Letter 9: Faustus, bishop, to his beloved brother.

Faustus, bishop, to his beloved brother. You ask about the monastic life — whether it is appropriate to pursue it, what its dangers are, how to distinguish genuine vocation from mere flight from the world. I speak as someone who spent years at Lerins before being made bishop, and who has never entirely ceased to be a monk in his heart, however much episcopal work has filled the hours where prayer used to be. The danger of the monastic life that I have seen most often is this: it becomes a pursuit of one's own perfection at the expense of love for one's neighbor. The monk who spends his life in the quest for his own sanctification, carefully protecting his spiritual life from contamination by the needs of those around him, has mistaken the means for the end. The end is love. Everything — prayer, fasting, vigils, lectio divina — is a means to love. If the means are cultivated without producing the end, something has gone wrong. The way to tell genuine vocation from flight: genuine vocation looks toward something. It is drawn toward God, toward prayer, toward the community of people trying to live for God together. Flight from the world looks away from something. It is driven by fear, disgust, the desire to escape rather than the desire to arrive. Both may produce the same external behavior — the same tonsure, the same cell, the same Office. But the interior life they produce is very different. Ask yourself which it is. Faustus