CALLING HAS A TRINITARIAN FORM

We may now go a step further. If we ask ourselves what is the deep meaning of this use of the word “call”, we see that it is one of the doors that open on to the Trinitarian mystery. So far we have spoken of the mystery of the Church of the one God but the Trinitarian mystery also appears. Jesus is the mediator of the call of the Father that happens through the Holy Spirit.

The Christian vocation cannot but have a Trinitarian form, both at the level of the individual person and at the level of the ecclesial community. The mystery of the Church is enlivened throughout by the dynamism of the Holy Spirit, which is a vocational dynamism in the broad and perennial sense, starting with Abraham who was the first to hear God’s call and to respond with faith and action (cf. Gen 12:1-3); until the “behold” of Mary, a perfect reflection of that of the Son of God at the moment when he accepted the Father’s call to come into the world (cf. Heb 10:5-7).

Thus, at the “heart” of the Church — as St Thérèse of the Child Jesus would say — the call of every individual Christian is a Trinitarian mystery: the mystery of the encounter with Jesus, with the Word made flesh, through whom God the Father calls us to communion with him and for this reason wishes to give us his Holy Spirit; and it is precisely through the Spirit that we can respond authentically to Jesus and to the Father within a real, filial relationship. Without the breath of the Holy Spirit the Christian vocation simply cannot be explained, it loses its vitality.

--Benedict XVI, Address to Seminarians of Rome, 2011