Discernment

Sister Serra is a late vocation, and yesterday she described her discernment process.  Sister Roberta called it shopping:  "When she arrived, we said, 'Here comes a shopper!' "

Sister Serra spent a long time visiting different orders.  She felt certain she had a vocation to the religious life, but couldn't find an order that matched her spirituality.  In my words, some were too modern, without a clear structure and tradition, and others were too traditional, using their traditions to avoid a confrontation with the modern world.  She said eventually she made a list of the things she was looking for, and she recognized the order that fit once she encountered it.

I too had to make a list, but I didn't realize it was part of discernment.  Mine listed the attributes of the man I wanted to marry. I spent my late teens and early twenties in one relationship after another, until in my last summer of college I was emotionally exhausted and in despair.  Only then did I seriously consider what I wanted, and realized that yes, I did want a permanent relationship, I did want to get married. And I thought out carefully what I wanted in my future husband.

Only after listening to Sr. Serra's story have I recognized that I had actually discerned a vocation to the married life before I made my list.  I never had any doubts that I wanted, needed, to be in a relationship to be complete. For a long time I simply assumed that everyone felt this way as part of the human condition.  Recently I have begun to think I had basic emotional damage and flaws that caused me to experience the sense of incompleteness I felt when alone.

Suddenly, only now after spending twenty-five years in the married state, I see that this is indeed part of God's plan for me, that even in my blind struggle to become an adult He moved my life in the direction He had mapped out for me.  I think the pain and loneliness would still be part of the process, but I probably would have found comfort in the midst of it had I had an understanding of and trust in His providence.  Yet here I am, in the same place.

A voice said, "Look me in the stars,
O men of earth,
And say if all the mind and body scars
Were not too high a price to pay for birth."
--Robert Frost