By Rachel Curry & Josh Low
Prominent Catholic speaker and writer Anna Krohn challenged young people on the importance of discerning their vocation and loving with intelligence and respect at the Embrace the Grace Conference (ETG) this past December.
Some 150 young people were taken on a journey of getting to know themselves and understand their relationships over a series of self-reflecting sessions.
The youth were gathered to hear Mrs Krohn, a Catholic educator and theologian from Melbourne, speak as part of the Archdiocese of Perth’s Catholic Youth Ministry led annual conference in Australia’s only monastic town of New Norcia.
With a focus on the theme, ‘Who am I? We can only truly discover ourselves through the discovery of God’, those in attendance had the opportunity to listen, pray and have small group discussions as she expanded on this theme during the three sessions she led at ETG.
Mrs Krohn’s first session involved guiding the young people present through her speech via a workshop on temperaments.
“Temperaments are those qualities we’re born with that determine how quickly or how long we respond to the world around us – and we shouldn’t be angry with our temperaments,” she said in an interview with The eRecord.
“It’s important to understand your own temperament so you can explain [the reasons behind our actions]”
“It also helps you in a friendship or relationship to respect who you are and who the other person is, instead of shaping them in your likeness, because that’s not a mature relationship.”
Mrs Krohn proceeded to look at relationships more closely in her second session, when she detailed how loving with intelligence and respect helps in relationships.
“The idea was about the different types of intelligence we need when we’re loving,” she said.
“Usually people think of intelligence as being brainy, but it’s also important to understand how people’s social and emotional intelligence works in relationships.”
Respect is also integral in relationships, Mrs Krohn said.
In order to delve deeper into this subject, she spoke to attendees about Pope Saint John Paul II’s book, Love and Responsibility, which he wrote based on his pastoral experiences as a Polish priest.
“He looked at questions like the objectification of the other person. Do we treat our partner as if they are a person or an object?
“Sometimes with our culture around relationships today, it’s easy to see a person as a means to an end or as an object of desire, so one of the things we explored was what true love looks like, as opposed to infatuation,” she said.
In the book, Pope St John Paul II asserts that love is about more than our desires or instincts – something which was brought strongly into focus through the sexual studies of the 1950s, Mrs Krohn said.
“He was concerned that these studies were reducing people to their instincts, but a human being is always higher than their instincts,” she said.
During her final session, Mrs Krohn spoke about the importance of our relationship with God, and of discerning our vocation.
She reminded attendees that their primary vocation, before considering anything else, was to live as a baptised Christian who has accepted God’s call.
“We need the grace and sense of vocation that Christian vocation gives,” she said.
“Our primary vocation, even before choosing the priesthood, consecrated religious life or single or married life, is to be a baptised Christian. That’s really the foundation of who we are.”