I thought I would be a priest since I was very young, but I began discerning in a serious way around the age of 16. This was around the time I began to prioritize my relationship with God. Though I am a cradle Catholic and very grateful for the faith my parents handed on to me, I never realized how backwards my priorities were until about this time. As I grew in the practice of prayer and began to discover the tender love of Our Lady, my desire to dedicate my life solely to God grew.
At the time, I was attending an annual summer camp and retreat for boys run by the priests and seminarians of my home diocese. The main topic for the talks was discernment. Eventually, at age 17, I decided that I wanted to visit the seminary and ended up shadowing a seminarian for a day. It was awesome. However, I got the distinct notion that God was not calling me there.
I ended up going with the flow and applying for college, beginning my studies there in fall 2019. Between my seminary visit and my first semester, I had been toying with the idea of entering religious life. I knew of the Carmelite monks because my parents had been ordering their coffee for a long time. I was specifically interested in them and the Dominicans. It was after reading the monks’ website during fall 2019 that I began to have great desires of joining them. Their union with Mary and their liturgy seemed most attractive to me. However, I still felt that I needed to complete my education. After having a conversation with the priest who was assigned to my university, I realized that it did not necessarily make sense to finish my degree prior to discerning. It was only my first semester at university, and I would have just incurred more loans, further prolonging any discernment.
I contacted the Carmelite monks in November 2019. After going through some initial discernment via phone and email, I attended a discernment retreat at the monastery in early January 2020. I absolutely loved it there. I could hardly sleep during the retreat, and the talks the fathers gave got me really fired up about Carmel. Their liturgy was inspiring, and all the monks I encountered seemed like super genuine and holy people. Their humility was especially striking to me. Speaking with the vocations director and the prior was the best part, though. It was there that we decided that God was calling me to enter. I did, and my wait was very short. I entered Carmel on March 7th, 2020.
It was a dream come true. Our Lady is truly present among those brothers in a special way. Their most striking attribute as a community is their fraternal charity, the likes of which I had never seen before. I had a relatively easy time during postulancy, though that is not true of all the monks. I never wavered in my conviction that I had a vocation, and I felt like a real part of the community. As a side note, when we (the monks) became aware of the accusations against the community (especially against the priests), all of us thought they were crazy and completely unfounded. The allegations did not shake my convictions at all. And so, I advanced on towards novitiate. On the Carmelite feast of Our Lady’s patronage of their order (January 30th) in 2021, I was clothed in the full Carmelite habit and given the name Br. Ambrose Mary of the Child Jesus. Things were calm in my soul for a while, and I just kept working on the same virtues I had been working on. After a few months of novitiate, however, I started to realize with the help of my novice master that I had not done thorough discernment. I could not pinpoint why, and I grew more and more puzzled, as ever since my discernment retreat, I felt that I knew my vocation for a fact. After lots of trying to figure it out on an intellectual level, one day I simply imagined myself getting on a plane and leaving Carmel. I sensed deep peace, but on a surface level I was terrified. After speaking with my novice master and going before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, I settled down and really made the decision to leave. I left the monastery on August 28th, 2021. It is very evident to me that I made the right choice when I decided to enter Carmel, and I made the right decision to leave when I did. I am extremely grateful for every second I spent there and for all the fathers and brothers.
When I got home, I set about figuring out what the next steps of my life would be. I settled on going back to the same college for engineering, and I am happy with my decision. I have settled into a great Catholic community there. I know that I am doing what God wants of me, even though I do not have a monastic vocation. Lay people are called to be saints too.