13. Should We Reformulate the Religious Vows? Today it is very fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them. — I don’t believe that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why religious life has experienced so much diminishment in recent years. There probably is no one simple answer, but rather a cluster of reasons. Religious life, like the Church at large, can influence but it cannot control the many social and cultural forces that have carried us toward the end of this millennium. And if there no one easy answer, then there is unlikely to be just one clear solution for revitalizing religious communities. The task of interpreting the signs of the times is both challenging and ongoing. The Christian story is getting old and maybe feels a bit too worn; or to put things even more sharply, it appears to be losing its timeless character and increasingly regarded as a cultural relic. Contemporary biblical studies have so focused on questions of history in interpreting scriptural texts that some Catholics have found themselves spiritually adrift, cut off from the in whom they had once placed so much faith. The reaction is unfortunate but understandable. We are still in the early stages of learning how to read and preach the gospels in a new key. We cannot shoot the messenger who announces that there are political, social and human dimensions to the gospels that until recently we had not recognized. The real culprit behind the sense of loss and separation that some people have experienced is not contemporary biblical studies. The real culprit was a religious cosmology and a catechesis that put too much emphasis on heaven and too little emphasis upon history. Recovering the human, historical Jesus unsettles any rhetoric which concentrates on the next life at the expense of this one. For those who refuse to rethink their understanding of the story of Jesus in light of the biblical movement there is no choice but to watch the gospel grow less and less relevant to their lives. Left unchecked, this sorry state can only become worse as years turn into decades, and decades roll into centuries. We ignore at our peril the figure of Jesus in all his Jewishness and his rootedness in the political and cultural life of first-century Palestine. If religious life is supposed to be patterned after the life of Jesus in the gospel, then it is imperative that we learn as much as we possibly can the Jesus of the gospels. Sometimes this learning process is going to cost us and force us to rethink our identity and our mission. Yet even when the gospel is understood anew there can be difficulties. People who build their lives on the gospel story might sense themselves increasingly out of place in a post- modern world. It is not that they mind being treated and accounted as fools for Jesus’ sake; it’s just that no one wants to look and sound like a cultural oddity needlessly. As the numbers of believers declines, or as our grasp of what it means to be Christian crumbles under the weight of spiritual and doctrinal illiteracy, the present situation will only grow worse. It is difficult to imagine religious life flourishing in a culture which has little familiarity with the things of God, or where the name of God is not hallowed, or where families do not eat and pray together. Religious life presupposes a culture of faith. One doesn’t harvest grapes from thistles. The traditional marks of religious life are, of course, the three vows of poverty, and obedience. Through these vows a person dedicates himself or herself to God in and for the

139 people of God, the Church. To these three vows, like codicils, some groups have appended other promises. Benedictines, for example, pronounce a vow of stability. Jesuits take a special vow to obey the in matters relating to mission, while the Rogationists take a to pray and work for vocations. But the orientation of the three traditional vows strikes some people as negative: one renounces material possessions, marriage and family life, and control over one’s own future. The vows themselves appear to be negative instruments or forms by which a person shapes his or her very humanity in order to render it increasingly open to the mystery of God. The truth of the matter is that the goal of religious life is God, pure and simple. A person does not actually live the vows; one lives the desire for God. A person’s whole existence as a religious man or woman ought to reveal or sacramentalize that desire. Religious life itself, therefore, is guided by something positive. It should be shaped, not by renunciation, but by affirmation; not by the act of turning away from the world but by turning towards it. The institution of religious life is not uniquely Christian, of course. The search for God, or for the Absolute, has led countless individuals across various spiritual and cultural traditions to embrace a way of life centered on prayer and meditation. That universal thirst has been drawing Christians for nearly two thousand years into the wilderness, or into monastic enclosures, or into world-renouncing solitude. There they have often discovered the one Spirit which knows no national or ethnic frontiers, no cultural or institutional boundaries, and which never utters a word or a reveals text which exhausts or surpasses all other words and all other texts.

