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'- u VOL. IX. No. 6 NOVEMBER, 1900 ooTheoo Gettysburg Mercury CONTENTS An Evening Lesson, Abraham Lincoln, Lament for the Pine, Rabbi Ben Ezra, . Thanksgiving Day, . Editor's Desk, A Chapter of a Life, The Stability of a Republic, Shakespeare's Attitude Toward Education, . 193 The Horse vs. the Automobile, 196 Our Old School Ground, . . 198 When Should a Young Man Choose his Profession, . 201 How it Looks from the Road, 203 My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, 203 m FAVOR THOSE WHO FAVOR US. For Fine- Printing go to i Jo Co Wile Priiptlipg Sfaw CARLISLE ST. GETTYSBURG, PA. C. B. Kitzmiller Dealer in Hats, Caps, Boots and Douglas Shoes GETTYSBURG, PA. R. M. Elliott Dealer in Hats, Caps, Shoes- and. Gents' Furnishing Goods \ Corner Center Square and Carlisle Street GETTYSBURG, PA. EDGAR S. MARTIN, ^CIGARS AND SMOKERS' ARTICLES. q^f l2^ t&* Chambersburg St., Gettysburg Leadership IN THE CLOTHING and MEN'S PURNISHING Business It is strictly here—everybody knows it. Testimony ? The stock itself. The pen suffi-ciently nimble to tell all the good points of our ::::::: FALL AND WINTER. SUITS AND OVERCOATS has not been found. We will keep you dressed right up-to-date if you buy your Clothing and Furnishings here. : : : : STIINE McPherson Block. No. II BALTIMORE STREET THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY, The Literary Journal of Ptnnsylvania College. Entered at the Postoffice at Gettysburg as second-class matter. VOL. IX. GETTYSBURG, PA., NOVEMBER, 1900. No. 6 AN EVENING LESSON. [J. B. B., '01.1 'Twas in a dusky twilight hour I wandered down the vale, Beneath the cooling- azure bower My spirit to regale. I spoke to God ; He answered back And nought our talk disturbed, Till down the narrow winding track A noise our talk disturbed. 'Twas not the sound of human tongue, Nor beast nor bird aloof; But ringing from the hills among, A call to man's behoof. I stepped aside and turned awry To watch the iron steed, Till rumbling, roaring, rolling by He vanished o'er the mead. My thoughts again to God returned, He spoke once more to me, And from his sovran lips I learned These words of majesty: So run my plans creation through Across the track of time, Tneir goal as sure, their course as true Their journey more sublime; And nations, that as thou will show Attention's early gaze, In wisdom, and in strength shall grow, To prosper all their days. 172 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY ABRAHAM LINCOLN. [ORATION BY J. FRANK HEILMAN.] '"PHIRTY-FIVE years have passed and the Republic is stronger A than ever. The battle smoke of civil war has rolled away, and as we look into the clear past our first glance meets the colossal figure of Abraham Lincoln. He seems a mountain— when you examine each particular crag and feature how homely he appears; but stand back half a century, behold the entirety. —Do you not see the hand of God ! We wonder at him for his greatness, and we are proud of him that he is ours. We cannot imagine Lincoln as a Grecian or a Roman ; he is not English and certainly not French—he belongs to us alone but his fame is the world's. Our broad land can no more contain that than the pres-ent generation can estimate its duration; ages are the units which shall measure its extent and eternity shall not behold its com-pletion. Let us for a while then consider him who, under God, more than any other preserved our liberties and kept us as a peo-ple what we are. The nation was falling; that government of which sages had dreamed, that Republic toward which the Liberian exile cast his longing eye, the hope of mankind, the home of the brave sink-ing into theory ! On the fate of our country hung the fate of the human race for all time and our country was perishing. "Hu-manity with all its fears" was "hanging breathless on her fate ! " Should kings reign forever and the people never be free ? Then came the hour and the man;—from the ranks of the common people appeared the "rail-splitter" of Illinois. Who was that unknown man ? When England saw him she jeered at his home-ly face, France mocked his big hands and bent shoulders, the great men of his own land had no faith in him—but he had come with a mission, God had sent him ; and amid the clash of armies and the hell of war he rose Godlike. Those big hands erased the Mason and Dixou line, tore the shackles from the slave and held our country on the great world map ; those bent shoulders lifted our Republic to the highest place in history—and when his work was done he sealed it with his own blood. Then France took the name of the backwoodsman and said, "It belongs with Richelieu and Napoleon " ; then England took that homely face and hung it with Shakespeare and the elder Pitt; while the negro, THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 173 holding up to the world the shackles and chains of two centuries, exclaimed, "Lincoln broke these." The hisses turned to cheers ! While he lived, however, Lincoln was never fully appreciated, it was only when he had passed away and strong men staggered under the great burdens which he had borne so well, that his countrymen began to feel how strong he had been ; it was not until the giant of the forest had. fallen that, by the space unoccu-pied, its magnitude was realized. Then the world looked on and wondered—that child of poverty, that rail-splitter, that uncrowned king! His influence rose from an unseen shoot to a vast and mighty tree, and now in the hour of civil heat and international suspense our country rests beneath its shadow. Unknown, untried, slandered, without a single precedent in all history, called by the American people to lead them—where ? —through an earthquake epoch that was splitting the land north from south and shaking the pillars of human liberty. When Abra-ham Lincoln entered Washington, kings rejoiced, proclaimed that republics were forever done ; but when they bore him back to the west, historians wrote, "Republics shall stand and kingdoms fall." When amid the jeers of Europe he entered the Capitol our coun-try was breaking apart and five million slaves breathed our air; but when they bore him, murdered, back to Illinois our land had been united forever and our flag made the flag of the free. Yes, he was poor and unpolished, awkward and homely, true, he was a rail-splitter, and yet—he was a king ! His wisdom, his elo-quence, his humanity, courage and prophetic vision blended into the ideal statesman just as the prismatic shades fold into the pure white. Then, too, so many heroes are famous either for great heart or great brain power, but in Lincoln the great heart and the great brain were together. While the awful responsibility of the Re-bellion was sinking its story deep in his brow, and while the re-peated disasters of our armies where so nearly overwhelming him that occasionally his mind was weak, he found time to write and in the name of the Republic to thank mothers whose sons had fallen in battle. A master of language ! what did he know of Latin or Greek—to-day a university of Great Britain is studying the perfect English of an off-hand letter. A stump speaker who distorted his face to provoke a laugh, they tell us that his Gettys-burg oration will live with "De Corona." Washington was 174 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY proud, aristocratic, in habit and reserve English; Lincoln was a democrat, out and out a man of the people, distinctively Ameri-can. How appropriate it is that he sleeps his last sleep far away in the West, on an arm of the "Father of Waters," in the bosom of our country, in the heart of the people he loved so well. It is said that the greatest of Italian sculptors owing to the superstitious fear of losing his genius always left unfinished some parts of his creations, but it seems that when God formed the masterpiece of American history, He gave to the world the in-comparable boon of a leader perfect in every respect. Your children's children shall lisp his name with reverence, aye, when continents have changed their coasts and the twentieth century shall be called the dawn of history, your posterity, the great American people, shall point with pride to Abraham Lincoln, our uncrowned king. LAMENT FOR THE PINE. [C W. WISER, '01.] High up on the mountain side, In his cabin lone and drear, Pondering o'er the glowing fire, Sits the aged pioneer. Cold without the wind is roaring, Thro' the tops of many trees ; Dismally its wierd notes moaning:— "Gone is summer's gentle breeze." Darkness now is quickly gathering 'Neath her folds the parting day, And with forces growing fuller, Comes the storm, the night to sway. Bright within a great log burning On the ancient hearth aglow, Lightens up the little cabin, With its smoky rafters low. In his arm chair, dozing, napping, Sits in peace the aged swain; While upon the window pattering, Fall the little drops of rain. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY Thus he sits and gently dozes, In the fire's cheery glare, While without, in roaring tempest, Mournful sounds now pierce the air. Hark ! he cries, what do I hear In the wildness of the night, Is it then a lost one near,—■ Or the eagle in its flight. Ah I I know, it is the sighing Of the top of yonder pine, How it sets my heart a throbbing, When I think of days long syne. How my heart aches at the thought Of those days so long gone by, When beneath the mighty forest Naught was seen of yonder sky. When within its darksome shadows Roamed at large the nimble deer, And upon its mossy carpets Walked the panther and the bear. When beneath its mighty shelter Naught was felt of winter's sting; Snugly sheltered 'neath its branches We did wait the coming spring. Long since those trees have fallen Like stout heroes of the past; Felled by the brawny woodman, Tho' they braved the wintry blast. Ah ! no more I'll see those pines, As they towered to the sky, And no more will feel their shelter As I thro' the forest hie. In their place new ones have risen, Scrubby trees of oak and pine, But no more I'll see its glory As I did in days long syne. 17S The dead leaves their rich mosaics Of olive and gold and brown Had laid on the rain-wet pavements, Through all the embowered town. —Samuel Longfellow- -November. 176 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY "RABBI BEIN EZRA." [C. C. GROVE.] /^"\N taking up the present theme, realizing as I hope some of ^S the great depth and beauty of the poem, my spirit is found breathing with Milton: " What in me is dark Illumine ; what is low raise and support," that I may bring to the notice of someone the consummate beauty of religious philosophy in Browning's "Rabbi ben Ezra." "Bring to the notice," I said, for it has been well written, "This is one of those poems which can never be profitably anatyzed or commented on: it must be read." Therefore, it is ours only to give the poem in sections with some outside substantiating and explana-tory thoughts. Like Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," this poem is an address of an old man, the Rabbi, to a young man, concerning the course of life, to light him on the way and to counsel him that he may come off victorious. He begins :— Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made : Our times are in His hand Who saith, "A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God : see all, nor be afraid ! " The glory of the sun in the zenith is one; in its setting, a more serene, benignant glory. Such is old age—"I shall know, being old." In "Saul," the poet expresses the same in other language, thus :— By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shall enjoy More indeed, than at first when unconscious, the life of a boy. Would there were more who think Tennyson's Ulysses :— How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use ! As tho' to breathe were life ; More ready to "see all" nor "be afraid." The fears and hopes of youth's doubtful stage are thus out-lined :— Not that, amassing flowers, Youth sighed, "Which rose make ours, Which lily leave and then as best recall ? " Not that, admiring stars, It yearned, "Nor Jove, nor Mars ; Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all I " THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 177 Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do remonstrate ; folly wide the mark ! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. While "Young, all lay in dispute" and so it must needs be. i/ove, hope, fear, faith,—these make humanity These are its signs, and note, and character.—"Paracelsus." These are exponents of character, as Bailey says, in Festus, Sc. A Country Town :— Who never doubted never half believed, Where doubt, there truth is, 'tis her shadow. Yet this is not all; the hopes, joys, and pleasures of youth although not remonstrated against are nevertheless proper only in their place and season. Poor vaunt of life indeed, were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; Such feasting ended, then as sure an end to man ; Irks care the crop-full bird ! Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast "Such feasting ended" would but mark the beginning of a period of lassitude, inactivity, and indifference. Does any care harass the crop-full bird or doubt the well-fed beast? But strong souls, having passed the days of being fed on broth, are different. Says George Eliot in "Spanish Gypsy," Book IV :— Strong souls Live like fire-heated suns, to spend their strength In furthest striving action. Not enjoyment and not sorrow Is our destined end or way, But to act that each to-morrow Finds us farther than to-day. Let us then Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive ! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. We have a nearer hold of God, possess a closer relationship with God who gives than with His tribes that take. Ours it is to minister, not to be ministered unto; to provide and not par-take ; to sow and not share the harvest. Our relationship is more close with God, the giver, than with the hosts who would merely receive. 178 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting- that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! Be our joys three-parts pain ! Strive, and hold cheap the strain Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe ! Enviable ye "strong souls"; yea, ye, who like Paul say, "I glory in tribulation also." For from such a course, For thence,—a paradox which comforts while it mocks,— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me : A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. Aspiration, breathing toward higher things, ennobles, exalts man more perhaps than a backward glance at past achievements, as is said in "Saul," " 'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man would do." He might sink to low depths, to the brute even, but would not. To the brute ? Yes, for What is he but brute Whose flesh hath soul to suit, Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play ? To man, propose this test—Thy body at its best, How far can that project thy soul on its lone way ? The body cannot stand this test, nor was it intended to do so. Yet it dare not be looked upon as a mere encumbering tenement as Browning in the next four stanzas shows, bringing out the fact that our body is holy ; that it is glorious, even divine to live in the "rose-mesh" of flesh. Yet gifts should prove their use : I own the Past profuse Of power each side, perfection every turn : Eyes, ears took in their dole, Brain treasured up the whole ; Should not the heart beat once "How good to live and learn ? " Not once beat "Praise be Thine 1 I see the whole design, I who saw Power, see now Love perfect too : Perfect I call thy plan : Thanks that I was a man ! Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do ! " For pleasant is this flesh ; Our soul in its rose-mesh Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest: Would we some prize might hold To match those manifold Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best! Let us not always say "Spite of this flesh to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! " As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry "All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" m THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 179 To revert to the second of these stanzas, this is the expression of man at the very crest of the mountain of his glory and power. It all follows the order of Divine Revelation—Power, Love—first Elohim, then Jehovah, then "God is love." There also appears the trust begotten of love. Here is a man in his prime. "The truth of truths is love." Now we pass to age. Its glory, knowledge : "I shall know, being old." Therefore I summon age To grant youth's heritage, Life's struggle having so far reached its term : Thence shall I pass approved A man, for aye removed From the brute , a God though in the germ. And I shall thereupon Take rest ere I be gone Once more on my adventure brave and new; Fearless and unperplexed, "When I wage battle next, What weapons to select, what armor to indue. The former years have taught; age comes to pass sentence on youth ; then shall aged man go forth unperplexed by the varying changes and problems of life, removed from the brute, a God in powers and thought though embryonic. Stanza five presented man in Youth as gladly being of those who "provide" and "effect." Now at the beginning of the period called "Age," he tries, tests, calculates the profit or loss resulting from those efforts, those "fires." "Every man's work shall be made manifest : for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is." Youth ended, I shall try My gain or loss thereby ; Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: And I shall weigh the same, Give life its praise or blame : Young, all lay in dispute, I shall know, being old. Thus ends Youth, and Age begins. The latter carefully ex-amines the past and pronounces at last its worth. Youth dies as the day and glory tinted Age begins. For note when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the gray : A whisper from the west Shoots—"Add this to the rest, Take it and try its worth : here dies another day." So, still within this life, Though lifted o'er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, "This rage was right i'the main, That acquiescence vain: The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY For more is not reserved To man, with soul just nerved To act to-morrow what he learns to-day, Here work enough to watch The Master work, and catch Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. How beautifully expressed the thought that the Master's life was for an example that we should follow, and that too, carefully, devoutly, day by day ! The previous stanza reminds one of that superb simile of Goldsmith's in "Deserted Village" lines 187-192. Age has passed the active stage. As Youth was told to ' 'trust God; see all, nor be afraid," so our minds are turned back to think of the beginning of a new stage by similarity in verse: As it was better, Youth Should strive, througfh acts uncouth, Towards making-, than repose on aught found made: So, better, age, exempt Prom strife, should know, than tempt Further, Thou waitedst age : wait death, nor be afraid ! Now comes the serene period of waiting. It is glorious only as it is found in the way of righteousness, Prov. 16 : 31. Enough now, if the Right And Good and Infinite Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, With knowledge absolute, Subject to no dispute From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right ? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Supply the relative whom twice ; first, with / as antecedent, sec-ond, with they as antecedent. The sentence is hard to pass, for the decision is not easily made. The Right some would say is not absolute therefore. It is so and universal too but man in applying the principles to particular cases does not know all the conditions, and circumstances or may be laboring under a delu-sion or superstition ; hence, the difficulty. Now, who shall arbitrate ? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me : we all surmise, They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul believe? There follow now several paragraphs concerning the proper judgment of life, comparing man's with God's estimate of worth. "Man looketh on the outward appearance but God looketh on the heart." THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 181 Not on the vulgar mass Called "work," must sentence pass ; Thing's done, that took the eye and had the price ; O'er which, from level stand, The low world laid its hand, Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: But all, the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount. Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through the language and escaped: All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. The great Judge shall consider the secret intents of the hear t We know not these, how can we judge? We may know them for ourselves ; therefore, we are commanded to judge ourselves. The last clause attracts to itself (its own elaboration) or causes the poet to expand the metaphor most beautifully. "We are the clay, and Thou our potter; and we all are the work of Thy hand," Isa. 64 : 8, or Jeremiah gives it more fully, 18 : 2-6. Aye, note that Potter's wheel, that metaphor ! and feel Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay— Thou, to whom fools propound, When the wine makes its round, "Since life fleets, all is change ; the Past gone, seize to-day !" Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. He fixed thee 'mid this dance of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent, Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed. What though the earlier grooves which ran the laughing loves Around thy base, no longer pause and press ? What though, about thy rim, Skull-things in order grim Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress ? Look not thou down but up ! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash, the trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's lips aglow ! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who moldest men ! And since, not even while the whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 182 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY Foolish proposition that, that "since life fleets, all is change," when applied to man's real self, his spiritual being and its life. The "Past is gone," but only in that it is "past recall." "Every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." The deeds in the body shall all have to pass examination. They are not gone forever. " Tempus res humanas mutat," but not the characters of men. " Potter and clay endure." How meter, rhyme and alliteration, everything conduces in the first two lines of the next stanza to show the evanescence of circumstantial influences ! These are just enough to bring about the proper results in all God's people. " All things work together for good to them that love God." We must fret and chafe because in later 3'ears the shapings may be more stern in character and less attractive. They all and each have their place to bring about true beauty and strength of char-acter. Let us look to the higher import and purpose in all works, and especially in ourselves, "heaven's consummate cup.'' We need not fashion ourselves upon earth's wheel, according to the designing of men. " Be not confor7ned to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God." Not " earth's wheel" then, but the great Fotter we need now as ever. Lastly, after striving in youth, following meekly and trust-ingly in later life, and waiting reverently to have the Potter's plans completed, the whole is surrendered, to be taken for use in the temple above, when the flaws shall have been righted, when this inglorious body shall be raised in glory, incorruption and im-mortality. So, take and use Thy work, Amend what flaws may lurk, What strains o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! My times be in Thy hand ! Perfect the cup as planned ! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same ! c*p The drying up of a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore. —Byron. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 183 THANKSGIVING DAY. E. C. RUBY, '02. /'"VUR Thanksgiving Day is a composite one. It is made up ^-^ from parts of celebrations of that day by other peoples. We have taken the time from an Indian festival which used to take place during the fall of the year. The wild-wood festival, with its feasting, its dancing of Indian warriors to the songs of their dusky sweethearts, may well be called the original Thanks-giving Day in this happy land of ours. The Thanksgiving we celebrate at the close of every harvest season owes something to the religious rites of ancient nations. The oldest of these is the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, with its magnificent festivities. It was the feast of the " ingathering" of the harvest of all the fruits, the corn, the wine, and the oil. The labors of the field were then over for the year, and the feast was an occasion of joyousness and gladness to the people. The glory of the great Hebrew festival has long since passed away, but the fundamental principle—that every one should equally rejoice in the fruits of the current harvest, together with the whole people of the land '' before the Lord''—has entered into the harvest observances of Christian lands. Greece celebrated the great feast known as the Eleusinia, or the feast to Demeter of the beautiful robe. Demeter was the goddess of harvests. Her daughter, Persephone, had been kid-napped by Pluto, and, because she had tasted a pomegranate seed, could remain with her mother only part of the year. This made Demeter angry, and she left the gods, made her dwelling upon the earth, and taught Celeus, King of Eleusis, how to plow, sow and reap. For this the Greeks celebrated the Eleusinian feast, one of the grandest of the Greek festivals. The Romans celebrated a harvest festival called the Cerealia. It took its name from Ceres, who was the Demeter of the Romans. This festival was a general holiday, every one resting from work, and eager for enjoyment and pleasure. Coming nearer to our own harvest festival is the English Har-vest- home. This was usually a day of boisterous mirth. The people kindled bonfires, danced on the green sward, and engaged in athletic sports. The Pilgrim Fathers remembered this festival in their new home, and expressed their thankfulness for their first harvest by 184 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY a feast. Of their harvest, Governor Bradford tells us that " they began now to gather in ye small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recov-ered in health and strength, and had all things in good plenty." Thereupon the Governor issued a proclamation appointing a Feast of Thanksgiving. On the appointed Thursday the feast was opened with religious services. Then came a period of feasting and recreation. The real Thanksgiving dinner took place on Saturday, the last day of the celebration. The earth, the air and the water had yielded of their bountiful supplies to make this Thanksgiving dinner, and when the pioneers sat down to the meal they saw a table spread with water-fowl, wild turkey, veni-son, corn and barley ; with this cheer they gave thanks that "by the goodness of God they were far from want." Our Thanksgiving of to-day has taken some part from each of these different festivals. It has taken the time of the Indian meeting ; its charity is gained from the Jewish Feast of Taberna-cles ; it has copied the festivals of Demeter and Ceres, in giving thanks for the crops ; its mirth and festivity has a flavor of the English Harvest-home festival ; and its spirit of thankfulness and religious adoration was given to it by our Pilgrim forefathers. When the American Colonies had established their independ-ence, and had united themselves under one form of government, the New England Thanksgiving custom was gradually extended to the Middle States, then to the West, and more slowly to the South. In 1863 it began to be annually proclaimed for observ-ance throughout the country. For more than thirty years has Thanksgiving been a national institution throughout this country, while as a religious festival it dates back over two and three-quarter centuries—to the first celebration by the Pilgrim Fathers of New England. In the early days of the planting of church and commonwealth on this continent, when a sterile soil began to yield its bounties to the often-famished settler, it is pleasant to recall that the little community took delight in giving public ex-pression to the spirit of thanksgiving, which has now grown into a mighty custom over the entire Republic, after the annual har-vesting of the fruits of the earth. The following extract Irom Mrs. H. B. Stowe's " Oldtown" indicates graphically the general character ot the New England Thanksgiving observance : "Great as the preparations were for the dinner, everything was so con- I ~ THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 18S trived that not a soul in the house should be kept from the morn-ing service of Thanksgiving in the church, and from listening to the Thanksgiving sermon, in which the minister was expected to express his views freely concerning the politics of the country, and the state of things in society generally, in a somewhat more secular vein of thought than was deemed exactly appropriate to the Lord's day." There is no religious tradition more interesting from its an-tiquity and its general significance, or more suggestive and useful as an American custom, than that of the annual Thanksgiving service, the purpose of which is to express general thanksgiving for the bounties of the year, and especial thanksgiving for national prosperity and progress. In this light alone the service ought to command, without any exception whatever, a more than usual interest in every church of every name. It is little less than a national misfortune that the opportunity of Thanksgiving Day is not universally improved by all churches. Throughout the entire history of the most ancient tradition of Thanksgiving it has always been recognized that the best and highest expression of Thanksgiving was that of charity to the suffering and the needy. The same Thanksgiving Day which marks the close of a season of bounty should not less mark the opening of a season of benefaction, the giving of thanks finding its full expression in the sharing of our bounties with those who may suffer want. A more recent and no less commendable feature of our Thanks-giving Day, is the custom of gathering together in family reunions which keep well knit the bonds of kinship and attune hearts, often sundered by discord, to the universal note of harmony and common rejoicing. This pleasant feature is beautifully expressed in the following verses from a poem written by Phoebe Carey: " O men, grown sick with toil and care, Leave for awhile the crowded mart; O women, sinking- with despair, Weary of limb and faint of heart, Forget your years to-day and come As children back to childhood's home. Walk through the sere and fading wood, So lightly trodden by your feet, When all you knew of life was good, : ■ 186 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY And all you dreamed of life was sweet, And ever fondly looking- back O'er youthful love's enchanted track. Go sit beside the hearth again, Whose circle once was glad and gay ; And if from out the precious chain Some shining links have dropped away, Then guard with tender heart and hand The remnant of thy household band. Draw near the board with plenty spread, And if in the accustomed place You see the father's reverend head, Or mother's patient, loving face, Whate'er your life may have of ill, Thank God that these are left you still." November woods are bare and still, November days are clear and bright; Each noon burns up the morning's chill, The morning's snow is gone by night ; Each day my steps grow slow, grow light, As through the woods I reverent creep Watching all things lie "down to sleep." —Helen Hunt Jackson. All brilliant flowers are pale and dead And silent droop to earth, While pansies chill in velvet robes Count life but little worth ; But in these dark November days That wander wild and wet, Our thoughts are winged to summer hours On breath of mignonette. —Eliza O. Pearson. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY. Entered at the Postoffice at Gettysburg as second-class matter. Vol. IX. GETTYSBURG, PA., NOVEMBER, 1900. No. 6. Editor-in-Chief, S. A. VAN ORMER, '01. Assistant Editors, W. H. HETRICK, "W. A. KOIII.I'.K. Business Manager, H. C. HOFFMAN. Alumni Editor, REV. I\ D. GARLAND. Assistant Business Manager, WILLIAM C. NEY. Advisory Board, PROF. J. A. HIMES, LIT. D. PROF. G. D. STAHLEY, M. D. PROF. J. W. RICHARD, D. D. Published monthly by the students of Pennsylvania (Gettysburg") College. Subscription price, One Dollar a year in advance; single copies Ten Cents. Notice to discontinue sending* the MERCURY to any address must be accompanied by all arrearages. Students, Professors, and Alumni are cordially invited to contribute. All subscriptions and business matter should be addressed to the Business Manager. Articles for publication should be addressed to the Editor. Address THE GETTYBURG MERCURY, GETTYSBURG, PA. EDITORS' DESK. '"■pHERE is a tendency on the part of college students to sell *■ their text books as soon as the branches in which they have been used are completed. There can be no objection offered to this custom in general, for many of the books will not be needed again during the college course, while the money invested in them can be used to advantage by most students ; but there are books that ought not to be sold—books that ought to be not only kept but used throughout the college course, and chief among these is the Rhetoric. If we measure the importance of a branch, in comparison with others, by the use to be made of it in after life, surely no other branch can claim more of our time and energy ; it we would express ourselves forcibly and accurately in 188 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY speaking and in writing, we must be familiar with the principles of Rhetoric ; if we would obviate the humiliation that comes from having our writing in after life criticised and condemned, we must cultivate the habit of looking up troublesome and un-certain points while in college. J> That the colleges of our country are taking an active part in the present political campaign is evinced by the number of clubs that nave been organized and the selection of the great issues of the campaign for discussion in literary societies and debating clubs. Colleges rightly invite free thought and free discussion of political issues in the class room as well as in student organiza-tions, for these and similar issues are to confront those now in college when they shall have become local leaders in political circles. A careful, thorough and unbiased study of National economic problems must necessarily broaden the intellectual hori-zon of the student and prepare him the better to meet the de-mands that shall rest upon him as a citizen. A CHAPTER OP A LIFE. T,. W. GROSS, '01. INVITATIONS were out announcing the wedding of Miss *■ Estella Wellington to J. Harry Ashland. It was to be a church wedding in the Episcopal church of that town. Friends and relatives of both families from far and near were invited. At last the day dawned and the merry wedding chimes rang out bright and clear. It was in June, the beautiful month of roses. Nothing could be more beautiful than the gay and happy scene that was presented to the honored guests who filled the little church on this occasion to witness the ceremony. Nature seemed to offer her congratulations in the extravagant profusion of flowers she furnished for the bride and the decorations. The birds in the tree tops along the deep, shady drives warbled a merry march for the bridal party as it passed to the elegant mansion of the bride. Harry Ashland was not rich. He was the only son, and the pride and joy of his mother's heart, and so it was with a feeling of sadness THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 189 that she, regardless of the gaiety and mirth around her, saw another woman claim a place in his affections. He had married against her choice. Yet she saw that her son dearly loved the one he married and was loved in return, and so said not a word except iu gentle reasoning; but even the desire of his mother, much as he cared for her, could not alter his intention. He married his choice and Mrs. Ashland calmly submitted, and made the occasion of the wedding and short visit at home of her son as pleasant as possible. Harry was industrious, popular and a general favorite in his home town, as was always shown by the host of friends who greeted him on his visits to his mother. He had no other profession, but traveled for his uncle, who was manager of a large machine in-dustry in the South. He had been in his uncle's office for some time, and when he was promoted to collector his salary was raised sufficient, he thought, to warrant his taking the step he did, and so he married. His wife came from an old Maryland family, bringing him wealth, social distinction and culture in exchange for his name, honesty and good character. He met her since he was working for his uncle, and although she was, perhaps, above him in the social scale, yet his manliness, comeliness and winning personality won her heart and hand for him; and finally she decided to share his fate through life. He had no fortune to depend on, yet his prospects for a successful life were bright as the morning sun. And they hoped in a year or so to have a home as beautiful as her own down in Maryland. In August Mr. and Mrs. Ashland moved to their residence in a small town in the territory Harry was to work, storing their goods and boarding at a hotel. He at once took the road and began business for his uncle. L,ong trips had to be made, some-times by rail, others by stage, and sometimes he drove in a buggy over long, lonesome roads through the wild and mountainous country. Business was good, and although it required him to be away from home a great deal of his time, he was happy in the thought that it was done for the one he loved above all others. His uncle entrusted him with collecting large amounts of money from which he drew his own salary and paid other assist-ants under him, turning the balance over as the net earnings of the company. 190 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY Harry had now been married a year, expecting by this time to have a neat little sum over and above his family expenses at the hotel, but found that their boarding there was very expensive. His wife was accustomed to the luxuries of life and dressed according to the fashions of the day. Thus the satisfaction of her fastidious tastes drained his yearly income to its lowest dregs. It was with disappointment that he learned these facts; yet he started again with renewed determination to make more money the next year than he did the first, and in'spite of everything, make his coveted home for himself and wife to enjoy life with the wealthy. The second year rolled around without apparent change in his financial affairs. His expenses were increasing, the savings decreasing ; yet he made more trips through mountain and valley, and through town and city than ever before in his energetic struggle for existence. Besides his loving wife he now had a little girl to welcome him home with her childish prattle and glee, and he often dissipated his gloom and disappointment on coming in from a hard trip by talking and a frolic with little Iyida. But still it seemed as if the clouds were lowering and his domestic horizon getting darkei instead of brighter. He was often found in deep thought by his wife, who would try to cheer him, unconscious of his real trouble, never dreaming that she might be the cause of it. He often thought of his mother's advice about this very thing, of marrying within his class, and thought, now there might be something in it, after all. But he would rather struggle to the last than say a word to check his wife in the spending of the money he would earn. May be Harry had too much pride. About this time he was sent out to make one of the largest collections of the year, and he rather dreaded the trip because it had to be made in a buggy over lonesome and rough roads. However, giving his wife and daughter a loving farewell he started on the trip. He visited subordinate agents and dealers, collect-ing money from each till, by the time he was ready to start for headquarters, he had a little over five thousand dollars in his possession. This money he kept in a tin box securely fastened under the buggy seat. He had never been molested by highway-men himself, but often had heard of such robberies occurring in the vicinity through which he had to pass, and he felt a peculiar THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 191 dread pass over him lest he should be attacked on this particular trip when he carried so much money. Harry had been driving all day and his horse became very tired and somewhat jaded. He hoped to reach his destination before night-fall, but being in Autumn and the days growing shorter, darkness gathered sooner than he anticipated. A drizzling rain set in, and to add to his difficulties, his horse became lame from much traveling. As a result intense darkness caught him in the very worst part of the road. Yes, he was robbed. His worst fears were realized. A full and vivid account of the bold and daring robbery appeared in the daily papers giving all the details. But the highwaymen had the money and were still at large. It was the same old story. The tired horse was stopped and held while three or four men sprang at the occupant of the buggy, bound him hand and foot, gagged him, tied the horse to a tree in the wood by the road side and then hastened away with their booty. He remained in his help-less condition till at last, after a night of agony trying to free himself, he was set free by a passer-by in the morning after the banditti were miles away. He went at once to his uncle, told his story and had detectives started in pursuit of the robbers. But the old man was angry, flew into a rage at such a great loss of money, blamed Harry for neglect and carelessness, and finally discharged him from his service. This was the climax to all his trouble. He tried to reason with his uncle but he would hear none. Harry could not pacify him. He went home to his wife with a heavy heart; his bright-est gleams of home and success blasted, utterly ruined. His wife tried to console him, but with no avail. He saw bills staring him in the face, his month's salary stolen and nothing for the future in sight. Here again pride came in his way and he refused several offers of help by kind friends because the salary was lower than he had been used to getting and in the humbler occupations. His discouragement increased; at times he became moody and silent. The thought of his great misfortune, his uncle's relentlessuess and his domestic affairs weighed heavily upon him. At last it became unbearable and he told his wife he must go to the city and obtain a position worthy of his station in life. He bade 192 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY them goodbye and left little L,ida and her mother in their rooms at the hotel. Harry was gone, alas! never to return. He failed to obtain the position, his money was soon spent, and he paid his last dime for a piece of rope. The next morning his cold, distorted and lifeless body was found hanging to the limb of a tree in a secluded part of one of the parks about the great city. His body was identified by his friends, who were notified by the authorities, and taken home and buried. Time, the great physician, the healer of all wounds, bound up the broken hearts of his many friends, and soon they looked up again. He was rid of the world and its struggles and soon for-gotten by it, remembered only by a few of his friends. One life less in the world ; one leaf fallen from the great tree—the world; one pebble less on the great sea shore; one drop less in the ocean. Soon the waters closed over the ripple and were as placid as before. THE STABILITY OF A REPUBLIC. W. H. HETRICK, '01. TVTATIONAL, evolution in the course of its progress has finally •*■ ^ given government a sublime perfection in the principles and constitutions of modern Republicanism. A republic such as our own, firmly grounded on union, liberty and independence, is not modern in development, but stands as the complete product of the ages. Its grand perfection and accomplishment is the re-sult of long centuries of national experience. Out of the confu-sion of the past, the rude primitive rule of patriarchs, the disso-lution of empires, the unrelenting tyranny of despotism, the heart-less cruelty of kings, out of innumerable wars and inhuman wrongs, God, the maker of destiny, has perfected a government for man, and we call that government a republic. Heretofore the government of nations was, to a great extent, at variance with the desires and thoughts of the human mind. There was no satisfaction in serving ; no morality in slavery ; no justice in taxation without representation ; no virtue in ine-quality. Man since his creation has felt and expressed a strong dissatisfaction with the government imposed upon him. It was his conviction that he was and by right ought to be free. A deep inexplicable fact of his being forced him to the belief that the law THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 193 which governs society should conform to his own conscience and reason. This was the requisite of his soul. When once attained and instituted, government would be perfect. There would be nothing beyond it; no deeper principle for higher attainment. It would be the consummation of law. Such is our own republic. The principles in her constitution strike deep into the heart of being. Liberty, union and inde-pendence are not artificial, not the invention of mind nor even the result of thought. No ! They are the aspirations of the soul; the uniformities of all natural law. Ages of time, millions of people and hundreds of civilizations, by the power of progress, have at last evolved from the great powers of human experience an en-during form of government, that can never fall or be dissolved by the presence of faults or the schemes of men. Our country shall never degenerate from her elevated place of greatness. To bring this about would necessitate retrogression, and retrogression means a changing of law for something worse. It would be the destruction of a perfect law for the adoption of one whose im-perfection was the principal cause of its revision. It would be contrary to the nature of things. It would mean imperialism which belongs to the past. It would mean despotism, militarism, disorder. It would be forcing the law of nature, of reason and of justice against its own development. No! Our constitution is founded upon a rock, the rock of tried experience, the deepest law of progress. It must ever stand as a monument built for all time to come. SHAKESPEARE'S ATTITUDE TOWARD EDUCATION. EMORY D. BREAM, '02. WHRN we turn to the history of education to ascertain the relative position of Shakespeare among the great writers of the world, we are told that Greece had its Homer, Rome its Virgil, Italy its Dante, Germany its Goethe, France its Hugo and England its Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and many others ; but if one of these distinguished writers were to be chosen king over the others, Shakespeare would, by common consent, be placed upon the throne. Naturally, then, we would expect a man of such a lofty liter-ary position to be a patron of education. Although he has written no treatise on education, nor is he recognized as an educator, yet 194 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY one cannot read his works intelligently without noticing how careful he is to endow the nobler characters of his plays with the love of knowledge. For instance, in " As You L,ike It," who does not admire the noble discontent of Orlando with a condition that hinders manly development ? In the " Tempest " do we not immediately recognize Prospero as a true Student ? Shakespeare distinguishes the educated man from the unedu-cated. The fact that he firmly believed that the mind, God's greatest gift to man, should be cultivated and adorned, is proved by the case of Orlando. He is discontented with his breeding, and recognizes that though he is a gentleman by birth, yet that avails little if he lacks breeding. " For call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox ? His horses are bred better." How strongly Shakespeare empha-sizes in these lines the fact that God would not have endowed us with minds superior to animals if he did not intend that we should cultivate them. Intelligence is a distinguishing mark of a lady or gentleman. In the " Merchant of Venice " this fact is brought out clearly. Bassanio lacks commercial ability and is unable to win for him-self the means necessary for the support of a man of rank ; yet he possesses the elegant tastes of a gentleman, and when supplied with money, he has no trouble in winning the heart of Portia, a young woman of wealth and high social position. Shakespeare is careful to portray her even as having good sense enough to esteem spiritual higher than material qualities. This is clearly shown in the.conversation between Portia and Nerissa when Nerissa recounts to Portia the various suitors that have sought her hand. She finds fault with all until Bassanio's name is mentioned. Here Shakespeare shows a distinction. The Nea-politan prince took so much interest in his horse that he boasted even of being able to shoe it. Faulconbridge, the young baron of England, is, in Portia's words, "A proper man's picture ; but alas ! who can converse with a dumb show ? '' But when Bas-sanio, the Venetian, a scholar and soldier, is named these two ac-complishments win for him favor in the eyes of Portia. In these examples Shakespeare made the educated man of greater weight than all the men of wealth, noble birth and polish. An educated person is recognized by people of less ability as being superior to them. This is also brought out plainly by THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 195 Portia after Bassanio has opened the leaden casket, and, according to the command given in the stanza of poetry that it contained, has claimed her with a kiss. In the conversation that follows she calls herself an unlessoned, unschooled and unpractised girl, but not too old to learn. Thus she recognizes Bassanio as her superior. In turn, when Portia is pleading for Antonio, Shylock admires her ability to argue, and as soon as she seems to be giving justice to his side of the question, he bursts out in exclamations of praise. " A Daniel come to judgment! Yea a Daniel! O wise young judge, how I honor thee ! " Considering the fact that Portia has before this confessed herself to be an unschooled girl, such ability to plead a case seems contradictory ; but this shows that educa-tion is not merely book knowledge. Though Shylock may have thought that it was to his interest to laud the wise young judge, yet doubtless Shakespeare wished to lay stress upon the influence that an educated person has over an uneducated one. Lastly, a love for study and close application is necessary to acquire an education in the true sense of the word. In " Hamlet," where the king tells Hamlet that his intention to return to Wit-tenburg to school is contrary to the wishes of the king and queen, from the words, "We beseech you, bend you to remain here," we would infer that he was a diligent student and loved study. The most forcible illustration of this, however, is Prospero. He was so attentive to his books that he neglected his duties as a ruler even so much as to allow his brother to usurp the throne. In the conversation between Miranda and Ferdinand, while he was piling up the logs, Miranda requests Ferdinand to rest awhile, saying that, "He's hard at study. He's safe for these three hours." Indicating how diligently Prospero studied. These seem almost like words of advice from the great dramatist to those who wish to be real students, and they show that Shakespeare not only was favorable to education, but believed that everyone should be educated. O reader ! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring ; O gentle reader ! you would find A tale in everything. —Woods-worth. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY THE MORSE VS. THE AUTOMOBILE. H. L. STIFEL, '03. pVER since this world began there has been in existence a cer- -*-' tain class of persons, who have opposed, with all their strength, every innovation, every invention, which untiring labor or a happy chance has brought before the public. Though I do not consider myself as one of this mean-spirited class, I wish to speak a word in favor of that good friend and servant of man, the horse, as opposed to the automobile. Of the three classes of the automobile, steam, gasoline and electric, it is hard to make a choice of the one with the least ob-jectionable features. The latter we may reject at once, owing to the difficulty in charging the batteries. An average electric ma-chine will run for twenty miles ; then it must be recharged. This circumstance renders it absolutely useless for long tours, as there are but few places along a country road where this recharging may be effected. Even in the city, the owner of this type of the automobile may find himself compelled to procure a team to drag home his horseless carriage. Nor is the steam wagon much better. It requires a great deal of labor in firing up before each trip. Another disagreeable feature is the incessant noise of the steam. Besides, a man must, to all purposes, know as much as a licensed engineer before he is capable of managing such a ma-chine. The steam pressure and the amount of water in the boiler must be careiully watched. The fire and fuel also require con-stant attention. There remains only the gasoline type. This is the most practical of all three, but it also has one very unpleasant feature. It is everywhere accompanied by the disagreeable odor of gasoline. Any one of these three classes, moreover, needs as much care as would two horses. The machine is fitted up with a large amount of nickel and brass trimmings, which, in order to be kept presentable, require as much polishing and cleaning as would a team. Then, too, the mechanism must be kept clean and free from rust, and must be thoroughly oiled, not to mention the fact that it must be kept in good running order. It has been asserted that the automobile will eventually dis-place the horse entirely. This I emphatically deny. In my opinion, it is only a fad which society, bored to the last degree, has taken up. At all events, in its present stage of development, THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY it is nothing but a toy. In the course of time the automobile may prove to be more serviceable thau the horse for heavy haul-ing or rapid transit, but it can never take the place of the hon-e for pleasure driving. There is a vast difference between guiding a mere machine and spinning along a road behind a spirited horse. The keen sense of satisfaction felt in the mastery of a creature of flesh and blood, intelligent, and with a will of its own, would be entirely absent in the running of an automobile. In regard to the matter of safety, the horse is again superior to the steam or gasoline wagon. A horse, on the darkest night, will keep on the road by instinct. An automobile, guided by a man, of course cannot do this, for man hasnot this instinct which is given to the animal. Therefore, the driver, if we may call the person who runs the automobile by that name, is likely to find himself lying in a ditch beside the road. We have often read of horses stopping and refusing to go on when their instinct tells them there is danger ahead. This again is impossible to the auto-mobile driver, for he receives no such warning. Naturally, an accident may happen to a careless driver with the most intelligent of horses; but is not the danger much greater when a careless man has a boiler full of steam, or a tank of gasoline under him ? A small stone, lying in the road, may strike a front wheel and throw the steering gear to one side, ditching the machine or send-ing it over an embankment, with an explosion, perhaps, as the result. An ordinary vehicle would simply run over the obstruc-tion with no worse effect than a slight jolt. In view of these facts, let us cling to the horse, an intelligent animal, capable of loving and of being loved, rather than take up the automobile, a thing of cogs and machinery. In following out this course we shall obtain more pleasure, and we shall obtain it with greater safety. Is it not, therefore, the more desirable ? o*p I hold it true, whate'er befall, I feel it when I sorrow most ; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. -Tennyson. 198 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY OUR OLD SCHOOL GROUND. [D. M. MISLCHIOR, '02.] TT may seem very odd that one should select a plain, country "■ school as the most interesting place he ever knew, yet, for me, there is no other place that carries with it so much personal interest as those nooks and crooks about our old school house. The beautiful parks about Philadelphia are very interesting not only for their beauty, but also for their historical connections; there is pleasure in watching the ocean dash its breakers against the beach of some seaside resort ; the rush and bustle of Broad-way is fascinating ; yet, I imagine that if I ever live to be an old man and think of the happy days of my past life, no recollections will come before me so vividly as those connected with that old school-ground. I should not say old so far as the building is concerned, for when I started to school it was a comparatively new one. About a quarter of a mile east of Springtown it stood—and still stands —upon a little hill beside a quaint, old Evangelical church. The house was a substantial brick building—much after the manner of all country school houses in a prosperous farming community. The playground was not much of a recommendation, for aside from being small it was uneven and rocky. It was probably for this reason that we sought other places for our sports and often wandered far beyond our prescribed limits. There was a row of sheds back of the church for the accom-modation of such church goers as were willing to pay a yearly rent to protect their teams from the rain or the burning sun. Here we would all gather on a rainy day, as long as it was not too cold, and amuse ourselves as best we could, playing such games as a half a hundred lively boys and girls could play in so small a space. On the east side of the building was an anything-but-hand-some- looking rail fence, and on the inner side of this we built huts, made of rails, corn-fodder, and dry leaves. At the back of these stood a row of cider and Baldwin apple trees, and many a feast we had off them, the owner having long before given up hope of ever getting any of the apples for himself. Running at right angles with the school ground was the road and right in front of the school house was the top of a very steep THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 199 hill which afforded us ample means for coasting. And what sport is more fascinating than coasting when you have a straight '' drive " tor a quarter of a mile or more ? I remember one im-mense sled (double-deckers were unheard of at that time) which was the pride of the whole school. Two big fellows would sit on it facing each other, and then a heap of little boys would be piled on crosswise and away they'd go. At the top of the hill there were usually immense snow drifts, and it was lots of fun to tun-nel them. First a fellow would start from the top and, feet first, would work his way through until a good sized hole would be made. Then little subways were made until the top, becoming too weak, would fall in. In the field on the other side of the road we would often build an immense snow fort, and how hard we would fight to defend it! It would be captured and recap-tured, until the teacher's bell would call us to our afternoon's work. Below this field ran a mill race, and I can well remember how, in the early part of September, we would sneak down to it, undress and take a lively little swim in the almost bitter cold water—a practice that was prohibited not only by the teacher, but also by our parents. Once, especially, do I remember how I sneaked away one noon with a fishing line in my pocket to try a half hour's luck at angling, and how I slipped from a log, fell in to my waist, and in the hope of not being detected put on a brave face and determined to sit the whole afternoon in my wet trousers. But the teacher had heard of my misfortune through someone else and was waiting for me. Instead of getting a thrashing, he gave me a sealed note to take to my father and sent me home. Believing that a great deal of harm is often done by exposing domestic affairs, I'll not say anything of the interview with my father in his private study. After the long, weary winter months were past, Spring would arouse the sleeping fields and woods, and then perhaps the most fascinating part of those school days would come. The early flowers, especially arbutus, would come out in the valley below the school house, or on the mountain back of it; and many, many times we would scour those fields and bring back not only flowers, but turtles, snakes and other such harmless creatures as would terrify the girls. Then, although perhaps chiefly in the Autumn, would come the time to play Hare and Hound, and through fields, over 200 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY streams, up the hills we would run, heedless of wet feet, torn clothes or of being late for school. Down at the foot of an adjoining field stood a lime kiln, and back of it along a small mountain creek we would sit and cut willow whistles, dare each other to do almost impossible feats, and just have a jolly good time. It was down there that on the last day of school we were always permitted to play that forbidden game—"ring tag." That was one of the times when the boys condescended to play with the girls, and everybody kissed every-body else good-bye. It was a bit of foolishness, and yet when one thinks back, and the faces of all those schoolmates come before him, he is struck with surprise to note what changes eight or nine years may bring. Some of them are married, a few have died, others are away attending some higher institution of learning, while the majority are still there, but gradually scattering one by one. Often, when thinking ofhome, I see before me that school house —a church on one side enclosed by a row of trees, fields of corn stubble on two other sides, and the well-travelled road directly in front. There is the narrow, rocky lane leading down to the mill-race, coasting down which a little girl, caught between a sled and rock, once broke a leg and was lamed for life. To one side stands the coal shed. On the right is the rock on which the auctioneer stood when we had "horse sales." So as I stand there and look upon spot after spot where one little thing or another happened that I shall never forget, it seems to me that if I live to be ninety years old, I shall never find a place of more personal interest than the scenes of my early country school life. Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear ; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. —Grey. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 201 WHEN SHOULD A YOUNG MAN CHOOSE HIS PROFESSION ? HEIGHTMAN, '02. '"PHIS question, manifestly of so vast importance to every young *■ man, should be presented to him at an early age. But he should be careful lest he make a decision too hastily. Often does a man see his mistake too late when, after spending a long time in preparation, he enters upon his chosen profession, and feels that it will be neither pleasant nor profitable to him. But he can put the blame upon none else than himself, unless perchance he has been forced by his parents against his own will to choose a certain profession, though he has had from his early youth a long-ing to be engaged in another—one in which he is confident of success. This we know ought not to be. Every young man has, without doubt, an inclination to some one profession, and he should be allowed to pursue it and not be persuaded to follow the same profession in which his father is engaged, simply because his father has made a success of it. And then, too, how often is a young man led into his father's business at so early,an age that he is scarcely old enough to have formed a true conception of the world. True, it may be the very best thing the father can do to give his son employment as early as possible, especially if he be inclined to be wayward ; and still more, it may, as is often the case, make a good, energetic busi-ness man of him, when, if he were allowed to remain idle a year or more, he might contract slothful habits, which would cling to him all through life. But yet, I think the father makes a mis-take if he does not give his son ample time to learn to know the world, and to be able to decide rightly and satisfactorily his pro-fession for life. In doing this, however, the father should not allow him to spend one moment in idleness. If he cannot send him to college, he should ever have some duty for him to per-form, and should afford him every facility for improving his in-tellect, by encouraging him in a desire for knowledge, and by surrounding him with the best books. If a young man can go to college, and would make the best possible success in life, let him, by all means, decide before he goes to college, what will be his profession. Doing this he will have a motive before him, and will press onward with renewed vigor at every step of his advance. Throughout his course, 202 THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY whenever he learns anything which he knows will be of value when applied to his chosen profession, for the very reason that he realizes its worth to him, that knowledge will impress itself upon his mind, and he will retain it when he enters upon his pro-fession. How essential is it, in this our day, to concentrate our efforts upon one line of study or thought in order to reach that degree of excellence required if we would be among the men in the first ranks of our profession. Especially is this so in the ministry. It is the belief of some that the successful minister is the one who has made special preparation in the study of God's Word all through his college years before he enters the seminary. He will surely be able to understand theology much more readily if he is well versed in the truths of the Bible, upon which theology is based. So it is in the preparation for any profession. First to choose a profession, and then to use every effort to advance to as high a degree of perfection as possible in this one line of study, is the secret of the success of all eminent men. But there are those who are at a loss to make a choice—some thinking that they would not be suitable for the profession they would like, and continuing on in a state of indecision possibly throughout their course, while others, somewhat indolent, put it off until they find which one will require the least energy on their part. What a fatal mistake ! Not prepared for anything espe-cially, they may go out into a business life and be successful, but not, indeed, to the degree of success they would have had they made special preparation—nor would they have as much satisfac-tion. And again, does not every young man have some one talent, which, if he cultivate it, may not only give him wonderful suc-cess in life, but may make his name famous ; while, if he allow it to remain dormant, and gives it no attention, though it mani-fest itself repeatedly, he doubtless loses his one chance of suc-cess in life. However, a man cannot always know what this talent is. In this case, let him make an earnest endeavor to find out what he may best fit himself for, and in what direction his mind and pleasure are bent the more ; but let him quickly make his decision. THE GETTYSBURG MERCURY 203 MOW IT LOOKS PROM THE ROAD. A. L. VERMILYA. Search the woods and rake the meadows For a robin, owl or bat; Something that when slain and mounted May adorn my lady's hat. Rip the feathers off the songsters, Take each head and tail and wing, For them is my lady waiting, Tender-hearted, gracious thing. See her sitting in her carriage Making all the show she can ; On her head a cemetery, In her hand a feather fan. Yet she talks of love and mercy To all things in honeyed words, While she's decked in borrowed plumage Torn from slaughtered singing birds. O, Consistency! thou jewel, Teach these women common sense ; Teach them, while they prate of kindness, They themselves give rank offense. MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS. My minde to me a kingdome is; Such perfect joy therein I finde As farre exceeds all earthly blisse, That God or Nature hath assignde ; Though much I want that most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave. —An Old Song. PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS. C. P. 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Transcript of an oral history interview with David Zobeck conducted by Sarah Yahm at the Sullivan Museum and History Center on February 10, 2015, as part of the Norwich Voices oral history project. The bulk of the interview focuses on Zobeck's experiences as an an instructor of the Transcendental Meditation technique, both at Norwich University and elsewhere. ; 1 David Zobeck, NU Instructor, Oral History Interview February 10, 2015 Interviewed by Sarah Yahm SARAH YAHM: So, I'm here with Dave Zobeck at Norwich, in our little studio at the Sullivan Museum. It is February 10th, 2015, which I know because tomorrow is my birthday. DAVE ZOBECK: Well, happy birthday tomorrow, in advance. SY: Thank you. I wasn't fishing for that or anything. DZ: No, not at all. SY: (laughs) And we're about to do an oral history interview. And so, question one is where were you born? DZ: I was born in Pueblo, Colorado, which happens to be a steel mill town. And it is the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi. And it's a town with wonderful mixed ethnicity. So, my neighborhood was from Yugoslavia, from Ljubljana in Yugoslavia, in Slovenia. And there's about a 12 or 13 block, square block area near the -- right on top of the steel mill. And then, on the other side of the bridge, there's a good-size Italian community. And now Latinos, mostly Mexicans, dominate the city's population. There's an African American population as well, Jewish and Greek. So, it's kind of like a little Pittsburgh. Little bit of everything. And I love it. It was a marvelous experience. I'm one of eight children, so we were good and Catholic. SY: What's your birth order? DZ: My -- I'm the sixth out of eight. So, I have a younger brother and a younger sister, yeah. SY: Number six. DZ: Yes. SY: You're, like, in the messy middle, right? DZ: Yes, kinda sorta, yeah. But, yeah, it was -- so, it's a marvelous experience growing up in that city. And really paid dividends, being exposed to all the different ethnicities. And, you know, we have pictures of -- when we were on our baseball team, it kind of looked like something out of the United Nations, you know? Little bit of everything. And we were cursed in several different languages when we won games, and it was marvelous. It was good experience. SY: Were there turf wars or was it [pretty immigrant?] -- DZ: No, no, not at all. It was very integrated. And especially my neighborhood, it was truly the statement about it takes a community to raise a child. I mean, the families looked out for each other and -- very much so. SY: Were your parents immigrants, too? DZ: My father -- my grandparents were. My father was born in this country. And my dad -- the house that I grew up in is the house that my father grew up in. So, my grandmother bought the house after my grandfather died in a -- extraordinary accident at work where he was killed with -- by a train. And my father was standing there, watching. And so, they bought the house, and my grandmother was raising the rest of the children. They had five children, and then she was also -- it was a boarding -- she was -- like a boarding house for steel mill workers. So, she would cook for them and so on and so forth, and that would help pay the rent and so on, so forth, so -- SY: And was that happening when you were a kid? 2 DZ: No, no, that was when my father was six years old. So -- SY: Oh, so she raised him alone? DZ: She raised them alone, yes. So, you know, it's a neighborhood and a community of extremely excellent work ethic. And if you're not work-- I mean, there was no welfare, just out of pride. Not that there wasn't a need for it. But no one would accept that. SY: Union town? DZ: Yes, and -- but they -- just was not going to happen. And everyone was -- you know, very -- oh, the yards were really well kept. The kids were clean, the -- you know, there was little to no crime other than orneriness. You know, lot of patriotism. Lot of guys went to war, and -- during World War II and then during Vietnam, my generation. So, it was a very beautiful experience because, you know, we were raised Catholic. The mass was in Slovenian for the older folks that didn't speak English. And then, you know, all the festivities and holidays -- and some of my friends who were Greek and Italian and Mexican and -- you know, when they had the festivals and -- everybody went and mixed, and it was great. It was a -- it's a marvelous place to grow up, but very -- definitely very blue collar. And all the children in my family worked their way through college. And that was the joy of my father, to see everyone with a college degree, of course, and all of our children and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren have -- everyone that could have graduated from college -- like, 48 of us or something like that, total, with nieces and nephews have graduated from college. And we expect success. We're going to make that. So, it was a really beautiful -- yeah, I'm very fortunate. SY: So, growing up, was the expectation that you would work in the steel mill or that you would get out? DZ: Oh, my family didn't work at the steel mill. My father didn't want that. He wanted us to do something different and -- not that it was a negative thing, but -- SY: He had seen his father die in a work-related accident. DZ: He did, and -- but he worked in a clothing store for a long time and was the manager of a clothing store. And then it burned down. And because he had assisted a customer who was extremely well off in -- fitting him with a suit, my father was excellent at doing that. And he was cleaning up the store one night after hours and he looked in the dressing room where this man was trying on his clothes, and he saw a paper bag and it was filled with money. And so, he knew who that belonged to. So, my father never drove a car. We didn't own a car. And my mother and father never drove a car their entire lives. Got on the bus and it took him, you know, an hour or so to get across town. And he knocked on the door, presented this bag of money to this gentleman. And, of course, he offered my father a reward, and that wasn't going to happen. And he got back on the bus, got home. Well, after the store burned down, my father was scrambling, looking for a job and "What are we going to do?" He has eight kids, and phone rings one day and it's this gentleman who left his money in the store. And he said, "I understand that the store burned down and you might be looking for work." He said, "If you call this number at the Pueblo ordnance depot," it's an Army depot, "they might be able to direct you some employment." So, my father called, and sure enough connected him to a job. So, he worked there for another, you know, 25 years as a federal government employee and was able to continue to support us and that sort of thing. So, you know, there -- it was a beautiful story, but I don't look back on it -- I don't feel -- we don't feel sorry for ourselves. It wasn't a poor us -- you know, we were poor, but it -- we were not at the 3 same time. I mean, we were rich with my parents and my brothers and sisters. And it was always a fun place for friends to come to the house, because they knew my mother would love them, and we would have a good time. And we were all athletic, we liked to play. And, you know, thank God, with all -- as rowdy as we were, there were no broken bones in the family or any sort of major illnesses. And so, in that regard, it was a -- we were real fortunate. But I'm extremely fortunate, so -- I had a marvelous upbringing. Marvelous. Yeah, no complaints. SY: So, well, I have two questions. DZ: Sure. SY: First of all, when you're a little kid and you're this kid running around on the streets, right, playing outside -- DZ: Sure. SY: -- what'd you want to be when you grew up? What were your dreams and visions? And also, what did you play? Do you remember if you had imaginary games that you played? DZ: Well, first of all, the games -- we played every sport imaginable. And one of the reasons is that, you know, we didn't go skiing because we didn't have the money or the transportation. But we did have a shotgun in the house, so my brother and I went hunting, you know? We would hunt ducks and geese and pheasants and, you know, quail and rabbit and -- not deer. We didn't have a rifle, but -- and we would eat everything that we shot. It was pretty good. So, that was one of the things that we did. The other thing -- I mean, we just dreamt of -- one of the things I wanted to be when I was younger was I wanted to be a professional baseball player. I always thought that I would be "in the show," you know? And I'm sure every young boy in that neighborhood who took up a glove and a ball and a bat had the same thing. I mean, we always had the same -- we thought we would all be on the same team. I mean, there was so much community spirit. And then, my younger brother was drafted several times and was very magical in his talents. And so, he was better than I was. He was younger. And that was my dream, that he -- then it, my dream, kind of shifted from myself doing that to him. So, I was helping him do everything he could to do that, because that was our dream. And in his senior year in college, unfortunately, he was injured and didn't get to make it. And that was a -- at that time, of course, it was a tragic event for both of us, you know? We saw this dream go by. But I think, at one point, I thought, early on -- I thought I might be a priest. And there was always this idea that the oldest -- I mean, one of the boys in every family would become a priest. And so, I thought it was me, and I enjoyed that thought. It was kind of cool. I just loved the parish priest. He was from Slovenia, and he was just -- he had such a heart of gold. He liked to help everyone, and I liked that feeling of helping everyone, and then the idea of saying mass and that was kind of cool. And these Catholic nuns, some of them were much better than others, of course. But there was one that was particularly interesting, and she was from our neighborhood. She grew up in our neighborhood, so she knew our culture and everything. So, she was -- she really took me under her wing, as she did all the children. But I just thought that was going to be something I would do, and even continue to think that when I was in the Air Force later on. I thought, as I was getting out of the Air Force, that I might become a Catholic priest. SY: Really? DZ: I thought so. I had the idea that I just wanted to do something extraordinary. And I thought maybe I would -- I talked to this priest when I was stationed in Torrejón Air Base 4 in Spain, in Madrid, Spain. And I told him that I wanted to become a priest. I thought I wanted -- I just wanted to talk to him about it. I wasn't 100 percent sure. And so, you know, we had these different chats from time to time, and then finally concluded that I could do priestly work because isn't everyone a priest? Isn't everyone a rabbi? Isn't everyone a minister? Can't you do that without having to wear the cloth and do that? So, he said, "You know, I think you'd be a wonderful father, and you would have that opportunity to do many things as well as help people." And so, it was a real cool experience. It wasn't a letdown. It was just, I think, a good part of my vision of doing things greater -- that I knew I didn't have to be one particular thing to do everything that I wanted to do. So -- SY: You're certainly doing pastoral work now. DZ: Well, you know, the interesting thing is, right after I got out of the Air Force, I had -- and I know you're probably going to -- I'm probably ahead of schedule here, but as far as -- SY: Chaos is my middle name. (laughter) Linearity? Whatever. DZ: OK. (laughter) Yeah, "so what if I have these questions that you're answering before I ask them?" SY: Oh, no, no, no. I write them down -- DZ: I'm teasing. SY: I never look at them. DZ: Yeah. SY: I just have them. DZ: Yeah, yeah, no that's good. SY: [For?] just in case. DZ: Good reference. SY: Yeah. DZ: But when I was finishing my last -- I was in the Air Force for four years. And when I finished my last -- the four years, last part of the four years, I was stationed in Torrejón Air Base in Spain, in Madrid, Spain. And I had already learned to meditate when I was in Tucson, Arizona, couple of years prior. And I got into some advanced courses, and I really enjoyed -- my friend and I started running, and then we started doing some camping, and we started watching what we were eating. And there was no -- there were very few guidelines at that time. We just started thinking about -- there has to be something to the quality of food that you put in your system, and how it helps your system perform. And, you know, kind of like the type of fuel or -- that you put in your vehicle. So, we thought we were just on the cutting edge, you know, with that thinking. And then, we would go camping and hiking, and we would just do the extreme stuff, like go -- we're going to go to the top of this mountain, we're going to camp out, and then we're going to come back. And this is what we do on the weekend when we're stationed in Tucson. And it was -- beautiful place to be. So, we would run together and [just?] that sort of thing. And one day, the -- there was an advertisement in the base activity center. And it said there's a yoga class. So, he said, "Let's go. Let's go check it out." So, this woman was talking about yoga and how it would benefit you. And we said, you know, why not? What do we have to lose? Nothing. So -- SY: Now, what year is this? What -- DZ: It was 1972. SY: OK, so this is the beginning or it -- 5 DZ: Yeah. SY: Yeah, OK. DZ: Nineteen seventy-two. Beginning of my four years. SY: [And you're?] -- DZ: Actually '71, I got in. But in '72, I was stationed in Tucson. SY: So, if you were in the Air Force, right -- DZ: Yes. SY: -- and yoga at this point is, like, firmly the bastion of, like, hippie stuff. DZ: Total hippie stuff, there's no question about it. SY: So, I'm having trouble picturing this guy in the Air Force being, like, "Sure, I'll go to yoga!" DZ: Well, it wasn't just "sure, I'll go to yoga." I said, "Let's check this out, you know, before we do that." And then she was talking about -- what caught our attention was she was talking about the benefits it had. And we were in that mode of how do we make our nervous systems function at a higher level? And so, we're running, and we got this runner's high. That's what the mode of, you know, the day was. You're going to get your runner's high, and we felt that. And then, we went hiking, and we would run up in the mountains in the higher levels and just say, you know, this is really cool. And all this healthy stuff. And we didn't drink and we didn't do pot. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life or even drank a cup of coffee. But I just thought there has to be some high and some way to get that inside of you. There has to be more inside than outside. What I see that grows out of the earth -- and people smoke pot and do all that sort -- that's good for them or whatever. They think that's good for them and that's their choice, no problem. But has to be the same or more inside. I have to be able to go inside and get to that place. Because when we would camp, we would look out and see the sky, and it would be -- and we'd see all these -- [well, you know?], in Flagstaff, Arizona, for example, we would look, and as far as -- I mean, it was just beautiful. And we would [say?] -- as far as we can see and then beyond what we can see still is space. So, it has to be the same thing inside. It has to be as far as we can go and beyond where we can go. It has to continually be space, so it has to be a reflection -- the outside has to be a reflection of the inside. And so, this woman started talking about yoga and "this position will create this flow in your circulation and will bring awareness and alertness to your mind," because she was talking to us in kind of a scientific way. And then we would start twisting around and doing things and -- you know, I didn't buy into all of it, for sure. It's a little too much. But we were doing that, and then -- we did that for about -- I don't know, about a month straight, and we would go to these classes three or four times a week. And we liked it. It was neat. And then, you know, lo and behold, here's this picture of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the community center on base. And it said there's a lecture on Transcendental Meditation. So, he said, "Hey, let's go to that one." I said, "Are you sure?" And he goes, "Yeah, let's go." I said, "All right, what do we have to lose? Let's go," right? So, we sat there. So, in comes this guy who was a Marine Corps veteran, and he had had two tours in Vietnam. And he sat down, and we -- there were about four of us, I think, that showed up. And, you know, introduced himself and was very casual, and start talking about meditation. And then he said, "My story is that I served two tours in Vietnam." So, that caught our attention. And he said, "When I got back, I knew there was something more. I was looking for something more." And he said, "So, I got back to Tucson, then I just 6 went to California. And I cruised around in the mountains, and I stayed on my own and I just kind of let this stress go out of my system. And then I start doing some thinking in this silence." And he said, "What I wanted to do was become a meditation teacher." So, he said, "When I came back to Tucson, I gathered my things and found out that there was a course in India where I could go and study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi." He said, "So, I did it." So, he said, "When I went there" -- he said, "I had -- keep in mind, I hadn't listened to the radio, I hadn't watched TV, I haven't been in circulation in society for two or three years. So, I just went there to study. I was just going to be by myself and listen to this guy and then come back and teach people, because that's what I wanted to do." When he got there, he said there were people from -- international group. They were from all over the world. And so, he said Maharishi would come out and talk about meditation and different concepts of consciousness. And, in the evening, then he would retire. He would go into his room. And so, it was a young crowd, and they would hang out, kind of on the shore of the Ganges. And they would cook and, you know, associate with each other and sing and so on, so forth. So, he said there were these guys that were -- these four guys, and they had guitars. And they would sit around and they would make up poems and songs about people on the course. And one of the women on the course was named Prudence. And she was extremely shy. She was the sister of an actress, Mia Farrow. So -- and Mia was there. And so, he didn't know anybody. Keep that in mind. Just as innocent as you can imagine this so far. I know you're grinning and you know what's going on. So, anyway, Prudence, who I met a few years ago -- she's a marvelous human being and just a dear, dear person -- she would go to her room, because she was extremely shy. Extremely shy. And so, they kind of wanted the -- these guys kind of wanted to draw her out, so they made up a song. So, they went to her door and they knocked on her door, and they sing, "Dear Prudence, why don't you come out and play? Dear Prudence," yeah. And, you know, she didn't come out, and then eventually she did. And she would -- she was still very shy. And so, they were making up different songs about different situations. And so, they started to talk to my friend. And so, they called him G.I. Joe, because he had these fatigue pants on. And he didn't have his -- you know, he was -- you could wear your fatigue pants, just -- it didn't say Marine Corps, didn't say sergeant or anything like that. So, he had that. And he didn't really care how he looked, and he was just there for the knowledge. And so, they start making up a song about GI Joe. They called him GI Joe and that sort of thing and so, you know, hey, that was kind of cool, you know? So, anyway, he became a teacher. He came back from India. He was going to his first lecture and he turns on his radio in his little jalopy that he was driving, and what comes across the radio was, "Jojo was a man from Tucson, Arizona. He smoked some California grass. Get back, Jojo. Get back to where you once belonged." Get back to the USSR. And he said, "I've heard that song before." And someone said, "Yeah, those are the Beatles." He said, "Really?" And then he -- start telling stories about, you know, John Lennon. He said he had these multi-colored glasses on and he had, you know, long hair, and he used to wear these necklaces. And he was really bright, and how he would have conversations with Maharishi. And Paul McCartney, of course. And then Prudence later on was married, and she had a son and she named him Paul. And so, they're still really good friends. And he told stories about that. But it wasn't about them, the idea that he liked -- that he related to me that was intriguing is that this man had some knowledge. Maharishi had some knowledge to take 7 you within yourself. And it wasn't about him, it was just about the knowledge that he had received from previous masters, and he passed it on. And now, this guy could teach this information. And that was really intriguing to him. So, we started, and it was everything that it was cranked up to be. I'd started with no expectation. I thought -- same thing I did with yoga. Like, if this is going to work, it's going to work. I'll do exactly how they say to do it, and I'll get the results. So, we did. And my friend Scott Nichols and I started on the same day, and since that time I've been meditating regular, and I haven't missed one time since I started. I think it is everything that it's cranked up to be. And what inspired me to become a teacher was just the idea that I felt really good already. I didn't -- I wasn't in any dire straits to learn a technique that would pull me out of some stressful situation in my life. SY: So, you weren't -- you were seeking, but you weren't hungry. Doesn't -- DZ: Not [at?] -- well, you know, the thing is, I was hungry, but I wasn't desperate. SY: [Yeah?]. DZ: And I think I've always been a seeker of how to get better things in life. My own natural intensity pushes me to say I want to be the best I can be, I want every day to be the best day. What is this? You know, I want to see that. I don't want to get in dire straits to wait until I need something. What happens if you take it when you're already functioning, you know, fairly well? Can you get better? Can you get to the next level? And that's kind of the attitude I took with it. And when we began to meditate, it was just marvelous. I had better running times, I slept better. I performed better on tests. I had a lot more stamina. I was more organized. And, you know, it just opened up a whole new vision in my life. And I thought it was already really good. So, when I did that for a couple years, I thought when I got out, here's an opportunity to become a teacher. So, when I was in Spain, the Spanish TM [Transcendental Meditation] teacher in Madrid was a director of the Spanish organization, TM organization, and they were just going to start a teacher training course. And he said, "You'd be a fool to go back to the States. There's thousands of teachers, and everyone's taught everyone else, you know?" He said, "If you stay here, you can teach lots of people, because there's only going to be eight new teachers in the whole country." So, I love Spain, it was where I wanted to go since I was in fourth grade and drew a map of my favorite country other than United States. It was Spain. And I remember my father and I worked on this thing. We had glitter in the river and we had -- for the forest, we'd stopped up these little twigs. And it was on this big yellow piece of -- I can remember it clearly, and I was so excited. And then, when I got a chance to go there, it was marvelous. And I started to study Spanish on the base through the University of Maryland. I took five courses in a row for credit. And then I would just go downtown and practice. So, it came to me like riding a bike. I mean, it just -- it made sense to me. And I was in the country, and I would go down after class, and I would go to Madrid. And on the weekends, I would go to the train station and take a train to some little tiny pueblo someplace, just by myself to force myself to speak Spanish. And I would practice with the Spanish Air Force guys who shared the base with us, and go visit their families on weekends and stuff. And I went to the TM Center and did advanced courses. And I became pretty proficient in Spanish, so I became a teacher with the Spanish natives and did it all in Spanish. Eight months in the first two phases of a teacher training course. And [in the?] third phase, we went to [Avoriaz?], France, and studied with Maharishi, in person. So, I was their translator. And that's who made me a 8 teacher of TM. So, you kind of -- you follow exactly what he asks to do to make sure that the technique is done right. And it's effective, so it's not about you. It's about following what the masters did, and exactly in that same form. So, it was very, very challenging. But when I began to teach my first course, I went back to the base, Torrejón, and I taught 20 of my friends how to meditate, because they would -- they'd been wanting to meditate because they saw me meditate. And sometimes, they would just like to come in the room and sit quietly. And I didn't do anything. I don't sit in the lotus or go "om" or anything crazy. I just sit quietly in a chair, and that's really no big deal. So, that's how that began. So, I got a chance to travel around the country, and I taught about -- and then was lecturing in Spanish, of course. Probably taught about 900 people and -- for that whole year. And then, I came back to my hometown. And I was gone for about three years by that time. Hadn't seen my family in three years. And while I was sitting in the back of the -- on the back porch, my mother was ironing and -- you know, I was the only one -- the only sibling left in the house. Everyone else was married and out of the house. And my mother and father were there. So, this is my first time in my life I had a chance to be one on one with them. And it was marvelous, because I was certainly older then, and they didn't have all these other things going on. And, you know, my father was retired. And it was just one on one with my mother and father, like being an only child for a period of time. And it was glorious. I mean, my mother and father are just saintly. They're just magnificent human beings. I idolize them. The phone rings during a conversation. I pick up the phone, and there is a woman on the other end, and she asks me my name. "Are you Dave Zobeck?" "Yes." "Do you teach Transcendental Meditation?" "Yes." "Would you like to teach in the Colorado State Penitentiary, TM?" I said, "Yes." She said -- I said, "How did you get my name? I mean, I've only been home a week." She said, "I'll tell you later, so -- but tomorrow, I'm going to show up in front of your house. Give me your address. You're going to follow me to the penitentiary. We're going to talk to the warden at the maximum security penitentiary, and I'm going to try to convince him that we need this, because we have so much violence and we need something. And I'm sure this will work." "OK." So, we went down there, we talked to him. He put us on hold and he said, you know, "That sounds great." We hit it off right away. He was a Latino guy. He had a little Spanish accent, we begin to speak Spanish, he -- then, that kind of melted the barriers. And on the way back from the maximum -- oh, on the way out of the penitentiary or out of our meeting at the maximum security penitentiary, Tia, the guard, had to go to work. So, she was dressed in her uniform, of course. And she said -- she turned to me and she shook my hand. She said, "Good job, white boy." I said, "Great, there you go. That's good." And that was cool, I mean, you know? That was -- I had no problem with that. SY: No, you were in. DZ: I felt very comfortable with that, and I grew up in that kind of atmosphere. In the service, of course, same thing, and I loved it. And on the way home -- it was 50 miles away from my home in Pueblo. It was in Canyon City, and I stopped at the medium security penitentiary, just on a whim, and I thought I'm going to see if the program director's in. And so, I went down and I stopped at the guard shack, and I told them I had an appointment with the program director, which was a little on the untrue side. And he said, "Go right down and they'll help you out." So, I drove my vehicle down there and they patted me down and escorted me to the -- a bench outside of this office and said, 9 "You'll have to wait here. He has someone in his office." And so, I was waiting in my little coat and tie, and there was an inmate and he was swabbing the deck. He was cleaning, mopping up. And, of course, he's there with his number on one side and his last name on the other side. And he looks at me, and he says, "Hey, what are you doing? Are you a lawyer?" I said, "No, are you?" And he goes, "No." He goes, "I like that answer." He goes, "What are you doing, man?" I said, "Well, I'm here to see if the medium security personnel are open to the idea of a meditation class." He said, "What kind of meditation? Transcendental Meditation?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Do you know George Ellis?" I said, "Yeah, I know George Ellis. George Ellis is a meditation teacher." He said, "How do you know George?" I said, "Two weeks ago, I met him in France." He said, "What'd you think?" I said, "I like George. He's a small guy, big ego." I said, "I like him." He goes, "Yep, that's George." He said, "Well, he taught me in Folsom Penitentiary. So, I do Transcendental Meditation." He said, "I'll tell you what. Here's what you do. You wait 'til you see Mr. Marshall, the programs director. When you come out, I'll have 20 of the toughest blomp-blomp-blomp-blomp-blomp guys here in the penitentiary, and we're going to start." I said, "Is that how it works?" He said, "That's how it works." I said, "OK." Sure enough, Mr. Marshall came to the door and he said, "I can see you now. Well, what are you here for?" So, I start talking to him. We had a marvelous talk. We talked about John Deere tractor, we talk about hunting deer. We talked about fishing, we talked about baseball. We talked about the stress he has in prison, his family. Yeah. And I said -- I was talking a little bit even about meditation. He said, "That sounds really interesting." He said, "I think I might like to try that." Well, he and I walked out. When we walk out, sure enough, 20 guys, inmates, are standing right in front of the door. And they already have their names signed up on a piece of paper. And they have Mr. Marshall's name as being the employee sponsor. So, they go, "Mr. Marshall? Here's what we're going to do." He said, "Now, boys, just a minute." Said, "We've got to check this out. This isn't how it works." And so, long story and fast forward, had it all checked out, and we did -- they didn't have any money, but they said, you know, "We're going to start." So, I said I would raise some money and we would get this done. So, I kind of went around the different TM centers around in Colorado and kind of [moved?] some money for sponsors. But I made the inmates pay $50. So, they were making 25 cents a day. But I said, "You're going to have to invest in it, because if you're [giving to it -- given it?], you may not do it." "Well, we don't have that kind of money." "Well, you'll find it." Now, what I did find out was, for marijuana in the penitentiary, if someone had three joints of marijuana in a matchbox -- that's what they call it, a matchbox -- it was $75. And someone would smuggle that in, and it would risk them getting a felony, and they would -- but it was worth it to them, so they did it. So, I said, in my first introductory lecture -- there were 75 inmates in this closed -- there were no windows in this closed room, and they could smoke at the time, of course. And I walk in and, you know, all the whistling began and all the catcalls and all the, you know, those kinds of things. And as they were talking, I finally -- it was too much noise, and I said, "Just a second. You know, I came here to talk about meditation. And those of you who are not interested, you have two options. You can go out this door or you can go out this door." Then it got very quiet. Course, there were a few other kinds of ways we said that in prison lingo. And they liked it, they clapped, it got very quiet. You could hear a pin drop. And afterwards, I told them what TM was, and whoever wanted to start, here's the 10 rules. And they clapped, and then we started our class. So, I taught TM for four years in the Colorado State Penitentiary. And the community sponsored -- you know, they would sponsor an inmate. And so, I didn't make any money. It wasn't a money-making thing, but I traveled back and forth from my hometown, which was 50 miles away, when I was -- I was enrolled as a student to finish my bachelor's degree with the GI Bill. And then I moved 167 miles away to go to grad school, and I would commute on the weekends down to the penitentiary. And then, you know, like, Friday, I would go -- drive down to the penitentiary. I'd work till 9:00, I'd go and stay at my mother and father's house, 50 miles away. Then I'd come back that Saturday morning, spend the entire day there from 8:00 to 8:00. Go back Saturday night, come back to the penitentiary Sunday morning and work till noon and then drive back to grad school. And it was a joy, what I learned. All the things I learned while I was there, because I was not a guard. I was not part of the system. They took me under their wing. They told me how all the crimes happened. (laughs) They educated me. And I felt that that was a real intriguing place to be. They were teaching me. And I wasn't, like, taking them into my homes or, you know, they were going to come and stay with me when I got -- it wasn't that sort of thing. It was just, like, "Here's what I do. And then, if you do this, you maybe have a better chance with a clear mind to not return, because your thinking will be different." But I didn't tell them how to live their lives or to behave, because that doesn't work after they've done 20 years and stuff. So, it was definitely a group of the alpha dogs in the penitentiary that were the heavyweights. And the violence level started to be reduced by a lot, because at one point I had 50 out of 500 meditating. And when the guys would meditate during the day -- they had to be locked down three times a day so they could be counted to make sure that everyone's there. So, three times a day, they had to go back to the cell and lock down, and the guard would go by the cell and count every single one of them. Well, during the count, it was about 30 minutes. So, the guys decided to meditate during that 30 minutes. Well, traditionally, it's really loud, because the guys have a chance just to yell and scream, and there's nothing they could -- what are they going to do, put them in prison? (laughs) So -- and these guys would meditate, and they were the heavyweights. Pretty soon, they start telling everybody, "When we do count, you shut up." (laughs) So, it started getting real quiet in all the different cell blocks. So, the guards were going, "Wait a minute, something is really unusual. What's happening? Because there's a change in these guys." So, every day, I would come in and I'd be in my little sport coat, and I would -- they would call the -- Mr. Zobeck's meditation class in the psychology room. And the guys would come in and I'd say, "Hey, how you doing?" Blah-blah-blah. So, at one point, the captain -- one of the captains came to me and said, "Get in my office," in a real stern tone. You know, right in front of the inmates. And the inmates went, "Oooh!" You know, like, "Uh-oh!" SY: "He's in trouble!" DZ: Yeah, exactly, you know? So, I went in the office and I sat down. And there was another inmate by his side, and he was talking to me in a very stern voice and it was kind of puzzling in the beginning, of course. And he said, "Do you" -- he said, "Young man, do you know that it's a felony to bring cocaine in a state penitentiary?" I said, "Sounds good to me. That sounds about right. Yeah, I do. That sounds -- yeah." I, like -- and then he said, "Well, you could be doing time with the rest of these guys, just like the guys you're trying to help and -- if you don't watch your step." And I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." 11 Then it occurred to me, I said, "You're talking about me bringing in cocaine? Oh." I said, "Captain, let me just give you a quick bio. I've never had a cigarette in my life. I don't drink. I've never had a cup of coffee. If you want to get your sniff dog and take him in my vehicle right now, I'll sign release papers. You could do a strip search, I'll give you a urine sample, a blood sample, whatever you would like to do. And, you know, we could do that in front of the inmates. I'll do whatever -- just so the evidence is clear. And if you don't find anything, I'll teach you meditation, because you're really stressed out. But good things are happening. (laughter) You know, when violence level goes down, that's actually a good thing." So, after that, when the -- when we were there for about a year, the in-- SY: Wait, wait, but so how did that resolve? That whole cocaine thing, how did that rumor start? DZ: He just -- it started because, you know, they -- the only reason that they would see that there were inmates being calm was when there were some drugs in the facility. SY: Of course, cocaine would not be a drug that would calm them down. (laughs) DZ: Well, but you know what? When they're maniacal -- if they're addicts, that would be a nice little fix. And there were several addicts in there. So, when they're coked up, they're a little bit different than when they're -- yeah. SY: So, he thought you were bringing in drugs because -- DZ: Yes, because I -- SY: -- the change in behavior was so dramatic. DZ: Yeah, and I was always happy. And that -- so, he knew that I had to be coked up, on coke, because I was always happy. And so, anyway -- but I saw a connection. The inmate that was sitting next to him was a convicted sex offender. I didn't know that at the time. And I didn't know the social aspects of the prison and sex offenders. What happened was, he came to learn TM. And I said, "Yeah, you could learn." But the inmates in the class told him, "Uh-uh. You're not coming with us, because if you sit with us, then that means we approve of who you are, and that ain't happening." So, I didn't realize that dynamic had transpired. And so, he was trying to upset the applecart and get this kicked out totally by putting this "I use cocaine" thing on me. And they would kick me out, and there goes the program and he'd get some revenge. SY: Right. DZ: So, I figured that out later on, and that aspect came to me. But, at any rate -- and then, after that, many guards saw what was happening, and they would come to me individually, like, privately and look around to see if there was anybody looking at us talking and say, "Here's my number. Call me at home." And I would call them at home, and said, "I want to start." So, I would drive to their homes, talk to them, their wives, and their kids and teach them. And then they said, "What we want is privacy, that you don't tell anyone, because if the guards -- other guards see us, then we're associating with an inmate program. If inmates see us, then, you know, we're -- it's a pretty negative situation." And so, at any rate -- and after -- of course, after four years -- and I was in grad school, then I was married, and I just couldn't continue. It was too long a deal. So, we had a very positive parting. But it was a wonderful experience, and it worked. The only thing I regret is I didn't keep real good -- great tabs on all the changes that occurred. I wasn't into the research end of it, and I regret that but -- 12 SY: Yeah. Any -- do you have any anecdotes of, like, transformations that happened with individual -- did you keep in touch with any of the inmates or -- DZ: They all kept in touch with me. I still have -- at one point, one of the most positive things, I think, is that -- well, I had one of the guys that was in there -- and he finished 20 years. He was in there for murder. And that's not good, and I'm not condoning any crime that any of these guys -- they're all wrong and they all -- SY: Yeah, of course. DZ: -- earned -- SY: Yeah. DZ: -- and earned the -- SY: Yeah, yeah. DZ: -- earned their time in prison. He got out and he spent one whole year in a monastery, on his parole. And the Jesuit brothers in Granby, Colorado, in a monastery, took him in, and he was in silence for a whole year. And he really enjoyed that, and it really made a huge difference. I keep in touch with him. Another one of the inmates who graduated, I -- got out and then finished the course. Became, like, an agent for a few professional athletes, some professional musicians. There's one right now who -- well, I'll tell you a personal connection, it was interesting. One of the guys got out, and he was from the city -- he grew up in the city in Colorado that I went to grad school in. It was Greeley, Colorado, at the University of Northern Colorado. And he said, "I understand" -- he said, "You said you're going to go to grad school in Greeley." I said, "Yeah." He said, "Could you look up my dad?" "Sure." So, he gave me the address, didn't tell me any story about his dad or anything. Didn't tell me anything about his father. I knock on the door, Mr. Smith comes to the door. I introduce myself, I said, "Hi, my name is Dave Zobeck, I teach meditation at the prison, and I met your son, Ted in the prison." And so, he starts cursing his son. "Ah," you know, he goes, "he's the cause of my divorce, because of his drugs and all that stuff. I hope he rots in hell," you know? And, OK, well, I said, "Well, I didn't know that part of it." I said, "So, like, you know, step away from the shotgun. I'm going to go back to my car," you know? Then he goes -- then he says, "Well," he said, "that's not your fault." Said, "Well, come on in." And fast forward, we became good friends. And he was an older guy, he just needed somebody to talk to. When I got back to the prison, I got in touch with Mr. Ted Smith and I said, "You got to tell me the whole story next time. You didn't tell me that." He said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, put your father on your visiting list, and I want him to come and talk to you. And I'm going to try to convince him to -- and he wants to talk to you. And you've got to drop that, you just have to talk to him." And so, anyway, they did. So, after I finished the four years -- and so, that went really well. But Mr. Smith would come and visit me a lot. I mean, sometimes uninvited. And I needed to study and he would just knock on the door and he would sit down, and he'd want to tell me his life story. And so -- and, you know, I accommodated most of the time, and sometimes I just couldn't do it. But I hadn't seen him for about two weeks. And in the meantime, I got a job at the Sheriff's Department in Greeley, Colorado. The Weld County Sheriff's Department. And I was a counselor in the jail, running this rehab program. I was sitting in my office, the phone rings. And this is when I was finished teaching TM in the prison. The phone rings, and it's Ted, the inmate who introduced me to his father. And we start talking. "How you doing?" "Good, I have a job, everything's going well." He said, "But my dad died." And I hadn't seen him in two 13 weeks. He said, "It was just sudden. He died and we're having the funeral. Would you and your wife come to the funeral?" I said, "Of course we will," you know? And he said, "I just need some support [there?]. I don't have any family." "Of course." So, you know, my wife and I went to the funeral, and then we had him over for dinner, because he wasn't any threat to us. I mean, he wasn't, like, you know. So, anyway, we had him to dinner. So, during dinner, he said, "My father really liked you, and he really appreciated you did all that work for free." He said, "He wanted you to have the house." I said, "Now, wait a minute. Time out. Have the house? I'm not going to have the house." He goes, "Well, we'll make it good for you," because he said, "I shouldn't have the house," because his drug guys would move in and he would just -- and it's a mess for him, and he was about 100 miles away. And he said, "I'd just rather have the money and move on. I'm ready to move on." So, he gave us, like -- it was just incredibly inexpensive. So, he said, "For your hard work in the prison for four years, this is your reward." So, we -- I've got the G.I. Bill, bought this house, and it was our first little house. And, you know, we raised our first little girl in it for a few years, and then we moved to another one and we used that as a rental house. But that was probably the most powerful anecdote that -- but some of the guys were -- I've lost track. You know, several of them, I know, had died. And, you know, it's not unusual that someone who's been in prison awhile has the stress factor along with them. But I didn't see, you know -- and some (inaudible) [00:45:22] I'm sure reoffended. I didn't keep that close track. But it was a marvelous experience. And, yeah, it introduced me to the field that I stayed in, the criminal justice field. I got interested in that. SY: OK, so -- DZ: I liked the adrenalin flow. SY: -- what was your master's in? DZ: My master's was in psychology, agency counseling. So, I did a lot of rehab work in the jails after that and ran a halfway house and that sort of thing, so -- and as a probation officer, when I was a probation officer, I did a lot of one-on-one kind of therapeutic kinds of things, and interventions in the community and that sort of thing. So, I really -- growing up in the neighborhood where I was, working in the penitentiary, and then getting that exposure and then applying that life experience to a career was a real blessing, you know? So, yeah, and I didn't teach TM when I was a probation officer, because that was a conflict of interest. I just recently started teaching since I've been here at Norwich. SY: So, I have a couple questions. DZ: OK. SY: First of all, do you know about Vermont's whole restorative justice model? DZ: Yes. SY: Yeah. DZ: Yes. SY: I was on a reparative board for awhile. It's pretty amazing. DZ: Yeah. I was certified as a trainer for restorative justice. SY: Oh, you were? DZ: Yes. SY: Yeah. 14 DZ: And Vermont had a prison here, and years ago, they had a TM program in the prison. And a woman by the name of Susan Gore, of Gore-Tex, who's from Vermont, had this project going and -- about the same time I was doing my project in Colorado. SY: Interesting. DZ: Yeah. SY: Doesn't exist anymore, does it? DZ: It doesn't what? SY: It doesn't exist anymore, does it? DZ: No. No, no. No. SY: So, that was one question I had to ask. And then, I'm just thinking about all these stories, and I'm thinking that you're in this unique position, right, where you can bridge these two worlds, right? So, I would imagine that you're different than most people teaching TM, certainly in the '70s, right? DZ: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. SY: And, you know, you're this guy who was in the service, right? So, you can, like, walk, you can be, like, respected for having this particular type of authority, right? You can tell them to take it or leave it -- DZ: Right, right, right. SY: -- in whatever crude terms you need to. DZ: Right, right, right. SY: Right? And have that sort of, like, gravitas, right? And then you're also able to teach TM. So, I -- is that something you've thought about? Like, how you sort of intersect these worlds? DZ: No, I just -- you know, I taught TM because that was the most wonderful opportunity I had at the present, and I got really into it. And then, when I came back to the states, what I was going to do was get my degree and possibly go back to Europe. And then, this project came along. And then, of course, in grad school I met my wife. And, you know, life happened in that regard. So, the next page in the next chapter was, you know, I have an opportunity to actually work in this field. And I had this previous kind of experience prior to that, and it wasn't for pay. But it was really on the front line, and the prison experience was real. I mean, there was a guy who was -- there was a lot of things that happened in the penitentiary, you know? Like murders and that sort of thing, and just being exposed to that. And I liked the adrenaline rush. I liked that there was an excitement and you had to be on your toes all the time. You had to be alert, and how to handle that, knowing that in a penitentiary, you're outnumbered if you're a guard. So, your best weapon is your mouth, and you could either get in trouble with it or you can calm people down. Because the inmates -- you live at the mercy of the inmates when there's 500 inmates. There's -- they don't walk around -- the guards don't walk around the penitentiary with guns for good reason, because somebody's going to take it away. So, it was kind of an idea of learning how -- it was -- it reminded me of a -- and I've never done this, but it was kind of like maybe being in the jungle, learning how to pet the lions, and still have all your fingers. These guys could kill me anytime. I mean, they were all -- and there was 20 of them. And out of the 20, 12 of them had been convicted of murder. And, you know, they weren't rehabilitated. But I have to give this one little story. So, what I do is I'd -- the first day with everyone that is taught, they learn with a teacher, one-on-one. They get the instruction. So, they receive a mantra, they receive the technique 15 how to use it properly, and then they meditate. They get it the first day, so you don't have to be a black belt in TM. You get -- you learn it right away. It's so simple, 10-year-olds learn. So, it's an effortless technique, which makes it really effective. You know, and it's certainly not a concentration technique or a contemplation technique and -- concentration takes a lot of effort and focus and mental activity, so it usually stays on a surface level. And contemplation is kind of -- you ask your mind to imagine a situation that -- you work yourself to get images or a value, like kindness or whatever it is, and imagine yourself in, for example, Costa Rica when you're actually in Vermont. But this is supposed to give you this relaxed feeling. Or imagine yourself, you know, the kindest person you can ever be. But it's thinking, and as long as you're thinking, you're on a surface level. So, TM is a little different than either one of those. It takes advantage of what's called the natural tendency of the mind. It sounds like a lot of woo-woo, but what it means is that if, you know, you and I are talking -- and I don't know what your favorite music is. What is your favorite music, type of music? SY: It's usually folk music of some variety. DZ: OK, so as you and I are talking, if one of your favorite tunes floats through the door, where would you imagine your attention might -- [yeah?]. SY: Sure, yeah. DZ: To the music. So, it's more charming. It's something more charming. So, what happens is that, in TM, when we -- when I teach a person to meditate, the natural tendency of the mind is to go to quieter levels of the mind where there -- it is more charming. There's more quietness, more silence. Now, how do you get there? So, the first day, I teach you a mantra, which is a word that has no meaning. Some mantras do mean -- there's thousands of mantras all over the world. Probably millions, I don't know. But the mantras that are used by TM are sound that has no meaning whatsoever. And sounds have certain effects on your nervous system. So, it's a soothing sound and I choose that for each person. Some people could have the same mantra, doesn't matter. But the technique, how to use it properly, is the other half of that knowledge. So, I teach that the first day. And by this soothing sound, and when it's used correctly, that directs the tension to finer levels of thinking and quieter levels of the mind, to a point where, you know, there is nothing but silence. And silence is different than quietness. Silence is -- in silence, there's no thought. So, the idea of Transcendental Meditation -- meditation being some form of thinking or prayer, and transcending going beyond that. So, you go beyond the level of thought to where there's silence. And that part is in every nervous system of every human being. So, transcending is that experience of silence. And so, 600 studies later -- show that, you know, the prefrontal cortex and all areas of the brain are affected in a real positive way. So, it creates a situation where there's -- it's called restful alertness. So, the restfulness is that -- it's a mental technique, but there's deep physical relaxation. So, the heart rate is reduced, the breath rate, the pulse rate. Even cortisol, which is a chemical in the body that measures stress is reduced almost to nothing. So, the physical part is there. But on the mental part, there's some awareness. So, it's not sleep, it's not dreaming, it's not being awake, it's not -- it's neither of those states of consciousness, but it's this pure awareness. So, when someone experiences this several times during a 20 minute period of meditation, which is the length of time that people meditate twice daily -- that that prefrontal cortex and all areas of the brain are affected positively, and there is some coherence in the brain. So, there is awareness. 16 There's alertness. And so, when you experience that and you finish, then you're refreshed. So, it reaches the level that's deeper than that of sleep. But it's not sleep, because sleep is measurable and your brain behaves a certain way during sleep. And the EEG that measures -- that does this research doesn't lie, doesn't make anything up. It says, hey, this is a different state of consciousness. So, we can tell when a person's sleeping by the function of the brainwaves. Then, when they begin to dream, there's some rapid eye movement, and you can tell there's a different function. I'm not being incredibly scientific, just -- right, just general. And when we're awake, like right now, there's a different -- so, scientists in another room looking at this screen could say that Sarah and Dave are sleeping, dreaming, and awake. And then, when we meditate, they're saying something different is happening. So, it's a fourth state of consciousness. So, being able to actually teach that to someone, knowing that it goes to what is a natural place in their own being, in their own mind and their own physiology, which is silent, and they get these deep results -- and when they come out and they're more alert and more relaxed, they're probably going to have better behavior. They're probably going to be more efficient in their activity. They're probably going to be more effective. So, when the violence level went down in the prison, it wasn't because Dave Zobeck said, "Be good." It was because we have 50 out of 500, and they're having more brain coherence, because every decision comes from the brain. It just made common sense to me that I didn't have to spew anything. I didn't have to tell them, "Eat -- be a vegetarian, think of Maharishi all day long. Quit your religion." Because that was convincing to me. I was Catholic, I didn't have to abandon my religion. I didn't have to become a vegetarian, because I'm not. I didn't have to walk around with a picture of Maharishi on me and think Maharishi thoughts, which -- and I met him. He's a marvelous human being. A marvelous human being. Incredible. I mean, he's a Hindu monk and I'm not. You know, I'm okay with that and it's not a big deal. So, to bring that knowledge into this field, knowing that in the field of corrections, with inmates and employees that work in that field, that -- high stress rates -- that police officers and people in law enforcement, corrections, they don't live to normal life expectancy because of stress. Not because of the bad guy. And then military, same thing. I mean, when -- sadly enough, when we have 13 -- minimum of 13 suicides per day, I find that -- I'm extremely patriotic, and these are our men and women, and these are people's -- course, now they're children -- that I have been with, and even if they're not -- that I don't know them, they're related and I understand that stress. I've never been in combat, so I don't understand that stress. But I tire of seeing our beautiful flag folded into a triangle and presented to a grieving family because the effects of their duty drove them to that place that they thought was better than living. And what am I going to do about it? I mean, you can only cry for so long. I want to do something about it. So, I think that this is a tool that may have an effect on that. And if someone can do that -- and I taught on this campus, I've taught a number of veterans that were -- have done a number of tours in different wars. And the results are phenomenal. And it is such a privilege for me to do that, it's such an honor for me to do that, to share that. So, to be here at Norwich is just -- this is -- SY: So, yeah, so how did you get -- DZ: -- ideal. SY: -- pulled back into this work? 17 DZ: Well, I retired from my work early, and I put in 28 years in the field. But I decided that I wanted to teach TM again. In order to do that, I had to do a recertification course, and I went to this recertification course and I met this guy there. He said, "I work for the David Lynch Foundation and I'd like you to work for me." I had no idea what that was. I said, "Oh, okay, that sounds good." And, you know, no big deal. And so, he contacted me later on and said, "You have a chance to go to Norwich and teach TM." And I thought that was England. I was all excited. I thought, cool, we're going to England. Break out -- "Hello." Break out the passport. (laughter) So, I came here, and the first day that I came -- it was kind of, like, an incredibly snowy day like today. I went to a meeting in the Plumley Armory, and I walked into the Nicholson Room and there were nine vets sitting around this table. And I had my little coat and tie on, of course, which is kind of the uniform of the day for TM teachers. That's what -- Maharishi would like people to look professional, so I did. And I had Peg Meyer and Shelby [Gile?] and the veterans, and they started introducing themselves around the table. And this man said his name, and he said that he had done some tours and gone through some troubled times. And so, I looked him in the eye across the table and I said, "Welcome home, brother." And he started to cry. And I got up and I went around the table. And he stood up and I gave him a big hug, and he was just crying. And I just said, "Welcome home." And he sat down, and we continued. And the woman next to me whispered -- she said, "Did you know him?" I said, "I've never seen him before in my life." And so, then we had a chance -- after that meeting, we told them about TM, and they were -- they could start. They didn't have to pay anything. Going to make an exception, because we had an agreement between our agency and Norwich. And then, I went and talked to the student body. I mean, there were about 200 [core or Corps?] members, and we got a group and we started the first study. I wasn't the researcher, but the researchers did -- took some measures before and after. And then, the results were great. Doctor -- or President Schneider got up in front of the students that were there and he said, you know, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have the opportunity to learn this." He said, "It's everything that they say it is. There's no obligation, and you can volunteer if you like. If you don't, that's okay." He said, "But I've checked it out. I've looked at the research," and he said, "that's the only thing that convinced me." He said, "Then I started it, and since I've been doing it, it's wonderful." You know? Not exactly his word, but that he started -- SY: So, the TM with people returning with PTS makes a lot of sense to me. And the TM with platoons beforehand also makes sense, but can? -- I feel like there's this elemental contradiction, right, which is no matter how resilient people are, in war they're going to be forced to see and do things that damage the psyche, right? DZ: Sure, sure. SY: So, I guess, how do you think about that? And how can -- do you believe that TM can, to some degree, change the nature of conflicts? DZ: Well, a couple of things. You know, it only works if you do it. And if a person's in a conflict -- I mean, I understand from a practical sense they're not going to call time out and go, "I got to meditate." But there are going to be some down times. There's going to be conflict that's going to cause that damage no matter what. If you do TM, you don't -- yeah, do TM. What do you do about it when you have it? And this is something that I like in this regard, because they could do it by themselves, and it's an extra tool. If they want to talk to a psychologist, that's great. If they want to take some medication, that's 18 great. Whatever. They can do this by themselves. The veterans that I taught said, "I wish I would have had this when I was in combat, because there were times when I was just losing my mind and I didn't know what to do. And I had time on my hands. I wish I could've sat down and done this." So, in a practical sense, we're giving them tools to use when they can -- if they're in a conflict or if they're not actively doing anything, they have some downtime, to relieve that stress, to maybe -- we don't have any data yet that says TM prevents PTS. I would never say that. Maybe lessen the effects, or even when they get back they have a tool immediately to use. Because what we know is that alcohol, drugs, you know, the different behaviors that break out -- violence, you know, it's fight or flight kind of time when someone has post-traumatic stress. They -- you lash out or they'll walk away from things, and they're not the same person when they return, because what's happened is the brain is damaged. So, the hope is that we can give them this tool to maybe get them strong before they get into the conflict. And if they're kind of doing this workout for the brain, being more flexible to stress that's incoming, they won't react as badly or as poorly as they did if they didn't have the tool. So, what we're doing is -- it's kind of like that analogy of, you know, there's this crack team that rescues people jumping in the river, and they're going down the tubes. And they can pull out every single guy in the river, and every single woman in the river. They can -- they're really good at it. Then someone gets the wise idea and says, "Why don't we catch them where they're jumping in? You know, we can prevent something." So, this is a preventative program. So, we get the vets that have -- coming back, they're on campus. We also get those who are going to be commissioned and go into the service. And I have, you know, over -- probably about 100, and I get text messages from several of them that say, "I meditated before I flew today. I was clear as a bell." Or, "I finished Army Ranger training, and if not -- but for TM, I wouldn't have made it." And so, I see that there's some results. And, you know, I'm not a meditation cop. I don't make them do it. I give them the tool, and that's what the president said. We're going to give them a tool that is proven and see if that makes the difference. SY: No, that's very interesting. So, OK, so Norwich is founded on this idea of the citizen soldier, right? DZ: Mm-hmm. SY: And I think that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? But part of it that I find compelling is the idea that you're creating soldiers who are thinkers, right? Who are -- they follow orders, but they also to some degree come to their own conclusions, right? So, I'm wondering if you feel like TM can create better, more ethical warriors, if it has a moral effect, perhaps, in some way? DZ: Well, I mean, if -- the idea that -- that's a good question. The idea is that -- I think a person's morals don't necessarily come from meditation. But I think when a person has a clearer mind, they make less mistakes, and they're probably apt to err on the positive. So, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we were talking about, ideally, a situation where one of these young men or women become a general and they're big decision makers, and it comes down to doing that -- [make?] a decision to -- is this war -- is it -- are there other alternatives? That clear mind would make the very best decision that that person could possibly make to benefit the most people around them. Of course, that's the hope of every time, so -- but there's no -- I think when people begin to meditate, the hope is -- I had one of my -- so, one of the guys who's a soldier now, he said, "I want you to teach all 19 of my platoon, because we're going to be more in touch with each other, and we're going to be more effective." And, you know, the hope is someday there will not be any wars. How -- you're talking about ethical with regard to during a war, ethical with regard to preventing war, or in what regard are you thinking about? SY: All of the above. DZ: I see. SY: All of the above. I mean, so, yes, so ethical in terms of preventing a war, if it could be prevented. But also, I'm just thinking about -- you know, we've had some unfortunate situations in the past decade of -- you know, that are coming to light more and more, like soldiers -- you know, I mean, I think of Abu Ghraib. I think of other situations like that, and I wonder if a practice like this could help a soldier in a sort of context like that. Be, like, "Yeah, I'm not doing that." DZ: Right. SY: Or, "I'm going to blow the whistle on that." Or, "That doesn't" -- do you know what I'm saying? DZ: Yeah, yeah, OK. That's a good direction. One of the things that I would submit that -- I don't have evidence in every single case, but I would submit that those types of decisions are made from a stressed mind. And same thing with crime. I mean, look at the example in prison. When these guys are doing that, none of them -- they rarely if ever got written up for any violations. And it's not because those rules were not there at all, they didn't understand the rules. It was because their reasoning was influenced by the amount of stress that they had. So, I would guess that when -- the people who did that in Abu Ghraib, and it wasn't every single one of them -- made that decision. That's not a relaxed place. That's an incredibly stressed place. And I would guess that those decisions come from stressed minds. So, I think that what could happen -- if I had the magic wand, I would teach every one of those guys. And, you know, there would be a difference in the -- a physiological change. And again, it sounds very ideal. But break out the EEG machine. And that doesn't measure left-wing granola conspiracies. That measures how the human brain functions in each individual. And when done correctly, there is a positive effect. And I would say that would be where the influence would go. And I see the same thing with, you know, stressed cops, stressed whatever. When I was on the street as a probation officer and we'd chasing the bad guys, I'd come home and there'd be all sorts of stress, of course. But I would meditate, and then I wouldn't bring that stress into my house, you know? And I think that that's the hope. So, I think it's a tool that is -- needs to be looked at, because scientifically it's proven. So, I do think it would have an influence in that regard. Do I think it would have been perfect and no violation? I'm not saying that. I'm saying does it make a difference if they would do it? I think it would increase the chances of positive behavior by a long shot. That's my opinion, absolutely. And so, if you look at that and you look at the idea of where wars come from -- I mean, people making decisions to go to war -- I don't think that's a relaxed nervous system. SY: No, and people that -- DZ: On either side. SY: Right. When people feel like caged animals, they act like caged animals, right? DZ: They're going to lash out, I would guess. I mean, in some cases. And rare -- and bless the guy who doesn't or the woman who doesn't, but it's rare. But I think that -- you know, the same thing -- well, anyway, so that's my opinion on that one. 20 SY: So, one last question -- DZ: Sure. SY: -- because I know I'm getting tired, mostly because these fluorescent lights are awful. Do you have this (inaudible) [01:09:52] (laughs) DZ: They're terrible, aren't they? SY: They're just the worst. DZ: Bam. SY: Ah, thank you! DZ: See? SY: Feel much better. DZ: See, now we're relaxed. SY: Look at that. DZ: We're roaming out. SY: Look at that. DZ: Come on. SY: Things changed. DZ: I mean, come on, hello. SY: Woo! It was, like, my eyes -- DZ: (laughs) Bzzz! SY: -- were like dilating in and out. (laughter) And I was, like, am I here? What's going on? DZ: Who am I? What am I? SY: So yeah. So, actually, I was talking to Sarah Henrich before and I was like, "What do you want to ask Dave Zobeck? What do you want to know?" And she said, "What's your big picture vision?" You could – if you were running the show, you were, you know, I don't know, leader of the world, right? What would you do in terms of TM? DZ: Of the world or for Norwich? The world -- SY: Or of Norwich or -- DZ: Well, here's the deal. I think -- what I think I would do -- I mean, in the world sense at it boils down to Norwich as well. I think you need to get it in the education system. I think this needs to be a class that's offered for credit, that this is -- that you can do maybe some measurements before you get in the class, and at the end of the semester, after X amount of meditations, you can do that. And I think every class would begin with meditation and then follow with some knowledge about development of consciousness, changes in brains, that -- some real scientific kinds of things. And that should be a part of every person's curriculum. I think it belongs in the curriculum. I think this tool belongs with civilians, it belongs to Corps people, it belongs to administrators -- and I have taught a number of administrators here that swear by it. So, if it works, let's do it. So, we have to have this type of knowledge of other subject matters. And I've taught that. I've taught sociology and psychology and that sort of thing and it was -- it's marvelous. You have to have that. It's a good, good bit of information. But the knowledge of the self is so powerful and timeless. These books are outdated five years after I teach the subject matter. Development of consciousness and going within never is outdated as long as you're alive. And that is eternal knowledge. And that's the difference in my satisfaction of teaching TM and teaching these other subjects. I love teaching. When I teach someone how to go and experience and that -- to find this place in their own nervous system -- and then, when they're finished, they feel better and their affect is more positive 21 on other people, because it's good to be around people that are very positive. And they're going to be the decision makers of the future. It's way too common-sensical to do. It makes sense, and there's no -- I don't understand a reason not to. And so, that's what I think the ideal situation -- there are school systems in California, entire school systems that use it. They call it quiet time. They start their day -- the entire school, with the teachers -- they have a bell that rings over the PA system. They start their day with 10 minutes of meditation, they go about their business. At the end, at three o'clock when they're finished, the entire school system sits down, including the teachers. They do 10 minutes of meditation. No violence in the hall, no afterschool violence. They've saved San Francisco millions of dollars -- SY: Of course it's San Francisco. DZ: -- because of shootings and so on and so forth. And the kids are progressing for the first time through middle school, high school, and they're going on to college. The data is there. There's no -- there's nothing -- and they're still Protestants, they're still Jews, they're still Catholics, they're -- they haven't changed. They're still meat eaters. They're citizens that understand how they can contribute better as a citizen to their country, to their city, their community when they're using more of their full potential. This is the tool, and it's proven. And I think it -- you know, move the obstacles out of the way, get to what works. And the sooner we do that, I think we can see results all over the place. Even in cities where there are crime rates and there's X amount of people who are doing TM, there's a difference in the crime level. So, you know, I think it's a tool. So, I think, to answer, you know, that question is -- very directly is put it in the school system. Without a doubt, it should be taught like any other subject matter. The knowledge of self is as important as the knowledge of other topics. And so, I would recommend that. And I'm hoping, eventually down the road at Norwich, it does get in the curriculum somehow, some way, you know? SY: Actually, when I was teaching middle school, we had something -- it wasn't TM, but it was sort of a mindfulness chunk of the week. DZ: Yeah. SY: It was -- it didn't quite work, I think because it was, like, a group activity, right? It wasn't something that, like -- I think with middle school girls in particular -- it was an all-girls school -- they need to close their eyes to, like, step out of the social context in order to be able to access themselves. But when there were -- it was more sort of, like, movement based and they could still see each other, they, like, weren't able to get rid of their self-consciousness. DZ: And to go inside. SY: And to go inside, yeah. DZ: Well, you know, every technique has their own benefits, and I'm not going to knock that. But this is a -- again, if you're going to anyone -- any institution's going to invest money, go to something that's proven. I mean, 600 studies later, and no one's fighting that they're bad studies. There's not one. SY: Do you think that if you hadn't -- if that Marine hadn't come and spoken at that -- at your Air Force base that you would have discovered TM? Or do you think your life would have taken another trajectory? DZ: I think probably -- I think people are on a path to probably discover what they discover. He was just the -- he was the person who -- like, I would -- with some others that just was 22 -- delivered the package that day that I had asked for in some way, shape, or form. I was always looking -- SY: And you were ready for it. DZ: Yeah, I -- and in kind of, like, that Chinese thing when the student is ready, the teacher appears. SY: Right, right, right, you're -- DZ: And I think I was -- we were doing other kinds of things and that came along, and that was just -- that was another thing. But it was the coup de grace. I mean, it made my exercise better, you know, my sleep better and my studies better. So, I saw the benefit immediately, and there's no reason to stop, so I haven't. And so far, there's some tremendous results here at Norwich, and the students like it. And, you know, there's some support. And it'll go as long as it's supposed to, you know? So -- SY: It also seems like, at Norwich, it's also to some degree changed the culture between the cadre and the rooks, right? And I know that people talked about less yelling and, like, a sort of, like, different relationship between -- a kinder relationship, potentially. DZ: Well, the thing is, the first two years when we had the group study that was done at Alumni Hall, we had one platoon that was, you know, taught, and their cadre. And they would meditate together for the first two years. Different platoons, of course. And then we had the control group that didn't learn and then finally learned in the spring when they got recognized. So, we had that -- so, in that specific platoon, they didn't need to yell because these men and women, young men and women, were alert enough the first time around. And they, you know, were less stressed, and they could respond right away. So then, the cadre didn't have to yell, because they got it right the first time. And I know the cadre personally, and they yelled. I mean, it's part of the culture. But it was really good. Now the group is different, because it's opened up to the general population. So, some of the rooks are meditating and they're meditating in the room, but their cadre don't and their other roommate doesn't. Or it's a smattering of -- you know, I taught 116 people last semester, and not all of them were rooks. So, there's still the culture of yelling and screaming, of course. But I think, you know, we've opened it up to the public this time around. But in that regard, when you have everybody with a clearer mind and you have a group of people with a clear mind -- in fact, they sit down and get a clear mind before they start their day and go forward. TM is a preparation for activity. With a clear mind, your activity's going to be more efficient. It's real simple. So, that's how it -- work, and I think Norwich is on the cutting edge of all of this, because they're the first academy to move forward with all this. SY: It's pretty exciting. DZ: It is. I think it's great. SY: It really is. DZ: Yeah. SY: So, OK, any last thoughts? DZ: No, I think it's good. SY: I still want to know why you joined the Air Force. DZ: Oh, well, you know, I mean, my two brothers, older brothers, were in the Air Force. We grew up in Colorado. The Air Force Academy is there. We were always fans of the football team, and we had visited the academy. We were all Air Force guys. And they did it, and I just followed suit. And, you know, it was during the war and I just thought, 23 you know, was a good time to serve. And I joined and -- certainly didn't go to Vietnam. I was a Vietnam era veteran, but I just thought it was a good thing to do. I liked it, and I didn't make a career out of it. I had -- opportunity to go to officer's school, and thought I could progress faster doing studies on my own. And, in fact, that was the case. But the Air Force changed my life. I mean, it got me out of the small town, and I saw the world. And when I lived in Europe, I visited all sorts of different countries, and visited my family in Yugoslavia. I would never have done that without the Air Force. So, I am deeply grateful for that experience. It was -- it's a life -- it was a life-changing situation. Became a TM teacher, taught -- you know, learned another language. So, very, very grateful, the opportunity that was presented, and then got my education -- I mean, finished my education when I got back with the GI Bill and bought a house. And there's so many things. So, it fit, you know? And I really didn't have the brains to figure that out, what I was going to do when I got in. I just said, hey, I'm going to do this and see what happens. SY: You were, what, 18? DZ: I was 20. SY: Twenty. DZ: Yeah, yeah, so -- SY: Yeah. DZ: -- but it was beautiful, I -- so, it was good situation. Very grateful. SY: And you liked the physical challenge, too, right? DZ: I liked it. And the Air Force isn't, certainly, as physically -- challenge as, like, the Marine Corps or the Army. And my Marine friends and my Army soldier friends all agree. SY: I heard (laughter) the joke the other day that -- of the Chair Force. DZ: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. SY: That was the joke that I heard, yeah. (laughs) DZ: But, you know, I take it in all good humor. SY: Yeah. DZ: And I admire them and am very grateful for all their service as well. So, it just -- we're -- I like to be part of the team. And being part of Norwich team and being accepted here and being part of the culture is really good. But, you know, in the beginning, it was very much, you know, weird and strange and odd, which I can understand. I understand that. But once we start looking at the science and the practical application and who I was and -- I wasn't into some of the strange things that are stereotypically associated -- SY: Well, again, you're this bridge. DZ: Yeah, yeah. SY: You're this, like -- DZ: Yeah. SY: -- amalgam that works, right? (laughter) Bringing meditation into these, like, more sort of, like, macho worlds -- DZ: Yeah, yeah. SY: -- like a prison or like the military or -- DZ: And, you know, what I find is that, you know, these young men and women -- Norwich -- the students here are just -- they absolutely amaze me. I mean, at the end of the sentence, they call me sir as opposed to other things that I was called when I worked in the criminal justice system, the combinations of family and different kinds of things were just very 24 creative. (laughter) But they are so motivated, and to add this tool to their -- already their intensity is really nice, because it's like a tune-up twice a day. So, it's going to make them even more effective. So, I say, as a decision-maker, when you become an officer, if that were my son or daughter, I would hope to goodness that you would have a clear mind when you're making decisions when lives are at stake. And clear minds make less mistakes. And your troops -- and you may not even have to go to war. You could be that formidable, that we don't want you as an opponent. We can -- let's have this chat. And so, who knows down the road? But we'll see. Greater minds than mind will make those decisions. But my biggest -- my hope is that they can get it in the curriculum and get it going and have somebody do that. And there's a few young people here who are interested in becoming teachers, and that would be really magnificent. There's a staff member who's interested in becoming a teacher. I would like that. It would be organic in nature, and then I could go onto whatever else I'm supposed to do and -- (laughter) SY: Right, whatever happens to be next. DZ: That's right. SY: Right? DZ: That's right. SY: And -- END OF AUDIO FILE

Issue 37.1 of the Review for Religious, 1978. ; pies of Discernment According Jesus of N~zareth Culti~atingthe Cegtering Pr yer REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Department of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are 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. © 1978 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: $8.00 a year; $15.00 for two .years. Other countries: $9.00 a year, $17.00 for two years. For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor January, 1978 Volume 37 .Number 1 Correspondence with the editor and the associate editors, 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. Gai/en, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. "Out of print" issues and articles not re-issued as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Review for Religious Volume 37, 1978 Editorial Offices 539 North Grand Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63103 Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Miss Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor Review ]or Religious is published in January, March, May, July, September, 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 edi-tion of Review ]or Religious is available from University Microfilms Inter-national; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyright (~) 1978 by Review ]or Religious. Principles for Discernment According to Jesus of Nazareth Br. Jonathan of God and Br. Carith of the Incarnation Brothers Jonathan and Carith reside in the Elias Desert House of the Zion Carmelite Com-munity; R.R. ~1; Garnet, KS 66032. Our age is one of sincere sign seekers unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees rebuffed by Jesus in Matthew 16:1-4. The Pharisees and Sadducees came along, and as a test asked him to show them some sign in the sky. He gave them this reply: "In the evening you say, red sky at night the day will be fight, but in the morning red sky and gloomy, the day will be stormy. If you know how to interpret the look of the sky, can you not read the signs of the times? An evil, faithless age is eager for a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah." With that [the evangelist editorializes rather graphically] he left them abruptly.~ We long, with a deep interior lohging, to know God and to live in his truth. We are the generation that has spawned the Jesus Movement. We have responded, more openly than any previous generation, to the teachings of the Religious East. Titles like Swami, Guru, and Yogi as well as Eastern spiritual practices like Mantra and chanting are becoming well-known in the West. Messianic personalities .have appeared on nearly everyone's spiritual horizon. These wise men from the East speak with persuasion and attract many faithful devotees. All claim to speak the truth and present themselves as ambassadors of God. Religious communities in this climate of sincere aThe New American Bible, (New York: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1970), p. 1089. 3 4 / Review for Religioas, Volume 37, 1978/I spiritual search have many men and women who feel called to a deeper life of prayer. For superiors this current direction has become an administrative problem by having to replace "good workers'" in now-vacated positions. For the religious seeker it has become a time of painful self-examination. Whether we are attempting to discern the words and actions of a particular spiritual teacher or determine if we have in our religious community a prophet or pious pm'anoid, we will do well to look carefully at the principles for discernment given to us by Jesus himself. Jesus gave ten very clear principles for the discernment of a person's spiritual claims. The principles are found in John's Gospel, chapter 5, verses 27-44.~ The verses are easily divided into two categories: 1) Prin-ciples for judging the person discerning: the subjective element that does come to play in every discerning situation. 2) Principles for discetvdng the person in question: the object of discernment. Since discernment of a religious phenomenon is of ultimate and not relative importance, Jesus was not satisfied with presenting a few static principles applicable by the spiritual and technical man alike. Just as a judge may know the law but lack wisdoml a person seeking to discern a spiritual matter needs more than a set of criteria, even if the norms used are the legacy of a great saint. Jesus insists that the "discerner" begin by scrupulous self-examination. The first set of principles, five in number, are for the purpose of self-discernment. Once the judge can assure himself that he does have the "gift" of discernment, he may turn his attention to the religious question to be reviewed. In testing the spirit of the person being considered, the discerner may use Jesus' second set of criteria, also num-bering five. Principles for Self-reflection The Father who sent me has himself borne witness to me. You have been deaf to his voice, blind to the vision of him, and his word is not continually present in your hearts; that is why you will not trast one whom he has sent (Jn 5:37). FIRST PRINCIPLE Men can recognize that one is sent by God if they are attuned to God and. his voice and vision, and if they continually have his word in their hearts. Commentary A group of teenagers from a street gang are not asked to review a new ballet about to open at the civic auditorium. Promoters of rock music do not solicit opinions from senior citizens. ~The Holy Bible, Trans., Ronald Knox. (New York: Sheed and Ward, inc. 1956), pp. 91-92. New Testament section. Principles fi)r Discernment According to Jesus of Nazareth / 5 With no reflection on teenage gangs or the aged, the pollsters are honestly judging the inability of these groups to evaluate the situations validly. According to this principle of Jesus a person must know God in more than an intellectual manner. He must know God and not only know about God. To put it in thi~ eloquent phraseology of the Carmelite hermit, William McNamara, "He must know the God of theology, not just the theology of God." You pour over the scriptures, thinking to find eternal life in them (indeed it is of these I speak as bearing witness to me) but you will not come to me to find life (5:39). SECOND PRINCIPLE Men fail to trust one as coming from God when they interpret scripture in a static way. Or when they subject gcripture to their own mind's inter-pretation. Commentary This is the problem of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism had tripped up many in the time of Jesus: "'The pharisees and scribes approached Jesus with the question: why do your disciples act contrary to the tradition of our ancestors?" Fundamentalism is the problem that has subdivided Chris-tianity. It is a problem we in the Catholic-Christian tradition, flatter our-selves in having overcome. We have become erudite in scriptural exegesis and are long removed, from the narrowness of the Inquisition. But who among'us can say that we look at reality without our limited personal perspective? Who among us is so egoless as to welcome in an unbiased manner God's messengers? I do not mean that I look for honor from men, but that I can see you have no love of God in your, hearts (5:41). THIRD PRINCIPLE Men fail to trust one as coming from God when they have no genuine love of God in their hearts. Commentary Just as "loving" our offspring by insisting that they become doctors may be a subtle form of self-glorification, so a .person's sincere love for the organization or institution can be a real bloc to God's plan of salvation. If the "temples" of our work are to be destroyed by a genuine loving response to a messenger of God, then we must have faith that better structures will be raised up in "three days." The demons that darken our vision in this area are the ones that Jesus suggests can be expelled only by copious prayer and fasting. 6 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 I have come in my Father's name and you give me no welcome, although you will welcome some other if he comes in his own name (5:43). FOURTH PRINCIPLE We welcome men with credentials from other men and fail to recognize a man who comes from God. Commentary When Saint Peter of Alcantra went to the bishop of Avila to seek his approve! for Theresa of Jesus to open a convent with no "fiked income" he. was rebuked and turned away because he was speaking poor economics. Francis of Assisi needed an introductory letter from ,Bishop Guido to see the pope and the intercession of a cardinal to keep him from being dismissed summarily. We are all beginning to realize that an academic degree does not tell us the degree of real knowledge, wisdom, a person has. The amount of technical information to which an individual has been exposed is indicated by a degree. True knowledge cannot be earned or discerned by degrees. How should you learn to believe, you who are content to receive honors from one another, and are not ambitious for the honor which comes from him, who alone is God (5:44). FIFTH PRINCIPLE Men fail to recognize a man from God when they look for honor from men only instead of being anxious for God's honor alone. Commentary This needs little comment. We are all wounded deeply in this area. Human respect is a serious problem. We all relate with the sentiment of Cardinal Wolsey: "IfI had but served my God as faithfully as I have my king, I now would not be naked to my enemies." Principles to Discern the Man from God As the Father has within him the gift of life, so he has granted to the Son that he too should have with him the gift of life (5:26). FIRST PRINCIPLE The man of God gives life like God gives life. Commentary The holy men of the East state it in this way: A flower filled with honey need not wear a sign to attract bees. The type of life referred to here is the kind Principles for Discernment According to Jesus of Nazareth / 7 we have the privilege of witnessing in the life and work of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. We stand in awe of the miracle of her activity but we are believers like Thomas. We have seen so much evidence of God's work in her life. Blessed are they who first commissioned her to respond to her "call within a call" and go live as the poorest of the poor. Many of us might have looked upon her proposal as a bit too idealistic. I cannot do anything on my own authority. I decide as I am bidden to decide and my decision is never unjust because I am consulting the will of him who sent me not my own will (5:30). SECOND PRINCIPLE A man from God does nothing on his own authority, only on God's, thus he is never unjust. Commentary The men and women who refused to cooperate with the "justice" of the Third Reich because of higher laws are the kinds of individuals seen operating under this principle. Acts done as an obedience to God, by interior realization or e.xternai vision, may contradict man's law but not the Law of God. Although Theresa of Avila seemed disobedient to her local superiors the day she opened her first convent of the then incipient Carmelite Reform, she had acquired permission from the pope and local ordinary. Theresa, also, had the support of her ardent admirer, the General of the Order, Fr. Rossi.3 The father., has also granted him the power to execute judgment (5:27). THIRD PRINCIPLE A man from God judges wisely. C6mmentary Wisdom is a gift that transcends technical thinking. Solomon's wisdom befuddled the two women seeking the custody of the child but the intuitive conclusion to which Solomon came did lead to justice. The words of the wise will often confuse those of us lost in our heads. All of life is mystery yet we want to "understand it." The wise person does understand by transcendir~g his thinking, limited and ego-filled, and begins to see reality through the eyes of God. 3The history of the Carmelite Reform of St. Theresa is immensely complex. For further reading see: Journey to Carith, Peter-Thomas Rohrbach, O. C. D. (Garden City, New York: Dou-bleday and Company, Inc., 1966), Chapter V., and The Carmelites, Joachim Smet, O. Carm. (Darien, Illinois: Carmelite Spiritual Center, 1976), Vol. II., Chapter If. I~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 lfl t'estify on my own behalf, that testimony of mine is worth nothing; there is another.who testifies to me, and I know well that the testi-mony he bears me is worthy of trust. You yourselves sent a message to John, and he testified to the truth (not that I depend on any human testimony; it is for your own welfare that I say this) (5:31). FOURTH PRINCIPLE A man from God gets testimony from holy men and from God, not from any human testimony. Commentary When it comes to discerning a spiritual person the otherwise hackneyed expression takes on a certain profundity, "it takes one to know one." The example of Peter of Alcantra's witness to the worthiness of Theresa of Avila as described under the commentary of section four of the first, set of principles is applic~.ble here. But the testimony ! have is greater than John's; the actions which my Father has enabled me to achieve, those very actions which I per-form bear me witness that it is the Father who has sent me (5:36). F~F'rn PRINCIPLE A man from God performs actions that are greater than a man can do on his own. Commentary Use Mother Theresa of Calcutta as a present day example of this principle in operation. The growth of her community is precisely the phenomenon that it is because it occurs in an age of vocational depression. Her efforts to sustain the efforts of thousands of Missionaries of Charity from alms alone, refusing any fixed 'income, is an economic miracle. Of simple peasant stock, Mother Theresa has been received as royalty by pontiff, prelates and presidents. Her resources she claims come to her on her knees. Rejecting the benefices of men who wish to tangle her work in red tape, Mother Theresa clings with childlike confidence to the only Benefactor she really trusts. The crowds were divided over the issue of Jesus. Some maintained "he is a good man" and others felt he was misleading the people: They were unable to comprehend how his knowledge surpassed his slight formal religious education. Some went so far as to voice the question: "When the Messiah does come, can he be expected to perform any greater signs than this man?" (Jn 7:31). We believe Jesus did come from God but many of his, and our, contemporarie's did or do not. It is grace that makes us free enough of our own perception of reality to believe that God, who is infinite, Principles for Discernment According to Jesus of Nazareth / 9 manifested himself in toto, in the finite son of Mary. Many of life's givens have been challenged, some taken away. Less of us are certain that those who cry, "the end is near" are mad. Living in a time of technological chaos and intense spiritual confusion, with salvation being offered us in monasteries and marketplace, how do we know who spi~aks with God's authentic voice? A sincere use of the principles given us by the Master will assure u~ of knowing whom he has chosen to represent him and to whom he has entrusted the words of etei'nal life. "Give beauty Retreat's End back., back to God" (G. M. Hopkins) I give you back this pure, full mountain morning, all leaping, blue as robins' eggsr here at Isaac Jogues where giving feeds, feeds the air. I give you back but keep the love, this gentlest affirmation of my need. Each moment as a specially-cared- for now, a nest of robins' eggs that could be eagles-- each one I give you back, but heart-wise I go down this mountain slowly, though light with love, renewed fidelities. I do not look back; the heart has eyes that memorize such mornings. Mary Enda Hughes, S.S.N.D. College of Saint Joseph the Provider Clement Road Rutland, Vermont 05701 Cultivating the Centering Prayer Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. Abbot Keating's article is based on talks given at "Advanced Centering Prayer Workshops" given at his abbey, St. Joseph's, Spencer, MA 01562. A practical method of contemplative prayer based on the Cloud of Un-knowing, developed by Father William Meninger and called "Centering Prayer," has been made available by means of tapes, workshops sponsored by the Religious Life Committee of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, and the increasing number of retreats in different parts of the country designed to communicate this method. An introduction to the Centering Prayer by Father Basil Pennington appeared in the REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in September, 1976. His book on the same subject, Daily We Touch Him, was published by Doubleday in March, 1977. In any form of prayer, listening, waiting, attending to God have an important place. This article deals with the kinds of thoughts that occur in the silence of listening and gives some indication of how to deal with them. How we cope with unwanted thoughts is of crucial importance since it affects the quality of prayer, its refreshment, and the presence or absence of tension. Considerations proposed in this article in reference to the prac-tice of Centering Prayer, therefore, may be applied, in a manner adapted to it, to one's own preferred form of prayer. Centering Prayer Centering Prayer is a renewal of the traditional prayer of the Church leading to contemplation. It is an attempt to present it in an up-to-date format and to put a certain order and method into it. This prayer is not meant to replace all other kinds of prayer. But it puts all the other kinds into 10 Cultivating the Centering Prayer / 11 a new perspective. It centers one's attention on God's presence within and moves on to discover his presence everywhere else. Thus it is not an end in itself, but a beginning. It is not to be done for the sake of an experience, but for the sake of its fruits in one's life. Here is a parable that points to what is happening in this prayer. There was a little fish who swam up to his mother one day'and said: "Mummy, what is this ocean I hear so much about?" She said to him, "You stupid little fis!! It's all around you and in you. Just swim up onto the be~ch and lie there for a while and you'll find out." Another time, there was a little bear who walked up to his mother one day and said: "Mummy, what is this air I hear so much about?" She said to him, "You stupid, little bear! It's all around you and in you. Just stick your head in a pail of water for a while, and you'll find out." Finally, there was a certfiin beginner in the spiritual life who was having a hard time. One day he went up to his spiritual director and said: "What is this God I hear so much about?" , The spiritual director should not, of course, say to him, "You stupid little novice! He's all around you and in you." But he is supposed to be able to tell him what to do to discover and experience this reality. Centering prayer is one way of doing this. By turning off the ordinary flow of thoughts, which reinforces one's habitual, way of looking at the world, one'.s world begins to change. It is like turning a radio from long wave to short wave. You may be used to a long wave set and the stations it picks up, but if you want to hear stations from far away, you have to turn to the other wave length.' In similar fashion, if you turn off your ordinary thought patterns, you enter into a new world of reality. To do this systematically, take up a position that will enable you to sit still Close your eyes. Half of the world disappears, because we think most of what we see. Then slow down the normal flow of thoughts by thinking just one thought. Choose a sacred word of one or two syllables with which you feel comfortable. It will be the sign of your intention to open yourself interiorly, to the mystery of God's enveloping presence. Keep thinking this sacred word. When you become aware that you are off on some other thought, gently return to this word. As you go to a deeper level of reality, you begin to pick up vibrations that were there all the time but not per-ceived. This broadened perspective gives you a chance to know both your-self and God in a new way. ' Method Our ordinary thoughts are like boats sitting on a river, so closely packed together that we cannot see the river that is holding them up. We are normally aware of one object after another passing across the inner screen 12 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 of consciousness: thoughts, m~mories, feelings, external objects.¯ By slow-ing down that flow for a little while, space begins to appear between the boats. Up comes the reality on which they are floating. The prayer of Centering is a method of directing our attention from the boats to the river on which they are resting, from the particular to the general, from the concrete to the formless. At first you are preoccupied by the boats that are going by. You become interested to see what is on them. You must train yourself to let them all go by. If you catch yourself becoming interested in them, return to the sacred ¯ word you have chosen, which expresses the movement of your whole being toward God who is present within y.ou. A familiar gesture of devotion consists in placing the palms of the hands together with fingers pointing upward. It is meant to express the movement of our body and soul toward God. All our faculties are gathered together and pointed toward God by this gesture. That is what the sacred word is trying to say. It is a pointer. The wofd itself can become vague or disappear. It can be only an impulse of the will. But it points one's whole being to God. Quieting the Mind Various kinds of thoughts may come down the stream of consciousness when one starts to quiet one's mind. The appropriate response is a little different for each. The most obvious are the superficial thoughts that the imagination grinds out because of its natural propensity for perpetual mo-tion. These should be treated like the weather which you just have to accept. The important thing is not to pay any attention to them. They are like the noise in the street which floats through the window of an apartment where two people are carrying on a conversation. Their attention is firmly directed to each other, but they cannot avoid hearing the noise. Sometimes they reach a point where they don't notice it at all. At other times the honking of horns may distract them momentarily. It would be useless to get in the elevator and g6 downstairs and tell the people on the street to shut up. You would have to discontinue the conversation, and you might not be able to take it up again where you left off. The only reasonable attitude is to put up with the noise and pay as little attention to it as possible. In this way you give as much of your undivided attention as circumstances allow to the person with whom you are conversing. The second kind of thought occurs when you get interested in something that is happening in the street. A brawl breaks out and attracts your curiosity. This i~ the kind of thought that calls for some reaction. Here is where returning gently to the sacred word is a means of getting back to the general loving attention you are offering to God. It is important not to be annoyed with yourself if you get involved with these interesting thoughts. That would be a great mistake, because any annoyance or any curiosity that you give in to is another thought, and that takes you farther away from the Cultivating the Centering Prayer interior silence which is the proximate goal of this prayer. Interior silence is always going to be relative. It is important not to reflect on what is happening while doing Centering Prayer. You can do that later. While in this prayer, dedicate the time to interior silence. Silence As we sink into deep peace and then silence, a third kind of thought may arise. Something in our nature--or maybe it is the devil--starts fishing. Brilliant intellectual or theological insights or what seem to be marvelous psychological breakthroughs, like tasty bait, are dangled in front of our minds and we think, "If only I can remember this fantastic insight!" But acquiescence to some beautiful or illuminating thought long enough to remember it afterwards will bring you out of the deep waters of silence. Any thought will bring you out. A very delicate but intimate kind of self-denial is necessary in this prayer. It is not just an experience of rest and refreshment--a sort of spiritual cocktail hour. It involves the denial of what we are most attached to, namely, our own thoughts and feelings---our very selves. This kind of asceticism goes to the very roots of our attachment to our superficial egocentric selves and teaches us to let go. It is the most thorough kind of self-denial, but also a delightful kind. Self-denial does not have to be afflictive to be effective. It is a question of choosing the best kind of self-denial and working at it. This is not the time to think about praying for yourself or somebody else. You can do that at another time. The basic principle for handling thoughts in this prayer is this: whatever thought, feeling or experience attracts your attention, always return to the sacred word. A thought can be anything you notice--inwardly or out-wardly. Even if you should have an overwhelming experience of God, this is not the time to think about it. As you quiet down and go deeper, you may come to a place that is outside time. Time is the measure of motion. With few or no successive thoughts, you may experience the time of prayer passing like the snap of your fingers. "It certainly did not seem like half an hour." As you settle down to deep peace and inner freedom from all thoughts, a great desire to reflect on what is happening may arise. You may think, "At last I am getting some place?' Or, "This feeling of peace is just great." Or, "If only I could make a mental note of how I got here so that I can get back to it whenever I want!" These are good examples of the fourth kind of thought. In deep tranquillity you are offered a choice between reflecting on what 14 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 is going on or letting go in faith. If you let go, you go to deeper silence. If you reflect, you come out and have to start over. There will be a lot of starting over. The presence of God is like the atmosphere we breathe. You can have all you want of it as long as you do not try to take possession of it and hang on to it. Nothing is more delightful than the divine presence. For that very reason we want to carve out a piece of it and hide it in the closet for safe-kee. ping. But that is like trying to grasp a handful of air. As soon as your fingers close over it, it is gone. The presence of God does not respond to greed. It has a different dynamism. It is totally available, but on condition that we freely accept it and do not try to possess it. This prayer is communion with the Spirit of God who is charity, pure gift. The possessive instinct in us wants to hang on to what is good for dear life and the tranquillity is so good and brings such a deep sense of security that the temptation to hang on is very great. But let it go. Accept each period of Centering Prayer as it comes, without asking for anything, having no expectations. In that way its fruits will grow faster. We always want to possess. That is why it is so hard to let go, why we want to reflect on moments of deep peace or union in order to remember how we got there and thus how to get back. But charity is non-possessive. It gives all back to God as fast as it comes. It keeps nothing for itself. The tendency to reflect is one of the hardest things to handle in deep prayer. We want to savor the moment of pure joy, pure experience, pure awareness. But if you can gradually train yourself to let the temptation to reflect go by,just like any thought, you will pass to a new level of freedom, a more refined joy. We are accustomed to think we do not experience something until we express it in a thought. It is difficult to be childlike, to enjoy what is happening and.forget it when it has passed--to savor the immediacy of reality. Reflection is one step back from experience. It is a photograph of reality. As soon as you start to reflect, the experience is over. Reflection on joy is an attempt to possess it. Then it is lost. This method of prayer is a t~-aining in self-surrender. It teaches us by our own experience and mistakes not to be possessive, but to let go. If in this prayer you can get over the inveterate habit of reflecting on what is going onnhave peace and not think about having peace--then you will have learned how to do it. Interior Purification There is a fifth kind of thought which arises in Centering Prayer. Any form of meditation or prayer that transcends thinking sets off the dynamic of interior purification. This dynamic is a kind of divine psycho-therapy. The experience facilitates the coming to consciousness of one's motivation Cultivating the Centering Prayer and evil tendencies, and sometimes enables the organism to release deep rooted tension in the form of thoughts. Generally, thoughts Which are the result of this process arise in the mind when one is most at peace, without one's knowing where they come from or why. They may introduce them-selves wih a certain force or even with an emotional charge. Once again, the best way to handle them is to return to the sacred word. If you can once grasp the fact that thoughts are not only inevitable, but necessary as part of a process of healing and growth initiated by.divine grace, you will be able to take a positive view of them. Instead of looking upon them with negative feelings as distractions, you see them in a broader perspective that includes both silence and thoughts--thoughts that you do not want or accept, but which, for the purpose of inward purification, are just as valuable as moments of profound tranquillity. Conclusion Take everything that happens during the periods of Centering Prayer peacefully and gratefully, without putting a judgment on anything, and just let the thoughts go by. It does not matter where they come from, as long as you let them go by. Don't worry about them. Don't fret about them. Don't judge the prayer on the basis of how many thoughts come. Simply follow the fundamental directive. When you are interested in a thought, either positively or negatively, return to the sacred word--and keep returning to it. This is fulfilling the Gospel precept to watch and pray. It is a waiting game to the nth degree. All through the Prayer of Centering your mind will be in and out of deep silencemlike a balloon floating in the air on a calm day. Just when it seems to be sinking and about to touch the earth, along comes a little zephyr from nowhere and up goes' the balloon. So it is with our consciousness. You should pick up the sacred word at whatever level you find it--a simple impulse of your will may be sufficient. Then you can go back into silence without delay. If you get angry--"O, I wish my mind would keep still!"--then you get thrown out farther. You must be non-judgmental about particular experiences of this prayer. The only way to judge it is by its long-range fruits: whether in daily life you enjoy greater awareness of the presence of God, greater peace, humility, and charity. Having come to deep silence, you see more clearly your capacity to relate to others at the deepest level, to pass beyond superficial appearances like social status, race, nationality, and personal characteristics. To know God in this way is to perceive a new dimension to all reality. The ripe fruit of this prayer !s to bring back into the humdrum routine of ordinary life, not just the thought of God, but the constant awareness of his presence beyond any concept. He Who is--the infinite, incomprehensible, ineffable Onemis the God of faith. In this prayer we are asking, "Who are you?"--and waiting for the answer. We Are No Longer Strangers. Ecumenism, the call of all Christians, is especially the apostolate of the Atonement Fathers who annually prepare special materials for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. along with their many other works. We present here two of the articles thus prepared which we deem of. special interest to religious. Contact: Rev. James J. Gardiner. S.A.; Graymoor Commu-nications: Graymoor/Garrison, NY 10524. Ecumenism- Source of Confusion or Renewal? Kenneth G. Stofft, S.A.* In 1889 a Southern Baptist pastor and editor proposed that "'representative men and competent scholars" from the churches come together to "con-sider the: differences of belief from the Bible standpoint." Thomas Tread-well Eaton was convinced that, even though scholars could not agree on all points, they could at least establish some agreement and clear the field of "much useless and cumbersome rubbish" impeding Christian reunion. This piea was taken up the following year by the Southern Baptist Convi~ntion in Fort Worth, Texas. Approvingly, the convention suggested that othe~ denominations appoint representatives to study together the biblical teaching on those points of doctrine and ecclesial government over which the churches were divided. At least, said the convention delegates, this concerted study could help achieve "a better understanding of the issues involved." In addition to the joint study, it was proposed that the *Father Stofft is Staff Officer in'ihe Office for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 16 We Are No Longer Strangers results of such deliberations "'be Widely published in all denominational papers, so that the Christian public may be thoroughly informed" and that "progress may be made toward true Christian union" (see Proceedings of the SBC, 1890, Atlanta, GA: Franklin Printing House, 1890, page 22). Even though the pleas of Eaton and the Southern Baptist Convention of 1890 were generally ignored by the churches and communities, the prin-ciples espoused were continually taken up by lone voices who attempted to keep the evangelical call for Christian unity before the ecclesiastical public--no matter how small that public became. The cali for '~a better understanding of the issues involved" in Christian divisions was reiterated by a small group of missionaries who ushered in the ecumenical movement at the turn of the century. The suggestion by Eaton that "competent scholars, . . consider the differences of belief from the Bible standpoint" Was recognized and officially affirmed by the Roman Catholic Church dur-ing the early part of the Second Vatican Council in 1963. The need to keep the Christian public "thoroughly informed., that progress may be made toward true Christian union" has been one of the major aims of the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (January 18-25), as well as of the national and international dialogues between the churches and Christian communions. Because of the pioneering vision of men and women like Thomas Treadwell Eaton and the Southern Baptist Convention of 1890, the biblical call for "conversion" through Christian unity is gradually being realized before our eyes in the present decade of human and ecclesial history. But has this perennial call become the source of unwarranted confusion among the churches or a true renewal of mind and heart for the sake of mission? As each Church tradition has reluctantly or enthusiastically entered various stages of renewal (liturgical, scriptural, ministerial), Christians have also entered a period when confusion, rath+r than a clean perception of renewed life and ministry in .the Spirit, seems to have grasped them. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is an historical accident or custom of Church life, and what is primary and essential to Christian belief and life. The ecumenical movement began with a di~dication to the scriptural mandate to witness to all nations concerning the saving work of God in Jesus Christ. However, the movement has grown in strength and credibility because, of its critical, historical eye toward the past and present, having firmly placed its precarious future within the will of the Father through prayer, patient study and continued shared ministry for the sake of the Gospel. The 1978 Week of Prayer for. Christian Unity (January 18-25) has for its theme: "We are strangers no longer" (Ep 2:12-22). In this passage from St. Paul's Letter to the Church at Ephesus, the apostle from Tarsus stresses the need for the Church to ground its faith in Christ Jesus, its foundation. Review,for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 Within the Church we are no longer strangers, because we form together the household of God, are saintly citizens, and rise up as the building whose foundation is the Risen One. Since we are no longer strangers to one another, nor to the Lord, we are presumably fellow saints who understand the issues having to do with our household. If this simple fact is not reflective of reality, or even close to our daily lives, then perhaps we are treading on dangerous ground and following the way leading to confusion, rather than renewal. Scholars of our various traditions and communities have attempted to examine both the truths we hold in common as followers of the Lord and the numerous differences in understanding these truths which characterize us as distinct "churches." These same scholars have passed on their research and findings to church officials for examination and dissemination to the wider community of the Church. We are requested to examine the results of these national and international dialogues and ask ourselves: Do these agreed statements re-flect our living faith? The first step toward Christian familiarity has been taken: to consider our differences in light of Scripture. The second step has been attempted: to publicize the progress of these dialogues through denominational media. The third step along the path to an intelligent process of education and renewal has not adequately been taken: to ask, is this our faith? The third step, however, presumes a great deal about church people and churches. It presumes we are familiar with the unique heritage we possess as part of the Church universal, with the inherited gifts we have as churches. Each church or Christian community has its own history but it also shares a common, history with others. Are we familiar-with the development of the Church and churches? Do we appreciate our differences as factors of his-tori~ al development? What binds the Southern Baptist churches to the Roman Catholic Church, for example? What has been the history of our development under the guidance of the Spirit and the pressures of world society? What separates and unites us as part of the household of God, fellow citizens of the saints? An examinatirn of such questions may help to reduce prejudice and confusion and may well achieve in the power of God a renewal, conversion of mind and heart for the sake of mission. A thorough renewal in the light of Scripture and history may aid the people of God in becoming more visibly the Church, in attaining "true Christian union" in close relationship with our. Savior and Lord, who is also our brother and the Son of Man. The historical period we are entering today is critical because it chal-lenges all of us to identify ourselves as "church" in relationship to one another and the Lord. Without educated lay people, religious educators and pastors, the challenge will be a major source of chaos. We must be familiar with our ecclesial history as both the source of our divisions and the oc-casion for our "reunion" in the Spirit for the sake of the Church's identity We Are No Longer Strangers I 19 and mission in the world. Who are we? Why are we who we are? Ecu-menically, we may be able to clear the field of "much useless and cum-bersome rubbish" impeding our "access to the Father" as "fellow citizens of the saints, and members of the household of God." Oo Ecumenical Worship: What Do We Say to the Father? Charles Faul, S.A.* ~n those first "spring-time" days of ecumenical dialogue that followed soon after the Second Vatican Council, I became involved with an interfaith discussion group in my hometown. We knew little about each other and the tone of our discussions, while friendly, was also a good deal defensive. Most of us, in the beginning, felt the need to defend the rituals and doctrines of our particular segment of Christianity. This was natural enough, since we had been raised to believe that our way came closest to what Christ had ordered for his Church. Due no doubt to the breath of God's Spirit;-we gradually came to understand each other better and moved toward the vision of the faith we held in common. Certainly,. some favored a Church centered on sacra-mental life and hierarchical order~ while others favored the primacy of Word and less structure,, but we also learned that words like "Father," "Lord," "Spirit," "Baptism" and "Gospel" had much the same meaning for all of us. Most important, we came to this understanding as we learned to pray with one another. When our lips spoke the words of faith that sprang from our hearts, the commonality of our beliefs became apparent to us all. Ten years or so have passed since that time, and the historians, liturgists and theologians of Western Christianity have Confirmed in their speeches and writings what we discovered in our grass-roots dialogue ~uring the 1960's: the faith that we share as Christians, whatever our denomination, *Brother Faul is a theological student atAtonement Seminary, Washington, DC. 20 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 is monumental. ,Our common bonds reach back to the faith of the Fathers of the early Church and to the New Testament. Our traditions vary, of course, but our willingness to rethink our positions has led to some remarkable convergences. The Roman Catholic Church, forexample, has centered much 6f its renewal on the need to rediscover the importance of the Word for liturgical and doctrinal formulations, while, at the same time, the more evangelical churches have developed an ever-increasing awareness of the importance of sacramental life and, in particular, the centrality of the Lord's Supper in the expression of Christian life and witness. Dialogue between the theo-logians of major church bodies has produced statements affirming one another's ministry and express.ing a common view of eucharist and church order. Truly it has been a remarkable decade, but what does all of this mean for the personal and congregational level? We live', work and celebrate not with theologians or liturgists, but with each other. Each of us is that most enigmatic of figures, "the average Christian." The average Christian, how-ever, is the Church of Christ in miniature. The summation of our faith is the faith of the Church, and our worship, its prayer. How then in our joint worship can we express this valuable new insight? The theme selected for this year's Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is~'No Longer Strangers" (Ep 2: 19). It describes the feeling, mentioned at the beginning, that is experienced by those who have come to know that Christians outside one's own tradition are not competitors, but rather brothers and sisters in the journey of God's Pilgrim People. The question, then, is how might our prayer reflect this point of view? First of all, we must understand that all Christian prayer is ecumenical, since we pray to the one Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus, through his Spirit. This is the basis of prayer for all Christians. Thus, whether we pray privately or in a body, with our own congregation or in an ecumenical - setting, we are praying with and for the Church of Christ. We, in fact. come to a deeper sense of the universality of Christ's Church. Second, at those times when we engage in specifically ecumenical wor-ship, that is, when Christians of various traditions come together to pray, we need to recognize the bonds which join us together. We all suffer fiom brokenness and division, not only as a Church, but also as individuals and communities. However, our hope is found in the redemption won for us by Christ, won for all of us, and in the grace of his Spirit poured out freely on each of us. This is the source of any healing that might stem from our common worship. We share the belief that the dying and rising of the Lord is the model of Christian life for each of us. We must die each day to sin, in order to rise, though the grace of God, to a new life. Realizing we need each other's prayer and support in order that God's action in our lives might be fruitful, we come to a deeper sense of the unity of Christ's Church. Ecumenical Worship: What Do We Say to the Father? Finally, when we examine the liturgical heritage of the Christian faith, we can find the practical elements of ecumenical worship. Christians can pray together, not only for eight days in January, but on any and every.day, using the sources common to Christian believers in every age, namely: I) the words of Scripture and the early church writers; 2) prayers of praise, thanksgiving and intercession; 3) the church creeds, especially those com-monly known as Apostle's and Nicene; and finally and most important, 4) The Lord's Prayer which is the model for all Christian prayer. None of these elements is the possession of any one denomination. They are the liturgical inheritance of all Christians. In their usage we come to a deeper Sense of the holiness and apostolic foundations of Christ's Church. In coming together to pray for Christian unity, one group might want to follow the formats suggested for Morning Prayer (Lauds) or Evening Prayer (Vespers) in the revised Roman, Anglican or Lutheran Prayer Books. Another group might wish to use a more flexible structure, such as has developed in the many prayer communities which have sprung up recently. It is not the format that matters, but rather the act of Christians praying together. We must remember that Christ did not organize a discussion group. Heprayed "that all may be one" (Jn 17:21). Mutual dialogue is vital to the future of ecumenism. We must discern, however, that the most important, fruitful dialogue is the exchange between God and the com-munity of believers in Christ Jesus. If we are able to worship together in "Spirit and in Truth" (Jn 4:24), we will have advanced the cause of Chris-tian unity, for we will have come not to lament our divisions, but rather to realize our need for one another as sisters and brothers, "no longer strangers." Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation Robert F. Morneau Father Morneau is a frequent contributor to these pages. He resides and teaches at Silver Lake College of the Holy Family; Manitowoc, WI 54220~ Integration is concerned with "putting it all together." This admirable quality is sometimes ascribed to actresses who excel in their art, to pro-fessional athletes who have reached the peak of performance, to persons who live healthy, balanced lives. How common or rare these people are is a matter of dispute. Perhaps most of us could identify, not so much with the integrated universal man of the Renaissance, but rather with the plight of poor Humpty-Dumpty. Like him, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot quite get us put back together again. The fragmented life of Humpty-Dumpty is a universal image in that all people of every age have had to contend with the realities of division, alienation and anomie. These forces are strangers to no one, though the intensity and longevity of each varies from person to person. Lest we despair in the face of this disinte-grative factor of reality, we must also come to recognize that the process of healing is a significant power in life. The healing process mends and restores persons, relationships and the world. A realistic view of life de-mands that the dialectical nature of division and healing, sin and grace, sickness and health all be fully appreciated for what they are. Despite the fact of disintegration, the Christian vocation has as its goal both individual and communal wholeness: integration in love is God's call to mankind. Our trust and hope is grounded in the Spirit of love who unifies and heals all of life. This love, God's gift of himself to his people, draws us into an intimacy with him that is the core of Christian living. Like a fish in Integration and the Sacrament.of Reconciliation / 2~i water or like a bird in the air, the very existence of the Christian demands the presence of God's love. St. Paul's message to the Ephesians summa-rizes this so well: "To live through love in his Presence." God's love is the source of all integration; living outside that love results in the darkness and estrangement flowing from separation from the source of light and peace. Those who have traveled before us have expressed well the central role of God in human life: the psalmist prayed, "You are my God. My happiness lies in you alone" (Ps 16). Augustine also summarized the nature of true peace: "For thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee." The succinct call to integration comes from scripture: This is what Yahweh asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God (Mi 6:8). Though we smile at the slight understatement ("only this"), the prophet presents a vision of life that is radically simple. The complexity of intricate theologies, the score of duties and obligations, the multiplicity of laws all seem less threatening when we can summarize God's will in terms of being and becoming a just, loving and faithful person and people. These qualities reveal the interiority of integration. Justice leads to peace and oneness, whereas injustice, by withholding from others their proper due, causes division. Love unifies through affirmation and support, thus providing hope to the weary and discouraged, whereas apathy and indifference isolate and separate person from person. Faith, the intimacy of a personal relationship with Christ, is an integrative power shedding light and warmth on the spirit of man, while faithlessness terminates in the despair of meaninglessness. Justice, love and faith are seen as the ingredients of an integrated existence. . The sacrament of reconciliation aims at fostering the vocation common to all of us: to-be-one with God, with others, with the world and with ourselves. As with all the other sacraments, the sacrament of reconciliation makes present God's love and forgiveness in a special way. Through the encounter with Christ, the penitent is offered the grace of healing which helps to put back together again all the spiritual.humpty-dumpties of his-tory, and we are in that number. God's gracious love hurries to friend the deep split within the person which Paul Tillich describes so well: It is important to remember that we are not merely separated from each other. For we are also separated from ourselves. Man Against Himself is not merely the title of a book, but rather also indicates the rediscovery of an age-old insight. Man is split within himself. But the depth of our s.eparation lies in just the fact that we are not capable of a great and merciful divine love towards ourselves.1 1Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scdbner's Sons, 1948), p. 158. ~4 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 It is in Jesus that this divine and merciful love touches our lives to mak~ us whole once again. Integration: Personal and Communal--The HHH Principle The historical pendulum swings violently fl'om one extreme to the other. One period will stress the uniqueness of the individual withoutgiving prop-er attention to the social nature of the person. The rugged individualism of American history is a case in point. Then the pendulum, having reached its one extreme, swings its reactionary way to the other pole. Collectivism and totalitarian ideologies arise to stress the social whole to, the exclusion of individual rights. The twentieth century's political and social theories of fascism and communism are examples of this one-sided mentality. The truth of the maiter lies in the middle: both the individual and the social facets of human existence must be recognized, protected and fostered. Their interdependence and interrelatedness are principles of in-tegral living. Oneness involves both the individual person and the com-munity. The new rites for celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation carefully protect both dimensions. This fact must be kept in mind through-out the following description of.integration. The themes and principles of ¯ integration applicable to the individual are also, by way of analogy, nec-essary for an understanding of communal integration. On the personal level, there are three major elements seeking integra-tion. Anatomically, each of us has a head, a heart, and hands (HHH). Symbolically, these parts of the human body represent the capacity to ¯ know, to feel and to act. In the field of education, the concern for growth of the whole person is spoken of in terms of developing the cognitive, affective and behavioral domains. On a community level, these elements might be described as common beliefs, common sentiments and a common life-style. In~ofar as there i~ harmony (congruence) among these various . components, there is a sense of integration and peace; when these elements contradict each other or are unrelated, the result will be one of varying degrees of conflict and tension. Looking more ~losely at the personal level, we can discover the inter-relationships among the various elements seeking integration. Through cognitive powers we search out the truth, often at a high cost: ¯. who has given up much that he loved and prized and could have retained, but that he loved honesty better than name, and Truth better than dear friends,2 The consequence of living in the truth, as St. John's gospel points out, is that it leads to freedom: the truth makes us free while ignorance en,slaves and issues in fears. We were born to see reality in its deepest dimensions 2John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956), p. 1 I. Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation / 25 and to act on the knowledge discovered there. Carl Jung in his autobiog-raphy shares a universal principle that deals with the relationship between knowledge and action: It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain the understanding of the images and that kn.owledge can here mak.e a halt. Insight into them must be converted ifito an ethical obligation.3 It is through the cognit.ive capacities of reason and intuition that insights emerge, concepts and principles are formulated, conclusions are drawn and life is lived. Our creeds, constitutions, journals and discoi~rses attempt to i-ecord our mental travels. Though our perceptions are always limited and our articulations fail to capture the fullness of the reality, yet the extent of our knowledge is amazingly vast. The affective domain, symbolized by the heart, takes us into a rich though complex area of life. Feelings, emotions,, urges, tendencies, and drives are terms attempting to describe some of the powrrful and ambig-uous movements of our affectivity. Here it is that joy and sorrow, panic and calm, anxiety and peace .are experienced in degrees which only our unique person can narrate. Because literature claims for her own the mat-ters of the heart, it has universal appeal. So often the literary genius speaks of the affective level: When your own heart's been broken it will be time for you to think of talking.4 "1 do not know at all," said Martin. "'i should have to be in your heart to know.''3 The relationship between the cognitive and affective domain is complex. During certain periods of life a dichotomy exists between the two. (One calculation measured the distance from head to heart to be two light years!) How many Christians. know intellectually that God loves them and is al-ways present to them and yet do not experience this truth in their hearts? Possession of an accurate and sound theology does not guarantee an ex-perience of the heart. With integration between intellectual Conviction and personal affectivity, the distance seems to vanish and there is a mutual support and affirmation. Emerson's insight is profound:. "Our intellectual ¯ and active powers increase with our affection.''~ Truth experienced af-fectively and affections experienced in truth enrich life.7 ~C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Book, 1963), pp. 192-193. 4C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1946), p. 97. 5The Best Known Works of Voltaire (New York: The Book Leagu~e, 1940), p. 142. 6"Friendship," Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Book League of America, 1941), p. 65. 7Two comments might be made at this point. Newman's well-known distinction between real and notional knowledge explains the dichotomy in more academic terms. Secondly, in light of the importance of affectivity in human and spiritual living~ our educational institutions must more systematically attempt to educate the affective area of life as well as the intellectual. 26 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 The old line, "Do as I say, not as I do!" draws attention to the third ingredient in personal and communal life, behavior. The question arises: do the words that I speak and the actions I perform truly express what is in my mind and heart? Do I live out my beliefs and values? Disintegration is experienced when a discrepancy exists between what I know to be true intellectually and a life-style that contradicts this truth, or when a dis-crepancy arises between that life-style and what I am feeling at the gut level. Every day life provides examples of such discrepancies: to know that a certain substance (alcohol) is dangerous in certain quantities and yet con-tinue to drink; to prize physical fitness as an important value and yet never take tim~ to exercise; to yearn for intimacyowith a loving God and never take time for prayer. Integration is realized when we channel into behavior our limited time and energy in such a way that this behavior parallels our thinking and feeling. A single stream is formed, a stream that contains truth, beauty and goodness. Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation The new rite of the sacrament of reconciliation delineates four basic and essential components: contrition, confession, satisfaction and absolution. These four elements directly foster both personal and communal integra-tion. The sacrament is the means by which the Lord Jesus makes us whole, healing the division within each person and the communal fragmentation resulting from injustice and apathy. The new rite speaks to the head, the heart and the hands, to the whole person. ~ In the new ritual, contrition is described as "a profound change of the whole person by which one begins to consider, judge and arrange his life according to the holiness and love of God" (Ritual, ~6). This is a call to integration, to put our lives together with God's help and to continue to grow in his gracious love. This process of growth implies an openness to God's word which transforms and molds us. It means that, as a pilgrim people, our lives are always in process and stand in need of conversion. Minimal self-knowledge exposes the dark areas of our life where selfishness flourishes and superficial change predominates. The new rite speaks of contrition as something that goes down to the very depth of our person, radically touching our ideas, attitudes and conduct. Integration is only possible at this level. Though conversion is a gradual process involving grace, time and en-ergy, it is not meant to be piecemeal. God calls the whole, person, not just one aspect of life. This realization helps to protect the unity of the person and implies that what affects one area of life will affect, if not immediately at least eventually, every other area. The ritual spells out the process of conversion as it touches upon three components of integration explained earlier: 1) Consideration. We are challenged to use our cognitive abilities to consider how our personal and communal lives measure up to the holiness Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation / 27 and love of God. 2) Judgment. After deliberation, we draw conclusions about how to improve our response to God and his will, employing the richness of our affectivity to sustain and give dynamism to that response. 3) Arranging life. Authentic contrition means that our life-style, what we say~and how we say it, the kinds and quality of our relationships, the reaching out to others, must at certain points be adjusted and modified. This broad, panoramic view of contrition challenges both the inner and outer man. The sacrament of reconciliation calls the whole person to turn to the living and true God in hope and fidelity. Confession, the second main component in the new rite, "comes from true knowledge of self before God and from contrition for those sins" (Ritual, ~6). Our sacramental system, concerned as it is with the covenant relationship between God and man, is obviously person-centered. It in-volves our worship of the person of our gracious Father, a deep partic-ipation in the paschal mystery of our Lord Jesus, the giftedness of peace and joy flowing from the Spirit. The trinitarian God is the core of all the sacraments. The challenge is to come to an even deeper knowledge of the living God, and from this perspective, to achieve our true identity. The crucial role of the scriptures becomes obvious in this framework. In God's word we find the revelation of his love and forgiveness; we enter into the rich world of faith. Cognitively we discover the reality of God's love which is the truth that creates freedom. Experiential knowledge of this most central fact necessarily touches the deepest affections of the heart. We are stirred interiorly to respond with our whole lives to this gaze of love. The canticle of Mary is a confession of being loved: My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant,a True affective knowledge works its way into the behavioral domain. Our life becomes different; our words and deeds originate from the wellspring of God's mercy and goodness. The confessing of sins will thus involve the whole person: what we know, what we feel, what we have done and will do. Confessing both expresses and promotes integration. Satisfaction or the act of penance is the third important element in the new rite. In a special way satisfaction reaches beyond the notion of per-sonal integration to embrace the larger community. In doing the truth, in correcting injustices, in serving more deepiy, we implicitly call others to witness and experience the newly gained integration of our own lives. The Roman Ritual states: "true conversion is completed by acts of penance or satisfaction for the sins committed, by amendment of conduct, by repara-tion of injury., to restore order"'(Ritual, #6c). Integration implies and aLuke 1:46. 21~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 necessitates order. Wholeness exists when things are in place just as frag-mentation is experienced in chaos. In a sense, sin is being "out of place." In Gibson's play The Miracle Worker, Annie Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller, speaks to herself in a mirror: '~Don't worry. They'll find you, you're not lost. Only out of place." The "hound of heaven" pursues us when we lose our way in the darkness of sin; in being captured by mercy and love, the Lord relocates us in the plan of the Father. For true satisfaction we must be aware and understand that the proper order of things has been broken (cognitive element); we must interiorly feel and be concerned about the anguish and restlessness caused by sin in our lives and the lives of those we touch (affective element); with God's. grace we must reconstruct the harmony shattered by our infidelity (behavorial element). This whole process of reconciliation is no abstract, nebulous role playing; it touches the core of our lives. It is based on fact and experience. Though somewhat overstated, Carl Jung's reflection that "in religious mat-ters only experience counted" does express the seriousness surrounding the sacrament of reconciliation. Satisfaction, the acting out of heartfelt sorrow in°experience, is a vital integrative force restoring that order that leads to justice and peace. Absolution is the fourth main element in the celebration of God's mercy. The new formula of absolution contains a wealth of theology, deserving in its own right a detailed explication. The minister, representing the Risen Lord and the Church, prays: God, the Father of mercies. through the death and resurrection of his Son,. has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace. And ! absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The wholb person is drawn to respond to this majestic oration. The mind is nourished with the experience of a merciful God, with the marvel of the paschal mystery, with the fact of the instrumentality of the Church, with the knowledge that pardon and peace are gifts from God, with the under-standing that all three persons of the Trinity heal the sickness of the person. These insights liberate us from false fears and narrow slaveries, enlighten the darkness of our minds and enrich our faith, foster wisdom, allowing us to see what is truly essential and worthwhile. Our affectivity is also nour-ished by this prayer of absolution. Our heart is touched by the revelation of God's love and graciousness, by the joy of reconciliation, by the dis-pelling of anxiety and guilt, by the calmness of peace and pardon. The sacrament intends to soften the hardness of heart and to foster the gen-tleness that alone brings life. Full, active and conscious participation in Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation / 29 this encounter with the Risen Lord abets a richer, affective life. Integration proves itself in action and the prayer of absolution necessarily includes Christian living; it touches the transformation of our truths and feelings into words and deeds. The absolution formula provides an example of what forgiveness is, thus challenging us to forgive each other as God forgives us. We are called to participate in the death-resurrection of Christ in our daily lives, dying to our selfishness in being for others. Through the gift of the Spirit, we are empowered to enrich the world by sharing the Spirit's love, joy and peace. Our lives are different when we recognize experientially the price of our sins: the cross. The shadow of the cross calls us to repent and to believe. The prayer of absolution is a prayer leading us to authenticity. It provides the vision that harmonizes our visible life of daily conduct with the new mind and heart we have put on in Christ. Integration and the Holy Spirit The possibility of Christian integration is based on the gift of Spirit. The Risen Lord in union with the Father sends their Spirit into the world to complete the work of redemption. Through the sacrament of reconciliation this work of restoration takes on visibility and becomes efficacious in the lives of those who believe. The Spirit directs us in .our struggle toward oneness within ourselves and among all people. Within the framework of the HHH Principle, we can examine the role of the Spirit in the process of integration. The tradition of the Church points out that there are four gifts of the Spirit that aid the intellectual and faith growth of God's people: wisdom, knowledge, counsel and understanding. Through these "cognitive" gifts we contend with the ever-present forces of folly, ignorance, rashness and dullness of mind. God, coming to the aid of our finite minds, supplements our ability to grasp truth through the personal Light of his presence. The heart, often bruised and broken, also stands in need of special gifts. Through the Pentecost event, fortitude, piety and fear of the Lord are offered as powerfui nutrients enriching our affectivity. Thus we are enabled to stand firm in the face of fear, to struggle valiantly against hardness of heart and acedia, to deal honestly with the arrogance of pride seeking to remove God from the center of life. In the sacrament of reconciliation, these gifts are available with the coming of the Spirit. But discernment is a difficult task ih life. How do we know whether or not we are growing in the Lord? Are we really allowing the mind and heart of Christ to influence our lives? What are the signs of health and illness in our Christian lives? Through the writings of St. Paul, God has given us an evaluation system to aid us in testing the quality of Christian growth. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul spells out the evidence indicating the spirit of evil and the Spirit of God. If the signs of God's Spirit are present, we have some assurance that we are doing the will of the Father and that the gifts 30 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 of the Spirit are truly effective in our words and deeds. If the opposite signs are present, we are provided with some hard evidence that we are failing in our Christian responsibilities. Paul writes: But when you follow your own wrong inclinations your lives will produce these evil results: impure thoughts, eagerness for lustful pleasure, idolatry, hatred and fighting, jealousy and anger, constant effort to get the best for yourself, complaints and crit-icisms, the feeling that everyone else is wrong except those in your own little group~ and there will be wrong doctrine, envy, murder, drunkenness, wild parties, and all that sort of thing . But when the Holy Spirit controls our lives he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gen-tleness and self-control? Conclusion The revision of the sacrament of reconciliation provides the contem-porary Church with a process and vision to bring about the oneness we all desire. Unity is something intrinsic to our lives. William Lynch beautifully expresses this need in every.person: What I want first to propose, as a sort of working point of discussion, is that the very deepest need the pe6ple have is the need for closenenss to, union with, things and persons and God. This principle underlies every need of man. It is not a luxury or a gimmick. It is fundamental, primitive; eternal and universal . Everybody knows, when it is put in his language, that real solitude is hell and that unity is peace)° The sacrament of reconciliation deals directly with that aspect of our life which obstructs and prohibits unity: the reality of sin. The great marvel is that God's love and mercy have conquered sin and death and through the sacrament of reconciliation bring us in touch with this victory of God. A schematic summary of this article might appear as follows: A. God's initiative: the call to justice love (lived out fully in the person of Jesus) faith B. Mankind's response: so much injustice / apathy / faithlessness (mystery of sin) C. Jesus came to reconcile all creation to the Father---continues to come in their Spirit to heal the whole person--to bring about integration Truth overcomes falsity Beauty overcomes ugliness Goodness overcomes evil Head Heart Hand Gifts of wisdom, knowledge, counsel understanding Gifts of piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord Signs: love, joy, peace, patience, kind-ness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. D. Result: Oneness with the Father through Christ in the Spirit. Wholeness, union, sanctity,' integration. gGalatians 5:19-23. ~°William F. Lynch, S.J. The Integrating Mind (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962), pp. 134-135. Integration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation / 31 A growing appreciation of the depth and breadth of the sacrament of reconciliation is important if we are to fully enter into this great gift. The revised rite provides us with many advantages: the stress and variety of scripture, the personal touch with the face-to-face option, the emphasis on the communal nature of sin, the demand for authentic conversion, the joyful tone of celebrating God's mercy and love and not getting caught up in oneself. Our challenge is to understand as fully as possible the meaning of the sacrament and to experience its tremendous force in our personal and communal lives. .0 Now Available As A Reprint The "Active-Contemplative" Problem in Religious Life by David M. Knight Price: $.75 per copy, plus postage. Address: Review for Religious 612 Humboldt Building 539 North Grand St. Louis, Missouri 63103 To Make Good Again: A Selected Bibliography on Reconciliation Mary Colurnba Offerman, P,B.V.M. Sister Mary Columba, a librarian, has contributed other bibliographies to these pages. She resides at 2360 Carter Rd.: Dubuque, IA 52001. The word reconciliation evokes many meanings. Its primary meaning is "to make good again" or "to restore." The need of reconciliation pre-supposes that some harmony has been violated or disrupted. Many times man has broken his bond with G~d. Man must choose to be reconciled completely. God's plan for the return to complete harmony involves God himself, man, his neighbor and his community. When God created the universe everything was good. The psalmist tells us that every-thing existed in harmony, peace. Man misused his power to be steward over God's creation. The way to restore peace and unity with God, our neighbor and our world is through repentance, conversion and reconciliation. There are various levels of reconciliation. There is a reconciliation with God and a reconciliation with one's fellowman. Reconciliation for the Catholic Church entails the relationships of the Church with other churches. Reconciliation Within society is required when we have differ-ences due to race, nation, class, degrees of economic and social devel-opment. Every person's life is filled with numerous calls to reconciliation. Oppor-tunities arise daily when we can reconcile with .brothers, neighbors and those around us. Reconciliation begins at home. By turning towards God, our Father, we can become aware of how little we are without him, we can 32 To Make Good Aga. in: A Selected Bibliography on Reconciliation realize the worth of each individual and our own personal worth in his eyes and create situations that promote cooperation and sharing. We can ob-serve God's goodness in all the events of life. The recent Holy Year of 1975 offers opportunities for reflection on those things and happenings that direct us toward Christ and the eternal reward of heaven. We had many occasions to be more concerned with our interior or spiritual life, rather than with the exterior and materialistic things of life. That year of reconciliation called us to promote works of charity, to do penance and to perform works of piety. The Holy Year theme of renewa[ and reconciliation has been an in-vitation to respond to interior renewal in order to become better instru-ments of reconciliation with God, neighbor and the world. By developing a true spirit of joy, compassion and kindness and by using our creative instincts, our love for life and for our fellowmen will contribute to holier years to come. The Church expects much of the religious man and woman. Religious have been urged to reflect on their way of life as this was asked of them by Vatican Council II. We are reminded to persevere in faithfulness to prayer, becoming more perfect followers of Christ and a radiation of joy in carrying the crosses that cannot be separated from our state in life. On each religious community rests its future destiny. The living out of the vows from day to day frees us to be a sign of reconciliation. The ministries of the religious woman have taken many forms. Some are in education, others turn to .nursing and still others perform one of the ministries of service which has emerged recently. The ministry which is chosen will become a healing ministry if the religious is a person of rec-onciliation, deeply rooted in Christ and proclaims him as her Lord and Master. How do we make our ministry h service of reconciliation? By being a peacemaker among the students, parents' and those with whom we work, by being more prayerful, reflecting on the gospels and on spiritual' reading, by showing enthusiasm, uniting our sufferings to those of Christ, by consoling, developing ,a spirit of forgiveness, "to come away from each new grief without bitterness in continuing service, to see no one as an enemy and everyone as worthy of my service. Such are the realities of reconciliation. And they are reflected in thequiet dignity ofa fai.th-filled valiant woman.''1 In an article on teaching children about reconciliation, Rod Brownfield says, "If they come to appreciate more their own worth as friends of God, loved individually for their own lovable selves, if they come to see all the material world as gifts for their use and for their sharing, if they come to appreciate other human beings, as images of God loved by God; if they learn the spirit of awe and reverence for a generous Father; if they come to qennings, Sister Vivien, O.P., The Valiant Woman (New York: Alba House. 1974), p. 33. 34 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 want to mend what is broken and right what is wrong; if they can pray as they experience the good gifts about them; if they promote peace among themselves, their religion is a reality, reconciliation is going on and the kingdom of God is nearer.''z This could be our goal and we wou~d be striving to "make good again." Our relationship with God would be renewed or strengthened and all would be right with the world and our conscience. The following selected bibliography has been compiled to provide spiritual reading on the topic of "reconciliation." Methods, ideas, exhor-tations, reflections and worthwhile knowledge on "reconciliation" can be acquired from reading these books and periodicals. Thus Pope Paul's ad-monition "to make good again," to reconcile, to renew, will keep the religious woman in touch with her God, in touch with her Church, in touch with her world, her feliowmen and in touch with herself. BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Abbott, Walter, S.J., ed., The Documents of Vatican 11. New York: Herder and Herder, 1966. Bailey. J. Martin, From Wrecks to Reconciliation. New York: Friendship Press, 1969. Paper. Banks, Robert, ed,, Reconciliation and Hope. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974. Barry, David W., Ministry of Reconciliation. New York: Alba House, 1975, Paper. Basset, Bernard, S.J., Guilty. 0 Lord, Yes. 1 Still Go to Confession. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1975. Burghardt, Walter, J., S.J., Towards Reconci6ation. Washington, D.C.: United States Bishops Conference. 1974. Paper. Elliott, Ralph H., Reconciliation and the New Age. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1973. Paper. Farrell, Edward, The Father Is Veo' Fond of Me. Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books, 1975. Chapter 3. Surprised In the Spirit. Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books, 1973. Chapter 2. Foley, Leonard, O.F.M., Your Confession: Using the New Rite. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Press, 1975. Paper. Guzie, Tad, What the Modern Catholic Believes About Confession. Chicago: The Thomas More Press, 1974. Paper. Hanson, Michael. O.M.I., and John Maronic'. O.M.I., The Pilgrim's Prayerbook (Holy Year Edition). Belleville, Illinois: Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows, 1974. Pages 25-32; 211-217; 237-287. Haring, Bernard, C.S.S.R., Prayer: The Integration of Faith and Life. Notre Dame, Indiana: Fides Publishers, 1975. Chapter 14. Harkness, Georgia, The Ministry of Reconciliation. New York: Abingdon Press, 1971. Paper. ZBrownfield, Rod. "'The Holy Year That Wasn't,'" The Catechist. IX, No. 3 (November, 1975). 9. To Make Good Again." A Selected Bibliography on Reconciliation / 35 Hellwig, Monika, The Meaning of the Sacraments. Dayton: Pflaum-Standard, 1972. Paper. Hessel, Dieter T., Reconciliation and Conflict: Church Controversy Over Social Involvement. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969. Paper. Hinnebusch, Paul, O.P,.Friendship In the Lord. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1974. Chapter 6. Praise God! Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books, Inc., 1972. Chapter 6; Chapter 23. Hunter, Gordon. When the Walls Come Tumblin' Down. Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1974. Jennings, Sister Vivien, O.P., The Valiant Woman. New York: Alba House, 1974. Chapter I; Chapter 4; Chapter 7. Nelson, John, Dare to Reconcile: Seven Settings For Creating Community. New York: Friendship Press, 1969. Paper. Nouwen. Henri, With Open Hands. Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1972. O'Reilly, James, Reconciliation and Renewal. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1974. Powell, John, S.J. He Touched Me. Chicago: Argus Communications, 1974. Paper. Rabalais, Sister Maria, Come Be Reconciled; Youth Penance Resources. Paramus, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1975. Schillebeeckx, Rev. Edward. O.P. Sacramental Reconciliation. (Concilium Series, Volume 6), New York: Seabury Press, 1971. Sisters of the Presentation, Witness to Love. Dubuque, iowa: Mount Loretto. 1977. Page 24. Stuhlmueller, Rev. Carroll, C.P., Reconciliation: A Biblical Call. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1975. Paper. Tibbetts, Orlando L., Reconciling Community. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1969. Torrance, T., Theology In Reconciliation. Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, 1975. Van Kaam, Adrian, C.S.Sp., Spirituality and the Gentle Life. Denville, New Jersey: Di-mension Books, 1973. Periodicals Abeyasingha, N., "'Penance and the Holy Spirit." REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, May, 1974, 565-573. America, "'1975: Holy Year of Reconciliation," America, January 11, 1975, 2-6. Baumer, Fred, "'An Hour of Reconciliation," Liturgy. August/September, 1975, 227-231. Bernas, Rev. Casmir, O.C.S.O., "' Reconciliation In Paul,'" The Bible Today. December, 1973, 1395-1400. Brungs, Robert A., S.J., "'Reconciliation: Man-the-Maker and Man-the-Made," Theology Digest. Winter, 1974. 324-333. Bryce, Sister Mary Charles, O.S.B., "'Reconciliation Means Change," Modern Liturgy, February, 1977.8-10. Callahan, William R., "'Reconciliation," National Catholic Reporter, May 16, 1975. 7-8. Cranny, Rev. Titus, "'Renewal, Reconciliation and Christian Unity," Onr Sunday Visitor. January 12, 1975. I. Deutsch, Sister B., "Operation Fervor," Today's Catholic Teacher. February, 1975. 40. Du Charme, Jerome and Gall, "Introducing Young Children to the Experience of Recon-ciliation." Modern Liturgy. February, 1977, 12-13. Every, Robert L., O.P., "'Theology of Reconciliation." Emmanuel. October. 1974, 404-41 I. Fitzgerald, Frances, "'Vietnam Reconciliation," The Atlantic.June. 1974, 14-28. Galluzzi, Alessandro. "Reconciliation Is Main Motive For Holy Year," L'Osservatore Romano, June 28, 1973, 2. Hatton, Sister Vianny, "'The Communal Rite of Reconciliation," Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy, January, 1975, 12-14. Jolliffe. P,, "'Prayer and Christ's Reconciliation," The Way, January, 1975, 66-76. Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 Joyce, Sister F., "'Reconciliation and the Teacher," Today's Catholic Teacher. February, 1977, 14, Krol, J. Cardinal, "'Human Rights and Reconciliation," Dimension. Winter, 1974, 148-151. Lynch, J. A. "'Meditation On Reconciliation," Sisters Today, January, 1975, 273-280. Maly, Rev. Eugene H., "'Haggadah,'" The Bible Today. October, 1975, 484-489. Miffletori, Rev. Jack, "'Rites and Lefts of Reconciliation," Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy. January, ~975, 23-26. Mossi, Rev. John P. S.J. "'A Reconciliation Service," Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy, January, 1975, 28-29. "Reconciliation Sevices For Children," Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy. August?September, 1975.25-26, North, Robert, S.J., "Yore Kippur and the Jubilee Year of Reconciliation," Theology Digest, Winter, 1974, 346-59. Notebaart, Rev. James, "'Symbols of Reconciliation." Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy, Janu-ary, 1975, 6-8. Paul VI, "'The Duty of Reconciliation," L'Osservatore Romano. April 18, 1974, I I. __, "Essential Characters of the Holy Year, Central Theme Is Reconciliation." L'Os-servatore Romano. May 17, 1973, 3. __. "'Human Rights and Reconciliation: Statement of Pope Paul VI and the Fathers of the 1974 Synod of Bishops," The Pope Speaks. Winter, 1974, 216-220. __, "'Peace Depends On You, Too," The Pope Speaks. Winter, 1974, 352-354. __, "'Reconciliation With God," L'Osservatore Romano. November 8, 1973, I. __. "'Renewal and Reconciliation," L'Osservatore Romano. June 14, 1973, I. Purdy. William, "'Holy Year and Reconciliation." L'Osservatore Romano. July 26, 1973, 10. Russell, John F., O.Carm., "'Reconciliation a Reflective Expression," Spiritual Lift,. Summer, 1977, 67-72. Saulnier, Rev. William P., "'Reconciliation: Let It Begin With Me," Modern Litargy. February. 1977, 8-10. Schaeffler, Sister Janet, "'Reconciliation Is Growth." The Catechist. November, 1975, 10-11. Schall, James, V., S.J., "'On the Mosl Dangerous Virtue." REVIEW FOR REI,I~OUS, November, 1974, 1301-1308. Seelaus, Vilma, "'Contemplation/Reconciliation/Inner Freedom," Spiritual Life, Summer, 1974.99-105. Senior, Donald, C.P., "'Resurrection and Reconciliation," The Catechist. Winter, 1974, 346-360. Seromik, Gary, "'The Holy Year: Renewal and Reconciliation." The New Covenant, January, 1975, 6-7. Stuhlmueller, Rev. Carroll, C.P., "'Reconciliation With the Old Testament," The Bible Today, October, 1975, 473-484. Wenz, Jack. O.F.M., "'The Cost of Reconciliation: An Interview With Anthony Padovano," St. Anthony Messenger, December, 1974, 14-19. Winiarski, M. "'Reconciliation Assailed, Upheld," National Catholic Reporter, May 13, 1977, 12. Bird With a Broken Wing: Christian Mysticism and Ministry Mar~ Ellen Dougherty, S.S.N.D. Sister Mary Ellen is director of novices for the eastern province of her community, in an interprovincial novitiate in Hinsdale. For this purpose, she is on temporary leave of absence from Notre Dame College in Baltimore where she is associate professor of English. Her present address: 427 S. Clay St.; Hinsdale, IL 60521. In his book A Third Testament, Malcolm Muggeridge says of the con-troversial personality William Blake that he was "sane to the point of sublimity." Blake, considered by some of his contemporaries to be mad and by others to be a mystic, was an early Romhntic English poet and visual artist who reported ea~;y dialogues with the spirits of Socrates, Milton, and Voltaire. At the same time he had the simplicity to urge his readers: To see the Word in a Grain of Sand ¯ And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Etei:nity in an hour. Indicating Blake's creativity and originality, Muggeridge narrates the following incident: On another occasion, he told a visitor he had a great rarity to show him. This turned out to be "a naked figure with a strong body and a short neck--with burning eyes which long for moisture, and a face worthy of a murderer, holding a bloody cup in its clawed, hands, out of which it ~seems ea~ger to drink." "But what is it?" his visitor asked. "It is a ghost, sir," Blake replied. "The ghost of a flea~a spiritualization the thing!" Whether Blake was mystical or mad (o.r both), debates about him do suggest some of the standard tensions about mysticism. In current society, 37 31~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 sanity is one thing, sublimity another. Fleas do not have ghosts. As a result of lived history and the statements of Vatican II to religious, monastic traditions in most apostolic orders have diminished. There has been, concommitantly, an increasing emphasis on service. Many religious orders, at one time known for a single apostolic commitment, now embrace multiple commitments. Dress, daily orders, life-styles are frequently and often wisely subordinated to apostolates. There is a fresh and creative view of the needs of the Church. Ministry is a command. Any simple analysis of apostolic theology would indeed be simplistic. The practical effects are complex, and their reverberations are not totally without irony. For example, while contemplatives sometimes struggle to justify their existence to themselves, members of apostolic orders con-sistently apply for transfer to the cloister. Contemplative groups experi-ment with appropriate ways to expand a ministerial dimension, while apos-tolic religious seek credible ways to circumscribe activity with prayer. In this, there is more than just an intimation of the traditional contempla-tion- action dilemma. There are implicit questions about the authenticity of mysticism in this apostolic age. We return again to fleas and ghosts. Recently in the Chicago Tribune a cartoon entitled "The Now Society" featured a young man and woman seated casually at a cafe table. She is saying to him, "Oh sure, I've felt funny a couple of times, but I can't honestly say I've had a mystical experience." In popular concept, mysti-cism is often characterized by a withdrawal from reality. It is connected with everything from marijuana to sunsets. Even among serious thinkers, it is somewhat suspect as a way of prayer for a Christian, especially for apostolic religious. I have met more than one competent spiritual director who will not encourage directees of apostolic orders to contemplative prayer, even when they are so inclined, on the grounds that it is generally incompatible with their responsibilities. This, it seems to me, is a mis-understanding of contemplative prayer. In his book The Still Point William Johnston, S.J., speaks of Christian mysticism. He says: ¯ . . in the long process which precedes the canonization of a Christian saint, the Church never asks about the profundity of his enlightenment or the depths of his mysticism, but only about his practice of heroic charity; traditionally, mysticism is valued only as a means to something more imporlant--namely, the charity which is the center of the gospel message. When this charity expresses itself in mystical experience (that is, when the love of God becomes so violent that it drives the soul down into its very center in mystical darkness and existential abandonment of thought), then it is inestimably precious. On the other hand, he says, "Granted this . everyone must recognize that deep contemplative prayer is indeed a way (and perhaps the best way) to Christian charity . " The purpose of this article is not to describe the contemplative ex-perience that Father Johnston speaks of. There are numerous experts, Bird With a Broken Wing including Father Johnston, who do this well, namely Thomas Merton, and Evelyn Underhill, as well as more traditional writers like Tanqueray and Poulain, and, of course, saints like Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross. The purpose here is to suggest some of the practical effects of Christian mystical prayer, whether it is occurring in the life of a contemplative or an apostolic religious, to show that it is a way to the active "charity which is the center of the gospel message," to indicate that sanity and sublimity can coexist. Here, then, references to mysticism are meant to apply to the Christian tradition, not to other forms of mystical prayer. Mystical prayer as a way to ministry is verified if we look at the lives of those whose mysticism is judged by history and the Church to be authentic. If we focus not so much on their experiences in prayer as on the fruits of their experiences (their practices of heroic charity), we will see that they are concerned not with looking or sounding like mystics, or even with being mystics, but with acting out of their experiences, in accord with some call to service. St. Theresa of Avila, for example, steadily confirms this. As she grew in mystical graces, she grew in active service to the Church, and to her Order. One has only to read the works of St. Theresa to see that she is an assertive, energetic woman. Throughout her writings she integrates steadily emotional response with idea and daily experience. Unlike her companion mystic, St~ John of the Cross, whose prose is as austere as his message, and whose poetry is charged quietly with passion (and who, in his own life, apparently integrated the two), Theresa is never a writer of academic prose, or a poet. She is a narrator of the spiritual life whose warmth and intelli-gence fuse into an explication of mystical experience that is as loosely personal as it is loosely objective. She says in her autobiography ". sometimes love makes me foolish." In her prose we read of the pain, the joy, the humor of this foolish lover. We read, too, the history of mystical prayer as Theresa knew it, as well as the history of an active woman who believes firmly, as she tells us in the Interior Castle, that "what the Lord desires is works." Theresa's mission was to reform. And so she did. Theresa took the Carmelite habit at the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila at the age of twenty-one. It was approximately twenty years later that she experienced her first visions and locutions (after, as she tells us, going for the first fourteen years as a religious unable to pray without a book). In her early forties, then, she experiences mystical graces with some regu-larity. It is interesting to note that it is at this same time that she first engages in discussion about the reform of her order. It is at the age of forty-seven that she establishes the daring (and some might say devious) foundation of the convent of St. Joseph in Avila, a beginning that was to launch significant reform in religious life in the Church. At the age of fifty she completes the final version of her autobiography (written, as most of her works were, under obedience), and she begins The Way of Perfection. Both of these 40 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 works, especially the second, reflect a woman of deep contemplative prayer, and the recipient of significant, mystical graces. 'They lack, how-ever, the clarity and totality about the mystical life that is evidenced in The Interior Castle. It would seem fair to assume that between the composition of The Way of'Perfection and The Interior Castle Theresa's own experi-ences in prayer matured and expanded, so that clarity and totality were possible. The latter work is a portrait of a mystic Who has experiential knowledge ofeverything from the prayer of quiet to. the spiritual marriage, and who is thus able to order her observations in readable fashion. It is in this~work that she tells us, quite practically, that."perfection consists not in consolations but in the increase of love," and that "love exists not in the extent~of our .happiness but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God." It is here thb.t she. reminds us that "God's will is that no bounds should be set to his works." Theresa, herself, during these years, set no bounds. It was at this time, the interim betwee.n, these written works, that the bulk Of her endeavors for. reform occurs. In The Interior Castle Theresa says, '.'When I think of myself, ! feel like a bird with a broken wing . " Nevertheless, before her death at the age of sixty seven, this bird with the broken wing was responsible for the foundation of more than a dozen Reform convents; she served several terms .as prioress; she acted unofficially as spiritual director for many priests and sisters (for women in those days the role had to be unofficial); she was the author of several solid volumes on the spiritual life. And she was a mystic. One could do a similar, profile of St. John of the Cross, to the same effect. He died at the age of forty-nine, after a full life as a 6ontemplative. A prolific and profound writer, he is better known as mystic than he is as theologian, reformer, spiritual director and confessor, administrator. And yet it was these tasks that consumed his energies, that accounted for his imprisonment, poor health, and untimely death. An"accomplished poet ,whose lyrics reveal the mysterious rhythm of his spirit, he was also a writer 6f practical pros~e. He was capable of mystical poetry that was ap-propriately elusive and at the same time concrete: When the breeze blew from the turret Parting his hair He wounded my neck, With his gentle hand . He was also the author of stark precepts: "Endeavor to be inclined always not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most .delightful, but to the harshest; not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasan,t; . desire to enter into complete nudity, emptiness, and poverty" . .I.n poetry and precept, he, too, knew that what the Lord desires is works. ¯ St. Ignatius of Loyola, another man of action~ demonstrated, too, the compatibility between mysticism and ministry. Unlike the Carmelites Bird With a Broken Wing / 111 Theresa and John whose actions seemed to flow from their mysticism, Ignatius' mystical experience, it seems to me, emerged from his action. In all three of these saints, there was, nevertheless, a mutuality between prayer and service. On a more contemporary scene we have Thomas Mer-ton who~e last years, and last books, suggest, too, a proportionate growth between contemplation and outward reach. The point seems evident. An authentic mystical experience does not begin and end in itself, nor does it begin and end in self and God. While a genuine encounter of this sort will, as St. Theresa tells us in the sixth mansion of The Interior Castle, create an ambivalence (on the one hand, the soul seeks much solitude; on the other "it would like to plunge right into the heart of the world . ") the final option is usually for service. In the seventh mansion, the ultimate of the mystical life, St. Theresa says of mystics, '~They have now ari unusually strong desire to serve Him . So what they desire.now is not merely not to die [the "delectable pain" of the sixth mansion was accompanied by a desire for death, and thus union] but to live for a great many years and to suffer the severest trials, if by so doing they can become the means whereby the Lord is praised." To "become the means" is perhaps what Christian mysticism is all about. Itis what prayer is all about. Whatever methods God chooses to use in cultivating us as his ~means is not the issue. Whether our prayer is like the songs of Blake on his deathbed ("They're not mine, you know. They're not-mine,''~ he said, implying, again, a current of mystical grace), or whether our prayer is the solid, structured meditation of prelude and point does not matter. Whether we are contemplatives seeking to clarify our service, or apostolic religious trying t.o deepen our action by prayer, perhaps does ri'ot matter either. It seems as erroneoog to say that all mysticism is an evasion of reality as.it is to say that we are all c~alled to be. mystics. Service is no more a contradiction in the life of a Christian mystic than mysticism is in ¯ the life Of an apo.stolic religious. History defies such.myths. It seems clear that while Christian mysticism ~s alw_ays characterized by service, Christian service need not be rooted in mysticism. It seems, clear, too, then, that the most practical of us in. the Church today have nothing to fear from an increase of Christian mysticism. That would mean, in effect, a fear of an ¯ increase of charity. In the contemporary drama "The Belle 6f Amherst," Julie Harris re-cords sensitively the insight of another poet, Emily Dickinson (no less eccentric than Blake)as she listens intently to a.warbler on a bush. Emily asks, "Why are y~ou singing, when there is no one here to listen?" The. warbler replies, "I was born to sing." With this, Ern, ily is affirmed as a poet. Watching the bird in flight, she says, "I, too, was born to sing.'" And so it is with each of us, whether we sing (or pray) as warbler or poet. Ministry in the Church and a Structural Concern for Justice Francis X. Meehan Father Meehan is Associate Professor of Moral Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary; Overbrook; Philadelphia, PA 19151. Much has been written recently about theologies of social concern. This article is not an effort to review those theologies. Rather it aims simply to point out some very mainstream considerations on social justice as it per-tains to the Church. Its original context was an ecumenical gathering of Church leaders, and this revision attempts to keep a focus on those social insights that are by now practically consensus teaching. In any consideration of the Church and social justice one must start by citing both the clear problem and the challenge. The problem surely is that we have not been as outstanding as we should have been. Barbara Ward in a booklet written for the Vatican Commission Justice and Peace speaks of guests who are invited to the banquet but have other things to do. She then touches upon the key problem for Christians in developed societies; namely, the problem of not being exposed in any concrete way to massive poverty and of therefore not developing a prophetic voice. She says: In this general climate of indifference, the Christian does not yet stand out as prophet or catalyst. All too many of us aresimply relatively fortunate citizens who., are not exposed to the massive, growing miseries at the base of the world society. We are proving, if proof were needed, that it is very difficult for wealthy societies, like families or individuals, to get through the eye of the needle (The Angry Seventies, p. 61). 42 Ministry in the Church and a Structural Concern for Justice The Challenge Barbara Ward as an economist devoted to human life has given an example of single-mindedness. Throughout her wril~ing she remains hope-ful. She knows well the challenge yet she sees no reason why the Christian community cannot be a worldwide "catalyst of energy, devotion and re-form." She articulates the challenge in a way that sets the focus of this paper: ¯ . . if, then, with courage and persistence and the energy of true hope, Christian citizens are ready in season and out of season, to lobby legislators, rally voters, instruct fellow citizens, worry the indifferent, encourage the active and create a new kind of justice and world responsibility in the Church and in the nations, the world may be saved from the evident wrath to come (pp. 62-63). Notice she asks for a new kind of justice and world responsibility in the Church. Thus she speaks not merely of giving food to a hungry man, but of "lobbying legislators" and "rallying voters." If we take a look at official Church teachings over a long range, we can see in this past one hundred .years one broad and obvious evolution. It is a movement that is very well summarized in that key article of the Pastoral Constitution: The Church in the Modern World, that underscored social concern: Profound and rapid changes make it l~articularly urgent that no one, ignoring the trend of events or drugged by laziness, content himself with a merely individualistic mo-rality. It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person . . . promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life (n. 30). It is fitting that such words should be in a document concerned with the Church's relation with the world. For here, too, there is an evolution of awareness. The Church's moral concern gradually becomes, in the social documents of the last century, not only a concern over individual salvation, but also over the collec.tive future. She recognizes that certain structures of history are man-made and that Christians therefore must have a respon-sibility not only for individual men, but also for structures of history. The Church must not be worldly, but she is in the world and has a responsibility for the world. Perhaps such an evolution could be understood by pointing to one man's autobiography as a metaphor. I think the life of Thomas Merton capsulizes a whole movement of the Church. This journey of the Church is symbolized so very aptly by Merton's monastic journey. It has often struck me that his own evolution as a monk said something to us about a model of holiness in the Church of our day. A recent thesis by Sister Elena Maltis makes this point more systematically.~ She cites Merton writing, in his early work, Waters of Siloe: ~"Thomas Merton: Symbol and Synthesis of Contemporary Catholicism." Critic, Spring, 1977, pp. 26 ff. 44 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 It [monastic life] takes a man above the terrors and sorrows of modern life as well as above its passing satisfactions. It elevates life to a superhuman level to the peace of the spiritual stratosphere where the storms of human existence become a distant echo and do not disturb the center of the soul--no matter how much they may rage in the senses and the feelings (p. 28). Then she cites the later MertOn who, in his workFaith and Violence, writes with different images of the monastic life: My :own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who [instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons.at once] is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. It is a. kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt.when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. (p. 30). Notice holy Mertonno longer conceives of himself as above and beyond the world. He is not in a stratosphere above the terrors and sorrows of modern life, but now, at the bottom of things where the phrase "submarine life" becomes a dominant image. His very spirituality of the 1940's does not cease, but in the 1960's it is a spirituality that takes integrally within itself the role of social criticism. He sums up who we are in the Church today when he says~: That I should have been born in 1915, that I should be the contemporary of Auschwitz; Hiroshima, Viet Nam and the Watts riots, are things about which 1 was not first consulted. Yet they are also events in which, whether I like it or not; I am deeply and personally involved (Contemplation in the World of Action, p. 145). What is central here is not only that a man's spiritual journey should lead him to the welfare of our fellow humans. Indeed this is true of all the saints. But what is central is that now such a spiritual journey leads also to a structural concern for others. Merton is implicated in the world's move-ment. He is, and we are, and the Church is, not only helping others socially in the world as a static theatre, but taking responsibility for the very move-ment of the world itself, for the very milieu of humankind. And the point of this article is that such an hwareness is now flowering in the Church and we ought not to miss it or take it for granted. Perhaps a concrete example will help us see more clearly. In 1830 a French pastor of good will may have courageously preached to factory owners that they must give their wo~kers a living wage. But what he could little understand was what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman called the "social construc-tion of reality." In other wqrds, reali.ty had been constructed by humans themselves in such a way that ifa converted factory owner did pay a living wage, he would go out of business because of the competition. What was needed was--as we know today--a new construction of reality, namely some empowerment of the workingman through unionization. NotKze that such a new reality had to be created not only to allow workers to achieve . Ministry in the Church and a Structural Concern for Justice / 45 just wages, but also to allow an employer to pay a just wage while remaining competitive. Such an element of structural justice was recognized by Leo XIII when he said in Rerum Novarum that even though someone made an agreement, such an agreement (contract) could be invalid because of the unequal bar-gaining positions. In Leo's teaching we see the beginnings of an awareness in the Church of the meaning of a structural reality in morality. Justice is denied not only by the individually greedy man, but through the inheritance of circumstances embedded in social systems. Application to Ministry In the last eighty years such an insight has developed richly in Church teaching. John XXIII in Mater et Magistra and Paul VI in Populorum Progressio applied the teachings to inequalities inherent in relations with the Third World. There have even been some high points of pastoral ap-plication in the Church. For example it remains the glory of the American Church that she (unlike some of her European sister-Churches) did by and large keep faith with the immigrant workers in her midst. Yet while the insight is old enough to trace to even before Leo, it nevertheless remains a new insight in need of fresh application in many areas of social concern. Most of all it calls for fresh application in the Church's ministry. Ministry must concern itself not only over individual conversion, not only over healing hearts, but also over healing structures. Otherwise the healed heart will be unable to inscribe its fruit of justice on the world itself. In Reinhold Niebuhr's classic terms, "moral man" ~will remain powerless and ineffectual in an "immoral society." The word structure is not always an easy term to understand, It has many meanings in many contexts. A helpful articulation of a meaning sufficient for our purposes here is one given in the statement of the Appa-lachian Bishops. They speak of how the forces of corporate giants become perverted, and destructive growth patterns develop.The principle of ~'max-imization of profit" becomes an idolatrous power. Then they give a clear understanding of what an evil structure does: This power overwhelms the good intentions of noble people, it forces them to com-pete brutally with one another. It pushes people into "conspicuous consumption" and planned obsolescence. It delivers up control to a tiny minority whose values then shape our social structures. Then they point out how difficult it is for good individuals to change things when structures militate against change. We know that there are many sincere business people, zealous reporters, truthful teachers, honest law enforcement officers, dedicated public officials, hard working lawyers and legislators, who try to do a good job. But we know too that, the Way things are set up, it's hard for good people to do a good job. Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 Such an insight by the bishops into structural evil corresponds to con-temporary insights into scriptural understandings of the powers of evil. The simple phrase, ~'. the way things are set up, it's hard for good people to do a good job," is a perfect way to describe what theologians today mean by "'the situation of sin." So the power of evil becomes autonomous and embeds itself into structures. These structures entrap us. They tend not to draw good from us but to draw out our worst--sometimes despite good will to the contrary. We have what some see here as one perspective on the original-sin tradition in the Church. Obviously, then, the work of redemp-tion, in which Jesus has given his Body the Church a certain share, must include a healing of this history of sin. Thus the very baptismal function of induction into a saving community implies a ministerial work to heal struc-tures. The Domain of Gospel Ministry and Arthur Simon's Parable The foregoing ushers into focus a problem, namely, how can work for structures remain a gospel work and not merely become a social-secular work. Arthur Simon, the founder and leader of Bread for the World, a Christian Citizens Movement for world food resources, tells a parable that helps us understand this problem of placing work for structures into min-istry. The parable is basically this: Once there was a farming town that could be reached by a narrow road with a bad curve in it. There were frequent accidents on the road especially at the curve, and the preacher would preach to the people of the town to make sure they were Good Samaritans. And so they were, as they would pick the people up on the road, for this was a religious work. One day someone, suggested they buy an ambulance to get the accident victims to the town hospital more quickly. The preacher preached and the people gave, for this was a religious work. Then one day a councilman suggested that the town authorize building a wider road and taking out the dangerous curve. Now it happened that the mayor had a farm market right at the curve on the ~oad and he was quite against taking out the curve. Someone asked the preacher to say a word to the mayor and the congregation next Sunday about it. But the preacher and most of the people figured they had better stay out of politics; so next Sunday the preacher preached on the Good Samaritan Gospel and en-couraged the people to continue their fine work of picking up the accident victims. The parable illustrates what Paul Ricoeur says about man's new aware-ness, namely an awareness of being in relationship with others in structured ways, i.e. not merely as "neighbor" but as socius. Father Chenu, the French Dominican, calls it the.new way of charity. He says that man has always been social, but he adds: Today, not accidentally but structurally the collective event lends scope and intensity to the social dimension--human love treads these lasting paths, these organizations Ministry in the Church and a Structural Concern for Justice / 47 of distributive justice, and these administrative systems (in G. Cottier et al., eds., Eglise et pauvret~, 1965, p. 174). The problem then is very real. When is ministry for life religious and gospel, and when does it become secular? What work for life is natural and what is supernatural? What is gospel and what is humanism? The questions are age-old. And without presuming that the Church today has completely solved the problem, I do think a good part of the answer is already within the Church's official grasp and official teaching. In official meetings and synods, papal and episcopal teachings have addressed the problem and have given us enough of a theological answer to go on. Let us just cite chosen, illustrative texts from the Catholic context. First, the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World has many comments on the subject. But one celebrated sentence is as follows: While we are warned that it profits a man nothing if he gain the whole world and lose himself, the expectation of a new ean.h must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one . Earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom. Nevertheless, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the kingdom of God (n. 39). The World Synod of Bishops of 1971 and 1974 both dealt with the problem. The famous statement of 1971 said this: Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the gospel, or, in other words, of the Church's mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation. And in 1974 Pope Paul after citing the danger of losing the religious di-mension of our mission says this: There is no opposition or separation, therefore, but a complementary relationship between evangelization and human progress. While distinct and subordinate one to the other, each calls for the other by reason of their convergence towards the same end: the salvation of man. The continuity of the two Synods is sharply manifested in the Human Rights document of the '74 Synod. There the Bishops used a theology of the Divine Image and taught that the "integral development of persons" makes clearer in man the divine image. Then they say: Hence, she [the Church] believes firmly that the promotion of human rights is required by the gospel and is central to her ministry. Summarizing this brief set of quotes we can say that healing structures of irreverence for life and of injustice is part of the ministry of the Church because such healing is "of vital concern to the kingdom of God" (Gaudium et Spas), "a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel" (Synod '71), "required by the gospel arid central to the Church's ministry" (Synod '74). 41~ / Re~iew for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 Why take time to cite these examples of official documentation? First, awareness that such insights are now mainstream official teachings will keep us from being intimidated by those who would accuse us of humanism or of becoming social agencies. ' But more than that: it is to underscore that the concern for structural justice and the concern to place the struggle for structural justice within the mission of the Church is not merely a concern of a Daniel Berrigan, of a Helder Camara, or of a Latin American theologi~an, but rather it is official and central teaching within the Church. Most of all it is a matter of rejoicing that such an insight is found not only in official teaching, but is making its way into the popular religious psyche of our.people. At the Eucharistic Congress, when people struggled to touch Mother Theresa, they were struggling to touch, in this case, not someone known for mystic gifts such as Padre Pio, but someone known for simply picking men up offthe sti'eets of Calcutta. But more than that, the people also welcomed Dom Helder Camara. And those who knew his history, knew that his life has been a different struggle from that of Mother Theresa. Dom Helder symbolizes .not just an enormous interpersonal love for the weak, but also the struggle for justice against systems of dependence and exploitation. Dom Helder in the midst of his talk at the Philadelphia Civic Center walked over, picked up and embraced Mother Theresa. I like to think this embrace was more than a kinship of courageous people. Rather I see a symbol of two forms of ministries-in-the-Church meeting and embracing. And in a way, Dom Hel~ler's emphasis is a struggle that poses the most important challenge to Church leaders. His work is less clear, more risky, more apt to provoke misunderstanding even among one's own people, and yet all the more urgent today. The Problem of .Ambiguiiy Yet this ministry .that attempts to heal structures has a special problem connected with it. I would term it the problem of ambiguity. Many Church leaders can agree that gospel includes work for human life and human rights--even structural work. But they rightly fear choosing certain con-crete options that commit the Church to one economic or political view that may riot be the only valid Christian view. The point of Paul Ramsey'.s work Who Speaks for the Church? was to purify us of easy assumptions that the charism of leadership will lead us to right decisions in the complex area of socio-economic and political affairs. So there is a special need for a humility and tentativeness that, in the words of Paul VI, "will rid action of all inflexibility and sectarianism" (Coming Eightidth n. 48). We do not wish to preach our own ideology, but Christ crucified. So we seek to avoid easy partnership. This is a common caution perhaps needed today. But I would like to accent another side to the issue that sometimes Ministry in the Church and a Structural Concern for Justice goes unaccented. Namely, that not always what appears to be neutral ground is really neutral. And sometimes when the Church refi'ains from taking sides in an issue, for fear of partisanship, she sometimes, willy-nilly, by not taking a side has taken a side. Another way of saying it is simply that sometimes our silence speaks loudly. This may not be an everyday occa-sion, but it does happen that situations become radicalized to the point where there just is not ample neutral ground in which a large institution can find room. Historical examples may be easiest here. In the Germany of th~ 1930's was there a political neutral ground? Can we not at least in hindsight recognize that what looked like neutral ground was not so neutral? There was a personal heroism of many priests, ministers and bishops, yet in the episcopal statements of the German hierarchy (in the words of Gordon Zahn) there was "not even a hint of any question, of whether or not the Hitler war effort met the conditions set for a 'just war' " (cited in Paul Hanley Furfey, The Morality Gap, p. 13). Another example. In the bombings of Hamburg of July-August, 1943, the dead numbered 30,000. The raids on Dresden of February, 1945 killed some 135,000. On March 9 and 10 the raids over a four mile residential district of Tokyo are estimated to have killed 84,000. On August 6 and 9 the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed an estimated 68,000 and 38,000 respectively. My point here is that the killing of noncombatants was even at that time, clearly recognized as evil. Yet one can find no significant corporate criticism of these actions. Moreover, despite Pius XlI's pleas to statesmen for a negotiated peace, no official Catholic spokesmen gave sustained'protest against the allied policy of unconditional surrender--an omission John Courtney Murray called a "classic example" of a failure to apply moral principles. ¯ A third example concerns racism and segregation in this country. It could be summed up in a symbol. The symbol is contained in the words of Leander Perez, political boss of Plaquemines Parish in New Orleans. He was, you may remember, the man excommunicated for his opposition to the integration of the parochial schools (a courageous act .ot~ Archbishop Rum-mel). But Perez' comment was "How come we could have slaves, separate schools and churches for these Negroes for ages and ages and now all of a sudden it's a sin?" (see Paul Hanley Furfey, The Morality Gap). The point in all of these questions is not historical Monday morning quarterbacking. Indeed even at the time of these incidents there were clear teachings already in the mainstream of Catholic thought--teachings that were not applied. The point is that the Church took stances that at the time m. ay have seemed to be stances of moderation or may have seemed to be prudent neutral ground. But now we know they were not, Rather they appear to have been examples of an immigrant Church so anxious to be " established that it became absorbed in the zeitgeist of the times, and so lost its prophetic voice. 50 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/1 The main point is this: we may be right in our anxiety that the Church not be pulled into partisan blocs, in our anxiety not to provoke undue division in the Church by too quickly identifying one social option as the gospel option. But we must be careful not to allow this anxiety to bring us to a silence that really is an unwitting speaking in behalf of the status quo. There is a corollary to this problem. It concerns the matter of com-petefice. Often times it is stated that the Church or a churchman cannot speak on an issue because it is so complex and specialized. Surely we must be careful of easy and abrupt position-taking in the complex areas of so-ciooeconomics and international politics. But the deeper question must always be asked. Namely why is it that at times we choose certain areas in which to be competent, to research care-fully and to locate manpower and resources and other areas in which we do not? We must always ask ourselves what might be our cultural and theo-logical biases that predispose us to give certain questions a priority. Too many good Germans said they could not protest because, after all, they really did not know enough. Dualisms That Lead to Neglect Sometimes a certain idea about ministry can lead a man of good will to neglect a certain gospel reverence for life. For example, I am sure that the chaplains of institutions in which recent press releases have exposed cruel treatment would be men of good will. But if they observed some of the same things newspaper reporters saw, and if they did not complain in any effec-tive way, we must ask how did they conceive their ministry? What kind of dualisms between soul and body, between spiritual and physical, between creation and redemption must have been going on in their understanding of ministry? Has speaking in behalf of ill-treated mental patients, ill-treated children, ill-treated elderly in profit:making nursing homes, ill-treated pris-oners, ill-treated h

Issue 30.4 of the Review for Religious, 1971. ; EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Everett A. Diederich, 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 R~LIGIOUS; ~12 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; 321 Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ~9m6. + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited with ecclesiastical approval by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis ~. ~.,'ersity, the editorial oflfices being located . ';12 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard. Saint Louis, Missour 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. Published bimonthly and copyright ~ 1971 by REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Published for Review fi,r Religious at Mr. Roval & (;uilford Ave., Bahimore. Md. Printed in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at Baltimore. Maryland and at additional mailin~ offices. Single c~pies: $1.25. Subscription U.S.A. and Canada: $6.00 a Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order paya-ble to REVIEW eort REL1OIOUS in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to persons claiming to represent REVIEW IgOR RELIGIOUS. Change of address requests should include former address. - Renewals and new subscriptions should be sent to REvmw ~OR RELIGIOtJS; P. O. Box 1110; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Manuscripts, editorial correspondence, and books for re-view should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; .539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to the address of the Questions and Answers editor. JULY 1971 VOLUME 30 NUMBER 4 SISTER MARIE BRINKMAN, S.C.L. Toward a Theology of Women's Religious A theology of any aspect of the Christian life by its nature evolves. Perhaps the greatest difficulty of living in an age of transition in the Church is to feel the process and not the fruits of theological evolution. That seems to be where we are in what has long been called--and lately "unlabeled" by Brother Gabriel Moranl--religious life. Whatever such a theology has been for the past, it is no longer adequate if we are to judge by current efforts to enunciate a theology of celibacy for the present, or fu-ture. If it is fair to generalize, we might call that of the past a "theology of negation." In the sense used here, the term means an understanding and practice of the vows o~ religion which emphasized mortification or restraint of human inclinations and desires, in order to realize an ideal of universal charity dedicated to service, sharing of goods in community, and snbmission to the will of God. The end was wholly positive: to follow Jesus Christ in establishing His kingdom on earth. The ground of the theology was the gospel. But complex factors resulted in emphasis on the self: self-denial, self-perfection, and a profound privacy in living united with God. Such em-phasis wa~ natural and necessary when the life of celibacy for the kingdom struck its roots in a primitive Christian-ity inimical to its pagan surroundings. Flight from the world to the desert--literally or simply in spirit--was a dramatic and effective model for following Christ. If Augustine's experience and temperament brought liim to it in struggle, others sought it by inclination. It ~See his article in National Catholic Reporter, December 18, 1970. ÷ ÷ ÷ Sister Marie is a faculty member of ¯ St. Mary College; Xavier, Ks. 66098. VOLUME 30, 1971 4" 4" 4" Sister Marie ¯ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 564 would be some time, furthermore, before the asceticism of the desert and Augustinian theology, influenced by Paul, would be modified by Benedict's rule of modera-tion. Even then, throughout the Middle Ages, as the monastery came to grips with the world, the need for strict asceticisnl gTew. If its roots in the gospel became manifest in the joy of Francis's mendicant poverty, the joy was no less the fruit of renunciation. Yet within the Poverello's .lifetime, that reach of the spirit that says "yes" to all creation proved too difficult an integra'tion for many. Extremes and strife divided his followers. But if negativism and individualism were always abuses of celibate life, spiritual freedom and individnal-ity were its frnit in every age. The passion of universal charity, of profound friendship, and of intimacy with Jesus Christ is the part of the mystery that Benedict, Francis, and John of the Cross knew to its depths. So too conntless others. A positive theology then is nothing new--except in an interpretation and practice appropriate to contempo-rary experience and language. The question is not the validity of renunciation under vows, which by Christ's promise brings the hundredfold of communal life, but the meaning of that recompense. If emphasis in the past has been on limitation and self-denial for the sake of the spirit, it is growing into a desire for celebration of the spirit. If, in the past, a certain privatism of spirituality paralleled external community life, today personal and communal relationships are becoming ways to God in a different manner. Far from a secularistic or humanistic approach to reli-gious commitment, the question may involve a more de-manding and mature way of living in simplicity and obe-dience to the Spirit than did older forms of communal living. It may call for a fuller renunciation in the very experience of personal commnnion and communal rela-tionships. The point is that, primarily, the question is one of community. Here is no suggestion that the historical phenomenon of individual persons freely coming together to live in celibacy and service, and publicly declaring their inten-tion to the Christian community, is pass~ in the life of the Chnrch. That personalism, freedoin of life style, and sharing can become fetishes of a new kind of communal life is an evident risk. That the life may broaden to include celibate anti married persons in the same commu-nity is an evident possibility. But the risk of any communal life is loss of solitude sufficient to sustain it, and sharing that becomes expo-sure. Put another way, the nltimate risk is absence, rather than presence, of God to lnan in his heart. Then the presence of fellowmen becomes an absolute necessity-- and a new flight to the desert follows. Paul's analogy of marriage and the Church can be a foundation stone for a new enunciation of an old theol-ogy of celibate communal life. The analogy has less to do with the submission of woman to man and a concept of virginity as superior to marriage than with the comple-mentary values of marriage and celibacy. The Church is imaged in neither one nor the other, but in both. This is so because the analogy to the Chnrch lies not only in the sexual union of man and wife, fruitful in the family, but in the union between mature persons in friendship. Without this highest valne--which is Christ's own word for man's union with him--marriage is imper-fect, and celibacy is not fully hnman. It may be that for most people the ration of Cltrist and tl~e individual per-son is fully realized only within a spiritual union of free, eqnal persons. Marriage wants this; celibacy shoukl nur-ture it. Further, in Augustine's doctrine of uni~m with God, it is not the negative and ascetical aspects of the spiritual life that are significant so much as his emphasis on pres-ence, the inner Light that is God dwelling in man. That presence between persons is a reality analogous to, even conducive to growth in presence with God was not a strange idea to Augustine. He knew it fully in relation to his mother, if to no one else. In the twelfth century, Kichard of St. Victor, by way of Augnstine's doctrine of exemplarism, the "necessary rea-son," explained from the experience of human love the communion of Persons in the Trinity. Ewert Cousins, in a recent issue of Thought,'-" perceptively analyzes Ri-chard's treatise as a contribution of medieval theology to contemporary philosophy and psychology. Examining the dynamics of interpersonal love in the faith-transformed tradition of the Christian community, Richard sees that charity demands that a person love to the fullness of his capacity: "To enter into a partial rela-tionship with another person, without depth or intensity, is to fail to realize the possibilities of human love." And in realizing such capacity "one mounts into the life of God . The human person ~nost imitates his divine Exemplar--and is therefore most a person--when he transcends himself in a union of love for another per-son." :~ The author then explores a deeper level of Richard's theology of love, as a growth from charity to the happi-ness of loll communication to the generosity of sharing -""A Theology of Interpersonal Relations," Thougt, t, Spring 1970, pp. 56-82. :~ Ibid., pp. 71 and 65. 4- 4- + Women's Ret~g~ous VOLUME 30, 1971 + ÷ + Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 566 this ~nutual love. In explaining the exemplary reason for the Trinity of Divine Persons, the medieval theologian speaks of three aspects of charity: self-transcending union, individuality of persons, and their creativity. In this third and perfect stage of charity, it is fruitful in a third per-son: ua the Trinity, the Spirit; in the union of hnsband and wife, the child; and in friendship, community with yet another. But a theologian, contemporary now rather than to his own time, offers a doctrine of analogy even richer in implications, perhaps, for present thought about the spir-itual life. It may well be that Ricbard's and his own thinking coincide. John Henry Newman, especially in his writings about the act of knowledge, the life of faith, and the development of doctrine, dealt with man's relation-ship to God in a way that foreshadowed the insigl~ts of philosophers and psychologists of human relationships for a century to come. Althongh he speaks in the traditional language of Catholic doctrine about revealed mysteries, he is con-stantly describing and reflecting on experience, and re-fuses to leave mystery or doctrine on any abstract plane. The act of conscience, observed in the earliest life of reason, becomes for him a consciousness of AnotlYer and a response that demands fidelity. When this moral princi-ple becomes a growing knowledge of Person, faith be-comes experiential. That it becomes an experience to be shared is the explanation for Newman's writing about it. As be knew faith, it was the fulfillment of reason. It was a profoundly human experience of a divine gift, so fitting to the mind, rigorot, sly exercised, as to seem na-tural. This experience, as the ground of a concept of anal-ogy, is so far from being simply intellectual that it be-comes an act of relationship, a response to presence that is the very analogue of friendship. Analogy here means no mere parallel between knowl-edge and belief, between human and divine relationship; neither did the exemplar, or "necessary reason," for Au-gustine or Richard. It means an interaction, a comple-ment. Levels and quality of experience remain distinct even while illnminating and enlarging one another. But the implications cannot receive fair treatment outside the context of Newman's full reflections and development of ideas. They are the ground for asking some serious ques-tions about communal life nnder vows, as it develops today. If the most serious of these tend to converge, it is per-haps toward an nltimate qnestion: Is there something absolute that constitutes religious life as a necessary fac-tor in the life of the Church, and if so what is it? Answers wonld not be slow in coming: the vows, corn- munity, celibate consecration to Jesus Christ, service to the people of God according to the Gospel . or others. Then, because any one of these, in relation to the others, can evoke a fair argument for its primary value for reli-gious life, the question remains, what is there in com-munal living, or an act of dddication, or apostolic witness that demands patterns of living in obedience, poverty, and chastity? For not only the patterns but their princi-ples are in question. The thesis here is that an experienced relationship to God in Jesus Christ, known througla a like relationship to one's companions, is the absolute factor without which religious life wonld not exist. The theological, psycholog-ical, and strnctnral dimensions of the relationship are not different approaches to the question, but aspects of a single phenomenon of celibate consecrated life--here considered as it may be for a woman. Companions, in tbe traditional context of religious life, are tile members of one's immediate religious family and include all the members of the community. In the whole view, however, they are not defined by either of these groups, for at one time in the history of the Church, celibate women witnessed to the kingdom within the sin-gle Christian community, without need for a gronp set apart, and it is conceivable that the condition conld pre-vail again. Then the Christian commnnity itself would be so renewed that its communal witness would be all that the Church would require and individual celibate men and women would minister within it, but in more varied ways demanded by the needs of a Church in a secularized society. A married clergy within the ranks of the diocesan priesthood might be prophetic of such celibate life in the Church, which ah'eady exists along with religious com-munities. Celibates, priests, and laity would then make one whole community. The relationship in question is that which tlows from the life of the Trinity to man in God's acts of Father-hood, or creation and providence; of Sonsbip, or revela-tion in redemption; and of Spirit, or indwelling to make whole, integTal, or holy. All this is a matter of initial, continning belief for the Christian who, gradually by God's graciousness, comes to know experientially what it means to be created, forgiven, and loved. Fm'tber, the quality of that experiential knowledge of faith is undefin-able and dilferent for each believer. The point here is that it takes on a special aspect for one who responds to the call to live by the evangelical counsels. Then the relationship to God entails a complete dedication, or giving over, of oneself to Jesns Christ for ÷ + + Women's Religious LiIe VOLUME 30, 1971 567 Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 568 the sake of extending His kingdom on earth. The de-mand on a person may be simply that of God's will, a desire to live in a religious community, gratitude for what God has given and the need to share it, or any other form the call may take; bnt it is answered with the knowledge that it means service, nndetermined by oneself and in a condition of personal poverty. The service and its necessary conditions, as well as the connnunity in which it is given, are secondary to the ultimate motivation which comes from the realization that God is one's Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifying Life, and that He wishes to be so to others who do not . know Him. The initial undertaking of a vowed life for such reasons is like the commitment of a young woman to a man whom she knows and loves for his goodness and wishes to marry; as yet she has no real knowledge of what he is like in his whole self and in the power of his relation to her. That can only come in their day-to-day mntual giving and growth in conjugal love. The consent and gift of the marriage vows arc an act of faith that fuller realization of each other will bring to maturity. If the love grows in the depth that the sacrament signi-fies, and when it includes the full dimension of friend-ship, the realization must come in the most intimate and generous hnman relationship possible to man. This then is not model for, but parallel to the realization and inti-macy that the religious woman should achieve in relation to Jesus Christ: parallel in th:~t a conamitment either to marriage or to religious life depends upon an extension, in concrete experinaental terms, of the faith and hope and love in which a believing person lives with God--but frequently at a less profound depth of experience than he knows in a human relationship. In fact, it is almost easier for a yonng woman to believe in the creative power for her of the man she loves than in the highly personal creative providence of God for her. She may experience his forgi~reness in a more immedi-ately healing way than she knows the mercy of Christ; and her sense of oneness with him grows more strong than her awareness of God's dwelling in her. When reali-zation of her relationship to God eqnals in intensity of experience her relationship with her husband, she will live to the full the sacrament of marriage and be herself a channel of God's action. But the same difficulty in realizing a personal relation to God that integrates ;ill hunaan relationship can attend the spiritual growth of a religions. It is not so ranch a matter of which must take precedence as it is a constant projection of one to the other for the sake of understand-ing, and realizing God through knowing and loving man. Whatever the actual level of experience in relationship a person knows in marriage or religious life, the two are parallel, .or complementary, in the Church as a sign of God's relation to man in a human commnnity. One is as necessary to the Cburcb as the otber. But in tbe parallel lies their difference. Marriage isa formal sacrament, be-cause the family community is fundamental to buman natnre and stands in need of special grace beyond that of the individual Christian life; because families propagate the Christian community of believers; and because the union of man and wife signify the union of Christ and his Church. Furtber, marriage lind the family witness to the mysteries of Incarnation and Redemption as they renew man in time. The religious community, on the other hand, bad its beginning later in bistory when a special witness within the Christian community was needed. The witness con-sists in colnmunity, as does that of the family, bnt not in any particular form--monastic, mendicant, apostolic, or contemplative. The form may even be the Christian com-munity as a whole, with certain members living in celi-bate witness and service. The essential note of religious life is the witness of a relationship to Jesus Christ unique in the Church, dependent upon the absolute surrender of oneself to God for the sake of the kingdom. II The religious consecration and the common life that ordinarily flows from it are sacramental by their nature, a sign of the escbatological mystery of the fulfillment of the kingdom, that is, the full realization of God's creative, redemptive, and nnitive action upon an individual man and the whole human community. Religious life itself is the temporal sacrament of the Church as it will be be-yond time when all realities signified will be revealed. But just as nothing of the God-man relationship is an abstraction of doctrine or theology when realized in expe-rience, so this connection between the individual and the human community under God's action is a living reality to be experienced, if it is true. If the nature of its truth could be realized by the individual, living either in the natural family or the religious group, then much of the conflict between the personal and the communal, be-tween the natural and the supernatural would disappear. To say its trutb lies in living out the doctrine of the Mystical Body and in realizing the community of the people of God is not to perceive how this is accomplisbed psychologically. To say it is the work of grace is not to explain what grace is, in the interaction of God's and man's freedom. And the words of Cbrist that "what you do to the least of tbese you do to me" are a truth that, like all trntbs of such dimension, is in danger of becom-÷ + ÷ Women's Religious VOLUME .30, 1971 569 4" Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ing axiomatic. Perhaps his other words, "This is my Body, which shall be given for you," bear upon these truths in such a way as to make clear what the experience of the relationship of the believer, and more particularly of the religious, to Jesus Christ can be. The full dimension and significance of the Incarnation is latent in these words of consecration. The mystery of God's taking on a created body, in order to be present to us fully in suffering our human condition, becomes here the mystery of Christ's signifying His creative and re-demptive presence in us in the form of food. Because He Himself is the food, we become one in eating it together --a unity of personal communion with Him and inter-communion with one another, a community hidden and yet to be realized in human personal communion. As with Him, this grows and expresses itself in the aware-ness of another's presence, in a growing knowledge of another's reality, in merciful acceptance of one's own and another's sinfulness, and in free creative unifying love. If these are effects of our communicating Jesus Christ, they are to be the effects of our communicating with one another. They are what man in his nature needs and constantly seeks in a fellowman; they are what only God can supply fully. But it may well be that God does not ordinarily work these effects in man except through his communion with those associated with him in a human community. When marriage becomes what it is meant to be for a man and a woman, their interrelationships are God-like in their effects, are, in fact, the very way in which God comes to and acts upon them. Ideally, as a couple mature in marriage, husband and wife increasingly liberate the creative power of the other, in the public ways of making and governing a home, of rearing a family. But the im-measurable factors of personal liberation of the spirit that determine the growth and interaction of personality between a man and a woman are the real cause of the family's unity. When a woman is fully recognized for what she is_and can become, is even brought to be what she could not be alone; when time after time she receives forgiveness for what she has done and compassion for what she is from one who knows her; when imperceptibly she comes to freedom and peace in union with one who loves her, then all of her creative powers are awakened to be exercised primarily upon her children, within her home, and beyond it. If she believes and contemplates this action of God upon her spirit through her relation to her husband, her faith in God's providence, her hope in His mercy, and her love for Jesus Christ become one with and realized in the bonds that unite her with husband and children in their community. The same needs of the spirit are fulfilled .or frustrated in the human community of those wbo have consecrated themselves by vow to Jesus Christ. But just as a husband can be neither substitute for a relation to God nor an "instrument" of salvation for a woman, so relation to Christ, for a celibate woman, is in no way a substitute for or even a sublimation of what a husband might be to her; nor is her religious community a substitute for a family. The relation to Christ is the ultimate human fulfillment in either familial or religious community; the human relations are not image of or psychological substi-tute for but the very substance and realization of the personal relation to God, in Jesus Christ. They are, or should be, fulfillment of Christ's words, "This is my Body." It is such relationship---of creative freedom, of healing mercy, and of unifying love--in a strong consciousness that this is what shonld be happening between them that can bind together the members of a ~eligious community. What they are to one another, in varying degrees of knowledge, affection, and effectiveness, God is to each of them. Their awareness of and action toward one another is in their presence to and action toward God. The two relationships ideally tend to be one. If relations with fellow religious in community reveal and make concrete the relation with God, the latter, as it is realized, purifies and strengthens the former. For to live deeply in faith and bope and charity is to know that relation to God constitutes one's being and qualifies all existence. The knowledge is not merely of the mind bnt the whole person, in the Biblical sense, and conditions all other relationships, afflicted with self-inter-est as they ~nay be. Realizing this, religions can under-stand what it means to find Christ in another, or to be Christ to another, because He has said and makes it come abont that "This--person and human community--is my Body." Yet he only does so within the limits of our psy-chological capacity and free choice to make such human commnnion a reality. That is why it is important for a young woman enter-ing upon religious life to understand that it is meant to fulfill bet as a woman quite as fully and selflessly as conjugal love and motherhood fulfill a married woman. Celibacy is a condition of life that means relationship as intense as that of marriage but more extensive, for its purpose or end is different. The sacramental community of marriage propagates and nurtures, within the family, the kingdom of God, while the sacramental commnnity of celibate men or women witnesses and ministers to the ÷ ÷ ÷ Women's R~tigious Li]e VOLUME 30, 1971 ÷ ÷ + Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 572 kingdom in its universal extension. But to accomplish this end the celibate woman must realize her capacities as does the married woman, and for both the fulfillment must come through commtmion with other human beings. To be what God intends her to be to man, any woman must exercise fully her power of creative love. If the woman dedicated to Christ were to be denied this, God would not be just. She undoubtedly denies herself the joy, the comfort, the strength of marital union; but she in no way denies herself womanhood. In her, then, passion must become whole, purified, and fruitful in her total surrender to Jesus Christ and in the human loves such dedication implies--love of such single-heartedness that it demands of her the devotion and selflessness that a husband and children require. And this love in her, too, is a receptivity to the strength and life that another can give in friendship. For in the life-begetting love that is the spirit of a woman, nothing can be lost or repressed. The reality of her sex, the psychology of her love, ;~re not lessened or transcended, but snbsulned in the comprehensive, effec-tive tenderness and devotion she is free to offer others. This increased and extended womanly power is the meaning of virginity. It is a power of love that does not fear, for the power is from and fruitful in God. It manifests itself, further, in ways that make celibate COllllnuual life, among equals and tinder authority, more difficult for a woman than is tile natural communal life of the family~that is, in certain ways. By natnre, a woman is receptive in human relationship, rather than aggressive; open to receive all another has to.give and desirous of giving in turn where she can be received. For a wife and mother, these qualities fulfill her when family life is normal. For a religious, when this openness and freedom are inhibited for any reason--lack of genuine comnumication or loss of self-confidence--she suffers iso-lation and can hardly relate even to one other. So com-nlunity is lost. It happens not infi'eqnently, for even while we know that we cannot live except in response to one another, we do not in any human community readily live in full responsibility for one another. That costs, and the price is oneself. To be responsible for another is to invite his pain to oneself and to accept the terms of his love, which can appear not as love but as self-defense or even aver-sion. It is to respect one another's freedom and integrity with something of the respect in which God holds us, knowing us wholly. Awareness that God's action comes in all the ways we react to one another can be traumatic and hard to accept, but can deepen faith not only in God but in the other person as well; then growth in grace is the same reality as growth in a human bond. When this identification of God's action with the action of one's sisters extends itseff in very ~nany relations in a religious community, its bonds are born at once of grace and human needs, ful-fillment, and suffering. This is the degree to which nature and grace, personal and communal fulfillment are one. Granted, it is for the most part achieved in the desire that it be so, always imperlectly in fact. But to believe that it is possible is the substance of hope, which "knows what it believes is true." Further, the bonds that unite a religious community in this way are the strict measure of the effectiveness of its apostolic service. Only insofar as the members liberate, have compassion for, and love one another can they be redemptive in their relations with others. It is as if the co~nmunity were the fruit of each member's relation to Christ, extending itself to others, just as the union of a man and woman in marriage bears fruit in the commu-nity of the family. But this creative power a woman has is love that does not grasp its object, as zeal and desire can make her do. It is the difference, in her human relation and apostolic witness and service, between a self-motivated determina-tion and a peaceful confident waiting for God's discovery in her and through her. A woman always wonders, with joy that does not obsct~re pain, at the life God brings forth in her; so this power of the life of pure faith that is virginity awakens her wonder. And that is lost when she reaches ot~t to take what she was made to receive, in discovery. Nor can the celibate woman depend, as can a married woman, upon another's singular love to support and in-spire her; hence, her radical solitude. She knows, in each human bond, that she is one of many whose relation to anotl~er reveals and re-creates that person. Making no exclusive claim, she acts with regard to another in the knowledge that any creative result will be the fruit of union with .]est~s Christ: t~ltimately His action, not her own, and this breeds a diffidence and restraint that re-spects the other's freedom and does not presume. A woman instictively knows, perhaps, that her latent power does not lie in the project and plan, in the self-confidence that acts without allowing hindrance; these are the characteristic roles of man, who rules the earth. A woman's power lies in re-creating persons, through suffer-ing what they bring to her, through freeing them from fear that they do not suffice for themselves and others. But it lies as well in the sensitivity and personal dimen-÷ + ÷ Women's VOLUME 30, 1971 573 sion she can bring to leadership and service in public actiou and institutional structures. Whatever bet role, in private and public life, as a woman is herself free, she supports and restores others. The liberation each achieves is really received, as creative grace or gift from God, through this hnman interaction. This kind of relationship is woman's natural fertility, and it matters little, so long as she is faithful, whether she realizes it through union, with a single man or as vowed solely to Jesus Christ. She must inevitably realize it in nnion with human beings--in free and unselfish love for another. But, united by vow to Jesus Christ, she is fruit-ful in darkness of faith, in freedom that does not kuow itself, and in love that cannot see what it creates. In a celibate life she cannot hold any child of her own beget-ting. III ÷ ÷ Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 574 Such considerations, theoretical as they may seem, lead to certain conclusions regardiug the structure of religious life. If this relationship of a celibate woman to Jesus Christ, realized in and determined by her relationsMp to her companions in comnmnity, is the absolute factor of religions life, then the forms and conditions of that life are wholly relative to it. N6ne of them are the end or essence of religious consecration; a woman does not give herself over to a community, nor to a way of life, nor to an apostolate. She gives /lerself to Jesus Christ in an extension and intensification of the relation of faith and hope and love in wbicl~ baptis.m established her. She is simply converted, or turned to Him wholly, in the grow-ing experience of that relationship and, like any other woman, must, if she is to be what God intends her to be, realize it at the greatest possible depth in a human com-munity. The latter, in fact, results from the relationship. That it demands a ministry of service and witness is as natural as that marriage demands of a wo~nan child-bearing and nurturing of a family. If human relatiouship and free-dora to serve as she can according to her abilities do not develop her, she can be ;i. detriment to strong communal life rather than a vital member. The natural, human, and personal dimensions of her life are not simply the base for supernatural dedication; the two are the same, when a person is sonnd and whole of body and spirit. It is out of place, then, to orientate discussion of com-munal authority, poverty, and service from the determi-nation to safeguard strnctnres--valid as they were in their origins--or values which are simply asking for new expression. An absolute end will always require certain conditions; this personal and communal relationship to .Jesus Christ demands the most stringent ones. In the family, the conditions are determined by nature: "witness, within the single dimension of a constant natnral group, to the God-man relationship, incarnated in this family in a singular time and place. Its creative, redemp-tive, and unitive acts will procreate the hufiaan and Chris-tian communities and, given man's frailty, its continuity needs guarantee and safeguard. The marriage contract is taken before and within the existing commnnity. Paren-tal authority is all-embracing in the rearing of children, and life style is highly concentrated and uniform--allow-ing for contemporary developments to the contrary. The limits of interdependence and natnral responsibilities condition freedom in day-to-day living, which has as its end the maturing of children to independence. But the conditions of celibate commnnal living are altogether different. The Incarnation of Christ i,a reli-gious commnnity is a continuing celebration of Eucha-rist: of thanksgiving that we are here together, who have come to witness to the mystery of Jesns Christ. The grace of a con~munity's sacramental value for the world is the graciousness of a Savior. More simply, perhaps, it is the manifest joy of meeting, between friends, whose presence to one another is what matters. From the start they are, or need to be, adnlts, capable of a life commitment and creative human bonds. What is absolutely necessary to the life of snch a com-munity is that the forms of communal living, of govern-ment, of anthority and responsibility, of personal and comnlunal poverty, and of apostolic service are conducive to each individual's realization of her relationship to Christ in her companions. There is no dichotomy be-tween personal and communal needs; they are one, when recognized in this context. The difficulties and suffering that attend responsibility for one another in such rela-tionship are a deeper asceticism than self-imposed forms of penance and prayer may be, for they demand thor-ough self-abnegation. Even the external practices of commnnity life, with the self-denial they entail, do not guarantee the experience of community unless they are informed by this experience of knowing and being known, in the way God knows and loves, by some few, or even one, of a religious woman's companions. The value of any given form, strnctnre, or practice is strictly determined by its contribution to the context in which each sister can freely and responsibly grow in the relationship to Christ that constitutes her life, determines her service, and produces community with her fellow reli-gious. Ironically, this relationship, spoken of as the spirit-ual life, is the growth in holiness that has been tradition- + + + Women's Religious Li[e VOLUME 30, 1971 575 + .4. Sister Marie REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ally held as the first end of the vows. But its psychological implications in the context of commnnal living and per-sonal fnlfillment need to be explored. It is there we can discover the common ground from which person-oriented' and commnnity-oriented concepts spring. This is not to say that the psychological needs and experiences of different generations are the same. But they can be quite different and still depend on the same values; the point is that legislation will not safeguard the commnnal values nor guarantee the personal realization here discnssed. The freedom of life style and respect for diversity of experience that such realization demands will l)e secnred by individuals, regardless of legislation that frustrates their action, and they will not consider them-selves disrespectful of authority in the taking. For their integrity and peace may, nnder certain circnmstances, de- But more important, the multidimensional natnre of the religions comnnmity demands it. Unlike the family, its end is a witness to the universality and fnlfillment of the kingdom of Christ in service that extends rather than concentrates itself. Becat,se it resnlts from the self-gift of responsible adtdts, acting nnder personal charisms, and continuing life together in daily voluntary offering, its structnre cannot be predetermined by traditions, nor can its govermnent be essentially hierarchical. To say that it is ecclesial is simply to reiterate the charismatic and communal aspects that it draws from the Church to which it is a witness. The hierarchical aspect is secondary to this, as it was in the early Chnrch. Yet it is nnlikely that strict collegiality rnled the early Christians who, even in communal living, needed strong leadership. The authority and collegiality are one in a community, when honest and educated responsibility govern its members. The evolution of the Christian com-munity and of religious commnnities, through many ages of dependence on authority, demands now much more trnst in the capacity of those in community to govern themselves. But the trust can come only from a mutual confidence that they ,~re persons committed in a common endeavor to witness to .Jesus Christ and to serve His peo-ple. The contract it religious makes by her vows is to God within this total ecclesial commnnity. It is also within a given religious community insofar as that gronp relates to the end of the Church. In a transitional age such as this one, the service a community gives within the Church must evolve even as the Chnrch's relation to the world is evolving. Hence, the evolntionary quality of any commu-nity, as the experience of its members and demands of its service cause it to change and renew itself. Flexibility of form and diversity of experience, now leadir;g to even freer forms and more varied services, actually guarantee the continuity of a religious community, if it is strong enough to change and grow within without loss of unity. Responsibility for that unity rests on each one, facing the valid and very different experience of .others with whom she lives. Past and present and future experience must he encompassed somehow, so that corn,non values and differing concepts can continue to grow together. Then varieties of life style need not threaten the unity. Latitude of practice in manner of dress, of government, of prayer life can actually guarantee the unity if the freedom allowed is not considered a concession to some kind of self-interest, or independence from the whole. Freedom then is not merely a means or condition, but an end: a liberty of spirit necessary for trne ~inity of persons in God. And authority is ,a means to it, especially when exercised by a woman. For the ultimate purpose of her power ls to assist others to the self-value that makes obedience acceptable to God. Then exercise of authority is more a ministry than a function, and can become the most creative of hnman acts and the most self-effacing. It is a woman's unique imaging of the action of God, which gives autonomy while it creates and in governance gnar-antees freedom. As in other apparent conflicts between natural and su-pernatural values, integration is the desired end. Author-ity and freedom, like celibacy and love, complement each other; the second is the fruit of the first. Whether experi-enced in counsel from one in an office of ministry, or sim-ply in friendship, the human relationship, grounded in Jesus Christ, is the sine qua non of religious community. This kind of bum:m relationship, with or without for-realities of office, can help religious women in community to come to a deeper realization of their vows. It estab-lishes obedience more firmly in the Spirit throt.,gh the depth of this htm~an dimension; it makes actual poverty the condition for simplicity of life and poverty of spirit in human relation; and celibacy, the condition of life that allows for the fullness of charity. Women's Religious Lile VOLUME ~0, 1971 577 BARBARA DENT The Mediocrity Challenge ÷ ÷ ÷ Mrs. Barbara Dent lives at 17 Piago Rd.; Clande-lands; Hamilton, New Zealand. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS God calls each human being in a unique way to come to Him. This unique way ~s that particular person's individual vocation. The quality and degree of his identi-fication with it is the measure of his powers of love, of his capacity for self-giving. Christianity has never pretended that to conform perfectly with a God-given vocation was easy. Our Lord Himself warned that anyone who compromised was not worthy of the kingdom of heaven. The foolish virgins were shut out. So was the guest without a wedding gar-ment. The man busy filling his barns died that very night under unfortunate circumstances. There was no time for a disciple to go back and bury his dead. The un-forgiving servant was "handed over to the torturers till be should pay all his debt." The house built on sand collapsed in ruins. It is human nature to hear God's call (for, after all, that is why he gave us ears), but it is also human nature to become so busy counting the possible cost that we answer with only a half-hearted murmur: "I may come--prob-ably tomorrow," or perhaps refuse: "I'm busy now for an indefinite period. Call again later." Even those who respond generously and enthusiasti-cally--" As Jesus was walking on from there he saw a man named Matthew sitting by the custom house, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him" (Mt 9:9)--seldom improve on that initial enthusiasm or even manage to maintain it. In the first fervor of dedi-cation, they are sincerely convinced that they want to make the total response, say the uncompromising yes; yet they often fail to continue through the years without surrounding that initial gift with reservations and elaborate systems of self-protection. They want to give, but their flawed human nature, played upon by the devil, forces them into mediocrity. In all the current controversy about the need and value of consecrated celibacy, the human urge to com-promise, to have one's cake and eat it too, plays its part. The argument for self-fulfillment sometimes forgets that any human being's ultimate fidfillment is in God, and therefore that whatever way of life aims straightest at God and is therefore that person's true vocation is also most designed to complete him as an individual: "The Church knows that only God, whom she serves, meets the deep-est longings of the human heart, which is never fully satisfied by what this world has to offer" (Church Today, 41). Human living provides innumerable routes to God, all of which can be the means of tmion with Christ; yet "sin has diminished man, blocking his path to fulfill-merit" (ibid. 13), and "a monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man" (ibid. 37). An element in tiffs struggle is that divided purpose which seeks to evade the .consequences of total commit-ment, and in the process often develops compromise into a fine art. However fashions change, whatever way-out forms theological speculations adopt, the call of Christ to each individual person remains the same, and its de-mand total. A true response to this call, whatever mode of life it involves, must lead to affirming with St. Paul: "For me, to live. is Christ." "The Lord is the goal of human history, the focal point of the longings of history and of civilization, the centre of the human race, the joy of every heart, and the answer to all its yearn!ngs" (ibid., 45). This is a fact of life, whatever the individual's voca-tion, celibate or married. There can be no essential self-fulfillment apart from Christ. We discover our true selves as we become those particular extensions of His incarna-tion tlmt He has chosen us to be. Any apparent fulfill-ment that occurs in alienation from Christ is spurions and dependent upon factors that chance can shatter, and t,st, ally does. Leaving aside the question of whether Christ and hu-manity are better served by a celibate or married clergy, let us look at the state of celibacy itself, whether in priest, religious, or lay person, male or female, and assess some of the ways in which it is subject to the mediocrity chal-lenge. No one can realize the full implications of the promise or vow of celibacy at the time of making it (lust as no marriage parmer can, on his wedding day, assess the im-plications of his vows). The vow is made as the formal seal of the gift of one's whole self and life to Christ in response to His call. ÷ ÷ 4- Mediocrity = VOLUME 30, 1971 579 + ÷ 4. Barbara Dent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 580 It is in the subsequent living of the vow that its impli-cations are gradually made clear, so that one either as-sents more and mote deeply to them, relying more and more fully npon grace, or withdraws,' aghast, and com-promises, giving in before thb mediocrity challenge. Consecrated celibacy is a way of life, and a vocation, freely chosen as a positive good because intuited as one's personal rotate to God ordained by Him. The service of God and the service of humanity are inseparable. There- [ore, to travel courageously along this route for love of God is also to love one's neighbor. To be consecrated as a celibate is to become in a publicly recognized way Christ's man, Christ's woman, pledged to participate in the Savior's redemptive work, answering the call to total love for the sake of others in an all-embracive sense. In other words, the consecrated celibate is directly dedicated to the building tip of Christ's kingdom without deviation or withdrawal, to the bringing forth of spiritual children for God in eternity, instead of children of the ttesh for this world. Any route to God is straight and narrow with Calvary an inseparable part of it. The married state is no easier than the celibate state i[ it is entered into as one's pe-culiar and God-indicated route to Him. Of course this is often not the case, whereas the celibate's choice is usually a deliberate and conscious dedication to Christ first and foremost. The total love that consecrated celibacy demands is in-carnated in Christ Himself, and only in Christ. It can ex-press itself through human lives when infused into them as an extension of the divine life itself, those living wa-ters, that indwelling of the Trinity, that our Lord prom-ised to those who love Him. It means a passionate, un-compromising involvement of the whole self with the whole self of the personal, living, triumphant yet glori-ously wounded risen Lord. This entails becoming "a fragrant offering and a sacri-fice to God" (Eph 5:2) because incorporated into the sacrificial love-offering of the Son, made for the sake of humanity, to the greater glory of the Father. Human nature, disintegrated and flawed as it is, nat-urally fears such complete involvement with both God and man. We want to preserve intact the ego with all its intra-venous systems for feeding self-satisfaction and self-pres-ervation. We cannot help fearing and repelling such an invasion of the Other, although without it the enchained ego cannot be released into the freedom of the sons of God. We tare prisoners who have become dependent upon the enclosure of our cell walls for our sense of security. Just :is the trumpet blast shattered the walls of Jericho, so would the blowing of the Holy Spirit upon our pitiful ramparts raze them finally--if we let it: "For he bursts the gates of bronze and shatters the iron bars" (Ps 106:16). We recoil from even the thought of encouraging such invasion. The ego is certain it would mean disaster. Its instinct for preservation rebels against the dissolution of its barriers. Such fears are involuntary. Tbey are part of the com-plex defense mechanism against God that is I~orn with us in onr flawed human nature. We cannot help our myopic way of looking at things, our instinctive reaching out for half-truths, our intense anxiety at being taken over by God, our dread of Him as an alien, destructive force instead of our loving, eternal Father. What is required of ns is the calm recognition of all such systems of evasion, and the willed construction in the power of divine grace of contrary systems of encour-agement. We are called upon by God to recognize the insidious nature of the temptation to mediocrity, of the urge to compromise. We have to counter it by persistent prayer for His help, by the will to give and receive all, and by actions which express that will: I believe nothing can happen that will outweigh the su-preme adwlntage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For him I have accepted the loss of everything, and I look on everything as so much rubbish if only I can have Christ and be given a place in him . All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death (Phil 3:8,10). This must be what we consciously will in opposition to our involuntary desires and schemings to retain our walls, to refuse "the loss of everything." The temptation to mediocrity is essentially the tempta-tion to choose comfort. It is a special danger to the celi-bate whose vows and way of life can insulate him lrom involvement with others, from all those battering, in-vigorating, stress-provoking, exacerbating and fecundat-ing fluctnations of give and take that are inseparable from married and family life. It is necessary to remember always that consecrated celibacy has been chosen not in order to evade or be spared these, but to facilitate an even wider, deeper, and more selfless involvement with the human family itself. It should lead not to a peaceful withdrawal and the COln-forts of a serene bacbelorbood or spinsterdom, but to an nnending and painfnl generation and parturition of children for the kingdom of heaven: My children, I must go through the pain of giving birth to you all over again, until Christ is formed inyou (Gal 4:19). The mystery is Christ among you, your hope of glory . It is ÷ Mediocrity VOLUME 30, !971 581 4" + + Barbara Dent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 582 for this I struggle wearily on, helped only by his power driving me irresistibly (Col 1:27,29). Like a mother feeding and looking after her own children, we felt so devoted and protective towards you, and had come to love you so much, that we were eager to hand over to you not only the Good News but our whole lives as well (1 Thes 2:8). The danger of celibacy is not sexual pressure building up to possible transgression level, but tile evasion of tension, stress, and battles in favor of ~omfort and safety. This can lead to petrification, through repression or cir-cumvention, of a person's whole affective powers. The personality becomes sterile, dehydrated, protected by a complex system of evasions and compromise, the real person who was meant to be reborn into Christ through total dedication and "undivided attention to the Lord" (! Cor 7:35) gone to earth from sheer lack of encourage-ment. Alternatively, the affective powers, instead of being stifled, may be diverted. Theu the celibate's life and pas-sion become centred on snbstitutes--liturgical niceties,. research, art, administration, power, antiqnes, aesthetics, sport, animals, relatives, or one other particular person. They may even become fixated on some such mundane and irreligious activity (if lie is a secular priest, for ex-ample, and free to follow it) as golf, racing, or dog-breed-ing. Or his passion may become raising monuments ostensibly to the glory of C, od but perhaps more to per-petnate his own memory (in lieu of sons and daughters of the flesh) if all hidden motives were made plain. The temptations to compromise over the demands of total love are ~nany and dangerous. The celibate is perhaps more open to them than the person whose vocation is marriage. In marriage, if it is a dedicated Christian one, total love is also demanded, but its channel is tile mar-riage partner, there in the flesh, obvious, defined and inescapable. For the celibate tile channel, being the hu-man family loved and served in, for, and by means of Christ, is much more easily mistaken, or silted up, or wrongly labeled, or simply ignored just because it is so ubi(jtfitous. The htunan family means not some nebulous abstract, but real persons whose abrasive presence anti perpetual demands cannot, and are not meant to be, evaded. In all cases it is people, individuals, persons, actnal living, pal-pitating entities who cannot be avoided, and who must be made contact with in some fructifying way if Christ is to be served and honored, if celibate love is to be fnl-filled. The whole of humanity is one organism, and this orga-nism is the Body of Christ in the process of being incar-nated. Through it we are meant to confer the sacrament of love upon one another. Through it we can, on the con-trary, by hate and sin shut off ourselves and others from participating in this sacrament of love. The consecrated celibate has cbosen by his vow to be a means of conferring the sacrament of love upon others. His role is to be a visible, actual sign that God's tender care and solicitous yearning for us is present among us, to be a reservoir of the living waters laid up in human hearts. The temptation to mediocrity suggests that this reser-voir be turned into a stagnant lake of sel~-enclosure by blocking off the Ebannels by which God's love pours into it and the outlets that are meant to pour it out again upon others. In time the whole place becomes "a fen of stagnant waters," with the affective powers choked: "They have abandoned me, the fountain of living waters, only to dig cisterns for themselves, leaky cisterns, that hokl no water" (Jer 2:13). To dig a cistern for oneself means to construct it with the intention of not sharing it with others. One form the temptation takes is that of doubts about the value of celibacy itself together with all kinds of rationalizations concerning the importance of human sexual relationships and of the need to experience them in order to be a whole person, in order even to be able to tmderstand others. Excuses are readily found for reading the kinds of books, watching the kinds of films, and encouraging the kinds of conversations that titillate and provide disguised --and not so disguised--sexual enjoyments.Iustifiable and necessary reverence for sex and acknowledgement 'of its power and wide ramifications give way to obsessive interest in its minutiae and manner of functioning. When snch a mental invasion has been encot, raged, the borderline between legitimate attainment of information and committing adnltery in one's heart has become blurred. The whole ideal of consecrated celibacy is in danger of becoming meaningless, and it will probably not be long before convincing excnses are found to abandon it. Also evident where mediocrity threatens is the "one for you, and one for me" trading mentality. The celibate considers that in .return for his gift of himself to God, God owes him certain satisfactions, comforts, consolations, snccesses, recognitions, rewards. If he does not get what he believes is his due he becomes sour, bitter, self-pitying, cynical, savagely critical (perhaps of the Chnrch as "a juridical institution"). He is a disappointed man who feels he has not been wdued and recognized at his true worth, and someone or something must be made to suffer for it. ÷ 4- ÷ /tlediocrity VOLUME 30, 1971 Barbara Dent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 584 He has forgotten that the initial total gift of self to God was a form of interchange by which he accepted in return, and unquestioningly, whatever God chose to give him. Total love means embracing what God gives, and lets happen as the token of His loving kindness and the means of both one's salvation and sanctification, and also one's redemptive work for others. There is no barter involved. God gives. We accept, welcome, absorb, in faith and loving trust. There can be heroism here, unavoidable majesty of selflessness that can register on the ego as its contrary-- humiliation, defeat, squirming self-seeking. God's gifts and their effects are often paradoxical, and recognized as good qnly by means of faith. The "one for you, one for me" temptation is aimed at making one repndiate or avoid suffering and that death o~ self, that burying of the seed in the dark tomb of the earth fi'om which alone can emerge the risen self in the power of Christ's own Resurrection, and hence the crown-ing of total love. It is well to remember that "God's gift was not a spirit of timidity, but the Spirit of power, and love, and self-control" (2 Tim 1:7). There is also the temptation to succumb to mediocrity in personal relationships, avoiding intimacy and the pain of self-revelation and of receiving the confessions and love of others. In such relationships honesty is avoided in favor of polite half-trnths, soothing evasions, and surface agreements, these being rationalized as kindness or even Christian charity. Those blinding moments of truth in which we acknowledge how we use others (and they us), how we are run by our mechanisms of self-interest by which we feed secretly on those we profess to love most sincerely, are repndiated. Instead are chosen the sly pre-varications that assure us we are good mixers and not the type to give offense to anyone, and that this is the best way to he. Mediocrity can also be succumbed to in our relation-ship with ourselves. We have to love ourselves as God loves us, but this does not mean self-indulgently excusing ourselves. Rather it involves a pitiless self-honesty in which we pray fervently for the grace to face ourselves as we are. "My God, beware of Philip, else he will betray yon," prayed St. Philip Neri; and St. Paul saw with searing clarity his inability to do the good that he wanted to do unless he relied entirely upon the "grace of God." Consecrated celibacy with its vocation to total love means there can be no mediocrity regarding self-knowl-edge. If the truth that God offers, together with the grace to bear it, is accepted when and how He offers it, the ntmost interior humiliation is inevitable. Christ sets out to invade and permeate the life and the person dedicated to Him, and this means progressive insight into the un-christed self down to its demon-haunted depths. These depths have to be cleansed in what has aptly been called the "passive purgations," to' submit to which requires both a torrent of grace and heroic courage. It means the painful relinquishment of all masks, all comforting illusions, all evasions of reality, all dramas, all role-playing. Christ is truth. He is also light. Where He is, lies and darkness cannot also be; yet the unredeemed per-sonality is steeped in these. Total love becomes a reality only when heroic courage has refused the temptation to mediocrity in one's relation with onself, to choose instead Christ's invasion and powers of transformation at what-ever cost to oneself: If any man come to me without hating his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, he cannot be my disciple. Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple (Lk 14:26-7). The mediocrity temptation also presents itseff as one to self-cosseting. Having renounced all the comforts of home life and the consolations of marriage, one has a right to pamper oneself a little here and there by way of compensation. There are legitimate pleasures, necessary relaxations, prudent concessions to one's own acknowl-edged weaknesses. The danger is when these are indulged in as a result of self-pity or a desire to make up to oneself for rennnciations once made but now secretly hankeretl after or envied in others. In other words, when we seek substitnte satisfactions for what is denied to us because of celibacy and the vocation to total love, we are compro-mising with that vocation. An old name for mediocrity is acedia, or spiritnal sloth. There is an old-fashioned ring about these terms which inclines some to dismiss them and what they stand for as irrelevant to modern life and post-Vatican II spiritnality. Yet Vatican II documents themselves affirm the ancient call to total love, and hence to a war against all forms of mediocrity: The followers of Christ are called by God, not according to their accomplishments, but according to his own purpose and grace . All the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity (Church, 40). Hence the more ardently they unite themselves to Christ through a self-surrender involving their entire lives, the more vigorous becomes the life of the Church and the more abun-dantly her apostolate bears fruit (Religious Life, 1). Through virginity or celibacy observed for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, priests are consecrated to Christ in a new and distinguished way. They more easily hold fast to him with undivided heart. They more freely devote themselves in him 4- ÷ Mediocrity "VOLUME 30, 3.971 585 and through him to the service of God and man. They more readily minister to his kingdom and to the work of heavenly regeneration, and thus become more apt to exercise paternity in Christ, and do so to a greater extent (Priests, 16). Consecrated celibacy as a route to God can never be-come out of date because Christ will always remain the way, the truth, and the life, and intimate union with Him will always be a human being's highest form of fulfillment. The vocation to celibacy is a vocation to direct embrace-ment with the Bridegroom for the sake of the kingdom He became incarnate to establish. Those called to such a vocation are called also to total love of God and man and to an heroic battle against all temptations to mediocrity. God provides with the vocation all the graces necessary to endure and defeat these temptations, even when it ap-pears subjectively that failure is all that is achieved: The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God. We know that by turning everything to their good God co-operates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose. They are the ones he chose specially long ago and intended to become true images of his Son, so that his Son might be the eldest of many brothers. He called those intended for this; those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory (Rm 8:28-30). Barbara Dent REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 586 SISTER MARY SERAPHIM, P.C.P.A. Living Creatively under Stress Stress, tensions, pressnres all tug and pull at ns day in and day out. We get up in the morning with a sense of having spent the whole night rnnning and getting no-where. Urgency clogs our steps. Clocks tick inexorably at us, staring clown from walls, peering up from dash boards, glowing in the clark on our wrists. Appointments, assignments, schedtdes rtde our clay and haunt our nights. Even when we manage to salvage a 15it of "free time," we spend it worrying whether we could not put it to more profitable use. This phenomenon of twentieth century living has provoked much discussion lately. Techniques for relaxing, drugs to tranquillize our shattered nervous system, systems of yoga and zen to lift us out of the present into a timeless nirvana glnt the common market. Despite this proliferation, I offer a few more insights, this time based on the experience of cloistered contemplative liv-ing, which might be of interest and assistance to us Chris-tians of pressurized society. Yon may have noticed that I said "us" of pressurized society, for cloistered ntms are just as apt to be canght in the bind of too "nauchwork" and not "enonghtime" as the rest of the human race. How then can a person who senses that life is meant for something more than just "to get things clone" work creatively within this fleeting thing called time? How can we escape the pressure to "do" in order to simply "be"? As most of ns have already discovered tension results, not from all the demands made upon us frorrtowithout, bnt from the pressures we generate w~thm Stress-~s not an evil in itself. It actually constitutes ~-positive good when it serves as a prod to move us to higher achieve-merits. The meeting and surmounting of difficulties is the normal process which leads to maturity. Most of the great inventions of the world would not have been discovered 4- 4- + Sister M. Sera-phim, P.C.P.A., is a member of Sancta Clara Monastery; 4200 Market Ave-nue N.; Canton, Ohio 44714. VOLUME 30, 1971 587 Sister Seraphim REVIEW FOR RE/I~II00S 588 unless there had been a need to overcome some inconven-ience or obstacle. Many of the great masterpieces of art, literature, and music might never have been executed had not the artist been forced by some circumstance to plumb the depth of his genius. Stress and difficulties have their positive side then; and we should not expect them to be totally absent from our lives, any more than we should, as Christians, expect the cross hot to cast its shadow across our days. The handling of the problem of stress can be ap-proached from many angles, such as the psychological, the sociological, the anthropological. However, I propose to utilize a more theological dimension without overlook-ing the necessity of integrating theological ideals with practical psychological data. Supernature and Nature As we know, grace builds on nature. Supernature is simply a highly developed, highly gifted operation which has its seat in our natural faculties. To be in a position to insure steady spiritual growth our natural faculties must be in as good working order as possible. Much insistence is laid today on the necessity of healthful and happy climates in our religious houses. The human in the conse-crated man or woman must be given consideration so that the whole person progresses in holiness. We have shifted from an overemphasis on the divine and spiritual aspect of our religious life to an almost exaggerated con-cern with the mundane and bodily elements in our daily existence. The movement away from a purely spiritual concept of religion was a necessary one. If we divorce our soul from its intrinsic relationship with our body, we are in clanger of becoming split-level creatures. We would end in the neurotic condition of perpetually ascending and descend-ing the staircase between onr "higher" mode of living and our "lower" bodily state of existing. Afraid to remain on only the lower plane, yet unable to live perpetually on the higher one, we would literally live on the stairway--a most unnatural and unrestful state of affair!! Now that we have acknowledged that we must stand firmly rooted on the ground-level of our huma.nity if we are to stretch our branches high, we must beware of spending too mnch time mulching the soil and preparing the proper amount of water and sunshine. It is undenia-bly true that good environment contributes heavily to the full development of the human creature. Yet if most of us are honest we must recognize that the majority of persons realize their finest potential when facing adverse condi-tions. Furthermore we know that there exists nowhere on earth a paradise of idyllic situations. To look for it is useless or to try to develop it will prove fruitless. We could spend a lifetime looking for the perfect siti~ation in which we could become our true selves. Since such a solution to the problem of stress and tension is chimeri-cal, we might do well to accept our present situation with its good and its bad and try to work creatively within it. I submit that if we can order our inner (spiritual) life to fnnction harmoniously with our "outer" life, we will have reduced the stress and tension in our days to a minimum. We Are Not God First of all, let us humbly admit that we are not God. We do not know the complete plan for our own exist-ence, much less that of others or of society as a whole. Obliged to work with only partial knowledge, we are not responsible for the barmonions ordering of the universe. Although as Christians we do have a responsibility to each and everyone of our fellowmen, yet as finite crea-tures our personal response is not expected to reach all of tfiem directly. Much which goes on in the world cannot and even should not be solved by us personally. We are asked to do what lays before ns to the best of our ability, nothing more. Does this sound like mere selfishness? Or simply common sense? Actually it can become very uncommon sense when we view it in God's perspective. He has a plan and a work for each one of ns. He weighed it beforehand to meet our limited strength. He measured our capacities to make sure they were adequate for the task at band. He is very careful not to ask more of us than He knows we are able to do. Why should we strive against Him and demand that we take care of situations and solve problems which are beyond our scope? Humility can be a very restful virtue. It teaches us to recognize what we are and what we are not. With its clear vision, we see our talents an~.l we recognize our limita-tions. We learn to look up to God for strength and for wisdom. The bumble man goes peaceftilly about his as-signed job and usually is able to make a good success of it because be does not waste a lot of psychic energy attempt-ing to solve difficulties that are not his to solve. He leaves all that is beyond his immediate scope to God's provi-dence. This does not mean, however, that he does not care. On the contrary, the person who really lives in the faith of God's guiding hand in the nniverse will care more effectively than many others who become so caught up in their own plans for reforming the world that they see nothing but themselves. ÷ ÷ ÷ Living Creatively VOLUME 30, 19T1 589 + 4. 4. Sister Seraphim REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 590 Power and Splendor We cannot help becoming immersed to the point of being enmeshed by our everyday problems if we concen-trate all our attention only on them. If we permit our prayer life to consist merely of begging God's assistance for the project in hand, it will be difficult to rednce the problems involved to manageable size because we will have magnified them to the point where they and God are the only realities in the universe. Instead we might do well to devote a good portion of our personal prayer time to considering the magnificence of God as He is in Him-self. If even for a fleeting, breathtaking moment we sense the grandeur and greatness of this Being whom we ad-dress as our Father, a moral earthquake occurs in our portion of the Lord's vineyard. Problems and vexations sink nearly out of sight for the time being and the ground we stand on raises us startlingly near to the stars. Huge becomes tlm universe, immense the (limensions of God's activity and small, very small onr share in this cosmic pageant. Such an intuition does not destroy our appreciation of the little things of life but rather enables ns to see them in their proper perspective. In such a setting their true beauty and value shine forth. We are free to "be" among all these encompassing wonders for inwardly we have expanded to the degree where we now encompass them. We learn to support the "horizontal" with the "vertical." St. Benedict, it is said, once saw the whole universe in a single ray of light. "How conld a man see all creation in one glance?" asked St. Gregory in his Dialogues and he answered himself: "He who sees God sees all things in Him." Do you perceive how integrating such an attitude can be and how beneficial to us as human beings if we culti-vate it? Tensions and difficnlties we meet will not become too large for us to handle and even nse creatively. With our minds free and onr energies concentrated fully on the task at band, we will bring to our work fresh insights and profound wisdom. New sources of energy will be released as we meet new obstacles. Instead of mentally attempting it all ourselves, we will take it to the Lord whose strength we know is equal to the task. While laying the bnrden of worry at His feet, we will be enabled to stand light and free before Him. God will grow greater and greater in our estimation and our problems proportionately smaller. When we attack the difficult situation which cannot be avoided we will be able to experience the tug and pull of contrary tensions without being shattered or torn apart. We will move in the conscious awareness that a power greater than our owu is at work here. That power, that strength, is a Person. It is a Person whom we profoundly love and whose Presence is onr supreme joy: "The joy of the Lord is our strength." An-other way of expressing this phenomenon is to call it growth in contemplative awareness. ~te utilize the prob-lems of the "lower story" to call down the assets of the "tipper story" of onr nature. XYe grow in stature so as to live spiritnally in the midst of materialities. All of this requires time and . tension. Until tension enters onr lives, we feel no need to become more than what we are. Until we find ourselves under the pressure of more than we can do, we will not experience the necessity of throw-ing ourselves on our knees before our sovereign Lord and looking humbly to His greatness. When His aid is vonchsafed, we shonld remain humble enough to use it in the manner He intended. A marvelons freedom marks the man who knows, in the roots of his being, that he is only the custodian and dispenser of the creative energy of ahnighty God. This man appears to accomplish tremen-dous things with serene ease. We do not know for certain but can gness that in the depths of his spirit, this man kneels in constant and hnmble supplication before His Lord. Before the shrine of this overmastering Presence, lie knows himself as nothing. In the light of this over-whelming Love, he knows himself heloved. In the strength of such love, nothing is impossible. Hope is in-vincible. Hope The virtue of hope here manifests itself as the trnst to leave the past and the future in God's hands. If we strive to live only here and now, we can eliminate much of the artificial stress which stretches our days beyond the limits of their twenty-four bonrs. How often have we not wor-ried ourselves into a stew abont possibilities which never materialized? Again, how frequently have we not fretted ourselves thin over past events which nothing can change now? The hope which is strong enough to le~ve the p~st to God's mercy, the future to His providence, and the present to His wisdomis a marvelous help to relaxed and fruitfnl living. We do not develop such hope overnight. Indeed we need many "nights," often painfully dark, be-fore our hope is refined to snch perfection. If we can view the dit:ficulties created in ourselves by tensions as so many stepping stones to hope, we have begun to work creatively with one of the most fi'ustrating aspects of our lives. We would like to be persons who do ~lot feel tension, who do not experience nerves, to whom nothing is a serious threat. But the more we strive to deny the deadening effects of anxiety and nervonsness in ourselves, the worse it becomes. We are humiliated by the 4- 4- 4- Living Creatively VOLUME 30, 1971 + + + Sister Seraphim REVIEW FOR RELiGiOUS 592 outward manifestations of our inner inadeqnacies. In-stead of humbly recognizing our human needs, we try even harder to suppress them. One (lay, however, we are forced to admit that we are practically "nnglned" and barely holding our sbattet~fd self togetber with rapidly weakening will power. Hopefully, such awareness occurs long before serious neurotic disturbances take over. We are still capable of being the master of our ship if we look to another to be the Captain. Quietly accepting the fact that tensions will wreck havoc with onr digestive or nervous or muscular system, we are in a position to work with them creatively. Reality recognized hecomes a pliable instrument in the hands of a thinking man. Reality unrecognized becomes a demon in the closet of the unconscions man. We need help to come to such recognition--God's help. He is the One who made us with these peculiar tendencies and weak-nesses. He Mone knows how ~'e are to work with them to accomplish His ends. Our task is not to augment ~the problem with useless imaginings. Tomorrow will bring its own problems., and its own solutions. Perhaps this interweaving of common sense and snper-natnral motives into a harmonious whole does not seem an extremely new or exciting solntion to. the problem of living creatively under stress. Yet it has proved a very workable one in the environment of the cloister. Few persons live in a situation so fraught with artificial ten-sions aud i,~grown perspectives as the cloistered nun. These dangers are what may be termed the "occupational hazards" of cloistered living. They are not reasons for dissolving cloisters, however! Almost any occupation, if it is worthwhile, carries with it certain hazards. The diffi-culties of living a celibate and consecrated life in the active religious orders are not valid reasons for doing away with religious life in the Church. Rather these very hazards can prove to be a most provocative challenge to yonng idealists. If we keep our vision broad and our feet steadfastly on ascending paths, the dangers will threaten bnt not overwhehn ns. Beauty One of the most closely allied natnral and snpernat-ural activities is the contemplation of beatlty. Beauty excites the noblest aspirations of human nature. On the natural plane, familiarity with beauty refines and purifies our sensitivities. We find in its contemplation a peculiar rest and contentment. Yet it rarely satiates. We forever bnnger for more. Onr thirst is ultimately for Beauty itself --the splendor of the undimnaed attractiveness of tbe Trinne God. God has placed in our souls a capacity for infinite loveliness. The passing beanties of this earth wound our sensibilities, with their constant fading and withering, instinctively we know that beauty is meant to last forever. To grow into a "see-er" of beauty is to de-velop a capacity for mystical contemplation. The hair-breadth line which separates them is easily and naturally crossed. If all human beings are made to respond to beauty, women are especially endowed with this reflective faculty. As Father Bernard H~ring remarks, "I think that women have a distinctive sense [or beauty in their spirituality. The great beauty of all created things consists in their being the language of a personal God" (Acting on the Word). Since women naturally "personalize" all the "things" they encounter, they spontaneonsly apprehend beauty as the speaking of the Beloved. The words may be mysterious but the Voice is well known. Development of our capacity for the appreciation of beauty does not reqnire special training. It only asks for time. Somehow we must learn to "take time for the good things of life." Instead of pressuring ourselves with a perpetual motion precept we should condition ourselves to moments of tranqnil stillness. We should strive to see time as primarily space in which to "be." Be what? Be ourselves. We discover who we are by becoming aware of our actions and reactions to persons, things, and events. If we foster the reaction of silent admiration before any source of loveliness, our contemplative self grows stronger. A new phenomenon unfolds within us. For a tiny moment there is silence--a quiet space in our spirit where we are nndistractedly absorbed in the immediacy of beauty. X,\re savor the loveliness of the moment and discover we are side by side, if not face to face, with eternal Beauty. If this quiet space within onr spirit is permitted to expand, it soon penetrates our exterior activity. Others become aware of a mysterious dimension in our personal-ity which attracts them. We exhibit a marked serenity and freedom. Whenever we find ourselves in situations of tension, we can more easily cope with them becanse of an inner strength fostered by habitually striving to integrate the transcendent with the mundane. This is not an unreal existence divorced from the concrete circumstances of our life. Rather it could very accurately be termed the "im-manent" level for we learn to penetrate to the deepest (and most beautiful) realities of all the surface phenom-ena we meet. Contemplative living is the result of striv-ing for h;fl)itual attentiveness to natural beauties. In the cloistered contemplative life, beauty plays an extremely important role. Much rethinking should be done in this area. Education to the appreciation of good art is of only minor ir.,portance. The more important 4- 4- 4- Living Creatively VOLUME 30, 1971 593 thrust should be towards the recognition of deeper and more lasting loveliness hidden in every atom of creation. The contemplative is a person who withdraws from the world only to view it more comprehensively. Such a one distances himself from worldly turmoil in order to pene-trate its inner significance. His should be a thoroughly optimistic, thoroughly Christian outlook. The fleetingness of beauty teaches him forcefully that man is only a pilgrim on earth. The infinite longing of his spirit for beauty proves to him the necessity of an everlasting Loveliness. Made for eternal splendors, finite man is forever restless in time. He longs for the repose of unchanging possession. Freed from the impossible task of finding complete fulfillment in the present situation, he experiences no false tensions. Set loose from the obsession that he must order the universe aright, he does not writhe in the stress of too little time and too much work. He pauses momentarily before the passing beauties of time and permits them to enkindle his spirit with the desire of everlasting splendors. Then freely, gaily he walks on, bearing the burdens of mankind but lightly for the joy of the promise set before him. 4- 4- 4- Sister Seraphim REVIEW FOR RELI{~IOUS 59,t CHRISTOPHER KIESLING, O.P. Celibacy, Friendship, and Prayer In recent decades, and especially since Vatican Council II, the potentialities of marriage for holiness and prayer have gained the attention of many Christians. Young peo-ple desirous of following Christ closely are less inclined to enter religious life or the priesthood. They are apt to choose a more adventurous following of Christ to holi-ness through the largely uncharted land of marriage. Many already living the celibate life wonder whether they have chosen the "better" way to holiness after all. In marriage they could have the natural fulfillment of their God-given sexuality and at the same time zealonsly follow Christ. Marriage, no doubt, complicates the following of Christ, but the history of the priesthood and religious life in the centuries of the Cht~rch's existence testifies that celibacy by. no means guarantees a Christlike life. Mar-riage, moreover, in daily care for spouse and children, provides many opportunities for growth in charity. As far as prayer is concerned, no intrinsic incompatibility exists between marriage and prayer; in fact, marriage offers many spurs to growth in prayer. The celibate life, on the other hand, certainly does not automatically produce a deep life of prayer. What, then, is the value of the celibate life for prayer? What potentialities for growth in prayer are found in celibacy? The question is not whether celibate life is better for prayer than married life, or the single state, or widow-hood. No attempt is being made here to discover possibil-ities for prayer in the celibate life superior to the possibil-ities in any other state of life. Each state of life has its own opportunities for growth in prayer, and any at-tempts to compare the opportunities of celibacy with those of any other state will always be limited and ulti-mately of little practical value. Comparisons fail because + ÷ Christopher Kies-ling, O.P., is a fac-ulty member of Aquinas Institute School of Theology in Dubuque, Iowa 52001. VOLUME 30, 1971 595 C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ,596 they imply some standard of judgment, for example, free-dom from family demands and concerns. In this perspec-tive, celibacy has an adwmtage over marriage in regard to prayer, for the celibate has more time free from family claims and few, if any, family responsibilities to occupy his thonghts. But another standard of jndgment may be awareness of the needs of others which prompts one to pray. By this norm, a husband or wife, a father or mother, has an advantage over the celibate, for the bonds of marriage and parenthood make oue especially sensitive to the needs of at least a few persons for whom one is inspired to pray. Comparisons fail also because generali-zations abont life are open to many concrete exceptions. In coutrast to the generalizations made above, some older married people have more time and freedom for prayer than celibates who are teaching, and some celibates are more sensitive to the needs of others tban some married people. So the concern here is not to prove that the celibate is in a better position to grow in prayer than the person who is in some other state of life. It is not even of con-cern whether the possibilities for prayer in the celibate life are unique to it. The aim is simply to explore the opportunities for prayer given in the celibate life, so that celibates may exploit them fully. The discernment and exploitation of the potentialities for prayer in other states of life is preferably done by those living in them. The question is not co~lceived, moreover, as a search for a reason why someone should.choose the celibate life or remain faithful to it. The inquiry is regarded, rather, as a help to those inclined or commited to celibacy, so that they may take advautage of the gift which God has given tbena or now offers them. The celibate life is not the product of reasoning. Celi-bates are a fact in the history of the Church up to this moment. These men and women have entered upon, and continue in, this way of life for many reasons of a per-sonal nature, rather than from any theoreti'cal ideas abont the valne of celibacy. Temperament, character for-mation, family life, environment, edu.cation, interests and talents, particular interpersonal relationships, and uniqne interior experiences explain their celibate lives. When initially inclined to this state of life, or after adopting it, they undoubtedly welcome theoretical ideas about its value to legitimize or justify their choice. But the motives for their choice are much more complex and deeply buried in individnal history than any rational justifications. The believing Christian, of conrse, sees a religious meaning in all these factors: they fall under the loving care of a provident God and constitute a divine vocation to the celibate life. That life is ultimately a charism, a gift, from God. Without His call realized in personal history, there is no authentically religious celibate life. The inspiration of the celibate life is the Holy Spirit calling one through one's personal history, not some ra-tional demonstration of the superiority of the celibate state over other states of life. Celibacy is a mysterious gift. The aim here, therefore, is to explore the potentialities for prayer in a state of life ,~hich many find God has already given to them, or which many feel God wishes to give to them. For the success of that God-given life, at whatever stage it is, the exploitation of its potentialities is imperative, and particularly its possibilities for growth in prayer. Having put one's hand to the plow (or having reached toward it), and perhaps even having pushed it partly across the field of life, one does not wish to be looking back to weigh the advantages of this state of life against those of another state; one wishes, rather, to get busy actualizing the potentialities for prayer in the life which God has already given or begnn. The potentialities of celibacy for growth in prayer may be seen as residing radically in celibacy's exclusion from one's life of an intimate companion such as one has in a marriage partner. The celibate may indeed have very close friends, bnt the closeness of friends is not the same as the intimacy of marriage. He will not have some one person with whom be shares, in mutual loyalty, a joint responsibility and care for the development of life, fam-ily, and the world in fulfillment of God's vocation to mankind. He will not have another person closely united to him in daily life to alleviate the loneliness which haunts human beings. He will not have someone at hand whose fidelity be can count on, with whom he can frankly talk over many of Iris worries, aspirations, and satisfac-tions, and in whose presence he can be himself, setting aside the masks he must wear and the roles he must play in business and society. Nor will he have some one person for whom he can create and build and provide, whom he can cherish and protect, knowing that his care and con-cern are welcomed and appreciated. And of course he will have no one with whom he can express all his powers of love, including the physical,t This description of what a wife provides for her hns-band may sound romantic rather than realistic, or indica-tive of neurotic needs in the husband. We do not wish to be romantic about what marriage provides. Marriage is fundamentally an arrangement for living in which man a These reflections are cast in terms of the male celibate because that is the experience which the author knows from the inside, so to speak. What is said, however, will be applicable, with appropriate "adjustments, to the celibate woman. + + + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 597 + + + C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 598 and woman can have the full natural development of their sexed humanity.2 Marriage, more6ver, is more likely to be successful and happy if the partners are not merely satisfying subjective needs by means of one another but, being somewhat matnre, secnre, and capable of standing on their own feet, are free to care for one another's welfare? What we wish to note by this description of what a wife provides for her husband is tbat his life is enriched by intimate companionship with another per-son. To say that in marriage one's life is enriched by an-other person does not mean that a marriage partner is a crutch for personal weaknesses or a pleasant bnt unim-portant trimming added to one's life. What the marriage partner provides is essential for personal matnrity. A common theme of contemporary psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy is that to become mature persons we mtlSt interact with other persons, and mnst even have some intimate relationships with others. 0nly through interaction with other persons, and through some inti-mate interactions, do we come to awareness of our own unique selves with our pecldilu" qnalities, good, bad, and indifferent. Only through such interaction do we learn to master our constructive and aggressive drives and direct them to personally and socially beneficial goals. Through interpersonal relationships we acquire that freedom of self-possession which is characteristic of man. So a mar-riage partner provides, not a supplement for personal inadequacies or for pleasanmess of life, but a comple-ment necessary for the achievement of personal maturity. Briefly, to be mature persons we need other persons in our lives and even some intinaacy with others. For most men and women this need is supplied largely, though not necessarily exclnsively, by naarriage. The celibate, how-ever, excludes marriage from his life and thereby ex-clndes the common means of developing personal matu-rity. Herein lies both the peril and the opportunity of the celibate life. If the celibate's potentialities for personal matm'ity are unfnlfilled, lie will become a dull non-en-tity, if not a disgruntled, nenrotic, nnltappy person. If these potentialities are not sublimated, he will be in-clined to abandon the celibate life for marriage. The celibate must have other persons in his life, even inti-mately, if lie is to become a mature person and give himself its a full human being to God. Where will lie find these other persons? He will find them in friendships, first of all with God 2Sce Aron Krich with Sam Blum, "Marriage and the Mystique of Romancc," Redbook, November 1970, p. 123. sScc Erich Fromm, The Art o[ Loving (New York: Bantam, 1963), p. 17. the Father, His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and then also with other human beings. Intimate friendship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will be realized in prayer, and friendships with people will ma-ture in prayer. Thus celibacy, by excluding an intimate relationship with another person such as one has in mar-riage, yet leaving the need for personal relationships and even some intimacy, creates two great potentialities for prayer: the potentiality for prayer in the need to develop intimate friendship with the three divine Persons of the Trinity, and the potentiality for prayer in the need to develop friendships with people. Celibacy creates in one's life a vact~um which craves to be filled. For a mature personality, for happiness, and for a truly successful celi- I)ate life, the wise celibate fills this vacuum with intimate personal relations to the F:tther, Son, and Spirit and with hun~an friendships. Filling the vacut~m in these ways in-volves prayer. We will consider the possibility for growth in prayer first in relating personally to God and then in establish-ing friendships with people. A married man who, in the course of the day, has experienced failure, disappointment, or hnrt can un-ashamedly recount his tale of woe to his wife that evening. She can console him and make love with him and so ease his pain and restore his self-confidence, so that he can go on with life. The celibate has no person who can do all th;~t for him in the way a wife can. He is usually forced, therefore, if he wishes consolation and restoration, to seek them in prayer to God. The same holds true for the expression of joy. The married na~n can recount his suc-cesses and tritmiphs to his wife who will consider them as her own, share his happiness, and reward him, so to speak, by m:~king love with him. The celibate will have to turn to God in prayer for comparable satisfaction in the expression of joy. The married man does not have to make all serious decisions and bear their consequences alone. Fie makes many of them with his wife and can count on her loyal support in the conseqnences that fol-low. The celib;~te has no one who can so closely cooperate with him in making decisions and in living with their consequences. He will have to find help and support in God in prayer. All this tells us something about wh:lt prayer should be for the celibate. It should be an encounter with a per-sonal God, with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as per-sons. The celibate must cnltivate a sense of the person-hood of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He cannot afford to allow God to remain some distant, impersonal force behind the universe and his life. The three divine Persons mnst become genuine persons for him to relate 4- 4- + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 ,'599 + + + C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 600 to, even as a man's wife is a person for him to relate to. Of course, the divine Persons are not persons in exactly the same sense as a human person. But°divine person-hood includes what is most essential to personhood as we know it in human beings. It includes a knowing,, loving, caring subject who can sympathize and can act to help oue. Important in the life of the celibate, then, is the cnltiva-tion of a sense of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as genuine persons in his life, as truly as a man's wife is a person in his life. This cultiw~tion will be accomplished " through various forms of prayer. It will be done by meditative reading of the Scriptures through which the celibate will discover and appreciate more and more how truly the Father, His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, and Their Spirit are knowing, loving, sym-pathetic, caring, belpfnl persons relating themselves to men in their sorrows and joys. Tbrongb familiarity with the Scriptures, the celibate will disceru that he, iudividu-ally, with his good and bad qualities, is accepted uncondi-tioually by the Father, even as the prodigal son was by Iris f;ither, th:~t he is loved by Christ, even as the woman taken in adultery was, and that he is supported by the Holy Spirit who deigns to dwell in him as his constant companion. Also important for the. celibate is the practice of the presence of God, that is, the effort to be aware of, and respond to, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as personally present to him. Personal presence is not merely physical proximity. In regard to God~ it means not only that He is near the celib:lte to snstain his being and activity. It means also that be is in God's thoughts and affection. The practice of the presence of God, the heart of mental prayer, is awareness of God's personal presence and re-sponse to it by holding God in one's own thoughts and affection. Bnt we should be more precise and speak of the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Chris-tian God is threefold in person. What must he cnltivated is awareness of, and response to, these three Persons pres-ent in one's life. Through various forms of prayer, the celibate mnst become as mt, tually personally present to the three divine Persons as a man is mntnally personally present to his wife, thougl~, of course, the former presence will always be in the obscurity of faith. Because the presence of the Trinity is realized only in faith, it is difficult to have a sense of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as genuine persons in one's life. Besides, the persons of the Trinity are not like hmnan persons: unlike a man's wife, they are not bodily beings, visihle, andible, tangible. They do not talk back to the celibate immedi-ately, as does a man's wife, bnt answer him only through his search into revelation, the signs of the times, and his own peculiar situation. Bnt through the humanity of Jesus, the personal being of God is clearly revealed; with-out question God understands and sympathizes with us in our miseries anti joys, anti He accepts us despite our limitations anti failings. Through communion with the person Jesus Christ, the celibate learns also to recognize the Father anti the Spirit as genuine persons in his life. Christ's presence in the Eucharist is a further help to the celibate in relating to God personally. The Son of God incarnate lays hold of bread and wine and trans-forms them so that they are no longer bread and wine, except in appearance, but Himself for men. Thereby He is personally present to the celibate not only spiritually, by thought and affection, but also concretely, spatially, and temporally (though through'the mediation of the appearances of the consecrated elements), as a man's wife is present to him. It remains only for the celibate to respond to this most intense anti full personal presence of God in Christ by sacramental communion or by a "visit" to Christ in the Eucharist. Foolish is the celibate who never turns to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament for conso-lation in sorrow or for the sharing of joy. On the part of God, Christ in the Eucharist is the most concrete realiza-tion of the presence of God in the celibate's life. Com-munion with Christ in the Sacrament is analogous to the commnnion which a husband has with his wife as they embrace. It may be objected that the Christian married man also lntlst develop a sense of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as krxowing, loving, and caring persons in his life if he is to progress in holiness and prayer. There are times when lie will not have his wife at hand to snpport him anti share with him; anti even when she is at hand, there are needs and experiences which he cannot fully share with her, as mnch as lie may try and she may be willing. On these occasions lie must turn to Father, Son, anti Holy Spirit in prayer. It is even more obvious that the single man and the widower also are invited to relate to the Father, Son, anti Holy Spirit as genuine persons in their lives. In answer it may be said that it makes no difference to the celibate if others are called to an intimate friendship in prayer with the three divine Persons. hnportant for the celibate is the fact that, in Go'd's gift to him of celi-bacy, there is a great potentiality for prayer opened tip to him. Whether or not others have a similar potentiality for prayer is not nearly :is important as his making the most of the potentiality which has been given to him. Yet the celibate's situation is different from most other men's. The married man does have a wife in whom lie + + + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 601 + ÷ + C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 602 can often and at least partially fulfill his need for inti-mate personal relationship. The single man can marry. The widower, if his faith is vigorous and vivid, can enjoy the spiritual presence of his wife, whose life has not ended with death but changed; he can also remarry. The celibate, in virtue of his vow, is without any of these possibIe means of satisfying his need for intimate per-sonal relationship. In times of need, he cannot turn to any of these possibilities but is compelled, as it were, to turn immediately to God. The celibate should rejoice that a potentiality for prayer which is a normal part of his life as a result of God's gift of celibacy is also bestowed on others by the circumstances of their lives. He should develop a keen sense of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as persons in his life to whom he intimately relates, so that he can help his fellow men do the same thing for the times in their lives when they need it. This is one way in which he serves as an example of Christian life and as a help to his fellow Christians in other states of life. The call of the celibate to turn in prayer to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as genuine persons in his life for personal fulfillment tells us something about the content of prayer. One is inclined to think of prayer as saying "nice" things to God or thinking edifying thoughts in His presence. To pray is to recall God's wonderful works for men in the history of salvation. It is to praise God for His power, wisdom, and providence and to thank Him for .Jesus Christ and the gift of the Spirit. It is to express faith, hope, and charity in His regard. It is to have beau-tiful tl~oughts inspired by passages in Scripture or in spiritual books of meditation. It is to pray for the salva-tion of souls, for the growth of the Church, for the Pope and bishops, for health and holiness. As the content of prayer, all this is excellent. But if this is all that one ever regards as appropriate content for prayer, it may be doubted that one very often prays with the deep conviction and feeling with which the Psalmist or Jeremiah or Jesus prayed. If we turn again to the married man, we can get some idea of further and more realistic content for the prayer of the celibate. Marriage provides for the support and fulfillment of the married man because be has another person to whom be can unburden his soul. He does not talk to his wife only about beautiful and inspiring things. He does not always praise and thank her. The concerns which be ex-presses to bet are not limited to the general needs of mankind or society. He sometimes speaks to her about his doubts, his anger, his pity, his misery. He sometimes com-plains about her household management. Out of sincere admiration and gratitude, he sometimes congratulates her for a delicious meal or for a well-planned dinner party. To her he expresses deep emotions of fear, grief, hostility, hope, and joy, without fear that he will be rejected or tl~ougbt silly. He expresses to her his carnal desire for her. With his wife he is himself, lets himself go, and discovers what is in himself. As the married man expresses himself to his wife, the celibate expresses himself to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In prayer the celibate talks to God about his doubts and convictions, his misery and his happiness. To God be rehearses his dislikes and hatreds, knowing that God will not condemn him but will heal his hostilities or at least help him live with them in a way which will not harm him or others. He vents his disappointments, his hurts, his aspirations, his feelings of triumph, without feeling that God will think him damnable or vain but, on the contrary, will go on loving him the more for opening his beart to Him. He tells God bow annoyed he is by his snperior or how vexed he is that his plans for the summer have been thwarted. He tells God about the happy visit he had that clay with a clear friend or about the program which he directed with remarkable success. He thanks God for the many blessings He has bestowed and complains to Him about His designs for him now. In a word, the celibate's prayer is not only saying things to God which one is expected to say to Him, as one is expected to say certain things to a bishop, or a superior, or the president of the United States. A married man does not find support and fulfillment in married life by telling his wife only those things which are expected in some romantic notion of marriage, but by telling her what is really in his mind and heart. So the celibate prays authentically to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by ex-pressing to Them what is trnly in his mind and heart, whether it is beautiful or ugly. In this way he discovers himself through prayer to the three divine Persons. It should be noted that it is not mere self-expression that leads to self-discovery, but self-expression to which there is a response from another self. A husband's expres-sion of himself evokes a response from his wife; she ex-presses herself in silence or in words, favorably or unfa-vorably, admitting and accepting or challenging and re-fusing what her husband has presented. A husband's wife "talks back" in various ways. Dialogue between two per-sons arises. As a result of the exchange, the "truth" emerges into the light: what sort of person each is, what motivates each, strong and weak points of character. This truth about the self may not be recognized in the conrse of the exchange but only afterwards as one reflects on what happened in it. Nor does the whole truth emerge from one dialogue. It is only tbrongh repeated dialogue ÷ ÷ ÷ Celibacy VOLUME 30~ 3.971 603 + ÷ ÷ C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 604 over the course of time tbat a husband understands him-serf better, acquires some self-possession, and thus ma-tures. The analogous relation between husband and wife on the one hand and, on the other, the celibate and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appears to break down at this point. The Persons of the Trinity do not talk back. But they do! The three divine Persons talk back in reve-lation, in the external circnmstances of the celibate's life, and in his internal condition. In revelation, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit express the sort of persons they are, their motives, their designs. As a husband has to adjust himself to his wife as he discovers her to be through their dialogue together, the celibate must adjust himself to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Important for the celibate, then, is his continual searching in revelation, especially as found in the Scriptures, for God's response to what is in his mind and in his heart. In the external circum-stances of his life (where and with whom he lives, the duties he has, the claims made on him by others) and in his internal condition (his strengths and weaknesses of character, his interests and talents, his fears and hopes), God also talks back to the celibate. The celibate must adjust himself to these circumstances and conditions which divine providence has imposed or permitted. By examining his thoughts, feelings, desires, and activities in the light of revelation and the circumstances and condi-tions of his life in prayer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the celibate, over a period of time, discovers more and more of the truth about himself. This truth makes him free, makes him a mature human person. I[ prayer is the expression to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of all the celibate's thoughts and feelings, the "not-nice" ones as well as the "nice" ones, then prayer will not be limited to neat little times of prayer punctuating the (lay. The celibate can be personally present to the three divine Persons while he is walking down the street, tak-ing a shower, or dropping off to sleep at night. Moreo-ver, it is during just such times when he is alone and involved in activities which do not engage his mind very mnch, that he finds himself rehearsing in his mind and imagination his resentments, disappointments, failures, pleasures, and achievements. Dnring these times he has an opportunity for prayer. All that is required is the recognition that he is in the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the wish that They hear his recital of woe or happiness. The celibate will welcome times set aside for prayer, for then he will have the opportunity to express more fully his thoughts and feelings to the three divine Per-sons. He will have an opportunity to ask Them to forgive him for the wrong he has discovered in himself and to help him persevere in the good which he has found. He will welcome more formal and objective liturgical prayer, or spontaneous prayer in a group, for in some words of the liturgy or some words of a fellow Christian, there is the possibility that God's response to his self-expression will finally come: God will at last talk back. The dia-log. ue between the celibate and God will be consummated and the celibate will discern the truth about himself. God will not talk back to the celibate every time he engages in common prayer, liturgical or informal, but certainly on some occasions God's word will be there for him. Conse-quently, he will not neglect such prayer lest he miss the word of God which is meant just for him. When this word comes fi'om God in common prayer, it will continue to resound in his mind and heart as he goes his way, a new man, knowing himself better, more free, more ma-tllre. Real prayer is not always pretty. It is a cry to God in anguish or anger. Real prayer is not dispassionate. It is a song of gladness and triumph. It purifies because it places before a loving Father, Son, and Holy Spirit both what is ngly and what is beautiful in one's life. Coupled with the response of the three divine Persons, it leads to dis-covery of one'~ self, freedom, maturity, and personal ful-fillment. Celibacy creates a condition which calls for snch prayer with special urgency. Snch prayer is necessary in every state of life, but it is especially necessary for the celibate if lie is to achieve personal maturity, for lie has excluded from his life the ordinary means of achieving that maturity through the intimate interpersonal rela-tionship of marriage. The second great potentiality for prayer in the celi-bate's life resides in the need to develop human friend-ships. Tills.potentiality for prayer will be considered in the second part of this article. The first part of this article considered the first great potentiality for prayer in the celibate life, namely, the need to develop an intimate, truly personal friendship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, analogous to the relationship which a man and woman have in marriage. The second great potentiality for prayer in the celibate life resides in the need to develop human friendships. We begin exploration of this potentiality by noting different kinds of fi'iendship in the celibate's life. The first sort of friendship is toward those people with whom the celibate ordinarily lives, works, and recreates. The second class is toward those few people with whom lie shares particular views, interests, and wdues. The third kind of friendship is toward those persons to whom he is strongly attracted because they especially satisfy his + + + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 605 + + + C. Kie~ling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 606 particnlar subjective needs for certain other persons in his life. In the case of the first sort of friendship, the name "friend" is used in a very broad sense. The "associate" expresses more literally the relationship wlficb the celi-bate has with people in this first class of friendship. These people are his associates in daily work, meals, rec-reation, and prayer. With them he shares some general views, interests, and values, and be "gets along" with them. His interaction with them provides some personal support and happiness, but they do not satisfy some of his deeper, unique, human, and personal needs. lu this first group is included a subclass of associates to whom the celibate relates only with difficulty, perhaps even in continual conflict. Bnt such people are not strangers to him nor he to them; they know one another better than they know the clerk at the store or the passen-ger they meet on the plane. They "associate" with one an-other daily or very fi'cqucntly in w~rious activities. Inter-action with these people plays an important role in the celibate's personal development and pursuit of happiness. The name "friend" applies quite well to people in the second class of friendship, though here we will call them "good friends" to distinguisla them from friends of the first and third kind. The celibate particularly enjoys the company of his good friends and feels especially at ease with them. He feels free to express to them his opinions ~n(l feelings about many things because he knows that they will be respected and accepted. Most of the time, with most of these people, however, be will not express his most intimate thoughts and feelings about some things, and especially abot, t himself and them. The bond here is not mutu;d attraction to, and interest in, one another, but particular views, interests, and values which they bold in common. Witbont some good friends, the celibate may find life difficult. He will more likefy feel the pain of loneliness which the first kind of friends, associates, only superfi-cially alleviates. It is even possible that without some good fiiends he may develop neurotic tendencies, for he will not express to sympathetic listeners many thoughts and feelings, especially of hostility or discouragement, that would better be brought out into the open, lest, being confined within, they produce depression or mor-bidity. "Friend" is a rather pallid name for people in the third class of fiiendship. These people we will call "close friends" to distinguish them from associates and good friends. From the first sort of friend, the celibate parts with equanimity and, in some cases, relief; fi'om the sec-ond sort, with regret; from the third, with great reluc- tance and even anguish. If a close friend suffers misfor-tune, the celibate's own life is upset, perhaps to distrac-tion and disorientation; he finds it difficult to go on tran-quilly with his ordinary duties. It is as if be himself suffered the misfortune. Close friends are most truly "other selves." The celibate is interested in his close friends, not simply in their views and values, but in them, their innermost thoughts and feelings, their physi-cal, mental, and spiritual welfare. To them he reveals his deepest thoughts and feelings, his doubts, convictions, and emotions, confident of their affection (not just re-spect) and their loyalty toward him. He is more or less emotionally involved with them. in them he finds fulfill-ment of his need for intimacy with persons. They are surrogates for the marriage partner which he has ex-cluded from his life. Sonie celibates cannot live well-balanced, full, and happy lives without one or more close friends. Others can, though they will lack sympathetic understanding for some experiences of the human heart. On tile other hand, every celibate's life can be imlnensely enriched by close friendship, even though lie may not absolutely need it for persoual maturity and contentment. The celibate's friends of all three kinds may be men or women. One and the same person may be a friend in one or more of these three ways. Thus the celibate may be strongly attracted to a member of his local community with whom he finds particular compatibility in likes and concerns. On tile other hand, he may find such compati-bility or such personal attraction or both in someone with whom lie rarely associates. This typology of friendships in the celibate's life has, of course, the limitations of every typology. It is an at-tempt to find some intelligible pattern in the infinite variety, complexity, and fluidity of life. Actual friend-ships will approximate one or another type, sometimes partaking of characteristics of more than oue type. The whole matter is complicated further in actual life by the fact that tile celibate and a certain friend may not re-spond to one another in the same class of friendship; lie may regard as a close frieud someone who looks upon him as simply a good friend. Hence one may find that one's own experiences of friendship do not fit neatly into this or that category of the typology that has been pre-sented. In spite of its inadequacies, this typology serves to sug-gest that some o~ the celibate's friendships will not be very problematic, while others will; some will evoke re-sponses from him beyond what be expects and is immedi-ately prepared for and thus will demand growth in per-sonal matnrity. Compatible associates and good friends + + + Celibacy VOLUME 30, 1971 607 + ÷ C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 608 are usually taken for granted. They are lubricants, so to speak, which make the wheel of life turn easily. They do not make very great demands on the celibate but make it possible for him to bear with the demands of life which come from other sources. Relating to irritating associates or to close friends, on the other hand, is not easy. Relating to irritating associates is difficult because of the conflict of personalities. Relating to close friends is arduous because strong instinctual drives, powerful emo-tions, deep personal needs, and wish-fulfilling illusions are involved, and because the focus of attention is not the stable, objective mntual interests and activities shared by good friends, but the person of the close friend, a free agent, susceptible to moods, hence often falling short of expectations, and ultimately a mystery, as every human person is. In attempting to develop these two kinds of friendship, the celibate discovers his limitations and is driven toward prayer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for help. Hence these two sorts of friendship may be said to contain more conspicuous potentialities for growth in prayer than the other kinds of friendship. Actual instances of these two difficult sorts of friend-ship are infinitely varied by circumstances. The difficulty in relating to an annoying associate may be due to nor-real differences of temperament and character or to neu-rotic traits in one or both. The irritating associate may be a superior or a peer, or may be someone with whom the celibate lives elbow to elbow or someone with whom he deals only in his work. The person toward whom the celibate feels drawn in close friendship may be a man or woman, celibate, single, or married, frequently or only occasionally in his company. Becanse actual instances of these two kinds of friend-ship are so different fi'om one another, to speak of the potentialities for prayer in them in general would not be very helpful. Hence, we will restrict ourselves to explor-ing the potentialities for prayer in a close friendship of the (male) celibate with a woman, also dedicated to celi-bacy, whom he sees only occasionally; it will also be as-sumed that both persons are firm in their dedication to the celibate life. From this single instance, one can gain some idea of what it means to speak of the potentialities for prayer in friendship. One can then explore on one's own the possibilities for prayer in one's own difficult hnman relationships. In a close friendship of the kind stipulated, the celibate finds pleasure, satisfaction, and joy. Deep cisterns of sex-ual, human, and personal needs are filled to brimming with cool, fi'esh water. Life becomes extraordinarily beau-tiful in the present and rich in possibilities for the future. He marvels at the qualities he discovers, one after the other, in Iris friend and at the total uniqueness and mys-tery of her being. In her presence, life assumes a timeless, eternal quality. Particular words and actions are lost to view in the more comprehensive awareness of the inter-personal presence which they mediate; just being to-gether is more significant than anything said or done. Because of tiffs friendship, the whole of life and the world receive a new interpretation and meaning. A frequent form of prayer found in the Bible is praise of God in thanksgiving for his gifts of creation and salvation.4 The Bible contains countless joyful songs (Psahns and Canticles) in which God is praised and thanked by simply reciting in His presence the beauty and awesomeness of creation and His wonderful works of salvation on behalf of His people or individt, als. In the pleasure, satisfaction, and joy which the celibate finds in Iris friendship, there is inspiration for praise of God and thanksgiving to Him for what gives so much happy ful-fillment. As he rehearses to himself the wonderfulness of his experience and of the loved one--be can scarcely avoid doing tbis~he has only to place himself in the presence of God and add to his rehearsal, in a spirit of gratitude, acknowledgment to God for His gift. Knowing experientially what it means to break out in praise and thanksgiving to God for one gift so keenly appreciated, the celibate more readily values the prayers of praise and thanksgiving for other gifts of God (some of them, in the final analysis, far more itnportant than his friendship) which constitute so much of the liturgy. He welcomes a period of mental prayer, for it provides time to recount before God, in thankft, l praise, the joys of his friendship. But there is also the pain of separation--the anguish of parting and the ache of being apart. What does the cell bate do with this pain? He nnites it with the pain of Christ on the cross-and thus makes it, not an inexplicable dead-end, but redemptive and life-giving. He does this in tl~ought whenever be feels the pain with particular acute-hess, but be does it also when be offers himself to God in, with, and through Christ in His unique offering of Him-self and all mankind on Calvary rendered sacramentally present in the celebration of the Eucharist. The pain of separ~tion is grist [or the miil of t, nion with Christ in suffering and death, even as the joy of presence antici-pates the joy of sharing in the resurrection of Jesus. Through the pain and joy of friendship, the celibate ~Sce T. Worden, The Psalms Are Christian Prayer (New York: Sbccd and Ward, 1961), for an excellent analysis of tbc Psalms and other prayers in Scripture as basically praise (thanksgiving) or lamen-tation (petition, hope, confidence). Both kinds, especially the first, have been carried over into the Christian liturgy, with modifica-tions. Both arc exemplary for private prayer. ÷ ÷ + Celibacy VOLUME .:30, 1971 609 C. Kiesling, O.P. REVIE

