Discerning your Call

A call to the priesthood or religious life can occur at any time in one’s life. Some individuals determine at a young age that God is calling them to this special vocation. Others may have professional careers and determine later in life that God is calling them to enter Holy Orders or the religious life. But how do you determine whether or not God is calling YOU to life as a priest, brother or sister? Here are some hints for discerning God’s will for you:

First, there are some necessary conditions that will help in the discernment process:

• Good Health: a call to the priesthood or religious life necessitates relatively good health in order to perform the duties of a priest or religious.
• Ordinary Talents: one must be aware that there are certain gifts that each of us possess, that we can offer to the Church
• Reasonable Independence: I do not have responsibilities or commitments that would make it difficult or impossible to freely choose the priesthood or religious life.
• Normal Piety: If you are not ordinarily devoted to the religious practices of the Church than you are probably not fitted for the more than ordinary religious practices of the priesthood or religious life.

Secondly, there are other signs that are inherent and dependent upon free will, that may be an invitation from God to follow Him through a vocation to the priesthood or religious life:

• A Spirit of Sacrifice: an ability to give up lesser but more appealing goods for greater, spiritual ones.
• A Spirit of Zeal: that special form of charity that inspires one to the work of saving souls.
• A Spirit of Detachment: the power that enables a person to be in the world but not of the world.
• A Desire to be a Priest or Religious: a conviction that the religious state is, for you, the surest way to save your soul.

One needs confidence in the goodness and power of God, whose grace is always sufficient to accomplish what He asks. This trust will be gained by fervent prayer. We must pray in order to know and do God’s Will, and we must also ask for the grace to carry it out promptly. To delay one’s vocation without a very good reason is to risk losing God’s special invitation.

One who feels he may be called to the priestly or religious life should seek the wise counsel of a priest or a religious brother or sister. In the choice of one’s vocation, the essential thing is to understand what is God’s Will, not necessarily what pleases oneself most. The rich young man of the Gospel story certainly loved God, kept the Commandments and was greatly loved by Our Lord. But in his attachment to his riches, he rejected the call to follow Christ and “went away sad.”  Do not be afraid to explore the possibility that you may have a religious vocation. Like the Sacrament of Marriage, priesthood or religious life is not something that you jump right into. It is a process of prayer and discernment to understand the will of God for your life.

Religious Orders for Men and Women