I had a conversation recently with a former professional sports chaplain. We discussed the fact that the lives of many professional athletes fall apart after retirement. Some fall into bankruptcy, addiction, and all kinds of family problems like divorce.

I asked him if he could identify any patterns in the guys who would make it after retirement. From his observations, a key factor was where the athletes found their primary identity: If they saw themselves first and foremost as professional athletes, football players or baseball players, they no longer knew who they were when that was taken from them. But those athletes who found their identity primarily in Christ were able to stay steady through the upheavals in the life of a professional athlete.

I asked him if he had a particular time that he addressed this with the players. He said that it was a constant theme in his preaching. While some athletes talked a good talk, tests came along the way in the form of injuries and when the team would draft another player in their position — little shocks to the foundation of the identity of the athlete.

Professional sports are not the only place where people can have a hard time finding their primary identity in Christ. In another recent conversation with a friar, I was told that there is a constant temptation to find his primary identity as being a friar and being one of the popular CFRs instead of seeing himself primarily as a child of God. As strange as it may seem, even in a calling to the religious life, it can be a challenge to remain grounded in one’s relationship with Jesus, the one thing necessary, the pearl of great price.

One of the very difficult challenges is that for professional athletes, as well as religious, much of the attention they get is because of their perceived vocation. Every time someone asks an athlete for his autograph, the message is that he is valuable specifically because he is a professional athlete. The message can be even stronger when it is a fellow Christian asking for the autograph.

Father Benedict Groeschel and Mother Teresa were once walking into a large gathering for the perpetual vows of some of her sisters in New York. The crowd cheered for them as they walked down the aisle. While the applause surrounded them, Mother Teresa leaned over to Father Benedict and said, “Don’t inhale.” Even Mother Teresa guarded herself against “breathing in” the praise of her fellow Christians.

St. Paul, too, seeks to break down barriers by identifying all members of the Church first and foremost as Christians. Aligning ourselves with this or that group and seeing ourselves as someone who does this or that job will fail us and prevent us from the kind of unity Jesus intended for us, that we might all be one in Christ (Galatians 3:28).

This is a challenge for all of us no matter what our vocation is. Whether we are priests, religious, professional athletes, spouses, parents, teachers, writers or anything else, there is always a temptation to place our identity in those vocations instead of seeing ourselves primarily and always as children of the Father. There is nothing wrong with those vocations. Just the opposite. They are good and necessary, and we must live them well. But they cannot be the thing first and foremost in our hearts and minds.

The greatest thing is to love God with all our hearts. My identity as a father faces challenges every day as I fail to keep my patience, my children fail to make good decisions, and I can never spend enough time with them. Finding my primary identity there is like building a house on a foundation of sand. However, God’s love never changes, and his mercy is always new; my identity in Christ is the bedrock foundation for my soul.

Once again, it is the old lesson of putting first things first and second things second. If we put first things first, then all the other things will fall into their proper order. If we put second things first then we will miss out on the first things and the second things. We must constantly strive to rightly order our loves. The First Commandment is to love God, and the second is like it.

In my philosophical study of beauty, I have found that the philosopher Francis Kovach summarizes the traditional wisdom on beauty by defining it primarily as order, in other words, integral unity. A rightly ordered life is a unified life. The life of rightly ordered identities is a beautiful life, as in the life of the saint.

And so whatever our earthly vocation is, we have to strive to remember our heavenly vocation, our ultimate destination, and our number one priority. Nothing in life is more important than a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.