I think the goal of religious life is to fall in love with the Trinity.

Do you love God? You can always learn to love Him even more. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind, all thy heart, all thy soul, and all thy strength.” Ask Him to help you love Him. He will help you. He has given us His mother Mary to help us.

If you are called to religious life you have been given a wonderful gift. You can live out and deepen your love-relationship with God by the vowed evangelical counsels: chastity, poverty, and obedience. If you are called to Passionist contemplative life, two more will be added: promotion of devotion to and grateful remembrance of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and the vow of enclosure.  As cloistered contemplatives, we don’t go out and preach devotion to the Passion in words, but we help spread such devotion by obtaining graces from God for others, and we cultivate devotion to the Passion in our own hearts.

When I first saw the Passionist nuns on the Web I thought a life dedicated to the Passion sounded depressing. It isn’t. It really isn’t. The Passion isn’t a source just of sorrow, but is even more of love, and wonder and rejoicing. Thank You, Lord Jesus, for loving me so much that You would die for me. St. Augustine said that there is no better exercise for the soul than to think frequently of the Passion. Our Lord has told the saints how pleased he is by the thought of His passion, more pleased than by many spiritual exercises done apart from His passion, and has said He is even more pleased by our thought of His mother in her sorrows.

As for the cloister, I love the cloister. No more driving around long hours in the car, thank goodness. In the cloister, it is so much easier to turn one’s thoughts to God, and to remember also His Church, and all persons in the world, those in and out of the church, so many living lives of sin and needing God, and to call upon God’s mercy for oneself and others, remembering the dying. In His work for souls, Our Lord relies on us his religious far more than we know. How he has used us will all be revealed in the next world. 

If you are being called to the religious life, you are being given a great gift for yourself and others. No matter what your vocation, God will use you. If your vocation is to be religious, thank God because it is a gift.