An Open Letter: To any recent convert from Anglo-Catholicism who thinks he may have A Carthusian vocation

Extract

Dear Fellow Convert, I am writing this letter at the request of the Prior of Park minster. He seems to think that because I ‘went over to Rome’ more than forty years ago and decided that I had a Carthusian vocation even before I ceased to be in communion with Canterbury, I might be able to explain to you, better then he can do, why all converts, especially recent ones, should recognize that the Carthusian life is in the literal sense an extraordinary and abnormal one; and whilst it is most admirable to fall in love with the golden heights, no one dare take this thing to himself unless God calls him. This is just common-sense. God does not Call the world as a whole by abnormal ways. Few men have the vocation to climb Mount Everest. Perhaps it has never struck you that at the present time there are less than six hundred Carthusian monks in the whole world, of which the Catholic population is reckoned to be about 423,000,000? These figures are enough to Prove that a Carthusian vocation is only granted to a tiny elite.