Vocation Station for men

[bardegaulois]

On 12/23/2015, 1:58:40, Amppax said:

Thank you for this thread Chrysostom. I've been lurking on and off on VS since I joined Phatmass. For most of that time, I did it mainly to pray for people, as I thought my vocation was to marriage. However, I stop by more now, as I am unsure where the Lord wants me to go, and am again considering religious life or the priesthood. 

I don't know why so few men post here. I think that Julie is right about the keeping quiet and the desire to figure it out on our own. Apart from that I don't really know. 

It might just be that men go ahead and do what they need to do without feeling the need to rally a lot of support behind them. We get our marching orders (or see a necessity), and we execute them without much discussion. It does, unfortunately, lead to a dearth of information, so far as I've been able to find, about how a man should discern religious life, particularly religious life in itself, without the added duties of a cleric. I've often asked the question, on this forum and elsewhere, about which distinctive criteria would define a good brother as opposed to which would define a good priest and vice versa, without any solid answers available. Most of the vocation stories from brothers I've read, moreover, only seem to indicate, "I didn't feel called to the priesthood," or "I didn't want to become a priest," thus giving only subjective criteria.

So we can say on the one hand that discernment resources for men are lacking (except those concerning the priesthood; these are ample), but on the other that there isn't really a strong demand for them. Whether there should be or not is a debatable question to me.