Suchergebnisse

Issue 54.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1995. ; Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ° ~,~ashington, DC 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1995 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any ,naterial (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read Joann Wolski Conn PhD Iris Ann Ledden SSND Joel Rippinger OSB Edmundo Rodriguez sJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUARYI995-* VOLUME54 * NUMBER 1 contents 22 faith and culture U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality William A. Barry SJ proposes that a spirituality, lived out vibrantly, is our way to God and our way to let God break through the encrustations of cultural conditioning. Back to the Future: Franciscan Literary Tradition, Virtual Reality, and Infomania Timothy J. Johnson OFM Cony draws attention to the twin challenges virtual reality and infomania pose to the appropriation of heritage texts for religious candidates. 41 48 pioneering the future Beyond Ecumenism: Religious as Pioneers Ruth Fox OSB gives examples of what it means to move from events to processes for our ecumenical effort. Dynamic Memory's Role in Reimaging the Future Shaun McCarty ST describes the role of dynamic memory in bonding community and discerning the future. 59 seeking formation directions Reflections on the Lay Spiritan Program in Canada Michael Doyle CSSp presents a picture of the successes and difficulties that are part of a contemporary development of the Lay Spiritan program. 73 Cross-Cultural Issues in Vocation and Formation Ministry Dennis Newton SVD and Ed PeHo SVD share the challenges and questions of cross-cultural formation. 81 The Ministry Spiral James H. Kroeger MM presents core el~ments of the contemporary call to Christian ministry. 2 Review for Religious 89 IOO learning the tradition The Desert and the Cell Kenneth C. Russell explores the significance of the desert and the cell for the men and women solitaries in the third and fourth centuries. Clare of Assisi: Her Leadership Role Marie Beha OSC explores the example and understanding of leadership which Clare of Assisi provides by her life and in her writings. 113 131 coping in crises Where Is God in Our Suffering? Richard J. Hauser SJ highlights the two religious contexts for coping with suffering: the meaning context and the support context. The Midlife Crisis: God's Second Call Robert S. Stoudt explores the meaning of religious call at two special moments in life--adolescence and midlife. departments 4 Prisms 143 Canonical Counsel: Directives on Religious Formation: Potissimum Institutioni 149 Book Reviews Janttary-Febrtutry 199Y 3 prisms No sooner had the relatively unevent-ful synod on consecrated life ended than Pope John Paul II published the most extraordinary apostolic letter of his pon-tificate. The letter, Tertio millennio adveniente (As the Third Millennium Draws Near), was officially released on 14 November 1994. It sets forth an agenda to be implemented from the time of its publication until the actual celebration of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. The letter is addressed to bishops, priests and deacons, men and women religious, and all the loy faithful. Pope John Paul confesses that preparing for the year 2000 has become a hermeneutical key of his pontificate and that the time leading up to the jubilee year is to be lived as "a new Advent." He points out how this theme, found in his first encyclical Redemptorhominis (1979), is developed at length in Dominum et vivificantem (1986) and has continued to mark his addresses and other writings. Although the pope reviews significant 20th-century events of both world and church history, he centers on Vatican Council II as directing us towards this celebration. He now challenges all Catholics to a more immediate preparation. He identifies two phases: (1) an ante-preparatory time (1994-1996) dedicated to reviv-ing in Christian people an awareness of the joyful meaning of the Great Jubilee in human history, with its call to con-version and reconciliation as we commemorate the birth of Christ, and (2) a more focused preparatory time (1997- 1999)--with the year 1997 devoted to reflection on Christ, savior and proclaimer of the gospel, the year 1998 bringing attention to the Holy Spirit's sanctifying presence within the community of Christ's disciples, and the year 1999 given 4 R~viewfor Religious to believers helping one another to see things in the perspective of Christ as with him they journey to the Father. Although the prepa-rations are described with broad strokes in this letter, John Paul indicates certain concrete steps to be taken during each stage and promises to call for widespread consultation regarding plans for spe-cific events. The juxtaposition of the synod on religious life in October 1994 and the release of this apostolic letter in November 1994 is not hap-penstance. No one will deny that there is a certain obscure light around the phenomenon of consecrated life in the Vatican II church. The synod, with its ten thousand speeches coming from places where Christ actively continues to play, reflected the obscure light in which religious live and work. But on the very heels of the completion of this synod comes an agenda for the church of the third millennium. Religious congregations should take note. They mal(e a positive choice, I believe, for their own futures in proportion to their enter-ing into the church agenda outlined in this letter. John Paul challenges all church members. Religious, "at the ser-vice of the church," need to respond with all the prayer and zeal their proper charismatic identity supplies. There is no place for a wimpy or weaseling response that would look first at how the lim-ited particularity of "our congregational or province plan" fits some-how into the pope's challenges. Rather, religious need to give the church agenda a chance to inspire, shape, change, and give new direction to community life and apostolic endeavors. Religious life receives a vital challenge for the future millennium in Tertio millen-nio adveniente. As we enter into 1995, Review for Religious welcomes two new members to the advisory board. Father Joel Rippinger OSB, a writer and currently chair of the American Benedictine Academy, is a monk of Marmion Abbey in Aurora, Illinois. Sister Patricia Wittberg SC, associate professor in the Department of Sbciology at Indiana University (Indianapolis), just recently published The Rise and Decline of Catholic Religious Orders (Albany: SUNY; cloth $59.95, paper $19.95). At the same time we say a grateful farewell.to Sister Suzanne Zuercher OSB and wish her well with her new responsibilities as president of Saint Scholastica High School in Chicago, Illinois. As we noted in our last issue, Sister.Mary Margaret Johanning SSND died from cancer in October 1994; we miss her but also know her continuing support. David L. Fleming SJ aTanuary-February 1995 5 faith and culture WILLIAM A. BARRY U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality In recent years I have grown in the conviction that I do not best understand myself as a believer who tries to love and engage his culture. The wiser ques-tion asks: Since it is a given that I am shaped by my culture, what do I need to help me to become a believer? I never possess faith as some fully formed object that I then bring to my culture. In faith I live a lifelong conversion of the culture I carry within me. I am, in short, a late-twentieth-century capi-talist; along with most of the readers of this essay, I carry the inclinations, the burdens, the nobilities, and the violences of capitalist culture deeply etched in the core of my being. My situation is no worse, surely, than that of citizens of other cultures. But no better either. Culture lies too deeply embedded in human beings to ever become completely baptized, and the life of faith in every era takes the form of a holy tension between primordial cultural ten-dencies and God's endlessly affectionate challenge to learn to live faithfully.~ With this sharp commentary John Staudenmaier cuts to the heart of the issue of culture and spirituality. There is no spirituality that is not imbedded in a culture. If a William A. Barry SJ, well-known author and currently provin-cial of the Jesuits of New England province, gave this presenta-tion to the Augi~st 1994 national assembly of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His address is P.O. Box 799, Back Bay Annex; Boston, Massachusetts 02117-0799. 6 Review for Religious spirituality wants to be in contact with the living God, then those who espouse it must work hard and beg God's help to free them-selves from the cultural biases which make it almost impossible to find the real God. For Staudenmaier the issue is not so much how religion or spirituality influence culture, but rather how any of us encultured human beings can become free enough from our culture to be believers. That puts it starkly. The Meaning of Culture What do we mean by culture? Clifford Geertz defines cul-ture as "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embod-ied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."2 Culture in this sense, then, is the way a particular group of peo-ple makes sense of its world. Culture is imbibed with mother's milk and inculcated in every member of the group by formal and informal education and formation, and increasingly, by the mass media. One can see why Staudenmaier says of himself: "I am a late-twentieth-century capitalist." Of course, he could have added many more identities, such as "I am a late-twentieth-century American Roman Catholic," "American Jesuit priest," "academi-cian," and so forth. Given his age, he could also have said of him-self "Roman Catholic formed by pre-Vatican II culture and reformed, insofar as this is possible, by post-Vatican II culture." For the most part, the influence of culture on us escapes our consciousness. We have so imbibed our culture or cultures that we are unaware of how it conditions our behavior. Let me give an example. A few years ago I spent three weeks in Ireland where I did a lot of walking. Every time I had to cross a street I looked left first, and started across if I saw no traffic; only then would I look right to see if there were traffic coming the other way. In the United States this ingrained way of proceeding is not only second nature, but also self-protective. In Ireland it was downright dan-gerous because the pattern of traffic is just the opposite. So I learned that I was unconsciously conditioned to a traffic pattern by growing up in the United States. Moreover, when I drove a car in Ireland and in Jamaica, I periodically experienced anxiety when I instinctively felt that I was on the wrong side of the road. Attempts to change the unconscious way we do things lead to .~anuary-February 199~ 7 Barry * U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality anxiety. Years ago Bill Callahan argued that we are cultural addicts who find it uncomfortable to try to overcome our cultural addic-tion) Remember that culture influences our image of God. One way for us to discover some of the unconscious ways our culture works on us is to live for a time in another culture. I believe that this is one of the best reasons for having part of one's formation as a religious in another culture. When they give them-selves to the process, young religious who live and work in a for-eign culture, especially a Third World culture, find themselves facing in a new way their alleged trust in God. Another way is to ask for honest feedback from our brothers and sisters from another culture about their experience of living in one of our communi-ties. We would probably be surprised at what we might hear and thus learn how our culture unconsciously conditions how we live, how we pray, and how we worship. The Meaning of Spirituality What about "spirituality"? Philip Sheldrake trenchantly notes that spirituality "is one of those subjects whose meaning everyone claims to know until they have to define it.''4 He then gives one of the best definitions of the term that I have found: "I would suggest that what the word spirituality seeks to express is the con-scious human response to God that is both personal and ecclesial. In short, 'life in the Spirit'" (p. 37). He also says of Christian spirituality: Spirituality is understood to include not merely the tech-niques of prayer but, more broadly, a conscious relation-ship with God, in Jesus Christ, through the indwelling of the Spirit and in the context of the community of believers. Spirituality is, therefore, concerned with the conjunction of theology, prayer and practical Christianity (p. 52). A spirituality is, first of all, the enactment of one's religion by a group and only secondarily a reflected upon and system-atized set of characteristics of that particular enactment. Since spirituality in this sense develops in historical people and not in the abstract, there are multiple spiritualities. For exam-ple, we speak of Benedictine, Franciscan, or Dominican spiritu-ality; of nineteenth-century French or fifteenth-century Flemish spirituality. As soon as we speak in this fashion of different spir-itualities, we realize that a spirituality is enculturated. As Sheldrake 8 Review for Religious says, ". part of the contemporary problem with defining spiri-tuality is associated with the fact that it is not a single, transcul-rural phenomenon but is rooted within the lived experience of God's presence in history--and a history which is always specific" (p. 3 3). Indeed, just as culture is carried by a living tradition, so too is a particular spirituality. I would argue that a particular spirituality is part of a culture. As I noted earlier, not only is John Staudenmaier a late-twen-tieth- century capitalist, he is also a late-twentieth-century U.S. Jesuit priest. Part of his encultured personality is rooted in the spirituality founded by Ignatius of Loyola and formed and deformed by four hundred years of history, including two hundred years of history in the United States. Putting things in this way makes for at least one interesting paradox: One of the hindrances to belief in God could be the spirituality we have imbibed. Spirituality, even though culturally influenced, has a built-in safeguard against encrustation by a culture; any spirituality defined as I have suggested posits the active presence of God in human affairs. Stephen Carter, in The Culture of Disbelief, makes this point with regard to religion: "Although many thoughtful sociologists and historians have defined religion in other ways, the belief in supernatural intervention in human affairs is a useful divider for our present purposes, because that is where the culture seems to draw the line between that which is suspect and that which is not.''5 Whereas, as Carter makes plain, our political and legal culture considers belief in divine intervention "a kind of mystical irrationality" (p. 7), any spirituality worth its salt banks on such intervention. Such a spirituality expects that God is actively pur-suing the divine intention iia the one action which is the universe. God is, therefore, continually trying to break through the encrus-tation of any specific culture to reveal God's own reality and desire. The trick is to develop ways of noticing God's interven-tions, ways of letting the crust of culture be dented enough so that we pay attention. God is continually trying to break through the encrustation of any specific culture to reveal God's own reality and desire. January-February 199~ 9 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality Any specific spirituality derives from an experience or series of experiences of God that a group has. Any such experience is never, of course, a pure experience of God. Any human experience is multidimensional, the product of an encounter between some-thing and a person with a psychological, social, and cultural his-tory. Benedictine spirituality with its vow of stability was the product of an encounter between God and Benedict and his fol-lowers who grew up at the time of the breakup of the Roman Empire when stable institutions were few and far between. Recent work on Ignatian spirituality has shown how it is the product of the encounter with God of a late medieval wounded warrior whose mother died when he was an infant.6 The point is that any spiri-tuality is the product of an encounter with God of a group of human beings with a particular history that includes, among oth-ers, psychological, social, and cultural influences. An American Spirituality? Joseph Tetlow argues quite cogently that over the past two-hundred years Catholics in the United States have had a unique experience of God and have, therefore, developed a distinctive American spirituality.7 He believes that our contribution to the church may be the very spirituality that has developed on these shores; indeed, American Catholicism with its distinct spiritual-ity may be the bridge between a European church and a worldwide church. We have not yet fully delineated what that spirituality is, he notes, but it is important to do so since the discovery will help us to understand American Catholic identity and to clarify how the American church ends the European captivity of the Roman Catholic church. Tetlow himself has attempted to delineate some characteris-tics of an American Catholic spirituality. First, it is pluralistic, not only because different ethnic strains and religious traditions have gone into its makeup, but also because it developed in and adapted to a predominantly Protestant culture. Second, it is ahis-torical for the most part; like our fellow citizens we Catholics do not look to history for instruction. Third, it is democratized in the sense that American Catholics feel that everyone has equal access to God and to holiness. In our day, for instance, anyone, not just a priest or religious or an upper-class lady, can have a spiritual director. As Tetlow says, "American Catholics are not impressed 10 Review for Religious by the thought that spiritual gifts are spread around about as unevenly as IQ, health, and length of life" (p. 34). Another instance is the way American Catholics have decided issues of morality, especially birth control, on the basis of their own expe-rience and have not felt the less Catholic for it. Fourth, it is func-tional in the sense that it deals not so much with truth claims, but with meaning and meaningfulness; American Catholics tend to look for "theological wis-dom in the meaning of con-crete experience" (pp. 34-35). For American Catholics experience is a sound theo-logical source. Tetlow cites the way John Courtney Murray found Catholic truth in the meaning of American democracy. To show the dif-ference between a European spirituality and ours in this regard Tetlow notes that at about the same time that Hans Kung published his hugely successful Does God Exist? Donald Gelpi pub-lished Experiencing God. Fifth, it is experimental in the sense that we have imbibed the definition of belief of American philoso-phers, namely that "belief is the willingness to accept the practical consequences of what we claim is true. We tend to think that we either do the truth or the truth does not exist."8 Hence, for example, we are willing to try out all kinds of prayer forms to see which ones help us, and religious congregations try out var-ious forms of government to see which ones work. Sixth, Americans have developed a spirituality of plural loyalties; an example is the fact that we have grown up in a church where both the American flag and the papal flag stood in our sanctuaries. "I believe that we will find at the core of American Catholic spiri-tuality a complex but quite tenacious loyalty.''9 A vibrant, self-confident yet critically astute sense of how American Dominicans, for example, have lived out the spirituality inherited from St. Dominic and his European followers could have great benefits for the whole order, especially for the Dominicans in developing countries. ffanuary-February 1995 11 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality With this sketch of some characteristics of an American Catholic spirituality we already see how our culture has affected our spirituality, with both good and bad effects. Each religious congregation has to do its own reflection on how American cul-ture has affected it for good and for ill and how its distinctive spirituality is lived out in this country. I believe that it would be healthy for each of us to do so to gain some self-confidence in the distinctive cast the living out of a particular charism has taken on in the United States. A vibrant, self-confident yet critically astute sense of how American Dominicans, for example, have lived out the spirituality inherited from St. Dominic and his European followers could have great benefits for the whole order, especially for the Dominicans in developing countries. The task lies before each of our congregations. Individualism Some elements of our U.S. culture have impacted on our spir-ituality. One element has been apparent at least since the time of de Toqueville, namely an emphasis on the individual. Bellah and associates in both Habits of the Heart and The Good Society have documented quite well that our culture is dominated by this cult of the individual. We operate on the assumption that the indi-vidual is prior to and takes precedence over the community. The individual is considered to be rational and autonomous in his or her dealings with other individuals, and the individual's goal in life is to maximize self-interest; the acquisition of private property is, in principle, unlimited. But a group of self-interest maximiz-ers will inevitably come into conflict with one another over prop-erty and goods. To avoid conflict social contract is necessary to protect private property. This leads to market economy which eventually tends to take over all our institutions. In politics we now have no civic culture, but a claimant culture with the politi-cian as manager; we continually hear of "rights," but rarely of our "civic duties" to one another. We sue at the drop of a hat. Even marriage has come to be looked upon as a limited contract for the benefit of the two individuals leading to an adult-centered rather than a child-centered family. Education more and more has taken on a market character where the question is what the students want. A liberal education for its own sake is increasingly difficult to find and to sell to people who look on education as a 12 Review for Religious way to get ahead. Even religious institutions have taken on some of the aspects of the market culture; people ask, "What is in this church for me?" The authors of The Good Society note that a Lutheran church in California has a money-back guarantee: Donate for ninety days and if, in that time, you do not get what you have asked for, you get your money back (pp. 93-94). In an insightful talk to a convention of spiritual directors Robert J. Egan SJ noted that one of the roots of this rampant sec-ularized individualism may well be the religious individualism of our Catholic spiritual tradition with its emphasis on the renun-ciation of the world and of family life and the embrace of poverty, celibacy, solitude, silence, and so forth. The outcome of such a spirituality is a radical spiritual individualism.~° In this analysis the lonely ascetic fighting his battle with Satan is the spiritual precursor of the model American hero, the Lone Ranger. Many of us were brought up in the spiritual tradition of renunciation, something which puts us doubly at risk to be infected with indi-vidualism. Effects of Individualism on Religious What are some of the effects of our culture's cult of the indi-vidual on us? First, let us be grateful for the positive effects. Our culture teaches us to prize the individual and his or her gifts. In our religious lives such a prizing is a healthy corrective to the "long black line" mentality that prevailed among us and led to the use of individuals as mere cogs in the machine. Obedience without consultation of the individual's own desires and dreams has happily gone the way of the dodo. We Jesuits, for example, have recovered the tradition of Ignatius which expected that the dreams and desires of good Jesuits might well be a clue to dis-cerning God's will. I believe that our culture helped us to that recovery of the tradition. But we must not overlook the dangers in the kind of radical individualism rampant in American culture. For example, do we use the yardstick of salary to measure our own or another's worth? Do we also measure the quality of our life by the amenities available, the kind of car at our disposal, the vacations we can take? Is the difficulty we have in taking a serious look at what a simple lifestyle might mean at least partly the result of our cultural addiction? One of the results of the cult of the individual in the United ~Tan~,ary-Febr~tary 1995 13 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality States is the loss of a sense of community, a point made strongly in the two books by Bellah and his associates. The demands of community, especially an inclusive community, impinge on the freedom of the individual. Has this virus affected us? I have noticed a tendency for religious to criticize community life, but not to ask what they are contributing to it. "This community does not meet my needs" is a common enough complaint. But rarely do such complainers say, "What can I do to make this community a better place for all of us, or at least for those of us who want a more meaningful religious community?" The cultural climate which puts the individual before the community makes it difficult for us Americans to see ourselves as having embraced a community of brothers or sisters for the quality of whose religious life each one of us is responsible. Yet God, the perfect community of three Persons, creates this universe not for individual fulfillment alone but so that all people might be enticed into the community of the Trinity. In fact, I cannot achieve fulfillment without other people. One of the desperate needs of our country is the example of vibrant community life. All of us need to work hard against the virus of individual-ism which destroys community. The efforts many religious have made in recent years to share their faith journeys and their expe-riences of the apostolate with one another and with their lay col-leagues run counter to the culture of individualism. Such sharing of experience is one of the characteristics of American spiritual-ity. We find that ideology and abstract theologizing divide people, whereas the sharing of experience brings people together and thus helps to overcome the virus of individualism. Narcissistic Personality Type Robert Egan makes a trenchant comment about the type of personality that results from contemporary American individu-alism, namely the narcissistic type. It is noteworthy that recently psychiatrists and psychologists have written more and more about this personality type, different from the neurotic type seen in European culture earlier in this century by Freud and his associ-ates. Without even knowing it, narcissistic persons tend to think first of all: "What's in it for me?" The male version is dubbed the "Eternal Boy." One of the characteristics is a great difficulty in making lasting commitments. Another is suspicion of institutions 14 Review for Religious and authority because they can get in the way of my rights, my needs, my desires. Have we been infected by this narcissistic tendency? I think that I perceive some disturbing trends in myself, in some of my brother Jesuits and in other religious. VChen we are asked to con-sider an assignment, are these the first questions that pop into our minds, "But what will happen to me ifI take that job? . Will I be able to keep my car? . Will I be happy there, the way I'm happy here? . What's the TV reception like there?" Just recentl~ tears of gratitude and admiration came to my eyes when I said to a Jesuit who had been approached to take on a new assignment, "I want you to give that serious consideration." His immediate response was: "If you want me to go, I am on my way." Obviously my reaction indicates that I do not run into this attitude as often as I would like. One former provincial asked a man to take on a job for which he had the talent, but which he did not want. After a period of time to think it over, he again asked the man if he wanted to do the job. Again the man said no. The provincial then said: "I am sorry, but I need you to do it. I want you to do it." Our man said: "Fine!" The provincial then said: "There are only three men in the province who would be ready and willing to go anywhere and do anything if I should ask them to." Do we as religious tend to think first of "my rights," "my hopes," "my desires," "my comfort" when looking at apostolic opportunities? If we do, then we have been deeply infected by the individualism of our culture. Again, however, our spirituality gives us the means of coun-tering this culturally induced narcissism. Any spirituality, as we noted earlier, presupposes an encounter with God. There is noth-ing better as an antidote to narcissism than meeting the living God. Moreover, any Christian spirituality is not just about saving one's soul; eventually the saved sinner is called to discipleship with Jesus. One Protestant minister makes a wonderful statement in The Good Society: Ira person really has Jesus living in their life, and they are in a Christian fellowship growing in the Scriptures and learning what he is talking about; then eventually they are going to worry and be concerned about the homeless peo-ple, pregnant teenagers, people who are addicted, people in minorities being persecuted and denied - women, blacks, poor people in the rest of the world. If Jesus is really in their life, and they read in there that God is no respecter of January-February 199Y 15 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality Religious take a vow of obedience which should lead to thinking beyond personal discernment. What is the greater good? What does the church need? What do people need? persons that Jesus died for everybody, it's going to come out socially. Saving souls is not the whole gospel. That's just getting born (pp. 201-202). Any vibrant Christian spirituality will move in this direction. Each of our spiritual traditions is aimed precisely at helping us to overcome our inordinate attachments which Gerald May calls addictions.11 These attachments include our cultural addictions. By opening ourselves to hon-esty before the Lord and with our spiritual director we can allow ourselves to be freed from these attachments. The daily examen of consciousness is another element used by many religious (or, should I say, recommended to many religious) that can lead us to the life-long conversion from cultural addiction. Falling in love with Jesus and his mis-sion is a powerful antidote to narcissism. At the same time we need to ask ourselves whether our culture's cult of the individual with its concomitant tendency toward narcissism has some-what co-opted the recovery of our spiritual traditions. Statements such as "In my retreat I discerned that I should work and live in such an apostolate" or "My spiritual director agrees with my discernment that I should study for a doctorate in Zen" are often taken as the final word in the process of discernment. Such statements may betray the unconscious cultural narcissism that we have imbibed. Religious take a vow of obedience which should lead to thinking beyond personal discernment. What is the greater good? What does the church need? What do people need? What does the province or community need? These are questions that must also enter into any discernment of spirits that merits the name Catholic. We Jesuits in preparing for our 34th General Congregation.have a chance to rediscover the necessary 16 Rwview for Religious tension between personal discernment (inherited from the Spiritual Exercises) and spiritual obedience (inherited from our Constitutions). Any authentic Roman Catholic spirituality, I believe, has this built-in, and healthy, tension between individual dis-cernment and obedience to legitimate authority.~2 Of course, authority can be abused, just as can individual discernment. That is why the tension has to be there. The Culture of Disbelief Another element in our culture is slightly different from the tack we have been on, yet moves in the same direction. The stress on the individual as rational and autonomous in his or her pursuit of self-interest with its concomitant glorification of science and technology has tended to downplay the mysterious and nonra-tional as aspects of human life to be taken seriously. In academic and political life religion is relegated to the private sphere at best. Stephen Carter speaks of the culture of disbelief in his best-sell-ing book of that title. This culture, he maintains,-presses believ-ers "to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them" (p. 3). By the use of numerous examples he shows a trend in our culture to treat religious beliefs as: arbitrary and unimportant . More and more, our cul-ture seems to take the position that believing deeply in the tenets of one's faith represents a kind of mystical irra-tionality, something that thoughtful, public-spirited American citizens would do better to avoid (pp. 6-7). As a result, many Americans split their public and private selves. What they believe about God and God's intentions for this world does not enter into the way they speak and act in pub-lic. As people of faith we believe that God is active in human affairs and that God does have an intention for our world. Yet I have the impression that we have bought into the culture of dis-belief to such an extent that we unconsciously assume that unbe-lief does not have to be defended while belief does. We do not realize that unbelievers and believers are on a level playing field insofar as justifying their divergent stances; both of us plant our feet firmly in midair and march on. Unbelief is as much an irra-tional stance as is belief; neither can be justified on purely ratio-nal grounds. .~anuary-February 1995 17 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality Effects of the Culture of Disbelief on Us Insofar as we cannot speak of our experiences of God with one another, we cannot engage in any kind of communal discernment. Has this culture of disbelief infected our religious lives? Is this culture behind our seeming fear of speaking with one another about our experiences of God, for example? Are we afraid to be considered naively, pious, not with it? In my religious life I had not talked with another Jesuit about my own religious experience until we rediscovered the individu-ally directed Spiritual Exercises and a kind of spiritual direction that focused on the experience of peo-ple with God. Even with this recov-ery it is very difficult for us Jesuits to speak of our experience of God outside a retreat or session of spir-itual direction; some of us may find it easier to speak of our sexual and aggressive fantasies and feelings than about our experiences of God. Insofar as we are infected with the culture of disbelief religious cannot become a community of friends in the Lord, people who know through mutual communication the bedrock experiences that ground our life together. Moreover, insofar as we cannot speak of our experi-ences of God with one another, we cannot engage in any kind of communal discernment. Communal discernment requires that we be able to share with one another our experiences of God with the trust and hope that in that sharing we as a community will find the way that God is pointing out to us. Moreover, if we cannot share our experiences of God, can we really collaborate with one another and with our lay colleagues in a religiously convincing way? Our collaboration will be based on functional and utilitar-ian grounds, not on the ways of God. This culture of disbelief deeply affected my practice of clin-ical psychology. Even though I believed that God could be encountered in human experience, I did not expect that my clients would speak of such encounters, even when I was doing psy-chotherapy with Jesuit scholastics at Weston School of Theology. It was only when I began to give the Spiritual Exercises individ- 18 Review for Religiotts ually that I realized what I had been unconsciously doing. Even my Jesuit clientsdid not bring up religious experiences because they felt it inappropriate to do so, something I unconsciously approved. So the central reality of the lives of these young Jesuits did not fig-ure in our conversations which covered many other intimate details of their lives. Spirituality as an Antidote Our spirituality can counteract the deleterious effects of cul-ture. Any spirituality is culture bound, as we have said. Indeed, the American way of living out a particular religious spirituality has engendered suspicion in other parts of the world, especially in Europe and particularly in Rome. At the turn of the century the Spanish Jesuit General Martin removed the English provincial, believing that he and many of the English Jesuits were infected with "Americanism." 13 But any spirituality has a built-in correc-tive against the corrosive effects of culture, if the spirituality is vibrant. That built-in corrective is, of course, the fact that a spir-ituality is a way to God and a way to let God impinge on our lives. For each of us religious our spirituality, as it is lived out vibrantly in the United States, is our way to God and our way to let God break through the encrustation of cultural conditioning. To overcome the corrosive effects of American culture on our religious living and working we must recover the authentic way of our spirituality for our time and place. Each of us must engage deeply in our way to God, and then we must find ways to com-municate with other members of our congregation the experi-ence of meeting the living God in our way. But we must be clear that it will be a difficult and messy process. We are, as Callahan pointed out, culturally addicted, and attempts to overcome the addiction will produce anxiety. In addition, as Staudenmaier said, we are talking about a process of lifelong conversion to the living God. We can never completely shed the conditioning of our cul-ture. We can only try to engage the living God individually and collectively with humility and courage and, above all, with char-ity toward one another. A final note: According to Bellah and associates our culture desperately needs an antidote to its rampant individualism and narcissism. They speak of the need of communities of memory, of the replacement of the politics of f~ar with the politics of love January-February 1995 19 Barry ¯ U.S. Culture and Contemporary Spirituality (quoting Vficlev Havel), of developing the habit of paying atten-tion as an antidote to distraction. What they are speaking of could be construed as the need for a spirituality. They are not afraid to use religious language in a book devoted to a sociological analy-sis of our culture. With Reinhold Niebuhr they argue for the need of basic trust for the health of our democracy. Theologians such as Niebuhr.suggest that behind parental love, essential as that is, lies a deeper question: Is reality, is Being itself, trustworthy? To argue that trust or faith is justified, that God as the very principle of reality is good, is not obvious--not obvious to Christians and Jews, who through the centuries have been supposed to believe it, and not obvious to anyone who has to live in the world as it is. Trust or faith, like parental love, is a gift. It comes to individuals and groups in particular experiences at particular times and places. Niebuhr did not say that it comes only to Jews and Christians, or that it comes only to people who think of themselves as religious, but that to whomever it comes, it comes as a gift. And when it does come, it brings a great joy and enables us to live responsibly with our fellow beings.14 We who belong to communities of memory, which is what religious communities at their best are, have a pearl of great price to offer to our fellow citizens. We who belong to communities that foster contemplation, which is a way of paying attention to what God is doing in our world, have a pearl of great price to offer. We who have a special way to God which has been shaped by our being planted in this country, a way to let God assure us that he is trustworthy, have a pearl of great price to offer. Let us not be afraid to share it with our fellow citizens. Only God can save us all. Let us give God a chance to do it. Notes I John M. Staudenmaier SJ "To Fall in Love with the World: Individualism and Self-Transcendence in Mnerican Life," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 26/3: May, 1994, p. 2. z Tbe Interpretation of Czdtltres (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 89. In Habits of the Heart: lndividllalism and Commitment in American Life Bellah, et al. have a similar definition: "Those patterns of meaning that any group or society uses to interpret and evaluate itself and its situation. We take culture to be a constitutive dimension of all human action. It is not an epiphenomenon to be explained by economic or political factors," (New York: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1986), p. 333. 20 Review for Religious 3 William R. Callahan, "The Impact of Culture on Religious Values and Decision-Making," Soundings: A Task Force on Social Consciousness and Ignatian Spirituality (Washington: Center of Concern, 1974), pp. 8-12. q Philip Sheldrake, Sph'ituality and History: Questions ofl~Jterpretation andMetbod (London SPCK, 1991), p. 32. s Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelie3~ How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 25. ~' See William W. Meissner, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (New Haven: Yale, 1992) for the psychological dimension of Ignatius's experience and John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1993) for the cultural and historical dimensions. 7 Joseph A. Tetlow, "The Emergence of an American Catholic Spirituality," Theology Digest, 40/1 (Spring, 1993), 27-36. 8Joseph A. Tetlow, "!Mnerican Catholic Spirituality," New Catholic World, 225/5 (July/August, 1982), 153. 9Tetlow, "The Emergence ." p. 35. ~0 Robert J. Egan SJ, "Contemplation in the Context of Contemporary Culture: Reflections on Spiritual Direction in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism," talk delivered at a conference of spiritual direc-tors in February 1990 at Mercy Center, Burlingame, California. ~ Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). ~z See William A. Barry SJ, "Discernment and Obedience: Finding God's Will and Staying Roman Catholic," an article first published in America (164/24, 1991) and reproduced in God's Passionate Desire and Our Response (Notre Dame: Ave Maria, 1993), pp. 129-133. ~3 See David G. Schultenover, A View from Rome: On the Eve of the Modernist Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993). ~q Robert N. Bellah et al, The Good Society, (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 284. January-Febr~ary 199 ~ 21 TIMOTHY J. JOHNSON Back to the Future: Franciscan Literary Tradition, Virtual Reality, and Infomania Z~195a3 Ray Bradbury presented a chilling vision of the future Fahrenheit 4YI.~ In this novel, books have been banned by a totalitarian regime that lives in dread of the truth. Books are set aflame by a new breed of firemen bent on eliminating any still in existence. In such a climate of fear, society as a whole no longer cultivates any sense of literary appreciation. Only a few individ-uals still stubbornly believe in the significance of the great works of literature. Bradbury ends his numbing glimpse into the future on a hopeful note by describing a community of men and women who commit themselves to the preservation of their literary cul-ture by memorizing important books. Each person metaphori-cally becomes a living book. While we do not have to fear a future as grim as that of Fahrenheit 4Yl, we may witness the demise of our literary sensi-tivity, at least in some sectors of our culture, through the lack of education and widespread indifference. While society can take concrete steps to improve the quality of education, it cannot implement measures to force people to develop an interest in lit-erature. In the dawning age of what is termed virtual reality and infomania, books as we know them may become nothing more than boring, irrelevant relics of an earlier age. This article exam- Timothy J. Johnson OFM Conv is the director of formation at Saint Bonaventure Friary in Washington, D.C. An earlier version of this arti-cle appeared in Miscellanea Francescana 94 (1994): 3-19. His address is Saint Bonaventure Friary; 3514 Fifteenth Street N.E.; ~AZashington, D.C. 20017. 22 Review for Religious ines the question of literature, contemporary American culture, and the formation of members of religious communities such as the Franciscans in their respective literary traditions. It describes the nature of virtual reality technologies and infomania and delin-eates the challenges these cultural phenomena pose to those reli-gious communities relying on classical spiritual texts in the appropriation of their traditions. I offer some tentative strategies from a Franciscan perspective to face and interpret these chal-lenges. These strategies are based on the Franciscan vision of the world as book and on the sapiential focus of Franciscan theology. The articulation and implementation of a Franciscan response to virtual reality technologies and infomania are fundamental tasks not to be ignored. Otherwise the lasting wisdom of our spiritual heritage may become obscured or lost in the climate of literary insensitivity and insatiable information hunger increasingly char-acteristic of the United States cultural milieu. The Nature and Challenge of Virtual Reality What is meant by the term virtual reality? Michael Helm gives the following definition in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality: Virtual reality pertains to convincing the participant that he or she is actually in another place, by substituting the normal sensory input received by the participant with the information produced by a computer. This is usually done through three-dimensional graphics and input-output devices that closely resembie the participant's normal inter-face with the physical world. The definition of VR includes several factors and emphases: artificial reality, as when the user's full-body actions combine with computer-generated images to forge a single presence; interactivity, as when the user enters a building by means of a mouse traveling on a screen; immer-sion, as when the user dons a head-mounted display enabling a view of a three-dimensional animated world; net-worked environments, in which several people can enter a virtual world at the same time; telepresence, in which the user feels present in a virtual world while robotic machines effect the user's agency at a remote location in the actual pri-mary world.: Although the arrival of the age of virtual reality is not read-ily recognized by everyone, it is apparent to those cognizant of United States cultural trends that we are moving from a culture ffobnso.n ¯ Back to the Future based on books to one based on computer-driven graphics and visual imagery. For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the challenge of the future is already found in the crowded amuse-ment arcades across the United States where thousands of young people gather to spend long hours staring at video screens. Following the example of many of their parents, who found great solace and entertainment in front of the television, many of these young people are not likely to develop a taste for serious reading. The shift from the written word to the visual image carries with it a tremendous challenge to those involved in the preser-vation and interpretation of religious traditions. The memory of a religious community such as the Franciscan Order, for example, is preserved in many literary documents. Not only do these texts serve as a historical disclosure of the particular tradition, they also carry the promise of the future development of that tradi-tion inasmuch as they are interpreted and appropriated anew by subsequent generations of community members. Those who work in formation and education have a particular responsibility in the future development of their religious traditions; therefore, they cannot avoid the question of the appreciation and use of those texts that are normative documents for the development and expo-sition of their charisms. Formators and educators introduce these classical texts to their members. Their role, however, will be equivalent to that of museum custodians if the spiritual classics are presented simply as part of a formation requirement and not inter-preted and integrated anew in the life of the community. Formation and education ministries provide a unique and privileged setting for this hermeneutical project; yet the cultural emphasis on visual images, as opposed to literary texts, complicates this task because many of our present and potential community members are already formed in an image-based culture long before they contemplate entering religious life. The trend towards a visual culture, manifest in many sectors of United States soci-ety for years, has been accentuated and accelerated by the appear-ance and ongoing refinement of what is spoken of as virtual reality. The emergence of a visual or image culture and the concomitant development of virtual reality technologies pose a challenge, in general, to a culture which has been largely transmitted by the written word, and, in particular, to cultural traditions such as reli-gious life which consider literary texts among the definitive, nor-mative expressions of community identity. 24 Review for Religious The challenge of a visual, image-centered culture, symbol-ized in the growing interest in virtual reality, can be faced by a cre-ative incorporation of technology and text. Our very idea of reading may change and lead to a new way of approaching clas-sical spiritual texts. Fortunately virtual reality itself may lead us back through the past to our future. The possible demise of lit-erary appreciation under the continuing onslaught of virtual real-ity technologies opens up an exciting, albeit undeveloped arena, for the cultivation of our literary tradition. Michael Heim writes that by the year 2000 the vast majority of written texts will be accessible in electronic form (p. 56). The availability of "elec-tronic literature" opens up attractive avenues for the develop-ment of an appreciation of traditions previously transmitted by the written word. One possible route for development is linked with the advent of what is termed hypertext. Hypertext technology is, according to Heim, an approach to navigating information. From the computer science point of view, hypertext is a database with nodes [screens] connected with links [mechanical connections] and link icons [to designate where the links exist in the texts]. The semantics of hypertext allows the user to link text freely with audio and video, which leads to hypermedia, a multimedia approach to information (p. 154). Hypertext allows every element of a text to be related to another element thereby creating an environment of electronic intertextuality, a "supertext" so to speak, where everything can be referred equally to something else. This is far different from the earlier literary experience where the secondary text or foot-notes were visually and conceptually subordinated to the primary text. Now, when a search is made of a particular word or phrase in hypertext, every context of the text containing that word or phrase will appear on the screen. Reminiscent 6f earlier forms of writing such as medieval illuminated manuscripts, hypertext unites the word and image into one text that is particularly appealing to those raised in a video or image culture. Hypertext allows these words or phrases in question to be cross referenced or linked simultaneously with photos, films and audio recordings. The reader, jumping back and forth at will through the electronic text, is free to enter into a world of con-tinuous textuality where the normal linear sequence of reading ~Tanuary-Febr~ary 1995 25 Johnson * Back to the Future The Scriptures are necessary because the debilitating effects of sin blind the eyes of the spirit and impede the effort to. understand the book of creation. is replaced by the intuitive, relational association of word, image, and sound. Since all the possible textual referents are but a click of the mouse away, the experience and the concept of a primary and a secondary text disappear on the screen right before our eyes (Heim, pp. 30-31). The introduction of hypertext capabilities into electronic lit-erature allows for an amplification and opening up of traditional spiritual texts to the inyriad levels of possible meaning embed-ded within the texts. Already there is the nascent realization among some contemporary observers of the literary scene that interactive soft-ware offers new possibilities for the appreciation and retrieval of classi-cal spiritual texts) From a Franciscan perspective, it is possible to envision an interactive version of Saint Bonaventure's Major Life of Saint Francis written in hypertext. This electronic classical text would incor-porate words, images, and sound. Among many of the advantages made possible by hypertext technology is that of allowing the introduction of other classics from the same tradition of the literary work into the dialogue of interpretation and appropriation. Not only would people be introduced to the written text of Bonaventure's work, but they would also encounter other classics of the Franciscan tradition represented in art, architecture, and music. Given the possibilities offered by hypertext, it is not difficult to imagine reading the Major Life of Saint Francis at a video terminal while simultaneously viewing the Giotto cycle of paintings in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi and listening to Gregorian chant of the same era. The utilization of interactive software in the manner just sug-gested leads us back, in a somewhat analogous sense, to the medieval experience of reading a text. For the medievals, like their classical predecessors, reading was an act of speaking and hearing words read aloud from a manuscript, since legere, "to read," and a'adire, "to hear," were virtual synonyxns in the Middle 26 Review for Religious Ages.4 This medieval practice of reading was often accompanied by looking at images on the manuscript which interpreted or illus-trated the words of the text. Our current custom of silent, pri-vate reading was rare in earlier times. Since it is largely culturally determined, our present mode of reading could be altered with-out losing the sense of what it means to read. Viewed against the horizon of cultural history, perhaps our current manner of read-ing is only an aberration that will gradually disappear as the use of virtual reality software with hypertext capabilities becomes a common reality in classroom education. A shift to the world of vir-tual reality, as unsettling as it might be to those who appreciate the solid feel of a book in their hands, may lead, paradoxically, to a greater appreciation of our literary tradition. Virtual Reality and the Franciscan Vision of the World The application of virtual reality technologies in the trans-mission and appreciation of the Franciscan literary tradition should not be reduced to simple, pragmatic response to an emerg-ing cultural challenge. Instead, this proposal is firmly grounded in the Franciscan approach to the world. The fundamental open-ness of the Franciscan tradition to the new possibilities offered by virtual reality technologies flows from a vision of the world as a divinely written text which can be heard as well as seen. Bonaventure, reflecting the medieval understanding of nature as the book of creation, considers all creatures as unique words uttered by God. He writes in the Commentary on Ecclesiastes, "Every creature is a divine word." All that exists comes into being through the word of the Father which is uttered eternally in the Son. Just as an audible word first exists as a mental concept in the mind of the speaker and takes on sensible form when spoken by a human voice, so also does the Son exist as the eternal Word of the Father which takes on sensible, temporal form in the Incarnation. From this perspective, creation can be considered a linguistic expression of the divine reality constituting a primary text or book in which men and women can read of the Creator. Scripture is a complementary text which fosters our attempt to read and appropriate the message found in the book of cre-ation. The Scriptures are necessary because the debilitating effects of sin blind the eyes of the spirit and impede the effort to under-stand the book of creation. Bonaventure notes in On the Trinity: January-February 1995 27 Johnson ¯ Back to tbe Future ¯. the book of creation was efficacious in the state of orig-inal innocence, when this book was not obscured nor the eye of humanity had been darkened. When the human eye, however, was darkened by sin, that mirror was rendered enigmatic and obscure and the interior ears of understand-ing were closed to hearing that testimony. Divine provi-dence decided to .provide, therefore, the testimony of another book, that is the book of the Scripture which was written, certainly, according to divine revelation . . . (q. 1, a. 2, concl. W. 55a]). The book of creation speaks of the Creator because, just as the wisdom of the artist is manifested in particular works of art, so too, all of created reality reveals the hand of the Master artisan. For Bonaventure, the same creatures, which are divine words, are also images of God which reveal the causative, creative wisdom of the Creator and share an analogical relationship with their original cause. As a result, any attempt on our part to come to know the Creator is determined by the exemplary nature of creatures and the physical and spiritual composition of human beings. The reality of the human condition dictates the necessity of learning about God through a careful reading of the book of cre-ation because the intellect is incapable of directly perceiving the light of God. Because of its material composition, it must depend on creatures who reveal, albeit in a darkened, imperfect manner, the divine light. Ultimately only contemplatives can read the book of creation because .only they, as opposed to natural philosophers, are able to perceive the divine image in the natural world which surrounds them. Creation serves as an appropriate matrix for contemplation because knowledge of God, like all knowledge of the intelligible, begins in contact with sense objects. Through the instrumental-ity of the five exterior senses, the contemplative can discern the power, wisdom, and benevolence of the Creator in the manifold works of.creation. While it would be a mistake to remain fixed on the level of sense objects by treating them as if they were more than images of the Creator, the intellect cannot ignore these images if it wishes to come to a profound knowledge of God. As Bonaventure points out, a painting can be known in two ways, either as a simple picture or as an image. To refuse to consider a painting as aft image is to remain fixated on the beauty of the perceived object wi.thout being drawn to the source of the beauty. To attribute the beauty to the source is an excellent way of know- 28 Review for Religious ing about God, because all noble properties observed in creatures speak of the Creator. Bonaventure's decision to ground the contemplative ascent into God amidst the beauty of creation was confirmed by Francis of Assisi's experience of creatures as witnesses to God. In the Major Life of Saint Francis, Bonaventure points out that the Poor Man of Assisi was neither deaf to the testimony of creatures nor blind to their beauty. Attentive to the divine glory resplendent throughout creation, he delighted in creatures and joined his voice with theirs in praise of the Creator. In the midst of nature, Francis perceived the divine harmony reflected in the various qualities of creatures and invited all humanity to praise God. With the keen gaze of the contemplative, Francis considered the world around him as a ladder allowing him to ascend to God. This lad-der, leading from creatures upward to the Creator, has three prin-cipal steps. The first step directly concerns the book of creation and consists in the proper reading of external, visible, sense objects. Bonaventure gives these images of the divine the techni-cal term vestige, meaning footstep. These vestiges are the discernible traces of the Creator in the world because they speak of God in a distinct, yet distant manner. Creatures as vestiges manifest the ternary properties of causality attributable to God as efficient, exemplary, and final cause. According to Bonaventure, all men and women are called, like Francis of Assisi, to read the book of creation. As the medieval understanding of reading indicates, the reading of a text entails the use of both our audio and visual faculties. Consequently, Bonaventure urges those who would pick up the book of creation in contemplation to open their eyes and ears to the presence of the Creator in the world. They will thereby come to a deeper knowl-edge of the divine which will be revealed in loving praise of God. A refusal, however, to seek the Creator in the splendors of creation through the use of the senses, is the height of stupidity: Therefore, whoever is not enlightened by such great splen-dors of created things is blind; whoever does not awaken from such great outcries is deaf; whoever on account of all these effects does not praise God is dumb; whoever does not perceive the First Principle from such great signs is a fool.--Open your eyes, therefore, direct the ears of your spirit, free your lips and apply your heart so that you may see, hear, praise, love and worship, magnify and honor your God in all creatures lest perhaps the whole world rise up ~anuary-February 199~ 29 ffobnson * Back to the Future against you. Fo? because of this the whole worm willfight against the senseless, but on the contrary it will be a matter of glory for the intelligent, who can say according to the Prophet: O Lord, you have delighted me in your work and in the works of your hands I will rejoice. How exalted are your works, 0 Lord: you have done all things in wisdom, the earth has been filled with your possessions.5 This text from Bonaventure's classic, The Journey of the Soul into God, along with other texts, is helpful in understanding the Franciscan approach to the world and serves as a point of depar-ture for a discussion of the relationship between virtual reality technologies and the Franciscan literary tradition. These texts indicate that Franciscans perceive and interpret the world as the book of creation, whose words are both visible and audible images of the Creator. Such an approach to the world, often spoken of as exemplarism, elicits a positive stance toward the senses, especially seeing and hearing, because they are essential in the reading of the divine truths revealed in the book of creation. The cultivation of the senses as doorways to the divine with the concomitant insight into created realities as images of God creates a favorable envi-ronment in which a response to and implementation of virtual reality technologies can be envisioned. In fact, the contemporary turn toward graphic imagery and multisensual reading of elec-tronic texts is a cultural shift which is harmonious with the tra-ditional Franciscan understanding and positive evaluation of imagery and senses. The various aspects proper to the Franciscan tradition which have been examined, the world as book and reading as a visual-aural experience, are reflected to some degree in current efforts to develop hypertext versions of literary documents. For example, if we regard the world as a book, we expand the concept of a leg-ible text beyond that of a written product such as a published book to include all created reality. Creation can be ~onceived as a hypertext replete with myriad referents to be read and inter-preted by the attentive reader. When the world itself is under-stood as text, a hypertext exposition of Bonaventure's Major Life of Saint Francis, which would include written words, images, and sounds, can be considered as a book and, therefore, as an inte-gral element of the Franciscan literary tradition. To admit with Bonaventure that hearing along with seeing is involved in the act of reading is to embrace the idea of reading as an audiovisual 30 Review for Religious experience. Consequently, those who listen to and look at a hyper-text version of the Major Life of Saint Francis on a monitor are as much involved in the task of reading as those who, book in hand, follow the written text. The Nature and Challenge of Infomania The challenge of virtual reality is not the only potential obsta-cle to the formation of members in a tradition exemplified by Franciscans. Infomania is another. The term infomania is used by Michael Heim to describe the ever growing hunger for informa-tion at the expense of wisdom. The roots of infomania are dis-cernible in the rapid and nearly universal acceptance of word processing as the standard form of writing technology within United States culture (pp. 41-42). The introduction of the com-puter and word processing capabilities has not only dramatically increased the flow of written material, but it has also altered the very experience of writing. The majority of writers in the United States, as recently as a decade ago, were compelled to formulate their thoughts carefully before typing them. The penalty for hasty composition was the inevitable task of retyping or, at the very least, the necessity of fumbling around with erasing tapes or bot-tles of correcting fluid. The logical sequence of thought, which demanded a beginning, middle, and end to every proposed sen-tence, paragraph, and chapter before it appeared in print, is no longer required with word processing. Words are now electronic data bits which are easily manipulated and transferred. Authors can create their texts free style, thinking, so to speak, on the screen in front of them. One consequence of writing with word processing technology is that language can become merely a surrogate for information transfer. Helm points out that when words are reduced to autonomous data bits they are easily removed from their original context and their significance obscured or lost: Information is a unit of knowledge that by itself has only a trace of significance. Information presupposes a significant context but does not deliver or guarantee one. Because con-text does not come built in, information can be handled and manipulated, stored and transmitted, at computer speeds. Word processing makes us information virtuosos, as the computer transforms all we write into information code. But human we remain. For us, significant language January-February 199 ~ 31 Johnson ¯ Back to the Future always depends on the felt context of our own limited expe-rience. We are biologically finite in what we can attend to meaningfully. When we pay attention to the significance of something, we cannot proceed at the computer's breakneck pace. We have to ponder, reflect, contemplate. Infolnania erodes our capacity for significance. With a mind-set fixed on information, our attention span short-ens. We collect fragments. We become mentally poorer in overall ~neaning. We get into the habit of clinging to knowl-edge bits and lose our feel for the wisdom behind the knowl-edge. In the information age, some people even believe that literacy or culture is a matter of having the right facts at our fingertips (p. 10). The challenge of infomania which Heim outlines is much more pressing for us as Franciscans than that of virtual reality, because infomania threatens to erode our capacity to appreciate the wisdom found within our own literary tradition. To encounter such wisdom requires contemplative reading antithetical to the rapid assimilation of information proper to the world of infoma-nia. While the reality of infomania does not appear to offer a res-olution of the problems it engenders, the seeds of a solution to the possible threat of virtual reality technology are contained within the technology itself. In fact, it could be argued that the growing emphasis on visual imagery in United States culture may lead to a deeper appreciation of the very literary texts we fear may be neglected. Electronic literature, augmented by hypertext soft-ware, holds out the promise of a richer understanding of classical spiritual texts like Bonaventure's Major Life of Saint Francis. It would be difficult to take the same optimistic position about info-mania. The widespread growth of infomania as a cultural phe-nomenon within the United States heralds a staggering shift in the relationship between reader and text. The implications for Franciscans and other religious communities are evident. When words are viewed as vehicles for bits of information to be trans-ferred and absorbed, as opposed to meaningful ideas to be com-municated and contemplated, the retrieval of traditions within a religious community by means of literary texts becomes prob-lematic. Both the initial appreciation and later appropriation of clas-sical spiritual literature presupposes a shared belief in the possi-ble significance or meaning of the texts; those who read the 32 Review for Religious definitive texts of a community do so with the notion that the lit-erature has meaning for the members of the community that pro-duced it, and by implication, significance for those who are considering entrance into the community. That literature in gen-eral, and religious texts in particular, has any lasting significance for individuals or communities is no longer a presupposition in the present era of infomania. Already, the appreciation of books and the sense of meaning proper to literature is disappearing in cer-tain sectors of our culture in the wake of an ever growing desire for information. Heim's observations here are trenchant: Today libraries are becoming information centers rather than places for musing. The Los Angeles County Public Library, the world's largest circulating library, receives more requests for information than requests for books. In 1989, one university in California opened the first library without books, a building for searching electronic texts. Books still remain a primary source, but they are rapidly becoming mere sources of information . Searching through books was always more romance than busyness, more rumination than information. Information is by nature time bound. Supported by tech-nological systems, information depends on revision and updating. When books become mere sources of informa-tion, they lose the atmosphere of contemplative leisure and timeless enjoyment. Old books then seem irrelevant, as they no longer pertain to current needs. One of the new breed of information publishers epitomizes this attitude in a pithy warning: 'Any book more than two years old is of ques-tionable value. Books more than four or five years are a menace. Out of date = dangerous (pp. 24-26). Infomania and the Franciscan Theological Tradition How are religious communities like the Franciscans to respond to the challenge posed by infomania? The answer may be found in our taking a hands-on, direct approach to the reading and interpreting of the spiritual classics of our tradition which accen-tuates their sapiential character. In a fashion somewhat reminis-cent of the futuristic literary community of Fahrenheit 4~I, Franciscans, especially those in formation and education ministry, bear the task of keeping their literary heritage alive. They can accomplish this by assisting potential candidates and present com-munity members in the art of textual interpretation. Their efforts would serve as a practical way in which the wisdom of definitive January-February 1995 33 Johnson ¯ Back to the Future texts can be preserved and handed on to subsequent generations. This hands-on approach necessitates the active involvement of the formation directors and educators in the reading and inter-pretation of these spiritual sources. The proper interpretation of spiritual texts in formation and educational spheres encourages a dynamic of contemplative appre-ciation; it also opens the door to the discussion of a wide range of issues relevant to the living out of the wisdom embedded in the texts. To simply throw supposedly "important books" at others, and especially at candidates for religious life without assisting them in the appropriation of their significance is a disturbing rep-etition of the same attitudes fostered by the culture of infoma-nia. Literary texts once again become nothing other than data bits to be processed and absorbed. The wisdom of our literary tradi-tion is acquired only when we, as Heim would urge us, go beyond the mere collection and assimilation of information to "ponder, reflect, contemplate" the meaning of what we read. Religious for-mators and educators can encourage such a contemplative stance toward 6ur literary tradition by entering into the process proper to the interpretation of spiritual classics, regardless of whether they are written in a mechanical or electronic format. When we speak of fostering a contemplative attitude toward the spiritual classics of the Franciscan tradi'tion, we do so in light of the invitation of the Second Vatican Council to religious to rediscover and interpret their charism in contemporary society. One dimension of renewal concerns the interpretation of defini-tive literary texts of the religious communities, since it is hard to imagine how they could rediscover their charism if daey.neglected the classics Of their traditions. There are any number of wisdom texts which religious communities consider as classic expressions of their community traditions. Many Franciscans, for example, would place works like Bonaventure's Major Life of Saint Francis into the category of spiritual classics alongside those of Francis and Clare. As the Directives on Formation in Religiolts lnstitute? recom-mend, texts like these are to be introduced early in the forma-tion process so they might foster in novices, "a relish for the great authors of the Church's spiritual tradition, without being limited to spiritual reading of a modern cast.''6 Unfortunately the practice of reading spiritual classics is often neglected in formation and educational programs. This situation is understandable, given that those responsible for the develop- 34 Review for Religious ment of these programs often lack the skills necessary to grapple with important, but obtuse wisdom texts from the past. Given the crucial role of spiritual classics for the renewal of religious life and the cultural obstacles to their appropriation occasioned by infomania, a major task facing formators and educators is that of acquiring a modicum of competence in this area so they can help those in their care to know and value their spiritual tradition. The discipline of spiritual reading will become a reality in the context of formation and education programs when, and only when, the forma-tors and educators themselves are willing to enter into an interpre-tative conversation with the clas-sical literature of their traditions. What does it mean to speak of textual interpretation as a conver-sation, and how is the conversa-tion conducted? When we use a term like conversation we are not referring to an idle debate, gossip, or nonnegotiable confrontation. The model of conversation here is that found in David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Cult~tre of Pluralism. Authentic conversation takes place when the participants are able to go beyond self-consciousness and self-seeking and enter into a joint reflection upon the subject matter of the conversation. The pattern of their conversation is back and forth; it includes the capacity and willingness to listen, reflect, correct, and to speak to the point. In the conversation, the questions raised in the exchange take over--not the individual agendas of those involved--as the sub-ject matter assumes primacy. The conversation model, as paradig-matic for the dynamic of interpretative understanding, is applicable in the reading of those literary texts that religious com-munities consider definitive or classic. This model can also be The discipline of spiritual reading will become a reality in the context of formation and education programs when, and only when, the formators and educators themselves are willing to enter into an interpretative conversation with the classical literature of their traditions. January-February 1995 35 Johnson ¯ Back to the Future employed in reflections on images and symbols of art, music, architecture, since all these areas are potential "texts" offering subject matter for religious conversation and interpretation. This proposed interpretative stance toward the wisdom texts of the Franciscan tradition, which reflects a contemplative approach to literary classics, is a direct challenge to infomania. It is grounded in the methodology of Franciscan theology. From the beginning, Franciscan theologians have been concerned with the pursuit of sapiential knowledge as opposed to the mere accumu-lation of information or growth in conceptual knowledge. According to Alexander of Hales, theology as a science has more to do with the experience of wisdom than the conceptual knowl-edge proper to science in the strict Aristotelian sense of the word. While Alexander distinguishes between the science of created real-ities and the science of original causes, he goes beyond Aristotle's definition of wisdom as the science of original causes to include affective knowledge of God. This manner of knowing is an expe-riential "tasting" of divine goodness because the term sapientia, according to medieval etymology, is related to the term sapor denoting "taste." For Alexander, such affective wisdom, which moves people to live better lives, is identified with theology: Furthermore, it must be noted that there is a science which perfects knowledge according to truth and a science which moves the affections toward the good. The first is knowl-edge according to sight and, therefore, must be spoken of as an absolute science.The second is knowledge according to taste and, therefore, wisdom must be spoken of as com-ing from affective taste according to what is said in Ecclesiastes 6:23: It is wisdom according to its name. Theology, therefore, which perfects the soul accord-ing to affection, moving [the soul] toward the good by the principles of fear and love, is properly and principally, wis-dom. The First Philosophy, which is the theology of philosophers, concerns first things and perfects under-standing by way of the arts and reasoning; however, it is not properly spoken of as wisdom. Indeed certain sciences, which treat consequent causes and those things which are caused, are said to concern science and not wisdom.7 Alexander of Hales's description of theology as sapiential knowledge is reflected in the writings of his most famous stu-dent, Bonaventure, who held that both Franciscan and Dominican theologians are called to the "tasting" of divine goodness. In their dedication to theological studies, the friars distinguish themselves 36 Review for Religious from other communities such as the Cistercians, Carthusians, and Canons Regular, whose attention was directed primarily towards prayer, devotion, and the celebration of the liturgy. For their part, the lives of the Preachers and Minors are called to theological reflection; there is a distinct difference in emphasis. The Preachers focus primarily on study itself and then on the affective enjoy-ment of God afforded by study, while the Minors emphasize the "tasting" of divine goodness followed by study. The view of the Franciscans was based on Francis of Assisi's conviction that it was pointless to acquire information about God without enjoying the experience of God. Bonaventure quotes Francis in this regard in the Collations on the Six Days, "What good is it to know many things and taste nothing." The savoring of "the goodness of the Lord" in the course of theological reflection was a significant, but certainly not the exclu-sive purpose of theology, according to the early Franciscan mas-ters. While they responded to the Aristotelian challenge by indicating that theology was indeed a speculative or contempla-tive science, the friars stressed that the discipline of theology was ultimately oriented toward praxis. Oddo of Rigauld writes "As to its end, theology does not rest in pure knowledge, but is moreover ordered to works; therefore, one must say that it is a practical science." Bonaventure notes that while theology does have a con-templative dimension to it, it is concerned most of all with the sapiential knowledge which moves the affections and leads to moral goodness. Following the teachings of Francis, the theolo-gians of the Franciscan community taught that accumulation of information or knowledge for the sake of knowledge was useless, if not dangerous. Knowledge of God was to be translated into daily life. Oddo makes this point when delineating the relation-ship between theological knowl.edge, pastoral skills, and action: And to that objection, 'that science has little or nothing to do with virtue' one can say that this statement concerns those sciences which are purely speculative; however, the-ology is not purely speculative, but practical. Or one can say that the Philosopher is referring to a certain knowledge provided that it does not lead to action. This is not the case with theology because even though someone may be a good theologian and preacher, if he does not wish to use what he knows, it is of little or no use to him.s The Franciscan understanding of knowledge as wisd6m, as sought in theological study and expressed in the context of daily .~anuao,-February 199Y 37 Johnson ¯ Back to tbe Future life, is diametrically opposed to the view of knowledge as insignif-icant, autonomous bits of information or data. Classical texts such as the Scriptures are of perennial value because they continually reveal the depths of divine wisdom and offer insights capable of molding the lives of those who read. The book of the Scriptures, together with all creatures who are divine words in the world, speak of the wisdom of God with words in need of interpretation and appropriation. The same point can be made about the literary classics of the Franciscan tradition. Franciscans, therefore, are to grow in knowl-edge by reading and appropriating the divine words uttered throughout creation. Listening and responding to their spiritual classics, Franciscans engage in a lectio divina marked by an expe-rience of divine wisdom which changes their lives for the better. In the present age of infomania, where growth in knowledge can be mistakenly equated with the accumulation of information, the Franciscan hermeneutic underlines the inseparable link between words, be they written or electronic, discursive or graphic, and meaning. Words are rooted in a context of ~neaning which is to be respected. In the transfer of information, there is the peril that the significance of the words used will be altered or disappear all together. Whatever their form, words cannot be reduced to incon-sequential data bits because they are ultimately an expression of the word of God.9 In a culture marked by infomania, a contem-plative stance toward the words found in the classical texts of the Franciscan tradition will go a long way in preserving these works as wisdom texts for generations to come. Conclusion The twin challenges of virtual reality and infomania call for the sober realization, first of all, that there is no going back to a supposed earlier, precomputer age of innocence. Those who used to do battle with typewriters and now play with word processors will testify to this. Would-be Cassandras warning of nightmare cybernetic futures will never succeed in turning away the crowds pushing through the doors of America's myriad video arcades. The fact is that the very people huddling around video terminals are future candidates for religious communities. The era of vi~tual .reality.and infomania has already arrived in the experience of these young people regardless Of what 6ur feelings about the.real 38 Review for Religious or perceived, negative or positive aspects of these cultural phe-nomena may be. In response to this challenge, a reasoned, pro-gressive approach is imperative that capitalizes on the potential of new technologies such as hypertext, while safeguarding the sig-nificance of our literary heritage. We need not fear the growing diffusion of a virtual reality mentality, if we are willing to utilize the new technologies in a manner suitable to the texts we wish to preserve and hand on to future generations. These efforts will be wasted, however, if there is not a concomitant attempt to appreciate and retrieve these spir-itual classics. The appropriation of these texts, be they written or electron]i:, is uli:imat~ly dependent on an interpretative dialogue within communities, such as the Franciscans, that produced and enfleshed them in the praxis of a shared life. In the future, candi-dates may read the classics of spir-ituality in hypertext with the assistance of images and sound. And just as Augustine was struck by Ambrose's .silent reading of the Scriptures in a Milanese garden, a formation director may marvel at a candidate reading the writ-ings of Francis on a glowing mon-itor in a Minneapolis home. Whatever our future real or vir-tual reality scenarios may look like, one thing is certain: We will always need men and women capable of interpreting and living out the perennial wisdom embedded in our spiritual classics. Their efforts in the formation and education spheres are essential if the abiding significance of our religious traditions is to be appreciated and appropriated anew in a culture formed in the matrix of info-mania. The Franciscan understanding of knowledge as wisdom, as sought in theological study and expressed in the context of daily life, is diametrically opposed to the view of knowledge as insignificant, autonomous bits of information or data. Notes ~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 4Yl (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991). January-February 199Y 39 Johnson ¯ Back to the Future 2 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 160. 3 John Cumming, "The Frankfurt Bookshelf," The Tablet, 30 October 1993, 1434. 4 Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections: Typologie dedsources du moyen age, 17 (Turnhout: ]~ditions Brepols, 1976) 54. s Quote from Jos~ Antonio Merino, Visionefrancescana della vita quo-tidiana (Assisi: Cittadella Editrice, 1993) 92. 6 Potissimum lnstitutioni, Directives on Formation in Religious Institutes (Rome: Vatican Press, 1990) 38, n. 47. 7 Alexander of Hales, Summa tbeologica, trac, intro., q. 1, c. 1, Solutio, 2b (Quaracchi: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1924-1928). s Quote from Leonardo Sileo, Teoria della scienza teologica, 18. 9 Orlando Todisco, Le creature e le parole, p. 127. A Commuter's Winter Reflection Dawnlit silhouettes of leafless trees crisply etched against a glowing sky simple and spare: long lacy limbs, primly elegant, tangent tapered trunks, trimly debonair for all their rootedness. Wind-whipped or rain-soaked, ice-tipped or snow-cloaked, steadfast they stand as wif~ter witnesses: daily summoning not to vivacious hope (the grace of evergreens) but to a feisty faith in future blossoming. Mary Karen Kelly GNSH 40 Review for Religious RUTH FOX Beyond Ecumenism: Religious as Pioneers Everyone today is aware of the need for ecumenism, with the call for dialogue and mutual respect among the various religions of the world. Because of their grounding in theology and in a life of prayer, men and women reli-gious are in an especially advantageous position not only to be involved in ecumenical affairs, but to move beyond the ordinary boundaries of ecumenism. What does it mean to go beyond ecumenism? It means going beyond dialogue, coffee, exchange of homilists, prayer for unity, interfaith choirs, joint Thanksgiving Day services, and ecumenical conferences. Each of these typical ecumenical events is limited in scope and intention. The participants come together for an hour or so for a specific task, are nice to one another, learn about a new book to read, and then go home feeling good about their open-mindedness. But because these are only events, the results probably go little further than the boundaries of the event. Sister Ruth Fox OSB is the president of the Federation of St. Gertrude, a union of eighteen monasteries of women in the United States and Canada. She is the current representative of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious to the National Ecumenical Consultation. This article was originally presented at the annual meeting of the National Ecumenical Consultation 8-10 August 1994, at Narragansett, Rhode Island. The NEC is an organization for religious interested in ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue. Sister Ruth's address is Sacred Heart Monastery; Box 354; Richardson, North Dakota 58652. aTanuary-February 199 ~ 41 Fox ¯ Beyond Ecumenism How, then, can religious go deeper than these ecumenical exercises? To put it simply, there is a need to move beyond events to processes. Some valuable insights into this shift of focus can be gained from a recent book on business management: Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe by Margaret Wheatley (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1992). The author has used the findings of new science to take a look at organizational management. She says that we have lived and worked from a Newtonian point of view--everything has its parts which function in a predictable, hierarchical order. All we need to do is figure out the structure of the universe, apply it to our human systems, and all will function in an orderly manner. Most organizations have tried to operate this way, even the church. If we just get this program, these people, the right plans, com-petent hierarchy find obedient subjects--especially obedient sub-jects-- then the church will be a perfect organization. If we get a good ecumenical program, get the right parts and right people, organize them carefully, direct from an efficient main office, unity will result. But that is not the way the universe works, and it is not the way ecumenism will work. Wheatley says that the new science has revealed a different kind of universe: "The quantum mechan-ical view of reality strikes against most of our notions of reality. Even to scientists, it is admittedly bizarre. But it is a world where relationship is the key determiner of what is observed and of how particles manifest themselves. Particles come into being and are observed only in relationship to something else" (p. 10). The world is made up of events that are held together in rela-tionship by unseen connections. "These unseen connections between What were previously thought to be separate entities are the fun-damental elements of all creation" (p. 10). Relationships define structure, not the other way around. Living structures are con-stantly changing as the inner relationships change. They are a "continuous dance of energy" (Fritjof Capra quoted in Wheatley, p. 32). Particles come and go, in time too brief to imagine, into a state of being through relationships with energy sources. Matter is manifested now as particles, now as waves of energy, always in relationship. "Nothing exists independent of its relationship with something else" (p. 34). Even our observation of matter brings us into the relationship, into the dance, by which we are changed 42 Review for Religious and matter is changed. Everything in nature is a web of connec-tions, of potential relationships. For organizations in this age of quantum mechanics, the rel-evant question is not what structure will give control, but what structure will enhance the current channels of relationships? What structure will encourage more channels of relationships? Channels of nourishment are needed also. Wheatley says that healthy structures are nourished by information because infor-mation gives energy. "We need to have information coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with new life" (p. 105). Energy, new life, relationships extend far beyond their point of origin. It is now believed that space is filled with so-called "fields" of connections. We have long been familiar with the all-pervasive fields of gravity and magnetism. "The invisible world is filled with mediums of connec-tions" (p. 49) that exert influence on mat-ter far and wide. In human relationships also, there are comparable fields of energy. One can actu-ally feel different kinds of fields when walk-ing into a home or church or community. Because of attitudes and behaviors of individuals in the community, a person can almost tangibly touch an invisible field of energy: hospitality, openness, peace, friendliness, or tension, suspicion, coldness, rigidity. Wheatley says, "We need all of us out there, stating, clar-ifying, discussing, modeling, filling all of space with the messages we care about. If we do that, fields develop--and with them, their wondrous capacity to bring energy into form" (p. 56). I am reminded of the Buddhist prayer flags that I saw waving in the wind around the Tibetan Buddhist temples in India. Words from the Buddhist scriptures are printed on these flags, with the idea of sending the message of peace and love throughout the universe. Without knowing about scientific "fields" the Buddhists have been, in a sense, attempting to create invisible fields of tran-quillity for ages. How does this new science speak to religious who are chal-lenged to move beyond ecumenism, to be pioneers for interreli- The world is made up of events that are held together in relationship by unseen connections. January-February 199Y 43 Fox ¯ Beyond Ecumenism gious activities? The insights from science imply that we do not need to focus our main energies on constructing programs or structures that will create unity. The unity we desire is already a reality in the existing web of connections. Faulty information and attitudes have divided us in the past. Now we need more infor-mation to overwhelm us with the realization that God created us one, that we are already bonded together by existing relation-ships that come from the creative hand of God. We have allowed patterns of self-interest to blind us to this web of connectedness. Where the web has been broken or cam-ouflaged by centuries of debris, religious have the vision and ded-ication to reveal the truth of our connections once again. Where fields of suspicion, self-righteousness, arrogance, and misunder-standings abound, religious can replace these invisible energies with new fields of trust, openness, charity, humility--first in our own houses, then in our local church, then our civic communities. Each single word we speak, each simple act of unity we perform, goes forth from us on an endless journey of connections. An image came to my attention as I was reflecting on this topic. My daily meditation location is in my bedroom where I can look out over the North Dakota prairie from my window. My attention fell on a barbed wire fence that separates our property from a cattle pasture. Fences. Humans build them to mark bound-aries, to keep something out and something in--to protect, define, possess, claim, imprison, differentiate. Yet this past winter, a herd of deer who could find no food in the snow-covered pasture dis-regarded the fence and leaped right over it to enjoy the needles of the evergreen trees on our property. The fence did not mark any boundary for them. At best, it was just a minor barrier. Then I thought of birds who fly over all human fences, and of crawling creatures who would barely notice the wires stretched above them. For these creatures, all the earth is one. For us also, in God's eyes, there are no fences between us; we are already one. We are united in our humanity, in our crea-tureliness, in our being images of God. But we have created fences to mark boundaries between us. With the ecumenical movement, we have decided sometimes to hold hands through the fence, or, while staying on our own side, to walk together along the fence line for a short distance. Religious authorities have decided at times to build gates at certain specified points in the fence and to allow their subjects to go in and out with supervision. More and 44 Review for Religious more of these gates are being built for interchange. Decrees are occasionally issued which declare some portions of certain fences outdated. Recently I read that Catholic and Lutheran leaders around the world are moving their respective churches toward lifting the 16th-century mutual condemnations on the doctrine of justification. The target date is set for 1997. Why does it take so long? These breakthroughs, it seems, are slow and labori-ous, and meanwhile the fences are still there to divide us. Using a rural prairie image, I see religious called to be the fence-crossers, like the deer, the birds, the squirrels, the crawlers, who know the oneness of the ground beneath them and the heavens above them. They qui-etly fly over, jump over, crawl through, or slide under the fence, perhaps even without noticing it, building networks and relationships with one another, the earth, and all crea-tures. I myself have crawled through the barbed wire fence many times. Sometimes I have lost my balance and fallen on the ground, gotten little tears in my clothing and scratches on my legs. Fence crossing can leave us with scars, but scars are at least signs of something tried. Only a few of us may be called to the level of making ecu-menical documents and decrees, or founding interfaith commu-nities. But I think our pioneering as religious can be just as valuable in discovering and developing ways for us and for the friends of our communities to build local networks, one-on-one relationships beneath and over the fences. In my own limited experience, I am aware of four such con-temporary ongoing processes involving religious that have been moving the participants beyond ecumenism. 1. Monastic Interreligious Dialogue: After Vatican Council II, the Vatican asked the Benedictine Order to initiate dialogue with Our pioneering as religious can be valuable in discovering and developing ways for us and for the friends of our communities to build local networks, one-on-one relationships beneath and over the fences. January-February 199Y 45 Fox ¯ Beyond Ecumenism the non-Christian Eastern religions. Because of the commonality of monasticism, there was already a basis or groundwork for the beginning of dialogue. The American Benedictines began their dialogue with the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile in India. Since 1978, several exchanges have occurred, with Buddhists monks and nuns visiting Benedictine monasteries of men and women in the U.S., and American monks and nuns spending time in India. I was one of the fortunate ones to spend ten weeks in India in the fall of 1986. Because of my monastic formation, I felt quite at home in a Buddhist monastery, where the daily horarium, the chanting of scriptures in the tem-ple, and the lifestyle of simplicity, poverty, celibacy, and obedience was similar to my own. We joined the Buddhists in their temples for their hours of prayer and talked about our common concerns for world peace, justice, a recognition of dignity for all persons, self-support, and care of our elderly. Although dialogue took place, there was much more than dialogue--there was a connec-tion of the heart, an ongoing process of communion that is con-tinuing to change the hearts and attitudes of all the participants and their respective communities. As I reflected on this exchange, I began wondering if such an exchange has been happening among Christian religious. I suspect that most Catholic religious are only vaguely knowledgeable of other Christian religious in the United States. I am not aware that there has been any exchange of Catholic women religious with Anglican, Lutheran, or Orthodox communities of women. (I would not know about the men, but I have not heard of any exchanges.) Are we even on each other's mailing lists for our newsletters? Do we have any members interested in such exchange? 2. Great Plains Institute of Theology: Several years ago the west-ern North Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America initiated an ongoing education program in theology for pastors and lay people. Clergy with theological expertise were invited to share their studies with others in small group classes. One of the first faculty members was a Benedictine monk, and one of the ongoing board members has been a Benedictine abbot, with many of the sessions being held at the Benedictine abbey. I was invited to be a member of the board seven years ago, even serving a term as president. Although several Benedictine monks and nuns often participated in the classes and seminars, very few 46 Review for Religious Catholic priests or lay persons did. There was somehow a con-nection between Benedictines and the Lutheran clergy and laity. Perhaps studying theology together is not beyond ecumenism-- but the resulting ongoing relationships, trust, and openness are. 3. Monastery of St. Benedict Center: We have within the Federation of St. Gertrude eighteen monasteries of Benedictine women in the U.S. and Canada. Most of our communities are facing diminishment of members, energy, and sponsored institu-tions. As Jude Weisenbeck SDS wrote in an article in Review for Religious (November-December, 1993), most religious commu-nities are struggling for survival and renewal, perhaps even refounding. One small monastery of seven members in our Federation, in Madison, Wisconsin, has in a particular way met this challenge head-on. They initiated several consultations with their ecumenical friends, and, as a result, have made a commit-ment to refocus their identity as an ecumenical Benedictine monastery. There are several canonical as well as lifestyle ques-tions yet to be answered. But I believe we do not even know what the questions will be until it is tried. I am pleased that this monastery is willing to begin this journey beyond ecumenism. 4. United Methodist Church: Some years ago (1984) the United Methodist Church approved a resolution to explore the possibil-ity of establishing an ecumenical monastic community. Since then some attempts have been made to establish various types of com-munities with the mentoring of Benedictine monasteries of men and women. Will these small efforts make any difference in promoting unity? The herd of twenty deer criss-crossing our lawn almost daily for a couple months this past winter will affect our lawn this summer. Their consumption of the lower branches of our ever-greens will affect the birds who nest there, which, if it does not affect the insect population, will affect the beauty of our grounds. I am reminded of Wheatley's quotation of Edward Lorenz regard-ing the butterfly effect. "Does the flap of a butterfly wing in Tokyo, Lorenz queried, affect a tornado in Texas (or a thunder-storm in New York)? Though unfortunate for the future of accu-rate weather prediction, his answer was yes" (p. 126). As men and women of the Scriptures and imbued with the Holy Spirit, we know that we stand on common Holy Ground and that we worship the same God. We are one; let us do what we can to move beyond ecumenism and live as one. .~anuary-Febr~ary 1995 47 SHAUN MCCARTY Dynamic Memory's Role in Reimaging the Future d s we approach the third millennium, there has been much talk concerning the quest for new visions and the need for new paradigms that will express old values in ways suited for the future. We face complex and confusing social contexts affected by such influences as scientific and technological advances, the movement towards a global economy, the realignment of national boundaries, and the growth of multicultural societies. These pose formidable challenges for people of faith. In religious cirFles, too, many perceive what they consider to be major paradigm shifts in progress. There has been considerable interest in developing new models of church, of consecrated life, of various ministries, of spiritualities that will incarnate peren-nial values in ways more suited to the accelerating changes the future will bring. As We attempt to accept coresponsibility for fashioning the future in these transitional times, there is obvi-ously a need for the exercise of creative imagination as well as for careful, prayerful, and corporate discernment of the signs of the times. My purpose here is not to offer predictions or prophecies for the next millennium. Rather, it is to provide some framework and stimulus for pursuing new visions and new paradigms in these transitional times. My focus will be on the role of dynamic mem-ory as it relates to the process of reimaging the future. To move Shaun McCarty ST has taught in the Washington Theological Union and in the Shalem Institute. Currently he is director at the Trinity Ministries Center. His address is 1292 Long Hill Road; Sterling, New Jersey 07980. 48 Review for Religious forward responsibly, we need to go back faithfully. My basic premises are these: (1) Shaping new paradigms calls for the exer-cise of creative imagination. (2) Key to the development of creative imagination for the future are dyna~nic memories of the past. (3) Personal and corporate memories will be more dynamic to the extent that we bring them to prayerful reflection and discern-ment of the signs of the times. Creative Imagination As understood here, creative imagination is the power to cre-ate new images or ideas by combining past experiences. As I use the term, I mean the graced capacity that allows us to project ourselves into the future; it involvds the creative ability to con-struct a dream and the human imperative to conceive an individ-ual and corporate vision. Without a vision for the future, both groups and individuals become moribund. Every lasting society, culture, tradition needs its utopia, its dream. No civilization has survived without its cor-porate dream. For example, the American Dream is articulated, though far from realized, in documents such as the Bill of Rights which stress equality for all . . . life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nowhere was it more prominently symbolized to our immigrant forebears than in the Statue of Liberty nor more lyricized than in the verses of Emma Lazarus inscribed at its base: Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she With silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost, to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door.' Every faith tradition has its vision for the future. As Christians, our corporate dream for the future is for the reign of God; our individual piece of that dream is for resurrection. Faith communities within the church have visions that are, as it were, refractions of the larger Christian vision of the reign of God. These dreams need ongoing reinterpretation suited to given times and culture. For example, the corporate dream of my own faith tradition as expressed by our founder (Thomas Augustine Judge, CM) was that "every Catholic be an apostle." January-February 199Y 49 McCarty ¯ Dynamic Memory's Role This might be better fornmlated today in terms of the universal baptismal call to mission as well as to holiness of life. Visions like this, I would suggest, are capable of containing the commitment of a person's entire life. Hence, relevance of a dream for the present summons us back to the past so we can move ahead to the future. Our collective and individual memories of God's actions in the past are touch-stones for discernment in fashioning new paradigms for the future. Indeed, as discerning communities of faith, we are bonded by shared memories of the past and shared hopes for the future. Each of us needs a dream to lure us forward unless, of course, we are content to live by convention. We are energized by our dreams, enervated without them. It involves the choice, either to dream or to die. Individuals need a sense of vision in discerning their call and their gifts in bringing those dreams to fruition. When people will not dare to dream or when they lose the dream, a sense of meaning in life can fade or si~nply vanish. Dynamic Memory In exploring the notion of dynamic memory, I ask the reader's indulgence as I begin by paraphrasing a favorite story of mine written for children of all ages entitled Wilf!'id Gordon McDonald Partridge.t Wilfrid Gordon was a small boy whom, we are told, "was not very old either." He lived next door to an old folks' home, and he got to know them all. He liked, listened to, played with, ran errands for and admired different residents. But his favorite per-son of all was Miss Nancy Mison Delacourt Cooper because she had four names just as he. He called her Miss Nancy and told her all his secrets. One day he overhears his mother and father calling Miss Nancy a "poor old thing." "Why is she a poor old thing?" asks Wilfrid Gordon. His father replies, "Because she's lost her memory." "What's a memory?" Wilfrid Gordon asks. He was always asking questions. "It's something you remember," said his father. But Wilfrid Gordon wanted to know more, so he visits his favorite old folks asking each in the turn, "What's a memory?" They respond variously that memory is something warm . . . 50 Review for Religqous something from long ago., something that makes you cry. something that makes you laugh . . . something as precious as gold . So Wilfrid Gordon goes home to look for memories for Miss Nancy because she had lost her own. Into a basket go his shoe box of shells . . . a puppet . . . a medal his grandfather had given him., his football . . . and, last of all, a fresh warm egg from under a hen. Then he calls on Miss Nancy and gives her each thing one by one. Then she starts to remember. The warm egg reminds her of tiny bird eggs she had once found in her aunt's garden. When she puts a shell to her ear, she remembers going to the beach long ago by tram in her button-up shoes. The touch of the medal leads her to talk sadly of her big brother who had gone to war and never returned. The puppet brings a smile to her face as she remembers a puppet that used to make her sister laugh. She bounces the football to Wilfrid Gordon and remembers the day she had met him and the secrets they had told. The story ends, "And the two of them smiled and smiled because Miss Nancy's memory had been found again by a small boy, who wasn't very old either." Using this story as a point of departure, permit me to make a few preliminary observations about dynamic memory. In his quest for the meaning of memory, Wilfrid Gordon finds it has various facets. He hears respectively that it is something you remember, that it is warm, that it is from long ago, that it carries feeling as well as thought (it can make you cry or laugh!) and that it is as precious as gold. As with Miss Nancy, there is in all of us a human tendency to forget. Most are prone especially to spiritual amnesia. Dynamic memo~Ty is the opposite of amnesia. It is the kind of memory that has life and power in the present. Wilfrid Gordon understood that Miss Nancy needed to find her lost memories. We all need to find lost or half-forgotten mem-ories and to be reminded of old ones, lest they fade from con-sciousness. Indeed, it is the function of the Holy Spirit, as Jesus said, to "instruct you in everything, and to remind you of all that I told you On 14:26). It is the work of the Spirit to unfold an ever new understanding, interpretation, and application of the once-and- for-all dream of Jesus. January-February 199Y 51 McCarty * Dynamic Memory's Role There is much locked-up power in the past to affect the pres-ent and the future. Wilfrid Gordon was able to unlock some of that power in Miss Nancy with his little treasures. Each became a reminder for her--the egg, the shells, the medal, the puppet, the football. Often help is needed to reawaken memories so as to activate their power. Little people like Wilfrid Gordon sometimes make better helpers. Sharing faith experiences can trigger forgotten ones in others. There need not be words. Silences can speak. Symbols and rituals reach a deeper level of remembrance. Memory is a gift or grace that enables both personal inte-gration and community. As with Miss Nancy, its loss tends to dis-connect one from previous life experiences and to dismember one from effective community and communication with others. The act of remembering has the power to "remember" what has been dismembered, scattered, disconnected. Wilfrid Gordon enabled Miss Nancy to connect with her past and, in the process, to deepen a bond with him in the present. Obviously, dynamic memory is more than mere mental recall. As with both Wilfrid and Miss Nancy, some memories are happy and some sad. This .kind of rmnembrance affects the whole per-son-- mind, body, and spirit. It is recall that summons feelings as well as facts. As with Miss Nancy, some are happy and need cel-ebration; some are sad and perhaps need healing and integration. Dynamic Memory within a Faith Context By dyna~nic me~nory I mean remembrance that has life and power now. It is the opposite of static memory, that is, memory without life, unable to influence the present or future. It is not rote 2nemory, that is, the ability to commit mere facts to the store-house of memory with or without accompanying meaning. Dynamic memory is more than nostalgia, that is, a fond recollection of and longing for ari idealized something or someone in the past. Often this kind of r~membering can be an escape from the pres-ent. Similar to nostalgia is reminiscence that can range from mere sentimental longing to dwelling in the past to the neglect of the present. Reminiscence is often a recall of something no longer present, a past that is over and done with. Rather, dynamic memory is an active, grace-empowered, lib-erating remembrance that brings the past into the present so as to 52 Review for Religious influence and empower it and to provide hope for the future. For Jews and Christians alike, it is sinful to have a "bad mem-ory," that is to say, to forget God's saving actions in the past. Thus the Passover story is told over and over again. Our Eucharist is celebrated unceasingly. In the Old Testament, remembering is one of the chief vehi-cles of God's dream. Memories are handed down largely through stories. We need to know and to own our own personal and cor-porate stories. Our personal sto-ries take on new and deeper meaning as part of the larger and longer stories of our faith tradi-tion which are really memories of God's graciousness. In the Book of Deuteronomy particularly, the Israelites are summoned to remember God's past mercies as the basis for their present fidelity to the covenant. The role of memory and tradi-tion is often stressed in Deuteronomy with reference to Yahweh's appearance at Mount Horeb where God says: ". Take care and be earnestly on your guard not to forget the things which your eyes have seen, nor let thegn slip from your memory as long as you live, but teach them to your children and to your children's chil-dren" (Dr 4:9). The Hebrew verb to remember means to act on behalf of. It implies bringing what one remembers to life in the present. In so doing, the continuing efficacy of saving events is tapped. If remembering calls for action in the present, memories can be dangerous, something to which martyrs are witness. The Greek word for remembrance is anamnesis. It is used in reference to memories of God's saving intervention in history. In the Eucharistic assembly we hear Jesus' words, "Do this in remem-brance of me." They are an invitation for the worshipping com-munity to appropriate the salvation Christ accomplished once and for all. Story-telling can enrich memory and stimulate imagination. Each little reminder Wilfrid Gordon brought to Miss Nancy evoked its own story. In addition to our corporate stories of God's The act of remembering has the power to "remember" what has been dismembered, scattered, disconnected. January-February 199Y 53 McCarty ¯ Dynamic Memory's Role past mercies, each of us has personal remembrances of God's felt presence and power in our lives and ministries. Importance of Dynamic Memory for Corporate Identity Dynamic memory bonds believers in faith community. Together in faith we are communities of memory and hope. Our worship is grounded in memory. Remembering is an essential dimension of worship. Symbolic action or ritual is a fundamental way of remembering. Through rituals, memories are recalled and connections are made. As a matter of fact, rituals can touch into deeper levels of the psyche than can mere words. This became evident to me on visits with my dad in the clos-ing years of his life when he was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. For me, it was watching a loved one die in slow motion as the human faculties only gradually shut down. Long after we were able to carry on a coherent conversation, indeed, until the very end, before leaving him I would ask if he wanted me to bless him. Immediately, he'd bow his head and make the sign of the cross as I raised my hand in blessing. It confirmed my belief that religious symbols and rituals, better than words, can evoke response from deeply imbedded values. For Christians, in liturgical acts of remembrance (for exam-ple, sacraments), Christ is truly present. This is especially true for Eucharist in which our memories are taken up into the paschal mystery. It is in memory of Jesus that the church assembles. Importance of Dynamic Memory for Individual Identity Memory is fundamental to personal as well as to corporate identity. It not only enables each of us to hold fast to an identity, but it can also help us to shape it in new ways. As we grow older, we try to piece together a unified self from the fragments of our lives. It is a process that can result in greater openness, inner peace, and wisdom. Dynamic memory is certainly central to personal religious iden-tity. Faith adds an essential dimension to remembrance. Our per-sonal stories take on new meaning as part of a longer and larger story which embraces our stories, deepening and broadening them, giving them context and continuity. It has been said that Jesus came to know himself Out of the religious memory of Israel. 54 Review for Religious In retrospect, dynamic memory reveals God's presence and power in our lives as a kind of personal anamnesis. Retrieving memories of our God experiences helps us find the design of God's particular providence for each of us. It enables us to string the beads of past epiphanies. This heightened sense of previous religious experiences (or better, religious dimensions of human experiences) provides us with a touchstone for testing the authen-ticity of movements within in the process of discernment. Such memories of the past are the basis for confidence in the present and hope for the future. Memories, Imagination, and the Future What of the relationship of memory and imagination in dis-cerning the future and for being coresponsible for shaping it? Concisely put, memories are the stuff of which dreams are made. Creative imagination does not involve creatio ex nihilo (cre-ation from nothing). Only God can do that. Creative imagi.na-tion produces new configurations from the stuff of dynamic memories. We see this, for example, in the ways in which New Testament writers draw from the images, stories, and rituals of the Old Testament. We note it particularly in the way Jesus defines his own identity and mission in the language and personages of the Old Testament, especially of Isaiah. For example, at the begin-ning of his preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth, he read from the Book of Isaiah to claim his own mission: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind and release to prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the Lord . Then he began by saying to them, "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing" (Lk 4:18, 20. As discerning communities of faith we are bonded by mem-ories and hopes. Our collective and individual memories of God's actions in the past are touchstones in discerning for the future. Processes or Prayerful Reflection/Discernment The need for ongoing prayerful reflection/discernment of past and present becomes all the more important for seeking new January-February 199Y 55 McCarty ¯ Dynamic Memory's Role We are called by virtue of baptism not just to holiness of life, but also to proclaim the Good News in word and deed, to be "walking beatitudes." visions and paradigms. I am referring to intentional efforts to dis-cern the signs of the times. In pursuing the tasks of renewal, much progress has been made by religious groups in discerning and applying two of the criteria for genuine renewal, namely, Gospel values and fo.unding charisms. I am not sure we have become as adept at discerning corporately on the basis of a third criterion frequently men-tioned in renewal documents, namely, the signs of the times. We would do well to collaborate in developing and implementing models of group reflection and discernment so we can responsibly and in ongoing fashion continue to read the signs of the times. By processes of prayerful reflection and discernment, I mean that intentionally and consistently we come together as groups of Christian people to be led by the Spirit in prayerful silence and dia-logue con.cerning our experiences of life and ministry so as to allow these experi-ences to become dynamic memories and occasions of disclosure of God's inten-tions/ desires for us and the people we serve in carrying forward Jesus' redemptive mission. This com-pressed definition bears some unpacking. I am speaking of processes that are dynamic, ongoing, varied, and done together. They are communal ventures, collaborative action in the present, stemming from and productive of genuine spiritual community. This calls for a coming together as Christian people. I see this as an ecumenical project with people bonded by a common bap-tism into Christ's Body to continue his mission of proclaiming the reig

Issue 67.2 of the Review for Religious, 2008. ; Challenges Witnessing Being Disciples Ignatian Exercising QUARTERLY 67.2 2008 Re view for Religious fosters dialogue with God, dialogue with ourselves, and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to liveaccording to charisms, of Catholic religious life. As Pope Paulvl said_, our way of being church is today the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Maih review@slu.edu ¯ Web site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ° Pontifical College Josephinum 7625 North High Street ° Columbus, Ohio 43235 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2008 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. Editor Associate Editor Canonical Counsel Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Paul Coutinho SJ Martin Erspamer OSB Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen Hughes RSCJ Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib S'(/'D QUARTERLY 67.2 2008 contents prisms 116 Prisms 118 134 challenges No Escape from Finitude John Navone SJ reflects about our struggle for human growth, our development with all its limitations, !n relation to our transformation through the risen Christ. Personal and Group Reflection Being Burned by the Fire Mary Joseph Schultz SCC ponders candles and fire and their symbolism in our spiritual life and growth. 114 140 159 witnessing Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley Avis Clendenen explores episodes from the lives of two churchwomen, the 12th-century Benedictine H]ldegard of Bingen and the 19th-century founder of the'Sisters of Mercy, Catherine McAuley, which show the duty and daring needed then and now in leadership that is transforming and transformational. Weavers of God: The Warp and the Weft Jeanne McNulty SFO, OCV, draws upon the art of weaving as an image of effort and pattern in our spiritual life. Review for Religious 165 173 181 being disciples Discipleship, Faith, and Commitment Damian C. Ilodigwe shows how Peter's forthright confession of Jesus as Son of the living God accentuates the importance of personal encounter with the Lord for authentic discipleship. Personal and Group Reflection Seeing with the Eyes of Christ Peter Schineller sJ suggests some practical ways that the imitation of Christ can become our way of seeing, thinking, and acting with the eyes, mind, and hands of Christ. The Celibate Aunt or Uncle: Another Blessed Vocation John J. Fisher OSFS describes the grace and gift of family as not only enriching our vocation as religious but also defining who we are as we minister to our wider, extended family in our various apostolates. Personal and Group Reflection 190 196 ignatian exercising What Is a "First Week Retreat"? David L. Fleming SJ presents a way of understanding the First Week of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, often called "sin week," as a time that is about deepening a relationship with God. Is the Church Ignatius's Fourth-Week Focus? J. Thomas Hamel SJ suggests that the Fourth Week of the Ignatian Exercises, which deals with the appearances of the risen Christ, might take' on a more ecclesial look as a kind of triptych. departments 204 Scripture Scope: The Letters and Theology of Paul 209 Canonical Counsel: The Lacuna Canon 215 Book Reviews lly 67.2 2008 prisms O~ 2 February 1974, Pope Paul VI issued his apostolic exhortation Marialis cul-tus. Following up on the liturgical reforms of Vatican I1, the pope desired to identify clearly the age-old norm for all theological and devo-tional development regarding the place of Mary in our Catholic lives. As the pope wrote, "In the Virgin Mary everything is relative to Christ and dependent upon him. It was with a view to Christ that God the Father from all eternity chose her to be the all-holy Mother and adorned her with gifts of the Spirit granted to no one else" (25). The norm is that Mary is always viewed in her relation to Jesus. Liturgical art, both Eastern and Western, has traditionally portrayed Mary with Jesus in its icons, statues, and paintings. It appears that it is only in the 19th and 20th centuries, espe-cially with the Lourdes and Fatima devotions, that the statues and paintings picture Mary by herself. The famous tilma-image of Our Lady Review for Religious of Guadalupe from the 16th century is not an exception. Mary is a woman wearing the broad band around her waist that signifies her pregnancy. Appropriately, then, our traditional imaging of Mary is always stressing her basic title from the earliest church councils. She is Theotokos--the Greek word meaning "the one who bears God." Mary is the first of the apostles; she is always the one who brings Jesus (God) to whom-ever she goes. From our New Testament account, we know that the event we identify as the Visitation follows immediately upon the Annunciation. Mary brings Jesus to her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist. Mary's place in all our Christian lives remains the same as it was for Elizabeth. She is a woman always on mission. She brings Jesus (God) to us. As a result, she remains for each one of us a model of our own Christian vocation. We all are meant to be like Mary in the light of our baptism in Christ. We too are "theotokoi"--people who bring Christ to whomever we go. We are like Mary, our model. We, too, are always on mission. We bring Christ by our way of speaking and acting or just by our way of being present to others. In every situation of our daily living, we Christians are on mission, bringing Christ to others. David L. Fleming SJ Miss Jean Read, an RfR staff member from 1975 to 1998, died peacefully on 23 February 2008 at the age of 96. Answering the office phone, she was the soul of friendliness and readiness to accommodate people in whatever questions or needs or desires they had. She was a proofreader par excellence. We can have a healthy envy of her and her long and good life. 67.2 2008 JOHN NAVONE challenges No Escape from Finitude Life stories, true life stories, involve a struggle from the start. We have complex relationships to work out with the members of our family. We are marked by our early experiences for the rest of our lives, even though changes occur in the way we perceive events, imagine ourselves, understand others, and choose to act at various stages of our life. As our life goes on, changes become more and more difficult. 1181 Human Authenticity Calls for Struggle People hope to grow in sensitivity and responsiveness to true values, but such growth is not inevitable. There are human failures and mediocrities. Continuous development varies with people's roots, their opportunities, their good fortune, their adroitness in avoiding set-backs. People can come to recognize harmful, John Navone SJ has written for this journal for more than four decades. His address is Via Silvio Spaventa, 4; 50129 Firenze; Italy. Review for Religious dangerous, and misleading satisfactions for what they are and drop them. They can choose not to let discom-fort, pain, and privation obstruct their pursuit of true values. They can discover values they had previously overlooked. They can move beyond mere personal tastes and interests to benevolence and beneficence towards others. They can disdain rationalizations, open them-selves to things as they are, and help themselves and others to become what they should be. This is a matter of creative tension struggling towards personal integration. Various conflicting claims and urgencies divide us. Our human relationships can-not be free of all constraint or ambiguity. Our authentic personal development needs questions and problems no less than answers and solutions. In fact, every answer and solution prepares us for the creative tension of fur-ther questions and problems. We develop when we are steadily oriented toward goals which strain our personal resources and are truly worthwhile. Tension between Desires and Limits We experience a tension between our desires and our limits. Desire, imagination, and inquiry would seem to have no fixed limits; a corollary of the absence of limits would be the absence of any need to choose. We learn from experience which desires are impractical and to be dismissed. False or exaggerated ideals, desires, and plans could lead to negative consequences, and so we deliberate about what actually can be implemented. We settle on a possible course of action and proceed. Such a decision implies the acceptance of limits. As G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When ,I19 67.2 2008 Navone * No Escape from Finitude Christian faith does not believe that the tension between desire and you choose anything, you reject everythingelse . If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton." Goods chosen imply goods renounced. Our decisions ratify and increase our.limitations. Our commitments imply our acceptance of limitation. Our desires, hopes, dreams, and ideals strain against that limitation, but limits remain even when our desires are fulfilled. Jesus Christ, the paradigm of Christian faith, never sought exemption from limits, decisions, or death. Christian faith is lived in the concrete realities of finitude and resists flight into illusion. With no escape from finitude, it relies on God's will and grace. Our actions are sustained by desire of some kind. We seek to attain something we deem good, straining __ against limits. Changing our-selves or our situation implies an ideal which limits should be resolved by differs from our present reality. eliminating desire. This ideal must have come to terms with lim-its; if not, it would remain an empty dream. Christian faith does not believe that the tension between desire and limits should be resolved by eliminating desire. A contemporary theologian says: "For Buddhism, the supreme perfection is to kill desire. How distant the men of the Bible, even those closest to God, seem from this ideal! The Bible is, on the contrary, filled with the tumult and conflict of every form of desire D.e.sire is essential and ineradicable." 120 Review for Religious The Challenge of Serious Decision Making Often our reluctance to make serious decisions and choices is less a fear of suffering than a secret dread that permits few illusions or certainties about what will fol-low. We share with Hamlet the tendency to indefinite postponement; we might, with Heyst in Joseph Conrad's Victory, choose drift. Even that fails. Heyst elect~ some-thing that is not there to elect: security by withdrawal and passivity. Persons who choose to ignore the demands of their circumstances choose what is itself a form of death. Our very needs become known to us as inner tensions, and the way we strive to fill them requires choice. A good choice relieves the tension. Other needs will become evident later, and other choices can attend to them. If our inner tensions imply our need for new deci-sions, our decisions demand awareness and strength. The lack of such strength makes us pathetic. On the other hand, strength is of no use if we are not aware of alternatives. If decisions are to be fully free and human, all that one knows must come into play, and one's will-ingness to detect self-deception. The Second Vatican Council gives expression to the inner tension within which our decision making takes place: The truth is that the imbalances under which the modern world labors are in line with that more basic imbalance rooted in the heart of man. For in man himself, many elements wres-tle with one another. Thus, on the one hand, as a creature, he experiences his limitations in a multitude of ways. On the other~ he feels him-self to be boundless in his desires and sum-moned to a higher life. Pulled by manifold attractions, he is constantly forced to choose among them and to renounce some. (GS §10) 67.2 2008 Navone ¯ No E~cape from Finitude Fear of Insignificance There is a tension at the heart of every human life story, which Ernest Becker describes as the fear of insig-nificance. This tension reflects the human nature at the heart of the life story. As a contemporary author puts it: "Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity." At the same time, "man is a worm and food for worms." He lives in the tension of his duality. His inner self enjoys freedom of thought, imagination, and the endless reach of symbolism; his body limits, however, determine and bind him. This tension is aggravated by the fact that we are not living among ideal persons in an ideal, world. From the aggra-vation of our basic predicament, we often seek pseudo-solutions to avoid having to face the tragic aspect of life. Rousseau taught the French Revolution that people were good and institutions evil, so reorganize the institutions, and people will be able to be good. He assumed that, by their own unaided efforts, people could create institutions to resolve all their tensions and conflicts. 122 Development within Limits Some lives are more integrated than others; some are more full of conflict. We can search for our own true story only within certain limits of possibility and prob-ability. The recognition and acceptance of these limits is, in fact, the only way to the realization of our true story-- the story most appropriate to our authentic possibilities. Tensions are aggravated when we try to be what we cannot be, when we pretend to be other than we are. They are aggravated at the social level when a political ideology engenders in the masses a passionate hope for a utopia Review for Religious without the means to attain it. Both individuals and societ-ies can miss their true stories through self-deception with regard to their true and limited possibilities. Detachment from self-interest and bias is difficult to achieve. We sense the gap between our possibilities and our actual moral achievements. Awareness of our moral inadequacy cre-ates a tension which we often attempt to resolve through rationalization, a "cover story" that is out of joint with our experience. Guilt, rationalization, and self-deception imply the painful experience of moral finitude in our aspiration toward values and our true possibilities. Creative Crises The personal crises of a life story are often turbu-lent, but they do not necessarily have the disintegrating effect of severe mental illness. The powerful emotions which erupt from a personal crisis can signify a per-sonal liberation from false beliefs and lead to a more productive life'. One can emerge a stronger and better person. Some hardship, suffering, or mental anguish is the lot of everyone. These things are potentially creative; they can help individuals improve the quality of their inner self. Economic prosperity and a good educational system are no guarantee of personal morality, charac-ter, and maturity. People grow by passing through such critical periods as coming of age, getting married, the birth and raising of children, and the advent of bereave-ments, old age, and dying. Frustration, too, may assist personal development, for character and personality are achieved through overcoming difficulties with patience, intelligence, and persistence. Getting all we want when we want it does little towards personal development; it even seems to preclude personal growth. 123 67.2 2008 Navone ¯ No Escape from Finitude Some hardship, suffering, or mental anguish is the lot of everyone: The psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski has developed a theory of mental growth through positive disintegra-tion. He holds that, to achieve a thorough integration of the cognitive, moral, social, aesthetic, and other such human functions, one must undergo a disintegration of a previous integration. The positive disintegra-tion of an integration characterized by biologi-cal determinism, automa-tism, rigidity, stereotyping, and a lack or low degree of consciousness is effected by a growing insight into oneself and others and a con-scious and deliberate adoption of other multilevel and multisided understandings. 124 The Correlative Notion of Self and God Our personal history in the use of the word "God" may reflect a maturation process characterized by criti-cal turning points and creative suffering. Inasmuch as our notions of self and God are correlatives, we may uncover something about our own identity by exploring our encounters with the word "God" in our personal crises. If Christ means "he who saves us from a self-centered existence," personal crises may be prerequisites for finding God's true value in our lives. Concentration on self-preservation and self-satisfac-tion, on what appears to keep us from harm, turns love in on itself and blocks it from going out to God and oth-ers. It is good if our personal crises liberate us to live in society with God and neighbor. Never to be free from self-concern about our slightest needs is the condition Review for Religious of alienation from God and neighbor. It is only in our God-given ability to respond to God's self-surrendering love that we can be free to live and love anything other than ourselves. Personal maturation entails suffering in confronting crises in our lives. Carrying our cross daily implies the Christian conviction that, to understand scriptural truth adequately, we need to experience the cross in our lives. Those who can freely lay down their lives for their ide-als and values are persons who have been strengthened by their Master's mission and by their joyful awareness of being loved by him. Such freedom comes from expe-riencing with others a grand participation in God's life of self-giving love. If our notions of the self and God are correlatives, they alert us to the suffering of others, to the reality of their condition, the condition of all those to whom we are related and whom God loves. The Book of Genesis affirms the goodness of the world when it describes God affirming the goodness of it. The compassion that Jesus felt for the afflicted is the compassion of his Father. Not only our notions but also our feelings about the self and God are cor-relative. A reasonable love for oneself betokens a rea-sonable love for others. Its reasonableness includes a profound awareness of the self as gift, as dependent for its existence on the loving generosity of the Giver. Our personal crises should help us to mature in our under-standing of the love which the Giver expresses in his gift of the self and other selves; they remind us that we are not autonomous monads, that our existence and happiness depend on others. Adrian Hastings affirms that cruel people want a cruel God, and cruelty has been a characteristic of human society: the sadism and masochism of the human 6Z2 2008 Navone * No Escape from Finitude race time after time create a face of God as cruel as itself. Old Testament theology could not be unaffected by the cruel divinities all around and the cruelty of the Israelites themselves; still, Hastings believes, the heart-rending struggle of the Old Testament was to show that such was a false face of God, that Yahweh is not mer-ciless but merciful. Our behavior reflects the face of God that we see. What we do or do not do expresses the meaning of our God-talk; our behavior reflects the healthiness or unhealthiness of our vision. 126 The Face of God in Christ Crucified The face of God is revealed in personal crises. Jesus on the cross reveals the compassionate face of God. "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" On 4:18). For Christians the cruelty of the cruel cannot express the nature of God; rather, it is the most outra-geous denial of it. A personal face, the face of Jesus, the suffering and crucified Messiah, is the face of the God of love and compassion. This is the reality which the apostolic church communicates in its preaching: "We preach Christ crucified" (1 Co 1:23). Those who die with Christ rise with him; the cross is the security of Christians. The evangelists speak of the cross in considerable detail, for this is the story of Jesus' ministry making available the way to God. To preach the cross is to preach the resurrection; for it is the message of the cross that sets us free: "dead, yet here we are alive" (2 Co 6:9). On the cross the Son of Man recovered our lord-ship in and over creation, through the obedience for which we Were created. The true face of God is revealed in the Crucified; the loving obedience of Christ is for Review for Religious Christians the model of the perfect self. What Christ has done at Calvary creates and shapes our notion of God, the correlative of our notion of the self that is Christ. Calvary reveals a God who serves his creatures with a compassionate, healing, and community-creating love; it is God giving his life for his people in the high priest who is also victim. Calvary expresses the loving servanthood of God in Christ which gives direction to Christian faith and action. The stoW of Jesus is the stoW of God waiting on us: "The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them" (Mt 11:5). It is the story of a costly, commit-ted, and constant Love that prevails over death. Jesus' life is the parable of God's rule, the embodiment of God's diakonia. Paul appeals to this when he says, "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ" (Ga 6:2). The way of the cross is the way of Christian maturation in a life of theocentric self-transcendence. It is the way to meet personal and social crises, not a way of escaping them. To preach the cross is to , Treach the resurrection. Communion: God's Purpose for Us All The suffering of Calvary transformed the Jewish con-cept of Messiah among the first Christians. At the Last Supper, Jesus waits on his disciples. The servant who waited at table in Jesus' day was the diakonos. Now Jesus, the master, in washing the feet of his disciples, performs the new diaconal deed, the embodiment of agape: "A new {_/27 67.2 2008 Navone ¯ No Escape from Finitude 128. commandment I give to you, that you love one another even as I have loved you" (Jn 13:34). "As I have loved you" points to God's kind of love, the love of costly self-giving. The diaconal deed of the Last Supper expresses the saving, community-creating love of service and friend-ship. According to John's Gospel, Jesus thought of his disciples as sharing in his diaconal work of cosmic redemption. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (3:16). "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (16:33). "He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father" (14:12). Communion through Self-Expending Love Acts of self-expending love for others, rather than out-of-the-body experiences, are Christians' usual confir-mation of the life after death that the risen Jesus' appear-ances express: "We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren" (1 Jn 3:14). Paul relates Christ's love to our Christian belief in life after death: "I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rm 8:38-39). The completion of God's purposes for his entire creation and our individual destiny are indivisible, for our lives occur and develop in community. Our lives are incomplete without a depth of fellowship with God and with others, even though this fellowship is only a fore-taste of our joyful participation in God's glorious life, which is the ultimate object of our Christian hope. Review for Religious The Christian vision of God is incompatible with indifference to injustice and the suffering of others. Its vision is of a trinitarian God whose being is in commu-nity, and whose self-expending love creates community. In the light of this vision, salvation is participation with others in the goodness and beauty of God's self-giving love: "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on us what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Co 2:9). Life and Death in the Paschal Mystery For Christians the risen Christ is the focal point of a theme common to all religions, the pursuit or convic-tion of the ultimate nature of reality. The resurrection of Christ is the key to meaningful life in a numinous but incomplete world. This awesome and fascinating event~ysterium tremendum et fascinans--is at the heart of the life coming out of death that is shown in love of our brothers and sisters (1 Jn 3:14). It is the key to understanding the fulfillment of our life stories in the perfect community of God's kingdom, and also to understanding the mission of the church in solidarity with all humankind. The community of Christian faith interprets the life story of Jesus Christ as a divine summons to a personal and social transformation that requires prayer, informed conscientiousness, and appropriate action. Paul is the community's spokesman both when he preaches what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and in his recogni-tion that the "old man," the old self, self-centeredness, does not die a sudden death. There is a phenomenol-ogy of both life and death at every level of our con-sciousness. There are incontrovertible signs of physical death, and there are incontrovertible signs of physical 129 67.2 2008 Na~one ¯ No Escape from Finimde life. There are similar signs at the psychic, affective, intellectual, and spiritual levels of our existence which are perhaps not as readily discerned. Many of the names or titles referring to Jesus are metaphors, Tides for the Life-Enhancing Jesus Metaphor is a way of grasping the unknown through the known, of relating our former experience, to our new experience. Our metaphors say a great deal about what we are, or are like, and about what we are becoming. They can express the self and help in telling life stories. They are a clue to our feelings about our relationships and about the Mystery which is their context. Many of the names or rifles referring to Jesus are metaphors. Jesus defines himself in terms of the life-enhancing effect he has on others, an effect which cre-ates a community. To John's disciples he says: "Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, good news is proclaimed to the poor, and happy is the one who does not lose faith in me" (Lk 7:22-23). Jesus is what he does. He is sight for the blind, legs for the lame, purity for lepers, word for the deaf, good news for the poor, and the happiness of the believer. The community of faith manifests the new consciousness that Jesus Christ creates. Jesus' life shows the previous deficiency of individual and communal human existence. People diagnose illness from their awareness of what constitutes good health. Review for Religious Human Transformation through the Risen Christ "Almost twenty centuries have elapsed since the Christ-event took place, and yet no completely satisfy-ing overall explanation of that fact has been proposed," states Joseph Mitros sJ. Theological studies, the sciences, and philosophy have opened new vistas concerning the origin of humankind and its physical and moral state, concerning the problem of evil and liberation from it. These achievements and the data they provide must be evaluated and then integrated into present knowledge before more satisfying answers can be found. There is, however, no doubt among Christians about the risen Christ, the transformation of the apostles, and the community of Christian faith. The apostolic, evangelical, patristic, medieval, modern, and contem-porary theological attempts to explain the Christ-event originate in the reality of Jesus Christ's resurrection. Clement of Alexandria taught that the incarnate Logos illuminates the believer with his own incomparable light. Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria wrote elo-quently of Christ as the light of the world and as the giver of the Spirit of truth, transforming humankind through enlightenment. There is no single formulation of the .doctrine of the Christ-event in the patristic period. The exemplarist tra-dition describes the effect of the risen Christ primarily as moral regeneration, a redirection of the human mind and heart. The Western liturgical tradition tends to note what Christ's self-giving love has achieved for others. The Eastern liturgies see the event as a rescue and a healing. Christ the victor has enabled us to experience a deliverance from evil, whereas Christ the illuminator explains our entry into a life-giving reality. Humankind has been brought from darkness to light, from blindness 13,1 67.2 2008 Navone ¯ No Escape from Finitude to vision, from bondage to freedom, from turmoil to peace, through our participation in Christ's gift of his Holy Spirit, through our divinization (theosis), through our becoming brothers and sisters of Christ and sons and daughters of his Father. The experience of the lex orandi, of communion with the risen Christ in prayer, stimulates theological reflec-tion on his life story throughout the centuries. It bears witness to tile resurrection as God's action on behalf of humankind and as the transformation of humankind in relation to God. Christian Hope Transcends All Images For every doctrine which sees human lives in rela-tion to Jesus Christ's life stow, the elements of divine and human, of once-and-for-allness and human fulfill-ment, are essential. The saving effect of the risen Christ on our life stories is interpreted according to different models of various cultures throughout the centuries. When they clarify how, through the risen Christ, we may live life more fully, they serve God's people well. The community of faith, however, lives in a state of tension, aware of its limitations. It is only on the way to the fullness of life in the kingdom of God. Our present situation feels precarious, and the future kingdom seems remote. There is .tension between the kingdom to be revealed at the end of history and that same kingdom already present in the Christian faith community and in the lives of individuals going through the stages of their own life stories. Christians live in hope. There is a continuity between this hope and the grace-filled pull of God's eternal kingdom. There is, however, an obscurity surrounding this kingdom. The reason, according to Kevin McNamara, Review for Religious is that the object of our hope is none other than God, the question-raising and question-answering Mystery at the heart of all human life. And so any clear and definite idea of our true future can only be provisional. Christians cannot commit themselves absolutely to any blueprint for human happiness. We are always aware that something is missing, that our true hope eludes all human definition and planning. Josef Pieper says this about hope: "What marks the true hope is that [a per-son] holds himself in readiness for a fulfillment which goes beyond every imaginable human postulate." Hope, nevertheless, experiences the goodness and promise of the Mystery encompassing our life stories. Christian hope, defined by the Christ story, is not without some positive knowledge of what the future kingdom will be like. The titles and names of Jesus, the doctrines and models with which the church discusses our diviniza-fion in Christ, are all attempts to express this positive knowledge of and hope for the kingdom of God. Personal and Group Reflection 1. How have I handled the tension between realizing my desires and, by shutting out other possibilities, experiencing my limits? When have I experienced this tension as bringing me closer to Christ? 2. What is my response to the statement: "The face of God is revealed in personal crises" (p. 126)? 3. What name or title for Jes~s is my favorite? Can I explain the meaning of this title? " 67.2 2008 MARY JOSEPH SCHULTZ Being Burned by the Fire 134] l have come to set the earth on fire, and how I .~. wish it were already blazing" (Lk 12:49). Last year my mind and heart were caught up in this Gospel verse from a Sunday liturgy. Some phrase spoken by the homilist hit a nerve in me and inspired me to pon-der the symbolism and the reality of fire. Why do we use a flame to witness to the Eucharistic Presence in our tabernacles? Why are candles and flames frequent symbols of religious life? What is the primal image of fire saying to me today? How might God use me and my community to set the world ablaze? Open to the Fire Though I have never learned the art of creating fire, I know that kin.dling a flame from scratch requires effort, concentration, and patience. It also requires the proper materials. Using a match is so much easier, but how much more satisfying it must be to create a fire Mary Joseph $chultz SCC last wrote for us in our 65.2 (2006) issue. Her address is Assumption College for Sisters; 350 Bernardsville Road; Mendham, New Jersey 07945. Review for Religious using only rudimentary materials, persistent friction, and breath! Long ago Jesus desired to create a spark in me, at the first beckoning to religious life, when I was a child. He chose me, the most rudimentary of kindling, unknown middle child, shy and backward, plain and unassuming, and invited me to leave home and lend myself to the creation of fire. Calling me to join, at fourteen, a small and little-known religious community in a tiny, obscure New Jersey town, he knew his plan. He desired to use me as kindling, if only I would agree. The dry ordinari-ness of my life could actually catch fire more easily, I suppose. I was easily uprooted and picked up, and will-ingly I came. The chafing and friction began at once. Over these forty years, there has been constant rubbing. Isn't that what community life is for, at least in part? The twig with so many rough edges has lent herself to the Divine Hand. Personalities, assignments, self-knowledge, faults, losses, illnesses, disappointments and shattered idols-- all were offered for the kindling, warmed by the Spirit's breath, and the friction came fast, furious, and constant. How else to create a fire? God rarely uses a match! The twigs of my life were all laid bare, bark removed, and the quickening hand chafed a new spark, a blaze to be used for others. The breath of the Spirit has been ever present, gende, and at times unsettling, fanning the spark into flame. Imagine the patience of God! Most times the liv-ing Wind has been imperceptible to the kindling, stir-ring up smoke and covering its source, always keeping the promise of a blaze alive. Persistent breath needs to change direction if one side is unresponsive. The Breath never gives up in its passionate desire for flame. 135 67.2 2008 Scbultz, ¯ Being Burned by the Fire Eventually the Spirit came with greater urgency, the kindling was in just the right place and disposition for the fire to catch. Now the Breeze was more needed than ever to sustain the blaze, as is still the case. Where would I be without the constancy of the Spirit, nourishing, lighting, stoking the flame, and keeping the blaze alive? As I approach a fire I can choose to take one of three gtances: warmth, risk, or consummation, 136 Coming Close: Warmth, Risk, Consummation As I approach a fire I can choose to take one of three stances: warmth, risk, or consummation. Coming close, especially on a winter day, the warmth is delight-ful. It sets me at ease, calms the shivering limbs, and holds out to me a promise of comfort. I drop my burdens and begin to loosen my wraps, undo the scarves with which I am bound up, and settle in near the comforting warmth. The fireplace can be romantic., a rosy glow to melt away harsh realities and frozen relationships . . . the honeymoon of novitiate days and early ministries when all was right with the world. Soon a promise (threat?) of change creeps into the heart. The Spirit Breath is still blowing. The flames lick higher. Should I choose to back off?. Why risk losing comfort? The rosy glow lulls me, even into a trancelike state. It becomes easy to go through the motions of reli-gious life, near the fire but not in it. Content to observe, being warmed and even nourished, I need to take no risks and I am definitely not consumed. Safety is compromised Review for Religious by getting too close to the Fire, too involved. If I get too near I will be burned. And yet It draws me. I come closer, even at times reach out a hand, and I am singed. Fire purifies, but only when I am close enough. Gold is not refined, iron is not melted, food is not cooked, and a wick is not set alight when kept at a safe distance. I am useless unless I allow the Fire to surround me, catch hold and use me, draw me in to consume. For what else am I saving my life? The flames beckon, even mesmerize, as I contemplate them, but I had better be aware of the risks if I choose to draw closer. The Fire is painful. Over the years when times of suffering enveloped me I have rarely realized the close-ness of God. On the contrary, God seemed utterly dis-tant, mere vapor on the horizon. Only in retrospect did I realize that it was God's closeness and my immersion in the Fire that caused the pain. I could not draw close to a Flame without being burned. Risky? Yes! But also so necessary to be a part of the blaze set upon the earth. Being one with the Fire fulfills my purpose in being. Was I not called to be a holocaust? To remain on the periph-ery, insipid and lukewarm, might be safe, but it is surely not productive. Leaving the rosy, romantic glow of the fireplace to jump into the Blaze is what religious life is all about. I need to be enveloped if I am to be of any use. Being Fire Wood that is caught, right in the middle of the fire, takes on the appearance of the fire itself and loses its own identity. The log glows from within. No longer do sparks dance on the edge, no longer is there only risk of being singed, but now the blaze works its magic from the core. It consumes the willing fuel. Fire and fuel can no longer be separated. 67.2 2008 Schultz ¯ Being Burned by the Fire Leaving the rosy, romantic glow of the fireplace to jump into the Blaze is fohat religious life is all about, 138 Fire burns away the dross and purifies only as much as the wood lends itself. If I resist, roll away, fall off the pile back to a safe distance, my comfort zone, I will not be touched. I will save myself, but for what? I might still feel the warmth as I seek to return to the "safety" of my earlier days. But once I risk being part of a conflagra-tion I cannot go back or run away. My already singed self tells the tale. I had caught the light and begun to burn. Now nothing but total consumption can satisfy me. Why pretend otherwise? I have also learned that seasoned wood burns the best. Wood too moist, too green, too full of sap (self) leaves no room for the flame to take hold. It sizzles, spits, and smokes, too little fire to be of much use. I must let myself be alone to dry, to be cured, even to unfeeling brittleness, as the sap is drained from me and I lie lifeless on the ground, forgotten for the time being. The Stoker of the Fire will again pick me up when I am ready, gather me when I can be of most use, when the flames can really do their job. What does it mean to become Fire? To me it means nothing less than being Jesus, the Light of the world. He is the one who called me, the kindling. He lets me lie at times, unused because I am not yet useful., too green and full of the self-sap that deters the flame. I need to be seasoned, over and over again, dried out and left alone. Only when I am ready will he gather me up Review for Rdigious for kindling, hold me close and breathe his Spirit, all the while applying friction where most needed, turn-ing me this way and that, harder and faster for sparks to catch. There is nothing else for me but to become Fire. In this is my purpose, the purpose, I believe, of all religious men and women. Let God throw me into the Fire. Let Jesus take me over, glow in me, radiate warmth and light, and let me be a part of the blaze ignited by Love on earth. Let me be part of something much bigger than myself. In my consummation my life is fulfilled. Unveiled Hide not Your face. Show me Your face. And though that sight Be my death, I shall live indeed. Show me that incandescent, Altogether lovely face, That earth-splitting, Sky-rending, Fire-kindling face. Be my sole desire, Burn bright in me Until I am molten gold Reflecting only You. Teresa Burleson 139 67.2 2008 AVIS CLENDENEN witnessing Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley Do you remember having a Jeremiah experi-ence once a long time ago? You told God "I am only a youth" and God said, "Be not afraid for I am with you" (Jr 1:4-8). Do you remember that first consciousness of being called, when the clay of youth was moist and malleable? A time when you took for granted that the Potter was on your side, shaping you? When you felt that you and your companions were singing the new church into being? In your commu-nity, do you notice treasure dwindling away? In the anxiety and bewilderment of this our time, how desperately do you seek to prevent further loss? In these days, when I find myself among women and men religious to share faith and 140 Avis Clendenen wrote for us in the September-October issue of 1999. She is professor of Religious Studies at Saint Xavier University; 3700 West 103 rd Street; Chicago, Illinois 60655. Review for Religious community, I sometimes think of recalcitrant clay and a frustrated Potter. I wonder if some have adapted Jeremiah's words from "too young" to "too old": "Ah, Lord God! I am weary from speaking the truth in love. Our best days are behind us. I am too old." And God says: "Do not say, 'I am too old,' for even now to all to whom I send you you will go; be not afraid, for I am with you to deliver you." Jeremiah would understand and empathize with the disillusionment, even terror, of feeling that life is falling apart. The youthful Jeremiah found himself in the stocks in midlife. His view (Jr 20:1-9) provides a window into his soul. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that it is in prayer that this prophet of deep dispute finds sustenance for his life and ministry; he finds sus-tenance, however, only in continued dispute. Can you imagine the dialogue as Jeremiah struggles with the God who called him to his vocation in the first place?2 Was he not the one to whom Yahweh addressed the lovely words of "knowing him before he was formed in the womb, consecrating him, and appointing him prophet to the nations"? The help in destabilizing situ-ations, Brueggemann proposes, is honest conversation that draws God in deep and thick.3 Brueggemann goes on to say: "This is the very God to whom prayers can be reliably made, not a therapeutic God, not a warm fuzzy, not a dear uncle, but God of hosts, God with hard capacities and stern resolves. Jeremiah prays to and trusts this God, because alone he cannot withstand his persecutors and he will not appeal to a God who is kind but helpless.''4 Jeremiah's confinement is the kiln of his becoming. He finds a deep freedom; he finds duty and daring, cour-age for the next challenge. He is the patron prophet of 141 67.2 2008 lendenen * Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley 142 The Christian faith itself is built upon anamnesis/ best days ever before us, not behind us. What we know about the ministerial vocation is that it keeps unfolding in unexpected ways, that safety is never forever. We will feel fire in our bones from now till the time, as Rahner says, when the harvest of our earthly life is enfolded into the Incomprehensible Mystery of the One past-all- graspness. Until that day we are still in the world's grasp, striving to discern the Spirit's complicity in the losses we experience and to imagine a new vision from the confines of the stocks. How do we tend the fire when the embers are struggling for air? As people of faith we live in anamnesis: the retrieval of deep memory so powerful that reality being recalled from another time becomes present. The antonym of anamnesis is amnesia, the loss of a large block of inter-related memories. It is a catastrophic and sad reality to lose one's memory. People of the Book and those who treasure the long sweep of religious his-tory experience anam-nesis in their liturgical remembering and in the duty and daring of their vocation. The Christian faith itself is built upon anamnesis: "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again." The lyrics of Marty Haugen's "We Remember" capture the why of our charge not to forget: "We remember how you loved us to your death, and still we celebrate that you are with us here" (GIA, 1980). This remem-bering roots us in a permanently meaningful past, holds us meaningfully in the present, and orients us toward the future whose meaning we are called to both wait Review for Religious for and bring about. Such Catholic remembering effects what it signifies by evoking and provoking what Johann Baptist Metz long ago called "dangerous memories." He said there are memories of earlier experiences that break through the center point of our lives and reveal new and dangerous insights for our present. They subvert our structures of plausibility. They are like dangerous and incalculable visitants from the past.5 Dangerous Memories Only those who have been transformed to some degree can be agents of larger transformations. Transformation usually relies on the ordinary forma-tive episodes of our lives. The Jungian scholar Murray Stein says, "The transforming person is someone who realizes the inherent self to the maximum extent pos-sible and in turn influences others to do the same.''6 Such an individual has the substance and style to inspire and elevate others to a greater moral largesse. Relatively few people desire to attain the social consciousness and do the soul-making inner work that would make them transforming and transformational persons. In describ-ing them Stein says, "Their lives show an extraordinary degree of uniqueness, imagination, and pristine indi-viduality." 7 Like the prophets of old, the 12th-century German Benedictine Abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the 19th-century Irish woman Catherine McAuley were two such transforming and transformational individuals with fire in their bones. Both women were-in their early forties when they took their first steps beyond what was toward what could be. Hildegard, a medieval theologian, visionary, and church reformer, and Catherine, the foundress of the Sisters of Mercy, were both fifty-two years old when 143 67.2 2008 Clendenen ¯ Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley they faced and decisively overcame obstacles to bring their visions to fruition. Both developed extraordinary skill in conflicts with church authorities, and, interest-ingly, over three hundred letters of each remain. In short, Hildegard and Catherine are dangerous memories whose legacies of duty and daring remind us of our own often untapped potential. Episodes of duty and daring in the lives of these treasured visitants from the past suggest that they can work in weary souls like oxygen on embers. 1441 Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen On the nine hundredth anniversary of Hildegard's birth in 1998, the Hildegard scholar Barbara Newman wrote: Hildegard is the only woman of her age to be accepted as an authoritative voice on Christian doctrine; the first woman who received express permission from a pope to write theological books; the only medieval woman who preached openly before mixed audiences of clergy and laity with full approval of church authority; the author of the first known morality play, and the only 12th-century playwright who is not anonymous; the only composer of her era known both by name and by a large corpus of surviving music; the first scien-tific writer to discuss sexuality and gynecology from a female perspective; and the first saint whose official biography includes a first-person memoir,s Born in the summer of 1098 in Bermersheim, Germany, Hildegard was thrust upon the stage of life at the close of one century and the dawning of the next. The role of wise women, midwives, h~alers, and coun-selors fell under new suspicions. The practice of seeing the divine in all things was eroding. It was an epoch of spiritual fervor amid the growing corruption of a Review for Religious church bent on the Crusades, which led "poor and frail" women, like Hildegard, to rise up and challenge the clergy to reform. Hildegard wrote prolifically between the ages of forty-two and eighty-one. In addition to two major works on medicine and natural science, Hildegard completed a trilogy of theological works: the multimedia illuminated manuscript for which she is most famous, Scivias (abbreviated from the Latin for Know the Lord's Ways), The Book of Life's Merits, and The Book of Divine Works. She composed seventy-seven liturgical songs and wrote them down in the Symphonia: The Symphony of the ¯ Harmony of Celestial Revelations. Fifty of her homilies are extant. The historian Gerda Lerner says, "The life of Hildegard of Bingen exemplifies the breakthrough of a female genius who managed to create an entirely new role for herself and other women without ostensi-bly violating the patriarchal confines within which she functioned.''9 Hildegard thrived at a time of political and religious tumult not vastly different from our own. "Her sheer force of will," Newman says, "combined with a dazzling array of spiritual and intellectual gifts, a courage hardened by decades of struggle, and a pro-phetic persona, which she displayed in season and out, made her a formidable opponent; and she did not take defeat easily.''~° This could equally be said of Catherine McAuley. Portrait of Catherine McAuley The life and vision of Catherine McAuley, seven [ centuries after Hildegard, provide another deep story 14~ of a woman whose spiritual and intellectual gifts, cour-age hardened by struggle, and prophetic persona made her a formidable opponent; like Hildegard, Catherine 67.2 2008 Clendenen * Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine M~uley Hildegard thrivedat a time of political and religious tumult not vastly differen~ ~om our own. did not take defeat easily. From her childhood to her middle years, she knew what it was like to be forced to the edges of her culture and to experience the prejudice of being Irish and Catholic in an age of intolerance. ~t Catherine's efforts to accomplish something lasting have their roots in the faith and courage with which she faced hardship. She reflected often upon adversity as key to her theology of the cross, the central sym-bol of Christianit~,. Over her lifetime she experienced many losses: her father's death when she was five, their fami-ly's descent into poverty, and her mother's death in 1798, when Catherine was twenty. In 1827 she buried her sister Mary, mother of five children. She cared for her sister's children and outlived some of her beloved nieces and nephews. Inheriting in 1827 the for-tune of a couple she had lived with for twenty years-- and driven by her deep faith, her sense of Christian duty, and her compassion--she built in Dublin the first House of Mercy. Her selection of a site on Baggot Street, in one of the wealthiest and most exclusive sections of Dublin, flouted the as yet unrevoked late-17th-century penal code that prohibited erecting a Catholic building on a main thoroughfare of Irish cities and towns. This proved to be the first step toward the founda-tion, in 1831, of the Sisters of Mercy, many of whom would die from the cholera and typhus that plagued Ireland in those early years. Two letters to her younger, Review for Religious most trusted colleague Frances Xavier Warde provide a window into Catherine McAuley's spirituality of the cross¯ In 1840, after the death of two young novices while a new foundation was being proposed, Catherine wrote, "I suppose all will go on well to shew us that what we think a drawback will be followed by greater progress. If they should have a new foundation--it will not be without the cross.''12 In 1841, offering words of encouragement as Sister Frances faced a challenge to her religious leadership, Catherine reflected: I know it is an affliction to you--but rest assured, God will send some. distinguished consolation¯ This is your life, joys and sorrows mingled, one succeed-ing the other. Let us not think of the means [God] has employed to convey to us a portion of the Holy Cross, being ever mindful that it came from Himself¯ ¯. Far better and more profitable for you to receive with all your heart the cross which God will send you in any form or shape He pleases. I earnestly hope you will receive this trial so as to render it valuable to you.13 Catherine's Decision for George's Hill Catherine McAuley was in her forties when she experienced a defining moment in realizing her vision. The novelty of an intentional community of lay women without religious vows and enclosure brought such neg-ative attention that "the criticism threatened to discour-age young women from joining Catherine's endeavors and thus to undermine the very stability of the works of mercy to which she was committed, including visita-tion of the sick poor in their homes and hospitals.''~4 Catherine began "a long deliberation" on how to pro-ceed. On 8 September 1830 she, Anna Marie Doyle, and Elizabeth Harley entered the Presentation Sisters' con- 147 67.2 2008 Clendenen ¯ Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley vent on George's Hill to serve the canonically required novitiate year before professing religious vows on 12 December 1831 as the first Sisters of Mercy.~5 These fifteen months away from Baggot Street were a pain-ful challenge for the fifty-two-year-old Miss McAuley. She spent the time surrounded by novices more than thirty years her junior. During the last seven months of her novitiate, a very strict mistress of novices made the duties of the time quite burdensome for Catherine. A letter from Mary Clare Moore to Mary Clare Augustine Moore describes the time: Catherine "often said it was so hard a struggle for her to remain [at George's Hill] on account of meeting there many things repugnant to her feelings that had she not the establishment of the Institute most deeply at heart she would (that very e~ce-ning) have sent for a coach to take her back to Baggot Street.''~6 This is a prime example of Catherine's sense of duty reshaping her earlier inclination to dare founding an unenclosed religious congregation. One can imagine how difficult the months of enclosure and silence must have been for a mature woman of such burning vision and apostolic zeal. Centuries earlier Hildegard had a different diffi-cult experience, but one that produced similar daring results. 148] Hildegard's Self-Awakening Following the custom of noble families, Hildegard's parents tithed their tenth child, Hildegard, as a tribute to the Lord when she was eight years old. She pro-fessed her religious vows as a Benedictine nun at the age of fifteen or sixteen. During these formative years, she watched as the original 7th-century Disibodenberg site was reconstructed into a small 12th-century Review for Religious German medieval city. It is interesting to speculate that Hildegard's own desire to found an independent monastery, which she eventually did, had its roots in a mind alert to all the construction going on around her. The physical buildings may have suggested to her young imagination the idea of being a spiritual architect. An unusual child, Hildegard confided in her mentor Jutta: "When I was three years old, I saw an immense light that shook my soul; but, because of my youth, I could not externalize it.m7 This light within her soul she would eventually name the umbra viventis lucis: a spiri-tual gleam or hint of the Living Light, appearing day or night, in full consciousness, and in multicolor brilliance accompanied by a "hearing in the soul." Hildegard, fear-ful of what others would think and what sanctions might be imposed upon her, remained silent with respect to the theological content of her visionary life. This silence and its consequent physical debilitation enfolded itself in Hildegard's daily existence. In 1136, when she was elected abbess, she received a new scope of authority. It was not uncommon for the abbess to be the magis-trate over dual monasteries of both monks and nuns. The authority of medieval abbesses included leaving the enclosure and entering into council with other abbesses. The abbess held spiritual power to bless, proclaim the gospel, instruct, lead Eucharistic processions, and hear the confessions of her nuns. Such powers exercised in Hildegard's time were forbidden a century later and have never again been held by women religious, even to the present day.18 At the age of forty-three, Hildegard finally broke silence on the content of her inner visions. She was "instructed" by the Living Light "to put her hand to writing" and "release the power and mystery of hidden 149 67.2 2008 Clendenen ¯ Duty and DaHng in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley A~ the age of forty-three, Hildegard finally b~oke silence on the content of her inner visions~ and marvelous visions." For the next thirty-eight years, she put her talents and spiritual gifts into both writing and public speaking. An official church commission went to Disibodenberg to examine her partially completed Scivias. The examiners took their findings to the Synod of Trier, where the well-respected Bernard of Clairvaux read portions of the Scivias aloud to the assembled bishops. Bernard urged the pope "not to allow such a brilliant light to be covered by silence, but rather to confirm this charism through his authority.''19 Pope Eugenius III gave Hildegard apostolic license to continue and told her to complete her "divinely inspired" work. (When completed, the Scivias was an illuminated manuscript of twenty-six visions with theological commentary address-ing an array of Christian doctrine.) Such ecclesiastical encouragement freed Hildegard to go forward into an unprecedented future. lyO Duty and Daring Both Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine McAuley successfully negotiated life at the crossroads. Living life on life's terms presents people with challenges to choose well and manage change. Hildegard and Catherine are models of midlife women who took themselves seri-ously as gifted gospel women and resisted the temp-tation toward being insubstantial, toward settling for less instead of more. Hildegard mustered the courage Review for Religious to break from her self-imposed and culturally enforced silence. On the other hand, Catherine chose to embrace the silence of enclosure at George's Hill and the confin-ing duties of the canonically required novitiate so that her vision might find acceptance. Each in her forties possessed an inheritance. Hildegard's was an internal, visionary, prophetic giftedness, and Catherine's was the material gift of £25,000 (a million dollars in today's currency) coupled with her social vision to make a dif-ference for the poor. Their midlife transition brought them to greater vistas of generativity. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke captures this moment when he writes: I love the dark hours of my being in which my senses drop into the deep. I have found in them, as in old letters, my private life, that is already lived through, and become wide and powerful now, like legends. Then I know that there is room in me for a second huge and timeless life.2° Both Hildegard and Catherine consistendy, albeit pain-fully, found within themselves a duty and daring in the daily struggle for what mattered most. Their stories help us do the same. They are dangerous memories. Hildegard's Decision to Leave Disibodenberg Hildegard experienced a vision calling her to leave Disibodenberg and establish her own independent mon-astery. The abbot dismissed the possibility of such an undertaking. Hildegard, in a pattern that marked her life, was stricken with a severe malady. She was filled with energy when she was advancing her outer and inner work and experienced terribly depleting episodes when she was impeded in what she believed to be God's will. Eventually the abbot came to see that the paralysis that 67.2 2008 Clendenen ¯ Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley turned Hildegard's body stonelike was the result of his interference with God's will. He reluctantly conceded, granting his permission for her to proceed. After her move to Rupertsberg in 1150--an excep-tional action for one who described herself as "timid and lacking boldness"--Hildegard made arrangements to acquire complete canonical and legal separation from the monks at Disibodenberg. She wanted to choose the monks who would provide spiritual care for the nuns at Rupertsberg, to keep the dowries from the families of women who joined the order, to call the free election of superiors, to hold the deed to the property, and to be accountable solely to the archbishop of Mainz. She insisted that this (secret) arrangement be put in writ-ing, and she received it from the archbishop and from Frederick Barbarossa, king and emperor of Germany. Hildegard's memory of Disibodenberg's physical recon-struction now took wings. She supervised the erection of a 12th-century monastery with indoor plumbing, a complete sewage system, and a hospice for the sick and dying. The community grew from twenty to fifty nuns. While busy with preaching tours (begun at sixty), managing affairs at Rupertsberg, giving pastoral care to her nuns and others who requested it, writing The Book of Divine Works, and maintaining an active correspon-dence amid secular and religious tumult, Hildegard, fif-teen years after founding Rupertsberg, decided to found another congregation at Eibingen. With thirty nuns she set out down the east bank of the Rhine and established it on a site overlooking Rudesheim and across the river from Bingen. Hildegard kept living at Rupertsberg but traveled twice weekly to Eibingen until her death on 17 September 1179 at the age of eighty-one. Review for Religious Catherine McAuley and the Chaplaincy Crisis The McAuley scholar Sister Mary Sullivan writes, "In the six years since its founding in Dublin on 12 December 1831, the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy had merited episcopal approval and support . But the last months of 1837 were a very painful period in Catherine's life for one specific reason: in September a deep conflict arose between her and Dr. Walter Meyler, parish priest of St. Andrew's Church, over his unwilling-ness to assign a regular chaplain to serve the sacramen-tal needs of the homeless women and girls sheltered in the House of Mercy on Baggot Street"21--a situa-tion similar to Hildegard's centuries before. Catherine thought the continuity of pastoral care very important for both the Sisters of Mercy and the residents of the House of Mercy. "By depriving the House of Mercy a chaplain," says Sullivan, "Walter Meyler had, in effect, removed the possibility of daily, and even Sunday, Mass at Baggot Street. This meant that the forty or more servant women and girls living there had to go out to a parish church on Sundays, with the consequent free-dom to dally in the city and delay their return to the House--the very shelter created to protect them from the sexual and other dangers lying in wait for them on the streets.''22 Catherine wrote to Sister Mary de Pazzi Delaney, "My dearest Sister Mary, will you relieve me from the distressing business about the chaplain? It is constantly before me, and makes me dread going home. I know it is not possible for me to have any more argument with Dr. Meyler without extreme agitation . Do get me through this--don't be afraid.''23 Catherine's cor-respondence with Dr. Andrew Fitzgerald OP notes his seven-word summation of the controversy: "a wanton 67.2 2008 Clendenen * Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine Mc~luley unwarranted abuse of church authority.''24 Catherine wrote to Michael Blake, bishop of Dromore, who sup-ported her rationale for "one individual clergyman" as chaplain to the house and encouraged her to submit her case again. In doing so (to the Rev. John Hamilton), Catherine quoted from a letter she had sent to Dr. Meyler: We were happily at home today in time for all our dif-ferent duties., but our poor young women are still about the streets, taking advantage, to be sure, of the irregularity which has been introduced among them. I will make one more effort., to prevail on the Sisters to accompany me to their Bishop . We will shew what is lost by the change that has been made . This sad alteration in our once orderly establishment cannot fail to excite pity in a mind like his. At eight o'clock on Sunday evening, a letter was handed me from Doctor Meyler. It began thus: "When is your procession to take place? I should like to see the theatrical exhibition--the Bishop must be apprised--perhaps you may not admire the reception you will meet, for he is too straight forward a person to be caught by your Juggle." I read no more and put it out of my power ever to do so by burning the letter. I must now be done with the matter entirely. I will attempt nothing more.25 In a private letter to Frances Xavier Warde in January 1838 about the situation, Catherine said, "It is humiliating no doubt, a smart attack on self-importance, and if this part of it is well managed, it must turn to good account.''26 A few months later Catherine reported to Frances, "Our Mass is celebrated very regularly every day, and the confessions pretty well attended to--but I never feel reconciled to it . Pray fervendy to God to take all bitterness from me. I can scarcely think of what has been done to me without resentment.''27 Review for Religious Crises and Character The substance and style of Hildegard's leadership in moving her community from Disibodenberg and establishing the foundation at Rupertsberg, and the per-sonal cost and art-istry of Catherine's moving through the chaplaincy cri-sis, suggest some-thing important that has a bearing on leadership that would be trans-formational. They had the capacity for liminality and pos-sessed a prophetic passion. The term liminality is taken from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Angela Bolster RSM defines limin-ality as "all about risk., a countercultural movement on the frontier, opening up new horizons, indicat-ing new possibilities . . . fueled by a new vision of the future.''28 Those on the limen, at the edge of new fron-tiers, can live in ambiguity and perceive opportunity. Like Jeremiah, they learn to bear disquietude and use agitation and anguish as kindling for the flame of zeal. Hildegard broke silence when she could no longer hold in the content of her visions. Catherine's daring social vision took her more than once to the edge of con-frontation with church authority. Their sense of duty provoked in them an adaptability that deepened them as churchwomen and staved off the bitterness, alienation, and cynicism people feel under the weight of perceived Catherine's daring social vision took her more than once to the edge of confrontation with church authority. 67.2 2008 lendenen ¯ Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine McAuley injustice. It is especially poignant when the injustice is meted out at the hands of the church. It is easy to imag-ine each of these liminal women pr~ying with Jeremiah 20:7-9: You have seduced me, Yahweh, and I have let myself be seduced; you have overpowered me: you were the stronger. I am a daily laughingstock, everybody's butt. . . . The word of Yahweh has meant for me insult, derision, all day !ong. I used to say, "I will not think about him, I will not speak in his name any more." Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones. The effort to restrain it wearied me, I could not do it. Both women's large-mindedness enabled them to sus-tain the distress of the life that wanted to live in and through them and, at the same time, animate others to help them realize the possibilities they perceived were of God and worth the cost. The liminal among us often dwell at the edges of society where the anawim of God live. Transforming and transformational leaders find a home among the homeless, in fact and in faith. They bear God's pro-phetic pathos as their own. They bear the cross where they find it, whether in the medieval crusades, the Irish penal laws, or the current building of walls at U.S. bor-ders. The prophetic personality struggles and stumbles but never succumbs to despair because the umbra viven-tis lucis--the gleam of the Living Light--stirs the soul of those who artfully integrate duty with daring and daring with duty. Such transformational persons are of biblical proportions, vessels of Holy Wisdom in every generation (Ws 7:21-28). The 12th-century German Benedictine Abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the 19th-century Irish Mother Catherine McAuley are two such liminal, passionate, and prophetic women. They wit- Review for Religious ness to other courageous lives lived within the difficult confines of changing eras and changing destinies. Their dangerous memories get into the marrow of our bones. Theirs is an irreducible legacy given to us. Their names are anamnetic and, when they come among us today, they are an oasis in the midst of wilderness wandering, bearing witness to the possible future always before us, especially in times like ours. Notes ' Attributed to an insight from Sister Doris Gottemoeller RSM, senior vice president, Mission and Values Integration, Catholic Healthcare Partners, Cincinnati, Ohio. 2 Walter Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text: Sermons and Prayers, ed. Anna Carter Florence (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 156. 3 Brueggemann, Inscribing, p. 157. 4 Brueggemann, Inscribing, p. 159. s Johann Baptist Metz, "The Future in the Memory of Suffering," Concilium 76 (1972), p. 15. 6 Murray Stein, Transformation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), p. xxiv. 7 Stein, Transformation, pp. 146-148. 8 Barbara Newman, ed., Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 1. 9 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 52. ,0 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 15. n See Angela Bolster RSM, Venerable Catherine McAuley: Liminalfor Mercy (Cork, Ireland: Sisters of Mercy, 1998). ,2 The Correspondence of Catherine McAuley, 1818-1841, ed. Mary C. Sullivan (Baltimore: Catholi~ University of America Press, 2004), p. 316. 13 McAuley, Correspondence, pp. 400-401. ,4McAuley, Correspondence, p. 33. ,s McAuley, Correspondence, p. 34. ,6 Mary C. Sullivan, Catherine McAuley ~nd the Tradition of Mercy [IY7 6Z2 2008 lendenen * Duty and Daring in Hildegard and Catherine Mc~uley (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 93. 17 Carolyn Sur, The Feminist Images of God in the Visions of Saint Hildegard ofBingen's "Scivias" (New York: Mellen Press, 1993), p. 26. ~s Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet: Women in Medieval Life (London: Hamish Hamilton Paperback, 1986), pp. 33, I01. ~9 Renate Craine, Hildegard: Prophet of the Cosmic Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1997), p. 26. 20 Rainer Maria Rilke, I Am Tob Alone in the World: Ten Poems, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Silver Hands Press, 1981), p. 4. 21 McAuley, Correspondence, p. 94. 22 McAuley, Correspondence, 2~ McAuley, Correspondence, 24 McAuley, Correspondence, 2s McAuley, Correspondence, 26 McAuley, Correspondence, 27 McAuley, Correspondence, see footnote 83, p. 112. pp. 96-97. p. 103. pp. 112-113. p. 119. p. 144. Time Dive Plunge into the.flow of time Ride the current moment Swirl awhile 'round bubbling eddies Bob lithely on sun glistened ripples Cascade over rapid rocky rills Float out into embracing arms of open sea Then soar aloft to clouds above And gently freefall Rain Drop in the river of time. Walter Bunofsky SVD Review for Religious JEANNE MCNULTY Weavers of God: The Warp and the Weft A nY artisan of handwoven fabric knows this: If the vertical threads (the warp) are weak and under uneven tension on the loom, no matter how the horizontal threads (the weft) are woven, the resulting cloth will be a puckered, slapdash mess. "Called to weave a new spirituality that generates hope and life for all humanity" was the theme of the plenary session of superiors general of women religious held in Rome in May 2007. The question was asked: "What thread are we religious, responsible for our con-gregations, called to weave in this moment in order to become prophetic and mystic 'weavers of God'?" Weaving has been a feminine image for centuries, and cave paintings document the existence of tapestry weaving as long ago as 3000 B.C. Handloom weaving flourished in the 1700s. Nowadays a few of us, mosdy women, but some men too, still send shuttles flying Jean McNulty SFO, OCV, a secular Franciscan and a consecrated virgin (see canon 604), wrote for us in 1997; she lives a semi-eremidc life. claire@wvadventures.net 67.2 2008 McNulty ¯ Weavers of God across warps and are delighted to see new designs pop up on the fabric or web before our eyes. Those who have persevered in the art can draw many analogies between our craft and the loom of our spiritual life. Everyone's vocation or lifestyle needs some structure. Without a plan, purpose, or focus, days and years may be frittered away. On a loom the "castle" is the outer encasement. Within the castle there are "harnesses," usually between two to eight of them. These are frame-like rectangles that hold the "heddles." The heddles are slender metal rods each containing a needle eye in the center. These are threaded in various sequences according to a pur-posed design. Below the heddles and harnesses, close to the floor, are the "treadles," which are attached to the harnesses in a specific arrangement. When the treadles are pedaled or tromped, the harnesses are raised and the "shuttle" (a little boat-like device that holds the bob-bin with the weft thread) flies over and under the warp threads. The interlacing threads form the pattern that begins appearing on the newly created fabric. Almost an infinity of designs can'be produced, and a great mul-tiplicity of shades and hues are made manifest as the various colored threads cross over and under each other on the web. Many designs were developed by those who have gone on before us. Others are waiting to be dis-covered. The threads on the loom can be compared to all the people that cross our paths in life and help us to become the persons we are. This interlacing of our lives with theirs helps develop the finished pattern on the web of life. On the loom there is a front and back beam. In the weaving that I do, the vertical threads are initially tied Review for Religious to the back beam, the farthest away from the weaver, and then threaded through the heddles toward the front of the loom and then through the "beater." This is a long rectangular device containing a reed with short thin metal rods. It can be expanded at least to the width of the warp. The reed keeps the threads from getting tan-gled .and also helps create the density of the fabric. The beater "beats" the weft threads into an even line across the warp, which is tied on to the front of the loom. The aim is to get all the warp threads through the castle and then though the reeds in the right sequence and then tied with even tension to the front cloth beam. This takes time and patience, and it does no good to try and expedite the process. An experi-enced weaver knows not to hurry because, if a thread is put through the heddles or beater in the wrong sequence, the whole pattern or design is flawed. It often means going back to square one with the threading. So it is better to do it right the first time and save hours of unnecessary labor. An analogy to the spiritual life is easy to see. Just as buildings need a firm foun-dation, so a weaver of a tapestry (or of the fabric of her life) should humbly spend the time and energy to thread her loom with order and precision. She should begin by looking to the future with humble and atten-tive prayer. Occasionally, despite very careful planning and execution, a warp thread will break in the middle of a weaving project. It will take a special knot with a piece of new thread in even tension with the others to fix it. experienced weaver knows not to hurry. 161 67.2 2008 McNulty ¯ Weavers of God This requires added time and effort, as it does in the spiritual realm when our sins and flaws require repen-tance, confession, forgiveness, fixing--the knot and thread renewing togetherness and integrity. In the repertoire of weaving designs, there are warp-faced patterns and weft-faced ones. This means that, in any piece of cloth, what meets the eye is either the pattern of the weft threads or the pattern of the warp. In traditional Navajo weaving, for example, the weft completely covers and hides the warp. It is considered a real flaw for a warp thread to be seen, and so the weft is always beaten tighdy into place. The contemplative life can easily be compared to the warp in Navaio weaving. It is so totally obscure. It is, however, the framework for the entire fabric. The warp threads have to be very strong to take the intense beat-ing and packing of the weft threads that will show on the sur- The contemplative life face. Strenuous active lives and ministries can easily be compared to can beat people down the warp in Navajo weaving, in their endeavors to make the world bet-ter. These endeavors, these activities, are what people see and value, but, if they are not sup-ported by the strong threads of contemplative union with God, they will not produce the desired beautiful patterns. Pope Benedict encouraged religious to "weave 62 the living fabric of a useful service to the church., yet always maintaining solid interior relations with Christ. In fact, only from this union with God can that 'pro-phetic' role of your mission flow and be nourished." Review for Religious He added: "Never yield, therefore, to the temptation to distance yourself from intimacy with your Heavenly Spouse by allowing yourselves to be overly attracted by the interests and problems of daily life." Our Holy Father encouraged religious to cultivate the mystical dimension of consecrated life, keeping united to God through contemplation. He said: "The authentic prophet, therefore, is not concerned so much to accomplish works, which undoubtedly are important but never essential. Above all, he tries to be a witness of God's love, seeking to live it among the realities of the world, even if his presence can sometimes be 'uncom-fortable' because he offers and incarnates alternative values." !n creating a piece of material on the loom, once the warp threads are threaded through the heddles and tied on to the back warp beam and the front cloth beam, and once the weaving has commenced, the warp threads can-not be changed without dismantling. It is different with the weft threads. In the active life we can change our occupations, put different yarns and a different picture on the loom of our existence, but always underneath there has to be the contemplative warp to hold things together. What is essential is our vertical and horizontal union with Jesus. If the love relationship is there and he decides to change the design, it can hurt, but it is not devastating because the contemplative warp is strong. There are times in life when the weft patterns seem to coalesce. Everything works out well, and we have a lot of good "yardage" to show, but then can come years when no matter what we do all seems insignificant. The Lord appears to be asleep in the boat, our litde shuttle, and we feel tossed about in darkness. In the obscurity of the night, we become mystic weavers who feel at odds 67.2 2008 McNulty .,Weavers of God with the surface of our life. We cannot see what is going on, but we hope and trust that something special and beautiful is happening in the context of our life. When I have thrown the shuttle for the last time on a long-woven piece of cloth, the moment has arrived to see the web completely finished. I take the scissors and cut each warp thread. I draw the material forward and fan-fold it on the bench in front of me. A passage from the Book of Isaiah comes to mind: "You have folded up my life, like a weaver who severs the last thread" (Is 38:12). We know this moment will arrive, the one when the Master Weaver severs our web from the loom of our earthly life and surveys the finished product. Then we hope that he will delight in the display of designs and intertwining coloi's. In this moment all of us are unique and original. No other person will have the same patterns, the same gifts to display in the king-dom of our God and before our sisters and brothers. Hopefully, our lives will have been prophetic examples of the gospel message, and we too will hear the words the Father spoke over Jesus at the river Jordan: "You are my beloved child. On you my favor rests" (Mk 1:11). Review for Religious DAMIAN C. ILODIGWE Discipleship, Faith, and Commitment Getting to know people is a process. It can be long and complicated, involving several phases that result in increasing knowledge of them. Yet the process can hardly begin effec-tively unless we are prepared to discover who the individual persons are and do not approach them merely in terms of what we think or what others say about them. To be sure, what we think or what others say is important and should not be ignored, but this is not enough if our concern is to know them personally and intimately. For this we need a firsthand experi-ence that gives them the opportunity to reveal themselves to us. Consider what happens when we meet peo-ple. It takes only a while before they begin to Damian C. Ilodigwe wrote on the Magnificat in our 66.3 (2007) issue. He is a priest and lecturer in philoso-phy at Ss. Peter and Paul Major Seminary; P.M.B. 5171; Secretariat P.O.; Ibadan, Nigeria. dammychuks2000@ yahoo.tom being disciples 67.2 2008 Ilodigwe ¯ Discipleship, Faith, and Commitment 166 reveal themselves to us in various ways. If we really want to get to know them, such rrioments are precious. We pause and listen to what they have to say. By so doing we might begin to penetrate the mystery that underlies their personality. Such attention involves a certain pas-sivity in the face of their self-disclosure. Indeed, this moment of self-disclosure must guide our subsequent effort to learn who they really are. The process would be skewed if we imposed some prejudice of ours on them before they had the benefit of self-disclosure. Difficult and complex though it is to get to know other people, the reward can be great even after only a little success, and the success is bound to grow the more we try. We become more comfortable in their presence, and with this at-homeness we are able to trust them and perhaps even depend on them. We grow in our appreciation of their worth, and this leads to a much better relationship. Before we realize it, the friendship becomes intimate and personal. We need such a friend-ship with Jesus. Peter's Significant Breakthrough Like all who are called to be Jesus' disciples, the apostles had to get to know Jesus. They were specially chosen by him and destined to play an important role in his mission, but that does not mean it was easy for them to get to know him. Having been with him for some time and having seen the deep impression he made on people, they held him in high esteem. They knew how much people appreciated his words and presence. They were familiar with what people thought about him (see Mk 8:27-29). Yet this did not mean they really knew him. Their knowledge of him, like that of people he healed, was at best superficial. They knew he was the Reviem for Religious son of Joseph and Mary, but it is not evident that they penetrated the mystery of his divine personality (see Jn 5:1-18). If they were to be his ambassadors, it was crucial that their knowledge of him was not superficial, limited to a few details of his parents, his hometown, and so forth. It was impor tant that they knew and understood him for who he really is. Their coming to know him was a long process indeed, which was not over until, after his resur-rection, they received the Holy Spirit (see Lk 24:13-35). Nonetheless, the event at Caesarea Philippi offered a preliminary advancement of their knowledge of Jesus. Jesus brought up for discussion the topic of his identity (Mk 8:27-38, Mt 16:13-20). It was almost like any con-versation in which we seek feedback from others about a particular issue. He began by asking them who people said he was. That was not a difficult question, for the disciples only needed to be steeped in current affairs to answer it, and they were not wanting in this regard. They mentioned the various perspectives that people had: "John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets." The answer touched the reality of Jesus' per-sonality, but still was superficial. Jesus did not evaluate their answer; he simply asked another question, a more personal one: "But you, who do you say I am?" This sort of question upsets people. It certainly upset them. It took them from the nonpersonal to the personal. It Jesus brought up for discussion the topic of his identity. 167 67.2 2008 Ilodigwe ¯ Discipleship, Faith, and Commitment had implications regarding their allegiance and commit-ment. The burden of responsibility became enormous. In such circumstances we usually censor what we say. We say only what we mean to say and what we have evidence for. We can imagine the disciples considering their words carefully. Indeed, it would not be surprising to discover that there was a long silence before an answer came. As usual, it was Peter who took the lead, saying: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." We can almost imagine that Jesus was surprised, a pleasant surprise, for Jesus' true identity was and is always a kind of secret. People focused (and still do) on accidents of Jesus' birth and circumstances, as happened when he preached in Capernaum (Lk 4:16-28). Focusing on these things, they missed (and still do) the essen-tial Jesus. Peter, however, was absolutely correct. But how did this happen? What emerges is that Peter had been assisted. It was not as a result of any merely human agency that he was able to enter the mystery of Jesus' personality. As Jesus put it, "it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven." We can recall here Jesus' words that no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom he reveals him (Lk 10:22). So it was not through Peter's human effort that he discovered this truth. It was through the Holy Spirit, of whom Paul was to affirm that "no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit" (1 Co 12:3). It was the Holy Spirit that spoke in him. This was revelation, not merely natural knowledge. Not only was Jesus satisfied with Peter's answer, call-ing him a happy man, but he moved quickly to reward him: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. And the gates of the underworld can never hold Review for Religious out against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven." The enormousness of this reward is breathtaking, but the content is also rel-evant to the future of Jesus' mission (see Jn 21:15-19). That declaration of Jesus' identity revealed imme-diately Peter's deep configuration to Jesus to the extent that he had the seal of the Holy Spirit upon him. Peter's reward can be understood only in the context of this deep configuration. And the logic of this is relevant to us as well, in our relationship with God and with one another. In penetrating the truth of the divine personality of Jesus, Peter moved from a somewhat superficial relation-ship to an intimate personal one. If we understand Jesus in the depth of his divine and human reality, this knowl-edge is utterly transforming, and with transformation comes the burden of commitment and responsibility. To know people at an intimate level is to become committed to them. When we recognize that our rela-tionship has reached this deeper level, we are more pre-pared to take them into our confidence and relate with them still more intimately.| I suppose we are familiar with this situation. When we consider it briefly, we real-ize that it fits well the new phase in the relationship between Jesus and his disciples. With Peter's confession, the disciples were no lon-ger outsiders. They were brought inside and enabled by God's grace to perceive what others longed to per-ceive but could not perceive. The veil was lifted, and they were privileged to perceive the Lord of all creation in his true identity. Now their knowledge of him went far deeper than what people were saying. It involved 67.2 2008 Ilodig'we ¯ Discipleship, Faith, and Commitment something intensely personal, something that commit-ted them to him irrevocably. It did not, however, mean they had mastered everything about this mystery.2 In their very grasp of the mystery, something remained mysterious. They were ever in need of divine assistance to relate with him at this profound level. Toknow Jesus in his divine reality is a transforming experience, and it is our portion as Christians to attain such knowledge: 170 Peter's Confession and Our Contemporary Situation Like Peter and the other apostles, we too need to get to know Jesus better. Indeed, we can regard our journey of faith as getting to know Jesus and experienc-ing the power of his presence in our life (see Ph 1:12- 30). Also, like Peter, we need divine assistance to enter the profound reality of Jesus' divine personal-ity-- beyond a minimal grasp of what the church teaches in the creed. We need that, of course, and we need to integrate it into our faith journey. To know Jesus in his divine reality is a transforming experience, and it is our portion as Christians to attain such knowledge. The deeper our knowledge, the more we see that Jesus is our companion on our journey through life (Col 3:1-17). We see that he cares and that his presence makes all the difference in our life. We see the goodness of committing ourselves to Jesus. Living in accordance with our deeper knowledge of Jesus and our commitment brings us more and more into the divine realm. To confess Jesus as a good man Review for Religious or even a great prophet is not enough. It is to miss the whole point of his mission and our relationship with him. In the face of the artificiality and superficiality of our world, there is a need for us to encounter the full reality of Jesus, not mere extrinsic details. We must not live as if our faith were separate from our lives. Peter's confession of Jesus as the Son of the living God should make us step back and examine our own relationship with Jesus. How deep does my relationship with Jesus go? Is my relationship with him personal, or is it superficial, based on mere secondhand knowledge? God created us to know him, love him, and serve him.3 Knowledge is the gateway of love. The more we get to know Jesus and his love for us, the more we are able to love him in return and commit ourselves to him. All this may seem a tall order. It is a challenge. But it is not impossible to attain, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, our advocate and teacher. The Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth, knows the depth of every reality, including God (see Jn 16:5-15). If we listen, the Holy Spirit will lead us deeper into the truth of Jesus. He will help us integrate this truth into our faith journey. We turn, then, to the Spirit and ask that our eyes be opened that we may see, our minds opened that we may understand, and our hearts so inflamed with divine love that our lives may be more and more conformed to the life of Christ. Notes 1 See Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus .of Nazareth (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007), pp. 335-341. 2 See Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (Bandra, Mumbai: Society of St. Paul, 1999), pp. 29-32. 3 See the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Dublin: Veritas, 1994), §§356-361. 67.2 2008 Ilodigwe * Disdplesbip, Faith, and Commitment Personal and Group Reflection 1. How would I describe the process of getting to know another person? Do I find that this process is the one I use in getting to know Jesus? 2. In this article, I look at Peter in his coming to a deeper relationship with Jesus. Who else have been models for me in my own being able to grow as a friend of Jesus? 3. Have biblical studies been helpful or not in my coming to know Jesus? What part does prayer play in my growth? 172) Mary, at the Hour of Her Death "And not an easy dying," said her sister Mary the wife of Clopas, smoothing back Her own gray hair from a forehead marked With midnight watching; "but for all her Pain and the Weight of memories she and I Have shared, she went from us smiling." The ritual prayers she knew are said again; Lovingly, th.ey cover her. And while the women Of the cross go to buy the spices and prepare As once before burial, the Overshadowing Presence that she knew visits where she lies; When they return: Mary is not there. Nancy G. Westerfield Review for Religious PETER SCHINELLER Seeing with the Eyes of Christ A bold statement! How can we claim to see with the eyes of Christ? We are weak, sinners. We live in a different time and place, two thousand years after Jesus Christ. Yet this is what Pope Benedict says in his encyclical "God Is Love." About loving our neigh-bor, he writes: "Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessi-ties; I can give them the look of love which they crave" (§18). Following the Holy Father's lead, we might try to understand and retrieve this part of our Christian tradition. Where is Jesus? We often speak of the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst, especially in other persons. A key text that points to that presence is Matthew 25: "I was hungry and you fed me, naked and you clothed me." When we reach out to others in compassion and love, it is Christ we are touching. Mother Teresa saw this clearly: "Every person is Christ for me, and since173 Peter Schineller SJ writes from America House; 106 West 56 Street; New York, N.Y. 10019. 67.2 200g Schineller * Seeing with.the Eyes of Christ Saints live and model the Christ-life in their own day and agei there is only one Jesus, that person is the only one per-son in the world for me at that moment." We often hear that the goal of the spiritual life is union with Jesus Christ. He is the way, the truth, and the life. We join our lives to Jesus through word and sacrament, through prayer and action. We move to the Father Jind to his kingdom as followers of Jesus Christ. But is there another even more intimate way to speak of our relationship and union with Jesus? Is there a way that lessens the separation or dis-tance between us and Jesus, so that we begin to feel and say with St. Paul, "I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me" (Ga 2:20)? Can we not dare to say, as Pope Benedict does, that we are "see-ing with the eyes ofChrist"? Can we be bold and daring enough to say that we are to put on the heart and mind of Christ? That we reach out with the hands of Christ? Are these words true, or are they mythical, oversimplified piety? There is a story about a statue of Christ in a church. It was wartime, and the church was bombed. The statue stood, but the arms of Christ, reaching out, were broken off. Rather than remove or replace the damaged statue, someone put a note on it: "He has no hands but ours." Is this just a pious tale, or does it express a deep insight into the Christian life? Christian Tradition Speaks This Way St. Paul certainly saw his own life and the Christian life as intimately joined with Jesus Christ. We live Review for Religious and die with Christ, in him, through him. The Pauline writings use these and similar prepositions about 165 times to describe our relationship with Jesus Christ. Paul explains that we are slowly, gradually being trans-formed into the likeness of Christ (1 Co 3:18). Writing to the Christians at Philippi, he urges them to put on the attitude or mind of Christ: "Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus" (Ph 2:5). All of our thoughts are to be "captive in obedience to Christ" (2 Co 10:5). With even greater boldness he says, "We have the mind of Christ" (1 Co 2:16). The Christian, through the power and reality of grace, grad-ually assumes the shape, the form of Jesus Christ. Saints live and model the Christ-life in their own day and age. We find a strong expression of how we put on Christ in a few words of St. John Eudes. He writes of the Christian's relationship to Jesus: He belongs to you as the head belongs to its mem-bers; all that is his is yours: his spirit, his heart, his body and soul, and all his faculties. You must make use of all these as your own, to serve, praise, love, and glorify God. You belong to him, as members belong to their head. And so he longs for you to use all that is in you, as if it were his own, for the service and glory of the Father. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1698) How This Might Apply to Us The phrase "imitation of Christ" is a hallowed one in the history of Christian spirituality. It often refers to the classic book of Thomas h Kempis. What might it mean in light of what we have outlined above? Can we see our lives not simply as an imitation of Jesus Christ who is out there, over against us, but as one with us, cooperating with us, working in us in every good deed 67.2 2008 Scbineller ¯ Seeing with the Eyes of Christ that we perform? Can we see, think, act, with the eyes, mind, hands of Christ? Can this become a way of envi-sioning our lives? Here are a few examples. The eyes of Christ and our eyes. Jesus observed and learned lessons from the birds of the air, the lilies of the field. Jesus observed, and pointed out to the disciples, the great generosity of the widow who with her two coins put in more than all the rich men. Jesus saw with eyes of compassion the needs of the sick and the blind. Are we open to seeing the needs of others, and to seeing as Jesus saw? Or do we have a beam in our own eye and so fail to see the good in others, fail to see the needs of others, with the eyes of Christ? The mind of Christ and our mind. Jesus was one with his Father. His Father's thoughts of truth and peace-- were in the mind of Christ. Jesus emptied himself and thought of the good of others. Do we let Jesus enter into our minds and reshape our attitudes, our way of thinking? Do the needs of others have more weight than our own needs and desires? Does the truth prevail in our words and our conduct, or do we compromise and bargain with the truth? The heart of Christ and our heart. Christ says, "Come to me, all who labor and are burdened. I will give you rest." His heart went out in compassion for the crowd, hungry for food and for the word of life. His heart went out to the lepers. His heart was pierced on the cross, so much did he love us. He wants to transform our hearts into his own. From hearts that can be cold and insensitive, isolated and stubborn, he wants our hearts to become warm like his own, overflowing with love for his Father and for all God's children. The hands of Christ and our hands. As a youth Jesus assisted in the carpenter shop in Nazareth. In his min- Review for Religious istry Jesus reached out with a healing hand, a hand of friendship and blessing. Children came to receive his welcome and blessing. His hands shared food with his disciples and with the crowds. With his hands he washed the feet of Peter and the other apostles. Do we extend a clenched fist or the open hand of friendship? Do we let Christ work through our hands as we go about our daily tasks in the home, the workplace, the market? Do we see ourselves as instruments of his work, his care and concern? The feet of Christ and our feet. Jesus went about doing good. He continued steadfastly on the journey to Jerusalem, knowing that it would lead to suffering and death. He carried the cross to the hill of Calvary. In our walking and travels, are we instruments for the spread of the gospel and for works of charity? The ears of Christ and our ears. We sing with the Psalmist that "the Lord hears the cry of the poor." Jesus heard the blind cry out for help, the cry of the Syro- Phoenician woman for assistance for her child. Do we fill our ears with unnecessary noise and entertainment so that we have little time to hear the call of the child, the friend, anyone in need? The words of Christ and our words. Jesus spoke words of love and words of power. He spoke with authority. His words often evoked faithful, beautiful responses such as Peter's words "Depart from me, Lord, I am a sinful man." Jesus' words gathered apostles and follow-ers, and captivated the crowds. Do our words echo the words of Christ, so that Christ can.be said to be speak-ing in and through us? Do others hear the words of the gospel, good news, in our conversation? The prayer of Jesus and our prayer. Jesus prayed before major decisions such as calling the apostles. He prayed I177 67.2 2008 Sebineller * Seeing witb the Eyes of Cbrist _178] for Peter that his faith might not falter. Jesus called God "Father" and invites us to do the same. As we pray the Lord's Prayer, do we realize that it is Jesus praying in and with and through us? He prayed for forgiveness even for those who crucified him. Do we let the Spirit of Jesus, dwelling in our hearts, cry out, "Abba, Father"? Do we let Jesus pray in and through us for the needs of our world and our family and friends? The will of Christ and our will. Jesus came to do the Father's will. "Not my will, but yours be done." He became obedient even unto death, death on a cross. Do we let God direct our will, or do we resist handing over our will to the divine will? Are our choices in line with the way and the words of Jesus, letting his Spirit be the power, impetus, and guide for our choices? Prayers That Reflect This Vision Four prayers of the Christian tradition reinforce the thrust of this reflection. The first is the familiar prayer of St. Patrick on the presence of Christ, how it sur-rounds and fills us. Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. A second prayer is from the Book of Hours, of 1514: God be in my head, and my understanding; God be in my eyes, and in my looking; God be in my mouth, and in my speaking; Review for Religious God be in my heart, and in my thinking; God be at my end, and at my departing. The third prayer comes from St. Ignatius Loyola. At the end of the Spiritual Exercises, we hand over ourselves completely to the Lord, to his transforming power, for him to do with us as he wills and as he thinks best: Take, Lord, receive, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have and pos-sess. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. All is yours. Do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me. The fourth prayer, more contemporary, the Grail Prayer, is an excellent prayer for Christians as they go about their daily responsibilities: Lord Jesus, I give you my I give you my I give you my I give you my I give you my I give you my spirit that you may pray in me. Above all, I give you my heart that you may love in me your Father and all humankind. I give you my whole self that you may grow in me, so that it is you, Lord Jesus, who live and work and pray in me. hands to do your work. feet to go your way. eyes to see as you do. tongue to speak your words. mind that you may think in me. One way to begin to live this seeing, thinking, and walking with the eyes, mind, and feet of Jesus is by making it part of our daily examen. Rather than exclusively focus on our sins and failings, or our dominant feelings or emotions, we might focus on how we have or have not spoken, lis-tened, and acted like Jesus. With this Christocentric per-spective, we reflect on how Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ, lives in and through us. 67.2 2008 Scbineller ¯ Seeing witb tbe Eyes of Christ Jesus Christ was born 2000 years ago in Bethlehem. He will come again at the end of time. He comes now in word and sacrament, and he wishes to be born again in us. He wishes to reshape, reform, and transform our bodies into his own. He wants to speak his words of love through us, and to reach out in compassion to the needy through our arms. The poet Hopkins captures this vision in his "kingfishers catch fire" poem: Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, To the Father through the features of men's faces. 180 Mourning "I'm so sorry for your loss," I said, or I think I said that, And held out my hand to a black glove that shook, then grasped hard and held on As if my outstretched palm held gold, gold for the going, For going home tonight and leaving him there cold, alone and lonely. No, he is no longer lonely or in pain, or alone - She is. Suzanne Mayer IHM Review for Religious JOHN J. FISHER The Celibate Aunt or Uncle: Another Blessed Vocation Byrother Joe and I worked together for thirteen ears at the Catholic high school that our religious order owns and administers. Beyond our shared ministry and living in community together, we did not have much in common. As facilities manager, he was concerned with heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) issues and requests for proposals (RFPs) to read. As a (eacher and administrator, I was concerned with Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and collegial observations to write. He loved Broadway music while I played rock and roll. He would go out for a bike ride while I went out for a run. The special thing about which we agreed was that there is no greater vocation than being a celibate uncle. With excitement we exchanged stories about fam-ily get-togethers, our nephews' and nieces' accomplish-ments, and their latest activities and e~iploits. We could John J. Fisher OSFS has worked for twenty years in secondary and now college education. His address is De Sales University; 2755 Station Avenue; Center Val!ey, Pennsylvania 18034. Email: john. fisher@desales.edu 181 67.2 2008 Fisher ¯ The Celibate Aunt or Uncle Prayer is a special, gift we religious priests, brothers, and sisters offer to our nephews and nieces. 182 visit their homes, have tremendous fun with them, spoil them, sugar them up, hold the babies once changed, and then leave. We would brag about their strengths and minimize their growing pains. All of our friends heard many family stories. We knew that our nieces and neph-ews were a special grace toward living our religious life well. Let me share an anecdote. "To listen to your messages, press one; to get mes-sages, press two. 'Hey, Uncle John, this is Danny. Just calling to ask if you can pray for DJ, one of our basket-ball players at Central Catholic. He got in a car acci-dent driving home from the school dance. He must have fallen asleep and drove off into a ditch. The police didn't find him till the next morning. He's in a coma. Please pray for him. Okay? Love you.'" As Danny was only in fifth grade when he left this mes-sage, it tells me three things. First, Danny already has his sights set on playing basketball at the high school level. He even speaks as if he is already part of the team, telling me "we lost a close one last night." Second, not only does Danny believe in the power of prayer, but he is other-centered, especially if the other is a star athlete. Third, Danny looks to his celibate uncle as one to whom he can go for prayers of intercession. Danny is now in sixth grade, DJ is recovering nicely, and I am still blessed with the privilege of praying for the intentions of my siblings and their greatest gift to me: their sons and daughters. Review for Religious Prayer is a special gift we religious priests, brothers, and sisters offer to our nephews and nieces. Because of our vocation and its implicit commitment to individual and communal prayer, we become the obvious "go-to" people to pray for people's petitions. We are asked to pray for this nephew's intention, this niece's special favor,~ or that of someone we do not even know but who is dear to our loved ones. They believe not only in the power of prayer, but very specially in our including them and their intentions in ours. Our fidelity to prayer in our state in life frees us to do just that. Several years ago I was challenged by a classmate to include my family, naming each one individually, in the intercessory part of my prayer life. Daily, morn-ing and evening, I conclude the intercessory portion of my prayer by naming all my siblings and their children from oldest to youngest. I include the intentions I know abouh ones specially asked for and unvoiced ones I sense are needed. In a generic way, I pray through the inter-cession of our parents (the young people's grandparents) that all within the family may be safe, protected from harm, happy, healthy, faithful to parents' and grand-parents' good example, and open to the presence and blessing of the Lord. Depending on the situation, I add specific intentions, from guidance in choosing a college to success in a master's program. Including them daily in prayer brings to mind the gift they are as individuals and our special relationship with each other. It is also a daily reminder of the tremendous gift of prayer and the need to specially cultivate this treasure. In addition to prayer, there are other aspects of the spiritual place we have in our relatives' lives. We are always invited to receptions of a new sacrament, the yearly school Christmas plays, and every gradua- 67.2 2008 Fisher ¯ The Celibate Aunt or Uncle tion. Our relatives expect something spiritual from us, whether it is a holy card or a blessing on their fore-heads. Our small monetary gifts are always appreci-ated in a unique way, for they know we do not have the wherewithal that other aunts and uncles may have. It is often the celibate aunt or uncle that remembers all the birthdays of nephews and nieces. They count on us for the yearly birthday card, perhaps one at Halloween, and a small gift at Christmas. They call on us for that spe-cial "religion project" or an answer to some theological question. Of course, this can be a mixed blessing. When we do not know offhand who was the mother of Ruth or the pope of frequent communion, they call into ques-tion how we got ordained or what kind of a religious we are. We are, though, privileged to baptize them, to give them their first Eucharist, to witness their exchange of marriage vows or to read at their wedding. We hear of them explaining our way of life to their friends with a sense of special pride, bragging in their own way. Many of them call us weekly to "check in," affording us the opportunity to affirm and to express our ongoing love for them. We are their personal cheerleaders in each and every adventure, whether it is a passing fad or a passion that perdures. They expect us to say that they played well regardless. They understand that we have a right to be biased in thinking they were the best on the stage, on the court, or on the playing field. Every picture they paint is a Rembrandt, and every musical composition borders on something worthy of Carnegie Hall. Our nephews and nieces give us joy and hope. We are privileged to share their lives and stories in a way that maybe their other aunts and uncles cannot, because they are necessarily attentive to their own children's Review for Religious journeys. With no children of our own, we have the freedom to be the special aunt or uncle. They all become ours in a special way, collectively and individually. In a special bond of trust, we may be privy to hear-ing something that their own parents do not yet know (one getting stopped by the police for driving over the speed limit or a niece protecting a nephew from getting into trouble). Such discreet listening is usually not seri-ous, and things turn out well. We serve as a compassionate ear when they are not ready to go to their parents. They come to us for hope, under-standing, and accep-tance. They know clearly that we would never withhold something their parents need to know, but we can still listen to them as they tell us that their parents do not understand or are being unreasonable. They hope that we may serve as the voice of reason interceding for them to have a cell phone, be allowed to drive to school, or stay out just a little longer. We may be able to reach them simply because we are not their parents. We can be their sounding board, and we can help them realize how deeply their parents love and care for them, sensitizing them to the delicate vocation of parenting. All of this allows us to bring, with pride and vital-ity, this great sense of family into our homilies or our classes. In understanding them, their accomplishments, and their gradual maturation, we are able to relate to parents to whom we preach or whose children we teach. We may be able to r each them simply because we are not' their parents. 67.2 2008 Fisher ¯ The Celibate Aunt or Uncle Our love manifests itself in our being compassionate and gentle with those whom we serve and who in various ¯ ways are similar to our nephews and nieces. It lets us see that there is no vocation more difficult, more precious, and more needed than parenting. Invited into the homes and lives of our siblings, we get a real sense of what it means to parent and to grow up in this changing world as a child, teenager, or young adult. In sharing these sto-ries, our preaching and teaching become real, vital, chal-lenging, and spirit filled. We can offer a strong sense of faith because we have received it from these relatives of ours. Our siblings' fidelity to their spouses and children exhorts us to a renewed commitment to be poor, chaste, and obedient for our own sakes and for the world. The relationship afforded us as aunts and uncles reminds us that we were born into a natural family before entering our religious family. We journey like everyone else as we see our loved ones struggling in school, working tirelessly to afford tuition, striving to stay sober, searching for employment, or hoping to find that special soul mate. We prayerfully accompany their growing pains, seeing the cycle in one after another. We serve as one who, standing off in the distance, perceives the special quality in each of them and then helps them appreciate their own unique spark of the divine. With everyone we have different relationships that change and grow over the years. With each of several families, we may experience different traditions, habits, and customs. But we highlight for all of them a larger sense of family, a broad sense of gift, and the God who is the giver of all. We can also share with family our religious lives and what we have to offer from our own ministry. We can offer a sense of hope to siblings who are so closely con-nected to their children that they cannot see beyond an Review for Religious attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a poor self-image, a lack of responsibility, an inability to make this team or star in that role. We can remind them that their children's growing edges are no different from other children's, and we can offer the assurance that "things take time" and "this, too, shall pass." We may downplay the seriousness they see as concerned parents, knowing ourselves the greater severity of some other peo-ple's worries. With the passing of years, - we can reflect back to our nephews and nieces and their parents the fine growth and maturing we have observed. At the same time, we may be disconcerted that they grow up so quickly. We take another look at ourselves, our mortality, the fragility of our life, and may wonder what lessons we will have handed down to them. Additionally, we share our religious family, its mem-bers, and its charism with our relatives. We occasionally invite our natural family into the intimacy of our reli-gious family, where a mutual enrichment is enjoyed that enhances each family. We enjoy hearing our nephews and nieces call our fellow religious by their first names (Bob, Jack, Mary, Pat), showing the close bond they share instead of using titles like Father, Sister, Brother. They become extended members of our various reli-gious orders, championing our cause and ministry, even becoming our cheerleaders, bragging about our spirit, charism, and apostolates. Later in life, they invite us into their newly formed families and homes. They come We can also share with family our religious lives and what we have to offer from our own ministry. 187 67.2 2008 Fisher ¯ The Celibate Aunt or Uncle 188 to visit, take us to dinner, invite us on their vacations, and support us as benefactors. These sentiments and relationships may not always be the lived situation. For some religious, they might not be real or feel real. Perhaps we find ourselves at odds with members of our family. We religious are like people everywhere. Though wonderfully redeemed, we are keenly aware of our flaws and sinfulness, and our fellow religious remind us of them. This is a blessing of living the communal life. But, sadly, we may find our-selves estranged from members o~ one or both of our two families. If so, a question needs to be asked: Is there anything so devastating that prayer, grace, and the pres-ence of God cannot heal? Of course, we cannot make up for lost time direcdy. Our nephews and nieces only have one "first communion," special recital, or game-winning three pointer. But, still, let us work at being gende and loving toward members of our families. Let us be vul-nerable to their forgiveness or compassion so that their grace and spirit may enrich our lives and ministries. They have much to teach us about being pastoral. Our nephews and nieces have trust in us. They value our vocation as religious and the graced role we serve as their special aunts and uncles dedicated to God's wider family. They can inspire us to a tremendous sense of fidelity. They need us to be women and men of integ-rity, faithful to our calling and our ministry. When it becomes difficult to be faithful, when it feels desirable to be anything but poor, chaste, and obedient, who we are to them and for them can serve as our motive to be the religious we vowed to be in the presence of God, the church, and that family of ours. We must not dis-appoint them. Being a celibate aunt or uncle is more than another hat, another role, another relationship. It Review for Religious is a phenomenal blessing like few others that breathes meaning into who we are--and how we are that uncle or aunt for all of God's people. Brother Joe and I no longer live in the same local community. When we gather for a communal celebra-tion, we keep each other abreast not just of our doings, but rather of our lives as uncles, our blessing as uncles, and all the joy that our nephews and nieces bring to us. Personal and Group Reflection 1. How has this article stimulated me to reflect on my vocation choice as I relate to the younger members of my family? 2. Acknowledging the tensions that arise in family relationships, can I reflect on some success stories in handling a difficult time? Invitation to Prayer The lake reflects a mirror calm, scents of wildflowers fill the air, a lone deer at the water's edge stares into the depths of heaven. Evergreens frame the tranquil scene, fir and pine in a regal pose, anticipating the coming of the finch and wren and sparrow. It is a time to approach God, to savor his creations, to let him penetrate the soul, raise the spirit, possess the heart. Neil C. Fitzgerald 67.2 2008 DAVID L. FLEMING gnatian exercising What Is a "First Week Retreat"? The Ignatian retreat of a few days to a week has commonly been called a "First Week" retreat. Ignatius himself described an adapta-tion of the full four-week Exercises with the phrase "giving the First Week exercises." The assumed focus has traditionally been on "sin" as outlined by Ignatius in the five explicit "exercises" of the First Week. In the tradition it has been acknowledged that Ignatius allows for some instruction on prayer as described at the end of the Exercises and on the various examens that are briefly explained at the beginning of the First Week. In this brief study, however, I want to focus on the prayer exercises, not on the instructions the retreat director may give. :190 ] David L. Fleming SJ is nearing twenty years as this jour-nal's editor. He first published the following article in the Indian journal Ignis, volume 37, number 3. Review for Religious Despite the practice known as "traditional," espe-cially with the retreats preached in the 19th- and 20th-century retreat houses, I question whether Ignatius intends a closely literal interpretation of the First Week. Does Ignatius intend to restrict the prayer material for those making a shorter retreat to meditation only on sin? Do we not need rather to take into consideration the dynamic of the First Week in order to understand how to structure and adapt a First Week retreat? How might we describe the dynamic or movement of the grace of the First Week? It is the interplay between the grace retreatants seek and the colloquy or conver-sation they have with God in each prayer period. Although in this Week, in the second prelude, Ignatius usually suggests a specific way of praying for a grace, he also speaks generally about the way of conversing with God in the colloquies. Because he describes a colloquy as a friend talking to a friend (or perhaps a servant to his master), he presumes that the conversation flows and is not predetermined. The Ignatian dynamic appears in this interplay between the grace sought and the results of the conversation, the colloquy. In an individually directed retreat, the director listens to this interplay between the grace prayed for in the prelude and the grace received as described to the retreat director. The director thereby receives inti-mations for the direction of the following day's prayer. Ignatius places the emphasis, not on dwelling on personal sins or on evil in our world, but on being grateful t

