An article by Lola Arrieta, published in Frontera Hegian no. 56
1. Understanding and living life as mission
It is about living “life as mission”, much more than “doing things for others”. Understanding life as mission and living it that way is a profoundly theological attitude. Living “life as mission” is an attitude to life. And yet how much confusion there is between mission and tasks, and even how many arguments in the very discernment of which activities are mission and which are not. That is why this journey is important, and why it involves continual discernment.
Life lived as vocation/mission, once the fundamental option has been made on the basis of the founding encounter with Jesus, the Messiah and Servant, needs to take concrete shape in a particular way of life and ecclesial vocation. Vocation permeates the whole of a person’s life. This is how the life project takes on meaning. Its foundation is Jesus himself, who offers himself – in his person, in his works and in his words – as a project of liberation.
Being an adult is defined, among other things, by the capacity to work
When we do things for others, we are left with a sense of personal power and fruitfulness. How good we feel then! We get tremendously enthusiastic, all the more so the better received our work is. How happy the disciples were when they came back from their first field experience, and how they loved telling Jesus: “even the demons submit to us in your name” (Lk 10:17).
How good the first years of work feel during formation, when we verify our own power and fruitfulness: a clear task, a concrete space to fill, efforts that bear their corresponding fruit. In work and in love we humanly set the horizon of our fulfillment. This is important and we cannot neglect it in formation. The worst thing is when the way we approach work becomes distorted; that is when problems arise. When we pursue “work for work’s sake”, it is easy to deceive ourselves. As long as satisfaction stays high, things work. But if dissatisfaction takes hold of us, we may keep working, yes, but our interest in what we do will drop, we will work without much care, we will feel pressured to change tasks frequently out of tiredness or conflict, and we will be a permanent “headache” for those around us.
The question of mission, made concrete in work and in various tasks, calls for a specific approach within a radical following of Jesus. There are basic traps in the dynamics of mission understood as “doing things for others” that can blur the horizon.
When the ego is fairly strong, we think we own the world. If, on the other hand, we experience it as weak, we beat a retreat. Inhibition arises from the fear of not being capable, of looking bad or of not meeting others’ expectations, and the worst thing is when we give up out of frustration. It may also happen that we have measured what we are by the value of what we do. Then the madness begins: every task to be done turns into a challenge, a real “final exam” in which the validation of our own worth is at stake. How exhausting, my God!
How many conflicts in people and communities over the question of work! “Helpfulness” is a value on the rise, and for the same reason “laziness” is heavily penalized. Likewise, we hear complaints about excessive activity, about how hard it is to retire, about the tendency to cling to what we do, about power struggles over who gets which jobs, about the resistance to leaving some tasks and taking up others. All this shows that our motivations are not clear.
How important it is to have people with whom to clarify all these things! That is what the disciples did when they began to have their first difficulties in the tasks of mission: they talked it over with Jesus. “Why could we not cast it out? This kind can only be cast out by prayer” (Mk 9:28-29).
While there is strength and vitality, there is the capacity to carry out work. But without forgetting the small point the disciples had already learned. We are invited to carry out our work as mission, and it can only be done that way if we do it “in his name”, not on our own initiative. A motivation of authentic value (a secondary motivation, as we will call it below; that is why it is worth clarifying what motivations are).
What we do is important, but even more so “what moves us in what we do”
That something always moves us in what we do is indisputable. That the motives moving us reveal our practical life project is much harder to admit! How embarrassing when we catch ourselves exposed by our less presentable motivations! That is why we so often limit ourselves to expressing those that seem most positive and respectable, so that our inner self does not feel too threatened.
Remember how crestfallen the rich young man was when Jesus unmasked his project: to be good, to be the best of all, to show off to others his ability to achieve whatever he set out to do. And Jesus did not do it to ridicule him; he simply said to him: “It is good that you keep the rules, but you lack one thing: strip yourself – or better, let yourself be stripped – share; that is the way to what you say you are seeking!”. We have always kept the idea that he went away very sad, but what strikes me is what Mark says in his Gospel: that “he frowned” (Mk 10:22), that is, he became tremendously angry, because he had many possessions and was not willing to give them up just like that. He presented himself as dutiful; those were the motives he boasted of, but in truth he was a “hoarder”.
I remember the experience of a 38-year-old man, a late vocation in a religious congregation, who lived all his first years with a very “well-adjusted” attitude, as his formators acknowledged. The conflict came because he owned a house and had to give it up before making his perpetual vows. His insecurity and his fear of not remaining in the congregation for life, and of finding himself with nothing if he left, made him abandon the path. His motivations pointed in opposite directions and he found himself facing a conflict of interests. In a tight spot, he chose what gave him the most security.
