Things You Should Know Before You Enter a Religious Order

Brief Overview

• Entering a religious order is one of the most serious commitments a person can make in the Catholic Church, and it demands honest self-examination long before you ever knock on a monastery or convent door.
• The formation process is lengthy, demanding, and designed to test every dimension of your character, your faith, and your willingness to surrender your own will to God and to a community.
• You will give up personal freedom, financial independence, romantic relationships, and many individual choices, and the Church teaches that this sacrifice is not a loss but a participation in a higher form of love (CCC 914).
• Religious life carries genuine joy, deep community, and a clarity of purpose that many people find nowhere else, but those goods come wrapped in real difficulties that formation directors rarely advertise in their vocation brochures.
• Many people who enter religious life leave before final vows, and this is not always a failure; discernment is a process, not a single moment, and leaving when called to do so requires just as much courage as staying.
• The hidden truths of religious life, including the community tensions, the spiritual dryness, the institutional pressures, and the grief of leaving behind family and personal ambitions, are things you deserve to know before you sign your name to anything.

This Is Not a Spiritual Retreat That Never Ends

Before you romanticize religious life, you need to understand what it actually is and what it is not. Religious life is not an extended retreat, a monastery vacation, or a life spent in quiet prayer while the world hums pleasantly outside your window. It is a structured, demanding, and often uncomfortable way of living that the Church describes as a total consecration of one’s life to God through the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (CCC 914). The Catechism makes clear that those who take on this state do so not merely to withdraw from the world but to give themselves entirely to God for the sake of the Church and the world (CCC 916). That distinction matters enormously because many people enter a religious order with the image of peaceful chapels and morning chant in their heads and are completely blindsided by what they actually find. What you find is a full daily schedule, community obligations, manual labor, assigned apostolates, and a formation process specifically designed to strip away your self-reliance. You will be asked to do tasks you find beneath you, to submit to authorities you sometimes disagree with, and to live alongside people you did not choose and do not naturally like. The spiritual life inside a religious order is real and rich, but it looks more like a demanding school than a permanent retreat. The sooner you make peace with that reality, the more honestly you can discern whether you are actually called to this life. Going in with clear eyes is not a lack of faith; it is actually a sign of mature faith.

Poverty Is More Radical Than You Think

Most people hear the word “poverty” and think it means living simply, driving an old car, or skipping fancy dinners. In a religious order, poverty means something far more specific and far more demanding. It means you do not own anything. You cannot keep a gift without permission, open a bank account, or make a financial decision without the consent of your superiors (CCC 915). If your grandmother dies and leaves you an inheritance, that money goes to the community, not to you. If you want to buy a book, a specific pair of shoes, or even a particular brand of soap, you may need to ask for it. This level of material dependence is genuinely difficult for people raised in a culture built on individual ownership and financial self-determination. Many people discover this only after they have entered, and the psychological adjustment can be significant. The Church teaches that this poverty is meant to free you from attachment to material things so that your heart can be fully directed toward God, but experiencing that freedom takes time and does not come without real struggle. You may feel infantilized at first, and that feeling is worth examining honestly during your discernment. You should also understand that some religious communities live this poverty more strictly than others, and you need to investigate the actual practices of the specific order you are considering, not just its written constitutions. Poverty in a Benedictine monastery looks different from poverty in an active apostolic congregation, and you owe it to yourself to understand that difference before you arrive.

Chastity Is Not Just About Not Getting Married

Consecrated chastity is frequently misunderstood, both by people outside religious life and by those who are entering it for the first time. The Church teaches that chastity in the religious state involves a total gift of self to God, expressed through the renunciation of marriage and sexual intimacy (CCC 915). What people often fail to appreciate is that this also means renouncing the emotional intimacy that comes with a romantic partnership, the comfort of being someone’s primary person, and the deep human connection of building a shared life with a spouse. You will not have someone to come home to in the way that married people do, and that absence can hit you with unexpected force on lonely evenings or during moments of personal suffering. Human beings are made for love, and religious chastity does not eliminate that need; it redirects it, and that redirection requires ongoing spiritual work throughout your entire life in the order. The Church is honest about the fact that this form of life requires a genuine charism, a specific gift from God, and it is not simply a matter of willpower or discipline (CCC 1579). If you are entering religious life because you are afraid of relationships or running away from past wounds, formation directors will eventually see this, and more importantly, you will eventually see it too. Healthy celibate chastity is not a suppression of human affection but a different expression of it, one that becomes possible only through ongoing prayer, community, and honest self-knowledge. Before you enter, spend real time examining your motivations and your emotional history with a spiritual director who will tell you the truth.

