Our Purpose and Method

Recently at Andrew's Birthday Mass and lunch (pictures coming soon) I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Mhari, whose excellent blog can be seen here. She's a wonderful young Catholic living in Manchester, thinking very seriously about religious vocation. Mhari is very active in Youth 2000, and visited the Franciscans Sisters of the Renewal (the photo on the left is of a Franciscan Sister of the Renewal) in the Bronx recently to see what would happen. We got talking about vocationy things, and I promised that I'd copy out some of my favourite text on vocation from a book called Our Purpose and Method by Abbot Aelred Carlysle (1874 - 1955) for her enjoyment, and in the hope it might help!

The book is really a collection of essays written in 1905 when Abbot Aelred and the Benedictine Community to which he belonged on Caldey Island (just off the coast of Wales) was still Anglican. However with much joy the entire community bar two converted to Catholicism in 1913 and 15 years later moved to Prinknash where there is still a Benedictine community. The community at Prinknash has also given rise to Farnborough Abbey (picture on the left) and Pluscarden Abbey (photo on the right) no less.

"Although written in the Anglican days" Abbot Alfred Spencer of Pluscarden Abbey writes "this essay on monastic life was throught to be masterly by Abbot Columba Marmion who read extracts of it to some of the professors and students of Sant' Anselmo, Rome, who agreed it was one of the best expositions of monastic principles that they had ever listened to."

Here are some of my favourite paragraphs, the first of which I read often for my own personal edification:

God has given each one of us the germ of the gifts and powers necessary for the particular purpose He has planned for us, and in that state alone shall we find our true development and most perfect obedience to His Will. For us, severally and individually, this plan which God's perfect Love and Wisdom has decreed, is our Vocation, whatever or whevever it may be: whether in the shop or factory, on sea or land, in a profession or trade, the Priesthood or the Cloister, of itself matters nothing. The main essential is, that we should occupy the exact place God wills for us, and do out duty in that state, so that our lives become what He meant them to be. In the sight of God the good Religious is of himself no better than the good secular, the good Priest no better than the good business man: if God intended the Priest to be a Priest, and the business man to be such, that is enough: in their respective states they are, by His grace, to attain that measure of perfection which He requires of them, and neither can change place with the other by his own choice without going against the Will of God.

...To realize one's Vocation, then, is to correspond to God's Will...

... It may be asked in what manner does God show us His appointed path? and (sic) the answer is to be found in the training of our childhood, our special environment, our friends and our natural tastes and disposition. The call of God comes to us by prayer, in the crises of our lives, by the apparently accidental meetings with those who opened our minds to fresh aspirations - in short, by the careful consideration of our capabilites and attractions.