Suchergebnisse

Issue 38.6 of the Review for Religious, 1979. ; I Will Be--Who I Am Traveling Light in Community: The Oratory St, Teresa, Contemplation and the Humanity of Christ Volume 38 Number 6 November 1979 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS (ISSN 0034-639X), published bi-monthly (every two months), is edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Department of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428:3601 Lindell Blvd.: St. Louis, MO 63108. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute: St. Louis, Missouri. © 1979 By REVIEW FOR REI.IGIOUS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. Single copies: $2.00. Subscription U.S.A.: $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 November, 1979 Volume 38 Number 6 Correspondence with the editor and the associate editors, manuscripts and books for review should be sent to REVIEW FOR 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 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. Liturgical Spirituality Of Poets, Prophets and the Word Janet Schlichting, O.P. Sister Janet resides at 1314 West Market Street, Akron, OH 44313. The poet Rilke writes, "'For the sake of a few lines, one must see many cities, men and things." He then sets forth a long list of life experiences that will enrich Our treasury of memories, concluding, "Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves--not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them."' Essential to the poet is the perceiving and savoring of life experience. So also is the turning to blood of what is perceived, and the "rare hour" when from that lifeblood springs forth a new word. The life experiences, the turn-ing to blood, the arising and going fortfi--these realities give to poetry its heart. It might also be suggested that these same three realities intertwine to give to prophecy its power and to ChristianitY, its truth. Whether we be poets or prophets or Christians, our call is to communicate. Those moments in which we express our identity are initiated, carried and concluded by the power of word. To all of us are entrusted words. To be human is to have words. Words are the creators and determiners and definers of our life situations. We have words to tell about ourselves, t6 build relationships, to express the meanings ' The Notebooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1949). 801 802 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 and memories and hopes of our lives. Words are human but they are not to be taken for granted. Words are sacred because they are the means by which we grow, and by which we, in turn, nurture growth in others. Sharing with one another our feelings and understandings, we tell one another of new possibilities. Words are tools for building the human community, for forging our future. Words are as resilient as the human spirit that calls them to be. Thus, to have words is to have immense power. To have words is to bear a sacred trust. The most life-giving words are, in Karl Rahner's terms, "primordial words.''~ When a word breaks open reality for us, giving us new understand-ing and new vision, it is a primordial word. When it springs from the heart, when it whispers something of everything, and renders the pulse of infinity somehow available to us, its speaker is apoet--a poet made when the word is spoken. When the word comes howling out of the wilderness, cracking the veneer of our lives, illumining in the suddenness of lightning a raw and throb-bing truth, we have heard a prophet--a prophet made when the word is" spoken. Both poetry and prophecy are entrusted to Christians. They are two edges of the same sword, cutting through to reality. The one comes to birth in the blood within, arising and going forth. The other takes by storm, a power from where the person does not know, only that to speak is a necessity and not to speak is a torment: Woe to me if 1 do not preach the Gospel! (1 Co 9:16). Both poetry and prophecy are entrusted to Christians because a Word has been addressed to them: the Word of redeeming love spoken by the Father in Christ Jesus. We gather to hear and to celebrate this word in liturgical prayer. It is made known to us in and for our particular situation and now. The words 1 have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. (Jn 6:63). If you make my word your home., you will learn the truth and the truth shall make you free (Jn 8:32). When we speak of liturgical spirituality, we speak of three things: the grasping of life, the forging of identity and the going forth--the tasks of poets, prophets and every Christian. One task comes with us to worship; one occurs at worship; one follows worship. The primary truth that these activ-ities together express is the intimate welding of liturgy and life. The first concern of a liturgical spirituality is the way in which we take hold of life, the way we are disposed to our world. For, as the parable 2"Priest and Poet," Theologicallnvestigations HI (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1967), p. 294. Liturgical Spirituality: of Poets, Prophets and the Word / 803 reminds us, the Word is like a seed. It must find a home. It must fall on good ground, that "good ground" of our lives which we bring with us to worship. And so we are called to question ourselves. Do we bring eyes to see and ears to hear? Do we bring our nights and days, our hungerings and thirstings, our growings, our rejoicings, our failings? Do we bring our brothers and sisters? Do we bring tax collectors and sinners? Do we bring hearts willing to be converted? Liturgy concerns itself with appropriating all of these: the gleaming and the tarnished; the cabbages and the kings; taking it all in--as the poet must do "for the sake of a few lines"--and affirming it. We do not affirm lightly or passively. A.ffirmation goes far beyond acceptance and is more than approval. To affirm, I must grasp hold of and ponder, and thereby allow my life experiences to turn to "blood within." The ability to affirm depends upon a sacramental understanding of human life. To view life sacramentally is to find holiness present in the everyday world of creation and human relationships, in the joys and sorrows and in the decisions placed before us, to realize our relatedness to one another and to the whole groaning creation. To view life sacramentally is to be able to find the glory of the Lord glim-mering, the Kingdom of God bubbling up in the goodness of a Samaritan to a beaten traveler and in the love of the father for his errant son. It is to have a care for mustard seeds and widows' mites, and to know the importance of yeast. '~ To view life sacramentally is not to deny pain and darkness, nor the con-tradictions we find within ourselves, nor our relentless pattern of fail-ure- nor the subtle weaving of sin into our social structures. These, too, are to be taken hold of in the sure hope that amid the terror of the storm at sea, and under the shadow of the cross, we can yet proclaim the triumph of life-over- death and love-over-hatred in the reign of God begun in Christ Jesus. What is this event called worship? The event called worship is the moment when Christians are made and ¢vhen they are made again into prophets and poets. It is a moment when we gather in response to the Word that calls us together, when we bring the ground we have prepared that the seed of the Word m.ay fall upon it; when, in the simple sharing of common things--the gifts of creation, we praise and we thank and we make memorial of the saving action of the Lord Jesus; when our eyes and ears and minds and hearts are again opened to the memory and presence and hope that undergird our lives. It is a moment--a "most rare hour"--when the Kingdom of God breaks in upon us and comforts and confronts us, consoles us and disturbs us, strengthens us, energizes us, and forges in and among usa new identity. It is a moment when we hear and see and taste what we are, and, when reaffirmed in our identity, given again a memory and a hope, we together become again --and more--the Body of Christ. It is a time, a "most rare hour" when, with the Word in our hearts and in ~104 / Review for Religious, l/olume 38, 1979/6 our mouths, we are sent forth to share what we have seen and heard and tasted. My word is not my own: it is the word of the one who sent me (Jn 14:24). Commissioned again as prophets and poets, Christians are entrusted with the Word. It is the nature of the Word to arise and go forth. There is no being called together without the being sent forth. Liturgy is inseparable from life. For the lot of us, the existential experience of worship is somewhat less than that described here. The way we have taken hold of our lives is not wholly affirming, the view we have of life is not always that it is "gift." The ground we present for the seed of the Word is not always too well prepared. In these and in other small ways the quality of our worship is compromised. Oh, we sing our "alleluias"; we say our "amens"; and yet we know well that it would be'a rare moment indeed for us to come bursting forth from worship proclaiming "The Kingdom of God is breaking in upon us!" And yet, that is precisely our commission: to proclaim to the world, "Behold your God!" It is a hard thing, this call. We find here the truth of our Christianity. It is not about privilege but about service and responsibility. And, faced with the utter ordinariness of people and problems, we drag our feet. On-again, off-again poets, part-time prophets. It is hard, preaching this Word entrusted to us, We have not just met the Risen Lord in the garden, so quite possibly we do not come running with his smile still warm upon us. We do not come pounding down the stairs from some upper room with the roar of wind still in our ears. And yet--our God has touched us. Still, in less dramatic ways we are called and sent, in less dramatic ways we can and do speak words of conversion and reconciliation. When the power behind our words is love, when the center from which our words come is a repentant heart, then our words can be a call to faith for others. So daily we arise and go forth: to love and to serve and to forgive; to wit-ness to the Kingdom; to confront our worl~ with its need of salvation; to reach out around us; to build Christ's Body; to strain forward to the fulfill-ment of God's promises. Liturgical spirituality is about becoming poets and prophets. It is about daily living with openness to the Lord's action in our lives. It is about the "turning to blood within us," the affirming of experiences and the forging of our identity in worship, where we gather to meet the Lord in word and sacra-ment. And it is about our going forth, entrusted with the Word. We are ordinary people with ordinary words. Yet, as erratic and clumsy as our speakings may be, we know this: God himself chose the.way of ordi-nary human flesh to make himself known to us. He is accessible to us in our sharings of faith with one another. This is what we proclaim to you: What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have looked upon and our hands have touched--we speak of the Word of Life. Liturgical Spiritut What we have seen and heard we (1 Jn 1:1,3). And with the apostle Paul (ity: of Poets, Prophets and the Word / 805 ~roclaim to you, so that you may share life with us ve give him glory, ¯ . . whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. (Ep 3:20). whose power at work in us can make us, in a "most rare hour," poets and prophets one for another. Morning Pra$,er 1 turn the corner of driest prayer to find you smiling amo.ng' the shining children in this raggdd, dusty land and crying with the weary women who carry albaby's body to its stones end, Bitter black~ against a sun-spoked sky. Five strong Icane cutters trudge the dirt sweat-stained sombreros, worn mache es. You'll be tl~ere, arms around them all the way ~o the burnt-black fields, while the silent Senora pleads for p~ennies, and you, a moment's caring¯ In the pla~.~, the youth are dancing. You are~young, Lord, you know the tune . Tonight weIhear a tragic story-- Husband g~ne and children hungry. Tears fall o~ the table-top. Jesus Lord! L~ke Bartimaeus, bhnd and begging, When will ~e truly see our land, Hear your ,footsteps, run to meet you, Find our Treasure, You in all,land all? Sister Wendy Cotter Apartado 460, Chiclayo, Peru Novitiate Formation Agostin Lovatin, C.S. In the course of his studies at St. Louis University's Institute of Religious Formation, Father Lovatin prepared a paper of reflection on novice-formation. He is presently Novice Director and a member of the formation team, residing at Sacred Heart Seminary; 3800 West Division Street.; Stone Park. IL 60165. The central message of the Gospel is a call to repentance and belief (Mk 1:15); it was addressed by Jesus to all those the Father was drawing to Christ. In a radical way it was meant for those whom Jesus chose to be his compan-ions, whom he would send to preach (Mk 3:14). The same call echoes still today in the lives of those the Lord chooses for the continuation of his mis-sion. It is a call to conversion. A radical conversion to God in our case is that process of the transforma-tion that our lives undergo in order to become the best instruments to serve our mission. This process comprises all the elements of what we call formation: prayer, vocation, religious life, priesthood, sending, aposto-late . These elements are harmoniously united together and interdepen-dent upon one another. They develop in due time under the direction of God who alone invites and fosters the new life when the person gives him full co-operation. Because the call and the action'are absolutely of God and depend on the cooperation of the person, the rate and the modality of growth are different from person to person because God in his infinite providence and creativity works through.the most unthinkable circumstances, even through the indi-vidual's unfaithfulness. There is no set order of steps through which this pro-cess takes place nor is there any way of telling beforehand which will influ-ence or provoke what. There isn't either any prefixed length of time that can 806 Novitiate Formation / 807 be made normative for the duration of formation. God's choice hnd man's response make up every time an unrepeatable and unique story. Reflection on the experience and charism of the Scalabrinian community, it seemed to me, could be fruitful in helping others to formulate for their own communities novitiate programs which would nurture and promote the nov-ices' identity with their own community charism and apostolate. Our novitiate program serves only a limited scope. It is normative in a very restricted sense: that is in the choice and updating of general principles and methods, according to the experience and the choices of the community. It is descriptive onlyin the sense that a stated program illustrates some of the stages of growth regardless of the real order in which they take place in the in-dividual because this will depend on the creative action of God and the re-sponse of the individual. Conditions for Entering the Novitiate Novitiate (noviceship) in its real meaning is the beginning of a journey, the first "yes" to God in one's heart; the beginning of a process of intimacy with the Lord that will end at the moment of death. Accordingly, there are conditions presupposed for admission to noviceship. Human Psychological Maturity. Grace presupposes nature. Before an in-dividual can tackle the vital questions that will radically affect the rest of his life, he must possess a psychological, intellectual, affective-sexual maturity that gives him a hold on his life and relieves him from the anxieties this de-velopment br.ings about. Only then can he give himself wholly to spiritual de-velopment. On this condition only can he and the community be safely assured so as to make the formal, mutual religious commitments to his following of the evangelical life in their company. In case the actual development of the personality by the time of noviceship leaves unexplored any significant portion of the major areas of development (intellectual, psychological, affective-sexual), the amount of self-knowledge required for a life-decision would be dangerously reduced and the value of the ensuing commitments would be certainly limited. Maturity means also having acqui~red a sense of independence that means a capability to run one's life in an adult manner. Responsible religious life ought not tend to create dependent people, but should take mature people and make them interdependent. Religious experience. The individual's determination of asking to start the period of noviceship should be understood only as a response to the God-who- calls. Consequently the candidate must have come in contact with the living God and felt his drawing. No matter how simple and unsophisticated this experience might have been, the candidate must have felt in some way the vanity of the world, its principles and values, and an initial attraction to a life of union with God. He must have seen himself as a creature and son of the Father who alone can satisfy all the longings of the human heart. There is no I~011 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 hope of success in the work of the novitiate if the candidate does not know experientially who God is, and does not believe that God can be taken as the absolute partner of his life. The encounter with the living God one way or other, must have generated some willingness to serve him. The individual must possess some concrete ideas about priesthood, religious life and what they entail. Along with this, there must be a sufficient knowledge of the special call to each congregation's particular apostolate: for us this would be the care of migrants. Part of the "yes" to God is the still-vague willingness to leave, to give up one's land and culture, the security of an earthly fatherland, so as to follow the call of those who are homeless and lost in a new country and culture. Goals of Novitiate. Learning how to pray, and prayer itself, is going to be the main goal of novitiate because prayer expresses and fosters the union with God which is going to be the primary reality in the future life of anyone called to an inti-mate cooperation with God. It is in prayer that a religious and priest finds his identity. It is in prayer God manifests and renews his call to him; it is in prayer that God reveals his action in the present and reveals concretely the ways and the means of the still-future apostolate. The apostolate is the salvific action of God in the world, an action that he chose to continue through the cooperation of those who respond to his call. The novice will express and deepen his prayerfulness through the various forms that enrich the Christian tradition. Most of all, he will be introduced to mental prayer, making acquaintance with different methods of meditation. He will experience various forms and, under the guidance of the director, he will search for that particular type which better corresponds to his needs and his character. Scripture will be opened to the novice. It will not be a study of the Bible, but the Bible as the source of the living word of God who revealed himself, and continues to reveal himself to anyone who listens with humility to his voice. Scripture will reveal a new dimension to prayer, and tune the novice into that highest form of prayer which is the prayer the Spirit offers unceasingly in the soul of the believer (Rm 8:26), The liturgy takes the novice into the core of the living Church that, united with her head, offers praise, intercession, pleas and thanks to the Father. The novice will thus share in the eternal priesthood of Christ who alone brings about the salvation of mankind. All apostolate, all building of the Church flows from and to the Eucharist; our apostolic action is the continuation, concretization and development of the action of Christ as.it takes place in the liturgy. Spiritual Direction. All spiritual growth is the action of the Spirit who moves and sanctifies. This action of God is always effective by its nature, However God chose not to force the response of man because he wanted a re- Novitiate Formation / 809 sponse of freedom aided by his grace. As a consequence, the action of God becomes efficacious only when received and accepted by an open heart. In formation, the most important person is the one being formed. He alone is solely responsible for his life. However it is a basic experience in the history of Christianity since its very beginning that this cannot be accomplished by the novice alone. Because of our nature, blinded and weighed down by sin, because of the novelty of the process, it is absolutely necessary to have a guide--one who has experienced the action of God and can direct the soul in its journey. When God moves in with his own light, and the soul is laid bare in its past and present poverty and sinfulness, the experience can be quite shattering. Only an experienced guide can lead the soul through this deep darkness, pointing out the enfolding grace that purifies, through desert and pain, the commitment to love God. God speaks to the soul but his ways are mysterious. The role of the director can be compared, at times, with that of the prophets of the O.T., or with that of John the Baptist: to point to the Lord, convey his message. He will never take the place of God, nor can he respond in the name of the direc-tor. He must keep faithful to his mission by staying out of the way in this inti-mate exchange between the Lord and the novice~ The spiritual director, be-cause of his own life of prayer and careful heeding sensitivity to the action of God in his own life, will help the novice to recognize the action of God in his soul, and help him to respond adequately. He will be in a better position to detect the Word of the Lord, as distinct from those other voices that will speak quite strongly; he will be able to show the novice when he is avoiding, or putting obstacles, to the word. He will encourage, console, advise, chal-lenge- according to the circumstances. He will be a witness and a proof of the everlasting love of God towards the novice. The ,novitiate will provide also other moments of intense prayer and re-flection, such as days of recollection, shared prayer, communal prayer, and other forms current today. Silence. To help set the climate for a gradual focus from the exterior to the interior, from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, it is necessary that there be a constant attitude of recollection and silence. The novitiate will not succeed in its goal if it does not provide an atmosphere of solitude and quiet. The novice has to be free from pressure from the outside to be able to come in contact with his self and find there the privileged place of his encounter with God. He must avoid all distractions that keep him from facing his interiority. Even the necessary amount of leisure and work have to be chosen in a measure that help him to re-create his spirit, not upset and disturb it. At this point he will be invited to a revision of values and priorities in his own life. The society and culture we live in are spasmodically craving for ex-terior action, motion, productivity, noise . There is deeply ingrained a dreadful fear of facing oneself and coming in touch with the core of the per-son. Solitude, peace, interiority, inner motivations are not appreciated. 810 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 Maybe the reason is to be found in the great deal of pain, loss, and confusion caused by the discovery of the dark side of our being. Fear of pain and run-ning away from our self become an excuse and a protective shield that impede going a further step. Silence and solitude will break the circle that keeps peo-ple stuck in this withering rut. Once that we find the courage to risk the loss of superficial well-being and face ourselves, a healing process can take place, and release the vital forces that we constrict in the recesses. A spiritual life be-comes possible. Then the real self emerges in all its riches and creativity from within. Our basic poverty of spirit and incapability of being and doing will open to an encounter with God. Sl~eeit'ic Formation. God revealing and recognized in prayer will start supplying a deeper awareness of a mission to which he will prepare those whom he calls to his in-timacy and service. He will let the novice know that while he calls him to serve and build the universal Church, he wants him to do so in a very specific manner by being the universal Church to migrants. Consequently God is going to renew the call he gave to our founder presenting once more the field of migration as the portion of the Church to which he will send him to har-vest the flock that needs to be gathered and tended. This. is going to be his mission and his name in the Body of Christ (I Co 12:12-26). At this point the novice is ready and willing to receive more formal input about the specific vo-cation and the specific religious family which he is about to enter. The biography of the founder and his writings will provide a model of the call and how to respond to it. The priestly and episcopal ministry of Bishop John Baptist Scalabrini, a man of great union with God, was consequently a man of great dedication and compassion; his work to establish the congrega-tion', his apostolic ideas, his ecclesial openness, his hatred for compromises, his charity that knew no limits, his love for the Church and loyalty to the pope, were to become the prime inspiration and rule in the lives of his fol-lowers. The unfolding of salvation history is mediated through the free response of individual persons (Adam, Abraham, Moses, Mary.) whom God chose as representatives of the whole people and instruments of his blessings. Even in the present time the Church is thus enriched with new charisms by the same Spirit. John Baptist Scalabrini is one of those "whom the Lord calls to be the unique and fitting instruments of his deep, mysterious and providential plans in the world" (G. Toniolo). During his pastoral visits to his diocese he was met with the tragic reality that follows upon migration. By the thousands, his people, because of extreme poverty and a time of political turmoil, were forced to leave their homes and land if they wanted to survive and have a bet-ter future for themselves and for their families. The pain of separation was not the hardest. From the moment they left their towns and villages, their Novitiate Formation / 811 journey was a nightmare, not only given the conditions of the day and their inexperience, but mostly because they were without protection, becoming the easy victims of agents of immigration, lodging owners and travel companies. The crossing of the ocean itself very often became a bad adventure. The new land, once reached, became very soon much less than the place they were foreseeing in their dreams. They found, all too often: --inhuman working conditions --unscrupulous bosses --abominable living conditions --discrimination, loneliness --abandonment by the government of their own country Even when their financial situation was more adequate, their isolation, caused by their ignorance of the language, lack of education, the difficulty of adjusting to different customs and mentality, all these would produce a profound and shocking disorientation. What primarily touched the sensitivity of Bishop Scalabrini was the al-most absolute absence of the Church at the side of the immigrants. He knew that this was hurting them the most. Some even let him know directly. "Tell our Bishop that we are always mindful of his counsels, tell him to pray for us and to send us a priest, because here we live and die like animals. !" (Scalabrini, L'Emigrazione Italiana in America, Piacenze 1887). "That mes-sage," reflected Scalabrini, "from my faraway children struck me as a re-buke." It found a response in his heart: "Faced with this lamentable situa-tion . . . I confess that I blush with shame, I feel humiliated, as a priest and as an Italian, and I ask myself again: What can be done to help them?" (ibid.) His plan of action, and his dreams, were as wide as his vision of faith. He devised a society, the Saint Raphael Society, composed of lay people who would take care mostly of the social and material welfare of the migrants. They were to assist them at the ports of departure and arrival. His mission-aries would assist the migrants not only religiously but also by founding schools and other centers of education and culture. Once this assistance would be established, he saw a new society being born. Emigration, for him, was not to be the mere flux of indigent working forces to more affluent countries to be absorbed in them, but an exchange of cultures to form a new civilization made rich by the best that the world could offer. He saw the world being united by ties of friendship. He also envisioned a missionary expansion of the Catholic faith, given the reality that most of the well-to-do countries were Protestant. It is a fact that national affinity was one of the driving forces that was moving him to action. However, especially after having visited his first 812 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 missions in the United States and Brazil, his vision took the dimension of the universal Church. Besides having accepted a Polish priest to be sent to assist the Polish community in Boston, he began negotiations with the Holy See to start a new Roman Congregation (Congregatio Pro Emigratis Catholicis) and he wrote the draft of the document that would establish it. In the history of our congregation, the novice sees how the action and providence of God has worked in the concrete through the cooperation--and even the weakness--of its members. Both the glorious pages and the dark ones will equally show that our work is the work of God, that he and he alone is the bestower of the good gifts. He had led us through a period of purification and confusion to a clarification of his will in our regard. The present history of our religious family studied under the light of faith should reveal the same traits in its constant effort for continuation, renewal and purification. The place where we find the plan of God for us today is our Constitu-tions. The novice will study and interiorize them with veneration and humil-ity. They contain the spirit of the founder made concrete, and translated into the language of our time to fit our present situation. The constitutions be-come the ~erm of comparison, renewal and challenge for each member of the congregation. From what has been said above, it follows that right at the core and source of our vocation and consecration there exists a tension between two poles. God calls each one to himself, with the absolute exclusivity of any oth-er creature. However he calls to service and witness. The call itself is basically bifocused. Because love of God is genuine only when it becomes love of neighbor, and love of neighbor is charity only if it is love of God, we will have to be balanced between contemplation, and the apostolate, solitude, and being with people, God-centeredness, and people-centeredness, being in the world, yet not of the world. Any attempt to simplify and resolve these tensions destroys the uniqueness of the divine call and makes the person a pure social activist, or a sterile misanthrope. Since the beginning of the process of formation, the novices have to be made aware of, and begin to realize in their lives a balance between the two poles of tension. One feeds the other, influences the other, and makes the other effective. Any apt way to practice this difficult exercise is to expose the novice to the genuine apostolate of the congregation. The purpose is not to learn the ropes or to acquire professional skills but precisely to test oneself on how to do God's work. The exercise of the apostolate does not depend on personal resources but on the grace of God and discovering how to pray, not as a solitary exercise, but in order to continue and carry out the work of crea-tion and redemption. Evangelical Life. Our founder, at the time of establishing the character and distinctive traits of our community, wanted us to become a full-fledged religious congregation. However it does not seem that he handed down to us Novitiate Formation / 813 religious life as some standardized form. Rather, looking at the apostolate, he understood that to perform it there was only one way possible: the Gospel. We understand it more clearly today when we identify religious life as a call to discipleship. Bishop Scalabrini, for his part, never found a better qualifi-cation for his missionaries than to call them "apostles" in his letters and in his conferences. He understood chastity as a condition that made the priest totally available in his ministry to his people, because he has dedicated himself to God with an undivided heart. So great was his conviction on this point that he hardly mentioned chastity in his writings to the missionaries. It was an in-dispensable, undiscussed principle. Most of all, the genuine charism of chastity was eminently present in his own heart. His soul bears the fruits of his life-bearing love. As a young priest he wanted to become a missionary to India. He was sensitive and available to the needs of every sort of people: deaf-mutes, rice pickers, those stricken by famine and cholera. Most of all his fre~edom and wholeness were witnessed by his episcopal ministry: the Chris-tian love he showed his people up to the summons to provide for migrants. Being himself poor and detached from possessions to the point of sacrific-ing readily what could be considered necessary to his position, and even what was most significant and dear to him, he saw poverty as a basic condition for the efficacy of a ministry among migrants. Unless the missionary were de-tached from riches, he could hardly dedicate himself to his ministry, and he could hardly preach among the poor about the poor Christ. One of the main traits of Scalabrini's life was his obedience and loyalty to the pope and to the Church. The practice of this virtue caused him the most bitter sufferings during his life. However he professed that, without intimate union with the Church, there was no way to carry oiat the will of God that is the plan of salvation. To this purpose his writings to his missionary excur-sions contain numerous exhortations to obedience, obedience to Bishops as heads of the local Church. Evangelical virtues. From his biography we learn that, besides these three virtues and vows, his union with God made the bishop rich in evangelical qualities that made of him a true follower of Christ: humility, prudence, meekness, availability, compassion, tender love, loyal friendship, firmness, courage, sacrifice, patience, zeal for the house and honor of God, self-sur-render, love for beauty, peace. Most of all he was ready to lay down. his life for his people. In fact it is known that it was because of his strenuous work in his diocese and through the visits he paid to his missionaries and migrants to America that his life was considerably shortened. Community living. In the writings of our founder to his missionaries he stressed the point of community life as a necessity. He saw it flowing from the call to unity with Christ and the Church that makes every apostolate pos-sible. He saw in it the means to provide the mutual encouragement and sup-port that the hardships and the dedication to. the apostolate would require. I~14 / Review for Religious, l/olume 38, 1979/6 Our evangelical life. When the Lord calls a person to perform a mission, he measures his gifts and charisms to the same mission. Those who are called to continue in Christ the work of salvation are called to a life of identification with Christ, to reproduce his life and ministry as we find it in the Gospel. We saw this happening in the call of our founder who was reading the quality of life-style for himself and his missionaries into the plan of salvation for that particular portion of the Church in which he was called to be active. Our way of reproducing the evangelical life is determined by our mission and dedica-tion to migrants. As we have a special charism of service, so we have a special charism of witness to the life of Christ. Chastity. Our dedication to God with undivided heart in chastity opens our lives to love and to service making it possible for us to leave our family, friends and even our land in order to be completely available at all times. In this condition, we are free to love and to give ourselves to those whom we are called to serve. Our dedication to them. in the Lord will be radical enough for us to dare to spend all our life and energy in serving them. Our love is a free gift, selfless and self-sacrificing. We discover the beauty that is in every per-son. Our Christ-like love will blossom in friendship which is one of the best gifts God grants to a person. Our friendship will not be the satisfying of a craving, the filling of a gap inside our heart, but an overflow of grace from the abundance:of God's love for us. However the novice will learn, even from experience, that his call invites him to purify his heart, at all times, of every human attachment, and to put his trust in the Lord alone: "Cursed the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in the flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord" (Jr 17:5). Poverty. The poverty that we profess is a sign and a means to achieve that poverty of spirit that is our human powerlessness and weakness of creatures before the Lord. It makes humility and truth the necessary starting point to recognize the absolute power of God in our life, and to make us docile instru-ments in his hands. When we are poor in spirit we recognize that everything that we are and have is a gift of God, not to be grasped at, but to'build the Church with. The idea that God is the "owner" of everything will also teach us to share among all the children of God. By contrast, we understand that human sinfulness tends strongly to appropriate jealously the gifts of God and use them as a weapon of division and exclusion. Even higher gifts like educa-tion and culture become instruments of oppression and division. The introduction of the novice to poverty will start from the appreciation of material thihgs, their purposes and value, in order to lead him to see all things as gifts, discovering their native tendency to lead back to their creator and giver. Learning the difference between grateful use and possession, he will relish everything with gratefulness. This exercise will soon reveal to him how easy it is to become attached and to accumulate; this difficulty will open him to the idea of necessary renunciation, purification, self-examination. .Novitiate Formation / 815 Poverty is not to become a game or a reason for a more subtle buildup of pride and superiority, but a means of liberation and fraternity. A real appre-ciation of poverty will be shown in the simplicity of life-style. Our call to serve the migrants, to welcome the stranger, requires a deep faith in the na-tive dignity of man even when he is deprived of goods and education. The novice will be ready to dispossess himself of all the prejudices and false priv-ileges that accompany his own culture. To become migrant with the migrants means to participate in their struggles, appreciate the true values of their cul-ture from the depth of one's heart and share their homelessness and rejec-tion. Obedience. In his prayer, the novice will be drawn to know and to value the will of God as the only lead in his life, the will of God that is to bring ev-eryone to salvation in Christ. The life of union that he is called to realize will enkindle in him the strong desire to conform himself deeply to this will of God. Our community and the Church are both committed to this will of sal-vation that constitute them. He will learn that God speaks and reveals himself to everyone if each would put himself in a humble, listening attitude before him. However God never prescinds from the mystery of his will to bring everything under Christ's headship (Ep l:9-10) so that his plans for an individual is always in harmony with the building of the body. The novice will gradually learn that God speaks also through the Church and the com-munity. As a consequence he will make every effort to keep alive and oper-ative the bond that ties him to the Church and to the community in order to become a living branch (Jn 15). Union with God and the Church should blossom in unity among the members of our community. Not any type of community corresponds to our needs. Our community is found in the Word, and gathered by the Word. Its members feed on prayer that they share, renewing themselves constantly in it. Our community is the center of irradiation for our mission. The quality of life that enlivens our communities is the fraternity in Christ that will show the migrants that Christ was born and is risen through being mindful of one an-other, carrying each other's burdens, encouraging, challenging and correct-ing one another; through exercising our welcome among ourselves we will be able to welcome the stranger. By the lives of our members, our communities should give the same corporate witness that our individual lives are called to give. Besides these three headings, our religious life, as a call to discipleship, covers all the virtues that characterize the life and the teachings of Christ. The Scalabrinian in particular cultivates humility, the fruit of his poverty; availability, his openness to people and cultures that are different; patience with those who are ignorant, understanding and appreciation of diff6rent ways, customs and practices; gentleness, a welcoming spirit, simplicity of life, love and respect for those who are poor and simple, the spirit of sacri-fice, and a readiness to move on when our charism calls for it. Religion Can Be a Bad Trip The Psychology of Evangelization Gillian Straker Dr. Straker's last article, "Psychotheraphy: Its Potential and Limit," appeared in the March, 1979, issue. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of the Witwater-srand; 1 Jan Smuts Ave.; Johannesburg; 2000 Republic of South Africa. n the February 1979 issue of HIS' the~'e appeared an article entitled "Reli-gion Can Be A Bad Trip." The article dealt with the high rate of student dropout from evangelization campaigns. It went far beyond statistics to quote what students had actually felt about their experiences. One of the rea-sons students gave most frequently to explain their negative feelings toward religion was that they had become disillusioned with the very people who had first introduced them to it. The article went on to encourage these "religious casualties" to give it another try. In offering this encouragement the follow-ing suggestions were made: Evaluate: has the Bible itself molded your experience or have you been the product of family, school or other people? Make your own decisions. Grow up. They (whoever they be, false Christians or true--a human authority) have been telling you what to do. Now start deciding for yourself. Don't let your encounter with a weak or sickly Christian (or group) cheat you of finding the Truth that can set you free:. 