Ecclesial Vocations: On the Importance of Honest Mutual Discernment in Times of Doubt

[[Without entering into the vocation with the right motive, Sister Laurel warned “the most profound healing of past trauma, rejection, and any correlative search for identity and value” that can come from the hermit’s solitude with God would not be possible for Matson. She warned Bishop Stowe that the ramifications of permitting Matson to become a diocesan hermit without proper discernment could be significant, especially for hermits in the midst of their own vocational doubt. “If the church’s own discernment of the truth of this vocation is driven by anything other than the most rigorous honesty of perception and judgment, the entire vocation can be undermined just when the hermit’s own life is most vulnerable to redemption and transfiguration,” she wrote. “The result can be disastrous.”

Sister, I wondered if you would clarify what you were reported to have said in this passage from the article in OSV. I didn't understand the reference to doubt.]]

Thanks for asking. Yes, what I was speaking about was those times in every hermit's life when we wonder if we have really heard God's call in petitioning or responding to become a hermit. The vocation is so countercultural, and in many ways so counterintuitive and there are so many more obvious ways to do good, to show others the love of God, or (it seems) to become more fully and generously human, that we can come to doubt we have rightly heard and responded to God's call. Because the vocation is an ecclesial one and because this means the Church must also discern this vocation before she entrusts us with it or permits us to live it in the name of the Church, it becomes terribly important that we are able to trust those who have discerned the vocation with us. If, as we have been looking at during the last few weeks, the church (meaning bishops, Vicars for Religious, mentors in the formation process, etc.,), does not do an honest and rigorous discernment, then during these periods of doubt we have no way to rest in the church's decision to profess and consecrate us.

Beyond this, when we move through the doubt and find the faith to trust in the church's mutual discernment, we also move more deeply into the truth of our vocation, and this means we are more able to open ourselves (or be vulnerable) to the redemptive presence of God. At the heart of every vocation is a redemptive experience where God comes to and takes us to Godself in our doubt and emptiness, our brokenness, woundedness, and unrealized potential, and assures us of our inestimable value as he brings us to greater fullness, wholeness, and holiness. This experience comes to us within a God-given vocation. To know one has this vocation is to know God has entrusted one with a very unusual and real place in his own story. It is to be loved beyond knowing and to come to regard ourselves as a precious and unique representative of a specific vocational path. Paradoxically, being able to rest confidently in the church's honest and knowledgeable discernment makes possible this radical vulnerability and the redemption that can follow. Still, the journey of this particular path is a journey we can only make in radical vulnerability and that cannot happen when the journey begins with the kinds of lies, deception, and egregious self-will present in the Lexington situation. 

From the perspective of our need for the church's mutual discernment, it must be underscored that the situation in Lexington resulted from the betrayal of the local church's responsibility regarding canon 603 (and Cole Matson as well). Despite the candidate's candid admission that what he sought was public profession without having discerned a call to solitary eremitical life and likely being called instead to community life, he was allowed to attempt profession as a solitary hermit. The minister of profession commented he didn't see whom it would hurt, which is a far cry from affirming a sense of a divine call. He acted carelessly and without regard to the vocation itself, its history, or those who might truly be called to it. Moreover, he implicitly says in this way, that he does not believe Cole Matson has any kind of genuine vocation in the Church and can live with this kind of hypocrisy rather than in genuine joy. I find that distinctly uncharitable. 

Meanwhile, while C. Matson, for instance, might never have to depend on the honesty and rigor of the church's discernment concerning his eremitical life (he already knows he is not called to this precise vocation and that he used c 603 in a stopgap way), others in the diocese down the line who might truly be called to this vocation (or others!) might want and need to assure themselves that the diocese has a history of honesty, sensitivity, and understanding in their discernment of certain ecclesial vocations.