Motivation is identified when I ask a double question about any activity I carry out: Why do I do what I do, what encourages me to do it? What am I looking for in what I do? When we look for what moves us in what we do, we almost always discover a goal beyond the task itself. We do not always succeed in naming it. We often confuse motivation with the disguise it has put on (apparent motives). The unconscious, after all, is very fond of keeping its secrets.
That is when our emotions unmask us. When something does not turn out the way we planned, what inner turmoil! People may tell us from the outside, “calm down”, “it’s not such a big deal”; the reaction will not be long in coming: “That’s easy for you to say, but you can tell it didn’t happen to you!”.
I remember a woman, a biologist working for a company, who changed jobs and devoted herself to working with disadvantaged young people as an expression of her Christian commitment. Two years later she went back to her company with a sense of failure. This is how she expressed her reasons: “I didn’t know these kids were so ungrateful. I go with all my good intentions to devote myself to them, even losing out by it, and they pay no attention at all. I would carry on, but I’ve become convinced that it’s impossible to do anything with these kids. It’s clear God doesn’t want this from me”. But you could tell she was angry and upset when she talked about the young people, and very depressed by what she had been through. She often repeated: “Happiness is never complete!”.
This woman experienced a great deal of dissatisfaction in her job at the company and needed to feel good. She also had a desire to live her Christian faith more deeply and to make it concrete in commitments on behalf of others. What is more, she had a mortgage on an apartment, and her teaching salary was a third lower than what she earned at the company.
In this case we see very clearly that the woman is not moved by a single motivation but by several (three); that is what happens most of the time in our actions. And there is more, because motivations do not all push with the same intensity, nor do they point in the same direction. There are primary motivations (associated with the urgent need to satisfy basic needs); in this woman’s case, “feeling good”. This motivation pushed her first to leave the company, and then to leave teaching and go back to the company.
But there are also secondary motivations (associated with values, with goals in keeping with what we want to live in our life project): in this woman’s case, the desire to make her Christian commitment more alive and concrete moved her to change jobs, even knowing that she would earn less in teaching. Her motivation is authentically sincere, because it leads her to make committed decisions, and even after this experience she longs to keep looking for something to do along the lines of commitment.
And finally there are mixed motivations, that is, the coexistence of both, as in the example we have been following. Secondary motivations (put into words and confirmed by behavior) are easier to discern than primary ones. Above all, they are easier to digest, because our affectivity is not threatened. Hence the importance of knowing ourselves and opening up truthfully, so as not to be held prisoner by them. How much it helps at such times to have someone in our life who helps us face the truth about ourselves! It is a tremendous blessing!
From these examples we might suspect that this matter of motivations is very complicated, and that we can hardly ever manage to be moved by secondary motivations of value. But no, we do not want to deny the autonomy that secondary motivations can come to have with respect to primary ones. They are autonomous and interdependent at the same time. The most important thing is to be able to identify them. Allport says: “Our motivations are autonomous (at least relatively). A large part of our life is lived on the basis of mature and conscious schemes of values and purposes, not merely as a defense against primitive forces. To a person who has reached that degree of development, Fromm applies the name of productive personality”.
I sincerely believe, from experience, that we must tread carefully where motivations are concerned. Once again we are referring to the dynamics of a process. Primary and secondary motivations grow together, like the wheat and the weeds. The important thing is to identify both and pay attention so that one does not smother the other, and so that in due time each falls into its place. Jesus proposed a criterion: do not try to pull up the weeds, for you may uproot the wheat as well. The psychology of growth offers this criterion: clarify them, distinguish them and manage them properly; do not repress them.
The need to feel good about what we do, the need to earn money, the desire to be happy are human, legitimate and healthy. We cannot reject them outright; the more we do so, the more they will try to impose themselves as our ultimate motivations. What matters is to cultivate motivations of value as well, and not to lose sight of the fact that our main motivation cannot be grounded in these things, but in Jesus’ call to follow him. Once all our motivations are resituated around “the pearl of great value” (cf. Mt 13:46), each will take its place, and we will be able to live healthily, do good and be happy, because we put the best of ourselves at the service of the Kingdom.
Then we will recognize “doing things for others” as important: it is what Jesus did, and he confirmed it with his word: “My Father is always working, and so I too am working at all times” (Jn 5:17). But by this he did not mean a restless kind of work that left no time for anything else, but a kind of doing that lay at the heart of his way of understanding “life as mission”. Living life as mission does not endorse activism, but it does call for an unconditional, clear-sighted self-giving.
