on vocation

i'm not one for big goals, as if trying to achieve something particular. rather - i'd hope that at some point along my journey of life, people regard me as even somewhat close to even something similar to this Christ-like description of St. Francis:

"...he was an Apostle who incarnated the whole spirit and message of the Gospels most perfectly. Merely to know St. Francis is to understand the Gospel, and to follow him in his true, integral spirit, is to live the Gospel in all its fullness...

St Thomas's phrase 'comtemplata aliia tradere' (to share with others the fruit of contemplation) is not properly understood unless we have in mind the image of a St. Francis walking the roads of medieval Italy, overflowing with the joy of a message that could only be communicated to him directly by the Spirit of God.

The wisdom and the salvation preached by Francis were not only the overflow of the highest kind of contemplative life, but they were quite simply the expression of the fullness of the Christian Spitit - that is to say of the Holy Spirit of God."

- No Man is an Island, 1955

contemplata aliis tradere: edible fruit of the contemplative Spirit