Obedience Will Humiliate You Before It Frees You

Of the three evangelical counsels, obedience is the one that surprises people the most and unsettles them the deepest. Most people who feel called to religious life are thoughtful, motivated individuals with strong personal convictions and a clear sense of what they believe God wants from them. Obedience asks all of that to sit down and wait. Religious obedience, as the Church teaches, involves submitting your own will to the will of legitimate superiors as an expression of trust in God’s providential governance of the community (CCC 601, 916). In practice, this means you might be assigned to a ministry you did not request, moved to a community you did not choose, or asked to accept a decision you genuinely believe is wrong. You do not get to negotiate your way around those moments. Formation is specifically designed to expose your attachment to your own agenda, and it will succeed in doing so, sometimes in ways that are genuinely painful. Many people discover during the novitiate that they have a far stronger attachment to their own will than they ever realized, and that discovery can feel like a crisis of identity. The Church does not teach blind obedience; you retain the right and responsibility to speak your concerns to superiors through legitimate channels. But once those concerns are heard and a decision is made, you are expected to submit unless the order involves serious moral wrong. This is a spiritual discipline that the Church describes as a way of sharing in the obedience of Christ himself (Philippians 2:8), and understanding that theological foundation before you enter makes the lived experience far more coherent.

Formation Is a Process Designed to Filter, Not Just to Train

Formation in a religious order is not simply a period of instruction where you learn the prayers, the schedule, and the charism of the community. It is also a structured process of discernment and evaluation, and the community is assessing you just as surely as you are assessing the community. There are distinct stages in most orders, beginning with a candidacy or postulancy period, followed by the novitiate, then a period of temporary vows, before final or perpetual profession (CCC 916). Each stage carries its own demands, and you can be asked to leave at any point, for any number of reasons that may have nothing to do with personal failure. Some people are asked to leave because the order determines the fit is not right, even when the candidate is genuinely holy and motivated. This reality is rarely discussed openly in vocation materials, but it is an honest part of religious life that you deserve to know about in advance. Formation directors have a genuine responsibility to the community, to the Church, and to you, and sometimes that responsibility means telling someone the truth when the truth is difficult. You should go into formation understanding that your acceptance at each stage is not guaranteed, and that a decision not to continue is not necessarily a rejection of your faith or your person. The Church teaches that the religious life requires a specific vocation, and confirming or clarifying that vocation is precisely what formation is for. Going in with humility, transparency, and genuine openness to what the process reveals is the most sensible preparation you can make.

Your Family Will Not Understand, and That Will Be Hard

One of the most emotionally demanding aspects of entering religious life is what it does to your relationships with your family. Most families, even Catholic ones, struggle to understand or accept a child’s decision to enter an order, and the struggle can surface in ways that genuinely complicate your formation. Your parents may grieve the grandchildren they expected. Your siblings may feel abandoned. Your closest friends may quietly assume you have been drawn into something unhealthy. These reactions are not malicious; they come from love and from genuine confusion about a way of life that modern culture has no useful category for. The Church acknowledges that the call to religious life can place real strain on natural family bonds and asks those in formation to hold those bonds with love while not allowing them to become obstacles to discernment (CCC 2232). What this looks like in practice is setting limits on the time and emotional energy you give to family concerns during formation, which can feel cold from the outside even when it is necessary and healthy. In some orders, contact with family is significantly restricted during the early stages of formation, and this is a reality many candidates are not fully prepared for. You may find yourself managing your family’s fear and grief at the same time you are managing your own interior adjustment to a radically new way of life. Before you enter, have honest conversations with your immediate family about what this will mean, not just for you but for them. Understanding the emotional landscape ahead of time gives everyone involved a better chance of handling it with charity and maturity.

