Joyloise Rau married a Catholic and went to Mass every week.

But she was more concerned with working and raising her family than with stopping to consider spiritual things — until after her children were grown, she’d lost her husband and the family business was struggling.

“You face challenges and reach the point where you think, ‘There’s got to be a purpose in all this,’” she says. “If you don’t have faith to deal with it, life would just be meaningless.”

Her search for a faith that would make a difference in the midst of her difficulties led Ms. Rau about five years ago to an oblate group in St. Joseph led by Benedictine Sister Evelyn Gregory. An oblate — which literally means an offering — is a Christian lay person, either married or single, Catholic or not, who seeks to incorporate elements of monastic life into his or her life.

Although she attended the weekly oblate reading, discussion and prayer meetings, Ms. Rau didn’t have time while she was working at her business six or seven days a week to attend the retreats held at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kan., required for officially becoming an oblate. But finally, after selling her business last fall, she was able to take those steps and make her oblation — a promise to try to live by the Rule of Benedict — last month.

“I used to tell Sister Evelyn I was an ‘oblate in training,’ because I took so long,” Ms. Rau laughs.

For Benedictine oblates, living according to the Rule means striving for a structured prayer life, seeking continual Christian renewal and improvement, living in community with others, showing hospitality and caring for the poor. St. Benedict, the fifth-century monk who established the Rule, considered it to be a simple guide for living out the gospel.

“Oblates really are an extension of the Benedictine community,” says Sister Gregory, who began her first oblate group in the mid-’90s and now leads three groups in St. Joseph with a total of about 30 members. “In the workplace, wherever they are, that’s where they try to implement and live out the Rule taught by Benedict.”

This might mean eating a meal each day with their families, she adds, or making a point to have their families pray together — both activities that mirror monasteries’ focus on living in community. Books the oblate groups read and discuss, such as “How to Be a Monastic and Not Leave Your Day Job,” focus on ways such as these that oblates can live according to the Rule of Benedict and, through it, achieve more moderation and balance and become more aware of the presence of God.

Although she’d been attending daily Mass for years, becoming an oblate in 1995 is what has most created this awareness in Barbara Reiner.

“Studying the Rule of Benedict helped me realize more the presence of God and the need for constant and ongoing conversion,” says Ms. Reiner, who belongs to one of Sister Evelyn’s groups and is a friend of Ms. Rau.

It was the closeness to God and the strength and stability she saw in Ms. Reiner’s life, even as a single mother, that initially sparked her interest in becoming an oblate, Ms. Rau says. And now that she has been practicing an oblate’s lifestyle herself for several years — praying every morning and evening, always seeking and being aware of God’s voice in her life — she can tell the difference it’s made.

“I just was searching for answers to some of the challenges I’ve faced, and I’ve found you don’t have to live in a monastery to live like a monk, ” she says. “It’s calming. It’s reassuring. And it was just a time in my life I was ready for that.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.