Thomas Pounde of Beaumont found his true vocation after being kicked by Queen Elizabeth I.
How free of troubles must a candidate be to enter your community?
Years ago, I heard an interview of the abbot of the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, KY, on a radio station in a large city. They were talking about men who enter the abbey. I will never forget his words, “Every time someone knocks on our door, we assume he has the wrong motives.”
The prior’s comments show how difficult it is for a community’s leadership to discern God’s will in determining whether a person has a vocation to their community. In the 1800’s, a 17-year-old girl, Róża Bialecka, of Poland, met with the Master General of the Dominican order, to discern her vocation. She wanted to join the Dominicans and teach children and adults. Her character was so stable, and her desire so intense to give herself to God, that the good priest made an immediate decision to allow her to be admitted into the novitiate, and if God willed it, that she found a new convent that would fulfill her dreams.
There aren’t many candidates like Róża, who founded the Dominican Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. Most of those who ask to enter religious life are those with many of life’s problems, with a lack of maturity, family problems, and a host of other ills of our modern secular society.
St. Francis de Sales, however, did not demand perfection in religious candidates. He said that some souls are preserved from the delusions of the world, and thus open to the call of God, through sorrow, disgust or social rejection. “There are souls,” says St Francis de Sales, “who were the world to smile upon them, would never become religious; yet by means of contradictions and disappointments, they are brought to despise the vanities, and all allurements of the world, and understand its fallacy.”
St. Francis says,
“Now, though these persons come to God, as it were,
- in anger against the world, which has displeased them, or
- on account of some troubles or
- afflictions which have tormented them,
- yet they do not fail to give themselves to God of their own free will; and very often such persons succeed very well in the service of God, and become great Saints, sometimes greater than those who have entered it with more evident vocations, or with far purer motives.”
See also VocationInformation and search for “The Two Marks of a Religious Vocation.”
