God is at the center of the monk’s life, yet often a man or woman enters the monastery with an unclear notion of the why of his or her motivation. There is a sense felt within that this is what God wants and the way God intends to reveal himself to him. Almost always, there is at a deeper level a belief that this is where he will grow and experience self-realization, in effect, where he will become his true self. All this is very good, but not the real story when it comes to a vocation to monastic life. The real story has a twist.

As Michael Casey points out in his latest book, Strangers to the City: Reflections on the Beliefs and Values of the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic life is not really about self-realization, but rather self-transcendence, a much more profound process, the process of conversion. This becomes clear to the neophyte monk at some point or other in his journey when he realizes that his original conscious motivations for discerning the monastic way, though good, were only the tip of an iceberg that has yet to reveal itself. The Holy Spirit’s work on him is here beginning to bear fruit, though it is often felt as an extreme inner challenge. Perseverance emerges in his lexicon as a fundamental practice, and he begins to understand its place in monastic history and his own monastic identity.

Every monk at some point goes through an identity crisis, where his cherished ideas of who he is and what he is all about come into question. His reliance on the grace of Christ is no longer just a nice theological theorem, but a matter of survival. He begins to let go of his facades, and surrender to the love of God. He’s beginning to become a real monk.