Living the Faith in Exile by Edwin Faust

As we grow older, we spend more time roaming the corridors of memory, for we grow less interested in acquiring new experiences and more intent upon assigning meaning and imparting order to the life we have lived. As I have been bumping about among my own recollections, the consciousness of how vastly different my early experience of the Church is from that of my children has possessed my thoughts of late. We older Catholics raised in happier times of family piety often forget that generations have now grown up in a cultural landscape we could not have imagined in our youth. How solid, how immense, how immaculate seemed that noble edifice of Catholicism in the 1950s. And how appealing it was to ponder the possibility of one's having a vocation. To enter that great City of God as one of His chosen ones was a thought that used to thrill and, in some measure, frighten us. The fright came from the terrible responsibility that such election brought with it; the thrill from the prospect of the spiritual romance. I never considered that I had a vocation to the secular priesthood, but I cherished the notion that I might be summoned to join one of the religious orders. It was these men in their ancient habits that we looked upon as spiritual heroes, God's athletes, knights pursuing the holy grail of perfection.

(Continues...)

Yes, I thought the "Benedictine Rule for the Family" to be a particularly interesting idea.