To respond to God's call then is to enter upon this way of conversion. To pursue this way is to change from a duller life, enmeshed in passionate attachments that raw us from what we recognize as being worthy of what is best in us, to a way of living in which some of the beauty and purity and clarity of God's glory alters our consciousness of our inherent dignity as created in God's image. As a result we realize more keenly the purpose of our existence. Every Christian, of course, is by virtue of the faith received at baptism, intended to awaken to this call which is a summons to conversion, that is to say, a turning from thje obscurity of mind resulting from yuielding to disordered passion and sin to the light of Christ. The response to the call of grace assumes a wide variety of forms as we can learn from the New Testament already and from the history of the Church from earliest times until today.
Monastic life is one of the more radical forms that conversion takes to itself.
From the beginning of the monastic way of life the decision to seek God in solitude through a life of chastity and withdrawal from the usual concerns and activities of society required a very deliberate decision to alter one's life from the root, which is what radical means. The root of the monk's life in principle is no longer passion, personal fulfillment, success but God's will and his grace. The work of conversion means applying this high principle to the daily decisions and activities that constitute our train of life. It does not require a very long time in a monastery to begin to discover how thoroughly enmeshed in this world we had been prior to our conversion. We encounter a variety of forms of resistance to what we come to see as being God's will that surprise us.