Personal Vocation Discernment through the Stages of Faith

EPISODE 136 | PERSONAL VOCATION DISCERNMENT THROUGH THE STAGES OF FAITH

[00:00:00] When we become more free, liberated from all the things that keep us trapped, things that imprison us from being who we are the fear of being who we are the fear of stepping forth and following Christ as we feel Him call us, as those shackles fall away, the picture just becomes clearer. 

[00:00:21] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me. 

[00:00:50] Hello, everyone. Okay, so, the last couple of sharings that I did have been around the topic of the stages of faith from the critical journey. So, today's sharing, I wanted to talk about the experience of personal vocation discernment as it varies through the stages of faith. 

[00:01:24] Okay, so, I think it's been very helpful to introduce the idea of the stages of faith. I've often talked about how so many parts of the interior journey just differs, depending on what stage you are in, depending on what season you are in. And now, I finally introduced a framework. Just bear in mind, it's not like the only way of understanding developmental stages in the interior journey. But I find this model from the book, The Critical Journey, to be a very helpful one for my purposes about talking about integration. So, I'm using it, all right. 

[00:02:02] And another thing that I always talk about is discerning personal vocation, right? And I've talked about different dimensions of it, the general experience of what it's like to try and ask the question, "who am I and what is the unique work of love that I'm created to bring into the world". And how it takes really long. And I've also shared some snippets of the interior experiences of discerning personal vocation. 

[00:02:30] But what I haven't done, which I'm going to attempt to do today, just informally, as we chat, I'm going to try and talk about the experience of discerning personal vocation at the various stages of faith development, okay, in the stages of faith as per the book, The Critical Journey, how it describes. 

[00:02:55] Okay, for those of you who are watching this as a video, I've called up now, the diagram of the six stages of faith, all right. So, just as a refresher, this is from the book The Critical Journey.

[00:03:07] RECAP: THE CRITICAL JOURNEY STAGES
Stage one is the recognition of God, it's usually when we first begin to really have personal experience of God's presence in our life and we're filled with awe of Him. And that's really at the start of the journey, a more personal relationship with God, right? That He becomes more than just an idea and a concept, but a person that we are in relationship with.

[00:03:28] And then stage two, the authors of The Critical Journey call it the life of discipleship. Really, it's like the initiation into the life of discipleship, where a person usually at this stage, is apprenticed about the ways of the faith. So, let's say if you're a Christian, you learn a lot about what the church teaches or what it means to be catholic. And it's a lot more focused on structure and community and being part of that community and learning what it is that this faith community is meant to do., for example. Stage three, the productive life is a stage where we enter into not just learning about the life of discipleship, but we begin to step up positions of leadership.

[00:04:12] So, for example, we become teachers, formators, catechists, pastors. We help, we mentor other people in the journey, maybe by the position that we've been given, or we've been called and chosen for leadership. In some sense, stage 3 is when we also begin to feel more confident that we have something to contribute, that we have something to offer God. Stage 3 is often defined by great productivity, a lot of doing, a lot of exploration, experimentation about what is it that we can best offer God, okay?

[00:04:47] And then stage four is a journey inward where suddenly it's not about what we can do for God anymore. It's a recognition that we are not so sure about what it is we're doing in the first place. Doubts begin to set in, questions come in. We begin to question sometimes, very fundamental things about ourselves because at stage four is when we begin to realize that we've been building on the surface of our lives, even our relationship with God and our faith has been very much on the surface, and God is beginning to show us that there are things underneath the surface that need our attention.

[00:05:22] That's why in this model, the authors call stage for the journey inward, okay. And then if we make it through stage four, pass the wall. So, in today's show I'm not going to go much more into these stages. If you haven't heard this, if you haven't heard me talk about the stages, go back a couple of episodes, a couple of videos to the one where I talk about the stages of faith. I gave a brief introduction there.

[00:05:47] Okay, so, the most intense part of stage four is called the wall, where integration happens in a way that's never happened before. So, integration of, let's say, psychological, emotional dimensions of our life together with our spiritual dimension of our life. After we come through the wall, we enter stage five, okay, which is called the journey outward, here, by the authors. 

