Vulnerability

It is not easy to follow Christ.

There's a line in John Paul II's Stations of the Cross that always strikes me: he speaks of how it was Peter's love for Jesus that set him up for failure. When Jesus was arrested, Peter followed Him. It was in this act of following Our Lord that his faith was confronted, and he faltered. Not once, not twice, but three times. Thrice, he denied Our Lord.

We are no different. This morning I was pondering my own failures, and how I was so ready to run away from discernment, from any vocation at all.

And then I met the uncondemning gaze of Christ, and was ashamed. No one ever said discernment is easy. It's not. It's brutal. To discern one's vocation is to follow Christ into the very pits of Hell, if He so beckons. It means to come under the same scourge, to be weighed down, with Him, under the weight of the Cross. It means we must have a willingness to stretch out our own hands and offer everything we have, everything we are, everything we have ever been or will ever be. It is an act of total surrender.

That very act is what brings us to failure. Not God's failure, but ours. We have to confront ourselves. We have to fall to the ground and die so that He can raise us up to new life.

Even outside of the context of discernment, all of us, in following Christ, has to enter into His Passion and pass through it. It's the only way to become who we are called to be as children of God.

We have to become vulnerable and risk everything so that Our Lord can act in us. We have to be willing to set ourselves up for failure for it is only through those failures that we can be purified and learn humility.

If we truly desire to know Christ, and claim that we love Him, we have to be willing to follow Him everywhere, no matter how often or how hard we fall. He will never abandon us.

Will we abandon Him?
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