Everyone Should Discern Religious Life
The benefits of not assuming you're called to marriage even if you actually are
From 2020-2023, I was discerning monasticism with a Byzantine Catholic women’s monastery. I got on a plane to visit the monastery around twice a year through periods ranging between two days and a week. I visited the nuns during fasting seasons. I visited the nuns during feasting seasons. I sang the hours with them. I cooked meals in the kitchen with them. I cleaned with them. I recreated with them and had many long talks with them while we tried to discern whether it was God’s will for me to spend the rest of my life with them. Spoiler alert: it was not. A little over a year ago, I was supposed to do an observership, a three to six week extended visit after which I would have been eligible to apply to enter. Except I never did my observership. Instead, three weeks before I was set to leave, God the Destroyer came and ruined my life. My observership was called off, and I left Texas to wind up in Montana.
Before ultimately ending up in Montana, I spent a good portion of that summer traipsing across the country, couch-surfing with friends and camping in national parks, as I tried to figure out where I was going to live after having a lease end and what I was going to do for work after abruptly leaving a career field where I was miserable despite it being the only one in which I had any formal training. In the midst of that, I realized the necessity of having my life ruined and my monastic discernment shut down: I had been discerning monasticism, in part, for the wrong reasons. I had been discerning monasticism to run away. A combination of reading a lot of post-modern secular feminist material online in my teens, meeting a number of young women while a student at Wheaton College who had been raised with misogynistic marital theology (though I was never taught it directly), going on bad dates with red-pill Latin Mass guys, and seeing a lot of moms at my home parish who stayed home and homeschooled, which is awesome if that is what you want to do, but not seeing that many moms who were academics, were doctors, were lawyers, ran marathons, etc, what I want to do, made me not want to get married. I was also, as aforementioned, in a career field that I knew was not my vocation, and I was experiencing anxiety on my way to work. Still, though I knew teaching middle school English, what I had been doing, was not the same as being a writer and intellectual, what I knew my professional vocation to actually be, it was a career field that was a form of service that was guaranteed to always put food on the table and came with health insurance and a retirement plan, none of which writing automatically did.
It dawned on me while out in the desert of the American South-West that if I still wanted to be a nun while seriously dating, something I had never done before, and in grad school finally studying again, then there would be a lot more to that than wanting to be a nun while, shall we say, hating my life. Since being accepted into a rigorous MFA in creative writing program, no longer coming home from work too mentally and emotionally drained to write and study, and meeting a handsome gentleman with a deep sense of moral integrity, I cannot quite say the desire for monasticism has continued to linger in the same respect. That being said, I also cannot say I regret anything at all about my monastic discernment. I do not. In fact, I would actually strongly recommend all single young adult Apostolic Christians discern religious life in some regard because the benefits I received from discerning monasticism cannot be overstated.
In mid-2021, it occurred to me becoming a nun would mean my life would consist of a lot of liturgy. It would be prudent, therefore, to make sure I liked and was deeply familiar with the liturgy. I then made it my practice to attend vespers and matins in addition to Divine Liturgy just about every weekend. The result after years of doing such was that, with the exception of the stichera, the aposticha, the theotokia, etc, the parts that changed every day, I ended up memorizing the Byzantine Rite vespers service as well as several of the resurrectional troparia.
More importantly, besides the ability to rattle off the Lamp-Lighting Psalms, I ended up deeply internalizing the structure of the liturgy. The liturgy made sense. Since I am and have always been a layperson living and working in the world, praying the Horologion, the Eastern liturgy of the hours (which takes a lot longer to pray than the Western liturgy of the hours) like a nun would do, is not at all practical; however, I ended up setting aside time in the morning, afternoon, and night where I would often grab snippets from the hours to pray. This made it so liturgical rhythms were ingrained into my own life and I was living liturgically.
Above all, it is impossible to live liturgically alone. Only Eastern monastics who have been life-professed for a while having lived monastic community life for decades can become megaloschemoi, hermits and hermitesses who have received many crosses. Living liturgically meant I could not just go to church on Sunday and then sneak out without talking to anyone. It meant I was at church a lot. It meant I was interacting with my fellow parishioners a lot. My parish became my main community. I hung out at coffee hour. I regularly found myself hanging out at a family’s house on Sunday afternoons after church. After the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified gifts on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent, I hung out with my fellow parishioners for a dinner that went along with the Eastern Christian fasting regulations. It had not exactly been my intention to join the choir, but I got absorbed into it because I was at church all the time and by that point had learned the tones. This meant I was not just attending services, but I was actively serving my parish. Being at church all the time also meant that I was available to do things, which meant I was asked to do things. I got “voluntold” to teach catechesis for children. I was expected to show up for parish manual labor days. Besides the regular tithing, I was also expected to contribute to parish canned food drives. And then I had this conversation with my priest:
Me: Father, we need some sort of catechesis/youth group for teenagers.
Father: Are you volunteering?
Me: Oh
And then I was running the youth group.
Through being at church a lot, singing, and catechizing, I was making a gift of self to my parish. My spiritual father once described monasticism to me as the perfection of the lay state. Monastics live out prayer, fasting, almsgiving. It has been often said lay people are to live out monasticism to the extent possible and practical in their daily lives1. Because I was discerning monasticism, I prayed with my parish community, fasted with my parish community, and gave alms to and with my parish community in an ultimately communal way.
Our parishes are our faith communities. They are not liturgy and sacrament dispensers. As St. Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” When we receive Christ’s body in the Eucharist, we and all else communing viscerally become Christ’s body. We are to go out into the world as little Christs. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not good at this. I regularly end up in the confessional, but everything is ultimately forgiven there, and the grace is received to go do better. When we pray, fast, and give alms with our parish communities, we are doing what we can to be Christ’s body on earth and making the experience of being part of something bigger than ourselves more real.
I’m a better Christian and parishioner than I was because I took the time to discern monasticism. I am now friends with a monastic community, and my children will grow up knowing nuns are still real through interacting with them and not simply vestiges of a less secularized past. It is now much more likely I’m going to get married than become a nun, but having better learned self gift through looking into monasticism, I’ll be a much better wife and mother because of it.
This will often look different from actual monasticism. Most parents are not going to stay up praying midnight office, but if they stay up all night with a sick child, then they are still keeping vigil in a way that will make them saints.
Well said. Thank you