For my entire career in ministry, I have worked with college-age young adults. Now, in my work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, I’m journeying with recent college graduates. I only see our Jesuit Volunteers every few months, on retreats designed to help the JVs process and share their experiences with one another. This past weekend, I was blessed to be on one such JVC retreat, and I got to connect with the 70 volunteers in our region.Halfway through their JV year, these gifted, passionate, faith-filled young adults are committed to the “right now,” their jobs and their communities. But they’re also thinking about what lies beyond their one year with JVC. Many of the inspired conversations I had with the JVs this weekend came with this background music: Where is God calling me next?So it was with particular delight that I experienced with our JVs the Gospel reading at a rousing JVC Mass on Sunday. Of course: the call of the first disciples. A few fishermen, doing their fishing thing. Invited by Jesus to take their gifts to the next level. To fish, yes, but to fish for people. (Mt 4:18-22)This reading, so familiar, sounded somehow different this year, in this context with the JVs. I realized something I hadn’t quite picked out before. In this startling story of shifting vocation, I had never quite heard it. Jesus’ invitation to the net-men is more gentle than I had ever perceived. Jesus doesn’t even ask them to change jobs: they fished by trade, and they will still fish by trade. It’s just that Jesus asks them to use new tools, and a new perspective, to acheive an even more beautiful and lasting result. Jesus asks them to pay attention to what they do well, nurture new skils in that trade, and in so doing transform the whole enterprise.As this insight opened before me, I realized that my many conversations with JVs this weekend touched on this same realization. These supremely talented young people are already living their call; they are already fishing. Come August, they will make a shift: they will leave the boats of the JVC program. But what they do next won’t be some radical departure. It will merely be the next step in what they are already doing, the next phase of who they already are.This all somehow reminded me of my new journey with Ignatius. A new tool in my tackle box has become paying attention to the currents of consolation and desolation in my life. By staying in touch with what drives my passions and what drives them away, I’ve become better able to know when I’m really fishing, and when I’m just floating aimlessly. And I am beginning to realize, in flashes and fleeting visions, what it might mean to someday devote all of myself–gifts and warts and all–to the great fishing work I know I am called to do.
Photo: “Answering the Call“by mugley from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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