140 More than anything else, spirituality is what at least potentially we have in common; it is what creates the possibility of religion and religious institutions. Spirit after all forms the backbone of human nature. Contemplative religious life, understood as a steady and prayerful search for the mystery of God, will surely persist in some form or other within humanity’s major spiritual traditions for as long as there is human life on the planet. Apostolic religious life is a different matter. Members of active communities live out a dialogue with the world. Their mission, basically, is to promote the full development of the human spirit. They help human beings to find the God of life within the everyday world. The inspiration behind such communities is clearly evangelical. Jesus in the gospel story lived and worked in the villages and towns of Galilee, amidst ordinary people with ordinary concerns. For this reason some God-seeking men and women choose the “apostolic” or mission-oriented life of engagement with people. The vows themselves provide visible structure to . They define publicly what makes that radical living for others specifically and formally “religious.” The distinction between active and contemplative is an uneasy one, however. In different degrees, action and contemplation are dialectically related to one another in every Christian life. For practical reasons alone, no one can pray absolutely all the time and no one can work all the time. For one thing, as we grow older and mature as Christians, we realize existentially how little we ultimately accomplish by ourselves, how much of what we do depends upon the work of others, the support and ongoing liturgical life of the Church, and the grace

141 of God. Age has a wonderful way of drawing the contemplative out of us. But to return to the vows. There are a number of problems associated with the traditional religious promises. First, the promises are basically negatives; they name what a person is giving up. And no matter how much one has been assured that what is being renounced are things which are good in themselves, the fact remains that framing the vows in terms of renunciation leaves one feeling that these goods could not have been all that beneficial for salvation after all. Second, the traditional vows need to be constantly rethought in light of the fact that Jesus himself was not a religious. One can say, of course, that the life of Jesus was characterized by a total dedication to the reign of God. But he did not (so far as we know) pronounce any religious promises. The way he lived followed from what he had surrendered himself to. Men and women in the “consecrated life” run the risk of configuring the gospel portrait of Jesus in light of their own lifestyle, highlighting those aspects of the story which might make him appear to have been an exemplary religious: poor, chaste and obedient. Such a picture, however, is not helpful to the majority of Christians who have not embraced religious life. Yet a third problem is created by each of the vows individually. What does it mean to be poor? This question has occasioned endless discussion and debates in religious communities. Does the poverty which one commits to designate spiritual poverty or material poverty? With what social class or classes is one identifying? Are all human beings poor by the sheer fact that we depend upon God? There has never been a single, uniform definition of religious poverty.

142 And why could there not be a form of religious life that includes married people? What is so precious about remaining celibate in view of the fact that Jesus did not make a requirement for following him? Finally, why obedience? What special merit is there in surrendering one’s will to another, or to a community? There are a good number of veteran religious who could testify to the immense personal frustration and suffering inflicted on them by those in positions of religious authority. Perhaps a far more important religious promise would have been the renunciation of power (Mark 10:42-45), or of security (Luke 9:57-58), or of prestige (Matt 18:1-5). Fourth, the Church’s renewed understanding of Christian baptism has highlighted the universal call to holiness and the in Christ that marks the life of every believer. Having promised to follow Christ faithfully and wholeheartedly in baptism, it is hard to imagine that a person could ever improve upon such a far-reaching commitment. Religious vows may specify the direction of living out one’s baptismal promise, but the vows do not replace baptism and they certainly do not improve upon it. The survival of apostolic religious life hinges upon far- reaching cultural and social forces which we do not yet fully understand and which we certainly cannot control. The words of John Paul II at the opening Mass of the 1994 synod are intriguing: One could say that the horizon of the kingdom of God is revealed in a unique way through the vocation of consecrated life. And, one could also say, in the marvelous flowering in recent years of secular institutes and societies of apostolic life, which are doing so much good in the

143 church. We are also witnessing the birth of new forms of consecration, particularly inside the ecclesial movements and associations, which seek to express in ways adapted to the present culture religious life’s traditional tension between contemplation of the mystery of God and the mission to our brothers and sisters. At the outset of his homily, the Pope called attention both to the variety of recent developments within religious life and to its adaptability. As we move further into the future, we should anticipate more experimentation, more searching, more efforts at adaptation and inculturation, as the universal call to holiness prompts Christians to find ever more creative and satisfying ways to balance their thirst for the mystery of God with their love for their neighbor. At the same time, the future might also entail the deconstruction of the more traditional forms of consecrated life. Preferential option for the poor: a new expression of the religious vows The one idea in Christian theology and spirituality to emerge over the last fifteen or twenty years which warrants special consideration in any effort to think about the future of religious life is the preferential option for the poor. This important expression entered into the wider Catholic world chiefly as a result of the meeting of the Latin American bishops at Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. The harsh political, economic and social experience, together with the rich grass-roots reflection underlying the preferential option for the poor, have turned out to be a grace for the whole Church. As a kind of theological first principle, the option for the poor distills and clarifies what the gospel story and Christian reflection are fundamentally about. They are about a God who