2. What really matters for us is to discover “life as mission”
That is how Jesus lived it: his whole life given over to proclaiming the Good News. He achieved a sound ordering of his motivations. Not many: one central, centered motivation that organized the whole constellation of the others. “My food is to do the will of the Father and to accomplish his work” (Jn 4:34).
A well-known anecdote by Chesterton explains the same thing in another way. The story goes that a group of men were working on a building. One of them was asked: “What are you doing?”, and he replied: “Painting a wall”; another answered: “I’m joining these stones with mortar”. Another, who was working with wood, replied: “I’m carving these beams to make a coffered ceiling”. Finally another, who was coloring glass, answered: “I’m building a cathedral”. Seeing the whole puts each task in its place.
When we come to understand life as mission, our whole existence is involved in everything we do. For life in mission means living wholly given to proclaiming the Good News of Jesus, who “has come to bring life, and life in abundance for all” (cf. Jn 10:10) on behalf of our God.
Life in mission is discovered by walking behind Jesus, becoming familiar with his pedagogy and his methods, even if it takes us a long time to learn. In this task we all experience our clumsiness at some point, perhaps so that it becomes clear that we follow Jesus through the action of the Spirit. It is about savoring poverty as a beatitude, itinerancy as an attitude, and a heart wide enough to love everyone in freedom.
Discovering life as mission is a bet with no guaranteed return; sometimes we get tired, it is true, but we know that “the die is cast”. Embracing life as mission frees us from the temptation to “look back” (cf. Lk 9:62).
Life in mission is purified when we have to live through something we did not choose, and the other side of well-being, of tranquility, of a naive happiness understood as the absence of difficulties and conflicts comes to the surface. At such moments everything deepens: our understanding of life according to the logic of the Gospel, our own maturity. We begin to sense what “venturing well” might mean as a path to happiness. Remaining active through these stages spurs us toward creative fidelity. Trust in God protects us from ourselves and from the forces of evil.
Discovering life as mission means coming to understand that in God’s plan there is a place in the world that is unique and irreplaceable for me. Taking up that place and bringing it to fulfillment is an opportunity for self-realization. That is what we call personal vocation. Sometimes it seems that God is more interested than we are in our discovering it, because he has thought of us with love from all eternity and keeps “winking” at us to see whether we notice. I really like how Tillich expresses it, in his deep, existential tone: “For He who has called us, He who sees our daily movements, contemplates the whole of our life. And in that whole we discover an inescapable, assigned place of the greatest importance. Both individually and collectively we have an ultimate destiny.”
This is what Ignacio, aged 44, wrote when he was asked to put down in writing his life situation at this stage of his life: “Well, after spending a long, long time tormented because I had many difficulties both in the community and in the tasks of mission, and I didn’t really know what I had to do, I even felt like giving up, thinking I had taken the wrong path. During the days of prayer in the summer, the light came. We had been invited to pray with Is 43: ‘Thus says the Lord, he who created you, he who formed you (…). I have called you by name, you are mine (…), do not fear, for I have redeemed you (…). I declared, I saved and I proclaimed, you are my witnesses (…). Do not remember the former things; see, I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?…’”.
“At that moment I had a strange perception. I perceived my truest and most intimate self; I felt ‘unique’ before God, ‘called by my name, loved, chosen, led by his hand’. And I realized that what was happening to me was that I was wavering in the face of the difficulties I was encountering, but that my place was there, and nowhere else. A strange peace came over me – I even blush a little to write it. For a moment everything I was living passed through my mind like a film; the things and people that appeared were the usual ones, but I looked different, somehow younger, happier, less overwhelmed and hesitant. I remained wrapped in that experience for a while, giving thanks, adoring, welcoming. Since the summer (almost a year has gone by) I have rethought many things, but now I have the feeling that I am doing what I have to do – or rather, what God wants for me. My people confirm it, and so do the circumstances; and I tell myself that if I need to change anything, I will be given to understand it.”
Discovering life as vocation and making concrete the personal vocation we have received is the secret of integration. All our motivations fall back into place. Discovering it and embracing it, like Jesus. For Jesus’ personal vocation was made known to him in a single word: “Abba”. A word that sums up his whole life and mission: because “Truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own; he does only what he sees the Father doing: whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he does” (Jn 5:19-20).
3. Understanding “life as vocation and mission” takes shape in living as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters
We receive mission from the Father as a vocation; the Risen One entrusts it to us in our encounter with him, and it is lived in the power of his Spirit. And how long it takes us to realize it! That it is not our own doing, that it is the Spirit in us. But Jesus’ disciples took no less time. They, who had been called, who had lived through many adventures at his side, who had been able to cast out demons and to share banquets with him, came close to abandoning their following of him because of the scandal of the cross.
