COME and SEE!

To begin the inquiry process, you must:

✥ Be a practicing Catholic or in RCIA/OCIA.

✥ Have some college and/or work experience and/or professional training.

✥ Be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

✥ Be free of debts, long-term family obligations, and addictive behaviors.

✥ Be in good physical and psychological health (documentation will be required).

✥ Be single or have received an annulment.

1. To familiarize yourself with our Order, we suggest you visit our regional website, where you will find much information about all our monasteries in the U.S.A. The American Region’s vocation website is: www.trappists.org.

2. What if, after having grown more familiar with our Order, you would like to explore the possibility of a vocation at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit? We invite you to tell us about your faith journey, prayer life, work experience, reason(s) for desiring monastic life, and whatever might help us to know you better. Please email cassian@trappist.net.

Should our vocation team agree that the matter deserves exploration, your status would shift from inquirer to candidate.  You will receive an information form and a medical/contact document to be sent to us before your visit.

3. If the vocation team concludes that it would be good to begin a process of vocational exploration, you would be invited to come and be with us for a time. Prayer and quiet pondering in a silent environment would set the tone of your initial visit.

4. Your visits with us would offer an opportunity to live, pray and work with our community and to meet with members of the vocation team. These visits would help both of us to discern mutually if signs pointed to a continuation of the exploration.

5. If you and the vocation team mutually agree that our monastery might be the direction God is leading you, we would invite you for a two-month live-in observership. During this time, you would provide us with letters of recommendation from your pastor, a former employer, and a good friend. During the observership, you would also receive a full battery psychological evaluation.

There are three major steps in monastic formation following a live-in observership:

1. Postulancy (six months).

As a postulant, you learn to follow grace, step by step, patiently. The things that Christ invites us to do for the love of Him "are usually prepared by a gentle and imperceptible providence that seem to come as if of themselves." If this stage results in affirmative progress, you will begin your novitiate.

2. Novitiate (two years).

This stage involves a comprehensive, gradual incorporation into our community life through prayer, interaction with the brothers, spiritual accompaniment by the novice director, solitude, study, and participation in a monastic horarium.

3. Juniorate (three to six years on the way to professing solemn vows).

Monks profess three vows: obedience, stability, and conversatio morum.

• Obedience is the first virtue of Christ and involves listening, in love, to someone else so that what they want seems more important to you than your own will.

• Stability is a promise to persevere in this particular community and is a promise of loyalty.

• Conversatio morum is a vow to a continual change of soul and a daily reshaping of the whole human person according to God's plan for us.

From this point forward, the monk continues a process in which he experiences Christ as the beginning and the end of his day. Christ is the point, core, and purpose of monastic life. Finally, a monk makes his solemn (final) vows, promising to live them out in the monastery until death and Heaven. 

We rarely accept candidates younger than 21 because we want to encourage them to have more life experience. We rarely accept candidates over 45 because of the difficulty experienced in transitioning from an independent lifestyle into the interdependence, challenges, and limitations of a cloistered environment. Exceptions, however, may be made on a case-by-case basis.

The Monastic Guest Program offers an opportunity for men 21 and older to experience monastic life. Applicants to the Monastic Guest Program should be in good physical and psychological health. The Monastic Guest Program is for men who are not considering a monastic vocation. For more information, please contact Br. Philip Wodzinski, OCSO at philip@trappist.net.

An authentic vocation is never a hostage situation. It is never forced; it is always freely offered. The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, or "to call," and a call invites a freely-given response. God is not speaking into an answering machine or a voicemail inbox. We are not automatons, and our vocations are not mechanical or pre-programmed. A vocation is a gratuitous invitation which invites a dynamic and ongoing RSVP (Repondez, s'il vous plaît!, or "Respond, please!") from a living person. Otherwise, God would simply be talking to himself! Thus, an authentic vocation is never a one-sided conversation; it is always a real dialogue between God and us because God delights in our involvement and does not desire to do anything without our consent. 

There are lots of ways to "test the spirits" (1 Jn. 4:1) and determine whether or not we have an authentic vocation to monastic life. The best way is to actually live in a monastic community and experience the life firsthand, but here are a few immediate red flags to consider:

If you're seeking to "run away from the world," you should probably seek elsewhere. Monks do not run away from the world; rather, we run into the depths of the human heart in a spirit of profound solidarity and intimacy with all the peoples of the world. Our love runs into the world from within our cloister, humbly offering the world a hopeful sign of what a redeemed humanity can truly be when we are faithful to our sacred calling.

If you think you're holy or wise, you should probably seek elsewhere. We do not come to the monastery because we are holy but because we believe in the promise of holiness and strive to attain it by the help of God's grace and the love of our brothers. Our life is not a life for people who think they have all the answers. Our life is not a life for people who are convinced they are always right or that their way is the only way. Our life is one of continual progress in holiness and wisdom, not for those who are already perfect (or pretend to be).

If you think monastic life is "just between you and God," then you should probably seek elsewhere. Our life is rooted in the Trinitarian love of God, neighbor, and self. We are a community of monks who welcome, affirm, and accept one another. We are not a community of hermits who merely tolerate one another while all seeking separate spheres of solitude and solipsism. That isn't cenobitic monasticism. Our lives are bound up in our brothers' lives in mutual obedience to and mutual charity towards one another. 

If you're looking for an idyllic life, you should probably seek elsewhere. We are not a retirement community. The yoke of the Cross is, at times, a very difficult one to bear; it requires much hard work and much sacrifice. That is why we live in a community, brothers helping brothers, bearing our burdens with one another patiently and with love. We hate to disappoint, but we are not angels. We have all of the same struggles all other human beings have; that's part of God's design. We are men, but we are men who are called to share in the divinity of the God who shares and delights in our humanity.

If you're looking for an echo-chamber that confirms your ideological biases, you should probably seek elsewhere. Ideally, monastic life—when lived faithfully—will challenge us and purge us of all of the vain and vacuous ideological pretensions which substitute themselves for the radically-inclusive Gospel of Jesus Christ. There is no -ism—not even monasticism!—which can ever replace the Gospel, which calls us, above all, to be loved and to love. When our faith and our vocation are reduced to mere ideological posturing, then we have lost the Gospel and have lost Jesus Christ. Ideologies are loveless and lifeless things, but the Gospel vivifies all things by love. In monastic life, there is no "us vs. them"; there is only "us" (cf. Gal. 3:28).