Community Life Is a Crucible, Not a Fellowship Retreat

Religious community is often described in idealized terms, as a gathering of like-minded souls united in prayer and apostolic purpose. That description is true in a limited sense, but it leaves out something important. You will live in close quarters with people you did not choose, from different backgrounds, with different temperaments, different opinions, and different histories, and you will be expected to love them. Not like them necessarily, but love them. Community life is where most of the real formation happens, because it is where your ego, your preferences, and your need for control get consistently challenged by the simple reality of other people. Conflicts in religious communities are real and sometimes serious, and the absence of the option to simply walk away makes those conflicts more intense than many people anticipate. The Church teaches that community life is itself a school of charity and that the friction of living together is a genuine spiritual discipline, not an obstacle to holiness (CCC 2204). Saints have described community life as harder in many ways than solitary asceticism, because you cannot escape into isolation when another person annoys you. You will have disagreements about schedule, about ministry, about theology, about how the kitchen should be organized, and about a hundred other things that seem trivial but add up over years. Learning to address conflict directly, charitably, and without resentment is one of the most practical skills formation should develop in you. Before you enter, honestly examine your history with conflict and community, because what you bring into the order does not disappear when you put on a habit.

Spiritual Dryness Is Normal, and Nobody Warns You Enough

One of the most disorienting experiences of religious life is the onset of spiritual dryness, and it catches almost everyone off guard. You enter full of fervor, drawn by genuine prayer experience and a sense of God’s closeness, and then at some point, often early in formation, that feeling disappears. Prayer feels mechanical, Mass feels routine, and the very practices you entered religious life to pursue feel hollow. This is not a sign that you made a mistake or that God has abandoned you. The Church’s tradition, rooted in the writings of saints like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, describes this as a normal and even necessary stage of spiritual growth (CCC 2731). The dark night of the soul, as John of the Cross calls it, is the process by which God weeds out spiritual self-indulgence and deepens genuine faith beyond emotional consolation. But knowing this intellectually and living through it are two very different things, and many people leave religious life during this phase precisely because they interpret the absence of feeling as a sign that they are in the wrong place. Formation directors who are honest will tell you that dryness does not mean your vocation is false; it often means your formation is working exactly as it should. The key is having a skilled spiritual director who can help you distinguish between normal spiritual aridity and a genuine crisis of vocation. Those two things require very different responses, and confusing one for the other is one of the most common reasons people either leave when they should stay or stay when they should leave. Be honest with your spiritual director, even when the honesty is uncomfortable, and especially when the honesty is uncomfortable.

Final Vows Are Not the Finish Line, They Are the Starting Point

Many people in religious formation think of final vows as the goal, the moment when everything becomes stable and certain and clear. This is a significant misunderstanding that can cause real problems after profession. Final vows are a commitment, not a destination, and the challenges of religious life do not resolve themselves once you have made them. In many ways, the pressures of community life, apostolic demands, spiritual dryness, and personal limitations become more acute after final vows, precisely because the exit routes you relied on as an option during formation are now genuinely closed. The Church teaches that perpetual religious profession is a stable and definitive consecration, and the seriousness of that stability is exactly why the Church requires years of formation and temporary vows before it allows anyone to make the permanent commitment (CCC 916). What this means practically is that you need to enter formation with the honest question of whether you can live this life not just for a year or five years but until you die, through seasons of consolation and dryness alike. Some people discover after final vows that they entered with an unconscious assumption that the feeling of rightness would eventually become permanent, and when it does not, the crisis can be severe. The Church does provide processes for laicization from religious vows in genuine cases of necessity, but these processes are serious, demanding, and not designed to function as a back door. Go into formation expecting that final vows will demand more of you than you currently know, and prepare yourself for that reality by building a genuine interior life well before you arrive.

The Order’s Charism Is Not Just Its Branding

Every religious order has a charism, a specific spiritual gift and mission given to the Church through its founder, and understanding that charism is not just an academic exercise. It shapes every dimension of daily life in the community, from the structure of prayer to the type of ministry to the culture of governance and correction. Dominican charism centers on preaching and study; Franciscan charism centers on poverty and fraternal simplicity; Benedictine charism centers on stability, community, and the opus Dei, the work of God in the divine office. These are not interchangeable, and entering the wrong order for the wrong reasons is a real and preventable mistake. The Church encourages those discerning religious life to spend extended time with several communities before making any formal application, precisely because reading a charism on a website is nothing like living it for a week (CCC 918). You need to ask yourself honestly whether the specific spirituality of an order actually resonates with how God seems to be forming you in prayer, or whether you are drawn primarily by aesthetics, reputation, or the personality of one impressive member you met at a conference. Some people enter a particular order because they love the habit, or because they attended a beautiful Mass in the community’s chapel, and then discover years later that the actual day-to-day spirituality leaves them flat. Doing proper research means extended visits, honest conversations with long-professed members, reading the founder’s primary writings, and praying through what you learn. The charism of an order is not just its branding; it is the living spirit that will shape your soul for the rest of your life.

