The entire process of discernment is damnably, damnably complicated. Anything bound up with religion is immediately more difficult, mainly, at least for me, because I am suddenly dealing with factors that I cannot simply yell at or throttle or browbeat or threaten or cow. How frustrating! I cannot even fire off an angry letter or e-mail! Enveloping man is this intricate, invisible panoply at work interfering with and interacting with all the material, visible things of creation, themselves impossibly complex and interdependent, ranging from the sub-molecular to the macrocosmic, from the lifeless to the ensouled, from unthinking to free-willed. This entire improbable cosmos spins and dances to a rhythm utterly beyond comprehension, all at the behest of God, Mystery of Mysteries.

None of which has a convenient complaint department or an Inbox.

This hampers my decision making just slightly. Job interview? You are either hired or not. Ask out a girl? You have a date or not. Pray to know God’s Will? Well… Hahaha, patience is a virtue.

The labors of Hercules produced an eponymous adjectival form, but so might the sufferings of Job and while I find the holy man more edifying than the demi-god, I appreciate the applicability of both. We are after all sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters to each other by faith, sharers in a common heritage and a common lot. We, each of us in our own degree, know something of suffering and challenge, striving and failure, happiness and despair.

Waiting upon the pleasure of God could well be seen as ‘Jobian’. Even as sifting the empty hours does at times bear an unpleasant resemblance to the work in the Augean stables, a structure which is evidently uphill from me, given what seems to so often have rolled down.

I have been praying a great deal for the humility necessary to be obedient. Anyone who knows me is well aware of my not inconsiderable self-regard. This is not vanity so much as an armor of pride, scrounged piecemeal over many hard years. It has seen much use. But religious profession requires that great Gospel virtue of docility; I must be receptive to instruction; I must be open to being taught. And this has been a problem in the last eight months (if not the last thirty six years). I have been willfully blind and hard-headed about this. I kept insisting that I was needed to speak, to do, to accomplish and that this was, to some evident extent, the will of God.

It is a wonder I did not swallow my own tongue when the full audacity of it hit me.

Small favors, I suppose.

I can’t approach formation thinking that I’ve been called to do something for God, as if somehow I'm the Chosen One. No. I’ve been called to be (or become) something for God. Namely, a saint. And while the world may indeed be a saint making machine, a religious order is a school of saintly instruction.

If the Society of St. Paul is a school, then I am a pupil. And I must not fight that reality, because it will do me no good. In fact, it will do me an evil. There is nothing so empty and absurd as a prideful religious. I must embrace this opportunity to sit, childlike, rapt in my learning, caught up, not in thoughts of self, but in the words of Christ and mindful of those who stand in His place.

Shit, fire, and molasses.

Discerning God's will may have proved easier if I had stumbled across this little revelation on humility prior to beginning my discernment. Of course, it may have meant nothing to me then, given that I likely benefited (in the Jobian sense) from beating my head against the wall of my own pride for a time. There is nothing like a little humiliation to get the humility moving, eh? It is just not cut and dry. Vocation is not synonymous with career. It is about more than doing. It is about being. And sometimes it takes more than a little suffering to figure that out.

Especially for me. 

Many thanks to John May, Jim Cottrell, Elisabeth and Sam, Naomi, Lori, Uncle Joshua, Mom, the Cursillistas, and all the saints and angels who so graciously allowed me to hang myself with my own tongue, and then kindly cut me down. If you had not listened, I would still be talking. Thank you and God bless you.