The Call of Levi

Behind the many calls addressed to us in life there is but one call — God's.  It takes its fullest and most luminous form in the mystery of Christ.  In perceiving and responding to this call, human beings realize their humanity and discover authentic happiness, a happiness that will be fully theirs in the glory of the life to come….

Any call from God is a call to life.  Our first vocation is to live, and a call cannot be from God unless it leads us to live in a more intense and beautiful way, engaging human life as it is with more confidence, in all its aspects: physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual....

Responsibility presupposes the existence of a call, of a duty.  To take responsibility for one's actions is not only to accept responsibility for their impact on others, but to acknowledge that one had several options — good or bad as the case may be — before choosing and acting.  Even so, to give the idea of freedom real weight requires recognition of some kind of call.  The exercise of human freedom is arbitrary and trivial unless it is a response to an invitation from something that transcends it.  As for desire, it becomes a mere psychological construct, a product of the alchemy of impulse unless understood at the deepest level as a call.  Beneath the often contradictory desires of the human heart lies a single desire — for fulfillment, for happiness.  To show it respect as something serious, something fully human, and not simply one more craving or impulse, we must see in it the traces of a call that comes from beyond ourselves.

Humanity cannot be understood apart from a call to become more human.