Your Personal Identity Does Not Disappear, But It Will Change

There is a persistent myth, held both by people outside religious life and sometimes by those entering it, that taking vows means erasing your personality and becoming a uniform version of a religious. This is simply not true, and the Church does not teach it. Religious profession consecrates the person; it does not clone them. Each member of a community brings a distinct history, temperament, intellectual formation, and set of gifts that the community and the Church genuinely need (CCC 814). What formation does, however, is ask you to submit those gifts to a communal purpose rather than a personal one, and that reorientation does change how you understand and express yourself. The habits, titles, and structures of religious life are real disciplines that shape identity over time, and some of the changes that come from that shaping are things you cannot fully anticipate in advance. People who enter religious life report that the experience eventually produces a clarity about who they are before God that is difficult to describe but genuinely significant, but they also report that arriving at that clarity required passing through real confusion and loss. You may lose certain ambitions, certain social relationships, and certain self-images that you did not even know you were attached to. That is not a defect in the process; it is part of how formation works. The key is entering with enough self-knowledge to recognize what is being asked of you and enough honesty to work with your spiritual director through the moments when the asking gets hard. Identity in religious life is not erased; it is reoriented, and there is a real difference between those two things.

The Daily Schedule Is Non-Negotiable, and That Is the Point

Life in a religious order operates on a structured schedule, often called the horarium, and that schedule is not a suggestion. It governs when you rise, when you pray, when you eat, when you work, when you rest, and often when you speak. For many people who are naturally independent and self-directed, the experience of submitting to an external schedule is one of the first and most persistent difficulties of religious life. In monastic communities especially, the rhythm of the day is built around the Liturgy of the Hours, the official prayer of the Church, which calls the community to prayer multiple times throughout every day (CCC 1174). You do not sleep in because you feel tired; you rise and go to choir because the schedule calls you. You do not eat when you are hungry; you eat when the community eats. You do not stop working on a project because you are in a creative flow; you stop because the bell rings. These disciplines are intentional, and the Church’s tradition holds that submitting to a regular rhythm of prayer and life gradually forms the soul in ways that undisciplined individual piety simply cannot. But understanding this intellectually is very different from living the first winter in a monastery when the alarm goes off at five in the morning and the chapel is cold and your prayer feels like nothing. People who thrive in religious life are generally people who have already developed some genuine discipline in their personal life before entering, not because discipline makes religious life easy, but because it makes the adjustment more realistic. If your personal prayer life is currently inconsistent, sporadic, or primarily emotion-driven, that is honest self-knowledge worth taking seriously before you apply to an order.

Mental Health Matters, and the Church Knows It

The relationship between religious life and mental health is something the Church has taken increasingly seriously in recent decades, and you should take it seriously too. Canon law and most orders’ formation guidelines require a psychological evaluation as part of the application process, not because holiness requires psychological perfection, but because some psychological conditions make the demands of religious life genuinely dangerous for the candidate (CCC 1579). A person carrying unresolved trauma, significant anxiety disorders, or certain personality structures may find that the stresses of community life and formation amplify rather than resolve those struggles. This is not a judgment on the person’s worth or their faith; it is an honest acknowledgment that religious life is psychologically demanding and that entering with unaddressed wounds can cause serious harm, to the person and to the community. Formation directors are trained to observe psychological health as part of their discernment role, and this observation is meant to serve the candidate, not punish them. Before entering, it is genuinely wise to spend time in competent therapy, not to fix yourself or to pass a psychological evaluation, but to understand yourself honestly enough to know what you are actually bringing into community life. Many religious communities now offer access to psychologists during formation, and using that resource is a sign of maturity, not weakness. The Church has learned through painful experience, including the abuse crises of recent decades, what happens when institutions ignore the psychological dimension of formation, and the reforms that have followed take this seriously at every level (CCC 916). Take your own mental health seriously as part of your discernment.