Issue 44.3 of the Review for Religious, May/June 1985. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS (ISSN 0034-639X), published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, M O 63108-3393. REvlEw FOR RELIGIOUS is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus, St. Louis, MO. © 1985 by REVlEW FOR R ELIG~OU~ Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A. $10.00 a year; $19.00 for two years. Other countries: add $2.00 per year (postage). For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR REt,tGtOUg P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editor May/June, 1985 Volume 44 Number 3 Manuscripls. books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent Io REVIEW F'OR RELtGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Richard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REVtEW t'OR RELt~tOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. LoUIs, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. The Charism of Peter at the .Service Of Unity In an ex.change.of Ch~stmas gceetlngs with his "b~:other~ and collaborators" of the Roman Curia, Pope John opaul II reflected at length about the Church and about his niinistry in the Church. The text is based upon the translation of L'Osservatore Romano, 21 January, 1985, pp. 6ft. Dominiasprope est (The Lord is n~arl Ph-4:5). The celebration of Christmas, now fit hand, h~is brought us together once again for this fine custom of exchangin~g good wishes.'.~With minds filled With gratitude we ~repare to kneel before the crib along with the sh'epherdg during this Holy Night, near which the '~Vir~in Mother," proclaimed by'the prophet Isaiah ('Is 7:14), keeps watch with ~ageraffe~ction. 'We knowthat in this fragile Infant still unable to ~peak thei-e comes to me~ us the Etet:nal Word'of'God, ttie uncreated Wisdom Who rulesthe univd~se. He is the Light of God who "shines in darkness," as the Apostle Jdhffsays--adding'immediately with bitter realism: "But the dark-ness did not accept it." L~ght and darkness confront each Other before the manger in which that Infant lies: the.light of truthaffd the darkness of error.°It is a confrontation which does not admit of neutrality. Each one must ChoOse which side to take. It is a choice in which each stakes his 6r her future. The Infant of the Crib, become an adult, will one day say: "If~ou live according to my teaching, you are t~rul~ my disciples; then you willkhow the trfttl, and the trtith will set you free" (Jn 8:31 ff.). ~ ' ~ " The Woi'd of God, in becoming flesh in order to fiaak'e his dwelling among us (see Jn 1:14), comes to bring us the inestimable gift of the knbwledge of the truth: the truth about him,~nd the tr~iii~abotit us and about our transcendent ,destiny. Man cannot.build up himself or his free~io~n~ except on the foundation of this truth. It is therefore a~ exir~meiy'precious girl, one to be safeguarded 321 322 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 and defended. The loss of even a part 0f that integral truth beating in the heart of the Infant "wrapped in swaddling clothes" in the manger would mean that man puts at risk the full realization of himself to a greater or lesser degree. The Church, knowing herself to be the depository and guardian of this truth, is aware of this. She therefore feels invested with a special mission, one which makes her the duty-bound subject of a special service to humankind. To each generation newly arrived to inhabit the earth must she reveal the marvelous plan that God has prepared in his only Son, a plan which will benefit every. child of man who is willing to accept in faith the wonderful initiative of God's love. For this reason the Church, and in her especially the Roman See of Peter, keeps watch at the cradle of Bethlehem. She keeps watch so that these trans-cendent values which the Creator has offered to humankind--truth and free-dom in truth, which is to say love--may not be obscured, much less distorted. She keeps Watch so that, despite all opposing currents, these values may be constantly revivified and be ever more affirmed in the lives of individuals and of families in both the Christian and civil communities and thus in the life of the entire human family. The Church has both a complex and.~unified,awareness of thes~e valpes, as has been emphasized in a well-known passage of the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, the twentieth anni~,ersary of which occurred just a month ago (November 21). Paragraph 13 of this fundamental conciliar document recalls the Church's attitude with regard to "the abilities, the resources and customs" proper to the variety of peoples. The Church sees in them "gifts" which the various cultures bring to h~er, and she is therefore happy to take them to herself, even though she is committed to purify, strengthen and elevate them. In p~a. rticular, for the sake of that character of uniyersality, which adorns and distinguishes her, the Church is mindful that she must harmonize these "gifts," bringing them into a higher unity :so that they may cOntribute to the progressive affirn~, afion of the one kingdom of Chi'ist. And hence it is that "in virtue of this catholicity each individual part contributes through its special gifts to the good of the other parts and of the whole Church. Through the common sharing,of gifts and through the common¯ effort to attain fullness., in ~unity, the whole'and each of the pa~s receive increase." . o There is more. Continuing along this line of.thought, the text pres~ents a ¯ fundamental thesis of Catholic ecclesiology. It p.oints out that '.'within the Church particular churches hold a rightful place; these chhrches ream their own traditions, without in any way,.0pposing the primacy of the~Chair of Peter, which presides over the whole assembly of charity and protects~ legitimate differences, while at the same time assuring that such differen~s do .not hinder unity but rather contribute toward it." It would be difficult to expre~ss tills any, more cl~ariy c~r profou'ndly: the universal Church is present~ed ~s a ~ o.mmunion of (p~articular) chu~rches and indirectly as a communion of nations, languages and cultures. Each of these. The Charism of Peter at the Service of ~]nity / 393 churches: brings°its own "gifts" to the whole, just as individual scientific and'~ socihl conquests, as also'the goals of civilization as these are gradually achi, eved, all. make their contribution. Pluralism in the ChurCh So m~h emphasis is given today to ttie "special" Christian experiences of particular church~s in the socio-cultural context in which ehch of them is called to live. These specific experiences--it is stressed---con~rn the Word of God as this is to be .read and understood in the light of the data which emerges from one's existential jofirney. They concerti liturgicalfprayer, which must draw from the c~ltfire to which belong the s*gns, acuop~s and words used m adora-uon, worsh|p and celebrat|on. These experiences concern the theological reflectmn which~ m .turn must have an influence on categories of thought typical' of each ~ulture. And Anally the~ special experience~ concern.~ecclesi~ii' communion itself, which is rooted in the Eucharist, but whose concrete devel-opme~ n~t ~lepend~ on ihe historico-t~nporal condiii6ns which derive from it~ insertion into~the ambience oi" a particular country or of a specific region bf.the world. These are. int~erestmg pei'spectives" because 9f ihe lines of theologicai inves-tigation ,which they seem to open regarding the unfathomable mystery ?f the Cil~urch, ahdeven more because of the possibilities they offer to the°faithful to p~'r~ivg~nd to own ever more fully ihe immense ~ch~s of the new life broughi~ by Christ. ~ But these_ ar~e perspectives which, in order tc~i be fruitful, presume respect for affinescapable Condition: Such ekperiences must not be li~,ed separatei~ or independently of, much less in oppositton to experiences hved by churches ~n oiher par~s of~the world. In order to be constituted as authentic experiences of Church,~(hese entail the necessity of being in har~mony with those ~,hich othe~ Christian~ intouch with other cultural contex(s fe~l called to live in order to be faithful to the requirements which flow fromthe one identical mystery of Ch~s~. This affirmation touches a central°point of Catholic ecclesiology and bears rgeapl"e atetinrd~egn. c~i'eos ~insd cuolgnetr ainrY " itsoo l,tahtieo encisc{le's(o~roileongtya tOi0fn st'h, eb rS eecvoennd t oV faat~,coarn " cCepnutrnicfud-.' In, its paragraph 13, cited above, Lumen G~ntium stresses the possibilities. inherent in a wholesome pluralism. However, it also very clearly, specifies' its limits. True pluraligm is never a divisive factor, but an element whichcontrib-_o ute~ to the building up of unity Within the universal commur~ion of the Church. Communion of Minds, Communion of Hearts - In fact, there exists among individual particular churches an ontological relationship of mutual inclusion. Each particular church, as the realization of~ the ore Church of Christ, is in some way present in all the particular churches "in and from which churches comes into being the one and ohly Catholic 324/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 Church" (LG 23).~ This ontological relationship must be carried over onto the dynamic level of its concrete life, if the Christian community does not want to enter into contradiction with itself. The basic ecclesial choices of the faithful of a community must be able to harmonize with the choices of the faithful of other communities so as to give rise to that communion of minds and hearts for which Christ prayed at the last Supper: ~. as you, Father. are i~h me, and I in you~' ! pray tti~they may be [one] in us . tha~t their unity may be compli~te" (Jn 17:21, 23). A particular task bf the Apostolic She consists precisely in serving thik universalunity. Indeed, it'is here that the ~specific office and, we may even say, the charism 6f Peter and his successors lie. Was it not to him that Christ said before the dark night of betrayal: "I have pray6d for you that your faith may never fail. LYou in turn must strengthen, your brothers" (Lk 22:32)? lnd~ed he is the "~ock" on whichChrist willed~to build his Church (see Mt 16:18). It is precisely°fi:o~m the foundation' that the iniegrated si"rength of the efitire edifice is expected. For" this reason, in a dialogue charged with pathos' ,.afte~ the ~esu,rrection, Jestis left to Peter the demanding responsibility: "Feed my lambs . feed my sheep" (Jn 21:15ff). Certainly, the one Supreme Shepherd is the Incarnate Word, Christ the Lord~ And so, with spontaneous fervor the pope'makes h~s own,the words of St. August.ine: "Vobis pastores'sumus, sed sub illo Pastore vobiscum Oves sumus. . . Vobis ex hoc loco doctores sum'us, sed sub ill un'o Magistro.in hac schOla vobiscum condiscipuli surnus" (For you we are shepherds,"biat, unde/ that Sheph,erd, with you we are sheep . For you., we are teachers, but, under that ofie Master . with you we are fellow disciples Enarr in Ps 126:3). This i:10es not eliminate the fact, however, that in the Church each has his own specific .task for which he must one day answer to'Christ. Over the centurie~ the popes have deeply'felt their responsibility for the s'ervice to Catholic bn~ty that was entrusted to them'~i and have soughtto: provide" ~ ford:it in many ways~as by surrounding themselves ,with experienced collfiboratot~"the better to meet the multiform responsibilities of their office. ° Recently, in response to suggestions from the.Conciliar Assembly, we gave exPr,ession to the desire to "internationalize" the Curia, so that'th~ presence of offici~als coming from various parts of the world might'facilitate dialogue with churches living on various co'fiiinents. This morning 1 have the pleasure of meeting with a select representation of the organizafioffg into which the Roman Curia is divided. I gladly welcome the opportunity, beloved brothers in'(~hrist2 to e~press my appreciation to you and to thank you'fo~:'ih~ cOmpe~t~int collaboration which you so generously offer me in the daily fulfillment of the duties inherent in my ministry. The Ministry of Peter . ~ With me you live that "anxiety~for all the churches" which constituted the t'daily tensiofi" of the Apostle Paul (see 2 Co 11:28). This constitutes the daily The Charism of Peter at the Service of Unity /325 tension of every,pope. ~Indeed, it is ~for the Successors of Peter to ensure the convergence towardg the center of th~ Church ofthose many "giffs" to which allusion was made in the conciliar texts we cited. And again it is for them to make provision for those;same gifts to flow outward to the various members of :Christ's Mystical Body, carrying to them new impulses of fervor and of life. There are ordinary means for addressing this apostolic task, among these being ad limina visits. Thus, during.the, present year I have had the pleasure to receive the episcopal conferences of Costa Rica, Oceania, El Salvador, Taiwan, Togo, Lesotho, Peru, Greece, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Guinea, Ecuador, the AntilleS, B_o!iyia a.nd Paraguay. ' There are also extraordinary means, among which the pope's visits and pilgrimages to .particular churches on the various continents are proving espe-cially effective. Still keen in my mind i~ the pleasant memory of my apostolic journey at the beginning of May to Korea, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon , Islands and Thailand to share the concerns and hopes of the young and promising churches of those lands. Also of significance was the journey during" the month of June which took me to Switzerland and enabled me to strengthen~ the bonds of communion between the See of Rome and the noblechurches of that:nation. Also unforgettable are;the emotions I experienced during my journey :to Canada, when I encountered both those who live their faith in the heart of.a highly evolved ~society and with those who received the gospel message in the context of ancient native Civilizations. Important finally, even if rapid, was the journey in mid-October when, after touching Spain, I reached Santo Domingo, the land from which, almost five centuries ago, evangelization spread into the :New World. On that occasion, too, I was able to meet the people of .Puerto Rico. ~ It is .with joy that I also recall the pastoral visits I made during the course of the year. in Italy: to Bari, Bitonto, Viterbo, Fano, Alatri and then; at the beginning of October, to the churches of Calabria, and finally, in November,~ my pilgrimage to the places sacred to the memory of St. Charles [Borromeo], marking the fourth century of hi~ death. The Apostolic See also maintains a dense network of contacts with all the particular churches in its constant concern not to lose any "gift from above" ,(see Jm 1:17), while at the same time safeguarding the priceless treasure of the Truth of God, along with everything of permanent validity which this has caused to.germinate in the fertile soil of generations of Christians down through the centuries. Neither preconceived prejudice nor deplorable ignorance, there-fore, butconstant ~attention to,"what the Spirit says to the churches" (Rv 2:7)! And this in order "that everything which authentically comes from the Spirit may benefit the entire composite of ,Christ's Mystical Body. Teach the Faith in Its Int grity , , In the context of these reflections we must emphasize ~ also the special responsibility which the :entire episcopate has--cum Petro et sub Petro (with $26 / Review f~or Religious, May-June, 1985 Peter and under .Peter)--with regard to the "deposit~0f thefaith~" entr.usted by Christ to theChurch to be integrally eared for and faithfully taught to genera-tions of people in every age. How can we not recall, the solemn words with which Jesus took leave of the Apostles at the moment of his return to the Father'?. These constitute a precise charge: "Full authority.has been given to me both in heaven and on. earth; go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. Teach them to. earry out everything I.have commanded you" (Mt 28:18ff). ' Everything! Nothing of the "deposit."_ can be set aside~ tampered'with or neglected. Aware of this, the Apostle Paul addresses to his "disciple Timothy the . categorical imperative: "Depositum custodi!" (Guard what hasbeen committed to you! 1 Tm 6:20), and impresses on him: "I charge you toopreach.the word, to stay with this task whether convenient or inconvenient-~correcting,°reprov-ing,- appealing--constantly teaching.and never losing patience" (2 Tm 4:2). ° Indeed, the faithful of each historical era are exposed to the temptation ' "not to tolerate sound doctrine" and to "surround themselves with teachers who tickle their ears, refusing to listen to the truth and wandering off,to fables" (see ibid, vv. 3 ff). / Our age is also exposed to this temptation¯ An exact duty therefore falls .upon today?s~ shepherds and guides of the People of God: to defend the authenticity of gospel teaching from all that contaminates and distdrts it. Certainly we must be able to recognize and accept the "grod" that our generation is able to express in order to "purify, strengthen and elevate it." The Council reminded us of this (see LG 13). BUt we must also reject courageously whatever bears the imprint of error and sin, whatever coniains substantive threats to truth and to human morality, whatever spreads thrrugh society, ~whether by deceitful maneuver or with arrogant high-handedness, attacking the dignity of the person and the inalienable rights of individuals and of nations. ¯ The Church has the duty to keep watchAn order to defend,the integrity of the .faith and .of Catholic doctrine, warning against the deceits which seek to contaminate it. This is a specific task of hers which she cannot renounce. "Promoting~Truth Is the Duty of the Church The Holy See, for its part, carries out this duty of promoting and protecting the depositU~mfidei (deposit of faith) with the help especially of the Congrega-tion for the Doctrine of the Faith. As is known, following upon the Second Vatican Council, t.he procedures which the'Sacred Congregation fbllows in examining persoffs and writings submitted to its judgment h.ave been somewhat modified with the intention of offering every guarantee to interested persons. The protection of the truth, which is the Church's sacrosanct and indispensable duty, is not achieved by passing over in any way the dignity and rights of the person. Anyone willing to look with unbiased objectivity cannot ,but recognize, The Charism of Peter at the Service of Unity also in the context of recent events, that in its interventions this Congregation is constantly inspired by ~trict criteria of respect for the ~persons with whom it must rela~te. What can be hoped is that an equally respectful attitude,be always accorded .by those persons toward the Congregation itself when they comment, in private 6r in_ public, on its work. The same principle should apply to every member of the ,People of God, since this Congregation intends nothing other than to safeguard from danger the greatest good which the Christian possesses: the. authenticity and integrity of his faith: It is certainly of great importance that there be established within the Church a sincere and open dialogue among the various components of the Pegple of God. ~This dialogue, however, must be understood as a way to search for what is true and just, not as an ~occasion to indulge in words andattitudes scarcely compatible with an authentic spirit of dialogue. Everyone: must always keep in mind the,duty that each has with regard to truth, most of all.that truth which God has revealed and of which the Church is theL~guardian. ¯ The Option for the.Poor Before. concluding, 1 would also like to mention another 0point~whidh is especially being heard today, the "'preferential option for the poor." During the Second Vatican Council the Church has solemnly proclaimed that she.makes this option her own declaring: "[Like Christ] the Church encompasses with love all wh~ are afflicted with human suffering and in the poor and afflicted she sees the image of her ~poor and suffering Founder. She does all she can to relieve their need and in them she.strives to serve Christ" (LG 8). ¯ This ~"option,~'~. stressed so strongly by the episcopates of Latin America today, has been repeatedl); confirmed by me, following the example of my unforgettable predecessor, Pope Paul Vl. I gladly take this opportunity to repeat that the commitment to the poor constitutes a dominant theme of my pastoral activity, a0constant concern accompanying my daily Service to the,. People of God. I have madeand continue to make this "option" my own. I identify .with it. And I feel that this could not ~be otherwise, since it is the Gospel's eternal message. This is what Christ did. This is what Christ's Apostles. did. This is what the Church has done throughout her two-millennium history. In. the face of today's forms of exploiting the poor the Church cannot remain silent. She reminds the rich as well of their precise duties. Made strong with the Word. of God (see Is, 5:8; Jr 5:25-28; .lm 5:1,3-4), she condemns the many injustices which, unfor{unately, even today are committed to the detri-ment of,the poor. ., ~ Yes, the Church makes her own the preferential option for the poor. A preferential option, notg carefully. Therefore not an exclusive, or excluding option--b.ecause the mes_sage of, salvation is meant for everyone. It is an option~ furthermore, which is essentially based on the Word of God, and not on criteria offered by human science or by adverse ideologies which often reduce the poor to abstract socio-political or economic categories. 328 / RevieW for Religious, May-June, 1985 It is an option, nevertheless, which is unwav~ering and irrevocable. As I said recently in Santo Domingo: ""The pope, the Church, and her hierarchy want to continue to act on behalf of the poor, their dignity, their elevation, their rights as persons, and their aspirations to a social.justice'that can n9 longer be delayed" (L'OsservatOre Romano, EngliSh edition, November 26, 1984, p. 8). Nevertheless, the Apostolic 'See which, because of 'the special mission entrusted to it, closely shares in the experiences of the Chfirch in the various regions of (he world, knows that the forms of poverty, to which modern man is'~ subjected are manifold, and4t feels a moral obligation also in i'egard tO these other forms ,of poverty. Alongside, and, so to speak, in the face of the poverty against which the Episcopal Conferences of Medellin .and Puebla have raised their ~oices, there is also the poverty which stems from the privation of those spiritual goods to which the human person by nature has a right. Is that individual not poor who is subjected to totalitarian regimeS which deprive .him .of those fundamental freedoms in which his dignity as an intelligent and responsible person finds expression? Is that person not poor who is wounded by:otfiers in' his-0r her interior relation to truth; in his or her conscienc~e, in his or her most personal convictions, in his or her religious faith? '., " "' ' This is what I pointed out in my previous interventions, most especially in the Encyclical Redemptor Hominis (no. 17), and in the discburse delivered in 1979 before the General Assembly of the United Nations (nos.,14,20), when 1 spoke abfut the violations inflicted today in the"sphere of man's Spiritual goods. There is not only the poverty which strikes the body; there is another;and more insidious one, which strikes the conscience, yiolating the,most intimate sanctuary~of personal dignity. " In this context of the Church's authentic option for the poor must we ¯ include an event which has, aroused a great deal of int(rest this year: the p~blication of the Instruction regard, ing Certain aspects of the "Theology of Liberation.," . ,This document, contrary to some distorted interpretatiofis which have been given it, not only is not opposed to the optio~i for the poor,~ but rather constitutes an authoritative confirmation of'it, and at the same time effects a clarification and a deepening, of it. By emphasizinffthe intimate and constitutive bond whjel~i°unites freedom to truth, the Instruction defends the poor from ill.uSory and dangerous ideolog-ical proposals of liberation which, beginning with real and dramatic situations of poverty, would make of them and their sufferings only a pretext for new, and sometimes more serious opp?ession: The reduction of the Gospel message to the mere socio-political dimension robs the poor of what constitutes their shpreme right: to receiv~ from the Church the gift of the whole truth about the human person, and hbout the presence of th~ living God in human history.~ The reduction of the human being to just the political sphere, in fact, constitutes a threat not only to the dimension of his "having" but also to his ¯ The Charism of Peter at the Service of Unity / '329 "being." As the Instruction ri~ghtly affirms, the totality of the message of ":salvation alone can guarantee also the totality of human liberation (XI, 16). It is for this liberation that the Church has fought and is fighting at the side of the poor, making herself the advocate of their violated rights, the inspiration for social works of~every kind for their protection and defense, and the voice which proclaims the word of God, which summons everyone to reconciliation and penance. It is not by chance that the Apostolic Exhortation which I recently pub-lished against the background of conclusions reached by the Sixth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops propose~ yet again the fundamental evan-gelical theme of conversion of heart, l did so ~in the conviction that the first liberation to achieve for man is liberation from the moral evil which nests in his heart, since it is there that also lies the cause of "social sin," indeed of every oppressive structure. In this commitment to human liberation from all the forms 0f poverty that frustrate the: full realization of the person, theChurch is sincerely and confi-dently open to dialogue With everyone. She declared this to be her intention by the lips of Pope John XXIIIwho constantly ~tretched outwards in the search for "what unites rather than what divides" humankind; she repeated it in the voice of Paul~ VI who dedicated his first Encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, to this subject; finally, she confirmed it with an especially authoritative pronouncement in the Second Vatican Council which stated that "[the Church] can provide no more eloquent proof of its solidarity with, as well as its respect and love for the entire human family., than by energizin~ it in conversation" that i8 based on the dignity of the human person and on the profound significance of his activity in the world (see Gaudium et Spes, nos. 3 and 40). .The one who, in the unfathomable divine plan, sits today on the Chair of Peter confirms his own intention to contihue the way of a respectful and sincere dialogue with the modern world arid with those who can speak for it and represent it, because he relies on the possibilities for good inherent in human nature and on the renewing power of Christ's Redemption, which is at work in history. Indeed, it is my profound conviction as I said in my message for the 1983 World Day of Peace--that. 'dialogue is a central and indispensable element in the ethical philosophy of'htiman persons, whoev(i- they may be" (no. 6). In order for this dialogue to be fruitful, however, the competencies of other parties must not be infringed upon, and the Church herself, "by reason of her role and competence, must in no way be confused with the political commu-nity, nor bound to any political system," and precisely for this reason does she remain "the sign and the safeguard of the transcendence of the human person" ( GS 76). The Encounter with ChriSt Permeated by the light and the warmth which emanate from these truths, 330 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 ,we set foot on the threshold of the stable of Bethlehem. He who is born in "poverty" asks us to turn our thoughts and hearts towards the varied forms of poverty which oppress.humanity today. He asks us to go to meet this humanity. "Jesus Christ. made himself poor though he was rich, so that we might become, rich by his poverty" (see 2 Co 8:9)¯ ~ Only by making room for, Christ in our own lives and in the lives of our communities will we be able to resolve the problem of the many, forms of poverty from which we suffer, will we truly become "rich," that is, fully, human. The true,problem, however, remains this: to recognize Christ's right to citizenship in each of the various '~worlds" which make up the'modern world. He and he alone possesses the secret for filling our every "poverty"and arousing in our hearts 'the joy of the true wealth, which, in the last analysis, is the treasure of love¯ . May Christmas bring., to the sons a~d daughters of the Church and to all men and women on earth, a foretaste of the indescribable peace of that new world to which the temporal birth of the Son of God happily and irrevoc-ably gave a beginning. May the Holy Virgin, who carried the Incarnate Word in her womb, prepare us to welcome him with deep faith and grateful love. A Gift of Stilln~s The flame from the candle bums steady and bright: It remains that way until a gentle breeze ¯ . comes its way, and it begins to, fliCker. The flickering is a speaking out and a reachi,ng out fo~ a stillness-- that Stillr~ess has but to be present, touchable, available, gentle. :. How much am 1 like that flame-- at times steady, reaching out, . at times burning bright-- and many times flickerin!! I need 0nly be touched by the Stillness.of the Flame of flames-~ ° Then my light becomes~radiant, penetrating, atz,one with the Light of lights. I have been made a Christ,ed flam!! 'I have been gift.ed with Stillness! Sister Regina Hlavac Mother Scton School 100 Creamery Rd., Emmitsburg, Mp 21727 The Mass in "My Cathedral" Pedro Arrupe, S.J. Father Arrupe is well known to our r~aders. In failing health, his resignation from the office of General Superior of the Society of Jesus was .accepted by the 33rd General Congregation of that Society' in September, 1983. "l~his article and introductory comment is I~ased on a chapter from In Him Alone Is Our Hope: Texts on the Heart of Christ (1965-1983), by Pedro Arrupe, S.J., with a foreword by Karl Rahner, S.J.; see Reviews in this issue, p. 466. . These intimate notes of Father Arrupe were jottings written in the course of 1981. °The ailing General hasnow consented that these notes, however incom-plete, ~be made public. In these pages we are able to glimpse how spontane-ously Father Arrupe has lived his intimacy with 'Jesus Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist in his oratory. " This little private chapel of,Father Arrupe, his "cathedral, "had been for Arrupe the powerhouse of in'calculable energy and dynamism for the ~whole Societp~ of Jesus, a place of inspiration; and a source of comfort and strength. This was the place where, for seventeen years, Father Arrupe performed the most important act of his daily routine--the celebration of the Eucharist. As though talking to himself, in these jottings the writer pauses at salient moments of the liturgy, having all the time the body of the Society in his mind. United to the Heart of Christ--he writes--he felt himself to be a mediator between God and the, Society, and understood better what St. Ignatius had in mind when he set down as the primar);~duty and function Of the General: to be "closely unitedwith God our Lord and intimate with him in prayer and in all his actions,, that from God, the.Fountain of all good, the General may so much the better obtain for the whole body of the Society a large share of his gifts and grace.s, and also a great power and efficacy for all the means which will be used for the;, help of souls"'(Constitutions, n. 723). A mini-cathedral! Just eighteen feet by twelve. A little chapel which had .331 332 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 been prepared after the death of my predecessor, Father Janssens, for "the new general'--whoever this was to be! Providence willed that I should bethe one. I am grateful to the person who had the idea; he could not have interpreted the wish of this new general better! The planner of this tiny chapel may have desired to give th~ new general a quiet and convenient place to celebrate Mass in greater privacy, where he might visit the Blessed Sacrament without leaving his rooms. Possibly the planner did not think how much thi~ little oratory would be the fountain of incalculable power and dynamism for the whole Society, a place of inspiration, consolation and strength---even a living room! This was going to be my room for relaxing in the most active leisure,. where, doing nothing, .everything is done! Just as the idle Mary, drinking in the Master's words, was so much more active than her sister Martha! This was going to be the room where the Master's glance and mine cross each other-- where one learns much in silence. The general would have the Lord all the time, every day, next tO .him-- with just a partition between them: the very Lord who was able to enter through the closed doors of the Cenacle, who made himself ~rese~t among his disciples, the One who would be invisibly present in so many conversations and meetings in my office. They call this little room "the private chapel of the general." But it is a teacher's chair (c6tedra) and a sanctuary: Thabor and Gethsemane, Bethlehem and Golgotha, Manresa and La Storta. Ever the same, ever different! If its walls could speak! Four walls that enclose an altar, a tabernacle, a crucifix, a Marian icon, a zabuton (a Japanese cushion), a Japanese painting, one sanctuary lamp. Nothing else is needed, that's all: a Victim, a sacrificial altar, the Stan-dard of the Cross, a Mother, a burning flame that is slowly being cofisumed while giving light and warmth, and love expressed by two Japanese characters: God/Love. Here is a program of life: a life being consumed in love, crucified with Jesus, in Mary's company, being offered to God even as the Victim which is offered to the Father day after day on the altar. In recent years 1 have often heard it said: "Why visits to the Blessed Sacrament if God is everywhere?" My answer, sometimes unexpressed, is: "Really, they don't know what they are saying. God is indeed everywhere, but 'come and see' (Jn 1:39) where the Lord dwells: this is his house." My appeal is not to arguments and discussion, but to the experience of living in the house of the Lord: "One with much experience will speak with understanding" (Si 34:9). ¯ "The Teacher is here and is calling for you"(Jn.l 1:28). Here those requests. rise s~ontaneously: "Lord, teach us to pray" (Lk l lr:l); "Explain tO US the" parable" (Mt 13:36). When we hear his words, we understand the expression of popular enthusiasm: "No man ever spoke like this man" (Jn 7:46),~or that of the Apostles: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life" (Jn 6:68). Then one understands by experience the significance of that sitting at the Lord's feet and listening to his teaching" (Lk 10:39; see Lk 24:32): 7he Mass in "My. Cathedral" / 333 This "cathedral" is the theatre of the most important act of the entire daily routine: the Mass. Christ is the true and supreme priest, the Word made man. It is a divine attribute to be contained in the smallest place and not_to be circumscribed by the universe. This tabernacle or little tent is not too small.for him, but the entire universe is not big enough to hold him. Each Mass has an infinite value, but under some personal circumstances and in ,some special moments this quality of infinitude .is felt more deeply. There is no doubt that the ~fact of being General of the Society of J~sus, with its 27,000 men consecrated to the Lord and totally dedicated to collaborate with Jesus Christ the Savior in all sorts of difficult apostolates, which may at times lead to sacrificing life in ~o.bloody martyrdom, carries with it a weight of responsibility and a profound sense of universality of its own. I Shall Go to the Altar of God In union with Jesus Christ, I, a priest, carry witl~in myself the entire body ofthe Society. The walls of,this littld chapel look as though they would crack. The tiny altar seems to be.come ~that heavenly "altar on high" iEucharistic Prayer I) where the prayers, of all tl~e members of the Society ascend to the Father "by the hands of his~holy a, ngel.".My altar resembles "the golden altar before the throne" (Rv 8:3)~ referred to in the book of the Apocalypse. If, on the one hand, I feel myself, ~s St. Igna~us would have it, "a sore and ulcer" (Spiritual Exercises 58), "nothing but an obstacle" (todo imped(mento), on the other hand I also find myself identified with Christ, "designated by God a high priest" (Heb 5:10), "ho!y, ,blameless, unstained, separated from sinners, exalted above the heavens" (Heb 7:26), "who has entered, not into the sanctuary made with hands, but into Heaven itself, now.to appear in the presence of God on our behalf".(Heb 9:24). With Christ I find omy~elf ~t.oo a "victim": "I saw standing before the throne., a Lamb as,though it has been slain" (Rv .5:6). The Mass begins on this altar; suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth. If I look upward, I can see the heavenly Jerusalem: Wits radiance l!ke a most rare jewel, like jasper:.clear as crysta!" (Rv 21: l~l). But ~I saw no temple in the city, ~for its temple is the Lord God, and the Lamb is its sanctuary" (Rv 4:2~2-23). If I look downward, I see "human beings~ on the face of the earth, in such great dive.rsity in dress and in manner of acting. Some a~e white, some black; some at peace, some at war; some,weeping,so~e laughi.ng; some well, some s~ick; some coming into the w6rld, and some dying.? (SpEx 106). I am profoundly impressed at seeing from this altar, thus suspended between heaven and earth, all the members of the~Society in the world, toiling and suffering in the midst of their endeavors to help souls, ~sent th~:oughout the whole world to spread his sacred doctrine among all men, no matter what their state or condition" (SpEx 145). How I wish that from this altar blessings may fall as a mighty cascade, graces of light and strength that they need at 334 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 eveiy moment. In this Mass Christ will offer hirrigelf, and I wiih him, on behalf of this worldand this Society of Jesug'. Again, if I raise my eyes towards th~ heavenly Jerusalem, I see God's infinite hdliness, "the Three Divine Persons, seated on ~he royal th~ohe of the Divine Majesty, looking down upon the whole surface of the earth and behgldi~ng all nations in great blindness" (S~Ex 106). Meanwhile the clamor of "We have sinned" surges all the time from the face of the eh'rth~ a clamor tha~ resOufids with the rumbling of a ca~ract: ~the thur~der of thy cataracts" (Ps 42:7); "Then I heard the noise., of many waters and tlie sound of mighty thhnderpeals~ (Rv 19:6). When I feel myself, like the "servant of Yahweh," bearing ~the sins of the Society, chiefly during my generalate, and my own countless person~ilgins', 1 appear "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces." (Is 53:3). Meanwhile I wish it might be said of me, as it was said of Jesus: ."0port him'was the chastisement that made us whole" (Is 53:5); "He was oppressed and hewas afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth" (I~ 57:7). Thus while I hear the great'penitential act of the Society: "Wd have finn&l, and hax~e acted perversely and wickedly" (l K 8:47), I feel myself "the last of all, ,as one untimely born, unworthy of being called 'a son of the So~ciety'" (~see I Co 15:8-9). This is precisely the feeling that pCrmits me to sympathize with the fallen and the straying, and to grasp the whole meaning of those words of the leiier to the Hebrews: "He can deal gently with the ignorant.and 'wayward since he himself is beset with Weakness, he is bound to offer sacrifice for ~his owh sins as well as for thos~ of the people" (Heb 5:2-3). '" ' "° Christ becomes "the mediator of the n~w covenant" (Heb 9:15). I, too, in union with the heart of Christ and in spite of ever~hing, 1.feel mYself to ~be a mediator, and understand why St. Ignatius designat~es, as the l~fimary function of the General of the Society of Jesus, that "he should be clbsely united with GOd our Lord and intimfite with him, that from the Lord, the Fountain of All Good, the general may',.so i~uch the better obtain foi the whole body of the Society, a l~irge share of his gifts and gra~s, and'algo a great power and efficacy for all the meahs which will be used for the help of souls" (Const 723). My position between God and. the Society of Jesus, as a pribst and during the celebration of the Eucharigt, is that of a "inediatOr between God and men," to "govern the whole body of,the Society . This he will do~rimarily'by his prayer which is full of desires and by his s, acrifices, to 'obtain the grace of preservation and development. : and on his own part he should hold these means in high esteem, and have great confidence in our Lord, since these are the most efficacious means of gaining grace from hi~ Divine Majesty, the source of what is longed for" (Const 789-790). The office of general thus considered appears in all its~ depth and in clear light: "Morning by morning he awfikens my ear. The Lord God has opened my ear" (Is 50:4-5). Aware of my being°a priest with the servant Of 7he Mass in "My Cathedral"/335 Yahweh, "I do notwish to be rebellious or turn.backward; I offered my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pull Out my beard. I hid not my face from shame and spitting" (see Is 50:5-6). But how consoling it is to read in the sacred text: "When he makes himself an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand; he shall see the fruit of the trav~iil of his soul and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall, the righteous one~ my servant, make many 'to be accounted righteous,, and he shall bear their iniquities" (Is.53:10-11). The Offertory ~" I experience the profound feeling ofstandin~ before the God of mystery (arcano),.the~4gios athanatos (Holy Immortal One) and the Deus absconditus (the hidden God).- I feel that he is present in me and loves me as a father, that he is the fouritainhead of all life, and that' he accepts my offering. As I raise the paten, I.try to penetrate with the eyes of Christ, and with the light of faith, through the infinitude of the universe to the very heart of the Tririity: -"Blessed ~re 3;ou, God of all creation; through ydur goodness we have this bread to offer:."At the same time those .words,from the former offertory text come to my mind: ".-. which 1, thy unworthy servant offer to thee, the living and true God." All my unworthiness, faces,'me again: "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief' (Is 53:3); "and he shall bear their iniquities" (Is 53:11). You know everything, Lord! As I raise the paten, if'seems to me that all my brothers ,gaze~at it., feeling themselves to be present:?'., and for all those around me." The paten seems to expand as "my innumerable sins and negli-gences" and those of others are accumulating along with the aspirations.and desires of the whole SoEiety. Like'Moses, lfeel that "I am not able to carry all this people alone; the burden is toffheayy for me" (Nb 11:14). I feel as though the hands of all the Jesuits of the v~orld would help me to sustain this most heavy paten, loaded with sins.but also with desires, hopes and petitions. I seem~ to hear the Lord say to me, as he said to Moses: "I will.take some of the spirit which is upon you and put it upon them; and they-shall bear the burden of the people with you, that you maY not bear it yourself alone" (Nb 11:17). And then, as though the paten would become lighter--or my arms stronger I am able~tb lift the patenhigher as if to place it nearer to the Lord. "And also for all faithful Christians, living and dead . and for the salvation of the whole world." I almost feel like fainting when faced with human malice and sin. 1 need that you. stretch out 'your mighty hand, Lord. "I stretched out the heavens alone, ~I~ spread out the earth. Who was with me?" (Is 44:24). Sustained by this powerful hand, I shall be able to carry on: "This bread will become for us the Bread of Life." I now take the chalice with the wine which will be changed into the blood of'Jesus: "Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this wine tb offer., it will.become our spiritual drink." t 336 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 This wine, fruit of the vine pressed down in the winepress and fermented, will be converted into the blood shed on the cross. This chalice, symbol of that cup that caused you to shed blood at Gethse-mane, .and that was so bitter that you wished you would not have to drink it, Will soon becrme the chalice of your blood~poured out for the salvatior~ of the world. Into it are now poured .the sufferings of so many Jesuits who, crushed in their turn, have given or shall give their lives for you in a bloody or unbloody manner, their tears,,their sweat., a foul, unsavory mixture,which, when united with your blood; will become pleasant and sweet-scented--the aroma of Christ (2 Co 2:15). ~: "We know that this is to be our lot. ,~to suffer affliction" ( 1 Th 3:3), but irresistibly impelled by your charity "for the love of God overwhelms us" (2 Co 5:14), we choose and beg "to be received under your standard . and bear insults and wrongs, thereby to imitate you better" (see SpEx 147): Certainly you have heard our prayer, for the cup is overflowing, but charity makes us to be "overjgyed with all our.affliction" (2 Co 7:4). This chalice, converted for us into,"a°fragrant offering and sacrifice" (Ep 5:2), is accepted by you as an offering pleasing to God (see Ph 4:18) and will become for us "our spiritual drink." ,, .~ Thu~, bowing before the throne of the Trinity, I can.say with the whole Church: "In the spirit of humility and. with a contrite heart, let, us be received by thee, O Lord; and grant that the sacrifice we offer in thy, sight this day may be pleasing to Thee, O Lord God." Our sacrifice--of Christ, of me, and of the whole Society, asa body united' in the charity of the Holy Spirit, members and head with Christ (see Const 67,1.). United also with "the bond of obedience"(Const 659)~ by which we all, as one man, offer the daily holocaust of our lives, "in which the entire man, without any reser~vation, offers himself in the fire of charity to his Creator and Lord (Letter on Obedience; March 26, 1553: MI Epp IV, 669-681). Our personal sacrifices, united in the da.ily community holocaust, constitute a total sacrifice-- our sacrifice of praise (Eucharistic Prayer IV). Preface and comecra~ion ,, From the heart itself of the Society spontaneously arises that acknowledg-ment: "Father, it is truly meet and just, it is our duty and our salvation always and everywhere to give you thanks:" Our song of praise would join tliat of the angels and blend it into a harmonious choir, every member of which sings in his own voice in.a multitude and diversity of tones, similar to that impressive, chorus formed by that "great multitude which no man could number from.all the tribes and peoples and tongues., crying out witha loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb'" (Rv 7:9-10). Our song would join also ~that.of the Society triumphant in heaven, and that of all the saints: "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and might be to our God for ever and ever! AmenL' (Rv 7." 12). The Mass in "My Cathedral"/337 Following on this mighty chorus, I.seem to hear a striking silence. "Be silent before the Lord God! For the day of the Lord is at hand; the Lord has prepared a sacrifice and consecrated his guests" (Zp 1:7). "Be silent, a.ll flesh, before the Lord!" (Zc 2:1,3). "There was silence in heaven for about half an hour" (Rv 8: l). Let us, therefore, keep in the silence of our heart, as Mary did (Lk 2:51), everything that is .going to take place on "this altar .in heaven" (Eucharistic .Prayer IV), the mystery of the Passover, in which "Christ was immolated," the mys_tery of the Redemption of the world, the mystery.of the highest glorification of the Father.~"And they were filled with wonder and astonished at what had taken place" (Ac 3:10). The sublime moment of the consecration is drawing near.,In union with the whole bgdy of the Society,0identified with Christ, I hold the host in my hands and pronounce the words "This is my body"--my body, that of Christ; "This is thecup of my blood'--a solemn moment which can be noted only in awesome silence. ~ Christ converts the bread into his body and the wine into his blood, but the one pron.ouncing the sacramental words is I! This identification with him is such that I caia'say, "This is my bod~,,'-' but it is Christ's body! My inner self, is all ablaze--as if I felt the Heart of Christ beating instead of mine, or within ¯ mine! As though his blood was coursing through my veins at the moment of consecration! ~The mystical, sacramental separation of the body and blood of Christ is a reality and a symbol, but he who receives the body receives the whole Christ and he who receives the blood receives the whole as well. The redemption of the world was thus accomplished: incarnation, death, paschal mystery, ~salvation. All this is repeated at this moment in my hands. _I remain "filled with astonishment," yet "I believe, Lord,~help my unbelief (Mk 9:24). Christ in my. hands! The Lamb that takes away the sins of the world is not on the "highest throne" of the Apocalypse, but in my hands, as bread under the sacramental species I believe! At the moment of consecration the perfect glorification of the Father takes place. This will soon be exp,ressed in the doxology: "Through Christ, with him, and in him, in the unity of, the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor~is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever." . At this solemn moment I pause a while "in order to reflect and ponder upon what presents itself to ~mY mind (SpEx 53). How does the world appear from this altar? How does Jesus Christ see it? In order to understand this I mus.t enlarge my hear~ to world proportions. Like the Heart of Christ, the heart of the body of the whole Society must be enlarged, and with it the heart of each one of us. Ours must be a heart that embracesall men without exception, as did the Heart of Christ "who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tm 2:4), so that finally "there shall be one flock, one shepherd" (J~n 10:16). From this altar, between heaven and earth, one gets a better vision and 338 / Review for Religion, May-June, 1985 understanding of the needs,of men and women in the ~,ast ~vorld;:one sees and ¯ unders.tands, now in a new light, the impoi't of that universal'mission: "Go into all the world and preachthe Gospel to the whole of creation" (Mk 16:15), I. personallyfeel myself, as it were; hurled into the world, hnd withi!me the whole Society sent to the wide ,world. Thisqs its target, its~allotted tfisk, until it return again to g!orify the Lord; once the'battle-'for tile kingdom is won. " My ears keep ringing with those reassuring statements:'~"I ~send~ you"~ (Jn 20:21), and "I am with you.always" (Mt 28:20). These words fill ourhearts:. with donfidenc~, My incomparable:companion is Christ'himself; wh6 is pregent not only on this altar but within 'me, filling me with his divinity, and he: sends me to those Who'did not receive him (see Jfi 1:11). 'My response can 6n13~ be: "Lord; whai would you have meto do?" (Ac 9:6),'~and "What ought I t0do f6r Christ?" (SpEx 53). '" :~:- "~ ~ The body of the Sbciety;" in its full awareness of being sent and°strengthened with the power of God, feels rejuvenated and full of vigor and zest; it feels the blood' ~fChrist coursing through its veins, and the fullfiess of thi~ Spirii of Christ pbs~essing its~ve~y being, as if propelled by the rush of a'mighty wind (see Ac 2:2). ~Who.~vill be able to withstand this Society if it faithfullyfollows the line of mission pointed out to it by the Lord?The Societyknows~thai~the life of its members is:that of "men crucified to .theworld and to :'wh6m-the world is crucified" (see Ga 6:14), and that no one will be able to withstahd "the~ wisdom and the Spirit who speaks" in such men (~ee Ac 6:10), nor r~gist their Voice (Jdt 16:14): ~- , ~ The Our Father . ' The Father bfthe Society: all sons of the same Father, of the Father:who, at La Stortia, asked:the Son, loaded with the cross; to receive l~natiti~ as his servant, thereby confirming the name'of "Society°of Jesus.-': The Our Fathe'rqs the perfect pra3~er'for the individual and for the commufiity. "- Who are in heaven: A Jesuit must always look'hehvenwards. There is ,his Father and his fatherland. Our entire life is for. the kingdom. " ", 'You'r kingdom dome: All our labors would be of no avail without the di~ihe help in establiShing this kingdom. The whole Society asks for this grace.most earnestly because it knows that the success of all its undertakings hinges on the answer to this°farayer. Your Will lie done: We must cooperate with the divine will--for Wliiehit is necessary that we know it. ~ Give us, Lord, tlib sense of true discernment for knowing'at every moment what your will for Ug is. 'Keep on enlightening us to find ~our will, and~iving us the strengtli.~o fulfill it. ~ The Society's on13~ goal is the carrying'out of your will--your wilFmani-fest~ d in various ways; but especially through obedience. My responsibility, as Superior General of the Society, is very great,indeed. "To him all auihpHtyis given ad aedifica?idnem (for building up)!" (see Const 736). Your will'b~ done: The Mass in "My Cathedral"/' 339 may ,I never be an obstacle; may I never disfigure, misrepresent, or mistake your will for the Society. It is very painful to think that this might happen. Keep me faithful to your teaching, and ''never let me be parted from you" (the ,prayer°before Communion). ~ ~ . o I onside.r this to be a most necqssary grace. Therefore, bowing before the paten which holds your Body, I repeat this prayer again and again: Death a thousand times rather than to be separated from you! "As the Lord lives. wherever my lord the king shall be, whether for death or for life, there als0 will your servant be" (2 S 15:21)~ ~ With my eyes fixed on the consecrated Host; I present it to the brother who accompanies me in the celebration, and who takes the place.rof all the Jesuitk--just as with the first disciples who,saw Jesus when John the Baptist drew their attention to him. There they saw a man; here we see only a piece of bread. This is an act of true faith: believing against what we see. The act of faith in the Eucharist is indeed "a hard saying; who dan listen to it?" (Jn 6:60). No; Lord, faith in the, Eucharistic, Mysteryis not hard. It is rather a source of immense joy: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words ofete rnal life" (Jn 6:68). I believe! "Lord, I am not Worthy, but only say the word and I shall be healed" (see Mt 8:8), just as you ,healed the centurion's servant. The Society believes that you are~Lord; and wants to. shelter ~you under its roof: in our houses, in our churches in which we want to visit you and contribute to your glorification and cult.'~And.especially the Society wantsto sbelt~i~ you in the hearts of each one .~f us, and .in the tabernacles of each community, where they will-keep,.you .company and seek from you light, comfort and strength to carry out the mission you have entrusted to them. ~ ,, Enter, Lord, under the roof of your ~Society. We need you. There are so °many crises of faith, so mhny sophisticated'interpretations parading as scientifi-cally theological! At times even Christian piety is made light of, as though ,.these manifestations of solid and.~ lgnatian faith were antiquated superstitions. "Anti, my soul shall be saved:,~ Lord, do,not permit the Society,to.yield in this matter, or degenerate from ~what St. Ignatius wanted it to be. Eooking fixedly at thi~ white.Host, I fall on my knees; and 27,000 Jesuits° kneel with me, saying, with the Apostle Thomas; from the bottom of my soul, ~and with .unswerving faith: "My Lord and my God" (Jn 20:28). May the Body of Christ Bring Me to Everlasting Life Lord, keep the whole Society; keep me especially, since you have given me this office of such great responsibility. Communitarian communion; identifica-tion with Christ; a food that is not transformed but transforms. Body of the Society "Christified'--all united and converted into Christ himself. What bet-ter "union of hearts"! (Const) 655). "For me to live is Christ'~ (Ph l:21), now more than .ever. How well Nadal's observations fit in here! "Accept and diligently exercise 340 / Ri~view for Religious, May-June, 1985 the union wherewith the Spirit of the Lord favors you regarding Christ and his powers. Thus you may come to perceive in your soul that you understand through his intellect, will by his will, remember through his memory, and that your entire self, your existence, your life and your actions are realized, not .in you, but in Christ. This is the highest .perfection in this life: power divine, happiness beyond compare" (Nadal, MHSI, Orationis Observationes~ n. 308, p. 122). With this identification of the Society and of each member of the Society with Christ, our aposto!ic activity and our help to souls will gain in efficacity. Our words will be those of Christ who knows which is the suitable word at every moment. Our-plans and manner of apostolate will be precisely those with which th~ Lord will inspire us, which cannot fail to be fruitful--a "Society of Jesus," truly of Jesus, one with him. The Blessing of Almighty God How consoling and moving for me, as identified with Christ, to impart the .blessing, his blessing, to the universal Society, a blessing which cannot fail to be efficacious. This blessing goes to you, workers of the Lord's vineyard, scattered throughout the world and beset with so many difficulties: to you, who are bound to the bed of suffering by pain and infirmity, who offer~ your prayers and afflictions for souls, and for the Church and the Society; to you superiors, who bear a heavy responsibility, and have been entrusted with a task not easy in the present time; to you who are in charge of the formation of our young Jesuits, who are shaping the Society of tomorrow; to you coadjutor brothers, who, in a decisive movement of our history are going through a:profound transformation, and ~who are serving the Church and the Society with so much dedication and selflessness; to you young scholastics and novices~in whom necessarily rests.the hope of the Society for the future, in which 0yot~°ought to be men dedicated to the Church and to souls, in the ,Society deeply, imbued with the .spirit of St. Ignatius; to you very especially, who live in countries deprived of true feedom, who need to feel that the Society is very near to you and values your difficult ministry and testimony; to all of you in the furthermost corners of the world, in the most hidden rooms in our houses, in th~ remotest stations in the jungle. May the blessing of Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit descend upon you and remain with you always. The Mass in my cathedral is ended. "Go and set the world on fire!" Vocation: Where Gladness Meets Hunger J. Peter Sartain Father Sartain. ordained four years ago, is presently Director of Vocations for the Diocese of Memphis. He may be addressed at the diocesan offices: 1325 Jefferson Ave.; P.O. Box 41679; Memphis, TN 38104-1679. For the past three years I have vacationed with Mike, a friend from seminary days and a priest of another diocese. Inevitably our vacation conversations have turned to the subject of vocation: how~ we had both .discovered the importance :of staying in touch with the roots of our vocations meaning not simply that we felt called to be diocesan priests, but on a more profound .level, that we felt called' at all. We know each other well en6ugh ~o confront~and challenge each other as we discuss possible directions~for our ministry in living out our call. At times we would speak of specific hopes and dreams, our clearest p~ayerful perceptions of our call. Thus it was~that Mike told me he had a deep desire to live a simple lifestyle in community, to Work with the very po6r, and to have some experience ¯ of the desert. In the months that followed this conversatiofi we corresponded about his efforts to start a Catholic Worker community in'his diocese. Event~- ally those efforts,proved unfruitful~ or at. least ill-timed. That was little more than a year ago. F0i'4he past ten months Mike's letters have been postmarked "Zimbabwe," where he was sent with a team from his diocese:to inaugurate a mission. The mov,e happened very fast, but ~e both knew it was right. Not long ago Mike wrote that he realizes his new.ministry is just what he had hoped for--he shares the poverty of those he serves, Who are among the poorest of the, pbor; and the "desert" within is fed by the desert without: his territory has not~een rain in more than two yearS. It.is a difficult mission, and 341 ~42 / Review for Religious, ~May-June, 1985 the transition has not been without its struggles, ~ ~ My friendship with Mike, our sharing with one another the movement of God within us and our pra~,erful support of each other have taught me a great deal about my call and about "vocation" in general. In this article'I will reflect on an understanding of vocation which has proved helpful for me and those to whom I minister as Director of Vocations for my diocese. I do not propose to address every aspect of a complete theology of 9ocation but to offer a frame-work which may help contextualize one's understanding of his or her call to service in the Church. Gladness and Hunger In Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC Frederick Buechner proposes an insightful definition of vocation: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."1 -From the moment I read it this definition struck deep chords within me, for it resonated with my experience of myself and of the Gospel. God calls each one of us to authentic happiness and to service; and these two dimensions of God's call meet in an honest and prayerful search fortruth~ ~ Discovering Our Deep Gladness If anyone wisbes to come after reel he must deny his very self, take up his cross, and begin to follow in my footsteps. Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life,for my .sake will find 4t (Mt 16:24-25). ~ . Jesus" challenge of self-denial has always intrigued me as.I have,sought to deepen my. response to. his invitation to "come after me." Teilhard d~ Chardin . . . lays ddwn two ~ospel imperatives, self-developnient and " renunciation. The first call of'the Gospel, he says, is'to utilize our talents, develop our, " gifts, and construct our human life. Only then does the call to total ab_negatio_n make sense. We are called to renounce everything and give our life to,,tally back to Ggd. But we must first possess ihat life in~ order to give it away3 At the center of each Christian vocation is an on-going call to know oneself. No response to God's call can be immediately whol#, in the sense that none of us is totally in touch with our_ livesat any one point in. time, especially in the. early, stages ofoformation. One who ~senses a call from God, then, ~ begins a life-long process,of gaining self-knowledge. I believe this search for'self-knowl-edge, when seen in the light,of the search for God and a lovefor God's creation, becomes~a,search for one's "deep gladness~? Authentic happiness lies not in doing what makes me happy but~in being f~ully whorl,am--learning the truth about myself and living it for God and his people, ~possessing" my life so that I can give it back to God. This search can, take place~ authentically only in the context of prayer. "l:hose who pray are inviting the Spirit into their lives; and those who invite the Spirit into their lives are inviting the truth--about God, about themselves and. about the world around them . . Vocation: Where Gladness Meets Hunger The. Fear .and Freedom of Truth There can"exist simultaneously within us a deeply curious,ahd burning need to know ourselves and a consuming fear about what we will find within. ffhere can be~the suspicion that~ what we will find will be unacceptable, or unlovable, or at least something other than that for which w6 had hoped. Nevei'theless,o;the Christian who, genuinely struggles0to follow the Lord will cbme~face-.to~face ,with truth. Living~the Gospel means learning the truth, for as we seek to enflesh the words of Jesus, the Word of Truth enlightens us. If you live according tb my teaching, you are ii'uly my disciples; th'en yo~ will know the ~itruth, and the truth will set you free (Jn 8:31-32). ~° ' Jesus ~ys, "The truth will set y0ia free." Jesus the Truth liberates; it'is lies which enslave. We do not have to look far to see that lies really do ensla e: ~t is the lie that says: "All people are not fundamentally equal" which perpetuates policies and practices of discrimination across the gl6be; it° is theqie that sa~,s: "Unlimited possessions are my due" which causes half the world to go to bed hungry each night; it is the lie that says: "Deep within each of i~s there is some unspeakable ugliness" which can keep us frotri being-freed~-by the ~truth. Lies en~lave, the trtlth sets fre~; and one cannot come to a saving encounter with Trtith 0with0~it facing the truth about-oneself. ~ The"call to~cbnversi~)n can be wrongly interpreted as a call to becoming 's~)ihething I am not, as tho, ugh, somehow, my 'natural condition as God's child. include"~ "unacceptability." But con~,ersion does not m~an becoming acceptabl~ to Gbd. This misapprehension can'be abetted by a pervasive but distorted view 6f the~ human person which carries tile body/soi~l dichotohay to the ultimate degree. Then it is that I become c0n~inced that my body is the worldly/sehZ "~tial/sinful 15art of my existence, and my soul is~the othei'~-worldly/spiritual/i'e-deemable part. Such a view of the human person ~ould only' lead to an unhealthy spiritual dualism which pretends' that only "good" tho~Jghts and "positive" feelings are "worthy" of Gbd; "bad" thoughts and'"negaiive" feelings are therefore to be avoided, even denied at all costs sinc~they originate in the d~irkness of that'"~)ther" part of my being, the part of me which God tolerates but does not cherish. SuCh dis~tortions militateagainst any substantial growth toward wholeness, and th~ Christians who are enslaved 6y them will meet continually with frus-tration' as~ they~find that their "unspiritual" bodies arid "worldly~ thought~ s~mply will not go away. For them, the search for triJ~ih will be a frighte~ng enterpri~; a journey into an unfriefidly and ungodly void. " ~ F6~tUh~tel~, G~Sd does not have designs solely on,our souls. P~ul mak6s this clear in the closing blessing o~" his letter to the Th~ssalonians: May the God of peace make you perfect in holiness. May he preserve you whole and entire, sprat', soul,'and body, ~rreproachable at the coming of our Lord Jesus Chris. He who calls us is trustworthy, therefore he will do it (! Th 5:23-24). For the true disciple of Je'sus conversion rather mean~ transformation in :344 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985' Christ; it embraces a new way of liying in love. Conversion does not mean denying who I am, but acknowledging thar.I am not whole without Jesus, and accepting the wholeness he wishes to bestow on me. Moreover, conversion involves, being fully who I am--holy and unholy--in.Jesus, and discovering in prayer and life with others that only in confronting the truth about myself and holding that,truth up to the light of the Gospel will I be truly free and "deeply glad." The full truth is that I am the sinner redeemed, the enslaved set free, the beloved called t6 love. For ma~y people coming to that full truth is not easy. For them truth is something to be feared, not embraced. ,~They are frighten.ed by the nagging suspicion that at the center of their hearts and heads there is really s0m~eone wh~ is~unattracfive and abnormal, someone certainly not called by God. They are haunted by the~ fear that at the center of their lives there is no "deep gladness," but only a painful sadness. The Fruit of.~Honesty The fear of truth is played out jn a number of w.ays in.houses of formation. It can be manifested in anger, defensiveness, a purely passive submissiveness to authority, and everything in between. Formation ministers, then, r~ust be honest people people so in tune with the freedom of truth that they create an environment which values and demands~b, onesty in every forum. In evaluating ~ndidates they must speak the truth gently but directly~ realizing that any-thing but.clarity is useless and potentig!ly even harmful. They must make evident in themselves the sine qua non, that one must be honest in prayer, spiritual direction, ministry,friendship and self-evaluation; that avoiding the-risk involved in revealin.g oneself to another means avoiding growth, avoidihg a liberating and truth-filled gladness. It goes w, ithout saying that professional counseling~-and the opl~ortunity to inte~rate~ it with spiritual direction--should be readily available for those ministers whrwish to avail themselves of it. To avoid the truth about oneself is to feel, hu.nger yet refuse food. The Church needs ministers who want t~ face the truth. . In writing just now of coming to know oneself I have not mentioned the obvious that the Perso~n who really knows him or herself wil),hapl~ily dis-cover that they really do possess even ~unused talent and untapped potential. I have seen many extremely talented peo~ple--people whose i~bility was widely known and often praised who neverthel'ess were deeply unhappy. They were blind to their talent because they were convinced that the truth about thehaselves was not acceptable. Th~y'~oncluded that any praise directed to them was given only out of sympathy or out of "Christian charity." Often they busied them-selves 'doing too ma~y. things, and their hyper-activit~, ~left~them tir, ed~ and unfulfilled--and sad. Our talents will remain untapped and any use of them apologetic until we discover deep within us ~he uncompromised and joyful love of God. We Vocation: Where Gladness Meets Hunger / 345 ca, nnot discover that love until we seek, with the help of Others, ,to know ourselves honestly. And we cannot hope to know ourselves unless we pray, inviting the Spirit of Truth to abide in us. Henri Nouwen has written: Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare show our wounds; on|y with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. As we come to realize that it is not we who ¯ live, but Christ who lives in us, that he is our true self, we can slowly let our compulsions melt a~way and begin to experience the freedom of the children of God.a "Deep.gladness~ comes with the incredible revelation that Christ is our true self and that he calls us from within. Our~deep gladness resides foundationally in kno.wing the truth about our-selves and discovering in that truth the overwhelming love and acceptance of God. The truth frees us from the lies which enslave us and enables us to use our talents Confidently and generously. It causes us to boa~st in the weakness which i~ntensifies ou~r hunger for.God. It teaches us tooffer totally to God what we know to be ourselves. And it liberates .us to see clearly the hungers of the world and to minister to those hungers with a burning gladness. A Hungry World ' I sometimes feel uneasy around the poor, partly because they unwittingly remind me. of my comfortable lifestyle and partly because they challenge me to live a life of true justice. An experience during my seminary~days in-Rome had a profound effect on me in this regard. On the feast of the Epiphany I had gone with a group of seminarians to St. Peter's Basilica for the celebration of the Eucharist at which the pope would be presiding. Halfway through the Mass a friend ~became oill and had tO return tothe seminary;I decided to a.ccompanyohim. Shortly after leaving tl~e basilica we noticed a small, shabbily-dressed woman following us; she appeared to be one of the many poor who live on the streets of Rome, At first we paid little notice, but'~Padually sh6 drewl.up tb within a few feet of us. We assumed that she was going to ask for money, burmuch to our surprise she simply inquired of my friend, ''What's wrong with you?" When he explained that he was not feeling well she took us both by the arm and led us hurriedly to a nearby bar. She ordered two glasses of hot milk into which she stirred several 'teaspoonsful of sugar, and~ three large cream-filled pastries (one for herself). Now we assumed we would be asked to~.~pick up the tab, but tb our total amazement she paid for everything. After admonishing us for not taking better care ofourselves'she told us to eat and drink up.~Then she said she had to be off to Mass because it was a feastday. We never saw her again. That little Italian woman taught"me as much about love as anyone I can remember; she spontaneously and joyfully nourished a hunger I did not know i had: the need to learn to love spontaneously and without conditions. Mother Teresa of Calcutta has written: "In heaven we will all be surprised to find how our poor have helped us to become Christ-like in love and compas- 3~16 / Review f or Religious, May,June, 1985 sion.,4 On that Epiphany l~witiaessed a simple, Christ-like love, and I learned something more about my vocation. ,4 New Vision Self-knowledge is the foundation of the spiritual life; but that is not to say that spirituality is merely a gutsy, prayer-laden introspection whose purpose is to help one feel good about oneself. Prayer itself is suppos~ed to be a two-way street, l seek to know myself that I might possess the life I am giving back to God; I pray that I might know the God to whom I am giving myself; through prayer and self-kngwledge I allow God to open my eyes to the hungers -bf his people~ and hear Jesus' call: "Feed my lambs." The progression, then, is circular: living the Gospel helps one know the liberating truth about God, self and others~ and the.resulting free, dom allows one to learri how t~ live the Gospel more frilly. Nouwen has rightly observed that in ministry one makes visible~vhat is seen in contemplation: "The contemplative life'is a life witha vision, and'~the. life of ministry is a life iri Which this vision is revealed to others."5 Through prayer the eyes and heart of the believer~are gradually transformed into the eyes and heart of the Lord; and having acquired this new vision the beli6ver makes it palpable in life and ministry. Having seen with God's eyes "the hung~e~ of God's people, the Christian senses~a call to'attend those hungers-:-because-iri the faces of the "hungry" is seen the face of Jesus himself. Letting the Lord shap~ our vision or better, 'cure our~blindne~s is a gi~adual process and an important l~art of ~onversion. I'think of the story of the blind man at¯ Bethsaida: , ¯ When they ~irrived at B~thsaida, some people brought him a blind man and I~egged him to touch him. Jesus to6k~the blind man's hanOI and led him outside the .village. Putting spittle in his eyes he laid his hands on him and asked. "Can you see anythingT~The man opened his eyes and said~ ~I can see people but they look like walking trees!" Then a second time Jesus laid hands on his eyes, and he saw peff~ectly; his sight was restored and '~e could see ever3~hing clearly (Mk 8:22-25). Mark .uses this story to illustrate that the disciples~of Jesus only gradually open their eyes~ to ,see ,things as he sees them, just as the blind man 0nly gradually received his sight through repeated contact with Jesus . ,At its heart, conversion means,allowing the Lord to shape our vision through prayer and a~truth-seeking.meditation on his word, and then respond-ing to what we.see. A ~'~ne~w vision" does not mean that things external to us have changed, but that we see things in a new~ and proper light. In ,his poem "Journey of the Magi" T. S. Eliot presents the retrospect of one of the astrol-. ogers who had traveled to Bethlehem to see~the Christ-child; what he had ~een changed and unsettled him: ,~ o, All this fffis a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all float way fo'r Vocation: Where ,Gladness ,Meets Hunger /347 "'~irth or Death? There was a Birth, cei~inly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, ' " ¯ . But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our deatl~.' We returned to" our places, ,these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here~ in the old dispensatiofi, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.6 Thevision of Jesus is an unsettling vision, a vision marked by an active ' impatiqnce and a passionat~ dissatisfaction with,r,tbecondition of the worl, d~It is a vision which abhors indifference and is ariimated by hope. It is a vision which can s!ngle out the individual in the nameless~ suffe~ring crowd, and embrace an entire people, having seen one h~urti~g face. It is a vision of compS|ling truth and compassionate l~'e. Our Vocati6n in Jesus It iS precisely~in ~he unsettli.ng ambiguity of a vision which is hopefu~l in the face of hunger that we sense our vocation. Here it is that we hear the Lord telling us to transform our impatience and disSatiSfaction inio active love, as he has done before us. Here we begin to know that it would make us "deeply happy to respond m the name of God to the hunger~ we see. Here we realize that our vocation is, m fact, the vocation of Jesus himself. Ifi the synagogue at Nazareth Jesus revealed his vocation through a passage from the pr.oph~y of Isaiah: The,Spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring gl~d tidings to th~ poor, to proclaim liberty to ¢hptives, Recovery of sight to the blind ." and release to pnsoners, ~ - ,,. .To announce the year of favor from the Lord (Lk 4:18-19)~, Having been~anointed with the Spirit of Truth, Jesus'finnounced that his vocation was to bring glad tidings to the poor and hungry, freedom to the enslaved, and new vision to the blind. He lived his vocation, and he calls others to do likewise.~. ' '~ Christians discerning their vocaiions must be attentive to the signs of the ¯ times with the sabne.prayerful passion with which'they seek to know themselves. They must be students of culture and current events as well as theology, and they' must strive for a, sense' of compassion which, is world-wide in its scope. God's love ki~ov~s noclass distinctions or' national boundaries. Vocation ministers have a responsibility to challenge those in'formation to understand the prophetic nature of the Gospel, and t~o reject as !nadequate any view of ministry which seeks tl~e salvation of the soul but not of 1he whole person or of society. The attention given to the Church's social teachings today helps candidates for ministry understand the un-evangelized condition of the 348,/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 world and the perspective wh!ch is offered to that situation by.the Gospel. Our ~social tradition does not offer specific solutions to every social problem, how-ever, nor should it. Candidates, then, should be given tools to evaluate for themselves what tfiey see around them in light of the Good News. I have learned the most ih life not from people who taught me what they thought, but from people who taught rn'e how to tl~ink. Ministers who have been given tools to think for themselves will be not only more self-confident but ultimately more effective. Like the Beadle Moch~ in Elie Wiesel's Night they will learn tO"pray to the God within me that he will give me the strength to ask him the.right qtiestidns."7 If I value the freedom of truth I will respect the freedom of others." Hunger is not only global and physical, nor is it found only in tenements or on street corners; it is als0 fotihd in the Church. A friend recently.told me that one reason he is considering the priesthoodis because he sees a c.rying n~ed for strengthening communities of faith on the parish level. As a professional.in his early 30s he knows how difficult it is to find support for Gospel values in the marketplace, and his experience of parish life has not always given him or his peers the community support and insight needed for applying the Gospel to everyday life. As he strives to be a better Christian he is often struck by the success of other Christian denominations in formihg communiiies of ~uppon and e~an-gelization. He sees the pri.est ~s a ledder of the faith cbmmunity and recognizes his own talent foi" leading, communicating and creating community. He is asking whether for him priesthood might be the place wherehis gladness and a real hunger meet. The hungers of the world are as many and varied as our gifts. The specificity of one's vocation will emerge as self-understanding and self-love grow into an appreciation of what one has to offer God's people. Truth will meet truth in prayer when self-knowledge comes face-to-face with a cldar, unsettling, inviting vision of the hungers of the world. And that truth will be enlightened by the confident hope won for us in the paschal,mission of Jesus. "What Is Needed Is Trust" Another fruit of prayer and the Christian life is trust. Trust enables us to remember God's deeds on our behalf and gives us confidence that he will care for us now as he has in the past. It enables us to take steps which otherwise we ~would be terrified to take---especially when a vocational~choice confronts us. Answering God's call.means choosing to love in whatever way.love is needed-- it does not mean choosing a new job; and trust in God is needed in order to say "yes" to such an unclea r future. In one of Mike's recent letters he was reflecting on our ministries, his in a mission in Zimbabwe and mine in vocations and personnel work in Memphis. He wrote: Both of us planning and preparing to be parish priests now end up in ministries we each would never have dreamed of and would have run full tilt from if we'd gotten wind of it~ Vocation:~ tVhere Gladness Meets Hunger / 349 before ordination. Maybe that's why Jesus said "Today has enough troubles of its own"---what is left out in that verse is ~lf you knew the troubles of tomorrow you'd be scared to death." Funny they 'don't print t, hat stuff in the Bible. Must They Look for Another? Captive in Herod's prison John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus to ask him a question which both scandalizes and indicts us: "Are you 'He who is to come' or do we look for another?" (Mt 11:3). Jesus responds by pointing out the x;ocation he is fulfilling: Go back and report to John what you hear and see: the blind recover their sight, cripples walk, lepers are cured, the deaf hear, dead men are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them (Mt I 1:4-5). The Baptist's question is asked today in countless languages and is born of countless hungers. Jesus responded in his day by, telling John to see in his ministry the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. In our day we can hear our vocation in the question. The Spirit of Truth °helps us discover our deep gladness in sharing the victory of Jesus with God's hungry.world as only each of us can do. NOTES I Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A TheOlogical ABC (New York:. Harper &' Row. Pub-lishers, 1973), p. 95. ~Ernest E. lmrkin~ O. Carm., Silent Presence: Discernment as Process and Problem (Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books Inc., 1981), p, 13. ~Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981), p. 30. 4Mother Teresa in a letter to a group sponsonng a~ fund-raising activity on behalf of her ministry. ~Henri J.M. Nouwen, Clowning in Rome (Garder~ City, New York: Image Books, 1979), p. 88. 0T. S.'Eliot, "Journey of the Magi." in T. S. Eliot~."~ Se'lected Poems (Near York: Harcourt~ Brace &" World, Inc., 1964), pp. 98. 7Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, oi982), p. 3. Mary:= Our Encouragement in Christ Donald Macdonald,= S:M.M. FAther Macdonald'is~vdil kno~,n to our readers. His=How It Strikes a ContemlJomry" appeared. in the January/February issu~ of ifiis yeai. He may .be addressed at St. Joseph's;,Wellington Road; Todmorden, Lanc,; OLI4 5HP; England. ,, Whatever the origin of the phrase "When the disciple is ready the teacher will appear," it seems to be universally valid. If ! am not using the bread and butter which is immediately at hand, I need not expect nourishment from richer more ex~)tic food to be found elsewhere. It will prove indigestible to a starved or weakened system. Equally, having used whatever is available I am perhaps ready for more_substantial fare. Saint Paul ~aid as much centuries ago: "l fed you with milk not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready" (1 Co 3:2). The variety of retreats, seminars, courses on offer to-religious today worldwide can illustrate this. Some go to them looking for what they cannot properly give. Not all take as mui:h as they had hoped back to their everyday lives. By the~ same token it is not unfair t'o say that not all of those offering guidance on these courses are qualified to do ~so. Academically they may be ¯ competent and their teaching technique'acceptable, but, presumably, what the Christian enquirer is looking for is more than a combination:of these two skills. One need scarcely go to a Christian institute for that. This is in no way to denigrate the academic, but to suggest that it may not be enough to throw light on the meaning of Christian existence. To restrict the guidance to that level may be to largely miss the point. With so many voices competing for the religious' time and attention how is one to choose? How best use what may be on offer? In the light of the opening sentence it might be practical to heed its-implicit warning. Rather than first scan the brochures and programs with a view to finding light and encourage-ment elsewhere, why not ask oneself.how one is using the resources of one's 350 Mary: Oub Encouragement in Christ own neighborhood? Supposing I choose to go on a course in a twelvemonth from.now, how can I be sure that I am today making best use of what my ordinary environ-ment offers? This would be a.genuinely worthwhile preparation for wheat is. to come. We are open to so very many influences, from the prophets and evange-lists to the anonymous advertiser and third-rate magazine. What other people think can be a dominant influence, none the less powerful for being much of the timeun.~recognized. Is there, therefore, a Christian influence for good in my local area that I-have not tapped and, maybe, ignored? Undoubtedly; there may be several, but I wish to suggest that, unfortunately, perhaps Our Lady may be such for some of us. This is regrettable as "Mary. is. clearly a teacher of the spiritual life for individual Christians."~ A Guide Must See For anyone to,offer guidance presumablyone ~nust see ~A light speaks i'or itself. Arguably one reason for the lack of vocation and commitment among some re!igious is that they, do not see. "As our Congregation is now I,would not encourage anyone to join," is a remark widely heard: A sister at-a gathering of religious,was struck by the sad, tired, almost featureless faces of so many. She thought,of~her.mother and sister who had,lived particularly hard lives, yet seemed,,younger and more alive than her.religious sisters about her.Within such a context~it is unrealistic to call people to follow when self-evidently they do not see the way: "If the tru~mpet gives an.uncertain note, who will get ready for battle?" (1 Co 14:8). ~ There is a degree of insecurity in all of us. The~best of us has but partial vision, "for we walk by faith not by sight~ (2 Co. 5:7). It is all the more encouraging therefore to live in the company of a woman who has known the ¯ fearful insecurity that day-to-da~ life can present, and within that situation,has seen God. "Blessed are the pure of heart ,for they shall see God", (Mt .5:8). Our Lady, immaculate from the moment .of her conception has, therefore, never been coarsened by sin, and has been given in full measure the blessing of seeing God. Her heart was a sheer capacity to receive whatever God would give her: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you., for he who is mighty.has done great things for me" (Lk 1:28, 49). She is thus alert and alive to God ~eyond anything we can understand. So full of the Holy Spirit, that the Word of God once taken root in her heart became enflesl~ed in her body, so that "the child to be born will be called holy, the Son ofGo'd" (Lk 1:35). No creature has ever assimilated the Word of God so complete!y "a.s the Holy Mother of God and the worthy Associate of the Redeemer."2 In other words, "God who had special!y, chos~n~me ~vhil~ still in my m~ther's v~omb, called, me through his ~race hnd chose to reveal hi~'Son in me" (Ga 1:15). If those words ar,,6 true of aul whht d~ they say of Mary? Her entire person is "clothed i~God'i ~hb, i,n her case especially, has taken every thought . . . prisoner, captured to be brought into obedience to Christ" (2 Co 10:5). So, at one with the will of God 352/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 that she is instrumental, in the providence of God, in bringing into~the world a .neck creation in her Son: "For anyone who is in Christ ther~ is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God's work" (2 C,o 5:17). She is'the mother of God, a new creation in Christ. Following the biblical tradition, one so pure must see so Clearly. It is God's Spirit who enlightens."The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will Overshadow you" (Lk 1:35), says it all, Her eyesight she shares with most of us. Her insight isa giftfrom God. The unutterable, andin her case, unfettered holiness of God is so present to her, "that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit Within you which you' .have from God. You are not your bwn" (1 Co 6:19). So the Spirit generates the capacity~to See God every-where in a sacramental world, from the joyful expectation of the ~birth-of her Son, to standing crucified with him on Calvary. To see is, therefore, not necessarily to understand, butto b-eliex~e whole-heartedly arid commit oneself totally to God present in every circumstance, so "that I might live to God, I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I wh6 live;~but Christ Who lives in me; and the life Inow live in the flesh I lix~e by ;faith in the Son of God who lo~ed me and gave himself for me" (Ga 2:19-20). Once true of St. Paul, how much more of Our Lady? Her humanity really earths her among us ~s her faith, and so her insight, finds her blessed among us all. She believed, entrusted God with the gift of herself--"Lo me, God's hand: mayd~'---in the lovelywords of Julian of Norwich's translation which seem to express the. courage in vulnerability of every young person with life before them.3 The result is a person wholly "dead to sin and alive,to God in Christ Jesus" (Rm 6:11~). As such, she will leave an enduring mark on the human race, representing light for so~ many as over the centuries "deVotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is an indication of the 'Church's genuine piety., because it takes its,origin and effectiveness from Christ~ finds its complete e~pression in Christ, and leads'through Christ in the Spirit to the Father.TM Much of this is beautifully focused in Psalm 131. She,might have sat for the portrait,~ ~ O Lord'my heart is not proud nor haughty my eyes. ~ I have not gone after things too great ',n,or marvels beyond me.~ Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace. As a child has rest in its mother's arms, :even so is my soul. " This is the mind of one ~ho sees. Thei~e is no~ a :superfluo~s .word. Eve'ry-thin~ per~pheraihas been stripped away leaving a faith which is'real without b~i~ig"~m~talli~:. MuCh (hat th~ world might ~c~ffei" has been seen and seen through. There is no ~uggestion' bf fear of life, ri~the~ its 'acceptance. :~'Hae 'po~t fiyes life,, takes his stahc~ ~th~n it, not escaping from it. Silence and peace are both powerful and positive possessions'~sugg~ting Mary: Our Encouragement in Christ'/ ~great assurance--in the poet's cage, in God'. His faith is such that it best expresses itself in the child asleep in his mother's arms, the symbol offserenity and trust~ We will never know the price thepsalmist paid for such faith, but the image he presents unmistakably reflects the genuine article. This is why it can speak to us of Our Lady. It is the single gaze of one who looks oh life,from within the vantage point of faith in God, in h~er case, "because God by calling you has joined you to his Son Jestis Christ; and God is faithful" (1 Cb 1:9). Here is the"un~hanging core of changing circumstances: The, religirus looking for a guide to Christian living could' gain much if willing to open themselves to such~agaze "an immense reservoir of silence and pe~ice tested b~y life. The Blessed Virgin Mary offers a calm vision and a reassuring word to modern man."5 This comes from the heart of existence, as Christian reality would have us see that "you are the body of Christ and individually, members 6f it. If bne member suffers, all suffer togethei'; if one member is honored all rejoice together" (1 Co 12:26-27). Remarkably; both Our Lady and the individual religious are "neither male nor,female; for you all one in Christ Jesus" (Ga 4:28). Whatever concerns one concerns the other, and prirticularly in Our Lady's case, the law of the body is lived to "owe no one anything except to love one another" (Rm 13:8). This governs the interchange between them, taki.ng nothing away from ~her preeminent place in the com-munion of saints."6 It isall of a unity as in a living body, yet neither loses their identity. The medium of exchange is knowledge and love heightened in grace, and nothing in human experience is more personal than that. - So the image of mother ~nd child, powerful in any culture, represents a genuine Christian reality. It needs only to be seen to be understood:~ ~and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother" (Mt 2:11). :~.'. "But standihg by the cross of Jesus [was] his mother" (Jn 19:25), one in flesh and spirit with her Son"at so many levels. ,, "In the Virgin Mary everything is relative to Christ and dependent upon him. 7 That same stance in Christ sh~ takes with us today--however life treats us: The compassionate mother, "so oned in love" ~'ith us in her Son, not least in our suffering and insecm'ity, can bring a depth' of realism to~ the present moment which can transform it in faith.8 Hilaire Belloc superbly expresses what many have seen when, incensed ata Protestant bishol5 ordering the removal from a church of a statue of "a female figure with a child," he felt impelled to respond: Prince Jes~s in mine agony Permit me, broken and defiled Through blurredand glazing eyes to see A female figure with a child. "Ballade of Illegal Ornaments" This is, of course, the prayer of one who sees one of the most comforting realities of the Catholic faith. The vision is from within the everyday Christian community. Belloc's singular poetic gift may express it, but it stems from his common Christian faith. Reality really is like that. There is a realism, purity, ~.354 /Rg.viewfor Religious, May-June, 1985 warmth and concern in the engagingyulnerability and strength of mother and cliild that can clarify the Christian °vision. H,~ere the religious ~n stay today, making grateful, explicit acknowledgme_nt in wooder, that "now the life you have is~hidden with Christ in God. ~.,.~ he is your life" (Col 3:3).,.It is a pr,esent reality not a future hope, seen solely by faith. It is su~,ely no footnote but must follow~ logically, that God having created suc.h a delightful person must-want her known and loved. Clea.rly she means everything to her Son, and whatever the human .race aspires to as all generations call her blessed,.it comes a poor sec0nd~ to how God has loved her in.~Christ. "He wills it to be known ,that all whodeligh(in him should delight in her too, with the same pleasure he has in her and she in him."9 In this instance the medieval~mys.tic only~articulates what the authentic Catholic voice has always known. ¯ G'~do."loved tier for his own sake andhe loved her for our sake too: he gave h~r to himself and he gave her also to us."~0 The disciple was only the first of many who having heard the.crucified Christ say "Behold your mother," from that instant takes her into his own home (see Jn 19:27). For so many she "can walk into the.heart without knocking," as Chesterton said of Doctor Johnson. A Guide Knows The Path An additio.nal, reason for deepening our awareness of the presence of Our Lady is that. because of her calm, God-centered gaze she can help us put together the pieces of a sometimes fragmented life. Part of the ~reason for atte_ndin.g courses and seminars is the hope of learning how to cope with the puzzling present. She, is an ,integral, if ancillary, part of "God in Christ. " reconciling the world, to himself"(2 Co 5:19). She can thus help us see Christ~, ~as~from his conceptiowto ascension and subsequently,,she is intrinsically part of his life, not some external charitable "meals on wheels'? servic~e. Some seem to,see M~ry as a distraction, almost a maverick, drawing attention away from what God has done for us in Christ. So, for example, a London based journalist once wrote of the visit of Pope Paul VI to Fatima,that this wasa clear sign that he should resign. By going there the pope showed that he was obviously afraid of, the contemporary.world and for the Church's place in it, and so he visited ,Fatima as a man might regress to childhood when the adult world becomes all but unbearable. , One did wonder at this opinion when newspapers carried reports oLa million or so people at Fatima at the same time as the Holy Father. One should, of course, be careful of countingheads, but it might ~have given the journalist pause, pontificating from a typewriter in London, exercising power without the responsibility which burdened the pope, to consider whether at least some of those pe0ple~saw something which he did not? "Devotion to the ~Mother of the Lord becomes for the,faithful an opportunity for~growing in divine~grace, and this is the ultimate aim of all pastoral activity."~ Another ,journalist, writing of the present pope's evident ttevotion of, Our Mary: Our Encouragement in Christ / .355 Lady, sees it as something specifically of the man, and not for the' ChUrch. It stems, the journalist"believes, from losing a sick mother when he was nine, -having no sisters, and the on the whole harmful influence of Saint ~Louis-Marie de Montfort'steaching, as well as the particular history of Poland/,Although Pope~ John Paul is a twentieth-century figure, because of~his backgroimd, and not"least the tragic history of Poland leaving such an individual ma'~k on his devotion to Our Lady, "the rest of us can only look on admiringly and wonderingly.''~2 Again, should one be surprised at the journalist writing~so confidently and patronizingly for "the rest of us," speaking presumably for the Christian Catholic world? It is just possible that the pope; too, carl assess the psychological, theological and national influences on himself at least as well as~ the journalist, and has come to a different conclusio~i. One might also consider that whatever influences produced such a twe~ntieth-century Christian man, might be welcomed in a cofitemporary Church suffering i~large part from loss of nerve. Journhlisti~ opinion,is legitimately free. It is un]'air to the'writbr and unwise of the reader to read it as Gospel. o One recalls thejou~rnalist G. K. Chesterton writing of Mary and thdconvert. He came across a rather garish image' of Our Lady in Italy when he wa~ hot yet ¯ a Catholic. "I never doubted that thig was the figure of the ~Faith; that she embodied as a complete human bein~ still only human all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic Church I remem-bered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than m~y fate;the freest and liArdest~of all my'actsbf freedom, it was in front o'f a gilded and very gaudy little imhge of her in'the port of Brindisi that I promised the thing thht 1-would do if I returndd tO my own land."~3 Chesterton delighted ifi the title'0f Catholic and journalist, and Our Lady did:not ~'ragment the faith ,for him. Of course one might research Chesterton's pdsgibly romanticiz6it picture of~ English history, ~is attachmi.~nt to Geoffrey Chaucer, his domestic circumstan-c~ si andso construct an explanation of why.he believed as he did. But ~iould that tell the whole story? OneO~an build'virtually anything on ass~mptidn and inference. The subjective is in the eye of thebeholdei'-.-and assess'0r, tbo ~' wh6 ventures what is at l~e~t an0educated guess. Meanwhild' life ig to be li~ed~= ~2hesterton could never have kept his feet and 'his humor in'his contemporary~ wdrld ona diet of rom~intici~srri, no more than Woiild ~the present pope who tias been brought up in a particularly hard ~cho01. Such men-know'what :the~ believe. Life has tested it. In every individual Christian experience, surely space has to be allowed for" the'presence of the Holy Spirit. This0is~the one Constant factor in everyorfe's life which can never be properlyasgessed. The column may add up to Our satisfac-tion, but in any account of the individhal Christian life the ~fnswer can only be provisional',~a~ so aiuch" can never be known, "for the Spirit reaches, the'depths of everything,~even the depths of G6d . 'Now instead of the spirit of the world we have received the Spirit that comes from God; to teach us to under, 356 /"Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 stand the gifts that he has giyen us" (1 Co 2:!0, 12). The Spirit gives light enabling us to see. If those words are true of the ordinary Christian and Corinth seemed encouragingly full of such pe0ple.---what do they say of Mary? . They speak .volumes for ourselves. They deserve~ time for wonder, reflection and assimilation. Consider a woman who never at any instant put self-will in the way of t6e Spirit's enlightening, energizing presence? As ever, the best that can be sai~ of the Christian is preeminently true of her, as ~'God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us"- (Rm 5:5). Here lies the key to Our Lady as a guide to the Christian, helping to find a ,w9y among so many conflicting paths. Many, enlightened by that same Spirit, "above all . . . had recourse to the Virgin,s intercession in order, to obtain from the Spirit the capacity for engendering Christ in their own souls,"~4 She is~ seen radiating the glory of God. There is no suggestion of the esoteric or the Gnostic. Mother and child imply responsibility. Their needs are .imme-diate and practical. The religious, enlightened by the Spirit to respond to such a God-given presence, will be none the worse f6r the cold douche of realism such company brings. God,is always, in th~ situation but never at our beck and call. Mother and Son have walked every step of the road on earth, "obedient unto death, even death on a cross" (Ph 2:8). Familiarity in their case breeds affection and compassion enc.ouraging us to integrate life in faith. A Guide Leads Home Finally, besides helping the religious to see an~l integrate life in God, Our Lady can also reflect the radiance of God's glory. As with the earlier word "delight, fu!," "radiant" is not immediately associated with faith. This isin part because., while the transcendent is real, it is continua~ lly neglected though never in Our Lady's c.omEany. Her personal experience of God left an unfor-gettable imprint upon her. "For:it is the God whq said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' w.ho has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge.of the glory of God inlthe face of Christ" (2 Co 4:6). ff the impa, ct of God in Christ ¯ on Pau~l can~, only be compared to the creation of light, what do those words say "of the Blessed Virgin's free consent and cooperation in the plan. of redemption .w)5 Realityis Christ-centered. Everyone and everything is illumined by his light enab~ling us to see what God islike (glory). The present.moment is then transformed. We need such light to see what,is really ~there, to begin to gfimpse Christian existence. OutLady's .strong, selfless, evocative presence can only help, "for it is not ourselves that we are preaching, but Christ Jesus as the Lor.d, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Co 4:5). The words are Paul:s_but the sentiments Mary's too. There is the perspective in which she lives one person in Christ with ourselves. The contemporary religious does not have, a.surfeit of authentic Christian support t9 afford to neglect such a person. And this, let it~be empfiasized, is to be-found in the heart of the Church now, quite literally for the taking. When Paul then goes on to marvelously outline what should be basic Christian experience if only we ~.w,~.h_e speaks Mary: Our Encouragement in Christ / 357 above all for Our Lady, as indeed he speaks for us: "And we with .our'unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit" (2 Co 3:18). Here is genuine Christian visior~, tl~'e'meaning of religious life. The glory of God in Christ transfigures us progrdssively insofar as we ar~ open to the love of God in the present moment~ Life is God giving himself to us in Christ in every circumstance not excluding death. 'Living in faith in Such a world we become like what we see. "Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known" (1 Co 13:12). That knowledge and vision Our Lady now enjoys t~afisfigured in God. The religious might wish that of the many influences on him~known or unknown, the light of God in such a person might not be the least, "for it is impossible to honor her who i~ 'full of grace' (Lk 1:28) without thereby hofior-ing in oneself the state of grace, which is friendship with God, communion with him and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It is this divine grace ~vhich takes possession of.the whole man and conforms him to the image of~ the Son of God. (Rm 8:29; Col 1:18)."~6 ~ Living like this implies that contemplation is basic. "Contemplative" does not mean arcane, esoteric, unreal. It is the attempt to live in the present, aware of what~is there; alive to God in Christ now, rather than pining for.a past memory or future hope. Wherever we are God is. The conteml61ative sees the connection. Categories of timd, place, occupation, structure, people, no longer 'shackle as the moment is transfigured in Christ. To the outsider with no faith, it may seem to be attempting to rationalize a welter of characters and evefits into a rather complex artificial plan, rather like the coach planning tactics before a game. But given faith working through love (see Ga 5~6), the Christian finds it progressively simple, though not easy, rather like the player moving almost by reflex once tlie game begins. The time for discussion,is over. Nowis the time for action. To be effective.the need is for interior silence,~stillness and assimila-tion or how else can ond r~cognize what is happening? If there'is,no center only'the peripheral can register. The world of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven might be accessible inthe room in which this is being read, but unless the radio is turned on, and turned to the correct wavelength, it will n~ver be heard.To be unaware of such a world is a pity. To be conscious of it, yet unwilling or unable to switch-it on is real impoverishment. Religious life today may be a Chastening experience, though none the worse for that, perhaps humiliating us~ as we~at last see that nowo~'my one hope and trust is that I shall never have to admit defeat, but that .now as always I shall have the courage for Christ to be glorified in my body whether by my life or by my death. Life to me of coursb is Christ" (Ph 1:20-21). We need~help. We have help if only we see what i~ there. Looking elsewhere for guidance in seminars, retreats and courses is sensible and worthwhile, all things being equal, but, as 1 have tried to suggest, perhaps &~$ / Rey~w for Religious, May, June, 1985 secondary. Even the qssential restructuringof religious~ life may do more for the .system than for the individual~if it leaves me untouched (see, Perfectae Carita-t/ s, n. 4).~A rebuilt community reflecting subsidiarity, psychological well-being .and~pr.acti~! relevance may not be ,enough for meaning eyen if it is for occupatign.~ The danger lies in taking my identity from what I am doing or ot.ber people's estimate of what I am doing. As has been seen so.often these past twenty ye~.rs or s0, once circumstances c~hange, so, too,, can the religious, who~:~nhappily, fiod themselves virtually naked, alone and afraid as the struc-ture which gave th~em stability changes yet again. Their identity came essentially from 0u~ide of th~emselves. What does one do? Build another structure? -.Yes, in part, but as an imperfect person in an imperfect world I cannot expect too much from that. The new model is using the same all too familiar building material. Much better, surely,~to~shouldo'~.more personal responsibility as did Our Lady, who, "in her own,,Particular life, she fully and responsibly accepted the will of God (see Lk 1:38). the first and the most perfect of Christ's disciples."~7 As i cannot realistically legi.slate for anyone else, what room for maneuver, do I have myself?. The scope is immense. ~. . A contemplative reading of the Gospel might suggest that the worid is harsher than,ever we believed possible. Our Lord, we recall, was_crucified with his mother ~s~nding beside him. That is horrific and all too recognizable today. The patterh '.is plainly set out in the Gospel, "for we were so utterly and un~bearably crushed that we despaired of life its'elf., but that was.to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead; he delivered us. '~ and he .will deliver us; on him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again" (2 Co 1:8-10). Note the tenses of those verbs! There speaks authentic Christian experience up to and including the present day. Perhaps I have to make-that experience mine as did Our Lady, St. Paul and countless others? It is a recurring cycle and can ferrify the individual"botl~ in fact and in anticipation. The natural tendency is to run away to another job, anotheg~course, another structure, another place, another explanation. While very understandable, the Gospel does not suggest that salvation is found in that. If there~is any validity in what has been written here, why not look within ones~elf? Since I am christened, perhaps there is more going for me than-I have yet known? God is in every sit .uation everywhere. God is to be glimpsed in.Our Lady~ Saint Paul, the sisters who taught me catechism as a child, and in so many mo~. True, God needs none of these to reach me, no more~than he need use Church or sacrament. But I do need guidance, encouragement and vision. .I need_ .light. Inevitably this means that I need people: ~for .I longto see you . twant to be among you to receive encouragement myself through the influence of'your faith on me as of mine on you" (Rm4:l 1-12). ~ .Left to myself, with my scaled-down model of God made largelY, in my own image, my religious life might be spent with the small changeor petty cash of experience. What a pitiful waste! Whereas with the strong, challenging, Mary:. Our Encouragement 'in Christ understanding presence of Our Lady at the heart of the ~hurch as reflected in the Gospel, I migh[ (will?) find in her_~omp~ny a light which ha§.brought so many to her Son in the centuries of the Church. One in Christ through baptism, even if only partially glimpsed, will show that she is no more of a static fixture in a stained glass window than I am myself. It is not' the juxtaiaosition of immobile figures in a quasi,infinite hierarchy. There is no need to attempt some uneasy collage. That is for a museum not the Church. "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?. So that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life?" (Rm 6:3-4). "All of us" are alive in Christ! Our Lady, so graced by God as to be supremely one in him, is therefore especially alive and active. The clo~er one is to Christ the more one is alive and active. She compels no one. She is simply there. As to the cautionary opening sentence of this article--the Christ!an disciple by reason of need alone ought always to be ready for help. Sub tuum praesidium is a very ancient prayer. NOTES ~Marialis Cultus, C.T.S., London: 1974, n. 21. ~ 21bid, n. 15. ~Julian of Norwich, A~Re'velation of Love, ed. M.rGlasscoe, Exeter: 1976, eh. 4. ¯ 4Marialis Cultus, Introduction, pp. 8-9, .'~ .5lbid, n. 57. 61bid, n 28. " 71bid, n. 25. o s Julian of Norwich, op. cit., ch. 18. 9Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, e~l. C. ~/oltors, London: 1973, ch.~25. ' iOMari~lis Cultus, n. 56 " ~ ' °. " ~qbid, n. 571 ,2p. Hebblethwaite, "The Mariolo~y of Three P0pes,t' Way Supplement, No. 51, October, '1~984, p. 68. " ~3G. K. Chesterton, The Well, and the.Swallows, London: 1906, p. 176. ~ ,, ~ ~Marialis Cultus, n. 26. ~5lbid~ n. 6.~ : ~Ibid, n. 57. ~Ibid, n. 35. Information to.,Transformation: An Integrated Spirituality for theoReligion Tea cher J. J. Mueller, S.J. Father Mueller came to St. Louis University's Department of Theological Studies in the summer of 1994 from Gonzaga University (Portland) where he had been teaching theology. He may be addressed at St. Louis University; 3634 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108. Most articles begin in predictable ways: a statement of purpose, a thesis, a definition, or perhaps a description of the topic ~at hand. This one will be different, not to be different but to shake the cobwebs from what we have become familiar with. Let's begin with a flight of the imagination. Imagine yourself as a visitor from another planet on ~mission to investigate th~ educational habits of earthpeopl~. You have visited the North American continent because it has beautiful blue oceans bordering it which doi~ exist on your pl~anet, and as long as you have to make a long trip in the galaxy you might as well choose a beautiful setting. While fact-finding, you discover that there are two educational systems. You have visited the public school system and now it is time to visit the private system, particularly the Catholic schools. You are beamed down.to from your spaceship to the school (where 5;ou' are piesently teaching). Looking at your school, you as the other-world visitor discover a teacher who does not exist in the other system: the teacher of religion. Your curiosity is piqued. You conclude that by occupation these teachers of religion serve a unique educational role and distinguish the character of Catholic education. Perhaps they have special power in the society? No, it seems that the occupation of a teacher of religion is a powerless job; that more than 99% of the population does not seek the job but wants others to accept the job. Perhaps a teacher of religion cams more money, then, because the job is so selective? No again. 36O o ~ Information to Transformation Religion teachers earn less than most people and even less than fellow teachers. ~Well, perhaps a teacher of religion is a terrible service jobthat no one wants but ."someone has to do it?" Wrong again. The schools themselves state that the reason they are a rival education~il-system is precisely to educate students with rrespect to religion. As a'~isitor from another planet, you are becoming frustrated trying to analyze exactly what the teacher of religion is. Underpaid, overworked, and not receiving the i~ppreciation he deserves, a teacher of religion does not resemble any other occupation. Perhaps, then, a teacher of religion is a kind of spiritml person unique to .this society? No again. Religion teachers seem to be no better or worse thhn anyone else. They don~tbecome presidents or even principals,' let alone bishops or saints. There may not even be a patron saint for religion teachers. Then perhaps religion teachers are like grandparents who keep tradition alive and transmit wise moral norms? Wrong again. Reli-gion teachers are often considered iconoclasts, reactionaries, andparents can be heard to utter the judgment: "They donX teach the doctrine that I learned at school." With the spaceship ready io leave, you have to make the final report. Y6u write, "Religion teache~:s are the most unique teachers inall the earthly world. They function as teachi~rs but are more like spiritual leaders. It ~secms that humans aren't chosen for this role but, instead, a few offer to commit themselves to this role thereby becoming public symbols of what life is all about. By occupation, they seem to represent what is distinctive of Catholic education. They carry the traditions of the earth and at the same time create the possibil-ity of a better future. Perhaps they could be summed up as those in education who work at informing students about the'transforming quality of human life. With this report, the visitor returns to a planetofar, far away. My flight of the imagination has less to do with an exercise of the imagina-tion than a new congtruct by which to appreciate the unique role of the teacher. of religion in our world. Our alien's report that "humans aren't chosen for this role but, instead a few offer to commit themselves to this role"expresses what I think is the essential element in religion teaching and the topic that I wish to address. The teacher of religion is one who commits him or her self to the occupation of transforming others. As a commitment, the occupation most resembles a vocation, i.e., a "calling." We use the word~ vocation in education--for example as in vocational training--to signify occupations. I mean "vocation" both in that sense--a person has, an occupation or job as a teacher, andin the sense of a spiritual charge--a person responds to a faith community to discharge faith responsibil-ities of that community. The teacher of religion then lives the dual role of teacher and minister. it seems to me that some reflection should be done on the integration"of these two responsibilities in light of the commitment. In theological talk we are speaking about'spirituality. Spirituality means the behavioral.living out of. 362 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1985 Christian faith through particular religious convictions and commitments. Although many possible spiritualities exist and more wiil occur, I believe that the teaching of religion makes a consistent claim for an integrated spirituality that brings together the various respon.sibilities, or obligations, ~of a church, school, family, and individual wherein life is interpreted. At the same time the responsibility proceeds in the same manner: from information to transforma-tion. In sum, an integrated spirituality unifies the pr~ocedural dynamic_ within the various communities 'of interpretation. Rather than speak about how to teach religio.n, this presentation focuses upon.the religion~teacher. The concern is not the pedagogy in.the classroom, i.e., how to present material, but how. to live both inside and outside the classroom influenced by the commitment to teaching religion .within a faith community.~The model of spirituality that I offer comes from the model of student-te~acher relatignship of Jesus and hisofollowers: what we call disciple-ship. Discipleship as Jesus defined it in action is.unlike any other. ~The relation-ship between Jesus and his disciples reflects the relation of Jesus to God. Discipleship to~day continues to take as its model the relationship of Jesus to God and the disciples' relation to¯ Jesus. The relationship of Jesus to the F~ather, and the disciples to Jesus has three stages: God calls a person in a given situation, one hears in a situation, and then that person is sent out or what is called missioned. Part I: God Call~ Us ° The first important factor is that the teacher of religion is a Christian who believes. Never is a religion teacher considered a mere communicator of knowledge. The teacher is expected to be living alife of faith. Very~ simply, to live a life of.faith implies an ongoing commitment to the self-communication of~ God. For the Christian, the interpretation of belief resides in Jesus Christ and the power of his life that flows out actively in our own day through the Holy Spirit. The believer then becomes a disciple in the twentieth century in continuity with Jesus' life,.death and resurrection. To be a disciple, according to the synoptic Gospels, implies "to pick up one's cross and follow me." What, is the nature of this cross for disciples? In mode~rn language we~might describe it as the "cross of reality".where God calls us in our situation today. If you will imagine~ ~a cross like Jesus died on. with horizontal and vertical lines, then the disciple, like Jesus. embraces the extremes of each crossbar with most of the body centered in the middle. The four dimensions of the cross of reality are: backward, forward,, inward and outward. These are the four extremes that comprise our situation to hear God and respond accordingly. Backward Backward : means the past. It implies two thousan~l years of Christian tradition inserted into a longer historical tradition wherein .I find myself today. Information to Transformation / 363 I am.born into the :middle of a' story that is unfolding, Hence the weightof that tradition rests upon me. I am an individual believer within that tradition and I possess a communal identity. The teacher of religion is not free to discard this tradition and the identity which, flows forth: whether Scrii~ture, the doctrinal history of the Church, or the history of the Church herself. Because we are constantly being re-created in~ continuity with our past, we .Christians have long memories that speak of .God's continued interaction with us: If ], am. to respond as a disciple today, I :cannot betray.my past. Forward Forward means the future: It implies .that Christians do not stan~d still like settlers but move ever outward like pioneers. As pilgrims "on the way" who journey through life with feet solidly set upon the earth, we seek thekingdom~ of God where love reigns and,empowers everything. Hence~ Christians are-people of hope who depend upon the re-creative actipn of the Holy Spirit to make all things new. The teacher of religion proclaims this forward transfor-mation of life in love as .the purpose of all that we do . ~ Inward . ,~, , ~ ~ -~,~Inward means the individual.° It implies that God has given me_~lJrimary-responsibility over my own self. I make the decision either to center everything in,my life in God or not. My physical environment'which is called a body, my~ psychological and emotional life;and myspirit comprise my inwarddimension. These o.too are influenced~ by-other .factors such as family, chemicals, ~disease, temper~ament and love. Hence, beinga Ch.ristian implies being totally in.touch with the various dimensions of.what constitutes me as a human beingin order to hand everything of my self over to the Lord.The teacher of religion is a believer who continually works on this inward dimension of handing his or her very self totally over to the Lord. - Outward ~ ,~ Outward means other people. It implies all the social relationships which comprise human life. No one is an island and Christian belief never stops with the,individual. It is thoroughly corporate, first in those who believe called church°and secondly in the connect

Issue 43.3 of the Review for Religious, May/June 1984. ; Volume 43, Number REVIEW FOR REI.IGIOI~S (ISSN 0034-.639X). published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428:3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. REVIEW EOg REI.IGIOUS is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis, MO. © 1984 by REVIEW FOR REI.IGIOI,~S. Composed. printed and manufactm:ed in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A. $10.00 a year: $19.00 for two years. Other countries: add $2.00 per year (postage), For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW VOlt RELIGIOI~S: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor May/June, 1984 Volume 43 Number 3 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence wilh the editor should be sen! 1o REVIEW rolt 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 University; City Avenue at 54th St.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from Rt.'vlt:w !'on RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. "Ou! of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from Universiiy Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. -A Revealing. Light to the Gentiles John Paul H At the beginning of February of this year, Pope John Paul invited religious throughout the world to join him in spirit at a special celebration for religious of the Jubilee Year of Redemption. The celebration was concluded by a liturgy held at St. Peter's Basilica on February 2, in which 25,000 religious participated. During the Mass, the pope delivered this h~omily, inviting the participants o to renew their religious profession. Today, dear brothers and sisters, 1 want to borrow these words of the old man Simeon in order together with you to adore the Light: Christ the Light of the World! We are gathered in St. Peter's Basilica in the Year of the Redemption, in the year of the extraordinary Jubilee. We are meeting in that great and multiform community which you all make up, brothers and sisters, from so many religious orders, congregatio.ns and institutes: Individuals and com-munities that are consecrated to God! This meeting brings together the representatives of the religious families who live in Rome and, at the same time, extends to all those fellow brothers and sisters with whom the oneness and the identity of your vocation unites you. Through this same oneness and identity you are also bound together by a specialunion of mission in the Church--a mission in the midst of the People of God in every country and on every continent, to the ends of the earth. Today, in this great, universal community, you join the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter to proclaim, in the spirit of today's liturgy: A revealing light to the Gentiles! The light is Christ, the Light and Glo~:y of the People of God throughout the world! It is with this proclamation that you desire to respond to the meaning of tile liturgy on this feast of Candlemas, and at the same time you want to give expression to that which constitutes the interior mystery of each and every one of you. In fact, by reason of your vocation; you walk in this Light which is 321 322 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 Christ in a special way, and you bear witness to it also in a special way. Today this is made evident by the lighted candles which in a short time you will be holding in your hands. Each of these candles recalls, above all else, the Sacrament of Baptism, through which Christ began to illuminate your life with the light of the Gospel and with the light of his Redemption--Christ, whom you received through faith within the community of the Church; Christ, handed on to you from day to day in the Christian life of your family, your surroundings and your school. The full flowering of baptism is the Eucharist; and at the same time, the constant renewal of its purifying power is the Sacrament of Penance and Reconcilation. These candles that you hold, then, remind you, in the context, of today's feast, of the moment of your consecration, your religious profession, your choice of this way of life that is based on the evangelical .counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience. The ligh~t of Christ shone at that moment with an especially brilliant flame. The.Oarries of fait.h and hope joined the vivid flame of charity and focused on the Heart of your divine Spouse, which at the same time itself opened wide because of this focusing--just as this divine Heart opens widely in the mystery of our redemption which, as we know, is universal, embracing everyone and everything. " Depth and universality: these ar~ the two characteristics of the religious vocation which attest to its being ro0tedqn the mystery of the Redemption and in the light of Christ. Today's liturgy, on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, leads you toward this light. So you may enter the temple, just as Mary and Joseph once did when they took Jesus to JeruSalem to offer him to the Lord (see Lk 2:22). The law of the Old Testament provided that every first-born son be consecrated to the Lord (see Lk 2:23), and this consecration Was accompanied by a sacrifice of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons. Today, beloved 'brothers and sisters, you enter this temple to renew, in the light of Christ's Presentation, your' own offering to God in Jesus Christ, your own consecration to be his exclusive property. F~:om the depths of the mystery of consecration springs this particular way of belonging to God himself--a belonging of which only the person, the knoWing and free subject, is capable. This belonging has the nature of gift. It responds to"a gift and at the same time gives expression to a gift. In the light ~of Christ, each one of you perceives with penetraiing clarity that all creation is a gift. You perceive in creation the special gift of your own humanity. And with the gift of this entire and indivisible humanity, you desire to respond ~to the gift of your Creator, of your Redeemer, of your Spouse. In this way,' there is inscribed in the huma0 "I" of each one of you a special bond of communion with Christ ahd, in him, with the Most Holy Trin!ty:~ the Father, the Son, find the Holy Spi.rit. Revealing I~ght to the Genliles / 323 Entering~the temple,, th~en, along with Mary and Joseph--where the rite of the Presentation of Jesus provided for by the law is to take place--we encounter two persons, Simeon and Anna, who are wholly consecrated to God, dedicated to the expectation of Israel, or rather, to, mankind's greatest hope of all time. Simeon, having been inspired by the Holy Spirit,~had gone to the temple (see Lk 2:27). Does this not perhaps bring to minda similar "inspiration" with which you were once moved., itself an inspiration of the Spirit? Yes, for the Holy Spirit, in the power of Christ's Redemption, is the author of all sanctity. So.is he also.author of that~ special call on the way to sanctity that is contained in the religious vocation. Today, when you renew your profession, in your hearts, remember that interior "inspiration" of the Spirit which was at the beginning of your path. Remember how this "inspiration" began, how it grew stronger, how it may perhaps have returned again after a period of time.until finally you recognized in it the clear voice of God, and the power of the nuptial love of the Lord who was calling you. Remember this today in order to give thanks with a renewed heart, in order to profess "the marvels of God" (Ac 2:ll). This inspiration from the Spirit cannot be extinguished. It must endure and mature, along with your r~ligious vocation, throughout your entire lives. You can nev.er separate yourselves from this salvific "inspiration from the Spirit," caring for it in the interior temple that each of you is! How eloquent are the words concerning the Prophetess Anna in today's Gospel: She was constantly in the temple, worshiping,day and night in fasting and prayer. Coming on the scene at this moment, she gave thanks to God and talked about the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem (Lk 2:37-38). Simeon leans over the child and utters prophetic words: This child is destined to be the downfall a~d the rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed so that the thoughts of many flearts may be laid bare (Lk 2:34). He addresses these words to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and addS: "And you yourself shall be pierced with a sword" (Lk 2:35). A strange prophecy! And yet perhaps it is at once the most concise and the most comPlete synthesis of all Christology and of all soteriol0gy. Dear brothers and sisters! May this prophecy reach your souls t6day with new strength. Welcome Christ, who is the ligh't of the world: Christ in whom God ~"has prepared his salvation in the presence of all peoples" (~see Lk 2:31). Welcome Christ, who is also a "sign that will be opposed." This "opposition" is engraved into your vocation. Do not try to remove it or to erase it. This "opposition" has salvific significance. The salvation of the world is achieved precisely along the path of this opposition that is offered by Christ. And so you, by welcoming Christ~ are also a manifestation of this 324/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 salvific opposition. It cannot be otherwise: It is precisely in 'the name of this saving opposition that there is engraved upon your Christian and religious "I" the profession you have made of poverty, chastity and obedience. The world needs the authentic "opposition" of religious consecration as a constant leaven of salvific renewal. You will be carrying in your hands the lighted candles of today's liturgy. They say that Christ is the Light which enlightens every man who comes into the world. They are the testimony of your entire dedication to Christ and to God; they are the testimony of your consecration. These candles also illuminate the meaning of human life, the life of each one of us. As the candle gradually burns, the wax melts and the candle is consumed. May your lives burn in ~the light of Christ! May yours be lives of total nuptial dedication to his service! May the life-giving current of the mystery of our redemption pass through this life, reaching the world and man and directing all our human existence toward~ the eternal light: the light of vision and glory. Simeon said to Mary, Mother of Jesus: "And you yourself shall be pierced with a sword!" Dear brothers and sisters, receive Christ from the hands of Mary. May the mystery of your redemption reach you through her soul. May all the salvific plans of consecrated hearts always be manifest before the heart of the Mother! Be united with her, with your glance focused on her. In her is there a special resemblance to Christ who is the Spouse of your souls. Formula for the Renewal of Vows This formula was used by the Holy Father on February 2, during the liturgy in which the religious addressed by him renewed their vows. Dear Brothers and Sisters: in answering the call of the Lord, you have risen with him and have died to.sin. Through your baptism and your perpetual commitment you have been consecrated to him. Do you wish to reaffirm your desire to follow Christ chaste, poor, and obedient, in imitation of his Holy Virgin Mother? R. Yes, l do. Do you wish to persevere in your commitment to'follow the Gospel of Jesus, and to observe the rule of your religious family in order to live in evangelical comm~union with God and with your brothers and sisters? R. Yes, I do. With the grace of the Holy Spirit, do you wish to dedicate your whole life to the service of the Peopli~ of God, and above all, tO the very poor? R. Yes, l do. May God, who has begun this good work in you, bring it to completion until the day of the Lord Jesus. R. Amen. Amen. Amen. On Choosing Religious Life Today Sallie Latkovich, C.S.J. Sister Latkovich is presently nearing the completion of her noviceship in Cleveland. Sister may be addressed at St. Joseph Convent; 3430 Rocky River Drive; Cleveland. OH 44111. ~ ~klong with the obvious aspects of the renewal of religious life, in local living situations, in diversity of ministries, and in community structure and govern-ment, there has also been renewal in initial formation. To be sure, there is a newness about those who enter religious life, a newness about their very choice to live in community, and a newness in'the process of initiation into existing community structures and traditions. AS one new member, I'd like to share my reflections on coming to com-munity: at age thirty, degreed in education and theology, having been a teacher and department chairperson in a Diocesan high school, and a pastoral associate in aparish. ' About one year ago, I participated in a federation event for novices of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The meetings were held at De Mattias Hall on the campus of St. Louis Univ.ersity, where th~ sister-student~ shared their dormitory, dining room, and meeting area. I rode the elevator with bne of the resident sisters, a Golden Jubilarian, who asked how the meetings for the novices were going. After my enthusiastic reply, the sister touched my arm warmly, assuming that l was one of the directors, and said: "This is so good for the~young ones." I chuckled and responded to my dear and special elevator companion: "I am one of the young ones!" This incident challenges us all to take a good look at the new realities which have emerged past some of the old stereotypes, including the age and life-experiences of new members, the process of initiation into-and bonding with community, and the preparation for vowed commitment. There undoubtedly is something shared by all individuals who discern 325 326 [ Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 religious vocation and respond to the mysterious call from God. The very choice, however, takes on different dimensions today from the time when the choice was made by young people of high school age who came to community from their parents' homes. In my perception, the women who choose to enter religious life today are fairly self-identified, at age 25, 30, or 40 years old; they come with education, credentials, work experience, achievements, and "street smarts" that come from self-support; they have had the experience of adult human relationships, and an important growing relationship with the Lord. Thus, for the new member to community today, the adjustment involves several major changes: from single living to community living, taking seriously and publicly the values and lifestyle of the vows, and sharing their life's journey with one person as director during the time of initial formation. In the past, a person entered religious life, and the entrance carried with it obvious signs and restrictions. This is a source of some confusion today, both for the new member and for family and friends. Looking and acting the same after entrance as before leaves one hard put to describe the inner transformation that is happening in surrendering one's life to the Lord and in bonding with community. Those who entered at a young age grew into adulthood as religious; many who enter today face the conversion of integrating their adult identity with religious identity. For most who come to community today, the single life has been a life of their choice, and seemingly, of their control. There has been the responsibility and enjoyment of a home, furnished according to taste and budget. One's budget has been determined by one's employment and salary, and has included the management of credit cards, checking, and savings accounts. Regarding employment, one's functioning and achievement on the job have likely been very significant, as our society places so much emphasis on the work/productivity ethic. One has probably owned a car, thought of as a "freedom-mobile" as one gives up that ownership. Though most who choose community are highly principled and have made decisions based on good valiaes,,there has been no accountability aside from self and God for schedule, activities, involvements, for decision-making in general. When persons actually enter community, they appeal to be the same as before; and yet, not. one part of each new member's life remains the same. Living poverty leads one to relinquish ownership of possessions, Some held dear. Though the anticipation of that was much worse than the reality for me, I was surprised to discover how attached I was to my own wondeff~ul doub.l~ bed! There is a real adjustment as one begins to rely on a relatively small monthly allowance for one's personal needs; and to rely on the community for other more major expenses. The importance of my self-sufficiency was very striking the first time Ihad to present my dental bill to the community treasurer, having paid those bills myself for the last ten years. These obvious, external changes seem fairly easy by comparison ~o the less obvious, internal transformation. For a .single woman to survive and to On Choosing Religious Life Today /327 succeed in this culture, she needs to compete in the male system, which demands independence and control of every aspect and detail of herqife; and thus, to be recognized as a responsible adult.'There is a great and sometimes awe-full experience of poverty in rei:ognizing the falseness, the illusion of all that, in coming to the truth of our own gifts, but also our limitations and weaknesses. Recognizing ourselves as responsible adults.involves faith that God is the One who is in control, and our dependence is on him. One then begins ~to experience the Gospel truth: "in .weakness, power reaches perfection." Options have been open for relationship for the single woman in today's world. Being atti'active to others and being attracted by them is a dynamic which doesn't change with community membership. Soon after 1 moved into community, I attended a surprise birthday party for someone I had dated and with whom I had remained friends. When his new dating relationship came in the door, 1 was surprised:~at my jealous reaction. A sister,with whom I lived answered my own questioning with: "Welcome to the human race." Indeed, I was and am human. What does change upon entering religious life is one's availability to pursue exclusive relationships. Of course, intimacy in human relationships remains an important value; but, the expression of intimacy may undergo some change or redirection as one approaches the vow of .celibacy. Living in a homogenous community of women is a drastic change for one who has led an active life in a heterogenous setting. Families and friends have had experience in how to celebrate and live with one's marriage commitment; they fumble a bit at understanding, much less celebrating and living with one's celibate religious commitment. Obedience is difficult for one Who has made decisions singly, privately, and well for a number of adult years. Sharing discernment and decision-making is fundamental and necessary to community life, but it can feel like regressing to an earlier parent-child situation--the last~experience of consulting with an authority. That very feeling of regression was the source of my own difficulty with simply sharing with my director the Choices or plans I had made; and learning to distinguish between decisions that warranted discussion and those that did not. Along with this sharing of .significant decisions, following the proper channels and the time it takes to do so may seem very long and unnecessary as compared to spontaneous choices made .previously. Thus, beginning to live obedience demands patience and focus on integrating one's life and choices with the very life and direction of the community. ~ In communities today, there is usually one person designated as director of the new members. Perhaps this responsibility is handled in a team approach. What an important position this is, ,both for the individual new member and for the whole larger community. 1 think, however, that'in light of the role, the title "Director" is a misnomer, as the directio.n of the phase of initial formation is a joint effort as opposed to "director" and "direction-taker." 321~ / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 In my experience, this person has been one who has shared a precious space of my life's journey; she has been mentor, counselor, and most importantly, model. Though she necessarily becomes the new member's primary contact person, she is representative of every other member ~of community who have individual responsibility to welcome the new member in the bonding/belonging .process. The new member's relationship with the director is unparalleled and unprecedented in previous adult life. Mention mtist be made, too,.of the other professed members who live with those in formation. °Their presence in local community only enhances the bonding/belonging process. Their own lives, ministries, and stories of com-munity history are a significant contribution to the new member. Occasionally, one becomes aware of an unconscious, unintended stigma attached to the "formation process" which looks backto the days when the present professed community were in formation themselves; the time when new members were young and inexperienced, not allowed to speak with professed, much less participate in community affairs, or even ,be present for chapter proceedings. The ghosts of those times come out of the closet when new members today are welcomed with rhetoric but subtly held at a distance from the professed community, not actually excluded but neither included, or not taken seriously because of a "hangover attitudi~" that they are just novices. It is especially difficult when a new member feels or experiences a separation, one that is hard to articulate or explain, from professed members of community who may be the same age, have common interests, or like experiences. To be truly welcomed is the beginning of bonding and encouraging of self-investment. The choice for religirus life in community is just that: the choice to invest. oneself in response to a call from the Lord, to join together" with others for the sake of the kingdom. The choice is full of hope, expectation, and celebration. Like the Gospel grain of wheat, there is death, there is loss. We mourn every loss, and experience pain in that; pain that deserves to be named in order to be a source of growth, of resurrection to new life. Just so, the grain of wheat produces much fruit. The dynamic of community life is like being planted in good, rich soil, which nourishes that growth: in the sharing of life and prayer, in gathering around the eucharistic table and the supper table, and in mutual support and challenge. In conclusion, one might look at the numbers of people who are entering religious life today, and despair that so many fewer are choosing community than did some years ago. On the other hand, there can be. i~ause for great rejoicing that people are attentive to the Lord's call, seek to respond, and so choose--in many cases, a choice that is clearer and freer than in previous times because there is an understanding and experience of options and of life. When we take stock of the renewal that has taken place and continues in religious communities, let us include the new experience of those who come. What Is a Novitiate For? DonaM Macdonald, S.M.M. Father Macdonald has been a frequent contributor to REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, He has served his congregation as master of novices while in India. Presently Father Macdonald resides at 'St. Joseph's; Wellington Road: Todmorden: Lancashire 0114 5HP: England Roberi Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. a young man called Richard asks "Thomas More for a job. "Employ me" he says, "I would be steadfast." To this °Mo~:e replies: "Richard, you couldn't answer for yrurself even so far as tonight."~ These proved unhappily propheti6 words, as Richard was to perjure himself later at the trial of the saint. All generalizations are false to a degree, but More's comment is true of ~o many today under the age of thirty. There is good will and idealism in ,~arying degrees, but little internal cohesion. Too many are too soft centered. One cannot take too. seriously, therefore, much of what such people say or do. Equipped though tohey may possibly be for ~a short run, one would be ill-ad~; ised to bet on their stamina over a longer distance. If on(~ takes Bophoeffer's de's~riptior;~ of maturi.ty as an acceptable criterion the maiure per'son is one 'whrse center of gravity is always where he or, she actually is2--then clearly many ~n this age group are immature. The a'doleffcent, by definition, has n6 central reference point, in some cases starting each day with a clean slate. The commitments of yesterday ark behind him or forgotten. He is, after all, trying' tO form an independent character. Considered in law to be adult at eighteen or so, by any other criterion he might not be so viewed. Quite often he is an emotional mess moving in a world where so much is relative and little seems meant to last. Entering into adult commitments with the mores Of an adolescent, the miracle is that so many make i,.t in view of the numbers who do not.ln the contemporary jargon, young people are today subject to so marly presstires. One pressure notable by its absence, is the need to accept 330,/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 personal responsibility for decisions taken. There is no c~iiter of gravity in the present moment. The effects of this paradox of persons being legally adult and emotionally adolescent, are seen in every walk of life, not least in their seeming inability to fbim a permanent commitment. So harmful are the general ~effects of this in marriage, for example, that it is now being seriously canvassed whether there is such a thing as an automatic right to marry. As society has to pick up so much of the failure and casualities, has it not the right to take out preventative inSurance? , All of this is relevant to religious life find to the admission and formation of young candidates. "Am I dealing with an adult or an adolescent?" is an ever-present question for anyone working in formation. The pattern sketched earlier is valid for the young religious and young priest as well as the young married. One °has had similar conversations, hearing an uncannily uniform vocabulary, with all three categories of young people facing difficulties over their commitments. ~ Whether speaking~to married, priest or religious among the young, one so often hears "The magic has gone. ~.," "It does nothing for me . "':l've reached a dead-end . .," 'Tm too young for responsibility~:.," "Surely God doesn't want this.!" Against the wider canvas of feeling that the world owes them a living--or at least that it should play fair--the underlying thread seems to be that since the commitment made to marriage, priesthood or religious life no longer does anything for me, I owe it to myself to get out from under this yoke. Less often does one hear: "! gave myself to this commit/hen! expecting it to demand the best f, rom me; here, then, is my center of gravity. I Stand, thbyefore, on this gift of myself. What, then, is to be done within this situation?" 'The Church is coming to see this. Increasingly, dioceses are ,sl~eqif~,ing s~x-months' ~otice, with genuine preparation, for a.nyone° wishing to be married in a Catholic Church. Students for the priesthood are invited to take ,t~eir prepaEation more seriously, and encouraged to live and work for a while away from ~he 'tmmed~' a~te support of a seminary or °religibu~s dommunit~,.3 Yo~ng~people today often come to seminaries and religious houses to work odi" the problems of adolescence. Are they, then, in the wrong place for wrong reasons? Is this the point of religious initiation? Quite~genuinely, a ni~vitiate may have to decide wheth~r to offer an a~olescent formation pr~ogram, or an adult course for approaching God in community. Individual no,vices may have different needs,.so it is a very. difficult questipn to answer. But the results of our failure to resolve itare all about us. Immature Formation : An implicit d~cision in favor' of adolescence is sgmetimes taken in an attempt to offer Ypung can, didates a congenial environment for,~their early What-~4s a Novitiate For? / 33"1 formative years. They are kept-very much with their peers. Tho~e guiding formatioffare chosen because of their alleged ability to mik with yogng peol~le. Older religious either fight shy of their company or~are carefully screened or shepherded away from them. With such mentors one _sometimes observes in formation the pooling of insecurity. The adolescent candidate is reflected in his guide, with the formation community sharing the ethos of a studi~nt hostel. One has been at prayer in such company with their leaders, and heard the spontaneous reflections of a ,young religious ono~the,Pau, line view that '~those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh With its passions and desires" (Ga 5~.2.4), virtually reduging it to t!~ezlevel.of occasionally doing without sugar in one's ~.tea. The sense of the prayer me.eting seemed to second this interpretatio.n, and the lifestyle of th~ young religi.o~u~.did nothing to challenge it. Similarly, listening to a lunchtime discussion on,where a religious ought to I~b buried whefi he digs, .of several pos_sibilities, argued over. no one suggested. even as a debating point, t.hat, as" religious are p.o0r, the question ought scarcely arise; poor people have'no choice. Time spent with novices, young Yeligious and their gu!des, reinforces this impression, all the more revealing because it is patently unconscious. Nov~ unless some adult shows them otherwise, they~will spend their early formative years in at,least a lower.middle~class lifestyle, in the free association character-istic, ofa comfortable student.hostel and develop~such patterns of thought and behavior in the name'of the~Go.spel and of the~ charism of their founder. In one sense they have it m~de. Yet sooner or~later a price has io be paid:~ One cannot keep playing guitar in a.student group forever: T~here is a, ,big, wide,world out there whic.h .will .not accept their premises. Nor will the GospeL.It is better to glimpse this sooner rather than.later. Ultimately.one,has to choose fgr one, self and take the consequences. A formauon program should,at least enco.ur~ge this.~ - ~ .~ ¯ Challenge the Candidate~ _ . ~ There is here an interesting contrast with the armed forces when they advertise for officer recruits. Appealing to the same age group as do religious, the individual is aske~l, for e.xample, "Did you. spend three years at university to spend twenty years sitting.behind a desk"?. The armed forces have .much to offer but.the individual must choose, and-this to~ an~ age group readycfo_r a~job. but not always for a career. Having taken a decision to inv~estigatefurther, it is~- never suggested that they are being offered a soft option The be~;t.thing about initial basic training, oit is said, is when it, stops.AL will be physically and intellectually demanding but not pointless. The emphasis is on demanding the best to enable the recruits to receive the best that can be given the.re. "We will use qualities you do not know you have" says the Navy. Responsibility will be real and given early. "Earn the right to wear these wings" is part of the al~peal of the air force. Pilots wings are not given lightly. They are something we value and you have to earn. Once you do that. they are yours by right. The army 332/ Revie~wfor Religious; May-J.unel 1984 explains t'hat, it can:pick and choose--and it does. It .d0es'not want just anybody. !t wants the best; particularly men and women who really want it. You may ,not' be good ~enough, but if yomthink you~a~e, please apply for an interview.~You may fail the interview as many do, b~t we can promise you that any subsequent interview .you take Will be easier. All advertising is partial and selective but the. overall pattern here may be worth considering;by those working in formatio'n. Do we believe that we have much'to offer? Can people glimpse this inwhat we do and who we are? Do we ask the best of young people? ~ The initial dynamic of religious founders isnot in.question. Their appeal is clear-cut. But in ~ost cases they are dead. They "live"at second hand, through us. Their once sharp insightfinto the Gospel may well have died the death of a thousand qualifications, blurred and out of focus as~ pres6nted in chaptersl constitutions and'personal living. This,iS inevitable and need cSause no surpris& After all, even theGospel,was dilutedwith'the call of the first apostle. What is to be done? Personally Responsible - lfthe candidate' is 16oking for short term canonization material in those he ,meets he will. in .the main, be dis~ppointed~ He~might:filso reflect that such company ffould probab~ly exclude him. Rather is the".novitihte Best used by someone Who can tak~ a dec'isioh and st~, with thecons~qu~nces, able to give himself to something c~ther than himself:The program th~n" is basically one of self-developmen~t, .u~ing whatever physical, emotional,, intellectual, spiritual qualities are there. The individual has't6 do it himself, and the progi'am should allowhim scope: To be.effective, the no"vice has to give himself to whatever he is doing, trying always to k¯eep it simple. Part of himself, for part.of thetime, will produce a hybrid character unable to identify with what he is doing. .Spontaneity is usually at its best when underpinned.by assiduous practice. The sportsman~who shirks training is usually, found wanting on the day of the. competition:~ qs this not unrealistic if not plain silly? An earlier generation spoke ofa "second conversiori" in religious life. One made profession, but to the degree that one W;,s~faithful to.that initial commitment. God might well-extend the invitation one tiay'to~move out of Second gear, to go de~per. Can one, ~therefore, ~a.sonably ask of the novice what may not be found in his guide? Further, young people today are from an environment where commitments to marriage, priesthood and religious life are not kept for all manner of reasons. Th'ere are of course marvelous instances of fidelity, but found alongside a very strong contrary'c,urrent. But is there any choice? Thomas More's daughter Margaret~ in Bolt s play, begs him as a skilled lawyer to find a form of words to Save himsi~lf from igrison and death. More answers her: "When a man takes an oath. Meg, he's-holding his own self in his own hands like water. And if he ope6s his fingers then--he needn't hope to find himself again. Some men What Is a Novitiate .For?/333 dren't,capable o£thi,s, but I'd be loathe to think your fathe~r~ one of them" (Act 2). This may not be the point of arrival of someone com, in~ .to a novi.tiate, bot surely it points the direction in which he must'travel? How else could he:say yes or no to anything? How form a permanent relationship with anything e!se?, "Freedom from the contemporary" is one of the rarest freed0ms0today. A novitiate could offer that; in-the exercise of personal, responsibility. ~ .l,n practice, this needs littl~e theoretical discussio.n. The can.didate,is urged to do_whatev.er ought to be done. Living this way in'the present moment,,it, has the added value, of helping the noOice come!to :terms, with ,boredom, routine and drudgery, without which he will make little-of permanent c6mmitment. "It's~boring" iS a universal escape clatise from responsibility in the age group we are considering, Living like this, he. may or ~ay not fifid thi~t theJife is for him--but at least he has a hope of a genuine ans,.wer to a question he really asked. A Minimal Frameworl~ The novice should be awa~ of a minimal framework in which the bench marks lie in his observed approach to God and thec6mmunity.~As far as God is concerned, worship may well have to be taught today in the western world, where there is little innate .reverence or sense of wonder before ~the holy. A tabernacle, set in.a corner alcove over a radiator beside a window, where an earlier generation might :have put a statue, will hardly foster worship in a novitiate chapel: The young person who is rarely seen in ~chapel other than at a community celebration, who never genuflects or bows before° the Blessed Sacrament, but immedi,ately sits down in a relaxed, leisurely position, might be indicating limitations in his awareness of God which Isaiah 6 might usefully help. The assumption that "that was a lovely Mass" indicates an objective value may have to be examined. According to his capacity, the novice may be introduced to Scripture and some of the. classical Christian writings. There is a clarity, warmth and centr.a!ity, about them that can scarcely be foun~t in contemporary spiritual writing, some of which is both popular and effeminate, neither~one thing nor the other. Self-evidently the God of'.the mys.tics may not be well,known, but novices could with pr,.ofit b.e- given a glimpse of what those closest to God in the Jewish, Christian and oth~er-'traditions have felt. This can both encourage him to widen'his horizons, and unsettle any complacen~y,.realizing perhaps that no one can program God .into any personal equation. ¯ The novice may simply be challenged by :a library. He is not asked to assimilate much, just spen~l some time~ in the.company of men and women who knew God as perhaps he never will. Is there any need to claim more for a novitiate than its offer 6f an initial thrust towards God and community living? It is for his guide :to give basic instruction on basic truth, whether the novice reads a page or not. Almost certainly at the beginning of a novitiate, novice. and mature guide Will not live in the same Church in any real sense. 3~1~1 / Revikw for Religious, °May-June, 1984 Living in the-Eresent will be equally'reflected in the novice's obse~e~t relationship'with th6Se amoi~g Whom he'lives. Again the accent is best placed on where he finds himself. Anxiety over poor water supply in a Third World ,village, while good in'itself if expressing genuine concern, rings hollow in the person~hnwilling t6 use w~te~r available to' him to wash the community ~tishes. Unlike the .man whose one acknowledgment to democracy waTs to ride in the same car as fiis chauffeur, young religiohs (or would-be religious) are not to be too choosy about the~c~)mpany they k~eep. They should'~htti~mpt to" build community with what is"given~. ,The moody young person is better elsewhere. Good manners and politeness, sometimeg ridiculed as outworn con~,entions, can at base be a genfiine regard for~ th~ feelings ~of others, particularly those outside on6's own group. They are a ,protection for the shy and the weak. Imagination is necegsary to see that one cannot live within one's pee? group forever. Ultimately, the novice should reflect trust. This is the one thing he can really give to his community. He cannot speak for anybffe else', but he can for himself: "You can trust mb." If there is.someone in the house unable to trust him, this should concern him. He tries to be honest. One °has been present at liturgies and pra~ers'in the age group we are considering, and heard sentiments expressed and gestures made that'would have made 1 Corinthians 13 read like a'chiid'sessay,'while feeling one-~ould be more at home with Bogart, Cagney, and0Edward G. Robinson. With them; you knew where you were: you did not turn your back. Young ,people may be mesmerized by words, mood and music. Truth is not ,that important for some. Again, this'may not be'a starting point, but it points the direction the novice should travel. Unless Someone Show.Me oo ~ Of ~ourse, if this i~ expected! in the candidate, it must be seen in his guide. Integrity is caught and taught, which is why, ideally, young people need to mix with adults~ There is no point in expecting honegty, if, in one's company, people feel that the~, should begin c0unting the spoons. To expect to r6ceive a confidence one should be seen to respect a ~onfidence'. Or~e wins respect and trust. Responsibility must not be a burden for the candidate and an option for his guide. Without trust one cannot build.~ A base like thfit, though~ ca~ support an encouraging amount of human weakness in the guide: ~ In earlier times novitiates were found at the end,of.long driveways or behind high wallsin buildings where the,windows were often°opaque. This cut off novices and their mentors from everyday life, and °more particularly, from their families. Yet the unpretentious pdrents of many ainovice or'guide made a more successful:job of integrating life and God than .did their sons or daughters in religioUs congregations. Yet it was made difficult f6r them to visit ~their children. Soa formation was attempted with often~no real roots in human nature and familylife. What Iso, a Novitiate~For? /~ 335 I am simplifying but not, I think, falsifying a Process which,produced many excellent religious but also. by common observ~atibn, left numbers of ,religious and their guides floundering in a no-man's,land. They could not, synthesize God and life: they often lacked human warmth and,commonsense:~' unlike many of their parents. We may make the same mistake today, unlesswe~ test the lecturer's idea against ttie lived experience of the genuinely Christian. man or ~woman. ~, .~, Maturityocan show something of human nature and off, God. Even,if.the ink is dry on the diploma, the guide may still be wet behind the ears. because what :is wanted in a guide is wisdom: knowledge asiimilated, not just knowledge acquir~'d. The availability of lecturers iniseveral disciplines for the formation team is excellent, but the mature novice needs more. What he wahts is God in the present, and the gift' of wisdom alone cambest direct him.oA university, for '~xample could give him all the knowledge her-.is capables.of receiving regarding the text of the Sermon on the Mount. but some,xriight agree with Bonhoeffer when he set up his seminary Lha_t the univ.ersity could never provide the context for living it.~ In the last anal~,sis. ~vhile properly emphasizing that formation is chiefly based on self-development, equally:,~fov the Christian, it must reflect wholly the ideal of Christ. Under The Influence of an Idi~hl Ul"timately what is off~ered in religious life? A candidate is offering himself or herself to a community of men or, women at whose hea'rt is one who has sa o, am the bread of life; he who comes to me shali not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst" (Jn 6:35). Whaiever th~ young perso~ wants from life is to be found in Christ. the Lord 9f ihe community. To be really,alive is to be really Christian, drawing life from Christ as the body does fr~om food. Whatever their capacity for love and so for giving,~all that is deep~;t ih candidates can be met in (~hrist. T.hey shall never thirst in his company is his claim. He above all can use qualities they do not know they have. The young person's thirst for life and love can be satisfied and more°i~'they ~ome- to Christ in faith. In the fourth gospel we are told, faith is used some ninety eighi times-- always as a verb. never a noun. Thus it indicates a personality, trusting, believing in, relying on, wh'olly given to God in Christ. The verb in the text~e have q uoted,is particularly strong. "To believe" means.io hold on to, like a .~ice or cla~p, and never let go. The Christ of the °i~ommunity a.[one can make demands like that. and his words will take flesh oi~l~.,t,,o, the degree that'ihe candidate has such~faith. This contrast between the promises of our Lord and the lives of some of his religious will pose questions for the youngcandidate. Evidently, the novices' guides are tobe seen as men and women of. genui.ne faith. Again it is a world only for the mature. The fourth gospel is a marvelously practical place to explore the implica- 33~ /~ Review for ~Religious~ ~lay-June, 1984 tions 0f formation in, Christ, but.the merest sketch can be "given here. The gospel.'s earlier chal~te~S can be seen a.s signs illustrating what was promised to our Lord's first followers in chapter one: "You will see heaven opened and the :~ngels~of God a~_cending and descending on the Son of Man"-(Jn 1:51). In Christ's company they~wiil see God present and active among them "angels oof~God ascending and descending"---as Jacob once understood from his dream to his. utter astonishment. The subsequent challenge of the gospel is to re'~ognize this. and s6 be given "power to become children of~God" (1:12). ¯ .The sixth ~chapt'er, from which we took our original text, is really an extended plea for faith in Christ to the exclusion of all else. Despite pitiful res,our~es "whaVare they among so many?"(6:9) Christ fed thousands, and so won their allegiance to .the point of their wishing to make him King, "because you ate ,your~ fill of the loaves" (6:26): Since they thus misread the sign, "Jesus'°withdrex:v again to .the mountain by himself" (6:15) a,n enigmatic and-~far from'obvious figure. He is insistent that they look deeper: "Do not labor for, the food, tha_t perishes, but~ for the food which endures to eternal life which the Sbfi .of Man will give~ you" (6:27). With all the Old Testament overtones of the God-given. manna feeding Israel. our Lord is inyiting them a~nd us to see this in himself, and so "believe in him whom he [God] has sent" (6:29). This is extraordinary language on the lips of someone from nondescript Nazaret.h in Galilee. Persons are to cling to Christ as to food from God. This insight is progressively and shockingly deepened until, for many, it was]ust too much:. "'This is a hard saying and who can listen to it?. After this many of his disciples'drew back and no longer went about with him" (6:60, 66). ThOse who stayed perhaps saw bettei" men and women than themselves ¯ walk away from ChriSt.°Thry, too. possibly, were in the position of a marginal minority. But they must take a personal decision: "Do you also wish to go away?" (6:67). Others have voted with their feet: What will they do? They decided: "Lord to whom shall we go?., woe have b~lieved and have come to know . .~ " (6:68-69). In accepting what Peter says on the disciple's behalf, Cl~rist's words seem to cut like a slap in the face: "Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?" (6:70). He is of ~ourse speaking of the one who "was to betray him" (6:7.1). This tension runs throughout the gospel our Lord rubbing shoulders with his offn yet so unlike them. They think they at last underst~.nd him only for him to escape their grasp yet again. Undeniably attractive. Christ has'drawn human nature~ at its finest: generous, trusting, ~ivingTand at ~he'sarfi~imel tirash, fearful, faithless. No one's faith in Christ is ab~blute, but must'ever~ynature as the disriples found in the crucifixion and death of their Lord wheri,they had lost all reason to ho pc. But in the.situation, its low~est point outsi~l~ of an empty grave when there was not ever/a dead body,?to~clifig to with its past remembered hopes, they once again hear tllemselves pesonally addresseff by Christ: "Mary . ""Thomas . ""Peter . " Signs which gave glimpses of God in Christ in their frrmative years are now eclipsed in the wonder of fiis resurrection presence.oHaving practically despaired What Is a Novitiate For? / 337 of life and its meaning as centered on Christ, they are now men arid women reborn. They now know :frorfi experience, that. no one need ev~e.r-hunger and thirst coming to Christ. But to attain that belief they had t0 loseMrt.uall)~ every rational indi~tion that made such a belief credible.~.They, too, died with Christ. ¯ This experieni:e is enshrined in the fourth.gospel, which, while taking the reader to the heights in God, will no less really.take him to the depths of human experience. The adolescent's faith can mature in such company or he will hurriedly leave it. It is so fearfully honest: "One of you is a devil . Do you also w~sh to go away? . Is not this the man whom. they seek to kill?. So they took up stones to throw at him, but Jesus.hid himself . I lay down my life " . Let us go that we may die with him . If anyone knewwhere he was, he should let them know, so that they might'arrest him., . He knew who was to betray him . The cock will not crow till you have denied me three times . Standing by the cross, of Jesus [was] his mother . It is finished; and he bowed :his head and gave up his spirit." All o~" this takes place in the presen.ce of God among real and, for the most part, ostensibly good people.,The signs have to be read in circumstances of everyday life and an adult response given: These are the signs of faith to which the novice's guide must point, and both of them must follow, the whole illumined by the gloriously effective sign. of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of their' Lord. "It isoa fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God~' says Hebrews (10z31), but, realistically, where else can one live? Faith will mature nowhere else. Beyond All Meaning ,, ., Itis for this reason, surely, that the contemplative side of a religious vocation must be stressed. Here truly lies the specific difference in our way of life. One may debate religious life as being primarily .a group of people trying to live the gospel under one roof, and expressing this in the outreach of an apostolate; or perhaps seeing community chiefly as an effective tool, stripped down to whatever best serves human need; but underlying it all, there has to be a hunger and thirst for God. Genuinely-chaste, poor and obedient living may seem simply odd otherwise. However imperfectly it is lived, this is what is seen. Marginal men and women living at odds with, what makes life livable for most people will need "guts," courage and conviction to keep faith with their commitment. It will all take place first and foremost within the individual man or woman. Following the gospel pattern it may mean at times looking for the living among the dead, heartbroke ~n and terrified, ofitside an empty grave. The logic of the gospel is not naturally~ours. Under GOd, only those closest to him in the contemplative tradition in every walk of life can guide us through it. To be introduced to this (or to continue in it) the novice and young religious need to be shown an uncluttered lifestyle. It is surprising .how little is needed if one's eye is kept on the one thing necessary. God and human warmth are needed in formation but little else. ~31~ / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 Humor is~a marvelous teaching and growing mediumoable, to-both humanize and divinize. The vows are meant to free the human personality, to admit the love of God and so make one fully alive. For any of this to have an effect it will need to be. made part of oneself. If conversion to God in Christ is to happen it must be in the human heart. This is why silence, both external and internal, is necessary. One has, therefore, to be trained to be still and to listen, or one will,continue to live by external stimuli, equating immediate satisfaction from what is there with authenticity. Though young people today may sing of the gentleness of silence, few find it so. Yet an introduction to it during formation can offer' still another priceless "freedom from the contemporary." How, in fact, one can mature and hope to hear God in daily life without an understanding of silence, I do not know. In this context, a relatively recent, urgent recommendation from the Congregation for Catholic Education to those in charge of seminaries, is of particular value to persons charged with initial religious formation. Students, the Congregation maintains, "must receive an experience of interior silence. They must acquire a genuine sense of it. They must become capable of communicating it to others . [The] main task of those responsible for the running of the seminary is the formation of the students in interior silence. They must make continual and concerted efforts in this undertaking,ns This article has attempted to pursuebut one thread in the complexfield of initial religious formation--the exercise of personal responsibility in both novice and guide. Those who know something of what interior silence is are best placed to exercise responsibility in freedom, and respond in faith to wherever God will take them. NOTES ~R. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (l~ondon: 1960), Act I. ?D. Bonhdeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London: 1971), p. 233. a'Experience shows that a period of'preparation for the seminary, given over exclusively to spiritu~.l formation, is n.gt only not superfluous but can bring surprising results., is welcomed by the students., insist., that th!.s suggestion be tried" (Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education: Circular Letter[Rome: !980. CBCI, New Delhi], p. 24.) *"God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the. dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by GOd, by others and by himself . When his ideal .picture is destroyed, he sees the,community going to smash. So he becomes. ~ an accuser of his brethren., of God. of himself'(D~ Bonhoeffer, Ltfe Together [London: 1970], p. 16. ~E~ Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, (London: 1970), p. 334. 6Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education, op. tit., pp. II, 14. The Charism of the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati John~ Miriam Jones, S.C. Sister Jones is Assistant Provost at the University of Notre Dame. Regarding the topic of her article, Sister wrotei "Whilethere is a uniqueness about each charism, there is also a universalitY recognized by. many wom~n religious." Originally a talk delivered to her own sisters, Sister Jones intended as well to address this universality of value and goal. She may be addressed at: Office of the Provost; The University of Notre Dame; Notre Dame, IN 46556. We Sisters of Charity are called to be faith-filled women of the Church (Charism of the 'Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati). This simple, short sentence has four pieces that describe most of what is so central to our lives: Sisters of Charity, women,faith, and .Church. By God's grace we live out our womanhood as Sisters of Charity, and so these two pieces of the statement describe the essence of our very being, containing as well our vocation from the Lord. The other two pieces of that statement call us t~pfaith, lived out as part of the Church--and so they describe our relationship with our God and with his People. This paper is an attempt to touch upon that core experience, to fan its fire and thus cause it to burn more brightly. The' Charism of the Sisters of Charity 'Our consideration together of a part of our ~harism launches congrega-tion- wide four-year emphasis on our newly crafted charism statement. Our ability to put .words to ~hat charism comes at the end of a lengthy road. We have traveled that road now for nea.rly twenty years at the bidding of Vatican II. In the early 60s we were asked, as women religious, to discover again the spirit of our foundress and to adapt that spirit to the times in which we live: The council's document, Perfectae Caritatis, told us in 1965: 339 340 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 It serves the best interest of the Church for communities'to hax~e, their, own .special, character and purpose. Therefore loyal recognition and safeguarding should be. accorded to the spirit of founders. Over these years we have strugigled with that first,mandate: recognition of the speciai character and purpose of the Sisters of Charity. If your memory of that struggle matches mine, you will agree that in the beginning our effort to give words to the spirit that drove us seemed to be a rather frustrating one because initially it seemed to reveal more the commonalities of religious life than the uniqueness of our congregation as compared with any other. We went through a time when there seemed to be an almost interchangeability to the self-definitions of the Sisters of Charity or Of the Sisters of Mercy or of the Sisters of Loretto. But within the last few ~,ears our special character has indeed come into focus as we prayed over it and talked about it in an effort to express what it is that makes us unique. Finally in the Chapter of 1983, we as a congregation could, at long last, put into just four sentences what we believe to be our lifeblood. Thus, our coming to a recognition of that lifeblood has been for us all a long, but very rich discovery process--o~- perhaps better, a rediscovery process. Secbndly, Perfectae Caritatis ~dmonished"us to :,~afeguard our charism. That is what we are about in today's Church. But if the word "safeguard" seems a bit static, put it another way. We protect a treasure for the Church in our living out the graced vision of Elizabeth Ann Seton. Father John Futrell has defined charism as "simply a graced way of seeing and following Jesus for the service of the whole Church . "1 Elizabeth Seton saw Jesus, and she followed him; so the grace, the vision was initially .hers. It was her vocation, her mode of participation in the mystery of God. But at some historical moment over the years, each of us has received the same gift. Mother Margaret Cecilia George and many others before us have treasured it and lived it. And now it is ours to protect. The.word charism, as you know, comes from the Greek ~'ord for.gift. "Gift" not only means something freely given--that is, a grace--but "gift" .can also mean a special ability, as a gift for art~ or music, or dance, or numbers. Such a gift is recognizable in a person. In our case the gift is to be recognizabl~ not only in each of us, but in the corporate person, the Sisters of Charity 6f Cincinnati. But as with any gift, musical or otherwise, it will thrive only if it is used. And that is our challenge. A few years ago in an article in REVIEW FOR-RELIGIOUS,2 Norman Brockman, in dealing with some of the aspects 6f"charism, indicated that charism is khe very reason for a congregation's existence. The group has been given a particular graced vision for the sake of the Chiarch, and as'its member~ gather to follow their foun.d.ress anew, there comes a point where they incarnate this gi]'t, they express it, in new ways andin new forms of life. The group prays the gift, ponders'ii, witnesses it, comes to a communal realization of the charism. The Charity of the Sisters of Charity .' Our identity then as "faith-filled women of the Church" is indeed our treasure; As, with any treasure it surely needs active attention. The remaining three.sentences of our charism statement tell us somelhing of what that active attention ought to be so as to nourish the very marrow of our life with our God. But my current focus is on "faith-filled women of the Church" and will consider each of its three components: the aspect of our gift attribute to our being women; a consideration of what it means to be faith-filled women; and our call to be women of the Church. Gift We Offe.r as Women It is only in ihe last fifteen or twenty.years that we might be tempted to focus on the gift we offer to the Church as women,,to suggest that the nature of womanhood might be of specia! significance to the Church. We have ,no evidence that in 1809 Elizabeth in. Emmitslsurg; or in 1852 Margaret in Cincinnati, had an~, such realization. But the gift was there. Both those. women, those giants who preceded us, had qualities that could have been developed only in the best of women. While I doubt that either of them sensed that reality, all the years of our history give ample evidence of the qualitiesand contributions which women uniquely bring. What is it about womanhood that can be of such basic significance to the Church? At the very root of it all is something quite fundamental. God is so entire that his creation can~reflect.only bits and pieces of his goodness and his wonder: The best qualities of humans are, indeed, those piecemeal reflections. There is a great variety of these: kindness, consideration, gentleness, strength, truthfulness, honesty, all somehow reflecting in bits and pieces the wholeness of God. But consider this: there is a whole set of human qualities best reflected through .the feminine mode Of, humanity. If this is true, then inversely there mustbe another whole set of qualities that is reflected by the masculine mode. Ideally, then, it takes both those sets to come anywhere near reflecting the whole . Because historically the institutional Church is predominantly masculine and patriarchial, there has been scant opportunity in some arenas for one whole set of values to be operative. There is an increasing agreement today that the Church, as with most of society, needs to complement such male traits as rationality, aggressiveness, competitiveness, and control with a female approach that is intuitive, collaborative, egalitarian, holistic, integrative. Lest there be misunderstanding, let.it be recorded that neither approach has a monopoly on these qualities. It would be faulty reasoning indeed to suggest that women religious alone bear the burden of.bringing a feminine .counterbalance to the Church. All women of the Church are called to that. Also let .it be said that God need not be limited by structures. All of us know many a layman, priest, bishop who has a gentle, caring, contemplative side. through which those aspects of God have been reflected and taught to others. We also know .many women, through ~142 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 history and personally, who have brought the feminine to bear in Church matters--in ministry of every sort, and in the daily living out of their faith. While it is true that women religious are a very small part of the feminine side of the Church I want to suggest that because of our opportunities we bear a disproportionate obligation for feminine influence and for public representation of those facets of God which we perhaps have special capacity to understand. Daniel O'Hanlon, a Jesuit from Berkele3~, suggests that a Western world and Church suffer from the lack of the feminine.3 He calls on women to portray--and the Church to acknowledge and relate to--traits of God which he describes as feminine. They are lovely traits and we khow them, tro. He names God's compassionate, unconditional love for us; his nourishing and life-giving care for us; his presence in mystery to be found not by "rational effort but through loving contemplation; he names God's gentleness and .his sensitivity toward our every need; he describes God as an~intimate friend and companion, much more than a Master and a Lord. And capping his list, he describes God's unyielding fidelity. Those. insights invite us to contemplate God anew, to search more deeply to understand this magnificent Person. Ought we not then talk to one another about him? Help one another as sisters to plumb his depths? What an adventure is in store for those who, perhaps through us, experience those lovely feminine aspects of their God and thus know new energy and completeness in the Church. What a source of gratitude if, perhaps because of us, people's needs are served with the tender, empathic, patient touch that is especially present in women. ,~ " Faith-filled Women What does it mean to be faith-filled women? That is a powerful phrase, a phrase without which Elizabeth Seton would remain undescribed. It desi:ribes not an attitude, but an interaction that took place between God and a woman. That interaction was an integral, inseparable part of her fabric. She spoke of it as, "My blessed faith: all that 1 possess., so dear to me." It is obvious that faith was her driving force. From very early days, for her to live meant to be faith-filled. As she matured in faith it came to be synonymous with her very being, Consider the time frame. Her journey in the Catholic faith was less than twenty years, as a religious, about a dozen, but that faith journey was intense and profound.~, It pervaded the very marrow of her bones. I have chosen to dwell on three remarkable manifestations of Elizabeth Seton's faith°: her attention to the presence of the Lord, her surrender to his Providence, and the place of sorrow in her maturation in faith. Among her words are these: "The. daily lesson: to keep., quietly in his presence, trying to turn every action on his Will . "This was a lesson she offered freely, often, and to many. Again, expressed not in her words, but in a phrase from our 1979 Mission Statement, this was an experience of the "active The Charity of the Sisters of Charity / 343 presence" of an initiative-taking Lord. For her, God was the reality in life. Her awareness of him was unfailingly demonstrated in her words, whether they were written or spoken, in her daily actions, in her propulsion toward eternity. It was clear that she experienced God and that her experience was personal, intimate, confident, consuming. ~ That was one hundred and fifty years ago, when life was less hectic. And so we need to ask whether that kind of experience is affected by the passage of time, by a change in the pace of life? Is being that faith-filled a possibility in the twentieth century? The answer is visible in our midst. The manifestations, the circumstances may differ from those of Elizabeth, but if you look around at those for whom God is real, you will find women whose consciousness of their God is a twenty-four-hour-a-day affair. We constantly rub shoulders with our own sisters who bear the spark of God in their lives. We converse with' these women whose lives are fueled by a realization of God and of his loving initiative toward them. All of us need to talk more with each other about such a wonder so that we will become increasingly filled with faith in the God we love but cannot see. The second manifestation of Elizabeth's faith was in her surrefider to his providence, to God' loving arrangements in her life, to a~ God whom she personified as "The Will." Remember her zest for life, her affection for dear and' loved ones, her tendency to hope and to 0ptimism. Contrast that with the untimely deaths of William, Annina, Rebecca, Cecilia, Harriet, many of the early sisters of Charity, with her early struggles over conversion, with rebuff fro~ the Seton family, with misunderstandings from Church representatiyes, her' uncertainty about the future and the welfare of her children, her own ill health. And then hear her say, "As Sisters of Charity we should fear nothing . You must, must leave Jail] to the dearest, kindest, best of Fathers." And again, "His dear, adored; blessed Will be done! I have none, and if he but continues to give himself, 1 am blind tO everything else." In all of this, there was struggle and pain, but she surrendered to such evidence of his "active presence;" not in fatalism,~but as Jesus did, as part of the mystery of love. For her it was all or nothing. 'There is no painless path to God. She taught us the truth~ of what Kierkegaard wrote: "When God calls me,' he bids me come and die." Kierkegaard spoke of love as "passion for God" and for him an intrinsic part of that passion was obedience. In such passion there can be .no effort to control the rdationship. In his book When the Well Runs Dry, Thomas Green, in speaking of total response to the love of God, said: "It's not so much to do something a.s to allow something to be done to us.'~ In the bool~'s context that statement is describing prayer--but living in surrender to Providence is very much a lived prayer. In the third place Elizabeth Se~on matured in faith througti the place of sorrrw in her life. And sorrows there were. There was a spate of illness:death, financial struggle, two sons unresponsive to her example and urgings, ~1~14 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 complications created by her clerical superiors. All of those were accepted with graciousness and with unwavering love, but at greatcost. Her surrender became a transforming~force. In a few years she moved from an uncertain groping toward faith to an absolute spiritual mastery. At the time of Annina's death she described her anguish as a "grief of the heart--never a grief of the soul." That composure no doubt resulted from her manifestation of faith through surrendering to God's will. But with no less surrender at a later point she came to kno~w what grief of the soul meant. In her writings one can detect the presence of a dark night, a great dryness of spirit. In discovering that she suffered from such dryness w,e ought to take great solace because that is a sorrow which all of us share. Few of us know, or will know, any equal to her personal hardships. We find her endurance and equanimity marvelous and are tempted~otO think those characteristics more within the grasp of a saint than of ourselves. Nor are we very anxious to be tested. But all of us who have come beyond the earliest stages of our journey toward God know something about darkness and dryness. So here is an experience that we do share with Elizabeth. Do you recall in .your formative years in the Community any instructions on the meaning or purpose of. darkness or how to handle it? 1 don't. Yet that pattern comprises a large part of our prayer life. Elizabeth wrote about it: "This sadness of mine ~I cherish as a grace." Precisely! When we common folk can come to recognize our' darkness and dryness in prayer as God's choice for the present moment, and to surrender to that choice, we too can know the grace of transformation. That isa humbling experience and a thrilling one. Father Green says that the major part of the work of transformation in the life of a pray-er isaccomplished by surrendering to this dryness, this darkness.S The darkness is a grace. It calls us to.yield our very selves, and to be acted upon by a loying God. As prayer appears fruitless and we learn the lessons regarding .this new way to pray, we have to let go of control, words, formulae, comfort. We must learn simply to attend and yield to God. That is what prayer is all about. It can bring us to love even as we speak we desire to love: Surrendering to what ~is.happening to us in prayer can result in surrendering our whole life. Understanding this experience of apparent distance from God as proof of his very presence and of his wanting to strip and transform us, allows the experience to ready us for eternity, and allows us to yearn for him with realism. Here. indeed, We are,,one with our foundress, who matured in faith through sorrow and surrender. Lest emphasizing those three facets of Elizabeth's faith obscures the whole, let us look at the woman whom faith ~brought Elizabeth Seton to become, the whole woman, and examine her as described by Joseph Dirvin.6 Toward the end of her twelve years in religious life, Dirvin says of her, "Elizabeth had balance, a superior c, ommon sense--divine and human that puts everything in its place,unerringly, tidily." Dirvin speaks of her spirituality a.s "wide, warm, 7he Charity of the Sisters of Charity / 345 sunny, practical, generous, informal, American." He describes her as "romantic, poetic, tender," yet a realist; efficient in her work, simple, down-to-earth, a "woman of hope and unconquerable optimism."