'An inter-varsity Christian Fellowship magazine. -'Stephen Board, "Religion Can Be a Bad Trip," HIS, Feb., 1979, Vol. 30, No. 5, p. 5. 816 Religion Can Be a Bad Trip: The Psychology of Evangelization / ~117' At one level these admonitions seemed to make sense. In essence they di-rect the individual back to examining his relationship with God which is the obvious source of true spirituality. Further, they point out that if one turns away from God one cannot blame others; one has to assume responsibility for one's own actions. At another level it struck me as sad that these admonitions were necessary at all. The advice given that disillusionment with the representatives of reli-gion should not be generalized to include God, or all his representatives for that matter, is sound. However, the painful question that is left unanswered is why the level of disillusionment among erstwhile converts is so high. To search for an answer to this question would seem to be imperative. As Christians, we acknowledge that successful evangelization has its source in God, but we also a_ccept that conversion can be and often is medi-ated through human means. In this regard if the reports of the "religious casualties" are to be taken seriously, it would seem that we who are supposed to be mediators are failing, at least partially, in our roles. Furthermore, the indications are that we are failing, not because we make no impact, but be-cause having made an impact, we do not follow it up in a meaningful way. It is important to question the reasons for this. Naturally there are practical considerations to be taken into account. It would be very time-consuming to follow up every individual who merely indi-cated that he had been reached in some way. This perhaps could be used validly to excuse some degree of the neglect of which we stand accused. How-ever, perhaps the major factor involved in our failure to follow up individ-uals whom we have invited to respond to God rests rather on an oversight on our part regarding the process that is involved in conversion. An invitation to conversion is, of course, an invitation to something that has ultimate value and lasting meaning. It is on this that we usually focus, and, in so doing, we may often see little need to give ongoing support to a person to whom we have offered such a splendid gift. However, by focusing on this end point we may well have lost sight of the whole process that is involved in conversion. Conversion is a process not an event, and therefore evangelization itself should also be conceptualized in terms of process and not event. Doubtless most people involved in evangelization do know this. However, it is easy, in one's enthusiasm to impart the good news or to get others to see one's point of view, to lose sight of the fact. There might well be point, then, to restate some of the known facti~al and experiential aspects of the process of conversion. Carolyn Osiek, R.S.C.J., writing'about what must be the most famous of all conversion experiences, that of St. Paul, draws attention to several issues prominent in the process of conversion.3 One such important issue is that 'Osiek, C., "The First Week of the Spiritual Exercises and the Conversion of St. Paul," RfR, Sept., 1977, Vol. 36, No. 5. 818 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 Paul's transformation did not happen overnight. She points out that Paul himself spoke of a lapse of three years before he began to preach Christ (Ga 1 : 18). Thus Osiek emphasizes one essential element of the conversion experi-ence: it takes a long time. This is a vital fact to remember. Clearly, then, evangelization is not successfully completed when the indi-vidual first repents, requests baptism or initiation into the Church, or indi-cates by some other means that his heart has been touched. Rather this should be regarded as only the starting point. Thus, if evangelization is to be meaningfully completed or brought to full fruition in regard to. this indi-vidual, the need for ongoing support is clear. This is especially true if the evangelization process has netted people who are particularly vulnerable. Eric Hoffer, in his book, The True Believer,4 points out that people who have weak egos or are under stress to begin with are often those most likely to respond to high-pressure political or religious movements. These people, in their search for answers, are usually extremely willing to believe authorized "representa.tives" of the faith. They are keen to join any group which holds out hope of providing answei's to the pressing problems of their lives. This fact, viz., that they have embarked on a religious excursion more out of a need for answers or for a group affiliation than out of a true understanding or personal calling, does not make the evangelizer less responsible for them.Rather, it makes his responsibility even greater, since their very vulnerability and need make him even more responsible by virtue of his original choice to hold out to them the hope of a solution to their problems. The evangelist cannot withdraw simply because his converts did not turn out to be the kind of persons he hoped them to be. Withdrawal would indicate a greater concern with getting the convert to conform to the evangelist's expectations rather than with helping him, within his own limits, to respond freely to God. The difficulties in helping another respond to God without having one's own ego invested in the process are manifold. A close look at church history amply illustrates the extent to which power motives can underpin the determination to evangelize others. Of course, not all individuals who respond to evangelization campaigns do so out of some affiliation need or some need for instant answers. There are individuals for whom evangelization merely clears the path, so that God's call can be more deeply and clearly felt. In instances such as these, where the individual is primarily responding to a personal call from God, it is much more likely that he will survive with or without human support. In fact, he may ultimately be stronger for not having received such support. This, how-ever, should never be used as an excuse for not offering it. The emotional and psychological cost involved in sustaining a conversion experience is not to be underestimated. Osiek, in her articleon Paul makes this explicit. She. points out that Luke's image of blindness approximates in ~Ciled in HIS, op. oil. Religion Can Be a Bad Trip: The Psychology of Evangelization / 1~19 physical terms what must have been Paul's psychic state for some time. She discusses the fact that he must have experienced "confusion, loss, fear, inner chaos, spiritual paralysis, the terrifying feeling that his whole world was com-ing apart. "~. When one considers this description and realizes that it is part and parcel of the process which one is inviting another to undergo, the enormous re-sponsibility involved in extending such an invitation becomes self-evident. That conversion involves psychic trauma is further indicated by the psy-chologist, William James, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience.6 James, in discussing the psychological component in conversion, acknowl-edges that positive emotions, like love and security, may be involved. But he also points out that the explosive nature of these emotions, experienced as in-tensely as they are in conversion, seldom leave psychic structures as they had been. A fundamental reorientation of psychic structures is a common occur-rence attendant on conversion. That the reorientation of psychic structures can be an excruciatingly painful experience has long been recognized by psychotherapists, who, like evangelists, also work for personal change, albeit of a different nature. In recogniton of the pain involved in change, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapists prepare to commit themselves to patients they take into therapy for an average length of three-to-five years. During this time the patient is very often seen, at the very least, once a week. This is not meant tO imply that evangelists should be prepared to do the same thing. It is fully recognized that while therapy has only human resources to rely on, conversion relies on God and has its ultimate source in him. How-ever, the point being made is that on a psychological level, therapists recog-nize that the shedding of one's old self is always a painful process, even when one is moving toward a higher level of integration and functioning. If this is the case when one in therapy is changing in a fairly limited way, how much more so should it be true in the case of a person undergoing a radical trans-formation, such as is demanded by conversion. St. John of the Cross was well aware of what was involved, and of the delicacy with which such situations need to be handled. Although the follow-ing was written in the context of spiritual direction and the progressive conversion involved in contemplative prayer, it has great relevance to the present discussion. St. Johrl of the Cross wrote as follows:7 The affairs of God must be handled with great tact and open eyes, especially in so vital and sublime a matter as is that of these souls, where there is at stake almost an infinite ~Osiek, C., op. cir., p. 63. ~James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience (Fontana Library: Glasgow., 1960L 'St. John of the Cross, Living ~-'lanle of Love in Kavanaugh, K., Rodriguez, D. (trs.). The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross ( W~ishingt on, 1973). 820 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 gain in being right and almost an infinite loss in being wrong. This statement eloquently summarizes the whole point of this article. If the affairs of God were handled with the great tact and open eyes suggested by John, there would certainly be fewer religious casualties and less need for articles such as that in HIS. As it is impossible to add to St. John's statement in this matter, perhaps this article should conclude on that note. However, having stressed human responsibility to the full, lest we should err at the other extreme and see the conversion of another as being wholly within our own power, perhaps it would be better to conclude by reacknowledging that, in all things, "the overflowing power comes from God and not from us" (2 Co 4:7). Now Available As A Reprint Psychosexual Maturity in Celibate Development b\' Philip D. Cristantiello Price: S.60 per copy. plus postage. Address' Review for Religious Room 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Religious Formation and Social Justice Stephen Tutas, S.M. Very Rev. Father Tutas is Superior General of the Society of Mary (Marianists), an office which he has held since 1971. Since 1975, he has also been President of the USG Commission Justice and Peace. He resides at the Curia Generalizia Marianisti; Via Latina 22; 00179 Rome, Italy. We have all witnessed the steady development of the movement to pro-mote justice and peace. For myself, shortly after I came to Rome in 1971, one of the first meetings I attended was organized by the Pontifical Commis-sion Justice and Peace at which the Presidents of the Unions of Superiors General, Father Pedro Arrupe and Sister Mary Linscott, asked the Superiors General to urge their religious to follow up the 1971 Synod document on Justice in the World by active participation in the various justice and peace groups that were being organized on national and diocesan levels. We know that since then religious men and women have distinguished themselves not only by their invaluable collaboration with the local Church but also by their own initiatives and expressions of religious leadership in this field. We know, too, that not all these initiatives were always looked on favorably by others, both within the communities and beyond. But we als6 know that there was a gradual purification of motives and clarification of strategies leading to an ever increasing official endorsement of these movements both by the religious communities in their general chapters and also by the local ordinaries and national conferences of bishops. Today we find ourselves in the mainstream of one of the most important movements in the history of the Church. The promotion of justice is now seen to be an integral part of evangelization and has even been called by some a constitutive element of contemporary religious life, If ever it were, the pro-motion of justice is simply no longer an option for religious--as though it 821 822 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 were merely an added feature to the preaching of the gospel. We now see that the promotion of justice is part of the Good News we are called to announce to the world today. We are living in an important period in the history of the Church, one in which the commitment of religious takes on special significance in an-nouncing the gospel to the world in a way that touches the lives of all men and women. The message that we bring to the world is not new, but we are finding a new way to respond to the needs of the world. The whole movement of justice and peace is simply the consequence of the truth that the Church is in the world, and is concerned about the total life of all men and women. In this article I want to comment on some trends that refer especially to this comparatively new dimension of religious formation, the preparation of religious for a greater commitment to social justice: I. Formation is a lifelong process. 2. Prayerful reflection on the gospel inspires social action. 3. Formation at all levels implies serious and systematic study. 4. Reflection on one's personal experience of justice and injustice neces-sarily complements the study of the social doctrine of the Church. 5. The integration of prayer, study and discernment leads to action. 6. Formation prepares for collaboration with others. Formation is a Lifelong Process There was a time when we identified the term "formation" with "initi-ation." Today we understand that the quality that needs to be developed in our life is the capacity for continued growth. Everyone has a built-in tendency to stop growing. Part of our work with others is to assure the conditions for continued growth and to stimulate the desire for this. The goal of a good formation program is not a finalized position but openness to change. The application of this trend to the issue of social justice is evident. We are all learning. Here, more than anywhere else, initial formation is a preparation for ongoing formation. The most important skill to be acquired is learning how to continue learning and to develop that wonderful capacity for continued growth in our lives. Prayerful Reflection on the Gospel Inspires Social Action The most controversial element in the promotion of justice is the discern-ment of motive. Many men and women, including religious, are committed to justice primarily as a humanitarian reaction to injustice. This is certainly a good motive, but Christians should find their fundamental motive in the gospel itself. It is this quality of our motivation, this faith dimension, that must distinquish our commitment to justice. We must never lose sight of the fac~ that the promotion of the integral development of man is related to Religious Formation and Social Justice / 823 evangelization. The ultimate goal of all our activity in building one world must be the explicit proclamation of Jesus Christ. What this means is that we must become more and more men and women of prayer. It is in our personal union with God that we sense the call to go to others with the message of Good News and with a helping hand. Nor must we take refuge in a kind of prayer that is divorced from action simply because the challenge is overwhelming. An important biblical orientation is given to us in the narrative of the multiplication of loaves. The disciples felt that their resources were ridiculously limited in the face of the great need of the people, but Jesus simply asked them to begin and to do what they could. The miracle of multiplication followed upon this act of courageous good will and unquestioning faith. In our programs of formation we must continually refer to faith as the motive for justice and show how this faith is translated into action. Formation at All Levels Implies Serious and Systematic Study Although study is not a new trend in formation, it takes on special mean-ing today when programs of formation are necessarily individualized and geared to the development of personal responsibility. With regard to prepari,ng our religious for a greater commitment to justice, we find that the gospel motive for this is developed further in the documents of the Church. The Catholic social teaching of our time is remarkable. There is "nothing comparable to this in the world today. It is a special gift the Church can offer to all men and women of good will. But we have to study this doctrine. And the habit of serious and systematic study must be inculcated from the very beginning. I do not want to suggest an impossible !ist of documents but I do find the following to be absolutely necessary elements in a basic ,program of formation: 1. Gaudium et Spes 2. Populorum Progressio 3. Evangelii Nuntiandi 4. Redemptor Hominis To these must be added the 1971 Synod document Justice in the World simply because of its timeliness.' To the study of these documents of the Universal Church must be added 'If a textbook presentation is desired, there is in English Monsignor Joseph Gremillion's master-ful study, The Gospel of Peace and Justice, which presents Catholic social teaching since Pope John. Incidentally, Msgr. Gremillion deserves the gratitude of all religious for recognizing the strategic importance of religious communities in the movement to promote justice and peace throughout the world. During his period of service as Secretary of the Pontifical Commission Justice and Peace, Msgr. Gremillion made, through the Unions of Superiors General, special efforts to sensitize religious to the importance of this movement. 824 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 the study of the documents of the local Church-- statements by national con-ferences of bishops or by local ordinaries, as well as statements by national conferences of religious men and women. ~ Another source of guidance and inspiration is to be found in the state-ments of the various general chapters. Since i971 the theme of justice and peace has been one of the principal issues acted upon by most general chapters of active religious societies. What is particularly helpful in these statements is the relation of the founding charism to the promotion of justice. In addition to these statements by the Church and by religious in the Church there exists a huge documentation coming from various centers for justice and peace. Articles about social justice are published continually. It is important to develop a certain familiarity with all this and to develop habits of study that will carry over into a life of the most intense activity. There can be no real commitment to social justice without serious and systematic study. Reflection on One's Personal Experience Complements the Study of the Social Doctrine of the Church The conciliar and papal documents of our time concerning social justice are inspiring calls to action--if they are studied in conjunction with each one's personal experience of the reality of which they speak. The most urgent call to a~:tion comes when we reflect on our personal experience of justice and injustice. Contact with the underprivileged necessarily prods us to do something for the betterment of others. Study of the documents themselves, no matter how inspiring we find the message, is not enough. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to develop a genuine social awareness without actual contact with the underprivileged. A feature of some programs of formation is the experience of another cul-ture. Generally this means the experience of the needs of the Church in other parts of the world, as when religious from Europe and North America come into personal contact with the reality of the Church in Latin America and Africa. The experience of the underprivileged prompts us to ask in what way we are responsible for their condition and what we can do about improving the situation. However, this experience of the life of the underprivileged must always include an openness to recognize special values in them that one lacks in his or her own culture. We must learn from each other. If there is an economic gap between the rich and poor nations, there are also values in the peoples of the so-called Third World to which peoples of the First World would do well to aspire. Such reflection on personal experience is related to the discernment of the signs of the times. This is another way of saying that the faith dimension must take precedence over purely humanitarian and sectarian considerations. What is God saying to us through the events of history? This is one of the Religious Formation and Social Justice / 1125 exciting questions that individual religious and religious communities need to ask themselves. One of the most practical elements in programs of social action is this personal and especially communitarian discernment. Personal discernment is related to study and personal reflection and consultation with others. Communitarian discernment goes on from there. It is an act of faith in the active presence of the Spirit among us and a genuine openness to what the Spirit says to us through the community. "Community discernment" is not limited to reflection among ourselves in community, but also includes consultation with the larger community. On the one hand this refers to the province and, ultimately, to the whole Society; on the other hand, it also refers to the local Church and, ultimately, to the universal Church. Action for justice undertaken as a consequence of such discernment .is well-founded. It is to this kind of social action that our formation programs must be directed. The Integration of Prayer, Study and Discernment Leads to Action We now come to the most difficult point in formation, especially in programs of initial formation: how to translate ideas into action. Yet one of the most heartening features of formation today is precisely that it is action-oriented. We are living at a very privileged time in the history of the Church. We have the documents of the Second Vatican Council, and a rich collection of statements flowing from the Council. We do not lack clear and challenging orientations. And our emphasis on prayer, reflection and personal experience gives us an understanding both of the world around us and also of our mission as religious, so that we hear clearly the call to action. I believe the key element needed to respond well to this call to translate ideas into action is the gift of sharing in the zeal of our founders. I say this because I was struck very much by a remark recently made in one of the meetings of the superiors general in Rome, that our founders were far more prophetic than their successors. Our founders were men and women of vision, gifted to discern the signs of the times in their day and to respond to the needs of the Church in very specific and important ways. It seems to me that today we are giving a renewed value to the specific charisms of religious communities. This involves not only looking back to our roots but also includes the exciting process of discerning what the application of our charism means in our day. Moreover, in international religious communities, the charism of the foundation is continually being enriched as it is made incarnate in different cultures, ' thus enabling us to share new dimensions of our charism throughout the community. Having said this, however, the question remains: "How do we translate ideas into action? It is comparatively easy to instruct others in what must be done but far more difficult to suggest ways and means of how to do it. Of course opportunities for direct action are necessarily limited during the periods of formation, whether this be seen as initial or ongoing, The chal- 896 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 lenge is all the greater with regard to the issue of social justice. There is probably no dimension of formation that must be as action-oriented, in order to be effective, as formation for social justice. Therefore, difficult as it is, we must attempt to suggest how to promote the integral development of a man rather than content ourselves with simply calling for some kind of commitment to human development and letting it go at that. The knowledge of theory must be applied to reality. And for this, there must be a real commitment of time, creativity and energy. There is still another qualification that must be noted. In our commitment to social justice we must always be conscious of our identity as religious. We must find our way, as religious, of committing ourselves to the promotion of justice. At one time in the history of the movement of justice and peace it was believed that the key agents in this movement were the laity. In one sense, the key agents are the laity, but certainly not to the exclusion of priests and religious men and women. In fact, there is a specific role of religious leadership and witness that can be provided only by priests and religious. It is on this specific role that we must concentrate our formation of religious for social justice~ Another mark I want to make about action for justice is the importance of taking a positive approach rather than a negative one. Most calls for social action seem to be phrased in terms of protests. Such reactions to injustice are undoubtedly necessary, but it is far more important to take the initiative, to act for social justice rather than simply react against cases of injustice. This promotion of justice is necessarily determined by the distinctive situation of each culture. But some general examples of social action are the following~. --The use of the material resources of the community for the integral development of men and women. --The updating of guidelines for general and province investments, and decisions taken in consequence of these guidelines. --The use of investments to influence action for the integral development of all men. A religious society, especially in collaboration with others, can, for example, influence justice through the use of rights at-tached to shares in company stocks. --Giving witness of a simplicity of life-style. --Service of the underprivileged in general, and in the Third World in particular, keeping in mind the importance of helping people to help themselves rather than by means of any form of a patronizing "doing for others." --Programs of action-oriented education for justice in our schools and universities. In this regard, it is important to find ways and means of influencing the civic and business worlds to a greater commitment to social justice. Religious Formation and Social Justice / 827 --Participation in programs to help form the social conscience of the laity. At the same time, as we work at those programs which reach beyond the community, we must recognize that, to be authentic and effective, we must also work to promote justice within our own religious communities. As long as someone believes he or she has been treated unjustly there cannot be peace. It is our mission to promote that internal freedom of the human person which permits true openness to God's action in his or her life. To the extent that our religious are really free and open to the action 9f the Spirit, to that extent can they be effective instruments in God's hands for the good of his people. In working to correct unjust structures or practices in our own communities we must be careful not to become aggressive or belligerent ourselves. Many of these injustices come about simply because there is a lack of awareness. Formation Prepares for Collaboration With Others Although formation is necessarily personalized, calling for the develop-ment of a great sense of personal responsibility, formation today is oriented to the building of community among ourselves and with others in pursuit of a common mission, Our own religious communities must be seen as centers of ongoing formation, and care must be taken to try to make our communities favorable to this continued growth in the life of every religious, Efforts must be made, too, to have the local community have a sharper sense of the larger community to which it belongs, whether of the same religious family extended throughout the world or of the local Church in which the community is inserted. The development of a transnational mentality, and at the same time a more effective insertion in the local Church, are important thrusts in religious life today. And one of the features of "insertion in the local Church" is collaboration with other religious societies in the same area. From the moment of each one's entry into religious life, we must em-phasize the importance of collaboration with others: with the local Church; with other religious societies in the local Church; with other communities of our own society locally, in the Province, and throughout the society; with national and local conferences of religious; with national and diocesan commissions of justice and peace; with other men and women of goodwill. As religious communities, in all that we do, but especially in the promotion of justice and peace, we must strive to work with others rather than establish parallel structures. Conclusion Today's call for social action has profound implications for the Church and for religious life within the Church. The insertion of the Church in the world to meet the real needs of men and women today--their integral development and the integral development of the entire human race--is 828 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 part of the Good News we are commissioned to announce. Within our own religious communities, this commitment to social action brings with it one of the most important elements for the radical renewal of religious life. Our commitment to social justice will necessarily stimulate us to greater holiness of life, both individually and as communities. In this question of social justice we must be very patient with one another. There are some religious who are uneasy with the call to social action. Their entire formation and personal experience of the apostolate directed them to a different kind of commitment. The changing of attitudes called for by the Second Vatican Council is not accomplished easily and quickly. While working for the ongoing formation of all our religious we must accept the fact that some will not be able to commit themselves to the promotion of justice in the way that the documents of the Church call for. We must not be aggressive with such religious on this point. But we must he firm in not permitting them to impede the commitment of others who are responding in goodwill to the call of the Church, as is often made specific in general chapter orientations. Not everybody in religious life believes that social action is compatible with religious life; but it is certainly important that everyone in formation believe that this is the case and act accordingly. It is simply a question of recognizing that the commitment to justice is an integral part of religious life today. Annunciation Stirring summer air salutes her cheek, Then tomorrows whirl inside her, Kaleidoscope of thunderstorm and sunrise. She cups a question--"How?"--around the message To know its shape, And strikes white-hot divinity. "Let it be done!" Storm and sun explode In searing glory That contracts into a spark Within her womb. Sister Mary Cabrini Durkin, O.S.U. 1339 East McMillan Street Cincinnati, OH 45206 I Will Be.Who I Am Reflections Culled By M. Geraldine, O.P. Sister Geraldine is a member of the community of Oakford Priory; P.O. Box, Verulan; North Coast; Natal; South Africa. The reflections which follow are writings sent in letters sent at various times by a young doctor working in a very large and busy African hospital. I asked her. permission to publish these, simply because they come from someone--not a religious--who is living in the world, being involved in life, with all its primitive and brutal aspects, and yet remaining gentle, with her inner eye fixed on God--a contemplative in the world. Most of these passages were written over the past two years, during which time she was overworked to a degree beyond comprehension. Her one request in giving her permission was that only her first name be used: "Bobby." I added headings because, in their original form, the pieces did not bear headings, falling rather into the context of letters. Sister Geraldine Me Today This morning It is good to share in the Presence of my Lord. Today, Christ is in the touchables. He is in all that matters 829 830 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 --and doesn't matter. He is Lord of even the mediocre. Today, all I have is mediocrity, And the Lord is here--within all. He promised my coming and my going --my feeling and my unfeeling. I will not leave myself today. I will be--who I am, What I am--with Him. He will have--what I am He will love--what I am He will see--what I cannot see, Unable to see--but quiet In the truth--in Him Who is me. Me I wake in the mornings, and life, apart from the need, The great and unfulfilled need, to find silence, Comes like a great abyss of emptiness over me, Conflicts--tightening and exposing. But today--I felt my own fingers And knew that I was apart from them. I no longer felt my fingers as mine-- I was apart--and I will become Believe, hoping--knowing That God and I will grow together. That God will remove himself from my becoming And become one with my being. And all is more than knowing--this is all! The end of why I am. He has returnedwand I live again A tiny flame of love burns-- And I will be of God. Annunciation Salutation breaks the silence. Words, like rain, drop softly Yet thunder in her ears--as Mary I Will Be-- Who I A m: Reflections Culled By / ~3~ Mother--bends to gather words Which fell on desert earth On drought and burnt horizons. And Mary--Mary speaks her word, And waters flow as streams Through valleys--leveledbhills--brought low. "Do unto me" is a gentle breeze Which sweeps Him into life--through Mary. Contemplation Placid wilderness, You are the cold place--the quiet place and I, shivering in the coldness of your night, I do not mind you. For you have beauty in your wildness And comfort in your darkness And I hold you to me As a singer holds her song Awaiting her final note. Contemplation And I still wait upon His word Though He has laid waste my fields And cast me beyond my knowledge. He has dazzled me in splendor, He has made me sick with love. And though His ways are hard, And tears in solitude have blinded and drenched my roots I wait--humbled--in patience For He calls me by my name And His gracious ways Are beyond my knowledge. Autumn Snow is falling today--not crystals Multi-fashioned of cosmic force-- But life-sprung, from seed and fruit. Our early autumn snow--crisp and dry 839 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 Gentle leaves, slipping on windgusts In their own wafting way Assimilate cold-country snow. Nature Wind, I have rushed like you and blown before me fallen leaves. Clouds, I have touched like you The tips of hills--scudded mountains. Today a man will trample you, Grass, And I, too, will feel your pain. Winter fare It is raining today! Deep inside, water is falling-- And a heart, drenched From constant deluge, ' Hopes for dryness--desert warmth It is raining today, in my heart. Faith To sing relentlessly all my day-- Whether hearing the song, or merely listening for it-- I will sing, I believe-- In heart open, breaking forth-- My song will herald the quiet and the splendor Of the Lord I sing to, Whose music I step to A sound of gentle movement--a manner of being A manner of becoming--movement, Life and splendor. Bobby Progress in Centering Prayer M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O. Father Pennington's last article, "The Vocation of the 'Vocation Father,' " appeared in the May, 1979, issue. He continues to reside in St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, MA 01562. ~ would like to share with you three reactions to Centering Prayer. Recently I led a workshop on Centering Prayer for the Eastern Asso-ciation of Seminary Spiritual Directors. After an initial presentation, one of the spiritual directors asked; "Is this the kind of prayer we should move our directees toward, with the idea that, when they get there, they will stay there?" On another occasion a young religious was shirring with me his experience in prayer. After his first few experiences of transcending, he said, he asked himself: "Is this a!l there is to it?" Finally, a priest who had been centering regularly for several years wrote to me from Rome shortly after his election as superior general of his congre-gation: "As for the prayer, all I can say is that when I miss it, I miss it." Itseems to me that that spiritual director, who was not yet well acquaint-ed with or practiced in experiential prayer, was still approaching prayer as a project. This is most common. In our accomplishment-orientated society we tend to approach everything as a project--something to be done, accom-plished. There is a determined, measurable, finished'product in view. In prayer the program or project is lined up according to some traditional teach-ing. If a more ancient teaching, we might think in terms of lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio--receiving the Word of faith through listening or read-ing, internalizing it by a faith-response in discursive or imaginative medita-tion, responding to it in living, affective power, and finally enjoying it in 833 834 / Review for Religious, Volume38, 1979/6 ¯ quiet contemplation. We may be sophisticated enough to know that no one of these four will ordinarily occur as a pure state or way of prayer. There will usually be an admixture. As, for example, in Centering Prayer: we begin with a moment of recall, bringing forth from our memory the Word of Faith. Then we briefly reflect on it and respond to the reality it bespeaks. We then move to the center, the Presence, in affective love. And finally, there abide in contemplation. The four stages are present, and one predominates: contem-plation. It is this latter that is seen as the "goal" when prayer is conceived as a project; we want to get to the stage where contemplation predominates. Or, to express this using another, perhaps more common terminology: our aim is conceived as getting through the purgative and illuminative stages to the unitive, where we can, in our prayer--and more and more, outside of it also --retain a sense of our oneness with God, abide in his presence, touch and enjoy him in all persons and things. Certainly this is a state we do want to enjoy in our lives. And we are real-istic in thinking that it is something that will in its full realization come about gradually, something that we can foster by our spiritual practices and espe-cially by serious, prayer. But the fallacy I detect here is the tendency to identify particular expe-riences with certain stages of growth, and in particular to identify a certain kind of prayer, a contemplative type of prayer such as Centering Prayer, with a certain advanced stage of progress, and to make a project of its,attainment. All Christian prayer does imply a certain turning from self to God, some acceptan,~ce, h6wever implicit, of his personal revelation o~f himself, and a re-sponse to that'. This, therefore, does imply some "progress."~But apart from this basic conversion or turning to God with mind and ~eart, I do not think we can bind any form of prayer to a particular stage of progress in the Chris-tian or godly life. William of Saint Thierry, one of the great spiritual fathers of the twelfth century; and of all time, wrote a beautiful little treatise, On the Nature and Dignity of Love. In it he depicts the growth of the Christiafi, using as his analogue man's natural growth from infancy through childhood, youth, and maturity° to the wisdom of old age. At the conclusion of his very~rich and beautiful description, which includes some deeply insightful and loving re. flections on our Lord Jesus Christ, William says: It must be remembered, .however, that the stages of love [we can substitute the word prayer, in each case, as it is but an expression~of love] are not like the rungs of a ladder. The soul does not leave,the lesser love behind it as it moves onward to the more perfecL All the degrees of love~work together as one, and for this reason another soul's experi-ence of the scale of love may well follow an order which differs from the one 1 have described. ' ~ In .other words, if we want to think in terms of a ladder, then we should Progress in Centering Prayer / 835 see the ladder lying flat on the ground, so that we can be on all the rungs at the same time. Growth in the Christian life is a matter of intensification, of growing toward loving God in Christ with one's whole mind, whole soul and whole strength. At any moment, mind, heart, soul and strength should be at play, each in its own inte.nsity. At a particular time one may be enjoying a deep ex-perience of union with' ,God on one level, thanks to the touch of his grace, while on another level still be strugglingwith quite naked passions. In a word, one might beenjoying a contemplative type of prayer, true prayer, authentic prayer, while still needing and undergoing a process of purgation and purifi-cation in regard to certain deviant tendencies, and a process of growth in understanding in regard to some Of the basic facets of the divine revelation. It is false to relegate contemplative prayer to a marked' state Of Christian perfection or to consider its practitioner as one who "has arrived" there. A contemplative type of prayer is a way of prayer open to anyone who truly seeks God.' And it is the type of 16rayer experieffce that frill ordinarily best help one to make progress in 'the Christian life, to be purified and illumined, and to abide more integrally in union with God in and through all. It is, therefore, not something to be worked toward, a project to I~e undertaken, a goal, but simply a way to b~ entered into, an experience that can be enjoyed --and struggled with--by all who seek GOd'. But this means that the experience of contemplative prayer is open to de-velopment. The initial experien~ce of transcendent union with God is not an ultimate experience. The young religious was right to question,after his first experiences: "Is this all there is to it?" And at the same moment he was shar-ing with me, he.well knew the answer, for he had been faithful to contempla-tive prayer through several years and therefore knew !t was an evolving ex-perience. But it is an experience, and an ,experience that is beyond thought.or feel-ing or emotion. Therefore, we are not really able to capture it in words. It is good; in fact, it is of the substance of our lives. Once we have begun to be really in touch with it; to know it actually, we will say with that superior general, "When I miss it, I miss it." While most of the "official" pray-ers in the Church are celibates, the analogy of married love, it seems to me, can best help towards understanding and appreciating ~the contemplative experience. God himself, in'~the Old Testament, when he wanted to convey to his~peop!e the fullness and intensity of his personal love for them, again and again had recourse to the analogy,of human lovers. We, following perhaps not a few of the Fathers, tend to shy away from taking this portrayal of God's love for us with any literalness and are quick to spiritualize it, to reduce it to mere imagery. But it is precisely its integralness on an experiential level that makes human love such an apt image and ultimately makes it worthy of being, in the New, Testament, elevated to the sacramental order as the sign of Christ's love for us, his Church. 