Father Stanway then said it was very easy to delude oneself in most things, but not in following a religious vocation. One might in not following it. It would be easy to pretend to oneself one was staying in the world for someone else's sake. One's merely earthly happiness was not a reason for not following a vocation, nor was anyone else's, because the religious life belonged not to things temporal but to things eternal. However, if it were her duty to remain in the world she would feel no call to leave the world. It was impossible for a human being to gauge the vocation of another human being. A vocation was a "categorical imperative" to the soul, and there was no mistaking its presence. Mrs X. would know for certain after she had spent some time in the Convent, she probably knew already, whether or no what she felt was a vocation or not. Nobody else could judge, though her Director might help her to decide. He would certainly not allow her to stay if he felt she had no vocation.
I said: "So, if after she has lived through her first period, or any period of probation, she feels uncertain as to her vocation, there would be no objection to her leaving the religious life, and marrying Y.? Would the Church then allow her to marry Y., and allow her to go back to the world, knowing she would in all probability marry Y.?"
Father Stanway said: "Of course, and the Church would allow her to marry Y. now."
I said, perhaps a little impatiently: "Then why doesn't she?"
"I think," said Father Stanway, "you are a musician, Mr Mellor?"
I said music was my one and sole hobby.
He said he would try and express himself in terms of harmony.
"Perhaps Mrs X. has a great sense of harmony herself," he said. "If she married Y. that would make a legitimate harmony certainly. But her very feeling for the full harmony of life would make it impossible" (and he said this with startling emphasis) "for her to use X.'s death as a means for doing rightly what she had meant to do wrongly, for her intention to do it wrongly had in a measure caused his death. Within the harmony of her marriage the memory of that discord would always be present. And perhaps she is a woman who is able to have a vision of perfect love and harmony. In that case she could not put up with an imperfect one. She is now free to enter upon a perfect harmony and love, by marrying Christ, which I imagine she always wanted to do, even in the normal married state, in fact by means of the normal married state, for it is a Sacrament and unites the soul to God by Grace.
"But I understand from you that her marriage was such a travesty of marriage that she felt she couldn't worship Christ through that, and so swung across and decided she couldn't be in relation with Him at all. Then comes this catastrophe and the pendulum swings back and stops up.
"There is nothing selfish about this. For all we know it was the will of God that all this should happen (the shipwreck of her marriage, Y.'s love and present misery) solely to make her vocation certain, and as far as Y. is concerned we don't know the end. Even from the worldly point of view we don't know whether his marriage with Mrs X. would have made for his ultimate happiness or for hers. His present unhappiness may be an essential note in the full and total harmony of his life. It may be a beginning and not an end. It may lead him to some eventual happiness, it may be welding his nature and his life for some undreamed-of purpose, a purpose which he may afterwards be led to recognise and bless 'with tears of recognition.' If Mrs X. is certain of her vocation, and continues to be certain of it, you can be sure she is right, and that whatever the world says it will be wrong.