The write calling: two might-have-been monastics discovered their real life's work and then tell all about it in a pair of new spiritual memoirs.

TWO GENERATIONS AGO POSTWAR CATHOLICS were flooding into the university, professions, and suburbs as their clergy welcomed them into positions of church leadership. Searching for guides and mentors in their new and expanded vocations, millions of Catholic laity picked up Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt) and Pope John XXIII's Journal of a Soul (Image).

This year two English authors have written a fresh pair of spiritual journals, each telling the story of their search for lives full of meaning, purpose, and a sense of the sacred--indeed, for their vocation.

Back when Merton was writing The Seven Storey Mountain and John XXIII was kicking off Vatican II, Tony Hendra and Karen Armstrong were falling in love with the idea of life in the monastery or convent. Now, more than 40 years later, Hendra's Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul (Random House) and Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (Knopf) recount the tale of each author's long journey to the vocations they were always meant to embrace.

Karen Armstrong entered the convent when she was 17 and departed at 24, missing the sexual revolution, the Beatles, and most of the '60s. Deeply idealistic, the young sister hoped to find a sense of the sacred in the cloister's routine of silence, prayer, and work. She poured herself energetically and then desperately into her order's discipline and rituals but achieved neither sanctity nor solace. Instead she felt increasingly unhappy and alone in a medieval community trying to leap into the 20th century. In the end, she left the order a dispirited and wounded young woman, unable to stay, unprepared for what awaited her outside.

Bright and disciplined, Armstrong turned to the academy, hoping to find her calling as a professor of literature. At first, life at Oxford seemed like a good fit for an ex-nun, allowing her to spend her days in solitary reading and study. But the convent's stress on obedience had stripped Armstrong of her creativity and she struggled to find her own voice or ideas. When this obstacle passed, she was crippled by a series of mysterious and paralyzing blackouts that her psychiatrists misdiagnosed and mistreated for years, sending her into her own private hell. Meanwhile her faith in God began to evaporate, and Armstrong left the church.

When her university dreams ended in disaster, Armstrong had to change course once again. In time she discovered a gift for writing, producing a memoir of her years in the convent and a series of television pieces on, of all things, religion. Initially Armstrong's work blasted the flaws and failings of faith and religion, especially her own; but as television projects exploring the Holy Land led her to take a second look at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the ex-nun and ex-Catholic picked up the study of scripture and theology with a flesh zeal and open mind. The result was a series of books on St. Paul, Muhammad, Genesis, Islam, and Buddha, as well as her bestselling works, A History of God (Ballantine) and The Battle for God (Ballantine).

To her amazement, Armstrong discovered that she was now teaching a much larger audience than she could have reached in the university, and that her study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was satisfying the deep longing for the sacred that had brought her to the convent all those years ago. She did not return to church but soon found herself immersed in the passionate and meditative study of the transcendent God who had haunted her throughout her life. She spent all her energies trying to teach the world about the compassion and mercy at the core of all major religions.

The Spiral Staircase is the vocation story of a woman who goes looking for God in a convent only to be driven out into the world. She finally finds herself in a place where she can spend quiet days studying the God who would not be put in a box and spreading the good news that this God, called by countless names, calls all of us to be compassionate to one another. Armstrong's memoir is a reminder that each of us does have a calling, even if it is not the one we expected.

TONY HENDRA WAS CERTAIN AT 16 that he knew his vocation, but it still took a lifetime to discover his true calling--and even then he needed a lot of help. Gratefully he had Father Joe, a Benedictine priest who became for Hendra the face of a compassionate and faithful God.

When the 14-year-old Hendra was caught almost in the arms of a married woman, he was whisked to Quarr Abbey to confess his sin to a monk, and the adolescent prodigal expected a punishment to fit the crime. But Dom Joseph Warrilow was no Grand Inquisitor, and the elfish monk with knobby knees and a giant heart offered the juvenile offender a heaping serving of God's mercy and love, telling him only to "sin no more."

Touched by this outpouring of grace, Hendra found himself drawn to Father Joe and the monastic life at Quarr, and so the teenager returned again and again to enjoy the hospitality and solitude of the Benedictines. Saying the Office and attending Mass with the monks, working in the fields with one of the brothers, and taking walks with Father Joe, Hendra fell in love with the idea of a monastic calling and began making plans to come to Quarr for good.

But Father Joe encouraged his young charge to finish high school and--against Hendra's wishes--to accept a university scholarship. Then during his second year at Cambridge Hendra fell in love with the idea of becoming a satirist and abandoned the idea of a monastic vocation. Still, he stayed in touch with Father Joe, and Joe (rather more faithfully) with him.

In the years and decades after college Hendra enjoyed success as a writer, editor, and performer, working at National Lampoon and Spy magazine, starring as band manager Ian Faith in the movie This is Spinal Tap, and helping create the award-winning British television series Spitting Image.

But his marriage and family life were failures. Although Hendra denies the allegations of molestation made by his daughter after Father Joe was published, he admits to being a terrible husband and father--absent, indifferent, and selfish, and as years went by, his work seemed flat and unimportant.

Throughout all these years Father Joe remained a beacon and a safe house, listening to Hendra's complaints and offering love and support as he floundered through a series of crises at work and home. Nudging him gently, Father Joe never judged or condemned Hendra, but remained a faithful friend and guardian to an aging adolescent.

Finally, when Hendra's second marriage began to disintegrate, a desperate Hendra fled to Quarr and begged Father Joe to let him join the monastery. He would make amends, returning again to the one place he had known God's peace. But his beloved Father Joe rebuffed him, telling Hendra he did not have a calling to be a monk. Instead he had a vocation to be what he was--a husband and a father--and this was the life he needed to embrace and love.

FATHER JOE WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE, and Hendra returned to his wife and began to mend fences and tend the garden of his true calling, eventually finding the peace he had always thought was waiting for him at Quart. Not an easy, quiet solitude, but a bustling, messy peace filled with flawed and wondrous humans.

Father Joe and The Spiral Staircase are tales that tap into our appetite for the sacred and transcendent. Both authors felt the appeal of lives filled with solitude and the quiet beauty of prayer and reflection. And yet each memoir tells of our need to find our vocation in the place where God and our talents have placed us, and to discover the sacred and practice God's compassion in that place and with those people.

By PATRICK McCORMiCK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.