836 / Review for Religious, l~olume 38, 1979/6 The analogy has a good bit to say to us in regard to experiential prayer. Those who use the sex act seeking only gratifying experiences rather than holding it as the most integral way of expressing truly human love find it to be but an experience which quickly plateaus. New techniques, positions, ap-proaches are sought to increase and vary the stimulation, but the long-term result is inevitably frustration, or at best something far short of,. full human satisfaction. So, too, the one who uses methods of meditation or prayer to "have" experiences will soon ask, as did the young religious: "Is this all there is to contemplation?" And soon one will be trying other methods, looking to diverse traditions and teachers. But if one is truly seeking God, if.the use of a method of prayer such as Centering Prayer is undertaken to find a way to express one's love and desire for God in a fuller, more integral, freer way, then the method opens not only to a gratifying experience, but allows the fuller experience gradually, and sometimes quickly, to unfold. Newlyweds would greatly deceive themselves and be much disillusioned if they thought their first bungling attempts at making love were all that sex in marriage could be. Rather, as they attain a greater ease and facility with the bodily ex-pression, it should take its proper role as the vehicle for the fullness of their human and sacramental, grace-enlivened love. Then, free from false and exorbitant expectation, the physical experience will reveal its potential' to be part of an endlessly fuller realization of the union of love and life. So, too, the contemplative experience of God, in :harmony with the whole growth of Christian life which it especially fosters and matures, will daily become a fuller, richer experience. But the qualitative growth of the inexpressible is itself no less inex-pressible. One will only know by the very experience itself and, to some ex-tent, by its overflow into one's life, that this experience is an ever more mean-ingful and fulfilling expression of one's being. As a little boy I used to enjoy, of a summer's evening, to sit on the top step of-the porch and just be there. There was something indescribably good about being there. In the background my grandparents sat, silently, on the porch swing, rarely exchanging a word. I realize now that that something that made this an especially good and memorable experience was the currents of love that flowed between these two whose understanding and communion had matured through m~any decades. And these currents reached ou.t to enfold me. The man or woman whose love of God has matured through years of intimacy is the one whose presence brings enfolding love. We usually call such a person a saint. But the person himself is usually too much in ttie current of love and its outreach to notice anything special going on on the outside. In regard to the inner reality he is apt to say with the Prophet, "My secret is mine. My secret is mine." Many, though, will still be inclined to ask: "As we go on in Centering Prayer, won't we be aware of some progress? Won't we have a greater fa-cility? Won't there be fewer thoughts, greater peace, etc.?" I think in actual Progress in Centering Prayer / 837 fact we say "yes" to such questions. Yet I say that with some hesitancy and fear, for as soon as we begin to approach theprayer with any expectations, in any way seeking something for ourselves, instead of purely and simply seeking God, we undermine the purity of the prayer and thereby impede our" progress. Undoubtedly, as we repeatedly settle:into the prayer, we gain a greater fa-cility to do so. As the prayer grows in meaningfulness for us, a certain eager-ness aids our entry into it. As a greater love compels us to seek the Lord more wholeheartedly, we will more readily let go of lesser concerns so as to turn ourselves to the presence in our depths. Our chosen "word" will grow in its facility to take us to the depths. In fact, at quiet moments when we are initially not thinking of prayer, the word will arise spontaneously, beckoning us to enjoy a moment's repose in the center. With regard to thoughts: Yes, in general we might expect that after a time they will be less.interfering. The basic surface flow of thoughts and images will depend largely on our own particular make-up. Some of us will always be more given to thoughts and feelings than others. But as we grow in love and detachment--two of the many fruits of this prayer--a particular thought will be less apt to get a hold on us and pull us away from the presence at the center. Experience will teach us more and more to ignore the apparent or real inspirations and brilliant ideas. We will know that they are actually usually half-baked, that they will usually emerge again at some free moment when we will have the leisure to evaluate and use them. As for our little friend, the monitor of self-reflection, with the growth of God-centered love and detachment from self and with his simply being ignored he will gradually give up--at least to some extent. As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing assures us: Should some thought go on annoying you, demanding to know what you are doing, answer with this one word alone, if your mind begins to intellectualize over the meaning and connotations of this little word, remind yourself that its value lies' in its simplicity. Do this and I assure you these thoughts will vanish. Why.'? Because you have refused to develop them with arguing (c.7). Increasing peace will let us move through life with less stress, and re-peated soakings in Centering Prayer will release the built-up stresses of the past, so there will be less need of thoughts on that score. So, all in all, we should ordinarily, as time goes on, be freer and freer from thoughts, left more to enjoy uninterruptedly the presence. All of this is apart from an increased activity on the part of God to draw us into a deeper experience of himself through the graces of what some authors have called "passive contemplation." The Lord, of course, is always free to take special intiative and, if he wants, to take us so beyond our own center into himself to the extent that we can only speak of ecstasy. But until he so takes a hand in things there will always be some mental activity. And we should expect recurring difficult periods as he leads us into deeper and deeper freedom through a more thoroughgoing purification. 838 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 At every stage the rule remains the same: Whenever we become aware of anything we simply let it go by, gently returning to the center by the use of our prayer word. Becausb the development we are concerned with herb is essentially a ques-tion of experience, it can, to put it simply, be known only by experience. The Fathers, when speaking of this, repeatedly say--and I must admit it sounds at first hearing a bit snobbish: Those who have experienced this know what I am talking about. And those who have not, pray that you may have the experi-ence, and then you will know. I have often told people that if, before I entered thee monastery, anyone had ever given me an idea of the pain and sorrow I would encounter in my years as a monk, 1 would have run fast in the opposite direction, because they could never have conveyed to me the experience of love that I would find. Such experience can be gained only in the living. Having that experience, l have never for a day,'an hour or even for a moment regretted having re-sponded to the Lord's most merciful and gracious invitation. We have to enter into the experience of Centering Prayer and let it reveal itself to us day by day. I entered the monastery and stayed long enough to "taste and see how sweet is the Lord" because I heard and saw the witness of those who were willing to share this way with me. So too, we need to hear the witness and see in the lives of others the fruit of Centering Prayer to induce us to practice it faithfully until itself can reveal to us its own meaning. And we, in turn, need to share.what we receive and let the beauty of the Lord's work in our live~ shine forth so that others will be attracted to begin and persevere in the practice till they, too, know and can share. "Freely have you received, freely give." One can then rightly expect to. make progress in Centering Prayer. But one should not see that progress primarily, or try to evaluate it, by what hap-pens on the level of thought or feelings during the prayer. The reduction of thoughts, the feeling of peace and so forth are truly accidental' and no true norm of what is going on. Above all we need to avoid coming to this prayer with expectations. For expectations involve seeking something for ourselves --seeking in some way ourselves--and this undermines the very essence of this prayer which is essentially a total, pure seeking of God, a total giving over of ourselves to him. Only I~y a repeated abiding in this will we, bit by bit, die to our false selves and live more freely unto God so that we come to know more and more fully the expbrience of being, through a union of love, one with our V~ery God. Sisters and Nurses Joseph H. Fichter, S.J. This article is part of a larger study being prepared in regard to religion and pain, focusing on the hospital personnel who bring the consolations of religion to the sick. Father Fichter, of Loyola University (New Orleans) is presently on sabbatical leave. He is residing at Corby Hall; Univer-sity of Notre Dame; Notre Dame, IN 46556. he occupational role of women has been Changing rapidly in the recent past of American society. Women are given assurances by affirmative-action emPloyers that they will have job opportunities equal to those of males in the work force. Nevertheless there is still the stereotype and the actuality of certain kinds of "women's work" as exemplified in some areas of the helping professions: social work, school teaching and.nursing. Even in these areas, both in the Church and in the larger society, the manggerial positions are.still largely in the hands of males. The statement of Vatican II, that "wpmen claim for themselves an equitywith men before the law and in fact," is still short of achievement.' Our specific quest for the spiritual ,dimensions of health care focuses here on the women who are engaged in the personal service to the sick in Catholic hospitals. Many religious women hold responsible~positi~ons in administra-tion in the hospital system, just as they do in the field of Catholic education. If spirituality is exemplified anywhere in the Catholic hospital system it ought to be found among the women who have dedicated their lives to God in the service of sick and needy people. Historically, there gradually developed groups of Christian women who formed religious communities specifically 'Gaudium et Spes, n. 9.The first papal statement on equal rights of women came from John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), n. 41. 839 840 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 dedicated to health care. In later years they have been joined by more and more trained and dedicated lay women in the nursing care of people in pain, The Helping Professions Vocational opportunities for women within the American Catholic Church have been in traditional female occupational roles, with the largest number in the Catholic school system. A survey of female religious person-nel, made about two decades ago, showed that 81o70 were teaching, 120707 were in hospital work, and the rest in several forms of social work.2 About nine out of ten of all fulltime teachers in the Catholic school system were female (61 o70 sisters and 28o70 lay women). Teaching is still the Catholic occu-pation that employs the largest number of women, but the proportion of lay women teachers has increased significantly while the number of elementary parochial schools has declined. Women continue to dominate in the Church's institutions of education and social service but numerous factors account for the shift of emphasis indicated in the following table. We have already seen that the number of Catholic hospitals and schools of nursing have dramatically declined. With the lower birthrate, the numbers of orphanages and infant asylums have also gone down. On the other hand, the growing proportion oi~ the elderly in our society has resulted in the establishment of more homes for the aged. Every large diocese in the country has a variety of institutions to carry on the works of mercy, and they hire professional social workers, most of whom are women. These organizations have different labels while covering approx-imately the same~kind of services to the needs of the people~ Most of them had been under the title of Catholic Charities, but are also known as the Department of Christian Service, Family Life Bureau, Program for Refugees and Migrants, and often there are special committees for types of handi-capped persons, the lame, the blind and the deaf. None of these apostoli( ministries could continue to function ~successfully if there were not large numbers of conscientious and trained women available. Table l--Distribution of Establishments in Which Catholic Women Religious Are Employed, 1963 and 1978 1963 1978 Parochial,Elementary Schools 10,322 7,959 Hospitals and Sanatoria 946 728 Schools of Nursing 342 124 Homes for the Aged 357 486 Orphanages and Infant Asylums 258 204 Protective Institutions 134 122 When these diocesan bureaus and committees first began they were 2See Jospeh H. Fichter, Religion as an Occupation (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), pp. 145-148. Sisters and Nurses / 841 almost always headed by a clergyman--a monsignor if the post was pres-tigious enough--and may have included one or two professionally trained religious sisters. As the social needs became more apparent and as these insti-tutions increased in size, they employed more and more lay women social workers. The helping professions also grew more demanding for further and more complicated education and training. The criterion for employment began to place almost as much emphasis on the fact that a woman was trained for the work as on the fact that she was of the Catholic faith. The feminist movement has brought forth many legitimate complaints about discriminatory sexism in organized religion, and particularly in the Roman Catholic Church.~ There is, however, one positive aspect that is fre-quently overlooked. It is only within the Catholic Church that large numbers of women, religious sisters, hold important positions in the faculty and ad-ministration of women's colleges. This is true also of the other establishments listed in the above table, where nuns held responsibility for hospitals and orphanages and old folks' homes, and other facilities in Catholic charities. Before the Second Vatican Council there was occupational upward mobility for Catholic women, but it was almost exclusively for the members of relig-ious congregations.' While the sex distribution of the respondents to this study is not meant to reflect the actual proportions of men and women in these Catholic hospitals, we find that almost two-thirds of them (64%) are female. The listing of hos-pitals in the Catholic Directory usually provides the names of the administra= tot and the priest chaplain, and the number of religious sisters and nurses. It does not reveal how many males are employed at the hospital, but simple observation and experience in these hospitals demonstrate that females far outnumber males. The number of women physicians is gradually increasing, but there continues to be a predominance of males in the medical staff of these hospitals. Fewer Women Religious When Cardinal Suenens published his popular book, Nun in the World, in 1963,~ the American religious women were busy about improved profes-sional training and an expanded apostolate. Various options were earnestly discussed and we were reminded that "the hospital apostolate is almost unlimited: contact with patients in apostolic follow-up in their homes; con-tact with the families of patients, often themselves spiritual patients for our ministrations; home visiting of the sick and aged in the parish; organizing ~See Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York, Harper and Row, 1968), Chapter I, "The Case Against the Church." 'See Sally Cunneen, Sex: Female; Religion: Catholic (New York, Holi, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), Chapter 7, "Nuns in Evolution. " 'Leon-Josef Cardinal Suenens, Nun in the Worm (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1963). 842 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 retreats and recollection-days for different categories of patients, for doc-tors, nurses, personnel; organizing action groups of the same categories ~for training in the apostolate and in their roles in. the Church.''6 It was a time of great aspirations when almost unlimited opportunities for development lay before the American congregations of religious women. In 1966, the year after the,close of the Second Vatican Council the number of religious Sisters reached its,peak, 181;421. By 1978 this number had shrunk to 129,391, and the repercussions of this .shrinkage were felt in all the Church apostolates where the nuns had been making their greatest occupational con-tribution. Fewer young women were entering the novitiates of religious con-gregations to replace those who had died and especially to fill the roles of the large numbers who resigned from the sisterhoods.7 There is no need to dis-cuss here the reasons for this decline in the numbers of vocations among women :religious, a decline:which is apparent also in all Catholic male church professionals: priests, brothers, seminarians. Meanwhile the American Catholic population continued to grow; new dioceses were established and new parishes were opened. Because of the shortage of sisters to staff the elementary and secondary schools many of them had to close down and others had to employ a growing echelon of lay teachers. The lack of religious women to staff and administer Catholic schools of nursing was one of the reasons, why so many of.them went out of existence. Many changes of personnel occurred also in the Catholic hospital system. ~ With the exception of three institutions operated by congregations of religious brothers, all of the hospitals of this study are under the auspices of religious congregations of women. Some of the largest of these hospitals have more than twenty-five nuns on the staff,8 but the average number for all of them is 11.1 religious sisters. In otherwords, the 297 sisters' hospitals of this survey had 3,300 religious women serving the patients in various capacities. The following table reveals their distribution in the several categories of hospital work. ~ ; Table 2--Occupational Distribution of 3,300 Religious Sisters in 297 Catholic Hospitals Number Percent Bedside Nurses 556 16.9 Pastoral Care 657 19.9. Supervisors 905 27~4 Other Positions ~ 1,182 35.8 °Sister,Gertrude Donnelly, The Sister Apostle (Notre Dame, Fides, 1964), p. 21. 'For a sociolological analysis of this phenomenon see Helen Ebaugh, Out of the Cloister (Aus-tin, University of Texas Press, 1977). For an earlier study see Joseph H. Ficter, Religion as an Occupation, Chapter 8, "Giving Up the Vocation." 'For the correct definition of sisters and nun's see W. B. Ryan, New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10, p. 575 for "nun," and vol. 13~ p. 261, for "sister." Sisters and Nurses Most of the religious sisters who took hospital training and became reg-istered nurses say that they had originally intended to exercise their apostolic ministry as bedside nurses. Indeed, when the oldest of these' hospitals was first established practically all of the bedside nursing was done by religious sisters. This was the direction in which their vocation lay, I~ut circumstances decreed otherwise. Over the decades, as the hospitals expanded and the num-ber of patients multiplied, many lay women were trained in nursing while many of the sisters became head nurses and supervisors or moved into admin-istrative positions. At the present time, and among the hospitals answering this survey, almost three out of ten (28~/0) do not have any sisters at all in the role of bedside nursing. A'young lay nurse in a Catholic hospital of over 350 beds told us that she knew of only three bedside nursing sisters out of the 238 nurses in the hos-pital. She felt that the sisters have certain educational ~iiad [9rofessional ad-vantages in belonging to religious congregations, '~They"don't have to pay for their own training and education, and they are able to get bachelor's and master's degrees in nursing. They get to be supervisors on the different floors and wardSof the hospital. The sisters, of course, are the administrators of.th6 hospital.''It is true that the sister nurses answering our questionnaire are twice as likely as the non-sisters to have attained an acad6mic degree. Many of the hospitals conducted by religious congregations of women continue to have a sister as president, chief executive or administrator, but there is a gradually increasing proportion that now employ trained lay per-sons in positions of top management. From the point of view of personal and spiritual contact with sick people, however, the most significant switch for sisters has been away from the immediate beds.ide care of the sick. It is inter-esting that the largest single category of sisters iri Table 2 is made up of women iff"'other'' positions which constitute an interminable listing in the financ( office, the cafeteria, the laundry, the laboratory, and elsewhere in the hospital.9 This does not mean that all of these positions are filled by sisters who-were formerly involved in nursing. As a matter of fact; most of them were trained and educated for non-medical occupations. '~ Non,Sister Nurses As the numbers of religious women decline, and as they move from bed-side nursing to 'Supervisory 'positions and to other hospital functions, their prayerful influence on the patients will be funneled through the nurses work-ing under their direction. Whether or not this will lessen the influenceof the consolations of religion to sick people will probably depend on the extent to which the lay women nurses fulfill the spiritual functions of the Catholic hospital s~,stem. "If a Catholic .health facility is to witness to Christian values ~The Variety of people who deal directly or indirectly with the patient is listed by Beverly Du Gas, Introduction to Patient Care (Philadelphia, Saundcrs, 1977), p. 104. ~144 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 today, it must do so through the services rendered and values expressed by its employees in their contacts with patients and fellow staff.'''° At the present time in these Catholic hospitals the vast majority of the nurses are lay women, and almost one-third of them (32°70) are not members of the Catholic Church. For the most part, however, they are Christian believers and have affiliation with various Protestant churches. The compar-isons we make here between the sisters and non-sisters who are nurses do not revolve around their technical and medical skills. The non-sisters are on the average two years younger than the sisters, have been in hospital work for fewer years, and fewer have academic degrees in nursing. We assume, how-ever, that all these nurses have been tested for professional competence and are retained in employment on the basis of experience and proven ability to deal with sick people. The comparative analysis then centers on questions of faith, spirituality, the consolations of religion. One of the puzzling differences between these two categories of nurses is that the lay women appear to have a higher appreciation of the hospital's efforts to bring religion to the patients. When we asked them, "In general, how is spiritual ministry to the sick rated in this hospital?" the lay nurses were much more likely (70°70) than the sister nurses (540/0) to give a high rating. We asked them also to make a general assessment of pastoral care at their hospital," and again the non-sisters were more likely (56°70 to 310/0) than the sisters to say that it is "excellent." Indeed, one-fifth of the sisters assessed it as "only fair." One may speculate that because of their religious training and professed ideals, the sisters have higher expectations of the hospital's spiritual ministry and place greater demands on the people in the pastoral care department. In other words, they are less easily satisfied with the quality of spiritual care than are the non-sisters. It is likely also that they pay closer attention and know more about the actual ministry that is being conducted for the religious benefit of the sick patients. Religious practices are more central to their whole way of life, both personal and professional, and this seems certain to sharpen their awareness of others. The proportional responses were switched when we asked the much more personal question about their own spirituality. When we asked to what extent these hospital nurses considered spiritual ministry to the sick an aspect of their own daily work, a higher percentage of sisters (~87°/0) than of non-sisters (71070) said that they consider it "essential." There was practically the same proportional difference (87°70 to 73070) of agreement to the statement that '°William Kenney and Charles Ceronsky, "Developing Christian Values in a Catholic Health Fa-cility," Hospital Prog~'ess, vol. 55, October, 1974, pp. 32, 36-37. "A similar question asked of patients in a large Catholic hospital in Minnesota elicited responses that differed according to the church affiliation of the patient. See Cashel Weiler, "Patients Evaluate Pastoral Care," Hospital Progress, vol. 56, April, 1975, pp. 34-35, 38. Sisters and Nurses / 845 "you can't be a good health professional unless you have a spiritual perspec-tive on life." We proposed also the statement that "the holistic approach in modern health care has to include spiritual ministration to patients." Here again the sisters were much more likely (8007o) than the non-sisters (57070) to say that they "strongly agree" with this statement. It is clear then that the religious conceptualization of the health care pro-fession is of greater significance to the women religious than it is to the non-sisters. Nevertheless, many of the lay women give the impression of deep spir-itual solicitude. "There is a manner about them; they are comfortable with themselves and this is reflected in the way they are with peers, with patients and families. I mean there is a love there that is radiated to others." These remarks were made by a clinical nurse specialist who has been friend and counselor of many nurses. Both types of nurses say that they pray for God's guidance in the work they do daily with sick people, and this tends to be a relatively brief petition for divine help rather than a formal meditative prayer. Practically all of the sisters, and about seven out of ten of the non-sisters report that they "reg-ularly pray" for their patients, asking God to relieve their pain and anxieties. In approximately the same comparative proportions they also say that they "sometimes pray" with patients. Aside from the pastoral care department, which now also includes women, the hospital nurses constitute the main instrument for bringing the consolations of religion to people in pain. Summary The helping pr6fessions of personal service in the Catholic Church are largely in the hands of women, mainly in school teaching, secondly in hos-pital work, and also in social work. In the early sixties there was almost unre-strained enthusiasm about the prospects for women's i'eligious orders. In spite of later charges of sexism, the Catholic Church was the only system in the country that provided opportunities of upward mobility for women in schools and colleges, hospitals, and departments of social welfare. The drastic decline of membership in the religious congregations forced some shifts in the occupational distribution of sisters. Many .parochial schools closed down. Hospitals either retrenched their work force, or hired more and more lay women. The hospital sisters themselves tended to move from bedside nursing to supervisory and administrative positions. Their contact with patients, and their opportunities for spiritual consolation, became remote and less personal. The majority of nurses now in Catholic hospitals are lay women, a signif-icant number being non-Catholics. Nevertheless, they hold the pastoral min-istry to the sick in high regard. The majority of them appreciate the need of a spiritual perspective in health care and agree that spiritual ministry to the sick is an integral aspect of their job as nurses. In personal habits of prayer, how-ever, the religious sisters have more training, experience and appreciation. On Monastic Sexuality James M. Deschene, O.S.B. Brother James' last article, "The Mystic and the Monk: Holiness and Wholeness," appeared in the issue~of July, 1979. Since then, Brother's address has changed to: Ecumenical Monks; P.O. Bo~ 462; Oakdale, NY 11769. monk, almost by definition, is an enigmatic figure. Where most men and women seek out solid niches in society, the monk remains on the fringes, a shadow-figure hard to categorize. While most people seek to make names for themselves and build families to succeed them, the monk.stands apart in a curious,.anonymity, "surrounded by an aura of solitude whidh the modern world finds fascinating, though not perhaps entirelE appealing. Yet of all the enigmatic aspects of the monk's life,°perhhps nothing is more odd to the modern mind than his permanent commitment to a celibate life. There must be moments in the frenetic busyness of life when the monk's solitude appeals to many; moments when his quiet anonymity looks like a sweet .relief from the constant checks and appraisals society makes of most men. and women; moments, too, when the odd "outlaw'.~ freedom of the monk appeals to those whom society has neatly imprisoned in its labels and categories. One can imagine much of the monk's life having at times a certain appeal and enviability for many people, But it would be the rare person, in-deed, who found himself envying the celibacy of the monk's life. ~ In our time--l~erhapS more than in any previous age--celibacy is an enigma and a mystery. But it is through this mystery, faithfully lived out from day to day, that the monk is finally led to a fulfillment and a peace the modern world so desperately seeks y~t so rarely finds. Let it be clear at once that all this is not to say that celibacy ought to be 846 On Monastic Sexuality lived by everyone--it should not. Nor that celibacy is the only path to fulfill-ment and peace--it is not. No sensible person would make such claims. Yet celibacy is~meant to bring into the monk's life a.dimension present, though usually obscured, in the life of every man and ~woman. In being faithful to his commitment to the celibate life, the monk provides an essential witness to this dimension and to its value in the life of authentically human men and women. This is the dimension of intimacy in human love. We cannot hope to understand the mystery of celibacy until we have ex-plored the mystery of intimacy in human life. I suspect, in fact, that much of the modern negative view of celibacy has arisen out of a failure to see and appreciate this deep bond between celibacy and intimacy. Much negative feel-ing- sad to say--must also be attributed to the failure of many celibate reli-gious either to be genuinely celibate or, more commonly, to live celibate lives which radiate rich and deep intimacy. So many celibate men and women have failed tQ generate and radiate the deep affection and luminous warmth that is kindled by genuine intimacy in persons who are not merely unafraid of inti-macy but embrace it joyfully and embody it in their lives. There are few sad-der and more tragic figures in the world than those monks and nuns who, after years in Christ's~,service, have not bloomed with warm human love. These are men and women whose hearts should have blazed like suns with love, yet now lie cold and dead within them. The tragedy is very much theirs, but it is everyone's tragedy too. For it was )ust through these prophetic fig-ures that Christ wanted to work in the world living signs of love. Through them, through their commitment to him, Christ hoped to work miracles of grace, to convince the world that to be human is to be gloriously loving and alive. It was to these figures that the world would come to drink living water; yet too often all the world finds there is a heart of stone. We must pray for such men and women that Christ willprotect them from the despair that daily haunts them. We must do what we can to be loving, warm and intimate human persons ourselves. Celibacy without intimacy is a dead thing. Celibacy without warmth is a deadly thing. Themedieval poet, William Langland, in his i/ision of Piers Plowman tells us that "chastity without charity will be crhained in hell. such a loveless virtue as this shall be fettered in hell.'" To really understand the mystery of celibacy then, we must explore the my~stery of intimate human love. What one discovers almost at once is that intimacy is no merely social or psychological dimension of our person, but one whose roots lie deep in the very ground of our humanness. Intimacy is a real metaphysical dimension of human life. To explore its. landscape is to,.discover whole realms of our human being, heights and depths of which we are often--perhaps sometimes deliberately--unaware. 'William Langland, Piers tire Ploughman (Baltimore: Penguin Book, 1966), p. 37. 848 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/6 It is important to know from the very start that this landscape of intimacy is not entirely or even primarily the "garden of earthly delights" purveyed by some modern psychologists. Visions of false intimacy abound in our time, luring us with promises of fulfillment no genuine intimacy would ever prom-ise to deliver. We must not confuse intimacy with some kind of utopia--a word, it helps to recall, meaning "nowhere." True intimacy will have the richness and complexity of reality about itS' Intimacy is a very real--indeed essential--element of a truly human life. Coming from the Latin intimus, meaning innermost, intimacy refers to the dimension of depth and of inwardness--the contemplativedimension in each of us, or as the ancient Fathers would call it--the heart. Insofar as a man or woman is in exile from this inner dimension of the heart, that person's life is a shallow affair, infertile and rootless. Alienated from the depths within, we cannot 'help but become dry, cold, shriveled crea-tures, thereby turning God's rich creation into a barren desert of death. Exiled from the heart, we become exiles on the earth. Our lives become sterile and meaningless, and intolerable loneliness drives us to search frantically for something--anything--to fill the aching void we feel. Yet so long as we are exiles from our true inner selves, we find no solace or comfort in any other creature. All our socializing, all our frantic sex can do nothing to bring us peace or rest or life. In this desert exile we learn that the things we so desperately seek to fill our emptiness are revealed, once we grasp them, as mirages. Where we saw water and thought our thirst about to be slaked, the cruel desert--raising our hopes only to dash them more brutally--reveals the illusion and offers us only its dry and deadly dust. Thirstier than ever we run about, sure, despite our every disappointment, that our thirst will be ~atisfied, that the desert will be kind. In this wasteland of our modern rootless lives, only a few paths lie open to us. We may go on as always, restlessly seeking, "distracted from distraction by distraction," hoping to outrun the dark, pursuing shadow that would whisper into our ears the meaninglessness of our lives; hoping perversely for death to deliver us :from bur fretful race and give us, if not peace, at least a blessed nothingness. Others of us, not so adept at fleeing dark truths, end this miserable travesty of life with the quick bullet in the brain or the slower suicide of alcohol and drugs. Still others learn to numb themselves, to deaden the fear and anxiety, to assent to their deathful existence and become living corpses devoid of warmth, liveliness, humor or love. Finally, some few learn to stop in their hectic flight, to resist the whispering voices that offer distrac-tion or tempt one to despair. They learn to become still, to halt beneath that harsh sun and send down their roots into the burning sand in search of water. How foolish these last ones must appear to the others! Yet they alone of all our exiled race stand some chance of becoming really grounded and root-ed-- creatures in touch with the vital source of life, the living water that flows On Monastic Sexuality / 849 in the desert's hidden depths. They are, in a word, contemplatives. Or if that seems too re6aote or specialized a term for modern ears, let us call them people for