Leaving Is Not Always Failure

One of the most damaging myths surrounding religious life is the idea that leaving an order, whether during formation or after temporary vows, represents a failure of faith or a rejection of God. This is not what the Church teaches, and it is not what honest formation directors believe. The formation process exists precisely to provide a structured space in which both the candidate and the community can discern together whether a permanent commitment is genuinely fitting (CCC 916). Many people who leave formation during the early stages do so because they arrived at an honest answer to the question of vocation, and that honest answer was not what they expected. Leaving under those circumstances is not a defect in the person or in the process; it is the process working as it should. The Church also recognizes that people change, that circumstances shift, and that the same God who called someone to begin discernment in a religious order may be calling them toward a different form of consecrated or lay life as that discernment progresses. What matters is honesty, both with yourself and with those responsible for your formation, and the willingness to follow the truth wherever it leads. People who stay in religious life when they genuinely should leave cause harm to themselves and to their communities, and that harm is far greater than the short-term discomfort of acknowledging that the fit is not right. If you are in formation and struggling, the healthiest thing you can do is bring your struggle honestly to your spiritual director and your formation director and let the process work. The Church does not need reluctant religious; it needs people who are genuinely called and genuinely free.

The Church’s Institutional Reality Will Challenge Your Idealism

When you enter a religious order, you are entering not just a spiritual family but an institution, with all the bureaucratic, political, and structural realities that come with institutions. Some people enter religious life with a highly idealized image of the Church, and the encounter with institutional reality, including internal politics, poor governance decisions, financial pressures, and genuine human failures among superiors, can be a serious shock. The Church is holy because of what it carries, not because every person in it always acts well, and that distinction is important to hold clearly before you enter (CCC 771). Religious communities have governance structures, decision-making processes, and internal cultures that are shaped as much by history and personality as they are by theology. You will encounter decisions you find bureaucratic, unfair, or spiritually uninformed. You will sometimes watch leadership protect institutional interests in ways that feel at odds with the community’s stated charism. These experiences are real, and pretending they do not happen does a disservice to anyone trying to discern seriously. The Church calls members of religious communities to charity and perseverance even in the face of institutional imperfection, and this call is not a demand to be naive or passive. You can and should bring honest concern to appropriate channels when something is wrong. But you cannot afford to enter religious life with your faith in God attached to a belief that the institutional Church or your specific community will always act perfectly, because that faith will not survive contact with reality. The saints who shaped the Church’s religious life were almost all people who faced serious institutional opposition and chose to remain faithful despite it.

Your Prayer Life Will Be Public, and That Takes Adjustment

One of the more quietly demanding realities of communal religious life is that your prayer is no longer primarily private. In most religious communities, prayer is communal by design, and the Liturgy of the Hours forms the backbone of the day, celebrated together as a community regardless of how any individual member feels on a given morning (CCC 1174). For people who have developed a deeply personal and individualized prayer style, this communal format can feel initially constraining, even stifling. You may find that the pace of the chant does not match your natural rhythm, that the assigned Scripture passages are not what you feel drawn to pray, or that praying next to a community member with whom you are in conflict makes genuine prayer feel nearly impossible. These are real adjustments, and they are part of what makes religious life a genuine school of charity rather than simply an amplified version of private devotion. The Church’s tradition holds that communal liturgical prayer is higher than private devotion, not because private prayer is unimportant, but because the liturgy unites the community with the universal prayer of the Church in a way that individual practice cannot (CCC 1174). Learning to receive the prayer of the community as a genuine gift, even on the days when it does not feel like one, is a significant part of interior formation. Most communities do allow and encourage personal prayer in addition to the common prayer, but the communal prayer is not optional and cannot be approached as merely one option among several. Before you enter, examine honestly whether you have the flexibility and humility to allow your personal prayer style to be shaped by a community, because that shaping is central to what religious life actually is.

