Vocation to "singlehood"

[Oremoose]

Not Sure how to ask this question, But I am hoping to get more information on what exactly is the Vocation to single life? I have been told that it is a "transitional vocation" (meaning it is your vocation till you living fully into any of the main vocations of Matrimony or Holy Orders/Religious life). But for some reason I feel like it is a deeper vocation than that driving me to ask here.

[truthfinder]

By no means an official answer, but I attended a talk on this and it was concluded that unvowed singleness was not a vocation, that is something which God calls one to.  But if that singleness is consecrated, by taking even private vows, then it is a vocation (because then it becomes transformed and dedicated to God). 

[Luigi]

I'm no theologian, but...

Singleness may not be a vocation, but that's not to say it's a waste of one's life, either. I know any number of people, both females and males, who have never married, never entered religious life, never had children, never made any kind of private vows or public consecrations. Yet, hard as it may be to believe, they are still worthwhile people who live happy and productive lives. Miracles will never cease!

[Nihil Obstat]

I always repost this when this question comes up.

To put it very briefly, simply being single is not a vocation. To be consecrated is to mark a vocation, so if one is consecrated in the single state, whether that be as a lay religious, a cleric, even a consecrated virgin, that constitutes a legitimate vocation. But being single is more of a state of tension, where one is called to discern God's voice, and determine the manner in which they are called to actualize their vocation by fully giving their lives to God, and by binding themselves to a particular state of life.

 

Communio (summer 2010, "Living and Thinking Reality in its Integrity", David L. Schindler). 

16: "There is much that needs to be sorted out here. A state of life, properly understood, gives objective form to an "existential" as distinct from "office-bearing" participation in Christ's eucharistic love. Each of the baptized participates in Christ's Eucharist both existentially and "officially", in the sense that ordained priests are always first members of the Church, and that all members of the Church, by virtue of their Baptism, exercise a priestly office, manifest, for example, in the capacity themselves to baptize in certain circumstances. This emphatically need not, and does not, imply attenuation of the clear and profound difference between the laity and the ordained priesthood. What I mean to emphasize here is simply that a state of life, for example, consecrated virginity, is as such not a clerical state. It seems to me that an awareness that this is so opens the way to a deepened appreciation for the state of consecrated virginity as a distinctly lay state, recognized already officially by the Church in Pius XII's Provida Mater, and indeed in Vatican II's renewed teaching regarding the laity and their "wordly" vocation. My statement is also meant to carry the implication that the vowed life of the three evangelical counsels, which expresses the gift of one's whole self- possessions, body and mind- indicate the most objectively fitting existential form for the priest's office-bearing participation in the Eucharist and the sacramental life of the Church. But again, all of this needs more sustained development that can be offered in the present forum. For a reflection on the relation of the life of the evangelical counsels and the vocation of the laity, see Balthasar, Laity and the Life of the Counsels (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003).
17: The suggestion here that there are only two states of life [consecrated virginity or sacramental marriage] raises many questions within the Church today. On the one hand, there is the common perception that the priesthood as such is a state of life, which in the proper sense it is not. On the contrary, it has its sacramental-ontological reality as an office, indeed as an office that, as I have suggested, bears an objective fittingness for a vowed life of the three evangelical counsels. On the other hand, there is also an increasing tendency today to affirm that singleness as such can qualify as a state of life. But neither is this properly so, because a state of life requires saying forever to God in a vowed form. And the character of this vow that constitutes a state of life has its ultimate foundation in the dual character of the human being's original experience, in original solitude and original unity, or filiality and nuptiality, both of which have their center in God. A state of life, properly speaking, is the mature person's recuperation in freedom of one's call to fidelity to God forever, which occurs either through consecrated virginity, and thus remaining "alone" with God; or through marriage, and thus promising fidelity to God forever, through another human being. But it is nevertheless crucial to see here that the single life, if not (yet) actualized by either of these vows, does not thereby remain merely in a kind of neutral place where one remains suspended in a mode of inaction and unfulfillment. On the contrary, as we have indicated, there is a call for the gift of one's whole self implicit already in the act of being created: and this call is immeasurably deepened in the act of being baptized. The point, then, is that this call is actualized in the tacit and mostly unconscious fiat which, in receiving creation, and in turn the new creation in Christ, already begins one's participation in a promise of the gift of one's self to God. The call to be faithful to God forever with the wholeness of one's life is implied, and is already initially realized, in a natural form, at one's conception, and again, in a supernatural form, at one's Baptism. As long as one remains single, then, the relevant point is that one can already begin living the fiat of total availability to God, and, in this sense, realize the fundament of what becomes a state of life when recuperated in the maturity of one's freedom in the form of a vow of consecrated virginity or marriage. What one is meant to do as long as one is single, in other words, is to live one's total availability: to wait with active availability for God's will. Of course, it has to be recognized that humanity, and the cosmos as a whole, exists in a deeply disordered condition by virtue of sin. And therefore it has to be recognized as well that the call objectively to a consecrated state of celibacy or to marriage may never be historically realized- as is the case that everything in the cosmos exists in a broken condition, sometimes a seriously disordered condition that must be accepted, even with much suffering.