Issue 52.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1993. ; for r elig ious Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JULY-AUGUST 1993 ¯VOLUME 52 ¯ NUMBER 4 Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-535-3048 ¯ FAX: 314-535-0601 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ° 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ° 5001 Eastern Avenue ° P.O. Box 29260 Washington, D.C. 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. SUBSCRIPTION RATES Single copy $5 includes surface mailing costs. One-year subscription $15 plus mailing costs. Two-year subscription $28 plus mailing costs. See inside back cover for more subscription information and mailing costs. ©1993 Review for Religious for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Assistant Editors Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Michael G. Harter SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP J~an Read Mary Ann Foppe Joann Wolski Conn PhD Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden SSND Edmundo Rodriguez SJ Se~in Sammon FMS Suzanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JULY-AUGUST 1993 ¯ VOLUME 52 ¯ NUMBER4 contents 486 feature The Most Adventurous of Nuns: Ursulines and the Future Mary.Jo Weaver gives contemporary meaning to the legacy of Angela Merici and the Ursulines. prayer 503 Hermitage, a Metaphor of Life Eileen P. O'Hea CSJ shares the struggle of a desert-day experience. 507 Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation Robert McCown SJ explains how Christian Zen, or centering prayer, as an ancillary to the Spiritual Exercises offers spiritual repose. 519 God's Human Face Revealed: A Retreat in Wales Mary Corona FMDM shares her experience of God's working in a thirty-day retreat. 532 541 548 spiritual life What Trouble Is Tad Dunne ponders how coping with trouble allows us to find energies that produce growth. Prayer, Memories, and God Theresa Mancuso suggests a fascinating relationship between recalling joyful and painful memories and praying to God. Adding Up 75 Years Vera Gallagher RGS adds up the balance sheet of God's love in her own life history. 482 Review for Religious 553 566 574 apostolate Prayer and Work, Mostly in South Africa Timothy Stanton CR believes that intercession is the main respon-sibility of the church in the painful process of bringing a new South Africa to birth. Religious Life in West Africa 1966-1990 Martin O'Reilly CFC offers an outline of the development of reli-gious life from foreign-born to local-born in West Africa. The Sanctification of Their Neighbor Thaddeus J. Kazanecki CO examines some characteristics of the Italian confraternal life within which St. Philip Neri founded the Congregation of the Oratory. 584 596 6O2 610 religious life Culture and Contemplative Community Marie Beha OSC reflects on how living the Franciscan charism in the United States can be ddngerous both for U.S. Poor Clares and U.S. culture. Canonical Room for Charisms William F. Hogan CSC emphasizes the uniqueness to be fostered by each particular religious institute for the good of the church's mission. Journal of a Novice Director Melannie Svoboda SND explores the mind and heart of a novice director through excerpts that could be found in a journal. A Family Business: Management in Religious Congregations Dennis Newton SVD spells out some practical directives for deal-ing with complications arising from interaction between religious-congregation members and nonmembers in the workplace. departments 484 Prisms 616 Canonical Counsel: The Synod on Consecrated Life 622 Book Reviews 37-uly-Aug~st 1993 483 prisms A seminarian recently told me, in a certain exasperated way, of his frustration about political label-ing in the church. Informally representing others of sim-ilar age, he pointed out that he has known no other church than the post-Vatican II church. An English-language liturgy, a catechetical training distinguished more by ques-tions than by answers, parish organizations still in devel-oping stages, a school faculty composed mostly of lay teachers, along with a few religious women and men not appearing all that different in dress or in lifestyle from their lay counterparts--these are the only memories of church that he has. He has no more nostalgia for the prac-tices of the church of earlier years than he has for the cel-ebrated golden age of radio before the advent of television. His complaint is that any expressed desires for con-nectives to a pre-Vatican II church immediately raise the likelihood of himself and other people his age being called "neoconservatives." These thirtysomething people and younger want rather to explore more fully their heritages of Catholic .faith and practice. They have no battles to fight over the rigidities and meaninglessness that were part of some Catholic devotions and regulations of the recent, past. They are gra,teful for the freedom and respon-sibility which "older" church members have not always felt comfortable with. They appreciate the maturing fits-and- starts of an American hierarchy in providing leader-ship in their letters on peace and justice and on economics and even in the failed .attempt to address the role of women in society and the church. They see as well-mean-ing but fearful the attempts at control and centralization made by what they might want to label as a "conserva- 484 Review for Religious tive" Vatican bureaucracy. But they are nevertheless looking, sometimes toward the past, for something more in their church than they have at present. They would want, in Jesus' imagery, to be like the "head of a household who can bring from his store-room both the new and the old" (Mt 13:52). If I have rather faithfully understood and presented a major concern of significant numbers of younger members in the church, I believe that their complaint is legitimate. The necessity for an in-depth contact with and study of our rich heritages has never been more apparent. We are all-too-aware of the old truism that unless we know our past we are condemned to keep repeating it. We in the church are also well aware that the danger of being prisoners of the past is all-too-real, with the embarrassing irrel-evance of various "churchy" issues in the face of modern world problems and technology. So for us to know our heritages is to have the strength of consistency with our past but also the stim-ulus to move into a creative future where our faith is a light for appropriate decision and action. Our feature article, "The Most Adventurous of Nuns: Ursulines and the Future" by Mary Jo Weaver, is one attempt to make contact with a heritage in this kind of significant way. I hope that this article will serve as a model for people to study and write engagingly about other heritages, with implications for the present and future opportunities of those very heritages. The women and men who lived our heritages before they were heritages make vivid the values necessary for today's Christian living and the courage it takes to live these values in the face of difficulties, including at times the opposition of good people. This journal has a privileged role to play in bringing people into greater contact with the good-ness within so many spiritual families that live together in our church. In coming to know more fully the relevance of our spiri-tual heritages, we dan expect that our liturgical and prayer practices will be more life-giving, our ministries inspired by gospel beati-tudes will be more clearly focused, and our lives supported in Christian community will be more vigorous. Vatican II and the subsequent years have given the church the occasion for straightening out the gospel storeroom. Now we, the church members, need to enrich our faith lives by com-ing to know and use its treasures, both new and old. David L. Fleming SJ yuly-A1lgust 1993 485 feature MARY JO WEAVER The Most Adventurous of Nuns: Ursulines and the Future I found the title of my talk in the first sentence of Agnes Repplier's biography of M~re Marie: "Of course," she says, "the Ursulines were the most adventurous of nuns." As I skimmed the book, I found phrases like "the most adven-turous of patronesses," the "robust intelligence and fear-less imagination" of the founder, and the "constitutional fearlessness and valorous spirit" of the first missionary to North America. The women most often mentioned in Ursuline history--St. Ursula, Angela Merici, and Mhre Marie--were all formidable figures, and as I read about them I was wafted back into a romantic past when pio-neering women were intrepid and when everything worked out all right in the end. Although the women associated with Ursuline history were not feminists in any modern sense of the word, I wondered what it would mean to attempt a feminist reading of their lives. I was drawn most powerfully into Angela's life, but not before the other two made me stop and take notice. The medieval legend of Ursula as a graceful, beauti-ful, wise, cultured scholar whose learning amazed the doc- Mary Jo Weaver is professor of religious studies and women's studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. Author of Springs of Water in a Dry Land: Catholic I, Vomen and Spiritual Survival (Beacon Press, 1993) and other works, she spent ten years explor-ing feminist issues in the American Catholic Church and has recently begun a long-term research project on traditionalist Catholics in the United States. Her address is 1030 S. Mitchell; Bloomington, Indiana 47401. 486 Review for Religiot~s tors of the church explains why she inspired so many paintings and poems. The bare outlines of her mythical life--martyred along with eleven .thousand virgins with whom she was wandering around barbarian Europe--are fanciful, to say the least, but I do not think it troublesome that the historical facts about her are rather dim. True or false, her legends shaped part of the Catholic tradition and tell us something about the roles women were able to play in the medieval imagination. That she was a virgin, the patron of innocent girls, and a charismatic figure and leader even though she was single--neither married nor in a convent--was obviously attractive to Angela. When I moved to the stories surrounding M~re Marie, leader of the first Ursuline mission in North America, I found genuine historical material used by her biographer in a skilled portrait. Repplier's biography can be summarized in this sentence: "She had escaped every groove in which she had been imprisoned by circumstances." It is a marvelous summary of the life of an ordi-nary woman responding to extraordinary demands, and that seems to be an Ursuline theme, at least in the North American context, where Ursulines were on the scene early and seemed to thrive in the most desperate of situations. Male historians, who typically pay little attention to women, unite in praise for the teaching charism of the Ursulines and their civilizing power on the frontier. There is more, of course, but the bottom line from the his-torians is a witness to dedicated purpose: "The development most distinctively American was the role in educating the young assumed so largely by a myriad of women's communities, begin-ning with the Ursulines in New Orleans in 1727." These same historians do not make much of the fact that the founder of the Ursulines was an independent and rather remarkable woman sur-rounded by strong, inventive women. Those attributes attracted me, however, and it became clear to me that the best way to think about Ursulines was to get to know their founder. Besides, there seemed to be excellent sources of information: well-researched critical biographies, spiritual reflections, historical notes, and modern symposium notes say something about the kind of energy Angela Merici has inspired in her followers. About Angela Merici, there seems to be solid historical ground for an interpretation, but as with the stories of other founders and other times, the pious imagination has sometimes filtered the facts. For example, Angela is remembered ih connection with the July-Aug'ust 1993 487 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns education of girls and is sometimes pictured as energetically open-ing schools; but she neither spent her time founding academies, nor was she drawn primarily to an apostolate of education. Her pioneering spirit was directed towards the moral support of young girls and the regeneration of society as it could be accomplished through a formation program within family settings. Still, because she established a company of independent women at a time when things were astonishingly bad for women, Angela is an example of the "theoretical feminism" that some critics believe has always existed even though it was seldom successful. Theoretical femi-nism means the dedication of women to the abolition of hie(ar-chics, especially those that put women under the direction of men. That description appears to fit Angela's context, and the fact that she tried her experiment during the Renaissance makes her case even stronger. One of the salient points made by feminist historians for the last twenty-five years has to do with periodization. The ways we mark historical periods have been set by men and often mark the realities of women's lives. The late Joan Kelly ~nade this argu-ment with specific reference to Renaissance Italy, Angela's time and place. According to Kelly,.there were no gains for women during the Renaissance. In fact, the age was marked by a restric-tion of the scope of women's powers. Female sexuality, women's economic and political roles, their cultural power in shaping the outlook of their societies, and the ideology about women all underwent profound changes, mostly to the diminishment of women. Yet Angela acted as if the subordination of women was not an issue for her. The "new subordination of women to the inter-ests of husbands and male-dominated groups" that went hand in hand with Renaissance "progress" did not seem to touch her per-sonally though it may account for the rather quick enclosure of the women Angela hoped could live a more autonomous existence. Like fascinating women everywhere, Angela regularly over-turns predictable assmnptions about her. The woman who gath-ered the company later valorized as "the most adventurous of nuns" seems to have been the most reluctant of founders. The founder who has gone into history as one of the world's great pioneers of education seems not to have been that at all, and the visionary who heard a voice from heaven in her teens finally got around to acting on it when she was an old woman. Angela's life fits no .pattern that I can find unless it might be 488 Review for Religious that of Dorothy Day, who summarized her own life's work by say-ing that she never planned to do very much at all. "Opportunities presented themselves and we responded," she used to say, refus-ing to be relegated to the musty shelves of sainthood, out of ordi-nary reach. Dorothy Day is not a perfect parallel figure for understanding Angela, but can help us to perceive the more or less prosaic ways in which ordinary people can be propelled into extraordinary activity. Almost everything we know about Angela Merici happened in Brescia, a small but very volatile city. In 1401 it had been dubbed "the little Rome" because it had 70 churches and 50 monasteries for a population of 16,000, yet sixty years later the apocalyptic reformer Savanarola preached sermons there evoking visions of hellfire and damnation to inspire a change of heart in a morally bankrupt population. Perhaps Brescia was simply unlucky in terms of episcopal leadership. Paulo Zane, absentee bishop there for fifty years (1481-1531), seemed to be in a contest with corrupt popes, cardinals, and priests to see who could lead the most lav-ish and egocentric life. Perhaps Brescia was simply unlucky in terms of its geographical location; it was used, stomped on, and overrun by various armies during the complex territorial wars that dominated the region in the late 15th and early 16th cen-turies. When the French sacked the city in 1512, four years before Angela arrived, the torture and killing of local citizens was so ferocious that all of Europe was shocked by it. If we think of mod-ern- day Somalia, or parts of Latin America or the Middle East, we would not be far off in our analogy. The context for Angela's life, therefore, was collapse and tran-sition. The medieval models for politics and religion were not working, but nothing better was yet in place--a time, in other words, not entirely unlike our own. It was also a time of rampant corruption and moral gridlock, in which those "in charge" appeared uninterested in the daily spiritual li;¢es of ordinary peo-ple. Outside of the 10th century, it is hard to imagine a worse set of popes, one after another, than those who occupied the Holy See then; nearly half of the men who~e stories make up Chamberlain's The Bad Popes ruled during Angela's lifetime. Religious life, although abundantly present, was scandalous rather than edifying, creating a kind of spiritual vacuum for a scream of protest to fill. And, of course, someone did produce such a scream. A young Augustinian monk teaching Scripture at Wittenberg protested .~uly-Aug'ust 1993 4.89 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns Charlotte Lichtblau vehemently, but that is a different story. It is not clear how sharply the Lutheran remonstrances touched Angela herself. Many of the reformers of the 16th century--Teresa of Avila, for example-- were so taken up with their own missions that they appear to belong to a climate of religious reform that has very little to do with the great Protestant revolt that began a year after Angela arrived in her new home. Still, ten years later, in 1527, a major anti-Catholic demonstration in Brescia signified, among other things, that people there were in a state of spiritual uproar. 490 Review for Religious To understand Angela's context, therefore, we have to imag-ine a situation that felt generally hopeless and beyond control. The northern Italian borders were not secure, and towns like Brescia were a kind of permanent war zone, not always the scene of bloodshed, but sufficiently precarious to raise the disease rate, encourage prostitution, destabilize families, and generally scuttle normal life. Religious leaders were nowhere to be seen unless one happened to be in Rome attending the theater. The streets of Brescia in 1532 probably resembled Times Square in 1993. They were full of con men sensing opportunities, young women selling themselves for their next meal, old men with diseases or old war wounds and no place to go, and ragged children darting from one bad situation to the next. Acting courageously in this little scene were some dedicated young men operating hospitals for "incur-ables" and a steadfast group of young women whose desire to help young girls led them to imagine themselves working together in a new way. What did these young idealists have in common besides a lively conscience and a desire for spirituality in action? They were all friends of or drawn to Angela Merici, an efficient, maternal woman who, by all accounts, had a magnetic personal-ity shaped by personal sanctity. She had even, so it was said, once had some kind of "vision." As I noted earlier, whatever the facts of her life, Angela Merici is not typical in any way. The outline of her visionary experience-- adolescent orphan girl sees something and claims to be instructed by it--is a standard story; but what Angela did with it is not. Her modesty in claiming very little for herself because of her experi-ence reminds me of Dame Julian of Norwich, who after a series of remarkable visions went on with a modest, reclusive life, recounting them to a scribe only much later. As an adolescent, Angela apparently had a profound religious experience--a dream or a vision--which she believed gave shape and direction to her life; but she did not immediately run to a bishop to disclose its contents, nor did she speculate about the concrete terms into which it might eventually be cast. She simply went about her life as a third-order Franciscan, te.aching catechism in her own village and willing to go wherever she was needed--to Brescia, as it turns out, when she was in her forties. Unless we count a pious life as extraordinary, she did not do anything out of the ordinary there. Perhaps the very routineness of her life calmed people: At the same time, the little things she .~uly-August 1993 491 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns Like any normal prophet, she was reluctant to believe that God was directly calling her. did made an impressibn on those around her. She lived a selfless life in the company of rich people and brought the attractive wis-dom of common sense to a besieged.situation. She apparently felt secure enough to pursue her lifestyle choice of virginity in the home of a wealthy young merchant, living in his house for more than a dozen years. She was an ascetic who was surrounded by friends, many of them men. She was a good organizer and pitched in to do what needed to be done--nursing, counseling, pro-tecting children, consoling the bereaved--but also apparently felt free enough to go galli-vanting off to Jerusalem, to Rome, and to Varolla, a kind of Holy Land theme park in the Alps. How it became clear to her that it was time to act upon her early vision and gather "a company of consecrated virgins" around her is not Clear to me, especially since I see her vari-ous trips as flights from that call. Every time someone called a meeting, she disappeared! In 1522, when she was in her early fifties, Angela went on a pilgrimage to Mantua, to the tomb of Blessed Osanna Andreasi, a third-order Dominican. Why? Did she simply want to honor this holy woman, or was she begin-ning to suspect that she herself was gifted beyond what she had up to now felt to be ordinary abilities? Did she hope by honoring Osanna, a new and popular cult figure, that she could elude her own fate, like Moses telling God that, in comparison with the articulate Aaron, he was simply not the man for the job? It seems reasonable to assume that she experienced some kind of inner turmoil and was seeking refuge from it. In that way--like any normal prophet, with the exception of Isaiah--she was reluctant to believe that God was directly calling bet. Whether at Mantua she was seeking refuge or confirmation, however, she did not quit running away. Her next pilgrimage, in 1524 to Jerusalem, is what we might expect from such a woman in those times, and having an on-site episode of hysterical illness was not untypical. People in the highly charged atmosphere of a major place of pilgrimage often have unex-pected or frightening physical experiences, but let us examine this moment more closely. She did not, like Margery Kempe, faint or have visions of herself assisting at the birth of Jesus; she did not, like 492 Review for Religious Felix Fabri, feel as if her whole life had been turned upside down. She went blind and so could not see some of the holy places. When I read that story, I wonder what she did not want to see. On her way back from Jerusalem, she stopped awhile in Venice, where city officials begged her to stay and administer a hospital for incurables there, an honor and a challenge to which she responded by fleeing quickly and returning to Brescia. Running away from this opportunity would have made sense if she returned to Brescia to take on similar responsibilities there, but she did not. She was scarcely unpacked when she booked pas-sage on another pilgrimage, this time to Rome and the celebration of the jubilee year (1525). I read this activity as a voyage of internal discovery. Those attuned to their inner voices know that "you can run, but you can-not hide," something An\gela was trying to do in ever more press- xng ways. Whatever her reasons for going to Rome, once there she managed to get an audience with Pope Clement VII. It is hard to imagine this event without the kind of bribery required by most Renaissance popes, so if she managed to see the pope without such machinations, I daresay he already knew about her and saw how she might be useful to him. In any case, if she wanted the solace of a papal blessing, she received another scare instead: he begged her to stay in Rome and administer a hospital there. Here the story gets even more dramatic because, in the face of a papal request, Angela fled lest she be compelled by obedience. Other popes might have pursued her, but Clement was not a man of swift decision. His nickname--"I will and I won't"--was given to him because be was a notorious temporizer, agonizingly slow to make any decision. His disadvantage was her victory. She got herself back to Brescia and away from Rome. Perhaps she imagined she was now safe and sound. ¯ What can one make of all this flight? I see a woman who probably knew she had led a useful life, who was self-assured and willing to help out where she was needed, but not eager to fit into a role she could not yet imagine for herself. The idea that she might be more than a reasonably pious and useful woman and the fact that young people involved in arduous and creative cor-poral works of mercy gathered around her as if around a mother hen may have strained her .self-understanding. Maybe she was just tired--she was in her late fifties--maybe she was just stub-born. I find her self-possessed, unwilling to act until she herself j~uly-August 1993 493 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns was clear about what she might do and how she might act to con-trol her own future. In "running away" she found the time and space to begin to come to terms with it. It is fascinating to see this middle-aged woman struggle with the logical implications of her own life. She had been in Brescia for nearly fifteen years, living a prayerful life and doing good works. People thought her so wise and caring that they called her madre (a tide reserved for holy women and nuns), and from morn-ing to night she was called on by people seeking her advice or drawn to her sensible simplicity, A group of courageous young people who had their own ideas about how to live the gospel in a forlorn world were drawn to her spiritual power. And an increas-ingly clear apostolate, dedicated to the care and protection of young women, had been staring beseechingly at her since Elizabeth Prato, a friend young enough and devoted enough to be her daughter, started working with lost girls in 1522. Vv'hy, then, the reluctance? And why do I find it comforting? Without intending to be cryptic, I think it is middle age, Angela's and my own. Had she been in her twenties, perhaps she would have dived right into the creative community she founded, as many of today's middle-aged sisters, in their youth, were drawn into the irresistible energy of religious life with its sacrifices and promises. But, like many of us today, she was in her fifties, not so quick to act, distracted by alternatives and the cautions that come with age. Maybe she just wanted to live out her days in the mod-est way she had been doing. After all, it is reasonable at this age to be tending the gardens of one's own soul and unreasonable to be launching a major life project. Maybe the call which had come with such clarity many years earlier now seemed distant or unreal, impractical in the present situation. VVhen we are young, the idea that God wants us for something specific seems only natural. All the scary choices--marriage, motherhood, convent life, profes-sional training--are made with the blessed ignorance of youth. But when we are older, the same idea can make us wonder if we are imagining things; we see all the reasons not to believe what we are hearing. In such cases the mysterious ways that God is famous for often manifest themselves in some dramatic way. For Angela, not unlike many of the saints, illness was a factor. Fleeing again in 1529 to Cremona in order to get away from political intrigue and an active war zone, she became gravely ill. And here, I think, she 494 Review for Religio~ts encountered an interesting temptation that may have looked like the answer to her problems. Illness and death beckoned as an option, the last flight, the final escape. She apparently thought that she might really die there and--whether with drama or res-ignation I cannot say--took to her deathbed. Yet, when one of her young supporters composed her epi-taph and read it to her, she bounced back, not as ready to go to heaven as she imagined. Again, I think, she shows the wisdom of age, for it is only when we are very young that we find a "longing for death" something to nurture in our-selves. Angela, hearing her epitaph, dis-covered new energy in herself. She still may not have been ready to lead a new movement, but neither was she ready to be led into eternity to the strains of In Paradisum. Whatever happened to her during those days in Cremona, she was resolved, at the end of this exile, to put down her traveling staff and follow the spirit she had been running from. She made one more short trip to Varolla that winter, to renew her memories of the Holy Land-- a symbol for her sense of purpose--then returned to Brescia and moved into a small room in Elizabeth Prato's house near the church of St. Afra. Now nearly sixty, Angela tucked into this new stage of her life with determination. She lived even more austerely, spent more time in prayer, and began to instruct her spiritual daughters. It is probably only a geographical coincidence that Prato's house was near the church of St. Afra, a 4th-century prostitute who achieved sainthood through martyrdom; but it is interesting that the early work of Angela's group was partly directed at.opening possibili-ties for "penitent women," a euphemism .for prostitutes. By 1532 Angela had gathered a small group around her and developed a rather extraordinary and yet quite simple idea: all the women would engage in an exterior apostolate and lead vir-ginal and virtuous lives, but would take no vows. In its broad out-lines this plan is reminiscent of the Beguines, religious associations of women begun in the 12th century in Belgium and the All the scary choices-- marriage, motherhood, convent life, professional training-- are made with the blessed ignorance of youth. July-Augt~t 1993 495 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns Netherlands. Their success in the 14th century did not impress itself upon the clerical mind so much as the fact that they took no vows and were not subject to the rules of any order. Did Angela know about them? Was she attracted by their relative autonomy? Did she think their exp+riment was worth another try? Her idea was so simple and so revolutionary that it boggled the minds of the authorities: women would commit themselves to an apostolate--the care, protection, and education of girls--and they would promise lifelong fidelity to consecrated virginity. We may consider how her plan might have threatened men. Pious men would see women able to lead useful virtuous lives without their advice, and "men of the world," accustomed to pursuing an occasional dalliance, might now have to sneak into the house late at night, only to be met with the soulful glances of an at-home daughter vowed to virginity. Angela's notion of governance was also disturbing. However much she said about obedience to authorities, the Holy Spirit was her real teacher, and so she stipulated for her daughters. Her desire to trust the activity of the Holy Spirit in the individual heart, however, did not appeal to male authorities. On the con-trary, it frightened them profoundly. Charles Borromeo--still in diapers when Angela died--found the idea of an unmediated Holy Spirit speaking directly to the heart and conscience of individual women wildly dangerous. The changes made by this young arch-bishop of Milan in Angela's Rule are not surprising to anyone with even a minimalist feminist consciousness. Borromeo was a man of his times; Angela was a woman ahead of hers. I find it fascinating that, unlike some other reformers and founders such as Teresa of Avila, Angela did not invoke the com-mands of Christ to carry out her purpose or to solidify her sense of authority. She was sure that what she was doing was made pos-sible by and would be sustained by God, but she exhibited no need to couch her ideas in the language of mystical certainty. Perhaps because she was single and surrounded by eager disci-ples she had no need to talk about divine directives. Perhaps she did not have any. Her ideas about community seem to follow directly from her own experience, an extension of her practical holiness. The memory of her vision--by now no more than a vague request to a bereaved girl--and a st.eady relationship with God were enough for her. The practicality and ordinariness of her plans made her an 496 Review for Religious inspired leader with amazing insight into the needs of women. The frescoes she commissioned for her oratory--the meeting space and prayer room for her young group--constitute a kind of "womanspace" in which her young followers could imagine new possibilities for themselves. Angela's frescoes gave her fol-lowers examples of spiritual heroism. Looking around in that room, young women saw Angela's models. Ursula, Elizabeth, Paula, Eustochium, and, by some accounts, Catherine of Alexandria make exquisite sense and testify to the power of Angela's self-concept. She did not choose prepubescent martyrs or women noted for fasting and silence; she selected strong, bright, self-confident women. It is worth lingering on this point. Although the Catholic tra-dition has a long list of impressive women saints, women whose sanctity rests on suffering, self-effacement, and masochistic penances often predominate. That Angela did not choose such models for her girls speaks eloquently, not only to Angela's time, but also to our own. The women in her murals are all.mature, educated, learned, single, undaunted by male threats or violence, and autonomous in their fashion. Like Angela herself, these women exhibit an inner certainty and independence, making no great claims for themselves, but creating atmospheres of respect by their clearheaded, fearless lives. Even if we look at the under-side of their stories--Elizabeth's sick relationship with her spiri-tual director, for example--the last line of the story is one of strength rather than brokenness. All these women are virgins-- some belatedly, some, like Ursula, spectacularly--and all com-bine devotion to learning with lives of Christlike action. Within two years of the setting up of the oratory, Angela and twenty-eight of the young women who regularly visited that col-orful space signed a book promising to serve faithfully as members of the company of St. Ursula. Within five years that number more than quintupled, and Angela died, leaving behind a growing group, three small documents, and a legacy of self-reliance. How does one survive in a world where, in Yeats's descrip-tion, "the centre cannot hold"? Angela's writings suggest that she endured by reliance on the Holy Spirit, self-confidence, adapt-ability, and kindness. She assumed that her daughters would sur-vive and that God would somehow take care of them, but I see no evidence that she had much stake in gathering a group that would last forever. She does not appear to have been much of a worrier, 3%dy-~lugust 1993 497 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns perhaps because she thought of herself as a mother and had such a fearless concept of motherhood. Angela's model of mothering was dominated neither by the medieval bias that considered women to be morally and intellec-tually inferior nor by Renaissance romanticizing. In her reckon-ing, a mother is loving, but also demanding; tough as well as flexible; able to embody both divine mercy and divine judgment. As CarolynWalker Bynum has shown, these qualities are partic-ularly important in contrast to concepts of divine motherhood that we find in the writings of medieval monks. For them, moth-ers are eternally nurturing, never critical, always available, in other words, stereotypical in the worst ways. Angela's concept of motherhood is the best indicator of her independent spirit. Like the great female mystics of Helfta-- Gertrude the Great, Mechtild--she was able to look into the mir-ror and see herself and her daughters as powerful even as they committed themselves to lives of service. She managed for much of her life to be what many of us hope eventually to become, self-accepting, aware of life's bleak realities without being defeated by them, and so quietly self-confident that it seems not to have occurred to her that she would not be able to do what needed to be done. In managing to live without marrying or entering a convent, and seeing no reason why other women could not do the same, she may have failed to recognize the extraordinary qualities of her own personality, but in that, too, I see modest ambitions con-cealing a powerful sense of purpose. If I can do this, she seems to say, so can you. Little Wonder that young women were attracted to her. She looks out from the past, not with directives, but with encouragement. "Take heart," she says, "I have confidence in you." The word that dominates her writings is kindness, the notion that people can teach more effectively, pray more openly, and act in the world more compellingly insofar as they remember to be tender, encouraging, loving. The ability of hers to enable her fol-lowers by encouraging them to trust themselves is no small thing to emulate in these times of confusion and anxiety about the future of religious life. Because I find Angela's life a statement about women's oppor-tunities, I think she is something of a feminist hero. Among other things, feminism is a countercultural movement related to the ways women are taught to act and to imagine themselves. As 498 Review for Religiozts someone deeply committed to women in an age that was deter-mined to keep women in lives of subservience, Angela was coun-tercultural. Her relationships, attitudes, and actions did not fit the norm for Renaissance women, nor did they fit into the accepted molds for "pious" laywomen. She did not take up residence with a man in order to have an overseer, for example, nor did she count it a danger to faith to be living outside the control of a husband or a bishop. When she says, in Counsel number 7, to follow the old Law but lead a new Life, she makes a countercultural statement. In the ways she used her own expe-rience to make her life and the lives of other women better, she did then what feminists urge women to do now. Like women in most times, she knew that she could not operate as men do, by domi-nating a situation, and so learned to lead by other means. She was a madre, a mother and leader whose "gov-ernance" was more by example than by decree. At the same time, she was not afraid of provocative images of power, urging her fol-lowers to be "like Judith," the Israelite woman who saved her peo-ple by beheading the enemy leader, Holofernes. In her Counsels Angela suggests that her followers serve oth-ers; practice gentleness; not be anxious if they do their best; build community anywhere; teach by example; find refuge in Jesus; nur-ture those entrusted to them; honor authority in the community; and live in harmony. People can, of course, read those bits of guidance in profoundly conservative ways to suggest that Ursuline women simply comply with rightful authority and define them-selves in terms of old-fashioned virtues of maternal charity. Compassion, prayer, solidarity, and a creative imagination, they might say, have been the tools women have used for centuries to shape life toward their purposes, find they work well in traditional models. But I think it is also possible to read them as directions from a self-possessed, powerful woman to those she expected to follow her lead. The bottom line is Angela herself: she trusted her friends and counted on them to be able to make use of their own experience as she had done. As I see her legacy, she was more Because I find Angela's life a statement about women's opportunities, I think she is something of a feminist hero. Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns interested in encouraging women to trust themselves than she was in providing them with a set of rules and regulations. However one interprets her life, the things Angela did can still be done. Women today--laywomen and religious women--have moved beyond passivity and found new ways to make innovations and to ameliorate social ills, as she did. She knew how to read and respond to the sigris of the times in creative ways and assumed that her followers would, too. She was able to read the gospel in prag-matic terms, as a demand to respond to the human demands of everyday life, and left that as part of her legacy. She looked for a new form of religiou~ life within her own experience and com-bined it with the tried-and-true formulae of work and prayer and fasting to come up with something so ahead of its time that it scared the men in charge of things. That can still be done, too. Whatever happens to "religious life" over the next few years-- and there is no end of controversy about it--I believe that at least three things need to be combined with your own reading of Angela's life. These general recommendations apply to all of us. First, we need to know the Catholic tradition: to be literate about revelation, creation, redemption, Christology, grace, and the rest, not in order to hold on in an obdurate or triumphal way, but to have a solid appreciation of what Catholicism is and is not. With Angela as a model, be assured that I am not talking about the truncated tradition handed on by men, the one that excluded women. I am talking about the full, richly embodied, woman-rich tradition of Roman Catholicism. Those who teach young people know that we now stand in a stream of Catholic tradition that very few people really know or understand. Those whose lives are focused on education might be both scandalized and galva-nized by that fact. Second, we need to have a firm grasp of the sacramentality of Catholicism since it both strengthens the spirit and informs the imagination. If we understand that the things of the world are sacred, that God is often present in the most unlikely of places, then we might see new possibilities in the universe. We need, in other words, as Angela did, to cultivate our religious sensibili-ties: to paint frescoes, create new holy cards, celebrate life. Finally, I think we should read Scripture and its commentaries and make that a part of our prayer. Angela may have done good works and taught her "daughters". all afternoon, but only, I think, because she spent the mornings in St. Afra's in front of the altar, sometimes 500 Review for Religious deeply connected, sometimes wildly distracted, but always, rou-tinely, there. I was attracted to Angela Merici originally because she was a powerful woman and, in my reading, a reluctant founder. As I read and thought more about her, I was drawn to her sense of adventure, her willingness' to risk what may have looked like an idiotic experiment at a time when she may have been mostly tempted to retire. So how can Ursulines combine their founding charism--tied to Angela Merici--with tradition, sacramentality, and Scripture? The hard part of that question for me has to do with the Ursuline charism. What is it? Education? Virginity? Working with young women? The possible answers sometimes seem as multivalent as the life of the founder and perhaps, like all life forms, reflect some facet of divinity back to God in their par-ticularities. Ursulines together embody the varieties of Ursuline life in a way that highlights the many aspects of Angela that are worth emulating. The bottom line for me is confident innovation. I do not know if that constitutes a "charism," but it seems to me that it could. Seeing what needs to be done and doing it with an embracing charity, while refusing to capitulate to fears about the future, is a rather astounding legacy, as useful today as it was then. Bibliographical Notes Many of the ideas for a feminist reading come from the work I have done over the last decade on women in the Catholic Church. My New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985) is the best state-ment of that interest (see especially chapters 1 and 3). Joan Kelly's Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) is still the best place to start when considering the problems raised by feminist historiography. Because Kelly's work is often set within the context of Renaissance history, her essays were particu-larly useful in interpreting the context for Angela. Also, Carolyn Walker Bynum's books, especially Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) are outstanding resources for thinking about the ways late medieval women actually thought and acted in the face of various religious and social changes. To learn about Ursulines, I began with Agnes Repplier's Mbre Marie of the Ursulines: A Study in Adventure (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1932), which gave me some amusing and provocative insights into Angela and Ursula along with the f~scinating story of M~re Marie herself. I am most indebted, however, to Teresa. Led6chowska's marvelous two- .l~uly-Augus* 1993 501 Weaver ¯ The Most Adventurous of Nuns volume critical biography, Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula: According to the Historical Documents (translated from the French by Teresa Nylan and published in Rome: Ancora, 1969). I used this amaz-ing resource to reconstruct the events of Angela's life. The interpre-tation of Angela as "fleeing" from the voice of God and as a "reluctant" founder are my own. I was also instructed by various works of Ursuline historian Irene Mahoney, whose Portraits of Angela (privately printed, 1985) and St. Angela Merici: Foundress of the Ursulines (privately printed, 1985) are excellent books, full of detail and insight. Martha Bucer's Also in Your Midst: Reflections on the Spirituality of St. Angela Merici (Green Bay, Wisconsin: Alt Publishing Co., 1990) was also helpful. Friends provided me with various notes from Ursuline conferences, especially with a very large set of materials from an international conference in Rome in 1991. I read them with great appreciation and have bor-rowed from them here. Other books cited or alluded to in this paper include E.R. Chamberlain, The Bad Popes (New York: New American Library, 1969); Louise Collins, Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1964); Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes (New York: Curtis Books, 1963); James Hennesey, American Catholicism: A Histo~bv of the Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); H.EM. Prescott, Friar Felix at Large: A 15th-Century Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming," in The Collected Poems of W.B~ Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1959); and the Penguin Dictionary of the Saints (London: Penguin Books, 1965). Progeny Imagination gives birth to a new offspring with its own world of wonder. From a procreator's seed comes a poem or a painting, a sonata Or a cathedral. each pulsing with th~ heartbeat of Progenitor-God, Giver of beauty to beauty's ministers anointed with the rite of co-creation. Anna Marie Mack SSJ 502 Review for Religious EILEEN P. O'HEA Hermitage, a Metaphor of Life I am in a hermitage. It is, again, not what I expected. The brochure made it seem inviting, a way to satisfy the desire of my heart. I wanted a place to be--to just be, be an empty vessel in God's presence. I wanted to symbolize my response to God at this point in my life and to make sure I am open, attentive to any desire or whisper of the Divine. This hermitage looks out on woods that are covered with ten inches of pure white snow. As one walks, there is no sound but the crunch of rubber boots on a would-be path and the rusde of some frozen leaves that still hang on to bare branches like icicles. To be empty before the Beloved is my desire. And so I sit cross-legged on my saffron pillow before a large wooden cross, flanked by two small icons, and a vigil light. At last, I think, desire meets fulfillment in this quiet, undistracted place. But I am distracted; I am cold. I push the thermostat knob on the small gas heater behind me to its highest set-ring. The heater begins to ci'ackle and bang continuously and make little explosive noises every six minutes or so. It robs me of silence. As darkness absorbs the light of day, I get colder and colder. I have already layered myself in all the clothes I brought with me, and I have squeezed my Eileen P. O'Hea CSJ is a psychotherapist and spiritual director. Her address is 2311 Woodbridge Street; Suite 210; St. Paul, Minnesota 55113. prayer 1993 503 O'Hea ¯ Hermitage, a Metaphor of Life I want God's truth to be straightforward-- no glitches. ice-cold feet with their two pair of socks into my new "Thinsulate" mittens. As my feet flop around on the cold wood floor, I remind myself of Emmett Kelly, the circus clown. It is not quite funny, however. I force myself to persevere for one half hour of quiet prayer, but the clanging radiator, my clanging mind, and my freez-ing body do not lead me to a place of rest. I decide it is time for the bread and cheese, the orange, and the cup of tea that are to be my supper. I watch the night as I eat. Each piece of food, each sip of tea, carries its own taste when one is so concentrated. The orange is succulent and sweet, the cheese substantial and rich, the bread mealy and nourishing, the tea satisfying. I am grateful for each. Fortified, I read the Scripture that lies open as if ready for me. I read Psalm 139 out loud and slowly, wondering as I do so if this is the place God will choose to cast some direct light and move my spirit to new understanding. I want to be awake. If I am supposed to be getting a message, if that is why I am here, I do not want to miss it. Toward the end of the psalm my spirit is thwarted by the words: "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?" I cannot say these words; I check my own revised version of the text. It is the same. I close the book, wanting to feel glad that God knit me in my mother's womb, but put off by the dualistic image. This glitch prevents me from totally giving myself to this experience. I want God's truth to be straightforward--no glitches. After wrestling around a litde, I decide to again attempt some contemplative sitting. I drape the blanket around my head, shoul-ders, and feet. I set the timer for thirty minutes and wonder if I should. Perhaps this will be the time when I will just want to linger in God's presence unrestricted. So often when I experi-ence this desire some duty calls me away. This is partly why I am here in this hermitage--so I can linger in the sweet and loving presence of God or be carried beyond my own self-consciousness to a very deep and still place. I do not set the timer. I do not rest. I am very cold. I stay in this prayer position, waiting for the time to be over. I want to be comfortable. I am not. After twenty minutes I give up. I think of going to bed. I am tired and everything has taken too much 504 Review for Religious energy. The outhouse is the least of inconveniences, I think, as I stare blankly toward a small wooden washstand. Eight plastic gal-lon containers of water, icy cold, flank it. They are for washing, cleaning, and drinking. I do not like them. I decide it is too early to go to bed. It is only 6:45. I sit in the rocker, my glasses and I peeking out through the draped blan-kets, and begin to read about "unity." The cynical part of me wonders if Ruusbroec (or Ruysbroeck) could have written or known these things if he were as cold as I am. Another level of me intuits the abiding truth he is trying to articulate. I want to sip his words like fine wine and, like the effect of wine, feel them in all the cells of my body. But the resistance of my body and psyche to the frigid Minnesota weather that is penetrating this north-woods hermitage will not forsake its stance. Although I have only one page left to end the chapter, I do not continue. My heart is moved again by Ruusbroec's words when he writes about Christ's prayer for unity (Jn 17:21-23) and says it is the most loving prayer which Christ ever prayed for our salva-tion. I am touched that Christ was praying, that Christ too was filled with desire. Stay with this, I think; do not read further. I close the book. I go to bed. I am warmer. My mind goes back to Ruusbroec's words. I wonder: Is this the truth I am meant to penetrate? It has not quite caught hold of me deeply enough, I ruminate, but perhaps during the night my enlightenment will come. My mind casts about as my body begins to settle into the comfort of warmth. Perhaps Sharon, the woman running this retreat house, is a mystic who can read my soul and tell me things that God wants me to know. I fall asleep. I dream of Sharon. Morning comes. I hesitate to get up, to begin the ordeal of being cold again. I pray, eat breakfast (I do not have to dress because I am already wearing all my clothes), and go for a walk. The atmo-sphere is frigid; the sky is gray" and overcast. Ithink of leaving early. I do not need bodily hardship, I muse; things have been phys-ically hard enough this past year. I need solace and nurturing. However, I counter this thought by reminding myself that I am old enough in hermitage experiences to know one must let them be what they are, not impose oneself or one's desires on them. Let God be God, I remind myself, and you be an open space. As I reenter the hermitage, I realize I dreamt of Sharon, but can only remember her saying it is about change. I wonder if this 3~uly-A~t 1993 505 O'Hea ¯ Hermitage, a Metaphor of Life My time here has taught me how hard it is to contemplate when one is reduced to survival. is significant and a message from God or if it is a matter of my own projections and happenstance. Rather than get caught in this distraction, I reassert the pact I have secretly made with Divine Love and say: "You know my great love for you, you know I desire only you and your will; then, if you want me to move in a certain direction or to know something about you or me, you must let me know it in a way that is not obscure and leaves me free of doubt. I am open to you, but you must remove the obstacles that prevent me from knowing or seeing your will clearly. I am totally dependent on you for this and feel it is not too much to ask of one who is in a relationship of mutual love. In a word, do your stuff and I'll do mine." Inside I sit in the rocker that I have moved as close to the gas heater as possible. I pick up my pen and yellow pad and begin to write: My time here has taught me how hard it is to con-template when one is reduced to survival. Survival sets one's consciousness at the level of basic and immediate, human needs and so occupies it with food, clothing, and shelter that it gives no attention to deeper lev-els of reality. Consequently, these deeper levels of consciousness-- places where intimacy with Divine Being is realized and expressed--are, practically speaking, obliterated. The heinousness of human sin, its death-dealing power, is many-leveled. Starving peoples in Africa and war-torn countries come to mind. I put my pen down and pray: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. It is afternoon.I am still cold. In a few hours my time here will be over. I do not want to leave. As I begin to gather my things I think: This hermitage time was neither "lights on" or "lights off," as Ruth Burrows describes moments of the spiritual journey. I console myself with the thought that I came to be an empty ves-sel before God. Before leaving I sit one last time on my saffron pillow to pray. As I do so, I see outside my window a brown oak leaf surrender to a current of air, then glide gently down to the waiting snow. It is sitting there now, very still, ready in due season to become one with the earth. I sit too, quietly waiting, attentive, attuned to Love. ~06 Review for Religious ROBERT MCCOWN Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation Or What You Always Wanted to Know About Being a Mystic But Were Afraid to Ask pmeople of the ancient world strove in many ways to com-unicate with whoever they believed to be out there, with whoeveg made the world and somehow controlled their lives and destinies. They offered in sacrifice choice things: grain or wine poured out, sheep or oxen slaughtered then immolated with fire. The smoke, they thought, would rise before the gods with a pleas-ing odor. Th.ey played flutes, used prayer wheels, painted their bodies, stamped their feet, and babbled. They hoped to get the gods' attention, to bring down favors from them. Human nature has not changed with the New Dispensation, nor have the ways men and women try to pray, except these are now purified and made gentle by revelation. Christ invited us to intimacy with his Father, and we respond by lifting our hearts to him: in the Eucharist (above ~11, the true and ultimate sacrifice), in vocal prayer (such as the Rosary), and in private prayer. We address God with words often chosen from the Psalms or given us by Christ himself or by his saints. These same words, as we use them, enrich our hearts and minds with wisdom. Robert McCown SJ has traveled widely in Japan, Thailand, India, and China. He has for the past two years been teaching literature in the University of Hangzhou, on China's eastern coast. His current address is: The Shrine of the Holy Cross; EO. Box 1497; Daphne, Alabama 36526. aTuly-dugust 1993 507 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation Zen has been used for decades by Christian contemplatives who came under the influence of ascetics of the East. But there are problems with using words in prayer--even God's words. Over time we tend to multiply them and to load onto them our own intellectual and emotional baggage, allowing our selfishness to co-opt their meaning. So in some prayers we might even want to dispense with words, to use body language only, which can sometimes be for us clearer, deeper, more pow-erful than spoken words. This, I think, is the prayer Christ meant when he said, "When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret." In such private and largely nonvocal prayer we offer God ourselves in our silent presence, and God responds to us, creatively, in our lives. This kind of prayer goes under a variety of descriptive names: meditation, contem-plation, and mental prayer. There is a long history of it in the church, going back to her earliest years, but it flourished especially in Europe in the fourteenth through the six-teenth centuries with a succession of great spiritual directors. St. Ignatius Loyola taught his followers in his Spiritual Exercises to meditate upon structured concepts and upon chiseled images--both anchored in powerful words--to explore the destructiveness of their sins, to accept forgiveness for them, and then, centering their lives in Christ, to redirect them to God in service of the church. But he reserved a choice place at the end of these Exercises for his largely wordless, though still rich in imagery, Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love. Others led their fol-lowers to shun in their meditations activities of both the intelli-gence and the imagination and, instead, to go beneath these, down to the marrow of the soul, to encounter the Father in that secret "room" they felt Jesus was speaking of. Zen as practiced by Christians is, in many ways, like this lat-ter form of prayer. It is not new, for it has been used for decades by Christian contemplatives who came under the influence of ascetics of the East. Although in recent years Zen has experienced in the West a growth in popularity, many devout people, unfor-tunately, have misconceptions of it, bringing mistrust. 508 Review for Religious Zen masters themselves often give little help in understand-ing their elusive discipline. When one puts questions to them about it, they often smile and remain silent. I believe this is because they see Zen not as a doctrine but as an activity--and thus an experience--so simple and immediate that, when one attempts to conceptualize it, he only obscures it, as when one tries to define the experience of love or of life. But I feel once people see what Zen is not--certainly not a rival to Christian spirituality--they may wish to try to do Zen themselves and thus to experience the extraordinary benefits claimed to derive from it. Let us consider first--lacking a better term--traditional Zen. Rather than enter the question of the historical origins of it, let it suffice to say it has been practiced for more than 1400 years. Concerning the question of its place of origin--whether India, Tibet, China, or Japan--let us concede simply that it developed in the East, probably in a pantheistic culture. But this should not influence Zen's practical value to us as a mode of meditation any more than the lack of faith of a philosopher should keep us from benefiting from his thinking. After all, a key foundation of scholas-tic philosophy and theology is a series of clear concepts St. Thomas found in the writings of the pagan Aristotle that first came to Europe through the works of Islamic thinkers. Of grea~er importance for our purpose are the reasons Zen developed into the form it ultimately took. These we hope we can intuit as we consider the practice of Zen itself; from these, perhaps, we can gain an insight into why Zen has been found by Christian con-templatives of former times and today to be useful in their prayer life. To do Zen one follows a series of seven conventions. So that our efforts remain not an exercise in looking only but translate into a creative experience, let the gentle reader observe successively these conven-tions as we set them forth: 1. Having chosen carefully the place for our meditation--as free as possible from distrac-tions, harsh lights, sounds, and drafts--we assume the Zen position, as shown in the illus-tration on this page. In this position we join our hands and bow from the waist in the tra-ditional oriental gesture of courtesy which here means, "Now I begin my meditation." A July-Aug~wt 1993 509 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation similar bow at the end will mean, "Now I end my meditation." If we must stand to attend to something--best disconnect the tele-phone beforehand--or we have an itch or a cramp we simply can-not ignore, we bow as we break off meditating, then again as we resume it. This puts parentheses around each session of our med-itation, separating it from interruptions coming from us and from our world around us. 2. We try to keep our backs as erect as comfortably possible: the base of the spine is the key. We do not worry if at first it tires quickly. After a couple of weeks of daily meditation, it will surprise us by its new toughness, even during longer sessions of Zen. 3. Our legs should be crossed as well as possible, but com-fortably, making allowances for bad knees and general decrepi-tude. We strive to keep faithful to the time we agree with ourselves to meditate daily. Twenty-minute sessions are good to begin with. As we go longer, circulato .ry pain in our legs can force us to take a break. For this, we bow, stand, join hands before us, pace the room for two minutes; then, taking again the Zen position, we bow, and resume meditating. 4. Our hands and wrists should rest comfortably on the insides of our thighs--left four fingers on top of right four fingers, the fingers underneath press up dynamically against those above, while the tips of the thumbs touch together ever so lighdy and del-icately. Here we aim to combine a relaxed and stable dynamism of our fingers with an alert delicacy in the touch of our thumbs. 5. Our head should be erect, tilted slightly forwar.d comfort-ably, and with chin in. Our tongue should rest relaxed in the base of our mouth, and we avoid all nervous movement of tongue and jaw. Lips should be relaxed and slighdy parted to permit exhaling through the mouth. 6. Our eyes should remain half closed and out of focus. If we close our eyes, we will go to sleep;, if we focus them on anything, that thing will become a distraction. 7. Our breathing should be not from the chest but from the diaphragm. We loosen our belts, allowing our lower abdomen full freedom to expand and contract. We inhale, knowing the air we take in through our nostrils will heal and give peace, and the air we exhale through our mouth will carry out those things that rob us of peace. This breathing is indeed the key to both tradi-tional and Christian Zen because, once we are in observance of these conventions, the conscious listening to the sound of our 510 Review for Religious breathing becomes the central continuous deliberate activity dur-ing the entire time we are meditating. W.e strive to make this breathing more and more regular, more deeply from the diaphragm. We seek to become increasingly absorbed in repose-fully listening to and centering ourselves in its sound. As we descend deeper into this centering, the thoughts, desires, and images that our mind naturally gener-ates will diminish to nil. If some persist, we do not fight against them, but, by continuously renewing this reposeful centering, we ignore them. If they con-tinue aggressively, it is probably because we are not observing certain of the conventions above. Perhaps our hands have slipped away from the position of dynamism and delicacy, or we are permitting nervous activity in our mouth. But most often the reason will be found in our breathing being not from the diaphragm, or our not centering ourselves in its sound. Striving meticulously to maintain these conventions, in spite of the turmoil our daily lives may be subjected to at the time, and striving, as well, to pass the whole period with a mini-mum of surrenders to needs to scratch or to shift our body's mem-bers, make for steady progress over the months, over the years. Indeed this striving for perfection in every detail--in posture and in centering in our breathing--becomes the daily bread and but-ter of Zen meditation. Even the pain we will feel in our legs after thirty or so min-utes of continuous meditation can be turned to our advantage. As this pain grows, we seek to enter it, to center within it, and, as it were, to find in it a certain rest. Thus our concentration upon our breathing will become more complete and more central, and foreign thoughts will be more completely excluded. The above conventions are, curiously, the essentials of Zen as it has developed over the past millefinium. Being in essence non-verbal, nonconceptual, and nonimaginative, Zen does not lend itself to being systematized. To those practicing Zen, it is the experience that matters, whereas the conflicting ways one tries to describe or analyze this experience are to them secondary at best. But for us Westerners, who look for reasons to be persuaded, let us ask what we are doing when we do Zen, and why. Simply stated, following these conventions meticulously permits us a Zen does not lend itself to being systematized. j~ldy-August 1993 511 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation maximum control of both our physical and mental activities, and from this we are able to suspend them partially. Thus, during meditation, the Zen position encompasses and brings under con-trol in appropriate ways every member and organ of our body-- even our heart--which, we will find, will beat slower as we descend deeper into the centering. While consciously listening to the sound of our breathing itself, we can make it more regular, more from the diaphragm, and it will further become the key to controlling and emptying the activities of our mind: memory, intelligence, will, and imagination, including especially emotions. Thus, in doing Zen we strive to make each session of medi-tation both as dynamic and as empty as possible. As far as I know there is no better way than this to disengage our physical and mental powers over an extended period of time while still con-tinuing awake and alert. Anyone attempting to observe self-imposed silence and recollection during a conventional retreat knows how recalcitrant our bodies and our minds are to this kind of discipline. Not even in sleep itself, which we now know is filled with both physical and mental .activity, is there such a diminish-ment of these as there is in Zen meditation. This partial suspension of our bodily and mental activities for a set period of time daily is the objective of Zen, and from this derive its singular benefits. As we strive for this disengage-ment, and achieve it in a growing degree, we are actually induc-ing our physical and mental powers into a daily, deep repose. Not only are each member of our bodies, but also the thoughts of our hearts, put to rest during our meditation: our conflicting values competing for dominance; our desires, inordinate or not; our ambitions and passionate longings; and our memories, both joy-ful and painful, with ruminations of past grievances. Thus we turn over, to our own mysterious powers of healing within us, our bodies, minds, and hearts; and from this daily repose and renewing of the whole person, a peace is given. We speak, of course, of daily meditation-Z-not over weeks, but over months, over years. If we do Zen faithfully, we will become aware of certain gifts that mysteriously enter our lives. We are surprised by new insights that fall out of nowhere into our minds, perhaps not during the time of meditation, but at other times dur-ing the day or night. We acquire a deeper understanding of our own best values, of how to bring to bear our nobler motivations. We acquire a deeper understanding of our own weaknesses, and we 512 Review for Religious see ways which perhaps we did not see before to put to rest inor-dinate desires. We become less afflicted by painful images of griefs or disappointments; and we are less obsessed by regrets, by per-sonal defeats and shames. Even memories of hurts from deep in our childhood, of which we are perhaps only barely aware but which still send poisonous tentacles up into our present relationships, can be uncovered and healed. We are mystified by how our own recuperative powers can now work within us. Just as, for exam-ple, when one morning we awake and realize happily that at last we are he~iled of a drawn-out bout with the flu, so in practicing Zen we might one day realize that now--but not before--we are able to turn with sincere affection toward a friend who has deeply hurt us. In short, what we experience in ourselves is a self-rehabilitat-ing human being, perhaps with long-immobilized personal gifts now renewed. From this, then, our own creative energies can emerge unencumbered, with a new freedom. This healing will often spread to others around us in our family, in our community and work place, even when they are not aware we meditate. As described thus far, traditional Zen is not intrinsically a religious action; it is, thus, neither theistic nor atheistic. Hence the curious smiles coming from Zen masters when one asks if, as practitioners of Zen, they believe in God. Somewhere further on in this direction lies the experience of enlightenment. Zen masters describe enlightenment as a percep-tion totally beyond reason, beyond imagining; intuitive, yet at the core of our life itself. All of Zen teaching, they add, is but an effort to take the disciple beyond concepts and images that stand for reality, and put him or her in intimate contact with that real-ity itself. It is in vain, they maintain, to pursue intellectually this stage, since all ratiocination on this point is useless, futile, and confusing. Thomas Merton calls this "the Zen fact" and com, pares it to an alarm clock. When it goes off, the sleeper 1) does not hear and just keeps on sleeping; or 2) making a misguided response, in effect turns the alarm off, permitting him to go back to sleep; or 3) he jumps out of bed with a shout of astonishment that it is so late. Zen is the alarm clock, it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It teaches nothing. It points. Merton continues: "But we in the West, in ego-centered practicality and ¯ . . manipulation of everything, always pass from one thing to another, from cause to effect, from the first to the next to the last and then back to the first. Everything always points to something 3~dy-August 1993 513 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation else and hence we never stop anywhere because we cannot; as soon as we pause, the escalator reaches the end of the ride and we have to get off and find another one. Nothing is allowed just to be and to mean itself; everything has to signify something else. Zen is designed to frustrate the mind thinking in such terms. 'The Zen fact,' whatever it may be, always lands across our road like a fallen tree beyond which we cannot pass. Nor are such 'facts' lacking in Christianity--the Cross for example . . . which gives Christians a radically new consciousness." The way some Zen masters describe enlightenment, as an experience of the unity of all being, reflects the monistic, cos-motheistic, philosophical climate of Zen's origins; and it can be disconcerting to a Christian. Yet, if one takes seriously one of the central teachings of Zen itself~namely, that it is the experience and not the concept of it that matters--then one may judge pan-theistic doctrine as the above to be not central to Zen. Indeed such might be for us the "misguidance" that prompts us to turn off the alarm clock, to go back to sleep and miss the experience. The "fact" of Zen is simply the experience that puts us in touch with this ultimate personal reality itself, and that, I believe, must at last come down to be our own individual living soul--the con-crete reality, not a concept of it. We cannot think our way to our soul's living presence, or analyze or visualize it; but in doing Zen we are brought to the experience .of the soul's availing itself of space to renew itself, and then of its mysterious healing powers in renewing our body, mind, and heart. Being in Zen an apprentice of only some twenty-five years, a full-blown experience of enlightenment, with 'its sudden flash of intuition, is still unknown to me. Nor do I seek it as such; as Christian, I try to keep my heart open to whatever grace the Lord sends and to whatever form he wants it to take. But before we dismiss Zen and turn off the alarm clock, I suggest we take seriously stated opinions of respected specialists, not only of such as Thomas Merton or Dom Aelred Graham, but also of Dr. John C. H, Wu, an eminent jurist and diplomat, a Chinese convert to Catholicism, and a scholar, who is able to write of Zen not from hearsay or study alone, but from within. He is not afraid to write that he brought Zen and Confucianism with him into Christianity. Looking further back, I have been assured by Carmelites who are specialists in both their tradition of con-templation and in Christian Zen that these two traditions are 514 Review for Religious essentially the same: what Teresa of Avila, in her own inimitable way, and what John of the Cross--and what Meister Eckhart 200 years before them--practiced, perhaps unknown to them, was essentially Christian Zen. But what is Christian Zen, which we will now call centering prayer, and how is it prayer if traditional Zen is not? Will an attempt to use Zen in prayer, contrary to what Zen masters main-rain-- that one cannot accommodate true Zen to any ulterior pur-pose- render it ineffectual? To answer, let me offer an analogy. Consider a ballet apprentice who works daily on her technique. She may give little thought to what ballet grammar--the body language she is learning--might be saying or to whom; she metic-ulously strives only to perfect every move, every step of it. For the present, the immediate benefits of her efforts--pride in pleasing a respected teacher, satisfaction in mastering an art--are suffi-cient reasons for striving for self-discipline; and she grows daily in poise and beauty. But one day a certain impresario discovers her and offers her a part in a new production. Now she has two things she lacked before: a role, a dramatispersona to live within, and an envisioned audience. These give form and finality to her efforts. Just as this ballerina can adapt her previously acquired skills to this new orientation, so also, as many Christian contemplatives have found, the skills and the strengths of traditional Zen, with little change in its dynamics, can be fitted into the larger synthesis of Christian prayer. Neither our ballerina above, nor a person doing Zen medi-tations daily, acts without a certain basic desire, or even a pas-sion, which drives their actions, enabling them to keep a daily commitment. One must first wish to do what is necessary to become, to be--whether in ballet, in Zen, or in Christian prayer. Satisfaction found therein will, in turn, sustain and nourish the motivation. When the prophet Samuel was a small boy sleeping in the temple, he was awakened repeatedly by a voice calling, "Samuel, Samuel!" Each time he got up and went to his master, the elderly priest Eli, and asked what he wanted. Each time Eli replied, "I didn't call, my son; go and lie down again." Again Samuel heard the voice calling, and again he went to the old priest. But this time Eli, perceiving it was thd Lord calling, instructed him, "The next time he calls, you must respond, 'Speak, Lord, for your ser-vant is listening.'" Whether that night Samuel really heard the 3~uly-August 1993 515 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation voice of God, or whether he heard only, as he had many times before, the wind blowing through the porticos of the temple, his listening and then giving response is the same. It is the reality from which the call came that makes the difference between an obedient child and the prophet-to-be. We must listen continu-ously to the voice of the Lord who speaks to us when and how he chooses. If we find traditional Zen apt for putting us in contact with the healing and peace-giving powers of our human spirit within, how much more will we find centering prayer apt for opening our beings to the Spirit of God within us, to surrendering ourselves to this Healer, this Comforter? It will be this Spirit's voice we listen for within the sound of our breathing, as she leads us into that silence within, where, using utterances beyond human words, with ineffable groaning, she cries, "Abba, Father!" Far from taking from Zen its dignity, thi~ carries it to its fulfillment. What a grace it is that Christian contemplatives discovered Zen and were able to enrich Christian asdeticism with it. The Christ-centered dynamics of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, especially when renewed yearly, give peace and build motivations to service, but they were not meant to be used daily over a long period of time when they can become exhausting. Centering prayer, on the other hand, not in contrast to the Exercises but ancillary to them, offers spiritual repose. Many of Ignatius's instructions can be applied with profit to Zen.medita-tion: making preparation before meditation by spiritual reading and acts of self-denial; cultivating honesty and sincerity in eval-uating our efforts at praying; making from time to time reviews of moments of joy or of sadness; and, with the retreat master's help, using carefully Ignatius's instructions on the discernment of spirits. In sessions of centering prayer, unlike in other forms of med-itation, one does not pray the words of any pious text, nor even of Holy Scripture. Words, whether we want them to or not, will bloom into images, and images invite concepts which multiply, and thus we are on the way to taking our bodies and minds out of that total surrender to the Spirit, the true mode of centering prayer. Rather, we should see each session of this prayer as that time when the Bridegroom is present before us, looking into our eyes, speaking into our hearts, so we put aside during this qual-ity time his love-letters from times past, no matter how treasured 516 Review for Religious they are. With no more than a bow of adoration and a word to greet him by name, such as, "Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner," we surrender ourselves with total passivity to his Spirit within us, who will shape our minds and hearts according to his holy will. In this action of the Spirit, one is reminded of a great, silent, mov-ing body of water, imperceptibly and with ease, carrying all obstacles before it. We will look forward to this daily prayer as the best moment of our day, and find in it an anchor for the rest of our lives. Let me mention now one special blessing I have received through centering prayer. When I was a very small child, I once heard my older brothers, one six, the other seven years old, talking about how hell is "for ever and ever--for eternity, which never, ever ends." My mind became beset with fearful images of this eternity, like "the void of infin-ity" that so terrified Pascal. These were most acute when I was ill, which I often was, with high fever, and with accompanying nightmares. During these I often dreamed I was looking up and saw the ceiling above me (and all reality with it) recede up and up and up, for ever and ever. My sight was forced to go with it, on and on, and I could never, ever make it stop; and that was eternity. And I felt desperately alone and forsaken. I could not turn off the nightmare, until my screams brought my father or mother who would awake me and comfort me. This terror remained with me even into later life. When I discovered Zen meditation, which then became for me centering prayer, I took up the custom, after meditating and during the brief prickly feeling as my legs recovered circulation, of lying back on the rug and looking straight up at the ceiling, never forgetting that this was the way I had so fearfully felt I was look-ing into the face of eternity. But over the years, gradually, imper-ceptibly, the terror departed. In its place has grown a trust in God's mercy and, even, flashes--ever so brief and fleeting--of joy in looking forward to my death, which now is approaching apace. These graces I consider among the most precious of my life. Remembering how the ancients strove to get the gods' atten-tion, we know we have already the Father's attention in his son, Jesus, who taught us to pray to his father by offering, not per- We must listen continuously to the voice of the Lord who speaks to us when and how he chooses. 3~ly-Aug'ust 1993 517 McCown ¯ Christian Zen-cum-Ignatian Meditation ishable gifts of animals slaughtered or wine or grain poured out, but one infinitely more desirable: our total selves. This same Jesus promised, moreover, "whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give it to you." Jesus must have meant precisely that, unless we ask for something that is not good for us, then he will give us something else--something far better for us. Centering prayer, as an ancilla to the Spiritual Exercises, more than any other prayer method I know, enables us to put ourselves into this total trust-ing frame of mind, not stating what we think we want, or need, or when, but silently taking Jesus at his word and waiting. The Father, who knows our needs far better than we do, will respond; and why wouldn't he, since Jesus said he would? Night Prayer The saints have left for the day, their stained-glass coves Are dark. The night, that deep iconoclast, Obscures the panes with his breath, as a prayer revolves Inside me, calling to the blackened east. I close my eyes and linger there, in the glow Of a bleak and fallen image of the outcast world, And wander through remembered brambles that grow Where squandered immortalities should. When young I crossed an ocean. Nearing land Candescent seeds arose from the water's rim As if sown in the sky by a hopeful, graceful hand To mingle with a tide of stars, to bloom unseen. From the altar candles' final gasp of light Two tendrils of smoke vanish into night. Kevin McCaffrey OP 518 Revie~v for Religious MARY CORONA God's Human Face Revealed: A Retreat in Wales Iyhad been living and working in Amman, Jordan, for eight ears when in 1989 I began reading The Journeying Self, by Diarmuid McGann. Becoming deeply involved with it, I came across these words: "The journey of faith begins at the Lord's invitation. He finds us in our places of marginal existence, where we hunger for liberation." I did not go further than that for sev-eral months, but those lines I read over and over again. I could wrest no personal meaning from them, and yet somehow they riveted me. At the same time I was picking my way through a book by Karl Rahner. Being no scholar, "picking" is how I cope with Rahner, and yet I am hugely attracted by him. Of the many sentences I jotted down knowing that I would return to them, here are a few: In contemplation the pray-er is intent on hearing an utter-ance of God never given before . We need the courage to believe that God will say some-thing permanent. It will happen when God is ready. God places me in complete freedom. He deals with me leaving intact my autonomy and self-direction. God is Love and in the face of that--I decide. There were many more, and while I went about my life in community and my teaching duties, these thoughts floated in and out of my mind whenever my interior screen was empty, setting up such a longing that I knew I would need to respond sooner or later. Mary Corona FMDM lives at 6, St. Anthony's Road; Forest Gate; London E7 9QA; England. .~uly-Auguxt 1993 519 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed Remote PreparationmI Go to Anjara The time to plan my annual retreat came round. I thought of Jerusalem, where I had made retreats before, but I had little heart for going there because of the heavy military presence at the time. Though Jordan itself has no retreat facilities, I knew that Father Joseph Na'maat, a diocesan priest in the north of Jordan, had spare rooms in a separate building which anyone was welcome to use on a self-catering basis. He said if I came during July I would have the entire building to myself. With typical Jordanian courtesy he also told me that his house and his table would be mine anytime I felt lonely. Josephine, his housekeeper, would, he assured me, keep an eye on things and make sure I was all right. The fee was so small it was a joke. So eight days on my own loomed. How would I work it out? I went along the shelves of our library and found Rahner's Eight Day Retreat and a paperback copy of the Ignatian Exercises. From my room I picked up my Bible and missal and that was all. I think the journey of faith McGann discusses began for me that day. I felt quite naked going off with what seemed so little in the way of resources. Anjara is a village in the northern Jordanian countryside. Feeling at home in the Arab world and having enough Arabic to do my own shopping, talk with people, and get by generally, I had no fears along those lines. On my arrival I was given a warm welcome by Father Joseph and the redoubtable Josephine. Then, after being shown "my" building and handed the keys, I heard the oft-repeated words "If it gets too lonely, you know where we are!" That first evening I worked out a program for the eight days, allotting time for the breviary, rosary, and Scripture reading. I then marked out three separate hours daily for prayer, leaving time for rest and recreation which, during the eight days, would take the form of walks, sitting on the roof in the sun absorbing the view, and wandering in my host's extensive orchard followed by his floppy old dog. Knowing nothing previously about the Exercises, I soon aban-doned the paperback because it made no sense to me.I stuck to the Bible and the missal and continued to read over the sentences from McGann and Rahner which had so affected me. For the full eight days I spoke to no one, except the dog. I waved to Father Joseph each morning after Mass and that was the excitement over 520 Review for Religious for the day. Through the grace of God, I remained faithful to all to which I had committed myself. On my final evening Josephine came to bring me over to sup-per and, like the hedgerow and byways folk of the gospel, I was compelled to attend. If you have never experienced an Arab sup-per or indeed Arab hospitality, you have missed one of life's love-lier moments. We sat on the verandah eating, talking, and--I must admit--drinking slightly too much of Father Joseph's homemade wine. The sun slowly sank behind the brown hills. Lamps were lit, creating a soft pool of light in the velvet darkness, and the night insects began their con-cert. We sat on. Eventually, however, and with real reluctance I rose, to a duet from Father Joseph and Josephine of "So soon?" I went to bed that night heavy with good food and wine and quite drunk--no, not from wine, but from the heady smell of honeysuckle and jasmine coupled with the heart-swell that comes from having spent a long summer evening with friends. The following day I returned to Amman knowing that I must do the long retreat. This is where the invitation mentioned by McGann and previously so dimly perceived was pointing. What a Franciscan was doing being so convinced that a Jesuit approach to life and prayer was the right one, I cannot say. But convinced I was. I waved to Father Joseph each morning after Mass and that was the excitement over for the day. To Wales I set about obtaining permissions for the following year and began to look for a place. Almost everyone I spoke to suggested looking for a Jesuit-run center, saying this w6uld be right for what I had in mind. But I prefer retreat houses run by women: they are cozier, and I like my creature comforts. After a few blanks I got a positive answer from a small guest-cum-retreat house, Coleg y Groes, in North Wales. Yes, they could take me. Yes, one of them could direct me. Yes, they were in the heart of the coun-try, and to all my other questions yes . . . yes . . . yes. I booked, hesitant to share with some of my more conservative friends that all was not as they might expect. I would be alone without the support of a group; I would be directed by a deacon, not a priest; 3~uly-Aug~tst 199.t 521 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed worse still, an Anglican deacon; worse again, a woman Anglican deacon! What would Ignatius have said? In August 1990 I returned to England, and in July 1991 I traveled to Wales. Arriving in time for supper, I found the small 18th-century house nestled behind the Anglican parish church in the village of Corwen. My room was very nice, with the promise of quiet. My quick eye noticed the electric kettle, tea bags, and coffee. It all augured well. I began to get the sinking feeling that comes from having made a big decision and then eeing the signs going wrong. I Meet My Directress Margaret, who was to direct me, suggested I join the other guests for supper that first evening; after that I would dine alone. Supper was served in a delightful low-beamed room with a huge fireplace cut from Welsh stone. Flowers were in the deeply set window alcoves, and the whole place exuded security and good living. I began, however, to get the sinking feeling that comes from having made a big decision and then seeing the signs going wrong. To my Roman mind the conversation became so Anglican, cen-tered on the ordination of women. Most of the women present, and indeed Margaret her-self, were ordained deacons. It was the last thing I wanted to get involved in. Intermingled with that were fairly long dis-sertations on the three resident cats. I drained my coffee cup as I tried to quell the rising panic within me. Relief came when Margaret suggested we go to my room for a first talk. In five minutes my fears evaporated. I knew instinctively that in her I was on to a winner. That night I slept well, waking totally refreshed. I made coffee, and one glance at the Welsh weather put me into warm trousers and a thick sweater. In the still sleeping village I found the small Catholic church. Inside, in a back pew, was a very still figure. I knelt down near the door, ready to escape if this man were not the sort I ought to seek out for company. After some minutes he looked up and said "Welcome." This was Father Joseph (I seemed destined to be mixed up with Josephs and 522 Revie'w for Religious Josephines). In answer to my question he said that so seldom did anyone come for daily Mass that we could arrange it any time suited to the two of us. Father became a true friend to me during my thirty days. He watched over me with such care and was always available for counsel or confession. That first morning he arranged for me to have a key to the church so that I could come and go at will. He knew Margaret and felt I was safe in her hands. The Thirty Days Begin And so the routine for the thirty days began. Margaret sug-gested that for the first three days I just browse over my own favorite passages of Scripture, go for walks, and take on an atmo-sphere of quiet. That first morning I took my Bible and went out. I sat overlooking a sweeping green valley and read slowly through some of my favorites: "Widen the spaces of your tent." (Is 55:2); "Behold the Bridegroom is coming." (Mt 25:7); "May He give you the power., to grow strong . " (Ep 3:16-21). And through it all I wondered just what I was doing, alone in Wales, on the threshold of this experience. Those first three days went in very gently. Sleep, walks, quiet reading, and three one-hour prayer periods a day. The kettle, tea, and coffee played their part. On the fourth day we started in earnest into the pattern of the retreat. We moved into four one hour periods of prayer a day. Each "day" would begin at 5 p.m. The four "weeks" were to be flexible as regards length. Margaret spent considerable time giving me the background to the Exercises. As she spoke, words from Robert Gleeson's intro-duction to Anthony Mottola's translation of the Exercises came back to me: "Ignatius intended to stay in Manresa for a few days. These days stretched into ten months with results that are still reverberating around the world." Yes, I thought, even to Corwen. Something of Margaret's own love for Ignatius overflowed into me. Here was no mere competent guide, but rather one who was imbued with the spirit of Ignatius. I felt very secure, but real-ized Margaret was no soft touch as she explained the conditions: no reading, other than that prescribed; no music, news, corre-spondence, conversation, and so forth. She spoke of the neces-sity of being utterly faithful to the full one-hour prayer periods, and she warned me off interior conversation which could easily become the little foxes destroying the vineyard. When she had July-Auffust 1993 523 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed finished, my snug feeling of security had drastically slipped, to he replaced by a sense of vulnerable nakedness. Thus stripped I entered the first "week" of the retreat. The First Week (Seven Days) Sin, in its hideousness, was the focus of this first week. Powerful meditations on words previously heard but never fully absorbed came back to influence my prayer. The First Principle and Foundation offered at the beginning of this week presented such a challenge thai it almost unseated me. Could I, in complete sincerity, make such a prayer? Part of my background reading said, "This law which I enjoin on you this day is not beyond your strength" (Dr 30:11-14). These words stood, like a kind mother, beside the demands of the First Principle and Foundation, urging me to compliance. Yet I hesitated. I moved on into the sin of Adam and Eve; the Angels; the Prodigal Son--all meditated on against a background of Philippians 2:1-11, Baruch 1:13-22 and 63, and Ephesians 1:13- 14 and all deepening in me an appreciation of the heinousness of sin. Karl Rahner says (I quote from memory), "I need to see sin, not so much as an offence against God, but rather as a rebuff against Jesus personally," and "I see him wasting there on the cross--for us--and ~eeing him in such plight, I make my deci-sion." It is difficult to take a detached view of sin with words like that running round one's mind. As the first week was coming to a close, the next commit-ment point was drawing near, the Kingdom meditation with its inbuilt self-offering; and yet I had still not made the First Principle and Foundation my own. I felt discouraged. If I could not per-sonalize the sentiments of the First Principle and Foundation, was there any point in going on? I told Margaret of my difficulty. She suggested rewriting it in language I would feel at home with. And that proved to be the answer. It was the stiff, masculine lan-guage that was getting in the way. After rewriting it in my own words, I could accept what Deuteronomy had been trying to tell me. On the seventh evening Margaret said that tomorrow would be a repose day. She explained what this meant: one prayer period this evening, a good night's sleep, then, after morning Mass, out for the day; on my return in the evening, one more prayer period 524 Review for Religious before she came to see me. She gave me a few ideas as to where I could go. I chose Llangollen: it seemed a place where I could continue to be quiet while doing something different. The Kingdom Meditation-- and Some Sort of Disturbance The meditation given me for the eve of the repose day was the Kingdom, so after supper, and with my inner eye on my day out, I settled down to this period of reflective prayer--and it all went wrong. The whole hour tumbled around in a confusion of despon-dency and misery. I saw myself as a hypocrite and a fool and felt sick with disappointment and embar-rassment. I was not being called as Rahner sug-gested; this was all totally beyond me regardless of Deuteronomy; there was nothing here for me. Some of us are destined for mediocrity; I was obviously one such. Illusion would get me nowhere, and get-ting nowhere was costing a lot of money and time. Leaving my room, I went out into the garden. The moon was riding high, swiftly brushing aside the small clouds which, busy about their own affairs, were trotting along in the opposite direc-tion. Shadows flitted about the garden, and some-where nearby an owl hooted. Further away a dog was barking, but it soon trailed off into a lazy yawn--his heart just was not in it. And here, under the canopy of deep sky, my thought slowly came together and clarified; I began to see what was going on. I returned to my room and found my crucifix and holding it firmly commanded, in the name and power of the crucified and resur-rected Christ, everything not of God to depart. I repeated the command twice. The result: "The storm abated and there was a great calm" (Mk 4:39). Without further ado I made my Kingdom offering as given by Ignatius, went to bed, and slept. Some of US are destined for mediocrity; I was obviously one such. The First Repose Day A glorious day of sunshine and Welsh mountains. A ride on the Railway Enthusiasts' railway from Llangollen along the moun-tainside to Deeside Halt; a leisurely walk by the canal where later I sat and ate my sandwiches while watching boys--up to the age ~uly-Aug'ust 1993 525 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed of forty plus--playing with their boats. Full of fresh air and peace, I returned to Corwen on an early evening bus. Each turn in the road presented a different scene to delight the heart, and I found myself silently singing the word of St. Francis's Canticle of the Sun: "All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made., and first for Brother Sun. how beautiful he is! How radiant!., and Brothers Wind and Air. and all the weathers' moods . " It seemed so appropriate. (Something I discovered during these thirty days was that Francis and Ignatius have much in common.) After supper Margaret came, and I told her of the previous night's upset. She said it was to be expected and then referred me to the description of discernment of spirits in the Exercises, where it was all clearly set out. The important thing, she said, was that I had made the Kingdom offering. Much was gained and nothing at all lost. The Second Week (Eleven Days) And so into the second week. I traveled far in that week. Journeying with Jesus through his life in the given meditations, I became aware of another journey I was making, toward a deeper commitment--and yet my previous fear of.fidl commitment reared up again and again. The demand was too clear, too total, too final. There was no space for maneuver. I stalled badly and frequently during that week. Margaret advised me to use the First Principle and Foundation offering and also the Kingdom offering as ways into the given meditations. She also gave me some salutary advice: "Don't try to give today what properly belongs to tomorrow." "The grace for the future is not yet being offered." I remembered similar advice given me in the past. As a young sister I had made a group retreat under a Carmelite friar. In one of his talks he said that many people fail to advance because they quail before what they fear may be asked of them if they say an unreserved yes. They forget that God is totally to be trusted and would never take unfair advantage of a generous yes. A superior, at a later date, took up the same theme with me (it seems I have had this lack-of-trust problem forever!) and said: "The Lord is total courtesy. He doesn't grab. He looks at what you have and asks 'May I take this?' If you refuse, he will not insist--for the time being any-way." Urn--for the time being. 526 Review for Religious The Two Standards and the Three Classes of Men These meditations caused the same problem that the First Principle and Foundation and the Kingdom had caused; as I saw it, all called for total and irrevocable commitment. Again I had to remind myself of what Margaret had said and what the Carmelite friar and my own superior had said when I was just knee high in my religious life. I spent long hours beg-ging the grace of trust. I tried to reset my focus and not waste precious time looking at abstract problems and missing the grace of reality. I turned to St. Francis at this stage and found his presence a great comfort. On the twentieth day, after lots of struggle but also tremendous peaks of joy and achievement, Margaret suggested I spend one day drawing the experience of the entire two weeks together and then summarize it in a truth-ful prayer of offering. As I set about doing this, I found it amaz-ing how I could look back along the road I had traveled and see so clearly the efforts, frustrations, joys, hopes, gains, losses, and desires and the loneliness and--running in and out of it all like a flame in dry grass--the'fear. And yet ~omehow it all came together with a marvelous coherence: everything fitted. I could see, with a rare clarity, that God was with me. I had moved. I had definitely moved. I had moved light years from where I had been two weeks previously. For better or for worse, I had moved. The agonizing lack of trust, the fears, the anxieties were all part of this pattern of walking. The Lord had supplied where I had been weak. Together we had made it through these two weeks. He had blessed me beyond all imagining and had accepted my desire as though it were something of substance. I was content. On the twenty-second day, a repose day, I went to Ruthin and presume I had a relaxed day, but I have no memory of it. Without the brief note in my journal saying I had been there, I would not know I had. What that says about me I have no idea. I could see, with a rare clarity, that God was with me. I had moved. The Third Week (Five Days) Margaret moved me into the last earthly days of Jesus. Over the next days, spread over five one-hour meditation periods, which j~¢O-dugust1993 527 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed included a midnight hour, I contemplated the Lord at the Last Supper, Gethsemane, and Calvary and right through to the postresurrecfion period. Having visited the Holy Land many times while living in the Middle East, I found it very easy to situate these meditations, but somehow the depths eluded me. On the twenty-fourth day Margaret suggested that I spend four of my five one-hour prayer periods reading through the four different accounts of the Passion. Anyone who has done this in one day will know it does not come easy. Physically it is draining to read something of that nature and length with concentration. By the evening it had quite taken me over, and after supper I went for a long walk, but somehow I could not shake off (was I even meant to?) the felt heaviness of trudging the Calvary road four times. Another Disturbance It is not easy to stay with someone in agony while knowing you are part responsible. During the night I woke in the grip of a strange tension, feel-ing physically cold and frightened. I have never been especially brave, but I am not given to irrational fear, and this sense of men-ace was wholly irrational; yet it made me feel that, if I did not give up this retreat, it would break me. For several minutes I did nothing beyond switching on the light and allowing the fear to swamp me. Fear of what? I could put no name to it. Then I remembered Margaret's words, based on those of Ignatius: "It is common for the evil spirit to cause sad-ness, fear, discouragement, and acute anxiety and to place all sorts of obstacles in the way of right reason. The good spirit gives courage, strength, inspiration, light, and peace so that right reason will prevail. Learn to distin-guish." Once again I reached for my crucifix and holy water and followed my previous routine. All returned to normal, but it took some time. The twenty-sixth day I spent quietly looking back over the entire Passion. It proved to be a very hard day. It is not easy to stay with someone in agony while knowing you are part responsible. On the twenty-seventh day, another repose day, I went to Lake Bala. It was a beautiful day, but too hot. Tourists and pic-nickers were all over the place--not helpful. I found the Catholic 528 Review for Religious church, a small converted stable. It was very peaceful, and I stayed quietly there for some time before boarding the bus for the ride home through heart-lifting scenery. The Fourth Week--Coming to the End I was now coming to the end of this whole experience, and Margaret suggested moving back from five to four periods of prayer, 6mitring the night one. She also brought me a tape recorder and some classical-music tapes. Winning some grand prize could not have brought me more joy. I was ecstatic. On the twenty-eighth day I meditated on John 20:11-18, Mary Magdalen's encounter with Jesus in the garden, with Isaiah 30:18- 26 and 35:1-10 as background. I also used Luke 24:13-35, the Emmaus story, with Psalm 62 as background. I became quite filled with the quiet. Jesus' sufferings were over. His pain was finished. I was able to walk calmly in the garden with Mary Magdalen--you see, I knew the answer to her question. The Emmaus road also was peaceful. Again I had the advantage: I knew who he was. All this was leading me quite naturally into the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love. From the twenty-ninth day onward I used this con-templation for one period each day, the other three periods cov-ering postresurrection Scripture. I continued my daily walks in the serene countryside, which for me became Galilee, where Jesus said he wo~ld meet his friends again and where I myself have walked many times. A Final Disturbance One meditation, on the thirtieth day, was given over to the events that include Jesus cooking breakfast for his hungry disci-ples. As I moved further into the scene, it all changed and became blasphemous; but I did not recognize it as such. My discerning powers were, it seemed, in suspension. During Mass the follow-ing morning I became aware that something had been very wrong with that meditation. I looked back at it and saw immediately the gross irreverence of the scenes which had been presented to my view. I was aghast and marveled that I had not realized at the time what was going on. I went hotfoot to Father Joseph after Mass and poured out my sorry story. He took it all very calmly--as con-fessors are apt to do--and explained how the devil will use every July-August 1993 529 Corona ¯ God's Human Face Revealed possible means to stop a person pursuing a course that has as its aim a closer union with God. Margaret, of course, said the same thing. The experience left me with a profound disgust of the one who works such evil things. The Final Days The thirty-first and final day arrived. I drew together the ele-ments of the four key meditations--the Kingdom, the Two Standards, the Three Classes of Men, the Three Modes of Humility. I then moved them into a prayer of offering that I tried to make utterly truthful and realistic for me. Later that day I had a final few words with Father Joseph and returned the keys of the church. Back at the house I had a last talk with Margaret and my retreat was over. The following day I left Corwen and--via Wrexham, Chester, Crewe, Euston, and Plaistow, changing train or bus at each one--I arrived home in London. Eighteen Months Later Days have built on days, and a year and a half has passed since my long retreat. By now it should have gone the way of all the others. It has not done so. Father Joseph's words during our final talk, "You will never be the same again, this experience has changed you," have stayed with me; I know them to be true. That retreat has changed many things. It has set sin in its right context, one which makes scant distinction between small and big offenses. It has cleared away any number of secondary purposes and under-lined the one purpose for which I was born. It has filled my store-rooms with kindling, that I may not perish when my winter fires burn low. It has increased my recovery rate, so that sin and repen-tance are almost simultaneous. It has brought a staying power I never thought to possess; a strength to stay with prayer even when, apparently, there is nothing in it to stay for. It has brought an acceptance that I am as I am and, as far as performance goes, the future will not be much different; progress will still be wob-bly, with backward steps, with fears and sin. But this acceptance of my situation has brought a new dependence; I know I will make it through to the end if I cling like a limpet to Christ. There is, quite simply, no other way. 530 ' Re~ie~ for Religious The Human Face of God But overriding and underpinning all this is the greatest change of all. I am aware that, through all the contemplations of that month, even those during which I was distracted, irritated, fidgety, or just plain bored, God was working. He was working as one whose work it is to take an old manuscript, mosaic, or fresco and restore it to its original beauty; he was etching and bringing into relief, for me personally, the lines of his own human face. I can no longer think of God without, at the same time, seeing Christ; I see him, in some small measure, as Francis of Assisi saw him in great, in the people, however seemingly insignificant, and in the events, however trivial, that form th~ fabric of my everyday life. This new vision is the greatest grace to accompany me into these, the afterdays. The word "Wales" will never again mean for me just a geo-graphical place, hut rather will set a pause for remembering: remembering that revelation did not end with the Apocalypse; remembering how God revealed his face to me in Wales; remem-bering how something of beauty was planted within me and has, in spite of me, continued to grow. My life has become perma-nently divided into "before Wales" and "after Wales." And it all started way back in Jordan, where I "hungered for liberation" and knew myself "intent on hearing an utterance of God never given before" (in the words of McGann and Rahner) and felt strongly impelled, Franciscan and all that I am, to take up the invitation to an Ignatian experience. That, and so much more, is what my long retreat was all about. Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distri-bution, advertising, or institutional promotion or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will be consid-ered only on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. July-August 1993 531 TAD DUNNE What Trouble Is spiritual life Most of us, at some lull in the cacophony of life, think to ourselves, "I really should be a person who . " And we take some stand on avoiding trouble. Of course, trouble wears many hats. There is the regular trouble of having to learn through our mistakes. There is our unwitting igno-rance of the times when our behavior makes others roll their eyes. Or maybe the trouble is our own doing, like the lies we lay on others and the follow-up work we lay on ourselves just to keep our stories straight. Or like the legacy of emotional trouble callous parents bequeath to their children that continues long after they have died and the children have grown up. The stand we take to avoid trouble is usually rather elemental. We hope a simple strategy can meet every kind of trouble coming our way. Not that we succeed. Indeed, the reason we do not succeed may well be that the way we defined our troubles was a big mistake. This is why, for many of us, our images of God are shaped less by our experience of divine help or by the Scriptures and more by how we conceptualized our getting into trouble in the first place. When people describe their spiritual journeys to me, they usually divide the chapters according to this or that difficulty from which God delivered them, but the difficulties were defined very often by simple earthly sym-bols, not by any measures drawn from revelation. Tad Dunne writes on contemporary spirituality. His address is 2923 Woodslee; Royal Oak, Michigan 48073. 532 Review for Religious We get most of the symbols of our troubles from the drama of everyday life--a vacillating boss, a domineering spouse, hard work with no reward, bad weather, and so on. But where people draw the line on what is unacceptable to them will vary nation to nation, old to young, woman to man, race to race. So, before we assume that our view of trouble is totally objective, we need to look instead at the experiences of trouble common to everyone. Then we can look at what the gospel says about trouble and make comparisons about what we have observed. Our universally common experiences of trouble lie not in the dramatic but in the practical patterns in our experiences--expe-riences like carrying burdens, feeling slowed down, running into roadblocks, taking chances and missing, setting schedules and failing to meet them, planting seeds that produce puny fruit, arranging our surroundings carefully and finding that the sur-roundings have trapped us. Everyone, in any culture, grows up with these practical troubles and looks for ways to overcome them. The Example of Physics For the sake of talking about these analogs of our miseries, it will help to classify them. One simple way follows the example of physics. In physics we expect events to occur either in a natural relationship to other events or just coincidentally. While physicists talk about the naturally related events by using terms like elec-tromagnetism, gravity, or inertia, children simply notice that when A happens, then B usually happens. Behind the merely coinci-dental events lie no laws at all, so physicists talk about probabil-ities and norms while ordinary people talk about taking chances and seizing once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Each of these two kinds of expectations, of regularity and of chance, gets frustrated in its own way. Regularity is frustrated when a routine is broken or a law is not followed. Chance is frus-trated when overcontrol eliminates the lucky chance or when exceptions to the rule are somehow ruled out of court. But each kind excludes the other, and so, pressured as we ar.e by this intrin-sic antinomy to Choose only one as our fundamental code for translating experience into meaning, some of us worship a God of Law and others a God of Freedom. The Broken Routine. The God of Law is incarnated in our ear- 3~uly-August 1993 533 Dunne ¯ What Trouble Is God brings salvation by giving laws to maintain order and by raising up saints to serve as our examples. liest teacher of regularity: the sun. It gives us as children a sym-bol of what it means to be faithful, kindly, and dependable. We learn at an early age what our race took eons to formulate in a principle: that bodies in motion keep going and bodies at rest stay where they are. If only people could be that orderly! So we experience the trouble of broken routine. Things are going smoothly and something interrupts. Interruptions and contradictions are our enemies, though we can never fully avoid them. Better calm down and do what God expects and all shall be well. Pity those who live in chaos, who seem never to settle down, who spend their lives searching for they know not what. They could well learn a lesson from nature that life lies in regu-larity and dependability. This elemental experience of day alter-nating with night has a remarkable influence on the loftiest and most religious levels of our psyches. We imagine the kingdom of God as a smooth meshing of generation upon generation of peo-ple, as if the oiling of divine grace was meant to eliminate all fric-tion between people. God is an implacable and consistent Trinity, a perfect community, an example which every human family and nation is called to imitate as far as possible. God brings salvation by giving laws to maintain order and by raising up saints to serve as our examples. Life is essentially a struggle of law and order over anarchy and extreme independence. OvercontroL The second kind of trouble is practically the oppo-site of the first. As the first kind loves controls, the second hates them. At some time in our growing up, when we discover that we have taken too many of our parents' controls to heart, we start to wriggle free of them. We take a chance. When governments lay such heavy controls on people that hardly anything is left to chance, we condemn them. The worst kind of control, of course, is self-imposed--when I make more resolutions than I could pos-sibly keep or when I forbid myself to ever try anything daring or maturing. Trouble is anything that impedes probabilities. These elemental experiences tell us that God is a God of free-dom, calling us to a radical trust in all we do. The voice is per- 534 Review for Religious vasive: Let go of trying to control everything and everyone; you are ruining yourself in the process and will never succeed in any case. God will never lay a load on your back without also giving you a strohg back with which to carry it. "Look at the birds of the air . " Human planning is largely a waste of time. The goals of our endeavors so seldom match their outcomes that it is a won-der we keep on setting goals. God will intervene at the oppor-tune moment; divinity cannot be pinned down to laws and predictability. And so on. The Example of Biology Notice how these first two kinds of order and trouble are dis-tinguished by whether or not individual events are either part of some repeating cycle or the result of mere chance. We can also look at sequences of events or stages in something undergoing development. Again, to keep this simple, we can distinguish two fundamental kinds of development, those driven by a single law or principle and those driven by forces only coincidentally related to each other. The single-law kind can be illustrated by seeds. Tulip bulbs develop tulips, not dandelions, and, within quite narrow ranges of development, tulips everywhere look alike. Multiple-principle development can be represented by human relation-ships. People's values differ from each other across the face of the earth far more than tulips do. The reason is that the genetic coding in the fertilized egg that each of us once was does not confine the range of our potential development anywhere near as tightly as the tulip's coding does. Growing up, we continually "recode" ourselves by our choices. By interacting with others we develop in dialectical fashion, making something unrepeatable of both ourselves and our surroundings. If both the genetic (single-law) and the dialectical (multiple-principle) kinds of development are elemental,-then we can expect them to precondition what we mean by trouble and, by exten-sion, what we mean by God's saving grace. Again, the dichotomy between these two kinds of development tends to force a reli-gious choice between a God of Success and what I shall call a God of Exchange. The Weeds among the Wheat. One kind of trouble is caused by bad beginnings. It concerns anyone anxious to make continual July-August 1993 535 Dunne ¯ 14/-bat Trouble Is growth and progress, anyone who worships the God of Success. Long before people study genetics in biology, they experience built-in potentials and patterns of growth everywhere, in flow-ers, birds, and house pets. But some elements interfere with nat-ural fulfillment and choke the natural process of growth. These elements may be people, who themselves have been affected by their own upbringing. The notion here is that people are basi-cally good and that, given rich soil and hearty fertilizer, every person and every project will turn out a success. The worst form of this kind of trouble shows when a person feels predestined to fail because of some original and irreparable personality flaw. If we develop sheerly by genetic laws, then it would follow that God calls us to be creators, to overcome obstacles, and to keep a positive spirit. There is no doubt that the kingdom will come; the inner workings of grace in history guarantee it, sure as an acorn will become an oak. Our job is simply to help it come more quickly. It will be a kingdom of exciting new discoveries, increasing cooperation among all people, and continual improve-ment in people's health and happiness. The Good News is simply the announcement that Jesus loves you and that you have the germ of grace within you. Sin is ignorance, not malice. Evangelization is chiefly education; moral reform will follow auto-matically. In the meantime, we are called to grow in holiness, to grow closer and closer to God like a blossoming flower. Hoarding Energy. This fourth kind of trouble is also about growth, but the pattern of development is determined by a series of events related to each other only by chance. We notice how living things are determined not only by origins or seeds but through a continual exchange with their environments. Here biol-ogy studies how living things give and take within their ,sur-roundings. Flowers give honey to bees while the bees ensure progeny for the flowers. While genetic coding strictly limits any one bee's behavior, the location of beehives and the proliferation of flowers are interdependent. Should a storm wipe out one, the other soon disappears. So nature's contentious personality gives us a symbol of a God of give-and-take, a historical God, an engaged God. Farmers plow their fields and their fields return corn. The better the plowing the better the corn and the better the farmer. The quality of the exchange has a dialectical effect on both sides. 536 Revieva for Religious The same goes for the growth and decay of our friendships. Eventually the friendship is either good for both of us or good for neither one. Trouble comes when things cost more than they return. If a boy exasperates his friends by compulsive chatter, he does not feel energized. He wears everyone out, including himself. Then there is the trouble we cause when we take more from the phys-ical environment than we contribute to it, as is evident in oil spills, acid rains, and fluorocarbon-charged spray cans. Whatever the case, there is trouble eithe

Issue 24.3 of the Review for Religious, 1965. ; Counseling and Religious Life by Vincent S. Conigliaro, M.D. 337 Mortification by William J. Rewak, S.J. 363 Mary and the Protestant Mind by Elsie Gibson 383 The Mass and Religious Life by Jean Galot, S.J. 399 Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Anton Morgenroth, C.S.Sp. 418 Priest as Mediator ~ by Andrew Weigert, S.J. 429 Religious Life by Sister Elaine Marie, S.L. 436 Election: Choice of Faith .by Carl F. Starkloff, S.J. 444 Our Old Testament Fathers by John Navone, S.J. 455 Poems 461 Survey of Roman Documents 463 Views, News, Previews 467 Questiom and Auswers 473 Book Reviews 478 VINCENT S. CONIGLIARO, M.D. Counseling and Other Psychological Aspects of Religious Counseling,* a technique and a philosophy of treat-ment and human relatedness, is a topic of importance to both psychoanalysts and religious persons, both in a general and in a specific context: in a general context, because both psychoanalysts and religious persons work with human beings and are committed to a profession of service; and in a specific context, because religious sisters may be affected by mental problems as often as other individuals. Thus, in reflecting on counseling in the religious life one cannot help reflecting also on the problems making counseling necessary, the problems, in other words, about which one administers counseling; and on the factors behind these problems, that is, why these problems occur in the first place. Members of religious orders have been the victims of diverse, benevolent and malevolent, prejudices for cen-turies. One problem with prejudice is that sooner or later its victim comes to believe the prejudice himself and begins to think, feel, and act along the prejudiced stereotypes culture and/or society set up for him; this is why prejudice is always detrimental. As an example, one may think of just one of the many prejudices that have been formulated against the American negro: the prejudice whereby the negro is "good-natured," "basi-cally lazy," "clownish," a. jocular Amos or Andy. Even- # This paper was derived from a talk given by the writer on No-vember 9, 1964, at the Maryknoll Mother House; Ossining, New York; the paper was sent to the REvmw in December, 1964. 4- Vincent Conigli-aro, M.D., a prac-tising psychoana-lyst and member of the faculty of Ford-ham University, ihas offices at 104 East 40th Street; New York 17, New York. VOLUME 24, 1965 337 + ÷ ÷ Vincent $. Conigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 338 tually, some negroes began to believe the stereotype themselves and behaved as if they could only be an ineffectual nice-guy Amos or a scheming, shrewd Andy-- or the other way around--I could never tell the two apart. Among the many prejudices formed about Catholic religious orders, there is one that proclaims that "mem-bers of Catholic religious orders are, by the very fact of being that, singularly immune from mental disorders"; or the opposite one, announcing that "members of Catholic religious orders are, by the very fact of being that, singularly prone to become mentally sick." Both prejudices of course are just that, pre-judgments, based on little factual evidence and substantiated by super-ficial experimentations. The facts actually suggest that (a) members of Catholic religious orders do not become mentally ill significantly more often or significantly less often than members of other religious orders; when they do become ill more often, this relates more to circumstantial problems (that is, poor screening of applicants) than to essential fea-tures of religious life; (b) members of religious orders do not become mentally ill significantly more often or less often than members of other tightly organized, rigidly structured organizations, for instance the Army; (c) neither the essential nor the accidental characteristics of religious life make, per se, a significant difference in the incidence of mental disease among the members of Catholic religious orders; (d) the occasional severity in degree of mental illness encountered among members of Catholic religious orders is not related to the essential or accidental characteristics of religious life, but to socio-cultural characteristics at large (for instance the socio-cultural concept that "to have a mental illness is dis-graceful"; treatment, thus, is sought too late, when the illness has been given the time to become severe); and (e) that the intrinsic and extrinsic features of religious life will be, psychologically, an asset or a liability ac-cording to the way each individual reacts to them in terms of life history, heredity, and childhood experi-ences. It may be of interest to examine both prejudices more closely. The first view holds that Catholic religious life is the best guarantee against emotional upsets and claims that members of Catholic religious orders rarely become affected by mental disease. This view is mostly held by members of religious orders; it was frequently expressed to me by the superiors of sisters I have treated or by the priest-counselors I have trained and supervised. The basis of this prejudice is wishful thinking and con-fusion between the natural and supernatural aspects of religious life. This view equates the symptoms of mental illness with the illness itself: ."There are no visible signs of illness; ergo, there is no illness . " I am reminded of an article recently published in a religious journal implying that religious life may actually "cure" neurotic symptoms. The writer of the article first listed some of the traits that may be symptomatic of a neurotic per-sonality, that is, self-centeredness, hypersensitivity, im-maturity; then observed, rightly enough, that religious life is essentially antithetical to such traits: and then concluded that religious life will thus automatically dis-pose of these neurotic traits: religious life, being theo-centered, will dispose of self-centeredness; being giving-hess, will dispose of selfishness; requiring spiritual ma-turity, will dispose of immaturity. One rather suspects that all theocenteredness, givingness, and spiritual ma-turity will do is to veil, temporarily, those neurotic traits they were supposed to have cured. This prejudice, actually, is quite unfair to the re-ligious sister. It suggests that the supernatural aspects of the sister's vocation will sustain not only her soul, which it does, but also her mind, even when natural causes, going all the way back to her childhood, act as a constant irritant; it holds that since she is isolated from the anxieties of the "real world outside," she should have no anxieties from the convent world (which happens to be equally real); and that since she is surrounded by the silence of the cloister, she will not hear the loud clatter of human problems: as if silence, at times, could not be many times louder than the loudest noise. This prejudice also engenders unrealistic attitudes; the religious sister feels supernaturally protected against the frailties of the human mind, and is led to believe that, by sheer virtue of the spiritual direction of her life, whatever factors there were that started operating, years before, toward the development of a psychosis or a neurosis will magically cease to operate. When she ex-periences signs of a mental illness, she feels disillusioned and as if God Himself did not live up to His part in a bargain He had never made; and she feels like a freakish rarity, the only one cursed by an illness that was not supposed to occur, the exception to the rule, thus adding to the anxiety and anguish of a neurosis the painful feeling of being an oddity. In a sister I treated, the latter feeling constituted a very intense symptom that, while mainly determined by a complicated intrapsychic proc-ess, was supported by the prejudiced belief that "reli-gious sisters are not supposed to become mentally ill . " This prejudice creates a problem also in treatment: the sister may be unwilling to unveil her problem to a superior who could take remedial steps; or, once treat- 4- 4- 4- Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 339 ÷ + ÷ Vincent S. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 340 ment has started, may be little cooperative and may rationalize her resistance to change by believing that "she can only get better through prayer . " In a case I recently worked with, it was the patient's superior who felt sister should not receive psychotherapy and should only help herself with prayers: "Good sisters do not be-come mentally ill . " On the other side of the coin is the prejudice holding, equally erroneously, that members of Catholic religious orders become mentally ill significantly more often than other persons. This view is mostly held by persons who are not in the religious life, are not Catholics, and, fre-quently, not religious. I believe this prejudice is mainly based on hostility; or on a lack of understanding of what is entailed in the religious life. The danger of this view is that already unbalanced members of religious orders lead a life of trepidation based on the neurotic fear that they will become overtly mentally ill (psychotic, "insane") because "everyone says so . " Here, too, this fear is overdetermined and related to an unconscious intra-psychic process; here, too, however, these patients "latch on" to the prejudice to express unconscious needs. In a priest I treated, the idea that he was going to become insane---because everyone he knew believed that "all priests, sooner or later, become insane"--had become a true obsessional idea; it expressed, among other things, his unconscious desire "to become insane" (more exactly, his unconscious drive to lose all controls and inhibitions) and his need to impute the responsibility of his insanity to those who believed that "all priests, sooner or later, become insane . " At the basis of this prejudice is also the fact that the religious life does have features which, in borderline personalities, may tip the balance in the direction of mental illness. A better understanding of these features will help to understand how religious life may contribute to t,he development of a mental illness. I want to make sure that I am well understood on this point. I am not suggesting that religious life may be the cause of mental disorders; I am saying that some features of religious life, when operating on a personality that has been af-fected by specific childhood occurrences, may precipitate, or "trigger," mental illness. This "trigger effect," evi-dently, may be set up just as effectively by college life, army life, marriage, as it can by religious life: once the keg is filled with dynamite, the explosion may be set up just as well by a spark of electricity, a match, or a gradual increase in room temperature. Which features of religious life act as a trigger on what kind of personality-- this is what may be quite important to reflect on. One might start by reflecting on the spiritual essence of religious life. Considering that this journal is widely read among members of religious orders, there is a bit of "carrying coals to Newcastle" in reflecting on this sub-ject at all. It must be remembered, however, that the specialist, knowledgeable as he is on the most minute detail of his specialty, often misses what may be too basic for him to remember. Basic psychiatric and psy-choanalytic concepts have been pointed out to me by friends who were neither psychiatrists nor psychoanalysts; and I myself have been able to point out basic points on music or art to musicians or artist friends of mine. As a lay person, as a "non-specialist" on religious life, I understand religious life as a life of greater growth in greater union with God~ All of us are born with the potentials for greater and greater participation to a transcendental existence in God; but those in the reli-gious life have the greatest chance of achieving the greatest participation. This spiritual participation, how-ever, can only be realized if the personality is sound; and a healthy supernatural life cannot exist without a sound, well-integrated psychic life. The old Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano can indeed be complemented with religio, sana in mente sana. It must be realized that the accidental properties of religious life may appeal to different personalities for different reasons. Just as one may become a psychiatrist or a surgeon for a combination of healthy, unhealthy, conscious, and unconscious reasons--and a good psy-chiatrist is usually one who, finally, is in his profession more for healthy and conscious reasons than for un-healthy and unconscious ones--it is also possible to enter the religious life with a combination of healthy, un-healthy, conscious, and unconscious motivations. Un-balanced personalities, the individuals with the "keg of dynamite" beneath the placid exterior, may enter the religious life attracted not by its spiritual features but by what these persons unconsciously consider useful for their neurotic needs. When the latent neurotic individual has been attracted to the religious life, religious life will indeed have the "trigger effect" mentioned before. Some examples at this point may be helpful. Religious life, through its essence, offers, to the healthy, opportunities for spiritual and existential richness and for the fullest expression of one's personality; to the unhealthy, opportunities for an impoverished, restricted existence (again spiritually and existentially) and for the fullest expression of one's neuroses. Such features of religious life as the vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, may attract the latent neurotic personality not 4- 4- 4. Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 ÷ 4. + Vincen£ $. Conigllaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS because of their essential spirituality but because of the opportunities they offer for neurotic defenses and neu-rotic acting-out. The healthy religious sister has a greater chance of experiencing the transcendental union with God, not in spite of, but because of her vows; the unhealthy sister uses the vows to express instinctual drives and neurotic defenses. In the latent neurotic, the vow of chastity may be appealing for reasons having little to do with spir-ituality, that is, emotional frigidity, fear of love, fear of sex, homosexual tendencies. The all-female environment may be chosen not in order to be chaste to better serve God but because of fear of closeness to anyone. This sister will be fearful of any and all emotional involve-ments, will stand aloof, and will withdraw from every-one, God included. Similar situations have been found with regard to the vow of obedience. As it was once ex-plained to me by a sister student of mine, this vow is "a listening to the will of God as it is expressed through one's community, environment and, ultimately, supe-rior"; a "dialogue in charity," with the superior as the "master listener" fashioning the dialogue between the sisters and God and evaluating what has been heard as the will of God. The sister who enters the convent with healthy motivations can afford to be obedient: she can see God's will beyond the superior's will; the sister with unresolved authority problems cannot be obedient with-out hostility (and the superior affected by the same problem will tend to abuse her authority and provoke rightful resentments). In the obsessive-compulsive per-sonality, which, under a meekly submissive and ingra-tiatingly passive surface, much anger and rebelliousness are concealed, vows of obedience will have a strong neu-rotic appeal to begin with (unconscious wishes to placate authority~ neurotic resolutions of total passivity and total submission) and will trigger, later, serious conflicts. Sister may role-play complete obedience and submission to the point of making no contributions whatsoever to the community life; she may be passive and overdependent; have no intiative; obey automatically, making no repre-sentations even when representations are called for; and create a mockery of authority and a caricature of obedi-ence by indulging in what has been called "whole obedi-ence" as contrasted to "holy obedience." The vow of poverty, too, essentially beautiful (with no material possessions one can better pursue the knowl-edge of God) may be appealing not for spiritual.reasons but because of unconscious feelings about money, love, and possessions. A sister may enter the religious life because of insecurity and the semi-conscious realization that although in the convent she may not have personal possessions, her basic needs will be adequately met. A sister I treated equated having money and possessions with having evidence of being loved. She created a prob-lem in the community by hoarding things, demanding expensive clothes and privileges, requiring costly medical treatments (and feeling intensely guilty when her demands were acceded to). When she did initiate psy-chiatric treatment, the matter of payments was a monthly crisis. She reacted to the fact that the com-munity was disbursing funds for her health not with realistic gratitude--or realistic concern--but with intense guilt (at the fact that a neurotic fantasy about which she had much ambivalence was being satisfied). If the neurotic needs of the religious are actually met by some of the accidental features of religious life, why, then, is there a conflict? I[ a sister with neurotic feelings about authority enters the religious life to find a better disguise--or a better expression--for these feelings and, in some o~ the accidental features of religious life does meet this opportunity, then, again, why is there a con-flict? One way to understand this is by realizing that human drives are arranged by "polarities": we love and hate, like and dislike, are active and passive, assertive and sub-missive, dependent and independent. In the healthy personality these polar extremes are harmoniously inte-grated and blended in the overall economy of personality, and there is no conflict. In the neurotic personality each polarity, as it were, is treated separately by the executive agency of personality, the ego; and each holds separately and simultaneously prospects of security and insecurity, pleasure and pain. Thus, by being overdependent, one is taken care of, but one's needs for prestige and successful competition are frustrated; and by being over-assertive one fulfills one's needs ~or power and status, but one's need to be loved, cuddled, mothered are frustrated. As an example, a sister with unresolved authority problems enters the convent to placate her superego by total sub-missiveness; this will fulfill the polarity of dependency, passivity, submission; but the opposite polarity, which energizes rebelliousness and independence, will have to be vigorously repressed and will remain frustrated. This will result in a worsening of the authority problem; symptomatologically, there will be dissatisfaction (frustra-tion of one polarity); chronic fatigue (because of the need to divert psychic energy to the task of repressing the polarities of rebelliousness and independence); periodic explosions (during which the polarities energizing sub-mission and passivity are frustrated); feelings of guilt; and so forth . One is reminded of what is found in the neurotic marriage, in which the partners marry one + ÷ ÷ 343 4. Vincent S. Conigllaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 344 another because each offers the other the opportunity for the disguise and the release of unconscious drives. The man with latent homosexual problems marries a frigid, cold woman; the outwardly efficient, "strong" male (the type who exaggerates the outward signs of masculinity because of deep seated feelings of inadequacy) marries a woman who under a calm and restrained exterior is assertive and domineering; a woman with unconscious sexual anxieties marries an impotent male; and so forth . In these cases too, the neurotic bargain is fulfilled and the unconscious expectations which have led to the marriage in the first place are being satisfied: this is why the marriage fails or is beset by severe incompati-bility. I am reminded of a patient in my recent experience, a bright and attractive woman with severely disturbed ideas on sex and much anxiety and guilt about any type of sexual involvement; these feelings were unconsciously rationalized by the conception that sex is "always degrad-ing" and "inherently dirty." She did not marry until the age of thirty-two: the healthy, eligible males who had appeared on the scene up to that time had not been "attractive" enough to her neurotic expectations. She finally met the "right" man: an extremely puritanic, neurotically judgmental individual who consciously visu-alized sex as dirty and degrading; he would subtly "seduce" her into giving in to rather innocent exchanges of affection and would then reject her by sternly lecturing her on the basic depravity of all women. After sixteen months of formal engagement, she married him primarily because she had found in him the external counterpart of her own rigid, punitive superego. It can be easily antic-ipated that this couple's marriage was extremely un-satisfactory. They found each other unbearable; he felt she was shamelessly passionate and "se.xy"; she felt he was sadistically judgmental and critical; and they both acted as though neither had had any idea (in sixteen months of engagementl) of what the other was "really like." The neurotic polarities of each of these individuals were being fulfilled through the neurotic marriage at the expense of intense anxiety, rage, and guilt. In the latent neurotic personality, religious life may trigger neurotic symptoms through some of its accidental features. While the essence of religious life is immutable, its accidental elements, the ways this essence expresses itself, are necessarily mutable and in a state of constant transition and adjustment to changing socio-cultural conditions. The transition itself may be disturbing to the rigid, obsessive personality. A sister I once treated could have functioned satisfactorily only if the Church had gone back to medieval times. A priest once told a colleague of mine, with much anxiety and bitterness: "They are changing my Church, Doctor; they are chang-ing my Church" (in reference to the Ecumenical Council). Some sisters' neurotic structure is such that they only accept meditation and contemplation, to the total exclu-sion of action; and they do this more for neurotic than spiritual reasons. It is also important to realize that religious orders are a world of their own, a society with its own culture (some religious orders even call themselves "societies"). The fact that there are to be rules is inherent in any society; but the religious societies are particularly bound by rules (the etymology of the Word "religious" is "rule-bound"). Some religious societies are very rigidly set up; there may be a rigid ordering of time (the "horarium," the setting down of every hour and activity of one's day from rising to retiring) or a rigid ordering of authority, community rank, behavior (the book of cus-toms). This system of rules may indeed appeal to a rigid personality or to persons with problems about routines, schedules, and time tables. These persons, again, will be attracted not by the spirit behind the rules but by the rules themselves, the scheduling for its own sake, the opportunities thus offered for neurotic defenses or neu-rotic acting out. Religious life indeed may, with its essential or transi-tional features, trigger neurotic symptoms in the latent neurotic personality. It may seem that this point is being belabored. Yet, in reading the religious journals read by most sisters, one finds cause for concern over the explana-tions prevalently given as to the causes o~ mental dis-orders among the religious. While the situation has im-proved considerably in the last fifteen years, there still prevails a lack of awareness of what really should be remedied; and why; and how. Often, we still bark up the wrong tree or beg the issue or believe that sister is neu-rotic simply because she has a difficult superior or because her order is a very rigid one, completely overlooking the fact that most probably these sisters had a neurotic prob-lem to begin with and the environment to which they are now overreacting has only brought the neurotic con-flict to light. I am reminded of a question asked by a group of sisters (and recently published in a religious journal) on the subject of the measures suggested by the Church to reduce tensions among the religious. The answer, as given by a well known and justly respected priest, gives cause to ponder; it suggests that, while the Church has recognized the importance of childhood in the causation of mental disorders, and, at least by implication, the importance of counseling and psychotherapy--these factors (childhood) ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 345 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Conigliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 346 and these measures (counseling and psychotherapy) are, too often, seen as the least important. According to the above source, among the remedies suggested by the Church are, mainly, such remedies as avoidance of a disordered and restless life, a minimum of calm and peace, avoidance of overwork, enactment of the rule of silence (thus the availability of cloisters), vacations and weekly days off, and so forth . All these measures, I suggest, are far from meaningless; but also far from sufficient. All these measures are important; without them there will be anxiety and tension, but there will be anxieties and tensions in spite of them. A restless and disordered life most often is not a cause of mental illness but a symptom, just as the ability to live a joyful and pleasurable life is a manifestation of good mental health, not a cause. I remember a sister I once treated for a severe compulsive character neurosis, with symptoms of depression, scrupulosity, perfectionism, and chronic fatigue. She had been told (innumerable times) to take some days off and have a good vacation; for at least two years her rigid, grandiose, self-punitive personality had prevented her from doing so: there was too much to do and no one could do it as well as she. Sister was not tense because of overwork: she was tense and overworked because of a deeper common cause. When she was finally ordered to take a vacation and have fun, she worked strenuously and grimly at having fun with no benefit whatsoever from either vacation or recreation. Committed Catholics and psychoanalysts will grow equally concerned over the fact that we still too often believe that emotional illness among the religious is caused by such spiritual reasons as spiritual frustration or the feeling of not having attained the vocational ideal of apostolic sanctity. Spiritual frustrations, again, are more often symptoms than causes of mental illness; and to relate them to incomplete spiritual formation, poor spiritual training, and so forth, is often inaccurate. The psychotic sister will not feel better mentally by leading a better spiritual life; she will lead a better spiritual life when she feels better mentally. The sister with an authority problem will not become more obedient solely by forcing herself to become more obedient; and the sister obsessed with impure thoughts will not be able to solve her problem only with prayer. All this does not question the supernatural power of prayer; it simply questions whether the neurotic or psychotic sister can truly pray, or, better, how receptive one is to grace while in a state of severe neurosis or psychosis. The point, at any rate, is that if these sisters were able to be spiritually obedient, religiously fulfilled, prayerful, and so forth, they would not have these mental problems to begin with. Thus it is often a mistake, for a spiritual director or superior, to simply demand of the neurotic sister to pray more, implying that if she does, this will resolve all problems. When sister finds herself unable to do so, she will feel guilty and become more anxious and depressed; or an emotional problem which could have been cleared in a relatively short time (had counseling or psycho-therapy been administered immediately) is treated psy-chiatrically after months of attempts at treating it by supernatural means, and it may be too late. Evidently, the total answer to the mental problems of the religious does not lie only in counseling and psycho-therapy; but the latter should play a larger role than it played up to five or ten years ago and even larger than the role played now, a time in which the Catholic Church has already made so many strides in pastoral counseling,x The mental problem of the religious, I believe, can only be approached through a holistic concept in which supe-riors, sisters, social workers or psychologists, spiritual directors, pastoral counselors, and psychotherapists make available to the disturbed sister all available means to 1 The history and development of the Iona Institute of Pastoral Counseling well exemplifies these strides and the Church's positive attitudes on mental health. In 1959, Dr. Alfred Joyce, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, offered his services for a program of talks and seminars on pastoral counseling at the St. Francis of Assisi Church and Monastery in New York City. The Franciscan Provincial, Father Celsus Wheeler, O.F.M., and a Franciscan psychologist, Father George Fianagan, O.F.M., Ph.D., supported the program enthusiasti-cally and the following year Dr. Joyce, this writer, Dr. L. Moreault, Mr. F. Peropat and Dr. J. Vaccaro, under the leadership of Dr. Joyce, founded the St. Francis Institute for Pastora! Counseling, a pioneer-ing institute offering a two-year curriculum on the theory and practice of pastoral counseling. With greater and greater support be-ing received from the New York Archdiocese and Francis Cardinal Spellman, and through the dynamic encouragement of Monsignor George Kelley, Director of the Family Life Bureau of the New York Archdiocese, in 1962 the five founders of the St. Francis Institute transferred to Iona College (New Rochelle, New York) and associ-ated themselves to Brother John Egan, Chairman of the Department of Psychology of the College, to form the Iona Institute for Pastoral Counseling, the only institute of its kind in the Eastern United States. Since 1962 the institute, under the leadership of Dr. Joyce, has offered to larger and larger groups of Catholic priests (total enrollment for 1964-1965 was just under one hundred students) a unique, com-prehensive, three-year curriculum of courses and clinical supervision leading to a Master's Degree in Pastoral Counseling. The Institute's program is designed to develop in its students greater awareness of the psychological dimensions of the problems encountered in pas-toral activity; to foster understanding of the conscious and uncon-scious processes operating in a counseling relationship; and, in general, to increase the effectiveness of the Catholic priest's pastoral work. The Institute's program, therefore, is quite consistent with recent directives of the Holy See, that is, directives which have emphasized the need for the development and refinement of the special competencies required for the pastoral ministry in the twentieth century. + + Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 ÷ ÷ Fin~en~ $. Conigliaro~ M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS help herself, including prayer and spiritual self-improve-ment but also including counseling and psychological self-improvement. In a truly holistic approach one would also include preventative concepts and work toward the improvement of the existing screening procedures for the applicants to the religious life, the improvement and modernization of training programs for the religious, and the inclusion in these training programs of psychological considerations (mental hygiene concepts of education, group dynamics of training, and so forth). The latter, I believe, can be done very successfully without com-promising in the least the spiritual and religious con-siderations of training. One can think of counseling and the religious sister in many different ways. One may think of counseling admin-istered by a sister who has been trained in the theory and technique of counseling and who gives counseling to the sisters in her own house; the sister counselor may be the superior or another sister. One may think of counsel-ing administered by a trained sister who practices counseling as part of her own missionary, teaching, nurs-ing, or social work, in which case the counselee may be another sister or a lay person, male or female, adult, adolescent, or child. One may think of counseling in terms of "diagnostic counseling," "motivational counseling" and "therapeutic counseling." Finally, one may think of counseling as a philosophy of life, an existential commit-ment, a philosophy of deeper understanding of human psychology and human motivations, by which the trained sister becomes, in the house where she lives or at her place of work, a very valuable trouble shooter and "sig-nificant figure." One may think in terms of the superior of a house who has had enough training in counseling or psychology to do counseling with the sisters of her own house as soon as a problem arises and before it becomes too serious. This may be a "diagnostic counseling," in which the superior, after two, three, or four interviews, is able to recognize the "danger signals" of mental illness, can differentiate them from the symptoms of a strictly reli-gious or moral problem, and is therefore in the position of advising remedial steps. It may be a "motivational counseling," in which the superior has a number of sessions with the disturbed sister for the purpose of help-ing the sister to recognize the psychogenic nature of the difficulty and preparing her for therapeutic counseling or psychotherapy. It may finally be "therapeutic counseling" in which the superior, by using the technique of counsel-ing, helps the sister to help herself. I am convinced that it is administratively unfeasible for the superior of a community to do counseling with her own sisters; and, it administratively feasible, I am still convinced it would not be advisable therapeutically be-cause of the very nature o[ the superior's status in the community: the fact that she is, by virtue and necessity, identified with "authority" and because of the psycho-dynamic dimensions of being the "mother" superior. Better, then, for another sister to be the "house-counselor"; even in this case, however, it will be helpful it the superior is sympathetic to, and understanding of, the philosophy and the techniques of counseling; it will avoid friction between superior and house counselor and the unbalancing of the group dynamics of a religious community. Incidentally, should there be a "house counselor"? Should counseling be at all administered in the house, within the community, b~ an "insider"? I am convinced there are important advantages to doing so-- at least initially. This is in keeping with modem mental hygiene concepts, that is, the concept of "emotional first aid stations." Industrial psychiatrists have found that optimal results were often obtained by treating situa-tionally triggered emotional crises "on the job." In research on this subject I published a few years ago, I felt that the system of having a full time mental hygiene team on the premises is very advantageous. By having a house counselor, emotional emergencies can be handled on a truly emergency basis; situational and reactive crises can be approached more insightfully and with more perma-nent results. To conduct diagnostic and motivational counseling within the community appears advantageous also from a practical and financial standpoint. Finally, disturbed sisters may flatly refuse to see an outsider (especially lay) counselor or psychotherapist or may co-operate with the outsider only superficially. The presence of a house counselor on the premises and the fact that counseling is being practiced within the house may indeed have a disturbing effect on the group dynamics of a community, at least in some houses. This, however, is more an indication for, than against, the presence of a house counselor. If the community group dynamics can be unbalanced by her presence, then there already are neurotic processes operating under the sur-face. The processes would be triggered anyway by other "irritants"; they might as well be triggered by the house counselor, who can understand and treat group anxieties and individual anxieties. Some of the problems that may be triggered by the house counselor are: anxiety about the sister who is undergoing counseling ("There, but for the grace of God, go I"); resentments about the time she spends with the counselor or the superior (a form of sibling rivalry); anger (and envy) at the apparent fact that she is given ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24~ 1965 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Conigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 350 special privileges and dispensations (a sister I once treated said about another sister also in treatment: "They are letting her get away with murder . "); and so forth. Some of these problems might perhaps be prevented by utilizing a house counselor from a different house. A Maryknoll superior I recently spoke with suggested that two trained sisters from the same order but from two dit~erent houses could be exchanged between the two houses and be "on call." Parenthetically, I do not believe that one needs to be alarmed at the thought of a nonmedical sister counselor practicing "diagnostic" counseling. Although the formal diagnosis of any dis-order, whether "physical" or "mental," remains within the province of the medical doctor (psychiatrist or medical psychoanalyst), a well trained counselor is quali-fied to evaluate the severity of a mental disorder, formu-late hypotheses as to its course and prognosis, and differ-entiate it from solely moral or religious problems. What one should fear, rather, are the "snap diagnoses" made by untrained individuals in any walk of life: in the case of the religious sister, the diagnosis, "spiritual problem," with the prescription, "prayer, three times a day," for a problem that is mainly emotional in nature and needs counseling (or psychotherapy) as well. I referred above to the "understanding superior." I wonder how many sisters, troubled emotionally and mentally, did not feel, at some point, that it was-"all mother superior's fault., if she only had more under-standing . " I also wonder how many superiors, whose sisters were in the throes of a severe mental problem, did not feel, at some point: ". It's all my fault., if I had only had more understanding . " (I also wonder if some psychiatrists, in treating sisters with emotional problems, have not at times felt that it was ". all mother superior's fault., if she had only had more understanding . "). I believe there is something significant here and worth-while looking into. At times, undoubtedly, the superior is largely respon-sible for a sister's emotional problem as a "trigger factor," as precipitating element. More often, however, the superior is blamed because of the need for scapegoats, be-cause of the psychological tendency to explain difficulties in simple black and white, "good guy, bad guy" terms, and, finally, because of a specific psychological function called "transference." The truth of the matter is that to blame it all on the superior is incorrect; and if it is incorrect, it is also unfair: unfair to the sister, who likes to believe that changing houses will solve all her problems (she will go through one, two transfers to realize, after several cycles of heightened hope and frustrating letdown, that nothing has really changed in her mental status); and unfair to the superior, who will unrealistically blame her-self for her sisters' emotional problems and use this self-condemnation as a nucleus for her own neurosis. The interpersonal relationship of sister--superior is necessarily a very complex one; here, too, we find that in both its essential and accidental characteristics it offers opportunities for spiritual and psychological enrichment to the healthy and for neurotic expressions to the neu-rotic. The superior has full and unquestioned authority, because she represents, supernaturally, the will of God; the healthy sister willfully chooses to submit and defer because she can see the transcendental aspects of her submission and deference; the neurotic sister or superior sees, rather, a symbolic relationship between an omnipo-tent mother-figure and an infantile daughter-figure. Once the relationship has been unconsciously visualized in these symbolic terms, the development of "transferential" reactions is highly likely, because the relationship is already a "transferential" one. "Transference," I believe, explains why the disturbed sister is too ready to put all the blame on the superior or why the superior is ready to put all the blame on herself (or, in opposite cases, on her "insubordinate daughters"). It also explains why everything the superior does, the rewards she administers, the punishments she metes out, the assignments she makes, the time she take to reply to the sisters' mail, even her very traits of personality, become, at times, a matter of life or death for some sisters. ~Vhat is "transference?" Transference is an unrealistic emotional posture which supposedly occurs only in psy-choanalytic psychotherapy but which also develops, in varying degrees of unreality, in other intimate emotional relationships (husband and wife, soldier and N.C.O. on the battle line, pastor and priest, superior and sister, and so forth). In transference, one feels about a contemporary figure not the feelings it deserves because of what this figure realistically is, but the feelings one felt about significant figures from one's childhood, whom the con-temporary figure symbolically represents. In transference, the patient sees his analyst not as what he is but as he saw his own father and/or mother; and feels about his analyst the quality and quantity of feelings appropriate not to the analyst but to his own father and/or mother. Similarly, in transference the sister sees the superior not as the superior objectively is, but as she saw, as a child, her own parents; and her feelings about the superior are not proportionately related to what the superior, objectively, is, does, stands for, but to the feelings the sister had, as a child, about her parents. Transference motivates behavior as well as feelings and thoughts; in transference, the sister will behave, toward 4- 4- 4- ÷ ÷ + Vincent S. Coniglia~o, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS the superior, not realistically but "transferentially," not as sister-to-superior but as daughter-to-mother. Transfer-ence is "remembering through actions and feelings." In psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the development of transference is facilitated by some of the essential and accidental features of the treatment itself and may be fostered by the therapist (a skillful therapist encourages the appropriate quantity and quality of transference and uses it for his patient's benefit). The accidental features of religious life will also encourage transferential relationships and painful, neurotic transferential reac-tions. But, again, not per se, but in direct proportion to the mental health of superior and sister. Such features as the fact that sisters are referred to as "daughters" and superiors are addressed as "mothers". the psycho-logica. 1 message that may be contained in the very word "superior". the reality of the superior's unquestioned authority over the sisters., the vow of obedience., and other accidental features of religious life will not by themselves "infantil-ize" the sister or "mother-ize" the superior; but the sisters will be infantilized (and the superior motherized) who, from the depth of their un-conscious and latent neuroses, had already looked go these features as opportunities for the release of latent neurotic drives. The very fact that there are so many obedient, submissive, and deferent religious sisters who are, at the same time, joyful, vibrant, productive creatures, with attractive, vital, and no less feminine personalities is a living admonishment against believing that the poten-tially infantilizing (to the neurotic) features of religious life must necessarily (that is, also in the healthy) cause transferential relationships and reactions. Whether the superior is a trained counselor or not and whether her qualities of "understanding" will be rightly perceived by sisters wearing or not wearing transference-colored glasses, there can be little doubt that the "understanding" superior will contribute to the pre-vention of emotional crises in her community. Too often one thinks of an understanding superior as someone who smiles, agrees, and gets emotionally involved with her sisters or who is gentle and unassertive and goes around giving realistic or unrealistic reassurances or who shows total approval of whatever neurotic behavior is exhibited on the part of her sisters. This actually is more the stereotype for a neurotic superior than for an under-standing one. I remember a priest counselor whom I once supervised. He was counseling a hostile, resentful, rebellious adoles-cent whose father was rigidly authoritarian and coldly punitive. The counselee acted out his hostility in the counseling situation itself by being.consistently late for his sessions or breaking appointments without previously canceling them. The counselor was extremely "under-standing," remarked about the patient's lateness only casually and gave him a full-session time by cutting into his own rest periods, feebly joked about the cancelations and, to his own great inconvenience, rescheduled make-up appointments, and made sure not to appear in the least annoyed at his patient's erratic behavior. The counselor's conscious rationale for his "understanding" was: "I want him to see that there are understanding people in this world . 1 don't want him to think that everybody is as bad as his father . " In reality his "understanding" covered his own neurotic feelings about hostility and assertion; he neurotically equated justifiable annoyance (at having his schedule continuously disrupted) with irrational rage and rigidly controlled the former to avoid the risk of expressing the latter. Another counselor I supervised managed to convey to his patient his tacit approval of the patient's practically delinquent behavior; in this case the "understanding" dis-guised the counselor's own neurotic rebelliousness and hostility against authority. The giving of unrealistic reassurances (also often seen as a sign of "understanding") may actually be a symptom of neurosis. I remember the case of a sister with a paranoid char-acter neurosis, very intelligent but extremely disagreeable because of her mistrusting, hostile personality. Sister believed the other sisters disliked and resented her be-cause of her scholastic accomplishments; and her superior usually reacted to these complaints by "reassuringly" telling her that when one is very bright one may be resented by those who are less bright, and telling her not to worry, the other sisters really liked her. The con-scious rationale of this "understanding" was: "Sister is too sick to be told that the other sisters do dislike her. and for her arrogance and imperiousness, rather than for her brilliance . " In reality, this "understanding" covered the superior's unconscious fear of the paranoid sister and only resulted in the consolidation and strengthening of sister's hostility and disagreeableness. Real understanding--whether in the knowledgeable superior or in the trained counselor--basically cor-responds to the ability to understand human psychology and, especially, the complexity of human motivations. This understanding, which the counselor obtains from training, the superior can only derive through her own studies, readings, and observation, since in the great majority of cases we are not born endowed with it. "Intui-tive understanding," "horse sense," the "knack of under-standing people," are either an altogether di~erent quality of understanding (the superficial understanding of ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 353 ÷ ÷ ÷ Vincent S. Coniglidro, M.D. REV|EW FOR RELIG|OUS few, superficial situations) or the major ingredient of often catastrophic "snap diagnoses" (the simplified con-clusions on "what really bothers" our fellow human beings). If this is fully realized, the superior who has little understanding should not blame her constitution, heredity, luck, or intelligence~in most cases she only needs to study, read, and observe. I am not implying that every superior should go to medical school and eventually specialize in psychiatry. I am suggesting, however, that any investment she will make in courses and lectures on human psychology will pay huge dividends in terms of house morale, a smoothly growing community, and her own peace of mind. Actually, it is a wonder that so many superiors, in spite of very little training in human psy-chology, do such a creditable job as leaders of a com-munity. Industry or government would not expect such a performance from untrained leaders of theirs who were to operate under conditions as difficult as most superiors (unisexual environment, closeness of quarters, the ever present possibility of transferential developments and transferential reactions; and so forth). If real understanding is to work--for the house as a whole, for the sisters, and for the superior herself---it must be mature and loving. It must be loving, or there will r~ot be the concern, care, interest motivating one human being to want to understand another (or, at least, to want to apply this u. nderstanding for healing purposes); and it must be mature, or it may be a neurotically motivated understanding in ~which the superior distorts the sister's demands because of unconscious needs to do so or understands these demands rightly but out of proportion to the total picture and more for her own needs than sister's. The positive features and attributes of real understand-ing can best be discussed in reference to counseling and religious counselors. Some of these features will be of great interest also to the superior: the superior who, without being a counselor or without intending to be-come one, wants to achieve, through her own efforts, personal interest, and dedication, real understanding of her sisters. This superior, however, would not be fair to herself if she expected to attain the quality of under-standing of the trained counselor just by following "a few simple rules," listening to the house counselors' "talk-ing shop," or reading a few articles, like this, at best just glossing over a few aspects of counseling theory. Both in real life and in the understanding of human psy-chology, there are no short cuts; and there are no instant substitutes for the understanding that can be derived only from years of studies, readings, and observation. The trained counselor attains a specialized quality of understanding of human psychology. A house counselor, through the time and effort invested in a comprehensive curriculum on theory and technique of counseling, can recognize, diagnose (in the connotation given before), and prognostically evaluate the signs and symptoms of healthy and unhealthy mental functioning. She can determine which patients are an indication for therapeutic counsel-ing and which patients, an indication for motivational counseling, should be referred to a psychotherapist, psy-chiatrist, or psychoanalyst. With the patients with whom she practices therapeutic counseling she knows, after evaluating the patient,s ego strength, environmental conditions within which the patient functions, and the overall circumstances surrounding the counseling rela-tionship, what techniques of counseling to follow and for how long. The counselor knows that human behavior and the symptoms of emotional disturbances are always over-determined (related to multiple causes and factors) and that the more disturbed is behavior, the more distressing a symptom, the more critical a crisis, the less likely it is that just one or two factors are responsible. Consequently, she will not "jump to conclusions," oversimplify, dispense quick, superficial "diagnoses" ("What really bothers you, Sister, is this and that"). She also knows that presenting symptoms and initial complaints are often a disguise for more distressing and intimate problems. Thus she waits beyond the first few sessions before concluding that sister has told her the "whole story" or even the "real story." She knows the inherently devious and implicitly mimetic nature of defense mechanisms; within herself, therefore, in the process of privately evaluating and understanding her counselee's problems, she will not take "no" (or "yes") for an answer, will not accept every-thing at its face value, will try to read between the lines of the counselee's manifest verbalization, will obtain clues from nonverbal communication, and will, in fewer words, constantly try to understand the dynamic motiva-tions, the "why," the "latent,'.' of her counselee's com-munication. (The really understanding superior may well try to remember this. Sister may come to see her to discuss problem "A"; whether sister knows it or not, she may actually be in the superior's office to discuss problems "B" or "C." The patient, knowledgeable, and, especially, un-hurried superior, will help sister to come to the real problem by prolonging the first interview, by non-direc-tive prodding--"is anything else on your mind, Sister?" is much better than "Is this (or that) what is really on your mind, Sisterl" and, especially, by asking sister to come in again "to talk more about problem A or any-thing else that might be on your mind, Sister . ") 4- 4- 4- Counseling + ÷ Vineent S. Conlgliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 356 The counselor knows that even truly distressing symp-toms may only be a first line of defense the personality uses against even more distressing problems and con-flicts. The counselee of a priest I supervised was literally torn apart by persistent masturbatory behavior con-sistently accompanied by vivid heterosexual fantasies; yet this behavior was only a cover-up for very frighten-ing, still unconscious, homosexual problems. A sister I treated was painfully convinced (and so was her superior) that she had a severe sexual problem as she was mainly obsessed with obscene fantasies and per-secuted by sexual compulsions; after several months (and a dream in which she discovered a knife hidden by stacks of pornographic literature) it became apparent that she was using obscene fantasies also to punish herself for unconscious fantasies of a sadistic nature against the superior (and her mother). Thus the counselor knows better than to prematurely remove symptoms or defenses, lest the problems so disguised come to the fore, thus causing disintegration of the whole personality and psychosis. The counselor knows that the best way to counsel is, often, by the "non-directive, minimal activity" technique. Within this technique the counselor, after having ascertained (with a minimum of activity and direction) the quality and severity of the counselee's problem, assumes an "actively passive" posture. She patiently listens; benevolently and calmly waits out pauses of silence; asks few or no questions; stimulates the counselee's continuity of communication by nonverbal means (nodding, assenting, saying "Uhm-uhm") or, verbally, by repeating the counselee's terminal sentence; echoes and reflects back, in simpler, clearer, more concise phraseology the counselee's utterances, and so forth. With the mildest counseling problems this approach is therapeutic in itself and is both means and end. The counselor becomes the counselee's oral vehicle; and the counselee, just by listening to the counselor's clearer re-formulations of the problem, can see solutions or the roads towards them. With most counseling problems this approach is very valuable as a means to an end, as it provides the counselor with material through which she will be able to help the sister to help herself. (A little tip for the superior: "true" listening, with minimal ac-tivity and direction, will cause the "true" problem to shape itself in its clearest outlines under her very eyes.) An important point, made just in passing before, is the one to the effect that light attempts at premature removal of symptoms can be catastrophic. Freud spoke of "wild psychoanalysis"; in a sense, one can talk of "wild counseling." In "wild counseling," the counselor tells the patient what to do; advises; judges; prescribes courses of action; removes symptoms or eliminates defenses; prods too actively, eliciting too much too soon, all this without knowing enough of his counselee's personality structure and whether the patient can safely ~ollow the prescription or in ignorance of the adaptive and defensive meaning of normal and abnormal be-havior. One of the most important discoveries of psychoanalysis was that psychic disorders have a meaning and represent partly successful attempts at defensive adaptation. Even the most distressing symptoms are a partly successful defense---without the distressing symptom of hysterical mutism, the hysteric would be hced with the more distressing problem of wishing to verbalize highly ex-ceptionable sexual desires; without the embarrassing symptom of "trigger-finger paralysis" (a hysteric condition of soldiers on the battle line), the patient would be ~aced with the more serious problem of wanting to press the trigger of a rifle aimed at his own sergeant; without the torturing symptom of persecutory thinking, the schizophrenic would be faced with the much more painful problem of having homosexual desires. The dis-comfort of hysterical mutism, trigger-finger paralysis, and persecutory ideation are a psychic bargain compared with the discomfort the psychic apparatus would experi-ence were it to face, in raw state, the sexual desires, the murderous aggression, and the homosexuality that mutism, paralysis, and persecutory delusions stand for. Thus, if we remove one line of defense, a more drastic defense will be set up and, with it, a more severe mental illness. I remember the patient who came to the emer-gency room of a city hospital in a wheelchair because of hysterical paralysis of both her legs. A brash and eager young psychiatric interne decided he would omnipotently remove the paralysis by hypnotic suggestion. The patient did walk out of the hospital on her own legs; once home, however, she became severely depressed and attempted suicide. The hysterical paralysis was, to her personality structure, an indispensable prop; deprived of that prop prematurely (that is, without any preliminary work on her ego), her personality could only cave in; the process could only be arrested by the setting up of more primitive defenses (more drastic "props"), for instance, the defense of depression. Counseling can be powerful medicine. Words and advice are to the counselor what scalpel and clamps are to the surgeon. Wrong counsel and ill-timed advice can have disastrous effects. I remember a patient "counseled" into borderline psychosis by her own G.P. A twenty-eight year old girl, beautiful and quite feminine, she had never been 4- ~,ounseling VOLUME 357 ÷ 4. ÷ Vincent $. Conigliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS engaged, married, or romantically involved, She had consulted her physician because of ill-defined heart and stomach symptoms, fatigue, sleeplessness, and choking sensations; the physician correctly diagnosed hysteria. In discussing her social life, he was struck by the fact that she never went out with men; he took the explanations she gave (shyness, moral reasons) about her sexual isola-tion at their face value and proceeded to persuade her into going out. After several sessions of "counseling" she reluctantly agreed to go out on a date. Shortly after the first date (and having given in to a very minor physical exchange of affection) she became depressed and with-drawn. Again, the physician accepted the explanations she gave for her depression (moral guilt) at their face value and counseled her to be "more broadminded." She became more depressed and withdrawn and eventually attempted suicide. Several weeks after she had finally en-tered psychotherapy, it was found that at the ages of five and nine she had been sexually molested by a psycho-pathic father. Unconsciously, she had come to associate adult sexuality with the incestuous sexuality experienced at five and nine; and the guilt, horror, and remorse at-tached to the latter had become associated to the former; thus sexuality had to be shunned in all its forms and manifestations. Deprived of her defenses of shyness, ti-midity, and sexual isolation, the patient could only ex-perience severe anxiety, depression, and guilt. The above examples refer to situations in which "wild counseling" was both erroneous from a psychoanalytic point of view and faulty from an ethical and moral standpoint. Yet examples can be given of morally un-exceptionable counseling that is equally "wild" from a psychodynamic point of view. A judgmental and psycho-dynamically imprudent pastoral counselor once strongly advised a young man to give up compulsive masturbation at all costs; the counselee did, at the cost of severe homo-sexual panic and suicidal behavior. A couple was once treated in marital counseling; he was a drug addict, moody, manipulative, exploitative, sadistic, occasionally violent; she, the unnervingly patient and "holy" type of woman who goes through life proudly protesting her humility and vigorously proclaiming her martyrlike good-ness in the face of unbearable male provocations. The counselor did not see that this was a neurotic marriage and that this woman (fully aware of her husband's long record of addiction at the time she had married him) had done so to fulfill her masochistic needs and express her controlling and manipulative polarities in the least obtrusive way. The counselor also failed to realize that this woman had a need to foster her husband's addiction (for example, she used to express astonishment at the fact that her husband always managed to steal the groceries money to buy drugs; in actuality, it was she who would unconsciously "forget" some money [always just the right amount for "a fix"] on her dresser for her husband to steal) and that his addiction was an essential '"prop" to her personality. When the counselor finally persuaded her to separate from her husband, she became severely depressed and became an alcoholic. As indicated before, the counselor should be both mature and loving; without these qualities, the most sophisticated psychological understanding will be basi-cally vitiated; and counseling will remain ineffectual. The psychoanalyst's personal maturity can be assured, in most cases, by the fact that he is demanded to undergo inten-sive personal psychoanalysis before he is o~cially per-mitted to psychoanalyze others; the counselor's maturity can only be assured by rigorous screening procedures at the time he applies for training; constant supervision during training gives the additional opportunity to certify as counselors only those who have demonstrated the needed maturity. Why should the counselor be mature (the quality of "loving," I would like to suggest, is an inevitable by-phenomenon of maturity) is self-evident. The mature and loving counselor practices counseling in terms of his counselee's needs--not his own. He is actively passive and non-directive because he believes in the rationale of this technique--not because he is uninterested or because he wishes to work as little as possible. When he gives active counsel, he does so because he honestly believes that it is right to do s~not because, by so doing, the counselee will love, admire, and respect him or "get off his back.~' The mature counselor responds to his patients realisti-cally and not in terms of neurotic reactions set up in him by the counselee's attitudes, symptoms, or values. He can be acceptant of his counselee's behavior, without condon-ing or approving it. He does not "judge" the counselee's actions; rather, he helps him to understand why he acts this or that way and what results can be anticipated from these actions. In being loving, the mature counselor is also capable o~ the adequate measure of self-love and self-respect, without which, I might suggest, there may be no genuine and consistent love and respect of others. A few examples may be given which will clearly in-dicate the maturity or the immaturity of the counselor. A lay counselor I supervised always managed to ask his counselees very personal questions of a sexual nature not to clarify his views on relevant aspects of his patients' personality but to fulfill, vicariously, neurotic sexual needs of his own. Examples given before (while we were 4- Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 359 ÷ ÷ + Vincent S. Conlgliaro, M~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS on the subject of the "understanding superior" and "understanding coun.selor") indicated how the counselor (or the superior) responded in terms of their own neurotic needs rather than their patients'. One pastoral counselor's sternly judgmental reaction to the rage exhibited by one of his counselees was less related to the patient's prob-lems with sadism than it was to the counselor's fear of his own hostility. Sometimes the counselor's immaturity first creates problems to the counselor himself which will then be transmitted to the counseling relationship and the counselee. A counselor I once supervised, incapable of mature self-love and self-respect, became very anxious because of his inability to resist his counselees' manipula-tions and dependency. He allowed counselees to contact him at home, at all hours of the day or night; the more dependent they became on him (and the more they in-convenienced and disrupted his family life), the more he resented them and the more he felt he had to "make up" for his hostility by giving in to their manipulations and dependency, thus getting involved in a self-perpetuat-ing vicious circle. Immature~or insufficiently trained--counselors may want to terminate a counseling relationship for a com-bination of '"right," conscious reasons (that is, the pa-tient is too sick and needs psychotherapy) and uncon-scious, "wrong" reasons (that is, hostility set up by the patient's values, attitudes, habits, and so forth). These counselors may feel so guilty, unconsciously, for the "wrong" reasons that they may be unable to recommend termination on the basis of the conscious, "right" reasons. They may present the "right" reasons to their counselees in such ambivalent, confusing fashion that the counselees sense the existence of hidden hostility, perceive the recommendation to terminate as '"rejection," and neu-rotically cling to the relationship: "interminable counsel-ing." On the other hand, an untrained pastor I know (truly and genuinely loving--of others; not enough, per-haps, of himself) often feels he does not have the right to refuse or deny anyone and gets involved in intermi-nable counseling in a different way: the parishioner keeps on coming, once, twice a week, to the rectory, refuses to be referred to a psychiatrist, and clings to the unhappy and helpless priest for years. Sometimes it is a superior who makes herself un-realistically available to her sisters. She is "willing" to practice informal counseling at any time during office hours (and beyond) and is unable to turn down any sister's request for "a few minutes of time." This superior may be taking too literally the Christian, ethical, or professional obligation to make oneself available to those who suffer, forgetting the equally ethical and Christian obligation to be good to oneself. One superior I knew refused no one coming in to see her, no matter how busy she was, how many deadlines she had to meet, and how many unfinished tasks were before her. She made her-self available "so that sister won't feel rejected."; her inner discomfort and tension, however, inevitably diffused to the counseling relationship. She would listen superficially and be exposed to the risk of making super-ficial, premature comments; or, while she "listened," her eyes would dart to the typewriter or steal a glance at the wristwatch; or her hands would tap impatiently by the telephone or tug at the crucifix ("Dear God, help me be patient."). The sisters she "listened" to inevitably received the message and felt just as rejected as if they had been asked to return later. A more self-loving superior will do better (by herself and by the sister) by recognizing her right (and her duty, perhaps, to herself) to tell sister warmly but firmly that she will take just a few minutes right away to discusse the matter of an appointment: which will be given within the day if sister feels the matter is that important, later, if sister feels her problem is not that urgent. I am suggesting, then, that when counselor, superior, pastor have sufficient mature self-love and self-respect (at least enough of it to resist the temptation of making themselves unrealistically, or masochistically, available to others) they will, at the same time, be capable of mature, joyful, and genuine love of others. (Could it be that "love thy neighbor as thyself" really means that one has as much obligation to love oneself as to love one's neighbor? And that this beautiful maxim, read between the lines, suggests that without mature self-Jove there cannot be mature other-love?) ! On the subject of "mature and loving understanding," it may be very appropriate to conclude by briefly reflect-ing on the question of values and counseling. While the counselee's values should have little relevance to the counselor's effectiveness, the same cannot be said of the counselor's values. ("Values" here is meant on a broad ethical and philosophical plane, not only on a religious or moral plane.) At the risk of being considered an incorrigible idealist, I should like to suggest that the effective counselor (like the effective psychotherapist) must be, above all, a decent, good human being. If he is not to be, at best a sterile and antiseptic technician, at worst a manipulator and a hidden persuader, he must be committed to a philosophy of integrity, love and respect of others, self-love and self-respect. The attributes of maturity, loving-ness, and understanding will ulti-mately be inherent and intrinsic in the man's existential ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling VOLUME 24, 1965 36] integrity and ethical commitment. He cannot be auto-cratic, manipulative, devious outside of office hours, and genuinely permissive, truthful (to himself and his work), and sincere in his office; by the same token, he cannot be weak, manipulable, neurotically self-effacing outside of his office and reasonably assertive, reliable, and helpful during office hours. He need not be "perfect" (whatever this word may connote in his personal weltanschauung), but honest. He need not feel that he must make no mis, takes; all he needs is mental alertness to the mistakes he makes and the emotional courage to recognize them and try to do his best to rectify them. He need not be a self-righteous crusader for love, freedom, and a democratic philosophy of life, but someone who does his best to love, be free, and set others free. I began by noting that "counseling, as a technique and a philosophy of human relatedness., is important to both psychoanalysts and religious persons. (who) both work with human beings and are both committed to a profession of service . " In closing, I should like to suggest that both psychoanalysts (or psychotherapists, counselors, and so forth) and religious persons (or pastoral counselors, house counselors, and so forth), be-cause of the specific quality of their relatedness to the human beings they work with, are alike also in this respect: the measure of their success in their work is, to a large extent, a measure of their existential richness and integrity. ,4" 4. + Vincent $. onigliaro, M.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS WILLIAM J. REWAK, S.J. Mortification: An Entry inta the Christ-Mystery I. Aversion of Modern Man In the spirit of the Church's aggiornamento, there is a great demand today for authenticity in moral and ascetical theology, a demand for new and valid expres-sions for the old values. A value is a value, after all, not because it is traditional but because it is an authentic expression of my personal relationship to God and to other people. We are aware of, and fear, the crystalliza-tion of the primary Christian experiences. It has often happened that the Church---or more exactly, institutions and individuals within the Church---have bequeathed to succeeding generations rites, methods, and customs with-out any inner ideal and spirit. Such a stagnation of the original value can occur in any human experience: mysticism can degenerate into magic and ritualism; prophecy is always in danger of crumbling into moral-lsm. So the original value, idea, must forever be reex-pressed; it must grow within the historical context and be reinterpreted in the light of changing modes of thought. At the same time, it must keep a strong hold on the primitive experience. It is for this reason we will investigate the New Testament doctrine on mortifica-tion. A theology of mortification is badly needed. The pres-ent doctrine is inadequate, for it has not kept pace with the advancements in Sci'ipture and other branches of theology. At the present, we are reacting against a moral theology that has emphasized sin and progressing towards a positive program of Christian life: doing good in the service of a generous charity. The idea of morti-fication, then, which according to many manuals is practiced either as a punishment for past sins or as a deterrent against future sins must be reappraised,x What ~$ee P. J. Meyer, s.J., Science o] the Saints (~t. Louis: Herder, ÷ ÷ ÷ William J. Re-wak, s.J., is a mem-ber of Regis Col-lege; 3425 Ba~.view Avenue; Wallow-dale, Ontario; Can-ada. VOLUME 24, 1965 4, 4, 4, William ~. Rewak, 5.1. REVIEW FOR REL]G~OUS 564 is objected to is not that sinful man needs mortification, but that theories of mortification seem to bypass Christ and have for their starting point, their raison d'etre, the fact of sin. Every natural philosophy tried to elimi-nate "sin"; the Stoics were concerned with perfection, but only natural perfection. A Christian existential view of sin cannot fall into this trap. Many wish to find their mortification in the daily struggle involved in working for their neighbor, in the apostolate. The absolute value itself of mortification is not always questioned; a blank rejection would be an act of infidelity to the Word of God. What is vehe-mently questioned is selpchosen mortification: corporal punishments, voluntary acts of abnegation of the intel-lect and will, all those acts, freely chosen, which hurt our pride or human respect. Their necessity is question-able in the light of the very real difficulties confronting the apostle in today's pluralistic society, in a world where the general breakdown of morality requires a new and more refined, more soul-searching response in his communication with his neighbor. There is no doubt about it: mortification is the daily fare for the dedi-cated apostle. Why opt for additional, self-chosen acts of mortification? Mortification has too often been identified with ex-traordinary corporal austerities. The ordinary apostle, not given to sackcloth and ashes, hairshirts, dank caves, and bloody lacerations, is sincerely seeking an "ordi-nary" saint. He wants as an example someone who must stay strong and healthy in order to perform manfully, joyfully, and effectively the tasks of a university pro-fessor, a retreat master, or a Catholic businessman. Besides, corporal austerities are currently out of favor as a result of the renewed "theology of matter." We have, it is hoped, at least theoretically banished all traces of Platonism and Jansenism from our books and lectures on spirituality. There is today an emphasis on the sacramentality of matter, an emphasis fostered by the late Teilhard de Chardin. The body, the world of the material and concrete, are all good and will con-tribute in their own specialized way to the glory of the kingdom to be revealed in us. If corporal austerities are to be retained, they must be based on a more solid foundation than the Jansenistic distrust of the ma-terial. 2 1902), pp. 88-91. Father Meyer's primary reason for practicing morti-fication is "as an atonement for past sins"; and it is "still more neces-sary as a preservative from future sins." This obviously needs quali-fication and completion. i We use the terms "Jansenistic" and "Jansenism" because they are readily intelligible to the modem reader. It must be admitted, how-ever, that the use of such terms is more for convenience than for Older spiritual books, books which influenced the ascetical teachers of the first half of this century, are notoriously negative in tone: If we were to count all the miseries of human life, we should never have done. Holy Job says, "The life of man is a per- Detual warfare upon earth, and his days are like the days of a hired servant that labours from sun-rising to sun-set" (Job vii. 1, 2). Several of the old philosophers had such a lively sense of this truth, that some of them said, they could not tell whether to call nature a mother or a step-mother, because she has sub-jected us to so many miseries. Others again used to say, it were better never to be born, or at least to die as soon as we were strict and complete historical accuracy. An explanation is therefore in order. We urge the reader to consult Louis Bouyer, The Spiritual-ity o] the New Testament and the Fathers, trans. Mary P. Ryan (London: Burns and Oates, 196~) for an excellent account of the problem of gnosis in the early Church. Contrary to modern popular belief, Father states, there was a legitimate gnosis sought by St. Paul and by the early fathers; one has only to think of the formulation of the First Epistle to the Corinthians on knowing God even as we are known (1 Cor 13:12; see also Eph 3:19 and Phil 3:7-11). And this is a knowledge which is really an experience of God, in the love of the Spirit. St. Ignatius of Antioch says: "Why do we not all become wise in receiving the gnosis of God, Jesus Christ?" (p. 246). Gnosis for primitive Christianity was an experiential knowledge of the mysteries of the Father's plan for salvation. But at the same time the natural Greek philosophers themselves were seeking ~alvation through a gnosis of their own. These influences came in turn to form Christian gnosis. "Eons or angels descended in endless cascades from a pleroma in which everything is divine, towards a foreign matter in which everything is mired and becomes degenerate. To this fall, which is one with creation itself, is opposed the mission of the Logos, more or less strictly identified with the man Jesus. But since salvation is nothing but the recovery of an con fallen into mat-ter, the incarnation could be only apparent. It must lead, in fact, to a salvation which is not a redemption of the whole of man, but a disengagement in man of what has never ceased to be immortal 'spirit,' that is to say, an escape from the bonds of the body and the world . The cross of the Saviour only frees our soul along with his from the chains of the body" (p. 223). It is immediately apparent that the grandfather of the heretical positions of the Jansenists, Puritans, Albigensians, Manicheans, is Greek Gnosticism--a corrod-ing rationalism which understood nothing of the true Gnosis, the Word of God. It is not the Logos of Hellenistic syncretism that we, as Christians, come to know, but the Word made flesh. This is why so many spiritual writers of the last few centuries have misfired with their ascetical doctrine; they were influenced by the same rationalism that has threatened Christianity from the beginning and is too often the error of Christian "humanism": the adoption of ascetical prac-tices for the purification and reintegration of the purely natural man, with no consideration for the priority of the interpersonal relation-ship between man and God. The early Greek Gnostic sought an apatheia: the calming of all disordered tendencies, rendering him insensible to outside influence. The Christian Gnosdc also sought apatheia, but it was attained through perfect submission to charity. This in no way meant an extinction of the human, "but rather its unification in which everything is taken up and transfigured which is worthy of being so" (p. 274). Christian asceticism must begin from faith, from the Word of God; it must proceed from the Spirit of love speaking within us. + + .I-Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 365 4. 4. 4. William J. Rewak, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 366 born; nay, some of them have gone so far as to say, there are but few persons, that would accept of life after having made an experiment of it, that is, if it were possible to make a trial of it beforehand,s If one were to take this seriously, he would have to regret that God ever uttered a fiat. Having disposed of the object, the author turns to the subject: Cast your eyes on yourself, and you will find there motives enough of humility. Do but consider what you were before you were born, what you are since you have been born and what you are like to be after your death. Before your birth, you were a filthy matter unworthy to be named, at present you are a dunghill covered with snow, and in a short time you will be meat for worms.~ An adequate understanding of the Incarnation can surely dispel such gross misconceptions of God's creation. But it is precisely upon such misconceptions that the author--and other authors--have based their arguments for mortification. Little wonder modern man is repelled. An unhappy refrain running through most spiritual manuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is A bstine et sustine! Refrain and endure,s Cast unwillingly into a flaming abyss of sin where even the apostolate is fraught with unimaginable dangers, mortification alone will lead us to "perfection." And this is perhaps the worst aberration of rationalistic moralism: the use of ascetical practices not for establishing and maintaining a dialogue with God but for the stoical perfection of all the virtues. Most spiritual books of the last century offered detailed instructions on how to develop the virtues of fortitude, for example, or temperance, chastity. And the first means was always mortification--as they understood it. "We must possess more virtues; through them only can we reach our end. Here comes in the aid of self-denial and self-discip-line." 0 Another section of the book explained the ob-stacles to the acquiring of these virtues;7 and a third sec-tion enticed the reader with such titles as "Of the Spiritual and Temporal Advantages Promised to Virtue in this Life, s Rev. F. Lewis, O.P., The Sinner's Guide (Dublin: Richard Coyne, 1825), p. 162. ~ Ibid., p. 271. ~ See, for example, Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J., Practice o! Perfec-tion and Christian Virtues, trans. Joseph Rickaby, S.J. (London: Manresa Press, 1929), p. 567; and Meyer, Science of the Saints, p. 97. °Moritz Meschler, s.J., Three Fundamental Principles of the Spiritual Life (Westminster: Newman, 1945), p. 80. The author seri-ously calls his book "Christian Asceticism in a Waist-Coat Pocket" (p. v). 7See John Baptist Scaramelli, S.J., The Directorium Asceticum, trans, at St. Bueno's College, North Wales (4 vols.; London: R. and T. Washbourne, 1902), v. 2. This second of four volumes is devoted en-tirely to the manifold obstacles to Christian "virtue" and the means for overcoming them--penance and mortification. and particularly of Twelve Extraordinary Privileges be-longing to it" s or "Some Easy Kinds of Mortification." 9 Such pragmatic spirituality, which is nothing but the victory of reason over animality, lacks a real Christian motive based on Christ's entry into our life through baptism and the sacraments. Fortunately, we have recovered the notion that per-fection is not the piling up of virtues, computer-fashion; it is more fundamental, it is Chrigt-centered. We see Christ as the focal point of all our religious activity, of all our apostolic activity, of all human relations; and when an author bids us go forth from our father's house because "in the shelter of the religious life, separated from the world, from all that might .have occupied your thoughts and your hearts, you live for God alone," 10 we cannot believe him. Or if someone counsels us: "If the religious vocation demands the abandonment of the parental roof, sons and daughters must sacrifice their affections for parents and relatives that they may gain thereby Christ's promise of eternal life," or asserts that friendships are dangerous because "friendship between proper parties that has for object their mutual spiritual advancement is rare and found only among saints," 11 we can hardly take him seriously. The author is too much like those of whom P~guy wrote that "they think they love God because they don't love anyone." Mortification and sacrifice have often been put in opposition to joy. Come, my children, when pain, sacrifice, and duty press heavily upon you, when you experience dryness and disgust, endeavour to make, if you will, a dry and bitter act of love of God . Fervour and sensible devotion is good for small minds; shake off these feminine ways, aspire to something more noble, more vigorous. As for ourselves, we have had not one quarter of an hour's consolation in forty years.~ Hard saying for a generation that is experiencing the ascetical consequences of St. Paul's theology of the Res-urrection. Surely sacrifice and consolation, as authentic expressions of God's Good News, must somehow be re-lated. But most authors of moral guidebooks struggled with this "problem" of pleasure, happiness, consolation, and could not easily reconcile it with Christ's example of suffering. There exists in fact the problem of pleasure. Readily enough ~ Lewis, Sinner's Guide, p. 85. ~ Meyer, Science oJ the Saints, p. 101. 10 P~re de Ravignan, S.J., ConIerences on the Spiritual LiIe, trans. Mrs. Abel Ram (London: Washbourne, 1877), p. 185. Italics mine. ~aMonsignor P. J. Stockman, Manual o] Christian Per]ection (Hollywood, Calif.), p. 611. ~ De Ravignan, ConJerences, p. 191. Mortification VOLUME 24, 196S 367 4. 4. William ]. Rewak, 8.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS $68 does the concept of pleasure evoke the idea of something which, morally, has little to recommend it, or at the most, something which is to be tolerated. Living in the memory of Christ, the Christian soul with difficulty separates sanctity from suffering. Is it not by the cross that Christ redeemed and sanctified us? How can pleasure, then, be integrated into the moral life? Does this life not seem, on the contrary, to exclude it? Is there a place for pleasure in the context of a life of selbcontrol?18 And the author solves this conundrum by consoling his readers with the distinction that the essence of an act is what determines it and not the pleasure that may sur-round or follow upon it. Pleasure is outside the moral law: if the act is good, the pleasure is good; if the act is bad, the pleasure is bad. It is, he states, permitted to renounce this pleasure for a superior motive; but it is sometimes better to accept it, especially if it leads to virtue; and it may not always be possible to exclude it.14 Such a treatment of pleasure and consolation strikes the modern reader as negative, moralistic, and exces-sively rationalistic. It has not embodied the spirit of St. Paul: "They will forbid marriage, and will enjoin ab-stinence from foods, which God has created to be par-taken of with thanksgiving by the faithful and by those who know the truth. For every creature of God is good and nothing is to be rejected that is accepted with thanksgiving. For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer:' (1 Tim 4:3-5). One last remark, and this first part will have per-formed its function. Mortification has been strongly identified with the devotions centering around the idea of reparation. We supposedly mortify our flesh to al-leviate the pain of the lash as it struck Christ during His passion; we kneel for hours to repair for the sins which are causing Him pain and sorrow. Sentimentality has conjured up the image of a Sacred Heart, sitting on the banks of the Loire, weeping and bewailing the sins which men are committing. Such misguided devotions can readily develop into dolorism, a perverted anguish which plays on false feelings of guilt; and for the modern psychology-oriented intellectual, this" is territory to be shunned. Mortification, if it is to be Christian, must turn one away from the self and towards Christ and ="I1 existe de fait un probl~me du plaisir. Assez ais~ment le con-cept de plaisir ~voque l'id~e d'une chose moralement peu recom-mandable, d'une tolerance tout au plus. Vivant du souvenir du Christ, l'fime chr~tienne dissocie malais~raent la saintet~ de la soul-france: n'est-ce point par la croix que le Christ vous a rachet~s et sanctifi~s? Peut-on donc integrer le plaisir clans la vie morale? Ne convient-il au contraire de l'en exclure? Peut-on lui assigner une place clans le gouvernement de soi-m~me?" Dora Odon Lottin, Aux sources de notre grandeur morale (Editions de l'Abbaye du Mont Cesar, 1946), p. 32. a~ Ibid., pp. 33-4. man. Sentimentality has no place in the authentic Chris-tian experience of reparation. It is the sum of all these inaccuracies, these exaggera-tions, these inauthentic expressions of Christian asceti-cism, which are causing the current questioning, if not the rejection, of mortification. If we are to retain morti-fication and sacrifice as indispensable e|ements of Chris-tian life, they must be integrated into the scheme of the "Christ-life" of which St. Paul is the outstanding interpreter. We have to make what we mean intelligible to modern Christians so that, as Karl Rahner says, "they will not think that 'sacrifice' is an expression for that misanthropy and secret hatred of life felt by failures who are incapable of courageously enjoying life and this world and the glory of human existence." a~ H. New Testament Doctrine on Mortification We have been using the term "mortification" in its popular sense, meaning all those acts of abnegation, of sacrifice, which are commonly understood as "mortify-ing." It is time now, however, to clarify the meaning of the three words ordinarily used interchangeably as synonyms: abnegation, renouncement, and mortification; and we will present, in the main, Fr. Iren~e Hausherr's distinctions,a6 This analysis will lead us into a further study of the Pauline texts on mortification. The Synoptics have all preserved the saying: "If any-one wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." a7 Fr. Hausherr has pointed out that in the Scriptures, when abnegate, "to deny," concerns a duty, there is always the same direct object: oneself. We cannot, strictly speaking, deny ourselves; that is, negate ourselves. We cannot deny what we really are. The abnegation demanded by Christ consists in denying, or not attributing to myself, that which I am not. The great truth about myself is that I am a creature ---or better, a son---of God; negatively speaking, I am not God. This elementary negation constitutes the es-sence of abnegate, of the "denial" of oneself. It is, to be sure, an intellectual judgment on my condition as a creature, a fully free human commitment to adore and praise the God Who has entered my life. But to stop here would enclose us in the same narrow straits of rationalism that hemmed in former ascetical writers. This basic abnegation--the adoration of God---demands that I act as a creature; but it demands primarily that ~ Karl Rahner, S.J., The Christian Commitment, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), p. 167. l~Iren~e Hausherr, S.J., "Abnegation, renouncement, mortifica-tion," Christus, v. 22 (1959), pp. 182-95. a7 Mt 16:24. See also Mk 8:34; Lk 9:23. Mortification VOLUME 24, a965 William ]. Rewak, $.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 370 my filial relationship to God, which is discerned by faith, take precedence over and therefore exclude the primacy of every purely natural reference to self, and this in consequence of the existential character of the supernatural order of redemption I am now living. Transposed into life, this principle demands acts of mortification. The commandment "to renounce" appears in only one text: "He who does not renounce all that he pos-sesses cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:33). Christ is here again referring to all men, to whoever wishes to follow Him; it is therefore not a counsel but a command, a Christian duty. Obviously, the degree of embodiment of this renunciation will vary for every person and every state in life. Renunciation for a religious is not the same as renunciation for a layman. Although the specific command, "to renounce," does not appear elsewhere, there are related texts: "If your right eye is an occasion of sin to you, pluck it out . " (Mr 5:29); "If you wish to be perfect, sell all that you possess, give it to the poor, and come, follow me" (Mt 19:21); "And anyone who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or moth.er, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive a hundred-fold and shall possess life everlasting" (Mt 19:29). The first Matthaean text is hypothetical but is uni-versal in its application. The remaining two texts refer to those who have decided to follow the counsels, since "to leave" is not commanded, it is optional. Luke has seemed to use the same logion, but the tone is harsh: anyone comes to me and he does not hate his mother and his son and his brother and his sisters, and himself, he cannot be my disciple" (Lk 14:26). In this context, "to hate" someone is to love him less than God, or better, to discern by faith that love of the Father grounds our love for other men. "To leave" is not a duty (except in the hypothetical case of an occasion of sin); but "to hate" and "to re-nounce" are obligations which fall on every Christian, as they indicate the relation that should exist between a son and a Father. Abnegation, then, refers to the subject: my self-love will be characterized and determined by my love for the Father. Renouncement refers to the persons or things outside the subject: all created things will be loved in the Father and through the Spirit because they are ex-pressions of God's love for me. "The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). Transposed into life, both of these principles demand acts of mortification. It is St. Paul who uses the word "mortification," and the first text we wish to examine is Col 3:5: "Therefore, mortify your members which are on earth." Some have understood this text literally to refer to punishment of the physical body. The Greek word for mortify, nekro-sate, does mean "to cause to die"; but St. Paul is not asking for the physical amputation of our members, he has too great a respect for the body: "Learn how to possess your vessel [body] in holiness and honor" (1 Th 4:4). But neither should the word be weakened to merely mean "suffer," for this, too, would have no precedent in Pauline doctrine. The word "members," then, can-not refer to our physical members; and in the context of the passage, there is an interpretation given to the word. Appearing in apposition to "members" are: "im-morality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire, and covetousness (which is a form of idol worship)" (Col 3:5). What we must put to death, what we must "mortify," are the dis-ordered affections which proceed from blunted self-love, a self-love not grounded in the Father's love, in Paul's terminology, the "flesh," sarx. Now the works of the flesh [sarx] are manifest, which are immorality, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, angers, quarrels, factions, par-ties, envies, murders, drunkenness, carouslngs and such like . And they who belong to Christ have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires (Gal 5:19-21,24). The effects of selfish egoism destroy the beauty and the harmony of the Christian person. All these sins which Paul enumerates set a man against his neighbor, against God, even against himself. We must "crucify" the source of this disorder, our "flesh," in order that we may "walk in the Spirit" (Gal 5:16). Mortifying the flesh will produce the "fruit of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, modesty, continency" (Gal 5: 22-3). The primacy of the spirit of charity in our lives is evidence that we have "risen with Christ": If you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, your life, shall appear, then you too will appear with him in glory. ThereIore, mortify your members . " (Col 3:1-5). Paul is inviting us to the state of mortification, in the interests of our resurrected life. "If by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live" (Rom 8:13). Egdism must be mortified and sensuality curbed; then we live in the full supernatural sense. And here we begin to touch upon a basic Pauline theme. For Paul, the fundamental law of the spiritual life is a dying and a living with Christ. This occurs sacra-÷ ÷ ÷ Mortifwatlon VOLUME 24, 1965 371 4, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 372 mentally in baptism and it is of this he speaks to the Colossians. Perhaps his most explicit statement is in the epistle to the Romans: Do you not know that all we who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? For we were buried with him by means 6f baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life" (Rom 6:3-4). The spiritual life is union with Christ; but this is a fellowship with His death and life. We die and rise again sacramentally in baptism, an invisible action which must be fully manifested and made effective in our daily lives. The sacramental, ontological change we undergo in baptism must have a corresponding effect on our moral and ascetical conduct,is Only in this way, by uniting ourselves sacramentally and ascetically to Christ's earthly activity of suffering, can we obtain a freedom from sin and our final resurrection: For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things, and I count them as dung that I may gain Christ and be found in him not having a justice of my own which is from the Law, but that which is from faith in Christ, the justice from God based upon faith; so that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering: become like to him in death, in the hope that somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead (Phil 3:8-11). Fr. F. X. Durrwell states: These texts do not say that the remission of sin is gained in virtue of the merit acquired in the past by that death---one must not water down the reality of a single word of Scripture on the ground of reason being unable to cope with it; they say that it is gained in a communion in that immolationTM. Only by entering completely into the mystery of Christ, by uniting our sufferings to His in such a way that they are no longer our sufferings but Christ's--"l bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body" (Gal 6:lT)-~can we truly become a "new creation" (Gal fi:lS) and enter upon the glorious life awaiting us. And so a radical transformation has already taken place at baptism: "As many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ" (Gal 3:27); "You were heretofore darkness but now light" (Eph 5:8); "The law of the spirit of life, in Christ Jesus, hath delivered me from the law of sin and death" (Rom 8:2). In the Chris-tian life, however, there is a vast difference between establishing a beachhead and the full experience of ~ Concerning this Pauline theme, see Alfred Wikenhauser, Pauline Mysticism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960), pp. 149-56; and F. X. Dun'well, In the Redeeming Christ (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 84-90. ~ Durrwell, In the Redeeming Christ, p. 85. victory--the pleroma. In principle, Christ's death and resurrection and our sacramental participation in it have destroyed the inevitable domination of "the lusts of the flesh" (Gal 5:16); but the possibility of sin remains. The Christian life is a life of struggle, as Paul knew so well from his own personal experience and fa'om his ex-periences with the imperfections of the early Christian communities. But Christian suffering, the appropriation in our own person of the passion and death of Christ, must reflect the same motive that inspired the exinanitio: the redemp-tion of man and of the universe. "For we the living are constantly being handed over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. Thus death is at work in us, but life in you" (2 Cor 4:11-2). Only to the extent that what is exclusively natural in us dies can the life of Christ become manifest in us in the form of apostolic activity. The death of the apostle is the necessary condition for the life of the Church and her members. And every Christian is an apostle. Only to the extent that we "bear about in our body the dying of Jesus" (2 Cot 4:I0) can we effectively continue the redemption by applying its saving activity to men. And here we reach the basic reason for all mortification: it is an entry into the mystery of Christ, a communion in His suffering, for the purpose of prolonging His re-demption in the world through the Church. His activity in Jerusalem two thousand years ago was not ineffica-cious for the present age; He effected the transforma-tion at that point in time, but He continues it in His glorified state through the members of His Church who recapitulate in their lives His redeeming experience. "Therefore I pray you not to be disheartened at my tribulations for you, for they are your glory" (Eph 3:13). The most important statement of this theme appears in Col 1:24: "I rejoice now in the sufferings I bear for your sake, and what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ I fill up in my flesh for his body which is the Church." Paul does not mean, of course, that he must supply by his sacrifices the defects in the sufferings of the historical Christ. Interpreting "the sufferings of Christ," Fr. Benoit says they are, in general, the tribula-tions of the apostolic life;2° while Fr. Wikenhauser ap-plies them more personally, stating they are Paul's own sufferings.21 These interpretations do not do injustice to Paul's thought; as he says elsewhere, "the sufferings ~o Pierre Benoit, "L'Epitre aux Colossiens," Bible de Jdrusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1959), p. 60, footnote (b). m Wikenhauser, Pauline Mysticism, p. 161. ÷ ÷ Mortification VOLUME 37~ of Christ abound in us" (2 Cor 1:5), meaning his own sufferings. At any rate, all reputable scholars agree with the general tenor of the text: Paul, and all Christians, must express in their lives Christ's passion and death for the salvation of the members of the Mystical Body, the Church. Quite simply, "they live no longer for them-selves" (2 Cot 5:15). And this salvation of the Body of Christ is a source of great joy for Paul, a joy that is a participation in the Resurrection: "For our present light affliction, which is for the moment, prepares for us an etei-nal weight of glory that is beyond all measure" (2 Cot 4:17). Com-munion with Christ in His death necessarily means com-munion in His Resurrection, for this too is the moral and ascetical prolongation of baptism. The Resurrection should be lived, as mortification and suffering are lived. The apostle is a man of joy: "For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so also through Christ does our comfort abound" (2 Cor 1:15). It is in the letter to the Philippians, written during a harsh and humiliating im-prisonment, that Paul overflows with joy--a word that appears in this epistle eleven times because of the fellowship he experiences with his converts who them-selves have endured suffering for the sake of the gospel: "I have you in my heart, all of you, alike in my chains, and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, as sharers in my joy" (Phil 1:7). In summary, Paul puts great emphasis on the mystical and sacramental fellowship in Christ that is effected at baptism; but he is equally insistent that Christians must foster in their lives a personal relationship founded on imitation--and this can only be done by re-experienc-ing Christ's life, performing the same redeeming activity He performed. To be one with Him in glory, we must be one with Him in suffering. This is the only way we know, the only way given to us by which we can be saved: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny him-self, take up his cross and follow me" (Mr 16:24). III. Some Conclusions ÷ ÷ + William I. Rewak, Sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS And what then is mortification? Most basically, it is a state of having died with Christ so that we may live with him, We must make more explicit, however, a dis-tinction which until now has only been implied: St. Paul is speaking primarily about absolute mortification, the state we all must enter as a result of our communion in baptism with Christ. Every Christian is called to this state; and the requirements are the same: the "putting to death" of the disordered inclinations and affections that are ours as a result of original sin.2~ We do not "mortify" the body, properly speaking; we mortify our flesh, sarx, the urge we possess to disassociate our in-terests from God's interests. And we do this that through us the Body of Christ, the Church, may live the Res-urrection more fully. But a problem remains. For this absolute principle of the spiritual life must be appropriated by each Chris-tian and embodied in his daily life. The acts of mortifi-cation, therefore, by which we make St. Paul's principle our constant concern, we term relative mortification. For these acts are always relative, to our state in life, to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and to the force of the disordered affections which remain in us. It is this we are concerned with now and it is under this heading we discuss selpchosen, freely imposed mortifica-tion. We live as members of a Church; all our Christian acts are ecclesiological--through, with, and in the struc-ture Christ set up for our sanctification. The existence of sin in any one of its members stops the flow of grace in a particular area and impedes there the growth of the Christ-life. Mortification does serve, then, as punishment for sin and as a deterrent against future sin, as the manuals have pointed out; but sin must be seen in the context of the Mystical Body, of charity: "For you have been called to liberty, brethren; only do not use liberty as an occasion for sensuality, but by charity serve one another" (Gal 5:13). We mortify our disordered affec-tions so that nothing will hinder us from entering into a meaningful dialogue with God and with our neighbor. We must make of our lives a dynamic redemption--a redemption that is continued through our Christian acts of prayer and mortification, in the Church, for mankind. It is in the light of this Christian experience, for example, that we seek the meaning of reparation. Acts directed to reparation are performed principally to further the penetration of the Christ-life in the members of the Church: the Church suffering and the Church militant. They are intended to "repair" the damage done by sin, to heal the wounds which Christ--in His members m St. Ignatius of Loyola insists that a "disordered affection" is an affection which does not take into account the action of God in our life. To mortify this affection, (I) w~ starve it by not allowing it to exercise its influence and (2) we pray that God may change this af-fection. It is obvious how important Ignatius considered both the initiative and the decisive influence of God's action in us; for this reason he puts great emphasis on the necessity of prayer when troubled by "inordinate attachments." See Spiritual Exercises, Nos. 16, 157. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mortit~ation VOLUME Z4, 1965 375 ÷ ÷ William J. Rewak, Sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS --has suffered, to open the channels of sanctification that we all may live healthy, grace-filled lives. Christ does not suffer, but His members do: the loss of grace, caused by the power of sin. The dialogue must be re-established, and our acts of mortification do effect, in ourselves and in our neighbor, through the mercy of God, the resurgence of the Christ-life. For within the mystery of the Mystical Body, there is room for mutual help--and this in the sphere of grace alone. This re-vealed fact in itself attests to the mysterious character of the organic union of this Body: "For we the living are constantly being handed over to death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal bodies. Thus death is at work in us, but li[e in you" (2 Cor 4:11-2). But many Christians, agreeing with the general nec-essity of mortification, point to the apostolate, as we have indicated, as source enough of that "dying" Paul insists we must undergo for ourselves and our brothers in Christ. Failure in the apostolate, the limitations of our personality in dealing with others, the rejection of love, the inability to be effective--these are real crosses to be borne by every apostle. They point also to the one great abiding mortifica-tion, the acceptance of personal death. Karl Rahner has said: We have only to recall that death, as an act of man, is pre-cisely that event which gathers up the whole of the personal human life of the individual into one consummation. We have only, too, to recall, as Eutychius (A.D. 582) said, that there oc-curs "pragmatically" in death what had occurred mystically at the sacramental heights of Christian experience, in Baptism and in the Eucharist, namely our assimilation to the death of the Lord.~ And the death of the Lord was not an easy one. But self-chosen mortification, we affirm, performs ex-actly the same function, and that is one of the reasons it is so necessary. Just as personal death demands activity on the part of the Christian, so should our mortification, for mortification prepares us for and establishes a begin-ning and an acceptance of our final assimilation to the death of the Lord. Acceptance of suffering, of the crosses meted out to us in our apostolate, has great value; but it does not reach the depths of the personality as our self-chosen acts do. It is easier to accept .the loss of something we hold dear than to throw it away of ourselves. The blame can al-ways be put on circumstance, on someone else, even on God; and this is a consoling thought, for it is hard to ~a Karl Rahner, S.J., On the Theology of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), p. 77. blame ourselves, to freely commit ourselves to a dying in Christ. Penances imposed from without are .not free from the nonchalance and superficiality of routine. What may pass for a religious act may often be unthinking obedience. As Fr. Rahner says: One has only to have heard something, however little, about depth psychology, repression, substitution, self-deception, etc., to have to agree that thousands of "religious" and "moral" acts can take place in man which are induced by training, imitation, suggestion, mere instruction from without and a "good will" which does not reach to the real kernel of the person; acts which are not really religious acts because they do not stem from that level of personality, supernaturally elevated and ab-solutely individual, whose free fulfillment they must be if they are to signify, before God, the creation of an eternally valid life?' To maturely and effectively create a situation in which I turn back upon myself the hand of penance and deal a death-blow to self-love, is a fearful thing. Self-love is frightened of it; but self-love, inasmuch as it opposes God's interests and plans for me, must be hammered, molded, that a "new man" might appear whose affections are ordered to one end: that the Lord may appear in us. This creation of an act of mortification, then, reaches profound depths; it engages the whole personality, calls for a personal commitment that acceptance of suffering alone cannot command. What St. Paul calIs sarx--"im-morality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire and covetousness" (Col 3:5)---is rooted out only with dogged and ruthless persistence. "This kind can be cast out only by prayer and fasting" (Mk 9:18). Those who would reject all forms of mortification are, unwittingly, Platonists--any of the forms of false Gnosticism--for they make of us angels who do not need to be on the offensive against attacks of the "flesh"; they would not subscribe to a real Incarnation. Freely-chosen acts of mortification do prepare us for death because they anticipate it; but they also prepare us for the moral and physical suffering which we have admitted will be ours in the apostolate. There is no question of will power here: performing ten acts of morti-fication will not make my will ten times stronger than it was. It does increase our faith, our insight into the suffering Christ as He appears in mankind. We cannot make quick improvisations when Christ approaches in the sufferings we have not chosen. If we have begged for the grace of faith--for that is what we do when we "practice" mortification--it will not be lacking when the crosses He has prepared for us appear. To recognize Christ, where He is and who He is, is the fruit of a life of faith; this does not come full-blown from our hearts; it is the result of much hard labor. The Christian Commitment, p. 88. + + Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 William ~. Rewak, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Besides, Christ has given us an example. It is surely not a coincidence that before His public life He fasted and prayed in the desert for forty days. This unique and signal attention to the Father for the good of men is our invitation to imitate Christ at this salvific moment of His life. We need not retire to the desert, conceived of as a geographical place. But the inner quiet, the fast-ing, doing battle with each one's personal "devil" re-stores an equilibrium that leaves us docile to the inspira-tions of the Spirit. Some type of solitude is necessary for every Christian, be he a contemplative, a diocesan priest, a lay apostle, or the busy parent of a large family. This solitude will take different forms, dictated by the person's own. spiritual potential, the age he lives in, the labors he must perform as a citizen in a highly complex social and economic structure. But some type of inner quiet seems mandatory for true growth in the Christian spirit: Solitude is a terrible trial, for it serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we all carry within us. And. soli-tude discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted: it is not only the depths of our own soul, unknown to us, that we dis-cover, but the obscure powers that are as it were lurking there, whose slaves we must inevitably remain as long as we are not aware of them. In truth, this awareness would destroy us, if it were not illuminated by the light of faith. Only Christ,, can open out to us with impunity "the mystery of iniquity, be-cause he alone, in us today as ]or us in the past, can confront it successfully.~ ~Bouyer, Spirituality, p. 313. Apropos of the "flight into the desert," Father Bouyer is at pains to dispel the misconceived notions surrounding the early Christian hermits. They were not inspired by net-Platonic spirituality; on the contrary, he states, there was nothing more evangelical than their primary motivation. Speaking of St. Antony, he says, "Anchoritism did not make Antony a con-templative unconcerned with the fate of his brothers; it made him a spiritual father beyond all others" (p. 315). He quotes the beautiful passage ~rom the Vita of St. Antony where, after twenty years, friends break down the hermit's door in their enthusiasm to be with him and to imitate him. This is what they find: "Antony came out, as one initiated into the mysteries in the secret of the temple and inspired by a divine breath. Thus, for the first time, those who had come saw him. They were lost in wonder: his aspect had remained the same; he was neither fat from lack of physical exercise nor emaciated by his fastings and struggle against the demons, but just as they had known him before his withdrawal. Spiritually pure, he was neither shrunken with regret nor swollen with pleasure; in him neither laughter nor sadness; the multitude did not trouble him, having so many people greeting him gave him no excessive joy: always equal to himself, governed by reason, natural" (p. 314). Antony recognized that solitude allowed him to discover the obscure forces he had within himself and to discover the means to cast these forces out. Solitude was not an end in itself: it was a victory of one Spirit over the others that made him seek it. "Men can no longer tempt him, separate him from God. On the contrary, it is he who now finds himself in a position to guide them, to lead them to God. Here Mortification in the form of a retreat, in the form of fasting, became a part of Christ's plan of the redemp-tion; we can do no better than to make it a part of the role we play in the redemption¯ And this is surely the key: by mortification we enter into the Christ-mystery. We become His Body, resuming in our lives His redemptive acts, pleading with the Father for the salvation of man; for mortification is a language, not a sign. It is a response to a Person who has initiated a dialogue with me through baptism and the sacraments and through His reve~led Word. God's action in history is a word to me now; I can only trespond by placing myself before Him as His son, by per~forming acts which indicate my willingness to accept His love, to treat Him as Father¯ I accept Him as the bes.t part of my life, the whole of my life. This is prayer, of course; and mortification, as a language, is an essent, al part of my prayer life. All of my acts as a Christian. are a prayer, and they all contribute to the consolation I should experience--as a Christian--in formal~ prayer. The formal prayer itself fills the reservoirs of f~ith and love, just as formal, self-chosen acts of moruficatlon do, so that my effectiveness in the Mystical Body, through Christ in me, is increased a hundredfold. My formal mortification will result in lived mortification. I The af-fections become ordered, their false security uhmasked by a judicious use of corporal and spiritual p.enances, and the inmost person is calmly and confidently la~d open to receive God's Word. I It must not be forgotten, however, that theseI acts are relative to my present insertion into the mystery of Christ; and so all must be ruled by an expertl discern-ment of spirits. To codify too carefully pemtentlal prac-tices in the novitiate, for example, destroys the'ir mean-ing and their effectiveness; it stultifies ~nventlveness and I often just creates matter for humorous stones. Young religious, no less than young lay people, must be edu-cated in the reality of sin in their lives, in the part they must play in salvation history; and only in this way, I ¯ through the direction of a wise spiritual father, ,will they discover the path of mortification which is suitable to them. result Uniformity of ascetical practices is often the~ of pragmatic spirituality. If everybody performs an act of mortification at a certain time in a predetermaned way, there is an implied assurance that all are r~ortifying themselves. This is hardly the case. St. Ignatius, la mystic who was keenly aware of the value of acts of Oortifica-anchoritism reveals how httle it is a way of escaping from charity. On the contrary, ~t ~s simply the means of effectively ga~m.ng integral charity" (p. 315). ÷ ÷ Mortification VOLUME 24, 1965 379 ÷ William ]. Rewak~ sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 380 tion, refused to set down any rules governing their performance: ¯. it does not seem good that in those things which regard ~Pgnsr,a ywear,t cmheindigtast iaonnd a ondth setru dayu,s oter rciotirepso,r aaln eyx reurclies essh souuclhd abse f alasti-d down for them except that which a discreet charity will dictate to each: provided, nevertheless, that their confessor is always consulted . ~ It is for this reason some countries and dioceses have cur-tailed or abolished the fasting rules. This action does not indicate the depreciation of the value of penance; it has been made obvious that the Christian obligation of penance now devolves upon the individual who, guided by the Holy Spirit and insured against error by the advice of his confessor, will perform more spontaneously and therefore more effectively the penitential practices suitable for him.27 It is not necessary that mortification be identified with corporal austerities, though these will ordinarily be useful to some extent. The best way 0f seeking mortifica-tion is in the sphere of human relations. There is much need here for broadening the scope of our penitential practices: seeking the solutions to others' problems, standing up for others' rights in the face of ridicule, intelligent obedience to legitimate authority--being a Christian individual, in other words, in a world where conformity is a despotic fashion. Father David Stanley says this was the real mistake of the Judaizers: they could not be Christian individuals in a society which con-sidered the cross of Christ a folly and a stumbling-block.~ s "As many as wish to please in the flesh compel you to be circumcised simply that they may not suffer persecution for the cross of Christ" (Gal 6:12). The state of mortification is a state of love; for love is the source of the dialogue that takes place between ~".non videtur in iis quae ad orationem, meditationem et studium pertinent, ut nec in corporali exercitatione ieiuniorum, vigiliarum aut aliarum return ad austeritatem vel corporis casti-gationem spectantium, ulla regula eis praescribenda, nisi quam discreta caritas unicuique dictaverit; dum tamen semper Confessarius consulatur . " Constitutions o! the Society of Jesus, P. VI, c. 3, n. 1 08~). ~ See Paul J. Bernadicou, $.J., "Penance and Freedom," R~vmw FOR Ra~LIOIOUS, v. 23 (1964), pp. 418-9, Father Bernadicou writes with conviction and persuasiveness of the need for expert spiritual guid-ance in the sphere of mortification. Karl Rahner applies this same principle of each one's unique entrance into and expression of the mystery of Christ to the problem of the relation between the indi-vidual and the Church, and here also insists upon the application of the discernment of spirits. See "The Individual and the Church," Nature and Grace, trans. Dinah Wharton (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963). ~ David Stanley, s.J., Christ's Resurrection in Pauline Soteriology (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1961)0 p. 78. man and God and results in man's response of faith, prayer, and acts of mortification. Love is forgetfulness of self because of the neighbor who is loved with the charity of Christ, and what else but this is an act of true penance? Kenunciation, then, cannot but be an exer-cise in joy, for where there is love, there is joy. Our self-chosen acts of mortification, performed at times in great spiritual unrest, are tokens of confidence: Man implicitly recognizes that he does not know where his true happiness lies and that it is hidden from him, but God knows it ~or him. He perceives it through the signs which reveal it to him: the escape from Egypt, the land of slavery, the crossing of the desert under God's guidance, the hope which dwelt in the heart of the wandering host making its way to the Promised Land. The desert is the apprenticeship of an austere joy which is like the dawn on the horizon of conscience.~ We do share in Christ's resurrection, having shared in his death; and consolation will ever be the keynote of authentic Christian experience. But the fullness of joy is not yet ours for we live in the eschatological age, an age of tension between time and eternity, hope and fulfillment. Acts of mortification take on, in this con-text, the character of witness. Asceticism is the eschato-logical attitude of the Church, an attitude that is most acute in religiou

Glatfelter, Charles H.; Oral History Collection To read the transcript and access the audio/video (if available) of this interview at the same time, first download the pdf of the transcript by clicking on the link at the top of this screen. The transcript will open in a separate window. Next, select the or option to the right of the screen to access the media player. Special Collections & College Archives Musselman Library Interview with Michael Birkner Interviewer: Rebecca Duffy Interview Date: November 22, 2013 Interview with Michael Birkner Rebecca Duffy, November 22, 2013 1 Rebecca Duffy: [Today is November 22, 2013. I am Rebecca Duffy and I will be interviewing Professor Michael Birkner in Special Collections at Gettysburg College's Musselman Library.] We will start with you as a student here, so that we can get some insight. I think that's really special that we have an alumnus [that is so accessible] from the 1970s. You graduated in 1972? Michael Birkner: Yes. Duffy: Did you start here in 1968 and go straight through the four years? Birkner: Yes, I did. Duffy: You were a History major. Did you have any other majors or minors? Birkner: Actually, I was a back-ended History major. I was a Political Science major for three years and I intended to go into political journalism. That was my interest. I was always a politics junkie, so it was a natural for me to be interested in that. If you know anything about American History from 1968 to 1972, you know it was a very tumultuous time. Being interested in history as it was being made was particularly attractive to me. But by the time I was finishing my junior year as a student I looked back and thought about what I had done in Political Science and what I still had to do and I wasn't impressed by the coherence of the Political Science major. Specifically, I also had been avoiding a particular faculty member who was terrible and who taught a required course in International Affairs. I thought about it and I said [to myself], "I don't want to take this person's course just for the sake of getting a major that I'm not even convinced is worth having. So I went over to see Dr. [Charles] Glatfelter. I said to him, "I realize I am a second semester junior, but I think I would rather major in history. Is that possible?" [Pause] I don't want to make myself out to be special, but the people in the History department knew me and I had taken courses in history because I had liked history. They [Norman Forness, George Fick, and Charles Glatfelter] pitched to me that I should switch majors and become a history major. The important thing was they said, "if you just take this and this and this, you have got your major." So I did. I had probably seven or eight courses in Political Science, but I didn't [think well enough of my 2 experience to] declare it a minor. I just left and became a History major and then wound up going on to graduate school. Duffy: What were some of the courses that you took in History while you were here? Birkner: Well, I won't go into all the details because that will bog you down, but I will say that the program in History at the time was Euro-centric. If you look at the catalogue you will see that there really was very little World History. You took courses on the western historical tradition, you took courses on the European and British history, and you took courses on American history. There was no Africanist in the department, there was no Latin Americanist, and there was no Middle Eastern person. We did have a person that did Asian history, but half of that person's courses were focused on American diplomatic history which was not unusual at that time. So, essentially outside of the West we actually had half of a person to do anything else in the world. It was a provincial kind of historical learning. I did take a course in Chinese history, but I cannot say I had a good grounding in anything more than the Western traditions. The other thing I can abstract for you about my experience is that I was again unusual in that my interests were American history, but I took more non-American history than American history. My attitude- and I think it was justifiable- was that if I went to graduate school in History, I would be doing almost all American history and why should I not have the opportunity now to get a little wider range. In retrospect now there are all kinds of ways I could have broadened my education in college [with]. I was not adventurous and the college wasn't particularly adventurous in its curriculum. When you think about it, the one smart thing I did was not do all of that American history when I was going to get [plenty of] it in graduate school. Duffy: That Professor that you had for Chinese history, was that Professor Stemen? Birkner: Yes, Roger Stemen. Duffy: He was in charge of anything East Asian, sometimes even Indian history, I think I noticed? 3 Birkner: He might have done that once and that was it. He wasn't really interested in Indian history. We had a woman named Janet Gemmill [whose maiden name was Powers], so [after her divorce] she is Janet Powers. She taught Indian Civilization, but for reasons I have never really understood- this is before my time as a faculty member -I think she and the History department were not on the same wavelength, so she didn't teach it through the History department, she taught it through IDS. Mr. Stemen was the Asianist. He came in 1961 and he was the first to teach that. Duffy: I noticed that. I also noticed that the courses at that time [during the 1960's primarily] were dual courses, such as 201 and 202. Were you required to take both of them if you took one? Birkner: No, but you are right, they were sequenced. I'm guessing a lot of that was because a good percentage of undergraduates in those days went on to social studies education. They probably wanted to fill out a card of having the 201, 202 of History. That wasn't anything that affected me as a student. That wasn't a requirement. [Pauses to collect thoughts] The only requirement where we had to go through both parts of the sequence were interdisciplinary courses called "Contemporary Civilization" and "Literary Foundations of Western Civilization." Duffy: What was required by the History department [when you were a student] was passing a few three hundred level courses, the Methods course and Senior Seminar, right? Birkner: Right. Duffy: So you completed all of those? Birkner: Absolutely. Duffy: Did you have Professor Glatfelter for Methods? Birkner: Absolutely, everybody took Methods with Dr. Glatfelter. Except for the semesters when he was on sabbatical, he was it. Duffy: What was that experience like? How would you have described it when you were in the class? 4 Birkner: Maybe, it was a lot like what you experience with me. However, Dr. Glatfelter was a very different personality than I am . He was very Germanic. He had been trained originally to be a high school social studies teacher. Now he was a very smart man and wound up getting a PhD from Johns Hopkins. You don't do that unless you have some brains. He was one of these people who went by categories--one, two, three- which is not the way I do things. His approach to teaching was not very exciting to me. Just to give you an example of the way he taught Methods, one-third of the course he lectured about the historiography of Western Civilization, the writing of the history of the West from Herodotus until the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. Each day he would come in for seventy-five minutes and lecture about Herodotus or Livy or Gibbon or Voltaire- who was a historian not a very good one, but a historian [none the less]- [hand motions and voice indicating droning on], Prescott and Parkman and Bancroft. Your first big paper in the course was to read three of these historians--one from the Ancient World, one from Early Modern Europe and one from the 18th or 191h century--and write a comparative [paper]. He did that every semester. I benefited from it, though I have not read those historians since. But [in general] this was dull. The second part of the course was more "Nuts and Bolts." That's where he talked about doing footnotes and bibliographies and reference books. Of course [this was] the pre-computer age so he would bring in a cart and show you reference books. Again, it wasn't too exciting. The third part of the course was the "Philosophy of History'' in which he would talk about a range of things from why we do history to the discourses of history. It was very conservative. As I may have said in class, we read one article about Oral History and he basically said, "I made you read this because it is possible this may be interesting, but it is also possible that it may just be a fad." We didn't do anything more with that. We did the same thing with Psychohistory; maybe we read an article on it. Now Psychohistory came and went really, it is not much today talked about. But he was not an adventurous person. So why is it that he is remembered? Because Dr. Glatfelter had extremely high standards and he challenged you to be the best that you could be. He was a very demanding task-master. 5 When you handed in a paper, he read every line and corrected every line. You got away with nothing. He was a person of tremendous integrity and he wanted you to be. That's what really affected me the most, to be honest with you. The specifics of what he was teaching didn't grab me much, but his ethos, that's what really grabbed me. I don't know what students think about me, but I would guess I am considered "old school" and that's okay, because you need to authentic. Dr. Glatfelter was authentic. And I like to think I am. Some students probably think it is good and some maybe think I am too hard [and demand too much work]. Again, I don't know what the word on the street is, but you've got to be what you are as long as you're nice and fair and all those things- some [professors] can be mean and that's not a good thing [chuckles], but I don't think I am that! [In the end] I think I took away [Dr. Glatfelter's] sensibility about doing history and that has always had an impact on me- [even] forty years on. If you talk to other graduates, I bet you would get similar responses. Duffy: That he was a challenging teacher, but certainly worth it in the end for [the experiences] you get out of it? Birkner: Yeah, sure. Duffy: More than [simply] as a historian? Birkner: [Thoughtful] Yeah, absolutely. [Pauses to collect thoughts] He and I were colleagues for a year when I was back in the late seventies teaching here. When he retired [in 1989], I took his job. We became close [friends] and for the last 24 years of his life- he died in February [2013]- we did a lot of things together. For [many] years I brought him into the Methods class to talk to the students about a specific project or brought the students down to Weidensalllobby to talk with him if they had questions about a particular topic. He was wonderful. Duffy: What was that like when you first came back here having Professor Glatfelter and I can't remember exactly who was still here then who had been here when you were a student­Birkner: Everyone 6 Duffy: Everyone? Birkner: Everybody. Duffy: [So then,] what was that department dynamic like when you joined, having your old professors [as colleagues]? Birkner: . As a student was I was very close with faculty, more close than I think [most] students are today. Just to give you an example, there was no Specialty Dining in those days, there was the Bullet Hole- [though] it was in a different part of the CUB- and there was a group of about 8-10 faculty that ate there every day and talked politics- remember, it's a very interesting time- and they talked campus business as well. They invited me to eat lunch with them. So, I ate lunch in the Bullet Hole every day with the faculty. Now, you say you already know a creepy amount of information about me, but one thing [is that] I belonged to a fraternity. The fraternity I belonged to only ate dinner together in our house; we didn't eat breakfast or lunch together. We were on our own for lunch. Most of my fraternity brothers after class went back to the house and ate lunch together; probably watched Jeopardy or something and just hung out. I never did. I always went to the Bullet Hole and ate lunch with the faculty. Secondly, I was the editor of the Gettysburgian. At the time newspapers were different then they are now. They were really newspapers as opposed to mostly opinion. [Pauses to collect thoughts] The paper [during my years in college] was well respected. So, faculty members wrote for it, faculty members called me up. I had a kind of elevated sense of myself. To answer your question, it wasn't a hard transition to come back in 1978 to teach because people had always treated me collegially as opposed to say you were simply a student. Duffy: As a subordinate71 Birkner: Yeah, well [Pauses to collect thoughts] I hope I don't treat you [quite] like that. We all have different roles to play. It was an easy transition is the short of it. 1 Intended to say something which more conveyed the mentor-student relationship 7 Duffy: What about the transition that we started to talk about before- when you took over the Methods class? What was that like? Did you see that you wanted to make a lot of changes? Did you make them right away? Birkner: That's a good question. Dr. Glatfelter was not a controlling person, but on the other hand he was a very "tracked" person. As I said there wasn't a lot of change [over time] . I was hired, in some measure, because [members of the History department] felt the Methods course was an important course and they felt that I would be the person who could make it matter in the future. When I came back, Dr. Glatfelter said [something like], "You do what you want with the Methods course, but here's the way I do it." The first year I tried to teach it along the track he laid out. I used some different books, but I basically had the same structure he had. I was bored teaching it! Teaching about Medieval historians and giving students bits and pieces about historians -I could see that nothing was going to stick with them. I just said [to myself], "I can't do this!" That's when I said to myself, "this course is going to need re-tooling." That's how you have more or less greater extent what you are experiencing [this semester in Methods]. Dr. Glatfelter was the one who had the three projects and I have three projects, but he never would have assigned an Oral History! Here's the other interesting thing, he didn't assign any manuscript, original material research because we didn't have an archive for the students to work in! We really couldn't do a lot of that. Dr. Glatfelter's laboratory was the Adams County Historical Society where he was the director. He never had the students [go there]. I was surprised about this because we could have done that. We had an archive [at the college]; it just wasn't a place where you could work. He could have assigned us to have stuff to work on and under controlled conditions we could have done it. He just never did it. The part that really surprised me was that here he is the director of the Adams County Historical Society, which has tons of great [material] to work on. I've used it many times in my Methods class- just not this semester because they have had some difficulties moving out of the old Schmucker building [and into a much smaller facility]. So, one of the things I said was that 8 were going to start doing this! What I did [was encourage the creation of a facility for storing a working with archival material on Gettysburg College's campus]. I had something to do with the fact that this [special collections research room] exists because [as department chair] I was able to get a very unusual bequest which had not originally been directed to Gettysburg College. I was able to convince Homer Rosenberger's executor [Attorney William Duck of Waynesboro, PA] that Gettysburg College would be the place to house the Rosenberger Collection, with the idea we would get his estate. The money we got from that estate allowed Robin Wagner, the library director, to hypothecate into other money which enabled them to build this room- which is an enormous asset to students of history, and not just in Methods. Plus we have all of these great internships etc. which we didn't have before that. So, [to go back for a second] in 1990-1991, which was my second year here, I revamped the course really along the lines of what you are taking now. Duffy: So has it not changed so much in the past few decades? What would you say has changed? Birkner: What has changed in part is that the discourses in history have grown increasingly focused on anthropology. The opportunity for students to do more intensive work in Special Collections has probably been the biggest change. They can do much more in Special Collections than they could when I first started teaching here. The idea is always to give students opportunity to work with the stuff of history and be historians rather than just write about [secondary works]. I'm a little off sync with some of my colleagues who are so emphatic that what students need to learn is historiography and what I think is what students need to learn is to feel confident about doing history and that means doing it, instead of writing about historians doing it. I want you to do it. Now, of course the two are not mutually exclusive. You should learn that history is an evolving discipline and there is always an on-going dialogue -that's of course important. But to me, for the Methods course, what's really important- if I can put it this way- is to get your hands dirty doing it, [for example] have that one-on-one experience doing an Oral History with a senior citizen; it will stick with you for a long time. 9 Duffy: Definitely. I think I have noticed that. I feel like I live in Special Collections sometimes! Birkner: And that's a great thing because it is your laboratory! You may have friends that are Environmental Science majors, they're working in a lab. Your lab is right here. Duffy: [Pauses] [So then,] If we could just go back one moment to when you were a student and there weren't as many opportunities [to research in-depth on campus]. I know the senior seminar was molded into a course throughout the sixties Uust before and during your time here as a student]. so I was wondering about your experience in the senior seminar and how you were able to do the research you needed to do [without the facilities here]? Birkner: That's a good question; I think it was only in the late 1960s that they developed the senior seminar more or less the way we know it. Until then, students had to take comprehensive exams and they also wrote a senior thesis, [but there was no senior seminar]. The problem with that program is number one: camps terrify students. A high percentage of the students were not capable of engaging them very effectively, which depressed the faculty. [Further], the quality of the senior theses was generally pretty low, in part because there was little faculty supervision. If you have say forty seniors who are majors and you've got the faculty you have, they just weren't [able to] give the time to the students on an independent study basis to do the senior thesis. So that is when they came up with the seminar notion. As far as being able to do the research- it was unusual for you to be able to spend time doing anything original. Today, more and more of our students [are doing original research]. I was talking to Lincoln Fitch the other day, he's a senior and he is doing his senior thesis on Reconstruction and he's going down to the Library of Congress and working with the papers there and he is making some interesting finds. We wouldn't have thought of that because nobody was encouraging us to do that. I wrote my senior thesis on Christian Humanism in England in the early 16th century. I read a lot of first-hand accounts, they were printed, but they were still primary sources. I read secondary sources about the Humanist movement, which is part of the Renaissance, as it affected life in England. 10 Duffy: So you feel that students now have a better opportunity to delve in deeper? Birkner: Yeah. The other thing that should be emphasized is that our faculty are more "teacher-scholars" or "scholar-teachers" than was the case in the sixties when their primary emphasis was on teaching. Again, you can't draw with too broad a brush because Dr. Glatfelter was always doing scholarship of a kind. He was very productive, but his focus tended to be narrow--on Adams or York counties or religions of York and maybe Pennsylvania. Few people in the department were pursuing active research agendas because they didn't have the same emphasis on scholarship and mentoring students as scholars as we have today. I think having a teaching faculty that is also a scholarly faculty is going to make for better mentors at the senior level or any level. Think about someone like David Wemer, who is a senior History major and just won a prize for the best paper by an undergraduate in the United States. [The prize was sponsored by the American Historical Association.] It was published in a student scholarly journal. What a great recognition for Gettysburg College. He is an exceedingly talented person, but having someone like Dr. Bowman advising him and mentoring him made it [possible]. I mentored three students [over the past several years] who were [George C. Marshall] Scholars. Each was invited down, at my nomination, to become an undergraduate fellow in Lexington, Virginia [under the auspices of] the George C. Marshall Foundation. Each of them did outstanding work and each was recognized for that work. By coincidence, I had lunch today with one of those students. He was a History major and now works as an archivist for the CIA and wanted to come back and talk to me about graduate school. That kind of mentoring I don't think would have happened forty years ago. [However,] I have a certain reputation in the field, I know people, I know what my students are doing and I can then recommend them. The sad thing with the Marshall Program is that they blew through all their money. So, after the program existed for four or five years they ran out of money and I can't recommend students to it anymore because it doesn't exist. The two other students who I recommended for it and got accepted, 11 one is now working on his PhD in Cold War History at Ohio State and the other one is doing a PhD in Early American History at William and Mary, so clearly they moved on and did good things. Duffy: So you would say that the faculty dynamic today- [a group made up of a dozen or so] individuals each scholars and, I would say talented, teachers is creating these opportunities for students? Birkner: I think it enhances and enriches the environment for our History students; hence, it gives them an extra boost toward having a valuable college experience. Dr. Glatfelter had the right standards and the right spirit. But I think that what we have today, is not only that among most of our faculty -I wouldn't say everyone does because Dr. Glatfelter was pretty much the top of the line in that- but they are committed on both the teaching and scholarly side and that's good modeling for students. When you are a senior taking a seminar you will be asked to attend a seminar session in which you will read a faculty member's paper in advance and then go in and hear that faculty member describe how he or she got into writing that paper and then you will be able to ask questions of that member about it. We do that every semester. That's a bit of modeling. You can see what the faculty member does and say to yourself, "Maybe that's how I can do it." That didn't exist forty years ago. We do a lot more stuff you would take for granted, but didn't exist then. Such as, Career Night, Grad School Night, bringing in alumni who are successful in the field of history to talk, the Justin DeWitt Lecture. How about two student journals? The Civil War Journal and The Gettysburg Journal of History again didn't exist forty or even, fifteen years ago, but they do now. That's how David [Wemer] got this national recognition, because he published his article in the History journal. [Earlier today] I was talking to Sam Cooper-Wall today about his thesis for me and I was saying how he really had potential to publish it or expand it as his master's thesis. "Don't forget," he said, "I published it in the Gettysburg Historical Journal." That's right, he did. That's the kind of thing that gives you value added. 12 Duffy: I guess my last question is just going back, once again in a more comparative way, you said the time that you were here was a very [tumultuous] time. Did the faculty use any of those current issues as teaching moments in the classroom? Birkner: Not really. I think one faculty member who taught American Cultural History picked up on environmental issues, which was one of the pieces of the puzzle in the late sixties. Earth Day started when I was college student. He tried to connect Post- Civil War environmentalism, Darwinism, with the new environmental ethic of the late sixties- early seventies. I thought that was good, but he was the only [one]. Professor Stemen, who taught Chinese history, was teaching at the very time that Nixon made his initiative to open doors to China, and he would mention it, but it wasn't integral to the teaching. We were aware of it. I think people made a definite effort not to politicize the classroom. It's not a good idea for teachers at any level to voice their ideas about politics to students. So, that didn't happen really. People were very focused on the subject matter. Duffy: I think that is about it for the questions that I have- Birkner: I think that the one piece of this you are not getting is the student side. You don't want to assume that everything is always [better each year]. I think, today, our students are more sophisticated in many ways about history. You are much more cosmopolitan and you are much more adventurous than our generation in many respects. Just think about that fact that students take courses in fields I never took courses in because they weren't even there, but nobody is afraid to take a course in Middle Eastern history or Australian history or African history. [Today's] students are interested. That's a very good sign. On the other side ofthe coin, I wouldn't disparage students from the late Sixties who were, like me, first generation college students who had a hunger for education and were willing to work hard . . , , There were a lot of people in that circumstance. So, the students were a little bit more aggressive for their education in the late sSxties. Now I will tell you also, that when I came back in the late Seventies the students were not what I remembered them being. They were very self-focused and 13 [pauses to collect thoughts] uninterested it seems to me in the same kinds of issues I had been interested in in college, so that was a little bit of a disappointment. Duffy: I read that I think in one of the oral histories with Professor Glatfelter. He had realized a shift around the mid-Seventies. [He noticed] students were changing what they wanted out of school and how they felt about school. So, I think he saw as well, a decline in the level of learning or [rather] interest in learning. Birkner: I think this is not just a Gettysburg story. Duffy: Right. Birkner: I think it would [have been the case] at you name the place. I remember when I taught my first class at the University of Virginia. This is almost hilarious in a way because I taught a course in [19]74 at the University of Virginia as a grad student. It was a seminar and we read a book on the Sixties. The kids were all like [Raises voice, indicates excitement], "What were the sixties like? What were the sixties like?" and I was thinking [Chuckling between words], "Whoa, whoa!" [To them] It was like "what was World War One like?" It was 1974 and I thought, "Whoa, how quickly the gestalt of the times changes." So, what Glatfelter noticed is certainly what I noticed. Now, particular students, of course, were terrific. They are wonderful and friends of mine now, but the mentality [gestalt] of the campus was very different. Just as an example, the fraternity that I was in had disappeared by the time I came back to teach because it was a more alternative, non-conformist fraternity [and there was no market for that at Gettysburg after 1975]. We didn't do hazing and hell week. We invited the faculty to our parties and they came. Duffy: [Laughs] Birkner: Seriously! It was kind of an admixture of fraternalism, but not the dopey stuff. Obviously, to each his own, but I never had a use for anything [like that]. I remember Dr. Glatfelter- he was not a funny man- but I remember one of the funniest things he ever said. I once said, "Charlie, I know when 14 you were a student at Gettysburg College they still had traditions during orientation where they would punish [underclass] students [for infractions of the rules]. They would cut men's hair off, make women wear side-boards over their front and back with their hometown and phone number on it." Duffy: [Laughs] Birkner: Oh yeah, absolutely! And I said to him, "What if you had ever been brought up by the Tribunal for some infraction when you were a first year student?" Without missing a beat he said to me, "I know exactly what would have happened. I would have packed up my suitcase and gone home because I wouldn't have put up with that nonsense for one second!" That was Charlie. I can't claim that I was as individualistic as he was. For all I know I would have accepted [hazing], but it was nice to find a home [in a fraternity] where it really wasn't practiced. But by the late seventies students weren't into that. They didn't want an alternative fraternity, they wanted a gung-ho fraternity experience. Again, that's okay. I would wish that a fraternity like the one I was in would exist again today because I think there is something to be learned from living in a house with people from different backgrounds [with] different values in some cases. Learning how to live together, learning how to keep a place up [is important]. I don't regret for one minute that I did that. I also had a [fine] experience in that I was a free agent to do what I wanted. Duffy: You got to go to lunch! Birkner: Yeah, I got to go to lunch and I got to eat dinner with my fraternity brothers and party with them and make those horrible road trips down to Wilson College. You did the things that college students do, but you also did it on a slightly different track. When I came back in the late eighties the college was in transition. It had become by then a more national institution, so students were coming from a larger swath of the country, which was a good thing. [It reflected] a more cosmopolitan view. [The population] was still very white, not as diverse as it is today, but moving in the right direction, I think. I would honestly say that your generation of students on the whole is a lot more fun to teach than 15 any generation I have taught before. Just take for example class yesterday on the "Cat Massacre." You are willing to buy into reading something challenging, thinking about it and then talking about it. To me that is learning. But that wasn't really the pedagogy [in the 1960s and 1970s] and when the transition was made a lot of students just wouldn't buy into it because they were [satisfied] being more passive. Learning should be active. It seems to me we have got that buy in from our majors and more generally, too. Hopefully, what you do in my class and your other history classes carries over into Poli Sci and the other courses you are taking, because again, why should it not? [From here we continue to talk for the next few minutes about the intersections between disciplines in the case of myself and my partner Ryan, as well as the possibilities of support from the government for public history and the National Park Service]. 16

Issue 57.5 of the Review for Religious, September/October 1998. ; f,o r r eltg ous Christian Heritages and Contempora~ Living SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER1998. VOLUME57. :NUMBER5 Review for Religious is a forum for shared reflection on the lived experience of all who find that the church's rich heritages of spirituality support their personal and apostolic Christian lives. The articles .in the journal are meant to be informative, practical, bistorical, or inspirational, written from a tbeological _or spiritual or sometimes canonical point of view. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: FOPPEMA@SLU.EDU Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP 1150 Cedar Cove Road ¯ Henderson, NC 27536 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1998 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This per,nission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe TracT Gramm Jean Read James and Joan Felling Kathryn Richards FSP Joel Rippinger OSB Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wktberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1998 ¯ VOLUME 57 ¯ NUMBER 5 contents 454 feature Learning Communities: A Spirituality of Work for the Information Age Michael Skelley proposes that a spirituality which focuses on creating learning communities promises to be especially appropriate for work in the info~'mation age. He integrates theological concepts with ideas from organizational development research. 472 484 491 ignatian spirituality The Parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises John J. Begley SJ offers a contemporary understanding of Jesus' parables that inserts their use within the Ignatian Exercises and so facilitates a retreatant's entering into the experience of Jesus. St. Ignatius and My Piano Anita J. Baly reflects on how her experience of the Ignatian Exercises gave her insight about playing the piano and praying as complementary processes that call on remarkably similar skills. consecrated life The Experience of God in Consecrated Life during the 20th Century Joseph A. Tetlow SJ sums up the differences between the pre-Vatican II and Vatican II approaches to consecrated life in terms of the postmodern understanding of experience as constructed, derivative, intentional, and dialogic. Review for Religious 513 Gathering the Fragments: Associate Leaders Reflect on Their Experience Roberta Archibald SSJ, Joanne Bauer SBS, and Jean Ustasiewski OSF share the experience of a group of associate leaders who meet regularly in the Philadelphia area. 522 529 536 prayer Unceasing Prayer: Romancing the Divine Jerry D. Keeney develops the image of romancing the Divine for shaping our relationship with God. Prayer Joseph McCloskey SJ draws upon his experience as a pray-er to describe some necessary elements in a prayer life. Renewal of Prayer Mary Terese Donze ASC explores ways in which the word of God inspires and nourishes our prayer life beyond and above every book on prayer. departments 452 Prisms 541 Canonical Counsel: The Evangelical Counsel of Obedience: Key Current Legislation 547 Book Reviews September-October 1998 That they may be one, as we are one. prisms Rpe John Paul II wrote the encyclical That They May Be One (Ut Unum Sint) in 1995. This document, dealing with our Christian commitment to ecumenism, took its title from the petition spoken by Jesus in his Last Supper discourse as remembered in the Gospel of St. John. Jesus prayed that all his followers would be blessed with the unity, the oneness which his Abba-Father and he enjoyed: "That all may be one as you, Father, are in me, and I in you; I pray that they may be one in us" On 17:21). A most pervasive tendency among us is to make a divi-sion of any grouping into "them" and "us." It happens in families, between those "siblings or relatives who are "out" and those who are "in." It occurs in the way male and female differences have become "them" and "us" in the gender movements of our day. It is evident in the struggles caused by racial, ethnic, or religious distinctions. Witness our contemporary history of the United States, Bosnia, Sudan, and Rwanda. It is found in the church whether between hierarchy/clergy and laity or between liberal and conservative/traditionalist. Even an official church action like excommunication pronounced by local bishops or by Vatican congregations seems to divide off members into a "them" against an "us." Historically it has been true that religious congregations vied with each other within the church, for example, the competition between branches of 14th-century Franciscans and between 17th-century Dominicans and Jesuits--something in consecrated life, Review for Religious thank the Spirit, which seems less a problem in our time. It is writ large in the struggles in our economic world between east and west and between north and south--the "have's and the have-not's." The "them" and "us" (or, at its personal ultimate, "the world" and "me") mentality seems to be in the very air we breathe. What does this year dedicated in a special way to the Spirit call forth in us? Our desire could well be that the Spirit gift us with various prisms through which to view life and our relation-. ships with others in more accepting ways. We might pray that the Spirit become for us the pervading atmosphere in which we live and move and have our being. We need to stir ourselves to take the first few steps away from "political maps" that divide everything into a "them" and "us." We could decide to take action by our daily examination of conscience~ We begin our examen by thanking God for the small ways in which we have allowed the Spirit to unite ourselves with others in our thinking about them and in our acting towards them. We then examine ourselves and note the occasions when we have succeeded in avoiding a "them" and "us" attitude and the occasions when we have not. We, moved by the Spirit, beg God's forgiveness for the obtuseness of our minds and the hardness of our hearts in choosing and reinforcing the deadly worldview of division in our behaviors of this day. Finally we ask ever more fervently for the outpouring of the Spirit upon us to strengthen us in our mission. Empowered by the Spirit, we dedicate ourselves anew to struggle at eliminating the "them" and "us" mentality in our family, in our community, in our parish life, in our work life, and in whatever other areas it seems to pre-vail. The Spirit is the Love-Reality, the very communio, of God's life. The Spirit, we might ~ay, is the Love-touch of God's life in us, and so the Spirit's presence in our lives means our communion of life with our Trinitarian God. The Spirit's activity is God's cre-ating the communio among all of us here and now. Christ's prayer, then, becomes more insistently our prayer and moves us so to work to bring about a world that is at once more human and more divine--that all may be one. David L. Fleming SJ September-October 1998 feature MICHAEL SKELLEY Learning Communities: A Spirituality of Work for the Information Age Many spiritualities of work have been developed by the world's religious traditions. The differences between these spiritualities come not only-from their various theological presuppositions, but also from the various economic and social realities they address. As the nature of work has changed over the course of human history, so too have the religious interpretations of work. We have entered a new era in the history of work, the information age. The new realities of the workplace pose an immense challenge to workers and to the theologians, pastoral counselors, and ministers who want to help them develop a spirituality of work. How can we articulate, fos-ter, and practice a spirituality of work appropriate to the information age? We may not simply assume that a spir-ituality deduced from past theologies will fit our present situation. If the nature of work truly has changed, then a different kind of spirituality will be required.~Nor can we assume that theologians have the competence by them-selves to develop a new spirituality of work. This task requires ~hat we dialogue with a wide range of scholars who study contemporary work organizations. The potential number of partners and possible agen-das for such a dialogue is immense, and we cannot engage Michael Skelley is a full-time faculty member and the director of the undergraduate program at DePaul University's School for New Learning. His research and publications have focused on spirituality, worship, work, and learning. His address is DePaul University; 243 S. Wabash, #700; Chicago, Illinois 60660. Re~iew for Religious them all. Nor will we survey the historical development of the theology of work; that has been done quite well elsewhere.~ We will integrate some insights from this tradition with a few ideas from scholars of information-age work. The growing consensus in the latter field is that the primary challenges and opportunities of the information-age workplace revolve around learning. In the Christian tradition, coincidentally, learning has long been seen as a path to holiness. This paper, therefore, will explore how a spirituality focused on transforming our workplaces into learn-ing communities might be an apt spirituality of work for the infor-mation age. The Spirituality of Work Throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, work has been seen as both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we some-times experience work as an opportunity to display our talents, develop our gifts, contribute to the common good, and exercise our creativity. When work is like that, it is joyful, engaging, and fulfilling. Such work experiences return intrinsic rewards that far outweigh their extrinsic compensations: they satisfy some of our deepest needs and highest aspirations. But, on the other hand, we also experience work as overwhelmed by impossible demands, torn by interpersonal conflicts, dehumanized by trivial proce-dures, and oppressed by unjust practices. Such work causes frus-tration, anger, and despair. Whatever compensation we receive, then, cannot repair the damage done to our spirits and bodies. When our work is like this, it poisons us and our family, friends, and communities. Work brings out the best and the worst in us. We need a spirituality of work precisely because work is so ambivalent. As our spiritual predecessors did in their own cir-cumstances, we search for ways of working which might help us taste more of work's blessings and fewer of its curses. We search, in other words, for ways to transform our ambivalent experiences of work into a consistent experience of God. Our positive expe-riences inspire us to believe in the goodness of work. Can we, then, find ways of working which regularly evoke the best in us and our work? Our negative experiences test our character and challenge us to change. Can-wE find ways of working which will liberate us from the destructive aspects of our work and our work-places? This transformation is the task of a spirituality of work. September- October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities A spirituality of work is a way of working that helps cowork-ers to achieve together our fullest development as human beings. Three points are important about this definition. Thefirst is that a spirituality of work is a way of working, not a way of promot-ing religious ideas and practices. Work can be integrated into spirituality without being interpreted in explicitly religious ways. We need to challenge that ancient legacy of dualist thinking which still conditions most people to assume that secular activities can-not, by definition, be sacred. That is why P~re Marie-Dominique Chenu, a pioneer, in the modern effort to develop theologies of work, said that the question of the relationship between nature and grace is fundamental to the spirituality of work.2 When people see grace and nature as separate and opposed realities, they think that the task of a spirituality of work is to make work explicitly religious. Spirituality then becomes the intrusion of something foreign into the work. Unfortunately, most of what is touted today as spirituality of work suffers from vari-ous degrees of this dualistic thinking. Such spiritualities impose religious ideas, language, and practices on work. The vigorous resistance that many working people have to these intrusions is justified, not simply because these spiritualities discourage humane work, but also because they encourage questionable theology. But when grace and nature are seen as inseparable, the task of a spirituality of work is to enhance something that is already pres-ent in the work. Spirituality then becomes a matter of making explicit what is already implicit. If, as Karl Rahner said;, our world is permeated with the divine self-communication, we can experi-ence God and achieve our fullest human potential even in the most ordinary kinds of work.3 Work becomes spiritual, not by becoming religious, but by becoming more truly work, by being true to the spiritual dimensions already part of its character. This does not diminish the important and proper place of religion; rather, it points to religion's roots in daily life. Such a spiritual-ity of work is concerned with fostering human development in ways which are appropriate to the workplace. It supports the potential we already know work possesses to engage our gifts and contribute to the common good. ~ Second, the definition above implies that a way of working is a form 6f spirituality to the extent that it supports our complete human development. Holiness is a matter of wholeness, and so whatever fosters our holistic human development leads us toward Review for Religious spiritual maturity as well.4 Or, as Irenaeus taught, God is glorified when human beings are fully alive. The major religious and spir-itual traditions of the world have proven successful at furthering the kind of human development we seek. They provide us with a wealth of complementary images of the breadth and depth of our potential as human beings. Obviously, each of these traditions has been guilty at times of fostering narrow-minded notions of virtue that highlight only some aspects of what we are capable of becoming. But, when they are seen together, it is clear that they share some fundamental values, attitudes, and standards that lead people toward fulfilling their human poten-tial and help them understand this effort,s The task of a spirituality of work is to root our ways of working in these basic understandings of holistic human development. This second point does not con-tradict the first one, namely, that the spirituality of work is a way of work-ing and not a way of promoting religious ideas. To say that a spir-ituality of work needs to be rooted in the values of the world's religious traditions is simply to propose that we need to be reflec-tive about the assumptions we bring to our work. The ways we work necessarily presuppose certain ideas, frequently muddled and usually unarticulated, about the values that guide our lives. The question is not whether we want to have a spirituality of work or not; everyone already has some sort of spirituality of work, although we are rarely conscious of this fact. Nor is the point to advocate the values of one particular religious tradition, no matter how emi-nent they may be. To do so would be to presume a consensus in the workplace about religion that is unlikely to exist. The goal is to be reflective about our fundamental values and to ensure that they support not only efficient and effective work, but fully humane work as well. We can do so by rooting our work in the most uni-versal possible expressions of basic human values. The third point we need to notice about the definition above is that a spirituality of work is about achieving our full human development together, in common, not just individually. It is a Work becomes spiritual, not by becoming religious, but by becoming more truly work, by being true to the spiritual dimensions already part of its character. Septentber-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities way of working together with our coworkers for the transforma-tion of our work and our workplaces so that all of us can develop our full human potential. In other words, we need to challenge another kind of dualism, that between our private, individual selves and our public, communal selves. Popular spiritualities today typically identify the spiritual with an individual's interior experience. People seldom connect work with spirituality, for it is associated with the public and exterior dimensions of our lives.6 Popular attempts .to develop a spirituality of work typically assume that their task is to enhance our individual, interior development. They rarely reflect on how the spirituality of work could and should be something that all workers share. This dualistic think-ing does a disservice both to work and to spirituality. It ultimately reinforces the kind of depersonalized, mechanistic approach to work associated with Frederick Taylor, the inadequacies of which are now widely recognized.7 And it misses the critical insight of liberation and feminist theologies that transformation of the social, political, and communal dimensions of our lives is an essential part of spiritual development. Work in the Information Age: Organizational Learning After this review of the task faced by a spirituality Of work, we now need to explore how the information age has changed the nature of the work we do. This will prepare us to think about how a spirituality of work needs to be different today. At the beginning of this century, most workers in the United States were either farmers or domestic servants. By 1950 the com-position of the workforce had completely changed, and most workers were engaged in some form of industrial labor.8 The the-ologies and spiritualities of work that have appeared in the last fifty years focus on the issues of that industrial age, not recognizing how work has changed.9 At the end of the 20th century, it is clear that we have entered an entirely new age in the history of work. We live in a postindustrial society of "knowledge work," the infor-mation age. A significant but steadily shrinking number of work-ers are still employed in the industrial sector, and many others work in service jobs, but the largest portion of the workforce now consists of knowledge workers. By the year 2000, only ten percent of the workforce in the United States and other postindustrial countries will be directly involved in making things.19 Review for Religious While our parents and grandparents usually worked with their hands, moving and making things, most of us work with our heads. The work we do involves knowing, thinking, and learning. Our jobs do not simply require more educational preparation than the work of previous generations did. They require us to do some-thing fundamentally different: to create, interpret, organize, apply, transfer, and manage knowledge. Knowledge work radically changes the nature of a market economy and redefines the rela-tionship between workers and the means of production. This is a new kind of economy and a new kind of work.1~ As Peter Drucker has said, "The social center of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker. M1 developed countries are becoming postbusiness, knowledge societies. Access to good jobs and career opportunities in developed countries increasingly requires a university diploma. Looked at one way, this is the !ogical result of a long evolution in which we moved from working by the sweat of our brow and by muscle to industrial work and finally to knowledge work. But the development also represents a sharp break with the past."12 Knowledge work requires new abilities to continually learn from and think with one's coworkers. In the past, tasks that required thinking could typically be carried out by individuals using general knowledge. Much of today's knowledge work, in contrast, is too complex for any generalist to accomplish alone. It requires the coordinated efforts of a variety of specialists. People must be able to share their expertise with one another for the work to get done. The primary agent of knowledge work, there-fore, is an organization, not an individual. This fact need not diminish the importance or dignity of the individual worker. It is a consequence of the highly specialized expertise that individ-ual knowledge workers have. Together they are able to create some-thing that none of them could create alone: Knowledge work is a multifaceted task that requires the collaboration of a variety of experts and specialists. It must be done by an organization con-centrated on a particular task. Effective organization, then, is a necessary condition for knowledge work.13 Consequently, as knowledge workers we must work not just for an organization, but at it. That is to say, we must work con-tinually at growing with our colleagues into a community that can do real knowledge work. The organization is not just where we work; it is an essential outcome of our work itself. The task of cre-ating an effective organization where knowledge work is possible Septe~tber- October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities is an inescapable part of each knowledge worker's creative efforts. The nature of knowledge work requires us to deal continually with organizational change, development, and transformation. The academic or professional discipline which concentrates on organizational change is commonly called organization develop-ment. L4.Organization development systematically applies behav-ioral science knowledge to the planned development of organizational strategies, structures, and processes in order to improve an organization's effectiveness.~s Organization develop-ment is practiced in many different ways. Most recent approaches, however, emphasize increasing the organization's capacity to learn.~6 For example, Peter Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, focuses on creating learning organizations, "organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where peo-ple are continually learning how to learn together."~7 Organizational change experts focus their efforts on organi-zational learning for many reasons. They hope that learning will simultaneously foster the development of the people in the orga-nization and provide superior economic performance. They see it as an extension of the movement to improve the quality of prod-ucts and services. They see it as a way of managing the increas-ingly rapid pace of social and technological change.~8 But, most basically, they recognize that there cannot be any consistent change for the better in work organizations unless these organi-zations are able to learn. All planned change presumes learning, and so leading change is a matter of facilitating learning. Argyris and Sch6n speak of this "learning imperative": "Now in the mid-1990s, it is conventional wisdom that business firms, governments, nongovernmental organizations, schools, health-care systems, regions, even whole nations and supranational insti-tutions need to adapt to changing environments, draw lessons from past successes and failures, detect and correct the errors of the past, anticipate and respond to impending threats, conduct experiments, engage in continuing innovation, build and realize images of a desirable future. There is a virtual consensus that we are all subject to a 'learning imperative,' and in the academic as well as the practical world, organizational learning has become an idea in good currency.'''9 Review for Religious But it is not proving easy to transform our work organiza-tions into learning communities. Organization-development spe-cialists agree that our work organizations have handicaps that prevent them from learning effectively. Senge thinks that funda-mental difficulties most organizations have in becoming learning communities can be traced in part to traditional Christian spiri-tualityd° He says that our work organizations have been rendered dysfunctional by three problems: reactiveness, fragmentation, and competition. These problems reflect deeper cultural problems that are due in large part to a tradition of dualistic thinking in Western society. From his reading of Thomas Merton, Joseph Campbell, Raine Eisler, and Elaine Pagels, Senge thinks that Christianity insti-tutionalized this dualistic thinking. Obviously, Senge's critique of Christianity would need to be more carefully nuanced and solidly supported, but in its broad outlines it is consistent with the critiques made by lib-eration, feminist, and ecological theologians.21 The problem is not spirituality per se,. but the consequences of dualistic, hierarchical, and patriarchal spiritual-ities. Dorothee Soelle, for example, says: "The tendency to isolate Christian faith from the social order has meant, among other things, that mainstream theology has failed to address work in the context of creation and redemption. It has ignored the worlds of pain created by the structural organization of our work. It has unconsciously or often even cynically obscured our creation as workers in the image of 'the great artist.' Christianity has a long record of complicity in bad, meaningless, or harmful work. This is the result not just of insufficient ethical reflection, but also of the inability to perceive Christ's work in returning the world to its people. Resurrection from sin's power happens in good work. We still wait for good work. Through good work we are revealed, in our creative empowerment, as children of God.''22 Senge is one of many organizational-change experts who see a pressing need for a new, holistic spirituality of information-age work.23 Senge's comments about spirituality and organizational change are particularly striking both because of the wide accep-tance his approach to organizational change has gained and because of the scholarly foundation that supports his work. The "Christianity has a long record of complicity in bad, meaningless, or harmful work." September-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities fact that Senge and his colleagues stress spirituality so strongly, albeit clumsily, indicates that this area is being given more and more serious consideration by professionals in the field of orga-nization development. It is clear, therefore, that the only certainty amidst the turmoil in our workplaces today is that we must learn how to learn. A host of inexorable forces such as the explosion of information, the shrinking of the global marketplace, the reordering of social priorities, and the emergence of new technologies is reshaping every sector of the working world. Both the environment and our work requirements are changing, and changing more and more rapidly. In times of such pervasive change, neither individual workers nor work organizations are likely to be effective unless they can learn easily, quickly, and well. An important part of all knowledge work today is the transformation of our work organi-zations into learning communities. The Spirituality of Learning Learning is not only a critical issue for the information age; it is also a fruitful theme for spirituality. Learning has often been seen by the spiritual and religious traditions of the world as a path to holiness. Jean Leclercq's classic work on medieval monas-ticism, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, beautifully cap-tures one manifestation of this intimate relationship between learning and spirituality.24 We do not have space here to sample all the rich and varied ways theologians have interpreted the role of learning in spirituality. We will focus instead on just one the-ologian who has had a widespread effect on contemporary Christian theology, Karl Rahner. Epistemological concerns are at the foundation of Rahner's understanding of Christianity, and in that sense his theology is a theology of learning. His insights can readily be translated into a spirituality of learning which deep-ens the way we see the purpose, process, and products of learning. First, Rahner changes the way we see the process of learning by showing us that learning always involves self-transcendence.2s For Rahner, learning is an activity which is necessarily rooted in our nonconceptual awareness of God. We can know finite things only because we can transcend them and experience God. Learning is possible for us because we are embodied spirits (Geist-irn- Welt) capable of self-transcendence. We are able to learn about Reviezv for Religious our material, temporal world precisely because we can reach beyond it and open ourselves to the infinite horizon of absolute mystery. This preapprehension (Vorgriff) of God is the condition for the possibility of any and every act of learning. Every time we learn anything, we experience our transcendental openness to God. When we explore the spirituality of learning, we are not introducing a transcendent element to the learning process, but rather affirming one that is already there. This means that we can never entirely understand, much less hope to control, the process of learning. We generally think of learning as a skill that we can direct and develop, and it is. Most of us expend energy throughout our lifetimes not only learning but learning how to learn. As teachers, parents, colleagues, or friends, we are also regularly called upon to direct the learning of others. We even assume that some people are such proficient learners that they will inevitably be master teachers. But the fact that our ability to learn depends upon our transcendental open-ness to the horizon of absolute mystery means that the learning process transcends our control. All learning requires that we sur-render ourselves to our capacity for self-transcendence. And, if we want to help others learn, we have to support their self-tran-scendence. We will generate very little new learning if we restrict or manipulate the learning process. Ultimately, learning is not a skill to be mastered but a mystery to be loved. Practicing a spir-ituality of learning, then, means creating space for the experience of self-transcendence to happen. Second, Rahner's theology of freedom changes the way we see the products of learning by showing that learning always involves our free self-creation.26 Learning is an expression of the capacity we have as embodied spirits to act freely. The prod-ucts of our free acts are not simply choices between particular goods. Freedom is also a process through which we create our-selves. Whenever we exercise our freedom, we not only make a choice about a particular good; we also make a choice about our-selves. The decisions we make determine who we are as persons in relationship to God and the world. Some of our free acts so totally engage us that they constitute fiandamental choices about who we are. Other acts engage us less completely and serve to confirm or,deny the fundamental selves we have chosen to become. But every exercise of our freedom in some way is an act of self-creation. Septentber-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities Since we exercise our freedom whenever we learn, every act of learning is an act of self-creation. We usually assume that the products of learning are new ways of thinking and acting. But, for Rahner, our own self-creation is also a product of every act of learning. Whenever we learn, we not only learn about something particular; we also help determine who we will become as per-sons. Learning is not just a process through which we adopt new behaviors or ideas; it is a process of creating ourselves. Each choice we make about what, why, or how we will learn contributes in some way to our self-realization. The criteria by which we assess the products .of our learning, therefore, need to include the question of whether we are becoming more fully human, Measured by this criterion, learning which does not support holis-tic human development is fundamentally flawed. People who resist learning risk dehumanizing themselves just as much as those who resist loving. This is not to say that our value as persons is depen-dent upon how bright we are. Learning can no more be reduced to intelligence than love can be reduced to emotion. But learning and loving are critical to our self-realization because both are ways we fulfill our human potential for relationship with the world and the mystery of God. Practicing a spirituality of learning, therefore, means honoring this process of self-creati0n. Third, Rahner's theology of grace changes the way we see the purpose of learning.27 For Rahner, our transcendental orientation to the holy mystery has been universally graced by God's self-communication. Grace is not a gift from God but the gift of God, In our "natural" experience of transcendence, the absolute.mystery of God is present to us as the horizon which we can only approach asymptotically. We believe, however, that God has not remained the distant horizon of human transcendence, but has graciously drawn near to us as free and forgiving love. We never experience our transcendence, therefore, as purely natural and ungraced. The transcendence we actually experience has been radically trans-formed by God's self-gift, which is always present at least as an invitation made to our freedom. Grace is the fulfillment of our deepest human potential as embodied spirits to be filled with the infinite God. Grace makes possible for us the immediate experi-ence of God, which is always mediated by our historicity and mate-riality. But God becomes closer, not less of a mystery, in the experience of grace. Grace is the self-communication of God as the absolute mystery who remains absolute mystery. Review for Religious This theology of grace implies, then, that the ultimate purpose of learning is not to know more, but to be known more.28 When we learn, we do not simply gather new information or master additional skills; rather, we open ourselves to the self-communi-cation of God. The deepest purpose of learning is that it leads us to the point where we surrender to God's knowing of us. Learning is a privileged opportunity to enter more deeply into the abyss of the absolute mystery of God. Learning is at its best not simply when it is rooted in good principles of pedagogy or andragogy, but when it is a form of mystagogy. The process of learning, then, develops our potential to be mystics. Rahner believed that everyone is called to be a mystic.29 Mysticism is not primarily about paranormal experiences, but about attending to hidden experiences of the mystery of God in daily life. It is difficult to be a mystic, not because God is so distant, but because. God is so present. The challenge isto find ways to notice the gracious presence of God in the midst of everything in our lives, This is easier to do in some expe-riences than others. Oddly enough, our experiences of the goodness and beauty of life are not necessarily the best places to look for God. Rahner believed that we perceive the presence of God most clearly in those events in which we struggle with our limitations. Our experiences of lim-itation bring us right to the threshold of the presence of God. To the extent that we can attend to how we transcend the limita-tions we face, we open ourselves to the mystery of God. The pro-cess of learning offers abundant opportunities to struggle with limitations and experience God. Whenever we really attempt to learn, we strain to see beyond the limits of what we currently know. If we have the courage to face the limits of what we know, therefore, we invite God to enter more deeply into our lives. Rahner shows us that the process, products, and purpose of learning have spiritual depths that we normally overlook. Learning is not a neutral process of inquiry that only takes on a spiritual character when we choose to focus it on religious phenomena. Learning is intrinsically spiritual and is one of the most impor-tant ways we have to experience God. It is not surprising that tell- Learning can no more be reduced to intelligence than love can be reduced to emotion. September-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities gious traditions throughout the world have revered learning as a path to holiness. Whatever enhances our capacity to learn fosters our spiritual, development, whether we recognize it as such or not. Disciplines for Creating Learning Communities As the 20th century draws to a close, we are beginning to glimpse how our lives will be different in the information age. But, because this new age of work is only now coming into focus, it is impossible to see yet what all of its spiritual opportunities and challenges will be. Nonetheless, we can be certain that learn-ing will become increasingly important to the work we do. The growing significance of learning makes a new way of integrating spirituality and work possible. The most effective spirituality of work for the information age will be one based on helping us transform our workplaces into learning communities. We defined the spirituality.of work above as a way of work-ing which fosters the transformation of our work and our work-places so that together with our coworkers we may achieve our fullest development as human beings. This means that a spiritu-ality of work should be a way of working, not a way of practicing religi6us activities or enjoying esoteric experiences. It should sup-port our complete human development. And it should foster the transformation of our work communities, not just our growth as individuals. A spirituality of work which is based on creating :learn-ing communities meets these three criteria. First, since it focuses on learning, such a spirituality advocates a way of working which is not explicitly religious, and which is appropriate, even vital, to the information-age workplace. Second, since the learning process engages the fundamental basis of our human identity, our capac-ity for self-transcendence, the process of learning is a particu-larly powerful way of supporting holistic human development. Third, such a spirituality of work draws us beyond caring for our individual growth into building learning communities with one another. But, if it is to help us engage in the difficult process of con-version and growth,, this spirituality of work needs to be incarnated in particular disciplines. The major spiritualities of the West have generally encouraged disciplines such as meditation, prayer, fast-ing, reading, and service as concrete means of achieving spiritual growth. There is no qu~sti6n that such disciplines will continue Review for Religious to have an important role in a fully developed spiritual life. But, since the spirituality of work attempts to engage us in a different and more specific kind of transformation than that of traditional spiritualities, it will need to encourage some additional, new dis-ciplines. The disciplines for a spirituality of work in the infor-mation age will be the disciplines for developing organizational learning. Organizational-learning researchers have over the past fifty years advanced our understanding of what those disciplines are. Peter Senge, for example, has organized them into five sets: per-sonal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning, and systems thinking. Each of these disci-plines has to do with helping us develop the skills to learn effectively as individ-uals and groups. There are three distinct levels to these disciplines: practices, principles, and essences. The practices are the specific activities which con-cretely express the discipline. They are the primary focus for those beginning to follow the discipline. The underlying principles are the theoretical bases for the practice of the disciplines. Progressing in the disciplines requires following the practices and understand-ing the principles. The essences are the state of being which comes to be experienced by individuals or groups that have mastered the discipline. At this level Senge's learning disciplines are united by a common sensibility: that we are learners in an intrinsically interdependent world.3° Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. It involves learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire and to create an organizational environment that encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose. The practices of this discipline include various techniques for clarifying our personal vision and for holding a creative tension between the results we desire and our grasp of current reality. Senge sees the discipline of personal mastery as the spiritual foundation for a learning organization. The disciplines for a spirituality of work in the information age will be the disciplines for developing organizational learning. September-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities The discipline of shared vision is the collective version of the discipline of personal mastery. The discipline of shared vision builds a sense of commitment in the groups we work with by developing shared .images of the future we seek to create and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there. The practices of this discipline involve techniques for helping groups both acknowledge their current realities and develop a shared picture of their future that fosters sincere commitment. This discipline assumes that, when there is genuine shared vision, people excel and learn because they want to, not because they are told to. Like the discipline of personal mastery, the discipline of men-tal models is an individually oriented dis.cipline. Senge sees men~ tal models as the deeply ingrained assumptions and generalizations that influence how we understand the world and take action. The discipline of mental models helps us reflect upon, clarify, and improve these internal pictures of the world and see how they shape our actions and decisions. The practice of this discipline also helps us learn how to carry on "learningful" conversations that get us to expose our own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others. The discipline of team learning is the collective counterpart of the discipline of mental models. This discipline transforms conversational and collective thinking skills so that a team of coworkers increases its collective intelligence and its ability to take coordinated action. The heart of this discipline is the theory and practice of dialogue. Dialogue challenges team members to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine thinking together. Team learning also involves recognizing the patterns of interac-tion in teams that undermine learning. The most critical learning discipline for Senge is the disci-pline of systems thinking. He sees it as the discipline that inte-grates the other disciplines into a coherent body of theory and practice. Systems thinking is a way of thinking about and a lan-guage for describing ~he forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. It makes the full patterns of a system clearer and helps us see how to change them effectively. Systems thinking helps us shift from seeing problems as caused by some-one or something external to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. Once we discover how we create our reality, we can then change it. Review for Religious When they are used together, the methods of organizational learning represented by these five disciplines have been proven to have great potential for transforming our workplaces into learn-ing communities. They provide us with the concrete theories and strategies we need so that together with our coworkers we can not only learn, but learn how to learn. By virtue of the fact that they expand our capacity to learn, these disciplines also foster our spiritual development. The disciplines of organizational learn-ing help us to learn in new ways and so broaden our opportuni-ties to experience the spiritual depths of learning. The most effective spirituality of work for the information age will focus on transforming our work organizations into learn-ing communities. It will do so by integrating disciplines of orga-nizational learning with insights from the spiritual traditions. This paper has contributed to this integration. New approaches to organizational learning such as the ones we have mentioned here provide the spirituality of work with the concrete disciplines it needs to develop learning communities. At the same time, the insights which our spiritual and religious traditions can provide deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the transforma-tion of work. We will be able to create meaning~l spiritualities of work in this new era only if we continue to engage in this process of integration. Notes ~ William E. May, "Work, Theology of," in The New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, ed. Judith A. Duryer (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994), pp. 991-1002; Karen Ready, "Work," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, 1987), vol. 15, pp. 441-444; Edward C. Sellner, "Work," in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael Downey (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993), pp. 1044-1051; Francis Schiissler Fiorenza, "Religious Beliefs and Pr'axis: Reflections on Catholic Theological Views of Work," in Work and Religion, ed. Gregory Baum (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), pp. 92-102. 2 Marie-Dominique Chenu, "Work," in Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, ed. Karl Rahner (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), vol. 6. 3 Karl Rahner, "Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace," in Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 297-317; "Nature and Grace," in Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1982), vol. 4, pp. 165-188; Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Chr#tianity (New York: Crossroad, 1978). 4Walter Principe, "Toward Defining Spirituality," Studies in Religion Septentber-October 1998 Skelley ¯ Learning Communities 12 (1983): 127-141; Sandra Schneiders, "Spirituality in the Academy," Theological Studies 50 (1989): 676-697. s Hans Kiing and Karl-Josef Kuschel, A Global Ethic: The Declaration of tbe Parliament of the World's Religions (New York: Continuum, 1993). 6 Joseph Holland. Creative Communion: Toward a Spirituality of Work (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), pp. 24-26. 7 Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Bros., 1911); Marvin R. Weisbord, Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity~ Meaning, and Community (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), pp. 50-69, 8 Peter Drucker Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993), p. 5. 9 "John Paul II, On Human Work (Laborem Exercens) (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1981); Dorothee Soelle with Shirley A. Cloyes, 7~ Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Joe Holland, Creative Communion; Lee Hardy, The Fabric of This World: Inquiries into .Calling, Career Choice, and the Design of Human Work (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990); Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (New York: Oxford University, 1991); John C. Haughey, Converting 9 to Y: A Spirituality of Daily Work (New York, Crossroad, 1989). l0 Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, p. 5; Charles Handy, The Age of Unreason (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1989), pp. 34-35, 50-51. *~ Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation," Atlantic Monthly (November 1994): 53-80. ~2 Drucker, The New Realities (New York: Harper, 1989), p. 173. ,3 Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, p. 49. 14 A large and important segment of experts in this field prefers to call.the discipline "organizational transformation." See John D. Adams, ed., Transforming Work: A Collection of Organizational Transformation Readings (Alexandria: Miles River Press, 1984). ,s Thomas G. Cummings and Christopher G. Worley, Organization Development and Change (Minneapolis: West Publishing, 1993), p. 2. ~6 Chris Argyris and Donald A. Sch6n, Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1996), ~7 Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of Learning Organizations (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p. 3. 18 Peter Senge et al., eds., The Fij~h Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 9-12. 19Argyris and Sch6n, Organizational II, p. xvii. 20 Senge, "Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations," in The Learning Organization in Action: A Special Report from Organizational Dynamics (New 'York: American Management Association, 1994), pp. 9-15. Review for Religious 21 Holland, Creative Communion, pp. 18-42, and Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994). 22.Soelle, 7~ Work and to Love, p. 112. 23 Adams, Transforming Work; Peter Hawkins, "The Spiritual Dimension of the Learning Organization," Management Education and Development 22 (1991): 172-187; Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1993); Alan Briskin, The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996); Harrison Owen, Spirit: Transformation and Development in Organizations (Potomac: Abbot, 1987); and Tony Smith, Parzival's Briefcase: Six Practices and a New Philosophy for Healthy Organizational Change (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993). 24 Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961). 2s Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1968), pp. 57-383; Hearer of the Word(New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 1-54; and, Foundations of Christian Faith, pp. 14-23, 26-35. 26 Karl Rahner, "Theology of Freedom," Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1982), vol. 6, pp. 178-196; Foundations of Christian Faith, pp., 35-39; "The Dignity and Freedom of Man," Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 246-263. 27 Karl Rahner, "Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace," pp. 297-317; "Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace," Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 319-346; "Nature and Grace," Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1982), vol. 4, pp. 165-188; Foundations of Christian Faith,. pp. 116-133. 28 Parker J. Palmer, 7b Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993). 29 Karl Rahner, "The Experience of God Today," Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1982), vol. 11, pp. 149-165; "Experience of the Holy Spirit," Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1983), vol. 18, pp. 189-210; "Christian Living Formerly and Today," Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1977), vol. 7, pp. 3- 24. 30 This and other ideas below are developed in Senge, The Fifth Discipline, and in Senge et al., The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Septe~nber-October 1998 gnatian spirituality JOHN J. BEGLEY The Parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises This article~ proposes a contemporary understanding of Jesus' parables, and it shouts their importance for the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. Those familiar with St. Ignatius's book are aware that he does not propose the parables for prayer during the Exercises. Several reasons, however, prompt the exploration of this relationship. First, contemporary scripture studies stress the importance of the parables in the Jesus' teaching, and including them within the Exercises can enrich that experience. Second, we take the New Testament seriously as the starting point of our prayer, and we want that prayer grounded in the best understanding of the New Testament that solid con-temporary scholarship can provide; Third, the parables make up a full third of Jesus' teaching, and so any attempt to "put on the mind that was in Christ Jesus" (Ph 2:5) cannot afford to overlook them. Finally, for retreatants who are troubled by doubt concerning what Jesus really said, the parables deserve our close attention. As a pio-neer of modern parable study has said, "We are standing on a particularly firm historical foundation., part of the bedrock of tradition. We are standing right before Jesus when reading his parables" (Jeremias, p. 5). Later we will discuss the dynamic of the Exercises in some detail. For the moment it will be useful to recall John J. Begley SJ teaches in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies; University of Scranton; Scranton, Pennsylvania 18510. Revie~ for Religious both the purpose of the Exercises and the purpose of the parables. Their similar purposes will readily appear. The purpose of the Exercises is "the conquest of self and the regulation of one's life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment" (§21). Behind the somewhat archaic phras-ing is the understanding that the Exercises have as their purpose to lead "a person to true spiritual freedom, so that we make no choice or decision because we have been influenced by some dis-ordered ,attachment" (Fleming, Spiritual Exercises, §21). Similarly, the. parables' "purpose is to effect a change in the hearer, to lead to decision or action" (Boucher, p. 16-17). We begin with the parables. As Raymond Brown has remarked, "The study of the parables has generated an immense literature and sharp debates" (p. 132). We' will try to make the most of recent scholarship and to avoid controverted issues. Given the literature and the debates, it is difficult to capture the mean-ingof the parables in a single definition. J.R. Donahue in his Gospelin Parable (p. 5) cites approvingly C.H. Dodd's inductively derived definition; it will serve our purpose well. "At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leav-ing the ,mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought." As metaphor, the familiar and better known--a mustard seed, for example--is compared to the less familiar kingdom of God. The kingdom is compared to and illuminated by something bet-ter known and more readily imagined. In the context of a retreat, the astonishing growth of a tiny mustard seed into a large bush illumines the growth of the retreatant's relationship with God, which is God's work in the retreatant. As a metaphor, it moves people, to greater participation in the more obscure retreat mate-rial being described or explained. Metaphor talks of the familiar so that one can participate in the less familiar (Crossan, p. 16 ). We may note that there are parables in the Hebrew Bible: the trees (Jg 9:7-15), for example, and the ewe lamb (2 K 12:1-4). The rabbis used parables for the normal pedagogical purposes of illustrating and illuminating their teaching. The listeners of Jesus were familiar with the genre. Jesus subordinated the familiar uses of the parable to his primary purpose of proclaiming the king-dom, of sounding the call and challenge to embrace the conditions of living in the kingdom. The parables of Jesus transcend any September-October 1998 Begley ¯ The Parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises previous use, for he thereby expresses what cannot be expressed by any other means than symbol and metaphor: the kingdom of God. The parables, like other, symbolic expressions, are polyva-lent. No single meaning exhausts their content. Parables cannot be reduced to a proposition. Modern parable study begins with several commonly accepted suppositions. First, the early church supplied the context of the parables as they appear in the narratives of Jesus' ministry, and we must bracket off that context if we wish to hear the parable as Jesus spoke it. For example, the command "Go and do likewise" (Lk 10:37) presently concludes the parable of the Good Samaritan. The common judgment, however, is that it does not belong to the parable as Jesus taught it, and so we exclude it from consid-eration. As we will see, the bracketing changes the parable's mean-ing dramatically. Second, the tradition has at times changed a parable of Jesus into an allegory. For example, in Mark's Gospel the parable of the sower appears both as Jesus taught it (4:3-9) and as the early church preserved it as an allegory (4:13-20). This is not to say that allegory is improper. However, to recover the para-bles as Jesus taught them, we avoid the allegorical interpretation. Other parables, such as that of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:29-37), have in their transmission become example stories. As the message about Jesus was proclaimed in a non-Jewish culture, its second generation non-Jewish listeners were unfamiliar with the mean-ing of Samaritan, priest, and Levite. The parable became an exam-ple story, lessening the challenge of the original parable. We are not suggesting a single interpretation to the exclu-sion of all others, whether that interpretation is traditional or contemporary. The parable of the prodigal, for example, is fre-quently understood as a parable of God's mercy. As the First Week progresses, a retreatant may suggest to her director, as the result of her own understanding and experience, that she would like to spend some time during the First Week praying over The Prodigal as a parable of God's merciful love. The director must respect the retreatant's freedom and the gift of her prayer. In days to come in the retreat, as discretion suggests, the director can pro-pose the parable once again with a different interpretation drawn from modern parable study. Both interpretations are valid. Retreatants find two contributions of J. Dominic Crossan particularly helpful. First is the manner in which he has located the parables in Jesus' own experience. To a previous observation Review for Religious that parables move people to greater participation in the matter a parable illustrates, it is important to add that "Jesus' parables are radically constitutive of his own distinctive historicity, and all else is located in them" (Crossan, p. 33). They proclaim and they establish the historicity of Jesus' response to the kingdom. There is an intrinsic bond between Jesus' experience and his expression of that experience in parables. Parables are cause and not effect of what Jesus said and did (Crossan, p. 32). Retreatants find it very attractive to pray over the parables and thereby to enter into the experience of Jesus. Second, Crossan's classification of the various parables as expressions of the kingdom's temporality (as advent, as reversal, and as action) is most help-ful. As we'will see, the parables of reversal in particular have an important role to play in the Exercises. One final observation is important. For some few commentators, Crossan among them, the urgency of the para-bles is related to the ever present now of the kingdom. While it would be interesting to consider the range of scholarly opinions on the relation of the kingdom to the end time, it seems better to avoid the confusion which could result. One scholar, Donald Senior, has preserved the urgency of the parables without enter-ing into the controverted question of eschatology. He writes, "The kingdom may be future but the choice is now" (Senior, p. 93). The temporality of the kingdom in terms of advent, reversal, and action appears in two paradigmatic parables which model all three modes of the kingdom. "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Mr 13:44). "The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; onfinding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it" (Mr 13:45-46). The parables are simi-lar in structure, as revealed by the three verbs common to both. To unpack but one, in the parable of the treasure hidden in a field, we hear of a man whose nor.mal past-present-future is rudely but happily shattered. The future, which he has presumably planned and projected for himself, is totally invalidated by the finding (advent) of the treasure, which opens up new worlds and There is an intrinsic bond between Jesus' experience and his expression of that experience in parables. September- October 1998 Begley ¯ The Parables of Jesus and the I~natian Exercises unforeseen possibilities. In the force of this advent, he willingly reverses his entire past and acts to sell all that he has. From this advent and this reversal, he obtains the treasure that now dictates his future history in a most concrete way. It gives him a new life that he could not have planned for~himself and a new world in which to live this life (Crossan, p. 34). Advent parables are fewer than parables of reversal, ~which in turn are fewer than those of action. The frequency distribution probably reflects later tradition's needs rather than the frequency with which Jesus spoke them. Later generations experienced the advent of God in the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus and so felt less need to preserve the parables of advent. Advent parables stress one or another of three themes: hid-denness and mystery, gift and surprise, discovery and joy. For example, in the sower and mustard-seed parables, there are sharp juxtapositions of two states. In The, Sower, three instances of sow-ing loss are contrasted with three instances of harvest gain. In The Mustard Seed the contrast is between the small seed sown and the ample shade of the fully grown plant. The parables are not concerned with growth but with miracle, "not the organic and biological development but the gift-like nature, the graciousness and surprise of the ordinary, the advent of the bountiful harvest despite the losses of sowing, the large shade despite the small seed. In these ways the kingdom is advent. It is surprise and it is gift" (Crossan, pp. 37-51, emphasis added). To turn now to the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, con-temporary experience of both directors and retreatants under-scores the advent character of the First Week. It would be impossible to number the retreatants who have summed up their First Week experience by saying, "It is all gift." In whatever man-ner the topics Ignatius proposes for prayer are treated--topics such as sin and punishment in the history of the world and in the self, past and present--the result is not a self broken by sorrow and remorse, but rather a self healed and given new life and freedom. It is an experience of one's own sinfulness, to be sure, but it is much more an experience of God's love embracing me with all of my sinfulness. The darkness of my sinfulness is shattered by the brilliance of God's reconciling, healing love. The modern mind reading the Exercises understands Ignatius's "cry of wonder" (§60) to rise from the felt awareness of God's love as experienced in the wonder of creation, in the wondei" of Review for Religious others who have been sources of life for me, in the wonder of myself as gifted, graced, and loved. The retreatant realizes, in the phrase that has become a familiar experiential reality for those who have made at least the First Week of the Exercises, that she is a "loved sinner." Mthough memories of the past, or feelings of inadequacy, fear, or self-rejection may have gripped the retreatant, now the redemptive love of God has set the exercitant free, desirous of reordering her life more effectively "to the end for which we are created" (§23). At this point the retreatant has experi-enced what in Crossan's language is called advent. To the retreatant have been revealed the hiddenness and the mystery, the gift and surprise, the discovery and joy of the king-dom. One or another of all these parable themes describes the retreatant's experience as she concludes the First Week. What had remained hidden, the mystery of the self as loved by God, has been discovered with joy as the surprising gift of God's love. In the manner of the discovery of a pearl of great price--which cannot be explained by either the skill of the direc-tor, the dispositions of the retreatant, or natural psychological development--the retreatant experiences the sheer joy of one who is loved and affirmed in the depths of the self, not despite who one is but precisely as one is. This is the important meaning of the advent parables of Jesus, and the retreatant can profitably pray over them during the First Week. From the first meditation of the First Week, the retreatant's attention has been focused on the crucified Lord, whose love for-gives and frees. In his presence the retreatant has asked, "What ought I to do for Christ?" (§53). Having experienced advent, the retreatant is now in a position to consider what return she shall make to the Lord whose love has opened for her a new way of life, more abundant than she ever thought possible. The loved sinner desires to be a loving servant. The retreatant is ready for the Second Week, in which parables of reversal and action have an important part to play. These parables have. as their purpose "to effect a change in the hearer, to lead to decision or action" (Boucher, pp. 16-17). More To the retreatant have been revealed the hiddenness and the mystery, the gift and surprise, the discovery and joy of the kingdom. Septentber-October 1998 Begley ¯ The Parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises dramatically but not less surely, the parables of reversal look to the situation where "the last becomes first and the first becomes last, We have a polar reversal, When the north pole becomes the south pole and the south the north,, a world is reversed and overturned" (Crossan, p. 55) The world that is meant here is the inner world of values, priorities, and motives. It is the inner world of atti-tudes, dispositions, habitual judgments, This reversal is very much what Ignatius proposes to the retreatant at this point in the Exercises. The readiness to turn my familiar world upside down is the necessary predisposition for a good election. Ignatius underscores this in his singularly important consid-eration on the Two Standards. In an introduction to this medita-tion (§135). Ignatius reminds us that the following of Christ in loving service admits of various degrees; the sincere following of the commandments, which has been considered in meditating on Jesus' obedience to his parents, and the state of evangelical per-fection, which was considered in the youthful Jesus remaining behind in the temple. Now the retreatant, while continuing to investigate his life, is to begin to consider and to pray for a knowl-edge of the kind of life to which the Lord summons her. In the Two Standards Ignatius asks the retreatant to imagine Christ mak-ing an address "to all his servants and friends whom he sends on this enterprise." In his address he reverses the strategy of his adversary, "the chief of all the enemy," who stands beneath the first standard. As Ignatius sums up what the retreatant is, to con-sider, he says, "Hence there will be three steps: the first, poverty as opposed to riches; the second, insults or contempt ~as opposed to the honor of this world; the third, humility as opposed to pi'ide (§146, emphasis added). The .colloquy that concludes the Two Standards meditation is to be repeated at the end of each of the five periods of prayer every day until the election has been made. This threefold collo-quy addressed first to Mary, then to her 'Son, and finally to the Father is for the grace to be received under his standard, where the disciple of Christ can expect to bear poverty and humiliations in imitation of him. In a note to the subsequent Meditation on Three Classes of Men, Ignatius advises the retreatant: "It should be noted that when we feel an attachment opposed to actual poverty or a repugnance to it. it will be very helpful in order to :overcome the inordinate attachment, even though corrupt nature rebel against it, to beg our Lord in the Colloquies to choose Review for Religqous us to serve him in actual poverty" (§ 157). As Ignatius makes clear, such a disposition does not come easily: "We should insist that we desire it, beg for it, plead for it, provided of course that it be for the service and praise of the DiVine Goodness" (§157). At the critical time of making a decision that will define the self in relation to the Lord, to others, and to the contingencies of experience, the parables of reversal will serve the retreatant's need very well. It is helpful to recall that the parables represent a call which is absolute (the kingdom cannot be subordinated to any other concern) and that this absolute call is not specific (as the command to love is not specified for each particular circumstance of human life). Indeed, it is the absolute but nonspecific nature of the call of Christ to "follow me" (here and now, or later?) that requires discernment in order to come to a properly ordered deci-sion. The absolute but nonspecific call of the parables is empha-sized in the Exercises as well. The call of Christ in the Meditation on the Kingdom is abso-lute: "Whoever wishes to join me in this enterprise must be will-ing to labor with me, that by following me in suffering he may follow me in glory" (§95.). However, the manner in which one "labors with me" is not specified. Ignatius, in the oblation which concludes the Kingdom, speaks of poverty, humiliatiqns, and humility, but ~does not specify the manner in which "those who wish to give greater proof of their love, and to distinguish them-selves in whatever concerns theservice of:~the eternal King" (§97), will incarnate the proof of their love. The specification is the goal of the retreat and requires the prayer and discernment of the retreatant. Second, the change in the "world" of the retreatant, which the First Week begins and the Second Week develops, is precisely the retreatant's world of values and judgments, of desires and priorities, of hopes and dreams. The parables of reversal chal-lenge this world of the retreatant, who, through the reciprocal process of praying the parables and "reflecting on myself," begins to investigate and ask in what kind or state of life God wishes to make use of me (§135). The retreatant enters into "the mind of Christ" (Ph 2:5) and prays to make his mind her own. The parables, which communi-cate the experience of Jesus and not conclusions or admonitions, assist the retreatant to enter into her own experience of the Kingdom and to draw from that experience her own way of life. To accept the parables and the experience they offer is to take on September-October 1998 Begley ¯ The Parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises a new personal perspective, a new way of interpreting and valu-ing, of deciding and acting. In a word, the retreatant develops a different and more refined set of principles, insights, and critical judgments which can be termed a personal hermeneutic. It is to grow in faith. It is worthwhile to note that the theme of reversal is an essen-tial theme of the teaching of Jesus and of the parables. The beloved Good Samaritan parable (Lk 10:25-37) has tradition-ally been heard as an example of neighborliness. In the wake of Jeremias's study, commentators today suggest that the parable has been reconstructed in the course of transmission. The con-text (Jesus' conversation with a lawyer) and his concluding com-mand ("Go and do likewise," §37) have been provided by the early church and have to be removed from consideration if we are to .come closer to the parable as Jesus spoke it. At a distance both geographical and temporal from the world of Samaritans, priests, and Levites, the story lacked the immediacy that it had for the first listeners of Jesus, and this parable of reversal has been changed by the second-generation of Christians into an example story. Once the parable is allowed to stand on its own, it is no longer simply a story of the neighborliness that fulfills the law, but becomes a parable of reversaL Crc;ssan has brilliantly noted that, if the parable is primar-ily to provide an illustration of neighbor love or an indictment of heartless religious leaders, then help offered by a Jewish layperson would have made the proper point. The shock is that it is the Samaritan who stops. At the remove of centuries, it is easy for us to overlook the hatred that existed between Jews and Samaritans. During the period of the Exile, the Samaritans had intermarried with non-Jews, had opposed the restoration of the Jewish temple, and in the 2nd century B.C. had actually helped the Syrians in their wars against the Jews. The Jewish high priest had burned the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, and the Samaritans had scattered the bones of a corpse in. the Jerusalem temple, thereby defiling it and making it impossible to celebrate Passover. The Samaritans did not accept the whole of the canon-ical Jewish Scriptures. They refused hospitality to Jesus and his disciples because they were on their way to Jerusalem (Lk 9:52- 53). The Jews believed they had insulted Jesus by calling him a Samaritan (Jn 4:7-10), and Jesus himself warned his disciples to avoid the Samaritan territory (Mt 10:5). Review for Religious The shock of the parable, calling for a reversal of attitudes on the part of its hearers, is that the one who helps the Jewish victim and fulfills the law is the enemy and religious apostate. The parable reverses our understanding of who God is and whom God approves. It destroys a narrow, legalistic under-standing of the law and reveals the hatred and divisions which had become institutionalized. The world of the lawyer and his fellow listeners is turned upside down. They are to speak the unspeakable; they are to join the apparent contradictories "good" and "Samaritan." Another parable of reversal that can be useful during the Second Week is that of the Prodigal Son. It is lengthy (Luke 15:11-32) and so well .known that we need not retell it here. In Crossan's interpretation the reversal is located in the presence of the prodigal at the banquet while his dutiful older brother is out-side pouting (Crossan, p. 75). Merely to state the reversal in this way is to grip the imagination of the retreatant. It calls for a rever-sal of mind and heart that must be prayed over until it is interi-orized and can then move the retreatant toward her election/decision with gratitude and enthusiasm. Another approach to the Prodigal Son (Donahue, pp. 151- 157) may be even more helpful to the retreatant. Here the rever-sal is in our understanding, of what constitutes a relationship to God. Both sons define sonship in terms of servile obligation: "Treat me as one of your hired servants," says the younger son; "I have slaved for you," says his older brother. Each in his own way destroys the family. "As the younger son felt that the way~ to restore the severed relationship was to become a servant, the older brother maintained it by acting as a servant. Between the dutiful son and the prodigal is a bond much deeper than is visible on the surface . A relationship . . . worked out in terms of servility leads to destruction. The relationship as redefined by the father leads to joy" (Donahue, p. 157). Some women may find it difficult to pray with the images of "father" and "sons." Sandra Schneiders has captured the power of the parable from a feminist perspective: "Jesus' parable about the father actually constitutes a radical challenge to patriarchy. The divine father who has been understood as the ultimate justification of human patriarchy is revealed as the one who refuses to own us, demand our submission, or punish our rebellion. Rather, God is the one who respects our freedom, mourns our alienation, waits Septentber-October 1998 Begley * The Parables of yesus and the Ignatian Exercises patiently for our return, and accepts our love as pure gift" (cited by Donahue, pp. 161-162). The parable conveys the essential mindset for understanding discipleship and for making the decision that leads to more faith-ful discipleship. Crossan has expressed it perfectly in his discus-sion of the primary issue between Jesus and the Pharisees: "Obedience does not lead to God, God leads one to obedience" (Crossan, p. 80). The Two Standards! Ignatius focuses the retreatant's attention upon the activity of the poor and humble Christ, and so the prayerful consideration of the action parables may be somewhat less necessary than those of advent and reversal. The action parables, though, do portray cru-cial or critical situations that demand prompt and energetic deci-sion, firm and resolute action, that are very much in line with retreat purposes. They summon us to commit ourselves in response to the advent of the kingdom regardless of the reversal they demand, and so they, can prove helpful in the later days of the Second Week. They reflect the situation of the retreatant as she moves towards free self-disposition in response to her experience of the advent of the kingdom. Parables of action portray three different responses to the urgency of action (Crossan, pp. 84-85). As examples of one response (see the parable of the friend at mid-night [Lk 11:58] or the unjust judge [Lk 18:2-5]), we meet persons who accept the inevitability of what must be done and take action. In other parables (for example, the rich fool in Lk 13:16-20), the person fails to recognize the urgency of the situation and so fails to act. A third set of action parables (for example, the bridesmaids, Mt 25:1-13) describes those who respond adequately and those who do not. These parables of Jesus can effectively move the retreatant to overcome her natural hesitancy to choose what is beyond the strength of her own resources: to choose, with faith in the advent of the kingdom within her, what "would be more for his praise and glory" (§180). The explanation of the relationship between the parables of Jesus and the Ignatian Exercises has been long. A director may well question the advisability of proposing such an explanation when Ignatius expects the director to "adhere to the points, and add only.a short or summary explanation., for it is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the intimate under-standing and relish of the truth" (§2). Despite the length of this article's explanation, experience has shown that it is possible to l~eview for Religio~a give retreatants a "summary explanation." Retreatants easily grasp the primary idea of the different parables, are comfortable with the understanding proposed, and experience an unexpected delight in praying the parables of Jesus. A Selection of Parables Advent parables: The leaven, Mt 13:20-21; the sower, Mk 4:3- 8; the mustard seed, Mt 4:30-32; the lost sheep, Mt 18:12-13; the lost coin, Lk 15:8-9. Reversal parables: The Good Samaritan, Lk 10:30-37; The Prodigal Son, Lk 15:11-32; the rich man and Lazarus, Lk 16:19- 31; the Pharisee and the tax collector, Lk 18:9-14; the wedding guest, Lk 14:1-24; the great supper, Mt 22:1-14; the sheep and the goats, Mt 25:31-46. Action parables: the wicked husbandmen, Mk 12:1-,12); the doorkeeper, Mk 13:33-37; the talents, Mt 25:14-3 O; the unmerciful servant, Mt 18:23-38; the unjust steward, Lk 16:1-7; the workers in the vineyard, Mt 20:1-16. Bibliography Boucher, Madeleine I. The Parables. Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1981. Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Donahue, John R. The Gospel in Parable. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988. Fleming, David L. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978. Henog, William R. Parables as Subversive Speech. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994. Jeremias, Joachim. Rediscovering the Parables. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989. Puhl, Louis J. (trans.). The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951. Senior, Donald. Jesus: A Gospel Portrait, 2nd ed. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1991. September-October 1998 ANITA J. BALY St. Ignatius and My Piano One of the best things I got out of making the thirty-day Spiritual Exercises was learning I could play the piano. That is not all that I experienced in the long retreat, by any means. And Idid not know I was taking away that particular fruit when the retreat ended. At a distance of two years, however, I sense that that.gift of musical empowerment is closely linked with my spiritual journey. What would St. Ignatius think of my response to his Exercises? Would palm slap forehead in pained frustration at my lack of com-prehension? Would he laugh--or cry? Would he sharply insist that I had trivialized the meaning of his work--and knew it? Would he smile ever so slightly and nod approval? I would not presume to read back into the saint's mind. I am even clueless as to how oth-ers who have completed the Exercises would react. In the silent and solitary conduct of the Exercises, it is impos-sible to know for sure what other retreatants derive. One can make some guesses based on body language and apparent changes, but there is no way to check out assumptions orhlly. At the con-clusion of my retreat, half a dozen of us retreatants sat and tried to share with one another what had occurred for us. What impressed me that evening was how different the perceived fruits seemed to be for each participant! It was also pleasing to see how diverse outcomes seemed to comport with the Exercises. Anita J. Baly JD, MDiv, PhD, is interim pastor of the Lutheran Church of Our Saviour and an adjunct faculty member in theology at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education. Her address is 3001 Libby Terrace; Richmond, Virginia 23223. Review for Religious The Spiritual Exercises are not a map that points in only one direction via a single route. The end desired is surely the same for all Christians: that we grow continually in faithfulness to the Lord's person and work, approaching more and more the fullness of the fruits of the Spirit; that we grow in the capacity to attain, relish, and express the love of God. Or, as St. Paul says so suc-cinctly: the end (telos) the Christian seeks is "eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rm 6:22-23).~ The means to achieving that end, however, clearly differ according to God-given differences in per-sonalities, capacities, and experiences. No means are excluded automatically since "all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose" (Rm 8:28). The Exercises affirm, support, and foster individual wrestling with God's individual graces, to attain the end that is at once universal and also particular. The Exercises, that is, attune to the fact that the Spirit blows how, as, and where it wills. Each exercitant's task is to meet that universal Spirit in the exact par-ticularity of who he or she really is. Were this not to occur, the positive effects of the Exercises in fostering "the salvation of souls and their spiritual profit" would likely be severely limited.2 Theologically this makes sense: incarnation is God's presence and manifestation only in what is really there. God does not meet us inthe past, in the future, or in the way we wish things were. Incarnation means that God meets us precisely here, immediately now. It is, I believe, out of respect for God's ways of working dif-ferendy with different individuals that St. Ignatius urges the direc-tor to be brief in explaining the meditations and contemplations (§2). The saint seems to find it acceptable that exercitants work out much of the matter of the Exercises alone, with God's help. In this way, inevitably, exercitants will surely miss some details and fine points. Ignatius's sense of the compensation for this loss is clear. He says: "It is not in knowing much, but realizing and rel-ishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul" (§2). My own journey with the Exercises involved the discovery that I could play the piano. As I see it, that was not just a nice My own journey with the Exercises involved the discovery that I could play the piano. September- October 1998 Baly ¯ St. Ignatius and My Piano thing--though it is wonderful! Studying piano has actually become a major support of my continuing spiritual journey. It was a dis-covery I in no way sought, envisioned, or wanted. It came about in response to the circumstances of my long retreat. I made the Exercises at one of the large houses that groups retreatants together with multiple outside directors for one or a few events each year) Our group of retreatants and directors numbered close to seventy people, with an overall director who is a musician. He wanted music provided for the daily liturgies and asked for vol-unteer music leaders. Although there were one or two profes-sional- quality musicians among the group, they, understandably, wanted to retreat from musical production. That left canvassing the rest of us for volunteers, and five or six of us agreed to "do something" according to our capacities. In my case that was to mean simply leading hymns and responses and functioning as a cantor. I could sing and read music, but I played no instruments. As the retreat went on, the strain of producing coordinated music in an atmosphere of total silence showed on some of the original musical volunteers, who quit. That left fewer of us respon-sible for more liturgies. So I was providing music leadership to liturgies every few days with nothing but voice--and boring myself. Besides that, the various celebrants wanted different set-tihgs of liturgical responses. In order to be able to lead those, I had to try to hear them. In the silence, no one could sing them to me beforehand. There was, however, a brief daily period when all retreatants had access to the lone piano. I managed to find the notes to plunk out the melody lines of responses. I knew where the notes were on the keyboard from years of finding singing melodies with a one-finger, hunt-and-peck .method. It was, however, a sort of desperation for variety and for beauty that prompted me to take the next step. I finally made a few attempts to play a melody line under a hymn or two and once even attempted to play something as postcommunion meditation music. Those attempts resulted in poor music that did not enhance the services, in my opinion, and embarrassed me. I suppose I would have quit trying and that would have been the end of it, were it not for the movements of a few people there. One of the directors saw my embarrassment at the poverty of my tries at accompaniment. He managed to honor that pain by helping me try again in a safer way. And, when the retreat ended and we could speak, I learned that a few of the retreatants actually assumed I was Review for Religious a professional music minister! I suppose it was that small amount of affirmation and the serendipitous discovery of pleasure in a new "skill" that prompted me to continue. Once home, I had access to a piano--through the grace of two other friends. For a year I tinkered with that piano on my own, trying to teach myself, sensing in some vague way that for me the piano was a way of continuing to connect with the graces of the retreat. A year after the retreat, I began taking formal lessons. Those have now con-tinued for over a year. The piano is one among those created things that Ignatius would urge using or discarding according to its effect--for the individual pianist--in fostering or detracting from the praise, rev-erence, and service of God (§23). Music can be perverted in var-ious ways. Of itself, though, it does seem to enjoy divine approbation. The Bible in many places, especially in the Psalms, enjoins us to sing to the Lord, to make a joyful noise, to praise our God with timbrel and trumpet, voice, dance--and strings.4 Why would music be so privileged? Maybe God just likes music. That is, the use of music for religious expressions may be linked to something in God's being. Maybe music is special because it is always a common expression, a community endeavor. Even solitary composers or musicians do not invent their instru-ments. Neither do they create the musical notes and their fun-damental relationships--though composers group in "new" ways and patterns the notes and chords they have .been given. The musical givens are built right into~the world. One who discovers them is in dialogue with God the Creator. Because I only play the piano, and do not compose music for it, I dialogue with the Creator about music at one remove. My communion with the composer provides a way for me to make my musical connection with the Directing Source. When I attend faithfully to playing that music as it is written down, I know something too of God's conducting. That faithful attempt to connect with the composer's aural "vision" helps me understand and even "hear" that my studying and playing piano is connected also with my spiritual journey. For me, both praying and piano playing seem more satisfying and closer to hitting the mark when I approach them with a certain kind of discipline. Ignatius illuminates the fact that successful meditation involves the integration of memory, reason, will, and feelings (§50). And the good progress of the Exercises seems to verify that pro- September-October 1998 Baly ¯ St. Ignatius and My Piano found insight. To me, it proves the saint was truly a spiritual genius, As one who .once scored a hundred percent on the feeling compo-nent of the Myers-Briggs Preference Test, my psyche is perpetually on the edge of drowning in emotion. Besides that, my imagination is so strong that I could almost live in it. Now, imagination and feeling are essential for getting through the Exercises. It is difficult to see how an Application of the Senses meditation, for example, could progress without them (§123). The same is true for music. Without feeling, it is lifeless and powerless. Imaginative hearing certainly helps in the process of learning music. Feeling and imagination are good things in moderation. As an extreme "feeler" and "imaginer," however, I cleave to the Ignatian system because of the constant pressure it exerts on me to think and to perceive what is actually there in the world. Overly enthu-siastic thinkers and sensers probably value the Ignatian system for the opposite reason: the pressure it exerts on them to feel and to imagine. One of the supreme marvels of Ignatius's method is the way it teaches, inculcates, presumes, and honors balance. Such balance and integration are often difficult, to keep up in daily life. They are particularly hard to sustain at times of stress when the temptation is to fall back into the ways of reacting that are most automatic and comfortable for us. Our customary responses may be too lopsided to be effective--or holy. It is aware-ness followed by practice, building habits of mind and heart, that can help us to redirect our responses away from the habitual and into more prudent directions. The practice of Ignatian prayer helps with this. In a very similar way, the study of piano also teaches me to strive for balanced, integrated responses. Playing piano, like praying in the lgnatian.mode, requires using memory to aid the intellect, engaging the will in the endeavor, and aligning feelings with the will. My teacher, thus, emphasizes for me the importance of learning chord relationships and learning and remembering proper fingering. In this way my memory assists my reasoning about how to play a new piece of music. And only when my will controls my~ feelings can I keep my enthusiasm from ruining the dynamics and phrasing of com-positions. For me it is truly useful discipline to have to count continuously, thereby exercising a form of reason. My teacher also patiently reminds me that I must play the piece as it is writ-ten-- not as I may prefer or wish it to be, nor as I would find it easier to play. Those reminders are echoes of incarnation! When Review for Religious I lose the balance and proper relationship of memory, reason, will, and feelings, the pieces do not sound right. They cease to please the ear. In a profound sense they are no longer "good." In turn, that reminds me that, when I lose the balance in my spiri-tual life, it too is swerving from the best direction. One particular place where Ignatius urges balance and indif-ference is in making an election (§179). The single criterion of election is that a given alternative seems to lead more to the glory and praise of God and to the salvation of one's soul. The ideal choice, thus, is very pure and very disciplined. In a similar way, the best choice in playing music will be to put aside any personal inclinations or biases or even technical insufficiencies. The goal is to play the piece as near as possible to the composer's intention. The search for that intention can be like discerning the will of God. Sometimes neither the one nor the other is apparent on the surface. It is in both cases openness, dialogue, respect, fidelity, and persistence that create the atmosphere in which disclosure becomes more likely. Within all the balance and indifference in prayerful elections, however, it does seem that reason takes primacy (§ 182). Ignatius seems almost to anticipate the Kantian ethical principle about acting in ways that would please you if they became universal law. The saint counsels us to imagine advising an unknown person whose sanctification we desire, within the context of our own sense of what best conduces to God's glory. Having determined that advice, we are ourselves to follow it (§185). So too in music, where it is hard to imagine advising anyone to play a work other than as it is written. Once reason has helped us to know the goal for living well or for playing music well, the honorable course is to set about engaging the other parts of the personality to col-laborate in moving to this end, and in practicing and honing needed skills for doing so. Relaxation and trust enhance both instrumental playing and prayer. At a recent lesson, my piano teacher watched and heard me struggle through a work white-knuckled, tight-shouldered, gri-macing, and gritting my teeth. She then inquired, sweedy, whether I found it easier to play tense or relaxed. That reminded me of the priest at my last directed retreat who kept urging me to pray in Imaginative hearing certainly helps in the process of learning music. Septentber-October 1998 Baly ¯ St. Ignatius and My Piano peace and serenity--until I finally did. Tension and trying to retain control do not facilitate progress in either prayer or piano. Humility certainly helps in both spheres. Ignatius specifically counsels cultivating the attitude of humility at those times we contemplate our sins. He says that we are then to "lessen" our-selves via various imaginative comparisons (§58). The whole envi-ronment of the Exercises, moreover, induces humility. Much in the system cooperates to encourage the exercitant to esteem God's control and another's direction over what comes from the self alone. For me the Exercises went best at those times when I was most teachable and directable. The same is true of piano study: I play better by attuning to what is there musically and to the teacher. Playing the piano and praying are complementary processes that call on remarkably similar skills. As I hone technique in one area, I also seem to position myself for advancement in the other activity. A kind of cross-leavening seems to occur. As I attend con-sciously to what happens, it seems as though piano learnings tend to foster px:ayer learnings, not vice versa. I think that is because progress in piano happens in an external realm where any who wish may hear, measure, compare, iudge, criticize, and so forth. The no-less-real results of prayer exist in' an internal sphere fully accessible neither to others nor even to myself. Whatever helps someone to understand more of what occurs in personal prayer and to be able to communicate that has to be a boon to progress in prayer. Piano does those things for me. Piano also intimates to me and gives me the hope that King Hezekiah expressed: "The Lord will save me, and we will sing to my stringed instruments all the days of our lives, at the house of the Lord" (Is 38:20). Notes 1 Scriptural citations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 2 The quoted words are from the Papal Approbation of St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises in 1548, as given in David L. Fleming SJ, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978), p. xxiii. Other citations (§) are standard paragraph numberings used in this and other modern trans-lations of the Exercises. 3 Jesuit Retreat House, Los Altos, California. 4 Psalms 33, 68, 81, 92,144, 149, and 150 all direct the use of musi-cal instruments in praising God. Review for Religious JOSEPH A. TETLOW The Experience of God in Consecrated Life during the 20th Century In this article I try to describe the experience of God, not to prescribe for it. I begin, first, with the meanings of the terms spirituality and religion and the content of the term experi-ence. Second, I characterize modern times just before Vatican Council II under three headings: aggressive realism, methodi-cal universalism, and rugged individualism. I do this because modernity has marked consecrated life deeply and in some mea-sure still marks it, and because, when conservatives talk about the past, this is the past they mean. Third, about the council, I note only that the reform of church structures and the renewal of consecrated life brought out deep problems with authority and with our concept of the self. Finally, coming to today, I urge that we can appreciate consecrated life well in terms of the postmodern understanding of experience as constructed, derivative, intentional, and dialogic. I hope these somewhat scattered theoretical points will deepen our reflection on what the experience of God has been in consecrated life during the cen-tury that is now ending. Spirituality. For us spirituality means the experience of God in Christ. For others it means other things. The Communist government of China, for instance, has begun Joseph A. Tetlow SJ makes available here a talk that he pre-sented in Rome at a workshop attended by members of the union of major superiors of men religious; it retains something of that provenance. No newcomer to these pages, he is director of the Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality; C.P. 6139; 00195 Roma Prati; Italy. consecrated life September-October 1998 Tetlow ¯ The Experience o[ God in Consecrated Life promoting what it calls a "spiritual civilization." Alcoholics Anonymous acknowledges only a "Higher Power" but has a spir-ituality. So has the New Age pseudo-philosophy. In this article the word spirituality is used in none of those vague senses. Here it means the experience of God in Christ, always incarnated in a tradition of prayer and interior discipline.~ A spiritual life, consequently,is the ongoing, cherished, fos-tered experience of God in Christ in one of the great consecrated-life traditions.2 Shifting "from the former stress on the rational to the experiential," serious theologians now recount "the in-break-ing God of personal experience.''3 Karl Rahner, certainly a spec-ulative theologian, was deeply stirred by Ignatius's conviction "that he had in fact experienced God directly and that others may do so as well.''4 Rahner wrote many prayers like this one.- "Thanks to your mercy, O infinite God, I know somethingabout you not only through concepts and words, but through experience . Yes, really you yourself, not just a concept of you, not just the name which we ourselves have given you.''5 John of the Cross experienced God, not an idea or a poem, and so did Don Bosco, St. Benedict, the author of the Cloud. Each experienced God in the specific way God chose~ All those who follow each of them adopt the perspectives, perceptions, and values of their masters, desiring and determined to know God as their tradition knows God. This is what we mean by spirituality. It differs from religion. Religion. Religion is the experience of creed, code, cultus, and culture and, in and through these creatures, the experience of God. Hinduism; Buddhism, Islam, even animism yield the expe-rience of God in the experience of creed, code, cultus, and cul-ture. 6 Islam, for instance, holds faith in Allah and in the prophet Mohammed, follows a moralistic code, practices cultus six times a day and a month each year, and has spread into a vast poly-morphous culture. Each Muslim experiences these creatures directly and, in them, God. The "ordinary Christian" who spent three hours worshiping in St. Peter's Square on Palm Sunday felt the presence of God in the liturgy. True, many ordinary Christians may have momentary "mystical experiences"; Andrew Greeley reported in one survey that perhaps eight in ten American Catholics have had such experiences, and we have no reason to think Americans more mystical than any other people. But those "mystical experiences" come as a surprise, for religious people Review for Religious experience God indirectly, through the created creed, code, cul-tus, and culture in their everyday lives. Religious leaders need to note two points connected with this: first, about the apostolate. The people we serve, the "millions in the middle," in Cardinal Joseph Bernardin's phrase, experience God in and through their religion. When the powerful or the super-spiritual despise these people's religion, the people suffer; for their special experience of God seems despised and degraded. Perhaps the church harmed them inadver-tently when it swiftly and almost wordlessly dismantled the liturgi-cal use of Latin and quotidian laws about fasting and communion on the tongue, Yet for centuries the church had called the full, whole-hearted living of religion, just reli-gion, "spirituality." Only a few centuries ago did theologians begin using the word spirituality for the life lived by an active, dedicated, religious elite, and only in the last two centuries did theologians begin separating the experience we call spirituality from the experience we call religion. We who find ourselves in this "elite" run the risk of so raising up spirituality as to depreciate religion. This is wrongheaded. The second thing superiors might note here concerns our own congregational lives. Are there not men in every congrega-tion who live the charism in wholehearted ways and yet cannot say they know God? We all know men who have pictures of the Holy Father, of saints and holy places, all over their rooms and offices. Perhaps they are living religion--creed, code, cultus, and cul-ture- as religion is embodied in a congregation's way of life, with all its pious practices. (Somebne told about a man who was watch-ing television and reading his breviary during the commercial breaks. He explained that Jesus had instructed us to "watch and pray.") Above all, perhaps we should consider whether the strongly conservative among us may live their interior lives in this way of religion. How do they experience God? Experience. Our topic is experience. As everyone does today, I have been talking about experience as though we all mean the same thing. But we do not. Some say experience includes just what Only in the last two centuries did theologians begin separating the experience we call spirituality from the experience we call religion. September-October 1998 Tetlow ¯ The Experience of God in Consecrated Life happens; some, that experience includes only what I am conscious of happening; some tinsist that human experience always includes language. Every one of. us, also, varies what he includes in the term. What does our topic mean, "The experience of God in con-secrated life"? Obviously, we cannot work out a perfect descrip-tion of experience here and now. Also obviously, we are probably not going to talk about it the way "scientific" philosophers talk about it. We are going to talk about experience, most likely, as Vita consecrata does.7 Perhaps, though, we need to notice, on a slightly theoretica,1 plane, that today people regularly talk about experience by using seven categories. A sort of common philosophy holds that each and every experience unfolds in seven dialogically inter-related elements: context, perspective, perception, value, desire, decision, and habit. We tend to think that any and every experi-ence is adequately described when each of these elements is accounted fo~, both in itself and in its relationship with each of the other elements. So, biographers get the concrete details of their subjects' time and place and recount how their context shaped their perspectives, how their values shaped their perceptions, and so on. Scripture scholars try to recapture the context of Jesus' life and the perspectives, perceptions, and values with which his context would have imbued him. When we look at a man's expe-rience to see whether he has the capacity to govern, we weigh his decisions and hal6its, how he perceives, what he values. Things like these constitute our view of his experience. So, at least for now, let that stand for what experience is. The description is hardly .satisfactory, so why did I raise the question? For two reasons. Fil:st, we whose main task is listening to .others must keep in mind that there is no such thing as a naive appeal to experience. The man who says, "Well, my experience tells me such-and-such" has not ended discussion, but just begun it. As philosophical theologiaJ~ John Smith argues, every appeal "carries with it a theory of experience, some principle indicating what expe-rience is and how much it is supposed to contain.''8 Conflicts between superiors and consecrated men, between individuals and their communities, commonly grow from different appreciations of experience. The second reason we need to be aware of the con-tent of experience is that the teaching church is changing its approach to experience, but is no more consistent than any of us in what content it puts into the word. Review for Religious Now let me turn to the three topics I mean to open: the pre-conciliar and modern, the council, and the postconciliar or post-modern. Preconciliar and Modern Times I begin with a story. In 1947 a young man of sixteen boarded a train on his way to a novitiate. Answering the questions of the novice-master, his back straight and shoulders squared, he explained his call. He felt drawn to a military life (his father had sent him to a military school). But he thumped the oak arm of his chair--absolutely, God wanted him to be a religious and a priest. Fifty years later, he remains both. The year 1947 came in the evening of modern times. What is modernity? How had it affected our experience of God in Christ? Intellectual historians generally concur on certain qualifies. Albert Borgmann, for instance, identifies as marks of modernity an aggressive realism (we experiment to know and we intend to con-trol life and nature with our knowledge); methodical universalism (any empirically established truth is true in every realm and in any culture); and rugged individualism (the person comes to be over against the community). Aggressive Realism. In the 1950s we perceived the modern uni-verse, unlike the medieval Christian cosmos, as impersonal and governed by regular laws that had to be understood mathemati-cally. We felt free to tear out forests, dig up mountains, and blow a hole in the earth's atmosphere. As we grew absorbed in this aggressive realism, in Richard Tarnas's words, "God was now dis-tantly removed from the physical universe, as creator and archi-tect, and was now less a God of love, miracle, redemption, or historical intervention than a supreme intelligence and first cause.''9 1 have the clearest recollection from the early 1950s of being instructed by a spiritual book written by a Frenchman and translated by a North American to turn at the end of a period of prayer and with whole heart and great fervor pray to "my First Cause." 10 This kind of realism seriously trammeled our experience of God, in part because that realism was magnified by a centuries-long failure in the church to develop anything like an adequate theology of creation,~ as John Courtney Murray argued in his book, The Problem of God. In modern times we spoke about God's Septonber-October 1998 Tetlow ¯ The Experience of God in Consecrated Life providence or God's will, both exercised, in some measure, in dis-tans. But we had lost the strong sense of God continually, con-stantly creating us and personally calling us.~2 Most religious are still surprised and delighted to hear that we are in an intimate relationship with God the ongoing Creator. In truth, our God had some of the aspects of the rationalists' Great Watchmaker who created the earth and spun it off to do its own work. Notice that the experience of God in consecrated life in the West has been countercultural and is an important gift to the Western church, as Vita consecrata points OUt.13 It also has to be the source of a renewed theology of creation for the church (one thinks of Teilhard de Chardin). Rugged Individualism. Just a century ago the West gave scien-tific sanction to individualism in social Darwinism's "survival of the fittest." So the powerful grabbed oil, railroad lands, monopolies in finance, and so on; the less than powerful were taught to blame themselves. Between Vatican Councils I and II, between the first automobile and the first manned space vehicle, the socioeconomic program of the West, in Roberto Mangabeira Unger's words, was "to turn all society into a world of patrons and clients.''~4 Furthermore, this was certainly the methodical program of the Communist elites (only six percent of China's population) and arguably the established program of the rest of the world. Princes and rich landowners lavished patronage; their clients begged help. Colonial powers favored a native elite (that now rules seventy-five new nations); the natives depended on them. Bosses ruled "their" workers; bishops had "their" priests; religious superiors had "their" subjects. All these were "clients," including the reli-gious, who leaned on (the Indo-European root of "client" is klei, to incline to or lean on). their superiors. This patron/client relationship flourished in the church, which Catholics were taught to conceive of as a "perfect" society, that.is, a visible society fully equipped for its purposes with autonomous rights and resources, with powers of jurisdiction, legislation, and administration, and, in words of Pius XlI in Mystici Corporis, a society lifted "above the whole natural order [by] the Spirit of the Redeemer, who., penetrates every part of the church's being and is active within it.''~s We religious exhorted one another to dependence on our superiors. I do not speak critically here. We must empathize with this earlier perspective on authority. Authority was felt to be, in itself, profoundly benevolent to the Review for Religious subject, creative, and ultimately successful in making people what God wished them to be, Modern people simply did what they were told by superiors, and if some of them acted immorally-- remember Eichmann--many others flourished under good lead-ership. And tens of thousands of consecrated men lived holy and productive lives by doing what they were told. It was in this con-text that a young man (just like the one who took that train in 1947), when told .by his master of novices to tie his hands to his bedstead to avoid nocturnal pollution, at first obeyed confidently. I say "at first," for there was a shadow side to this embrace of authority. As Donald Gelpi has written, "submission of one's own will to a superior [was] subtly trans-formed from a means into an end in itself." 16 The religious subjects had an. easy way to personal holiness, and, superiors could ask them to be instruments of our congregations, instruments, we confidently believed, in God's hands. Very commonly it is this instrumentalism that conservatives yearn to recapture. One man said as much to me as he was planning a par-ticularly egregious action against some liberal Christians: "I just want to be a hammer in God's hands." What did he think he is? Who had responsibility for his harmful activities? Authority, and its instruments, were experienced as univer-sally valid until the very late stages of modernism. This century's experiences--the Holocaust, the Soviet Union's Gulag, Idi Amin, My Lai, terrorism, governmental lying, the totalitarian habit of "disappearing" people---have changed our appreciation of author-ity. In earlier modernity it was perceived as benevolent; at moder-nity's end, it has come to be perceived as malevolent or at best deeply ambiguous. Even consecrated men may nowadays won-der, at a letter from superiors, What do they want now? At the end of modernity, as Hannah Arendt argued, we have to study what authority once was to come to any realistic appreciation of it. This situation is, in part, the fruit of rugged individualism. Methodical Universalism. If the secular world gladly embraced empiricism as a universal method, the church embraced scholas- We had lost the strong sense of God continually, constantly creating us and persona, lly calling us. Septentber-October 1998 Tetlow ¯ The Experience of God in Consecrated Life ticism as gladly. Before Vatican II, the teaching church was insist-ing on a unique philosopbia perennis, a single intellectual approach to meaning in human life. This insistence expressed a methodical universalism; it belonged more to modernity than to revelation. Scientists rigidly adhered to what they considered induction; Catholics rigidly adhered to deduction. One reviewer in 1949 called a masterwork by Garrigou-Lagrange "an outstanding exam-ple of the ability of a master scientist to draw a whole system of practical conclusions from a single principle.''17 The book was The Three Ages of the Interior Life, and the reviewer resonated with the book's methodical universalism.18 Integral to that methodical universalism was the firm con-viction that nature had an intrinsic order, put there by God and functioning flawlessly. Unaided reason could perceive this order with certitude (one of my philosophy professors liked to cite the Letter to the Romans). This modern trust in reason unrelated to God'.s "ongoing revelation transmuted the church's philosophical commitment to a "natural law." The trust in reason and law affected consecrated life, too: "Keep the rule, and the rule will keep you." As the 20th century progressed, we learned that nature ordered itself by evolution--having been so created by God at the time of the Big Bang. Catholics were quicker than most to accept that scientific theory as fact. Then we learned also that each person evolves, comes to be, grows, from some interior prin-ciple. The combination, grew to an insistence on "authenticity." Hence, as one author summarized the development, "in contrast with the medieval Christian worldview, modern man's indepen-dence- intellectual, psychological, spiritual--was radically affirmed, with increasing depreciation of any religious belief or institutional structure that would inhibit man's natural right and potential for existential autonomy and individual self-expres-sion." 19 He has caught most of the shibboleths of the 1960s, the pseudo-ideas, the decaying core convictions of modernity: inde-pendence, radical, institutional, structures, natural right, auton-omy, self-expression. These are the "plastic words" that many of us used when pushing far in the conciliar reforms.2° Vatican II and the Return to Roots Here is another story. Around 1967 a man from a religious com-munity made a workshop-retreat. He had been busy running a college Review for Religious and raising funds; he had never made a directed retreat or listened to one of the well'known spiritual gums. About a month a#er his expe-rience, he told another man in his community that the retreat had been powerful. He had never known, really known, that God accepts him, that God loves him as he is. He wept as he recounted the experience. In complex and varying ways, modernity had shaped the con-secrated life before Vatican II. Now we were called by the great decree Petfectae caritatis to return to our roots, to leave nature alone for a w, hile and go back to history. We needed to re-create our communities, an immensely conse-quential effort, which meant recovering ¯ our history. Some of us found that our communities were hardly living our full histories. I was astonished, for instance, to find out that St. Ignatius Loyola did not found the Society of Jesus all alone, but led a committee of friends in the Lord. to found the Company. (I have never been sure what that committee tells us about Jesuits.) One of the great consequences was a deep shift in leadership style from hierar-chical power to discerning authority, a genuinely splendid achieve-ment. Superiors decided that they were called, in Ann Ida Gannon's bold phrase, "for the service of [their] fellow religious.''~ They learned to be servant-leaders, adopting a leadership style that rejects power and governs by authority. So we began to reha-bilitate authority, and to reconnect the modern individualist to the community. Authority, which humankind always needs, is the ability so to arrange a lifeworld that those served by authority desire in great freedom to follow its decisions. Fully exercised, leadership by authority elicits and empowers the authority of every individual. For in its roots--note the Latin nounauct0r (originator, doer, author) and verb augere (increase)~authority names a human per-son's self-actualization and growth, which cannot happen to a person except in connection with a community. We need to pur-sue a difficult notion here: the concept of the self. Under the weight of modern individualism, we came to think of the self as isolated, estranged--all those anguishes of existentialism. We came to appreciate the self as having no extension, independent Fully exercised, leadership by authority elicits and empowers the authority of every individual. Septentber-October 1998 Tetlow ¯ The Experience of God in Consecrated Life not only of our bodies but even of our experiences. We have all heard people say that they can "use their experience," as though it were a computer program. We have heard that a woman "has a right over her own body" as though it were something like a suit-case. Charles Taylor summarized all this as "the punctiliar self.''22 The self has become like a little point floating through our life-world, our own life history, our experiences, convictions, body parts. For our topic, the important thing to notice is that, when the conciliar renewal arrived, we were all thinking of the self detached from our own experience and over against the commu-nity. When one of us said "I personally think." he really meant "I individually think"--that is, over against the rest of society. For person had come to mean individual and had been cut off from society. Only during postmodernity, with its search for commu-nity, did we recover the truth that no human person can exist apart from the human community. We are not angels. We might note one final rather abstruse but intensely conse-quential point. The modern concept of self, split off in Catholic life from any adequate theology of ongoing creation, let us conceive of our autonomy as almost divine. That concept entailed both the "denial of death" that philosophers have noted in some cultures and also an attempt at repudiating creaturehood. Thus, many could retract their permanent commitments and their priestly vows: "It was not my true self." At the beginning of this century, theolo-gians wrote of a triad: God, man, and creatures. Listen to the incompleteness of the modernist expression in Canon Four of the Roman Missal: "You have created man and set him over all crea-tures." Not "over all other creatures"; just "over all creatures." After the council we in consecrated life once again began to hear all other creatures "speak to us in 'their own right," and it is not an accident that consecrated men and women have been leading the so-called "ecological spirituality" movement.23 Postmodernism and Expe~ience A thirdstory. In 1987 more thanfifty men from oneprovince made a retreat together. They listened to briefpresentations during the day and prayed in silence. In the evenings they sat around and talked about themselves: How did I get my vocation, what was the hardest obedience I ever faced, where has the cross been in my life? Each said what he wished to say, the young and the 6ld; no one answered another; no one Review for Religious was forced to speak. Ten years later the men still remember that expe-rience. It drew them into communion. They even found out that they liked one another. Describing postmodernity is like describing where you are in a vast desert. There are markers, of course; but they are very hard to discern. I particularly like a triad developed by philosopher Albert Borgmann, whom I have already cited: "For each of the modern principles a counter possibility is emerging: information processing in place of aggressive realism, flexible specialization instead of methodical universalism, and informed cooperation rather than rugged individualism.''24 This is a description of global culture, but perhaps you recognize these emerging experiences: Information processing: Once we worked by the rule; now we read the signs of the times and discern. Flexible specialization: Once we legislated apostolic work; now we inculturate, make the option for the poor, and try to keep faithful to our charism. Informed cooperation: Once our ideal of obedience was the blind man being led; now we dialogue, discern, and even as we are given a mandate we remember that we are, each of us, free men. This is conse-crated life in a postmodern world. We are not likely to comprehend the experience in any seri-ous way unless we accept that postmodernity sees experience as a construct of many elements. This construct is intentional (of and by and for and with other persons and things); derivative (from other experiences and other things); and dialogic (moving in and out, back and forth, between old self and new self). Let me take each of these marks of experience and suggest a thought or two about consecrated life. Constructed. Experience is constructed. It incorporates a past and moves into a future; it combines social, cultural, intellectual, emotive, aesthetic; it entails sensations, memories, desires, and perceptions. Thus, even Descartes's insight Cogito ergo sum--one of the deepest roots of modern individualism--was in a language (Latin) that many past and present spoke. He had the insight with a brain incorporating DNA from two other persons. He felt emo-tions and conviction. Every experience is thus constructed, so that George Schner can correctly claim, "There is a sense in which no experience is strictly 'mine.'''25 The experience of living a consecrated life is also, quite obvi-ously, a construct. Each of us had a unique experience when tak-ing vows, yet we used a formul~ used by thousands before us. And September-October 1998 Tetlow * The Experience of God in Consecrated Life we promised to live these vows accordi