Issue 38.2 of the Review for Religious, 1979. ; Psychotherapy: Its Potential and Limit Models of Community A Directory for the use of Scripture in Retreat Volume 38 Number 2 March 1979 REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS (ISSN 0034-639X) is edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Depa:-tment of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. © 1979 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.: $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 March, 1979 Volume 38 Number 2 Correspondence with the editor and the associate editors, manuscripts and books for review should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELIC:IOUS; 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 reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Religious and Social Justice Mary Evelyn Jegen, S.N.D. Sister Mary Evelyn is an adjunct faculty member of Mundelein College in Chicago, and teaches in the Christian Spirituality Program at Creightori University in Omaha. She resides at 3000 N. Mango Ave.; Chicago, IL 60634. istorically we are still in an early phase of the age of the Second Vatican Council. The context of our call to collaborate in the work of human promotion is beautifully stated in the opening words of the Pastoral Consti-tution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes). Here, in language that has the grandeur and immediacy of a psalm, is set forth the intimate bond between the Church and society, or more precisely, between the Church and all humanity: The joys and hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. When we specify the "joys and hope.s, the griefs and anxieties" of all our brothers and sisters, we find those signs of the times, those temporal sacramentals in which God reveals himself to hs, and through which he calls us forward to .freedom" in him. What, then, are the most visible "joys and hopes, griefs and anxi-eties" for our sister and brother religious today? We recognize in the reality of our religious life itself the most profound sign of joy and hope. There are reasons which transcend history, but there are also historical factors which today take on particular significance. It is a.prophetic sign for our times that religious life carries within it the seed and promise of that global community which transcends narrow nationalism. Today, in a way that has never been 161 162 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 true before, the very survival of the human race depends on the ability to transcend local and national loyalties without abandoning them. And reli-gious have some experience of this. Imperfect as religious life is, carrying the scars of personal and collec-tive sin, it also shines with the brilliance of the healing, redemptive love of Jesus. Because we each have our own congregation and local community, we forget that we also exist as a whole, that we are physically present in the world as a transnational community founded on a commitment to a radical following of the Way of Jesus. World civilization has reached the stage where.its continuation depends on the ability of all men to perceive and express in many ways their solidarity with a race that is fundamentally one. They must learn to experience the unity of the human family which has become increasingly interdependent. Physical and economic interdepend-ence is a fact. The oil-rich countries, if they choose, can paralyze the world. The food-rich countries can starve the world into submission. Neither would need to deploy a single bomb. In such a world, what must become a choice is love. We must love or perish. And how is that love to be expressed? In the words of.Pope Paul VI at the Eucharistic Congress in Bogotb.: "Justice is love's absolute minimum." Reflecting, then, on the nature of religious life as it both expresses and prefigures the necessary evolution of the human family towards unity, we begin to come to an intuition that our transnational nature should manifest itself in signs that can easily be read by others. This becomes even more clear when we turn to a reflection on the other griefs and anxieties of so many of the men, women, and children of our time. In Octogesima Adveniens (1971), Pope Paul called our attention to the "new poor," those on the fringe of society. In actual fact, the "marginal" constitute the vast majority of the human family. These are the ones who do not have access to an equitable share of the underpinnings of life. It is difficult for men to bring this home to themselves when they do not live in daily contact with such all-pervasive suffering. But they are kept at least minimally aware through religious, and others, who have physically cast their lot with the poor. Though there are many forms of human suffering today, two global manifestations of injustice are of such magnitude that the effect can be numbing. These two griefs and anxieties are hunger and the arms race. The first is the greatest actual killer of the innocent; the second is the increas-ingly dangerous threat to the continuation of the human race itself. And the two are intimately connected in a cause-and-effect relationship. Even if the arms are never used, according to a Vatican note to the Secretary General of the United Nations (30 April, 1976), the armaments race "is in itself an act of aggression against those who are the victims of it. It is an act of aggression which amounts to a crime, for even when they are not used, by their cost alone, armaments kill the poor by causing them to starve." Religious and Social Justice / 163 Hunger still condemns 450 million of our brothers and sisters to an earthly existence which is degrading and destructive. The spectacle of 5000 hungry people moved Jesus to active compassion. How are we called to respond to children gone blind for lack of vitamin A, to the grief of parents unable to provide food for their offspring? It is in this context that our Holy Father and the bishops in the 1974 Synod issued a statement on the human rights most threatened today. Under the title of the right to life, they specified the arms race as "an insanity that burdens the world and creates the conditions for even more massive destruction of life." They next specified "the right to eat" as "directly linked to the right to life," and they called upon governments, not merely individuals, "to undergo a conversion in their attitude toward the victims of hunger, to respond to the imperatives of justice and reconcilia-tion and speedily to find the means of feeding those who are without food." Within weeks of that statement, Pope Paul iterated the concept of the "right to eat" in an address to the delegates to the World Food Conference, November 9, 1974. He said: The right to satisfy one's hunger must finally be recognized for everyone, accord-ing to the specific requirements of his age and activity. This right is based on the fact that all the goods of the earth are destined primarily for universal use and for the subsistence of all men, before any individual appropriation. Christ based theju'dgment of each human being on respect for this right (see Mt. 25:34). He went on to make a recommendation linking, concretely two central issues of justice and peace, when he said, As far back as 1964, on the occasion of our journey to India, we launched an appeal to the nations, asking that, by a truly substantial commitment--the result mainly of a reduction in expenditures on arms~there be set up a Fund with the aim of giving a decisive impulse to the integral advancement of the less well-endowed sectors of mankind. Today the time has come for an energetic and bindin~ decision along the same lines. Will such a decision--not yet obtained by a sense of solidarity or rather elementary social justice, which consists not only in not "'stealing" but also in know-ing how to share--finally be imposed by the perils of the present moment? The link between violence and injustice, and therefore, between peace and justice, is. intrinsic. It is p.rophesied in Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." Today we cannot have food for the hungry unless we purchase it at the expense of preparation for genocidal war. The call to religious to become engaged in the work of human promotion may take many forms. Certainly the call to re.ligious who form a corporate body, a body transcending national boundaries, is a call to enter more deeply, prophetically, and sacrificially into the struggle for peace and jus-tice, a call expressed in the agony of human destruction through hunger and the agony that witnesses the escalation of preparations for war. Later in thispaper I will try to.suggest some concrete possibilities. "164 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 Perceptions of Religious in Various Situations First, however, let us review the different situations of religious in our world, a world which is characterized by the joys, hopes, griefs and anxie-ties described above. In some places, religious perceive as their greatest problem and challenge an oppressive political regime which also stifles religious liberty, threatening the possibility of an authentic catechesis. These totalitarian regimes are related to ideologies of the "left" in Eastern Europe and some parts of Asia, and to the "right," especially in Latin America. In either case, any adequate analysis will reveal institutionalized fear at the rort of oppressive political structures. Ultimately, only the liberty of the children of God tan heal that fear, and we seem a very great distance from that liberty. In other places, Western Europe and North America, for example, religious perceive acutely a responsibility to resist many elements of their society which they see as unjustly exploiting the poor and the weak around the world. If the economic practices of the affluent nations do not always directly cause hunger and poverty, at the very least these practices do not vigorously seek to redress an unjust situation. The gap between the rich and poor continues to widen, as the rich have more goods and more power, even when this is at the expense of the vast majority who have relatively less--less even of the basic necessities of life, and less power over their destinies. That is why a macro-analysis of global economics which includes an examination of trade and financial policies (lending and foreign aid) and of the practices of multinational corporations leads inescapably to the con-clusion that no amount of individual generosity, though it is more in-dispensable than ever, can get at the root-causes of poverty and oppression in our world. Moved b~, the compassion of our Lord, we must turn our efforts towards nothing less than reshaping the political and economic institutions which control the lives of all of us. Surely this is what the Synod Fathers meant in 1971, when they said that "Action on behalf of justice and for the transformation of the world fully appears 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 oppres-sive. situation." Obviously, we must find ways of acting in concert with many others. To work in any other way would be to admit that either we do not understand the situation or that we do not care enough to become realistically engaged in the struggle for justice and peace. The Spirituality of Human Promotion We are all aware of the phenomenon of the person who burns himself out in activity related to social injustice. This points to the importance of finding the key to a spiritual dynamic which will sustain action without Religious and Social Justice / 165 destroying the person. We find such a dynamic in the reality of freedom or liberty. Freedom is both gift and prize; and, as prize, it is won not once and for all. Rather, it develops organically, as it were, once certain fundamental choices are made. In The Church in the Modern World there is a marvelous description of the external conditions of human liberty. Article 31 reads: Now a man can scarcely arrive at the needed sense of responsibility unless his living conditions allow him to be conscious of his dignity, and to rise to his destiny by spending himself for God and for others. But human freedom is often crippled when a man falls into extreme poverty, just as it withers when he indulges in too many of life's comforts and imprisons hi.mself in a kindof splendid isolation. Freedom acquires new strength, by contrast, when a man consents to the unavoidable requirements of social life, takes on the manifold demands of human partnership, and commits himself to the service of the hum&n community. Hence, the will to play one's role in common endeavors should be everywhere encouraged. This passage aptly describes the external situation of a free person, a person whose life is ordered, by commitment, to the service of the human community, to service by deliberate choice. As the passage points out, this kind of freedom is crippled when a person is caught in a situation where all energies must be expended in providing for survival needs. It is a kind of obscenity to talk about freedom to a person or a nation that is denied access to control over the means of production and distribution of basic goods. But freedom can also wither, and this is, too, the case, according to the passage just quoted, when a person "indulges in too many of life's comforts and imprisons himself in a kind of splendid isolation." This is the state of many people of the rich nations, who have only a foggy, shallow notion of the political and economic realities of most of the human family. We re-ligious must not avoid the continuing and painful examination that looks to see whether, and to what extent, we are among those whose spiritual freedom or maturity (the two are the same) is debilitated by a materially comfortable way of life. The 1971 Synod document, Justice in the World, asked for this ongoing corporate examination of conscience. Have we re-sponded to the call of the Lord in the pointed question (Article 48), " . . . [Does] our life-style exemplify that sparingness with regard to consumption which we preach to others as necessary in order that so many millions of hungry people throughout the world may be fed?" But what is the interior dynamic of a free person, a person committed to the service of the human community? Here, Justice in the World pro-vides a response, founded on a Pauline theology: According to Saint Paul, the whole of the Christian life is summed up in faith effecting that love and service of neighbor which involve thefulfillment of the demands of justice. The Christian lives under the interior law of liberty, which is a permanent call to man to turn away from self-sufficiency to confidence in God, and from concern for self to a sincere love of neighbor. Thus takes place his genuine liberation and the gift of himself for the freedom of others. "166 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 On the personal level, this interior law of freedom involves a call to shift the center of one's existence, or, in the more beautiful words of Jesus, to let the seed die, to lose one's life in order to find it, to lay down one's life for one's friends, knowing that only this is the full measure of love. Only those who are willing to die are free. For us Christians, this willingness can only be a gift, the gift of a growing identification with Jesus in his passion, death, and resurrection. The obstacles to the shift of one's center, or to living in the interior law of liberty, are fundamentally fear and selfishness. These counterweights to liberty are embodied in institutions as well as in the human heart. It is precisely where the process of personal conversion bears on the effort at structural change or conversion that we have a struggle, an "agony," an experience of the mystery of the Cross. Corporate Action for Human Promotion Having reflected on the exterior and interior dynamics of freedom in the Lord, we ask ourselves this question. Are there any ways in which religious across the world could act in concert in'the work of human promotion? The deepest value of concerted action, it seems to me, would be its power to prefigure and prepare for the new forms of transnational political, social, and economic life that are essential if the human family is to live in justice and peace. What are some forms that such concerted action might take? COuld we set an example by modifying our own budgets? Granted, there is a fundamental difference between a national budget and our own. We do not, happily, allocate funds for weapons of war. Nonetheless, we have our own funds for commmunity security and for personal and community goods beyond our basic needs. Are we not called to share these goods more liberally in our moment in history? In the early seventh century, pope St. Gregory the Great said, "Feed the man dying of hunger, for if you have not fed him you have killed him." The quotation found its way into Gaudium et Spes (Article 69). How would Saint Gregory apply that principle to our situation? We would miss a great opportunity, however, if we modified our com-munity budget in favor of children with shriveled limbs and swollen bellies, in favor of the 100,000 persons in Asia who go blind each year for lack of vitamin A, in favor of the malnourished of our own inner cities, and stopped there. We need to link our justified economy with the Eucharist. We could fast in solidarity with our poor brothers and sisters, who fast not by choice but by necessity. That fast could be in conscious preparation for our cele-bration of the Eucharist, the memorial of Christ's own giving of his Body and Blood to be our food. The money saved by fasting could be an exten-sion of our eucharistic celebration, our going together in peace to love and serve the Lord, the same Jesus who nourishes us, and who also hungers for us in his most distressing disguise. Religious and Social Justice / 167 If religious across the world joined together this way, we could antic-ipate our governments in creating the Great World Fund that Pope Paul was urging. We could use our experience to urge other societies to do the same--within religious life, from local community to province to generalate level; beyond our congregations from parish to diocese to na-tional conference. In all this we should remember the norm of Populorum Progressio, which echoes the constant tradition of the Church, that we are asked to share not only from our abundance, but even from our necessities. In this way we act in faith in our Father's providence, and we forge the bonds of loving solidarity with all members of our huma~ family. If Christians also learned to live this way, the climate would be prepared for moving our governments. Truth would indeed be speaking to power. We would experience a profound renewal of our eucharistic life, and our reli-gious life would know a new birth of deepest freedom in Christ Jesus, our Lord. It would, of course, be only a beginning of the ways in which we might celebrate our corporate life in the Lord. But ~iven the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the men and women of our time, it may be an indispensable beginning. 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 Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Psychotherapy: A Consideration of Its Potential and Limit Gillian Straker Doctor Straker teaches psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa; she also has a private practice in therapy in the same city. Her address at the university is Jan Smuts Ave.; Johannesburg, South Africa. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic philosophies underlying some of the more popular psychotherapies currently in vogue. Its intention is to assist religious who have been, are, or will be in therapy to come to a more realistic evaluation of the potential and limits of psychotherapy as a facilitator of growth. Given that psychological and spiritual growth are interconnected, it is the thesis of this paper that psychotherapy can be a useful tool--provided its limits are clearly perceived by both the client and the therapist. This involves a realization by both that,while psychological and spiritual growth are related, they are not synonymous. Furthermore, psychotherapy should never be regarded as autonomous in its own right but should rather be seen as a possible means to certain goals. In the case of the religious, these goals have been set a priori. It is not the function of the therapist to attempt to alter theseends/goals or to provide alternative philosophies of life. A religious in therapy who feels that the therapist is more involved in trying to get him to alter his goals than in exploring reasons for his diffi-culties in achieving these goals, should consider terminating treatment and seeking help elsewhere. A therapist who attempts to change goals when a client has indicated a commitment to them, or who subtly devalues these goals by continually trying to explain them away in psychological terms, is 168 Psychotherapy: Its Potential and Limit / 169 indicating not only a lack of awareness of the boundaries of his area of expertise but also an unawareness of his personal limits. It should be clearly recognized that such a therapist is, in a sense, guilty of malpractice and it is such misuse of the practice of psychotherapy which should be con-demned rather than the practice itself. Having drawn the limits applicable to all therapies, it might now be of value to examine some specific therapies in more depth. As has been indicated, it is the personality and personal attributes of the individual therapist which play the most vital role in determining not only the direction of therapy, but also its success or failure. The school to which a therapist belongs is a very important factor, as his allegiance reflects something of his personal ideals and values. A recent survey in America revealed that at present there are more than one hundred and forty different kinds of psychotherapy actually being practiced.~ However, these types of therapy can quite conveniently be categorized under three main headings, viz., the psychoanalytically, be-haviorally, and experientially oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Each of these three schools has a different view of man, which then dictates its psychotherapeutic techniques. The psychoanalytic view subscribes to the idea that man is a victim of turbulent inner forces from the power of which he continually struggles to be set free. In the Freudian view, these inner forces are largely sexual in nature; but later analysts felt that these inner forces were not only sexual but reflected, for example, a will to power, or a will to superiority. In terms of this view man is seen as fraught with inner and unknown urgings and contradictory pulls. He is subject to, and resists against, a reservoir of impulses which are largely inaccessible to the conscious self. He thus is troubled by behaviors and symptoms which he often cannot understand himself and which seem resistant to control by a conscious act of will. The aim, therefore, of psychoanalytically oriented therapy is to give the individual insight into the forces against which he is battling, so as to help him gain more control over his behavior and to enable him to give expression to these forces in a more socially acceptable way. I do not think religious would dissent much with these stated goals. The idea of gaining insight into motives and trying to express impulses in more acceptable ways would probably accord well with the outlook of religious. The.re are some pitfalls however, as there is a tendency among psychoana-lysts to explain all behavior including e.g., a belief in God, as being merely an expression of repressed impulses. A further difficulty which the psychoanalytic approach might pose for religious is in terms of method. In order to encourage the expression of feelings by the individual, so as to facilitate an awareness of desires and ~Parloff, H., Twenty-five Years of Research in Psychotherapy, New York, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, October, 1975. "170 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 needs which have blocked his emotional life, the analyst creates an environ-ment of almost total permissiveness. Such a process which is essential in the analytic situation is surely disastrous as a way of life. Psychoanalytic principles, by their very nature, cannot relate to morality or define limits for permissiveness. Thus, if the client or the therapist perceives that this kind of therapy is to become a life-style, a modus vivendi, the end-point will be an overvaluing of the mind and the expression of emotion, and a failure to move beyond the emotional blocks once they have been uncovered. Nevertheless the value of the psychoanalytically oriented therapies in uncovering these emotional blocks should not be ignored. These therapies are specifically geared for this. Once the blocks have been uncovered, the individual should become free to work through and beyond them in what-ever framework he has chosen for himself. For the religious, Christianity would obviously be his framework, and it is within this that he would continue to work from where the therapy had left off. We turn now to the second major school of psychotherapy, viz., the behavioral school. This school does not see behavior as determined by internal conflicts but rather sees all behavior, both normal and abnormal, as a product of what man has learned. Behavior consists of learned habits reinforced either by the self or by the environment. Thus therapy consists of teaching the individual alternative modes of behavior which have to be practiced both inside and outside of the therapy situation. This school of therapy probably holds the least potential danger for the religious since it deals mainly with overt behavior and de-emphasizes affective issues. This school does not primarily concern itself either with issues concerning in-ternal motivations or with questions concerning ideals and values. However, this very defocusing from self-exploration which diminishes this approach's potential danger is also, in my view, the factor which limits its potential as a facilitator of growth. In addition, the view of man which underlies the behaviorist approach is a deterministic one. As such, it is opposed to the Catholic idea of free choice. Man is primarily seen as a product of his environment, in this de-emphasis on man's capacity for choice, the behaviorists are similar to the analysts, although they differ from one another in the reasons they give to justify this. Nevertheless if the referring problem of the religious is a specific and definite symptom such as a phobia, rather than something less definite, such as generalized interper-sonal difficulties, the behaviorist approach might be the treatment of choice because of its concern with discrete symptoms and overt behavior-patterns. The final main school of. psychotherapy which calls for our present attention is the experiential school. Of the three schools of psychotherapy discussed here, this is the one which in some sense comes closest to the ideals proffered by Christianity. But again, in some regards it is the most dangerous school within which the religious would seek help. Experiential-ists reject the view that man is predominantly passive, subservient to the Psychotherapy: Its Potential and Limit / 171 less conscious aspects of himself, or to the stimuli in his environment. The experientialists criticize the psychoanalysts and behaviorists for their com-mitment to science, and for their underplaying of man's ethical dimension, his will, choices and moral relations to others. This emphasis on man's personal responsibility is what leads the experientialist to seem most sym-pathetic to the religious. However, given that man is considered responsi-ble by the experientialists, the ihamediate question which comes to mind is: "Responsible to whom and responsible for what?" It is at this point that there would probably be some divergence in thought. On the whole the experientialists see man as responsible to himself for the actualization of his potential. This leaves unanswered the question of when one man's freedom becomes another's bondage. However, in partial answer to this vexing dilemma most of the experientialists put forward the view that man is basically good and thus actualization will always involve actualization to the good for himself and others. This is an assumption which lacks full support. Nevertheless, some of the intermediate goals of certain experientialists would not conflict with Christian ideas. Helping the individual to relate in a "meaningful way" is one such goal which the experientialists have. They define a fulfilling relationship as one in which the individuals have come to terms with the paradoxical nature of love, in which love and power are not opposed but complementary. In this kind of love "we find ourselves at our strongest and most powerful when we are able to transcend ourselves in communion with another.''2 This notion of love involving selflessness would accord with the Christian ideal. Similarly congruent is the idea that we are "less-than-perfect creatures who need to live with ourselves as we are, while still attempting to grow toward an unattainable vision.'''~ In terms of this it is the aim of the experientialist not merely to heal illness but to promote growth. However, many experientialists hold an implicit assumption which would conflict with views held by his religious client. This assumption is that man himself, as an autonomous being, has within himself the capacity to bring about his own actualization to good. There is no acceptance of the idea that man cannot bring about his own salvation. There is a belief that man himself can, via various methodologies, aimed at the promotion of dimensions such as self-determination, authen-ticity and creativity, bring about an ultimate integration of his body, mind and soul. It is from this idea that the basic divergence between the experien-tialists and the religious comes. The former believes himself to be respon-sible to himself and at times to society. There is no higher authority than himself, and he is capable of bringing about his own integration. This is totally opposed to the idea of the religious concerning man's dependence on 2Forish, B. "Fulfilling Relationships: The Vision and Reality," J. Humanistic Psychology, V. 18, No. i, Winter, 1978. 31bid. 172 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 God for the integrating gift of grace and salvation. In terms of methodology, this school has hazards because, in its thera-peutic approach more than any other, the personal attributes of the thera-pist are of paramount importance. This is because, on the whole, experien-tial schools renounce specific techniques as part of their understanding of human existence. The therapist is, for the most part, discouraged from applying techniques, although, in some of the more radical branches of this school, nonverbal techniques are used as a means of helping the individual to get in touch with his feelings. Generally, though, therapy is assumed to occur naturally if the therapist can, as far as possible, share the being and experience of the client. It is the mutual encounter between therapist and patient in which both attempt to communicate honestly with one another which is seen as the sine qua non of growth. The experiential therapist, therefore, does not have a contract with the client other than to interact as honestly as he can. Thus the therapist, in his own person, is the primary tool for change. Experientialists are probably correct in stating this and making their assumptions explicit. This means though, that a client entering into this kind of therapy must be aware that what he is contracting for is to be exposed to the person of the therapist. Thus the client must evaluate more than ever whether he has confidence in the therapist as a person, not primarily as a psychologist or trained expert who has something to offer. If the answer to this is negative, then it is best not to enter into the contract of such a relationship. If the answer is affirmative, this school could offer something very positive because its therapists are committed to being honest, making their own values, beliefs and assumptions explicit in a way which the psychoanalysts, for example, are not. Thus, in psychoanalysis, the influence of the values of the therapist are much more subtle, and therefore difficult to deal with. However, in some ways this disclosure of values is less important in a psychoanalytic situation because the goals of the approach are limited to freeing the individual from repression rather than the more extended goal of the experientialists to promote a "higher level of consciousness.''4 Of course it is for the individual religious to °decide what it is he wants from therapy. In my view, though, for the religious, therapy should perhaps end at the point of freeing the individual from his blocks, since religious should have available to him other and better means than therapy to promote growth. Nevertheless therapy can be extremely valuable as a means of putting the individual in touch with his emotional difficulties, as well as the needs and motives which may be controlling his behavior. Therapy can assist the individual in working through these, and, since working through things is surely a prelude to working beyond them, it would seem that therapy can indeed be a useful tool, provided both client and therapist clearly acknowledge its limits. 4Maslow, A. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 1971. Resentment William F. Kraft Dr. Kraft is well known to our readers. His last article, "Nothingness and Spiritual Growth" appeared in the November, 1978 issue. He is professor of psychology at Carlow College; 3333 Fifth Ave.: Pittsburgh, PA 15213. I admit that I'm bitter. I resent the way she treated me. Just to see her irritates me. What really galls me is that she behaves as though nothing ever happened! It's like there's nothing wrong with her--the whole fault is mine. ! resent her for that. Sure, I have to admit that she really did help me. When l first met Sister, I was timid and shy, never really sharing with anyone. She listened, and encouraged m~i to give of myself. I guess i have to thank her for that. But when i really started to open up, and asked her to reciprocate, suddenly she seemed to become distant, not at all friendly as she once was. i asked her a couple of times what was wrong, and all she said was, "Nothing." I guess what I'm saying is that when i was lower and she was higher, things went well. But when we became more equal, our relationship changed. ! resent that. I don't like the way I feel. Even when I just think of her or hear about her, I get these strong feelings, l realize that they aren't doing me any good, but that's the way I feel. l just can't push a button to stop these feelings. I'd like to love. It would make life a lot easier. I'd like to forgive, and not feel the way I do. And I don't like hurting her, besides hurting myself, with this psychological cancer. But how do 1 stop feeling this way? Resentment is an experience that is completely foreign to very few peo-ple. We know that it is an intense, unpleasant feeling that can alienate even close friends, even brothers and sisters. Few, if any people, enjoy feeling resentful. But it happens all too often. We would rather be in love than at odds with one another; But things just don't work out that way. 173 174 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 Still, love and resentment need not necessarily be mutually exclusive. Though resentment can be destructive and negative, it can also be positive. For example, I can resent your lying to me. I can resent your attempts at manipulating and scandalizing me. I may validly resent your rank-pulling behavior that violates my dignity. But we seldom think of resentment in terms of its being positive. Along with looking at experiences and theories of resentment, a clue to the meaning of resentment lies in its etymology: "to feel again." One of the peculiar features of resentment is that it is a feeling that we hang on to--or perhaps it hangs onto us. It is as though we are in a state of constant edginess, just waiting to be "triggered off." We also see that resentment is similar to anger and hostility, at least in the form of being aggressive and disapproving. In a sense, resentment points to a "no" that will not go away. Resentment is intense and highly personal. Rather than being oriented toward a peripheral or passing experi-ence, resentment tends to center around important values and especially around our own dignity. Resentment is persistent in that it tends to remain fixed. It is always "there" as a kind of warning. It also involves an indignant stand that protests insults or unjust acts that violate or threaten me. Finally, resent-ment incorporates disapproval--a "no" that proclaims that I will not con-done or sanction such action. Resentment involves an affective judgment that attempts to reclaim, maintain, or proclaim my worth. Thus, resentment refers to holding on to a feeling which serves as a warning to stop indignant treatment. In resentment, I say that I will never tolerate, accept, or condone such behavior. I say: "If you act this way, I'm ready for you." Resentment is a constant readiness to defend, protect, and protest. In light of this description, it is important to make the distinction be-tween the experience or feeling of resentment and what constitutes resent-ful behavior. How 1 behave or act on my resentful feelings is much more within my will than how I feel. The ideal is to listen to feelings of resentment so that I can act in a positive way. Let us first examine resentment in its positive form. Positive Resentment Positive resentment is a protest against a violation of my dignity. When my worth as a person, including who and what 1 hold most sacred, is violated, I have the responsibility and the duty to feel resentment; other-wise, 1 become less, or settle for less, than 1 really am. Not only am I insulted but also 1 insult myself. Furthermore, it is not fair to let others violate my dignity because ! am letting them be less than they are. Thus, my readiness to respond in indignant disapproval is a way of maintaining and promoting my own dignity and evoking the dignity of others. Resentment / 175 For example, people who pull rank on me, try to make me les's than l am, and make themselves more than they really are. My resentment can be in service of the truth that we should be (and ontologically are) brothers and sisters together rather than on different planes or in different worlds. My vigilant'and steadfast "No" to such manipulation can be a form of healthy resentment. I resent being used as a thing because I am infinitely more than that. We should feel resentful for being treated as second-class citizens. So, a woman should deeply resent sexist treatment because she is used and being treated as less than she really is. Being treated unjustly can also evoke resentment. For instance, a sister may feel resentment because she is always the one told to have phone duty or because she feels she is never appreciated. Unfortunately, a sister espe-cially if she is middle-aged may feel guilty over such reactions of resent-ment. Actually, the sister should "listen" to her resentment as a means of maintaining and proclaiming her dignity and as a gift that may motivate her to seek to change the situation. I should feel resentment if ! am used as the community scapegoat, always made fun of, only seen as a workhorse. My resentment clearly says that when you treat me as less than 1 am, you are not going to get away with it. 1 am going to protest, 1 am going to try to change the situation. I am going to manifest myself as more than you see. Healthy resentment, which it can be paradoxically called, is primarily a function of love. It emerges out of and is an expression of love more than of hostility or hate. In positive or healthy resentment, my intention is not to get even, to hurt, or to lower the other. My intention is to manifest and deepen my own dignity and the dignity of the other. In fact to condone behavior that violates my dignity is what would not be healthy. Indeed, 1 can accept and even understand people's acts of aggression, their insulting me, being unjust to me, exploiting or manipulating me. But I neither have to, nor should !, condone their mad behavior. Along with and sometimes beyond these purely psychological ap-proaches, I can also choose to act in a directly spiritual way. In fact, rather than being a matter of "intellectual gymnastics" or mere theological rhetoric, the spiritual resolution of resentment can also be clinically opera-tive. For example, if 1 am a ~:ommunity scapegoat who is manipulated and used unjustly, I should try to determine whether and how I may myself be responsible. I can ask myself, for instance, if ! have an unconscious need to be exploited, or if I have a compulsion to please. But even if I fail to cope healthily with my area of responsibility, or if I am psychologically naive, 1 can still transcend the experience spiritually. Experientially and behaviorally I can identity with Jesus Christ--the Supreme Scapegoat. Such an approach to transcendence need not be a sentimental, saccharine basking in pseudo-spirituality. 1 can actually dif-fuse and dissolve m.y resentment when its grounds are accepted (not wanted masochistically) in Christ. For instance, regardless of, and beyond, 176 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 psychological analysis, I can foster a "crucified love." In the Spirit of our Lord, I can choose to act on the grace which enables me to suffer for the welfare of those who persecute me. This is not pietistic masochism, suffer-ing for my own sake under the guise of love, but rather it is becoming a disciple of Christ. How realistically possible and frequent such a spiritual approach is for most of us is another issue. But it is possible to strive to practice the message of the Cross that redeems and heals. Negative Resentment Instead of emerging out of and in the service of love, negative resent-ment is fixated, closed, and retaliatory. In negative resentment, I try to hurt, to lower the other. My persistence is fixated rather than cieative. It is destructive rather than self-creative, selfish rather than life-giving, closed rather than open, hindering rather than helping. In negative resentment, 1 simply will not or cannot "let go." You--the resented one--haunt me so much that at times 1 feel that 1 would want you dead so that you can no longer hurt me. At least, I would like to cripple or lower you to the state of being powerless. I want to even the score. Such retaliatory fixation cuts offany future, it identifies you with the past. Rather than being open to new possibilities, 1 tend to identify you with what hurts me. To be sure, I feel indignant: my dignity has been hurt. But instead of responding creatively out of love, l try to make you hurt worse than I. 1 try to get the better of you so that 1 can control and manipulate you. l try to make you become less worthy than I feel. Of course, in trying to pull you down, ! lose my own dignity rather than gain it. My disapproval can too easily turn to hate or hostility. At the very minimum my intention is to make you powerless and me more powerful, and then maybe you will come to me for help. Actually, I am trying to make myself bigger and higher precisely because I feel smaller and lower. In making you helpless, I have the illusion of being higher, more powerful, and more valuable. Clearly negative resentment violates and can even destroy community. It fractures, fragments, and fixates the community. Rather than growing together in love, which can include some positive resentment, we hurt and alienate one another. Still, there is some sense in the apparent nonsense of negative resentment. Let us look at some of the more common reasons for negative resentment. Psychological transference can be a dynamic which produces negative resentment. For instance, I may resent my parents, perhaps for good rea-son, but then I transfer my feelings or displace them onto other authority figures. Though 1 may feel and behave well in most areas, I find myself resentful toward authorities, though I can find no particular reason to feel resentful. I have to realize that my resentment may be rooted primarily in the past rather than in the present. Resentment / 177 Similarly, if 1 am in a position of authority by virtue of my function as a superior, teacher or whatever, I may be confused and hurt with peo-ple who resent me. I sincerely feel that such people may resent me not primarily for what I am doing or even for who I am, but because I evoke past unresolved feelings that are now transferred or "dumped" on me. Of course, I have to discern honestly whether I have my own authority problems that evoke positive resentment that may or may not be com-pounded and blurred with transference. "Divinizing" can easily lead to negative resentment. When I divinize you (a friend, parent, or authority figure), I put you on a pedestal. 