Welcome back to our next episode on the vocation series, Father McFarlane, how is your week been?

Fine so far.

Good. It's always good to hear. I always say if you can just get one task accomplished

during the day, just one, that's enough. And then just deal with everything else that just

kind of falls on the plate.

It's better than some of my days.

Yeah, fair enough. We got something done today.

Oh, good. And then hopefully by the end of this recording, we'll have two things done.

Two things. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad at all. Well, this week, Father, we're looking at the

religious life. Last week, we looked at the vocation to the priesthood, what that entails.

And then today, we're going to be doing sort of the same thing, but just looking at it from the

perspective of the religious life. So where should we start? Maybe I asked the question,

is there such a thing as a vocation, so to speak, to the religious life? Maybe you want to answer

that a little bit later on, but where would you like to begin? Well, the short answer is kind of. Depends what you mean. And we will get to that a bit later on. I think the first thing, and it's something I think I've mentioned before, but the priesthood and religious life are different things. So it's not, again, I think as I've said before, it's not as if the umbrella is religious life and all of those who are consecrated to God are religious, and in that you have priests and nuns and brothers.

Religious are something distinctly separate from the priesthood. You can be a priest and a

religious at the same time, but a priest is not necessarily a religious. So I am a priest,

I am not a religious. I do not take the three vows of religion, which constitute the essence of the religious state.

So we'll explain that as we go on.

So of course, God wills that all men follow the commandments, obtain the salvation of their soul, but he wants others to live a more perfect life to follow our Lord Jesus Christ more closely.

And they do so by living what we call the evangelical councils, which are poverty, chastity, and obedience.

And so the purpose of the religious life is primarily this, this

consecration to God by the three vows that correspond to the evangelical councils, the vows of

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