If you are a consecrated religious under the age of thirty-five, it is likely—if not inevitable—that you will one day be asked to take part in a ministry called Vocations Promotion. Vocations Promotion involves going to retreats, workshops, and festivals aimed at young Catholics, looking fresh-faced and approachable, and talking about the joys of the consecrated religious life. There is an assumption that most if not all young religious enjoy working in Vocations Promotion. I do not.

There are two main reasons for this. First, I have a full-time job promoting my own vocation to myself; I can barely get through a paragraph of the Rule of Saint Augustine without becoming overwhelmed by my laxity, hardness of heart, and general unworthiness for the life. Second, the only young women to whom I can justifiably offer counsel are those who are even more spiritually immature and emotionally dysregulated than I was at their age, and this, frankly, is a sparsely populated demographic. When I was twenty, my first act upon realizing that God was probably calling me to the religious life was to compile a mental list of single male friends whom I could ask out in order to avoid becoming a sister; after all, once I had a wedding date in the calendar, I’d never have to think about religious life again. Three years later, at a summer party just before I entered the convent, a friend of mine said to me—with the most intense sincerity with which I had ever heard her speak—“It is so weird to think of you becoming a nun.”

I became a postulant three weeks later, and celebrated my fifth anniversary of religious profession this year. God’s ways are, quite clearly, above our ways. I would not dream of taking it upon myself to Promote them on earth.

My relationship with Vocations Promotion is further complicated by the fact that I personally have little direct experience of it. I attended scarcely any Vocations Promotion events during my time of discernment, because as far as I could tell they mostly involved consecrated religious giving advice, and I (perhaps unexpectedly, given how my life has turned out) didn’t really like being told what to do. In fact, one of the few acts of Vocations Promotion that has ever been practiced upon me was brief, unstructured and entirely bespoke—though very successful for all that. It was nine years ago, and I was at a friend’s house for dinner with several others of our social circle, including a couple of Dominican friars. I asked one of them how long it had taken him to join the Order after he first began discerning.

“That’s not a very long time,” I said, when he told me. “I know some girls who have been discerning for years.” The friar fell silent, looked me up and down, and then said, very deliberately: “Well, women tend to overthink these things.” Women tend to overthink these things! The nerve! I was so outraged I had to restrain myself from reaching across the table and poking him in both eyes; my application for the convent was in the post by the end of the week.

Of course, this instance of Vocations Promotion would have never worked if I did not already possess a deep-seated conviction that religious life was worth pursuing. Had the friar insinuated that I was needlessly putting off a decision about something which I perceived as of little importance, it would have been no wound to my pride at all. This conviction about the religious life was, paradoxically, also what motivated all my attempts to avoid it: my mental list of potential suitors was a testament to my belief that only a commitment on the level of sacramental marriage could be a fitting substitute for religious life; my friend’s observation that my behavior was not that of a typical discerner only stuck in my mind because I knew the value of what I was trying to discern.

The small, singular acts of Vocations Promotion I received as a young woman (including, but not limited to, having my pride wounded by Dominican friars) did not so much promote vocation to me as promote it up a scale of priorities within me. They were nudges that only worked because, fundamentally, I was open and willing to be nudged; they could not determine my decision to pursue a religious vocation, but determined how soon I would make that decision relative to other, potentially equally valuable ones.

In Catherine Pakaluk’s book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, this view of human decision-making is applied to a very different but equally significant vocational choice: childbearing. Pakaluk, an associate professor of political economic thought at The Catholic University of America, argues that state-offered financial incentives to encourage childbearing are built on “faulty logic”—not because incentives do not work per se, but because these particular incentives have little to no influence on the kind of value judgements that inform a woman’s beliefs about family and child-rearing. The most such an incentive can do is help inch the pre-existing choice to have a child slightly closer to the present day, but it cannot contribute to the genesis of that choice. “Would anyone think you could increase the number of ultramarathoners by offering people a monthly cash payment or a bonus?” she asks. “What you’ll succeed in doing is rewarding the people who already want to train for ultramarathons.” The choice to have a child (or another child) is, Pakaluk concludes, not materially determined but a matter of “subjective personal value,” a value which is, in the case of most of the women whom Pakaluk interviews, transcendental.

Pakaluk’s economic analysis of the shortcomings of birth incentives is greatly insightful. It has also helped me understand my reticence towards Vocations Promotion a little better. After all, both the call to motherhood and the call to religious life can be externally incentivized, but never externally supplied—and the incentives themselves must recognize that the scale of values they are attempting to nudge is fundamentally a spiritual one.

In the end, it is the Holy Spirit who is the only true promoter of vocations, whether that vocation is to birth new life or give one’s life over in consecration. Our role is simply to encourage those whom He has already called and chosen. Perhaps I need to accept that, occasionally, He might want to use as faulty and fragile a human instrument as myself to do so.