Discerning An End

[Golden Years]

Have spent all of the past year trying my hardest to find a path that leads to Carmel, or elsewhere, as a cloistered or extern nun, and praying to know God's will.  Events of the past couple of weeks have made it abundantly clear (like getting hit over the head with a 2x4 clear) that this is not God's will.  So, it is time to close that volume and move on to the next in the series, which is tentatively entitled "Unaffiliated Hermit Sometimes Prays at Home Sometimes Cares for Disabled Family Member and Sometimes Works at the Office."  Gotta work on that title.  But you get the idea. 

 

Peace ya'll and Happy New Year!  (And please pray for me.) 

 

 

[AnneLine]

Prayers and :console: follow you, Golden Years.   There are a LOT of us here, and we form community for each other, too.

 

If/as you are interested, you might want to explore something like a secular order.... sometimes that adds a missing piece.  But take it one step at a time, and trust that God will lead you....

[SilentJoy]

 "Unaffiliated Hermit Sometimes Prays at Home Sometimes Cares for Disabled Family Member and Sometimes Works at the Office."  Gotta work on that title.  But you get the idea. 

 

I love it... :hehe2:

 

Prayers for you that you will find wherever it is that you belong and that you will have peace.

[Eowyn]

Golden Years, I hope this new year is a blessed one for you. 

[TheresaThoma]

Prayers during this transition time

 

I love your current "title"!

 

My this next year be a blessed one.

[nikita92]

My prayers are with you Gy! Be with us here! Offer what you know! Do what is in your heart! You are a "Sister" to us!! Have a blessed New Year!

[BarbTherese]

I like very much indeed your title too! 

I read somewhere that someone was thanking God for putting them "outside the square", and the ingredients for trail blazering :)  Thankfully, nowadays The Church does appreciate those who are outside "the square" and determining and living their vocation simply as God is calling them.

I know that 2x4 feeling........... takes a while to recover.

 

 Blessings in 2014 and prayer.

[AnneLine]

I also love your new title/vocation... and you know what... the fact that there are MANY of us who identify with this -- on and off Phatmass I might add! -- tells me perhaps the Holy Spirit is busilyl at work doing something new.  May we be open to the Spirit's Call!!!

 

Please do continue to stay here with us -- there is place for us here at VS, if nothing else, to help keep the fire burning and the soup pot ready for our sisters and brothers who are going in, working through the discernment of a vocation, andcoming out in response to God's prompting.  There is a role for us here, and there is a role for us as the ultimate 'stay at home moms and dads' in God's world...

[BarbTherese]

Props to your post, AL!  Lovely post.

Under private vows, I can now do what I could never do in religious life simply because we had a quite specific Rule of Life to follow in RL with a quite specific ministry and I needed the authority of leadership in all things.  I have no other ministry now but Jesus and His Gospel (and my own Rule and spiritual director - both of whom understand the call re the latter two) and can move wherever, however and whenever The Gospel and The Lord might indicate and at any time day or night.

I am not disputing religious life in any way as The Holy Spirit has called these religious families into existence and with a quite specific Rule and ministry - and leadership - and for quite specific holy and important reasons to The Church and the world.  But as you so well indicated, there is a place for us 'outside the square' of the currently accepted more traditional roles and for many reasons - and possibly an indication of a work of The Holy Spirit.  I am always encouraged by just how long it took for The Church to affirm that religious did not have to be always fully enclosed.

 

Thank you for the well worded and important post, AL - it struck chords with me and I am hopeful prayerfully with Golden Years too.

 

PS I am 68yrs old in a few days and a 'more mature lady' (elderly) !

[AnneLine]

Thank you, BarbaaraTherese, for your kind words.  If they are well-worded it is only because the Spirit can use a sleepy AnneLine with a glass of Champagne in her (!) and because I have been giving this SO MUCH thought in recent months.  If I put into one room all the women (and men!) who fit my description, we'd have enough to fill a convention hall.  All of us are people who would LOVE to be religious, but God seems to have had a different idea in mind.  I have no idea, yet, what that might be.... but I trust His guidance.  