1 look up to you and expect you to be perfect. Perhaps you meet my expectation, or at least try to be perfect for me. But when you begin to show your imper-fections, 1 may feel cheated and hurt. Then, instead of divinizing you, I demonize you. Feeling let down, I angrily pull you off your celestial pedestal (of my own making) and perhaps put you in hell. To be freed from such a resentful bind, to be free for a forgiving love, it will help if I can discern why 1 initially had the need to divinize you. Did I humanly but foolishly become too dependent on you for affirmation and support? Why did 1 make you a god when actually you are essentially the same as I? Did I, and do I, sell myself short? Why do 1 need you either in heaven or hell rather than where you really are---on earth? Poor self-esteem and consequent insecurity is a frequent cause of resentment. For whatever reasons (which can be rooted in the first few years of life), I can too easily be insulted, lowered or threatened. Conse-quently I may feel compelled to have a divine love which will never hurt or let me down. Or, from another direction, I put you down in the futile attempt to raise myself; in short, my worth eventually comes from making you feel and look bad, at least in my eyes. In such a situation, I may not only resent what you did but also and perhaps more radically who you are. Your very being threatens me so much that 1 resent you just for being. It is not rare to place too much of one's self-worth in another. If I am too dependent on you, 1 can resent you when you hurt me. And if you deliberately and willfully hurt me, I should resent you. But if you hurt me because of your imperfections or limits, or because of some painful truth, my resentment may be only negative. Then, I can no longer face or trust you. I cannot "let go" and forgive, because my heart is broken. I am afraid I will be "wiped out." I am fearful of losing my dignity and sense of life. Resentment can also emerge out of and be combined with jealousy. In jealousy I feel compelled to minimize the worth of a third person because he or she threatens me; that is, the presence of the other means that I may lose your love and therefore my dignity. Too much of my security depends on our relationship and on your affirmation of me. Or, if our friendship ends, 1 may resent you for years, becoming embittered. Instead of being my friend, you are my enemy. Though losing a friendship usually is painful, too 171~ /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 much of my dignity had been dependent on our friendship. My resentment is a desperate attempt to maintain my dignity, but also a defense against my insecurity and lack of self-affirmation. Resentment can also be a way of controlling you so that the you will not hurt or humiliate me again. My resentment puts you on edge. It keeps you wary and at a distance. Though it is understandable that I do not want to be hurt, my resentful behavior cannot be justified. Ideally, 1 should not try to hurt you because you hurt me. Rather than manipulating you, I should strive to give you the freedom to emerge. Arrogance, too, can be at the root of resentment. When I am arrogant, I blow myself up out of proportion. I claim higher rank, greater dignity or more power than I really have. In arrogance I am likely to feel that 1 know better than others, that I am always right. So when you criticize, disagree, or threaten me, I may resent you as a way of affirming my arrogant self-concept and as a way of lowering and controlling you. When you do not give me homage, I resent you. In effect 1 say: "How dare you act this way to me. Don't you know that 1 am better than you are? I am too good for such treatment, and therefore 1 will make you pay for it." Different life-styles can be a threat to my worth. If I am so insecure that I need other people to affirm my ways of living and consequently cannot be open to their other ways, I can easily feel resentment. When I am insecure about my own way, other ways intimidate me, evoking resentment. For instance, if my life depends on watching or not watching television, people who are bored by television may evoke resentment. Or if my life depends exclusively on certain kinds of prayer, other modalities may evoke resent-ment in me. Ideally, I should be open to many kinds of activities or prayer, though I do not have to agree with, condone, or follow them. In the same way, if people force or embarrass me into doing "their thing," perhaps I should feel justified resentment. For instance, some people may uncon-sciously resent my "old-fashioned" ways and try to make me feel guilty for not following their "modern" methods. Of course, the opposite is also possible. How to I-leip The starting point of helping others is to help oneself. When you mani-fest resentment toward me, first I must try to understand myself. I must discern whether I have anything to do with causing your resentful feelings. For example, did I unconsciously encourage you to put me on a pedestal, or be too dependent on me? Did I think to try to fulfill the role and expec-tation of being perfect? Was I subtlely arrogant in my desire to be helpful? Did I imply that I was '~the way, the truth and the life"? After taking stock of myself, then I can begin to help you take stock of yourself. In feeling your resentment, I should not try to retaliate with bitterness, hostility, or withdrawal. Though withdrawal out of love may sometimes be Resentment / 179 necessary, withdrawal should not be a form of passive hostility, perhaps taking the form of the "ice water treatment." Thus, when feeling the fire of resentment, I should try not to burn in return. Ideally, I should be available in love. I should try to understand and appreciate your reasons for being resentful. When I can make sense of such apparent nonsense, I can help you affirm your true source of dignity. Though important, reasons and words are secondary to seeing and responding to your dignity no matter what you are doing. Rather than being overwhelmed with resentment and returning the hurt, the challenge is to affirm your dignity through your hostility and hate. No matter what, I can always "be for you" in love. The way I might confront you is primarily a function of our relationship. When confronting another, I must be willing and able to take the time, energy, and responsibility for the consequences. It is usually unfair and poor "pop" psychology to express feelings "honestly and sincerely" or to expose another's psychic nerve endings without working through, perhaps for weeks or months, what occurred and will emerge. To confront irrespon-sibly can justly evoke positive resentment. A primary goal is to forgive. Forgiving includes "letting go," allowing ourselves to become more than resentful. Forgiveness also points to a giving that is always there no matter what; I am always there for you regardless of how you or I feel. And, I can and should forgive myself. I cannot always immediately forgive, so that, at times, I may have to forgive my own lack of forgiveness. Forgiveness does not simply mean to forget. Indeed, forgetting may be unjust to both of us. Forgetting our resentment, for example, can decrease opportunities to learn fi'om our obstacles and increase the likelihood of being caught again in the same trap. But, forgiveness does mean not bearing a grudge or identifying you with your faults. My la(k of forgiveness often is a way of controlling and fixating you and myself. Whatever the reason, at base I cannot forgive because forgiveness makes us equally sinners struggling in love. Though I may have been hurt justly or unjustly, it is good to keep perspective and tO experience you as really more than just a hurting person. Even if you are evil, it is highly doubtful that your entire personhood and life are negative. More likely, you stand on the same ground as I do and are much more similar to, than different from, me. To abstain from identifying you with one of your functions or qualities helps to keep perspective and to foster a forgiving and compassionate stand. To be resentful in love is a saving grace. Though seldom can I determine completely the way I feel, I can be vigilant in staying in love. In love, I can embrace all of myself and you. Love heals our wounded and broken lives. Even though we may feel bitter, love allows and encourages us to see more than is apparently there. In love, we get a glimpse of what can be---of the Kingdom already begun on earth. The Stage of the Hidden Spring Carol Jean Vale, S.S.J. Sister Carol teaches English at Delone Catholic High School. She resides at St. Joseph Academy; Main St.; McSherrystown, PA 17344. What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well . ~ We stand today at a crossroad in the passage of time. Vatican II altered the course of the modern Church and, in so doing, changed the direction of all responsible Christian lives. The council demanded that all renew them-selves and, in conjunction with this dictum, many of our general chapters have mandated for us a real participation in renewal; certainly for the dedicated religious no option exists. Refusal to renew is tantamount to a direct refusal to correspond to the will of God. Such a renewal demands a radical conversion to the person of Jesus. It is a call to a unique type of selflessness and self-emptying. The twentieth century is starved for men and women who express by their lives the truth of the message they proclaim. Such a correlation between spoken word and lived reality comes within the realm of possibility only when Christ touches the human heart and turns it completely toward himself. Vatican II has asked us all to undergo such a spiritual revolution. In- .deed, Jesus came to preach a revolution; a revolution not of social values or political ideologies, nor of.scientific values or economic policies. The 1Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943), p. 75. 180 The State of the Hidden Spring Lord came to effect the most radical revolution possible; to overthrow and free the heart of each person who would ever embark upon the adventure of living.2 To show us a Father's love, to make us new in that love, to recreate us in our real image is the reason for his coming. Difficulties will continue to arise in the pursuit of renewal. Being made fresh involves grinding down the rough edges of personalities, scraping clean the tartared remnants of sin, scooping out our full abundance of selfishness. It means allowing Christ to polish us until we shine as precious stones. "I will lure her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart" (Ho 2:14). That is precisely what Jesus wishes to do to each of us--take us with him to a desert place and there speak a new word known only toour hearts: a word that transforms self-consciousness into other-consciousness, a word that magnifies and evokes all our latent potentialities, a word that enkindles a fire capable of warming another's heart. Interior renewal is difficult because it asks that we journey into this desert with Christ and there face ourselves. This tryst heralds many significant repercussions. Although the Lord leads us as solitaries into the wilderness, he takes us there not for ourselves alone. The desert remains a proving ground, a training camp where we prepare and are prepared for others. Nothing is ever given for the self alone, but rather to be shared so that others might eat, be nourished, be healed, and in turn give to yet others from their new abundance. Our m6st intimate moments alone with the Lord reverberate with worldwide significance. We stand alone before God, but in God we stand together. I am at once by myself and yet a multitude, a solitary yet an assembly, an individual yet a community. I am; we are. We live in relationship, and there exists no exit where we can escape this fact. We are one in Jesus with one another. The desert teaches this fact undeniably. To meet Jesus Christ is to meet our fellow men and women. Success in the apostolate will be in direct proportion to our living out of this desert experience. In the desert, our praye~" life soars to new depths of intimacy with the Lord. A person can be transformed in minutes when touched by someone alive with Jesus. Without him, we can talk for a lifetime, spend human energy, use every gimmick available, and change no one. He alone can give the increase; and he works through us only in the measure to which he first is living within us. The world in which we live thirsts for prayerful men and women. It hungers for a transformation powered by the dynamic of understanding love, reverent gentleness, and uncompromised integrity. It starves for peo-ple who are committed to ideals and values that remain despite the fluctuations of time. Today's world craves persons who possess the power of the Spirit, for only this power turns hearts of stone into those of flesh. zCarlo Carretto, The God Who Comes (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1974), p. 143. 11~2 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 Until new growth in the Spirit happens, until more of us grow into living enfleshments of Jesus and bid others do the same, there will be no peace; rather fear and hatred will continue to wreak their havoc on humankind. The religious person must combat the apathy, the hatred, and the cruelty of our times. We are summoned to be countercultural, different, to proclaim the values of the Gospel--values that never have been, are not now, and never will be popular. Christianity means the cross. The Resur-rection and Crucifixion may never be divorced. In America especially, the concept of an "Alleluia People" is being misconstrued to perpetuate a cross-less Christianity. Yet our joy is only as deep as the depth of the pain we have suffered. Suffering prepares the soil of our deepest persons for a harvest of joy. Suffering well-embraced, builds, not breaks the human spirit. Jesus is calling us now to suffer and to die with him. We are being graced as instruments for the redemption of the modern world. Redemption costs bloodbsometimes our own blood. The future demands of us the courage to pay such a price. With these thoughts in mind, then, let us ask why it is that, after more than a decade, religious communities are still struggling internally with the problem of renewal. If we believe in those concepts, what is it that still holds us back from becoming truly renewed? Perhaps the difficulty can be recognized as possessing two very interrelated dimensions. First, there exists the challenge of aiding those religious who seem totally incapable of bridging the gap between past and present. Second, there is the often unrecognized problem of the religious, who though in step with the changed pace of the Church, is still not manifestly credible or visibly authentic in his life's reflection of this change. These two types of persons responding tO the renewal effort generate confusion and uncertainty for all involved. Further-more, the latter, living a seemingly unauthentic response to the call of Vatican II, inadvertently perpetrates a negative response to renewal. This outward lack of credibility on the part of the ostensibly renewed is indeed at the core of the renewal problem today. Multitudes of words have been written concerning the first type of religious; therefore, let us concentrate for a brief space on those religious who have embraced the call of the Vatican Council to renew. Could it be that this renewal has been stalled or slowed because of the way it has been introduced and conducted'? Do those who are fearful of change see in the renewed religious a person of Christ-like depth? This is perhaps the central question that must be asked. If the religious does not first possess a heart converted to warm, compassionate love, to gentle, untiring presence, and to tender, forgiving concern, others will not see in him a model worthy of imitation. From the very beginning of renewal, there has been a firm distinc-tion between renewal and adaptation of life-style. This writer suggests, that while there has been much adaptation, there is still lacking a great deal of visible renewal. Yet this is th~ case through no one's conscious fault. The State of the Hidden Spring / 1 !13 Renewal is a basic conversion experience and lies at the very core of the Christian message. Metanoia comes as a gift from the Lord and cannot be earned or merited. It takes a long time to change a heart, and a longer time for that change to evidence itself in the behavioral patterns of an indi-vidual's day-to-day life. So much of human development and growth occurs in the dark, in the unseeable recesses of the inner heart. The journey from seed to even a small shoot is a long and arduous ascent. Frequently, this maturation process is hidden even from the person engaged in it. Only the gnawing hunger and unquenchable thirst for the ideal hint at the unfolding life within. In our journey on the road c~f renewal, we have come but a brief dis-tance. Often there exists a real gap between what we are saying and believ-ing and proclaiming and how we are living and loving and being. This is not because the renewal is not real, but rather because so much of the growth it has birthed is as yet invisible to the naked eye. The outward changes and adaptations manifest themselves in a visible form readily apparent to the most unperceiving human eye. However, it is much easier to take off a habit, change apostolates, and alter structures than it is to allow one's heart to be made flesh, to put on Jesus Christ, to become an empty vessel of the Spirit's fashioning. The former changes require weeks or months, the latter, years of even the space of a lifetime. Inner change and growth hide in the deepest chambers of the human person and grow ever so slowly to the light, while the outward adaptations flourish in the light and yet, paradoxically, must grow slowly inward to be understood and espoused by a heart-in-process- of-transformation. Adaptation and renewal must converge at some point within the center of the heart and there mingle, coalesce and become lost one in the other. This union between inner belief and outward practice will empower and energize the religious to live out in an ever fuller manner the true message of Jesus as proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council. However, it must be remembered that at this time, this dynamic is still in process of becoming a reality within the hearts of many religious. Perhaps such facts as these will help those fearful of renewal to under-stand why there is so often a disparity between the real and the ideal. Because of this dichotomy, the renewed religious must strive consciously and persistently to overcome such disparities, to be more loving in the face of a frustration that is but a fear of a dreaded unknown. Those who are fighting renewal are basically good, holy men and women. Fear and insecur-ity often cause them to be powerless .before a resistance within them that they cannot stem or control. All that they have known, loved and worked for seems to be in jeopardy of being eradicated permanently and without an understandable cause. Often they feel crushed or useless, weighed down by a burden too heavy for them to lift alone. Such anxiety can be assuaged only where there is selfless, warm, compassionate, sacrificial love. Those who are freer to be less fearful must also be freer to die in all those 11~4 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 ways that are not vital to the renewal. This dying includes taking the time to listen to the fears and anxieties of others without trying to force new ideas upon them before they have been allowed to know that they have been understood where they are. It is incredible how a listener changes when he finally begins to understand exactly how another feels and why he feels that way. Such a listener becomes more reverent and accepting of the pain and fear that choke someone into inaction or even active resistance. This dying means being willing to taste the pain of another's heart and to truly let that experience sink into and permeate one's entire being. It means compromising whenever and wherever possible no matter what the cost to self. It means going the extra milel giving away also the tunic, and turning the other cheek. It means loving with the whole of one's self---open, exposed, vulnerable, and weak. It means being so renewed that others will yearn to share the vision that draws such a religious on to ever greater heights of faith-lived love. Those who harbor a fear of the present and a dread of the future can be put at ease only by a person very much at home with his own weaknesses and failings, a person who is willing to share his own fears and dreads, a person who is not threatened by a truth different from his own. At the present many of those who are fearful of renewal are unable to reach out even halfway to the renewal effort. Therefore, the demand is often doubly difficult because time and time again, the renewed religious must be willing to go the whole distance. Yet, if we are willing to do this, we will gradually find that the miles are fewer and those with whom we are meeting, more willing to communicate. Perhaps the demand of renewal at present is to listen with a loving heart, say little, but be by one's presence a witness of all that is best in renewal. Those who question renewal must remember what was mentioned earlier--that growth is slow and that it takes many years for it to evidence itself. Renewal is yet young, and so there is often little outward manifesta-tion of transformation. This does not mean that growth is not there, but just that there has not been enough time for it to become visible. Patience becomes a demand on everyone's part. It must also be remembered that it is imperative to the future of religious life and to the future of our world that we accept.fully the challenge of the Council. If we do not, the twenty-first century will form itself without our aid. The result will.be destruction, if not physical,-then moral. Structures cannot be changed unless the hearts of those who build the structures are reformed and created new in Christ Jesus. These hearts will be touched only if we first let the Lord Jesus remold us into his image and likeness. Before we can affect anyone we must first renew ourselves. In community, we have one another as a source of strength and support for this renewal. Together we may begin to build new selves transformed in Christ. The very painful act of this growth to authenticity will be redemptive. To offer our The State of the Hidden Spring pain for the world is itselfa beginning of our participation in the redemption that our earth awaits. Our pain constitutes a saving difference. We are called to proclaim in our flesh the mystery of Jesus. We are summoned to give witness by our lives that true joy abounds when a person lives in relationship to the Lord. We are called to enable others to change, to be "Christ-ed." To baptize our earth in Jesus we must relinquish ourselves in "self" death. If we do not recognize this, if we do not allow Jesus to change us, then religious life itself will die; and with our death, who can even guess what other values will perish forever? For those fearful of all that this renewal asks because it seems to demand a break with the past, it is important to recall a few thoughts. The past is a part of us. We have imbibed, assimilated and integrated it into the reality of who we are. Our lives reflect the truth and vitality of all that has been as our present witness gives life to that reality in an ever-deepening dimension of being. Future seeds of life are at this moment being planted in us. Our past gives life to our present while our present nurtures all possibilities for the future. Indeed, the good of the past lives on in the present and creates the pattern for the future. All that we are and have been will continue to develop and mature into an ever fuller expression of the Person who we are as Church. Who we are will not change, but perhaps how we express who we are will be different. To stand at this crossroad--to live in a time of transition is both a curse and a blessing. It is a curse because of the tension and turmoil so innate to all change; yet a blessing because we are faced with the challenge of helping to make all things new in Christ. It is a blessing because the future rests in our hands and we are asked to shape it, mold it, form it into the reality that will meet the measure of tomorrow's need. At the moment, we move at a point of invisible growth. With regard to renewal we still must journey in the dryness of the desert, in the darkness of the night. A time of pain it is undeniably, but we have cause for a deep, resilient hope and a new, vibrant faith, for the path we tread is but "the stage of the hidden spring." One day the hidden water will gush freely and, at another moment in time, our thirst will be quenched with the vision of the beauty of the Church transformed. I will open up rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the broad valleys: I will turn the desert into a marshland, and the dry ground into springs of water. 1 will plant in the desert the cedar, acacia, myrtle, and olive; I will set in the wasteland the cypress, together with the plane tree and the pine, That all may see and know, observe and understand. That the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Is 41:18-20). The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows Vincent J. Genovesi, S.J. Father Genovesi is an Associate Professor of Theology at St. Joseph's University. He resides at St. Alphonsus House; 5800 Overbrook Ave.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you (Jn 14:27). These words from Christ's farewell to us are unquestionably encouraging, but they are not the whole story. What is left unsaid but is necessarily implied here is this: "Peace is my challenge to you." I say this because peace, like any gift, must be received in order really to be a gift. To receive the peace of Christ, then, we are challenged to open ourselves to his life, we must struggle to be conformed to him, which means we must let Christ and his spirit take form within us. As Christians we have long known that salvation is not simply a matter of external obedience or of frenetic good works. No, salvation is a matter of life in and through Jesus Christ who frees us from the law, from sin and from everlasting death. Coming to life in Christ is, of course, more a welcoming of him and what he stands for into our lives and allowing the consequences to overflow into our actions, however surprising and costly this may prove to be. This is St. Paul's meaning in insisting that salvation lies in the "faith that expresses itself in love" (Ga 5:6). All the hope there is in Christians focuses here: that those who answer the Father's love with love will be raised up even as Christ has been, and they will be gifted with unending joy. If faith-inspired love, a personal, affirmative response to the 186 The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows / 1117 Father's invitation to enter into his life, is the dynamic of Christian living, so also is it the impetus behind life in religion, and so also is it the wellspring of Christ's living and acting among us. What I suggest in this essay is that if religious wish to live the virtues of the vows we must be people first of living faith, for such was Christ. It was his total commitment to the Father, his unique life of faith, which freed Christ to such preeminent love that it serves always and everywhere as the ideal and inspiration for Christian life. More specifically, Christ's faith allowed and persuaded him to give a particular shape to his love for the Father and to his involvement in the Father's work. In other words, Christ's faith overflowed into a love that took on the contours of voluntary poverty, celibacy and radical obedience. What do these contours reveal of the inner life of Christ, and to what do they challenge those in religion? Poverty As we attend to the issue of poverty a basic truth must be initially affirmed: much of the world's poverty is slavery, the result of external oppression, an unconscionable demand made by some of God's children upon their own brothers and sisters. This kind of poverty is a human contrivance, a stubborn trace of a resilient inhumanity in the face of our Father's unalterable generosity. -We are focusing on another kind of poverty, however--one which is a matter of godly conviction and choice. This is the poverty of God himself in Christ who was born poor and who made himself poor for the sake of his Father's kingdom. It is also the poverty of those who wish to be poor in Christ, and the poverty of men and women who voluntarily accede to Christ'.s admonition: "If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me" (Mt 19:21). What is the meaning of this kind of poverty that Christ himself assumes so that he does not hesitate to link the desire for perfection with the abandonment of earthly riches? Why is the choice of poverty met with the assurance of an eternal treasure?1 For some people there is no need to question what voluntary poverty means, nor is it necessary to know why Christ commits himself to such a life. The important truths are only that Christ freely lived poorly and that he invites others to do likewise. This mentality finds virtue in the imitation of Christ and his style of life without attending sufficiently, in my opinion, to the charge we have inherited: that we are to put on the mind and heart of Jesus Christ. While there is no propriety in criticizing the desire to be '~poor with Christ poor," I do believe that such grace-inspired ambition, left unexplored, allows much of the richness of chosen poverty, both in ~These reflections on poverty are a slightly revised and expanded version of my earlier article, "Christian Poverty: Sign of Faith and Redemptive Force," The Way, Supplement 32, (Autumn, 1977), pp. 78-82. "11~1~ / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 Christ and in his followers, to remain unappreciated, and much of this poverty's challenge to stand unmet. What, then, might be the meaning of the poverty into which Christ freely entered? Let it be said at once that Christ's entrance into poverty is central to his message and crucial to his mission; Christ's poverty is of the very fabric of his being. Although divine, yet he "did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are" (Ph 2:6-7). Just as, in his incarnation, Christ truly divests himself of divine prerogatives, so, in his commitment to poverty, does he enter into a condition of worldly dispossession. In Christ, poverty is a continuation of the process of self-emptying and self-forgetfulness which began in his agreement to enflesh the word of his Father's promise to Israel. In entering into humanity among the poor of the earth, Christ prefigures and verifies a decision never to grasp after the things of the world. By embracing the poverty of Mary and Joseph, Christ gives flesh and human life to his faith in his heavenly Father, a faith which is so profound and so compelling that he comes to resist the temptation to establish and confirm his identity in anything but his Father's love. Having surrendered the privileges of divin-ity, Christ seeks no substitutes in the paraphernalia of wealth, power or social status. In his Father's love, Christ finds not only his strength to work, but also his freedom to forego the satisfaction of accumulating the products made available as a result of his labor. Christ's poverty, then, incarnates his personal openness to his Father's love and his trusting acceptance of his Father's plan of salvation. In choos-ing poverty, Christ in effect grounds and locates himself in the life of his Father, learning his love so that he can live and share it with others. Beyond this, Christ's entrance into poverty illuminates the inner disposition which must characterize all those who wish to be joined to the Father. Christ, freely poor, is the living sign to us of that faith which is necessary for salvation. He comes in poverty out of love so that we might know that salvation, precisely as the expression of the Father's love, is, like love, a gift that can never be earned but only earnestly desired, patiently sought and, in the end, gratefully received in handing self over to the Father in love and trust. Christ's decision for poverty is meant to deal the deathblow against the illusion that salvation is the reward of our labors, duly won; if self-righteousness reflects a deluded state of mind, no less does the attempt at self-sufficiency betray one's ignorance of life in the Father's love. The poverty of Christ is an inspir.ing challenge, for in anticipating a Messiah we would more likely have in mind a person of noble lineage or power, not a child so much, and certainly not a child of poor and unknown beginnings. Thus Christ's poverty tests us and encourages our response to a divine Father who uses his powerful love to surprise and confuse us, and to draw us to reliance more upon him than upon ourselves. The poor Christ calls us The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows / 189 to recast radically our thoughts and ways, for these are not the Father's. False gods and self-reliance are equally ineffectual for salvation. Only the Father's prodigal love which we accept and cherish in living faith finally explains our entrance into the joy of his kingdom. And so, around Christ's poverty and the attitude it embodies is centered much of the new and startling truth of Christianity. For this poverty seems to be connected to the introduction of a new law (of love), a new salvation (by grace through faith), and a new kingdom (offered as a gift to be freely and actively received). Just as the poor of the earth are essentially power-less in the economic order, so are all people without effective power in the order of salvation. Had Christ come in riches we might find this truth even harder to accept than we presently do. As it is, Christ's free acceptance of poverty proclaims that there is everlasting life in opening ourselves up completely to the rich hopes and love of the Father for us. The poverty of Christ shouts out salvation not through economic security, not through political processes, not through military might, but only through the kind of creative, serving and healing love which gives body to our faith in the Father of us all who has so generously blessed us. Only when poverty expresses concretely our acceptance of the Father's presence, power and saving action is it truly a value to be lived, for only then does it keep alive the virtue of poverty which the incarnate Christ lived and valued. So far we have looked at Christ's poverty as a chosen style of life illuminating an interior disposition of that faith which is essential for human salvation. But there is also a prophetic dimension to Jesus' poverty, by means of which his life proves provocative to poor and rich alike. In addition, then, to telling us something of the kind of personal relationship Jesus enjoyed with his Father, his poverty is meant to be a redemptive force for the lives of others. Christ's poverty must be viewed within the context of his life-mission; he walked the earth as servant of all people in need of the gospel of redemption; his desire is that everyone--poor and rich--will hear his good news, do p.enance and believe. I would suggest, therefore, that in the lives of those who choose today to be poor for the sake of the kingdom, poverty ideally expresses not only their own open abandonment to the Father's love, but also their earnest desire to extend the redemptive concern of Christ for all people. These people choose poverty for the sake of the poor and of the rich. They assist the poor in a practical way by using their talents on behalf of the poor, or by surrendering their wealth to them, or employing ~t for their benefit. The poor are served in still another way, however, on the level of the spirit, for those who undertake to live Christian lives of poverty signify their faith in the Father and his kingdom. Because they know that this world and its standards are not ultimate and will not prevail, those who are religiously mQtivated to live poorly die to the world's way of measuring success; in this way their lives are transformed into shouts of exhortation to the poor not 190 /Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 to be blinded into seeing and desiring nothing beyond the satisfaction of material needs. But the gospel is not for the poor alone. The rich also need its life-offering. Thus for the rich, no less than for the poor, the lives of those who choose poverty must carry redemptive significance, and they can in two ways: first, by the example of a simple life-style and by an informed exposition of the Christian principles of social justice, those who are poor in Christ poor may encourage the advantaged of the earth to human respon-sibility; secondly, those who enter into Christian poverty may humbly serve as signs of admonition to those who are well-off-~whether they be consciously oppressive, mindlessly ravenous, or simply incautious in their material accumulations and expenditures--that their lives must be tem-pered by God's perspectives lest they be charged with unjust stewardship and their laughter turn to tears because they will know only the happiness which they wrench from this earth, but not the happiness which is our Father's gift. Anyone who wants to enter into poverty with the spirit of Christ must know that the Father's desire is for universal salvation. The only important thing is that the conditions of possibility be provided by means of which all people--poor and rich--may be freed and encouraged to enter into the good life of God. All people need to be reminded that the deepest value of material welfare lies in its being a prelude to the welfare of the human spirit. Choosing poverty with Christ poor must involve, therefore, a concern not only for the material and spiritual welfare of the poor but also, and equally, for the spiritual welfare of the rich. There is always a danger that those who wish to be poor in Christ will become myopic and unchristian, that they will grow preoccupied with enhancing the material welfare of the poor, wresting wealth and power from their possessors, forcing indeed the hands of the rich, but all the while leaving their hearts untouched, unnoticed and even uncared for. The well-off, in short, might very well face the prospect of being left ill-disposed for receiving the Father's life. This, of course, is a most unsatisfactory situation, and one in which nO follower of Christ can be joyful. Although the point hardly needs emphasizing, let it be said simply that working for the material enrichment of the poor is not the sole or ultimate expression of the spirit of Christian poverty. Unarguably, any profession of love for the poor would be ungodly, senseless and deceitful were it to omit any effort to win release for the poor from the economic, political and social chains that keep them imprisoned both in body and in spirit. At the same time, however, it would misrepresent Christianity to suggest that, inqtself, liberating others from depriva.tion or oppression, with all their destructive implications for human living, either fully reveals or finally exhausts the riches promised by the Father. Christian love demands that the poor come to ~realize that their economic and human liberation is ultimately significant only in terms of that interior freedom by means of which they may be The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows / 191 fulfilled as their Father's children, gratefully receiving his love and heartful-ly returning it. When people choose poverty for the sake of the Father's kingdom, they choose it for the sake of the poor and of the rich--for all who need love's redemption. Being poor in and with Christ involves indeed a labor to relieve the burden of the poor, but it also essentially involves a commitment to communicate to all people a knowledge of, and a yearning for, the best and the most that our Father offers--his life and his love. If Christians must not betray the poor, neither must they abandon the rich; if the rich do not take the gospel to heart, we must wonder why and we must also increase our efforts and our pleadings that their hearts may be opened to the Father. If this occurs, not only will there be rejoicing in heaven but also on earth, for no one receives the Father except through the Spirit of the Son in whom all are brothers and sisters. Thus I suggest that the poor cannot help but be materially benefited by the entrance of the rich into the spirit of the gospel, because if any return is made to the Father it is made necessarily to those whose fullest dignity lies in being sons and daughters of our Father who gave the riches of the earth and wants them to be shared by all. If the gospel moves the rich to lose their hearts to the Father, it must also move their hands to refashion the earth, and to make room for the poor where they may come more easily to know the Father's goodness and more freely to taste his sweetness. - Our reflections suggest, then, that Christ's poverty illuminates his inner being; it speaks of his knowledge of his Father's goodness and it reveals the loving faith which frees him to seek first the Father's kingdom. But Christ's poverty is also a call to all people to enter into that spirit which allows them to acknowledge the Father as Father and to enjoy forever the best and the most that he offers. Today, people who profess voluntary poverty do so as a way of embodying an appreciation of the richness which is theirs by virtue of their calling as sons and daughters of God. These people struggle to translate the mind and heart of Christ into their actions so that they may live more fully as he did, forgetful of self, careful of all others, searching out especially those who are lost and hurt, striving to secure their rights and to ease their affliction. But the poor with Christ also have a hope: that their poverty will invite, challenge and free both the poor and the rich to join them in the cry of praise and love, "Abba, Father." Celibacy Having viewed Christ's poverty as a virtue which both gives us a glance into his spiritual life and illuminates the challenge facing those who desire to be poor even as he was, we may attend more briefly to Christ's celibacy and obedience. The issue of celibacy serves to focus a certain evolution which has occurred in the everyday perspectives of Christian living. One observer has expressed the change this way: in times gone by, religious 192 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 assured the laity that even though they married they could attain true sanctity and first-class citizenship within the Christian community; now, however, the laity seek to assure religious that even though they are unmar-ried they can achieve true personhood and first-class citizenship as human beings." If we in religion do in fact need this kind of reassurance it is an indication, at the very least, that we have fallen forgetful of the full human stature attained by Jesus Christ. He became a man and grew in wisdom, age and grace before God and men. And one of the ways in which this growth occurred was through his chosen life of celibacy. What, then, can be said of celibacy in Christ's life? First of all, Christ's celibacy, like his. poverty, is an outgrowth and expression of his profound relationship with his Father. It is, I suggest, by reason of his growing perception of himself as one inimitably loved by the Father and as one called to a singular loving response that Jesus makes the decision to remain celibate. Not only is he completely trusting in, and grateful for, his identity as only-begotten Son of his Father, but he is also keenly aware of his role as but the firstborn of a new nation, the head of a new creation. Both from his confidence in his presence to his Father as beloved Son and from his sense of responsibility to be at all times, in all places, and in every way available for the Father's work, Christ is impelled to forego the joys and obligations that invariably constitute the exclusive and permanent covenant of married love. His decision for celibacy is a decision for a complete commitment to the establishment and building up of the people of God who are being summoned to a new relationship with their Father in heaven. But there is, I think, something more implied in Christ's celibacy. It is the clarion cry that salvation is not a matter of being born "according to the flesh in any human family"; rather we must be reborn as children of the Father through the Spirit who has come from on high. Celibacy, then, appears as a challenge against any and every tendency to absolutize the values of human sexuality, familial ties, or national heritage? There are, then, these notes to Christ's celibacy: he makes himself utterly available for the far-ranging service of God and his people, he proclaims the universality of God's Fatherhood and he reminds all men and women that they are known and valued ultimately and most importantly by their being images of the Father who loves them and invites them to live forever. But, at root, Christ's celibacy speaks to us of the full and single-hearted love-relation-ship he enjoys with his Father. As we consider our calling to celibate love we must do so from within the context of realizing the magnificent vocation which is shared by everyone. God has issued a universal call to perfection; all people are to be as perfect and as compassionate as our Father in heaven. Given the bound-aries of human nature, however, each one of us can incarnate only certain facets of the infinite reality of God and of his love for humanity. For this 2Kilian McDonnell, "Religious Life in Low-Profile," America, (July l l, 1970), p. 16. nThomas E. Clarke, S.J., "Celibacy: Challenge to Tribalism," America, (April 19, 1969), p. 465. The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows / 193 reason, some people are called to witness to God and his love in the joy and tenderness of conjugal love and in the abandonment of self to meeting the immediate and constant needs of the precious people to whom they make a special response and for whom they bear a special responsibility. Other people are invited to testify to the expansiveness of the Father's love through their commitment of celibate love in which no a priori limitations or boundaries are drawn on their loving care for others. Regarding the invitation to perfection, however, one thing at least is certain: whether the call is to conjugal love or to celibate love, the noblest and best vocation for anyone is the one to which that individual is personally invited and directed by the Father. If Christ's celibacy is an expression of his deepest identity in and with his Father, so also must our celibacy express our identity in the Father through Christ if it is to be truly for and of the kingdom of God. And indeed our grounding in the Father is through the heart and Spirit of Christ in whom we come to appreciate, with confidence and joy, our singular presence to the Father. It is in and through our union with Christ that we are renewed in the fulfillment of our basic calling from the Father: that by virtue of our distinctive imaging of him each of us is invited and empowered to love him as he has never been loved before. Clearly, then, the celibacy which reflects the celibacy of Christ for the kingdom of God is a charism, a gift calling for our reception and response to God's initiative of love. It cannot be under-stood simply as a reality which we initiate; rather it is a grace-inspired expression of our desire to live single-heartedly for the Father and his people, even as Christ did and because he did. Celibacy, finally, proclaims our faith and hope in the powerful care which the Father shows us in his Son Jesus Christ to whom alone we look for the deepest and fullest giving and receiving of love, and who alone inspires us along the way of our return to the Father. Theological reflection reveals three levels of significance for Christian celibacy; they are the Christological meaning, the ecclesial and the eschato-logical. In terms of Christology, celibates for the kingdom of God find in this response of love a specific way of letting the spirit and action of Christ take form within them so that their mindg and hearts may be more fully respon-sive to the love of Christ and to his values and interests. In the context of ecclesiology, celibacy expres.ses the desire and willingness to retain sufficient flexibility so as to serve the Father wherever the needs of his people are greatest. Finally, in eschatological terms, the love of a celibate gives witness today to a quality of life which is properly characteristic of the final stage of God's kingdom, that end-time when there will be no marriage and when God ~vill be all in all, everything to everyone.4 Thus celibacy is a way of living and doing the future now. Celibates try to live as though the 4These ideas were developed by Pope Paul V1 in his encyclical letter, Sacerdotalis Coelibatus, June 23, 1967. 