[00:06:14] And then the last stage in this model is called the life of love. Stage six is called the life of love. Now, just bear in mind while these are developmental stages, not everyone makes it through all the developmental stages in this life for many different reasons. I can't get into in this video, in this sharing. But the higher stages or like later stages doesn't necessarily mean better or holier, okay.

[00:06:42] It's just a more mature developmental. I just want to emphasize that because that's important to bear in mind the interior journey, if we can grasp it, not just mystically, spiritually, which we only can do as we enter greater integration. And is not something that we can push through. It's not something that we can do with our own, all right. And that's why having some idea that there are developmental stages can be helpful because depending on where we are, like depending on where you are, as you listen to me explain this, your interpretation, understanding of what I'm talking about is also going to be affected by the stage that you're in. 

[00:07:27] It just is that way, okay. And as you continue to integrate and mature, maybe at a different point in your journey, you might think back to what you've heard me say, or you might rewatch or relisten to something that I've talked about, and then you're going to get it at a different level. You're going to get something else out of it, all right. So, these are the six stages and what I'm going to be talking a bit about is not comprehensively because these conversations can never be comprehensive because they're so big. The topics are so big, right?

[00:08:03] But a little bit about what it's like when we discern our personal vocation as we move through these stages. I just want to be able to talk a bit about them so that you can maybe recognize yourself, like where you are, or maybe you recognize where you've been. All right, and I also want to focus a little bit more on the between stage three and stage four and stage five, that transition there. Because it's usually at those stages that the question of the discernible personal vocation, even begins to come up more, I think, in our lives and our journeys. 

[00:08:42] STAGE 2
[All right, so, I'm not going to be talking about stage one because usually stage one is just too early in the journey for people to even really be serious about asking the question of personal vocation. It doesn't really occur that much yet. Maybe just in the very general question like Lord, who are you? Who are you calling me to be? Where are you asking me to go? What are you asking of me? So, in stage two, in the life of discipleship is often when we begin to hear about maybe not even that many. But some of us begin to hear about this thing about discerning God's call for us, right? 

[00:09:15] We learn that part of being a disciple of Christ is learning about how we are uniquely formed and gifted and that ultimately it's not just about being a Christian or a disciple in a general sense of the word, but that each of us are called in a very unique way to follow christ and that the way we follow Christ will look very different from everybody else, all right? 

[00:09:41] At stage two, if we're lucky, we begin to hear about these things - I say if we're lucky because in my experience at least, in my faith tradition, most catholics don't even hear about that when they're learning about the faith. It's just like more about what the faith teaches, about worship, about liturgy, about scripture, but not so much about personal vocation, which is actually a very key part about the incarnation of our faith, of living our faith out.

[00:10:08] So, it's not just intellectual. Okay, but anyway, stage two, just briefly, is maybe when we begin to hear about the idea of personal personal vocation and discernment, right? But we're probably not very actively engaged in discerning that yet. Although, I think because of the times that we are in, generally, more people are interested in understanding what's unique about them. They want to learn about their strengths. They want to learn about their gifts. So, maybe from that context, people already begin to ask that, okay. 

[00:10:45] STAGE 3
But often it is when people move stage three of this interior journey, okay, in the faith development journey, on the faith journey, that they become a lot more intentional and take effort in discerning the personal vocation because now they have the sense that not only am I called I'm growing in confidence, that I am gifted. But I want to know how am I exactly gifted. Like what makes me unique? Or maybe I would have a sense where people in stage three often have a sense of what sets them apart from others, what they're good at, maybe what they're not so good at. 

[00:11:23] So, very often, in stage three, is when people do charism discernment, maybe they want to discern their personality, the strength finders and all those things to better equip themselves and to better direct themselves in the service of God because stage three is the productive life. It's very much about working for God, right? So, the thing about being in stage three, when I think back to the time when I was in stage three, I was very interested and very keen on testing out my charism. So, I went through a charism discernment program, Called and Gifted.