? Who: wouldn't appreciate being so described? One concludes that the faith that filled and drove her, brought her to wholeness, holiness, at its loveliest, its feminine loveliest. Women of the Church Finally, we are called to be Women of the Church. This realist whom we emulate spoke deathbed words which have clearly echoed in Charity hearts for more than one hundred sixty ybars: "My Sisters, be daughters of the Church; be daughters of the Church." It was always with great affection that she spoke of "our Church in America" and believed in its future greatness. She whose entry into that Church was such a struggle became an intimate part of a young American Church, saw its strength and dreamed its dreams--including a role for her Sisters of Charity. She also saw its unsteady side, the fragility of its human component. She herself was a victim of that weakness. It seems safe to claim that the pronouncement of Vatican II concerning the Church a century and a half later, and the thrust that the Council initiated would have delighted Elizabeth Seton and would have been in tune with her understanding of what she called "the mystery of the Church." Vatican II called it that also. The dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, described the Church as a kind of sacrament of salvation, the way to ultimate union with the God of our faith. The Council Fathers took pains to show two aspects of that sacrament: the one--institutional, structural; the other--the Church as ~ gathering of a messianic people, of God's people. Lumen Gentium begins, not with the treatment of structures and government, but with the aspect of the people of God. It views his people in terms of dignity, witness, .ministry, and relationships to one another. When the Council Fathers develop the concept of the institutional Church, they do so in terms of service to God's people, never domination. They identify the aim of the structure to nurture, to contribute to the growth of God's people, to serve the human family through the various functions of authority, teaching, governing, sanctifying. But the Council Fathers also make clear that both aspects of the Church are made up of frail and sinful people who are in constant need of forgiveness and renewal. In that post-Vatican Church Elizabeth Seton would feel very much at home. She grasped its mystery, on the one hand with great affection, service, loyalty, respect; on the other, with a sympathy for human frailty and at times, with loving criticism. She complained to Church authority when she saw decisions impeding the good that she felt God intended, or interfering with freedom of conscience--the conscience of others, never her own. Archbishop Carroll received many a letter from her bemoaning decisions made by Sulpician superiors, asking him to adjudicate their propriety. However, the content of those letters always testifies to her understanding of authority, and to her loyalty. As Dirvin says, "She knew when to fight and when to submit."7 3t16 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 Struggling for that kind of balance is a lesson for her twentieth-century daughters in a time which Jesuit Avery Dulles described as the "century of the Church.TM We as women of that Church must breathe its air, think in its terms, identify with its people, be involved in its struggles, fine tune the voice of God's Spirit, so that our convictions and subsequent struggles are devoid of self-interest or personal causes. True women of the Church are first faith-filled women in love with their God. Only from that perspective can we be genuine leaven in ~society, agents of transformation. Whatever else it is, the Church to which our foundress commended us is charged with the revelation of God's mystery. It is to be the agent of our meeting God, of bringing him to men and women, and of bringing men and women to him. Our Church is a universal church. In today's world communi-cation, transportation, international attitudes join people in every segment of the globe. All peoples deserve our prayers, our concern and some of our service, but our compelling charism is to be women of the American Church, just as it was Elizabeth's in her brief time. Elizabeth Ann Seton had a particular understanding of that American Church which grew out, of her understanding of both American Protestantism and Italian Catholicism. Long before its time, she seemed to understand both aspects of Vatican ll--the mystery of the Church as God's people in their journey toward him, and the structured Church, the various levels of which she dealt with in a very personal way during the twelve years she gave life to the Sisters of Charity. Her hope for our Church and her fidelity to it was not blind. She knew human frailty--her own, her sisters, the clergy; she experienced a lack of understanding personally and on behalf of the congregation. If justice were impeded or good thwarted she spoke and wrote with conviction and with a marvelous mix of humility~ courage, frankness and reverence. Regardless of our point of view, I daresay that each of us is troubled in some way about today's Church. We may have misgivings about the place of American women religious, about official or semiofficial positions takeri or not taken, or about the expectations of the hierarchical Church vis-a-vis our renewal experience of the last twenty years. Sixteen decades after she asked us to be women of this Church, what would be Elizabeth Seton's advice to us today? With no claim that 1 have heard her accurately I do want to share with you what 1 believe 1 heard. I believe that her advice would be voiced with enthusiasm for post-Vatican life in the Church and in religious life; that with us she would find these times of change and uncertainty rich, growthful, challenging. I think her advice would go something like this~three categories, three points under each: Advice for the Head I. Keep recalling the nature of the Church. Have sympathy and patience with the human element, with the need toaddress diversity and to learn The Charity of the Sisters of Charity 34"/ 2~ from it. When there are differences, know, always that there are two sides to the issue. Appreciate the good will of those who judge the position differently, and think very long thoughts about its being God's Church and about the ultimate direction being in his hands. As women with gifts in their heads, continue to probe and to learn. Having limited vision makes us part of the problem. The total truth resides in no one human being, but the more of that truth which we possess the more we bring God's mind to the task. Recognize the importance of bridgebuiiding for effectiveness. If one spans a spectrum, no "we/they" division becomes possible. Advice for the Heart i. Foster positive emotions so as to outweigh negative ones. Our love for God's people should tip the balance against any cynicism about the institution. Our gratitude for mystery should outstrip any impatience with human limits. Our hope for the Goff of our faith is more powerful than any kind of discouragement. There are all sorts of wisdom afloat about what can be accomplished by light hearts as opposed to heavy ones. 2. Let your hearts be governed by your experience of the Lord. Yearn for him and his kingdom as the very framework for your life in the Church. That kind of perspective enables "living with" a great deal which we may find frustrating. 3. Stretch toward an unyielding, full-hearted commitment. Expect to pay the price to accomplish that good. Elizabeth Seton taught us that. Jesus Christ taught us that! If things go smoothly, it might just be because they are going our way. Advice for the Person I. Elizabeth Seton anticipated that Sister-of-Charity presence would effect good in the Church. We, as individuals and as a congregation, should make decisions about our service on the basis of contributing toward a stronger, healthier American church. In a time of lessening numbers, it is critical that we target strategic areas of service with special concern for the ne~ds of the poor, whether that poverty be of body, of mind, or of heart. 2. The gifts of our women are our greatest resource. Developing those gifts, preparing for ministry and choosing that ministry become the joint responsibility of congregation and sister. 3. We represent and participate in both aspects of Church. We are part of the People of Ggd; we are, as women religious, some part of the structure of the Church. We therefore have two kinds of loyalty, two kinds of understanding, we must strive to balance those two parts of the Church as she did. 1 believe that Elizabeth might hope for us to do so 34~1 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 with the feminine traits we have. learned from our God: compassion, gentleness, patient fidelity, the urge to give life. We will make a real difference among Grd's peopl~ and ifi the institutional Church, and therefore in the to~tal, Church, only if weare deeply of God. Only as ]'aith-filled will we be impelled to be women of the Church. And so, as was stated in the beginning, "We Sisters of Charity are called to be faith-filled women of the Church." It is our heritage and vocation. It is a mark by which we are to be recognized. It is our gift, the treasure we keep alive, for those who also will come to be Sisters of Charity. NOTES ~John Carroll Futrell, S.JL "Some Reflections on the Religious Life," Review for Religious, 28, pp. 705-718. 2Norbei-t Brockman. S.M., ~The Shadow Side of Charism," Review for Religious, 35, pp. 229-231. -~Catholic Theological Society of America's convention, reported in National Catholic Reporter, July 15. 1983. 4Thomas H. Green, S.J., When the Well Runs Dry (Ave Maria Press, 1979). Slbid. 6Joseph I. Dirvin, C.M., Mrs. Seton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). 71bid. ~Avery Dulles, S.J. "Introduction to the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church," in" The Documents of Vatican 11 (Guild Press, 1966). Marriage and Continence Complement Each Other Jesus did not say that marriage was inferior to celibacy in itsel£ He recommended celibacy only for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The two forms of life are complementary. The Christian community witnesses to the eschatological dimension of the kingdom through celibacy for its sake. Married love must be marked with the fidelity and total self-giving that are the basis of religious and priestly celibacy; and continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven must lead to parenthood of a spiritual kind (John Paul ll, General Audience, 19 April, 1982; L'Osservatore Romano, 19 April, 1982). Bonding Together for Mission Melinda Roper, M.M. Sister Melinda Roper has been president of the Maryknoll Sisters since 1978. This article is based On an addres~ given by her to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cleveland in preparation for their Chapter of November, 1983. Sister Melinda may be addressed at: Maryknoll Sisters; Maryknoll, NY 10545. ~am happy to be able to share with you some of my reflections and experience on mission. I would like to talk about how mission is a source of energy and commitment in community and how commfinity is a source of energy and commitment in mission. Where we begin to discuss such a theme is important. My starting point is the recognition of a fundamental tension which permeates both mission and community. This tension is described by the following phrases ih John's gospel: "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world,"(Jn 17:16), and "As thou didst send me into,.the world, so I have sent them into the world," (Jn 17:18). The everlasting kindness and faithfulness of God's love for the world is condemned and crucified by that same world: "And the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as | am not of the world," (Jn 17:14). Why does this happen? Why must it happen? Is there any way for Christians, the Church and religious communities to evade conflict and confrontation with the world? Today, as in the histo~'y of the Church, there are two principal routes of escape: isolation and aloofness from the world is one; the other is through compromise with the world. Each route is paved with fear whose source is self-interest, be it "eternal" self-interest, or the temporary security of power and comfort. If we opt for one of these routes, there are many scenic side paths along the way which subtly distract us from the isolation or compromise we may have chosen. We thus elude this fundamental energy and tension in the life and person of Jesus to which John refers. 350 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 As we read the letters of Paul to the early Christian communities, we can trace these same tendencies to escape the radical implications of.believing in Jesus Christ: Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory (I Co 2:6-8). As I look at many groups within the Church in the United States today, I perceive that we have moved from a spirituality of flight from the world into the arena of public issues to a degree that had not been part of oi]r recent past. We have moved into the world. As we continue to become involved in public issues, especially those which deal with economic and political policies and structures, we must be keenly aware of the radical differences between the wisdom and tactics, strategies and ideologies of the world and the wisdom of God in Jesus Christ. Our temptation today may be to seek change by compromising the wisdom of God with that of the "rulers of this age." Most Christian communities today have given much time, effort and prayer to social justice, solidarity with the poor and world peace. Our intention and motivation are in harmony with our great biblical tradition. Yet, how frequently do we find ourselves co-opted by the ways of the world when it comes to action toward a future world of peace with justice. It seems that there are at least five considerations we must address if we are not to be coerced and co-opted by the world: ~ 1. The Christian community dreams of and envisions, the reign of God together. How do we concretize our vision of the kingdom or reign of God today? Each culture and society will descri6e the fullness of life or the reign of God with different images. The biblical images with which we are familiar range from a land flowing with milk and honey, where no one is in need, to the heavenly Jerusalem coming out of heaven, with God dwelling among us and wiping away all tears, death, rriourning and pain. The quality of our relation-ships will flow from a superabundance of love and understanding; there will be no inequality among nations,, races, men and women, rich and poor. Today, what are the concrete images tliat we in a technological culture visualize for ourselves and our sisters and brothers around 'the world as we move in hope towards the reign of God? How much does the "great American dream" of our ancestors--freedom, liberty and justice for all--influence our vision of the reign of God? Perhaps we have increasingly greater difficulty concretizing our ~,ision of the fullness of life for all peoples. I believe this is also one of the greatest challenges for us rdigious today regarding community, living. What are the concrete images and vision~ we have of community in terms of thee reign of God? It 'seems tO me that the twff Bonding Together for Mission / 351 are intimately and intrinsically ,bound up in each other. Our religious communities can only exist for and within the reign of God, not for themselves. What is our vision? It is not sufficient for individuals to articulate a vision. Communities of believers must share a vision. 1 believe that shared reflection moves us more deeply into the wisdom of God. As our ability to listen,becomes more sensitive, we enter into the harmony and paradox of our world and of~our God. We will become communities Of contemplation; From this contemplation together will flow a vision for tomorrow. The most concrete question I can put before you is: Do we take the time? 2. The Christian community discerns and selects together those ministries which will move it toward its vision. How do we move from where we are today towards our vision? This question is a bit easier to comment on because we can deal directly with where and how we expend our time and energy. We do make choices and organize our lives and communities in order to effect change in our world. For most of us, our ministries or apostolic works are key indicators .as to how we see the reign of God coming about, and this is also where we can easily slip into the coercion~of the world of which John and Paul wrote so much. Iwill use one example of this coercion which I judge to be very subtle in our society, culture and Church, namely: professionalism. It is a two-edged sword because, on the one hand, the skills and knowledge we can acquire in order to better serve others in the spirit of the Gospel are extremely useful. On the other hand, the systems, institutions and values within which a profession is learned and exercised are frequently fundamentally opposed to the Gospel. Perhaps the old American dream was envisioned as coming about through competence and hard work, but that is not sufficient for the coming of the reign of God. Some of the mechanisms which keep our systems going are: competition, prestige and achievement rewarded by salary, benefits and promotion to positions of greater control and management. We become immersed in bureaucracy instead of in the life of the world. Once,we begin to take all these on as signs of success and even as sources of our identity, we are being co-opted by the world, and, before we know it, we begin to accommodate ourselves, our institutions and the Gospel to the standards and values of the world. Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. Forit is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness," and again: "The Lord knows that th~ thoughts of the wise are futile" (I Co 3:18-20). I believe thav'0ne of thekey functions of the religious commu.nity today in the United States is to reflect and discern together those ministries and works which ate most in tune with the spirit of the Gospel. At the same time, we challenge each other and our ihstitutions to a keen awareness of the great possibilities of being coerced and co-opted by those values and standards 352 / Review for. Religious, May-June, 1984 which demand that the Gospel be accommodated. What procedures and criteria do we use in order to set directions or priorities in ministry? 3. The Christian community chooses a lifestyle which contradicts those values in a c~lture which undermine the Gospel There is a ,.fundamental tension in most religious communities today regarding lifestyle, especially concerning material goods. In most .of the great religious traditions, including the Christian tradition, there is a stream of asceticism and spirituality which advocates simple or austere living .in the pursuit of truth. There is also the fact that most organized religions, at one time or another 'in their history, have become wealthy and powerful according to worldly values. In terms of their purpose, this is frequently evaluated as a time of decadence. The Catholic Church in the United States has moved from being a Church of the poor immigrant to one having social acceptability and even prestige. We religious have moved right along with this change. Our expectations of material comfort, from health care to diet and entertainment, have blended pretty well with those of our society. In one sense, this may not be so bad in that we are no longer traveling an escape route of isolation and aloofness. In another sense, though, it is time to examine the invasion of materialism and consumerism into our values and understanding of the Gospel. To the degree that our economic structures, which both support and export materialism, undermine our vision of the reign of God, we who form Christian communities must be a living sign of contradiction. We must remember, however, that we, as Jesus, are sent into the world, not away from it. We will be tempted to compromise. Living community today means that we can both affirm and challenge each other to become living signs of contradiction to our unjust, materialistic society. ,, 4. The patterns o~f relationship in the Christian community contradict the fear and defensiveness in United States society. Again, ~we must look at the reality of our society and culture .and .be sensitive and insightful in order to clearly distinguish that which is of the world and that which is of the Gospel. Examples abound--and I will select just one for comment: our system of defense in the name of national security. Any defense system is based more on attitudes and values than on dollars and weapons. First of all, it requires an enemy and a threat. It necessitates sufficient fear in order to mobilize resources to destroy the enemy, in this case, communism. Aititudes of defensiveness and fear permeate our society to such a degree that "an eye for an eye"is not even held up as an acceptable basis for action. Through fear, we have created an enemy who is ,so monstrous that the only acceptable posture of defense is the capability and willingness to totally destroy it. Followers of Jesus are sent into this world to live according to radically different attitudes and values: love your enemies, forgive those who offend Bonding Together for Mission / 353 you, pray for those who persecute you. These teachings are not meant solely for isolated communities of believers. They are meant to be announced and lived in the market places, court rooms, Congresses and White Houses of the world. Paul gives a lot of advice to the early Christian communities. To the community in Corinth, he writes: "When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things" (I Co 4:12-13). As we attempt to move toward our vision of the reign of God, we will, without doubt, be slandered, persecuted and ridiculed. This will happen because, according to the defensiveness and fear of our woi-ld, we have nothing to defend and nothing to fear. We have a source of hope and truth which makes us free. This freedom is perceived as subversive and as a threat by those who control and operate within the psychological, political, economic and cultural structures and systems of defensiveness and fear. It is neither easy nor simple to be sent into the world with these values. The Christian community and, therefore, the religious community must become a place that is radically different from the world. Our communities challenge the hostility of our society with hospitality, welcoming the refugee and the outcast. We will become a source of courage for each other and for the world. We will also become a sign of contradiction to the world. 5. The Christian community lives and celebrates a universal Eucharist. When we gather in table friendship with the poor, the sinners, the refugees and the outcasts of our society and of our world, we do so in memory of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As a community of faith, we share his body and blood in forgiveness and in hope of the fullness of life for all peoples. As Eucharist becomes the strength of our unity, it also becomes the energy of our mission. We know that worship without justice is blasphemous; we must come to understand that there is no justice without worship. As communities in mission, we pursue truth and justice with forgiving hearts. As fear disappears from our lives, we become the living memory of Jesus. We celebrate salvation in harmony with all of creation, and in communion with all peoples. 1 have given them thy word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not pray that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into the world, so 1 have sent them into the world (Jn 17:14-18). This is Jesus' prayer for us. He not only prayed for us, but he himself experienced what he prayed. He calls and sends us into the world to be the living memory of that prayer "God so loved the world . , May our communities move freely into the world to announce and live the Good News of the reign of God. Mission as Communication: A Marginal Note Anthony J. Gittins, C.S.Sp. Father Gittins, who has had "mission experience" in the conventionally accepted sense of the term, is now a member of London's The Missionary Institute and resides at the Chaplain's Residence; 34 Adolphus Road; London N4 2PP; Engl.and. Contraries and Contradictories The Church is missionary by nature; we are coming to the end of missionary work. Missionaries are special people who go overseas to preach the Gospel," you can be a missionary from a hospital bed. Every Christian is a missionary; we can't all be missionaries. A few people have a special missionary charism; if you are not a missionary, you are not a Christian. Today is the age of mission on six continents; today we must have a moratorium on missionary activity. "I work in a London parish, but I'm a missionary," . I'm not really a missionary, but l~n working here in Tanzania for a few years." "This is a comfortable, urban parish--it badly needs a missionary; . This middle class, comfortable parish is not for me--l'm a missionary." One could easily multiply these antithetical and seemingly contradictory statements, all of which are easy to elicit these days. I list them only as a reminder that the notions "mission" and "missionary" are still emotive terms and not amenable to a simple, acceptable definition. If we were to look at the usage of the word "pastoral," we would find similar problems of definition and clarification; and any discussion which tries to contrast the notions "missionary" and "pastoral," and to reach satisfactory and agreed conclusions on the distinctive and common features of each, is almost certainly bound to end in an impasse. Each of those opening statements contains some truth, indeed some important truth; but each too contains either some gross oversimplification or 354 Mission as Communication [ 355 some very dangerous implication. Could we not simply reach a careful and common definition of mission, and solve the ambiguities? In the following pages 1 will consider the question: "how can one be a missionary?" and avoid the questions: "what is mission?" and "what is a missionary?", since to attempt to do the latter would be to fall into the trap of defining mission and missionary, which is impossible; the words "define" and "definition" contain the notions of "limits" or "limitations," and derive from the Latin verb "to set bounds to." Yet the word mission comes from the verb "to send," and in some sense at least, the missionary is someone who is sent without limit, to the ends of the earth if necessary. So let us not define mission; let us not set bounds to the ends of the earth. Identifies and Differences If there is no useful reason to attempt an etymological definition of mission, and no theological reason either, why, we may ask, is it so fashionable to try to define the concept? And why has so much ink been recently spilled, on this issue? Do missionaries need to define themselves? I suggest that there is, and has been for some time, a tendency, inhibiting and unhealthy--a tendency both in conversation and in print, and illustrated in part by some of the statements with which I started--to overanalyze the concept of mission, to the point where missionaries have become self-conscious and apologetic or aggressive. Do missionaries need to prove that they are different from everyone else, somehow special? Do they need to be assured like James and John, that they will sit by the side of Christ in his glory (Mk 10:35-37), or to be told that they are the greatest (Mk 9:33-34), even though they should be very familiar with the mind of Christ on these matters? Do the professional missionaries, whose identity was once unquestioned and unchallenged, now feel peeved that they have borne the burden and heat of the day only to find latecomers equally acknowledged and rewarded (Mr 20:1 !-i6)? Is this not what Christ warned us against? When you have done all you have been told to do, say "We are merely servants: we have done no more than our duty" (Lk 17:10). So long as any missionary is basically insecure and needs to be accepted as "special," he or she simply cannot fulfill the missionary and Christian vocation. What is needed is a strong sense of identity and self acceptance, certainly: a sense of purpose and a sense of vocation. But if the identity of the missionary vocatipn is unclear, how is the individual missionary to cope? And if missionaries cannot cope with themselves, how can they cope with others? A strong self-image and self acceptance are prerequisites for authentic service, and need to be nurtured through parents and family or through other forms of community. Religious or apostolic communities are, theoretically, ideally constituted to provide affirmation, solidarity and support, yet many such communities are notoriously poor at reinforcing and encouraging their members, whether 3[i6 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 through rivalries within or uncertainty and disagreement about the nature of their apostolate and lifestyle. Anyone with an underdeveloped sense of identity or selfworth, is hardly going to be able to affirm others, because such a one feels threatened; and anyone without a conviction about the nature of mission, is not going to be able to challenge or share with others. While some individuals search for their vocation anew, and institutes try to rediscover their charisms as though they were some pot at the end of the rainbow, many missionary institutes settle unhappily or unknowingly into a terminal stage of their existence, and other individuals agonize over their loyalties to their communities and their own integrity. And all the while, "mission" remains an imperative of the Church, generous souls seek an authentic experience of this reality, and new shoots are to be seen tentatively pushing through the earth's mantle into another spring. Exclusion and Inclusion The different Christian denominations have moved increasingly--on the individual and community level--towards identifying and exploiting what they have in common rather than isolating themselves in their differences. But whilst there has been undoubted progress and marked goodwill among the denominations, there remains much work to be done within them. I can and will speak only of the Catholic Church when I say we have sometimes seemed to overemphasize the difference between us, on an individual, parish or religious-institution basis. And, admittedly justifiably on occasion, we have made a virtue out of pluralism and variety, where a greater virtue might have been discovered in exploiting areas of similarity and examining possibilities for collaboration. Why should we make lines of demarcation and distinction unless we are certain they are necessary? Why foster an exclusive mentality when an inclusive invitation is central to the Gospel? Why distinguish what is pastoral from what is missionary, unless to do so is to discover a great truth? What is devalued if we say that all pastoral activity must be missionary, and that all missionary activity must be pastoral? We can argue that there is a real distinction to be carved out between what is pastoral and what is missionary,I but less and less is there any justification for defining them in exclusive terms, as either/or. Far more important than a terminological issue is a psychological issue? how can we make mission work more pastoral and pastoral work more missionary: to put it another way, how can the universal Church be localized, and the local Church be universalized? And how can we break away from a narrow parochialism of ecclesiastical structures if our minds, however putatively missionary, are parochial? If the pastoral and missionary dimensions of the Church cannot be dynamically interrelated, it is difficult to understand how the outcome of apostolically oriented undertakings can build up the body of Christ which is the Church. To say that everyone is called to take some part in the mission of the Mission as Communication / 357 Church, is surely not so much to devalue mission as to value each Christian; it is to challenge the secure ahd the complacent, and to encourage the fainthearted and timid; it is to see the call of Christ as inclusive rather than exclusive. So what is this call of Christ? It is something so powerful that a matter of an hour or two after having borrowed the boat of a fisherman and preached from it, Jesus had Peter, a bluff fisherman, agreeing to fish where he had spent a fruitless night, and with his partners James and John turning his back on the security of his fisherman's business, leaving everything he had, and following the stranger. That is the call: as stark and unqualified as: "come, follow me." This, essentially, is what characterizes the Christian; essentially it is what characterizes the missionary: the response to the call of Jesus, wherever that call may lead. Jesus himself did not go far from his home, but his mission was from his Father to the whole of humankind. Our participation in that mission is more important than any location, and it is as possible to be missionary on one's doorstep, as it is to fail to be missionary ten thousand miles from home. Our only objective should be to be included in the Mission of Christ, not so much by where we are as by who we are. Apostles and Apostils An apostle is someone who is sent out with a mandate; an apostil is something in the margin, an e×empIification. Just as the Son of Man was not called to be served but to serve (Mt 20:28), and as the servant is not above the master (Jn 13:14-15), so we are called to serve (Lk 22:26). So the Christian, being a missionary, is sent out with a mandate, and the mandate is "to serve." The one who serves is a server or a servant, an.d the word servant comes from the Latin for a slave--a person legally owned by another: one with no freedom of action or the right to property, or, in a very accommodated sense, one who works in very harsh conditions for very little remuneration. Jesus came to serve (Mt 20:28), and of his own lifestyle he remarked: Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head (Mt 8:20). So what are we called to, if we follow Jesus? Though it is rapidly becoming a clich6 that it is more important for us to be than to do, I would like to reflect on the truth therein and say further that for missionaries it is more important to be than to go; if we solve thefirst problem or rise to the first challenge, the second will not frighten or confuse us. What we are called to do is to become marginalized; otherwise we cannot follow Jesus, since he went to the "lost sheep" of the house of Israel. He was himself sent to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free (Lk 4:18). But the point is not so much what he did, as who he was, and in looking at 35~1/ Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 what he did, we see what he was: pushed to the margins of society. There is little point in one's going to a foreign country if one cannot communicate. I may go to France or Germany with no French or German, and provided there is someone who is linguistically competent in my language, we can communicate. And we have been reminded a thousand times of the necessity of language-learning for missionaries; I am not going to repeat that reminder. But if one is to go to the margins of society--to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the downtrodden and dispossessed--how is one to communicate? Since by definition they are not able to communicate in terms of the rich, the free, the sighted, the emancipated and the privileged, there is only one way. If they are like French or Germans who speak no English and cannot hope to, then the English must learn French or German. And if we are to be missionaries in the spirit of Jesus, we must not only realize that we must become marginalized; nor is it sufficient to want to become marginalized; we must learn to become marginalized. Some missionaries certainly realize that they must become marginalized, and of those, some certainly want to. But how many really learn to become marginalized, and how many don't see the problem? It is not for me to point the finger or to make judgments; I am having enough of a problem recognizing the issue. It is not possible to be an apostle without being an apostil: out on the margin--an example. Missions and Margins One of the popular definitions of mission is the following: "a group of people sent by a religious body, especially a Christian Church, to a foreign country to do religious and social work." It is the "foreign country" that characterizes this definition, and many people would accept this without demur. It may be argued that this is a necessary element; but it is certainly not a sufficient one. The missionary must in some sense be on the margin of society. But how can one accept a marginalized status (surely this is a "cross-cultural" dimension of mission?) if one cares overmuch about defining oneself as special? And if a person does not have a strong sense of identity, belonging, and self acceptance, how is it possible to embrace others at the margin of society and not be crushed and destroyed? We need to be trained to be marginalized since most of us have no idea what it is like. We are secure, fed, housed, privileged; we need to be "conscientized" before it is too late and we react with incredulity to the burning accusation: I was hungry and you never gave me food; I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink; 1 was a stranger and you never made me welcome; naked and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me (Mt 26:41-44). If we are not trained we will make dreadful and culpable mistakes, for goodwill is not enough. Without training we will not be able to localize the Mission as Communication / 359 Church--make it relevant to the people of God. And how can the local Church localize, unless we marginalize? Otherwise we are perpetuating an unwholesome and stifling universalism. Without training we will try to perpetuate a Church "always and everywhere the same," with no idea of the forces of social change and the real problems of real people. Without training we will not be walking with the poor and the disenfranchised and the marginalized--we will be walking by them, and maybe even on them. The real meeting to be effected is not, 1 suggest, between us--English, American, Italian--and them--African, Latin American, Hispanic: us and therh in this context are almost totally other, almost alien to each other. That kind of meeting would be like the meeting between tourists on a round-the-world trip, and the Mud-men. of Papua New Guinea or the dancers of Bali. No, the real meeting, the model for which is Jesus (see Lk 7:22-23), is between the marginalized: the 1--by choice not quite part of the value system of a dominant culture, wherever it may be, and the Thou--by necessity not quite part of the value-system of a dominant culture. Whether at home or abroad, the apostle with the true missionary spirit, will become inculturated at all levels, not only by learning the language and culture but by taking the mission of Jesus seriously (Lk 4:18), to the point of insecurity, unpredictability, discomfort, and the rest--not because these things are good, but because they are the burden of the children of God, and that burden has to be lifted by strong hands lest it crush the weak. Only when we share the burden can we begin to walk together--otherwise we exploit or patronize those we are sent to serve. It does not really matter how we are described on our passport or on immigration papers; it doesn't matter very much what actual job we do. But it matters a great deal who we are and who we are becoming. Not everyone can be as visibly marginalized as everyone else, but we can all be detached from things and attached to people. A simpler lifestyle is mandatory, otherwise we are guilty of injustice; and the cultivation of a "marginalized mentality" would seem to be demanded. Whoever is not this much marginalized is not missionary. And whoever is not missionary is not yet fully Christian. Communication and Context The first letter of Peters provides a context of hope and an eschatological dimension for our reflections. Christians are urged to animate society by the witness of good works and their general lifestyle (1 P 2:12, 14; 4:!9), not in order to proselytize but to communicate to the people the promise of God, to receive his glory (I P 4:7-11). They are to be involved(I P 2:11-35: 5:5-8), and to be filled with hope. The letter develops a theology of vocation, and in our own day we surely need to continue, in our programs of formation and beyond, to tease out a theology and praxis for communicating the Good News in an appropriate context--not from ivory towers or groves of academe alone. 360 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 Communication is only possible when there are interlocutors who have not simply a code in common but find the context in which that code can be transmitted and received with minimum interference. First there has to be a meeting; then reciprocity; and finally comprehensibility. Only if we are trained, only if we learn the code and are prepared to listen as well as speak, can we hope to have any communication. But at least the marginalized can begin to talk to the marginalized; they do speak the same language. NOTES ~Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church, n. 6, in The Documents of I/atican IL W. Abbott (Chapman, 1967), p. 592. 2A helpful article for further reading is: B. A. Joinet, "Integrating the Mission Societies into the Local Church," esp. pp. 271-272, in Mission in Dialogue, edited by Motte and Lang (Orbis Books, 1982), pp. 264-281. 3For this section I have referred to D. Senior and C. Stuhlmueller, The Biblical Foundations of Mission (SCM, 1983), pp. 300-302. Theology and the Magisterium ¯. be faithful to your faith, without falling into the dangerous illusion of separating Christ from his Church, or the Church from her magisterium. "Love for the concrete Church includes fidelity to the testimony of faith and the ecclesiastical magisterium and does not alienate the theologian from his proper task nor deprive it of its irrenounceable consistency. Magistcrium and theology have different functions. Therefore, one cannot be reduced to the other" (Discourse to Theologi-ans of Germany. Alt6tting. Nov. 18, 1980. n. 2: cited in John Paul I1: Address to Theologians ~f Spain. November I. 1982. n. 5). On Being an Ex-Superior Roland J. Faley, T.O.R. Father Faley served as Vicar General (1971-1977) and as Superior General (1977-1983) of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. During his earlier term, he wrote "Generalates and Social Justice," which appeared in the issue of May, 1976. Currently he is an associate pastor at St. Michael Parish; 3713 Harwood Road, Bedford, TX 76021. ~n the post-conciliar Church considerable attention has been given to the continuing formation of almost all segments of religious life. Little has been said, however, of the lot of the ex-superior. The term is used here in the sense of the major superior in a religious order or congregation. The person who is called to leadership in a religious community today is faced with many difficulties which are unlike those of former times. Authority is called to be more dialogic which can be psychologically draining and certainly more time absorbing. There are new "crises" with which he or she is faced: diminishing vocations, overworked religious, new directions in the community's apostolic thrust, not to speak of the personal problems, brought about by the winds of change, faced by religious of the institute. Major superiors in most communities have a limited term of office. An initial three or four year term is the usual minimum which in many instances leads to reelection. This means a mandate of service of six to eight years. A superior general may very well serve double that length of time. Since there is not usually an apprenticeghip for this type of service (at least prudence would seem to dictate the contrary!), this means that the initial adjustment can be, if not traumatic, at least very demanding. During the length of the term of office it is very difficult for the major superior to meet the need for her or his continuing education, at least over any extended period of time, because of the weighty responsibilities inherent in the office. Vacation time is usually kept to a minimum. Moreover a great deal of mobility is required with superiors dividing their time between the central office and the various houses and 361 362 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 missions of the institute. It is probably safe to say that even the most insensitive religious today, who may have all sorts of difficulties with authority, is forced to admit that this is a service to the community which exacts a very high price. Today men and women are called to leadership roles within an institute at an increasingly earlier age. This of course brings vitality and thrust to the office, but it also means that these religious finish their term of office with a consider-able life span still ahead of them. This is not so in the case of many other eccle-siastical officeholders who hold a position until retirement, at which time they are physically and psychologically at a point of decline. How is the ex-major superior to deal with the future? How is she/he prepared to deal with it? The issue needs to be addressed. The necessity of showing special concern for the psychic health and well-being of religious is today much to the fore and this demand is placed squarely on the shoulders of major superiors. Yet how much attention is given to the superiors' own spiritual, intellectual and psychological needs? Many religious presume that all goes well at the top and never take the time to verify their conclusion. It should be noted that affirmation is not solely a felt need of the people in the ranks. The simple fact is that there is little attention given the major superior, who is presumed to be self-assured, full of confidence and capable of operating somewhat as a robot. Such is not the case. His or her needs are no different from those of others. While seeking to avoid overstatement, one need only reflect on the number of times the major superior becomes the automatic.target for all the ills of the community. More than one person in a leadership role has been subjected to a heated diatribe simply because of the position he or she holds. Moreover their peer group within the institute (other major superiors) are usually far removed geographically and not readily available for consultation and support. It is true that they receive valuable assistance from other major superiors who belong to the national conference of superiors. However, this is often limited to the time of annual meetings or other such gatherings. It is not available on a continuing basis. In recent times much has been done to afford local superiors the chance to meet together regularly. This is becoming increasingly common within institutes today and is helpful in many ways, not the least of which is the decree of peer support which it affords. However, it should be remembered that major superiors do not usually enjoy that same possibility. Members of a provincial or general council can offer a certain measure of support. For this reason it is important that at least some members of the council live in community with the major superior. This affords the major superior someone with whom he or she can share concerns and be assured of confidentiality. But even then it should be noted that people are often elected to the council (and not ordinarily selected by the major superior) for a variety of reasons. Ability and expertise are front and center; compatability with the major superior is not always one of the criteria. In fact, in more than one instance it is sorely lacking. While allowing for exceptions and inevitable variations on the theme, it On Being an Ex-Superior / 36~1 can be said that those called to religious leadership are called to a life of considerable loneliness. They carry much of the burden of their office alone, and, of course, theirs is always the relatively ultimate responsibility. It might well be argued that such isolation should not be the case. Experience however, shows that such does occur and often to the spiritual and human detriment of the person. It should be noted that the office of superior is not that of a professional person who works a nine-to-five day. Many people in society cope with their problems on the basis of the compartmentalization of their life. The hours and locale of work and rest are clearly separated and delineated. In religious life, the role of leadership demands an almost constant availability, the heroics of continuous performance. The needs of religious do not follow the horarium of an ordinary work day. This writer was once told by a former provincial, that after his term of office ended, even the sound of a telephone during the night meant the loss of an entire night's sleep. The crises of night calls had sunk deep into his psyche. State of Mind In what state of mind do superiors reach the end of their mandate? Admittedly for some the transition to a new way of life presents no noticeable difficulty. They move into new assignments with no apparent stress. There are others who evidence no exterior dramatic change but internally suffer a great deal. Still others, after the initial sigh of relief, begin to experience very evident psychological problems. If it can be reasonably posited that most major religious superiors finish their term of office well in advance of retirement age, how are they to address their own future? "Burnout" has become an "in" expression and points to a reality that has become all too common. Many a major superior finishes the term of office in such a state. These persons feel that they have no more to give; they suffer from a pronounced weariness and are psychologically, if not spiritually, drained. The whole experience has proved to be too much. Very often their "wind-down" begins a year before their term ends, during which time the mach!nery of office, for all practical purposes, grinds to a halt. Important decisions, as well as some which are less important, are left to "my successor." There is a pattern of withdrawal from all except essential duties; the only thing anticipated is a "smooth transition." This is a sad picture. It is even sadder when one stops to think of the youth and vigor with which the incumbent began office and then compare it with the signs of age and exhaustion which have come to the fore as the "twilight~ approaches. No new ideas are being generated. The only desire is to leave the office and extend a heartful word of congratulations to the next incumbent. It should be noted well that such a state of "burnout" can have serious spiritual repercussions, even in virtuous and stalwart souls. On the other end of the spectrum are those per,dons who at the end of their ~!64 / Review for Religious, May-June, 1984 term of office still have a very high level of effectiveness. They are so psycho-logically geared to decision making, to generating ideas, and to the overall role of government that they have trouble bringing themselves to the inevitable "slow down." The adrenalin is still running high. A swift transition to a position wherein there is drastic deescalation in authority almost overnight can produce seriously adverse effects. It is not a question of being hungry for power. It is simply that the sustained level of operation to which the person had become accustomed has suddenly ceased, and this in many instances at a relatively early age. Such a person has specific needs to be addressed which are different, but no less pronounced, than those of the person suffering from "burnout." The Period After Leadership It is the writer's conviction based on experience that an extended period of time should be given an outgoing major superior for spiritual and intellectual renewal before any new assignment is made. It is a principle which is valid quite independent of one's character or personality. For legitimate reasons the person has a need for time and space for readjustment and reentry. A sabbatical year is not in any way excessive. This affords a relaxed atmosphere in which the ex-superior is being revitalized and is not called upon to revitalize others. The interests of individuals certainly will vary. Some ex-superiors may feel strongly the need for spiritual renewal; others may see the need for a return to studies in theology or perhaps the discipline which was pursued prior to major superiorship. Still others will sense a need for pastoral "retooling." In all of this a person should be given as much latitude as needed, with as little external pressure as possible. Not infrequently this period of renewal will be pursued away from the houses of the institute. This can be salutary and whol

Issue 14.5 of the Review for Religious, 1955. ; Reviewfor Religious SEPTEMBER 15, 1955. Caussade on External Grace . John A. Hardon Effective Governing . Claude Aquavlva Mother Xavier Warde . $1s{er Mary Julian To Teaching Sisters . ~'ope Plus XII Secular Institutes . Francis N. Korth Intellectual Obedldnce . Augustine G. I:llard I, Book Reviews" Questions and Answers ForI Your Information Communications VOLUME XIV NUMBER 5 R Vlg:W FOR RI::LIGiOUS VOLUME XIV SEPTEMBER, 1955 NUMBER CONTENTS EXTERNAL GRACE IN THE SPIRITUALITY OF PI~RE CAUSSADE-- 'john A. Hardon, S.'J . 225 SOME RECENT PAMPHLETS . 234 EFFECTIVE GOVERNING-~Claude Aquaviva, S.'J .2.3.5. FOR YOUR INFORMATION . 240 MOTHER MARY XAVIER WARDE-~Sister Mary ,Julian Baird, R.S.M. 241 TO TEACHING SISTERS--Pope Plus XII . 251 THE DEDICATED LIFE AND SECULAR INSTITUTES-- Francis N. Korth, S.'J . 257 A RATIONAL APPROACH TO INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE-- ~ Augustine G. Ellard, S.3 . . 261 COMMUNICATIONS (on "praying reasonably," and on retreats) 266 OUR CONTRIBUTORS . 266 BOOK REVIEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS-- Editor: Bernard A. Hausmann, S.,J. West Baden College West Baden Springs, Indiana . 267 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS-- 22. Introducing a Thirty-Day Retreat . 278 23. Introducing Perpetual Adoration . 278 24. New Devotions at Mother House . 279 25. Introducing Lay Retreats at Mother House . 279 26. Annual Retreat outside Houses of Institute . 279 27. Rank of Lay Sister when Grade is Abolished . 280 28. Extended Vacations for Favored Group .280 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, September, 1955. Vol. XIV, No. 5. Published bi-monthly: 3anuary, March, May, 3uly, September, and November at the College Press, 606 Harrison Street, Topeka, Kansas, by St. Mary's College, St. ~vlarys, Kansas, with ecclesiastical approbation. Entered as second class matter 3anuary 15, 19420 at the Post Office, Topeka, Kansas, under the act of March 3, 1879. Editorial Board: Augustine G. Ellard, S.J., Adam C. Ellis, S.J., Gerald Kelly, S.'J., Francis N. Korth, 8.2. Literary Editor: Edwin F. Falteisek, S.2. Copyright, 1955, by Adam C. Ellis, S.~I. Permission is hereby granted for quota-tions of reasonable length, provided due credit be given this review and the author. Subscription price: 3 dollars a year; 50 cents a copy Printed in U. S. A. Before writing to us, please consult notice on inside back cover. l:::x ernal Grace in the Spirltuali F ot: P re Caussade John A. Hardon, S.J. pERE CAUSSADE ~.s unique an~ong ascetical writers in modern times. The one book on which his reputation rests, L'Aban-don a la Providence Divine, was not published by him but edited a hundred years af~ter his death, by Father Rami~re, the apostle of the Sacred Heart in France. I.t was not even a book in the ac-cepted sense but a collection of 1.32 letters of spiritual direction, which he wrote to the Religious of the Visitation at Nancy~ where he had charge of the local retreat house. Yet this posthumous work has enjoyed a diffusion 'perhaps unequalled in its class during the past century. As of 19218, it had gone through twenty-one editions in French and had been, translated into a dozen languages. In the new Enciclopedia Cattolica, published under Vatican auspices, the author is described as "the classic teacher of resign,ation to the will of God." I The full title of the original edition, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence, Constldered as the Easiest Means of Sanctification, gives us the clue to its Wide popularity. In the mind of Caussade, the easiest way to spiritual perfection--for everyone--is complete resignation to the super.~atural providence of God. As such, the idea was nothing new, but Caussade's hafidling of the subject was decidedly new. He integrated this ,familiar concept into the body of Catholic doctrin~ onI external grace and thereby clarified what previously had been known, but not so pointedly realized. The following study is "inteNded to synthesize the basic elements of Caussade's teaching oni self-abandonment to divine providence, where the latter is conceived as a veritable atmosphere of external graces in which God pla~es our life, and through which He designs our salvation and sanctification. The Meaning of External Grace In the spirituality of P~re Caussade, the activity of God is de-scribed as embracing all time and all things, operating without ceasing and with divine surety for the sanctlficanon of human souls. He sees all creation as unified in this divine operation and conse-quently regards every creature, in its way, as a predestined means 225 JOHN A. HARDON Review for" Religious to lead men to their supernatural end; in other words, 'as a grace of God. "The order established by God, the good pleasure of God, the will of God, the action of God--grace--all. of these are the same thing in this life. It is God laboring to make the soul like to Him-self. And perfection is nothing else than the soul's faithful co-oper-ation with this labor of God." Moreover, what may not seem im-mediately evident, since the power of God is infinite, it is not only the good things but also the evil which He can use to accomplish His eternal designs upon men; so that "everything succeeds in the hands of God, He turns everything into .good." Although P~re Caussade makes no distinction between internal and external graces, but considers everything in some sense as a grace of God, yet it is not difficult to trace such a distinction in his writings. Following the common terminology, graces are called ex-ternal when they are outside of man's intellect and will and internal when they are immediately and specially received from God within the intellect and will. In answer to the question, then-~What does Caussade regard as an external grace?--he would answer, "Every creature which is "not an internal grace of God." "The divine order gives to all things, in favor of the soul which conforms to it, a super-natural and God-given. value. Whatever this order imposes, what-ever it comprehends, and all objects to which it extends, become sanctity and perfection; for its virtue knows no limits, but divinizes all things which it touches." As extensive as it is, this concept of external grace is in full accord with Catholic theology. St. Augustine, for example, does not hesitate to call external graces all the effects of supernatural providence which help the human will to perform acts of virtue and those which, under divine guidance, prevent men from committing sin. Different Kinds of External Grace An exhaustive classification of the various types of external grace described by Caussade would run into a score of items. But these can easily be reduced to several large divisiofis. Eoergthing which is good. As a general principle, the love of God transforms into grace everything which is good, nor does i't limit this transformation only to such things as appear good to as. For divine love is present in all creatures, with the sole exception of those which are sinful and contrary to the law of God. Temporal afflictions and adversities. God uses them to convert and sanctify our souls. No matter how painful, sickness and physi- 226 September, 1955 CAUSSADE ON EXTERNAL GRACE cal suffering are in reality a grace of God, always intended as such for the one suffering and sometimes used by Him for the conversion and sanctification of others. Writing on one occasion to a friend whose fields were destroyed in °a storm, Caussade expressed his sym-pathy that "hail and the rains have done great damage in many provinces, including your own. But God intends this'as a grace, that we may derive profit from all the plagues of heaven for the ex-piation of our sins." Spiritual and psychological trials. It is generally easier to accept sickness and temporal adversity as coming from God than to recog-nize His gift in the negative conditions of our mind and emotions: aridity in 1Stayer, coldness in spiritual things, anxieties, discourage-ments, and fears. Caussade does not subscribe to the theory that these states of mind and feeling are a certain sign of negligence on the part of the soul. Without denying this possibility, he prefers, with St. John of the Cross, to consider them as species of'divine grace. "Just as God converts, reproves, and sanctifies people living in the wo, rld through afflictions and temporal adversities, so He or-dinarily converts, reproves and sanctifies persons living in religion by means of spiritual adversities and interior crosses, a thousand times more painful, such as dryness, fatigue and distaste" for the things of God. The actions o[ others. God uses the actions of other people as graces for our sanctification. Their ordinary words, conduct, and gestures are in'tended as means of producing supernatural effects in our souls. This is particularly hard to see where the actions are offensive and the offender is personally not wicked, and may even be highly virtuous. Hence the exclamation. "Blessed be the God of all things and in all things, but especially because He knows how to use all things for sanctifying His elect through one another . He often uses a diamond to polish another diamond. How important is this thought for our consolation, that we may never be scandalized at the petty persecutions which good men sometimes occasion against each other." In this connection, St. John of the Cross used to say that a religious is refined and sanctified in word, thought, and action by the character and manner of conduct of his fellow religious. It is of special importance to see. God operating in the perse-cution or perhaps criminal actions of others. He permits these things in order to draw good out of them. Thus St. Paul's inspired pane-gyric on the great believers of the Old Law--Noe, Abraham, Moses, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph--is an application of this principle, that 227 JOHN A. HARDON God tries His chosen servants by sending them trial ahd opposition~ and their sanctification is determined by the measure of faith which recognizes in these human obstacles the workings of divine grace. This was tbe~spirit in which David accepted the cursing of Semei, as a just punishment ordained by God for his spiritual welfare. With St. Augustine, therefore, we should "marvel at the way G6d uses even the malice of those who are wicked in order to help and elevate those who are good." Temptations. If considered as coming from the devil,' ten~pta-tions are directed only to the destruction of souls; but from the viewpoint of God's permissive will, which never allows us to be tried beyond our strength, they are true graces. And "violent temp-tations" are especially "great graces for the soul." By the same token, the revolt of the passions, which is often a cause of anxiety to spir-itual persons/should not be regarded as evidence of aversion from God,*but, "on the contrary, as a greater grace than you can con-ceive." Troubles of conscience may be estimated in the same manner. Sins at least might seem to be excluded from the category of external graces. Evidently God does not want anyone to commit sin. And yet, says Caussade, "we must remember that, without willing sin, God uses it as an effective instrument to keep us in hu-mility and self-depreciation." This thought is very much like that of St. Augustine who, when speaking of' Peter's denial of his Ma~ter; explained that God permitted this humiliation to teach him not to trust in himself-~thus turning a grievous fault into spiritual ac-quisition. Sanctif~ting Effect of External Graces The sanctifying effect of external graces was already familiar to Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that God exercises a special supernatural providence over souls who are living in His friendship. What seems to be Caussade's contribution in this matter is the tie-up which he made between external graces and the sacramental system; while only analogous, there is a real simi-larity between the two. In both cases, the external element is an in-strument for the communication of grace. External graces are sanctifying in countless ways. But in general Caussade concentrates on the three most familiar in the spiritual life; n~mely, by purification, illumination, and union with God. This -is not to say .that only these effects take place, or that they Occur in any.particular sequence; and least of all does it mean that Caussade 228 September, 1955 CAUSSADE ON EXTERNAL GRACE ignores the correlative necessity of internal grace to ourify, enlighten, and unite the soul with God. I. P~ri[ication The second volume of the French edition of L'Abandon is mainly concerned with the purifying effect of external grace, achieved through detachment from creatures and stripping of self. Repeatedly the axiom is stated that "a person cannot be united with God, source of all purity, except through detachment from everything created, source of impurity and continual corruption." To this end "it is necessary that our souls be emptied [of creatures], before God can fill them with His own Spirit." By means of external graces, and especially suff4ring, God ac-complishes in us this detachment from creatures and self. There is a difference, however, in His way of acting with different persons. Those already advanced in the spiritual life, He is accustomed to "despoil of all gifts and sensible f~rvor," whereas "the effect of His mercy is to deprive worldly persons of temporal goods in order to detach their heart from them." Time and again, Caussade, stresses the same truth: God purifies the soul by suffering and trial. But he goes beyond the ordinary in-terpretation of the statement in Scripture that the just man is tried by afflictions as gold is tried by fire. "Crosses and tribulations," he says, "are such great graces that generally sinners are not converted except through them, and good persons are not made perfect except by the same means. Following the analogy used by the saints, Caussade compares God to a doctor who administers bitter medicine to restore health to the soul and removes with the scalpel of suffering whatever stands in the way of our spiritual progress. According to St. Augustine, "in those whom He loves, God, like a wise physlciam cuts away the tumor" of overweening self-confidence. To be specially noted is that this law of purification is universal; it applies as well to worldly minded as to saintly souls; it affects temporal goods as well as spir-itual attachments; and it is proportionally more intense and com-plete as the degree of union with Himself to which God intends to raise a soul is greater. Thus'St. John of the Cross: "according to the proportion of its purity will also be the degree of enlightenment, illumination and union of the soul with God, either more "or less"; and the requisite purity is obtained in the crucible of purification. Caussade therefore concludes that "the more God retrenches nature,,. the more He bestows the supernatural.'" 229 JOHN A. HARDON Reoiew for Religious II. Illumination External graces also enlighten the soul to recognize l!h'e will of God in its regard. Caussade looks upon this manifestation of the divine will as th~ "~piritual direction of God." One of the surest means of sanctification, he believes, is simply to use whatever God, ¯ the supreme. Director of souls, places before us moment by moment, e.ither to do or to suffer. Souls who thus abandon themselves to the will of God find evidence everywhere of what He wants them to do. They are directed "by the intermittent actions of a thousand creatures, which serve, without study, as so many graces of instruc-tion." Consequently, God is seen as leading us as much by the external events of our life as by the internal inspirations of His grace. He - "speaks" to us as He spoke to our Fathers, to Abraham and to the chosen people, showing us His will in all the circumstances which befall us. Addressing himsel~ to God, Caussade declares: "You speak, Lord, to the generality of men by great public events. Every revolution is as a wave from the sea of Your providence, raising storms and tempests in the minds of those who question Your mys-terious action. You speak also to each individual soul by the cir-cumstances occurring at every moment of life. Instead, however, of hearing Your vdice in these events, and receiving with awe what is obscure and mysterious in tbese Your words, men see in tbem only the outward aspect,' or chance, or the caprice of others, and cen-sure everything. They would like to ad& or diminisIi, or reform, and to allow themselves absolute liberty to commit any excess, the least of which would be a criminal and unheard-of outrage. "They respect the Holy Scriptures, however, and will not per-mit the addition of a single comma. 'It is the word of God,'. they say, 'and is altogether holy and true. If we cannot understand it, it is all the more wonderful and we must give glory to God, and render justice to the. depths of His wisdon~.' All this is perfectly true, but when you read God's word from moment to moment, not written with ink on paper, but on your soul with suffering, and the daily actions that you have to perform, does it not merit some at-tention on your part? How is it that you cannot see the will of God in all ~his?" Every circumstance, therefore, of our daily life is an expression of the divine will .for us at that moment. And, correspondingly., .every external grace is meant for our "guidance and illumination:'i Commenting'o'n thi~ doctrin~e in L'.A.bandon, Garrigou-Lagrange. 230 September, 1955" CAUSSADE ON EXTERNAL GRACE 'points out another function' which external grace may serve as a means of our instruction. "In this way," he says, "within us is formed that experimental knowledge of God's dealings with us, a knowledge without which we can" hardly direct our course aright in spiritual things or do any lasting good to others. In the spiritual order more than anywhere else real knowledge can be acquired only by suffering and action." For example, "we foresee that a very dear friend who is sick has not long to live, yet when death does come and if our eyes are open" to see, it will provide a new lesson in which God will speak to us as time gbes on. This is the school of the Holy Ghost, in which His lessons have nothing academic about them, but are drawn from concrete things. And He varies them for each soul, since what is useful for one is not always so for an-other." An important element in this experimental knowledge is the experience it gives us of our weakness and imperfection in the face of trial and temptation. These occasions--external graces of tribu-lation- show us how impotent we are to do any good without the help of God, and teach us to turn to Him in'stead of depending on ourselves; for, as Caussade e~plains, "We must be thoroughly con-vinced that our misery is the cause of all the weaknesses we experi-ence, and that God permits them by His mercy. Without this re-alization we shall never be cured of secret presumption and self-complacent pride. We shall never understand, as we should, that all the evil in us comes from ourselves, and all the good from God. But a thousand experiences are needed before we shall acquire this two fold knowledge as an abiding habit: experiences which are. more necessary the greater and more deeply rooted in the soul is this vice of self-complacency." III. Union with God The most important effect of external graces is the union with God which they develop in the soul, to which purity and illuminatiofi are only contributing means. In a famous passage, P~re Caussade regrets that more people do not appreciate this power that creatures have to unite us with the Creator. ",What great truths are hidden ever; from Christians who imagine themselves most enlightened. How many are there among us who understand that every cross, every action, every attraction according to the designs of God, gives God to us in a way that nothing can better'explain than a .comparison with the most august mystery?-Nevertheless there is nothing more 231 JOHN A. HARDON Ret~iew for Religious certain. Does not reason as well as faith reveal to us the real pres-ence of divine love in all creatures, and in all the events of life, as indubitably as the words of Jesus Christ and of the Church reveal the real prese~nce of the sacred flesh of our Savior under the Eucharistic species? Do we not know that by all creatures and by every event, the divine love desires to unite us to Himself, that He has ordained, arranged, or permitted everything about us, everything that happens to us with a view to this union? This is the ultimate o~bject of all His designs, to attain which He makes use of the worst of His creatures as well as the best, of the most distressing events as well as those which are pleasant and agreeable." It may be added by way of explanation that Caussade, in com-mon with traditional theology, understands union with God in two ways, as active and as passive. In active union, the soul gives itself to God by conformity to His will; in passive union, however, besides the active conformity of will, God Himself acts in the soul by ~he gifts of His interior grace. Obviously, external graces cannot, of themselves produce the latter kind of union; they only dispose the soul to receive it. Yet, in the ordinary providence of God, they are the conditio-sine-qua-non for passive union with God. This doctrine which regards external graces as disposing the soul for passive union is familiar from the writings of St. John of the Cross. It is also the underlying theme of The Abandonment to Divine Providence. God uses external events,, persons, places, and circumstances to perfect a human soul in His love. This may take place in a variety of ways. 1. External graces give us occasion to resist temptation and acquire the contrary virtues. In general, temptations are said to be the effect or permissive result of "one and the same mortifying and life-giving operation of God. On the one hand, He allows the various movements of passion to give you an opportunity for combat and development in the opposite virtues. On the other hand, He estab-lishes in you, in the midst of these agitations, the solid foundation of perfection, namely, understanding, profound humility, and hatred of self." Thus conceived, the fight against temptations takes bn a nobler meaning. Without them we should remain satisfied with a minimum of effort, with less intense acts of virtue. They spell the difference between a certain regularity in well doing and the fervor which leads to high sanctity. 2. These trials not only help us acquire solid virtue, but they prepare us" for union with God, that "you may love God for 232 September, 1955 CAUSSADE ON EXTERNAL GRACE Himself at the cost of yourself." We are also given occasion to prove our love, as declared by St. Francis de Sales, that "it is not in ab-negation, nor in action, but in suffering that we give the best evi-dence of our love . To love suffering and affliction for the love of God is the high-point of heroic charity; for then nothing else is lovable except the divine will." 3. Finally, external graces assist our growth in sanctity and render us more apt for union with God by increasing the store of supernatural merit. Divorced from the spirit of faith, the routine details of domestic and religious life'seem to be quite meaningless. In reality "these 'trifling' daffy virtues, faithfully practiced, will bring you a rich treasure of graces and merits for eteznity." More heavy trials, says Caussade, ale more meritorious. This does not mean that the &gee of merit corresponds to the difficulty of the work performed, which is false. But in supporting burdens that are more difficult, we generally give a greater proof of virtue than when doing actions which are more agreeable. Difficult tasks not infrequently demand the outpouring of all the generosity of which a soul is capable. Estimate of P~re Caussade When introducing P~re Caussade's L'Abandon to the public, Henri Rami~re felt he should answer the first question that comes to the mind of anyone familiar with some of the aberrations in - French spirituality that were current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Is there any danger that this doctrine of abandonment, if put into literal practice, will lead to a type of quietism which says that "in the state of perfect resignation to God, the soul renounces every act and exercise of any virtue, and remains in quiet repose in the presence of God"? P~re Rami~ke first analyzed Caussade's theological principles, somewhat as we have done in ,,the foregoing study, and concluded that they are founded on the" bedrock of Christian asceticism, as taught by the Church~s tradition and as practiced by the greatest saints. Then he makes a number of distinctions, which completely dissipate any misgivings about the orthodoxy of Self-Abandonment. Caussade did not °write a c~mplete treatise on Christian perfec-tion. He took only one aspect~ namely, submission to the will of God, and omitted--without tl~e suggestion of denying--the bulk of ascetical principles, in whos~ light this one aspect must always be viewed. Moreover, the people for whom he was writing were persons already advanced in vibtue, consecrated to a life of perfec- 233 SOME' RECENT PAMPHLETS tion, who could be considered as already practicing the essentials of the gdspel precepts and counsels. The basic error of quietism was its utter passivity, equivalently denying the necessity of man's active cooperation with the grace of God. To attribute this kind of passivity to the self-abandonment recommended by Caussade would be to completely distort its mean- : rag. It is something eminently active, in combatting self-love, repug-nance, and the snares of the devil. Its "passivity"--so-called--con-sists in the nonresistance to God's will, and in the fruit of this non- .resistance, which is an e;cer more perfect indwelling of the Holy, Spirit. Given these distinction~, Rami~re concludes, so far from being dangerous,, the doctrine of Self-Abandonment "may be taught to p.ersons in every walk of life, and, if properly undi~rstood, will make sanctity appear to them most accessible," as it really is.1 1The most detailed study of this question is ~y E. J. Cuskelly, M.S.C., "'La Grace Ext~rieure D'Apr~s Le P. De Caussade,'" Revue d'Asc~tique et de Mgstique, 1.952, pp. 224-42, 337-58, from which the present article has drawn many ideas. SOME RECENT PAMPHLETS GRAIL PUBLICATIONS, St. Meinrad, Indiana. Follow Christ. Edited by Gerard Ellspermann. O.S.B. This is a vocation pamphlet. Pp. 64. 25 cents.--Hints on Preaching. By Joseph V. O'Connor. Pp. 50. 25 cents.--Pilgrimage to Fatima. By Jerome Palmer, O.S.B. Pp. 42. 15 cents.--The Six Sundays of ~Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. Compiled by L., N. Douglas. Pp. 30. 15 cents.--Whg on Sundatls? By John M. Scott, S.J. Pp., 44. 15 cents. THE LITURGICAL PRESS, St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minn. Sanctifging Pregnancg. By Margaret .Place. Pp. 39. 15 cents.--Liturgg's Inner Beautg. By Abbot Ildefons Herwegen. Translated by William Busch: Pp. 44. 20 cents. THE NEWMAN PRESS, Westminster, Maryland. An Eas~j Method of Mental Prager. By Bertrand Wilberforce, O.P. Pp. 31. 50 cents. ~ SOCIETY OF SAINT PAUL, 2187 Victory Blvd.; Staten Island 14, N.Y. ~ A Preparation /:or Perpetual Vows. By James J. McQuade, S.J. Pp. 62. THE QUEEN'S WORK, 3115 So. Grand Blvd., St. Louis 18, Mo. Recover!j, Inc. By John J. Higgins, S.J. Pp. 32.~Novena to St; doseph. By Sister Emily Joseph, C.S.J. Pp. 32. So You Want Peace of Min$! By Hugh P. O'Neill, S.J. Pp. 24--Hold Your Tdngue! By Winfrid Herbst, S.D.S. Pp. 31~Mothers with Empty Arms. By Rev. John J. Regan. Pp. 24. --That Won-derful Sundag Mass. By Daniel A. Lord, S.J. Pp.~32.--Will You Save "Souls? By Ferdinand Schoberg, S.J. Pp. 30.--The Loving Heart of a Mother. By Daniel A. Lord, S.J. Pp. 32.--You're Sense-ational! By Rev. Chester Wrzaszc-zak. Pp. 32.--Each, I0 cents. 234 Governing Claude" Aquaviva, S.J. [EDITORS' NOTE: While superior general of the Society of Jesus, Father Claude Aquaviva wrote a treatise called the Industriae, which was intended to help super-iors deal with the "spiritually ill"--that is, subjdcts with ~motional problems~ The second, and perhaps most celebrated, chapter of the lndustriae contains many suggestions for combining firmness and gentleness in governthent, When we beglin publishing various items under the genera! heading "The Good Superior," it' was suggested that we publish an English version of this celebrated chapter. For the version given here, we are indebted,to Father W. Coleman Nevils, S.J. and Mr. James E. Whalen, S.J.] ~ RACIOUSNESS must go hand .in hand with: strefi.gth.ih ef- ~ fective governing. This especially applies, to a commfinit~; o'f religious who voluntarily have given themselves to G6d's service, who have a spontaneous and enthusiastic desire to be directed aright in the path of perfection and are animgted thereto by ~he practice of mortification and self-denial. Thd fathers of the Church as well as our constitutions abundantly dictate the necessity of uniting graciousness and firmness in all administration. St. Ignatius himself, by word and example, taught this lesson. However, to combifie these two in practice is no easy task. We are dealing with.those who profess to,follow the path of perfectiori and should be ever eager and anxious that nothing be omitted that' may be helpful thereto: yet, the flesh and human weakness are not always able to follow with equal strides the aspirations of the spirit. A process of governing may be initiated with highest zeal, but it ma~ also fail to be guided by knowledge. As a result, this way of governing, oblivious of human weakness, would become harsh and simply intolerable. Again, if we keep our eyes fixed on human weak-ness and under pretext of brotherly compassion yield to what the flesh desires against the spirit, shall we not have a community of tepid and carnal men in whom we shall be fostering not the spirit of abnegation and love of the cross but sensuality and self-will? For, as the Scriptures say, "Its torrent sweeps away the 'soil of the earth" (Job 14: 19). Thus we destroy the ess'ence of the religious life. That the religious life means abnegation and love, of the cross is the iesson beautifully taught by .St. Basil and all other spiritual masters; .instructed by Christ our Lord, they have handed down the same lesson as the principle and foundation of the religious life. What then is-t.he superior to do to keep firmness from degenerating into severity or graciousness into langour and laxity? As far as I have been able to learn from experience and observation, I will now explain this 235 CLAUDE AQUAVIVA Re~ieu~ for Religious very briefly. To do this clearly and concisely, I have felt that the most convenient plan would be to draw up certain headings of rigorous and severe governing and likewise to enumerate some causes 6f laxity. Then through a comparison of the two extremes, to in-dicate how we may keep to a middle course. A. HARSH AND DISAGREEABLE GOVERNING: 1. If heavy and unbearable burdens are imposed; this is some-times due to indiscretion on the part of the superior and his narrow mindedness. , 2. If, as more frequently happens, the task is not so difficult in itself, but the one on whom it is imposed would find it so, because .he has neither the physical nor spiritual strength to bear it. 3. No matter what the task is, if it is imposed in a harsh way, with a certain despotic manner; especially if the superior appears to be influenced by some inordinate mi~tive. 4. If the task is imposed at an inopportune time when the sub-ject is not properly disposed and no time has been granted nor a.ny help given that the subject may become better disposed. 5. If there is lacking a sense of proportion, and hence light burdens and heavier ones are imposed with the same ardor; in fact it can happen that, because of some fad or fancy of the superior, lighter duties are made more of than more serious ones. 6. If all attempts made by the subject to expose excuses and explain personal difficulties in this particular task are abruptly rejected as temptations, without any effort to listen in a kindly way. . 7. If the superior shows himself of a suspicious nature and so .ill-disposed that the subject has not a chance to present his dif-ficulties, etc., and has no hope of ever satisfying the superior. 8. If the superior has preconceived an unfavorable opinion of the subject and is always disposed to put an unworthy interpretation on whatever he does, this causes great affliction. 9. If, while considering the institute and the rules and failing to look at himself, the superior makes no allowance for the weak-nesses of others; if, in fact, he greatly exaggerates their defects and, in assigning tasks, acts not as if he were dealing with a son who is rational and willing but with insensible instruments at his disposal. 10. If he is not clear and gives orders in an equivocal way as if he purposely does not want to be understood, so that he can easily ¯ blame the subject if the result is not as might be desired--it is a- 0 ~mazing how very irritating this defect is to the subject. '236 September, 1955 EFFECTIVE GOVERNING I 1. If he never knows how to say "yes" to any petition; rather let him weigh well the request and by whom it is made and see if it is edifying for the community or externs and of advantage to the -subject. 12. Finally, if in doubtful cases he is always rather strict and rigid in his interpretations. B. WEAK AND LAx GOVERNING: 1.~ If attention is paid only to the big things and the mere avoidance of scandal is the norm, while everything else is let slide along. 2. If rules are looked upon rather lightly either because they seem so numerous or under the pretext of their gracious phrasing by the original founder. 3. If what has over because subjects others urge a change, sed over. 4. If, from the grows accustomed to been enjoined is easily changed or e'~en p~ssed show some slight repugnance: or if, because it is made or even the whole injunction is pas-frequent transgressions of some, the superior regard violations as not so wrong though he really knows they are wrong. 5. !'f he does pass judgme'nt and a[tually disapproves, but in order not to pain anyone or stir up a hornet's nest, be omits admoni-tion or refuses to give a reproof, let him refledt on St. Gregory's warning that in his fear to speak out, his silence gives consent. 6'. If, to console certain .individuals and to keep them from murmuring, eitt~er because of the position they hold or have held, or on account of friendship or for some personal regard, be easily makes concessions which both for those so favored and for the edification of the community are not proper. 7. If, in order to avoid any unpleasantness with this one or that, he either shuts his eyes to faults or administers no correction and, as if to be on the safe side, ;:toes not take the necessary steps. 8. If, under the pretext of humility or meekness, be allows him-self to be disregarded and his own words to be contemned. 9. If, from natural timidity or some other weakness, he admon-ishes in a routine and lifeless way, so that he makes no impression on the delinquent, and acts as if he were only doing so because he is obliged to do so before God, thus freeing himself from any scruple for baying omitted a correction. I0. Finally, if he feels that now he has done his duty, when,' 237 CLAUDE AQUAVIVA Review /=or ~Religious content with admonitions he has shown his displeasure at what has been wrong, but does not take efficacious means for its correction, and, like Hell, thinks he has accomplished everything if be should say, "What wickedness is this of yours, that brings me the complaints of a whole people!" (I Samuel 2:24) C. GRACIOUSNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN GOVERNING From the above we can easily see where there is harshness and where weakness and laxity; and either extreme must be avoided--not to be unduly hard nor too lenient. Nor is it difficult to see how effectiveness 9ught to be joined to graciousness, so that there will result strength in securing the end desired and graciousness in the manner and way it is attained. For, in making concessions and in denying them, in correction and reprimand, in punishing those who Wfail, in giving orders, in advancing subjects to virtue and perfectiofi and drawing them to a higher life, consideration must be given to the individual himself, his powers of body and soul; opportunities must be well weighed, exhortation used, and above all charity joined with zeal must hold highest sway; forbearance and patience must be constantly preserved. However, it must not be allowed that subjects aspire to act with impunity, doing just what they wish and omitting what they do not wish with the result that they satisfy their own inclinations and be-come accustomed to act and to relish what they desire even against the orders and decisions' of superiors; that they look upon the rules as mere counsels, which, if observed, they do well, but if not observed, there is no harm done. To tolerate this is not graciousness but slug-gishness; it is not to look to the good of the order, nor to the good even of those who are',so dealt with. Let not superiors imagine them-selves kindly and gracious if they govern in this manner; indeed, they are remiss in their duty and are weaklings. Nor let them flatter them-selves that, when they are harsh, they are only zealous for religious discipline. But let not subjects call rigorous and harsh an effort or zeal which is made to sustain religious discipline and to prorhote perfection. Nor let them exact such g,raci.ousness on the part of the superior that is rather a harmful indulgence.~ Rather let them under-stand that many things, if impediments to perfection, must be denied them; and many injunctions must be given which may not be to their liking but which pertain to the glory of God and to the good of the community. He who desires to be directed and improved must not try to shun all corrections and penances nor to regard that physician 238 September, 1955 F~FFECTIVE GOVERNING as kind who, for fear of offending the patient, neglects a cure and allows a disease to increase dangerously. Cassian in his conference on fickleness of soul claims that a certain Serenus, who, he says, mirrored in his person his name, had known of some cases where the indulgent governing of certain superiors had come to such a sorry state that they were obliged to coax with sweet words thei) subjects to stay in the cloister and not go out to the pernicious occasions of sin in the world; in fact that the greatest fruit to be hoped for was that subjects would shut themselves up in solitude, though remaining just as lazy as they wanted. The great cure-all of these indulgent superiors used to be this favorite pre-scription: "Stay in the cloister, and eat and drink and sleep all you want, so long as you stay in the cloister!" Let superiors, then, and especially provincials, be on their guard against too great indulgence and undue leniency, as these can work all sorts of ruin to a religious order; thence, graciousness is not to consist in gratifying every will and desire of subjects. We should recognize that graciousness lies in this, as we bare said, that in giving a reprimand, for example, there be no .harshness, no sign of ange~ or perturbation; rather, there shines forth a paternal interest, an affec-tionate sympathy, and a certain vigorous and efficacious agreeableness. Let the one who is being reproved realize that there is no question of a desire to give humiliation and punishinent, but only of a neces-sity to provide for the good of the community and for the true ad-vantage of the individual himself who is being punished. If we re-fuse what must be refused, let it appear we do so with regret, and that we are always ready to grant the request when it may be pos-sible or expedient to do so. If we wish to remedy a defect let us not be so hypercritical; rather, kindly enforcers who are not eager for the upperhand but for the good of the Society and of the subject himself, we should rather seem to be conspiring with him to gain a victory over the Tempter. In giving orders in a considerate and friendly way, we should show that we are seeking nothing else but God's glory and the good of the subjects. What cannot be granted today, may patiently be expected tomorrow, so th~it we are always looking expectantly to-wards the end and carefully applying the means thereto. Even though through the subject's lack of spirit we do not accomplish much, yet we cannot do anything more efficacious and gracious than to make him a careful examiner of his own spiritual welfare. Graciousness, in a word, is had if we treat subjects with a heart full of charity so 239 FOR YOUR INFORMATION that they readily entrust their temptations to the bosom, as it were, of their mother; and if, on the other hand, whatever corrections corn4 from us, the subject receives them not with irritation (no mat-ter how disagreeable to his feelings), but as springing from the sup-erior's love of him. Hence, St. Ignatius has taught in his constitutions that strictness must be so mixed with kindliness and gentleness that the superior never allows himself to be swayed from what he judge~ to be more pleasing to God, our Lord. As is fitting, let him l{now what it is to be compassionate with his sons, bearing himself in such a .way that even though those who are reprehended or corrected may be displeased according to their lower nature' at what is done, still they will acknbwledge that the superior is doing what is right before the Lord and that he does his duty with charity. Your nrrorma!:ion Apology and Explanation It was long our policy to printcommunlcat,ons' " ~from our read-ers, as well as items of information sent to us concerning their work, their publications, and so forth. During the past year we have had to omit much of this because material that had to be published left us very little extra space. We regret this because we believe that, besides being interesting, such items further mutual understanding among religious communities. We mention this now so that those who bare sent us communications and other material of an inform-ative nature.will realize that we have not purposely neglected them; also, we want to make it clear that this restriction of space has been a temporary measure. Material sent in future will be given due at-tention. The Mind of the Church As we have stated previously, the present mind of the Church concerning the government of religious is best expressed in three addresses by Pope Pius XII and in the address given by Father Larraona at'the conclusion of the meeting of mothers general in Rome, September, 1952. Father Larraona's address was published in our November, 1954, number. Of the three papal addresses, one (to the mothers general, September 15, 1952) wa~ published in (Continued on page 276.) 240 Mother M ry X vier W rde Sister Mary Julian Baird, R.S.M. [All facts for this account are taken from Reuerend Mother M. Xauier Wa~de by the Sisters of Mercy, Mount St. Mary's, Manchester, New Hampshire, published by Marlier and Company in Boston in 1902.] i l ~VEN by A,,m, erican standards," wrote one of her Irish bi/ ~ ographers, Mother Xavier was a stormy petrel." Certainly the mayor of Providence in the March of 1855 would have agreed with him. ~ Five years earlier, on the feast of the Translation of the Relics of St. Francs Xavier, the Sisters of Mercy from Pittsburgh, led by Mother Mary Xavier Warde, had made their first foundation in Rhode Island. Bigotry was rife in that section of New England, where only brave women would have come, and braver ones stayed. There were days when every window in their poor little house on Weybosset Street was broken by the Know-Nothings, an un-Ameri-can group that showed, in rough ways, hostility to anything Cath-olic. Of them, however, Mother Xavier would say to the sisters: "They have, no doubt, the best of motives. Only their judgments are clouded by prejudice. All that will pass away . " Well indeed it might have passed, thought Mayor Knowles, as he twisted his hat nervously while waiting for Mother Xavier in the parlor of the academy which Bishop O'Reilly had opened for the sisters in the October of the previous year. Had the sisters stayed in the poorer section of the city, ill-feeling might have died. Now the news of the more ambitious venture to' educate the daughters of the wealthier citizens of Providence had spread; alarm was general. What would not these Catholics achieve if left alone? The mayor sighed. He must persuade Mother Xavier and her nuns to leave the city. He rose hastily as she entered. This tall, 'well-proportioned woman with the keen, dynamic face and gracious manner silenced the speech of protest he had prepared. In rich, soft toneh she as-sured him of her pleasure in meeting the mayor of Providence. "Happy to have you in the city," he heard himself saying. Yet he had the presence of mind to add, "I wish we might ask you to remain." The question on Mother Xavier's face forced him to go on. The 241 SISTER MARY JULIAN BAIRD Review for Religious sisters were in serious danger, be continued. He could not hope to defend them against ten thousand ruffians bent on their destruction. They must leave the city, and soon. Mother Xavier looked her astonishment. "Your honor," she said, her voice still sofl~, "we have disre-garded no duty, no responsibility-of good citizenship. As a body of religious women we are laboring here in our own sphere. Have we given any provocation for this interference? Will Christian men constitute a mob against unoffending women? Are our rights as citizens not to be protected?" Mayor Knowles gripped his hat more firmly as he faced her. "I am powerless to prevent an uprising, Madame." "If I were chief executive of municipal affairs, I would know how to control the populace," she countered. Looking at her again, the mayor knew that this slender Irish woman could probably have done so. But he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. "Best to go quietly," he repeated. Mother Xavier shook her head more stubbornly. "We will remain in our house, and if needs be, die rather than fly from the field of duty where God has placed us." She was true to her word. On March 22, less than a week later, the Sisters of Mercy were still resident in the academy on the corner of Broad ~nd Calverick Streets. As evening fell, the novices, ignor-ant of any danger, said their night prayers and "retired. The older religious stayed on guard before the Blessed Sacrament. Mother Xavier alone went to the garden where the Catholic men of Provi-dence, well,armed, took their places to protect the convent. From group to group she went, with evident calm, and exacted from each man a promise that no gun Would be raised nor offence given unless they were called on to do so in self-defense. The rioters made their way up the street, and, as they drew up in line before the silent convent, could see t~he quiet activity within the garden, the white linen coil and guimpe of Mother Xavier clear in the glare of the. street lamp. Gradually the calm was broken by hisses and cat-calls. The sisters were summoned by the mob leader to leave their convent. At this juncture, Bishop O'Reilly and Mr. Stead, the former owner of the property, appeared at the front entrance. In resonant tones Mr. Stead told of the armed force within the convent grounds. They were ~rishmen, he added meaningfully; and they could fight. 242 September, 1955 MOTHER MARY XAVIER WARDE Then the Bishop came forward. His words rang with sincerity. "My dear friends, in God's name, let not this city, nor the free institutions of this republic be tarnished by any dastardly uplifting of your arms against those who have wrought you no harm, but whose blameless lives are their sure defense before God and men. Depart in peace to your homes, and sully not your honor in act so vile." The night air was tense. Then, one by one, the rioters with-drew. Mother Xavier's courage and faith had won. This intrepid spirit was probably what had first attracted Cath-erine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland, to Frances Warde.She met her in the early days of her foundation, before establishing a new community of religious women was so much as in her thoughts. Fanny Warde was then a socialite in Dub-lin, a girl of only eighteen, the spoiled daughter of a widowed father. Wealth and good times had not filled her heart, however; and a few hours of every day were spent in helping Miss McAuley in her schools for poor children. In Fanny, Catherine McAuley found the counterpart of herself, a vivid, powerful personality alert to Christ's work for souls, and a born leader. Against the tranquillity of her own personality; Fanny's temperament seemed a mounting flame. Together they made a remarkable team. After the foundation of the community, when Fanny had become Sister Mary Xavier and was assistant to Mother McAuley in the Baggot Street house, it seemed a foregone conclusion that she would succeed to the office of superior when Catherine died. God changed that. Carlow, a thriving city some distance from Dublin, asked for Sisters of Mercy. Mother McAuley was quite justified in declaring that she bad no more to spare. The only leader left was Sister Xaviei', the only manager among her lay sisters was Sister Veronica. Neither of them could be moved from Dublin without crippling the work there. But on the heels of her refusal to make a foundation in Carlow came the swift and sudden death of Sister Veronica. This strong admonition of God was sufficient for Mother McAuley. A group of sisters was sent to Carlow at once. At their head went Sister Xavier, from that time on called Mother Xavier. Even before Mother McAuley's death in i 841, several new houses were founded from Carlow. When Bishop O'Connor of Pittsburgh, U.S.A., came seeking Sisters of. Mercy for his American poor, it was natural that he should g.o there to Mother Xavier. It was in-evitable that she would head the mission. Although only thirty- 243 SISTER MARY JULIAN BAIRD Review for Religious three years old at the time, she was accustomed to leadership since her early training under Mother McAuley. Strong, activel apostolic -~Mother Xavier was the ideal pioneer for the rough work that awaited her and her sisters in the United States. Her travels over America read like an Odyssey. A stop on the first trip to Pittsburgh when crossing the. Allegheny Mountains must have given her a poetic vision of the days ahead of her. Bishop O'Connor had the stagecoach stopped at the summit of the Alle-ghenies. Here, he told Mother Xavier, he had received a commission from Demetrius Gallitzin, the Apostle of the Alleghenies, who had died only three years before, to bring the sisters to teach his mountain children there. As Mother Xavier looked at the virgin-forests, through which the dauntless Russian prince-priest had traveled to cover his faptastically large parish., she thought, "This is America. This is the wilderness of Godlessness to which we must bring Christ and Mary. Here we must build again the City of God." $o she pledged her word, to be redeemed by the Pittsburgh sisters in 1848, that some of them would fulfill the dying wish of Father Gallitzin. Pittsburgh itself would have .been enough for a smaller soul's ambition. The basement of the convent became a school immedi-ately after their arrival from Ireland. Visitation of the sick was be-gun at once. The sisters took charge of the girls of the Cathedral Sunday School while the bishop's students continued to care for the boys. On the first floor of the convent, Mother Xavier instructed a large' class of adults. Her impressive manner and clarity of ex-p! anation were instrumental in winning many souls. So large did the adult classes become as the fame of her gracious and simple inter-course spread, that the opening of further day schools had to be delayed eight months after the foundation, while she transferred her clasges to the first floor of the newly constructed' school. Soon girls of the better families were attracted to join the sisters in their work, and the first American novice, Miss Elizabeth Tiernan, received the Mercy habit on April 11, 1844. In honor of the Ameri-can foundress, she asked for the name Sister Mary Xavier. It was she whom Mother Xavier took with her when she returned to Ire-land seeking mbre recruits. Generous though American girls were, they could not be trained quickly en6ugh to supply sufficient work-ers for the increasing labors that opened to the sisters. When Mother Xavier came back with more Irish nuns, the bishop of Chicago, a newly formed diocese, demanded that she keep a'promise made to him the day she 'landed in New York harbor. Sisters of Mercy were 244 September, 1955 MOTHER MARY XAVIER WARDE needed in the West, he had told her, and she had said she would send him some as soon as possible. Now, he seemed to think, that must be. $o, in the summer of 1846, Mother Xavier took there six of her Pittsb,urgh nuns. The trip by stagecoach was killing; accomo-dations in the then primitiye city were beyond her imaginings. In the small wooden city of Chicago, with its fifteen thousand inhabi-tants, the sisters' home was a rude shack. Even the bishop won-dered, as .he talked with Mother Xaviec the morning after her ar-rival, if he should have asked such women to face such privation. Mother Xavier smiled at his consternation and lifted her finger. Through the rough boards that formed a wall between the room in which they were talking and the so-called community i~oom of the sisters, came the sound of merry laughter and happy voices. "The sisters are content," she assured him. And he was satisfied. For the first months they worked unceasingly. The customary works of mercy--visitation of the sick and poor, instruction in re-ligion, and the opening of schools--were launched. Among the pupils who came to the first school of the sisters in Chicago were children of trappers, bordermen, hardy settlers, sea-faring men, brigh~ matter-of-fact children whose spontaneous vivacity appealed to Mother Xavier's own simplicity of heart and direct approach. Even the Indians fell beneath the charm of her personality, calling her "Palefaced Mother." When the foundation seemed able to continue without her aid, Mother Xavier planned to return alone to Pittsburgh. It was winter. In view of the difficulties of the journey to Chicago, when the weather was clement and she had the company of six sisters and the brother of the bishop who accompanied them, it seemed noth-ing short of madness for her to consider such a step. The decision was part of her careless courage, of her constant minimizing of her own hardship, and, above all, of her boundless confidence in the providence of God. For a week, all by herself, dressed in secular clothes, she traveled through the bleakness, over prairie and wilderness, through mud-bogs and, blizzards until she reached Pittsburgh on a cold, rainy morn-ing. At the convent, she had only the strength to knock on the door. The amazed sisters found her on the doorstep in a state of utter collapse. For ten days-she hung between life and death. Then, as though, like dohn Henry Newman, she realized that she had "a ¯ work to do," Mother Xavier began to recover. There was still al- 245 SISTER MARY .JULIAN BAIRD Review /:or Rellqlous most a half-century more of pioneering before her. Had she died then, Mayor Knowles of Providence would prob~ ably have had no worry about the Know-Nothings demolishing the convent of the Sisters of Mercy. For it was to his city that she led a party of sisters in 1850. At this so-called Parent House of New England, Mother Xavier stayed. Pittsburgh was to see her no more. From here ~he opened missions in Hartford and New Haven in the May of 1852. It was then that she noted in her journali ardent desire to see Christ's little ones trained under the guidance of religious teachers is coming to pas.s to an extent far beyond what I ever dared to hope . How true is the old proverb, 'The first step is the only difficulty.' " As the Western children had attracted her, so in these new fields she praised "the grand, sturdy, New England character." But this may have been what one of her clerical friends called her undefeatable optimism. "With Mother Xavier," he said, "all the geese are swans." She always, in her own estimation, lived in the best possible section of the country among the best people that God had ever made. There was also notable in her outlook a broadness very well illustrated in the debate as to whether the Sisters of Mercy should have schools for the well-to-do or confine themselves to the instruction of the poor. The issue first arose in the American mission in Pittsburgh when .the bishop proposed the building of St. Xavier Academy at Latrobe. Only Mother Xavier voted for the project.t The other sisters said that there was more than enough work for them to do among the numberless l~oor; that their community had been founded specifically for the service of the least fortunate of Christ's children. Knowing M~ther McAuley as well as she did, Mother Xavier did not hesitate to challenge this opinion. It is the need for mercy that dictates our activities, she reminded them; the spirit of the institute is mercy in whatever form it is required. Specifically of this she wrote: "Charity may be practised on the rich . Let us d~o good to rich and poor as our Divine Master did while here on earth." At Rochester, New York, a foundation was made in 1,857, The following year Bishop Bacon of Portland, Maine, appealed to her for sisters. In his letter he stated bluntly: "Only the piety, the courage, the zeal and the hardihood of a pioneer religious will ever be able to rough it in the establishment of Catholic schools in Maine and New Hampshire." When the sisters heard this, they knew that they must lose Mother Xavier. Reluctantly the bishop of Providence let her go to this new mission field. Once again she w, as on the 246 ~epternber, 1955' MOTHER MARY XAVIER WARDE road for Christ. The situation she found in Manchester, where she made her headquarters, was somewhat similar to that in Rhode Island earlier. In July, 1854, the Know-Nothings had driven the Catholics from their homes, dragged the sick from their beds into the streets, de-stroyed the furniture, and proceeded to break the stained glass windows in St. Anne's church, then nearing completion. Only the peace-making spirit of the pastor, Father .McDonald, had kept the Catholics from retaliating. Under his wise direction, the spirit of prejudice abated, but not su~ciently for his parishioners to share his enthusiasm for introducing teaching nuns in the still bigoted city. It is only by seeing the sisters at work that they will learn to appreciate them, Father McDonald argued, and started to build a convent. Before it was half erected, a mob demolished it. He began again. This time he had it guarded night and day, himself sleeping there to prevent further damage. When it was ready, he asked the bishop for Sisters of Mercy. In this remarkable pastor, Mother Xavier met her equal in courage and devotion. From the day she met him, they worked together for Christ and His little ones. Beginning slowly, the sisters gradually fulfilled his prophecy that the citizenry would be con-vinced of the good they might do by seeing it done. One of their most important and most satisfactory works was the instruction of converts, a task to which Mother Xavier gave herself with tremendous zeal and prodigious success. A new type of work begun here was night schools for the children working in factories. In the autumn of 1858, in addition to the extensive free schools she had already established, Mother Xavier began an academy at Mr. St. Mary's, housed at first in the convent itself, and then in a separate school building. Unlike the first academy in Providence, there was no ani-mosity aroused by this structure. In fact, so completely had the sisters conquered the bigotry of Manchester that the city council, in 1860, permitted them to use a vacant public school in Father Mc- Donald's parish for a grammar school of their own. During the Civil War Mother Xavier and the sisters ,were gratified to receive numerous letters from their "boys" who were cared for by Sisters of Mercy in the. hospitals of the Union army. This was a work of Mercy to which Mot~her Xavier could not give herself. But a remarkable incident recorded by one of the sister-nurses shows how fa~ her silent example, even without words, had reached.One of the soldiers whom she nursed told her that he had been one of 247 SISTER MARY JULIAN BAIRD Reoiew for Religious the mob that intended to destroy the convent in Providence Wher'e Mother Xavier had boldly ~xposed herself to speak to the men in the garden who guarded the building. The sigh~ of her xrariquillity and courage had shamed him so that he left the scene even before the bishop spoke, went to a priest,, asked for instructions and baptism. "The sight of her," he said, "was a blessing." Foundations sent out during Mother Xavier's years in Man-chester were many: Philadelphia in 1861; Omaha, Nebraska, in 1864; Bangor, Maine, in 1865; Yreka, California, in 1871; Bur-lington,' Vermont, in 1872. The houses already~'opened flourished and made foundations of their own. Orphanages and hospitals and homes for the aged were added to their already extensive works of mercy. As the works increased, so did the number of girls entering the novitiates. Each foundation had its own novitiate, and was in-dependent of the mother house in most cases, a necessary circum-stance in the days of limited transportation and communication :fa-cilities. '~ Of considerable joy to Mother Xavier in 1878 was the sending of her sisters to Maine to work among the Indians. Their first convent was the wigwam of the chief of the tribe, who generously vacated it to accommodate the nuns. She visited them a few months later, to be welcomed ~on the banks of the river by a flotilla of Indian canoes. Probably for the first and last time in her life, Mother Xavier evinced fear. The canoes were of birch-bark, and very fragile in appearance. The chief invited her to enter his to cross to the other shore where the reservation was located. Mother Xavier looked. She took a small step: She hesitated. The swarthy face of the chief wrinkled in an understanding smile. With a wave of his hand he summoned a more sturdy-looking rowboat. With dignity Mother Xavier entered it and was rowed safely to the opposite bank, Characteristic of her was the remark she made on her way to the wigwam convent, with Indian children clinging to either hand and gifts of homemade baskets waved at her from eager Indians lined along the path. "Oh, how happy Mother McAuley Would have been to see this!" Her loyal' heart never let her forget the woman who had taught her mercy. In her speech she reverted so constantly to her teaching and example that the sisters who lived with her felt that they had a first-hand; personal knowledge of the foundress who had never set foot in AmeriCa. The Indian missions were the last to be directly founded by Mother Xavier. In the following year she was~shocked to learn of 248 September, 1955 M(~THER MARY XAVIER.WARDE the death of her blood-sister, Mother 3osephine Warde, whose death in Ireland robbed the Sisters of Mercy there of one of their greatest leaders. From this point on; ,Mother Xavier seemed old. Yet she was strong enough for the work of the day, always first i'n the chapel in the morning and busy daily with administrative duties. It did not seem possible to those who saw her activity that she could be the oldest Sister of Mercy in the world. In 1883 this fact was brought home to everyone by the national celebration of her golden jubilee.Every convent of the order joined in a novena for the American foundress. Invitations were issued to all connected with the Sisters of Mercy to be present at the day of celebration, January .24, at Mt. St. Mary's 'in Manchester. Of all the congratulations and gifts that poured in upon her that day, the one that Mother Xavier cherished most--and the only one that brought tears to her eyes--was a tribute of shamrocks from St. Patrick's grave sent to her by school children in Ireland, with verses that ended in the hope that Mother McAuley would bless her spir-itual daughter's festival "with her smile and her blessing from Heaven." The jubilee was really the ,beginning of the end for Mother Xavier. Her health failed perceptibly from that point on, but the loyalty of her sisters unanimously elected her again to be Mother Superior at Manchester. In spite of the practicality of that gesture, notes from a retreat she made immediately, after the election show that her mind was already in heaven. On August 12, 1883, she wrote: "May the Cross of Christ be about us! O good cross, that makes us rejoice in the Holy Will of God. Close to God, all is peace and contentment in Him. They tell me that I am growing strong again; they try to hope it is so, but I feel old age is here, and I realize that very soon I shall stand before His throne. Shall I be able to go on doing the little I have hitherto done? I do not know; but I put myself without reserve into God's hands. Let us pray and give ourselves up to the Divine Will." A singular happiness was reserved for these last days in the ap-pointment of Reverend Denis M. Bradley as the first bishop of Man-chester by Pope Leo XIII. As a child, the bishop-elect had recited his catechism to Mother Xavier and had received his First Com-munion from Father McDonald. With joy they had watched him prepare for the priesthood and ordination. Now the month ~f May was entirel~r &voted to preparations for his consecration. Mother Xavier's part was in supervising the making of vestments to be worn 249 SISTER MARY ,JULIAN BAIRD by her bishop. Before he began his retreat in Troy Seminary, he vis-ited her to beg her prayers. But on June 11, when he was consecrated, she ffas too ill to attend. His first visit after the church festivities were ended was to her poor little cell, for even in her last illness she re-fused the comfort of the infirmary. When her sight left her that 'summer, she asked the sisters to lead her to the chapel, where she spent endless hours in prayer. Im-potence to lead might have made her querulous, she who had always led. But her sense of humor did not fail her, and her gentle charm made it such a joy to care for her that the young nuns vied for the privilege. Especially devoted to her, and especially beloved, was Mary Agnes Warde, the grandchild of her brother John, who had entered the novitiate a few months before. She had the consolation of frequent visits from Bishop Bradley, and from her faithful friend and pastor, Father McDonald. To him she said one day,. with a half-whimsical, half-~vry smile: "My long and stormy life is at last coming to an end." God's stormy petrel was content now to rest. " To her sisters in the end she had no word but love. "God bless you and love you," she would say to them in her tired voice, and add with her characteristic personal touch, "eoery one.'" On the night of September 16 even her voice failed, and on the morning of the feast of the Stigmata of .St. Francis, she died while Mass was being said for her in the convent chapel. As was to be expected, her daughters "rose up at her side and called her blessed."' The key~note of the funeral was not sadness but joy in a life lived out for God alone. No pilgrimages are made in large bands to the simple grave with its simple marble stone in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Manchester. Even the writings about her community seem to overshadow her achievements with those of her friend and foundress, Mother Catherine McAuley. That is the way Mother Xavier would have liked it. But it is more honest to see her life as an extension of Mother McAuley's. To the ten short active years that her leader gave, Mother Xavier added her fifty full and vigorous ones. Complementing each other in character and temperament, they make together one achievement in the Church of Christ, recognizing that above all the works of God is His mercy. To Teaching Sisl:ers Pope Plus XII [EDITOR'S NOTE: This apostolic exhortation to the ~rst International Congress of Teaching Sisters was given on S~ptember 13, 1951. The following English translation, except for minor changes in capitalization and punctuation, appeared in the Catholic Mind, June, 1952, pp. 376-80. The original Italian text appeared in the Acta Apostolicae 8edis, 1951, pp. 738-44.] WE particularly welcome the occasion offered by your presence at the COngress of Teaching Sisters to express Our heartfelt and paternal praise for the activities of sisters in the school and in education both in Italy and throughout the Catholic world. How could the Church have fulfilled her mission of education and charity during these last few years, especially in the immediate past, without, the aid given by hundreds of thousands of sisters with so much zeal? How otherwise could the Church fulfill her mission today? No doubt, there are many other useful and energetic women work-ing with or beside nuns or dedicating themselves to the apostolate of the laity. We have in mind especially the good Catholic women teachers in the state schools. But they must r~ot wonder if, today, We turn to you, beloved daughters, gathered around Us as repre-sentatives of the religious orders and congregations devoted to the apostolate of the school and education. May the dedication, love, and sacrifices that more often tha~ not you bear in obscurity for the love of Christ and the benefit of young people bring forth fruit a hundredfold in the future as they did in the past. May our Lord reward you and shower upon you the abundance of His divine favors. We hope all the more fervently that this may be so because with you We are aware of the crisis through which your schools and educational institutions are passing. It is a question of the youth of today and convent schools. In your congress you have doubt-lessly had the opportunity of treating this subject fully. Many points concerning you no less than priests and brothers in religious orders have already been discussed by Us in Our address of De-cember 8, 1950. For this reason, We can confine Ourselves now to those aspects of your problem which, in Our opinion, need more consideration. I. Lack of Understanding If it be your painful experience that the teaching sis~ter and the 251 POPE PIUS XII Review [or Religious mgdern girl no longer understand each other, well, this is not a thing peculiar to you. Other teachers, often parents themselves, are not in a very much better position. It is not using empty wor.ds to say that young people have changed, become very different perhaps. The chief reason for this difference'in the young people of toda~r may be that which forms the subject of the frequent lament: young peoi31e are irreverent toward many things that formerly from child-hood were naturally regarded with the greatest respect. But young people of today are not solely to be blamed for their j~resent atti-tude. In childhood, they have lived through horrible things.and they have seen many ideals formerly held in high esteem fail and fail miserably before their eyes. F.or this reason they now mistrust and reject them. It must be remembered also that this complaint about lack of understanding is not something new. It is one made in every gener-ation; o and it is mutual between maturity and youth, parents and children, teachers and pupils. Half a century ago and even a little more, there was a good deal of sentimentality. People were fond of' believing that they were "misunderstood" and said so. Today,, the complaint, not devoid of a ce,rtain amount" of pride, is more con-cerned with the intellect. The result of this misunderstanding is, on the one hand, a reaction which may sometimes exceed the limit of justice, a tendency to repudiate anything that is, or. appears to be, new, an exaggerated suspicion of rebellion against any tradition. On the other hand, it is a lack of faith that shrinks from all authority and, spurning every competent judgment, seeks solutions and coun-sels with a s6rt of infatuation more ingenuous than reasoned. To try to reform young people and convince them by exacting submission, to persuade them by force', would be useless and not always right. YoB will induce them very much better to give you their trust if you, on your side, strive to understand them and to make them understand themselves--save always in the case of those immutable truths and values which admit of no change in the heart and mind of man. Understanding young people certainly does not mean approv-ing and admitting everything they" maintain in their ideas, their tastes, their caprices, their false enthusiasm. It consists fund_amentally in finding out ~hat is solid in them and accepting this trustfully without remorse or anger, in dis'covering the origin of their deviations and errors, which are often nothing but the unhappy attempt io solve real and difficult problems, and, finally, in following closely 252 September, 1955 TO ~EACHING SISTERS the vicissitudes and conditions of the present time. Making yourself understood does not mean adopting abuses, inaccuracies, confused ideas, modern expressions ambiguous in syn-tax, or the words' themselves. It rather means expressing clearly one's own thoughts in different yet always correct ways, striving to fathom_the thoughts of others, always keeping in mind their diffi-culties, their ignorance, and their inexperience. On the other hand, it is also true that young people of today are fully capable of appreciating true and genuine values. And it is preciseIy at this point that you must assume your responsibility. You must treat young people with the same simplicity and natural-ness you show among yourselves; you must treat them according to their character. At the same time, you must all show that spiritual seriousness and reserve which even the world of today expects from you, that spiritual seriousness and reserve through which it must sense your union with God. When you are with young, people, it is not necessary to speak continually of God. But when you do so, you must speak in a way to command their attention: with genuine feeling arising from profound conviction. In this-way, you will win the confidence of your pupils who. will then allow themselves to be persuaded and guided by you. II. The Reliqious Life And now We come to that which concerns you particularly: the religious life, your habit, the vow of chastity, your rules and constitutions. Do these render you less fit or downright incapable where the instruction and education of today's young people are concerned ? In the first place, We say that those who have the (primary) right in education, the parents, are not of this opinion. Sisters' schools are still sought after and preferred even by many people who care little or nothifig for religion. In 'many countries, vocations to the life of a teaching sister and the number of sisters' schools are much below the demand. 'This does not happen through mere chance. Therefore, we may add--and not only in regard to Italy but speaking in general--from those who have a part in drawing up school legislation, we must expect that determination for justice, that democratic sense, so to speak, which corresponds to the will of the parents, in such a way that the schools founded and directed by religious institutes be not placed in a worse condition than the 253 POPE PIUS XII R~oieto ¢or Religions state schools, and that they be given the freedom which is necessary for their development. And now, let us briefly discuss the religious life in itself. The religious habit: choose it in such a way that it becomes the. expres, sion of inward naturalness, of simplicity, and spiritual modest-y. Thus it will edify everyone, even modern young people. Chastity and virginity (which imply also the inner renunciation of all sensual affection) do not estrange souls from this world. They rather awaken and develop the energies needed for wider and higher offices beyond the limits of individual families. Today there are many. teaching and nursing sisters who, in the best sense of the word, are nearer to life than the average person in the world. Followed in letter and spirit, your constitutions, too, facilitate and bring the sister all she fieeds and must do in our time to be a good teacher and educator. This also applies to purely mechanical matters. In many countries today, for example, even sisters use bicycles when their work demands it. At first this was something entirely new, though not against the Rule. It is possible that some details of the school schedules, certain regulations--simple applica-tions of the Rule-~certain customs which were, perhaps, in harmony with past conditions but which today merely hinder educational work, must be adapted to new circumstances. Let superiors and the general chapters proceed in this matter conscientiously, with foresight, pruddnce, and courage: and, where the case demands, let them not fail to submit the proposed changes to the competent ec.: clesiastical authorities. You wish to serve the cause of Jesus Christ and of His Church in the way the world of today demands. Therefore; it would not be reasonable to persist in customs and forms that hinder this service or perhaps render it impossible. Sisters who are teachers and edu-cators must be so ready and so up to the level of their office, they must be so well versed in all with which young people are in con-tact, in all which influences them, that their pupils will not hesitate to say: "We can approach the sister with our problems and difficul-ties: she understands and helps us." IlL Tile Scfiool and Education In this way, We come now to the needs of the school and educa-tion, which We particularly wish to recommend to your care. Many of your schools are being described and praised to Us as 254 September, 1955 TO TEACHING-SISTERS being very good. But not all. It is Our fervent wish that all endeavor to become excellent. This presupposes that your teaching sisters are masters of the subjects they expound. See to it, therefore, that they are well trained and that their education corresponds in quality and academic.degrees to that demanded by the state. Be generous in giving them all they need, especially where books are concerned, so that they may con-tinue. their studies and thus offer young people a rich and solid har-vest of knowledge. This is in keeping with the Catholic idea, which gratefully welcomes all that is naturally good, beautiful, and true, because it is an image of the divine goodness and beauty and truth. Most parents entrust their daughters to you because their con-sciences bid them to do so. But this does not mean that the children should suffer by receiving in your schools an education of inferior value. On the contrary, you must do all you can to assure parents that their children are getting the best education right from the elementary classes. And then, do not forget that knowledge and good teaching win the respect and consideration of the pupils for the teaching sister. Thus she can exercise a greater influence on their character and their spiritual life. In this respect, there is no need for us to repeat that which you know well, that which has certainly been the object of ample dis-cussion during your Congress. According to the Catholic concept, the object of the school and of education is the formation of the perfect Christian, that is--to apply this principle to yo.ur conditions --to exercise such spiritual and moral influence and to so accustom girls and young women that when they are left to themselves they will remain firm in their faith as Catholics and put this faith into daily practice. At least, there must be the well-founded hope that the pupil will later on lead her life according to the principles and rules of her faith. Your entire school and educational system would be useless were this object not the central point of your labor. Our Lord wants you to strive toward this aim with all your strength. He has called you to the vocation of educating girls and making them perfect Christians. In this He demands your complete dedication, and one day He will ask you to render an account. The modern girl! You can measure better than many others the still unsolved problems and the grave dangers resulting from recent 255 POPE PIUS XII changes in the woman's world from her sudden introduction into all walks of public life. Was there ever such a time as the present, when a girl has to be won and trained interiorly, according to her con-victions and will, for Christ's cause and a virtuous life, remaining faithful to both despite all temptations and obstacles, beginning with modesty in dress anal ending with the most serious and anguishing problems of life? Let it never happen th'at material advantages, personal authority, wealtb, political power, or similar considerations induce you to re-nounce your educational ideals and betray your vocation! An ex-amination of conscience during your Congress may have salutary ef-fects. This paternal exhortation is motivated solely by Our benevo-lence for you, because your cares are Ours also, your Bappy success is Ours, too. In obtaining favorable results, harmony and generous accord between the different religious families can play a big part. Mutual knowledge and enco,uragement, holy emulation can be put to your mutual advantage. The most encouraging steps have already been taken in this respect. All you have to do is to continue them. Like Christian education in general, which today is not an oh-' jective easily to be achieved, your mission is not an easy one. But regarding the inner formation of the young girl, your religious vocation is a powerful ally. Living faith, union with God, the love o]~ Christ, with which each of you has had the chance to fill herself in the spirit of the congregation from the first day of the novitiate, the vow, not only of chastity, but especially that of obedience, a common task under one guidance in the same direction'---all these t, hings act strongly on young minds, always supposing, of course, that you live up to your vocation. May divine Providence direct and lead you in all that you pro-pose and undertake. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ fill your minds and hearts. May the Blessed Virgin, Mary our Mother, be your model, protectress, and advocate. Together with the ex-pression of these wishes, We most cordially impart Our Apostolic Blessing to you, beloved sisters, and to all the young people en-trusted to your care. 256 The Dedica :ed Lit:e and Secular Insti :u :es Francis N. Korth, S.J. THE BREVOORT HOTEL in Chicago's busy downtown Loop "was the scene of a recent, inspiring two-day conference on "The Dedicated Life in the World and Secular Institutes." The dates were February 19 and 20, 1955. ("Dedicated life in the world" as distinguished from membership in a secular institute means that the individual is living in the world and has truly,dedi-cated his life at least by a private perpetual vow or promise of per-fect cbastlty or celibacy.) Conference participants, those who came to impart information and to lead discussions, a~ well as those who came pri'marily to listen, to gain knowledge and inspiration--these various people came from points along .both coasts, from the south and from the north and from places in between, and from Canada. For purposes of concentrated effort, the number invited was .ke.p.t small. Some twenty-five priests and about seventy lay persons (mostly women) were on hand for the openifig session on Saturday morning, February 19. Father Joseph E. Haley, C.S.C., of Notre Dame University, welcomed the group and then gave a very con-densed historical r~sum~ of general trends in a dedicated life through-out the centuries up to present-day secular institutes. Then a number of reports were made about organizations that actually are secular in.stitutes, abou't some that are developing along the lines of possibly becoming secular institutes, and about other groups that are interested in a special manner in a dedicated life in the world. Some highlights follow. Opus De[ has been blessed with American vocations; another house will. be opened; besides persons in professional fields, clerical workers, farmers, and others are being accepted. The Missionaries of the Kingship of Christ, though small in number in this country, have experienced a gratifying increase in vocations. The Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary of the Catholic Apostolate have intern and extern members in the United States; they give lectures, publish some no-vena booklets and pamphlets; a booklet entitled Euergdag 8anctitg is;to be released soon. The constitutions of tl~e Daughters of St. Catherine of Siena are in Rome awaiting approval; the American 257 FRANCIS N. KORTH Reoiew for Religious novitiate is currently ~in Montreal, Canada; most members are be-tween the ages of twenty-one and forty-five, are single or widows. A little leaflet of the Pro Deo Workers of Cincinnati mentions that they are engaged in various works of the apostolate, that they have no official status as yet. The Daughters of Our Lady of Fatima in Lansdowne, Pa., as their attractive leaflet Spiritual "Scrabble" tells us, stimulate interest in, and take part in, varied parish activities, such as census-taking, instructing converts, visiting the sick, bus driving, church music and art. A new companion-group, the Sons of Our Lady of Fatima, ~is beginning to function along similar lines. A small but active group in New Orleans, known as Caritas, has as its purpose to help develop Christian life in parishes, particularly in poor ones; summer camps and long weekends are especially devoted to helping young people; liturgy and arts are stressed to cultivate an appreciation of the real beauty in things; parish census work is be-ing done. To work in missionary lands and to stir up interest in the mis-sions elsewhere is the special purpose of the International Catholic Auxiliaries (women); membership is about two hundred with fif-teen nationalities represented; the group was founded in Belgium about twenty years ago and now has two centers in Chicago. The Rural Parish Workers of Christ the King, while still small in num-bers, are doing fine work in a poor rural district in eastern Missouri. In Canada the Oblate Missionaries of the Immaculate (women), founded about three years ago, already have over three hundred members; there is a recent foundation in Chile, and some members are also in this country (at Lowell, Massachusetts) ; they undertake whatever work the local ordinary desires; nurses, teachers, social workers are among their numbers. From New York word comes that the Campaigners for Christ are busily engaged in explaining the faith (on street corners and in other places) and in h~lping the poor. The Union Caritas Christi, founded in France, has s~read to several other countries, and now-has some members in New York City; the members (women) come from various walks in life; their specific work in helping souls is determined by talent and circumstances. The house in Chicago of the Work of the Sacred Heart is connected with an organization established in the archdiocese of Lucca, Italy; devotion to the Sacred Heart is stressed; Italian immigrants are helped. In New Jeisey a parish group is forming, based upon the spirituality of St. Francis' de Sales; various apostolic activities are 258 September, 1955 SECULAR INSTITUTES undertaken. A member of the Company of St. Paul is currently par-ticipating in the apostolate of Christian art and movies. Friendship House in Canada undertakes varied work in the field of the social apostolate as indicated by the hierarchy. So much for the brief re-ports. " Of the above groups the following five are secular institutes: Opus Dei, the Missionaries of the Kingship of Christ, the Scboen-start Sisters of Mary of the Catholic Apostolate, the Company of St. Paul, and the Union Caritas Christi. The first four are insti-tutes of pontifical right (Schoenstatt Sisters are not listed in current Annuario Ponti[icio) : the fifth is an institute of diocesan right. The first session of Saturday afternoon was devoted to an en-lightening and stimulating presentation of the "Requisites for the Dedicated Life in the World and for ,Approval of Secular Institutes." The speaker was Father Andr~ L. Guay, O.M.I., Director of the Catholic Centre at the University of Ottawa in Canada. During the question period that followed, Father Guay solved problems and difficulties in competent fashion. The second session that afternoon was given over t'o a panel of three speakers. The three panel mem-bers, in the order of their appearance, and their topics were: Miss Bertha Mugrauer of Caritas in New Orleans and professor of soci-ology at Xavier University in the same city--"Social Action in American Life"; Mr. Vincent Giese of Fides Publishers in Chicago --"Professional Apostolate": Miss Violet Nevile of the Interna-tional Catholic Auxiliaries in Chicago--"Foreign Missions." After the three interesting papers were given, the audience had an opportu-nity to direct comment or questions to any of the three speakers. Saturday evening a number of optional workshops were held; lively discussions made the time pass quickly. At ten o'clock Sunday morning, two-minute reports were given on each of the workshops held the previous evening. Then Father Francis :Wendell, O:P., of New York spoke in an inspiring manner on "The Spirituality of the Dedicated Apostle in the World." Dis-cussion followed. The closing session in the early afternoon treated the general theme of "Channels of the Dedicated Life in' the World." The breakdown of this general theme resulted in three informative papers: "The Parish as the Living Community of Worship and Apostolate," ably presented by Father Robert Carroll of Chicago; the fine treatment of "The Third Order Secular as a School of Christian Perfection" by Father Stephen Hartdegen, O.F.M. of 259 FRANCIS N. KORTH Washington, D.C.; and a capable discussion by Mr. David O'Shea of YCW Headquarters in Chicago of "The Lay Apostolate Giving Christ to the World." Everyone privileged to attend felt that the two days had been time spent very well indeed. Currently, regional conferences are being stressed. Other Items of Interest about Secular Institutes 1) Father Leo Neudecker, pastor of the Immaculate Conception parish in Kellogg, Minnesota (35 miles northeast ofRochester) held his sixth annual Lay Apostolate Week, July 3-9, at Kellogg. Father Nicholas Maestrini, a former Chinese missionary of twenty years ex-perience, was guest speaker. A gratifying number of young women, many of them nurses or teachers, attended. The Lay Apostolate Week is a week of prayer and instruction; much time is given to the study of secular institutes; each day centers around the liturgy. 2) The Union of Catechists of the Holy Crucifix and of Mary Im-maculate is a secular institute affiliated with the Brothers of the Christiar~ Schools. Its headquarters are in Turin., Italy, where it was established as a secular institute ot~ diocesan right on June 24, 1948. Members teach catechism and spread devotion to the Five Wounds of Jesus Crucified. The lay catechists (members) 'live either with their own families or in community "houses of charity;" 3) The Annuario Pontit~cio for 1955 lists the following eleven secular institutes of pontifical right. Four for men (pages 863-64) : Company of St. Paul (originated in Italy) ; Opus Dei (originated in Spain); the Priest Workers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Spain); and the Society of the Heart of Jesus (Fraiice). For women seven such secular institutes are gi;cen (page 1283) : the Daughters of the Queen of the Apostles (Trent); the Teresian Institute (Madrid); the Missionaries of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Milan) ; the Institute of Our Lady of Work (Paris) ; the Women's Section of Opus Dei (Madrid) ; the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Way (Vienna); and the Missionaries of the Sick (Cremona). The last two institutes just mentioned for women were added to the list in the 1954 edition of the Annuario Pontit~cio; no new ones are listed in the 1955 edition. Of the institutes of pontifical right for men, no new ones have been .listed in either the 1954 or 1955 edi-~ tions of the Annuario. 26O A Ra!:ional Approach !:o Int:ellec!:ual Obedience Augustine G. Ellard, S.3. INTELLECTUAL obedience seems to be a perpetual thorn in the side of many good religious people. They are constantly being urged to practice it: they feel that they should; they keep on try-ing to achieve that aim; but~also they are always failing and hence experiencing dissatisfaction. Upon reflection they notice that their difficulties are not only practical and ~motional, as with most other arduous virtues, 'but also conceptual. They hav~ not succeeded in working out a satisfactory concept of the ideal itself of intellectual obedience. We migh't consider three cases. First, let us suppose that Father Provincial directs Father Rector to proceed to the erection of a new building for the instituti6n that he is in charge of: Father Rector sees the desirability of it; the money is available; every consideration appears to be in favor of going on with the project; and so, easily enough, he agrees in judgment with his superior. Thus far there is no difficult.y. The propriety of the step prop6sed is obvious to both men. Imagine another situation. Brother Infirmarian is told by Father Superior, whose excellence does not extend to a knowledge of nurs-ing, to do this or that for a sick brother whose condition, in Brother Infirmarian's view, calls for just the contrary. Respectfully he re-monstrates with Father, but to no avail. Father persists in his order. Brother Infirmarian reconsiders the whole matter and in particular weighs all that he can think of from Father's point of view. But the more he reflects, the more firmly he feels convinced that his first judg-ment was right. It is evident from the principles of good nursing that the patient should not be treated in the way that Father wishes. Brother comes to the conclusion that Father, however admirable and wise in general, is wrong in this matter. Nobody would quarrel with him. Those who most advocate obedience of judgment allow an inferior to consider an order ill-advised when it is quite evidently imprudent. ' Consider a third case. Father Rector instructs'Father Subject to found, say, a retreat house on,the south side of a large city. Father Subject's opinion is that the appropriate place is the north side. With 261 AUGUSTINE G. ELLARD Reoiew for Religious due deference he explains his reasons to Father Superior. He does whatever he can within the limits of propriety to persuade Father Rector to agree with him. But he fails. Let us suppose that the judgments of each of the two men are not categorical and absolute, but take the form of more probable pronouncements. Now Father Subject is an obedient man; and, mindful of all the admonitions to think with one's appointed guide, he carefully reconsiders the whole question, from all angleS, utilizing every source of information, and duly allowing for all known contingencies. At last he concludes that, if he is to be honest with the truth as it presents itself to him and to his own intelligence, he must abide by his previous judgment. Here, therefore, we have an instance in which there is no perfectly clear right or wrong, but room for legitimate difference of opinion. The two men take contrary views of the likely place for the retreat house. What seems more likely to the one man seems less likely to the other. This is the typical situation in which in the mind of one trying to practice ideal obedience painful conflict can arise. Should Father Subject, disregarding his own insights, by fiat of his will, as-sert to himself, "After all, conditions seem to suggest that, as Father Rector thinks, the house should be on the south side"? This pro-cedure, judging not in ac~cordance with what seems to be the truth, but by a chqice of the will, is just what much that is written on in-tellectual obedience appears to call for. It is submitted that a more rational approach to the problem of obedience of the mind is to conceive it as the disposition to see and acknouJledge the truth in as much as it is fauo.rable to the superior or his command. One might add--though surely this should be ob-vious and taken for granted--"and in so far as it is knowable to the subject". A subject cannot reasonably argue for less. It is, of course, true that practically and emotionally there may be the most vehe-ment objections to seeing the truth as it favors, say, a very unwel-come order. But rationally, without contradicting oneself, one can-not plead against the truth. To kno~; and possess the truth is in accordance with our nature as intelligent beings, becomes it, and in fact pertains to its essential development and perfection. It is par-ticularly fitting that we come to know and acknowledge the truths that are relevant to us. Evidently such are the truths that we'are referring to: those that concern one's superior and his directions for oneself. Thus, very obviously, it is only right and reasonable thal: ~a man should see and acknowledge whatever is true in the matter of. one's own authoritative guide and his guidance for us. It may be 262 September, 1955 INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE practical too. A soldier whose trust in his captain does not measure up to the truth available to him might ~ell lose his life, and the same could happen to a patient with respect to his doctor. On the other hand, superiors cannot ask for more. To affirm more would be tantamount to uttering a falsehood or at least to be-ing presumptuous, affirming what we do not know. Nor can those who 'give us spiritual conferences and exhortations urge us to do more. One may object that we should conclude that what has been commanded has been well commanded. We could learn truth from the command itself. To a certain but very variable extent this con-tention is correct. Those chosen to exercise authority are wont to be persons of more than average ability, judgment, and good character. Superiors have a better knowledge of the total situation in which the order has been given and is to be executed. Often enough they have secret or" confidential information that is not available to the subject. These and possibly other reasons can very often justify one in argu-ing that what was ordered was wisely ordered. Almost always they have some evidential value and thus increase the probabilities in the superior's favor. The obedient man will do his best to see and ap-preciate their full force. But those indications do not simply and necessarily lead to the conclusion that the superior's command was well advised. Nobody, as far as I know, goes so" far as to maintain expressly that they do; oftentimes, however, that seems to be implied or suggested. No one would dare say that superiors are infallible and never make mistakes. The utterances and warnings of higher super-iors exist in abundance to prove the contrary for lower superiors, and the verdicts of historians for the errors of higher superiors. Everybody knows that human beings have a strong tendency to judge rather in accordance with their emotions, their likes and dis-likes, their prejudices and passions, than in the cool light of reason. This unfortunate propensity is. an excellent example of emotional thinking, of letting one's judgments be guided by feeling or im-pulse instead of the evidence. This weakness of human nature con-stantly runs counter to obedience. Hence one who is striving to be-come a perf.ectly obedient man will of course have these facts in mind and allow for them. He will do his best to keep his judgment as obj/ctive and correct as possible. One of his supreme aims will be precisely to hold reason and genuine love for the truth dominant in all his judging and willing. In very many daily practical matters the best judgments that ate humanly possible are probable rather than certain. Hence a .disagree- 263 AUGUSTINE G. ELLARD Review for Religious merit between a superior' and an inferior in such cases would natur-ally .take the form of "more probable" versus "less probable"; that is, what seems more probable to the superior seems less probable to the inferior and conversely. Thus Father Rector in our third ex-ample, decided, As I see things, we ought to build that retreat house on the south side of the city; and Father Subject, who was commis~ sioned to do it, thought, No; my opinion is that the north side is the place for it. The important point to notice here is that probable judgments, carefully made, are true and unchangeable, though of course not in the same way or so simply as' certain judgments. When "carefully made" they correspond to the incomplete evidence or reasons for judging insofar as these are open to the person forming his opinion at the time. Let me illustrate from what I shall call analogies rather than examples. Suppose that six men out of ten are to be chosen by lot for some dangerous mission. Then the odds are six to four that any particular one of the ten will be taken. No act of anybody's will can alter that likelihood. Only a fool would try to think otherwise; and, if he did, he would be virtually lying to" himself. Suppose another case, less precise and closer to what occurs in practical matters. One bears that a friend is very seriously ill with pneumonia and spontaneously concludes .that perhaps he will die. But that would be very much against his wishes, and so voluntarily he chooses to judge, because after all it is not evident that the patient will die, He will not die. Such thinking would be irrational and self-deceptive~ Thus probable judgments critically and considerately made cannot reasonably be changed by mere fiat of the will. Only some new disclosure of the truth or a better grasp of it justifies a new conclusion. One might as well determine the truth in matters of fact by flipping a coin. He who judges what he pleases is ~ollowing a blind faculty. Hence~ if all things considered, it seems that a giyen order is less probably the prudent one, no juggling of one's mind by one's will can make it really more probable. A person whose ideal of intellectual obedience is to agree with the mind of his superior insofar as his perception of the truth permits will avoid many of the difficulties experienced by those who attempt by sheer force of will to embrace the opinion of their superior. He need no( feel conscious of being disloyal to th~ truth. He will not try to argue with himself that whatever is ordered is wisely ordered. He will not cultivate "wishful thinking," determining what is judged true by an act of will. He can fall back upon the universal criterion of truth, namely, the objective evidence in the case. His 264 September, 1955 INTELLECTUAL OBEDIENCE judgments, certain or probable, will corr.espond exactly to that evi-dence. He will not appear obliged to do violence to his rational na-ture. He will not endeavor, as it were, to lie to himself, affirming to be true what is really against his mind. He will not have to change his principles when he gets a new superior. Some may object that St. Ignatius, in his celebrated Epistle on Obedience, seems to require~more in the way of intellectual submis-sion than is here proposed. At first sight and according to the strict letter of the text, that is correct. However, in interpreting him, we can and should be guided by a.principle that he himself uses in the Spiritual Exercises. When be presents for contemplation an appari-tion of Christ that is not recorded in the Gospels, namely, the very first one, made to the Virgin Mary, he writes, "Scripture supposes that we have understanding, as it is written, 'Are you also without understanding?' " (Puhl's translation, No. 299). What he says on obedience is to be understood, in accordance with the fundamental laws of reason. Therefgre, if one looks to the ultimate mind and in-tention- of the author .rather than to the precise form of his words, one would hardly interpret him as exhorting people, to go beyond the truth or beyond what they know of the truth. Beyond the truth there is nothing but falsehood, and to assert, even to oneself, more than one knows of the truth is at best to be presumptuous. Hence St. Ignatius's wqrds cannot rightly be taken to mean more than that to be perfect in obedience of judgment is wholeheartedly to acknow-ledge all the truth that favors the superior or his command. "All the truth" includes every truth that is relevant, though that relevance be very indirect or remote. The abnegation of judgment which St. Ignatius advocates in matters of obedience consists, not in affirming what is false or unknown, but in so controlling one's likes and dislikes that they will help, rather than hinder, in bringing about the maximum amount of truth in one's mind. As St. Paul wrote long ago to the Corinthians: "For we cannot do anything against the truth, but everything must be for the truth" (II Cor. 12 : 8 ; Spencer's version). It was St. Ignatius's idea that through intellectual obedience we should come to ever greater and greater harmony with the supreme rule of every good jffdgment and will, that is, with the eternal Goodness and Wisdom. The more thorough-going that harmony between our minds now and God's, the keener .and more beatific will be our vision of Infinite Truth in heaven. ¯ 265 ommun cat: ons [NOTE: Since the following communications were unavoidably held over for a long time, it seems necessary to say a word about their background. The first refers to an article by Father Gallen in our May, 1954, number. One of the main points in this article was to stress the need of reducing the frequently excessive number of community devotions. Another important point made in Father Gallen's article was that retreats do not produce the fruit they should because proper provision is not made for th~ retreatants to meditate: they simply listen to conferences. A follow-up on this was a letter from a sister, punished in September, 1954, which suggested: "If these points are to retain their purpose of preparation for mental pra~jer, twenty minutes or half an hour would not seem to be an unreasonable limit, with the explicit injunction that the retreatants continue the meditation themselves, al-though not necessarily remaining in the chapel to do so." The second communi-cation given here refers to this suggestion. --ED.] Reverend Fathers: At our summer school were different orders of sisters. Father Gallen's article, "Pray Reasonably," was much discussed and appre-ciated- and it did much good. In our case, for example, many of the novenas, daily litanies, and extra devotions have been shortened or eliminated. Part of our class preparation formerly had been used for these extras, and added to this were cooking, washing, house cleanin'g, etc. It was a real strain to get a quantity of prayers said. All agree that at last they get satisfaction from saying a reasonable number of prayers well and with real devotion. Many thanks to Father GaIlen. A number of sisters have expressed the wish that he would give them an article, "Dress Reasonably." -~A SISTER. Reverend Fathers: I disagree with the sister who wrote that "twenty minutes or half an hour would not seem to be an unreasonable limit" for points during retreat. I made. one retreat in whi[h the priest never talked over twenty minutes, and I was so weary I thought I would die be-fore the eight days were over. What in the world does the sister do with the time between the conferences if she isn't meditating then? Personally, I like the priest to talk about forty minutes or so. -~ SISTER. OUR CONTRIBUTORS AUGUSTINE ELLARD and FRANCIS N. KORTH are members of our editorial board. SISTER MARY JULIAN BAIRD, of the Scranton Province of the Sisters of Mercy of the Union, is in the English Department of Mount Aloy-sius Junior College, Cresson, Pa. 266 [All material for this department should be addressed to: Book Review Editor, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, West Baden College, West Baden Springs, Indiana.] THI: PSALMS IN RHYTHMIC PROSI:. Translafed by dames A. Klels÷, S.d., Ph.D., and Thomas d. kynam, S.J. Pp. 236. The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee I, Wis. 1954. $4.00. No one whose eye falls upon this new translation of the Psalms will be otherwise than favorably impressed by the attractive binding, the legible typography, the useful index of "titles,': the preliminary outlines for each Psalm, and the brief explanatory footnotes. But some will ask a legitimate question: Why another trans-lation of the Psalms? Father Lynam answers that question quite clearly in his preface. The translation was projected as a labor of love by the. late Father Kleist, who asked Father Lynam's coopera-tion. The translators set for themselves a comparatively simple aim: to turn the Psalms of the new authorized Latin version into English prose, making "a borrowing from poetry" to the extent of intro-ducing into the prose "a stress, a rhythm." The basic stress ulti-mately chosen was the iambic. Granted the legitimacy of such a purpose, the success of the translation can be justly measured only by the standard that the translators have set for themselves. There can be no doubt that they have succeeded in producing a consistently rhythmic version, predominantly iambic. That they have in many instances tran-scended their self-imposed limits and achieved true poetry is all to the good. One has only praise, too, for the fact that the English is modern in many respects. The consistent substitution of "You" for the traditional "Thou" is a simple but notably.effective device that makes not only for modernity but for the impression of that familiarity with God that characterizes prayer. The only respect in which the translators seem to have fallen below their own stan-dards is that they have occasionally allowed themselves to be forced into violent inversions in their attempt to preserve the iambic stress. One may be tempted to quarrel with such expressions as "mob-bish turbulence," 'heaven's marge," "lave his feet in sinners' gore," "in their joy they jubilate," "Immersed I am in abysmal mire," "As 'twere a prodigy I have appeared to many," "A subject of dispute you made us 'mongst our neighbors," "Well for the people skilled in holding jubilee," "My sire are you, my God, the bedrock of my 267 BOOK REVIEWS Retqew ,/:or Religious weal." The phraseology, of this sampling is not the phraseology of m6d~rn"prose. (Nor, one m~ay add, of modern poetry.) One would not complain of such archaism if it were not for the fact that the publishers' jacket makes claims for the modernity~ of the Kleist- Lynam version that the translators do not make. Despite such occasional infelicities of expression. (fewer and less annoying than thos~ that are to be found in the ordinary man-ual of devotions), The Psalms in Rhythmic Prose will serve as a fine prayer-book for the layman who would model his prayer upon the official prayer of the Church. It will also be a welcome companion volume to the Latin Breviary of the English-speaking priest or re-ligious.-- PATRICK J. RICE, S.J. MARIOLOGY. Volume I. Edi÷ed by Juniper B. Carol, O.F.M. Pp. 434. The Bruce Publishing Company, Milwaukee I, Wis. '1954. $6.75. This book could hardly have been written by one man. For the sweep and depth of treatment of the whole field of Mariology could have been achieved with the excellence of scholarship con-tained in this book only by a group of scholars working under an editor with the thorough-going competence and courage of a Father Juniper Carol. We have in Mariolog~/ the first of a three-volu'me series which will take its place alongside, the Marian symposia of Strater, du Manoir, and Roschini. : Mariology is that part of theology which attempts to ~ain some. understanding of the Marian mysteries. But this understanding must take place by insight into the data of revelation as given in its two-fold source: Scripture and tradition. This first volume of Mariology consists in a culling of Scripture and the various records of the Church's tradition in a search for all the relevant Marian evidence. The ~econd volume in the series will contain a grgup of essays deal-ing with Marian theology as such; the third will trace the effect. of Marian creed and cult in the devotional life of the Church. The opening article by Eamon R. Carroll, O.Carm., has com-pressed within fifty pages an extraordinarily rich selection of the Church's pronouncements on Mary, organ, ized under~ eight titles: Mother of God, Ever Virgin, Full of Grace, Immaculate, Assumed into Heaven, Mediatrix with the Mediator, Spiritual Mother, and Queen. Fathers Erk May, O.F.M., and M. J. Gruenthaner, S.J., turn to the pages of the Old and New Testaments respectively to present what God has written about His Mother. Both of these studies are 268 September, 1955" BOOK REVIEW8 characterized by a care and a balance not always present in a dis-cussion of Marian Scriptural texts. The article by A. C. Rush, C.SS.R., supplements these two scriptural studies by reviewing the testimonies of the early Christian faithful for Mary as found in the New Testament apochryphal writings. Three articles follow which open up the vast and complex records of patristic and liturgical literature on Mary: Mary in Western patristic thpught and in the Eastern and Western liturgies. The article by Father Burghardt on the Latin Fathers is not only an outstanding piece of research in its thoroughness of treatment and brilliance of interpretation, but also in its tight organization and excellence of style. G. W. Shea has continued the investigation of the history of Mariology through the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. He shows how active the writers of the Church have been since the close of the Patristic Age in deepening and expanding our under-standing of the Marian mysteries. Because the long article on the Mariology of the Eastern Fathers was not available in time for publication in this first volume, its place has been given to two shorter Mariological studies of the Im-maculate Conception and Mary's immunity from actual sin, which, in content, rightly belong in the forthcoming second volume. But if these two studies are an indication of the quality of the second volume, we can be sure that it will attain the high standards "of scholarship and readability achieved in the first. The book closes with a short history of the name of Mary by R. Kugelman, C.P., who concludes that the weight of evidence seems to favor the meaning of the name Mary as "Highness" or "Exalted One." The book with its copious notes and references is a mine of information on our Lad;, which priests, religious, theological stu-dents, and educated Catholic laymen will be tapping for a good many decades to come. --MICHAEL MONTAGUE, S.J. A HISTORY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Volume VII. Period of ÷he French Revolu÷ion (1775-1823). By Fernand Mourre÷, S.S~ Trans-lated by Newton Thompson, S.T.D. Pp. 608. B. Herder Book Com-pany, St. Louis 2, Mo. 1954. $9.75. The average American looks upon the French Revolution merely as a Gallican edition of the American fight for independence, In the political sense this opinion comes close to the truth, for as the 269 BOOK REVIEWS Review for Religious, colonial patriots threw off the rule of George III, so the French lib-erals and rationalists overturned and then completely ~estroyed the monarchy of Louis XVI. The French Revolution, however, dif-fered greatly from that in America ii~ its organized hatred of re-ligion, especially that of the Catholic Church. The seventh volume of Father Mourret's fine work on the His-tory of the Catholic Church gives a scholarly, treatment to this phase of the French Revolution. The book is divided into three parts. In order to give his reader a better understanding of the ecclesi-astical side of the Revolution,, Father 1VIourret.treats, under the title "Decline of the Ancient Regime," the political, social and intellectual status of France and of Europe from 177,5 until the beginning of the Revolution. Part two deals with the Revolution itself. This section of the .book is the most scholar!y of the three and descends to minute par-ticulars. A general knowledge of the political history of the French Revolution is a "must" if the reader is to understand the various sessions of the French assembly that methodically did away with religion in France and deified "reason" to take the place of God. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy is completely discussed, and the plight of the. jurors and non-jurors among the clergy is well de-scribed. Father Mourret has used his documents well in picturing the suffering and complete disruption of ecclesiastical life in France. For the ordinary reader the third section of the book, "~Fhe Religigus Restoration," will prove the most understandable and interesting. Napoleon and Plus VII wire both powerful characters. Their duel of wit, will power, and principle is boldly and graphically told. The entire history of the famous Concordat of 1801'is clearly explained. An appendix has the entire text of the concordat. Father Thompson has done a fine job of translating. The foot-notes are excellent; the bibliography is extensive and should help the research student. There is also a fine index that will save the interested seeker much time. The book is primarily for the scholar~ but the third part can be profitably used by anyone who has a high school knowledge of French history. Although the price is rather high, this book could profitably b'e put in the Church History sec-tion of any seminary or college library.-~JOHN W. CHRISTIAN, S.J. SAINT IGNATIUS' :IDEA OF A JESUIT UNIVERSITY. By George E. Ganss, S.J. Pp. 368. Marqueffe Universify Press, Milwaukee 3, Wis. Ss.so. With a ~hrewd eye to modern university problems and applica~ 270 September, 1933 BOOK REVIEWS tions, Father Ganss, director of Classical La.nguages at Marquette Universityl has written a brave historical analysis of St. Ignatius Loyola's root principles of higher education. Analyzing Ignatius' view of Renaissance university, its functional relation to the social-cultural environment, and Part Four of the Jesuit Const"lt "u t"~on (On Education), Father Ganss outlines the purposes, ideals, and pro-cedures of Ignatian higher education--at least as had in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The burden of the work is, bo~vever, to isolate perennial principles from passing procedures in the historical picture of Ignatius' universities. Besides terminology clarifications (e.g. the sixteenth-century meaning of college, arts, uni~ersit~l, etc., contrasted with our own) there seem to be three difficulties in a work of this kind. St. Ignatius himself, the master of adaptation to circumstance, presents a problem to one siftirig his educational writings for their spirit. One could get the impression from uncareful reading that there simply ar3 no real guiding principles beyond that of a clear goal and absolute freedom of means in attaining it. Again, the social-economic environment for which the early Jesuit educators were preparing their students presents the second problem. Time after time Father Ganss separates what is rooted in the Ignatiar~ spirit from what pertains to the Ignatian times. Thus speaking, reading, and writing Latin might seem an educational must in the Constitutions, but this prescription is cIarified by the realization that Latin was still the exclusive language of the universities and "opened the way to the choicest positions in state or' commerce or Church." Thirdly, the Constitution itself, admittedly the foremost source for Father Ganss, contains much practical procedure that must be sifted to find the primary principles of the~ Ignatian educational spirit. Beginning then with a historical study of the universities as Ignatius saw them in l~is own education, and progressing through the gradual acceptance of colleges and universities by the Society of Jesus, Father Ganss sbow~ how ignatius drew up his principles .of an orderly development in learning, following the self-activity prac-tices of the Un, iversity of Paris and substituting the Summa Theolo-giae for the Sentences of Peter Lombard as the prime text for study-ing theology. In the second part the author points up the relation between Ignatius' universities and the socio-cultural life of the times. The humanist educational ideal which was then reaching its peak was inculcated by Ignatius and applied to the natural and super- 271 BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS Reoiew t:or Religiod~ natural life aims of his education. He insisted, however, on £eeping theology and philosophy as the most ~important branches of study. In Chapter nine of the third part of his book, Father Gauss sums up fifteen clear principles of Ignatian education. In this chapter he has gi~ven modern Jesuits, especially American Jesuits, the structure on which to build the methods and adaptations for our universities today while preserving what is truly the Jesuit spirit of education. Any review of this thorough and scholarly book would be in-complete without mention of the Appendix called "A Historical Sketch of the Teaching of Latin." This brief study of the use of the Latin Language as a means of education is well worth the price of the entire book. He clearly shows how the history of Latin in education has undergone a change in aim from the Renaissance (fa-cility in reading, speaking, and writing for cultural, social, and economic life-preparedness), through that of John Locke and Chris-tian Wolf (mind-training and some contact with classical thought), down to the present practical abandonment of the language in favor of a fuller study of classical literature in the vernacular. Father Gauss has written a challenging and controversial book that certainly will be most helpful in the discussions and planning of modern Catholic education.--RAYMOND J. SCHNEIDER, S.J. BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS BEAUCHESNE ET SES FILS, Rue de Rennes, 117, Paris. Le Ciet ou l'Enfer, I, Le Ciet. Par le Chanoine Georges Panneton. How little most religious know about heaven where they firmly hope to be happy for all eternity! But then heaven is not a subject about which many books have been written. Readers of French therefore owe a debt of gratitude to Canon Panneton for his excel-lent treatment of this much neglected subjedt. His book covers the subject most thoroughly, and is based on sound theology. Learned and unlearned alike will read this book with pleasure and profit. Pp. 253. ¯ THE BRUCE PI.)BLISHING COMPANY, Milwaukee 1, Wis. Jesus, 8on of Daoid. By Mother Mary Eleanor, S.H.C.J. To meditate on an incident in the life of our Lord, we are told to imagine that we are present as the incident unfolds. If this has been difficult for you, you must read Jesus, 8on of Daoid, and learn how a person blessed with a vivid imagination carries out this ad- 272 September, 1955 BOOK ANNOUNCEMENTS ~¢ice. You will find the bbok very easy to read, and it should make your meditations on the life of our Lord much more vivid. The book also serves as an excellent introduction to the life of our Lord for the young and for those who find it difficult to profit from the learned biographies ~ of Jesus. Pp. 224. $3.25. Bloody Mary. By Theodore Maynard. Lest the reader be mis- -led, the author points out in his very first paragraph that he uses the title ironically. He also insists, and with truth, that his book is in no sense "special pleading," but an objective study of °the available historical documents. He is an inveterate scholar and de-lights in communicating his findings to others as his more than thirty books testify. If you are interested in Tudor England, you must read Bloody Mary. Pp. 297. $4.95. CLONMORE AND REYNOLDS, LTD., 29 Kildare St. Dublin. Meditations for Priests, Seminarians, and Religious. Compiled by Dominic Phillips, C.M. This book of meditations was designed to help those beginning mental prayer. There is a twenty-two page introduction that deals with the excellence and necessity of mental prayer, gives detailed instruction on mental prayer according to the method of St. Francis de Sales, and gives advice about the ordinary difficulties encountered in meditation. All the meditations are of uniform length, a page for each meditation, and follow a uniform pattern. The book should prove helpful not only to beginners but also to those more advanced. Pp. 456. 25/-. LA EDITORIAL CATOLICA, S.A., Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Apartado 466, Madrid. Ciencia Moderna y Fitosofia. Introduction Fisicoquimica ~t Mathematica. Pot Jose M. Riaza, S.J. In every major seminary certain courses called Quaestiones Scientigcae, wh

