Vocation in the Order of the Holy Cross

A Meditation on the Religious/Monastic
Brother Reginald-Martin Crenshaw, OHC

This booklet presents short descriptions of Religious and Monastic Life in the Episcopal Church.  Intrigued by these descriptions, you may want to find out more about religious and monastic life.  Perhaps reading these selections have provoked within you some faint sense of call.  You, probably like most Episcopalians, may have only thought of a "call" in terms of ordained ministry.  But, to your surprise, these descriptions suggest the possibility that the "call" to serve exists in a container in which ordination is only one of many ways to serve God.

What then is this "call" that may be stirring within you; a "call;" that isn't necessarily a call to the ordained ministry?  Like all of the Baptized the goal of life is to seek God.  This is the basic component of the spirituality of all Christians, lay or ordained.  But this stirring within you may be a stirring toward a radical transcendence.  This radical transcendence is what Sandra Schneiders, IHM, describes as a "developed relationality to self, others, the world and God."  What is stirring within you then is the radical desire to move yourself toward God.  You seek God pure and simple.  And it is that seeking of radical transcendence that may spark an interest in the possibility of religious life for you.  As you read the descriptions of the various communities, you might have experienced an "Aha!"  That is, you may come to the realization that religious/monastic life may be the container in which that inner stirring you feel to seek God might be reached.  And that the Religious/monastic life might be the place where that "developed relationality to self, others, the world, and God" is developed and becomes the context for your fulfilling the Gospel mandate to reconcile yourself and others to Christ.

Religious Life is the invitation to live on the margins of life so that the following words of the psalmist, becomes your ongoing reality: