Introduction
My question is whether everyone has a unique, personal vocation. To prepare the way for answering this question I will first summarize what Christians believe about their personal vocation to follow Christ. It is likely that a majority of our readers are Christians, but I apologize to our non-Christian allies in the struggle to make ours a culture of life for some specifically Christian reflections at the beginning of this essay. I do so because as I hope then to show we can speak meaningfully of a unique personal vocation for everyone, including non-Christians.

Baptism and the vocation to “holiness”
Most of us were baptized as infants when we were unable to make free choices for ourselves. But others, our godparents, stood as our proxies, responding in our name to the call to die to sin and to live in a way worthy of God's own children, to be holy. And, as we grew in the household of the faith, we renewed our baptismal commitment when we received the sacrament of confirmation; and we are given the opportunity to reaffirm this commitment throughout our lives, particularly during the liturgy of the Easter vigil. Christians believe that in choosing to be baptized they have, through their faith and the redemptive work of Christ, “died” to sin and been raised to a new kind of life. They have now become truly “children of God,” members of the divine family and called to be "perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt 5.48). Baptized persons, like Jesus to whom they are united, are now those whose "food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work" (Jn 4.34). They have the God-given vocation to become holy, to become saints.

This was a central theme of Vatican Council II, whose dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, insists that "all in the Church, whether they belong to the hierarchy or are cared for by it, are called to holiness, according to the apostle's saying: 'For this is the will of God, your sanctification' (1 Thes 4.3; cf. Eph 1.4)” (no. 39). In this document the Council also affirmed: “The followers of Christ... must hold on to and perfect in their lives that sanctification which they have received from God” (no. 40). Moreover, the way lay people are to pursue holiness, the Council insisted in its pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, is in and through the commitments and ordinary activities of everyday life (see no. 43).[1]

All Christians have the common vocation to holiness. But in addition to their common vocation, each Christian has a unique and irreplaceable vocation within the family of God. Not only are different Christians called to different ways of life in the world--the married life, the priestly life, the religious life, the life of a single person in the world--but within each state of life each Christian has his or her own unique and indispensable role to play in filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions and in bringing his work of redemption to completion. Vatican Council II insists that each one of us has a personal vocation to carry out as a member of Jesus' people. Indeed, as the Council Fathers said, "by our faith we are bound all the more to fulfill these responsibilities [our earthly ones as Christians] according to the vocation of each one" (Gaudium et Spes, n. 43).

What about non-Christians?
But most of the people in this world are not baptized Christians, and the percentage of baptized persons in our country is shrinking. What about all these human beings? Do they too have a common vocation to holiness and unique and indispensable personal vocations?

First of all, we know that God wills all men to be saved, as St. Paul teaches in 1 Timothy 2:4 where he says that God “wills everyone to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth.” Moreover, Vatican Council II’s declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, declared in no. 2: “It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.”

Conscience and God
I think that one can show that all human persons, whether baptized or not, have the vocation to come to know that they are not the creators of the moral order but that there is a “more-than-human source” of meaning and value; that man is not the measure of all things. This can be shown by reflecting, with the help of the nineteenth-century scholar John Henry Cardinal Newman, on the phenomenon of conscience.

Considering conscience as our awareness of ourselves as moral beings and called to shape our lives in accordance with the truth, he wrote:"conscience...vaguely reaches forward to something beyond self, and dimly discerns a sanction higher than self for its decisions, as is evidenced in that keen sense of obligation and responsibility which informs them. And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice...and moreover a voice, or the echo of a voice, imperative and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience."[2] Newman goes on to say in a particularly eloquent passage, conscience, precisely because it bears testimony to "how it is with one's self," is always emotional. "It always," he writes,

involves the recognition of a living object, towards which it is directed. Inanimate things cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny security of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being: we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction on breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and on the other hand it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit....If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which this perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of Conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive, and is the creative principle of religion...[3]

To know that someone is approaching is not to know that Peter is approaching
In his Summa theologiae, 1, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1, where he raised the question, “whether it is self-evident that God exists,” Thomas Aquinas said: “to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching.”  It means that someone, for example a person who repudiates the claim that “man is the measure of all things” and recognizes that there is a more than human source of meaning and value knows implicitly that “some One” more than human is approaching even though he may not know as yet that this is God who is approaching. It means that the human person, as yet an unbeliever, is nonetheless impelled by his own nature to seek the truth and to shape his choices and actions in accord with the truth he finds. He is the kind of person whose heart and mind are not closed to receive the truth that in reality there is a God. I am thinking of people in the ancient world before Christ like Socrates or Cicero who firmly repudiated the banal relativism of the Sophists—the culturally elite of their day, in many ways similar to the cultural elite of our day. It was rightly said by early Christian writers that the philosophy of Socrates and Cicero and others like them was in a true sense a praeparatio evangelica. I suggest that the testimony given in our day by Buddhists like the Dalai Lama and by a Hindu like Mohandas Ghandi is an analogous praeparatio evangelica for our day. What they are doing, even if they do not realize it, is preparing the soil so that it will be prepared to welcome the culture of life and reject the culture of death. In this way, it seems to me, they are preparing the soil so that it is receptive of God’s saving word.

Some who consider themselves atheists (perhaps because of the bad example given them by some who hypocritically confess faith in God while hating their flesh-and-blood neighbors) may themselves recognize that there is a more than human source of meaning and value and they too, like the non-Christians who are may be non-theists but who are not a-theists, have the personal vocation I have tried to describe. Those atheists who are like hypocritical theists have, as it were, in reality embraced the sophistic, relativistic idea that man, i.e., they themselves, are the measure of all things and the source of meaning and value. What they have done is to harden their hearts to make it the kind of soil in which the seed of the culture of life—and of the gospel- cannot flourish.
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Notes
1.Russell Shaw shows this in his essay, “Lay Ministry, Lay Apostolate, and Vocation,” Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, 32, 4 (Winter, 2009) 5-9.
2.Newman, A Grammar of Assent, p. 107. Emphasis added.
3.Ibid., pp. 109-110. Newman’s reflections were echoed about 50 later by Pope Pius XII, "Nuntius Radiophonicus de conscientia Christiana in iuvenibus recte efformanda," 23 March, 1952; Acta Apostolica Sedis 44 (1952) 271 and in 1965 by Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, no. 16.

 
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