Issue 57.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1998. ; religious Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1998 ¯ VOLUME 57 ¯ NUMBER 1 Review for Religious is a forum for. shared reflection on the lived experience~ of all who find, that the church's rich heritages of gpirituality support their personal and apostolic ¯ Christian lives. The articles in ~he journal are meant to be informative, practical, historical, or inspirational, written from a theological or spiritual or sometimes canonical point of view. Review for Religious (1SSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the .Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: FOPPEMA@SLU.EDU Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP 1150 Cedar Cove Road ¯ Henderson, NC 27536 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1998 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) cbntained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this perxnission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for r ligiou$ Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming sJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read James and Joan Felling Kathryn Richards FSP Joel Rippinger OSB Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1998 ¯ VOLUME 57 ¯ NUMBER 1 contents 34 48 leadership Congregational Leadership and Spirituality in the Postmodern Era Sandra M. Schneiders IHM offers an analysis of changing worldviews as an aid to understanding present-day religious congregations and exercising effective leadership in them. Leadership for the Common Good Donna J. Markham OP focuses on three areas of leadership skill development: conflict management, guarding against "groupthink," and promoting communal efficacious action. Hearts Afire: Leadership in the New Millennium Anne Munley IHM sees congregational leadership as being the work of impassioned hearts sharing, finding, and making meaning in concert with all the members, with a view to warm cooperation in endeavors of burning urgency. 60 67 tradition Stability: A Monastic Charism Retrieved Joel Rippinger OSB explores stability as a matter of heart and place in the light of contemporary rootedness. History's Role in Defining Spiritual Direction Steve R. Wigall proposes that contemporary spiritual direction needs to embrace openly its historical and theological variety. Review for Religious 77 88 prayer Today's Contemplative Prayer Forms: Are They Contemplation? Ernest E. Larkin OCarm takes a discerning look at contemporary personal prayer practice and terminology against the background of centuries-long traditions. Union with God according to John of the Cross Paul J. Bernadicou SJ describes some aspects of the sanjuanist process towards intimacy with God. departments 4 Prisms 94 Canonical Counsel: Life Consecrated by Profession of the Evangelical Counsels 100 Book Reviews Jant~aty-Februat~ 1998 I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life. prisms 4 T citizens of the United States in recent years have been reinforcing a reputation for being a people that has lost its sense of the sanctity of human life. After a brief lull in the use of the death penalty for what is considered heinous crimes, more and more individual states have been seeking execution for serious crimes committed by both men and women. Then, when we look to the beginning of life, we find that abortion in the United States, even in late term, is justified through the most permissive legal understanding allowed by any Western nation. Finally, when we consider the possible end of life, assisted suicide for the elderly or for the chron-ically ill is already legal in one state and is being promoted by a number of people who defend what is euphemisti-cally called "mercy killing." As we come ~o the last years of this millennium, this most powerful, prosperous, and well-educated nation is sadly being identified as a people that readily "takes life." The year 1998 focuses upon the Holy Spirit in our Christian preparations for entering into the third millen-nium guided by the pastoral plan presented to us by Pope John Paul. Whatever the strength of our faith, the Holy Spirit is the Trinitarian Person most difficult for us to talk about, t9 imagine, and to relate to. Spirit, breath, wind, love, fire are words that in themselves have no face nor even a substance that can be grasped. And yet these are some of the common, traditional words applied to the One we call the Third Person of our Trinitarian God. We might, though, begin this second year of our preparations for the millennium by calling in prayer upon the Spirit by a name appropriate to the times in which we live. Review for Religious In the Nicene Creed we express our belief in the Person called the Holy Spirit, professing first that he is Lord God and then designating this Person as "the Giver of life." What a wonderful identity--Giver of life--especially in regard to a people earning a reputation as "takers of life." It seems obvious that a basic gift we seek from God in this year 1998 is a renewed reverence, respect, and appreciation for human life. Throughout this year, perhaps we all need an examination of conscience on behavior involving us as "takers of life." "Takers of life" can involve an attitude which sullies our approach to any part of God's creation--each part a gift from God. We can become so self-centered that everything--from the ecological environ-ment to the earth's resources to human life itself--is viewed in its value now for us. Takers of life know no gratitude, for life is not seen in terms of gifting but only in terms of getting, a disease of a consumer society. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit will inspire and guide our efforts to be, like God, gi,vers of life. The age-old prayer still speaks out our desire: "Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful." Review for Religious continues to have its own experience of life being given to us. New life continues to flow into our Advisory Board as some members finish their term of service, and new members join. We welcome Sister Kathryn Richards FSP, vice-provincial of the USA province of the Daughters of St. Paul and executive director of the twenty Pauline Book and Media Centers in the USA and English-speaking Canada. She is also the direc-tor of Paulinas Distribudora, the Daughters' Hispanic media dis-tribution center, and the director of the National Association of Pauline Cooperators, the lay collaborators of the Daughters of St. Paul. In addition we welcome Bishop Carlos Sevilla SJ, bishop of the diocese of Yakima, Washington. Bishop Sevilla serves as a member of the NCCB committees on Hispanic affairs and on religious life and ministry. Before his ordination as bishop, he had filled administration and formation roles in the Society of Jesus (California province). Farewells are always harder to express than welcomes. I want to express my appreciation to Father Edmundo Rodriguez SJ and to Sister Iris Ann Ledden $SND for their many contributions to the advisory board over the years of their service. We remain grateful for their continuing interest and support. David L. Fleming SJ January-Febr~,aot 1998 o o o o o o leadership SANDRA M. SCHNEIDERS Congregational Leadership and Spirituality in the Postmodern Era In addressing the issue of leadership in congregations which are increasingly influenced by the emergence of cultural postmodernism, I write not as one who is engaged in leadership or trained in the fields of organization and management, but as a theologian reflecting on the spiri-tuality of contemporary religious. But part of my prepa-ration for these reflections involved talking with a number of religious in leadership positions, asking them what were the major challenges they faced as leaders. One woman, by means of a highly symbolic vignette, epitomized what many others expressed. She said that, if one prepared an agenda for a meeting far enough ahead of time for the participants to come prepared, the first item on the agenda would be the revision of the agenda because the actual situation in the congregation would have changed so sig-nificantly that neither the items on the agenda nor their relative importance would be what they had been when the agenda was formulated. In other words, the challenges about which leaders talked were not so much specific problems but pandemic unpredictability and uncontrol-lability. While leaders face particular challenges because of Sandra M. Schneiders IHM presented this paper, here slightly revised, to the Leadership Conference of Woxnen Religious on 23 August 1997 in Rochester, New York. She is professor of New Testament Studies and Christian Spirituality at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, where her address is JSTB; 1735 LeRoy Avenue; Berkeley, California 94709. Review for Religious their public role and more global responsibilities, the situation which makes leadership so difficult today is the same one all of us in religious life face, namely, the context of chaos within which we are trying to live religious life coherently and minister effectively. It is this peculiarly contemporary experience and its significance for spirituality that requires analysis and engagement. Whether or not we articulate it explicitly, we are always living, thinking, working within and out of some implicit worldview which defines both the problems and the potentialities of our historical situation.~ Until we come to some understanding of that world-view, we stand little chance of developing an operative spirituality. How we understand reality in general, religious life in particular, and our own congregation specifically determines what we think we are doing as religious leaders or followers. A worldview is like light or a pair of glasses. We do not notice its role in what and how we see until it flickers or gets cloudy. Furthermore, until relatively recently we were unaware of the plurality of worldviews because we thought that what we saw was simply what is, rather than what is visible through a particular set of lenses which not everyone in the world is wearing. Until the mid-sixties Catholics in general and religious in particular lived within a peculiarly schizophrenic worldview whose intrinsic con-tradictions seldom came clearly into view. Within the institution and culture of the cht~rch, we lived out of a medieval worldview in which society was organized according to an ontologically based, and therefore unchangeable, hierarchy of status and roles; in which all reality could and must be explained in the categories of an Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy and the-ology; and in which the next world, and therefore religion, held a clear priority over the present world and its concerns. However, outside the church arena we lived out of a modern worldview in which democratic capitalism constructed an economically com-petitive society within a deceptive rhetoric of personal equality. The explanation of reality in this modern world was supplied by the confluence of the dualistic philosophy of Descartes, the mechanistic physics of Newton, the deterministic biology of Darwin, and the materia.listic hydraulics of Freudian psychology. The practical priority of this world over the afterlife was expressed in the banishing of religious concerns from public life to the pri-vate realm of family and church. Although these two worldviews, medieval and modern, were Januat3,-Februat~y 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality largely incompatible, what they had in common may be more sig-nificant for our present considerations than how they differed. Both of these worldviews presented chaos as the ultimate enemy and order as the ultimate good. It is hardly surprising, then, that we are uncomfortable to the point of panic amid the unpre-dictability and uncontrollability of so much of our experience today. And, the more people, property, and projects we are respon-sible for, the more threatening and even paralyzing widespread chaos in our domain of responsibility is likely to be. However, as cultural critics are increasingly convinced, the modern worldview itself is rapidly giving way to what is being called postmodernirm, a worldview that is still largely inchoate and unarticulated, but which is actually conditioning our experience more deeply and extensively than we can yet appreciate.2 Characteristic of this emerging worldview is what is being called the "new science" or quantum physics,3 which is not only calling into question the adequacy of Newtonian science to explain the natural or physical world, but implying the necessity for a new, cosmologically based philosophy that sees much deeper connec-tions between matter and spirit, between humans and the rest of reality, between this world and whatever transcends it.4 Implied in the collapse of the classical dualisms is ~i revisioning of chaos and order which may open up some possibilities for reinterpreting our present experience within religious life. Although I have been reading voraciously in the new science for a while, I do not claim to understand, much less be able to explain, quantum physics. What I want to do, however, is to use a few of its basic categories, namely, autopoietic structures, fields, and strange attractors, as metaphors for thinking about contem-porary experience in religious congregations. After exploring these categories from the new science in relation to religious life, I will try to make'some suggestions that are theologically sound, spir-itually vital, and culturally plausible about our current experience of religious life and leadership. Autopoietic Structures Margaret Wheatley, in her wonderfully provocative book Leadership and the New Science, brings together new ideas from biology, chemistry, and quantum physics which are analogous in suggesting that order and chaos are not contradictories, but that Review for Religious order emerges from chaos as from its matrix,s Furthermore, con-trol is not synonymous with order nor does it produce stability. Rather, control causes a deadly immobility or stasis which ulti-mately dooms the structure to disintegration. This phenomenon of the constructive relationship between chaos and order is characteristic of living organisms. Erich Jantsch, whom Wheatley cites, describes autopoiesis as "the characteristic of liv-ing systems [by which they] continu-ously renew themselves and., regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is main-tained.'' 6 In other words, living things maintain their integrity and identity not by eliminating change, but by continu-ous, dynamic interaction with their environment. It is equilibrium, not change, that is fatal! However, the history of religious life in the United States from the 19th century until Vatican II was character-ized by steadily increasing equilibrium and control and steadily decreasing interaction with the environment.7 After the chaotic pioneering days--when our founders and foundresses braved the rigors of frontier life using everything that came to hand, secular and profane included, to survive personally and institutionally-- American religious life settled into a rigidly defined and tightly controlled pattern within an increasingly battened-down eccle-siastical institution. Interchange with the environment was ever more stringently controlled and, to the extent possible, elimi-nated. We understood our congregations as Newtonian machine-like systems composed of virtually identical parts, operating according to established laws of motion codified in Rules and. customs books and functioning best when no part acted in orig-inal, that is, "singular" ways. Leaders functioned somewhat like factory managers maintaining strict control (erroneously seen as order) for the sake of spiritual and ministerial efficiency. Newtonian physics, which supplied this machine model for all systems, also gave us the laws of thermodynamics which gov-ern such systems. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, when a system reaches equilibrium, entropy or disintegration We are uncomfortable to the point of panic amid the unpredictability and uncontrollability of so mucl of our experience today. Janllary-Februaty 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality sets in. We moderns learned that this law of increasing entropy or the inevitable wearing down of systems was also characteristic of living things (which we understood as basically very complicated machines) and certainly true of organizations such as religious congregations.8 What the new science is telling us is that social organizations are not entropic like machines, but more like living organisms, which are autopoietic, that is, self-renewing. The basis of autopoiesis or self-re-creation is the openness of organisms to their environment. As Wheatley says, Each structure has a unique identity, a clear boundary, yet it is merged with its environment . What we observe. ¯ in all living entities, are boundaries that both preserve us from and connect us to the infinite complexity of the out-side world. Autopoiesis, then, points to a different universe. Not the fragile, fragmented world we attempt to hold together, but a universe rich in processes that support growth and coherence, individuality and community.9 When we look at religious congregations of the 1950s, we see relatively hermetically sealed organizations operating accord-ing to the quantitative laws of mechanics. Numbers, material resources, institutional agencies of influence, and hierarchical control of all operations were the sources of efficiency. The cat-aclysm of Vatican II and its immediate predecessors in religious life such as the Sister Formation Movement suddenly opened these closed systems to their environment. New information of all kinds flooded the system. Sisters studied new disciplines in secu-lar as well as religious universities and interacted with a variety of people they formerly would never have encountered in any mean-ingful way. The mass media and the uncensored contents of libraries burst through the boundaries of the closed system. And then Vatican II called on congregations to reevaluate those old-world traditions which had so effectively kept religious out of the mainstream of American culture. Ministries changed dramatically and, with them, living situations. Contacts with other religious and with the laity, stringently rationed in previous times, broad-ened and deepened. In short, religious congregations suddenly drew deep breaths of fresh air and discovered that they were not ecclesiastical robots but sociospiritual organisms, living systems in vital interaction with their environment. Increasingly congregations, and their relatively uniform mem-bers, began to exhibit the characteristics of autopoietic structures. Review for Religious Perhaps the most unsettling characteristic is that a healthy liv-ing system is in a continuous state of disequilibrium. New infor-mation, constantly flowing into the system from the environment, challenges it to respond, to change, and to develop without loss of integrity or identity. There is no settling down, no way to call off the bombardment of the new and just be. There are no per-manently right answers, no one correct way to do things, no abso-lute authority. The organism is always off balance. Local chaos is the normal condition out of which global order is continuously being both threatened and resourced. Another characteristic of autopoietic structures, precisely because they are not in balance but precariously poised in the turbulence of a constantly changing ambiance, is that very small influences can have very significant effects on the system. In mechan-ical entities, significant change is usually proportionate to the mass of the influencing agents. Large groups, sizable funds, long-range plans are necessary to alter the status quo. But in a living system a small agent, for example, a virus, can have tremendous impact because it can galvanize the whole organism into response.'° The effect of one book like The Nun in the Modern World, or one speaker like Theresa Kane, is out of all proportion to the mass of the cause. One person generating negative energy can immobilize a whole assembly while one visionary chapter pro-posal can propel the whole congregation into self-renewal. A third feature of living systems is that they are programmed toward life. In this respect they are the very antithesis of the machine. Once entropy has set in, the machine inevitably and irreversibly winds down toward disintegration.11 But, even when very diminished, very endangered, the living system is mobilized toward self-renewal, toward regeneration. I think the merging of some small communities and the combining of facilities among others are examples of this salmonqike burst of upstream energy characteristic of open systems. Fourth, self-organizing systems'are bundles of competencies, "portfolios of skills," rather than collections of optimally func-tioning units,lz This feature has been ve.ry prominent in post-conciliar congregations. V~rhen individual religious or congregations decide that a particular institution or form of ministry no longer responds to the environment and they reconfigure competencies to meet new needs, it seems to me that they are manifesting an organic self-understanding, not, as some seem to think, a des- January-February 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality perate need to' find something useful to do until the corporate lights go out. Fifth, as Wheatley says, self-r~newing systems are "structures that seem capable of maintaining an identity while changing form. They exhibit "global stability" over time even as their subsystems undergo enormous, seemingly chaotic, change. I was struck by this feature of living systems when I first saw the Great Barrier Reef, the largest organism on earth. This enormous living sys-tem has a form that makes it so distinct from its oceanic envi-ronment that it is even recognizable from the moon, and yet every cell of its vast expanse is undergoing incessant change. Most reli-gious can remember the stupendous resistance to even minor, external changes in religious congregations on the eve of Vatican II. We could hardly conceive of a maintenance of identity through incessant change, and any attempt to engage the environment seemed like a sellout to secularity. But autopoietic structures main-tain their identity precisely by changing in response to environ-mental influence. Obviously not all living systems survive, much less thrive. What determines whether an organism will successfully negotiate what Wheatley calls the "bifurcation point" where the choice between death and transformation occurs? ~4 Wheatley maintains that the deciding factor is what she calls the principle of "self-ref-erence." Healthy organisms do not change randomly or in any and all directions. Rather, they change in ways that are both respon-sive to the environment arid consistent with their own already established identity. A firmly established identity makes the organ-ism both responsive and resilient, both dialogical and autonomous. Whereas a static system constructs external boundaries, fences designed to keep out the influence of the environment and hold the assemblage of units together, the healthy organism develops organic boundaries which make it increasingly autonomous in relation to external pressures even as it remains deeply involved in the ongoing process of iriterchange. Unlike a fence which sim-ply walls out the "other," the organic surface of the Great Barrier Reef is both a resource for relationship with the environment and a self-defining boundary. "Self-reference is what facilitates orderly change in turbulent environments.''~5 This raises directly the question of identity. If religious life itself, religious congregations, and individual religious are open, autopoietic systems whose incessant interaction with the envi- Review for Religious ronment is governed by the principle of self-reference, that is, fidelity to core identity in the midst of continual disequilibrium, what establishes that identity? How is it recognized and main-tained? Fields To begin to get some purchase on this issue, I want to intro-duce a second metaphor from the new science, the familiar but mysterious category of "field." Religious life has always involved the creation by some Christians, "religious virtuosi" in the ter-minology of sociologist Patricia Wittberg,'6 of an alternative "world" within which to live their faith, whether that was a sociologi-cal, geographical, or institutional reality construction.~7 The expres-sion so often used for entering reli-gious life, namely, "leaving the world," was a negative articulation of the positive act of choosing an alternative arena for one's life. Today, speaking of entering reli-gious life as "leaving the world" is so probleinatic as to be counterpro-ductive. Nevertheless, there is something about religious life which distinguishes it from other forms of life. It has an identity. Like the Great Barrier Reef, it stands out from its cultural and ecclesiastical environment even while being involved in continu-ous interchange with it. Perhaps a better metaphor or model for understanding the identity of religious life than the quasi-geo-graphical one of alternative world is the category of "fields." Science has made us aware that reality is composed not pri-marily of substances but of space. Space, however, is not empty. Rather, "space everywhere is now thought to be filled with fields, invisible, non-material structures that are the basic substance of the universe."ls Fields are invisible geometries structuring space, invisible media of connection bringing matter an&or energy into form. We cannot see fields any more than we can see space, but we can observe the effects of fields on that which comes within their influence. We have all seen this mysterious phenomenon in operation when iron filings come within the field of magnetic Perhaps a better metaphor or model for understanding the identity of religious life is the category of "fields." January-Februaty 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality influence and arrange themselves in certain patterns. Wheatley hypothesizes that personal and corporate space is also filled with fields, both positive and negative, and that, when the personal fields of the people in an organization intersect with the corpo-rate fields of the organization itself, certain predictable behav-iors are manifest. I find this metaphor very descriptive of a frequently experi-enced phenomenon, namely, that the same people behave very differently in situations which do not, exteriorly, differ notice-ably. Something "in the air" (or, perhaps more accurately, "in the space") affects them, for good or ill, and often everyone in the situation is similarly affected. We sometimes call it morale, or good or bad energy, or social climate. Sometimes we even speak of being "in good or bad space." We also know that an individual who is personally "in bad space" either can be pulled out of it by entering positive corporate space or can cause positive space to curdle. Social space, in our experience, seems to be really invisi-bly structured. Perhaps this metaphor of fields could help illuminate the issues of corporate and personal identity that religious have strug-gled with for years under the rubrics of "charism" and "vocation" and their intersection in the mysterious corporate identity prin-ciple called the "spirit of the congregation." Probably the only thing we have agreed on in regard to charism is that it is a mys-terious something that generates a certain recognizable congre-gational identity. Some have tried to equate it with the congregation's traditional ministry, or to identify it as a grace given to the foundress which was somehow passed on to later members, or to find it embodied in a characteristic spirituality. None of these explanations has proved very satisfactory, and all fail in relation to one or another congregation. Wheatley suggests that social fields are generated as people converse, share their visions and hopes, work out their problems, develop modes of interacting, participate in common projects, elaborate symbols and myths to articulate their shared identity and experience?9 In other words, groups create or generate fields. When coherent fields are generated in corporate space, people are drawn together; they begin to act in corporate ways. Eventually the group ethos can be recognized in the members. This sounds very much like what we mean by charism, an invis-ible structuring of corpor.ate space which manifests itself in the Review for Religious indefinable "something common" that is visible in the attitudes and behaviors of all the members. Furthermore, fields, once gen-erated, can outlast the individuals or groups that generated them. Perhaps what comes down through history from our foundations is not some work, set of rules, or uniform spirituality to which new members must conform, but a structured shared space that continues to give common form to ever new energy coming into the congregation in new members. When a new individual comes into this space, her own per-sonal fields intersect with the corporate fields of the congregation and the person is either drawn into and ener-gized by this cgrporate space or not. If vocation were understood as a certain constellation of overlapping fields in an individual personality's inner space, structuring that person's energy and behavior, her entering a congregation would involve the intersection of her personal vocational field with the fields of the particular congregation, especially its charism. Vocational discernment could be understood, then, as try-ing to discover if her personal fields and the congregation's corporate fields are mutually compatible and enriching or not. When the fields that structure the inner space of an individual (that is, her own voca-tion or life call) intersect creatively and har-moniously with the fields that structure the corporate space of a congregation (that is, its charism and other characteristic fea-tures), we often say that the person has "the spirit of the congre-gation." When the members of a congregation are together in "good space," they often feel "the spirit of the congregation." Perhaps what we mean by the spirit of the congregation is the global identity of the group as it manifests itself within the complex of fields that invisibly but really structures the personal into the cor-porate. 2° To use this field metaphor for understanding charism, voca-tion, and the spirit of the congregation does not reduce these realities to the purely natural any more than accounting for the universe by the theory of the "big bang" or for human emergence by evolution denies the divine role in creation. The metaphor simply offers us a more organic way of understanding the human When the members of a congregation are together in "good space," they often feel "the spirit of the congregation." Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality experience of stable and shared congregational identity in the midst of incessant change. It also provides a possible answer to the question about self-reference as the key to coherence for an open, autopoietic sys-tem experiencing continuous life-giving disequilibrium. In a sense, nothing observable in the congregation remains the same--type of ministry, horarium and content of spiritual exercises, commu-nity lifestyle, dress codes, financial practices, patterns ~of inter-acting-- but the field, the spirit of the congregation, in which all the change takes place can account for the ever new order which arises out of the seemingly chaotic pluralism and incessant vari-ation that characterize the community's day-to-day life over time. The Strange Attractor A third possibly illuminating metaphor, drawn from the new science, is that of the "strange attractor," a simple example of which many of us have seen as the computer screen saver of inces-santly changing lines and curves which maintain a moving form that is never repeated. Wheatley says this about the "strange attractor": Chaos theory has given us images of "strange attractors"-- computer pictures of swirling motion that trace the evolu-tion of a system. A system is defined as chaotic when it becomes impossible to know where it will be next. There is no predictability; the system never is in the same place twice. But as chaos theory shows, if we look at such a sys-tem long enough and with the perspective of time, it always demonstrates its inherent orderliness. The most chaotic of systems never goes beyond certain boundaries; it stays con-tained within a shape that we can recognize as the system's strange attractor . '~ This description seems very pertinent to the history of religious life, not to mention that of individual congregations. Religious life has undergone so much movement, so much deep-level change, that it is indeed impossible to know where it will be next. It is never in the same place twice. At times it seems to be in total disarray. And yet, over its nearly two-thousand-year history, it demonstrates a moving pattern which makes it recognizable, distinguishable against the background field of ecclesial life. What, we may ask, is the strange attractor of religious life? A strange attractor is a basin for the system's activity that Review for Religious pulls all activity within the system into a form or shape but with-out immobilizing the system or reducing its inner variety to pre-dictability. The strange attractor itself is not visible. It manifests itself by its power to allow a few simple "instructions," for exam-ple, equations, to repeat and intersect as they feed back upon themselves in an infinite variety of ways so that these iterations create analogous forms at finer and finer levels. These forms are what we call fractals, repetitions at various levels of scale that manifest the whole in each part. Our most homely example is probably a head of broccoli in which each flowerette, down to the tiniest, repeats the pattern of the whole head. But we can see it also in the computer image of lines and curves, or in the clouds, or in a branch of fern. VVheatley was moved to ask the question about the strange attractor when she observed that, in terminally dysfunctional sys-tems verging on collapse, where almost everyone had psycholog-ically abandoned ship and survival had become the only agenda, there were some individuals within the dysfunctional system who continued to be personally centered, creative, and productive. Amid corporate disintegration, personal order. She also observed--in healthy organizations which allowed maximum autonomy, even seeming chaos, at the local level--that the seem-ingly chaotic variety at the local level did not lead to disintegra-tion, but to a kind of global order and stability. Out of local chaos, global order. Somehow the creative individuals in the disinte-grating systems and the healthy organizations permitting high levels of local autonomy were pulled into coherence as if a strange attractor were at work. Her highly suggestive conclusion is that the strange attractor in both cases is meaning generated by a "frame of reference," that is, a coherent vision and pattern of val-ues, which gives direction to all the seemingly disparate activity. Meaning, vision, values, however, are formal categories. What vision, what values, what meaning might be the strange attractor of religious life that accounts for its self-identity and coherence, its fractal wholeness and beauty, through nearly two millennia of chaotic movement in an often dysfunctional church?22 More importantly, is the strange attractor still at work, still generating a recognizable lifeform today in what might be one of the most chaotic periods of development in the history of religious life? Are there a few "equations" that have iterated throughout these two millennia in thousands of different fractal realizations man- January-February 1998 Schneiders * Congregational Leadership and Spirituality ifesting the strange attractor that keeps this lifeform coherent and true to itself?. From the time of the lst-century virgins until it was pro-claimed anew by Vatican II, the basic principle, the fundamental "equation," has been that religious life is essentially gospel life. The pattern of the life has been the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, perhaps the ultimate instance of order out of chaos, that is, life out of death. Of course, religious life shares this deter-mining equation with all Christian life. But religious life has also always been distinguished from lay Christian life by the particu-lar way religious have entered into the paschal mystery of Christ, by the specifically religious "equation," namely, by the life of con-secrated celibacy lived in community and mission. The strange attractor of religious life, then, may be a partic-ular kind of gospel-based relationship with Jesus Christ, expressed in freely chosen lifelong celibacy, lived in community and mis-sion, that has generated a lifeform which is distinct and recog-nizable despite enormous variety. It has reinvented itself endlessly, but from a distance and over time we can note the repeated pat-terns, its fractal wholeness. The effect of the strange attractor is a global stability and self-identity through incessant change, a particular and recognizable order out of chaos. Christian Spirituality and Congregational Leadership If these metaphors .drawn from the new science--that is, the congregation as an open and autopoietic system invisibly structured by the corporate fields that manifest in the spirit of the congre-gation within the shaping influence of the strange attractor of celi-bate living of the Gospel in community and mission--are illuminating of our current experience of religious life in our par-ticular congregations, we can ask what light they throw on the problematic of leadership. Does such a postmodern model of reli-gious life based on metaphors drawn from the new science suggest anything helpful in understanding what leadership in such sys-tems might mean today? Obviously, the image of the leader as manager whose task is to minimize disequilibrium by control of all personnel, policy, and practice is obsolete. But probably the image of the leader as the lone visionary who boldly imagines and projects goals to gal-vanize the membership toward the future is also obsolete. This is Review for Religious not because care of the community and corporate vision are not as important today as they have always been, but because we increasingly realize that they are the shared responsibility of the entire congregation.23 What is characteristic of the context of leadership today is that the kinds of systems over which leaders preside are situations which are not only uncontrollable in fact, but chaotic in principle. Chaos is the system's "steady state." Whatever leaders do today, it cannot be imagined realistically as merely the direction of reliable resources toward clearly perceived objec-tives. It has to have something to do with the creative potential of chaos itself. Even while managing the modern social systems that our congregations, at one level, certainly are, leaders are chal-lenged to engage the deep dynamics of meaning in the increasingly postmodern systems that we are becoming. It seems to me that religious life today is at the bifurcation point between death and transformation, between entropy and self-renewal, and therefore that the responsibility of leaders in relation to the deep dynamics of meaning has to do with the prin-ciple of self-reference which Wheatley identifies as the most impor-tant single determinant of self-renewal in autopoietic structures.24 The science of autopoietic systems suggests that, if the congre-gation (or religious life as a lifeform) is true to itself, in touch with and living out of its own identity, it will continue to renew itself even in the face of the massive material and ecclesiastical challenges of this historical period. If it is the case that the iden-tity of religious life lies in the celibate living of the gospel in com-munity and mission within the spirit of the particular congregation, we are at the heart of the issue. And the issue is faith. In what follows I am relying heavily on a remarkable 1995 study by a British theologian, Denys Turner, of the apophatic ele-ment in the Christian mystical tradition.2s In this book Turner is dealing with what I suspect is the most challenging issue for all of us in religious life today, but perhaps especially for those charged with the care of the community as a whole, namely, the mean-ing, reality, and integrity of Christian faith today. Religious life is fundamentally a faith reality, and the faith in question is not simply a generalized conviction that there is more to reality than meets the eye. Christian faith is both an unthe-matized openness to the ineffable Divine Mystery that has no name and a thematized participation in a particular religious tra- t--!-9- January-Februa~3~ 1998 Scisneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality 20 dition which believes that this Holy Mystery is both revealed and encountered in Jesus of Nazareth risen from the dead whose life is communicated to us in and through the gift of his Holy Spirit within the community called church. A major question today for Christians, including religious, and especially women, is whether these two aspects of faith, unthematized openness to Divine Mystery (which is not necessarily Christian) and thematic adher-ence to a particular religious tradition (namely, Christianity), are or need necessarily be related and, if they are related, how that can be personally experienced and authentically lived. Many postmodern Christians are caught in an experiential disjunction between their God-experience on the one hand and, on the other, their participation in the particular faith tradition, that is, the religion, within which they were initiated into that God-experience and which still claims to mediate it. In other words, there is an experienced disjunction between spirituality as lived faith experience and religion as articulated tradition. This may be partially due to the sudden (at least historically speaking) reversal of our evaluation of the role of experience in spirituality that coincided with the upheavals in religion of the conciliar era. Let me trace this development in broad strokes. For several centuries Christians were educated to discount feeling in the practice of religion in favor of a kind of blind faith and naked exercise of will. It was not the person who believed but the intellect; not the person who loved but the will. The body with its emotions was that which had to be overcome and sub-jected in order for the soul to seek God. This approach to the spiritual life, which effectively reduced spirituality to religious practice, was seriously challenged by at least three developments in the middle of this century. First, for all kinds of reasons that were psychological and cul-tural as well as theological, the radical wholeness of the human person began to resurface, and many believers began to reclaim the importance, perhaps even priority, of feeling in religious prac-tice. Retreat directors learned to ask people how they felt, not what they thought. Retreatants learned to be attentive to subjec-tive states of consolation .and desolation. Discernment began to take into account the person's felt response to alternative possi-bilities. Rather than considering felt religious experience unreli-able or even suspect, people began to consider it the touchstone, even the essence, of genuine spirituality. Desiring such experi- Review for Religious ence, seeking it, trusting it, living from it was no longer an aber-ration but the norm. Second, the feminist movement took hold among Catholic women, and its analysis of patriarchy enabled women to name and claim their experience of oppression in the church and to trace ecclesiastical sexism to its theological roots in Scripture and tradition. Women's experience of the Catholic religious tradition became laced with negative feeling just as they were learning that feeling was not irrelevant, but a valid and important indicator of the real. Many concluded that, if Catholic religion feels deeply alienating, Catholic spirituality may be highly suspect. Third, Catholics, for the first time, came into meaningful appreciative contact with non-Christian religious traditions where they encountered spiritualities that counteracted some of the very aspects of Christianity that were becoming increasingly problematic. The nature-affirming rituals of native American spirituality countered the overcerebral otherworldliness of traditional Catholic wor-ship. The nondualistic, nondogmatic meditation practices of Eastern mystical traditions offered an attractive alternative to the rationalistic and mechanical prayer practices of ordinary Catholic piety. Thus, at the very time that experience was becoming the touchstone of truth in the sphere of religion, both negative and positive experiences in the realm of spirituality converged to undermine adherence to the Roman Catholic Christian tradition. This has led some, perhaps many, religious to seriously question whether Catholic Christianity offers an adequate, much less a preferable, access to Holy Mystery or compelling motivation for ministry. For many the God of Christianity seems too small, too violent, and too male; the focus on Jesus Christ seems narrow and exclusive; the resurrection seems mythological if not incred-ible and, in any case, irrelevant to a world in anguish; the insti-tutional church seems hopelessly medieval, sexist, and clerical; liturgy is alienating; morality is out of touch with reality; and church ministry is a continual battle with male hostility and power There is an experienced disjunction between spirituality as lived faith experience and religion as articulated tradition. Januao~-FebruaO, 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality dynamics. Spirituality centered in personal experience was increas-ingly engrossing while religion, especially the Catholic religion, was increasingly alienating. After a certain amount of experimentation, many religious have settled into a kind of personal, often highly eclectic, spiri-tuality within the context of a nominal Christianity whose central tenets and practices are of little practical import in their lives. Their God may no longer be the God of Jesus Christ, but a non-personal, benevolent cosmic energy holding reality together in some mysterious way. Jesus may have been consigned to history as one of many prophetic figures whose memory remains moti-vating although they themselves are long dead. The Bible may no longer be, for them, revelatory or normative Scripture, but one religious classic among others. Christian sacraments may be quarries of symbolic elements which can be combined with anal-ogous elements from other traditions in the formulation of mean-ingful rituals. Prayer may be any practice from listening to music, to Zen sitting or Tai Chi, to hiking or massage which is calming and focusing and helps one keep a balance in a crazy world. In religious communities the effect of these developments in spirituality is profoundly disintegrative. It can no longer be taken for granted that the members share the same faith, a serious sit-uation for a lifeform which is based not only on faith but specif-ically on Christian faith. Members for whom Christian faith remains normative may hesitate to speak in explicitly Christian terms lest they be branded reactionary or dismissed as out of. touch with contemporary reality, while post-Christian or selec-tively Christian members may hesitate to voice their spirituality lest they shock their hearers or find themselves branded as heretics. Christian liturgical celebration at congregational events is sometimes so divisive as to be impossible. Nevertheless, wherever they are on the Christian map, reli-gious women continue to be resolutely religious, seeking God in disciplined spiritual practice, making retreats, engaging seriously in spiritual direction, reading widely and deeply in theology and spirituality, attending workshops and renewal programs. Those religious who have survived the postconciliar exodus and are still committed to both community and ministry are not indifferent to the God quest that brought them to religious life in the first place. This is the point at which the disjuncture between spirituality which is a matter of passionate concern and religion which is a Review for Religious locus of struggle and alienation is apparent; and, in my opinion, this may be the bifurcation point at which the choice between death and transformation is going to be made. We cannot afford to ignore this situation or pretend it does not really matter as long as people are sincere and committed. What is in jeopardy is not control but self-reference, the con-gregation's response to its strange attrac-tor, that is, to religious life itself as a faith reality. It seems to me that what many reli-gious are attempting is not to dispense with faith, but to find God in a kind of personal mystical quest that bypasses what are experienced as the superficiali-ties and hypocrisies, and even the vio-lence, of the official structures of institutional Catholic Christianity. In par-ticular, many are trying to find in the Christian mystical tradi-tion itself guidance for developing an apophatic or nonthematic contemplative spirituality that is experientially satisfying and moti-vating, but that bypasses the concreteness of the Christian cat-aphatic tradition with its specifically religious beliefs, liturgy, and practice. In short, it is an attempt to develop a spirituality with-out religion. Denys Turner wrote his treatise on the Christian mystical tradition, The Darkness of God, as a challenge to this contemporary development, which he calls spiritual "experientialism" and which he sees as widespread among Christians in general. Turner regards this experientialism as a kind of modernist positivism in the arena of spirituality. In other words, felt religious experience has become the "hard data" of authentic spirituality analogous to the observ-able results of laboratory experiments in modern science or the quantifiable data of sociological surveys. Personal experience has become the nonnegotiable criterion of validity in the arena of faith.26 The practice of contemplation, yielding direct experience of either the delightful presence or the painful absence of Holy Mystery, has become for many the sufficient, if mir~imal, structure, content, and dynamics of their spirituality, augmented perhaps by a symbolic and ritual eclecticism that draws from various reli-gious and nonreligious traditions. This experience of Holy Mystery is believed to be "apophatic," that is, unencumbered by What many religious are attempting is not to dispense with faith, but to develop a spirituality without religion. January-February 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality specific religious doctrines, images, symbols, liturgical traditions, and so on. Against this misguided turn to experience Turner maintains, with impressive support from the data of the tradition, that there is no such thing as "apophatic experience." This is a contradiction in terms. The experience of the absence of God is just as much an experience, that is, just as cataphatic, as is the experience of God's presence even though it might be less enjoyable. It is the quest for mystical experience itself, and especially reliance upon it as the touchstone of faith, which is the problem, Turner maintains. Furthermore, following Bernard McGinn, Turner points out that no one who is serious about the God quest, especially not the mys-tics (at least not until very recent times), attempts to "practice mys-ticism." People practice Christianity or Buddhism or Judaism.27 The mystical is a moment in the practice of these traditions, but there is no freestanding mysticism or pure apophatic practice. The development of this kind of experience-oriented, reli-giously decontextualized spirituality has been encouraged in recent years by a tendency in popular books on spirituality to talk of an apophatic and a cataphatic "way" as if there were two types of spirituality, one of which, the cataphatic, proceeds through the use of the theological symbols, images, rituals, and practices of a religious tradition and one of which, the apophatic, makes no use of these "externals" and reaches directly to the Divine Mystery that transcends all human institutions.28 Furthermore, there has been a tendency to suggest that these "ways" are a matter of per-sonal choice and so one might decide to bypass the cataphatic and plunge into the darkness of the apophatic way, where God would be met in pure spiritual nakedness. There has been much talk of foolproof methods by which to achieve mystical empti-ness and union, often without or before any serious ascetical train-ing, theological formation, or liturgical involvement. What Turner exposes is the basic fallacy of this whole "expe-rientialist" turn in spirituality. All spirituality, insofar as it can be practiced or pursued, is cataphatic, and all religious experience is by definition cataphatic. The apophatic is not a "way" or a "prac-tice," much less a kind of "experience." It is a moment of negativity, of nonexperience, at the heart of genuine, ordinary religious faith and practice. This moment is, by definition, not something one can experience at all. The apophatic or mystical is precisely the neg-ativity, the total darkness which cannot itself be seen or felt. It is Review for Religious the absence of experience, the "hole" at the heart of religious expe-rience, the place of the Holy Mystery Which is utterly beyond our experiencing, attainment, knowing, or naming. Mysticism is not negative (or positive) religious experience, says Turner, but the negativity of all religious experience.2Vlf I can experience it at all, it is not God in Godself that I am experiencing. If Turner is right, this attempt to bypass religious practice of the Christian tradition in search of some direct experience of the Holy Mystery is wrongheaded and futile, and it can end only in self-delusion of the kind pilloried by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.3°Insofar as the apophatic moment occurs, it is abso-lutely nonexperienceable and hidden. And it occurs only within the cataphatic context of resolutely faithful Christian practice, which may at times overflow in the exaltation of spiritual peak experiences or generate the psychologically devastating suffering of the "dark night" described by John of the Cross. But, as all the mystics have maintained, such graces of light or darkness are neither the content nor the criterion of genuine spirituality. As Turner says, the deformations of the "experientialist" derive . . . from the error of understanding that which is a "moment" of reserve, of denial and unknowing within worship, prayer and sacrament as if it were a rival practice which displaces that Christian ordinariness. "Experientialism" in its most extreme forms is therefore the displacement of a sense of the negativity of all religious experience with the pursuit of some goal of achieving negative experiences.3~ In other words, a purely mystical spirituality is not a viable alternative to full participation in the religious tradition. The mystical, insofar as it is spiritually significant and transformative (as opposed to momentary experiences of oceanic bliss which may be caused by any number of stimuli from drugs to trance) is available only within some ongoing, ordinary, everyday cataphatic practice. The alternative to being imprisoned within the rigidities of an overmaterialized tradition is not the flight into a disembodied, decontextualized, and individualistic pseudomysticism. The deeply interior life of the serious postmodern Christian requires the shaping influence of a tradition worked out over centuries by saints and scholars, mystics and martyrs, even as the tradition itself requires the critical challenge of its postmodern adherents, whose new insights into reality must refine the tradition of its historical dross. 25 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadersbip and Spirituality Let us return now to the framework of meaning that has sup-plied us with the important principle of self-reference. If the focus of self-reference of religious congregations and their members is the gospel-based celibate living of the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ in community and mission within the spirit of the partic-ular congregation, and if the self-renewal and continued flour-ishing of religious life and the particular congregation depend on this self-reference, then nothing is more important than the authenticity of the spirituality of religious. Obviously, people can form and live community and altruis-tically serve others without being either Christian or Catholic. And a religious congregation can certainly transform itself into such a community of life and service, leaving behind its specifically Catholic identity and affirming whatever religious affiliation, or lack thereof, its individual members espouse. That is, it can cease to be a religious congregation and continue as an intentional com-munity with or without religious roots?2 My concern is with con-gregations which have not, or not yet, made that choice, but are struggling to maintain their Catholic Christian identity in a highly dysfunctional ecclesiastical context. For such communities the quiet sidelining of Christian identity believed and practiced in the church is not compatible with their ongoing life and self-renewal as a religious congregation. And perhaps the most impor-tant task of leadership in such congregations is helping the congregation to negotiate the moment of bifurcation between congregational death through the abandonment of that identity and congregational transformation through the critical reappro-priation of its Christian identity. There can be no question, in a postmodern context, of deal-ing with this issue by fiat. The present state of spirituality in many religious congregations is highly chaotic, and attempting to abol-ish chaos by control is, as we have seen, the kiss of death. Hope lies not in the exercise of coercive power, but in the realization that the current disequilibrium is potentially far more creative than the kind of static uniformity that prevailed in the spiritual-ity of most preconciliar communities. But how do leaders facilitate the emergence of new spiritual order from religious chaos? The analogies from the new science suggest several possible leads. First, a climate has to be created in which divergent theological views and spiritual practices can rise to visibility and articulation and be seriously and respectfully Review for Religious engaged. The unspoken agreement not to talk about anything that could cause dissension and not to use any ritual with which someone might be uncomfortable--and to substitute therapeutic methods and organizational techniques for theological engage-ment with controversies in the area of faith--is analogous to main-taining tight managerial control in a dysfunctional organization. The upheaval in spirituality at the individual and local level needs to be articulated, recognized, and owned. Within it lies the poten-tial, not for a restoration of preconciliar uniformity of doctrine and practice, but for a self-renewing reclaiming of the tradition in very new, perhaps even startlingly new, forms. Any Christian!ty that can be relevant and life-giving in a postmodern context is simply not going to look like, or be like, the Catholicism of the Middle Ages or even of the 1950s. Second, the basic framework of meaning needs to be reartic-ulated, but in ways that take seriously the problems which have led to its practical collapse. This basic framework is the gospel in all its depth and breadth, and that means the theological and litur-gical, moral and socially transformative riches of the Christian tradition in dialogue with the postmodern culture emerging in our time. The Christian tradition that has become alienating for so many is not the gospel itself, but the moribund formulations of post-Tridentine Vatican institutionalism. The extraordinary response of so many, especially women religious, to the work of theologians like Elizabeth Johnson and Catherine LaCugna, bib-lical scholars like Carolyn Osiek and Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, liturgists like Mary Catherine Hilkert, ecumenists like Rosemary Radford Ruether, moral theologians like Lisa Sowle Cahill, and scholars of spirituality like Constance FitzGerald and Joann Wolski Conn--along with the rediscovery of the Christian mys-tics themselves--suggests that the tradition has the potential to be reappropriated and renewed in feminist, ecological, and pluralis-tic patterns if the meeting between the postmodern religious and contemporary theology can be facilitated. A system converts local chaos to global order by the infusion of new information which can be appropriated within a coherent frame of reference. Access to theological resources and also deep engagement with the new science, feminist thought and practice, and ecological and social theory by all the members of a congregation would seem to be an absolute requirement for the development of an authentic post-modern Catholic Christian spirituality that would be adequate Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirit~tality for religious life in the 21st century. If religious develop such a spirituality, we can expect resistance from the official exercisers of institutional control. But, if religious fail to develop such a spir-ituality, we can expect religious congregations to disintegrate from within as their spirituality unravels and becomes a tangle of idiosyncratic and individualistic syncretisms. Third, the interaction between the whole and the parts has to be facilitated so that what is emerging in the spirituality of the members appears in a corporate spirituality that breaks the ver-bal and ritual silence at the global level and also transforms the global frame of reference itself so that it is not a religious strait-jacket but a flexible focus of self-reference. In preconciliar days. most communities had a repertoire of symbols, myths, celebra-tions, and ceremonies which integrated the spirituality of the individual members with the spirituality of the congregation. How can we experience this local-to-global articulation today? The order at the global level, which is not dogmatic uniformity but deep unity in shared faith and spirituality, can be authentic only if it emerges from the lived variety and ferment at the local level, among the individuals and groups that make up the community. In recent years some congregations have begun processes of getting religiously sensitive issues out on the table and seeking ways to bring theological resources into dialogue with personal religious experience in the context of open sharing of faith. This is very risky business. But in many cases it has resulted in unusual experiences of renewal of the spirit of the community. Perhaps, having negotiated so many of the more "external" issues of lifestyle and even ministry, many religious are eager, even if fearful, to engage the deeper issues of faith, religious identity, and spiritu-ality. Congregational leadership may be challenged today to take the initiative in helping the congregation address the fundamen-tal issue of Catholic faith and spirituality, that is, the issue of identity and self-reference. Conclusion Let me briefly summarize and conclude. What leadership means and how it is exercised depends essentially on how one understands the social system one is leading. I have tried to sug-gest that the quasi-mechanical modern model of the religious congregation is giving way to an organic postmodern model of Review for Religious community. I have explored a few features of this new model, namely, the conception of the community itself as an autopoietic or self-renewing organic structure; the category of fields as a way of un.derstanding the unifying forces of charism, vocation, and the spirit of the congregation; and the strange attractor as a way of understanding the quintessential role of the gospel lived in consecrated celibacy in community and mission as the principle of self-reference of religious life. I then tried to suggest that the role of leadership today may be neither primarily social maintenance nor ministerial goal set-ting, but the facilitation of the congregation's self-renewing pro-cess through attention to its core identity, its framework of meaning. This framework of meaning is not a uniform religiosity nor a particular type of ministry. It is Christian paschal spiritual-ity, rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, lived celibately in com-munity and mission, a spirituality which cannot bypass the Christian theological, liturgical, moral, and socially transforma-tive tradition within the believing community we call church. But in a postmodern context such spirituality cannot be leg-islated or enforced. Nor are leaders, in all probability, any less caught up in doubt, alienation, and theological-religious confusion than the other members of their congregations. What we ask of our leaders today is not that they supply us with the correct answers, or even that they pi6neer the road to the future, but that they mediate the creative interchange between local and global levels, helping us to own the real questions and search honestly, together, for appropriate responses, and thus facilitate the life-giving interaction between the religious congregation and the real world in which we live and minister. When Peter, that first leader of the Christian community, asked Jesus for a clear fix on church order and ministry by inquiring what role his apparent rival, the Beloved Disciple, was to have, Jesus replied, "That's not your problem. What you need to do is follow me," that is, become a beloved disciple and thereby become capable of the ministry to which you are called. Perhaps for all of us, leaders and followers, it is both that simple and that difficult. Notes ~ On this issue of the i~nportance of worldview and the character of the emerging worldview with which I am concerned in this paper, see the very provocative thesis of Danah Zohar in collaboration with I.N. Marshall, The Quantum Self." Human Nature and Consciousv~ess Defined by the Januao,-FebruaO, 1998 Scbneiders ¯ Congregational Leadership and Spirituality New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990), esp. pp. 231-237. 2 For a comprehensible introduction to the notion of postmodernity in the context of Christian faith, see James B. Miller, "The Emerging Postmodern World," in Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World, ed. Frederic B. Burnham (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 1-19, or Douglas C. Bowman, Beyond the Modern Mind: The Spiritual and Ethical Challenge of the Environmental Crisis (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1990). The SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought, edited by David Ray Griffin, and published in Albany, New York by the State University of New York Press, includes several volumes of essays repre-senting most of the preeminent writers attempting to relate Christianity and its concerns to the postmodern worldview. For a powerful presenta-tion of secular postmodernity, see Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 3 My primary resources in trying to understand this new approach to reality have been the following: Heinz Pagels, The Coswtic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1983); David S. Toolan, "Praying in a Post-Einsteinian Universe," Cross Currents 46 (Winter 1996-1997): 437-470; Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1992); Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers,/t Simpler Way (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996); Danah Zohar in collaboration with I.N. Marshall, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990). 4 Zohar, The Quantum Self, p. 234, speaks of the new worldview chal-lenging the modernist dualisms which split subject and object (mind and body), individual from relationships, and culture from nature. This is a slightly different focus on what I am talking about in more humanis-tic/ religious terms. 5 Specifically, Wheadey relies on the thought about living systems of Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980); the treatment of chemical reality of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984); the work of quantum physi-cists on strange attractors as explained by James Gleick in Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). 6 Cited in Wheatley, Leadership, p. 18. 7 Much of the following description of U.S. religious life from the 1800s until Vatican II is well illustrated in the volume, coauthored by a team of IHM sisters, Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, ed. Margaret Susan Thompson (Syracuse: University Press, 1997). 8 It is interesting that sociological theory of organizations has .applied these Newtonian principles to social systems, leading theorists like Helen Rose E Ebaugh, in Women in the Vanishing Cloister: Organizational Decline in Catholic Religious Orders in the United States (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993), to confidently predict the immi- Review for Religious nent demise of religious life, not because the spirituality of religious has died, but because the organizations seem to have lost their niche in the social, economic, and occupational machinery. If I understand Wheatley's thesis, she is convinced that the mechanistic understanding of organiza-tions that underlies much organizational and management theory is inap-propriate to the kind of entity such organizations are. I think Wheatley's thesis is applicable to religious life in general and religious congrega-tions in particular. 9Wheatley, Leadership, pp. 18-19. 10 Wheattey, Leadership, pp. 95-96, treats this feature. ~' When I hear religious wearily predicting the demise of their con-gregations as simply inevitable since decline in one or more areas seems to have set in and, in the long run, decline cannot be arrested or reversed, I am struck by the mechanistic character of their image of religious con-gregations. ,2 Wheatley, Leadership, p. 93. 13 Wheatley, Leadership, p. 90, italics mine. 14 Before reading Wheatley, who uses this very expression, "death or transformation," in relation to living organisms, I was looking at this same phenomenon in religious life in terms of the mystical tradition, the "bifurcation point" represented by the "dark night." See Sandra M. Schneiders, "Contemporary Religious Life: Death or Transformation?" Cross Currents 46 (Winter 1996-1997): 510-535. is Wheatley, Leadership, p. 94. 16 See Patricia Wittberg, Pathways to Re-Creating Religious Communities (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1996), pp. 19-31, for her very enlighten-ing treatment of the sociological category of the "religious virtuoso" as a descriptive of religious. Peter Brown, in The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 58, refers to the lst- and 2nd-century virgins, the original religious, as "virtuoso practitioners of continence." 17 In the earliest period of church life, the choice of lifelong virgin-ity created an alternative to the sociological givens of society in the 1st century of the Christian era. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the desert ascetics moved geographically out of the overacculturated church of late antiquity. In the Middle Ages cenobitic monasticism was an institutional alternative to life in the cities. The "leaving the world" motif continued in the closed lifestyles of apostolic religious congregations right up to Vatican II. 18 Wheatley, Leadership, p. 48. 19 See esp. Wheatley, Leadership, pp. 52-54. 201 think this dynamic metaphor fnight have some potential for dis-cussions of the issues of belonging and membership. For example, if every individual is a distinct constellation of overlapping and intersecting fields (family, personal friends, professional associations, ministerial involve-ments, and so forth) which structure her personal identity and which 3I Janua~y-Febt'uaty 1998 . 32 Scbneiders * Congregational Leadership and Spirituality intersect with the fields of other members and the corporate constellation of fields of the congregation, we have to expect that ways of belonging and participating in community life are going to be very diverse and that this need not lead to disintegration. Likewise, there may be significant but not determining intersection between the field of some person and the congregational field,, leading to a considerable sense of"belonging" on the part of this person who, nev-ertheless, does not feel called to become a member in the full sense of the word. 2, Wheatley, Leadership, pp. 20-21. 22 The amount of chaos within religious life and the sometimes over-whelmingly dysfunctional character of the ecclesiastical settings in which the life survived and even thrived over the centuries is strikingly chron-icled by Jo Ann Kay McNamara in Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 23 1 do not mean to suggest that leadership does not play a special role in maintenance and mission. In fact, I suspect leadership in these arenas is even more important today than it was in the recent past when eccle-siastical control dictated virtually all major decisions about mission and stable financial procedures and reliable resources assured maintenance. I want to suggest, however, that these functions, although facilitated by leadership, are largely handled by specialists or by congregational struc-tures that do not depend exclusively on leaders. 24 Wheatley, Leadership, p. 146: "More than any other science prin-ciple I've encountered, self-reference strikes me as the most important. ¯ . . As an operating principle, it decisively separates living organisms from machines." 2s Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian MystMsm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 26 Turner, Darkness of God, p. 262. Turner says (p. 259): "Experientialism is. the 'positivism' of Christian spirituality. It abhors the experiential vacuum of the apophatic, rushing to fill it with the plenum of the psychologistic." 27 Turner, Darkness of God, pp. 260-261; he cites Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of VVestern Christian MystMsm, Vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1992), p. xvi. Turner does not actually agree with McGinn about the role of experience in mysticism, but he does agree with him that, until the present century, tnysticism was not isolated from religious traditions but an element within the,n. 2s Mthough there is much of value in Diarmuid O'Murchu's latest book, Quantum Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1997), I have serious hesitations about his facile dismissal of .religion as a dispensable human invention (see esp. pp. 7-12). He is right to point out the distinction between spirituality, religion, and theology, but I doubt that the direct leap from spirituality to theology is possible because, while the categories of theology can be enriched by science, I doubt that they can be supplied Review for Religious without recourse to sacred texts and liturgical ritual. It is indeed part of the function of theology to purify religion of its excesses; but it is also part of the function of religious tradition to criticize theology. 29 Turner, Darkness of God, p. 259. 3o See the caustic description in chaps. 52-53 of The Cloud of Unknowing (The Classics of \Vestern Spirituality), ed. James Walsh (New York/Ramsey/Toronto: Paulist Press, 1981), pp. 220-223. 3t Turner, Darkness of God, p. 259. 3: In speaking of religious congregations, I am using the term theo-logically and not canonically. I am talking about the faith reality that constitutes religious life, not juridical requirements ofany particular period in history. Tropical Night Watch (Cap Haitien, Haiti) The current is cut, the light fails, generators die, sleep prevails. Wakened by silence, I stagger onto the gallery, stumble over stars, so many stars the sky overflows, the Milky Way spilt and star running all down the dome. Does someone, I wonder, watch with me, or do I alone gorge on the glory? Two a.m. an ungodly hour?-- with this luxury of light? this starry sight? I gape, I gape, at this godly night. Mary Alban Bouchard CSJ Januasy-February 1998 DONNA J. MARKHAM Leadership for the Common Good Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being torn asunder, the clarity of their vision along-side an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes . --Irene Claremont de Castillejo Knowing VVoman: A Feminine Psychology AnY person who is called upon to lead today is also called to the heroic act of unifying and healing in the midst of a world that is increasingly fragmented by nationalism and regional separatism. Nor are religious leaders unaffected: denom-inational sectarianism and ideological divisions threaten to take a mortal toll on the community of believers. At the same time, we live in an exciting era, alive in the midst of an enormous shifting in the collective experience of our planet. Insights from world religions, the new sciences, and feminist consciousness are con-tinually shaping our responses to the suffering oppressed. Religious leaders want to unify their members in order to meet the various challenges effectively, but the personal and communal risks are great. Women religious leaders find themselves engaging in heroic action as they contend with complex and differing perspectives on Christology and spirituality and on what constitutes the core Donna J. Markham OP is CEO for Southdown, a center for Christian healing that serves clergy and religious. Her article, published in Origins 27 (I 3 November 1997), is a slightly edited version of her address to the annual assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, held in Rochester, New York, in August 1997. Her address is Southdown; 1335 St. John's Sideroad East; RR #2, Aurora, Ontario; Canada L4G 3G8. Review for Relig4ous identity of religious life in this emerging global reality. Those who are entrusted for a time with the exciting task of fostering greater union and community are also expected to keep in front of our eyes the gospel-illuminated vision to which we have all committed ourselves. Irene Claremont de Castillejo rightly asserts that those who strive to accomplish such things are, indeed, mod-ern heroes. We actually have modern-day heroes--who have called us to common ground, who have invited us to envision a new way of being dwellers on earth, who have risked opening dif-ficult conversations and bringing forth serious critiques as new insights and truths are searched out. Within our midst are, I believe, unobtrusive modern heroines. The thoughts I share come from one who is clearly not a philosopher or a theologian, but rather a student of human behav-ior who has herself been stretched and challenged by a loving God. I share these thoughts as one who has experienced a call to profound conversion in the midst of the awesome responsibility of being entrusted with leading. I share these thoughts as one who, lost in deserts of confusion, has called out in fear; one who, with her sisters, has called upon a God of mystery, wisdom, and hope to show some clarity or meaning in daunting, sometimes terrifying, situations pregnant with disharmony and division. I hope to propose some specific skills for leaders to use in their efforts regarding the good we hold in common. Before doing that, however, I note two perspectives on the meaning of the com-mon good and offer a summation of our own experience of the past ten years. Perspectives on the Common Good There are two principal perspectives about how to achieve the good of society. The prevalent one, perhaps, is that the aggre-gate of individuals all pursuing their own self-interest constitutes the most good for the greatest number. This individualistic and utilitarian view--from John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill--emphasizes the common good as a composite of individual goods. It wants the civil authority to keep out of people's affairs except to ensure that no one tramples on another's rights. The second perspective, in the Thomistic tradition, emphasizes the common good as a social good that all must.participate in if the good of the whole is to be achieved (Hollenbach, 1989, pp. 85ff). January-February 1998 Markham ¯ Leadership for the Common Good Maritain elucidated this by speaking of a "personalistic commu-nitarianism" in which individuals achieve their own good more fully and readily when, in relationship with others, they work to enhance the common good. History has demonstrated, especially over the past two cen-turies, that two extremes of governance must be avoided: a lais-sez- faire individualistic philosophy that heralds each person in There is an increasing plurality of expression regarding personal spirituality and one's relationship with God. society as completely autonomous and indepen-dent, and a socialistic collectivism in which the individual sacrifices everything for the society, even to the loss of self-actualization. Within these polarities there exists a tension for each of us: to want each individual member in our community to be fulfilled and to flourish and to want our religious institutes to unleash their communal passion and energy in service of the mission of Jesus. After a long history of reflecting a more col-lectivist model, with the needs of individuals heavily subordinated to the needs of the larger community, religious life has, I think, swerved toward the Lockean-Smithian libertarian notion of the common good. Leadership itself has, at times, colluded in this--unconsciously, I think. We saw this reflected in some of our early documents after the call to renewal: the individual member was noted as our primary asset and first concern. While this concern was certainly not intended to subordinate the communal mission, experience has shown that this interrelationship has remained a serious issue for us, and we find ourselves seeking ways to lead well in the midst of escalating diversity of thought and belief. Experiences, Insights, and Questions What I say about the experience of leaders over this past decade is by no means exhaustive; I simply offer my own obser-vations: ¯ Women religious have a far stronger sense of internalized personal identity and individual maturity than previously. We also seek clarity concerning what constitutes corporate, com-munal identity .and what the requisites for membership are. Review for Religious ¯ We have witnessed a growing diversification of ministries, in which members are far more able to use their individual cre-ativity and talents in service of the gospel. ¯ We have deepened our sense of inner authority and self-direct-edness, yet we struggle with how this relates to any congre-gational ministerial focus and communal accountability. ¯ There is an increasing plurality of expression regarding per-sonal spirituality and one's relationship with God. ¯ There is a clear movement away from structures and systems that are oppressive and demeaning to women, and a deliber-ate movement toward systems that address the needs of the poor, the oppressed, and the abandoned. ¯ We have deepened our understanding of feminism in relation to our church and our world. ¯ We see an escalation of profound questioning, with conse-quences for our communal life as members of our institutes, not to mention our life as dwellers on this planet. ¯ As leaders we continue to experience the pervasive tension between our pastoral responsibility with its consequent care-giving obligations, and the possibilities of vision-driven, spirit-linking, heart-stirring leadership. ¯ We continue to examine models of leadership, modes of par-ticipation and decision making, and forms of governance that are faithful to our commitment as gospel-driven women. ¯ We live within the growing complexity of all the institutions and systems in which we minister. ¯ And we have witnessed the common good being held hostage, at times, by malaise and a depletion of communal passion. We have seen the common good compromised by leaders who have become overly preoccupied with the torment of a trou-bled individual and have diverted their attention from the broader work of leadership, with its potential to accomplish major transformations. We have witnessed the common good being co-opted by leaders who have become frightened and paralyzed in the face of an articulate few whose sociocultural precommitments distract them and others from gospel faith, the living water of religious life. At times we have also seen leaders--perhaps in misdirected efforts to affirm individu-als- fail to critique emergent societal, religious, and cultural movements as these impact on the common good of the con-gregation. 'L37 . 1998 Markham ¯ Leadership for the Common Good 3-8A So what is it that we have learned from what we have experi-enced? We have intensified our conviction that pluralism and diversity must work in tandem with a binding sense of identity and relationality. We know that interdependence is imperative for our survival as a planet, as nations, as a church, and as religious institutes. It is clear that all living systems are characterized by net-works of relationships. We are aware, more than ever, that all things are somehow connected and have an impact on one another for good or bad. Consequently, we know that various necessary and desirable boundaries need to be permeable enough for bond-ing with other communities and the global community to be pos-sible. We have learned, too, that neither hieratic leadership models nor totally consensual models are effective in this time of rampant change, greater complexity, and anxiety-provoking ambiguity, and we search for new ways to express leadership and exercise author-ity. We have learned that neither the subordination of individu-als to the needs of the community nor the subordination of the common good to the needs of individual members will make for a viable future. We have learned that new expressions of com-munity are being called for, whereby persons exercise true inter-dependence, participation, and responsibility about matters pertaining to the well-being of all those involved. We know that, if we are to do this, we need to develop skill in managing conflict and diversity. We have embraced even more deeply our need for ongoing contemplative reflection and conversation about mat-ters of the heart and soul. And we have learned with some trepi-dation that, insofar as profound doubt about the meaning and validity of our founding myths pervades our communities, we flirt with division and dissolution. Given all this, we are faced with serious questions. At what point does diversity within our institutes lead to entropy and orga-nizational dissolution? How will we work with our differences so that the result is synergy rather than division? How can we, with our members, become more intently engaged in the promotion of a personal communitarianism which recognizes that each per-son's dignity is most fully achieved in communion with others? What can we do as committed women of the gospel to help heal the gender and ideological rifts within our church, the racial and economic rifts in our country? What deliberate and concerted actions should we be taking as communities of faith to address Review for Religious materialistic individualism and the exploitation and mutilation of creation? How will we inspire others to that end? What signs will identify the better emergent models of leadership? In an effort to shed some light on these questions, I will focus on three areas of skill development: conflict management, guard-ing against "groupthink," and promoting communal efficacious action. By no means the only skills needed, these three call for some special attention today. Skills by themselves are, of course, not enough; but a leadership team's understanding of the princi-ples behind them can help keep the congregation moving for-ward while holding open the possibility of true synergy emerging. By synergy I mean the energy-laden, unexpected accord--or com-munion- within a group that gives it momentum toward the good which it esteems in common. Comfortable and Adept in Handling Conflict Perhaps more than any other skill, religious leaders today need the ability to manage conflict well. This prevents group-think from setting in and supports communal efficacious action. While we all know that some conflict is normal in any human relationship and an important part of the interaction in any vital group, much of what I say about managing conflict will seem counterintuitive. It flies in the face of our upbringing and our instinctive responses to confrontation. Most of us probably employ two basic responses to conflictual situations. Either we shy away from them, taking no action or procrastinating in the hope that the problem will go away, or we engage in symmetrical inter-change, being defensive or aggressive toward one another, prob-ably debating to a standoff. With the first strategy we quickly learn that the denial of the possibility of conflict is an easy way of becoming involved in one. With the second strategy we find our-selves caught in dualistic thinking that categorizes others as either with us or against us; we draw the proverbial line in the sand, and some become self-righteous winners and others demoralized losers. To use a third strategy, that is, to act counterintuitively, we anticipate and deliberately move toward that which is feared in efforts to establish connection. VCe meet conflict proactively or, in the wonderful words of William Shakespeare, we "meet the first beginnings; look to the budding mischief/before it has time to [-~9-- January-February 1998 Markham ¯ Leadership for the Common Good Where debate aims at convincing and winning, dialogue is a commitment to listen and learn from one another. ripen to ,naturity." We anticipate conflict and confrontation and approach the other with the clear, well-articulated intent to dia-logue. In so doing we open the possibility of engaging in a kind of ecological relationship building, a way of working through erroneous assumptions about and resistance to one another. We do not engage in debate, but rather in dialogue that has been pre-pared for with rigorous study, prayer, and reflection. Where debate aims at convincing and winning, dialogue is a commitment to lis-ten and learn from one another. Debate encour-ages dogmatic rigidity and judgment; dialogue encourages the search for insight and truth. If all parties have not prepared for the conversation by disciplined and intensive study, prayer, and reflec-tion, we are not ready to dialogue. Dialogue means that, while we are open to lis-tening and learning, we. also know that there are certain issues about which a group cannot com-promise. These include identity, internal consis-tency, and core values. A group ceases to exist as itself when these constitutive elements are com-promised. For example, leaders of religious congregations have a fundamental fiduciary obligation to promote the unity of the con-gregation. They canr~ot compromise those founding values and principles which have endured over ti,ne and which constitute the community's identity, charism, and mythic history. On the other hand, conversation and dialogue around the contentporary meaning of communal identity--no matter how divergent our understand-ings may bemis of critical importance and should not be shied away from in spurious hopes that differences will disappear. Still, to entertain that the fundamental identity of the group is open for negotiation is to promote disunity, disintegration, and ultimate demise. Membership in the group has become meaningless. A few examples: One can be a part of a group called "psy-chologists" and struggle with reformulations and new constructs relative to the study of personality and behavior. But to assert that the study of personality and behavior is no longer relevant to the discipline of psychology is to move oneself outside the iden-tity of being a psychologist. Similarly, Dominicans can struggle with how to enflesh the mandate of the order to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in today's world, or how they will name and address contemporary heresies, but they cannot say that they will Review for Religious replace the gospel of Jesus Christ as a foundation for that preach-ing mission with some other construct. To do so would be to move outside the identity of being Dominican. Likewise, when an indi-vidual experiences a loss of identity, that person moves into a state of confusion and terror. In the most dramatic sense of this phe-nomenon, the psychotic person has little or no awareness of who she is, what she is to be doing, or what meaning there is to her very existence. This is why the therapist, as an agent of responsive and responsible authority, must take swift action to protect her from further disintegration and potential self-destruction. Good leaders take clear and directed action to protect the solidarity of the group, its commitment to unity in the face of challenges to its founding purpose, its identity and mission. They do so by calling the group to reflection, prayer, and respectful dialogue. They, with the group, walk toward what is feared and claim their truth in faith and in commitment to the greater good. Leaders in this era of connection (Lipman-Blumen, pp. 8-21) live in the midst of ongoing diversity. Accordingly, they also live in the midst of the conflicts which arise from this diversity of insight and thought. Successful handling of these conflicts demands certain assumptions: that all are committed to learn from one another and to search for truth together; that they agree to carry out the conversation to its conclusion; that they respect one another; and that no party will resort to oppressive or vindictive strategies during or after the conversation. Leaders who succeed possess an internal disposition of grace, flexibility, balance, empa-thy, courage, creativity, and a heavy dose of curiosity about the dif-ferent and unusual. But even these qualities are insufficient if leaders are frightened or unclear about or uncommitted to what constitutes the identity of the group which they have been called to serve. A time may come when evasion or avoidance--or a direct naming of the futility of carrying a discussion any further--may actually be a worthwhile move. The problem has often been that we have resorted to these moves before working proactively with the conflictual situation. Guarding against Groupthink One way, of course, of avoiding conflict within a close work group is for all to adopt patterns of thinking that are so "agree- Janttal.3,-FebtvtaD, 1998 Markham ¯ Leadership for the Common Good able" that disagreement becomes unthinkable: it would be "dis-loyalty." But "agreement," then, is an ambiguous thing. The greater the ambiguity, the more likely it is that a leadership group has fallen into the groupthink that some analysts describe. This dangerous dynamic arises when, in the face of adversity or perceived danger, a cohesive "ingroup" (here, the leadership team) insulates itself from conflict with the "outgroup" (here, the other members). It does this by concurrence seeking and unques-tioning agreeableness among the ingroup members. Groupthink interferes with leadership's ability to act on behalf of the com-mon good because it has closed off alternative courses of action. It falls into a tight-knit, closed system in which team members avoid deviating from consensus. The ingroup thus shares an illu-sion of unanimity concerning most of its judgments and posi-tions. In the worst scenario, certain members of the ingroup unwittingly assume the role of "mindguards" who protect the leader and other ingroup members from adverse information that might break their sense of well-being about their past decisions. Groupthink can result from a largely unconscious effort on the part of a leadership group to fortify itself, in ambiguous and con-flictual times, against perceived threats from the outgroup. It is characterized by the ingroup's feeling a certain invulnerability and having exaggerated optimism about the future. Negative feed-back has been dismissed by rationalizing, by stereotyping the behavior of members who disagree as invalid, irrelevant, erro-neous, disloyal, or uninformed. The search for truth has thus been compromised not only in the leadership group but also throughout the community, because sincere engagement between the ingroup and the outgroup has been aborted. W-hen diversity of thought has been stifled within a leadership group, stagnation, boredom, and a certain brittleness, set in. This situation comes from a misunderstanding of consensus, but it often masquerades as a nonhieratic, more feminist model of managing disagreement and arriving at decisions. Groupthink is serious and should not be underestimated. Group analysis has shown that the membership of any large group reflects the deficiencies of its leaders. V~rhen diversity of opinion, conflict, and serious dialogue find little or no room for expression in the leadership group, the membership will unconsciously mir-ror the leadership or react strongly to it, in either case jeopar-dizing the common good. Review for Religious In order to counter the unconscious pull toward groupthink, leadership teams may wish to set up safeguards. They could, for example, devise ways of getting critical evaluations of decisions and actions (including evaluations from outside the leadership team); they could, before coming to agreement, probe for alternatives; they could seek and happily come up with more than one way of addressing a given issue; they could broaden the decision-making base by consulting persons from different disciplines and areas of expertise; they could, after a period of time apart, hold a sec-ond- chance session to readdress the issue; they could simply ask whether there is "too much unanimity." Promoting Efficacious Communal Action Leadership teams that manage conflict well and avoid group-think instill in their communities the belief that it is indeed pos-sible for something important and significant to come from concerted communal action directed toward the greater good (Bandura, 1997). On the other hand, if a community has little sense that it is making a difference as a group, it will experience organizational anxiety, corporate depression, and a growing fear of the future and it will not attract new members. Leaders who work well with conflict and promote the unity of the group through a clear commitment to pursuing the truth together make a difference in this world of ours. Their fearless-ness and passion in repeatedly calling the group to fidelity to its mission have an impact. If all else is equal, a group that is more unified and clear about its identity and mission will endure beyond one that is fragmented. In other words, integration and unifica-tion contribute to life; disintegration and fragmentation, to demise. We know well that our desire to flourish is not an end in itself. Rather, we choose life as members of religious institutes because we are committed to radical discipleship. We commit ourselves to a vowed life in community in order to make a differ-ence-- for the poor, the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the aban-doned in our world. We believe we can do this better because we are united as sisters, and so we invite others to walk with us. We do this not simply to bolster our sense of well-being, but because we believe desperately in the mission of Jesus to promote justice and right relationships among people, between people and their Januaty-Februa~y 1998 Markham ¯ Leadersh~ for the Common Good God, and among all the various peoples that dwell upon this planet. We know that this work is not finished. We invite others to join us in this connective mission of pursuing what is true, what is just, what is merciful, and what ultimately is the One who unites us all. Most of our congregations have identified issues which they see as critical to the common good of our society today. In meet-ing with communities across North America, I have noted a remarkable consensus on the critical issues calling for our response as women religious. Through chapter acts, vision statements, and communal goals, concerns about the environment, racism, the poor and oppressed, spirituality, and women's needs and oppor-tunities continue to surface. These concerns, besides inviting our deep compassion, recall us to our commitment to live the gospel as wholeheartedly as we can. I watched in awe as the NASA scientists shared the excite-ment of accomplishing something awesome. This team of women and men was jubilant that their Martian dreams, their hard work, their collaboration gave us earthlings a chance to see another world. They were passionate, and millions of us on the Internet shared their passion as we took in the unfolding events. Why, then--though our dreams and efforts on behalf of the oppressed and abandoned bring successes and are no less altruistic than those of NASA scientists--do we seem not to have such excitement and passion about our corporate accomplishments, either just among ourselves or in the eyes of others? I found myself pon-dering this question with a tinge of sadness as I watched the ongo-ing televised press briefings. We want to make a difference in our mission. We want to see something come of all our hard work. We want to know that we are participating in something that makes a tangible difference in our world. We long for excitement and passion regarding our work. When a group has a sense of nothing much coming from a colossal effort, it gets discouraged. Negative corporate conse-quences follow: heightened individualism, attrition of member-ship, loss of momentum, corporate sluggishness. While many of us individually experience satisfaction in know-ing that we are addressing those compelling needs identified through our chapter processes, I wonder if we are depriving our-selves of the possibility of magnanimous corporate accomplish-ment. I wonder if the aggregate of our individual good works has Review for Religious buried in oblivion our ability to do something passionately, and concretely, together. What might it mean for us if we were to spec-ify concretely what we will do together as a congregation--or per-haps all of our congregations in concert--by way of making a passionate and grand contribution to this Mother Earth of ours, especially the neediest causes on it? I realize that, as soon as we entertain thoughts of concerted and clearly defined com-munal endeavors, we may conjure up our worst memories of the past. The urgency of the needs of these times, however, demands that we let go of that history and allow the fire of a revived corporate passion to brighten our eyes and our vision as we look toward the future of the life and labor for which God called us together, and keeps calling us. We have dedication and commitment and a vision and a mission that are at least as broad and deep as the NASA team has. We are attuned to needs that make the Martian endeavor look small and childlike. Oppression and exploita-tion are no strangers to us. The exploitation of our planet, of the abandoned, of women and children, is daily being resisted by wonderful women religious all over this continent and beyond. But now is a time for us to come together, in ways we have never imagined, to make an even greater difference for the good of our world's people. We join with John Paul II in seeing ecological concern as a driving force in the communal mission to which we are called: The earth is ultimately a common heritage, the fruits of which are for the benefit of all . It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of sub-sistence. Today the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness-- both individual and collective--are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interde-pendence . Simplicity., moderation, and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become part of everyday life, lest all suf-fer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a We commit OldYselves to a vowed life in community in order to make a difference-- for the poor, the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the abandoned in our world. Januao~Feb~wa~y 1998 Markham * Leadershi~for the Common Good few . An education in ecological responsibility is urgent; responsibility for oneself, for others, and for the earth . (John Paul II, 1990) Engaging in this efficacious action on behalf of the common good calls each of us to a deeper expression of our personal value and meaning and makes it available for the well-being of one another. To lead on behalf of the common good is as exciting as it is heroic. To stay centered on the ultimate vision of unity; to manage conflict in service of what is true, faithful, and just; to stand committed to the unfolding meaning of our identity in mis-sion-- these things are the substance of leaders who invite con-version and the linking of spirits and hearts at a time when not to do so is, all too probably, to toy with death. Steering Clear of Resistance Temptations to let oneself be drawn away from the demands of such a ministry of spirit-linking leadership abound. To allow oneself to be caught up in efforts directed toward problem persons and a minimal status quo is to entrench oneself and one's con-gregation in a futile defensiveness. Recognizing the difference between getting caught up in crisis management and working with the crisis in order to promote the common good is an art form that requires continual attention and development. In the process we must guard against a certain emotional and behavioral passivity that lulls us into a tolerance of diversity without restraint. Individual efforts and accomplishments should not crowd out the larger vision of a community's contemporary identity in mis-sion. When community leaders sideline or postpone or limit a unified group response to the crying needs of God's people and God's world, when leaders give too much attention to individual members (to their preferences, their convenience, even their per-sonal gratification) or fail to set limits on behaviors that stand in the way of the greater good, then something is wrong. Any group, of course, has maintenance tasks that need atten-tion. But how much time and energy should those entrusted with leadership today spend on those tasks? Honest self-evaluation of the use of team time is an important reality test for a leadership group. Such a group needs continual creative redesign so as to become or remain free to lead and not just manage. Beyond merely managing or even merely leading, I ask con- Rev&w for Religious gregational leaders to call one another and to call our communi-ties to heroism. Call us to risk entering into conflictual conver-sations that hold promise of connecting us in trust and in hope to one another. Lead us into the midst of difficult dialogues that will bring us into deeper and more respectful relationship with all who long for a church, a society, and a world in which communion in spirit and in truth prevails. Risk calling us to concrete corpo-rate ministerial responses. Invite us to be passionate. Help us to face together the different, the other, the frightening, and the unexpected so that we may discover ever more deeply that the good which we hold in common is nothing less than participa-tion in the compassionate goodness and mystery of God. Bibliography Bandura, A. "Human Agency: The Emperor Does Have Clothes." Canadian Psychological Association Convention, Keynote Address, June 1997. Bellah, R., et al. The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Claremont de Castillejo, I. Knowing Woman:/t Feminine Psychology. Harper Colophon Books, 1974. Hollenbach, D. "The Common Good Revisited." Theological Studies 50, no. I (1989), pp. 70-94. Hollenbach, D. "The Catholic University and the Common Good." Current Issues in Higher Education 16, no. 1 (1995). John Paul II. "Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All of Creation." Papal statement, 1 January 1990. Lipman-Blumen, J. The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. Rivers, E The Way of the Owk Succeeding with lntegv-i~y in a Conflicted World. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Roszak, T., M.E. Gomes, and A.D Kanner, eds. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995. Tracy, D. Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Whyte, D. The Heart/1roused: Poetry and the Preset'ration of the Soul in Corporate America. New York: Doubleday Currency, 1994. Wren, J.T., ed. The Leader's Companion: Insights on Leadership through the Ages. New York: Free Press, 1995. Janttary-Feb~'uary 1998 thNv N E MUNLEY Hearts Afire: Leadership in the New Millennium I love you, God, with a penny ~natch of love that I strike when the big and bullying dark of need chases my startled sunset over the hills and in the walls of my house small terrors move.~ ~edeeSSica Powers's image, "a penny match of love," is a won-rful imag~e o.f human desire for God that yearns" to be stronger, that yearns to ignite hearts, capture imaginations, shape dreams, and awaken possibilities. There is nothing paltry about God's gifts. God longs to kindle our penny matches of love into a growing fire as we gather here, more than a thousand strong, representing ninety-four percent of the women religious of the United States. It is a precious gift to be alive and to be called to leadership as one millennium ends and another begins. The last decades of the 20th century have been a time of cataclysmic change. The coming of the third millennium is certain to prompt diverse mus-ings about the challenges of this moment in history. Some, lament-ing present evils, will forecast doom. Others will gloss over substantive issues of dignity and justice to focus on the bizarre. Still others, including ourselves, will view the millennium as a kairos time for renewing hearts and transforlning society. Anne Munley IHM presented this paper, here edited and somewhat short-ened, as the presidential address to the August 1997 national assembly, in Rochester, New York, of the Leadership Conference of V¢o~nen Religious. She may be addressed at the I.H.M. Center; 2300 Adams Avenue; Scranton, Pennsylvania 18509. Review for Religious The year 2000 presents the world with an extraordinary occa-sion to commemorate-the birth of Christ as an historical fact and as a saving event for humanity for all times. The new millennium is an invitation to renewed wonder at the lavishness of a God who so loved the world that Jesus, the Christ, took on human flesh that all might become alive in God. We are called to leadership in a time when humanity yearns for connection with God, with one another, and with all creation. Yet we are acutely aware that we live in a world of violence, envi-ronmental desecration, economic polarization, racism, poverty, systemic oppression, and cultural breakdown. Our senses are bur-dened with images of human suffering in the homes, streets, vil-lages, neighborhoods, suburbs, and cities of this nation and throughout the world. In this age of globalization, when the peo-ples of the world are linked together as never before by commu-nication, economic interdependence, and the diffusion of cultural values, gaps continue to grow between rich and poor. Most peo-ple would agree that beneath obvious contemporary problems lie a crisis of the spirit and an erosion of concern for the common good. There is little sense that all the peoples of the earth are brothers and sisters having a common destiny in one global fam-ily created by the God of infinite love and compassion, but such a sense is what is needed." Inside the walls of our house, "the bul-lying dark of need" aches to see flames of love and moral com-mitment, aches for a revolution of the human heart and a resurgence of spiritual leadership. There are many signs of hope for this moment: conscious-ness that there is a crisis, desire for practical life-giving solutions, hunger for meaning, purpose, and direction and a longing for connectedness. The biblical concept of jubilee offers a revolu-tionary vision of reform for these times. The call to jubilee rec-ognizes the sanctity of time, the sacredness of creation, the importance of rest and contemplation, the equality of all in the eyes of God, the need to attend to the common good and the jus-tice of right relationships. The biblical jubilee calls for forgiveness, reconciliation, and joy, not ju.st an inner joy but a jubilation that is expressed in communal celebration) In proclaiming a new covenant of unity among peoples, Jesus brought the jubilee promise to life. We lead in a time of soul-stretching possibility. It is a holy time for "bringing good news to the afflicted, liberty to captives, January-Februaly 1998 Munley . Hearts Afire sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed." One of the greatest gifts that leaders can bring to this age is a sense of hope that transformation is possible. This gift is a penny match of love that can ignite great fires. Scientists tell us that tiny movements can have a huge cumulative impact on vast systems.4 Spiritual seekers discovered this truth long ago. In the words of Kukei, an 8th-century Zen master: "A hand moves, and the fire's whirling takes different shapes . All things change when we do."SMore than anything else these times need leaders who can bring to the outer world the transforming spirit of the inner world. Spiritual Leadership Recent literature about leadership reflects growing awareness that spirituality sustains community, meaning, and hope. The titles of many of these works suggest a shift toward conscious-ness of the inner life: Leading with Soul, The Corporate Mystic, The Heart .4roused, The Soul of Politics, and "Leading from Within.''6 The message of Leading ~vitb Soul is that leadership is a jour-ney of the heart. Heart, hope, faith, compassion, and courage are essential to leadership, to the creation of communities of mean-ing, and to a rediscovery of the ethical and spiritual center of society. Corporate mystics are spiritual leaders who are comfort-able with their own spirituality and who nurture the spiritual development of others. Corporate mystics call forth the best in themselves and others; they operate with integrity and intuition and pursue their visions with passion and compassion. In The Heart/1roused, the poet David Whyte links the inner world of spirit and creativity to the preservation of the soul in corporate America. Whyte knows well that leadership from within involves far more than techniques, plans, goals, or strategies. In his latest book of poetry, The House of Bdonging, he urges us to remember:7 What you can plan is too small for you to live. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. Re'view for Religious Jim Wallace in The Soul of Politics and Parker Palmer in his essay "Leading from Within" emphasize responsibility for co-creating the world we live in by bringing to it the best of our spiritual traditions and convictions. Our spiritual traditions tell us that we are not victims of the world as it is, but are its co-cre-ators. Borrowing from Annie Dillard,s Palmer says that, unless leaders are willing to take the spiritual journey inward and down-ward, we are likely to project what we hate in ourselves onto other people because we fear to face the enemy in our own souls. Great leaders have the courage to face their shadow side and consciously choose to project a spirit of light. Our own experiences on the inner journey and as women religious committed to co-creation of a just and loving world are a valuable part of our call to lead-ership within our communities. Gift of a Heart Afire At this national assembly of ours in outstate New York, I recall the determination and incredible belief in possibility of the hand-ful of women who organized in 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention that lit a fire to change the legal and political position of women in the United States. Using various means to secure suffrage for women, leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Carrie Chapman Cart drew on their inner fire to breathe spirit and passion into their quest for reform. Women like Mice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Rose Winslow must have drawn deeply on their inner strength as they endured impris-onment, hunger strikes, and forced feedings. I recall also the countless women from all ethnic, class, and racial backgrounds who addressed severe social problems at the end of the last century and the early decades of this one. I recall the inner fire, faith, and vision that sustained the founding and pioneer members of our congregations, enabling them to over-come great obstacles. In the depths of their hearts they realized that, for those who love, the impossible becomes possible. I am conscious of the millions of people who daily confront abuses of human rights and work for change. I am conscious of all of the women religious throughout the world who, with listening hearts and eyes focused on today's fierce urgencies and spiritual hungers, continue to imagine alternate possibilities as they struggle toward the reality of God's reign in the immediate circumstances of daily January-February 1998 Munley . Hearts Afire life. I am conscious of the collective spiritual energy in this room and of the force that it is for the life of the world. Understood in its broadest sense, spirituality includes more than the inner life. It is, in the words of the theologian Anne Carr, "the whole of one's spiritual or religious experience, one's beliefs, convictions, and patterns of thought, one's emotions and behavior in respect to what is ultimate, or to God.''9 As women of faith and conviction, the greatest resource we can bring to the new millennium is the spiritual leadership of a heart afire. Spiritual leadership rooted in the gospel involves working for a transformed understanding of the good life as life that is profoundly good for all. When the heart is on fire, light comes from within. With the "eyes of the enlightened heart," we can see the hope to which we are called (Ep 1:18). By baptism and the mystery of vocation we have proclaimed publicly that the quest for God and the new creation is the fire of our lives. Our world longs for visible expressions of God's saving presence and for new ways of seeing that are graces of the inner experi-ence of God's love. In the Christian tradition seeing with the eyes of the heart occurs on the journey of discipleship. Discipleship is not an easy journey. It is an ongoing effort to live the gospel with integrity--trying, sometimes succeeding, often failing, recognizing the need of being forgiven and then trying again. It is a way of being in the world that affects every relationship. Disciples shape one another according to the action of the Spirit in their lives. The energy of the disciple flows from faith in what_is unseen yet believed. At its root, discipleship is a call to a love that never gives up on God, one's neighbor, or oneself. Disciples are called to love well., as Jesus did, with hope, truth, fidelity, and compassion. This leads inevitably to taking a stand with the Christ of the paschal mystery, who willingly laid down his life in love so that all may have life in abundance. In these times, spiritual leadership rooted in the gospel involves working for a transformed understanding of the good life as life that is profoundly good. for all. Such transformation will happen in our communities and in the world around us when Review for Religious precepts of compassion and justice inspire the collective soul and have an impact on behavior. All around us and among us there are compelling stories of discipleship. As leaders we need to see them with the eyes of the heart. In the sharing of the stories, heart touches heart and souls are filled with the spirit that makes ongoing commitment possible. Meaning-Making Spiritual leaders empower their communities for ongoing commitment by keeping questions of meaning before them: Why are we together in community? How are we called to the unique circumstances of these times? What is our commitment to one another and to those with whom we journey? In times of sub-stantive change there is an extraordinary need to explore ques-tions of meaning and purpose. In the midst of chaos, a coherent worldview and a dynamic understanding of the relevance of reli-gious life are helps toward interpreting the signs of the times and living discipleship with integrity. Leaders can make an enor-mous contribution to this process by helping the other members to make sense of shifting fealties both outside religious !ife and within it. At the deepest level, our congregations are held together by myths, values, beliefs, and foundational stories. These are the roots of the congregation's identity and purpose. They constitute the why of our being together as communities. They have their effect on the passion with which we live our mission. They influ-ence the way we use resources, the way we work together to press the mission forward. The shared meaning and work and mem-ory of our lives together provide symbols, relationships, and prin-ciples for making sense of the changes going on within us and around us. Shared meaning is essential for shared commitment. At a time of rapid social change and shifting demographics and resources, spiritual leadership is not about getting people to do something. It is about helping the group to keep before itself the kind of meaning that will guide choices and call forth com-mitment.~° Spiritual leadership is a group process rather than an individual's personal qualities or skills. It is interactive and rela-tional. When members of a community are closely involved in piecing shared meanings together as a basis for corporate action or direction, they experience significance together, discovery together, leadership together. Today, as many congregations grap- pie with issues of governance and restructuring, it is a key func-tion of leadership to foster meaning-making together. The more things change around us and within us, the more important it will be to create connections for exploring the pos-sibilities that change and newness offer. As Margaret Wheatley notes, "Life invites us to create not only the forms but even the process of discovery.''l~ The kind of effort that we put into mean-ing- making will affect the credibility of our way of life as well as our own sense of authenticity and integrity. Integrity and Justice In

Issue 36.1 of the Review for Religious, 1977. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS IS edited by faculty members of St Louis University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Braiding, 539 North Grand Boule-vard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. Published bimonthly and copyright @ 1977 by REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Composed, printed, and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. Single copies: $2.00. Subscription U.S.A. and Canada: $7.00 a year; $13.00 for two years; other countries, $8.00 a year, $15.00 for two years. Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order payable to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in U,S.A. currency only. Pay no money to persons claiming to represent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Change of address requests should include former address. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor January 1977 Volume 36 Number I Renewals, new subscriptions, and changes of address should be sent to REVIEW I~OB R~L~GXOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Correspondence with the editor and the associate editor together with manuscripts and books for review should be sent to B~vi~w Foa R~LmlOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boule-vard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsyl-vania 19131. Review for Religious Volume 36, 1977 Editorial Offices 539 North Grand Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63103 Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Miss Jean Read, Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor Review ]or Religious is published in January, March, May, July, September, and November 6n the fifteenth cff the month. It is indexed in the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and in Book Review Index. A microfilm edi-tion of Review ]or Religious is available from University Microfilm; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyright (~) 1977 by Review ]or Religious. Sand Traps for Renewal Programs Francis Blouin, F.I.C. Brother Blouin, who has written for REVIEW FOR RELI~31OUS before, has recently completed six years of service as provincial, an,d is presently enrolled in a full-time doctoral program in theology at Fordham University. He resides at 93 Park Terra'ce West; New York, NY 10034. ' For more than. ten years now, most of the communities of religious in the United States have made valiant efforts to be attentive to the injunction of Vatican II, Renew Thyself. Considerable energy, valuable time, impressive sums of~ money were expended in a host of activities and programs, in seminars and renewal sessions, in chapters and mini-chapters, in experi-mentation and adaptation. Many congregations which have .not initiated . renewal programs are either dead or dying; however, those that are involved in renewal efforts are not necessarily alive and well. Though it is impossible accurately to evaluate this determined effort, I would like to reflect in the following pages upon some Of the factors which might,have vit.iated the .dreams and the programs so optin~istically conceived and so enthusiastically endorsed. This exercise might ,appear quite negative, but it can help direct our thinking-in an area of renewal that might offer more chance of success, or discover a few,.of the reasons why some pro-grams have produced disappointing results. During the past six years, I was involved in a number oLrenewal pro-grams and was an active member of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men. The following reflections are based in great part upon my. personal observations and my prolonged discussions with superiors, of men.~ My"con-tacts with~religious superiors of women lead me to surmise that the results of their renewal activities are quite similar to those of men religious, though somewhat more encouraging. 4 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 I would classify the sources of tension and frustration in the renewal effort under six headings: 1) Con,versiOn o] Heart; 2)Interiorization of Re-ligious Values; 3) Psychological Factors; 4) American Success Ethic; 5) Influence of Mass Media; and 6) Fragmentation. Conversion of Heart I am absolutely convinced that the most significant factor for the failure of many renewal programs was the fact that too often renewal efforts were based upon external programs which did not lead to a true conversion of heart. We cannot convert ourselves, let alone convert others. Yet we know that the Lord is ever calling us to greater love and fidelity and asking us only to remove the obstacles to his presence. In some religious communities in the 50's and 60's, community prayers were too often a ritualization of set formulas rather than an encounter with the living God present to all life. The prayer life of many religious was based upon an inadequate spiritual formation without sound scriptural basis. Furthermore, most religious were encouraged to develop a certain discretion, even circumspection, in speaking of their God-experiences. Spon-taneous shared prayer was seen as a threat to spiritual modesty and some even hesitated to speak freely and openly to their spiritual director (when they had one!). Thus, prayer was often considered a community activity rather tha~n a personal encounter with the Lord. Unfortunately, some of the religious who were most faithful and regular to the traditional forms of prayer were adamant against any change or adaptation and thus created a negative tension, while some of the most dedi-cated individuals openly questioned the need for prayer, further discrediting the God-encounter. In the 60's, when many communities granted religious considerable freedom in their prayer life, many religious simply ceased to pray rather than replace community prayers by longer, more intense periods of individ-ual prayer. Pragmatic, work-oriented Americans had been educated to recite prayers, to chant psalms, to meditate cognitively, but had been given woefully little education in contemplation and little incentive to be open to this vital form of prayer. They had been so active doing that they forgot that prayer was: .waiting, receiving, listening, centering, contemplating, creating a void, being open to the small still voice within, being present to a Presence. While they scurried from program to program and from .activity to activity, they'forgot to sit attentively and listen to the Lord speaking within. Man~y communities ~are now re-directing their renewal efforts, and it is this new orientation to a more contemplative stance that is giving new reason for hope. Communities that are still discussing "whether one should pray if one doesn,t feel like praying" or "whether one's work is one's prayer" are not in process of renewal: they are dying. Sand Traps Ior Renewal Programs Commuriities lose their raison d'etre unless they are gatherings of men and women of God whose lives find their meaning and sustenance in a personal relationship to Christ and provide moments and occasions of con-version of heart, an ever-to-be-renewed process. .,~'Without' personal prayer, a deeply religious life ~simply cannot develop, because no one can be a witness to Christ unless he knows Christ personally.'" ~ lnteriorization of Values A value has little influence upon a person unless it has been interior-ized: adequately formulated, clearly understood, generously accepted. Yet it is the unusual person who has interiorized his true values early in life. A significant number of religious entered religious life at an early age and quite often during their initial formation period, they were asked to conform to certain standards or to adopt definite procedures, more through trust in a person or a Rule, than through a reasoned, logical.process. "They were not to question why, they were to do ~and die." There are no shortcuts to an authentic religious formation which is a life-long process of growth in the understanding, acceptance and love of gospel values. Values cannot be legislated or decreed. They must be freely accepted after a long process of reflection and contemplation. It-is evident that this was not always done. Some religiou.s were willing to conform to set values when the external structures and the social climate supported and re-enforced these values/but they later discarded the same values be-cause these had not been properly interiorized. Long-established practices were~ often quickly abandoned because no rationale had been given for them. To try tO return to a system of regimentation.would be futile. "Religious life.with its demands of chastity, poverty, obedience and perpetual commit-ment can only be understood by a fully adult person . There are certain things, such as the need for affection, the security of a home, certain en-gagements and above all an affirmed need for independence, which a person cannot renounce too soon without doing himself harm., for a minimum of human maturity.is necessary to enter the religious life, and this minimum . may be long in coming,''~ Religious must .!iv, e in authentic freedom, the gospel freedom which is "not the power to choose between several possibilities, but is the reasoned ¯ decision, springing from the person's inmost depths, which causes him to follow at any price tl~e course that appears to be God's will. It is not a question of 'do as you please,' 'do what appeals to you,' but 'do coura-geously what you know your God has called you to accomplish.' This free-dom is linked with the inner power that enables each person to fulfill himself 1Ladislas Orsy, Open to the Spirit, p. 245. . ~Ren6 Voillaume, Con]erence o! Religious Superiors, Feb. 1970. 6 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 in terms of his truth, by. making a choice that is absolutely Consistent with his fundamental calling.''3 . This is the freedom that will give religious the desire, the conviction and the strength to live the gospel values of simplii:ity, poverty, celibacy for the kingdom, a life of contemplation and service, a life that is attentive to the call of the Spirit. The example of all revolutions certainly must have taught us that free-dom has to be learned. Tillard states that "it is essential to ~ve all members of the group an education in freedom; that is the first task of authority, the initial effort that 'precedes its fruitful ~xercise.''4 If values must be interiorized through a long reflective process, then it is useless for ~religious communities to attempt~ renewal through legislative reforms or by the imposition of new structures: The most important role of superiors is to establish in the community conditions that will. permit a true conversion o/. heart, encourage religious to~ deepen and strengthen their personal convictions, and promote~an atmosphere that will facilitate a true encounter,with each other and with the Lord. Psychological Factors ~ ~ During the p.ast ten years,~religious educators have generally stressed the values of openness, flexibility, adaptability, creativity, confidence, per-sonalism, sharing; and the initial formation programs areofrequently offered in one's normal milieu," This is quite different from the policies of the early 60's when Cardinal Suenens could state that the Church kvas in a period of "immobilism"; religious communities were strongly affected by this attitude. Religious educators stressed the values of conformity, perm.anence, stability, humility, obedience, self-denial; and religious formation was re-enforced by long periods of isolation from normal environments. Religious perfection was often considered conformity to set norms as proposed by the rules of the order. This radical change of attitude towards religious :formation is one bf the most significant develoPments of the past fifteen years. Formatioia is now seen ~is an on-going' process of growth,~ an ever-to-be-renewed activity e~nd-ing only at death. To have ceased to grow is already to have died. However, it was totally unrealistic and overly optimistic Co presume that religious who spent long years of their lives in a different value System, who were rarely e~ncouraged to share deeply, who were isolated at an early age, who were~often the victims of poor psychological practices, would b~ able to 'assume this radically different stance withrut deep anguish. That.many leaders greatly underestimated the difficulty of this adaptat~on and this over-sight partly explains the confusion and disarray of many renewal prograrias. :'I. M. R. Tillard, A Gospel Path, p. 73, Lumen Vitae Press, Belgium 1975. 4j. M. R. Tillard, ibid., p. 199. Sand Traps [or Renewal Programs / 7 It is a .credit to religious that so many were able to adapt and re-orient their thinking without major difficulty. I. would dare say that mhny religious communities are now plagued by the after-effects of .unsound and poorly adapted initial formation programs. I also believe this partly explains'why so many religious have a poor self-concept, have difficulty sharing at a value level, do not easily adjust to new situations. They were educated to stability and permanence when "one must now accept the. radicality of change, change that must go°right down to the roots . Change must be built into our systems so that they incor-porate flexibility and adaptability . The asceticism of today is to accept the agony of change. That's the discipline. It means study, dialogue, meet-ings, discussions, until you're sick of them. When you're sick, get healed and go back to the discussions.":' Religious communities should be. composed of individuals whom the love of Christ has so moved that they have given themselves 'totally to his cause and have united to transmit this love to others. They share their faith and their~ love and together build a community of believers, a com-munity of Christians. This can only be achieved in a real dialogue of love. American Success Ethic "There is nothing that succeeds .like succ6ss," and in the,50's and 60's, American religious wet6 "winners." They were highly respected, they en-joyed a privileged pbsition~in~ the ~urch and in society, their fiaembershilJ was increasing, and they .directed large, well-reputed institutions. They wanted to succeed, and they worked long hours for causes th~y esteemed yery highly. Too often however, they gauged their success according to human criteria rather than gospel values or by the authenticity of their witness to the Good News. One does not become a religious for human motives, but there is no doubt that success, respect, prestige, influence were definitemorale boosters for. pragmatic Americans. Because of past recognition and achievements it is now more difficult for religious to. accept rejection, failure; disalSproval, scorn. When. their apostolic work is questioned, their institutions closed, their values rejected; their ranks depleted, they become disheartened unless they remember that they _are simply being treated like the Mhster who was scorned, rejected, crucified. ~ Religious were so closely tied to their institutions that at times they confused means with ends, forgetting that they were first and foremost messe0gers of the gospel rather than professional workers. "To the degree to which an end is spiritual, the means employed to attain it are always inadequate. In fact, when speaking of a spiritual end, it is preferable today ~Fr. Cassian Yuhaus, C.P., Con[erence to Religious, Winslow, ME, Nov. 1975. Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 to avoid the word 'means,' for to our contemporaries the word evokes an action which obtains exactly the effect envisaged,''6 This period of confusion and turm6il may become for religious a period of great creative tension. Though their lives and their activities a~re in-carnated in a specific work-situation which may project few signs of human success, their gospel vision will enlighten an apparently hopeless situation and give their religious consecration its full depth of meaning. "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest . Anyone who loves his life will lose it; anyone who hates his life in this world° will keep it for eternal life" (Jn 12:24-26). Now more than ever it is necessary, for religious to ponder the gospel message of failure, of inefficiency, of rejection, of death,,as well as the com-plementary message of success through failure, of life through death, of resurrection through annihilation. Father Pasquier states that: "It is impossible to bein communion with another before we have experienced our own poverty and our limitations. The quality of presence to others entails a risk of rejection. It is a risk that religious are called to take and from which they should not be sheltered by their vows.''7 Religious are now in the privileged position of experiencing their poverty and their weakness and are thus better able to commune with the weak and the rejected as well as with the strong and the respected. Influence of Mass Media Whether religious realize it or not, many have been gravely affected by the historical process of secularization. Some religious are now totally in-serted into a professional work-environment and they may have accepted almost imperceptibly many of the secular values so effectively propagated by mass media. The message of self-and~sense-gratification is in direct op-position to the gospel imperatives. , Self-denial and personal ascesis are in such ill repute that some religious have unwittingly accepted many of the pseudo-values and prevalent sophisms adroitly disseminated by our sense-sated society. It is never a pleasant prospect to accept experientially the reality of Christ's call to self-denial, but to speak seriously of renewal in religious life and ignore the injunction~ "Let him who wants to be my disciple, deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Mt 16:24), is nonsense. Very often religious simply do not realize the extent to which they are C'R6gamey, L'exigence de Dieu, p. 86, Quoted by Voillaume, Conlergnce o] Religious Superiors. :Jacques Pasquier, O.M.I., "Conference~on Spiritual Leadership." Sand Traps ]or Renewal Programs / 9 victimized by .mass media or subtly controlled by their professional en-vironment. Religious strove so strenuously for so many years to be fully integrated into the American culture that they forgot that by their religious consecration they had vowed to be "counter cultural." Some have suc-cumbed to the temptation of living a progressively more affiuent life-style or have been blinded by the glitter of wealth and the prestige of social status. It is useless to speak of renewal until the stark gospel message can once more be heard over the din of television commercials. "Where supposedly committed persons~seem to enjoy all the good things of life, the witness value is destroyed and not unusually, the whole person's sense of vocation along with it. He has fallen into the mistake not simply of imagining that things and experiences can make him happy, but that fulfillment or happi-ness itself can be directly sought.''8 Ordinary professional and religious obligations ,are certainly the main ingredients of a life of ascesis, yet Father George Maloney, S.J., in a course on prayer at Fordham University dared state: "It is impossible to make significant progress in prayer unless one is willing to practice ascesis with aggression." He was simply echoing St. John of the Cross: "Contemplation or detachment or poverty of spirit . are almost one and the same thing.'"' A life of authentic poverty, of generous service to others, of sensitivity to the Spirit, of loving celibate commitment, of creative solitude, of constant attentiveness to the Lord, are not possible unless one willingly accepts" the Lord,s clear challenge to self-denial. Many renewal efforts have come to naught because religious refused to pay the price. ~ Fragmentation I previously mentioned that' some of the values that are now cherished by certain religious communities are those of flexibility, openness, adapiabil-ity, creativity, personalism and I also indicated that most communities now permit a wide choice of apostolic works: All these positive values are to be respected, but if they are taken separately without consideration for stabil-ity,: permanence and community commitments, they can lead to a fragmenta: tion of the group, a qoss of identity with the community and an impover-ishment of the sense of missi6n. For a religious, "to do his own thing" or "to go his own way" may be an, acceptable temporary solution to a difficult problem, but it will rarely be satisfactory in the long run. Many communities have a number of religious "on the fringe" members who are hardly associated with the larger group either in body or in spirit. If this trend becomes .generalized, it could be disastrous for the communities. SRichard Jo Kropf, "Radical Commitment and Fulfillment," Spiritual LiJe, Summer, 1975, p. 91. ~'John of the Cross, Dark Night, I, Chap. 4, par. 1. Review [or Religious, V~lume 36, 1977/1 "A community cannot exist long in the Church, unless it is dedicated to giving collectively.''1° Furthermore, it. is not sufficient for individuals to 6e renewed. The whole community, or a significant number of members, must make deter-mined efforts at renewal. 'In every community there are a number of re-ligious who have: come alive during the past years, but sometimes these members are stymied or frustrated by a lethargic~ apathetic group. "For a revitalization to occur, transformation must go beyond the personal. It must penetrate and reshape the. social reality of the community. If the cen-tering of personal-transformation is ekperienced~:by a number ~of people within the community, then a network can emergd through which that trans-forming experience is '~ustained, supported, enhanced. As the sharing of transformational experiences and awareness deepens and intensifies, there emerges a group with a shared vision and codamitment~.~This group becomes a revitalizing force dedicated to building more rewarding community ex-periences and recovering the gripping attraction to living according to Christ's conditions.for .evangelical discipleship.'''1 When this revitalization occurs to'a significant number of people in the cbmmunity great things~ begin to happen, a new life pulsates through the group and a spirit (Spirit?) comes alive in the community._ Possible Orientations It is impossible' for me to indicate what could or should be done by each community to promote a true renewal. Let me simply raise a few ques-tions that may suggest some possible orientations in groups seriously dedi-cated to renewal. l. Are the difficulties~experienced by many communities in organizing community discussions that are a true faith-sharing,due mainly to psy-chological factors, poor knowledge of group dynamics, or weak religious motivations? What .specific steps have been. taken by your community to facilitate this meaningful exchange? 2. Is it POssible for ygu, for your community to live with insecurity, contradiction, rejection? IS this contrary to the gospel teaching? 3. How does your co,,mmunity determine the priorities of personnel, of time~, of resources in selecting an apostolic work? If apostolic choice is left to the individual, what efforts are made to determine a priority .of ac-tivity? 4. Has your community ever tried to gauge the ~impact of mass media upon community values? How many religious in your community are slaves to the "one-eyed monster?" a~°Ladislas Orsy, "Talk, given to Conference of Major JSuperiors,:' America, August 8, 1970, p. 59. ~Lawrence Cada and Raymond iZitz, REVIEW FOa REL~OOS, Vol. 34, No. 5, p. 716. Sand Traps ]or Renewal Programs 5. Is contemplation a common and regular form of individual prayer in your community? What is the attitude of the community towards this form of prayer? ~ 6. Do you define yourselves in terms of your work or in terms of your status? What conclusions can you draw from this? 7. What percentage of the religious in your communities have partici-pated in some more prolonged renewal program within the last three years? five years? eight .years? What does this indicate about your group? 8. Is the life-style in your communities consonant with a religious com-mitment to poverty? In what way? 9. "Christian leadership is accomplished only through service. This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation with all the human vulnerabilities a man has to share with his fellowman" (Henri Nouwen, Wounded Healer, p. 77). Does this quotation quite adequately portray, your district and com-munity leaders? 10. What is the community attitude towards tension? When is it a positive sig9 of growth? When is it a negative factor in the community? 11'. Do community discussions occasionally lead to specific decisions which can be implemented? Why is it so difficult to reach a consensus when specific proposals are suggested? 12. Are religious in your community personally affected by the plight of the 450,000,000 people in the world who are on a starvation diet? What specific activities have been taken by your community to alleviate this situa-tion? 13. Do religious in your community have the freedom to challenge each other to fidelity to sacred promises publicly expressed? If not, what does this indicate? - 14. Do your communities have an effective way of evaluating~the initial formation program? 15. Are long-term institutional: commitments still possible or desirable? How are these to be implemented if everyone is free to choose his own apostolic activity? , Let me conclude by a quo.tation from Father Ladislas Orsy: "Since re-ligious life is the existential gift of God, any question about the future of religious life is a question about the future ~of God's abundance in the Church, about the dynamic action of the Holy Spirit among his pebple-- thus it is not, subject ~to human power. If God gave this gift in the past, he is not likely to deprive, his Churcl~ of it in,the future.''~ V-'Ladislas Orsy, op. cit., p. 21. Seven-hundred-and-fifty years later: Reflections on the Franciscan Charism Eric Doyle, O.F.M. Fr. Eric Doyle, O.F.M. teaches at the Franciscan Study Centre, Canterbury CT2 7NA. Kent, England. This year marks the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi at the Portiuncula on October 3rd 1226. The sources for his life record that larks gathered on the roof above where he lay dying and sang sweetly as he welcomed Sister Death into his life? No one would deny that on that Saturday evening in 1226 a most holy man, a truly human man and a faithful disciple of Christ Crucified passed over to God. And the earth was made the poorer for that passing. Already in various parts of the world there have been courses of lec-tures and celebrations to mark the event and there will be quite a few more before the year has ended. Eulogies will be made in many languages and no doubt St: Francis from his place in heaven will hear himself hailed again as "Patron of the Environment" and "Patron of Ecumenism." The anniversary provides a good opportunity for a Franciscan to reflect on the order's efforts to come to terms with the demands to rediscover its own charism made over the last decade or so since the Second Vatican Council.-Though my ~primary concern is the First Order of Franciscans, and specifically the Order of Friars Minor, I think these reflections will have some relevance for the Conventuals, the Capuchins and the various branches of the Third Order Regular as well, for it is the same charism aSee "Legend of Perugia," 110, in St. Francis o] Assisi. Writings attd Early Biogra-pities, English Omnibus Edition o] the Sources ]or the Li]e o] St. Francis. Ed. by Marion A. Habig. Franciscan Herald Press, ChiCago 1973, 1085-1086. ~ . , Reflections on the Franciscan .Ch~arism / 13 which ultimately inspires them all. These reflections may have even wider relevance. Orders which lead the so-called "mixed" life share many of the same problems in facing the demands of renewal. The Question of Poverty These pages contain no detailed analysis of poverty. In the case of an order which has been so intimately assdciated wiih the profession of pov-erty, this calls for a word of explanation. For the Franciscan Order the question of poverty is ambiguous. It can be a very complicated question and it can be a very simple question, according to the approach one takes to it. For the order as it is de facto organized in the world, poverty is a complicated question. It cannot be examined or discussed in any realistic or satisfactory way if it is isolated from the findings of biblical exegesis and the understanding of poverty in the bible, from a study of all the ele-ments contained in the idea of evangelical perfection which relati;cize the place of poverty in the life and writings of St. Francis, 'from the question about the extent and effectiveness of apostolic activity; and from the de-mands made on the order to find resources to cope with and provide for the numbers who seek to enter it. No one would deny that the Franciscan Order should bE involved in work among the poor. At the theoretical level this is almost a truism for. the Franciscan. At the practical level, however, it is no easy matter to de-termine who precisely are the poor today. While the term certainly covers the homeless, th'e destitute, the oppressed and the exploited, it may also be used to describe countless millions all over the globe who ar~ spiritually impoverished. But even when we have arrived at a moderat~ely sa!isfactory answer to the question': Who are the poor?, we find at once that there are required no mean resources, for example, to have a friar trained to be a ~ompetent and reliable apostle among social outcasts. For the order to providd re-sources to train a friar as a professional social worker is a deeply Christian work and a tremendous act of service to the world. : On the°'~other hand, the question of poverty can be very simple. If a person reads the accounts of the early history of the order and is convinced that the poverty which St. Francis and his first companions embraced is the unique charism of the order, and feels assured that he is called to do the. same, then that person must go and do likewise and thus institute a new branch of the Franciscan Order in the world. The same obligation, it seems, would rest upon a professed friar who became conscientiously convinced that the order has sacrificed an essential element of its charism and mission to the wrrld in abandoning the poverty of St. Francis. He would be bound quite simply to leave the order as it is and to establish another form of the Franciscan life. It would be pointless to ask him where he would go, because, from that moment onward, total ' 14 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 abandonment to divine providence would be of the structure of his voca-tion, and he would literally have to wait for something to turn up. What he certainly cotild not do would be to stay in the order as it is now consti-tuted, passing away his days in criticizing it and growing old in bitterness, while living by its resources and in its security. Perhaps at the very outset we ought to familiarize with these difficulties all who seek to join us. They would then be able to make such considerations a conscious factor in their decision to join us or not. We should also make sure they know by experi-ence that the gospel spirit of St. Francis does live on in the order, despite the fact that his povertyis not observed. I do not wish to suggest that the order as it now finds itself can'simply ignore the question of poverty. In .fact it has not ignored it over the last decade. There have been many attempts to come to terms with it at the practical level. But it remains problematic.~ However, the issue cannot be discussed in these pages, nor can a.ny assessment be made of the at-temp~ s to come to terms with poverty, firstly, because it would take far too lorlg and, secondly, because while it isundoubtedly an important issue, it is not, in our opinion, the most important issue for the life and mission of the order. There are more vital matters to be considered to which we now shall turn: Rediscovery of the Origi'nal Charism, The Second Vatican Council called all religious to rediscover the par-ticular charism given to the Church in the grace of their origins and to renew and adapt their life according to its form. By a proces.s of discernr ment in the light of the gospel and according to the signs of the times-- that is by Word and wprld--religious were required to define the specific ahd permanent acquisition made by the Church in the life and work of their particular order. ~Th, e FranCiscan~ Order, like every order, belongs to the Church. Only in virtue of its ecclesial character can it be understood in its specific genius at any moment of its higtory and as a renewal movement at its origins. Apa.rt from the Church, the Franciscan Order is ultimately meaningless. St. Francis himself was not only a man of the gospel, but also and by that very'fact, he was a man of the Church. Therefore, the attempt by any order 6r congregation to discover its own particular grace is not anexercise in self-analysis, but a profound act of service to the Church. The call to rediscover the original charism ~raised ~t once a question for the Franciscan Order which .has not yet been satisfactorily treated. The question is this: Is the original charism to be sought uniquely in the period between the oi'al approval of the Rule by Pope Innocent and the death '-'We have touched onosome, of these problems in "Reflections on the Theology of Religiou.s Life," REv~:w FOR RELICIOOS, vol. 32, n. 6. Nov. 1973, 1254-1256. Reflections on the Franciscan Charism of St. Francis (1209-1226), or is' it to be sought throughout the first cen-tury of the order's history from the approval of the Rule to the death of John Duns Scotus (1209-1308)? This is not just an academic question, but a matter of some concern to any Franciscan conscious of the profound contribution made to the development of Christology by the Franciscan School, in the first century of its history, The order has beew far :to6 pre-occupied in its renewal program with the period up to the death of St. Francis. This is an unjust .and uncritical restriction of the content of tile Franciscan charism. Of course, the call to rediscover the charism required of us to return to St. Francis himself. About that there is no argument. The complaint being made here concerns the well-nigh exclusive preoccupa-tion with the early years of the order's life, which drasticallyotruncates the order's charism. Many reasons might be suggested to explain this restrictive version of the charism. I wish to single out,the one which bears most responsibility. It is romanticism. Romanticism has exercised far too much influence on judgments of the order's history since the death of St. Francis. It has given the order a bad conscience, especially over the last eighty years or so since Paul Sabatier's views became common patrimony? What we can describe in general terms as the "Fioretti-picture" of the early years, has exercised inordinate influence over the general public and over the scholarly fraternity, particularly its non-Catholic representatives. We need to be on our guard in the presence of romantics. Their understandable sadness at the way the order developed can have the most extraordinary effe°ct on how they .read the sources . ,~,J When the, Franciscan Order, for example, in late fourteenth-century English history is described.by students of Wyclif, Chaucer and Langlan~d ,as "decadent" I have often concluded that we really ought to read in many cases no~t "decadent" but,"different"--that is, different from the little band of beggars which landed at Dover in September 1224 and different from the early days at Rivo Torto. Disapl;ginted and sad romantics are a dangerous breed. The "romantic myth" has had profound .though subconscious influence on the order, It has subtly brainwashed~ us into believing that if only we could repeat as " closely as ,possible the form of life which .S~. Francis led, if only we could do away with the ~whole intellectual edifice which the orde{ constructed for itself, then we would be true and authentic Franciscans. From these remarks it will be clear where we intend to place the locus of the original Franciscan charism. According to our view the original charism is to be sou.ght in the period~from the approval of the Rule in 1209 up to the death of John Duns Scotus in 1308. To return to the sources means, for a Franciscan, a return to the first hundred years of develop- :~Vie de S. Francois d'Assise, l~dition drfinitive (Paris: Fischbache'r, 1931). 16 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 ment in doctrine and life. The fullness of the charism is to be found there and not exclusively in the life and teaching of St. Francis. It is quite legiti-mate, in function of. this, to consider the Franciscan charism under two headings: form of life and Christological doctrine. The first concerns the evolution of the order's life in the thirteenth century. The second concerns the development of the Christology in the Franciscan School in the thir-teenth century. The results of historical analysis show that the form of Franciscan life changed radically from what St. Francis had intended and that the Christological doctrine of the Franciscan School remained totally faithful to his original Christocentric inspiration. The ,Form of Life The foundation of the Franciscan Order in the thirteenth century marked a new stage in the history of the religious life in the Wefftern Church. While it. is clearly the case that St. Francis intended to establish an order in the commonly accepted sense of that term, it is equally clear that he was conscious of its radical newness. According to his intention, the order was to be a brotherhood of itinerant apostles--whether priests or manual workers, or, as we should say today, professional men--who would go into a society that was still Christian and also go out to foreign lands among the ~Saracens, to spread the gospel of peace and reconciliation by the ministry of the Word and the apostolate of presence. For a period of time that intention was realized. Whenever the friars met they showed that they were members of the same fraternity and they offered one another mutual help and support. At the end of their day's work they returned to their small communities to be refreshed bodily and spiritually, to pray together, and to draw strength from their fraternal cele-bration of the Eucharist. Thus renewed and restored, they were able to return to their mission of sharing with others what they themselves had re-ceived so generously from being together in the "local church" 6f their own community. As is universally ~recognized, this did not remain for very long the pat-tern of life of the order. Due to internal tensions and from ~xternal pres-sures from the demands of the apostolate at the time and from the wishes ~f the Holy See, the order was compelled to take a line of development which° radically changed what St. Francis had intended and what the original form of life had been. There are those who look upon this as a Salutary de-velopment, precisely because it took place ultimately under the authority and guidance of the Holy See. While this attitude demands sor~e respect, it also creates difficulties in ,deciding which has priority between the poles of institution and charism. In responding to the call to rediscover its original charism (and it was the institution which gave the call) the Franciscan Order found itself in a slightly embarrassing position. As it retracted the steps of its development Re[tebtions on the Franciscan Charism / 17 through a very checkered history back to the thirteenth centur);, it discovered that.~it was largely due to the institution that an important element in its charism :h~id been lost. The loose structure of its form of life had been heavily instituti6nalized and the fraternity had been "monastified" and "hierarch-ized" almost beyond recognition. Institution and Charism From the outset there has been tension in the Franciscan Order between charism and institution. St. Francis himself, who is always proclaimed as a most obedient son of the Holy Roman Church, managed to get his own way with the wily and astute Pope Innocent IIl. One wonders what would have been the outcome if the pope had refused him permission to live his very distinctive interpretation of the Gospel. Perhaps he would have be-come a hermit. To the end of his days, in any case, he remained convinced that what he desired his order to be was completely at one with the will of God." The turn of events in the thirteenth century gaye the order a very dif-ferent character from that which it possessed in its early decades. The con-stitutional development from the late 1230's up to the Chapter of Nar-bonne in 1260 is the history of a gradual "monastification" of the order. This cannot in justice be laid exclusively at the door of St. Bonaventure, for the winds of change had already been blowing for nearly thirty years when he was elected Minister General." By the end of the thirteenth century the order had been substantially altered, due in 'large measure to the institu-tional Church, for what were undoubtedly the most laudable ends. Of course, there were also internal reasons for the change and it would '1See Lawrence C. Landini, The Causes o] the Clericalization O[ the Order o] Friars Minor 1209-1260 in the Light o] Early Franciscan Sottrces (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1968). We have given rio consideration here to St. Bonaventure's theology of history nor to his eschatological interpretation of the life of St. Francis. These highly developed aspects of St. Bonaventure's thought played no significant part in the order's self-understanding and program of renewal during the past decade. For this reason we have not touched on his solution of the "Franciscan Question." This omission, therefore, should not be understood as a value judgment. Our concern is ¯ with those aspects of the original charism which have been re-discovered and, with varying degrees of success, reduced to practice, and with other aspects which deserve further consideration, which ought to influence the o.rder's continuing renewal. St. Bonaventure's eschatological interpretation of St. Francis is, in our view, the most satisfactory solution to the problem about th~ order's relation to St. Francis. It is, however, not only, satisfactory; it is" also fully consonant with the way the early sources present him and the ~rimitive community. It has most relevance in any dis-cussion of Franciscan poverty, for it raises the question not only whether the order can or cannot observe St. Francis' poverty, but whether or not it is even meant to observe it. To assess St. Bonaventure's place in the development of the order in the thii'teenth century, without taking into serious account his theology, of history and his eschatological interpretation of St. Francis, leads to profound misunderstanding of that development and commits injustice against St. Bonaventure. Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 be unhistorical to place responsibility entirely on the Holy See.-It is no idle speculation to ponder what the order might have been, had it not experi-enced the process of clericalization in the thirteenth century and had Friar Elias not alienated so many while he held office. But in the final analysis, one is compelled to conclude that the Holy See can hardly be :said to havi~ done all in its power to preserve what St. Francis so plainly intended. This was the result of tension between charism and institution. The Church ha~s known this tension in varying degrees of intensity ever since the New Testament, and perhaps." never so acutely as over the last two decades. Tension arises precisely because both institution and charism proceed from the grace of God. Charisms are given to the Church for the sake of the institution; the prophet is alw~iys sent to renew the institution. The sad story is, however, that so often the institution resists the charism because'it threatens the established order; it leads out into the unknown and the uncharted. The temptation for the institution is always to neutralize a charism by institutionalizing it. This is not done maliciously or even con-sciously. But it is done and it is done effectively. The intentions of St. Francis could not easily be categorized. They were not neat and tidy, cut and dried, but on the contrary, like himself; paradoxical and a fraction complicated. I have never believed that this passionate, romantic and ambitious young man was ever as simple as some of his biographers have inade out. Of course, he did not have a legal mind; he had the soul of a poet'sand poets are notoriously difficult to pin down. In his own head ior perhaps better: in his own heart) everything was crystal clear: he. wanted to 'live the life of the gospel according to the form that God 'had revealed to him. One can sympathize with Rome, ithei:efore,t whose genius has always been principa!ly of the legal order. How does one categorize an intention that expresses itself in a Rule for itinerant apostles which is identified with the gospel, and in another for hermitages that al-lows for a change of rbles between Martha and Mary according to what seems best for the moment? Aspects of the Charism Rediscovered In going back to its original inspiration, the Franciscan Order knew in its heart that,~it simply could not recreate in our time the full intentions of St. Francis. However, it has mandged to reintroduce some of the essential elements of his charism, and what it has done is a sple6did achievement. 1. Over the last ten years the order has "de-monastified" itself and restored in principle its truly fraternal character. It is now more obviously an Order of Friars, some of whom are engaged in priestly work, others in manual work inside'~and outside the order and still others who Are engaged in professional work. There is a deep consciousness of what it means e~xistenti~ally to be a Franciscan friar. This consciousness is growing alsace and it will ultimately be in complete possession. Reflections on the Franciscan Charism / 19 2. There has also been a gradual "de-clericalization" of the order. This does not necessarily mean a reduction in the number of priests (though this will happen, I think) nor does it imply, nor should it ever have im-plied, an anti-priest complex, The order was unfortunately plagued .with that complex for a period after the Council. To be a priest does not neces-sarily mean to be clericalized. There are many young priests, middle-aged p~iests and elderly priests in the order who are most certainly not clerical-ized; but then there are some who .are. Clericalization creates an elite and a,:caste system. There is no true place for an elite or a caste system in the Franciscan Order, nor, for that mat~.er, .in the Church at large. The Church knows no hierarchy of persons but acknowledges only a hierarchy of func-tions and at its pinnacle is service. Moreover, authority has been restored to its original role, according to the understanding of St. Francis, as a ministry and service to the friars. This has had its influence also on the gradual abolition of hierarchical structures from the order. 3. Experiments of living the Franciscan life in small communities have proved in the main successful and have undoubtedly enriched the quality of community life. This has been one of the most significant contributions of all our efforts to restore the fraternal character of the order. There have been losses, excesses and mistakes. But these are negligible when compared with the gains, the openness and the insights we have harvested. Franciscan life in small communities or groups has. proved to be far more demanding on the individual friar than it ever ~was in the heavily structured .forms of life we knew for so long, Our experiences have taught us that life in small communities requires a high degree of human and Christian maturity: For life thus lived is a creative process, not a structured, unchanging pattern into which one is fitted. 4. Many of these small communities have been established in the center of towns and cities where the realities of modern living, its pressures and demands may be witnessed and experienced at first hand. A number of friars in such communities have taken up ~work in social organizations often not' instituted by the Church nor directly connected with it. These developments have given concrete expression to other aspects of the original charism and primitive form of life. Unlike~the older monastic orders, the friars settled in the heart~ iof towns and cities where they were brought face to face with the social evils of the time: As a result, the Franciscans were closely con-nected with the foundation of medieval guilds, the ,distant0ancestors of the modern trade unions. They supported the organization of workers into guilds. which protected the legitimate material interests of the workers and fur-thered their spiritual lives. Some of the charters of these guil~ls were drawn up in the refectories of the friars or on the altars of their churches. Later on, in the fifteenth century, the iniquities of t~sury led the Franciscans to establish the Montes Pietatis--an institution which guarantees them a place for all time in social history. All these developments may be traced back 20 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 to St. Francis himself who, from the outset of his conversion, was involved in caring for lepers, one of the greatest social evils of the Middle Ages. The modern form of the apostolate of presence: living at the heart of urban life and working from within non-ecclesiastical social structures, is really a reduction to practice of The Canticle o[ Brother Sun 'and of St. Bonaventure's beautiful work On Retracing the Arts to Theology. For the Franciscan there is no distinction between the sacred and the profane. The problems of what is described as secularization prove for a Franciscan to be false problems~ This is now simply man's world and man is made in the image of Christ and Christ is the image of the Father we cannot see. The Spirituality of St. Francis The rediscovery of the basic elements of Franciscan spirituality has been the most rewarding of all. A comparative study of the spirituality of the Conciliar documents and the writings of St. Francis shows how incredibly modern this very medieval man turns out to be. His spirituality is simply Jesus Christ. The thoroughly biblical and sacramental, above all eucharistic, char-acter of his piety and holiness make it clear that it was our spirituality and practices of piety that had to be brought up-to-date, renewed and reformed, not his! There is nothing nauseating about his spirituality, nothing repulsive about his piety. There° is not one line, not one word, in the expressions of his evangelical holiness that need be changed, corrected or expunged. He loved the God-Man in all his poverty and humanity, in all his kindness and suffering. He loved him absolutely, without qualification. He loved Christ not only with his whole heart, but with his whole soul and mind and strength. His conversion was complete because it was born of love. Every-thing he said and sang, everything he desired and longed for, his every though and deed, came from and led back directly to his love of Jesus Christ. The most distinctive feature of his holiness is its tenderness. And it bears that feature because he was a passionate man. He did not extinguish in himself the fire of passion; he redirected it by grace into the love of Christ, where it burned more ardently in the all-consuming flame of the love of Christ's heart for the Father and for all creation. Our renewed understanding of the totally Christocentric spirituality of St. Francis has Shown the order that in its common life of prayer it does not need a multiplication of devotions and practices of piety. To: be faithful to the spirituality of St. Francis requires of the friars to live and work, to think and pray;" after the example of the life Jesus led on earth, by the power of his glorified existence with the Father, in the beauty of his vestiges and images in creation, according to the message of his Word, through his selfless love in the Blessed Eucharist and together with his brethren in the Church. All of which may be summarized by saying that we must live by his threefold presence in our midst; his verbal presence (the proclamation Reflections on the Franciscan Charism of the gospel, among us); his sacramental presence (preeminently the eucharistic celebration); his mystical,.pregence (the community of believers which gathers to proclaim and celebrate his victory over death and his faith-ful witness' to love). The Tension That Remains "~ None of these changes according to~ the form of the original charism has been achieved without suffering and bitterness; This is the sad side. to the history' of renewal and reform in the Church generally. However, it was an inevitable and predictable concomitant to the renewal from the begin-ning and it is,'rooted in the tension between institution and charism. The movement for reform initiated by the Council brought to the surface two diametrically opposed views of the Church which have been labeled, not satisfactorily though not unjustly, as reactionary-conservative and liberal-progressive. The fears of the former soon turned to suspicion; the enthusi-asm of the latter speedily became intrlerance. And for a time the .result was deadlock and suffering on both sides. Tension between institution and charism can be healthy and construc-tive. It can also be deadly and,destructive if attitudes polarize. As an out-come of the changes in the order's form of life there was a polarization of attitudes. Two basic attitudes emerged which differed radically about what had taken place and" what were being predicted as the .lines of future development. The attitudes correspond to the labels reactionary and liberal. The tension between these polarized attitudes 'is by no means as acute now as it was five years ago, but it is still present. From a state of complete in-ability to communicate, a modus vivendi was eventually found, based on an unspoken and precarious truce to steer clear of all that might open the wounds. Now, thanks to more openness ~on the one side and.greater tolerance on the other, the truce has given place to a willingness to dialogue and the gigns areothat the tension will become creative. Up to the present, however, while having had some creative and productive effect, it has been largely negative and counter,productive. Two "orders" have been existing side by side in the one order. But now the signs are that they are growing towar~s unity once more. This tension continues to exist in varying degrees of intensity through-out all the provinces of the order. To a greater or less extent it concerns every aspect of the charism in relation to our form of life and every attempt to reduce it to practice. But the deepest tension has been caused by the opposing views on what may be described as the order's apostolate of presence. The one view maintains that it is our vocation to engage in priestly ministerial work, in charitable works centered upon our friaries ~and in domestic works within the friaries, which latter ensure that they remain habitable and in good condition, so that the former works may be carried 22 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 on with competence and efficiency. To these works the major part of the order is now committed and thi~ commitment has come to pass by the demands made upon us and the indications given to us by °the institutional Church, whether the Holy See or the diocesan bishops. These works; it is argued, have been assigned to us by the 'authority of the Church and there-fore they are clearly what we are meant to do unde'i: God: Furthermore, they put us in direct contact with the evolution of the order as this took place under the guidance of the Holy .See in the thirteenth century. This is a version of the adage, "Roma locuta est"; it gives priority to the institu-tion. It maintains that priestly work is the ~paradigm of the Franciscan apostolate. This view is prepared to admit that some friars might well work in other forms of the apostolate which are .neither priestly nor ministerial nor centered upon a friary. These forms of the"apostolate, however, have significance only insofar as they~ proceed ultimately from the priestly min-istry and eventually lead back to it. The other view maintains that it is our vocation to spread the gospel message by our presence in the world. This can be fulfilled in a large variety of ways; by priestly ministerial work and charitable works centered upon our friaries; by priestly ministerial work and charitable works not centered upon our friaries; by domestic work inside and, outside our friaries; by professional work outside the friaries in ecclesiastical institutions-or non-ecclesiastical institutions~ by taking up salaried trades and professions out-side ecclesiastical institutions. This view, it is argued, is in direct continuity with the earliest years of the order's history and is a version of the saying of St. Francis that the Holy Spirit is the Minister General of the Order; it gives priority to the original charism. It holds that there is no special paradigm for the Franciscan apostolate and that the order must balance the demands made by the institution with the clear requirements of the charism, even if this means that we may have to sacrifice some of the areas in which we are exclusively committed to priestly ministerial work. Due to circumstances we could neither foresee nor control, these two views eventually reached the compromise of co-existence and then entered into dialogue. The circumstances which brought them together were the overall decrease in numbers of those entering the order, the high figure of those who left the order and an extraordinary awareness of the original charism among the majority of those who seek to enter~the order. This last phenomenon is remarkable, Its major effect has been that entrants to the order express their vocation simply in terms of wanting to be friars with-out further qualification.This is a reliable sign of how the future of the order will evolve. Christology and the Franciscan School . Earlier in this paper we insisted that the original charism of the order is to be sought not exclusively in the life and teaching of St. Francis but Reflections on the Franciscan Charism in the whole period that extends to the death of Duns Scotus, the last of the major representatives of the Franciscan School of Theology. We must examine the reasons which jrstify this position. During the period up to the death of Duns Scotus theologians of the order worked out a doctrine of the person and work of Christ and of his l~lace in the oikumene and cosmos that is as beautiful as it is original and as inspiring as it is profound. It stands out as a remarkable contribution to the development of Christology in the Church. Any study'or presentation of the original F.ranciscan charism that limits itself to the life of St. Francis not only misrepresents that charism, but also does disservice and injustice to the Church by depriving her of what,belongs to her by right. The Christo~ logical teaching of the Franciscan School is as much an essential element of the Franciscfin charism as is the fraternal character of the early order, ,the apostolate of presence, the Rule o/ 1221, the Rule ]or Hdrmitages, The Canticle of Brother Sun and the Rule of 1223. What Fr. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. has written about the philosophy of education in the spirit of St. Bonaventure, may be applied without qualification to the Christological doctrine of the whole Franciscan School: : Those of us who stand heirs to that tradition have a weighty obligation to ~ee that such a tradition be not lost and that it be brought to bear in our world today. That it should have.come to be deposited with such clarity and power in the order that claims the poor, s~mple man of Assisi as its founder will no doubt puzzle those who tend to limit the meaning of that order in an unhistori-cal and arbitrary way. That its outstanding spokesman should be a Franciscan does not make it the private possession of the order. For what the order car-rieshere as in an earthen vessel is a treasure for the whole of the Church and a heritage for mankind as such. Certainly the order would be unfaithful to its tradition and remiss in its obligation to the Church and the world if'it were not to thke up" this tradition anew, in a creative way, in"a world for which one of the,most pervasive and potentially destructive idols is the ideal of rational control.'~ The Constitutions of the Order The General Constitutions of the order published in 1953 state in Arti-cle 238, par. 6:~.~'In the philosophical and theological faculties the lectors shall earnestly endeavour to follow the Franciscan School; they shall hold in high regard the other Scholastics, especially the Angelic Doctor, .St. Thomas, the Heavenly Patron of,Catholic Schools.''° Despite this exhorta-tion, however, the order as a whole has not endeavored as earnestly as it might have done to follow its own school. The manuals of philosophy and z",Toward a Philosophy of Education in the Spirit of St. Bonaventure," Proceedings ol the Seventh Centenary Celebration o/ the Death o] Saint Bonaventure (The Fran-ciscan Institute: St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1975), 26-27. 6The Rule and Constitutions o] the Order o] Friars Minor (Rome, 1953), 100. 24 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 theology, ,which were the staple intellectual diet of most of the houses of study in the ordei'~ were composed chiefly by authors of the Thomistic tradition (not always the same as the tradition of St. Thomas!), who tended to reduce the contents of the Franciscan tradition at best to footnotes and scholia, at worst, to being adverse to the thesis advanced. The high place accorded to St. Thomas in Catholic theology and the fact that he received honorable mention in the Code o] Canon Law made him the touchstone of orthodoxy and the gauge of true Catholic doctrine. The second title given to him--the Common Doctor--resulted in every other doctor becoming for the most part decidedly uncommon. In comparing the Dominican and Fran-ciscan Orders we find that the former exalted St. Thomas and tended to forget St. Dominic; the latter exalted St. Francis and tended to forget St. Bonaventure. Thus it is that we speak of the Thomistic School, not the Dominican School; of the Franciscan School, not the Bonaventurian School. This latter designation has further significance, as will be seen below. , In the Revised General Constitutions promulgated by the Minister General in December 1973, it is stated.in Article 20, par. 1: "Mental prayer should be based on the writings and example of Francis and on the teaching of the Franciscan masters. Nevertheless, each friar is free to choose the method~of prayer that suits him"r; in Article 170, par. 2: "Theological edu-cation should be encouraged in the order with special care. The greatest at-tention shouldobe given to the preparation of expert teachers of theology who will administer spirit and life after the intent of Francis and the other masters of the order"; ibid., par. 4: "Where there are no houses of study of the order, students should be given lectures on the~history and teaching of the Franciscan School"8; in the Introduction to Chapter Six: Formation to Franciscan LiIe: "Franciscan pedagogy, according to a thought-plan (dialec-tic) which continually renews itself, takes as its greater and most difficult task to bring together the divine with the human--a process begun by St, Francis and set in logical order by the Masters of the Franciscan School, a process rightly styled "thought in acting"--in other words, love.''° It is to be hoped that the spirit behind these statements in the new Constitutions will prevail over the strange indifference to the Franciscan theological tradition that has characterized the order in modern times and that it will eradicate the dull anti-intellectual element in the order which re-sulted from that fatal romanticism mentioned earlier. This anti-intellectual element has been making itself felt ifl'various parts of the order over the past few years. Its root lies in a subconscious belief that there is something rThe Plan ]or Franciscan Living. The Rule and General Constitutions o[ the Order of Friars Minor (English-Speaking Conference of Provincials: Pulaski, Wisconsin, 1974), 70. ,~ Slbid., 147, 148. °Ibid., 129-130. ~ Re~qections on the Franciscan Charism not quite authentic about a learned Franciscan or a Franciscan who wishes to devote his life to study. The popular picture of the Franciscan friar has had a surreptitious influence on the order. The Franciscan is expected to be a jolly friar, simple to the point of lunacy, preferably rotund in shape and bald into the bargain, rfiddy-face.d and definitely not learned, who trips through the world hoping to get a good dinner, but happy to sing to the sun if he does not. This picture is reproduced each year on hundreds of Christ-mas cards all over the world. (I have made a collection of the more amusing ones!) The irony of the popular picture is that it bears no resemblance what-ever to the first Franciscan, St. Francis himself was a man of joy, but in "no sense could he be called jolly; he had the simplicity of the dove but also the cunning of the serpent, just as the gospel says; he was a small man, thin and emaciated; not bald, but shaven-headed; his skin was delicate and his flesh very spare;1" though not learned in a bookish sense, he knew French, wrote tolerably good Latin, composed a very beautiful song and was ac-quainted with the intricacies of the cloth trade and he had some idea about building. His attitude to learning is at best ambiguous. In any case he ad-vocated reverence for theologians and Scripture scholars and he warned even those who work with their hands not to allow their work to extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion. Despite Masseron's .fear that if St. Francis were to return to earth today, he would probably consign a Franciscan bibliography to Brother Fire,ll I am convinced that he would not destroy the sermons of St. Anthony, the works of St. Bonaventure nor the third book of Duns Scotus' Commentary on the Sentences. The Development of Christology ,. It is noteworthy and encouraging that the Renewed Constitutions ex-plicitly link the teaching of the Franciscan masters of St. Francis himself. Specifically, the Christological doctrine of the Franciscan School took its origin from the insight of St. Francis into .the absolute centrality of the Word-made-flesh. His spirituality was centered totally on Christ. He gave concrete expression to it in devotion to the Crib, to our Blessed, Lady-- precisely because she made the Lord of Majesty our brother, to the Passion and Cross, to the Word of God in Scripture and to the Blessed Eucharist. To read of the imprinting of the stigmata on his poor body comes hardly as a surprise after a life spent in total conformity to the Gospel Christ. His initial encounter with Christ issued in a desire to imitate the life of a0See the description of St. Francis given in I, Cel. 83 in English Omnibus Edition o[ the Sources, 298-299. 11Alexandre Masseron, The Franciscans. Tr. W. B. Wells (New York, 1932). 4: "What would St. Francis, if he returned to earth today, have to say to anyone who was rash enough to show him a Franciscan bibliography? Is it not to be feared that 'our Brother Fire' would be charged with settling the fate of a work of such un-wieldy uselessness?". 26 / R~view lor Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 Christ in its every detail, to follow in the very footsteps of Christ:To follow the footsteps of Christ was for' Francis to take the Way that leads back to the Father. Though his heart and soul were .centered on the poverty and humility of Jesus in the New Testament, whereby the Rule and life.of his order became, synonymous with observing the gospel, there is no exclusive concern with the so-called,"simple" Jesus of history in the life and writings of St. Francis. He embraced a life of poverty in imitation of Christ who "is the glorious Word of the Father, so holy and exalted, whose coming the Father made known by St. Gabriel the Archangel to the glorious and blessed Virgin Mary, in whose womb. he took on our weak human nature. He was rich beyond measure and yet he and his holy Mother chose poverty.''1"-' This humiliation which the Word of the Father freely chose for our sake, is daily renewed on our altars: "Every day he humbles himself just as he did when he came from his heavenly throne (Ws 18: 15) into the Virgin's womb; every day he comes to us and lets us. see him in abjection, when he descends from the bosom of the Father into the hands of the priest at the altar?'1,~ There are three texts in the writings of St. Francis which in our opinion contain the seeds of the future development of Christology in the Franciscan School. If these were all he had left us, they would be more than sufficient as the foundation of the Franciscan School. The first is to be found in the fifth Admonition: "Try to realize the digqity God has conferred on you. He created and formed your body in the image of his beloved Son and your soul in his own likeness (see GO 1:26).''~4 The second is in the first paragraph of his Letter to All Clerics: "Indeed in this world there is noth-ing of the Most High himself that we can possess and contemplate with our eyes, except his Body and Blood, his name and his words, by which we were created and by which we have been brought back from death to life.''~'~ The third is found 'in the Letter to a General Chapter: "Kissing your feet with all the love I 'am capable of, I beg you to show the greatest possible reverence and honour for the most holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ through whom all things, whether on the earth or in the heav-ens, have been brought to peace and reconciled with Almighty God (see .Col l:20).v~ There is a fair amount of deep theology in the writings of St. Francis, but nowhere is this more clearly attested than in these texts. Their depths and the implications they contain will be obvious to any student of St. Bonaventure or Duns Scotus. With regard to the first text, we may ask if St. Francis meant to say that the body of the Word Incarnate was the lz"Letter to all the Faithful" in English Omnibus Edition o] the Sources, 93. a3"First Admonition," ibid., 78. ~4English Omnibi~s Edition, 80; .a~lbid;, 101. ~qbid., 104. Re[tections on the Franciscan Charism blueprint used by God in the creation of Adam? He states explicitly: "He created and formed your body in the image of his beloved Son." The Son as Son has no body; it is the Son as Word-Incarnate who possesses a body. Whether or not St. Francis was aware of the implications of what he wrote, these lines evoke at once Duns Scotus' doctrine of the ~absolute primacy of Christ. Furthermore it would not be difficult at all to trace St. Bonaven-ture's entire theology of creation and incarnation ~back to the two latter texts .we quoted. St. Anthony, St. Bonaventure and Duns Scotus 1. The Christological teaching of the Franciscan School found its earli-est expression in the setmons of St: Anthony of Padua. Already therein we find contained the doctrine of the primacy of Christ, for which Scotus is so justly acclaimed. St. Anthony shows a preference for the symbol of the circle of egression and return of which St. Bonaventure made such pro-found and superb use in his theology of the Word and creation?r 2. It is, however, St. Bonaventure himself who gave the most complete theological formulation to the Christological insights of St~ Francis. He is the mystical theologian par excellence of the Franciscan Order and in him the~ School reached the high point of its development, He belongs to the tradition.in the Church which has its origin in the Greek and Latin Fathers, according to which the work of the theologian and the ministry of preach-ing are understood to be.no more ~than different modalities of one and the selfsame service of the Word of God, Every concrete form in'which St, Francis expressed his devotion to the poor and humble Christ, is paralleled by a mystical work in the Bonaven-turian corpus, For example, to the crib at Greccio corresponds the beautiful work On the Five Feasts of the.Child Jesus; to St. Francis's reverence for the Blessed Eucharist corresponds the work On How to .Prepare for the Celebration of Mass18; to his devotion to the Passion and Cross of Christ correspond St. Bonaventure's The Tree of Life and The Mystical Vine.l'J St. ~Bonav.enture's !heology of the Word may be summarized as follows: the Word is the inner expression of the Father and the world is the outer expression of t_he Son. Creation gives outward expression to the inner Word of the Father, With the advent of man, the Word of God 5s spoken in a ~rSee V. Schaaf, 'O.F.M., Saint-Antoine de Padoue. Docteur de I'Eglise (Montreal: Editions Franciscaines, 1946); T. Plassmann, O.F.M., "St. Anthony the Theologian;" St. Anthony o] Padua Doctor o] the Church: Universal Souvenir o] the Commemora-tive Ceremonies (Washington, D.C., 1946), 49-70. J. Heerinckx, O.F.M., "Antoine de Padoue," Dictionnaire de Spiritualitd~ 1, 714-717. a,~The Works o[ Bonaventure. Tr. Jose de Vinck. Ili: Opuscula, Second Series (Pater-son, N.J., St. Anthony Guild Press, 1966), 197-214; 215-238. V.qbid., I: Mystical Opuscula (Paterson, N.J., St. Anthony Guild Press, 1960), 95- 144; 145-205. Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 radically new way, for it now opens the possibility of the most perfect out-ward expression of God's inner Word in the Incarnation of the Word: the Man, Jesus of Nazareth. By the enfleshmcnt of the Word, the words already spoken by God in every creature throughout all creation can be heard un-ambiguously for what they are: revelations of God. As the Eternal Word is the Center of the Trinity, so the Incarnate Word is the Center of every-thing outside the 'Trinity. Nothing can be known unless it is known through Christ. At every level and in all orders of reality Jesus Christ is Mediator. To have true knowledge of God, man and the cosmos we must take faith as our starting point. From this we may then proceed to reason in order to know whatdt may discover about God, man and the cosmos.-"° This latter aspect of St. Bonaventure's world view has a relevance today which it would be difficult to overestimate. It concerns particularly the separation between philosophy of God and theology in Catholic institutes of education which has had deplorable effects on intellectual formation.'-'1 A return to the con-creteness of St. Bonaventure's method will teach us to distinguish, but not separate, a philosophy of God from theology. The correct method is to treat the theology of God first. After St. Clare I know of no one who loved St. Francis more than St. Bonaventure did. His sermons on St. Francis show him to have agonized in loving astonishment at what God had done in the person and life of the poor Francis of Assisi.~'-' Everything St. Bonaventure strove after in his study of the Word of God he found realized in St~ Francis. Of all the vir-tues which St. Francis possessed, St. Bonaventure avowed that he admired most his poverty and humility. He laid.down at the feet of St. Francis the powers of his brilliant mind and the rich treasures of his wide and deep learn-ing. Thus it was in his own act of humility that St. Bonaventure proved that after all a learned man can be holy and be saved! ,~ 3. In the teaching on the absolute primacy of Christ, Duns Scotus put the final touches to the Christological doctrine of the Franciscan School. The '-'°For recent presentations of the Christology of St. Bonaventure see the important studi+s by Zachary~Hayes, O.F.M., "'Revelation in Christ," Proceedin~,s o[ the Seventh Cehtenary Celebration o] the Death o[ St. Bonaventure (The Franciscan Institute: St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1975), 29-43; "The Meaning of Convenientia in the Meta-physics of St. Bonaventure," Franciscan Studies, vol. 34, Annual XII, 1974, 74-100; "Incarnation and ~.reation in the Theology of St. Bonaventure," Studies Honoring Ignatius Charles Brady. Friar Minor. Ed. R. S. Almagno, O.F.M. and C. L. Harkins, O.F.M. (The Franciscan Institute: St: Bonaventure, N.Y., 1976), 309-329. See also Ignatius Brady, O.F.M., "St. Bonaventure's Theology of the Imitation of Christ," Proceedings of the Seventh Centenary Celebration o[ the Death of St. Bonaventure (The Franciscan Institute: St. Bonaventure, N.Y. 1975), 61-72. '-qSee: B. J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Philosophy o[ God and Theology (The Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1973). :zSee his five sermons on St. Francis in Opera Omnia IX (Ad Claras Aquas, 1901), 573-597. We are preparing an edition and translation of these sermons. Relqections on the Franciscan Charism / 29 Incarnation is not occasioned by sin, though sin affected its modality. Scotus is not indifferent to evil and sin in the world, nor does he merely juggle with hypotheses. But the destruction of sin and evil is no more than a moment in God's movement out of himself towards the world, to unite all creation in the Love that is forever. The most recent and famous formulation of this doctrine has been made by Teilhard de Chardin in terms of an evolving cosmos. °Speaking of the Scotistic doctrine with Padre Allegra, Teilhard ex-claimed:"' v'o"l~a," la th6ologie c'osmique; voile, la th6ologie de l'avenir"--a cosmic theology, a theology of the future. Because of the unambiguous value it places on creation, one can readily understand why this,, doctrine is so attractive to the French Co.rnmunist philosopher, Roger Garaudy.'-''~ These brief reflections on the development of Christology from St. Fran-cis himself to the School which has from him its name, make it clear that Franciscan Christology is a structural element in the original Franciscan charism. If it is ignored .or neglected, then the charism itself is impaired. Charism and Ongoing Renewal As the order moves on towards the beginning of the third millennium of the Church's history, it will continue to adapt and renew itself accord-ing to the spirit of its original ,charism. In the process of on'going renewal the following aspects of the charism will need to be giveo more serious con-sideration: 1. Public witness--minimum structure." The "monastification" of the order was an undesirable development, not merely because it led to a dull uniformity and reduced individuality to a minimum, but also because it .imposed,a superstructure of organization on the order's life which virtually abolished one of the most characteristic aspects of the Franciscan charism. This is the genius of living a publicreligious life in the Church (St. Francis founded an order) with a minimum amount of structure (St. Francis was conscious of its original newness.). It is among the order's most attractive and, at the same time, most deman.ding characteristics. It is attractive be-cause it manifests the freedom won for us in Christ Jesus; it is for the order a sacrament of freedom from the :burden of the Law. It is demanding because it places firmly on the shoulders of each member of a community full re, sponsibility for every facet of communal life. Community life is an ongoing process, created by the uniqueness and originality of its several members and it issues in a unity which is something more than the mere sum total of the individuals. In such a process no one can shirk responsibility without setting back this process and thus injuring community life. An important area in which this aspect of the charism should exercise maximum influence is formation. The whole process of formation must have 23See Eric Doyle, O.F.M., "John Duns Scotus and the Place of Christ," The Clergy Review, vol. LVII, Sept. 1972, 667-675; Oct. 1972, 774-785; Nov. 1972, 860-868. Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 as its "chief aim the active reception by each friar of total responsibility for 6ur way of life, where the duty of each is to help the others to glow in wis-dom and maturity before~ God and man. The capacity and willingness to ¯ accept this responsibility may be taken as the touchstone of suitability for this way of life. 2. The Rule for Hermitages:'''~ Thomas of Celano in his Second Life tells us that St. Francis "wanted his brothers to live not only in the cities, but also in hermitages." This element of the charism has had effect in some provinces and it is recommended and encouraged in the Renewed Constitu-tions."-'~' It is clear from the short Rule for Hermitages that St. Francis .wished his order to lead not only a "mixed" life'--that is, one devoted to prayer and the apostolate---but to hold within itself at one and. the same time the two distinct expressions., of the.religious life: the active and the contempla-tive: The contemplative life he intended as a permanent feature of the order's existence in the world. It is interesting to recall in this context that both the Rule of the Friars Minor (for itinerant apostles) and the Rule of St. Clare (for enclosed contemplatives) are identified with life according to the Holy Gospel. In our opinion the notion of a "hermitage" should not be confused with a. "house of prayer." Houses of prayer, to which friars may resort for shorter or longer periods of recollection, do not fulfill adequately what St. Francis appears to have intended. It seems that he wanted the contemplative life to be a permanent feature of the life of the First Order. If our view here is correct, then there should be a place in the order for the exclusively contemplative life. On this understanding a "hermitage" and a "house of prayer" are quite distinct notions. The former should be employed uniquely to describe a community of friars dedicated exclusively to the contemplative life. The feature's that would distinguish a Franciscan contemplative community from the older monastic forms of the contemplative life would be precisely the minimum structure and the far smaller number in the community.-Whether the number would have to be restricted to three or four, as is mentioned in the Rule [or Hermitages, is a matter that calls for further discussion. It may not be possible for every province of the order to have'a hermi-tage (or hermitages) as a permanent feature of its life. Perhaps, therefore, hermitages could be instituted at the inter-provincial level and be made open tO international membership. Such contemplative communities in the order would give fine expression to this. element of the Franciscan charism. The reference made above to the Rule of the Poor Clares recalls what St. Francis wrote down in the Form of Life for St. CIare: ~'I desire and promise you personally and in the name,~of my friars that I will always have the same loving care and solicitude for you as for them." Their way of life "-4English Omnibus Edition of the Sources, 72-73. '-'SThe Plan ]or Franciscan Living, Articles 28-31. Reflections on the,~Franciscan Charism / 31 was very dear to St. Francis both because he loved St. Clare and because he himself was strongly attracted to the contemplative life. The First Order today should show the same loving care for the Poor Clares and there ought to be more frequent and closer contact between the first and second branches of the order. By so doing we would be more faithful to St. Francis and we would be helped considerably to.discern our own charism more clearly. 3. The Rule of 1221.""-~ Although the Rule of 1223, which gave the FrancisCan Order its legal" basis, and the Rule of 1221, which never re-ceived papal approval, both contain the spirit of St; Franci.s, it could be argued that the latter is a finer expression of that spirit than the former. This is not to deny that the Rule of 1223 is more a spiritual document than legal code. Nevertheless, it is just that one step removed from the earliest expression of the form of life and, therefore, just that little further from the original charism. .,, In terms of continuing renewal, the directives of the seventh chapter of the Rule of 1221 raise important questions for ,the future development of the order. The chapter is titled: "Work and the Service of Others." It con-cerns the friars who are engaged in the service of lay people and those who already have a trade when they join the order. The chapter lays down: "Everyone should remain at the trade and in the position in which he was called." This one sentence alone gives rise to a serious question about what attitude the order ought to adopt to a person seeking admission to it who is already qualified in a trade or profession. It is not a question about whether the order .should,allow a plumber or a doctor to continue as a plumber or ¯ doctor after an initial period of formation; it is rather a question of Whether or not the order is obliged to allow a plumber or a doctor to return at least for a certain time, to his previous work, after the period of formation. Priests who have joined the order in the past have continued to exercise their priestly ministry to a.limited extent during the period of formation and it has always been assumed that. they will go back to its full exercise after formation. There are many, many more professions ands:trades which are as equally compatible with the vocation of being a Franciscan friar,as is the ministerial priesthood. Before the oral approval of the Rule in 1209, St. Francis had already assured the Bishop of Assisi that he and his companionS would earn their living and have recourse to begging only when it was absolutely necessary. Some of them worked as laborers in monasteries and private houses; others took care of lepers in the lazar houses; others helped farmers in the fields. In the early years after the,approval of the Rule the friars were given to preaching, praying and manual work. The statement made at the Madrid Chapter in 1973 concerning the vocation of the order today, gave definite approval to this aspect of the "-'~English Omnibus o] the Sources, 31-53. 32 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 original charism as contained in the Rule of 1221. The statement empha-sizes: For recent times, our participation in the general evolution of religious life and the influence of certain other communities,have led us to the rediscovery of an aspect of work as it was understood by ~Francis. New forms of work and a variety of occupations are now being undertaken by our friars. Min-istry, our own works, and domestic tasks within our friaries legitimately oc-cupy the majority of our friars, but it is becoming more frequent to find friars engaged in salaried trades and professions within enterprises and institutions which belong neither to the order nor to the Church. An orientation of this kind appears to us to be in line with our vocation; by it we are a part of society in a special way, working for its upbuilding and we are brought closer to those who live. by their work. While placing us squarely on the road to the future it brings us back to one of the institutions of our origins.zr This new type of work is itself the apostolate: the apostolate of presence by silent witness. We must not forget, however, that this form of the apostolate is not easy. It demands that a friar put into practice the unsystematic though profound theology of work scattered throughout the writings of St. Francis. Thus: pay is not to be the motive of work, nor should the friars become the slaves of work or of gain. Work is to be undertaken as a contribution to the final form of creati6n, carried out under the supreme lordship of God; it is to be sanctified by being brought back to its right relationship with God. It is not, nor can it be, for the friar an end in itself; it is a means of exercising the apostolate of peace and reconciliation in the midst of the world. It requires above all of those who engage in it, that they be contem-platives. Before actio.n there has to be what St. Bonaventure calls sursumac-rio-- that uplifting activity which is contemplative prayer. Further developments of this kind of work may well bring about a de-crease in the number of priests in the order. At the same time it must not be ignored that those engaged in the apostolate who are not~priests (for ex-ample, nuns°and brothers) often find that there are circumstances where it would be a definite advantage to be a priest. In fact, experiences of this kind have often led~non-ordained apostles to seek ordination to the priest-hood. 4. St. Francis the Deacon:'-'~ St. Francis never became a priest. One often hears that the reason for this was his deep humility; he felt himself unworthy of so sublime a dignity. This explanation, however, is not to be found in the sources; in fact there appears to be no mention of the matter at all. In any case our concern here is not with the reason why he did not become a priest, but with the [a.ct that he was a deacon. "-':General Chapter Documents, Madrid 1973 (The English-Speaking Conference of the Order of Friars Minor; 1974), 68. '-'sSee I, Col. 86 in English Omnibus Edition o[ the Sources, 301: "The saint of God was clothed with the vestments of the deacon, for he was a deacon, and he sang the holy Gospel in a sonorous voice." Re[tections on the Franciscan Charism / 33 The re-institution of the order of permanent diaconate is one of the most encouraging results of Church renewal. The diaconate in the Church is directly derived from, and immediately related to, the episcopal office. It concerns the Church's mission to the world in.the very concrete form of the corporal and sp)ritual works of mercy and of work for reconciliation, justice and peace. These works pertain to the essence of the apostolic office. It is, therefore, theologically incorrect and quite unsound to understand the diaconate merely in terms of assistance to the priestly ministry; nor is the diaconate adequately presented exclusively in terms of liturgical functions. In practice at the moment, however, the actual form of ministry exercised by permanent deacons is, in the vast majority of cases, only a lesser form of the priestly ministry. This is true throughout the Western Church. On the missions it has been ~made a substitute for the priesthood, and the permanent deacon is in fact a "mini-priest?' With the exception of saying Mass and ad: ministering absolution, he does everything that the priest does. The diaconate has become also a substitute for a married priesthood. In ,many of our city and towm parishes in the Western world, the ministry of the permanent deacon is in fact no more than that of assistant to the local priests. In all these cas~s, therefore, 'the priesthood is the determining factor in the per-formance of the office of deacon. It would be a pity if this were to become the exclusive form of the diaconal ministry. The permanent diaconate in the Church proclaims that the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and work for reconciliation, justice and peace are not merely the special concern of individuals who may feel called to per-form them. They belong to the episcopal office, because the bishops must have anxious care not only for all' the churches but also for the whole world. Ordinatioh to :the .permanent diaconate graces the man called to this work with the authority and power of the apostolic mission to the world, In virtue of this sacrament the deacon is sent by the bishop publicly in the name of Christ to work; for example, in the field 0f communications, as a counselor, a welfare officer, a doctor or a nurse. The. Franciscan Order is committed by its very existence to work for reconciliation,., justice and peace. It would be most fitting for the order to incorporate the permanent diaconate, as here understood, into its life and mission and to offer this as an option to those wishing to join the order. It would manifest that work other than priestly'ministry is not merely the hobby or pa~rticular preference of an individual, but a part of the Churcl~'s ¯ mission to the world. It would contribute also towards restoring the diaconate to its fuller ministry. 5. Christology of the Franciscan School: Every friar should receive a thorough grounding in the doctrine of the Franciscan School. Christology is at the heart of that doctrine from which has developed a distinctive anthro-pology, .!he values of which center on freedom, the primacy of the will and charity, and the dignity of the individual person. In order that this rich 34 / Review Jot Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 heritage be not lost; it is of paramount importance that studies be encouraged ever more keenly in the order. One acknowledges with gratitude .the re-newed interest in Franciscan studies brought about by,~the establishment of the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University, New York. More friars should .be encouraged to devote their lives to the production of good texts and critical editions of the authors of the Franciscan School. It must be impressed on them that this is not a waste of time nor merely the pri-vate interest of the scholarly "types" which the order can tolerate, but a splendid contribution to the understanding of a tradition which belongs, to the Church and mankind at large;. ~ The~Future of the Order and Its Vocation The future will see a more balanced proportion between, the number of priests and non-priests in the Franciscan Order. The indications are that throughout the world the order as a whole will continue to decrease in numbers. There will be many more small communities. In fidelity to its many-faceted charism the order will have to learn to hold within itself a great pluriformity of~ life-styles and, work. The former will have to contain the widest variety from the contemplative to the actix;e' life.~ The latter will have to.embrace every, form from strictly priestly.work to the apostolate of presence and silent witness in salaried trades, and pro-fessions. Every friar on the apostolate will have to be prepared to preach, teach or' share with others, in whatever ways are opened up, the riches of the order's Christological tradition, particularly the teaching on the centrality of the Word and the absolute 'primacy of Christ: By so doing, the order will contribute to the fruitfulness oLthe encounter and dialogue between East and West, from which will result a spirituality for the post-modern world. The East has developed towards an extreme spiritualistic interpretation of man and the world; the West towards an extreme materialistic interpretation of man and the world. There are~ however, strands in the tradition of both East and West, which point the way to a real unity and balance between these extremes. It is not too much to suggest~that the theology of the:Fran-ciscan School and the spirituality of St. Francis belong to these strands in the West. This theology and spirituality lead one to a material spiritualism or spiritual materialism, to a holy worldliness or worldly holiness. It is along these lines that spirituality in the future will develop. In conclusion we wish to make a brief comment about a very important matter. It concerns a fair number of those friars who have left the order and have taken up other walks of life. In traveling around one frequently comes across ex-friars who long to share again the spirituality and atmosphere which formed them and left a deep impression on their minds and hearts, and who desire to participate once more in some way directly in the order's mission to the world. It is not that they are unhappy in their new. way of life or regret having married~ These longings and desires are th~ outcome of a~ Reflections on the, Franciscan Charism / 35~ renewed and deeper appreciation of Franciscan values which their new life has brought home. to them. Specifically, 'it is married rife which is most fre-quently mentioned as the cause of this. There is a very positive impulse behind these desires which one discerns as the Ho!y Spirit of God. Serious thought and prayer must be given to working out how these desires might be fulfilled, It must not be presumed a priori that we can do nothing for them. One suggestion would be the institution of a new [ormof the Third Order which could be so established as to meet both desires mentioned. It could exist in very close liaison and cooperation with the work of the First Order, for this latter is mature enough to embrace an added element in its. pluri- ¯ formity. In this way the order would be helping to prepare for the eventual re-deployment of so much energy, goodwill and holiness in the apostolic mission of the Church. Now Available As A Reprint Centeri. g Prayer-Prayer of Quiet by~ M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S~.O. Address: ¯ Price: $.50 pier copy, plus postage. Review for Religious 612 Humboldt Building 539 North Grand St. Louis,, Missouri 63103 To God Via Per Patricia Lowery, M.M. Sister Lowery's article, "The Suffering Servant and the Wounded Healer" (May, 1976) was well-received by our readership. She continues to reside at: Madres de Maryknoll; Casilla 491; Arequipa, Pert]. Editor's Note: I asked Sister Patricia to write an article on her reason for remaining in Pert] even as a suffering servant. In response to read.er-reaction, she had earlier written an article with fuller information about "The Fraternity of the Sick," but I judged the present article to be of haore immediate im-portance. The other article will be published later. The following passages from her covering letter will "flesh out" the article which follows. She writes: "I guess it is not such a great thing that I stay in Pert], but some people without a missionary vocation might think it is. 1 am not exactly 'all crippled up,' but Rheumatoid Arthritis affects all the joints, and, whatever the degree of deformity, there°is always pain . Some people, I think, Would be taking it easy in my condition, but because my spirit is always 100 miles ahead of my body, I need to romp around. I do it in Pert] because the pace is slower, I have the freedom to invent' my own aids to independence, and most of all because it is 'home' for me .I hope what I have written will serve as an inspiration to someone else." When I left New York harbor destined for Pert] on the f~ast of St. Rose of Lima, I instinctively felt that I was making.a journey that would shape my life. Twenty-five years later, as I reflect on the events of those years, I know it to be true. As I stood at the rail, face to face with the ocean, the fact that I was going to a strange country, to a-mission that was as yet an empty lot, to work with people I did not know and whose language I could not speak, seemed not to frighten me. I was too caught up with the journey itself. With Sister Madaleva's "Travel Song" in my heart, I was blinded by' enthusiasm! 36 To God Via Per~ / 37 "Know you the journey that I take Know you the voyage that I make The joy of it one's heart would break. No jot of time have l to spare Nor will to loiter anywhere SO edger am I to be there. What thatothe way is hard and long What that gray fears upon it throng I set my journey to a song. And it grows happy, wondrous so Singing I hurry on, for Oh! It is to God, to God I go. I am still singing that song, for my journey has taken me steadily toward God, accompanied now by many frierids and the voice of ,the quena (Indian flute), whose music calls to mind all that I have liv.ed, loved and learned in Peril. A Life of Fulfillment Recently, a visiting sister from the United States asked me what satis-factions I had after working twenty-five years in Perti. I could not answer that question directly because .I had not thought of my years in Perti in terms of "satisfactions," but. rather, more comprehensively, as a lifetime of fulfillment. I feel that I came to Peril almost as a child, unsure of many things, and here I grew up, formed 'in the school of joy; struggle, suffering, achievement and love. My teachers'were often uneducated people whose only book was the testimony of their lives. I knew, sowehow, that in such a book were contained the lessons I wanted desperately to learn. There was conflict, though, because I was supposed to be the teacher, prepared as I was for that profession. Later in novitiate work, I assumed the role of spiritual guide only to find that the insights of the Peruvian girls with whom I lived were much more "real" than my own. In pastoral work, too, I had to learn to accelSt people as they are, in the context of their cul-ture and reality, and to set aside my well-prepared o~ganizational plan. It was only when I found myself on a level with so many others (brought together through that universal mystery of suffering) that I began my real ministry~ This shared experience taught me to be present to others as a friend, learn from them, be at their side rather than "ahead" of them, to understand and appreciate them--and m~self as well. I sincerely feel that over the years the gift of happiness and fulfillment has been given to me by people who are themselves still oppressed by in- . justices and hunger for bread and who carry man-made burdens. In humble gratitude to them, I take my stand with all those who fight for liberation, human dignity and the precious gift of personal fulfillment. A Vocation to Stay As a Maryknoll Missioner, my heritage includes devotion to the Church, Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 love for people of all cultures, simplicity, loyalty, generosity, adaptability, joy in hardships and faith in God. My earliest years at Maryknoll were filled with hearing about, and meeting, great men and women who, sustained by those virtues, ventured to "fields afar" even before I was born. Their unassuming lives spoke to me of humifity, courage a,ad joy, virtues that stood by them. as they fought the good fight, faced imPrisonment and even death for the people to Whom they were g(nt. All this was part of their missionary vocation. ~ Therefore, it seems strange to me that anyone would ask why I, who am only semi-incapacitated by a physical'iliness, would remain on a mission where few resources are availi~ble. Actually, it never occurred to me to do otherwise. Having received very good medical attention and knowing how to take care of myself, there seems little else to do but wait until science discovers a'cure. B~t one can waist anywhere. Bishop James E. Walsh, M.M., whose story is well known in the United States, made a statement in 1951 regarding his decision to remain in China in the face of imprisonment (which he actually suffered for twelve years). From among his valuable insights, ! will quote a few which I can apply to myself: Vocation: Our vocation is not simply our occupational work. The teaching, preaching, village visiting we usually do, it is something much deeper, per-mahent, indelible. It does not change if our work is imped(d, if we are in. prison, or for any other reason. One of the necessary conditions to carry it out properly, I think, is to accept in advance every trouble and contingency in connection with it that Divine Providence puts in our way. If we start to pick and choose for ourselves; it is very hard to tell if we are carrying out our vocation or running away from it . The only safe rule for a man with a mission vocation, .I think, is to adhere to the clear indication of God's will (his appointed place where he finds himself) and to make no changes of his own volition. .4ch°vity: Enforced inactivity is a term that needs some distinguishingl Activ-ity does not depend on the place; it depends on the man. Suffering patiently bourne is activity, so is prayer, so is any kind of mental work--things that can be done, one WOUld think, in prison as well as anywhere. What is really meant is a change of activity. This is something of a hardship to many men, I confess it---especially to those who are lacking in the. faculty of imagination. However, we can all learn something new, or at least wecan try tO do so. If an examp!e of prison life will help the Church in China, as. I. believe any suffering undergone for Qod will do, then we are just being given another sort of activity for a time. There is no question of ~complete inactivity, I believe."r Encouraged, therefore, by the tradition of my elders as well as by the example of many valiant companions of today, I choose to stay in Pert~ because: 1Zeal For Your House by James E. Walsh, M.M., Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. (Hunt= ington, IN; 1976), pp. 140-141. To God Via Per~ / 39 --it is my vocation; ---I believe in Christian witness (no matter what else I may or may not be able to do) ; --although it is the nature of the missionary vocation to move on when when the. local Church has come of age, I feel that Peril is still in the growing process and needs to feel solidarity with the universal Church; --it builds morale both for the people and the missioners; (to celebrate a "staying-here" rather than a "going-away" makes everybody happy); --God has directed my life in such surprisingly beautiful wa3;s that I fear if I "pick and choose for myself," I may miss out on something he has in store for me; --finally, I would feel reluctant to break the bonds of friendship built up over the years. Yahweh's feeling toward his people has rubbed off on me: How could I give you up, O Ephraim? How could I part with you, O Israel? (Ho 11:8) While my sentiment for Peril runs deep, I k~aow that missioners are sent to people rather than to count.ries. In the case that ,I were to find my-self in another situation, my ministry to people need not change: Pockets of Hope In my small circle of the poor and the sick, I se.e signs .of Christi.an witness which prove that what we have been able to build in the hearts of people has already outlasted our institutions and monumental structures. Christian values like kindness, service, patience, humility, thoughtfulness and friendliness mark people as being followers of Christ. In my own ex-perience, especially since I have been sick, I have been deeply moved by the unexpected and touching concern shown for me.by those who carry heavy burdens and, apparently, have nothing to give. It prompts me to look into my life, and give of its essence as well as its superfluity. Because of my involvement with the "Fraternity of the Sick," I have come to realize the truth, that through baptism (be it of water or in the fire of suffering), the humblest among the people of. God are called to be ministers. In the past, because of concentrating only on our own call to ministry, we religious have tended to over-look the vocation to service being lived out all around us. Only with our encouragement can these ministers come to take their place as true servants of the Church. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain if only we can set aside our fears and believe that: As one lamp lights another, nor grows less So nobleness enkindles nobleness. (Lowell) Founding "Founderology": Charism and Hermeneutics Francis E. George, O,M.I. Father George is Vicar General of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. This article is based on a conference given in Rome at the beginning of a three-week congress, April 25-May 15, on the charism of their founder, Eugene De Mazenod, ,He resides at the Curia Generalitia O.M.I.; Via Aurelia, 290; 00165 Roma, Italy. The renewal of religious, institutes means getting in touch with several "charisms." We can distinguish the charism of the religious life as such, individual charisms and the cha.rism of a founder and of his institute. Religious life as such is a gift of the Holy Spirit, a" grace given to the entire Church, enabling it to follow Christ ever more closely (Lumen Gentium,~ 44). There is also.the "charism" or individual grace of each member of a religious institute. The Spirit calls each of us by name, and this individual vocation is a source of the richness that religious institutes have recently begun to acknowledge more openly and appreciate more warmly. But the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council spoke of the "original inspiration behind a given community" as one of the principles of ongoing renewal of religious institutes (Perlectae Caritatis, 2), and the "spirit" of a founder has' its source in a grace (charis) given to him. Like all.grace, it is a personal gift; but by reason of his founding a public institute in the Church, this grace has far-reaching public consequences. Those who are his followers adopt a stance, a viewpoint, in some way derived from or inspired by his thought, his work, his graced life. It becomes possible there-fore to speak of a "collectNe charism," a view proper to a group. The charism of a religious institute, as such has been defined as "a grace given Founding ~'Founderology'" / 41 by the Holy Spirit to a religious institute to help it to carry out its proper mission.''~ Each religious foundation began with a group who shared a common spirit. This spirit, rooted in grace, enabled them to lead a common life and attempt a common task: How can a religious institute today know if it still has this original spirit? Is there a method which can help a religious community get in touch with the founder's spirit and live it authentically? Historical Approach to Charism There are two methodological approaches to charism (the spirit of the founder and his followers) which, taken singly, . might ,lead to an impasse. The first approach is historical. Starting with the historical reality of a founder, his life and work, we can try to see him as a kind of model, some-what separate from us in time, but still providing us with a clear and even a detailed picture of the life we should lead today. "Fidelity to the founder's spirit" then means handing on this model, essentially unchanged, to future generations of religious. They, in tur6, will interiorize it and make it vital thr~ough their lives and works. The difficulty with this ap~proach is that it "often assumes a "funda-mentalism" based on texts or on events, accepting as normative many models which are irrelevant to contemporary life. While seeming to empha-size the historical reality of the founder, this approach, taken by itself, is really a means of escaping from history. It makes the founder's ideas become ah ideology, protecting a community's present institution,'ilizati6n but divorced from the contemporary responses to problems the founder him-self was concerned about? On the practical level, "copying" the founder cannot serve as a guide for present decision making. Few people, and certainly not most religious founders, are so .self-consistent in act that it is not possible to find his-torical precedent in their lives for al}nost any a~tion. Almost any par-ticular decision can thereby be justified by saying we are "imitating the founder." The ideological nature of this approach, used alone, becomes clear. Experiential Approach to Charism The second approach "begins with contemporary experience. Looking at an institute's life and ministry today, the members discern what are the values and the motivation inspiring them. A synthesis of this group "spirit" is articulated and accepted as normative. Certain similarities with the XTeresa Led6chowska, O.S.U., A la'r~cherche du charism de I'institut (Rome, 1976), p. 14. "Ideology, as used here, means ideas which serve as weapons or cloaks for special interests. This usage is common., in .the sociology o~ knowledge and derives from Karl Marx via Karl Mannheim. 42 / ,Review ]or Religious, VOlume 36, 1977/1 spirit of the founder are either° found or are-read back into his life, but the important thing is to avoid withdrawing into the cocoon of the ~insti-tute and away from contemporary events and problems. If historical similarity.to the founder is lacking, this must be accepted" as a part'of his-torical development itself, the price ,paid for being truly in and of our own time. ~ The difficulty with this approach, considered in itself, lies in its easy acceptance of the zeitgeist as almost uniquely normative. The founder himself tends to become instr~umentalized, brought'in .whenever he can be used to justify current thinking and activity; and conveniently forgotten at other moments. Eventually, it would be hard to find any specific content at all to the so-ca.lled charism of the institute. If the first approach merely "copies" the founder~ the second tends to replace him. Hermeneutic Approach to Charism Is ~here a third approach,~incorporating the best Of the two sketched above? Perhaps a iook at hermeneuticg ~igl!t help to put'together a meth-odology which neither copies a founder nor replaces him but rather inter-prets him for Our time and for generations of religious yet to come. Hermeneutics Heymeneutic~, the science of interpretation, has its theolggic)d roots in the discussion of the historical Jesus and his relation to the Christ of faith? ]~he~gradual dissociation of religious, beliefs from historical'dvents had its beginnings in the late"l 8th century work of Lessing and has its best known twentieth century explication in the work of Rudolf Bulimafin. Hermeneutics as such, h~owever, is .a" theologically neutral ente'rRr~ise, concerned with the understanding of expressions of life as fixed in writing2 As a method, hermeneutics demands first of all exegesis, the careful establishment Of what the author ~f a text consciously meant to say in his writing. Next, h~rmeneutics tries intelligibly to span the historical distance between the text and our present reading of it by studying the author's con-text of understanding, including both his presuppositions (what he took for granted) and his horizon (what he was up to and how he did it). Finally, a third area of understanding must be made explicit. If the text is to be adequately interpreted, there is needed also a critique of the reader's context, the presuppositions .he brings to his reading, what is mean- .~See P. Grech's rrsum6 o[ the question in, "Jesus Christ in History and Kerygma," A New Catholic Commentar.v on Holy Scripture, Reginald G. Fuller, General Editor (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1969), pp. 822-837. 4See Berriard Lonergan, Method in Theology (N.Y.: Herder & Herder, 1972), pp. 59-64 and 153-173. Founding "Founderology" / 43 ingful in his understanding and life~ The interpreter's own subiectivity is utilized as a principle of interpretation. The challenge of hermeneutics lies at least partially in finding a context of understanding which incorporates both the explicit intentions of the author of the text and his cont6xt of understanding, along with the context of the reader or interpreter. ~ ,, Charism Interpretation In charism interpretation, the object of interpretation is not directly a single text or group of te£ts but rather a group-spirit which has its. origin in a particular historical person. Nevertheless, three areas of understanding, anaiogou~ to those necessary for textual interpretation, can be seen to be necessary: for an appreciation of a founder's spirit. First, we must understand what he personally intended and chose. A study,~ of his own writings and the decisions of his life is therefore necessary. Secondly, we must understand the founder's historical context, his horizon .of meaning and ,action .as a~man of his age. Accepting a spurious. contemporaneity, overlooking, for example, authoritatian presuppositions ~which.~.are now unattractive, would only falsify our interpretation. Thirdly, we must understand our own presuppositions and 'our own historical context. The general horizon of modern consciousness accepts unquestioningly that finitude is the vantage point of all, thinking and that ,,there are no privileged viewpoints. Nobody today, for example, believes he can know the mind of God or his will in the same rather absolute way peo-ple thought it possible to know them before the mediating structures :broke down. This contempor.ary tentativeness :can readily degenerate into a super-cilious attitude, debunking, every human thought "and value; at its best, however, it reminds us that we, too, are not necessarily smarter than peo-ple were in the founder's time. We just have a different pbint of view; and we must therefore work all the harder to understand the founder's context of meaning and action. Interpretation as. a. Communitarian. Activity But these three areas of understanding do not of themselves give us an interpretation of a founder's spirit. They prepare the task of' interpretation, but the actual interpretation must be~done in community~ Interpretation takes place in community nc;t only because community is a constitutive part of the life of most religioias institutes, but also because :interpretation is, of its very nature; a communitarian activity. ~ Community of Interpretation Interpersonal" Structure Interpretation is a communita~-ian activity because it is a joining, a communion, of three poles: the interpreter, the sign or object interpreted, 44 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 and the person(s) for whom the interpretation is intended, or the inter-pretee( s)? By way of example, one can imagine an international conference during which speeches are translated simultaneously. The speaker's words are the sign or object interpreted, the translator is the interpreter, and those who do not understand the speaker's language are the interpretees. Together they form a community of interpretation, Without one of the three, but espe-cially without the interpreter, no community exists and the conference be-comes impossible. To push the example a bit further, one can imagine a particularly abstruse speech which makes little sense even to those who understand the language in which it is given. Then another sort of inter-preter is called for, perhaps a teacher or clarifier, who creates community between speaker and those spoken to. What might happen Should even the speaker not understand his speech? Then probably the situation calls for that sort of interpreter called a psychiatrist,'who can explain the speaker to himself. In any circumstance, the act of interpretation means that someone interprets something to and for another. The "other'-' might be the inter-preter himself at a different time. Everyone has had the experience of puz-zling through a conundrum and finally "interpreting" it to himself --- but even in this case there are three logically distinct subjects of the relationship: interpreter, interpreted and interpretee. Interpretation, then, is always a communitarian activity. Temporal Structure Chronologically, the interpreter can be placed in the present, the' inter-preted in the past and the interpretee in the future. The community of in-terpretation is a temporal community, in the sense that something in the past is interpreted by someone now for someone else in the future. The ac-tivity of interpreting, then, creates a community of memory and of hope. It brings together, in the present, both the past and the future. Again, an example might help. It is fashionable today to speak of "owning" one's own behavioi'. A person self-consciously appropriates in the present some act of his past so that it fits into his future. A self-image is an interpretation. When others share the individual's self-interpretation, community with them is possible. When all place the same interpretation on a past event and look forward to a common future, a larger community is possible, There is a Christian community, to use another example, because in the present we all interpret the past Christ-event in such a way that we look forward to his future coming in glory. Those who do not look back to Jesus '~This analysis of interpretation depends upon the work of tl~e American philosopher Josiah Royce, The Problem o] Christianity (N.Y.: Mac"millan, 1913), vol. ii, Lectures ix through xiv. ~ Founding "Founderology'" / 45 of Nazareth as Lord and Savior or do not look forward to the Parousia are not members of the Christian community, There is no common interpre-tation. Every community is a gathering of many separate persons into a commonly held memory and a commonly shared hope. In this sense, every community is a community of interpretation. In the community of interpretation which is a particular religious insti-tute, the members interpret in their time the.spirit and acts of their founder, a person now dead, to their future selves and to future generations of re-ligious, They say what they understand the founder to be, thereby establish-ing their community with him and enabling him--and them--to join those who will consider their interpretation in the future. This future considera-tion, of course, will be another interpretation in another present for another future in which they are past. Religious Community of Interpretation The Founder:s Concerns The relation of interpretation has a triadic personal structure (interpre-ter, interpreted and interpretee) and a triadic temporal structure (present, past and future). But the abstract framework explored so far is true of every act of interpretation and of every community of interpretation. Is there a specific 'contribution a founder makes to the community of interpretation which is his religious, institute? Obviously; if we are able to speak of a charism proper to an institute, then the object interpreted, the signs of God's grace which are the founder's words and acts, must provide the content which his followers interpret in the present. The founder raises concerns in the hearts and minds of his followers and these concerns specify religious com-munities .of interpretation., so that followers of Francis of Assisi are different from followers of Francis de Sales, Each religious, each community, each institute can produce a list of those concerns which were closest to its founder's heart. The founder I know best, Eugene De Mazenod,* was a diocesan priest who brought together a small mission, band to help re-evangelize southern France after the destruc-tion of parochial life in the French Revolution, Heavily influenced by the writings of St. Alphonsus Ligouri and by the example of St. Vincent de Paul, De Mazenod chose as a motto for.his missionaries the words of Isaiah echoed in Luke's Gospel: "He has sent me to preach the .Gospel to the poor; the poor have the Gospel preached to them." A practical leader rather than a speculative theorist, he saw his group develop slowly in response to many different needs in many different situa-tions. In some respects he seems to be a not very original man, yet certain *Eugene De Mazenod (1782-1861), ~ounder ~f the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and Bishop of Marseilles. ' He was beatified on Mission Sunday, October 19, 1975. 46 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/1 personal concerns return constantly in his letters and his.life, An authentic Mazenodian community of interpretation, therefore,, would have to harbor at least the following four concerns:, 1 ) ~a concern ]or the poor: who are they; what language do they speak; what are their needs and their ways of understanding themselves? This was a constant ,concern of ,De Mazenod from the days of his first preaching in" the Provenqal dialect to his final instructions to his missionaries in Africa, Asia and North America ~ 2,) a co'ncern ]or the Church as universal: De Mazenod's own conver-sion to Christ crucified and his .love ~of Christ as universal Savior prompted both, his missionary zeal and his love of the pope as universal pastor; a vision of Christ's universal salvific action as sacramentalized in the Church must be somehow present to De Mazenod's interpreters. 3) a concern ]or ministry, and specifically for preaching Christ 'cruci-fied, in local circumstances: religious foundations were frequent in nine-teenth century France, but when another founder spoke~t6.De Mazenod of the need to go to all of France, De Mazenod insisted'on,first making Christ present in Provence, in the circtimstances he knew best. ,.A universal. Vision was coupled with a concern for local effectiveness, even as.the congregation itself became global. 4) a. concern ]or the quality of copnmitment bf the community itself: De Mazenod called his followers not to,share his opinions nor even only to share his work but to share his commitment, a commitment finally expressed in religious vows. Other areas of concern could certainly be raised. Concern for the way in which Mary is part of the Oblate spirit as exemplar:and guide is forced on De: Mazenod's institute by its very title. Concern for the proper under-standing of mission or of evangelization is also important~ But De Mazenod in pr~actice preached to and served and lived with certain grotips of people. Without living contact with analogous groups today, his spirit will escape his followers. ~ For the purpose of this paper, De Mazenod is only an exam