Issue 39.6 of the Review for Religious, November 1980. ; The Fot~rth Level of Prayer Developmental Stages and the Novice Limits of Adaptability of the Exercises Volume :~9 Number 6 November 1980 REVIEW ~:OR Rrl.J~aOt~S (ISSN 0034-639X). published hi-monthly (every two months), is edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Departmenl of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room a,28:3601 Lindell Blvd.: St. Louis, MO 63108. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri, © 1980. By R~v~w FOk RFa.~¢aous. Composed. printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis. Missouri. Single copies: $2.(X). Subscription U.S.A.: $8.1XI a year; $15.00 for two years. Other countries: $9.00 a year. $17.00 fi~r two years. For subscription orders or change of address, write R~v~w I;Ok R~-:~,~;~ot;s: P.O. Box 6070: Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor November, 1980 Volume 39 Number 6 Correspondence with the editor and the associate editors, manu~ripts and books for review should be sent to REw~:w ~on R~:~AG~OUS; 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 College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. "Out of print" issues and articles not re-issued as repr.ints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. The Benedictine Call to Judgment James M. Desche~e, O.S.B. Brother James has written this article especially to celebrate the 1500 anniversary of the Benedic-tines. His last article, "Journey into Christ," appeared in the issue of July, 1980. He resides at Christ-of-the-Hills Monastery; P.O. Box 32849; San Antonio, Texas 78216. Make no mistake about the age we live in; already it !s high time for us to awake out of our sleep., the night is far on its course., day draws near. (Rm 13:11,12). Despite the Lord's command to comfort the afflicted, one cannot help but be struck by the frequency with which the Lordhimself afflicts the comfort-able. Despite our very human tendency to seek peace and security, one cannot easily forget (for the Lord will not permit it) that Christ came "not to send peace, but a sword" (Mt 10:34). When, like ancient Israel, we have come to prefer the security of enslaved lives, the Lord, ever perverse in his grace, calls us out of our comfortable slavery to wander in a desert of freedom, exiled from security and peace. ¯ Wandering.in that terrible place, we long with all our hearts to be back in the dreary mud pits of Egypt, preferring the dry but dependable crusts of slavery to those fierce, unsatisfied hungers we discover within us as we sojourn in the desert of fre~edom.and ~of judgment. Whatever the pain of crises in our lives, we must never forget that the crises themselves are divine gifts. The Greeks, who had a word for everything, gave us the word crisis. But they wisely knew (as we often do not) that the word, while it involved pain, really meant a time of challenge and judgment, an opportunity to-measure and evaluate and change. For the Christian, crises are moments in which God confronts us with truths we had preferred not to see, with realities we have chosen to ignore, with decisions we have refused to make. For the Christian, a crisis is a 801 802 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 moment--albeit painful--of deepest grace. For a Christian who has become settled in a life of slavery to routine and superficial existence, a moment of crisis is a moment of salvation and an opportunity to regain touch with th~ deep roots of being, to be enlivened and energized by a return to life and grace. Just as there are moments of crisis ! of j udgment-- in each human life, so are there moments of crisis in each human generation and in each human society. This is the human condition: to stand--as an individual and as a race--at eve.ry moment in need of judgment and of conversion, in need of redemption and of new life. It is his recognition of this condition--and of Christ's lordship over all our crises--that prompts Saint Paul to call us to judgment: "Make no mistake about the age we live in; already it is high time for us to awake out of sleep." Paul's word, translated here by "high time," is the Greek kairos, with its sense of urgency, of.opportunity, of occasion. The word for Paul usually suggests a critical time (a time of judgment), a God-filled moment of salvation, an end and a beginning. Fifteen hundred years ago was born a man whose wisdom in crisis was to have an incalculable influence on the history and life of our. western world. Benedict, born around the year 480 in the small Umbrian town of Nursia in the Apennines, found himself thrust into a world in crisis. The old Roman Empire and its social fabric were f~lling into ruin around this young man. Rome itself narrowly escaped attack by Attila the Hun in~452 only to be sacked a few years later by the Vandals. Nor was the Church im-mune from crisis. In 451, churchmen struggling over the doctrinal issue of the two natures in Christ met in council at Chalcedon. The results were a victory for dogma but a defeat for Christian unity, giving rise to the two schisms of the NestOrians and the Monophysites, and planting the seeds of the great disunity between east and west that were to bloom prodigiously in the later Middle Ages. In brief, it was an age not unlike our own. Into the crisis of his age entered this man Benedict who wisely allowed the larger crises of his time to become one with his own personal moment of crisis, of judgment and of salvation. In the person of Benedict, in fact, a judgment is passed upon the age itself: "Even while still living in the world, free to enjoy all it had to offer, he saw how empty it was and turned from it without regret" (St. Gregory the Great: Dialogues, H, Preface). It is the genius of Saint Benedict, and the special mark of his,holiness, that this judgment, while never compromising itself, always avoids the taint of the puritan harshness we of later generations have come to expect in those who renounce the world. Instead, as we discover in the Prologue to his Rule, Benedict's judgment is filled with goodness and grace, with charis as the ancients knew it, sounding clear notes of kindliness; graciousness and mercy. Benedict calls his advice that of a "loving father" and finds only joy in the~call to judgment: "What can be sweeter to us, dear brothers, than this voice of the Lord inviting us? Behold, in his loving kindness the Lord shows us the way of The Benedictine Call to Judgment / 803 life" (Rule, Prologue). As the monk confronts the crisis of his own life, any hardness results from the very hardness and smallness of his own heart. But in crisis, the Lord stands ready to give the monk a neff heart and with this growth comes an ineffable joy: "For as we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand, and we run the way of God's commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love" (Rule, Prologue). In its essence, the monastic or religious life as Benedict understands it is a call to judgment, a call to be ever open to the voice of the Lord, a vocation to enter into each and every moment of crisis with the faith tha, t God is present in that moment to recreate and renew our hearts and our lives. The great enemy to this vocation is hardening the heart: "Today if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts." And Benedict's remedy for this is sounded in the opening of his Rule: "Listen, my son, to your master's precepts, and incline the ear of'your heart." For Benedict this is no poetic fancy. To listen, to incline the ear of the heart, is exactly what is meant by obedience. "By the labor of obedience you may return to him from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience" (Rule, Prologue). Obedience, to the Latin ear ofSaint Benedict, always carried a message we easily miss in the English word. Obedience (from ob +audire) has to do with listening, with hearing, with attending to. It involves an openness and a sensitivity to the voice and,the, will of the Lord speaking to each person in each situation. To obey is tobe wholly open and submissive to the Lord in crisis; it is to be ever willing to enter into crisis because that is .where the Lord will be found at that moment. It is a willingness to allow the Lord tobe our judge, to have his way with us. It isa willingness to let one's,heart be broken, if that is the Lord's will. It is to. hold back no part of one's life,ands'being from the Lord of all life and being. To obey is to be wholly the Lord's creature, Benedict clearly indicates that it is in obedience that the monk finds a deep stability when he quotes from the Gospel the words: "Whoever listens to these w~ords of mine and acts upon them, I will liken him to a wise man who has built his house on rock. The floods came, the winds blew and beat against that house, and it did not fall, because it was founded on rock" (Rule, Prologue). When we are in crisis, security and stability appear to lie in avoiding the critical issue. When .the Lord calls.us out of slavery into the desert, slavery doesn't look so bad. Only the0deepest faith and the deepest trust in the Father's love can teach us to face the crisis, to enter into judgment, to listen to and obey the voice that calls us into seeming desert and chaos and.ruin. For Benedict this faith and trust are reflected in the words: "In his loving kindness the Lord shows us the way of life." What appears to be a way of death is really the way of life. One of the.practical ways Benedict provides to his monks for learning this deep trust in the Father's unfailing love is the office of the abbot; the abba who incarnates among the monks the Father himself. It is by his obedience to the abbot that the monk learns obedience to the Father. Indeed, it isin his obe- 804 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 dience to the abbot that the monk is obedient to the Father. Yet Benedict is careful to remind the monk that obedience-- in its radical sense of openness to crisis and the will of God expressed in concrete situations--is not limited to the relationship between a monk and his abbot. The monk is to recall that he must be obedient to all his brothers. "Not only is the boon of obedience to be shown by all to the Abbot, but the brothers are also to obey one another, knowing that by the road of obedience they are going to God" (Rule, Chapter 71). The call to crisis involves every member of the community. No one is to be denied our obedience--our listening, our sensitivity, our responsiveness. Every crisis between Christians, whether they be monks or not, is a God-filled kairos, a time of salvation. In light of the foregoing, it may be objected by some that this appears to be a diminution of the force of the vow of obedience. I have avoided all the juridical and legal aspects of the vow. Yet I have done this purposely, and for two reasons. First, the vision I find in Benedict of obedience is deeper, stronger and more demanding than. any purely juridical concept. Indeed, it is possible (perhaps even common) to find juridically conceived obedience an effective means of escaping real crisis, real judgment and encounter between the monk and the Lord. Secondly, a purely juridical view limits our considera-tion to those who are juridically bound by a vow. Yet Benedict's view of obe-dience is no less applicable to every Christian man and woman than to monks. All are called to crisis, to judgment. No Christian is exempt from this demand nor from the demand of obedience to each of his fellow Christians. Nor is any Christian exempt from the demand Benedict makes by the vow of conversatio morum, usually translated as "conversion of manners" or "reformation of life." For in its most profound sense, this vow is essentially a radical call to crisis, to judgment. It requires that at every moment we respond to the voice of the Lord calling us to newness of life. Today's response may have to be relinquished to tomorrow's response. Our hearts must be continu-ally open to each new judgme.nt and call from the Lord. We are not to settle down, not to set camp in the desert, but to be continually on the move. There is no standing still in the service of the Lord. Endless conversion, perpetual metanoia, are the marks of a truly living Christian. To guarantee that the monk will not be tempted to escape this demand of endless reformation and endless conforming to the living will of God as revealed in crisis and discovered by obedience, Benedict adds the third vow of stability. By this the monk renounces his right to escape God's demands in the present moment and circumstances by moving into other circumstances. Run-ning away is not permitted the monk and so there is nothing for him to do but to submit to the divine crisis and know it is God's will that he submit. From the day of his profession, the monk is assured by God's promise that it is here, among these particular persons,, that God will confront him in crisis. To flee from these brothers, then, is to flee from God and his call. (I do not wish here to enter into the problematical issues of canonical transfer of stability or of The Benedictine Call to Judgment / 805 departure from the monastic life, though these deserve fuller treatment in light of what has been said here.) One of the last points to consider in Benedict's vision of the Christian life authentically lived is the place of humility. A close examination of his chapters on hi~mility reveals that humility has a great deal to do with truthfulness. It has to do with facing the truth about ones.elf. It has to do with seeing oneself for what one is. It is a virtue of utter and radical realism. Above all, its end is tosee oneself as God sees one. It involves looking at fearful truths intently and steadily, refusing to turn away from them, until by grace and work, all fear is transformed into love and "the monk will presently come to that perfect love of God which casts out fear" (Rule, Chapter 7). Humility is thus related to crisis; it helps us to face crisis, to endure judg-ment, to bear the truth. It also enables the monk to be of assistance to his brothers in their need to face crisis. The monk serves his brother by being perfectly truthful, by obscuring nothing of his own weakness or sin and nothing of his brother's weakness and sin. Humble monks do not support one another in self-deception. Equally importantly, the monk is alway.s ready, in humility, to take from the moment of crisis the truth of his own goodness and to affirm the same in his brothers:.Humility is the readiness to admit the truth as it is revealed at every moment. This is particularly seen in the requirement that the monk hold back nothing about himself from his spiritual father. Every selfish thought, every petty jealousy, every twinge of hatred--all must be laid without hesitation before the spiritual father. In this way, spiritual direction for the monk becomes in the truest sense a crisis and a moment of salvation. Nothing of Benedict's vision is without relevance to the life and growth of every Christian. In this fifteen-hundredth year of Saint Benedict's gift to Christianity, it must be seen that his gift is a gift to all men and women who seek the Lord. The gift of his monks is to be bearers of crisis. The monk must live in such a way that the world may never forget that Christ is Lord. The monk must live in such a way that the values of the world, insofar as they are opposed to the values of Christ, are absurd and empty. Benedict's sons and daughters must see that their lives bring a continual judgment on the lives of all men and women; that their lives are lived in a way that proclaims the power of truthfulness, of humility, of obedience. The monk must live his life in such a way that it would make no sense if there" were not a loving Father guiding and ruling all things. It is this "senselessness" that can bring the world into crisis, into facing the truth of its own empty values, its own abandonment of God, This is the Benedictine crisis, this call to judge the world not by condemn-ing or rejecting it, and certainly not by fleeing it; but by living every moment in such a way that the world must face the question of God's rule and the reality of his kingdom. Our criticism must lie, like Benedict's, not in speaking against the world (though this too has its place), but by the positive and grace-filled 806 / Review for Religious~ Volume 39, 1980/6 living of our lives in truth, in love, in brotherhood, in simplicity, in peace: In our time, perhaps more than ever, this is the task to which Benedict's monks and nuns are called, For all of us it is a time of crisis, of asking whether weare really doing what Saint Benedict interided. To answer this question, we do not 'need to examine our effectiveness. For our effectiveness lies entirely in our observance of the Rule and spirit of Saint Benedict. It is by being witnesses to God's kingdom that we shall have our effect, and this witness lies in our fidelity to the principles we have briefly looked at~here: obedience, continual reformation, stability, humility. For fifteen hundred years the presence in the world of Benedictine monks has been a sign and a challenge, a judgment and a question .--a crisis. So long as~we do not ourselves abandon the elements of our life which keep us ever open and sensitive to the workings of the Spirit, so long as we have the faith and the courage to examine ourselves for fidelity to the authentic Benedictine tradition and to step into the future with faith and trust and submissive-ness- so long as these things are present,,the Benedictine family and mission will be .needed, will be in crisis, will be genuinely alive, ~ We attest to a frightened world that the'sword of Christ.is but a prelude to the peace of Christ, that death through olSedience leads to the fullest life, and that the ruins of our lives in the crises we meet are the foundations of Resur-rection. The world's fear must be cast out by the perfection of our love.For it is love that is the greatest judgment and crisis in all of human history. Benedict, in his school of the Lord's service, shows us the way to the crisis of love. The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery David J. Hassel, .S.J. Father:Hassel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyol~i University in Chicago. His last arti-cle, "'Prayer of Personal Reminiscence: Sharing Oners Memories with Christ," was printed in the issue of March, 1977 and is still available in reprint form. He currently resides at 6525 North Sheridan Road; Chicago, IL 60626. Ironically, the terms most frequently used to describe our present-day spirituality can cause us the most c6nfusion: peace, consolation and desola-tion, dryness in prayer, contemplation in action, discernment. Since these terms.point to.mySterious processes within our experience, even a book-length analysis of them would be hardly adequate. But perhaps an article can achieve some clarity if it attempts simply to locate the happenings described by these terms~ In other words, if we were to ~st~rvey the various level~ of human awareness--e~en with some crudity--we might better understand the events occurring at these levels.' But before doing tlais survey, could we first describe the problems to be touched hire? For ~xample, people can feel disturbed about the peace they experience in their decisions and their prayer. Is this peace simply the euphoria of having finally made a decision after hours or days of sweaty deliberations? Is peace in prayer mainly exuberant physical ~nd mental health? The f6~ty'- year old priest has decided that God no longer wants him to practice° his priesthood but now wishes him to marry the woman who has helped him so ' I am deeply indebted to the retreatants whose honesty and trust have furr~ished me with the data out of which this article rises, i am particularly indebted to the following persons who have attempted to save me the usual number of unhealthy exaggerations inevitable in such an article as this: Mary Ann Hoope, B.V.M., Robert Harvanek, S.J., Paul Clifford, S.J., John Schuett, S.J., Richard Smith, S.J., Robert Murphy, S.J, :Mary Jane Linn, C.S.J., Frank Houdek, S.J., Jules Toner, S.J., Mrs. Mary Ellen Hayes. 807 808 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 much in his ministry and in his discovery of manhood. He feels peace in this decision; but is this "peade" simply the relief from heavy parish obligations and the glad anticipation of married life? Will "peace" remain when his new life begins to place renewed obligations on his shoulders? Again, a person can experience what seems to be a split in his personality. He finds himself half-miserable, half-happy. He asks himself: "How can I, at one and the same time, experience the depressing defeat of losing my job and yet, in my depths, feel confident? Are there two of me? Is this the play of con-solation and desolation within my life? Or are the pressures of life splitting my consciousness into two?" A third problem is Christ's command: "Pray always." Such a request seems psychologically impossible when a mother is raising four children between the ages of two years and twelves years or when an engineer is testing a heavily traveled city bridge for stress-breaks and wondering what will hap-pen in the business community and-at city hall if he condemns the bridge, or when the advertising executive is sizing up a prospective customer, estimating the product to be advertised, and puzzling over the morality of a slick sales-pitch which has just come to mind. But if Christ is asking the psychologically impossible, is he not providing the conditions for skepticism about his whole message? A fourth problem arises when we focus upon discernment process the three puzzling cases just mentioned. What does it mean to discern God's will in a decision, if I am unsure about peac~, consolation-desolati0n, and ongoing prayer in my life? Such discernment is often termed the concrete call of Christ to the individual Christian or to his community. But does God call only through external circumstances and other people, or does he not also" make his desires known within the experience of the individual Christian? Does such an interior experience occur in the imagination or in the mind or in the heart of the person? Or in all three at the same time? Or somewhere else? Some clarity, it is contended here, can be attained in these problems if one distinguishes four levels of awareness in the praying Christian: the superficial, physical, psychic, and mysterious. Could we, therefore, describe these levels then indicate a way of uncovering the fourth level, next show the type of partial solution which the appreciation of this fourth level offers to our prob-lems, subsequently explain how the fourth level would seem to affect the upper thre~ levels of awareness, and finally offer some cautions about the use of this fourth-level explanation? These five steps would be the strategy of this presentation. Four Levels of Awareness2 First Level: the Sensuous-Superficial. This first level is the skin-surface of experience: sensuous awareness. It is a tissue of minor irritations and pleasures. For example, I am displeased by the cold draft playing on my neck during the auditorium talk, or by the raspy.voice of the woman describing her The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 809 Florida vacation or by the first gnawings of hunger at 4:30 p.m., or by the slight rash on the back of my hand. At this same level, I experience satisfac-tion at a favorite meal of ham and sweet potatoes, at the sweet smell of spring grass just cut, at the relaxation of a hardy laugh, at the caressing of the family cat. Such minor irritations and pleasures ordinarily do not demand much at-tention and are taken for granted as the normal flow of life. Though I am often barely conscious of them, they do give life its continuous texture. Second Level: the Physical-Vital. Underneath the first level of awareness, there are other happenings which demand attention because they last longer and are more intense tfian events of the first level. Here are the pains and joys which go deeper than minor ir.ritations and pleasantries~ Anyone who has experienced the steady throb of neuralgia or the constant harassment of ulcer pains or the brain-deadening effect of insomnia will vouch for the e~xistence of this second level of awareness. Here are also pleasurable joys which exceed the simple pleasures described in the first level. There is, for example, the exuber-ance of glowing health, the feeling that "all the world is beautiful and owned by me'~-experiences which the carbonated-drink advertisements exploit. At this level the fifth symphony of Beethoven can stir a person to his depths with its elegant majesty, can make him feel noble beyond his dreams. Or this level contains the sustained sat!sfaction of slowly mastering one's tennis or golf. Here, too, the ecstasy of sexual pleasure .occurs with its deep drum-beat of powerful delight. The very power of the pains and pleasures of this second level demand our attention and make us aware of how superficial the first- . level irritations and pleasures are. Yet these second-level happenings do com-penetrate and influence the first-level, sensuous awareness. One's enjoyment of a favorite dinner is enhanced by the feel of good health or diminished by in-somnia. Third Level: the Psychological-Psychic. Although the second level of awareness contains happenings of insistent strength, still the third level of awareness is capable of riveting a person~.s attention and so possessing him or her that, for a time, he or she is seemingly unaware of second- or first-level happenings. The deep sorrows and the pure joys of this level totally permeate a person's being and consciousness. For example, the young woman, working at her first secretarial job, may be hypnotized by fear of failure so that her voice creaks, her fingers clog the typewriter keyboard, her memory fails and she feels no hunger throughout the first day of work. The paranoid person 2 In their article "Phenomenology, Psychiatry, and Ignatian Discernment," (The Way, Supple-ment #6, May, 1968, 27-34) Felix Letemendia and George Crofts'peak of four levels of experience: the sensorial, the vital, the psychic and the spiritual, which somewhat resemble the levels described here. They have borrowed their descriptions from Max Scheler, the philosopher, and from Kurt Schneider, the psychiatrist. Of course, there are many levels of experience, if one wishes to be very specific. But perhaps this more simplifiedlsketch of four levels better serves our present purpose. 810 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 may be so concentrating on the "derogatory actions" of others that he walks through a glass door without knowing that he is bleeding from cuts. At this third level a woman may experience haunting doubts about her ability to love another adeq~uately and thus may begin to feel like a dull, unattractive child u~na.ble to evoke love from another. A father's mental pain at watching his daughter waste away in unrelievable cancer is matched on this level only by the suffering of a wife undergoing systematic and.continuous belittlement from her husband while the children look on bewildered. But at this third level, the depth of the pure joys~equal such sorrows. Here an6ther mother experiences the warm security of being loved by an admired husband and of being respected by admiring children: Here, too, is where the older brother ~njoys the four-touchdown afterri0on of his younger brother whom h~had 6oached on all the moves of a tigl~t end during four years. It is at this third lev61 that the novelist reads over the'laudatory reviews of his book and experiences lasting gratitude to the elderly journalism teacher who had taught him his craft. Here, too, the woman social worker sits late at her desk, savoring the bone-tiredness but deep satisfaction of a day well spent in patiently binding together fragmenting families, persons, and situations. This third level, then; encompasses the top two levels'and, in so doing, can render them almost routine. For the top two-levels, distracting as they may be to this thir~l level of awareness, are integrated into a fuller meaning at the°third level. The tired social worker does feel the pangs of hunger at the ~irs~t level, and at the second level does anticipate the pleasure of relaxing at home with her husband over a leisurely dinner, but all this is occurring in the wider and deeper context 'of fulfillment in her work at the third level of awareness. Fourth Level: the Underground River of God. ~ The fourth level is like a great underground river which, underlying the upper three levels, quietly nourishes them, sustains them in their storms and blisses, acts as the continuity (the stay-in~ power) underneath~their sometimes rapid fluctuations of irritation-pleasantry, pain-pleasure, sorrow-joy. Compared to theupper three levels, this fourth level is a quiet beneath turbulance, a constancy amid flux, a seem-in~ Passivity under great activity. Consequently, the fourth level is never explicitly conscious in itself (as are the top three levels) but only by way of cont~ast with the top levels. It is not simply experiential, but implicitly experiential,' as we note in the following two cases. Discovery of the Fourth LevEl A remarkable case-history, whose details rife changed to disguise the ~ Being ignorant of C. G. Jung, the author would not wish the combined images of underground river and of ever deeper experiential levels to be interpreted as intentionally Jungian. ' John F.~ Dedek in his Experimental Knowledge of the Indwelling Trinity: an Historica/Study of the Doctrine of St. Thomas (St. Mary of the Lake Seminary Mundelein, Illinois, 1958, pp. 125r142) calls attention to Aquinas' doctrine that.the Christian's knowledge of the Trintiy is quasi The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 811 person, illustrates how this fourth level can be discovered. A woman novice in a religious order located onthe west coast came to a midwest Jesuit University to begin her collegiate studies. Her novice mistress had taken a dislil(e to her, told her that her lack of intelligence would keep her from ever being a useful member of the congregation, succeeded in turning the other novices against her and yet had capriciously admitted her into vows. When ! met this woman, her skin was blotched with anxiety, the doctor had diagnosed stomach ulcers, she herself felt isolated and :depressed~ But she also was convinced that, despite all the sufferings, God wanted her to be a nun. As three years went by, she discovered that she was a straight "A" student, that she had special talents for political science, that she was being accepted by her fellow students and by the nuns with whom she lived, that she could pray. In other words, she found that she had a future, that deep happiness could occur in religious life. As these discoveries slowly permeated her life, the skin-blotches .disap-peared, the ulcers became healed, the sense of alienation was replaced with the warm feeling of being accepted by her religious community. The steady accomplishment felt at the top three levels of her experience now allowed her to experience by contrast a constant uneasiness or lack of peace at her deepest level, the fourth level. During the period of her novitiate experience, she could not be clearly aware of the uneasiness at the fourth level, because it was clouded by all the disturbances at the upper three levels. Only the growing brightness at the top three levels of-her experience during her collegiate days enabled her to appreciate the bl~i9k uneasiness at the deepest level of her being. After a year or so of disc_e~;nment at-this fourth level, she gradually came to acknowledge that the Lord was asking her to leave the religious community and was calling her to another way .of life. She resisted this leave-taking because she had found so much pleasure, joy, fulfillment in her religious com-munity and in her study-work. Finally she accepted God's will and, leaving the congregation, secured a job in Washington as research assistant to a member of Congress who bullied every member of his staff consistently and impartial-ly. The former novice's skin again took on the anxiety blotches, again she was consulting a doctor about stomach pains, again :she felt herself sinking into a dark and angry depression. But to her surprise, at. t.he fourth level of awareness now opened to her by her previous and present experience, she found a constant serenity never before experienced, The Lord was apparently experimentalis, i.e., "knowledge that is joined to charity" (p. 146). But he is unable to determine whether for Aquinas "this knowledge is merely discursive cognition based on signs or rather some kind of immediate or supra-discursive perception of the divine persons." Such knowledge is cer-tainly at the deepest l~vel of man's experience and, according to.the above analysis, is inferential, that is, the person becomes aware by contrasting the top three levels with the fourth level. The cen-tral texts noted in Aquinas by Fr, Dedek are in I Sent., D. 14, q. 2a., and 3; D. 15, Expositio Secundae Patris Textus. Also Sum. Theol. I, q. 43, a.5, ad 2. 812 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 approving her new way of life. At a great price and with subtle indirectness she had discovered the fourth level of awareness where the Lord calls to her and speaks in her discernment. Among other factors for diagnosing God's will for her, the crucial factor was the continuous uneasiness or the steady Peace at this fourth level. A second quick example illustrates these same points in a less extra-ordinary way. One day in a community corridor I met a fellow Jesuit who had just returned from home. He said to me, "You know my younger sister just died, I discovered two weeks ago that my doctoral thesis of a year's slaving has already been written by a South American, I'm wondering whether I can handle the theology courses scheduled for next year, and I haven't slept more than four hours a night during the last two weeks. But do you know? I must be crazy. Down deep I'm at peace, God loves me and will help me work out these things, I worry at one level of me; but at a deeper level I feel at peace." Could it be that this man is discovering with new clafity 'and enjoying with fuller appreciation the fourth level within his experience--precisely because of the striking contrast between the top three levels of suffering-sorrow and this fourth level of serenity-security? But what is this fourth level so poetically described as the underground river of God within us? First of all, its peace ap-pears to be a sense of God's approval, almost a companioning of the person by God, On the other hand, its uneasiness seems to express God's disapproval which produces an emptiness and loneliness. Secbndly the experience of peace or uneasiness is implicit to the top three levels; that is, it is recognizable by contrast with these levels yet is hidden under and within them. Thirdly, because of its depth and implicitness, this fourth level is difficult to describe directly. Instead, one offers experiential case-histories with the hope that the latter can point within the hearer'sexperience to his or her fourth level. For this reason, too, metaphor ("underlying river of God," "the ocean floor of life-experience" and "the background music of our activity at the top three levels") is employed rather than neat definitions composed of essential char, acteristics or criteria. Fourthly, the peace of the fourth level is marked by a passive alertness to.the top three levels of activity, an intent listening at the fourth level, a sense of not being along, a wi!lingness simply to be and to let be, an expectant openness to all future events. Yet at the same time, this peace permeates, patiently strengthens and lends finer quality to all the activities at the top three levels? What Is Happening at the Fourth Level? Peace. One event of vital importance seems to be happening at the fourth level: peace, a perduring serenity even amid storms at the top three levels. ~ Prayer experience at the fourth level bears a number of resemblances to what Karl Rahner describes as transcendental experience in his Foundations of Christian Faith (Seabury, New York, 1978), pp. 20, 21, 54, 58. The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 813~ Once the four levels are distinguished, it becomes clear that the word peace can refer to at least four different states in a person's awareness. At the first level, peace would mean enjoyment of life's little pleasures without its normal irritations. Confer television's beer and cosmetic advertisements for further clarification of this bodily peace. At the second level, peace could well mean a combination of good health, unworried mind and settled emotions. The fisherman, safe from the office telephones and watching the sun rise over water dimpled by surface-fee~ding trout, may well be the symbol of tl~is peace of mind. At the third level, peace may be euphoria, the neatly balanced inner life of felt achievement, of skilled competence, of fully satisfying family life, of pleasant prospect. For examples, look at the All-American father or mother in the Geritol or insurance-annuity advertisements; or, .better, look to the disciplined people who are willing to suffer much for the good of others. This could be called peace of heart. As we have mentioned, the top three level~ of peace, when disturbed, can reveal by contrast the fourth level of peace. Evidently, when one is recollecting himself or sinking into himself to discover his center of being so that he can pray better, he is actually dropping down through the three upper levels of awareness so that he can reach the fourth level where life flows most richly, quietly, serenely. He will note how the peace of this fourth level tends to render peaceful the upper three levels and he will understand better the restlessness of those who appear to have everything but lack peace of being or person. So, h'~ will discover that fourth-level peace is not just the concern of the wise, the religiously inclined~ the fortuna~tely educated; it is the goal and hope of every living person. Indeed, this is precisely what the Taoist, the Buddh.ist, and the transcendental meditator seeks. Yet not all seem to recognize the fourth level cli~arly for what it is: the felt presence of God. And quite a few seem unwilling to pay the price of such .recognition. For the price i~ double: (1) a sometimes painful discerning of ~what factors are operating within the fourth level and (2) for the Christian, the consequent willingness to accept the call of Christ (n6w heard more clearly,) and to respond to it more generously. Let us attempt some exploration of thesetwo points. Discernment. A spate of articles and floods of conversation about discern-ment make it one of the "in" terms. As luck would have'it, the mystery of discernment is not lessened by all this attention. Nor will this article do anything more than try to show where discernment takes place~ To put it starkly, discernment occurs radically at the fourth level.6 What 6 In using the term radical discernment to point to God's approving (peace) or disapproving (uneasiness) movemeni within the fourth level, I do not intend to discount the other convergent factors which go into the full discernment process, e.g., the weighing of reasons pro and con, obe-dience to lawful authority, spiritual direction, the testing of the decision in the actual living of it, use of Scripture, the calibrating of patterns of past behavior and accomplishments (the direction 814/Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 this:statement means become clearer only after one defines the events (or states) of desolation, consolation, depression, and elation. For it would seem that these four states occur only at the upper three levels. In other words, although desolation and consolation are used to read the spirits influencing a person to good or to evil, and although they may well appear to intrude upon the fourth level, still they are quite distinct from a perons's peace or lack of peace at this lowest level. Nor do depression and elation enter the fourth level of man's awareness even though they can obscure the peace or uneasiness of this level. Consolation-Desolation, Elation-Depression. It is necessary to define these four terms experientially in order to understand and to test in one's own awareness the truth of the above statements. First of all, though desolation can cause depression and intermingle with the latter almost inextricably, still desolation is not the psych.ological state of depression. For desolation is induced by the evil spirit, not by the psychological dy~.namisms causing depres-sion such as extreme fatigue, poor self-image, seemihgly depreciatory actions by admired people, neurotic or psychotic impulses, and so on. In addition, desolation has spiritual effects, i.e., those based on faith experience. Thus the person undergoing desolation feels that God igat a cold distance or does not exist at all. This person finds himself convinced that he has no future b~cause he can do no good for. anyone, least of all for the kingdom of Godl He feels totally unloving and unlovable for God and his people. On the other hand, depression is not concerned with faith-o.bjects such as these, but is involved with natural goals and hopes which, however, can be easily entwined with faith objects, e.g., when th~ nun-teacher estimateg that her attempt to write a biology book is being thwarted (depression) by her own lack of competence or (paranoia) by the devious enyy-tactics bf the department chairman so that as a result she cannot Contribute to God's glory and his kingdom. To put all this succinctly, depression paralyzes or weakens the human as human; while desolation freezes or enerx~ates the Christian as Christian. Thus it almost goes without saying that consolation is not elation since of one's life), and so on. But I am saying that in the midst of complex decisions, peace or uneasiness at the fourth lex;el is the predominant factor to be considered. For often enough the reasons pro and con cancel each other out; authority often gives such broad directives that numerous alternatives are left open; spiritual direction can only help the directee discover for himself or herself the peace or uneasiness; testing of the decision in practice can be somewhat ambivalent; use of scriptural prayer is itself tested in terms of consolation and desolation which, in turn, are discerned in terms of peace or uneasiness; patterns of past behavior do not fully account for new demands of life, new turns on the road of life. For more on discernment, confer Karl Rahner's The Dynamic Element in the Church, (Herder and Herder, New York, 1964) Part 111: "'The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola." Thomas M. Gan. non and George W. Traub's The Desert and the City (Macmillan, Toronto, 1969) Chapter VIII: "The Logic of Christian Discernment" says much clearly in short compass. The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 815 strengthening consolation ~(as distinct from Satan's eventually debilitating elation) is caused by God, not by such psychological dynamisms as the sense of worked achievement, the feel of competence in skilled activity, the reassurance of someone's deep affection, the hope of career-success, the discovery of one's deepest self. Fo~ consolation, unlike the elation which it can cause and enter, is concerned with faith-effects. That is, God consoles me with the inner faith-vision that he pervades the whole world, with the hope that I can do much for him and his people, with the certainty that I amcapable of deep devotion to the triune God and his people, Briefly, consolation is the state of feeling cl.ose to self, God, and others; just as desolation is the state of feeling isolated from God,. others, and even one s self, Consolation ~s a deep sense of the commu'nion'~of saints because of the felt presence of faith, hope, and charity; while desolation is experience of the utter loneliness of hell. Only God can cause consolatio.n; just as Satan is the sole cause of desolation, a deliberate attack on the three God-given virtues of faith, hope and charity. And both pheno~aeha occuronly at the top three levels of a person's experience- .Dryness in Prayer. Obviously, when consolation and desolation are swinging back and .forth (along with elation and depression) in one's experience, one feels no "dryness in prayer." For this dryness is the state of normalcy, the middle balancing state between the swings of consolation and desolation, of elation and desolation. Indeed, it is the state of~everyday living. Thus, dryness in prayer is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure. For one cannot undergo the alternations of desolation-consolation or of depression-elation over.long periods of time without becoming exhausted'physically as well as spiritually. There must be periods of so-cailed~dryness if only so that the con-solations and desolations may be felt with refreshed sensitivity. It should be noted here that there is a dryness induced by ungrateful or disloyal actions, by petty selfishness, by clever screening out of spiritual insights which might disturb Complacency. This is when God declines to speak to Us with Consolation lest he seem.to approve our.state, and when Satan does not want to disturb our foolish self-satisfa'ction with desolation. But this dryness of complacency is not the normal dryhess in prayer even though both types of dryness occur within the same top three levels and can intermingle or at least succeed each other This intermingling makes it necessary to enter the fourth level of e~xperi-ence to explain~what normal dryness in prayer is. For underlying this dryness of the top three levels, can be a perduring sense of being right with God, of not being alone, and even of companioning God--despite all one's mistakes, shortcomings, and sin~fulness. This fourth-level, implicit sense of God is itself a prayer of quiet calmness which gives endurance, balance, and centering to all our spiritual living.~ This prayer of trusting expectancy would seem to be the somewhat experiential divine presence of which Aquinas speaks. Here the 816 ./ReviewforReligious, Volume 39, 1980/6 person is, in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, "a sustained utterance of prayer.''8 For this reason, such prayer can go on underneath one's fatigue, distractions, deadness of feeling, fitful sexual urges, tightening tensions, twitches and quirks. The quiet, hidden (not explicitly conscious) presence of God is supporting all the events at the tbp three levels of experience as one studies educational theory, works crossword puzzles, sells toothpaste, kisses children goodnight, and argues with one's spouse; This is why the :fourth level of experience can be described as a great underground river which quiets, stabilizes, nourishes, and guides the praying person. It is that which enable us literally to pray always. For, to change the figure, peace of the fourth level is like the quiet background music to all our endeavors on 'the upper levels. Again, this peace is the sense of carrying within oneself the Center of the World and of having nothing to fear (See Rm 8:35-39; I Co 3:21-23). Seeming Dereliction. For these reasons, even a partial obscuring of the fourth level can be a confusing, even an initially frightening, experience. When one'~ sense of the indwelling presence of God seems clouded in some way within the fourth level itself and not merely by desolation or depression at th~ top three levels, one experiences a certain dereliction. One.feels cut adrift, terribly alone, like a solitary canoeist drifting on a great body of night water. For the fourth level contains the center of one's universe, the hope of one's total future, the sourse of one's strength to love when not loved back. Of course, the fourth level of experience is never completely obscured; God is never far away. In fact, our very vulnerability and helplessness prob-ably make us, like the waif, even more appealing to him. Yet because this feel-ing of atheism at the fourth level is often accompanied by a convergence of outside calamities affecting the top three levels (confer the example of the Jesuit mentioned earlier), the suffering is acute. In fact, the sufferer needs the reassurance of spiritual direction as much as the storm-engulfed navigator needs clear sighting on the North Star. Still, in this seemingly total absence of consolation, to say nothing of elation, there perdures the subtle peace of God's presence never doubted even though ba~ely felt. Indeed, after the tem-porary dereliction, one feels more sensitive to peace', more alert to G.od's movements within the fourth l~vel.9 ' A wise and experie~ntial description of prayer amid dryness is Leonard Boase's Prayer of Faith (B. Herder, St. Louis, 1962), especially Chapters IV and V. (Paperback reissue: Our Sunday Visitor Press, Noll Piazza, Huntington, Indiana, 1976, a somewhat rearranged edition). ~ Hans Urs yon Balthasar, Prayer(Paulist Press, New York, 1961), translated byA. V. Littledale, p. 36. (Though not easy reading, this book gives deep understanding of prayer. One of its surpris-ing insights is that "even the dark night of the soul, the total absence of consolation, is a form of consolation" (p. 239). The paradox would seem to be that the ve~:y endurance of desolation with trust and love is itself a type of consolation. , * In his When the Well Runs Dry (Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, 1979), Thomas H. Green, S.J., has provided an encouraging synthesis of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Leonard Boasei and The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 817 Levels of Prayer. Consequently, as one sinks down past the first or sensuous level where vocal prayer finds expression, past the second and third levels where meditative and affective prayer predominate, and into the fourth level where prayer of.simplicity (simple being) occurs, the praying person hears more and more clearly the call of Christ within. Here one listens with a deeply passive alertness underneath the swirl of activities on the top three levels.'° Here the God-hunger is never sated; here in faith one feels heard, faced, touched by the Other. From here one responds with a surprising strength and tenderness. For, from here an all-embracing hope reaches up through the top three levels to say: "There will always be someone to serve and to love wherever I go, whomever I meet, whatever be the conditions of myself and others," From here love explodes up through the top three levels in strong generosity: "How can I give joy to my friends, coworkers, people I serve? How can I help each discover his or her deepest value and find this in each other and in Christ?" Thus, at the fourth level one seems to discover the peaceful river of God's mysterious presence, the radical source of discernment underlying consola-tion and desolation, the prayer of quiet calmness underneath the normal dryness of routinized life, the sometime feeling of dereliction when God is Closest, and the source of exuberantly hopeful generosity at the call of Christ. Influence of the Fourth Level on the Top Three Levels Despite its many levels, human experience is a unified focusing on the world, God, and self. So, it is not surprising that the peace of the fourth level percolates up through the upper three levels--with varying results. For example, in flooding up into the top three levels, this peace may make a face radiant, give added physical strength, direct strong emotions into creative activity, lend stable purpose .to one's thinking, imagining, feeling, deciding. Under these conditions even the ordinarily dour person will occasionally appear to be cheerful and rather outgoing. Because joy and lightness of heart are not infrequently a result of this pe~ace, people may rashly judge that a per-son undergoing deep sorrow at the third level is strange because of "his being unmoved, his quiet smile." On the other hand, uneasiness felt at the fourth level can move up and disturb. A person may be fe~eling euphoric at the top three levels and yet expe-the Cloud of Unknowing, within his own experience of prayer and of giving spiritual direction. ¯ Especially helpful are Chapters IV, V, and VI where he imaginatively and succinctly describes the Dark Night of the Senses and the Dark Night of the Soul. ~o M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O., works with brilliant clarity at this fourth level in his two articles "Centering Prayer--Prayer of Quiet" (REwEw FOR RELIGIOUS, Vol. 35, 1976/5, pp. 651-662) and "Progress in Centering Pr~iyer" (REVIEW FOR RELIGIOOS, VOI. 38, 1979/6, pp. 833-838). These are complemented by Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O., with his "Cultivating the Centering Prayer" (REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, Vol. 37, 1978/1, pp. 10-15). 818 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 rience a vague restlessness; 'amid continuing success, the man who has everything may feel a sense of incompleteness; within a totally secure situation ("I simply can't lose") a sense of impending chaos sends up ripples of fear from the fourth level. When this happens, people will sometimes~seek to distract themselves from this basic uneasiness. They will overwork., start an unending process of job-jumping, try multiplemarria.ges, haunt psychiatrists, exhaust themselves .on attractive trifles like stamp collecting, golfing, crocheting and televiewing. St. Augustine's description of his ownfascinatio nugacitatis is a case history of one man's twenty-year struggle with constant uneasiness at the fourth level. But if peace from the fourth level is arising within a person's euphoria at the top three levels, it acts as a stabilizing ballast to the ballooning emotions and exuberant activities. For its very perdurance at the depth of one's being gives a sharp sense of the temporariness of success. Indeed, the .implicit awareness of God at the fourth level helps us to feel, as well as to understand, how relative are all events and things compared to the absolute faithfulness of the Lord. In this way, contemplation is permeating not only the top three levels of experience but entering into all the activities issuing from these levels of experience. The duality of contemplation and action is becoming more and more unified as the active person becomes more and more aware of the fourth level of experience. For the prayer of simplicity at the fourth level, in penetrating the top levels of experience, gives a new alertness to God's presence in others, a renewed hope in people's future fidelity, a deeper con-fidence in God's providence. Lastly, it should be mentioned here that the neurotic or psychotic person, if put in touch with the fourth level,, may find a new source of hope. Underneath all the disturbances at the top three levels where the psychiatrist competently works to free his client from constricting fears, is the fourth level where the spiritual director competently tries to help a person interpret God's call. Because these four levels intermingle, both the psychiatrist and the spiritual director must know something of the other's area of competence, must learn to respect each other's discoveries, and must cooperate to help their client accept and live within his limitations. In this way, the neurotic or the psychotic can slowly learn that God will be daily with him, that he can hope against hope without this being just another contradiction, that he is lovable and capable of loving, that, like Theresa of Lisieux, he can become a saint. '~ Four Dimensions of Prayer Experience. Once we have indicated, how the fourth level of awareness intermingles with and influences the other levels, we " In his Storm of Glory (Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1955, Image) John Beevers indicates that Theresa of Lisieux struggled with personality imbalance of a serious nature from her mother's death (Aug. 28, 1877) until her miraculous cure by the Blessed Virgin (May 13, 1883). See pp. 34, 41-43. The Fourth Level of Prayer: Mystery / 819 are in a position to change the metaphor of "levels" to that of "dimensions" of experience. For human experience is marvelously unified and thus all the levels of awareness do permeate and mutually modify each other in forming a single human consciousness. For example, the fourth level contains the deep root of every prayer. Yet this prayer flowers differently, e.g., into prayer of the feelings and imagination at the third level, into reflective-meditative prayer at'the second level and into vocal prayer (action-prayer) at the first level. This is why these forms of prayer can be equally profound, can succeed each other quickly during a fifteen-minute period of prayer, can support and challenge each other, and can vary in intensity as does conversation between two human beings. This interchange between levels of prayer experience is also the reason why discernment, though founded radically at the fourth level in basic peace or uneasiness, nevertheless also occurs at the third level in the shapes of consola-tion, desolation, obedience, friendship; at the second level in terms of Scrip-ture, historical memories, and reasons pro and con; and even at the first level in the setting of such conditions for discernment as fasting, silence, and mortification. Obviously, then, the presence of God, so intimately and per-duringly active at the fourth level, is not limited to that level of awareness. Consequently, to change the model of explanation from "levels" to "dimensions" is not to deny the distinctions among the four levels and to homogenize their diverse influences on each other. Rather, it is to assert con-comitantly the remarkable unity of a praying person's consciousness. This is to say that all four levels, while remaining distinct, nevertheless are como penetrating and mutually influencing each other like distinct eddies in the single stream of human consciousnesL ,Some Cautions About the Fourth Level Because the above description of the location and the dynamics of the fourth level is rather crude, one must carefully assess one's own experience to see if it somewhat fits this description. One should not be unduly surprised if things are not totally clear. Then, too, one's spiritual director should be con-sulted for the necessary qualifications of the many flat statements made above. At the heart of each person is the deepest mystery and this article can hold only a fitful candle-flame to it. It is hoped that the shifting shadows accompanying such a flame will not obscure the basic contours outlined. For there are many, many layers of experience, and consequently, many, many interpretations of them to be considered. Still, no matter how many levels of experience, there is always the last and deepest level of man's being where union with God is radical.'2 ,2 Would it be outrageous to predict that growing sensitivity to the fourth level of experience will occur through steady practice of the examen of consciousness? 1120 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 Further, though God may be most present and most clearly speaking at the so-called fourth level, still he is also present in all the levels above. As a result, it takes some reflective living to distinguish these levels and to calibrate their functions. So I have been warned: "Only veterans of the spiritual life will really understand what you are saying; others will be mystified or will mistakenly think that they understand--with consequent bad results." In response to this, I can only say that the Lord protects those trying to find him and that no one can escape the facing of mystery deep within himself. It seems to me that we are never "safe" with any mystery, never in control, never ade-quately understanding, always searching and groping, always trusting amid our fears. If we must take chances in order to grow, then here would be the best place of all to gamble. Now Available As A Reprint Prayer of Personal Reminiscence: Sharing One's Memories With Christ by David J. Hassel, S.J. Price: $.60 per copy, plus postage Address R~view for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Journey into Journey--A Reflection Rita Bernard Walton, S.S.J. Sister Rita's last article, "Nomadic Memories," appeared in the January issue, 1978. She resides at St. Charles Seminary; Overbrook; Philadelphia, PA 19151. i was tired, as though at the end of a long journey. Long it had been, for I had journeyed into the human condition and had come to the doorway of under-standing that the human condition was so fragile, so delicately beautiful and so unique. I had journeyed and had come to the crossroads of another journey. It was there that I met Jesus in a new and startlingly beautiful way. For many days I had concentrated on the road itself, the dust, the rocks, the potholes, the many trials of faith and trust, the deaths along the way. It was easy to lose sight of the sunshine, even when it was directly overhead, when my mind grappled with the why of human events of suffering and death, events that seemed to crash in, like hurricane winds. Jesus had been my companion on the whole of my'journey, but for awhile I lost full sightoof him as I became enveloped in the dust-cloud of self pity and independence. It was only when I fell, or when I cried out in hurt or pain that my vision cleared enough to allQw me to see that others were just as fragile and beautiful as I, and I saw him in them. Friends tended to my wounds, making his,compassion so real. I continued on my journey, renewed in tasting the empathy that had been portioned out to me. It was when I came to what seemed like the end of my journey, at the crossroads, that my vision cleared in grace and I saw Jesus again. He was standing there right in front of me as though in a line at the bus depot. He was as dusty and worn down at the heels as I was. He had been journeying in the human condition, too. We looked deeply into each other's eyes, feeling recognition flood within as our eyes drank in the sight of the human condition. "I have come to do the will of him who sent me" (see Jn 6:35-40) we both said together, laughing and hugging 821 822./Review for Religious, ~'olume 39, 1980/6 each other as old friends do. Calvary lingered in my bones and memory. We had tasted each other's experience in dialogue often along the way before this. The look in our eyes now spoke more eloquently than words as we recalled our meetings on The Hill. I saw myself reflected in his eyes and came to understand how much he loved so many other fragile creatures like me--enough to die upon that Hill. Suddenly, I saw an endless procession of fragile creatures reflected in his eyes as once again I heard him say: "I have come to do the will of him who sent me. come follow me" (ibid.; Jn 1:43). All through my life I had worked to achieve something and here I was wrapped in the total surprise of being given unconditional love and the knowledge of its depth of meaning, of its desire for response. I felt rooted in time, yet weightless, as my mind and heart saw and felt the others who had responded to his call. I saw Jesus before me gesturing like a white-faced clown who beckons a crowd to come forward. He skipped around gleefully to show the.adventure with him that lay ahead. I felt life and death penetrate me, both at the same time. Self came to life and self died as I stepped forth, lifted by the urgency ofthat leap. I found myself transformed, a new clown among clowns, called to love the human condition. The clowns remind us, with a tear and a smile, that we share the same human weakness. Thus, it is not surprising that, in the:clown, we have a powerful image to help us under-stand the role of, the minister in contemporary society.' I had laughed and cried so often along the way, feeling the human condi-tion fired in my bones, but it was only my own condition that I had felt. I had seen others and so often moved on without feeling. In this leap away from myself I experienced the desire to share in, and feast in the human condition of my brother an~d sister clowns, the soon-to-be Clowns as well as the never-to-be clowns. Jesus had touched my fire-brighted stillness and unharnessed me. I no longer marched in my own parade~ My mind whirled in thoughtful excitement and new comprehension as I" found myself thinking of my Old Testament favorites, friends whose life stories had~ encouraged me to persevere along the way. I laughed when I thought of Abraham. In my own way I understood how he felt having been stirred by Yahweh (Gn 12:1). When Abraham was seventy-five years oid he had an experience 0f God that created a disturbance in the order of his life. Yahweh took possession of him as friend and placed within him the seed for upsetting the known order of the time. Abraham was headed toward a new foundation caused by the deliberate intervention of God into the course of human history. In response, Abraham abandoned his natural roots and "went" (Gn 12:14). Abraham was called to bring life to celebration in know-ing God's affirmation, and he allowed God to alter the course of his life ' Nouwen, Henri J. M., Clowning in Rome, New York, 1979, p. 2-3. Journey into Journey--A Reflection dramatically. His response brought biblical religion to birth. God moved across the existing culture, purified the existing religion and showed himself to be a personal, saving God. Abraham's story is a story of the trials and con-solations he experienced in his need to have faith in the God who called and stirred him. I think Abraham would have made a good clown. His faith touched me as I reflected on his journey into a new land. I, too, was journeying in a new land and realized that love had placed within me, also, the seed for upsetting my known order of time. Jesus had intervened in the course of my human history and created a disturbance in the order of my life with his call to follow him. He walked on my sand and seeded the field of me. He called me friend, beloved; and I felt his warmth. I was unbirthed, in labor to be born, wrapped in silent wonder, wrapped in warmth, encased, ensacked in womb-like nurturing, waiting to become more of who I am. I was born and aging, greying, daily dying, stepping slower, encased, ensacked in tomb-like mystery, waiting to become more ofwho I am. I was spiraling unborn to birth, spiraling birthed to dying, going both ways--to life, to death-- like the seed, dying to be alive. Quantum leap, broken shell, o rising beauty from out of clay, reaching upwards to the Son; I felt the warmth of him who enters and transforms in utter silence and mystery. His warmth pulled my roots down into the numerous sands of time. His warmth pulled my beauty up into the spiraling newness of his life. Ah, the wonder of it all. I was 894 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 nurturing the mystery of God in me, waiting for the moment to be more of who I am. I had journeyed into the human condition and found the footprints of those who had been there before me. I had cried out from my own slavery that held me deep within my selfishness. I had longed for a new freedom. My Lord, I ask you' to lure me once more and lead me out into the wilderness and speak to my heart. Give me back the vineyards of your love and make my troubled valley a gateway of hope. Show me how to respond to you as I did when I was young, as I did when I came out of the Egypt of sin and into the land of freedom in your love. When that day comes, teach me again how to call you "my husband" and no longer let me call you "distant Lord." Take the names of sin off my lips; let them never be uttered again. When that day comes make a treaty for me with all that is wild in me. Break up the battle in me and make my sleep secure. Betroth me to yourself forever, betroth me with integrity and justice, betroth me with tenderness and love. Betroth me to you with faithfulness so I may come to know you. (see Ho 2:16-22) The Lord put Moses before me for reflection. He marks a turning point in salvation history and is a promise, an expectation for the future (Dt 18:15). Moses' journey with God took him to.the edge of fulfillment. He was deprived of the joy of entering the Promised Land in this life. His glance across the Promised Land accepted ownership of it for his people and it climaxed his ministry to them. His glance thrust us forward as a people of God. Glances along my journey, glimpses of future freedoms thrust me forward, too, and helped form me along the way. My living-dying-living is an exodus event that I continue to celebrate in my covenant with God in grace. I had to learn, as did Moses and the Israelites, to live with confidence in God. God wished me, too, to be content with him. Though he provided much manna, he continued to call to a deeper surrender, to total reliance (Dt 8:2-3). Exodus became a present :reality in the celebration of Eucharist. My "daily bread experience" called me to come out of my self-will slavery into the freedom of surrendering my needs to my Provider. I began to learn to live Journey into Journey--A Reflection / ~125 without the securities and comforts that had been baals along the way. He gave to me in "miraculous measure" (see Ex 16:14-31, 17:6) to increase my faith in order to conquer temptations and survive the desert trials. I began to realize that my whole life was dependent upon his sovereign grace and prom-ise. I felt the trust formed within me asI came to a new life, became a truer person, nourished and brought into covenant. My gratitude and trust found expression in the celebration of the Eucharist and in the ways I began to live with others. His all-the-time presence which had cut into my life, became a deeper experience of presence. This "peak:' experience left its mark on me and continues to call me into wonder and celebration and into deeper exami-nation of the heart of my being. I found that I was interacting with the extra-ordinary love of God. Justice, equity and charity e.ntered a new depth within me. "The wages of a day laborer are to be paid before the day is over, before sundown of the day itself, since he is poor and looks forward to them" (Dt 24:15). This thought brought affirmation alive in me. To pay my brothers and sisters their due ,wages before the sun goes down, to affirm them for who they are, for what they do, was to help me to live in sacred truce with my God and with each one of them. Affirmation makes me lovable. God affirmed me by my creation, by my calling to be more along the journey. Affirmation enriched community liv-ing and spilled out over into liturgy where the heart of affirmation comes to a depth of appreciation around the table of the Lord. I had journeyed into the human condition and learned affirmation from God's presence to Abraham, to Moses in the desert, and with me in the desert night into which he had invited me. I realized that finally My self-will cocoon had worn thin. It had cracked. The long hours of darkness and death-like sleep were at an end. A new awaking had flashed through my being, and I felt the pulsation of new life in the deep recesses of my unknown self. I felt my weakness, fragileness, and the limited space this life permits; but I had come to know the unbounded space of time that my Creator has. I felt a flutter in my new wings, faith sustained and overcame the fear of being lifted by the gentle breeze that warmed my wings and lifted them to the sun and sky. There ffere flashes of color and shapes of hope I had never seen before. They surrounded me and formed a world of trust that enhanced the colors I, too, had been gifted with. Wings and color, 826 / Review for fleligious, Volume 39, 1980/6 warmth and sun, gentle .breeze and cracked cocoon, --a new world, a new pulsation of life, and surrender, amen, your will be done. . and I was born, and borne aloft to him on the wings of love. Silence, burst of sound. Darkness, flash of light. " Once entombed, now unwombed, made real. Made real and set free, set free in the desert castle of life, sparked by the Flame of Love, enveloped by the Cloud of the Spirit, held only by the Song of Mortalness and the time to sing it in joy. I was made real, with what was real gone. I no longer fit into the crevices of the past nor in the ways of yesterday. I couldn't speak to yesterday as once I did. I tried and laughter faded, while puzzles formed and pain stood up. Yesterday and I were no longer one, and I had to trust that wings and colors would speak for themselves, that pains would be salved by the Son for I could not fold my wings to return to the cocoon of yesterday. A new form of life was presented io me in my quantum leap; for it to remain effective I knew I had to relate to and affect the world where I lived. I had to examine what would guide and support, my internal strength during my period of adjustment~ I was. on journey with a definite purpose, to keep cove-nant with my beloved God. I knew my quantum leap was a "peak" moment to recall and bring to celebration. I knew that I had to celebrate.by living fully alive, deeply in tune and in harmony with the life that surrounded me. God had funneled me down through many generations of people and I had to live as an important part of the whole production of life. I realized that Jesus held the promise of life. He set me free from sin and death through the sorrow and joy of the cross. Faith and trust had to stay alive in me and come to external expression in the celebration of life. Jesus had drawn me close and changed the structure of my existence. I became aware of his wanting my total dependence, a dependence of love, a life of daily living- " dying-living in the internal martyrdom of the consuming fire of love. I felt like bread dough that had become leavened and I was rising to the proportion that Journey into Journey--A Reflection / 827 he had measured out for me. He asked only for love. His was the action which created laughter within me, a love that reflected itself in a deeper sense of peace and joy. I was given a new identity in living a deeper form of covenant love. I was being built and structured into a new expression of love that gentles, purifies and strengthens as it sets the soul aflame with the desire to serve and love in total unity of mind, heart, and will. Nothing seemed dif-ferent, yet everything was different, is different. There is a new beauty in the air, in the pulsation of life and in silence which is an alive silence filled with wonder. In the silence of wonder I found and. still find my attitudes under reform. My wildness is being consumed further. The cry of the poor wants to be heard; and Jesus asks for a compassionate friend to respond to the cry of pain, of loneliness, of suffering that is crying out from members of his bruised body. In my meeting with Jesus at the crossroads of my journey, in the quan-tum leap of faith, in exodus from self, Jesus had blessed me--blessed me as poor. He brought me to the beautiful awareness of the fragileness of the human condition we all share. In union with him in the blessed poverty of dependence I am learning to share his love-gift. His living word gives me courage and encouragement. I hear him say: You are poor, and I have need of your povertyr your dependence on Me, Blessed are ihe poor in spirit; the kingdom o'f heaven is theirs (Mr 5:3). Your Father, who sees all that is done in secret, will reward you (Mt 6:6). You are poor, and I have need of your poverty to fill the hungry with good things and to give dessert to the poorest poor who are filled even with the crumbs of things, and the little that the poor can share. You are poor. Come! I know the plans .I have in mind for you. Plans for you to seek me with all your heart (Jr 29:11-14), for you are poor with need to find me, with need to listen so to listen to the poor and the poorer-- with a heart's care. 828 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 You are poor. The Plan I have for you is poor, a foolish plan, a prophet's plan. ¯ Console my people, console them (Is 40:1). Go now to those to whom I send you. and say whatever I command you (Jr 1:7). Do not be afraid, for I am with you (Is 43:5). I have called you- pool', I will be with you--poor, passing through the sea.--poor, walking through fire~ poor, you are precious in my eyes--poor, you are honored--poor, and I love you--poor. Do not be afraid, for I am with you. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty for the poor are blessed in spirit, heaven is the kingdom that is theirs. It is the Father's given reward. You are poor . Come! I lead you with reins of kindness, With leading strings of love (Ho 11:4), for you are poor with need to be fed, with need to be led-- so to, lead, for it is only the led who become those who lead. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty; for the poor are blessed in spirit, heaven is the kingdom that is theirs. It is the Father's given rewhrd You are poor, and I have need of your poverty. Come! I shall feed you in good pasturage. Journey into Journey--A Reflection / 829 You will rest in good grazing ground. I will show you where to rest (Ezk 35:14-16) Come! Come to feed the rich who fatten on the spoils of greed. Come! Come to look with me for the lost one, the stray one, the wounded one. Come! Be a true shepherd to them. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty, for the poor spirit is blessed. Heaven is the kingdom, a reward given by the Father who sees. Who sees that you are poor. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty. I have need for your spirit to be poor, poor enough to be sustained only on manna, on quail, on water, from rock (Ex 16), poor enough to be sustained on providence, the sustenance of the poor. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty. Come! Show the anawim the manna for thb seventh day so they may gather and share what few omers they need (Ex 16:23). Bring forward the people tha~t is blind, yet has eyes, that is deaf and yet has ears (Is 43:~). They are poor and in need of your poverty. Your poverty-- my song, piped through a bruised reed of foolish clay. Come! Sing a new hymn! Let praise resound from the ends of the earth, Let the sea sing praise, 830 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 Let the deserts and the cities raise voice! (Is 42:10-11). Your poverty--my song, piped through a bruised reed of foolish clay. Come! Come to the water, thirsty as you are; and though you have no money, come! I make no charge for corn, for wine, for milk. I make no charge for satisfying bread (Is 55:1-3). Come! Give your attention, listen! I know theplans I have in mindforyou (Jr 29:1 l). Come! Come to covenant (Is 55:4). you are poor. Your poverty--my song. My words do not return to me empty. They water the earth. They give growth and seed (Is 55). --seed for the poor. Your poverty--my song. You are poor, and I have need of your poverty, for the poor spirit is blessed. Heaven is the kingdom, a reward given by the Father, who sees . . and he took pity on them. (Mk 6:34). He took the five loaves and the two fish. (v. 41). They all ate., and (v. 42) They collected the scraps remaining, twelve baskets full (Mt 14:20). Come! You are poor, and I have need of your poverty. In grace and love I respond: Let what you have said be done to me (Lk 1:38). I am poor, ° and I have need of your song. Journey into Journey--A Reflection / 831 It took many years to form Israel as a people:. It takes us years to be formed as his beloved. We each experience our own Exodus, Covenant, Tran-sition, and Celebration through many times of stepping but of chronolo.gical time into kyriological moments. So, come! I was tired, as though ~at the end of a long journey. Long it had been, for 1 had journeyed into the human condition to find that the next stage of the journey was just beginning. I have joyfully met you along the way. Come! O God, in mercy bless us; let your face beam with joy as you look down on us. Send us around the world with the news of your saving power and your eternal plan for all people. How everyone throughout the earth will praise you! (Ps 67:1-3, adapted The Way). An Apostolic Spirituality for the Ministry of Social Justice by Max Oliva, S.J. Price: $.50 per copy, plus postage. Address: Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Developmental Stages and the Contemporary Male Novice Jonathan Foster, O.F.M. Father Jonathan is Director of Continuing Education for the Chicago-St. Louis Province of Franciscans. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Adult Education and Develop-ment. His present address is Office of Continuing Education; 3400 St. Paschal Drive; Oak Brook, IL 60521. Writing an article such as this is a precarious business. The study of adult development stages is of fairly recent origin in the empirical sciences. There is some very interesting theory (Erikson, 1963, 1964; Kohlberg, 1968; Levinson, 1978; Fowler, 1978; Vaiilant, 1977), but not an abundance of evidence. Moreover, what theory and evidence exist leave us with no clearcut delimita-tion of such stages. One prominent developmentalist (Neugarten) has in fact stated that all we know is that there is some development in adults. Its precise staging is by no means widely accepted. An article such as this is also precarious because of the subject of interest: novices. They comprise no one adult developmental stage. In recent years in my own community, the age range has run from twenty-two to fifty. To treat them all as "young adults" is obviously to allow some of them to fall through the cracks, or, if you will, off the end. Nevertheless, I will attempt to make some sense out of the evidence we have to date, and apply this to a reasonable estimate of what a novice is. I take the age of a typical novice from our Vocation Center's projection of the next few classes currently in pre-novitiate programs for our province. According to this projection, the age of most novices in the immediate future will fall between twenty-two and twenty-eight. There will certainly be a few older than this. But it is not likely, in view. of current policies, that there will be any younger. The observations I will make here will concern the generality of 832 Developmental Stages / 883 young American adults, from whose company we can assume most novices come. According to Levinson (1978), the essential task of the young adult is to separate himself .from emotional dependence on his family and the social structure from which he comes-- not thesame, it should be noted, as destroy-ing his roots. He does this by exploring different possibilities for making his life and creating a stable life structure in which to live out whatever this separation has led him to. Both elements, exploration and stabilization, need equal attention during this period. In one way or another, ehch of the stages we shall look at attempt to deal with this dynamic. The Developmental Task: Identity and Dream Formation I am treating these two stages as one because of their intimate connection with each other. By identity I mean the ability of the individual to see himself as essentially the same person as he passes through the many, even profound, changes of his life. The first great change in a person's life is the traumatic passage from adolescence to adulthood with all the separation and newness it brings with it. The achievement of identity is not so much the search for something new and frustratingly elusive as it is the maintenance and building of a "unique and reasonably coherent whole".(Erikson, 1968), something that holds together and remains ultimately the same despite the shock of change, and the addition of the new. In other words, "identity" is not exclu-sively drawn from within. It is built on a given reality growing out of the experience of community, persons, the historical times, and especially at this age, out of ideology. Ideology is a vision according to which the individual wants to live. Identity in this ideological sense moves into dream formation, a concep-tion of life that the individual picks oi~t as most suitable to his personality. Identity is thus not a mere summation of all experiences a young man has. It is the process by which he tries to integrate what he already knows about himself with elements of experience that seem to promise him a vision and purpose by which he can live and give meaning to life. In this process he must perceive himself as at core unchanged. The question he must answer at this stage of life is simply, "Do I fit with this dream?" Several elements go into the achieving of this identity. One of the principal catalysts is the attraction of a strong ideological system, such as, for example, the Franciscan way of life. This is the "dream." It may stem from a purely ideological contact with St. Francis. But it does not become a real and viable dream until it is experienced in a vital institutional reality, and in attractive personalities living it out. In accepting and trying out the "lived dream," it is especially important that there be at least one special person who embodies that dream, and inter-prets it to the new aspirant in a way that has personal significance to him. This 834 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 is the mentor so often spoken of today. He is not typically a hcro at a distance--though this is possible--but, in our context, a committed religious who shares the younger religious' visionandwho pays special attention to the latter's apprenticeship in that vision. The first reality is probab!y of more significance to older communities with well-known and charismatic founders. We find it particularly so in the Franciscan order, whose founder is one of the most popular and attractive men in history. The problem is this, that today, to a far greater extent than in earlier years, young men are attracted to the Franciscan order precisely by the dream, with relatively less experience of those who profess to embody it. Up to fifteen years ago, most aspirants came to the order out 6f heavily Franciscan contexts, attracted, not by the historical vision of St. Francis--of which they had but a dim view--but by the actual way in which Franciscan priests and brothers lived their own vision of religious life, or by a traditional piety which was, upon close examination, barely distinguishable from that of any other religious order. The dream that attracts candidates today, however, is more often.in touch with the historical view. Candidates thus are more likely to be confused and puzzled by their encounter with many friars who entered the order out of con-tact with Franciscans, not St. Francis, and who may seem, therefore, to the candidate to have rationalized the historical "dream" away. It creates in him, moreover, great insecurities that perhaps his vision is not a real one, or that "those who count" may not view his "dream" as an acceptable version of the Franciscan vision. It is for this reason, once more, that the mentor is extremely important to the young religious, to reassure him--perhaps even to play the advocate before "those who count." In this connection, it seems desirable that the place where novices live should not feature a uniform view of the particular order's "dream." Both staff and community should display some diversity in interpretation of that "dream." Thus both mentor and community can at once challenge and support the candidate's perception of the "dream." Another identity-related problem with this age-group is the prolongation of the moratorium (Erikson, 1963). This is a period of life, usually beginning with adolescence and lasting an indeterminate period (often well into the mid-twenties), in which an individual, committed to nothing, explores and plays with a variety of possibilities or dreams. This is an entirely legitimate develop-ment, perhaps one that many of us never fully undertook. Ideally, it ought to be completed by the time of entry into novitiate, but in today's society, which increasingly delays adulthood, it is not at all unlikely that a candidate will try novitiate with the same degree of uncommittedness as he might hax~e tried being a cowboy in the nineteenth century. Novitiate, it seems, implies some degree of commitment to the dream, and"should not be 'viewed as a moratorium experience. A third problem is that young adults at the "identity-dream formation" Developmental Stages / 835 stage are given to caricaturization. In an attempt to make the dream fit, and fit so securely as to cover all aspects of the aspirant's reality, he tends to see it in terms of black and white. Consequently, he tends to portray his chosen dream somewhat unrealistically, and even to be intolerant of other dreams. The attraction of young people to an oversimplified view of life and reality is well known, and applies just as much to novices in religious orders. Kohibert (1968) and Fowler (1978) have both pointed out that people at this stage of development make moral and religious judgments primarily in terms of their commitment to a particular group of people or an institution which they see as embodying their dream. This is distinct from making judgments in terms of abstract principles applicable to one~'.s own group as well as others. Such a development is perhaps natural and necessary. However, the activity of an overzealous or overly charismatic director--or indeed mentor--can play directly into this .,caricaturizing tendency and allow it to sharpen into a dangerously unrealistic view of life. A further problem is that powerful religious conversions sometimes occur at this stage. Individuals allow themselves to be so overwhelmed by a vision or dream .that they cease to see continuity between what they were before the conversion and what they see themselves to have become because of the conversion. Indeed often they do not want to see the continuity. Such conver-sions, apart from rare cases, are obviously disruptive to the developmental process of identity formation. Of some interest to directors of a novitiate, which, ambng other things, is a time of an intense and unremitting daily round of organized prayer, is the attitude of young adults towards organized religiosity. It is in the latter phases of identity formation that participation in formal religious practice is typically at its very lowest ebb. This usually reflects the individual's attempt to separate himself from dependence on his family and culture, including the religious structure bound up with that. The fact is that it is precisely in the novitiate year that aspiring religious are subjected to the most intense exposure to formal religiosity they will perhaps ever know, and this may rub a bit excessively against the developmental grain. Some caution must be urged, too, concerning the possibilities of contem-plation at this stage. True religious contemplation--by means of which the individual, while retaining his identity, is drawn out of himself into union with God--is objectively oriented. It assumes some stable sense of identity. It is for this reason that religious contemplation is not normally found in young adults and most often flourishes in the more contented self-acceptance of mature adulthood. What passes for contemplation among the young is more typically a preoccupation with the achieving of identity than the handing over of this identity into union with God. The young adult is by developmental necessity more self-centered, indeed self-absorbed, than other-centered. Novitiate directors need to keep this in mind when inculcating habits of prayer and contemplation. To speak of the novitiate as a "year of contemplation" 8:36 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 can be misleading, and even, in terms of what both novices and their directors expect to happen, damaging. The Developmental Task: Intimacy Intimacy is basically the task of learning to establish close relationships with others, to respect human beings as ends, not mere means, of learning to communicate. It is a form of love, and it is the love that characterizes persons at this age. Erikson (1964) distinguishes this love of Relationship from the love of Care that is characteristic of the more mature adult. The task of intimacy may be described as one of the major tests of a person's identity. If this identity is'securely in hand, then one is capable of risking it in relationship, and indeed must do so. If the identity is not secure, intimacy is more difficult to achieve and is often avoided or at least sim~ated. Most young people, however, make serious forays into intimate or quasi-intimate relationships at this stage. Intimacy is indeed the task that marriage at this age seeks to accomplish. The relationship is not, however, exclusively heterosexual, although this is the typical form it takes. Erikson (1964), in a phrase reminiscent of St. Francis of Assisi who urged his brothers to exercise a mother's love for their confreres, wrote that intimacy also happens when "young adults become sons of each other." The failure to achieve intimacy results to some degree or other in isolation, the inability to relate deeply. A number of structures will be important in a novitiate to enable the process of intimacy achievement to go forward. Obviously, there must be opportunities for the development of friendships, including friendships with women. Some friendship will be available within the community, but since friendship-making is highly selective, this may not always be the case. With the smaller novitiate classes prevalent today, making intimate friendships has become more difficult. Larger classes make such relationships more possible. Smaller numbers limit the possibility. Given these smaller numbers, the importance of locating the novitiate in a community which includes a substan: tial number of other religious seems important. For this reason, close friend-ships outside the novitiate community cannot be excluded either. Hence the advisability of allowing, indeed encouraging, other forms of maintaining friendship contact: visits, correspondence, telephones. The mentor is very important to this task. The mentor-relationship is an intimate one when it is exercised in spiritual direction, confession, or simple friendship. There is indeed a case to be made (Levinson, 1978) for the "Special Woman" as mentor to the young male adult. In this relationship, intimacy expands easily into a heterosexuality which is less threatening to the celibacy aspect of the dream. A lived brotherhood is important for the young adult. Not only does it increase the likelihood of selective friendship, but failing this, still allows for a considerable amount of sharing at a deeper level. In this respect, the current emphasis in most orders on brotherhood or community is an especially attrac- Developmental Stages / 837 tive aspect of/he dream for young men. The achievement of intimacy in an all-male structure presents special problems. Women, in such situations, tend to get caricaturized. They may be over-romanticized as indispensable partners in the life-journey. They may be feared as a threat to the dream. Or they may be ridiculed as a result of a cultural residue of male chauvinism, a position unfortunately supported by a large segment of the male ecclesiastical establishment. Hence, it is important that novices have an on-going encounter with women their own age, such as for example the inter-novitiate program in the Chicago area where novices from several different communities of men and women meet weekly for study, prayer and informal interaction. However, it is also interesting to note that, even in the larger world, many men get so caught up in their dream, or their career, that women do not romantically interest them at this stage. This may very well describe the situa-tion of the modern novice, as we shall note when we discuss career consolida-tion below. What frequently happens, however, is that once they reach the thirties, some of that pressure lifts, and the quest for intimacy with women starts anew, including a deep interest in marriage. Homosexuality is a form of intimacy, and is, of course, always a problem in the all-male society. This is more true today when there has been some social legitimation of the homosexual friendship. There is simply no way of avoiding this possibility, and directors should understand that an occasional homosexual encounter neither automatically implies homosexuality nor is necessarily grounds for expulsion. Finally, the concern for intimacy explains in part the young religious' preference for one-to-one ministries over the ministries involving administra-tion, leadership and social change. It is the need for people in his life. Developmental Stage: Career Consolidation Vaillant (1977) points out that an intermediary stage occurs between Erikson's stages of Intimacy and Generativity, one that Erikson did not fully consider. This is the stage at which the young adult becomes preoccupied with establishing work skills and climbing the career ladder. It begins in the twen-ties, and lasts usually throughout most of the thirties. What is important about this period is the mastery of a craft, the seeking of approval for one's work and achievements, the thrust of ambition, the excitement of developing a career, the sheer pleasure of work and success. It is a time when the vividness of the dream recedes, and the individual focuses rather on the work associated with the dream. The role of the mentor also declines. Thus, what guides the young adult at this stage is neither parent, mentor, nor even dream. It is the satisfaction of the work itself. What happens at this stage may very well be the triumph of the larger society's "Dream" in the individual, the American Dream of Success and Achievement. Certain it is that American society strongly rewards work, achievement and success. It is not surprising that the 838 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 career-consolidation stage is accompanied to a large extent by the decline of the intense inner life that characterized the stages of Dream Formation and Intimacy. Given the increasing number of older candidates entering religious life, especially those already committed to or having just finished intensive preparation for professional careers, it is important that directors be aware of this dynamism. To the extent that this development stage is at work, the novice must have opportunities to exercise his competence, not, perhaps, in his chosen career, but at least in some area of novitiate life. This means that he shall have to be given some area of responsibility that is more than sweeping a corridor~ He must, moreover, be constantly able to exercise at least the basic tools of all work-competence: the hands, the mind, the imagination," and judgment-making that has consequences. The larger question may be to what extent this professional training and competence already acquired may have on the novitiate experience. Such training and competence may have achieved apart from the dream formation which the novitiate agenda is all about. It may even be somewhat separate from-- even in conflict with -- that dream. Yet it usual-ly has brought continued rewards and satisfaction so necessary at this stage of life. It is not clear to me how a novitiate experience handles such a conflict. But for a novitiate director to simply ignore this previous experience does not seem to me to constitute a reasonable response. These, then, are the stages of development likely to be encountered in a given novitiate class. Because of their fluidity and because of the individuality with which each person passes through them, they are perhaps useful more as mind-sets by the director than as the basis for actual guidelines. Three recom-mendations emerge strongly from their consideration, however. The first is the necessity to view a novitiate as a highly individualized experience. Not a solitary experience, but one which a group of young men move through together, each following to whatever extent necessary his own individual track. Obviously, Group Spiritual Direction is no substitute for individual attention. Which leads to the second recommendation, the need for mentors. Whether this role is carried out by the director, his associate, a chosen spiritual director, or another member of the religious community, its impor-tance is critical. Finally, given the social context of Identity/Dream Forma-tion and Intimacy, it seems important that the novitiate be not a sequestered experience. A director and his novices should not go off to the woods by themselves for a year. They should live in an extensive friar community and they should be in regular, on-going contact with the community-dream-- manifested certainly in its documents, but even more so by regular in-depth contact with the people who incarnate that dream in their lives. Yes Peter G. van Breemen, S.J. Father van Breemen is a staff member of the newly erected Dutch Center of Spirituality Om Vuur; Twelloseweg 5; 7419 BJ Deventer, The Netherlands. This article is a chapter from his forthcoming book, Certain as the Dawn, scheduled for publication by Dimension Books (Denville, N J) in the fall of 1980. doration always implies surrender, a fiat. In fact adoration is a surrender of our whole being, a dedication of all our affection, a gift of every minute of our time. Adoration has to be lived; it commands a life-style. Since adoration is the ultimate, it includes everythir~g. Adoration is a Yes, expressed with or without words during prayer, but then lived every single moment of the day and of the night. Being the ultimate, adoration also provides perspective to all that precedes; the total Yes injects meaning into everything that is encom-passed by it. Three concise lines which Dag HammarskjOld wrote in his diary in March 1956, some five years before his tragic death, offer a framework for a meditafibn on Yes. You dare your Yes--and experience a meaning. You repeat your Yes--and all things acquire a meaning. When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a Yes!~ You Dare Your Yesmand Experience a Meaning "Yes" is a daring word: it implies arisk and requires courage. It means a leaving behind in order to move ahead. We leave behind what is certain and we ventureinto the unknown. We give up what has become dear and proceed as a ' Dag HammarskjOld, Markings, transl, by Leif SjOberg and W. H. Auden (London, Faber & Faber), p. 110. 839 840 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 free person without looking back. "None of you can be my disciple if he does not renounce all his possessions (Lk 14:33). "Whoever puts his hand to the plow but keeps looking back is unfit for the reign of God" (Lk 9:62). It can be very hard to really say good-bye. A famous French proverb claims it is mourir un peu, a little, dying. It means farewell to people and to things to which we are far more attached than we realized. We give to the people with whom we live and we take from them. Somehow we are more aware of the sacrificing during the actual process, while the receiving becomes more manifest after it has stopped. It is like the various organs of the body which we easily take for granted as long as they function well, whereas we learn to appre.ciate them most when ill. It is only in the concrete leaving that we find out how dependent we are on the things we have collected during the years, how we have become entangled in the small world of our hands, our minds, our hearts. We have developed our own ways of enjoying and asserting ourselves in that small world, even to the point of imposing it on others. We have learned to manage in it. To leave means to cut the ego. That is one reason why we shrink from giving up the past. Being human is essentially living in an exodus-situation. Leaving is part of life. We have to ready ourselves in many .minor rehearsals for the final farewell which is the only absolute certainty of everybody's life. Apart from God, everything in life is transitory: everything biological, social, political, intellectual, etc. The refusal to accept this passing quality of life causes stunted growth, induration, and in extreme cases, neurosis. The early Chris-tians sometimes called their faith "The Way." God is always greater; he keeps us continually on the move. "Here we have no lasting city; we are seeking one which is to come" (Heb 13:14). Jesus stressed that the kingdom of God re-quires the Gift of self: "Whoever would save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Mt 16:25). The giving up of oneself in this life is not done once and for all; it is an ever-growing gift of self and demands an increasing willingness to sacrifice. To leave people and things behind does not mark the end; rather it opens up a new beginning in a wider context. The severing of the umbilical cord introduces the baby into the family; the leaving of the family's security challenges the adolescent to venture into a big world; the renouncing which Jesus demands leads us into the kingdom of God. The pruning is for increas-ing the yield. The Father is glorified in our bearing much fruit. It is not the stripped, stifled, petty life that honors him, but the life which surges to the full. Jesus leads the way. This man-for-others appeals. The reflection of his intimacy with his Father intrigues and invites us. He calls us to follow. We do not know where his way will lead us, but we do have an intuition that it will transform us for the better. If our hearts are cluttered with houses or land, relatives or friends, job or hobby, he is going to set us free so that we can go forward. All that remains will be love--serving God and serving people. The Yes is particularly scary because it is so personal. It affects the deepest 841 in me, where I am most myself. There exists no mold for it. It is my yes, such as no one before me has ever said and in which no one can really accompany me. The Yes condenses my whole self. I have 'to descend into the depths of my self in order to perform the act of my life. The person who wants always to be upheld by others could never go that far. Yet in saying Yes, there is a solidarity with others which gives strength and inspiration. The community of all those who spoke their Yes gives us support. Outstanding is the help of Mary who is an immaculate Yes, a simple fiat. Above all, her Son in his absolutely unambiguous and unrestricted Yes, enables us to dare our Yes: "Jesus Christ. was not alternately 'yes' and 'no'; he was never anything but 'yes.' Whatever promises God had made have been fulfilled in him; therefore it is through him that we address our Amen to God." (2 Co 1:19-20). Nevertheless it remains an adventure to follow Jesus in his Yes. It entails giving up tangible security and the felt affirmation by others. It is an act of faith. "Yes" is a word of freedom; to be authentic it can never be forced. Ultimately it can be said only to a person, not to a thing or an institution. The German author Giinther Grass once wrote an enigmatic little "poem" to which he gave the title "Yes." This house has two exits; I use the third one. Between Anne and Anne, I choose for Anne. The interpretation is said2 to be that both exits of the house lead into meaning-lessness which G~nther Grass rejects. The third exit is not something but someone: Anne. Between Anne the saint and Anne the sinner, between Anne the beautiful and Anne the unattractive, the poet chooses the actual Anne, and through her finds life meaningful. His yes to the real Anne saves him from the existentialist void. Grass' poetic riddle rhymes well with HammarskjOld's clear entry: "You dare your Yes--and experience a meaning." Meaning implies more than an intellectual conviction; it comprehends the whole of life. True meaning is beyond success or failure. The Way leads to the wisdom of the cross; this is a disaster which is a triumph, and a victory which is a catastrophe. The paschal mystery unites the horror of the crucifixion and the glory of the resurrection. The folly of the cross reveals the ultimate mean-ing. The following of Jesus leads beyond the antithesis of humiliation and elevation. The Way leads into a new realm of life where old values acquire a new perspective and where what used to be considered meaningless shows an unexpected significance. Therefore it provides a tremendous strength for making sacrifices. As long as we count the cost, seek our own comfort, fight for our position or strive for recognition we have not yet said a whole-hearted gsef Sudbrack, S.J., in Geist und Leben 48, October 1974, pp. 346-347. 842 / Review for Religious, Volume 39, 1980/6 Yes nor experienced the true meaning of life. You Repeat~Your Yes--and All Things Acquire a Meaning It is not enough to say Yes just once, It has to,be repeated over and over again. We have to set out on a way and we have to carry on step by step. Our Yes is a growing reality; the further we go, the deeper and richer its content. The resistance, of course, is always there. We do not want to reiterate it in ever new circumstances. We find ourselves, like Jacob, resisting the angel of Yahweh (Gn 32:23~33). During the night Jacob crosses the ford of the Jabbok and untildaybreak he wrestles with aman whom he does not know is a divine messenger. At the end of his fight he asks for the stranger's blessing. He then receives a new name, Israel, meaning "you contehded with divine beings." In his struggle against God he becomes injured and keeps on limping. It is a strange, but .typical story. How difficult to recognize God in his numerous disguises. How easy to consider him a threat to be fought. How often is our encounter with God, before it becomes a bow to receive his blessing, first a long, dark ~resistance. How much harm do we inflict on ourselves in that opposition. Every refusal to repeat our Yes does harm to our personality; it stifles our growth, eats out our joy and reduces the meaningfulness of our life. What follows are self-concern, grudges, resentment, compensations, addic-tions of all kinds, polarization which we stretch too far, fencing in against other people. The half-hearted Yes creates impaired persons, very much unlike the kind God wants us to be. "I know your deeds; I know you are neither hot nor cold. How I wish you were one or the other--hot or cold! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth!" (Rv 3:15-16). The Yes has to be repeated so often that it includes everything in the past, in the present and in the future. As long as there is something in my past which I reject, there is still a screen in me that pr~events my being transparent. That which I repress or resent splits my inner self, or becomes a heavy chain I drag along behind me. It may take time to really accept the suffering or the failure that came to me, maybe long ago, but it is vital that I do accept it. The Yes can create a meaning where first there was none. The repeated Yes will become more mature, more profound, more silent, and eventually it will extract light from the dark, radiance from, the cross. "We know that God makes all things work together for the good of those who have been called according to his decree" (Rm 8:28). To say Yes is to accept the present. It means to acknowledge gratefully the talents and the possibilities I have without thinking that all of them have to be realized. It means to accept my limitations in health, education, character, etc., while at thesame time trying to overcome them. It means to transform gently weaknesses into strength, innate temptations into grace, given potential into a ripe harvest. It means to say Yes to the lives of others and to give them the room and the sympathy they need. It means to accept the situation I am in, Yes / 843 and myself in that situation. To repeat my Yes will lead to self-acceptance which in turn, will make everything else meaningful. It is obvious of course, that the Yes is not identical with a limp settling for anything, neglecting all attempts to improve things. The opposite is true: it is only by accepting them that things can be improved. No effort born of anger, impatience or resentment will bear fruit. An example may illustrate this point. Suppose the parents of a stuttering boy have great difficulty in accepting /he child's handicap. Whenever he stammers, they harshly make him repeat his words. One evening the parents discuss the situation. They both had noticed that the stuttering was becoming worse and they begin to see that the pressure they put on the boy may have something to do with it. So they decid~ to make no more remarks when the child stammers. Both father and mother manage to live up to their resolution, and yet they find that the speech handi-cap is becoming still worse. After some time, they talk things over once more and discover that, in their first discussion, they had changed only their policy, their external approach, but not their interior attitude. They had stopped scolding all right, but they still resented the stuttering. The boy was no longer being reprimanded, but he still felt the pressure of disappointing his parents. At this :pOint the parents break through to a new mentality and accept the boy as he is, with his stuttering. The paradox is that from now onward, the child can slowly improve in his speech because he no longer has to. This is a real paradox: as long as the parents resentfully demanded it, progress was blocked; after thedefect is accepted in peace, it begins to improve. In some cases we are simultaneously both the parents and the boy! The Yes to the future is a stark act of faith since we do not know what ~ve are saying Yes to. It is only the confidence in a person that enables us to say Yes for better or for worse. In the wedding it is the trust in the spouse, together ¯ with our faith in God that allows us to engage in a common future and to accept whatever it has in store. In ordination and in religious profession it is--over and above the reliance on the community--the belief in the living God that constitutes the basis for commitment. Without a strong spirit of faith, it would be utter foolishness to promise solemnly and forever poverty, chastity, and obedience. In fact the beauty and the testimony of the vows con-sists precisely in their being so explicitly an act of faith. When Everything Has a Meaning, How Can You Live Anything But a Yes! The faithful repetition of our Yes eventually leads us to the watershed where life starts flowing in another direction. The uphill climb pays off in a panoramic perspective and gracious ease to live the Yes continuously. The pilgrim has become single-hearted and now sees God everywhere. The purity of his eye penetrates to the deepest Ground of everything and discerns all as grace-filled and meaningful. This in turn reinforces the Yes. Life has become whole and holy. Meaninglessness implies that the various life-experiences are disconnected 844 / Review for Religious, l/olume 39, 1980/6 and therefore disconcerting. It just does not make sense! They present a void which creates feelings of despair. They paralyze all efforts to do something about it because they suggest that it is all useless anyway. Suicide becomes an alluring temptation. In the realm beyond the watershed the isolated pieces fall into place and show a pattern never perceived before. Perhaps it is more accu-rate to say that the change takes place not so much in the objective reality as in our view of it. We have finally reached the vantage point where we have the right perspective. The total Yes has rendered all reality transparent and coherent. We feel like Jacob awakening from his dream at Bethel: "Truly, the Lord is in this spot, although I did not know it!" (Gn 28:16). A deep joy a~ccompanies this experience. It is like coming home after a long, hopeless meander. That home is really the presence of God. We now recognize him everywhere, even where previously we had discerned nothing whatsoever of him. He is the bond that connects all. It is the old concept of divine providence which we rediscover in shining newness. Meaningfulness then, is not some-thing, but someone. God has nothing since he is the creator of all. He does not produce something which he then delivers. He remains the living center of all that is; without him, it could not be. In everything he gives, he gives himself as well; therefore he can be found in everything. It is ohly in recognizing God this way that reality acquires its full meaning, is allowed to be all that it is meant to be. The basic trust which is so vital for human well-being now extends to all of reality. "Nothing can separate us from the love of God." (Rm 8:39). The surrender can now be complete. How can we live anything but a Yes? We can join in with Charles de Foucauld in his prayer of abandonment: Father. I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, 1 thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures-- I wish no more than this, 0 Lord. Into your hands l commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for ! love you Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my father. Others, to art.iculate their gift of self, may prefer the older prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola at the end of his Spiritual Exercises: Take, Lord, all my liberty. Receive my memory, my understanding, my whole will, Yes / 845 all that I have and possess. You have given all to me; I return it all to you. Do with me as you will; Give me only your love and your grace. with these I am rich enough and ! desire nothing more. In Luke's Gospel we find an expression of total abandonment that is still much older and took only one word:fiat. With it Mary chooses obedience as the pattern of her life, "Let it be done to me as you say" (Lk 1:38); through it she surrenders her body to God, and all her possessions are also included in this one act of abandonment. Said in a moment, it is spelled out in a lifetime. As a sheaf is bound in the middle and fans out towards the ends, so the life of Mary, in all its bounty, is held together by this little word. All her years before this moment flow into it and all the rest of her life flows from it. God's grace enables her to say it, and in saying it, she enables God's grace to work in her. It directs her whole beirig towards God and away from selfishness and self-concern. It makes her completely transparent so that through her the Light in its fullness can come into the world. It creates the room God needs to become man. Jesus is the embodiment of. Mary's Yes, the fruit of her fiat; greater fruitfulness is inconceivable. Her fiat in no way stymies her personality; in fact, it brings her utter fulfillment and is the prototype of all Christian fruit-fulness. We come to you, Mother of our Lord and Mother of us all, to thank you for your Yes that gave us the incarnation of God's own Yes and brought life to its fullness. We ask you, teach us to follow you in saying our Yes with faith and courage. You know the cost of living the Yes; protect ours in integrity and joy. Ask your divine Son for the grace always to repeat our Yes with an ever-growing surrender and to experience how this increases the meaningfulness of our life. Under your inspiration may we help to build the kingdom of God today and every day, for ever and ever. Amen. The Social Context of Personal Prayer in Seminaries Stephen Happel Father Happel is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at St. Meinrad Seminary; St. Meinrad, IN 47577. This article is based on an earlier paper originally published in Learning to Pray Alone (Abbey Press), pp. 34-43. Private prayer is never accomplished without a social, communal context. Individual prayer has not only social conditions and social ramifications, but also social ingredients which quaiify and constitute its very nature. Our private languages are learned in the public forum. We speak to ourselves because others have spoken to us and because we have learned to speak to them. So too with God. Both the personal vocabulary and private grammar of our speech with God are primarily social-ecclesial in their initial stages (whether learned from parents or teachers), in their performance from day to day, and in their various results (ministering to others, praying with others, allowing the kingdom to be formed). If one combines this sense of the social dimension, indeed social constitu-tion, of prayer with its fundamental component, dialogue with the Other, then that Other will almost necessarily have the characteristics of the "social other" experienced at any given point in human development. So, for exam-ple, in one's earlier years, speaking with God is accomplished in the horizon of the discipline and "otherness" of one's parents. Religious psychologists maintain that it is possible atany given point in an individual's life to indicate the creative synthesis of parental figures which qualifies the notion of God.' Thus, I will maintain in the following that "the other" in the seminary context ' See A. Vergote, Psychologie religieuse (Brussels: Dessart, 1966), esp. pp. 294-299, 307. The Social Context of Personal Prayer / 847 will radically qualify the ability or inability of individuals to pray alone. How is "the other" experienced in the seminary environment? Needless to say, the reflections offered here should not be taken so much as judgment, but as description. It may be true that the achievement of human freedom in relation to God is the goal of seminary education programs; but what sort of inter-active freedom does seminary structure actt~ally provide? The typological description of institutional structure which follows is not so much an analysis of any particular seminary as it is the affective grid of the institution-known-as- seminary. I offer it as an hypothesis about the problem, and suggest that facing it constructively may assist in achieving a solution to the problem of praying privately.2 The Perfect Society: A Unity of Transcendentals The seminary, whatever its historical origins, seems to think of itself as an autonomous, indeed "perfect society." In an updated version of this ideal, it would be described as a place in which all would be brothers and sisters; in which power would intelligently persuade and invite to participation rather than willfully force; in which external forms of .religious expression would always mirror interior dispositions; and in which each person's relation to sur-rounding Nature would be in terms of appreciating and creating Beauty, rather than exploiting it. Affect and reason would be coincident; and the Good would necessarily flow from and be the origin of both. The truth would always be told; the good would always be practiced; and the beautiful would be in evidence everywhere. Institutional structure would incarnate and measure this integration; individuals would readily learn to assume the responsibility of living these goal,s; and, as St. Paul says, God would be "all in all." This enlightened reincarnation of Christian society, however, contains two major oversights of fact: namely, the overwhelmingly transient character of a seminary's student population, and what has been gracefully entitled by a colleague of mine "human sloth." These may be described in more classical terms as "the finite character of the human condition," and "original sin." Now the inclusion of these two facts of human experience into our descrip-tion of societal mix does not justify removing the human odcasion for achiev-ing freedom. I do not subscribe to the simplification which would suggest: "Mistakes will be made; therefore remove the possibility of mistakes." But their inclusion does allow us to see what happens when it is assumed that an institution can easily incarnate the human good without reference to the criticism required by the acknowledgement of finitude and guilt. The first consequence of these two facts is that power will inevitably fall to 2 1 am also convinced that some of the problems discussed and the solutions proposed, if utilized, would go a long way in aiding contemporary Catholic seminaries in their task of acculturating the older students who are entering seminary at present. 848 / Review for Religious, l/olume 39, 1980/6 those who remain the longest in the situation, in this case to the faculty and administration. The second is that this power will be concretized in a bureaucracy which is supposed to "run the system" irrespective of the iden-tities of the participants. Students, faculty, staff, and administration will all feel victims of "the other" who is the system (confer the,response to ques-tions: "That's the way it's done around here," noting especially the neuter passive construction). But because students are the primary mobile popula-tion, they will feel the alienation of power

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

Letter From The Representatives Of France, Kuwait, The Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Sweden, The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland And The United States Of America To The United Nations Addressed To The President Of The Security Council ; United Nations S/PV.8217 Security Council Seventy-third year 8217th meeting Tuesday, 27 March 2018, 11.10 a.m. New York Provisional President: Mr. Blok . (Netherlands) Members: Bolivia (Plurinational State of). . Mr. Inchauste Jordán China. . Mr. Wu Haitao Côte d'Ivoire. . Mr. Dah Equatorial Guinea. . Mr. Ndong Mba Ethiopia. . Mr. Alemu France. . Mr. Delattre Kazakhstan. . Mr. Umarov Kuwait. . Mr. Alotaibi Peru. . Mr. Meza-Cuadra Poland. . Ms. Wronecka Russian Federation. . Mr. Nebenzia Sweden . Mr. Orrenius Skau United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . Ms. Pierce United States of America. . Mrs. Haley Agenda The situation in the Middle East Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017) (S/2018/243) This record contains the text of speeches delivered in English and of the translation of speeches delivered in other languages. The final text will be printed in the Official Records of the Security Council. Corrections should be submitted to the original languages only. They should be incorporated in a copy of the record and sent under the signature of a member of the delegation concerned to the Chief of the Verbatim Reporting Service, room U-0506 (verbatimrecords@un.org). Corrected records will be reissued electronically on the Official Document System of the United Nations (http://documents.un.org). 18-08569 (E) *1808569* S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 2/21 18-08569 The meeting was called to order at 11.10 a.m. Adoption of the agenda The agenda was adopted. The situation in the Middle East Report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017) (S/2018/243) The President: In accordance with rule 37 of the Council's provisional rules of procedure, I invite the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic to participate in this meeting. In accordance with rule 39 of the Council's provisional rules of procedure, I invite Mr. Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, to participate in this meeting. Mr. Lowcock is joining today's meeting via video-teleconference from Geneva. The Security Council will now begin its consideration of the item on its agenda. I wish to draw the attention of the members of the Council to document S/2018/243, which contains the report of the Secretary-General on the implementation of Security Council resolutions 2139 (2014), 2165 (2014), 2191 (2014), 2258 (2015), 2332 (2016) and 2393 (2017). Recalling the latest note by the President of the Security Council on its working methods (S/2017/507), I want to encourage all participants, both members and non-members of the Council, to deliver their statements in five minutes or less. Note 507 also encourages briefers to be succinct and focus on key issues. Briefers are further encouraged to limit initial remarks to 15 minutes or less. I now give the floor to Mr. Lowcock. Mr. Lowcock: As all members of the Council know, the Syrian conflict has now entered its eighth year. When weapons speak, civilians pay the price — a relentless price with horrific violence, bloodshed and unspeakable suffering. The past few months have been some of the worst yet for many civilians in Syria. Today I want to start with the situation in eastern Ghouta. Since the adoption of resolution 2401 (2018) on 24 February, military operations in eastern Ghouta, in particular air strikes, have reportedly killed more than 1,700 people. Thousands more have been injured. Attacks on critical civilian infrastructure, such as medical facilities, continue to be reported. There have been at least 28 reported attacks on health facilities since mid-February and more than 70 verified incidents since the beginning of the year. The World Health Organization has reported that attacks on health facilities, health workers and health infrastructure were recorded during the first two months of the year at three times the rate that we saw during 2017. In recent weeks in Damascus city, at least 78 people were reportedly killed and another 230 injured by shells fired from eastern Ghouta. That includes reports of at least 35 people killed and scores wounded on 20 March, when Kashkul market in Jaramana, a suburb in the south-eastern part of the city, was struck by a rocket. Tens of thousands of civilians have been displaced from Douma, Harasta, Sagba and Kafr Batna in recent days and weeks. So far, reports indicate that some 80,000 civilians have been taken to places in Damascus city and rural Damascus. Nearly 20,000 combatants and civilians have been transported to locations in north-western Syria. Nearly 52,000 civilians from eastern Ghouta are currently being hosted in eight collective shelters in rural Damascus. That displaced population has endured months of limited access to food, medical care and other essential items. In the words of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator, Ali Al-Za'tari, who met and spoke to some of them, those people are "tired, hungry, traumatized and afraid". Most of the collective shelters do not have the capacity or infrastructure to accommodate such large numbers of people. They are extremely overcrowded and severely lacking in basic water, sanitation and hygiene facilities. There are a number of serious protection concerns related to risks of gender-based violence, unaccompanied and separated children and restrictions on movement. The United Nations is not in charge of the management of those shelters. However, since 13 March, together with humanitarian partners, we have mobilized a rapid response to provide evacuees with basic support in close coordination with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and other local partners. So far, more than 130,000 non-food items have been distributed, 130 emergency 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 3/21 toilets have been installed, and water trucking services have been provided to most shelters. In addition, supplies to feed more than 50,000 people and a total of 38 mobile health teams and 18 mobile medical teams are currently providing support to those in need inside the shelters. Humanitarian organizations also need access to the people still trapped within eastern Ghouta, in particular in Douma, where fighting and siege continue. The United Nations and its partners are ready to proceed to Douma with food for up to 16,500 people, as well as health, nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene supplies, but facilitation letters need to be signed by the Government of Syria. I reiterate the Secretary-General's call on all parties to fully respect international humanitarian law and human rights law in order to ensure immediate humanitarian access and guarantee the protection of civilians, including in relation to displacements and evacuations. The United Nations and its partners require unimpeded access to all those affected by the situation in eastern Ghouta. That means access to the areas where civilians remain, through which they transit and to which they exit, such as collective shelters, in order to ensure that effective protection mechanisms are in place so that we can deter any possible violations and provide remedial protection support. Eastern Ghouta is not the only place in which humanitarian needs continue to increase. In north-western Syria, in recent weeks, an estimated 183,500 people have been displaced by hostilities in Afrin district in Aleppo governorate. The majority — some 140,000 people — have fled to Tell Rifaat and the remainder have gone to Nubl, Al-Zahraa, Manbij, Hasakah and surrounding areas. That massive influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) is putting a strain on host communities, which are already overwhelmed. Two days ago, on 25 March, an inter-agency convoy to Tell Rifaat delivered assistance for some 50,000 people. However, overall, humanitarian partners are still struggling to gain sustainable access to the area. Moreover, access to Aleppo city for IDPs from Afrin district is currently restricted. Of particular concern are medical evacuations that are urgently required for severely sick people to receive care in specialized hospitals in Aleppo city. Four deaths due to the lack of proper health care have already been reported. Between 50,000 and 70,000 people are estimated still to be in Afrin city. Humanitarian access to the city and its outer perimeters is possible through cross-border operations mandated by the Council. Today, the Government of Turkey told us that it is positively disposed towards such access, and we plan to run convoys in the very near future. We know that needs are very substantial. In Idlib governorate, the situation remains catastrophic, with almost 400,000 people displaced since mid-December. Local capacity to assist is overstretched. Thousands more people are now arriving there from eastern Ghouta, with no sites or shelters available for the vast majority of them. We have received reports of an increase in violence in Idlib in recent days. According to local sources, on 20 March air strikes hit an IDP shelter on the outskirts of Haas village in southern rural Idlib governorate, reportedly killing at least 10 displaced people and injuring another 15. On 21 March, air strikes on Kafr Battikh village, also in southern rural Idlib governorate, reportedly killed scores more. The next day, the central market in Harim town was hit by an air strike, reportedly killing 35 people, including many women and children. On 12 March, air strikes also resumed in southern Syria, with attacks being reported in and around Dar'a city. There have been no air strikes in those areas since an agreement was reached last year on the establishment of a de-escalation zone for parts of the south of the country. That therefore appears to be a major unwelcome development. Let me turn to Raqqa. On 19 March, we received approval from the Syrian authorities for an assessment mission to Raqqa city by the United Nations Mine Action Service, the United Nations Department of Safety and Security, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization. As Council members know, we have been seeking agreement to that for some time. That was on 19 March. Three days later, on 22 March, the United Nations Department of Safety and Security deployed a team to conduct a security assessment. They report that while the city is considered calm and stable, considerable risk remains. Raqqa city is still highly contaminated with landmines, unexploded ordnances, explosive remnants of war and improvised explosive devices. We hope that access to Raqqa city will be possible for humanitarian aid deliveries via Qamishli, Manbij, Aleppo, Hamah S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 4/21 18-08569 and Homs, depending on operational and logistical arrangements. The United Nations and our partners are now preparing a humanitarian assessment mission, which is likely to take place next week. Next I shall address Rukban, on the Syria-Jordan border. United Nations partners received permission from the Syrian authorities on 8 March to organize a humanitarian convoy from Damascus to reach people in need along the Syria-Jordan border. Last week, on 19 March, the United Nations itself received permission to join that humanitarian mission. Preparations are ongoing, and a first humanitarian convoy is expected to deploy soon. As the Council knows, we have been seeking approval for that for many months. As we sit here today, almost at the end of the month, we have reached some 137,000 people in need through inter-agency convoys — that is, cross-line convoys sent to hard-to-reach and besieged areas — to Tell Rifaat, Al-Dar al-Kabirah and Douma. That is limited, incremental progress, compared to the first part of the year, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the team on the ground and some of those around this table. But we are essentially just given crumbs — an occasional convoy here and there, often, coincidentally, shortly before our monthly briefings to the Council. A total of 5.6 million Syrians in acute need cannot live on crumbs, and with a quarter of the year gone, our level of access is currently far worse than it was this time last year. We need the support of all Council members and members of the International Syria Support Group humanitarian task force to do their part to exert their individual and collective influence over the parties. A few days ago, the Government of Syria and others asked for more United Nations help with humanitarian aid in eastern Ghouta. In response, we have, first, proposed that a team of United Nations emergency response experts be deployed to strengthen efforts on the ground. Visa requests for the team have been submitted. Secondly, we have confirmed a new allocation of $20 million from the Syria Humanitarian Fund, which is managed by my Office, for eastern Ghouta and those displaced from Afrin to provide shelter materials, improve sanitation for displaced people, ensure that safe water is available, provide life-saving medicines and medical services and put in place measures to enhance protection in relocation sites. The United Nations and its partners, on average, reach 7.5 million people every month with life-saving humanitarian assistance across the whole of Syria. Clearly, without that assistance, the situation would be even more catastrophic than it is now and the loss of life even greater. The United Nations has no money of its own to do those things. We can do them only because we receive voluntary contributions from our donors. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported our appeal over the last year, including our top donors: the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Norway, Canada, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Qatar, Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Resolution 2401 (2018) was adopted just over a month ago. I ask all in the Council to make the resolution a reality. Whatever the difficulty, the United Nations and its partners remain determined to follow through, for the sake of the Syrian people. The President: I thank Mr. Lowcock for his briefing. I shall now make a statement in my capacity as the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Recently, a Dutch photographer working with Save the Children published a photo album featuring 48 Syrian children, all seven years old. Those photos were school portraits, like we all had taken when we were young. The children were born in Syria, but they had to flee. They are as old as the Syrian war, so they have never seen their country at peace. Their memories of their homeland are fading. Sometimes they cannot remember their country at all, nor their family members left behind. But by giving those young children a public face, the photographer has tried to restore some of the dignity sacrificed to a war in which all humanity seems lost. I have here a photo of Nour. Those children were relatively lucky; they were able to escape. At the same time, inside Syria, during seven years of war, thousands of children have been killed. I myself am a father, and I am certainly not the only parent in this Chamber. Images of children affected by war should leave no one unmoved. Despite any differences between us, we should at least have one thing in common: the belief that protecting children should come first. Yet, such protection is lacking. The Syrian crisis is, above all, a protection crisis — a grave violation of the long-established norm to protect civilians and their belongings in the time of war. 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 5/21 Together, we — the international community — have expressed our determination to prevent conflict and save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. And where conflict cannot be prevented, we have agreed to regulate the conduct of warfare. One of the very first steps to that end was taken in Russia, almost 150 years ago. In Saint Petersburg, it was decided to forbid weapons that cause unnecessary suffering. Since those first steps, the body of international humanitarian law has grown considerably, including through the adoption of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The imperative of those laws has always been to protect civilians in conflict, to spare them from disaster, save them from harm and respect their dignity. Sadly, what we see in Syria today is the exact opposite. Every day, many are showing total disregard for civilians. In eastern Ghouta, the Syrian regime and its allies, including Russia, have trapped hundreds of thousands of civilians and are relentlessly continuing their offensive. The United Nations has reported air strikes on densely populated areas, blatant attacks targeting hospitals and medical personnel, the use of starvation as a weapon of war and the use of chemical weapons. Many innocent children, women and men are suffering. They should be protected. Yet instead, families are seeing their homes destroyed, their loved ones killed and their dignity shattered. In Afrin, the effects of the Turkey-led offensive are clear for all to see: a worsening of the already precarious humanitarian situation, with more than 160,000 displaced people and a further obstacle to efforts to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Sham (ISIS). I ask Turkey not to extend its military activities to other border regions in Syria or Iraq. Four weeks ago, the Council adopted resolution 2401 (2018). It is telling that in 2018, the Council should need to spell out that warring parties should immediately lift all sieges in Syria and grant unimpeded humanitarian access to those in acute need. Those are by no means exceptional demands. They are basic obligations under international humanitarian law, developed over decades to instil minimum standards of human decency in warfare. Not even the presence of terrorists is an excuse for disregarding those standards. It is humiliating that the Council is unable to enforce those minimum standards. If the Council is not willing or able to do it, who is? With all that in mind, we should not forget that the responsibility, and indeed the obligation, to execute the Council's decisions lies with individual Member States. So what should be done? First, we should reaffirm these norms and enforce the relevant resolutions. We call on all parties to the Syrian conflict — including the Syrian regime, Russia, Iran, Turkey and armed opposition groups — to respect and implement the Council's decisions. Secondly, we must strengthen resolution 2401 (2018), with United Nations monitoring of the implementation of the ceasefire and with full access for fact-finding missions to sites and collective shelters housing internally displaced persons. These missions are ready to go; we need their impartial information. Thirdly, with regard to accountability, if there is to be any credible, stable and lasting peace in Syria, the current culture of impunity must end. All those guilty of crimes must be brought to justice. The perpetrators of crimes, including ISIS and Al-Qaida, must know that they are being watched, followed and identified. They must know that files are being compiled with a view to prosecuting them for crimes that may include genocide. They must know that one day they will be held accountable. We urge all States to increase their support for the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism to Assist in the Investigation and Prosecution of Persons Responsible for the Most Serious Crimes under International Law Committed in the Syrian Arab Republic since March 2011, which aims to ensure that information about serious crimes is collected, analysed and preserved for future prosecutions. The Netherlands again calls on all Council members to support referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court. What will become of the children in the photographs I mentioned? Will they one day be able to return to Syria? Like all children, they long for a normal life, for stability, for safety. The Syrian regime believes in a military solution. But there is none. There are no winners in this war. But it is clear who is losing — the ordinary people of Syria. In these most extreme circumstances we commend the incredible courage and perseverance of the humanitarian aid workers. It is up to us to restore credibility to the Council. It is up to us to ensure a negotiated political process, in which all Syrians and other relevant actors are represented. And it is up to us to end the agony and restore dignity and humanity to the people of Syria. I now resume my functions as President of the Council. S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 6/21 18-08569 I give the floor to those members of the Council who wish to make statements. Mr. Alotaibi (Kuwait) (spoke in Arabic): We welcome you, Sir, in presiding over this important meeting. I am delivering this statement on behalf of Kuwait and Sweden. At the outset, I would like to thank the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mr. Mark Lowcock, for his briefing. Today I will address three main areas: first, the status of the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018); secondly, measures needed to improve the humanitarian situation; and thirdly, the responsibility of the parties to implement the resolution. First, on the status of the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018), we are meeting today one month after its unanimous adoption by the Security Council, calling on all parties to cease hostilities without delay for 30 days following the adoption of the resolution. We deplore the fact that it has not yet been implemented. However, we must continue to do everything in our power to ensure the resolution's full implementation throughout Syria. The increased number of humanitarian convoys entering the besieged areas during the month of March shows that partial delivery was achieved by comparison to the complete deadlock in access in previous months. That indicates that progress can be made in implementing the resolution, and we must build on that progress. We affirm that the provisions of the resolution will remain valid beyond the first 30 days after its adoption. We look forward to continued reports from the Secretariat on the status of implementation through monthly briefings, as stipulated in the resolution. In that regard, we support the proposal for providing the Council with further regular updates. We appreciate the continued efforts of the United Nations to facilitate talks among all parties in eastern Ghouta with the goal of securing a ceasefire. We are particularly concerned about the continued military offensive by the Syrian authorities in eastern Ghouta, as well as air strikes on Dar'a and Idlib. The shelling of Damascus from eastern Ghouta is also a matter of concern. All of those acts of violence have claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians. Secondly, on measures needed to improve the humanitarian situation, we must take the necessary measures to protect civilians fleeing eastern Ghouta and to improve the humanitarian situation in collective shelters. As we have said before, implementing the provisions of resolution 2401 (2018) is the only way to improve the humanitarian situation and to achieve tangible progress in that regard. Those provisions stipulate that there must be a cessation of hostilities and that access for humanitarian aid to reach the civilian population must be enabled. Regarding the humanitarian situation in eastern Ghouta, we have five points to convey to the relevant parties, which represent our special concerns about the protection of civilians. First, all evacuations must be voluntary. People must have the right to return and to choose safe places to go to. Secondly, any negotiations on the evacuation of civilians should include civilian representatives, such as local councils. Thirdly, humanitarian aid convoys should continue to enter eastern Ghouta for the benefit of those who decided to stay there. Those convoys should occur on a weekly basis, as stipulated in resolution 2401 (2018), according to the United Nations assessment of needs, including medical supplies, and with full access for United Nations staff. Fourthly, human rights violations, including detentions, disappearances and forced conscriptions, must end. Those are serious protection concerns for civilians staying in eastern Ghouta and for those leaving it. We therefore encourage the United Nations to register the names of those evacuated and their destinations and to reinforce its presence in the collective shelters for internally displaced persons, including through the use of monitors to protect them and prevent sexual violence. We call on the Syrian authorities to grant immediate permission for that. Fifthly, the deteriorating situation in the collective shelters for the internally displaced persons should be improved as quickly as possible as the number of new arrivals continues to rise. We are deeply concerned that the United Nations partners are bearing the brunt of a burden beyond their capacity. It will therefore be essential to make the maximum use of the United Nations, its staff and its resources in order to assist in managing the increasingly crowded collective shelters. We welcome the United Nations plans to increase staff on the ground to that end, and we encourage the United Nations to do the same for eastern Ghouta as soon as the security situation allows. We call on the Syrian authorities to grant visas for additional United Nations staff immediately. 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 7/21 Thirdly, on the responsibility of the parties to implement the resolution, we have a collective responsibility, as members of the Council and, specifically, as parties with influence, to work with the Syrian authorities and urge them to implement the provisions of resolution 2401 (2018) according to international humanitarian law. We expect the guarantors of the Astana agreement, Russia, Iran and Turkey, to achieve progress towards the fulfilment of the commitments undertaken in the statement they issued on 16 March in advance of their summit meeting, to be held in Istanbul on 4 April. Those commitments include, first, ensuring rapid, safe and unhindered access for humanitarian aid to areas affected by the conflict; secondly, increasing their efforts, as guarantors of the ceasefire agreement, to ensure observance of the respective agreements; and thirdly, pursuing their efforts to implement the provisions of resolution 2401 (2018). In conclusion, we affirm our full commitment to continuing to follow up closely on the status of the implementation of the resolution in the monthly reports to the Council. We will spare no effort to make progress in its implementation. This month marks the beginning of the eighth year of the conflict in Syria. Sadly, there is still a need for an end to the violence, sustained humanitarian and medical aid through weekly convoys across conflict lines, evacuation operations, the protection of civilians and hospitals, and the lifting of the siege. Mrs. Haley (United States of America): I thank you, Foreign Minister Blok, for presiding over this meeting, and I thank Under-Secretary-General Lowcock for once again laying out the facts about what is happening in Syria. I also want to personally welcome Karen Pierce to the Council as the new Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom. I know all of us in the Chamber look forward to working with her. Today we have a very difficult subject to address: siege, starvation and surrender. That is the awful, unceasing rhythm of the Syrian war. As we meet today, the third step, surrender, is taking place in eastern Ghouta. After years of enduring siege and starvation, residents are surrendering eastern Ghouta. The terrible irony of this moment must be stated and acknowledged. In the 30 days since the Security Council demanded a ceasefire, the bombardment of the people of eastern Ghouta has only increased and now, at the end of the so-called ceasefire, eastern Ghouta has nearly fallen. History will not be kind when it judges the effectiveness of the Council in relieving the suffering of the Syrian people. Seventeen hundred Syrian civilians have been killed in the past month alone. Hospitals and ambulances are being deliberately targeted with bombs and artillery. Schools are being hit, like the one in eastern Ghouta that was bombed just last week, killing 15 children. Siege, starvation and surrender. I would like to ask my Security Council colleagues to consider whether we are wrong when we point to the Russian and Iranian forces working alongside Al-Assad as being responsible for the slaughter. Russia voted for the so-called ceasefire in Syria last month (see S/PV.8188). More than that, Russia took its time painstakingly negotiating resolution 2401 (2018), which demanded the ceasefire. If we watched closely during the negotiations, we could see our Russian friends constantly leaving the room to confer with their Syrian counterparts. The possibilities for what was going on are only two. Either Russia was informing its Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations, or Russia was taking directions from its Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations. Either way, Russia cynically negotiated a ceasefire that it instantly defied. Russia even had the audacity to claim that it is the only Council member implementing resolution 2401 (2018). How can that possibly be true when in the first four days after the so-called ceasefire, Russian military aircraft conducted at least 20 daily bombing missions on Damascus and eastern Ghouta, while the people of Syria remained under siege? The so-called ceasefire was intended to allow humanitarian access to sick and starving civilians. Russia even doubled down on its cynicism by proposing five-hour pauses in the fighting. It said that they were necessary to allow humanitarian convoys to get through, but Russian and Syrian bombs continue to prevent the delivery of humanitarian aid. Only after territory falls into the hands of the Al-Assad Government and its allies do they allow food and medicine to be delivered. Russia and Syria's rationalization is that they have to continue to bomb in eastern Ghouta in order to combat what they call terrorists. That is a transparent excuse for the Russians and Al-Assad to maintain their assault. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, the opposition groups in eastern Ghouta expressed their readiness to implement the ceasefire. They told the Council that they welcomed the resolution. Russia's response was to call those groups terrorists and keep pummelling S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 8/21 18-08569 civilians into submission, while the people of Syria continue to starve. Last week, after Syrian civilians had spent years barely surviving, an agreement was reached to allow them to leave eastern Ghouta. Who brokered it? Russia. So we see the cycle being completed. The people of eastern Ghouta are surrendering. That is the ugly reality on the ground in Syria today. Cynical accusations of bad faith from Russia will not stop us from speaking out, and their blatantly false narratives will not keep us from telling the world about Russia's central role in bombing the Syrian people into submission. Fifteen days ago, when it was apparent that the Russian, Syrian and Iranian regimes were utterly ignoring the ceasefire, the United States developed a plan for a tougher and more targeted ceasefire focused on Damascus city and eastern Ghouta. Despite overwhelming evidence that the ceasefire was being ignored, some of our colleagues urged us to give resolution 2401 (2018) a chance to work. Reluctantly, we agreed and put off introducing the resolution. Now, more than 80 per cent of eastern Ghouta is controlled by Al-Assad and his allies. Their deception, hypocrisy and brutality have overtaken the chance of a ceasefire in eastern Ghouta, and for that we should all be ashamed. If we were upholding our responsibility as a Security Council, we would adopt a resolution today recognizing the reality of what happened in eastern Ghouta. A responsible Security Council would condemn the Syrian authorities, along with Russia and Iran, for launching a military offensive to seize eastern Ghouta the same day that we called for a ceasefire. A responsible Security Council would condemn the Al-Assad regime for deliberately blocking convoys of humanitarian aid during its military campaign and removing medical items from convoys that attempted to reach eastern Ghouta. A responsible Security Council would recognize that the provision of humanitarian aid was never safe, unimpeded or sustained, and that there was no lifting of sieges. A responsible Security Council would express its outrage that at least 1,700 civilians were killed during a military campaign that it demanded to come to a halt — 1,700 civilians who should have been spared in the ceasefire we demanded, but who died on our watch. But we cannot. We cannot take those actions because Russia will stop at nothing to use its permanent seat on the Council to shield its ally Bashar Al-Assad from even the faintest criticism. And we cannot take those actions because instead of calling out the ways in which Al-Assad, Russia and Iran made a mockery of our calls for a ceasefire, too many members of the Council wanted to wait. That is a travesty. This should be a day of shame for every member of the Council and it should be a lesson about what happens when we focus on fleeting displays of unity instead of on what is right. For those who think otherwise, the people of eastern Ghouta deserve an explanation. Mr. Delattre (France) (spoke in French): At the outset, I would like to thank Mark Lowcock for his briefing and to commend him on his tireless efforts and those of his team in their response to the urgent and severe humanitarian situation in Syria. To address that urgency and severity, a month ago almost to the day the Security Council adopted resolution 2401 (2018). We thus collectively and unanimously demanded that all the parties to the conflict cease hostilities throughout the country to allow for sustained and unimpeded humanitarian access to civilians in need and for medical evacuations. A month later, what is the situation? Not only has resolution 2401 (2018) not been implemented, but the humanitarian situation in Syria has worsened. The civilian population is living in despair, trapped between bargaining and fighting, particularly in eastern Ghouta. Over the past few weeks, not only has the fighting has not subsided; it has doubled in intensity, with a land offensive launched by the regime, supported by its allies Russia and Iran. The carefully planned offensive was unremitting, using the double strategy of terror and parallel negotiations that was used in Aleppo to obtain the surrender of combatants and the displacement of civilians. For a month there has not been a single day when eastern Ghouta, which has been besieged and starved for years, has not suffered indiscriminate shelling by the regime and its supporters. They have systematically bombed schools and hospitals and killed more than 1,700 civilians, including more than 300 children. Those deaths are the result of a deliberate strategy of the Syrian regime to forcibly bend an entire population, annihilate any form of opposition and remain in power. Nothing should justify breaches of international humanitarian law. Not one humanitarian convoy has been authorized to enter eastern Ghouta since 15 March, and almost no humanitarian assistance has 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 9/21 been delivered in recent weeks. Meanwhile, there are immense needs among those still in eastern Ghouta, the majority of whom are women and children. For several days we have been witnessing forced evacuations of populations from eastern Ghouta, which could constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes. We have demanded humanitarian access to eastern Ghouta in order to provide assistance to people in their own homes, where they wish to stay as long as the ceasefire allows. That was the reason for the adoption of resolution 2401 (2018). Instead, we have witnessed just the opposite — an escalation of violence to force a massive displacement of civilians. Bombing has forced civilians, approximately 80,000 people, to flee. The displacement of people from eastern Ghouta is an integral part of the military strategy of the Syrian regime to force the opposition to capitulate. Once again, civilians are the primary victims. As I said, those forced displacements could constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes. Evidence of such crimes will be collected, preserved and used. We were clear on that point during the Arria-formula Council meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights a few days ago. Some 55,000 civilians are now in eight collective camps managed by the Syrian regime around eastern Ghouta, without water or electricity and in disastrous sanitary conditions. Their lot has not improved; their hell has simply moved a few kilometres away. We are extremely concerned about the fate of those civilians who now live in overcrowded conditions, with no assurances of protection or security, with no guarantee that they will return home. How do we protect civilians in the situation I have just described? It is absolutely urgent to protect those who can still be protected. Although the 30-day cessation of hostilities demanded by resolution 2401 (2018) has still not been implemented, that demand remains, more urgent and relevant than ever. The resolution is still the framework for our collective action. In that regard, and in line with the briefing just given by Mark Lowcock, I would like to underscore three vital demands. First, it is indispensable and urgent that humanitarian convoys be allowed to enter eastern Ghouta daily and with adequate security. Although humanitarian needs are great, the regime continues to deliberately block aid. United Nations convoys must be able to enter and make deliveries. Fighting must cease long enough to allow for delivery, unloading and distribution of supplies, including of medical assistance. The second demand concerns civilians who remain in Ghouta, who have the right to emergency humanitarian assistance and to protection. Aid must reach them where they are. To that end, the United Nations and its international and local humanitarian partners must be able to work safely on site to assess the needs of those populations. It is an obligation under international humanitarian law, but it is the minimum required to provide tangible assistance to those concerned. The protection that is due them under international humanitarian law must be unconditionally guaranteed. In that regard I call again on the responsibility of all actors with influence on the Syrian regime. The third demand, which has taken on new importance in recent days, is for assistance to be provided to the displaced civilians in camps outside Ghouta. Very concretely, that means that those populations, who have been forced to leave everything behind in order to survive, must be assured of their safety, access to basic necessities and a chance to return home when they so desire. Care must be taken that they are not threatened with retaliation, threats or persecution of any kind. In order to ensure that they are protected, the United Nations and its partners must be able to escort civilians who have been evacuated from their point of departure to their destination in the collective shelters. The United Nations and its partners must be granted continuous access to civilians living in those camps. We hope that the United Nations can strengthen its support to displaced persons who have fled eastern Ghouta. That would call for an increase in the number of international staff on site. We hope that approval will be granted to that end as soon as possible. It would also call for security guarantees for humanitarian workers. The situation in Afrin is also extremely worrisome. A great many civilians are in a critical situation. More that 180,000 people have been displaced. A single convoy was authorized, yesterday, which is insufficient given the tremendous needs of the population. Ongoing fighting in Afrin has forced the Syrian Democratic Forces to halt operations against Da'esh, whose threat, as we all know, has not dissappeared. Our position on the issue is the same. The legitimate concerns of Turkey with regard to the security of its borders cannot in any way justify a lasting military presence deep inside Syria. S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 10/21 18-08569 More than ever, we need the fighting to end. We call on all parties on the ground to conclude the negotiations under way and respect a cessation of hostilities. We support the efforts of the Special Envoy for Syria, Mr. Staffan de Mistura, and his commitment to resuming the Geneva process and to reaching a lasting political solution in line with resolution 2254 (2015) that starts with the establishment of an inclusive constitutional committee, under the auspices of Mr. De Mistura. It is the only way to end the Syrian crisis. It is absolutely essential to work on both the humanitarian and political fronts. I appeal on behalf of France, first, to those who can make a difference on the ground, starting with Russia. It is never to late to save lives. Let us be well aware that without urgent, decisive action, the worst is undoubtedly yet to come in the form of a worsening and enlargement of the conflict. The time has come for us to learn seriously the lessons of the Syrian tragedy. This tragedy is the illustration of a new global disorder where the rappelling ropes have disappeared due to a lack of strong international governance, a lack of a power of last resort and a lack of convergence among key actors — to which we add the well-known attitude of Russia. In other words, if we want to avoid other tragedies of this type in future, it is essential to structure the multipolar world in which we now find ourselves around a robust multilateralism embodied by a reformed United Nations. It is the only alternative to the fragmentation of the world and the return to the zones of influence — and our history teaches us all the dangers of that — and it is with the settlement of the Syrian crisis, which is our priority today and which is the emergency before us, one of the other challenges of our generation. Ms. Pierce (United Kingdom): I thank you, Mr. President, both for being here today to underscore the vital importance of this topic and, in particular, for your very powerful statement. The United Kingdom supports your call for a referral of the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court. I also wish to express our thanks to the Under- Secretary-General for his continued efforts to keep the Security Council informed of the toll that hostilities are having on civilians in Syria. We also thank him for the heroic efforts of all his teams on the ground. Their efforts are much supported by most of us on the Council. The Under-Secretary-General's briefing eloquently underscores why it is essential that the Council comes together to agree on concrete steps to allow the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to fulfil its mandate to ensure humanitarian assistance and protection for everybody who needs it. Ambassador Haley has laid the situation bare, Ambassador Delattre has set out the regime's intentions, and Ambassador Alotaibi has focused on the need for protection and registration. I support their calls. I will not rehearse a catalogue of suffering that we have heard expressed so eloquently today, but that omission should not be taken as any indication that the United Kingdom is not as horrified as others by what is happening on the ground. Specifically, it is diabolical that access is actually worse in the face of such suffering. Diabolical is a strong word, but there are no others to describe what is happening. The worst destruction and suffering has continued in eastern Ghouta. Those who support Al-Assad have not taken steps to help stop the violence. Instead, Al-Assad and his supporters have violated the strong words of the Security Council in resolution 2401 (2018), making mockery of the Council's authority, as Ambassador Delattre stated. Since 11 March, an estimated 100,000 people have left eastern Ghouta and are in makeshift reception sites in rural Damascus. Thousands more have been bused to Idlib. Because there is no independent monitoring nor provisions for civilian safety, those fleeing and those staying remain vulnerable and at risk of mistreatment and abuse by the regime, including being detained, disappeared or separated from their families. Humanitarians, health workers and first responders on the ground report that the regime is deliberately targeting them. That is illegal, and those who help the Al-Assad regime are complicit in that illegality. The situation continues even for those who are left behind. An estimated 150,000 civilians remain in eastern Ghouta. They suffer from acute food shortages and lack of medical supplies. They are afraid, and above all they remember how the regime punished the civilians who fled from eastern Aleppo in December 2016. That is why Ambassador Alotaibi's call for protection and registration is so urgent. We welcome United Nations plans to scale up support to deal with the dire situations in the internally displaced persons camps and collective shelters. We call on Russia to use its influence with the regime to 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 11/21 ensure that the United Nations and its partners can also provide assistance and protection for those who remain in eastern Ghouta. Whether civilians choose to stay or leave, it is essential that they be protected against attack and have access to the essentials to survive. This is not just a plea on the grounds of humanity; it is a requirement under international humanitarian law. It is the job of the Council and all members of the Council to uphold international humanitarian law. Those who side with the regime in its actions are themselves guilty of violating that law. In concluding, I would like to highlight two further areas. The suffering of the Syrian people continues in Idlib, where civilians have been under attack by regime forces for many years. More than a million internally displaced Syrians live there, including those who have fled eastern Ghouta. In Afrin, we recognize Turkey's legitimate interest in the security of its borders, but at the same time we remain concerned about the impact of operations on the humanitarian situation, and my Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have raised the need for protection of civilians and access with President Erdoğan and his Ministers. It was good to hear from the Under-Secretary-General that there may at last be signs of progress in Afrin. After seven years of conflict, over 13 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria. The Al-Assad regime has created the situation and is now preventing humanitarian actors from relieving some of the horror it has inflicted. We call on Russia to use its influence to ensure that at a minimum the United Nations can fulfil its mandate to ensure humanitarian assistance and protection for Syrians on the basis of need, regardless of any other considerations. I was at Geneva in 2012. I think we all feel that that was a huge missed opportunity, in the light of events. The situation has escalated every year since that time, and, as the Under-Secretary-General said, the level of access is worse. The Council has a small opportunity to put measures in place to reduce the risk of reprisals. As you said, Mr. President, if the Security Council cannot do it, who can? Mr. Umarov (Kazakhstan): I join others in thanking Under-Secretary-General Lowcock for his comprehensive briefing. I also wish to welcome the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, His Excellency Mr. Stephanus Abraham Blok, who is presiding over today's meeting. Kazakhstan remains committed to all Security Council resolutions aimed at solving humanitarian issues in Syria. We believe that it is most important to preserve all possible humanitarian-access modalities, including cross-border assistance, which are indispensable in bringing humanitarian aid to millions of people in Syria. Implementing resolution 2401 (2018) is a collective responsibility, with each Council member and State Member of the United Nations playing a significant role. We must all continue to do everything we can to ensure full implementation across Syria. We look forward to continued reporting on the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018) to the Council through the regular Syria briefings and reports of the Secretary- General, as stipulated in the resolution. Urgent attention must be focused on long-term humanitarian assistance, with the assurance of safe humanitarian access by the United Nations and other aid agencies, and evacuation of the wounded. We commend the sterling contribution of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the World Health Organization and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent for their provision of increased medical supplies and life-saving services, including surgical procedures. In that regard, we welcome the increase in humanitarian convoys gaining access to besieged areas in Syria in March, compared to previous months. It is necessary to take note of the worrisome humanitarian situation in Syria, as fighting in different parts of the country are causing massive displacement. We endorse the appeal of the United Nations to help stem the catastrophic situation for tens of thousands of people, from both eastern Ghouta and Afrin. We look forward to the next round of talks, to be held in mid-May in our capital, Astana, where the stepping up of efforts to ensure observance of the relevant agreements will be addressed. We also believe that the dialogue between Under- Secretary-General Mark Lowcock and the Government of Syria should be ongoing. We reiterate that all obligations under international humanitarian law must be respected by all parties. A further United Nations needs-assessment mission to these troubled areas, similar to that which Under-Secretary-General Lowcock led recently, may be required very soon. The Syrian authorities must cooperate fully with the United Nations and relevant humanitarian organizations in S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 12/21 18-08569 facilitating the unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance and thereby mitigating the suffering. Lastly, we are of the view that the crisis in Syria can be resolved only through an inclusive and Syrian-led political process, based on the Geneva communiqué of 30 June 2012 (S/2012/522, annex), subsequent Security Council resolutions and relevant statements of the International Syria Support Group. Mr. Meza-Cuadra (Peru) (spoke in Spanish): We appreciate the convening of this meeting and the briefing by Mr. Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary- General for Humanitarian Affairs, on the humanitarian situation in Syria. We also welcome your presence here today, Sir, in presiding over our meeting. Peru deeply regrets that violence and human suffering continue to characterize the situation in Syria, 30 days after the humanitarian ceasefire demanded by the Council. Resolution 2401 (2018) remains in full force, and we consider that the Syrian Government and other actors with the capacity to influence developments on the ground are obliged to ensure its full implementation. The ceasefire should be immediate and enable unrestricted access to humanitarian assistance throughout Syrian territory. While there has been some limited progress in that regard, the delivery of humanitarian assistance must be continuous and unrestricted. In view of the Council's responsibilities in line with international law and international humanitarian law, Peru will continue to advocate for the protection of civilians in all conflicts and humanitarian crises. An indeterminate number of Syrian citizens, including thousands of women and children, have been driven out of eastern Ghouta by the violence. We note with concern that the shelters in the vicinity of Damascus cannot cope and that they lack food, clean water and medical supplies. We must remember that international humanitarian law has mandatory provisions for the evacuation of civilians. It is also compulsory to take measures to safeguard private property from looting and destruction. Syrian citizens must be able to return to their homes and businesses when security conditions improve. We must also protect the majority of the remaining population in eastern Ghouta, who are particularly vulnerable to reprisals, forced recruitment and sexual violence. We are also concerned about the humanitarian situation in Afrin, Idlib and Raqqa, among other areas of Syria. The responsibility to protect civilians cannot be conditional or subordinated to political or strategic interests. We highlight the efforts of the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies, such as the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, to assist people in such a difficult situation. They have our full support. Given the intensification of violence in recent weeks and its devastating consequences for the population, we must once again reiterate how urgent it is to make progress towards achieving a political settlement on the basis of resolution 2254 (2015) and the Geneva communiqué (S/2012/522, annex). In that regard, we hope that progress will soon be made in the establishment and composition of the constitutional committee agreed on in Sochi. All the Syrian parties, and especially the Government, must engage constructively in this. Mr. Alemu (Ethiopia): We thank Under-Secretary- General Lowcock for his comprehensive briefing. We want to express our appreciation to the United Nations and humanitarian partners for their continued selfless and courageous service in providing assistance to all Syrians in difficult circumstances. We remain concerned about the humanitarian crisis in all the areas of Syria where it is prevalent. As the Under-Secretary-General said, the Syrian war has entered its eighth year, bringing unspeakable suffering to the people of the country. The escalation of violence that we witnessed last month in eastern Ghouta and other parts of the country has been a source of extremely grave concern. According to the statement issued on 21 March by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, shelter, protection, water and sanitation remain the key priority humanitarian needs of the internally displaced. In that regard, we thank the United Nations and its humanitarian partners for providing much-needed assistance. Alleviating the suffering of Syrians requires urgent and coordinated action on the part of all actors, while respecting the relevant resolutions of the Council, particularly resolution 2401 (2018). It was encouraging that the Council unanimously adopted resolution 2401 (2018), demanding a cessation of hostilities throughout Syria for at least 30 days so as to ensure the safe, unimpeded and sustained delivery of humanitarian aid and medical evacuations. In that regard, while much remains to be done to fully implement the resolution, compared to the previous month there has been positive 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 13/21 action, including aid delivery to some of the areas that are especially badly affected and difficult to reach. The conflict has also diminished in intensity in some areas, according to the report of the Secretary-General (S/2018/243). However, this does not mean that the action taken has been sufficient. We therefore stress that it is vital to redouble our efforts to do everything possible to fully and comprehensively implement the resolution with a sense of urgency and enhanced political will. We believe that what the people of Syria need is a cessation of hostilities, along with protection and access to basic goods and services. All of those demands are contained and affirmed in resolution 2401 (2018). All Syrian parties should therefore respect and fully implement resolution 2401 (2018), and all States that have influence over the parties should try to bring the maximum pressure to bear on them, with the ultimate objective of helping to fully operationalize the resolution, which was adopted unanimously by the Council. In that regard, we hope that the Astana guarantors, Russia, Turkey and Iran, will play their role in implementing resolution 2401 (2018), strengthening the ceasefire arrangements and improving humanitarian conditions, as stated in their final statement of 16 March. In addition, while we acknowledge that the United Nations and its humanitarian partners have been able to reach millions of Syrians using all modes of aid delivery, the fact remains that humanitarian access, particularly inter-agency convoys, remains a critical challenge. In that connection, it is absolutely vital to ensure safe, sustained and need-based humanitarian access so that life-saving aid can reach all Syrians in need. Let me conclude by reaffirming that only a comprehensive political dialogue, under the auspices of the United Nations, can ultimately end the humanitarian tragedy in Syria. We reiterate our position that the only solution to the Syrian crisis is a political solution based on resolution 2254 (2015). We support the continued efforts of the Special Envoy and encourage all Syrian parties to engage with him constructively and meaningfully in order to revitalize the Geneva intra-Syrian talks and support the establishment of a constitutional committee, in line with the outcome of the Sochi congress. We fully concur with the Secretary- General, who states, in his report of 20 March, "Political efforts to bring the war to an end must be accorded priority and redoubled by all parties to the conflict." (S/2018/243, para. 48) While the primary responsibility for resolving the conflict lies with the Syrians themselves — a principle that is firmly embedded in resolution 2254 (2015) — the Council also has an important role to play in supporting the efforts in a spirit of unity, which we believe can have a positive impact on the ground in alleviating the suffering of all Syrians. That may be a tall order, in the light of the fragmentation that Ambassador Delattre mentioned earlier. However, the effort must be made. Mr. Inchauste Jordán (Plurinational State of Bolivia) (spoke in Spanish): We welcome your presence, Sir, and the fact that you are presiding over the work of the Security Council today. We would also like to thank Mr. Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, for his briefing. We support him in the difficult work with which he is entrusted. We must once again express our regret that this conflict has continued for eight years and that we are still witnessing the ongoing sieges and violence being endured by the Syrian people, particularly women and children. In addition to living with the psychological consequences of the situation, they urgently need humanitarian assistance. We unequivocally condemn the ongoing bombardment of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, and the military activities in residential areas in the cities of Damascus, Afrin and Idlib, as well as in eastern Ghouta. They have only led to more civilians being killed, wounded and displaced. According to the most recent report of the Secretary General (S/2018/243), between December and February alone, there were 385,000 internally displaced persons and 2.3 million people living in besieged and hard-to-reach areas. We regret that so far there are still obstacles preventing the full implementation of resolution 2401 (2018). We call on all parties involved to make every effort to ensure the effective implementation of the resolution throughout Syria in order to facilitate the safe, sustained and unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid and services, as well as to enable the medical evacuation of those who are seriously ill or injured. In addition, according to the same report, since October 2017, 86,000 civilians have returned to the city of Raqqa, of whom 20,000 arrived in February alone. Regrettably, 130 civilians have died and 658 have been seriously injured by explosive remnants of war and anti-personnel mines. In that regard, we would like to highlight the visit by the United Nations mission to Raqqa last week. We reiterate that the work of clearing S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 14/21 18-08569 anti-personnel mines and explosive remnants of war is crucial to facilitating the safe return of the displaced. While it does not reflect what has gone on throughout Syrian territory, it is important to highlight the recent delivery of humanitarian aid through convoys, of which the first, on 5 March, was to Douma in eastern Ghouta, bringing food for more than 27,000 people. We also believe that cross-border assistance is an important part of the response to the situation, and we highlight the food assistance to 2 million people and the dispatch by the United Nations to areas of northern and southern Syria of 449 trucks carrying aid for 1 million people. We welcome the efforts of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, all the humanitarian agencies concerned and the Russian Federation that have enabled humanitarian assistance to be delivered to various populations, in particular in eastern Ghouta, which three convoys recently entered. We call for that assistance to continue as safely as possible. In that regard, we believe it is important to strengthen the dialogue and coordination among the humanitarian agencies, the United Nations and the Syrian Government in order to facilitate the entry of convoys and humanitarian aid workers, as well as the safe and dignified return of refugees and internally displaced persons. We emphasize the dangerous work of the personnel of the various agencies and humanitarian assistance bodies, whose staff risk their own lives in carrying out their dangerous work on the ground. We therefore reiterate the importance of full respect for international humanitarian law and international human rights law. We want to take this opportunity to reiterate how important it is to build on the political momentum following the commitments made at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi. That should be the channel for reinforcing the Geneva process, led by the United Nations in the context of resolution 2254 (2016). We hope for the speedy implementation of the Sochi outcome and, as a result, the establishment of a constitutional committee that can facilitate a viable political transition. In that regard, we support the results of the latest Astana meeting, which enabled the agreements establishing de-escalation zones to be strengthened. We hope they will be reflected on the ground so as to reduce the violence and meet the urgent humanitarian needs. We condemn any attempt to foment fragmentation or sectarianism in Syria and believe that it is the Syrian people who must freely decide their future and their political leadership in the context of their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Finally, we reiterate that the only way to resolve the conflict is through an inclusive, negotiated and agreed political process, led by and for the Syrian people, and aimed at achieving sustainable peace on their territory without foreign pressure of any kind. Mr. Nebenzia (Russian Federation) (spoke in Russian): We would like to welcome you as you preside over the Council today, Sir. We also welcome Ms. Karen Pierce, Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom, who is now here with us. We thank Mr. Lowcock for his briefing. The difficult humanitarian situation continues in a number of areas in Syria. The Russian Federation has been taking active steps to normalize things, including within the framework of the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018). While some here may not like it, it is a fact that we are the only ones who have been making concrete efforts to implement resolution 2401 (2018). Since we first established humanitarian pauses, with the assistance of the Russian Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in the Syrian Arab Republic, and the participation and oversight of the United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, nearly 121,000 people have been evacuated, on a strictly voluntarily basis — let me stress that — from eastern Ghouta. Many of them have talked about how difficult it has been for them to live under the repressive regime established by the armed group militants. Civilians continue to flee eastern Ghouta through the Muhayam-Al-Wafedin humanitarian corridor. There is real-time video of this running on the Russian Defence Ministry's official website. In just the past few days more than 520 civilians have left Douma. Russian agencies have organized the distribution to them of hot food, food kits and individual food rations, as well as bottled drinking water. Yesterday alone, Russian military doctors treated 111 civilians, including 42 children. At the same time, the Russian Centre for Reconciliation continues to organize the return of residents of Saqba and Kafr Batna. On 24 March, as a result of an agreement reached by the Centre with leaders of illegal armed groups, another checkpoint was opened for fighters and their family members to leave from Harasta, Arbin, Zamalka, Ain Terma and Jobar. In the past few days, militias from the Ahrar Al-Sham 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 15/21 and Faylak Al-Rahman groups and their relatives have been evacuated along the corridor and bused to Idlib governorate. In three days, more than 13,000 people were evacuated from Arbin alone. However, many have decided to remain, taking advantage of the presidential amnesty. Incidentally, there have been active efforts to plant stories about detentions and torture and possibly even executions. They are lies. The Syrian police are ensuring that these operations are safe, under the oversight of specialists from the Russian Centre for Reconciliation and representatives of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. Yesterday 26 Syrian soldiers and civilians who had been taken prisoner by Faylak Al-Rahman were freed. In our view, those facts clearly attest to the difficulty and extent of the work being done by the Russian specialists on the ground, in communication with the Syrian authorities and the leaders of the armed groups. There are some members of the Security Council who prefer wasting their time on inflammatory speeches and letters making groundless claims about our country, probably to conceal their own unwillingness to do anything constructive to implement resolution 2401 (2018) in cooperation with the groups they sponsor. At the same time, yesterday the fighters from Jaysh Al-Islam who remain in Douma detonated four mines yesterday in several districts in Damascus. Six civilians died and another six were wounded. Al-Mazraa, a residential neighbourhood in the capital was shelled earlier. As a result of mine explosions around the Al-Fayhaa sports complex, a 12-year-old boy died and seven children were injured. Hundreds of people have died from mine explosions in Damascus overall. This is apparently the message that the militants are sending every day about the willingness to implement the ceasefire that they loudly proclaimed in their famous letter to the Secretary-General. I want to again point out the importance of clarifying the data used in the Secretary-General's report (S/2018/138), including on possible attacks on civilian infrastructure and the victims of such attacks. Where does that information come from? The February report has a footnote that mentions various United Nations agencies and departments of the Secretariat. The main source cited is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which does not have a staff presence on the ground. The big question, and what we are trying to get to the bottom of, is who is providing the United Nations staff with this kind of information? Is it the anti-Government groups and terrorist accomplices like the White Helmets? But they are interested parties. So why is there only a sprinkling of the information provided by the Syrian authorities? We call on the United Nations, humanitarian organizations and States to deliver urgent assistance to help the people who are evacuating eastern Ghouta. It is also essential to strengthen the United Nations presence around the humanitarian corridors. The Syrians need immediate assistance with the infrastructure reconstruction that the Syrian Government has begun in the liberated residential areas of eastern Ghouta. We would like to ask Mr. Lowcock to oversee that issue personally. We also hope that as soon as possible the coalition will create the conditions and provide the necessary security guarantees enabling a United Nations assessment mission to be sent to Raqqa and humanitarian convoys to the Rukban camp. The Syrian authorities gave their official consent to this some time ago, as Mark Lowcock confirmed today. We should note that we were shocked by the recent reports that more than 2,000 civilians may have died during the coalition forces' assault on Raqqa. Let me ask it once again — where were the weeping and wailing and calls for humanitarian aid then? We have noted the statistics in the Secretary-General's report on the numbers of people who have returned to Raqqa, but we would like to see similar information on other parts of Syria and the country as a whole. How many people are returning to their permanent homes? We would like to propose to the United Nations representatives that they designate the areas where those indicators are the highest as a priority for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and monitor how effectively it is being implemented. We also think it would be appropriate to include information on reconstruction assistance in the reports. Resolution 2401 (2018) stipulates that Syrian districts, including those that have been liberated from terrorists, need support in restoring normal functioning and stability. One of the key areas in that regard is mine clearance. We get the feeling that external donors are losing interest in delivering assistance to residents in areas under Syrian Government control. We are seeing signals from some capitals that only opposition-held enclaves should be helped. Such double standards go completely against the core principles of neutrality and impartial humanitarian assistance. We hope that we are wrong about this and that Mr. Lowcock will refute the S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 16/21 18-08569 possibility of such a trend. But if our suspicions are borne out, how does the United Nations intend to deal with the issue? Just the other day a meeting of senior officials was held in Oslo under the auspices of the United Nations and the European Union to address the humanitarian situation in Syria. No representatives of the Syrian authorities were invited. How does Mr. Lowcock view the prospect of another assessment of the humanitarian situation in Syria without the participation of its official representatives? Does he consider that a productive format? That is a very urgent question considering that the forthcoming second donor conference is scheduled for the end of April in Brussels. I would also like to ask Mr. Lowcock what is known at the United Nations about the facts of sexual services being provided in exchange for humanitarian assistance in the context of cross-border operations. There is information about that in the November report of the United Nations Population Fund, and the BBC did a journalistic investigation of the issue. If this issue is known about, why is it avoided in the Secretary- General's reports? And if it is not known about, it should be investigated. We hope that in close cooperation with the Syrian authorities and consideration of their views, the United Nations will agree on an emergency humanitarian response plan for this year as soon as possible, with an emphasis on the delivery of assistance to liberated areas. Ms. Wronecka (Poland): I would like to welcome you here today, Sir, and to commend the presidency's leadership. I would also like to thank Under-Secretary- General Mark Lowcock for his comprehensive but once again alarming update. Like many around this table, we share a sense of urgency on this issue, especially following the adoption of resolution 2401 (2018), which we adopted unanimously a month ago. Unfortunately, we have to recognize that it has not been implemented in the first 30 days since its adoption. We are meeting again when there has been no substantial change on the ground and the fighting is far from over. The military offensive in Syria continues and the human suffering is growing as a result. Any action, even against terrorists, cannot justify attacks on innocent civilians and civilian infrastructure, including health facilities. That must stop, and the parties to the conflict must strictly comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law. Accountability for serious violations is a requirement under international law and central to achieving sustainable peace in Syria. As indicated in the last report of the United Nations-mandated Commission of Inquiry, there is a need for the international community to take a broader view of accountability and to take urgent steps to ensure that the needs of Syrian conflict victims for justice and accountability are met both immediately and in the long term. We call upon all parties to alleviate the suffering of the civilians, including children, by granting them free and safe access to humanitarian assistance, including voluntary medical evacuation, which should be strictly overseen by the United Nations and the implementing partners in order to ensure the voluntary character of the process. While discussing evacuations, let me underline that people must have the right to return and to a safe location for settlement. Any evacuation negotiations should also include civilians. Humanitarian aid convoys to eastern Ghouta must continue for those who choose to stay. We would like to stress that all actors should use their full influence to immediately improve conditions on the ground. We urgently call for the cessation of hostilities in the whole of Syria. Attacks against civilians, civilian property and medical facilities must stop in order to alleviate the humanitarian suffering of the Syrian people. Some small positive steps have taken place, such as a larger number of humanitarian convoys reaching the besieged areas in March, especially when compared to previous months, when humanitarian access was almost completely blocked. That improvement shows that it is possible to make progress, although much more is needed. In that context, we call on Russia, Iran and Turkey — as the European Union did, and as the High Representatives did through their respective ministers after the Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union in February — to fulfil their obligations and responsibilities as Astana guarantors. It is also important to note that the cessation of hostilities may also provide a chance for the peace talks under the auspices of the United Nations in Geneva to gain momentum so that a political solution may finally be reached. Once again, let me underline that we should seek to reach an intra-Syrian framework political agreement, in line with Council resolution 2254 (2015). In that connection, we strongly believe that the conclusions of the Congress of Syrian 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 17/21 National Dialogue in Sochi could and should be used to advance the Geneva process, especially with regard to the creation of a constitutional committee by United Nations Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura. In conclusion, let me stress the necessity of maintaining the unity of the Council on the question of the full implementation of the humanitarian resolution across Syria. The civilian population of Syria has already suffered too much. The adoption of the resolution was just the beginning of the process. We call on all with influence on the ground to take the necessary steps to ensure that the fighting stops, the Syrian people are protected and, finally, our joint humanitarian access and necessary medical evacuations continue. Mr. Ndong Mba (Equatorial Guinea) (spoke in Spanish): We welcome Mr. Stef Blok, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, to New York. We take this opportunity to congratulate him for the commendable presidency of the Netherlands during the month of March. The Republic of Equatorial Guinea is grateful for the holding of this informative meeting, which enables us to once again assess humanitarian resolution 2401 (2018), which we approved one month ago. We thank Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock, who, as he always does, has just given us a very informative and detailed briefing on the developments on the ground in Syria. The 30-day ceasefire throughout Syria, established under resolution 2401 (2018) in order to carry out humanitarian operations, has expired. Despite the diplomatic efforts of the United Nations team in Syria, violence has increased in eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, in Idlib and in Afrin, where there is an ongoing Turkish military offensive. Daily air strikes and bombardments have increased, including in residential areas, among Government forces, opposition forces and non-State armed groups, making it difficult to ensure the protection of all civilians and the immediate, secure and sustained provision of humanitarian aid. That excessive resurgence of violence, orchestrated by the various parties, only serves to exacerbate and aggravate the already grim humanitarian situation in those conflict zones. As we have reiterated, the solution to the humanitarian crisis in Syria is tightly linked with a ceasefire. The prolongation of the conflict can only further aggravate the tragic humanitarian situation, which in turn creates greater instability and negatively affects neighbouring countries that take in the millions of refugees fleeing the war. As the Secretary-General underlines in his 20 March report: "Our common objective" — and one of high priority — "should be to alleviate and end the suffering of the Syrian people. What the Syrian people need immediately has been made abundantly clear and affirmed in resolution 2401 (2018). Civilians need a cessation of hostilities, protection, access to basic goods and services" — and access to humanitarian and sanitary assistance — "and an end to sieges." (S/2018/243, para. 48) All parties involved in the Syrian crisis must accept that none of them can achieve a military victory. Government forces, opposition forces and armed groups must accept that no matter how much death and destruction they cause in their country, there will be no victor but rather one single loser — the Syrian people. Similarly, national parties and international partners that have significant political and geostrategic interests and that have the capacity to exercise their influence on their respective allies must redouble their efforts and political commitments in order to bring sustainable peace and stability to the country. Any party that insists on political red lines that block the necessary commitments must also consider the setback caused by the loss of innocent human lives. It is evident that the Council has not entirely reached its goal by unanimously adopting resolution 2401 (2018). The Republic of Equatorial Guinea will support any humanitarian initiative that seeks to definitively put an end to the suffering of the Syrian people. In conclusion, I renew the tribute of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea to Mr. Lowcock and to the entire humanitarian team of the United Nations for their noble and tireless work in Syria to provide relief to the Syrian people living through a humanitarian catastrophe. Mr. Dah (Côte d'Ivoire) (spoke in French): Like others, my delegation would like to welcome Mr. Stef Blok to New York and to congratulate him on the holding of the current meeting in the Security Council. My delegation also wishes to thank Mr. Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, for his informative briefing on the humanitarian situation in Syria. S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 18/21 18-08569 As we are all aware, the war in Syria has unleashed one of the most serious humanitarian crises in recent history and continues to have a devastating impact on the Syrian people. My country remains particularly concerned about the attacks and bombings, including those against hospitals and civilian infrastructure, that continue to punctuate the daily lives of people subjected to forced displacement in the areas of Afrin, Idlib and eastern Ghouta. Côte d'Ivoire condemns those actions and calls on the parties to take the steps necessary to protect people, civilian infrastructure and humanitarian personnel. More than a month after its unanimous adoption by members of the Security Council, resolution 2401 (2018), on which so much hope was pinned, has fallen woefully short of our expectations, much to our regret. The fact is that the demand for an immediate cessation of hostilities to allow safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid and related services, as well as medical evacuation of the seriously ill and wounded, in accordance with relevant international humanitarian law, has still not been adhered to, despite our joint efforts. The ongoing fighting has forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee to camps and makeshift shelters where living conditions are extremely difficult. Côte d'Ivoire calls once again for the effective implementation of resolution 2401 (2018) with a view to resuming the delivery of humanitarian aid, including medical evacuations from besieged areas and camps for internally displaced persons, in order to ease the suffering of people in distress. We urge the Council to overcome its differences and to demonstrate unity in order to ensure the effective implementation of the resolution, which is more relevant than ever. My delegation reiterates its belief that the humanitarian situation will not improve unless significant progress is made at the political level, as the two issues are closely linked. We therefore encourage the parties to prioritize political dialogue and resume peace talks in the framework of the Geneva process, in accordance with the road map established by resolution 2254 (2015). Mr. Wu Haitao (China) (spoke in Chinese): I thank Under-Secretary-General Lowcock for his briefing. China commends the active efforts of the relevant United Nations agencies to alleviate the humanitarian situation in some areas of Syria. The conflict in Syria is in its eighth year and has caused terrible suffering for the people of Syria. The humanitarian situation in parts of the country has recently deteriorated. China calls on all parties in Syria to put its country's future and destiny, as well as its people's safety, security and well-being first, cease hostilities and violence without delay, resolve their differences through dialogue and consultation and ease the humanitarian situation in Syria as soon as possible. United Nations humanitarian convoys have now gained access to eastern Ghouta in order to deliver aid supplies to the people there. China welcomes Russia's establishment of temporary truces in eastern Ghouta, opening up a humanitarian corridor for Syrian civilians. As a result of the efforts of the parties concerned, some ceasefire agreements have been reached and a large number of civilians evacuated through the corridor. In the circumstances, it is important to continue to promote the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018) so as to alleviate the humanitarian situation in areas such as eastern Ghouta. China welcomes the meeting between Foreign Ministers held by Russia, Turkey and Iran in Astana, and commends Kazakhstan for hosting the meeting. We hope that the upcoming meeting of the Heads of State of the three countries and the next round of the Astana dialogue will contribute positively to restoring the ceasefire momentum in Syria and supporting the Geneva talks. The international community should continue to support the role of the United Nations as the main mediator, and back Special Envoy de Mistura's diplomatic efforts to relaunch the Syrian political process. Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity must be respected, and all Syrian parties must be encouraged to reach a political solution to the Syrian issue, based on the principle of the Syrian-led and Syrian-owned peace process, and in accordance with resolution 2254 (2015), with a view to fundamentally easing the humanitarian situation in Syria and continuing to advance the counter-terrorism agenda, as mandated by the Council's resolutions. The Council should remain united on the Syrian issue and speak with one voice. China stands ready to work with the international community and to contribute actively and constructively to a political settlement of the Syrian issue. 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 19/21 Mr. Orrenius Skau (Sweden): As the representative of Kuwait has already delivered a joint statement on our behalf, I will make my remarks very brief. One month ago, the Council adopted resolution 2401 (2018) by consensus, in response to the deafening calls for action to address the horrific humanitarian situation in Syria. Today we have heard around this table a continued commitment to moving forward with the implementation of that important resolution. I wanted to speak last in order to identify some points of convergence. From the discussion today, I believe that there are a number of critical areas where there is broad agreement within the Council. First, we all share a deep disappointment and sense of dissatisfaction and frustration with the lack of implementation. While a limited increase in access for humanitarian convoys shows that progress is possible, much more is needed. The resolution remains in force and all parties remain obliged to comply. Secondly, we have heard a common concern about the continuing hostilities throughout the country, particularly the ongoing military offensive in eastern Ghouta. Those who leave the area should do so voluntarily, with the right to return and a choice of safe places to go to. At the same time, humanitarian aid convoys must continue to support those who choose to remain. Thirdly, we agree that efforts to strengthen the protection of civilians must be stepped up by the United Nations and its partners, both inside eastern Ghouta and for those leaving and in the collective shelters. I want to emphasize that preventing sexual and gender-based violence should be an integral part of those efforts. We condemn the attacks in February that affected health facilities. Many colleagues also reiterated today that resolution 2401 (2018) applies across the whole of the country. I just wanted to mention our concern about the Turkish operation in Afrin and the statements that Turkey has made about expanding its military operations in the north, beyond Afrin. We are also concerned about the protection of civilians fleeing Afrin, as well as the difficult conditions for those remaining. We call on all relevant parties, especially Turkey, to ensure the protection of civilians and facilitate cross-border and cross-line humanitarian aid deliveries, as well as freedom of movement, for internally displaced persons. The need for the full implementation of resolution 2401 (2018) remains as urgent today as when it was adopted. As Ambassador Alotaibi has said, we will spare no effort in making progress on the implementation of resolution 2401 (2018). We will continue to work actively and tirelessly to that end, be creative in considering possible further steps, and remain ready to reconvene the Council at any time should the situation warrant its renewed action. We are convinced that the unity of the Council, as difficult as it may be, is the only way to effectively make a real difference on the ground and alleviate the suffering of the Syrian people. For our part, even when terribly frustrated, we will never give up trying to achieve that change. The President: I now give the floor to the representative of the Syrian Arab Republic. Mr. Ja'afari (Syrian Arab Republic) (spoke in Arabic): At the outset, I would like to convey the condolences of the Government and people of my country to my colleague on the Russian Federation delegation in the wake of the tragic incident that claimed children's lives in the commercial centre in Kemerovo. A few minutes ago, I was checking the list of the States members of the Security Council and I realized that two — only two — of its 15 members have embassies in Damascus. That is why the statements made by the representatives of those two countries offered the most accurate description of the humanitarian situation in my country. They were able to provide an objective and fair assessment of the situation there. In late 2016, right here in the Chamber (see S/PV.7834), we announced the good news to our people in Syria that the Syrian Government would liberate eastern Aleppo from armed terrorist groups, and as a Government, an army and a responsible State we have done just that. Today we announce to our people the good news that the time has come to liberate all of eastern Ghouta from these armed terrorist groups. We declare that we will liberate the Golan, Afrin, Raqqa, Idlib and the rest of our occupied territory because, as a State, we reject the presence on our territory of any illegal armed group or occupying Power, regardless of the excuses, just like all other States represented in the Council. Such victories would not have been possible if we had no just cause. They would not have been possible without the sacrifices made by the Syrian Arab Army, the support of our people and the support of our allies and friends. S/PV.8217 The situation in the Middle East 27/03/2018 20/21 18-08569 Facts that have come to light recently with the liberation of eastern Ghouta from armed terrorist groups again prove what we have always told the Council since the first day of the global terrorist war waged by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom and France against my country. We said that the suffering of Syrians is the result of the practices of armed terrorist groups against civilians. The testimonies of the tens of thousands of our people leaving eastern Ghouta underscore that those groups have continued to deprive them of their freedom, destroy their livelihoods, disperse their families and prevent them from leaving to areas under State control in order to continue using them as human shields. They have seized control of humanitarian assistance in order to distribute it to their supporters or sell it to civilians at exorbitant prices. They have also targeted the safe corridors allocated by the Government with explosive bullets and mortar shelling, which has led to the death of dozens of people, including some Palestinian brethren. We have borne witness to a state of hysteria in recent days and weeks in the Council as the Syrian Government has sought to exercise its sovereign right, combat terrorist groups and eliminate terrorists in Syria in order to restore security and stability to all Syrians and implement Council resolutions against terrorism. That state of hysteria proves that the States supporting those terrorist groups have never sought to end the suffering of Syrians. They have sought only to perpetuate and prolong their suffering in order to blackmail the Syrian Government, at the political and humanitarian levels, and save terrorists from their certain deaths. I would like to assure the supporters of terrorism, some of whom are present in this Chamber, that the plan that they have promoted for the past seven years has failed. Their plan was to deny that the Islamist takfiri groups were terrorists and instead present them as moderate Syrian opposition. That plan has failed. Eastern Ghouta has not fallen, as my colleague the representative of the United States stated. It was liberated in the same way we liberated eastern Aleppo. It is terrorism that has fallen in eastern Ghouta, not civilians. As the representative of the United States said, today should be a day of shame for the supporters and sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups. They have supported those terrorist groups for years in order to topple the Syrian Government by force in favour of Islamist takfiri groups. Such actions have led to considerable suffering among the Syrian people, and I have proof of it. Two days ago, at the Senate Armed Forces Committee, led by Senator Lindsey Graham, the Chief of Central Command, General Joseph Votel, stated that "the change of the Government in Syria by force in favour a number of Islamist opposition groups has failed". The Security Council has to date held 49 formal meetings to discuss the so-called humanitarian situation in Syria and a number of informal emergency and Arria Formula meetings. The Council has read reports and heard briefings that were replete with falsehoods that senior officials of the United Nations sought to present in order to serve the policies of some influential Western countries that are members of the Council and to pressure the Syrian Government. Such reports and briefings were completely devoid of professionalism and objectivity. They have failed to take note of the attacks on the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic, including the attacks by the international coalition, led by the United States, and those by the Turkish regime and the Israeli occupying force. Those same parties have also sought to provide all kinds of support to terrorist groups associated with Da'esh, the Al-Nusra Front and other militias fabricated in those countries. After 49 reports and hundreds of meetings, briefings and thousands of working hours, some countries continue to refuse to recognize that the humanitarian crisis in Syria is the result of an external investment in terrorism and unilateral coercive measures. Forty-nine reports have been issued, and I say today that my words are falling on deaf ears. People from the Netherlands say that beautiful flowers have thorns. The Netherlands is famous for its flowers. Perhaps that saying reflects the situation on the ground. Mr. Lowcock stated that the Kashkul was targeted by a missile but he did not specify its origin. He said there are eight shelters for those leaving eastern Ghouta. He did not mention the efforts of the Syrian Government to host the 150,000 civilians leaving eastern Ghouta. He does not know who manages those shelters. Perhaps aliens are taking care of the 150,000 civilians. Mr. Lowcock stated that the United Nations, its partners and the Syrian Red Crescent are helping people from Ghouta. He did not mention the Government at all. If the Government has no role to play, why ask it to help the Council? Why does the Council request its approval for the entry of humanitarian convoys? Mr. Lowcock stated that 153,000 people left Afrin and went to Tell 27/03/2018 The situation in the Middle East S/PV.8217 18-08569 21/21 Rifaat because of military operations. Who forced 153,000 people to leave Afrin? Was it not Turkey that forced them to leave? Was it not the Turkish aggression against Afrin that forced these people to leave? Mr. Lowcock mentioned the Syrian Government only once, saying that it approved the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the Rukban camp. He did not say that the United States was behind the obstacles preventing the deployment of the humanitarian convoy in question. The United States occupies the Rukban camp and the Tanf area. I will not go into detail now for the sake of time. I will not even go into the details of the forty-ninth report of the Secretary-General (S/2018/243). I will give only one example to prove that the report lacks objectivity and impartiality. The report devotes nine paragraphs to the suffering of civilians in eastern Ghouta and the damage to the infrastructure there as a result of Government military operations, as the report claims — nine paragraphs. As for the situation of the 8 million civilians in Damascus, the targeting by terrorist groups of the capital with more than 2,500 missiles, the killing and injury of thousands, and the destruction of homes, hospitals and clinics, the report dedicates only one sentence to Damascus. The report says, "Attacks on residential neighbourhoods of Damascus also continued from eastern Ghouta, resulting in deaths, injuries and damage to civilian infrastructure." (S/2018/243, para. 8) We hope that the United Nations will not adopt in eastern Ghouta the same approach that it has taken in previous situations by not providing support to the areas liberated or achieving reconciliation. We hope that the United Nations will adopt a new approach in line with the Charter and international law, based on full coordination and cooperation with the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic, which is the only party concerned with the protection and support of Syrians. We hope that the United Nations will not succumb to the dictates of certain influential Western countries in the Council that run counter to humanitarian action, the Charter and international law. During the past week alone, the Syrian Ministry of Commerce has distributed 4,000 tons of food to civilians leaving eastern Ghouta. I am not sure about the sources mentioned by the representative of France, because France does not have an embassy in Damascus. So its sources of information cannot be credible. In conclusion, the States sponsoring terrorism have instructed armed terrorist groups to use chemical weapons once again in Syria. I ask the Council to pay attention to this information. They asked them to fabricate evidence, as they have in the past, in order to accuse the Syrian Government. We sent this information to the President of the Security Council yesterday. According to that information, this theatrical act will be produced by the intelligence agencies of these countries, and the starring roles will be the White Helmets. The production will be directed by foreign media. This theatrical act will take place this time in the areas close to the separation line in the Syrian occupied Golan. Terrorist groups will use poison gas against civilians in Al-Harra. Afterwards, the injured will be moved to the hospitals of the Israeli enemy for treatment there. Council members can already imagine the testimony that will be offered by doctors of the Israeli occupation forces. The information we submitted also refers to another theatrical act in the villages of Habit and Qalb Lawza in the suburbs of Idlib, where a number of satellite transmitters and foreign experts have been spotted. This time, the cast will include women and children from an internally displaced persons camp on the Syrian-Turkish border. Once again, I provide the Council with this serious information. The President: There are no more names inscribed on the list of speakers. I now invite Council members to informal consultations to continue our discussion on the subject. The meeting rose at 1.15 p.m.

