Do You "Have A Vocation?" Or Do You Just Think That Because Your Friends Do?
Mimetic Pressure, False Vocations, and "Religious Vocation: An Unnecessary Mystery" by Fr. Richard Butler
Recently, I wrote a post about the “vocation crisis” and how children need to be exposed frequently to the priesthood and religious vocations1 in order for some of them to be able to desire them one day. Obvious to some degree, yes, but the results when this happens, as I pointed out through two young men I met last summer, Ben and Tryson, were incredibly beautiful to behold. The attitudes of their young, well-formed hearts and minds (and those of their siblings) were eager to soon lay aside the world and follow God in the religious state of life.
Their lives, based on their upbringing in proximity to many priests, monks, and nuns, provide a basic example of Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, that we naturally incline toward the models of desire that we encounter. Someone who sees a lifestyle or practice considers it, and someone who doesn’t see it as much desires it less. For the things of God, this is usually a good thing. Starved of good models, we don’t end up thinking of them. With them, we consider them, and in the case of Ben, Tryson, their families, and people like them, religious vocations are chosen very frequently. Religious vocations are not rare; most of the time, they’re just never given a chance to flourish.
But exposing young people to religious vocations frequently and early isn’t enough to make it clear and distinct for the young men and women involved. Young discerning Catholics often struggle between two opposing concerns, one of believing that they need special signs and confirmations of a religious vocation on one hand, and on the other hand, believing that they need special signs and confirmations not to pursue it.
Mimetic examples alone, while good for leading people to consider the religious life, produce dangerously confusing states of mind. Too many young Catholics, exposed a lot to the religious life, and having many of their friends entering it, worry too much about whether they “have a religious vocation,” and out of turmoil and confusion, often wind up doing nothing. Fr. Richard Butler O.P.’s Religious Vocation: An Unnecessary Mystery offers some clarifying lessons for those in this position of confusion that I’m excited to share, as his clarifications have been helpful and clarifying in my own life as I am one of these people.
Two False Theories of Vocation
The message of the Dominican Fr. Butler in his 1961 book is clear: everyone is called to follow the counsels of perfection, everyone is invited to enter the religious state, yet only those who truly respond to it with a right intention have a vocation. Many of us know all these clauses already, but there is frequently confusion among those discerning about “whether I have a vocation” because many of us don’t know how to integrate these statements into our own lives.
Fr. Butler distinguishes between two false theories of what a religious vocation is that make it unnecessarily complicated and confusing to understand. The first is the objective theory, whereby one has a religious vocation if one is objectively able to live such a life of following the evangelical counsels. This, the interpretation many of us take to be the position of the Church Fathers and theologians throughout history, seems to imply that anyone who can live the religious life ought to pursue it, and ought to without delay. Perhaps one, as was the custom in the Middle Ages, should even consign one’s children at a young age to a convent or monastery! One has a religious vocation automatically if one takes this position, unless there is some strong reason to think otherwise, such as being rejected from a seminary or postulancy.
The second theory, what Fr. Butler calls the attraction theory, is much more common today. It entails one looking at one’s subjective feelings and looking for special signs to decide if one has a mysterious subjective state called a “vocation.” A religious vocation is manifest as an interior, low, and small voice, where one feels mystical, mysterious, sweet, and perhaps romantically enticing feelings of “calling.”2 For the supporter of the attraction theory, this mystical interior feeling is both the necessary prerequisite sign of a religious vocation and the vocation itself. Someone who doesn’t feel any particularly mystical experience or sweet internal feelings about religious life, even if they can live the evangelical counsels, isn’t “called.”
Synthesis: Demystify the Religious Life and Religious Vocations
Fr. Butler ends up disagreeing with both theories, and instead explains, following St. Thomas Aquinas, that the truth is a synthesis of both; religious vocation is our Divine-inspired individual cooperation with God’s universal call of all of us to holiness. A vocation is cooperation in us, assisted by grace, to live out our pursuit of the perfection of charity by the particular means of the vowed/ordained religious states. As Fr. Butler defines religious vocation:
Religious vocation is a divine invitation, extended to all by Jesus Christ, to the practice of the evangelical counsels in the religious state, to which a capable subject, under the impetus of grace, responds through generous devotion.3
There is no need for special mystery or mystical experiences in discerning a religious vocation. Rather, Fr. Butler believes that religious vocation is often obscured by thinking it has to be so. We should, he enjoins us, so normalize vocation as to demystify and almost devalue it:
Too many people outside of the fold look at those in religious life from a purely natural point of view and understandably shy away. You can see the hostility in the eyes of the unbeliever, or the uninformed, glancing at the serene nuns seated in the subway. But there are also too many within the Church who shy away for other reasons. Rather than look askance, they exalt religious life to a supermysterious level which is altogether unnecessary and definitely undesirable. As a matter of fact, their interpretation, or lack of it, of religious vocation is detrimental to the further increase or success of these vocations. They make religious life as unnatural as the secularist does, perhaps more so. They fail to understand the supernatural and distort, by divorcing, its relation to the natural. They are guilty of promoting the unnecessary mystery.