Your Vocation Story Is Not the Final Word

Many people who enter religious life carry a compelling personal narrative about how they felt called, a retreat experience, a moment of clarity in prayer, a sense of interior certainty that felt unmistakable. These experiences are real and they matter, but they are not the final word on whether you are actually called to a specific religious order at a specific time. The Church teaches that the discernment of a vocation is a process that involves the interior movements of the soul, the honest assessment of one’s character and gifts, and the confirmation of the community into which one seeks to enter (CCC 2233). Your personal sense of call is necessary but not sufficient, and this is something many people struggle to accept. If your formation community raises concerns about your readiness or your fit, that feedback deserves to be taken seriously even when it contradicts your interior experience. The saints who discerned poorly did not always discern poorly because they were dishonest; sometimes they simply trusted their own interior narrative more than the communal wisdom around them. A compelling conversion story, a mystical experience, or a long-standing sense of call does not guarantee a vocation to religious life, just as the absence of those experiences does not disqualify someone from genuine calling. What matters most is sustained faithfulness in ordinary circumstances, the capacity for honest self-knowledge, a genuine love for the Church and its mission, and the willingness to submit your personal narrative to a larger discernment process. Enter with your story, but hold it with open hands.

The Habit and the Public Identity Come With Real Weight

In orders that wear a religious habit, putting it on for the first time carries a genuine sense of significance, and it should. The habit is a public sign of consecration, a visible statement to the world that this person has given their life to God in a specific way (CCC 916). But the public nature of that identity also comes with pressures that many people underestimate before they enter. You represent your order everywhere you go, and the way you behave in a grocery store, on public transportation, or in a casual conversation carries implications for how people perceive not just you but your community and the Church. People will say things to you that they would not say to a person in street clothes. They will confess grief to you in airport lines. They will challenge your faith in restaurants. They will ask you to pray for them in ways that carry enormous personal need. Some of these encounters are genuinely moving and remind you exactly why you are living this life. Others are exhausting and arrive at moments when you have nothing left to give. Managing the public dimension of religious identity is something few vocation programs address directly, but it is a real and ongoing feature of life in an order that wears the habit. Before you enter, consider honestly how you handle the weight of public representation, because your private struggles will sometimes play out in a very public costume. This is not a reason to avoid the habit; it is a reason to enter with your eyes fully open to what it means to be a visible sign of the consecrated life in a world that increasingly does not know what that means.

Stability Is a Spiritual Gift, Not a Trap

One of the hardest shifts in thinking that religious life demands is the reorientation of your relationship to stability. Modern culture treats mobility and optionality as signs of freedom; more choices, more locations, more possibilities are understood as more life. Religious life, especially in the monastic tradition, understands stability as a spiritual gift rather than a limitation. The Benedictine vow of stability, for example, binds a monk or nun to a specific community for life, and this binding is not understood as a restriction of freedom but as a gift that makes depth possible (CCC 916). Even in non-monastic active congregations, religious life involves a fundamental acceptance that you will go where you are sent and stay where you are assigned, and this acceptance runs directly against the cultural assumption that you should always be moving toward better options. Many people in religious life describe the experience of staying, of not having the exit option readily available, as what finally forced them into genuine depth with God, with community, and with themselves. But this same dynamic can feel like suffocation to someone who has not done the interior work of accepting their own limits and the limits of their circumstances. Before you enter, ask yourself honestly how you handle situations where you are stuck. Ask yourself what you do when the environment around you is imperfect and you cannot simply leave. The answer to those questions will tell you a great deal about your readiness for the stability that religious life requires.

This Life Requires Ongoing Conversion, Not Just Initial Commitment

The last thing you need to understand before entering a religious order is perhaps the most important: religious life is not a one-time commitment that runs on its own momentum once you make it. It requires ongoing conversion, daily recommitment, and a sustained willingness to keep choosing what you chose when you made your vows, even when that choice is hard (CCC 1428). The Church teaches that conversion is a lifelong process, and this is nowhere more true than in religious life, where the structures of the vowed life hold you in place long enough for real transformation to happen, but only if you keep showing up willingly to that transformation. Many people who struggle in religious life after final vows do so not because they made the wrong choice but because they stopped actively choosing their vocation and began simply enduring it. There is a real difference between those two postures, and the difference shows in the quality of a person’s prayer, their charity toward community members, and their engagement with their apostolate. Scripture is clear that love requires active, ongoing decision and not just initial feeling, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, and religious vows are a specific form of that active love directed entirely toward God. You will need to find ways to renew your interior motivation repeatedly across decades, through seasons when the life feels rich and seasons when it feels dry, through communities that are generous and communities that are difficult, through superiors who are wise and superiors who are not. The saints of religious life are not people who found this easy; they are people who kept choosing fidelity when it was genuinely hard. If you can hold that reality clearly before you enter, you will be more honestly prepared for the life you are considering than almost any vocation brochure will make you.