“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair.”
(2 Corinthians 4:8)
There is a kind of dismay that does not announce itself loudly. It does not reject God. It does not storm out of the Church. It remains present. It attends Mass. It prays when it can. It believes, at least in principle. But somewhere beneath the surface, it begins to suspect that the language of calling was written for someone else.
Many of us were taught that discernment unfolds in freedom. That God’s voice is heard most clearly in silence, in stability, in the absence of distraction. We were told to listen for peace, to wait for clarity, to respond generously once the path becomes visible. This vision of vocation is sincere. It is beautiful. It is also unfamiliar to those whose lives have rarely known neutrality.
For many Black Catholics, dismay does not come from doubt in God. It comes from the quiet realization that the conditions assumed by our spiritual vocabulary do not match the conditions in which we actually live. The call to listen deeply can feel distant when one is already listening for survival. The invitation to respond freely can feel abstract when responsibility is not optional. The promise that vocation emerges from interior calm can sound foreign when calm itself is a luxury.
So, dismay begins to grow, not as rebellion but as distance. Not from faith, but from the feeling that vocation does not belong to us. We begin to wonder if calling is meant for those whose lives are not constantly negotiated between obligation and hope. We suspect that discernment happens somewhere else, in quieter rooms, under steadier skies, among people whose lives allow them to pause.
Dismay often hides behind ordinary faithfulness. Some sit in church already calculating the week ahead. Tuition. Rent. Family needs at home. Inherited and structural poverty. The quiet threat or memory of violence. Medical bills. The homily speaks of listening for God’s voice, but the mind is crowded with responsibilities that will not wait. The question becomes unavoidable. How does one discern when the future already feels spoken for?
It looks like continuing to show up while quietly wondering if one is already late. It feels like carrying responsibility that does not pause long enough for discernment to feel spacious. It emerges when the language of calling seems to assume that life can be arranged, postponed, or simplified for the sake of listening.
For many Black Catholics, discernment does not falter because we are unwilling. It falters because the imagined conditions for hearing God’s voice rarely appear. Family need does not wait. Economic strain does not suspend itself. Migration, obligation, grief, and fatigue do not politely step aside so that clarity may enter. Over time, dismay begins to whisper that perhaps vocation belongs to those whose lives allow them to stand still.
Scripture, however, tells a different story. When Abram is called, he is not placed in ideal conditions for reflection. He is summoned into movement. The call arrives as disruption. Leave your country. Leave your kindred. Leave your father’s house. The voice of God does not wait for Abram’s stability. It meets him at the edge of displacement.
What is striking is not Abram’s readiness, but his location. He hears while being unsettled. He responds while losing ground. Abram is not given a map. He is given a direction.
The promise does not eliminate uncertainty. It accompanies it. Abram is told that blessing will unfold, but he is not shown how. He is asked to move without knowing where he is going, to trust without guarantees that the cost will be light. In this sense, Abram does not discern after dismay is resolved. He discerns while it is still possible to turn back.
The call does not remove risk. It reframes it. For many Black Catholics who feel spiritually stalled, this matters. The absence of clarity is not evidence that God is silent. It may be evidence that the call is unfolding as it always has, not by eliminating uncertainty but by inviting faith into it.
This pattern repeats throughout the biblical witness. Moses is called while reluctant and unsure. Jeremiah protests his own inadequacy. Mary asks how her mission could even take place. Even Christ, in Gethsemane, does not experience vocation as serenity but as anguish.
Calling, in Scripture, does not depend on emotional clarity. It often emerges in disturbance. If this is true, then dismay must be reconsidered. It is not necessarily a sign that discernment has failed. It may be the place where discernment begins.
Another one of the quiet burdens many Black Catholics carry is the assumption that vocation must be chosen as though one stands alone. Much of the Church’s language about calling presumes an individual who is free to weigh options, step back from obligation, and respond from a place of interior spaciousness. Yet for many of us, life has never been structured that way. Our decisions are rarely solitary. They are woven into family need, communal expectations, shared survival, and inherited responsibility.
