‘Finding God’s will’ or ‘responding to God’s call’ is central to the Christian journey.  It is also central to many of the Bible stories that we know so well.   Still, one aspect of ‘call’ that we don’t often speak about is “how does God get one’s attention in the first place?”  That is, God doesn’t so much call directly as if to say ‘Erik, I want you to become a Jesuit priest’ but rather, God takes his time and allows one to wake up to the plans that he has for each of us.  

This is important because a ‘call’ is deeply personal and unique and one needs to beware of the dangers of falling into the ‘trap’ of abstraction or of trying to fit into a predetermined mould.  That is, there is always a risk that an authentic call can get lost or misunderstood in a plethora of ‘I should be and do this or that’ if I am to follow a particular path. 

This is not to say that ‘call’ stories are not helpful.  The ‘call’ stories that dot the scriptures often give an incentive to reflect on one’s particular sense of call or, as I am inviting us to reflect upon in this blog entry, ‘how God gets our attention?’  Jonah, for example, the almost comic and reluctant prophet, makes God work pretty hard to get his attention.  Prior to accepting his calling, Jonas flees Nineveh by boat, hoping this will quiet the insistent God who is calling him to be his messenger. 

But the insistent God of this very ancient text, stirs up the waters, creates a lot of fear among the sailors on the boat, who in turn blame Jonah for making God angry and he is tossed into the stormy waters, in hopes of appeasing an angry God.   Finally, Jonah is swallowed by a whale and it is in the belly of the whale that he finally ‘wakes-up’ and accepts his ‘call’. 

In another celebrated ‘wake-up’ call, God gets St. Paul’s attention on the road to Damascus with a blinding light and a voice saying ‘Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me?’  It is only later that Paul understands his call as apostle to the Gentiles. 

Then there is the conversion of St. Augustine’s, encapsulated in his beautiful phrase ‘late have I loved you,’ where God, after many years of trying, finally gets his attention by means of the voice of a child singing in a garden nearby: ‘take up and read.’ 

Closer to our age, God got the attention of St. Ignatius during the long convalescence following a war injury when he began to notice how reading the lives of the Saints gave him deeper consolation than reading of the romanticized exploits of medieval heroes.  All of these examples can provide a motivation to reflect on my particular call without being constricting.  To be honest, many of us have something of Jonah’s reluctance, Paul’s stubbornness, Augustine’s hesitation or Ignatius’ romanticism. 

How did God get my attention?  Slowly.  In brief, during my 20s I began to take my faith more seriously.  At the same time I was quite happy to be pursuing my work in music (actually making a living in the Classical music field was nothing to shake a stick at).  I had flirted with the idea of religious life and priesthood but never really thought about it seriously.  Eventually God got my attention when I found myself with a good chunk of time due to a cancelled performance tour when I decided to take a look at a version of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises that I had picked up by chance.  This version was made up of excerpts from the Exercises, interspersed with guiding commentary and poetry.  

Without going into details, I embarked on the guided prayer of this ‘do it yourself retreat’ and soon I came to the realization that God had been trying to get my attention for quite a while.  I understood that I needed to take the idea of a religious vocation more seriously.  Otherwise I would be left with the perennial question “what if I had given it a try?”  Thus, the journey that brought me to the Jesuits began with God getting my attention through the means of the cancelled tour.

Shifting the focus from ‘call’ to the question ‘how does God get my attention?’ allows for a more immediate and spontaneous discernment.  An ‘in the moment’ spirituality that often begins quite simply with questions such as: How is God be trying to get my attention right now?  How is God working even in the simplest activity?  How am I open to pick up on these signs and nuances?  Do I really want God to get my attention?  And once God has my attention how does this relate to a particular call that I might be praying about today; whether in the simple things or the big things? 

God so wants to get our attention because God calls all of us to do special things for our world.  Sometimes, it happens pretty radically as in the calling of the first disciples where we read: “and immediately they left their nets and followed him” and “immediately he called them and they left their father…..”  But most of the time it is more subtle… so subtle that it is easy to miss.  

It might be most helpful to think of some of the more immediate applications of listening to how God is trying to get my attention such as reading scripture and looking for words and phrases that jump out at me, taking time to reflect on how I am living my life and how I might want to change some things; reflecting on the surprises and disappointments of my day; choosing to follow a new path or an intuition that doesn’t necessarily make sense on the surface. 

For, in reality, getting our attention is simply part and parcel of what God does; like the person on the street who says hello to everyone but is heeded only by a few.