194 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 future of God were already fully present, but they also try to live in such a way so as to make that future present. Their hope is in fact to be of help in the building of God's future. In their loving, celibates find a way of saying that they hunger for our God and their hearts are restless until they rest in him. What celibates desire is that, through their loving, the reality of Christ may be further personalized in the lives of others who will be reminded that the holy joys of physical human love are only a glimmer of the delightful and filling love which awaits us in the house of our Father. Sometimes, of course, these desires are not realized. The testimony of celibacy is not heard. When this happens, we as celibates must look within for it is quite possible that the problem is our own. Chances are that our loving may have become more a matter of words than of deeds. It may be that we have become cold and unfeeling, withdrawn and unspirited; or it may be that we are attempting to love too much on our own terms or in keeping with our own timetable. If this is the case, then we have reneged on our commitment to celibacy and on our calling to Christianity, for at the core Of celibacy, as at the core of love, are the Christian ideals of other-centeredness and self-forgetfulness. If we take leave of these qualities, we surely take leave of the spirit of Christ ,and we depart from redemptive celibacy, for the deepest value of Christian celibacy is the specific form it gives to our love of God and his people. Out of love we are made for love, for self-giving for the sake of others. As Christ's celibacy testifies to his faith in the sustaining and enriching power of his Father's love for him and to his desire to be ever about his Father's business, so is.the life of Christian celibacy today a faith-event, a sign of our confidence and expectation that the love of God-in-Christ for us is bringing us to full life; out of the joy and strength of our "being loved" we are enabled to face the risks of living with others the good news of our Father who calls everyone to the fulness of life through love. Obedience If Christ's faith in his Father takes on the shape of voluntary poverty and celibacy, no less does it express itself in his radical obedience. Jesus' awareness of being on a mission, of being one sent by the Father, is pro-found. His profession of allegiance to the will and work of his Father runs like a refrain through his life and teaching. St. John's Gospel resounds with the protestations and reminders of Christ: ¯. what 1 was to say, what I had to speak, was commanded by the Father who sent me . . . (12:49). Yes, I have come from him; not that I came because I chose, no, Iwas sent, and by him (8:42). ¯. I have come from heaven, not to do my own will, but to do the will of the one who sent me (6:38). ¯ . . my aim is to do not my own will, but the will of the one who sent me (5:30). The Faith of Christ: Source of the Virtues of the Vows My food is to do the will of the one who sent me, and to complete his work (4:38). As long as the day lasts I must carry out the work of the one who sent me (9:4). As these words of Jesus make clear, the purposefulness of his life is explained by his adherence to the Father's will; it is from his Father that his life derives strength and takes on direction; here, too, in the Father's will Jesus finds joy and peace for he knows that whatever the Father asks, he asks only and always out of his great love for him. In the core of his being Christ listens to the word of his Father; he hears and he obeys; his mind and heart and will are shaped in and by the Father so that in the life and action of Christ the Father's Word becomes flesh. It is not without reason, then, that Jesus reminds us: "To have seen me is to have seen the Father . You must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (Jn 14:9-11). Living in accordance with the Father's will is not, of course, without its difficulties, even for Jesus, as his temptations at the beginning of his public life reveal. For here Jesus is confronted with perhaps his greatest challenge: to be other than his Father wishes him to be, to let his messiahship be cast more according to the pleas and pleadings of Israel than according to the plans of his Father. The temptation for Christ is real and strong to follow the course of political expediency, to exercise power and might, to bedazzle with miracle and mystery and thus to win a following of people whose ambitions and fantasies are stirred, but whose hearts are still untouched by love and whose minds still do not know the secret and wonderful life to which the Father invites them. But this path Christ rejects; instead, he chooses the way of the Father: to reach out to others through the openness and vulnerability of love, to live and work for others rather than to grand-stand, to suffer and die so that others may know that, by the promise and gift of the Father and through his power, pain ends in happiness and death ends in life. It is hard, I think, to stress too much the significance for Christ himself of his faithful obedience to the Father. Having overcome the temptation to play up to men rather than to trust in the Father's knowledge, power and love, and being wise to the snares of Satan, Christ wishes to leave no doubt either about his own perception of himself or about the expectation upon those who would seek to join him. What explains his own life and what must characterize the lives of those who would be one with him is simply obedi-ence to the Father. For a relationship with Christ, obedience binds rather than blood: "Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother" (MT 12:50). That Jesus yields to the authority of another does not go unnoticed. It is a truth acknowledged at times by the most unlikely people. For example, when the centurion with the ill servant sends a message that he is not worthy to have Christ enter under his roof and suggests that Christ need only utter the word of healing from afar, he makes a strange admission. The "196 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 soldier of Rome proclaims: "For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me" (Lk 7:8). The implication is clear; the centurion sees Christ as being in a situation not unlike his own: as being under authority and as having authority over others. Even as he is commissioned, so he sees Christ as commissioned, as deriving authority from another. The centurion, it seems, has walked--silently, but nonetheless really--into the heart of faith. He recognizes that in Jesus the power of God is being expressed. He seems to know without saying it that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Christ, the one who is totally shaped to the Father so as to be his work of love. In the face of such faith Jesus is astonished and he could well say of this man what he said to Peter: "You are a happy man, because it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven" (Mt 16:17). For those who desire to be obedient in and with Christ it is not enough to know and appreciate that his faithful surrender brought him to death, even death on a cross. What we must also learn to cherish is the truth that obedience shaped his being and life. Christ's actions are the work of the Father because Christ thinks with the Father and wills with the father. In putting on the mind and heart of the Father Christ's only concern and his full joy are to do the Father's work. Being fully obedient in and with Christ is a challenge, then, to respond to our Father's love by offering him the service not only of our hands, but also of our hearts, minds and wills. Obedience to the Father is redemptive only because it expresses, reveals and encourages among others an acceptance of the truth that the father so loves us that he wants only what is for our good. Because of his love for us and because of his desire to render this love effective in our lives, the Father asks that we attend to him, even as Christ did, so that with Christ we may be lifted up. Conclusion The authenticity and vitality of our vowed lives express both the reality and presence of God to us and our trusting and grateful effort to direct our lives ever more clearly and singly toward rendering him a return of love. There is a way, moreover, for us to dispose ourselves for such a response. Jesus himself offers the advice: "If you make my word your home you will indeed be my disciples, you will learn the truth and the truth shall make you free" (Jn 8:31-2). To his word, as to our home, we must come for rest, for relaxation, and for re-creation. In his word, as in a home, we will find support, we will be nourished, accepted and encouraged to grow; we will, in short, be loved into fuller life. In his word we are valued for who we are and not for what we accomplish; in his word we come to understand our beginnings. There we dream, and thence we derive our hopes for the future. Making God's word our home, living, moving and having our being there, frees us to the surrender of faith in which we live out our vows as our pledge that we will allow our Father the freedom to keep us as free as possible for him, for his gospel and for his people. Wilderness and Marketplace Prayer and Action in Mark's Gospel Marian Madore, F.C.J. Sister Marian conducts adult-education classes in Scripture and prayer while she continues her studies. She resides at Mr. St. Joseph Convent; Ferry Rd.; Bristol, RI 02809. The Gospel of Mark moves at a breathless pace, its sentences frequently beginning with the Greek equivalent of words such as "immediately" and "straightway." Its action-packed narrative conveys the urgency of the mission of Jesus. Ft. Gerard S. Sloyan comments: lfthe Master relaxes, one does not learn it from Mark. To read this gospel at a single sitting is to feel hemmed in by crowds, wearied by their demands, besieged by the attacks of demons? We could, perhaps, take exception to the statement: "If the Master relaxes, one does not learn it from Mark." There are unobtrusive state-ments here and there in the gospel that seem to indicate a kind of cycle.in the days of Jesus' public ministry: a constant seeking after solitude only to be interrupted once more by the demands of the crowds; sometimes a sacrificing of quiet time to attend to their needs, only to be followed by another period of solitary prayer. As he moves back and forth from the wilderness to the market-place, Jesus shows us how to harmonize prayer and action in our living of the Christian life. It is significant that Mark's gospel begins in the wilderness. John the Baptist is presented in terms of Isaiah 40:3 which in the prophet's time ~Gerard S. Sloyan, The Gospel of Saint Mark, "New Testament Reading Guide" #2 (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1960) p. 7. Used with permisssion from the publisher. 197 Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 announced a new Exodus, the return of the Israelites from Babylon. Now, John is proclaiming the ultimate deliverance through the Messiah: "A voice cries in the wilderness: Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight" (Mk 1:3).z Mark adds: "And so it was that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (1:4). It is helpful to keep in mind the Old Testament significance of "the wilderness." The desert experience of the Exodus was a time of testing, the great test being: Can we continue to trust that the Lord will guide us to the promised land? Later prophets such as Hosea and Jeremiah tended to look back on the sojourn in the desert with rose-colored glasses and to see it as a time of first fervor: "Yahweh says this: I remember the affection of your youth, the love of your bridal days; you followed me through the wilderness, through a land unsown" (Jr 2:2). A return to the desert orto first fervor was longed for by many of the prophets: "I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart" (Ho 2:14). Hence, the desert came to be symbolic of both temptation and change of heart, the gateway to new beginnings. In Mark's gospel, we find the wilderness presented as a battle-ground, and also as a place of refreshment and renewal. Mark, with his usual tendency to "get down to business," tells the story of Jesus' baptism very briefly, stressing the most important aspect of this event, the combined witness of the Father and the Spirit to Jestis, the Belo.ve~l Son. Then, he continues: "Immediately afterwards the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts and the angels looked after him (Mk 1:12-13). Mark's language is particularly expressive; he says that "the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness." Matthew and Luke say that Jesus was "led by the Spirit" into the wilderness (Mt 4:1 ; Lk 4:1). Are we to understand here some human repugnance on the part of Jesus in facing this ordeal? William Barclay suggests that Matthew and Luke delib-erately softened the expression here.3 If we supplement Mark's brief sketch with the longer versions of Matthew and Luke, we shall find that for Jesus the desert experience was a time of testing, when in prayer and fasting, he resisted the temptation to conduct his ministry in a manner which would substitute worldly expediency and acclaim for his Father's will. "Forty days" is a Hebraism for "a long time" and suggests the similar ordeals undergone by Moses (Ex 34:28) and Elijah (I K 19:8). But the desert is not only a battleground. Paradoxically, it can also be a place of refreshment, light, and peace. Mark indicates that Jesus frequent-ly sought out lonely places for prayer and rest from the crowds. Very early in his gospel, Mark presents us with what Jim Bishop would call "A Day ~AII quotations from the Bible are taken from The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966). Used with permission from the publisher. 3See William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark, "The Daily Study Bible Series" (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), p. xix. Wilderness and Marketplace: Prayer and Action hl Mark / 199 in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth" (see Mk 1:21-34).4 It is a day of teaching and healing, packed with activity. Immediately after the account of this specimen day, we read: In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went offto a lonely place and prayed there. Simon and his companions set out in search of him, and when they found him they said: 'Everybody is looking for you." He answered, 'Let us go elsewhere, to the neighboring country towns, so that I can preach there too, because that is why I came' (Mk 1:35-39). We know that chronological order is not always important in the gos-pels, but this passage seems to be a notable exception. D. E. Nineham sees it as placed very deliberately after the specimen day and providing a significant commentary on it.5 The enthusiasm of the crowds on the preced-ing day was born of admiration for a wonder-worker--not the kind of reception that Jesus was really looking for. It could be that this was a time Of stress for Jesus when he needed to be alone with his Father and to reassess his ministry. Instead of leaving him in peace, Peter and the others "tracked him down" (Mark uses a Greek word which suggests a hostile pursuit) and here, the evangelist very pointedly omits calling them "disci-ples" since they are not really acting like disciples but are caught up in the excitement of Jesus' worldly success?~ They think they are the bearers of good news--"Everybody is looking for you." Jesus, seeing through the motives of "everybody," announces his intention to "go elsewhere," add-ing "so that I can preach there too, because that is why I came" (1:38). In other words, he did not come to bask in the adulation of the crowds at Capernaum. By the end of the first chapter of Mark's gospel, the wilderness theme is very much in evidence. After the leper fails to keep the "messianic secret" and talks freely about his cure, the result is that "Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived. Even so, people from all around would come to him" (1:45). It is interesting to note that within the brief compass of Mark's first chapter, Jesus is shown making three excursions into the wilderness! The same Greek word--the equivalent of "desert"--is used in each case. There are instances in Mark's gospel where nothing short of an escape from the crowds is suggested. For instance, we read: "With the coming of evening that same day, he said to them, 'Let us cross over to the other side' And, leaving the crowd behind, they took him,just as he was, in the boat" (Mk 4:35-36). Here, we do not find the usual "dismissal" of the crowd (see Mk 6:45-46). The degree of Jesus's exhaustion is graphically highlighted by vivid descriptive details: "Then it began to blow a gale and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But he was in the 4See D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark, "'The Pelican New Testament Commentaries" (Baltimore: Penguin Books, lnc., 1963), pp. 73ff. 5See op. cir., p. 83. 6Cf. Nineham, op. cit., p. 84. 200 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 stern, his head on the cushion, asleep" (4:37-38). When the apostles return from a missionary journey, Jesus encourages them to follow his example: "You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while . So they went off in a boat to a lonely place where they could be by themselves" (Mk 6:31-32). Again the Greek word means "a desert place." On this occasion again, Jesus and the apostles sacrifice their solitude. The crowds follow them and Jesus takes pity on them, teaching, and later feeding them. But he has not forgotten his original plan! Mark tells us: "Directly after this he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to Bethsaida, while he himself sent the crowd away. After saying good-bye to them he went off to the hills to pray" (Mk 6:45-46). Fr. Bruce Vawter suggests that both the apostles and the crowds were suffering from what he calls "messianic fever" and that it was necessary for both groups to be separated from Jesus and from each other for a time.r For both "the agony and the ecstasy" of his earthly life, Jesus chooses a place of solitude. Introducing the account of the transfiguration, Mark writes: "Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone by themselves. There, in their presence, he was transfigured" (Mk 9-2). The last recorded instance where Jesus seeks a lonely place for prayer is before his Passion when he goes to the garden of Gethsemane to pray. Mark's Greek is simply "a piece of land." The name suggests the Hebrew word for "olive-press." John calls it "a garden" (see Jn 18:1), while Luke refers to it as "the Mount of Olives" (see Lk 22:39). Putting all this together, we could think of an olive-grove on a hilltop. Here, in his last "desert," Jesus faces his last temptation and surrenders to the will of his Father unto death. Owing to his gift for vivid descriptive narrative, Mark presents the most graphic pictures of Jesus hemmed in, suffocated, at times almost crushed by the crowds thronging to him for cures and instruction. The following sample passages speak for themselves: i :33: The whole town came crowding round the door . 2:2: So many people collected that there was no room left, even in front of the door. 3:9-10: And he asked his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, to keep him from being crushed. For he had cured so many that all who were afflicted in any way were crowding forward to touch him. 3:20: He went home again, and once more such a crowd collected that they could not even have a meal. 5:31: His disciples said to him, "You see how thecrowd is pressing round you and yet you say, 'Who touched me?" "" 6:31:. for there were so many coming and going that the apostles had no time even to eat. 7See Bruce Vawter, C.M., The Four Gospels: An Introduction (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1967), p. 175. Wilderness and Marketplace: Prayer and Action in Mark / 201 Perhaps nowhere does the humanity of Jesus shine through so convinc-ingly as in this picture that Mark has left us of Jesus wearied and crushed by the crowds, exhausted in serving their needs, and going off to a desert place where he could be alone and pray. Mark's gospel shows us that the "time-pressure problem" in the apostolate as in other aspects of life, did not originate with the technological twentieth century. Jesus had to deal with it too. Most of us have made the discovery that too much emphasis on the quantity of our works and apostolic involvements can result in a deterioration in the quality of our presence to other people. In his book, The Human Adventure: Contemplation for Everyman, Fr. William McNamara reminds us: We need to become less crowded, less rushed, less dispersed, less victimized by the tyranny of diversion. We need to simplify our lives. We need to "collect" ourselves in periods of silence and places of solitude--not in order to withdraw or isolate ourselves from others, but in order to relate more thoughtfully and lovingly to at least some of the others, if not all.8 The same author makes a suggestion that might exasperate and even infuriate some of his readers, so impossible does it seem to be: I suggest that we stop doing half the work that presently consumes us. Then let us attend to the remaining half whole-heartedly, with contemplative vision and creative love. I stake the authenticity of our lives and the effectiveness of our work on this radical shift.9 When I first read this passage, I asked myself: "If I were to stop doing half of my present work, which half would it be?" Needless to say, the question was exceedingly difficult to answer. Even if we cannot take these words literally, there will be times when we will be wise to say that difficult little word, "No"--realizing that we are not expected to take on the salva-tion of the world single-handedly! True, prayer and discernment are needed to distinguish between lack of generosity and a genuine need to slow down. Jesus knew what it was like to work with human limitations of energy and opportunity. If he could unashamedly withdraw from the crowds, surely we need to do the same. Perhaps the outburst of activism we have witnessed in the Church during the pa~t few 3~ears is beginning to die down, thanks to the growing recognition that the person in a "mad rush" will never commu-nicate the healing touch and inner peace of Jesus. A large part of Mark's "Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (1: 1) is that he shared so completely in the weakness of our humanity. His methods must be ours. Mark's gospel tells us that we shall never be effective in the marketplaces of this world unless, like Jesus, we withdraw at times to the wilderness to be alone and pray. " 9William McNamara, O.C.D., The Human Adventure: Contemplation for Everyman (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1974), p. 165. Used with permission from the publisher. aMcNamara, op. cit., p. 171. Used with permission from the publisher. Trinity and Community Lewis S. Fiorelli, O.S.F.S. Father Fiorelli is superior of the community at De Sales Hall; 5001 Eastern Ave.; Hyattsville, MD 20782. The opening lines of the Book of Genesis have frequently served as a clue to an understanding of God and of man, and of the relationship between the two. Verses 26-27 of Chapter 1 express this relationship well: Then God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.". God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. In Genesis, the origin of the universe in all its parts is attributed to God's creative activitythrough the agency of his Word. It suggests that the Word's highest work of creation was the imparting of the divine image (eikon) to man. It is well to understand the import of "image" so as to appreciate its significance for man, who is the ikon of God. Greek liturgical art can be helpful here, for in this art the ikon is not simply a picture which one observes objectively. Rather, for the Greek mind, the ikon makes the reality of the depicted mystery present to the observer. The ikon, then, serves as a medium of encounter between the observer and the mystery. If, for instance, the ikon depicts Jesus, the reality of Jesus is somehow made present to the observer through the ikon. In this way, Jesus and man encounter one another through the medium of the ikon. Such an encounter precludes neutrality; rather, it calls for a mutual response which is both personal and powerful. This understanding of ikon can powerfully deepen our appreciation of the biblical affirmation that man is the ikon of God. Man is created in such 202 Trinity and Community / 203 a way as to be able to make God present to his fellowman. In man, then, other men can encounter the reality represented by man: God himself. Only one man in history, of course, has made God fully present to his fellowman, because he was in fact the enfleshment or tangibility of God. That man is Jesus. However, something of his unique faculty as the true ikon Of the living God is also within the potential of all men and women, who also bear the divine image. But just what does man, the living ikon of God, make present to his fellowman? In the fulness of revelation, personally expressed in Jesus, we have learned that our God is community. Father, Son and Holy Spirit partake of the one same essence and yet are three persons. The oneness of the Godhead expresses itself in the plurality of persons, the community we call Trinity. As ikon of God, man makes community present to his fellow-man and enables him to participate in it. More emphatically, as ikon of the divine community, man finds himself, his meaning and his ultimate purpose in, from, and with others. In being God's ikon, man is oriented toward others: God and his fellowman. The man Jesus has been called "the man for others" because of his intermediary role, making God present in a saving way to man. Contempo-rary biblical ~cholarship is unanimous in assigning to Jesus a sensitive and sustained awareness of being sent on behalf of the God whom he knows as Father. Jesus finds his own meaning in the message which proclaims the arrival of the Father's kingdom among men. Again and again he assures those to whom he ministers: "My doctrine is not my own; it comes from him who sent me" (Jn 7:16). Jesus is sensitive to the reality that all he does and is derives from the Father, for "he who gives me glory is the Father" (Jn 8:54). He sums up this radical orientation when he responds to Philip: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father . I am in the Father and the Father is in me . It is the Father who lives in me accomplishing his works" (Jn 14:9-10). It is precisely because Jesus, the divine ikon, was unswervingly oriented toward others that as man he was the visible mani-festation of God, and, as such, the saving presence of God to man. Schille-beeckx terms him "the primordial sacrament of man's encounter with God." Jesus, fully the ikon of God, makes the Community which is the Trinity present to man and to creation. In Jesus, man and all creation encounter the Community of God, and this encounter is the saving deed of God on behalf of both! Made to the image of divine community and redeemed by Jesus on behalf of the same community, each man is called to manifest this commu-nity by locating his meaning in others: in God and in his fellowman. St. Francis de Sales is deeply sensitive to the trinitarian nature of God, to man's creation in the image of this divine community, and to man's consequent challenge to find his meaning in and on behalf of community. He affirms in the Treatise oll the Love of God that though "God is sole he 904 / Review for Religious, Volume 38, 1979/2 is not thereby solitary" (AE IV: 204).1 And he insists that "we are created to the image and likeness of God. What does this mean if not that we have the utmost congruity with his divine majesty?" (AE IV: 74). Further, since each man possesses the image and is therefore the ikon of God, Francis preaches that "we are the image of one another, all of us representing only the one portrait who is God" (AE X: 270-271). It is the Salesian conviction that the community of man is the collective portrait of the Community which is God. In preaching on the Lord's high priestly prayer for unity (Jn 17), St. Francis de Sales asks: "Who else would have dared., to make such a comp~.rison and ask that we be united as the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit are joined together?" (AE X:267). Together men form the portrait of God and together they are intended to realize the community of which they are the image. For this reason, Francis de Sales preaches that "man has been created to the resemblance of God; therefore, love of the neighbor leads us to love in him the resemblance and image of God, that is to say [that we are to help] to render this resemblance more and more perfect" (AE VIII: 148). In all of this there is a profound simplicity. Community creates man; man is the image or ikon of community. The other-directedness of man is rooted in the other-directedness of his Trinitarian God. Therefore, man is radically community

Issue 36.4 of the Review for Religious, 1977. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS IS edited by faculty members of St Lou~s Umverslty, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Btnldmg, 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. Louisa 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 July 1977 Volume 36 Number 4 Renewals, new subscriptions, and changes of address should be sent to R~:v~w yon RELiGiOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Correspondence with the editor and the associate editor together with manuscripts and books for review should be sent to R~vmw roe RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boule-vard; St. Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsyl-vania 19131. In Process: John the Baptist Mary Catherine Barron, C.S.J, Sister Mary Catherine, whose last article appeared in the March, 1977 issue, resides at 91 Overlook Ave.; Latham, NY 12110. ¯ Are you the one who is to come, or have we.to wait for someone else? (L.k 7,: 19). It seems that John the Baptist spent his-wtiole life.waiting. As such, he was an extremely patient man. Somehow, through the centuries, ~ though, we came to have his story wr6ng, and tend to name him solely as messenger and prophet. In doing so, we miss the mighty impact of his questions and the overwhelming witness value of the answers he accepted. He must have learned something vital---early on--in the, womb, as he expectantly waited for the moment of his birth. Again, we tend to ascribe that birth to a certain day and hour.when,."the time of fulfillment came for Elizabeth to have her child." Actually, it happened earlier, some three months past, when John first met Jesus and greeted him with joy: The symbolism of that encounter must have haunted the heart of John even as its vestiges traced a pattern through the years. In the darkness of confinement John felt divine intrusion and in a mystical leap of faith, he assented to vocation. And then divinity withdrew and John, was left to wait. Had he known that waiting period was to be not months, but years, he may not have had the courage. Had he known it would end in another dark confinement and another mystical leap to another divine intrusion, he may not have had the strength. But Yahweh was merciful and John was content to grow. And he did so slowly through the years, in ~the shadow of the question: "What will this child turn out to be?" Neighbors asked it first, but its overwhelming import must have~g,radually fashioned the contours of his life, drawing him like a lodestone into the current of salvific process. Surely, in. the desert, it must have echoed, in the wind and the force of 497 4911 / Review [or Religious, Volume 3~6, 1977/4 its persistence must have, at times, lured John to fear. "Suppose it is all myth? Suppose I am only a deranged desert'man, wa~iting for a prophecy never to .be sent, waiting for a mission never to be given? Suppo'se I am to be like the shifting desert sand--blown back and forth relentlessly by an overwhelming passion? Suppose I am deluded and my life is just a waste?" What impels a man to wait in the face of such a doubt? What causes him to stand expectant and receptive? What constitutes the tenacious re-silience of his heart? Perhaps it was only the glimmer of remembrance, the flash of light and grace that had exploded in his soul the day his cousin first had come. Who knoffs the value we posit in the memories of love? Or the power they have to summon us? So John was summoned, probably in much the same elusive fashion that he had been beckoned all along: a change of mood, a passing desert flower, the way a bird called, the different shape, of sky--and suddenly he knew the~time had come~ and he was ready. "And so it was that John the Baptist appeareOd., proclaiming a baptism ' of repentance" ~Mk 1:4). This is where we get things all confused. This is where we miss the prophetic message. We are so used to reading all'that John announced that~we never get to,discerning.all that John was asking. You~see, he lived in mtich the same condition .that we do'--waiting for 'a Someone whia is,to come. And he did not know any more than we, when that Someone would emerge nor how he could be known~ And so, the discipline of his river days was as intense and all embracing as the discipline of his wilderness. Nothing much had changed except that life was less his own. What had shifted was responsibility. Now he was em-powered to,convert and to baptize and this authority made him responsible for the followers he engendered. So that is why we find him sometimes a bit harsh--loud and somewhat strident, demanding and even fearsome. He was impelled to trumpeting because he was so needy. And the quality of his message derived from solitary waiting. ~ The gospel.tells us that "a feeling of expectancy had grown among the people" (Lk 3:15). How much more so had it grown within the heart of John? ~ ~ ~ The anguish of that wait must have been unbearable. "Is this the day? Is that the Man? Am I where I should be? What if 'he never comes? And 'why do all these people think 1 may be he? Am I?" ' We ~will never know the . terrible questions John kept buried in his heart but ~his flailing words indicate their power and their~ pain . : "Brood of vipers, who warned you to fly from the retribution that is coming? Even now the ax is~laid to the roots of the trees. Any tree which fails td'.'produce good fruit.owill be cut down and thrown into the fire'~ (Lk .3:7-9). In Process." John the Baptist /_499 And the flame of his own vigilant spirit burned without being con-sumed. Then, one day, He came. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he strode across ~the hills and asked for baptism. The relief which floods John is almost pathetic in expression. The force of vindication overwhelms him and in torrential words he iterates: This is the one I spoke of when I said: A man~is coming after me who ranks be'fore me because he existed before me. I did not know him myself, and yet it was to reveal him to .Israel that I came baptizing with water . I saw the Spirit coming down on him from heaven like a dove and resting On him. I did not know him myself~ but he who sent me to baptize with water had said to me: 'The man on whom you See the Spirit come down and rest is the one who is going to baptize with the Holy Spirit.' Yes, I have seen and I am the witness that he is the Chosen One of' God. (Jn 1:30-34). The ph'rases are haunting: "I did not know him myself, and. yet it was to reveal him to Israel that I came baptizing with water . I did not .know him myself., and yet I am the witness that he is the Chosen One of God.~ . John does~not verbalize the implied question but it resides: "Why did I not know him? Shouldn't I have known him? How could I be.asked 'to ~witness within such total darkness?" His only uttered protest, however, is humble simplicity::~ "It is I who need-baptism from you and yet you come to me" (Mr3: 14). His only answer received is to "Leave it like this for the time being; 'it is fitting that we should, in this way, .do.all' that righteousness demands." It is another womb experience: in darkness John feels the divine intrusion and in a mystical leap of faith, he assents to his vocation. And then divinity withdraws and John is left- to wait--"for all that.righteousness demands." . Certainly, if John had little foreknowledge,.of preceding~ even'tS, he has even les~ .cohcerning those to come. His mission apparently is fulfilled; his prophecy is verified; his baptism is authenticated. What more is there to do? For what does he still wait? What yet will "righteousness demand"? And then in mounting disbelief, John begins to see, the route---the :winding way. he must tread after straightening other ~roads; the~rough trail he must walk after smoothing other .paths. He never asks the question "What will become of me?" He merely waits,for it to be fulfilled. The womb, the wilderness and the rivet will meet,,within the prison. Sensing, this, John begins divesting. , What a lonely figure he becomes etched against the hills hand out-stretched, finger pointing towards-that elusive Someone;~''Look, there°is the Lamb of God" he,urges his disciples--and watches.as they walk away to follow a greater prophet. Even.when some faithful friends balk,, at such diminishment, John refuses consolation~and speaks of growing smaller. It is his life played backwards to confinement. It is the full cycle of seed 500 / Review ]or Religious, "l/olume 36, 1977/4 and flower and. seed. Cynics choose to call it the terminus of life. Some others, more graced, name it a beginning. All that John perceive~ is that, again, he lies in readiness, awaiting a delivery. Deep within the bowels of earth, he languishes in prison, formulating the tormented question that rings acrbss the ages: "Are you~the one who is to come or have we to wait for someone else?" It is a valid death cry. A man should know, shouldn't he, the reason for which he dies? If angering kings on moral issues involves the risk of life, shouldn't One" be assuaged in kho~ving the risk to be well taken? rAndso John awaits an answer from his removed, and distant Cousin-- some sort of vindication for the truth that he has uttered. It is a lonely wait made lonelier by the answer: "Go back and ~tell John what you have seen and heard: The blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised to life, the Good News is proclaimed to the poor--~nd happy is the man who does'not lose faith in me (Lk 7:22-23). Jesus tells John nothing more than that he is to wait--to wait and see the signs fulfilled--signs which John foretold. He sends this message know-ing well that John will never behold any of that for which he preached and forowhich he will give his life. And with an utter emptiness, John accepts the answer, urged to a fidelity of heart ratified in faith. The rest is just the spectacle--bringing all things to fulfillment--"all that-righteousness demands." Thus, in one sense, John's life ends whim-sically, of no account or importance weighed against a girlish dance. And yet, in another ~ense, it ends with abrupt savagery, brutal and unpredictable asia woman's.rage. In the darkness of confinement John feels divine intrusion and in a .mystical leap of faith he assents to his vocation, And 'then divinity with-draws, and John is left to wait--to wait for his disciples to place him in the earth. And so, he does not hear, of course, the tribute he is paid: "I tell you, of all the children born of women, there is none greater than John" (Lk 7:28,). For he is still awaiting the ultimate birth, when Jesus the Messiah will deliver him from death. His. life is prophetic, not because of what he said, but because of how he .lived. The irony is that he did not know this. He was a man in process, with a heart full of questions, with a tongue full of words, with a head full of visions. He could never quite integrate the visions and the questions and the words because he lived in mystery. All he could do was wait~-- wait in silence and °darkness and faith--for the words to be uttered, for .the questions to be answered, for the vision to be fulfilled. And in this hi~ is our brother--and very near to us. Towards a Sacramental and Social Vision of Religious Life Philip J. Rosato, S.J. Father Rosato teaches theology at St. Joseph's College and also to the novices of his province (Maryland). He resides at St. Alphonsus House; 5800 Overbrook Ave.