Discernment does not begin in isolation. It begins in entanglement. To consider one’s calling often means asking not only what God is asking of me, but what happens to those who depend on me if I respond. The call is never heard in a vacuum. It arrives in the middle of relationships that cannot be paused.
Black Catholic life has long existed within tension. We belong fully to the Church, yet our history has often unfolded at its edges. Our faith has been nurtured not only through institutional support but through endurance, memory, and communal improvisation. The Church has been a sanctuary and a strain at the same time.
Within this reality, discernment has rarely followed the ideal pattern described in spiritual language. It has not always emerged from retreat or stability. More often, it has taken shape amid constraint. Faith was sustained while working long hours. Calling was considered while supporting the extended family. Hope was preserved while navigating migration, racial vulnerability, and economic uncertainty. This does not make Black discernment defective. It makes it historically honest.
Across generations, Black Catholics have responded to God without waiting for life to become manageable. Vocation was lived by parents who labored without recognition, by lay leaders who built parish life in the absence of resources, by believers who served while carrying burdens unspoken. Calling was not heard after dismay passed. It was heard through it.
The story of Black Catholic discernment is not only biblical. It is also historical. Consider the life of Venerable Augustus Tolton. His priesthood did not emerge from calm conditions. He was born into slavery. He escaped with his family into freedom. He pursued formation while being refused entry into seminaries in his own country because of his race. His path to the priesthood required exile to Rome because the American Church could not yet imagine him within its structures.
Tolton did not discern in neutrality. He discerned while being told, directly and indirectly, that his vocation did not belong. His perseverance was not fueled by the absence of dismay but by fidelity within it. When he returned to serve in the United States, he did so not because conditions had improved but because calling had endured. His priesthood was not the fruit of peace. It was the fruit of persistence.
A generation later, Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman would live a similar pattern in a different register. As a Black Catholic religious sister, theologian, and teacher, she carried the weight of representation and resistance. She spoke openly about the tensions of belonging to a Church that had not always made room for Black experience, even as she loved it deeply. Her witness was not one of naïve harmony. It was one of courageous presence.
Even while suffering from terminal illness, she continued to speak and sing into the life of the Church, calling it toward greater truth. Her discernment did not emerge from comfort. It unfolded within struggle, fatigue, and the ongoing labor of making space where little existed.
Neither Tolton nor Bowman waited for dismay to pass before responding to God. They responded through it. Their lives remind us that Black Catholic vocation has often taken shape not after exclusion ended but while it persisted. Calling was heard not when the path became smooth, but when it remained uncertain.
Their witness reframes our own hesitation. If vocation required ideal conditions, neither would have answered. But vocation does not wait for history to resolve itself. It is heard within it. For those who feel spiritually delayed, this matters. This pattern has not disappeared.
Today, many Black Catholics continue to discern in conditions that do not resemble the calm often described in spiritual language. Some are navigating student debt while feeling drawn toward service. Others are supporting family across borders while wondering if God is asking more of them. Still others are discerning within systems that feel indifferent to their presence, unsure whether the space they feel called toward will ever fully receive them.
The question remains painfully familiar: How does one respond to God when the ground beneath one’s life is already unstable?
For some, discernment unfolds alongside the responsibility of caring for aging parents. For others, it takes place in the shadow of racialized fatigue, economic vulnerability, or communal grief. Calling is considered not in retreat but in transit, not after resolution but during ongoing strain. This is not a modern deviation from the story of faith. It is its continuation.
Just as Abram moved without guarantees, and just as Tolton and Bowman responded without waiting for ease, many today are discerning while still carrying what cannot be set down. The presence of dismay does not silence the call. It changes the way it is heard.
You are not behind. You are not disqualified. You are not waiting outside the story of vocation. Dismay is not the opposite of calling. It may be the place where calling becomes real. Discernment does not begin when history quiets down. It begins when one dares to listen within it.
And God has always spoken there.
Fabian S. Adderley is a contextual theologian and pastoral minister originally from the Bahamas. He holds a B.A. in Pastoral Ministry and Philosophy, a Master of Divinity, and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Theology. His work explores vocation, suffering, and the lived realities of faith within marginalized communities, engaging the intersection of Black Catholic experience, social structures, and the Church’s pastoral imagination.
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