 

For many people living as you do, Barbara, or as I do in a Secular Order, gives us enough structure to not be total amoebas  (formless masses that get pulled this way and that!) while still being very, very free to respond to His call.   I think of Bl. Charles de Foucault..... who did not live to see his own envisioning of a new and vastly different form of religious life take shape.  But he was convinced, absolutely convinced, that God was doing something, and he was part of it.  

 

I don't know what it means, but I do sense that the Holy Spirit is doing something... and that there are so many of us that He must have some big plans.

 

It will be interesting to see where God goes with this!!!!   

 

And it is wonderful to have so much company!!!!!

 

Holding you all in prayer... and thank you for articulating this discernment, GoldenYears.   You are NOT alone.   Many have not had the courage to just state it that simply.  nd to do so, in my mind, is a huge gift.

 

Praying for all of you....

[maximillion]

Fantastic way of expressing it GY! Thanks.

 

So I guess I am one of you too. I am in my sixties now, and while I still love to support and revel in the plenitude of the Spirit as manifesting in RL in community, I too think there is a bigger picture. I no longer yearn for RL, He has shown me that is not where He desires me to be. Nor do I have a specific calling to be a CV or a hermit or even like BT, under private vows. 

 

However, I have striven and strive to keep the vows I made, like BT I follow the promptings of the Spirit, the Gospel and the Church, and 'blow where He wills'.

[brandelynmarie]

And this is why I love VS on PM so much...so many people doing their best to hear His voice & follow Him....& so many people willing to share their journies, struggles, &/or what they have learned...so many beautiful ways of authentically living out our Catholic vocation...

Peace be with you Golden Years :console: ...do your best to continue to be open to the Holy Spirit...to stay put or go where He leads...

[IgnatiusofLoyola]

Golden Years--That was a very difficult decision to make. I hope that making it gives you peace.

 

Like you, I live outside any form of life with a known title. Mine would be something like "A very Catholic non-Catholic who lives essentially as a hermit, but under the rule of a benign and loving, but firm cat who sets my hours and tasks for me. I have found myself in the role of a supporter of women discerning religious life and in religious life. I have never been called to religious life, although I have been fascinated by it since I was a child and I find some aspects of it very attractive. God knows me well--I would not have made a good religious.* The disabled person I take care of is myself. I have to make decisions about moving in the next year because I can no longer take care of my house, and I have no idea what God wants for me. My current life reminds me of growing up near San Francisco and sometimes walking to school in a fog so thick I literally couldn't see a foot ahead of me. Yet, I knew the way to school, so I just kept walking, one step at a time, and sure enough I got to school. As a kid, I thought that was fun. As an adult, it's scary, because this time I don't know where I am being led."

 

Your title is far more concise than mine. I continue to try to work on being concise, but my posts are almost always too long. :paperbag:

 

I hope you stick with us, Golden Years. There are a number of us here who act as "supporters," and I like to think/hope that we have a purpose here, both to pray, and also to provide what we hope are helpful and caring words.

 

*I was raised as an Anglican, and there are Anglican Religious Orders, as well as Catholic ones. So, being called to religious life could have been an option for me. However, despite my interest in religious life, I was never called. My call was very clearly to marriage, and I did marry, and was married in the Catholic church. However, at age 40, my ex-husband decided unilaterally to end our marriage, with no option for counseling, etc., so I found myself divorced, something I had never even considered an option. I expected to remarry, but have never yet found the right man, so here I am, walking in the thick fog, alone. God knows where I am going, but I don't. Perhaps that can also be considered a form of "discernment."

[maximillion]

God does not just ask people in formal RL to walk a path blindly with Him.......this is the deepest trust.

Prayers to you Ignatious.....

[Feankie]

Golden Years.

Blessings and Peace to you this new year of 2014! 

[Golden Years]

Golden Years.

Blessings and Peace to you this new year of 2014! 

 

Out of props....Francis Clare, thank you! 

 

And thank you all so very much!  What a wonderfully caring group of people you are!  And what a blessing this website is. 

