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How can I know if or where I'm called to active or contemplative life, especially since I don't have time to visit anywhere?

Nathan asks:

1. How does one know if one is called to a more contemplative or a more active life, or even if one is called to religious life at all?

 

2. Assuming I do have a vocation to some form of religious life, how do I find out where I ought to visit? How do I know which communities are faithful to Church teaching and which are not, and so on? It is difficult for me because I only get one week of vacation a year, and have a good job which I don't want to lose. If I quit, I would find it very hard to be rehired to the same position, since it probably will be filled. I seem to think most of the time I have a vocation to a more contemplative life, but how do I know which communities to visit? There seem to be so many.

 

Nathan 

Dear Nathan,  

You are asking yourself the question, so there may be something there.

 

At the heart of a particular vocation is an attraction that is not only natural (it seems to go with my temperament) but also spiritual (I can really show Christ my love and serve the Church in this vocation, for example). This has to be tested to see if we have the aptitudes both natural and spiritual for the particular vocation. The testing is in order to see if the attraction I feel is the echo of God's grace working in my soul and calling me. The first stage of this testing is usually to speak with someone who has experience and the gift of discernment, and that person is most often the vocation director or formation director of the place you are interested in, or your own spiritual director. A second stage is to visit, to have some experience of the life, and on the basis of this experience speak again to that person and continue your own prayer.

 

You ask which community to visit, since there seem to be so many. I would suggest that you do some reading. It is often through the life of a saint or someone's biography that we begin to get insights into what God might be doing in our lives. If something special (a mention, a reference, a remembrance) sparked the question about contemplative life look up the order that was connected with it. God usually acts through seemingly meaningless secondary causes in this way.

 

At some stage, when a particular interest has developed and when prudence says it's time to take a bigger step, you will be faced with the big decision of giving up what you have to try this path even though you have no 100% guarantees everything is going to work out. At that stage you will have to trust God and know that whether it works out ultimately that it is your vocation or not, the best decision is to give Christ the benefit of the doubt when we have done all that spiritual prudence counsels.

 

God bless,

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