Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father

When Minna Proctor's father, a university professor and musicologist, tells her he has decided to pursue the priesthood, all she can say is, "oh." Having grown up the child of divorced parents without a religious compass, Minna realizes how little she knows of her father's spiritual life, and beyond that, how little she knows about what it means to be called to something, much less a life of religious devotion. And then the church rejects her father's petition. Being the spirited, thoughtful intellectual that she is, Minna sets out to define for herself just what it means to have a "call," and then to be told by some authority (the church, in this instance) that your call may not be a call in the classic sense (whatever that is) at all. But, wonders Minna, who's to say? A kind of extended personal essay on the idea of calling based on conversations with her father, interviews with myriad priests and religious scholars and readings of classic faith narratives from Augustine to Simone We