Let me offer you a couple examples: Several years ago one of my best friends, a mountain climber, lost his hold on a rock outcropping on Little Bear peak in Colorado and fell over a thousand feet to his death. I think I grew up at that moment and suddenly realized that so few things in life are under our control, we are fragile creatures. Death comes upon us unawares. But it was a sacred moment for me. There was a mystery in it all.

On another occasion I was called to a hospital emergency room to be with a mother whose young college-age daughter had just committed suicide. I could only think: Human life is tenuous; who knows what is occurring in the mind of a person that they will take their own life like this?

Finally, I was once called to a hospital to calm a young man and his wife whose first child had just died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. (SIDS) The man was so overwhelmed with grief that he literally put his fist through a wall.

I remember asking myself whether the hand of God was part of these tragedies. I thought to myself: Even God must be weeping in these moments of life.

My point in all this is to say that I came to grips with my life during those moments. I would take nothing in life for granted hereafter

There are, of course, many, many events that are also unexplainably beautiful: There is transcendence in the birth of a child; there is something of God in the first words a child speaks, the first step it takes. They come close to being divine occurrences. We grow up in those moments; we see life in some deeper fashion.

Having considered all that, we have two events in our Sunday scriptures for today that were interpreted as beyond the human: The first happened to Isaiah at a moment when felt the call to be a prophet. He is in the Jerusalem temple; God appears to him in the midst of angelic creatures; the building shakes; the odor of incense is overwhelming. Then he hears the voice of the Lord God saying: “Who will go for us? Whom shall we send?” His immediate response is: “Here I am, send me.”

I interpret this event as a unique vocation that happened at a moment’s notice. It is quite unlike most vocations, however, that come about as a result of many sacred moments in life.

The second vocation event happens to three of Jesus’ followers, all who make their living as fishermen. Their skill and luck, however, are running against them. Jesus takes matters in hand and suddenly their boats are overflowing with fish. The three can only describe this as a divine event that led to their decision to follow Jesus. Of course, we know the rest of the story from history: Peter James and John became the first leaders of the Church.

The point of these stories is to say that a vocation rises up out of ordinary human events that we, in turn, interpret as divine occasions, the work of God in human form. True, some events may seem tragic, as we have just described. But even the tragic events in human life speak of God.

I think there is no one answer to my opening question: How did I come to this point in my life? It is rather a whole series of events that happened rather haphazardly in life. Our task is one of interpretation, of imagination. God is ultimately discovered in the details, the unexplainable, the beautiful, the overwhelming, The awesome and yes, even in the tragic. Strange, isn’t it, how we end up being who we are, doing what we do? For some, perhaps the lucky few, it comes in a flash of insight. But for the rest of us…well it may be a lifetime and perhaps that’s not so bad, you know?

The scriptures: Isaiah 6: 1-2a, 3-8; 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11; Luke 5: 1-11