I’ve had the unusual good fortune of spending the last four days hanging out at a novitiate in the thriving heart of the Catholic Church in Africa. A somewhat rare opportunity, I know, to find out that…gasp…novices are normal young women!

Someone once said to me “there seems to be this massive chasm for young people these days, to even begin considering religious life as a vocational option.” In many respects, I think he’s right – but I think our ideas of how to narrow that chasm would be quite different.

However, the experience I’ve had in the last three days has certainly helped narrow the chasm. In the name of making a well-informed vocational choice, and through a good dose of God’s providence, I thought it worthwhile to at least take a look and see what it’s like.

While I haven’t yet been around the work the sisters do, the novitiate has been a great experience anyway. You start to learn a lot about the commitment to any vocation – marriage, single, religious life…whatever. You start to see the common elements in them all, not least of which, the primary vocation to love.

During my stay there, I got stuck into reading Karl Rahner’s ‘Religious Life Today’ (written in 1974!). Despite the title, it covered much more about the role of any member of the Body of Christ, both lay and religious. However, it also discussed things like the vow of obedience, growing old in religious life, and dying in religious life…things I’d never really thought about. Below is just a few quotes (hopefully not pulled too much out of context), that particularly struck me…

“The cross of Christ extends very ‘anonymously’, very unexplicitly, very unemotively, in a very everyday fashion, over our lives.”

“A mature Christian has no right to be a good sheep who accepts the guidance of wise shepherds in silent obedience. Disputes and opposition, conducted by both sides in faith and love, justice and self-critical caution, are part of the life of the Church.”

“If we are to assess religious life in a community correctly, we mustn’t forget that the finiteness and inadequacies of human life, which we have taken on ourselves with our free determination to live in religion, are, because of this free decision, more noticeable than the inadequacies that spring from life unasked and are accepted in silence as part of it all.”

“Religious life means the – worthwhile – courage to take advice from others, to conquer an overhasty fondness of one’s own opinions and feelings. Once you have dared to try that courage, you notice that entrusting yourself to the larger mind of a group is rewarding.”

“In a religious community like ours, the going is sometimes difficult both because an order is out to serve a cause (that of Christ and the Church), and because it is not a small circle of people who have nothing but high regard for each other.”

“The [religious] does not ‘sacrifice’ his freedom. The false mythologization of religious obedience must vanish from ascetic literature. The religious does not ‘sacrifice’ his freedom any more than anybody else who (in getting married, in professional responsibilities etc) exposes himself for the genuine realization of his freedom, to the commitments entailed by the freely chosen cause.”

“Growing old is a really serious matter. It is a grace, a mission and the risk of radical failure. It is a part of human and Christian life which (like every other part of life) has its’ insubstitutable and irreplaceable importance. That is particularly true since old age must be understood not simply as life’s running out, but as life’s ‘coming to definitiveness,’ even when that happens under the paralyzing influence of slow, biological death.”