Issue 34.5 of the Review for Religious, 1975. ; Revtew ]or Rehgtous ts edited by faculty members of the School of DIvlmty of St Louts University, the edttorlal ol~ces bemg located at 612 Humboldt Buddmg, 539 North Grand Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. Published bimonthly and copy-right (~) 1975 by Review [or Religious. Composed, printed, and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. S!ngle copies: $1.75. Subscription U.S.A. and Canada: $6.00 a year; $11.00 for two years; other countries, $7.00 a year, $13.00 for two years (for airmail delivery, add $5.00 per year). Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order payable to Review ]or Religious in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to persons claiming .to represent Review ]or Religious. Change of address requests should include former ad~ciress. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Joseph F. Galicn, S.J. Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor September 1975 Volume 34 Number 5 Renewals, new subscriptions, and changes of address should be sent to Review for Religious; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Correspondence with the editor and the associate editor together with manuscripts and books for review should be sent to Review for Religious; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsyl-vania 19131. / ;" ~: :°~Vith these ,words Po o ~t only for Jesmts,~but-~f6r all~rehg~ous;~ )s wh6, .in ~varyingways, ~dentff, y:.o. 671 A Survey of the Thirty-second General Congregation John R. Sheets, S.J. Fr. Sheets, chairman of the theology department of Creighton University and director of its new Masters Degree in Christian Spirituality program, was an elected delegate of his province (Wisconsin) at the 32nd General Congregation. He resides at Creighton University; 2500 Califor-nia St.; Omaha, NB 68178. The Thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus began on December 2, 1974. It finished its work on March 7, 1975. The Holy See authorized the promulgation of its decrees on May 2, 1975. In this article I will attempt to set down in an intelligible way a description of what went on during those ninety-six days, especially for (hose who are not Jesuits but who are in-terested in the congregation. Having gone over once again both the official documents and the Acta of the congregation, and having tried to recapture.my own experience over those days, I feel keenly the limitations of what follows. In the first place, it is difficult to give a survey of the vast amount of material covered by the various commissions;-secondly, it is hard to detail my own ex-perience without writing an autobiography; thirdly, it would take someone with both a sense of historical detail and a journalistic flair to present the in-terplay that took place among the various identifiable groups within the con-gregation, and also what took place between the Vatican and the congregation. In spite of these reservations, I hope that the observations that follow might provide some insight into what happened, and at the same time provide a counterweight to impressions given to the public through the general press. For me personally the congregation was the peak experience of my life. I am still trying to sort out the reasons for this. There is the obvious fact of hav-ing been part of a decision-making body whose decrees could have momentous importance for the Societ), of Jesus and for the Church at a very critical mo- A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation / 673 ment in history. Again there was the experience of being "companions in the Lord" with two hundred and thirty-six other Jesuits from all over the world, united in the same Ignatian vision, sharing a common purpose, praying and working together to formulate with the help of the Holy Spirit responses to what the Church and the world ask of the Society today. The "honeymoon experience" of the first days gave way, as the weeks went on, to the .experience of fatigue, the perplexities of the search for the proper wording, the experience of working on disparate problems at the same time, without any clear point of convergence. Added to these was the experience of the interaction between the Vatican and the congregation which brought with it great anguish. However, it was also perhaps the experience that changed the congregation from a group of planners relying much on our own wisdom into something approximating an instrument of the Holy Spirit. The whole experience of the congregation in many ways paralleled what a person goes through in making the Spiritual Exercises, where one is subject to the movement of different spirits. On the one hand, it was the occasion of the greatest consolation; on the other, 1 have never in my life experienced such heaviness of heart. There were moments when one could almost feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, particularly at the concelebrated liturgies where one was drawn into the mystery of the communio jesuitarum, both the living and the dead, ~hrough our sharing in the Eucharist. Certainly the con-celebrated Mass, celebrated on the opening day of the congregatiofi in the Gesu, a church hallowed by the memories of Ignatius, Xavier and the early history of the Society, with seven hundred Jesuits participating, was one such moving experience. But if there were consolations, there were also periods of desolation, the worst desolation I have ever experienced. These came from the pall of uncer-tainty cast over the congregation from the communications of the Holy Father through Cardinal Villot in reference to the way the congregation had proceeded on a particular point concerning the Fourth Vow in the Society. This was also the occasion for the Holy Father to remark with pain that he detected from the Acta of the congregation attitudes among the delegates which were at variance with the kind of disposition a Jesuit should have toward the Pope. To be frank, however, it was not so much the interventions of the Holy Father that depressed me. In fact, as events would show, he was under the im-pression that we had received a specific communication on the subject that he had given to one of the delegates to be transmitted to us. But because of a mis-understanding the delegate did not in fact communicate it, and the congrega-tion learned about it only after we had taken a step which seemed to con-travene directly the explicit instruction of the Holy Father. To me the tone of his and Cardinal Villot's letter, while severe, was comprehensible in the light of this misunderstanding on the communication of their earlier message. What was far more upsetting was the sudden change in the mental climate of the congregation. Somewhere Kierkegaard mentions that the sudden is the 1574 / Review for, Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 category of the demonic. In the course of only minutes, the demon of rumor, suspicion and recrimination was let loose. Suddenly it all fitted into a kind of master plot to discredit Fr. Arrupe, bring about his resignation, and bring to nothing the efforts of the congregation. No one knew who the enemies were, but some gave the impression that there was one hiding behind every column in the Vatican. Among the memories which will always be with me are the occasions when I used to walk in St. Peter's Square at night, when it was deserted, except for a police car and a few pa~sers-by. The majestic beauty of the facade of St. Peter's, bathed by the light of the moon, the beauty of the fountains flashing in the lights, the Vatican apartments with a light here and there, formed a setting of peace which seemed to overflow into me, particularly when events occurred which plunged the congregation into gloom. Looking back over those difficult periods I am certain that if it were not for the example and leadership of Fr. Arrupe we would have lost courage. He transmitted to us both by word and example a sense of the working of God's providence and the life-through-death process in which we were engaged. We were faced with the humbling and humiliating fact that we experts who were supposed to discern the signs of the times could not discern a sign that was much closer to us. In many ways the misunderstandings did not "have to be," when one looks at them from a human point of view. The reports from the press about con-frontation, maneuver and counter-maneuver were the product of journalistic imagination. The sad fact is that pain was caused by people who were trying their utmost to act with responsibility to the Holy Father and to the Society. But I have probably got ahead of myself. All I wanted to do in these in-troductory remarks was to point out that for me personally the experience of those three months led by the diverse paths of joy and anguish to a deeper ex-perience of the ways of God, that "If Yahweh does not build the house, in vain the masons toil." The Procedure Followed in the Business of the Congregation In preparation for this congregation there had been four years of highly organized participation on the level of the local communities and the provinces. The extent of this participation varied. In general, however, it had a beneficial result in creating the awareness that this congregation would grow out of the discernment that took place on the local level rather than work from the top down. Perhaps some might consider that this was a waste of time and money when we measure the results of those years of preparation, and the little impact that it had directly on the congregation. However, the minimal result of this preparation was that at least we did not come into the work of the congregation cold, but had some awareness of the problems that confront us, as there were seen by a large segment of the Society. For those who are not familiar with the structure of the Society of Jesus, a few words of explanation may be helpful. In the Society of Jesus the supreme A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation / 675 authority is vested in the General Congregation. It does not meet at regular in-tervals, but only on two occasions, either to elect a new superior general, or to face a particular state of affairs which can be handled only by the highest authority of the Society. Of the thirty-two congregations that have met in the four hundred and thirty-five years of the Society's history, all except seven have been called to elect a new superior general. When, therefore, in 1970 Fr. Arrupe decided to call a General Congregation to convene after appropriate preparation, he felt that the state of the Society needed to be reviewed. It was an opportune time, since ten years would have elapsed since Vatican II and our last congregation. Delegates to a General Congregation are basically of two kinds: the provincial superiors, who attend by right of office, who make up ap-proximately one-third of the membership of a congregation and the other two-thirds who are elected. The only delegates who were unable to attend the 32nd General Congregation were a few from behind the Iron Curtain. Their unoc-cupied desks remained an ever-present symbol to the assembly of the oppres-sion of the Church in various areas. In spite of these absences, there were two hundred thirty-six delegates present. In the Society of Jesus the agenda is made up after the congregation con-venes. It is based mainly on the postulates (requests) submitted either from in-dividual Jesuits or provinces. Contrary to what one might suspect, there is probably no more democratic legislative group than is to be found in the General Congregation. Any Jesuit can send in postulates either through his province or directly, as an individual to the General Congregation. All of these are considered on their merits independently of their source. Over one thousand postulates were submitted. After a preliminary analysis, it was seen that they could be organized according to ten categories. Ten commissions were set up roughly corresponding to these ten categories. Initially the commissions had a membership of about twenty-five each, com-posed of representatives from different parts of the Society. Later, for the sake of efficiency in composing the documents emerging from the commissions, the number was reduced to four or five. The amount of work that went into the final draft of the documents was enormous. The work of the commission would be submitted to the whole assembly, receive revisions (or even be re-jected), be returned to the commission; then again be submitted to the assembly, with a repetition of the same procedm:e, until the assembly was satisfied with it. The whole assembly convened in a large hall that had been especially renovated for the congregation. Electronic equipment was installed to provide simultaneous translation. Voting was done by means of a small switch at each desk. In the front of the hall in full view of all the delegates was a large elec-tronic board, with indicator lights arranged accordihg to the seating plan in the hail. This board registered the votes with a green light if affirmative or a red, if negative. At the top of the board was a place where the total affirmative and negative vote would register immediately after the vote was taken. All ~'~' ~ ~.~. 676;~ R~i~.w for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 voting~'~bhe exception," was public. The exception came at the request of the congregatiori ~hen it came to vote on the question of grades in the Society. Doubtless this pr0ce.dure was intended to provide the general with the oppor-tunity to vote in a way that would not compromise him in whatever future ac-tions he would have to take.as a result of the vote. The Main Themes Seventeen documents issued from the congregation, most of them originating from the ten commissions which had been established. Other documents came from special commissions appointed as the need arose. Though the documents differ in content, some common themes run throughout. Perhaps the main theme reflected in the documents is that of mission. Related to this is a reawakened awareness of the Society as a whole, of which the local communities are part. The Society, while it exists also for the sanc-tification of its members, takes its special meaning from its apostolic orienta-tion. This apostolic orientation is specified by its relationship to the Holy See, particularly through the Fourth Vow, and in its service to the Church through the promotion and defense of the faith. A characteristic of this apostolic orienta-tion is adaptability to the needs of particular times and places. In our day this involves an overriding concern to overcome the injustices which oppress so many millions of people. However, in all of its apostolic work, the goal and the means it uses are to be consistent with the tradition of the Society as set forth in its Formula of the Institute which sets forth its fundamental pontifical law. This ties in with the identity of the Society, a theme that is both the subject of one particular document and one that runs through all of the others as well. The Society is a priestly, apostolic body, bound to the Holy See in a special way for the defense and promotion of the faith. The sense of mission involves not only working with those who are op-pressed but it also involves becoming identified with them as far as this is possible. Our poverty, therefore, which has its juridical as well as evangelical aspects, takes on a particular experiential mode in so far as, by it, we can iden-tify with the poor. The decree that has to do with union of hearts and minds is also intimately related to the nature of the Society as an apostolic body. Ignatius clearly saw that the Society's apostolate depended first of all on the union of the members with God, and then derivatively on their union with one another. One theme which is conspicuous is that of repentence. The Society acknowledges that it has failed in recent years to live up to those characteristics which were suppose to distinguish it, such as obedience, loyalty to the Holy See, fidelity tO the principles of the religious life. The State of the Society One of the commissions set up early in the order of business was the one charged to examine the state of the Society. Its purpose was to form some A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation / 677 kind of an evaluation of the condition of the Jesuit order at this point in its history, assessing both its weaknesses and its strengths. To provide this com-mission with input, the delegates met in small groups over a period of several days. These small groups were of two kinds: what were called "assistancy groups" (for example, all of the American Jesuits belong to one "assistancy," the French to another, etc.), and "language groups," composed of people from different countries who had some facility in their own and other languages (German-English, French-English, Spanish-French, etc.) These groups dis-cussed the state of the Society in reference to key points such as formation of Jesuits, religious observance, the apostolate. These sessions broadened the practical knowledge each of us had of the Society and helped to create among us an awareness of community. They were also informative, first of all in bringing us to realize that many of the problems were common, with varying degrees of acuteness, while others were peculiar to a particular section of the Society. A criticism which many of us in the western world resonated with came from one of the German provincials in my group when he said that the image that the Society in Germany gives is that of B~rgerlichkeit, which in English connotes a comfortable, gentlemanly, middle-class existence. On the other hand, the situation of the Jesuits from behind the Iron Cur-tain, some of whom were also in my language group, has spared them some of the enervating effects of secularization. For one reason, their apostolate, where they are able to exercise it, is mostly pastoral work; secondly, their precarious existence serves to keep their faith at a high level of vitality. The delegates from the Third World countries brought other emphases. From the Spanish speaking countries there was a strong orientation toward social change, bringing with it problems of political involvement and the degree to which such involvement could subscribe to an ideology which often had Marxist overtones. In other regions, such as Africa, Indonesia and the Far East, one of the main problems is "inculturation," embodying the faith and the spirit of the Society in forms peculiar to their own cultures. As part of this evaluation on the state of the Society, Fr. General himself gave a picture of the way he sees the Society at the present, as a body which is very much alive, but with certain illnesses. He also gave a detailed description of his own relationship with the Holy See and the other officials in the Vatican, providing afterwards an opportunity for the delegates to question or discuss any of the points he had brought up. The document on the state of the Society which came out as a result of all this exchange is not one of the papers published to the Society. It was intended only for the delegates and their work in the congregation itself. However, the document is not in fact that useful. Its main value was in providing the oppor-tunity for the delegates to familiarize,themselves with the state of the Society through their live exchanges with one another. A document of this kind by its nature remains general, and gives little sense of the extent and import of either the positive or negative points. 671~ / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 The Work of the Commissions As was mentioned above, ten commissions were formed, more or less along the lines of the categories of material received in the postulates. While a few others later came into being and some of the original ones were changed, these ten commissions formed pretty much the working base of the Congrega-tion. Risking over-simplification, they could be divided into those which looked mainly inward, for example, about our "grades," the Fourth Vow, for-mation, final incorporation into the Society (final vows), central government, the constitution of provincial and general congregations; those which looked outward, namely, the mission of the Society today, inculturation, the service of the Society to the Church; and finally those which look both inward and outward, for example, on union of hearts, the Jesuit today. Some comments on a few of the documents might contribute to a better understanding of them. 1. The Mission of the Society Today The decree which took up the lion's share of the time, and which provided the platform for most of the rhetoric was the one that dealt with the mission of the Society today. The very nature of the topic explains why it took so long to come up with a satisfactory formulation. It involves an articulation that had to bring together the old and the new: fidelity to the essentials of the Society's apostolic nature, and coming to grips with the needs of today. While such a formulation has its own difficulties, the problem was exacer-bated by an initially one-sided approach and by the impression that some gave of using language more appropriate to political parties than to a religious group attempting to clarify its mission. The initial approach was largely horizontal, too much concentrated on the socio-economic aspects, with too lit-tle of the priestly. In the effort to make the congregation conscious of the urgency of these problems there was a tendency to absolutize what was in fact only one aspect of the Society's apostolate. One of the observations offered by Cardinal Villot in the letter in which he com-municated the Pope's authorization to promulgate the work of the congregation pertains to this decree. He stresses an important point, which is already present in the decree, but which deserves emphasis, namely, that the total work of evangelization has a comprehen-sion that cannot be reduced to working for social justice, and secondly that there is a priestly way of working for social justice that is distinct from the proper role of the laity. No one can judge from the final document how much work went into it. If one were tothink of a carpenter shop filled with shavings, and one tiny cabinet to show for the work, the comparison would be apt. The final decree, though somewhat diffuse, manages to relate the fundamental apostolic orientation of the Jesuit life as a priestly order to the promotion of faith which in the real-life situation is inseparable from the promotion of justice. 2. Poverty The. subject of poverty has continued to bedevil our recent congregations. A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation ] 679 As everyone knows, there are two main aspects to what is called religious poverty: the juridical and the evangelicalwor the personal appropriation of the values of evangelical poverty. The decree on poverty, probably the most im-portant document to come out of the congregation, has two parts, the first be-ing more inspirational and exhortatory, while the second is juridical, setting down a basic reform in the structures of our institutional practice of poverty. It is not possible to enter into the technicalities of the juridical part of the decree since it presupposes some knowledge of the structure of the Society. Suffice it to say that the decree formulates what is, to my mind, a creative way of realizing for our own times the Ignatian ideal of poverty, taking into con-sideration the different socio-economic conditions of the twentieth and six-teenth centuries. On the personal side, frugality, the sense of being part of the kenotic mystery of Christ, dependence on the community, and identification with the poor are stressed. in his letter, Cardinal Villot makes two points concerning this decree. After commenting on the fact that the Holy Father was aware of the immense amount of work that had gone into this decree, which attempts to relate the traditional practice of poverty in the Society to the needs of our times, he says that considering the newness of the approach, it would be better to promulgate the decree ad experimentum, to be reviewed in the next General Congregation. He also cautions that the decree should not jeopardize the Society's traditional approach to gratuity of ministries. 3. Grades and the Fourth Vow No other subject discussed by the congregation received as much attention from the press as that of our "grades" and the Fourth Vow. As I remarked above, the delegates had proceeded in a spirit of obedience to the Holy Father's wishes, but in the spirit of Ignatian obedience which allows represen-tation of one's case to the superior, with full openness, however, to the final decision of the superior. But, as I mentioned above, the delegates were not aware of an important communication from the Holy Father which he had given to one of the officials manifesting his mind clearly on the topic. We were made aware of this special communication only after we had proceeded in good faith to take up the question, and to give an "indicative" votewone that is not definitive, but from which it is possible to infer the mind of the delegates. The indicative vote was overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing grades. One can imagine the consternation of the Holy Father when he read of the results of this in the Acta, a copy of which he received regularly, especially when he learned that we had not been given his specific directive on this matter which had been communicated to one of the officials of the congregation. This unfortunate series of events precipitated a strong response from the Vatican. First there was a letter from Cardinal Villot in the name of the Holy Father expressing his consternation at the proceedings. Later there was a letter from the Holy Father himself, tin which he expressed his wonderment, pain, disappointment. What the delegates found particularly difficult to understand in Cardinal Viilot's letter was the strong language used about the failure of Fr. Arrupe to exercise the proper kind of leadership that could have headed off this series of unfortunate events. I~1~0 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 While the delegates were still reeling from this unexpected turn of events, they learned of the directive that had been given by Cardinal Villot to one of the officials to be given to the congregation. The official explained before the whole congregation that he had not understood that he was supposed to transmit this directive to the delegates in any official way. This was a costly mistake. Yet in some ways I think it was a felix culpa because of the benefits which came out of it, as I shall comment below. At this point I should say something about the meaning of the grades and the Fourth Vow for those unfamiliar with the Society's structure and legisla-tion. When the idea of the Society was evolving in the mind and experience of Ignatius, one of the features that emerged was a conception of having membership in the Society on different levels, or "grades." For those with their final vows, there were to be three levels or grades. First of all, there are the "solemnly professed," with solemn vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and a Fourth Vow of special obedience to the Holy Father in regard to mis-sions, that is, apostolic commissions. In the past one hundred years about 40% of Jesuit priests have belonged to this grade. In the mind of Ignatius the professed were supposed to exemplify to a special degree what he looked for in every Jesuit, proficiency in learning, a high degree of virtue, mobility, a life supported only by free-will offerings, exemplifying in their lives a similar relationship to the Vicar of Christ that the disciples showed toward Christ Himself. In addition, key positions in government were reserved to the professed, such as the office of provincial. Again, only the professed could take part in a General Congregation. In the second place, there were priests whose final vows were simple, not solemn. Without going into detail on the differences between solemn and sim-ple vows, it is sufficient to remark here that for one thing they differ accord-ing to the seriousness of the reasons needed for dispensation. This grade is that of "spiritual coadjutor." Members of this grade do not take the vow of special obedience to the Holy Father. In the third place, there are "temporal coadjutors" or brothers. Their final vows are also simple vows of poverty, chast.ity, and obedience. They have the same apostolic purpose as the priests, but have a different way of contributing to the realization of it. The grades are a feature that are peculiar to the Society. As one would sur-mise, the distinction has not been an unmixed blessing in the history of the Society. Though Ignatius never conceived of a Society which would have privileged and unprivileged castes, human nature being what it is, the results were predictable. Since human nature associates power with authority, the professed came to be considered as a kind of first-class type of Jesuit, and the non-professed as second-class. In recent years there has been much historical research on the origin of the ~grades. Also there has been considerable discussion whether the distinction of ~the grades was inextricably tied up with the vision of St. Ignatius, or whether it was something that with the change of times no longer served a purpose. The A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation Thirty-first General Congregation did not face the question head-on. It con-tented itself with broadening the norms by which a person could be admitted to profession. It also transmitted the final solution of the problem to the Thirty-second General Congregation. The intervention of the Holy Father did not directly concern grades. He limited himself to the question of the Fourth Vow, which he said could not be extended to non-priests. This intimates that the Holy Father was concerned not simply about a juridical division in the Society which could be changed by another law, but about a theological question concerning the relationship between the priestly identity of those who take the Fourth Vow and the mis-sions which are the direct object of the vow. Again (I am speculating) the intervention of the Holy Father might be a healthy reminder in this age of blurring all distinctions for the sake of dubious notions of equality, that differentiation in functions does not necessarily mean division. Reserving the Fourth Vow to priests helps to keep the priestly focus of the apostolic work of the Society which has characterized it from the begin-ning. This need not create first- and second-class citizens, but it could engender an awareness that there are different gifts within the same body by which the same goal is realized. 4. The Union of Hearts A commission without a name was set up as a kind of catchall to handle four topics that on the surface had little unity: the question of union and pluralism, communal discernment, religious life, and community life. Since I was a member of this commission from beginning to end, I feel more in touch with it than with the other commissions. It was a kind of a "Benjamin" com-mission compared with those set up to handle the "important" topics like mis-sion, grades, poverty, etc. Ironically, Benjamin was suddenly given an importance late in the con-gregation. The Holy Father in his intervention had commented on the fact that he had heard a lot about mission and justice, but little about renewal of the religious life, even though we had already been at it for two months. So all of a sudden the pressure was on to come up with something significant along those lines. The final document on union of hearts is a contemporary commentary, on Chapter One of Part VIII of our Constitutions, "Aids Toward the Uniori of Hearts." Under this heading the commission found a focus which could unite the various topics given to it. Much effort was spent in an attempt to formulate a clear statement on the subject of union and pluralism. Many of the postulates asked for such a state-ment, some of them stressing the harm coming from internal divisions, others emphasizing the need for a "healthy pluralism." Eventually the commission decided that a theoretical statement would not be helpful. Instead it for-mulated, along with principles on which union of hearts is based, certain prac-tical directives on prayer, community life, sacraments, and communal discern-ment. 682 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 The subject of communal discernment received a lot of discussion. Some wanted to turn it into a kind of Aladdin's lamp which could call forth some kind of a jinni. Others were more skeptical over the possibility of univer-salizing the practicableness of such a process. The final statement in the docu-ment attempts to locate communal discernment within the spectrum of various kinds of spiritual exchange within a community, not exaggerating its role, but on the other hand recognizing the value that it has when the right dispositions and circumstances are present. Incidentally about midway through the congregation, an ad hoc commis-sion was also established to see whether the congregation itself could not carry on its work through a method of communal discernment. After a couple of meetings, it dissolved, because it felt that proceeding according to a formal method of communal discernment was impractical for the congregation because of the large numbers involved and the wide range of subjects on the agenda. 5. The Jesuit Today In the light of the diversity that has appeared in Jesuit life over the past ten years, it was felt necessary to have a statement which would describe the meaning of being Jesuit today. The congregation was presented with five different papers, each of which approached the subject of Jesuit identity from different points of view. They opted for the one which now appears among the official decrees. The decree relates Jesuit identity today in a very simple way to our Igna-tian tradition, to our apostolic mission, and to the source, center, and goal of Jesuit life, which is the imitation of Christ. The Holy See and the General Congregation We have already commented on the intervention of the Holy See in regard to the subject of extending the Fourth Vow to non-priests. However, this is only an application of something which is much broader. The interest of the Holy See in this congregation is unparalleled in the whole history of the Society. Perhaps this comes from the fact that Pope Paul had a keen sense of its importance for the Society and for the Church itself. I have just finished once again going over the papal documents, beginning with the letter written to Fr. Arrupe on September 15, 1973, which the Holy Father wrote after Fr. General had announced the convening of the General Congregation, and concluding with the covering letter which was added to the approbation of the decrees. There is one theme running through all of these communications: the necessity of being faithful to the distinctive nature of the Society as it is expressed in the Formula of the Institute, a distinctiveness which has proved its fruitfulness over hundreds of years of experience. Specifically, the Society is described time and time again as a priestly apostolic order, with a special bond of obedience to the Holy See. There is, to be sure, a stress on the need to adapt to the needs of our times, but such adap- A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation I 683 tation must always maintain the essentials as these are to be found in the For-mula. 1 Pope Paul wrote of his concern for the Society not only as the Vicar of Christ who has responsibility for the whole Church, but in terms which, unless I am mistaken, are unprecedented in the history of this relationship between the Society and the Holy See. He speaks of himself as the one who has the chief responsibility for the preservation of the Formula of the Institute, "supremus 'Formulae Instituti' fideiussor," and the chief protector and preserver of the Formula, "Formulae Instituti supremus tutor ac custos." It would not be true to say that all of the delegates responded with un-qualified enthusiasm to the interventions of the Holy Father. Though all recognized his right in abstracto to intervene, a~nd the corresponding attitude of obedience to which we were obliged and, which all gave without contesta-tion, nevertheless when the interventions came in this particular way, with these particular words and in this particular timing, there were signs of ruffled feelings. In case anyone needed reminding, we learned in the process that the delegates as a whole, while good and responsible men, are not yet ready for canonization. However, we did see in an exemplary way the incarnation of Jesuit obedience in at least one person, Fr. Arrupe. This was not something he did just "to give good example." His whole life has been so totalized by his faith that even his perceptions pick up the reality beneath the appearance. He senses the presence of the Vicar of Christ beneath the appearance of Pope Paul. The concern of the Holy Father shown in so many ways over the past few years and in a special way through his vigilance over the activities of the con-gregation are to my way of thinking a special grace for the Society. In a way that we never planned on, the interventions of the Holy Father brought us to a level of faith we would not have reached by ourselves. It also brought us to a realization that the Society is a servant of the Church. In some small way the history of this congregation parallels the description of Peter's death, about whom our Lord said, "You will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go" (Jn 21:18). Father Arrupe I have already mentioned that if it were not for Fr. Arrupe's example and leadership the congregation would have capsized under the difficulties it ran into. He constantly called us to a vision we needed in order to see what was happening from a supernatural point of view, and in order to avoid the traps of tNot many Jesuits are aware either of the content or the importance of the Formula of the Institute. Yet, even more than the Constitutions, it is the basic rule or fundamental code of legisla-tion in the Society. It contains the results of the deliberations of Ignatius and his companions in 1539 which provided the first sketch of the Institute of the Society of Jesus. It was first approved by Paul Iil in 1540, then again by Julius 111 in 1550 in a slightly revised form. 684 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 self-pity or recrimination that were only too present. Like one of th~ prophets, he reminded us to see what was happening as coming from the hand of God, and to use it for our own purification and conversion. In a talk given to the delegates on the second day of the congregation, he spoke of the answer that we had to give to the needs of our times. It should be the foolishness of the cross by which Christ redeemed the world, which is the wisdom of God. "In the absolute foolishness of the Cross, the emptying of all things, we find the key to the ultimate solution to the problems of today." In a way we did not foresee, those words were prophetic. Again, he exercised his leadership by leaving the congregation free to follow the paths where its deliberations would take it. In its authority, the General Congregation is superior to the general. Fr. Arrupe always acted with full awareness of this fact. On occasion he would let the delegates know how he felt about certain things, not to pressure them, but in order to make this part of the input of their deliberations. The congregation showed its appreciation of his leadership over the past ten year,s in many ways. There are few who have had to pilot a ship through such a stormy period. The burden has not been easy. But there is always evi-dent in him the same buoyancy and infectious joy that somehow puts him in touch with the Stillpoint that is beyond, above, beneath the storm. Yet, while realizing his outstanding qualities, the delegates did not apotheosize Fr. Arrupe. They realized that with all of his gifts there were also limitations. In fact, the decree which set up a council for the general was framed mainly to supply the kind of help which might balance out the one-sidedness of some of his gifts. Differences Between This Congregation and the Previous Ones The Thirty-second (2ongregati0n had many characteristics which made it very different from any preceding General Congregation. Some of the more important ones might be the following. As was mentioned above, there was a four-year period of preparation for this congregation which was unprecedented. Similarly a few months before the actual opening day a special preparatory commission met to organize the material. This was the first General Congregation where, from the start, traditional rules of secrecy were lifted, except for the prohibition against making public either the names of delegates who spoke on the different questions, or the tally of the votes. Five Jesuit journalists were given free access to the meetings. They published a report about every week that kept the Society informed of the progress of affairs. In this Congregation for the first time the voices of the Third World were not only heard in larger numbers, but they showed a vitality that added zest to the meetings. However, even among these voices there were different accents. All of them were keenly aware of the injustices which oppress their peoples by reason of the exploitation of the capitalistic countries. However, the Spanish- A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation / 685 speaking delegates tended to stress political and social involvement; the Africans continually reminded us of the need for the sense of the transcendent, the specifically God-and-Christ-centered nature of our apostolate; and those from the Far East, while keeping these same perspectives, also stressed the need for approaches that were directed both toward personal conversion and change of the structures. No other congregation has met at a period when there has been such a crisis in vocations. Over the past ten years, the Society has diminished from about 36,000 to 30,000 members. While in some places the number of novices has begun to pick up again, the overall picture remains dim. In 1965 there were 1902 novices compared to 705 in 1974. In the United States there are about 200 novices, showing a slight increase over the past few years. In some coun-tries, however, the picture is dismal. Spain, for example, had 269 novices in 1965. In 1974 it had only 30. Germany had 114 in 1965. At present it has about 30. Similar figures could be given for France, Belgium, Holland, Italy. When one compares the number of scholastics presently in their training with the number of priests engaged in apostolic work, there is only one scholastic for every five priests. This will seriously change the scope of our apostolic work over the next fifty years. Another unique factor was the everpresent concern of the Holy See in regard to the preparation for the congregation, the things taken up, and the final results, as I have mentioned above. The theme was repeated over and over again: be faithful to yourselves, especially to your identity as it is ex-pressed in your Formula of the Institute. The only specific feature which was singled out in the expressions of this concern was fidelity to the lgnatian idea of the Fourth Vow, both positively in the fact that it should be a vital factor in the life of the Society, and negatively in that it should not be extended to non-priests. Again, the fact of asking the congregation to submit its decrees to the Holy See for its approval before they were promulgated was unprecedented. The approbation was given with, in some instances, a few qualifications. Another characteristic which distinguishes this congregation from begin-ning to end and is evident in the decrees is thee theme of repentance. There is a mea culpa, mea maxima culpa evident in the Introductory Decree, the Decree on Mission, on The Jesuit Today, as well as in others. The Society is painfully conscious of its failings over the past ten years. Particularly in contrast to the Thirty-first Congregation, with its stress on freedom, subsidiarity and conscience, this one stressed the complementary features of the limits of pluralism, the need for norms that are applicable for Jesuit life as a whole, the responsibility of superiors for a greater firmness in governing, the importance of the manifestation of conscience both for the spiritual direction of the individual, and the good of the apostolate, the value of communal discernment when the proper conditions are realized. This congregation, unlike others, had a unifying theme throughout: the mission of the Society today. This did not happen because it was planned. There was a kind of unconscious dynamic at work which imperceptibly gave 686 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 this orientation to the various decrees. The consciousness of mission, if fully appropriated in all of its richness, could do much to revivify the Society, over-coming in the first place a great deal of individualism and self-will, and bring-ing about a greater sense of the living presence of Christ sending through His Church, and through superiors. In the actual procedure of the congregation there were unique features arising from the sharing that took place in smaller groups. One of the most im-portant parts of our daily life was the concelebrated Mass which was celebrated according to the different language groupings. Finally this congregation is probably distinctive in the fact that a little over half of the delegates were under forty-nine years old (122 out of the 236). Strengths and Weaknesses of the Congregation Like all meetings of this kind there are both strengths and weaknesses to be found. I could not resist the temptation to say that one of the strengths was un-doubtedly sheer psychological tenacity to "keep at it" for over three months when everyone was exhausted both from the work itself and the emotional strain. But the main strength of the congregation is the sense of solidarity manifest among the delegates and throughout the Society, a solidarity coming from a vision based on faith and brought into an Ignatian focus through the Spiritual Exercises and our Jesuit tradition. However, I think that there are also some deficiences evident in the work and structure of the congregation. Some way has to be found to expedite the carrying out of business. Though it was an attempt to get the input from the whole Society, on balance, the analysis of the postulates took up too much time. And questions of order consumed interminable hours. In regard to particular questions, in retrospect, it might have been a serious mistake not to have separated in some way the question of the Fourth Vow from that of grades. While they are related, they are distinct. And the interven-tion of the Holy See was concerned with the Fourth Vow, and not directly with grades. Again the expression given to the relationship of the Society to the Holy Father is "safe," but it creates the impression of one who is driving a car with one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. It does not seem to ex-press the 61an of Jesuit spirituality in its fullness. One reason for this inade-quacy stems from the fact that the congregation came to the topic only in the last few days before it ended, and the members did not have the mental energy or the time to do justice to it. Another difficulty is in the formulation itself. Attempts to combine both the unreserved expression of the spirit of loyalty and the juridical aspect of limits tend to cancel one another out. For example, there were numerous attempts, all sterile, to speak of "mission" in relationship to "doctrine," wherein loyalty would be unreserved in regard to mission, but conditioned in regard to doctrine. Consequently the resulting statement is bland, not nuanced. This will probably be one of the main topics that will have to be taken up at the next General Congregation. A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation Another deficiency is the fact that the congregation treated those problems which are more obvious because they have a certain shrillness--the problem, for example, of global injustice. Just as important, however, but without the volume being turned up, are questions touching man and technology, par-ticularly the genetic manipulation of man. Again, these questions will probably have to be faced by the next congregation. What to Hope For If the Society as a whole could translate what is set down in the decrees from formulation into fact, it would be renewed. In turn it would become a great force in renewing the Church and the world. What hope is there for such a renewal? The parable of the sower and the seed has its application to the Society as well as to the Church. There are those whose roots are not deep enough to withstand trials. There are others whose life of faith is choked by cares and riches. But then there are the many who do yield fruit, some, a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Decrees, however excellent, are no substitute for the gospel-call to totality. To the degree that individuals open themselves to the radical call of the gospel will they also open themselves to the decrees, which after all are only a faltering attempt to express this radical call in a way that is both Ignatian and contemporary. There are many factors which will contribute to energizing this renewal. Many feel a need for a deeper life of prayer. The importance of spiritual direc-tion is expressing itself strongly. A fuller appropriation of the Spiritual Exercises ¯ through the directed retreat is a great blessing. Again, an important factor is the reinforcement and leadership given to the Society by other religious con-gregations which have already led the way in the renewal of religious life by bringing their lives more in conformity with gospel simplicity and single-mindedness. We can also hope that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past ten years. Considering the turmoil and confusion coming from "future shock," these mistakes are perhaps understandable. But no organization can exist in a state of continuous convulsion. Many of the delegates, in searching for answers to the problems which faced us "discovered" our Thirty-first Congregation, which someone described as the great congregation in the history of the Society. We found that in many cases we could not do better, in fact could hardly come up to the decrees of the Thirty-first. But we also felt like a traveler who had spent hours trying to find his way only to discover after much meandering that there was a map in his glove compartment. The documents of the Thirty-first General Congreg -tion were such a map. The logical question, then, is: why were not the decrees implemented? A still more haunting question is: will the same thing happen to the decrees of this congregation? This was a problem which preoccupied the delegates throughout the whole time. Meetings were held to discuss implementation. But as the saying goes, 61~! / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 there is many a slip,between the cup and the lip. How much will the Society be able to drink in from the decrees? One of the main sources of hope, in addition to those mentioned above, is a renewed sense of solidarity and confidence among the provincials, and a strong sense of support in Fr. General. In the past ten years very often inaction resulted not from a failure of courage or faith, but because of a blurring of ideas concerning the fundamentals of religious life, often enough because of contradictory views bandied by theologians. The provincials obviously have not suddenly received some formula of universal application to solve all problems, but there is a greater sense of assurance and direction. The weight of implementation turns around the local superiors with the support of the provincials. There is hope here also, because the superiors themselves have a greater sense of their solidarity and of their role as spiritual leaders of the local communities. Ultimately the problem is always the same: conversion. It is something never accomplished once and for all, but continues to repeat its call. There are the perennial obstacles to conversion: inertia, self-love, self-will, the evil spirits that affect us all as individuals. However, it especially in the way that the collectivity reenforces the inertia in individuals that we find the main obstacle today. Group-think and group-feel, in large part created through the media, produce a kind of closedness that filters down from a collective level to in-dividuals, bringing about imperceptibly a closedness in the individual. Each one, young or old, is caught in some degree on this split level of collectivity and self, and suffers from the unfreedom of the collectivity. Jesuits already engaged in the apostolate have to discern how much this group-think affects their personal lives, impeding their personal conversion and the fruitfulness of their apostolate. Jesuits who are in formation have to do the same. The responsibility of those who are in charge of training the younger Jesuits is great. The importance of the congregation comes not from the written decrees but from the support that these decrees give to creating in the Society a different kind of group-think, a "group-feel" based upon the gospel. "My name is legion." Legions can be driven out only by legions. The demonic in collectivity can only be driven out by the embodiment of holiness in collec-tivity. The Society will rise or fall to the extent that the good will of the in-dividual is supported and sustained by a corporate realization of sanctity. No individual can abdicate the responsibility for his own conversion. But in a special way superiors have a responsibility for the whole group. Newman remarked somewhere that good is never done except at the expense of those who do it, and truth is never enforced except at the sacrifice of its propounders. Reformers and prophets have never been well received. Perhaps superiors are destined to enter into that role, not, however, with a martyr complex or heaviness of heart. We have a living example in Fr. Arrupe that it is a role that is compatible with a deep joy. Aiding and facilitating the work of the superiors are the communities A Survey of the Thirty-Second General Congregation / 689 themselves which are called upon, through community meetings and prayerful discernment, to face their own response to the gospel call to simplicity, and to bridge the gap between the radical response to which we have vowed our lives and the actual way in which we live them. When I asked one of the delegates who was in great part responsible for the formulation of the decree on poverty how optimistic he was about its im-plementation, he said: "When I think of human nature, I am not very op-timistic. But when I think of the power of the Spirit, 1 am hopeful. Everything depends on the Spirit. Legislation can support; it cannot convert. Of ourselves we are weak, but with the power of the Spirit we can overcome, overcome even ourselves." POSITION OPEN The Department of Theology in the School of Religious Studies of the Catholic University of America announces the opening, beginning January, 1976, for: Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in the field of Christian Spiritual Theology. Applications should be sent to:Chairperson Department of Theology Catholic University of America Washington, DC 20064 The Catholic University of America is an equal ol~portunity employer. The Recovery =of Religious Life Bro. Raymond L. Fitz, S.M. Bro. Lawrence J. Cada, S.M. Both authors belong to the Marianist Training Network. Brother Raymond Fitz is director of the Marianist Institute of Christian Renewal and associate professor of Engineering Management and Electrical Engineering at the University of Dayton. He lives at 410 Edgar Avenue; Dayton, Ohio 45410. Brother Lawrence Cada is chairman of the Department of Science and Mathematics at Borromeo College of Ohio and lives at 315 East 149 Street; Cleveland, Ohio 44110. I. Introduction~ How long will the turmoils now besetting religious life last? Are they almost over, and has the process of returning to a more normal situation begun? Or will things stay unsettled for some time to come? This article will argue for the likelihood of the latter alternative. On the basis of the models and analyses presented, the article will try to show that religious life in America is undergo-ing a profound transition, which will take another twenty to twenty-five years to run its full course. Moreover, the study will seek to demonstrate that social disintegration (loss of membership, lack of vocations, collapse of institutions, etc.) of religious communities in the Church will probably continue for at least the next ten to fifteen years. The most significant questions facing religious life in those ten to fifteen years will center on "death and dying." Many aspects of the life as it has been known will be passing away. Only after these questions are accepted and creatively answered can religious life be expected to be revitalized and renewed within the Church. This process will demand both a recovery of that deep dynamic impulse which first gave rise to religious life in the Church and a recovery from the malaise through which it is now passing: tThis is a draft of a work in progress. Feedback on the content and style of this paper would be ap-preciated. 690 The Recovery of Religious Life hence the title "The Recovery of Religious Life." Although much of this arti-cle argues for the plausibility of these assertions and their implications for the future of religious life, there will also be provided an explanation of how the data were collected and organized, and of what was called important or unim-portant. In this sense, these assertions represent a starting bias that informs the entire article. As such, this bias merits being stated at the outset. The approach taken in this article2 is to explore the questions about the future of religious life from a historical and sociological point of view. In the first two parts of the article, two models are developed: a historical model of the evolution of religious life as a movement in the Church and a sociological model dealing with the organizational life cycle of an individual religious com-munity. Then, in the final sections of the article, these two models will be used to address questions about the present condition of religious life and its future. Every model represents a simplification of reality, and the models in this arti-cle are no exception. To arrive at the questions posed in the final sections, the article will digest and condense large amounts of material drawn from a variety of sources that are partially indicated in the notes. It is hoped that this simplification is not a serious distortion of the facts and that it will arrange the historical and other data in such a way as to provide an overview from which some tentative generalizations can be made. II. The Evolution of Religious Life: A Historical Model Religious communities in the life of the church are not fixed and static en-tities. Taken together they make up a historical process unfolding over time, and religious life can be viewed as a significant social movement in the history of Western Culture. As parts of a movement, religious communities arose in response to dramatic social change in the Church and in the larger cultural and political arena of Western Civilization. They became a dynamic force in shap-ing and cha~ging the Church and secular culture. They have been both a cause and an effect of social change: the founding of religious communities has fre-quently been a response to major developments of society, and the evolution of the Church and Western Culture has been significantly influenced by the life and work of religious communities. As in all social movements, the role of myth, the emergence of belief systems, the fashioning of institutions and social structures, and the role of personal transformation and commitment are central to the evolution of religious life. The dynamic interplay of all these elements creates, sustains and limits the histo~'ical unfolding of religious communities. ~This article grew from a variety of experiences over an extended period of time with multiple presentations at workshops and reflections from many religious. Especially helpful were Fr. Norbert Brockman, S.M., Sr. Gertrude Foley, S.C., Bro. Thomas Giardino, S.M., and Sr. Carol Lichtenberg, S.N.D. The scheme of dividing the history of religious life into the five eras presented in the second part of this article was first suggested in a lecture given by Fr. David Fleming, S.M., at the University of Dayton in December, 1971. 692 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 A. Organizing Concepts One way to view the unfolding of religious life within the Church is to look at how the image of religious life has evolved over time and what implications this evolution has had for the functioning of individual religious communities.3 The term dominant image of religious life is used here to name a multifaceted reality that includes how religious view their life and its functions and role within the Church and the world during a given period. The term is also meant to indicate the sense of history which permeates religious life at a given time. How do people, both the religious and the members of society at large, picture the past of this way of life? What kind of future are religious supposed to be creating? The process by which the dominant image of religious life evolves in time can be characterized by a repeated sequence of identifiable phases of change: - Growth Phase. A relatively long period of elaboration and develop-ment of the dominant image of religious life and its implications. - Decline Phase. A period of crisis in which the dominant image of religious life comes under strong question. Religious communities seem no longer suited to the aspirations of the age. Religious com-munities lose their purpose, drift into laxity, and disintegrate. Transition Phase. A comparatively short period of revitalization in which variations of the dominant image of religious life emerge and one of these is gradually selected as the new dominant image. - Growth Phase under a New Image. A period of elaboration and development under the new dominant image of religious life. The supposition that religious life has passed through a succession of such phases of growth, decline, and transition is the basis of a model that can be used to organize and interpret the data of the history of religious life.4 The remainder of this section is devoted to illustrating a way this model might be constructed. 3Some sources used to clarify the notion of dominant image were Fred Polak, The hnage of the Future, translated and abridged by Elise Boulding (San Francisco: Jassey-Bass, 1973); Changing Images of Man, Policy Research Report No. 4, Center for the Study of Social Policy, Stanford Research Institute, May, 1974; and Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). *Some sources used to clarify the notion of social evolution were Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding-I (Princeton: P. U. P., 1972); Anthony F. C. Wallace, "'Paradigmatic Processes in Cultural Change," American Anthropologist (Vol. 74, 1972), pp. 467-478; Donald T. Campbell, "'Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution," in H. R. Barringer, G. I. Blanksten, and R. W. Mack (¢ds.), Social Change in Developing Areas (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1965); Edgar S. Dunn, Economic and Social Development." A Process of Social Learn-ing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1971); and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). The Recovery of Religious Life / 693 The following questions have been used in fashioning the model. First, there are questions about variation that deal with searching and experiment-ing. Under what conditions do variations appear in the dominant image of religious life? If these variations lead in certain directions, what factors in culture, the Church, or religious life itself influenced the choice of those direc-tions? Second, there are questions about selection. What determines which variations in the dominant image of religious life are selected out to serve as essential elements of a new image of religious life? How do members of religious communities distinguish well-founded and properly justified variations from those which are precipitous, not well thought out, and hasty? ¯ Finally, there are questions about retention that deal with incorporating and establishing the new. How are selected variations incorporated into religious communities? What processes are needed? What set of factors distinguishes in-novations which endure from those which disappear quickly? B. Major Eras in the Evolution of Religious Life Using the concepts described above, the history of religious life can be divided into five main periods: the eras of the Desert Fathers, Monasticism, the Mendicant Orders, the Apostolic Orders, and the Teaching Congregations) The description of these eras given in this section constitutes the historical model that will be used in the final portion of this article. 1. Era of the Desert Fathers The first period was the Era of the Desert Fathers. Following the earliest manifestations of religious life in the mode of consecrated virgins and widows within the Christian communities of the persecuted Church, ther~ emerged the image of the religious as the ascetic holy person. The description of the her-mit's life given by Athanasius in his Life of Anthony crystallized an ideal which inspired both solitary anchorites and many communities of cenobites. The desert was seen as the domain of the demons to which they had retreated after being driven out of the cities by the triumph of the recently established Church. It was to this "desert" that generous men and women withdrew to 5Factual and historical data on the history of religious life were gathered from such standard sources as The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), The New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), the An-nuario Pontificio, The Official Catholic Directory, and The Catholic Almanac. Some of the other sources on this topic were Raymond Hostie, S.J., Vie et mort des ordres religieux (Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1972); David Knowles, O.S.B., Christian Monasticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Humbert M. Vicaire, O.P., The Apostolic Life (Chicago: Priory Press, 1966); Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964); Owen Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: C. U. P., 1968); William Hinnebusch, O.P., "'How the Dominican Order Faced Its Crises," Review for Religious (Vol. 32, No. 6, November, 1973), pp. 1307-1321; William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., The History of the Dominican Order, 2 vols. (New York: Alba House, 1966, 1973); Teresa Ledochowska, O.S.U., Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula, 2 vols. (Rome: Ancora, 1969); William V. Bangert, S.J., A History of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972); and Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, 2 vols. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961). 69t~ / Review for Religious, lZolume 34, 1975/5 carry on the Church's important work of doing battle with the devil in the wilderness as Christ had done long ago. In this way the desert came to be seen as a place of austere beauty, where the monk was trained in the ways of perfec-tion. He returned from time to time into the midst of his fellow Christians, who saw in him the power to do good--healing the sick, casting out demons, comforting the sorrowful with gentle words, reconciling the estranged, and above all urging everyone to put nothing in the world before the love of Christ. This image captured the imagination of the Christian world as news about the Desert Fathers spread from Egypt to all points of the Roman empire. Throughout the 4th century monasteries sprang up on all the shores of the Mediterranean. By the 5th century, the golden age had begun to fade. In the East, the monks had become embroiled in doctrinal controversy. In the West, TABLE 1: ERA OF THE DESERT FATHERS (200-500) Dominant Image of Religious Life. The ideal of religious life is the holy ascetic who seeks " the perfection of Christ as a solitary or in community with a group of monks. Disciples withdraw into the "desert" and place themselves under the care of a master ascetic who teaches them the ways of perfection. They live nearby as hermits or gather in cenobia or monasteries where the master is the superior. The monk prays, mortifies himself, does battle with the devil for the sake of the Church, and spends his life seeking union with Christ. 2nd and 3rd Centuries 251 Anthony horn Consecrated virgins and widows live a form of 271 Anthony withdraws into the desert RL within Christian communities of the early 292 Pachomius born Church during the persecution. 4th Century 313 Edict of Milan 325 Pachomius founds cenobium 356 Anthony ~lies 357 Athanasius writes Life of Anthony 360 Basil founds monastery in Cappadocia 363 Martin founds monastery in Gaul 376 Melania founds monastery on Mount of Olives 393 Augustine founds monastic group in Hip-po 399 Cassian, disciple of Evagrius, migrates from Egypt to West Hermits and cenobites flourish in the Egyptian desert. Various forms of solitary and com-munity RL spread around eastern rim of the Mediterranean (Palestine, Syria, Cappadocia). First monasteries are founded in the West. 5th Century 410 Alaric sacks Rome RL continues to expand in the East. Spread of 415 Cassian founds monastery in Marseille wandering monks and various kinds of 455 Vandals sack Rome monasteries in the West while the western half 459 Simon the Stylite dies of the Roman Empire crumbles. 476 End of western Roman Empire 1st TRANSITION: SPREAD OF BENEDICT'S RULE The Recovery of Religious Life / 69t~ the foundations of Roman civilization weakened under the onslaught of the barbarian tribes, and the ties between the eastern and western halves of the Empire began to break apart. The monasteries in Gaul and other parts of the moribund West became refugee cloisters, where the monks gathered the few treasures of civilization they could lay hold of. As dusk settled on the glories of imperial Rome, the stage was set for the rise of feudal Europe and with it the next period in the evolution of religious life. 2. Era of Monasticism The next period was the Era of Monasticism. In his attempt to regularize religious life as "a life with God in separation from the world," Benedict produced a new dominant image of religious life. This image was not only a correction of the abuses which had crept in during the 5th and 6th centuries, it also, and more importantly, turned out to be a successful adaptation of religious life to the feudal society of the Dark Ages and the early medieval period. Benedict's short and practical Rule furnished workable guidelines for all monastic activity and every age and class of monks. It combined an uncom-promising spirituality with physical moderation and flexibility. It emphasized the charity and harmony of a simple life in common under the guidance of a wise and holy abbot. By the 9th century, this new image had spread to virtually all the monasteries of Europe. The ideal of the Benedictine monk became the model for Christian spirituality and played a part in the stabilization and unification of society. Various modifications, such as the Cluniac, Carthusian, and Cister-cian Reforms, maintained and adapted the dominant image to the developments in European society. Cluny and the Cistercians devised methods of uniting monasteries into networks that became harbingers of the modern order. However, by the time the 'first stirrings of urbanization began at the end of the 12th century, the dominant image began to show its inadequacies and once again laxity in religious life was not uncommon. There was also a great debate between monks and canons about which form of religious life was a more authentic embodiment of the apostolic ideal. As the civilization of the high Middle Ages began to emerge, new possibilities were felt in society and with them came the opportunity for a transition in religious life. 3. Era of the Mendicant Orders When Francis and Dominic launched their communities, they ushered in the next period, the Era of the Mendicant Orders. As mendicant friaries sprang up in towns across Europe, they met with an initial hostility which could not fathom how this new style could be an authentic form of religious life. Gradually, though, the new image of religious life became acceptable, and it proved to be a much better adaptation of ~:eligious life to the needs of urban society than was possible for the monasteries in their rural settings. During the course of the 13th century, even the monastic orders established studia close 696 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 to the new universities, where the mendicants were flourishing. As Christen-dom was passing through its zenith, the image of a religious life unen-cumbered with landed wealth played a key role in the cultivation of the in-tellectual life by the Church within society and in the preaching of the Gospel for the Church. TABLE 2: ERA OF MONASTICISM (500-1200) Dominant Image of RL. Life in a monastery is the ideal of the religious. The daily round of liturgical prayer, work, and meditation provides a practical setting to pursue the lofty goals of praising God and union with Christ. Within the Church and society, the monks set an example of how deep spirituality can be combined with loving ministry to one's neighbor and dutiful fidelity to the concrete tasks of daily living. 6th Century 529 Benedict founds a monastery to live ac- Spread of monasteries throughout western cording to his Rule Europe (Gaul, Spain, Ireland, etc.). Various 540 Celtic monasticism takes root in Irela'nd formats. Excesses and laxity are common--as 590 Columbanus founds monastery in Lu~r are wandering monks. euil 7th and 8th Centuries 642 Arab conquest of Egypt Gradual spread of Benedict's Rule to.more and 700 Venerable Bede more monasteries of Europe. Missionary 746 Boniface founds monastery in Germany journeys of Celtic monks to evangelize 755 Canons of Chrodegang founded northern Europe. 9th Century 816 Regula Canonicorum of Aix-la-Chapelle Observance of Canons Regular is made uni- 817 Charlemagne's son decrees that form by the spread of the Rule of Aix. Con- Benedict's Rule is to be observed in all solidation of Benedict's Rule. Virtually all monasteries. This project coordinated by monasteries are "Benedictine." Benedict of Aniane. 910 Cluniac Reform 1084 Carthusian Reform 1098 Cistercian Reform 10th and llth Centuries Various reforms breathe new life into Benedict's ideal and introduce organizational variations. 1111 Bernard joins the Cistercians 1120 Premonstratensians founded 12th Century Canons Regular unite into orders which are a variation of the monastic networks of Cluny and Citeaux. Military orders attempt a new form of RL which is temporarily successful (Knights of Malta, Templars, Teutonic Knights, etc.). 2nd TRANSITION: RISE OF THE MENDICANTS After a rapid flowering, the mendicant orders were affected by the same changes which spread across the Church and European society in the 14th and 15th centuries. As the Renaissance presaged the new humanism, the secularization of European society, and the breakup of the unity of Christen-dom, there emerged the conditions for yet a new kind of religious life. The Recovery of Religious Life / 697 TABLE 3: ERA OF THE MENDICANT ORDERS (1200-1500) Dominant Image of RL. The simple friar who begs for his keep and follows in the footsteps of the Lord is the ideal of RL. He prays as he goes, steeping himself in the love of Christ. Unencumbered by landed wealth, the mendicants are free to travel on foot to any place they are needed by the Church. They hold themselves ready to preach, cultivate learning, serve the poor, and minister to the needs of society in the name of the Church. 1211 Franciscans founded 1216 Dominicans founded 1242 Carmelites founded 1256 Augustinians founded 13th Century Mendicant friaries spring up in medieval towns across Europe. These foundations lend themsel~,es to work in the new universities and the apostolate of preaching. Rapid expansion of the mendicant orders. Monastic orders make some attempts to take up the style of the mendicants. 1325 75,000 men in mendicant orders 1344 Brigittines founded 1349 Black Death 1400 47,000 men in mendicant orders 1415 Hus burned at the stake 1450 Gutenberg 1492 Columbus 1500 90,000 men in mendicant orders 14th Century ~tabilization and slow decline of the mendicant orders. Abuses in RL are prevalent. 15th Century Various reforms restore the mendicant ideal and produce a gradual increase in membership. First stirrings of the Renaissance introduce an uneasiness into the Church and RL. 3rd TRANSITION: THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 4. Era of the Apostolic Orders The transition to the next period in religious life, the era of the Apostolic Orders, happened with the Counter-Reformation. Not long after Luther sparked the Protestant Revolt, the new image of religious life appeared with the foundation of various orders of Clerics Regular, the chief of which were the Jesuits. The verve and style of this new foundation set the pace for religious life, The mendicant orders had taken up this ideal in part by joining in the mis-sionary conquests,of the Church in the newly discovered lands. The new image also spurred religious to come to terms with the secularizing trends of the scientific revolution, modern philosophy, and the rise of nationalism in Europe. Jesuits, for example, could be found in the royal courts of almost all of Europe's Catholic kingdoms, in the laboratories of the new scientists, and teaching the youthful Descartes at La Fl~che. As the proponents of the Enlightenment testily challenged the very ex-istence of the Church, a slow decline descended upon religious life. Large and nearly empty monasteries dotted the European countryside. Jansenist and Enlightened thought undermined the.rationale for religious life from opposite directions. The Bourbon kings succeededin persuading Rome to suppress the 69~! / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 Jesuits in 1773. On the eve of the French Revolution, worldwide membership in all the men's religious orders stood at about 300,000; by the time the Revolution and the secularization which followed had run their course, fewer than 70,000 remained. Many orders went out of existence. As the 19th century began, there was need of a thorough-going revival of religious life, which could realistically cope with the new consciousness of Europe. TABLE 4: ERA OF THE APOSTOLIC ORDERS (1500-1800) Dominant Image of RL. Religious are an elite of dedicated and militant servants of the Church with a high level of individual holiness, a readiness to defend the Church on any front, and the zeal to win new expansion for the Church to the very ends of the earth. 1517 Luther sparks the Reformation 1535 Ursulines founded 1540 Jesuits founded 1541 Francis Xavier sails for Far East 1545 Trent starts 1562 Discalced Carmelite Reform 16th Century RE virtually wiped out in Protestant Europe. Founding and expansion of a new kind of RL in the format of the Clerics Regular. These groups work at shoring up the Church's political power in Catholic Europe, reforming the Church, and spreading the Gospel in the foreign missions. 17th Century 1610 Visitation Nuns founded 1625 Vincentians founded 1633 Daughters of Charity founded 1650 St. Joseph Sisters founded 1662 Ranc6 launches Trappist Reform 1663 Paris Foreign Mission Society founded 1681 Christian Brothers founded 1700 213,000 men in mendicant orders Flowering of spirituality, especially in French School, leads to new foundations such as the various societies of priests and clerical con-gregations. Bulk of men religious still belong to mendicant orders. 1725 Passionists founded 1735 Redemptorists founded 1770 300,000 men in RL in world 1773 Jesuits suppressed by Rome 1789 French Revolution starts 18th Century A few clerical congregations emerge, but RL as a whole seems to be in decline due to the in-roads of Enlightenment thought, Jansenism, wealth, and laxity. Weakened RL is given the coup de gr?tce by the French Revolution, which sets off a wave of political suppression and defection in France and the rest of Catholic Europe. 4th TRANSITION: FRENCH REVOLUTION 5. Era of the Teaching Congregations The revival of religious life which occurred in the next period, the Era of the Teaching Congregations, set off in a new direction. There were about 600 foundations of new communities in the 19th century. They were, for the most part, dominated by the movement of educating the masses. For the first time The Recovery of Religious Life / 699 in European history, the idea of educating everyone had the possibility of be-ing concretely realized. The new congregations joined in this movement in hopes of planting the seeds of a hardy faith in the souls of the children they taught by the thousands. This zeal for the education of children was combined with a cleansed Jansenistic spirituality to form the new image of religious life. While the activity of religious spilled over into other apostolic works such as hospitals, teaching set the pace. Even the few pre-Revolution orders which were managing a slow recovery took on many of the trappings of the typical 19th century teaching congregation. For the first time in the history of religious life, recruitment of adult vocations was almost completely displaced by the acceptance of candidates just emerging from childhood. Through the end of the 19th century and on into the 20th the religious who gave themselves to this demanding work of teaching edified the Church and produced a brand of holiness which was most appropriate for a Catholicism which sought to strengthen a papacy denuded o.f worldly power and to care for the masses of the industrialized wor.ld in need of christianization. By the mid-1960's membership in religious communities reached the highest point in the history of the Church. In the last decade, this trend was reversed for the first time in more than a century. Crises have set in which some ascribe to a loss of identity TABLE 5: ERA OF THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS (1800-present) Dominant Image of RL. Religious dedicate their lives to the salvation of their own souls and the salvation of others. The style of life of religious men and women blends in intense pursuit of personal holiness with a highly active apostolic service. Identity with the person of Christ unites this two-fold objective into a single purpose. 19th Century 1814 French Restoration; Jesuits restored by Rome 1825 Fewer than 70,000 men in RL in world 1831 Mercy Sisters founded 1850 83,000 men in RL in world 1859 Salesians founded 1870 Papal infallibility declared Revival of RL after widespread state sup-pressions. Numerous foundations of con-gregations dedicated to a return to authentic RL blended with service, principally in schools. Old orders, such as Jesuits and Dominicans, rejuvenated in the format of the teaching con-gregations. Church gradually centralizes around the papacy and isolates itself from secular trends of the modern world 20th Century 1950 275,000 men in RL in world 1962 Vatican II starts; 1,012,000 women in RL in world 1965 335,000 men in RL in world 1966 181,500 women in RL in U.S. 1972 879,000 women in RL in world 1973 143,000 women in RL in U.S. 1974 227,500 men in RL in world Expansion and solidification. In the sixties, crises set in from within RL due to loss of iden-tity and inroads of secularizing process. Numerous defections and decreasing numbers of new members. 5th TRANSITION: (?) 700 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 and the inroads of secularism. It seems that another transition in the long history of religious life has begun. Further considerations will be undertaken in the remainder of this article to better analyze the present situation. 11I. The Life Cycle of a Religious Community: A Sociological Model The previous section of this paper focused on a historical model for the evolution of religious life as such within the Church; in this section attention is turned toward the life of the individual religious community or institute. To this end, a sociological model for the life cycle of individual religious com-munities which organizes the important dimensions of each period in the life of the communities is developed.6 This model allows further probing of the questions concerning the plausibility of a revitalization of religious life, since revitalization of present religious communities is one way that religious life as a whole will be renewed. A. Organizing Concepts To date, only thirteen men's religious orders in the entire his.tory of the Church have ever surpassed a membership figure of 10,000 at some point of their existence. The membership pattern of three of these orders--the Dominicans, the Minims, and the Jesuits--is graphed in Figure 1 below. Although these three examples are taken from among the largest orders of the Church, they are representative of the membership pattern in most religious communities, large or small. Typically one finds one or more cycles of growth and decline in the number of members. These membership patterns suggest a dynamic of inner vitality that goes on in a religious community. Using such analogies as the human life cycle and other cycles of growth and decline, a sociological model has been devised which divides the life cycle of an active religious community into five periods: foundation, expansion, stabilization, breakdown and transition. The model is shown schematically in Figure 2. The shape of this curve is intended to repre-sent the over-all vitality of the community as it passes from one period to the next. In the following section salient events and characteristics which typify each of these periods are described. An attempt is also made to isolate the crises which occur during each period. ~Some sources used to clarify the notion of a life cycle were Hostie, Vie et mort; Wallace, "'Paradigmatic Processes"; Gordon L. Lippitt and Warren H. Schmidt, "Crisis in a Developing Organization," Harvard Business Review (Vol. 45, No. 6, November-December, 1967), pp. 102- 112; and Lawrence E. Greiner, "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow," Harvard Business Review (Vol. 50, No. 4, July-August, 1972), pp. 37-46; Thomas F. O'Dea, The Sociology of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Luther P. Gerlach and Virginia H. Hine, People. Power and Change: Movements of Social Transformation (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1970). The Recovery of Religious Life / 701 _z 20 LLI ~ lO 30 1200 1300 ! \/ , st 1400 1500 1600 1700 I t I t I I I II ! I ! 1800 1900 2000 Figure 1: Membership of Dominicans, Minims, and Jesuits IFOUNDATIONIEXPANSION ISTABILIZATION BREAKDOWN TRANSITION Figure 2: Life Cycle of a Religious Community B. The Periods of the Life Cycle 1. The Foundation Period The first period in the life of a religious community centers around a found-ing person and his or her vision. The founder or foundress undergoes a radically transformi,ng experience, which can usually be pinpointed to an event or series of events, and .which is perceived as an abrupt shift in the founding 702 / Review for Religious, I/olume 34, 1975/5 person's identity and a timeless moment in which a vision or dream is received. Contained in the transforming experience is a new appreciation of the message of Jesus which leads to innovative insight on how the condition of the Church or society could be dramatically improved or how a totally new kind of future could be launched. A new impetus to live the religious life in all the totality of its demands is felt, and a new theory emerges that is at once a critique of the present, an appropriation of the past, a compelling image of the future, and a basis for novel strategies. The founding person's transforming experience is followed by the initial emergence of the community. A fortuitous encounter takes place between the founder or foundress and some contemporary men or women in which the founding experience, the innovative insight, the emerging theory, and the call to holiness are shared. The group unites under the guidance of the founding person to search for and invent new arrangements for living the Gospel together and working toward the realization of the Kingdom of God. The foundation period may last ten to twenty years or longer and fre-quently coincides with the last part of the founding person's lifetime. Integra-tion and cohesion center on the founding person and still more deeply on the person of Christ. The structural identity of the community appears in seminal form, and authority in the community springs from the wisdom of the found-ing person. Founding events of religious communities have a uniqueness about them which has caused them to be especially treasured as significant moments in the Church's past. Examples of founding persons and their visions readily come to mind: Angela Merici's dream of a new kind of religious life for women that centered on an active apostolate; the hopes of Robert of Molesme to restore fervor through the primitive observance of Benedict's Rule in the wilderness of C~teaux; Don Bosco's contagious vision of loving Christ and joyfully serving the poor. The more striking cases of founding persons receiving their in-spirations have become part of the common heritage of all religious: Anthony hearing in a Sunday Gospel the words which were the key to his life's aim; Ignatius retiring to Manresa to receive his visions. For the most part the foundation period is a time of grace and charism for a new religious community. But there are also crises that must be faced. The crisis of direction forces the community to decide which undertakings are im-portant and which must be sacrificed. The crisis of leadership confronts the community with the problem of finding out how it will live beyond the time of its founding person. The crisis of legitimization engulfs the nascent community in the question of whether or not the Church will approve it as an authentic form of religious life. The Waldensians, for example, showed some signs of becoming a new religious order on the pattern of the mendicants, but they never overcame the crisis of iegitimization. Instead of becoming a religious community, they ended up as renegades who had to hide out in the woods of medieval Europe. The Recovery of Religious Life / 70a 2. The Expansion Period When the community has emerged from the foundation period, it un-dergoes a fairly long period of expansion, during which the founding charism is institutionalized in a variety of ways. A community cult and belief system solidifies, a community polity is fashioned, and community norms and customs take hold. As members of the community's second generation mature and grow older, they recount stories of the foundation, which they have heard from the pioneers or have themselves experienced in their youth. These stories enshrine decisive events which set the community's direction or establish its characteristic traits. Gradually, rituals and symbols which express and com-memorate the most treasured facets of the foundation are fused with the.iore of the older members into a sort of sacred memory and cult that begins to be passed on from generation to generation as the community's "founding myth." Attempts are made at thinking through the founding myth and expressing it in terms of contemporary thought patterns. Eventually these efforts result in theories, interpretations, and social models which coalesce into a belief system and give a rational structure to the more intuitive thrust of the founding myth. Simultaneously, procedures are devised for community decision making and communication, and bit by bit the community's polity.takes shape. Norms are set down and customs emerge which cover all aspects of the community's life, such as membership criteria, leadership standards, and apostolic priorities. The members of the young community experience an excitement about the growth and success which characterizes the expansion period. Large numbers join the community, and new works are rapidly taken on which enhance the possibility of a still broader recruitment. Major interpreters of the founding vi-sion are recognized. Patterns of spiritual practice are determined, and the community's spirituality is made concrete in manuals of direction or other written documents. With expansion come certain organizational crises. How is authority to be delegated? What means will be used to integrate and tie together the rapidly expanding network of establishments and the burgeoning membership. When Bernard joined the Cistercians thirteen years after their foundation, he led the community through this kind of organizational crisis. In the process, a new en-tity, the general chapter, was invented to cope with the situation, and this in-novation is still a standard feature.of most religious orders today. Another crisis of this period centers on maintaining the pristine vigor of the founding vision. As rival interpretations arise, which will be discarded? A classic exam-ple of this kind of crisis occurred in the great debates about poverty among the early Franciscans just after Francis died. 3. The Stabilization Period After a fairly long expansion, which may last two to three generations or "/04 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 longer, there ensues a period of stabilization. Numerical increase in membership may continue, but geographical expansion usually slows down. The stabilization period may last a century or more, but it is sometimes as brief as fifty years or so. A feeling of success pervades the community during the stabilization period. Members experience a high degree of personal satisfaction from simply being in the community. The prevailing image of religious life is clear and accepted. It provides a basis for describing unambiguous social roles for religious. The community is accomplishing its purpose and this purpose is self-evident. The need to improve is not seen as a need to change things but simply to do better what is already being done. Gradually, as stabilization sets in, more and more of the community assumes that religious life has always been the way it is now and that it will always remain so in the future. There is little need to elaborate the understanding of the founding vision or penetrate into it more deeply. It is simply accepted and repeated to new members who join. No one is left in the community who knew the founding person or the first dis-ciples personally. Memory of the founding events takes on the cast of past his(ory that is separate from the present moment. Formation of new members emphasizes their conformity to standard patterns of external behavior that are seen as the best means of cultivating interior commitment. The over-all feeling of success which is so typical of the stabilization period is not illusory. There is in fact a job that is being done and done well by the many generous religious who devote themselves to its accomplishment. The kinds of crises that Crop up during the stabilization period are linked to the other characteristics of the period. The crisis of activism occurs. Members become so absorbed in work that they lose sight of its spiritual and apostolic underpinning. They allow the satisfactions of accomplishment to dis-place a centeredness in Christ. Loss of intensity is another crisis of the stabilization period. Is it possible to maintain the intensity of vision and com-mitment among members, now that the community has become so highly in-stitutionalized? They can often be simply carried along by the sheer inertia of the community's activity and held in place by the pressure of social expecta-tion placed on their role as religious from people in the Church. Another danger stems from the crisis of adaptation. In the midst of success the com-munity is seldom open to adaptation, and any changes that have to be made are fraught with difficulty. Quite often, even the most legitimate changes are rejected, and their proponents are righteously and intolerantly silenced. The failure of later Jesuit missionaries to implement the ideas of Matteo Ricci con-cerning Confucian practices among Chinese Catholics is perhaps a good ex-ample of the sort of resistance to adaptation that can be found during the stabilization period. 4. The Breakdown Period Eventually the seeming immutabilities of the stabilization period start to give, and the religious community enters the breakdown period. The The Recovery of Religious Life / 705 breakdown may be gradual and last a half a century or more, or it may be rapid and run its course in a few decades. In either case, what happens is a dis-mantling of the institutional structures and belief systems that arose in the ex-pansion period and served the community so well during the stabilization period. This collective decline gives rise, in turn, to stress and doubt in the in-dividual members. Initially .a number of persons become dissatisfied with the current state of the community. Perhaps they are simply struck by what they judge to be the silliness of some of the community's customs or procedures. Or they may come to see that the community's life and work are not equipped to handle im-portant new challenges. Unanswered questions about the function and purpose of the community begin to accumulate and start to raise doubts. Levels of in-dividual stress increase slowly at the beginning, but then rise rapidly as doubt spreads to more and more levels of the community's social structure. To handle the growing problems, standard remedies are tied. All that is needed, it seems, is to get back to doing well what has always been done and to renew commitment to the community's mission. However, the usual problem-solving techniques become increasingly ineffective. A sense of crisis grows as community authority and decision-making structures become confused. The community's belief system begins to appear archaic and bound in by the trap-pings and articulations of a bygone age. The founding experience and myth, which had been internalized by the community's early generations, is no longer felt by the members. As the community loses its sense of identity and purpose, service to the Church becomes haphazard and lacks direction. Moral norms in the com-munity are relaxed and some members perhaps distract themselves with sex and a misuse of wealth. There is a net loss of membership through increased withdrawals and decreased recruitment of new members. The crises that arise during the breakdown period center on the various phenomena of decline in the community. The crisis of polarization can become acute when those who have faith in the community as it was align themselves against those who in varying degrees reject the community as it is. The crisis of collapsing institutions sets in as the community is forced to stop doing "business as usual" and abandon long-established works. The resulting demoralization leads to the crisis of the community's impending death. What is to be done as the chilling awareness grows in the community that it is inex-orably listing into disintegration on all sides? 5. The Transition Period The breakdown is followed by a period of transition. Three outcomes are possible for religious communities during this period: extinction, minimal sur-vival, or revitalization. Extinction, the first of these outcomes, occurs when all the members of a community either withdraw or die and it simply passes out of existence. This happened, for example, to 76% of all men's religious orders founded before 706 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/5 1500 and to 64% of those founded before 1800. From a historical perspective, then, a reasonable expectation would seem to be that most religious com-munities in the Church today will eventually become extinct. A religious community which does not die out may go into a long period of low-level or minimal survival. If the membership pattern of presently existing religious orders founded before the French Revolution is examined, one finds that most of them enter into a period lasting across several centuries in which the number of members is very low. In fact, only 5% of all men's orders founded before 1500 and only 11% of the orders founded before 1800 have a current membership which is larger than 2,000. The Minims (Figure 1) are typical of the orders which once were quite large and now have a small membership. This type of outcome should not be interpreted as a dis-appearance of vitality in every case. The Carthusians, for example, follow this membership pattern. Yet they seem to be living UP to their reputation of never having relaxed their observance--never reformed and never needing reform. To this day the order's spiritual impact appears greater than its numerical strength. There is also a small percentage of religious communities which survive the breakdown period a~d enter into a period of revitalization. At least three characteristics can be singled out in all communities which have been revitalized in this way: a transforming response to the signs of the times; a reappropriation of the founding charism; and a profound renewal of the life of prayer, faith, and centeredness in Christ. The time in history fn which revitalization occurs seems to make a difference. If the revitalization occurs during one of the shifts in the dominant image of religious life singled out in the historical model above, the com-munity takes on many of the characteristics of the emerging image, and the transforming response to the signs of the times seems central to the revitaliza-tion. If the revitalization occurs midway during one of the major eras in the history of religious life identified earlier in this article, the revitalization takes on the characteristics of a reform with the reappropriation of the founding charism playing a central role. In either case the community experiences the revitalization as a second foundation. Personal transformation or conversion is central to revitalization. With personal transformation comes innovative insight and a new centering in the person of Christ. The innovative insight allows the transformed individuals within the community to develop critical awareness of the assumptions un-derlying the traditional meaning of the community and functioning of that community within the Church and the world. This innovative insight brings with it a focusing of energies through a new positive vision of what the com-munity should be in the future. The vision allows the emergence of a new theory which gives meaning to the experiences of individuals and the shared events lived within the community and spurs the community to building and creating its future. Such a new theory guides the community in the search for The Recovery of Religious Life / 707 and the invention of new models ~of living together as a community bound by. the evangelical conditions of discipleship in the service of the Church. A more complete sketch of the human dynamics of revitalization will be given in the last section of this article. The essential components of this dynamic, namely, insight and vision, and new theory and new models, are mentioned at this point to complete the picture of the life cycle of a religious community. Some limitations of this sociological model and the historical model of the previous section are given in the next section together with some generalizations that can be drawn from the models. IV. Some Limitations and Generalizations A. Limitations of the Models Before proceeding, some concluding and cautionary remarks must be made. Evidently the rapid overview of the history of religious life given in the first portion of this article should not be taken as anything more than a demonstration of how the evolution of religious life can be interpreted so as to fit the model of the five main eras that are being postulated in the proposed historical model. The account is far too compressed and over-simplified to provide an adequate and proi~erly nuanced telling of the story of religious life. For example, little attention was given to the Canons Regular, who constituted a significant portion of men religious from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. There was no discussion of the medieval military orders nor of Orthodox monasticism. A still more gaping lacuna is the almost complete absence of any analysis of the way women's religious life differed from or followed the same pattern as that of the men. It may be that the sources used in this study were not sensitive to the distinctive role women actually played in the evolution of religious life. On the other hand, it may be that up to the present time the trends of women's religious life have been very parallel to those in the men's orders. The models proposed for the evolution of religious life and for the life-cycle of a religious community are also both simplifications. Some might validly question, for example, whether there were just five major eras in the history of religious life and whether the transitions between the eras occurred as clearly as the historical model suggests. The description of the dominant image of religious life for each era is a simplification of what was in every case a rather complex phenomenon. Hopefully, the liberties that have been taken are justified by the intention of trying to synopsize the history of religious life in such a way as to make some tentative insights more easily accessible to someone who is not a professional historian. Similarly, the breaks between the successive periods in the life cycle of a religious community are nowhere near as clear-cut as the proposed sociological model suggests. In .history, breakdowns sometimes occur within one order in different geographical locales at different times. Revitalizations often occur in some places for an order, while it decays elsewhere. At times 708 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 there are orders in which the role of the founding person is rather minor and does not have the decisiveness described in the model. Some communities have been founded in rather modest historical circumstances that were not accom-panied by the profound inspiration described in the model. These and similar qualifications must be kept in mind when the sociological model is used to in-terpret the life cycle of any particular community. B. Generalizations The models presented in the previous sections suggest some generalized conclusions. These conclusions can be helpful in exploring the present crisis of religious life. The historical evidence suggests that there have been significant shifts in the dominant image of religious life across the centuries. These shifts seem to occur when there are major societal changes astir and when the Church is un-dergoing major changes. The first transition happened as the Roman Empire fell in the West and feudal Europe was beginning; at the same time the rift between western and eastern Christianity was starting. The second transition occurred as feudal Europe was giving way to medieval urbanization and as the Church was gathering all of Europe into the unity of Christendom. The third transition took place at the start of the modern period of Western Civilization as the Church underwent the shock of the Reformation. The fourth transition resulted from a direct attack of society on the Church as a whole and on religious life in particular. Admittedly each of these changes in the culture and the Church differed from one another in many respects. However, the pattern seems clear enough at least to permit one to ask whether perhaps another shift in the dominant image of religious life would happen if major changes in society and the Church should come to pass. Although religious communities have been founded in almost every cen-tury of Christian history, it seems that each major shift in the dominant image of religious life is heralded by some significantly new foundations which em-body a new image in an especially striking way. This could be said of the earliest Benedictine monasteries for the first transition, of the Franciscans and Dominicans for the second transition, of the Jesuits for the third transition, and of the plethora of 19th century foundations for the fourth transition. It also seems to be the case that many communities go out of existence at each transition. Those that survive either continue in a diminished form or somehow blend the new dominant image with the charism of their own foun-dation to get another lease on life. The mendicant orders, for example, grew numerically stronger during the Era of Apostolic Orders as they adapted their own special gifts to the new style of religious life. The culture of the high Mid-dle Ages was rapidly and irretrievably passing away, but the mendicants adapted and flourished. One might ask, then, if the Church would witness the death of many religious communities and the foundation of new and different ones if a shift in the dominant image of religious life were to occur. The remainder of this article will explore the plausibility of maintaining that The Recovery of Religious Life / 709 another major transition has in fact begun in the history of religious life. Should this hypothesis be true, it would be appropriate to pose questions about h6w religious life is dying and how a recovery and revitalization might happen. Another observation that suggests itself from this brief survey concerns the continuity that underlies the shifts of the dominant image of religious life. As the image evolves it continues to hold up the impelling ideal of a radical following of the conditions set forth by Christ for an evangelical discipleship embedded in a life of prayer and deep faith. While the contemporary religious would probably not feel called to take on the externals of the life of the Desert Fathers, he or she will surely understand and be drawn to the stark beauty of the life of radical discipleship that moved Anthony to withdraw into the desert. Similar remarks could probably be made about the ultimate aims of the first Franciscans and the first rugged band of Jesuits. Through all the twists and turns in the make up and style of religious life, there is a deep core of seeking union with Christ in a special and total way that endures century after century. A great deal of historical precedent would have to be explained away by anyone who would wish to maintain that religious life is about to disappear as a separate and distinguishable way of life in the Church. The historical pattern seems to be one of repeated recovery. The present moment is indeed a time of trouble for religious communities, but religious life as a whole will doubtlessly survive. Turning to the sociological model, some further generalizations can be made. In the evolution of a religious community the non-rational elements of transforming experience, vision, and myth play a central role. This is es-pecially true during the periods of foundation and revitalization. Although necessary for each period in the life-cycle of a community, the techniques of rationality (long-range planning, leadership training, etc.) will never be suf-ficient to found a religious community or to revitalize one. The renewed vitality that comes to some religious communities during the time of transition finds its source in plumbing the depths of.the mythic and non-rational and in-tegrating them with the more rational dimensions of human life. A central insight of the myth of original sin is that humankind is not capable of sustained development; breakdown and disintegration are ever-recurring manifestations of the human condition. Since religious men and women exist within the human condition, it should not be surprising that, from time to time, all religious communities experience an extensive period of significant breakdown and disintegration. These bleak realities should be em-braced with humble acceptance of th~ human condition and a faith-filled hope that the Lord will in time resurrect life-giving initiatives from the death-dealing processes of breakdown. V. Where Does Religious Life Stand Today? In the previous sections of this article, the history of the religious-life movement in the Church and of particular religious communities was ex-amined to determine the major factors within culture, the Church, and 710 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/5 religious communities themselves that significantly influence the evolution of this movement. Generalizations from the proposed models indicate that major. transitions are likely to occur in religious life when secular culture is in the midst of a major crisis, and when religious life has experienced a period of major breakdown. The factors can serve as a useful matrix for answering the question, "Where does religious life stand today?" As was mentioned in the in-troduction, the answer proposed in this article is that religious life is undergo-ing a pervasive transition that will last for the next twenty to twenty-five years and which will significantly change the style of life and service of religious communities. The plausibility of this assertion is developed in this section. A. Signs of Transition in Secular Culture Many writers have noted that contemporary culture is in the midst of a societal transition. Some compare the present time to the Renaissance. Others claim that the present multifaceted change is equal to if not greater in magnitude than the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Many strands of societal transition have been pointed out. Spiritual, intellectual, philosophical, psychological, political, economic, and many other crises in society have been described by writers from a wide range of disciplines. For the purposes of this article, a cluster of these difficulties, which might be broadly termed the socio-economic crisis, will be summarized below as a sample of the sort of comment on contemporary society being made today. Catastrophic events and critical trends are continually reported by the news media. These reports range from widespread famine in the Sahel and South Asia to the continued downward spiral of the national economy. Careful analysts and writers have noted that these events and trends are a manifestation of the parallel growth of a set of interrelated critical issues which they have designated as the "world problematique.''7 A list of the critical issues that make up the "world problematique" would include: Energy Problems: Runaway growth in domestic and worldwide use of energy; shortages and scarcity of energy; insufficient capital resources to develop new energy sources. Food Problems: Food supply unable to meet the demand for food; worsening of weather conditions through pollution; increasing food prices due to food scarcity and increasing cost and consumption of energy; deterioration of arable land through increased urbaniza-tion and ecological undermining; actual widespread famine; potential long term problems of hunger and famine. Pollution Problems: Rise of pollution-induced illness; exponential increhse in the pollu-tion of the air and seas; denuding of natural environment through strip mining. 7.Some sources used to examine the "world problematique" were Kenneth E. F. Watt, The Titanic Effect: Planning for the Unthinkable (Stanford, Conn.: Sinauer Associates, Inc.); Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth (Washington: Potomac Associates, 1972); Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point (New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1974); Lester R. Brown, In the Human Interest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); and Lester R. Brown with Eric P. Eckholm, By Bread Alone (New York: Praeger, 1974). The Recovery of Religious Life / 711 Economic Problems: Growing world inflation; market saturation (e.g. airplanes, elec-tronic equipment, automobiles); instability and manipulation of monetary system, lack of alternatives to growth economics; increasing gap between the "have's" and the "have not's." Work Problems: Increasing unemployment and underemployment; saturation of the labor market; decreased productivity; increasing alienation and dissatisfaction with work; depersonalization of work environments. Problems of Urban Areas: Deterioration of urban areas; increasing crime rates; in-creasing cost of essential urban services. Problems of International Order." Hazards of international competition and war; com-petitive economic policies. What makes the "world problematique" different from problems en-countered in previous eras is its complexity and the pervasive interrelationship of its elements. Hence, the "world problematique" is not amenable to normal methods of problem solving. Attempts to address such critical issues in a singular or joint fashion introduce fundamental dilemmas that do not appear resolvable within conventional modes of thought. Among such dilemmas which seem to be plaguing the contemporary politico-economic situation, four might be singled out: the dilemmas of growth, guidance, global justice, and social roles.8 These dilemmas are delineated more fully in Table 6. One may ask if these problems and dilemmas have not been present during most of the Industrial Era. Are not the problems of the 20's and 30's very much the same as those of the 70's and 80's? What makes the above mentioned problems and dilemmas different is that they have not been ameliorated through the use of conventional wisdom and standard problem-solving ap-proaches. In fact, one may argue that application of these approaches has led to many unanticipated and undesirable consequences. Resolution of the problems and dilemmas is dependent upon a thorough-going shift in social perceptions, involving restructuring of beliefs, images, and human aspirations at a fundamental level. B. Crisis in the Church and the Breakdown in Religious Life The Catholic Church in America has been profoundly influenced by con-temporary change. For at least fifteen years the Church has been experiencing a transition of its life. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1964) was a result of the early stages of this transition and a triggering event for its later stages. The Church began to open itself to a world which was undergoing a dramatic secularization. This opening up or aggiornamento had significant impact on all dimensions of Church life. Parish life and parochial education are no longer the only shapers of the values and beliefs of American Catholics. The once-clear norms and social roles ~vithin the Church no longer seem to serve their original purpose. For example, the Vatican's official position on birth 8The schematization presented in Table 6 is based on the work of Bill Harmon, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Stanford Research Institute. 712 / Review for Religious, I~'olume 34, 1975/5 TABLE 6: SOME DILEMMAS OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY Growth The fundamental "new scarcity" of fossil fuels, minerals, fresh water, arable land, habitable surface area, waste-absorbing capacity of the natural environment, fresh air, and food come from approaching the finite limits of the earth. These limits demand a radical slow down or leveling off in material.growth and energy-use curves of the past.' Yet, the present economic and political system is built around a growth hypothesis. The economic and political consequences of limiting growth appear unbearable. Guidance Dilemma Ecological considerations along with awesome power of modern technology to change any and all aspects of the human environment establish a mandate for greater guidance of technological and social innovation. Yet, the political price of such guidance is very high. Such guidance is perceived as con-trary to man's fundamental right to freedom and as an inhibition to economic growth. Global Justice Dilemma Further advances by the industrialized nations make the rich nations richer and the poor nations relatively poorer. The impressive ac-complishments of the industrial economy are largely built on a base of cleverness plus cheap energy, the latter from the world's limited stockpile of fossil fuels. Yet, the costs of not redressing these inequities may be serious political and economic world instabilities as well as widespread famine and inhuman suffering in the poorer nations. Social Roles Dilemma Present economic system is failing to provide Yet, the absence of satisfying and personally an adequate number of satisfying social roles meaningful roles for women, youth, the especially for women and minorities. The aged, and minorities along with worker employment market is saturated; there is a dissatisfaction in general results in in-need to keep youth and the aged out of the creased I~ersonal alienation and erodes labor market, the morale of the nation. control is considered unacceptableto an increasingly large number of Catholics. Difficulties are arising in the functioning of such Church structures as the priesthood and the traditional role of the laity and of such Church institutions as parishes, schoo|s, and hospitals. Their once-unquestioned role within the Church no longer seems to satisfy the needs of an increasingly large number of church members. This crisis and transition within the Church has had a dramatic effect on religious communities of women and men. Religious communities have begun to experience all of the signs of entering into the breakdown and disintegration period described earlier in this article. There has been a sharp decline in membership due to increased withdrawals and a decrease in new recruits. Re- The Recovery of Religious Life / 713 cent literature9 gives a statistical picture of this breakdown in the United States. - A recent National Opinion Research Center study indicated there is a larger relative number of resignees among those already established in church careers than in any other equivalent period of time since the French Revolution. - For the years between 1965 and 1972 66% of the yearly decrease in communities of religious women was due to dispensation or termination of vows. In communities of religious women the average annual net increase over these years was approximately 768 members, the average annual net decrease was 3841, with only one-third of that loss caused by deaths. - The total number of Sisters in 1974 had declined 17% from 1960 and 23% since their peak membership year in 1966. - The total number of religious Brothers in 1974 had decreased 12% since 1960 and 26.5% since their peak membership year in 1966. The purposes of religious communities which were once clear and widely understood have become vague and meaningless to some in the midst of the modern church crisis. The structures of authority and process of communica-tion and decision making within religious communities seem no longer to fit the needs of the individuals within the community or suit the evolving work of the communities. The processes of formation to religious community have sometimes become disorganized and seem to lack purpose. These and other signs indicate that the last fifteen to twenty years have been a time when most religious com-munities have begun to experience breakdown. This cluster of the signs of breakdown in virtually all communities seems to indicate that we are ap-proaching the end of another major era in the history of religious life. C. Restatement of the Bias This review of the transitions in secular culture as well as the current crisis of the Church allows us to use the historical and sociological models of the evolution of religious life and religious communities outlined in the previous sections to answer the question "Where does religious life stand today?" In the introduction of this article, an answer was given in what was called the fun-damental bias of the article, namely, that religious life in America is undergo-ing a profound transition, which will take another twenty or twenty-five years to run its full course. The arguments leading up to this bias can be set forth as follows: 1. The dominant image of religious life has undergone several major tran-sitions as religious life has evolved as a movement within the Church. 2. The occurrence of these major transitions is associated with a number 9Carroll W. Trageson and Pat Holden, "Existence and Analysis of the 'Vocation Crisis' in Religious Careers," (pp. 1-3) in Carroll W. Trageson, John P. Koval, and Willis E. Bartlett (eds.), Report on Study of Church Vo

Issue 28.1 of the Review for Religious, 1969. ; EDITOR ¯ R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 631o3. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's Church; 3~i Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ~9~o6. + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited v¢ith ecclesiastical approval by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis University, the editorial ottices being located at 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. 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Manuscripts, editorial cor-respondence, and books for review should be sent to REvlr:w rOa R~L~GIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint ~ouis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answermg should be sent to the address Gf the Questions and Answers editor. JANUARY ~969 VOLUME ~8 NUMBER t REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Volume 28 1969 EDITORIAL OFFICE 539 North Grand Boulevard St. Louis, Missouri 63103 BUSINESS OFFICE 428 East Preston'Street Baltimore, Maryland 21202 EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Dlederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gailen, S.J. Published in January, March, May, July, September, Novem-ber on the fifteenth of the month. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is indexed in the Catholic Peri. odical Index and in Boo/~ Re. view Index. Microfilm edition of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is available from University Ml. crofilms; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. HILARY SMITH, O.C.D. Qgiet Prayer for Busy Busy religious today seem to be shying away from more contemplative approaches to prayer. The references to quiet and recollection in the older spiritual books are considered now to refer back to a time when every-one's approach to God was modeled on that of cloistered nuns and monks. Yet, outside the religious life people as diverse as Walter Kerr and about the importance of some we are to maintain our sanity. I think it might be helpful the approach to God through Harvey Cox are writing kind of quiet periods if at this time to see that recollection and periods of quiet is neither an approach suited only for monastic congregations nor simply a far out, naturalistic fad in-dulged in by flower children. I think it might be profit-able to examine the approach some of the busy fathers of the Church used in treating of prayer to show that traditionally the effort to find God through recollection was not a practice limited to people in monasteries and cloistered convents. It is interesting to see what a lofty concept of prayer some of the busiest fathers of the Church recommended to their equally busy congregations. While the fathers did speak of prayer as asking God for things, just as preachers a few years ago did, they did not hesitate to talk or write about prayer as a simple raising of the heart to God, as recollection. This might be expected among the monastic Fathers such as St. Basil. But I think it is significant that the more active fathers--bishops, teach-ers-- should tell their congregations--the same people they warned about fornication and drunkenness--about the higher kinds of prayer. It will be helpful, before looking at the works of the fathers, to establish a fairly clear idea of the notion of praye~ that we will be looking for. What we hope to find are suggestions on the part of the fathers that their ÷ ÷ ÷ Hilary Smith, O.CJ3., lives at 7907 Bellaire Boul-evard in Houston, Texas 77096. VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ ÷ Hilary Smith, O.C~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS congregations of working men and housewives practice what we would call today, or at least would have called a few years ago, "mental prayer." In St. Teresa of Avila's classic definition, mental prayer "is nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent solitary converse with Him who we know loves us." 1 This definition of prayer is broad enough to include methodical meditation and even vocal prayers said well, but I believe that it shows that the essence of mental prayer is not a systematic arrangement of considerations with a concluding resolution. Rather mental prayer consists essentially in "tratando," dealing with God, in a friendly way. St. Teresa presents a more specific method of mental prayer, sometimes called the prayer of active recollection. "It is called recollection because the soul collects together all the faculties and enters within itself to be with its God," St. Teresa says in the now quaint sounding language of faculty psychol-ogy. It is with this specific form of prayer, active recollec-tion, that we shall be especially interested. It is impor-tant for us today to understand that this approach to prayer was not peculiar to St. Teresa or to the medieval monastic tradition. It represents a traditional Christian approach to prayer recommended to busy Christians long before men and women with education and leisure were almost all found in monasteries and convents. I hope that the following few remarks of the fathers on prayer will show that the early fathers, not haunted'as spiritual writers a few years ago were, by the spectre of Quietism, did not hesitate to recommend to their congregations a form of prayer that we might think to be too lofty or too mystical. One. very good example of a father of the Church addressing himself to ordinary lay people yet recommend-ing a lofty prayer of recollection is St. Gregory of Nyssa. He was almost certainly married, since in his treatise on virginity he says that he regrets that he himself is pre-vented from attaining to the glory of this virtue. Al-though it is true that he lived in a monastic community for a while, he is most famous as the active bishop of Nyssa, a post he held for eight years., In his works es-pecially in his commentaries on the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes, he has in view the needs of the average Christian. Although he is inclined to the asceticism of the desert, he is not a desert father living in isolation from the world around him--a world that seems in many ways similar to our own--but rather a man living in the .1 St. Teresa, Way of Perlection, in The Complete Works o/ St. Teresa, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950), v. 2, p. 115. world, steeped in its culture and interested in all it has to offer.~ In his treatise on the Lord's Prayer, St. Gregory de-scribes his idea of prayer: "First my mind must become detached from anything subject to flux and change, and tranquilly rest in motionless spiritual repose, so as to be rendered akin to Him who is perfectly unchangeable; and then it may address Him by this most familiar name and say: Father." a St. Teresa's description of the prayer of recollection in her commentary on the Lord's Prayer is closely parallel. She says: "The soul withdraws the senses from all outward things and spurns them so com-pletely that, without its understanding how, its eyes close and it cannot see them and the soul's spiritual sight becomes clear." 4 We must be careful to understand that neither St. Teresa nor St. Gregory is describing some form of mys-tical prayer. St. Teresa is careful to explain that what she is describing "is not a supernatural state but depends upon our volition; by 'God's favor we can enter it of our own accord." 5 Thus St. Teresa distinguishes this recol-lection from what the students of mystical phenomena called "infused contemplation." St. Gregory is not so explicit, but he gives us to understand that the mind lifts itself from created things and places itself at rest in God. There seems to be no question here of God effect-ing something extraordinary in communicating with the Christian. Less to the point is St. Gregory's definition of prayer in general. He says: "Prayer is intimacy with God and contemplation of the invisible." n Though not so graphic as the earlier description, this definition shows St. Greg-ory's lofty concept of prayer; and, found in a treatise written for laymen, it shows that he was not afraid of presenting his lofty ideas to ordinary people. Another early Christian writer who recommends a contemplative type of prayer to ordinary men and women is Origen. His treatise, De Oratione, one of the first Christian treatises of prayer, was written as a reply to questions raised by his friend and patron, the married deacon Ambrose. Although Origen does not describe a kind of active recollection as clearly as St. Gregory, he does indicate that married folk, such as Ambrose, need not confine their praying to the recitation of vocal pray-ers or to asking God for favors. His description of the preparation for prayer brings to mind St. Teresa's defini- = St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Lord's Prayer. The Beatitudes, trans. Hilda C. Graef (Westminster: Newman, 1954), pp. $, 8, 15, 19. 8 Ibid., p. ~8. *Peers, v. 2, 115. 5 Peers, v. 2, 110. 6 St. Gregory of Nyssa, p. 24. + ÷ ÷ Quie~ Prayer VOLUME 28 ~.969 5 4- Hilary Smith, O.C.D. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 6 tion of prayer as a friendly converse with God. He says that by the very way one disposes his mind to prayer, by the very attitude with which one prays, "he shows that he is placing himself before God and speaking to Him as present, convinced that He is present and looking at Him." 7 Further on he says: "When praying let us not babble, but let us speak to God"; and, "When we pray in this way [in secret] we shall be conversing with God." In another context, in his Contra Celsum, Origen speaks of approaching God in a similar, contemplative-like way. Celsus has complained that the Christians do not worry about the cult due to the national idols, nor do they erect temples for their own worship. Origen answers in a beautiful passage where he says that Christians carry the image of their God within themselves. Every Chris-tian, he says, "strives to build an altar and carve a statue himself, keeping his eyes fixed on God, keeping his heart pure, and trying to become like God." s Again in De oratione, Origen recommends that Am-brose find a quiet place in his home to pray: "If you want to pray in greater quiet and without so much. dis-traction, you may choose a special place in your own house, if you can, a consecrated place, so to speak, and pray there." 0 Origen might well have been speaking to today's busy sisters. Another Church writer known for his work on prayer is Tertullian. Scholars say that Origen very likely drew many of his ideas on prayer from a Greek translation of Tertullian's De oratione. Some idea o[ his realistic recom-mendations to busy people on prayer may be drawn from this remark in his treatise on marriage and remarriage. He has been speaking of the value of continence as an aid in attaining union with God. Then almost equating prayer and union, he says that "men must need pray every day and every moment of the day." This may seem like only a paraphrase of the command "Pray always," but in the context it can be considered as an elaboration of Christ's command. Tertullian does not take Christ's words to mean that we should be constantly petitioning God for help, but rather that Christians should be con-stantly united to God in prayer through much the same kind of converse or treating with God that St. Teresa recommends. One last remark, this h'om St. John Damascene, may serve as a summing up ot what we have seen in St. Greg-ory o~ Nyssa, Origen, and Tertullian about the possi-r Origen, Prayer. Exhortation to Martyrdom, trans. John J. O'Meara (Westminster: Newman, 1954), p. 37. Cels., 8, 17, 18; quoted in Jean Danielou, Origen (New York, 1955), p. 35. Origen, Prayer, p. 43. bility for a contemplative approach to prayer for busy people. It is true that at the time he produced his little work, Barlaam and Joasaph, he was more of a monk than an active preacher, but he says that he is summarizing the ideas of the fathers before him. He says that the fathers define prayer as "the union of man with God," "angel's work," and "the prelude of gladness to come." He asks: "How shalt thou converse with God?" and an-swers: "By drawing near him in prayer." And he ex-plains: "He that prays with exceedingly fervent desire and a pure heart, his mind estranged from all that is earthly and grovelling, and stands before God eye to eye, and presents his prayers to him in fear and trem-bling, such a one has converse and speaks to him face to face." lo Better known, and at the same time a perfect example of a man who was busy, prayerful, and ready to recom-mend prayer to his congregation was St. Augustine. The ditficulty in discussing St. Augustine's approach to prayer briefly is that he has said so much about prayer. I have selected a few passages in which he seems to be speaking especially to busy people and in which he seems to be dealing with what we would call mental prayer, and more specifically with the approach to mental prayer that we described above as active recollection. Shortly after his conversion, before his baptism, Augus-tine retired for awhile to the country where he might have the leisure for prayer. We know from his Con-fessionsix that at this time he began to pour out his soul to God using the words of the Psalmist. But his corre-spondence with his friend Nebridius reveals that at the same time he was trying to withdraw from the noise of the world to find God in the depths of his soul; that he was, in our terminology, practicing mental prayer. His withdrawal was not a flight into the desert or monastery. He still considered himself and Nebridius as "busy people." The recollection he recommends to Nebridius is a practice made easier by the.solitude and leisure he is enjoying for a time in the country, but it is a practice which he says will be helpfullin the midst of activity. First he tells Nebridius of the advantages of adoring God in the "innermost recesses of the soul." He promises him that this recollection brings with it a "freedom from fear," and "an inner peace which permeates our human activity when we return to activity from our inner shrine." Finally, he tells him: "You, Nebridius, are free 10St. John Damascene, Barlaam and Joasaph, trans. Gr. Wood-ward and H. Mattingly (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1937), p. 295. ~ St. Augustine, Contessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 185. + + Quiet Prayer VOLUME 28, 1969 Hila~J Smith, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS of fear only when you are inwardly recollected." lz From the Very beginning of h.is life as a Christian; St. Augustine shows, an attraction to solitary converse with God. His own prayer and the advice he gives his busy friend Nebri- ~lius furnish an interesting contrast to the prayer for-merly described in convent spiritual 'reading books. There is no question in St. Augustine's mind about re-pe~ iting many vocal prayers or following-some well-or-ganized meditatiOn plan. A few ~ears later, now a priest, St. Augustine con-tinued his exhortations, .encouraging a ~ontemplative approach to prayer, in The Lord's Sermon 'on" the Mount. He comments on Christ's words: "But when you pray, enter into your chambers." The chambers, h~ says, are our hearts.' We must close the door on things without, "all transitory and visible things which through our fleshly senses noise in upon us while we pray." Then there takes place a turning of the heart tO God; and this very effort we make in praying calms the heart, makes it clean and more capable of receiving the divine gifts. He says: "It is not words we should use in dealing with God. but it is the things we carry in our mind and the direction of our thoughts with pure .love and single affection." These ideas, coming as they do early in St. Augustine's life as a Christian, and very much like, in spirit, the teachings of the neo-Platonists on contemplation, may seem more like Platonism than Christianity. In fact, it might be argued that most of the people cited thus far, including St. Teresa, were influenced by.Platonism. It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss the influence of Platonism on Christian mysticism, nor is the question of great practical import. If authorities on prayer have found that they could effectively approach God in a way that resembles the approach of some philosophers to peace or wisdom, then the marvelous thing is not that some Christians are using a pagan philosophy in their prayer, but rather that there is such a universal inclina-tion in human nature to withdraw from the hustIe and bustle of the world from time to time and turn to loftier things. This inclination was recognized by the pagan philosophers and far eastern mystics, but it can find its best realization in a Christian context in which a personal God comes to live intimately with those who are really dedicated to Him. Later in his life, St. Augustine kept hi~ lofty concept of prayer, although, as a result of his struggle with the Pelagians, he seems to make more mention of prayer as petition. He has to explain that no one can receive ~St. Augustine's Letters, trans. Sr. WilIrid Parsons, S.N.D. (New York: 1951), v. 1, p. 157. grace simply by asking for it, but rather we ask because we have been moved by grace. Nevertheless, his classic definition of prayer in the ninth sermon on the Passion shows that he is not limiting the prayer of his congrega-tion to vocal prayer or meditation. He defines prayer as "the affectionate movement of the mind towards God." In the Enarratio in Psalmum 85, we find the idea ex-pressed above by St. Teresa that prayer is converse with God. St. Augustine says: "Your prayer is conversation with God. ~Nhen you read, God speaks to you; when you pray, you speak to God.'.' As St. Augusdnffbecame more and more imbued with the theology and language of the Bi, ble and more forgetful of Platonism, his thoughts on prayer at6 expressed more in Biblical metaphors than in philosophical abstractions. He had told Nebridius to turn away f(om created things and try to converse with God in the center of his soul. His descriptions of this contemplation of God are not too unlike the instructions of the neoPlatonists on the contemplation of true wisdom. In his later years, St. Augustine continues to instruct Christians on~ the importance of dealing With God through the heart, not just with the lips, of worshiping God in spirit, in truth, not simply in an external way. But now he presents his teaching more in the words of Christ, St. John the Evangelist, the Psalms, and less in the language of Plodnus. He frequently cites Christ's directive about praying in our own chambers, and he explains that the chambers are our hearts,is He quotes Jesus also on not using many words when we pray;14 He likes to point out that the Psalmist who so frequently calls or shouts to God is crying with his heart: " 'You have heard, Lord, the voice of my prayer. You heard when I shouted to you.' This shout to God is made not with the voice but with the heart. Many, with their lips ¯ sil.ent,~ shout with their hearts; others, making a great deal of noise with their mouths, have their hearts turned away and can ask for nothing. If then, you are going to shout, shout from within where God hears." ~ St. Augustine, then, all through his life recommended to his congregations a lofty form of prayer. He did not think it unrealistic to suggest that his people, who Were not cloistered nuns or monks, should strive after a prayerful, contemplative awareness of God's personal presence. Very likely he had achieved a contemplative union with God himself in the midst of his bu~y life and knew that it was possible for others. The modern, harried religious should not feel that his own contemplative aspirations are at all unrealistic. Rather he should see taEnar, in Ps, n. 5; Epis. 130. 14 Sermo 80. 15 Enar. II in Ps. 30, serm. 5. ÷ + ÷ VOLUME 28, 1969 9 ÷ Hilary Smith, O.C.D . REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS them as an important aspect of the Christian tradition in which he lives. Another great, active Church father with lofty ideas about prayer is St. John Chrysostom. He also defines prayer as a "conversation ~vith God." a6 He explains the first verse of Psalm 140, "Lord I shouted to you and you heard me," as the cry of a deeply prayerful man. The Psalmist here, he says, speaks of "an internal shout, from a heart of fire. He who thus shouts with his heart, turns to God with his whole heart." Always interested in the affective nature of prayer, he makes an important dis-tinction in explaining verse one of Psalm 5: "You hear my shout." The shout, he says, is not "an intonation of the voice but an affection of the mind." 17 To indicate the lofty nature of the kind of prayer he has in mind he says that it is a duty which we have in common with the angels. To pray with the proper rev-erence we must remove ourselves from worldly things and place ourselves in the middle of the choirs of angels. Although St. John Chrysostom has special praise for the life of monks he is anxious that everyone should give themselves to prayer, "both civil servants and private citizens, both men and women, both the elderly and the young, both slaves and freemen." as And he gives special instructions for busy housewives who would like to spend some time in quiet prayer. He reminds them that unlike their husbands "in the middle of the forum or before the tribunal, stirred up by external things as by heavy waves," housewives should be able to sit down for awhile in the privacy of their homes and recollect themselves. In this way they are like those who go out to the desert, bothered by no one: "Thus the housewife, always remaining within, can enjoy a permanent tran-quillity." Obviously St. John Chrysostom had the same notion of a housewife's life as many men today--and his ideas were probably received with the same disdain. But we are not citing John Chrysostom so much for his socio-logical data as for the importance he attaches to a con-templative form of prayer even for housewives. He ex-plains that even if she is forced to go out to Church or to the baths, once she has acquired the habit of recollection she need not be perturbed. What is more, the prayerful, recollected wife will be able to quiet a restless husband and help him forget the worries and cares of the forum.19 If we remember that St. John Chrysostom recommends a certain amount of solitude and prayer for everyone, ~ In Cap. X1 Gen., Horn. 30 n. 5. a7 Exposit. in Psalm. 5, n. 3. rs Homil. encomiast, in S. Meletium, n. 3. a~ In Jo. homil. 61, nn. 3, 4. we can profit from his commentary on Christ's prayer away from the crowds. St. John is not suggesting that everyone flee into a desert, but rather that everyone imi-tate Christ by leaving the noise of society for a little while to be able to pray and thus to return strengthened and fortified. It is thus that St. John explains the words of St. Matthew: "After he had dismissed the crowds he went up into the hills by himself to pray." ~0 "Why did Christ go up into the mountain? That he might teach us how appropriate is the wilderness, is solitude, for calling upon God. He thus frequently sought the wilderness and spent the night there that he might instruct us that we ought to seek out tranquil times and places for prayer." ~x St. John insists that the solitude necessary for prayer is not the physical solitude of the desert. Christians can pray everywhere because "God is always near." We can pray "in the bath [St. John seems especially interested in the possibility of prayer here] on the road, in bed, before the judge." ~ He says that it is not necessary to be rich or a philosopher to pray, but that even manual laborers can pray "as in a monastery: for it is not the comfortable-ness of a place, but an upright life that brings us quiet." ~3 St. John's insistence that everyone can pray everywhere at any time is b:.sed on two principles: First that God is always near to us, actually living in us as in a temple: "The grace of the Holy Spirit makes us temples of God so that it might be easier for us to pray." ~4 Secondly, we can pray always because in prayer, "the mouth makes no sound, while the mind shouts." Religious should understand, then, that aspiring to a more simple, contemplative approach to prayer, even in the midst of a highly active life, is not at all unrealistic. In fact it is more in keeping with the Christian tradition and the aspirations of human nature than the formalized meditations stressed so much in religious houses in the last two or three centuries. It is an approach to God long fostered by some of the most active fathers of the Church and recommended by them to their equally active con-gregations. .-o Mt 14:23. -~ In Mt. homil. 50. m Homil. de Canan., n. 11. ~ Ad llluminand. Cateches., I, n. 4. =4De Anna, serm. IV, n. 6. + 4- Quiet Prayer VOLUME 28, ]! VINCENT P. BRANICK, S.M. Formation and Task ÷ ÷ + Vincent P. Bran-ick0 S.I~I., is a mem-ber of the Maria-nist Seminary; Regina Mundi; gri-bourg, Switzerland. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS A dilemma confronts those charged with the forma-tion of religious today. A program of formation which encourages the spontaneity of the religious, one which minimizes regulations and concentrates on personal re-sponsibility seems to be the only valid method of forma-tion today. This is true not only for houses of formation but also for active community life where growth in per-sonal identity and in a way of life must continue. But in such a program of formation severe difficulties of vocation often arise. Self-doubt replaces original enthusiam. Scep-ticism challenges the very viability of religious life. And many leave. I believe these vocation difficulties are neces-sarily connected with this type of formation. In such programs administrators engage and direct the critical spirit of members to the interior structures of the life. Focusing on the life of the individual and the com-munity, this criticism strives to minimize the regulated activities and increase the optional elements of daily life. By allowing a religious to choose for himself the details of his life, the administrators hope both to develop per-sonal autonomy and help the younger member to identify himself fully with the life of the community. Seldom, however, do these great hopes materialize in a more vigorous religious life. In fact where superiors implement these reforms most whole heartedly, the greatest difficulties seem to arise. The critical spirit focuses on the interior structures of the life, and the agonizing questions begin. To what minimum should we limit our regulations? What is the basic concept of re-ligious life from which we can derive these minimum regulations? Can the present superiors be trusted to define religious life as it should be? Can a member rely on anyone but himself to conceive the definition and regulations of the religious life he is to lead? This distrust, self-doubt, and aggression generated by this type of criticism is isolating religious in an extreme individualism and is draining away real enthusiasm. The difficulty, however, is not with the criticism in itself, I believe, as with the notion of regulation implied both in this type of critical questioning and in the defensive at-tempts to answer. The basic difficulty consists in a loss of the practical sense of rule, in attempts to deduce rules from a defined concept of religious life rather than from a practical selection of religious tasks. Without an appreciation of objective task as the coun-terpart of rule, the efforts to criticize and modernize our programs of formation are developing an ex.ag.ger.a.ted self-consciousness. Our great emphasis on minimizing rules and developing autonomy is throwing out of bal-ance the dynamic but delicate dialectic of human life ¯ between self-consciousness and self-forgetfulness in task, between subjectivity and objectivity. "Responsibility," "fulfillment," and "freedom," the key words of today's personalism, pertain to subjective states of an individual, just as "minimum regulation" and "optional time" pertain to the subjective or interior conditions of a community. These terms indicate a re-flection of the subject on himself. As developing from this reflection, they are abstract and formal, belonging to a secondary thematic. As categories of human life they are certainly valid; but when taken out of their relation to a concrete activity in a concrete situation, they are deceiving. When considered outside of this relation, these terms appear very precise in. idealistic simplicity. They are ideals and in their simplicity, they evoke a radical response, a response that is immediate and totally absorbing. Men die for freedom. Priests leave their Church for fulfillment. But when these categories are not separated from their context in life, their simplicity is lessened by the com-plexity of daily business. Their radicalness is tempered by respect for the values of concrete situations. The re-sponse to these ideals can still be radical and totally ab-sorbing, but in a way that is more realistic, persevering, and in the end more effective. The objective and concrete counterpart of these sub-jective and reflex categories is task. Task is the creation of values that can be shared, values not simply of an individual subject but of a public world, where many can partake. Yet, task is more than a man's material work. It includes also his duty to worship God, his duty to be thoughtful and thankful of truth and beauty, because such duties are eminently public, even when accom-plished in silence. Task is the outward going service of that which is not self. By emphasizing task as the necessary correlative of subjectivity, we respect the nature of the human subject. Man is no't an enclosed container but an outward thrust to another. Human subjectivity is basically intention-ality. The self becomes self in becoming other. Here we 4. ÷ Formation and Ta~k VOLUME 28, 1969 + ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 14 have the fundam.ental human paradox--a man finds himself through his interest in another, a man achieves personal autonomy by binding himself in love of the other, a man can reflecton ideals only when engaged in tasks. Only the altruistic love of a task can preserve and intensify personal autonomy in the unavoidable restric-tions imposed by daily choices. Choosing some goal or some means to a goal always restricts and limits, whether a person simply accepts, another's choice or whether he chooses for himself. A decision always ex-cludes a multitude of alternatives. But a person who loves his task in no way loses autonomy by this restriction. In his love he concentrates himself in the positive core of his decision, locating his life in the values he wants to accomplish. Without that love he remains scattered over all the alternatives so that the restriction of the al-ternatives becomes a restriction of self. For example, one who loves the task of community prayer can accept the restrictions of a community schedule. One who loves his task of witnessing to eschatological values can accept disengagements from some elements of the commerce of civilization. In these loves a person seeks the fulfillment of what is not himself, and by so doing he develops in and through the unavoidable limitations. Fulfillment by love of task is such a common occur-rence that we tend to overlook it. We find it in the suc-cessful professional man, in the loving parents of a fam-ily, in the dedicated missionary. Conversely, we are struck by the lack of autonomy in the person concen-trating on his own stature in a type of adolescent self-consciousness. The person concentrating directly on achieving his autoflomy is the person least capable of finding it. By centering his attention on himself he can-not maintain the intensity of his normal thrust to the outside without which he cannot live as a mature free man. The man without a task is a tragic figure. The soul searching into which he is forced only aggravates the loss of identity he suffers. He is caught in a closed circle until another comes to him and appeals for his cooperation. In our present appreciation of personalism, the notion of task has faded from importance. Task appears as an impersonal category, something to do rather than some-one to relate to. But in no way are task and person op-posed. Rather the two notions are inseparable in the understanding of human relations. A task has signifi-cance only in view of the person who will benefit from it. And relating to a person implies concrete action that is more than purely symbolic gesture. To limit our cor-poral activities in interpersonal dynamics to mere signs of interior attitudes is to attempt an angelic community and to end up in a gross sentimentalism. Our interper-sonal relations are not simply encounters between spirits. Human community demands the creation of values through corporal work as a medium of com-munication. Task as an impersonal category is an in-dispensable presupposition for a truly human person-alism. A human community receives its unity and its identity from its common tasks. No community can exist on its own substance. A community which concentrates only on interior community life will never attain the well being of its members. The cohesion and dynamism of a com-munity results from a common advancement toward a goal which transcends the community. The convergence of the members with each other results from the con-vergence of all the members on a common goal. In selfless striving for this goal, the members find them-selves united. Their mutual confidence rests on the con-fidence each has that the other' is striving for the com-munity goal, or at least is not surreptitiously seeking his personal advantage to the detriment of that goal. Dis-unities are constructive only if they occur in the context of a greater dynamic unity. If the members agree on their general task, their different ways of conceiving the specific work enter into a productive dialectic. Even adamant differences about the means to accomplish a task are not divisive in the context of agreement about the end. But where members disagree on the basic task of the community, where they dispute the primary pur-pose of themselves as a group, there can be no dynamic coherence. No amount of dedication of the members to each other as individuals can supply for this lack of dedication to a common task. No matter how much the members love each other as persons, they cannot function together. In such a group, accord can exist only by agree-ment not to work together. That is, accord can exist be-tween individuals, but not between members of a func-tioning community. After saying all this about the dependence of the in-dividual and. communitarian subject on its tasks, we cannot stop here without risking a onesided distortion. All I have said is open to the totalitarian interpretation that individuals and communities should uncritically accept and dedicate themselves to tasks handed to them from the past. This is not true. A continuation of the analysis of the relation between self and task indicates why this is not true. Our objective tasks are not fully intelligible in and by themselves. These tasks depend on the subject just as the subject depends on the tasks. Every task presupposes a certain readiness in the subject. Ira man is not ready to meet objective realities by a Formation and Task VOLUME 2B, 1969 15 V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS certain sensitivity or openness to them, he will never recognize them when he comes across them. And with-out this recognition the objective task can never exist. An educational task exists only for an educated person. A religious task exists only for a religious person. Only by knowing his own religious demensions can a person articulate and thereby give reality to an objective reli-gious task. Besides depending on a subject's recognition, a task also depends for its existence on a subject's freedom in accepting or rejecting it. A task exists only as someone's task, and only in a person's free decision can a task be-come his. The automaton cannot create a task for itself because it cannot freely identify its good with the accom-plishment of the task. A free decision is thus necessary for the existence of a task, and such a free decision pre-supposes a subject who has already achieved.a degree of selfhood or autonomy. This dependence of the object on the subject holds also for communitarian dynamics. The recognition and free acceptance or rejection by a community of its task presupposes a level of coherence and self-understanding already .existing in that community. A task could never draw a group if the group could not direct itself through a group decision. We seem to have an unbreakable circle here. The autonomy of the subject presupposes a thrust toward its objective task, but this thrust presupposes the au-tonomy of the subject. In reality this mutual dependence exists more as a dialectic or oscillation between self and task, by which the subject grows in maturity and his work grows in precision and importance with each turning of the self to his task and from task to self. At the beginning of this dialectic lies, on the one hand, the basic openness of the human spirit, and, on the other, the original call of reality which can only be the direct appeal of God Himself. Task, as this dialectic reveals, has a role in human life which is at once relative and absolute. Any given task will be relative because it depends on the subject who can therefore criticize and change it. This dependence of the task on the recognition and decision of the subject refutes a totalitarian submission of the person to his work. The autonomy which the task confers on the subject is the autonomy l~y which he can dominate the task. But because this autonomy is indissolubly linked with task as such, task is absolutely indispensable to human existence. We cannot change or criticize our need to work as such. And this absolute need to give ourselves to task is present in a concrete way in any given task no matter how temporary or contingent it is. In all its provisional and contingent character, the task at hand remains the source of dynamism for the human dialectic of growth. In fact, the mature development of task requires a very delicate balance between self-reflection and outward-going service, between critical detachment and dedicated engagement, between autonomy and abnegation. Today in many areas of religious life, I believe, we have upset this delicate balance. The sudden wave of self-criticism which religious life has undergone has over-weighted the subjective pole of the dialectical balance. Individuals and communities have almost locked their sights on themselves in a direct concentration on their subjective fulfillment. The surging experience of the need to criticize and modernize the communitarian tasks is failing to issue into a more intense outward dedica-tion. This need to criticize and modify tasks has resulted primarily from the advances of Christian theology in the last twenty years, advances which in a way climaxed and received great publication in the Second Vatican Council. Modern theological insights showed the great horizontal expansiveness of Christian life, the great variety of ways in which Christianity can be :lived. The former theologies. tended to picture Christian life in a rather narrow ver-tical plane which allowed variety only in terms of hier-archic positions. The various tasks of Christian life dif-fered from each other because some were more perfect than others. This gave an absolute character to de-cisions in the selection of concrete tasks. In this narrow but precise view of Christian life, the various tasks of religious orders--their ways of prayer, their apostolic works, their degree of cloister--all seemed direct deduc-tions from the gospel following necessarily from a totally unlimited acceptance of Christianity. By showing the horizontal expansiveness of Christian life, modern theology has changed this view. We can now see many ways of acting and working as Christians, each way with a dignity proper to itself, a dignity that is not simply a limited edition of that belonging to a more perfect task. Modern theology has not depreciated the basic tasks traditional to religious life; but it has rela-tivized them by presenting them in the context of other tasks, thus showing that the acceptance of a task results more from contingent decisions than from absolute de-ductions. There are pressing needs for so many tasks that no necessity binds a community or an individual to one or the other. Seeing for the first time the contingent and provisional character of their tasks, many communities and individ-uals are experiencing a real crisis of identity. The tra-ditional tasks on which they built their identity seem 4- ÷ 4. Formation and Task VOLUME 28, 1969 ]7 ÷ ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, $.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]8 to have been depreciated because they have been rela-tivized. For people who tend to think always in ab-solute categories, this relativization of traditional com-munitarian tasks is anguishing. Many religiou.s have become worried about their fulfillment and autonomy through such tasks. This worry often leads to a search to reabsolutize the community tasks, finding a modern task that is the task of the Church today. Although opening new possibilities and purging re-ligious life of obsolete structures, this intense concern about personal antonomy and this criticism of all tasks at hand is impeding the turning outward toward work in self-dedication. By fixing attention on tile subject, this critical self-consciousness is obstructing the oscillation between selfhood and task and in this way is diminishing the general vitality of religious life. Houses of formation are especially susceptible to this loss of vitality becanse it is there that the dialectic be-tween religious identity and religious task must begin. Equipped with neither the subjective identity of a re-ligious congregation nor an understanding involvement in its present tasks, candidates arrive usually with simply a willingness to enter. At this moment of entrance only a vivid presentation of tasks can engender enthusiasm, a presentation of tasks which the person sees worthy of his dedication. Concentrating on such tasks a young religious will gradually develop a self-possession in the style of the congregation that will make him fully responsible for its works, that will allow him to live without thought of external pressure, that will enable him to criticize and modify his tasks. But if on entering religious life or during the years of formation, he sees in the administrators a paralyzing hesitation regarding tile most basic tasks, if his program of formation turns his attention constantly back to him-self in questions of autonomy, fulfillment, and minimali-zation of rules, the dialectic of growth can hardly begin to operate. There is certainly no facile answer to the problem of developing religious enthusiam in a time when all tasks of religious life are being revaluated. We cannot simply ignore the severe doubts that do in fact exist in the minds of administrators. But the present hesitation to present concrete tasks to religious is serionsly hampering the possibility for formation. A rehabilitation of religious task must take place on two levels. The first level is that of the Church as a whole. On this level we can recognize a permanence and uni-versality of tasks. In the life of the Church there is a permanent need for some people to pray in a way that disengages them from personal participation in the eco- nomics and politics of our world, just as there is a per-manent need for others to ~ray in a way that involves them person.ally in economic and political progress. These needs derive from the very nature of Christianity. On this universal level we can articulate a theology that shows the beauty and depth both of the traditional and. o~ the new tasks of the Church. Such 'a theology of the functions of the Church can present these tasks in such clarity that they engender enthusiasm and initiate self-dedication. The second level is that of the particular congrega-tion. On this level we must learn to understand the co,,n~tin, gent and limited nature 'of the congregation'~ en-traiace into the universal work'of the Church. From the expansive range of ecclesial tasks, each with its own theology and permanence, a" congregation must decide on specific tasks to assume. This decision is necessarily contingent on historidal and p~rs~nal ,circumstances, but this contingency need not prevent an intense adherence~ to the tasks. The decision by a congregation will be based on its continge~tt capabilities, as a result of a his-tory of insights and ~pecializatiops, but in that decision a congregation enters into theuniversal dimensions evangelization. A chosen task may not be the most cen-tial, the most perfect possible task of the Church today, but by accepting it with its limi(ations, a religious con-gregation can take its part in the whole work of the Church in all its depth and beauty. The only alternative' to this is a perfectionist idealism that paralyzes all forts. Although in the actual appropriation of a task the two levels blend together, each operates according'to its own rules. The first level is theological and universal; the second, historical and contingent. Formation to task takes place on both levels. It educates to a vivid aware-ness of the universal tasks of the Church and to an ac-ceptance of the contingent communitarian decisions by which a society shares in these tasks. By focusing attention on the fulfillment and spon-taneity of the individual, many programs of formation today run contrary to the needs of both levels. The tasks of the Church are being obscured. Relieving the anguish-ing needs of the people of the world, bringing all men to an intimate knowledge and love of Christ, worshiping God as a community~these tasks of the Church are being displaced by concern for personal development. At the same time, the emphasis on minimizing rules and foster-ing spontaneity is blurring the need to accept the con-tingent communitarian decision of a task and the struc-ture of authority that makes the communitarian decision possible. Certainly we should be pruning away obsolete Formation and Task 19 rules, rules which are no longer associated with a task. But the effort simply to minimize rules for its own sake is equivalent to the effort to minimize community tasks. For a religious dedicated to the community work, the minimization of rules is not a burning issue. The dis-tinction between what is regulated and what is optional is of secondary importance. Rules appear as means of coordinating community effort, as expressions of what the community expectsof an individual, how he can contribute to the community functions. Since contribu-tions to the community functions may vary in a contin-uous range, from indispensable activities to actions which have little relation to the community work, the categories of "regulated" and "optional" are simply in-adequate to divide the day. Endless discussions about the precise limits of regulations indicate that the ques-tion of task has not yet been resolved. Formation must begin and end with mission, a selec-tion and a confiding of tasks, an education of people to the realities of these tasks that evokes their love for the good to be accomplished through these tasks. Trying to educate people to self-direction without at the same time giving them tasks will always tend to a loss of self-giving. Educating people to love and know tasks, allowing the tasks to draw people will inevitably result in a develop-ment of responsibility and self-confidence. The dynamism of task is the only atmosphere conducive to human autonomy. ÷ ÷ V. P. Branick, S.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 20 JOSEPH FICHTNER, O.S.C. Religious Life in a Secularized.Age Vatican Council II, in its decree on The Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, analyzed our renewal as a twofold process and laid down two generic principles for the pursuit of that renewal.1 The first principle takes us historically backward, the second forward. The first principle is a continuous return to the gospel of Christ as a basic norm of the religious life, and the second is an adjustment or adaptation to the physical, psychological, cultural, social, and economic conditions of our day. But at this point already one should ask the question: Is not religious life caught in a false dilemma when it at-tempts to return and renew itself at one and the same time? 2 How can it move backward and forward simul-taneously? Is it possible for religious to draw their in-spiration from the gospel as well as adjust themselves within the context of a secularized age? The decree underscores the return to the gospel ideal first of all; this is why a concerted and communal effort is to be made to catch anew the gospel inspiration as a rule of life and conduct. Yet the gospel presents reli-gious with no stereotype of their life that is always and everywhere valid and that they can turn to when-ever they find themselves in religious straits. In order to re-evangelize we have to ask questions of the Bible out of our own concrete, contemporary life, because the religious life experience of 1969 presents us with prob-lems. The problems are compounded because we have till now developed only the embryo of a new style of life which shows very indistinct features of further growth. XN. 2. "E. Schillebeeckx, "Het nieuwe mens- en Godsbeeld in conflict met her religieuze leven," Ti]dschri]t voor theologie, v. 7 (1967), pp. 1-27. I have followed to a large extent the development of ideas in this article. See also Soeur Guillemin, "Renovation de l'espHt et des structures," Vie consacrde, v. 38 (1966), pp. 360-73; she covers much of the same ground from a more practical point of view. Joseph Fichtner, O.S.C., is a faculty member of Crosier House of Studies at 2620 East Wallen Roadi Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805. VOI'UME 28, 1969 - ~oseph Fichtner, O~.C. REVIEW F.OR.RELIGIOUS We are asking questions, therefore, which the past Christian generations could not have asked since they did not live in a secularized age. The gospel cannot reply to questions not put to it; nor does it await questions from us which were already put to it by generations past.,'It is inconceivable that we should inquire .intb the Sc'riptures from the same van-tage point, say, as Sts. Jerome and Augustine had to do for .their respective communities whose members did not take vows but simply pledged themselves to persevere in their religious purpose. The medieval monks interpreted the Bible in a much different way than we can, and they tended to encapsulate the religious life into a profession of the three vows, a notion retained by canon law in its definition of the religious state.3 The former tendency was to regard the religious experience as a form more or less of flight 'from the world, of self-denial; renunciation, the exclusive service of God. We must strenuously reject the identification of the evangelical community life with the fo~ms it has taken in a given period and locale. Perhaps~- though you will have to judge this for yourselves--the change with the times and places is harder for the woman religious because of her naturally (and in other respects advantageously) conservative spirit. The past.historical ~onception of religious life hardly coincides with the demands made upon'human life by a secularized society.4 If we are to research the gospel for goals and guides to present,day religious .life, then we will have to approach it with an open mind, not with the m~ntality of our forebears, founders or foundresses, most of whom lived in a pretechni.cal, preindustrial, pre-democratic age. We may e~,en, have to rephrase our. ques-tions once. we listen to the cadences of God's word. The gospel may. echo. to us the question whether we have been tuned in to the secularization process critically, whether our life context offers any guarantee of human values. The times we live in, with their alternate possibilities of. good~, and evil, do not simply call for an unqualified adaptation. .-Hence what the decree aims atis that religious.evaluate their world in the light of the gospel. Some kind of eval-uation has already.been done for the Church at large in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World; here the world is seen from a threefold view-point-- as created, as fallen and sinful, and as loved and redeemed.5 Religious life itself has to be reinterpreted 8 C. 487. ' ]. Bonnefoy, A.A., "Presence au monde ~an.s une vie religieuse," Vie consacr~e, v. 39 (1967), pp. 353-67. ; . ~ 8 E. Pin, $.J., "Les insfituts religieux apostoliques et le ~hang~- ment ~ocio-cultuel," Nouvelle revue thgologique, v. 87 .(1965), pp. 395-411. by means of a confrontation between the two, gospel and world. Without such a confrontation, the attempt either to re-evangelize or to adapt is empty and meaning-less; it is sold short by too much evangelization on the one hand and too much humanization on the other. The only way to arrive at a confrontation of the two is to examine human experience today in the light of the gospel and to understand the gospel from the viewpoint of contemporary human experience. Man today looks upon the natural world as the raw material out of which he can create his own world. The supremacy he feels over the things of the world is chang-ing his view of himself too as part of this world. Through his own scientific work he finds himself able to live a more human life; by humanizing the world round about himself he is discovering more human values. One of the values that he has freshly uncovered and that have prompted him to make the world more hu-manly livable is his freedom. Freely and creatively he would carve out of the world a home where the human community can exist in justice and love. He is filled with an indomitable desire to build a better world where men can live together in the solidarity of justice and love. But the humanization of the world by means of science and technology has also created, by way of a byproduct, the danger for man to render this world uninhabitable. The Great Society has been so organized by man that it has well nigh done away with other human opportunities such as the contemplative side of life offers him. He is forced almost to flee from the world in order to have the time and place for that contemplation which does not only regard the things of God but respects the dignity otr his fellowmen. Man risks the danger of treating his fellowmen as things and of overpowering them, of using and abusing them as he would the things of nature. If he loses his respect for his fellowman, he is liable to manip-ulate him, exploit him, and usurp his rights to human achievement.6 Of all the human qualities young people wish for themselves and expect of others the most out-standing are personal right, authenticity, trust, under-standing, loyalty, and honesty. They reject any and every sort of depersonalization. Man can so dominate the world socially, economically, and politically, that he runs roughshod over his fellowman. So the same scientific and technological progress can be both a boon and a threat to a more human existence, depending upon the use to which man puts it for his fellowman. The whoIe secuIarization process that has fallen into human hands has affected man's stance toward religion, 6S6eur Marie-Edmond, "Qu'attendent les jeunes filles de la vie rcligicuse communautairc?" Vie consacrde, v. 39 (1967), pp. 40-50. + Religious LiIe, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 23 ÷ ÷ Joseph Fichtn~r, 0~.~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS though primarily it is a social event that of itself need not lead to any irreligiosity. It does, however, set man upon the pinnacle of the temple of this world; it puts him into a relationship with the world which he never yet experienced. This change of relationship and his own understanding of it is bound to alter his view of God. While formerly the Church was the means of bringing his attention to God as He operated in nature, history, and society, now that man has asserted his creative power over the world, he has at the same time contrib-uted to its desacralization. God would seem to be left out; man comes to the fore. As a result the conclusion we can easily reach is that secularization and desacralization are pagan, heathen, or anti-religious. But the fact of the matter is that this proc-ess has both Christian and non-Christian elements and hence cannot be accept.ed unqualifiedly or uncritically. If anything shakes the younger generation, it is their fear for the destiny of a world so insecure in its secular struc-tures. To give the secularized world its due, we must ac-knowledge it with faith as God's creation to which he gave an autonomy and secularity. Our belief in His act of creation implies that the world be left wholly other than God---creaturely, human, worldly. 0nly if we recog-nize the world for what it is can we catch some insight into who God is, as Someone unworldly, transcendent, uncreated. The more we tend to sacralize the world, the less transcendence do we attribute to God and the less likely are we to worship Him alone. Acceptance of the world and everything worldly from a divine point of view means setting the world free for man; to secularize it is to allow it freedom, a created autonomy. In a sense, then, the secularization process follows from Christianity itself as a consequence of its refusal to commingle, confuse, or fuse God with the world. Chris-tianity has no intention of divinizing or Christianizing or baptizing the world from within, but rather of keeping the world humanized through the retention of its essen-tially human values. Christian secularity is precisely this, that Christians in a spirit of faith discern the dif-ference between the concrete Christian and the pagan elements which make up the world and allow it to be itself. Grace makes it possible for Christians to prepare for Christianization, that is, to secularize and humanize the world by means of a faith outlook. The Gospel does not sterilize the heart of man, emptying it of an appre-ciation of all earthly and human values; rather it opens to him the same full human perspective which Christ had in assuming and recapitulating humanity. Sin alone dims or eclipses the possibility of that perspective. This is the kind of world, its history and culture, in which we must situate the religious life, and this is the same world in which we can ask the appropriate ques-tions of the gospel for the inspiration of the religious life experience. A false understanding of the world will in-evitably lead to a series of false questions. It will incline the religious to view nature, the world, man, negatively, and argue for a flight from the world. The old concept of God.has undergone a change along with the old concept of the world. But the death-of-God theology has evidently failed to come up with a new con-cept of God. In the. past Christianity was always con-vinced that God is inaccessible and ineffable. Faced with the radical inability to express themselves about God or present him to their fellow Christians, theologians and mystics resorted to an apophatic or negative theol-ogy. They admitted to knowing less about who God is not than about who He is. Oftentimes God was popularly conceived as one who intervened in the world; such repre-sentations of Him in the ordinary theological manuals reflected the social and cultural milieu. The experience of faith in God was colored by the social and cultural context necessarily, but 'this did not render it less authen-tic than the experience of faith in our own cultural situation. 'If our era is less sure of and less concrete in its con-cepts of God, it is because we have turned God into a big question mark and into a popular conversation piece. Perhaps there has been more conversation about Him since his "death" than there ever was while He was still considered "alive." We would like to unmask all the former illusions about God and do away with all the pseudo-gods of the past, but in getting rid of all such idols we have not clarified or facilitated the making of God in our own image. By raising the problem of God in our own day, we are likely to forget our own human condition which threatens to falsify the truth about God. In searching for Him we run the risk of creating other idols .than those we just finished demolishing. One of our approaches to God which hides some of His reality for us and which we may be guilty of in the religious life is to think that we can dedicate our-selves to him directly and exclusively. This approach may be devoid of any real, concrete content, a sort of chase into empty space, a flight after some utopian ideal. The only way remaining for us to express ourselves about Him has to derive from our experience within this world and within this era of salvation history. God speaks to us through men, their world and history; this is the hearing aid by which we can listen to His voice. There r.eally is no opposition between God's word in Holy 4- Religious Lile, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ ÷ Joseph Fi~htner, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Scripture and the authentic religious life experience of today, for the Scriptures provide us the norm whereby we can be faithful listeners to His word as it appeals to us in today's life experience. The latter feeds our under-standing of God, concretizes it, and gives content to our belief in God. To overlook this fact is to retrace our steps to the days when Christians felt it their duty to separate or alienate themselves from the world. We have no criticism to offer of their religious posture, be-cause it had meaning for them, but it leaves us without a real living God. Today we have the idea that to try to approach God directly and exclusively, without any worldly and human medium, is an unchristian illusion. We are inclined, if not theoretically then practically,, to distinguish between a Christian and a pagan secularity. We believe we come in contact with the living God in and through and with our fellowmen. This does not mean that as Christians we do not respond to God immediately and personally, but that our relationship with Him is real and concrete be-cause mediated through worldly and human realities. Christ experienced the immediacy of God's presence in Himself, in and through His humanity. He willed to be-come God in human form. In like manner we encounter God in the immediacy and mediacy of that image and likeness of Him which is man. What is immediate and what is mediate are not mutually exclusive but are linked together in our relationship to God. Against this modern background the religious life must examine the Scriptures to seek the solutions for the problems facing it. Sacred Scripture contains a number of evangelical counsels that simply are irreducible to the three classic vows the medieval monks or nuns pronounced. In fact, the gospel refers to only one counsel,7 one which was not expressly imposed or urged upon the early Christians.s It teaches that the perfection of love is attainable by all Christians, whatever their state of life, without their having to keep the counsel of celibacy.'° All Christians are called to an observance of the commandments and the other evangelical counsels in order to attain the per-fection of love. The one counsel alone is left to the free choice of every Christian and is the evangelical source from which the religious life has grown. Essen-tially, therefore, the religious life is a freely willed Chris-tian celibate life. This life is lived mostly in a community because few people freely will to live it in solitude.~0 7 Mt 19:10-2. s 1 Cor 7:25. ~ 1 Cor 13. ao Soeur Marie-Edmond, "Qu-attendcnt les jeunes filles?" The personal choice of this style of life is motivated by the gospel and makes sense fo~ alifetime only in virtue of the same~ The force of this motive is borne upon those young people who because of the instability and.change-ability of our age fear giving themselves to any style of life demanding continuity and stability. One who is will-ing to spend his entire life ~s a Christian celibate does.so because he is sensitive to the grace of 'God .cifll'ing. him in thegospel. He feels himself responsible to" God-who so strongly affects him that He becomes the source"of his religious life. But ~he particular form or structure of the religious life inspired by the gospel is ~as such a human project and a human construct. The whole human side of this life has developed in the course of history and is bound up with its vicissitudes. It,has t6 face the challenge of changing customs and cultures in older to survive arid renew itself. .We misunderstand the gospel message if.we base bur choice of a celibate life on a gupernatural motive alon~, as if we conceive the delibate life as a ctfoice between the natural good of marriage and .the supernatural good.of celibacy.11 Dedication of a celibat~ life to God has both immediate and mediate aspects about it, just a~ marriage itself. A couple united in Christian man'iage have an immediate duty toward God though they may mediate their love for Him through each other and thdy mayex-periefice tension and conflict in a way similar to what religious feel when they try to mediate their love for God through the world' and their fellowmen. The reli-gious life therefore has no immediate relationship to God without a worldly and human mediacy. Sometimes the immediacy of the religious life is more apparent, .'for instance, when religious live and work in community~ pray, celebrate the liturgy; at other times, in the apos-tolate, the mediacy of such a life comes into starker relief. Christian ~elibacy has also a human meaning, a natural value aside from its supernatural value, for otherwise, no matter how religiously or supernaturall~? motivated it is, it will somehow be left hanging in the air. Essen-tially it does not consist in a.chgice between God and 'a life partner; rather it is a positive choice of aw~y k)f life having natural and human meaning for those who have the iniier ability to embrace, it. Their choice, when you analyze it thoroughly, does not come down to one be-tween God and creature or between God and the world of man, but it is one which springs from the wholenes~ of his being. Celibacy of its nature permits the celibate to concen- ~ Schillebeeckx, "Het nieuwe mens- en Godsbeeld," p. 12. 4- +- +. Religious Ei~e, - Seculhri~ed Age VOL'U~E 2~, 4" 4" 4" Joseph FichOtn.Se.rC, . REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS trate upon a certain life value and to dedicate to it his entire life. He freely accepts celibacy because he is con-vinced this is the only way, special as it may be, for him to be totally expendable. The value he has discovered within himself so fascinates him that he is willing to remain unmarried to achieve it; he places himself at its service; he considers it a part of an authentic life. Christian celibacy, moreover, adds to the natural value a religious, charismatic value, especially if men and women would concentrate their whole life upon its value because they would be witnesses to the world of their conviction. Within the Church their witness to the value of celibacy is a more easily and understood sign. It is seen to be a means some men and women take for the sake of the kingdom of God. Religious give to the world an irreplaceable witness of a supratemporal element alive and at work in it. In a sense they transcend history, manifesting a supernatural value and significance--point-ers to a life beyond the present. The better they can serve mankind in this way of life, the better they are able to serve the God who founded His kingdom among men. Religious men and women will show to the world the. authenticity of their life only if they commit them-selves totally to it, convinced that their expendability makes their style of life worthwhile. Others may sacrifice marriage for the sake of a tem-poral career--scientific, social, political, cultural; but Christian celibacy on the contrary entails sacrifice for the sake of a religious value. In both instances there is a sacrifice of a human value, but in the latter a trans-cendence of the religious self becomes evident. The sacrifice points to a transcendence--men and women are willing to give up marriage not for some secular good but because they want to give evidence of the religious dimension of life.x2 The religious sign value of celibacy too easily fades out or is lost among those who engage solely in a secular career, good and beneficial to society as it may be. More than ever in the past religious must be a sign of the transcendence of God in the midst of a secularized world, even when at times this sign may appear to be nothing else than a protest against a world gone pagan. They give eschatological witness of a life that overcomes the temporality of this worldAa Christian celibacy has essentially a close affinity to the other evangelical counsels, poverty and obedience, in that they too contain positive human and religious values. Heretofore the general tendency has been to re-gard the counsels or vows too negatively and isolatedly. = Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Theology of Renunciation," Theological Investigations, v. 3, pp. 47-57. 18 Lk 20:34-7. When a problem arises, we are prone to isolate it and to forget it may have far-reaching and entangled roots (the race problem provides a good example in those who advocate job opportunity for a cure-all). Perhaps we lose sight of that unity of purpose which brings all counsels together--the following of Christ in His kenotic life; and especially the unity of the person living a trinity of counsels. Like Christian celibacy, poverty and obedience are questionable because in our time and culture they seem to lack any positive value. Today's trend is to stress the need of getting rid of poverty and of accentuating free-dom, and thus to outdate them. The question then arises how are we religious to retain the positive, human values of the two at a time when they are considered caricatures or illusions of reality. For example, how are we to evaluate poverty in a society characterized by mass production, mass consumption, white-collar work, a so-ciety preferring to poverty a prosperity that promotes health, welfare, and education programs, and leisure? Religious poverty makes sense only if it is in keeping with the real poverty existing among peoples today. Its inherent demand is that we live on a similar basis with the poor and at the same time, precisely because we have pledged ourselves to be poor, join in the effort to better the lot of the poor. Religious poverty must square with the economical situation of society and must take into account the level or standard of living. Young reli-gious are filled with a sense of sha~'ing rather than econ-omizing (as formerly) material, intellectual, and cultural goods--a spirit more current with the times. A balance has to be struck between the means and the end of the religious institute which, in any case, will require a special moderation in food, clothing, recreation, and a determination to earn a communal living by hard work. In addition, various kinds of social work performed by religious may lend themselves to social progress. Religious community life can no longer model its authority upon the medieval feudal system. Religious authority that appeals for obedience in the name of God's will is old-fashioned; it dates back to that old era of the divine right of kings. It leads to a confused idea that superiors must reign and their opinion must prevail under the pretext of deriving their authority from God. On the other hand, wherever like-minded people are ¯ gathered into a community, however much they may be motivated by love, they will still have to hold to the inte-grating factors of authority and obedience. Faithful re-ligious do oblige themselves to observe the will of God. Such a spirit of obedience is all the more sensible when Religious Li]e, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 ~9 ÷ ,÷ ÷ Joseph FicOht~n.Cer., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ¯30 it believes God speaks His will not only through the superior but within a life situation, within a community living together with love, friendship, dialogue, for the common good, and from within one's Own conscience. This type of obedience is not a blind following of the .superior's will rather arbitrarily determined or unex-plained, nor the keeping of meaningless, minute, mean commands, a routinized life without any commands at all, a perfunctory performance of duty without any pro-fessional competence, but an open-eyed observance of God's will as it is made known within an entire life situa-tion. The American practice of obedience functions best in an equalitarian atmosphere; Americans will not tol-erate supremacists in their midst; they are. used to bu-reaucratic (in the good sense of the word), consultative government. The religious life then consists not first and foremost in a negation, the exclusion of positive human and religious values, but in a special Christian, meaningful way of life. This life does entail the sacrifice of such values as wealth, marriage, independence which most Christians freely choose and cordially treasure. By the mere mention of the words "sacrifice" or "renunciation, we are likely to turn off people who think such practices .dwarf the human personality or stifle its spirit.14 Renun-ciations, however, are emphatically no evasion or escape f.r.om the world. The paradoxical fact about them is that they detach us to some degree from the world so as to allow fuller involvement in other ways.15 Religious do not directly choose to sacrifice earthly and human values, but they do choose a Christian way of life full of other and superior values accepted in a spirit of faith, hope, and love. Tertullian once re-marked: "Every choice implies a rejection." ~0 In choos-ing a kenotic way of lift Christ did not sacrifice human values m~rely for the sake of supernatural values; His prefere, nce was for a way of life out of various, meaning-ful messianic possibilities. Among other things His was a predilection for a celibate life because it left him free to establish the kingdom of His Father.17 Religious likewise are inclined toward a style of life which does not drive them from the world but enables them to orient their life, energy, and competence toward the world's future. Theirwhole thrust is to take the world with them to God, and this is the reason for their willingness to accept sacrifice or renunciation along with that a4 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, n. 41; Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, n. 46. ~ K. Rahner, "Reflections." 16 Apology, 13, 2. ~"~ Lk 9:23. faithful and unconditional service they would give to God and their fellowmen. The loving service they offer concretizes that self-emptying which contradicts an egotistic spirit. The love they dedicate to God and to the world of men expressly calls for self-criticism, sacrifice, and self-emptying. If there is any emerging feature of the new-style religious life it is the conviction of its' mem-bers that they have to be present in and open to the world. The fact that the religious life is a matter of lifelong choice makes it difficult for people of our times to recog-nize its value and meaning. They are quite well con-vinced, and rightly so, that man is so built as to be un-able to appreciate the unknown dimensions of a human act binding him for a lifetime. Human psychology is so complex that for one to make such a binding decision wonld oftentimes be irresponsible, lighthearted, an act tmcharacteristic of the human will. This attitude is exemplified not only in the modern outlook upon the religious life but upon marriage too. Can man morally commit himself to an obligation that, humanly speak-ing, seems to be contradictory to his very nature? No matter how free and knowledgeable his act may be today, he cannot foresee tomorrow--he may react differently to his choice once he is put into hard circumstances where he is likely to experience his failings. To validate and give meaning to his decision, his only alternative is to entrust himself to Christian hope. That this modern mentality has a glint of truth about it, there can be no doubt. But there are values which for the moment we cannot, certainly not [ully, appreciate or approve, which nonetheless surpass the momentary situation and are imperative for the integrity of man. They have an enduring value; they hold good in any and every situation (with some exceptions) which man has to abide by if he is to be true to his own nature. In the matter of the counsels and their public pro-fession, the vows, we are dealing with a choice that in the first place is not ethically binding, it is not necessary, it is not a matter of commandment. So why should anyone be obligated to keep his choice for a lifetime if he has freely willed it in the first place? Man has an intrinsic right to freely change his mind, to decide tomorrow against his decision today. But this human vacillation is obviously giving the world much trouble. The value of following the counsels for a lifetime lies not in a freedom of choice alone but in the free and faithful acceptance of a way of life. It evidences how a religious finds it pos-sible and meaningful to dedicate himself for life despite his failings and mistakes; he accepts a lifetime of service. Fidelity too, and not only freedom, is a basic human + Religious Lile Secularized VOLUME 28, 1969 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS quality, .substantiated by both the nature of man and his history. The will-to-fidelity must have meaning therefore; it is not a mere will-o'-the-wisp; it is the expression of the human self once and for always. Despite the fact that man can point to the vicissitudes of history and to the uncertainty of the future, that he can personally leave himself open to various possibilities for the sake of ex-periment, to see how he reacts to them in the process of maturing, still his human limitations tell him that he cannot experiment or vacillate in his decisions forever. His human limitations force him to make that decision to which he can devote the totality of his life. This is what psychologists have called the "fundamental op-tion," which has its correlative reality in a fidelity to grace and is motivated by a single love, the following of Christ. The fidelity, and integrity of a life of the counsels springs from our efforts, gradual and constant, to per-sonalize them, unify them, liberate ourselves thereby from the selfish impulses which may dominate our lives. Fidelity and integrity are ours to the extent that the counsels permeate us; taken together they add up to a complete style of life. I dare say one reason for religious discontent stems from the failure to bring the three counsels within the focus of the one fundamental option. The saying, "Divide and conquer," applies here: the more divided and disrupted a life, the greater the loss of personal energy and the less resistance to difficulties.18 To be a full man is to be faithful to the true self. It is by totally giving that each of us becomes totally him-self. The full Christian is one who gives a faithful re-sponse to that divine fidelity which never fails him unless he proves faithless to himself. The basic human reason for the inviolability of the religious life is the fundamental option, and not the pub-lic vow from which the religious can be dispensed. The religious who opts for the celibate life is a living em-bodiment of the counsels, particularly celibacy; they do not exist in the abstract or in vows or in constitutions. In making a lifelong choice man wants to be true to himself and thus to bind himself in the service of a basic value. This value is an enrichment to both the religious him-self and to his community. The value, as it were, me-diates between the person and the community, recip-rocally helping the person to serve the community and the community to respect and draw benefit from the per-son by warding off some risks of instability. In its wider scope, the value of a religious community extends to the unlimited horizons of the Church and society. When See Summa theologiae, 2-2, q.44, a.4, ad 3. a person publicly announces his fundamental option to live a celibate life in a religious community, he makes an appeal to the community to help him be a full man and a full Christian. He is helped negatively when the com-munity does not interfere with or hinder the realization of his fundamental option--the development of his personality under grace; he is helped positively when the community has a concern and care for his life ful-fillment. The binding force of a vow is derived immediately from the option one makes of God but mediately from the religious community and the Church in which the religious pronounces his vow. The religious .vow has a quality of reciprocity between the religious himself and the community of his profession. Between the two there exists a sort of two-way street of right and responsibility. In our sociotechnic world there still is much need of the other-directed spirit, of teamwork and a measure of con-formity and mutual respect to obtain the same goals. The religious cannot oblige the community onesidedly, nor can the community willfully or lightly discharge its duty toward the religious. Just as the religious can prove unfaithful to his community, so can the community fail the religious particularly if it does not renew or up-date itself. The human and Christian quintessence of the reli-gious life consists of a special concentration upon a lifelong value by means of a freely willed Christian celibacy. Whatever is added to this quintessence is of human creation and consequently is historically con-ditioned. The evangelical inspiration is subsumed into a variety of concrete forms and structures and institu-tionalisations, all of which are bound up with historical experiences and cultural patterns. None of them has eter-nal value, not even the form(s) the founder or foundress gave to the gospel message. Whenever the evangelical inspiration is found wrapped in a new life experience, its particular value can be questioned and criticized by the psychologist, sociologist, economist, hygienist, anthro-pologist, and others interested in the practical life of man. They compel us to rethink the religious life as it is time-honored and -bound in our constitutions. It is a fatal mistake to identify the latter with the gospel in-spiration. The Council fathers of Vatican II were not unmindful of the fact that religious institutes periodically revise their constitutions in order to adapt themselves to time and place. Surely in calling for a radical overhauling of the religious life they were thinking of the social and cultural revolution we are passing through, when slight and detailed changes and modifications are not enough. + + + Religious Li~e, Secularized Age VOLUME 28, 1969 33 + ÷ Joseph Fichtner, 0.$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS There is much room for consolidating, deepening, and trimming. The crisis we face is deeper and graver than we know; it is clearly evidenced by the revolutionized concept of man and God in our secularized age. If the religious institute as we know it is to survive, we must make a heroic effort to restructure and revitalize it. It does not need a heart transplant, but it will need a series of blood transfusions. Needless to say, the religious institute that cannot or will not adapt will sing its own requiem. The gospel inspiration of the religious life offers no guarantee that the various traditional forms or structures have to endure forever. A religious institute may well have served its purpose and should go out of existence or coalesce with a more viable group. The life experience today is so new, so revolutionalized, so secularized, that in a sense all re-ligious institutes can be considered old which do not reinterpret the gospel in the light of the new life situa-tion. We have to bear a crisis so severe that only a radical restructuring of the religions institute will tide it over: This restructuring has to be more than an offscouring of antiquated practices, making our life easier or more sociable. It has to arise from a thorough re-evangelisation which asks questions of itself and of life as religious live it in a secularized society. Nobody can accomplish this tremendous task but the community itself, and especially its young members who are not baffled by the new life experience becat~se they have been born and raised in it. But one can hardly insist enough upon the duty of the entire community, young and old members, to enter into the restructuring phase. This is not a task divided between the young members pushing ahead with a crea-tive spirit and the old upholding the canons of ortho-doxy. Both have to be patient and indulgent. Nor is it a summoning of an endless series of meetings and discus-sions where members reflect upon their life, haggle back and forth over community life, the apostolate, the struc-tnre of authority, and what have you, yet in the mean-while make no effort at experimentation with new forms and are fearful of groping toward a reincarnation of the religious life. Who does not feel stymied by an inconsist-ency between thought and action, plan and life? Given plenty of room for experimentation, for pilot projects, not necessarily in every monastery or convent but here and there where local needs require it and the proper authorities are willing to assume the ultimate responsi-bility, where everybody enters enthusiastically and not merely tolerantly into the experimentations, thus mani-festing their loyalty to the institute, the religious life will blossom out anew, perhaps in an unsuspected way-- at least under the mysterious, unforeseeable guidance of the Holy Spirit. ANDRI~E EMERY Experiment in Counseling Religious When* I began working at the Hacker Psychiatric Clinic in 1961---on the staff of which I am the only Catholic, unless I count one doctor, who although baptized Catholic does not consider himself a member of the Church--the general opinion of the staff would have paralleled the oft-quoted but not sufficiently validated statement that many more religious than lay persons were mentally ill. At that time they thought, I guess, that most if not all religious must be at least a little crazy.~ In the past seven years the climate of opinion in our clinic has changed, not as a result of apologetic dialogu-ing but through every day, pragmatic experience. Today, if one were to ask our staff for an opinion, they would probably say that the problems of religious were rather similar to those of lay people but that on the whole the religious seemed to be more insightful, more intelligent, and more motivated toward resolving their problems. O£ course, except for the very ill, who constituted merely a fraction of our religious clientele, intelligence and moti-vation could be presupposed; otherwise they would not have asked for psychiatric help. The Hacker Clinic is not a subsidized agency but a private clinic with some 20 professionals on the staff, most of them psychiatrists (M.D.'s). Because of its private character, patients who seek help there are mostly middle-class, financially independent or well insured, and thus comparable to the well-educated and, sup-posedly, well-socialized religious. In the past three and one half years 156 religious--73 men and 83 women-- and 6 diocesan priests were seen in our clinic. I, personally, spent more than 3500 hours interviewing these men and women. Since each person * This is the text of a talk given on August 8, 1968, at the Ameri-can Canon Law Society's Workshop on Renewal at Notre Dame, Indiana. 4- Andr~e Emery, area director of the Society of Our Lady of the Way, is a sociologist and clinical counselor residing at 127 South Arden Boule-vard; Los Angeles, California 90004. VOLUME 28, 1969 ÷ ÷ admitted to our clinic undergoes a full evaluation, which includes testing and psychiatric consultation and in-volves interviews with at least three different profession-als, and since some religious were seen in therapy not by me but by other members of our staff, the total hours spent by our clinic with religious and priests could easily be three or four times this number. I did not include in my 3500 hours time spent in workshops, conferences, seminars, personal interviews during educational ven-tures, nor time spent evaluating aspirants before they were accepted into a community. Thus the 3500 hours, and some, were devoted entirely to direct clinical inter-views, either for evaluation or for therapy. The 156 religious seen in the past three and one half years--118 of whom were finally professed--represent 34 communities. Of the finally professed 66 were religious sisters, 5 were religious priests, 31 were major seminar-ians, 14 were teaching brothers, and two were members of a secular institute of men. One religious priest was on leave of absence, one woman religious was exclaustrated, and three were dispensed from perpetual vows shortly before coming to the clinic. Of the remaining 38 religi-ous, 21 had temporary vows--5 men and 16 women-- and 17 were novices, of whom 14 were men. Only about 10 per cent of these patients were diag-nosed psychotic and approximately another 10 per cent as severely neurotic. The majority merely had problems, probably not very different from those who did not seek our help. The median age of all religious men and women and diocesan priests whom we saw was 28 years. The median age of the men was somewhat lower than this figure, be-cause of the relatively large number of seminarians and novices among them, and that of the women was some-what higher. Only 19 per cent of the women and 8 per cent of the men were over 40 years of age. The services rendered by the clinic varied. 78, fewer than half of the total, were simply evaluated by us. Of these we recommended therapy or counseling for 37, but to our knowledge only in ten instances was our recom-mendation followed. The other 27 did not receive the recommended help. At present, there are 10 men and 10 women religious in therapy in our clinic, 7 of them for less than a year, 13 for more than a year, and there were 64 others in therapy who are no longer coming. 22 hospital patients were visited daily; the majority who were outpatients were seen once or twice a week, and a few follow-up cases were seen once a month. All were seen in individual therapy, but 15 were also in group therapy. Priests and brothers attended group sessions with lay men, the sisters had their own group. 86, or more than half of all the religious and priests seen by us in the past three and one half years, told us that they wished to leave the religious or priestly life. Had we had longer contact with those whom we have merely evaluated, the number might have been even larger. We did not ask them directly about this and not all volunteered unasked-for information in the first in-terview. Exactly half of those who mentioned leaving did leave, most of them shortly after evaluation and without hav-ing been given an opportunity for further counseling-- or perhaps not desiring it. Ten who were in therapy in our clinic left their communities after therapy was in-terrupted against their wishes or against our recommen-dation. Of the 74 whose therapy with us was not interrupted, only four left--three during therapy and one after mu-tually agreed termination of therapy. These figures speak for themselves: problems can and should be solved rather than run from. After listening carefully to a relatively large number of religious men and women, I asked myself the ques-tion: Are their problems similar or different from those that weigh down our other patients? We cannot separate our personal growth and our in-dividual crises from the historical development and con-temporary crises of the group with which we are identi-fied. There is no human being who is free from the influence of the society into which he was born and in which he has been raised. While we sift perceptions and experiences through our personal physical and psycho-logical apparatus that is very particularly our own and give them special emphasis and slant, our apperceptions, our symbols, our values, our conflicts, our likes and dis-likes, the very traits that we think of as most personal, most expressive of our individuality, are suprapersonal. They are consensual with the culture in which we are rooted; at least they must be such if we are to be con-sidered "normal" and not "odd" by our contemporaries. This was brought home to us rather early in our ex-perience with religious patients. At that time some of our non-Catholic staff still expected to find intolerable conditions triggering if not causing the acute problems of religious. (Off the record, I have seen conditions in religious houses of men which I, or most any woman, religious or lay, could not have tolerated, and I am sure that some men, in turn, would feel the same way about our houses.) But to come back to the clinic: Not more than half a dozen of our religious patients described without corn-÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 37 4. Andr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 38 plaint, external circumstances in their convents that seemed intolerable to us. The remarkable thing was that. the communities from which they came were all foreign in their origin and rule and also in their membership. The conditions described would have seemed intolerable to most American religious, too; yet the religious who lived under these conditions, including our foreign-born patients, did not find it particularly intolerable. And so we had to face the fact that our judgment of what was tolerable or intolerable was made from' the point of view of national culture, which was the same for American doctors as for American religious from active congrega-tions. Taking this basic dependency on the culture group for granted, we cannot be astonished that many of the basic problems of religious men and women in the United States do not seem to differ greatly from those of other American men and women. The growth of Western civilization, together with its stratification and specialization, has created models of shifting, sectional, and contradictory prototypes, from Ronald Reagan to Martin Luther King Go Malcolm X. Ours is a mobile society, multi-valued, materialistic, outer directed, as the sociologist would say, easily brain-washed by mass media, advertisements, fads, and. ffish-ions. It is peer-group oriented rather than hierarchical and, at present, is plagued by rebellions, which while not necessarily more violent than those of the past are cer-tainly more ubiquitous. Change and not stability is the epitome of this kind of society even in human relationships, as the steadily in-creasing divorce rate dramatically shows. That time, and thus change, is a human dimension was already recog-nized by Heraclitus 2500 years ago. But the rate of change is not constant; some structures change slower than others; and there are periods when the same entity, be it matter, living being, or human society, slows down or accelerates. The period in human life when change is most evident is adolescence. Yet Erikson, who is perhaps the best known psychologist of this country, calls this period "moratorium"--delay of adulthood, which the young person needs to integrate earlier childhood experiences and to learn to conform to the larger society which will soon replace his immediate family environment. In our Western world--and, particularly in the United States which is considered the apex of it--this morato-rium on adulthood has become extended far beyond the period of physical and sexual maturation and," thus, adolescent problems he.avily "interlace and aggravate the problems that young adults, as a matter of course, must face. It is not that our young who marry or enter religion are much younger in age than were those in former generations, but their readiness to assume adult respon-sibilities, particularly continuing responsibilities, seems to be less. Young and not-so-young religious who were born and nurtured in our culture are no less exempt from this extended moratorium and its consequences than are their married counterparts. Is it really--as we often hear---~the hierarchical struc-ture of religious communities that keeps religious im-mature? More immature than their lay counterparts? We did not find religious more immature or more frequently immature. But, obviously, those who did not wish to assume responsibility, for whatever reason, had a better excuse, a ready-made rationalization. Still, the child wife, the happy-go-lucky husband are not rarities either. The impulsive adolescent who marries or enters religion, having "fallen in love," will back out quickly, and this will be less traumatic for the religious than for the married. But those who cling to the idealized image con-structed by their immature motivations and resist facing reality---even a reality not inferior to their fantasy, just different--will experience severe crises, in marriage or religious life alike--one, two, five, ten years after their initial commitment. The fantasy wears away bit by bit, leaving them numb, empty, and somehow feeling cheated. I was told with great feeling by a 25-year-old mother of four that she had just discovered that she was not a teen-ager any more but "mommy" and that she did not like it a bit. As a matter of fact, she did not know whether she liked children at all. And I had to listen to a very angry, very depressed young superior of 28, who "just wanted to do a good job," but whose ambition was thwarted by the non-cooperation of several sisters, in-cluding one severely mentally ill, and who found that she could not maintain the unruffled, cooly kind exterior that earned her the early appointment to office. The pedestal broke, both under the community where "such things could happen" and under her who could not live up to the fantasy ideal. But to go a step further: Not only does our culture extend the moratorium on adulthood, it openly vaunts that adulthood is not worth aiming for. We have a cult of youth--the historical development of which, though relevant, cannot be presented here. Youth has ceased to be regarded as a transition period in which adult living is learned, in which adult identities are crystalized. It has become an aim, an identity, a subculture, emulated in some ways by the broadest segments of society. Who wants to be an adult today? (And who wants to be a + + ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 39 A~dr~e JEnt~ry REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS religious superior?) The model wears a miniskirt not only on her hips but in her (or his) head. At the same time, in strange contradiction but with unavoidable logic, we have put terrible responsibilities and burdens on young shoulders, probably more so than did any former generation. One of the main characteris-tics that differentiate human from animal life is time binding: the ability to transmit experience from one-generation to another. To demand from young people that they learn all the answers "on the go," pragmati-cally, by experimentation, to pretend that in the few years of their lives they could and should discover or duplicate the accumulated experience of mankind is sheer hypocrisy, or what is worse, delusion. The im-mature cannot become mature in human society with-out guidance. To quote Erikson: "By abdicating, by abrogating responsibility, the older generation deprives the young from forceful ideals which must exist for their sake--if only so that they can be rebelled against." Ra-tionalizing our inconsistencies and vacillations, our cow-ardice and lack of principles, with the excuse that it frees them from dependency does not help the young to grow. Is the peer society of the street gang superior to the authoritarian family still found in urban minority groups and in farming areas? If we elected (or, God forbid, appointed) only religious under 35 years of age into all offices, would that really guarantee a better gov-ernment than when we acted according to a different cultural pattern and gave the offices only to the old and supposedly "wise"? Are the younger more tolerant, do they show more empathy, more Christian virtue than the old? Or the other way around? No. The generation gap is legitimate only as an ado-lescent phenomenon--as a pause (though a very active pause) in which the young person has left childhood behind and has not yet reached adulthood. Otherwise the gap is mostly semantic: personalities clashing because they do not use the same symbols, same words, for the same concepts. Interestingly, now it is the old who are expected to learn the jargon of the young and not the other way round. I still smile when I remember a recent conference attended by some 200 people where no one was less than twice 16, and most three times that age and more, and where we had to sing Ray Repp songs during Mass--which in my opinion are both poor music and poor theology--just to show that we were "with it." To this point I have spoken only of a basic social fact--I don't like to call it problem--that affects both lay people and religious in our culture and which is at the root of many symptoms that we encounter in the clinic. There is an important facet of the present confusion that (oncerns religious and priests in particular. At a recent discussion in our clinic I was asked whether I could specify the ideal, the model of a religious--his own concept of his role or identity. I had to admit that had I been asked this question ten years ago, or even five, I would have thought it answerable--but not now. Incidentally, I have asked this same question of several major superiors and received just as vague a reply. It becomes more and more clear that the theology of religi-ous life still needs to be written. Up to the time Pope John opened the windows of the Vatican, we have had--and to some extent we still have--a subculture of religious institutes, distinct though related to othe~ subcultures of the Catholic Church. In the United States the religious subculture was colored by Irish-French, or rather 'French-Irish Ca-tholicism. This religious subculture, this cultural island, was well defined, stable, hierarchical, in contrast to the mobile, multi-valued, peer-oriented culture that sur-rounded it. It had not only a particular philosophy but also its own symbolism and language--understood only by the initiated but understood by all of them much in the same way. Because of its confidence-inspiring stability and the idealism of its teachings, it greatly appealed to many: to the searching, to the young who wanted to cut the apron strings but still needed support, to those who needed status, or those who wished to leave behind materialism, competition, and self-seeking. In a sense it was all to all: it provided security and challenge, asceticism and freedom from cares, opportunity for self-development and oppor-tunity for self-sacrifice. Or so it seemed. As we have been a nation on wheels for some time, not only the present generation of religious but at least two previous ones had to do quite a bit of adjusting to this distinctly delineated structure when they left their families of origin. Perhaps the children of foreign-born parents found it easier to adjust--perhaps not. It de-pended on how much they introjected or, conversely, rejected the values of their primary group. But whether first, second, or fourth generation of Americans, all who entered attempted to adjust to religious life as they found it. I said, attempted to adjust, because our early up-bringing cannot be completely eradicated and conflict patterns will persist. Many of our seriously ill patients were older men and women: some chronically ill with symptoms of chronic frustration in attempted adjust-ment; some acutely ill, with primary processes breaking through the surface of more or less successful controls exercised for years. Adjustment to the religious life, however, has not been 4- Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 4] ÷ ÷ ÷ A~tdr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS entirely a one-way street. Needs and values which the individual member brought from his primary culture had also an effect on the religious institutes. These slowly changed, became more American in character, sought some kind of equilibrium with the broader society around them. Still, on the whole, they remained distinctive. Thus, the young person who entered might have found it more or less ego syntonic, more or less cor-responding to his personality and early upbringing, but rarely found it completely so. The religious way of life always demanded sacrifice, self-denial, rejection of some earlier values. At the same time it offered sufficient re-wards to enable the individual to exist in it. And then, if I may say so without offending, after Vatican II we suddenly changed horses mid-stream. The point here is not whether the change was for the better or for the worse, and most of us hope and trust that it will be to the better; nor am I questioning the need, in some respects the overdue need, for change. I merely wish to underscore the unavoidable problems that arise from such a massive and headlong change. For the sake of illustration, imagine that you are a teacher, nurse, or drill-press operator and on short notice you are told that your job description and the require-ments for employment have been redefined and that the procedures as well as the rewards have been changed. Moreover, not only are the old role definitions super-seded, but you are told that you must get new directives and guidelines--except that you are not sure from whom or what. Would you not get upset? As one of my patients said: "Formerly we knew that if we got on the boat that went in the right direction and didn't get of[, we were ok. Now we are made personally responsible to get where we are going, but no one has yet thought it through how to get there." Under such circumstances it is understandable that severe conflicts develop. You will say that most of the changes were thoroughly discussed and dialogued, that they were not sudden, that opinions were polled, votes were taken. No one's good will and integrity are being questioned. But even if experiments Were discussed beforehand, did we evalu-ate them thoroughly afterwards? This conference is an attempt to do so. Just how long is it that we have been discussing them? Two years, three years, five years? If we cannot integrate complex childhood experiences during the normal years of adolescence and must extend the moratorium, just how long do you think we need to sift and integrate the huge mass of divergent opinions, rules, roles, and behavior that has been sprung on us in the recent past? A frequent consequence is panic, and not necessarily among the old timers who now have an excuse to remain passive, to leave the initiative to the young, and, if they cannot resist temptation, to sit back and criticize. It is more often the young who panic, because the responsi-bility is too great. Hence exodus of many young progres-sives. Willy-nilly, they accept re.sponsibility for them-selves, but not for the groupl And one cannot blame them; the rules of the game are equivocal and they do I . not know what will prove rewarding. When the religious role is merely a thin veneer on the .I personality, under the abrasion of uncertainties and clashes it wears off. Religio6s ,,who s'eeme,d, to be well adjusted now revert to tlaeir real selves--and since public disapproval has diminished--leave the subculture with which they were not fully identified. It is only lately that we have come to recognize that ¯ I keeping young religious isolated for long periods in the exclusive company of their peers, even for the sake advanced education, did not help them develop ~rich human qualities and did not foster community spirit. They tended to remain a sepa, rate group which out of psychological necessity had to f, ancy itself better and dif-ferent from others, inside and outside the community. The unreality was further inflated when the young sisters were assigned, strmght from school, into positions which their lay ¯counterparts ~could achieve only .after many years of hard work. We liave seen the young Ph.D. who was made a full professojr right after she received her degree leave the community when she encountered the first serious obstacle; the[ young R.N., supervisor without ever having been a rookie nurse, getting doctors, staff, and patients into turmoil land feeling "defeated for good"; the young priest, promiiing member of his order, going literally on a sit-down strike because he could not do all that he expected from hi~nself and from others. Into this group belong also t~e men and women whose delayed adolescence led to so-cAlled "late blooming" and who leave religious life because of real or purported .I sexual oroblems. In our experience, there were far fewer of .these than generally assumed, at least among the women religious. Here I must stop and quali[y~ what I have just said. In the last two months 78 case histories accumulated on my desk, of clients not seen by us in the clinic but about whom I was consulted by a non-sectarian adoption agency. These are cases of seventy-eight ex-religious, most them college graduates, many with advanced degrees, who left their convents 6 to 18 months ago and who are expecting a child out of wedlock. They are mostly in their middle thirties, and most of the fathers of the child ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 Andr~e Emery REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 44 to be are members of underprivileged minority groups. Not one was a victim of rape. Practically all said the same thing: our community did not change fast enough with the times; our community is not involved with the poor and underprivileged. We wanted to get dose to people in a personal apostolate (none of them were trained social workers); we wanted to live with them in the inner citymand get involved. And so they did. A few of them stated that they were advised by priests to leave the celibate life and get married. But, one of them added bitterly, they never warned her how few eligible men there were in her age bracket. Not knowing these women personally, I cannot judge how many had serious sexual problems, for which this certainly was not the answer, and how many were naively following fashions or using broadly preached but not sufficiently thought through slogans to excuse their im-mature acting out. As regards the quoted advice, it seems to be freely given to both men and women religious, as if marriage were a cure for sexual problems, to be used on prescriptionmwhich incidentally doesn't work rather than a sacrament and a responsible human relationship requiring maturity and mutual respect from the part-ners. ~Arhile some of the foregoing is a regrettable but pre-dictable reaction to stress, enhanced by a cultural incli-nation to buy what is advertised or what is in fashion, irregardless, there is an additional psychological com-ponent in the existing confusion among the religious. When a person searches for a new identity or new iden-tification, by definition he ceases to act in the role of a mature adult. He regresses to quasi-adolescence, to turmoil, indecisiveness, influencibility, impulsive acting out. We have seen this syndrome frequently in refugees and adult immigrants when they tried to adjust to their new country and its culture. The search for new mean-ing, new relevance, new identity in the religious life, whether to the better or worse, per se increases the turmoil caused by other individual and social factors. Perhaps the present quasi-adolescent upheaval of the religious is unavoidable, and hopefully it will lead us into a more and better integrated religious adulthood; but it is painful for those who go through it and more often than not embarrassing for the onlooker. Having become aware of widespread immaturity in comtemporary society and of its consequences, we are now inclined to fall into another pit. We are tempted to demand the impossible: that the girls and boys who enter our institutes, seminaries, convents, be mature. Per-haps maturity could be demanded if we would up the entrance age by some 20 years, in the hope that someone else would give the young the necessary guidance and would develop their personalities for religious life. We cannot stock novitiates and seminaries with sure bets--we have to take chances. We cannot screen out all who are immature, because if we do we abdicate as religious educators, as adults who take the responsibility for nurturing and forming the young. And certainly we should not screen out anyone on the basis of one test, given in absentia and scored by someone who never saw the applicant in person. On the other hand, we should not let young religious take perpetual vows when there is a serious question regarding their suitability. Severely neurotic persons, not to speak of psychotic or potentially psychotic ones, should not be burdened hy commitments which they will not be able to keep. But, when a professed member of a community be-comes disturbed or mentally ill, do we have a right to say that he should never have entered, that she never had a vocation, that they should be let go if at all possible? Are only the perfect seated at the banquet of the Master? Father Orsy last night said that St. Peter would not have been canonized--I don't think he would have been ac-cepted into a novitiate. Are our disturbed brothers and sisters very different from us but for being harder hit by suffering? Who is my neighbor? Only the under-privileged in the inner city? These troubled men and women in our communities are our closest neighbors. They are our poor: we have accepted them, we formed or tried to form or deform them, and we must bear their burden if we are to be called Christians. There are great differences in attitudes toward disturbed religious in their communities. Trying to get rid of them, with the shallow excuse that they never had a vocation and never should have been accepted, is injustice, even if there should be some truth in it; sending them from house to house or cramming them into the motherhouse is no answer to the problem either, and neither is the plan to live in an apartment with chosen friends the solution. When I said good-bye to the chief of our clinic, he said: "You will make a theological point, won't you? [He meant some reference to religion.] After all, you will be speaking to religiousl" I am tempted to belabor for a couple of minutes the often heard remark that no one wants to commit him-self today--which is true to a certain extent. But more often than not we found that persons, religious or lay, are desperately hungry for commitment. They want to give themselves to something or someone. They so very much want to entrust themselves to some group or indi-vidual. But they have not learned to trust because they Counseling Religious VOLUME ~'8, J.969 + ÷ Andr~e Emery REVIEW'FOR R'EL'~G IOUS ,t6 have not found anyone really trustworthy in their young years. Therefore they want and need some tangible evi-dence of appreciation, something in exchange--love or ~uccess--and they want a way out if things do not work out. Their needs are unfulfilled childhood needs; their reservations are rooted deep down in bone and marrow. The concept of commitment is not easily reconciled with such reservations--certainly not Christian commitment which must be an adult act of self-giving. I know that the saints and particularly the mystics are not "in" now, but rarely have I found a better description of the "perfec-tion of charity" (if I may use such an antiquated term) than in one of St. Catherine of Siena's mystical dialogues when she heard our Lord say." I have placed you in the midst of your fellows that you may do to them what you cannot do to me, that is to say, that you may love your neighbor of free grace without expecting any return from him. Someone asked how to tell whether a tree brought good fruit? We are too often inclined to think of success as good fruit. From where did we, Christians, get this notion anyhow? Of instant success as a must? Or even as hard-earned reward of the just? Christianity always was a losing cause, at least in the short run. Few apostles have reaped where they have sown. There was a small item in the Los Angeles morning paper the day I left home. I cut it out because of its deep significance for us. The follow-ing is an excerpt from it: The finest sermon he ever heard, said Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, was just three sentences long. It was delivered by Miss Kathleen Bliss of the Church of England, before the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches last year. In a very brief closing service we had sung the ancient hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus". Dr. Bliss then read from the Gospel of Luke in the 4th Chapter, the account of Jesus returning to Nazareth and entering into the Synagogue and opening a book where it read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering the sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to pro-claim the acceptable year of the Lord." ,, Then Dr. Bliss spoke her three sentences. Our hymn was a prayer in which we dared to ask for the presence and guid-ance of the Holy Spirit. We never know whether He will come or what He will do to us if He comes. I remind you that the scripture account which we have just heard goes on to tell us that Jesus' neighbors in Nazareth then tried to kill Him." .There is another variation on the success theme that is even more disturbing than the naive expectation of in-st~ int reward. In our work with religious we frequently came face to face with a man or woman, capable, tal-ented, "who was deeply angry, resentful, depressed, be-cause he or she was not omnipotent. Some wanted to change others, some wanted to change themselves, some sought external success, recognition, others the persdnal satisfaction of achievement, or, occasionally, material goods. None of them faced "this carnal reality," the limits of human existence, in themselves and outside. They wanted something and therefore it had to be. If it did not happen, they went on a "strike" or they became negative, withdrawn, maneuvering-~each according to his personality. Passive-aggressive? Not always. But what-ever the pathology or the character structure, with one's "third ear" one perceived the echo of the ancient pro~nise: And you will be like God--all knowing, all powerful. When the promise did not come true, there came forth the even more ancient answer: Non serviam. I will not serve. Familiar? Some years ago it was thought that emotionally dis-turbed and mentally ill people were often preoccupied with religion. Actually, in certain crisis periods of life, such as 5-6 years in childhood, in adolescence, in the so-called change of life, when approaching death, people become preoccupied with basic human problems: life-death, love-hate, God or the void. There is a certain logic in that people should turn to God in periods of suffering and turmoil--though sometimes this might be expressed in the form of cursing. I might have misunder-stood one of the earlier speakers, and if I did, I apolo-gize, but it seemed to me that she said that the suffering and the dying are always completely self-centered. Not always, as many concentration camp cases have shown, to mention only extreme instances. When an individual is deeply rooted in a culture that recognizes the tran-scendent, and if his childhood trust was permitted to grow into adult faith, even if he experienced shorter or longer periods of emotional fatigue (to use an euphe-mism) in high and low periods of life he will return to God. This is why I was deeply shaken by the fact that of the 161 religions and priests to whom I have listened for several thousand hours, only two, one priest and one brother, mentioned God. No matter how much I would like to shun it, how can I avoid asking the question: What tragic lack in us, Christian parents of the present generation, religious men and women, teachers, nurses, social workers, catechists, what tragic lack in us has buried God so deep that even the suffering and the troubled cannot reach Him today? Indeed, there is a need for renewal that goes far beyond adaptation. + ÷ ÷ Counseling Religious VOLUME 28, 1969 ANDREW J. WEIGERT Social Dimensions of Religious Clothing Andrew J. Wei-gert is a faculty member of the De-partment of Soci-ology and Anthro-pology at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS The Catholic experience as presently interpreted in America is undergoing many changes.1 In the midst of such widespread change, there may be a danger in under-valuing certain sociological dimensions of clothing in the case of the religious orders, both men and women, and to some extent for the diocesan clergy as well. The prob-lem is no doubt most pervasive in the religious orders of women. At the same time, there seems to be some un-clarity and lack of simple sociological principles to in-form the discussion and aid in the decision making. A folk adage has it that "the cowl does not make the monk," but the resistance offered to changes in religious garb from certain quarters makes it apparent that some may think differently. Nor is such resistance always to be attributed to unthinking conservativism. It may be based on a well founded respect for the "reality" and social, power of appearances. These realistic bases for questioning the advisability of change for the sake of change deserve respect and should be distinguished from various traditions which grow around uniforms (for example, saints appearing in a certain habit) as attempts to legitimize and sanctify a uniform for all times, places, and social orders. The present discussion of religious clothing will focus around two value orientations which are taken to be more or less conflicting: witnessing for other-worldly (transcendent) values, and identifying with this-worldly (immanent) values. In order to witness for other-worldly values, an individual must be recognized as standing for such values; and the sign, for example, a uniform which cannot be identified with contemporary cultural styles, which enables him (throughout this paper, the him will refer to the "religious," both male and female, with all wish to thank Sisters Rosina Fieno, C.S.J., and Mary Margaret Zaenglein, I.H.M., for criticizing .an earlicr version of this paper. II due respects to the latter) to be recognized as a witness also sets him apart from non-witnessing persons. Simi-larly, in order to be identified with this-worldly values, an individual must be recognized as belonging to the group which shares these values. Social recognition, as mediated by clothing, is a cognitive process whereby the viewer classifies and labels individuals according to his interpretation of their tailored appearance. An in-escapable social-psychol0gical dimension of every social order is the necessary visual "giving off" of information about his place and identity in that society which each individual proffers in his appearance. Stated aphoris- ~tic.ally, a member of society cannot not "appear," tha