[00:11:58] I even went to learn to teach this and to do gifts interviews for people in charism discernment. That is very much part of being a stage three person in the journey right. And because I was so involved in service and ministry, it was exciting I had many opportunities to experiment and try out and see, for example, I'm discerning a particular charism. Is it a charism or is it just a natural talent? Which is not that is worse or anything. It's just different dimensions of giftedness, right? Different kinds of giftedness. 

[00:12:32] But, one thing that I find characterizes people in stage 3, when I look back at my own journey and also other people that I've accompanied who are in stage 3, it is very much marked by impatience. Because stage 3 is so much about what I want to do for God what I believe, in a sense what I believe God wants me to do for Him. But very much is actually what I want to do for God. And so, I want to be able to serve Him well, and I'm impatient to find out where my giftedness lies because I want to use those gifts for God. That is very much a stage three thing.

[00:13:12] And people at stage three do not yet realize that there is so much more to knowing our personal vocation, even being able to actually recognize our personal vocation, and then to step into living it out. There's so much more than knowing how we're gifted and where our strengths are and what we can do for God.

[00:13:35] STAGE 4
Okay, so, that's what begins to happen when we enter into stage four. So, in the developmental journey, at stage three, we're like at the peak in terms experiences of faith. And we feel like we're very fruitful. We are actually in stage three, actually quite fruitful in the sense of being very productive in the kingdom and doing things for God and working for God. And we often see our fruitfulness, but we cannot see the shadow side when we're in stage 3. And we have no idea that, beyond being a stage 3 person, for example, that there is a different kind of spiritual fruitfulness. 

[00:14:16] That is a lot deeper and a lot more abundant than what we could ever accomplish at stage three. But we don't know that, all right. But when we move into stage four is when our confidence in a sense you could say gets shaken because our eyes begin to be opened to something be below the surface of our lives instead of just seeing all the amazing things that we can do for God and wanting to grow our strengths and our gifts to serve God.

[00:14:45] As people enter into stage four, we begin to recognize where our foundations are weak, where our human foundations are actually very weak indeed. So, if stage three is characterized in general by a sense of empowerment, right, of strength of being able to do things for God and lead others. Stage four is defined or characterized by a sense of growing powerlessness and helplessness because we begin to recognize 

[00:15:19] that 

[00:15:19] all the amazing things we have done up to that point in our lives, like in our spiritual life or you know for God and for others, that they're actually built on sand. 

[00:15:29] At stage four we begin to recognize just how much of our foundation is sand and it's not solid rock right and the whole work of stage four that God brings us through is towards the work of revelation, of recognizing our weakness, our powerlessness, our woundedness. And then becoming willing to let God enter into that space and heal us and integrate us. 

[00:15:54] That, in a nutshell, describes the work of stage four, which is very hard indeed. I talk a lot more about this experience in the previous sharing that I did, about midlife and midlife crisis in the spiritual life, right? So, stage four very much is actually entering into that midlife. And when we enter into the wall stage of stage four, where it is the greatest intensity of the crisis experience of spiritual midlife, all that. When we are in this stage of our developmental journey in our spiritual life, the question of personal vocation discernment shifts or the experience shifts usually in stage four, and especially at the wall.

[00:16:38] We are not constantly badgering God to tell us what is our mission? What can I do for you? How do you want me to serve you in stage four and at the wall? It is a much more humbling place. Okay, we are being emptied and we are entering greater and greater surrender because at this point, we realize that there's nothing that we can offer God that He didn't give us in the first place. And that there's so much that we have not even been able to offer up to Him, our very selves, our innermost selves. 

[00:17:13] We recognize how much we're hiding even from ourselves, right? The experience of personal vocation discernment in stage four and at the wall is actually very much one of just surrendering and following God. And we give up at stage four and at the wall, we pretty much give up the sense of needing to know where we are headed. There is a shift from being in the driver's seat of wanting to serve God and feeling empowered and deciding how I want to serve, to feeling a very different kind of feeling one of just leaning in trust and in surrender to God. 

[00:18:00] So, our prayers change from one of tell me how I can serve You, show me how I can serve You. You know, I want to serve You all that kind of stuff. Or give me what I need to serve You, to Lord, give me grace to survive this journey. Give me grace to receive You more deeply into me, right? Give me the grace to just allow you to do what you want to do with me. There's this very big shift, okay? So, it's no longer any more about what I want, although we can still experience that, that I prefer this over something else. 

