Interview

Early in my time in the SSJE one of the older members of the community was interviewed by a student journalist. He was asked what life in community had been like for him the fifty years he had been professed. He answered in a quavering voice that it had been a struggle the whole way.…

Q:  When did you first begin to have a sense of a monastic vocation? I went to seminary right after college because an internship made me think I wanted to be a hospital chaplain. After my first year I got a real taste of chaplaincy in Clinical Pastoral Education and found I did not want…

 When did you first have a sense of your vocation?  When I was a young chorister in my parish, I became fascinated by the church’s history and very caught up in its worship. Although only half aware of it at the time, I do remember being very drawn to images of monastics as depicted in…

A Conversation about Vocation When did you first have a sense of your vocation? My parents and family are devoted Christians. I was raised in the Christian Reformed Church, a predominantly Dutch, Calvinist denomination. My sister and brother and I attended Christian schools, and our family was very active in the church. From my early…

When did you first begin to have a sense of your vocation? Even as a little kid, I somehow or other knew that I wanted to be a priest. I used to have a very dark blue wool dressing gown, which I would wear backwards as I wandered around the house pretending to be Mr.…

  Q: When did you first have a sense of your vocation? I was twelve and I had a dream—a dream about monks. After all these years, I can still picture what I saw in my mind’s eye. I have no recollection, at that point, of ever having met a monk, nor having been to…

Q: How old were you when you first started to have a sense of your vocation? When I was about fifteen, somebody I knew mentioned that they wanted to be a monk, and I remember how – though I didn’t even go to church at that time – something about that struck me very deeply.…