Thank goodness the Risen One brought them together again, coming out to meet them on the roads to renew his call, gather them into community and send them back to Galilee to continue his mission. He also reminded them that for all this they would receive the Spirit; it would be that Spirit who would bring it about in them.
It is John, in his Gospel, who tells us: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. He breathed on them and said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit…” (Jn 20:21-22). The Risen One calls us to live in mission as he did and in his style. Obedience and the daily struggle are at stake in this mission, as are self-giving and endurance in difficult moments; everything becomes possible if we feel “included” in Jesus’ mission. This is how we travel the journey, “the ecclesial path of faith in history, that holy ‘intertwining’ between God and humanity called to the life of faith”.
The practice of mission takes concrete form in a way of living relationships. Living as sons and daughters, living as brothers and sisters. There is a very close link between these keys of salvation and the way we understand relationships.
Living as sons and daughters, we confess our God as Father and Mother. And in confessing God as Father with our lips and our heart, we recognize him as the source of love from whom all life and every life proceeds. In calling God Father, with the thousand names and facets revealed to us each day, we are expressing the sum total of all the good things created. In calling him Father and Mother, we recognize him as the God of tenderness and deep mercy. That is why we can contemplate every moment of life, and of our own life, as imbued with his presence.
“When we name God fully, all of life becomes an exercise in contemplation”. And what better way to name him than by using the very words Jesus taught us: “Our Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, teach us to forgive. Do not let us fall into temptation. Deliver us from evil. Amen” (Mt 6:9-13). A whole life project.
When we dare to say to God “Father! Mother!”, we are confessing that “God is my strength, the creator and procreator of all of us. That God has always known us, desired us, thought of us; has cared about us, and God would care and will care for us forever”. This confession is not made in a day; it is learned along the way. Sometimes by contemplating him directly, or by contemplating in his presence the events that happen and that we live each day. At other times it is learned by living as brothers and sisters: the gift of meeting other men and women who also live as brothers and sisters with us.
Living as sons and daughters, living as brothers and sisters. Through relationships lived in these keys, we open ourselves to a way of understanding the human and Christian community. A way beyond hierarchical conceptions, a way of relating that does not allow us to regard those who are “different” as superior or inferior to ourselves, but simply as brothers and sisters, that is, as family.
In this way we can all – men and women, near and far – become passionate about taking on the responsibility of turning this earth into a common home, a home for everyone. Dreaming of a world in which justice and peace, beauty and respect for difference are able to restructure the balancing forces of life.
Would our communities not be far more livable, and a far stronger witness, if we applied ourselves to living as sons and daughters and as brothers and sisters in daily life? The best thing of all is that there are signs telling us that things are moving in that direction. There are brothers and sisters who bear a very simple witness to an alternative way of living.
Communities that:
- Relate to God with such trust that they dare to call him “Abba, Father!” And they do so each one individually and all together when they gather to celebrate life (Rom 8:15).
- Relate to one another in a genuine spirit of equality: no one tries to impose themselves on the others; they share out the tasks and take turns at them; they take seriously the work of building community every day, and they gather around Jesus to listen to his Word and seek the Father’s will together. Could it be that they have understood what Jesus said? “Call no one father or teacher, for you have only one Father. You are all brothers” (Mt 23:8-10).
- Try to remain clear-sighted in the face of all kinds of pressure: personal, communal, institutional, social. They take seriously walking the path of freedom, because they are in tune with what Paul said: “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm, therefore, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1).
- Organize themselves in such a way that they share their goods. A fundamental value of their community project is sharing rather than having. They do not want money to be their “master” any longer (cf. Mt 6:24).
- Try to remain in love in joys and in difficulties… “I give you a new commandment: that you love one another” (Jn 13:34) “to the point of giving your life for others” (Jn 15:13).
For personal reflection and sharing
When we do things for others, we are left with a sense of power and fruitfulness. Recall occasions when, after exhausting work, you felt on top of the world.
- Read the commentary on the rich young man and compare yourself with him. What primary motivations do you discover in yourself? What secondary motivations? How have both coexisted, or how do they coexist, in your life over time? Describe it.
- Is there a special moment when you remember discovering “your life as mission”? Can you identify just one? Several? What different nuance do you find in each moment? Name them.
- How would you define your personal vocation on this life journey in your own words? When were you first able to put it into words? Let the feelings this stirs in you resonate.
- In what everyday situations do you now find yourself living as a daughter? And as a sister? Write them down. How do you receive others in this same practice? Write it down.
If you can and wish to, share your answers to these questions in community.
Note: you can use these questions to help you reflect and share, but bear in mind that the point is not to fill in the questionnaire as if it were an exam. What matters is the reflection we are able to draw from it.