vocation: para kanino ka bumabangon? festival of vocations 2017

Today I am tasked to welcome you all to the Festival of Vocations.  Why create a festival for vocations?  What is in a vocation that is worth celebrating with a feast?  What?  We are celebrating the reality that we were created on purpose and with love.  We are celebrating the fact that we are not accidents of nature, we did not come into this world as a product of chance or we did not begin existing just because we are a random consequence of a coincidence.  No.  We were created on purpose, and because we were created on purpose, we have a purpose, each of us has a purpose?  That is what we are celebrating today.  We celebrate the reality that each of us has a purpose.

Is this worth celebrating?  Ok here’s the alternative.  People who feel no sense of purpose in life are more prone to depression, more prone to anxiety attacks, more prone to drugs and to suicide.

Why, because  “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”   (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

There is this advertisement years back which asks us an important question worth answering every time we get up from bed –  para kanino ka bumabangon?

Have you asked that question?  Have you decided on that question?

Today our theme for this gathering is:  Tawag ni Lord, pusuan mo!

Where do we search for this sometimes elusive tawag ni Lord?  Or to go back to our original quest, how do we discover our purpose in life?  Do we look for it in some place near or far?  Do we need to search for it in google?

One famous searcher was St. Augustine – he went places, he went to various schools, he listened to intelligent and insightful men, he tried to find it even in a love affair and he even tried other Christian beliefs.  Then one day probably in those days when you have nothing to do and just holding on to a cup of coffee the discover came.  You can say the hider revealed himself to the seeker.  Where?  St. Augustine said, You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.

St. Augustine was searching for something or even someone who was already within himself.  It is there already within each one of us – we have only to discover it.

And so I end this introductory talk with a quote for the mystic of our day and age - Thomas Merton: 

“Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”

Your purpose has always been there within you. Ask God to reveal it to you, to help you see clearly.  Pray, hold your cup of coffee and drink it slowly, keep quiet, consult experienced people, they cannot point it to you for you will have to discover it yourself.  But they can help you see clearly.  Then, when you have found it, pusuan mo.

…….Welcome.