Some comrades of mine from the seminary are disgraced priests. I left in 2008 after three years, and most of my classmates were ordained priests in 2011. Most whom I've known do great work in parishes, others in academia and tribunals. But some are already, just a few years later, totally disgraced.

I often ponder this, because as friends and brothers are defrocked and defenestrated, I can’t help but wonder if that would have been me, too. Pride goes before a fall, as Proverbs notes, and none of us can be sure we would resist every temptation the priesthood would offer. I found that I was not called to the priesthood, but I still wonder sometimes if I recognize well enough the traps in my own vocation as I’ve discerned it since then; for there’s a short distance between honor and disgrace.

A decision to leave the seminary—a time, as I often say, that I wouldn’t trade for the world—for me involved keen alertness of the need to leave and yet very sparse understanding as to why. I was conscious of everything that drove me away but unable to piece it together; and only now, seven years, three kids, a few jobs, and many other milestones later, are the lessons of that decision beginning to truly sink in.

I’m learning that what makes a vocation yours are the moments of beauty within it; not the (sometimes trying) selection of it. We’re given cut and dried rules for discernment—the lines by which the Church guides us—and, the products of the Church’s long experience, they have great value. This is easily seen at work in the seminary. But they don’t help you to accept and live your own vocation. This insight has shifted my thinking and my practice, and where it’s left me has surprisingly little to do with disgrace or honor, at all. Vocation has primarily to do with holiness.

Holiness as I understand it doesn’t fit well within the cut and dried “discernment process” that’s nevertheless required in some way to know our particular vocation. The holiest men at seminaries, for example, are often the weird ones—surely not without their own “formation issues.” I expect this is true for any religious house. And my friends who are the holiest priests, as far as I can tell, are those who deal steadily with the strain of discipleship—of intense learning and friendship with Christ—by constantly remaking and reforming themselves from the inside out. The Church tells us far more about the art of holiness than it does about the science of discernment, yet “process” is still what fascinates us most.

Contrary to our first experiences, Christian vocation is only partly about “process.” And it is not about finding and abiding by “lines” but rather coming to see beyond them.

There’s a rather famous maxim of scholastic philosophy (as famous as it could be, at least): Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur (“Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”). It’s good to recall that everything we receive, including our vocation, we receive only in the way we can receive it. God gives immeasurably, but we receive only what we can hold. So any vocation is always bigger and deeper than the best we can ever do to hear, accept, or live it. The result is that we struggle to recognize the Lord even as we are fully immersed in his life.

This doesn’t mean the lines we’re given by the Church aren’t important—lines for living faithfully a particular state in life or a holy life in general. It does mean, however, that they’re given to us not because they’re good in themselves, but because they’re necessary. God calls us beyond our understanding of vocation without calling us to disgrace it. And real honor lies in confessing that no understanding is really ours.

It takes a certain amount of experience to see these things and begin to believe them. (Some may react to reading that statement as I did when a young spiritual director told me that contemplation would eventually happen if I practiced meditative prayer well. He was right even though he was young; experience is not only for the aged.)

I was in Rome, soaking in the finest spiritual, intellectual, and liturgical treasures of the priesthood. Yet I remember the harrowing months leading to my departure from the seminary. I can still nearly touch the mire of uncertainty it caused. The formation program failed to move me; or rather, I was quite moved but against my best understanding of how the visible Church should move a man on the road to priesthood. (Why it moved me that way and not differently I still don’t know.) The more I gave time to things that drew my affection—the poor, especially, and the distraught families of pediatric cardiology patients at Bambino Gesù Hospital—the more I felt drawn to raise, and to suffer within, a family of my own.

I realized eventually—some years later, through a domestic church far humbler than the Holy See—that the necessities of a vocation can lead one to do good; but that holiness, the goal of Christian virtue, is a sort of “afterimage” of more pronounced lines. These are the “Aha!” moments in one’s vocation, and they’re joyful beyond all telling. As it happens, though, they tend to occur once you’ve already acknowledged and agreed that the “lines” themselves are important. They’re insights and actualizations of things already known by faith. And all of this is nevertheless the “mode of receiving” we possess by nature.

Put another way, we’re designed not only to abide by rules but to surpass them. It is not the law but the spirit that saves.

When I ponder the thin line between honor and disgrace, I’m consoled to remember the moments of beauty. And I’m sad to know that some I’ve called brothers came to realize them only too late. Discerning one’s vocation isn’t good in itself, but it is essential to Christian holiness. And it is a lifetime’s work, the other side of a coin that is conversion, confession, and very necessary contemplation.

Andrew M. Haines is the editor and founder of Ethika Politika, and co-founder and chief operating officer at Fiat Insight.