[00:18:33] But much more deeply is this surrendering, okay? Lord, not what I want, but what You want. Because I don't even know why I'm here. I don't even really know who I am. I'm realizing I don't even know who I am. Show me, more and more, how You love me. And what does it mean to be loved by You. When we go through stage four, and if we can do it, and if we can follow through the work of integration in stage four, which very much is actually a work of allowing God's will to be done unto us, right, then we will come into stage five, okay.

[00:19:10] I'm talking about these stages as if it looks, it sounds so neat, right? Like one stage and then the next stage, I just want to remind you that the experience of faith development of interior integration is not linear, okay? So, we often can get stuck at a stage, maybe go backwards and all that. But just generally, as we move into a later developmental stage, we include all the earlier stages, 

[00:19:36] STAGE 5
All right, so, when we step out into stage five, which the authors of The Critical Journey call the journey outward, we reach a different stage in personal vocation So, here's the very interesting thing that illustrates the mystical side or the really spiritual side of personal vocation, because it is. Personal vocation is answering God's call, not just through what we do, but by being more fully who we are. When we are at the earlier stages of this developmental journey, we think that vocation is about answering God's call by doing what He asked us to do, which is not entirely untrue, but it's still a very externally focused, surface layer focused kind of way of looking at things.

[00:20:27] As we make our way deeper into the later stages of this journey, we begin to realize that personal vocation or our vocation is the answering of God's call to us by being who we are. It's not about what we do. We realize that God's calling to us is not like calling us to be a servant to do a job. He's calling us into being. He's calling us into life. His call is a call of love that is making us alive. And the more alive we become in the unique way that we were created to be alive, the more we fulfill our vocation, okay?

[00:21:09] But the ability to even understand this, much less live it, requires the journey itself, okay. And it requires in particular, I think, making it through stage four and the wall. If and when we emerge in stage five, usually the experience that is the experience that I have, right now, I feel like I may be at the very early stages of stage five, I still have some stage four in me remnants kind of thing going on. But I feel like I'm tasting stage five a little bit more now.

[00:21:43] The huge difference here is, there is no need to really keep asking about personal vocation because it is much clearer now than it ever was before. We find the experience that as we integrate, what happens is we become more free. And when we become more free, liberated from all the things that keep us trapped, things that imprison us from being who we are the fear of being who we are the fear of stepping forth and following Christ as we feel Him call us because we're so afraid of what people may think. 

[00:22:20] We're so afraid of being judged or being criticized that we don't fit in that we don't belong, for example. As those shackles fall away, the picture just becomes clearer. We don't even need to try very hard anymore. It's like in God's time and in God's grace, suddenly, sometimes, it just adds one more piece into the overall picture and then everything begins to click. 

[00:22:44] And even though we don't have the full picture yet of our life, and the fullness of our vocation, our gift because I don't believe we can have that picture in this life, we have this sense we didn't have earlier on in the journey, that we are now walking in our vocation. And we have a lot more clarity. When I say clarity, I don't mean like I know exactly what I'm doing.

[00:23:12] No, at least my experience is that I think oftentimes, I don't know what I'm doing in the larger scheme of things. Maybe, in the smaller pieces, yes, I have a sense of what I'm called to do. But every now and then, I'm still stunned by I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know where God is leading me and I can't see maybe beyond just a few months or even a year ahead of me in terms of the doing of what I'm called to do. I don't know but it doesn't matter that much anymore and I think that's the point when we enter stage five, this journey outward. It is a lot more - we're letting our being emerge and flow out. There is less human effort in the way that we used it in stage three. 

[00:23:58] So, when we come out in stage five, it's not that we don't work as hard. I think we work just as hard., if I ask myself I work in some ways, I work much harder now than when I was in stage three, but the way I work is different than the experience of that work is different. It's so much more unitive and integrative. It's not just, because the work isn't just like the labor of creating content or teaching trying to grow my business, which actually is. Not even that big thing into part of the call. 

