When the day came to purify them according to the law of Moses, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus up to Jerusalem so that he could be presented to the Lord, for it is written in the law of the Lord, every first-born male shall be consecrated to the Lord. They came to offer in sacrifice a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons, in accord with the dictate of the law of the Lord. There lived in Jerusalem at the time a certain man named Simeon. he was just and pious and awaited the consolation of israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. It was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not experience death until he had seen the anointed of the Lord. He came to Temple now inspired by the Spirit, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform for him the customary ritual of the law, he took him in his arms and blessed him in these words: "Now, master, you can dismiss your servant in peace. You have fulfilled your word. For my eyes have witnessed your saving deed, displayed for all the people to see. A revealing light to the Gentiles, the glory of your people Israel The child's father and mother were marveling at what was being said about him. Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "This child is destined to be the downfall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed, and you yourself shall be pierced with a sword, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be laid bare." There was a certain prophetess, Anna by name, daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher. She had seen many days, having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage, and then as a widow until she was 84. She was constantly in the Temple, worshiping day and night, in fasting and prayer. Coming on the scene at this moment, she gave thanks to God and talked about the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. When the pair had fulfilled the prescriptions of the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee and their own town of Nazareth. The child grew in size and strength, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him. (Luke 2:22-40)

I don't wish to speak about the family this morning, as good a topic as that would be. We hear so much about family, we hear so much about dysfunctional families. One could even say, if this doesn't shock you so much, the Holy Family was a dysfunctional family, because Joseph wasn't the father of Jesus. Therefore it's dysfunctional by modern standards.

What I want to talk about today is something else, something that touches on it, but indirectly. Years ago, in Germany, there was a great disciple of the phenomenologist Husserl, the great pioneer of phenomenology, a philosopher--Husserl--who has influenced a great deal our present Holy Father in his philosophical thinking. And the disciple's name was Edith Stein. Edith Stein was a devout Jew. Eventually, through her studies as a kind of secondary thing of her studies she became Catholic, and eventually she became a Carmelite nun. And eventually, just the evening before she was to escape to freedom in England, she was apprehended, sent to a concentration camp, and there lost her life.

But in her time, and even in our time, she has been very influential. Some of you have heard me refer to this before, but i will do it again. She wrote a series of essays--a marvelous essay on Christmas and another marvelous essay on education--but one of the essays she wrote that is often overlooked is an essay on vocation. She says there are three elements to a vocation.

First of all, there has to be a call--that's what the word "vocation" means, vocatio, and so there is someone who gives a call, an invitation, who speaks a word and the word is to be heard, the word is to be heeded. And after you have to have a call by someone to someone for something, you have to have, she says, a person who hears that call and heeds that call, who responds to that invitation. So the second element is one who hears, one who responds, one who follows the call. The third elements, she says, is that the call is always based on some quality, some attitude, characteristic in the person. Whatever the call is, it is always touching on something that the person has innately, something that the person is born with, some gift, some talent.

So she says these three elements have to be there. Now over the course of Christianity, when we talked about vocation, we tended to relegate it to vocation to the priesthood or the religious. We always thought that they were the people who had vocations. (I don't know what we thought the others of us had.) Even the great St. Thomas Aquinas said that religious and bishops are in the state of perfection. I don't know what he would have said the rest of us were in (although some today would question whether bishops are in a state of perfection, but we'll leave that topic aside).

But with the coming of Vatican Council II, and with the document, "The Constitution on the Church," Chapter 5, we begin to see and--how shall I put it--we begin to bring the pendulum back to the center where Jesus intended it to be all the time. Vocation is not something that men and women are called to live out in religious life and in priesthood. Vocation is something to which each and every one of us is called. The call of Jesus to follow him is a universal call. It is not restricted to a particular group of women or to a particular group of men. And you might say, "Well, what is that call to?" The call is to follow Jesus. "Well, what does it mean to follow Jesus?"