Issue 29.4 of the Review for Religious, 1970. ; EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Everett A. Diederich, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to I~EVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63to3. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's Church; 3at Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania tgxo6. + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited with ecclesiastical appro,'al by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri ¯ 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. Published bimonthly and copyright ~) 1970 by REVIEW FOR RELtO~OUS at 428 East Preston Street~ Baltimore, Mary* land 21202. Printed in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland and at additional mailing offices. Single copies: $1.00. Subscription U.S.A. and Canada: $5.00 a year, $9.00 for two years; other countries: $5.50 a year, $10.00 for two years. Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order paya-ble to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to p~rsons claiming to represent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Change of address requests should include former address. Renewals and new subscriptions, where a~eom-panied by a remittance, should be scat to REvz8w ~oa RE~m~ous; P. O. ~x 671; Bahimo~, Ma~land 21203. Changes of addr~, b~n~ co~es~nd~ce, and orders ~t a~¢ompanitd ~ a rtmittanee should be ~t tO REVIEW ~R RELIGIOUS ; 428 East ~eston St~t; BMfmo~. Ma~land 21202. Manu~ripts. ~ito~al cor- ~s~ndence, and ~ks for ~iew should ~ sent to R~v~w ~oa R~m~ous; 612 Hum~ldt Building; 539 North Grand ~ul~ard; Saint ~uis, Mi~u~ 63103. Qu~dons for answering should be s~t to the add~ of the Qu~fio~ and ~we~ ~tor. JULY 1970 VOLUME 29 NUMBER4 MOTHER MARY FRANCIS, P.C.C. Creative Spiritual Leadership If we are going to talk about creative leadership, we shall first of all want to clarify what we mean by leader-ship and what we mean by creative. That these are not self-evident terms or even pr~sen.tly readily understand-able terms should be obvious from an imposing current witness to creative leadership envisioned as an abolition of leadership, and a transversion of creativity into annihi-lation. While it is true enough that, theologically ~and philosophically speaking, annihilation is as great an act as creation, hopefully we do not analogically conceive of our goal in leadership as being equally well attained by annihilation or by creativityl As God's creativity is to cause to be, something that was not, our creativity as superiors who are quite noticeably not divine, is to allow something that is, to become. As a matter of fact, we assume a responsibility to do this by accepting the office of superior. Much has been and is being written and said about the superior as servant. This is so obviously her role that one wonders what all the present excitement is about. Quite evidently, Otis role, this primary expression of leadership, has been for-gotten by some superiors, even perhaps by many supe-riors, in the past. But why should we squander present time and energy in endlessly denouncing such past forget-fulness? Let us simply remember truth now, and get on with our business. One characteristic of creative leader-ship is to point a finger at the future rather than to shake a finger at the past. St. Clare wrote in her Rule more than seven hundred years .ago that the abbess must be the handmaid of all the sisters, not pausing to labor so evident a fact but simply going on to give some particulars which have a ve.ry modern ring: the abbess is to behave so affably that the sisters can speak and act toward her as toward one who serves them. That dear realist, Clare of Assisi, who Mother Mary Francis, P.C.C., is federal abbess of the Collettine Poor Clare Federation; 809 E. 19th Street;. Roswell, New Mex-ico 88201. VOLUME 29 1970 497 ÷ ÷ Mother Francis REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS passes so easily from blunt warnings about such un-monastic natural virtues as envy, vainglory, covetousness, and grumbling, to airy reminders that it is no good get-ting angry or worried about anyone's faults as this merely deals charity a still severer blow--that dear realist had obviously run up against so~ne personalities who were "handmaids" sufficiently formidable to discourage any-one's rendering them personal recognition in this area. The abbess is supposed to be lovable, for St. Clare en-visions a community where sisters obey a superior be-cause they love her and not because they dread her. This was quite a novel as well as a radical theology of superior-ship in Clare's day. And if it remains radical today, it is a great shame that it sometimes remains novel also. The medieval saint makes so much of this point of the lovable-hess of the superior that she returns to it in her dying Testament, begging her successors that they behave them-selves so that the sisters obey them not from a sense of duty but from love. It's not just the same thing she is saying again, however. You note that whereas in the Rule she does not want any fear or dread of the superior, in the Testament she rules out dutifulness as well. It has got to be a matter of love itself. Who, after all, would want to be loved out of a sense of duty? It would be in-suiting, really. Any normal superior would rather be loved in spite of herself than because of her office. St. Clare makes quite a point in her brief Rule and Testament of describing the manifestations of this lovableness she so insists upon. She gives us her idea of creative leadership. And its present practicability may make us want to pause and clear our throats before the next time we utter that bad word, "medievalism," as an indictment. Besides the general affability which Clare describes in Rule and Testament, she underscores an availability rather beyond and considerably more profound than the "let's sit down in the cocktail lounge and talk about salvation history" mentality. St. Clare wants an on-site superior who is "so courteous and affable" (there's that word again) that the sisters can tell her their troubles and need~, seek her out "at all hours" with serene trust and on any account,--their own or their sisters'. This last point is particularly arresting, considering again that this is a medieval abbess delineating the characteristics of a creative superior as she conceived those characteristics in about 1250, not a 1970 progressive-with-a-message. Clare did not favor isolationism in community. Each of her nuns was supposed to notice that there were other nuns around. And she called them sisters, which was quite original in her day. She favored coresponsibility quite a while before the 1969 synod of bishops, taking it for granted that the abbess was not to be the only one concerned for the good of the community, but that it belongs to the nature of being sisters that each has a lov-ing eye for the needs of all the others. Again, there is her famous saying: "And if a mother love and nurture he~ daughter according to the flesh, how much the more ought a sister to love and nurture her sister according to the spiritl" Yes, it does seem she ought. And maybe we ought to be as medieval as modern in some respects. For some medieval foundresses did an imposing amount of clear .thinking on community, on sisterliness, on the meaning of humble spiritual leadership which we, their progeny, could do well to ponder. So, there's affability, availability, accessibility. When we read St. Clare's brief writings and savor the droll confi-dences given in the process of her canonization, we can conclude that this superior often toned her sisters down but never dialed them out. Then, St. Clare insists that the creative spiritual leader be compassionate. There is no hint of a prophylactic de-tachment ~om human love and sympathy nor of that artificial austerity which pretends that to be God-oriented is to be creature-disoriented. No, Clare says of the su-perior: "Let her console the sorrowful. Let her be the last refuge of the troubled." Note, she does not tell. the contemplative daughter to work it all out with God, and that human sympathy is for sissies. And she warns that "if the weak do not find comfort at her [the abbess'] hands," they may very well be "overcome by the sadness of despair." Those are quite strong terms from a woman who did not trade on hyperboles or superlatives and was no tragedienne. Again, she has something v~ry plain and very strong to say about responsibility. For we had better not talk about coresponsibility unless we have understanding of primary responsibility. "Let her who is elected consider of what sort the burden is she has taken upon her and to whom an account of those entrusted to her is to be rendered." So, Clare will have the superior clearly under-stand that she has a definite and comprehensive responsi-bility to a particular group of people, a responsibility which is immeasurably more demanding than counting votes to determine the consensus. She is supposed to cre-ate and maintain an atmosphere in which sisters can best respond to their own call to holiness. Obviously, she can-not do this alone. But she is the one most responsible for making it possible for each sister to contribute her full share in creating and maintaining this atmosphere. She is the ,one who is particularly responsible for not just al-lowing, but helping the sisters, and in every possible way, to r~alize their own potential. ÷ ÷ ÷ Leadership VOLUME 29, 1970 499 + + + Mother Frands REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ~00 If I may deliver to any possibly frustrated or depressed superiors some glad tidings out of my own small experi-ence, I beg to announce this finding: Sisters are not as hard on superiors as many dour authors make them out to be. They do not expect perfection in the superior. They are, as a matter of fact, quite ready to pass over the most obvious faults and failures in the superior as long as they know she loves them and would do anything in the world for them, and is herself struggling along with them to "walk before God and be perfect," and having just as hard a time as they with this quite exacting but certainly thrilling divine program. Isn't it, after all, singularly ex-hilarating to have been asked by a God who has witnessed all one's past performances, to be perfect as He is perfect[ But that is an aside of sorts. The point I was making is that sisters will sooner forgive the faults of the warm-hearted than the "perfection" of the coldhearted. At least that is my personal observation. It is not faults that alienate people, it is phoneyness. And may it always alienate them, for it is nothing to make friends with. Now, if the superior is set to create and to make it possible for the sisters to help create an atmosphere suited to the response to a divine call to holiness, this atmog-phere will have to be one of real human living. For the only way a human being can be holy is by being a holy human being. I believe one of the more heartening signs of our times is the accent on humanness. For one of our tiredest heresies is the proposal that the less human we are, the more spiritual we are. Another aside I am tempted to develop here is a reflection on how we describe only one type of behavior as inhuman. We never attribute that dread adjective to the weak, hut only to the cruel. .But I had better get on with what I was saying, which is that dehumanized spirituality is no longer a very popular goal. This is all to the good. However, we shall want to be sure when we talk enthusiastically about the present ac-cent on real human living in religious life that the quali-fying "real" is not underplayed. It needs rather to be underscored. Certainly we would evince a genuine poverty of thought to equate real human living with ease. On the other hand, there is evidently a direct ratio between sacrificial living and real human fulfillment, between poor, obedient living and joy, between ritual and liberty, between the common task and real (as opposed to con-trived) individuality. Genuine common living in reli-gious life is not the witness of the club, but of the com-munity. Its real proponents are not bachelor girls, but women consecrated to God as "a living sacrifice holy and pleasing to God." Our blessed Lord emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. And no one yet has ever been fulfilled by any other process than kenosis. Beginning with the Old Testament, history affords us a widescreen testimony to the truth of the binding and liberating power of sacrifice. It binds the individuals in a community together, and it liberates both individuals and the community as such into the true and beautiful expression of self-ness which is what God envisioned when He saw that each of His creations was very good. History shouts at us that self-ness is not a synonym but an antonym for selfishness. May we have ears to hearl Just as nothing so surely situates persons in isolationism as establishing a mystique of ease and a cult of comfort, so does nothing so surely both promote and express genuine community as sacrificial action, whether liturgical or do-mestic. This generation feels it has come upon the glori-ous new discovery that the world is good. It is indeed a glorious discovery, but not a new one. St. Francis, for one, discovered this in the thirteenth century. But if joyous Francis owned the world, it was precisely because he never tried to lease it. It is essential that the creative superior be a living reminder that our situation in time is not static but dy-namic, our involvement in the world urgent but not ulti-mate, our service of others indicative rather than deter-minative, and our earthly life not a land-lease but a pilgrimage. Somewhere or other I recently read that the one good line in a new play whose name I happily can-not now recall is the one where a character looks at a plush-plush apartment hotel and remarks: "If there is a God, this is where he lives." I seem to detect a bit of this mentality in some of our experimentation. This would be only mildly disturbing if it pertained to the kind of luxuriousness that keeps periodically turning up in his-tory until a new prophet-saint arrives on the scene to de-nounce it and expunge it from the local roster. What is deeply disturbing is that we are sometimes uttering brave and even flaming words about identifying with the poor at the same time that we are rewriting just this kind of past history. But that is another small aside from the large issue, which is real human living and the sacrificial element that is one of the most unfailing preservatives of that "real" in human living. The material poverty and inconvenience just alluded to is but a minor facet of the idea, but I do think it is a facet. Do any of us lack personal experience to remind us that the poorest communities are usually the happiest? Nothing bores like surfeit, nothing divides like ease. If it is true--and it is!--that the religious community does not rightly understand its vocation unless it sees it-self as part of the whole ecclesial community, the cosmic VOLUME 29, 1970 50! + ÷ ÷ Mother Frands REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS community, it is equally true (because it is the same truth turned around) that the religious community will be to the ecclesial community and the cosmic community only What it is to itself and in itself. The creative leader will want to accent this to her sisters so that they can accent it to one another. Not verbally. Just vitallyl we shall be to the Church and to the world only what we are to each other, no more and no less. And what we are to each other will inevitably serve the Church and th~ world. Every superior is called to be a prophet. Perhaps we could even say that this is her highest creative service in allowing and assisting others to realize their potential and release their own creative energies. Now that we are all nicely educated to understand that the prophet is not the one who foretells the future so much as the one who says something about the present, the creative superior's prophet role becomes not only clear but uncomfortable. Jeremiah would doubtless have had a much higher popu-larity rating if he had limited his observations to a pleas-ant, "Shaloml" It is so much easier to say "Shalom" than to say "Do penance, or you shall all perish." Of course, it is best of all to prophesy both penance and peace, but we shall have to keep them in that order. And our own ef-forts to achieve that real human living which has to be rooted in penance and sacrifice give abundant testimony that peace is indeed a consequence of penance performed in love, of sacrifice as a choice of life style rather than just a choice among things. Obviously, obedience is the profoundest expression of sacrifice. And maybe one of the biggest mistakes that eventuated into that maternalism in religious communi-ties which has had us running such high temperatures in recent press years, is that of supposing that obedience is for subjects only. Allow me another aside to interject here another small idea I have been nurturing. It is, that "subjects" is a very poor word substitute for "sisters" and of itself precipitates a whole theological misconception of what and who a superior is. Subjects are persons ruled over. However, a servant does not rule. We need to get rid of the monarchical connotations of "subject." And if we begin by getting rid of the term "subject," we may be already better equipped to understand that the superior, as servant, is the first "abject.in the house of the Lord." Once we establish her as abject, we shall perhaps be less ready to label her "reject." A creative superior will have to excel in obedience. It is part of her role as prophet. She must obey others' needs at their specified time according to their manner and manifestations. She must respond not just to the insights God gives her, but to those He gives her sisters. She should obey their true inspirations as well as her own. She ought to be obedient to the very atmosphere she has helped the sisters to create. For we can never establish a communal modus vivendi and then sit back to enjoy it. Life, like love, needs constant tending. Life needs living as love needs loving. This very thing is essential to crea-tive leadership. Charity is a living thing and, therefore, it is always subject to fracture, disease, enfeeblement, paralysis, atrophy, and death. The prophet is more called to procla!m this truih and to disclaim offenses against this truth than to wear a LUV button on her lapel. It is much easier to waste a LUV banner at a convention than to tend and nurture love in those thousand subtle ways and by those myriad small services for which womanhood is specifically designed, in which religious women should excel, and to which religious superiors are twice called. Real human living which the creative superior is called to promote, can never be anything but spiritual, sacri-ficial, intelligently obedient, and--yes---transcendental. We need not be wary of the word or the concept. The new accent on horizontalism is well placed, for many of us seem to have got a stiffening of the spiritual spine with past concentration on verticalarity. Still, if we adopt a completely horizontal mentality, we are apt to drift off to sleep as concerns genuine spiritual values. After all, the position is very conducive to sleep. We are most fully human when we are vertical. Yes, we reach out horizontally, but our face is upturned to Heaven. The really lovely paradox is that it is only when our eyes are upon God that we are able to see those around us and recognize their needs. They are, after all, each of them "in the secret of His Face." It is a vital serv-ice of creative leadership that it emphasize the essentiality of the transcendental element in real human living. In fact, we could more accurately talk of the transcendental character of full human living than of any transcendental element. The term of our d~stiny is not on earth. There-fore, we shall never rightly evaluate anything that per-tains to earthly existence unless we see it or are attempt-ing to see it from an eternal perspective. And we shall never really live humanly unless we are living spiritually. Certainly we shall never have a religious community that abounds in warm human affection and mutual concern unless it is a religious community concerned primarily with the kingdom of God. We can properly focus on one another only when we are focused on God. For to be fully human is to share in what is divine: "He has made us partakers of His divinity." The most natural superior is, therefore, the most super-natural. And real human living must be based on a val- 4- VOLUME 29, 1970 503 Mother Francis REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ues system that is transcendental. In these days one need scarcely look far afield to discover what becomes of com-munity when the values system is not transcendental. A group of individual women, each doing her thing, is' by no means the same as a community which has a thing to do. To such a community, each sister brings her own creative contribution, and in it each realizes her creative potential. And a servant of creativity is needed for all this. There is much more to be said about creative leader-ship, and others are equipped to say it much better. One can only speak out of one's own experience and with one's own limitations. However, it has been my observa-tion that cloister6d living does offer a certain insight into humanity which is sometimes different from that of per-sons whose professional qualifications doubtless exceed those of the cloistered nun. It's quite predictable, really. We ought to anticipate expertise in human living from those who have chosen to achieve human living in such close quarters. We should expect some spec~ial insights into humanity from those who see it at such dose range and on such limited acreage. So perhaps these simple thoughts may have some small point to niake. Let me add, then, only a final word about the realiza-tion of creativity and about the full expression of human living. We've talked about sacrifice, penance, obedience, transcendentalism. Recently, our sisters ran up against an example of a truly fulfilled human being. This was a priest in his seventies. At thirty, he'd got drunk. And a ,series of really devilish events conspired to turn that one mistake into a tragedy for which he was not responsible. He was used by bigots, manipulated by the circumstances they precipitated, and he was deprived of his priestly faculties. He sought help from his bishop who said it was all very sad, but he really could not do anything. He took it to Rome and got put in a file because, though it was all very sad, there was no canon to cover it. He turned to fellow priests who agreed it was all very sad, but they were very busy and there was nothing they could do about it. (I am very rejoiced to report that one Franciscan ~riar did try, desperately, to help.) No priest ever had more provocation to bitterness. He was the example classique of being treated as a number and not as a person. So, who could blame him that he wrote such vitriolic articles after he left the Church? Anyone could understand his contempt for the hierarchy. And when he sneered at the Roman Curia, you could only say that, after all, he had really had it. Only, the fact is, he did not leave the Church, nor did he write vitriolic articles, nor did he sneer. For forty years he lived the obscure life Of a workingman. He went to Mass each day. And he persevered in faith. God crowned that faith with exoneration of the past and the restoration of sacerdotal privileges only after~ forty years, but one can speculate on the interior crowning when one knows that this priest now offers dally Mass w~th tears that are neither self-pitying nor bitterly s~lding. He's just happy. He's just grateful. And he has obviously ex-perienced more personal fulfilment than any[of the local protestors, for he is beautiful to behold. And this is not to say that wrongs don't m~tter or that protests should never be lodged. It is merely] to offer for consideration the evidence of what suffering]and silence and unshakable faith can do in the line of creating a .I fully realized human being. Maybe supengrs need to point.up these things a little more than some] of us some-times do. ! I am scribbling some of this manuscript ag I watch at the bedside of a dying sister of ours. It's my !first experi-ence as abbess with death. And somehow all reflections on religious life, on community, on leadership, ~n creativity are turned upon this one deathbed in this one small cell. I lind it a very revealing perspective. Sister l~as a way of pointing at the ceiling regularly. And whdn you ask: "What do you see? What is there?" she does ~ot check in with a "vision." She just says: "Joyl" That is the direction to seek for it, if you want to lind it on earth. 4. VOLUME 29, 1970 JOHN D. KELLER, O.S.A. Some Observations on Religious Formation and Spirituality John D. Keller, O.S.A., is the rector of the Augustinian Study House; 3771 East Santa Rosa Road; Camarillo, California 93010. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS There has been a great deal written and great amounts of private and public discussion on the subject of religious formation and spirituality in recent years. I hesitate, therefore, to add to an already prolonged dialogue. But I am encouraged to submit these observations to the wider review of the readership of this journal quite simply be-cause they are not those of an onlooker or expert but of a p.articipant.1 And they are not springing from the mem-ories (be they good or bad) of one person's own period of formation. I write as a member of a large diocesan seminary col-lege faculty and as rector of a small house of studies in which and out of which both clerical and non-clerical candidates are living life in community and preparing for the active ministry. I am not an expert, am not a scholar: I write not as sociologist or statistician or psy-chologist. I have a short memory as regards my own semi-nary and religious formation; with it I am not dissatisfied. For the past three and a half years I have been involved in establishing and guiding a rather minor innovation in the religious formation of candidates for my own order. For this lack of expertise I make no apologies for, I would judge, it is well that we hear more from those who come from the land of untidy students, not neat theory. It is a land where individuals correspond to no profile and frequently, alas, do not respond to the analyses and predictions of the community position paper makers. There is frequently quite a distance between theory and reality, between the goals and philosophy and plans of 1 This ~rticle is adapted from a talk given at the annual meeting of R~gion V (Western) of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in Honolulu, Hawaii, November 3-5, 1969. community study groups and their implementation: pro-posed causes do not always neatly bring abdut their pro-posed effects. My intention is not to rehearse what is ~already (per-haps painfully so) known to you: Houses of formation, as the Church, are in a time of change, innovaltion, and ex-perimentation; initiative, Eersonal choice, ",apostolic ex-periences, questioning, persbnal growth, widening of re-sponsibilities, psychological, counseling ard all on the upswing and have occasion,ed, along with other realiza-tions and "discoveries," chafiges and propose~d changes in religious formation and approaches to th~ life of the Spirit. ' I would like to discuss some observations'I have made ¯ in living with and working with candidates and at the same time indicate the dire'ction of my thl~nking. Father Cuyler's recent report for CARA indicdtes that my thoughts are not without companyfl but there are cer-tainly many points of view. My experience i~ with college age candidates for a men's religious fxatern~ty, but these observations seem applicable in most cases ~o women re-ligious as well. I have grotiped my remarkS¯ under these three headings: the candidates; "format"lon~ ; and spirit-ual life. The Candidates It is axiomatic that our candidates are prgducts of our times. They are articulate; they have been ra,ised on visual media; many come from un'settled home cofiditions; they I are casual in their convers~ttion concermng sexual mat-ters; they respect honesty tb a high degree;' yet they are frequently infected with the cynicism which is prevalent in our society; and like youth of every age they are strug-gling with the personal resolution of the~ discrepancy between ideals and reality.,, ' A study of statistics indicates the number ~of candidates is lower than most of us hi~ve, perhaps been accustomed Io o to. What is most difficult t~ make a determination on is whether or not the quahty is better or, worse. Optt-mists have suggested that we have fewer candidates, but they are of better "quality'(--whatever that! might mean. Optimist or not, my observations are threefold: (1) Many candidates are coming forward with far less "background" as regards their prior religious formation than before. There are fewer presuppositions we might make as regards their general religious belief and prac-tices prior to their becoming.candidates for~ the religious life. The same may be said as regards their family train- I g Cornelius M. Cuyler, S.S., The Changing Direction o] thv Semi-nary Today (Washington: CARA, 1969). .I-÷ ÷ VOLUME 2% 197'0 ]. D Keller REVIEW FOR R[ LIGIOUS ing with regard to manners, use of time, their study habits, recreation, family life style, family authority roles, and so forth. These facts are facts of experience. It is not to say, necessarily, that life in community will be more difficult; but it does say that the trend toward longer pe-riods of probation and orientation is called for. There is a great deal that has to be "got used to." And we must be very patient. As regards background, there is a certain ambivalence in many candidates from another quarter. They are af-fected by a certain "image-lag." The monastic and tradi-tional concepts of priest and religious are still frequently present to the man considering seeking admittance to the religious life. Yet, for the most part, the candidate meets not the bell and cowl, but the call to be his own man and shirtsleeves. The men quickly adjust and very soon one-up us with their call for sandals and beards, but this is a crucial point for many as one image dissolves and the search for a new and more realistic one takes place. Candidates must be taken as they are and from where they are. The need at the moment, as perhaps it was also in the days of our own formation period, is for tremen-dous amounts of firm patience. (2) A second observation on our candidates: They ap-pear to me to be no more nor no less generous than other persons of other times and other places and in other walks of life whom I have known. To oversell their generosity at the offset is to provide the seedbed for the bitterness and resentment toward our new members which is sometimes disturbingly present both among men in the houses of formation and superiors of communities. Our candidates are aspirants--aspiring toward the ideal of Christ's generosity--but they are frequently selfish, their motivation (like ours) is not always 100% pure. And so in the proposing of our programs and in the formulation of policy, we want no penal colony; we do not want to poison the well of our trust in the possibility of doing good with a Lud~eran conception of man's ne'er-do-well nature, but we must accept the fact that selfishness and ignorance do coexist with a man's desire to make a gift of his service and of himself. High ideals coupled with selfish or inconsistent behavior do form a part of the men who wish to join our fraternities. This should not cause alarm: To help resolve this is one of the reasons for their being in training. (3) Our candidates, generally, come 'with the intent of joining in with us. They do want to be a part of what is going on in the religious family. A delicate process must be going on in which the men do feel that they are mem-bers of the fraternity according to their present commit-ment. They must be exposed to the community's mere- bership; join in (in differenlt capacities) the work of the fraternity; be closely linked with the style of life and values of the community. But at the same ume their in-volvement must not be too rapid: predetermined patterns and strong identification with the status quo might cancel out the fresh and renewing insights and contnbutxons of young members; premature inclusion might, make neces-sary withdrawal from the group more difficult or the need to withdraw less apparent; full exposure to all the prob-lems and "intimacies" of the family are not appropriate for the recently arrived and ~often can be a source of dis-traction for the real person,al work at hand. The need for committingl oneself to something is real and we dare not involve ourselves, once having accepted a candidate, in stringing hi.m along indefinitely. Candi-dates should become less and less strangers in our midst and more and more our friends and brothers, or they should leave. The task of formation is also that of inte-gration. Formation" The very notion of "formation" is under attack from some quarters: formation involves being "conformed to"; there is a mold, then, and the program is the cookie punch. Formation, then, is a, threat to the person and his own unique realization of himself. Formation, therefore, is bad and one more examp~le of the dehumanization of the individual not only present in the world but here too in the religious life. That is how the argument runs, and it is buttressed with innumerable examples from the folk-lore of community and convent. If this is what formation is.thought to be, or what it has been, it deserves condemnation. But this argumentation against formation may be refined; examples brought more into line with present practice; the extension of its con-demnation reduced--in gen,~ral, made more reasonable; and it will contain a more s~rious threat to what, I feel, must be involved in the intro~duction of new men into our fraternities. Candidates are joining a pre-existing group of men. They are joining themselves to and identifying them-selves with certain expressed, values and goals. There is a conformation element in the introduction of members to the community. This is related to the discussion by Branick of task and formation in the fine article pub-lished in the RrvlEw FOR I~LIGIOUS last year) This is a fact, I feel, which should not be minimized (personalized, yes, but not minimized). On the contrary, we must at- *Vincent P. Branick, S.M., "Formation and Task," R~vmw RELIGIOUS, V. 28 (1969), pp. 12-20. ,4- 4. + Formation VOLUME 29, 1970 509 ÷ 4. ÷ I. D. Keller REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 511) tempt to give in theory, practice, and the lives of our members a clear representation of our goals, our values, our style of life, our standards--who the community .is. We have an obligation to do this: The candidate has to make a judgment, and he has to be a real sharer in or tending toward these values, goals, and so forth or we cannot hope that his life among us in the future will be a happy one. This brings up a problem which is not the subject of these remarks, but which must be faced: We must have a rather clear understanding of who we are and what we stand for as a community. This does not have to be pre-sented in verbal fashion. In fact it is most convincing when it is seen (not read or heard); but if we have no standards, if we are not clearly standing for something, perhaps we should call a moratorium on accepting candi-dates. All of us are aware of the changes taking place in our houses of formation as regards house rules and discipline. I believe most of us agree with the general thrust of these moves and changes; we accept the rationale behind them. With them as a backdrop I would like to make the fol-lowing observations: (1) Freedom of choice and personally confirmed activ-ity are essential to growth in maturity. But people do make objectively bad choices. And when, with reason, a person's choice is thought to be a bad one, he should be told so. And if a person consistently makes bad choices, his candidacy should seriously be questioned. (2) Frequently candidates' principal occupation is that of studies. It is urgent that the academic program be ex-cellent, that it be demanding of the best the student pos-sesses. The good candidate wants to work; he is being prepared to work in the vineyard; if the candidate finds himself unable to work, he and his superiors, may take this as indication that he is not called to the brotherhood. (3) The period of training is real training for. There is a need, at times, for explicit correlation of the training and the work of the apostolate. This is particularly true of men in the college years. Not only the demands of the future apostolate, but also the present need of these Chris-tians to express their Christian concern for fellowman suggests the desirability and the practice of "apostolic works" during the years of formation. It is well that this be with men of the community already in the field; in works which are allied to the present and future works of the fraternity; that it be work with supervision and encouragement; that it be work with specific goals in mind and which meets the real needs of people in the area. But the experience of many is that this work can easily become overextended, irresponsibly carried out, and serve more as steam cock for seminary pressures than re-sponse to the needs of others. This is not to minimize the value and need of apostolic works. On the contrary, it is to say that because they are important, they deserve greater attention. (4) Part of formation today must include training in the forms of religious obedience which are taking shape in our orders. If the form adopted is one which is relying on consultation with the community, a kind of collegial-ity and consensus, then men must be prepared to accept this responsibility and share in it intelligently. What must be developed, in view of failures in practice which I have witnessed in our own formed communities, is the accept-ance of the fact that regardless of the form in which deci-sions are reached (perhaps after discussion, consensus, and voting), .there is follow-through: though perhaps now seen as more "horizontal," obedience is still a virtue of religion and a normal extended expression of the will of God. (5) In general, there is a great need in formation for more leadership, not less. For the most part, students want more models, more example. They need more en-couragement to reach higher. In this regard I would rec-ommend highly John Gardner's two books Excellence and Self-Renewal.4 And so while authoritarianism will never do, there is in some parts a crippling vacuum of inspiring leadership and demanding standards. Spiritual Lile From "formation" I would like to move on to the sub-ject of the spiritual life. And as I do I would like to call attention to the principal point I wish to make, and at this moment violate. Formation and the spiritual life should not be taken as separate elements of introducing new members into our life. There are elements of discipline and training which we can separate and discuss as it they were separate. But the overriding impact upon the candidates in the house of formation must be that all is marked by the Spirit. We are brothers because we are all possessed by the same Spirit: our rules, discipline, relations between older and younger members, concern for each other, should all be formed by and judged against the Book of Life and the book of our life together. In this regard, conformity to good educational prac- ' John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too. Renewal: The Individual and the Innovating Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1956). Formation VOLUME 2% 1970 4" 4" ÷ ~. D. Keller REVIEW FOR RELIGIOU5 tice seems imperative. Theory and practice must go side by side. And if we must err (as human it is), far better to be heavier on practice than on theory. Let the house of formation practice a real poverty, let the students realize the cost of living, the budget and the crimp of doing without--far better than theorizing. Let there be good liturgy in the house and let it be a central work and con-cern of the community--far better than a course in lit- There might be one exceptionmthe matter of prayer. Many students are inexperienced in the practice of forms of prayer encouraged in our lives. This most personal and delicate area must receive special attention. If riot, we in-troduce the. possibility of impersonal prayer and innumer-able "periods of prayer" which become education in non-prayer. All of our houses, but especially our houses of forma-tion, should show forth this authenticity: 1.ire in the Spirit finds expression in the life of the community--a kind of symbiosis where there is an unconscious flow and tele-vance of one to the other. In all the seminaries and houses of formation I have come in contact with recently, there is a noteworthy point of emphasis being given in the task of spiritual formation. This is the increased importance and use of what has tra-ditionally been called "spiritual direction." It goes by dif-ferent names and the priests and religious involved in it have varying competence, but its value as being very per-sonal and very helpful is quickly appreciated by our can-didates. Though conferences and classes remain necessary in providing a familiarity with our religious tradition, no house of formation should neglect this tremendous oppor-tunity, nor should religious superiors neglect the effort to provide easy access to the spiritual counselors our young members need. One final point with regard to the spiritual life--the much discussed question of religious chastity and celibacy. My experience in discussing the matter with college stu-dents, candidates for the diocesan priesthood and for the religious life, has been that it is far more a problem for journalists, theologians, and men who are already celi-bates than it is for these men. That is not to say that they do not have trouble with the virtue of chastity, nor diffi-culty in whether or not to make the choice for celibacy, or whether or not they are Opposed to celibacy as an obliga-. tory thing. It is to say that they can see celibacy held as both an ideal and a requirement and feel that they can make a personal, non-compelled, and religiously mean-ingful choice in favor of it. This contradicts the conclu- sions of the recent CARA study on the Seminarians ot the Sixties," but I report to you my personal experience. General Observations I would like to bring these remarks to a close with several general observations on our present situation. There are many possibilities for styles of formation. Most communities are presently in the midst of inaugu-rating revised programs. What needs to be said is that most probably many forms will "work" and different combinations of elements can overcome the deficiencies of a program. Students are willing to overlook the inade-quacies, or at least give them their understanding, as long as we show ourselves aware of them and attempt to compensate--and all the time show the interest which proves we care about them as candidates for full mem-bership and our brothers now. Houses of formation and formation programs are not, nor will they be, perfect. As our congregations and the Church herself, the house of formation will always stand in need of reformation. This fact itself can be educative for our students: houses of training will not be ideal, as life in the ministry and full membership in the commu-nity will not be ideal. This might be a source of rein-forcement for the sense of reality in the candidate needed for mature living and decision. In these moments there is a great need for leadership and encouragement in the works of formation as there is in the Church in general. For new members in particular, uncertainty and hesitancy on the part of those to whom they turn for leadership can be not only crippling but also compound the lack of sureness (despite their some-time's cocky appearances) which surrounds the young. In conclusion, may I point out the obvious and be ex-cused for underlining that which stands in bold print: In the selection of personnel for houses of formation, hap-piness in their own calI must be the primary requisite for such an appointment. And yet one more point: most of our houses have small groups of students and even where the groups are large the cadre system is frequently being employed. This means total immersion for the members of the staff and large amounts of wear and tear. Each member of the entire community does well to attempt to offer them his understanding and cooperation. This, fre-quently, is a very large contribution to the task which is vitally important to all of us, that of initiating new mem-bers into our fraternities. ~Raymond H. Potvin and Antanas Subiedelis, Seminarians ]or the Sixties: ,,1 National Survey (Washington: CARA, 1969), p. 89. + + + Formatlo. VOLUME 29, 1970 HUGH KELLY, s.J. The Heart oj Prayer ÷ Hugh Kelly, is on the staff of St. Francis Xavier's; Gardiner Street; Dublin 1, Ireland. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 51,t "Lord, teach us how to pray." "When you pray say 'Our Father' " (Lk 11:1) That isa petition we must constantly address to our Lord. We must not expect to be taught how to pray once and for all so that we could exercise the art at will, as if we were masters of it. We must constantly be trying, ex-perimenting, learning. Of course if things between God and us were as they should be and as they once were, then prayer would be the most spontaneous, the most natural act of our life. It would not need to be learned. It would be as spontaneous as the smile of a child to its mother; as natural as the thrust upward of the cornstalk to the heat and light of the sun. There was something of that quality in the prayer of the Psalmist. The world about him spoke at once to him of the Creator. Everything in the universe pointed to God and invited him to pray. The sea, sky, earth, the'trees, the storm, the snow, the animals --all of these reminded him that he must praise God for them. Such a prayer was as natural, as necessary, as the act of breathing. It had not to be learned. It was a func-tion of man's activity. For reasons we need not stop to consider, that quality is no longer found in our prayer, or very seldom. Our relations with God are not so spontaneous. Man has so changed the world that it is difficult to see the hand of God in it. As a result prayer has become a complex thing, an art, that has to be learned and practiced with effort. Consider the excellent book of Cardinal Lercaro, Meth-ods of Prayer. It is a study of the different ways of prayer proposed by some of the recognized masters of the spiri-tual life. Each has his own approach and method of pro-cedure. But such methods could not be called spontane-ous or simple. They are elaborately studied. One of the masters, treated of by Lercaro is St. Ignatius. Here is how this saint introduces a prayer, the first meditation in the Spiritual Exercises: "This meditation is made with the three powers of the soul, and the subject is the first, second and third sin. It contains the preparatory prayer, two preludes, three principal points and a colloquy" (n. 46). Whatever the merits of such a form of prayer it could not be called simple or spontaneous. When we consider these different methods, which are so complex and so systematic, we may well ask if there is not somewhere in them a core or kernel of a purer prayer. If we unwrap the different layers, the steps, the tech-niques, shall we find at last something that is the heart or essence of prayer? "Is there.an essential prayer?" asks Y. Congar, O.P., "total, simple, which exceeds and em-braces all particular prayers?'; (Jesus Christ, p. 98). Is there something at the centre of each method, which is the same for all and which constitutes them true prayer? Something which, if absent, will leave them merely empty methods or systems? None of the commonly received definitions of prayer seem to give us what we seek. The definition of St. John Climacus, which is accepted by the catechism, that "prayer is an elevation of the soul to God" implies too much of a deliberate effort--that it is a matter of our own efforts and our own mmauve. It might equally apply to the study of theology, especially as it says noth-ing about love. The definition of St. Augustine comes closer to our aim: that prayer is a reaching out to God in love. Here there is indicated something spontaneous and natural; the role of love gets its recognition. But perhaps it speaks too much of our need of God and may be trans-lated too exclusively into a prayer of petition. It conveys the image the saint expressed in his phrase menclici Dei sumus--we are God's beggars; we stand before the Lord with outstretched hands. Our need of God is total; but our indigence is not our only approach to Him or our most immediate; it is not the ultimate root of our prayer. The words which kept St. Francis of Assisi in ecstasy for a whole night, "'Deus mi et omnia,'" "My God and my all," are certainly close to the heart of prayer. But they miss the essential constituent and inspiration of our prayer, that it is made to our Father. Obviously it is from our Lord alone that we must learn what is the heart of prayer. "Lord,. teach fis how to pray." It is instructive to note the promptness with which He answered that request, as if He had been waiting for it: "When you pray say 'Our Father.' " The condition of our most perfect prayer must be our assurance that we are addressing our Father, that we are addressing Him as Christ did. We are thus availing ourselves of the privilege which Christ won for us. When He said to Mary Magdalen, on the first Easter morning beside the opened empty tomb, "I ascend to My Father and to yours," He summarized His work of redemption: He ex-pressed the full dimension of His achievement. When we ÷ 4- Heart ot Prayer VOLUME 2% 1970 Hugh Kelly REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS say "Our Father" with the assurance which His Beloved Son has given us, we no longer pray merely as creatures, we are not considered by God as the beggars who stand at the door, still less as the puppies which catch the scraps falling from the table. We know we are the children of the household who have their rightful pla~e at the family board. Consider how our Lord emphasized the fatherhood of God in the Sermon on the Mount. The chief purpose of the discourse was to instruct us in our role as children: "That you may be the children of your Father, who is in heaven." Stretching out His hands to the simple folk, the fathers and mothers who sat around, He asked: "Which of you would give your child a stone, when he asks for bread? or a scorpion when he asks for a fish?" We can sense the movement of indignant rejection of such con-duct, in their faces and gestures. No, no; they would never dream of treating their little ones in that way. And then He points the lesson: "If you, evil though you are, can give good things to your children, how much more your Father in heaven will give good things to those who ask?" The little spark of love in a human father's heart which will urge him to be good to his child, what is it to the love in the heart of our Father in Heaven, from whom comes all parents' love? Nemo tam Pater, there is no father like God, St. Augustine reminds us. How much His Sonship meant to Christ, we gather from every page' of the Gospel. It is the source of His joy, confidence, exaltation. It is the support of His strength, His endurance, His resolve to carry out the mis-sion for which He was sent into the world. His life was entirely oriented to the will of His Father, was totally responsive to it. That orientation, that dependence, is His chief lesson to us. We too are sons of God and it should be the deliberate effort of our spiritual life to give our divine adoption its true place in our dealings with God, and not least in our prayer. "Our Father" might well serve us as the true heart of prayer. But there is another phrase of Christ, equally short, and perhaps even more full of suggestion, which might well give us what we are seeking. He spoke the phrase on the occasion of the return of the disciples from the short trial mission on which He had sent them to the cities of Israel to prepare the way for His own coming (Lk 10:17; Mt 11:25). Seeing their naive, childish joy in their suc-cess--" Lord, even the demons were subjected to us"--He thanked His Father for revealing to those little ones the spiritual truths He had concealed from the wise and prudent: "Yes, Father, so it was pleasing in your sight." Ira, Pater: "Yes, Father." This is His shortest prayer, and it is perhaps His most comprehensive one. It gives us His abiding attitude of mind to His Father. It reveals that His soul and spirit were always open to the Father, al-ways fully responsive to the Father's will. At first sight they indicate merely a mood of resignation and accept-ance, such as He showed especially in Gethsemane and on Calvary: "Not My will but Thine be done." But the words "Yes, Father" have a wider and deeper connota-tion. They cover all the emotions and reactions which were His as He looked on His Father's face. They ex-pressed not merely acceptance and submission; they con-vey approval, admiration, joy, praise, and most of all a loving agreement with all His Father is and does and asks. "It cannot be questioned," says Yves Congar, O.P., "that the prayer of loving, joyous adherence to the will of the Father was coextensive with the whole earthly life of Jesus" (Jesus Christ, 'p. 93). Perhaps in these words "Yes, Father" we too can find the heart and essence of our prayer and in some remote way may learn the prayer of our Lord. After all we are sons of the Son; we have within us His spirit who inspires us to say "Abba Father" --we may then without presumption make bold to say "Our Father" or "Yes, Father." These phrases indicate a prayer which is contempla-tion. They give the attitude of a soul which is facing God, looking at Him, listening to Him. "All prayer," says Y. Congar, "is communion in the will and mystery of God. This essential prayer consists in being receptive and wholly offered to God, so that He might be God not only in Himself---but also in His creatures" (Jesus Christ, p. 98). This prayer opens out the soul to catch the influ-ence of God. It looks to God expectantly to see, to learn, to receive, to respond, to admire, to accept, to praise, to approve, to thank. It mirrors in some way the riches of God. It will try to express itself sometimes in our Lord's words: "All My things are Thine and Thine are Mine" (Jn 17:10); sometimes in the words of the Psalmist: "What have I in heaven but Thee and there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides Thee" (Ps 72:26). St. Francis expressed this attitude to God in the words "Deus mi et omnia"--"My God and my all." Thomas "~ Kempis has voiced it in his great hymn of love: "A loud cry in the ears of God is that ardent affection of soul which says: My God, my love, Thou are all mine and I am all Thine; enlarge me in Thy love" (Imitation III:5). This is a rich prayer in which the constituents of all other kinds of prayers are found. It can register adoration, praise, thanks, petition, reverence, submission, offering, accept-ancemall the different moods of the soul when it feels its proximity to God. The phrase "Yes, Father" gives an at-mosphere, an attitude which "is one of total prayer, in which seeing and self-directing to what is seen, receiving ÷ ÷ ÷ Heart oy Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 ÷ ÷ ÷ Hugh Kelly REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS and self-giving, contemplation and going out from self, are all present, indistinguishably at the very core" (von Balthasar, Prayer, p. 65). This is substantially the re-sponse to the call of God. It is the response of the boy Samuel: "Here I am, for you called me" (1 Sam $:5). God made the first advance to man and spoke to him in His word: a word of love, an invitation to hear what God had planned and designed for His creatures~"Prayer," says von Balthasar again, "is communication in which God's word has the initiative and we at first are simple listeners. Consequently what we have to do is, first, listen to God's word and then through that word learn how to answer" (Prayer, p. 12). When this prayer of contemplation, of presence, reaches a certain degree of intensity, as with the mystics, it will be beyond the reach of analysis or explanation. The soul will remain passive, absorbed in God, knowing only how sweet it is to be so close to Him. But that state of intensity will not be frequent. Normally those who pray in this way are able to give some account of their meeting with God, to distinguish certain forms and fea-tures of prayer, and to realize how rich it is. We have access to the Father only through the Son. We are the sons of God because we share the sonship of Christ. Our prayer then must have the qualities of the prayer of Christ--we can speak in His words and make His prayer ours. The Father will recognize the prayers of His adopted sons as the blind Isaac recognized the voice of his younger son. There are certain notes and tones very frequent in the prayer of Christ which we must make our own. The Mass mentions these prayers explicitly: "He gave you thanks and prayers." And the Gospel testifies abundantly to them. They should be the chief features in our prayer. We should praise God just because He is God and most worthy of our praise. Our praise is the expression of the desire we have that He may be God in Himself and in His creatures. It is the theme of the first part of the Lord's prayer; it is the most frequent prayer of the Psalms. It is the highest, the most disinterested form of prayer. It is the opening note of the Magnificat, the prayer of our Lady spoken when the mystery of the Incarnation was at its newest. If prayer at its best is a loving attachment to God's will, then the prayer of praise must be the fullest attachment to God's will because it is God's will primarily that He should be God. The prayer of thanks may often be a variant of the prayer of praise. "We give Thee thanks for Thy great glory" the Church proclaims in the Gloria. We thank God for being Himself. Even if we owed nothing to Him, He would be most worthy of thanks just for being Him- self, the all powerful, the all perfect. But while fie is ill-finitely great He is infinitely good to us and therefore we must never cease to thank Him. That was the abiding mood of our Lord's soul: "Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me. I know that Thou hearest me al-ways" (Jn 12:41). Our prayer then as sons of God must be as far as we can the the prayer of the only begotten Son, whose Sonship we share. It must express the fullest at-tachment to the will of the Father. It must be compact of adoration, submission, acceptance, all of these as expres-sions of love. We are justified in thinking that our Lady's prayer was of this kind, but in the highest degree. Her prayer was in a unique way a prayer of presence. It was fed from a double source. There was her interior union with the Holy Spirit who had come upon her and had done mighty things for her. But her interior contemplation of God and His design in the Incarnation was immensely deepened by her contact with her Son, the Word made flesh tlu'ough her. In a unique way she was in contact with the Word of God. She was more in contact with it than St. John and could give a greater testimony than his "What we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life--the life was made manifest and we saw it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us" (1 Jn 1:1-2). In the visible presence of her Son she was always gazing on the Word, always listening to it. We are told explicitly of her study of Him, how she kept all His words and deeds in her heart and turned them over in con-templation. This was most truly a prayer of presence. She had but to open her eyes and ears and her mind would be flooded with light. How deeply would His words and deeds speak to one so disposed to hear, to a handmaid so responsive to the Father. When she turned over in her mind what she saw with her senses, what floods of light, what insight and consolation came to her. Who could tell of her growth in the knowledge of God in the long silent years at Nazareth? What more appro-priate prayer could she make than "Yes, Father" in which she gave a wholehearted approval to God's designs? On the eve of His passion Our Lord could give a sad repri-mand to the Apostles--"So long a time have I been with you and you have not known Me." We feel that He could not have given such a reprimand to His Mother though her insight and knowledge were gradual and ever grow-ing. Her prayer must have been an openness to God, a love of His will, a resolve to accept it and do it that could be found only in one so deeply concerned with the eternal designs of God. + 4- + Heart o] Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 519 Perhaps in such phrases as "Our Father" or "Yes, Father" we are at the heart 9f prayer and can find in them that which was the core of all the methods. Perhaps if we bypass the preludes, the techniques, the preliminaries, and enter 'at once into the presence of God and greet Him in such words, we shall experience that our prayer will become what it should be: natural and spontaneous, a genuine communication with God. Perhaps we are too eager to do the talking, to tell God "various things He knows already." We try to take the lead in the interviews --we expect God to be the patient listener. But surely this is a reversal of roles: "What do we do, when at prayer, but speak to a God who long ago revealed himself to man in a word so powerful and all-embracing that it can never be solely of the past but continues to resound through the ages?" (yon Balthasar, Prayer, p. 12). In the words, "Yes, Father" or "Our Father" we take up the true atti-tude of prayer. We stand before God, we listen to Him, we wait to know His will and His good pleasure; and these short forms of prayer will reveal our response to His word, our docility and submission, our gratitude and praise, and first and last our love. 4. 4. Hugh Kelly REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 5~0 ROBERT J. OCHS, S.J. Imagination, Wit, and Fantasy in Prayer Robert: How do you mean? voices? Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God. Robert: They come from your imagination. Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us. riG. B. Shaw, St. Joan. This article is in the nature of a plea, even a kind of court plea, for a fcesh look at what used to be called dis-cursive prayer. Inasmuch as it is a court plea, it is a plea of "not guilty." This fresh look might exonerate dis-cursive prayer of two charges commonly leveled against it: of being dry meditation and of being the lowest rung on the prayer ladder, a step quickly taken on the way to the higher prayer of quiet. As we shall see, these two charges are not unconnected. If discursive prayer runs quickly dry, it is no wonder people look for something higher and it deserves its bottom rung. "Exonerating discursive prayer of guilt" is a metaphor. But exonerating those who practise it from their guilt complex is not. They do feel vaguely guilty before God and themselves when they are unsuccessful at it; and when successful they still feela kind of-inferiority com-plex about its lowly status, a feeling that by now they should have advanced beyond it to the prayer of quiet. They feel the only way of progress is up, and so they re-peat their occasional efforts at the prayer of quiet, with middling success. There would be scant harm in this if the prestige of the prayer of quiet did not relegate them to the role of spiritual slum dwellers, blocking their imaginations from exploring the possibilities which lie hidden under the forbidding category of "discursive prayer." This plea has two parts. One is to broaden the scope of discursive prayer to include fantasy, affective reactions (annoyance, complaining, rebellion as well as fervor; 4- 4- 4- Robert J. Ochs, S.J., is a faculty member of Bellar-mine School of Theology; North Aurora, Illinois 60542. VOLUME 29, 1970 521 ÷ ÷ ÷ R. 7. Ochs, SJ. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS desolation as well as consolation), and, not least, wit, an imaginative use of our heads. The other part is histori-cal, a look at the original narrowing of scope of dis-cursive prayer in the 16th and 17th centuries, which soon brought religious writers [ace to face with the widespread "problem of dryness" and issued in the recommendation of the prayer of simplicity as a solution. Not that it was a bad solution. The prayer of quiet is an excellent method for those who can use it. Leonard Boase's book The Prayer of Faith, recommending it again so persuasively-some years ago, came as a real release for many. But I would venture a guess that for every person who was liberated by it, two others eventually felt them-selves hampered, and dissipated their efforts to explore further in a discursive way. And Father Boase's sugges-tion that the night of sense (which includes a night of the intellect), an intense but brief period for great souls like John of the Cross, lasts a lifetime for the common lot, sounded like a sentence to an unlivable life in the twi-light. Boase conceived the work of the mind and imagina-tion as a linear, undialectical, and conflictless a.bsorption of the truths of revelation, that reaches its saturation point rather quickly. It is pretty much limited to medi-tation "in the sense of methodical, analytic study of sacred truth" (p. 47). Not surprisingly, such a simple absorption process can hardly be expected to last a life-time, and before long "the sponge is full" (~i6). Further activity of the mind can only lead to boredom, and so one had best turn to a quiet contemplative view of the whole. Reading Boase one gets the impression that the evolution of prayer is all rather tranquil and uneventful. No doubt our poor prayer seems to prove him right. And yet, one cannot help suspecting that beneath the placid surface of our not very exciting prayer a passion-ate world is seething. The itinerary Boase sketches (ad-mittedly, I am caricaturing this excellent book a bit) takes us along the periphery of this turbulent interior world instead of through it. One has only to recall the eventful cri~es which mark the milestones in any psychoanalysis to sense that something is missing. Ronald Laing has sug-gested that for all our interiority we moderns are living in another Dark Age, before the Age of Exploration of the interior world. The model for "appropriating the faith" might well be exploration and confrontation rather than simple absorption. The eminent historian of modern spirituality, Louis Cognet, has recently tried to get at the origins of this atrophy of discursive prayer. In some homey and yet polemical pages (Les probl~mes de la spiritualitd; Ch. 5; also La prikre du chrdtien, Ch. 8--both Paris: Cerf, 1967), he has attacked what he feels to be a centuries old misunderstanding. The anti-meditation bias arose out of a series of historical accidents in the 16th century and has narrowed the scope of prayer ever since. As he tells it, theology in the late Middle Ages had taken on a highly rationalistic form, becoming a domain of specialists, cut off from interior sources. Spirituality was divorced from it, and therefore divorced from any searching theological activity. Methodical prayer, using simple meditation man-uals, was introduced to provide the uncultured with something more accessible. Thus "meditation" came to be associated with this new idea of untheological prac-tical prayer. Its practice spread so that even the educated depended on these manuals for prayer. By the time so-called mental prayer had become general practice, the impression was also well established that it built on a narrow intellectual base~ The theologically educated lived split lives. However imaginatively they might use their wits otherwise, "mental" prayer engaged their minds very little. Frustration was not long in coming. Cognet is struck by the simultaneous emergence all over Europe of a new problem for the religious writers of this period~ the prob-lem of dryness and disgust. Theorists had to find a way of explaining and coping with the distaste which seemed to afflict educated people who embarked on mental prayer for any length of time. The generally accepted so-lution was to suppose that discursive prayer was just an elementary stage. Dryness was taken as a sign that this stage had served its purpose and should be left behind for more simple forms. Discourse in words and images was to give way to a contemplative look. This scheme became generally adopted during the 17th century. We find it in St. Teresa and John of the Cross whose authority has made it accepted in treatises on prayer down to our own day. It was a good solution for the problem so conceived. It served to highlight the special nature of the prayer of quiet, for which many had a real capacity. But others who could not follow this way out, whose prayer re-mained obstinately discursive for all their efforts to fol-low the "normal" trajectory toward the prayer of sim-plicity, felt condemned to the meagre means available at the elementary level of the spiritual life. Cognet claims that this inferiority complex has hampered growth in prayer ever since. A realignment is therefore called for, Cognet insists. We must especially remind ourselves that the "traditional view" is relatively modern, and ruled by a particular view of prayer conceived to answer concrete problems of the VOLUME 29, Z970 4. ÷ 4. R. I. Ochs, sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS late Middle Ages and early Modern period. It was not always so. As far as we are in a position to reconstitute the prayer, of St. Augustine, for example, we must con-clude that he remained'discursive all his life, for all the contemplative aspects of his'prayer. This discursive form did not keep him from the heights of prayer. Nor did it keep Cardinal Berulle on an elementary level. Above all, we should emphasize that these psychological forms of one's prayer.are secondary, that it is one's relation to God in prayer which is fundamental. We should encourage a freer, more pragmatic attitude toward these forms, and arrange them less into stages. The psychological mani-festations of one's relationship to God are more a matter of temperament and style, and even of periods of one's life, which follow a rhythm back and forth from dis-cursive to "contemplative, rather than a set progression from one to the other. Even St. Teresa wrote abundant narratives about her prayer; and Jeanne de Chantal, after a period when she could not start the Our Father without falling into ecstasy, used discursive forms in the same way as the rest of us. Obviously, more is at stake in correcting this mis-understanding than freeing discursively oriented people from their inferiority complexes. (It is a bit hard to imagine vast numbers of people consciously suffering from the classical division into stages, in our contempo-rary scramble for any form of prayer which makes sense.) What is at stake is breaking open the category of dis-cursive prayer, giving scope for people to explore it with more confidence of finding something. At stake is healing the rift between theology and prayer in our own religious sensibility, learning to pray with our minds as well as our hearts (and theologize with our affectivity as well as our heads). There is no mindless prayer of the heart. Human affectivity is saturated with meaning. Closing the gap between spirituality and theology means breaking down prejudices built into the Christian prayer consciousness over generations, prejudices that thinking in prayer can only be idle curiosity, speculation about bloodless truths, asking impertinent questions pi-ous minds were never meant to ask. But there is the book of Job to make it clear that our minds were meant to ask. Surely a great curiosity about divine things is not foreign to prayer. Man was meant to argue with God. The Lord even demands that His people ask an explanation from him. The prophets had questions to put to the Lord who called them. And Mary answered the angel with the question: "How shall these things be?" Besides the prejudice against asking questions in prayer, there is another against using the imagination. Imagination and fantasy could well be what is required to bring heart and mind back together in prayer. Both theology and spirituality, as they are now, suffer from not being sufficiently tooted in the imagination. Discursive prayer does employ imagination and fantasy, but in a feeble, and, one might say, witless way. What is needed is a bolder use of fantasy.in prayer, a parallel to the bold-ness recommended above in asking questions of God. The Esalen Institute, for example, has uncovered re-markable abilities to fantasize in outwardly bland people. Its use of fantasy can teach us something. In guided fan-tasies, for instance, any blocks that occur are looked on as highly revelatory. A person embarking on a fantasy trip through his own body may suddenly find his body impenetrable, or, once inside, find he has no access to his heart. The important element to note here, for method, is that the person follows his fantasy, that there are things the person can and cannot do spontaneously in fantasy, because of their meaningful affective charge. This is much more concrete than our usual attempts to imagine our-selves present in a gospel scene where we try to elicit "appropriate" feelings and, when they are not forth-coming, dismiss our inability unreflectively as just an-other bad meditation. Closer to what masters like St. Ignatius must have had in mind is one case I am familiar with, where a man who had been unable to pray for years began a retreat by imagining himself at Bethlehem but found he could not enter the cave. Feelings of un-worthiness, and of simply not being welcome, blocked his fantasy at that point. He and his director interpreted this, not as an inability to "make the contemplation," but as a sign that he was praying; and he continued to imag-ine himself barred at the entrance to the cave in his repe-titions of the contemplation. After two days of this, dur-ing which the resentments and hopes of his whole past life welled up within him, he reported that he was in-vited to go in. The fantasy, with the block and its resolu-tion, was so much the man himself that it became the carrier for a real encounter and meant the turning point of his spiritual life. These short examples of how the use of mind and imag-ination might be broadened are, of course, not cited merely as .gimmicks, but hopefully as indications of a wider dimension and as reminders of how sluggishly we have used them in the past. Limitations of space preclude elaborating them more. Numerous qualifications would also be in order---discernment to avoid equating the in-terior world with God and our feelings with his Holy Spirit. But God does speak to us in our thoughts and. imaginations, or He cannot reach us at all. + ÷ ÷ VOLUME 29, As a conclusion let me cite the words Robert Bolt gives to Thomas More in A Man/or All Seasons: "God made the angels to show him splendor--as he made animals [or innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle o[ his mind." The way through a tangle is discursive and dialectical. + + + R. 1. O~h,, S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS JOSEPH T. FORGUE, F.S.C. Religious Life and the Educational ApostOlate Apparent to many engaged in the task of reformulation of the structures of the religious life is the inadequacy of mere personalism to remedy mechanical institutionalism. What seems to be necessary is an approach at once task oriented while incorporating the wide range of personal concerns. The following--an interpretation of the docu-ment The Brother of the Christian Schools in the World Today: A Declaration-- is offered as a model of just such an approach. What are the brothers? It might be said that they are men who, with lucid faith and burning zeal, serve the poor through Christian education, by establishing them-selves as a disciplined community. To be sure, there are many persons with lucid faith and burning zeal; many who serve the poor; many committed to Christian educa-tion; and there are many disciplined communities. The Brothers of the Christian Schools, I suggest, are a unique dynamic convergence of faith and zeal expressed through Christian education on behalf of the poor, facilitated and sustained through the mechanism and mystery of dis-ciplined community life. Christian Education in Service of the Poor In the first place there is the logical and historical pri- ÷ ority that leads to understanding the brothers' coming ÷ together as task oriented. To be sure, the quality of their + corporate lives must go beyond the task; but the task-- Christian education in the service of the poor--is the ini-tial and sustaining motivation for the community. To b~ concerned with an educational task is to partici- ¯ pate in the cumulative process of building the "new age of mankind." It is to foster the development of the noosphere, that network of human cohesion based on the twin dynamism of knowledge and love. To educate is to 527 Joseph T. Forgue, F.S.C., is a faculty member of Chris-tian Brothers Col-lege; Memphis, Tennessee ~8104. VOLUME 29, 1970 ¯ J, T, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS provoke and to evoke an ever increasing growth in criti-cal self-consciousness, to elicit insightful understanding of the structural realities of the world. Education that is in the service of the poor is educa-tion which recognizes that the thrust of history pulsates primarily among the poor. Education that is Christian is education which recognizes that all structures are on be-half of persons, aiding them toward personal and com-munal growth in responsible freedom. Christian educa-tion in service of the poor responds to those who suffer from the imperfections in society and understands that to realistically participate in its task, there must be real and co-ordinated contact with all strata of society for the sake of societal change. The educational task of the brothers, then, ought to be both comprehensive: urban, rural, suburban; and far-reaching: formal and informal. Urban education seeks to minister to the persons who suffer most immediately the brunt of the radical trans-formation in the human self-image caused by the tech-nologization of society. The historic thrust of the broth-ers adds the further dimension: a preference for the. poor of the inner city. Rural education seeks to foster the em-pathy and radicalization necessary for those not touched directly by urban awareness--and this to develop a sense of responsibility for the solutions to the problems of the city. The educational task in the suburbs--similar to the rural task---seeks to promote a sense of unity with, and responsibility for, the city. The result aimed at: the shat-tering of isolationist attitudes reinforced by provincial governmental boundaries. In order to reach all the people, the comprehensive ed-ucational task must be far-reaclfing. The brothers are called to operate through the academic framework of the school (formal education) and to include as an integral dimension of their work various educational endeavors that are outside the regular academic structure (informal education). Disciplined Community Just as historically John de La Salle was confronted by the educational task that was needed and in meeting that need discovered the need for a task force, so the contem-porary need of Christian education in service of the poor requires the existence of a disciplined community. The interpersonal dimensions of men risking their lives to live together in celibate community are not to be slighted, but such dimensions are not the reason for the brothers' coming together as an institute larger than one community. If such were the reason, the need for cor-porate structure apart from or beyond the "local group" would be unnecessary. Hence in describing the Brothers of the Christian Schools such considerations are omitted. They are presupposed as necessary for any human com-munity; they do not specify the uniqu.eness of the or-ganized religious life. The Brothers of the Christian Schools are disciplined-- that is, they have structured aspects of their living to-gether to hold up to themselves the continual demands oI the educational task. Traditionally such discipline has been called poverty, chastity, and obedience. Under the rubric of poverty, the brothers deny them-selves the personal use of individual salaries based on the market value o~ their work, pooling their regular moneys to manifest that they have staked their lives upon each other. Chastity refers to their decision.to live a non-family life style, symbolizing (and making really available) openness to personal mobility to insure meeting the fluc-tuating needs of the corporate task. Subjecting the indi-vidual direction of their careers to the approval of the corporation, the brothers under the rubric of obedience have decided that their individual efforts on behalf of mankind shall be united to, and co-ordinated with, the corporate task. To the traditional disciplines are added two others: one corporate: liturgy--the other personal: meditation. In liturgy the community agrees to meet in communal wor-ship. That is, it agrees to attempt to understand its re-sponse to the world in terms of meeting the demands of the Mysterious Unconditioned. The community under-stands its mission as the mission of the Church: mediating through the dynamic presence of the Spirit, the Father as revealed in Ghrist. Besides the communal necessity to come to grips with the presence of mystery, there is the demand for each to do so in his unique "being addressed" by God. Hence the need for meditation. The disciplined community is a community: which necessitates the decision to enter into regular, serious, personal dialogue on the part of whomever the demands of the corporate task have called to be comrades. There is the concern that comes of risking one's life upon the persons who share the taskmthe concern which enables the brothers to sustain their lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Further, the community is composed of brothers who wholeheartedly participate in the common work required when men live together, who foster the formal and in,or-real study and thought necessary for developing corporate self-understanding of their life in Christ, and who, fi-nally, simply let their hair down together in joyful cele-bration of their comradeship. VOLUME ~9 1970 ]. T. Forgue REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 550 Faith and Zeal The members of a disciplined community who are en-gaged in the corporate task of Christian education on be-half of the poor manifest the spirit of faith and zeal. The faith of such brothers is the free response they give to the experience of being addressed at the very core of their selfhood by the Absolutely Unconditioned--me-diated in our traditions by Christ. Further, such faith is global since it understands the free response to be neces-sarily comprehensive, relating to all men everywhere--a catholic faith. The faith of these brothers is futuric since they understand that their free and global response is to the demand that they live their lives on behalf of the fu-ture of men--to build the Body of Christ. The free, global, futuric faith has yet another dimen-sion: it is grateful. Such faith rests upon the gracious cumulative presence of God in history; it is a faith me-diated in time by the Church. Finally, the brothers rec-ognize their faithful response to be ambiguous, always under scrutiny, ever in need of perfection through the systematic prophetic questioning of its authenticity--a faith on the brink of unbelief. Just as the brothers' spirit of faith has five marks, so may the power of their zeal be sustained and characterized in a fivefold manner. The zeal of the brothers is manifested by their remain-ing articulate about the multiple dimensions of their professional field--education--and the specific academic discipline of their speciality. Since effective work demands coherence and specifica-tion the zeal of the brothers is characterized by planning. They must decide to operate on the corporate and indi-vidual level in response to the researched needs of the world as reflected in the specific areas they find them-selves. Such operation must be systematically efficient and highly co-ordinated. The brothers must be guided by the spirit of Romans 5:1,5, living the reality of zeal in terms of patience and persistence. They must suffer the presence of obstacles to their goals, take heart in the struggles they meet, and develop a sense of humor that will keep them from b-solutizing any aspect of their task. The brothers, giving every calorie of energy to their task, will live in the hope which is born of worthwhile effort. Finally, the zeal which sustains a group of Christian Brothers must develop a sensitivity to the real needs of the poor in their midst: that they might burn with a zeal that is salvific for men. Unknown to them will be de-structive fanaticism or self-aggrandizing complacency. Conclusion Such is a suggested model for understanding the broth-ers and their being-together. Unless religious operate out of some such corporate understanding; unless they ac-tually do act with an impact that is at once local, regional, national, and international; then there seems to be little justification for the life style they have chosen. + + ÷ vOLUME 29, 1970 CHARLES A. SCHLECK, C.S.C. Community Life: Problematic and Some Reflections Charles Schleck, C.S.C., lives at 2300 Adeline Drive; Bur-lingame, California 94010. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS The problem of community life in religious institutes today is beset by many different factors both those of an environmental and ideological nature. There are first of all the conflicting currents of pressure with which man is faced in our contemporary societyA There is, for example, the problem of mobility, the fact that men can and do move around much more quickly than before, from one job to another, from one profession to another, from one place of residence to another. There is the consequent "need for change" which this very fact of mobility can easily cause. And very often connected with this, and fol-lowing from it, there is the experience of solitude or loneliness, plus the consequent uneasiness which this causes, not to say anxiety and anguish. There is the pro-found need for love and acceptance, and men are willing to do almost anything in order to get this. At the same time we find the presence of fear, the fear of being ab-sorbed by the impersonalism of our society, the fear of being rejected by others, fears which account for the rather bizarre and defensive behavior of so many, and fears which also account for the profound superficiality and veneerness of the relationships which persons do have--even those relationships which are entered into as an act of protest against other interrelationships. So often our relationships today are often marked by many words, and the doing of many things together, but by very little real personal communication or communion-- of the kind which leaves us free and which leaves others free as well. Thus, many persons in our society today live in real 1See K. Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, Doubleday, 1957; Marcel, Man against Mass Society, Gateway, Chicago, 1962. solitude, and this throughout their entire lives. This is due at least in part to the sociological uprootedness in which they are almost forced to live. Solitude is never more painful than in many of our larger cities where many complain that they can never be alone, and yet, in reality, are almost always alone, that is, without any real communication or communion of a spiritually and truly satisfying nature. There are others in our society who are psychically incapable of being alone, or of recollecting themselves, or of becoming aware of their true sitnation in the world. Life outside a crowd is for them untolerable, so untolerable that they feel a kind of a pressure or com-pulsion to do everything that everyone else is doing, especially those persons or those groups with whom they identify socially. Thus their frequentation of the same bars, or theaters, or dubs or discotheques and so forth. It is not that they really desire these things necessarily, but they simply must do them because of their need to be "with people" and their fear of being alone. Yet for all this frequentation and for all these encounters, there is little or no real profound and personally satisfying com-munication or communion, whether there be the com-munication or communion of man with man, or that of man with God3 Another reason for the problematic in community life today is the advent and current cult of the many insights into man given to us in and through the existential and personalist philosophies of our time. These teach us that there are three involvements that characterize the exist-ence of modern man who is bodily-spiritual. There is first of all the involvement of man in the world. Even man's knowledge of God comes from the world in which he is rooted by reason of his bodiliness. He cannot even be thought of in his total reality unless the world is also perceived or thought of together with him. In fact, even his redemption or salvation is connected with the world, because man is redeemed as a being-in-the-world, or a being involved in the world. In fact, it is through man that the whole of creation shares in the redemption and salvation. For sanctity or holiness which is the fulfillment of man involves not merely the offer of Christ but the response of man as well. Again there is man's involvement in community. He is quite aware that he is dialogical, that he is not simply a being-in-the-world, but a being-in-the-world-with-others, that he is a listener as well as a speaker. He does not stand alone in society; he stands always in relation to others in society. While he possesses his own personal and indi-vidual natnre, and this in a unique way, still he cannot =See Ignace Lepp, The Ways o] Friendship, Macmillan, N.Y., 1966, pp. l,gff. ÷ ÷ ommunity " Li~e VOLUME 29. 1970 ~. A~ Schteck REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS develop his nature or his person alone; he can do this only in and through the human community, that is, through other human persons. He sees his environment and his becoming and development, as intimately linked up with presence, the presences and influences of other persons, or with the interactivity of many interpersonal relationships. If man has selfhood, he is given this so that he may encounter other human persons who by their presences and interactivity will contribute to his whole-ness and personal fulfillment. No man is an island; and if his personal talents and capabilities are to unfold, if he is to become himself, completely this person which at first he is only potentially, if he is to become uniquely and personally creative, then the unique powers and gifts he has must be awakened .and stimulated to growth through the presence and interaction of others. And thirdly, there is man's involvement in history. There is not one moment of his life when man can be said to possess his own existence fully. What he is now, he became as a result of his past, and it is what he is now --including this past--that leads him on toward the fu-ture, a future to which he is even now already reaching out. Thus, every human life bears the stamp of outside forces, even though it is also internally being shaped by God and by the individual himself. Man's being and person are being shaped not bnly by the apparently autonomous forces of God and himself but also by the coexistential forces of his living moment, those of the hu-man community in which the forces of history are accu-mulated. While man's decisions are free, they' are not made in any kind of vacuum. They have their roots in the soil of human society and its history. And this means both the past and the future as well as the present, since the past and the future enter into our here and now de-cisions to a great extent, greater than many of us imagine. Man lives historically or in history, and he is involved very much in the ebb and flow of history. In short we find many currents impacting on man and his situation in the world today, currents that almost force themselves on us in spite of ourselves. There is the emphasis on personalism, the search for personal fulfill-ment or happiness, the need for independent and respon-sible action, the insistence on the primacy of the person over the society--at least when this is considered in its form of institution or organization--which is considered as being at the service of the person. There is the em-phasis on fellowship, on the sacramentality of our brother, on brotherhood in the sense of togetherness, collabora-tion, teamwork, complementarity, mutual enrichment, or completion, through interpersonal relationships and ac-tivity. There is the preoccupation of modern man with the "world" and the need for religious who are trying to be fully human and Christian to enter as completely as possible into all that is human and can be consecrated to God. The world is our world and we hold a serious responsibility in reference to what it is going to become, and we hold this in communion and cooperation with each other. Therefore, we must be involved in the world and in the human community--in order to become per-sons ourselves and in order to help shape the destiny of man in history, in order to help others become persons themselves.3 Still another source of the problematic regarding com-munity life in religion is the manifold way in which the expression "community" is understood by different per-sons today. As we find in so many other areas of human relationships, our problem often becomes a linguistic problem--we use the same word and yet we do not mean the same thing. The theologian or canonist will mean one thing by the word "community" whereas the sociologist or the psychologist might mean something quite distinct; and possibly the cultural anthropologist might mean something different from all these. And then again, dif-ferent theologians or different canonists, or different so-ciologists or different p?ychologists or different cultural anthropologists might mean different things by the same word. What the theologian refers to when he uses the word "community" within the sphere of his science is a group or corporate entity that we know and regard in and by and through the light of faith, or a community or group that is established and built on a faith vision of one kind or another. What the canonist will mean by the word "community" is a group of persons that lives together following certain norms or laws established by the com-petent authority empowered to establish those rules and regulations. Yet a psychologist or a sociologist would be speaking of something entirely other, of a group of per-sons or an association of persons viewed according to the norms and principles of the behavioral science which they represent. For a good number of psychologists, the word "commu-nity" would refer to a group of persons whose quality and depth of interpersonal relationships would establish them in some kind of communion of unity, personal unity or unity and communion of persons. Thus, they would stress the sacredness of the person, his need to be ful-filled within an expansive and free community. They would stress that persons are ends in themselves, im-portant for who they are as well as and even more so 8See Otto Semmelroth, S.J., The Church and Christian Belie], Deus Books, Paulist Press, N.Y., 1966, pp. 81-3. + + + Community Life VOLUME 29, 1970 ÷ ÷ RENEW FOR RELIGIOUS ~536 than for what they do. They would stress that a diversity of works and personal talents is a good thing in a group, precisely because this variety evokes the actualization of the full range of the human potential which exists within the group and because it also creates the possibility for adaptive changes within the group enriching its total view and being and action. They would also stress the fact that the insights of the person-members serve the community, that personhood is a process, a reality that is not achieved simply in virtue of existing together, but rather by personal exchanges, the kind that imply ac-ceptance of change within the persons "and also a realistic knowledge and acknowledgment of human fallibility. They would emphasize that self-revelation and accept-ance of others, far from working to the destruction of the unity of the group, enhance both the person and the group or community as well. In fact it is these very things that provide the basis for continuing growth in under-standing and love on the part of the various members of the group. The sociologist would be concerned with community within the framework of group formation and operation. He might tend to emphasize the professional and the adult relationships of the members and tend to look at the group in terms of its ability to carry out goals and ob-jectives with some kind of e~ciency. Or he would tend to emphasize or look at a community as a social group phenomenon which identified or did not identify with this or that value system. For example, among the many distinctions which sociologists have made to clarify the social reality of "community" was the introduction of the notions of "gemeinschaft" and "gesellschaft." The first term refers to a community in the sense of a communal collectivity based on diffuse emotional attachments exist-ing between the members. The second term refers to a communal collectivity that rests primarily on the con-scious choice of specific objectives on the part of the membership. This division might approximate what we often call a division of community into a community as home, and a community as service organization. The sociologist is often far more interested in the second kind of "community" than in the first, that is, in the associational community or "gesellschaft" than in the emotional community or "gemeinschaft." Affective rela-tionships are and will indeed remain important to the sociologist, but he does not see them as constituting the totality of human existence, that if they did, they would soon lead a community to becoming dysfunctional or non-functioning, reduced to a kind of love-in experience or amateur group therapy unit rather than an adult associa-tional group having specific objectives. He would see that in some circumstances the affective relationslfips and the constant search for these on the part of a group would simply tend to desu'oy effective performance on the part of the group and to render their associational objectives impossible or difficult to achieve. He would stress that there should be organic solidarity in the membership of the group, and this such that there would be more than mere juxtaposition, but rather an interdependent divi-sion of labor, the key to which would be not that diversity in which each part goes its own way, but that kind of diversity in which each part is deeply concerned with meaningful exchange and for the good of each part, but for this good in reference to the good of the whole. The sociologist is very much concerned with preserving the sovereign demands of the common good together with the dignity of the person. To employ a rather practical example: A sociologist would see that in the case of liturgical experimentation by different groups, this should be concerned with the functional or service con-tributions which this group is making to the larger whole, and not with its own personal wishes or the indi-vidual affective relationships which exist ~znong the cele-brating group. He could easily accept the principle of a pluralistic liturgy based on the notion of vocation or profession, in which each societal role and its contribu-tion to the life of the totality would permit diversity and " yet stress organic solidarity, for example, a Mass for pro-fessionals, for factory workers, and so forth. But he would also tend to consider that it is a fruitless task on the part of liturgists in their attempt to achieve togetherness in the liturgy to try to define their problem in terms of supernatural charity becoming translated into human emotion. A person need not feel affection for another in order to have charity toward this other person, nor need charity always express itself in a social relationship which is defined as affective. Christian love may impel a man to lend a helping hand to another, but this is quite an-other phenomenon than that of holding hands for the sake of holding hands. Though the temptation to unite these two forms or expressions is very great by reason of an appealing and yet rather false idealism, liturgical forms must respect the fact that this equation is fre-quently impossible. The good Samaritan did not form an I-Thou relationship with the man who fell in with thieves, at least if we accept this according to the terms of some psychologists. He bandaged his wounds, put him on his pack-animal, took him to an inn and gave the inn-keeper money to cover the expenses, and went on his way.4 'See R. Potvin, "The Liturgical Community: Sociological Ap-praisal," in Experiments in Community, Liturgical Conference, ÷ 4- Community Li]e VOLUI~IE 2% 1970 4. To further complicate the linguistic problem or the problem of and in communication, the word "apostolic" has also undergone an evolution in meaning. In the New Testament it involved two elements: (1) a kind of juridi-cal element, that is, a commissioning by Christ for some form of leadership in the Church; and (2) a kind of charismatic element, that is, a vision or experience of the risen Lord. The word "apostle" and its corresponding adjective were more or less limited or concentrated on a certain well-defined group of persons in the first genera-tion of Christian history. Gradually, however, the word took on other meanings. It referred to what could be traced back to the Apostles, for example, their writings, their doctrines, their traditions, and so forth. It was later on extended to refer to the Roman See, the Roman Pon-tiff, and finally to the Roman Catholic Church described as the "apostolic Church." Later on in the Middle Ages the word "apostolic" was used to describe a life or life style that was conformable with that instituted by the Apostles of the primitive Church. Thus the monks were Wash. D.C., 1968, pp. 90-3. "Many people use the word community to imply a group welded together by affective bonds, a love-in whereby emotional attachments are generated and maintained. Christian community and the cultic symbols which surround the eucharistic feast should not be reduced to a notion of community with affective overtones . It is unfortunate that the word com-munity and family should be abused as much as they are. The problem is not simply one of definition since the meaning of the words can and does differ in various contexts. The confusion re-sides in the arbitrary conjunction of the elements of one meaning with those of another, and in not realising that they are often mutually exclusive. The end result is frequently little else than stagnant unrealism which precludes the understanding of the social and spiritual realities which are being discussed. Thus the totality of the community of God's people is not a community in the strict sense of the word. Its unity is not the unity of affective homogeneity. It is not emotional attachment nor that of primary, deep, total relationships between people. It is not the unity which arises from the sharing of common territory--all contemporary definitions of community. These exist within the community of the faithful, but they are not that community, nor can their characteristics be at-tributed to it as such. In fact we are in the secular city of God and we have moved from a tribal unity with its kin-like bonds to the unity of the technopolis. As Harvey Cox suggests, there is another alternative to Buber's dichotomy between an I-It relationship and the I-Thou encounter. It is the I-You relationship which is at the base of the secular city. The unity which is characteristic of the contemporary world is a functional unity of diversity whereby people are of service to each other, and one which can be devoid of affecfive connotations, which at times must be devoid of such personal overtones if the common welfare and the 'interests of our fellow men' are to be achieved. Sociologists would say that such unity is based primarily on associational and not communal rela-tionships. In other words, it is not necessary that the baker know personally and like the plumber for the two to be of service to each other. It is even conceivable that if they did their mutnal service might be less efficient." thought to be living an apostolic life by reason of their practice of the common life and preaching. And they were said to be living in conformity with the first community in Jerusalem. While it is true that these elements--com-mon life and the ministry of preaching--were found in diverse ways in different groups, so long as these two ele-ments were in some way present, the group was said to be living the apostolic life. In the sixteenth century the word was again slightly modified. It began to refer to those persons or groups of persons who were sent by the Church to preach the gospel and to live or practice the virtues which the fulfillment of mission entailed. It was not so much a question of their imitating the life of the Apostles, but rather of participat-ing or sharing in their mission. Even semi-cloistered nuns spoke of themselves as having the "apostolic" spirit, cause they participated in the spirit of the apostolic mis-sion, namely, the redemption of mankind. Finally, the word "apostolic" received another altera-tion in recent times. With the advent of Catholic Action, the laity was said to have an "apostolic vocation." It would seem to be this use of the word "apostolic" that brought into being its highly "quantitative" aspect. Some persons were said to be more apostolic than others. Some works were said to be more apostolic than others. And finally some groups and' even religious institutes were said to be more or less apostolic than others depending upon the degree to which they engaged in external works. Under Plus XII an attempt was made to correct some of the inadequate implications of such a use of the word. He spoke of completely enclosed communities as leading a life that was essentially and wholly "apostolic." Thus the word "apostolic" would seem to admit of several essential elements, one ontological--a life that is con-nected with the inner life of the Church, with the life of agape or charity; and the other phenomenological--the various concrete ways or expressions in which the life of agape or charity can be expressed and mediated both in being and operation by persons, or groups, or even re-ligious communities. While we should be able to distin-guish one or other element in the word "apostolic," it would seem to be the wiser thing not to dissociate them from one anothbr, or dichotomize them in our practical attitudes. This could easily give rise to a triumphalism of one kind or another, contemplative or active, and both of these could simply establish more snob clubs in a Church where we already have enough. This linguistic problem or problem in communica-tion is not limited to the area of community. We find it existing in many other areas today. In regard to the area of family planning, for example, during the years in 4- 4- 4. Community lilt VO~UM~ ~, ;~o C. d. $chleck REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ~40 which the papal commission met, it was quite obvious that there were problems, and serious ones, involving the use of language and words and expressions. Words used were the same, but the ~neanings and emphases, the cate-gories and selective placement of values connected with these words, were extremely diverse.5 This linguistic problem is a real problem. And it would seem to me that because we do not spell out the exact and rather well-defined limited idea or meaning which we have in using the word "community" we come to the rather quick and open conflict concerning the idea of "community" which we experience today. An approach, for example, that would be primarily sociological would easily emphasize an aspect of community or group asso-ciation that is the object of the science of sociology, and it would tend to emphasize the tools and instruments which this behavioral science normally employs. The same would be true if a psychologist Were to approach the same problem. Yet the theological dimensions of community, and the theological presuppositions of com-munity life within a religiously motivated group of per-sons, or a group which faces community with the back-ground of a faith vision, for example, sin-redemption, the ambiguity of man in the world, the manifold dimen-sions of the evangelical counsels, and so forth, might be ignored, even perhaps purposely or intentionally; and this, not because of any hostility toward these dimensions on the part of the experts involved, but simply because these dimensions might not be the specific area of con-cern or competence of a psychologist or sociologist. Yet the practical impact of this presentation could bring about a rather different net result than would be proper or correct; it might bring about a primacy of an entirely different value system as far as "community life in a re-ligiously motivated and assembled group" than should really be the case. The fault would not lie with the sciences or the experts in question, if and when they operate within the limited and specific sphere of their competence, but in the imperialistic attempt on the part of any one of them to make itself or himself supreme where and when it or he is not supreme. The same thing would be true in the case of the Scripture scholar or theologian if they attempted to pronounce on some topic or point which was a point of these sciences and not neces-sarily that of revelation. Thus, there are many complexities within the total understanding of "community life in religion," many of which are perhaps approached much too facilely and ~ See Donald N. Barrett, "The Sociology of Religion: Science and Action" in Sociological Analysis, Winter, 1967, pp. 177-8. without much depth of insight as to the real subtleties of the problem. There are theological or revealed dimen-sions of the idea of "community" which would show that the call to community is not really something special in the sense of unique to religious, such that only they are called to express this reality. All Christians are called to express it, even though not all are called to express it within the framework of associations such as religious are called to be. Moreover, this Christian approach or re-vealed approach to community would show that the Christian ethic gives to already existing human relation-ships new dimensions and exigencies by transforming them through a new specifically Christian basis: the life of the Pneuma of Christ. Secondly, there are other dimensions besides the re-vealed one. There are the behavioral dimensions men-tioned above, sociological, psychological, cultural, and so forth. And finally, there are juridical dimensions in-volved in the notion of "community," that is, certain legal requirements or dimensions established by the agency which gives a group its status, public or civil or ecclesial. In the case of religious communities of public vows, we are told that they are by definition stable forms of life, or stable life styles providing their membership with an organized way of living the evangelical counsels. And thus it is quite reasonable to expect that there would be in their case juridical dimensions to establish and as-sure this stability. This note is referred to in the Per[ectae caritatis and in the sixth chapter of Lumen gentium as well as in Ecclesiae sanctae. By reason of the religious community's being a public and official organ of the Church-sacrament, the hierarchical element of the Church gives it something of the incarnational structure and composition which the Church itself was given by Christ. It is for this reason that the hierarchical element of the Church approves not merely the soul or the spirit dimen-sion of a religious community's life style, but also the fundamental delineations of its body expression or its bodiliness--this for reasons of distinction, and comple-mentarity, organic solidarity, and related identity. The reasonableness of this juridical dimension for publicly approved religious institutes or communities does not mean that the counsels or a life dedicated to Christian service cannot be lived outside such a framework, or within a community or association of persons having no official or public approbation. Such groups have always existed in the Church historically, either by choice of the persons themselves who did not want any such approba-tion for one or other reason; or by choice of the approv-ing agency or arm, estimating that such a group or groups 4. 4, 4- Community Lite VOLUME Zg, 1970 541 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS do not have that degree of stability which they feel war-rants public approbation, at least for the time being.B These are only some of the factors involved in the problem of community and in the problem of man in community, of man looked at in the totality of his personality and condition. It is a problem that will never see any completion or perfectly satisfactory solution. But it would seem to the present writer that many of the problems or at least some of them which religious com-munities are facing today in their desire for renewal could better be resolved by a more clear-cut understand-ing of just what the problem is, or better, just where the sources of problematic lie. Then there must be a re-assertion of certain ideas, especially those of a theological nature, which are involved in the establishment of a community that gathers its members together for religious motives or purposes, those revealed within the Scriptures. In the expression "religious community" the adjective "religious" is just as important as the adjective "rational" in the expression "rational animal." And while it is true that this adjective does not describe all the dimensions and complexities involved in those associations of persons which we call religious institutes or communities, it does point to that dimension which distinguishes these kinds of associations from other kinds not based primarily on religious motives; Consequently, in the remainder of o This does not mean that one may not question the advisability of certain decisions regarding disciplinary and other such matters, for example, the current questioning regarding the legally im-posed uniform pattern for all apostolic institutes. Seeking a greater flexibility in the new legislation for the application of the particu-lar charisms of each institute is one thing; operating as if this were already an accomplished fact, without asking the permission to ex-periment contrary to the Code where this is requested by the compe-tent authority, and thereby facing authority with a fair accompli is quite another. If modern man claims to be so mature, it would seem that the presence of courtesy should be more present today than before. At times one wonders whether this is true. ~ In one of his weekly addresses the pope referred to one of the problems of our times as the phenomenon of anthropocentric reli-gion: "Religion must be by its very nature theocentric, oriented toward God as its first beginning and its final end. And after that toward man, considered, sought after, loved in terms of his divine derivation and of the relationships and duties which spring from such a derivation . To give in religion preeminence of humani-tarian tendencies brings on the danger of transforming theology into sociology, and of forgetting the basic hierarchy of beings and values. I am the Lord your God, and Christ teaches: You shall love the Lord your God. This is the greatest and the first command-ment . It should not be forgotten that to let sociological interest prevail over the properly theological interest can generate another dangerous difficulty, that of adopting the Church's doctrine to hu-man criteria, thus putting off the intangible criteria of revelation and the official ecclesiastical magisterium" (Address of July 10, 1968, Documentary News Service, Oct. 28, 1968). this article I would like to consider some oI the following areas: the nature of community life in religion, its pur-poses, and its ability to be expressed in different ways. The Nature of Community Life in Religion The early Church looked upon its community life as the expression or actualization of the commandment of Jesus--"That they may be one as you Father in me and I in you, that they may be (one) in us." s The very nature of community life in religion demands not just a juxta-position or lining up of persons; nor does it refer merely to a group that has come together for professional serv-ices of teaching or health care or social work of one kind or another. Nor does it refer to a group of merely naturally compatible personalities, or to persons who are forced to live together by reason of some kind of juridical or legal system of incorporation. It implies, rather, a community that has for its model and image the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity. There we find per-fect oneness and perfect relationship, and yet also, perfect distinction--all of which are essential to constitute their mystery and meaning. The theological notion of community life is aimed at far more than the establishment of a herd mentality, or a common status in reference to material goods, "or to a rule or to certain visible interpersonal relationships estab-lished on certain natural grounds, even though these are in no wise to be excluded. It implies far more than mere interest groups living together, such as teachers or nurses or social workers, even though any one or several of these aspects might be found in community living, at least to some extent. Community life in religion demands that the members of the community live with each other in religion as the Father lives in community of life with His Son and with the Holy Spirit. It asks that the mem-bets of the group show clearly that the charactoe or~sucally Christian commandment of fraternal ~hariotry agape which is the end of the New Law reflects" or corresponds with the characteristic dogma of our Cl~ristian faith, the mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity. For a religious com-munity is one that is constituted or created by agape, in agape, and for agape. And agape is God's love shared in or participated in by men, and becoming operative in reference to other men. Agape is intimacy with God and with other men as God would love them Himself. It sur-passes purely natural sympathies, and dominating or in-stinctive antipathies, making us see other men as sons of God, sharing the divine good with ns and called to share in the society of the elect with ourselves. Agape makes us "Jn 17:20-1. ÷ ÷ ÷ Community Lile VOLUME 2% 54~ ÷ + + C. A. $chleck REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS regard the next person not as a stranger but as our brother, as part of ourselves, as one who is united to us by divine life and whose good we desire as we do our own, good. The Purposes o[ Community Life in Religion Coming to the purposes of community life in religion and viewing them within the framework of revelation, we find that there are a number of objectives which it tries to realize. Not all of these are equal, nor are they all found in exactly the same way .in different religious institutes. Briefly they would seem to be reducible to the. following: liberating or ascetical, charismatic, and apos-tolic. The Liberating or Ascetical Dimension The liberating dimension of community life in religion is quite evident even after only a short experience of living with others. We are quite aware that even in spite of ourselves, it does strip us of much disordered self-love which is at the root of all sin. It provides us and almost forces us to practice the various expressions of real agape, real faith, and real hope in its daily human expressions: Love is patient, love is kind, love is eager but never boast-ful or conceited; love takes no pleasure in other people's sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to ex-cuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.9 The common life, in all its demands, acts as a marvelous means for self-giving and opening oneself more and more to and onto others. For most religious it is in practice the most constant occasion they have for personality build-ing, for self-denial, and self- and social-integration that lies at their disposal within the religious life. And this is true not merely in its domestic aspects, that is, in sharing work in the house, or recreation, of life within the frame-work of the religious residence, and common prayer in its various forms, but also in its service aspect, that is, in the common enterprise of the group.10 Community life in religion asks for collaboration with others in an operational community, such as a school or hospital or possibly a more loosely structured apostolate, such as social work. It usually involves a community in which the members have to fit together for a common work. This often means doing some things that one does not always like doing. It also involves that one be pre-pared to face the likelihood that often there may not be the exact kinds of diversions, distractions, ~'elaxations, and so forth that one would especially like. There are ~ I Cor 14:4ff. 1°See J. Coventry, S.J., in Religious Formation, Blackfriars, 1963, "Modern Individualism and Comxnunity Life," p. 37. reasons for this, other values which the community is at-tempting to give witness to: for example, eschatological values, Christological values, ascetical values, ecclesial values, those which are in keeping with the community's total mission within the Church. This ascetical or liberating aspect of community life forms part of the community's witness to the death-resur-rection mystery of the Lord. It witnesses to the fact that persons of different backgrounds, training, intellectual and social capabilities, can still live in Unity and commu-nion, in fact are called to li#e in unity and communion, and this in Christ and through Him, not primarily be-cause of mutual compatibility, but because they are called by the same agape and molded by the same agape. Con-sequently, religious are not entirely free---eVen though they freely accept this limitation of their freedom with the frustrations that this is inevitably going to mean--to reshape or arbitrarily modify their situations, seeking out the most congenial possible local community or select circle of collaborators. Such an approach to community life in religion is like matching blood types and would be just about as evangelical and gospel-motivated. Now in saying this I do not wish to give the impression that some of the attempts being made to establish smaller living groups is opposed to the gospel. It can be a good thing, especially when the motives are very much in keep-ing with the gospel values, a better image of poverty, a better spirit of personal and communal prayer, in short, if the motives are primarily for the establishment of a better religious atmosphere, and this not merely as a kind of an unfounded dream, but as a realistic probabil-ity. Moreover, such a group could provide for a better. sense of belonging. But here we must question the forma-tion of small fraternities among religious which are based primarily and almost exclusively on other values, socio-logical and psychological. The writer would still wager an educated guess that ev

