I have wanted to be a wife and mother ever since I was little. I figured i was called to marriage, but I didn’t really think much about it. One day, probably two years ago, I realized that a vocation to religious life was possible. I started crying because I really want to be married!!! Since then I have prayed about my vocation almost every day, and sometimes I still cry when I really think about how I might not be meant to be married. In a way I feel like my vocation is marriage because of my desire to be married, but maybe God wants me to sacrifice that desire for him. Maybe becoming a nun is God’s way of making me put my own self aside so I can submit to Him. And besides that sometimes I feel guilty or selfish because people are always saying that there is a need for more vocations to the religious life. I feel so torn, except that I don’t, because I really, really want to have be married and have a family.
God does not want unhappy saints. The fact that you cry when you think of giving up your dream to be a wife and mother should be a signal that this is your calling. Your crying sounds like a sense of loss of something that you love very much.
A person who has a religious vocation does not experience that sense of mourning. Yes, there is always the occassional question, “What if . . .?” But there is a sense of joy and peace when one thinks about the religious life.
As to there being less petty human nonsense in religious life than marriage, nothing can be further from the truth. There is more petty human nonsense in community life than in marriage. In marriage you are in an intimate relationship with one person and you deal with that person’s nonsense. Eventually, you learn to appreciate the idiocyncracies of your spouse, maybe even laugh at them.
In religious life you deal with the idicyncracies of a larger number of people. You do learn to appreciate them too, but it requires great discipline. Maybe that’s the reason tha the formation period for religious is usualy about six years long, depending on the community. Some communities have a longer formation period before perpetual profession.
I’m speaking from personal experience. I was married and was widowed. Today I’m a religious brother, Franciscan. I had a taste of both. They are both very different ways of life, but both very human. Religious do not leave their human frailties at home when we enter a congregation or order.
Those who are short-tempered struggle with it all their lives and so do the rest of us who live with them, LOL. Those who are sentimental do the same. There are those who are more mature and less mature and so forth. There are some people who are easy-going and other people who are very rigid. We learn to take deep breadths and show a great deal of charity and patience toward each other.
To return to your concern, despite the human frailties that we bring to religious life, we come in joyfully. From your post, it sounds like the very thought of religious life is a painful ordeal for you. Why put yourself through that? God does not force people into religious life or marriage. God calls us where we belong in his good time according to his eternal plan.
Please pray for me and I will do the same for you.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
There is a lot of sacrifice and laying aside of our own needs and wants for the sakes of our spouse and children.