To follow Jesus can be put in a nutshell: it's a call to holiness. Each and every one of us is called to a vocation of holiness. Our job, once we are baptized, and once we come to realize what baptism signifies, our job, you might say, our vocation is to become saints. Clear and simple. That's it in a nutshell. That's what Christian life is all about. That's what the sacraments are all about--means. That is what prayer is all about. They are all means to become saints, to become holy.

Now when you say that to people, they suddenly become very apprehensive, and they become very frightened. Because in many respects they think, well, to become holy, to become a saint, I have to become odd. I have to become something other than what I am. I have to deny my human nature, or I have to destroy my human nature. I must live a life that is not human, and that's one of the greatest mistakes that is made by people when we talk about holiness. St. Thomas Aquinas had a very good principle: gratia supposet naturem; "grace presupposes nature." We have to realize that to become holy, we cannot deny, nor can we destroy, nor can we alienate our human nature, because that becomes the foundation upon which true holiness is founded. And if you ever try to establish a holiness on something other than human nature, you end up with a lot of bizarre religious and ritualistic piety that is very shallow. It's like building a house of cards, and the least little draft blows them all over the place. It can't be done.

One of the things we have to realize about this is that Jesus himself was human. And God could never have taken anything on that was intrinsically evil. And I'm afraid there are a great many good Calvinists even among Catholics, who believe that human nature, creation, is intrinsically evil. But let me tell you, that has never been a position of the Catholic church. There might an encrustation of evil; there might be an encrustation of sin, original or actual, but what we have to do with the grace of God, and the means of God, the channels of grace that God has given us, is that we must break through that encrustation, that kind of--how shall I put it--coat of icing over the goodness that is there, and we have to let the goodness come out.

So basically holiness means that I let my human nature come to perfection as it came to perfection in Jesus. He was the perfect human. In fact, he was so human that the French novelist Francois Mauriac says, he was so ordinary that in order for Judas to identify him in the garden of Gethsemane he had to kiss him on the cheek, or otherwise the Sanhedrin would not have known who he was. He couldn't be distinguished from anyone else, says Mauriac. And I think that's very true. "Judas, why do you befriend me with a kiss?"

Now how do we become holy? We become holy in different ways. The basic thing is we have to live out the Gospel. But for some of us we live out the Gospel in the married life. For others we live out the Gospel in the state of "single blessedness," as I like to call it. For others we follow it out in religious life or in priesthood. But if you get back to that third element that Edith Stein says exists in a vocation, we are called to these states of life where we live out the Gospel, depending upon characteristics or qualities or dispositions or talents which are within us. It has always amazed me that Jesus called fishermen to be fishers of men. That was their talent. Now whatever state of life we have--married life, single life, religious life, priesthood--each one of us has to live out in that state the evangelical counsels of obedience, poverty, chastity. (Although some would like to make marriage one of the evangelical counsels). But in marriage you have to live out the evangelical counsels, just as you have to do it in the state of single blessedness, just as it has to be done in priesthood, just as it has to be done in religious life, but in varying ways.

And what is our task in this process of becoming holy? "Therefore it is quite clear, that all Christians in any state or walk of life, are called to the fullness of Christian life, to the perfection of love, and by this holiness a more human manner of life is fostered also in earthly society." One of the things of becoming holy is to foster a more human way of life. When I say "human," I don't mean it as you and I often understand it. I mean human life as Jesus lived it. That's the human life, that's the holiness.

What we are striving to do, then, is to see life, to live life, to see reality, to see the Father in heaven, as Jesus saw them. That's our task. That's our vocation. And as we come to the end of one year and begin to look forward to a new year, it behooves us to think about that vocation, that call that each one of us has to holiness, and how shall we live it out? How shall we, in the words of St. Paul, put on the mind and heart of Jesus. How shall we become fully human, or at least begin to become fully human in this earth. As the great St. Athanasius put it, and Jerome picked it up, "to become fully human is to become Christ. And if you want to become Christ, then just become fully human."