Before you chart your own future directions in life, you need to think again about a life option that has been important to hundreds of thousands of people in the past. You need to talk to someone about one of life’s major choices that has recently changed greatly but whose older stereotypes still linger. Most of all, you need to consider the meaning of it all with someone who has been on both sides of this ancient but always evolving institution. Religious life is a subject that has had phenomenal influence in the past and has made all of its present changes for the sake of helping to do the same in our own very fluid present as well.

This book poses a very big question. It describes a singular choice—one dedicated to a life lived entirely through the filter of the gospel. But this conversation is not just for people who might be thinking of pursuing some kind of religious commitment themselves. It’s for all people who care about the place and nature of religious life in the Christian community as much as you do. After all, it has shaped generation after generation of the Church. We all need to think again about what it is. About what it’s attempting to do. About what it’s become in the last fifty years. About what value it has to anybody—whether they want to be a part of it or not.

It’s also certainly for people who may actually be at the point of deciding whether they themselves ought to enter a religious community now. In this day and age. In this society. Some readers will have had years in public life, but find themselves looking for more out of life. As in, “Is that all there is?” Many will be younger and only beginning to explore the multiple opportunities the world seems to offer. It’s important that they consider them all. Others may feel, however much the world seems to offer them, that such a life is simply not profound enough for them to spend a life on. Whatever life’s present circumstances, good as they may be, many will feel that something is still missing in life, at least for them.

These concerns, these issues, need a lot of good information, a lot of serious thought. Those seeking answers need the opportunity to talk to someone who has been there, who has lived a religious life, who can answer some important but very difficult questions. That’s why I’m here.

Let’s be clear: We do not need a conversation about “the good old days.” We need to talk about what you can expect of it in days to come. We are all, lay and religious together, on our way home to the God who made us. Finding the path that fits us so that we may thrive on it and it may be better because we have been there is the purpose of life. There is in every heart, therefore, a magnet for good to guide us on the way.

There is only one vocation in life and that is to seek the God who is seeking us. And that one we all have. It is the basic elements of a life lived in the shadow of Jesus that religious life is really all about. Good works come and go; they change from era to era, depending on the needs of the world in every age. But what does not change in religious life is the ongoing growth into the mind of God that religious life develops in us as we go on in it from age to age. It is about wholeheartedness, about the giving of the self without reserve for the sake of a purpose larger than the self.

But what exactly does that mean? What does it mean to you? What will you mean to the world as a result of it? Those answers depend on your staying in the conversation.

—from What Are You Looking For? Seeking the God Who is Seeking You, by Joan Chittister (Paulist)