Vocational Guilt

[reginascribam]

Deleted by request of the author

[Sponsa-Christi]

Your vocation is between you and God, not God and your mother. God isn't going to reveal His will for your life to your mother instead of you. 

We owe our parents respect, and to a certain extent obedience when we are minors, but parents don't have the right to choose their children's vocations for them. 

If you in conscience prayerfully believe God is not calling you to consecrated life, you should feel free to marry without any vocational guilt. 

[reginascribam]

I truly, truly do. If God wanted me to be a nun, I would have already become one, but ever since I was little, I knew I was called to be a mom and wife

[gloriana35]

I'm so weary of the idea that whatever makes us happy is not 'God's will.' Follow your heart and happiness! 

It's odd - I remember two friends of mine (not even practising Catholics, both with a crop of boyfriends) who had several years of being afraid God wanted them in convents. Are you from Ireland? That seems to be a very Irish fear.

Stop thinking that whatever makes you happy means God wants a sacrifice (not that there isn't sacrifice in any life - but take them as they come, don't hunt for them.) I'm in consecrated life (for many years), but the love I saw between my mother and father, and the commitment that endured to the day they died,tells me what a blessed state it is. (I could give many other examples, of course.) Don't let this misplaced guilt trouble you. 

[reginascribam]

Funnily enough, my entire family is from Ireland. I'm a third generation American, but we still consider ourselves Irish. 

[Luigi]

An awful lot of women joined religious orders in the years before the Second Vatican Council. An awful lot of women left religious orders after the Second Vatican Council. One reason so many women (and men) left - and it's only one reason, it's not a comprehensive explanation - was that so many of them never should have joined in the first place. In those days, an awful lot of families put an awful lot of pressure on an awful lot of their children to become a priest or join a religious order.

If God doesn't call the person to religious life or the priesthood, she or he shouldn't join.

[Lilllabettt]

8 minutes ago, reginascribam said:

 

Your mom has screwed up this aspect of parenting.  All parents screw up something. Some do more than others. The different ways in which your parents failed will become apparent as you get older.  You can practice compassion, mercy, and forgiveness while at the same time recognizing their BS as BS.  

[truthfinder]

Being forced into a religious community de jure invalidates any vows received.  This has been time-honoured for centuries.  Further, unlike times past, one just can't be sent to the nearest convent - the general definition of a true vocation is the willingness of the person to try their vocation AND the ability of the superior to accept this person (which isn't completely confirmed until one is in final vows). 

Despite being rather wordy, I found this old article from the Catholic encyclopedia to be comforting (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15498a.htm) - to sum the key parts up: unless you have some giant physical manifestation of God's desire for you to enter religious life, there is no sin in choosing to follow a vocation to marriage or religious life as you feel.  Some people get very caught/trapped in a pattern of thinking that they are sinning by not following a religious vocation.  Further, you have already been betrothed, which is a formal, although not canonically - binding, commitment.  No one can overthrow that without a just and legitimate reason.

[Sister Leticia]

2 hours ago, reginascribam said:

she'd pressure me into leaving him and going to live with the Dominican sisters nearby. 

Really? She would decide that you are going to live with these sisters... and they would obey her decision regarding who comes to live in their house???

Don't worry. As Truthfinder has already said, nobody can just be sent to a convent, unlike in the Middle Ages, or melodramatic romantic novels. If you contacted a convent (to please your mother, say) and they asked you about your vocation story and you repeated what you've said here, they would not accept you. Nobody would.

So focus on preparing to marry your fiance, and on living the vocation God has chosen for you, and communicated to you.

[JHFamily]

I've read in Moral Theology books that it is actually a sin for a parent to intrude in the decision of their children in regard to their vocations, sometimes to the point that it is a mortal sin.  (Intrude here, not advise.)  She has certainly overstepped her authority in this matter.  You seem to already know what's in your heart, and I pray you will have many happy years with your husband.  

[Seven77]

 

I think that it's actually a good sign that your mom has been trying to force you to enter the convent--- it confirms that you probably aren't supposed to. from what you have described, it seems to me that you are doing and want to do what God wants you to do. I don't think it was an accident or coincidental that you were betrothed on the feast of St. Joseph (pretty sure you know this already).  I think you should be completely at peace about this. Also, I don't think that God got you this far in order to switch up on you. He doesn't rob us of our peace, he is the giver of peace, he is not our competitor… And if you are truly at peace and believe that you are where God wants you,, not hiding anything from  yourself, then it seems to me you are definitely on the right path.

Edited July 25, 2019 by Seven77

[reginascribam]

I am truly at peace with the decision I'm making to marry him. He is a wonderful man who will and has brought me closer to God. Thank you all for the help. My mom is wonderful, but is very pushy in some things. She doesn't let us kid our brothers about getting married and we were never allowed to go to dances growing up or the like because it would supposedly ruin our religious vocations. My dad isn't like that, he usually is the one to have my mom back off a bit.

[gloriana35]

I'm still in my sixties, but those of us in our 60s-70s were 'on the cusp' with ways in which Catholic practise developed. It was highly unstable. There were devout Catholics I knew personally who thought that an unusually strict upbringing (and openness to having any number of children, which was rare even for practising Catholics by our adult years) would create saints.

Sometimes, it did not surprise me that their children had no interest in church at all! Not that they wanted all of their children in religious life (...though those devoted to Therese might have aspired to this...), but they pictured children who were sort of apostles. 

I don't know your mother, of course, but for someone to not even want her children to go to dances, or to talk about marriage, is very odd. She seems to be highly controlling - possibly someone with great fear. I would imagine it might even be a pathological obsession. You must have had a lifetime of having a mother it was impossible to please - and may be exhausted with the effort, going along with her obsessions just to keep peace. 

There are many reasons people left religious life  - but there certainly were cases where priests or religious were miserable because it was their mother's vocation, not their own. 

Parents usually realise that their adult children may make choices which would not match what they envisioned. It's their problem if they can't live with this reality. Run off with your fiance and get married in another country if you must :D , but do it! You don't need a life ahead of abandoning your happiness - it will NOT mean God will shower you with graces for the sacrifice. Those who marry, enter religious life, whatever, have it come about naturally - it isn't that whatever we love opposes God's will, and that He is a trickster looking to thwart us.

This is NOT a work of spiritual direction, by any means, but, if you want to spend a relaxing summer afternoon, see if you can find a copy of Andrew Greeley's 'Ascent Into Hell.' The characters of Hugh, Elizabeth, and Maria all illustrate traits that you will not find unthinkable... and Maria has the right idea. 

[reginascribam]

My mom has severe anxiety. I don't know almost anything about her childhood, but my grandmother (her mom) is extremely controlling and can be very malicious. She converted right before having me and my other siblings. But, she converted into a really, really old form of Catholisism so we were all raised like it was the 1900s. I guess maybe that's why she was so protective of us.

[dominicansoul]

If you listen to your mom and entered the Dominicans they would see you don’t have a vocation and tell you to go home .  Then you would lose your fiancé.  You can’t pull a fast one over a community.  Communities can see right through that kind of stuff.  You have to enter because your heart and your happiness depends on it.  Seeing this is not the case, go forward in marriage and get the guilty feeling out of you, it’s not from God....