The true measure of a religious vocation is the pursuit of it for the right reasons and by the right means, that is, having a firm stance of one’s will towards the love of God but a will that wills to love God by the particular means of the religious state and in cooperation with His grace:
We hold to a general objective invitation to the religious state through revealed counsel, and, at the same time, to God's free choice and necessary causality in influencing some to respond to this counsel.
There is for Fr. Butler, a true possibility of living the religious life or pursuing a religious vocation while never truly having a religious vocation, as, for example, if one joins an order or becomes a priest by merely natural, human effort alone and not out of cooperation with grace, as with doing so merely to avoid other people, for the desire for human respect and praise, to have peace and quiet, etc. He gives several examples in his book, in fact, of people for whom this occurred and who later left religious life, one after twenty-five years of profession.
Cooperation with grace, assuming one is pursuing the religious life for the right reasons, manifests itself in one’s pursuit of the religious state. Mystery remains in that one’s very cooperation with grace is caused by God in an implacable way—yet not opposed to the freedom of man’s will. The mystery of religious vocation that remains is how the subjective interior willing of it is joined intimately with an objective ability to live in the religious state by means of one’s doing so out of cooperation with grace. The mystery that Fr. Butler wishes to dispel is that one needs to have special experiences to confirm a religious vocation.
Practically, thus, one’s pursuit of the religious state is a sign that one has a vocation to it, and a further sign is being admitted to a religious community or being ordained. Further confirmation of a religious vocation would be internally revealed to ourselves by persistence in the religious life, and not mere brute force persistence, but an ever more settled and peaceful state of the will towards the love of God, and by the aid of supernatural grace through the religious state. Exactly how this occurs is difficult for even Fr. Butler to define, because it is, in a certain sense, subjective. It is often easy for us to trick ourselves—he narrates several cases of people who forced themselves out of natural means alone for decades to live in the religious life. But it could be as simple as asking oneself, over time, “where sitteth my will in confronting the difficulties of the religious state?”
Again, subjectivity is involved, but a feeling that one is forcing oneself to join, or stay, in a religious community is probably a sign that one does not have a religious vocation. Pursuing a religious vocation out of pride, out of fear, for social status, etc., are also signs that one likely does not have a religious vocation. One’s intention, eventually, must be a firm orientation of will of ecstatic love of God.
These are Errors of False Romanticism of the Religious Life
Fr. Butler’s warning against looking for a vocation amidst mystical, mysterious signs and feelings is especially imperative amidst young, faithful, and fervent Catholics today. Twin errors frequently arise from a false exaltation and overromanticization of the religious state.
On the one hand, believing that miraculous signs or romanticized, sweet internal feelings about religious life are necessary proofs that one has a religious vocation will lead one to inaction if the proofs are lacking or don’t seem grand, bold, or clear enough. In this way, the error is not seeing the religious state as “normal” enough for one to be able to pursue without special sancture. This idle torpidity leads to anxiety, confusion, and a permanent state of “discernment” with very little action, the end result of which is that one isn’t following God’s will because one isn’t really willing or doing anything.
An opposing error also comes from false romanticization and exaltation of the religious state when it is coupled with pride. This is the error of one who pridefully thinks they have a vocation yet pursues the religious state out of pride, believing a supposed call to it, as a higher state, is a sign of one’s own superiority.
The first error is one of false negatives. Perhaps one in that case really does have a religious vocation. Your false conception of what it is, however, means you are doing nothing about it. The contrasting error is a false positive. You might have a religious vocation, but you likely don’t. You are, to use the modern parlance, LARPing, worshipping the discernment process and yourself rather than pursuing the goal of the discernment, confirmation of a religious vocation, and its end goal, serving God through a particular set of means.