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Today there are signs that the crisis which has marked religious life since Vatican II is waning. Religious watched the pendulum swing from an overly institutional conception of vowed life during the pre-conciliar period, to an overly individual condeption of the vows during the period directly after the Council. If the one conception was so communal that the individual religious suffocated due to a lack of personal freedom and self-worth, the other was so intensely individualistic that the religious froze due to isolation and loneliness as each one sought separately to gain freedom and identity. The one extreme was God-centered almost .to the detriment of the human; the other was man-centered almost to the point of excluding the divine. Now a new synthesis of these opposing conceptions is emerging. There is a felt need to correlate the spiritual and the human, the ecclesial and the personal, the eschatologic'al and the psychological? Thus a more sacra-mental understanding of religious life is in the air. Today's religious 'are struggling to keep God-centeredness and man-centeredness together in fruitful tension, just as the two foci of an ellipse, though distinct, form one ovular figure. This paper will aim at developing some of the dimensions of this new turn in the theology of the religious life. 1This search after a synthesis is evident in the Documents o] the XXXil General Congregation o[ the Society o[ Jesus (Washington: The Jesuit Conference, 1975L the central theme of which is stated as "Our Mission Today: The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice," pp. 17-43. 501 502 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 Religious Life and Contemporary Theology: Living the Third Section of the Creed One way of schematizing the different theologies behind each of the ex-tremes noted above would be to look to the Apostles' Creed, a key statement of Christian belief and a touchstone of all theology. Previously religious life was too Father-centered, too centered on the first section of the creed. The vows took on such an ethereal and transcendent dimension that many religious stifled their humanity in order to live out their promise to the Father. The other extreme, centered solely on the second (Son) section of the creed, resulted in an incarnational or Christ-centered theology of religious life. In this model the humanity of the individual religious could find breathing room again; Jesus of Nazareth was seen as a paradigm of human freedom and self-possession. This Son-centered spirituality, though a corrective to the first model, proved in the end to lead many religious to such an affirmation of the human person that the need to lose one's self and to qualify self-centeredness through radical openness to the divine dimension was overlooked. Many religious ceased to pray, viewed com-munity life as a denial of their freedom and the institution of the Church and of their own congregation itself as a hindrance.to social relev~ance and engagement as well as to self-fulfillment. As religious search for a new balance today, it might be possible that a theology of the Spirit, that is, of the third section of the creed, could offer them a new model by which to combine Father, centeredness and Son-centeredness.'-' If the Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son, it may be that Spirit-theology could lead to a synthetic theology of religious life which, grounded in love for God and man, avoids stressing either God's transcendence over his immanence, or Godls immanence over his transcendence. A Spirit-centered theology of the religious life could well bring religious back to the kind of balance which is currently being sought in the mainstream of theological speculatiofl today.:' " Why is this so? The third section of the creed links the Spirit with the pneumatic life of the community, with sacrament, service and mission. "I believe in the Holy Spirit, in the one, holy catholic and apostolic Church. I believe in the communion of saints." According to the Spirit-model~ religious life would be viewed as a specific way of living within the com-munion of the saints.The third section also affirms the reality of forgive-ness and of grace: "I believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins." If this were underlined, religious life could be seen as 9 special way of living out the Christian life of forgiveness and of being totally dependent on ~Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Einheit und Erneuerung der Kirche (Frei-burg: Paulusverlag, 1968), p. 12. aAvery Dulles, Models o[ the Church (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1974). pp. 58-70, where Dulles discusses the Church as a sacrament, a model which balances visible and invisible aspects of the Church most directly. Towards a Vision of Religious Life / 503 baptismal grace? Finally, the third section stresses the eschatological hope .of all Christians for themselves and for the whole cosmos: "I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." According to this phrase, religious must be marked as men and women of daring, of vision, of hope. In short, a~ theology of religious life based on the third'section 0f the creed ,would be pneumatic, ecclesial, apostolic, dependent on grace and eschat-ological. Inca word, it would be sacramental; it would take both the divine and the human most seriously and keep them in continual tension. But sacramental means more than bringing the divine and the human 'into a synthetic vision. Sacrament in this context also has to do 'with the sign-function which makes religious life distinctive. Religious live from grace more~ visibly and more unmistakably, that is, more sacramentally, than other Christians. Their life is not better than that of the baptized layman or laywoman, but it is less ambiguouS a sign, a pointer, a witness to the 'reality of grace? Religious live at the center of the Church and yet point to its eschatological edge. They live in the world as much as lay people do, but they are fascinated by the frontier, by the "not yet" of the promised kingdom of God. Religious life thus has a prophetic and end-time char-acter. This particular form of ecclesial life gives unmistakable and visible expression to the pneumatic, enthusiastic and eschatological elements of faith which are essential to the whole Church. Religious manifest God's victorious grace in the world by pointing beyond the world: The com-munity of religious humbly gives witness to the reality of paschal grace for 'all~ men and women by living~totally from forgiveness and from hope. Sacramental thus means that religious unmistakably witness to the divine and to the human in Christ and in his Church, and that Christ!s restless dynamism and his restful faithfulness to. God a~d man are most clearly symbolized in the ~world through the lives of religious in the Church,'~ The religious as such are at rest and yet restless, very human and very close to God as Christ was. This is the sacramental, Spirit-cgntered quality of re-ligious life. , It would be wrong, therefore, to separate the sacramental character of religious life from its 'social character. For the social and the sacramental go hand in hand. The vows ar~ ~not private promises; they are public signs in the midst of the world which offer prgmise to all men and women of the ultimate alleviation of want and pain at the eschatological fulfillment of the human and of the natural world. Too often in th+ past the theology of the vows had tgo little to do with the poverty of the world, with its loneliness 4Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans, by J. R. Foster (New York: The Seabury Press, 1969), pp. 257-259. :'Karl Rahner, "The Life of the Counsels," .Theology Digest XIV (1966) 224-227. "Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Otttline, trans, by G. T. Thomson (New ~York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 148. 504 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 and search for love and intimacy, with its desire for independence and free-dom. Poverty, chastity and obedience were, as it were, divorced from the real needs of others. Today :it is important to view the vows in light of the social and human problems of the whole community of men and women,r Only in this light will religious life maintain its true sign-function. In the midst of human poverty, voluntary poverty says no to man's injustice and lack of concern for the brokenhearted and the hungry. In the face of the sexual loneliness and frustration of contemporary society voluntary chastity says no to man's search for warmth merely through uncommitted pleasure. In the midst of a world crying out for freedom, voluntary obedience says no to man's use of brute power and violence to bring about a more inde-pendent future. Today the sign-function of religious life, its sacramental witness to the power of the Spirit of God, must be seen as most .relevant to the social problems of the day. The more identical religious are to their vows; the more relevant they will be to society in its deepest yearning for liberation,s The future of religious life, therefore, must be more sacramental and more social. The rest of this p.aper will try to spell out these two themes by.examining each of the three vows. One preliminary question, however, still remains. Which of. the vows, by its very nature, is most clearly pri-mary, in that it best ,demonstrates the sacramental and social dependence of religious on grace? It would seem that obedience is primary, since, though many Christians may live a poor and a chaste life, only religious live out poverty and chastity in the context of obedience to other members of the communion of saints in their particular religious institute? Religious find God's will for them by discerning the needs of the world with the help of the religious superiors in the community. Furthermore, obedience is the hallmark of Christ's own relationship to the Father; he humbled himself to the conditions of his human existence and became obedient unto death. In what follows, therefore, the main stress will be put on obedience as the distinctively evangelical way of living in the communion of saints. Then poverty and chastity will be seen in light of obedience, Finally community life itself will be viewed as resulting from the three .vows" and as essential to the prophetic and critical apostolate of the religious, in the world. In this-way it is hoped that a view of the religious life of the future will be rDocuments o] the XXXII General Congregation o] the Society o] Jesus, p. 13. sJiirgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross o] Christ as the Foundation and Criticism o] Christian Theology, trans, by R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 7-18. 'aKarl Rahner, ',A Basic lgnatian Concept: Some Reflections on Obedience," trans, by Joseph P. Vetz Woodstock Letters 86 (1957), pp. 302-305. As opposed to others, such as Ladislas Orsy whose work is cited below, Rahner chooses obedience and not chastity as the central vow, and sees poverty and chastity as two ways of living out the total commitment to grace which obedience signifies. Towards a Vision of Religious Life / 505 presented which is both more balanced and more relevant, more sacra-mental and more social. Obedience and the Human Cry for Freedom: Becoming Independently Loyal Religious When the early Christian communities came together, they were known for their desire to discover God's will for them through corporate discern-ment which had as its aim a concerted effort to preach the gospel and min-ister to the needy. Each member of the community was aware of his or her own gifts and was allowed to exercise them in the common task of wit-nessing to the grace of Christ in the world. Yet each individual was also loyal to the whole community. This type of fruitful balance between indi-viduals and the institution led the early Christians to see the relevance of their life-style for those outside the community who were searching for freedom as well as for unity."' For too long religious superiors in the Church did not allow individual religious to be independent, to exercise per-sonal responsibility or to find ways of making religious life relevant to the hunger for freedom in the world which marks the history.of modern man. As religious look into the future, it seems that obedience is a possible waY of expressing both the sacramental and the social dimension of being a Christian. Obedience is not the loss or relinquishment of personal freedom, but the means by which religious are more open to grace and more sensi-tive to the cry for liberation which is being heard throughout the globe.11 Through obedience religious give witness both to. the interrelation of the divine and the human in the world, and to the freedom of the gospel which has profound significance for the liberation which is so desired by all today. The religious obedience of tomorrow must therefore become more sacramental, that is, more unmistakably a sign of the divine and the human dimensions of freedom. The religious must become an independently loyal 'person. This means that more personal freedom on the part of the indi-vidual should lead to greater corporate fidelity and commitment rather than to less. If before, obedience either constricted religious or left them so free that they were not working together in a concerted way, obedience in the future must combine a healthy sense of individual inde.pendence with a pronounced sense of corporate responsibility for the preaching of the gospel and for the service of the whole human community. The more self-deter-mined and independent a religious is, the more ready he or she should be to accept the discernment of the community as it decides how the aposto-late can be carried out effectively. Thus obedience in the future should not 1°See-Martin Hengel, Poverty and Riches in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). 11Karl Rahner, "A Basic Ignatian Concept: Some Reflections on Obedience," pp. 299 and 308. 506 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 be understood as submission to traffic laws which govern the well-being of the community, but as a quality of ecclesial existence which is not an end in itself but which exists for the concerted apostolate of witness and ser-vice. 1'-' The individual charisms of religious should be fostered so that the ecclesial service of the whole congregation is intensified. In tfiis way obedience will have a pneumatic and eschatological character and be an unmistakable sign that the Church depends totally on grace by discover-ing God's will through a genuine listening to the fellowship of the saints. Once religious obedience regains its original sign-value by producing men and women for the Church who are independently loyal, this vow will no longer be seen as simply a private matter between the individual religious and God through his or her superiors. Obedience will be a sign to the whole society in which the religious lives and works. It will broadcast the fact that a life of faith has tremendous ,import for the liberation movement.13 What all men and 'women seek is a way of being free individually and cor-porately; in their scepticism over whether such a realization of corporate freedom is possible, they turn away from Christian revelation ~and ground their freedom on some other basis. Religious who can' live in obedience and who are still free to contribute their talents and energies to the human task of building' up the world in expectation of the coming kingdom of God offer the broader society around them a paradigm of human freedom in brotherhood. This societal dimension of religious obedience is not as emphasized as it should be. Religious tend to view themselves in abstrac-tion from the world which is searching for a genuine form of freedom. The eschatological sign-function of obedience, however, is that it speaks not only to. 'those in the Church and in the congregation, but also to those out-side it who yearn for liberation. In the future religious obedience must be so conceived .and so lived that it becomes a beacon of hope for those who hunger for independence in the context of interdependence.14 In this way religious obedience is itself an invitation to faith in Jesus Christ and to hope in him and his Spirit as the guarantors of man's search for liberation within a community. Poverty and the Human Cry |or Justice: Becoming Self-possessed, Sharing Religious , ~ ~ As was the case with obedience, religious poverty was often presented as an ascetical norm by which an individual religious could attain detachment from the world and lean towards God alone. This concept of poverty, how- 12Ladislas M. Orsy, Open to the Spirit: Religious Li]e alter Vatican 11 (Washington: Corpus Books, 1968), pp. 159-160. 13Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology o] Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. by Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973), pp. 104-105. 14Avery Dulles, The Survival'o] Dogma: Faith, Authority and Dogma it~ a Changh~g World (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971), pp. 52-57. Towards a Vision o[ Religious Li[e / 507 ever, had two debilitating effects: it made religious doubt their own self-worth by~ creating in them guilt feelings concerning their use of material things, and it isolated religious poverty from real poverty and thus deprived the former of its relevance for the latter. Many religious lost all sense of their own personal dignity by never becoming responsible in their use of possessions. Often they were not taught how to 'treasure and protect the goods at their disposal. Poverty was more a matter of not using something than it was of sharing goods with the needy and the hungry. As religious look to the future, it seems that religious poverty will be a way of becoming self-possessed and yet sharing persons.1:' This vow should not make religious childishly dependent on superiors, but responsible Christians who share all they have and are with others. Religious poverty should open the hearts of religious to the cry of the poo.r for bread, for protection and for justice. The vow of poverty can only do this if it becomes more sacramental and more social. The religious poverty of tomorrow must take on its original sign-func-tion. It must be an eschatolog!cal sign of hope in the midst of human want. It can only do so if religious freely choose to identify with the poor in order to bring them to faith in Christ's promise to be with them in their hunger and' to alleviate their misery. Religious are not destitute, but they freely elect to be like the very poor, so as to share whatever excess goods they have with their brothers and sisters in poverty."~ In effect religious pattern forth a model, of a sharing. Christian community to the whole Chuich. In this way religious poverty regains its prophetic and end-time character. It urges the whole Church tO be equally concerned with the hungry and encourages those who live 'in unjust' circumstances to hope. in the Christ who became poor,for their sake and who is preSent to them through the love of religious. The poverty of religious is 'therefore not an end in itself, but a form of ecclesial life for the destitute, so that they can hear .the gospel and taste its power. Religious who are self-possessed, sharing people give witness to their dependence on grace in the use and possession of material goods. They are an unmistakable sign to the world that the Christian community does not exist for itself and is. not insensitive to human misery,lr Religious poverty is a catalyst which makes the whole Church bring the grace of Christ into the homes and the hearts of the poor. Religious poverty, as a.sacramental sign,,mustrediscover its sociological roots as well as its theological significance. Just as the Eucharist is a meal l~Horacio de.la Costa, "A .More Authentic iPoverty," Studies in the Spirituality o[ Jesuits Vlli (1976), pp. 56-57. 16David B. Knight, "St. Ignatius' Ideal of Poverty," Studies it, the Spirituality o[ Jesuits IV (1972), pp. 25-30. lrPhilip Land, "Justice, Development, Liberation and the Exercises," Studies itl the International Apostolate o] Jesuits V (1976), pp. 19-21. 508 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 which has social as well as re!igious dimensions, since Christ cannot be recognized in the eucharistic bread if he is not first recognized in the poor and the hungry, so religious poverty presupposes that the religious choose poverty because they recognize Christ's presence among those who are in ghettoes, in prisons, ;in nursing homes and in soup kitchens,is Byobeing poor, religious,,also identify with Christ in the helpless, the confused, the power-less, the uneducated and the injured even in the midst of affluence. This identification is not, as the Marxists claim, the way in which Christians sanction injustice. Rather. the religious chooses to be identified with the poor so that Christ's promise of ultimate liberation from want becomes a present reality for the destitute. The charity which being voluntarily poor makes possible is nothing else than the religious' desire to feed the poor in the name of Christ and thus to bring them more than bread, shelter, technical assistance and organizational techniques. The religious witnesses to God's grace in the face of the evil that does more than deprive the poor of food and power, but also deprives them of dreams and hope?"' Chastity and' t.he Human Cry for Warmth and Fidelity: Becoming Sexual and Celibate Religious At a time when the sexual revolution is sending shock waves through the institution of marriage, religious celibacy certainly ~akes on a different character than it did only a decade ago. In the past most people viewed the religious as asexual people who lacked human affection and warmth. This critique was partially justified. Many religious were taught to suppress their sexual feelings and even more their sexual identity, The beauty of human sexuality was often underplayed in formation, and religious were encouraged to live as though they did not have bodies, feelings, sexual roles or psychological needs for intimacy and friendship. Recently religious have rediscovered how to be at peace with the fact that they are sexual beings, and are now learning tO live with their sexuality by making it a vital source of energy and enthusiasm in their apostolates,'-"' Yet there is a deeper mean-ing to religious chastity which is opening up to religious in the face of modern man's frustration and loneliness in an age of sexual liberty. Many people feel isolated even in the most intimate of relationships and are exaspe{ated when the experience of marital love disintegrates into infidelity, separation or divorce. As religious become more aware of the need for bal-ance in their daily lives as celibates, they must also become more aware of the social significance of their total dependence on grace in the matter lsPhilip J. Rosato, "World Hunger and Eucharistic TheologY,," America 135 (1976), pp. 47-49. ~"JiJrgen Moltmann, Man: Christian Anthropology in the Conflicts o[ the Present, trans, by John Sturdy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), pp. 116-117. ZODonald ,Goergen, The Sexual Celibate (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), pp. 115- 116. Towards a Vision o[ Religious Li]e / 509 of sexuality as this speaks to those who .are unable to make any kind.of lasting commitment."' There is no doubt that the religious chastity of tomorrow must be more sacramental than it ever was before. Religious must' be human and warm as well as genitally pure. The more their bodies and hearts belong to Godi the more they must be at the service of the love and the friendship of Christ. Celibacy .can no longer be an escape from affectionate relationships which can lead others to faith.'-'-~ A sacramental conception of chastity means that religious must be more free to give witness to the depth of divine love by practicing human love faithfully, Religious can only do this not by sup-pressing, but by channeling their sexual feelings and needs. Religious celibacy must not be seen as a relinquishment of sexual identity, but as a free renunciation of valid, though ambiguous, human intimacy and ex-clusiveness. Human sexuality is therefore an important force in the Church since it gives men and women the power to introduce others into the loving relationship with God which is the end of all love.'-':' A sacramental religious chastity would.~aim to combine a true .love ot~ God with a true 10ve of' other men and women. Often the sign-function of religious chastity is lost wlaen religious fail to love deeply on a human level precisely because they do not love deeply on the supernatural level. A proper balance of both affectionate love for God and affectionate love~for others is the challenge of being both sexual and celibate. Only if the religious loves genuinely, does he or she witness to the eschatological goal of all hum~in love when Christ will return in glory to lead to completion the men and women of all ages who have ¯ sought to reach out to others and commit themselves to him through them. The sacramental, then, cannot be seen in isolation from the social. If religious free themselves from exaggerated 6goism in the form. of self-serv-ing gratification which results in insensitivity to the needs of others, it is only for the sake of the kingdom of Christ and for the sake of others who are lonely, frustrated, unfree sexually or subjected to sexual abuse and lack of fidelity.:4 There is thus a very legitimate social aspect to religious chas-tity. This vow is not simply a matter,of private devotion; it has by its very nature a sociological function. This function is not simply critical in that' it protests against the excesses which result from sexual force. The sociological -°x John C. Haughey, Should Anyone Say Forever?: On Making, Keeping and Breaking Commitments (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1975), pp. 101-105. -°-~Ladislas M. Orsy, op. cit., pp. 94-97, where Orsy develops his thesis that virginity is the source of all other aspects of religious consecration. See also: Vincent O'Flaherty, "Some Reflections on Jesuit Commitment," Studies in the Spirituality o[ Jesuits 11I (1971), pp. 42-46. '-':~Donald Goergen; op. cit., pp. 220-223. See also: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), pp. 81-86. '-'~John 0. Meany, "The Psychology of Celibacy: An In-depth View," Catholic Mind LXIX (1971), pp. 18-20. 510 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 function of religious chastity is also positive. The religious models forth a pattern of human love which is not merely a blind effort to distract,man from death through embracing sexual pleasure. Christian love, as the religious :livesoit, symbolizes God's unswerving love for all and thus lends to, human love the character of a relationship with the source of all affection and warmth--God!s own trinitarian community of love. Just as obedience offers the human .search for independence an ultimate vindication, and just as religious poverty offers human want ultimate hope, so religious chastity has a social significance. It Offers the lonely and the frustrated, ~.who see human love as the only escape from absurdity, a vision of love which ultimately vindicates their own disillusionment over ,human. infidelity and hard-hearted: ness.~'~ In the person of the religious a type of faithful human love is ex-perienced which points to divine love and which thus attests that there is ~a deep, meaning to human tears and-hurt. In this sense religious chastity is sacramental as well as social. ,Religious Community and Christian Mission: the Locus of Healing Criticism o The basic thesis of this paper is that, just as religious faith in geheral has a sociological dimension in that it is concerned with justice, so also does religious life. The more identical religious are with their own tradition, the more able they are to criticize the society around them when it fails to live up to its responsibility to heal broken men and women.'-'~' Just as the whole Church serves faith by promoting justice, so the religious community lives out its prophetic and end:time sign-function by bringing the healing presence of Christ to the unfree, the poor and the lonely. The other theme, which has been woven into the first, is that religious can only be signs'of a critical and healing love if they themselves are balanced, Only if religious channel human talent and divine grace into an on-going sacramental.synthesis, can the~, carry out their call to be Christ's healing presence where men and women .harm each other by not living according to human,, and religious values.° The quest for personal identity which many religious are going through today is not irrelevant to the quest for the social relevance of the whole Church which is more pressing.:~ This paper would qike to assert that a more sacramental type of religious life would lead to a more socially relevant, precisely because socially critical, understanding of vowed life. -~Peter L. Berger, A Rumor o] Angels: Modern Society attd the RedisCovery o] the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1969), pp. 53~75. "~Pedro Arrupe, "The Hunger for Bread and Evangelization: Focus on the 'Body of Christ, the Church' in the Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice," Interna-tional Symposium on Hunger: The 41st International Eacharistic Congress (Phila-delphia: St. Joseph's College Press, 1976), pp. 21-24.o -°:John Courtney Murray, The Problem o] God Yesterday and Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 119-121. Towards a Vision o[ Religious "Li]e / .511 -, In effect~ this paper is advocating that a Spirit-centered Christology~be the mrdel for an understanding of the sacramental, that is, the spiritual and the social, significance of religious life today. For. the Spirit-filled Jesus did not allow himself to be categorized or to be understood solely in terms of any of the typical expectations which were prevalent' in his time. Instead he insisted on his identity as the one who proclaimed that the kingdom of God is near. The close identification between Spirit-theology and eschatology in the Scriptures leads us to see that Jesus' eschatological message was the fruit of his Spirit-filled being.~ In him God's future broke into the world time. God's kingdom dawned upon man and offered the whole cosmos the ability to head towards a new future that was guaranteed to it by the fully Spirit-filled and glorified Jesus. A Spirit-filled person and a Spirit-filled community, therefore, is esgentially a critical one; it is restless until the c~osmos is complete, until the kingdom'of God breaks definitely int6 its rriidst. Yet it,is also at rest because that kingdom is already a present phenomenon through the Spirit's activity in the ecclesial°community spe-cifically and in the whole cosmos as well.~' Religious who live together at the heart of the .Church are particularly the locus where the Spirit's activity everywhere is made most visible and most inc~indescent. A religious com-munity is a critical'community because it is not totally at peace until the kingdom is manifestly present. This critical function of religious communities in the Church adds a special~character to all of the vows, to their life-together and to their apostolate. As indicated in this paper, all of the vows are eschatological, and therefore critical, by nature. Th(y do not criticize society for the sake of criticism, but in order to awaken all men and women tb the'presence of God's kingdom which is already hiddi~n among them. Religious are also 'critical of each other since they are corhpelled to urge their brothers and sisters to live in the presence of the coming God and to view all things, and especially the community itself, as elements ~of an as yet incomplete cosmos which needs the healing and purifying presence of the Spirit.:"' If religious are critical of many aspects of 'their community 'life, it is not because~ they are discontent by nature, but because they long for the ever-fuller manifestation of the kingdom in their community, and thUg call their ¯ fellow religious to be what they are meant to be: a sign of the eschatological promise of God in the every-day life of the world. Re, ligious witness to God's coming in the midst of~ man's coming and going. The same is true of the zsC. K. Barrett, The Holy Spirit in the Gospel Tradition. 5th ed. (London: SPCK Press, 1970), pp. 153-156. :gWolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostles' Creed in the Light o] Today's Questions, trans. by Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972), pp. 139-143. aopierre Teilhard de,Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 112. See also: Avery Dulles, "The Church, the Churches and the Catholic Church," Theological Studies XXXIII (1972), pp. 222-224. 512 / Review ]or .Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 apostolate. Religious seek to make their work a sign, of the eschatological promise of God. If any work loses this end-time character and does not sign forth to others a longing for God's ultimate fulfillment of all creatures, it,has. Ios!~ its salt. Religious community, therefo.re, is not a haven of peace, but a place where members of the communion of saints strive to be ever more Church, ever more a community of pilgrims who await the coming of the Lord and work to prepare his way.:"- In the end religious communities, like the Lord whom they follow, canno~t, be categorized since they have a unique mission. That' mission is service.of men and women in the world with the specific intention of open-ing them to the Spirit who, is the bringer of the kingdom. Religious are not private individuals with an interior depth and an exterior way of life which facilitates and disciplines their co-existence for its own sake. Religious are social beings whose religious commitment is a public sign of God's promise. Their life is sacramental because it is a confluence of the material and the spiritual, the social and the religious, ~just as the being of Jesus was and remains sacramental.:~ Life in the third section of the creed is essentially sacramental life. A visible community of men and women exist in unity, in holiness, in universal openness and in apostolic service. They proclaim for-giveness and look to hope; they allow the Holy Spirit~to work among men, so that he can create a human body of men and women who are joined in word and sacrament to Jesus Christ. They are living signs in each genera-tion of the Church that the Spirit-filled Jesus will return and that he is in-deed already among men and women who wait in hope for him. The special form of life in the communion of saints and of life in the context of the third section of the creed make religious a healing and yet critical presence in society. As independently loyal, as self-possessed and sharing, as sexual and celibate persons who live in commun.ity and witness to the social dimension of the gospel, religious are a model Church in minia-ture, a local congregation of believers who have a sacramental as well as a social function.:':~ Their very existence is a visible sign that Spirit-filled indi-viduals in community can heal the brokenhearted and at the same time criticize the social institutions which are indifferent to the unfree, the poor and the lonely. In light of the thesis which forms the underpinnings of this paper, namely that religious life is both sacramental and social, it can be sa~!d that to deny either element would be to .lessen both the identity of religious life and its sociological relevance. The vows of religious make them into a community which can heal as well as criticize. Religious stand up in the cen.ter of the Churqh and, like Jesus at Nazareth's synagogue, .~lAvery Dulles, Models o] the Church, pp. 149-150. a~Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ, the Sacrament o1 the Encounter with God (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), pp. 13-20. 3aKarl Rahn~r. "The Life of the Counsels." Theology Digest X1V (1966), pp. 226-227. Towards a Vision of Religious Life / 513 identify themselves with the words from Isaiah which he chose to define his own mission: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord (Lk 4:18-19). This is the sacramental and social function of religious life. The vows speak to the world in a way which reminds all men and women of the healing work of Jesus of Nazareth and which causes them to gaze into the future and to be critical of the present, since they wait for the promise that "the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" (Rv 11:15). Deep within "becoming seed," sheltered in soil of fertile earth, life stirred-- and broke the barrior of crusted shell. Rooting down and pushing up, till tender shoot, warmed.by sun and washed in r~in, ., ~ budded :i prelude of l~idden beauty among foliage of natured kin: ,Serenely being, silently becoming, patiently maturing-- flowered sleep---still heavy and cloistered. Gentle wind touches, but bends not the bough: Storm pellets thee earth, but yields vanquished to supple strength of maturing bloom. Nature's war ended, beauty emerges, uniqu~e witness of silent fidelity-- of woven strands of love, a flower unlike it~ kih-- beyond and beside all others. Humble~herald of "terrestial otherness," prophetic vision of "Celestial bliss." Sister Mary Nanette 'Herman', S.N.D. 1600 Carlin Lane McLean, VA 22101 The Kingdom of God --Our Home Donald McQuade, M.M. Father McQuade is stationed at the residence of the Maryknoll Fathers; Box 143; Davao City, Philippines 9501." Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. Seeing his mother and the-disciple he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, 'Woman, this is your son.' Then to the disciple he said, 'This is your mother.' And from that moment the disciple made a place for her in his home (Jn 19:25-27). The Catholic Church has traditionally seen in this passage of John's gospel the role of Mary as the spiritual mother not only of the Church, but of each individual Christian--each of us who share by the mystery of grace in the very life of Jesus himself, Mary's son. In going beyond this basic insight, the pas'sage also reveals the incredible depths of the love of Jesus for all of his brothers and sisters, ~and perhaps in a particular way fbr those who, like "the disciple he loved," have responded to his invitation to leave all things and follow him completely,, and who continue today to stand with him by the cross. JesuS' words--and the graceful gift they contain-- spoken to John on Calvary, l~ave been repeated to all of his disciples and friends down through the. ages. They too, like John, are to "make a place for Mary in their home." But just where is the home of a disciple in which Mary is to live? It is obviously more than any physical reality. Even a "~,arm ~ind healthy milieu of loving human relationships, though necessary and contributory, still do not completely encompass the reality of a disciple',s home. For the home of a disciple must ultimately be conCerned with the depths of his faith, his hope and hi~s lov.e. It is there at the very roots of his being, where he comes in touch with God :an~l where the Spirit moves and breathes the life and the Word within him, that a disciple is truly "at home." 514 The Kingdom o[ God." Our Home / 515 Quite,simply, the home of a disciple is the kingdom of God. And the kingdom is ,within us (.Lk 17:21). A disciple makes .himself at home to the. extent that ~he: shares in the kingdom, to the degree ~that.the Lord lives within: him. And so, a chosen friend of our Lord is really meant to. be at home.:anywhere in the world. ~ On the night, before he died, Jesus promised his friends his parting gift of,~peace and joy in the Spirit (Jn 14:27)~ To be at peace and full of a deep and abiding joy; to be so free in today's regimented world that a ~disciple can be completely and fully himself---to others, to God, and to him-selfLto trust in the .Lord's care totally; to have a joyous and real hope .in life; to see the miracles of creation-and, of .God's loving providence con-tinually unfolding in the world about him despite the evil, the suffering, the sin.; to love deeply; and in turn to know and feel oneself incredibly loved .