Expert: Griff Ruby - 5/21/2007

Question
Dear Griff,

                   I have a question for you or two how does one catholic faith persona know when he or she is being called to the religious like priesthood, brotherhood, sisterhood, nunnery, cloistered life, monks and ect. How  do you know if that is you? My personality is careing and compassionate mostly to put it easier Christ Like and saint like. I have a calling to become a nun but there is a fork in the road one street says religious life way to God the other says worldly life I dont know what to do? I am 21 an adult woman and confused. I want to become a Dominican sister. And I am looking for a place that is semi cloistered one that will let me go out to see family and one that I can stay at the same covent at the same time is there any like that or is there such a thing? I want to write a biography about my life I am trying to  become an author as well. A Catholic author do you have any suggestions to how I can and should start a good book. I love to write and I am an artist as well. I draw like Michael Angelo. Plus my life is not smooth I dont have friends well a few. And I feel like no guy wants to look at me they look yea but I have a feeling that they are talking about me I have a mixture of Melida Doolittle and Jordin Sparks look I have Jordins skin tone olive complexion. I even wear a hearing aid and I feel like since I am learning disabled who would want to go out with me. So I stay at home mostly yeah boring I know dont have to comment. What to do I have depression I am fighting it like a battle of Armeggedon lol and it hurts I even get neverous ticks. There permenant. And I feel like guys wont like me and I have braces thats a plus.  

Answer
About joining the convent:  It is not that you make such a big decision, jump in, and never get a chance later to decide if you did the right thing.  All convents have a policy that you first sign on for a year or so.  During that year you live with the convent sisters, are obedient to their direction and the order's particular calling and duties, spend time learning about the order and what it expects of you, and basically just live the life of a consecrated sister, and at the end of the year you should probably have a pretty good idea if the convent life is meant for you (or at least that convent, another might be different).  Meanwhile, those in charge of the convent will be similarly assessing you as a prospective nun to see how well they like having you with them as well.
After that year, if you are not wanting out and if they are basically happy to have you with them, then there comes a longer tryout period (usually about 3 years or so) which is your last chance to make sure that this is really what you are going to do with your life, for at some point, when you have been with it long enough to know what to do you will then be called upon to make the solemn vows that make you a nun forever.
One particular Dominican order would be the Dominican sisters in Post Falls, Idaho (SSPX).  These sisters seem to have a pretty good thing going, where they wear full traditional habits, live in a convent, and devote much of their daytime hours teaching children in school.  You might want to look them up:  Dominican Sisters, 5450 West Riverview Drive, Post Falls, ID 83854
But there is another concern.  You wonder who would ever want to go out with you.  You feel unattractive, with certain problems that might make the guys not like you (or at least not be attracted to you as a woman, however much some might still simply like you as a person).  If the convent seems to you a viable alternative to marriage because marriage seems so out of reach, that is no reason to be a nun.  A person should be a nun because they love God and seek His glory and want to help out in His cause, not because one has nowhere else to go.
As to your attractiveness, I should point out that women in general tend to be the poorest judges of their own attractiveness to men.  Even movie stars, rock stars, and famous models will be the first to tell you that they are too short for their weight, or have lousy thighs, or crooked eyes, or whatever imagined physical defect none of the rest of us seem to notice or mind at all.  My own wife has no idea how beautiful she is.
The real problem with thinking yourself unattractive is that should a man take a liking to you, right away you think he has to have some secret nefarious reason for asking you out, or else some "problem" that he should be attracted to you, so you push him away, refuse to take his invitations seriously, until he eventually takes his business elsewhere (what else can he do?).  Might it not be that his only "problem" is a girl of your exact detailed qualities is exactly what he always dreamed of?  If only more men (and women) had such "problems"!
And another thing:  It should not be a matter of choosing between being a nun versus being a worldly person, as if one were choosing between God and the world/flesh/devil by choosing one's vocation in life.  Whatever you do you are called to become a saint, whether as a nun or as a married woman, or even as one of those "maiden aunts" who do so much to hold a family together, and especially after the parents are gone.  It is never a legitimate choice to decide whether to be a saint or a sinner, only what kind of saint to be.
As for writing a good book, the best thing to do is the hardest (but what I did in writing my book), namely decide just what kind of book you wish existed out there already (but doesn't) and then write it yourself.  Try to sense a general need out  there.  Is there really any need that people should want to read about a person whose life really hasn't even started yet, whose accomplishments are all still in the future?  By all means take notes on events, dates, thoughts, feelings, and so forth, but until such time (if any) as people start coming to you saying "You should write a book about your life," (something that typically happens when one is in their seventies or older) it would be best to find other things worth writing about.  It's tempting to say of such a difficult topic as you wish a book already existed "how can I write it since I can't even read it in the first place?"  But this is where research comes in, and where the real work of a book comes in.  For me there was no general book encompassing the whole traditional Catholic movement, just all these various personalities, issues, questions, groups, lines of succession, and so forth, all apparently rivals to each other, and little in the way of detail many of them, and in other cases, only the most useless details where there were any at all.  It took many years and many consultations with many of the persons involved, and personal visits to the people and places mentioned, and so forth to give me what there is to fill in the gaps and provide much that is not available elsewhere.  Of course, if you are thinking about writing fiction or comic wit, that is another thing altogether.