Discern Your Personal Vocation and Lead a Joyful Life Here is an article that has appeared recently in both Catholic San Francisco and the Oakland Voice about a program being offered in the Bay Area, which we call the Vision for You. It is on page 5, here.
It is a series of spiritual exercises that I was offered over 25 years ago by a friend. Going through this process led to my conversion to the Catholic faith and to my becoming an artist. Both of these outcomes were against all odds - I was a cynical unhappy atheist when I met my mentor, David; and I couldn't afford to go to art school. What convinced me to give it a go was seeing other people whom he had directed who demonstrated to me, as much in the way they were as anything else, that they had something in their lives that I didn't have.
It was only once I came into the Church that I realised how lucky I had been to have met David. I always felt that this process of systematic discernment is something that should be offered more widely. Over the years I have passed it on to a number people, perhaps 50 or so, and have seen the same thing happen to them - nearly all who stuck with it developed a faith and a good proportion of those became Catholic.
One of the great postives about a Catholic education, such as that offered by Pontifex University, is that it forms to the person to transform the culture. You might say that it helps him to do whatever he does joyfully and gracefully.
The big question, which is often left unanswered, is: 'But what am I meant to do? It's all very well helping me to do something well, but surely it would help me to know what it is that God actually wants me to do, joyfully and gracefully?'
The Vision for You process, which is what I have called the program David gave me, answered these questions for me and so I see it as something that can be offered hand-in-hand with the formation that a genuinely Catholic education offers.
The article in San Francisco Catholic describes how a small group of us, including myself and colleague Pontifex University faculty member, Dr Michel Accad, are hoping to make this process more widely available.
Dr Accad is a medical practioner with a practice in the city of San Francisco, as well as philosopher who has published in the Thomist. He offers a course on the Philosophy of Nature and of Man in the Fall. Dr Accad, for example, has begun to suggest that his depressed patients might like to consider the process.