Fr. Butler proposes a synthesis that avoids these two errors. Recognize, he says, that if you have a religious vocation, the glory therein and the means to attain it are God’s. You aren’t special for having one, it’s just the particular means by which God wants you to serve Him. In many cases, a religious vocation is even a sign of contradiction, of a sign of personal failings and vices that need the aid of the religious life to be rectified.
Mimesis is a Two-Edged Sword
While false romanticization and exaltation of the religious state are errors that arise in many Catholic young people today, and signify pride, fear, and confusion in their subject, these are corruptions of good intentions. Again, as covered in “Mimetic Aspirations”, being exposed to the priesthood and religious life frequently and at a young age is a very good thing for Catholic young people, opening one’s imagination to consider them as possibilities and one’s heart and will mimetically to desire them.
Mimesis is a two-edged sword. It is good and helpful insofar as it strengthens the idea of the religious life as “normal” and persuades young Catholics, even if the desire for such a path for God’s service begins in lower loves like young boys “playing Mass” or liking the appearance of a particular religious habit. These desires can even work great good in young people even if they aren’t called to religious life if through them the young grow deeper into their faith.
Once our imaginations and hearts are open, something that mimesis can do, God can work on us. If you’re to enter, He’ll have a lot of work in particular to do in you, as—false romanticizations aside—it’s a difficult and challenging life.
But mimesis can be false and dangerous, however, if our hearts begin to close off and idolize the religious state as an end in itself. This is where false romanticization enters, and where one might end up worshipping the image of oneself loving God instead of actually following the “Jacob’s ladder” ascent of perfection involved in true love of God. This is the same error as that evidenced in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector at prayer:
As soon as a “religious vocation” becomes oriented merely towards one thinking about a “religious vocation” instead of loving God or one’s “discerning” merely leads to more “discerning” it’s clear that something is off and you’re either failing to move forward on what God is calling you to by resting in a lower love or don’t have a real vocation in the first place.
Advice for the Anxious Young Catholic
True “vocation” is again a cooperation in oneself with God’s particular will for you and includes your response to it. True vocations are fostered out of and begin in mimetic aspirations but must transcend them. A tingling feeling of joy in one’s heart and mind about the image of yourself in the religious state in the future, or as a priest, can be the beginning. But such an image must be transcended to be a sign of a true vocation.
If you feel like you are forcing yourself to move forward towards a religious community or seminary discernment, and are otherwise in a state of grace, you’re forcing yourself, and God isn’t calling you to it. If you’re worried about whether you have a religious vocation, you probably don’t.
If you feel like you want the religious state of life, but are looking for a sign, don’t worry, that feeling is your sign; contact a community and try to move forward. Discernment means taking steps to test out God’s will for you and not just thinking and worrying.
But if you “feel called” in your heart and imagination but are “confused” about it, and haven’t been able to move forward in joining a religious community or seminary, this is a sign that your feelings are merely natural and mimetic. You should wait for your feelings to change and your confusion to go away before taking another step or overly thinking about “whether you have a religious vocation.”
My Personal Experience With These Mimetic Pressures
Currently, I’m in this latter category. Over the past six or so years, I’ve been very frequently exposed to the priesthood and religious life, having met numerous priests and monks and visited several religious orders, having had many of my friends enter seminaries, monasteries, and convents, including some very close friends.4 Such experiences and friends, for a while, and perhaps still even now, have me strongly consider a religious vocation. In my friend group, and yes, this is a positive thing, the religious life is not just normal, it’s hypernormal and expected; everyone I know has thought about it. Surely this affected me mimetically, yet it was a particular, well, set of experiences surrounding a random visit to a monastery two years back that served specifically to inflame my heart towards a religious vocation. I say “seemed” because I still don’t know how to objectively measure what happened that week, or where my heart was for sure the next two years of seeming surety that were to launch me onto two years of serious “discernment” with several religious orders.
Yet a door that I thought was open slammed pretty close to shut last summer during a longer visit to Clear Creek Abbey, with the realization that I would have had to force myself to take each additional next step towards entering. I was, therefore, not truly willing a religious vocation out of love of God, but far more out of reasons like “this is just the type of thing I should do” or “this would give me peace and quiet and allow me to avoid the bad things about other states in life.” These are reasons that Fr. Richard Butler and the Benedictine novice master I was meeting with last year warned are likely to lead to burn-out, as they show desires without confirmation of a supernatural, grace-aided root. Mimesis brought me this far, but it was not necessarily transcended and perfected by Divine charity into a true vocation.
