Working out my salvation one gloppy mess at a time

This is an article developed from one I originally wrote a couple of years ago. I'm delighted that it was recently published by Aleteia.org!

For a long time after reverting to Catholicism I would trip up over the idea of “duty”. Over and over again I’d read about discerning the will of God, and I’d consider that whatever God’s will for one’s life, it always included a sense of vocational duty.

But I had a stubborn resistance to being told what to do. In my mind I associated duty with oppression, or at least with unfortunate, toilsome obligation. Wasn’t this what the Protestants were always charging Catholics with: thinking we had to work for our salvation?

I came to realize that I had been thinking of my duty – within my vocation as a mother, for instance — as what I begrudgingly needed do in order to repay God for ....  

To read the rest of the article, please follow the link to the Aleteia website.