 

2013 is a year I will never forget, that's for sure.  And it wasn't a waste, because in anticipating entering religious life I taught myself to get up very early (for me) and pray every morning, which is a habit that hopefully will stay with me for the rest of my life.  And I finally met my spiritual director, which may open other doors for me later on. 

 

I did try to enter the Secular Carmelites, three times over the past 20 years, but it never worked out.  Twice as an isolated member (there are none close to me) and once in another city, but those nuns turned out to be on the very liberal side of things, so that didn't work out either.  And I never really felt called to become a third order anything.  I always felt called to be cloistered. 

 

However my spiritual director is Benedictine, so may I possibly look at Benedictine oblature down the road.  Right now I am just sort of taking it day by day, and letting Him guide things. 

 

When I watched the Teresa of Avila miniseries, when St. Teresa was appointed Prioress over her former community, they were fighting her tooth and nail, and so she took the statue of Our Lady and placed it in the Prioress' chair holding the keys to the monastery.  And I thought wow that is really incredibly awwwsome. 

 

I know we are all supposed to see Mary as our mother, but I have had trouble thinking of her in this way, maybe because my relationship with my own mother was somewhat strained.  But seeing her as my Prioress feels just right.  Who better to teach us ladies how to live a life pleasing to Our Lord?  A holy life of hiddenness, humility, prayer, sacrifice and surrender to the will of God.

 

Anyway thanks again for your prayers and very kind words.  They mean much more than I can say. 

 

Wishing you all a very blessed New Year.

 

 

Golden Years

[Pia Jesu]

The blessing is you, Golden Years...and all the posters here.  PM gives us the wonderful forum, but the willingness to share one's thoughts and concerns--and allow fellow searchers-for-God to respond--is a true gift!  It reminds me of St. Therese of Lisieux' "legion of little souls" who desire nothing more than to do God's will in their everyday lives (see the Foreward of Everything is Grace:  The Life and Way of Therese of Lisieux by Joseph F. Schmidt, FSC).  And from the description of Ignatius' "Prior/Prioress" cat (and I know Maximillion has mentioned her felines!) to AnneLine and BrandelynMarie's reminder to be open to the Holy Spirit--the VS community has become a Life-Saver (no candy-pun intended)!  Thanks to all of you!

 

 

 

[AnneLine]

AND... I am also reminded that God is the ULTIMATE RECYCLER.... He wastes nothing.   Every atom, every experience, He reuses to make more beautiful things.  The problem with us is we wanna hold onto the junk in our basements, attics, living rooms, hearts.....

 

Prayers for all of us to surrender to His Loving touch more and more this year....

[TheresaThoma]

And all of those who have discerned that they are not called to religious life are such a gift to this phorum as well. With so many people coming and leaving it is a blessing to have those who hang around and help keep track of everyone!

[Belongs2Jesus]

Hi everyone,

 

I've been "lurking" in the shadows for quite a while now but feel called to respond to this post.  I'm not sure if I've been hit by 2x4s or have *tripped* over them in my discernment process, but I'm at a life-altering place right now and could define myself as you have, GY.  It's oh so hard to close a chapter of your life that you've lived and longed for; and it's just as difficult to see an end as a beginning. But, as AL has said and others have repeated, there are many of us here, and although we don't understand at this point what God has in mind and what the years of preparing have meant, there *has been* a purpose to it all.  So many of the posts in this thread resonated with me, and I'm realizing that maybe *this* is the "box" God intends for me right now.  I love St. Charles de Foucauld, AL; and I'm also looking to our great saints and lay people ~ Caryll Houselander, St. Benedict Joseph Labre, Henri Nouwen, and St. Frances of Rome ~ as models of people who either didn't fit into, or feel called to, religious life.  As Corrie Ten Boom states so eloquently in her book "The Hiding Place" when referring to her childhood memories, but seems to fit just as well in our situations: "Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experience of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do."  He *does* have work for us; and we know that He is guiding and carrying us, even ~ maybe most especially ~ in the blank pages that fall in between the chapters of our lives. Thank you, GY ~ and AL, TT, IoL, PJ, Brandelynmarie, BT, and Maximillion for your beautiful words of understanding and encouragement.  And, AL, I love your avatar!