Because I want to be a cloistered nun

I am a novice on the contrary: this month I am entering a Trappist monastery. It is not something Catholics hear about too often, although vocations to monastic communities have not diminished as drastically as active communities. I suppose I am writing now, before I get to the cloister, because once a candidate gets to the point of asking for permission to enter, he hopes never to leave. And therefore I would like to greet the world.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not running away from the world because I hate the world and all that it contains. On the contrary, the world has been very good to me. I grew up well, I had a happy and carefree childhood, and in another era I could have been a true novice.

During high school I applied for admission to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and four other top universities in the country and I expected to get into all of them. I did it. I went to Yale. I have been counted among the best and the brightest. Something was still missing.

That something was faith. I had become a Christian the summer before my final year of high school, but it wasn't until my final year of college that I finally came home to the Catholic Church. I was confirmed Roman Catholic for my 21st birthday, which fell on the fourth Sunday of Easter, 1978.

I see my desire to be a contemplative, which has constantly deepened in the last two years, as a continuation of the same call: to be a follower of Jesus, to be only God. To allow him to do with me as he wishes. It is the same Lord who calls.

Now, why did I just do it: did I establish my credentials for success in the world I am leaving? I suppose for the same reason that Saint Paul boasts in his letter to the Philippians:

I did not reevaluate those things that I considered gain as loss in the light of Christ. I have come to consider everything as a loss in light of the superior knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ. For his sake I have lost everything; I took all the trash into account so that Christ can be my wealth and I can be in him. " (3: 7–9)

Those who think that anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence might not want to enter a monastery should think again. It's not that I want to run from the world as much as I want to run to something else. I came to believe, with Paul, that only Jesus Christ is important. Nothing else matters.

And so, once again, I applied for admission to a different type of institution. I did it with the belief that there is nothing else I can do. I see reality in terms of death and resurrection, sin and forgiveness - and for me monastic life lives that gospel better.

I exist to know, love and serve God. Poverty, chastity and obedience are positive choices, not simple vows that derive from being a nun. It is good to live simply, to align with the poor as Jesus did. It is good to love God so much that even his absence is preferable to the presence of someone else. It is good to learn to give up your will too, perhaps to what they cling more closely to, just like Jesus did in the garden.

All this makes monastic life seem very pious and romantic. There is nothing romantic about getting up at 3:15 in the morning for vigils. I did it for a week in retreat and wondered how I could do it for the next 50 years.

There is nothing romantic about giving up meat: I love pepperoni pizza and bacon. There is nothing romantic about not being able to write my friends and know that my family is authorized, but five days a year with me.

But it's all part of a life of solitude and silence, prayer and penance, and I want it. And is that lifestyle really that different from what people in the "real world" encounter?

Parents wake up at 3 am to warm a bottle or take care of sick children. Those without job security cannot afford meat. Those whose circumstances (not to be death) keep them away from family and friends know that separation is difficult. All without the advantage of looking pious and religious.

Perhaps God simply wraps the vocations of the human being in different packages.

And that's my point. This does not want to be simply an apology for my (apparently monastic) vocation. Unlike Thomas Merton or St. Paul or many other famous converts, I had no major trauma, no blinding conversion experience, no radical change in lifestyle or morality.

The day I recognized Jesus as Lord I was sitting on a rock overlooking a pond. As an indication that God had listened to my profession of belief in his Son, I expected half thunder and lightning on the water. There was none. There has been very little thunder and lightning in my life.

I was already a good boy. Should it be so surprising that I seek the greatest good, God himself? Christians so often only listen to extraordinary, radical conversions from the extremes of the saints. This tends to remove from the ordinary the business of being good, of following Jesus.

But God works precisely through the ordinary. The Gospel calls believers to a life of continuous conversion (as the Trappists say, moral conversation). Conversion of the ordinary. Conversion into the ordinary. Conversion despite and because of the ordinary. The life of faith must be lived in a human heart, wherever that person is.

Every day is an opportunity to see God again, to see God in others and in the very human (and sometimes irreligious) situations in which people find themselves.

Being Christian first means being human. As Saint Irenaeus said, "Gloria Dei vivens homo", the glory of God is a fully alive human being. Christians should not spend much time trying to figure out if they "have a vocation", as if it were a recessive gene or something hidden behind the left ear. All Christians have a vocation: to be fully human, to be fully alive.

Enjoy life, be human, have faith and this will reveal God and the glory of God, which all monks or nuns try to do.

My date of entry is May 31, the feast of the Visitation, the feast of bringing Jesus to others. There is a paradox in this, that in a party to go out for others I should go in, apparently far from others. But the paradox is that upon entering a cloister I am actually closer to others because of the mystery of the power of prayer. Somehow my prayer and the prayer of my Trappist sisters will bring Jesus to others.

The contemplative, after all, leaves the world only to pray for better. I ask for your prayers and I promise you mine.