vocation

Slate.com, the online news magazine, has an interesting but highly questionable assessment of consecrated and monastic life in the article "A Monastic Kind of Life: How Catholic religious communities are trying to attract young people again".

How blessed we are that a hermit is blogging because we don’t often get to see what this vocation and lifestyle is like. The eremitical life (the vocation of being a hermit as recognized by the Catholic Church) is another way to live out God’s call to live fully and to proclaim the Good News of Jesus. Here are my final questions and Sister Laurel’s responses …

Last week I posted Interview with a Hermit – called by God, the first installment from an interview I did with Sister Laurel O’Neal of the blog Notes from Stillsong Hermitage. Sister Laurel is a hermit of the Camaldolese Benedictine tradition. Here’s the next installment. I always wondered if hermits feel lonely or if they miss being within a religious community of other nuns … and so I asked …

“Your vocation is profoundly rooted in the particular Church to which you belong ... From the diocese, with its traditions, its saints, its values, limits and difficulties, you open up to the scope of the universal Church ... "

Too often people assume that nuns are women who couldn’t “get a guy” or who broke up with someone they thought was “the one” and was left with no alternative. Nuns are also stereotyped as sexually repressed, dowdy women who lack passion and care only about piety, cleanliness and order.