Issue 21.4 of the Review for Religious, 1962. ; ALOYSIUS J. MEHR, O.S.C. Community Exercises in Religious Life Introduction: The Religious Community in Perspec-tive The religious communityx exists within two wider communities from which it draws its own unique vitality and significance. These two communities--forming one kingdom of God--are the Church and the total human world. Both are immeasurably deep and charged with dynamism; and we cannot arrive at an adequate grasp of the significance of community exercises in religious life unless we see the posture of our own particular commu-nity within these two great communities which are great covenants, the covenant of creation and the cove-nant of Christ. The religious community, however, is not related to the Church and the world only extrinsically as though these formed some kind of background or framework out-side of the community. Kather, the religious community exists at the point of encounter between two great lines of force and destiny which are the Church and the world. Its being calls out to the total human Community from which it arises and in whose service it acts; and its being is a response, deep and creative, to the call of the Word of God. The religious community sums up, symbolizes, and is an eikon of the human community and of the Church. The religious community, therefore, arises from the depths of creation, from the depths of life, lost in the eons of the life's growth itself.2 We carry on the work of crea- 2 This paper was written for and delivered at the international convention on Crosier spirituality held at Maaseik, Belgium, July 24-26, 1961. It has been revised so as to make it applicable to re-ligious communities in genera!. 2 Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, translated by. Bernard Wall (New york: Harper, 1959); The Divine Milieu, trans-lated by Bernard Wall (New York: Harper, 1960). Hans Urs yon 4. 4. Aloysius J. Mehr, O.S.C., is on the faculty of Crosier House of Studies, Route 1, Wallen Road, Fort Wayne 8, Indiana. VOLUME 21, 1962 30! 4" Aloysius Mehr, O.~.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS tion, converging, as Teilhard sees it, to a kind of world unity in which all things are synthesized into community,a The direction of the history of life has moved through phases of biology ("biogenesis") into the world of incar-nate spirits ("noogenesis"); and in the New Covenant this force is caught up in the moment of the Resurrection, present among us as a pledge of the final entry into the glory of the Lord (kabod Yahweh). Our community-being, our being-together (Mitsein in Heidegger's termi-nology) is thus wrapped up in the forces and destinies of life, surging on in space-time towards its fullness, the seed of which it carries in itself at the present. Moreover, our community-being is also wrapped up in the fulfillment of creation, the new creation in Christ who draws all to the parousial and paschal destiny of all creation--a destiny that is already sacramentally present in a community called together in the Eucharistic sacrificial meal. These are undoubtedly far-reaching and difficult themes the full significance of which will always remain inaccessible to us, lost behind the veil of the future and the inscrutable destinies of man in the divine plan. We must expect, then, that any discussion of the religious community must, in its ultimate significance, shadow off into mystery. We shall not be able to lay out the forces in us as problems which can be solved, here and now, once and for all times. Community-being is essentially dynamic: we, as men and as religious, are homines vi-atores. Our fellowship in God is an eikon--an image, a sign, a symbol--of the Church localized in our areas of concern, but the Church which is the people of God on the march (in via), creating (in/ieri) what we most deeply are unto fullness in Christ who fulfills all in all (Eph 1:23; Jas 1:18). From this viewpoint we are able to see, or rather to begin to see, the profound significance of community exercises. Community exercises are the historical and temporal incarnations of our being-together (Mitsein). There is a deep and vast need, truly an ontological need, a need arising from our being-together, for authentic community activity that emanates from the inexhaust-ible fullness of our being.4 What we are demands suc-cessive real-ization; our being overflows into our life. Activity, operatio, exercise--these are not on some pe-riphery of the real, bu~ rather incarnations in the fabric of the real world. Man is embodied soul and besouled body. His existence is incarnate existence, caught up in Balthasar, Science, Religion, and Christianity, translated by Hilda Graef (London: Bums and Oates0 1958). s Teilhard develops this theme in The Phenomenon of Man: ~ Gabriel Marcel, Homo Fiator, translated by Emma Crawford (Chicago: Regnery0 1955), p. 26. solidarity with the corporeal universe but transcending it as spirit.5 Human being demands expression; as in-carnate, it is essentially temporal, basically historical, realizing itself further and more fully in successive and authentic encounters with the real--in the mysteries of birth, death, conversion, sickness, and above all, love.~ This paper is, first of all, a re-investigation of certain societal universals--relationships of persons which are the anthropological, sociological, and theological binding forces which help to produce a healthy and fruitful com-munity. The term "relationship" will be used more fre-quently than "community exercises" or "community ac-tivities." This, however, should not confuse the reader. An activity has social implications and social value if it is a relationship to others. The fact, therefore, that we will not group our material under the usual headings like "prayer life" or "recreations" or "the apostolate" should not tempt the reader to conclude that we are not speaking of things usually thought of as "community ex-ercises." We will speak primarily about the unifying forces, the community-building potential of community exercises, whether these be a simple conversation, a rec-reation, the Mass, superior-subject relationships, pro-fessional relationships of instructors with students, or even the exercise of talent in a "private" way within the community. It would be wrong to see as binding forces only those activities in which all of us perform the same movements or say the same words. On the other hand, community and society can hardly exist where there is no mutual a.ctivity, no common involvement of all the members in some fruitful, meaningful task. Finally, this analysis of communal activities precisely in their unifying value views the religious community in its objective, intersubjective, and Christian dimension. Part I: Community in Social Patterns To an anthropologist7 a very significant characteristic of the monastic community is that it is a celibate, reli-giously oriented institution'. This is without precedent or parallel in primitive or preliterate culture. In general, as the society becomes progressively complex,, certain indi-a Von Balthasar .develops this theme in his book Science, Religion, and Christianity. e Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy O] Existence, translated by 4. Manya Harari (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949)', p. 6. 7The Reverend Alphonse Sowada, OiS.C., received his master's degree in anthropology from the Catholic University of America, Community Washington, D.C., in the spring o[ 1961. In an interview with the Exercises Reverend Ronald Kidd, O.S.C., he initiated in outline form the following analysis of the monastic community based, on anthropo-logical procedure. Father Sowada is'presently working in the New Guinea Mission, VOLUME 21, 1962 3O3 ÷ ÷ ÷ Aloysius Mehr, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 3O4 viduals are set aside solely for religious activity. Hence the phenomenon even of the Israelitic priestly office, given to the tribe of Levi, suggests a somewhat highly developed social complexus. Furthermore, sexual prac-tices become restricted for religious specialists only in civilized, cultured society. The religious community, com-bining both factors, arises only late in the development of a people. This unique development suggests various problems: a separation from the elemental and primitive social binding forces, perhaps a tendency towards over-com-plexity and hyper-specialization, in general, a danger of an ever greater artificiality. Man-to-Nature Relationships The ecological system comprises the sum total of the man-to-nature relationships in a given social organiza-tion. It comprises all the activities by which these people make a living--how they satisfy their elemental needs from nature. Thus, the supplying of food, the manufac-ture of clothing, the realm of technology, and attendant organizations and belief are .elements in an ecological system. In primitive societies, these are the concern of everyone; social organizations and belief patterns (treated in the following sections of this paper) arise from this common involvement in wresting an existence from na-ture. The ecological system forms the foundation for the actual social forms of the people. In the religious community, participation in this basic, elemental social activity is often frustrated. The general pattern is the specialization of ecological functions; they are more often than not entrusted to a few--the prior,,;, procurators, and other superiors. As a result, the remain-ing members of the community lack this elemental bind-ing force with one another and with the community as a whole. This can easily lead to frustration, complacency, and eventually create parasites within the community, In this connection it should be noted that the work of those religious who are engaged in manual labor almost exclusively is much more in line with the needs expressed in an ecological system, provided that they are truly a part of the community in which and for which they work. In order to utilize this natural, social binding force, these religious must feel themselves solidly within the whole community. They should experience the same satisfaction that the son or daughter enjoys when they begin to co-operate with their parents in providing a livelihood for the family. The social bindings formed by the ecological system are intense and deep. For the clerical and teaching members of a community, there is also a need for an acceptable way either to fulfill this function or to find an adequate substitute. The apostolate might seem like a perfect substitute. But in the apostolate the results are apt to be too far distant for the immediate kind of satisfaction caused by common involvement in providing the basic necessities of life. In fact, where superiors or subjects try to make' apostolic work an "acceptable" sublimation, the very 'remoteness of results can tend precisely to create further frustration and complacency. '~ In general, any project in which personal initiative is called into play within and for the community and in which a sense of fulfillment can be forthcoming ~can be used as a substitute. Such projects are of great value in binding together the religious,community. Stress should be placed°especially on the matter of results; for example, graduation, profession, and ordination days should be planned wisely to be days of community joy in accom-plishment rather than of relief in being through with tedious work. Although effective substitutes depend on both subjects and superiors, it is the superiors, above all, who must see the absolute need for them. Individual ~religious may have the initiative to make valuable .suggestions, but :the only person who can integrate these suggested projects into the community and give them their full social force is ,the superior. Without due attention, the community moves towards increasingly artificial social forms, lacking and attempting to substitute for, the basic level of social solidarity. In order to have a healthy community, we must find effective and meaningful substitutes. Man-to-Man Relationships Next, we deal with interpersonal relationships, en-compassing social ability and practice, questions of status and hierarchy in the communal organization, questions of law regulating interpersonal behavior, family orienta-tion, pressure groups, informal and formal groupings. This is the area of personal response and personal: activ-ity~ phenomena that vary with,each individual. Consid-eration of the interpersonal relationships are of 'utmost importance in analyzing the social structure of a com-munity; they form the operative and dynamic structure of society. Perhaps the most evident charact~eristic of interpersonal relations within the religious community is its thorough structure ot control. First of all, everyone knows every-one else and every individual can control his response thereby. Moreover, the social control within our unique form of community is almost familial or patriarchal. This is a good basis for developed social organization. In a healthy community a person is a part of things, 4. + + Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 305 ÷ Aloysim OM.e~h.Cr., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS he knows what is expected of him, he is not bewildered or lost within the crowd. He is at home, he knows how to approach everyone else, he knows how to regulate topics of conversation, to account for individual differ-ences, to accept the particular interests of the other mem-bers of the religious society. He enjoys that ecce quam bonum feeling which is a natural result of being [ul_ly ac-cepted by the group. He belongs to them, uncondition-ally; they are happy to have him and would be distressed at losing him. As. a further consequence, he feels shel-tered, contented, and can gradually abandon all his poor little defensive mechhnisms as well as the defects of. char-acter which necessitate them. All his potential gifts can flower, he can. give himself up confidently to his most generous aspirations. Such. :are the blessings which accrue to an individual who lives in a healthy group definitely ready to accept him.s There are, however, definite dangers in our communal make-up. The first and perhaps most serious danger is that of artificiality--artificially controlled responses. To the extent that responses become too automatic, too pat, too set, too taken-for-granted, the very situation which ought to promote solidarity could conceivably destroy it. Responses must be genuine; meaningless responses are detrimental to community. The artificiality of community llfe can be much re-lieved by warm parental and fraternal relationships be-tween superiors and subjects, instructors and students, and, above all, between equals. This fosters the character formation that ordinarily occurs within the family. Con-sequently, everyone must take his role in community seriously; he must be open, understanding, sympathetic, and avoid meaningless responses and inflexibility policy in the name of functional efficiency. Professors ought to be aware of the fact that attitudes built up by personal relationships with students are as important as the material being taught. On the other hand, students must realize that they have much to learn and that their attitude towards their instructors is extremely important. Entering. into dialogue is always a two way street. Within the community deep and authentic friendships should be fostered, for personality grows in proportion as it is opened to others. Fear of friendship shatters munity and leaves only a group of isolated introverts living in the same building. Mistaken notions of partic, ular friendship have forced many a religious to lead an unnecessarily lonely life. Authentic friendship means that I am genuinely con-e Communal Lile, translated by a Religious of the Sacred Heart (Westminster: Newman, 1957), p. 267. cerned with my neighbor as a person. When interest is only pretended, people instinctively feel that they are be-ing treated, not as human beings, but as a case, an object, an It. Make-believe interest, pharisaical interest does more harm than good. Every Christian, and certainly every religious, should be conscious of the manyreasons why he should be deeply and genuinely interested in his neighbor in all places and at all times. Another danger in our communal make-up presents it-self where subjects refuse to cooperate with their supe-rior, or where incapable men are invested with status-power. In primitive tribes, subjects who refuse to work with their superior are simply eliminated. Moreover, a leader who blunders in personal relations or in tribal projects, for example, failing to bring off a hunting raid successfully, loses prestige ipso facto. But in our com-munity, the social status of the members is not easily changed. This has its advantages and disadvantages. More permanent social relationships can be formed so as to .give the individuals a greater security and to give the social order a basic stability. On the other hand, where poor relat!onships are formed, this situation too tends to perpetuate itself. Overspecialization is another factor which endangers solidarity in a community. Anthropologists distinguish between diversification, which can lead to mutual de-pendence and promote solidarity, and specialization, in which a member withdraws himself from the community in order to devote his time and energies to some partlc-ular field. In primitive societies, specialists share perforce a vast number of tribal interests: the medicine man is interested in the buffalo hunt and thereby enjoys a social binding to the hunters; he is involved in wars and raids since his status to some extent depends on a perpetuation of the present social organization. In general, in primitive cul-tures, bindings between religious functions and the re-mainder of tribal functions are very strong. But when society develops, it tends to free itself more and more from nature (the ecological system); and it does so only to become more and more dependent upon man and man-to-man relations. This dependence must serve as a constructive and not a destructive force. In order to prevent diversification--which is absolutely necessary in a complex society--from becoming special-ization, we must manifest and recognize on a community level our mutual dependence; for example, the very real dependence of one teacher upon all the others. Here we see the importance of faculty meetings in which the par-ticular field of competence of one person is seen as com-plementing that of another. There are many ways of Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 196Z ÷ ÷ ÷ Aloysius Mehr~ O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS keeping different interests and fields of competence from becoming divisive. Perhaps greater stress should be placed on the apostolate as a community apostolate, a common effort, accomplished in different ways by each individual, but without thereby becoming any less communal in in-spiration, motivation, and reality. An awareness of our mutual dependence is absolutely necessary for the proper integration of personal activity towards our social goals. Interpersonal relationships in the religious community include not only individual-to-individual relations but also those of groups.-A formal grouping is one which is established de [acto and is recognized by the society as exercising a certain control of the whole. Chapters, councils, a faculty, special committees for accreditation, and so forth are all formal groupings. Informal groupings are not officially set up or estab-lished. We see examples of informal groupings during common recreation periods or when some religious work together informally as a group. Informal groupings can at times exercise more influence than the formal group-ings; that is especially true if the formal groupings are inoperative or if the i.nterrelationships between formal groupings is neglected. It is in the informal groupings that public opinion is formed and in many cases social innovation begins. The informal groupings should pro-vide much of the initiative and dynamism necessary for any society to be alive, to grow and develop, and to keep in touch with the members and their real needs and as-pirations. While informal groupings are very important, formal groupings are even more important in a religious com-munity; ours is by its nature a hierarchical society, and one strongly so. Therefore the effective functioning of our formal groupings is especially important for the vi-tality of the entire community. Inoperative formal group-ings, or artificiality in formal ,groupings, invites seg-mentation of the society, then disintegration, and finally demoralization. The history of the American Indian is an extreme case of precisely this. Factors leading to inoperative formal groupings are many. Among them are age differences, lack of precise definitions of ideals, and immaturity. For a well-function-ing community, superiors-,must be willing to present straightforward proposals to their councils or others' whose advice they are to seek. This means the full pres-entation of real cases that involve discussion and choice, not simply decisions for'ratification.9 In short, he must seek to collaborate. Also, he must have the humility and wisdom to consider minority positions; seeking support Ibid., pp. 270-273. only in numbers infallibly excites mistrust, resentment, opposition, or utter indit~erence. "The prudent and most efficient thing for the superior to do is to make the group share, from the beginning, in the common task.''1° Cooperation between formal and informal groupings is of the essence in achieving a healthy, vital c0mmufiity. This means that we must understand the roles which these groups are to play within, the community. More-over, since the religious community is so strongly hier-archical and the superior tO a large extent controls the interrelationships between formal and informal group-ings, he should be doubly alert, astute, and comprehend-ing in regard to the ideas generated in the informal groupings.Suspicion on the part of a superior is harmful to the vitality of the community, kills personal initiative, and tends again to artificial substitutions and the seg-mentation of the community fabric. But beyond this a superior must have the ability to select appropriate ideas from the informal groupingsmthose ideas which will prove beneficial to the community. It is difficult to re-spect a superior who accepts every suggestion that is of-fered to him or proves that he does not have the ability to choose well. In a primitive society he would in that eventuality lose status. Man-to-Ideals Relationships Under this heading we find community purpose and sense of purpose. In primitive society religion ferments the whole society. And certainly community goals, re-ligious ideals, can and should be important unifying fac-tors in a religious community. It is worthy of note here that in primitive ~ociety where the satisfying of the basic needs has such a prominent role, the upper echelons tend to have the same ideals as those of lower status, the .young as the old, the specialists as those engaged in community projects. When the eco-logical needs become less urgent and the man=to-man relationships more important, it becomes more difficult for all to have the same ideals. But the religious commun-ity should be able to realize this unity of ideals in a way that other communities in contemporary life cannot. In a religious community we-ness will tend to be established by living according to a unique set of ideals--provided the ideals are well defined. Our fellowship, as we will see later, is a unique fellowship in Godl For social vitality and solidarity, it is better to define ideals clearly and energetically and then, as the need arises, to modify them than not to define them at all or to define .them haphazardly or casually. Searching for Ibid., p. 270. 4" 4" CEoxm~misuensity VOLUME 21, 1962 309 4. 4. dloysius OM.Se.hCr,., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ideals has little social result. Without well-defined, known, and accepted objectives, ideals will be fashioned individually and in groups; this leads directly to com-munity segmentation. In this situation, the very factors which in a healthy social organization cause solidarity and vitality have the el~ect instead of segmenting the community. Ideals must and will be formed. If the proper formal grouping will not define them, it is inevitable that informal groupings will attempt to fill this lack. Community goals and ideals, however, cannot be al-lowed to stagnate. Once they have been defined, they must be re-defined as social changes and new needs make themselves felt. In this sense, it is only by innovation that society can maintain its health and well-being. For these reasons, our ideals require constant modification and elaboration to insure their continued adequacy for the very real and growing society which they both reflect and form. Furthermore, wise inter-group relationships constitutd community dynamisms and insure that the social structures of the community are truly alive and' changing--that the incarnations of the community ideals are true responses to the appeals of the era and the per~ sons, that the community continues to be constituted through history in its response to the Word, that its voca-tion continues to be authentic. It is in this context that tradition possesses real meaning. One group, which is n.aturally the most capable of really fruitful effort in this direction, is the meetings oE the various spiritual directors on a regional or inter-national basis. Undoubtedly much good could be ac-complished by regular and well-prepared meetings of these spiritual leaders in each order or congregation. Each meeting should consist oE a series of scholarly papers followed by serious discussion. Here again, we should point out the grave responsibit-ity of superiors. Upon their shoulders must rest a good portion of the burden of keeping goals alive and develop-ing with the community itself. But this responsibility can-not be placed solely upon the superiors. For a society to develop, all should participate in the re-discovery of old ideals and the formation of new. Community is a "we"; its responsibilities are no less communal than the end which they serve. If a religious suffers from abnormal loneliness, an anthropologist would immediately look for some need which is neither being fulfilled nor et~ectively substituted for. Where such a condition exists, the man is not livit~g a whole life; and attempting to live a half life tends to-wards increasing frustration. The only effective remedy in such a case, according to anthropologists, is the real-istic integration of our activities by directing them mean- ingfully towards the specific and ,well-defined goals of our community. Any notable incidence of real loneliness will probably reveal upon careful .investigation some rupture in the social structure of the whole community-- whether ecological, man-to-man, or man-to-ideals, More-, over, from the fact that our society is in 'itself artificial to a certain extent (lacking almost necessarily the deep and elemental bindings of an ecological involvement), we must be doubly aware of the other unifying forces within our community. Part H: Community and Personal Creativity ~ Patterns of social organization are vital, without the slightest doubt. Much. of our actual failure to realize deeply and meaningfully fellowship with one another in a brother-to-brother relationship stems from the neglect or mismanagement of the social structure of our com-munity. Yet the religious community---even considered only as a deep community of men--is not simply cre-ated by experts. The expert manipulates, controls, studies problems, and finds solutions; but his union with his tools and the particular determined purposes of his craft is extrinsic. We can think in" this connection of the over-organiza-tion of working communes as they sprang upsince the last world war. Here, everything is functionalized--all the activities are planned out, with time alloted on the schedule for religion, recreation, and so forth, which are considered as necessary means for overhauling the ma-chine periodically. When people begin to see their lives coincide with the routines planned for them, when they see themselves and their own importance diminish to the level of cogs in a machine, their spirits harden, atrophy, and wither. Life becomes less than free in the sense that activities are not flowing from the deepest levels of being. They become re.ore and more a number in a filing system. This is no doubt an extreme case. But we must reso-lutely resist the temptation to reduce man simply to an aggregate of psychic functions and forget that he is a living soul. In my relations with the men in my com-munity, I am involved. My actions should not tend to build a wall of separation between the me I know myself to be and others. Given the thorough system of social con-trols characteristic of religious life, given too a life that is frequently arranged by my superiors, the most common temptation is to avoid reaching out in true personal ap-peal to the other in all his unique personality, but to see both him and myself as [unctions--a teacher, student, cook, carpenter, Mass-sayer (a cog in a machi'ne can never pray), a procurator, or sflperior. The conclusion we have been working towards is this: ÷ ÷ Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 dloysius Meh~, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS community is not established by merely legislating laws, setting up a hierarchy of superiors.and subjects, or giving a dozen human beings a common residence. Nor can it be produced by a system' of techniques. Community must grow out of its members, for it is a highly personal gift of oneself to the other person in all the richness of his individuality. While techniques cannot produce community, they are nevertheless valuable in eliminating those things which could prevent community from happening; for example, enclosure within myself, being trapped, as it were, in a system of concentric circles which stand between me and my life. Furthermore, techniques are undoubtedly neces-sary for the effective accomplishment of particular, goals; for example, organizing a sports program requires some manipulating of people. But teamwork still remains a union based on something outside of the being of the other person;, while it may be a true degree of community, it is still not the fullness of human community, let alone: of fellowship in the word and love of God. "Community," Martin Buber .writes, '"is where com-munity happens.TM There is something in genuine meet-ing which extends beyond calculations, plans, and proj-ects. Just as my being is not definitely exhausted in any one particulai'ity of my life but overflows into promise and possibility,12 rooted in my existence and its destiny, so also the community is never definitely established, en-tirely a "given" factor, a.status; Community, the genuine union of beings, is created out of the depths of promise of my bei~ng. It is not pro-duced. Community is meeting; and that meeting which calls to the other from all that I am is essentially creative: something new happens, I become something that I was only potentially before, and in this connection I must think in terms of gilt or grace. I can remain open to re-ceive this gift of the other as long as I am not artificially isolated from my own being in a world of function; but somehow we are here in a realm in which the notions of cause and effect no longer apply with their full import--. I do not cause dialogue. Even more, in a very real sense, I am given to myself fully only in dialogue, in the gift of another self calling out to me, joining our lives in com-mon destiny and hope. "All real life :is meeting.''13 The energies of life become fully real only in community: [ am the possibility, even more, the promise of community in my most elemental reality as incarnate spirit. r~Between Man and Man, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 31. '~ Marcel, Homo Viator, p. 26. ~ Martin Bub~r, I and Thou, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner's, 1958), p. 11. Hence community--and in a unique way, the religious community--fulfills a basic demand (exigence in French) of human being. The ability to say We, the possibility of genuine encounter presupposes beings who can love and give themselves to others, beings who are incarnati.ons of the spirit which man i~, a spirit embodied iia'spake.and time, in solidarity with the cosmos and the covenant of creation. The human spirit can be stifled for just so long--a time and a time and half a time of the Scrip-tures-- within the abstractions and reductions of a func-tionalized world which, we repeat, is a real danger in a religious community due to the artificiality and conven-tionalisms so easily developed in such a life. But in the well-chosen words of Gabriel Marcel, it seems, at least as far as man is concerned, tha~ even if life is weakened and in a way degraded, it must still retain a certain character of sacredness . We must accordingly realize, I think, that here we are faced with a~ certain absolute, and that this absolute must be assisted, however strong the temptation to resist it?' Man's spirit seeks the fullness of being, the fulfillment of its destiny.15 Even in the midst of degradation or open rebellion, the voice of his spirit calls out for authentic living. Rebellion is a call to another to answer my appeal, to respond, knowing that even if I fail, at least my call will go on being heard. Although many unfavorable things can be said about rebellion, yet we must admit that it is still authentic living. As Camus has written, "I rebel--therefore we are,''x~ In modern religious life, the danger is not primarily open rebellion. With us, frustration more frequently takes the place of rebellion. We begin with high ideals, but, after encountering many difficulties and meeting with many failures, it is easy for us to lose courage, to be-come despondent and frustrated. The principal cause of this frustration is the lack of understanding one's own abilities, strength, and weakness, Being frustrated, religious enclose themsdves within a shell of their own creation; they try to circumvent the full meaning of their vocation. Frustration is a flight from authentic living, and that is the reason why frus-trated religious try to escape and lose themselves in rou-tine or a ceaseless merry-go-round of activities. Here we see, or begin to see, the ontological.significance of frus-tration, despondency, and defense mechanisms--the psy- ~ The Mystery ol Being, translated by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Regnery, 1950), v. 2, pp. 182-188. x~ Marcel, The Philosophy ol Existence, p. 4 a0Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 22. ÷ ÷ ÷ Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 Aloydm 0M.$eh.~r., REV~EWFOR RELIG;OUS chological and sociological ruptures which prevent com-munity from happening. It is in this context that we propose to re-investigate the three relationships already viewed on the anthro-pological level: my relationship to things, to other peo-ple, and to ideals. Creative Community and Things 1. Art. In our mechanized world, things are considered more and' more as means, even pure means (bona utilia), apart from myself, only accidentally and, ontologically speaking, haphazz'rdly coming into contact with me. Their own values are, for me, simply utilitarian. I fail to see in them the mystery of creation in which I also am essentially involved. Art, beauty--these are simply esoteric tinsel, luxuries for the functional man. In a way this man is only half a man, and hence only half himself, begrudging those energies of life with which his created and corporeal being is essentially in communion.,x7 It would be almost meaningless to tell such a man that his activities are incarnations of his being, for he has denied any essential involvement in this universe of space and time.xs When I live out of harmony with myself and the deep community of creation in which I am, which 'is my world, my environment, my ontological context, how can I truly give myself to another? Furthermore, how can a com-munity that is out of harmony with creation be worthy of being presented to Yahweh in the Eucharistic assembly as the sign of His pleroma? The famous American painter, Ben Shahn, writes: I have always believed that the character of a society is largely shaped and unified by its great creative works, that a society is molded upon its epics, and that it imagines in terms of its cre-' ated things--its cathedrals, its works of art, its musical treas-ures, its literary and philosophic works. One might say that a public may be so unified because the highly personal experi-ence (of the artist) is held in common by the many individual members of the public. The great moment at which Oedipus in his remorse tears out his eyes is a private moment--one of deepest inward emotion. And yet that emotion, produced by art, and many other such private and profound emotions, ex-periences, and images bound together the Greek people into a great civilization, and bound others all .over the earth to them for all time to come.1D Art brings into play the unifying forces of creation but' at a deeper, more subjective, and thoroughly personal~ a~ Von Balthasar, Science, Religion, and Christianity, p. 45. a~Bernard Haring, C.SS.R., The Law o] Christ, translated by Edwin G. Kaiser, C.PP.S, (Westminster: Newman, 1961), v. 1, p. 87. ag Ben Shahn, Shape o] Content (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 45-46. level. Lacking a developed and fully shared ecological sys-tem, the religious-community unity depends on other re-lations to our world, activities of creativeness, ingenuity, activities which produce "results," or better, activities in which my being sees fruition in the corporeal world in which I am. The point is that we should not i~eglect the unifying force of art, the union of persons in the beauti-ful, in the shared experience of meaningful incarnation. But the attitude of encounter with the beautiful is not limited to what we call the fine arts. If I pick up a chisel, it is simply a tool which I use to perform some task. Con-sider, however, the difference when a highly skilled artist or carpenter picks up a chisel. His work expresses him-self, gives himself to the community. Here we return to the general theme of these 'pages: df community is to happ.en, I must give mysel[, and not simply offer the other some service which I perform. In art--from garden-ing to the liturgical setting--I give myself, I entrust to the community that deep and personal experience of creativ-ity. In accepting another's art, we "welcome" him. To welcome is active, personal, embracing. I go out of my-self to meet the other, to invite him to feel at home with me. We cannot merely accept the other's art, whatever it may be, as we accept the result of an assembly line. To accept his art, I must reach out and take his work into my own life; and by doing so I take him, too, into my life. And here again we glimpse a moment when com-munity happens. If a community does not accept the beautiful, it neglects an important binding force--a neglect which will tend to re-appear in personal encounters. Without the proper at-titude toward art, even the deep significance of liturgical symbolism and expression will lose some of the vitality which it was meant to have. The community chapel, above all, should be a masterpiece of art, expressing community, proclaiming the fellowship in God which we are. 2. Play. Finally, we should consider more deeply the meaning of play. Perhaps play is not the deepest of the arts, but it is a true creative expression of man.2° Play is of its nature public. "Through play we find ourselves no longer imprisoned and isolated in our own individual-ity.'' 21 Play "is act in its spontaneity, acting in its very activity, the living impulse.''~ As a vital phenomenon or manifestation of human being, play--to be genuine-- demands a man in contact with reality; "only the vital Eugene Fink, "The Ontology of Pla}'," Philosophy Today, v. 4 (1960), pp. 95-109. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 97. ÷ + ÷ Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 315 4. 4" 4- A~oysius Meh~, 0.$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS being., can die, work, struggle, love, and play. Only such a being is in touch With surrounding reality and the total environment--the world.''u3 Humanplay . is a creation through the medium of pleasure of a world of imaginary acuv~ty . Play ~s always character, ized by an element of representation (something like the real world and its rules, but never degrading into routine). This element determines its meaning. It then effects a transfigura-tion: life becomes peaceful.~' In our own world, play is apt to be a highly organized, commercial project; and here again its mea'ning tends to become more and more functionalized---I play, not for delight, but in order to preserve physical and psychic health. If we would look for a moment at the primitive world, we would find far more significant contours: In the primitive times, play was not practiced so much as an act in its pleasure-giving aspect as is the case for those isolated individuals or groups who periodically detach themselves from the social group to inhabit their own little isle of passing hap-piness. Originally, play was the strongest unifying force. It founded a community quite different, it is true, from that of the living and the dead, the governing and the governed, and even from that based on the family. The community of play of primitive man included all the forms and structures of com-mon life., and it called forth a reliving of all the elements of life. This reached its high point in the community festival. The ancient feast., was a liturgical spectacle where man ex-perienced the proximity of the gods, heroes, the dead, and where he found himself in the presence of all the beneficent and dreadful powers of the universe . What was represented was nothing less than the whole universe.= Genuine play is extremely important in a religiou:; community. We will develop this point further in Part III where we will see that community recreation should serve as a catechesis of the proper celeb'ration of the~ Eucharistic festival--the Mass. Inter-personal Creativity: Intersub]ectivity Community exercises are significant only in as far as they involve an encounier with the Thou. This is the point, above all others, which we must remember. This is the heart of the matter. Divorced from all genuine en-counter with the Thou, community exercises are mean-ingless. In our very proximity, it is easy for me--because of routine, fatigue, and so forth---to consider my confrere less and less as a person (a Thou) and more and more ;ts an object (an It). An object is contained within itself, something which I can possess and manipulate. A person Ibid. Ibid., pp. 104-105. Ibid., pp. 105-106. is a being to whom I can call out, whom I can invoke, who is able to return my call, and in our response to each other create community. I can say "We." But to approach the other in his own unique being and destiny, in all that makes him himself, I myself must be a presence to him. Self-consciousness atrophies,, encloses me in .myself; we may be with one another physically and temporarily, but we have not yet realized Mitsein, that full union in love and welcome where deep calls out to deep. Without doubt, our lives and our encounters with one another tend to form stereotyped patterns. In accordance with our rule and constitutions,~l meet others at certain determined places and at set times. We are joined to-gether for specific purposes: prayer, recreation, work, in short, every conceivable type of community exercise. In a way there is constant community. I am very little in real solitude whether before God or before men. The students whom I teach in the classroom, the community for whom I cook or for whom I build cabinets, the confreres with whom I watch television--these are certainly beings with whom I exist; and even though I cannot speak of the re-ligious life as being entirely or ~even properly speaking functionalized, yet frequently there is something in the other which I am neglecting. P~r~haps 1 am polite and courteous: I smile at the other and laugh at his jokes; I try to understand his problems and offer him sympathy-- and still; perhaps, we stand more in juxtaposition than in community. But there are moments when this half-face to the 'world breaks down, hours of.grace (kairos.in St. John) in which the possibility of far deeper community is suddenly revealed. It is then that we see individuals in an entirely new perspective and their presence becomes more mean-ingful to us. A time of community crisis can draw us to-gether in this way, and we learn to depend on a confrere as he is, and not just in what he does---or better, what he does incarnates what he is. The world from which our candidates come has been well described as a broken world.20 This factor must be kept in mind while considering, the present-day prob-lems of religigus life. Older forms of unity have been gradually breaking down--the family, for instance, has been to a great extent replaced by the peer group, the gang, the more casual associations. Political and techno-logical unions have become strong~ r, suggesting a growth 'in world unity. But frequently, ~he new unions which have sprung up are on the impersonal plane; technol-ogy, for. example, unites the worlO" because cultural dif- ~ Marcel, The Mystery o! Being, v. 1; pp. 22-47. The title used for this chapter is "A Broken World." ~ 4. 4. 4. Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 317 + Aloysius Mehr, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 318 ferences do not prevent a person from working a machine; in principle any one at all can learn this operation. But "any one at all," l'on,.das Man, does not exist. What exists are real people, individual, free beings, irreplace-able in the solitude of their liberty. In those moments of human existence in which I some-how transcend the world of mechanisms, I sense another dimension which I know to be more basic, and more real. I sense that there is something in myself and in the self of the other which is immanently private and which does not lend itself to concepts or superficial unifying or binding forces; this is unique subjectivity, the deepest level of per-sonal existence, that which constitutes me as I, the irreduc-ible core of personality, the shrine of what is most serious and authentic in me, the theatre of my eternal commit-ments. It is this dimension of mystery which constitutes the great distinction between persons themselves. Regardless of how close two persons may unite with one another, something of the other's.subjectivity will always evade the other: he may become a Thou for me, we may even speak with full force and meaning the word "We," but the other is always profoundly other than me. The We is precisely for this reason a miracle or the grace that it is. We can never be like two drops of water coming together to form a single drop. I may give myself deeply in love and hope to another, but he will always remain absent from me in some way and this hbsen~e is what makes him uniquely himself. But it is of the essence to note that the other is dis-closed to me in his full contingency only in those situ-ations in which we are genuinely open to one another. I can hardly speak of the mystery of subjectivity--the revelation of the other--without speaking of the mystery of intersubjectivity--the mutual revelation of both ofu~, which includes the gift of the other person to me. Here; we can speak more justly and fully of presence: presencel reveals a human dimension beyond that of proximity or even of sharing an experience, and this is the dimension of full encounter, coesse, of co-presence.~7 Presence is in its deepest reality co-presence. The structure of this situation is one of appeal and response. To meet another', I must call out to him, or welcome his appeal to myself by responding with my whole being, and not simply with a stereotyped, pre-determined response. When I speak to another, the area of mutual concern may be a purely business proposition; but if I welcome him into my life, if there springs up deep sympathy in the basic meaning of that word, we Roger Troisfontaines, S.J., De L'Existence a l'Elre (Louvain: E. Nauwelaerts, 1953), v. 2, p. 21. are to another something more than a billboard which announces the time of a community exercise or an IBM machine that reels off information. The question he asks me implies his faith in my ability to answer--my ability to stand, as it were, in his place and understand his question "from the inside.''2s" ~'The question, anyway, operates as an appeal, a signal that may or may not be received.''29 The appeal reaches me in my freedom. I may respond by being, for all practical purposes, some sort of information machine; yet in t~he course of our conver-sation, he becomes something more than a "somebody." "That is, he participates more a~d more in the absolute which is unrelatedness and we cease more and more to be 'somebody' and 'somebody e!se.' We become simply 'US.' "30 This is not merely a psychol~gical interpretation of emotional experience, for realistically speaking, "I cannot really invoke 'anybody'; I can only 'pretend~ to do so. In other words, it appears as if inv'ocation can only be ef-ficacious where there is communiiy.''al Truly, I can speak the word Thou to another only Where community is re-vealed, and we speak the word We.m This deep dimension of human reality reveals me to m~self; in my.deepest and freest being, I find the mystery Of intersubjectivity, the mystery of our solidarity in the destinies of the human phenomenon and the covenant of'creation. Although the sharpest mani[esthtion of this ontological community of men tends to be the somewhat dramatic events--birth, death, love, and go forth--which break in on our course of existence?3 still intersubjectivity runs in a scale from, for example, the chance smile of a stranger from whom I happened to ask directions in a city I am not familiar with to the union with one another in Ghrist in the Eucharistic assembly. Thi(. is important for com-munity life; by holding myself open to the other, by mak-ing myself available, by my. willingness to welcome him, entirely mechanical situations like asking a routine per-mission from my superior can be illuminated with a bit of the radiance of the truly significant. The deepest moments of intersubjectivity can act perhaps as beacons, reflecting that, unit most clearly and fully. As I enter the religious liie and make my pro-fession, the community kiss of peace manifests beautifully the community which has been created in me. This mo- ~ Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, translated by Bernard Wall (London: Rockliff, 1952), p. 21. "Ibid., p. 143. ~ ~a I bIbidid.,, pp. 114761. ~ Ibid., p. 303. a Marcel, The Philosophy o] Existence, pp. 3-4. ÷ ÷ ÷ Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 319 4. Aioysius Mehr, 0.$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ment, though past, can be kept alive, can remain a presence to me--a moment of deep community to which I bear witness in the day-to-day encounters. I know, deeply within myself, that these encounters, for all their routine, flow forth from the community which we are, the com-munity which must be ever renewed through the passing years in creative fidelity to the situations in which. I am given to myself as one whose life, in the religious com-munity, is a being-with. From this point of view, we can look more closely at the full meaning of the opportunities of our religious com-munity: The closeness in which we live with one another is dangerous if reduced to the level of the functional, but it can just as truly point out to us the heights and depths of intersubjectivity. Social bindings open out into onto-logical community. Religious community life is rooted in social organizations and patterns, but it exists on the level of the human person in his freedom. In conclusion, the activities of our religious life must reflect the deep fact of our community-being, of our being-with one another, sharing a common destiny, united in the bonds of true love in Christ, For the structure of intersubjectivity is in its fullness, the structure of love. But we must be willing to see the levels and the manifestatiom of this love dim from time to time, just as in marriage the union in love has its ups and downs. Nevertheless, I must be aware of my deep responsibility to make my-self what Louis Lavelle calls "accessible" and Gabriel Marcel "disponible" or "availabie" to the other. Marcel equates this accessibility with charity, and quite rightly so.34 This is the fundamental posture or attitude for any fruitful communication between men, a communication which means opening myself to the presence and in-fluence of the other, desiring this presence, and being will-ing to go out into something that is quite different from myself. The self-centered egoist finds it impossible to be accessible and available. He is incapable of sympathiz~ ing with other people or imagining their situation. "He remains shut up in himself, in the petty circle of his private experience, which forms a kind of hard shell round him that he is incapable of breaking through.''3G Handy rules for making encounter possible, while help-ful, cannot be used without the danger of taking up a position outside the encounter itself in order to manipulate both the other and myself.3e I can perhaps ~' Ibid., p. 15. ~ Marcel, The Mystery o/Being, v. 10 p. 201. a Dale Carnegie gives.many of these handy rules in his famous book How to Win Friends and Influence.People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936). The value of some of these rules is questionable because of their pharisaical tendencies. be more aware of what I cannot do--in summary, tO treat him as an object, as a somebody, as anyone at all, as a function (whether teacher., farpenter, or any o[ the categories that can substitute for the person). In dis-agreements, I must respect the gift, for the other gives himself to me in his ideas and intdrpretations; in com- ¯ munity we can seek not a Procru~stean compromise but a kind of common expectation so that together we can go on seeking the light of truth. Th~ very things which tear us apart from one another~differences in age, in taste, in talent, in personal history-~zan unite us, not in a collectivity where differences are ignored or frowned upon, but in a community of mu[ual understanding. Creativity and Community Ideals High ideals attract men; the. higher the ideals the greater the attraction. Ideals fire, men with enthusiasm. But ideals cannot be handed physically to me as, for in-stance, a book or the constitutions.' Ideals can be described on paper, but they cannot exist oh paper. They are real-ized only in free creativity at the ~ery depths of being. More particularly, the ideals of. a gommunity must be ideaIs for particular men. They must be possible of fulfill-ment in their unique life and in the unique situation which invites their loyalty andS,, faithfulness to them. Every religious must create, again and again, the tra, di-tions and ideals of his order or congregation .by incarnat-ing them anew in his own life. The passage of ideals to incarnate human life, to act and incarnation in space and time is truly creative, for it ~nvolves a full and personal gift of myself creating meaning. Bu~t this does not happen in a void, but rather in an encounter, or 'a revelation of what I am (in the community that we are) that calls forth my witness and fidelity. An e, ncounter means a call and a response; a gift and a pre~ence of another who confronts me in my uniqueness; a re'alization of the destiny which lies at the heart o[ myselL "In action," writes Teilhard, "I cleave to the creatlve~ power of God; I co-incide with it; I become not only its instrument but its living prolongation.''~7 In the words of Gabriel Marcel: We have to realize that there are modes o[ creation which do not belong to the aesthetic order, and which are within the reach of everybody and it is in so far as he is a creator, at how-ever humble a level, that any man at all can recognize his own freedom.~ In our context, this means that in my freedom I must ~ Teilhard de Chardm, The D:vtne Md~eu, pp. 26-27. m Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, translated by G. Fraser (Chicago: Regnery, 1952), p. 16. 4. 4. 4. Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 4. 4. 4. Alo~$ius OM~e.Ch~r., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS respond to the unique religious vocation, which I have received from God, and that response is the truly creative assumption of the ideals, traditions, customs, and rules of my community. If I am to be a religious, and not merely act like one, I must enter into the living tradition of my community, see clearly the deep relationship be-tween law and reality (law in its deepest meaning in Christianity is the living out of our incorporation in Christ), and sense within myself the dynamism within the community, the promise of the future held in the hands of the present moment, the hour of trlal and grace. By translating the traditional ideals of my particular community into my life, I reach back into the very an. rials of history and, at the same time, proclaim that which is yet to come. I enter into living communion with the past and the future, with all who have professed, or will in the future profess, these ideals. Ideals seen in their' existent,_'al fullness are moments of consecration, joininl~ us with the ever-continuing history of our community. As Hiiring points out, History is to be viewed from the standpoint of the "now" in relation to beginning and end. The historic present reaches out into past and future. The past has its heritage which may be compared to the warp and woof of a rich fabric constantly redesigned into marvelously new and alluring shapes and formsi The treasure.is a summons or invitation, and a challenge as well, to the free will of man in the historic moment of the present.~ My response to this challenge wiaps up the rich her-itage of my order in the dynamism of my unique, per-sonal life, and.hands it as a sacred trust to the community, enriched, for future generations. By thus entering deeply into the We, and sharing together, feeling together in our deepest being the subtle movements and aspirations which translate possibility into act and thus tradition into life, and being into incarnations, I realize existentially arid not only notionally or rationally both the being which I am called to be and the significance of the union of men who have joined their own destinies together in respond-ing to the same ~hallenge. But just as we cannot understand man until we see his marvelous destiny, so we cannot begin to see the beauty and mystery of our community until we view it in its promise, in its dynamic growth and activity towards fullness. The religious community, as we pointed out in the introductory pages of this paper, exists within two wider communities--the community of life and t'J~e community of grace--from which it draws its own vital- The Law o] Christ, v. 1, p. 87. ity and life-thrust. In either Community, our destiny is not encompassed by the immediate projects, particular ends, or temporary goals. Our being plunges back into the dynamisms of created being itself; and in us the world achieves a certain completion of its own dest!ny. We are then a kind of particular and contingent, though nonetheless real, summation or symbol or eikon, image, of the community of all being. But the deepest values of our activity do not only capitulate in us the mystery of creation and the dy-namisms of life. As Teilhard would phrase it, ontogenesis has passed on into Christogenesis. Creation has been caught up, in its deepest dynamisms, into the new cre-ation, which is fulfillment, not destruction (Eph 2:15). As a community within the Church, and indeed its true eihon, its incarnation, we continue the forces of creation through the Incarnation and the New Adam into the promise and pledge of the Parousia (1 Cor 15:24). In this perspective, or better in this divine milieu, lies the true significance of our activities; we are bound together under a common cause which is as wide and deep as the community of men and as transcendent in its promise as the parousial presence in which life and temporality shall be consummated in the supreme en-counter of love. Seen in this light, we must modify our earlier thesi~ about the artificiality of the religious community. Adapt-ing Teilhard's terminology and the vision of St. Paul, we can rightly say that the religious community is an anticipation of a later and final stage of evolution, the unity of all men in Christ, the Omega point of historical being. This higher unity of mankind, which we an-ticipate, involves a center of gravity, a focal point, an axis above and beyond the ecological and physical. And what is this axis of religious community life? It is charity. The religious community must be founded on love of God and neighbor. This new level of mankind, as any leap in evolution, involves a definitive departure, a break from the lower stages even though it is their continuation, ful-fillment, and transformation.4° And yet, as an anticipation we are beginning to create the new within the old; this combination of the old and the new must involve sacrifice and tension--the death of the type as we pass into the era of the antitype, the dis-sipation of shadow as we strive to realize the light. There is tension and strain. Creation groans and is "in the pangs of childbirth" (Rom 8:22). Life is born through death. In our very community, creation is being re-capitulated in Christ. Christ is being born! The Divine Milieu, p. 86. ÷ ÷ ÷ Community Exegcises VOLUME 21, 1962 323 dloysius Mehr, 0~.~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Part HI: Community in the Word The deepest significance of religious community exer-cises is not found in mere human encou.nter, but in the encounter with men in God. Religious life .is a charism, a localized outpouring of the Spirit of God, who fills the whole .Church, in such an intense and concentrated way as to bear witness to a particular reality which in varying degrees permeates the whole Church. Keligious life is not radically different from Christian life; rather it is the living image, the eikon, the type and inauguration of perfect Christian life. The perfection to which all Christians are called and in which all shall share when the Day of the Lord dawns is incarnately realized in the Church today by the religious life, which can be called the "sacrament" of Christian perfection. The flourishing of religious life in the Church stands an apocalyptical pledge that the things to come will truly come because they have already been realized living type; religious life bears encouraging witness to each generation of Christians that the life of the Gospel can truly be lived to the full now, into the fullness that is to come. Such a witness can only be the fruit of the Spirit outpoured in charismatic plenitude. Once the religious life is seen as charismatic, its sacra-mental and ecclesiological dimensions become apparent and important. Since the religious life is the image of perfect Christian life, the basic structure of religious life must be seen in relation to the strhctural pattern of the Church's life. The possible points of reference here are numerous; we will limit the discussion to two features of Christian life which seem to be most fundamental. First, the Church is a community formed by the word of God. Secondly, the Church is a community of sacramental worship. Community in Covenant The Church of the New Testament, seen in the con-tinuity of sacred history as recorded in the. Scriptures, is the fulfillment of that people of God which was in continual formation down through Old Testament times by the gradually unfolding revelation of the Word of God. After the fall, God's Word appears on the human scene as a call; God called Abraham to leave his people and his father's house for a land of promise in which his descendants would multiply until they became as numer-ous as the sands of the sea (Gen 12:1). When Abraham responded to the initial promptings of God's Word, God spoke again to Abraham to make a covenant with him for a mutual sharing of destiny down through Abraham's posterity, which would come into being as a result of God's Covenant-Word. Abraham's family came into being as the family of God (Gen 15). As the history of the family of God folds back upon it-self, the same pattern emerges in the formation of the Israelite people from the family of Abraham. The Israel-ites were called out of Egypt to hear the Word of God proclaimed on Mount Sinai'(Ex 3:16--17). Another cov-enant resulted from this new proclamation, a covenant which was again creative of the community with whom it was made (Ex 24:8). The Israelites became a spiritual community in becoming the people of God in the Mosaic covefiant. The pattern recurs again as each successive wave of revelation leaves in its wake a fuller, more spiritualized community to whom God's Word is addressed as a call and a covenant. There can be no doubt from the annals of sacred history that when God speaks to man He speaks to man in community. In the dialogue between God and man, God is the I who speaks the creative Thou to the community. In the light of the fall of Adam, this dialogue appears as a healing dialogue. The community of the'human race disintegrated in sin. It appears to be God's plan to build it back up again meticulously in time, .through the gradual revelation of his creative Word in a gradually more perfect community, until these last times in which He speaks to us by a Son (Heb 1:2). He is the perfect Word uttered in the community which in the new Adam already exists but which is still being perfegted. (created) and realized (actualized) in all the members of the new human race by the continued call and proclamation of the new covenant in every life and time. In the realm of salvation, man does not walk alone and he is not free to do whatever he chooses. He is saved in community by the healing Word of God which is spoken to and in the community which it itself creates. The inner structure and dynamism of the Church is to be and to become this community of the Word of God. Let us now look more closely into the religious life in terms of what has already been said. If the religious life is to be the type and the eschatalogical pledge of the life of the Church, it ought to be the flesh-and-blood realiza-tion par excellence of the community of the Word of God. It is here that the progress of sacred history toward the fulfillment of God's plan of perfect community ought to be moving forward to the last day when the perfect community of the cosmos will be reheaded in Christ and God will be all in all (I Cor 15:28). The implications of this reach deeply into the basic attitudes incarnate in the concrete circumstances of re- Eoxme~mc~uen$lty VOLUME 21, 1962 325 Alo~situ Mehr, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ligious life. If the religious community is to be at all, the breath--the spirit-~of. God's Word must be free to move through and in us. Through baptism and confirmation we received the Spirit unto the building up of the com-munity to the full stature of Christ.4x The religious com-munity must be the community of the Word of God, true to the pattern of sacred history outlined above: call, proclamation of the Word, covenant. 1. (Tall. We are accustomed to the idea of a vocation to the religious life. We must draw this out to its concrete conclusions. First, when God calls man He calls him to community. A vocation to the religious life .is a call to community. Secondly, when God calls man to a religious community, He calls him to be initiated into a particular religious community. This means that the candidate must undergo a true initiation into the concrete life of that community and that he must successfully complete the initiation: he has to prove himself ready and able to renounce anything and everything which stands between him and the ideals of his vocation, to accept deeply in his incarnate being the two-edged sword of the Spirit. The religious pre-novitiate and novitiate training ought to be for the religious community what the catechu-menate was for the primitive Church. It ought to test the authenticity of the call. The community, but also the candidate, must ask the question: Is the Word of God truly at work here? God speaks toman in human language, not in weight-less abstractions. Hence the family background of the candidate must be looked into to see if God's Word came to him through parents genuinely in touch with God by their lives of faith. I[ the indications here are strongly negative, the.stronger influence of less natural channels of God's Word must be evident. Because of the psychology involved in such a situation, the candidate's response to this call must be tested for its supernatural authenticity by a convergence of other factors indicating the working and direction of Providence with adverse circumstances. The following questions must be answered: first, hits the candidate attained at least the minimum strength of character, mental health, and social ability required for successful community life; for the monastery or convent cannot function as a rehabilitation center without in-justice to its other members. Secondly, does the candidate at least show promising signs of being able to respond to maturing influences that will be able to help him to ~ Eph 4:13; see La Saihte Bible de Jerusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1956), p. 1546, note n: "Non pas simplement le chrfitien arriv~ h l'~tat de 'parfait,' mais l'Homme parfait en un sens collectif: soit le Christ lui-m~me., soit mieux encore le Christ total, T~.te. et mere- grow to a greater measure of personal authenticity? If the latter is the case, one must investigate whether or not these maturing influences so much needed are actually present in the community which the candidate wishes to join and whether they will be accessible to him. ~This is only another way of asking whether this person,~who does seem to be called by God, is being called to thig particular community. 2. Proclamation. This has led us to our next point. The community has been called together to hear the Word of God; hence that Word must be. authentically proclaimed in the community. In the Church there are official proclaimers, messengers (kerukes), for this task: the priestly hierarchy. In the religious community, this responsibility rests primarily with the superiors. They must be men of God's Word. The Bible must be familiar ground to them. They ought to be able to breathe the Scriptures. God's Word cannot be spoken with authority except by men who themselves hear the Word of God and keep it. St. Paul's timely words to Timothy, the head of the Ephesus community, point out this obligation: Attend to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching., to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was g~ven you by prbphetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you. Practice these duties, devote yourself to them, so that all may see your progress. Take heed to yourself and your teaching; hold to that, for by so doing you will save both your-self and your hearers (1 Tim 4:15--16; see also Col 3:16). The central time and place for the proclamation of God's Word to the community is the liturgy. Everything within the range of possibility should be done to make this proclamation authentic. The laws of liturgical psy-chology must be understood and incorporated into actual liturgical practice. Also it should be understood that proclaiming God's Word in the liturgy is not confined to the scriptural readings but extends to the homily or sermon delivered in the assembly. It is a mistake to think that because religious do a great deal of spiritual reading they do not need to hear sermons. Faith comes from hearing (Rom 10:17). The Scriptures must be au-thoritatively interpreted in relation to concrete con-temporary events. Here the jurisdictional power of su-periors can be seen to be more than a matter of legality. Theirs is the charism to preach authoritatively and to recognize the authentic prophetic spirit in those whom they delegate to preach. In general, there ought to be within the community a real atmosphere of reverence to the Bible. This is mani-fested, for instance, in the handling of the sacred books. Dilapidated Missals ought not be found on the altar. Out-side of the liturgical assembly, the Missal should not be ÷ ÷ Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 AIoysi~s Mehr, O&C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS carelessly thrown in the corner of the sacristry but re-served in a place of honor, like the Blessed Sacrament and the Holy Oils. The same can be said for the Bible used for community reading during the meal, and to a lesser extent for the copy of the Bible kept by individuals in their rooms. Private Bible reading ought to be en. couraged within the spiritual reading program; but this entails some instruction in how to read the Bible, es-pecially for those who do not have the benefit of an in-tensive Scripture course. All these things are only ex. amples, but they indicate a direction .of attitude which must be fostered if the seed of God's Word is to find good ground to grow into a community. 3. Covenant. The proclamation of the Word of God in the community climaxes in covenant, an intimate I. Thou relationship of God with the community. Itshall be a continual burnt offering throughout your genera-tions at the door of the tent of meeting before the Lord; where I will meet with you, to speak there with you . And I will dwell among the people of Israeli and will be their God. And they shall know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them lorth out o] the land oI Egypt that I might dwell among them: I am the Lord their God (Ex 29:42-46). The intimacy of the covenant is best expressed in the Scriptures by the idea of a sacred meal with God at the time of the covenant. "Then Moses and Aaron and Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of Israel . they beheld God and ate and drank" (Ex 24:9-11). The sacred meal will be discussed later. What is of moment here is that God addresses the community as Thou. He covenants with the community. He shares the destiny of the community, and in this way alone does the community become God's people, heir to the promises. "I will be your God and you will be my people" (Jet 32:38)~ The community has in fact been established by the progressive call of God through both Testaments. Or, to put it more critically, the concrete possibility has been established for the authentically Christian community to become to be, to grow in creative fidelity into being fully what it already is in the reality of infallible promise. Nor is the creative, call merely the point of origin; the call is repeated through and in the community of the Church to each generation for the divinization of every era. We are in fact inserted into this order of the Spirit; and by this very reality bear the serious responsibility of. hastening the Parousia (2 Pet 3:12) by a total effort to build community, to respond to the creative call ad- dressed to us, to assure that there will be in us a Thou for the moment when God speaks his "I." There must be real communion of persons who have an authentic, conscious, un-egocentric participation in the human nature and creatureliness they share in their com-mon flesh from the loins of Adam. There must be com-munity in which Christ is progressively becoming in-carnated and given being-in-the-world, caught up, as it were, by the Spirit and created time and time again in authentic response (possible only in community) to the liturgical Word. proclaimed now, as in times past, in liturgical community. Then the great Passover of Jesus from the Cross into the glory of His Resurrection~ Ascen-sion, and Enthronement can take root- in the world and create from our community authentic and supernatural Christian community, the Body of the Lord. For a man to enter the We :of the community, certain things must happen to him. For one thing~ he must have experienced encounter with other persons in the com-munity. This occurs on various interpenetrating levels. On the sacramental level, the encounter begins with his initiation into the Church through baptism and confirma-tion which are an encounter with the concrete Church community. In the religious life a further sacramental encounter is the act of religious profession. Think of the handclasp, the Amen of the community, and the kiss of peace. , Through baptism, confirmation, and profession, the religious has already met the members ofthe community on the sacramental level, the. authenticity of which meet-ing will depend on the authenticity of the ritual. This also means that he is ontologically structured for and pledged to this encounter in all its dimensions. Other levels of encounter which are basic to the we experience are the father-son relationship between su-perior and subject, the brother relationship between con-freres, the teacher-student relationship, and the more in-timate encounter of true religious friendship. A parish community is as strong as the basic I-Thou relationship between the husband and wife in the families of the pa.rish, since marriage is the effective sign of the Church. similarly a promotion of genuine I-Thou relationships within the community builds up the great We of the I. Thou relationship with God, as the.se experiences open the personalities of the religious to that common human nature and creatureliness which would otherwise be hoarded up individualistically by each selbcenter. The human nature and creatureliness which we share is a concrete human nature and creatureliness incarnate in the human beings around us, and it is there where it must ÷ Community VOLUME 21, 1962 32g ÷ ÷ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS be met. Here we have the sensible, real basis, the sign, of the Body of Christ which is realized in sacrament. Another experience which conditions for and builds up the great We is the common sharing of a rich ex-perience, a going through something together, a com-mon passover. God made his covenant with Israel after the Exodus experience, after the people had passed through the Red Sea together. This experience involves the elements of crisis, judgment, and victorious issue. Once again, on the sacramental level, this is accomplished through the catechumenate and initiation sacraments of baptism and confirmation in which the candidate shares the Christian community's experience of the Exodus, of the Passover from the Egypt of sin through the Red Sea of baptism to the new life of the people of God. In the religious life a further sacramental or ritual sharing of crisis-victory is embodied in profession, the passover into the state of perfection. But this sacramental ontology of community on the basis of shared experience becomes incarnate in and is the fulfillment of numerous experiences undergone on other levels of life. Religious life can provide many ex-cellent experiences of solidarity through crises and vic-tories. As examples can be mentioned: working out phil-osophical and theological problems; a difficult community project such as the continued and successful support of a mission; a common experience of joy such as might be expected at ordinations and professions; the death of a member of the community; in short, any event which deeply affects the community. This solidarity in experience is not limited to events. What may be more important is the common experience of the presence of great persons. Just as the Israelite community was somehow bound up in the persons of Moses, Josue, and Aaron, and just as the Church is bound up in the persons of Christ, the Apostles, and the Virgin Mary, so the religious community is bound up in the per-sons of its superiors and leading figures. The superior must be a deep, spiritually mature person who is in personal contact with his community so that the members of the community actually have a chance to experience him and feel a solidarity in this experience. As fdr the other leading figures in the community, the more deep personalities God has given to a community, so much richer will that community life be as the solidarity in this experience broadens the horizons of the com-munlty. It is a corruption of a precious gift for a com-munity to consider its outstanding members as divisive forces or to make them feel like isolated individualists. Sharing the experience of encounter with a great man is one of the strongest bonds of unity there is between man and man. We have discussed some factors in the formation of the community We which becomes the Thou whom God addresses in his covenant dialogue. There is one other element of covenant that should be mentioned, and it is the sharing of destiny. God becomes involved in the community's destiny and the community is caught up into God's great mystery of salvation, the secret hidden from the ages and revealed fully in his Son, the movement of salvation history (Col 1:26-27). There is a movement toward fulfillment, toward Pleroma. Christ has already been established as the Head of new order in heaven, but his Body is still undergoing construction upon earth. The completion of Christ's Body is being realized little by little. It is a steady growth until the full measure of the perfect Man is attained. This fullness, Pleroma, means that in Christ harmony has been established among all things, that the universe is "filled b~ the creative presence of God."42 When this day shall arrive, the Church will contain Christ in his fullness. The Church will reach the stature of the perfect man (Eph 1:23), The movement .of salvation history, however, is not inevitable. God is faithful and will accomplish His pur-pose, but His people do not always respond with like fidelity, and He will not use force. If the Day of the Lord is to come, it is the Christian community, we, who must hasten it (2 Pet 3:12), we who must move ahead; and we are free to contribute to this forward movement or to hold it it check. If we should choose the latter, we would become like the Thessalonians who sat around and waited for the Parousia and who were upbraided for their pre-sumption (2 Th). The religious community ought to be an advance guard unit in this forward march, for it is by definition a place of perfection and fulfillment. This again points up the necessity for the proclamation of the Word of God in the community. The history of salvation is contained in the Scriptures. God's plan is there, and only those who are familiar with its patterns are capable of reliable frontier work on the boundaries of sacred history. Ful-fillment does not mean reckless lunging out in any direc-tion. Yet neither i~ it all mapped out in detail. Here the living tradition of the Scriptures assumes its rightful im-portance. The leaders of the community must be men who walk in the way of the Lord and meditate on His law. If we may say so, they must have a scriptural instinct, a Pierre Benoit, O.P., "Corps, t~te et pl~r6me darts les Rpitres de lacaptivit~," Revue Biblique, v. 63 (1956), pp. 5-44. ÷ ÷ ÷ Community VOLUME 21, 1962 .331 ÷ Aloysius OM.Se.hCr., REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS a feel for the way God does things, and a contact with the currents of life in the Church. They must be attentive to the voice of higher authority and at the same time be aware of the prophetic movements within their own com-munity. They literally have to know which way the Wind --the Holy Spirit--is blowing. Community in Worship At this point lines of thought begin to converge: the Word of God, community, covenant, sacred history; and their point of convergence is worship. We may say that the community called into being by the Word of God in the context of sacred history through the intimacy of the covenant is primarily a worshiping community. What happens in Christian sacramental rituals? The Word of God, spoken once definitively in Jesus Christ, is spoken now in the Church community which is the Body of Christ, the real, glorified soma tou Christou, which is building up to completion. Ritual makes possible.through its pneumatic bodiliness, its symbolic or sacramental na-ture, the entrance by the commUnity here and now into the great sacramental moment, the primordial time, Christ's great Resurrection Passover, which stands at a particular moment of history yet transcends it, catches up within itself the vitality of all history, its direction and its completion. Here the Christian community whose task it is to move sacred history ahead, to build up the Body of Christ, is in contact with the vital source of the upward thrust of sacred history: the leap of the crucified Jesus up into the life of the Christos-pneuma. Covenant intimacy with God becomes possible in ritual: the I-Thou rela-tionship between the Father and the community comes into being in the spoken word and the meal ritual (or other symbolic act), in both of which, taken together, the risen Christ in whom we meet the Father is present through the working of the Spirit. By hearing the ef-fective Word together and eating the sacred meal to-gether (or doing the ritual action of the other sacraments), the members of the community pass together through the greatest of all experiences: the Passover of Christ, the primordial passage of non-being into being, of what is away from God to what is in God, of what is dead: sarx, to what is alive: pneuma. 1. Mass. In this context, the Mass, as the supreme Passover ritual, becomes for the Church and the religious community the supreme moment of covenant communion with the Father and with one another. The place of meet-ing with God is the place of.assembly and formation of the people of God. The people of God were formed to the Qehal Yahweh by communication with God himself. The community entered a covenant with God, and the effec- tive token of this covenant was the paschal meal. This reaches its fulfillment in the Eucharist where we become one people of God by sitting at table with God. For the community, the Mass is not just one of the de-votional exercises of the day, nor merely one of the "means" used by a group 0f3ndividuals for accumulating personal merits. It is first of all a gathering, an assembly of Christians, those who are of Christ. Secondly, it is not an hour of community meditation, but an hour of com-munity action, an event, a celebration. The act of cele-bration is important, for the event is Christ's event (here we have the true meaning of ex opere operato), and the community enters into the mystery of Christ by their ritual transposition of the action of Christ. The event is the Resurrection Passover of Christ which He Himself rit-ually transposed in the sacramental moment of the Last Supper and ordered to be clone in commemoration of Him. Let us examine these two interrelat'ed realities: com-munity and event. The worshiping community is not a priori, not an automatically given thing with which to work out the problem of celebrating Mass. Nor can the community be improvised haphazardly. It must be .built up by active and intelligent effort; it demand~ active con-cern and reverence for the laws of human acting. In fact, if the sacramental reality is to be accomplished, if com-munity is to be created on the supernatural level, the sacramental signs must be authentic. As St. Thomas has told us: the sacraments signify what they cause and cause only insofar as they signify,aa This highlights the necessity for catechesis: instruction, explanation, acclimatization--initiation into the reality of the community and the event. Catechesis is a psy-chological necessity because words and actions must be significant. The Bible and the ritual must be understood by the community. Cathechesis is accomplished both by systematic instruc-tion and by the actual celebration authentically done. We have already spoken of some things that can be done out-side the celebration regarding the catechesis of the Bible. A suggestion or two concerning the cathechesis of the ritual outside the celebration may slip into what fol-lows by an occasional convenient parenthesis, but what we are primarily interested in here is .the ca-thechesis that occurs within the celebration of Mass itself. No matter how much formal instruction we have about the Mass, we can come to learn the Mass only by doing the Mass. Actions must be learned from within, by doing. No matter how many books we read about how Summa Theologiae, 3, q. 62, a. 1, ad I. + + + ommunit~ Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 ÷ ÷ ÷ Aloysius Meh¢, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ,334 to study or how to play tennis, we will never really have learned these activities until we have entered into them. Catechesis must adapt the celebration of the Mass to the psychological climate of the assembly. This, of course, must be done within the limit of the laws of the Church. We do not, for instafice, simply "adapt" our celebration into the vernacular, despite the fact that this might be an excellent cathechetical move, one to be hoped, prayed and worked for through legitimate channels. But there is much to be done within the limits of the present rubrical framework. Let us begin with the community itseff. We can talk the idea of community to people until the Parousia, and it will not create community. A Christian community has to be built up by the celebration of Mass itself. The daily conventual Mass is a summons to enter deeply into com-munity. The community must experience community. Community is indeed where community happens. In the primitive Church there were at first no Catholic schools to teach the idea of community. Community was built up through worship, a worship that took into account the concrete conditions of the lives of the faithful. One of these basic concrete conditions is the bodiliness of men. Body is intrinsic to human personality. Man not only has a body, but also is a body. As we have already seen, man is a spirit incarnate in a body which is its epiphany, its revelation, its sign. And to come to the point here, it is through his body that man is part of the community of the race of Adam 'and through his body that he enters into conscious contact with the community. It is the role of good catechesis to create a sensible at-mosphere of community. It is especially when brethren gather around the altar that they ought to get that ecce quara bonum feeling. What can be done toward this? First of all, there have to be people there. And they ought to be there for the Mass. If I sit down to eat a meal with someone and he insists on reading the paper, I do not feel that he is really with me. Likewise, if the man next to me at Mass is "getting his meditation in" or "getting through his Office," the sense of community i~ being broken down. This does not mean that everyone at Mass has to be doing the same thing, for there are many liturgies or works to be done at the one great liturgy: the celebrant, the choir, the schola, the altar ministers, the organist, the choir director--all have their own work to contribute to th~ whole. But there must be that sense of the whole to which all are contributing. All present must feel that "we came here to do the Mass." The importance of this, I think, is felt instinctively even by those who close themselves up in a meditation book at Mass: they stand, sit, and kneel with the community. This at least is better than nothing, but it is for from the ideal. Akin to this is the practice of having "a Mass going on" in church when the community has come there to do something else. One picks up the habit of not becoming distracted by the Mass. Not only does this dull ofie's abil-ity to participate at other times when he is supposed to, but such a psychologically unsound practice of not doing what you are doing, on the basic religious level, has a disintegrating effect on the total personality and shows up in other activities. The desire to "get in an extra Mass" may proceed from sincere devotion, but it some-what misses the point. Whenever the Mass is used as a background or as something that is secondary, its signifi-cance (which is of prime importance in the sacramental realm) is greatly lessened (I do not say completely ab-sent); this lessening of significance breaks down the au-then. ticity of the ritual, hence its effectiveness. But in the Mass-and-something-else situation, it is not only the Mass that suffers. When two community exercises which de-mand full attention are combined, neither is able to have any depth. The sense of community at Mass is also built up by the alertness and freshness of the presence of the participants. This means that those who plan to attend Mass in the morning ought io feel it their responsibility to get enough sleep the night before to enable them to be attentive to one another and to the sacred actions. It also means that Mass should not be scheduled to be done after a marathon of spiritual exercises has just about exhausted the normal capabilities of a man to do the intensive work which good praying demands. Another important contribution to the sense of com-munity is the very structure of the church building. People at Mass ought to be able to see the altar and to see each other. They must be able to feel close to one another and not to feel oppressed by one another. Their place in church ought to be related to their role at the Mass. They ought to be able to feel together in the pres-ence of God. These problems have to be worked out on the architectural level by those competent in the field. The furnishings of a church must be such as not to distract from the main purpose of the building. The com-munity ought not to be pulled in all directions by a penny arcade of devotional concession stands. This does not mean elimination of statues from the church, but it does mean an integration of all furnishings into the main-stream of attention. This must be done by the planning of skillful designers, not by a mere process of accumula-tion. ÷ ÷ ommunlty Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 335 4. ÷ 4. Aloy~ius Mehr, 0.$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 336 The celebrant, too, has his role to play in creating a sense of community. He must realize his role as the leader of the community, as one who acts in their name, and must by his very actions sweep up the community .into participation with him. Hemust understandthat not all parts of thd Mass are equally important, and he must learn how to emphasize the important parts with the proper gestures and tone of voice, and not to monopolize the attention of the community when what he is doing is not the main thing going on, especially when the choir is singing. His gestures must be authentic. When he greets the people, there should be contact, and he should wait for their response. When he proclaims the Word of God, he should do so loudly, clearly, and expressively. During the great presidential, prayer, the anaphora, from the pre-face to the doxology, he should invite the silent attention of the community to what he is doing by his own sense of presence, by his poise and serenity. His whole bodily attitude must be expressive of praise and thanksgiving, His priestly vestments ought to mark him as a man of dis-tinction. In short, he must look and sound like a leader, and to do this he has to feel like one. He is not to be esoteric or insert idiosyncracies into the celebration, yet his action must be personal action flowing expressively from his total personality which on the deepest level is priestly. Finally, the two .very important factors in building up the sense of community are music and movement. People experience real togetherness by mutual singing and mu-tual movement. Every conventual Mass should be a com-munity sing. But again this does not mean that everyone has to sing everything. Some of the prescribed chants are too difficult to be enjoyable for those who are not trained to sing them. The obvious answer is to let the trained schola sing those parts, while the rest of the community listens attentively--at that moment their liturgy is med-itative listening together. Beyond this, there is need for the composition of good music which is singable by the real communities that actuall~ exist. °The ability to sing must be built up, but we have to start where people are and help them experience their own way into better things. The most familiar mutual movements at Mass are the changes of posture: standing, sitting, kneeling, and bow-ing. These movements ought to be expressive and forma-tive of community. This means that all should rise, bow, and so forth, together because community actions are not fully authentic unless every member makes his contribn-tion to the communal movement. These movements, as well as all the ceremonies during any liturgical function, should be expressive of two things: first, the gravity of what is being done, and secondly, the anirna una et cor unum of the community. Beyond the familiar change~ of posture, there are three great movements of the .people of God at Mass--the En-trance Procession, the Offertory Procession, and the Com-munion Procession~during which the community is sing-ing together. There are practical difficulties in restoring the movement features of the first two processions which have been reduced to the singing of the Introit and Of-fertory Antiphons. The difficulties are not insurmount-able, but they are more formidable than the difficulty it would entail to reintroduce the singing feature of the Commun, ion Procession. There are few experiences of community which can match walking in a group of your confreres in joyful song on the way to and fron~ the table of the Lord where you share the .one Bread. Let Us now make a few observations about the cat-echesis of the Mass as an event. The Mass is not an ordi-nary dialogue, nor an ordinary meal. It is a festive speak-ing of God and a festive eating with God. It involves a longing for happiness and salvation, for every feast" has the atmosphere of expectation and liberation from rou-tine. This is the eschatological dimension of the Mass. The early Christian found it easier to feel the festivity of the Mass because he found it easier to see the Mass as a cel-ebration of the coming of the risen Lord, a pledge of His final coming. For the early Christian Christ was present in the Church, especially in the actual liturgical assembly gathered together in His name: as the community cam~ together, Christ came among them. When those who love come together the tone is one of festivity. The Mass must, then, become a real celebration, as its interpenetrating rhythm of dialogue and meal indicate it is meant to be. At a celebration people talk and sing and move around. There is real, free communication. Mass is a dialogue between God and His people through the mediatorship of the priest. The priest talks to God in the name of the people and to the people in the name of God. When people really come together in a festival setting to talk with one another, they bring their interests, their work, their experiences, and their whole personality which transcends these experiences. Here one can see the role that community recreation and community meals can play as a catechesis of the proper celebration of Mass. It is not stretching a point to see community recreation as the extension and fruit of the festive dialogue of the Mass; in itself it has something of the nature of a ritual and might indeed be considered a sacramental for community. Play is sacred. When the Bible says the people rose up ÷ ÷ + Community Exercises VOLUME 21o 1962 337 ÷ ÷ Aloysius Mehr, O.~.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 338 to play while Moses was conversing with God on Mount Sinai, it speaks condemningly of the event, including its sexual misbehavior, precisely because it was an act of false worship (Ex 32:1-6). Later in Israelite history we know that David leapt and danced before the Ark of the Covenant (2 S 6:14). Play is an expression of joy and freedom--like the Sabbath day of rest. The idea of worship and the free-dom from the drudgery of work belong together. The need to break routine is rooted in man's desire for the freedom of salvation. Play is free dialogue, whether it be in the form of relaxed conversation, or a contest in which make-believe competition is manufactured, or the sharing of some unroutinized activity just "for the fun of it." Play keeps a man from b~ecoming a slave to his work; it keeps him from confining himself to the world of I-It. We take a game seriously to a point. We must take it that far, for playing is literally "making fun" of work. The religious significance of this is deep. One can take his life's work seriously only to a point; from there he must "make fun" of it in the sight of God and man as David made fun before the Ark and the people. Other-wise he will become proud and self-sufficient. The world of I-It is not to be despised, but it must lead up to the world of I-Thou, of dialogue between man and man and between man and God. Community recreation ought to be fun, but it must never be dissipation or aesthetically squalid, or the whole meaning of it is destroyed. It is the bringing of the real necessity of one's work to the level of free personal dialogue with God and man. A person-alized celebration of community recreation is a great help to a personalized celebration of Mass. The festivities of" the Mass reach their climax in the meal celebration. Food and drink are an essential part of a celebration. The Mass is a holy eating together, a sacred banquet in which we are filled with the bread of life and drink of the cup of gladness. The symbolism of wine especially provides the atmosphere of festivity. The feeling tone of the Mass is that of a celebration of people who are spiritually well fed and well drunk, who feel the spiritual fullness from the rich bread and the spiritual freedom from the intoxicating wine. Here we might note that the regular community meals can be a real catechesis of the Mass, since they are in fact a sacramental extension of the meal aspect of the Mass through the ritual prayers surrounding them. Human eating is of its nature a sacred and communal act. It is not a mere refueling for another round of work. God is present at every meal in his gifts of food and drink and in the fellowship around the table. The prayers before and after meals set the tone of the meal. They are mos~tly i, excerpts from the Psalms, breathing the spirit of the anawim, the spirit of joy, thanksgiving, appreciation, de-pendence on God, praise, awareness of God's presence, simplicity. The meals themselves should reflect all this. The food should be simple fare, b,ut good. It ought, t.o be eaten in an atmosphere of calm enjoyment, not of frantic dumping from platter to plate to palate. There ought to be a real spirit of fellowship at the table. But besides fellowship at table, we should also be aware of how community meals tie in with the Mass. Father Godfrey Van Lit, O.S.C., describes the intimate relation-ship between the refectory and the ~ chapel, community meals and the Mass.4. The Christian dining room table is a symbol of the Eucharistic table, the altar, and hence the refectory used to be decorated with a large, artistic painting of the Last Supper. As we have silence of place in the chapel, so we also observe silence of place in the refectory, And as in the community Mass the leader pro-claims to us the Good News, so also during our commu-nity meals a lector acquaints us with the consequences of the Gospel narrative. Both at Mass and at table, we are reminded that "not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that comes forth from. the mouth of God" (Mr 4:4). Both the Mass and the community meals ought to par-take of the spirit of the Passover and Chaburah meals of the Old Testament. The pervading tone here is that of a family meal. The community superior presides in the place of honor at the table as the father of the family who provides the good gifts. In so doing he is the epiphany of our heavenly Father who provides us with all good things, and the assurance of His presence among us. "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). The hebclomadarius who leads the community both at Mass and at the meal prayers must be seen as the delegate of the father of the community, just as every priest stands at the altar as the delegate of the bishop. So simple a thing as the custom of not starting the prayers until the superior "knocks of[" in chapel or rings the bell in the refectory helps to keep this family awareness. At the com-munity table one ought not to feel that he is just one nameless stop along the long line of the gravy train, but that he is among the little group of his brothers with whom he is at home. We are one "b~cause the bread is one" (1 Cor 10:17). The event aspect of the Mass also demands that the ritual transposition of the sacramental moment should be ~ Lucerna Splendens super Candelabrum Sanctum, Id Est, Solida ac Dilucida Explanatio Constitutionum Sairi ac Canoni¢i Ordinis Fratium Sanctae Crucis (Coloniae Agrippinae: apud Antonii Boet-zeri Heredes, 1632), pp. 45-58; 87. ÷ ÷ ÷ ECxo~mrmcisuensity VOLUME 21, transparent; the celebration must be a revelation of the event itself. The main event is the Easter Passover, but there are other sacramental moments in sacred history which unfold in the course of the Church year as incip-ient or concluding stages of the Passover, from the In-carnation to the Mission of the Spirit. The sacramental moments are themselves revelations, openings into the Passover mystery, which pervades the whole Church in her sacramental ritual. A final note on the Mass concerns the apostolate. Cult is formative of missionaries. Worship is the school of the very Christian experience which the apostle seeks to com-municate to others. Here we must remember that there is no. effective activity without sanctity; there is no sanc-tity which does not radiate in the Church; there is no grace which does not come from the Head, and there is none which does not flow from the member back over the entire Body.~ + + lloysim Mehr, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 34O A religious who neglects his personal sanctity in order to intensify his activity, paralyzes it. The gift of the Spirit is the sacramental basis for com-munity in work. When a man works to bring forth the fruits of the earth as a Christian, he brings these temporal things into the sphere of the Spirit by doing the very best job he can to make his farming or his teaching, and so forth, as perfect as possible within the total context of human life, of community. He is working with the crea-tive force of the Spirit who hovered over the waters and brought order, harmony, and completion out of chao:; and who is now at work in the community. He brings; creation into his Passover experience. He is using the totality of his mind and energies and spirit, which totality exists only within the community, 'to bring creatures to perfection, to fill up the glory ofGod which will come in its fullness at the Parousia. 2. Penance. We are not accustomed to thinking of the sacrament of penance in terms of the community, and in this we have missed much of its meaning. The weekly confession of devotion can easily become for religious a routinized ticking off of peccadillos which one "gets rid' of" by inserting his penitential coins in the laundromat at the back of Church. The sacrament of penance is a re-penetration of our ex-istence into Christ's healing death and Resurrection. Re-penetration implies that something preceded. Through baptism man is ontologically structured into the commu-nity of the holy--holy persons and holy things which they share. Sin 'is something abnormal for man in Christ Jesus '~Jules Lebreton, S.J., The Spiritual Teaching o! the New Testament (Westminster: Newman, 1960), p. 375. (Rom 6:2). By sin man withdraws from the Body of Christ and sides with the world. The sacrament of penance is reconciliation with the Church. It is the Church that listens to his confession, prays for him, and gives him absolution. Here we see the Body of Christ, wounded by'sih, festoring itself t~0 health. For us, a return to God is always, first of all, a return to the Church. Forgiveness is not so much something which the Church brings us, but rather a belonging to the Church outside of which there is no salvation. The importance of the local Church community must be emphasized here. When a sinner is forgiven, he is for-given through the forgiveness of the local community. This was more evident in the earlier forms of the sacra-ment of penance when the sinner was received publicly back into the assembly. He was assured of God's forgive-ness by the concrete forgiving spirit manifested to' him by the community. The power to absolve is vested in those with hierarchical authority, but they absolve in the name of the community of the faithful; hence the?e is a more fruitful and creative spiritual power at work in the con-fessional of a community'where there is a strong spiri't of mutual forbearancb and forgiveness, where the '~'as we forgive those who trespass against us" is prayed with awareness and sincerity, where the offensive person is ac-cepted in patience, understanding, and ultimate trust in what in him lies beyond his offences: his Christian per-sonality. The sacrament of penance can also be made more fruit-ful if the sacramentals of penance in the community life are appreciated. Two important ones. come to mind: Compline confession of sins and the chapter of faults. Let it be remembered that by the institution of the Church these rites are sacramentals, and if approached in a spirit of contrition they accomplish forgiveness of sin. The Compline confession of sin is the best catechesis for the sacrament of penance for it clearly embodies .its essential elements: contrition, confession of sin in the community and to the community, including the whole community of saints in heaven as well as those present; absolution is given by the presiding priest; and everybody prays together for the effectiveness of the forgiveness. The chapter of faults is also well constructed to pro-mote the communal atmosphere of penance, but it needs to be approached in a genuine spirit of sorrow. The pub-lic confession of our faults in the presence of the com-munity helps to make us realize that by our transgres-sions, by our indifference, lack of interest, fulfillment of purely personal inclinations, and non-participation in the community as such, we cut ourselves off, in fact we deny, the ontological status or nature of our very calling. ÷ ÷ ÷ F~oxmermcisuens ity 4. .4. Aloysius Mehr, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Worse yet, we hold back the community, we retard its growth. This seems to be the point of the chapter of faults: we confess that we have not been completely faith-ful to the ideals to which we vowed creative fidelity. 3. Holy Orders. In clerical religious communities, the whole idea of community life is intimately bound up in the sacrament of holy orders. Some observations on the place of the priesthood in the Church are necessary to clear the ground. It has often been said recently that the Church is not the clergy, despite the impression that has long been given to the contrary. The community is the first inten-tion. The priesthood exists for and in and fromthe com-munity through the apostolic succession. The priesthood is a charism, a mode of being in the Church, for the com-munity, not for itself. It expresses and makes possible and matures the general priesthood of the faithful in its three-fold dimension of worship, kingship, and prophethood. These are the Messianic goods, and they have been placed within the community in the gift of the Holy Spirit. In this context the Church itself is the Ur-Sat~rament con-taining the fullness of the Spirit, which is worked out through many diverse gifts. The priesthood is a charism for the building up of the Church (Eph 4:11-14). Ordination is the,gift of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands in the Church for the community. The priest is filled personally by the Holy Spirit to be his minister. No man takes the office to him-self-- or for himself. The fullness of the priesthood is only in the bishop. He is the sign of the full presence of Christ on earth, the organ of unity within the local Church community. He is one with Christ and one with his people. His faith is the norm for the faith of his flock. St. Cyprian defines the . Church as the people united to its priest, the flock stick-ing with its shepherd. The 'bishop is the nucleus of the community because he is the link with Christ through the imposition of hands through which the continuum of the soma tou Christou is maintained. The presbyterate is only a share in the bishop's priest-hood, a subsidiary priesthood under the bishop. As the ordination rite explicitly states, the presbyter is a "sec-ond- rate" priest: secundi meriti. In this light, every priest is a diocesan priest, and, exempt or not, when he works as a priest in a diocese, he works there as the helper of the bishop. By his ordination he is ontologically struc-tured for this work. He is called from the depths of his being to be a helper to the bishop of the diocese in which he lives. Here one can see what a deordination it is for religious priests not to be on good terms with the local ordinary. These good relations should also exist with the rest of the local clergy since the presbyterate is not merely an in-dividualistic but a collegiate institution. The architecture of early churches and the episcopal liturgy indicate this by placing the corona presbyterorum on the bema round the bishop. We still put the clergy together in the sanc-tuary. When a presbyter is ordained he joins the ordo foresbyterovum. This is eloquently obvious in the ordina-tion rite when the "college of presbyters" encircles the ordinands and joins the bishop in the imposition of hands. Priestly fellowship is rooted in the sacramental re-ality, and this sacramental reality is also what makes com-munity life a natural thing for priests. The unity in an order of canons draws its essential vitality from the sacra-ment of holy orders. In this context, the naturally prominent position of the Divine Office and liturgical exercises in many of the cler-ica. I religious communities becomes evident. The Divine Office is, as defined by Pope Pius XII, ~he perennial prayer of the Church, offered to God in the name and on behalf of all Christians, by those who have been deputed for this. It is the hymn of the Divine Word who has united to Him-self the entire human race, and the hymn which He sings is the hymn of praise which is sung in heaven continu-ously. St. Augustine is correct in saying that in the Divine Office "Christ prays for us. as our Priest; he prays in us as our Head; we pray to him as our God . We recognize Our voice in him and his voice in us.''4~ It is the Church praying. But we should go one step further. When a community of canons regular is called into existence by the Holy Spirit and officially approved by the Church, it is by its very nature entrusted with the solemn and communal celebration of the sacred liturgy, especially the Divine Office and the conventual Mass. If any religious body has the right to say that the liturgical life is its ideal, it is the canons regular.47 They above all should lead the way in the liturgical revival of Christian life. The proper chanting of the Divine Office in common is formative of community. But, in order to be formative of community, it presupposes first of all that the community understands the dignity of the Church's prayer, secondly, that the choir members are able to read the text of the prayer intelligently, and, finally, that they adopt as their own the sentiments expressed in these prayers. ,e Mediator Dei, nn. 142-144. ,TDom Germain Morin, O.S.B., The Ideal o] the Monastic Life Found in the Apostolic Age (Westminster: Newman, 1950), p. 105: "If any Order has the right to boast of this it is the Canons Regular, rather than ourselves." See also the article "Canons Regular and the Breviary" by Roger Capel, Orate Frates, v. 23 (1948-49), pp. 246-251. ÷ ÷ + ECxoemrdmsuesnity VOLUME 21. 1962 343 ÷ ÷ ÷ Aloysius Mehr, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS It is not merely a question of recitatk;n or of singing which, however perfect according to the norms of music and sacred rites, onl)t reaches the ear, but it is especially a question of the ascent ot the mind and heart to God' so that, united with Christ, we may completely dedicate ourselves and all our ac-tions to him.'s Whenever the Divine Office is chanted "worthily, with attention and devotion," it is prayer in the fullest sense of the term, and every genuine prayer cements together the members of a community. "Our deepest contacts with one another can be made only through God.''49 It is only in the depths of prayer that, in the fullest sense of the term, deep calls out to deep, and the soul gives itself to God. In this sense, every genuine prayer is a renewal of religious profession, the leaving of all things and following He-who- is. If the religious community is to blossom forth into a true community of worship and love, it must be able, at all times, to call upon this interior gift to God.5° The central portion of the Divine Office is the Psalter: the Word of God. The best way for men to pray together is to speak with God in God's own words, for the Word of God is formative and expressive of the community. The common chanting of the Psalter is, by and large, a meditar tive re-experiencing together of the great events of sacred history--again a community-forming factor.5x The Psalter is redolent with man's proper responses to God and his works: the spirit of the anawira, the poor in spirit, God's lowly ones through whom sacred history is accomplished. By a continual singing of these prayers day after day for many .years, these attitudes of heart sink into those who give themselves to this prayer with their minds and hearts and bodies. Through the ritual action, the attitudes and events are effectively experienced by the total personality in community; by all the rules of psychology such prayer is extremely capable of transforming one's life as an aLt-thentic individual in the community. A final note on the Divine Office concerns the non-choir members and every other member of the community who has been assigned work incompatible with regular attend-ance at choir. Here it is important to remember that the choir is a community obligation'. In a living community there are many members "just as in one body we have many members, yet all the members have not the same function" (Rom 12:4). Some are sent out as missionaries, others do the cooking, others are engaged in social work--- ~s Mediator Dei, n. 145. ~9 R. W. Gleason, S.J., To Live is Christ (New York: Sheed anti Ward, 1961), p. 11. ~ T. de Ruiter, O.F.M., Her Mysterie van de Kloostergemeenschap (Mechelen: St. Franciskusdrukkerij, 1958), p. 131. ~ Mediator Dei, n. 148. each according to the grace that has been given to him (Rom 12:6). And then there are also those who are not excused and who have the responsibility to be in choir. In each case it is the community at work or at prayer. Whether we are in the choir or legitimately excused, we are all working together in the name of the omhaunity, fulfilling our role in the completion of the cosmic task. 4. Extreme Unction. The communal dimension of ex-treme unction must be viewed from the Christian stand-point on death. The creation of Adam in flesh is the man-ifestation of the mystery of contingency which attends the existence of all things outside of God. Only God is in Himself and by Himself. All other beings tend to fuller being, which implies nonbeing. Death is the natural con-sequence of man's fleshy nature. Since the human race is a community in flesh it is also a community in death. Adam, however, did not accept his contingency. He failed to project beyond the dissolution of flesh to fuller life. He revolted against being the creature who dies, and death became a punishment for this sin. since the human race is a community in sin, it is a community in the pun-ishment of death (Rom 5:12). Christ, the New Adam, humbled himself: took on con-tingency. He submitted, as the suffering Servant, to be the creature who dies, and death became a redemption, a passage into the eternal life for which Adam revolted in vain (Rom 5:15-19; 1 Cot 15:21). Since the Church is a community in redemption, it is a community in triumph over death. Through the Church's sacraments of death and disso-lution, Viaticum and extreme unction, all human suffer-ing. and death is taken into the redemptive sufferings of Christ. The falling apart involved in suffering and death becomes the creative mustering of forces for the upward thrust to a higher level of life. The death of the Christian is his final experience of the Passover of Christ. Without Christ, death is complete loneliness. One leaves the community of his loved ones to go alone into nothing-ness. Christian death conquers this ultimate loneliness. The highpoint of the ritual for the dying is the admin-istration of Holy Viaticum. The Christian does not go alone into death: the Lord comes to take his faithful serv-ant up into his triumphant Passover. The Lord is able to come in Viaticum because the community has celebrated the Eucharistic Passover. Much of the loneliness of death comes from the effect of sin, by which man cuts himself off from the community. In the prayers and anointing for sickness unto death, the healing Lord approaches in the person of the priest to cure the wounds of severance from the community, to re-store the peace of mind that can come only from c6mplete + + + Community Exercises VOLUME 21, 1962 345 4. 4. 4. Aloysius Mehr, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 346 reconciliation with the Church. Again, the priest is acting in the name of the community. The death of a Christian is a deep experience for the community in which it occurs. When at all possible, the religious community should be present at the administra-tion of the last sacraments to the dying members of the community, and they should pa.rticipate in the expressive prayers of the ritual. Such a death is a witness to the reality of the triumph of Christ, a real martyrdom. The joyful and peaceful suffering and death of one with whom we live in intimacy is a striking pledge of the reality of Christ's Resurrection and the certainty of the Parousia. Here we have the reason for a quite joyful celebration of a funeral. What is said of death extends also to the sufferings of illness, disease, and serious injury, as well as of old age. Here there is the same factor of dissolution and contin-gency which is at work in death. Illness and death are times of crisis that naturally draw the community together to struggle against the loneliness which has set into our flesh as a result of sin. The serious sufferings of a member of the community are a community experience and ought to be entered into by the community. This involves a patient care and con-cern for the aged and the sick and keeping the community informed of their condition. It means visiting the sick. It would also be good to make use of the magnificent ritual for the visitation of the sick: let the community gather occasionally in the sick room to join in these moving and consoling prayers led by the superior. In the communal carrying out of this sacramental, the healing Lord will be present, and the patient endurance of suffering in the true Christian spirit will again be a witness to the community of the reality of Christ's presence and the certainty of his coming. Epilogue: The Dynamism of the Sacramental Com-munity There is an inherent tension in the very being of a sac-ramental dispensation or system: the tension, inherent in the nature of a sign, toward the fullness of that reality which is less than fully present in the sign. This underlies the call, covenant, and passover aspect of the sacraments and gives them their "obligatory" dimension, their ex-istential imperative. In Christian life this tension is the cosmic covenant: the Christian community's responsibil-ity for the entire cosmos which needs redemption and building up. This means authentic community work. Religious life is Christian response lived to the full in the working out of salvation history. It is charged with the building up of the Church unto the Pleroma, with the hastening of the day of the coming of the Lord (Ac 3:20; 2 Pt 3:11-12

Issue 21.1 of the Review for Religious, 1962. ; Volume 1962 21 EDITORIAL OFFICE St. Mary's College St. Marys, Kansas BUSINESS OFFICE 428 E. Preston St. Baltimore 2, Maryland ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ellard, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITORS John E. Becker, S.J. Emile G. McAnany, S.J. DEPARTMENTAL EDITORS Questions and Answers Joseph F. Gallen, Woodstock College Woodstock, Maryland Book Reviews Earl A. Weis, S.J. West Baden College West Baden Springs, Indiana Published in January, March, May, July, September, Novem-ber on the fifteenth of the month. REVIEW FOR RELI-GIOUS is indexed in the CATHOLIC PERIODICAL IN-DEX. CONGREGATION OF RELIGIOUS Extern Sisters of Monasteries of Nuns AN INSTRUCTION TOGETHER WITH STATUTES CONCERNING THE SISTERS ENGAGED IN THE EXTERNAL SERVICE OF MONASTERIES OF NUNS. TheI characteristic condition of nuns living within cloister is such that in order to safeguard their life of recol-lection, it is necessary that there be certain persons to take care of the business and affairs of the monastery outside the cloister. Accordingly, therehas never been a time when there was a lack of pious women who generally lived out-side the cloister and who were not obligated by any bonds which properly speaking could be called the bonds of re-ligious life. Such women were given the title of oblates, mandates, portresses, or some other such name. In the course of time, however, these pious women ex-pressed a desire for a more intimate participation in the life of the cloistered nuns; and in various places they were permitted to remain obligated to the external service of a monastery after making a special resolution, .promise, oath, or vow. Moregver, there were rules, constitutions, and statutes which were approved by the Holy See and which consecrated this proposal of,leading their life in a religious way. In modern times the decree of the Sacred Congregation of Religious, Conditio plurium monasteriorum, of July 16, 1931, effected and regulated this state as a stable one of sisters with simple religious vows. These sisters (see Statuta a sororibus externis monasteriorum monialium cuiusque Ordinis servanda [Statutes [or the Extern Sisters.of Monas-teries of Nuns o[ Every Oi'der], n. 4) were declared to be "members of the community they serve and participants in the same spiritual goods as the nuns." In order, how-ever, that the juridical incorporation of the sisters into the community should not endanger the contemplative life of ¯ The original text of this document appeared in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, v. 53 (1961), pp. 371-80. Extern Sisters VOLUME 21~ 1962 1 4" ÷ Congregation oy Religious REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS the nuns, a general norm was laid down according to which the sisters were to live in. a part of the monastery outside of papal cloister. The experience, however, of the last thirty years has clearly shown that a number of things in the Statutes of 1931 need to be modified by adapting them to more recent pontifical documents concerning the life of nuns, by omit-ting certain prescriptions of common law already included in the constitutions of nuns, and by accommodating them more closely to the tules and constitutions of the second Order to which the sisters belong. Accordingly, the Sacred Congregation of Religious has decided to make a new, shorter, but complete edition of the previously mentioned Statutes. The following points, however, are to be noted. 1. Monasteries of nuns which do.not have sisters for ex-ternal. service and do not need them since the external ser-vice of the monastery is taken care of by secular persons of known worth who have been chosen with the consent of the lbcal ordinary and who live outside of cloister are not obliged to inaugurate this class of sisters. 2. Where the rules or constitutions of a given order ex-pressly prescribe and regulate the external service 6f sisters for a monastery of nuns, the canonical dispositions by which this service is governed retain their full force, pro-vided they are not contrary to the sacred canons nor to the apostolic konstitution, Sponsa Christi. 3.If for the sake of better preserving the spirit of their own foundation and vocation the nuns of an Order wish to insert into their own constitutions special dispositions for the external service of the monastery, they are free to draw up such dispositions, which, however, are to be sub-mitted for the approbation of the Sacred Congregation of Religious. Afer a similar approbation by the same congregation, such prescriptions may also be inserted into the statutes of those federations erected by the Holy See which preserve within the same Order a somewhat diversified practice of regular observance. HOwever, the prescriptions to be added either to the constitutions or to the statutes of the federation according to the nature of the Order are to be conformed to the following gen.eral statutes. Chapter 1: On the Duties and Place of Residence o[ Sisters Devoted to External Service ARTICLE I § I. With the consent of the chapter and with the ap-proval of the local ordinary as well as that of the regular superior if they are subject to one, monasteries of nuns may make provisions for sisters destined for external ser-vice whose principal duty will be to serve the monastery in those external matters which can not be cared for by the cloistered members. § 2. Moderate works of the apostolate connected with the monastery but performed outside papal cloister may be considered as part of the external service, to.which~ the sisters are destined. ~ "'~ ~ , :~'~, ARTICLE 2 The extern sisters are members of the community of their monastery, and in the orderof precedence come after the choir nuns and the lay sisters (conversaq);. they profess the same rule and constitutions as their fellow religious the nuns, but by reason of their proper office they are sub-ject to the present statutes which repeal some prescriptions of the rule and the constitutions. § 1. Without prejudice to article 4, the extern sisters have a residence which is annexed to the monastery and which is subject to common cloister (see canon 604 and the instruction Inter cetera, n. 73), though not within the limits of the papal cloister of the nuns (see the instruction, Inter cetera, n. 11 b; 44 b). Accordingly, they may not enter the part of the monastery reserved for the nuns except in accordance with the provisions made in these statutes. § 2. Without prejudice to the stricter law of individual monasteries, the superior with the consent of her council and with the approbation of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one, has the right to permit the extern sisters to meet at times with the nuns inside the cloister of the monastery for sake of piety or instruction as well as for eating and recreating together, care' being taken that nothing detrimental follows from this. At these times, the sisters, even though they should be questioned impru-dently, should refrain from referring to things they have sebn or heard outside the monastery; they should especially keep silent about matters which do not set a good.'bxample or which can disturb peace ~nd application 6f mind. The superior with her councilors should watch over these mat-ters; and if the entrance of the sisters into the monastery furnishes the occasion for abuses, suitable remedies should be used. § 3. In accordance with the, judgment of the superior and her council together with a previous and at least a general approbation of the local ordinary and of the regu-lar superior if there be one, the sisters living outside the cloister may at times be used for the internal dut'ies of the monastery, care being .taken that they do not habitually associate with the nuns. § 4. What is said in this article about the entrance of the ÷ 4- + Exterrt Sisters VOLUME 21, 1962 ÷ ÷ ÷ Congregation o~ Religious REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 4 sisters into cloister holds as well for postulants and for novices of the second year of novitiate. ARTICLE § 1. Attention being given to the spirit and nature of each order as well as to the number of nuns living in a monastery, monasteries, after a previous vote of the chap. ter and, in the case of monasteries belonging to a federa-tion, after hearing the council Of the federation, may with the approbation of the Holy See permit the extern sisters to be habitually within the limits of the cloister of the monastery, even though they are not bound by the law of papal cloister. In this case precautions should be taken that such association of the sisters with the nuns bound by the law of cloister does not harm the spirit of recollection; besides other precautions, a kind of separation should be instituted within the cloister similar to that prescribed for the novitiate (canon 564, § 1), and the sisters should be forbidden to relate to the nuns the things that happen outside of cloister. § 2. Since they are not bound by the law of papal clois-ter, sisters who habitually live within the cloister, may, ac-cording to the jud .gment of the superior, leave the cloister for the external service or work of the monastery or for another just and reasonable cause. Without violation of the discipline and the purpose of the postulancy and the novitiate (canon 565), the same provision holds also for novices even 'of the first year of the novitiate and for the postulants, if the postulancy, accord-ing to the norm of article 9, § 2, is made within the clois-ter. ARTICLE The residence and other places outside the limits of cloister destined for the extern si~ters are subject to the vigilance and visitation not only of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one, but also, due pre-scriptions being observed, of the superior of the monastery and of the moderator of the federation in the case of fed-erated monasteries (see the instruction, Inter cetera, n. 24, 5°). ARTICLE § 1. In order that works of the apostolate be exercised in monasteries in a stable way according to the norm of article 1, § 2, besides the previous approval of the local or-dinary and of the regular superior if there be one, the ap-probation of the Holy See is required. § 2. In exercising the works of the apostolate, the sisters should follow the norms set down by the local ordinary. ARTICLE 7 § 1. The habit of the sisters should be the same as that of the nuns, suitably accommodated, however, by the chap-ter to the purpose of external service according to the circumstances of time and place. : . ~ § 2. With regard to'th~ ~eii~s :habit in of one and the same ~ederation, the sisters, as far as pos-sible, should be dressed in the same way. Chapter 2: On the Training o[ Extern Sisters Aa'rIcL~ 8 In admitting and forming extern sisters, the same con-ditions should be observed as those prescribed in the con-stitution~ for the nuns of the monastery, account being ~aken, however, o~ the former's special role. The superior with her council should see to it that only those asp.irants are accepted who are mature in judgment and conspicuous for more than ordinary piety, in order that in their deal-ings with seculars, especially outside the monastery, they may give an outstanding example. Ax~cL~ 9 § 1. The postulancy should last one year; the superior, however, having heard her council, may reduce this time to six months or prolong it for another six months beyond the year, according as seems necessary for the fitting prepa-ration. of a postulant for the novitiate. § 2. The postulancy should be made in the residence of the sisters in order that the postulants may be exercised and tested in their proper duties. Nevertheless, in accordance with the judgment of the superior and her council and with the approval of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one, the postulancy can be made within the monastery; that is, within the cloister of the nuns, without prejudice, how-ever, to the statutes of the federation if it is the case, of a federated monastery nor to article 4, § 2. ARTICLE 10 § 1~ The novitiate is to last for two years. The first of these years is strictly canonical; and although these novices are not bound by the law of papal cloister, it is to be made together with the novices within the cloister of each mon-astery or, if it is a case of a federation, of another monas-tery of the federation. This year, in order to be valid, mus, t be whole and continuous according to tile norms of law. § 2. In order that the novices be exercised in their proper works, the second year of the novitiate should be made in the proper residence of the sisters under the vigi, lance of a specially designated sister who is to givea report E~tern Sisters VOLUME ~'1, 1962 5 lllll! I ÷ .t- ongregation ot l~liglous REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 6 to the mistress of novices. Two months before profession, the novices should refrain completely from external ser-vice and remain within the novitiate of the monastery in order that there under the direction of the mistress of novices they may be able to prepare themselves more tran-quilly for profession. § 3. In accordance with the judgment of the superior and her council and with the approval of the local or-dinary and of the regular superior if there be one, this second year also can be made within the monastery with-out, however, the novices being bound by papal cloister. § 4. In training the novices in religious life, while in-structions and conferences are to be given in the same way as is prescribed in the constitutions for the novitiate of nuns, special care should be taken to give them instruc-tions in the external matters and affairs for which they are destined. A~T~CLE 11 The novitiate made by extern sisters is not valid for choir nuns or for lay sisters (conversis); nor is the novitiate made for choir nuns or for lay sisters valid for extern sis-ters. ARTICLE 12 § 1. On the completion of the novitiate, the novice should make a profession of simple temporary vows for six years; these should be renewed yearly, at least during the first three-year period. At the end of the six years, they should make a profession of simple, but perpetual vows or return to the world. § 2. In making the profession the rite of each monastery should be retained with necessary changes, however, being made. The first religious profession following the novitiate is to be made by 'the sisters within the cloister of the mon-astery; the renovations of vows, as well as the perpetual profession, should be made outside of cloister at the choir grille of the nuns. However, in accordance with the judg-ment of the superior and her council and with the ap-proval of the local ordinary and of the regular supe~-ior it there be one, these may be made within the cloister. § 8. The formula of' profession should be the same as that of the nuns with the necessary additions and changes; for each profession of the sisters should be made in the quality of an extern sister according to the rule and con-stitutions of the monastery as well as according to the proper statutes for extern sisters approved by the Apostolic See. § 1. Without prejudice to the prescriptions of the con-stitutions concerning the cession of administration and the disposition of the use and usufruct of property, according to the norm of the common law (canon 569, §'1 and canon 580, § 1) every professed of simple vows, whether perpetual or temporary, unless something else is provided for in the constitutions, retains the ownership of her prop-erty and the capacity of.~acqu~rlng.~other 'property:- Lest, however, the extern sisters be solicitous about their prop-erty, even before their profession of temporary vows they should freely make a civilly valid will with regard to pres-ent property as well as to whatever may come to them in the future. They may not change this without the permis-siqn of the Holy See or, if the matter is urgent and there is no time for recourse to the Holy See, without the permis-sion of the superior of the monastery i~ which the sister is a, ctually living. § 2. Without prejudice to any ivtdult granted by the Holy See, the sisters can not renounce their property or abdicate it gratuitously. § 3. The cession or disposition which is treated in canon 569 can be changed by a professed sister not indeed by her own personal decision unless the constitutions allow this, but with the permission of her superior as well as of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one, pro.vided a change which involves a notable part of her property is not made in favor of the monastery. In case of departure from the monastery this cession and disposition lose their force. § 4. Whatever the sister acquires by her own industry or by reason of the monastery, she acquires for the monas-tery. Chapter 3: On the Discipline of the Extern Sisters ARTICLE 14 § 1. The sisters, no less than the nuns, are subject to the superior of the monastery in all things, both with regard to religious discipline and to the service to be done by them. It is the duty of~ the superior to prescribe the habitual order of their exercises for the sisters and to provide in a maternal way whatever is necessary for them to lead their common and individual lives. § 2. The superior can delegate one 6f the extern sisters or a nun mature in prudence and age and professed of perpetual vows to watch that everything pertaining to discipline or service is carried out in an orderly way ac-cording to the commands of the superior. This sister should prudently make what reports are necessary to the superior or to some other nun designated for this and should receive instructions from her. ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ ÷ Congregation Religious REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 8 ARTICLE 15, § I. The superior should see to it that the extern sisters perform the exercises of piety which are. contained in the rule and constitutions except those which are proper to the choir nuns: § 2. With regard to Holy Communion and to confession, the prescriptions contained in the constitutions for the nuns should be observed. § 3. With regard to occasional confessions, the sisters enjoy the faculties .which are granted to religious women not bound by papal cloister; namely, if a sister for peace of conscience goes to a confessor approved for women by the local ordinary, the confession is valid and licit, when made in a church or an oratory even a semi-public one or in any other place legitimately destined for the confessions of women or of religious women or legitimately designated as such for a particular confession (see canon 522). § 4. With the consent of the superior and the approval of the local ordinary'and of the regular superior if there be one, the spiritual exercises mentioned ih § 1 may be made by the extern sisters inside the cloister of the nuns. ARTICLE 16 As far as possible, the duties of piety treated in the pre-ceding article should be made by the sisters in common. The sisters should also eat and recreate in common. ARTICLE 17 With regard to the laws of abstinence and fast proper to each Order by reason of the rule and the constitutions, the superior should treat the extern sisters mategnally, dispens-ing in these matters insofar as there is real need. It is de-sirable that in each Order or at least in each federation there be set up the same norm for the observance by the sisters of such proper laws. ARTICLE 18 § 1. The sisters should remain at home, diligently en-gaging in prayer and work; and they should not go outside except to care for the business of the monastery or for some other reasonable cause and with the express per-mission of the superior; nor should they leave the house singly without a just cause and the permission of the su-perior. When they go.out, they should be mindful of their state in their conduct and speech with seculars; and by manifesting modesty, piety, meekness, urbanity, and the greatest reverence, they should be a source of edification to all. § 2. The superior may not permit the sisters to live out-side the house except for a just cause and for as short a time as possible; for an absence which exceeds a month there is required the permission of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one; for an absence, moreover, which lasts beyond six months, the permission of the Apostolic See is necessary. ARTICLE 19 § 1. A sick sister who, in the judgment of the physician or the superior, can not be conveniently cared for in the external residence, may be brought into cloister; and her cloistered fellow religious should take care of her with the greatest charity, offering their help kindly and solicitously. § 2. In the same way, aged sisters who ha~;e become in-capable of external service and who lack suitable assistance in the external residence may, with the permission of the superior to be granted with the consent of the council and with the approval of the local ordinary and of the regular superior if there be one, be admitted into the monastery. § 3. The superior, however, should be vigilant lest on this occasion the discipline of the nuns, especially the spirit of recollection which should always flourish within the cloister, should suffer harm. The matter having been taken up with His Holiness John XXIII in an audience granted to His Eminence the cardinal prefect on March 1, 1961, the Sacred Congrega-tion of Religious in accordance with the commission given it by the apostolic constitution, Sponsa Christi, of Novem-ber 21, 1950 (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, v. 43. [1951], p. 5) and by reason of the powers conferred on it, prescribes and commands that the present norms and statutes concerning the extern sisters of monasteries be put into observa-tion. All contrary matters notwithstanding. Given at Rome, March 25, 1961. VALERIUS Cardinal VALERI, Prefect L.~S. Paul Philippe, O.P., Secretary + 4- + Extern Si~ter$ VOLUME 21, 1962 9 MSGR. AGOSTINO CASAROLI Papal Plan for Latin America Msgr. Casaroli rep-resented the Ponti-ficihl Commission for Latin America at the Second Na-tional Congress of Religious. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 10 It is indeed an honor and a privilege for me to bring you distinguished members of this great assembly1, the cordial greetings, the thanks, and the good wishes of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. When the Holy See was informed that the Congress of the Major Religious Superiors of the United States was to consider the problems confronting the Church in Latin America as part of its program of studies and delibera-tions, Archbishop Samore, Vice-President of the Pontifical Commission and Secretary of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, was designated to rep-resent the Commission at this gathering and to speak to you of the struggles, of the desires, and of the hopes of the Church in those countries. Undoubtedly Archbishop Samore was the person most qualified to accomplish this mandate, not only because of the prestige of his office in the Church, but particularly be-cause of the deep knowledge he has of questions concei:n-ing all the facets and perspectives of the situation in Latin America where he spent three years as Apostolic Nuncio to Colombia. Moreover, Archbishop Samore also knows the great generosity and the resources of the Church in the United States where he spent some years at the Apostolic Delegation in Washington. But above all, his passionate and unstinting dedication to the cause of the Church in Latin America, which for many years has been one of the main concerns of his life, would have made him, perhaps, the best informed and most authoritative speaker at this convention on that subject. Unfortunately, recent sorrowful events have prevented him from being present here for a task that he considered as a mission to be accomplished for the Church itself. Since I am not in a position to speak with his eloquence 1 This is the text of a speech delivered by Msgr. Casaroli at the Second National Congress of Religious on August 17, 1961. and his personal authority, I shall limit myself to submit-ting briefly for your consideration some objective facts and remarks. Their compelling eloque.nce together with the heartrending appeals of the Popes in favor of Latin Amer-ica will, I am confident, lead you to adopt positive resolu-tions such as the Holy See eagerly expects, from~this as-sembly and from the magnificent group of thousands of men and women religious you represent. The appeal of the Holy See in favor of Latin America is fundamentally based on two considerations to which no true son of the Church, much less religious men and women, can remain indifferent. First, that duty of charity by which the family, the Body, which constitutes the Catholic Church, feels as its own the problems and needs Of each of its parts; all the more so when such needs and problems are more serious and the part of the Church affected hy them is more important. Second, the interest--in the highest and noblest sense of the word---of the entire Catholic Church, since weakness of or dangers to Christian life in such an important sector of the Church, as undoubtedly Latin America is, repre-sents for it a serious menace, while progress there repre-sents a bright promise. Here are a few facts to support these two propositions: 1. The importance of Latin America to the Church; first of all, its numerical importance, since, with about one hundred and eighty million inhabitants, the over-whelming majority of them Catholic, Latin America rep-resents about a third of world Catholicism in numbers. Moreover, the demographic increase of Latin Americam noted, not always without alarm, by sociologists, econo-mists, and political experts--together with the fact that children are traditionally baptized in the Church of their parents even if the latter are not practical churchgoers, would seem to indicate that such increase will augment proportionally in the future. Secondly, an importance arising from the fact that the twenty nations of Latin America, frequently acting en bloc, exercise in international assemblies--which often treat of principles and questions of vital interest to the Churchma very considerable influence. A third motive of importance is the richness of Latin- American Catholicism--although still rather potential than actual--both in quantity and quality, with the con-sequences deriving therefrom for the future development of Catholicism and its spread throughout the world. 2. This sector of Catholicismwimposing as it is both in numbers and unity, in sincerity and solidity of senti-ment, so heroic in times of persecution, so strongly resist-ing internal insufficiencies and dangers from without~ yet surfer's from perilous elemental weaknesses of structure. ÷ ÷ ÷ Latin America VOLUME 21, 1962 ]! ÷ ÷ ÷ Msgr. Casaroli REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]~ Characteristically, these weaknesses are manifested and in a way summarized by the well-known lack of clergy, and indeed of all apostolic workers, in Latin America; a lack which is at the same time the cause and the result of the dangerous situation there, aggravated by the greater menace of the enemies of Catholicism in those countries. Such enemies and such menaces are particularly--as Pope Pius XII declared to the Second World Congress of the Apostolate of the Laity.in October, 1957--"the inroads of Protestant sects; the secularization of .the whole way of life; Marxism, the influence of which is felt in the uni-versities and is very active, even dominant, in almost all labor organizations; and finally a disquieting practice of spiritism." This list, we might add, is only indicative. 3. Faced with this situation, and foreseeing its future developments, some people, pessimists who lack confi-dence in Divine Providence and the Church's supernat-ural resources and who very often are not objective in observing and judging things as they are in reality, even wonder whether in a few decades Latin America will still be a Catholic continent or if it will not rather be com-pletely lost to the Church. The Holy See does not at all share such pessimistic views. On the other hand, the Holy See does not ignore the danger there might be, if oppor-tune measures are not taken or if they are not taken suffi-ciently urgently. The mere possibility that even part of a continent hold-ing such an important place in the Church could be lost to her is more than enough motive to excite in her chil-dren, and particularly in you religious that feeling of dutiful charity and interest mentioned above. 4. In contrast with these deprecable and deprecated possibilities, there shine forth the luminous prospects em-phasized with such eloquence and paternal satisfaction by the Sovereign Pontiffs when speaking of Latin America; but always on condition that the necessary efforts and sac-rifices be made now, with wise generosity and without delay. His Holiness Pope John XXIII, speaking on March 25, 1960, to the Fathers and Mothers General of Institutes of Perfection, asserted: The future of the Church in the vast territories of Latin America appears rich in ineffable promise; and We nourish the firm conviction that Catholic spirit and life :in those regions have in themselves sufficient strength to encourage the most optimistic hopes for the future. Those treasures Of spiritual wealth so profusely bestowed there in the past, and yet more those which will be given with full hands in the future, will .surely give rise to rich fruits of holiness and grace, to the greater joy of the Chui'ch of God. Earlier still, Pope'Pius XII had affirmed with prophetic confidence: renWdeer earde b caocnkf iad ethnot uthsaatn tdhfeo lbdeln Tefhietsr en owwil lr eccoemivee dth we idlla yla wterh ebne Latin America will be able to give back to the entire Church Christ all that it has received; when, as We hope, it shall have put to use those ample and powerful energies which seem only to await the hands of the pr rhieis t, that they may at once be employed for the honor and wo.s P.~o;~f Gx.ozd:., 'a~n;d~,l ;t~h et '~ spread; of Christ's ,~t~r :~l~'b6iesiarn Kingdom on earth (P~us Ch'risti, 1955). ¯ Hence, the conclusions to be drawn ~rom these con-siderations, which could anal sh6uld be developed at greater length, are the ~ollowing: First, the Church~that ~is, all o~ us who, with the Pope, the Bishops and our brothers in the Faith, constitute the Church~has the duty o~ collaboration so that not even a small part o~ that precious heritage o~ the Catholic religion which is Latin America should be lost; second, that the Church has the sacred duty o~ aiding those apostolic ~orces, mostly still latent in Latin-American Catholicism, to activate them-selves, so that their strong support may be.relied upon to engage with high hopes o~ success in the great adventure o~ the conquest o[ the world to the.truth o~ the [aith and to the beauties o[Ghristian living. What is the Church doing, what is the Holy See doing, in regard to the religious problem o~ Latin America? It ¯ would take too long to answer exhaustively or even sum-marily; a ~ew indications are all we can give. First o[ all, it must be said that Latin-American Cathol-icism~ bishops, clergy, religious and ~aith[ul~is reso-lutely working tc~ break the -vicious circle in which it seems to be imprisoned. Good results have been and are being obtained, admirable, praiseworthy, ~ull o~ promise ~or the ~uture. We must also, with all [raternal charity, but also with necessary objectivity, add that the disproportion between the available means, especially o~ personnel, and the ever-growing gravity o[ the tasks to accomplish and the perils to avert is so great, that humanly speaking it would seem impossible, or at least extremely difficult, ~or Latin-Amer-ican Catholicism to be able, unaided, to overcome this critical situation in time. The work o~ the Holy See then, especially in most re-cent times, has been exercised in a two~old effort: (a) that o~ encouraging, aiding and promoting the initiative o~ the Latin-American hierarchy, clergy, religious institutes, and laity; and (b) that o~ encouraging, requesting and discovering collaboration therein ~rom other ~parts o~ the great Catholic ~amily. Regarding the first point, and apart ~rom what concerns the single dioceses or nations, I shall only recall the con-vocation o~ a General Conference o~ the Latin-American Episcopate in Rio de Janeiro in the year 1955 in order to VOLUME ÷ ÷ Msgr. Casaroli REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 14 study the problem together and lay the bases for a vigor- .ous collective effort; then the constitution in 1956 of a permanent office for contact and collaboration between the hierarchies of the various Latin-American countries, called the Latin-American Episcopal Council (CELAM), with its General Secretariat located in Bogat~; and con-sequently the establishment of the Latin-American Reli-gious Conference (CL-AR) in 1958. Passing to the second point, and omitting for brevity's sake anyreference to the collaboration furnished by Spain, Belgium, and other European countries, I shall recall only the meeting held in Washington, D. C., in November, 1959, between representatives of the hierarchies of the United States of America and Canada, and of Latin America, which prepared the foundations of a more in-tense and more closely organized apostolic cooperation of the two great North American nations in favor of those nations situated south of the Rio Grande. As a matter of fact, the Holy See has very great con-fidence, as regards a concerted "Catholic Action" in f.avor of Latin America, in the resources and the generosity of the Catholics of the United States and of Canada, that is to say, concretely, of the bishops, priests, and men and women religious. It is clear that, first of all and above all, this refers to resources of personnel, o~ men and women. In fact, this is the whole purpose of the presence among you of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America in my humble person; namely, to tell you how greatly the Holy See and the Pontifical Commission count upon the understanding and generosity of your religious institutes to aid Latin America; to urge you to respond heartily to its pressing appeal for this work, which the Holy See con-siders essential for the general interests of the Church; and, if necessary, to work together with you to prepare a plan of assistance according to the desires expressed by the Holy See. Of course, the Holy See is quite well aware of all that American religious communities--with their approxi-mately 2,700 members who are now in Latin America-- are already doing in this sense. Their spirit of helpfulness and collaboration has been admirably proven, and the Holy See is sincerely and deeply grateful. But the need is felt to request yet more from your generosity, just as more is being asked also from the generosity of other parts o[ the Church in favor of Latin America. Among the papers which Archbishop Samore had pre-pared for this meeting, I have found a reference to some possible objections, and I quote his own words in this re-gard: It may be objected:First, that just as numerous needs require your presence here in your own country: And I reply:This is true. You do great good here, and yet, in spite of your great numbers, there are not enough of you to meet the evergrowing exigencies of the modern apostolate. But it is also true that in comparison you are much more numerous in proportion to total Catholic population than your confreres in :Latin America. In the United States, for a total Catholic population of about 41,000,000 souls, you had in 1960 more than 21,000 i-eligious priests, 10,000 religious brothers ~rid 170,000 religi0iJs- 'si~ters. Certainly, for the more or less one hundred and eighty mil-lions of Catholics of Latin-America--a total more than four times greater than yours---we are very far from your total num-ber of more than 200,000 members of religious communities and institutes of perfection. You can see how great is the dispropor-tion. You, then, are rich, rich in personnel. And it is from you that personnel is Sought, in the confidence that the Lord will reward you for the generosity with which you give, by sending you ever more numerous vocations.Indeed, I know of particular cases in which, after the acceptance by a particular congregation, for a supernatural motive and at the cost of no little sacrifice, of new fields of apostolic endeavor, their vocations were actually muhi-plied in a geometrical progression. Thus once more the word of the Gospel was verified:Give and it will be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken together and flowing over . Second, it may be objected that you are already answering the appeal made in favor of other continents. This too is true. And here too you deserve the highest admiration for what you are doing. But it remains true that we ask from him who has. Be sure I shall never say:Go to Latin America rather than to other countries; I should be guilty of a serious fault and would feel remorse for it. But I do venture to say:Go, even more than you do now, in even greater numbers, to Latin America, without diminishing your efforts and your contribution in favor of other parts of the earth. These are the words of Archbishop Samore; and I be-lieve they remain valid and convincing. And thus we may pass on to the third and last point to consider; namely, what aid does the Holy See expect for Latin America from the religious communities of men and women of the United States, over and above that assistance already being given. I spoke earlier of a "plan"--a popular word nowadays, but truly appropriate in our case. That which the Ghurch feels it necessary to do for Latin America cannot be done through isolated and uncoordinated efforts, no matter how numerous or immediately efficacious they might be. The field is so vast, the urgency so great, and the danger of being circumvented, by enemy forces so real, that all such efforts must be added together, properly channeled, opportunely coordinated, and organically promoted. We could even speak of a real apostolic strategy, to assemble every possible° means, (which resuh always in less than those needed), so that none is lost, none underutilized; to determine the fundamental points of attack and defense; and to concentrate there a common effort so that, by God's grace, action may be prompt, timely, and effective. ÷ ÷ ÷ Latin America VOLUME 21, 1962 15 Msgr. Ca~aroli REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 16 We all recall that His Holiness Pope John XXIII, in, his discourse' to thos.e.attending the third meeting of the' CELAM in Rome, spoke of the opportuneness of setting up a double program for Latin America: a long-term program to solve the basic problems; and an immediate short-term one. Th~ basic solution would be that Latin America succeed in being self-sufficient for its own needs and, we may add, capable also of givi~ng a full and valu-able contribution towards the progress of the universal Church. The collaboration of outside forces should also be aimed towards this end; although immediate needs and exigencies must not be forgotten or neglected, nor yet be given precedence over the long-term basic solution. On its side, the Holy See saw to the establishmeni in 1958 of a "high command" for this effort; namely, the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, which has the duty of "studying in a unified way the fundamental prob-lems of Catholic life in Latin America, and to promote the closest collaboration between the various sacred con-gregations and offices interested in their solution." In their own respective spheres and ranks, the CELAM and CLAR have analagous purposes and aims. On its part, the hierarchy of the United States of America has set up in the National Catholic Welfare Conference a Latin America Bureau (LAB), with. a dynamic and ex-perienced director in the person of Father John J: Con-sidine, M.M. In order the better to coordinate the collaboration re-quested of your communities, it might appear opportune to instruct the Secretariats of your two Conferences to act directly or in cooperation with this Latin America Bureau as the circumstances dictate. In any case, the offices already set up~--together with the Pontifical representatives in the various countriesm can doubtless favor the study and effective realization of an opportune plan. In particular, it becomes possible to coordinate the requests of the ordinaries of each single country, so that the Pontifical Commission for Latin America can consider and evaluate their priority of im-portance and urgency, and recommend them to those or-ganizations or religious communities best ableto ~ope with them. In order that such a plan be realistic, it is of course necessary to know and study, not only the requests pre-sented, but also the means available to meet them. For this reason, the Pontifical Commission would be most greafful to this assembly if, on its part, it were to prepare at least the fundamental lines of a plan of its own. Such a plan should manifest approximately what means and personnel they will place at the disposal of the Holy See and the Pontifical Commission from the men and women religious of the United States of America. Archbishop Samore, in the name of'the Pontifical Com-mission, intended to propose to you a great Ten-Year Plan o[ aid to Latin America, by means of personnel and of foundations, thus corresp6iading to the.needs and requests already received and listed by the Latin America Bureau, and to those which will arrive later. The archbishop's personal knowledge of the generosity of American religous communities, confirmed by their actual contribution in so many diverse fields, encouraged him to make this pro-posal, which I now submit to you in the name of the Pontifical Commission: A Ten-Year Plan: for the decade of the 1960's whiEh may be decisive for the destiny of Latin America even in religious matters, with all the consequences for the Church either for good or evil. If an extraordinarily generous and wise effort is made within those ten years, we have every reason to expect that, with God's help, the battle will be won. A Great Plan: great on the part of the Holy See, of Latin America, and of the Church in general. Great, so the Holy See-hopes, in the contribution of the North American nations, so closely linked to those of Latin America. And great also on your part. This, then, is an appeal to the magnanimity of your communities, and presupposes generosity, self-sacrifice, lofty ideas and great love, love for the Church of Christ, love for God. The concrete content and scope of such a plan is some-thing you must be so kind as to study together among yourselves. Certainly, immense progress would already be made if every community represented here were formally to un-dertake to make, especially during the next ten years, a truly generous contribution of personnel and foundations in favor of the Church in Latin America. Naturally this should be a contribution within the limits of each com-munity's abilities, but also to the extent of your possibil-ities, measured in a great spirit of generosity, sacrifice, and love for the Church, and also measured against the re-quests presented in a plan organized and coordinated by the competent offices. A plan such as this would comprise several divisions, just a few of which we may briefly review: a) direct pastoral ministry, either in parishes, or in groups of parishes such as a deanery, or occasionally in entire ecclesiastical jurisdictions such as Prelatures Nul-lius, Vicariates, and Prefectures Apostolic; b) seminaries; c) educational activities, particularly the foundation of Latin America 17 4. 4. 4. Msgr. Casaroli REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 18 American schools, which are so necessary and so strongly desired in Latin America, in a special manner in order to combat the perilous propaganda spread by such schools directed by Protestant sects; d) catechetical activities; e) charitable activities, health programs, social service. This list is merely partial and indicative; but I feel that each of the communities repre~en.ted here today can al-ready see the part it could play therein, either to begin its apostolate in Latin America or to enlarge and intensify those works that several have already undertaken there. Is it worth while making more precise engagements? Is it opportune for each community to determine now a cer-tain percentage of its personnel which will be set aside for the service of the Church in Latin America? The judgment and the decision is left to you. However, interpreting the mind of the Pontifical Commission, I offer you an ideal toward which we reque.st every province to strive. This ideal is the following, namely, that each religious province aim to contribute to Latin America in the next ten years a tithe--ten percent--0f its present membership as of this current year. For example, if the present membership is 500, the ideal would be to con-tribute by the end of this decade fifty members for Latin America. Naturally, all will not be able to achieve this ideal. But it may be possible to reach at least ninety or eighty .per cent of it. For myself, I should like to add one further considera-tion: In no case, should personnel of what might be called inferior quality be set.aside for this work. The Church's cause in Latin America requires that your communities make the sacrifice and have the generosity to devote to it some of the best and most qualified of the vocations sent to them by the Lord. To you, and to the committee you will elect to consider and study this point of your program, let us leave the task of moving forward. The saintly and fatherly Pastor, whom God has set over His Church in our day, when speaking to the Superiors General of the Institutes of Perfection on March 25, 1960, said, "It is necessary that all those who wish to share in the Apostolic anxiety of Our heart, should make every effort and every sacrifice to meet the expectations of that great continent, Latin America." With that prayer, the Holy Father includes his gratitude and his benediction upon all those of his children who give a generous response. COLUMBAN BROWNING, C.P. Woman's Highest Fulfillment Every year hundreds of young women leave behind them family, friends, and the natural joys that might be theirs and enter the religious life. And every year hun-dreds of women go to their eternal reward after having lived their years in the service of God and their fellow man in religion. This vast army of generous women is one of the glories of Mother Church and one of the most con-vincing proofs of her divinity. Such generosity on so large a scale can find its explanation only in the grace of God that leads these women in their youth to the religious state and enables them to persevere in it until death. The world instinctively admires these many women who live their lives in so unselfish a fashion. A religious reception or profession ceremony fills the standers-by with awe and admiration, and they feel instinctively that there is something of God in what they witness. And indeed there is. A religious vocation and the response to that call is always the work of God. What many admiring idealists fail to realize is that the path the young religious enters upon is not an easy one. They admire the generosity of the young woman, but they are no( sufficiently aware of what that generosity costs her. In the practical order, these admirers fail to grasp how really human the young religious is and remains. An ele-ment of "angelism" pervades the thoughts of many out-siders about religious. This attitude is a tribute to the holi-ness of life that has produced it, but it still fails to grasp the genuine heroism of the religious. The young woman who enters religion is just as truly human and as fully a woman as are her classmates who enter the married state. Entering religion means that a young woman surrenders herself to God, making the com-plete gift of her entire self to Him. The greatest offering she makes is that of her womanhood itself, sublimating all her womanly instincts and ambitions to higher ends and 4. 4. 4- Columban Brown-ing. C.P., is the Rec-tor of St. Gabriel Monastery, 1100 63rd Street, Des Moines 11. Iowa. VOLUME 21, 1962 ]9 Columban Browning, C.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 20 purposes. It is precisely in this sacrifice of the natural for the supernatural that the greatest heroism is required, a heroism that cannot exist without the grace of God. And the greatest challenge that the religious faces is how to find in this sublimation the happiness and fulfilment of her deepest womanly aspirations. Because this matter is so.vital to the religious life and because understandably some religious meet with practi-cal difficulties in meeting this challenge, it requires and deserves a proper understanding of the factors involved. In this artidle we shall endeavour to discuss this problem and seek a practical solution to help religious meet the challenge. Factors of the Problem Understanding this problem requires asa starting point an appreciation of woman's nature itself. A full analysis of woman's nature could, of course, require volnmes. But let us here review only briefly the basic characteristics of woman. We can best understand woman's nature by considering it from the point of view of God's plan and purpose. And when we look for God's plan and.purpose we find the key to that plan in the fact that He has given her the body, the mind, and the heart of a mother. Pius XII high-lighted this fact when he said: Every woman is destined to be a mother; a mother in the physical sense of the word, or in a more spiritual and higher but no less real meaning. The Creator has disposed to this end the entire being of woman, her organism, and even more her spirit, and above all her exquisite sensibility. So that a woman cannot see and fully understand all the problems of human life otherwise than under the family aspect (Duties oI Woman in the Social and Political Order, Oct. 21, 1945). Woman is physically prepared for motherhood. She is also psychologically and emotionally disposed for it to the extent that motherhood is the most basic specific craving of a normal woman. Furthermore, she is altrocentric by nature, seeking her fulfillment in another whom she loves and by whom she wants to be loved. It is this that leads a woman to seek a husband and that qualifies her to bestow her undivided love on the child that is the fruit of her motherhood. Since motherhood is the basic orientation of her nature, it is not difficult to single out what is the most character-istic virtue of woman. It is the virtue that makes her motherhood possible and fruitful, the virtue of love. Her heart is filled with a mother's supply of love, and it is a love that must be given in some way. The ordinary young woman finds the object of this love in her husband and her children. In bestowing this love she finds her deepest fulfillment. Woman has by nature other characteristic virtues, of course. But without enumerating them let us merely say here that in her all the other virtues are the servants of love. In a woman who understands her nature propdrly and tries to practice intelligent!y.the vir~tue of love, all the other virtues will follow in due "bi-ddr. Withbt, t that,love at the center of things, the other virtues will also be im-possible to her. This is, in summary, the basic'pattern~of~woman's na-ture as planned by God. This nature is possessed by every normal woman and it is the thing that determines her thinking, her instincts, and her manner of acting. It is easy to see how a woman finds the normal fulfillment of her nature in an ideal marriage. The married woman finds in her husband someone to love and by whom to be loved. In her marriage there: is a complete giving of her-self and sharing of her love, including the physical shar-ing and giving that begets children. In her child, the married woman finds a further outlet for her love and a deep exhilaration of fulfillment. ~ But what about the woman who enters religion? She is and always remains as truly a woman as does her class-mate who marries. She has the same nature, physically, psychologically, and emotionally as her classmate. But she enters a state in which none of these ordinary means of fulfillment are present. She has no husband to love or who will love her, and no ohe in whom she finds a. omparable outlet on the same plane. She has no way of giving her-self in precisely the same way that the married woman has, nor will she ever enjoy the deeply satisfying experi-ence of physical motherhood. The question obviously arises: Is such a one destined inevitably to frustration and the impossibility of fulfill-ment? The answer is just as obvious. We simply cannot doubt that the religious woman, can find fulfillment of her womanly nature. The way of life that a sister lives finds its inspiration in the words and example of our Lord Himself. And the fruits of sanctity in the thousands of woman before her in the same way of life is proof enough that such a woman can find real fulfillment. Indeed, all we need as proof of this is to come' to know just one sister who has lived her religious life successfully. She radiates the best of womanhood to a degree that any other woman can only envy. Her life bears out the truth of the state-ment of Leon Bloy: "The holier a woman, the more she is a woman." Principles of Solution_ When we attempt to explain how a ~eligious can attain fulfillment, a twofold point of view presents itself. The first is the speculative point of view, or considering it + + + Woman's Fulfillment VOLUME 21, 1962 21 4. 4. otumban Browning, C.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 22 from abstract principles. The second a.pproach is from the practical plane. Speculatively, or in the abstract, the answer to the ques-tion is relatively simple. It may be stated this way: The religious woman sublimates all her noble womanly quali-ties and aspirations and finds fulfillment of all on a higher plane. In other words, she dedicates her womanhood in all its fullness to God. And the fulfillment that she fails to find naturally in marriage and motherhood, she finds supernaturally through a total giving of self to God. The love that makes her capable of being a good wife and mother she centers more exclusively on God. This love takes on a new dignity and richness in her dedicated state in that it is more supernatural. Her desire to be a mother finds its sublimation in that, through sacrificing physical motherhood, she achieves a spiritual motherhood toward all souls, and especially toward those whom she personally helps. Thus, on the supernatural plane, one that is richer in true and lasting goods, the religious sister finds an out-let for all her natural inclinations. And in so doing she attains a fulfillment that is really' higher and more reward-ing than is possible for the married woman. Pope Pius XII stated this very clearly in his encyclical on virginity: Finally, it may not be asserted, as some do, that the mutual help which is sought in Christian marriage is a more effective aid in striving for personal sanctity than the solitude of the heart, as they term it, of virgins and celibates. For although all those who have embraced a life of perfect chastity have de-prived themselves of the expression of human love permitted in the married state, nonetheless it cannot therefore be affirmed that because of this privation they have diminished the human personality. For they receive from the Giver of heavenly gifts something spiritual which far exceeds the mutual help which husband and wife confe~ upon each other. They consecrate themselves to Him who is their source, and who shares with them His divine life, and thus personality suffers no loss, but gains immensely. For who, more than the virgin, can apply to himself that marvellous phrase of the Apostle Paul: "I live, now not I; but Christ lives in me" (Sacra virginitas, NCWC edition, n. 39). As we stated before, this is treating the matter from the speculative, or abstract, point of view. And no one can question the validity of this statement of the question. The religious finds fulfillment on an higher plane, devot-ing her womanhood to higher things through the sacrifice of natural goods. When we turn to the discussion of the practical aspects of the same problem, we are guided, of course, by the principles just stated. But since on the practical plane we are concerned with how the individual may realize the ideal in her own life, we are immediately confronted with some difficulty. This difficulty arises from the fact that this higher fulfillment is supernatural. The area of the supernatural is an area of faith. Any supernatural living must be evaluated by principles of faith and all its rewards are supernati~ral. But'just~ as the supernatural life of grace does not destroy the soul's natural life and inclinations, so in our thinking the f~ict that we are guided by faith does not destroy our natural outlook and inclinations. In fact this natural outlook is often the more spontaneous one and needs to be super-naturalized by an act of the will. And it is precisely in the difficulty of maintaining a supernatural outlook on her life of dedication to God in its day by day unfolding that a problem can arise in the life of the individual religious. The goods that she has sacrificed are more tangible and can sometimes be more real to her just because they are natural. The supernatural goods she seeks are spiritual and intangible and can tend at times to be rather unreal to her. In the concrete, then, the conflict amounts to this: The religious is very conscious of her basic natural inclinations and knows that they are toward things that are very real to her. She has a clear idea of what a husband is and is awi~re of her innate desire to be loved by one. She knows what a baby is and feels the instinctive desire for her own baby. She is aware that she has sacrificed these natural goods in order to love and be loved by God and to become a mother of many souls spiritually. But these latter things she cannot see clearly because they are spiritual and super-natural. Sometimes they may appear very unreal to her as in times of greater darkness of soul or discouragement. The remedy in such a conflict is, of course, to use her will to apply the principles of faith to her life in its con-crete circumstances. She needs to remember that super-natural goods are of more worth. ~than natural ones, that goods are not to be evaluated only as they bear on this life, but in the light of eternity. It is in this way that the religious can preserve and deepen her basic spirit of dedi-cation to God. And in the process her faith will deepen enabling her to see the goods she seeks as all the more desirable and rewarding. The sting of sacrifice may always remain because natural inclinations always remain with us as long as we are in this world. But as faith grows, even the sacrifice can become a source of deep joy and peace. Christian tradition is full of evidence of this fact. A case in point is the love poems of St. John of the Cross. The themes of suffering and love are so intermingled in these poems as to be almost indistinguishable. The follow-ing verse is given as an example: 4- Womat~'$ Fulfillment VOLUME 21, 1962 ÷ ÷ olumban Browning~ .P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 24 0 cautery most tenderl O gash that is my guerdonl O gentle handl O touch how softly thrillingl Eternal life you render, Raise of all debts the burden And change my death to life, even while killingl (Poems of St. John of the Gross, translated by Roy Campbell, Penguin edition, p. 59) Sublimation in Practice A religious can easily understand that the principles stated above are true. She finds it easy to see that ideally the religious should find fulfillment through the sublima-tion of all that ig good in her womanly nature to higher goals. She has no difficulty either in seeing that there can be an amount of difficulty in actual practice. This comes from the fact that she is seeking goods that are seen only through faith while all around her she can see attainable goals of the human order that appeal to her. But because the transfer from theory to practice is not always easy, let us attempt to spell out a little more in detail what a reli-gious can do to help herself attain the goal for which she has sacrificed so much. As in all things else, so here, the proper attitude of mind is important. What a sister thinks about her way of life will determine in great part how successfully she lives it. And the attitude of mind that is so important here is that of faith. A faith that merely recognizes the principles stated above is not enough. A living spirit of faith has to be developed and deepened. Without this, the religious can never really attain what she is seeking. But when her faith is strong to the point of being an habitual attitude of mind, she will find in it the motives for living her life positively and happily. Regarding the need for and the role of faith in the consecrated woman, Father Perrin, O,P. says in his excellent little book, Virginity: By her physical constitution, also, and by her sensitiveness, woman is subject to variability and instability. Faith endows her with the stability of being supported by Him Who is the Savior and who changeth not. She is dependent upon Him who is peace both quieting and fulfilling. In feminine virginity the abundance and vigor of faith are more evident for more special reasons. It follows from St. Paul's words: "The head of the woman is the man" that unless she wishes to be a truncated being, a woman without a husband on earth must have Christ as her head (J. M. Perrin, O.P., Virginity [Westminister: Newman, 1955], p. 96). Guided by a spirit of faith, the sister must keep the deep conviction of the supremacy of the supernatural over the natural, of the eternal over the temporal. This means practically in her case that she is pursuing supernatural and eternal goods while the married woman is seeking what are more immediately natural and tem-poral goods. This does not mean to imply, of course, that the married woman is seeking only natural goods but merely that her immediate goals are natural and tem-poral. True, the married woman's, lqve for her husband will remain in heaven and be, a,;s0urce'o[ joy foi-,;he~ But it will be completely overshadowed by her love for God, The natural goods of marriage, which are the ones the re-ligious gives up when she enters religion, are primarily goods of this world. By contrast, the things that the re-ligious seeks are primarily eternal, Her grasp of them here on earth remains very limited but her faith will tell her that they are an anticipation of the union with God that is eternal in heaven, A religious needs a strong and persevering conviction of faith on this point or else she will begin to think too much of the things she has given up and that inevitably brings conflict. This same spirit of faith will show the religious ever more clearly the. necessity and the joy of loving Christ with all her heart. We have stated that love is woman's most characteristic virtue and that her love is something that she must give in some way. Pius XII tells us how the religious is to give her love: Certainly it is the love of Christ that ~arges a virgin to retire behind convent wails and remain there all her life in order to contemplate and love the heavenly Spouse more easily and without hindrance; certainly it is the same love that strongly inspires her to spend her life and strength in works of mercy for the sake of her neighbor (Sacra virginitas, NCWC edition, n. 39). The religious must also remember that since love always contains an element of suffering, this must necessarily be so in her life. In fact, this is all the more certain to be present in her life from the very fact that Christ is her Spouse. Regarding this Father Perrin says: Virginity, in sum, is too closely united with Christ, too near His tastes, too aware of what the service of redemption requires not to carry a profound imprint of the Cross. The union with Christ itself, undoubtedly, is enough to enable the virgin to participate in the mortification of Jesus Christ . The willing-ness of virginity for the mystical union will set the sign of the Cross on the whole life, something necessary to remember in order to understand many of the pages of hagiography at their just value (Perrin, op. cit., p. 103). ÷ Could it be that the difficulty that some meet with in ÷ their efforts at sublimation comes principally from their ÷ failure to grasp in a practical way the need for suffering Woman's in the giving of their love? These would do well to recall t~ullltlraent the many ways in which a mother suffers in the giving of her love and in the full implications of her motherhood. It may unquestionably be said that to the degree that VOLUME 21, 1962 25 + + Columban Browning, C~P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 26 the religious grows in the personal love for our Lord, to the same degree will she attain the higher fulfillment she seeks: "Christian virginity is devised for love as the lungs are devised for air" (Perrin, op. cit., p. 99). But when we say~ this, it is important to remember that the love we refer to is not the predominantly emotional feeling that is some-times called love. This type of love may have a great part in leading a young woman into marriage, but even there, it is not enough for happiness in marriage. The religious, too, may sometimes experience something of this feeling but it is not the love that can and must nourish her life. That love is a higher supernatural love that can be entirely independent of any feeling and that is far more enduring and rewarding. It is a love, in other words, that cannot be gauged by how one reacts to things on a given day but by perseverance in self-giving. After all that we have said, must we conclude that the religious woman must free herself from all those qualities of love that we think of as precisely human and womanly? By no means. It is upon her human womanly qualities that these supernatural qualities are based. For all the supernatural faith and love that must animate her, the religious must still remain thoroughly human in the best sense of the word. All that is good in her nature must be developed and used for the glory of God and the good of others. She must use the warmth of her human love es-pecially in her efforts to win others to God and in her dealings with her fellow religious. But at the same time she must remember that this human love has been dedi-cated to God to serve a higher supernatural end. That such an ideal is possible of attainment is clear from the following words of Pius XII: Chastity and virginity (which imply also the inner renuncia-tion of all sensual affection) do not estrange souls from this world. They rather awaken and deepen the energies needed for wider and higher offices beyond the limit of individual families. Today there are many teaching and nursing sisters who, in the best sense of the word, are nearer to life than the average person in the world (Pius XII, Apostolic Exhortation to the Interna-tional Congress o[ Nuns Devoted to the Teaching of Girls, Sept. 13, 1951). The religious has ever within her reach all the means to foster this spirit of faith and love that will enable her to find fulfillment. The sacraments, prayer, spiritual reading, and other spiritual exercises enter daily into the life of a religious. Nourishing herself faithfully at these sources of grace, she can daily strengthen her faith and deepen her love. And as she comes to live more on the supernatural level, she will tend to think less of the na-tural joys she has given up in terms of sacrifice. She will rather think of them as a small price to pay for the deep happiness she finds. Her craving to bestow her love will find its deepest fulfillment in loving God and his children. Her desire to be loved will come to rest in the calm as-surance that God's love for her is constant and unchang-ing. Her motherly instinct will find its fullest outlet as she sees herself as the mother" of~many souls spiritually. An amount of struggle may still remain for the simple reason that she will always retain her basic natural orien-tation. But perseverance will bring to the religious a ful-fillment known only to the woman who has surrendered her womanhood in its entirety to God. ÷ ÷ ÷ Woman's Fulfillment VOLUME 21, 1962 MOTHER MARY ANTHONY Cornelia Connelly and the Spiri of Suffering Obedience Mother MaryAn-thony, S.H.C.J. teaches English at Rosemont College, Rosemont, Pennsyl-vania. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Cornelia Connelly,1 who founded the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (S.H.C.J.) in England in 1846, saw her work spread to America in 1862 when the first foundation was made in Pennsylvania. Today, a hundred years later, the Society has twenty-eight houses in this country. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Society in this country, this article is offered as a slight memorial to her founder. The heritage of any religious family is a living tradi-tion distinctive in starting point and attitude (an area hard to define), less so in means, toward a goal recogniz-able in generally accepted terms. The initial channeling is traced by the instrument God has chosen and guided first to discern, then to execute a pattern which against the ground of particular time and circumstance will manifest in new detail God's plan for "filling up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ." Uniqueness resides in the individuality of the instrument, the religious" founder, and in his or her perception of the role of the new insti-tute within the larger grouping that is the Church. This perception, however it may communicate itself person-to-person from the founder to the ever widening circle of disciples, is ultimately formulated in the rule of the con-gregation where the solemn ratification of Mother Church safeguards it from distortion. But the sense of mission, of the public life, as it were, of the fully integrated society presupposes a deep interior-ity, a known way to God that constitutes the individual 1 This article has been approved for publication by the Reverend Desmond McCarthy, promoter of the faith, Diocese of S6uthwark, England. spirituality o[ its members. Personal sanctification and the salvation of souls are the twin goals of religious pro-fession, and the former is the matrix. In what concerns the intimate relations of the soul with God the greatest delicacy is only fitting. Prescriptive norms as such can point the path, then set the soul free to follow '~the draw-ing of that Love and the voice of that Calling." Lived example best helps the hesitant. The working out of the unit figure in the design, seen as God .sees it harmonious and whole, is learned indeed by heart, by loving study of the actual steps to perfection of the one who first lived the teachings cherished now by a growing spiritual family. Cornelia Connelly (1809-1879), foundress of. the So-ciety of the Holy Child Jesus, gives her children just such guidance--a rnle distilled from praye.rful experience and tried in the fire of the unitive life amidst the demands of the teaching apostolate. To her words then for definitive statement, to her life for burning confirmation. And in both the same pattern 'is discernible--love, suffering, obe-dience (conformity to God's will). These come through consistently as motive, means, and end. According to the end and. spirit, of our special, vocatlon,. mysteries of the most subhme teaching are to be found ~n the humble and hidden life of the Holy Child Jesus, in which God manifests in a most wonderful manner the .treasures of His Mercy and of His boundless Love. In that Divine Child, en-closed for nine months in the womb of His Virgin Mother, born in a stable, exposed to suffering and poverty, fleeing into Egypt, hidden and labouring in a humble workshop, is found our Divine Master, our Model and our Spouse; and from the living wells of His perfect humility, His divine charity, and His ab-solute obedience, we are to receive the spirit of the Holy Child Jesus (Rule S.H.C.J., par. 2). In this school of Divine Science, contemplating the Eternal Wisdom in the lowliness of His Humanity, we should seek to attain the knowledge of our own nothingness and misery, and that of His infinite love and mercy; we should learn to uproot the evil inclinations of our corrupt hearts, and to cultivate therein the germ of practical mortification, studying in the ex-ample of a hidden God the sweetness of suffering and contempt, that we may thus rejoice to labour and to die with Him in the constant practice of poverty, chastity, and obedience (Rule S.H.C~J., par. 3). In the rule on humility (adapted from that of St. Ig-natius), we are bidden. "with our whole strength to ac-cept and desire what Christ our Lord loved and em-braced" to the extent of wishing "to suffer insults, false witness, and injuries., through the desire of imitating our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and of being clothed with His shame," so conforming our lives to His. The order and emphasis are seen to be constant. Love is. motive, stressed as knowledge that moves the will, not as emotion. Suffering is means, chosen because of the exam-ple of Christ, never in isolation. Obedience is end, per- + + + Cornelia Connelly VOLUME 21, 1962 29 fect union in the conformity of our will with God's. The rule on obedience reiterates this forcefully: "All should give themselves up to perfect obedience, recognising the Superior whoever she may be in the place of Christ our Lord"; "they ought to have before their eyes God, our Creator and Lord, for love of Whom they obey His crea-ture"; "All should be prompt at the voice of the Superior as at the voice of Christ our Lord"; "Let each one con-vince herself that those who live under obedience ought to let themselves be ruled and guided by Divine Providence through their Superiors"; "the Sisters should endeavour to accustom themselves to regard not her whom they obey, but rather Him for Whose sake they all obey, Christ our Lord"; "Each one attending to her own duties and office should patiently await, as from the hand of God, what-ever may be decided for her." A directive at once comprehensive and specific opens the purely ascetical Chapter 19 of the Rule: From the Hidden Life of our Divine Spouse we should learn the value we ought to set on prayer and the interior life, making them the basis of our spiritual perfection, and the fountain whence we should draw help and strength to perform in a perfect manner the duties of charity in our active life. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mother Ma~y Anthony REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 3O This focuses the attention of Mother Connelly's daughters on the phase of our Lord's life which is least immediately suggestive of suffering, but from the earliest references the association is unmistakable--"In that Divine Child. ex-posed to suffering and poverty., is found our Model"; "studying in the example of a hidden God the sweetness of suffering and contempt." Love and obedience are in-evitably linked with childhood; what insight joins to these suffering, even makes it central? A grasp perhaps of the utter emptying--exinanivit seipsum---of the Incarna-tion, most compellingly evident in the dependence of the Child. This would indeed be best appreciated by one who had known natural motherhood. We recall the image of that Pieth of February 2, 1840--C6rnelia, the grieving mother, holding the body of her two-year old son. He had died in her arms after severe burns resulting from an accident at play near a vat of boiling sugar at their Louisiana home. This incident had followed swiftly upon an oblation made in response to a sudden inspiration of grace. Over-whelmed with a sense of gratitude and wellbeing in the joy of home life and the fervor of conversion, she had cried: "O my God, if all this happiness be not for Thy glory and the good of my soul--take it from me. I make the sacrific!!" This scene prompts further consideration of Cornelia Connelly's unusual vocation and its acceptance in the spirit of the suffering obedience of Christ. Her unques-tioning docility to ecclesiastical advisors who considered genuine her husband's call to the priesthood and coun-seled the separation it entailed, was truly grounded in the faith of Abraham. She knew as no one else could know the heart of the man who wa~ h~r hfsband.' Did-she:foresee his defection? She knew as no one but a mother could how this strange step would scar her children. Even had the wise and generous provision made for them been carried out, the three living Connelly children would have had much to adjust to in their uprooted and anomalous situa-tion. Mercifully hidden from Cornelia at the time of these decisions was the mad violation of agreement by which their father removed them from her influence and suc-ceeded in estranging them from her and from their Catho-lic faith.2 There was no ram in the thicket for Cornelia. But God raised up children as from the ashes of her holocaust. Her apostolate of education was chiefly among the young, those in whom she bade her daughters "constantly strive to see Jesus," and whom they are to lead "to taste and to embrace the sweet yoke which He offers them." Her choice of the Epiphany as the day on which members of her Society renew their vows points up this double mani-festation, the recognition and response of self-oblation, and the giving of Christ in the self-giving of their lives. Nor may we overlook the relation of the first Epiphany to the slaying of the innocents. To dwell exclusively on the sacrificial aspects of Cor-nelia Connelly's life and teachings is to miss the most dis-tinctive if most paradoxical characteristic of her spirit, its joyfuI simplicity. A brief re-examination ofthe texts al-ready quoted discloses this note: "studying in the example of a hidden God the sweetness of suffering and contempt, that we may thus rejoice to labour and to die with Him," "to taste and to embrace the sweet yoke which He offers." Elsewhere in the Rule we read: "All should cultivate a spirit of joy and spiritual contentment"; "the whole coun-tenance should express cheerfulness and peace." We have here the deep and resonant gaudiurn of Ad-vent, the sense of ancient sacrifice fulfilled and hope brought to fruition, the joy of the mother in her expected child. Cornelia's womanly gift of creating a home as focal point and radiant center of natural happiness has been transformed into Mother Connelly's sure supernatural ~ The Earl o[ Shrewsbury and the Borghese family were to see to the education of the Connelly boys, Mercer (already at Stonyhurst) and Frank when old enough. The daughter, Adeline, was to remain with her mother. Pierce Connelly took all three to Italy with him when he lost the lawsuit by which he hoped to regain power over Cornelia. 4- ÷ ÷ Corneliu ¢onnelly VOLUME 2~ ~962 instinct for making a religious house or noviceship ol: school a Nazareth whose inmates grow in age and grace. with liberty of spirit and loving guidance. It is less saying "no" to nature than "yes" to God. Positive joyous accept.