If a vocation is a dream of the Creator on the creature, the person called is the one who lets God fulfill His dream about her and the person has learned to dream the same divine dreams.

“Be ready… stay awake” (Mt. 24, 42-44) said Jesus at t he beginning of his preaching. It is an invitation to be vigilant and with the heart ready because life speaks if there is a heart that listens, even though, to tell the truth, sleep in scripture is not always is negative and ambiguous. At times sleep is even the place of mysterious and divine contact with God. In sleep, Jacob fights with HJWH and Samuel captures the voice t hat calls him, while –a  peculiar contrast – Eli, the priest who accompanies his vocation, does not hear anything, even though afterward h e understands and gives  him courage. Let us say, in terms pertinent to our theme, that there is a vocational sleep and an anti-vocational sleep. Let us examine both.

The Sleep of the Ten Virgins

The ambivalence comes out right away from this parable (Mt. 25, 113): All the ten virgins sleep and t hen awake at the right moment, but some, wise and farsighted, are able to go to meet the spouse and participate in the feast with their lamps filled with oil; while the other, distracted and forgetful, arrive too late and they are not admitted to the wedding rite.

The sleep of the first virgins is good and restorative and it disposes the heart to be intelligently awake; it is the sleep of which the Psalms speaks: “Even in the night my heart exhorts me…” (Psalm 16, 7). It is the sleep of person who knows that his/her work is to sow the seed of the word. The person might be “awake or asleep, at night or day, while the seed germinates and grows in a way that he/she does not know how” (Mark 4, 27). It is the sleep of the person who entrusts to God and gives in his great hands his/her own plans, especially if what God asks is difficult. He/she respects the night-day and rest-work rhythm and does not presume to do it all by himself/herself. That is why even the night does not pass in vain and it is not a neutral or lost time. To the contrary, even at night the heart beats and in the rest of the person the action of the Spirit is at work. For the same reason then what a person chooses to do immediately before going to rest becomes a direction and predisposition for the night time; it gives him/her a sense and a precise orientation. Because of this the person who believes ends his/her day praying and directing to God the last thought. The voice that woke up Samuel could be the same voice that now will answer him/her or call him/her.

The Sleep of Joseph

This is another good example of a friendly sleep. Often the sleep and in particular its guard, the dream, it is an open space a bit wild. It is a place unguarded and eerie in which all the most uncontrolled instincts explode. Not in Joseph. The just man has evangelized even this no man’s land. There is nothing in him that has been subtracted from the divine dominion, to the point that he can communicate with God even through his impulses and sensations… Joseph’s desires are those of God. For this reason we could see in Joseph, who dreams, the singular ideal image of the person called, if we define vocation as the dream of the Creator on the creature. The one called is not only the one who lets God dream but also the one who dreams the same divine dreams!

The Sleep of the Disciples at Gethsemane

Here we have the anti-vocational sleep. At the moment of the supreme call, Jesus calls some of his disciples to become part of it, in some way staying awake with him, but in vain. Three times the disciples go to sleep (cf Mt 26 26-46). This sleep then is a refusal of the call. It is the fear of the divine proposal. It is to run away from God’s requests… It is when the person runs away from God and in his calling-voice does not find anything that gives him/her life or something that is worth of living forever. Or does the person have the illusion of living but in reality has a lethargic life with drugs, a modern deception, which gives a chemical induced and desperate sleep? And who does not see today this situation of general anesthesia in which often young people live? Who does not see the ways in which this ephemeral society and its culture of nothingness exposes our youth to emptiness? Our society often takes way from the youth in complicity with the indecent political situation every hope to build the future, to believe in an ideal, to love a woman or man forever, to be professional competent and to exercise it at work, to build a house, to start a family, and to become parents… Once you take away hope in life there is nothing left but sleepiness or apathy of the person, who afraid to lose it, he/she catches it with greediness to keep it for himself/herself, and he/she is not able to read in it any call.

The Sleep of the Guards at the Tomb

Finally, there is the fake or mocked sleep of the guards a t the tomb (cf Mt 28, 11-15), which reveals the self-deception of the ones who do not let Christ awake them, or they give complete opposition to the novelty of his gospel. The guards are sent to look after the tomb, but before the angel of the Lord become stunned by fear. When it is discovered that the tomb is empty, the guards are persuaded, for a small amount of money, to tell the story that they were sleeping and that someone has stolen the body. First they accept to be the guardians of a death body (how likeable!), then how cowards to put themselves up for sale: what a high esteem of their won dignity!

Theirs is a fake sleep then, but in truth the sleep of mind and heart is more real and heavy for those who fall so low and do not realize that the dignity of a human being is believing in the impossible made possible by God, in not being afraid of the earthquake of his cross, in letting themselves be called by the Risen One, having faith in him. We have the example of Peter, who finally awake, throws the net trusting in the words of Jesus, after a night of failure and catches a great quantity of fish (those who do not sleep catch fish).

If many youth only would imagine how much life there is in the empty tomb of the Crucified and Risen Christ, where the sleep, par excellence, that of death, was forever defeated and where resounds the call of God, par excellence, to a life of resurrected, then the youth would cease to be the guardians of death risking to be sucked into a black hole. This last sleep would be not a fake sleep but one tragically real.

Vocations and Prayer

The Catholic Magazine on Vocation Ministry

July – September 2008, #73 Vol. XVII No. 3