On the sense of vocation, immediate or delayed

Saint Benedict’s

The youngest girl in a family of eleven children, Viola Orgon (1895-1992) was especially close to her father.  From him she learned architectural and building skills, a keen sense of observation, a love for nature, and an invincible determination.

When at the age of eighteen, after having worked in a business office for a few years, she expressed her wish to join the convent [monastery], her father said, “I’d rather see you dead.”

So she waited another year while her mother prayed and her father softened.

[From Imogene Blatz, OSB, and Alard Zimmer, OSB, Threads from Our Tapestry: Benedictine Women in Central Minnesota (St. Cloud, Minnesota: North Star Press, 994), 150.]

Saint John’s

Almost whenever I meet people who find out that I attended Saint John’s University, they presume that I came to Saint John’s with a purpose: “Somehow you must have known, or at least suspected, that one day you would be a monk.”  Wrong, I say.

“Oh?  When did you first think about entering the monastery?  On your first contact with the sanctity of the monks?  As a result of some inspired course on Scripture or the burning issues of theology?”

No.  The truth be told, I never once during my undergraduate years at Saint John’s considered myself to have a vocation, let alone one to be a monk.  Within a year after graduation I did, but until then it never crossed my mind.

[From Dennis Beach, OSB, in Colman J. Barry, OSB, ed., A Sense of Place II: The Benedictines of Collegeville (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1990, 13-14.]