I've formed many reasons over the years for avoiding the clerical state. When I actually worked through it, it seemed that I was looking for sacraments and books, and found psychological formation and pamphlets. (And having done a three-year conservatory master's degree, I'm considerably less naive than most about the first of the two.) When it came to filing a formal application with one order after a year or so of discernment, I actually took it with me to the research library, and stopped just as I was beginning to type, reluctant to sign on with the chaplains to the soi-disant minor aristocrats against whom I'd been struggling for years in the city.
It's as if you have a small lamp, and you realize that yours, through some error at the factory. is apparently a bit different than the others. Or perhaps you have a different relationship to it. But the condition of making this your social role is that you have to give up that lamp in the formation -- a bit like the Marines, in a way. They're not looking for tactical geniuses at intake. I think I would have been an Anglican priest in a heartbeat; I haunted the back of the choirs at evensong for many years, after Mass at St. Pats or the parish that morning. But we Romans have more Gregorian strictures.
With the passage of time, I see the cost of preserving my own ways. Those who leapt into the boat have been able to focus their lives on the work, precisely because of their agreement with society to play a certain role in society. Absent those comforts, deplorable in themselves, but occasionally useful for the work, the focus can dissipate, the engines of the heart and mind lose their plasticity, etc.
I shouldn't complain. I'd still be unwilling to sign on, or wear a habit that defined a social form that those who wind up wearing them have very much wanted to participate in all of their lives. It's best to become a priest if you want to become a priest, rather than doing it because you think it might be useful in your relationship with the divine. It is a participation in a social form that can be useful for the work, but you have to want the social form as well. Perhaps wanting the social form is even more important. God doesn't need you to take a certain form. Like Hegel's spirit of history, he moves in mysterious ways, his wonders (with complete idiots) to perform.