Ever since, while I retain a vague “this would be good” orientation towards the religious life, feelings about it have grown more and more distant and less and less sweet within my mind, leading me to wonder how much of the last two years were real and how much of my feelings were merely vague sorts of mimetic-induced Catholic guilt and status seeking.
Mimetic aspiration for the religious life was at the very least a factor in the last few years of my life. The desire for honor from my friends, matching their status, and relishing the social standing that “discernment” gave to me surely affected me at least a little. Mimetic feelings and their pride-induced failure modes can frequently manifest themselves in a variety of ways in Catholic circles that would seem odd to those outside them.
It’s not that the last two years of “discernment” were wasteful, or even that my attraction to the religious life was baseless. They were, on the contrary, extremely fruitful for deepening in prayer and beginning to understand and address my root faults. Perhaps it will come to something—and I have high hopes, perhaps a year or two ahead right now. But they have as yet come to nothing. I know for certain merely that I can’t—and shouldn’t claim the prideful trappings that claiming I’m “discerning” right now would give me. I know, for now at least, that my feelings toward the religious life were something that I experienced but were unconfirmed. I hope they will come to something in the future. But if it is to be so, it must be because love of God is driving me there and not merely because “everyone else is doing it.”5
Conclusions
Mimesis is a path by which we are jump-started into considering what God wants for us, but mimetic desire alone, even for a good thing like the religious life, is not a confirmation all on its own. A false vocation, a false positive induced by mimesis, will fizzle out; a real one will be self-propelling. If you are open to considering one because of mimesis and have a true vocation, it will be clear to you when the time is right. The key, as with many things, is to get outside of your head and actually take real steps in the world to test them out. Visit a monastery, don’t just revisit the thoughts in your mind. See what happens.
Providing many positive examples of the priesthood and religious life to young children is still a good thing. But Fr. Butler’s ideas about normalizing religious vocations so our frequent overthinking doesn’t lead us into confusion and false conclusions out of pride, guilt, or romanticization are helpful clarifiers to the individual Catholics who’ve opened their hearts and begun “discerning.” His book, for me at least, has been clarifying and very helpful.
See my summary of another good book on vocational discernment by a priest I’ve gotten to know, Fr. Joseph Bolin here:
I will use “religious life”, “the religious state”, and “to have a religious vocation” mostly interchangeably with a “vocation to the priesthood” here unless context demands otherwise.
Fr. Butler spends several pages hilariously laughing at the poetic extremes used by some recent spiritual authors in describing the subjective attraction theory of how a religious vocation is manifested.
Fr. Richard Butler, Religious Vocation: An Unnecessary Mystery. I received a copy of differing, non-standard formatting from a monastery that is not available online, so I will not include page numbers, but the book can be read online here.
The closest thing to a date I’ve ever gone on was tea with a girl just about to enter a convent whom, years earlier, I had almost dated. The second closest thing, a year earlier, was driving her to a discernment visit.
I’m moving to start a new job soon, and lo and behold, once again, my two best friends in that town are each also discerning a religious vocation.
It’s been years since I picked up that book, but I always remembered the conclusion as basically being “Enter religious life if you’re drawn to it and able.” I remember better the final article of the II-II of Thomas, concluding that you basically don’t need to take counsel before entering religious life: Christ himself has counseled it.
I’m in an odd spot. I’ve been drawn to the religious life almost as long as I’ve known it existed. In 2022, I took a month with the Carthusians. It was wonderful though challenging, and yet the Novice Master seemed to believe that my vocation was in the world. Three years later, I think most people I know would agree with him, but I still can’t get it out of my head! It was much easier to be holy in the Charterhouse and I seem to waste so much of my time now that it’s hard for me to believe I am more pleasing to God in the world than I would be in the solitude and discipline of the Carthusians.
Anyway, please pray for me that I may do God’s will! That if I must be in the world, He may show me how to do it and become a saint. I am a sinner and very undisciplined.
I wish I knew how you maintained your zeal for institutional Christianity. I regard it with sadness and disappointment mostly (and sometimes-like when that Presbyterian lady gave her speech in the National Chapel-frustration). You seem committed and certain. I would be interested to read some writing explaining why, and how.