Today's readings: Isaiah 6, 1-8; 1 Corinthians 15, 1-11; Luke 5, 1-11.

One of the most troubling issues confronting believers today is transmitting the faith, and com-municating to younger generations what we have received from the past as sure belief and in a manner that is relevant and comprehensible. Practically in all aspects of life we form part of a 'connecting' culture, but where faith is concerned we perennially experience a tragic breakdown of communication.

In the second reading, St Paul speaks of how he was teaching what he himself had been taught, "the gospel that you received and in which you are firmly established". At times, this is precisely our problem. We know what we received but we have great difficulties to pass it on. Besides, we seem to be dominated by an unsettled feeling, rather than, one of being firmly established, as Paul says.

In some sense, the readings from Isaiah and Luke illustrate that what we have received is not a doctrine or a philosophy of life. It is a fact, a person, the Word made flesh. Faith is not just notional belief, it is an encounter. An encounter that reveals to us who we really are. The story of Isaiah's calling and of the insightful encounter between Jesus and Peter by the lake of Gennesaret can serve as prayerful explorations into that form of spirituality that mostly suits today's way of living.

There is a quest for spiritual identity in our times. As Thomas Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation, "contemplation does not simply find a clear idea of God and confine Him within the limits of that idea. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by Him into His own realm, His own mystery and His own freedom."

Vocation, as Parker Palmer writes, is not a goal to be achieved but a gift to be received. The true self within every human being is the seed of authentic vocation, and it can take a long time to become the person one has always been. In the process, we often mask ourselves in faces that are not our own. Before we discover our deep identity there is much dissolving and shaking of ego that we have to endure.

The idea that vocation, or calling, comes from an external voice is somewhat rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood that makes us feel inadequate to the task of living our own lives and creates guilt about the gap between who I am and who I am supposed to be.

But, to use the imagery of St John of the Cross, there is a path to walk with "no light except the one that burns in your heart". To refer to the Emmaus disciples' incident in Luke, if there is no fire burning in our hearts on the road, our eyes will most probably remain closed to the vision.

The callings of both Isaiah the prophet and Peter the apostle are two cases in point which reproduce for us in an incarnate way the meeting between the infinite and the finite, between heaven and earth, between God and man. Vocation in this sense is not something merely psychological or intimistic, but fundamentally a manifestation, an 'epiphany', a vision.

The words of Peter in the gospel recall our own feeling of having toiled for so long to find ourselves in situations that disclose strong features of a crisis. But even if disaster may hit church attendance or the credibility of our institutions, out of the ruins the authentic experience of believing continues to occur in the spaces of interior adoration.

As Merton says: "At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody and if we could see it, so much darkness in life would vanish."

It is the vision of God's glory that shakes the temple, makes Isaiah feel that he is a man of unclean lips and at the same time takes away his iniquity.