- When I came to Greythorn, after 10 years in Asia, and one year doing little, I looked back at how busy I had been and how I would cope with a quieter life in the leafy Easter suburbs of Melbourne.
- Sometimes it is difficult to know where people get their energy from.
- The 12 hour a day Executive is certainly driven, but by what? Provision for family; a fortune; success; pride/ego or just wanting to do one’s best. (Is part of the answer to look at their salaries?)
- Sportspeople are highly motivated but for what? Is it themselves, the family or the coach? The fame and fortune or just personal satisfaction? (And how do they relate indulgence and rudeness into such a life?)
- Politicians sacrifice much of their family life for public service but is public service what they are thinking about? (public service would not include petulance and power)
- Human motivation shows itself to be ambiguous and, as we say, mixed motivation.
- A student working late nights to the limit is certainly wanting to do their best but also to please others and secure a future.
- A zealous priest may love people and enjoy the position he holds. But when that position is no longer highly regarded socially; people are indifferent and even suspicious of his words and presence, will he stop wanting to be a priest?
- Surely, as the gospel of John reminds us, there is a life that draws from a living relationship with God through His Son Jesus, the bread of life.
- It is vital that we draw life from a relationship with Jesus. If we only draw life from the excitement of the day – honor, success, fortune and fame – it is a terminal life. That is, the manna of today is drawing life from a world that soon dies.
- Unless you draw life from deeper sources then you are dead.
- The 10 step plan of recovery associated with Alcoholism demands that we must rely on a Higher source and it has some relevance here.
- Addictions are only good things gone wrong!
- Motives can go wrong too, when they drive us to work or perform to the point of sickness or emptiness.
- We are not used to living our lives from a relationship to a God outside ourselves. This is almost unknown in a society built on self-fulfillment and satisfaction.
- But the vocation of the priest, as it is best understood, is a life lived in response to a ‘call’ from outside himself.
- A call from God that demands a life where rewards, though they can be fine, can be absent and nothing changes when they are absent.
- It seems to me, in this week for vocations, that the priest is defined as a person who lives from outside the matrix of rewards and compensations; from a ‘call’ and a relationship with Jesus Christ, the bread of life.
- We cannot live from the ‘gas’ in our tanks; the talents of mind or even the feelings of the heart. They would all be OUR contributions.
- John’s gospel says it best: “As I, who am sent from the Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.”
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