[00:24:32] So, like part of my experience in the last couple of years was discerning that God isn't really asking me to grow my business. At this point it's just , it's a great thing to be able to make enough money to just cover the overhead costs of my operation costs and all the software and all the things that I use to create the content that I'm putting out there, which is free.

[00:24:52] So, you see, even what I thought God was calling me to do, like when He asked me to start a business, I thought, okay. So, then if you're asking me to start a business, I should get good at that, right? Which means that if I'm running a business it should be profitable and I should be increasing like my revenue year after year. At least I thought that's the aim of having a business, right? I still think, in the general sense, yes, it's true. 

[00:25:17] But the particular context of vocation is exactly what makes it unique. While what I just said about running a business or maybe being called, experiencing or hearing a call to start a business, we have a general assumption of what that should look like. But in the particularity of my life story, my life circumstance, that God has given me and called me, into including my marriage to a husband who provides for me, has shown me, painfully, that a big part of me wanting to grow my business is still coming from my desire to prove that I'm good, capable.

[00:26:01] Because in so many ways, the path that I've taken has had nothing to show to me in terms of worldly success. And that's something I still feel the pinch of sometimes when I look at my peers who are in very different spaces than I am, in terms of their career, where they are in the world, right? I am here, where I am because of the conscious choices that I make. I do not regret them, but you see, there is still inside of me, that fear of not being able to show that I can actually do it, that I want to prove.

[00:26:36] I'm sharing this as the internal, interior experience of someone who has been discerning personal vocation and following and trying to say yes, right? And then even as I come out of stage four with a much deeper understanding of myself and my wounds, I still feel the pull of those wounds, but I recognize that these things, like over time, these are the things that God is calling me to surrender to Him and that at this point of my journey, and at this point of my business journey, He's asking me not put so much energy and focus into growing the business side of things, right?

[00:27:16] It's great if I can just cover my operation costs and give myself a small little allowance so that I don't feel like I'm being exploited by myself. It's something that I need because it's part of my healing, my own healing journey, right? Of believing that I have value, that the work I do has value and being able to pay myself, even if it's just a small allowance, you know, not some grand salary. A small salary matters, right?

[00:27:47] But God is telling me that's just enough on that front and the rest and just enjoy creating and putting it out there because I created you to communicate and to share. So, at this point, coming out of stage four and into stage five, defined my last few years.

[00:28:04] The experience is very much letting go of what may seem like the most relevant or making sense. So, this is where the mystical spiritual dimension comes in. We must remember when we talk about personal vocation, it's always beyond just the natural. We live in the world. We operate within the world. So, there are many things that we need - how should I say - we're not completely apart from the world, but at the same time, our lives, our relationship with God and our vocations transcend the world and how it operates, okay.

[00:28:41] It's a very mysterious way. I don't even know if I can describe it properly. But because of this mystical dimension, in a sense, it actually makes sense, that as we step into our personal vocation we will be making choices that don't make logical sense in the worldly way of understanding, okay. It's not going to make logical sense to maybe our parents, our family members, our spouses, our friends, unless they are making the same journey as we are.

[00:29:17] And unless they are also close to where we are, it's not going to make sense to them. And that's why the authors of this of The Critical Journey say that people who are in stage five often seem rather irrelevant to the rest of the world or to people in stage three and stage two, all right? They can actually be very fruitful and depending on where they are. Sometimes, the work they do can be can seem very relevant, but at the same time, their lives sometimes can seem like it's being run on very different, okay.

[00:29:49] And at stage five, also, I think a lot of people, and the authors say this as well, the authors of The Critical Journey. People at stage five often also lose interest in what matters a lot to people in the earlier stages or what matter used to matter to them in the earlier stages, all right. So, they are not driven anymore to be in stage three. They're okay with being slower, the interior experiences of being slower, being more intentional, of pondering, of going at God's pace of leaning into grace, right? 

[00:30:28] They feel things often a lot more intensely than they used to in stage three, because at stage five, they've learned how to be present and they've learned how to suffer more than they had at stage three, okay. We suffer at no matter what stage we are in the journey. But as we move into, I think more mature stages of the journey, we learn how to suffer a little better. 