~ ance of God's way made known through ordinary means, this is the heritage of tlie Sisters of the Holy Child. ÷ ÷ ÷ Mother Mary Anthony REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 32 CHARLES B. TRUNDLE, s.J. I, ove and Perfect Chastity God is love, wrote St. John the evangelist. Because this is true, only those who love can possess God during this life and the next. To love is therefore man's greatest necessity: so it always was and so it will always be. Love is the key to life, or better, it is life itself, A man must love if he is to have life in him; this is God's law, a law based on God's own nature and therefore universal, eternal; and necessary. God did not conceal this law from mankind; he did not leave it to chance for man to discover. He did not say: "I will let men find out for themselves the secret of enter-ing into friendship with Me. Those who stumble upon this truth and live according to it, I will reward; those who fail, I will punish." God's love could not let mankind be ignorant in a matter of such importance. The goodness of God moved Him, rather, to establish a school of love, a school almost all men would desire to enter, a school teaching lessons most men would be will-ing to learn. This divinely founded school is marriage. Without marriage, it has been said, most men and women would not achieve the degree of love of which they are capable. And without marriage few children would re-ceive the love which is essential not only for their well-being but even for their continued existence. What kind of love is learned in the school of marriage? It is the love that typifies the mature adult; namely, a love of someone else for his sake, not for one's own. It is the love that characterizes God Himself who loves not that He may receive but that He may give. On the human level perhaps the purest expression of this love is that of a parent for his child. It is this kind of love which is man's best preparation for heaven, for it makes man most like God. It is certain that such a high degree of unselfish love is not to be reached without a long training; accordingly, ÷ ÷ ÷ Charles B. Trundle, S.J. teaches religion at the University of Scranton, Scranton 10, Pennsylvania. VOLUME 21, 1962 Ch~r/~s B. Trund/~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS God has' established some preparatory stages through which human beings normally pass. First, there is the complete self-love of the infant. This is good and a part of God's plan. The baby is just getting his foothold on earth; if he did not make known his hunger, his discom-fort, his needs by day and night, his very existence might be threatened. Soon.the child's love breaks the bonds of self and begins to include an ever widening field of persons: his parents, his brothers and sisters, the neighbors, his classmates, the members of his "gang," and after a brief period of aver-sion the opposite sex. There are, however--and this is to be expected---varying amounts of self-love in all these relationships. Some of them are heavily freighted with a love of gratitude; that is, the love is based on what the other has done or can do for the youth rather than for the other person's worth in himself. In the usual course of events, with the development of sexual maturity in all areas (emotional, intellectual, and spiritual as well as physical), one falls in love with a particular member of the other sex. Normally this love culminates in the establishment of a permanent relation-ship between the two, the state that we call marriage. The preliminary steps have been taken and the two now begin (if their schooling is to be successful) to live the profession vowed at the wedding, to love the other more than self. The couple is happy to express their inner union in a new way by becoming physically one (a unity which God selected as a fitting symbol of the union of Christ and His Church). The pair may be content with this new growth in love, but God has even further plans for them. Nor-mally, he blesses their bodily union with an extension of their love for each other: a new life, their child, is con-ceived and born. Almost without choosing it, the father and the mother are now led to new heights 6f unselfish love. Economies are made, painfully perhaps, but basically in a willing manner, in the areas of recreation, clothing, food, and so forth. Time schedules are altered to fit in with the needs of the newcomer. It may seem, in fact, that one's whole life is revolutionized by the arrival of the infant son or daughter. For the first time, perhaps, many parents will come to know what it means to love another without thought for oneself. An even further development of love is possible, how-ever. The parents' interests and concerns widen con-stantly with the growth of their children. They become attentive to the educational opportunities of their com-munity; they may get deeply involved in the scouts, in Little League baseball, taking on the role of coach or den mother and so forth. Decent literature, safety patrols, medical advances are important to them, as are a hundred other areas touching their child's life. Going along with all this is usually a widening of the heart, a breaking down of old confining walls to extend the limits of love to more and more of God's children. The father who has learned his iessons well in.the school of love can sympathize deeply with other parents who may lose their sons and daughters in a dreadful fire; he can feel for other families who are burdened by poverty, poor health, or other trials. He will wish to help them, if he can, by contributing of his own time and money. Wider and wider his heart becomes until it is much more like the heart of God; until it becomes perfect as his Father's who makes the sun to shine upon both just and unjust and the rain to fall upon the fields of both sinner and saint. Not all are willing, of course, to learn in the school of love; some rebel against its teacher, fail miserably at its lessons. Whatever the cause of this failure may be (very often, perhaps, because someone failed the learner at an earlier stage), God does not wish it to be so. There is nothing new in what has been said up to this point. What bears highlighting is this: the role and pur-pose of sex on the path to love which is traveled by the ordinary man and woman. If neither sex offered the other deeply satisfying intellectual, spiritual, and emotional completion, how few there would be who would enter the married state with its permanent obligations and bur-dens. If there were no physical attraction between male and female, how few couples would be herioc or unselfish enough to bring children into this troubled world! The divine strategy, then, should be noted well. God places in mankind strong appetites, powerful desires which win his heart and encourage his mind and will to make such com-mitments as they would never make by themselves. God does not intend marriage as an end in itself, therefore, but rather as a means to an end; that is to say, as a setting or school in which most men and women best learn how to love. This is one reason why every marriage, whether its participants are aware of it or not, possesses great dignity in the eyes of God. If the married state is dear to God because it can help man become more God-like, the state of consecrated chastity is far more precious to Him. And for this reason: the religious professes to begin his life where the married may be said to end his. By making the three vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity the religious cuts him-self off from the great obstacles to universal love. He enters a religious community so that he may be able to devote himself more completely to the works of love. He sacrifices the privilege of having his own family so that"he ÷ ÷ Love and Perfect Chastity VOLUME 21, 1962 Charles B. Trundle REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS may be a father, a brother, a sister, or a mother to all. He will never meet or serve all people, of course, but he does pray for all and he does make himself free and well-disposed to receive wholeheartedly anyone God may send to him in the course of his apostolic life. Freed from the duty and privilege of loving exclusively one husband or wife and six or a dozen children, he professes to give his love to every soul as if it alone were his only concern. Needless to say, some religious fail .in their own school of love and most of them must work for years to fulfill the ambitious goal they chose with God's grace at the time of their first vows. Be that as it may, the religious life in itself is aimed more directly at loving and serving God and all mankind, and this is one reason for its greater dignity in the eyes of both God and man. Since the young religious bypasses marriage in order to place himself further along the.road to God, he has no need for the God-designed means that lead to the married state; namely, sex. Nevertheless, he possesses it. God does not usually work miracles; he does not tamper with or mutilate His creatures. Accordingly, the sexual faculties (spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical) may be expected to be operative in the religious as in any other person of comparable age, education, background, and so on. As a matter of fact, because of a religious' greater sen-sitivity to beauty, generosity, and goodness, these faculties may be even more active than in his counterpart in the world. No religious may expect, therefore, to escape the strongly appealing call of marriage and of all the legiti-mate activities that comprise it. The responsibility for this is not his, but God's. For it was He who designed the faculties and it was His wisdom which added the pleasure to their use so that man would be led willingly to the grand purposes God had in mind for him. This attrac-tion, then; may be expected as a normal experience for most people; it is part of God's general plan for the hu-man race. It is unfortunate that some religious do not have a wholesome attitude ~regarding this very important area of life. One hears the complaint from those tempted; "But all this is so incompatible with my state in lifel" It is only one small, false step to that most disco.uraging conclusion: "Therefore, I am not a good relig!ous." How much more realistic and better would it be to say: "How important it must be to lovel Here is God, remind-ing me through faculties He designed for this very pur-pose that I must be sure to love if I am to have any part with Him. If others need this reminder, how much more do I, for love is. my chosen profession." Better still, he may even voice these thoughts as a prayer: "Dear God, I thank You for this reminder of the necessity of love in every life. But You Yourself have in-vited me to love in a higher and more Christlike way. Give me the grace, please, to carry off my gift to You suc-cessfully and without tension, worry, or fear. Never for-get, Lord, that it is Your doin~ ~h~it I f~el~th~ :appeal of Your school of love in the world; it is Your doing, too, that I have left the world to love You more. You have placed me between the two: I know that You will pro-vide." 4. 4" 4. Love and Peryect Chastity VOLUME 21, 1962 37 PHILIP C. ROND, M.D. Early Recognition of Emotional Illness Dr. Rond, 1500 W. Third Avenue, Co-lumbus 12, Ohio, is Chairman of the Section of Psychia-try at Mr. Carmel Hospital, Colum-bus, Ohio. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS For many--too manymyears there existed the notion that there was no need to be concerned with mental illness in religious because it was extremely rare. Then, too, prayer and devotion were considered a panacea for emo-tional ills such as worry, depression, and so forth; no one needed special medico-psychological help if he or she would just pray fervently. So, besides denial, devotion was prescribed by non-medical persons as a substitute prescrip-tion for medico-psychological help, in order to preserve our religious resources as intact as possible for the higher calling and services they provide. The Medical Corps of the military has the objective "to maintain the fighting strength" using the best 'available techniques. This motto could be modified for religious, "to maintain the devotional strength" using the.best avail-able techniques. This latter would include early recogni-tion of emotional troubles and/or the need for specialized help, from non-medical religious superiors and personnel, and psychiatry. Religious are men and women from all socio-economic backgrounds who carry with them into their spiritual lives their own personality traits, molded by their experiences prior to entering the religious community. Because of these features they may at one time or another develop emotional conflicts with or without associated physical complaints requiring medico-social-psychological aid. First aid could come from within the community, from those trained to handle these conditions. Later, but not too late, .outside professional help should be obtained, especially while the religious is still at his or her daily duties. The needed professional medico-psychological help for the concomitants of their tensions can relieve them of the suffering which makes them pQor community associates and inefficient attendants to their religious duties. The early signals of emotional distress can be put into two main categories: namely, those of habit pattern (be-havior) disturbances, and of physical (bodily) disturbances. The early recognition of these signals depends upon the open-minded, unprejudiced acceptance of emotional prob-lems as specific, actual entities by those in authority in religious communities. So, whileywe d~s~ribe sigfig:' for Which to watch, we are trusting that those who should be alert are not denying the importance of being attentive to them. Dividing the early symptoms into two categories does not exclude the possibility of overlapping of these symptoms. However, if there is alertness to signals from one or the other of these two areas, the sharper will be the perception of significant clues. First, regarding symptoms in the behavior category area, these are based upon knowledge of the individual prior to the devolopment of the changes. Every good leader knows his or her personnel well enough to have such a baseline of reference. The moving of disturbed personnel without the transmission of sufficient personality information puts the receiving superior in the unfortunate position of not having a baseline of normality from which to evaluate, and often precludes early proper action in a given case. Unprejudiced personality assessments should accompany every normal transferee. Disturbed personnel should be moved only with considerable planning in which the in-dividual's needs take precedence over the superior's or the community's needs. Knowing individuals' basic behaviorisms or habit pat-terns, we can proceed to compare them with themselves (not ourselves or others) periodically, casually, thought-fully. The very early signals are almost too numerous to mention but consist of such things as the development of a persistent inability to arise easily at the appointed time or go to bed and to sleep at the appointed hour; a change in eating habits, in appetite; a restlessness, a diminution in attention span; irritability, fussiness; nervousness at devo-tions; inability to perform the usual duties assigned; de-velopment of nervous habits such as eye twitching, fore-head wrinkling, na~al sniffing, head jerking, foot tapping, leg rocking; withdrawing, overaggressiveness, moodiness, silliness, and so forth. In the early stages help is almost 100% effective in stop-ping the progress of the disorder and preventing it from going on to a serious condition. At this point the relief may come from discussing matters with a wise superior. Early referral for professional guidance, diagnosis, and advice, can still keep the role of the therapist in the com-munity, with the superior, or his or her appointed rep-resentatives, with the psychiatrist acting only in the con-sultant role. These early behavioral changes are the result of an individual's efforts to deal with an anxiety that is Emotional Illness VOLUMI~ 21~ 1962 Philip . RoncI REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 40 new or too intense, or accumulative from a number of factors uniting with a crescendo effect. The new behav-iorisms may not necessarily be bad in themselves but they indicate a serious conflict situation which, while un-healthy, is often not so deeply fixated as to require in-tensive short or long term psychotherapy, removal from the current setting for therapeutic attention, or any medicine. An ounce of prevention---early recognition-- may make it possible to provide help from within the community. It is to be anticipated that early recognition of signifi-cant behavior changes will improve, as acceptance of them as meaningful is well understood in the community. There are those who are referred to as having always been a little different. However, there is always a point where it should not be accepted without special consideration. Then there are those about whom it is said, "They were 'so normal,' we just couldn't believe it." In the first instance delay with help may occur because "it's expected" behavior. In the second case people may not believe their eyes, until the behavior becomes so bizarre or unacceptable that action must be taken. If we will look on the early behavioral and/ or physical symptoms as ways of asking for help we can justify an earlier move to assist. This way of asking for help results from the fact that the symptoms, a resolution arrived at quite automatically, are quite indifferent to the pressures of social mores. They are admissible because they operate so smoothly within the ego function as not to have to be denied or rejected. Many neurotics are probably happy for the development of a physical symptom be-cause this offers them a reason (acceptable) to seek medical aid. Purely psychological symptoms do not warrant seek-ing help for many because of the social stigma attached even by intelligent people. The second category of body signals or disturbances can and do involve all the bod~, systems and organs, heart, lungs, muscles, bones and joints, excretory system, and sensory system. The specific body complaints are, like the behavioral ones, too numerous to mention, The social-emotional etiology of them is the item to be stressed. Too often insistence by the individual, and/or the superior, that the physical complaint has a structural origin which will be found, has delayed recovery, prolonged incapacity and led to many lost hours of fervent, undistracted devo-tion the world requires so badly. Early medical evaluation is very important for the individual and for eliminating lost devotional hours. The body signals, as the behavior signals, are recognized by their newness in the individual, their lack of responsive-ness to the usual medical procedures, their intensity, and often a bizarre quality in the complaint or in the relating of it; by their association or tie-in with a gradually built up source of emotional tension which reaches a peak, or the sudden development of an emotional charge which has overwhelmed the personality defenses. The signals may be recognized by anyone. Those especial!y close to the situation should be respected When the~ report" shch ob-servations to their superiors who are a little more removed from the case. Early recognition usually implies quick recovery. Better to have pursued a false early signal with a medico-psycho-logical checkup which proves, negative than to have de-layed and produced a medico-psychological cripple with associated impaired devotional capabilities. As the supe-rior and his or her staff develop a competency in counsel-ing, one would expect much relief from the tension effects for the human individual in the religious life and com-munity living. Then the early recognition of signals of emotional turmoil will mean even better results, reflected in a maintenance of a greater operational devotional strength and capacity. Early recognition of emotional dis-orders also must include spotting the person in a com-munity who, because of his or her position, may be the precipitating cause, in oneor more other individuals, of emotional crises with their behavioral and/or bodily com-plaints. The precipitators often are blind to their un-healthy faculty, but many, with help, can see what they do. If insight cannot be gained, removal often is as neces-sary as removal of a focus of infection in the body. In conclusion, early recognition of the signs of emo-tional illness involves co~nparison of the religious behavior and/or physical status with his or her previous behavioral habits and physical state. This may be done by peers or superiors. It requires an open-mindedness about such con-ditions being possible and acceptable and treatable ill-nesses. The treatment of such conditions will vary depending upon the intensity of the distnrbance and the facilities and capabilities of those in the community. Referral for minor emotional problems to the psychiatrist will diminish as the skills in the community to handle them develop. But until such trained personnel are available within the re-ligious community early referral for medico-psychological help should be too early rather than too late. Emotional Illness VOLUME 21, lq62 41 JAMES MICHAEL LEE Notes Toward Lay Spirituality 4. 4. .I. Dr. Lee, 217 Wash- ~ngton Street, Hart-ford 6, Connecticut, ~s a member of thi~ faculty of St. Joseph College, West Hart-ford, Connecticut. "~EVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 42 Like every practicing lay Catholic the world over, I went to Mass last Sunday. Nothing unusual about that. And there was nothing unusual about the sermon either. The preacher gave rather clear instructions on how the layman interested in saving his soul should act in the world. He recalled the story of Moses and the Edomites (Num 20: 14-21). The great Israelite leader wished to pass through the land of Edom en route to the Promised Land. He therefore sent a message to the Edomite King saying: "Kindly let us pass through your country. We will not cross any fields or vineyards, or drink any well water, but will go straight along the royal road without turning to the right or to the left until we have passed through your territory." The priest then told us that this passage should serve as the rule of life for all Catholics. Laymen should pass directly on the royal road to heaven and should nei-ther look around at the world nor enjoy its pleasures. Like many a practicing. Catholic the world over, I did some spiritual reading last Sunday. Nothing unusual about that. And there was nothing unusual about the con-tent of the book either. The spiritual writer exhorted his readers to steel themselves against the things of this world so that they may attain glory in the next. He warned that Christians can grow closer to God only by flying directly to Him, and that this flight would be made impossible if we concern ourselves with earthly things. This is standard spiritual fare, and Catholic lay people have been and still are subjected to it from pulpit and page. This approach views the spiritual life as a system of defenses against a hostile world which is literally hell-bent on our destruction. The higher we advance in the spiritual life, the more sturdy will be our defenses. If only the world could be eliminated, then would we attain God! But it is obvious that we cannot eliminate the world as it exists out-side of ourselves. We can make repeated acts of the will saying, "World, cease to existI' but the stubborn world re-mains despite our strongest will acts. The only other course of action, therefore, is to eliminate the world as it exists within ourselves. This can be accomplished by con-stantly directing our thoughts away from the world and focusing our attention on a~n0n~orldly reality, such as God as He is in heaven. In this way the world.will cease to become a part of us, and', if we are vigilant and steadfast, we will attain a state of otherworldliness. This approach to lay spirituality has at least four major defects, any one of which is sufficient to cast serious doubts on its validity as a means of attaining perfection. These four include psychological unsoundness, existential un-soundness, unsuitability, and lack of historical basis. Cer- .tainly this almost exclusively negativistic approach does violence to our humanity. We cannot escape our meta-physical situation. We were made to see, to touch, to hear. Without these our mind would wither, dry up. Over and over again St. Thomas reiterates the necessity of contact with the world outside of us if we are to come to an aware-ness of ourselves. Indeed we know ourselves precisely by knowing others. Our minds and senses were given to us not to negate or deny the real, but rather, as Ghrist did, to draw all things to ourselves and thus to God Man has a double task, namely to enrich himself by expanding him-self so as to take in all reality, and to enrich reality by re-deeming it. All baptized Catholics are other Christs, and as such it is their task to share with Him in the redemption of all things. Man confronts reality as a co-redeemer, as Mouroux has observed. Just as the grass became a bit greener because Christ walked the earth~ so it should be-come greener still because we have walked the earth. ality not only has a duty to us, but we also have a duty to reality. This reciprocal obligation and enrichment cannot be fulfilled by shutting the world out, but rather by letting it flood in and inebriate us. "To be a Christian is to carry the whole world in your heart," said Zundel rightly. The liturgy is an excellent example of how the Church uses the senses to bring the outside world into the wor-shiper, to fill him to the bursting point with sensations of every sort. The beautiful vestments, the altar with its tabernacle and linens, the movement of the ministers all fill the worshiper with visual delight. Gorgeous singing, whether pain chant or polyphony, fills the room with its resonance and melody while the powerfully fragrant smell of the incense wafts about and clings tenaciously, to both building and nostrils. The Church opens to us the beauty of God's world, so that we may fill ourselves to satiety. Ought we not, then, open ourselves to the world? This exclusively negativistic approach to lay spiritual living is also unsound from an existential point of view. Lay Spirituality VOLUME 21, 1962 43 lames M. Lee R~V|EW FOR RELIGIOUS 44 Did not God'create the world? If He did, if He really did, and if creation is continuous and ongoing as the theolo-gians .say, then Godis somehow intimately in that world. Every cause is somehow in its effect. God is in the world more than just by power, just as the composer is in his symphony more than just by his creation of it. This is not pantheism, but rather a realization of the deep .bond be-tween God and His world. Certain of the Greek Fathers were very conscious of God's intimacy in and with the world. All things sing with God, to paraphrase Aristotle. The world is not evil; it is worldliness that is evil. World-liness is a psychological state of man's mind about the world; it is an inordinate, disproportionate love of the world. The world, God's world, cannot be blamed for its misuse in man's mind. God has given us the world so that by it we may return to Him--not in spite of it, but pre-cisely through it. Indeed it can be said that without the world we cannot approach God except by infused con-templation, which is granted only to a very few. If the world were so e,~il, then why will God restore it to man after the resurrection of the body? The world, is man's natural environment. I~ he but lets it be, it can become his supernatural environment also. But for this to come to pass he must look at the worl, d with the eyes of Christ, not with the eyes of Jansenius. The work of that great French Jesuit of this century, Teilhard de Chardin, has done much to give Catholics 'a proper vision of the world. By placing Christ squarely in matter, Chardin has effected a revolution in the spiritual life and in so doing has made the most profound theologi-cal advance Of the century. Chardin did not say that Christ was matter, but rather that He permeated matter. Conse-quently the world deserves our love and respect for the God-soaked reality it is. Man can accept the world, add to it by his co-redemptive faculty or detract from it by giving it.attributes it does not possess. The latter is worldlinessi Strangely, we take away from the dignity of the world when we add to it that which it does not possess. The Chardinian revolution bids us face the magnificent world for what it really is, not run away from it and call this shrinking sanctity. The exclusively negativistic approach to lay spirituality is .further defective because it is almost totally unsuitable to the layman's life in the mode and manner in which he lives it. Unlike most spiritual writers and many priestg, the layman lives completely in the world. Farmers see the beauty of the wheat fields glistening in the sun. Doctors see.the wonderful advances which science has made tb help mankind. After a day's toil, workers in offices arid factories feel the warmth of human friendship. Mathema- ticians become enraptured over the harmony of numbers. Concert audiences are enthralled over the delights of a superbly played symphony. Travellers to Europe are ec-static over the art treasures they find there. Surely they do not really believe that the world is evil and should be fled. They have seen too much of g0od~n~ss, too much.of beauty, too much of love, and yes, too much of G0d.in the world. What happens when the lay Catholic listens to a sermon or reads a book telling him to steel himself against the world? He perhaps assents (if he does not become bored) and then proceeds to act as if nothing was ever spoken or ever read. This course of action clearly indicates that he does not really believe the world is evil and to be avoided. The layman is not a spiritual schizophrenic, as he is some-times .accused, simply because.he never believed what the preacher or spiritual writer said. The result is that many words are uttered by preacher and page which are really wasted. No lay person in his right mind takes them se-riously. Father Thomas Stack, the prominent American litur-gist, complains that spiritual preaching and writing are rarely done with the layman in mind, but rather are in-tended for people who live in some ideal world. The lay-man knows the goodness of the world by practical contact and resists attempts by speculators who tell him that what he sees is an illusion. What is needed is spiritual teaching for the layman. The fourth major defect in an exclusively negativistic approach is that those great figures of Christianity who lived in the world just simply did not believe it, judging by their words and deeds. Christ did not walk through the fields and vineyards on the royal road, neither looking to the right nor to the left. Rather He went right into the midst of the fields and gathered there the fruit of the wheat; and He went into the midst of the vineyard and pressed the juice of the grape. And He blessed both, and gave the world Himself foreverl He left us a sign, not only that we might know Him, but that we might know the proper way to deal with the world. What can be more rep-resentative of the world than bread and wine? Christ did not steel Himself against the world, or reject it; He blessed it and made it divine. The world became Christl One of Christ's greatest servants, St. Francis of Assisi, was a man who knew how to confront the world. He did not despise it, or curse it, or steel himself against it. He opened his soul to it, let it pour in upon his soul, for he knew that simultaneously there flowed in God. St. Francis knew the Christ-like way of confronting a bird, or a blade of grass, or the ocean. In his extraordinarily beautiful and moving Canticle of Brother Sun, St. Francis points the way Lay Spirituality VOLUME 21j 1962 45 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 46 toward proper confrontation of man to world. In this Can-ticle, the Saint takes the various realities of the world, the sun, the moon, the wind, fire, and so forth, and thanks God for what these realities are in themselves. Is St. Francis here denying the relation of God to matter, or holding that God is not deeply imbedded in the world? A close analysis of the Canticle reveals precisely the opposite. The first verse, on the other hand, speaks of the complete ineffa-bility of God; indeed St. Francis here notes that no man is worthy even to mention God. And then in the next verse the holy man of Assisi launches immediately into his praises of the world. Is there a lacuna in the Canticle? Nol St. Francis realized that reality is a paradox, that while no man could mention God, yet every man could mention Him at every moment of his life by properly confronting that world which He made and in which He was deeply imbedded. We do not live in a divided world, with an. abyss separating the natural and supernatural. Rather we live in one world where the natural and the supernatural interpenetrate each other in a fused reality. It was this way before the Fall; and after the Fall, the intense heat of Christ's love as manifested in His life and death acted as a tremendous fusion force to bring about once again the interwoven universe. St. Francis saw all this. We should profit from his life and teaching. Is this article a condemnation of the via negativa, the negative way to spiritual perfection? Certainly notl Rather it is a condemnation of an exclusively negative approach. No one can deny that Christ; or St. Francis, or any other saint for that mater employed the via negativa. However, this article attempts to show that the via positiva, the posi-tive way, is not only an important and necessary avenue to spiritual perfection, but is in fact more suited to lay spirituality than the negative way. It is not a case of a mutually exclusive either/or, but rather of an inclusive both/and. In their deepest existential reality the via nega-tiva and the via positiva merge and become one. The lay-man must use both ways, but for him the primacy belongs to the positive way. Spiritual writers and preachers should remember this when preparing their messages to the faith-ful. Undoubtedly one of the greatest Pontiffs of modern times was Pope Pius XII. Those of us who met him could not fail but to be profoundly struck by his deep sanctity. When this holy man of God lay dying, he asked for music to be played for him. He obviously felt that in his last mo-ments on earth, music would draw him closer tothe God he had served so well throughout his lifetime. What type of music did the saintly Pope ask for in his last hour? Gre- gorian chant? Spiritual motets? Nol He requested that Bee-thoven's First Symphony be played. Here was a deeply devout man, believed by many to be in heaven now, who in those crucial moments just before death, saw God more in "secular" reality than in professedly spiritual !reality. Here was the via positiva iri ~ictionl, ÷ ÷ ÷ Lay Sp~rituaUty VOLUME 21, 1962 R. F. SMITH, s.j. Survey of Roman Documents R. F. Smith, S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS This article will summarize the documents which ap-peared in ,4cta Apostolicae Sedis during August, 1961. All page references in the article will be to the 1961 Acta (vi 53). Three A llocutions On June 12, 1961 (pp. 495-99), Pope John XXIII ad-dressed the members of the Central Commission for the preparation of Vatican Council II on the occasion of the commission's first session. The Pope outlined the work of the commission which will consist in considering the prob-lems of the convocation of the council and in examining the preliminary drafts submitted by the other preparatory commissions of the council. His Holiness told the members of the commission that the coming council will leave art indelible mark on the history of the Church. On June 20, 1961 (pp. 499-503), the Vicar of Christ again addressed the same Central Committee, this time on the occasion of the closing of the first sessions of the corn, mission--sessions which were concerned with the member-ship of the council, procedural matters in the council, and the language of the council. The language is to be Latin, though the vernacular will be used when opportunity or necessity requires it. The Pope then proceeded to give the objectives of the council: the renewal of the holiness of the clergy; the effective instruction of the faithful in the truth:; of faith and of Christian morality; the right formation adolescents; the spread of the social apostolate; and the formation of a missionary soul in every Christian. On July 6, 1961 (pp. 503-04), the Pope addressed the members of the Commission for the Lay Apostolate for Vatican Council II. Through the commission he exhorted all the faithful to increased prayer for world peace. Miscellaneous Documents On August. 12, 1961 (pp. 525-27), His Holiness pub-lished the text of his handwritten letter constituting Amleto Cardinal Cicognani Secretary of State. On July 9, 1961 (pp. 504-06), John XXIII sent a radio message for the conclusion of the Seventh'~Na~i0nal Marlan~C0nven-tion of France held at Lisieux. He told his listeners that all Christians of whatever state of life were enveloped in the motherhood of the Blessed Virgin who does for all Chris-tians what every mother does for her child. The Pope in-sisted thatdevotion to the. Blessed Virgin is a mark of a person who is truly C~tholic. On June 20, 1961 (p. 507), the Holy Office issued a.warn-ing, telling those who. treat of Scripture to do so with pru-dence and reverence. They should be mindful o~ the teach-ings of the. fathers, of the magisterium of the Church, and of the sense of the Church. They should also be careful not to disturb the consciences of the faithful and not to violate the truths of faith. On June 26, 1961 (pp. 507-08), the Holy Office issued a decree placing on the Index Jean steinmann's La vie de Jdsus (Paris: Club des Librairies de France, 1959). On May 10, 1961 (pp. 513-16), the Sacred Congregation of Rites approved the reassumption" of the cause of BIessed Matthias Murumba, martyr~ and his twenty companion martyrs of Uganda. The martyrs died in 1886 and were beatified in 1920. On November 9, 1960 (pp. 517-20), the same congregation approved the introduction of the cause of the Servant of God, Brother Andrew (1845-1937), of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. On June 5, 1961 (p. 521), the Sacred Apostolic Peniten-tiary granted an indulgence of three years whenever a visitor to St. Peter's kisses the foot of the statue of St. Peter there and says the invocation, "St. Peter, pray for us." On June 9, 1961 (pp. 521~23), the Penitentiary approved a list of indulgences that may be gained by members of the Pontifical Work of Priestly Vocations. ÷ 4. ÷ Roman Documents VOLUME 2't', 1962 49 Viems/ Nets/ In Memoriam: Adam C. Ellis, S.]. (1889-1961) On November 25, 1961, in St. Louis, Missouri, oc-curred the death of Adam C. Ellis, S.J., one of the three co-founders of REw~w FoR RE~o~o~Js. Father Ellis was born in Buffalo, New York, entered the So-ciety of Jesus in 1905, was ordained in 1921, received his doctorate in 1926 from the Gregorian University, and for most of the rest of his life taught canon law at St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas. He was the co-author of Canon Law:,4 Text and a Commentary and the translator-reviser of Religious Men and Women in Church Law and Handbook of Cere-monies. Father Ellis was a zealous worker in behalf of the religious of the United States and deserves a remembrance in their prayers and good works. May he rest in peace. 4. 4. 4, Views, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Instruction from Congregation of Religious On February 2, 1961, the Sacred Congregation of Reli+ gious directed a new document to major religious superiors entitled Instruction to the Superiors of Religious Corn.,~ munities., on the Careful Selection and Training of Candidates. An English translation of the document can be purchased for one dollar from Sister Formation Bulletin., Ottumwa Heights College, Ottumwa Heights, Iowa. Seminary Statistics for the United States The July, 1961, Seminary Newsletter of the National Catholic Educational Association gives a statistical sum.~ mary of United States seminaries for the academic year 1960-61. According to the report there are 96 American diocesan seminaries; of these 28 are major seminaries, while 49 are minor seminaries and the remaining 19 com-prise both major and minor departments. During the same period in the United States there were 295 religious house~; of formation. Of these 106 were major seminaries; 122; minor seminaries; and 67 were combination major-minor seminaries. During the same period there was a total of 23,319 candidates for the diocesan priesthood and 19,629 for the religious priesthood, giving a complete total of 42,948 candidates for the priesthood in 1960-61. One re- mark would seem in order: the 23,319 candidates for the diocesan priesthood are cared for in 95 seminaries, while the smaller number of religious candidates (19,629) are found distributed in 295 houses offormation. This would seem to indicate that clerical religious groups of the United States might well'consider a consolidatingof theii" seminary institutions by grouping the seminary institu-tions of several orders or congregations into larger units. Retreat Conferences Fifteen retreat conferences for lay persons are available either on long play records or on magnetic tape. The con-ferences are given by the Reverend Raphael C.:McCarthy, s.J., retreat director at Sacred Heart Retreat House~ Se-dalia, Colorado. Each album of the records or each copy of the tape costs ~14.95 and can be ordered from Father McCarthy at the above address. The Church in Africa Herder-Korrespondenz for August, 1961, gives statistics illustrating the growth of the Church in Africa between 1949 and 1959. In 1949 there were 11,000,000 Catholics on the continent; in 1959 this number had increased to 20,200,000, a gain of 84%. The largest percentage increase was found in West Africa where Church.membership dur-ing the decade increased 120%; North Africa had the low-est increase, 37%. In eight countries of Africa Catholics form more than one-fourth of the total population. On the other hand two countries are listed as being without Cath-olics: British Somaliland and Mauretania, both of which are entirely Mohammedan in reiigious allegiance. The Church in Spain Raz6n y Fe for March, 1961, has a statistical survey of many facets of Church life in Spain. The following points from the article may be of interest. In 1960 in Spain there were 24,504 diocesan priests and 8,319 religious priests. In the same year there were 20,583 professed men religious and 71,309 professed women religious. In the academic year 1959-60, 5,302 men applied for admittance to Spanish seminaries; of these 4,173 were accepted, the other 1,129 being rejected. The latest available statistics show that Spain has 22,628 seminarians. A survey of more than 17,000 of these showed that roughly 25% were from large cities, another 25% from small towns, and the remaining 50% from rural areas. A similar survey of seminarians on an economic basis disclosed that out of 17,053 seminarians whose backgrounds were investigated 917 were from the upper class, 8,698 fr6m the middle class, and 7,438 from the lower class. ÷ ÷ ÷ Prev~ws VOLUME 21, 1962 51 ÷ ÷ ¥iews, News, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS The article also furnishes some data on the number of non-Catholics in Spain (including, therefore, Jews and Orthodox). In 1960 there were between 15,561 and 18,716 non-Catholics in Spain divided among fourteen different religious groups. The largest single group is that of the Plymouth Brethren who in 1960 counted between 4,815 and 5,615 membex;s. Missionary Bishops of the World L'Osservatore Romano oJ May 18, 1961, provides statis-tics on the number and origin of missionary bis.hops throughout the world (exclusive of missionary auxiliary bishops). As of May 15, 1961, there were 196 such bishops in Africa, 64 in the Americas, 153 in Asia, 8 in Europe, and 55 in Oceania, making a total of 476. Of these 289 were born in Europe, 54 in the Americas, 73 in Asia, 32 in Af-rica, and 28 in Oceania. The above figures do not take into account data for countries dominated by Communism. Twenty-Year Index A twenty-year index to REviEw FOR REI~e~OtJS is in preparation. The proposed index will have four parts: author-title index of articles; subject index; author-title index of book reviews; and a canon law index. It is hoped that the index will be ready by the end of 1962. New African Congregation According to International Fides Service of September 2, 1961, a new congregation of religious women was founded in December, 1960, in the diocese of Luluabourg in Africa. On August 22, 1961, the first.four members of the congregation received their habits; and a new postulant was received at the same time. The new congregation is called by the name of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Guide to Meetings A recent publication of the National Catholic Educa-tional Association will prove useful to those engaged in education. Entitled Calendar of Meetings of 195 National and Educational Associations, 1961-62, it lists by date meetings that have been scheduled for the present aca-demic year. The publication is available for seventy-five cents from NCEA Research Office, 1785 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington 6, D.C. [The following answers are given by Father Joseph F. Gallen, s.J., professor of canon law at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland.] Shou

Issue 36.3 of the Review for Religious, 1977. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS IS edtted by faculty members of St Lores University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Building, 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 May 1977 Volume 36 Number 3 Renewals, new subscriptions, and changes of address should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIGZOUS; 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 I~OR RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boule-yard; 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. Nomadic Love Rita Bernard Walton, S.S,J. Sister Rita Bernard resides at the Corpus Christi Convent; Sumneytown Pike and Supplee Rd.; Lansdale, PA 19446. :: Fpr centuries men have responded to a voice, a formless, faceless, nameless voice, a voice that pierced the inner depths like a fiery sword saying: "Come and see" (see Jn 1:35-51). To come and see is to come into Jesus, and to respond to the call is only to hear it repeated over, again and again, to _come deeper into Jesus. It means a lifetime of coming and a lifetime of seeing as one .surprise of.love follows another:in living in Jesus. The heart hears the silent language of Jesus' love that calls for acceptance. 'The acceptance of his love entails ac-cepting all the Lover is and~ all he gives. He gives himself in sacrament, in word,, in life. He reveals himself slowly with each love-touch and fills the soul with wonder at the awesome burden with which he impregnates it. ~In this prayer of love one is. urged to stand firm, to persevere in the gift of.,love in the sense that St. Paul urged the Thessalonians to stand firm: ,"Stand firm, then, brothers, and keep the traditions that we taught y0,u, whether by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Th 2: 15). "Standing firm" is a recognition of having been chosen, loved, formed and hollowed. It is a 'recognition of one's emptiness and fullness in Christ Jesus. To "stand firm" is to accept further the responsibility to love and be loved;~to be known and to,know the God who is. "Standing firm" is to be used, used as a reed on which he plays his tune. ~ Coming deep into this love with Jesus re~uires a lea.ring behind of all ~hat ,is self and, in some way, living within the heart the life of a nomad by abandoning oneself to the purpose~ of the Lord in an emptiness of spirit-- being a nomad without a desert other than the desert of life itself. This nomad 337 338 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 life whets the appetite for the fullness of the kingdom, a life fully embraced. The nomad life is a living in joy, a living wholly in the now. This great love renders one powerless and defenseless and 'one. feels the pain of the rendering. Such powerlessness allows God to be G6d, bring-ing to the lips a prayer for an increase of faith which enkindles hope and which builds further the great fire of love. In this love-prayer, the~desire to pray and prayer itself are planted in the heart of one's being by the God of ¯ love. As the desire is nurtured, the heart of one's being grows and ~.the cycle of life in prayer develops. It is recognized as the Lord's gift. This writer invites the reader at this point to place himself or herself in the sandals of the nomad and let the following speak directl3)' td you. Come and see, Nomad. The nomad carries little. The nomadic lover carries little, too, for this lover must pass through love's gate as through the eye of the needle, free of encumbrances and the excess baggage of self-love. As nomadic lover you go through the doorway of Jesus as yourself~ as a real person. You go with Jesus' to go through Jesus into Jesus more deeply,, realizing so de.eply that Jesus is in you filling you with so much love. Loving is what living is all about. Living the love of Jesus is allowing the fruit of hislove to be'~plucked while it is ripe and rich. Following Jesus in nomadic love leads you to a still point. A still .point is a further death to self. Freed of the baggage and clutter of ~elf-will, hands are emptied to embrace the Will of the Father, the Cross of-Jesus, the Gifts of the Spirit. This still point is an intense grace of being~known, and being filled with an unknown kind of knowing God in his Oneness and Trinity of Persons. Reaching, or being brought to this still point of love is like passing through the turmoil of a storm and no longer being in .the path of its destruction, but aware of it and aware of being held at the center of calm only by his grace. It is an experience of an overwhelming sense .of quiet joy where your being sings an endless, wordless song of silent praise. Nomadic love extends you and develops all the facets of yourself, and then it changes you. You become a new self with all the old facets"refined. 'You come to a point where you hardly know yourself, and yet you do, more deeply than you did before. If the Beloved allows you to see yours.df"vfith his eyes you see a sight of beauty, surprising beauty. What you see is so grace-laden and love-filled that your heart responds again in silen(, ioyful song to the love and the Lover who has made you this way. You know that all this grace and beauty are his gift to your creature-self. It is yours to 'rejoic( in, to use and to give away~ When you return to your owns, seeing, you find you are the same, but not the same. You have been held b~y Love unaware of space and time and you somehow know that you hold a inystery~ and are held by Mystery. The nomadic lover has thus rested in th~ sweet oasis of love. ' Soon, however, the nomad is stirred from the oasis-rest .by th~ silent Nomadic Love / 339 voice the heart has come to know. "Rise, cla~p my hand, and come!" ("The Hound of Heaven," by Francis Thompson). "Yes" becomes the word on your lips and the journey continues. Now the desert stretches dry ahead and its night settles in like a winter season. The fruit and the comfort and rest of an oasis are not in sight, but the memory of them warms your heart. All is silent within and without, and the nomad must stand firm in the silence as would a silent sentinal. The treasure of love must be guarded within the heart. As nomadic lover in the desert night you know, you be-lieve~ you trust in the touchless Lover who is with you, who encircles you with his love. A nomadic lover prays: I cannot walk, my Love, I cannot walk alone. I must be led, or carried. I cannot trust myself, my own sense of direction. I must let myself be lost as it were, with no map or seeable route on this journey in faith and trust and love with You. My Love, I depend solely on You and Your guidance with no desire other than the desire to be Yours. You p!ace in shadow all that has been familiar during this journey with You. The oasi~ of Your gifts and consolaiions is lost ¯ in the darkness of this desert night in order to test my love for You alone. My~ Love, I ask for the grace of receptivity. Open me to the greatness of desiring You . for Yourself alone. ".Rise, clasp my hand, and come!" ("The Hound of Heaven"). So, once again Nomad, you hear yourself asked to "come and see" mindful you are nomad by invitation; that the journey is a gift and that you do not "stir love until its appo~inted time" (Song of Songs 2:7). Grassroots Sisters Today: Calvary People? Anawim? Marie Emmanuel, S.C. Sister Marie Emmanuel, though retired otficially, icontinues to exercise an extensive apostolate through her writings. She resides at Mount St. Joseph, OH 4505.1. No writer can speak from her heart unless wha( she says is consciously directed to a well-defined group of readers. Even a g!ance at the topic sentences of the following paragraphs, for example, would indicate that this article would "turn off" religious caught up in the urgencies' of seeking self-fulfillment, of 'being recognized as a person, of securing independence, and of embracing a life-style which has much more in common with that of a career girl or married woman than with that of the traditional religious of ten or fifteen years ago. And these same pages would probably read like something from outer space to the few fortunate religious in whose com-munities wholesome, holy religious life has somehow managed to survive experimentation. The vast majority of American sisters, however, belong to neither of these groups. They are the typical religious of our decade the thoiasands who look with aching hearts on what mistaken attempts at renewal (a renewal too often not rooted in a primary interest in the things of God!) have done and are doing to their corrimunities, and to religious life itself as they can see it. Their cause is seldom taken up by the religious press or cham-pioned by speakers; yet they are the ones who are holding the line for Christ. They know what their Lord was asking of them when he called them to their community--and they know what they gave. him on their vow day. Integrity permits them to dilute neither his divine requests nor their giving. These are the religious who must be assured that their questioning is being heard, that their Calvary is understood, and that, if they have but faith, their fears for religious life itself will be quieted by the same dear 340 Grassroots Sisters Today:~ Calvary People? Anawim? / 341 Christ who answered the frightened apostles in the tempest-tossed boat on Galilee: "O ye of little faith, why do you doubt?" Not even the hardiest can deny, of course, that hurricanes have been buffeting religious life for a decade or more, and that unprecedented winds and waves have sadly battered the bark of those who follow the evangelical counsels. There is no question here of the exaggerated fears of timid souls. Too many facts corroborate 'the ~threats, too many experiences bolster appre-hension. All one need do to be convincedis read, watch and listen. " See whathas happened in our day to the observance of poverty and obedience! And often not even chastity survives at least not envisioned as an espousal relationship with Christ, a concept which, iust a short time ago, was. generally accepted as basic to the vow. Silence no more has a place in most Interim Directives; prayer has become largely a completely personal matter, with sometimes not even the offi~ze or rosary said in com-mon; and the whole concept of community living is under attack. One does not have to be a seer to be aware that in some congregations goals, aposto- ,lares, and life-style have been so revolutionized that even the most recent of founders would be hard put to recognize their own! Administrators of certain large American communities, for example, seeing membership plummeting and the median age rapidly rising, have °already experimented with the idea of extending membership to anyone who wishes to live with the sisters, "regardless of sex, religious affiliation or marital status." In some religious houses such~ extended membership is already an accepted fact. At a meeting of formation personnel late in 1975, one young director told her audience (and was immediately quoted in metro-politan and diocesan newspapers) that her community had "already opened its doors to such .applicants, among them a married woman, a divorcee, and a woman whose husband is in Europe." These people, she assured her hearers, "share the life and home of the sisters and are regarded as mem-bers, not as guests; employees or volunteers." In order to supplement recruitment, other congregations have accepted girls who came with the avowed intention of staying just for a year or two, although canon law has stipulated that candidates may not enter on a temporary basis, that they must have the iiatention of remaining or at least the hope of determining their permanent vocation by honest trial. We hear,. too, of young religious who, though they may have entered with the inten-tion of remaining, are now reluctant to maki~ any permanent commitment and are being permitted to stay on indefinitely, despite canonical strictures, merely making temporary "promises" over and over. Yet though membership is being supplemented in such unorthodox ways, genuine religious vocations in America have dwindled to almost nothing. Vineyards entrusted to us by the Church are abandoned for works of our own choosing; conx;ents stand empty in the midst of fields white for the harvest, and the tragic exodus of professed sisters "back to the world" con- 342 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 tinues, though God knows that some motherhouses have few, except the aged, left. A further tragedy lies in the fact that those who remain tend to fall into groups so diverse in their reactions to experimentation that the attainment of consensus in basic areas becomes impossible. There are the sisters of all persuasions, liberal and conservative, who are content with the status quo as they meet it; there are the crusader.s, dissatisfied with the ."inadequacy" of experimentation as they see ,it initiated, and dedicated to revamping re-ligious life now to conform to what they consider relevant to today's world. And then there is the army of ordinary sisters down at the grassroots who have suffered shock after shock as they were subjected to innovations (allegedly designed to make them more relevant, more self-fulfilled, and more libera.ted, but which have a~:tually proven incompatible with their ideals of religious life) who are now openly seeking answers to the disturb-ing questions which haunt them. "What is going to become of religious life?" they ask in desperation akin to that of the apostles, when their small boat was. storm-tossed that night on Galilee. "Will,it someday be impossible in my community to live the life I v6wed? What will be left of religious life when all this experimen-tation is officially ended?" Before sisters consider the future of their own communities in the light of such questi0.ns, it is logical that a prognosis for religious~ life itself be attempted. Is it dying? Is it still relevant? A number of current books study the topic from various points of view, but the Vatican II Fathers .have already settled all doubts in ~this regard bY the place in the modern Church which they assigned to religious. A dying group would scarcely be commissioned, as religious were in the Constitution on the Church, to ,"stren.gthen the kingdom in soul~, and extend it to every clime." And who is relevant to our confused, anguished world if not those to whom the council, in the same document, entrusted the needy of that world? "Religious should carefully consider that through them, to believers and unbelievers alike, (he Church wishes to give an increasingly clearer revelation of Christ," decreed the Council Fathers. "Through them, Christ should be seen contemplating on the mountain, announcing God's kingdom to the multitude, healing the sick and maimed,, turning sinners to wholesome fruit, blessing children, doing good to all, and always obeying the will of the Father who sent them." There is not one .sufferer among all those who throng our streets, or whose stories are blazoned in, the daily press or pictured on TV, who does not fit into one of the categories listed by the Council as being charges of today's religious. There is no human need, spiritual or temporal, which has not been confided to our charity in our own time by Holy Mother Church herself. Therein lies our blueprint of relevance. Father Thomas iDubay, contemporary writer on living the evangelical Grassroots Sisters Today." Calvary People? Anawim? / 343 counsels, states: "The religious life belongs inseparably to the Church's life and holiness . Periodically, in the history of the Church, someone is likely to prophesy the death of religious-life. Our day is no exception. Yet so closely bound up with evangelical perfection are consecrated virginity, voluntary poverty and ecclesial obedience, that to predict the disappearance of religious life is to assert the irrelevance of the gospel. The profession of the evangelical counsels may decline, through human weaknesses, but dis-appear it willnot.''~ Yet, notwithstanding such assurances, sisters confide that try as they will to tell themsel~,es that all will be right, they cannot shut their eyes~to what is happening in many communities. "Is it unreasonable," they ask, "to wonder how I can trust, when I know how convent walls have tumbled down since the '60's, destroyed not by enemies of the Church but by con-secrated women who are .apparently casting aside the very.essentials of religious life so as to grasp the best of two vocations without assuming the responsibilities of either? How can I"even hope that I will always be a nun, when I see congregations once flourishing and fervent actually falling apart or so revolutionized as to be unrecognizable?" Of course, there are no pat answers, as there are no pat answers for other questions'which vex us today. But Peter and his companions were expert sailors, and they had seen other vessels go down in squalls on Galilee like the one they were battling. Yet Christ rebuked them that night for their lack of faith when they were apprehensive. He did not tell them how to ride out the storm, he gave them no practical directives. But he did reassure them. "Fear not!" he said. And he did calm the winds and the buffeting waves, and bring his friends Safe to.shore. Suppbse their boat had sunk in the storm. Can we doubt that our Lord would have saved his 6wn; so that they still might, become the Spirit-driven anawim who were to establish his Church? That should tell us something! And there are many other gospel stories.~which'can set our troubled hearts at rest. This is a goodtime to remember~Bethany, for example; we who are frightened by what the future may hold have Christ's own word that our "best part"-~will never be taken away from us. In,another passage he gives us his solemn assurance that he will be with us always, and that whatever we ask in.prayer will be given us;, even to" feats like moving mountains! He reminds us that we did not choose him; it was he who called us. Dare we insinuate that-he was trifling with our hearts in making that invitation on our vow day? No, the circmfistances surrounding our aposto-lates may indeed be drastically altered, but our consecration to Christ no one no one--can take from us! Right now many mature religious stand onCalvary. We try to assure ourselves, perhaps, that faith and hope demi~nd that we look forward to a 1Ecclesial Women, by Thomas Dubay, 'S.M. (New York: Alba House, 1970). 344 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 glorious Easter, when resurrection joy and peace will fill our hearts again. That Easter will come. But ~hould we begin to face the possibility that we, personally, may never see its glad dawning? Maybe our little boat won't survive this. tempest! What if our community becomes so debilitated or so revolutionized that it no longer is our.community? Do we love Christ so much that we can offer ourselves, in that event, to become his anawim, the remnant beloved by God, who will somehow continue to carry on his work in and for a world which hungers for him while it rejects him? That may well be what he is asking of us now. If this should happen and we find our 'institutes rapidly losing all re-semblance to the dream of evangelical perfection which God gave our founders and to which he called us, we can find comfort, first of all, in knowing that religious life, itself will never die. That is where faith and hope lead us today. Isn't that, perhaps, where they leave many of.us, too? Let's admit it: we, at least we sisters in America, may well be Calvary-people all our lives. But .wasn't that what our Lord was? The shadow of the Cross touched everything he looked on, and Easter came only after the final agony of the crucifixion. "Fear not.t" Our Lord is saying to us. Even though this congregation or that is shaken, religious life will always flower somewhere in the Church, and no sister will ever be dispensed ]rom perpetual vows unles~ she herselI .has chosen, in some way, to cancel her commitment to the God who loves her with an everlasting love. 'We must remember that when things look black, when maybe even our own beloved community may seem'to be racing toward disaster.~, We must hang onto the fact, too, that "retreat masters and others in a position to see and judge are finding rainbows arcing over motherhouses here and there, where experimentation has not only. been lived through but is reaping a golden harvest of renewal. True, such blessed communities doubtless still have their respective cordons of dissidents unhappy because changes haven't been radical enough, but interested now in the ordination of women, in 'political jobs~ or~ in being, vocal on controversial theological questions. Their current involvement in topics beyond the jurisdiction of their communities leaves the body of the, membership free to yield. ;to the Spirit, and to concentrate on intensive, broadly-varying spiritual programs, which one priest-director tells me are proving "an astonishing purification, a genuine spiritual renewal, and a happy return to the ideals of the foun-ders" of several communities with whom he is in contact. How heartened many grassroots sisters should be by rumors of such rainbows, which indicate that for some religious at least, the storm is over for the time and the Paschal Sun is shining! There are communities, too, which have never lost their balance, but which, despite growing pressures, have managed to adhere t,o their self-definition and to maintain the life of the counsels as their founders would Grassroots Sisters Today: Calvary People? Anawim? / 345 have it lived at present. They are the ones (believe it or not!) who are be-ing sought out by young women who want just what these communities will give them. The same retreat master I quoted before confided that one such community with which he works "is swimming with postulants and novices, bright and lively young things who enter precisely because of the habit; who are genuinely (if youthfully) in earnest about learning the spirit of their congregation and (and through) the spirit of their founder." So even if, in our corner of the world, the eclipse still leaves us groping in dark and cold, we can rejoice that somewhere the sun is shining again on happy, holy novitiates and on burgeoning religious life. We can rejoice, too, that our way of-life is a good way; despite the odds against us, we do contribute to the holiness of the Church! And it is a relevant way. Millions of people contact God today because sisters still live and work among them. So if our particular corner of the vineyard is languishing, we must simply put our hand into the hand of Christ and trust him to use us as he will. Through an ordeal.like this, our consciences should reassureus that we are not disloyal because we can foresee local debacles resulting from ill-ad-vised changes in the very basics of~religious life. As mature religious we can-not help but be aware that congregations which cut themselves free from their moorings an the Church and dispose of authority, vows, silence, community prayer and the common life with fine, dispatch, are no longer offering their members the type of life the.y vowed to follow: There is no disloyalty here. No, it is love for the life to which Christ calls us that prompts us to challenge attemis°ts at renewal which have gotten out of hand. The pro~ing questions one hears now on all 'sides should alert the powers that be to the fact that definitely all is not well. Before it is too late, those influential in community affairs throughout the country should take inventory to see wfiether religious, life, as they are manipulating it, can flourish and bear the fruit God expects. Only a prayerful, serious evaluation by those supposedly in authority can dete~rmine for any congregation whether experimentation is sanctifying its members or secularizing them, meeting the needs of their assigned apostolates or merely working toward human goals or personal self-fulfillment. That some groups will not see the necessity for such reconsideration is a sad commentary on the problem. It is good, therefore, that individual sigters are not closing their eyes to what is being done, that we at last are asking serious qui~stions and seeking honest answers. We are not discountenancing faith and hope when we admit that we think it possible that our partiqular vineyards may someday lie in ruins. Rather, our faith and hope could never be fairer .than when we watch our dear garden-places transformed into alien desert and yet hold fast to Christ, confidefit of his love, ready to take up our interrupted apos-tolat~ wherever he wants us to be and to do whatever he may send us to do, even if that is just to suffer and pray for the harvest which we may no longer have an opportunity to plant or gather in. Symbols.'. Signs. and the Times Jane Marie Kerns, S.H.C.J. Sister Jane Marie is engaged in development work. curriculum planning and public relations at Cornelia Connelly High School; 2323 W. Broadway; A~aheim, CA 92804. _~er degree is in the field of sociology. Technically speaking,' says S. R. Wilson, signs are not symbols. Signs are perceptible m~inifes~ations which point to a condition present or to come because they flow from the ultihaate reality underlying the sign. In this sense signs are revelatory because the natural objects involved are ]as in-trinsic~ illy related to the ~:eality underneath as the smell of an onion is to the onion itself. For example, hot forehe'ad, weakness, perspiration and chills signify fever. Signs, in thig sense, cross cultural barriers of language and fl~ish essentially the identical message-content to all who can read the signs. At some point in history the acctimulated wisdom of a l~eople unravels the mystery behind the sign and passes on the same m.essage from generation to generation. Thus signs are stable in content because that which we~ per-ceive bears an unalterable and peculiar relationship to the reality wtii~zh is present or coming to be. Symbols are different. They are arbitrary things which are invested with 1Sociologists, in developing the implications of symbolic interaction, have made some distinctions between sign and symbol that differ markedly from the'more traditional scholastic terminology contrasting natural and conventional signs. For example, Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction o! Reality speak.of "detachability" as a characteristic of all signs and sign systems while symbols are any significative themes achieving maximum detachability by reason of their being located in one sphere of reality but referring to ahother. A far simpler presentation by S R. Wilson has generated a line of thought that can be applied to the contemporary religious scene with some profit for us if we are willing to follow up his line of thought"with some applications made on our own. 346 Symbols. Signs . . . and the Times / 347 a tempbrary message by consensus of the group which employs the symbol. Symbols are the shorthand which capsulizes a larger"concept, perhaps an abstract one--the cryptography which presupposes that the users share the meaning so fully'that they can afford to reduce it to a kind of code word, that beStows brevity without sacrificing richness. There need not be any necessary connection between the choice of an object to act as symbol and the content of the message.Symbols are temporary: time-bound~ timely,, tied to. context so they lose their significance or are invested with new meanings in new times. How fickle symbols can be is well exemplified'by the quirk of fate that transmuted .Churchill's gallant V-for-victory hand salute into the peace symbol of the 1960's. Signs are natural, unequivocal, independent "of time and place an~l ¯ language, Symbols are culture;bound, subject to misinterpretation by the uninitiated and to re-interpretation by succeeding in-groups, long- or short, lived depending on the consistency of the ,sub-culture that employs them. Perhaps some reflection on this distinction, between sign and symbol can shed light, on:,one of the dilemmas facingreligious today. We religious have tried abruptly 'to change our symbol ~ystem and we find often enough that We have lost our sign value in the world., of today, We changed 9ur dress to relate more easily to the world of the ~twentieth century. Removing a barrier did not automatically create a sign 6f the Lord present among us. We chose the symbol system of modern womanhood .and sometimes found ourselves comfortably bunched .in with all the other .bananas. The public we served was not interpretifag our symbolic action as we meant it to be. And we are forced to recognize that the dress we donned and the veil we doffed were only symbol--not sign, not natural,.cross,cultural., unequivocaI expression of what .is or what is to come--:-only symbol, 9nly thingg subject tO misinterpretation, 'time-bbund even for us who made the gesture of changing the symbolmand ambivalent;~ even,~ to the ~degree. that not all religious~would agree on the what. and the why of the gesture. By and large our people are complimentary 'and comfortable with our new look, yet amid a growing congeniality we. have lost some of the eschatological sign value that should be ours. Why? I, Hazarding guesses is hazardous and it is;my guess that an understanding of signs and symbols can shed some light. If we understood how 'a society creates .a symbol, if we understood how a group learns toread a sign, .per-haps we could appreciate the impact of. context on communication. Accurate identification of the "things': we use to present ourselves depends on the context in which we use them. Think of ~ome "symbols" we have adopted in the last few years: There are religious who see denim as denoting fellow-ship with the poor, But with the escalation of the denim fashion' parade, to many people denim speaks of the radical chic, the young affluent who chooses to dress down, the professional would-be college kid revolting against .white shirts and starched,collars. To many, "fellowship" with a 348 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 "groovy" bunch in.~faded cut-offs has no religious connotations whats6ever. We want to say simplicity of life-style; they hear over-age college set gone "mod." Unwittingly, there is growing up a garbled version of the Fountain of Youth myth where what we wanted to hand on was the Good News about the Fountain of Living Waters which springs up in men of faith. Our~ sym-bols aren't bad; it's just that we exist in a cultural context which colors the interpretation of symbols "due to circumstances beyond our control . " We are talking about the fact that we can't control the whole configura-tion of life that put denim (or its equivalent) into a context in which it will be understood by those who see the same symbol system used to convey a different message. We human beings acting in concert unconsciously invest symbols with meaning 6nly in context. + can mean Christianity or + can mean add it all depends on what goes with it. It's the nature of symbol to be tied to other people's mentality. Let me" push the notion of symbols-in-context a bit further. In some ways symbols are .like bumper stickers~ That is, they are "one-liners", that punch out a limited message about one aspect of a question or point of view--concise, catchy, incontrovertible as far as they go. But when we are talking about the sign value of religious in their mission of revelation, we find that we aren't able to frame the essential message and crop off all the peripheral or block out all the other things we do and are. Hence, our symbols are never seen except in a broader context of the configuration of our whole lives. Let's think a little then about configuration. Have you ever pondered the variety of countenances .the Lord has fashioned out of the simple set of major elements such as two eyes, a nose, a mouth, some small degree of color in the eyes, some minor variations-- all within the magnitude of an inch or less--in the spacing of these ele-ments, the alignment of them, and so forth? Fantastic how .little he had to work with and yet how totally unique are the billions of faces that inhabit the universe! And all ~.because the particular configuration of similar ele-ments so alters the' finished product! How marvelous is the import of the configuration in which a single pair of blue eyes is set in defining the unique profile of a German lass as opposed to a California coed! Taken separately all the major elements of their countenances could be identical. Only the final configuration gives the identity to each as a unique person. Something like that is true of our symbol systems. When we changed our bleak habit woolens for blue denim or for fashionable fabrics and styles, we also re-arranged a thousand seemingly unrelated parts of the mosaic Called life-styles. Visits to hairdressers, pierced ears, cosmetics, jewelry, stereo sets in our rooms, guitars under our arms, weekends at the beach or skiing in the mountains, ten-speeds, dining out when pressures mount, happy hours and wine-and-cheese-get-togethers--all the places we went and the things we did in our new dress. And gradually we blended with the Every Woman in tune with the times--and lost any aura of the "otherness" of Symbols . . . Signs . . . and the Times / 349 the woman in touch with the Lord. It is frustrating and confusing since there is nothing wrorig with any of the items taken separately, nothing that could not serve as a ~,ehicle for inserting the message of the Lord into the modern context. Yet, unfortunately, the gap between intentions and outcome is real, if we'dare tell it as it is. So what can we do in such a dilemma? Retreat to our pre,Vatican II existence? . How dare we even consider such a move--we who have been called by. the Lord in his Church to seek ever new ways to bring his .same truth to our age? ~ . I believe that there are several lines of action open to us. First, and perhaps the easiest to admit, we must recognize.that a private symbol sys-tem whose true message is known only to ourselves is a useless tool for communication. Hence, in our recognition ~of the public nature of the sym-bols we choose to employ, we must be attentive to the feedback from those around us, the feedback that comes in the form of spoken criticism or spoken praise, and also the feedback that comes in the form of a vacuum-- the indication that we aren't, even noticed~ This isr not so easy since it implies that if we listen and respond'just to, those who catch the message, it might be we are only speaking to our in-group. Openness to criticism and willing-ness to. vary our approach is the on13~ way that will. make our knowledge of de facto social interpretation of symbols work for the good we yearn to. do. Apropo.s., algo, is the need for a discerning spirit that can ferret out the essence of a critical remark and that has no fear to dare to be different if the difference is where, it really: counts--difference, because our fundamental orientation even in choosing fashionable clothes, and so forth, is utterly other. For the sake of the kingdom, for the sake of those around me, for the sake of my apostolic effectiveness I choose to use the things I use; for ¯ their ability to extend my vital concerns outward, not just for their ability to enhance me. From .the apostolic point of view ~vhat my symbol system says to. those around rn"e is:more important than what it"says to me as long as"it is genuine. , A second direction in which to focus our attention is on the mutability (as w~ll as .f.allibility) of any~ symbol which derives from the other mean-ings conferred on the "things" we use or do by other people whose message differs from ours. '~We can always afford to bend and 'blend and experiment with our symbol system in order to keep it 'up-to-date. Indeed, we must be alert to those circumstances beyond our control which render any system obsolete or .misleading--changing customs, .changing values in some areas of life, changing vocabulary. Even semaiatics can' cause a loss of utility in a given form of expression. Knowing' the difference between what is essential and what is merely an arbitrary, ,though well-chosen, form of expression is an art capable of infusing life ,into the means we use to contact the world around us; The art of choosing wisely, rests largely on the nature of what we.try to signify. How can we speak to men of our God who is so utterly 350 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 other? What has holiness to say to a modern world? What can communicate spirit to flesh:and-blood men of today?. As men and nations,~scramble tO get, what words speak of giving.'? And what can emptying oneself to put:.on Christ say to empty men who have lost .their own identity? When thinking men unite to feed the world's hungry because 'the survival of all ultimately depends on the wise sharing of resources, how does one say that enlightened self'interest isn't enough? For a task of this magnitude, perhaps symbol .is the wrong tool. Maybe we can't rely~on a form of "shorthand" for all that the Christian message means to us. Perhaps we have to strive; to explicate our message--impress it more fullythrough expressions revelatory, :flo~ving from the essential reality of life in Christ. Earlier we spoke of the smell of an onion as peculiar to the. reality that is the onion. Substitute perfume to the rose if you prefer, but that is just how specific our expression should be to what 'it is we're trying to communicate! Perhaps sign is called for-- natural, unequivocal, universal harbinger of 'what is or what is to come. Sin~:e whatever we do can be so easily mis-read by a generation that rarely reflects deeply, our?language" (spoken, body, symbol) must be one that is unequivocal, timelessly true, inextricably bound up with the nature of what we communicate. Our "language" must be sign of what is or what is to come. We can only hope to sign the Lord to the world if we ourselves can be the living revelation of~God present among us, actuating what we are. When we so live in the presence of God that his thoughts have become ours, his con-cerns, outs, we can hope that the vitality of his life in us will speak to"men of Someone else, just as Jesus invariably led people beyond himself to ". the~Father who sent me; the Father himself loves you. ; if you knew me you would know the Father also . . . the words I speak are not mine but the Father's; . as my F~'ther sent me so I also . ; I do always what the Father command~ . . . ; I must be about my Father'S' business~. ; I will ask the Father and he will send you the Paraclete . . . ; whatever you ask for in my name that I will do so that the Father may be glorified in the Son . , . ; the world must: be brought to know .that I love the Father. ; I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I have learned from myFather." It was when Jesus said. to his own, "I came from the Father,and have come into the world and now I leave the world to go to the ,Father," that his men replied at long last, "Now you are: speaking clearly . because of this we believe that you came from God.,." (Jn 16:28-31.). Hardly can we expect to be heard by our world tif we are less specific! Hardly do we ~dare to be so specifi!! Yet. I doubt that there is one of us who has,not in prayer thrilled to the vocation that is ours and marveled that God should choose to use us as a means of revealing and witnessing to his presence in the world. We believe--and yet . We shall never be able to offer our people more than fickle symbols until it becomes "natural" for us to perceive and Symbols . . . Signs . . . and the Times / 351 to speak of ourselves as signs that God is present and coming~ Our work for the poor may appear to be just the fad of generous adolescence or neo-humanism in action unless we are in fact coming from God and drawing our people to God. Angry activists can demand' prison reform as effectively as we and still remain atheists'. To what am I signing on the picket lines or in the classroom? Many good men grow whole from their repulsion over human suffering. Ft. George Aschenbrenner, in his article, "Hidden in Jesus Before the Father" (REviEW FOR RELIGIOUS, Jan., i975), spoke of the healing ministry of Jesus as springing from his vision of the holiness of God. So, too, for us philanthropy is not enough, It is significant that a woman of~ our times renown for her ministry of healing has had her story told to the world under the title, Something Beauti[ul for God. Mother Theresa undoubtedly comes to her poor as one sent ~by God to lead them on to him. Her meaning is unequivocal, its con-tent crosses language barriers and surmounts limitations of time and place. She is indeed a signto all of.the presence of God in his creation. But how was she different? She adapted the dress and the practices of religious life to the customs of India; so have we striven to meet America in the twentieth century. What more is there to it? . ' Perhaps it isosomehow or other connected with her approach to the first major work that .she undertook: her concern for the dying, the terminally ill; the cases that most of the hospitals there would not accept today be-cause there is nothing-that can be gained from medical treatment, there is no hope of recovery: . . . There is an element in her preoccupation with the dying that shouts aloud that dying is not the end, that even a dying man is worthy of respect and love and concern. Hers was an attitude-in-action which pointed a reality present in he~r and pre~sent in her world of the dying that could only mean that death~was not what it seemed to be to the masses who passed by the dying beggar in the streets. The reality alive in the center of her being revealed itself in act and attitude peculiar to those who know the God and Father of Jesus Christ. She was indeed a sign of God present in his world. Mother Theresa shows~us that it is possibleto be a sign in the world. What she stands,.for speaks internationally of humanity's ability, to stand 'before the experience of the Holy. Even more exciting, what she is and has become for our age is the revelation~that a person~who is sign doesn't sim-ply point out statically something that has .happened to her or him but rather that such a sign enables the beholder to experience the Holy for him'- self. It not only'allows man to~'think about God, but it activates an en-counter between God ands.the beholder. Our interpretation of the sign be-comes experiential, not simply intuitional or cognitive. I believe that the authentic Christian witness offered by Mother Theresa and her co-workers demonstrates, by the grace of God, the essential ele-ments of signs in an eminent degree. The grace which incorporates one into 352 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 the very life of Jesus enables a human life to be a natural revelation of the supernatural reality that is present and coming: Man's. experience of the Holy as it radiates through, the person and personality of another chal-lenges with the unequivocal demand to "take off your shoes" in ~ome fashion. The call to respond is universal, that is, it °cries out to hearts of men of every tongue, time or religious .traditi0n---assuming their hearts have been initiated into the mystery of God. And there is nothing in the configura-tion of his life~style to confuse or to cloud or to bury the sign under a bushel basket. ': We know that the same grace of God confers p6tential sign value on us all, even beyond the extent.to which we surrender to its gentle usurpation of our natural self. We may need to study our lives to perceive the dynamic of their configuration. We can scrutinize what we do with our time,, what we talk about, what we expend our energies on, what delights us, what we do with our free time, what .people we interact With most often--~and why. What do people ,bring to us as topics of conversation and as cause for concern? Not just what are the ice-breakers, but what are~ the substantive issues? Or .are there any substantive issues?,, Is it just fashion~talk, hair styles, and where are the best sales, what restaurants do we like, what about the latest recording artists, what team will win the World Series, what shows are worth seeing, what books are topping the Best Sellers lists? As well.educated women and well-rounded persons, we ought to be capable and to be intrigued .by exploring all facets of the contemporary scene.Yet there is incumbent upon us always the urgency of the prophet: A voice commands: Cry! and 1 answered, "What shall I cry?. Shout with a loud voice, joyful messenger . Shout without fear, "Here is your God." (Is 40:6-9) If we spend a day without ever mentioning our God to our world; if we: converse wisely about everything else but not about the Cent6r of our lives; if for a day, and days and a day, we apply psychology and economics and political :science and medicine and pedagogy in the. healing of hearts and the enabling of those striving to break out of bondage of any sort, it well may be that we present ourselves as professional personswho can live without any practical application of our religious profession. Then it is un-derstandable that the totality of the configuration of our daily lives obscures the sign and justifies our world's propensity for reading us according to the symbol system in vogue where we are. Our anomaly gtems not from our doing anything wrong and not from our not doing anything .at all, but just from the fact that our peculiar blend of actions~and attitudes islso familiar to our people that we fail to communicate the otherness of God. ~Where Jesus is the song sung softly all day long in the hearts of his own who are called to witness to him in this day and age, the most appropriate Symbols . . . Signs .,°and the~ Times / 353 exhortation might be "Preach what you practice." In terms of this article that could be translated to mean, "Find the ways--the signs, the symbols, the. emphases in the particular blend of attitudes and activities that are our life--(to say we come) from an inner experience of the God who is present and who continuously is coming." In this sign surely we shall conquer! NoW Available, As: A Reprint,, Colloquy of God with a Soul That Truly Seeks Him ,Address: Price: ~;.30 per opy,~ 161us post~ige.' Review for Religious 612 Humboldt Building 539 North Grand '~ St. Louis, Missouri 63103 Reflections on Vowed Living1 Claire Brissette, S,S.Ch. Sister Claire. a graduate of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at the Institute of Man, Duquesne University, is engaged in ongoing formation work in her province, working with sisters primarily at the local community level. She resides at 297 Arnold St.; Wrentham. MA 02093. More than a decade ago, the Church, speaking officially through the Vatican Council, invited and challenged religious throughout the world to re-evaluate their institutional structures and to re-examine their~ lives in light of gospel values and the spirit of their founders. For most congregations and most religious men and women, the spiri~t of Vatican II soon became crystallized in the phrase "renew and°adapt." During the years immediately following the council, we opened the windows of our lives and hearts to let in the fresh air and warm sunshine of renewal chapters', of .'revised Acts of the Chapter, of experiments in life-style~ community living, apostolate and forms of prayer. We questioned the structures and values of religious liv-- ing all in a sincer~ effort to ~:espond to the dictates of Vatican II. Through- 1This article is an integration of personal reflections from various sources. In listing these sources, it is difficult to distinguish Where their thought ends and where mine-begins. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to each of these authors and speakers for their insight which fias stimulated my own integrative reflection. Besides the publica-t'ions listed in the bibliography, the following workshops have also influenced the con-tents of this article: "The Life of the Counsels" given by Thomas Walsh, S.J. and ~Bernadette Casey, R.S.M. at the Diocesan Spiritual Life Center in Pawtucket, RI on Feb. 28-29, 1976; "Fashioning the Future,of Vowed Commitment" a ten day workshop given at Mt. Augustine, Staten Island, NY, during which nine nationally known speak-ers, m turn, provided input on a specific vow. Appreciation also goes to Susah Muto, Assistant Director of the Institute of Man,, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, for her helpful suggestions regarding the final draft, Of th~is a~rt!cle. 354 Reflections on 'Vowed Living / 355 Out this period of painful searching, we sought to discover the Spirit of the Lord guiding us through the confusion and turmoil of the~renewal. In more recent years, as~the initial turmoil has begun to subside, we have found ourselves facing and grappling with one of the deeper issues of the renewal, the meaning of our vows. Because of the :legalism that charac-terized our pre-Vatican II way of life, the meaning and living out of our. v6ws was often limited to external structures and rules. As many of these were put aside, and greater emphasis was placed on personal fulfillment and community living, poverty, celibacy and obedienc( seemed to fade into the background. We were no longer certain of (heir meaning_nor of their relevance forpost-Vatican religious life:' As we begin to take a new look at the meaning of our vowed consecration, the living of our vows is gradually emerging as the concrete expression of a personal love relationship with the Lord. In reflecting upon vowed living, 1 would like to elaborate upon the meaning of our love relationship with God, as well as on the meaning of each vow in light' of this love. Vowed Living: A Relationship of Love: A clue to the inner attitude of love which lies at the heart of our vowed living, may be found in the book of the Prophet Jeremiah:Experiencing an inner crisis, Jeremiah speaks of God rather boldly and directly, as he says, "You have seduced me, Yahweh, and I have let myself be seduced; you have overpowered me: you were the stronger" (Jr 20::7). Perhaps oi, too, living a way of life that seems absurd to our superficial world, .can address these same words to God. I can look back into my life, and perhaps remem-ber the moment I was seduced by God, the moment I felt the closeness of his presence and love in my' life, and with my whole being,, responded '~yes" to his invitation of loveTIt was a total "yes," one that would plunge me .deeply into ~n intimate sharing in the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, pone that would demand a constantly renewed surrender Of my whole self to his hidden designs upon my life. T0,seduce and to be seduced implies a love so deep and,~so strong that it enables lovers,to move beyond the externals of looks and ways, to touch one another's hearts. In thecase of God and,myself, a human creature, I have been ocaugh~up in the' infinite love of a God for me, and.,of my total love for my God. For some mysterious reason beyond my .limited compre-hension, God has fallen in love with me; I, in turn, have responded to his love. Our love for one another is not passing or temporary. Nor is it a senti-mental love. Rather, it is a love that has been sealed in the total consecrar tion of my entire being to him. It is a love that has changed radically the ¢ '-'For a more complete and di~tailed reflection on the love-relationship aspect of the vows, see Ladislas M. Orsy, Open to the Spikit (Washington. DC: Corpus Publica-tions, 1968), pp. 71-163. 356 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 course of my life, a love so powerful that I, a human creature, have allowed myself to be seduced by a God who is Spirit. "You have overpowered me: you were the stronger." At the moment of my "yes" to God, I experienced the overwhelming reality rOf his love_for me. Caught up in the experience of such a love, I could respond only with love, accepting to follow him wherever he would lead me. In my enthusiasm, perhaps it seemed to me then that just about anything was possible:. For, in my weakness, he would be my strength. In moments of darkness, he would light 'the way. In the experience of my powerlessness, l~e,would sus-tain me with his~power. Iri moments of ,aloneness, he would be .present in the silent depths of my heart. Confident of his love for me, and relying on his strength and power, I could say "yes" to a way of life that seemed some-what out of the-ordinary. Many years, perhaps; have passed.since the d~y of my love-filled "yes" to my Lord. Since that day, I have tasted the joys of my yes, as wel! as its sorrows and disappointments. I have also felt the weight of the cross, as well as the new and deeper life that has emerged from its pain. At times, also, I have perhaps doubted my Lord, for he seemed absent when I needed him most. And my flame of faith and love seemed on the verge of being extinguished. Through the persons who have entered my life, as well as through the various situations and events that have constituted my sacred journey with my Lord, my love has been tried and tested.In his love for me, my God~ has attempted to deepen and mellow my Iove~ for him. Each day, he continues to .purify my love, to shape and mold me, making me ever more precious in his. sight. Have I let myself surrender to his mysteri-ous ways of love in my life? As I reflect upon my love-relationship with my Lord, I need to realiz6 that as a human person, I am flesh and blood, limited by time and space as well as by my very nature. I can live out this love relationship only in a way that is possible for me, given who I am as a person, and~the concrete situation in which my Lord h~is placed me. He has probed me and has known me even before I.was knit in my mother's womb (see Ps 139). He knows better than I do what are my limits and abilities.,His love demands no more than what is possible for the human person I am. He is well aware that I cannot deny my human nature or my human needs. I can only tran-scend my needs in and through the experience.of his love for me and of mine for him. I also need to keep in mind that my love relationship with God, sealed on the day of .my religious consecration, deepens and,mellows over a life-time; as does the love of a married couple. I need to respect the present level of my relationship with him; while remain, ing open each day to concrete possibilities for deepening that love. Within the context of this love relationship between my Lord and me, it becomes possible to reflect on the lived meaning of our vows. For, if we consider vowed living only on the human level, we risk becoming enmeshed Relqections. on Vowed Living / 357 in such thinking as "My human needs are repressed." Or, "Human fulfill-ment is impossible." Or again~ "This way: of life doesn't make sense?' No, it doesn't make any sense at all, if we limit our vowed living to the nar-rowness of human logic and understanding. For God's ways are not ours, and what seems wise in the eyes of men is foolishness to God. Consequently, I need to take the leap of faith into the horizon of my love relationship with my Lord in order to grasp something of the spiritual meaning of vowed living. Consecrated Celibacy:' During a recent hospitalization, I was, to some extent, an "object of curiosity" for my roommate. She questioned me at length about my~life-style and work. But what puzzled her most was my celibate commitment: She .seemed unable to grasp why any+ne would want to make stich a com-mitment. "Whatever made you do it? .How can you live that way?" she often asked; For her, a celibate way of, life seemed .almost unthinkable. And yet, before she left the hospital, she very spontaneously admitted that she had grown to feel comfortable with me, remarking that I was "OK." The attitude of my new-found friend regarding celibacy reflects the thinking of a culture which extols sexual pleasure andgratification. We need only.listen to TV commercials, look at paperback racks in the local book-stores, or glance through the newspaper movie listings to become aware of the sexual orientation of our culture, Or, we need only listdn to teenagers speak of sexuality to realize that sexual morality has changed drastically in recent years. Within this cultural context, celibacy is frowned upon and looked down upon as an impossible and repressive way of life because for many, sexual pleasure and gratification have, to some extent, taken on an absolute character. Sexuality and sexual pleasure in themselves are sacred values, willed .by God from the time of creation. Simply.sacrificing these values in. and for itself for no deeper value, does indeed lead to a repressive way of life. How-ever, viewed within the context of one's personal love-relationship with God, celibate living'takes on deeper meaning and dynamism. As my Lord becomes central in my life, he becomes the hidden trea-sure and the pearl of great price for whom I am willing to give. my whole life, all that I 'am and all that I have. As Paul tells us: aln The Vowed Li/e, va~ Kaam maintains that the attitudes of celibacy, poverty and obedience comprise the fundamental threefoldO path of human and spiritual unfolding. He sees these human attitudes already foreshadowed in the highest forms of animal life. All human persons, regardless of their life form, are called to live out these attitudes according to the specific demands of their concrete life situation. Vowed relig!ous, he says, are called to be living witnesses for the threefold path of self-unfolding. They profess to find the beginning and end of this threefold presence in Gdd. See Adrian van Kaam~ The Vowed Life (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1968), pp: 11-74. 35'8 / Review Jor Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 Those things I used to consider gain, I "liave now reappraised as loss in the light: of the surpassing knpwledge of my Lord Jesus Christ. For his sake, I have forfeited everything; I have accounted all els~ rubbish so that Christ may be'my wealth and 1 may bein him" (Ph 3:7-9). To us, who ifi recent years; have placed much emphasis on human develop-ment and on the person, these words sound strong and absolute, demand-ing and without compromise. They may even turn us off. Yet, the challenge of the gospel, of Christianiiy, of vowed living is that over a lifetime, Christ become so central in my life, so real for me, that my human life and human values take their rightful place in light of him. Thus, the human value of the pleasure of a needy self-centered love is transcended by my total love for my Lord. He becomes the.companion of.,.my life, him in whom I live and 'move and have my being. In the exp.erience of his love, I grow in love for the human person that I am, a person with human potential and short-comings; a person entrusted with talents that I am called to own as mine and use for his love; a per~son graced with the loving presence of Father, Son and Sl~irit through the'.:gift ef baptism; a person so much in love with my Lord, that I too can willingly boast of my weaknesses, for I know and believe that his power is living and active within me (see 2 Co 12:9). Within the experience 9f God's personal love for me, I grow in self-love and self-acceptance. At the same time, I grow in respect and accept-ance of other~, the sisters I live with, the. persons I work with, those who enter into my life each day-s-loving them as they are, and allowing them to be who they are, different from me. Gradually, over a life-time, his love for me and mine for him free.;me, to some extent, from the subtle manipula-tion of using 'others for my"self-interests, or of trying to make others into my own image, and likeness. My love relationship with my Lord opens me gradually to the beauty of the other lying beneath the surface of appear-ances and behavior. In his love, I learn to transcend my own needs,"and begin to let go of my narrow labeling tendencies so as to allow the other to unfold as the unique person he or she is. Thus my celibate love fosters life within myself as well as within others. My love relationship with Christ makes me aware of his love .for others also. I do not seek to cling in a needy way to others, for ultimately, they, too, belong to God. Rather, rooted in his loxie, my love for others calls forth what is best in them. Celibate love cannot beqived in a vacuum. The deep and real sacrifice of the human love of marr!age and of a family must not turn me in on myself in a sterile, self-centered way. Rather, my capacity for love and inti-macy must gradually blossom forth in a deepening of my love for God, in the warmth and intimacy of human friendship, in the tenderness,of a love that moves outward to those with whom I live, and reaches out daily to those persons the Eoi-d allows to enter into my life, my co-workers, my stu-dents, patients or clients. R~ither than repress my human capacity for love, then, celibate love, vowed fc~r the sake of the deeper love of my Lord, frees Reflections on Vowed Living / 359 me .to spread his love warmly, tenderly, and generously, simply by being who I am and living what I am--a celibate lover/ ~ Furthermore, because I am human flesh and blood with needs, desires and passions, I may experience, at various periods in my life, and'with varying intensity, the overwhelming need for sensual satisfaction and gratifi- ¯ cation. At other times, I may experience the deep suffering of human alone-ness and of loneliness. To deny or repress any of these feelings leads only to deeper pain and suffering. Rather, I need to face my feelings, own them as .mine, and 'realize that they too are part of my being human. During .these, painful mon~ents, a living faith in my Lord's love for me, often concretized' in the love and concern of a supportive community or of a friend, may be the only means of transcending my suffering. Each encounter with my hu-~ man poverty and vulnerability becomes a renewed opportunity for strength-ening my love for my Lord as well as for other persons he places on my path to comfort and support ~me. Gradually, over a life-time, I learn to turn to him, relying on his strength and his power, aware that "when I am powerless it is then that I am strong" (2 Co 12: 10). Poverty.~ A sister friend of mine~recently graduated from college. Shortly before graduation, as she and her classmates were busily writing r6sum6s and look-ing into various job opportunities, she was approached by Rome of her friends. "What happens to your salary? Do you get.to keep the money you make?" ~ They - seemed somewhat puzzled as Sister explained to them that she turned her salary in to the community. "You mean ,you can't keep what you earn?" they replied with a kind of disbelief. Their attitude is characteris-tic of another trend within our culture. For many Americans, material wealth and possessions h~ve become important status symbols. We need only listen to various individuals speak of wanting a higher salary, of moving into a larger, more impressive home, or of buying a more expensive car, to realize that personal identity and prestige are often dependent upon one's income bracket. Everyone, rich and poor alike, is engaged in the struggle for survival, for more money and more possessions~ Part of the American dream consists in the belief that if.'one, earns enough money and. eventually works his way to the top, he will be blessed with perfect h.apptness. For many contempor~try Ameri-cans, acquiring wealth and~ possessions has become an ultimate value. 4Hinnebusch describes love as f611ows: "To Io~,e is to go out of myself as the center of interest, and to make'.the loved one the focus of attention." Paul Hinnebusch, Corn- " munity in the Lord (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1975), p. 23.~This is the kind of self-giving attitude fostered by g~nuine celibate love. ¯ ~For a more extensive development of poverty as total dependences on God, see Johannes B. Metz, Poverty o[ Spirit, trans. John Drury (Paramtis, NJ: Paulist Press, 1968). 360 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 Within this competitive materialistic culture, men and women religious vow to live poverty--not for its own sake, for poverty in and for itself is not a value to be encouraged. Rather, religious poverty becomes meaning-ful only in and through one's personal love relationship with the Lord. As I grow in the ispiritual attitude of vowed poverty, I become increasingly aware that God's love for me is so deep and so complete that he emptied himself totally'~of his equality with God, and took the form of a slave, be-coming one ofous, subjecting himself to the limitations of the human, condi-tion (see Ph 2:5-11). Once again, I find myself caught up in the mystery of my Lord's love, a love that has seduced and captured me. Only if I am truly in love with my God, rich in him, can I, in turn, gradually empty my-self of myself ~nd of material possessions. As my love relationship with him becomes central in my life, the human value of possession becomes subordi-nated to this: love, and takes its rightful place in my life. In the strength of his love, I am able .to let go, gradually, of my possessive attitude, no longer al-lowing myself to cling possessively to things such as clothing, money, food, the latest fad, machines, the community car, my own ideas, opinions, views, and.more. I recognize the need for possessions: for money, clothing, food, machines, as my friend recognized the need to earn a salary. Likewise, I recognize the need to have certain ideas, views, and opinions. But because I care so much for God, I care also for this world--for our world. Our love for one another frees me to use.things respectfully rather than possessively, with the detached attitude that allows things to be as they are, rather than with the grasping, and clinging attitude of hoarding, or of the' stubborn attitude that "my way is the right one.'''~ As my love for my Lord grows, I gradually learn to see myself in my rightful place as a.limited human creature. Through the eyes of a living~ faith, I begin to realize that my views, my opinions, my ways of doing things may be good and right for me, but remain relative for other members of the community as well as for those with whom I work. As iI become rich in the one thing necessary, the love of my Lord, the self-emptying of poverty helps me to transcend my need to totalize and absolutize. In light of my Lord's living and active presence in the cultural-historical situation of the world, I ~radually begin to distance myself from my views, values and ma-terial possessions. They are important to me at this time in my life, but they also are relative, even for myself. For if I remain flexibly open to the un, folding of my life situation, the values, principles and opinions that seem absolute for me today may be less important to me in a few years. For ex-ample, perhaps a few years ago, I was on the "band wagon~' for total, open-ness in community. At the time, openness seemed to be ~an ultimate value for community living, With time and experience, I may have come to see that openness is indeed important, but every member of the community is '~van Kaam, The Vowed Li]e, pp. 176-186. Reflections on Vowed Living / 361 not capable of the same level of openness. Consequently, the value of open-ness which at one time seemed ultimate for me, has become modified by the emergence-for-me of the deeper value of respect for the other. Through a continual self-emptying attitude, I gradually learn to let go of my opinions and views in order to become more open to the Spirit of my Lord as he expresses himself through the differing values and opinions of others, as well as through the unfolding of history. My love for my Lord enables me to learn to flow with life, expecting little, and accepting whatever comes, as it comes, rather than rigidly and possessively trying to control my" life. For, in love, I gradually come to realize that ultimately, I do not control my life; it i.s in the hands of a Father-God who loves me dearly and cares for me tenderly. Furthermore, the self-emptying of poverty viewed within the context of love, may prompt me to give myself' away through giving my time, through allowing persons and their needs'to take priority over things. In an individualistic culture .in which my life is often run by a time-clock, per-haps I have lost the art of sharing my time with others, of giving my time away for the sake of others. In silent reflection before my Lord, I gradu-ally discover how much of my time I can realistically give away, for the demands of my own life make it impossible for me to be totally available to others. While the self-emptying of poverty may at times demand that I give myself selflessly to others, this same self-emptying may at other times .require that I refuse a request, because of my personal obligations or simply because I need the time to restore myself both physically and mentally. The essence of the spirit of poverty is. that~I grow gradually into the lived realization that my life is in the hands of my Lord. In love, he .has created me. In love, he continues each day to sustain me. My love for him in turn, prompts me to empty myself of myself and slowly to detach myself from material possessions in order to create the inner space in which I may become ever more sensitive and responsive to the whispers of. his love in my daily life. The pain of self-denial and of daily dying to my self-centeredness is very real, and at times, may be overwhelming. At such moments, I need to remind myself that my Lord'~ love for me led him to the cross, the ulti-mate experience of detachment .and of self-emptying:Just as his love for his Father and for me enabled him to transcend his natural repugnance for suf-fering,? so too, my love forhim strengthens me to follow my Lord along the way of the cross, that through the pain of self-emptying, I may be glorified by an ever deeper share in his life (see Ph 2:5-11 ). Obedience A further reflection on our contemporary culture leads us to realize that the value of power, also, is highly esteemed. All of us, at some time or another, fantasize having some kind of power. Perhaps during my school years, I dreamed of being class president or president of the student council. 362 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 Or perhaps during my early years in religious life, 1 dreamed of one day being house assistant or local superior. Or;again, since ~those structures of-ten no .longer exist, perhaps my dreams are now directed toward being school principal, or head nurse, ot an influential member of tt]e parish team. What-ever my fantasy or my dream, chances are that some aspect of it is related to my drive for power. ,. Often implicit in this climb to the top of the social ladder is having power,over other human ~.persons, as well ashaving the power to make im-portant decisions. In fact, our world civilization seems to be based on a power struggle between the free world and communism. ., This power stru(:ture has .implications for ~the life of every human per-son: we often feel overpowered by technology, by the intricacies of big government and big business, by large ,agencies :that seem to control some facet of our lives, and before which we feel helpless. In turn, each of us to some degree seeks to react against, these overwhelming powers by asserting our own power within.:our small domain, be it in our limited ability to say "yes" or ,no" to issues pertaining to our personal life and work. Power in itself is to be valued, for without some degree of power, I ab-dicate the gift of my :human freedom, as well as human responsibility. How- ~everi power becomes detrimental when other human persons become ob-jects of my . personal project and desires. Then my power infringes upon their human freedom, and can become a destructive force. When this hap-pens, power, becofiaes an ultimate value for me, one by which I hope to gain some prestige and security, thereby repressing my own inner insecurity. '~ Religious men and women who vow obedience within our power-oriented world are reminders that human power, like the values of pleasure and possession, is not an ultimate value; that in light of my personal love relationship with my Lord, power is relative. For to be seduced by God means that ! allow him to have power over me. It implies that I grow in my ability to become attentive to his will, and become increasingly sensitive to his demands and desires. Our' love relationship assures me of his con-stant care and concern for me, In the security of his love, I discover the space to grow in the awareness that what he asks of me through the 'persons, events and situationg that enter into my life each day, is the concretization of his will for me at this time in my life,r Just as he speaks to me through~these realities that exist outsid ,myself, so too, he speaks through the reality that I myself am. His presence can be discovered in and through my possibilities and my limits, my desires and ¯ ambitions, my physical and emotional strengths and weaknesses. All that ¯ I am is my Lord's gift to me, a gift through which he speaks his word. Paul tells us that our deepest self is hidden in Christ, Part of our 10ve-re- ':For a further development of obedience as listening, refer to van Kaam, The VoCved LiIe; pp.'q57-169. '- Reflections on Vowed l,iving / 363 lationship then, demands that I be true to that deephst self, created in the image and likeness of .my Lord himself. To obey my deepest self, to submit myself to other persons, to events and situations demands a love so strong, that I am willing to empty myself of my desire, for total power over my own life, to accept in loving faith, that my Lord does indeed reveal himself through other creatures. In such a love, I can'.gradually loosen my grip on my own life, and slowly begin to listen more openly to persons, events, situations, both within my community and within the culture, as messengers of his divine will for me. In this loving openness, I am gradually freed from a slavish attachment to my feelings, my views, my opinions, my ideas, because I allow myself to be enriched by those of others. Recognizing the presence of my Lord in and through persons and events outside myself is difficult and challenging. For unconsciously, I tend to be-lieve that I know what is best for me. I tend to believe that what 1 know to be best for me is the concrete expression of the Lord's will in my life. How can otherpersons, each limited as I am, reveal to me anything of God's will? Such thoughts gradually close me in on my own thinking, my own ideas and opinions, somewhat like a snail closed-in in its shell. Uncon-sciously, I make myself like God, giving myself ultimate power over my life. Only in love can I gradually transcend my self-centered God-like atti-tude, and slowly begin to recognize my Lord's will for me as expressed in and through all of creation persons, events, situations.and things. In love, I discover the strehgth to die daily to my own will, in order to allbw my Lord's will to live and to be express~ed in and th.rough the limited human person that I am. Thus, every person who enters into my life, as well as everything that happens in my life becomes an integral part of my~ personal sacred history with my Lord. Conclusion ¯ A~' I reflect upon vowed living within the context of my personal love relationship with God, I can begin to see my vows as gifts which invite me to a continual deepening of this love relationship. For no longer is God a distant Spirit imposing upon me the obligations of the vows; rather, He be-comes Someone for me, someone real and personal inviting me to an ever ,deeper intimacy with °him through the sacred bond of my vows. As this intimacY deepens, I grow in the awareness of my need for him. I cannot live my vows on my own strength; I need to rely on his power. Paul tells us that "We possess this treasure in earthen vessels, to make it clear that its surpassing power comes from God and not from us" (2 Co 4:7). In hu-man terms, my vowed life makes no sensi~; it is foolishness in the eyes of men. Moreover, on the human levd alone, ].am unable to live such a way of life. It is delicate, fragile and vulnerable; ever exposed to the opposition of my own human nature and of controversial forces in our world. 364 / Review ]or Religious, I/olume 36, 1977/3 Living my vows becomes possible only through the centrality of my per: sonal love relationship with my Lord. In that love, I am graced with the strengtl~ and power, to re~spond to his constant invitation to enter into the self-emptying process. Our Lord is a jealous God who wants to possess me totally. He promises in return, to fill my emptiness with his loving presence. Each call to self-emptying is an invitation to die to some aspect of my old ~self; my needy self, constantly in search of the security of human power, pleasure and possession. However, this death is but a means of leading me to a life of deeper intimacy with him. It is a death c.alling me constantly to the new and deeper freedom of love. Each day of my life, he seduces me, calling me t6 a.morb personal" rela-tionship with him. Each day of my life, I must allow myself to be seduced-- to give him love for love, relying on his strength and his power. This call is a daily challenge, the challenge of living my "yes" to him. Am I willing to follow him all the way; ever open to i:laily situations as so many con-crete opportunities .for deepening my love through consecrated celibate .love, through self-emptying poverty and through freeing obedience? Now Available As A Reprint, ¯ Prayer of Personal Reminiscence: Sharing One's Memories with Christ by David J. Hassel, S.J. Address: Price: $.60 per copy, plus postage. Review for Religious 612 Humboldt Building 539 North Grand St. Louis, Missouri 63103 Toward Further Self-Definition William F, Hogan, C.S~C. Father Hogan is an Assistant General and General Procurator of his congregation'. His last article in these pages, "Communily Reconsidered," appeared in the September; 1976 issue. He resides Via Framura, 85; 00168 Roma, Italy. In' Per]ectae Caritatis the Fathers of Vatican II told us that it serves the best interests of the (~hur~h for religious institutes to have their own special character.and purpose. Thus, the spirit of founders and all the particular goals and traditions that constitute the patrimony of each religious institute should be recognized and safeguarded (See 'PC 2,,b). This statement oc-casioned a flurry of activity in some religious communities to start research-ing their traditions to ,.confirm again the self-definition of each community, and to stir up interest in the spirit of their founders. In many instances this activity has bo~ne fruit in that the religious have been put more'clearly in touch with their particular roots and have slowly effected,some changes of direction in their life and apostolic stance. In other institutes, the spurt of renewed interest subsided almost as fast as it. began, especially in those congregations in which nothing particularly unique seemed to stand out. The call to discover the uniqueness of one's heritage is being reasserte~i in the proposed new text of the law for instittitesof the consecrated,life; for those who have framed the proposed text have taken very seriously the mandate of Vatican II about' preserving,the patrimony of each religious in-stitute. Instead of drawing up legislation to cove'r all the points on religious life in a uniform way, as th( present law in. good part does, they are pro-posing general principles of Jaw within which each institute is to draw up its particular norms in accordance with its own traditions. By taking such a direction, the new law, if it be approved,, will be inviting and requiring of religious greater efforts at community self-understanding and self-definition. In order to meet this demand, it will be necessary for members of religious 365 366 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 institutes, and in particular members of general chapters, to develop a re-fined awareness of the founder's charism, the continuing charisms of the congregation as expressed into traditions and in its spiritual and apostolic heritage, a clear sense of where the institute has been in the past, where it is in the present and where the legacy of the founder and the traditions of the community are pointing for the future. That there is still a widespread need for further self-understanding and self-definition is becoming apparent from the various interim constitutions and position papers of religious institutes. Prior to the decree on renewal of religious life (Ecclesiae sanctae, August 6, 1966) and the directive to revise constitutions, the legislation of religious institutes had a remarkable sameness because constitutions had to conform to the ~Norms of 1901 and the subsequent rules of the Sacred Congregation, promulgated in 1921, which, had to be followed in seeking approbation for the texts of new constitutions. Today a new similarity is emerging, although it bears little resemblance to the primarily legal approach of the pre-sixties. The present-day "sameness of texts" appears to be rooted~in the fact that religious in-stitutes have followed the" lead of the council and gone back to the gospel roots of religious !ife, t0_us considering it as flowing out of the baptismal commitment. As -a result of this important emphasis on religious life in the context of the gospei and of bap~tism, underscoring, as it does, the.thorough-ly Christian nature of religious life, frequently the same scriptural and conciliar texts are cited. And in the process of situating the religious insti-tute in its proper ecclesial and Christian context,.little, or at least, insufficient stress,,~.is placed 6n those particular ways in which the founder wished to emphasize the gospel message and on those facets of. the Christ-life revealed through the Spirit's activity in his or her life and mission. Generally speak-ing, all religious have~'been very conscious of the need to express religious life in terms of a broad ecclesial vision and to avoid any instances of the exaggerated c~ngregationai emphasis~that may have closed them in on them-selves in the past. But in meeting, this issue, they may be.losing sight of that part of their contribution to the life of the Church which consists in positively developing their particular heritage. There is ~no reason why there cannot be harmony and balance between .the ecclesial and the peculiarly congregational elements, and thus a clearer understanding of the role of a particular .religious institute in the Church. For some religious institutes it may be rather difficult to grasp the unique-ness of their heritage, especially if they have been founded since the 1800's, when many congregations came to birth under the ~inspiration of. the Spirit ¯ to meet particular needs in some specific geographic area, and have pat-terned themselves on-other, already existi.ng congregations. But even in such instances, there.may well exist a uniqueness of insight and emphasis fr6m the founder, the early members and the riches that have accumulated~from the various religious over the years--spiritual, intellectual, apostolic riches that Toward Further Sel[-Definition / 367 constitute the legacy, of the congregation. It is these factors that will have to be borne in mind in delineating the norms of law for the congregation' today, and that will yiel'd the necessary self-understanding of the religious institute. Religiou,s today often have recalled in liturgies or at congregational gatherings concerned with community and plurality the celebrated text from the_ first epistle to the Corinthians: There are different gifts but the same Spirit: there are different °ministries but the same Lord; there are different works but the same God who accomplishes all of them in everyone. To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given , ~ for the common good . . . (I Co 12:4ff,). And similarly from Ephesians: ~And his gifts were that some should be apogtles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers in roles of service for the faithful to build up, the body of Christ. till we become one in faith and in the knowl-edge of God's Son, and form that perfect man who is Christ come to lull stature (Ep 4:11-13). The't~exts in themselves obviously speak of individual gifts of the Spirit to the Church; but in the modern context they can well'remind us of the diversity of gifts and charisms within the categories of the traditional gifts in the Church. If religious life itself is a gift of the Spirit to the Church, as the Church teaches, then even more precisely is the religious life of a particular institute a special gift of the Spirit to the Church for the building up of the Church. And the religious of the institute should seek to fathom the gift in all its particular aspects. The° gifts of diverse religious institutes to the Church reflect the many-faceted splendor of the Father's love for his peo-ple. Our response to that love should reflect the facets of that love as these are particularized in our institutes and their heritage.- To continue to reflect on and search out the heritage'of a religious in-stitute demands the continued expenditure of psychological energy. Yet many religious are tired of devoting their energies~this way, especially in view of the crying needs of mankind ~hom they are called to serve. The self-definition and self-understanding being requested of them may no longer be seen as a value worth pursuing. It cannot be denied that there are many demands on religious today, and they must~become ~selective in which de-mands they will meet. But in developihg personal and ~ollective criteria for responding to demands, religious must not forget.that the time and effort spent in self-understanding and self-definition is~ultimatelyfor the sake of greater and more meaningful service to others and for the building up of the life of the Church. The deeper the unde.rstand!ng of the call of the Spirit .,to the founder and those who have come after him, the deeper and more intense could be the response. And the growth in appreciation of the gift Of the Spirit that is a particular religious institute contributes to growth in wonder and appreciation of the gift that is Church. 368 / Review Jor Religious, Volume "36, 1977/3 . If the proposed direction of the new law for institutes of the conse-crated life is adopted in the Church, religious could be the richer spiritually for what it will necessitate in terms of further self-definition. But if the easier, more .comfortable path is followed of just latching on to that which is familiar, without serious examination of roots and traditibns, then the opportunity for seizing onto the uniqueness of God's gift of the particular institute will be lost. Every religious group was called into being because of a unique need in 'the Church. The continuance and growth of'institutes is suppo~sed to be .in terms of their umque contributions to the life of the Church and the world. This uniqueness is born of the special love of God for the founder and those who have succeeded the founder with the passage of time, all unique persons, who, in sharing life and ministry together, should be creating a unique response to God, the Church and the world. We need to know exactly where our insl, itutes are "new" in terms of this uniqueness, how we have arrived at this point through our traditions and history, and the best steps to promote ot~r response within a thoroughly Christian and ec-clesial religious life for the future. The Church's renewed call to the dis-covery of uniqueness deserves a serious answer if we value the gifts of God that are our institutes. ~ The Pregnancy The cloistered life within her sends the fire that burns her cheek-- Nature's proud assertion; Life's excited'glow; The insuppressible, open declaration Of yesterday's.creation and tomorrow's warm embrace. A compliant constitution accommodates her child--~ Time's prodigy care~ering toward release From cell to self so he may show his face And state in gurgled language instinctive gratitude. Never more important or more vital to another; ~ Linked by blood and substance in protracted intimacy O~f singular and enviable duration-- A high point in the human testament of love. A legacy for embattled man to learn from-- Acceptance, peace, surrender of one's self, Belief'in time hnd patience that reveals The unfathomable restoration of life's fragments in a soul. Donald DeMarco St. Jerome's College Waterloo, Ontario N2L _3G3 Canada Chapter Delegate" Qualities and R esponsi bi I iti es Robert Morneau Father Morneau is an Instructor of Philosophy at Silver Lake College; Manitowoc, WI 54220~ The significance of general chapters of religious communities cannot be overstressed. The responsibility of providing and sustaining a vision, the challenge to be true to the gospel while preserving the uniqueness of the community's special charism, the mandate to read the signs of the times and yet have a universal sensitivity, all demand diligent work and competent deliberators. This article is an attempt to describe some of the qualifies in-herently crucial to the fulfillment of the above challenges and to specify areas of responsibility following upon election as a delegate to a general chapter. Essentially what is being offered is a job description, a delineation ot~ the functions of a trusted steward, The thesis of this article is that a chapter delegate is called to be a dialogical person, a prophetic person, and a wounded healer.' / Delegate: A Dialogical Person God our Father is a God of revelation. In the precious mystery of his grace, he has chosen to reveal himself and his gracious love to mankind. Throughout history God .has communicated with his people, calling all crea-tion to life and fidelity. As a diaiogical God, he longs to speak his love and forgiveness; he searches out those who will listen and respond to his word. ~The image of wounded healer is taken from Henri J. M. Nouwen's book by the same title. 369 370 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 God has spoken and told us where he is and who he is. We are called to imitate our Father: "Try, then, to imitate God, as children of his that he loves. " (Ep 5: ! ); we do this from one perspective by becoming dialogi-cal persons. Our model is the Father who shares himself with us in word and sacrament. The qualities of a dialogicai person are many; we will limit our con-sideration to three essential attitudes that must be present if authentic com-munication is to happen. The first and perhaps most difficult quality of a dialogical person is listening. Monologues are terribly common in life; empty, one-sided discourses in which no one is listening and probably no one is thinking. Dialogue demands attentive listening, feeling behind the words into the reality being expressed. This type of listening is concerned not with simple, audible comprehension but with a compassionate desire to enter into the world of the speaker to see what has been seen, to hear what has been given. An example of this sensitive listening can be found in Tolstoy's classic War and Peace: He told of these adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as it were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that he was tell-ing it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him--not clever women who when listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their own little mental workshop--but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself. Natasha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word, not a single quiver in Pierre's voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his face, nor a single gesture. ~ She caught the unfinished word in its flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of all Pierre's mental travail.'-' If a delegate is to truly listen, there must be some degree of interior silence.Turning off the inner engines is difficult and demands discipline, yet so necessary if the message is to be understood and the feelings are to o be appreciated. C. S. Lewis expressed well our dilemma: "Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement.":' To obtain this silence we must deal with our own fears, insecurities and prejudices. These tendencies block lis-tening, put us into the land of defensiveness and create a sense of being threatened. Secure in our forts, with drawbridge raised and the moat filled with crocodiles, we protect ourselves from new ideas, visions and possibili-ties. Again C. S. Lewis drives home the point: "He could never empty, or silence, his own mind to make room for an alien thought.''~ A chapter dele- "Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. by Louise and Aylmer Maude. (New York, 1942), p. 1241. By permission of the Oxford University Press. :'C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York, 1944), p. 140. 4C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York, 1955), p. 184. Chapter Delegate: Qualities and Responsibilities / 371 gate must listen and discern. Electing a nondialogical person to a chapter is like inviting a deaf person to a concert or taking someone who is blind to an art museum. Neither experience nor growth is possible if essential capaci-ties are lacking~ Listening is essential to dialogue. A second quality of a dialogical person is trust. In an essay written in 1952, Martin Buber stated: "But here is an essential presupposition for all this dialogue: it is necessary to overcome the massive distrust in others and also that in ourselves.''~ If Buber's observation is correct, and there seems to be sufficient evidence to,verify his reflection, we have a lot of growing to do. We must reestablish trust in others and in ourselves. H~opefully, we will gr~aund our trust on the theological fact that God has faith and trust in us. He has given us freedom and intelligence, blessed us with insight and grace. We are his stewards entrusted to do his work in our times. Sensing this, a delegate must come to a radical trust in his own personal insight and conviction. This trust must then be extended to others who are also on the journey searching for truth and goodness. Nothing breaks down communica-tion so quickly as distrust; it hardly pays to initiate a discussion unless there is a solid degree of self-confidence and a climate of confidence in others. Buber, quoting Robert Hutchins, writes: "The essence of the Civiliza-tion of the Dialogue is communication. This presupposes mutual respect and understanding, it does not presuppose agreement.'"; Our trust in self and others must be supplemented with respect and the ability to understand. It would be profitable for delegates to spend some time critically reading Emerson's essay "Self-Reliance" and Howe's The Miracle o[ Dialogue. Desire ]or truth is a third quality of the dialogical person. A longing for insight and perspective characterizes the mind and heart of a truth-seeker. Like an ink blotter, this type of person quickly and completely absorbs truth wherever it presents 'itself. Desire for truth means being in contact with facts (hard data). There is no excuse for ignorance; the homework must be done. Besides researching and interpreting facts, truth demands contact with basic principles, those patterns of meanings which explain and eluci-date reality. Experience and reflection are prerequisites here. Besides dealing with facts and principles, desire for truth calls for the basic disposition mani-festing a willingness to change and grow. Regardless of who speaks a "pagan" philosopher, a formed provincial, a member in one's local commur nity, a poet--the searcher for truth listens and evaluates. So often God is speaking through these and other historical channels. If the search is honest, change will be demanded; certain, pet ~:ategories will be dropped and new ones added (e.g., collegiality) ; treasured prejudices must be let go and open-ness of mind fostered; static, rigid formulations must be reexamined in the :'Martin Buber, "Hope for This Hour;" quoted in Maurice S. Friedman, ed., Pointing the Way (New York, 1974), p. 222. ~;ibid., p. 222. 372 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 light of new research and insight. The process is painful and not without its victims but this is the price of honest discipleship. If a chapter delegate is called to imitate God by being a dialogical per-son characterized by attentive listeniiag, deep trust and a desire for truth, several responsibilities automatically arise. (1) A chapter delegate must be available to the people he represents. The thinking, feeling and life-style of his ~onstituency must be familiar material to the delegate. The duty of being available is not without its price: time and energy, precious and limited commodities, must be sacrificed in fulfilling this obligation. (2) A chapter delegate must be able to make distinctions. Meriol Trevor, in her biography of Cardinal Newman, wrote concerning Ft. Faber: "He would never dis-tinguish between disapproval and dislike; he himself always spoke of hating people who disagreed with him and he could not believe others were differ-ent.'' r This type of person should not be allow~id to be in the arena of policy making. One must be able to know and experience the difference between understanding and agreeing, between a person and an issue, between an idea and its emotive force. Chapters in which such distinctions are consistently made result in community growth and peace. (3) A chapter delegate must be willing to speak during the chapter proceedings. Some eloquent (and not so eloquent) discourses on stairways and in other private areas would be more profitably shared with the. entire group. There 'is no excuse for devastating criticisms made outside the halls of the chapter room and silence reigning within. As a general principle no one should say outside of chapter what he is not willing to say to the whole group. A delegate is mandated to speak out, to take a stance, to express points of view. If this is done with respect and in the spirit of truth, there should be tittle to fear. Merton's insight is helpful: "Ignorance is the parent of fear.''~ Our talk should flow from our study and reflection on life. Delegate: A Prophetic Person Jesus was a prophet. The study of Scripture verifies this fact and. further points out that throughout the Old Testament the Father sent prophets on special missions. Jesus' mission was unique and yet contained the basic in-gredients of those who preceded him: to reveal who the Father was and also to provide the means whereby people might return to the Father. Like Christ, the chapter delegate is missioned. This "being sent" comes through the community and the task flowing from this mission resembles that of all the prophets. The booklet Spiritual Renewal o[ the American Priesthood describes the prophet in these terms: The prophet's function was to perceive the presence or absence of God in situations and to point out the consequences of that presence or absence. A 7Meriol Trevor, Newman: Light in Winter (New York, 1963), p. 86. ,'Sotlrce unknown. Chapter Delegate: Qualities and Responsibilities / 373 prophet had to know contemporary issues, but even more, he had to be sensi-tive to the mind and will of God.:' In the context of this prophetic role, certain traits clearly emerge that would characterize a chapter delegate. The first of these is sensitivity. This sensitivity must embrace the three sectors of time: the past with its treasures and cultural limitations, the present with its high ideals and ambiguous facts, the future with its plans and realistic hopes. It is possible and often happens in life that we eat but do not taste, read but do not comprehend, listen but do not hear. Historical insensitivity cannot be excused; we must be in touch with our roots and our traditions. Unless carefully nurtured, this sensitivity can be lost. Sensitivity demands that we perceive what is happen- .ing here and now; that we enter in or are caught up by the present moment. This is not just a cognitive apprehension, since it necessarily includes an affective involvement~ The future will be basically meaningless if we do not avoid the tragedy of lost sensitivity written of by Hopkins: Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wear man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soul ls bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.~° It is time once again to take off our shoes/' to be sensitive to our world, to our people, to our deepest self. A sense of reverence, awe and wonder is much needed in our merry-go-round world. Prophets are, of necessity, courageous people. If Emerson is correct in saying that "God will not make himself manifest to cowards,''r-' then the V~rtue of fortitude takes on added importance in fostering the kingdom. Among the courageous people in history, St. Paul has been honored in a special way: ¯ . . But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years. One of the men here was speaking about that kind, and he called it 'Fortitude.' I reckon fortitude's the biggest thing a man can have--just to go on enduring when there's no guts or heart left in you. Billy h~id' it when he trekked solitary from. Garungoze to the Limpogo with ~This booklet, edited by Gerard Broccolo and Ernest E. Larkin, O. Carm., was pub-lished in 1973 by the Publications Office of the United States Catholic Conference ( 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., WashingtoniDC 20005). ~'~Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur." ~V'Earth's crammed with heaven And every common bush afire with God; And only he who sees takes off his shoes-- The rest sit around it and pluck blackberries." Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Aurora Leigh." I~Ra!ph Waldo Emerson, "The Over-Soul." 374 / Review lot Religious, ~'olume 36, 1977/3 fever and a broken arm just to show the Portugooses that he wouldn't be downed by them.,But the head man at the job was the Apostle Paul . 1:~ Courage helps us to deal,with two tendencies that permeate human existence: the tendency to fear the unknown and the drive to flee spontaneously from any object of danger. "Fright and flight"14 can block us from experiencing reality to its fullest. Courage enables us ~to stand firm and fight when the situation calls for this type of response; courage enables us to die to our-s~ lves for the sake of life. A delegate, knowing well what happens to most prophets in history, will have to face many dangers and crosses. At times his courage will manifest itself in patient endurance (the most difficult type of courage), while at other times he will be called upon to pounce on evil.1'~ Whatever is not compatible with the gospel must be courageously ques-tioned; whatever is antihuman or subhuman must be diligently removed. Living courage is a great boon to the entire community, not just to the in-dividual exercising that gift. A third trait of the prophetic person, exemplified so clearly in the life of Jesus, is that of vision. A delegate is called upon to have a perspective of what religious life is, to be able to situate in their context contemporary. issues, to sense the interrelationship among such things as prayer, asceticism and the apostolate. The blind cannot lead; only a person with vision can point the way. If a guide has not been to a given territory or if he loses the map which would get him there by carefully reading, he is no longer an asset to the group which relies on him. The delegate without vision con-tributes little in the attempt to provide meaning and direction for the com-munity. Two dangers have always plagued a healthy perspective: myopia and ignorance. The first danger allows one to see, but only to the end of one's nose--not a terribly helpful overview. Ignorance, th~ second danger, can only result in a valley experience even though the voice of the ignorant leader be forceful, and filled with an apparent self-confidence. A number of responsibilities become obligatory for the prophetic dele-gate. (1) A chapter delegate must be informed. Study and researizh will be as necessary and as natural as breathing for such a person. There is no excuse for not being aware of contemporary issues, the movements of our present culture, the meaning and influence of history. The presence or absence of information is relatively easy to detect. (2) If a person is to.be attuned to the mind and heart of God, prayer is necessary. Special emphasis should be placed on scriptural prayer since it is God's word which illuminates our understanding of contemporary issues. If the porters at the chapter doors should bar the uninformed, they should be twice as diligent in barring l:~John Buchan, Mr. Stead[ast; quoted in C. H. Dodd, The Meaning o[ Paul/or Today (London, 1920), p. 7. ~4Rev. Kevin O'Shea, "Enigma and Tenderness," Spiritual Li]e, Spring, 1975. ~sSee the. excellent Thomistic treatment of the virtue of fortitude in Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (Notre Dame, 1966), pp. 117-141. ,Chapter Delegate: Qualities and Responsibilities / 375 a person who does not pray faithfully. (3) A chapter delegate should be a person of decision. Newman in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua states: "Certitude is a reflex action; it is to,know that one knows.""; Study and prayer should lead us to this type of certitude which in turn enables us to make serious decisions, even though there will always be some element of risk if not doubt. Another facet in this process of decision making is the,willingness to assume responsibility for the decisions made. Indecisive and irresponsible persons should not be elected to chapters. The duties of being informed, prayerful and decisive are not acquired in a day not even a week. Yet the delegat~ should be growing in each of these areas if the community is to be served well. Delegate: A Wounded Healer Jesus promised that when he had returned to the Father he would send their Spirit. That promise has been realized in all who have come to believe in the Lord. This Spirit is leading all back to the Father through Christ; this Spirit is a Spirit of love, joy and peace. Through the Holy Spirit, heal-ing and reconciliation happens in our world today. A great vision of unity found in Pauline theology becomes a reality to the extent that people are living the life of the Spirit. Yet this vision of unity is premised on the tragic fact and acute awareness that fragmentation permeates creation. Man is divided within himself and separated from his fellow man, his God, and his world. We are a wounded pe~ople, scarred and battered by our own sins and the sins of others. "Everything God has made has a crack in it.'''r Our voca-tion is to make all one in Christ, to reconcile all creation to the Father. The gift of the Spirit dwelling in the Church and in our personal lives enables us to begin this glorious and painful task. The delegate as wounded healer is distinguishable by a sense of deep compassion. Graced with the ability to perceive things from the inside, the compassionate person has a knowledge of the heart and not just of external activity. The secret of the fox18 is undoubtedly correct: "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." Compassion promotes our seeing what is truly significant;.it goes far beyond the inhuman limitations of our sensate culture. So often in Scripture, reference is made to the neces-sity of a new heart.':' God's word urges us to .grow in compassion and empathy. Insensitivity to the hurts and pains of others, even though these may be self-imposed, prevents the building of community. Compassion heals! Hopefully, every deli~gate has had the experience of being healed a6Early in his book Newmah writes, "In the first chapter of this narrative I spoke of certitude as the consequence, divinely intended and enjoined upon us, of the accumula-tive force of certain given reasons which, taken one by one, were only probabilities." lrRalph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation." lSAntoine de Saint Exupery, The Little Prince (New York, 1943). 1:'E.g., Jeremiah 31 : 31-34; Ezechiel 36:24-28. 376 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 through the heartfelt concern of others. Perhaps the task of the doctor applies to all of us: "sometimes to cure, often to alleviate, always to care.''z'' Compassion is care incarnated. The destructive force of nuclear warfare is so obvious that no on.e can deny its effects; less obvious but extremely powerful in the psychological realm is the prevalent killer called judgmentalism. A delegate must be a non~ judgmental person. This does not mean that one ceases making judgments, judgments which at times are sharp and painful. God has blessed us with reason and insight and we must ferret out the truth and the falsity of our lives and the life of the community. We cannot renege on our responsibility to find the truth and to speak it boldly. Judgmentalism, on the other hand, uses the faculty of reason but in an abusive way. Judgments are made, not on dis-cernible consequences, but on motives which cannot be verified. Evidence is wanting, yet persons are judged and insinuations are made. This type of iudgmentalism is characterized by intolerance (a demand that everyone live by my interpretation of religious life), a defensiveness and air of hostility, a lack of warmth and affability. A delegate, therefore, should have a delicate balance between tolerance of persons and intolerance of falsity; between respect for the individual and firmness in sticking to principles; between understanding the human condition and calling each other to growth. We come to realize that without the gift of the Spirit we cannot but fail in this stupendous task. Again we are helped in this area by realizing that we have been blessed in our personal histories with people who have refused to judge and condemn us, who have manifested an infinite patience in allowing us to grow through the stages of personal development. If we have been ~he object of judgmentalism, our experience should forever prevent us from venturing down that road of psychological and spiritual destructiveness. The word of God provides light for our pilgrimage. In the prophet Micah, we are challenged by the Father's woi~d: this is what Yahweh asks of you: only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God.21 The call to justice, charity and faith is clear. Interestingly, spiritual love has the quality of tenderness, a-term which forcefully describes the manner in which we are to reach out to others in concern. It is possible to serve un-willingly, to meet needs because of duty, to heal out of necessity. This is neither sufficient nor healthy in an ultimate sense. God calls us to enter fully and generously into the lives of others. A tender love, a gentle con-cern, a warm respect characterize total love. Underlying this kind of love is the keen realization that human beings are terribly fragile. Indeed, "avalances gather force and crash, unheard, in men as in the mountains." "-'°America, May 1, 1976, p. 377. Paul Ramsey was quoted by the authors. '-'1Micah 6:8. Chapter Delegate: Qualities and Responsibilities / 377 People with whom we live can be breaking apart inside without our aware-ness; a tender word and radical love can heal so many lives that are on the edge.of despair. A chapter delegate would benefit from reading Fr. Kevin O'Shea, especially his article "Enigma and Tenderness.''~ The chapter delegate, a wounded healer, is challenged to fulfill certain responsibilities in this area. (1) He must ]ace the negative in self, others and the world. A recent Cartoon showed a street cleaner lifting up the edge of a sidewalk under which he swept the city's debris. No healing can take place unless we honestly and courageously face that which is destructive within life. Exploitation and manipulation are too common to be ignored; these must be searched out and dealt with in a reasonable way. (2) He should ]ace the positive in self, community and the world. Just as dangerous as the rug syndrome is the denial of or unwillingness to recognize the vast potential waiting to be actualized in creation. Leadership qualities lie fallow because of fear; intellectual skills remain untapped because of a lack of .challenge; talents stay on shelves for want of affective nutrients. "Our in-tellectual and active powers increase with our affection.'"-':' The truly great person has the vision to perceive the gifts of others~ the truly great person has disciplined productivity and shares his love and life with others. The delegate must perceive and promote the gifts and talents given by the Lord. (3) He should rejoice in life. Nothing heals so quickly as genuine humor and authentic play. Joy is one of the signs of the Spirit's presence. It flows from an awareness of God's personal love and the gift of his life. Consoling Conclusion It is eminently unfair.to demand of a single individual the. multiple qualifications listed in the foregoing pag.es. Who could possibly fulfill the following want-ad posted on the community .bulletin board? WANTED!!! 25 people who are: !) dialogicai persons --who have deep capacity to listen, trust, learn --who are available, discerning, vocal 2) prophetic persons who are --sensitive, courageous, visionary --informed, prayerful, decisive 3) wounded healers who are --compassionate, non-judgmental, tender --realistic, joyful ~20'Shea, op. cit. ~:~Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Friendship." 378 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 Although applications might be filled out, no one person could qualify in every area. The first spiritual Olympics are yet to be held. Consolation comes from the fact that chapters are not made up of only one individual. Rather, they a~:e community affairs and the principle of complementarity comes inio play. What one lacks, 6thers have. The above job description is not so much one for individuals as it is for a community. Because of the blessing of pluralism, many communities could easily qualify. Tragic is the election in a community that allows a strong predominance of a single personality type. Once again, it is diversity ttiat leads to life; a di-versity grounded in concern for the kingdom. Beginnings Somewhe.re, in the night I hear you gathering pebbles for tomorrow's task.' Take care to slip a stir amidst the stones you gather; temples hold fast with dreams. Only a locust lurks in the wrinkled meadows, keeping company with the wheat that waits to be reaped by our tears. Together we will meet you at the altar when only the sound of bees will be heard preparing waxen sacrifices for your vacant vigil. Until then, I will be chanting antiphons in tune with your canticles. Sister Carole MacKenthun St. Mary Academy 250 Forest Ave., Lakewood, NI 08701 The "System" Side of Stewardship Gerald R. Amelse Mr. Amelse has been a church finance manager and consultant for sixteen years. He studied Accounting, Business Administration and Economics at The Catholic Univer-sity, the University Of Notre Dame, George Washington University and the University of Maryland. Culrently he is a partner of Calkins-Amelse Associates, which offers management services for non-profit organizations. His office is located at 4531 Pine-crest Heights Drive; Annandale, VA 22003. The widely publicized financial mishaps of several Catholic Church organi-zations in recent years have brought into question the quality of church financial management in general and of financial management in religious congregations in particular. Public attention has tended to focus on the caliber of the financial administrators and advisors involved in these cases rather than on the adequacy of the underlying systems of financial organi-zation, policies .and procedures in each instance. Responsible stewardship can result only when qualified administrators function within an appropriate financial management system. An unsound financial management system; in whole or in part, can be as inimical to responsible stewardship as unquali-fied administrators or advisors. A sound financial management system is equally important for religious congregations because of their changed environment. For several genera-tions, ~religious congregations in the United States enjoyed almost steady growth in membership, resources, activities .and facilities. Now, however, total memberships are static, if not in actual decline; new needs, such as retirem6nt, are making additional claims on already limited resources, and the maintenance of much needed apostolic acti~,itie's and institutions is be-coming increasingly more difficult. Financial management systems developed and used during previous generations may have been adequate in an era 379 380 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/3 of growth. The present environment, however, requires a system that will improve the ability of a congregation to meet~ increasing internal and apostolic needs with limited and declining resource potential. The exercise of responsible stewardship today calls for clear financial organization, appropriate financial policies, and sound budgeting, account-ing and reporting procedures. Church leaders should be concerned about the adequacy of' their organization's financial management system and anxious to improve it in each of the following areas: Financial Organ&ation A congregation's financial organization is the structure of its formal decision-making positions, the relationships between those positions, and the lines of their accountability. Besides the standard positions (treasurer, controller, and so forth) a congregation's financial organization should also identify the individuals responsible for specific programs, projects, activities and departments, and clearly define their respective roles, relationships and lines of accountability. Lack of clarity in a congregation's financial organi-zation can easily lead to flawed communications, loss of direction, duplica-tion of effort, and wastefulness in the exercise of responsible stewardship. Financial Policies A policy is a definite course or method of action, selected from .among alternatives and in light of given conditions, to guide and determine present and future decisions. Without a comprehensive set of clear financial policies, officials and administrators ~i'e, in effect, more or less free to make financial decisions according to their individual discretion rather than according to previously approved courses of action. The four major sources of financial policies for a religious congregation are: Church law, norms and guidelines; the congregation's own rule and constitution; formal enactments of the congregation,s governing body; and day-to-day operating decisions. It is the responsibility of the congregation's governing body, however, to have a summary of financial policies prepared and periodically to review and approve it. Budgeting The budget is a congregation's principal financial planning tool. The long-range planning aspect of a budget (i.e., two or more years') should identify the congregation's future sources" and uses of funds, project the amounts of revenue anticipated from each identified source and project the amounts of expenditures required for each identified use. The short-range aspect (i.e., month, quarter, year) should detail the estimated ex-penditures for each proposed program, project, activity and department, and itemize the specific means of financing the expenditures. Since the objective of a budget is the development of a financial plan, it The "System" Side o[ Stewardship / 381 is necessary to begin the budgeting process with information about the programs, projects, activities and departments which the congregation is planning for the coming year(s). Information on past performance is an importarit input to the budgeting process, but relying too heavily on ac-counting data and financial reports (which are historical in character) can create the danger that.a congregation's budget will reflect more what has happened in the past rather than what the congregation wants to happen in the future. Clear financial organization is essential for sound budgeting. A budget can not be completely useful as a planning tool until the individuals re-sponsible for each program, project, activity and department have been identified and their responsibility for performance against the plan and budget has been accepted by them. Furthermore, budgets that are prepared without the participation of the persons responsible for directing specific programs, projects, activities and departments are generally weak as plan-ning tools. Program, project, activity and d~epartments heads can not be expected to comprehend fully, agree with or conform to a financial plan in which they did not participate in developing. Accounting ~nd Reporting The financial statements of religious congregations are meant to provide superiors, administrators, members and other interested parties with a mean-ingful summarization of the congregation's overall financial condition as well as the operating results of its programs, projects, activities and ~depart-merits. In order to achieve this purpose more effectively, congregations should introduce both "fund" and "functional" accounting procedures into their basic accounting systems. A fund is a sum of money or other resource, set aside for a specific pur-pose acc~ording to restrictions imposed either by the intent of the donor or" by regulation of the congregation's officials~ Grants, annuities and endow-ments are examples of funds whose uses are restricted by the intent of the donor. A retirement fund is an example of money set aside for a specific purpose by regulation of the congregation's officials. The significant char-acteristic of fund accounting is that it classifies and records the financial transactions within each fund--assets, liabilities, receipts, disbursements and fund balances--according to the specified restrictions. Functional accounting records expenses according to specific programs, projects, activities and departments, and reports this information to the administrators directly responsible for these functions. This procedure im-proves expense control and also provides a practical basis for realistically evaluating the allocation and use of the congregation's limited resources. A congregation could be led' tO revamp its finanEial plans of action when confronted with financial information that enables a comparison of pro-gram, project, activity and department ~osts with their intended results. 3a2 / Review jot Religious, lZolume 36, 1977/3. oaelusion Financial organization, policies and procedures are not the only aspects of responsible stewardship. They are, nonetheless, essential elements of-sound financial management and control. Any congregation that finds its present management system to be somewhat inadequate should obtain qualified assistance to help review and strengthen it wherever necessary. REPRINTS FROM THE REVIEW Profile of the Spirit: A Theology of Discernment of Spirits by J. R. Sheets, S.J. .50 Retirement or Vigil by B. Ashley, O.P. .30 The Confessions of Religious Women by St. M. Denis, S.O.S. 30 The Four Moments of Prayer by J. R. Sheets, S.J. .50 The Healing of Memories by F. Martin .35 The Nature and Value of a Directed Retreat by H. F. Smith, S.J . 35 The Teaching Sister in the Church by E. Gambari, S,M.M. .30 The Thepiogy of the Eucharistic Presence by J. Galot, S~J. .30 The Vows and Christian Life by G. Greif, S.J. .30 New Reprints Centering Prayer--Prayer of Quiet by M. B. Pennington, O.C.S.O . 50 Colloquy of God With a Soul That Truly Seeks Him .30 Prayer of Personal Reminiscence by D. J. Hassel, S.J. 60 Orders for the above should be sent to: Review for Religious 612 Humboldt Building 539 No. Gra

Issue 71.1 of the Review for Religious, 2012. This was the final issue. ; Volume 71 2012 Editor Michael G. Harter sj Associate Editor Garth L. Hallett sj Book Review Editor Rosemary Jermann Scripture Scope Eugene Hensell osb Editorial Staff Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp e v i e w f o r r e l i g i o u s A Journal of Catholic Spirituality contents prisms 4 Prisms Ignatian spirituality 8 Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent Kathleen Hughes rscj explores the provocative parallels between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist as two ways we are caught up in the work of God in Christ, and two invitations to replicate the whole life, death, and rising of Jesus. This article was one of the keynote presentations at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V held in St. Louis, Missouri, July 21-24, 2011. 29 Without the Drama: The Transition from Third to Fourth Week Ronald Mercier sj explores how those who make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are invited to enter into a grand silence where they contemplate the empty space without answers that follows the crucifixion—the space that remains the context of our lives, the place of our ministries, and the space within which joy dawns for those who know the Risen Lord. Questions for Reflection 58 Finding or Seeking God in All Things: A Few Cautionary Notes Peter J. Schineller sj researches the phrase "finding God in all things," common in writings about Ignatian spirituality, and discovers that it is rare in the writings of Ignatius. He finds that phrases such as "searching for and seeking God in all things" more accurately describe the Ignatian approach. 2 Review for Religious sharing experience 69 The Warmth, the Will, and the Way Ben Harrison mc is discovering that it helps him be more consistent in his spiritual journey if he is attentive to the warmth of the Spirit's presence in his heart and to the vows as an expression of the will to move deeper in his relationship with God. 78 Getting with the Program A young man writes of his experience of coming to terms during the novitiate with his addiction to pornography. This article could be used profitably as a case study during a novitiate class or read as background for a community discussion. Questions for Personal Reflection and Group Study discernment models 86 Dialogue with the Radically Other: Models of Discernment in the Old Testament Ligita Ryliskyte md phd sje explores the rich imagery of the Old Testament and offers valuable paradigms to understand spiritual discernment as a dialogue with God. In this essay she describes four models of discernment that might be distinguished in Old Testament imagery. departments 100 Scripture Scope: Vocation and the Call to Discipleship: A Reflection on Mark 1:16-20 105 Book Reviews 71.1 2012 3 Review for Religious prisms 4 A wise man once said: "It's a shame to waste a good crisis." If that is true, Review for Religious is facing a moment of great opportunity. In recent years the number of subscribers has steadily fallen off, and the cost of publication has risen to the point that our future as a print journal is in jeop-ardy. The recent deaths of Fathers Fischer and Fleming have taken their toll. We have reached a critical point in our history. When my provincial assigned me to succeed David Fleming as editor, he gave me a specific mission: Assess the viability of the publication. So for the past year, the staff and our advisory board have taken that mission seriously even as we worked to meet our ordinary production schedule. While we all hoped to be able to keep this good work alive, the real goal of our discernment was not to save or to close the journal, but to explore ways to more effectively serve the church. In the past months we have consulted widely. We looked at the shifting demographics of reli-gious life and understood that younger reli-gious are getting more of their information on 71.1 2012 5 the Internet than through printed periodicals. We sorted through spreadsheets of detailed financial information. We looked hard at our available resources and realized that we could sustain publication of the journal in its present format for a maximum of three to five years. The hand-writing on the wall could not be clearer: Simply maintain-ing operations as they are will inevitably lead to closure. Maintenance, without change, is not an option. Part of our analysis took us back to look at our history. Our journal came into being in 1941 at a Jesuit theolo-gate in St. Marys, Kansas, where three enterprising faculty members—Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, and Gerald Kelly (later joined by Henry Willmering)—invited their students to edit and publish the papers they wrote as class assignments in what became the early incarnation of this journal which has served the church and religious life proudly for the past 70 years. Richard Smith, Daniel F. X. Meenan, Philip Fischer and David Fleming edited the publi-cation over the subsequent decades. Since Review for Religious was founded at a small theology school, we began exploring the idea that a theology center, rather than the confines of our office, would be a more logical site for the publication of this journal. As we realized that a network of theology centers around the world linked through the Internet could have great potential for producing articles and generating lively discussion, we began exploring that path. We contacted the moderators of Jesuit Conferences that have significant centers of religious formation in Africa, India, and the Asia-Pacific region—in parts of the world Augustine Ellard, Adam Ellis, Gerald Kelly, Henry Willmering Review for Religious Author • Title 6 where religious life is growing—to see if any of them would have an interest in assuming responsibility for the journal. As a result of our inquiries, we are engaged in a conversa-tion with just such a center about continuing the mission of Review for Religious. We are not looking to replicate the journal as it cur-rently exists, but are talking about re-envisioning and re-designing it with current and future generations of religious in mind. As a result of our discussions and discernment, we have determined that this copy of Review for Religious is the final issue that will be produced by our St. Louis office. Whether the journal remains as a print publication, or is redesigned for delivery on the Internet, or ceases publication altogether is yet to be determined. In the meantime, we are suspending publication and putting a moratorium on renewals or new subscriptions until our discernment is completed. To say that we have reached the end is premature. A hiatus or pause is a more accurate description. As Ron Mercier points out in his article in this issue, a rest is as important a part of a musical score as is a chord or a whole string of arpeggios. And such a time of waiting can be a rich moment. We are not sitting idly while the discussion goes on but are in the process of digitizing our entire collection. We plan to make every article, poem, and book review we have published available on the Internet. It should be an invalu- Richard Smith, Daniel Meenan, Philip Fischer, and David Fleming. 71.1 2012 7 able archive for anyone wishing to research the shifts in religious life during the past 70 years. I am grateful to our current staff: Mary Ann Foppe, who has been the office manager for the past 25 years; Judy Sharp, our receptionist, who has handled subscriptions; Rosemary Jermann, who has written the Bookshelf column; Garth Hallett sj, who has served as Associate Editor; Tracy Gramm, who has done layout and graphic design. I have appreciated Ed Hensell osb, Elizabeth McDonough op, Richard Hill sj, and Joseph Gallen sj, who have provided regular columns over the years, and Jean Read, Iris Ann Ledden ssnd, Regina Siegfried asc, Claire Boehmer asc, Joe Meek, and many oth-ers who have made major behind-the-scenes contri-butions. They have been an excellent staff. We are grateful to the countless number of con-tributors who have sent us manuscripts and poetry for our consideration. They helped us keep our finger on the pulse of religious life. And finally, we thank you, our faithful subscribers. We are grateful for your support, and we trust that we have been an important resource for you over the years. Please read the inside of the back cover of this issue. It contains details about how to keep informed about the progress of our discernment. We will notify each subscriber about the outcome of that discernment. Please pray that the Spirit will lead us to a good conclusion. Michael Harter SJ Rosemary Jermann, Mary Ann Foppe, Tracy Gramm, Judy Sharp and Michael Harter Review for Religious Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? We Are Sent I need to begin with a confession. I was given an assignment to speak about the Eucharist, particularly as it describes a way of life flowing from Weeks Three and Four of the Exercises. I am not an expert on the Spiritual Exercises, but I have been a student of the Eucharist for many decades, so I was happy to think about this topic. And, though the talk was still non-existent, a description had to be prepared for the program booklet. Many of you have prob-ably had the same experience. You make up a description of a talk right out of thin air, hop-ing to be sufficiently generic so you can talk about almost anything at all. kathleen hughes ignatian spirituality 8 Kathleen Hughes rscj, former professor of Word and Worship at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and former provincial of her order's United States prov-ince, is currently a mission consultant in the Network of Sacred Heart Schools. Her address is 541 S. Mason Road; St. Louis, Missouri 63141. 71.1 2012 9 But a funny thing happened to me on the way to the topic assigned. I took a detour. I stumbled onto what I regard as an amazing new insight about how the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror each other. At first I thought I was the last to arrive. Then I checked with those who have far greater familiarity with the literature on the Spiritual Exercises, and no one had heard any reflection on such a topic. That, too, gave me pause and left me wondering how far out on a limb I was climbing. Nevertheless, here's the insight I want to develop in the first part of this talk: there seems to be a quite provocative parallel between the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four-part rhythm of the Eucharist. The gathering rites of the Eucharist include elements of praise and penitence, as are typical of movements in Week One of the Spiritual Exercises; the Liturgy of the Word is the gradual unfolding of the person and work of Jesus Christ, as occurs in Week Two; the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the celebration of Jesus' death for the life of the world, is the heart of Week Three; and the concluding rites of the Eucharist have an affinity with the rhythms of Week Four. In these pages I intend to develop this thesis in more detail, hoping in the process to give fresh insight into God's activity in these two parallel celebrations of the paschal mystery—these two ways we are being caught up in the work of God in Christ. Then I will move to a focus on the Eucharist itself, as it flows from Week Three, incarnates the intimacy of Week Four, and remains the abiding experience of consolation, chal-lenge, and invitation to faithful living, parallel to leav-ing retreat and picking up everyday life. Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 10 Part I: Parallels Overview First, then, before we look at the Four Weeks of the Spiritual Exercises and the four parts of the Eucharist in more detail, let me offer an overview of the resonances I've discovered between them. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises are a series of movements or stages that, negotiated with grace, realize the Christian ideal of identification with Christ. Both are invitations to conversion; both, at their heart, are offers of holi-ness and transformation. Both the Exercises and the Eucharist have a basic psychological rhythm that facili-tates growth in the spiritual life. The Exercises and the Eucharist as we know them only gradually evolved to their present form. The Exercises began as jottings in Ignatius's personal notebook—conso-lations, desolations, graces received—and this collec-tion of insights developed into a practical manual as Ignatius gave them to oth-ers and learned from their experience. They remain a core series of spiritual exercises that are endlessly flexible as enfleshed in the lives of individuals. The Eucharist, too, is the result of a gradual evolution over time around the core of readings and the breaking of bread, making every age and every human commu-nity a fresh inculturation of a basic pattern. Happily, in our day the basic four-part structure of gathering, listening, responding, and sending has been recovered in the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace. 71.1 2012 11 Interestingly, both the Exercises and the Eucharist are filled with words, indeed with dialogue, and with spaces of silence. Both also make appeal to all of our senses and stir up mystagogical insights in those who are attentive. Both the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises interrupt our ordinary time with extraordinary grace; they help us to make sense of our life as it is unfolding before the living God. And both the Eucharist and the Exercises send us to live, in deed, what we have just experienced in this time of encounter with the divine. Finally, both these patterns of prayer follow, for most of us, familiar and predictable dynamics and so, for each, we need the grace to pay attention, to move beyond the familiar in order to get inside the mysteries. The First Week and the Gathering Rites of the Eucharist We come to retreat or to Eucharist just as we are, and we bring our history and our particular world with us into this sacred time and place. We come, sometimes breathlessly, from the work we have just left behind and the preoccupations that fill our minds and hearts. We come always with unfinished business and with distrac-tions, even burdens, of body and spirit. We come with our crosses and our inexhaustible needs. We come because we are drawn to a time and space of intimacy and prayer, of encounter with the Lord who will tutor our hearts, of transformation to new and deeper life. We come to be nourished. We come remembering God's goodness and God's fidelity to us, no matter our own response. We come hoping to touch our finger to the flame once again, placing ourselves, for this span of time, on holy ground. God's unconditional and ever-faithful love perme-ates our awareness in Week One. Each one of us has Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 12 been blessed with divine life; God's creative activity has showered each of us in unique ways and has supported and sustained us throughout our lives. In face of the immense goodness of God, we acknowledge our inade-quate response; we know that sin has hindered our rela-tionships with self and others and, above all, with God. Week One provides the opportunity to recognize sin as our failure to respond with love to God always present, to express our own sorrow and repentance, and then to know God's ever-greater love, mercy, and forgiveness. We reflect on our lives in light of God's boundless love for us, knowing that God wants to free us of everything that gets in the way of a loving response. The focus is less on particular sins than on our relationship with God that has been damaged, perhaps even shattered. Yet it is a relationship always available, for God longs for intimacy with us far more than we could ask or even imagine. Our personal history gives us hope: God is filled with mercy and compassion, slow to anger, full of kindness. God's response to our repentance is mercy and forgiveness. By the end of the First Week, we know ourselves as sinners, loved and rescued by a God who is so much greater than our hearts. These same heart movements are present in the gathering rites of the Eucharist. We generally begin the celebration with a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. We are then invited into a time of silence before the liv-ing God, and we cannot but realize our unworthiness and our experience of sin. In the language of the new Missal we own our complicity in sin "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault," and we join with one another in begging for mercy and for-giveness: "Lord, have mercy." Then the Gloria is our hymn of praise after the words of absolution: "May 71.1 2012 13 almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you your sins, and bring you to life everlasting. Amen." We begin the Eucharist knowing ourselves as loved sinners, disposed to open our hearts to the word proclaimed in our midst. There are two additional striking parallels between the First Week of the Exercises and the gathering rites of Eucharist. The first has to do with the cross of Christ, for the cross is prominent at the beginning of both experiences. The retreatant is invited to make a first meditation before the cross; similarly, when we gather for the Eucharist, the entrance procession places the cross at the very beginning of the celebration. There is nothing like the cross of Christ to sharpen our focus, to bring us to the sober reality that relationships have consequences, that the paschal mystery of Jesus' life, death, and rising is what has made it possible to draw near to the throne of grace. And here's a second intriguing possibility with the Eucharist. There is a presidential prayer at the conclu-sion of the entrance rites, another at the preparation of the table and the gifts, and a third after Communion. These are all, essentially, prayers of petition; they each ask for a specific grace that is dependent for its focus on the place of the prayer in the rite. We really could think of these prayers as "preludes" that name and ask for a specific grace as we move from one week to the next, from one part of the Eucharist to the next. For example, the opening prayer for today's liturgy, the Seventeenth Sunday, Year A, from icel's Missal of 1998, reads: God of eternal wisdom, You alone impart the gift of right judgment. Grant us an understanding heart that we may value wisely the treasure of your kingdom Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 14 and gladly forego all lesser gifts to possess that kingdom's incomparable joy. We make our prayer through Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit God for ever and ever. Amen.1 What a perfect presidential prayer to open our hearts to the Word of God; what a perfect prelude to move to Week Two of the Exercises. The Second Week and the Liturgy of the Word The parallels between the Second Week of the Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word are easily dis-cernible. Both focus on the scriptures, and both invite decision; both are grounded in the Gospels and in the Mystery who is Christ; both the Spiritual Exercises and the Liturgy of the Word, over time, offer an intimate encounter with Jesus of Nazareth—healing, teaching, sharing meals, welcoming sinners, going about doing good, spending the night in union with his Abba, gath-ering disciples and forming their hearts. We reflect on scripture passages, in retreat as at Mass, one after another, not in order to know the scriptures better but to discover ever more fully the One whom they disclose to us. During the Second Week of the Exercises, like Martha's sister, Mary, the retreatant sits at the feet of Jesus, the teacher, drawn to his person, absorbing his attitudes and values, his choices, his preaching of the dream of God for the world, for humankind, for each of us. The Second Week, of course, is not full only of the consolation of spending time with a dear friend. That 71.1 2012 15 dear friend of ours also reveals to us the cost of dis-cipleship, the misunderstandings, the disappointments, the gathering storm of criticism and anger. We take in the whole of the life of Jesus Christ and are drawn to know him more intimately, to love him more ardently, and to follow him more faithfully. We choose to be dis-ciples of the perfect disciple. Empowered by the love of God experienced in Week One and by Jesus' friendship, which deepens for us in Week Two, we choose an ever closer relationship with him, no matter what. Loved sin-ners become loving servants, embracing and following Jesus, setting our faces, with him, to Jerusalem. It has been written that during the Second Week "We find ourselves drinking in the experiences of Jesus, so that we begin to assimilate his values, his loves, his freedom. This style of praying provides the necessary content of decision-making or discernment, which forms an essential part of the Second Week and is meant to be an abiding part of a Christian's life that is shaped by the Exercises."2 Of course, those statements also describe a regu-lar pattern of solitary prayer in daily life that reaches its summit in the Eucharist. God speaks to our hearts, opening up for us the mystery of redemption and salva-tion and offering us spiritual nourishment; Christ him-self is present in the midst of the community through the Word proclaimed.3 The cycle of readings, highlighting first one evange-list's portrait of Christ and then another's in the three-year cycle, invites our reflection on the life and ministry of Jesus, his proclamation of the Good News, his say-ings and parables, his teachings and miracles, and, espe-cially during Lent and the triduum, how his face was set to Jerusalem during his last days on earth. The Gospel is the highpoint of the Liturgy of the Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 16 Word, and we mark it with various signs of reverence for the book and with the tracing of the cross on our forehead, lips, and breast, praying that our mind be opened, that our words be true, and that our whole being be exposed to the consolation and the challenge of a Gospel way of life. The homily follows. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal describes the homily as a necessary source of nourishment of the Christian life.4 In fact, for a majority of Christians it is often the only source of spir-itual nourishment in a busy week. The Second Week of the Exercises illuminates the challenge to those who give the homily in the Eucharist. The point of the hom-ily is identical to the grace sought in Week Two of the Exercises, namely, to enable the assembly to know Jesus more intimately, to love him more ardently and to follow him more faithfully. Nothing less! Not entertainment. Not exegesis. Not personal self-disclosure. Nothing less than knowing, loving, and following Christ, choosing his choices, becoming gradually and almost imperceptibly more like him, putting on his mind and heart. Just as one chooses discipleship at the end of Week Two, so too there is a choice at the end of the Liturgy of the Word. As we prepare to move from the Table of God's Word to the Table of the Lord's Supper, we join ourselves to Christ and ask that we too be transformed every bit as much as the bread and the wine, that we and they may become for us and for our world the Body and Blood of Christ. The Third Week and the Liturgy of the Eucharist The focus of Week Three is both the Last Supper and the Passion. So, too, these two themes are conflated in the Liturgy of the Eucharist: "the Sacrifice of the 71.1 2012 17 Cross and its sacramental renewal in the Mass, which Christ the Lord instituted at the Last Supper and com-manded the apostles to do in his memory, are one and the same, differing only in the manner of offering, and . . . consequently the Mass is at once a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, of propitiation and satisfaction."5 The first meditation of the Exercises in Week Three is on the Last Supper in its entirety—including the preparations, the choice of place, the arrangements for the meal, the assembling in the upper room, Christ's washing of the apostles' feet, the supper itself, Christ's giving of his body and blood in Eucharist as the ultimate expression of his love for them, and his final words, his last will and testament, that they continue this same action in his memory. Much of this finds a resonance in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. There is, of course, first the preparation of the table and the gifts, the preparation of the altar itself and then of the offerings of bread and wine. There is the washing of the hands of the presider, a ritual of cleansing and interior purification in readiness for all that will follow. There is the prayer over the gifts, a simple and focused petition—a second "prelude," if you will, asking in a variety of ways that the gifts we have placed on the table will become holy and that we our-selves will be caught up in this action and be made holy to the praise and glory of God. Then the great prayer of praise and thanksgiving, the Eucharistic Prayer, begins. We tell the story of Jesus' life, death, and rising. We enter into Christ's liturgy, the endless self-giving of Christ into the hands of the One he called Abba, from whom he receives back his life. Our worship is an offering of our whole selves with and in Christ to God. That is our participation in the paschal Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 18 mystery of Christ's obedience unto death, our identifica-tion with Christ in his radical obedience to God. Have you ever used one of the Eucharistic Prayers for your meditation during Week Three? The Eucharistic Prayer is addressed to God the Father. Could we not think of it as a colloquy with the One Jesus called Abba, our own intimate conversation with God, as we ponder the mystery of the Passion? By turns, the Eucharistic Prayer "collo-quy" offers thanksgiving to God for the whole work of salvation realized in Christ; it implores the action of God's transforming Spirit; it tells the story again of the night before Jesus died when he offered his body and blood, gave the apostles to eat and drink, and left them a command to perpetuate this mystery; it recalls the events that fol-lowed the supper, especially the blessed Passion of Christ together with his victory over sin and death; it makes an offering to God not only of the spotless victim but of our-selves so that day by day we might be perfected through Christ the mediator and be brought into unity with God and with each other when God may be all in all.6 It is a perfect prayer; it is a perfect condensed statement of what we believe and what we long for; it is a colloquy, if you will, that gathers up and gives expression to the faith of the community in Jesus' salvific death and rising and our par-ticipation in that mystery. There is no better word at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, or at the end of our Third Week meditation on the Passion as we dwell in the silence of God, than the word "Amen." So be it. Week Four and the Communion and Concluding Rites We are ready for Week Four—Jesus' resurrection and his apparitions to his mother, to the women, to the disciples, to Mary in the garden. Always the message is 71.1 2012 19 the same: do not be afraid; peace be with you; go now and tell the good news; go now to feed my lambs. And as peace is the gift of the Risen One, we beg that same peace for the whole human family, and we ask for mutual love among ourselves. We approach the table of the Lord and receive the one Bread of Life, which is Christ who died and rose for the salva-tion of the world. Our Communion makes us one with the Risen Christ, and the last presidential prayer, the prayer after Communion, is a final "prelude"—a peti-tion that we might go forth and live, in deed, what we have just done in word and ritual action. "Please make this Communion take!" this prayer seems to beg. We become what we eat. Through the Communions of our lifetime we are gradually being transformed into God. We know that we ourselves and our world have been radically changed by Jesus' resurrection, and we embrace his commission to become the Heart of God on earth. In contemplating the love of God in the conclud-ing exercise of Week Four, we pray an intimate prayer of thanksgiving to the One who has shared his life so completely with us that we are filled with gratitude and with a desire to make a generous return of love. "Take, Lord, receive," we say, and in so doing we express our availability before God for whatever we will face, rely-ing simply and completely on God's grace. We know ourselves as blessed and sent. Thus far I have been developing the ways that the Eucharist and the Spiritual Exercises mirror and some-times illuminate aspects of each other. As a transition to the second part of this reflection, I suggest pausing over the words of the "Anima Christi" using David Fleming's translation. It was David who said that this prayer is a summary of the dynamics of the whole movement Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 20 of the Exercises, and he also described the prayer as a summary of the transformation wrought through the Eucharist. Jesus, may all that is you flow into me. May your body and blood be my food and drink. May your passion and death be my strength and life. Jesus, with you by my side enough has been given. May the shelter I seek be the shadow of your cross. Let me not run from the love which you offer, but hold me safe from the forces of evil. On each of my dyings shed your light and your love. Keep calling to me until that day comes, when, with your saints, I may praise you forever. Amen.7 Part II: Living the Eucharist David Fleming also called the "Anima Christi" a summary of the living of the Fourth Week in the everyday, so it is to that topic we turn, the living of the Eucharist. Many years ago I read a book by Gregory Dix called The Shape of the Liturgy, a very long, very erudite history of the Eucharist by an Anglican clergyman and liturgi-cal scholar. At the conclusion, around page seven hun-dred something, the author shifts from liturgical history, archeology, and philology to spirituality. He quotes the words of Jesus at the Last Supper, "Do this in memory of me," and then poses an intriguing question: Was ever another command so obeyed? Dix paints an extraordinary picture: Century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country, to every race on earth, this action of Eucharist has been carried out in every conceivable human circumstance and for every conceivable human need, from the heights of 71.1 2012 21 power to places of poverty and need, for royalty at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold, for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church, for the wisdom for the Parliament of a mighty nation, for a sick old woman afraid to die, for Columbus setting out to discover the New World, for a barren couple hoping for a child, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows, and on and on. Dix lyrically enumerates these and scores of other instances in which the Christian com-munity has been faithful to Jesus' command, "Do this."8 Over the centuries the Eucharist has been celebrated by innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful women and men like you and me, people with hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and sins and temptations and prayers every bit as vivid and alive as yours and mine are now. Week by week, on a hundred thousand succes-sive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, the followers of Jesus have done just this for the remembrance of him.9 This is an extraordinary picture of the sacrament that constitutes the community, of the event that binds us together, one with another and with Christians of every age, place, race, tongue, and way of life. The Eucharist has been like a wave of grace rolling over the community again and again across the centuries of Christendom, hollowing out spaces for the divine in the midst of the everyday. Was ever another command so obeyed? But after pondering Dix, I realized that when I con-sidered that Last Supper of Jesus and his friends, there was another question on my mind. When Jesus said "do this in remembrance of me," what did he mean by the this? Surely not just the Jewish pattern of the meal, though we know a lot about Jewish rituals, the blessing of bread, the number of cups, the style of blessing said over both. Surely the this is something more. What are Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 22 we being asked to do? to be? to embrace? to celebrate? What commitment do we make when we say "Amen"? Scripture supplies two directions toward an answer: one in the Synoptic accounts of the supper and Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, and the other in the Gospel of John. Recall the words of Paul describing the Last Supper: I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me" (1 Cor 11:23-25). Do this in remembrance of me. But what is the this? Have you ever considered that the Last Supper was precisely that—it was the last. The Last Supper was the last of a whole series of Jesus' meals recorded in the Scriptures. Jesus never played the pious ascetic, keep-ing away from celebrations. He loved a good feast. He used that image of feasting as a metaphor of the reign of God—a great banquet. It was said of him, "This man is a glutton and a drunkard." An even more shocking accusa-tion was whispered behind his back: "This man sits down at table with sinners, with the morally dubious, with the outcasts of society, with those living on the fringes." On nearly every page of the Gospels there is a meal or a reference to food. Jesus calls out to Zacchaeus, "Get down from that tree. I'm coming to your house for What commitment do we make when we say "Amen"? 71.1 2012 23 lunch." There is the story of Simon who threw a din-ner party but was an inattentive host, and of the woman who slipped in to minister to Jesus as he sat at Simon's table. There is the story of Peter's mother-in-law who is cured only to get up and wait on them. There is the Syrophoenician woman who would not take no for an answer, who spoke about crumbs that fell from the table and who expected—and received—more than crumbs from this man. There are the feeding miracles that tell us something of the utter lavishness of the banquet and that everyone will receive enough and there will still be something left over for another day. There are parables of feasts, of great abundance, of jockeying for places at table, of appropriate attire, of filling the room with those drawn from the highways and the byways. Even the risen appearances of Jesus include meals. "Peace be with you," Jesus says. "What's for dinner?" On the shore, in the upper room, on the way to Emmaus, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. How do you recognize someone? Even at a distance, you rec-ognize the timbre of a voice, or a particular gesture, or the slight tilt of the head so characteristic of an indi-vidual. The disciples recognized Jesus for what was most characteristic of him: the way he broke the bread. What is the this that we are to replicate? It is the whole life and ministry of Jesus at table. Scripture scholars refer to this as Jesus' ministry of table fellow-ship. To share food, in Semitic times, was to share life itself. And Jesus shared life with an astonishing assort-ment of people. Everyone was welcome to sit with him at table, to tell stories and to break the bread. Jesus' ministry of table fellowship is a ministry of universal reconciliation, no exceptions. The Last Supper reca-pitulated the attitudes and values of Jesus, who opened Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 24 his table and his heart to everyone, who offered hospi-tality to all, who was himself at home with all manner of people, who knew the human need for nourishment of body, mind, and spirit and who was always present to the other—welcoming, reconciling, offering life. Do this in memory of me. The Gospel of John offers a second answer to the question "What is the this?" In John there is a very dif-ferent institution narrative. It is the account of the foot washing. We know the story so well. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. He poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel. Peter resisted this tenderness until Jesus pressed: "If I do not wash you, you have no part with me." Peter relented in typical Peter fashion: "Not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" When Jesus had com-pleted the washing and resumed his place, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you" (Cf. Jn 13:1-15). You should do as I have done. In other words, "Do this in memory of me." I had an experience when I was studying at the University of Notre Dame that colors my understand-ing of the washing of the feet after the manner of Jesus. Notre Dame has a reputation for the excellence of its liturgical studies program and, at least when I was there, for the perfection of its liturgical celebrations: every 71.1 2012 25 minister rehearsed; every detail on a checklist; every liturgy perfect. And, during the sacred triduum, the lit-urgies were even more perfect! It was Holy Thursday and time for the foot washing. Twelve people moved forward, probably having prepared for the foot wash-ing by carefully washing their feet! Then, seemingly from nowhere, a very unkempt man started up the aisle, staggering a bit, perhaps under the weather. It was one of those stunning moments. Time stood still. Then the deacon walked down the aisle to help the man for-ward and assist him in taking off his shoes and socks. What is the this? Tender and loving care for the other; accepting our mutual vulnerabilities; choosing to open our hearts to all, even the one staggering into our life and upsetting its plans and perfections. Foot washing is not just a way of life but an attitude of heart, a kneeling before the other in reverence. Foot washing is embrac-ing a way of service after the manner of Jesus, simply, generously, not counting the cost. Do this: Embrace my attitudes and values as your own. Love those I love, and be my heart to them. Welcome the stranger, the one on the margins, the disenfranchised. Become vulnerable with one another. Kneel in reverence, especially before those whom soci-ety shuns. Nourish one another's bodies and spirits. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep, both here at home and half a world away— those in Norway who are paralyzed by a massacre they Foot washing is not just a way of life but an attitude of heart, a kneeling before the other in reverence Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 26 could never have imagined, those who are starving from the drought in Africa, those who are terrified of nuclear contamination in Japan, those who are caught up in trafficking around the globe or denied asylum here at home, those who have lost the ones they love and all they owned in fire, flood, tornado, or earthquake. Make a habit of roaming the globe in prayer so that you do not remain distant from the joys and pain of the world. Send those waves of grace once again across continents and cultures to bathe our world in the love and mercy of Eucharist. Do this in memory of me. Conclusion Week Three invites us to experience the Last Supper, to place ourselves there in the upper room, to look around at the faces, to listen to the words, to pon-der them in our hearts as we watch the immense tender-ness of the Lord with those he loved even to the end, whose hearts he was tutoring even on the night before he died. And we have stayed with him, watched and prayed with him, and accompanied him as he gave up his life. Then we have simply dwelt in silence. That same intimacy and presence to one another marks Week Four, a time of tenderness and affection with the risen Jesus who shares his love and his joy with us but does not let us cling to him. He sends us as apostles, empowered by his Spirit, to continue his sav-ing presence, to be his heart on earth. And day by day, week by week, the Eucharist con-tinues to draw us into these mysteries. The heart of the Eucharist is Jesus Christ. The heart of it is the cel-ebration of Jesus' life, death, and rising every time we gather—and the merging of our daily living and dying with his and with one another—for the life of the world. 