There is no limit to the number of ways in which the creative freedom of God's Spirit can call men to live and grow in Christ. The baptismal call into a life of grace creates the possibility of a further call which is rooted in baptism but which makes the response of grace specific. One instance of this is the call to the monastic life. However it becomes known to a person, it may be fore him who receives it the only way to realize the full implications of his baptism, and it demands a free personal response... His business is therefore to find out whether through commitment to monastic life he can respond with his whole being to the God whose love is calling him.
The most necessary means of finding this out is prayer for God's guidance... a candidate for Benedictine life enters not an order primarily, nor a congregation, but a monastery, a particular community with its own call, its own grace, and its own traditions. The pragmatic test is, therefore, Does he fit here? But there is more discernment than this. The community has to help him to find out not merely whether he is called but in some sense why he is called, how his own unique personal contribution is relevant and assimilable, and how to integrage what he brings with what he finds and will receive.
From Consider Your Call, A Theology of Monastic Life Today
by Daniel Rees and Others
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