Issue 34.2 of the Review for Religious, 1975. ; Review ]or Religious is edited by faculty members of the School of Divinity of St. Louis University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. Published bimonthly and copy-right Q 1975 by Review [or Religious. Composed, printed, and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. Single copies: $1.75. Sub-scription U.S.A. and Canada: $6.00 a year; $11.00 for two years; other countries, $7.00 a year, $13.00 for two years. Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or mgney order payable to Review ]or Religious in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to p~rsons claiming to represent Review ]or Religious. Change of address requests should include former address. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor March 1975 Volume 34 Number 2 Renewals, new subscriptions, and changes of address should be sent to Review for Religious; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Correspondence with the editor and the associate editor together with manuscripts and books for review should be sent to Review for Religious; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard.; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to .Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsyl-vania 19131. Typical Constitutions Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J., a specialist in canon law for religious, is a member of the Jesuit Community at St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. INTRODUCTION 1. Plan. The purpose of the present work i~ to facilitate the writing of constitutions of congregations of sisters. It is in fact a typical set of con-stitutions and consists of three parts: I. Spiritual, which is a topical list of spiritual matters for the articles of the first and purely spiritual part of the con-stitutions. Legal norms and details are excluded from this part. 11. Legal, the more important legal articles of congregations of sisters, and these are to make up the second part of the constitutions. III. Statutes, which are not part of the constitutions. These consist of the lesser legal norms to which are to be appended the enactments of general chapters and the ordinances of superiors general. The present work is baled primarily on "Typical Constitutions of Lay Religious Congregations," Review for Religious, 25 (1966), 361-437, also ob-tainable as a reprint from Review for Religious; secondarily on "Proper Juridical Articles of Constitutions," ibid., 27 (1968), 623-32; and lastly on "Constitutions without Canons," ibid., 452-512, which also contains a hand-book of the canons that apply to congregations of sisters, 477-508. 2. Two parts in constitutions. The essential principle of this plan is not that the constitutions are divided into two parts but that the first part is purely spiritual and therefore does not contain legal norms or details, which are con-fined to the second part and to the statutes. The reason for following this prin-ciple is my experience, observation, and judgment that legal norms and details necessarily dry up the spiritual articles of constitutions. The Holy See ap-proved the constitutions of Visitation Nuns, effective from February 2, 1971, 191 192 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 which are divided into two books, one spiritual, the other legal. The same ap-proval had been given in the past to the constitutions of some orders of nuns, in which the canonical norms were appended to but did not form part of the con-stitutions. A juridical norm is to be accurate, clear, and as brief as possible. There are to be no superfluous words; every word is to mean something perti-nent. The result is a dry utterance, and it is evident that details are dry. Law and details have their necessary and proper place in the religious life. They are to be observed but this does not mean that they are to obstruct or to be con-fused with the spiritual. Ecclesiae sanctae (no. 14) states in effect that less stable, less general, and more detailed norms should not be part of the con-stitutions. 3. Canons should not be included in the constitutions unless this is necessary or counseled for the sense of the particular article of the con-stitutions. The constitutions are the proper law of the institute; canons and other matters of common law are the universal law of the Church. There will undoubtedly be translations of the new canon law into at least the principal vernacular languages. An analytical index or handbook of the canons that apply to congregations of sisters can be used by all congregations, and the ex-cessive number of legal articles that have been in the constitutions of each con-gregation can thereby be eliminated. As stated above, there is such a handbook of canons for congregations of sisters in Review for Religious, 27 (1968), 477- 508. 4. First and spiritual part of the constitutions. Typical topics for this first section are listed below. This section should consist of the broad, fundamental, spiritual, religious, human, and social principles of the religious life. The style should be in keeping with the dignity of the matter, motivating, and inspiring. It is to be well written but is not to be merely attractive spiritual reading nor mere narration or information. It is to lead to action, as is the second part of the constitutions and the statutes; it is a rule of life and conduct, and it is in this most important aspect that the style of current experimental constitutions is defective (Review for Religious, 33 (1974), 378-9). This section is not to be a manual of spiritual theology; it gives the more general and fundamental motivation and spirituality of the Church and of the institute. The spiritual sec-tion does not free from but presumes and demands the constant prayerful study of Sacred Scripture, the teaching of the Church on spiritual, theology and the religious life, spiritual theology itself, and other sound spiritual words (ibid.). Obviously the spiritual section should be solid and not filled in with unreal or unsubstantial motivation or spirituality. Especially for this section, the follow-ing footnotes in the article, "Typical Constitutions of Lay Religious Congregat!ons," can be consulted. These contain a listing of other articles, particularly those of spiritual content, ,often found in chapters of constitutions in the past. These footnoteg are nos. 5, 16, 19, 22, 27-9, 32, 36, 40-1, 43-6, 71-2, 74, 90, 93, and 95. From this same article, the following articles should be in the first and spiritual section of the constitutions: 1-2, the general and special Typical Constitutions / 193 purpose; 82, 94-5, the definitions of the essential religious vows; and no. 93, the law of common life in relation to poverty. 5. Second and legal section of the constitutions. This is composed in greater part of the determinations of matters left undetermined in canon law and also of articles over and above canon law. By reason of canon 572, par. 1, no. 6, the vows must be received by the legitimate superior according to the constitutions. The constitutions therefore must determine who is the legitimate superior in this matter. Canon law says nothing on the age required for elected general officials nor for local superiors. The practice of the Holy See in ap-proving the constitutions of pontifical congregations commonly demanded thirty-five years of age for such officials and thirty for local superiors. These are consequently articles over and above canon law. The more important and broader legal articles are to be in this section, those of lesser moment and less general in the statutes. Headings are put at the beginning of many articles in these two sections that the reader may see at a glance and reflect on the topics to be in the second and juridical part of the constitutions and in the statutes and also to note the general difference of the topics in these two sections. These headings therefore do not have to be retained in the constitutions. The order of the matters or articles in none of the three sections will necessarily be the same in all congregations. However, it is recommended to follow the same order in this second section and in the statutes for facility of use. Other articles of like import may be added to any of the three sections. In the juridical part of the constitutions and in the statutes, more important additions should be put in the former, the less important, less general, less stable in the latter. This legal sec-tion and the statutes have especially been based on the three articles mentioned in no. 1 above. In the article, "Proper Juridical Articles of the Constitutions," the following explanatory footnotes can be ~sefully consulted: Nos. 2, 4, ad-mission to and dismissal from the postulancy; 3, prolongation of the postulan-cy; 5, admission to the noviceship; 8, dismissal of a novice; 9, prolongation of the noviceship; 10, admission to profession; 11, anticipation of renewal of tem-porary vows; 12, exclusion from profession; and 13-5, dismissal. Articles 86, 101-2 of this section may be omitted, and 58 transferred to the statutes. 6. Statutes, which are not part of the constitutions. It is to be emphasized that this section is not part of the constitutions. Therefore, it does not demand the approval of the Holy See nor of the local ordinaries in the case of diocesan congregations. Consequently, it may be changed by the institute itself, unless the matter is one of common law, as the custom book is now changed by the in-stitute. This section is to contain the norms that are less important, less general, less permanent, more procedural than .substantial, more office and job profiles and descriptions than norms on the religious life (Ecclesiae sanctae, no. 14). Articles 3, 10, 19, 21, 23-4, 29, 33, 41, 43, 88, and 95-6 of this section may be omitted. The enactments of general chapters and the ordinances of superiors general should be placed at the end of this section. For this reaspn it can be more efficient and economical to print this section as a separate and less expensive booklet. 194 / Review for Religious, Volume34, 1975/2 7. Bibliography. In addition to the articles mentioned in no. 1 above, the following questions and answers and articles in Review for Religious will be helpful: "Too Much Canon Law in Constitutions," 15 (1956), 220-1; "The Constitutions," 19 (1960), 323-67; "Differences in Constitutions of Sisters and Brothers," 26 (1967), 507-16; "Differences of Law between Pontifical and Diocesan Lay Congregations,"' 27 (1968), 289-307; "Omission of Canons from Constitutions," ibid, 1144; "Postconciliar Norms on the Revision of the Constitutions," ibid., 1145-7; "Votes Required for a Revision of the Constitutions," ibid., 752-7; "Canon Law for Religious after Vatican II," 31 (1972), 949-66; 32 (1973), 1273-87; 34 (1975), 50-70; "Revision of the Constitutions," 33 (1974), 376-85. 8. Exclusion of added notes. It had been my intention to add some ex-planatory notes, but I later felt that this would only encumber an article that was already very long. It is sufficient to note that the duration of the postulan-cy, noviceship, and temporary profession is that which 1 consider the best. Provincial superiors and officials may also be elected in the provincial chapter. Finally, the directress of novices and her assistant do not have to be designated for any determined duration of office. 9. Based on the practice of the Holy See. The legal section of the con-stitutions and the statutes have been presented with the practice of the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes in approving constitutions always in mind. However, at times I have proposed suggestions of my own, for example, in art. II, 31, 59, and 115 of the legal section and art. 60 of the statutes. 10. General chapter retained as now. I found the place and manner of presenting the general chapter difficult to decide. I finally concluded that the best place was at the end of the legal section of the constitutions, with the norms of common law retained as now. PART I. SPIRITUAL The spiritual section, as here given, is composed simply of a list of the headings that should be developed in it. One important reason for this plan is to give full possibility for the expression of the distinctive character of a religious institute, which cannot be readily actuated in the legal section. As stated in the introduction, this part should consist of the broad, fundamental, spiritual, religious, human, and social principles of the religious life. It should give the more general .and fundamental motivation and spirituality of the Church and of the institute. Other topics may be added but they should fall within the principles just given. I. Divine vocation. The invitation of the Holy Spirit is manifested in the interior illumination and inspiration of the personal, close, and especially the total love of our Lord for you. 1 Jn 4:9-11, 19; PC, no. 6. 2. Response. Your response was to accept a life of personal, close and es-pecially of total love for our Lord. Col 3:14; Rom 13:10; I Cot 13:!3; Eph 3: 17-8; LG, nn. 39-40, 44; GES, no. 24; PC, nos. 5, 11. Typical Constitutions 3. Baptismal consecration. Relation of this invitation, response, and acceptance by God to baptism, or baptismal consecration, as the sacrament of regeneration and initiation. PC, no. 5. 4. Spirit and charism of the founder or foundress. 5. Relation of Rule, constitutions, and all law for religious to this invitation-response or consecration. PC, no. 2; Review for Religious, 33 (1974), 381. 6. Invitation to perfection is to the perfection of love or better still to a love that is personal, close, and especially total of our Lord and of all mankind for Him. 7. Perfect love will be attained completely only in the eternal possession of God in the beatific vision. From this it follows that life on earth must be similarly supernatural and be lived with sufficient understanding and con-sciousness of the Indwelling of the Trinity, of sanctifying grace as the par-' ticipation in the divine nature, as adoption into the family of God, of the in-fused virtues, the predominance of the supernatural virtue of charity, of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and of the relation of these to the Mystical Body, the vine and the branches, and the sacraments. I Cor 3:16-7; Jn 14:23; 2 Pt 1:4; 1 .In 3:1; Rom 8:17; Gai 4:4-6; Eph 1:4-6; Rom 8:28-30. 8. Our Lord is the ideal. However, we do not so much imitate as live Him, by growing through love and in proportion to its degree into His way of think-ing, loving, and desiring, and thus in any circumstances doing what He would do. This is the source, the living, that Vatican II emphasized in its effect of witnessing to Christ. Phil 2:5. 9. The outstanding fact of the consciousness of our Lord was that He was the Son of God. Ours should be a like consciousness of being a daughter or son of the Father, the younger sister or brother of our Lord, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This should be a result of the conviction of the divine adoption. 10. Difference from the lay life is in the means to the end. Mt 5:48; 1 Thes 4:3; Eph 1:4; I Pt 1:4-6; LG, no. 11, 39, 42. 11. The purpose of the essential means, the evangelical counsels, is to con-trol the principal obstacles to the perfect lore'of God. LG, no. 44-6; Letter of the Papal Secretary of State, July 13, 1952, Bouscaren-O'Connor, Canon Law Digest, 4, 96. (a) Chastity. 1 Cor 7:32-8; LG, n. 42; Pius XII, Courtois, The States of Perfection, nn. 505-505a. (b) Poverty. Mt 19:23 ff.; 13:22; Lk 12:34; 12:23. (c) Obedience. Rom 5:!9;.Phil 2:8. 12. Religious life is ecclesial. The religious life is ecclesial because it is part of the function of the Church to promote the intensely universal and total love of Christ, which is what religious are primarily to live, and this is what they are primarily mandated to live by ~he approval of the Church of their institute and its Rule and constitutions; Vatican II places the religious life in the Dogmatic 796 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 Constitution on the Church; canon law makes religious life a distinct class of persons in the Church, with juridical existence and distinctive rights and obligations; the Church in approving the apostolic nature and constitutions of an apostolic religious institute gives its members a mandate to go forth as its apostles; in the religious life should be found primarily the sanctity that is the note or guide to the true Church; the Church interprets authentically the evangelical counsels, regulates their practice, establishes states of perfection, approves Rules and constitutions, and guides and watches over religious in-stitutes that they may remain faithful to the spirit of their founders. LG, nos. 43-5. 13. Necessity of all three evangelical counsels. Leo XIII, Plus XI, Plus XII, Paul VI, Vatican II. Courtois, ibid., nos. 33, 130, 403; Bouscaren- O'Connor, ibid., 6, 427; LG, no. 44. 14. Mass, Eucharist. The Eucharist as the center of the life and day of the religious; counsel of due devotion to the Real Presence. 15. Liturgy. The liturgical spirit should be progressive according to the norms of the Church, markedly interior, adult, restrained rather than distinc-tively emotional, and not prominently characterized by a love of novelty and change. 16. Devotions. The spiritual life of a religious should not be mere devotionalism, but devotions and practices approved by the Church should be neither excluded nor discouraged. 17. Blessed Virgin. The institute and its constitutions should necessarily emphasize the Blessed Virgin Mary in her relation to our Lord~ redemption, the Church, and to the sanctification, community life, and apostolate of the members. 18. Sacred Scripture. The reading and study of Sacred Scripture should be encouraged primarily in relation to and for the spiritual life. 19. Prayer. The broad principles of prayer and its place in the religious life should be given. Liturgical prayer does not exclude personal prayer. There should be a prescription of at least a half hour of daily mental prayer. Lk 5:16; 6:12; 9:18; 11:1. 20. Community life. Its pui, poses are: strength and perseverance to live the religious consecration by living with others of the same consecration; help in the apostolate and professional aspect of life; to enable the religious to develop socially and to have a socially satisfactory life. Anything is to be avoided that would fragment the congregation or that would factually eliminate or lower community life. 21. Apostolate. The mission of the Church must be a continuation of that of our Lord, and that of a religious institute must be to be a part of the aposto-late or mission of the Church. The primary purpose of redemption was the com-munication of divine life, and thus the essential apostolate of a religious in-stitute is that its members be an instrument, even if remote, in the communica-tion, intensification, and retention of divine life. The work should also be such as to help the union of the religious with God. The apostolic works are com- Typical Constitutions / 1117 munity works, not, outside of a rare exception, to be merely an individual work. There should be a special love and dedication to work for the poor, the neglected, the handicapped, the unfortunate, and the disadvantaged. The religious life is not mere natural development nor an apostolate of mere social work and action (GES, no. 42). All secularization of life or work must be avoided. 22. Formation. The broad spiritual, educational, professional, human, and social aspects of formation should be given in this section. 23. Cloister, Silence. In some institutes more contact with seculars should be encouraged than in the past, but cloister should be observed and the house should never lose the atmosphere of a religious house. The members of a com-munity should have the assurance of reasonable privacy. Religious silence is an aid to prayer and to an interior life, not mere politeness. 24. Mortification. The tendency to self and sin within us demands morti-fication. This must always be voluntary but much more passive than active mortification. Not everything in the Christian life is positive but nothing is purely negative. Mortification, renunciation, abnegation have as their purpose an intensification in virtue, which is always lived personally in Christ, and es-pecially in the supernatural virtue of charity. 25. Ecumenical spirit. 26. Religious and the modern world. The relation of religious to the tem-poral world should be included and based on the Constitution on the Church in. the Modern World of Vatican II. 27. The broad principles on at least several of the following should be in this part of the constitutions: suitability of candidates, pre-entrance guidance, postulancy, noviceship, juniorate, religious habit, profession, the sacrament of penance, religious exercises, correspondence, suffrages for the dead, retirement and care of the aged, sick and infirm, government, general and provincial chapters, superior general, other superiors, councilors, treasurers, directresses of postulants, novices, and junior professed, provinces, regions, houses, the Rule, and the constitutions. PART II. LEGAL I. General purpose. The Sisters of. are a pontifical (diocesan) congregation whose general purpose is the response of a personal, close, and particularly total love of our Lord and of all men and women for Him in a supernatural life that is a filial love of the Father, an intimate participation in the divine life, and whose primary and universal norm is the person Christ, un-der the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is a life mandated and guided by the Church, and by the charism and spirit of their own congregation. These are supplemented by the laws of the Church and of their own congregation. The sisters profess .the simple vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, which are an essential means to the attainment and intensification of this love. 2. Special purpose. (For example:) In their special purpose, the sisters, mandated by the Church as its apostles, are essentially to be an instrument of 198 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 God in the communication, preservation, and intensification of the same divine life in others. This they do through their life and work as Christian educators and nurses in hospitals. 3. Authorization necessary for a change in the special purpose or in the particular works. Without the permission of the Holy See the special purpose may not be changed, nor may works not included in it be added in a general and permanent manner. 4. Change in the habit. No permanent, substantial, or general change in the form or color of the habit may be made without the permission of the Holy See. 5. Right to admit to the postulancy. The right to admit an applicant to the postulancy belongs to the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior), who has also the right to dismiss her if she is judged unfit for the life of the congregation. A postulant has full liberty to leave the congregation. 6. Right to admit to the noviceship. The right to admit to the noviceship appertains to the superior general (higher superior) with the consent of her council. 7. Duration of the noviceship. The duration of the noviceship is two years. The added year is not required for the validity of profession, and the superior general with the advice of her council may dispense from it wholly or in part. 8. Dismissal of a novice. For any just reason a novice may be dismissed by the superior general (provincial congregation frequently: higher or provincial superior) with the advice of her council. 9. Prolongation of the noviceship. If the st~itability of a novice is doubtful, the superior general (provincial congregation frequently: higher superior) with the advice of her council may prolong the time of her noviceship but not beyond six months. 10. Religious profession. Upon completion of the noviceship and in the novitiate house, the novice shall make profession of simple vows or other com-mitment for three (two) years. At the end of this period the sister shall renew her vows for two (three) years. The superior general (provincial congregation: provincial or higher superior) may prolong the prescribed period of temporary profession but not beyond a year, in which case the sister must renew her tem-porary profession. OR: . . . the novice shall make profession of simple vows for one year. This profession is to be renewed annually until five full years of temporary vows are completed. The superior general . . . OR:. Upon the completion of the noviceship and in the novitiate house, the novice shall make profession of simple vows for three years or until the com-pletion of her twenty-first year, if a longer time is necessary to attain the age prescribed for perpetual profession. The superior general., may prolong the prescribed time of temporary profession, but not beyond a second term of three years, in which case the sister must renew her temporary profession. The right to admit to first profession, renewal and prolongation of tem-porary vows, and perpetual profession appertains to the superior general with Typical Constitutions / 199 the vote of her council. This vote shall be deliberative for the first temporary profession but only consultative for the renewal and prolongation of temporary vows and perpetual profession. (Provincial congregation:) The right to admit to first profession, prolonga-tion of temporary vows, and perpetual profession appertains to the superior general with the vote of her council. This vote shall be deliberative for the first temporary profession but only consultative for prolongation of temporary vows and perpetual profession. The provincial superior presents the requests for admission to the superior general, with the deliberative vote of her council for first profession and the consultative vote for prolongation of temporary vows and for perpetual profession. The right to admit to renewals of temporary vows appertains to ttie provincial superior w~th the consultative vote of her council. 11. For the validity of any profession, the following is necessary in addition to the other requisites stated in canons 572-3: that the profession be received by the superior general or a sister delegated by her. (Provincial, regional, and) Local superiors and their legitimate substitutes are delegated by the con-stitutions to receive all professions in their (provinces, regions, and) houses and with power also to subdelegate. The added period of two years is not necessary for the validity of the perpetual profession, and the superior general with the advice of her council may dispense from it wholly or in part. 12. The following is the formula of profession: 13. Obedience. The sisters are bound to obey by reason of the vow only when lawful superiors command expressly in virtue of holy obedience or in equivalent words. 14. Superiors shall rarely, prudently, and cautiously command in virtue of holy obedience and only for a grave reason. It is expedient that a formal precept be given in writing or at least in the presence of two witnesses. 15. Local superiors, especially of small houses, shall not give commands in virtue of holy obedience except in grave and urgent cases, and they should then immediately notify the superior general (provincial congregation: provincial superior). 16. The sisters are obliged by the virtue of obedience to fulfill the prescrip-tions of the constitutions, statutes, and other orders of superiors. 17. Supreme authority. Supreme internal authority is exercised ordinarily by the superior general assisted by her council and extraordinarily by the legitimately assembled general chapter. 18. Authority of the superior general. A serious reason and the deliberative vote of her council are required for the superior general (a higher or regional superior) to transfer or remove a superior or official before the expiration of a prescribed term of office. Unless otherwise specified, officials may be reap-pointed indefinitely. With the consent of her council, the superior general may prolong the term of office of (provincial, regional, and) local superiors when this is necessary. 200 / Review for Religious, l/olurne 34, 1975/2 19. The superior general has the right to transfer the sisters from one house to another and to assign their duties. 20. Provincial congregation. The congregation is divided into provinces. The original establishment and the total suppression of all existing provinces are reserved to the Holy See. All other establishment, modification, and sup-pression of provinces appertain to the superior general with the consent of her council and to the general chapter. Transfer to another province. Only the superior general with the advice of her council and ordinarily after consulting the interested, provincials may per-manently transfer a sister from one province to another. 21. The superior general shall prudently direct and supervise the ad-ministration of the temporal goods of the congregation and of each (province, region, and) house in accordance with the prescriptions of canon law, the con-stitutions, and statutes. 22. The superior general may not appoint a vicar and delegate powers to her nor may she grant a sister active or passive voice or deprive her of it. 23. If it should ever seem necessary to remove the superior general from of-rice, the general council must submit the matter to the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (diocesan: the ordinary of the residence of the superior general). If the superior general thinks it her duty to resign her of-fice outside the time of the sessions of any general chapter, she shall in writing make known her reasons to the same Congregation (diocesan: same ordinary). During the time of any general chapter, even if only of affairs, the superior general shall present her resignation and reasons to the chapter, which is com-petent to accept it, elect her successor and also other elective general officials. 24. Canonical visitation. The superior general shall make the visitation of the entire congregation at least every three years (at least once during her term of office). She shall see that the houses immediately subject to her are visited every year. The provincial superior shall make the visitation of all the houses of her province once a year, and the same frequency of visitation of a region shall be observed by the regional superior. Both may omit this visitation in the year of the visitation by the superior general. Should the higher or regional superior be lawfully prevented from making the visitation, another sister is to be delegated for this purpose. 25. The superior general may designate a visitor for an individual (province or) house or for a particular matter; (the provincial and regional superiors m~.y do the same for an indi~,idual house or a particular matter;) but to appoint a visitor for the entire congregation (in the case of a provincial or regional superior, for the ei~tire province or region), the consent of the perti-nent council must be obtained. The visitor must be a sister of perpetual vows. 26. The purpose of the visitation is to strengthen union and charity, to in-quire into the government and administration of the (province, region, and) house as also into the fulfillment of the obligations of the religious life; to cor-rect prevalent abuses, and to give occasion to each sister to speak freely on matters that concern her personal welfare or the general good. The (Provincial, Typical Constitutions / 201 regional, and) local superiors retain the usual exercise of their office during the visitation. 27. Councilors. The general council is composed of the four general coun-cilors. The superior general, although she presides and votes in the council, is not a member of the general council. She places all acts in her own name, even in matters that require the consent or advice of the council, since she alone possesses the authority to govern the congregation. 28. Although the superior general has the right of acting completely un-assisted except in matters reserved to higher authorities or that by law demand the consent or advice of the general council, yet she is earnestly counseled to seek the advice of her council also in other important matters. 29. The duty of the councilors is to give advice and assistance to the superior general in matters of government and administration, to cast a deliberative or consultative vote according to canon law, the constitutions and statutes, and to propose whatever they think is to the best interest of the con-gregation. 30. The councilors are bound to secrecy concerning all matters discussed in the sessions, as well as those confided to them by reason of their office. If a councilor violates this secrecy, she shall be admonished by the superior general. If she repeatedly violates it, she shall be corrected according to the gravity of her fault. 31. If a general councilor or elected general official dies, resigns, becomes incapable of fulfilling her duties regularly, or is deposed, the superior general with the consent of her council shall replace her by a sister having the requisite qualities, who shall hold office until the next general chapter. No general coun-cilor or official may resign her office or be removed except for a serious reason, accepted as such by the superior general with the consent of her council. 32. The assistant and vicar takes the place of the superior general when the latter is absent or when for any reason whatever is unable to exercise her office. 33. Although the superior general alone has the right to convoke the general council, when she is ill, absent, or otherwise impeded, the assistant con-venes and presides over the council. 34. When acting in her representative capacity, the assistant shall issue only such directions as are required for ordinary government and cannot be deferred; and then as far as possible she shall act according to the presumed will of the superior general. 35. At the death, resignation, or legitimate ~emovai from office of the superior general, the vicar shall assume the government of the congregation with full power and equal rights. She shall continue in this office until the elec-tion of the superior general at the next chapter, to be convoked according to art. 67. 36. In the absence or disability of the assistant, the councilor next in precedence and so on in succession shall act as the representative of the superior general. 37. Administration of temporal goods. Not only the congregation but also 202 / Review for Religious, I/olume 34, 1975/2 each (province and) house is capable of acquiring, possessing, and ad-ministering temporal property. 38. Provincialsuperior. Each province is governed by a provincial superior who like the superior general is a higher superior. The provincial superior is ap-pointed by the superior general with the consent of her council for a term of three years. She may be reappointed for a second but not for a third immediate term in the same province. She continues to govern the province until the arrival of her successor. 39. The primary duty of the provincial superior is to govern the whole province so as to promote the common and individual good. She must be an example of religious life, distinguished for her virtue and practical judgment, devoted to the interests of the sisters, loyal to the supreme authority in the con-gregation, and obedient to ecclesiastical directives. She is to be thoroughly convinced that on her administration depends the well-being of the province. 40. The provincial superior has the right: (a) To govern the whole.province in accordance with the constitutions and statutes, with the exception of matters reserved to higher authorities; (b) To give commands and make regulations in conformity with the con-stitutions and statutes; (c) To admit candidates to the postulancy; (d) To grant the sisters the necessary permissions for studies, travel, visits, and similar matters according to the established regulations; (e) To encourage and initiate good works. 41. It is the duty of the provincial superior: (a) To exercise supervision over the observance of the constitutions, statutes, and all obligations of the religious life; (b) To make the visitation of the houses in conformity with art. 24 and to submit a report of her visitation to the superior general; (c) To advise and direct local superiors in their activities; (d) To present, with her recommendations, matters submitted by local superiors that require recourse to the superior general; (e) To examine the financial statements of the houses and to make the financial reports of the province; (f) To examine the annual personnel and disciplinary reports of the local superiors and forward copies of these, along with her own report, to the superior general. 42. In extraordinary and difficult matters, the provincial superior should consult the superior general. If the urgency of the case makes this impossible, she should later inform the superior general of the matter. 43. The four (two) provincial councilors constitute the provincial council in the same way as was stated for the general council. One of the councilors shall be designated as assistant and vicar and shall take the place of the provincial superior when the latter is absent or otherwise impeded from fulfilling the duties of her offices, unless the superior general with the consent of her council has appointed another sister as acting provincial. In the event of the death or Typical Constitutions / 203 removal from office of the provincial superior, the vicar shall assume with full powers and equal rights the government of the province until the newly ap-pointed provincial assumes office or until the arrival of an acting provincial ap-pointed in the same way by the superior general. In other respects the assistant shall observe the norms established in art. 32-6. The provincial councilors, secretary, and treasurer are appointed on the recommendation of the provincial superior by the superior general with the consent of her council; they must be at least thirty years of age and of perpetual vows. The provincial secretary and treasurer may be councilors but not the provincial assistant. 44. The norms of statutes nos. 60-87 apply with due distinctions to the provincial council and councilors and the provincial secretary and treasurer. 45. Regions. Because of their distance from the motherhouse or other proportionate reasons, houses that cannot as yet be united into a province may be grouped into regions, which are not distinct moral persons. The establish-ment, change, and suppression of regions appertain to the superior general with the consent of her council. 46. Regions are governed by regional superiors who in almost all respects have the rights and duties of provincials. Their authority is delegated by the superior general but, unless an express restriction is made or is to be un-derstood from the nature of the matter, this delegation contains all the authority possessed by provincials. The regional superiors are consequently to be guided in general by the articles of the constitutions and statutes on provinces, the provincial superior, and the provincial officials. 47. By the law of the constitutions and for her lawful appointment as regional superior, a sister must possess the qualities required by common law for provincials. The articles of the constitutions on the manner of appointment, term of office, reappointment, removal from office, and relation of the provin-cial superior to the superior general all apply also to the regional superior. 48. The regional superior is assisted by two councilors and, if it seems necessary or opportune, by a secretary and treasurer, all appointed by the superior general with the consent of her council. These sisters must be professed of perpetual vows. One of the councilors shall be designated as regional assistant and vicar. With due distinctions, nos, 60-87 of the statutes, and art. 43 above apply to the regional council, councilors, and the regional secretary and treasurer. 49. Houses. For the erection of a house, the superior general must have the consent of her council and the written consent of the local ordinary. The con-sent of both is also necessary for the suppression of a house,, which likewise appertains to the superior general. (~Diocesan:) For the erection of a house, the superior general must have the consent of her council and the written consent of the local ordinary. The suppression of a house appertains to the local or-dinary after having consulted the superior general. The latter must have the consent of her council for requesting or agreeing to a suppression. 50. Local superiors. Every house, including the motherhouse, shall be 204 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 governed by a local superior, who is appointed by the superior general with the consent of her council for a term of three years. She may be appointed for a second but not immediately for a third term in the same house. The local superior must have completed her thirtieth year and be professed of perpetual vows. She continues to govern the house until the arrival of her successor. 51. The local superior possesses the authority that canon law, the con-stitutions, and the statutes assign to her and has the right to govern the house in all matters not reserved to higher authorities. 52. The superior shall devote herself with generosity and perseverance to the education and formation of the younger sisters, particularly those of tem-porary vows. 53. Directress of novices. The formation of the novices is entrusted to the directress of novices who must be professed of perpetual vows and at least thirty years of age. 54. Obligation, change, and interpretation of the constitutions and statutes. The (Rule), con~stitutions and statutes do not of themselves bind under sin but only under the penalty imposed for their infraction, unless the violation concerns the vows, or divine or ecclesiastical laws, arises from a sinful motive, or gives scandal. 55. Superiors are bound to admonish the sisters and to impose penances for violations of the constitutions and statute's. The sisters are obliged to accept the corrections and to perform the penances. 56. The superior general may interpret authentically also the statutes and the ordinances of the general chapter, but the Holy See alone can authentically interpret and change the constitutions. In a doubt about some particular point, the general chapter, as also the superior general with the advice of her council, may give a practical interpretation of the matter and the sisters are obliged to follow this interpretation. (Diocesan:) The superior general may interpret authentically also the statutes and the ordinances of the general chapter, but the constitutions may be neither authentically interpreted nor changed without the unanimous consent of the ordinaries of the dioceses in Which the congrega-tion has houses. In a doubt . . . 57. Changes in the constitutions may not be made without serious reasons. Any change must be first discussed in the general chapter, and if it obtains at least two-thirds of the votes, it shall be submitted to the Holy See (diocesan: local ordinaries) for a decision. 58. A complete copy of the constitutions shall be given to every sister at the beginning of the noviceship that she may study and earnestly strive to observe them. 59. Dispensation. No superior of the congregation, without an express con-cession from competent authority, may dispense from the laws of the Church or the decrees of the Holy See. 60. For a determined time and a proportionate reason, the superior general may dispense individual sisters, a house, province, region, or the entire con-gregation from a merely disciplinary article also of the constitutions. A provin- Typical Constitutions / 205 cial and a regional superior have the same power for their sisters, houses, province, or region, and a local superior for her sisters and house. The direc-tress of novices has the same power as a local superior but only with regard to the novices and the novitiate. 61. All superiors may dispense themselves in those matters in which they may lawfully dispense others. GENERAL CHAPTER 1. Convocation and members 62. The general chapter must be convoked as often as general elections are necessary. The ordinary convocation takes place every sixth (fifth, fourth) year at the expiration of the term of office of the superior general and on her death, resignation, or deposition. 63. (Pontifical:) To convoke the chapter for any reason other than those specified above, the permission of the Holy See is required in addition to the consent of the general council. (Diocesan:) To convoke the chapter for any reason other than those specified above, the superior general must have the consent of her council. 64. The chapter must be convoked by the superior general at least six (three, a year) months before the day fixed for its assembly. In the letter of convocation, the date and place of the chapter shall be designated, and the prayers to be said for the success of the chapter shall be prescribed. The place of the chapter shall be determined by the superior general with the consent of her council. 65. Before the convocation, the superior general must inform the ordinary of the diocese in which the chapter will convene of the date of the election of the superior general, that he may preside either personally or by delegate at this election. 66. The meeting of the chapter may be anticipated or deferred for an im-portant reason, but not more than three (six) months in either case. 67. In the event of the death, resignation, or deposition of the superior general, the chapter must be convoked by the vicar as soon as possible, so that the assembly of the chapter will not be postporied more than six (three, a year) months after the vacancy of the office. 68. The members of the chapter are: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) -- or (g) The superior general The four general councilors The secretary general The treasurer general Former superiors general The provincial superiors delegates elected by each province The regional superiors 206 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 The delegates elected by (the regions and) the sisters according to art. or (g) Forty (or other number) delegates elected by the sisters. 69. The superior general and elective general officials continue as members of the assembled chapter even though at the elections other sisters have succeeded them in office. 70. The superior general with the consent of her council may summon other sisters to assist in the clerical and similar work of the chapter. She may in the same manner invite such sisters and externs to present and discuss questions with the chapter. None of these are permitted to vote. 71. The chapter elects the superior general, general councilors, secretary general, treasurer general, and treats of the more important affairs that con-cern the entire congregation. 2. General norms to be observed in elections 72. The tellers elected for the general chapter must take an oath to perform their duty faithfully and to keep secret the proceedings of the chapter even after the elections are completed. All the capitulars are likewise bound to secrecy: The places of the tellers and secretary shall be near the president. 73. The tellers are to take care that the ballots are cast by each elector secretly, individually, and in order of precedence. The secretary draws up ac-curately the proceedings of the chapter, which shall be signed by the president, the tellers, and the secretary herself. These are to be preserved in the archives of the congregation. 74. Two-thirds of the capitulars must be present for the validity of the acts of the general (and provincial) chapter, but all must be convoked. 75. Even though a sister may have the right to vote in her own name under several titles, she may nevertheless cast but one vote. 76. The capitulars must be present in person at the election. No one may validly vote by letter or by proxy, lfa capitular in the house where the election is being held cannot be present at the election because of illness, her written vote sh"all be collected by the tellers in a sealed envelope. 77. If a capitular believes that she cannot attend the general (or provincial) chapter on account of sickness or for some other serious reason, she is to in-form the superior general (or provincial superior), who shall decide with the consent of her council whether the capitular should be excused and her sub-stitute summoned. 78. All the sisters, whether capitulars or not, are forbidden to procure votes directly or indirectly for themselves or others. Prudent consultation regarding the qualities of those eligible is permitted within the bounds of justice and charity. 79. Each of the electors shall write on her ballot the name of the sister for whom she votes, fold the ballot, and drop it in the ballot box placed before the president. 80. When all the ballots have been cast, the tellers shall first count the Typical Constitutions / 207 folded ballots in the presence of the president and the electors to ascertain whether the number of ballots corresponds to the number of electors. If the number of ballots exceeds the number of electors, the balloting is null and void. Otherwise they shall proceed to the inspection of the ballots. 81. The ballots are then opened and examined. They are read first by the senior teller, who in an audible voice shall make known the name on each ballot, then by the president and lastly by the junior teller. The votes must be recorded by the secretary. At the end of each balloting, the president must an-nounce the names of all sisters voted for and the number of votes given to each. 82. No sister may validly vote for herself. A vote is also null and void: (a) If given by one who is incapable of a human act or has by law been deprived of active voice; (b) If it is not given freely. Consequently a vote is invalid if an elector is forced directly or indirectly by grave fear or fraud to elect a specified sister or one or the other among several specified sisters; (c) If it is not secret, certain, absolute, and determined; (d) If it is blank or for an ineligible person. 83. Even if one or more votes are null and void, the election is valid provided the one elected received the number of valid votes required by the constitutions. 84. Unless otherwise prescribed for a particular election, all elections shall be decided by an absolute majority of secret votes, that is, a number which ex-ceeds half the number of valid votes cast; but if after two ballotings no one has received an absolute majority, a third and last balloting will be held, in which a relative majority decides. In an equality of votes among several candidates in this third balloting, the senior by first profession is elected; if the sisters made their first profession on the same day, the senior~by age is elected. This same norm shall resolve an equality of votes on the only, limiting, or decisive balloting of any election. 85. After the required number of votes has been obtained, the president shall declare the election legitimately made and announce the name of the sister elected. This proclamation of the newly elected superior general ter-minates the duties of the presiding local ordinary. 86. All sisters are obliged to accept any office to which they have been elected. 87. The ballots must be burned by the tellers after each session. 88. Ira sister elected as superior general or general official is not present at the chapter, she is to be summoned immediately; but the sessions of the chapter are suspended only in the former case. 89. The office of the superior general and of the elected general officials always terminates at the election of their successors. 3. Election of delegates 90. All sisters, including those of temporary vows or other commitment, have active voice in the election of delegates to the general (provincial) chapter. 208 / Review for Religious, l/olurne 34, 1975/2 Only sisters of perpetual vows, unless members of the chapter in virtue of any office, have passive voice. OR: Only sisters of perpetual vows have active and, unless members of the chapter in virtue of any office, also passive voice in the election of delegates to the general (provincial) chapter. 91. The superior general (provincial) shall publish a list accessible to all the electors, compiled with the consent of her council, of all the sisters of passive voice. 92. In each house on the day determined in the letter of convocation, the electors shall assemble under the direction of their local superior. Each shall elect by secret ballot forty (or other number) sisters. 93. The local superior shall collect all the ballots without inspecting them and enclose them with her own ballot in an envelope, which she shall seal in the presence of the electors. She shall write on this inner envelope, "Election of Delegates, house N . " and forward it immediately to the superior general (provincial). 94. As soon as possible after all the envelopes have been received, the superior general (provincial) and her council shall open the envelopes and count the votes of this first balloting. The secretary general (provincial) shall record the votes. All sisters who received an absolute majority are elected. A report of the first balloting containing a declaration of those elected, the number remaining to be elected in the second balloting, and a list of the sisters voted for and the number of votes each received will be published to all the houses as soon as possible. 95. A second voting with the same procedure will be held in all the houses on the day appointed by the superior general (provincial). A relative majority is decisive in this second balloting. The substitutes are in order the sisters who received the next highest number of votes after those elected in the second balloting. The superior general (provincial) shall immediately inform the con-gregation (province) of the complete results. OR: ,90. As 90 above. 91. The superior general (provincial) shall publish a list accessible to all the electors, compiled with the consent of her council, of all the sisters of passive voice divided into three groups as equal as possible in number according to precedence from first profession. 92. In each house on the day determined in the letter of convocation, the electors shall assemble under the direction of their local superior. Each shall elect by secret vote ten sisters from each group and a fourth ten from any or all groups and in any proportion. 93. As 93 above. 94. As soon as possible after all the envelopes have been received, the superior general (provincial) and her council shall open the envelopes and count the votes of this first balloting. The secretary general (provincial) shall record the votes. All sisters who received an absolute majority are elected. A Typical Constitutions / 209 report of the first balloting containing a declaration of those elected, the number remaining to be elected from each group in the second balloting, and a list of the sisters voted for and the number of votes each received will be published to all the houses as soon as possible. 95. A second voting with the same procedure will be held in all the houses on the day appointed by the superior general (provincial). A relative majority is decisive in this second balloting. The substitutes are in order the sisters of each group who received the next highest number of votes in the second balloting after those elected. The superior general (provincial) shall im-mediately inform the congregation (province) of the complete results. 96. (Provincial congregation) Houses immediately subject to the superior general elect two delegates, superiors or subjects, of perpetual vows who are - not members of the chapter in virtue of any office, to the general chapter. The voting is carried out and the votes forwarded to the superior general according to the norms of art. 92-5. 4. Provincial chapter a. Convocation and members 97. The provincial chapter is to be convened as often as a general chapter is to be held .and at least three (six, a year) months before the date of the assembly of the latter. The provincial superior is the president of the chapter, and its principal purpose is to elect the delegates to the general chapter. The provincial shall convoke the provincial chapter at a date sufficient for the proper prechapter preparation for both the provincial and general chapters. 98. The members of the chapter are: (a) The provincial superior (b) The four (two) provincial councilors (c) The provincial secretary (d) The provincial treasurer (e) The delegates as described in nn. 90-5 b. Sessions 99. The chapter shall immediately elect from among the capitulars by a relative majority of secret votes the two tellers and in the same way, in a dis-tinct balloting, the secretary of the chapter. The tellers for these elections shall be the two junior capitulars by first profession, and the secretary shall be the provincial secretary. 100. The chapter shall then elect by separate and secret ballotings and ac-cording to the norm of art. 84 two (three, four or more) delegates and two (three, four or more) substitutes to the general chapter. These must be sisters of perpetual vows. , 101. After these elections, the chapter shall deliberate on matters that con-cern the spiritual and temporal welfare of the province. The same procedure shall be followed in deliberations as in the general chapter. 210 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/2 102. Enactments of the provincial chapter have no force until they are ap-proved by the superior general with the consent of her council. They are then promulgated to the province by the provincial superior. 103. The chapter shall finally deliberate on the proposals to be made to the general chapter by the province. 104. The secretary shall draw up the complete proceedings of the chapter according to the norm of art. 73. One copy is to be sent immediately to the superior general, and a second copy is to be preserved in the archives of the province. The provincial superior shall immediately publish the elections to the province. 5. Preliminary sessions 105. The chapter immediately elects from among the capitulars by a relative majority of secret votes the two tellers and in the same way, in a dis-tinct balloting, the secretary 9f the chapter. The tellers for this preliminary election shall be the two capitulars youngest by first profession, and the secretary general shall be the secretary. 106. The chapter shall then elect by a relative majority of secret votes and on one ballot a committee of three capitulars who had no part in preparing or approving the reports of the superior general. This committee is to examine the reports thoroughly and give its observations to the chapter before the election of the superior general. 107. The superior general presents to the chapter two distinct and com-plete reports: one of the persons, religious life, and works; the other on the material and financial condition of the congregation since the last chapter. The financial report must have been prepared and also signed by the treasurer general. Copies of the reports should be distributed to the capitulars before the opening session. 6. Election of the superior general 108. The day before the election of the superior general shall be spent in retreat by the capitulars, and permission shall be requested for exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. 109. On the day of the election of the superior general, Mass shall be offered in the house where the chapter is held to invoke the blessing of God on the work of the chapter. If the rubrics permit, the Mass shall be the votive Mass of the Holy Spirit. 110. To be elected validly to the office of superior general, a sister must be professed of perpetual vows and have completed her thirty-fifth year. 111. The superior general is elected for six (five, four) years. She may be elected for a second but not for a third consecutive term, o i 12. The superior general is elected by an absolute majority of secret votes. If three ballotings fail to produce this majority, a fourth and last balloting shall be held. In this balloting the electors shall vote for one of the two sisters who Typical Constitutions / 211 had the highest number of votes in the third balloting, but these two sisters themselves shall not vote. If more than two would be eligible by reason of an equality of votes in the third balloting, the norm of art. 84 shall limit the can-didates to two. Of these two the sister who receives the greater number of votes in the fourth balloting is elected. (Diocesan congregation of women:) The local ordinary has full power to confirm or rescind the election of the superior general according to his conscience. 113. The president shall proclaim the newly elected superior general. This act terminates the duties of the presiding local ordinary. 7. Election of the general officials 114. After the election of the superior general and after she has taken the oath according to art. 72, the chapter under her presidency shall elect the four general councilors, the secretary general, and the treasurer general. These elec-tions are made by separate ballotings and according to the norm of art. 84. Immediately after the election of the four councilors, a distinct election for the assistant and vicar shall be held from among the four elected councilors. Or: The first councilor elected shall also be the assistant and vicar. 115. To be elected a general councilor or official a sister must have com-pleted her thirtieth year and have made perpetual profession. Any one of the councilors except the assistant may be elected as secretary general or treasurer general. These two officials should possess the special competence required for their offices. The superior general .may appoint one or more assistant secretaries and treasurers. (Appointment articles) The secretary general and the treasurer general are not elected by the chapter but appointed (for a term of three years) by the superior general with the consent of her council. Both may be general coun-cilors but neither may be the general assistant. Both should possess the specialized competence required for their offices. The superior general may ap-point one or more assistant secretaries and treasurers. The secretary general is not elected by the chapter but appointed (for a term of three years) by the superior general with the consent of her council. She may be a general councilor but not the general assistant. She should possess the specialized competence required for her office. The superior general may appoint one or more assistant secretaries and treasurers. 8. Chapter of affairs 116. After the elections the chapter shall treat of the more important af-fairs that concern the entire congregation. The enactments of the chapter may not be contrary to common law. or the constitutions. 117. Matters are decided by an absolute majority. I f the votes are equal, the presiding superior general has the right of deciding the matter. The voting is public. Any capitular has the right of requesting a secret vote on a particular matter. Such a request shall be put to the public vote of the chapter, lfthe ma- 212 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 jority favors the request, the voting on the particular matter shall be secret. Or: Matters are decided by an absolute majority of secret votes. If the votes are equal, the presiding superior general has the right of deciding the matter. 118. (The provincial chapters and) All professed sisters may submit written proposals to the general chapter. These must be forwarded to the superior general or her delegate at the prescribed time before the opening of the chapter. The capitulars retain the right of making proposals thereafter and during the sessions up to the definite time determined by the chapter, after which no proposals may be submitted. l l9. At a suitable time before the general chapter determined by the superior general, committees of three or more capitulars, appointed by the superior general with the consent of her council, shall arrange the proposals and prepare a report on each distinct proposal. These reports are to be com-pleted before the chapter opens. Every effort is to be made to have these com-mittees composed predominantly at least of capitulars. The superior general may permit that some or all of the committee members be elected by the secret vote of professed sisters or that they propose names for appointment. 120. The chapter is not obliged to deliberate on every matter proposed. It may simply exclude anything that appears useless or inopportune, or it may remit a matter to the study and decision of the superior general and her council after the close of the chapter. 121. The principal affairs are: (a) Suitable means of perfecting or restoring the living of the religious life (b) Proposals submitted to the chapter (c) Determination of the contribution that each house must make to the general treasury Or: Determination of the contribution that each house must make to the provincial treasury, and each province to the general treasury (d) Extraordinary expenditures which the superior general (provincial, regional), and local superiors may authorize or make alone, those that demand the advice or consent of their councils, and those for which local superiors must recur to the (provincial, regional superiors and either of these to the) superior general (e) Norms to be observed in addition to the prescriptions of the sacred canons in alienations, purchases, the assuming of obligations, and other matters of a financial nature (f) Determination of the dowry (g) Confirmation, modification, or abrogation of ordinances of previous general chapters (h) (In provincial congregations) Establishment of new provinces or the suppression of existing ones, the uniting of provinces, or the modification of their boundaries (i) Determination of more important matters for which the advice or con-sent of the general (provincial, regional) or local councils is necessary. 122. The enactments of the chapter remain in force permanently unless Typical Constitutions / 213 amended or abrogated by subsequent chapters. Or: The enactments of the chapter remain in force until the next chapter, in which they may be confirmed, modified, or abrogated. 123. The chapter may not be protracted beyond a reasonable length of time. The superior general shall publish the elections, ordinances, and other acts which the capitulars have determined should be published. STATUTES I. Classes in institute; rights and obligations. The members form one class of sisters subjec( to the one superior general and living under the same common norms. 2. Precedence. The following is the order of prec.edence in highly official and ceremonial matters (see full list in Review for Religious, 25 [1966], 365-8): 3. Titles. The superior general shall be called. The title of. shall be given to. The title of all other religious is Sister. The superior general alone at the expiration of her term of office shall retain the title of. and have the precedence stated in art. 2. 4. Religious habit. (For example:) The habit is of suitable black materi-al. 5. The veil of the professed sisters is of black material and light in weight. 6. The professed sisters wear a silver ring on the third finger of the left hand . . . 7. The sisters are permitted to wear white habits, veils, and cinctures while occupied in duties or in a climate that necessitates or counsels this dress. 8. Dowry. Postulants shall bring the dowry determined by the general chapter. The chapter may grant delegation in this matter to the superior general and her council. 9. The superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior) with the consent of her council may remit wholly or in part the dowry of a candidate who lacks financial means. 10. A postulant dispensed from the dowry is obliged to establishone later if she receives any substantial gift or bequest. 11. After the first profession of a sister, the superior general (provincial congregation usually: provincial superior) with the consent of her council and that of the local ordinary must invest the dowry in safe, lawful, and profitable securities. ! 2. The dowries must be prudently and justly administered at the habitual residence of the superior general (provincial congregation usually: provincial superior). 13. Material entrance requirements. The superior general (provincial con-gregation: provincial or higher superior) with the consent (or advice, or no vote required) of her council shall determine the wardrobe and the sum to be paid for the expenses of the postulancy and noviceship. In particular cases and for just reasons, the superior general (provincial congregation: higher or provincial superior) has the right to dispense wholly or in part from this requirement. 214 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/2 14. A record shall be kept in a special register of all the property that the candidate brings with her to the postulancy, signed by the candidate and two sisters as witnesses. 15. The candidates, upon their admission to the postulancy, must sign a civilly valid document in which they declare that they will not seek compensa-tion for services given to the congregation before or after profession, whether they leave or are dismissed. This document is to be renewed at the time of perpetual profession. 16. Testimonials for admission. Before being admitted candidates must present these credentials: (a) Certificates of baptism and confirmation (b) A testimonial of good moral character from their pastor or another priest, unless the aspirant is already well known to the superior general (higher superior) (c) Certificates of good health, both physical and mental, from reliable professional sources (d) Other testimonials that the superior general (higher superior) may con-sider necessary or opportune. 17. Postulancy. The time prescribed for the postulancy is a year. For a just reason and with the advice of her council, the superior general (higher superior) may prolong or shorten this time but not beyond six months. 18. Every three months the directress shall give to the superior general (higher superior) and her council a report of the postulant's virtues, defects, and aptitude for the life of the congregation. 19. About three months before the beginning of the noviceship, the postulant shall in writing petition the superior general (higher superior) for ad-mission to the noviceship. 20. Before beginning the noviceship, the postulant shall make a retreat of. entire days. 21. Noviceship. As soon as possible, each province shall have its own novitiate. 22. The noviceship begins in the manner determined by the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior) The added year ends on the second anniversary of the inception of the noviceship, and on this day the temporary profession (or other commitment) may be licitly pronounced. 23. Three months before the end of the noviceship, the novices shall in writing request admission to the profession (or other commitment) from the superior general (provincial congregation frequently: provincial superior). 24. The novice shall be informed of her admission to vows so that in due time she may relinquish the administration of her property, dispose of its use and usufruct, and make a will, as prescribed in common law. 25. Before pronouncing her vows (or other commitment), the novice shall make a spiritual retreat of. entire days. 26. Profession of a novice in danger of death. Even though she has not com-pleted the time of her noviceship, a novice in danger of death may, for the con- Typical Constitutions / 215 solation of her soul, be admitted to profession by any superior, the directress of novices, or their delegates. The ordinary formula of profession is to be used if the condition of the novice permits, but without any determination of time. 27. By this profession the novice is granted a plenary indulgence in the form of a jubilee; the profession, however, has no canonical effect. If the novice should recover her health, her state will be the same as if she had made no profession. Therefore, if she perseveres, she must complete the full time of the noviceship and on its completion make a new profession, All of these prescrip-tions apply to other forms of commitment. 28. Religious profession. The written declaration of profession, whether temporary or perpetual, must be signed by the professed sister, the superior general or sister delegate who received the profession, and two other sisters as witnesses. This document shall be carefully preserved in the files of the con-gregation. 29. Three months before the expiration of each temporary profession, the sisters shall present a written petition to the superior general (provincial con-gregation frequently: provincial superior) to be admitted to the renewal of tem-porary vows or to perpetual profession. 30. When the time for which the vows were pronounced has expired, they must be renewed without delay. However, for a just reason, the superior general (provincial congregation frequently: higher or provincial superior) may permit the renewal of temporary vows to be anticipated, but not by more than a month. An anticipated renewal expires only on the day on which a non-anticipated renewal would have expired. Higher superiors.for a just cause may permit first profession or commitment to be anticipated but not beyond fifteen days. 3 I. Before perpetual profession, the sisters shall make a retreat of. entire days, and before renewal of temporary vows or commitment, a retreat of. day(s). Only the first profession must be made in the novitiate house. 32. Poverty. With the permission of the local superior, sisters may perform acts of proprietorship required by civil law. If such an act includes alienation of property or concerns an important matter, this permission is reserved to the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superiors) unless the case is urgent, when it may be given by the local superior. 33. Penance. All superiors are to strive to have confessors readily available before Communion. 34. Religious exercises. The sisters shall daily recite in common Lauds (and) Vespers (and) Compline of the Divine Office. 35. Every day the sisters shall spend a half hour in mental prayer. They shall individually prepare the matter of the prayer beforehand. 36. They shall make the particular and gen'eral examen of conscience at noon and at nigl~t. Privately and at a convenient time during the day, they shall recite five decades of the rosary and devote at least fifteen minutes to spiritual reading. 216 / Review for Religious, IZolume 34, 1975/2 37. The sisters shall accustom themselves to visit the Blessed Sacrament frequently. 38. Annually the sisters shall make a retreat of. full days. They shall observe a day of monthly recollection, which ordinarily is to be the o. Sunday of the month. 39. The sisters shall make a public devotional renewal of their vows and commitment on . . . They should renew their vows frequently in private, par-ticularly at Mass, and on the day of monthly recollection. The formula of this renewal is . 40. Superiors shall grant another suitable time to sisters who are prevented from performing the prescribed spiritual duties at the ordinary time. 41. Mortification and penance. In the practice of corporal mortification and penances of a private nature, the sisters are to be guided solely by the con-fessor; for those that are public they must have the permission of the superior. 42. Enclosure. The parts of the house subject to enclosure are the dor-mitories of the sisters, their cells, the infirmary, in a word, all places destined by the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior) for the ex-c| usive use of the sisters. 43. If the chaplain or other priests live in a house of the sisters, their apartments shall if p~ssible have a separate entrance and be separated from the part of the house occupied by the sisters. 44. The sisters shall observe the prescribed norms and usages on leaving the house. 45. Sisters living outside a convent of the congregation for study are obliged, if possible, to live in a religious house. 46. Correspondence. The correspondence of the sisters is subject to the authority of superiors, and of the junior professed, novices, and postulants also to their directresses. 47. Silence. Religious silence shall be observed according to the prescribed norms and usage of the congregation. 48. "~postolate. The sisters in hospitals shall be guided by religious and ethical principles in their professional activities. In a doubt they shall consult religious or ecclesiastical authority. 49. Care of the sick. Spiritual aid shall be promptly given to the sick. They may ask for the confessor they prefer and are to be given the opportunity of receiving Holy Communion frequently and even daily during their illness. 50. Suffrages for the dead. At the death of a professed religious or novice, the local superior shall immediately inform the superior general (provincial) and the close relatives of the deceased. The superior general (provincial) shall promptly send a notification to all the houses (of the province). 51. Departure and dismissal. The superior general (higher superior) with the advice of her council, for just and reasonable motives, may exclude a religious from renewing temporary vows (or other commitment) or from mak-ing profession of perpetual vows, also because of physical or psychological ill-ness. Religious who have made profession of temporary vows (or other corn- Typical Constitutions / 217 mitment) may freely leave the congregation when the term of the vows has ex-pired. 52. For the dismissal of a sister of perpetual vows, serious external reasons are required, together with incorrigibility, after attempts at correction have been pre~viously made without success, so that in the judgment of the superior general and her council there is no hope of amendment. The efforts at correc-tion shall include not only the admonitions but also a change of employment, transfer to another house, and other suitable means, if judged expedient for a reform of conduct. 53. If by the consent of the council expressed in secret ballot the sister has been found incorrigible and her dismissal approved, the superior general shall transmit the whole matter, with all the relevant acts and documents to the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes (diocesan con-gregation: ordinary of the diocese where the religious house to which the sister is assigned is situated): (Added article in diocesan congregation:) The sister has the right to appeal to the Holy See against the decree of dismissal, and if she makes this appeal within ten days from the date on which she was informed of her dismissal, the decree of dismissal has no juridical effect while the recourse is pending. 54. In an automatic dismissal according to canon 646, it is sufficient that the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior) with the advice of her council make a written declaration of the fact, but she is to take care that the collected proofs of the fact are preserved in the files of the congrega-tion. 55. In the case of~rave external scandal or of very serious imminent injury to the community, any professed sister may be immediately sent back to secular life by the superior general (provincial congregation: higher superior) with the consent of her council or even, if there is danger in delay and time does not permit recourse to the superior general (higher superior), by the local superior with the consent of her council and that of the local ordinary. The sister must immediately put off the religious habit. The local ordinary or the superior general (higher superior), if she is present, must without delay submit the matter to the judgment of the Holy See. 56. A sister who has been canonically dismissed is by that very fact freed from all her religious vows. 57. Superior general. The residence of the superior general shall be at the motherhouse and may not be permanently transferred without the consent of the general council and the permission of the Holy See (diocesan: permission of the ordinary of the present and proposed places of residence). 58. With the deliberative vote of her council, the superior general may place certain houses and works under her immediate authority and may also transfer these to a province. 59. The office of the superior general is incompatible with that of local superior, even in the motherhouse, or with that of any other official. '60. General council. The councilors should live at the motherhouse, but in a 218 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/2 case of necessity two of them, with the exception of the assistant, may live else~,here, provided they can attend the meetings of the council, to which they must always be summoned. The councilors should not be burdened with any employment that might prevent them from fulfilling properly their duties as councilors. Or: At least one councilor, ordinarily the general assistant, must live at the motherhouse. The other general councilors must be assigned to houses from which they can attend the meetings of the council, to which they must always be summoned . . . 61. An ordinary session of the council shall be held every month, but the superior general may convoke the council as often as important affairs are to be discussed. The council may not deliberate unless the president and at least two councilors are present. 62. At the beginning of the session the miiautes of the precedit~g meeting as recorded by the secretary general shall be read. When approved they shall be signed by the superior general and the secretary. 63. The superior general shall then place before the councilors the matters for discussion. When a subject has been stated and appropriate explanatigns given, she shall allow the councilors to speak and shall take care to obtain'the opinion of each. The councilors shall express their opinions with becoming respect, simplicity, and sincerity. 64. When the consent of the councilors is required, the voting must be by secret ballot. The decisions of the council are to be made by an absolute ma-jority. In an equality of votes, the superior general may decide the matter. 65. A full council is necessary for appointments to office. If a councilor cannot be present and the appointment cannot be deferred, a sister of perpetual vows shall be chosen by the councilors as substitute. 66. The superior general may summon sisters who are not councilors for in-formation or advice, but such sisters are never permitted to vote. All who thus attend sessions of the council are 9bliged to secrecy. 67. The superior general must have the deliberative vote of her council in the following cases: (a) Condonation in whole or in part of the dowry (b) Investment of the dowry (c) Determination of the expenses of the postulancy and noviceship (d) Admission to the noviceship and first profession (e) Establishment or transfer of a novitiate (f) Imposition of a formal precept of obedience on the entire congregation, a province, or a house (g) Dismissal of a professed of temporary or perpetual vows and the send-ing of a professed religious immediately back to secular life (h) Convocation of an extraordinary general chapter; designation of the place of the general chapter; inviting of externs and sisters who are not capitulars to the chapter; excusing of a capitular and the summoning of her substitute; compiling of list or groups for the election of delegates; appoint-ment of committees for proposals to the general chapter; and approval of enactments of provincial chapters Typical Constitutions (i) Transfer of the permanent residence of the superior general or of a provincial superior (j) Appointment of a visitor for the entire congregation (k).Choice of a substitute for an absent general councilor (1) Acceptance of the resignation, removal, or deposition of a general coun-cilor or official, and appointment of a successor in these cases (m) Appointment, prolongation of term, transfer, and removal of (provin-cial, regional, and) local superiors, their councilors, secretaries, and treasurers; of a directress or assistant directress of novices, of junior professed, of postulants; instructress of tertians, supervisors of schools and studies, prin-cipals of schools, and administrators of hospitals (n) Placing of houses and works under the immediate authority of the superior general and transferring of them to provinces ¯ (o) Transfer or removal of a superior or official before the expiration of a prescribed term (p) Approval of the accounts of the treasurer general (q) Imposition of an extraordinary tax, investment of money, alienation of ¯ property, contracting of debts and obligations, making of contracts in the name of the congregation, extraordinary expenses, and other matters of a financial nature according to the norms of canon law and the ordinances of the general chapter (r) Establishment, change, and suppression of provinces, regions, and erec-tion and suppression of houses (s) Uniting of the offices of Iota1 superior and local treasurer (t) All matters remitted to the deliberative vote by the general chapter (u) Determination of matters that require the consent or advice of the (provincial, regional, and) local councils. 68. The superior general must have the consultative vote of her council in the following cases: (a) Abbreviation of the added period of the postulancy, noviceship, and temporary vows or other commitment (b) Prolongation of and dismissal from the noviceship (c) Admission to renewal of temporary vows, their prolongation, admission to perpetual profession, and exclusion from renewal of temporary profession and from perpetual profession (d) Declaration of fact for the.automatic dismissal of a professed sister (e) Transfer of a sister from one province to another (f) Approval of the reports of the superior general to the general chapter (g) A practical interpretation of a doubtful point of the constitutions (h) All matters remitted to the consultative vote by the general chapter. 69. Secretary general. It is the duty of the secretary general to assist the superior general with the official correspondence of the congregation. She shall be present at all meetings of the general council and record the minutes of the sessions. She is obliged to secrecy in all that refers to her office. 70. She shall be in charge of the general archives and of all documents relating to the history and administration of the congregation. No document 220 / Review for Religious, l~olume 34, 1975/2 shall be taken from the archives except in conformity with the established regulations. 7 I. The secretary shall compile the annals of the congregation. Every year she shall receive from the local superiors an accurate record of the principal events of their houses. Or: The secretary shall compile the annals of the con-gregation. Every year she shall receive from the provincial (and regional) superiors an accurate record of the principal events of the provinces (regions), and houses. 72. The secretary shall be attentive to all legislation and decrees of the Holy See and to diocesan regulations and civil enactments that affect the congrega-tion, and shall keep the superior general and her council informed on all such matters. 73. The preceding articles apply with due distinctions to (provincial, regional, and) local secretaries. 74. Treasurers. The administration of the temporal goods is entrusted to the general (provincial, regional) and local treasurers under the direction of the respective superiors and the supervision of their councils. The treasurers are obliged to secrecy in all that appertains to their office. 75. The superior general may appoint as many assistants as necessary to the general and local treasurers (general treasurer, and the provincial and regional superior may do the same for provincial, regional, and local treasurers). 76. Treasurer general. The treasurer general manages the financial affairs connected with the general funds. Every six months she must give an account of her administration to the superior general and her council. If everything is found in order, the superior general and the council shall approve her ad-ministration by signing the statement. 77. The treasurer general must see that the (provincial, regional, and) local superiors send a report of their administration to the motherhouse every six months. She shall examine these reports to obtain an exact insight into the financial state of the congregation and its parts and shall give the general coun-cil an accurate account of her examination. 78. Provincial and regional treasurers. The provincial (and regional) treasurer(s) is (are) appointed by the superior general with the consent of her council. Neither the provincial superior nor the assistant provincial may be provincial treasurer. The two preceding articles must be observed also by the provincial (and regional) treasurer with regard to the provincial superior (and the regional superior), her council (their councils), and the local houses. 79. Local treasurers. In each house there shall be a local treasurer, who is appointed by the superior general (provincial) with the consent of her council. Although it is preferable to separate the office of local superior from that of local treasurer, the superior general (provincial), with the same vote of her council, may combine them if this is necessary. 80. The local treasurer shall render a monthly account of her administra-tion to the local superior and her council, who shall examine and approve it ac- Typical Constitutions / 221 cording to the norm of art. 76. Every six months each house shall send an ac-curate financial statement to the superior general (provincial). 81. Administration of temporal goods. Each province must contribute to the general and each house to the provincial (or regional) treasury the sum determined by the general chapter. The superior general with the consent of her council may, when necessary, impose an extraordinary tax on all or some of the provinces and houses or authorize a provincial or regional superior to impose such a tax. 82. Houses or works whose financial responsibility appertains to ecclesiastical or lay administrators and in which the income consists of salaries paid for the sisters shall remit to the general treasury that part of the surplus established by the general chapter. 83. The treasurers validly incur expenses and perform juridical acts of or-dinary administration within the limits of their office. 84. Stocks, bonds, securities, and similar papers shall be placed in a secure safe or safe-deposit box, and the treasurer shall keep an exact record of all such deposits and withdrawals. 85. Each house must maintain an inventory of all property owned by the community. The inventory must be renewed annually for adjustment and depreciation. One copy is to be retained in the house (and another in the provincial or regional house) and one in the files of the treasurer general. An inventory is to be maintained in the same manner for all property owned by (the province and) the congregation. 86. The investment of money should not be made except on the authoriza-tion of the superior general (higher superior) with the consent of her council and ordinarily with the advice of a honest and competent financier. 87. Besides the ordinary expenses, each (province, region, and) house may expend only the sum determined by the general chapter. For other extraor-dinary expenses recourse must be made to the superior general (higher or regional superiors). 88. Provinces. In each house there shall be a provincial house so organized that the proper performance of all provincial duties may be assured. 89. Provincial councilors, secretary, and treasurer. The provincial coun-cilors shall individually submit an annual report to the superior general on the spiritual and temporal state of the province. 90. The provincial superior shall assemble her council once a month; ex-traordinary sessions shall be called when necessary or opportune. 91. The provincial superior must have the deliberative vote of her council for the following acts: (a) Condonation in whole or in part of the dowry (b) Investment of the dowry (c) Determination of the expenses of the postulancy and novicesliip (d) Admission to the noviceship (e) Imposition of a formal precept of obedience on the whole province or an entire house 222 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/2 (f) Sending a professed religious immediately back to secular life (g) Designation of the place of the provincial chapter, inviting of externs and sisters who are not capitulars to this chapter, excusing of a capitular and summoning of her substitute, compiling of lists or groups for the election of delegates, and the appointment of committees on proposals to the general or provincial chapter (h) Appointment of a visitor for the entire province (i) AppointmenL transfer, and removal of local councilors and treasurers, the assistant directress, of novices, the directress of postulants, principals of ~chools, and the uniting of the offices of local superior and local treasurer (j) Removal or transfer of an official before the expiration of a prescribed term (k) Choice of a substitute for an absent provincial councilor (1) Approval of the accounts of the provincial treasurer (m) Investment of money, alienation of property, contracting of debts and obligations, the making of contracts in the name of the province, extraordinary expenses, and other matters of a financial nature according to the norms of canon law and the ordinances of the general chapter (n) Other matters according to the enactments of the general chapter or of the superior general with the consent of her council (o) The determination of matters that require the consent or advice of local councils. 92. The provincial superior must have the deliberative vote of her council for the following requests to the superior general: (a) Erection and transfer of a novitiate and erection and suppression of houses (b) Admission to first profession (c) Dismissal of a professed of temporary or perpetual vows (d) The appointment, proposal of names, removal, deposition, and replace-ment of provincial councilors and officials, local superiors, directress of novices, of junior professed, instructress of tertians, supervisors of schools and studies, and administrators of hospitals (e) The imposition of an extraordinary tax (f) Other matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter or of the superior general with the consent of her council. 93. The provincial superior must have the consultative vote of her council for the following acts or requests to the superior general: (a) To assign the duties of the sisters and to transfer them from one house to another within the province (b) Abbreviation and prolongation of the postulancy, the noviceship, and temporary vows or other commitment (c) Dismissal from the noviceship (d) Admission to renewal of temporary vows (e) Admission to perpetual profession and exclusion from renewal of tem-porary vows a~nd from perpetual profession Typical Constitutions / 223 (f) Declaration of fact for the automatic dismissal of a professed sister (g) Other matters according to the ordinances of the general chapter or of the superior general with the consent of her council. 94. Regions. The regional councilors shall individually submit an annual report to the superior general on the spiritual and temporal state of the region. 95. Houses. At least., sisters must be assigned to a house and adequate provision made for their spiritual assistance. 96. Local superiors. A sister who has been in office for six (twelve) successive years may not again be appointed local superior in any house before the lapse of a (two, three) year(s), except in a case of serious necessity. 97. The local superior shall send a written report once a year to the superior general (provincial) on the spiritual and temporal state of her community. 98. Local officials. In every formal house there shall be two councilors. One is to be designated as assistant and vicar. In smaller houses there is one coun-cilor. The councilors must be sisters of perpetual vows. The local councilors shall write individually to the superior general (provincial) once a year on the spiritual and temporal state of the house. 99. In the absence of the local superior, the assistant shall preside and replace her in whatever is necessary for the ordinary management of the house. 100. The local superior shall convoke her council every month or oftener, if necessary. The norms on the general council, with due distinctions, apply to the local council. Local councilors have only a consultative vote except in the ex-traordinary case mentioned in art. 55 and in matters for which the general chapter or the superior general (or provincial superior), with the consent of her council, has decreed that the vote must be deliberative. 101. The following are the subjects to be discussed by the superior and her council: the fulfillment of the obligations of the religious life and the religious spirit of the community, the occupations of the sisters, the material and finan-cial condition of the house, the work of the school or institution, and the means to be used to encourage works of zeal and to correct deficiencies. 102. Directress of novices. If the number of novices or any other good reason renders it expedient, a sister shall be given as assistant to the directress. The assistant shall be under the immediate authority of the directress in all matters pertaining to the government of the novitiate. She must possess the necessary and suitable qualifications for the office. 103. The directress and her assistant are appointed for three years. Both must be free from all other offices and duties that might interfere with the care and government of the novices. 104. The directress shall grant all ordinary permissions and dispensations to the novices. 105. Every three months the directress must present to the superior general (provincial superior, regional superior) a report on the vocation, character, conduct, progress in.religious life, aptitude,'and state of health of each novice. Non-possessiveness and the Religious Vows Brother Richard DeMaria, C.F.C. Brother Richard DeMaria, C.F.C., is a faculty member in the Department of Religion; lona College; New Rochelle, New York 10801. "You can't take it with you" is an oft-cited maxim from the treasures of pop-ular wisdom, intended to temper the Faustian spirit within man by the reminder that death will separate him from all possessions, honors, and ac-complishments. The maxim applies not only to our inability to carry possessions beyond the doors of death. It speaks also to our daily experience: it is impossible to hold onto the joys whi,ch life provides. It is like the proverbial efforts of a child trying to capture soap bubbles. Rather than simply delighting in their multi-colored beauty, (he child tries to capture them and, in so doing, destroys them. So it is with pleasure: the attempt to capture the beautiful ex-perience destroys it. The attempt-to-own generates dissatisfaction, disappoint-ment, worry, jealousy, suspicion, envy, and a host of internal cancers, all of which crowd out the simple faculties of enjoyment. Possessiveness, the Enemy of True Delight This suggests an important principle: the enemy of true delight is possessiveness. He who would experience the beauty of God's world, the joys of full human life, must learn to enjoy beauty, love, achievement without try-ing, without wanting, to possess them. This approach--symbolized by open-handed arms, extended to touch without holding--is not easily learned, and yet it is necessary if one hopes to taste fully the joy which life bestows, erratically but prodigally, on those who have discerned her ways. The truly wise person is one who, for example, delights in the excitement of achievement, who knows well the joys of friendship,, who has developed an appreciation for the arts, but 224 Non-possessiveness and the Religious Vows / 225 who resists the tendency to possess them. This person knows that, because life is generous, there is no reason to cling to one particular object, person, or ex-perience. There will always be others. The possessive person, on the other hand, bent upon having certain selected experiences, fails to notice and thus enjoy the offerings of a bountiful world. This person has not learned a key truth about human life: the beautiful things in life "happen" and cannot be made to occur or to remain. The effort to force their occurrence, which in-evitably fails, only introduces disappointment and frustration, pain and anger. A new insight into religious life can be gained when it is approached in this context. The three vows, which have been considered descriptive of the religious life, are concerned with three drives within the human spirit which are particularly susceptible to the possessive tendency. It is the thesis of this paper that religious life, as it has been traditionally structured, places a person in a life style which should reduce the pressures leading to possessiveness in each of these areas. Accordingly, each vow involves both a promise to observe a par-ticular life style, as well as a pledge to seek the freedom from possessiveness which that life style is intended to inculcate. In this article, we shall consider separately these three human drives, noting both healthy (nonpossessive) and unhealthy (possessive) forms of each, showing how the religious life style should foster the former. The Vow of Obedience Essential to healthy personality is the sense of fulfillment which one feels when, with body and mind, through ingenuity and hard struggle, one over-comes the forces of disintegration and creates order, beauty and happiness. To know that one has created, has made one's mark upon the world, has con-tributed to the progress of society, is a deeply felt human need. For one who has known this self-affirmation which follows successful creative efforts, work is not drudgery but is an invitation to self-fulfillment. But we often find the possessive tendency present here, adulterating the healthy creative drive, transforming it into a force which is debilitating. The valuable drive to create can give way all too easily to a pathetic search for success and recognition and, then, the energy which should be directed toward creative activity is channeled into frantic efforts to attain or retain positions of prestige. The person who is possessive about success will avoid any under-taking unless there is a guarantee of succeeding. He will pare his life down to a few "safe" activities in which he knows he can succeed, activities in which there is no competition. When he has found something which affords him some recognition, he will jealously protect that position, resenting any newcomers who might replace him. He studiously will avoid challenge. Such are not the ways of the creative person. He, too, enjoys the taste of success and delights in the recognition which accompanies achievement. But he knows that too much concern with success is destructive, distracting,, and futile; therefore he refuses to expend excessive energies in vain efforts to main-tain positions of real or imagined importance. He knows when and how to let 226 / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 go of past success: he willingly relinquishes a position when others better qualified are available. He knows when and how to accept a new challenge, even when--especially when--there is no assurance as to the outcome. Such a life is filled with challenge and struggle, and the excitement of knowing that one is attempting the "impossible." It is difficult to be such a person. It is in this context that we might consider the vow of obedience. By the vow of obedience, a religious not only promises to observe the traditions and customs of a congregation but pledges as well the intention to overcome as far as is possible the tendency to be possessive with respect to creative endeavors, the tendency to idolize success, prestige, or power. The religious life style, in which authority is defined in terms of service to the community, where ap-pointments to positions of authority are for relatively short periods of time, where~ one's "standard of living" does not depend upon the positions held--such a life style establishes a milieu which should reduce the tendency to idolize position. The life of religious community should free its members from many of the pressures which are experienced by others in a world where com-petition is the game plan and where concern for livelihood itself forces many to engage, however reluctantly, in a scramble for positions, and a subsequent campaign to eliminate all contenders, once an office is acquired. Unfortunately, there are religious who never take advantage of this freedom which the structure of their life facilitates but who allow possessiveness to color all their activities. There is no automatic relation between the religious life style and true detachment. Many are the religious who carve for themselves niches in life from which they cannot be moved; many are the religious who place great store in the most foolish of honors and distinctions and who jealously resent anyone interested in the same; many are the religious who are fearful of innovation and innovators and allow this fear to paralyze their lives; many are the religious who never experience the sense of power~and of joy which come from struggle against, and success over, difficult odds. Insecurity is not easily overcome. But the point remains that the com-munal life style can facilitate, and is intended to facilitate, a detachment from the vitiating need to achieve success or prestige. Once freed, the creative drive can be a source of happiness, joy, and growth. The Vow of Chastity Little need be said of the important role which the drive toward human relationship can play in the development of mature personality. Love has the ability to shatter, even if only temporarily, the consciousness which walls a per-son off into an isolated, self-absorbed space. Suddenly, or gradually, the ex-perience of giving and receiving love introduces one into a new understanding of life and one's relation to it; it allows one to dispense with unneeded, counter-productive defenses; and it encourages one to "unpretzel" himself, to allow himself to touch and to be touched by powers beyond the self. For many, love is the first experience, the first taste, of that "other life," that other "self," which is within ("the kingdom of God is within you"), waiting to erupt into and Non-possessiveness and the Religious Vows / 227 gladden the lives of every person. "God is love" is the way the Christian writers spoke of the sacred, and for many, perhaps most, love relations will remain the door by which they can understand and enter into the Godly perception. Because the experience of love is redemptive, a person understandably wishes to prevent it from being destroyed, diminished, or infringed upon. Unfor-tunately, this healthy wish to protect something important can, and does, easily degenerate into counterproductive efforts to possess and to demand love, which can never be possessed or demanded. And, thus, the salvific drive towards relationship is transformed into a destructive passion. The possessive person mistakenly believes that exclusivity is a prerequisite to deep, "real" love, and thus he reaches out only to those few people from whom he expects near total response. He wants undivided attention from those he loves. In his desire to keep the loved one for himself, he cuts the other off from every outside relationship, interest, and involvement, foolishly thinking that he can be all things to that person. He even views the interests and ac-tivities of the other, when these are not held and enjoyed together, as rivals to be eliminated from the field. And in a similar way, he limits his own world. Cut off thus from the sources of growth, they both die of malnutrition. That is, if they are not first destroyed by the suspicion and jealousy which inevitably plague such possessive relationships. Clinging love, so different from simple love, is a cancer which leaves its host blinded or distraught. How different is the non-possessive person! He fears the human tendency to suffocate loved ones, and therefore he is pleased when the other develops new, outside relationships and interests, knowing that they are the sources of life and growth. He fears as well his tendency to suffocate himself. He knows it is important that he never stop growing in love, that he not cease to meet and commune with the different people life brings into his world. Without denying the special importance of long-standing friendships and loves, the non-possessive person values the opportunities to commune with many people in a lifetime. As he grows in maturity, he finds that it becomes progressively easier for him to let down his defenses, to give and elicit trust and spontaneity in others, to communicate as a person to a person. In other words, he grows in the ability to love. A clarification may be necessary here: at first, the suggestions in this sec-tion might seem to reject the possibility or value of permanent relationships, especially marriage. But a call for non-possessive love should not be confused with an advocacy for that non-responsible form of love which is delighted to be freed from any kind of commitment. In every friendship and romance one takes upon himself responsibilities to the other which perdure even after that mysterious, uncontrollable attraction we call love has passed on. Which is to say that the relationship of friendship or marriage is more than simply a form of intimate intercommunion. In view of this analysis, the vow of chastity might be seen as follows: by the vow of chastity a religious promises not only to live a chaste, unmarried life, but pledges as well his or her intention to eradicate the strong, "natural" 22a / Review for Religious, Volume 34, 1975/2 propensity toward possessive love and to overcome the "natural" propensity to restrict love and care to a few people over whom he or she can claim an ex-clusive priority. Celibacy is a call to be constantly open to relationship, to be ready to befriend any person met with a non-demanding love. Far from a pledge to live in isolation from human love, the vow of celibacy asks of those so vowed that they strive to love deeply without making claims upon others. Especially it would ask them to fuse this freedom with a concern for the lonely, the unattractive, the fearful. Because the religious neither takes a spouse nor parents children, he or she avoids the temptation to center all one's love and care upon a few people, and the temptation to regard spouse and children as people over whom one has a right to demand love. By opting to live a com-munity life, the religious places himself or herself in a milieu where both the joys and responsibilities of multirelationship are encouraged and facilitated. Thus the celibate life style is a structure which should aid the development of an enlarged and non-destructive approach to the world of intimacy. These comments are not intended to suggest that the celibate form of life automatically engenders this freedom so necessary if one is to know fully the joy of love. Many are the religious who faithfully observe the restrictions of celibate life, but who never attain its spirit: whose relationships with friends or students or colleagues are characterized by ownership, exclusivity, jealousy, and all the concomitant signs of possessiveness. Many are the religious who never find througl~ their celibate life the freedom to enter easily int6 warm, redemptive relationships, who never realize in their lives the truth of the maxim that religious are called to parent thousands. In summary: the vow of chastity has traditionally been presented in terms of sacrifice, a sacrifice which was valued because human relationships were thought to interfere unnecessarily with the search for God or the demands of the apostolate. There is, of course, truth in this argument: as we have seen, love can give birth to a possessiveness which does interfere with a person's service to God and neighbor. The vow might better be supported by a spirituality which differentiates between possessive and non-possessive relationships, which knows that love can be both the source of salvation and the source of destruc-tion. The celibate life, then, is valued, not because it involves renunciation but because it can be a step towai'd the ability to love without that possessiveness which weakens or destroys the consciousness which we call love. The Vow of Poverty Repeatedly in Christian hist6ry, there arose the temptation to embrace Manicheism: to see the world and its joys as the creation of an evil spirit and as traps for the human soul. Against this heresy, orthodox Christian theology has insisted that the God who created man's spirit also created the material world, and that, as the author of Genesis insists, He saw it, and found it to be good. Orthodox spirituality teaches the Christian that he can discover the God of the Gospels reflected in His creation: through the beauty of the world, through the joys which it brings, one meets and touches the sacred. Sensitivity to the beauty Non-pissessiveness and the Religious Vows / 229 of life is'a drive, an important ,one, by which a person can taste and see the goodness of God. The joys of life help man to venture outside his narrow self-world, to discover h~s at-homeness w~th that which is beyond, to understand the truth that one is but a branch whose fulfillment depends upon maintaining unity with the Vine. He who islinsensitive to beauty, whose mind cannot be moved by the complex-powerful-fragile world is indeed a poor man, dis-possessed of a key which can fr~e him from the prison of alienation and from the illusion of i,n, dividualism. ,~s the Christian learns daily when gathered around the Lord s Table, God [is to be found in His world, in the common bread and wine¯ But enjoyment of the world and its pleasures easily parents a possessiveness toward things which is neither healthy nor redemptive. The possessive per-sonality begins to amass, or Idesires to amass, large stores of material belongings, assuming that ownership of things is a prerequisite to enjoying them, is a means of holding onto joy. No sooner ts the beauttful encountered than the possessive person begm,s planmng ways to hold onto the source ofthat pleasure in order to insure that it can be repeated. But experience teaches that this effort to prolong-by-possessing fails¯ It succeeds only in introducing worry, jealousy, and dissatisfaction. This concern for, this worry about, owning becomes so ~mportant that the original goal of enjoyment ~s overwhelmed and forgotten. Time is spent collecting, protecting, preserving, insuringmand these become substitutes for enjoymetlt. In one's desire to hold onto a particular joy, one fads to notice, and therefor~ to respond to, the ~nnumerable joys which prodigal world offers PossessiTe people, people who desire to own a lot, are often people who enjoy very httle. The non-possessive person, precisely because his attentions and energies are not being channeled into the attainment or protection of a few chosen ob-jects of importance, is one who ~an find delight in the most unexpected places, I who is regularly surprised by joy. He understands that the person who wishes to know the joys of this life mus~ resist the ever-present, self-defeating tendency to force their attentions¯ He m!ust learn to touch without holding. Traditionally, the vow of poverty has been understood in terms of sacrifice, a "giving up" of the material world, whose pleasures are sirens to the spirit, diversions from the work of the Master¯ A more balanced, ~ncarnat~onal spirituality would teach Christians to be wary, not of pleasure itself, but of the spirit of possessiveness toward~ pleasure and the world which affords these joys. Such a spirituality woul~l teach Christians that in pleasure they ex-perience the salvific presence of the Creator, and that such appreciationsmfar from being destructive--can be invaluable aids to the spiritual life¯ This spirituality would also maintain that the attractions of the material world can be dangerous, not because they themselves are spiritually injurious, but because they do tend to excite the possessive tendency within a person. Enjoy-ment easily gives way to covetousness, worry, jealousy, frustration, all of which destroy integrity and distract from values. It is this spirit of possessiveness--the need to own, the fear of losing, the desire for more--which is injurious to the life of grace and which must be overcome¯ 230 / Review for Religious, l/olume 34, 1975/2 The vow of poverty might be approached in this context: by the vow of poverty, a religious promises not only to live communal life according to the constitutions and customs of his or her congregation, but pledges as well the in-tention to overcome as far as is possible the possessive tendency toward the good things, the pleasures of this world. Communal life, where material resources are shared and where individual worry about present or future needs is considerably reduced, is a structure which should make non-possessiveness toward material things a more easily attained goal. By eliminating many of the pressures of finance which accompany a more individualistic way of life, the common life facilitates the development of that freedom from possessiveness which is essential if one is to live life fully and enjoy properly the things which life provides. This is not to suggest that there exists some automatic relation between observing the requirements of a communal life and achieving a proper interac-tion with material things. Many are the religious who faithfully observe every detail of their communal obligations but who never attain a spirit of freedom from worry and possessiveness about "things," who never come to realize that "freedomrs just another word for nothing left to lose." Many are the religious for whom the life of communal sharing represents deprivation, rather than a door to fuller experience. Nor should one deduce from this approach to pover-ty that there is no sacrifice or renunciation involved in the life of communal sharing. Within most people there is something of the Lucifer who would rather be master in hell than serve in heaven. The desire to possess, to make certain things one's own, is a strong drive, and is controlled only with con-siderable effort and denial. But the point remains: the goal of the vow of pover-ty is not a renunciation of all pleasure, but the purification of one's ability to experience and enjoy God's world. Summary and Conclusion In summary, the three vows reflect three aspects of a central spiritual goal: to experience fully human life without seeking to "possess" its joys. While vowing to observe particular sets of obligations, the religious pledges as well the intention to lead a life characterized by freedom from possessiveness--to attempt a life in which the joys of intimate relationships with people, ap-preciative interaction with things, and genuine rejoicing in successful endeavors do not deteriorate into a jealous demand for attention and affection, into a constant search for things to own, into an idolatrous quest for prestige. These are the ideals of religious life. And, to this writer, the extent to which religious have been successful in realizing these ideals is impressive: Even in times when the spirituality was quite different from that articulated in this article, the writer met many religious men and women who exhibited that joy in life which follows upon a non-possessive stance. Loving and caring in their relationships; appreciative and sensitive to the simplest of pleasures; ready to respond to the challenge with a spirit which so often spelled victory--these describe well the lives Of Non-possessiveness and the Religious l/ows / 231 countless religious men and women. It would seem, then, to this writer, that religious life works. His judgment is favorable because he realizes how power-ful is the possessive tendency within the human spirit, and what a marvelous thing it is to see it mastered. His judgment is favorable because he realizes how difficult it is to learn that "obvious" truth about human life: that "you can't take 'it' with you." The Modern Religious Community and Its Government Sister Mary A lice Butts Sister Mary Alice of the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal is a member of the Department of Political Science of St. Francis Xavier University, Sydney Campus; her address is: Holy Angels Convent; P.O. Box 1384; Sydney, Nova Scotia BIP 6K3; Canada. The study of political philosophy involves, for anyone who takes on the exer-cise, a study of the term "community." In the process of such a study, it is not difficult to find some similarities between "community" as it relates to the political scene and the same word as it is used to designate particular religious groups. In the following pages I shall attempt to draw some lessons from political philosophy and then apply those lessons to the community life of religious. I want, first of all, to examine the senses in which the word "community" is used. Then I shall try to apply these findings to "religious communit.y" and specifically to the modern religious community. Finally, I shall look at a few aspects of the methods of governing a modern religious community. Community in Political Thought From the very dawn of the writings of political philosophy, there was a recognition of the fact that ~ human is created as a social being, that he or she can live a complete life only in association with other human beings. Aristotle and the Greeks in general taught that human life could be lived most fully in a small community where every citizen knew every other and each played his part "in ruling and being ruled." All through the history of political theory we recognize the inevitable conflict which must arise between the individual, on the one hand, and the group on the other. Even in philosophy itself, we speak of the whole as composed of heterogeneous parts. The smallest organisms contain 232 The Modern Religious Community and Its Government / 233 cells which strain to go off on their own and we need never be surprised if clusters of human beings living in communities will be less compact, since they are larger and looser. St. Thomas Aquinas and Medieval philosophers in general addressed themselves to the problem of the whole and the parts; that is, to the realization that individual members of any community may be for greater integration or for greater separateness simply because of their individual temperaments. The ones who are for greater integration seek security first; those for greater separateness may be simply moved by a spirit of adventure. For others, the side they choose may depend partly on the theory they hold regarding the nature of the group itself. These ask the question: Is the community a means of supplementing what the individual can do for himself or is it an organic body with a life of its own, in some sense beyond the life of the individual member? This is the question which is posed for the students of political theory. Just to illustrate how one pursues this problem, let us consider a few lines from a text in political thought describing the te~ichings of nineteenth century liberal theorists. The text reads: In the language of Emmanuel Kant, a community is a "Kingdom of Ends." A political problem . . . is a problem in human relations, to be solved with a mutual recognition of rights and obligations, with self-restraint on both sides. Within such a relationship, issues and disagreements will evidently be perennial. ¯. The liberal presumption is that their solution can be found by discussion, by interchange of proposals, adjustment, compromise, always on the assumption that both sides recognize rights and perform obligations in good faith. And the institutions of such a community are thought of as primarily providing the means by which discussion can end in a meeting of minds that reduces coercion to an unavoidable'minimum. They exert authority, but it is a kind of loose-fitting authority which is only rarely burdensome and on the whole is largely self-applied by the people concerned? Religious Community Is More than Political Co~mmunity The above

Issue 48.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1989. ; R F.vu-'.w FOR RF.uG~OUS (ISSN O034-639X) is published bi-monthly at St. l_x~uis University by thc Mis-souri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus: Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Blvd., Rm. 428: St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis MO. Single copies $3.00. Subscriptions: $12.00 per year: $22.00 for two years. Other countries: for surface mail. add U.S. $5.00 per year: for airmail, add U.S. $20.00 per year. For subscription orders or change of address, write: REviEw FO~ REt.~GOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to REVtEW ~'oa RE~ol~;totJS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors Jan./Feb. 1989 Volume 48 Number I Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REVIEW FOR REI.IGIOUS; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Rich-ard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709-1193. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from R~:vtEw r'oa REU~aOUS; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, M! 48106. A major portion of each issue is also available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. Review for Religious Volume 48, 1989 Editorial Offices 3601 Lindeil Boulevard, Room 428 Saint Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 David L. Fleming, S.J. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Editor Associate Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editors R~:vIEw FOR RELIGIOUS is published in January, March, May, July, Sep-tember, and November on the twentieth of the month. It is indexed in the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and in Book t~e te~I Index. A microfilm edition of R~:v~Ew FOR RELIGOUS is available from University~ Microfilms International; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyrighl© 1989 by R~vmw FOR RELiGiOUS. A major portion of each issue of REvmw FOR RgL~G~OUS is als~o regu-larly available on cassette recordings as a service for the visuallyl' im-paired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 1 O010. PRISMS . Religious life today presents a varied landscape of images. Some would see the landscape more in the fading light of autumn colors or, perhaps, far more somberly in the gray bleakness of a barren wintertime. Others look out and observe a springtime of new growth, with tender fresh green shoots and small delicate blossoms just visible above the ground level. All the various ways we have of picturing religious life have some basis in reality. For there are various prisms through which we view all life, including religious life. Prisms are very important because they do provide a way for us to see, to highlight and to emphasize, to reject and to ignore. As others share their prisms of vision with us, we gain en-trance to worlds of different colors and new life. Of course, if we main-tain our vision only through our own prism, our world begins to take on a singleness of color and a frozen artificiality of life. REVIEW FOR REL~C~OUS, from its first January issue in 1942, has tried to provide various prisms through which we might view the whole worldscape which must be a part of a vibrant Christian spiritual life and so necessarily a part of religious life. As newly appointed editor of this journal, I intend the variety of insights into the consecrated lifeform, tra-ditionally called religious life, to remain an essential contribution of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. This contribution seems all the more necessary at our particular moment in the Church when often more time is spent in defining and establishing one's own position than in listening or learn-ing of another's. I do not want to wear out an image, but there is another important pointer for us in the kaleidos6ope. The prisms of a kaleidoscope only pro-duce their beauty because of their relationships, one to another. I find that the prisms through which we view life only present us with adequate truth, new life, and fresh ways ofacting if we maintain the relationship of various viewpoints. That is the great strength of the Church who pos-sesses various pictures of Jesus in her gospels, who allows differing phi-losophies and theologies to provide understanding to her faith, and who approves the charisms of vastly differing forms of religious life to be le-gitimate icons of Christ for all the Christian faithful and for the world. It is in the maintenance of relationship that we possess the criteria of le-gitimacy, continuity, and true creativity. 4 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 In our current issue, the usual variety of articles gives indication of the richness of interests which help form the context of religious life. In subsequent numbers I intend to take the opportunity to highlight one or other article because of the importance of its issue or the insight or un-derstanding it provides. Sometimes I would like to reflect more broadly about certain key concerns of religious life as it is being lived in our Churc,h and world today. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in this way will continue to provide prisms as well perspectives on the relationships of the many prisms that make up our religious lives. David L. Fleming, S.J. What Do You Want?m The Role of Desires in Prayer William A. Barry, S.J. A frequent contributor, Father Barry wrote "God's Love Is Not Utilitarian" for our issue of November/December 1987. His address is Jesuit Community: Boston Col-lege; Chestnut Hill, MA 02167. know: you're going to ask what I want. "As I was driving up to the retreat house, I thought of your perennial question: 'What do you want?' and here's what l~came up with." I have often noticed that peo-ple who see me for some time for spiritual direction or directed retreats say things like this. It even becomes a bit of humorous byplay, as though they want to beat me to the punch. Clearly, one of my favorite questions for directees is the one Jesus put to the two disciples who began to fol-low him: "What do you want?" (Jn 1:38). If directees pick up on this predilection and start asking themselves the question, then, I believe, a good deal of my work as spiritual director is done. If we know what we want in prayer, we are going to find our way. After a practical belief that God wants an intimate relationship with each one of us and that God is directly encountered in our experience, nothing is more important for the development of our relationship with God-~-for our prayer, in other words--than knowledge of what we want and of what God wants. In this article I want to discuss the role of desires in prayer. Anyone familiar with the Spiritual Exercises knows that among the preludes to every meditation or contemplation is: "I will ask God our Lord for what I want and desire." In the various stages or weeks of the Exercises, Ignatius states what the desire is in each case. For example, in the First Week I "ask for a growing and intense sorrow and tears for my sins," and in the Second Week I "ask .for an intimate knowledge 5 Review for Religious, January-February 1989 of our Lord, who has .become man for me, that I may love him more and follow him more closely." In an earlier article in the R~v~Ew, l tried to show that each of the desires of the Exercises is a desire for some par-ticular revelation by the Lord. ~ On the face of it, it looks as though Ignatius is saying: "Here is what you should desire at each stage of the Spiritual Exercises." One conclu-sion might be to take a person through the four Weeks and just put be-fore him or her what Ignatius gives as the desire. In fact, this has been the procedure in preached retreats, including the preached thirty-day re-treats we older Jesuits and other religious made in novitiate and tertian-ship. But what happened if, as a matter of fact, I did not really desire to know Jesus more intimately when the Second Week was presented to me. Suppose, for example, I was still too afraid of what he thinks of me. In most instan(es, I would guess, we just presumed that we had the de-sire if it was Second Week time. But I would contend that without the real desire we never got very intimate with Jesus. Indeed, I believe that "what we really desire" is diagnostic of the stage of the Exercises we are actually in. To demonstrate this thesis we need to look at the role of desires in any relationship. If you get a call from someone asking for a.meeting, is not your first question, at least to yourself, "What does she or he want?" In fact, many meetings between people come off badly because the individuals involved have mistaken ideas of what each other wants. For example, I want to become your friend, and you believe that I want help with home-work; you want to help me, but are not even thinking of a deeper friend-ship. At the end of the meeting both of us are going to be pretty frus-trated unless we talk about our different desires and come to some understanding. Often enough, too, relationships become frustrating be-cause of ambivalent or incompatible desires in one or both parties. For example, I want to get closer to you, but I am also afraid of you. Or I want a friendship with you (a happily married woman), but I also want to goto bed with you. Every intended encounter with another person is accompanied by a"desire or desires'. We are not always aware of our de-sires, but they are present, and they condition our behavior in the encoun-ter. Now suppose that I want to befriend you and you do not want my: friendship. Will my efforts :at befriending get me or you anywhere? Only to frustration and resentment, probably. But let us say that I persist in trying to do nice things for you. What will happen? You will probably get more and more irritated and thus less and less likely to become my Role of Desires in Prayer friend. And like many a "do-gooder" whose good deeds are rejected, I may eventually wash my hands of you and call you an ingrate who de-serves his fate. Friendship is possible only when the desires are mutual, when you freely desire my friendship and I freely desire yours. Friend-ship cannot be coerced. "But," someone may object, "we often do things that we don't want to do. Because of my friendship for you, for example, I will go to a movie I don't like." But what do you want? If it is because of friend-ship with me that you go to the movie, is not your deepest desire to please me or to be with me? The friendship is more important than the movie. I believe that the centrality of desire for the developing of a rela-tionship cannot be denied. Now let us look at the importance of desires for the relationship with the Lord. In the first chapter of John's gospel, the two disciples of John are intrigued by this Jesus whom John has just pointed out as the lamb of God. So they start following Jesus. When Jesus asks them what they want, they say, "Rabbi, where are you staying?" They do not yet have strong desires, it seems; curiosity seems to be the desire. Jesus does not disdain this desire. "Come," he replies, "and you will see." Unless we have some attraction toward God, some curiosity or hope or desire, we will not take the time to begin our side of the relationship. If I be-lieve in my heart and feelings that God is an ogre, ready to pounce on any infraction, then I may try to placate him, but I will never want to get close to him. And God, as it were, does handstands.to convince us that he really is benign, that he is, as Jesus asserted, Abba. The p.rofli-gate wonders of nature, our own creation and life, the words of Old and New Testaments, Jesus himself, and other loving, caring people in our lives--these are all signg of God's desire that we find him attractive and let him come close. But he cannot force himself on us, or will not. We must have some desire to get to know him better. Sebastian Moore af-firms that God's creative touch which desires us into being arouses in us a desire for "I know what," that is, a desire for the Mystery we call God.2 This experience (understood as the experience of one's creation and continued creation) can be seen as the affective principle and foun-dation for the development ofone's relationship with God. The desire for "I know what" is what makes' our hearts restless until they rest in God. Many people need help to recognize that they have such a desire. Be-cause of life's hurts they may not recognize any other desire but to be left alone, or not to be hurt any more. Telling such people that God is Review for Religious, January-February 1989 love has little or no effect. They may need help to admit to God that they are afraid of, him and desire to be less afraid. Indeed, they may need help to voice some of their anger at life's hurts which seem to them to have come from the Author of life. The fact that they have not completely turned away from religion indicates that they may still want something from God, even if only an acknowledgment that he knows what hap-pened to them in life. Like Job some may cry out: "Then know that God has wronged me and drawn his net around me. Though I c~'y, 'I've been wronged!' I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice." Only after he has poured out his sorrows, seemingly, can he say: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth" (Jb ! 9:6-7.25). In other words, it may take a great deal of pas-toral care and patient spiritual direction for some people to come to the point where they can trust life and the Author of life enough to let into their consciousness the desire for "'I know what.'" Job's friends have tried to derail him from expressing his desires to God: In his misery he wants God to speak to him. He will not lie and say, as his friends insinuate,, that he deserves his calamities because of his sins. Hewill not accept the just-world hypothesis proposed by his friends according to which anyone's sufferings must be deserved. No, he knows~that he does not deserve the awful fate that has befallen him and desires to speak directly .to God and to hear God's answer. Often enough we Christians are like the friends of Job. To a mother who has just.lost her only child we might say, "God knows best." and thus make it difficult for her to voice her outrage at God and her need for God's own answer to this awful loss. Sometimes we feel that we have to de-fend God against the anger directed at him by people in pain. Yet the anger may be the most authentic way for a person to relate ~o God and to ex.press a desire to know God's response. Finally in chapters 38 through 41 God does answer Job out of the whirlwind. The response may not sound very comforting or apologetic to _us, but apparently Job is satisfied, for he says: "My ears had heard of you but.now, my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in ~du.s.t and ashes." Moreover, then God speaks to Job's friends, "I am angry with you and your two friends, because yQu have not spo-ken of me what is~right, as my servant Job has" (Jb 42:5-7). Whatever else God's speech from the whirlwind means, it certainly does not mean that Jg~bohas lost God's friendship by voicing so strongly his desire to have God answer him. Another biblical instance of an attempt to derail a desire directed to- Role of Desires in Prayer ward God comes in the first chapter of the First Book of Samuel. Han-nah, one of the two wives of Elkanah, is barren and miserable. She wants a son. Her husband, seeing her weeping and fasting, says to her, "Han-nah, why are you weeping? Why don't you eat? Why are you down-hearted? Don't I mean more to you than ten sons?" In other words, Elka-nah wants Hannah to forget her desire and be satisfied with what she has. In the story we do not hear Hannah's reply, but her actions tell us that she is not put off by Elkanah's entreaties. She goes to the temple and "in bitterness of soul., wept much and prayed to the Lord." Indeed, when accused of drunkenness by Eli, the priest, she says, "Not so, my lord, I am a woman who is deeply troubled. I was pouring out my soul to the Lord." Hannah knows what she wants and is not afraid to tell God over and over what it is (I S 1:8, 10, 15). Often we tell ourselves or are told to quell our desires, to look at all the good we already have. We can be made to feel guilty and ungrateful for desiring what we want. But if we do suppress our desires without be-ing satisfied that God has heard us, then, in effect, we pull back from honesty with God. The result for our relationship with God often is po-lite distance or cool civility. Perhaps God cannot or will not grant what we want, but for the sake of the continued development of the relation-ship we need to keep letting him know our real desires until we are sat-isfi~ d or have heard or felt some response. In 2 Cbrinthians Paul says, "There was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to tor-ment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' " Now Paul could stop making known his desire because now he knew God's answer. "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. :For when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Co 12:7-10). Convictions such as Paul's come not from theological or spiritual nos-trums, but from the experienc~ of growing transparency between a Paul and the Lord. Too often we use the hard-won wisdom of a Paul to short-circuit a similar transparency in our own relationship with the Lord. A woman may, for example, be experiencing the "dark night of the soul" and not like it at all. Her desire may be for it to be removed. She may be helped by the knowledge that others have experienced the same thing before her and been the better for it, but such knowledge does not have to satisfy her desire to be rid of the "dark night." A short circuit in the Review for Religious, January-February 1989 relationship might occur if she is told by her spiritual director or tells her-self to squelch her desire "because the experience is good for you." What she needs to experience is God's response, not a theorem of spiri-tual theology. She needs to know (really, not notionally) that God does want this darkness for the good of their relationship. Such real knowl-edge comes only through mutual transparency. Most of the healing miracles of the New Testament depend on the desire of the recipient for healing.The example of the blind beggar Bar-timaeus (Mk 10:46-52) stands out, but is not unusual. "When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, 'Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.' Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' " Obviously Bartimaeus will not be hindered from expressing his desire by any num-ber of voices trying to quiet him. These "voices" can come from within us as well as from without, by the way. "Jesus won't have time for the likes of me; other people have more important problems; things aren't so bad." These interior voices may be expressing our ambivalence about being healed. Just as Bartimaeus had made a way of life out of his blindness, so too we may have made our own physical or psychological or sPiritual limitations a way of life and be afraid of what a future without them might be. One person on a retreat thought that he desired healing from a kind of dark-ness that seemed to rule his life. But then he heard the Lord ask, "Do you want me to heal you of this?" and he had to admit that he was not sure. Interestingly, he felt that God approved the honesty of his response. The inner voices may also express our fear of arousing strong desires for healing only to have them dashed. "Suppose I really want to be healed and I hear the answer Paul got? What a disappointment!''3 Desires are complex and often contradictory. However, once we have allowed the ambivalence and complexity of our desires to surface, we have some-thing else to ask the Lord about. In the Bartimaeus story Jesus calls him over and asks, "What do you want me to do for you?" Bartimaeus is quite clear and unambi-valent, "Rabbi, I want to see." "Go," says Jesus, "your faith has healed you." I have italicized Jesus' words. Without the faith of Barti-maeus, apparently, this miracle could not have occurred. The miracle re-quires a. partnership between Jesus' healing power and desire to heal and Bartimaeus' faith and desire to be healed. Indeed, Bartimaeus' desire is his faith in action. An example may help to illustrate this point. Once I was filled with Role of Desires in Prayer anger and self-pity about the turn a friendship had taken and thought that I was praying for healing. I was contemplating the story of the two blind men in Matthew 9:27-30. When Jesus asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" I knew immediately that I was not ready to give up my self-pity and anger. If I did desire healing, it was with the same "but not yet" desire with which Augustine at one time desired chastity. I did not have the "faith" found in the two blind men and in Barti-maeus, a faith that showed itself in unambivalent desire. Another exam-ple that shows how desire is faith in action is provided by the father of the boy with the evil spirit reported in Mark 9: 14-29. Instead of asking directly for a healing, the father said to Jesus, "But if you can do any-thing, take pity on us and help us." Because he did not believe in Jesus' power to heal, he could not desire the hea!ing directly. "If you can?" said Jesus. "Everything is possible for him who believes." To which the father replied, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief." In effect the man is saying, "Help me to desire healing." This last example brings us close to the hub of why desires are the raw material out of which relationships are made. In order for the heal-ing to occur, there must be a meshing of desires. Bartimaeus's desire for healing meets Jesus' desire to heal; without both desires there is no rela-tionship, at least no mutual relationship. This point is beautifully illus-trated in the story of the leper. "A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, 'If you are. willing, you can make me clean.' Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured" (Mk 1:40-42). Clearly desire meets desire. The kind of relationship Jesus desires is a mutual one', where desire meets desire. The need for a partnership of.desires becomes even clearer when we look at friendship. In John 15:15 Jesus says, "I have called you friends," and then goes on to indicate what that means from his side, "for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." From his side the desire has been to be fully transparent, to com-municate to them all that he is. His desire meets their desire to know him as fully as possible. Of course, full mutuality of friendship means that they desire to be fully transparent before him and he desires to know them fully. Take away one side of these desires and there no longer is a mutual relationship. Of course, on the apostles' part (and on ours) the mere desire for mu-tual transparency does not carry it off. "Between the cup and the lip . " Our desires are ambivalent and complex; we are fearful crea- 12 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 tures, as well, and our fears get in the way of what we most deeply want. We need help and healing to grow toward mutual transparency with the Lord. But that help is available if we want it. If we notice, for example,, that we want to know Jesus better, but are afraid of the consequences, we can ask Jesus for help to overcome our fears. But again we notice that desire is the key to developing the relationship. The retreatant mentioned earlier who told God that he was not sure that he wanted healing of the darkness that ruled his life provides another example of the reciprocity of relationships. Later in the same day he be-came more sure that he wanted healing and asked the Lord to heal him. The Lord's response was perplexing; "I can't," he seemed to say. The retreatant was enraged at such a response when his own reluctance had been overcome, and he let God know in no uncertain terms. Yet still later in the day, out of the blue, as it were~ he heard the Lord say, "But we can." He knew immediately that the Lord meant that he could live more out of joy than sadness if he kept desiring the Lord's helpful presence rather 'than withdrawing into himself. "We can" meant partnership. At the beginning of this article, I stated that the real desires a person has are diagnostic of where the person is in terms of the four Weeks of the Exercises. Let me now return to that point. If retreatants do not have a real trust in God's loving care and providence, they will not desire that God reveal to them their sinfulness. Without an experienced-based be-lief in God's goodness and 16ve, without, in other words, what I have called earlier an affective principle and foundation, people are too fright-ened of God to be able to say and mean the last words of Psalm 139: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (23-24). If there is no such real desire, then the First Week of the Exercises is not on. And, it seems, at this point God's desire is not so much to reveal sinfulness as to convince the person that he is "Abba." Similarly, if a retreatant voices the desire to know Jesus in or-der love him more and to follow him more closely, yet in his prayer con-tinually identifies with those who need healing, perhaps his real desire is to be healed. The desire of the Second Week to know Jesus shows it-self in an interest in Jesus himself, his values, his emotions, his dreams, his apostolate. If the retreatant is not really interested in these matters, but continually focuses on his own needs and weaknesses, then the Sec-ond Week is not. really in progress. Jesus himself may at this time desire more to heal than to call to companionship. The difference between the First and Third Weeks also comes down to a difference in desire. In the Role of Desires in Prayer First Week I desire to know that Jesus forgives me (and us), that he died for my (and our) sins; the focus is on desiring to have a deep experience of how much Jesus loved us even though he knew how sinful we were. The desire of the Third Week is more to share the passion with Jesus in-sofar as this is possible. The focus is on what Jesus felt and suffered, and the desire is that he reveal that to me. Retreat directors, I believe, do their most important work when they help their directees to discover what they do in reality want. And so every retreat could begin with a con-templation of Jesus as he turns and says, "What do you want?" As re-treatants hear these words and let them penetrate their hearts, they will come to know better what they desire; in other words, they will know better who they are at this time in their relationship with the Lord. NOTES ~ "On Asking God to Reveal Himself in Retreat," REVIEW FOR REI.IOWOUS 37 (1978): 171-176; reprinted in David L. Fleming (ed.), Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of St. ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, 1983), pp. 72-77. 2 Sebastian Moore, Let This Mind Be in You: The Quest for Identity Through Oedi-pus to Christ (Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury, 1985). 3 In another context I have discussed the courage of Bartimaeus. See "Surrender: Key To Wholeness," REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 46 1987): 49-53. Perspectives on Parables and Prayer Donald Macdonald, S.M.M. Father Macdonald's most recent contribution to our journal was "A Pathway to God" (May/June 1988). His address continues to be: St. Joseph's; Wellington Road; Todmorden, Lancashire; 0L14 5HP England. A sister said that her annual retreat was less than satisfying because "the priest, who shall be nameless, seemed to spend a fair bit of time telling us how good he was. I nearly offered him a trumpet." My response was and is to wish that he could come for my annual retreat, if only to exer-cise my sense of humor, even though, as I suspect, he may be speaking tongue in cheek. If not, so much the better! This is not meant to be flip-pant, for it seems to me in recent years that retreats and such like are becoming more technical, esoteric, and managed. So often there has to be a title with content specified, ra~nging from privately directed to Bet- .ter World and charismatic, by way of the Spiritual Exercises, Inigo, Sadhana, Progoff, Zen, Yoga, and so much else; it seems a prudent step, therefore, to first inquire before one enters. The seeker for silence and stillness, for example, is likely to find an all-action organized retreat not a little off-putting. But it all seems so terribly earnest, with little humor. A retreat is undeniably important when seen as a chance for inspira-tion, encouragement, and vision, particularly if the opportunity comes only once a year. It is important that the Gospel is preached; arguably, over the years, some vocations may have gone by default, even among those who die as religious, inasmuch as the Good News, as the New Tes-tament would understand it, might not have been heard. It is sometimes asking much of a preacher during a retreat to try and shore up a creaking building on the verge of collapse when the day-by-day support has not been given. But what seems to happen today is a grasping for technique 14 On Parables and Prayer which is expected to provide the key to the Gospel. The search for the philosopher's stone is endemic. This, of course, may not be quite fair to someone who senses per-haps that "Thou [God] hast made us for thyself and our hearts are rest-less till they rest in thee" (Confessions 1:1).~ But expectation is not God, nor is disappointment nor, indeed, sat-isfaction. To set one's all on technique or the competence of the preacher or the receptivity of the audience is to risk losing everything. Humor will spare us that and much else. The late John Main, O.S.B., told a friend, a Ramakrishnan monk, who had asked him how he proposed to teach meditation, "Sit down, sit erect, say the mantra, and that's it.''2 His friend said that such an approach would never work with Westerners. It is so simple they will not believe you. His advice was to deliberately com-plicate it, saying you have esoteric knowledge which you can give only after they have been coming for at least ten weeks. Only then can t.hey be initiated. Throw in the name John Cassian for good measure. That should attract them. This raises a smile, as it is so close to reality as some of us observe it. A Greek Orthodox priest spoke similarly of students coming to his monastery asking to be initiated into the Jesus Prayer. "Say it." "But. ? . No, just say it." As you advance you need guidance. It is all rather deflating, for someone seeking the heights, to be told to begin at the beginning. It will be recalled that Peter L. Berger identified humor as one of his "signals of transcendence," a marvelous way out from all which might tend to dominate and frighten us in a seemingly locked-in world. It is crucial for perspective. "Laughter can show that power is ultimately' an illusion because it canno( transcend the limits of the empirical world. Laughter can--and does every time it relativizes the seemingly rocklike necessities of this world.''3 There is such a thing as gallows humor. Laughter can be a link with the divine and all that is, not just all that is here. How could a preacher or a community ever take themselves wholly seriously again after hearing this little story about a retreat director? He impressed a community as an obviously saintly man. His reputation grew as the week progressed--until he asked for meat on Friday. No saint would ever do that! On such are reputations built and lost. Favorite humorous authors such as P. G. Wodehouse or James Thurber can provide permanent links to God and reality. Once in their friendly and familiar company, we find space to simply relax and enjoy ourselves. We smile at Walter Mitty as we see ourselves in him. Our prob- 16 / Review for Religious,'January-February 1989 lems lessen in the face of what some of the Wodehouse characters have to meet. A Sergeant Bilko on black-and-white television can do as much. Holding on to the relative like this may help us see that there is always another chance--and if the Go.spei is to be believed, the time is now. I am far from underplaying the need for a properly prepared retreat or suggesting that one can laugh off whatever happens. Nor would I dis-count the value of any particular technique or approach. I would but say that everything here is relative and humor can help us see it. Father Enomiya-Lassalle once gave a day's Zen retreat to forty Korean novices, whose reaction was that "Up to now we used to have a scriptural text in our daily meditation to meditate on. Today for the first time we have felt that to meditate is to pray."4 One is grateful;for the sisters' experi. ence, but even if the priest had neve.r set foot in Korea, the providence of God would not have neglected them. Everything then can help, but nothing is essential. When the retreat .disappoints, all need not be lost. This is particularly so for those who know how to interpret their life in terms of Scripture. A fairly comprehensive experience convinces me that few can. If there is one cause of failure both in preacher and audience, it lies in the inability to do that. I would be astonished if novices knew how to do it, and very surprised to find it in the great majority of their senior brothers and sisters. One simple test is to listen for the Gospel when religious speak of what is happening to them and how they see it. The Gospel is the common coin of the Catholic Church, but many use it gingerly like a foreign currency. They do not know its value, or what to do with it. Authentic Sources 'Religious have been authoritatively urged that to genuinely live their calling they should draw "on the authentic sources of Christian spiritu-ality., in the first place they should take the Sacred Scriptures in hand each day" (Perfectae Caritatis, no. 6). Here faith and life are meshed as one. What a Jewish commentator, W. G. Plaut, said of the Torah, the Christian can wholeheartedly endorse for Scripture in its.entirety. "We hold that the Torah is a record of Israel's striving to meet God and un-derstand his will. In centuries of search, of finding and forgetting, of in-spiration and desperation, God touched the soul of his people and the sparks of these meetings burn in the pages of the Torah.' ,5 The "sparks of these meetings" are found in the pages of Scripture, and once prop-erly kindled they produce an enduring, not fitful, flame. In each meet-ing with God, which really means now, the religious by profession would wish his or her mind to be at one with the will of God, faith and life re- On Parables and Prayer flecting the one reality: "That man is Your best servant who is not so much concerned to hear from You what he wills as to will what he hears from You"(Confessions 10:26). That distinction is crucial, and none knew better than Augustine how hard it was to really make the transi-tion. All of us are innately self-centered, easily deceived. It is, then, prac-tical to go to the authentic sources of the Church's tradition, where "in the centuries of search, of finding and forgetting. God touched the soul of his people." Even Augustine intuitively seems to have felt this in his search for God. "I absolutely refused to entrust the care of my sick soul to the philosophers, because they were without the saving name of Christ. and whatever lacked that name, no matter how learned and excellently written and true, could not win me wholly" (Confessions 5: 14; 3:4). So while the attraction for God in Christ and authenticity was there, Augustine could not at first bring himself to find this, least of all in Scripture. He tells us honestly why: "So I resolved to make some study of the Sacred Scriptures and find what kind of books they were . My conceit was repelled by their simplicity, and I had not the mind to penetrate into their depths" (Confessions 3:5). He lacked "sincerity, openness of mind and that fundamental rev-erence which is a willingness to be commanded" which one who went deeper than most saw as minimum requirements before the Bible can do anything for a person.6 It is so hard to change one's mind radically, and that lovely quality of fundamental reverence before Scripture Js rarely found, especially in those who like to do things their own way--which means all of us, but for the grace of God. ~ Augustine was later to envy the Church's faithful whom he had once patronized as ignorant and unlettered. Once he himself had discovered the treasure which they so nonchalantly possessed, how his perspective changed: "Of what great harm to Your little ones was their far slower intelligence: since they strayed not far from You and so could fledge their wings in safety in the nest of Your Church, and nourish the wings of char-ity with the food of solid faith?" (Confessions 4:16). In thus moving from inauthentic to authentic existence as he saw it, he now realized that his "superior" stance was only that of the man with the empty stomach who does not know where to find food, in his case, "the food of solid faith." The search, tension, and struggle are perhaps heroic and the stakes are life or death, but nothing is gained by patronizing those who sit down each day at a full table. He finally knocked at their door and asked to come in and share what they had. Again his perspective changed: "It is with utter certainty that I love You. You have stricken Review for Religious, January-February 1989 my heart with Your word and I have loved You" (Confessions 10:6). It is well known that an appar.ently chance reading of Romans 13 and 14 finally enabled Augustine to see. Now from within the heart of the Church he is convinced that "Thou [God] didn't touch me, and I have burned for thy peace" (Confessions 10:27). This is not notional knowl-edge enabling him to speak to his intellectual peers, but the real insight given him by the word of God from within the Church enabling him to see faith and life as one. The sparks of the earlier meetings with God are now aflame in re-sponse to his word. His life and perspective are transfigured. It is per-haps not without its underlying humor to see this gifted man, with many of the gli~tering prizes within his grasp, now held enthralled by the faith of his mother and her nurse (see Confessions 9:8). He had traveled for miles and years searching for what he had left at home. If religious had this innate feeling of fundamental reverence before Scripture, always subordinating themselves to the word, never dominat-ing it, they might more easily warm to the sparks of the meetings with God in their own daily life, and so find a flame which they could never leave. Even among the trumpet calls of a preacher's self-proclaimed ex-cellence, the word of God isthere if one knows how to listen, but it is unlikely to be heard unless one is habitually doing this. That perspec-tive is all-important. A practical illustration may perhaps make the point. A Treasure Found Parables form much of the Gospel, and few strike a cord with the religious vocation more than "the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field" (Mt 13:44). Taken from life, it is meant to make us think. What is being said here? We under-stand what is being said, of course, but we are meant to assimilate its implications. Its dynamic is as powerful as Christ is real. Insofar as I be-lieve that God in Christ is here speaking to me, I shall respond and so attempt to make the Gospel my own. In fact, that parable, for many, is little more than an interesting analogy. It is a helpful example, an exter-nal, verbal, and indeed visual aid, as useful in the junior school as in the religious community. Precisely because that may not unfairly be de-scribed as the most usual understanding of the parable, the true perspec-tive is little known, and so those words scarcely ever spark into a flame. If that is compared with the approach to parables of T. W. Manson in a fine book first published over fifty years ago and often reprinted, we will find ourselves in another world where the sparks of the meeting On Parables and Prayer between Christ and ourselves can really catch fire. He says: Jesus is not concerned to demonstrate that God exists but rather to show the nature of the God whose existence is common ground for him and his audience. His aim is not to make God an article of faith but the ob-ject of faith. We are often concerned to make God probable to man; .he set out to make God real to them. It is this fact which makes parable the inevitable form in which the teaching of Jesus on the nature and ways of God should be delivered . The true parable., is not an illus-tration to help one through a theological discussion. It belongs to the same order of things as altar and sacrifice and prayer, the prophetic vi-sion and the like . It is a way in which religious faith is attained, and, as far as it can be, transmitted from one person to another. It is not a crutch for limping intellects but a spur to religious insight. Its object is not to provide simple theological instruction but to produce living re-ligious faith.7 This is Scripture seen from the inside. How many readers of this page honestly think like that? If religious habitually think in those terms, it seems to me that they keep it well hidden. Could the average reader echo, from experience, all that Manson sees--parable, the obvious teach-ing medium to make God real . . . a mode of religious experience on the same plane as altar, sacrifice, prayer, and insight., a way in which faith is attained, not a crutch for limping intellects., producing living religious faith? The easiest way to answer such questions is to ask: What did we feel when the parable was first quoted--' 'the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field."? If Manson was articulating what we have long known and felt, the resonances first produced by the par-able will still be there on the level of faith, not necessarily feeling. His comment would then simply buttress what we know to be true. Is our faith like a treasure found? Is this what has brought us to religious life? Is it a superb insight into reality? Is any sacrifice worthwhile to really possess it? What do we give in view of what we ~et? Can this treasure in any sense be found through the medium of an imperfect preacher? Do these words hold us up as they obviously show us up? One has to ask questions and link details together for the purposes of writing, but if the parable is properly assimilated to any degree, it is better to be silent and still and let the image absorb us and lead us where it will. We are then on the level of altar, sacrifice, prayer, and insight, willingly or even grudgingly, in view of the demands, letting ourselves be drawn into God through his Word. Perspectives that we perhaps know notionally are opened up to limitless horizons. Faith, not feeling, is seek- 20 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 ing to really understand. For years we have known the parable by heart. Have our hearts ever got the point and made it our own? Only silence and wonder stemming from fundamental reverence will do that. Fundamental Reverence For some years now virtually all religious communities have the for-mal daily prayer of the Church as their morning and evening prayer. In-variably, individuals or groups are given charge of liturgy and prayer, which generally means that coming to daily prayer one has to first find out what has been rearranged. Pages have to be marked, hymns noted, and alternative readings attended to. The pattern is rarely predictable. All this is done, one hears, because the community wants it, for the ordi-nary daily office is boring and repetitive. This constant adaptation is then seen as a practical attempt to engage the community in really meaning-ful prayer. In view of what has already been said, much of this suggests that those who foster or want this, apart from the risk of choosing only what-ever has personal appeal, may have no real feeling for Scripture, which may be why continual rearrangement is felt to be necessary to hold at-tention. This is, of course, the technique of the junior school, .where the children's attention span is limited and meaning has to be immediate. Yet if one receives~a line, phrase, sentence, or sentiment of Scripture on the level of altar, sacrifice, prayer, or insight, one just cannot keep chang-ing the focus without fragmenting the reality. Even to move, pick up a hymnbook, attend to alternative prayer or reading, or in general to be .never quite sure what is happening next, can be to break concentration. There may be some gain in alertness but, arguably, loss in continu-ity and assimilation. The Psalms and readings from the daily office have not yet been heard for the first time as Augustine, Manson, the Jewish commentator Plaut, and others would understand it, and will never be if one constantly changes the focus of attention in terms of relevance. One is all the time being brought up to the surface, never left long enough to go down to the depths. Ideally, the Psalms and readings could be so predictable that one almost knows them without turning the page. Only then do they have a chance of becoming part of ourselves so that we can truly listen, not just hear. Fundamental reverence would ask no less. But, however well intentioned, when one has to scan the board for the next item on .the agenda of prayer, or wait for the inspiration of a colleague, one is perhaps paying too high a price for spontaneity. The seemingly prosaic parable as a "spur to religious insight" must be in-vited to speak, not ordered to. On Parables and Prayer When Scripture is approached like this in the context of prayer, what one hears matters little. In time, perhaps less and less comes to mean more and more. It has not been and cannot be quite assimilated. Occa-sionally its relevance may be all too clear, as when, on the morning fol-lowing news of the horrific deaths of the seven astronauts in January 1986, one read: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken back. Blessed be the name of the Lord. If we take happiness from God's hand, must we not take sorrow too?" (Jb 1:21, 2:10). Even if the words appear as dull as a school textbook, it does not matter. Nor does immediacy or surface mood. On the level of prayer, altar, sacrifice, and insight, it is one's faith responding to God that makes the connection. In time the words will peel away and matter less and less as one is held in faith, just as a smile or wave from a friend has a mean-ing out of all proportion to the action. It is a perspective on reality for which one is grateful. NOTES t The Confessions of St. Augustine, translated by F. J. Sheed (London: Sheed and Ward 1944). All references to The Confessions are from here. 2 John Main, O.S.B., "Christian Meditation," The Grail, 1978, p. 19. 3.Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Penguin Books, 1971), p. 91. 4 The Tablet, London, January I 1, 1986, pp. 31-32. 5 The Torah, W. G. Plaut and B. J. Bamberger (New York: Union of American He-brew Congregation, 198 I), p. 1294. 6 C. H. Dodd, The Authority of the Bible [1929] (Fontana Paperback, 1962), p. 269. 7 T. W. Manson. The Teaching of Jesus (CUP, 1931; paperback, 1963), pp. 72-73. The Gift of Not Giving Jane Kammer C.S.Bo In our issue of January/February 1983, we published Sister Jane's "Three Times I Asked: Reflections on Weakness." She is a pastoral associate at St. Benedict Church in San Antonio. She may be addressed at 5107 Ozark; San Antonio, Texas 7820 I. So Jesus said to them, 'Well, then, pay to the Emperor what belongs to the Emperor and pay to God what belongs to God ' (Mt 22:21). "Jesus exclaimed, 'You ask me for a miracle? No! The only mir-acle you will be given is the miracle of the prophet Jonah' " (Mt 12:39). "As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had had the de-mons begged him, 'Let me go with you!' But Jesus would not let him"(Mk 5:18-19). A popular Christian saying and song is "God loves a cheerful giver." Giving has been exalted as a hallmark of Christianity, and so it is. Didn't our leader, Jesus, give his very life to show us God's great love? Giving has also been extolled as the virtue of the ideal Christian woman. For most of her life, my mother gave. She waited on my father; she gave of herself for her children. For all but the last few years of her life, I never heard her say no to anyone who asked a favor. But after she had grieved over my father's death, a change took place in my mother. At sixty-two she learned to drive a car; she went on vacations; she joined groups and clubs; and she began to say no to requests she really did not want to fulfill. She had discovered another dimension of giving. Giving is not always healthy for the giver or for the receiver. It is not true respect when I continually do for another what the person can do for him/herself. I am beginning to learn the gift of not giving. Teilhard de Chardin said, "Your essential duty and desire is to be 22 The Gift of Not Giving united with God. But in order to be united you must first of all be --be yourself as completely as possible. And so you must develop yourself and take possession of the world in order to be. Once this has been ac-complished, then is the time to think about renunciation; then is the time to accept diminishment for the sake of being in another. Such is the sole and twofold precept of complete Christian asceticism" (The Divine Mi-lieu [New York: Harper and Row, 1960], pp. 70-71). I believe that part of developing myself is learning, through practice, the gift of not giving to everyone who seems to ask. If I continually place my focus on others, then I cannot really give myself in love to them, for I do not have a self to give. It is my task to discover and develop the unique person God intends for me to be. I am codependent. To me that means I tend to place my center out-side of myself. I am inclined to seek affirmation and validation from some-one else. I feel safest when giving, not receiving. I am a people pleaser who fears rejection. Taking things personally and blaming myself for whatever seems less than perfect are aspects of my codependence. I have lived with many "shoulds" from the past which I have interiorized. In many ways my life repeats the story of my mother. But it is not too late to refocus my center within myself. I can learn to allow the true "me" to emerge from within. In time I can become a self-validating, self-affirming person whose peace is permanent and whose happiness does not depend on the mood of another. If I stay with myself, I can learn to love and accept myself as I am, even while want-ing to change some things about myself. I can give myself the gift of not giving up on the real, beautiful, and exciting "me." Moreover, I can learn to give the gift to others of responsibility for themselves. By re-fusing to absorb and carry the emotions of others, I will gift them with the faith that they are capable of living their own lives, making their own decisions, and caring for themselves. One morning I attended a meeting of four people who work in the same field. One of the workers continually griped and complained. Ne-gativity flowed out of her every word and facial expression. At the end of the session, I felt depressed, oppressed, and.burdened. I had absorbed into myself the flow of her negativity. But I can give myself the gift of not taking responsibility for other people's feelings, for others' pleasant or unpleasant feelings. I can maintain my joy, peace, and positive out-look if I am aware of my tendencies and if I give myself the gift of not giving in to codependence. I can learn to trust other people to run their own lives. I can deepen my trust in God. Review for Religious, January-February 1989 As codependent I also try to control others, though I may not be aware that I am doing so. I have not seen my friend for quite a while. I miss him or her. I may long with emotional intensity to see and be with my friend again. This is all right; this is me~ I fall into codependence, however, when I expect my friend to feel the same emotions that I do, the same strong loneliness. Because he/she feels differently does not mean that we are no longer friends. We are still connected by the bonds of love and the union of our spirits, but my friend is entitled to his/her own emotional swings. Occasionally we may both experience the same feelings, but that just happens; it cannot be programmed. By giving the gift of not giving my friend the task of living up to my expectations, I free him/her to be a unique self, and I free myself from the frustration of unmet expectations. As I grow, I learn the gift of n6t giving allegiance to everything that is said about,~me, even when it is said by significant others in my life. Opefiness to consider feedback is good and necessary for growth, but I can take the comments offered, test them sincerely against what I know of my true self, and decide to allow them to influence me or reject them as not fitting. More and more I stand free: receptive but able to make choices and.changes for myself. Each of us operates out of a specific personality type. I know that those "unacceptable" aspec.ts of myself, my "shadow," can become for me sources of undreamt growth and expansion. If I am introverted, recognition' of the shadow invites me to promote the development of more assertiveness, more sociability. By taking up the challenge of my "opposites," I give myself the gift of not giving in and becoming com-pletely immersed in my dominant qualities. I also give to others the gift of my expanded personality., my versatility to be reflective and quiet, and to be spontaneous and outgoing. I then realize that I have the potential to grow in all qualities of personality. Giving the gift of not giving can be risky. This is especially so if one is looked upon as a professional "helper." 1 am supposed to rescue peo-ple, or so it is often assumed. But the divine in me nudges me to grow and to foster my own "undependence" so that I do not need to rescue in order to feel worthy or worthwhile. I can then rejoice with the other in his/her efforts that lead to confidence, success, self-esteem, and de-victimization. When I encourage the other to look within her/himself for the indwell-ing God, the source of strength and goodness, then the other's success in dealing with difficulties is truly authentic and lasting. I become, not The Gift of Not Giving a rescuer or savior, but a real companion and friend. Recently a friend said to me, "I am upset over certain events that have taken place lately. I feel I can share with you about those situations because you are concerned and will give your support and prayers, but you won't take on my problems and become as upset as I am, and so be-come an added problem and burden to me. And you won't smother me with sympathy either." I consider those remarks a confirmation of the rightness of the gift of not giving and an uncovering of the true meaning of compassion. Jesus gave the gift of not giving. He refused to give direct answers to the Pharisees who were trying to trap him. He did not allow them to control him or his mission. Jesus did not perform miracles for those un-believers. He refused to compromise himself in order to please them. He did not even accept the adoration of the man who was cleansed from evil. Jesus will not allow us to follow him out of coercion or ignorahce. We must make up our own minds. He gave us the gift of not giving easy answers; he taught in parables. Jesus leaves us free and invites us to re- .sponsible living and loving. He refuses to take on our responsibility for ourselves and our world even though we often try to put on him th~ blame for our misfortunes and our mistakes. o Christ's peace was from within. He was "self-centered," anchored in the depths of his love springing from deep within. We too are chal-lenged to anchor in the gift of self that we find within, put there by God. One way to self is through the gift of not giving. Chapters and Structures William F. Hogan, C.S.C. Father Hogan wrote "The Cross Reconsidered" for our issue of March/April ! 988. His address remains: Fratelli Cristiani; Via della Maglianelli, 375; 00166 Roma, It-aly. Postconstitution chapters in most congregations take a very different form from those in which much labor was directed to working out, concept by concept, word by word, texts of constitutions to be submitted for ec-clesiastical approval. If there was perplexity in some institutes as to what a chapter would do when there were no more constitutions to write, the wonderment soon dissolved as attention was focused on the principal calls of the times: justice, peace, preferential option for the poor, sim-plification of lifestyle, apostolic spirituality, and so forth. Less legisla-tion emerged from the chapters; the accent was on setting immediate goals for administrations and planning steps for implementation of di-rection by the community: simple documents of challenge for reflection, inspiration, action. A variety of formulas, techniques, and approaches have been used to provoke a deep listening to the Spirit during sessions and to share the chapter's reflections and concerns with the larger con-gregation. Our times have seen much effort and creativity to make chap-ters meaningful experiences, and more will be needed in the future be-cause there is no magical formula that can cover every set of concerns or apply to all chapter circumstances. The uniqueness of each chapter will demand an approach suitable to its particularity: what works for one may very well not be beneficial to another. The experience of many congregations would advocate that it is not necessary for chapters to go over every element of the life of a congre-gation, as ordinarily done in the past, because there are so many other 26 Chapters and Structures participative structures in place between chapters. More effective results emerge when one topic is pursued in depth and the congregation's ef-forts are channeled in a particular direction. At the same time it is im-portant that a chapter and other community organs related to a chapter devote some attention to important points other than the principal topic. The 1983 code of Canon Law determines a number of issues to be treated in the particular law of religious congregations, and these fall under the responsibility of a general chapter. Most of these matters have been leg-islated in the constitutions; there is widespread reluctance to touch them after experiencing the difficulties of having constitutions approved, even when a group intellectually acknowledges the need for modifications. Oth-ers are taken up in the secondary book and should be reviewed by the chapter, even though its primary thrust is not concerned with the particu-lar law as such. There are ways of accomplishing this so as not to dis-tract from the major chapter consideration--for example, through the use of an ad hoc committee reviewing the legislation and making recommen-dations to the assembly. Without this review there is always the possi~ bility of a gap developing between living and the calls of the Spirit to move forward in mission. One of the most basic areas not to be overlooked is that of the struc-tures of government, where there are many questions deserving ongoing congideration even though structures are usually treated in the constitu-tions and considered of more permanent nature than rfiatters'of the sec-ondary book. Frequently the particular law of a congregation will state that structures are for the mission:, that the participation of the institute in the continuing mission of Jesus is the determining factor for structures of authority and government and the division of a congregation into life-promoting and mission-serving units. It .is far too easy to let the concept of structures for mission become a dead letter, since the mission is not staticbut constantly undergoing variables. Reflective vigilance is needed to take into account the changing factors of the mission of Jesus today and be at the service of the mission in fact and not just in word. This is especially true in international congregations with their divi-sions into provinces, regions, sectors, and so forth, but finds application also'in national and diocesan groups. Religious institutes are experienc-ing decreases in some of their internal divisions because of aging, loss of members, and other factors with the result that some previously sta-ble units no longer appear capable of maintaining the autonomy neces-saryto function as a unit in the same way. In not a few instances there is occurring a reversal of what have up to this point been geographical Review for Religious, January-February 1989 central and peripheral areas in congregations; then, too, there often is dis-persion of individuals and communities, along with new forms of com-munity. New foundations in third-world countries being made by differ-ent provinces of the same congregation point to a need for a networking among them to provide for sharing of experiences and insights, even if situations are not yet sufficiently clear to establish more permanent struc-tures. And surely, sufficient reflection on the units of a congregation will give rise to other situations in need of monitoring. Canon law and practice leaves the regulation of internal divisions to the individual institute and the authority therein determined, as long as the basic points of the approved constitutions are followed. These latter often allow for more flexibility than seems apparent at first glance; where there may be lacking the necessary suppleness, recourse should be had to the appropriate Church authority. A desire for survival may force the issue of restructuring in some congregations rather than a more overt con-cern that structures serve the mission; whatever be the motivation in fact, watchfulness is called for and the occasion of a chapter provides an op-portunity to exercise a healthy vigilance. Reflection on structures is not meant to pull religious in on them-selves, but outwards to furthering the work of Christ and promoting the qualitative dimension of ministry, life, and contribution to the local Church--lest there be a discrepancy between what we say of ourselves in principle and the reality of what we live. Connected with this reflec-tion is the issue of identity and charism, in the sense that the question at times arises whether to bolster the presence of the congregation in one part of the world through bringing new members from countries where vocations are still in abundance or simply to let the presence eventually fade out of existence. The tendency is to give an answer in terms of the works the religious are doing and whether the apostolates should be con-tinued; yet there is a deeper element than simply the works: Are the re-ligious bringing anything different in terms of witness to the local Church that others cannot effect? Not just a question of doing, but the reality of being: How are we in wha~ we do? No simple answers can be given to this; much soul-searching about the identity to which we witness is en-tailed. And if there is nothing .particular being shared with the local Church in terms of charism, it may be that the Spirit is saying that the congregation's presence is no longer gifting the local Christian commu-nity. A number of other matters concerning authority structures deserve periodic consideration, such as terms of office, interimsbetween chap- Chapters and Structures / 29 ters, and whether chapters are the only or best vehicles to accomplish the promotion of the mission and life. Many congregations have gone through a number of changes during the last two decades concerning the duration of offices because of concern with people being in positions too long, the need for freshness of vision in monitoring change and the cur-rents of the times, and the promotion of participation and development of individuals' gifts and talents. Sometimes in addressing one set of val-ues and making decisions in accord with them, experience shows that other values suffer and perhaps there is conflict in trying to integrate all the facets. Thus some congregations have gone full circle and returned to their original terms of office after various experiments; others have opted for a longer nonrenewable mandate; and still others have deter-mined upon several shorter terms. It would be idealistic to think that the workable formula reached for the present should not be open for recon-sideration if changing circumstances would indicate the need for another solution. Frequently religious Speak of the amount of energy that is expended in preparing chapters and implementing their decisions and orientations; also of the insufficiency of time between chapters for a congregation to realize the implications of chapter decisions before being moved on as a group to other subject matters. The frustrations sometimes expressed in this regard, in conjunction with fatigue over the number of meetings in which religious at times have to participate on different levels, raise the issue of whether there are other ways to accomplish the goals with-out the mechanism of chapters so regularly and all that is entailed therein, and still preserve and foster the principles of members working together toward policies of life and mission. Creativity of thought is needed here to safeguard the values intended by the structure of chapter and at the same time to prevent excessive use of energy that could be more directly channeled toward mission. Further, it might prove opportune from time to time to reflect on some of the points brought over into religious structures from corpora-tion models to assure the rights of individuals and promote participation. Some were needed to correct abuses or remedy problem areas at a par-ticular time. Are they still needed? Has something been lost from the com-munity- of-faith dimension while stressing organizational approaches? Where is the congregation now in the balance of values? Some benefi-cial insights could be gained by a congregation relative to structures for mission from treating these and similar questions. Not to be overlooked either would be the number of people involved :30 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 in community administration full time: too few? too many? enough for the needs of mission on the part of the congregation? How do we under-stand these needs now, taking into account the concept of community for mission and the need for good government and sufficiently broad-based decision making? The answer given at one time will apply only as long as circumstances remain basically the same: hence the need for periodic review. To look at some of these issues of structure from the viewpoint of service of the mission and the community's growth for mission may ap-pe. ar as an invitation to furiher instability in religious life; perhaps it would involve furthe~r unsettling, but in terms--hopefully--of the unset-tling aspe~zts of Jesus' message and mission a~d of the mentaJity of foun-ders and foundresses. Their primary passion, in following Jesus,,was to reveal the Father's love and assist others to experience it in their lives; institutionalization of religious life and structures as such generally arose after the founders' times. Stability of life is an important aspect of relig-ious life; it is expressed in the Church's definitions of consecrated life (see can. 573,1). However, stability must not be equated with no change, especially when the mission that gives meaning to the consecrated life demands change. Stability demands serious prayerful reflection on the whole issue of change, keeping our vision focused 'on the person of Je-sus arid his mission today. And while we concentrate our ,energies and attention on the great sweeping calls of the Spirit of Jesus as reiterated through the Church, we must also keep alert to whether internal struc-tures are enabling for response to mission. Meta-Expectations and the General Chapter J. Roberta Rivello, S.S.J. Sister J. Roberta Rivello is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia. She is currently Dean of Graduate Studies Division at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia; prior to that she was research analyst for the Department of Army where she worked for the past seven years. This paper is about the difference between expectations reasonably held and "meta-expectations," and what happens when "meta-expecta-tions" are part of the agenda for a general chapter in religious institutes. Having to deal with these meta-expectations in the general chapter may be a part of the reason why so many religious institutes find themselves, in the years immediately following a general chapter, in the midst of a good deal of frustration, anger, even~outright rejection of some of the mandates of the general chapter. I believe this occurs because many of the expectatio.ns explicitly ex-pressed by the members of an institute are clearly not the substantive con-tent for the general chapter to consider. When a religious institute re-quests from the membership proposals, recommendations, and sugges-tions prior to a general chapter, it may be of some benefit to explain at the same time what is reasonable for the members to expect from the chap-ter, and to provide some criteria for arriving at the proper methods for expressing those expectations to the chapter delegates. Part of this edu-cation could include guidance into what constitutes "reasonable expec-tations," and how to differentiate between these and what I term "meta-expectations." I use the term rneta-expectations as a phenomenological description for the kinds of aspirations and expectations which are not structurally 31 Review for Religious, January-February 1989 . and substantively significant to the issues ~hich h~ive been identified as chapter material. Persons who express such "meta-expectations" through their proposals and letters certainly do not perceive them as meta-expectations-- or they would not submit them. I believe it is the job of the prechapter committees to communicate to those who submit such pro-posals, even personally if possible, why it is that their expectations are not reasonable for the chapter to include in its portfolio of proposals. Do-ing this would eliminate some of the postchapter frustration, even if in-itially the explanation is quite difficult to accept. A general chapter may, for example, need to deal with spirituality and prayer as they relate to the charism of the institute, and proceeds to invite proposals to that effect. When the proposals are reviewed, how-ever, it is found that some members have expressed a variety of expec-tations which~ are, not substantive.ly identifiable with the charism and spiri-tuality of the institute. If these .expectations were to become content for the~delegates' consideration during the chapter, they could seriously im-pair the effectiveness of chapter deliberations and could ultimately erode the charis~n itself of the institute. The "mandates" of a general chapter are simply directives with en-forcement p.ower. These mandates deal with matters which have an im~ pact on the~members' sPiritual development, community life, prayer, ap-ostolic works, or other important areas which are integral to the life of a religious.The precise direction which the general chapter should take is undergirded by the constitutions and charism of the institute. Whatever else, a chapter accomplishes, it ought to accomplish the ful-fillment of its members' first-order reasonable expectations. These rea-sonably held expectations, in turn, ought to flow from the institute's spiri-tuality and charism. Ageneral ch.apter,, however, need not attend with great detail to ful-filling second-order expectations since these do not necessarily consti-tute the ne'cessary and sufficient matter for a general chapter to entertain. It is these latter which I term meta-expectations. Meta-expectations are something which a newly elected leadership might need: to consider sometime soon after entering into their term of office. But religious institutes which choose to concern themselves with such non-reasonable expectations during the general.chapter frequently find that there are.significantly sharp differences between the way the dele-gates perceive of the proposals presented to them and the way the pro-posing me,.mbers perceive the resulting chapter mandates. They will ac-cept the mandates accord.ing to what their expectations were prior to gen- Meta-Expectations and the Chapter eral chapter. Even in the Church today there is a growing sense that religious in-stitutes are experiencing very serious differences in the way the mem-bership perceives the outc0me of general chapters. This is partially due to the way general chapters often conduct their prechapter preparations and the way that Chapters of Affairs are conducted. These differences in perception and interpretation area result of the failure to differentiate between the reasonable expectations and the meta-expectations of the in-stitute's membership. This failure further fragments the members and their acceptance of the mandates and authority of the chapter. In this paper I will try to clarify what are reasonable expectations for a general chapter, and to show the difference between reasonable expec-tations and meta-expectations and how they influence the general chap-ter, Conflict between these two kinds of expectations can exist whenever expectations of any kind are elicited and aroused. For example, if one is invited to dinner, it is all right to expect something to eat but it is not reasonable to expect filet of beefi That is a meta-expectation, and while it may not be wrong to hold such a meta-expectation, it certainly is not reasonable; nor need the host meet it. Neither should the one holding such a meta-expectation be disappointed or offended if the host does not ~erve filet! More relevant to our discussion are the expectations religious have about their general chapters especially when preparations for them evoke strong expectations among the members as well as among the delegates. As I gtated above, two. of the things which ought to be simultane-ously evolving in the months prior to a chapter are how to identify and clarify the proper content for consideration and how to prepare both dele-gates and members to be able to differentiate between meta-expectations and reasonable expectations. It is reasonable for members of a religious institute to e£pect its gen-eral chapter to ~nandate programs for renewal, for spiritual development, for apostoli6 works, and for good community life. But it is not.reason-able to (xpect it to'decide how the membership ought to rest and relax, even thou'gti such matters are very important and time arid thou~ht~ought to be given to their consideration. It is as unreasonable for the member-ship to expect this to be considered as it would 'be for the general chap-ter to consider it---even if some of the delegates want it added to the agenda. The business of a general chapter is to redesign the future of the institute as it finds itself called to reveal Christ to the world in its con-temporary situation. This is its first-order work and is the only claim any- Review for Religious, January-February 1989 one can reasonably make on a general chapter. If the institute is true to its charism, the general chapter will succeed in fulfilling reasonable ex-pectations, and a newly elected leadership, or a reelected leadership, will be confirmed and authorized in working together to find ways and means to carry out what the chapter has mandated. In doing so, general administration should act in such a way that it further clarifies the difference between reasonable expectations and meta-expectations. Acting thus after the chapter assures continuity as well as flexibility in the institute's lived-out charism, since it preserves the in-tegrity of the institute's constitutions even while assuring versatility in their application to the reality that presents itself here and now.~ After all, it is in the real world that the institute exists, and its contemporary situation should be the focus of the institute's energies if it is to survive. If, however, the general chapter takes into consideration everything sub-mitted to it, the real essence of the institute's life becomes obscured. In addition, every proposal presented to the chapter contains its own par-ticular character and language which force the delegates to unpack its meaning before addressing the issue it contains. By sifting out the recta-expectations from the agenda, the delegates will be freed to concentrate on the constitutions and charism of the institute and to interpret the con-temporary situation in light of the Gospels for the world the institute is called to serve. There is good evidence that the bishops did this in Vatican II docu-ments. The document Lumen Gentium shows that they were aware of their .responsibility to separate out the recta-expectations from the rea-sonable ones.2 Their emphasis was on common-good considerations. Common-good considerations evolve from whatever the community has in common, not from things incidental to it. I believe this is why the docu-ments are clearly and straightforwardly parousial (expectant), so fitting for a Church in labor to reveal Christ to the world. For religious insti-tutes, the emphasis should also be on the common good, that is, on what the institute holds in common and what it shares as an institute in labor to reveal Christ to the world. For religious, this is found in their consti-tutions and in the charism of its founding. The document Perfectae Cari-tatis expresses the expectation of the Church about what it believes re-ligious institutes are called to be: Religious should carefully consider that through them, to believers and nonbelievers alike, the Church truly wishes to give an increasingly clearer revelation of Christ. Through them Christ should be shown con-templating on the mountain, announcing God's kingdom to the multi- Meta-Expectations and the Chapter / 35 tude, healing the sick and the maimed, turning sinners to wholesome fruit, blessing children, doing good to all, and always obeying the will of the Father who sent him.3 Rather than stating the expectations of religious, the document states what it is the Church expects of the religious institutes. This sense of expectation is not alien to either the Old or New Tes-taments. Scriptures retell the sacred history of a people filled with ex-pectation for a Messiah. For some, that expectation was misplaced or mis-focused so that when the Messiah came, when the expectation was ful-filled, they did not recognize it. Likewise, the message of Christ was clearly a statement of what it was he expected of us as we await his sec-ond coming. It is this same degree of expectation which is the ground-ing for religious institutes coming into being in the first place, that is, to reveal Christ to others even as we await (expect) his second coming. At this time some institutes are preparing for their chapter. A great deal of preparation will take place, I am sure. Included in that prepara-tion should be some education on what constitutes reasonable expecta-tions for the membership to have and how to express those expectations in proposals, letters, and prechapter committee work. I believe that some of the meta-expectations expressed prior tochapter in proposals to the general chapter are the result of excessive reliance on congregational and personal self-analyses which, in turn, rely too heavily on current statis-tics, social analysis, and popular trends. This tendency is best described as the historicist versus the historical view of events.4 Both views are needed but if they are not balanced, the religious institutes are robbed of either their historical tradition and dynamism (charism) or of insights derived from knowledge of the cultural and intellectual shifts occurring in society. Needless to say, I believe the omission of either is wrong. In fact, one of the tasks of the general chapter is to ensure that the bal-ance between both perspectives is maintained. Furthermore, an advan-tage to holding the Chapter of Election after the Chapter of Affairs is to ensure that the elected leadership is committed to carrying out the man-date of the general chapter and to the mission of the institute visible in its charism. The business of meta-expectations derailing expectations occurs daily in society--in the system of justice, in education, in government and other natural systems. It ought to occur less frequently in religious institutes if they are open to the Spirit unfolding in them. One other example of the distinction between meta-expectations and Review for Religious, January-February 1989 expectations might clarify what I am saying. In a religious institute mem-bers may experience some dissatisfaction with the missioning process, and all kinds of proposals expressing both meta-expectations and expec-tations emerge. The dissatisfaction is with the process and not with the people doing the job. Instead of focusing on the dissatisfaction, the dele-gates begin, as a result of some meta-expectations, to design new roles and functions for the persons charged with missioning when they ought to have seriously looked at the process and analyzed the cause of dis-content. The process is in need of change; failure to redesign it changes nothing, and future chapters will find themselves still dealing with dis-content about the process. Sometimes an issue is finally resolved but only after it has resurfaced in several chapters. One cannot be sure, however, that the ultimate resolution flows from reasonable expectations or not. What is certain is that if it is the result of meta-expectation something of the institute's charism is diminished. A model for expectations showing the process involved in discern-ment of the kinds of things which happen as a result of responses pro-vided in proposals follows: -Perception: dissatisfaction with missioning process -Response: a change is needed in the process In this model the response is a ~reasonable expectation for members to have. The model also lends itself to scrutiny by the delegates who will then test various recommendations made in the context of chapter to see how they relate to the charism and spirituality of the institute. In doing this, no special interest or meta~expectation will drive the final outcome. After chapter, the information and proposals not used in chapter can be given additional study and perhaps even be used for input into some ad hoc trial period of experimentation. A second model based on meta-expectations follows: -Perception: dissatiSfaction with missioning process -Response: establishment of new roles for persons charged with process The response in this case is the fulfillment of a meta-expectation since it begins to deal with m'any different aspects of the dissatisfaction. The issue is clearly defined as dissatisfaction with the process; then the charism and spirituality of the institute should dictate the solution. The response in this model is expressive of one of the many meta-expecta-tions expressed, all of which are not substantively, relative to the insti-tute's charism and spirituality. This model is provided as example; it is not a definitive model. Religious institutes can substitute ever so many examples which violate their own particular charism. This is not to say Meta-Expectations and the Chapter / 37 that it is wrong to have the vision to redesign the institute or to follow "paths unknown." What this paper is addressing is the growing aware-ness among religious that somewhere things are going amiss and worse, that it is becoming increasingly more difficult for the institute to recog-nize its own charism and spirituality at work in the Church for which it is called to reveal Christ and through him the Father. In this brief essay I have tried to make a distinction between the jus-tifiable and reasonable expectations one might have for a general chap-ter and the meta-expectations one might have, which are not reasonable for a general chapter to consider in its deliberations, no matter how at-tractive or relevant those meta-expectations appear. NOTES ~ Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London. 1958. passim. 2 Walter M. Abbot, S.J. (ed.), The Documents of Vatican !!, p. 225, n. 26. All ref-erences to the Documents are taken from here. 3 Documents, p. 77, n. 46. 4 For an insightful account of the distinction between historicism and historicalism, read Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., Method In Theology: London, 1971. pp. 323- 326, 239, 318. See also the works of Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernest Troeltsch; Maurice Mandelbaum. Enc. Phil., 4:22-25. Thomas Merton and His Own Cistercian Tradition M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O. Father Basil's most recent article in this journal was "Simple Contemplative Prayer" (March/April 1987). He now resides at Assumption Abbey; Rt. 5, Box 193; Ava, Missouri 65608. I presume most of the readers of this essay are fairly familiar with the life and development of Thomas Merton. In the last pages of the Secular Jour-nal, Merton sums up his spiritual journey towards the Church and mon-astery: From Gilson's Spirit of Medieval Philosophy I learned a healthy respect for Catholicism. Then Ends andMeans taught me to respect mysticism. Maritain's Art and Scholasticism was another important influence, and Blake's poetry. Perhaps also Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, though I read precious little of it. I was fascinated by the Jesuit sermons in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man! What horrified him, began to appeal to me. It seemed to me quite sane. Finally G. F. Lahey's Life of Gerard Manley Hopkins; I was reading about Hopkins's conver-sion when 1 dropped the book and ran out of the house to look for Fa-ther Ford. ~ It is not surprising that this author would be influenced primarily by authors and their books. In a preface to A Thomas Merton Reader, published in 1962, six years before his tragic death, Merton summed up his monastic years: I would say that my life at Gethsemani has fallen roughly into four pe-riods. First, the novitiate. I was a novice in 1942-1944. Those were hard years, before the days when radiators were much in favor during the win-ter, when the hours of communal prayer were much longer, when the 38 Merton and Cistercian Tradition fasts were much stricter. It was a period of training, and a happy, aus-tere one; during which 1 wrote little. The best Gethsemani poems be-long to this period. At the end of the novitiate my health broke down and I was ap-pointed to write and do translations of French books and articles. I was also studying philosophy and theology in preparation for ordination to the priesthood. This second period extends from 1944, my first vows, to ordination in 1949. At first the writing was very bad . In 1946 I wrote Seven Storey Mountain, in 1947 Seeds of Contemplation, and in 1948 The Waters of Siloe. After ordination, in 1949, there was an-other brief period of poor health and nervous exhaustion. I was almost incapable of writing for at least a year and a half after I became a priest. Then after a rest period in the hospital, I wrote The Ascent to Truth and Bread in the Wilderness (both about 1951) and finished The Sign of Jonas, 1952. In 1951 1 was appointed the Master of Scholastics, that is, of the young monks studying for ordination in the monastery. This en-tailed a fair amount of work preparing conferences and classes. Books like The Living Bread and particularly No Man is an Island and The Si-lent Life belong to the end of this period. Finally, a fourth stage. In 1955 I was made Master of the Choir Nov-ices. This is an office involving considerable work and responsibility. No writing of any account was done in ! 956, but after that it was possi-ble to produce short books or collections of essays, and some poetry. Disputed Questions, The Wisdom of the Desert, The Behavior of Titans, and New Seeds of Contemplation belong to this last period. So too do more recent essays on nuclear war, on Chinese thought, on liturgy, and on solitude.2 It is notable that in all of this literary reminiscing, Merton does not mention specifically any Cistercian Father or any of the work he did con-cerning them. Actually he does not seem to have had any contact with the Cistercian tradition prior to entering the monastery. But, in fact, once he entered the Cistercian life he so immersed himself in it that it became the very matrix of his life and .thinking. In his early days as he was as-similating Cistercian spirituality, Merton wrote about the Cistercian Fa-thers explicitly. When he served the community as Master of Scholastics and as Novice Master, he spoke about them constantly; his notes and his taped conferences are full of them. Later they cropped up spontaneously in his writings, the paradigm against which he evaluated what he was then absorbing. One of his favorites would find his place in the final talk Merton gave a few hours before his sudden death.3 When Merton first entered the monastery, there was, as he said in the epilogue of The Spirit of, Simplicity,4 little of the Cistercian Fathers 40 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 available in English.5 But this did not hinder him. He not only found no problem in reading the Latin texts in Migne, he strongly believed that translations always lacked something of the origin~il.6 How carefully he studied these texts is witnessed not only by his frequent use of quota-tions from them in his early writings and the talks he gave his scholas-tics and novices, but also by the .und.erlinings and annotations found in the voit]mes of the Fathers which he used. One of Thomas Merton's-- or Frater Louis, as he was then called-- earliest assignments was to translate a.report from the CisterCian Gen-eral Chapter, entitled The Spirit of Simplicity,7 and provide a suitable in-troduction for it. He'not only did that but gathered a complementary selection of texts from St. Bernard on interior simplicity in its fullness. He translated these and commented on them, turning the report into a full book. This part of the The Spirit of Simplicity has recently been published in a volume in the Cistercian Studies Series with two other early Bernar-dine essays of Merton.8 He wrote a five-part study of Bernard and St. John of the Cross for Collectanea which expresses his concern of that period when he was writing The Ascent to Truth .9 We can detect in these essays a certain struggle Merton was experiencing in trying to respond both to the rich, fully human patristic heritage Bernard offered him and the exciting, stimulating, scholastic approach which John of the Cross was able to integrate with a high mystical theology. It wbuld be Ber-nard's approach that would win him over. In the prologue to The Sign of Jonas he would write: "I found in writing The Ascent to Truth that technical language, though it is univer-sal and certain and accepted by theologians, .does not reach the average man and does not convey what is more personal and most vital in relig-ious experience. Since my focus is not upon dogmas as such, but only on their repercussions in the life of a soul in which they begin to find concrete realization, I may be pardoned for using my own words to talk about my own soul." ~0 The third piece in the Cistercian Studies volume witnesses to another early concern of Merton--the superiority of thecontemplative life. In an extensive essay which was first published serially in ~Collectanea and later appeared as a volume in French,~ Merton is at pains to establish that the apostolic life, though it may have a fullness beyond the purely contemplative life, as Bernard ,acknow!edges,.has true:value only inso-far as it flows out of contemplation. And thus the contemplative life is in itself more important or of greater dignity. Merton's~argumentation Merton and Cistercian Tradition here is not all that easy to follow, nor that cogent. Later he himself would comment negatively about such preoccupation.~2 The eighth centenary of Bernard's death led to a spate of publishing on the saint. Merton translated the papal encyclical produced for the oc-casion and wrote an introduction to it. ~3 He was invited to introduce other works. His preface to Bernard de Clairvaux, a collection of studies pub-lished by the Historical Commission of his order and edited by its chair-man, Father Jean-de-la-Croix Bouton, shows the increasing influence of Bernard on Merton.~4 The piece is filled with scriptural texts and allu-sions. We might.say it is a very Bernardine piece about Bernard. In line with his earlier concentration, Merton sees that Bernard added to the Cis-tercian reform "an emphatic call to contemplative union with God." ~5 At the same time Merton begins to reveal a more integral understanding of Bernard as a "man of his times . . . a many-sided saint." 16 This is further in evidence in the next piece. His .introduction to Bruno Scott James's translation of the letters of St. Bernard, he considered important. ~7 At his behest it was included in A Thomas Merton Reader in the section ".Mentors and Doctrines."~8 It revealed Thomas Merton's growth in his appreciation for Bernard in line with his own personal growth. Merton had had his experience on the cor-ner of Maple and Fourth. He now beheld all with a greater integrity. He had a new .appreciation for Bernard the man. H~e appreciated the letters because they so well brought out the human dimension of the great saint: They [the letters] show the man as he is, and because he is so much a man, readers who forget that saints must be men may sometimes be in-clined to question his saintliness . Bernard is sent to instruct us how human a saint must be to forge'out the will of God in the heat of the affairs of men . He had the humility to be himself in the thick of a silly argument. He had the good grace to admit that a saint might pos-sibly have to bicker with another saint . The angry Bernard, the pas-sionate Bernard . . . the merciful Bernard, the gentle long-suffering monk who could be as tender as a mother . 19 As Merton noted in his brief literary biography quoted above, liturgy came more to the fore in a later period of his life. In Seasons of Cele-bration he published one of his most beautiful pieces on St. Bernard: "The Sacrament of Advent in the Spirituality of St. Bernard.' ,20 It is undoubtedly St. Bernard, the "Theologian of the Cistercian Life" (as Merton's friend Jean Leclercq would name him), who received the most attention from Merton. Besides Bernard's prominence as the mas-ter of the Cistercian school, there would be the influence of Gilson. As 42 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 we have seen above, Gilson was one of the first to open the way for Mer-ton towards Catholicism. Merton's respect for him never diminished, and his masterful work The Mystical Theology of Saint BerndrdZ~ was most carefully studied and wholly accepted by Merton.22 But Merton read all the significant Cistercian Fathers, and spoke and wrote on them as occa-sion offered. The "Bernard of the North," Bernard's disciple, the abbot of Rievaulx, Aelred, received special attenti.on. Merton has an extensive un-published piece on him, which looks like it was on the way to becoming a book. We can hope it will. soon appear in Cistercian Studies. It is an important piece, and I shall return to it later in this esgay. As one of his first projects for Cistercian Publications, Merton wrote an introduction for Father Amfd6e Hallier's Monastic Theology of Aelred of Rievaulx. Here again we see the later Merton rejecting earlier attitudes: Let us be quite clear the monastic theology of Aelred is not a partisan "theology of monasticism." It is not an apologia for .the life of the monk, and not a kind of gnostic system organized to prove some sup-posed superiority of "the contemplative life," urging a flight to ineffa-ble convulsions,z3 He saw that "the Christian life is, for Aelred, simply the full flow-ering of freedom and consent in the perfection of friendship. Friendship with other human beings is an epiphany of friendship with God." Mer-ton notes that "Not so long ago, some of Aelred's books were kept un-der lock and key in Trappist libraries. ,,24 Merton never wrote a particular essay on Bernard's closest friend, William of Saint Thierry, but he considered him "a profound and origi-nal theologian and a contemplative in his own right."25 He dedicated one of his first books to him, "one of the saints and mystical theologians of the Golden Age," and quoted him extensively in the foreword.26 In regard to the fourth of the evangelists of Citeaux, Guerric of Igny, we have the opportunity to get a sampling of Merton's more ordinary treat-ment of the Cistercian Fathers in his talks to the juniors at Gethsemani. Sister Bernard Martin of Chimay transcribed two of Merton's talks which had been taped and published the transcription in Cistercian Studies in 1972.27 For Merton, "Guerric was really deep and very spiritual and very mystical."28 And as Merton.opens him up for his novices, he is also very much alive, very practical and down to earth. It is in these intimate talks that we best see how the Cistercian Fathers reverberated in the mind and heart of this twentieth-century Cistercian Father. Merton and Cistercian Tradition There is a more formal treatment of Guerric of Igny and his liturgi-cal sermons in Merton's introduction to the Gethsemani Christmas book for 1959: Sister Rose of Lima's translation of Guerric's Christmas ser-mons. 29 Other Cistercian Fathers turn up in Merton's published writings. There are poems about St, Alberic3° and St. Malachy.3! When Cister-cian Studies began publishing Sister Penelope's translation of the ser-mons of Isaac of Stella, Merton provided an introduction for this "not the least interesting of the Cistercian writers."32 He found him a "more independent thinker and less subject to the dominant influence of Saint Bernard''33, whose writings reminded him "at times of Eckhart in their tone."34 Merton's spirit resonated with this abbot who withdrew from a large and important Cistercian abbey to an erernus, a poor and lonely island foundation. Merton provided an introduction for another Cistercian Father, one of his favorites, Adam of Perseigne.35 Earlier he had written about Adam's theory of monastic formation in an essay that was published in Charles Dumont's French translation.36 Adam was for Merton something of a mentor in his duties as novice master, and his admiration for the ab-bot of Perseigne remained till the end. In his final talk at Bangkok he brings him forth to illustrate a basic monastic theory.37 When the earlier essay was further developed, Merton gave it a new title, one that wit-nessed to his own development: The Feast of Freedom. Adam, Aelred, all the great Cistercian Fathers led Merton in the same direction. But Merton did not have an unbounded admiration for all the twelfth-century Cistercian writers, Here is an example, Gamier of Langres: Gamier was not deep and not spiritual and not mystical. He was a literal-minded person with a lot of learning. As a matter of fact he is quite in-teresting, On the liturgy, he has a lot of little statements about what they did at the time and what they thought they were doing and why they did it. But these are just little statements of historical fact. Today Gamier would be a scientific-minded critic. "But a scientific-minded critic in the Middle Ages is just about zero, because he has nothing to work on . He's finished, he's dated, he's way back. He is no more modern than 'a twelfth-century concept of the universe.38 He goes so far as to say: "His work., is not in English at all, and if it never gets translated into English that won't be too soon.' ,39 This does, though, give, us another indication as to the extent to which Merton worked his way through the pages of Migne4° and ex-plored all the published writings of the early Cistercian Fathers. 44 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 Above I have mentioned the monograph that Merton was working on entitled "Saint Aelred of Rievaulx." This is a significant piece of work. In placing Aelred in context Merton gives a fine synopsis of Cis-tercian history and especially literary history from the foundation in 1098 up till the death of Becket (+ 1170). But I think one of the valuable ele-ments of this work is the insight that Merton has as a later Cistercian writer into these early Cisterclan writers. Indeed, as I read the pertinent section I ask.myself if this is not a candid insight into Merton himself as a Cistercian writer: ¯ . . the rich and elegant vitality of Cistercian prose--most of which is sheer poetry--betrays an overflow 0( literary productivity which did not even need to strive for its effects: it achieved them, as it were, sponta-neously. It seemed to be second nature to St. Bernard, William of St. Thierry, Adam of Perseigne, Guerric of lgny, to write with consummate beauty prose full of sound and color and charm, There were two natural explanations for this. The first is that the prolific Cistercian writers of the Golden Age were men who had already been thoroughly steeped in the secular literary .movements of the time before they entered the clois-ter. All of them had rich experience of the current of humanism that flow-ered through the twelfth-century renaissance . There is a second explanation for the richness and exuberance of theo-logical prose in twelfth-century monasteries of Citeaux. If contact with classical humanism had stimulated a certain intellectual vitality in these clerics, it hlso generated a conflict in their souls. The refined natural ex-citements produced by philosophical speculation, by art, poetry, music, by the companionship of restless sensitive and intellectual friends merely unsettled their souls. Far from finding peace and satisfaction in all these things, they found war. The only answer to the problem was to make a clean break with everything that stimulated this spiritual uneasiness, to withdraw from the centers in which it was fomented, and get away somewhere, discover some point of vantage from which they could see the whole difficulty in its proper perspective. This vantage point, of course, was not only the cloister, since Ovid and Tully had already be-come .firmly established' there, but the desert--the terra invia et inaquosa in which the Cistercian labored and suffered and prayed . The tension generated by the conflict between secular humanism and the Christian humanism, which seeks the fulfillment of human nature through ascetic renunciation and mystical union with God, was one 6f the proximate causes of the powerful mystical writing of the Cistercians. , However, once these two natural factors have been considered, we must recognize other and far more decisive influences, belonging to a higher order . It is the relish and savor that only experience can Merton and Cistercian Tradition give, that communicates to the writings of the twelfth-century Cister-cians all the vitality and vividness and impassioned sincerity which are peculiarly their own . The White Monks speak with accents of a more personal and more lyrical conviction that everywhere betrays the influence of an intimate and mystical experience . It is the personal, experiential character of Cistercian mysticism that gives the prose of the White Monks its vivid freshness . Since the theology of the Cistercians was so intimately persona! and experiential, their exposition of it was bound to take a psychological di-rection. All that they wrote was directed by their keen awareness of the presence and action of God in their souls. This was their all-absorbing interest.4~ Many scholars have noted that Merton's writings show a rather su-perficial knowledge of the Eastern religions. But when I traveled in the East and spoke with the spiritual masters there who had come into con-tact with Merton on his last journey, they said they had never met any-one from the West who had so fully understood their ways. I think the same might be said of Merton and the Cistercian Fathers. Certainly many scholars know more about the Fathers and the early history of the Cis-tercian order. But few, if any, so fully understand their spirit as does this twentieth-century Cistercian Father. Moreover, no one has been able to express so fully and clearly, and in a way that communicates to our times, what these Fathers have to say to our times and to the renewal of the Cistercian order. Cistercians cannot but profit from choosing Tho-mas Merton, their F.ather Louis, for their lectio, from spending time with him and letting him lead them into a deeper, fuller understanding and appreciation of their Cistercian Fathers. NOTES ~ Thomas Merton, The Secular Journal ofThomas Merton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959), pp. 268f. 2 A Thomas Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas McDonnell (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), pp. viiif. 3 Adam of Perseigne. See The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 333. 4 The Spirit of Simplicity: Characteristic of the Cistercian Order (Trappist, Ken-tucky: Abbey of Gethsemani, 1948). 5 Ibid., p. 137. Merton played an important role in remedying this situation in the part he played in the founding of Cistercian Publications, which has now published more than forty volumes of the Cistercian Fathers in English. 6 Reader, p. 317. 46/Review for Religious, January-February 1989 7 See note 4 above. 8 Thomas Merton on Saint Bernard, Cistercian Studies Series (hereafter CS), vol. 9 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1980), pp. 103-157. 9 New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. ~0 Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), pp. 8f. ~ Marthe, Marie, et Lazare (Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer, 1956). ~2 In the preface to A Thomas Merton Reader he would write: ". it would be a still greater misapprehension to say I am simply trying to prove that the contempla-tive life is 'better than the active life,' . Not only am I not trying to prove these propositions, but stated in this bald and unqualified manner, I do not even hold them. It is true that fifteen years ago I was able to get excited about such theses, but I have come to see that controversy about speculative matters of this sort is not only a waste of time but is seriously misleading. We are all too prone to believe in our own pro-grams and to follow the echo of our own slogans into a realm of illusion and unreal-ity"( p, viii). 13 The Last of the Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954). ~4 Bernard of Clairvaux (Paris: Editions Alsatia, 1953). It was later published in The Tablet and Cross and Crown and in Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960),.pp. 260-276, under the title "St. Bernard, Monk and Apostle." ~5 Disputed Questions, p. 263. 16 Ibid., p. 262. ~7 Bruno Scott James, St. Bernard of Clairvaux Seen Through his Selected Letters (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953), pp. v-viii. ~8 Reader, pp. 315-319. 19 Reader, pp. 316f. zo Seasons of Celebration (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), pp. 61-87. z~ New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955. 22 There is a copy of Gilson's work in the Merton Center at Columbi~ University with Merton's underlining and marginalia which indicate the care with which he stud-ied this book. 23 Am~d~e Hallier, The Monastic Theology ofAelred ofRievaulx, tr. by Colum-ban Heaney, CS 2 (Spencer, Massachusetts: Cistercian Publications, 1969), p. viii. 2,~ Ibid., pp. xif. 25 "Saint Aelred of Rievaulx," MSS, p. 20. ??26ft2The Spirit of Simplicity, pp. vf. 27 Thomas Merton, "Guerric of lgny's Easter Sermons" in Cistercian Studies, vol. 7 (1972), pp. 85-95. 28 Ibid., p. 85. 29 The Christmas Sermons of Blessed Guerric of lgny, tr. by Sr. Rose of Lima (Trap-pist, Kentucky: Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, 1959), pp. 1-25. 30 "Saint Alberic" in Selected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York~ New Direc-tions, 1959), pp. 44f. 3~ Ibid., pp. 75ff. This poem is reproduced in the Reader, pp. 177f. 32 Louis Merton, "Isaac of Stella: An Introduction to Selections from his Sermons," in Cistercian Studies, vol. 2 (1967), p. 243. 33 Ibid. 3,~ Ibid., p. 244. 35 "The Feast of Freedom: Monastic Formation according to Adam of Perseigne," Merton and Cistercian Tradition in The Letters of Adam ofPerseigne, vol. 1, tr. by Grace Perigo, Cistercian Fathers Series, no. 21 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1976), pp. 3-48. 36 "La formation monastique selon Adam de Perseigne," in Collectanea Ordinis Cisterciensium Reformatorum, vol. 19 (1957), pp. 1-17. 37 The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 333. 38 "Guerric . . . Easter Sermons," pp. 85f. 39 Ibid. 40 He read Garnier in Patrologia Latina, vol. 205. 4~ MSS. pp. 10-17. Liturgy of the Hours: A Canticle for Canticles Three canticles encompass all our praise: Three sacred songs of trusting love and hope. At dawn there breaks upon us like the sun, Old Zechariah's paean to God's work. At dusk, like Vesper star, young Mary sings Magnificat for mercy to us all. Then at day's end in darkness gently fall Old Simeon's thankful words, as clear and bright As Compline candles glowing in the dark To mark the end of day, perhaps of life: To let God's servants go in peace to him. Three son~s that with their jeweled antiphons, Like winking diamonds, daily bring delight As we lift hearts at dawn, at dusk, at night. Maryanna Childs, O.P. Ohio Dominican College 1818 Sunbury Road Columbus, Ohio 43219 The Challenge of Church Teachings: How Do I Respond? Lucy Blyskal, C.S.J. Sister Lucy Blyskal, C.S.J., has a doctorate in canon law and is a diocesan judge on the Tribunal of the diocese of Rockville Centre, New York. Her article is the fruit of her canon law dissertation on the Church's teaching authority. Her address is Tri-bunal of the Diocese of Rockville Centre; 50 North Park Avenue; Rockville Centre, New York 11570. In view of the increasing number of official Church pronouncements on many debated issues, how can today's religious keep informed and re-flect intelligently on such statements? How does one discern and listen to the Spirit of the teaching Church and the Spirit within oneself? The purpose of this article, comprised of two parts, is to help us to respond appropriately to papal and episcopal documents. The first sec-tion discusses three main aspects of the Church's teaching authority: (I) the truths of the faith as given to the ff.hgle.Church; (2) the concept of infallible Church teaching; (3) the noninfallible teaching and the response owed to it by the faithful. The second part offers the reader a practical method for analyzing doctrinal statements, and then applies this method to evaluate three somewhat controversial doctlments issued recently. Hopefully, this information will lead to a deepened knowledge and love of the faith which ought to transform our hearts and impel us to serve justice and peace in the world. Part I: Church Teaching Authority Revelation as Given to the Whole Church To set the correct context for'a discussion of teaching authority, it is important to keep in mind that the Church is fundamentally a commu- 48 Challenge of Church Teachings / 49 nity of faith and witness which worships God in Jesus Christ and bears witness to the Church's divinely given message throughout the world. Because Christ handed over the deposit of revelation to the whole Church, it is in the possession of the whole body of Spirit-empowered people, not just the hierarchy. While Scripture calls Peter the "rock" on which the Church was to be built, it never refers to him or the twelve apostles as "the Church." Thus, to speak of "the Church" as having done something when in fact an office or official is the source is theo-logic. ally incorrect; one should name the office involved, for example, "the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated . "~ In its doctrine on infallibility, Vatican I carefully and explicitlyaf-firmed that the deposit of revelation is with the whole Church. The text of Vatican I names the Church as the primary subject of infallibility in stating that: "the Roman Pontiff. enjoys the infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wanted his'Church to be endowed in defining doc-trine concerning faith or morals."2 Vatican II in The Constitution on the Church (article 12) clearly reitera.ted that, thanks to a supernatural sense of faith which characterizes the People of God, "the body of faithful as a whole, anointed as they are by the Holy One (see Jn 2:20, 27) can-not err in matters of belief." Since all believers possess, can perceive, and have insights into the Christian revelation, what is the specific task and charism of the hierar-chy? By Christ's will, the disciples were commissioned: (I) to be his "witnesses. to the end of the earth" (Ac !:8); (2) to "go and teach all nations" (Mt 28:19) his full revelation, under the guidance of his Spirit. (1) The chief vocation of the disciples and their successors is "to witness" to the integrity and truth of the evangelical doctrine. This call to witness does not necessarily include the capacity to have and to ar-ticulate the deepest insights into the meaning of the mysteries of our faith,3 which is a special gift. It is noteworthy that this gift has produced some of the most significant developments in the understanding of the faith not in members of the hierarchy but in such persons as Thomas Aqui-nas, honored as the common teacher of the Church, and Teresa of Av-ila, named doctor of the spiritual life. (2) Because of Christ's command to his disciples to "teach all na-tions," the Christian community from its earliest days has also recog-nized the importance of an authoritative teaching body to maintain inner unity as the gospel was being spread. By Christ's will, this teaching authority, termed the "magisterium," belongs to the hierarchy who are 50 / Review for Religious, January-February 1989 sacramentally empowered and assisted by the Spirit to speak in the name of.Jesus Christ. Therefore, Catholics are to trust what pope and bishops teach, not because of their personal learning or stated reasons for their teaching, but precisely because of the spiritual authority of the office they occupy.4 Infallible Teaching Authority Vatican Council I first defined the infallible teaching authority of the Church as an article of faith in promulgating the dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus in 1870.5 While it reaffirmed this dogma of Vatican I, Vatican Council II integrated it into the doctrine on the collegiality of the bishops united with the pope and the doctrine of the Church as the People of God (Constitution on the Church, articles 12, 18, 25). Article 25 of this constitution6 states that when the pope or the episcopal col-lege (pope and bishops together) solemnly,proclaim matters of faith and morals, they are protected by the Spirit of Christ from misleading the peo-ple by teaching erroneous doctrine; hence their teaching is infallible. Several conditions need to be fulfilled for a teaching to be consid-ered infallible. First, the doctrine must deal with a matter of faith or mor-als. Second, it must be proclaimed by a duly authorized Church teacher as binding on the universal Church. Finally, it must be proclaimed "to be definitively held" by all Catholics as a dogma of faith. This infalli-ble teaching authority has been exercised only rarely since its cautious and circumscribed definition by Vatican Council I. More recently, the Constitution of the Church and the 1983 Code of Canon Law7 describe three ways in which this infallible magisterium can be exercised. (I) The pope may issue a solemn or ex cathedra pronouncement. Ac-cording to Vatican Council I, popes possess and can articulate the infal-libility with which the Divine Redeemer endowed his Church for defini-tive decisions in matters of faith and morals. For example, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption by the bull Mun~ficentissimus issued November i, 1950. (2) The episcopal college may act solemnly in ecumenical councils. In ecumenical councils, the episcopal college, assembled in one place, acquires a special clarity and efficacy. Here the corporate episcopate can act in a solemn manner to define an article of faith; for example, Vati-can Council I promulgated the doctrine of infallibility in Pastor Aeter-nus in 1870. (3) The episcopal college may exercise its "ordinary and universal magisterium." In their ordinary and universal magisterium, the same bish- Challenge of Church Teachings / 51 ops, without coming together in one assembly, and with each remaining at his post, can definitively set forth some doctrine for the absolute ac-ceptance oLthe entire Church. In practice it is not always easy to ascer-tain whether or not the magisterium in a given case is exercising infalli-bility through this "ordinary" manner. It has been suggested that a pos-sible example of this level of Church doctrine is the common and con-stant teaching of pope and bishops throughout the world on the moral evil of abortion. How is an infallible doctrine to be received by the faithful? Vatican II's Constitution on the Church and the 1983 Code hold that infallible teaching must be accepted with obsequium fidei, translated as the 'as-sent of faith." This assent of faith is to be absolute and unconditional because it involves divine authority which utteriy excludes the possibil-ity of error. Consequently, the obstinate denial of truths proclaimed as infallible would constitute heresy. However, various Church documents warn the faithful to receive a teaching as infallible only when it has been definitively proclaimed as such. Vatican II, for example, declared that its statements on faith or morals should be seen as binding on the Church only when the council expressly declared them as such.8 Like'vise, the new Code cautions that no doctrine is understood to~ be infallibly defined "unless this is manifestly demonstrated. ,,9 From this review of the meaning of infallible teaching, it is obvious that the great majority of doctrinal statements issued on a day-to-day ba-sis do not fit into this category. Rather, most documents seem to belong to the nondefinitive level of authority--which makes the accurate under-standing of this noninfallible teaching crucially important today. Noninfallible Church Teaching The noninfallible magisterium is the term used to refer to the follow-ing exercises of the Church's teaching office: (l) the pronouncements of the pope when he is not teaching ex cathedra; (2) the declarations of an office of the Roman See with the special approval of the doctrine by the pope as his own; (3) the declarations of a curial office with routine but not special papal approval; (4) the promulgation of a doctrine by the pope toget, l~er with the college of bishops in council; (5) the teachings of an individual bishop; (6) the pronouncements of a grouping of bishops in an episcopal conference or a particular council. In order to respond appropriately to the numerous doctrinal state-ments issued by these official teachers, one needs to understand: (I) the nature of noninfallible teaching; (2) gradations among nondefinitive teach-ings; (3) inherent difficulties. Review for Religious, January-February 1989 ( I ) The Nature of Noninfallible Teaching. Three basic principles un-derlie this exploration of the noninfallible magisterium. (a) The concepts of noninfallible Church teaching and the response owed to it are evolving concerns whose complete meanings are not yet in the Church's consciousness. ~0 Recall that the definition of infallible teaching authority (1870) took place only within the last one hundred twenty years of the Church's two thousand year existence, (b) The issues of nondefinitive Church teaching and the response owed to it are being examined and applied by a Church that is itself an evolving reality as a community and an institution. ~ (c) With the spread and evolution of the Church, there has been a concomitant growth and development of doctrine, for example, "a growth in the understanding of the realities and the words which have been handed down" (Constitution on Divine Revelation, article 8). Vati-can II reiterated in its Decree on Ecumenism that: "If there are deficien-cies in the formulation of doctrine . these should be appropriately rectified at the proper moment" (article 6). More recently, the Congre-gation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the first time officially acknowl-edged that even the Church's expression of a truth of revelation at a par-ticular age may need to b~ reformulated in a subsequent era. ~2 These of-ficial statements on the growth possible in dogmatic teaching can be ap-plied afortiori to the noninfailible level of teaching. ,Basically, it is difficult to categorize the precise nature of nondefini-tire teaching. According to Orsy, noninfallible teaching is composed of two types of doctrine in an organic unity: some changeable h~uman thoughts (often of a particular school), and incorrupt expressions of the deposit of revelation. For this reason, simplistic statements such as "non-infallible statements by ecclesiastical authorities are binding," or, "dis-sent from noninfallibly stated doctrine should be always permissible" do not recognize .the complex content of the body of noninfallible beliefs. Orsy also makes the important observation that a particular document may, and. usually does, contain a mixture of infallible and noninfallible teachings without any indication of the different levels involved. ~3 In 1967, the German bishops referred to another significant aspect of noninfallible teaching authority when they pointed out that this level of magisterium "can, and on occasion actually does fall into error." 14 Francis Sullivan, a theologian, comments that it seems impossible to fault the reasoning of the German bishops: if the nondefinitive teaching of the magisterium is not infallible, it can be erroneous and can stand in need of correction. ~5 Here the basic principle of the development of Challenge of Church Teachings doctrine comes into play. Indeed the Church has corrected or reversed its stance on a number of occasions. 16 For example, the Decree on Ecu-menism of Vatican II clearly departed from previous papal teaching re-garding the Church's negative stance on relationships with non-Catholic Christians. Another obvious example is the final lifting of the condemna-tions imposed in the celebrated "Galileo case." ~7 In their pastoral letter, the German bishops point out that the Church has always been aware of the possibility of error. They conclude, how-ever, that in order to maintain the true and ultimate substance of faith the Church officials must, even at the risk of error in points of detail, "give expression to doctrinal directives which have a certain degree of binding force." (2) Gradation Among Noninfallible Documents. The weight or gra-dation of importance of a noninfallible statement can be indicated either by the person or body issuing the teaching, or the type of literary genre of the document itself that is utilized to promulgate the teaching. (a) As noted earlier, noninfallible statements can be issued by the pope or the bishops. Since the formal authority o.f the pope and the epis-copal college exceeds that of the bishops acting individually or con-jointly, there are obviously gradations among the various teachings prom-ulgated. (b) The second criterion for ascertaining the weight of a particular ~ondefinitive pronouncement is its literary genre, or, "the nature of the document" that is utilized (Constitution on the Church, article 25). Ap-ostolic constitutions, for example, are considered the most solemn form of papal documents. Then come papal acts in the form of letters in two categories, encyclical epistles and encyclical letters, the latter form be-ing less solemn than the former. The ordinary magisterium of the pope is also found in doctrinal dec-larations of the curia, for example, of the Congregations for Doctrine and for Seminari

