Vocare Spiritual Practice
Holy Tending: The Art of Paying Attention
Vocare
Vocare is an ongoing spiritual practice designed to help you discern and embrace your multiple vocations so that you can more intentionally live life on purpose. Vocare invites regular reflection upon values, openness, call, attentiveness, regret, and the experience of God’s presence.
Focus
You are invited to focus on where you regularly invest your attention by considering what captures your time, energy, thoughts, and imagination in everyday life. By so considering, you are invited to nourish in a particular way, God’s present-tense call in and through daily living. Use the time between the guided questions for your own reflection and meditation. Bring to mind a specific day or season in your own life. Is this day or season fairly typical for you, or is it an anomaly in the rhythm of your life? How has your attention in this specific day or season shaped your life and its horizons?
Guided Reflection
Opening Prayer
When I am distracted by things that cause me to lose track of your call, O God, turn my attention back to you. In the name of +Jesus, Amen.
- What life values are present for you in where you invested your attention during this day or season? Are they your most important values?
- How does your investment of attention in this day or season invite or compel you to be open? How easy is it for you to be open to this?
- What voices are calling to you through your investment of attention in this day or season? Are these voices that you want or need to listen to? Why or why not?
- As you consider this particular day or season, what actually held your attention? Is this where you want or need your attention to be?
- What regrets does your investment of attention during this particular day or season bring to mind for you? What do you do with these regrets?
- Where and how in this investment of attention do you experience God’s presence?
Closing Prayer
Direct the ponderings of my heart, O God, toward where you call me to pay attention.
Open my heart to be attentive to your work in my life.
Teach me to regard your work in all creation and to pay attention to what you are doing.
In the name of +Jesus, Amen.