144 has “chosen” the side of the poor and the oppressed in their long historical journey toward justice and equality. Whatever else we say about the God of Jesus, we must take into account where that God has “opted” to reveal himself. For Christians there is one unavoidable conclusion. To find and to contemplate the God of Jesus is to encounter the faces of the world’s poor and powerless and to be joined to those people in the deepest loyalty and affection. The Latin American bishops were not suggesting that the preferential option was a matter reserved for religious communities. The whole Church, they believed, was called upon to make such an option. Indeed, that call comes to us by means of our baptism and our immersion into the mystery of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Nevertheless, a strong case can be made that just as the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience have specified for centuries a particular way of living out one’s baptismal commitment, so also a promise to make and to live the preferential option for the poor would specify Christian existence in a way that speaks to the men and women of our time. By defining religious life in terms of the preferential option for the poor, one would be stating unequivocally and positively what is specifically evangelical about religious life in the Church. Consecrated life is evangelical, not because it renounces wealth, or marriage, or the liberty to determine one’s own future, but because it associates a person unambiguously with Jesus and the God whom he knew and worshipped. Consecrated life is fully and properly evangelical when it becomes a matter of living out a consistent and public solidarity with men and women who hunger and thirst for justice, just as Jesus did.

145 It would be misleading to assert that at the center of Jesus’ life lay the universal search for the holy and transcendent, or that Jesus’ primary concern was to help men and women to know and experience God. Many of the people who followed Jesus were already religious; they knew and loved God through the practice of their Jewish faith. Jesus’ attention was fixed on the kingdom of God, the Jewish meta-narrative of salvation history; that is what he preached. To desire the kingdom of God was to anticipate the divine action through which the world would be transformed. Those on the top would suddenly find themselves on the bottom (Luke 1:52). Indeed, the kingdom of God would belong to the poor (Luke 6:20). To make the preferential option for the poor the content of a religious promise would spell out the real, everyday consequence of one’s consecration to the reign of God. With a little theological imagination, this promise could be explained as translating for today the intention behind the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The reformulated promise might also enable religious life to chart a new course for itself by clarifying its mission and defining how it wants to be present in the world today. Whereas faithful observance of the traditional religious vows often appeared to be essentially a matter between the individual and God, observance of the preferential option for the poor would expose religious to the constant scrutiny of the faithful and the world. It would be impossible to dissociate religious observance from a full immersion in the political, social and economic realities of our time. The imaginary spiritual line sometimes drawn between the and the world would disappear. Committing oneself to living a preferential option for the poor would render the spirituality

146 underlying religious life an essentially corporate and public matter. What would happen if at or final vows, instead of making our vows in front of a religious , on in the imaginary presence of the whole heavenly court, the ones receiving the vows for the Church were the poor themselves: street people, homeless people, single mothers on welfare, the poor to be found in many urban parishes, migrant farm workers, and so on? What testimony would we be giving? What high ideals would we be committing ourselves to? The option for the poor as the content of a religious vow would underline a profound gospel truth, namely, that the Christian search for God takes us to the side and the defense of our victimized neighbor. Those men and women who have already internalized this option seem to have discovered an invigorating consciousness of their religious identity. We should listen to their confirming experience as a sign for our times. The Christian community needs joyful, unambiguous witnesses to the presence of the crucified and risen One in our midst. According to the curious, paradoxical example and teaching of Jesus in the gospels—where stones rejected by the builders turn out to be the cornerstone—God often becomes present where one least expects to encounter the mystery of the kingdom. Sometimes gently, sometimes prophetically, apostolic religious should always be directing the contemplative attention of the whole Church to those unlikely groups, places and situations where God-in-Christ is to be found. John Paul speaks of “new forms of consecration.” It may be that new religious communities will emerge specifically founded on the option for the poor, communities capable of integrating that option both

147 theoretically and practically into their way of life. Perhaps the new form of consecrated solidarity will begin with a fresh way of formulating ancient religious promises.

[1995]

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