By Sister Genevieve Sachse, OSB

The young reporter conducting the interview stated “I think many people feel sorry for priests and nuns. You know, they’ve taken this burden on themselves.”

Comments like this serve to remind me of the great misconceptions concerning religious vocations that exist today. Whether this reverts back to the medieval heritage of convents as havens for misfits, the Jansenistic concept that to be holy one had to be miserable and punish oneself, or to the negative publicity and confusion regarding current vocation problems, the fact remains that most people can’t imagine why any normal person would want to be a religious.

Why? Because she is convinced that in this lifestyle she will have the greatest possibility to develop into the person she was created by God to be. That summarizes the whole gamut of potentiality available to her from the mundane but necessary factors like education and job opportunities in fields of human service to the core realities of the sign value of public commitment and a lifestyle oriented by its nature to developing one’s stance before God.

Certainly there are some difficult moments and decisions. No vocational choice is free of these. For example, religious life is not of its nature less or more lonely or less or more secure than marriage.

The essential difference for me is that in religious life, all that I am and have publicly professed to be is a continual reminder and confrontation to my personhood to create and utilize opportunities for prayer and spiritual growth, opportunities which I did not find in the same frequency or depth in another lay vocation as I do in religious life. It must be acknowledged that this God-orientation of religious life presents no guarantee that I will thereby become holier, but the thrust is there to which I can respond if I will.

The call to search for a deeper prayer life is a personal one which elicits differing responses in different types of people because of the particular kind of person they were created to be. The question of vocation is never one that can be answered once and for all, even when a permanent commitment is involved. It is a “yes” to life, which must be affirmed over and over again almost every day of one’s adult life.

Many people find a need for private prayer and contemplation. They do not feel called or drawn to group prayer whether in the public liturgy of the Church or praying in groups. Other depend almost entirely upon the public prayer of the Church for any prayer life that they have and rarely, if ever, pray privately. When they do, that private prayer is often only those already composed forms of private devotion in which the words are already there for them so that they do not have to compose their own. Finding words and the feeling of comfort in conversation with God has to develop just as any relationship must develop.

The first time a couple has a date they may find enough to talk about for a couple of hours but time would get long and conversation would lag if they were to be together for hours and hours. As their relationship develops, their level of sharing ideas deepens, and finally you have those who, after many years of marriage, really don’t have to say many words as their communication transcends the merely verbal. The same can be said for prayer.

When I first entered the convent I found the long periods of prayer difficult (of course that was in the days of the Latin breviary) and I must confess that I sometimes looked for excuses to be occupied otherwise. Today, praying with my community is a real need to the point that there is a void if it is missed. But even when we do pray together, it still requires the work and concern which is a part of any developing relationship.

Love, prayer, community life, just as in marriage and family life, always comes back to a renewal of that “yes” to the life chosen. The tragedy is that so many people never say yes or no to their life.