71.1 2012 27 The heart of it is joining ourselves to Christ, the perfect sacrifice, to the praise and glory of God. The heart of it is begging that the Spirit will transform each one of us just as really as the bread and wine so that we become more and more Christ's Body in truth, not just in name. The heart of it is learning over and over again to say "Amen" to all of these realities and—at least some-times— actually meaning it. Meaning "Amen," meaning yes I will try to live, in deed, in the coming days, what we have just enacted in word and ritual action. I conclude with a favorite reflection of mine on the word "Amen." Be careful of simple words said often. "Amen" makes demands like an unrelenting schoolmaster: fierce attention to all that is said; no apathy, no preoccupation, no prejudice permitted. "Amen": We are present. We are open. We hearken. We understand. Here we are; we are listening to your word. "Amen" makes demands like a signature on a dotted line: sober bond to all that goes before; no hesitation, no half-heartedness, no mental reservation allowed. "Amen": We support. We approve. We are of one mind. We promise. May this come to pass. So be it. Be careful when you say "Amen."10 Notes 1 Cf. Sunday Celebration of the Word and Hours (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1995). This book contains the Sunday collects prepared by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy for the Missal of 1998, since withdrawn. Review for Religious Hughes • Were Not Our Hearts Burning within Us? 28 2 David L. Fleming sj, "The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises: Understanding a Dynamic," in Notes on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: Review for Religious, 1981) 11. 3 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 2003, §29, paraphrase. 4 GIRM, § 65. 5 GIRM, § 9. 6 GIRM, § 79. 7 David L. Fleming sj, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978) 3. 8 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945) 744-5, passim. 9 Ibid. paraphrase. 10 Barbara Schmich Searle, "Ritual Dialogue," Assembly 7:3, February, 1981. Obedience You have had my yes for years– and I have had yours since the sun, the seashells, and the storms at sea. But now, ah . . . you and I are more than yes. As time moves with, within, and around, this yes of ours takes on wings, takes on colors I never imagined, challenges that strengthen and soften me, glory that stills me, stirs me, extends and opens me. It becomes a murmur of love that we share. Love that frees me and compels me to choose you again and yet again . . . that I might respond as I wish to respond . . . openly, knowingly, even a little mysteriously . . . as the bush in the desert responded to flame. Kimberly M. King rscj 71.1 2012 ronald mercier 29 Without the Drama: The Transition from Third to Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises S travinsky's "Rite of Spring" caused a furor when it was first performed in 1913, but the more I listen to it, the more I think it expresses something important, and not only from a musical point of view. At the tail end of the piece, the "Sacrifice," Stravinsky tries to cap-ture the human spirit in its "pagan"—pure—form. You might want to find a recording of it and play it before you read further. Cacophony—there's no other way to describe it! Bad sound. It assaults the senses. It builds to a crescendo and with the violence of spirit that leads to the sacrifice of a human, a woman who dances herself to death for the Ronald Mercier sj is associate professor of theology at Saint Louis University and rector of the community where Jesuit scholastics pursue the study of philosophy and theology. This article was originally given as a keynote presentation at Ignatian Spirituality Conference V on July 22, 2011, in St. Louis, Missouri. Comments can be addressed to him at Bellarmine House of Studies; 3737 Westminster Place; St. Louis, Missouri 63108. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 30 sake of the community. It is violence that can kill and wound and send to hell, to use Ignatius's words from the Incarnation meditation. In the ballet that goes with the music, there is a frenetic dance that is almost a form of madness. No wonder people were so challenged by the music; this is not about some nice ethereal enjoyment, but is a revelation of what can shape the human heart and actions. This revelation opens to our fears but not to our hopes. Curiously, the music ends with a bang, a loud discor-dant chord that leaves us waiting for something more. We would like some kind of resolution at this point, but we are left with utter silence after that dramatic end. We wait, but the music just ends. Or does it? For me, this piece leads to a reflection on the transition from the Third to the Fourth Week in the Ignatian Exercises, a movement out of a murderous drama into a disorienting grand silence within which the Fourth Week dawns. I would like to invite you to sit with Ignatius in what we would name "Holy Saturday," a place he sketches as the space for contemplation within which we experience Resurrection. My thesis is simple: Without the grand silence of Holy Saturday, the "seventh day" for Ignatius, we do not experience the joy and freedom of the Fourth Week. Waiting in the transition—a transition into, not out of, emptiness—allows for creation of the space into which the Risen Lord comes, if we let the quiet ripen. The music of Stravinsky captures the movement of the Third Week, a drama of human making. We walk with Jesus as he experiences being sacrificed for "the good of the people." Curiously, Ignatius invites us to experience the Passion, but he does not describe the gore that would have been standard fare in the spiritual-ity of his time. No doubt he assumed that people knew 71.1 2012 31 the specifics of the passion, crucifixion, and death from the religious imagination of his time. I wonder, though, whether that is all. It strikes me that we are invited into two spaces: the fullness of the world upon which the Trinity gazes in the Incarnation mediation, but also the reality of the Trinity's desire effected through what happens in these moments. In this transition, we fulfill the movement of the Incarnation meditation. Ignatius certainly invites us to "consider what Christ our Lord suffers in His human nature . . . [and] to strive to grieve, be sad, and weep" (SpEx §195). We "must be with the Lord in his suffering, [and] follow him unto his death," lest we be "simply spectators at a Passion event which may be very touching, but which in no way dis-turbs the egotism of our lives,"1 as Gilles Cusson so nicely puts it. We experience with Jesus what human egotism can do, the dramatic clash that seeks sacrifice to maintain some order. Ignatius's contemplation of the Passion has little to do with Mel Gibson's hero worship; we con-template one who embraces utter powerlessness, not "muscular humanity." Yet, Cusson also says that we need to attend to Ignatius's Fifth Point, "how the divinity hides itself; . . . it could destroy . . . but does not do so" (SpEx §196). What is God about in Christ? What goes beyond the "work of our hands," the murderous sacrifice, and actu-ally effects the will of the Trinity? Is God violent? Is We contemplate one who embraces utter powerlessness, not "muscular humanity." Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 32 this the "divinity [who] hides"? Or is the violent god our god? What occurs when our dramatic violence ends? For me, personally and as a director, this question is never academic. The temptation to remain specta-tors or to wonder at the horrors of the Passion—and so to remain distant from it and from the Resurrection— always presents itself as a path of light, as "really feeling bad" for Jesus, and perhaps knowing real (even mur-derous) anger toward those who create perverse tor-tures for him. The experi-ence of the Fourth Week then somehow appears too remote, not surprisingly, and not only because by that time we know the exhaustion of having given ourselves so radically to prayer. But if we remain spectators of the Passion, what also becomes remote is the real joy of the Fourth Week, a joy so different from the transient happiness that we may whip up but never suffices for the long-term journey. And the Fourth Week is really for the long haul, not transient at all. What alternative remains? Consider for a moment where Ignatius leads us. As he did in the contemplation on the Incarnation, he places us with the work of the Trinity and with Mary. This gives us our transition point and deserves some pause. Notice how he frames our prayer at the end of the week, the time of transition: One should consider as frequently as possible . . . that the most Sacred Body of Christ our Lord remained If we remain spectators of the Passion, what also becomes remote is the real joy of the Fourth Week. 71.1 2012 33 separated from the soul, and the place and manner of his burial. Let [the exercitant] consider, likewise, the desolation of our Lady, her great sorrow and weariness, and also that of the disciples (SpEx §208, Seventh Day). Two dimensions frame the time after the death of Jesus on the cross, two movements that invite us into a depth within which resurrection happens: the experi-ence of death in Jesus and its impact on those (like us) who love him. Resurrection, Cusson rightly suggests, never becomes a topic for consideration, but encounters us in and through the one whom we love and who has conquered death, a "confirmation from above surpass-ing all human hope."2 Let us stay, though, for a moment with the two aspects Ignatius gives us not so much as a conclusion to the Third Week as the door through which the Third Week becomes, or opens to, the Fourth Week. We have in the Christian tradition a powerful sense that the Paschal Mystery—the death, coming to the dead, and Resurrection of the Lord—never constitutes the past, something complete and over, but, rather, remains the context of our lives, the place of our ministries, the space within which joy dawns for us and for all who know the Risen Lord. Two things, then, shape this contemplation, which really becomes the shape of "the seventh day," a con-templation of the Passion as a whole. First, Ignatius begs us to consider the fullness of the death of Jesus because, without an experience of that fullness, we really cannot complete the journey of the Third Week (and of the Incarnation) or comprehend the fullness of the ways in which Jesus' ministry touches and shapes our lives and our world. We need to ponder, prayerfully, what it Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 34 means for Jesus to "remain separated from his soul," to know death, not just to "be killed." Let me suggest that this consideration never rep-resents some thought exercise or parlor game. In our culture we often trivialize death and, in fact, avoid the topic completely or paper it over with euphemisms. We do not say that people die, but that they "pass away." We make the reality so antiseptic, so unreal, that we actually generate a fear of death that drives us even to try to con-trol it, like some unruly passion. Humans have always feared death, as the social critic Ernst Becker makes clear. In our modern North American culture, though, we have created a kind of nightmare; we rarely encoun-ter the reality of someone's dying. Even worse, people have to die not freely as Jesus did, but alone, caught up in our medicalized model. Alternatively, we can make death into a mere video game: how many can we kill? By contrast, Ignatius invites us to a thoroughgoing realism. In Jesus' death, we contemplate the fullness of his human death, freely embraced for us, the fullness of the trajectory of the Incarnation. We are invited to consider especially his embrace of abandonment. Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great Swiss theologian and pro-foundly Ignatian thinker, asks us to ponder just what this means, as a path toward hope: The Redeemer showed himself therefore as the only one who, going beyond the general experience of death, was able to measure the depths of that abyss.3 Think about that with me for just a moment. For Balthasar (and here he places himself in the whole strand of Christian mystics) we desire to shield our-selves from death. We may have "the general experience of death," but we seek to hold it at bay, often at great cost. No one wants to die, of course, and from time 71.1 2012 35 immemorial we have created lovely myths of "afterlife" as ways of avoiding the fullness of what we would expe-rience in death, so that we do not really die. Instead, Ignatius invites us, in the wake of the cry by which Jesus freely gives up his spirit and accepts death, to consider what it would mean for someone freely and fully to enter into the realm of Hades, of Sheol, in which, as the psalmist says, "no one can praise You." In Jesus, God goes fully to claim the reality of human death and dying as God's very own. Balthasar uses the image of the abyss—a wonderful image—for this. We need to ponder, not morosely but in faith, the full tra-jectory of the Third Week. Ignatius places us there and asks that during the Seventh Day—however long it might be—we continually call that reality to mind and keep it before us. He invites us there in place of repetitions or Applications of the Senses, because in pon-dering the fullness of the death of Jesus, in letting it "ripen to fullness," as it were, we begin to grasp the fullness of what it means that he dies for our sake, that he goes where we would not go. If, as David Fleming, John Futrell, John English and many others suggest, the Last Supper sets the tone for the Third Week, here we know what it means to "be broken and poured out," even to the fullness of death itself. We have been praying for the grace of freedom throughout the Exercises, and in a sense here we encounter freedom in its fullness. Balthasar notes what freedom—in its purest form, free from all stain of sin—would mean: "And precisely in that did his mortal anguish and God-abandonment differ radically from the habitual anxiety of the sinner." 4 Jesus freely—and with-out defense—walks the way ahead of us, embraces our path. Jesus claims the fullness of death as a space within Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 36 which to meet us—thus, the implication of the seventh-day exercise. We can—and do—often hurry by the real-ity, or simply marvel at the wreck of a corpse in the Pietà. Ignatius, according to Balthasar, invites us to let death be full, that we might know freedom with Christ, freedom for our mission ultimately, freedom to love "even to death itself." No masochism or delectatio morosa marks this moment, but only a profound invitation to explore what we fear with the One who has gone the way before us. For Ignatius, that remains key. If Resurrection cannot grasp the fullness of what death means, if it can-not meet us in the anxiety that would hold us bound and create the kind of craziness that marks our death-obsessed culture, it remains but a "nice idea," easily dis-pensed with, perhaps. For Balthasar, Jesus delves into death as abandonment, freely, without losing hope, but relying completely on the God who alone can overcome death. Imagine "separation of soul and body" in its totality, without the experience of Resurrection that often shields us. Jesus embraces that. This descent remains but part of the story for Ignatius, since he invites us to place ourselves with Mary and the disciples in their desolation—an impor-tant context. The imagery of that placement reveals a deliberate quality in two ways: it prepares us to encoun-ter the Risen Lord and accept our mission. In one sense, of course, we explore the same space as previously, explore what it means for Jesus to have died—but now from the perspectives of those left behind. Again, Ignatius invites us to contemplate with Mary—and to some extent with Mary Magdalene—to share space and time with women who also embrace the "empty space" without defense, freely. The sinlessness of Mary parallels Jesus' own condition, and invites us 71.1 2012 37 to imagine how she, whose heart knew only openness, would experience the "separation" of soul from body. In her once again, Ignatius asks us to confront death as death, in its fullness in Jesus, in one whom we pas-sionately love. While I will focus on the encounter with Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a basic form of the Resurrection con-templations, I do not mean to suggest that one must force people to engage that path. Eventually the pattern of the Exercises does lead us there, but as John English suggests in Spiritual Freedom,5 a directee may find it difficult to enter into the purity of Mary's openness to encounter the Risen Lord; a person may find more fruitful prayer with the grief of Mary Magdalene, or the guilt of Simon Peter, or others. Still, the fullness of that openness to the Risen Lord brings us back to the full "yes" of Mary, mother of Jesus, as a paradigm of freedom. We have probably all known a parent who has lost a beloved child. As I write this I cannot help but think of the parents of a young Chinese student who failed at university and chose suicide in the face of despair. I cannot begin to imagine the grief of soul such a moment would entail for those parents; nor can I imagine the added burden of feeling guilt for having laid on a child expectations that he could not fulfill. That empty space of a dead child shocks us; "it should not happen," we say quite rightly. Parents should die before their children do. The empty space becomes almost too much to take in, though with Michelangelo's Pietà we catch a glimpse of how a face might appear when gazing on that emptiness. Yet, for the director at this point in the Exercises, especially in the face of what happens in the transition, an important distinction remains. Monty Williams, in a work in progress that he shared with me, advises that we Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 38 note two different paths as one encounters fear, notably the fear of death. There are two ways of being present to our fears. We could look at them and wonder how we can be so stupid, and then make the plans . . . to ensure those mistakes never happen again. . . . The other way . . . is to experience the amazement. . . . The more we ponder . . . it, the more we are filled with a sense of wonder—which gives no answer. That wonder, that sense of amazement, is our first awareness of the presence of God in the space we have created by looking at our fears. As Williams frames it, two choices remain. We can panic and move into flight or analysis or simply an excess of emotions to make us feel better. Or we can be attentive, in the face of such fears, to an empty space without answers—a much harder place to be. When Ignatius invites us to contemplate, to recall Mary, all of those spaces we have known in the Second Week come to mind. Mary remains for us always the one who attends, who does not withdraw, even in the face of the horror of the slaughter of the innocents, but who pon-ders. The path of our entry into the Seventh Day parallels Mary's path, and a director looks at whether the exerci-tant gets caught up in his or her own pain or can ponder the empty space with Mary—that dreadful emptiness the church hints at in stripped altars and empty tabernacles after the Good Friday service. With Mary, we hear the invitation in freedom to know our beloved Jesus as dead. A terrible space, but not a maudlin one! We hear the call to compassion, to attentiveness, to let an empty space open. In essence, Michelangelo's Pietà invites us not to wild grieving but to face the reality of Mary holding her dead son. Attentiveness is a state of waiting, but for what? 71.1 2012 39 I can't help but remember Mary Oliver's powerful poem "The Uses of Sorrow," which captures so much of what I think Ignatius presents to us in constructing a place for prayer: (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.6 The poem admirably catches the difference between panic/analysis and attentiveness as ways of responding to the human—and here divine—reality of death. For us the path takes time; Ignatius invites us on the seventh day to recall this to mind again and again, but the full process may well be the journey of our lives and our dying. However, contemplating the loss of Jesus is but one dimension. With Mary—and with the disciples—we are invited to ponder the world in which, as Cleopas said, "we had hoped" but which is now a space of desolation. We face the fullness of what Ignatius means when he invites the retreatant to see and consider the Three Divine Persons. . . . They look down upon the whole surface of the earth and behold all nations in great blindness, going down to death and descending into hell (SpEx §106). The reality of human violence is seen in its full-ness in this moment, especially when, with the disciples, we see that violence is also part of their lives—in their abandoning their Master. With Mary and them, the full brutality of violence in the name of God, yet murder-ous of God, comes home to us in all its savagery. No doubt they had seen or heard of crucifixion before. This Roman "tool" helped maintain fear in the populace by destroying its memory of the one killed, lest anyone else Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 40 attempt to do what the crucified one had done. We can all rationalize human cruelty to suit our purposes. Here, though, their Master, Lord, Mentor, the one who healed, raised from the dead, preached Good News—the one they loved—becomes the victim of such cruelty. With him, the hope he had proclaimed also becomes a victim, exactly as the Romans would have desired. Hope is too dangerous a drug to a people fac-ing death. Is the reality of what Cleopas proclaimed— that "we had hoped"—also dead? With Mary and the disciples, we gaze on the empty space in the wake of the cross, and we know the dying of our hopes, of the ways in which all of our plans and expectations go to the cross with Jesus. Our history, our world, hangs in that balance. As director, how often have I sat with people who, in the wake of Jesus' death and burial, have to encounter again their own history of violence—received, experienced in others, commit-ted! The call to attentiveness in this space where our wounded history is made so evident places the past and the future in the balance. If in the first movement with Jesus and Mary we know the fear before death, in this second movement perhaps we face the fear of living in a world mediated by violence, a violence that we can usually hold at bay or ignore by switching the televi-sion channel. Yet, in this transition place, we face the brokenness and "poured-out" quality of our world, and we hear the call not to stronger forms of violence or retribution but to attend in that quiet space and know the fullness of a hope that might have died too. So many people live in this space. It is not theoretical. So, for me, the power of Stravinsky's piece, build-ing to that awful crescendo, that cacophony of death, followed by nothing, silence, lies in wanting some reso- 71.1 2012 41 lution other than the sacrifice. He captures well what those first disciples must have been going through on their "seventh day," after the terrible dramatics of human violence, cruelty, power; now Mary and the others know an empty silence made all the more desolate by what had come before. Building better plans, creating monu-ments, assigning guilt or blame—all of these would have tempered the grief. Instead, we hear the invitation to silence, to attentiveness. It may be that real forgiveness, hope, and resurrection can occur only in such silence. Ignatius places us before those realities that so easily move us away from attentiveness—fear of death and fear of violence or rejection—as a space within which some-thing very different—freedom—can arise. This experience could well represent a kind of "downer" for us, but need it be so? The sense of the deaths we experience—whether the physical death that Jesus freely embraces or the death of our illusions about the world and our patterns of dealing with it—create, as it were, a wasteland, an emptiness before which we stand and pray with Mary and the disciples. Its all-encompassing nature seeks to enlarge our freedom by placing before us our fears. Facing the wasteland yields fruit not in darkness or desolation (though we do indeed pass through these) but, as Antonio Valentino noted in a Directory written in the first generation after the death of Ignatius, aims at perfection in prayer and work, holding always God before one's eyes with gentleness and consistency, and remembering God whenever we think, speak or act.7 If we are moving toward the Contemplatio here as a mode of engaging the world, then this transition that "clears the ground" can yield an abundant harvest. We are left waiting for God's action—not ours. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 42 I do not use the imagery of "clearing ground" acci-dentally. I find myself touched by the way in which one deals with one sweep of contemplation, which clears, seeds, and bears fruit in ever deeper ways. Think through with me the extraordinary introduction to the Fourth Week that piggybacks on what we have seen. As Cusson mentions, when Ignatius presents the medita-tion on the first resurrection appearance (SpEx §299), he offers a first point, nothing else; the simplicity of the perspective shines through: "He appeared to the Virgin Mary." Ignatius sees no need for second or third points, as are given in all the other meditations. It is a unique tableau.8 Ignatius does complete the sweep from where we have been: His soul, likewise united with the divinity, descended into hell. There he sets free the souls of the just, then comes to the sepulcher, and rising appears in body and soul to His Blessed Mother (SpEx §219). We have before us the same matter as in the con-templations on "the seventh day" of the Third Week; the setting does not change. What happens arises from within where we find ourselves as we attend to the empty space at the end of the Third Week. Our entry into the Fourth Week comes not because we will our-selves to joy. Rather, in the space that death and vio-lence have laid waste, Resurrection dawns like light and, with it, love, joy, and hope as the fruit. We do not change spaces for Resurrection, for the Fourth Week; rather, we extend the Third until it bears fruit. As director, I cannot overemphasize how hard it is to keep people focused at this point; exhaustion has set in. The Fourth Week regularly gets short shrift, as does Resurrection in so much of Christian life; yet, as I pray with the transition from Third to Fourth Week, I 71.1 2012 43 realize how crucial that transition point is to our ability to be in and to serve a broken but risen world. Ignatius leads us to the "hell" which Jesus has entered freely and fully, with all those who have gone before—and with us eventually—and then moves to Mary, in her home and oratory, exactly the order that repeats the end of the Third Week. I would like to move in three points—Jesus' apparition to Mary, Jesus' rising "from the dead," and the gift of joy to a world that killed and can kill still. They are related, but quite distinct too. Think of how redolent Jesus' apparition is for Mary. Ignatius does not describe it much, except for a clear allusion. He asks us to "see the arrangement of . . . the place or house of our Lady. I will note its different parts, and also her room, her ora-tory, etc." (SpEx §220). In §103 we were asked "especially to see the house and room of our Lady." The parallelism is almost exact, and, of course, David Fleming in Like the Lightning alludes to the Annunciation contemplation.9 This is not pious drivel, as some are tempted to say; this really is a new Annunciation, but one that asks Mary—and us—to go on mission for the Trinity with the Risen Lord. After all the Sturm und Drang of the Third Week— the drama of our human violence and blood-lust, even the drama of the Last Supper that begins the Third This really is a new Annunciation, but one that asks Mary—and us— to go on mission for the Trinity with the Risen Lord. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 44 Week—this dawn of the Fourth Week, of a new world, is so undra-matic. Mel Gibson would have a difficult time with it. We would be tempted to make it dramatic, and certainly the Miraflores altar-piece does so, with Jesus showing his wounds and with Mary por-trayed as quite the medieval lady. Ignatius's description, though, is so different. Certainly, as he notes in the fourth point, the "divinity here manifests itself so miraculously," though in the fifth point the man-ifestation is as the consoler, the one who brings joy in the glory of the Resurrection. What are we to make of the apparition as "con-soler"? By the way, Ignatius gives only this contemplation in the Fourth Week, though we find a number of other texts arranged from §299-312 (in the section on the Mysteries of Christ's Life), with an ever wider circle of people let in on the Resurrection. In the Fourth Week itself, one contemplation alone pre-cedes the Contemplatio, again with Mary. If we take a step back, Mary represents the free per-son who has tasted the fullness of the passage of Jesus, both into death and at the hands of a broken, murderous world. If the darkness that John evokes in the Gospel stands as a hallmark of the Passion, Mary knows that darkness fully. As we wait with her, we hear the invita-tion to know that darkness, to let our own hopes and dreams die, to recognize the fullness of what death, as God-forsakenness, means. Mary roots us in a barren 71.1 2012 45 landscape without familiar landmarks. Stark—not dra-matic. Quiet. As long as we cling to our own artifacts, the land remains cluttered, and we are unable to receive. In essence, Mary descends into a kind of hell as well, the fullness of the First Week's hell, which is not of her doing, but which is the fruit of the world we have created. The more I ponder and pray with these texts, however, the more they strike me as a new "Incarnation," but with a different order and intent. In the Incarnation medita-tion, we move from the work of God, who ponders the broken, murderous world and chooses to enter it, invit-ing Mary—and us—to share in the work of the Trinity here now. With Mary we have been placed in a God-less world, the fullness of hell. We gaze, we ponder with her, in the freedom of those who have elected to follow Jesus. Mary—and we—know what God's heart would have felt in the acute desire to set people free. We now move from the order of "this world" to an encounter with the Trinity as we know the fullness of the desire of the Trinity in the Incarnation prayer, now effected by the Risen Lord. Again, I want to stress the point: Ignatius places us with Mary as the archetype of the person of the Exercises, the free person. While in later contempla-tions we are indeed shown the rest of the Gospel story, here he asks us to share in the fullness of what freedom The Apparition to Mary Reverses the order of the Incarnation meditation From the Trinity To a Broken World To revelation of the Trinity From a Broken World Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 46 means, freedom at the intersection of our engagement with a broken world, and we wonder at the dawning of a world shot through with Resurrection. The transition of this time represents not a movement from Third Week to Fourth Week, as if we could leave the former behind as just a bad memory; rather, the transition is the on-going space of discipleship. We, like Mary, remain in a broken world, but the transition into the Fourth Week recasts the meaning of the world in a dramatic way, so that we can accept the call to serve a world still broken. Contemplation constitutes the basic hallmark of this freedom; the encounter with the Risen Lord that Ignatius sketches out occurs as an offer of new life in the midst of the contemplation of the fullness of death and sinful violence. These two elements of death and life form a diptych, as it were, for our lives and our prayer. We encounter here not merely the Risen Lord but, with Mary, the pattern of what we shall know as we await that ultimate coming of Christ to the world, and we receive a mission to act upon hope. Into that space, the risen Lord comes, not just as resuscitated—"I'm back"—but as a living proclamation of a new world, God's plan for the ultimate healing and completion of the world God so loves. From the broken world, we encounter the divinity made flesh again for us, but now glorified and risen. If Christ performs "the office of the consoler," as Ignatius says, this consolation does not simply cause a "feeling good" or even a happi-ness, but a revelation of a new world and the empower-ing invitation to dwell in that new world and extend it through time and space. That power is "joy." Joy in this case is not an affect, or even a spiri-tual movement, for Ignatius. In fact, he distinguishes between the two realities: 71.1 2012 47 as soon as I awake [I will] place before my mind the contemplation I am to enter upon, and then . . . strive to feel joy and happiness at the great joy and happi-ness of Christ our Lord (SpEx §229). Happiness we know as an affective movement, a passing reality; we feel happy when we experience cer-tain realities. We can know happiness but still be alien to joy, since happiness comes and goes, depending on the experience we feel. Happiness has an object, and in this case Ignatius does want us to evoke within ourselves the experience of happiness; the encounter becomes the cause of our happiness. Joy, however, pertains to a very different reality. Joy—and this is Christ's joy, of course, a gift of the Holy Spirit—intends not a movement of the heart, a feel-ing, but a disposition, a way of being; it is the hallmark of those who have encountered the risen Lord in the midst of surrounding darkness. Joy makes possible the freedom to go on mission into the Fourth Week—our ordinary time. That light dawns in the Resurrection, not apart from but in the midst of the darkness which Mary—and we—have known. G.K. Chesterton's lament about "joyless Christians" captures something very important here: Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's [sic] ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.10 The joy we experience in the presence of the Risen Lord does not suddenly wipe away the reality of the grief we know at the experience of the brokenness of Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 48 the world and its impact on the vulnerable; rather, such joy places it all in context, allows us to see the world as it is, in the context of God's proclamation of new life and hope in Christ. The way Ignatius ends the Exercises with Mary and this twofold contempla-tion seems to suggest that this joy becomes our "new normal," what God intended in creation and effects through the Incarnation, ministry, and Passover of the Word. We often emphasize the continuity/discontinuity of the Risen Jesus; he is like but different. But is it not really also the world which is continuous/discontinu-ous? In a great line from "Lion in Winter," Eleanor of Aquitaine says, "In a world where carpenters get resur-rected, everything is possible." Exactly—and such is our hope and the cause of our joy. As contemplatives moved to action, we in the Ignatian tradition live in the intersection of the two parts of the diptych, of Holy Saturday and Easter, but with joy as the hinge, something into which we grow. The encounter with the Risen Lord in the midst of a broken world becomes the reality of our lives and a point of conversion into this "new world." In that respect, we are unlike Mary but more like the others who encounter the Lord in a gradual way, but who nevertheless grow into a joyful engagement with the world. However, we can-not separate this encounter from the work which serves life and just peace; we grow in joy and hope only if we place ourselves at the service of justice, as it were, as the thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus suggested. Yet, we are no longer simply disciples, but apostles, those sent as the Word was sent into the world, but now into a world transformed. This "new normal," a joyful realm, disorients in many ways. Please excuse me as I take a bit of a detour 71.1 2012 49 into a Byzantine theme, that of the "Harrowing of Hell," an ancient icon in the East that depicts a scene sketched by a homily from the second century. I ask you to pon-der it with me for just a few moments. We have here one particu-lar rendition of the icon, but a powerful one with three signifi-cant movements. One of these captures the Contemplation for the Fourth Week as given by Ignatius, namely that the Risen Lord sets free the souls of the just held bound before Christ's Resurrection. For Balthasar and oth-ers, this moment of encounter with the Risen Lord has become the deciding moment for them, the one in which heaven—and the second death—actually open. In that sense, we have a key moment of election again, a confirmation to "fol-low" but now in a different way—to eternal life for them. Yet this Risen Lord calls us to proclaim eternal life and freedom in this world. Second, and this evokes the reality of La Storta, the risen Christ carries the cross, but as a tool through which to break open the gates of Sheol. This Christ on mission invites us to the imagery of the Third Week, but now as a call to freedom, not to death or destruction. The order of the world is profoundly inverted here, and violence gives way to freedom. No wonder the thirty- Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 50 second General Congregation could so freely embrace being "under the banner of the cross" as a mode of identification. This rising Christ changes all the imag-ery of violence, death, and hopelessness we would have taken for granted. One finds joy even in the cross—how odd—but, again, joy is not simply a moment of happi-ness but a consistent mode of being. Again, we cannot separate encounter with the Risen Lord from presence to those who know Holy Saturday and its pain or loss of hope. Last, though, for the East—and for Ignatius, I think—the implications of this little icon and of the work of Christ show free-dom in an even bolder way. A second-century homily proclaims, "I did not create you to be held captive," as does the Office of Readings every Holy Saturday. Do we ponder, though, the implications of that little line, the heart of the link between the Third and Fourth Weeks? The dynamic of the Third Week—from the human point of view—reveals the inevitability of betrayal, duplicity, shame, violence, grief, blood-lust. Not an appetizing menu, to be sure. Ignatius would ask us to contemplate the recreated world in which such patterns have lost their power forever, not just for a moment; we know their power, but as something that has passed away, both from the world and from our lives. If a counterpart to the contemplation on the Incarnation in the Second Week is the Two Standards meditation, perhaps this "diptych" does something Joy is not simply a moment of happiness but a consistent mode of being. 71.1 2012 51 similar. In the Two Standards meditation, Satan calls his demons and "goads them on to lay snares for people and bind them with chains" (SpEx §142). Christ bids, attracts, graces, to a very different world, of poverty, bearing insult and humiliation freely as a means of free-dom (SpEx §146). We have seen that first standard lived to its full-est in the Third Week; now we see Christ who in his revealed divinity, as the fullness of the revelation of the Trinity, continues to serve, to free, to attract, to bid, but now as having conquered all freely and lovingly. Do we not know here the prospect of a whole new world unbound or in the process of unbinding, a process to which Christ missions us? Does Christ not call us in this contemplation with Mary to gather companions in the work of dwelling in this contemplative yet active space? The full import of what has been "the normal" becomes ever clearer to us, even as we enter more fully into com-panionship with Mary in this contemplation. The chal-lenge to us, however, never degenerates into hopeless self-scrutinizing or, even worse, scrupulosity. We do not get forced back into contemplating our sins, as too often happens when people gaze upon the cross, or into the violent guilt or shame of the Third Week. Rather, aware of the Third Week and its full impact on the one whom we love and on the world Christ so loves, we hear the invitation to explore contemplatively a dawning world, one which opens, I think, to the Contemplatio and to our role in extending Christ's joy. James Alison, the British Catholic theologian, has written movingly on this, inviting us to consider how our cultures shape our imaginations through the pat-terns of interaction—rivalistic patterns—which for us constitute "the normal." In Christ, and I think in Mary Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 52 and the disciples, God gives us a dramatically differ-ent pattern of interaction, one that creates relationships touched by joy, not by violence or rivalry or fear. In the complementary contemplations we are given through-out the Fourth Week, we encounter many such persons, wounded in and by the Third Week, even agents of the violence of the Third Week, with whom and in whom we now encounter the pattern of joy and hope. These reflections lead me to ponder the meaning of the "Rules for Thinking with the Church" (SpEx §352-370). They are usually given as a form of Counter- Reformation ecclesiology, a guide on how to engage the debates of the mid-sixteenth century. The text contains all kinds of very context-specific allusions—echoes of debates on predestination, sacraments, authority, and the like that helped tear the church apart. We realize that the inability to attend to what the other was saying represented but one more kind of violence in an already violent age. Ignatius, of course, never had shied away from a fight. One has only to remember how ready he was to dispatch the Moor who had shown insufficient defer-ence to the Blessed Virgin, his Lady. He certainly would not be the first choice as a poster boy for pacifism. Yet, think with me for a moment about the Rules, written at a time when everyone wanted a good fight and looked, all too often, for occasions to pick a fight or score a point. Ignatius's presentation strikes me as curious in that regard, strangely pacific, to use Alison's invitation to a radically different imagination, a con-version of imagination, where our normal expectation is no longer violence or the violent god but rather of a world ordered to and by peaceful relationships. We find here none of the grand drama of the instructions to 71.1 2012 53 the Cardinal Legates to the various Diets and Councils. Instead, we find a man desperate to preserve the unity of the community, to avoid the kinds of clashes that mark his age. Perhaps when we look at the Rules for Thinking with the Church, the metaphor that I have been using— of having had the earth scorched around us and entering a new world—could be helpful. We tend to bring with us the imagery and imagination to which we have grown accustomed. We bring the patterns of guilt or shame or blame or grief or violence that we have learned only too well from the world we have known as normal. Yet, the totality of the presence of the Risen Christ to Mary— and to us—challenges any return to those spaces to which we have grown accustomed. Certainly, if Christ has "harrowed hell" and broken dominant patterns, we are in need of "a way," of his way. Might not the Rules for Thinking with the Church be Ignatius's way of inviting us to turn from the slavish obedience so alien to the freedom of the Fourth Week and to become attentive to the community of people elected in grace, graced by Risen Life, empowered by saints, who could sketch out for us and for our imagi-nation a path with and to Christ? We stand in need of a community of faith, the Church militant in the original Spanish text, which can model for us the new life revealed in and through the Risen Lord. While the Rules invite a kind of docility in seeking a way of peace and renewal of imagination found in the community of the faithful, they do not require checking one's mind at the door. At times we can, like Ignatius, grieve because of a church that shows the marks of the violence and domination of those who killed the Lord. Nevertheless we wait in the hope of encountering Christ in this com- Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 54 munity, in the Holy Saturday-Easter Sunday diptych, still confident that we will contemplatively learn a way forward, not in spite of but in the pain. In a similar way, Ignatius needed the community to foster conversion out of scruples and into Christ. Still, a real encounter as is experienced in the tran-sition opens a path to community. Rooted in a new experience of the world, it is a community of peace, joy, hope, creativity. This, of course, has none of the "grand drama" of the Third Week that would thrill Mel Gibson, but it has the quiet quality of a son meeting a grieving mother who has been wounded by violence but, in joy, is experiencing the possibility of new life, the opening of heart and imagination. Quiet, not dramatic in the ways we are used to, but nonetheless a powerful and creative stance. The difference between the drama at the end of the Third Week and the quiet dawn of the Fourth invites us to know in its fullness what the Two Standards means and what Christ offers: not a crusade of our own, but an allowing of new possibilities to dawn in our age. We have seen such dawns, and their ecclesial power touches deeply. I think of Jean Vanier's L'Arche com-munity embracing the handicapped, those rejected by the world. There is the hospice movement, which rose from Dame Cecily Saunders's refusal to allow cancer patients for whom medical drama could do no more to simply go away and die. Those who serve refugees and bring a moment of tenderness and hope to fragile lives similarly stand at the confluence of this Paschal diptych. Easier, I suppose, would be to follow the temptation to take up arms and fight back or condemn, but we are invited to a very different path, not of moralism but of an embrace like that of Mary by her Son. 71.1 2012 55 We began this talk with Stravinsky's musical image of primal humanity and its lust for sacrifice, a lust that seeks "salvation for the people" in a woman condemned to die by dancing madly. The music crashes to a dra-matic conclusion followed by silence. I would like to end with a different dance, one described by Sydney Carter's words applied to the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts," here the "Lord of the Dance." Perhaps this could evoke something of the transition to a dance that is joyous, inclusive, expansive. May this be our prayer and our path. I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black— It's hard to dance with the devil on your back. They buried my body, and they thought I'd gone, But I am the Dance, and I still go on. Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he. They cut me down and I leapt up high; I am the life that'll never, never die; I'll live in you if you'll live in me— I am the Lord of the Dance, said he. Dance, then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be, And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he. Notes 1 Gilles Cusson, Biblical Theology and the Spiritual Exercises (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1988), p. 299. 2 Cusson, p. 303. Review for Religious Mercier • Without the Drama 56 3 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), p. 168. 4 von Balthasar, p 169. 5 John English, Spiritual Freedom: From an Expertience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual Direction (Guelph: Loyola House, 1973), p. 247. 6 Mary Oliver, Thirst (Boston: Beacon Press), p. 52. 7 Martin E. Palmer, S.J., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), p. 79. 8 Cusson, p. 303. 9 David L. Fleming, Like the Lightning: The Dynamics of the Ignatian Exercises (St Louis, Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004), p. 77. 10 Gilbert K. Chesterton, Othodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1959), p. 160. Questions for Reflection 1. Where have I embraced the emptiness of death and how has it enabled me to experience the joy of the Risen Lord? 2. Do you have any favorite music, artwork, or poetry that helps you enter into the sacred silence discussed in this article—or that helps you understand other moments in the Spiritual Exercises or in the Gospels? 71.1 2012 57 Dolor 5: At the Foot of the Cross Giving birth is contracting to sleep with death. It is an agreement to pass on everything that has been fed, fondled, fiercely treasured, looked forward to as one looks for the first hibiscus every spring. It is a signature and seal in pledge that one will leave someone something. It holds the possibility—tormenting as tarantula's tricks— that the loved child may pass first, cursedly, of illness, mishap, quick step in the wrong place, by fate or by murderous hatred heaped upon the great. The blood and wash of afterbirth foretell that every holding close lets loose. Small fingers, small toes enlarge as mothering bellies pull back to size and shape. Flowerings green up. They will, they must, brown down with wintering. And every footfall tells an end to every earthly good, each breath started with a slap, each name begun so well that slips into what's next. Pamela Smith sscm Review for Religious 58 peter j. schineller Finding or Seeking God in All Things: A Few Cautionary Notes "T o find God in all things" is a commonplace of Ignatian spirituality. Books and essays on Ignatius and Jesuit spirituality have highlighted the phrase as a hallmark of that spirituality. However, in an essay entitled "The Ignatian Charism and Contemporary Theology," the late Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote that "to the best of my knowledge the expression 'finding God in all things,' does not appear verbatim in the writ-ings of St. Ignatius."1 He admits that we do find "similar expressions" in the writings of Ignatius, and adds that "it seems evident that God can be found in all things." Dulles's observation makes me wonder and leads me to the unanswerable question of whether Ignatius deliberately avoided the phrase "find God in all things." Ignatius does write in many places that we should seek Peter J. Schineller sj is the archivist for the New York Province of the Society of Jesus. He resides at America House, 106 West 56th Street, New York, NY 10019. 59 71.1 2012 and serve God in all things; but, as we will see, except for one place, he does not use the phrase "find God in all things." Jerome Nadal, one of the early companions of Ignatius, clearly believed that Ignatius had the gift or charism to "feel the presence of God" and that this experience should likewise characterize Ignatius's fol-lowers. He writes: "I shall not fail to recall that grace which he had in all circumstances, while at work or in conversation, of feeling the presence of God and of tasting spiritual things, of being contemplative even in the midst of action: he used to interpret this as seeking God in all things."2 Note well that Nadal says Ignatius interpreted this experience as seeking God in all things. So too, Pedro Ribadeneira, also an early compan-ion of Ignatius, reports that "we frequently saw him taking the occasion of little things to lift his mind to God, who even in the smallest things is great. From seeing a plant, foliage, a leaf, a flower, any fruit, from the consideration of a little worm or any other animal, he raised himself above the heavens and penetrated the deepest thought."3 And, in the Autobiography of Ignatius, Luis da Camara, who wrote down the words of Ignatius, states: "At whatever time or hour he wanted to find God, he found Him."4 (To be precise, da Camara says that Ignatius could find God at all times, not that he found God in all things.) So we ask: might there be some wis-dom or insight—or caution—in the fact that Ignatius only once uses the phrase "find God in all things"? The Sole Text and Its Context In the long letter to Antonio Brandão subtitled "Instructions given by our father Ignatius, or at his Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 60 direction . . ." we read the advice given to scholastics: "the scholastics cannot engage in long meditations . . . they can practice seeking the presence of our Lord in all things; in their dealings with other people, their walking, seeing, tasting, hearing, understanding, and all our activities. For his Divine Majesty truly is in every-thing by his presence, power, and essence. This kind of meditation—finding God our Lord in everything—is easier than lifting ourselves up and laboriously making ourselves present to more abstracted divine realities."5 Again, a caution. This letter was not written by Ignatius, but at his direction by Juan de Polanco. Further, before he says "finding God in everything," he says the scholastics must "practice seeking the presence of our Lord in all things." Finding that presence is not auto-matic— and, perhaps, not so easy as we might think! In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, we read that Jesuit novices "should often be exhorted to seek God our Lord in all things . . . loving him in all crea-tures and all creatures in him" [§288]. Again, we see emphasis on the element of search. So too, in the Contemplation to Attain Love in the Spiritual Exercises, we read: "Here it will be to ask for an intimate knowledge of the many blessings received, that filled with gratitude for all, I may in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty" [SpEx §233]. Ignatius wants the retreatants to love and serve God in all; he does not write that they are to find God in all things. I wonder if the rea-son might be that Ignatius wishes to safeguard the Divine Majesty, the ever-greater God. Might it be that he fears that we will believe that we can capture or contain or iden-tify the ever-greater God in any one thing or in all things? In addition to frequently encouraging that we seek or serve God in all things, Ignatius does say that we 71.1 2012 61 can and must "find the will of God." Thus the Spiritual Exercises are a way of preparing the soul to rid itself of attachments and "of seeking and finding the will of God in the disposition of our life for the salvation of our soul" [SpEx §1]. And Ignatius most frequently ends his letters praying for the grace to "know God's most holy will and per-fectly fulfill it." Or, "may God in his goodness give us his abundant grace to know his most holy will and entirely to fulfill it." Even as Ignatius urges us to seek and find the will of God, he emphasizes the method and the search. He never claims that seeking and finding the will of God is easily done. It demands prayer, reflection, seeking, mortification, time, and effort. Today's Background, Context, Horizon In an obvious oversimplification, we might say that in our age we find two extreme tendencies: 1) the skepti-cal, secular way of underbelief and 2) the less critical way of overbelief. These correspond to two rival "isms" in our globalized world, spoken of by Fr. Adolfo Nicolás, supe-rior general of the Society of Jesus, in a major address on higher education: 1) an aggressive secularism and 2) a resurgence of various fundamentalisms.6 We might look at the cautious and critical way of Ignatius in light of these two tendencies. 1. The skeptical and secular viewpoint. Many today, including Christians, experience the distance, absence, Seeking and finding the will of God demands prayer, reflection, seeking, mortification, time, and effort. Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 62 or otherness of God. Rather than finding God in all things, they do not find God anywhere in their experi-ence. Or God is edged out by many possibilities, alter-natives, and options, by many "things" that are not God. They live in a world come of age that no longer "needs" God and are skeptical of those who find, describe, and talk of God so easily. They are critical of claims or interpretations that seem to make God into one thing among many. This objectification of God, they find, entails a loss of God's otherness and transcendence. 2. The less critical fundamentalism or overbelief. At the other extreme are the many believers who see God at work in every event. God is close and at hand. Some Christians seem to think they have a lock on God, clearly grasping and knowing the divine intentions and will for the world and for humankind. Statements to that effect indicate a temptation to reduce God to our size, to capture and lay hold of God. In a general way, two of today's thinkers reflect these two tendencies. The first is the critic George Steiner. In My Unwritten Books, a sequel to his book Real Presences, which points us to various signs of the transcendent, Steiner writes that he feels strongly the absence of God—a powerful experience of emptiness. "Awesome is the God who is not. . . . I strive to be with His sovereign absence."7 Steiner finds himself groping for and seeking God more than believing in and finding God. He adds that to be great, literature need not believe in or affirm God, but at least must grapple with the question of God, the search and debate over the reality of God. From an explicit Christian perspective, we might also listen to James Gustafson. In an article entitled "The Denial of God as God,"8 Gustafson writes that "the history of our religion is the history of human 71.1 2012 63 attempts to manage and manipulate the awesome power of God, who is finally beyond our capacities to know fully, to capture in human thoughts and deeds. . . . It is the history of efforts to control the times and places of his presence." Gustafson asserts that we overlook this awesome reality of God: "how we want a God we can manage, a God who comes when we beckon him, a God who permits us to say that he is here, but not there; a God who meets our needs on our terms; a God who supports our moral causes and destroys the forces we think are evil; a household God and a kitchen God." Then, drawing from the thought of Martin Luther, he challenges us not to try to manipulate or reduce God, but to "let God be God." Ignatius's Balance Surely Ignatius is not guilty of this reduction or denial of God. He had a strong sense of the immen-sity and majesty of God (he loved stargazing), as well as the closeness of God (recall his meditation on the Incarnation and birth of Jesus Christ in the Spiritual Exercises [§101-117]). But can this be said of all his followers? Might some be at times guilty of oversimpli-fying, reducing, identifying God with their own prefer-ences and thus not "letting God be God"? To put this more boldly; if we think it easy and pos-sible to find God in all things, might we end up by not finding the true God—the transcendent God—in or above any things? Emphasizing the finding of God in all things could become misleading and wrongheaded because it misses or misinterprets the special presence of God in some particular times, places, events, and things. Might this approach be similar to the positive emphasis on the generous and widespread presence and Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 64 offering of God's grace to all persons. If that view, good in itself, is pushed to the extreme, if all is grace, then we no longer distinguish between grace and non-grace, between grace and nature. Or, if all ground is seen as holy ground, then we might overlook or undercut the special presence or intervention, the special rev-elation of God. If we hold that everything i s sacred and noth-ing is profane or secular, then we could also hold the reverse, that nothing is sacred. Ultimately, it seems important and necessary that we maintain the distinction (not separation) of sacred and secular, of grace and nature, of the God who is in all things and yet above all things. Ignatius also writes of one other thing that Jesuits should seek in all things—namely, greater abnegation and continual mortification! "The better to arrive at this degree of perfection which is so precious in the spiritual life, [the] chief and most earnest endeavor [of the Jesuit candidate and those in formation] should be to seek in our Lord his greater abnegation and continual mortifica-tion in all things possible; and our endeavor should be to help him in those things to the extent that our Lord gives us his grace, for his greater praise and glory" [General Examen of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, §103]. While the seeking of mortification does not pre- If we think it easy and possible to find God in all things, might we end up by not finding the true God— the transcendent God— in or above any things? 71.1 2012 65 clude the effort to seek, find, and serve God in all things, surely it derives from a very different, and more sober perspective. It offers a balance to an overly posi-tive, totally one-sided incarnational spirituality. Ignatius is reminding us that the God or Christ that we seek and serve in all things is the Christ of the cross (abnega-tion and mortification) as well as the Christ of glory who comes with power. Thus Ignatius can write regard-ing the qualifications of the rector of a college, that he should "be a man of great example, edification and mortification of all his evil inclinations" [Constitutions, §423]. The ideal superior is one who both practices mortification and seeks to find God in all things! Living with and Maintaining the Tension Deus Semper Major—God Ever Greater—is the title of the monumental work of Erich Pryzwara sj on Ignatius of Loyola.9 The God of Ignatius, the God we seek, find, love, and serve is ever greater, always more. God is in all, but also always above all. Ignatius had the ability to keep seemingly opposing tensions or ten-dencies in view—prayer and action, contemplation and action, the local and the universal, trust in God and trust in our talents and efforts, and obedience and free-dom. In these reflections we are pointing to 1) the ten-sion between the God in all things, and the God above all things and 2) the possible tension between seeking God in all things, and finding God in all things. It seems best and most creative to hold on to both elements of these two tensions and not eliminate one or the other. In one tension we hold that God is in and also above all things: incarnate, indwelling, working in the world, and yet, in keeping with the fourth part of the Contemplation to Attain the Love of God, above Review for Religious Schineller • Finding or Seeking God in All Things 66 and beyond, the source of all. In the second tension, we maintain both the seeking for and the finding of God. St. Augustine writes that we would not seek God unless we had already found (and been found by) God. So I am simply suggesting that rather than conflate the two, or eliminate one or the other, we place a bit more emphasis on the seeking and searching, and less on the finding, in accord with Deut. 4:29: "from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul." A Caution and a Challenge Does this mean we should not use the phrase "find-ing God in all things"? No. It is in common use and does reflect the way Ignatius was interpreted by his contem-poraries even if Ignatius was normally reticent in using it. At the same time, we should use the words carefully and with awe, recalling that God is always greater and beyond. We dare not think we have captured God. We can preserve and use "finding God in all things" if we emphasize the search, the process, the prayerful effort of trying to find God in places and events around us. Two final cautions: Meister Eckhart said that "Foolish people deem that they should look upon God as though he stood there and they here. It is not thus." God is ever greater, ever here, and ever beyond. We might recall, too, the words of Fr. John Courtney Murray when he saw a poster to be used at a demonstration. Expressing the spirit of the times and a commitment to faith and justice, the poster read: "God Is Other People!" Murray is reported to have said "They forgot the comma after the word 'other.' It should read: 'God is Other, People!' " Probably the strongest challenge now is to seek and find God in the cities, in the world of technology and 71.1 2012 67 computers. We should not seek to find God only in sun-sets and stars and in the least of the sisters and broth-ers, but also amid skyscrapers and elevators, amid steel and concrete buildings, amid asphalt streets, on subways and in airplanes—wherever God seems to be edged out, overlooked, or denied. If the challenge seems daunting, we might be consoled by the words St. Augustine attri-butes to God: "you would not search for me unless you had already found me." And, we might add, we would not search for God "unless God had already found us." Notes 1 Avery Dulles sj, "The Ignatian Charism and Contemporary Theology." America (26 April 1997): 16. 2 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Mon. Nadal, iv, 651. 3 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Vita Ignatii Loyolae, in Fontes Narrativi, iv, 742. 4 Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, §99. 5 Ignatius of Loyola: Letters and Instructions, (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006), p. 342. 6 Adolfo Nicolás sj, "Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today." Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education 40 (Fall 2011): 9. 7 George Steiner, My Unwritten Books, (New York: New Directions Books, 2008), p. 209. 8 James Gustafson, "The Denial of God as God." Criterion (Autumn 1977): 6-9. 9 Erich Przywara sj, Deus Semper Major: Theologie der Exercitien (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1940). Review for Religious 68 In Distressing Disguise for Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhiu he's a lonely old man dandruff dusts his faded black shirt some polyester blend shiny, holding odors of sweat and cigarettes and left-overs some of which remains on the front of his trousers the purple around his neck shabby, soiled, worn-out even burned a little in one place careless as he is with his smokes over my head his palsied hand trembles and to my ears come mumbled words of grace while my heart strains to see Him, to see His true face, here before me in distressing disguise. Sean Kinsella Winter Sunset At exactly five-fifteen p.m. the over-ripe sun paused a second on the town's rim, all the horizon's color sealed in its neon pulp. I could hardly stop gazing, sure it would burst and spill red-orange juice, winter's redemptive blood, across the Western sky. Patricia Schnapp rsm The Warmth, the Will, and the Way The dilemma is that I am not making very steady progress on my spiritual journey. This leads me to think that I need more consistency. Since I already live "a stable way of life" as a member of a religious order, my basic direc-tion is set. I see that this way of life is leading me where the deepest currents of my heart want me to go. But despite that general clar-ity of direction, I find myself dawdling along, sometimes going backwards, often wandering off to explore some curiosity, rarely totally focused on the path, much less on the goal, of this particular journey on which the Way is also the End. We often pray that the Holy Spirit will fill our hearts and "enkindle in them the fire" of 71.1 2012 sharing experi-ence 69 ben harrison Ben Harrison mc is a Missionaries of Charity Brother. He has worked in formation and has journeyed, in the U.S. and Europe, alongside homeless people, prisoners, addicts, and other people on the margins of society. His email is . Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 70 his love. Once on a retreat I was complaining to the director that I didn't feel any sense of God's presence, and he assured me that I wouldn't be feeling the absence if there weren't a kind of presence; the longing itself was a sign of the Spirit's presence. If I could welcome that longing as a warming presence rather than endure it as a chilling absence, it would help to enkindle the fire of his love. When I speak of this warmth of heart I am not talk-ing about seeking emotional experiences in prayer but rather of finding that sense of inner presence that is so important in the prayer of Eastern Christianity. My mind and the actions it inspires range all over the place, but if I am attentive to that warmth in my heart, the inner pres-ence not only influences my thoughts and feelings but also anchors my actions and desires. This sense of warmth, then, helps me to be more consistent on my spiritual way. I frequently have very good insights, and for a long time I thought that they could keep me centered. I often thought, "Oh, what a brilliant idea! If I can only remember that every day, I will be set for life." And so I would make a note and stick it on the door, or I would write a prayer and say it every morning, until it became so routine that what I was saying didn't even register. Soon I would have another brilliant insight with life-changing potential. Such thoughts are like matches that provide real fire, but only for a few minutes. Then, unless the match is touched to a candle or to a heap of kindling, it is spent. I need something more reliable than insights. I need something more reliable than insights. 71.1 2012 71 Perhaps the secret is to do what would be done in a cottage in the woods: continually add fuel to the fire, a log at a time, to keep it burning. Then, late at night, bank the coals, rake them together in a little pile so that the heat will not dissipate. A few glowing embers will remain in the morning, upon which new kindling can be placed and fresh wood arranged so all is ready to warm the beginnings of the new day. That way the hearth never grows cold. I am discovering that this warmth of heart is a sign of the Spirit's presence with me, abiding in me, direct-ing me toward the goal. But there is something else that seems to be essential in order to deepen that presence and strengthen God's claim on me—what I would call will. The desire is there: the forward impulse, the yearn-ing for the heights, the longing to surrender my being to the One Who Is. What is the difference between this desire and will? To wish for something is to entertain a desire for it; to want it is to own that desire; to will it is to act on that desire, to put it into operation. Will has about it an element of determination. And it is not something I can drum up within myself. It has to be given. St. Paul says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil 2:12-13). Will and the Vows As I think about my vocation, I would say that my will is expressed, above all, by the vows. My vows are the way I demonstrate to myself, to God, and to oth-ers this desire to belong totally to him. The Latin verb for will is volo, velle, and the Latin verb voveo, vovere means vow or wish. Though etymologically the roots of volo and voveo do not seem to be related, there is, Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 72 to my mind, a consonance of meaning. The vows of religious life are a way of making concrete the double-edged desire that is God's desire for me, expressed in a call—a word spoken silently in the heart—that awakens a reciprocating desire in me. His desire to give himself completely to me sets that very same flame alight in me so that I desire to give myself irrevocably to him. The gentle fire of the Spirit's warmth that God enkindles in my heart is drawing me, slowly but surely, toward the blazing glory at the heart of God, and my vows repre-sent the power of that attraction and my determination by God's grace to reach that goal. I see the vows of religious life as the embodiment and expression of the will to be united with God and to give myself to him totally in a particular context, in response to his gift of himself to us in Christ. This is so whether we are speaking of the monastic vows of obedi-ence, stability, and conversion of life or the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience (or, for that matter, similar sets of vows or promises: those of priest-hood or sacramental marriage, of virginity or service, of oblate-hood or lay association). From primitive times a vow was a solemn promise to make some gift or sacrifice to a divinity as an earnest of a good requested or in thanksgiving for a boon received. Although on a literal level this sounds like a type of bargaining or commerce, I can also see it as a way of demonstrating to myself and my God how important something is to me, how sincerely I desire it, how des-perately I need it, how serious my intentions are. The medieval king might have prayed, "Lord, defend us from the threat of these brutal enemies and I will build a church for your glory." Or a mother may pray, "Lord, if you spare my daughter from this dread disease, 71.1 2012 73 I will do everything I can to support research for its cure." Or a widow may say, as one I know did, "Lord, if I am spared from this condition leading to blindness, I will never use my eyes to take pleasure in what is not good and pure." Thus we see how a vow is an expression of a wish for some good for oneself or others. The Italian word for such a commitment is impegno, which can be translated as "pledge." Literally, some-thing given in pegno is pawned. By the vows I am putting the treasure of my earthly life in pledge for a higher good. I am putting my security, my posterity, and my liberty in pawn for something I need more urgently. What is it, in this case, that I need so urgently? I need the grace to live up to this persistent impulse to give myself—an impulse that God has placed in my heart. I know that the faith, hope, and love in me are too weak and faltering to do the job, to get me where I yearn to go. And so I pledge what I have to him and entrust my poor being to him, not to pay him for what he freely gives, but to show him (and myself) that I am serious about following him and that I trust him with this pre-cious but paltry gift of my life, trust that he will keep it safe and see it redeemed and restored in his own time. Pledging my life to him, I am confident that he will give me the grace I need to live each day. In the world of commerce, one pawns something of value for ready money—something that has value but is not spendable, for something that can be spent. The ready cash makes it possible to buy what is needed today. Another word for this ready cash is currency, also called fluid or liquid assets. All these words—"current," "fluid," "liquid"— suggest an action of flowing and remind us of the Spirit, that spring of living water that flows forth from the heart of Christ. Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 74 Thus, when I make my profession of vows, I am proclaiming my faith in God and my desire to belong to him. The vows that I pronounce represent the totality of my gift of self. In the institute to which I belong, we profess the evangelical counsels—the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These three vows are an apt symbol of the totality of my life. By dedicating to God all that I have, all that I love, and all my choices and decisions now and in the future, I am effectively giv-ing him all I am. This triad of the evangelical counsels reflects a totality of being, as do many similar triads. I have no trouble, for example, in seeing parallels between the vows and St. Ignatius's prayer surrender-ing "my memory, my understanding, my entire will." The traditional baptismal formula asks us to renounce "the world, the flesh, and the devil." Scripture tells us that we are to love God with our whole heart, soul, and mind (Mt 22:37). The magi brought the treasures of the nations—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Micah tells us that our sole obligation is "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God" (Mi 6:8). It is easy to see how the three evangelical counsels reflect the three theological gifts of faith, hope, and love. And finally, without putting too fine a point on the comparison, I suggest that the vow of poverty is descriptive of my relationship with the Father, without whom I am nothing and have nothing; chastity reflects my relationship with the Word, the Son, who is friend, Savior, and Bridegroom of souls; and obedience is the domain of the Spirit, who prompts the content of obe-dience and makes possible its practice. The act of making vows is thus a statement of my desire to surrender myself absolutely to the Absolute, to dedicate myself to his way and consecrate myself to his 71.1 2012 75 purpose. The mutuality of giving to which God invites me does not mean a mere absorption in each other. Though I would be content to lose myself in God, he seems to want more for me than that. God wants me to share his love for others and so, by my self-offering, he unites me to his own mission—his out-pouring, in-gathering action of universal love. Thus I am given to the particular apostolates and ministries of the institute in which I live my vocation. Sometimes vows are spoken of as sacred bonds. Bonds are something that we feel gripping us, holding or securing us. If bonds are involuntary we feel them as a constraint, an injustice. If they are desired, we feel them as a comfort, a belong-ing, an embrace. I suppose anyone who makes vows feels them sometimes as a restriction and some-times as a liberation. But part of the radi-cal nature of such a commitment is the protestation that one is willing to pay the price, that one values the liberation of giving oneself more than the security of having oneself. It is a recognition that dying to self is the road to life and that the cross shared is the victory won. Like the fox in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, I want nothing more than for the Little Prince to tame me, so that "the wheat, which is golden [like your hair], will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat." The act of making vows is a statement of my desire to surrender myself absolutely to the Absolute. Review for Religious Harrison • The Warmth, the Will, and the Way 76 Consistency in the Way Returning, then, to my original point, I am saying that two things will help me to find a salutary consis-tency in my spiritual journey: the abiding warmth of the Spirit's presence in my heart, and the will—the determination—to yield to the relentless attraction of Jesus drawing me, and all, to himself. God's love for me in Christ arouses a reciprocating love in me. I give my poor self to him in pledge, not because I have to but because I want to, and he gives me, in return, the wherewithal to make the journey: the daily bread, the water from the rock, and the yearning for home—for the harbor—at the heart of God. Perhaps the greatest indication of his love that God has given me, from my point of view, is not his love itself for me (of which I can scarcely conceive) but my love for him, which is a sweet hunger, a soothing need. Nor is my love for him something that I can claim or that I often feel, but rather an occasional glimpse of light; a fitful melting of joy; a momentary, faint intima-tion of promised ecstasy. It is to the memory of those rare moments of tender quickening, of nostalgia for the unknown, that my will clings during the long periods of dryness, confusion, and loss. It is will that keeps me walking on the way when even the cherished memory fades and all I have left to fall back on is the Spirit's quiet presence in my heart. Indeed, it is all up to God. It is he who supports the journey from behind with his warm abiding. It is he who lures me from ahead through that hunger in my heart. And it is he who strengthens me on the way by the will to journey on. Each day's reminder of that will at work in me is the comforting burden of the vows, by which I experience within myself the debt of love, the 71.1 2012 77 yoke of gratitude, the claim of oneness by which I know that I am his. Being as I am, the fact that I do not manage to live my vows wholeheartedly is not surprising. But it is important that I feel the rub and the pinch and the chafe of them against my stubborn self. As my need and desire for God become stronger than all lesser needs and desires, so the bonds of my belonging to him will grow stronger than all my resistances. At the point that I can give myself without reserve, I will be free. And how do I dare to think that I will reach that point? St. Paul tells us that if God has gone so far as to give his Son for us, "will he not also give us all things with him?" (Rom 8:32). And Paul says further, "I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil 1:6). I trust that God would not have put this desire in my heart, and that of my companions on the way, if he didn't intend to give us the grace to see it through. Home Walking the Labyrinth at Chartres Home. Is it where I begin or end or at the middle stillpoint? Am I at home on the way? Here I am, Lord. Never far from the beginning always approaching the end continually circling the center. Eugene Cartier Review for Religious Getting with the Program P robably one of the most important graces of my novitiate was coming to realize that I had an addiction. It was a painful and embarrassing experience, and yet I have no doubt that it was the best thing that has happened to me in a number of years. During my novitiate I started accessing pornogra-phy online. It was a development I was so ashamed of that I was afraid it would herald the end of my journey into religious life. Previously I had bought magazines and sought out sexually stimulating images in films or through image search engines on the Internet. My behavior began to take root at an early age in romantic fantasy. I would fantasize about being with a girl and wooing her in some exotic setting. Even though I was sexually inexperienced and naive and did not know what adults did together between the sheets, I would some-times escape into this fantasy when I went to bed. 78 A young man writes of his experience of coming to terms during the novitiate with his addiction to pornography. He has requested that the article be published anonym

Issue 62.3 of the Review for Religious, 2003. ; Holiness Religious Life Saintly Mentoring QUARTERLY 62.3 2003 . to God's Universal call tO ,holiness that flow from tbe~cbarisms of Catholic consecrated life. 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: 314-977-7363 ° Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: 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 Mount St. Mary's Seminary; Emmitsburg, Maryland 21727 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. ©2003 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 LIVING OUR CATHOLIC LEGACIES Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Adviso~7 Board David L. Fleming SJ Clare Boehmer ASC Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Adrian Gaudin SC Sr. Raymond Marie Gerard FSP Eugene Hensell OSB Ernest E. Larkin OCarm Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla sJ Miriam D. Ukeritis csJ QUARTERLY 62.3 2003 contents 230 holiness Be Holy as God Is Holy George A. Maloney SJ reflects on the holiness of God and our own holiness from the evidences of Scripture. 239 Praying with the Body: Not Running Ahead of Grace Rende Nienaber SND describes a number of ways to enter into prayer by involving our bodies. 251 religious life Prophetic Voice in Religious Life Elizabeth A. Dreyer reflects on two aspects of being a prophet--being an agent of change and living a contemplative existence--and issues a challenge to religious life. Review for Religious 269 Charism: Is Marketing Needed? Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR proposes a refinement in a religious congregation's method of research into its charism by examining its own continuing pastoral care and pastoral sensitivity in relation to the founder's. 287 John of the Cross's Message for Today Ernest E. Lark.in OCarm indicates how contemporary forms of contemplative prayer--centering prayer, Christian Meditation, and the Jesus Prayer--fit into John of the Cross's teaching on contemplation. 301 Catherine McAuley's Reliance on Providence Mary Judith O'Brien RSM examines the life of Catherine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy, as an example of one who surrenders her whole being in trust to God. epar r en s 228 Prisms 316 Canonical Counsel: Effects of Departure 324 Book Reviews 62.3 2003 prisms A great gift of the four constitu-tions of the Second Vatican Council--on the church (Lumen gentium), on divine revelation (Dei verbum), on the sacred liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium), and on the church in the modern world (Gaudium et spes)--is their readability and their applicability. The matters treated in them can continue to enhance our Catholic life. Whereas the Council of Trent in the 16th cen-tury was needed to put the church's own house in order (the Catholic reformation), Vatican Council II in the 20th century, identified as a pastoral council, looked to revitalizing our faith practice and our mis-sionary effort (Catholic renewal) as we became more fully engaged in the world we live in. We might describe Vatican II as addressing the problem of a distance many Catholics felt from a God in heaven, from Jesus Christ in their awed reverence toward the Blessed Sacrament, from the church in its authority, and from our world itself (b~cause it was "out there"). The church, too, often seemed "out there," embodied in pastors and bishops and encycli-cals that were not exactly us. Vatican II reminded Catholics that they belonged, that baptism made them "the people of God," with rights and responsibilities in the church. God's word in the Bible had sometimes seemed only a Protestant thing, or a Latin thing that priests preached about in English. Catholics were often more touched and uplifted by holy hours honoring the Sacred Heart and evening devotions in honor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help than they were by Mass and the various sacraments. The Mass in Latin had a Revie~ for Religious certain majesty and mystery within our small or large churches, but people attended at a distance, often deliberately towards the rear. Though we in the United States did not generally feel excluded or constrained in our parishes, when we now look back we see ourselves as having lived and learned our faith in a kind of ghetto outside the mainstream of our country. The four constitutions and the decrees of Vatican II changed our ways of thinking and acting. They called on all of us to take responsibility not only for our own adult faith lives, but also for the talent and improvement we can bring to national cultures and values and international ones as well. All our lives long we are being continually formed by the word of God and by God's providence in the events of our lives. In this way we come to know Jesus Christ better, as our Lord and Savior and also as our friend in the joys and difficulties of our lives. Baptized into Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and thus into his priesthood too, we share, with the ordained leadership of our bishops, priests, and deacons, in celebrating the Eucharist and the other sacraments. Our church looks on our world with neither fear nor disdain, but seeks to be involved hopefully and helpfully in its happiness and sorrows. Yes, Vatican II has increased the participation of many in all things Catholic. Now recent Roman documents dealing with liturgy, Eucharist, and devotions like the rosary have been issu-ing a call, recalling for us our human need of reverence in deal-ing with God and the things of God. Family love and friendship, yes, but overfamiliarity has less place in the family of God than in ordinary families. We are being reminded that, as well-loved creatures, we still need awe and reverence towards our Creator, and even towards the people in our lives, nearby and on the other side of the world. We are being called to the Trinitarian roots of our Catholic spirituality--a grand unity in an unfath-omable tension. In our relation to God and one another, we yearn to give and receive loving reverence, reverent love. David L. Fleming SJ 62.3 2003 holiness GEORGE A. MALONEY Be Holy as God Is Holy St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, teaches these new Christians the essence of God's calling in Christ Jesus: Before the world was made, he chose us in Christ to be holy and spotless and to live through love in his pres-ence, determining that we should become his adopted children through Jesus Christ for his own kind pur-poses. (Ep 1:4-5) In all of the Old and New Testaments, we will not find any words to express, as the words holi-ness and holy do, the mystery of the perfection in the Trinitarian community of love and the mys-tery of God's will revealed through Jesus Christ: "to be holy and spodess and to live through love in his presence." It is sad that many Christians have never had a true scriptural meaning of holi-ness and what it means for us to be holy. George A. Ma]oney SJ last wrote for us in May-June 2002. His address is Contemplative Ministries; 13338 Del Monte Drive, #3-K; Seal Beach, California 90740. Revie~ for Religiou~ We need to ask God to show what holiness really means: his holiness first and then our own holiness. God's power can be seen and heard in nature, in lightning and thunder and rushing waters. But in describing God's holi-ness we are, in a way, trying to touch the "insideness" of God, the source of everything good and beautiful that we ever see or hear or feel. God's holiness is God in his per-fection as infinitely loving. Holiness is the totality of God's being moving outward as gift toward the other, toward human beings and angels. We read in the Book of Leviticus: For it is I, Yahweh, who am your God. You have been sanctified and have become holy because I am holy. Yes, it is I, Yahweh, who have brought you out of Egypt to be your God; you, therefore, must be holy because I am holy. (Lv 11:44-45) God Is Holy in Things and Places and Persons Moses fell back before the holiness of Yahweh in the burning bush. That was "holy ground" (Ex 3:4-6). God, who is holy, had chosen to be present to Moses in that place. No human hand was permitted to touch the Ark of the Covenant because God's holy presence was there. The Ark was kept in the Holy of Holies, a special place where God would communicate with his people. Yet, when for their sanctification God's holiness touches angels and human beings, he is present more perfectly to them. He enters upon a self-giving that allows us human beings to be sharers through love in his very own nature. This has always been God's purpose in creating us: "Be holy in all you do, since it is the Holy One who has called you. As ScripUare says: 'Be holy for I am holy'" (1 P 1:15-16). God calls us to receive his holiness and thereby to become holy too, opening ourselves to his outpouring 62.3 2003 Maloney ¯ Be Holy as God Is Holy We have no way of experiencing the fullness of God's holiness except in Jesus Christ. love, to his gift to us of himself and of our neighbor. We are called to be saints--holy people--sanctified by God's holiness (see Rm 1:7; 1 Co 1:2). "We have been called by God to be holy, not to be immoral" (1 Th 4:7). God chose us from the beginning to be holy by the sanctify-ing power of the Holy Spirit (2 Th 2:13) and to "become his adopted children through Jesus Christ" (Ep 1:5). Jesus is holy, and we too are called to be holy. We have no way of experiencing the fullness of God's holi-ness except in Jesus Christ. He teaches us about God's holiness, the actions of a loving Father concerned with all the details of our daily existence. Now we know what God's holiness is like. It is like the holi-ness of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament. Jesus' Holiness and His Growing Holiness The holiness of Jesus consisted first in his having been sanctified by the Holy Spirit. He was the gift of the Father through the Spirit. All that he had Jesus received from his Father. He could not act on his own, but only on what he received from his Father (Jn 5:19, 30; Jn 8:28). It is the Father who sent him into the world and consecrated him, making him holy in order to bring the holiness of God to the world (Jn 10:36). Jesus was sinless because he yielded to God's Holy Spirit within him and struggled against any urge toward self-centered independence (Heb 4:1). From the Synoptic Gospel accounts of Jesus' temptations, we realize, as essential to their meaning, that he had to struggle in his heart to reach the state of loving, humble submission to his Father that eventually would mean his ignominious Review for Religious death on the cross. Jesus would grow in holiness as he fought the Prince of Darkness for dominance, both in his own life and in the lives of those he healed of demonic possession. His struggle would end only on the cross, when he was lifted up and his adversary definitively thrown down from his throne and stripped of his power. From the New Testament we see that Jesus' increas-ing holiness is in accord with the Father's Spirit in him, giving him strength to unmask and defeat the devil. He seeks and confronts the evil one and conquers him. Jesus' Temptations The three temptations of Jesus in the desert empha-size his complete attachment to his Father. Jesus under-goes temptations--much like Eve's, the feminine side of all human beings--to seize the initiative in an aggres-siveness that would deny God's sovereignty over him. Jesus refused to feed himself with anything but God's word. "You must worship the Lord God, and serve him alone" (Dr 6:13, Lk 8). The Gospels present the peak of Jesus' holiness as an exodus experience. As he grew in holiness, he was tempted to hold on to his own life rather than surrender that life on behalf of sinful mankind. Imaging the Father's holiness in his own human development, Jesus grew in each event as he sought not his own but his Father's will. "Here I am! I am coming.to obey your will" (Heb 10:9). Jesus' holiness prompted him to a joyful response to do all that his human consciousness revealed to him as falling within the area of the Father's wish or even, more sensitively, what would please his Father more (Jn 8:29). Jesus suffers his most severe sense of abandonment on the cross when he cries out loudly to his Father: "My God, my God, why have you deserted me?" (Mk 15:34). In spite of his greatest temptation to doubt, in the seem-ing absence of the Father's loving approval, Jesus pushes 62.3 2003 Maloney ¯ Be Holy as God Is Holy himself to new depths of holiness and loving surrender. In such agony Jesus attains in his human condition the holiness of God. This is the crowning in human form of the Trinity's holiness, ultimate self-giving to mankind (through abandonment and death). Holy through the Holy Spirit Jesus at the Last Supper promised that he would pour out the holy and sanctifying Spirit after his death on the cross (Jn 14:16-21). If Jesus, by the Holy Spirit, is glo-rified by the Father and is able to bestow his sanctifying Spirit upon his believers through his final sufferings, it is no less also the Holy Spirit who effects the holiness of Jesus in the days and years of his earlier human development. We can see from the Gospel narrative of his baptism how Jesus, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, was led further toward full holiness by John the Baptist in the Jordan. As Jesus came out of the water, he received a vision of the Spirit as a gentle dove and heard his Father declare from on high: "You are my Son, the Beloved; my favor rests on you" (Mk 1:11). Jesus in his humanity is swept up into an ecstatic oneness with the Father. Heaven and earth have been closed by Adam's first sin in the garden. Now God's communicating pres-ence has passed through the barrier of sin, and Jesus, God's holiness, stands within the human family. Brightness and darkness are brought together in Jesus. The presence and sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit in the life of Jesus begins with Jesus' physical exis-tence. If Paul could appeal to the Corinthians' inner dig-nity because their bodies were holy--"Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Co 6:19)- how much more was this a living experience of Jesus in his body! Jesus was the most free human being that ever existed because the Spirit in him linked him with the Review for Religious Father in myriad ways. Seeing his Father in the materi-ality of his body and in the physical world around him, Jesus enjoyed a serenity and contentment in being there with the Father. Sin sets up a physical, psychical, and spiritual "ner-vousness" in us because it hinders our seeing the loving presence of God in these connections. Instead, sin inclines us to exploit them, as is evident in our abuse of our appetites for food, drink, sex, material and intellec-tual possession, honor--in a word, our pride of life. Finding the Father in All of Creation Jesus was free to find the Father's providential presence in all events and circumstances inasmuch as Jesus was continuously the expressed Word of the Father. In his humanity Jesus had spe-cial gratitude and love by rea-son of his Father's gift to him of intimate friends. He praised God in the gentle love he had for his mother, Mary, for Joseph, John, Mary and Martha, Peter and Andrew, and his other apostles and followers. Yet the freedom brought to him by God's Spirit gave Jesus an inner austerity in all of his human relationships. They were not merely gifts for him to use happily in glorifying the Father; they were diaphanous places in which to find the Father's love and then reciprocate that love by serving everyone he encountered. We cannot understand Jesus in his personal poverty and his preference for the physically, psychically, and spiritually poor people to whom he went and brought healing unless we enter into the conscious relationship Jesus knew that his Father's love for all people everywhere included full awareness of their absolute poverty. 62.3 2003 Maloney ¯ Be Holy as God Is Holy that Jesus entered as the Father's Word on earth. Jesus knew that his Father's love for all people everywhere included full awareness of their absolute poverty. We human beings are radical and ontological nonentities except for God's love poured out in unselfish creation. God is absolute love because he is perfectly holy and self-giving. Jesus' Poverty and Service of Others Jesus lived poorly, by the inner richness of his Father's continued gif~ of himself to him. This poverty can be called humility. Jesus was nothing; the Father was all. Jesus was absolutely poor because no thing possessed him. He was possessed only by his Father, and so he saw created things only as external indications of the inner emptiness of human beings before the Allness of his Father. Jesus served others because that is love in action. He was expressing in human ways the love of God the Father for them. The Father's compassion for his children was the source of Jesus' compassion for them. Jesus burned with desire to actualize the Father's presence in the life of everyone he met (Lk 12:49). He went about doing good, especially by healing all types of sickness and dis-ease. He was never more the perfect image of the heav-enly Father than when he saw the multitudes scattering and fainting like sheep without a shepherd and was moved with mercy and compassion (Mt 9:36). Jesus' Prayer Jesus' holiness is shown also in his prayer life. The Gospels give us much teaching by Jesus on how to pray, but they also give us nuanced pictures of Jesus at prayer. He prays to his Father in the company of his disciples, but also alone. The Evangelists have grasped the intrin-sic relation of Jesus' prayer and his holiness. From their descriptions of Jesus in prayerful communion with his Review for Religious Father, we see that his prayer is always linked with the coming of God's kingdom. Jesus usually prays in solitude, away from his disci-ples, deeply immersed for long periods, even all night. He seeks the face of his Father in praise and thanksgiv-ing, in petitions that follow from his desire that God's kingdom come. In such prayer Jesus touches the holi-ness of the Father and is filled with a like holiness that lives to serve the Father, his Abba. The Holy Spirit fills him with this filial trust in the holiness of his Father, and thus, from his constant experience of the Spirit, Jesus teaches others to pray to the Father in the Spirit, con-vinced that they would be granted everything they needed for their total happiness as the Father's children. Living in the Holy of Holies In awe of God's holiness, we are not to strive to be holy by doing "holy" deeds or works of holiness as though God needs us and our sacrifice. Rather, we are to obey the divine Word, enfleshed for love of us to image for us God's holiness, and to let ourselves be directed by his Holy Spirit within us. To enter into God's holiness, the place to go is our heart. By Jesus' incarnate oneness with us, by his death and resurrection and the gift of his Spirit, we now have the right to approach with boldness "into the sanctuary" by the blood of Jesus, our high priest. We have been saved by Jesus' gift of himself on the cross. Humbled by God's holiness revealed in Jesus Christ, we are enabled to be continually and joyously transformed into holiness as we seek to live lives of Christlike holiness. We are God's work of art, created in Christ Jesus "to live the good life as from the begin-ning he meant us to live it" (Ep 2:10). Now we can more easily, and in greater depth, understand how God's holi-ness makes it possible for God to be merciful towards 237 62.3 2003 Maloney * Be Holy as God Is Holy us. In our relationship with God and with others, holi-ness and mercy can never be separated. Father, Son, and Spirit: Holiness and Love Jesus is holy as his Father is holy because, in his dying on our behalf in obedience to his loving Father, his love for God reaches love's peak. He is holy by being one with God's holiness. He becomes God's holy Word in his obedience unto death (Ph 2:8). As Jesus became holy by learning obedience, so we also must do: "Although he was Son, he learned to obey through suffering; but, having been made perfect, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal sal-vation and was acclaimed by God with the title of high priest of the order ofMelchizedek" (Heb 5:8-10). When affliction comes, we are not to be constantly asking whether we accept the inevitable and submit to a will we cannot resist. Our true, loving question must be: Do we choose the will of God to be our chief good--do we delight in Christ's life principle as ours too? "My delight is to do your will, O God." Jesus sanctified himself and us by doing his Father's will constantly, to his life's end. The will of God is also our sanctification. Be holy, as God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is holy. Summer Transformation August rays insinuate themselves, burrow under epidermal sheath like God's grace, work their transforming till, ripened and marked as sun votary, you preach wordlessly the gospel of repentance for a pale and chilly life. Patricia Schnapp RSM Review for Religious RENI~E NIENABER Praying with the Body: Not Running Ahead of Grace (/~("~'~ on't run ahead of grace." This truth, learned from one of my greatest teachers of prayer, insists that we can find holiness only as God grants. Even though passive prayer has often been considered the higher path, people who are highly sensate might stay in active prayer much of their lives. St. John of the Cross warns against moving too quickly from active prayer. For many, cooperating with this wisdom can involve using our bodies in prayer. Respect for God's Gifts Rationales for prayer with the body can be found in Scripture, theology, and psychology. Respect for the body. We are not pure spirits. Many heresies would have us look with disdain upon the body as the source of temptation. Within this masterpiece, however, the Spirit of God dwells. According to the creeds we profess, our bodies will, like Jesus Christ's, be raised in glory. Fundamental knowledge of God came Ren~e Nienaber SND wrote about lectio divina in our January-February 2002 issue. Her address is St. Mary of the Assumption Parish; 121 West Main Street; Alexandria, Kentucky 41001. 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Praying with the Body A through our parents' bodies: a mother's gentle breast-feeding and a father's strong cradling. In many ways we already pray with our bodies: genuflecting, bowing, taking holy water, telling our rosary beads, making the sign of the cross, receiving Communion in our hands. Great people in the Hebrew Scriptures used their bodies in prayer: Miriam praising God with the timbrel, Moses praying with arms outstretched, and David dancing before the ark. The psalms especially show a people entering bodily into prayer: seeking God's face (27:8), thirsting for God (63:1), panting with open mouth (119:131). They also show a God who deals with the bodies of people, literally or metaphorically: leading them beside still waters (23:2), setting them high on a rock (27:5), hiding them under solicitous wings (63:8), making divine words sweet to the taste (119:103). No disdain for the human body in this kind of prayer! Hebrew prayer shows great respect for the human body's goodness, not the disdain espoused by Docetism, Gnosticism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism. Respect for the unity of body/soul/spirit. Such respect stands against dualism and moves us towards integration. Each part of this threefold "companionship" affects the others. Eastern religions teach that what we do with our bodies affects our prayer (for example, sitting straight and breathing attentively). We will pray better or worse, depending on the involvement of our bodies. If this is true, then we cannot find God by escaping the body. Respect for the incarnation and resurrection. Both of these doctrines involve Christ's body. His humanity belongs to the essence of our faith. Jesus prayed with his body: lifting his eyes to heaven and blessing little children. We, like him, will not find God by rejecting the body. Respect for the g~'eat commandment. Based on the Shema of the Hebrew Scriptures, our call is to love God with our Review for Religious whole self, with all of who we are, not just from our eyebrows up. In daily life we show love through our bodies: gestures, gifts, smiles, and so forth. God invites us to do the same in prayer. Respect for ourselves as images of a creative God. Praying with the body helps us to be playful like children. Childlikeness can keep the juices of prayer flowing. With the Spirit's gifts of wonder and awe, a child/adult can be ever ready for the surprises of God in prayer, like finding a treasure in a field. Respect for praying "from where we're at." Catholics are sacramental people. In part this means experiencing God as coming to us through the stuff of this earth. Prayer that begins with the body can penetrate into the inner self. Like osmosis, the senses can lead us from the exterior to the interior, from the touchable to the untouchable: the transcendent reality of God. Thus prayer involving the body can be a bridge from active to passive prayer. These two forms walk hand in hand, not against each other. To pray "from where we're at" also involves praying from "God experiences." Created reality invites us to pray with our bodies, as in John Denver's song about Annie filling up his senses. How often have we praised God with our eyes for an orange-red sunset, with our mouth for our favorite chocolate dessert, with our nose for the evergreen freshness,. With our ears for the ocean roar. God is the original "surround sound." We can get lost in ecstasy through such continuing revelations of the divine. Our call is to love God with our whole self, with all of who we are, not just from our eyebrows up. 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Praying with the B~dy Blessings of Body Prayer Besides these six forms of respect, prayer with the body can be an antidote to one of the main complaints about prayer: that it is boring. God wants our prayer to bring us life "to the full" (In 10:10). Prayer helps us dispose ourselves. God is the initiator of prayer and the responder to our desires. We can, however, prepare ourselves for the gift of prayer with our very bodies. For example, with our eyes we can gaze lovingly upon a crucifix, icon, or sunrise. With our hands we can touch bur heart or ears. With our mouth we can smile at God or whisper words of Scripture. Prayer helps us keep attentive. Too ubiquitous is the temptation not to pray because "I'm too distracted" or "Nothing happens." Involving our bodies in prayer can lessen those excuses because the pray-er remains grounded. For example, in praying about Jesus healing the woman with a hemorrhage, we can involve our body in such ways as these: coming before Jesus trembling and hopeful, reaching out to touch his garment, or pleading with our face for the gift of God's healing. Prayer helps us remember blessings. When prayer remains too cerebral, the pray-er can seldom recall the experience of God's grace. Involving the body can help the mind to focus rather than flounder. The experience of prayer is crystallized, thus becoming a memento of God's goodness. Forty Possibilities for Praying with the Body ¯ Hold a rock and remember examples of God's steadfast love. ¯ Hold a rock and consider how God might want to change your heart. ¯ Hold a pearl and feel how precious you are to God. ¯ Hold a pearl and consider how much God is your pearl of great price. ¯ Hold a pearl and be grateful for all the pearls in your life (people, experiences, events). ¯ Hold a pillow to your chest, trying Review for Religious to experience God or Jesus as a nursing mother for yourself, someone in special need, or even an enemy. ¯ Hold two coins tightly, like the widow's mite, representing what you do not want to let go of. When ready, release each coin. ¯ Hold a small seed (like a mustard seed) and ask for growth in faith, confidence, love, etc. ° Hold a seashell and ask to be more aware of God's dwelling in the deepest chamber of your heart. ¯ Hold an apple and know yourself to be the apple of God's eye. ¯ Hold a cactus and flower and ask God to bring life to your dryness. ¯ Hold a "lily of the field" and know how much more valuable you are to God than that. ° Hold a crucifix to feel the gift of Jesus' self-giving love. ¯ Walk slowly, aware that you journey lovingly with God, like Adam in the garden. ¯ Walk, aware that God is at your right hand, so you have nothing to fear. ¯ Walk, aware of the challenge to go the "extra mile" with God or another. ¯ Walk under the stars and moon. Delight in God's greatness and beauty. ¯ Walk slowly, just to restore your inner harmony. ° Sit in a rocking chair or porch swing, and allow yourself to be lulled by God. ¯ Sit with your shoes off, with reverence, like Moses before the burning bush. ¯ Sit near a tree whose roots are partly exposed. Touch the roots and the bark and know your groundedness in God. ¯ Squeeze modeling clay to get in touch with God's desire to fashion you further. ¯ Form modeling clay into some specific image God might be forming you into now. ¯ Form modeling clay into the image you would like to have of God. ° Dance your personal Magnificat or Gloria. ¯ Dance your own DayenuI after writing a list of people and experiences for which you are grateful. ¯ Whistle, skip, or show your delight with God in other ways. ¯ Inhale slowly, realizing that your breath is the very ruah of God flowing through you. ° Inhale what you need from God (peace, forgiveness, etc.). Exhale the opposite (unrest, 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Praying with the Body unforgiveness, etc.). ¯ Inhale, letting God speak a word of love. Exhale, returning that word. ¯ Inhale, simply breathing in the goodness of God. ¯ Sit in the breeze. Let it blow through you as the Spirit wills. ¯ Sit in the breeze. Just let it surround you with God's gende presence. ¯ Sit in the breeze or in front of a fan. Feel Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into you. ¯ Prostrate yourself to get in touch with your littleness, sinfulness, or need for God. ¯ Lie face up, as if paralyzed, accepting your need for God at every moment. ¯ Smile at God and feel God's smile in return. ¯ Look in a mirror and delight in the person God has created, is creating, and will continue to create. ¯ Tighten your fist in confidence against your enemies or fears. ¯ Cup your hands to your ears to emphasize a willingness to listen to God. Be attentive to a storm, and let the reality of God's power penetrate your being. More Suggestions, Involving the Easter Symbols Water ¯ Drink very slowly, using this mantra or a similar one: "Give me to drink." ¯ Sit by flowing waters or running water, and let the sound bring God's calm. ¯ Splash water on yourself to bring God's refreshment. ¯ Sprinkle water freely on your head to experience that God does not give the Spirit "by measure." ¯ Enter into a soft rain. Experience in it God's gentle, abundant presence. ¯ Let rain remind you that God sends "rain on the just and unjust." ¯ Be attentive to a storm, and let the reality of God's power penetrate your being. ¯ Pour water over your feet as if Jesus were ministering to you. White Garment ¯ Be aware of your clothes next to your skin; sense that God touches you even more intimately. ¯ Wrap your hands in strips of cloth, like Review for Religious Lazarus. Let God unbind you. ¯ Place a sheet or blanket over your head to feel your own overshadowing by the Holy Spirit. ¯ Place a sheet or blanket around your shoulders and body to feel the protection of God's "wings." ¯ Move with a blanket around your shoulders and feel that you, too, can fly on eagle's wings. ¯ Touch a bedspread tassel, like touching Jesus' garment, while praying for healing like the woman with the hemorrhage. Light/Fire ¯ Squint and let the rays of a candle penetrate your heart or mind with healing. ¯ Hold a candle near your body to feel the warmth of God within. ¯ Let a flame represent the Spirit of God. Ask for wisdom in a present confusion. ° Let the candle flame open your eyes to see the good in someone whom you do not like right now. ¯ Sit wordlessly before the sunrise or sunset, and use a mantra such as "Fill me with your light." ¯ Walk in midday. As you see the sun peeking through the trees, think of God as winking at you. ¯ Pray in the dark of night with only a vigil light. ¯ Pray one of the biblical stories of a blind person. Do this in the dark or with your eyes tighdy covered. Hands/Oil ¯ Hold your own hand to get in touch with God's strength, comfort, nearness, etc. ¯ Touch your heart or carotid artery. Let every pulse be a prayer of love to God. ¯ Touch with your hands or Bible the parts of your body that need healing (for example, eyes for being judgmental, mouth for talking about others, ears for listening to gossip, etc.). ¯ "Anoint" yourself with oil in areas that need healing. ° Rub in scented lotion to remind yourself that you are to be the aroma of Christ. ¯ Pour oil on your feet, representing the feet of someone you need to forgive. Bread/Wine ¯ Hold a piece of bread or loaf of bread, asking, "Give me (us) this bread always." ¯ Hold different kinds of bread. Break them and get in touch with your brokenness and that of others. ¯ Hold a loaf of bread and 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Pra~in~ with the Bod~ know that God will not give you a stone if you ask for bread. ¯ Take a clear glass of water and add red food coloring, representing the change at Cana and in yourself. ¯ Sip wine very slowly, letting it rest in your mouth. "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord." ¯ Sit in a grape arbor to pray the passage of the vine and branches. Two Extended Examples of Praying with the Body Psalm 23. Giv~ yourself plenty of time to enter into this beloved psalm. A day could easily be spent on it. If possible, pray Psalm 23 out of doors. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want; I will never be in need; I lack notbing.--Try to feel how God has faithfully cared for you through people, events, and other blessings. I lie in green grass, verdant pastures, lush meadows.--If you can, lie down outside; otherwise, embrace the verdure in some physical way. For example, hug a leaf to your heart. Stand or sit, if possible, beneath the shade of a large tree. The shepherd leads me beside restful waters, peaceful streams, quiet pools.--If possible, go outside where you can be close to living waters. Otherwise, use a fountain or simply the faucet in your room. Spend time listening to the flow of the waters until you begin to feel calm. The shepherd refreshes my soul, revives my soul, restores my souL--To "help" the shepherd revive you, splash different parts of your body. The shepherd guides me in right paths, in paths of righteousness, in paths of virtue.--Walk slowly and mindfully, trying to feel the presence of the shepherd at your right hand. Even though I walk in a gloomy valley, a dark valley, the darkest valley . . . --Get in touch with any darkness in your life right now. Then close or cover your eyes and continue walking. With his rod and staff the shepherd gives me courage, Review for Religious comfort, security.--Use something to represent the "rod and staff" (like a broom handle or a walking stick). Walk, still in the darkness, with the safety of the walking stick. You could also sit with the handle against your back, trying to feel God's presence and comfort. You spread for me a table, a feast, a banquet.--Eat some of your favorite food. Yearn for the Eucharistic feast and the final banquet in God's reign. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows, runs over, brims oven--Use lotion to "anoint" your head, heart, gut, or any part of you that needs God's abundance. If you lack lotion, pour water on yourself, even on your head. Surely goodness and kindness, goodness and mercy, goodness and love, follow me always.--Con-clude as you began, getting in touch with God's abundance. This could involve returning to some significant ex-perience during this prayer, like listening to the water or pouring water on yourself. If you cannot fully accept this goodness that God promises, let God speak this verse to your heart. And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever, for my whole life long, for as long as I live.--Again get in touch with the presence of the shepherd in your past. Know that the same shepherd has blessed your life with this psalm in the present. Be assured that you can depend on this faithful shepherd throughout your future. Amen! Walk slowly and mindfully, trying to feel the presence of the shepherd at your right hand. The Song of Songs might be the backdrop for an extended date with Jesus--at least a whole day, perhaps a whole week of retreat. The suggestions that follow are 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Praying with the Body geared for an extended length of time. They are intended to give numerous supporting ideas to the text, not specific suggestions on how to pray the Song of Songs itself. The setting. Bring in some favorite flowers and food. Play special love music between prayer times. Burn a fragrant candle or some incense. Anoint yourself with precious lotion. Dress in your favorite clothes. Getting started. Ask that you heart might be ravished. Ask to grow in desire for God; ask to know God's desire for you. Pray while lying on your bed, porch swing, or chaise lounge. Put something under your head to represent the lover's left hand there. During the day. Take a walk "hand in hand" with your Beloved. Sing/dance favorite love songs from your era; let Jesus sing back to you. Draw a mandala2 to express your love. Spend time looking into the eyes of the beloved, while the beloved gazes back at you. Whisper your words of love. Smile to your beloved. Mantra. "You are my Beloved in whom I am well pleased." Experience this mantra in different ways. See it in the beauty of the flowers. Taste it in your special food or drink. Feel it in the warmth of a candle. Smell it in the scent of incense. Touch it in your favorite clothes. Hear it in the music you play or sing. Journaling. Write your favorite names for Jesus and/or his for you. Write your own figures of speech for your beloved; write his for you. Compose a love letter to Jesus. Meal ideas. When you eat, think of being brought into your beloved's banqueting table. Eat slowly and linger after the meal. Eucharistic connection. Ask that your heart may burn within you as Jesus reveals himself in the breaking of the bread. When you receive from the cup, realize that you are drinking the wine of divine love. Fast for an extended period before Eucharist in order to enter more fully into communion, hunger more for God's loving presence, Review for Religious taste the divine goodness, and experience God's abundance. Other Suggestions Some psalms are particularly conducive to body prayer: Psalms 16:5-11; 23; 27; 63:1-8; 91; 131; 139:1-18; 150. Among the best Isaiah readings for prayer with the body are Isaiah 35:1-6; 40:29-31; 43:1-4; 49:14-16; 55:1- 13; 66:10-14a. Other excellent sensate passages from the prophets include Jeremiah 17:7-8; 18:1-6; Ezekiel 36:26- 27; 37:1-14. A sampling of helpful gospel passages: Matthew 5:13- 16; 6:25-34; 7:1-12; 14:22-33; Mark 4:35-41; 5:25-34; 8:22-26; 10:46-52; Luke 1:26-38; 5:3-10; John 2-1-11; 4:7-15; 11:38-44; 13:2-17; 15:1-11; 20:11-18; 20:19-23. The ideas offered here can be useful for running with grace, not ahead of it. They are useful for sensates as well as for intuitives who are developing their sensate function. Depending on the person's disposition, physical condition, and prayer setting, some suggestions will work and others will not. Many ideas listed here, however, have blessed my directees and me for many years. I trust that others who are willing to follow their own creative childlikeness will experience God profoundly in'body prayer. Although the kairos3 of a retreat setting works best, any place or time can be an occasion for the self-revelation of God in our ordinary lives. For centuries St. Paul has called us to use our bodies "for the glory of God" (1 Co 6:20). In our contemporary setting, Tilden Edwards (from the Shalem Institute) says, "Amazing things happen when our bodies join our minds in opening to God." Notes ~ Dayenu is a song from the Jewish Passover service. In it the refrain "that would have been enough" is a response to the abundance of God's 62.3 2003 Nienaber ¯ Praying with the Body blessings (for example, "If you had just fed us with manna from the desert, that would have been enough"). 2 Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning circle or center. It is an ancient symbol of wholeness. Making a mandala (a circular drawing) is a way to come into contact with deeper wisdom from the center within, the unconscious. 3 Kairos is a Greek word meaning the "right time," a time of opportunity. It can suggest fulfillment or the timelessness of eternity, where God's presence abounds. Piet~ Her head is slightly bowed, the gravity of love bending her to him, his death a weight more ponderous than stone. Her hand is stretched out, helpless to account for what the world has come to. What does that open, lifted hand convey? Does it implore the mercy of a hidden God, or beg to know the outcome of a plan incomprehensible to her? Does her hand commend her Son to us and plead for pity, for consideration of his innocence, for justice? I see that hand outstretched for us to take, reminded that her suffering is much like ours: in pain she, too,. is plunged in silence, brokenhearted as she contemplates the loss of all she loves. Kate Martin OSC Review for Religious ELIZABETH A. DREYER Prophetic Voice in Religious Life The desert fathers and mothers had a tradition of going to their abba or amma for a "word" of wisdom. When I was asked to give this 150th-anniversary address, the word prophecy came immediately to mind. Prophecy has been a constant of religious life. Women and men reli-gious, speaking prophetic words, have be-queathed the church and society a legacy of reform and renewal. My interest in prophecy emerged from my reflection on moral courage, which it seemed to me is in rather short supply these days--in society, in business, in education, in politics, and in the church. The road from moral courage to prophecy is not a long one. Who could have predicted even a year or two ago the church's current need of prophetic voices? Numbers of people have seen the prophetic call as central to the charism of Elizabeth A. Dreyer, professor in the Department of Religious Studies of Fairfield University, first presented this paper in September 2002 to inaugurate the 150th year of the Sisters of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin in Petersham, Massachusetts. Her address is Department of Religious Studies; Fairfield University; Fairfield, Connecticut 06430. 62.3 2003 Dreyer * Prophetic Voice in Religious Life religious life.1 Though everyone in the church is called to a prophetic life, institutes of vowed religious have had a distinctive and notable prophetic role down through the ages. It is a challenge to speak of prophecy, for prophecy means spealdng in the name of God. Being a prophet is akin to falling in love: you cannot decide to be a prophet. Nor can you declare that you are one or even be sure that someone else truly is one. The whole business is rife with the dangers of egotism. But there is also danger in refusing to accept the gift of prophecy, in not praying for the courage to be a prophet, and in neglecting to support those around us who are prophets. Timidity and self-protection stem from the knowledge--whether conscious and unconscious--that prophetic activity is dangerous to one's health. And yet the Christian life calls us to learn about and imitate the prophets who have gone before us and on whose shoulders we stand. Our Jewish heritage includes an impressive list of prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, and others. For Christians, John the Baptist, preparing the way for Jesus, is the prophetic model par excellence. But above all is Jesus, the Jew who fully embodied his tradition of prophetic compassion and courage, dying for his love of the outcast and the stranger, and confronting the religious status quo when it worked against the good of the people. More recently, interest in women's history has awakened us to the lives of prophetic women in the church. Historian Karen L. King notes that in every century women have exercised leadership in Christian communities and that their leadership has been contested. In the first centuries most of the clear cases of women's leadership "based their legitimacy on claims to prophetic experience," but Jo Ann McNamara suggests that, by the mid 3rd century, prophetic voices were overshadowed by Review for Religious clerical organization and leadership? At the Second Vatican Council, when Cardinal Suenens wanted to include in Lumen gentium a section on the share of every baptized person in Christ's prophetic office, Cardinal Ruffini argued that an emphasis on charism could endanger the institutional church.3 Happily today we look not only to John the Baptist and Paul but also to Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, Priscilla, and Maximilla; martyrs Agatha, Lucy, Theodora, Perpetua and Felicity, and their 20th-century sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel. Each community has its own list of prophetic figures. The Sisters of the Assumption have founding sisters Leocadie Bourgeois, Julie Heon, Mathilde Leduc, and Hedwige Buisson and later figures such as Alice Mignault and Marguerite Gauthier. More recent prophetic voices of women religious include Margaret Traxler (+2002), Theresa Kane, Mary Luke Tobin, Margaret Brennan, Anita Caspary, Mary Daniel Turner, and Joan Chittister. At this historical moment, how are we to think about the prophetic voice? What are its potentials and pitfalls? Endeavoring to be faithful to the gospel and God's reign on earth, how are we to support prophetic thinking and activity in the 21st century--for the health of each religious community, for religious life as a whole, for the church, society, and the world? As a laywoman I have been inspired by the prophetic lives of women religious. I have learned from your example, and I am privileged to stand with you and for you in your commitment to the life of the people of God. How are we to think about the prophetic voice? What are its potentials and pitfalls ? 62.3 2003 Dreyer * Prophetic Voice in Religious Life The Prophetic Vocation In an article on Hildegard of Bingen, Colman O'Dell describes the prophet's role as one of personal encounter.4 The prophet receives a special summons, an unforgettable experience that God has entrusted to her a message that she must reveal, either in words or by her very life. The prophet is one who yields herself to God as handmaid, witness, or sign. The summons can be to something dramatic and large scale or, for most of us, something ordinary and small scale, to be carried out over a long period of time. Thomas Merton describes the prophet as one who lives in direct submission to the Holy Spirit in order that, by her life, actions, and words, she may be a sign of God in the world. Jean Leclercq speaks of the prophet as a person of neither vague ideas nor ready-made solutions. Rather, prophets are the ones who by the vigor of their concepts and the intensity of their contemplation compel others to act, giving them worthy reason for doing so. Abraham Heschel describes the prophet as one who intensifies responsibility, who is impatient of excuse and contemptuous of pretense and self-pity, who is an exegete "of existence from a divine perspective." The prophet is one who is sensitive to evil and who feels fiercely,s In his classic 1978 work, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann sees prophecy as being concerned with change and how it comes about. The-prophetic task is to get people to have a perceptive consciousness that will stand against the dehumanizing and death-dealing aspects of our culture.6 Brueggemann describes the enemy of prophetic consciousness as Solomon's royal consciousness in which God's freedom is traded for God's accessibility, an economy of equality is traded for an economy of affluence, and a politics of justice is traded for a politics of oppression. The Solomonic regime silenced criticism through prohibition backed by heavy-handed sanction--or simply ignored it. In such a situation Revieva for Religious the gift of freedom is overtaken by a yearning for order and security.7 As Americans living in the aftermath of 9/11, we know well the seduction of royal consciousness. A prophet is one who understands language and its distinctive power to evoke newness--"fresh from the word.''8 Brueggemann speaks in terms of binary pairs of death and new life: numbness/criticism vs. energy/passion (compassion); death/cross vs. life/resurrection; grief/mourning vs. praise/joy. The prophet calls for an alternative consciousness and an alternative community. Forms of coercion and totalitarianism try to curtail fresh new possibilities and end up diminishing us as human beings. As a remedy, Brueggemann calls for a reappropriation of the biblical prophetic tradition to its full power and authenticity. The Hebrew prophets used poetry to present their vision and inspire listeners to respond. "It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one," Brueggemann says. He reminds us that worship and praise are ways to cut through ideology and recover compassion.9 Jo Ann McNamara concludes her massive treatment on the history of religious life with these words: "In the end, religious life is about worship and the positive benefits that worship brings to the world and its maker.''~° God is the creator of the world; we depend on God's loving compassion and power to make all things new. Praise of God is a wellspring of prophetic living. Discontinuity: Becoming Agents of Change In what follows I explore two particular elements of this prophetic way of living: discontinuity and contemplation. The prophetic voice interrupts "business as usual." It calls attention to, and says no to, the powers 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Religious Life The task of prophecy is to encourage people to be involved in the history of their time. of dehumanization wherever they may be. The prophet sees that the present arrangement need not always be so. This vision might apply to the way religious life is lived and structured, ways in which we think about and do ministry, ways that church structures and practice affect the people of God, ways we live as a society and as cifzens of the world. As I have said, the history of religious life reveals a steady stream of visionaries. One thinks of Jane Frances de Chantal, one of the first to question religious enclosure when it inhibited service in the world, and leaders of women's congregations in the mid 20th century who decided that education and worldly awareness would make sisters better teachers and better religious. Richarda Peters, Benedictine prioress in St. Joseph, Minnesota, from 1949 to 1961, encouraged her sisters to create study groups, earn academic degrees, update libraries, and subscribe to the New York Times. Her successor brought in television and encouraged the sisters to read Cardinal Suenens's The Nun in the World2~ The task of prgphecy is to encourage people to be involved in the history of their time. Brueggemann speaks about the visceral experience of waking up to the truth that things are not right. The light bulb goes on, and we wonder why we did not see that before. Pretending that things are fine is no longer an option. This awakening is often followed by feelings of disappointment, grief, and even betrayal. Bringing this hurt to public expression is an important step in dismantling the status quo and permitting a new reality, theological and social, to emerge.~2 Dorothee Soelle says that expressed complaint is the beginning of liberation.13 Review for Religious Prophetic agents of change live as if in a minefield. They may conjure up unwanted feelings of self-doubt: Who am I to demand and expect change? Most of us know that the risks are high. That prophets are not welcome in their own neighborhood is all too true. But, whether we ourselves are prophets or are attuned to those who are, the message can truly be "good news" to people. Even though the price is high, new vision energizes and creates new realities that can be trusted and relied upon. 14 Energy can even come from embracing the inscrutable darkness, trusting that something is on the move, even though I .may not see it.Is Waiting faithfully, with the anticipation of discovering a new way of being church, is prophetic activity. 16 We are also energized by the partisan nature of prophecy. Prophets do not function in the abstract, but always address persons in concrete historical situations. We become aware that God is free and acting for us in this moment, in this very community, in this geographic location. In the last thirty years, the extensive research on specific religious orders of women is gradually correcting past neglect, naming particular people and locations of prophetic activity in the history of religious life. 17 Looking at barriers to prophetic voice, Brueggemann examines the ways that satiation short-circuits passion. He reminds us that satiation--having too much and being full all the time--prevents our noticing that the king has no clothes. It dulls our capacity to be imaginative, caring, and passionate, to suffer, to live and die. We avoid facing up to failure; we shrink from the thought that there is an end to things as they have been. Consumerism tricks us into a false sense that "all is well." "The task of prophetic imagination," Brueggemann says, "is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord." ~8 This is as true of the church as it is of society and the world. 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Religious Life The dehumanizing aspects of our consciousness and practice can be mitigated. They have no final claim on us. The despair created by the king leads to hopelessness, infecting those who are excluded and those who have everything. But prophets like Second Isaiah, attesting God's radical freedom, announce genuine novelty to exiled Israel: God could have a change of mind. Ironically, those who know this kind of prophetic dying most painfully are the very persons who can convey hope most vigorously. And, just as grief undoes numbness, amazement confounds despair. Amazement, says Brueggemann, is the ultimate energizer. With the prophet's help, Israel finds that singing is again possible. Song indicates new life. All of us can recall not being able to sing because of depression or anger, satiety or preoccupation--and then discovering that we could sing again. Thus hope is born, and whenever it happens we are amazed.19 Jesus, coming after John the Baptist, is also a prophet. He lives at the margins and interacts with other marginal people who respond with awe---~om the shepherds at the birth to the crowds pursuing him in Mark's Gospel. Jesus' compassion takes many forms: he is not afraid to criticize the old order, he is ready to heal and forgive, he invites people to freedom from their enslavements. Newness brea~ in because "Jesus had the capacity to give voice to the very hurt that had been muted." Suffering made audible and visible produces hope; articulated grief is the gate of newness. The history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it voice.2° Standing at the decisive end of royal consciousness is the cross. The Way of Contemplation A second hallmark of prophetic voice is living a contemplative existence. Many theologians, including the well-known German Jesuit Karl Rahner, have made the Review for Religious plea that, if Christians are to survive into the future, they will have to become mystics in the world. I think our experience in the post-Vatican II church and in the postmodern world teaches us that mysticism and prophecy are not clashing symbols but interdependent requirements for gospel living. In antiquity, prophecy was considered a natural role for women, and in the early Corinthian community, for example, prophecy and prayer were closely linked.2~ Thus, we are not called to be mystics or activists but mystics and activists. Sandra Schneiders underlines this truth when she describes religious life as a prophetic life-form characterized by two linked realities--contemplative immediacy to God and social marginality. Indeed, she calls prophetic action the public face of mysticism.22 Genuine prophetic speech and action are grounded inholiness. Prophecy requires that one take time to attend to God's word. It demands singleness of purpose, what we used to call "purity of heart." It requires allowing oneself to be penetrated by the Spirit, thus gaining a certain freedom from external authorities. Authentic solitude and silent presence before God allow us to become "tuned in" to the ways of God and, out of this knowledge, to lament and speak a word of vision and hope to the church and to the poor. Genuine prayer helps us avoid making egregiously wrong projections in God's name, and this can be painful. To begin with, it is not easy to identify subde projections by which we make God into our own image, and when we do discover them it is difficult to let them go. Most of us are comfortable with the God we have experienced and imagined, but, unless we become freer to let God be God, we dare not venture into the world of prophetic utterance. God is the source and wellspring of prophetic life and mission, and only contemplation keeps us intimately attuned to God's voice.23 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Religious Life A hallmark of the mystical encounter is a sense of being at one with the world. This is an enjoyable experience and needs to be celebrated when it breaks into our consciousness. But often we do not allow this sense of cosmic unity to lead us to effective community living. How do epiphanies of connectedness lead us to prophetic voice on behalf of human community? The basic answer is that contemplative existence grounds prophetic activity. Generally, one doeg not speak a prophetic word out of the blue, even though prophetic speech has an element of spontaneity, like a "late-breaking news bulletin" from God. But, like a concert pianist's spontaneity and apparent effortlessness, prophecy depends on a life of paying attention to God in prayer. Genuine contemplation does not lead toward withdrawal or removal from the world, but just the opposite. The prophet is one who immerses herself in the joys and especially the sufferings of the world. Prophetic solidarity translates into acknowledging the truth of the present moment, however bleak it may seem. Prophets are "sent to participate humbly and fragilely in the darkness, to experience it as their own, but without losing heart." This faithful perseverance leads one to seek solutions and victory, but not to give up when failure is the outcome. Such a life requires both realism and deep spiritual reserves.24 The prophet identifies and gives voice to the sins of one's culture: consumerism, rampant individualism, fragmentation, and alienation. In her book Woman Strength: Modern Church, Modern Woman, Joan Chittister underlines the need for communal leadership against a rampantly individualistic culture. She calls for a spirituality of contemplative cocreation in which we look at the causes of social brokenness and begin to see the link between the personal and the political. "We need to intervene for one another," she says. "We need a new worldview that puts the old one 'in new light.'''25 Review for Religqous A simple way to enhance contemplation in the service of prophetic solidarity with the poor is to dwell within the words of the Hebrew prophets to see what they mean for us today. We begin by asking: Who were these people? What were the circumstances of their lives? What were their doubts and fears? How did they overcome them? How did they manage to love so much that they risked life and limb to speak the prophetic word? Abraham Heschel asks: "What gave them the strength to 'demythologize' precious certainties, to attack what was holy, to hurl blasphemies at priest and king, to stand up against all in the name of God?" He says they "must have been shattered by some cataclysmic experience in order to be able to shatter others." 26 In a 1997 article Brueggemann describes how the biblical text becomes newly available, how it can erupt into new usage and be seized upon to illuminate the present. This moment can be both personal and communal. He writes: "What has been tradition, hovering in dormancy, becomes available experience . In that utterance, the word does lead reality." In order for the prophetic word to remain ever new, someone has to have imagination and intuition and the courage to assert that texts from the past can and must be "concretely relocated in and specifically readdressed to contemporary contexts." Persons like this "permit the explosion of text whereby the world is transformed.''27 Meditating deeply on the following passages can lead us in such a direction. Listen, I groan under the burden of you, as a wagon creaks under a full load. (Am 2:13) You that turn justice upside down and bring righteousness to the ground, you that hate someone who brings the wrongdoer to court and loathe the one who speaks the whole truth: 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Reh~ious Life for all this, because you levy taxes on the poor. though you have built houses of hewn stone, you shall not live in them. (Am 5:7-11) Spare me the sound of your songs; I cannot endure the music of your lutes. Let justice roll like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." (Am 5:23-24) Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord. Though your sins are scarlet, they may become white as snow; though they are dyed crimson, they may yet be like wool. (Is 1:18) The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light: Light has dawned upon them, dwellers in a land as dark as death. Thou hast increased their joy and given them great gladness; Hey rejoice in your presence as people rejoice at harvest. (Is 9:2-3) These and other prophets past and present inspire us to become more and more convinced that a "new word" and "new light" are possible in every age. We must be the ones to assume the responsibility to remind the church that no one has a corner on God's word and that we dare not put a period, where there should be a comma, when it comes to God's plan for creation. Prophetic voices are needed in a church that "disputes how women can image Christ; restricts rather than promotes women's preaching; rejects dialogue with feminist theology; refuses to discuss women's leadership roles in liturgical assemblies; takes Review for Religious punitive action against women's public speech on controversial issues; considers qualified women ineligible for administrative offices and prohibits gender-inclusive texts in its public prayer."~s The Madeleva Manifesto, issued in 2000 by a group of Catholic theologians, states: "To women in ministry and theological studies, we say: Reimagine what it means to be the whole body of Christ. The way things are now is not the design of God." Past and Future One aspect of celebrating and being grateful for the past involves cocking an eye toward the future. W'e ask how we can honor the memories, the dedication, the love and accomplishments of those who have gone before us. How do we extend their legacy into a new millennium? This is no easy task. The prophetic voice of women religious may be intended primarily for the church, but it extends to the wider faith and civic communities. There are many challenges in the American church, in religious life, and in our culture. But, amidst the plethora of problems, one thing remains clear: The prophet must be attuned to the cause of the poor and suffering and act on their behalf. This is the rock upon which we stand and which must weather the slings and arrows of both ecclesial and social existence. Words of support and challenge are in order. While all baptized Christians are called to find inspiration and truth in the message of the Bible, women religious are eminently equipped to do so. The Spirit must be allowed to empower and embolden you, to give you confidence to The prophet must be attuned to the cause of the poor and suffering and act on their behalf. 62.3 2003 Dreyer * Prophetic Voice in Religious Life interpret the signs of the times in light of the gospel and speak and act on this knowledge. Your lifestyle, your experience, your prayer, your dedication, your commitment to discernment, all this enables and propels you to live and speak and act in Christ's name. It benefits not only your communities, but also the church and the world. Your prophetic voices are needed. Confronting a sinful church begins in humility, in the awareness that the sin I protest resides firmly in the center of my own heart. The church has an ambiguous record on this front. She has always embraced the principle that reform must be a constant dynamic in the church, but has often shied away from embracing this truth in action. The renowned 20th-century theologian Paul Tillich noted that a major Protestant criticism of the Roman church is the "exclusion of the prophetic self-criticism" by an authoritarian system.29 Awareness of the beam in one's own eye prevents making condescending judgments about others. But we cannot stop there. We must love God and the world and the church enough to be willing to cry out against the arrogance, deceit, and secrecy that burden most heavily the poor, the oppressed, the person in the pew. The danger in a time such as ours is to get distracted and deflected from hearing the call to prophecy. It is appropriate to commission studies and to meet and talk about the alarming statistics on religious life--health, membership, age, finances. But these concerns cannot be allowed to turn you in on yourselves, instead of outward to the reform of the church and the alleviation of suffering in the world. And, while we may need time-outs to step back from the fray and regroup, we must not give in to the temptation to withdraw out of legitimate frustration and anger. We need to act as individuals and as a community, embracing the responsibility and the honor of being agents of new vision. We cannot leave it Review for Religious to clerical leaders or to those with stronger, louder, deeper voices. The church needs women religious to resist being co-opted by the clerical culture of power, privilege, and denial. We need you to protest tactics of intimidation and silencing. And we hope and pray that you will have the courage to withstand the suffering of not being welcome in your own country. The Spirit blows where it will (1 Co 12:8-11), and I find that it often blows in the lives of mature, dedicated women religious. We laypersons, who have so often been empowered by you, are called to join you in this much-needed prophetic ecclesial mission. The prophet speaks also to culture. As we move from despising and fleeing culture to a critical embrace of it, we cast a loving, compassionate, contemplative gaze on it and on all cultures. Because we stand within our culture, not outside it, we are both tainted by its sins and enriched by its creations and discoveries. In simplicity and courage we need to protest against arrogance, individualism, and consumer ways. By living and thinking on the margins, we must speak a word of love to the most desperate, despised, and forgotten among us. Since we cannot fight excessive individualism with more individualism, we are cailed to figure out how to act communally, to marshal our resources to witness to the Spirit's plan to make all things new. We are called to take a prophetic stance toward the rampant individualism of our culture by acknowledging our shared vulnerability, respecting and loving our differences and yet inviting others to dwell in community with us. Mary Grey pleads with us to "take the responsibility of becoming the kinds of communities which challenge society and live by a transforming ethic, communities which 'shine like stars' because they are offering the word of life." 30 She locates hope in the witness of the community as prophet. In the face of dwindling resources and aging, this kind of fidelity 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Religious Life to the mission, this showing up each and every day to do the Lord's work, is in itself a prophetic act of enormous value and goodness. The prophet is many things. To be open to and touched by this gift is to be honored with an invitation from God. It is also to be burdened with heavy responsibility, to be ripped open and rejected, scorned and ridiculed. For the point of the prophet's life is not primarily her own burdens, but those of a suffering world in desperate need of hope. The prophetic voice both disturbs and gives hope, and this requires keeping close touch with God's purifying presence, seeing oneself as lowly and humbly developing the skills of discernment and surrender. We are grateful for those who have gone before us, and we celebrate our membership in the communion of saints. We are linked by the desire arid the promise to be faithful to living a gospel life in each generation. The witness of our ancestors in the faith calls us to recommit ourselves to be Christians who dare to voice a prophetic word in our time, who dare to offer a word of hope from our experience that God is faithful, and who dare to hear and respond to the gospel invitation: "Come to me all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light" (Mr 11:28-30). Notes ' See Sandra Schneiders [HM, Finding the Treasure: Locating Catholic Religious Life in a New Ecclesial and Cultural Context (New YorlotMahwah: Paulist Press, 2000) and Selling All: Commitment, Consecrated Celibacy, and Community in Catholic. Religious Life (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2001); Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Nadine Foley, ed., ~ourney in Faith and Fidelity: Women Shaping Religious Life for a Renewed Church (New York: Continuum, 1999); Joan Chittister, The Fire in These Ashes: A Review for Religious Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life (Kansas City: Sheed Ward, 1995) and Woman Strength: Modern Church, Modern Woman (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990); Barbara Fiand, Living the Vision: Religious Vows in an Age of Change (New York: Crossroad, 1990) and Wrestling with God: Religious Life in Search of Its Soul (New York: Crossroad, 1996). 2 Karen L. King, "Prophetic Power and Women's Authority: The Case of the Gospel of Mary [Magdalene]," in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 21 and 35. 3 See Mary Catherine Hilkert OP, Speaking with Authority: Catherine of Siena and the Voices of Women Today (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2000, p. 43. Colman O'Dell, "Elizabeth of Schonau and Hildegard of Bingen; Prophets of the Lord," in Peace Weavers, ed. J.A. Nichols and L.T. Shank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987), pp. 85-102. ~ Cited in Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 12ft. 6 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1976), p. 13. 7 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 36-37. 8 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 9-10. 9 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 45 and 26-27. 10McNamara, Sisters in Arms, p. 637. ~ See With Hearts Expanded: Transformation in the Lives of Benedictine Women, St. Joseph, Minnesota, 1957-2000 by Evin Rademacher, Emmanuel Renner, Olivia Forster, and Carol Berg (St. Cloud: North Star Press, 2002), cited in History of Women Religious News and Notes 15, no. 1 (February 2002): 4. ,2 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 20-21. ,3 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), pp. 70-76. ,4 Brueggemann, Prophetic Imagination, p. 23. ,s See Constance FitzGerald, "Impasse and the Dark Night," in Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (2nd ed.), ed. Joann Wolski Conn (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1996), pp. 410- 435. 16 Mary C. Grey, "Prophecy and Mysticism: The Heart of the Postmodern Church," Scot-fish Journal of Theology (1997): 53. 17 Recent examples include Dominicans at Home in a Young Nation: 1786-1865 (Chicago: Project OPUS); Women of the Vale: Perthville Josephites 1872-1972 by Marie Crowley (Melbourne: Spectrum Publications, 2000); Beyond the Adobe Wall: 1852-1894 by Patricia Jean 62.3 2003 Dreyer ¯ Prophetic Voice in Religious Life Manion SL (Independence, Missouri: Two Trails Press, 2002); Barbara Misner, The Living Love of Christ among Us: The History of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, 3 vols. (privately printed by the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, 1999). An excellent listing of new books on religious life can be found in History of Women Religious: News and Notes, ed. Karen M. Kennelly (2311 South Lindbergh Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63131). ,8 Brueggeman, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 47 and 49. ,9 Brueggeman, Prophetic Imagination, pp. 69, 70, and 79 20 Brueggeman, Prophetic Imagination, p. 88. 21 See Antoinette Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). 22 Schneiders, Finding the Treasure, pp. 137 and 150. 23 Schneiders, Finding the Treasure, p. 317. 24 Schneiders, Finding the Treasure, pp. 327 and 334-335. 2s Chittister, Woman Strength, pp. 69-70. z6 Heschel, Prophets, p. 12. 27 Walter Brueggemann, "Texts That Linger, Words That Explode," Theology Today 54, no. 2 (July 1997): 181 and 198. 2~ Hilkert, Speaking with Authority, pp. 2-3. 29 Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper,1957), p. 72. 30 Grey, "Prophecy and Mysticism," pp. 23 and 62. Sadness Today I embrace the air. The embodiment of heart and mind, .flesh and bone are gone. Too soon a (oraithlikefigure replaced reality l~aving only memories. Marcella LaKoske OP Review for Religious NIHAL ABEYASINGHA Charism: Is Marketing Needed? Ubnuti luenvdeer rs eslelsv eitns dfaibffreicr esnotf tneanmer etsh,r oouftgehno uwt iEthu rdoipf-e ferent bottles and different marketing strategies and sometimes even different formulas. Candy maker Mars no longer sells "Mars" bars in the United States; the same product is now called "Snickers Almond," and American "Milky Way" bars (same as ever) are sold in Europe as "Mars" bars. Such is the adaptability of mod-ern marketing. How, then, might one go about market-ing the productmor telling the story--of a religious institute's charismatic accomplishments and endeavors? This article argues that one needs to identify the project the founder launched (pastoral care) by identifying where his heart was (pastoral sensitivity). In particular, it deals with the Redemptorists, a congregation founded in 1732 and approved by the pope in 1749. Today's efforts to rediscover the charism of religious congregations often turn into an intellectual exercise-- doing meticulous historical research and then making the findings available to members through seminars, vis-its to places associated with the founder, and so forth. Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR writes again from the University of Kelaniya; 454/9 Piachaud Gardens; Kandy 20000; Sri Lanka. 1_9.KO~ 62.3 2003 But maybe a question asked by St. Bernard needs to be asked again: "What kind of concept could human beings have of God [in their mind] unless they first had an image of God in their heart?" This implies that people can have almost no idea of God in their mind until they first choose to love God through the image of him they find in their heart. Similarly, today's "bearers of the charism" need to examine whether their hearts are where their founder's heart was. I suggest that this would call for a refinement in the religious congregation's method of research into its charism. A Note on Method The historical method seeks to learn what the founders were thinking when they established their reli-gious institute. One arrives at the origins of that thought and traces its progress and completion. Whatever con-clusions are drawn are shown to have existed in some way in the founder's consciousness. That is a legitimate method of historical research. But, regarding a charism, I suggest that one is deal-ing with where the founder's heart was. The founder first has a commitment in his heart. It is only later that he emphasizes from the Christian memory and tradition what fits in with that commitment. The elements he highlights and puts together are never the total Christian vision. The founder in his insight is an artist, and a cri-terion of good artists is that they highlight some partic-ular thing in such a way that the "universal" shines forth more brightly. The founder did not first create a system of thought (a theory) and then fit his project into it. Rather, he first "fell in love" with the "project" in front of him. How? Why? Because he saw and experienced certain events in the world and their impact on his life as a Christian. He responded and witnessed to them. He invited others to join his project so that the witness could Review for Religious continue. I argue that the priority is the heart. The head follows, making sure that the heart ("Love is blind!") is not chasing after vanity. Rediscovering an historical fact or some perspective of a former era is a valid study in itself and a contribu-tion to knowledge, but, in matters of love and a tradition of love, the issues are different. One needs to keep alive today (in a world that has obviously changed) the story of a particular heartfelt response to events of a former era. Witnessing anew with-out changing the story is what is called for. The successive bearers of the charism do not have a different insight from the founder's. The present bearers of the charism have to love with the same insight. This is not primarily propositional truth or even a crys-tal- clear concept. This love produces a kind of feeling (or instinct or sixth sense) for the insight of the founder. It brings about a virtuous disposition such as "justness" (not justice) and "chasteness" (not chastity) bring to what is just and chaste. Ask any Redemptorist and he will tell you that the aim of the congregation is to preach the gospel to those who are pastorally "most abandoned" or most in need. That is propositional truth. After one or several of such groups are identified, ministry to them is made a prior-ity in each unit of the institute. But the crux of the mat-ter is what "insight" or "virtuous disposition" operates in regard to this target group. Is the agenda for action set by the target group where they actually are, in their iden-tity and reality as Christians, or from the textbooks of theology? In my opinion and that of several close asso- One needs to keep alive today the story of a particular heartfelt response to events of a former era. 62.3 2003 Abeyasingha * Charism ciates, there is something wanting in the textbook approach. It does not seem to have captured the imagi-nation either of the majority in the institute or of the people to whom its ministry is offered. So the question is: How does one identify the original insight, foster a love and feeling for that insight, and then put the "story" into practice in our own day? Alphonsus ahead of and behind His Time Alphonsus in some ways was ahead of his time. He anticipated, for example, the development of doctrine in the church and required the members of the institute to take a vow to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, before it was defined in 1854. But in some ways he was also falling behind, defending positions that do not have theological defend-ers today. Looking at matters in which Alphonsus fell behind may illustrate his "marketing" strategy. It came to me as something of a shock to read his refutation of a work of Dom Leoluca Rolli, a priest of Calabria, titled II Novello Progetto, o sia Dissertazione del buon uso delle Litanie, ed altre preghiere (The New Project, or Dissertation on the Good Use of the Litanies and Other Prayers).~ This was in 1775, and the Redemptorist congregation had been started in 1732. Mphonsus takes up basically three issues against Rolli: (1) the popular belief that house of the Mary was brought by angels to Loretto, (2) some titles used in regard to Mary in the Litany of Loretto, and (3) the singing or recitation of that litany before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. As regards the popular belief about the house of Loretto, Rolli considered it an account that runs like a fable. In his refutation Alphonsus refers to popes who said that the house was taken by the ministry of angels to Loretto. He goes on to say that the denial of this belief Review for Religious is common among Protestant authors, in contrast to Catholic authors. Obviously, in the view of the rational-ists of the time, the argument was weak. Today's theolo-gians would not set much store on Alphonsus's reasoning. Rolli thought the titles Tower of David, Tower of Ivory, and House of Gold used in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin were affectations, using words without adequate meaning. He thought that Mirror of .Justice, Refuge of Sinners, Morning Star, and Gate of Heaven were titles that should refer only to .Jesus. Alphonsus's refutation was simply that people in the church, including priests and religious, saw no problem with using this litany and that popes had approved it. He adds, "They are all [expres-sions] of piety and tenderness towards our holy queen, that we may trust the more in her protection." Rolli considered it an abuse to chant the Litany of the Blessed Virgin before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. Alphonsus admits that prayers should be directed to.Jesus our Savior, for he alone is absolutely necessary as a ~neans of salvation. But he goes on to say that others are nec-essary, not by a necessity of means, but by moral neces-sity, to help our confidence the more. "In this light, when we chant the Litany of the Blessed Virgin before the Blessed Sacrament exposed, Mary is asked to present our prayers to Jesus Christ.''2 The Sense of Alphonsus's Arguments Today the views of Rolli are commonly accepted. Should Alphonsus even at that time have seen some value in Rolli's opinions and conceded some probability to them? Why did he reject them without qualification? My short answer is that Alphonsus realized how impor-tant the Catholic sense of identity was at the time. He knew the importance of consciously "being different." His "pastoral care" was rooted in "pastoral sensitivity" for that sense of identity. 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba ~° Charism Priests, after spending years studying th6ology, tend to apply theological categories to pastoral situations with little sensitivity for the people's felt needs. Pastoral care involves sensitivity to the human situation, the sensitiv-ity of a shepherd leading his flock to pasture. That sen-sitivity raises questions. What instincts and heartfelt feelings of the people should he be careful not to offend, and why? What needs changing, and why? These are delicate questions. In the 18th century, the very things Rolli criticized were popularly held. Even the popes had reflected them in their writings. Rolli wanted to set those beliefs aside in the name of rationality. Alphonsus had a different con-cern. His stand was with the people, the majority. From that standpoint he would consider whether the "logic of reason" was a pastoral basis to eliminate those devotional titles and whether dropping them might leave a gap in the "logic of life." What would take their place? Would people feel at home in their faith without holding on to such devotional patterns? He concluded that eliminat-ing such popular piety would be pastorally harmful. I suggest that questions like these would have arisen as part of the "pastoral sensitivity" of Alphonsus. Such ques-tions are important today as well. In other words, peo-ple, their own perceived identity, and their felt needs--rather than the latest theological opinions-- should influence ministry agendas, especially the min-istries' points of insertion. In Alphonsus's day many people who were devoted to the traditional Litany of Loretto would have been unable to understand the principles of rationalism. Alphonsus probably understood them, or at least had the gifts of mind to understand them. The only ones at that time who rejected the traditional litany and even ridiculed it were Protestants. Alphonsus would have known that for him to reject such devotional formulations would be Review for Religious understood by many as encouraging, at least implicitly, some close rapport with Protestants. Alphonsus's view was that the people (including himself, a highly emo-tional Neapolitan) would not feel at home without the support (emotional and otherwise) of such devotions and prayers. That would confuse ordinary people. He had no adequate substitute to offer. It would have been like advocating email in Asia in the 1980s. Few Asians even knew of email's existence, and the infrastructure for it was not in place. In the 2000s the situation in Asia is dif-ferent. What Alphonsus hoped to achieve by his unquali-fied rejection of Rolli's ideas was a communication of truth (pastoral care) that would be attractive (pastoral sensitivity) to their sense of identity as individual believ-ers and as a community. He wanted to communicate, not pure speculative truth, but existential truth related to them as persons. Alphonsus wanted to touch ordinary people where they happened to be. To be touched in this way could turn out to be a moment of truth for peo-ple. Pastoral sensitivity finds a way to lead people to an encounter with truth. Truth has its way of cutting across the "lie" by which people sometimes try to live. The fol-lowing passage from a novel by Andrew Greeley explains what I mean. "Ellen's worst sin was against Ellen." Ellen is on her knees confessing to a priest named Kevin. Both of them have known each other for many years, and Kevin's family has assisted Ellen financially during a period of need. She says she has been away from the sacraments for ten years, and she lists her many sins. After she finishes, Kevin (who is the novel's narrator) speaks. "I'm still waiting for the real sin, the only sin," I said. 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Charism She [Ellen] tilted her head. "I've told every-thing." "You haven't told the one important thing. You were mad at God and mad at the church and pretended for a long time you could get away from both." "I don't want to talk about it," she said. "Then no absolution," I said firmly. She tugged her hand to free it. I wasn't ¯ going to let it go. "Don't you have an ounce of compassion in that ice-cold soul of yours?" "If you want compassion, Ellen, go to your husband or have him recommend a psychia-trist who will listen sympathetically. If you want absolution, don't play games." She stopped tugging. We were quiet for a long time. "That's the only one that does matter, isn't it?" she said. "All right, Kevin, I'll say it, and you'll have to mop up the tears on this hard floor of yours. I blamed the church and God for things that were inside me and my family. I focused on all the ugly things and forgot about Father Conroy and Sister Caroline and first Communion and May crownings and High Club dances and midnight Mass and all those wonderful things that I love so much. I gave them all up because I was angry. I blamed the church for Tim's death. I loved him so much. I couldn't save him, and I thought the church should have saved him. Even when doing it, I knew I was wrong and that someday I'd be kneeling on the floor before you and pleading to be let back in." "And now you have done it," I said . She put her head against my knee and wept. Review for Religious Then she gathered herself together and said, "So Ellen's worst sin was against Ellen.-3 "Ellen's worst sin was against Ellen" is not humanism. A foundational element of Pope John Paul's teaching is that "man is the way of the church." But "man" must be understood in terms of the man, Jesus Christ. Salvation is when the individual lets Jesus Christ judge his life and values ("wanting absolu-tion"). Humanism is when people reformulate Jesus in their own image and like-ness ("playing games"). The former course is an expansion, an openness to the Infinite; the latter is a reduction of Jesus to the measure of one's own finiteness. The former is redemptive; the latter is ratio-nalization and self-justification: narcissism. I suggest that the former is where the charism of a religious institute is centered; the latter is what may be called "pastoral opportunism." Pastoral sensitivity varies according to differences in the charisms of various institutes. ¯ Playing Games or Wanting Absolution? "If you want compassion, go to your husband .I.f. you want absolution, don't play games." How true! How easily the two are confused! "Ellen's worst sin was against Ellen"--that is different. The enumeration of one's sins is an objective matter, but the moment of conversion is existential, the realization that "I have sinned. I will go back to my Father. That is¯ where I am at home; in fact, I have nowhere else to go" (see Lk 15:11-31). Human beings need saving. All creation shares in the salvation of the human. "Creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord, but because of the one who subjected it in hope that creation itself would be set free from slav- 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Charism ery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rm 8:19-20). There is nothing wrong with compassion, but, in the perspective of absolution (existential salvation, redemp-tion today), there has to be more than compassion on the part of the pastor. The link between compassion and salvation is naming the game and discovering one's iden-tity in commitment and relationship to oneself, one's fellow human beings, and God. In the scene quoted above, Ellen has known Kevin for years and has experienced the generosity of his fam-ily. But as pastor he brings her to realize the injustice she is doing to herself. In that discovery and realization, she discovers the church community she has abandoned and God, who is present in that community. She sees that she is always welcome to the church and to the peo-ple and things she admits she loves: Father Conroy, Sister Caroline, May crownings, dances, and so forth. It is the entire mixture of ritual, imagery, and flesh-and-blood community that makes her feel at home. And yet we know that none of these are a hundred percent per-fect. Such is the church. What needs to be preserved for the individual in the church and for the church as a community is this feeling of being at home. In that setting people realize their true human and Christian identity. They do not blame the church and God "for things that were inside me and my family." Feeling at home does not mean complacency. To all--believers and unbelievers--the church must preach faith and conversion (see Sacrosanctum concilium, §9). Permitting people to "play games" and evade their call to conversion is not part of its mission. The Clarification of Pastoral Sensitivity Pastoral sensitivity varies according to differences in the charisms of various institutes. Is a given charism Review for Religious meant to function from the top down or from the bot-tom up? The top-down function is a way of exhibiting some transcendental value. Thus does a contemplative order bear witness to God's transcendence in any envi-ronment. In contrast, a charism that functions from the bottom up takes people where they are and leads them higher. Alphonsus's charism is certainly bottom-up. Redemptorist pastoral sensitivity, therefore, must be alert to where people actually are and concerned with them in their situation. The concrete situation determines the charism's "point of insertion" and the subsequent agenda. Does theology have a role in this agenda, and, if so, what is that role? First, it needs to be said that what unites the Christian community is faith, not theology. Pastoral care, first and foremost, contributes to growth in faith. Pastoral care is an art, discerning how faith func-tions in this person and this situation and then doing with skill whatever contributes to the growth of that faith. Theology, of course, does have a role in pastoral care. Years of formation in the science of theology provide principles for the art of pastoral care. Theology states and clarifies the goal of the Christian journey. Newman says: "Theology begins, as its name denotes, not with any sensible facts, phenomena, or results, not with nature at all, but with the Author of nature--with the one invis-ible, unapproachable Cause and Source of all things. It begins at the other end of knowledge, and is occupied, not with the finite, but the Infinite. It unfolds and sys-tematizes what he himself has told us of himself; of his nature, his attributes, his will, and his acts.''4 In this pro-cess of theology, logic is important, but, as Newman says, "logic does not really prove; it enables us to join issue with others; it suggests ideas; it opens views; it maps out for us the lines of thought; it verifies nega-tively; it determines when differences of opinions are 62.3 2003 Abeyasingha ¯ Charism Pastoral care is not a matter of saying and doing what pleases the majority. hopeless; and when and how far conclusions are proba-ble; but for genuine proof in concrete matter we require an organon more delicate, versatile, and elastic than ver-bal argumentation.''s Theology and pastoral care can enrich each other, but how does that work? In pastoral care the starting point is the finite: this individual, this situation. More than strict logic, there needs to be a "clinical sense." What "symptoms" does one perceive? Are there inter-connections? What is the diagnosis, and what treatments are possible? What treatment seems best? How is faith func-tioning here? What prin-ciples operate, however obscured they may be by seeming illogicality? Pas-toral care, in this perspective, is art and poetry. Artists have "insights" and then present them, using the best subject matter and materials and techniques known to them. In their presentations the artists and their glimpses and visions (all finite) that were the starting point rec-ognize themselves as called to grow towards the Infinite. What Rolli glimpsed in the Litany of Loretto were defects--they were indeed defects in the light of a the-ology influenced by rationalism. His solution was to eliminate them. The consequences of doing so were not his concern. I would suggest that Alphonsus's pastoral insight was that he saw how God operated and how pop-ular piety, defective though it was, was indeed express-ing faith in God. His pastoral sensitivity saw the danger of eliminating without substituting. He saw the possi-bility of initiating growth from "within." Pastoral care is not a matter of saying and doing what pleases the majority. That would be pastoral oppor- Review for Religious tunism. Pastoral care leads to an encounter with truth. Hence it is the pastor's function to uncover the truth that exists in what people do and then lead them beyond it. There is truth even in the fables, myths, and legends of popular piety. As Newman says, "fables are economies or accommodations, being truths and principles cast into that form in which they will be most vividly recognized; ¯. Again, mythical representations, at least in their bet-ter form, may be considered facts or narratives, untrue, but like the truth, intended to bring out the action of some principle, point of character, and the like. For instance, the tradition that St. Ignatius [of Antioch] was the child whom our Lord took in his arms, may be unfounded; but it realizes to us his special relation to Christ and his apostles, with a keenness peculiar to itself. The same remark may be made upon certain narratives of martyrdoms, or of the details of such narratives, or of certain alleged miracles, or heroic acts, or speeches, all of which are the spontaneous produce of religious feel-ing under imperfect knowledge. If the alleged facts did not occur, they ought to have occurred (if I may so speak); they are such as might have occurred, and would have occurred, under circumstances . Many a theory or view of things, on which an institution is founded, or a party held together, is of the same kind.''6 Acknowledging Identity in Affirmation of Difference At no point does Alphonsus say that the truth of the fables of popular piety are truths of faith or that they are the core of Christian faith. Alphonsus was clear in his own theological principles. He asserted that Jesus is the only mediator necessary by necessity of means¯ But he also knew that, in actual day-to-day living, people accepted other mediators as well, and so he speaks of them as a moral necessity. In the sphere of religion, Maryi_9.tLl__ 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Charism is a secondary mediator. That was the situation--as it stood with its imperfect and accommodated knowledge. As pastor he would present a picture of Mary and the saints as mediators on a different level from Jesus. He would insist that her primary function is to lead us to Jesus. On a secondary level she helps us in our imperfect situation by presenting our prayers to Jesus, increasing our confidence, and so forth. Alphonsus recognized that Catholic identity at that time included being different from Protestants and ratio-nalists. At that time Catholics honored Mary in ways that could be assessed rationally as exaggerated and imperfect--and which brought on ridicule from Protestants and rationalists. To seem to condone their ridicule would lessen their identity (their "being differ-ent") and tantamount to joining them. It was part of Catholic identity, of feeling at home, to retain the devo-tion as it was traditionally practiced. Alphonsus therefore rejects the rational and theologically assimilable posi-tions of Rolli. (Today Rolli's views are part of the Catholic tradition and Catholic identity. It was not so in the 18th century, and could not have been.) Alphonsus had to deal with the theological doctrine that acts of devotion performed by one who was not in the state of grace did not avail for salvation. He could not deny this; it was the common doctrine. So he searched at the human level for the benefits of such devotion. He says (with Thomas Aquinas and Robert Bellarmine) that, although such acts of devotion do not in themselves jus-tify, they at least dispose sinners to obtain justification through the merits of Mary and the saints. He points out at least three possible benefits that could accrue to sinners from such devotion: making them accustomed to good works, obtaining for them temporal favors, and disposing them to receive grace. In other words, sinners who practice devotion to Mary have a better chance of Review for Religious cooperating with grace and being justified than sinners who do not have such devotion. Acknowledging Identity and Moving Forward For Alphonsus, acknowledging identity through dif-ference was the beginning, not the end, of pastoral care. He wished to lead people to deeper understanding of their faith, but always worked first on their hearts, their emotions. His Glories of Mary is a com-mentary on the "Hail Holy Queen," a prayer that ratio-nalists ridiculed. That prayer gave him a framework for his pastoral strategy. He was not merely justifying popular devotion to Mary, but also inserting elements that would help the pray-er grow in faith. As Alphonsus saw it, the prayer combined contrasts (queen/mother; life/banished children). It abounded with words that evoke intense emotion. The climax of the prayer is an accurate theological description of what Christian life is: "After this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus." He makes Jesus the final goal of conversion. Until that goal is reached, even the slightest devotion to Mary, if carried through with perse-verance, gives the sinner hope. She becomes his patron, and exalted patronage was a well-known practice. In The Glories of Mary, Alphonsus takes the "Hail, Holy Queen" as it is and plays on the contrasts that are brought together in addressing Mary. "Queen" evokes power, while "mother" evokes love. Mary nurtures "life," even though our lives are precarious because of the ban-ishment caused by sin. These contrasts do not hold For Alphonsus, acknowledging identity through difference was the beginning, not the end, of pastoral care. 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba * Charism together in ordinary life. As sinners look to Mary as mother, affections of love, tenderness, and confidence are bound to override those of fear, dread, and punishment associated with "queen." Gradually people, especially the sinful and the desperate, would feel themselves more com-fortable and at home with the softer images (mother, life) rather than the harsher ones (power, banishment). His writing style is not pedantic; it is popular. He persuades, he encourages, he appeals. He repeats and exaggerates. He points out the benefits of simple acts (such as reciting a "Hail, Mary" every day) even for peo-ple who have not broken with their life of sin. He knows that the people he is writing for are an emotional peo-ple. He tries to bring reason to bear on their emotions. He does this by channeling their emotions towards two goals, sorrow and love. After reminding readers that God has done much by giving them Mary to be their mother, he asks what they have done. In various ways they have rejected her, and so they are called to sorrow and repen-tance and to expressing grateful love to God and to his mother, God's gift to them. The argument is not spec-ulative. It is an effort to have right reason (in the form of practical repentance and love) control any exagger-ated emotion in Marian devotion. Alphonsus provides a range of imagery drawn from people's ordinary life: Mary as midwife, shepherdess, and advocate. Such imagery is found even more in his poems, songs, and paintings. People could choose whatever image suited them, but, no matter what they chose, each image was mediatory, with Mary between the people and Jesus. Mary was the bridge. The Vatican's "Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy" (2002) treats devotion to Mary much as Alphonsus did.7 Alphonsus's expression is more laden with emotion. He wanted to lead people on a journey on which they would become attached to Christ in love. In "mar- Review for Religious keting" Alphonsus's insight, in bringing his Catholic charism to people of today, pastoral sensitivity needs to start where they are--start with what they consider their identity--and then, in the exercise of pastoral care, move them beyond it. This would be marketing, under a new and different label and brand name, the same product as Alphonsus "marketed" in his day. Is this "marketing" idea likely to convince the bearers of the Alphonsian charism today and to "work" for the people to whom their min-istry extends? A trial run may be worthwhile. I suggest that this approach is not altogether a "dream." A recent biography of Andrei Sakharov shows his journey from being a scientist who supported the Soviet system to being a spokesman for human rights.8 As a scientist he asked questions about physical nature and tested hypotheses, looking for reliable evidence. As a Russian he "believed that the Soviet state represented a breakthrough into the future." When he saw the deaths caused by the radioactive fallout from the tests he directed in 1955, he began to ask questions about politics the same way he had always asked questions about physical nature. This approach quickly made him a dissident. The rest of his life is too well known for repetition here. It was not a head-on attack on his ideology that changed him. The point of change was his own training, in which he was at home. At that point something new inserted itself: the deaths caused by his own experiments. This is a moral parable of change from within, somebne moving from the laboratory into action in the public arena, experiencing a martyrdom (witnessing and suffering), and "rising again." Can the charism of a religious institute function to effect change from within, meeting people where they are and progressing from there? Perhaps it can. That is the hope implied in being pastorally sensitive (to where people's hearts are) before striving to inculcate deeper and truer propositional knowledge. 62.3 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Charism Notes ' Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, Breve rispbsta alla stravagante riforma intentata dall'abbate Rolli contraria alia piet~ dovuta verso la divina Madre (written in 1775). http:// 2 It is interesting that the Congregations for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, "Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines" (9 April 2002), §165, states that, in the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the faithful ought to be "encour-aged to use the Scriptures" and "suitable hymns and prayers" and spend some time in "silent prayer and reflection. Thus they will grad-ually get the idea that they ought not use devotional practices in honor of the Virgin Mary and the saints during exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Given Mary's close relationship with Christ, however, the rosary, with its meditation on the mysteries of the incarnation and redemption, could help give the prayer a Christological orientation." Here I seem to detect that, although praying the rosary during ado-ration of the Blessed Sacrament is not rejected, neither is it considered the ideal. It seems to be considered an accommodation ("pastoral sen-sitivity") to where people are, with a view to leading them beyond it (with "pastoral care"). The burden of this article is to set the charism of an apostolically oriented religious institute in this perspective. 3 Andrew M. Greeley, The Cardinal Sins (New York: Warner Books, 1981), pp. 208-210. 4John Henry Newman, "Christianity and Physical Science," in The ldea of a University (Garden City: Doubleday Image, 1959), p. 395. s John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent (Garden City: Doubleday Image, 1955), chap. 8, p. 217. 6 John Henry Newman, "The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine" (Sermon XV, Preached on the Purification, 1843), in Newman's University Sermons: FiJ%en Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford, 1826-43 (London: SPCK, 1970), §35. 7 "Popular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is an important and universal ecclesial phenomenon. Its expressions are multifarious and its motivation is very profound, deriving as it does from the People of God's faith in, and love for, Christ the Redeemer of the human race and from an awareness of the salvific mission that God entrusted to Mary of Nazareth, because of which she is mother not only of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but also of all people in the order of grace" (§183). 8 Richard Lourie, Sakbarov: A Biography (Hanover, New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 2002). Review for Religious ERNEST E. LARKIN John of the Cross's Message for Today The focus of St. John of the Cross is the call to contemplation. Vatican Council ~I left no doubt about the universal call to holiness; the clergy, the laity, and religious are all called to the same high degree of union with God. John of the Cross locates that perfection in contemplation. Vatican II emphasized life in this world. It called Christians out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of worldly existence. Lay people particularly were to work for the betterment of humanity through science, politics, education, economics, and the professions. Such work is part of the Christian vocation; moreover, for Christians the motivation and animation for doing the work is the same in the marketplace and the family as it is in the cloister. The source is a loving relationship with the Trinity. This is the holiness at the heart of every vocation. Call it love, call it contemplation--it is the same Ernest E. Larkin OCarm wrote "Desert Spirituality" for our JuDy-August 2002 issue. His address remains Kino Institute; 1224 East Northern; Phoenix, Arizona 85020. 62.3 2003 biblical reality of "knowing .you, the only true God, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ" (Jn 17:3) or, in another formulation, "knowing Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship in his sufferings" (Ph 3:10). It is loving knowledge, for contemplation is knowledge by way of love. It is what St. Th~r~se called her vocation, to be "love at the heart of the church." In the lapidary formula of St. Paul, contemplation is the excellence of "faith expressing itself through love" (Ga 5:6). Contemplative prayer and contemplation are no longer to be seen as the domain of an elitist group. People in all sectors of church life and lay life are claiming their birthright and practicing contemplative prayer every day. John of the Cross can be their guide. In this paper I want to indicate how contemporary forms of contemplative prayer, specifically centering prayer and Christian Meditation, and the Jesus Prayer, fit into John's synthesis. I will first present a sketch of his teaching on the beginnings of contemplation and then relate this doctrine to the contemporary movements. Contemplation, according to John of the Cross Faith as "the only proximate and proportionate means to union with God" runs like a mantra through the works of John of the Cross. Loving faith, shown in word and deed, is the only road to God. Every act of faith, however small, is a ray of light piercing the darkness in one's consciousness. It is the light of Christ shining through. By acts of faith we let Christ in, we allow the Spirit to form Christ in our very being. Of course, he is always there in the depths of our spirit, in "the innermost chamber of our inner castle, the unscathed center of our being, where only the true God dwells.''~ But he is dormant there until we awaken him through activated faith. Our individual, discrete acts of faith are like the dots of light on a television screen. Multiply them, and the Review for Religious screen is fully illuminated. The soul is like the television screen: on it the dots of faith coalesce to form the image of Christ, fulfilling the words of St. Paul: "I live now, no longer I, Christ lives in me." Thus are we configured to Christ. The rest of the quotation is equally important: "I still have my human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God" (Ga 2:20). Our faith life brings purity of heart, the condition for this configuration. We are pure of heart to the extent that we live by faith. Purity of heart is not just chastity; it is all the virtues ordered and integrated in our being, giving us an openness to the indwelling God. In early stages God meets us in our rational minds, in our disparate thoughts and image~ and will acts. These are so many actual graces. When purity of heart is more perfect, we enter more deeply into ourselves at the spirit level where God reveals himself in a certain wholeness--in contemplation. "Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God." "Seeing God" occurs in holy thoughts and desires and more fully in contemplation. The metaphor in John of the Cross that corresponds to the television screen is the window pane that lets in the sun. When the window is clean, the sun comes through without any obstruction: the sun and the glass are like one same thing (Ascent 2.5.6). This is a beautiful image of purity of heart, of the entry of God. When all our desires are ordered by faith, we are transparent to God's indwelling. At first God comes to us in images and concepts, facsimiles and metaphors. When the soul is truly pure, that is to say, when it is free and detached and faith-filled, God comes in contemplation as Gracious Mystery, in his inscrutable reality. Our response then is We are pure of heart to the extent that we live by faith. 62.3 2003 Larkin ¯ John of the Cross's Message for Today simply a yes to this gift, resting in the presence, experiencing communion. Communion (koinonia, communio) is being one with God by participation in a unitive, nondualistic experience. Contemplation is the experience of communion. The experience of contemplation is ineffable: it cannot be put into words. We can have feelings about God, and they are sensible consolations or spiritual affections. Feelings are resonances of the experience of God. They are moments of enthusiasm or dis-couragement, joy or sorrow. They are secondary and accidental to the basic contemplative experience of presence and communion, which is incommunicable. The contact with God is the original experience of the theological virtues, whereas the emotional or spiritual resonances are the overflow. Often we have no assurance that we are experiencing the presence of God in contemplation other than blind faith. Feelings are ambiguous and need to be discerned. The act of contemplation is a return to the subject, a turning back on one's self in faith and love. It is moving from the Christ for us, who is objective and out in front of us, so to speak, to the Christ within us, who has become one with us. Thus contemplation is resting in the fruit of one's labor and search; it is the fruition of one's new, transformed self. The whole process is "putting on the Lord Jesus Christ," which begins with one's desires, purifying old ones and developing new ones one by one, and ends in the contemplative act of communion, when two things become one in participatory knowledge and love. This is nondualistic thinking, like the advaita of Eastern religions. God and the soul are united in a oneness that is not pantheistic, but pan-en-theistic. Communion is the common denominator of all the modes of contemplation, whether ordinary or extraordinary, active or passive, acquired or infused. Review for Religious Communion grows gradually as we are transformed in God. The one obstacle to our experiencing our .oneness with God is our unredeemed self, which is our false self or egoic self. Specifically, this bad self is our disordered desires. They are our attachments, an innocuous word better translated in our idiom as addictions and illusions. These are the persons and things and mindsets that control us, distort our thinking, and move us in the wrong direction. We deal with them by the two-pronged attack of getting to know Jesus better (so as to perceive his attractiveness) and letting go of competitive desires. There are two principles here, knowing Jesus and letting go. They are the two directives set down in the strongest language by John of the Cross as the necessary and sufficient program for holiness (Ascent 1.13.3-4). The strategy is to work on habitual, deliberate failings one by one until God negates them all in one sweep by leading a person into the "dark night." At that time one loses the attraction and pleasure in anything other than God. In John of the Cross, the gift of initial infused contemplation is the cause of this state. The budding contemplative is counseled to stop discursive activity, embrace the emptiness, and be present in loving attention to God, who is "infusing" light and love. At first the experience is distressful, because one fears she has lost God and everything else. The infused light and love are too subtle to be recognized. The landmarks of the old spiritual journey are gone: God is no longer available, 6ne cannot pray in the old ways, the excitement of ministry goes dead, and there is a malaise about everything. The only positive quality is an ache for God, which is aggravated by the fear of having lost the Beloved. Eventually one becomes comfortable with this new way of relating to God, and peace and serenity replace the anxiety. 62.3 2003 Larkin ¯ John of the Cross's Message for Today The dark night in general is the whole spiritual journey from beginning to end. Thus in John of the Cross the ascetical efforts that begin the journey to divine union do not complete the task. The dark night is needed for that. Why? Because our devious human nature, one's false self, goes underground into the unconscious and blocks a person's surrender to God in disguised ways. Jungian psychology calls the buried false self the shadow. It is made up of the capital sins, like lust or pride; in pious people these weaknesses take on forms of pseudo-piety that are as destructive as the crass expressions. Centuries before Jung, John was an expert on uncovering the shadow or dark side of human nature. His teaching is that only God can heal the shadow at its roots. God does this, not by "fixing" it, much less removing it, but by helping us confront and accept it and then move on to total surrender to God. One of John's great contributions is this teaching on the dark night. The dark night in general is the whole spiritual journey from beginning to end; the dark night under consideration here is one phase of the purification process, and is called the passive dark night of the senses. The new knowledge and love that are pure gift from God at this point (and called in-fused contemPlation) reconfigure the spiritual life. Inner worldly goods all lose their appeal. One sees them in their truth, and in comparison with God (Ascent 1.4; 3.20.2), and so they recede into irrelevance. At the same time God is no longer available in the cozy relationship of the past. The new knowledge and love of God is camouflaged and not knowledge in the usual Review for Religious sense, since it is apophatic, that is, knowing by unknowing. Nothing is felt by the senses, and the action of God is too subtle to be recognized. The result is ennui and accidie. John of the Cross reassures the beleaguered soul that the new state is an advance. The darkness is from God. John gives signs to authenticate the true grace from counterfeits. They are persistent dryness, the inability to function in the old ways, and the ache for God. Something new is going on. God is present in the scary silence. The person must relax and let God take over. Such is the dark tunnel of beginning infused contemplation. The new way of relating is communion. Instead of 'T' and "Thou" outside one another, the experience is "we" or "us." Mystics revel in this intimacy. It is at-one-ness with God. Such is the experience of this and every other kind of contemplation. It is in contrast to rational thinking about an object out in front. This is the way to just be-ing, participating in one life together, "abiding in Christ and Christ abiding in the person" (see Jn 15:5). Contemplation happens in prayer, in ministry, and in human relationships. It is a fine-tuning of the state of grace. It happens when childish babbling and chatting with God give way to silence. Only silence can handle the new knowledge and love. The silence may disconcert and cause anxiety, because nothing seems to be going on and one fears the emptiness. In fact, a great deal is going on, and the soul is undergoing a deeper purification and illumination. John tells the person to stay quiet, at attention. This blessed state is the proximate objective of the beginner in meditation. In John's view it may take a year or so to reach it.2 In my experience the apprenticeship is longer. It may take several years before one moves beyond discursive meditation into this prayer of silence. 62.3 2003 Larkin * John of the Cross's Message for Today Contemplation Today But something different is happening on the contemplative landscape today. Instead of working for years with discursive meditation and perhaps not entering " the dark night of the senses at all, people in all walks of life are choosing to practice a new kind of contemplative prayer. The contemporary practice is a new category and not the same as the contemplative prayer and contemplation of John of the Cross. For him these two terms are synonymous and always describe the absolutely free gift of infused contemplation. Contemplative prayer today is not discursive meditation, nor is it per se infused contemplation. It is an intermediary between meditation and contemplation. Centering prayer, Christian Meditation, and the Jesus Prayer cultivate silence and presence to God. In John's terminology these forms belong to meditation, since the prayer is active, personally chosen, and self-directed. But they are a kind of contemplation, because they are silent, without words or images or discursive movement from point to point. They are a species of contemplation, because they are communion with the Trinity. Thousands of people are practicing this self-initiated contemplative prayer. They are not forced into this way of relating to God; they choose it. They enter into deliberate and wordless silence. Instead of being busy inquiring, analyzing, and making multiple acts of the affections, they remain present to the divine indwelling in simple awareness and attention to the gift of grace within. This form of prayer is on the growing edge of Christian life. I believe that it is a gift to the church at this point in history. There is a widespread conviction that we do not have to wait until we are forced into the silence. We can choose it and foster it, and a fruitful kind of prayer results. All our other prayer, such as the liturgy and lectio divina, and our apostolic action and for Religious community relationships as well, are affected by this entering within. We come at life from a deeper level. All we need is an "open mind and open heart" to welcome the God hidden in the depths of our souls. This prayer is simply presence, silence, encounter beyond words. The challenge in this kind of prayer is to maintain the silence, to keep focused on the presence of God. The three forms under consideration use a word or a phrase as a way of maintaining attention. Centering prayer uses a holy word like Abba or Jesus to express one's consent to the divine presence and renew one's presence to God; the word is repeated as often as it is needed. Christian Meditation and the Jesus Prayer use the sacred word as a mantra, that is, a phrase repeated throughout the prayer. The usual mantra in Christian Meditation is the Aramaic word "maranatha," which means "Come, Lord." It is a greeting found in the New Testament. The mantra of the Jesus Prayer is the words "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." You will not find these prayer forms in the writings of John of the Cross. The architects of these prayer disciplines do not presume the presence of infused contemplation, though they hope that the practice will lead there. John Main maintained that Christian Meditation was a traditional form of meditation in the medieval church. Actually he was not a stickler about terminology or theological distinctions; he saw meditation, contemplation, and contemplative prayer as synonyms. The method of meditation taught by John of the Cross may well have been along the lines of John Main. Beginners were to "ponder a divine mystery.''3 A common way of doing that in early monasticism was to repeat