Issue 54.3 of the Review for Religious, May/June 1995. ; Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ¯ Washington, DC 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ° P.O. Box 6070 ° Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1995 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for. religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Adv#ory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer sJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP 'Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read J6an.n Wolski Conn PhD Iris Ann Ledden SSND Joel Rippinger OSB Edmundo Rodriguez SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and contemporary Living MAY-JUN~ 1995 * VOLUME54 * NUMBER3 contents 326 339 353 extending horizons Multiculturalism, Internationality, and Religious Life Gerald A. Arbuckle SM presents an understanding of multiculturalism and its lived difficulties by means of case studies. Accompanying New-Age People A. Paul Dominic SJ assesses and evaluates his experience of dealing with the ideals and quest~ of the New Age movement. Lithuania: A Return to My Ancestral Home Barbara Valuckas SSND relates her experience of three, visits to Lithuania and working with its peoples, women religious, and church catechists. 364 371 383 focusing community Community Today--Idol? Icon? Gift? Elizabeth V. Roach MM compares some of the secular criteria for community living with the gospel call to be a community of paschal living. Called to Community Dennis J. Billy CSSR presents the Trinitarian and Christological bases for life in community and identifies ten common difficulties in living the call to community. Public and Private: Some Confusion in Community Patricia Chaffee OP reviews some of the tensions and their relief in the public and private interfaces of religious community life. 389 399 rooting religious IJfe Apostolic Congregations' Monastic Roots John P. Auther_SJ suggests ways in which religious life becomes more viable in contemporary life by taking its monastic roots seriously. Women Religious: Widows of the Church, Women of Hope Anna Marie Kane SSJ draws out some comparisons of widows in the early church and women religious today. 322 Re~ie~ for Religious 4O3 A Meditation on Living the Vows Joel Giallanza CSC probes a familiar Gospel verse for its implications in living a life of celibate charity, obedience, and poverty. 410 418 424 433 growing spirituaJJy Freedom to Be God's Eric Kahn OFM suggests a style of retreat that is more fitting for the Franciscan tradition. Coming Home: The Journey Within Janet Malone CND describes various aspects of our lifelong process of moving inward to the ground of our being where God dwells in us. I Cast for Comfort GeorgeJ. Auger CSV reflects on how faith deepens in darkness and love grows in desire. Feeling and Pain and Prayer Margaret Bullitt-Jonas sketches four ways of prayer to deepen our intimacy with God and our capacity for full responsiveness to pain and io'y and being alive. 447 454 embracing heritage Heart of the Human John R. Welsh SJ explores the rich symbol of the Heart of Christ for our appreciation of the incarnation and of our own relationship to God. Enclosure: Sacramental Sign Jean Shively OSC presents her experience andunderstanding of a spirituality of enclosure as a positive and essential element of the contemplative lifestyle. 324 462 departments Prisms Canonical Counsel: The Concluding Message of the 1994 Synod on Consecrated Life 467 Book Reviews May-.l~une 199.q 323 many Christians the month of May evokes memories of processions and crownings and songs in honor of Mary, Mother of God. In a similar way the month of June recalls the novenas and hymns and vigils devoted to the heart of Jesus. Devotions, once such a bright part of our pre-Vatican II faith lives, now seem like faded fabrics preserved under some obscure museum's glass showcase. Although nostal-gia may too readily find its place, we need to acknowl-edge how devotions in a pre-Vatican II church~ fired up the faith lives of many parish communities and the mis-sionary zeal .of'many women and men. On the other hand, devotions, with their vernacular prayers and singable hymns, sometimes overshadowed even feast-day Masses in people's affection. In fact, the Mass itself often became the time and place for people's devotional practices while the priest quietly busied himself with the ~Latin prayers and formal ritual of the Mass. Perhaps the greatest gift of the liturgical renewal of Vatican II was the clarity brought to the central place of liturgy, both the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours. Devotions, as a result, were given the chance to take a more modestly proportioned place in our spiritual lives, sometimes even to die after years of devout usefulness. But at the same time that the Vatican II renewal was cre-ating a spiritual renewal of prayer practices in correct pro-portion, a major shift in human interaction was taking 324 Review for Religious place in the Western world and having undue influence upon some other nations. New cultural patterns of lifestyle, fragmen-tations of family.living and of many a neighborhood, the subur-bia driving (not walking) distances between home and church, and the easy attractions of TV and home video entertainment every night of the week are among the reasons why the practice of devotions fell by the wayside. The majority of Catholics today have no experience of such devotional practices. The case is lit-tle different in the present-day worship and prayer lives of many men and women religious. Devotions need once again to find their place in faith lives that too often merit the descriptive terms "thin" or "desiccated." There is no doubt that devotions bring color to our somewhat monochrome lives of worship. Devotions rouse some passion in a faith lived often too listlessly, even in Eucharists attended rou-tinely. Yet devotions from the'past need more than just a dusting off. They need to be rethought and reexpressed for our context and time. Even more importantly, perhaps, devotions need to be refounded on the essential of devotion itself. Devotion in the Christian-theological tradition is defined as "an ease in finding God." To say that "here we have a man or woman of devotion" is to point to someone who has an evident and easy relationship with God. To be a person of devotion is to be specially graced by God. Praying for devotion in our spiritual lives is essential for a healthy existence. Even our ministries receive special effectiveness from being permeated with devotion. Devotions and devotion are related, something like the chicken and the egg. If we are people of devotion, we will find that our faith naturally tends to express itself in prayers to Jesus and to Mary and the saints, in vigils, in processions and pilgrimages, and in other such external forms. Devotions in their proper propor-tion feed and strengthen the Christian lives of all the faithful. Devotions cannot be absent from our faith expression without the loss of devotion itself., ~ Perhaps the time has come for all of us to reassess our need for devotions as the fuel and lifesource for the devoted lives we Christians desire to live. David L. Fleming SJ May-June 1995 325 GERALD A. ARBUCKLE Multiculturalism, Internationality, and Religious Life The religious community "is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself." --Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi § 15 The world is tragically divided by ideological conflicts, pathological forms of nationalism, racial violence, ethnic cleansing programs, and intercultural tensions. It almost destroyed itself through interracial conflict during this century. We who gasped at Hitler's genocide policies live in a world where ecocide, that is, the genocide of virtually all living species of earth, is a real possibility because cul-tures still rarely live side-by-side with respect and justice) It is a world "groaning in travail" (Rm 8:22). Inasmuch as prophetic witness is at the heart of reli-gious life, the church rightly expects religious communi-ties to be models of intercultural understanding and action. If we judge from the constitutions and mission statements of many congregations, there is a growing theoretical awareness of this need. Thus, there are expressions like these: "We are committed to living internationality in a divided world"; "Let us inculturate the gospel in our own communities first by being authentically multicultural-ist"; "We are called to respect the rights of people to their Gerald A. Arbuckle SlVl wrote "Merging Provinces" for our May-June 1994 issue. He may be addressed at Refounding and Pastoral Develgpment Unit; 1 Mary Street; Hunters Hill; Sydney, N.S.W. 2110; Australia. 326 Review for Religious culture; this applies also to people of different cultures within our congregation"; "We commit ourselves to foster communities in which representatives of several ethnic groups live together in a spirit of dialogue, justice, and charity." But are communities in fact living according to these statements, or are the words just rhetoric and escapes into fantasy? The Future of Religious Orders Study in the United States (FORUS) contains disturbing conclusions about the gap between theory and reality. For example, 96 percent of American religious are white; minority groups are poorly represented; "unconscious racism makes penetration of minority populations into rather homogeneous orders very difficult." The report shows that older religious in particular, while believing they are accepting of minor-ity members, in fact cannot adapt readily to the cultural diver-sity this demands.2 My experience is that religious of dominant cultures usually do not lack goodwill towards minority groups in their midst, but also that, while using the language of multicul-turalism or internationality, they understand only imperfectly what these words mean and what attitudinal and behavioral changes they must make in consequence. This introductory article has two aims: to. explain the terms inculturation, multiculturalisra, and internationality and to help readers identify, through case-study analysis, ways in which they may be unconsciously dominating and even oppressing people of minority cultures within their midst, thus obstructing the emer-gence of multicultural congregations.3 Defining Terms Multiculturalism is an inculturatibn imperative. Incultura~ion is "the incarnation of the Christian life and Christian message in a particular cultural context, in such a way that this experience not only finds expression through elements proper to the culture in question, but becomes a p~'inciple that animates, directs, and unifies the [cultural context], transforming and remaking it so as to bring about a 'new creation.'''4 Multiculturalism is a process of inculturation whereby cultures are so transformed and remade into a "new creation" that they interact with one another in jus-tice and charity in the service of personal ~and community growth. This interaction does not occm" through a command from above or the planning of "just a few experts," as Pope John Paul II May-June 1995 327 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality reminds us in Redemptoris Missio (§54), but through the involve-ment of people at all levels of society. The way culture is conceptualized has significant bearing on the theory and practice of inculturation and consequently of mul-ticulr0ralism. As an hnthropologist I believe that the failure to define accurately what is meant by culture makes it impossible for people to understand the complexity of inculturation and the challenges involved in developing an authentic multicultural com-munity in religious, parish, or secular life. In the classicist's definition, culture is a visible, comprehensi-ble entity, the consEious creation of rational minds,s The focus is on observable phenomena (such as language, foods, literature, dances) rather than on how people feel about what they do. Cultures, then, can be graded aesthetically: one culture may be considered to have more artistic dances than another. This definition of culture has grave deficiencies. It overstresses ethnic groups' historical lifestyles and customs and downplays their adaptation to the world in which they now live. It freezes a culture in a time period and encourages romantic or fossilized views of a people's former way of living. This definition likens a culture to a machine something with visible, rationally con-structed, interconnected parts that can readily be replaced by sim-ilar components without creating any pa.rticular difficulty. If a religious community uses this meaning of culture, then it expects the process of inculturation to be speedy and simple. The com-munity merely replaces, with administrative efficiency, an existing custom with a gospel-inspired one. And it does this by imple-menting the directives of people (pastors, r+ligious superiors) from outside the culture. This is not inculturation; the people who are the object of t~ae process have no free involvement in it, but instead are ma~aipulated. The second definition of culture gives priority to a group's ideas and feelings: Culture is not an entity, but is primarily a pro-cess that is persuasively at work, particularly in the unconscious of the group and individuals. It is a pattern of shared assump-tions expressed in symbols, myths, and rituals that a .group has invented, discovered, or developed .while coping with problems of external adaptation and internal cohesion. This instrumental view of culture, while it assumes the importance of factual history and visible phenomena, highlights the developmental and ever evolv-ing survival role of culture for people in a world of change, prej- 328 Review for Religious udice, and discrimination. Finally, culture is not one aspect of life along with, for example, religious, political, and economic activ-ity. It embraces all human activity.6 An appreciation of this defi-nition of culture has the, following immediate practical consequences for inculturation and multiculturalism. 1. Because a culture is essentially a living interrelation of sym-bols and myths, the feeling of belonging to it is basically invisible to outsiders. The experience of being culturally different or of confronting a history of preju-dice and discrimination pro-duces a set of memories and feelings that are not easily shared with outsiders. The out-sider may gain some under-standing from participation in the visible activities .of the group (such~as dances and food ritu-als), but finds it difficult or even impossible to comprehend its inner experiences and feelings. 2. In order to begin to appreciate another cultu.re, one must have the gifts of empathy and of openness to dialogue. Empathetic listening means trying to become aware not only of others' feelings, but also of how they experience them-- and, as far as possible, to have the same feelings.7 An outsider As an anthropologist I believe that the failure to define accurately what is meant by culture makes it impossible for people to understand the complexity of inculturation and the challenges involved in developing an authentic multicultural community in religious, parish, or secular life. can know more about the history, cultural externals, and even language of an ethnic group than its members and still be alien to them because of a lack of empathy.Dialogue, a consequence of empathy, is the interaction in which people seek to give of them-selves as they are and to receive and know the others in their par-ticular oth.erness.8 Dialogue presumes that one is prepared to learn from others and their cultures and to let ~o of attachments that interfere with the growth in mutuality. 3. People of'every cultu.re tend to think that their own way of feeling about life and of thinking and acting is the right way; they May-June 1995 329 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality see the ways of other peoples as stupid, crude, or unreasonable. This prejudice in favor 'of one's own group is technically called eth-nocentrism. Taken to an extreme, the assumption is that "our way of life is the way of life," so that other groups have nothing of value to offer us. Hence, on the basis of assumed religious, eco-nomic, or racial superiority, people seek to dominate others and their cultures. Frequently people of dominant cultures are uncon-scious of the oppressive power they exert over minority cultures (people who, because of their ethnic origins, are excluded from group decision making); they take their cultural superiority for granted and relate to minority peoples according to cultural stereotypes of their inferiority.9 A stereotype is a set image that a people has of peoples that differ from them; it is a shorthand, but faulty and often unjust, method of handling or grasping a complex world of people. 4. People who are culturally oppressed are likely to become extremely sensitive to the dominant culture's symbols of coercive power. When people of minority cultures move into the main-stream, the resulting contact of cultures is not an abstract concept, but a high order of human drama. The plot and its crosscurrents, its motives and motifs, are played out by a ghostly cast of hang-ers- on, by prejudice, longing, fear.~° 5. When people of different cultures meet for the first time, they tend to react in two or three stages. First, they are fasci-nated by and even enjoy visible cultural differences in, for exam-ple, cuisine and entertainment. Later they experience disillusionment or friction when the difficulties of communication outweigh their enthusiasm for cultural diversity. If they strive to overcome the cultural obstacles to communication, they move to interaction--the experience of authentic multiculturalism. Most never get beyond the second stage. Multiculturalism and Internationality Multiculturalism is often an emotive word, "a buzzword with almost as many meanings as there are mouths to utter it.''11 Most commonly, however, the word is used technically in one of three ways. Demographic multiculturalism means that a particular soci-ety contains different cultural groups; holistic multiculturalism means that a society values cultural diversity, but gives higher priority to group-wide cohesion; political multiculturalism, as a 330 Review for Religious social philosophy; acknowledges the legitimate concerns of ethnic groups within a society or an organization and the need for these interests to be expressed in adequate politico-economic struc-tures and processes. Political multiculturalists seek to establish structures that allow by right minority peoples to be fully involved in decision making in matters that affect their lives. They foster a balance between the demands of overall group cohesion and inner cultural diversity. Multiculturalism, in these three senses, normally applies to situations within the same country; interna-tionality is multiculturalism as applied to relationship.s between separate countries. Political multiculturalism, historically, is a reaction against policies of cultural oppression. Phrases or terms such as "the melt-ing pot approach to immigrants," "cultural pluralism," and "inte-gration" are often synonymous with covert or overt programs to destroy minority cultures by forcing them to be assimilated into the dominant culture. Critical decisions are made about minority peoples and their future without their participation. Another insidious form of oppression is cultural romanticism. Here the dominant culture, using the classicist definition of culture, fosters romantic visions of minority cultures, emphasizing what is thought to be the exotic or strange features of these cultures (dances, rit-uals). People of the dominant culture claim "it would be a pity if such cultures disappeared." Minority peoples are made to feel like inanimate museum pieces to be called out to entertain peo-ple of the dominant culture at politically correct times and then to retire to their inferior positions when the need ceases. Case Studies Case studies are detailed observations of connected processes in individual and group experience thfit help us to understand complex social phenomena and to see ways in which theoretical principles and insights may be applied. I suggest that readers reflect on the following case studies, asking themselves--before ~ssessing my own comments~how the above theoretical clarifi-cations apply in each instance. 1. A General Chapter in Confusion An international congregation of clerical religious met in gen-eral chapter for two months. A participant from a first-world May-~une 1995 331 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality country reported his experience and that of many others: "During the first two weeks, there was a great spirit of internationality and friendship. Each group explained through song, dances, food, and visual displays the qualities of their cultural origins. We espe-cially enjoyed the presentations from the joy-filled third-world countries; they made our Western productions look rather dull in contrast. Then something happened, and it still puzzles me. Quite suddenly delegates from our third-world provinces began to complain angrily in the general sessions that the translation facilities for them were not as good as for the Western delegates, that they were made to feel inferior in committee meetings by never being asked for their opinions . I and others still cannot understand this anger, especially because we did everything pos-sible to give them the first places for their cultural presentations. These are the same people we have helped for so long with gifts for their formation houses and missions. They seem to be ungrate-ful. Perhaps we have failed to teach them the right way to act in international gatherings. The chapter ended without these peo-ple realizing that they had undermined the good spirit of the gathering." Comment: In this case study the delegate has unwittingly adopted the narrow classicist view of culture and moves from enthusiasm for cultural diversity to disillusionment; internation-ality for him and other Western delegates is restricted to such relatively inconsequential things as eating foreign food and admir-ing other people's exotic dances. Influenced by this approach to culture, he' is prevented from understanding the requirements for authentic multiculturalism and internationality within the chap-ter and congregation. Third-world delegates are reacting against a well-entrenched tradition of paternalism and cultural superior-ity on the part of the dominant culture. They rightly want to be accepted for what they are: members of the same congregation, with human experiences and insights of value to all. 2. Romanticism Destroys Formation ' .An international clerical religious congregation, founded last century in Europe, had developed several formation houses in third-world countries. In a report to an international meeting on initial formation in the congregation, the superior general wrote: "We thank God for so many vocations from [these lands]. Because [these lands] are extremely poor, the people so happy and carefree 332 Review for Religious and their cultures so unsophisticated, we have decided for now not to insist on the same rigorous screening criteria for appli-cants nor on the high-level academic and religious life formation that we have in the West. When you meet these students, you immediately feel their happiness and fine community spirit. They will make good religious, but we must not expect them to measure up to our professional standards for some time to come." Comment: The superior general, in his high praise for the cultures of the students, is a cultural romanti-cist, even an unconscious racist. The cultures he refers to are group-ori-ented ones; that is, they emphasize the need for public harmony at all costs, so that tensions and unre-solved, conflicts are kept hidden, but remain ready to explode into vio-lence at any time. The general's inability to recognize this deprives students of their right in justice to be trained professionally for min-istry, trained (for example) to under-stand objectively the cultural forces that influence their lives and those of their people. The ~eneral also makes a racist judgment, namely, that the students from poor techno-logical cultures are incapable of the Third-world delegates are reacting against a well-entrenched tradition of paternalism and cultural superiority on the part of the dominant culture. They rightly want to be accepted for what they are: members of the same congregation, with human experiences and insights of value to all. levels of learning expected in Western formation systems. Finally, the congregation is international, but the general is setting the stage for a two-tier membei'ship: persons with sophisticated edu-cation from Western countries and educationally deprived per-sons from the third world. This means that third-world members of the congregation will effectively be excluded from taking up leadership positions at the international level. 3. Theory and Practice Clash A congregation of brotherb from Europe has worked in Asia for over fifty years, but with no lasting success in recruiting or May-June 1995 333 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality retaining local candidates. Several former brothers of Asian ori-gin commented to me through an intermediary about their expe-rience: "The region was established from a Western nation. After our training we were sent to communities in which most reli-gious were from this foreign country. They were good people, but during recreation they always spoke in -English, never in our language, and the topics of conversation commonly were about incidents and characters of their formation days in Europe or the latest sporting event at home. Then from time to rime they would make ethnic iokes at the expense of our own people, putting them down, and we were expected to laugh as they did. It became so painful that we complained, but we were told to think 'interna-tionally,' not with provincial minds! It became too much so we left." Comment: I sense that the foreigners in this Asian region are totally unaware of their cultural imperialism; it is as if they have never left their homeland, and their use of ethnic jokes illustrates their lack of cultural sensitivity. Ethnic jokes are common in most societies, but examination shows that the object of such jokes is "to put down" members of other cultures and present one's own group as normal and superior. Ethnic jokes are unjust and can be most painful to members of minority groups, who nevertheless are expected, if present when the jokes are told, to laugh submissively and accept the ascribed expression of inferiority.~2 4. Inculturation Expectations Collapse One Mexican American sister recorded her frustration and that of many others: "I became a member of a North American congregation before Vatican II. We Mexican Americans were (and are still) in the minority; the majority are white third- or fourth-generation Americans. During my training we had to divorce our-selves from our families, and I cannot even begin to express what this meant to me and other Mexican American sisters. With the coming of Vatican II, I thought at last I can be a religious and a Mexican American at the same time. Our chapters spoke of the need for inculturation and multiculturalism in our communities and apostolates as priorities. When I and others attempted to take this priority seriously, all kinds of problems emerged. For example, members of my family began to visit frequently, openly using our language for conversation and prayer. Other community members began to object, sometimes hinting or saying directly to 334 Review for Religious me: 'You are disturbing our peace with so many relatives, espe-cially. distant ones, coming to see you. And why don't they speak in English? They should because this is America!'" Comment: Hispanic cultures traditionally emphasize the fam-ily as the basic unit of identity, in vivid contrast to the mainstream American culture, in which individuals claim identity for them-selves independently of family ties. When the congregational chapter in the above case study enthusiastically supports incul-turation and multiculturalism, they are unaware of the implications for individuals and communities. Individualism has become such an unquestioned way of life for the dominant culture in the con-gregation that most members cannot conceive of any alternative lifestyle. Hence, the culture clash. References to inculturation and multiculturalism in chapters remain pure rhetoric. 5. Popular Religiosity Unappreciated~ An international congregation, founded last century in Europe, and with many communities in North America, sought candidates for the first time among Hispanic Americans. For a short time it received several candidates, but the formation leader reported that "they did not survive for long either in the training programs or later in our communities." Several who had left com-mented, and this is a representative view: "My formation house was cheerless, without life, and the communities I lived in after profession were no better. Liturgies were dull, filled with words, but no color or movement. I felt myself dying spiritually. I com-plained to the provincial, and she commented: 'I cannot under-stand you. We provide you with highly trained formators, but you still complain.' The director of formation tried to listen to me and said she understood, so the following month she bought Mexican rugs and ornaments and put them around the house, saying 'This will make you immigrant people feel at home with us!' It did not. We still felt like aliens, unable to pray in devo-tional ways that make sense to us. The sad thing is that no one understood. No wonder Hispanics leave religious life~" Comment: In this case study, there is a serious clash between popular religiosity characteristics of many Hispanic peoples and the standard ways of praying within contemporary North American Catholicism. The inability 5o appreciate popular reli-giosity and the tendency to condemn it as "primitive, supersti-tious nonsense" continues to alienate countless Hispanics from May-June 1995 335 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality Unless candidates are freely able t~o relate the spirituality offered them to their own rich cultural religious experience, it will remain totally alien to them. the church today.~3 At its core popular religiosity is a storehouse of values offering answers of Christian wisdom to the great ques-tions of life. It creatively combines the divine and the human, Christ andMary, spirit and body, intelligence, imagination, and emotion in ways that are colorful and imaginative. Devotions to saints and pious practices--once part of mainstream American Catholic life--are integral features of popular religiosity. ,4. Hispanic Catholics complain, however, that the liturgies of mainstream Ca.tholicism today are cqmmonly too "heady," formal, and unimaginative. In the case study, Hispanic can-didates and religious are unjustly pressured to conform to the domi-nant culture's religious expression.s. This is a tragedy, at several levels. Neither the provincial nor the for-mator has any appreciation of the nature and power of culture; the for-mator assumes, without even asking the. candidates, that culture is syn-onymous with what we see, Bring in a few artifacts and minority peoples will "feel at home." The can-didates understandably feel insulted and misunderstood. Unless the candidates are freely able to relate the spirituality offered them to their own rich cultural religious experience, it will remain totally alien to them. 6. Congregational Colonialism Returns A congregation based in the United States had formally estab-lished a province in Africa. After some years it was decided uni-laterally by the general government to suppress the province for reasons of administrative and financial efficiency and to reunite the community of African sisters within the original province in the United States. The full provincial administration--all Americans-- visited the assembly of African sisters to explain the situation, but to their surprise they were met with considerable anger. An African sister spoke feelingly for her group: "Finance is not our primary need. We are prepared to be poor, provided we can gov-ern ourselves. Now by the adminstrative change we feel again 336 Review for Religious overwhelmed by the presence of the United States, and we are made tQ feel small and unimportant. You have economic and polit-ical power. Now we have none and must submit to a culture of dependency and inferiority!" The provincial administration could not understand this and ieported to the general that the African communities "had come under the influence of Marxism." Comment: There is little need to comment. In their reactions to the adminstrative change, the African sisters are fearful of a return to a new and degrading congregational colonialism. The American administration is unaware that their African sisters have been made to feel inferior under earlier administrative organiza-tional cultures. The failure~ to consult the African sisters about the decision reinforces their understandable distrust of both the provincial and the general administrations. The provincial admin-istrat. ion, by blaming the African sisters for the negativity, sees no need to examine its own cultural assumptions. Conclusion The task of expressing the consecrated life in diverse cultures today is one of the great challenges for its future. --Instrumentum Laboris §93, Synod of Bishops 1994 ° Thevision of multiculturalism is inspiring but rarely achieved in concrete ways. A reason for this is the failure to clarify the meaning of cul~ure. Culture is not primarily the lifestyles of peo-ple; rather, it is a group's sense of its identity, its inner history of struggling for equality, just, ice, and respect for human dignity. Through multiculturalism (and internationality) people of dif-ferent cultures commit themselves to grow humanly together in justice and charity, while respecting and learning from the legit-imate cultural differences of each other. ' Multiculturalism demands ongoing conversion to the mission of Christ, "a profound transformation of mentalities and ways of living" (Instrumentum laboris §93).If religious do not struggle to achieve this transformation, they are not true to the prophetic nature of their commitment, for the values and practice of mul-ticulturalism and internationality are everywhere desperately needed. Moreover, religious committed to refoundingotheir con-gregations would do well to ponder a lesson of history: Energy for the founding and refounding of communities comes from multi-culturalism and internationality. As Raymond.Hostie notes: May-June 1995 337 Arbuckle ¯ Multiculturalism, Internationality "Cistercians, Norbertines, Dominicans, Carmelites, Jesuits, and Piarists all emerged from groups .whose members belonged to three nationalities, even four or five . Heterogeneity is a nec-essary condition for activating effective fermentation."~s Notes 1 See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress PreSs, 1992), pp. 195-207. 2 See David Nygren CM and Miriam Ukeritis CSJ, "The Future of Religious Orders in the United States," Origins. 22, no. 15 (1992): 272, and Review for Religious 52, no. 1 (January-February 1993): 48. 3 ~ee an earlier article of mine on aspects of this theme: "Beyond Frontiers: The Supranational Challenge of the Gospel," Review for Religious 46, no. 3 (May-June 1987): 351-370. 4 Pedro Arrupe SJ, cited by Michael Amaladoss SJ, "Inculturadon and Internationality," East Asian Pastoral Review 29, no. 3 (1992): 23% s See Gerald A. Arbuckle SM, Earthing the Gospel: An Inculturation Handbook for the Pastoral Worker (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), pp. 26- 78, and "Understanding Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Inculturation," Human Development 14, no. 1, pp. 8-10. 6 On this point I would differ from M. Amaladoss's excellent article cited above, pp. 241-243. 7 See E Lopez, Pastoral Care in an Emerging World (Sydney: Marist Centre for Pastoral Care, 1994), p. 302. s See Arbuckle, Refou. nding the Church: Dissent for Leadership (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), p. 111. 9 See Arbuckle, Earthing, pp. 147-166. ~0 See Arbuckle, Earthing, pp. 166-186. it R. Hughes, Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 83. ,2 See Arbuclde, Earthing, pp. 162f. 13 See Allan Figueroa Deck SJ, The Second Wave: Hispanic Ministry and the Evangelization of Cultures (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), pp. 54- 119. ,4 See Arbuckle, Earthing, pp. 108-112. 15 The Life and Death of Religious Orders: A Psycho-Sociological Approach, (Washington D.C.: CARA, 1983), p. 259. 338 Review for Religious A. PAUL DOMINIC Accompanying New-Age People '7have often thought . . . if we regard the bomb (or world .~. hunger or the dying seas) as a monstrous demonic injus-tice, that must mean we never, somehow on some level, never took it seriously: the injunction to love. The stuff Jesus was talk-ing about and the Buddha." So wrote Joanna Macy somewhere; and, I believe, the same may well be said regarding the New Age movement (NAM) or, more correctly, the extreme variety of it focused on by the media: images of anything from psychic phe-nomena through esoteric beliefs in crystal gazing and spirit chan-neling to weird fads in self-centered or willful behavior going by the name of cosmic wisdom, My interest--"follow your allurement," Joseph Campbell would say--in writing on this new Western phenomenon comes from two semesters I spent a few years ago with an international group of some seventy people most of whom were Westerners carried along in the the New Age wave.1 We were, of all places, at a Catholic college in California where I had hoped to learn some new exciting approaches to Christian spirituality. Before long, however, I had to contend with some so-called spirituality that seemed anything but Christian. For one thing, "once a Christian, never again a Christian" was the prevailing mood of the majority, some of whom became more and more aggressive towards anything Christian. One time I could not refrain from remarking to my companions that as a group we could be toler-ant and respectful of every tradition except Christian. With so A. Paul Dominic SJ wrote this article from experiences he had while doing graduate studies in spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California. His address is Satyodayam; 12-5-33, S. Lallaguda; Secunderabad 500 017; India. May-.3~une 1995 339 Dominic * Accompanying New-Age People much bashing of Christianity in my spiritual circle, I felt like a fish--an ichthus--in a cesspool. As time went on, however, I felt different. I saw things dif-ferently; empathy brought some insight. Coming to hear the per-sonal stories of my companions, all of whom were quondam Christians (Protestant and, like Joseph Campbell himself, Catholic), I could not but feel and formulate that they sought and found this New Age haven because the Christianity of their experience had gone awry; their lives had become an enormous unhealed and unhealing hurt, like Carol Christ's. (She had suffered her incompatible marriage for years until one day, in a terrible skiing accident, she instinctively hoped that her death would make her a martyr to the indissolubility of marriage, only to find her-self still alive and confined to a hospital bed. She decided that she had had enough of the marriage she had entered upon in church, eventually giving up her Christianity too and discovering New Age freedom.) One thirtyish woman among my companions had for years suffered trauma upon trauma because her parents would not listen to her stoW of sexual abuse by a close relative, but instead would tell her to go to confession every time she brought up her nagging distress. Her anguish came to an end when she found a hearing among New Age friends of hers. Another woman who had been quite a staunch Catholic in her youth spoke of the joyless vision of life she grew up with as she prayed about the vale of tears instead of the original blessing (this is a three-word mantra of New Agers) of the universe. Seconding them, a man-- a religious brother in good standing--declared nevertheless that the church had constricted and restricted his humanity by its leaden dos and don'ts. In the New Age covenant groups, all of them found, or thought they had found, what they had missed out on during their childhood or adolescent Christianity. Obviously, in all such cases, whatever in their new associa-tion they perceived to be filling their psychological or spiritual needs was something basically Christian, however unaware of this they were because of the unresponsive, unenlightened, and per-haps even false practice of Christianity with which they had been contending. From this discerningperspective New Age spirituality may be said to embrace within itself certain Christian elements at their best which somehow for whatever reason were found miss-ing in avowed Christian circles, whether they were couples or homes or schools or seminaries or rectories or dioceses or, of 340 Review for Religious course, the Vatican (the veritable b~te noire of former Catholics finding their berth in the New Age). I would, then, dispute the claim of the NAM to offer a spirituality for a post-Christian world, and I would point out that, despite the NAM's aversion to Christianity, quite a few of its genuine experiences have been, in many times and places, very much at home in Christianity. As the New Age plays the queen of all it surveys and declares it to be "the post-Christian world," I would submit that her declaration is in vain for the simple reason that she herself has made a home for genuine Christian elements forgotten or forsaken. Ironically, thanks to her the church and Christianity have an unsuspected way of coming into their own. Perhaps this is what a deacon's twenty-year-old daughter--quite unlike my companions--meant when she said: "Don't get me wrong. I don't hate the church. I just want it to be better than it is. I want it to be alive--not what some old deacon thinks is alive, but my kind of alive . -2 It is not fanciful but altogether pleasantly surprising to find how, for all the avowed antagonism to Christ among those sab-batical- year companions of mine, Christ made himself discreetly, unobtrusively present. Have we not heard about the unknown Christ of non-Christian religions? Perhaps in the New Age circle of my acquaintance he was not so much unknown as unacknowl-edged, unwanted, and even (unsuccessfully) banished. A former seminarian, for instance, confessed virulently that he had no need of Christ to save him for he had nothing to be saved from. Christ, however, kept himself in their midst in an unintrusive manner. That, perhaps, is the very nature of Christ. I was led willy-nilly to think in this way by observing the effect a song had on some my of New Age friends. Of all the songs we used for the circle dance, the Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison especially charmed the most conspicuously anti-Christian one among us. I could not help chuckling over the archetypal trickster role Christ resorted to in order to reach out to one who had rejected him consciously and deliberately. If New Agers would "let go" (a favorite expres-sion of theirs) of Christ, Christ would let them, but he would not let go of them. While we rejoice in this latent presence of Christ in the NAM, we would do well to ask our'selves how much of Christ we, the people of present-day Christianity, hold on to~ Whatever of Christ we had, did it convey so untrue an image of him that someone close to us chose to turn his or her back on him? Why else did a May-.~ne 1995 341 Dominic ¯ Accompanying New-Age People young man make bold to say: "The picture we have of the Christian church as a continuation of the fellowship Jesus set in motion is a gross distortion" ? 3 If it is, is it not high time that we regrasp Christ and make more of a home for him in our churches so that people cannot avoid seeing and meeting him there? Now is a good time for the church to let the "Christ before Christianity" address himself to it so that it may come to know him afresh in a renewal of the reign of God that he initiated. The New Age, reacting against the present age of Christianity, seeks its roots in an age older than our familiar ancient civiliza-tions. It has found, however, a certain remnant of Christian tra-dition appealing to it, namely, the mystical tradition. So it would revive the memory of mystics like Mechtild of Magdeburg and Meister Eckhart who are credited with having drawn heavily from the chthonic and matriarchal era of humanity. Whatever the rea-son for the NAM's reverence for these Christian mystics, thought-ful Christians can think of them only as Christians and not in any other terms. Will it not be true to say that Christian mystics were more Christian than mystic, having become mystics precisely by their way of being Christian? Th.e acceptability of some Christian mystics to New Age reli-gionists (I say "some" because they find others such as Augustine and Ignatius Loyola distinctly unacceptable) should not be mat-ter for any triumphalism inasmuch as the NAM goes for all mys-ticism. Instead, the New Age's mystical interests must serve to open our eyes to what we have lost sight of, namely, the mystical horizon of the Christian universe from its very inception in Christ. How many can resonate with the declaration made by William Johnston that Christianity indeed originates in the mystical expe-rience of Christ, reaching its climax in his resurrection? How many will be persuaded by Johnston's sweeping view of our mys-tical heritage, starting with Christ, handed down by Paul, kept alive by the fathers of the church, cherished by the medieval mys-tics, and shared in even by the simple people whom Poulain found in his time and Johnston and others recognize in ours? Given the mystical strain of Christianity, he suggests that reflection on our mystical experience, together with the reflection on conversion that Bernard Lonergan advocates, could form the basis of our theology in the future.4 In keeping with the New Age penchant for all forms of mys-ticism of whatever origin, one crusader of the NAM, Matthew 342 Review for Religious Fox, has come up with a dozen or so running definitions of mys-ticism, qualifying almost everyone to be a self-designated mys-tic. However one may critique such New Age eclecticism, there is behind it such a thing as the real intention (to use Neuro- Linguistic Programming's term) that is certainly right and praise-worthy insofar as it only culls the beautiful wherever it finds it. This is one of the ways in which the New Age can pose a challenge to religions to recover their original spirit and. shed whatever has become unnecessarily hidebound,s Aiming at such a breakthrough, the New Age attends to the different religions as to a story and not a lecture;6 and so it can appropriately respond to the turns and twists and leads and plots of the different religious stories, thus creating a new story and generating a new spirituality. All modern, sensible Christians cannot but see in all this a certain spirit of ecumenism. However much official church pronouncements eulo-gize and emphasize the modern Christian spirit as ecumenical, the ecumenical practice in church life worldwide is not conspicuously vigorous even if present. How many have Christianity enough to hate but not to love, whether in Northern Ireland or Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia or other large and small places! What thoughtful Christian could fail to agree with what a New Age writer has remarked: "For many peo-ple, religion has become a force that creates enemies and teaches distrust and disrespect for differences, rather than a force that truly builds the human family and the meaning that sustains us"?7 Seen from this perspective, New Age eclecticism could well be practical ecumenism, something that Christians ideally seek to realize in their communities vis-~a-vis other religious communities. Here as elsewhere it is better to make mistakes and progress by learning from them than to play safe, avoiding mistakes only to make the big mistake of getting stuck in the status quo and then regressing. It is certainly high time to vindicate the bold inspira-tion of John XXIII and the proud heritage he bequeathed to his church, to all of Christianity, and to all the world. Will it not be true to say that Christian mystics were more Christian than mystic, having become mystics precisely by their way of being Christian? May-j~lne 1995 ~ 343 Dominic ¯ Accompanying New-AgePeople No story has been told of how this pope got the idea of con-vening an ecumenical council. But what if it had come to him in a dream? Whatever the hierarchy or the theologians or the church's rank and file might think about such a story, New Agers would not at all find it odd or shocking. They set store on their dreams, treasuring them as the nocturnal gifts of the Universe or the collective unconscious that counterbalance an overmuch influ-ence of the conscious reasoning power of the waking hours. They are intent on keeping a regular and detailed record of them, going to great lengths sometimes to stimulate and then recall them, pondering over them daily (reminiscent of the "additional direc-tives" in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola and also reminiscent of formal religious practice itself). They have their guru in C.G. Jung, who not only developed a mythological and mystical approach to dreams, but also left behind his conviction that dreams can be read by anyone who meditates on them long enough. Many New Age people would resonate with Henry Miller's experiences: "The realization that there was a pattern to my life, one which made sense, came about in a curious way. Shortly after moving into the Villa Seurat, I had begun to record my dreams. And not only the dreams but the associations which the act of transcribing them induced. Doing this over a period of months, I suddenly began to see, 'To suddenly see,' as Saroyan says somewhere. A pregnant phrase--to anyone who has had the experience. An expression which has only one meaning: to see with new eyes.''8 New Age people believe in the newness brought about by dreams on all levels (personal and social) and domains (artistic, scientific, philosophic, and theosophic) of humanity. They see themselves as cocreators of new humanity, thanks to the creative potential of dreams breaking through the premature closure of thought represented for them by the dictum that rev-elation was complete with the death of the last apostle. Though the real point of the theological dictum might be missed by New Age people, their rediscovery of dreams is some-thing that may be missed by church people. For one thing, we must realize that, along with all religious cultures, the Judeo- Christian tradition too has developed its own perspective of dreams. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have remarked some-thing obvious and yet valuable enough to appear as the epigraph of a Christian book on dreams: "How much there is in the Bible about dreams! . . . If we believe the Bible, we must accept the 344 Review for Religious fact that, in the old days, God and his angels came to humans in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.''9 There are sensible Christians who would wager that what happened in the old biblical days can and does continue to hap-pen even today for God's people, especially if God is the Revealer of Mysteries and also of our inmost thoughts (Dn 2:29-30), direct-ing our hearts even at night (Ps 16:7). Those who think in this line and yet are not very sure about the meaning of their dreams may well be enlightened by the remark of an anonymous author: "It is very interesting to see that all the dreams reported by religious fig-ures in the New Testament and in early Christianity do not require any interpreting at all. They are nearly always straightforward messages of encouragement from God.''~° A simple Tamil farmer, for instance, could appreciate this. In a dream he saw a leprosy patient asking him for a glass of water and he gave him one, but only after much hesitation until he heard a clear voice telling him to get up and read Matthew,25:35. On waking he looked up the passage: "I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink." Those in the Catholic tradition with their cult of saints may well draw inspiration from the way the saints benefited from their dreams even after reflecting on dreams fell into disrepute in the church in the middle of the 4th century. To recall a saint of recent history, John Bosco (1815-1888) certainly cherished his dreams and shared them with others. At the age of nine, he had a dream which recurred repeatedly for some eighteen years. First he saw himself surrounded by spoiled urchins and trying noisily and forcibly to control them; a man of noble bearing and great radi-ance called him by name and bade him do his work kindly and gently; then he saw a lady of beauty and majesty changing all sorts of wild animals into gentle lambs and asking him to do the same to her children. Through that dream he could in the course of time envision more and more the future establishment of his Besides their serious attention to dreams, New Age people have discovered in ancient cultures something else, the celebration of rituals. May-d~ne 1995 345 Dominic * Accompanying New-Age People Oratory and the spread of his work.11 Whatever spiritual profit accrued to the saints by way of dreams can become a matter of our own experience because each one of us is a special sort of a saint, an idea that NAM would laud heartily. Besides their serious attention to dreams, New Age people have discovered in ancient cultures something else, the celebra-tion of rituals. New Age celebrants perform some of the old rit-uals related to mythological tales like that of Demeter and Persephone, hoping to be empowered by them. They resurrect the rituals of the seasons, wanting to be in tune with the rhythm of the earth and the energy of the sun. They reenact and update the rit-uals of passage of human life from birth, through adulthood and marriage, to death. No wonder, then, that after the violent death of one of my compaflions, a New Age former Catholic, there was held a ritual which included a long circle dance with the song "We all come from the goddess / and to her shall we return / like the drops of waters / flowing to the ocean," followed by the unex-pected eerie cry of a woman almost beside herself swearing to avenge her friend's death. Of all the rituals the pride of place would go to the ritual of the maze. It consists in meandering through a maze to reach the inner center and then making one's way back to the outer rim. Interestingly, it developed out of, or at least came to be associated with, the archetype of the spiral that manifests itself in the total spectrum of the universe from the shape of the galaxies through that of the atomic space to that of the DNA helix. One may wonder ivhether this ritual has not pen-etrated beneath humanity's consciousness when one realizes the enthusiasm aroused by the variety of mazes or labyrinths extant even today in various countries such as Sweden, Japan, and Britain--this last, incidentally, declared 1991 the Year of the Maze. Two of the friends in our group decided to plight their love to each other singing their way through a labyrinth far from the madding crowd deep in a quiet valley open to the azure gaze of the California sky and in the presence, of course, of those who had journeyed with them. I wonder whether New Age revelers resorting to renewed or newfound rituals have known the wise words of the Tat Te Ching: "Ritual is but the crust of loyalty and good faith, / And the begin-ning of discord.''12 1 would, however, add this observation. Though some of their rituals can be weird, others are truly inspiring and religious. The ceremony "Remembering the Way," created by 34.6 Review for Religious Joan M. McMillen, for instance, honoring the eight-hundred-year- old labyrinth in the Cathedral of Chartres, with its evocative music even using Latin in a whole stanza and its call to let go, builds up a climax of expectancy in everyone, ending with the final song of calm assurance: "Sooner or later, everyone finds their way. / Wholly without, embracing; wholly within, ful-filling. / Go I know not where, seek I know not what. / Sooner or later, everyone comes home." That a genuine spiritual experience can be built around a long-forgotten and unused maze in the French cathedral is an eloquent symbol for me of the untapped, undying springs of spir-ituality hidden not only in the heart, but in the history of the church. Thus, the ritual celebrations at the vernal equinox and the winter solstice can with a little imagination be linked with the feasts of the Annunciation and Christmas, respectively, lead-ing people to experience heaven even on the way to heaven and that in an earthly way--as has been done, for instance, at the Jesuit retreat house in Sedalia, Colorado. So also, the simple drumming and dancing and singing of native peoples all over the globe have a spiritual potential that the church can effectively make its own with respect and gratitude and joy.13 In these matters the church does not need to conduct first-time experiments, but need only reclaim riches from its distant past. For example, even in the cenobitic times, long before churches of the medieval period served as stages for the enter-tainment that morality plays provided, the church building was already considered a festive hall?4 The modern church has been made newly festive mostly by the charismatic renewal, which is largely an urban phenomenon; it must become open to some of the festivity of "pagan" (from the Latin pagus "country district," as New Agers point out) or "rural" areas, the places of aboriginal roots. The New Age movement manifests an earthy or creation-ori-ented spirituality. Clear expressions of it--and extreme ones if understood literally instead of metaphorically--are "Mother Earth" and "Mother Nature." A literal understanding would go beyond James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and would conceive the earth as a living entity, with a life of its own on which ours depends. It would understand the divine principle as not only being in nature, but being nature itself. There would be no room for transcendence here. Everything of earth would be sacred, in May-j~ne 1995 347 Dominic ¯ Accompanying New-Age People particular the whole of human nature without any distinction between matter and spirit. A less extreme position about all this would be analogous to Copernicus's. As he saw Earth displaced from center stage, people would see themselves displaced from their superior position as the thinking species separated from the rest of nature and would give the preeminence to the whole of the universe and especially to Earth, unique planet that it seems to be, making it Earth's universe par excellence with a history of fifteen billion years or so. Comparable to this cosmological posi-tion would be this theological position: Since the earth is of such an age compared with which the whole of human history is no more than a brief moment, the point of departure for theologiz-ing should be the original blessing of the earth rather than the original fall. Aside from the first and most extreme position above--a fer-vid New Ager like Carol Christ, however, would prefer not to make such distinctions--the other two positions could easily become the ideal Christian view of earth. Though the Christian West may have used and overused the earth to the point of abuse, Christian sources tell a different story. The Bible opens with the story of the earth and all creation, in which the divinity finds due delight because of the imprint of the divine goodness all through it, Hopkins's one line "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" says it well, and so does Elizabeth Browning's couplet "Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush afire with God"--both reminiscent of the psalmist's familiar words "How great is your name, O Lord our God, / through all the earth!" (Ps 8:9). It is quite a revelation, is it not, that God provided a power-ful answer--through not a directly reasoned answer--to the bur-den of Job's anguished questions by encountering him as the God of creation's awesomely rich variety? "Ever since God created the world, his everlasting power and deity--however invisible--have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made" (Rm 1:20). It is no wonder, then, that, whenever God enters into a covenant with his human creation, he carries conviction by invok-ing the enduring solidity of his natural creation in such words as these: "Yahweh who provides the sun for light by day, the moon and stars for light by night, who stirs the sea, making its waves roar, he whose name is Yahweh Sabaoth, says this: Were this estab-lished order ever to pass away from my presence--it is Yahweh 348 Review for Religious who speaks--only then would the race of Israel also cease to be a nation in my presence forever" (Jr 31:35-36). This creation, however, is not as pure as it was originally because of original sin and all the successive sins of humanity. In spite of that, or' perhaps because of it, Paul could visualize the present thus: "The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons. It was not for any fault on the part of creation that it was made unable to attain its purpose, itwas made so by God; but creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slaver~ to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning till now the entire cre-ation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giv-ing birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bod-ies to be set free" (Rm 8:19-23). This visualization of all cre-ation, human as well as hatural, contains in an embryonic man-ner all the challenges and hopes Some, then, would say: Since the earth is of such an age compared with which the whole of human history is no more than a brief moment, the point of departure for theologizing should be the original blessing of the earth rather than the original fall. engendered and cherished by enlightened earthlings in relation to their earth, which, for all the ravages caused to it, is still humble, fertile, homely, and motherly. And so we learn to reverence cre-ation and earth and matter as St. John Damascene taught: "Through it, filled, as it were, with a divine power and grace, my salvation has come to me." At the end of a crescendo of ques-tions, he asks: "And, before all these things, is not the Body and Blood of our Lord matter? Do not despise matter, for it is not despicable.''~s These words are surely evocative of Teilhard de Chardin (quite a model for New Age faithful), but not only of him but of Ighatius Loyola (quite unacceptable to the New Age, though of him Teilhard has said that he could no more disown him than he could his own father), from whose Spiritual Exercises Teilhard had learned not a little about the divine milieu of the May-June 199Y 349 Dominic ¯ Accompanying New-Age People It is high time that we take the commandment of love seriously with regard to the way we look at New Age people. earth. In particular in the Contemplation to Attain Love he must have obtained a new vision of the universe in which he could find not only all things in God but God in all things.16 The dynamics of this vision is traced by Gilles Cusson thus: "The final fulfillment of God's revealed plan of salvation, which is a mystery of love expressed in the gratuitous calls to creation and salvation, is the pro-gressive movement of the world toward God, through the coming of the Christ who assumed the totality of our human condition; of the world which, now renewed, finds again on itself the divine mark of its origin and the sublime ordination which God's creative act had imprinted on it."~7 To conclude as we began, it is high time that we take the com-mandment of love seriously with regard to the way we look at New Age people. To the conservative and cocksure among us, some of them may appear to be freaks. But, as one of their fold, Jacquelyn Small, suggests somewhere, "What would Love do?" must be our constant question and search. By reading the signs of the times with a decided spirit of love, one may come to find many an admirable pearl of spirituality in the field of the New Age move-ment. These are to be valued in themselves and are worth redeem-ing for our church and ourselves, for we must love not only our neighbor but ourselves as well. Surely not everything in the New Age's,field is valuable, but among New Age leaders there are, for-tunately, some who dispute whatever is disingenuous and dehu-manizing and disintegrating. A witness to this reality I chanced to find in David Spangler, who in speaking of the New Age describes something that I as a Christian applaud: The shape of the new age takes on ordinary proportions for me. I find it, for example, in nurturing my marriage or in gracefully meeting the demands of parenthood. I find a new age in my craft and improving my work. I find it-in ¯ my questions about myself that impel me to confront my shortcomings and boundaries. I find it in the never ending quest to understand the nature and purpose of a God who 350 Review for Religious is not simply--or even primarily--the inner divinity that so many new age writers focus on, but the evocative Other whose very differences impel me to reach beyond myself and participate in the larger communion and community of life. I find the new age in the daily effort we share to live with integrity, grow with courage, and be a willing partner with life to allow expression of dreams and capabilities.~8 Accompanying New Age adherents in the spirit developed in the pages above would be a way to implement concretely two of the points contained in the call of the Inter-American Assembly of Religious held in 1994 in Santo Domingo, namely, (1) "to reject all that disavows the holiness of our world and its peoples, and instead to embrace our world and its peoples, sharing their con-crete social, economic, cultural, and religious struggles and hopes," and (2) "to reject efforts at evangelization that arise from stances of authoritarian power, and instead to proclaim" the good news and hope of Jesus from within the cultures and the experiences of people." t9 Notes ~ That it has made itself felt in the spiritual world at large is beyond doubt. See The Way, July 1993, devoted entirely to New Age spiritual-ity. 2 Don Gilmore, Extra Spiritual Power (Waco, 1972), p. 90. 3 Ibid, p. 93. 4 See William Johnston, The Inner Eve of Love (London, 1978), pp. 58- 59, and also Luis M. Bermejo, The Allurement of the Summit (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 1993), pp. ix, 66, 67, and passim. s See Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme, Manifesto for a Global Civilization (Santa Fe: Bear and Co., 1982), p. 38. 6 See David Spangler, "The New Storytellers," In Context, Winter 1985, p. 19. 7 V. Hull, "New Myths to Live," One Earth, June-July 1986, p. 19. 8 Cited by Jeremy Taylor, Dream Work (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), p. 20. 9 See Louis M. Savary et al., Dreams and Spiritual Growth (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. xi. ~0 Anonymous, Dreams and Destiny (London, 1987), p. 51. ~ SeeJ. Bacchiarello, Forty Dreams of St. John Bosco (Madras, 1969), pp. iv and 2-3. May-3nune 1995 351 Dominic ¯ Accompanying New-Age People ,2 The preceding lines are: When the Way (Tao) fades away, Virtue (7~) raises up, When virtue fades away, humanness (jen) raises up, When humanness fades away, justice (yi) raises" up, When justi6e fades away, the ritual (li) raises upi' --cited by'~Raimon Panikkar, Worship and Secular Man (London, 1973), p. ix. ,3 Happily such were some of the main topics discussed in the work-shop in Canada last year for Jesuits working among the aboriginal peo-ples in different parts of the world. 14 See Panikkar, Worship, p. 85. ,s Cited by Samuel Rayan, "The Earth Is the Lord's," Vidyajyoti, 1990, p. 121. , ,6 Spiritual Exercise¢, §§230-237. 17 Gilles Cusson, Biblical Theology and the Spiritual Exercises (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash and St. Louis: institute of Jesuit Sources, 1988), p. 323. See also p. 324, n. 34. ,8 New Realities, May-June 1988. 19 Review for Religious 53, no. 4 (July-August 1994): 619-620. Universe Universe becoming befriending and free Summon the more, the maybe, and the not yet from me. Open the winds to enter me in and find gift and seeds and hop~ and flowers knowing that creation comes in longing openness to Mystery. Patricia St Louis CSJ 352 Review for Religious BARBARA VALUCKAS Lithuania: A Return to My Ancestral Home ~hile making my silver-jubilee retreat in 1983, I prayed ~" I¢ over the biblical passages about the year of jubilee. The directive in Leviticus 25 to "return to [your] ancestral home" in the jubilee year penetrated my prayer, bur did not fully infuse my imagination. I was able to name and celebrate many ancestral homes including my family, my church, my religious congregation, and my womanhood. Among these I named my ethriic and cultural roots in Lithuania, but in 1983, several years before the collapse of the Berlin wall, a literal fulfillment of the biblical words was beyond my imagining. I was to learn, however, that it was not beyond God's'imagination for me. I made my,first journey to Lithuania seven years later, just one year after people began streaming through the former Iron Curtain. As provincial of the VVilton, Connecticut, province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, I was on my way to Hungary via Lithuania to attend an extended general council meeting of our congregation. I encountered a country in the first stages of its exodus experience of freedom. Lithuania,had been the first Soviet-occupied country to declare its° independence. The Sajudis ("Movement") Party sailed into power on a wave of public eupho- Barbara Valuckas SSND works in Pilgrim Ministries to support organi-zational journeys of people worldwide. This article, now slighdy revised, appeared originally in the Eastern Europe issue of LCWR Occasional Papers (March 1995). Her address is Pilgrim Ministries; 9 Academy Hill Road; Watertown, Connecticut 06795. E-mail in U.S.A.: MVV:K5 8 B@Prodigy.com. May-~ne 1995 353 Valuckas ¯ Lithuania ria about all the blessings that would come with freedom and a free market economy. No one then anticipated the long desert trek of turmoil and transition that lay ahead. The effects of five decades of brutal suppression of people and their nation would not dis-appear overnight. When I returned to Lithuania again in 1992 on my way to our general chapter in Rome, the rumblings of popular disillu-sionment had already achieved great momentum. In claiming their independence from Russia, Lithuanians had not fully antic-ipated the economic consequences of being cut off from Russian oil and other commodities. In changing from the ruble economy to one more related to Western currencies, people were jolted by the reality of Western prices. Shadow sides of capitalism were already making their appearance in the form of new unemploy-ment and homelessness; the presence of street beggars shocked people long unaccustomed to such realities. The simple people I met in the countryside expressed their desire to return to.the Egypt of economic security. They said, "At least under the Communists we had enough to eat, and we had heat." These unforeseen shortages of food and fuel helped to bring down the fledgling independence government and to sweep the Communists back as the majority party in Lithuania in the fall. This time, the Communists were not the forcible occupiers, but duly elected officials with a mandate from the people. Many Lithuanians were dazed by this outcome. They could not believe that they had voluntarily elected the same people whose power they had so recently thrown off. They felt stuck in the mud of their own confusion and ambivalence, even as they sought to take the first steps toward rebuilding their country. The rebuilding of every part of Lithuanian life was as daunt-ing a challenge as the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem after it had been totally destroyed. Within my own prayer I could feel the Leviticus jubilee invitation to return to one's ancestral home evolving into a more literal and compelling call. I found myself praying, along with Nehemiah (2:1-8), "If it please the king, and if you are satisfied with your servant, give me leave to go to Judah, to the city of my ancestors' tombs, and rebuild it." I prayed this prayer rather blindly because, from a practical point of view, it was not clear to me what I could contribute in Lithuania. Once again my imagination for myself was not up to God's imagina-tion for me. 354 Review for Religious Although all four of my grandparents had come from Lithuania and both of my parents spoke the language, I quickly moved from Lithuanian to English, as many second-generation children of immigrants do. Consequently, I did not know what I could do in Lithuania when my term as provincial gave way to a sabbatical year. I need not have wor-ried because, with little effort on my part, the doors flew open. After learning of my background in educa-tional television, Msgr. George Sarauskas, of the National Catholic Conference of Catholic Bishops Office to Aid Central and Eastern Europe, invited me to serve as a con-sultant to the newly created Catholic Television Center in Lithuania. In retrospect I can appreciate the loving providence of God, who picked up a thread from my profes-sional past and used it as a "leading string of love" (Hosea 11:4) to tug on my heart and my life, gently pulling it toward my ancestral home. Responding to this leading string, I reappeared in Lithuania in mid August 1993 for the first of two three-month periods of life and work with and for the Lithuanian people. From visitation to our SSND missions on other continents, I had learned the need to approach any kind of rebuilding as a humble learner. The Lithuanian people had to identify what needed rebuilding in the temple of their persons and their nation and how that rebuilding should proceed. My role had to be one of listening, support, and enablement. Sister Donna Steffan SC accompanied me for the first three weeks of my fall 1993 visit. Together we visited people in the cities and the countryside. We asked them to share with us their perceptions of Lithuania's current reality and to tell us what they most needed from the church. At first shyly and tentatively and then with growing trust, they revealed that one of their biggest needs was for people just to listen to their stories. The years of occupation had trained them not to trust anyone; as a result, most people kept their experiences and feelings locked up inside them-selves. They recognized a great need to unburden themselves. One woman described the effects of the occupation with the image in a distorting mirror that we in the West most often associate with the fun house in amusement parks. May-37une 1995 355 Valuckas ¯ Lithuania One woman described the effects of the occupation with the image in a distorting mirror that we in the West most often asso-ciate with the fun house in amusement parks. She said that every Lithuanian learned to live behind at least three faces. The first face was the "pro-Communist" face that one was obliged to show to one's employer and professional colleagues in order to keep one's job. The second face was the one shown to one's family and friends. Even this face had many subtle degrees corresponding to one's trust level. The third face was the one shown to oneself. My friend continued by saying that the overall effect of hav-ing to hide behind three different faces for such a long period of years was a gradual disintegration of the personality and a warp-ing of the soul. So, when Lithuanians look into the mirrors of their souls, it is like looking into a distorted mirror. What they see is not lovely but grotesque. It causes some people to go to con-fession often in the effort to "scrape their souls clean" and to receive constant reassurances of God's love and forgiveness of things they may have said or done behind the first face so as to assure their own survival or that of loved ones. This self-image of distortion was mentioned in one form or another by a number of people who described themselves and their country as "bent" in some way. It suggested to me an image of Lithuania as the bent-over woman described in the Scriptures. Like that woman, Lithuania has lost much blood in its tortured patriots and saints. One bishop, upon meeting me and hearing of my purpose in Lithuania, said, "Help us to stand up straight." Donna and I asked some of the parents with whom we visited if they had new hope for the future now that Lithuania had its independence. The most common reply was that these young and middle-aged couples viewed themselves as already having been "destroyed." If they expressed any hope at all, it was for their children. Many said that the years of occupation had forced them to live "like animals." In the stories of the people, we learned that during the occupation every dimension of human creativity was suppressed in the name of the "people." A carpenter could not design a new piece of furniture nor a dressmaker a new pattern unless the designs were approved by numerous offices in Moscow. The approval, in turn, depended upon the ability of the design to be replicated throughout the Soviet Union to preserve some stated ideal of socialist sameness. Eventually many people "forgot" how to think creatively and learned to do only what they were told. 356 Review for Religious I recently heard a radio interview with an American busi-nessman expressing his frustration with doing business in the for-mer Soviet republics. He said that, no matter what size boards he ordered for his building materials, the ones that were delivered were all the same size, the former Soviet standard size. Apparently the workers had lost the ability to imagine that boards could be cut to any other dimension. To me this was a powerful image of the damage that had been done to the minds and psyches of the people. This sense of damage to human creativity was reinforced by our visits to some of the museums in Lithuania. We were awed by the burst of Lithuanian creativity in music, art, literature and poetry, and sculpture during the brief period of national inde-pendence before the occupation. All of the exhibits seemed to me to come to an abrupt halt in the late 1940s. It was like applying to a whole nation the title of Etty Hillesum's book An Interrupted Life. What happened to all of that creativity for a half century? It appears that a lot of it went into the coordination of the under-ground resistance movements, including the underground church. Many Lithuanians, however, having become atheistic collabora-tors with the occupiers, used their energies to promote the pro-paganda machine. Still others turned their talents to the exploitation of people. After independence all of these forms of creativity continued, but in more open ways. The church, newly emerged from the underground, is using its creative energies to rebuild itself above ground. The collaborators are using their tal-ents at various levels of government, pursuing the old Communist agenda as well as their own self-aggrandizement while they are still in power. And the exploiters have emerged in the black market and in other criminal activities, that include an increase in violence. Some entrepreneurs opening private businesses receive almost instant demands for protection money. Resisters, if not murdered, find their new businesses destroyed. After many decades of being cut off from others, Lithuanians are eager to learn more about the rest of the world. Since most do not have the resources to travel, television becomes their win-dow on that world. The most popular television program in Lithuania today is the American soap opera "Santa Barbara." It is not clear to me if the story line is as important to the viewers as are the infinite clues to the first-world affluent lifestyle that May-j~ine 199Y 357 Valuckas ¯ Lithuania American viewers have come to take for granted. They notice that none of the characters have stainless steel teeth (as many Lithuanians do). They note the large living spaces with beautiful bathrooms, the gorgeous clothes and cars. I once gave a relative of mine some American magazines in a brown envelope, the kind with a small metal clasp. The whole family gathered around that envelope and examined the clasp in great detail. Eventually some-one said, "We saw one of these on Santa Barbara!" When the three weeks of Donna's visit had come to an end, we spent a day of prayer and theological reflection on the mean-ing of our experience together. One of the scriptural images that seemed to gather up those .first weeks of listening was the story of Ruth and Naomi. The unexpected loss in the experience of wid-owhood began that story. God seemed to have cut down their hopes, but in reality was leading them to a fulfillment of these hopes beyond their expectations. Ruth and Naomi chose to remain together as they journeyed into an unknown future. For Donna and me, Lithuania itself was like Ruth and Naomi. Its hopes for its own independence as a nation were ruthlessly cut down. But Lithuania is still in the middle of its story; the end-ing is not clear at all. Lithuania is still trying to nourish itself on the few stalks of grain dropped by reapers in the fields. We could also recognize the fidelity of Ruth and Naomi to each other in many of the Lithuanian people we had met: in the young family which remained faithful to their ill and old grandparents, in the young boy who chose to remain with his mother who was dying of tuberculosis, in the many priests, women religious, and lay people who chose to remain faithful to their religion during the long years of persecution. These choices were all the more coura-geous when one remembers that they were made in the teeth of efforts to break down all forms of fidelity, trust, and solidarity. We understood that we ourselves and others coming from outside the country and walking with the Lithuanian people were echoing Ruth's words "Your people shall be my people." We rec-ognized that this would imply a willingness to be with the Lithuanian people in ,their present experience of confusion and scarce resources; it would mean willingness to hold back from efforts to "answer" and "fix." In the end the Lithuanian people need to be the rebuilders of their own nation and church. It is a tricky thing to "accompany" a people without trying to control what they do. Another thread from my professional 358 Review for Religious past helped me in my own struggle to find a balance. While work-ing with an organization called Community Creativity before tak-ing up my ministry of community leadership, I learned how to elicit people's stories about their reality and to "mirror" these experiences to them in helpful ways. I learned that, if people can draw upon their own experiences as their base for learning and growth, they are more likely to see the rebuilding as their own. Over the course of the two three-month periods that I spent in Lithuania during my sabbatical year, I was able to use this "mir-roring" process with three different groups of people within the Lithuanian church: the staff of the Catholic Television Center, the catechists, and the women religious. After interviewing each member of the television center, I had a better sense of its short but significant corporate story. Like almost everything else in eastern Europe, church communica-tions had to jump from 0 to 10 in a very short time after the col-lapse of the Berlin wall. Church officials who had been forcibly silenced for five decades suddenly found themselves expected to speak--on national television--words.of meaning and hope to people who~ "like sheep without a shepher.d," desperately needed guidance as the structures.of their lives crumbled around them. It was a shock both for these church leaders and for the peo-ple to have to jump so suddenly from centrally controlled pro-paganda- oriented media to more democratic and truth-oriented forms. No one knew how to give or receive an opinion, and han-dling any diversity of thought posed real dilemmas. One of the first things that I was able to reflect to the staff of the Catholic Television Center was that, although people had technical skills, no one seemed to have a sense of what the mission of the center was. In the discussion that followed this observation, I learned that the whole concept of a mission statement was new to people whose entire lives had been bent toward purposes defined for them by the government. After much dialogue (which was another new experience in itself), we eventually were able to articulate a mission statement. The Catholic Television Center saw its mission as giving a voice to the once silent Lithuanian church and educating the Lithuanian people about the world church. These purposes, while clear, were fraught with ambivalence. The Lithuanian church survived under-ground only by the exercise of strong central authority that oper-ated largely in secret. There were no group discussions; there May-d~une 1995 359 Valuckas ¯ Lithuania was no consensus building. Information was passed from one per-son to another singly. Control over information was essential to survival. Given this history, It can be quite threatening to provide the .Lithuanian church with a voice Consonant with the Vatican II understandifig of the church as the people of God. The Lithuanian church grapples with questions of how much diversity of thought and'opinion should be expressed in the media and how much should be kept "secret" or even suppressed. There is also ambiva-lence regarding the life of the church in other parts of the world. On the one hand, there is a great eageyness to see how Catholics in other parts of the world live and worship. On the other hand, there is a certain suspicion of theologies, spiritaialities, and rituals coming from other parts of the world and a conse-quenttemptation to control what Lithuanian Catholics are allowed to learn about. With radio, television, fax, and e-mail increasingly available in Lithuania, the democratization 6f infor-mation that is a part of mass communications poses dilemmas for a church only emergin/~ from the underground after years of iso-lation from news about developments in the life of the church. The catechists I visited in each bf the six dioceses .of Lithuania echoed these challenges and voiced their own as they, too, jumped from 0 to 10. When Lithuania became independent, church lead-ers faced a choice: either to begin religious insti'uctlon immedi-ately with ill-prepared teachers without any materials to work with or to do adequate preparation first but thereby risk losing the present instructional opportunity altogether in the quite possi-ble event of reannexation by Russia. They chose the first option. When I visited the catechetical centers in each diocese, cat-echists spoke of the great difficulties they were encountering as they relied on their memories of decades-old religious instruc-tion and tried to pass these fragments on to a new generation of youth with no current materials to help or guide them. Eventually the six dioceses succeeded in collaborating to produce a common catechetical curriculum and in translating some materials from Italy and Austria into the Lithuanian language. The catechetical centers were also. interested in working with the Catholic Television Center to produce s'0me good in'service materials for the catechists and some interesting lessons for the students. When I had completed my visitation of the six dioceses, I wrote a report mirroring the great gifts and the serious challenges 360 Review for Religious I had observed; I distributed it to the directors of the catecheti-cal centers. They were astounded at my report for reasons that amazed me. '"You told the truth," they said. They were not accus-tomed to that. In other professional settings during the occupa-tion, they were accustomed to "inspectors" who came with the primary purpose of criticizing what-ever they saw and who wrote reports that had no correspondence with the reality of their visits. Because of such experiences, the catechists told me, they had awaited my visits with a mix-ture of dread and anxiety. They were flabbergasted to read a report that not only reflected what they had said, but aqtually offered observations and reflections that they found helpful. This was a totally new experience for them. For my part I was astonished to learn how much they had accom-plished, fueled only by zeal, °with scant resources and very meager pay. They had even experienced outright deri. sion from atheistic teachers and stu~- dents. For me, these courageous and selfles~ catechists enfleshed the stories Like many of the other prisoners, this sister fashioned for herself a tiny rosary of hard crumbs of black bread strhng together by a needle and thread. Hid under the lining of her coat, it was never discovered. from the Acts of the Apostles describing the church's early efforts to spread the Good News in the face of extraordinary limitations and challenges from within and without. This difference in experience was one of the many times that I imaged myself as being on the other side'of a chasm from the Lithuanian people. Ways of being that I took for granted were totally out of their lived experience; their faith and courage in the face of adversity were often beyond my ability to compre-hend: For example, the director of ofle of the catechetical centers told me that her entire family was taken away from her and sent to Siberia when she was a small child. Spared this fate because of her age, she was put into the care of some women who provi-dentially were underground nuns. It was through their example that she grew in the faith that sustained her through the loss of her family and ultimately led her to leave her post as a university pro- May-June 1995 361 Valuckas ¯ Lithuania fessor and accept the bishop's invitation to direct a catechetical center, The women religious were the third group of people I was privileged to accompany and mirror. The major superiors had been made aware of the interest which the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and other organizations had in their welfare, and they were eager to talk about their needs. They, too, had their stories to tell. One of these major superiors' told me that almost all of her early religious life was spent in prison. The prisoners were body-searched every day for any signs or symbols of religion. Like many of the other prisoners, this sister fashioned for herself a tiny rosary of.hard crumbs of black bread strung together by a needle and thread. Hid under the lining o.f her coat, it was never discovered. She still has that rosary; When she showed it to me, she said that her prison .experience was one of the most powerful God-experiences of her life. This sister and the other major superiors echoed what many others had said about needing to tell their stories and to experience healing of their memories. The sisters asked for resource people to come from America and other countries to help them psychologically, theologically, and spiritually. They were eager to learn about developments in theology, prayer, and spirituality in the last several decades of their "interrupted lives." They also expressed a strong desire to grow in leadership skills and in the skills related to the develop-ment of community life and ministry. In spring 1994, Sisters Carolyn Mruz OSF and Joan Klaas CPPS, both former general superiors, ioined me in Lithuania for the express purpose of providing input in some of the requested areas. Toward the end of their six,week stay, the sisters asked us to give them a day of recollection. When we inquired as to the usual length of such dhys, they replied, "We don't know: we've never had one before." Another chasm. In their final evaluation the sisters told us that.one of th~ best things about their gatherings with us, in addition to the input, was the opportunity they had to meet one ~another across com-munities. For most, this was their first experience of an inter-congregational gathering. During the years of occupation, when it was not possible to assemble, the sisters were not always sure who were members of their own congregations, much less mem'- bers of other congregations. When they did meet each other for the first time in spring 1994, it gave them great joy to discover 362 Review for Religious that they had so much in common. They learned that sometimes they were their own best listeners to each other's stories. And I, after ending each three-month period in Lithuania, came away feeling not only like Ruth with Naomi, but also like Mary staying with Elizabeth "about three months." Somewhere in those encounters and in spite of the chasms between cultures, languages, and experiences, there was a leaping together toward the life that is lived at the Center of Being, whether of the nation as a whole or of each person. Finally, I return to Nehemiah, who heard God's call to help in the rebuilding of the temple: "Then I said to them, 'You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem is in ruins, its gates have been burnt down. Come, let us rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and suffer this indignity no longer.' And I told them how the kindly favor of God had been with me, and also repeated the words the king had said to me. 'Let us start!' they exclaimed, 'Let us build',; and with willing hands they set about the good work" (Ne 2:17-18). Vignette The windows of the soul are clouded by hunger, and deeper wounds shrouded from our sight lie buried in the dark night. Foul birds of greed peck at the seeds of war And drop them to be sown in blood from Rwanda to Zaire. Martha Wickham ASC May-.~une 1995 363 ELIZABETH V. ROACH Community Today-- Idol? Icon? Gift? "I could do ministry without becoming a religious, but I want community," the new candidate says. Studies tell us that young people entering religious congregations today are looking for community. Formation directors work hard to provide healthy community experiences for them. Later, superiors general try to assign them to "good" commu-nities. Not only candidates but also men and women in religious life many years are approaching personnel direc-tors seeking "life-giving" communities. All this leaves lit-tle doubt that community has high importance for religious. If one thing is going well with us, it is the pri-ority we are giving to community. To question this trend might seem, if not audacious, perhaps impertinent. I believe, however, that a need exists for a closer look at the almost icon or idol status that com-munity enjoys today. My questions lie in the following areas: (1) In what "soil" did the present status of commu-nity grow? (2) Is it suffering from soil contaminants? (3) What are the gospel parameters for community? If you think I am about to come up with the answers, stop reading now. Then again, if you would like to delve into these questions, accompany me in my meditative mean-dering as I reflect on some questions that pebble the path. Elizabeth V. Roach MM works with three other Maryknoll sis-ters in a settlement area (40,000 people, no priest) on the edge of Panama City. Her address is Maryknoll Sisters; Aptdo. 813- 0343; Tocumen, Republic of Panama. 364 Review for Religious The "Ecological" History of Community Today Polluted streams mar our world. We breathe contaminated air. We read food labels to see what preservatives we are exposing ourselves to. We wonder what is in the water we drink. Why not investigate the "ecological" history of community? Where did community's current popularity grow and develop? Is there need for soil examination? Do we need to protect an endangered speci.es of community? I wonder if some of our present practice has developed, not from gospel roots, but from our environment of consumerism? Whether it is legislation bought by lobbyists, military secrets sold for profit, commerce with the fruit of a woman's womb, or designer drugs, we are a nation of consumers. Listen to us, the words we use. We speak of "mental-health consumers," "spin doctors," and "image" pro-ducers. This is the environment we live in. The nightly television news-cast would convince any visiting Martian that in our society just about anything can be bought. What has that got to do with our present practice of community? Maybe nothing, but similar remarks used to be made when ecologists questioned the purity of our lakes and streams. They were called alarmists. They were said to be exaggerating the dangers of industrial waste. As we seek commu-nity, it might not be amiss to ask how much the consumer envi-ronment we live in is affecting our practice and our working model of community. Maybe we need a quick inventory of our recent past. Even a brief glance at the 1960s shows that many people lived in a rigidly structured world. (When the protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War began, many could not listen to what was being said. They saw rowdy, carelessly dressed, long-haired people as simply out of line.) Marriage was the order of the day. A "significant other" was something new. Rights of homo-sexuals and lesbian relationships were not acceptable conversa- As we seek community, it might not be amiss to ask how much the consumer environment we live in is affecting our practice and our working model of community. May-3~une 1995 365 Roach ¯ Community Today tion topics. Women who had babies outside of marriage were "unwed" mothers. There were jobs for men and jobs for women. Women were housekeepers, wives, and, yes, diaper washers. Police and soldiers were men. People who bought things were customers not consumers. One had property rights, but consumer rights, sexual-preference rights, and victim rights were unheard of. Abortion was illegal. Body parts, sperm, and wombs were not yet on the market. Spirituality and retreats had to do with religious practice, not feminist circles or marketing seminars. Between the '60s and the '90s came the "me" decade. We are no longer in the '60s. Social consciousness in the '60s meant advo-cacy for the poor, the disadvantaged, the needy. Now, according to Congressman Gingrich, social responsibility means legislation to relieve the taxpayer of politically burdensome aspects of soci-ety. We who live on the edge between modernity and post-modernity may be too caught up in contemporary tensions to examine the ingredients of our community cake mix, but uncon-scious consumption of contaminating elements may cause unex-pected illness. Our search for community is taking place in a world where repression of sexual and other urges is no longer the problem. We have entered a deconstructed world where issues of individ-ual rights versus community rights provoke new conflicts. "Gingrich thinking" is but one example of.this reality. Notice the differing opinions about the trials of the Mel6ndez brothers, Susan Smith, and O.J. Simpson. At the same time, violence, crime, child abuse, elderly abuse, and the "maybe we need to open more orphanages" mentality prevails. "Protection" is the buzz word of the 1990s, whether it refers to protected sex, more police in the streets, or a balanced-budget amendment. In the case of the United States, is it creeping into policies and procedures aboutwhom we will integrate or isolate according to how they fit or do not fit our concept of community? This is the environment we live in. Our concept of commu-nity may be, if not corrupted, at least affected by it. In more than one ~workshop, I have heard presenters say that, when we are changing ministry or community, we should take time to imagine ourselves in the situation and then ask ourselves, "Does it feel good?" That is the same question I ask when I try on a new pair of shoes. Given the psychological healthiness of reflecting on how a 366 Review for Religious change of ministry or community will affect us, what criteria shall we use? Is community just another consumer item? Is it like buy-ing a winter coat, a new car? What are the gospel parameters for community? Have you said or heard any of your friends say, "I have a min-istry, now I'm looking for a community"? Is community just another item on our shopping list, something to be acquired? How gospel-oriented is our practice? New Testament Parameters for Community Another glimpse of what we are about in our practice of com-munity might be gotten by filling out the application form that personnel directors ask religious to complete when they seek a change of ministry or community. Some congregations require these applicants to provide an evaluation from the community where they have been living. Applicants are also expected to state their expectations of the receiving community. The new com-munity's scrutiny leads to acceptance or rejection of the appli-cant. Try filling out one of those forms for Jesus as he hung on the cross (or for one of the apostles, or for Paul). What kind of com-munity evaluation could we submit for Jesus? He was complet-ing a contract and about to move into a new ministry situation. How would the evaluation of his recent community experience read? Would it say he took initiatives not supported by his local community? How would it describe his being abandoned by his colleagues? How would you rate him: (1) on following the con-sensus? (2) on his ability to (a) dialogue with Peter, his confrere? and (b) with local church authorities? (3) on his initiative (a) in going up to Jerusalem? and (b) in going to the garden that Thursday night? (What would you say if you had to write a community eval-uation of Peter, the one who failed so miserably in a community crisis?) Would you have approved of Jesus' "cross" initiative? Would you have questioned his discernment process? Would you have suggested further discernment and perhaps made him miss his hour? (Remember that John and Peter, his close friends, seemed a bit confused about his plans and even about what he was saying at the Last Supper.) May-J~ne 1995 367 Roach ¯ Community Today Palm Sunday Communities or Easter Communities Still another way to reflect on community would be to ask ourselves if we are confusing the group of disciples, those who hung out with Jesus before Good Friday, with the communities that flowered after the resurrection and Pentecost. The crowd that walked with Jesus before that Friday, the Palm Sunday community (apostles and disciples included), seems to have had many characteristics that are considered important for today's communities. Notice that Peter, James, and John were friends. Philip invited his friend Nathaniel to join the group. Does that ring a familiar bell? Is that a way of being integrated into our communities today? Do friends invite friends? In the episode about sitting at Jesus' right and left hand (Mk 10:35-45), similarities with current practice are even more evi-dent. That group looks like they are having a "community day." The apostles and disciples who would soon be walking with Jesus on Palm Sunday had together sailed the Sea of Galilee, hiked to Jerusalem, prayed, and shared ministry experiences. Was that an emergency house meeting they called to confront James and John on their inappropriate power seeking and failure to dialogue before lobbying for the first places? This, after the many excellent workshops they had attended!--workshops on ministry, mission, spirituality, interpersonal relations, theology, and Scripture, and all conducted by the best of presenters. So what happened? Why did that group .of apostles run for it when Jesus stretched out his arms on the cross? All their systems failed. Neither the community days nor the hiking, the theolog-ical reflection, the personal and community prayer, the work-shops, or even the friendship they had with Jesus held them together on that Friday--except for John and Mary and a few other women. That scene, I think, offers an essential .clue to the mystery of what Christian community is. While numbers of people had walked and talked with Jesus, they had not become a community. They may have been a support group: they did meet regularly. They may have been a club: mem-bership was limited and had its requisites. They may have been an interest group or a cooperative, for they participated in the same mission. But they were not yet a community. This they demon-strated on Thursday night when they scattered upon discovering that the big C Jesus was talking about was not community but the cross. 368 Revie~ for Religious Only Mary, John, and the women had discovered that the acid test of Christian community is the permanent, nonnegotiable fol-lowing of Jesus to his death. The hard realities that Jesus himself faced on Thursday and Friday, the aloneness, the abandonment, the dying, are essential elements that must be accepted, lived, and embraced if we are ever to become Easter and Pentecost com-munities. It is not just the warm, fuzzy feeling of moments when we are all together, the consensus evident, celebrating with song and symbol. It is also those dark, fearful, lonely moments of truth-telling in our communities, the utter .aloneness of difficult deci-sion making, the moments described in 2 Timothy 4:9-22, when Paul says "all" deserted him; "no one appeared on my behalf, but the Lord stood by me." It is also those other terrible moments when we~ like Mary and John, stand by our sisters and brothers totally incapable of under-standing .the why of a situation. Both reflection and personal expe-rience lead me to believe that, with-out following Jesus on the way of the cross, we may become interest groups, assemblies of friends, or financially cost-effective entities, but we have not the shadow of a chance of becoming Easter and Pentecost communities. Just look at the Easter community, that community huddled together in fear, in terror for their lives, humiliated by their sinfulness. Has any recent applicant to your community or mine said they want to join us because they are fearful or ~inful? And, if they did, would we accept them or recommend therapy? Yet it is the Easter community, terrified, humiliated, utterly scandalized by the cross, who discovered Jesus in their midst, their sins forgiveh, and their hearts overwhelmed with the joy of his peace. They knew why they were joyful. They could say Jesus is risen and truly here because they knew this;was the same Jesus who died on the cross. Peter's cheeks, the legend tells us, were fur-rowed by tears. Mary had held Jesus' bloodless corpse in her arms. John had stood by the cross. Has any recent applicant to your community or mine said they want to join us because they are fearful or sinful? And, if they did, would we accept them or recommend therapy? May-j~une 199Y 369 Roach ¯ Community Today That Easter community did not come to their consensus by applying the correct interpersonal dynamics for good communi-cation. They did not learn to hang together through attendance at workshops or by hiring a facilitator. While all these may help and no doubt do, there is no way they will ever substitute for the big C on which Jesus built the Easter and Pentecost community or the later communities of Acts. In Acts the community is a motley crowd. They invite all sorts to join them, magiciansand soldiers, preachers and widows. Their criteria did not come from enneagram numbers and Myers- Briggs profiles. (Had these been available, they might have helped resolve interpersonal conflicts--and these communities did include great differences of personality and lifestyle.) The important thing for them was willingness to lay down their lives because of their belief in Jesus' Way. The joy of those communities came not from something available in Greek or Roman markets, but the gift of Jesus' Spirit filling them with overwhelming peace and joy. That peace was pure gift. It happened when they followed Jesus' Way, the paschal way of death and resurrection. In apostolic and early Christian times, Christian community grew'and developed when followers of Jesus came together fear-ful for their lives, humbly repentant of sinfulness, bearing one another's burdens, and willing to die as witnesses to Jesus' living presence. They believed that Jesus, who died for our sins, had risen from the dead and was~truly here. They celebrated this in their gatherings. Only through this paschal living will our com-munities, too, become centers of peace, joy, and good news for all the world. 370 Review for Religious DENNIS J. BILLY Called to Community ~ ~[ . ommunity~:P is an intrinsic element of the call to disci- ~ pleship." A statement such as this normally elicits little disagreement and little, if any, controversy. Whatever our par-ticular calling in life (religious, priestly, or lay), most of us rec-ognize the importance of some Eind of community to accompany us on our journey of faith. Simple agreement, however, does not always evoke profound understanding; it may even keep us from taking a deeper look at the meaning of our closest assumptions. How many of us, for example, actually understand our call to "community" as something at the Very center of our response to God? How many of us think of life in community as something intrinsic to our relationship to God, as something that actually leads us more deeply into the mystery of who God is? And how many of us actually advert to these ideas in the day-to-day cir-cumstances of our lives? Reflection on the nature of our call to community can enhance our vision of what our communal disci-pleship means and how it is to be lived out in daily practice. Vision and Call Everyone needs a vision in life. Call it a dream or a purpose; call it a goal or a sense of direction; call it a founding myth or a narrative of origins--whatever you call it, we all need something in our lives to help us make sense out of our experience and share it with others. One purpose of Christian community is to keep such a vision before our eyes and thereby encourage us to take Dennis J. Billy CSSR, author of fifteen articles for this journal over the course of ten years, writes ag.ain from Rome. His address is Accademia Mfonsiana; C.P. 2458; 00100 Rome, Italy. May-June 199Y 371 Billy * Called toCommunity steps to live it in our everyday lives. It reminds us of the larger context of our lives and keeps us in touch with the traditions that have shaped us and to a large degree have made us who we are. It challenges us to confront the dark side of our human experience and to remain steadfast in our response to God's call in our lives. Communities come in different sizes and shapes. They do so because they respond to different needs within the church and reflect the vast variety of God's creation. Families and base com-munities, parishes and religious congregations, secular institutes and third-order sodalities all exist for a purpose and flourish when they respond well to the needs they seek to fill. Community is not something peripheral to God's call, as if its purpose were only to provide an atmosphere conducive to private personal spiritual growth or to respond to a need in our anthropological makeup. Christian community can and does provide for such things. It is meant, however, to be and to do much more. Life in community is intrinsically related to our journey into the mystery of God and is part and parcel of our Christian vocation. Community life loses its sense of purpose and conviction when it is taken out of the context of a call. Because the Christian vocation leads people into the Divine Mystery, it is inherently communal. Christian community and Christian vocation enjoy a close, reciprocal rela-tionship. It is impossible to have one without the other. By the term "vocation" I refer not to the more qualified sense of the term as a specific state of life in the church (that is, reli-gious, priestly, or lay), but to the call to intimate friendship that God extends to everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike. This call to beatitude (or to the "beatific vision," as previous genera-tions of theologians have phrased it) extends to all people, regard-less of their faith, nationality, race, or position in life. It involves the capacity all of us have to be lifted up through the influence of grace and to see God face-to-face. This mystical vocation which all of us share is sustained through life in community. Because God's nature is inherently communal, our call to divine friendship is worked out and perfected through a life lived with and ori-ented towards others. The Trinitarian Community The Christian tradition acclaims God as the perfect commu-nity of love. God--who has conceived of us, who has created us, 372 Review for Religious and who holds us in being--relates to us in a manner that images his nature. God, who is love, relates to us in love and cannot do otherwise. This is not the place to expound the vast intricacies of the doctrine of the Trinity. Suffice it to say that, however we describe this mystery of intimate social relations (whether through the traditional formulation of Father/Son/Spirit or through recent formulations such as Creator/Redeemer/Sanctifier or Ground/ Other/Bond), the mutual indwelling of persons must somehow be presented within the very nature of the Godhead. Although the mys-tery of God is inexhaustible and no single formulation can fully convey its meaning and depth, revelation teaches us that God is communal by nature, a single being of three clearly differentiated relations. When God is viewed in this man-ner, union with God becomes for us a never-ending journey into the intimate community of divine rela-tionships. All of this may sound rather abstract and unrelated to the daily concerns of life in Christian com-munity. To be sure, lofty ideas about the Trinity may'seem to have little practical value when it comes to the nitty-gritty tensions and concerns of communal living. We should not forget, how-ever, that the Trinity rests at the summit of the hierarchy of truths and, in fact, is the ultimate reality from which all else flows. The Trinity is the quintessential fact. It is not simply a metaphor, or a purely human construct, or a projectiqn of our deepest hopes onto a divine plane. It is an element of God's self-disclosure to humanity which, in its doctrinal formulation, has the status of a divinely revealed truth. The intimate community who is God and whom we call the Trinity is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, of all things. It is the goal toward which we tend, the force that directs our lifelong activity on this planet, the reality that draws us to our final destiny. Life in Christian community is the primary way in which God prepares us to participate in the mystery of triune love. If it is true, as St. Augustine and many of the medievals thought, that Because God's nature is inherently communal, our call to divine friendship is worked out and perfected through a life lived with and oriented towards others. May-y-une 199Y 373 Billy ¯ Called to Community God has left traces or vestiges of the divine nature imprinted in the very fabric of creation, then one may point to life in Christian community as an important instance where a person can discover a reflection of God's hidden presence in the world. It would be presumptuous to expect that any of us would be ready or even capable of sharing in the intimate relations of the divine nature without a long period of preparation, Most of us will need to be led, step-by-step, along the long and narrow way of the Lord. Christian community, one might say, is the fiery forge in which God tempers our personalities and gets them ready to share more deeply in the fullness of the divine community. It stretches our character and challenges us to live lives that increasingly take others into account. To use an example from the Catholic mysti-cal tradition, it purges us of our imperfections, illumines us along our journey through life, and eventually brings us to a state of union with God. Life in community helps us to discover and become our truest, deepest selves; it naturally overflows in our relationship with others; and it shows us precisely what it means to be friends of God. Whenever we participate in community, we are really experiencing a vestige of God's triune love. The deeper we enter into it, the more we prepare ourselves for our relation-ship with God both now and in the life to come. Such is the role of Christian community, otherwise known as koinonia, that fel-lowship of God's friends we call "church." Given to us by Jesus himself and forever walking in his way, this circle of close disci-ples perpetuates itself by forging genuine human relationships wherever it goes. The Way of Jesus If the Trinitarian basis of Christian community is still too abstract a notion to give us practical guidance in day-to-day liv-ing, a more concrete example comes from the life of Jesus himself. A careful reading of the Gospels shows that he was always calling people to fellowship, especially those who were outcasts from the respectable social enclaves of his day. Prostitutes and tax collec-tors, the poor and the possessed, the blind and the lame were all welcomed by him and invited to partake in the friendship he shares with the Father. His gathering of disciples, his preaching through parables, his emphasis 6n table fellowship, his institu-tion of the Eucharist in the context of a meal, all reveal his deep 374 Review for Religious concern to provide others with a sense of God's gratuitous love and care for them. Jesus reached out to others simply because they were children of the Father and in need of God's friendship. He needed no other reason to call us his friends (Jn 15:15). Jesus' call to fellowship continues to this day. Now, as then, it is the perfect expression of the Son's intimate love of the Father. His fourfold movement of (i) entering our world (in the incar-nation), (2) giving himself away completely (to the point of dying for us), (3) becoming our very food and nourishment (in the Eucharist), and (4) being the source of our hope (in the res-urrection) is a concrete expression of the same selfless giving that characterizes the divine Trinitarian relations. Jesus' love for humanity reveals to us an even deeper love which he shares with his Father. This intimate relationship enables him to listen to the Father's concerns as a loyal and faithful Son. His humble response mani-fests the self-diffusive nature of God's love and discloses the underlying reason for the entire Christ event. Jesus' life provides us with an ideal vision of what life in community should emulate. Just as Christ entered our world and gave himself away completely, to the A careful reading of the Gospels shows that Jesus was always calling people to fellowship, especially those who were outcasts from the respectable social enclaves of his day. point of becoming nourishment and a source of hope for us, so we are called, both individually and in community, to enter the var-ious worlds of people around us and to give ourselves to them in a manner corresponding to Christ's sacrificial offering of him-self, to the point that we too become nourishment for them and a source of life-giving hope. This calling reveals to us the funda-mental meaning of our Christian identity. It' is accomplished not by ourselves alone, but by our cooperating with Christ working in us and influencing us by the grace of his Spirit. As might be expected, it is in the Eucharist that this process of divinization takes on its most concrete and visible form. There we gather as "church" around the table of the Lord and pray to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit. There we celebrate the fel-lowship of God's friends by reenacting Jesus' last meal on earth in its mystical identity with his sacrificial death the following day. May-3~ne 1995 375 Billy ¯ Called to Community There we welcome the presence of the risen Lord not only in our hearts and in our midst, but even in what we eat and drink. There we~celebrate the gift of "God among us" and recognize in the breaking of the bread that the Lord's vocation, like our own, is concerned with our becoming other Christs. Practical Realities These Trinitarian and Christological bases for life in com-munity do not of themselves remove the obstacles that often get in the way of our growth in the Spirit. The vision of what we can become and of what we are called to live is blocked time and time again by the fickle and obtuse human heart. As members of Christ's body, we recognize our divine calling to share in God's love and to carry on Christ's mission through time. We also rec-ognize, however, that human limitations and purely self-centered concerns often prevent us from living up to our noble aspirations. Sin in its various analogues--original, social, personal--distracts us from our mission and leads us into unholy compromises that sunder our vision and detach the remains of it from the practical realities of daily life. What follows are ten of the common diffi-culties communities face in their attempt to live out the implica-tions of their call. 1. Lack of Vision. Call it a lack of faith, a refusal to delve beneath the surface of things, an inability to see the close con-nection between the lives we live and the beliefs we espouse-- whatever you call it, a Christian community can easily get out of touch with its charism or very reason for existence. Vision. is a matter of both head and heart; minimal intellectual assent to the values and goals that originally called the community into exis-tence is not enough. Vision must seize the imagination of the members and generate in them a heartfelt desire to realize the community's objectives in their present situation. For this rea-son, a Christian community always needs inspired dreamers to keep the community's, founding vision in the forefront of its con-sciousness and prudent leaders to interpret this vision amid the practical exigencies of daily life. If the vision is not somehow kept bright and clear, the community loses its focus, dissipates its ener-gies, and eventually goes out of existence. 2. Dyoqtnctional Structures. Every community needs structures for its own good and the good of its members. Structures give 376 Review for Religious the community stability and enable it to function for a long time. Structures, however, can be a curse. If the community is not care-ful, its structures can in time lose their relevance and then inhibit the ways in which its members relate. The structures become dys-functional and deprive the community of the tranquillity it needs to live and do its work. Every community, therefore, needs to examine its structures periodically and change those that now are superflu-ous or needlessly obstruct the mem-bers' lives. Siflce there is only one perfect community (the Holy Trinity itself), communities should not be surprised to find some dysfunctional relating in their internal organization. The goal here should be to remove or minimize structures that are irrele-vant or cause some har

Issue 40.1 of the Review for Religious, January 1981. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS (ISSN 0034-639X), published every Iwo months, is ediled in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are Iocaled at Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus, St. Louis, MO. © 1981 by REWEW FOR RELiGiOUS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at SI. Louis, MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A.: $9.00 a year; $17.00 for two years. Other countries: $10.00 a year; $19.00 for two years. For subscription orders or change of address, write: Rt:vt~:w t'oR Rt:Lt(;tOUS: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55802. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. .~eremiah L. Alberg, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Book Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor January, 1981 Volume 40 Number 1 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REVIEW t'ott RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph's Universily; City Avenue at 54th St.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REVIEW t'OR RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.: St. Louis, MO 63108. ++Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from Universily Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Review for Religious Volume 40, 1981 Editorial Offices 3601 Lindell Boulevard, Room 428 Saint Louis, Missouri 63108 Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Jeremiah L. Alberg, S.J. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Miss Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Book Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is published in January, March, May, July, Sep-tember, and November on the fifteenth of the month. It is indexed in the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and in Book Review Index. A microfilm edition of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is available from University Microfilms International; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyright © 1981 by REVIEW FOR RELIGIOtJS. Toward a Method for the Study of Spirituality Edward Kinerk, S.J. Father Kinerk is presently on sabbatical leave, doing post-doctoral studies in spirituality at St. Louis University. He resides at Jesuit Hall; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108, A former professor of historical theology once described spirituality as a "gl0b" area. He explained this rather inelegant label by pointing out that spirituality enjoys an unlimited wealth of resources but possesses no tools for getting those resources organized. "I understand what it means to do history orto do theology," he objected, "but what does it mean to do spirituality?" StUdents contemplating work in spirituality will take small comfort in his remarks but they will know exactly what he meant, for, unlike most other academic disciplines, spirituality lacks both formal definition of its content and methodology proper to itself. Studies in the history of spirituality, prayer, religious life, Scripture, psychology, theology, and any number of authors and movements can be most beneficial in themselves, but where does one find the unifying principles to bring all this knowledge together? The occasional reader, who finds this or that work personally rewarding, will not be troubled by such abstract concerns,but this vagueness of content and style can be ~a formidable handicap for those who undertake a more thorough study, either for their own enlightenment or with the thought of being of service to others. In .the latter case one must analyze spiritualities, interpret them in their historical-cultural context, compare and contrast them to other spiritualities, and finally develop criteria for criticism and evaluation. The tools for such reflection are not commonly available in the way that they are for other disciplines, including theology.' Part of the difficulty lies in the very nature of spirituality. Except for the 3 4 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries it has been rare for theological speculation to elicit passionate responses on the part of Chris-tians, Spirituality, on the other hand, always makes at least an implicit appeal to the heart; it is much closer to people's lives and emotions than is theology. This is to be expected, but it places the "academic" study of spirituality in an awkward corner precisely because the material lends itself so immediately to practical application, the pastoral. Consequently, spirituality as a discipline finds itself more often called upon to train spiritual directors and retreat-givers than to engage in reflection. This onesidedness is risky. Spirituality can-not afford to neglect the mistakes or the riches which are a part of its heritage; nor can it forego with impunity the arduous task of using the theoretical pro-cess to correct the subtle mistakes of common sense.~ In a recent article for REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, Father Alan Jones chronicled the split between devotion and theology--head and heart--and called for the redevelopment of mystical theology in order to "combat the tendency to anti-intellectualism today, particularly in areas where religious experience is concerned.-3 Using William Johnston's definition of mysticism as "wisdom or knowledge that is found through love,'" Father Jones sug-gested contemplation--which includes all levels of knowing--as the means of bringing reflection into religious experience and religious experience into theological reflection. Father Jones's concern to bring head and heart together must be a con-stant preoccupation for spirituality; the great classics were developed more in the chapel than in the library, though they depended on both. However, I believe that we have an auxiliary task which is less "creative" and more "organizational" in character. In order to bring the vast and often unwieldy material from the history of spirituality into the arena of our prayerful reflec-tion it must first be arranged into digestible form. The purpose of this article will be to suggest some questions or distinctions by which such arrangement can proceed: in other words, a method for the study of spiritualities. Of course, this is an ambitious undertaking, and 1 will protest in advance that ' Theologians may protest that method is a problem for them, too, but at least work is being done. Recently David Tracy has suggested five basic models which have influenced theologica~ inquiry: orthodox, liberal, neo-orthodox, radical, and his own "revisionist" model. See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (Seabury, 1975), pages 22-34. Tracy has been influenced in part:through. his long association with the thought of Bernard Lonergan. In a very important work, Method in Theology (Seabury, 1979; first published: Herder & Herder, 1972), Lonergan ~ipplied his transcendental method to the task of developing a method in theology. 1 will cite Lonergan only briefly in the course of this article, but 1 need to acknowledge that the influence of Method has been considerable. 2 For an explanation of the relationship of the realm of common sense and the realm of theory, see Lonergan, Method, pp. 257-258. ' Alan Jones, "Spirituality and Theology," Rt~vm'w ~oR R~.l.~G~Ot~s 39 (1980), p. 171. ' William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love (Harper & Row, 1978), p. 20. Jones cites this on p. 170 of his article. Study of Spirituality / 5 these are remarks "toward a method." But since the need is great, I hope that .any venture in this direction might prove useful. Spirituality needs (1) a definition of itself, (2) some tools for analyzing a particular spirituality, (3) some guidelines for relating a spirituality to other spiritualities, and (4) some criteria for evaluation. In the pages that follow I will make attempts in the first three areas and then conclude with some limited thoughts about the fourth. What Is Spirituality? Everyone has a notion of spirituality, but efforts to pin it down in defini-tion can, be frustrating. It is everywhere yet nowhere; its scope is so vast-- potentially as vast as the sum and depth of all human experience--that workable content virtually disappears. Spirituality has been described as "life-style." If we realize that this means more than length of hair and particular preferences for food and clothing, this definiton is actually quite good. A person's spirituality is the way in which he or she lives in accordance with basic values. The famous Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, has given this a more philosophical formulation: "The way in which [an individual] acts and reacts habitually throughout his life according to his objective and ultimate insights and decisions.''~ The strength of such a definition lies in its completeness; its weakness is that it is too complete. We are left afloat on a sea of private human experience with no markers to make this or that dimension of experience stand out. These defini-tions are good because they include everything, but they are not workable because they distinguish nothing. And without distinctions analysis is impossible. What should we look for in a workable definition? First of all, a definition of spirituality for the purpose of study should limit the material to what is expressed. Nothing canbe studied unless it iscommunicated in some way. It is true that spirituality must deal with the mysterious depths of the human per-son in relationship to God and that. this mystery often defies conceptualiza-tion. However, it is usually open to communication through symbolization; and this, too, is a form of expression. Spirituality studies expressions, and these expressions can be conceptual or symbolic: they can be words, or they can be art, music, architecture, or indeed any form of human activity. Of course, an individual's full experience of his or her relationship with God can never be adequately expressed., not even symbolically. This is simply a dif-ficulty which the study of spirituality must accept; we can only examine what is expressed and yet we know that the expression is never exhaustive of the reality. Secondly, a definition of spirituality should contain the idea of personal ~ Hans Urs yon Balthasar, "The Gospel as Norm and Test of All Spirituality in the Church," from Spirituality in the Church, Christian Duquoc, editor, Concilium, vol 9 (Paulist, 1965), p. 7. 6 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 growth. There is no spirituality for an animal, nor do we ever speak of God's spirituality.~ What distinguishes the human condition is growth beyond self, self-transcendence. There is a restlessness which is a constant striving to move from the less~ authentic to the more authentic. This is why spirituality gravitates so readily to psychology, and it is precisely the point at which the greatest care must be exercised not to confuse the two.7 Finally, as indicated earlier, a workable definition must contain markers: terms in the definition which orient the material by distinguishing what is important from what is unimportant. Without some means of making distinc-tions the material of spirituality presents an undivided sameness inimical to study. Markers differentiate that material; and this, in turn, facilitates ques-tions for analysis. The particular selection of markers will necessarily be somewhat arbi.t.rary. Here I have chosen to view any spirituality primarily from the standpoint of expressions of the authentic and expressions of the inauthentic. A spiri'tuality, then, is the expression ofa dialecticalpersonal growth from the inauthentic to the authentic. There are three ingredients in the definition: expression, dialectical personal growth, and authentic-inauthentic. Expres-sion need not be clarified further. Growth has been called dialectical to underscore the fact that all spiritual growth is a simultaneous "yes" to one thing and a "no" to something else. Each step toward the authentic demands a corresponding rejection of the inauthentic.8 The Gospel of Luke manifests this dia.lectical character in its expression of the beatitudes: every benediction has its corresponding curse (Lk 6:20-26). Inauthentic and authentic are the markers referred to above. The total authenticity of a human person would be his or her complete self, transcendence in love. Conversely, total inauthenticity would be complete self-alienation, self-centeredness in hate. For our purposes, however, expres-sions of the authentic and inauthentic will normally be but partial representa-tions of these absolute states. In a famous line from the Imitation of Christ, for example, compunction is an expression of the authentic while vain knowledge is an expression of the inauthentic;9 they are signposts along the ~ Process theologians may take exception to this. In a di-polar notion of God one might be able to speak of God's spirituality: "God in his consequent aspect receives into himself that which occurs in the world, so that it becomes the occasion for newer and richer, as well as better~ concretions in the ongoing movement of divine activity," W. Norman Pittenger, "Process Thought: A Contem-porary Trend in Theology," Process Theology, Ewert H. Cousins, editor (Newman, 1971), p. 27. Even if one were to accept this position, it would be quite difficult to move from the idea of a spirituality of God to its description. ' It is very easy for spiritual direction to become psychological counseling. Of course, sometimes this is desirable because it is counseling which is needed, but often we slide into a counseling framework simply because it seems to have more substance than spiritual direction. This again reveals the necessity of definition and methodology proper to spirituality. a Lonergan views this as a fundamental characteristic of religious development. See Method, p. II0. Study of Spirituality / 7 way. Furthermore, specific expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic are not always univocal, even within the sam, e spirituality. In the Cloud of Unknowing, meditation on Christ's passion can be either an expression of the authentic or the inauthentic, depending on the stage of one's contemplative development.'° Questions for Analysis In an age as hermeneutically conscious as our own, it need not be stressed that a pre~'equisite for the analysis of any spirituality is some understanding of its historical-cultural context. To be unaware, for instance, that the end of the Roman persecutions coincided with the great movement to the desert in the fourth century would be to miss the opportunity for many insights into the roots of desert spirituality. The historical-cultural context is available for anyone who wishes to take the time to do someresearch. Our project assumes that this research can and will be done, but we are concerned here with something more general. Questions for analysis must serve two purposes. They must provide a means of organizing the material of a spirituality in such a way that the material can be more easily assimilated. In other words, they must teach us how to read and. how to retain what we read more effectively. The other pur-pose is that of comparison and contrast. The questions for analysis must be such that they canbe asked more or less equally of any spirituality. It is only by putting the same questions to many different bodies of material that we can begin, the,process o.f comparing similarities and contrasting differences which will lead us to deeper understanding. The first question flows immediately from the terms of the definition: what.are the expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic? An effective way to begin answering this question is to make a list. Reading through the SpiritualExercises of St. Ignatius, for instance, we would observe that shame and confusion, sorrow, tears, anguish, intimate knowledge, poverty, humility and gratitudeI' are but some of the expressions of the authentic; and we could do the same for expressions of the inauthentic. Making a list is a good way to begin because it directs us to the text with a simple and specific objective: how does the spirituality express what it values and what it rejects? An exhaustive 9 "I would rather feel compunction of heart for my sins than merely know the definition of com-punction," Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, edited with an introduction by Harold C. Gardiner (Image, 1955), Book I, chapter 1. ,o The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous fourteenth-century Englishman, edited and in-troduced by William Johnston (Image, 1973), chapter vii. , '~ Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, translation by Louis J. Puhl (Newman, 1954). Shame and confusion, sorrow, tears and anguish are from the First Exercise of the First Week, #48; intimate knowledge of Christ is from the First Comtemplation of the Second Week, #104; poverty and humility are from the Two Standards, #147; and gratitude isffrom the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God, #233. 8'/Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 list is rarely possible or even desirable, but we do want to be certain that we ini-tiate our analysis by carefully gathering all of the pertinent expressions. A list gives us the concrete expressions from which to work, but it is too one-dimensional to be of more than limited value. By itself a list cannot single out those expressions which are of special importance, nor can it fit them into a pattern of meaning. What we lack is an organiz.ing form'2 which could give the expressions depth and a relationship to one another. In the SpiritualExer-cises an excellent illustration of such a form is the image of the Two Stand-ards: the Kingdom of Christ verstis the Kingdom of SatanI' ~ The Kingdom of Christ gives depth and relationship to t.he expressions of the authentic while the Kingdom of Satan does the ~ame for the inauthentic. Intimate knowledge, poverty, humility, gratitude and the like contribute definite nuances to the understanding of the nature of these two kingdoms; and the expressions, in turn, receive their full meaning only in relationship to the complete image. The Two Standards are the unifying image for expressions in Ignatian spirituality. While Ignatius himself gives the organizing form of the Two Standards, it is often necessary to uncover a form which is not itself one of the particular images used in a given text. Such would be thecase in the Life'ofAntony by Athanasius. ~4 Clearly the text does not lack for images, but the best organizing form is rather the structure which Athanasius employs to develop his story: a series of four withdrawals by Antony, each one into greater solitude. The authgr uses these withdrawals to highlight periods of development in Antony's life, and each period unifies a corresponding set of expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic. In the first withdrawal Antony left his home to li~,e on the outskirts of the village with an older ascetic. The expressions of the authentig and the inauthentic are characteristic of a "novitiate" period: zeal, faith, desire for purity of heart, imitation 6f the older ascetic were set in opposition to anxiety over f~mily, money, fame, difficulties of asceticism and sexuality. In the second withdrawal, closing himself into a tomb,, the chief ex- '~ The identification of basic units (expr~essions of the authentic and the inauthentic) and the discovery of the forms by which these expressions are related have a slight resemblance to struc-turalism. However, a double caution is in order. In i!s extreme sense structuralism can become an ideology in which all we can know about a system are its basic units and their associations; further meaning would be denied. In a less ideological sense structuralism is a method of inquiry which can be more friendly to theology and spirituality, but even here--as the term can be 'very am-biguous- l wish to make clear that my own use is limited to exactly what has been described in the text. '~ Spiritual Exercises, #13~,- 148. ~' St. Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, was probably the author of the Life ofA ntony shortly after the hermit's death in 356. Antony represented a prototype .for the desert fathers, and, whatever the historical accuracy of the Life, it c~ertainly had a profound influence" on desert spiritqality. This important work is once again available in English: Athanasius: The Life of St. AntOny and the Letter to Marcellinius, translation and introduction by Robert C. Gregg, preface~ by William A. CIcbsh (Paulist, 1980~ Study of Spirituality p~'essions of the inauthentic are wild imaginings, terror and the temptation to flight, while defiance of the demons, perseverance and faith are expressio ~ns of the authentic. From the tomb Antony went to live in an abandoned fort in the desert where he was besieged by the demons. A hint of weariness from the clamor of the demons is the only expression of the inauthentic while expres-sions of the authentic reflect Antony's growing strength: confidence, utter equilibrium, purity of soul, and so forth. Antony's final withdrawal was to the "inner mountain" which is described in paradisal terms. The expression of the inauthentic most characteristic of this period is pride in the power God has given him; while the expressions of the authentic are the manifestations of the power of the Spirit working through Antony: overpowering the demons, curing the sick, instructing the monks and confiz lnding the heretics.~ It is not always possibly to find a single form o of material together. One rather difficult text is tt fine analysis of this spiritual classic, Bernard SI truths which they [the four books of the Imitati~ ranged according to a precise play, a rational s~ dialectic."~6 Much of the difficulty is due to the sl of thoughts useful to the spiritual life, possibly There is a variety of equal themes, and so no sine could give unity to all the expressions. The most o is to discover, or invent, several forms which toge into useful patterns. As a corollary to the organizing forms we can i of the authentic and the inauthentic for stages of s life is a type of growth but in many well-devei specified stages,'7 and the key for detecting thesl sions of the authentic and the inauthentic. When ~ authentic becomes an expression of the inauthen growth has been crossed. An example of this ha~ i the Cloud of Unknowing: meditation on Christi! the authentic for the beginner but just the oppt vanced in the spirit of contemplation. Sometimes 'image which will tie a body Imitation of Christ. In his ~aapen has noted that "the n] enfold have not been ar-ructure, or a psychological yle of the work: a collection by more than one author. le form can be found which ne can do in such a situation ther best gather the material dso examine the expressions !iritual growth. All spiritual 9ed spiritualities there are ~ stages lies with the expres-particular expression of the tic, then a stage of spiritual dready been furnished from passion is an expression of ~site for someone more ad-the stages of growth will be '~ The four journeys: leaving his home to live on the outskirts of a village (Life of Antony, c. 4); living in the tomb (Ibid, c. 8); from tl~e tomb to the abandoned fort (Ibid, cc. 11-12); and the withdrawal to the inner mountain (Ibid, cc. 49-51). ,6 Bernard Spaapen, "A New Look at an Old Classic," from Imitating Christ, E. Malatesta, editor, Religious Experience Series, vol. 5 (Abbey Press, 1974). This work is a translation from the French Dictionary of Spirituality. " Frequently a spirituality will describe the break between an unreflective Christian life and the desire to lead a more spiritual life. Another break occurs later when the Christian leaves the period characterized by struggle and "spiritual achievement" and moves more into a climate of sur-render and "spiritual giftedness." The classical distinctions have been the three ways: purgative, illuminative, and unitive. 10 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 the structure giving unity to the material, but this will not always be the case. The second question for analysis comes from the idea of personal growth. A ~pirituality which reaches the state of expression does not appear out of the vacuum, but it is the maturation of much personal experience. One or many have traveled a similar dialectical journey from the inauthentic to the authen-tic and from this experience comes a wealth of valuable insight. This insight, which embodies both the techniques and the lived experience of the journey, can be called wisdom, and it is the ob)ect of the second question: what is the wisdom of a particular spirituality? To discover the wisdom of'a particular spirituality we must look at its teaching. In what special manner does a spirituality propbse.to find God, and what experience flows from its techniques of encounter? In the Life of Antony, for example, wisdom comes especially from the experience of solitude, x~hich for the desert fathers meant struggle with demons representing every imaginable thought or feeling. The wisdom of the Life of Antony is expressed in a long speech by the hermit to a group of other hermits assembled for the occasion.'8 This speech, often called a speech on discernment, is a description of what to expect in solitude and how to deal with whatever (or whomever) occurred. The wisdom of the desert employs some of the most colorful and varied imagery in the history of spirituality, but it is always characterized by the detection and diminishment of interior turmoil in order to find and preserve apatheia.'9 A very different example, though with striking parallels, is fouhd in the wisdom of St. Ignatius. The Spiritual Exercises express wisd6m not in speeches but in appendices: rules for thinking with the Church, rules for eating, rules for discernment, and so on. Ignatian wisdom, however, is not contained equally in all these rules but in one special and famous set: the rules for the discernment of spirits.2° As mentioned above, the primary image of lgnatian spirituality is the Two Standards, and the go~.l is to serve with Christ who wishes to spread his Kingdom and defeat the Kingdom of Satan. Now these kingdoms will enjoy victory or suffer defe~t as a result of our particular choices. However, the kingdoms are distinguished from each other less by the ,8 Life of Antony, cc. 16-43. ,9 Apatheia was the ascetical goal of the desert fathers. It was not apathy but rather a state of in-terior calm and recollection. Athanasius described this state in the Life of Anthony: "The state of his soul was one of purity, for it was not cpnstricted by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection. Moreover, when he saw th'e crowd, he was not annoyed any more than he was elated at being embraced by so many people. He maintained utter equilibrium, like one guided by reason and steadfast in that which accords with nature" (c. 14). Perhaps the best summary of desert wisdom is contained in the writings of Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), especially in his Praktikos. This has been translated together with Chapters on Prayer and published as Praktikos: Chapters on Prayer translated and edited by John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O. (Cistercian Publication, 1970). ~o Spiritual Excercises, #313-336. Study of Spirituality object of a particular choice than by attitudes. Consequently, the disciple of Christ must differentiate between objects of possible choice according to authenticating.feelings (attitudes) or their opposites. The rules for the discern-ment of spirits, are Ignatius' wisdom for making this all important differentia-tion and decision. There is no need to multiply examples. Wisdom gets at the heart of a particular spirituality because it taps the special experience of the person or persons who have lived it. Often referred to "thoughts" in describing the struggle of solitude and to apatheia as the goal of that struggle. For Ignatius, the key word would be discernment. On the other hand, there need not be but one wisdom for every spirituality. Moving beyond the Spiritual Exercises one could speak also of a wisdom of obedience in Ignatius. The 0b)ective~is to identify the central insights of a spirituality; insights, however, that flow from matured experience. Finally, we.should underline the fact that questions for analysis--expres-sions and wisdom--are effective for focusing and organizing the material, but they certainly do not exhaust its riches. In addition to the fact that no set of questions can ever draw everything from the material, a spirituality will always retain a certain opacity regardless of how carefully it is scrutinized; ~and we will always find ourselx~es returning to the source for clarification, new insight, and personal edification. However, at some point in time we must determine that an analysis is finished, both in the number of questions asked and in the depth of the answers. It is the suggestion of this article that the two questions given above will focus and organize the material sufficiently to enable us to turn to the wider arena of comparison and contrast of different spiritualities. Questions for Comparison and Contrast Bernard Lonergan has described method as"a normative pattern of recur-rent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results.''2' What we have thus far isnot a complete method but its foundation. Questions for analysis provide a normative pattern of operat!ons which can be applied to. any number of particular spiritualities, but only continued application fol-lowed by comparison and contrast will yield cumulative and progressive results. Now the general matter for any comparison and contrast would normally be the exprbssions of the authentic and the inauthentic, the images and forms which give them unity, and the expressions of wisdom. From this one could proceed in any number of ways depending only on time, interest, and avail-ability of sources. Let us suppose, for example, that someone was interested in the general topic of prayer and that he or she had some familiarity with both 2, Lonergan, Method, p. 4. 12 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 the Cloud of Unknowing and the works of John of the Cross. Even an exami-nation'of the titles would reveal that "cloud" and "night" are expressions of the authentic for both. A study of the similarities and differences between the Cloud's understanding of "cloud" and John of the Cross's understanding of "night" might prove to be a straightforward and interesting investigation into the meaning of apophatic prayer.2' Ordinarily the work of comparison and contrast will draw heavily on our ability to understand the relative hist6rical-cultural contexts. This can be given some direction, however, if we keep in mind two principles for compari-son. The first is that a spirituality cannot help but reflect certain cosmological perspectives. As a result we should always ask: what understandings of space and time shape the relationship between self, world, and God for a particular spirituality? For example, the Life of Antony used a simple cosmological framework which placed a person on top of the world but under two concen-tric hemispheres: the air, which was the abode of the demons, and the sky, which was heaven and the abode of God. Thus, to go to God one had to leave the world and ascend through the air, and this meant battles with the demons. Today we experience ourselves through a cosmology which is couched in evolutionary and psychological terms. Instead of place, time is the important parameter: it is no longer "up" and "down" which correspond to the authen-tic and the inauthentic but "transformation" and "regression." The discovery and investigations of the unconscious have forged a new vocabulary for our descriptions of evil, human growth, and the nature of freedom. The unconscious has also given us a new locus for expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic. The cosmology of the day--be it Antony's, our own, or any other--will not only shape the expressions of spirituality but it will also locate those expressions in accordance with its perception of the relationship in time and space of self, world, and God. ~: The cosmological questions can be made specific. The question, "'Where is Christ?" yields interesting resolts when asked of St. Basil the Great (fourth century) and St. Ignatius (sixteenth century). Each has a passage about Christ the King and his call to men and women to follow him, but note the different images for describing where Christ is and the practical consequences for discipleship. For Basil: "Where is Christ the King? In heaven, to be sure. Thither it behooves you, soldier of Christ, to direct your course. Forget all earthly delights.''23 Ignatius, however, perceived the world as friendlier potential for the self's encounter with God: "Consider Christ our Lord, standing in a lowly place in a great plain about the region of Jerusalem . ,,2, And instead of forgetting the world in order to go to Christ in heaven, Ignatius See note 28 below. Basil, "An Introduction to the Ascetical Life," From St. Basic, Ascetical Works, TheFathers of The Church vol. 9, translated by Sister M. Monica Wagner, C.S.C. (New York, 1950), p. 9. Spiritual Exercises, #144. ¯ Study of Spirituafity / 13 encourages people to follow a Christ who "sends them throughout the whole world to spread his sacred doctrine among all men, no matter what their state or condition.''25 We can do similar comparisons for time. "'When will Christ come?" For St. Paul and the early Christians the answer was, "Soon!" But for most of the Church's history until recently, the question of time hasn't been that impor-tant. Most Christians tended to regard the world as having a certain timeless stability. The important time was not Christ's coming in glory but the individ-ual's meeting with Christ at death. Today, however, an evolutionary con-sciousness has made time very important. When will Christ come for someone imbued with the vision of Teilhard de Chardin? He will come when the human race, now responsible for cooperating in its own evolution, will have (with God's grace) brought about the kingdom. Statements about time and place are not theological statements; they are descriptions of world views. The location of a spirituality within its particular cosmological framework makes possible the comparison and contrast of similar expressions which come from widely different historical-cultural con-texts. It would be far beyond the scope of this article to attempt to outline the world views which have shaped and been shaped by western thought, but it is worth mentioning here two books which are particularly insightful: Romano Guardini's The End of the Modern World and John Dunne's A Search for God in Time andMemory.~6 Guardini has mapped out four cosmologies fun-damental to the history of western thought: classical, medieval, modern, and post-modern. If we take into account that much has occurred which might further clarify his analysis of the present (post-modern) period, this work is very useful. Dunne has given the study of world views an interesting refine-ment by pointing to the different~ ways in which autobiographies have been written: a story of deeds (classical), a gamut of experience (Augustine), a lad-der of experience (medieval), and a story of appropriation (modern and con-temporary). This does not do justice to the nuances given by Dunne, but the distinctions he introduces are invaluable for appreciating the genres under which spiritual growth has been described. A second principle for comparison and contrast is that there exist specifi-cally different, yet equally valid, spiritualities within the Church. In other words, spiritualities differ not only because of various historical-cultural backgrounds, but they also differ according to type. Of course, a rigid and exclusive classification would be impossible and undesirable, but the varied emphases of many spiritualities suggest that we might discover several models which would help us to better understand similarities and differences. ~ lbid, #145. 2~ John Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (Macmillian, 1967). Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, edited with an introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, translated by Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke (Sheed and Ward, 1956). "14 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 To develop models it Js necessary to select criteria for differentiation. This selection, always arbitrary, establishes the parameters by which the models are distinguished. Here the criteria will be "attitudes" toward two potential loci for expressions of the authentic: the world--including human society and institution--and history--especially change and conversion. We can deter-mine the models by asking this question: does a spirituality view the world and/or history as a positive locus for expressions of the authentic?2' If a spirituality is not positive toward either we will call it apophatic; if it is positive toward both we will call it apostolic; if it is positive toward the world but not toward history we will call it city-ofrGod; and if it is positive toward history but not toward the world we will call it prophetic. At one extreme, answering "no" to both the world and to history, are the apophatic'8 spiritualities. These are the mystical spiritualities known to us today primarily through the Cloud of Unknowing, John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton. For an apophatic spirituality, the chief expression of the authentic is negation of the specific image: one goes toGod through unknow-ing or through darkness. It should be stressed, however, that the apophatic spiritualities do not necessarily hold that the world is evil or that history is meaningless; one need only think of the concern and involvement of Thomas Merton. The apophatic spiritualities emphasize a wisdom of contemplation through negation, and the goal of that contemplation is the love and knowledge of God. A curiosity of apophatic prayer is that its central insight-negation- should never be practiced by a beginner. Both the Cloud and John of the Cross counsel that apophatic prayer is not for everyone, that beginners should definitely rely on the media.ting image, and that there are signs by which one can know if he or she is called to this form of prayer.'9 At the other extreme, answering "yes" to both world and history, are the apostolic spiritualities. An apostolic spirituality views the world and history as a locus for self-transformation, Its expressions can vary greatly. Ignatius was concerned with "the defense and propagation of the faith and the progress of souls.''3° For Ignatius holiness was found through an involvement with the 27 The idea for this came to me from reading John Macquarrie, Christian Hope (Seabury, 1978). In a s~ction called, "A Typology of Interpretations" (pp.86-88), Macquarrie works out four types of Christian hope: individual vs. social, this-worldly vs. other-worldly expectations, evolutionary vs. revolutionary, and realized vs. future. 2a Apophatic: in speaking of God one can either affirm certain truths (kataphatic theology) or, realizing that God is beyond any conceptualization, one can speak o'f him by negation (apophatic theology). The apophatic mystics are those whose way the the way of unknowing. This can be found to a high degree in many mystical writers, and the chief source for ~their apophatic vocabulary is the work of a mysterious Syrian monk of the t:ifth or sixth century who has been known through the ages as Dionysius the Areopagite or pseudo-Dionysius. 29 Cloud of Unknowing, c. 75. John of the Cross~ Ascent of Mount Carmel, translated, edited, and introduced by E. Allison Peers (Image, 1958) Book I1, c. xiii, pp. 219-223. ~0 Ignatius Loyola, The Formula of the Institute, as contained in the papal bull, Exposcit debitum Study of Spirituality world in an attempt to spread the kingdom. Ignatius' successor, Father Pedro Arrupe, wants "the conversion of the individual" but he also wants to "transform the world into a fit habitation for justice and humanity.''3' It is important to distinguish apostolic work from apostolic spirituality as that model is being described here. Everyone is called in some way to the apostolate, but not everyone seeks God primarily through involvement with the world and the transformation of its history. When a particular spirituality adopts the vocabulary of involvement and transformation in its expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic and in its statement of wisdom, then it exem-plifies the essential marks of the apostolic model. A city-of-Godspirituality, saying "yes" to the world and "no" to history, is characterized by the location of expressions of the authentic in one special place in the world to the exclusion of others. This place, which then becomes a reflection of the kingdom of God, could be a monastery, the home, or even the individual human heart. St. Benedict summarized his wisdom in the form of a Rule: how to live the kingdom together in the monastery. The Imitation of Christ counsels flight to the safety of our own hearts where "you will see the kingdom of God come into your soul.''32 A city-of-God spirituality has probably been the norm for most Christians throughout history, and it is also a characteristic of every other type of spirituality, even if not the primary one. Whenever we focus on a particular community or on our own heart we are highlighting the city-of-God dimension of our spiritual lives, The prophetic spirituality finds expressions of the authentic in .history but not in the world. The Old Testament prophet offered interpretations of history as well as judgments. The radical poverty of St. Francis of Assisi was a judgment of the abuse of material wealth and it was a sign of hope in a God who would fulfill all promises. Prophetic spirituality is often characterized.by living one or more of the gospel values to an extreme: Francis and poverty, the virgins and ascetics living a life of celibacy while awaiting martyrdom in the early Church, or the gospel-motivated civil disobedience in our own times. While prophetic spirituality often contains the dimension of a "challenge" it certainly need not be a gloomy spirituality--as witnessed by the joy of St. Francis. Once again, we must not adhere to these models too rigorously. The ex-amples given above illustrated the tendencies of their respective models to a marked degree; but most spiritualities, includ!ng those mentioned, are mix-of July 21, 1550. Translation from Th~ Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, translated and edited by George Ganss (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), p. 66. ~ Pedro Arrupe, "The Challenge of the World and the Mission of the Society," opening address to the Thirty-Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. Published in .4 Planet to Heal translated with notes by John Harriott (Ignatian Center of Spirituality, Rome, 1975), p. 312. ~ Imitation of Christ, Book 11, c. 1. 16 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 tures of all four, with perhaps one or more predominating. With this caution. in mind we could make use of the models to organize and clarify the dif-ferences and similarities we observe among the various spiritualities. For ex-ample, both Ignatius of Loyola and John of the Cross were sixteenth-century Spanish saints who shared the same geography and culture. The spiritualities of both these men are familiar enough to us that we would not be surprised to find a number of significant differences in spite of similar backgrounds. We know that consolation is an important part of the spirituality of Ignatius: it is an expression of the authentic, something to be sought in prayer. For John of the Cross, on the other hand, consolation in prayer was often a sign of the in-authentic: the contemplative advancing in prayer should neither seek consola-tion nor trust it when it came.~3 This apparent contradiction is resolved when we remember that we are dealing with two very different models of spiritual-ity. John, the apophatic mystic who shuns specific images so as to approach God in the "night," is consistent within his model when he rejects consola-tions. Ignatius, the apostolic man who finds God in the world through specific choices, is consistent in asking to have these choices confirmed through con-solation. Apophatic and apostolic are different paths of spiritual growth. Towards Evaluation Ultimately evaluation is the responsibility of the Church, and over the cen-turies she has generally given a wide latitude to the expressions claiming to be of the Spirit. As long as a spirituality refrained from making its charism nor-mative for all Christians, maintained a balanced view of theology and human nature, and did not habitually defy the directions of the hierarchy, the Church has been at least tolerant if not actively supportive. Ronaid Knox has catalogued a number of exotic spiritual movements beginning with the Corin-thian community, and his very thorough work is an encyclopedia of spiritual aberrations together with the appropriate judgment of the Church.3' Negative criteria are much easier to establish than positive, and the records of the Holy Office detail specific distortions to be avoided rather than positive principles on which to build. But, then, most great spiritual leaders did not consult the Vatican archives in order to construct a charism; they responded to the work of the Spirit and left the editing to others. Nonetheless~ it is possible to point out three indicators of a good spirituality: good theology, good sense, and good results. Good spirituality must flow out of the Christian communi-ty's understanding of the gospel and hence must exhibit good theology. Spirituality is a human movement, and so good spirituality should reflect a keen sensitivity to the human condition--good sense. Finally, a good spirituality will produce good results because it will be the work of the Holy Spirit-- "Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty" (Jn 15:5). John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, cc. 4, 7. Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford University Press, 1961). Study of Spirituality / 17 Good theology and good sense are not abstract principles which can be ap-plied unerringly to any new situation. In most cases they are the culmination of a long process of give and take between the Church and the proponents of a new spirituality. On the one side there must be an increasingly sympathetic understanding of the expressions of the new spirituality; on the other, there must be a growing clarification of the meanings of those expressions. Let us take St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans as an example. The cry for the vita apostolica--a return to the life of the gospels in penance, poverty, and preaching--did not appear suddenly in 1206 when Francis over-came his fear of leprosy. The twelfth century had already witnessed a large nu.mber of spiritual movements toward the vita apostolica, and many of these movements were in tension with the Church. A change in the socio-economic climate, the abuses of wealth especially among the clergy, and the Church's own reforms of the eleventh century had brought about a hunger for new ways of expressing the spiritual aspirations of those who did not feel called to the cloistered life of the monastery. The Cathars,3~ the Humiliati,~6 and the Waldensians~' were some of the better known movements which answered to this hunger. Almost inevitably there was resistance from the official Church. If we leave aside misunderstandings and personal animosities, this resistance was usually on theological and pastoral grounds. Theologically, the new movements presented opinions ranging from the outright dualism of the Cathars tothe denial of the validity of a sacrament administered by a corrupt priest. Such theological opinions, which touched the sacramental nature of the Church, could not be tolerated. Pastorally, the issue was normally over the right to preach. Did a person who took the gospel seriously and lived poorly have the right to preach without the permission of the local clergy or bishops? Both the Waldensians and the Humiliati approached Rome for approval but were rebuffed on the question of preaching. No one denied the need for greater poverty, and the pope himself called ~' The Cathars, also known as Albigensians, were especially active in southern France from the middle of the twelfth century. They were virtually a distinct religion with their own organization of dioceses. Theologically they were influenced by the Bogomils of Bulgaria whose theology can be traced back to a Manichean dualism. ~6 The Waldensians were an evangelical movement founded by Valdes, a merchant from Lyons~ They attempted to remain orthodox but were forbidden to preach at the time of the Third Lateran Council (I 179). ~' The Humiliati appeared in northern Italy during the second part of the twelfth century. They were forbidden to preach in 1179 but were eventually reconciled to the Church by Innocent III in 1201. He gave them a threefold rule which regulated the men as canons regular, the women as religious, and a group of married people as a type of third order. For an interesting treatment of the dealings of Innocent Ill with the Humiliati see Brenda Bolton, "Innocent lll's Treatment of the Humiliati", from Popular Belief and Practice, edited by G.J. Cuming and Derek Baker (Cambridge University Press, 1972). 18 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 the bishops and clergy to task for their failure to preach the gospel;38 it was a c/uestion of finding the right form. What took place in the twelfth century was a twofold development whereby the new expressions of spirituality were being clarified against the theological-pastoral demands of the Church; and the Church was learning to listen with more sympathy to the different spiritual needs of her people. By the end of the century the time was ripe for Francis and Dominic. Of course, the phenomenon of St. Francis was not just the inevitable out-come of an historical development. It was also the special work of God's grace in a man who was both generous enough to respond to the call for a life of radical poverty and humble enough to listen to the voice of the Church. Nonetheless, that long century of development points to the kind of prepara-tion and hard work out of which true spiritual insight is born. Nor did Innocent lII's approval of Francis in 1209 complete the process. As numbers increased problems did also. Good sense and a sound understanding of human nature called for certain modifications. More structure and organiza-tion were needed which could channel the charism without destroying it. Pro-vinces were established, local houses and superiors appointed and a year's novitiate was required.39 If we shift back into our own century we realize that the Church is con-stantly faced with new expressions of spirituality arising from the legitimate aspirations of a people hungering for God. These new movements need ~to be examined in the light of good theology and good sense, and they need to receive the sympathetic understanding of the Church. A serious study of spirituality can make a genuine contribution to this endeavor. First of all, a new spirituality needs to identify, and then clarify its expres-sions. This is the work of analysis described earlier. What are the expressions of the authentic and the inauthentic and the forms which organize them? What is its wisdom? Only after these questions are carefully answered does theological evaluation become possible. When we know the expressions of the spirituality and their relationship to one another, then we know its theological stance and we can judge it. The analysis will also reveal the spirituality's perspective on human nature, its understanding of the human condition. While great care must be exercised here, it would violate good sense to have a ,8 In his treatment of the twelfth century, M.-D. Chenu wrote: "Peter the Chanter had denounced the 'most dreadful silence' (pessima taciturnitas) of the clergy, and both Peter and Innocent Ill had invoked a phrase from Isaiah (56:10) to repudiate "these muted dogs who don't have it in them to bark," M.-D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century." Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, selected, edited, and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester L. Little. preface by I~tienne Gilson. (University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 244. ~9 For a discussion of these developments, see Cajetan Esser, Origins of the Franciscan Order, translated by Aedan Daly, O.F.M: and Dr. lrina Lynch (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970); see especially Chapter Ill: "First Crises and Attempts to Overcome Them." Study of Spirituality / 19 spirituality which proved to be psychologically destructive. It has unfor-tunately happened in the history of spirituality that "leaving the world" has become an occasion for hatred and destruction of the self or the body rather than a love for God?° Finally, analysis of a new spirituality will reveal its in-ternal coherence or lack thereof. This is important because personal growth demands a certain degree of unity of purpose and technique, and a spirituality which seems to move in many different directions at the same time will only provoke confusion and frustration. While this may appear to be obvious, it is not always so easy to recognize. For example, a spirituality expressed entirely in a nineteenth-century idiom might exhibit good theology and good psychology, but unless it is able to translate itself coherently into the language and forms of the twentieth century there will always be an unnecessary tension from trying to operate in a world view, a cosmology, which is no longer our own. This was one of the reasons for Vatican II's call for adaptation in religious life. In addition, a new spirituality needs to be understood externally, and this is the work of comparison and contrast. From the Church's standpoint, evaluation will be enhanced wfien a spirituality is known in relation to other spiritualities both past and present. This much goes without saying~ But such an external understanding'can also be quite useful for the spirituality itself. One of the habitual dangers for a new movement is to see itself as being unique in respo ~nding to the call of the gospels. Time and time again this has resulted in sectarianism and heresy. When a spirituality understands itself in the con-text of.history it will be better able to appreciate its uniqueness without overestimating its importance. 40 An extreme example of this might be found in the Cathars who practiced (though rarelY,) a form of suicide by starvation called endura. This occurred only after the reception of the consolamen-turn which was a conbination of baptism and Eucharist. Once the believer received the con'- solarnentum he or she was to live without any sin whatsoever. It was in fear of a relapse that some chose to end their lives as soon after consolsmentum as possible. The Treasurer As Professional Paschal Phillips, O.C.S.O. Father Phillips is a member of the monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey; Lafayette, OR 97127. Ulnder the bland title of this article lurks a contentious thesis. I hope to demonstrate that the function of the provincial treasurer is a specialized, pro-fessional calling, importantly distinct from related professions such as accounting or management, but every bit as clearly definable and of crucial importance to religious communities. The practical issue of all this appears in the damage done through failure to recognize or effectively utilize this unique function, and the concomitant misjudgments concerning training, qualification, and role recognition. Problems of Definition At the outset, the multiplicity of terms presents a hurdle with symbolic overtones. Titles such as "procurator" "econome" "cellarer" "fiscus" and "minister" vie with more commonplace old standbys like "treasurer" and "business manager" in vague but roughly interchangeable usage. The fact that such nebulous nomenclature has continued points to a lack of reflection on the common nature of the office underlying the multiple titles. Admittedly the office, which we shall for simplicity's sake henceforth call "treasurer," does admit of multiple definitions, since it changes not only from congregation to congregation, but, even more radically, with the person-alities of the incumbent and of the major superior served by the incumbent. In fact, it is usually easier to note major differences in the function which ensue from each provincial election than it is to discover a consistent pattern of divergence between the "economes" of congregation X and the "proc-urators" of congregation Y. 2O The Treasurer as Professional / 21 Besides, any congregation is free to define the duties of its various officers without having to make special reference to neat patterns convenient to the writers of magazine articles. It might follow that analyzing the functions of a treasurer is spreading nets to catch the wind, and that the function--if indeed there is a function at all--is characterized mostly by its lack of fixed form, for its utility lies largely in adapting to present circumstances and local custom. This is certainly true so far as peripheral duties such as bookkeeping go. But, under all the pluralism, a hard core of significance remains that may reward further reflection. The Core Function We live in a world of professionalism. Our first thought, in any need, is to call in a specialist. But routine can create problems. We are so used to calling in an "ologist,"'or training a member of the community to become one (which amounts to the same thing) that we hardly notice, much less reflect upon, the rather delicate set of questions that ought to proceed the call: Do we need help? Is this area important? Wti6m shall we consult? How Will the answers we get be conveyed to the community and its superiors? How will they be adapted to our needs? And how will we know that the answers have been accurately grasped, and emotionally accepted? The core-function of the provincial treasurer appears to be discovered through asking questions such as those, and providing some approaches to the answers. The function might be defined as liaison between the religious pur-pose of the community, and "the world" as organizational (business, legal, financial aspects). An example may clarify. Take the question of accounting: in many a congregation, any sentence which connects the words "treasurer" and "professional" automatically elicits the image of technical accountant. After all, the thinking goes, do we not carefully train teachers and cooks, pro-vincials and novice masters? So send the treasurer off to the university, and turn him or her into a C.P.A.! But there's the rub! We may have trained a C.P.A. who can perform a useful function-- but we have not trained a treasurer. This is not to deny that technical accounting abilities are one of the building blocks, but it does sug-gest that one building block does not make a whole structure. Reconstruct the scene from, that unfamiliar vantage point which defines the treasurer as the person who provides the liaison between the religious com-munity as religious and "the world" as organization. Obviously, accounting expertise is essential to understand and analyze much of what the organiza-tional world has to say to the religious, as it is also essential to translate some of the organizational and support problems of the community into a concise form that can be understood by speakers of "business-ese." But to stop at that point sets the stage for a familiar scenario: a treasurer who conceives his entire function to be that of expert in accounting (and he exists in a milieu where the tacit assumptions all reenforce this point of view), produces ever 22 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 more sophisticated and technically accurate quarterly reports, and submits them in all their complexity to a superior and council whose ability to under-stand them is no more sophisticated than it ever was. In practice the community ends with some poorly conceived mixture of ad hoc remedies. For example, the superior himself burns the midnight oil, hoping to assimilate the skills which enable business executives to glean their impressive insights from such corporate accounts. What has happened is that the already overburdened superior has taken on what is actually the core role of the treasurer. He is attempting to interpret to himself what the business world is saying, and the results are not always happy. The major superior has no time, really, to handle this added, and usually unwelcome chore. Neither does the training nor the personality traits which qualify a good religious superior easily blend well with the demands of business administration. Fur-ther, the superior is there~by subtly insulated from one key source of counsel, and this in an ominous way, since the change is scarcely noticed. Another common reaction of sophisticated reporting to .an unsophisti-cated audience is one of bland beffiddlement. An increasing percentage of council and community simply announce that they have no time for that sort of thing. They are sure that"such i~pressive figures must mean something, and "it is so comforting to realize that we can depend on such a skilled and dedicated treasurer." This remedy: so called, operates in the reverse of the one before. Now it is the treasurer who is isolated from needed feedback and in-telligent questioning, and the treasurer slowly begins to make decisions (or, more commonly, subconsciously to set things up so that only one decision can be made) which should have involved the superior's informed judgment from the start. The misunderstandings and confusions which result, and which so often are blamed on instincts for power or on exaggerated professionalism, are at root only the natural concomitants of poor role-definition. The above examples are painted in bold strokes. In practice any trained treasurer makes a more or less intelligent effort to translate the economic trends revealed by the analysis of the community books and by a general familiarity with the business cycle (changes of interest rates, increasing cost of government, red tape, inflation), and in those cases where this function is handled with skill and sensitivity, there is no doubt that the treasurer's office is being well served by its present incumbent. However, the main point is precisely that a function so delicate and so important should not be performed in a fit of absentmindedness. Few realize that there is the exact point where unreflective instincts, presenting a hastily conceived adaptation of the secular counterpart found in stockholders reports, as unverified assumption that "they" got the message, in short, amateurism, can effectively negate the benefits arising from professional accounting, skilled business analysis, and all the rest. The Treasurer as Professional / 23 Title and Function It should be apparent that one of our problems stems from the very title "treasurer," with its built-in connotation of "bookkeeper." Things are slightly better in more ancient Orders where the person filling this liaison role is called by some more generic title such as "procurator," but the basic prob-lem of role-definition usually remains unexamined. It is entirely possible that the "core function" we have been elaborating could be performed by someone other than the titular treasurer. Indeed, one of the problems is precisely that such is often the case, that, for lack of reflec-tion on the situation, this crucial liaison function is poorly performed by per-sons who scarcely realize they are even involved in such a role. Take, for example, these instances where some dedicated lay person now holds the office of provincial treasurer. There can be no question of these indi-viduals' technical skills, but, on the other hand, there can be little chance that they could ever deal with the community on the deep level of two-way com-munication that is needed to perform this liaison function. Yet someone must be performing that function--however imperfectly--or else the community would be left on the legendary "Cloud 9," a not unknown circumstance, sad to relate. Whoever that "someone" is, he or she is the de facto treasurer, while the holder of the titular office doubtless remains, skilled in his other profes-sion which is valid in itself but different in scope. Still, the very essence of the liaison function does d~mand an alert, in-formed, and up-to-date acquaintance with modern business and government trends. It is doubtful that any community officer except the treasurer would have the time, or even the inclination, to remain permanently qualified for the role. So if the titular treasurer is not the one functioning in the liaison role, our foregone conclusion is that sooner or later the function will be indifferently served. The essential connection between membership in the religious community and the liaison function is illumined more by practice than theory. At the risk of running one example to death we return to the quarterly accounting report. If the treasurer saw liaison as his or her primary function, the first question would still be "where can I hire a skilled .accounting technician to generate thoroughly reliable and professional figures?" Even the second question might be equally unsurprising: "Have I assured myself that I have the technical expertise to evaluate, accurately and professionally, the implications of the figures so presented?" (Already the field has broadened: the evaluation would, of necessity, include factors not strictly within the purview of an ac-countant.) It is the next step which becomes more demanding. "Exactly who are the real power-people and opinion-molders in the congregation, ~:egardless of title? And which items in this mass of data are the ones they need in order to make the decisions pertinent to th'eir role?" And, "Considering the individual personality, background training, and press of duties experienced by each such individual, what is the most effective way to present this data to him or 94 / Review for Religious, I/olume 40, 1981/1 her?" (These questions can lead to the elaboration of some very unorthodox but extremely effective financial reports!) /. It is a rare treasurer who sees the answer to the last two questions as so cen-tral as to demand more skill, more time, more thought and, if available, more training than the elaboration of the figures themselves. It is a rare community which would not be enriched and facilitated if the treasurer did just that. But it also seems next to impossible that any outsider, no matter how sagacious or trusted, could really have the indispensable in-depth understanding of the per-sonality limitations, the real power distribution (as distinguished from a table of organization), and the sundry lapses in hearing skills which form the living matrix of intramural communications. Perhaps fortunately, the liaison function is not usually looked upon as at-tached to the highest echelons of power. Yet, it is all too easy for casual observers, who already have the treasurer pigeonholed in a relatively trivial technician's role, to see any such outreach into the one indispensable function as an intrusion on the role of the superior. Such a reaction, though, is more concerned with shadow than substance: the very essence of the liaison function is to assist, not supplant, the superior in making informed decisions, and to assist, not supplant, the community in understanding the options open to them. Areas of Practical Concern The many excellent circulars on taxes, social security and related subjects coming from the offices of CMSM and LCWR provide opportunity for a quick, but necessarily very rough, check-up. These documents certainly sug-gest impending changes in life-style, deteriorating legal immunities, new norms of economic security and other important long-term adjustments of our community lives. Are these coming changes being considered in advance in every community? Do the CMSM circulars filter down at all? If not, perhaps the liaison function could improve to fill the void. Before noting more current problems, a somewhat dated example might provide historical insight. Between Leo XIII and circa 1970 there was a grow-ing rift between the papal social encyclicals and the employment policies of certain Catholic institutions. Areas of tension have run all the way from the areas of unionization through wages, pensions, and fringe benefits, to on-the-job working conditions. The business world of the United States had somehow tended to come more into line with the encyclicals than religious! Fortunately, this is largely water under the bridge; the majority of Catholic religious orders have recently shown an informed awareness of the problems of Christian employment, even in cases where lack of funds has made it very difficult to know how to respond. But it did take a long time, in some cases a scandalously long time. And the evident surprise which has overtaken more than one provincial administration when the "dear, dedicated lay-teachers" or the "sweet smiling nurses" hit the picket lines, would argue some degree of The Treasurer as Professional / 25 failure in their early-warning system. It is hard to imagine that the fumbling, uncertain--sometimes obscurant-ist- labor relations poli~ie~ ~l:iich charaCteriZed churchly institutions before 1970 would not have been improved if there had been in each congregation one person who was consciously aware of his or her duty to become fully in-formed concerning these trends, and to communicate them to a congregation which was itself aware of having appointed him to such a post-- and respected his function. In short, if each community had possessed a treasurer who was expected to perform the core-function of that office, and trained t.o do it, and if each such treasurer had been left enough time from routine mechanical ac-counting chores to function thus, the whole tale would have been quite dif-ferent. In the absence of that function filled, too often surprise and misinfor-mation proved a poor substitute for expertise at the bargaining table, and in the delicate reestablishment of truly Christian relationships afterward. Even though the labor relations example can be classified as historical in most communities (not all!), it still cannot be written off. For example, the presence of Douglas Frazier of the United Auto Workers on the Chrysler Cor-poration Board of Directors is no doubt just the tip of a large iceberg. Already in Europe workers' representatives on the top levels of management are a commonplace. Is anyone looking up from the accounting books long enough to start formulating a response, or thinking out alternatives, or evaluating present practices, or otherwise preparing for the day when the staff at Hospital A and High School B will be demanding board representation-- per-haps on the management level of the parent religious community itself? Insurance programs reveal another type of need. Too often "profes-sionalism" in the treasurer has been equivalated to the qualification requisite in some other profession simply because no one has noted that the liaison function is a separate profession in itself. We have already noted how this tends, in the accounting function, simply to distance the treasurer from the needs of the community superiors who are not businessmen and therefore can-not be reasonably expected to get maximum benefit from financial anal~,sis designed for business executives. In the related questions of insurance coverage, the problem takes a slightly different twist, although profes-sionalism (again the wrong profession!) here also ends up searching for the solutions that are most effective in the business world. In practice, we end by asking "How can we most expeditiously fit our community into insurance programs written for secular concerns?" The results are often ingenious and admirable examples of the professionalism of the insurance industry. But if someone in the communitY were professionally alert to the peculiar nature of a religious organization as such, he might well end up asking, "What are tl~e unique needs of this community, regardless of what fits the secular organization?" The answer may be quite surprising, and almost always results in unexpected savings and administrative simplification. Fortunately, the question is being asked more and more, and, as a result, some 26 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 specialized insurance policies are being written from the ground up to fit the unique needs of Catholic religious orders. But it should have happened sooner, and the questions should have been asked in many more quarters. Even today too many religious are paying insurance premiums for maternity benefits! The center-stage projects of the hour are probably energy conservation and socio-political activism via proxy voting and the like. Both problem areas carry implications of long-term and profound changes in community life-style. Both, too, are typical in their relations to the treasurer as professional. The current pattern of response is often enough characterized by aimless drift, unplanned, sporadic action, or responses evidently dominated by oen-thusiasts in the community who may or may not have a grasp of the long-run legal and economic implications. Since these areas do have overtones which are none of the treasurer's pro-fessional concern (although hopefully he or she will be deeply concerned as a committed Christian and religious), it follows that the treasurer should not be trying to direct the basic policy decisions in these affairs. But the complexity and multiple legal interlockings involved also suggest that someone--some one-- in each community has to be in a position to study the question from an overall point of view, and to do so with a trained expertise. Some individual must eventually take responsibility for gathering all available information and casting it ina form that alerts both officers and community to the implications for life-style, future economic security, hazards to legal immunities, and all the rest. Further, whereas ad hoc studies can be commendable, some one has gotto stick to the job and follow through, lest the community of 1985 be still acting on the circumstances of 1975. Both by a process of elimination and by logic, this important and irreplaceable function sooner or later (probably sooner) comes home to roost in the treasurer's office, If the incumbent is viewed as a mere technician who handles the computer printout, the community response will, in all probabil-ity," follow the too familiar pattern of muddling through very deep muddles. The rapid erosion of those tax exemptions which form.the practical economic basis of most religious communities provides another field of con-cern for the treasurer as professional liaison officer. Few communities have ever even done any daydreaming, much less planning, about the impact of various all,too-probable changes in the. tax laws. The tendency is to cling mutely and hopefully to the leaky ship. Thisis a wise procedure so faras day-to- day operations are concerned. But some one somewhere in the community should be monitoring, injecting caution into long-range plans, alerting superiors and community to the dangerous side effects of this or that policy, and noting, at least in passing, such unexamined drifts as the slow tendency of both tax courts and local officials to forget the tacit but once universal assumption that religious communities are families (for example: the recent The Treasurer as Professional / 27 tendency to raise zoning problems about sisters living together in a convent situated in a zone for single families; the erosion of the rights of superiors to make decisions for dying, unconscious, or elderly confused members of the community; difficulties with state officials who insist on nursing-home regulations instead of family rules for convents caring for a few elderly sisters, and so on. It is all of a pattern: we are being redefined as "strangers" -- and no one seems to notice). Unfortunately, the personality who gets maximum satisfaction out of the tidy details of bookkeeping is only rarely the same as the one who can perceive social or economic change from afar off. The rare exceptions are indeed pearls of great price. But the core-function is impossible, even for the pearls, if the only training they receive and the only role expectation they encounter are directed exclusively toward the routine of day-to-day administration. Conclusion In the twelfth chapter of Romans, St. Paul surprisingly lists "administra-tion" among the gifts of the Spirit. Indeed, he lists it just after prophecy and before teaching, preaching and almsgiving. It would be ridiculous to apply his thought literally to any specific church functionary, treasurers included--no doubt he had wider nets to spread. But Paul does thereby warn us not to trivialize the administrative functions in the Church into routine mechanics and technological computer-feeding. Faith, judgment, and spiritual insight are necessary, and the community which restricts its gifts of time, training, and trust to major superiors, novice masters, and theology faculties may be quenching the Spirit in a vital area of action. Reflection on the real core-function of the treasurer may lead in most cases not only to a deeper appreciation, of that office, but t9 some understanding of the damnable frustrations connected thereto. Hopefully such reflection could also lead to a major review of the qualifications for the office, along with adjustments in the organizational and psychological matrix which is required for its effective fulfillment. Admittedly there is no place where anyone can go for training in this most delicate function (the author is hatching a plot in this regard!), but probably such training is little needed at least at first. The first Step is to identify who, if anyone, performs the liaison function in the community and then to recognize that function as needed, legitimate, and welcome. Much else will follow naturally. The Eucharist, Priesthood, and Renewal Neil J. Draves-A rpaia Father Draves-Arpaia is a priest attached to Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish. The mailing address is: P.O. Box 160; Scottsdale, AZ 85252. Priesthood is not intrinsically linked to celebration. It is first, and ultimate-ly, united with self-giving, and therefore, sacrifice. And since the sacrifice of-fered by Christians at Eucharist is the victory of Christ which has brought us salvation, it is impossible, once we have grasped the depth of meaning and the redemptive grace of the eucharistic sacrifice, to be any other way than "celebrative." Those who would reduce the Mass to sober ritual, executed with rubrical precision and stone-faced devotion, or those who would see it as a moment for "religious merriment" have moved awfiy, in either direction, from the core mystery that the eucharistic celebration is. For me, the amuse-ment of one group and the solemn piety of the other are both suspect, and neither adequately speak or witness to priesthood to being a priestlypeople. What then might we look for? 1 believe it is necessary to move away from speaking on the Mass for a moment and concentrate on the daily life of God's people. Self-giving, self-forgetting love, sacrifice (whichever term we use) once placed within Christianity must be evaluated in light of the Cross. The eucharistic sacrifice then has "cruciform" implications, and we must look to a cross section of responses and attitudes that come forth from God's people in Christ. Priesthood is a visible sign in our midst of the reality of sacrifice, specifically in the life of a person who is priest, and in the believing communi-ty that would be priestly. Both must express in clear terms and behavior that something two-fold is happening in their lives: that, first, their personal rela-tionship with God is solid and radically oriented towards incarnating the first 28 The Eucharist, Priesthood, and Renewal and greatest commandment, and, then, that their human relationships are more than superficial and nice, but solid, radically oriented towards incar-nating the second and greatest commandment. How might we begin to make evaluation of these? I'm convinced that the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood must look to the life of prayer, be it expressed in formal, informal, public or private prayer-styles. There we must begin to ask if, when we go before the Lord, we are truly inter-ceding on behalf of one another. This will give us an indication of how much and to what degree we are in touch with human life and the genuine human needs of those around us. If we cannot bring ourselves to intercede, then we cannot fulfill our principle role as priests or as a priestly people. This is especially significant to the role of the priest-president at the eucharistic sacrifice, for without a continuous sense of intercession in the daily life of the priest, the eucharistic prayer will be formula-oriented and not at all like the priestly prayer of Jesus, who went to the Father on behalf of the people. Next, we must look, priests particularly, to our horizontal prayer: our beseeching and inviting the people to come forward as instruments and missionaries of love. It might not always mean using words, nor may it require lengthy "shar-ing sessions." Priestly people and ordained priests need to know more about the fact that in any "priestly" experience, the action must speak louder than the words. The religious leaders of Jesus' day, from the picture we get from the Scriptures, had words that spoke more loudly than their actions. Jesus called his disciples to the converse: action over words, both in G~d-oriented matters (faith) and people-oriented matters (charity). It's also important to keep in mind that Jesus had the least to say when he was crucified. It was at that moment alone that his Gospel call to love hung totally on pure act. What can we conclude with regard to priesthood and its place within pres-ent renewal and the Eucharist? Liturgical renewal cannot have the impact it is meant to have if it is not preempted by a priesthood that speaks clearly on the issue of "self-giving." For the decade and a half since the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was issued by the Council, the Church has heard stressed that "the liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed," and that the faithful should approach the sacred mysteries with the proper dispositions so as to cooperate with grace, for the liturgy to produce its full effect. If the Eucharist is the summit, what is the base of Christian activi-ty, if it is not self-giving? And what is the proper disposition with which we ap-proach the eucharistic celebration, if it is not a readiness and willingness to be of praise and thanksgiving, openness and intercession, primarily in attitude, secondarily in words? Priesthood, both ministerial and the priesthood of the faithful (but prin-cipally the ordained priesthood)in itself must begin to look more like the eucharistic sacrifice to the Father with the people of God assembled. It must show itself "in the flesh" to be a continuum between brokenness and wholeness, of movement from the confines of secular humanism and/or 30 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 religious elitism (clericalism, fundamentally among priests themselves and the structures in which they function) to a sharedness, not solely in matters of, priestly service to the Church, but in the basic issues of their lives, issues which are common to all lives. Priesthood, as an instrument of renewal and in its ef-fect upon the Eucharist, becomes an incarnational experience, for it takes the Word and makes it a Verbum Dei: fleshes it, clothes it, directs it towards the kingdom. The moment becomes a means for priesthood to have within it a holiness that is greater than that of the scribes and pharisees since it acts on rather than talks about the concrete issues which face the world today. So, at the base of Christian existence the priesthood is motivation for the Lord's people to join in sacrifice both at the table of the Lord and at the table which is the world. The nature of this life of self-giving requires unconditionally simple signs which speak to the people, like the signs of bread and wine. But signs of love in the daily life of the priest become obscured when humanness is over-taken by a rank-ism in the Church which, in turn, degenerates priesthood into a separate class aloof from the laity and ineffective in speaking about their life experience except in the most "lofty" sort of ways. As the liturgical renewal called for a stripping of secoridary elements which found their way into the eucharistic celebration over the centuries, the priesthood, too, if it is to be an aid in the deep renewal of the Church, must have itself stripped of non-essentials. Like the eucharistic sacrifice of the Roman Rite; priesthood must begin to face the people and become more accountable to them. It must have its distracti'ng bells quieted. Priests, one would hope, can more effectively speak the language of the people and must appreciate how much priesthood's unique gifts come from the people and must return to them. It must witness a praise of life by the priest's readiness to help the human condition in each per-son's struggle to become reconciled to God. Priesthood, to me, expresses its thanksgiving best when priests themselves show a humbleness (which active thanks implies) before God and people, plus an openness which allows for the person of the priest to be nurtured by the community he is calling into fullness. This call to intercession is a vehicle, not for doing some thing for others, but as a preparation, a prayer, to be with them. To pray on behalf of others re-quires that the priest be half of the person who is neighbor. This would mean that we move beyond any limited and debilitating spirituality which might suggest that God hears the prayers of priest over those of the laity. The truly intercessory prayer that is Christian is the one which seeks from God a "oneness" with the p,eople to whom the priest is sent, as did the prayer of Jesus, "that all may be one as you, Father, are in me, and I in you; I pray that they may be one in us." Intercessory prayer speaks of sacrifice, for it moves away from the tendency to badger God for things for ourselves and others, and, when made by a priest, requests that he, here and now, will become the response the Lord would make to those in need. It is occasion for furthering solidarity in the Body of Christ (person to person) and for furthering solidar-ity in the Body of Christ (person to person) and for allowing the Holy Spirit to The Eucharist, Priesthood, and Renewal use priesthood as sacrament (God to his people). When intercession is made by a priestly, people, they pray to be the response the Lord would make to the world's needs, and the Church then can be a "kind of sacrament of union and unity." In this way, personal needs, while neither denied nor overlooked, become secondary for the moment, and the needs of others become primary for the moment. Intercessory prayer does not give us the chance to be self-seeking, or to approach God with the long multiplication of words that would make prayer manipulative and evasive. It helps us to understand more precise-ly why Jesus r~jects this as authentic prayer and replaces it with a simple prayer of unity that begins, "Our Father in heaven." The prayer of the priest (or of a priestly people) allows for lives to blend, and there will be less cause for disparity in the p.riest's daily life and his ministry at Mass, for this sacrificial celebration at the "summit of the Church's activity" will be an authentic summation of what has been. Priesthood has everything to do with self-giving, and as it forces its way out of entrapments it becomes an event, an encounter with what is real. The same applies to the entire people of God in Christ. Events, or moments of self-giving, are times of celebration and joy for they are an exodus from slavery, from the death of isolation and self~centeredness. It is on this issue where renewal is most needed: moving people away from thinking in terms of what they "do" to how they position themselves towards God and neighbor, the way they choose to be. The vocation of priest and of the priestly people leaps away, so to speak, from cultic functions and attendance at such, to a covenant in the eucharistic sacrifice, because there have already been preliminary celebrations ofthis mutual, self-forgetting love among Christians wherever they meet between the times they gather at table in the grace and peace of God, our Father a'nd the Lord Jesus. Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua: A Friendship in Perspective Paul Conner, O.P. Father Conner teaches moral and spiritual theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His address is: St. Albert's Priory; 5890 Birch Court; Oakland, CA 94618. Catherine Benincasa's public life is more widely known than her personal life: during the six hundred years since her death, attention has been so drawn to her astonishing political impact on the Europe of her day that she is fre-quently called one of the most influential women of history. Within our own decade Catherine's enduring intellectual and spiritual authority has been heightened through her being declared one of the two women doctors of the Church. Little wonder, then, that the private life of this Sienese woman has escaped widespread notice, and yet in regard to human friendships, for instance, few life histories are as intriguing, both in scope and depth of development. I would like to focus attention in this article on the dominant human rela-tionship of her short life of 33 years, her friendship with Blessed Raymond of Capua. This relationship could be understood adequately on its own merits, but I find that it takes shape so much better within the immediate religious setting of Dominican life in which it was born and flourished. Looking to the Lord Jesus is indeed first; but after this, every religious family that seeks the essential features of its life must turn to its founder. Tempting as it might be, I do not claim that friendship is an essential feature of Dominican life, at least as friendship is ordinarily understood--though there are superb examples of it in the Dominican heritage, past and present. What is interesting though, is that Dominic did give the spirit of friendship to 32 Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua / 33 his followers, since his own life was so rich, even overflowing, in friendship, human and divine. A glance, then, at his life, together with what might be termed a theological consideration of Dominican friendship, will form a helpful con-text within which to view Catherine's and Raymond's unique friendship. St. Dominic In spite of popular misrepresentation of St. Dominic in later centuries as a stern, inquisitorial figure, conclusive, historical evidence shows him to be an exceptionally loving person. More than three hundred depositions for his canonization; his first biography written by his friend and successor, Jordan of Saxony; the Lives of the Brethren, collecting eyewitness accounts of the early years from all over the order, all tell of the many men and women in various walks of life who cherished friendships with him. Jordan speaks of Dominic's lifelong, radiant mixture of charm and reserve that attracted and held men's hearts. His best modern biographer in English, Bede Jarrett, puts it this way: "God's greatest gift to man in the order of nature, and almost the greatest even on the supernatural plane, is the gift of making and securing friends; and judged by this, Dominic was indeed blessed by God.'" The first brethren assure us that perhaps no one among them had a greater taste for fraternity than Dominic. He enjoyed friendships of varying degrees with his followers, and, like his Lord, chose from among them a "beloved disciple," John of Navarre. With the many communities of sisters that he founded, Dominic always maintained a personal bond, helping them in temporal but particularly spiritual needs, instructing them so that they absorbed his own spirit and dedication to truth. Besides 16aving us a descriptive portrait of Dominic, Blessed Cecilia kept a valuable record of his Roman ministry. She relates that during his visits to the sisters he either "exhorted them to greater spiritual ef-fort or merely sat among them, refreshing them with the charm of his conver-sation and sharing with them the experiences of the day.''2 The range of Dominic's friends outside the order was extensive. Legendary is his beautiful relationship with St. Francis. TheLives of the Brethren records that the two "became but one heart and one soul in God and enjoined their sons to foster this brotherly spirit until the end of time." Dominic befriended men and women converts; family members of people with whom he worked, such as the two daughters of Count Simon de Montfort; women recluses in Rome; bishops and cardinals--even popes. Gregory IX, in the bull of Dominic's canonization dated 1234, wrote that Domin'ic was ' Bede Jarrett, O.P., Life of St. Dominic (New York: Image Books, 1964), p. 122. 2 See M. H. Vicaire, O.P., Histoire de saint Dominique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1957), V. 11, pp. 278-279. 34 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 bound to us by ties of deep friendship, before we were raised to the pontificate; his life carried with it in our eyes certain proofs of heroic holiness . We are convinced, as also are our people, that through his prayers God may do us mercy, and that one who was our friend on earth will still in heaven hold us in no less ~ffection. Wherefore. we have determined to add his name to the number of the saints.~ The prominence of friendship in Dominic's life noticeably influenced his early followers. Numerous touching friendships among them are a matter of historical record: Jordan of Saxony and Henry of Cologne, Jordan and Diana d'Andalo, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and the two Dominicans of particular interest to this article, Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua. Theological Atmosphere A certain theological atmosphere has surrounded and, I would say, condi-tioned the development of Dominican friendships throughout the history of the order. This is as it should be, since Dominican life, like Christian life, tends toward fullness of love--primarily with the I ndwelling Divine Persons, but secondarily with all men and women whom God loves. This Christian love, or charity, is the main indicator of vitality and growth in the life of grace. Thomas Aquinas was the first theologian to penetrate into the mystery of charity by way of human experience of authentic friendship, applying his understanding to God's love for us and our love for him.4 A distinctodynamic seems to have resulted, creating the theological atmos-phere to which I refer. Dominicans have looked first to faith for conviction about divine love and friendship with God and God's friends. They have then looked to their personal experience of human friendship with God. They have found, particularly in prayer, that their experience 6f divine friendship served as corrective, if need be, and certainly as goal for their human friendships. These two experiences, the human and divine, mutually illumined and en-riched the other, each according to its competency. I would hazard a guess that a practical result of this theological atmos-phere has been that individual Dominicans were richer or poorer in friend-ships with other Dominicans depending on the age in which they lived. Let me explain. In all ages genuine Dominicans are very discriminating about their friends, owing largely, I think, to this conditioning theological atmosphere. They tend not to let natural instincts for friendship predominate, unless each particular relationship can be harmonized with divine friendship. Authentic charity as their chosen goal must determine everything in their lives. Besides rarely find-ing people enough to their natural liking in the baffling assemblage the Lord calls together in religious communities, their faith and theological orientation ~ See M. H. Vicaire, O.P., Saint Dominique, La vie apostolique Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965), p~ 90. ¯ See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, lI-ll, q. 23, a. I. Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua / 35 yield such a high ideal that natural potential alone is not enough to satisfy them. But in ages when many members of a Dominican community or province or the worldwide order are deeply one in mind and heart about essential goals and ways of Dominican life, friendships abound, even without much founda-tion in natural similarities. Close bonds are formed on the basis of similarity of thought, love for and dedication to the highest, most valuable, and most permanent of realities. On the other hand, history indicates that Dominican friendships are rare in times of wide diversity in mind, heart, and life concerning essentials of a com-mon calling. In these circumstances, with little in common by nature or by grace, profound friendships are the exception. Masculine-Feminine Complementarity in the Order of Preachers Before focusing on the profound relationship between Catherine and Raymond of Capua, let us look at an additional feature which Dominic built into the very structure of his order, namely masculine-feminine complemen-tarity. In Dominic's mind, the men and women of the order were each to con-tribute something essential to the order's goal of contemplating and spreading sacred Truth. His plan was that the nuns should pray and do penance, and the friars should preach. With this complementary power, no obstacle could pre-vent the accomplishment of goals. To assure from the beginning this complementary feature of the order, Dominic established at Prouille (southern France), in 1207, an arrangement he had known from his years as a canon regular in Spain: the "double-monastery" where friars and nuns lived side by side, each in separate convents yet joined in one common life. Later, wherever he had men, Dominic himself established the feminine counterpart: in Madrid in 1217; in Segovia, Saragossa, and Palencia in 1218; in Rome in 1221. He intended the same in Bologna with Diana d'Andalo and a group of her friends, but died before doing so. This planned masculine-feminine complementarity was emphasized throughout the order by the custom of calling the friars "Preachers" and the nuns "Sisters, Preachers, or Preacheresses.' '~ Saint Catherine, Doctor of Friendship Our context is now sufficient for turning to Catherine and Raymond, two Dominicans who personified in their friendship the masculine-feminine com-plementarity of their order. In her writings, Catherine was such a preacheress that, as noted above, she has been declared a Doctor of the Universal Church. Happily enough, she has See Paul M. Conner, O.P., Celibate Love (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1979), pp. 54-56. ~16 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 left explicit teaching on human friendship, particularly :in Chapters 41-44 of her famous Dialogue. Briefly, she sees positive temporal and eternal benefits as well as distinct dangers. An enduring benefit is that we do not lose human friendships at death. Rooted in happiness in God, the saints in heaven also share one another's hap-piness and so color their own beatific joy with "more abundant., delight and contentment." Catherine looks at friendship on earth as "consolation, sweetness, com-fort, and joy." Friends here help one another "grow in grace and virtue," and they provoke each other to honor and glorify the heavenly Father. A serious danger arises from human friendship which begins primarily as spiritual love but slowly becomes predominately sensual. To bring con-secrated persons to this end, Satan will insidiously engender a distaste for religious life, inducing them to search for pleasurable compensations in friendships. Prayer is judged in terms of self-satisfaction and is eventually dropped. "Worldly conversations" become more and more appealing and help stifle former desires for prayer, purity of spirit, suffering for God, and fraternal charity. Why does God permit this outcome? It is because he desires to purify the person from his unrecognized imperfection of loving creatures with a love mainly "passionate" or "sensible." After a friendship becomes established, the person might observe, for example, that his friend pays more attention to others than to him. He experiences disappointment and suffering. There are, then, two possible outcomes. His suffering can bring the deepened awareness that he has been seeking self in a love he thought wholly generous--the Father's hoped-for outcome. This insight will give birth to healthy "distrust of self" and to a more perfect love, charity, for all persons, including his par-ticular friend. This happy result, Catherine asserts, can occur only i.n someone "enlightened by faith," who desires "to walk in the virtues.especially prudence and discernment." A person, however, who is "ignorant in the faith" and not striving to walk in virtue, a person who "has no life," as Catherine puts it, will find the experi-ence of diminishing sensible satisfaction in prayer a great danger. He may well follow Satan's lead and give himself up to "confusion, tedium of mind and sadness of heart, abandoning any virtuous exercises." To such a person, friendship will eventually mean ruin and inner "death." Despite her medieval view and expression of things, Catherine's general teaching on spiritual friendship stands clear: it is good if the result is authentic charity, not self-love. Catherine lived her teaching, filling her short life with an amazing range of men and women friends. One among them was unique. Catherine and Raymond Born of the noble Delle Vigne family of Capua in 1330, Raymond entered Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua / ~17 the Dominican Order at age seventeen. During studies at .Bologna he excelled in scripture and patrology before obtaining the lectorate degree in sacred theology. He taught in Dominican priory schools between 1358 and 1362, and for the next four years served as spiritual director to the nuns of his order at the monastery of Montepulciano. In 1367, he was elected prior of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a principal Dominican community of men in Rome. Raymond was sent to Siena some six years later to be Regent of Studies for the young men of the order in training there. And so it was that this man of extensive education and experience came to meet Catherine in 1374, the consequence of both her praying for a confessor capable of guiding her in her evolving mystical experience, and of the order's appointment of Raymond tO investi-gate and direct her life. Catherine promised Raymond obedience, and after some time of testing her authenticity, he came quickly to understand her and her spirituality. From the beginning they admired each other, Raymond recognizing in Catherine a woman of fine intellect, intense striving for sanctity, and tireless apostolate; Catherine in Raymond, a man of intelligence, tact, breadth of understanding, and development in virtue. Upon this basis their friendship grew firm and profound. Frank admission~ in their writings and biographical events reveal that they came to know each other intimately. Catherine opened her whole soul to Raymond, who by his counsel and authority over her, helped her come to full self-knowledge. In four short years their relationship had become very important to both of them. When the pope called Raymond to Rome in 1377 to be prior again of the convent of the Minerva, Catherine's letters speak of her "torment" and the "particularly hard and painful" experience this first separation from her "intimate friend" occasioned. She asked the Lord, who had "imposed upon me a royal and very poignant trial., to strengthen me in this privation which language is so incapable of expressing.''6 Understandably, news from Raymond alwaysbrought her joy. Later correspondence gives further indications of the quality of their love. Once, when Raymond had turned back from a papal mission to Avignon because of impending ambush, Catherine affectionately reproached him. He misread her intention, and so she wrote: "You have thought that my affection for you had diminished; but you are mistaken . l love you as I love myself; and I have hoped that the goodness of God would also make your affection perfect.-7 In her numerous letters, Catherine customarily addressed Raymond as her ~ See Letter 119 quoted in Johannes Joergensen, Sainte Catherine de Sienne (Paris: Editions Gabriel Beauchesne, 1929), p. 187. 7 Josephine Butler, Catherine of Siena (London: Horace Marshall & Son: 1894), pp. 289-290. 38 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 "beloved Father," or "friend of predilection," or by the pseudonym that so pleased her, il mio Giovanni singolare--presumably in comparison to the Lord's preferential friendship for St. John. During the last months of her life, in extreme weakness and suffering, Catherine wrote a long report of her mystical experience to Raymond,. ad-dressing him lovingly over and over again: "My most sweet Father." In Letter 232 she tells him of a vision wherein she saw .herself entering by love and desire into Christ through the wound in his side, "accompanied by my Father St. Dominic; Giovanni, my friend of predilection; and all my spiritual children." It had been revealed to Catherine that the pope would send Raymond to King Charles of France and that she would die before his return. Raymond relates that she took him into privacy and "talked continuously, her large eyes shining., saying such strong and beautiful words." Often she "grasped his hand and smiled beautifully." Then, accompanying Raymond to the port of Ostia, she "knelt,., and crying, made the sign of the cross.''8 In their few years together, Raymond and Catherine collaborated in many undertakings, helping each other both naturally and supernaturally. Raymond, for example, was cured through Catherine's prayer from the plague which decimated Siena in 1374. He then joined her in relief work among the city's victims. Afterwards they went together in retreat to the tomb of St. Agnes of Montepulciano. Later in Pisa, Raymond was with Catherine in the Church of St. Christina when she received the stigmata. She prayed that the wounds be made invisible, and so it was that Raymond was the only person to bear public witness to the miracle. In 1376, the two met in Avignon in a successful attempt to persuade Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome. They traveled back to the Eternal City together, spending some time there with each other before Raymond's final departure. During their political actiQity, Catherine and Raymond turned to each other for support. She admired his political wisdom, most often following his advice which opened up new dimensions and possibilities to her. Together they promoted the crusades and prayed and worked for the reform of the Church. To counter a fear and reluctance in his character, Catherine would urge Raymond, when events demanded, to act bravely and with courage. In-deed, they cooperated in every way, so much so that one biographer con-cludes: "Catherine and Fra Raimondo were both working for the same ends, and aided each other with a mutual exchange of ideas, energies and counsels.''9 In the realm of grace, Raymond received instruction from Catherine for his spiritual progress. She was ever mindful of him in prayer, and even after See Hyacinth M. Cormier, O.P., Blessed Raymond of Capua (Boston: Marlier, Callahan & Co., 1900), p. 58. Arigo Levasti, My Servant Catherine (London: Blackfriars Publications, 1954), p. 140. Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua / 39 her death, Raymond testified that his spiritual stamina came from his con-tinued communications with Catherine in spirit. Before their final parting, Catherine wrote to Raymond: "1 beseech you to collect into your own hands any writings of mine which you may find and the book (the Dialogue); do with all of them whatever you deem is most for God's honor and glory.'''° Even in his overbusy life as Master General, Raymond worked successfully to promote Catherine's canonization, gathered and preserved all her writings, and found time to compose her first biography, a task that took him fifteen years. Dealing principally with her personal rather than public life and bringing to light the most touching incidents and her most characteristic traits, Raymond's is a surprisingly objective account. From it all later biographers have drawn their material. Conclusion Without doubt, in their close knowledge and love of one another and in the cooperative ministry they exercised, Blessed Raymond of Capua and St. Catherine of Siena exemplify the masculine-feminine complementarity of the Dominican Order. Their friendship helped each of them, as well, toward sanctity. We began by saying that Catherine's personal life could be better understood within its Dominican context. It has also become clear that through her own personification of the spirit of St. Dominic and of the charism he gave to the order, the latter itself stands better revealed. Friendship between Dominicans may not be an essential feature of Dominican life, but throughout the last seven hundred and fifty years, few friendships recorded by history surpass those between Dominicans. The order is fertile soil for close ties between persons fired by its goals and fully given to its ways. Could one not even say that the more Dominicans are Dominican, the greater the likelihood, today as in past centuries, of Dominican friend-ships? Letter 102 cited in Cormier, op. cit., p. 134. Service of the Heart: The Quest for Authentic Prayer in Judaism Michael Maher, M.S.C. Father Maher teaches Scripture at the Mater Dei Institute of Religious Education in Dublin. His last article appearin.g in these pages was "Old Testament Poetry and Religious Experience Today" (March, 1979). Father Maher's address is Woodview; Mount Merrion Ave.; Blackrock, Co. Dublin; Ireland. Everyone who has made an effort to develop a meaning,ful prayer-life knows how easy it is to allow regular prayer to become a mechanical ritual rather than a vital and elevating experience. But the danger of allowing prayer and worship to become a perfunctory recitation of hallowed formulae or a conventional performance of traditional rituals is not special to our age. The problem seems to be permanently contemporary, and Jewish religious tradi-tion seems to have been continually on guard against it. Ever since Isaiah sternly chided his co-religionists who honored the Lord with their lips while their hearts were far away (see Is 29:13), the leaders of Israel continued the prophet's task of safeguarding the truly spiritual and per-sonal character of the people's devotional life, and of ensuring that the indi-vidual's prayer should always be animated by a living faith, should always be the expression of sincere love, and should always involve deep feelings and devotion. The rabbis, and their successors right down to our times, used the word kavvanah to express the attitude of interior devotion and personal involvement that should accompany every prayer and every religious observ-ance of the devout Jew. Directing the Mind The word kavvanah which became part and parcel of Jewish devotional 40 Service of Heart / 41 literature is derived from a verb meaning to direct, and implies directing the mind to God, concentrating the attention on the prayers being recited, saying them in a spirit of devotion, and excluding thoughts and feelings that distract one from the experience of encountering God. When one prays with kavvanah one's heart and lips agree, and one's whole person is involved in the awesome act of appearing before one's Creator and Lord. This is what the Talmud' means when it says that "when a man prays he should direct his heart to heaven" (Berakoth 31 a). Another Talmud text declares that if a man does not put his mind to the performance of a religious duty his act is not a religious act at all (Rosh ha-Shanah 28b). These same ideas find another formulation in Pirke Aboth or the Sayings of the Fathers, a compendium of maxims that have been popular among all Jews since the early Christian centuries. Here the sage's warning runs as follows: "When you pray do not make your prayer mere routine, but a plea before God for mercy and grace" (PirkeAboth 2:13). To avoid the routine against which this saying warns the reader, and to minimize the danger of prayer becoming a merely mechanical recitation, the rabbis of the Talmud urged that something new should be introduced into one's prayer every day (Berakoth 29b). These and similar declarations created among the Jews an awareness of the importance of personal involvement in prayer, and by the Middle Ages the statement that prayer without kavannah or concentration is like a body without a soul or a husk without a kernel, had become proverbial. The Shulchan Aruch, a sixteenth-century law book which was regarded by all Jews up to our day as the authoritative guide to religious living, stated that "a little prayer with kavvanah is better than a lot without it." Although this declara-tion did nothing to diminish the prolixity of Jewish prayers or to shorten synagogue services--the Sabbath morning service, for example, lasting more than three hours--the spirit behind it continued to motivate pious Jews in their quest for sincerity and moral earnestness in their prayer. Just as the prophets of old rejected prayer that did not come "from the heart" (Ho 7:14; see Ps 108:1), the.rabbis o f the Talmud regarded prayer and worship as"a ser-vice of the heart" (Taanith 2a; see Sifre on Dt 10:12), and the Jews in general knew that prayer which was not a heartfelt, experience was not prayer at all. ' The word Talmud means "teaching," and is the name given to a body of writings that incor-porates what were at one time the oral traditions of Judaism. The Talmud records the laws that regulated the daily life of the Jews, as well as the general lore, legendary and otherwise, that formed popular Jewish culture. One version of the Talmud developed in Palestine from about the year 200-350 A.D., while another version was formulated in Babylon in the period between 200 and 500 A.D. The'Talmud is a commentary on the Mishnah (see next note), and like the latter is divided into six orders, which in turn are divided into tractates. Both Mishnah and Talmud are quoted according to tractate. Each tractate deals mainly with one special topic. Thus, for exam-ple, the tractate Berakoth--the word means "blessings"--deals largely with prayer matters. 42 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 Calm and Composure However, if the teachers in Israel regarded kavvanah as an indispensable quality of true prayer they realized that it was not something that can be easily acquired or retained. A text which has come down to us from about 200 A.D., and which is recorded in the Mishnah,' declares that "none may stand to say the Tefillah3 save in sober mind" (Mishnah, Berakoth 5:1). The text then goes on to say that "the pious men of old used to wait an hour before they said the Tefillah, that they~might direct their heart to God." The Talmud commen-tators on this passage remarked that one should not say the Tefillah while im-mersed in "idleness or laughter, or chatter, or frivolity or idle talk" since these are obvious impediments to the concentration and composure that should characterize one's communion with the Holy One. So important was this concentration and composure in the eyes of the rabbis that they recom-mended that one should not attempt to pray at all when one is agitated or preoccupied by distracting thoughts. They state, for example, that one should not pray on return from a journey in case one might not be able to give proper attention to prayer (Talmud, Erubin 65b). Another text which dates from the early Christian centuries declares that "One whose dead relative lies unburied before him is exempt from reciting the Shema" and the Tefillah . Because when a man sees his loss before him he is distraught" (Dt Rabbah 9:1). These recommendations convey the idea that one must control one's mind, one's imagination, and one's feelings before engaging in prayer. This teaching of the rabbis was to be expressed by Maimonides (died 1204), the great Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, who wrote as follows: Before engaging in pra'yer one must free one's heart from all preoccupation~s, and regard oneself as standing in God's presence. It is therefore proper to sit a while before praying in order to direct the heart and then pray calmly and devoutly. However, the Jewish teachers realized that the proper dispositions for prayer cannot be acquired during a few moments of concentration before ac-tually beginning to pray. The quality of one's prayer is greatly influenced by 2 The Mishnah, literally "repetition," is the name given to a collection of teachings that are attrib-uted to rabbis who lived in the period between 150 B.C. and 250 A.D. These teachings were codified by Judah the Prince in the middle of the third century A.D. However, in the compilation of~his Mishnah, Judah used earlier collections of rabbinic teachings. ~ Tefillah, meaning "prayer," is the name given to the Jewish prayer par-excellence which con-sisted of eighteen benedictions or petitions. The Tefillah was recited three times daily, in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Those who attefided the synagogue recited it there, while others recited it in private. The petitions of the Tefillah substantially go back to New Testa-ment times. ¯ The word Shema simply means "hear." It is the name given to a prayer traditionally recited in the morning and in the evening by every male Jew. The prayer, or rather confession of faith, begins with the passage, "Hear, O Israel." (Dr 6:4-9)--hence the name--and continues with Dt. 11:13-21 and Nb 15:37-41. Service of Heart / 43 the whole tone of one's daily life. Nahmanides, a thirteenth century Jewish mystic and scholar of Spain, was aware of this when he wrote: When you pray, remove all worldly considerations from your heart. Set your heart right before God, cleanse your inmost thoughts, and meditate before uttering your devotions. Act thus all your days and in all things, and you will not sin. By this course your deeds wil! be upright, and your prayers pure and clean, innocent and devout, and acceptable before God. Know Before Whom You Stand When Amos wished to warn his fellow-Israelites about the punishment that awaited them because of their infidelity he said simply: "Prepare to meet your God!" (Am 4:12). These blunt words were given a broad interpretation and the rabbis applied them to the preparation needed for prayer. Such an interpretation of the text is by no means unreasonable, because prayer is a meeting with God, and as such it cannot be lightly undertaken. Prayer for the rabbis in particular was a matter of what they called chutzpah, that is, an act of, boldness, even of impertinence. For who can have a right to appear before his creator and Lord, to address him, and to expect an answer? Yet the Jewish sages knew that prayer was part and parcel of Israelite life, and that the great heroes of old, like Moses, David, Jeremiah, had all prayed. Therefore, although the rabbis spoke of God as ".the Holy One, blessed be he," and addressed him in prayer as "Lord, King of the Universe," they never hesitated to present their every plea before him. The Talmud teaches explicitly that "'chut:&ah, even against God is of avail," meaning that God cannot resist one who prays, and that the Lord of Glory does not rejec~ his servants who approach him. Yet, lest the chutzpah involved in prayer go beyond boldness and con-fidence, and become insolence and offense, rabbinic tradition was careful to insist on the reverence and respect that should characterize one's attitude in God's. presence. The rabbis recalled tha,t when the Israelites saw the glory of God on Sinai "their souls fled" and the~, trembled in holy fear. If Moses and the generation of the Exodus who had experienced so many manifestations of God's power and goodness were unable to stand with confidence in his presence, how much more should the less privileged generations of the people feel overcome by his might and majesty? Rabbi Eliezer (c. 100 A.D.) gave this advice to his disciples: "When you pray, know before whom you stand, and in this way you will win the future world" (Berakoth 28b). A slightly modified version of this text became known to generation after generation of Jews who read the words "Know before whom you stand" inscribed in many synagogues over the ark which contained the scrolls of the law. Such an inscription reminded the worshippers of the awesome meaning of prayer, and forcefully suggested that all levity and casualness were inappropriate in the praying congregation. Other synagogue inscriptions that conveyed the same message were Jacob's words as recorded 44 / Review for Religious, Volume 40, 1981/1 in Gn 28:17: "How awesome is t his place! This is none ot her than t he house of God, and this is the gate of heaven," or the psalmist's declaration "1 keep the Lord always before me" (Ps 16:8), or the well known verse from Isaiah, "Ho-ly, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts," which was also to have an important place in Christian churches and in Christian prayers. These, or similar words, were continual reminders of synagogue worshippers that an attitude of flip-pant self-assurance or a casual or indifferent mood are unbecoming in one who genuinely strives to enter into communion with his God. However, lest the dignity of God and the serious nature of prayer frighten off the would-be worshipper, other texts which instill an attitude of trust in God's presence were at the disposal of those who went to the synagogue to pray. The Jerusalem Talmud laid down the general principle that the Jew need never hesitate to approach God in prayer: "When a man is in trouble let him not cry out to the angel Michael or to the angel Gabriel, but to me, and I will answer immediately" (Berakoth 9, 1.13a). The traditional Jewish Prayer Book began with a series of biblical texts which were designed to create an atmosphere of adoration and devotion in the worshipping community. Texts such as "O Lord, I love the habitation of thy house" (Ps 26:8), or "But as for me, my prayer is to thee, O Lord" (Ps 69:13) were calculated to set the scene for serene reflection, and to express an awareness of God's love and goodness without which prayer is impossible. So while the Jew's attitude to God contained an ingredient of reverent fear, and while his approach to his Lord was characterized by a sober recogni-tion of the divine majesty that 'cannot be flouted, his relationship to God was also marked by trust in a personal Being who, far from being an arbitrary despot, is a God in whom power and love are one, and who cares for those who approach him with faith. The Talmud taught that "one cannot deal familiarly with heaven" (Berakoth 33b-34a), but it did not set God outside the reach of the average Jewish believer. Gestures of Reverence In Old Testament times the temple in Jerusalem was for the Israelite "the house of the Lord" (Ps 27:4). The perpetual lamp which burned in the temple (see Lv 24:2f) was for the rabbis of later times a witness to mankind that God dwelt among his people (Talmud, Sabbath 22b), and the religious leaders of Israel strove to instill into the people a deep respect for the place where God had set up his abode. The Mishnah records the following prescription that was framed in order to ensure that the biblical command to "reverence the Sanc-tuary" (Lv 19:30) would be fulfilled: A man should not behave himself unseemly [in the temple area]. He may not enter the Temple Mount with his staff or his sandal or his wallet, or with dust upon his feet, nor may he make it a short by-pass; still less may he spit there (Mishnah, Berakoth, 9:5). Of course the ultimate aim of this prescription Was to honor the God who Service of Heart / 45 was worshipped in the temple~. The rabbis are explicit about this when they state that just as one does not revere the Sabbath but him who commanded the observance of the Sabbath, so one is not to revere the sanctuary but him who gave the commandment concerning the sanctuary (Talmud, Yebamoth 6a-6b). The authors of these rabbinic statements understood the importance of an aura of sacredness that can help to make one conscious of being in the divine presence, and that can help to generate the I~avvanah that makes prayer meaningful. Biblical tradition prescribes no particular postures or movements for prayer. But we do find mention of several physical postures that are meant to give expression to one's spiritual and menta