Sitting cross-legged on the rug, a classroom full of kindergarteners listened to a bishop tailor his message of marriage and love down to “baby talk.” Down the hall, fourth-graders peppered a newly ordained priest with questions about his favorite boba spot.

The scene at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Northridge didn’t look like your average catechism class — and that was precisely the point.

To tackle a pressing, nationwide shortage of religious vocations, the school took a unique approach for National Vocation Awareness Week from Nov. 2 to Nov. 5, inviting a lineup of priests, deacons, and women religious — 14 in total — to help demystify consecrated life and show students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade that God’s call is both human and attainable.

Principal Dr. Kris Brough gave full credit to Zoe Copeland, a first-time fourth-grade teacher who brought the program from her previous school.

Copeland carefully structured the week so that each class interacted with both a male and female religious. The speakers included retired Bishop Gerald Wilkerson, who served as an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles from 1998 to 2015, recently ordained priest Father David Zamora, and Sister Shawn Marie of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

Copeland prepared her fourth-graders by introducing them to various religious orders, pointing out how faith intersects with everyday professions.

“It allowed them to show that if they want to be a teacher, there are many religious who are teachers. If they want to go out and be a nurse or a doctor, there are many religious orders that are nurses and doctors too,” Copeland said. “It all depends on what order the Lord might be calling them. And so the kids realized that.”

Brough hoped that seeing the speakers’ humanity would help the students form more personal connections.

“I think depending on how we’ve been raised or our age or whatnot, we sometimes put religious on a pedestal,” Brough said. “For a youngster who only sees them on a Sunday or only sees them as priest representatives, there can be a gulf there in terms of their relatability.”

That sense of approachable awe was on full display when Wilkerson met with kindergarteners.

“They’re cute,” Wilkerson said. “You never know what they’re going to say. It makes it easy to talk to them because they're not confused. They’re not filled with all kinds of stuff from outside. They’re just kids.”

Rather than focusing on heavy theological concepts, Wilkerson said he hoped the children walked away with a warm, positive impression of the Church and bishops like himself.

“For them to say, ‘Father was a good person. And he came into our class today. And we had a good time, and we laughed.’ That’s so important for adults, kids, and everybody today,” Wilkerson said. “What I finally said to them was to just ask God: Where do you want me?

“That's a good prayer. ‘Lord. I don’t know where I belong, but I know you'll help me find the right place. Help me to be happy.’ ”

Sister Shawn Marie takes a similar approach, preferring to introduce young children — in her case, a class of first-graders — to the faith incrementally.

“You don’t start by taking them to an hour-and-a-half Mass. You start by taking them a five-minute visit, a visit to the Blessed Sacrament. We're going in to see Jesus, and he wants to talk to your heart, but he’s a gentleman. So you’re giving them little by little; you're increasing their knowledge.”

The Sister of Notre Dame traced her vocational journey back to her own first-grade teacher, Sister Catherine Marie, followed by a more profound call experienced at age 18. Children, she believes, absorb spiritual truths when presented with joy and simplicity.

“I don’t explain my day,” Marie said. “What I explain is what’s important to them. They are disciples of Jesus. They have to follow Jesus. That’s their job. And they will have a vocation, a special vocation. They get the idea that God is real. It’s important for them to know that they will be called by Jesus.”
Zamora, the newly assigned associate pastor at Our Lady of Lourdes, brought a fresh — and particularly young — voice to the initiative. Raised in Southern California, he attended public schools before entering the seminary at 17. He was ordained a priest at 27.

“I feel like I just gave them a little head start,” said Zamora after his presentation. “I know that God’s not calling all of them to be priests and all of them to be nuns. But I think that if the few that are called in there are going to be able to hear that well. And I hope that the rest of them are able to say, ‘You know what, I gave it a shot.’ ”

Zamora said he enjoyed removing the mystery about priesthood by answering practical questions about his daily life, from home visits out of his vestments to visiting the boba place across the street from the school.

“We try to justify or explain things, make it logical,” Zamora said. “And a lot of times God calls us out of, like, really random, seemingly illogical situations in order for us to, like, respond yes to him.”

As the week came to an end, Copeland acknowledged that the impact of the presentations won’t be seen right away. But she’s confident they will bear fruit in due time.

“The more knowledge students have about vocations, the more they’re able to share with other people,” she said.

“I hope that the students were able to receive the message that the Lord could be calling them in any way. And that Jesus is really there to support them if they are getting that call, and to just trust in him, and to lean on him.”

If we try to imagine God, it’s easy to become an atheist. Why?

Try imagining this: We believe that one Person, God, is the sole creator of all that exists. Now, all that exists, although itself finite, is already beyond what we can imagine — billions of galaxies, trillions of planets, and billions of people stretching back through thousands of years. As well, we believe that God knows every rock, insect, animal, and plant not just on earth, but everywhere in the universe. How can we wrap our minds around that? We can’t.