[00:30:49] So, that's like stage five. And I can say a little bit about it based on just a little bit that i've experienced. I like I said, my guess, my best guess for myself is that I think I've now stuck my toe into stage five. I've dipped my toe into stage five, the shallow very shallow end of stage five. So, I don't know how else it will develop. God willing, as I experience more, I will be able to share more my reflections and what I've gleaned about the personal vocation discernment process and the different stages of faith 

[00:31:20] STAGE 6
But even though I haven't experienced it myself, I think the authors of The Critical Journey do describe also, that those people, and very few people do in this life, make it to the stage six. Part of the faith development journey or you know the interior journey, at stage six it is really just it's called the life of love by the authors. But you just think it's just an outpouring.

[00:31:45] I think stage six, the way I imagine it. Okay, so, I am not describing this from personal experience at all. I'm very far from there. But from what I can get and into it, it's really the point where as St. Paul says, I live no longer but Christ lives in me. It is just an ongoing outpouring of the Father's love into Christ and into me because Christ lives in me. 

[00:32:12] It is a very different, I think, dimension or level of being. And I can only imagine, I think that part of the trick, the trickiness, not trick - part of the challenge of a faith like the one I am in, of the catholic faith, where we often look at the saints, we think are role models of the interior journey, role models of sanctity. Most of us we are at a much earlier stage of development of the journey and I imagine most of the saints or a lot of the saints, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them would already be at stage six.

[00:32:51] We see how they make sacrifices easily like with God's grace, sacrifices that we cannot imagine doing, you know, that we would have to bypass ourselves or deny and suppress ourselves to even try and imitate. So, because we cannot understand what it's like to be at stage six, when we, especially at the earlier stages of stage two and stage three, when we look at the models of the saints, we inadvertently get a very distorted interpretation of what it's like to give our lives for God.

[00:33:25] And the authors of The Critical Journey also write that, it is quite common that people at stage three, which is a productive life and they're leading and they're doing for God, many people at stage three, want to achieve stages five and six. 

[00:33:38] Okay, so, it's like you feel like you want to grow in your interior journey and you want to make it happen. I speak from experience. I was very much like that. And I really use a lot of my will and strength to try and grow spiritually. That's what it's like when you are in stage three. And you have to go through stage four and the wall to realize that's not the way it happens at all, and no one who strives to become a stage six person can actually enter stage six. 

[00:34:03] It's not the way it works. So, that's why the whole experience or even discerning personal vocation just keeps shifting depending on where we are in the journey. I would imagine again, I say, I'm not stage six, that as we approach stage six, the question of personal vocation probably doesn't even matter anymore because it, you know, it's like we're growing in union, like deeper and deeper union with Christ and with God, that we don't even have to keep asking because the sense of self changes.

[00:34:37] The sense of self is not that it completely disappears in the sense that God stems it out. But the fullness of our self, because we enter into, really being the most deeply and fully alive and deeply human as ourselves. It's like the drop of water that enters into the ocean and it's just, it doesn't, there is no drop of water anymore. It is the ocean. I think stage six, or I imagine stage six is that point where the question of personal vocation is just not, it's not needed anymore because you are living it completely fully. You don't even need to ask about it or it anymore, right?

[00:35:14] So, that's my attempt at talking about the various experiences of discerning personal vocation as we grow through the stages of faith. I don't know if any of what I just shared may resonate with you. I hope that some of it does. And even if it hasn't resonated with you, that maybe it gives you some idea of how even something like discerning our call, like how God is calling us, is not going to be static. Our experience of that question even is not going to be static. And it's going to shift and change as we make our way through the interior journey, as we get more integrated, okay? 

[00:36:00] So, that's it for today's sharing. I hope that it's interesting and helpful to you as you continue to discern your personal vocation and make your interior journey of integration. Bye!

[00:36:13] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

[00:36:43] If you like what you hear on this podcast, would like to receive a monthly written reflection from me as well as be updated on my latest content and offers, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter Begin Again. You can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until the next episode, happy becoming!