And there’s the further issue of trying to picture the scope of God’s love. Today there are more than 8 billion people in the world, and our faith asks us to believe that God loves each one of those 8 billion individually and intimately, as if he or she were the only person in the world. Moreover, through millions of years, God has loved intimately every man, woman, and child on this earth, right back to our ancestors who lived in caves. How can one mind, one heart, one person do this? It’s beyond the mind.

However, and this is the point, it’s not intended to be imagined or conceptualized.

God is infinite. Infinity, by definition, is impossible to imagine. For example, what’s the highest number it’s possible to count to? Infinity takes us beyond what can be conceptualized. To conceptualize something, the mind needs to start somewhere, and God has no beginning. Indeed, to the extent that we do create for ourselves an imaginative picture of God, we always have something less than God, and often an idol.

And the problem is that we are forever slimming down God to fit the size of our imagination when, by its very essence and definition, God is ineffable, unable to be pictured, imagined, or captured in a concept. This is a dogmatic teaching in all of Christian churches and in Judaism. As the prophet Isaiah says, God is holy, meaning beyond all visualization and all conceptualization, beyond anything that can be imagined. That’s why Scripture asserts that in this life “no one can see the face of God and live.”

However, as Christians, we believe that Jesus came to us, and in his person and teaching gave concrete expression (incarnation) to God so that we can grasp, imagine, and speak truly about certain aspects of God. To know Jesus is to know his “Father.”

However, that’s not the same thing as capturing God in a concept. Indeed, we can “know” God, but we can’t “think” God. We can never create a “picture” of God.

Why is this important? Because whenever we do create a picture of God, we always end up with something less than God — and invariably something that works for our self-interest.

Critics of Christianity accuse us of forever creating God in our own image and likeness. There’s a lot of truth in that. That’s why the God we create for ourselves invariably likes the same people we do, hates the same people we hate, makes the same judgments we make, likes us better than other races, favors our country over others, and assures us that our religion (and our own interpretation of it) is the true way to heaven.

Whenever we capture God in a concept, we end up with a God who is no more intelligent and compassionate than we are, whose heart isn’t larger than ours, and who is unworthy of Jesus and Christianity.

For a dozen years I taught a course to seminarians entitled “A Theology of God.” The course looked at many things: how God is presented in Scripture, the historical development of our dogmatic creeds about God, theological speculation about the nature of God, the salient critiques atheists have made about our Christian belief in God, and insights from the mystics and popular piety vis-à-vis how we might relate more affectively to God.

But throughout the course and particularly at its end, I would say this to the seminarians: Whatever else you do in your teaching, preaching, and pastoral practice, try not to make God look stupid!

In essence: try not to make God look tribal, racist, nationalistic, legalistic, denominational, sexist, rigid, petty, vengeful, angry, defensive, and anything less than unimaginable wisdom, unimaginable love, unimaginable embrace, and unimaginable forgiveness. Try not to make God just another imaginable human person with all our flaws.

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I know sincere, good-hearted atheists and agnostics who don’t believe in God, because when they try to imagine a Person who is creating millions of universes, billions of people, and trillions upon trillions of minerals, plants, and animals, and who is knowing and loving each element in existence intimately as if it were the only thing in existence, they can’t imagine it.

Neither can we. It’s not meant to be imagined. It’s meant to be known in a cloud of unknowing, to stretch our minds and hearts beyond their natural limits and bring us to an awe that bends our knees in genuflection.

St. Josaphat Kuntsevych was born in 1580 in Volhynia, Ukraine, and was baptized as “John.” His parents were Orthodox Christians, but their church had fallen out of communion with the pope in Rome. Through the work of Latin missionaries, John’s Ruthenian Church reunited with the pope in 1596.

John was trained as a merchant’s apprentice, but he felt a calling to the simple, spiritually rigorous life of a Byzantine monk, and entered a Ukrainian monastery in 1604, taking the name Josaphat.

Josaphat was made a priest, then an archbishop, working to reunify the Orthodox Church with the rest of the Catholic Church. He went barefoot, even in the winter, and always wore penitential garb. He was deeply concerned for the poor, and his example of piety and care for souls moved many to return to the Church.

However, not everyone in the area was pleased with Josaphat’s conversion efforts. In 1620, opponents began to consecrate and support a rival archbishop. Josaphat knew that many of the people of Vitebsk wanted him dead, and called them out on their ambushes and attacks, telling them he would be happy to give his life for them as a shepherd among them.

In 1623, he did give his life for his faith. An Orthodox priest assembled a mob in the town, and they came to Josaphat’s residence, demanding his life and threatening those who served with him. He was beheaded, and his body dumped in a river.

Five years after his death, Josaphat’s incorrupt body was found. He was canonized in 1867.