--this is a disciple's home; this is the kingdom of God on earth. However, the gift of a home in our Father's house which was prepared for~and given to us by Jesus (Jn 14:2) is, like,all his gifts, not an exclusive or selfish right for the disciple alone: It is given to be shared. It grows more loving and more profound to the extent that others are invited to enter into itnf0r we are compelled by Jesus,.himself to.invite our brothers and sisters into our home, into the kingdom. This is an invitation desperately"neede~d in~the.world today--the witness of men and ~women whose lives' reflect the peace and love of Christ and become an,, unspoken invitation t6 "come and see" the Source of such joy. So much has been written in recent years (and which can be readily seen and experienced all around us) of the alienation and loneliness of the men and women of our times. Threatened, on edge, never truly relaxed, so often without faith or a deeply meaningful .reason for life, many people today live, in Thoreau's phrase, "lives of quiet desperation." Increasingly, relief is sought in an excessive dependence on alcohol, in drugs, perhapg in hedonism or some other temporary escape. But the haunting and ultimately deadly loneliness, isolation and meaning-lessness of much of modern life always returns. This experience, so common today, of loneliness and despair, of never really feeling at home in the world is captured perfectly in Jesus" parable of the prodigal son. After the son has squandered everything he had in-herited on a life of debauchery, he is left totally alone, abandoned by his friends, reduced to a job of feeding swine while he himself is starving. In despe.ration he decides to return to his father, now emptied of all his former pride and arrogance, tremendously ashamed and feeling absolutely worth-less, a broken man, but a man who admits to being what he is--a sinner. He now seeks only enough to keep alive; and so he turns, to go home. In his state and in anticipation of meeting his father, he comes up with a prac-ticed, rather stilted request: "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be your son; treat me as one of your paid servants." So he left the place and went back to his father. While he 516 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 was still a long way off,~ his father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy clasped him in his arms and kissed him tenderly (Lk 15: 18-21). The.son hesitantly ~begins to recite his rehearsed line, "I no longer deserve to be your son . ".but the father doesn't even hear him in his overwhelming love and desire to give back to his son all that he has. "My son was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found." "My son, after so long a time in lonely and desperate searching, in suffering and being shattered by despair. -. my son who was lost has.come home." Thankfulness, joy, peace--there is really no word to describe the feel-ing of a man or woman who has deeply experienced the infinite and tender love of God our Father personally. Nor can any words ever adequately con-vey the fullness of the kingdom of God--the loving home into which the Spirit leads us even now. The whole life of Jesus has been an incredible gilt to us. At the very end of it, on the cross, he gave us the gift he held most dear in this world --Mary his beloved mother, to be our mother. We are "to make a place for her in our 'home." For she truly belongs in o,ur home, in the kingdom of God within us. This home needs a mother; the kingdom is incomplete without her. For our home, the kingdom, is in the final analysis the life of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, within us, and concerning the mystery of his life, upon which all creation hinges, Mary his mother most definitely has a very special place. Mary: Type and Model of the Church Barbara Albrecht Translated by St. Lucia Weidenhaven, O.D.(7. Doctor Barbara Albrecht has studied Catholic and Protestant theology, philosophy and Christian social studies at Marburg, Ttibingen, Freiburg and Miinster, receiving her doctorate in Catholic theology. She is head of the Training Center for Parish helpers ¯ in both Bottrop and Miinster. This article originally appeared in Christliche Inner-lichkeit II, I. Sister Lucia is a member of the Carmelite Convent; N. unnery Lane; Darlington; Co. Durham, England D13 9PN. It is not particularly fashionable to speak about Mary. But for the sake of the Church, which we are ourselves, it is necessary--one could even say urgently necessary--to swim against the stream. What is our situation? Hans Urs von Balthasar hits the nail on the head when he says: "The post-conciliar Church has largely lost her mystic features. She has become a church of permanent dialogues, organizations, commissions, congresses, synods, councils, academies, parties, pressure-groups, functions, structures and changes of structures, sociological experi-ments, statistics: more than ever before a ma!.e church." Without Mary the Church becomes "functional, soul-less, a hectic brganization without resting-point, alienated . . . and because in this male world one new ideology replaces the other, the atmosphere becoines polemical, c~itichl, humorless, and finally dull, and people leave his Church in masses.''1 There are many reasons for ~this state of things. Let us disentangle a single thread and think for a while about it. Let us ask ourselves whether, perhaps, a sometimes excessively isolated Marian piety, no longer rooted in the theology of Christ and of the Church, has not contributed to this IK/arstellungen (Freiburg, 1971). 517 5111 / Review for Religious, Volume 36;~ 1977/4 situation¯ Not without reason does the glorious final chapter of the Dog-matic Constitution on the Church of VatiEan II point out that true devo-tion to Mary must grow from true doctrine. But this question we only wish to ask in passing. Our aim is to speak of Mary herself: to contemplate not so much what she is, but how she is what she is: anima ecclesiastica--the clear, transparent type and model of the Church. Mary as type of the Church: thus she was seen and loved esp~ecially by the Christians and theologians of the first centuries who pondered on the tremendous challenge this implies. If we moderns wish to know what it means to be the Church, we, too, have to think about her .again, because in Mary the Church's attitude is exemplified in crystal purity. We can here only sketch a few outlines of this Marian-ecclesial attitude. Mary--Type of the Obedient Church Let us recall the beginnings of our whole Christian and ecclesial existence: Nazareth; a young woman, Mary, taken into service by God as receptacle for his eternal Word the mighty, infinite Word; Mary, wholly listening, all openness, space for the Holy Spirit, type of a Church not regarding herself, not centered around herself, but always orientated towards God: at his disposal in unconditional obedience, lovingly bpen to his Word, and putting no limit~ in his way. l~either man,'nor the Church, but only God has all the right. Mary is surrendered to him "in strength and in weak-ness: in the strength of one who is ready for anything God or~dains, and in the weakness of one who has already been taken possession of completely, weak eno~ugh to recognize the power of God.''~ "My grace is sufficient for thee, for power~is made perfect in infirmity" (2 Co 12, 9). This directive is not only given to Paul, it is given to Mary, to the Church, to every single one of us. And whfit is the word which God addresses t6 Mary? The word of the good news of the coming of God, of the I~irth of the Lord among men, an-nouncement of the joy that shall be for all the people. The~Angel says t0 her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most,.High~ will overshadow you. You shall conceive and bear a son." He does not ask cautiously, "Would you be ready to receive the word of G0dT' No detailed explanations are given, but it is stated very definitely: so it shall be! This is an absolute divine command. Th9 weight of the grace that God should allow a human being to cooperate in the salvation of the world falls on Mary. Not her action, but the action of God "not her~'rea~li-ness, but that of God, is the first thing for man. The initiative rests with God, not with man. Mary's action, the cooperation of the Church, is accomplished in receiving, in the acceptance of the saving-act of God.oTh6 s~mple wholehearted Yes of obedient love is the answer. "I am the hand- 2Adrienne von Speyr. Mary: Type and Model o[ the Church / 519 maid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word." Uncondi-tional readiness for God's demand, obedience that cuts into the flesh; a response that is a plunge into an abyss, because it is God alone who gives fullness and content to this response, and to any genuine response in the Church. There is no margin left for any possible and justifiable ifs and buts. "You shall . " And on Mary's part there is no demand for ano.explana-tion, h new exegesis, as it were, for God could'not possibly have meant what' he said!--There is only Yes or No, surrender or refusal. The word is clear as crystal, and, so is the answer of obedience. We are at the origin not of a "stretched" or "colored" obedience, but at the origin of the "uncolored obediences" to use an image,of Adrienne von Speyr. "In self-evidence, be-yond all,discussion, all rationalization.":' Here lies the source given and received as grace--of the possibility to dare to say Yes to the complete discipleship, as Church and member of the Church. Here, in the obedience of Mary the Church begins to be the handmaid of the Lord--confronted with the total demands of the cidl of God. Here is the source, the spring of the clear sound of the Fiat rnihi which in numberless variations has been repeated and maintained in the. Church of God throughout the ages, and must be continued throughout time to come: an echo resounding eternally. The .prayer of St. Ignatius, for example, ig. one such variation, which has influenced the history of the Church: Sume et accipe . Take, Lord, all my,,freedom.' . One could~equally mention the life and prayer of a Charlesde Foucauld, an Adrienne von Speyr, an .Edith Stein, a Mother Teresa, or other ardent members of the Church in our day, They all live in the Church in the sign of Mary, obedient to the Father's will and open to the Holy Spirit. " Nazareth-remains all through Church history as the focal-point where freedom and obedience meet; where the spotlight is thrown on the invisible grace which makes it possible to say: "All freedom unfolds from surrender and the renunciation of unrestraint. A~i:I from this t~reedom in subjection," from the obedience of those totally committed to the Lord, "proceeds every kind of fruitfulness and holiness in the Churt:h."' It is for us .to ask ourselves whethe~r we have not forgotten these fundh-mentals. MarybType of the Church Fiile~d with the Holy Spirit The attitude of listening obedience toward God the Father, the attitude of openness and receptivity to the Word which is the Son, is at once also absolute openness to the Holy Spirit. Mary allows herself to be filled, be-albid. 41bid. 520 / Review for Religious, Volume 36; 1977/4 come a dwelling-place for the Spirit, gives him room within herself. Be-cause it can be.said of her par excellence: '~I live, now not I, Christ lives in me," it can equally be said of her--and it should to some degree be said of us, the Church--"But. not I, the Spirit lives in me." One conditions the other. Both demand of Mary to be a human being totally given over to God: her whole heart, her whole soul, and all her strength. It is a matter of total identification with the Fiat once pronounced. Partial identification is in-sufficient. The source of Mary's mission is that her being is filled with the Holy Spirit by the Son. This is reflected in the story of her visit to Elizabeth. The Spirit within her makes her rise. He is the finger of God that leads her and she allows herself to be led. He is the impulse and moving-power of Maryqthe Church---on her way to bring the Son as the One who is to come, to men. The Spirit, one with the Son, communicates himself like a spark to Elizabeth, moves the child ~ within her and allows Elizabeth to recognize: the Lord in Mary. The encounter between the young and the old woman takes place in the Holy Spirit--through the Son. and on behalf of the Son. And the Spirit urges both to joyful praise of God. "There are few other examples which make it so abundantly clear how grace always over-flows and ne~ver remains alone. It goes from Jesus--in the Spirt--to Mary, from Mary to Elizabeth, from Elizabeth to John, in order to be poured out here more fully, and return to its divine origin, thus increased?''~ It becomes clear that the Church can only be fruitful and enkindle the joy of the gospel in others, her apostolate being only then efficacious when it springs from the total identification with the initial Fiat mihi and all it implies. "One whole person is more efficacious in the Church than 'twenty half-hearted ones," is a saying of Adrienne von Speyr. And further: ecclesial apostolate is only fruitful when it is service to which the Spirit sends. Should our energies be exhausted in multil~lying schemes and activities, without the Holy Spirit everything we do is empty and shallow. ' Mary--Type of the Praying Church What is it that enables Mary to walk in the obedience of faith, without understanding what is happening to her? It is prayer. "Be it done unto me according to your word," is her prayerful answer to the Word of God. It is not day-dreaming. It is rather her extremely wakeful "amen" to God's speaking. Prayer does not begin with man, but with God. But we cannot hear God if we begin at once .to speak ourselves. It needs silence. Only in silence can Mary, can the Church, and can we perceive what God is saying to us, and then try to conform to it completely. Mary's prayer is objective, simple, childlike submission, not a prayer of many words and considera-tions: hers is the direct answer that God expects. And the uniting factor in ~lbid. Mary." Type and Model oJ the Church / 521 this exchange is again the Holy Spirit. Through him, God's Word comes to life and grows to maturity in her, Thi,s again is only possible because Mary continues to cooperate prayerfully. Her entire activity is envelrped in contemplation. "Mary treasured 'this word' in her heart" (Lk 2, 19 and 51 ). She ponders and savors it. This contemplative pondering over the Word in the heart of Mary does not only begin with the word addressed to her by the shepherds. It begins with the conception of the Word in her womb. It even precedes it. And this "treasuring" includes everything not yet under-stood, everything beyon.d her comprehension and possibilities. This treasuring and pondering of the Word of God is something like the Church~s womb. of. contemplation, without which there can. be neither spiritual vocations, nor spiritual life, nor theological perception. Adrienne von Speyr once called prayer "the key to theology that always fits.'~' We are inclined to forget this today. And that is why the Church, losing sight of Mary, often becomes, as Hans Urs von Balthasar sketches her: a church of activism, of many and shallow words, a church without silence, where theological knowledge can-no longer mature in patience, a church without lasting fruit. The Spirit overshadowing Mary is the Spirit of obedience and at the same time the Spirit of prayer; silence, and therefore of wisdom and knowl-edge, the Spirit of counsel and of all the other gifts necessary for the service of missionary witness and ecclesial theology. No one can grasp the Marian° ecclesial mystery or any other mystery of faith with his own unaided intel-lect. They remain veiled. But they can be encompassed "by the Spirit of faith, by that intuition of love, that sense for the mystery''~' that is given to the soul in prayer. This Marian attitude is necessary for the theologian of today more than ever before: the renouncement of possession, the renounce-~ ment of a neatly fitting truth, which he has grasped.What he needs most is not intellectual theorizing but "a committed surrender in faith and docility." Humility and recognition of one's poverty: this is theology as service in love, not proving what it believes, :but witnessing tO it in the strength of the in-sight into the mysteries of God which prayer alone can give. MarymType of the Believing and Hoping Church Mary is not onlythe type of the unconditionally obedient Church, bringing forth fruit for the glory of God. Nazareth is also the beginning of a way through the darkness over which one has no control, a way in Advent-faith, a concrete unfolding of Mary's fiat in time, and a preparation for the way of the Son. She allows things to take their course. She goes the way of being tested in everyday life--without angel, without light. "Mary did not say 'yes' once, in a great moment; she has carried this 'yes' through patiently, in silence Glbid. 522 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 and constancy.''r Mary has to live 'in concrete terms what it means to be-lieve, not only until the birth of' her Son, but at Cana and in the strange rebuffs of her Son and at the ~foot of the cross; to cling to that God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and whose plans are mysteries; to be content that God is always greater, that. he is and thinks and acts as the quite other than .ourselves, To live faith as conformity, not arguing With God, but al-ways keeping step with him--always and everywhere, not for a time, but for-ever. o - Mary's Advent-r~ad of faith is one of hope, that does not rely on any strength of. her 6wn but on God's grace; a hope not without the wavering that is ours when we become aware of the ever greater God and his demands. For our effort is not made null but is fully necessary; hope that knows the fearfulness of wondering, whether: one will come up to the expectation; never; however, leading to discouragement but always aware that power is made perfect in infirmity. Mary--the Church--can never see herself other-wise than as the lowly handmaid of the Lord; a Church not powerful, but powerless, a Church .that disappears behind her. service, that is not self-regarding. And Mary is the absolutely positive model of this ChOrch. Here is also the place where we point to the silent and suffering Church and her fruitfulness in endurance. The silent Church has the deepest share in the Advent mystery of hope on this pilgrimage through time. Because she perseveres in patience, she bears much fruit. She brings forth her chil-dren after the model of the woman of the twelfth chapter of Apocalypse, in whom the ChurCh has always seen Mary: Mary not~ only as Mother of the incarnate Son of God but as "mother" in the universal sense: mother of many children whom she brings forth in pain. Mother and children are exposed to the Adversary, ~the' Evil One. Because he cannot touch the Son, and because he cannot destroy Mary and the .Church with his hatred; he 1falls upon the individual Christians--the "other childi'en" whom the "woman" brings forth. He makes war against them~ This war against the confessors and saints who "ke~p God's commandments and hold on to the testimony of Jesus Christ" (Rv 12, 17), has many faces: sub-human ones, inhuman ones, those Of the serpent, those of the dragon. The Adversary, the dragon, has been 'vanquished by Christ forever. That is why his last despairing efforts are still so powerful that "his tail wipes off one-third of the stars:from the sky" (Rv 12, 4). The power of evil does:not only reach the earth, it is capable of darken-ing the sky, since one-third of .the stars are swept away. It can extinguish hope, devour faith, and obscure love. This is a terrible possibility, and into this situation Mary--the Church--has been placed, into these eschatological sufferings for the world, a blind world without hope: Is this not th~ time for rKarl Rahner. Mary: Type "and Model of the Church ~/ 523 us .who are children of this Mother ;to support, today, in this hour the ".woman" giving birth, Mary--the Church--by trying "to. ,fulfill :the com-mandments of God and hold on to the testimony .of Jesus. Christ"? God's help does not exclude but includes the help of her children! .~This~help of God which ~sustains us is. also spoken of in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. °God is near to the ,"woman," ,to Mary and the Church. He comes--he, is with her, protecting her in the midst of the battle. He,carries her on, the strong wings of his love. He prepares a place for her. Fiat mihi. This place is not one chosen by herself, in palaces and safe castles, but in the desert, in poverty~ in silence. There God is present. There he feeds her "for a time and two times and half a time." God feeds his Church. in every new today, so that she can continue to walk in .the strength of this food: on.the road that is her destiny. ~ All this:~ the battle, the endurance:of tribulation, the bringing forth of fruit in patience and suffering, the testimony held on to, the desert, biat also the 19ying protection of God who is our hope--all this is also demanded ot~ us and promised to us, who are the Church of today. . ¯ Mary and the (~hurch in Advent We have spoken of Mary as the type of the obedient, believing, hoping, Spirit-filled, praying Church. Like a luminous thread through this little meditation ran the thought: Mary on the way, on the road of hope and faith, on the move to encounter Elizabeth. Nowhere do we read that Mary's road was an easy one,. without obstacles or eclipses, without fears and hesi-tations. On this same pilgrim journey, the Church continues to travel, to meet the coming Lord, that great Advent which presupposes the first com-ing of God in the flesh, uniting the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. He is the One who ever was and who is to come and who, hidden under the veils of his presence as he w~s hidden in Mary's womb, determines every present moment, including every moment of our own lives. He is there, Emmanuel, God with us and.for us, even though we are still on the way, in faith, as Mary was during her ~earthly pilgrimage. He is Emmanuel,' even tho~ugh'we are engaged in battle with the adversary, even should this battle 3~et grbw~fidrcer. The Loi'd walks, battles and stiflers with us, because he has made our battle~ ahd sufferirigs his own in a~ unique., way. He is~already the victor, carrying and protecting us, and he will always be with,us, On this road, the Lord takes Mary, the Church and each single one of us into his service: Our mission is to~ be witness and our witne~s is our mis-sion- no one i§ excluded. Everyone C'an and may and must.-.take ~art in the work of b~ingihg God to ~en, of making him present t9 men. The Christian has an Advent task. He is called to cooperate in kindling the hid-den longing for God which is in every man, just as it took place between Mary and "Elizabeth. Through human beings, through the Church, God wants to show his presence, and bring his joy into the darkness of our 524 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 prayer, our faith, and our hope. "God wants His own in joy.''8 And he wants his Church to proclaim the great joy, the good news, on the way. But we have to remember that joy is born from the obedience of the Fiat mihi, from a surrender that day after day commits itself anew to the unpre-dictable God, to his unfathomable and demanding will. It is a joy that does not ~o much look back at something that is complete and behind us but that looks forward and makes men raise their heads to look for the One to come. He conies in every "new today--in the midst of the desert of our times. But the Church--and that is all of us---can live this joy in obedience, in faith, in hope, in suffering and in praise only when she shakes off her for-getfulness and allows the Spirit."to remind her again of all things," in order to ponder and treasure the word of the Lord again in her heart. This alone will re-awaken in us Christians the longing for the final coming of Christ, and make us cry out again in the Spirit ahd in love: "Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!" SAdrienne von Speyr. -o It should give woman a feeling of exaltation to know that she--particularly in the " virgin-mother Mary--is the privileged place where God can and wishes to be re-ceived in the world. Between the first Incarnation of the Word of God in Mary and its ever new arrival' in the receiving Church, there exists an inner continuity. This and only this is the decisive Christian event, and insofar as n~en are in the Church, they must participate--whether they have office or not--in this comprehensive femininity of the'-Marian Church. In Mary, the Church, the perfect Church, is already a reality, long before there is an apostolic office. The latter remains secondary and instrumental in its representation and, just because of the deficiency of those who hold office (Peter!), is so made that the grace transmitted remains unharmed by this defi-ciency. He who has an office must endeavor, as far as he can, to remove this defi-ciency, but not ~by approaching Christ ~as head of the Church, but by learning t6 express and live better the fiat that Mary addressed to God one and triune. Hans Urs von Balthasar ¯ L'Osservatore Romano, Feb. 24, 1977, p. 7. Chapter: A,Community's Call to Conversion Colette Rhoney, O.S.F. Sister Colette is involved in the ministry of prayer, spiritual direction and retreat work. She resides~at 1340 E. Delavan Ave.; Buffalo, NY 14215~ While examining the technical aspects of a chapter and ways of imple-menting its decisions, it is also necessary to examine the results of a com-mun. ity's chapter as lived by the individual members of the congregation. Father Conleth Overman, C.P., recently presented a thorough development of.chapters from the "imposition chapters through the .liberation chapters into the. planning chapters."' The lived experience of this development and the future involvement of members takes place in the on-going conversion of each individual sister. In order to implement the plans, the mission and the decisions of a chap-ter by. the.members of a community, these members must recognize that a call to conversion becomes part of the spiritual dynamics of the chapter. :This call to conversion remains through the months and years ~that follow a chapter in the daily death and rising of each member of the community. It becomes an essential element in the process of community life, making each member aware of her attitudes toward the community in general and toward members in particular. The summons to continued growth leads each one to examine her response to the Spirit who bids her grow. Basically, conversion is a change of heart and attitudesmit is taking on the 'mind and heart o~ Jesus Christ. Within the religious congregation, con-version lies in our openness to experience God's calling us forth through 1Conleth Overman, C.P., "Chapter--An Opportunity," Sisters Today, June-July 1976, pp. 651-655. 525 526 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1~977/4 ~ the power ~f the Spirit, to ~examine, as our foundresseS did, the life of Jesus and to find a modern response to his salvific ministry. The successful chap-ter is not one that ends with a written document, but one that leads to con-tinuol discernment and growth in personal conversion. The elements of this conversion would seem to be those of penance, healing, reconciliation, and confirmation. Penance Penance fundamentally involves the grace of change, and so also do most new constitutions formulated by a community's chapter. Penance 'is centered in conversion, in metanoia, an admitting one's own sinfulness before God, self, and neighbor. It is a turning to God and self and neigh-bor in a serious attempt to grow in the knowledge, love and will of God. The grace of a new-found trust in God's fidelity amid our own infidelity leads us to an openness before the Spirit. This openness graces us with the desire and courage to surrender to the voice of the Spirit as expressed in the documents of the chapter. Metanoia is continual, a constant, thorough, on-going, despite the human weakness which We all carry with us. ~The belief, in hope, that God-with-us can do marvelous deeds, impo~sibie ones, moves us on even in the midst of our woundedness. Healing Those who have experienced the"healing p0~,er'that is possible anibng chapter members who have been gifted by.grace and trutti in the S~irit, the community and each other-~can bring themselveg" to believe and to work for the healing Of the whole community. The day~ ankl w(eks follow-ing a chapter are seeded with opportunities for th~ healing of memories, of personal and comhaunal hurts sustained during the long hours of debate, dialogue, and discussion. There is a time for everything; and"the period immediately after chapter seems to be an appropriate time for the healing of the mistrusts and mistakes made in the process Of chapter, i3od's saving action in our lives heals our wounds through Jesus--=and calls us forth to minister'a like healing to one another. Redonciliation Before we can know the power of recc~nciliation we must pe~:~onally experience the forgiveness of God. /~fter positioning' ourselves wiih the prodigal son or his jealous older brother, we turn back' to our loving Fatl~er who longs for our return. Our weakness and failures do not discourage him from stretching forth to eml~race us, to welcome us b~ick and to~ cele-brate the occasion with the entire household. The forgiving Francis of Assisi words it this way for his followers: There should be no friar in the whole world who has fallen into sin, nb matter how far he has fallen, who will ever fail to find your forgiveness for Chapter." ,4 Call. (o Conversion /o 527 the asking, if he will only look into your eyes. And if he does not ask forgive-hess, you should ask him if he wants it. And should he appear before you again a thousand times, you should love him more than you love me, so that you may draw him to God.z The sacrament of forgiveness, of healing, of reconciliation takes flesh as we offer ourselves to the power of God's Spirit and one another. The "grace" of our own self-righteousness must die before we can gift another with new birth in reconciliation. What succeeds from any chapter proposals for the building up of the kingdom will be rooted in the spirit of forgiveness among the members. As this forgiveness and reconciliation takes hold, the members of the community can extend this Good News to other members of the kingdom. Confirmation Perhaps the success or failure of a community chapter can be determined by the conversion of its members. The signs within the community that the ~vord and action of the "Spirited" chapter are still, alive would seem to be the lived forms of these document-words uttered in ,the lives and ministries of the members. The decrees of a chapter wi.ll not be understood completely or effected immediately. However, the on-going affirmation of its statements _i_s a sign of confirmation by the Spirit of Truth. ,The signs of the individual sister who is graced in the decisions and odocuments of her community's chapter will be an increased faith in her vocational call, the harmony pf her own being and the courage and determination to live out the written word. Conclusion As each of us enters into chapter planning,or emerges f~rom the process involved in the search for the new direction of religious life, let us be en-couraged by Jesus' words: . . . the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the F~ther will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of alibi have said to you. Peace I bequeath to you, my own, peace I give you, a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid (Jn 14:2.6-27). -°"Letter to a Minister" in English Omnibus Edition o] the Sources (Chicago: Fran-ciscan Herald Press), p. 110. " Contemplation Vera Gallagher, R.G.S. Sister Vera's work is described in her article. She resides at Christ the King Convent; 11544 Phinney Ave., N.; Seattle, WA 98133. I was fifteen when I.decided suddenly, totally, to join a contemplative religious order, God's call 'was clear, if abrupt, and I responded~ whole-heartedly. My parents, however, were unwilling to consent to either the Carmelites or Poor Clares, my first choices. Because I was equally reluctant to wait until I was eighteen, we compromised. They agreed to the Sisters of Charity of the Refuge, then a cloistered, contemplative order devoted to serving and rehabilitating delinquent teenage girls. ,~ Always protected, I knew nothing of delinquency. But, having read widely the books in my parents' bookcases, I knew a great deal about prayer. And into that I threw myself. Between meditation, Mass, Office and reading we devoted about three and a-half hours daily to prayer. I gobbled that up. Sundays were free, so I turned to six or seven hours of prayer then. While I was a second-year novice, our isolated convent in Vancouver, B.C., joined the Good Shepherd Order--world-wide, devoted to the same work, and with the same emphasis on prayer. For six weeks I was sent to a Good Shepherd novitiate in Minnesota, and then became professed. Shortly, I found myself teaching in our special education schools (spe-cial, not because our girls were retarded but because they had missed so much school), then sent to college, then appointed principal. So I wandered, principal of our schools, from Minnesota to Washing-ton to Montana to Nebraska to Colorado; back to Montana, and Minne-sota, and Nebraska. All the time, while I willingly served wherever God 528 Contemplation / 529 called, I lived a split-level life: level 1, being principal; level~2, being a con-templative. What hours I could beg, borrow, or steal were unceasingly devoted to prayer, my primary calling and delight. Over and. over, I asked God why he so clearly summoned me to contemplation and so obviously assigned me to administration: He did not reply. ~ Finally, when state and child-care agencies' rulings came to the point that religion, of whatever denomination, could no longer be freely taught and promoted, and when my order had meantime emerged into one no longer cloistered, no longer primarily contemplative, but apostolic, I re-quested a change of work: from education into pastoral ministry. Forthwith, I was engaged by a medium-sized church in Seattle. Here for three and ~a half years I have rediscovered and---finally--integrated my vocation as contemplative and apostle. Lilurgy In the convent, we had observed the church year but, somehow, it had usually passed me by. When I joined, as staff.,person, our Liturgy Commit-tee and discovered lay people studying the gospels, creatively designing methods of changing background, music, space to emphasize each mood of the liturgy, really living, in mind and spirit, every aspect of worship to make it compellingly clear to the congregation, I burst alive to the wonder, grandeur, simplicity, lowliness of the worship of the Lord. Personal prayer had meant too much for me to have become aware of the ever-chan~ing, challenging worship of the Church. Now that same liturgy, parish-celebrated, summons me to a. communal meal of adoration, love, and thanksgiving wherein each of us enriches the other by his/her gifts of insight and prayer, and all of us complete each day of living worship more attuned to God because we know our neighbor better, while all the adjunEts to worship which we have designed emphasize, in color and shape and texture, kaleido-scopic stories of God's relationships with his people. Home Visiting Most nights I am out visiting families throughout our widely scattered parish. Generally, these visits are devoted to pastoral counseling, spiritual direction, theological up-dating, accordir~g to the various requests and desires of those whom I visit. Simply and easily, as we chat together, people often share with me their experiences of God. Coming from men and women I know, in the simplest of everyday language, those descriptions of personal encounters with God leave me so silently breathless that I feel as .though I ought to be kneeling. There is the man who drank a fifth a day, smoked heavily, lived with little regard for God's law---but whose wife prayed for him unceasingly. One day, in total self-disgust, he turned to God and his wife in heart-broken sorrow. Such an overwhelming visitation by God was granted him that he 530 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 never as much as desired alc6hol or cigarettes again. Because he was so overpowered by gr~ice, he quit work for two years to pray, ponder, meditate, absorb the wianders he had seen. When I came to his apartment, Bob's greatest, desire was for an in-depth discussion of the~ works of St: John of the Cross. He had read, comprehended and loved every word in the saint's writings. He quoted them to me easily, expounding on their beauty. And I --- I felt like a child listening to a master of the contemplative dire. .There are Richard and Nancy, a young married couple who,have taken private vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to free themselves for con-templation. Their .lives are totally regulated by their need for prayer, Each works half-time, earning only enough for a simple life,~giving away anything in excess. They rise very early in the morning for their first hour of prayer together, meditating daily for a total of three hours. Their love for Scrip-ture is so great that they have memorized whole chapters, setting them to music. Their sights are so irrevocably, irresistably fixed on God that they see nothing unusual about so living. Naturally enough, their parish commit-ment is to the St. Vincent de Paul Society. I could' write story after story, each thrilling, . about parishioners who, through the ~scintillating brilliance of everyday living in closest harmony with the Eternal, direct the onlooker, like the whirling lights of a police car, straight to God. Pastor Very few diocesan priests have ever been canonized. I used to believe this was because of a life which, de facto, militated against sanctity. I have discovered the reverse: lives so simply and poorly dedicated to Jesus that no association or congregation has been built up to study the individual, obscure life, promote tit, pay, for its publicity, push it through to canoniza-tion. In our parish we have team ministry: the staff consists of one priest, three sisters, two deacons and one deacon's wife on a volunteer basis, and one single young man. All decisions are reached by consensus. No one per-son leads, directs or governs. In this situation, the pastor could be lost. Our pastor lives his very busy, very undistinguished life according to one principle: what"would Jesus do? His consequent devotion to poverty, love, service, compassion, understanding is such that I watch him to see Jesus incarnated again. I remember my first Christmas in the parish. Father '~X" brought me to the :tree in the rectory, surrounded by gifts. "These are my Christmas presents," he said. "Take whatever you wish." Then he handed me an en-velope full of bills--half of the money given him for Christmas; the other half he gave to another sister. That was my first introduction to the stark poverty of Father "X's" life. He has no savings account. He uses his salary primarily to give it away to whichever person asks for it first. His days off and vacations are simple, ¯ Contemplation / 531 usually spent with other priests. He shares his rectory with whoever comes along: currently two priests are resident; the young youth minister and the male head of the liturgy committee live there; whatever man is unfortunate, poor, in need of an overnight accommodation gets the one room which is left. In ,that last room I have discovered a poor black family passing through town; a .veteran with amnesia waiting for an opening in vet's hospital; a disturbed man with a knife.under his pillow awaiting transportation to Cafiada; a chef wit.hout .a job, and many others. Finally, in the housekeeper's apartment in the rectory, lives a talented drummer Father "X" picked up off the streets, homeless, hooked on drugs and alcohol, hungry. Totally re-habilitated now, he does his own thing from the rectory, and will, until he feels safe enough to move out on his own. Naturally enough, the rectory has become everybody's home. Father "X" owns nothing which he does not share. The parish drops in, commit-tees meet, people come for appointments, and all of us learn that the parish is more than a church: it is a radius of sharing love--a koinonia--a dia-konia-- a drop-in center--a haven for all in need. ~ The words of~ Script:ure are inspiring. But meditating and praying over them has not ,compelled' me to follow Jesus as forcefully as has the life of a diocesan priest devoted to making .that Scripture alive--today, now. Preaching About every six weeks I preach on weekends. What I have learned thereby would fill an encyclopedia. To compress the messages of the readings of the Sunday into a ten-minute homily means that those readings must be meditated over, pon-dered, searched, re-searched until they become a light glowing in my mind. So brightly incandescent does that one word become, after the hours of contemplative prayer devoted to it, that neither writing it down nor memo-rizing it is.necessary. Also, I need stories, everyday tales, to illuminate the gospel of. yesteryear into the imper~ative of today. So I reach back through my life, or into the stories of their lives which parishioners have shared with me, or into the happenings of this particular calendar month of 1977. And in so doing, I discover how truly each occurrence of everyday an-nounces, again, the coming of God's kingdom, the incarnation of his Son. I discover, too, that in nothing have I ever been alone: those experiences I tfi~ought to have been most personal, most private, most singular become, when shared in the light of the gospel, the most universal experiences of my congregation, the ones they tell me they know and have lived. I ha.ve learned that nothing should be hidden because God is alive in all--writing straight with crooked lines--so that the whole world with its sins, its sorrows and its shortcomings--and its soarings--becomes one sung paean of praise to the Almighty. Translating that song into simplicity is the task of the preacher. ' 53:2 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 Fasting Often throughout my life I have heard God's call to fast, and almost as often shuddered and said "no," hurrying on my way. One Sunday in the parish, three different persons told me that they were leaving the Church because of their problems with the institutional Church. I was stunned. In our parish we have, I thought, everything: a priestly priest, excellent liturgies, first-rate music, good preaching, a devoted community. What else could we offer? And three parishioners were still leaving the Church! I prayed for enlightenment as to ways to help~for I knew both the men and the young woman very well. Clearly I heard the words: "This kind of devil goes not out but by prayer and fasting." Those words left me with no alternative: pray, I would; fast, I must. For four months I fasted. Meantime, one man and the young woman not only came back to the parish, but became deeply involved in parish activities--much more so than usual, The third young man had dropped out of my sight. I continued to fast and to pray, a bit hopelessly. Th6n, one night, as I stood in the convent of a distant parish, Rob walked to the door: We looked at each other, and embraced. He had come, he told me, for a meeting of youth ministry in the parish: he intended to get involved; and he said that he had joined the choir. "I searched for something better than the Church," he said, "but I couldn't find it." That convinced me of the value of fasting in the service of the Church. Now I frequently fast: a week here, a week there; now a month; then two. Fasting brings me closer to God in prayer, but without the real-life motiva-tion of the parish, I would not persevere in it. Ecumenism Eight Protestant and two Catholic churches, one of which is ours, cooperate in our neighborhood. The ministers of the churches meet twice monthly, the laity meet once a month. As soon as I was engaged for work, Father "X" involved me in CHOICE ("Churches Involved in Common Effort"). The first really important happening was our ministers' decision to keep a prayer diary, meet weekly, and share. For me, the decision was no less than terrifying; prayer had always been very personal, very private to me. However, my curiosity as to how Protestant mirdsters prayed was so great that I consented to go along. We continued for one year. I discovered many things: foremost, perhaps, my realization that not only were Protestant ministers comprehending of contemplation, they also lived rich and variegated prayer lives of their own. I discovered a pyramid of errors in my past concepts of Protestant ministers: Contemplation / 533 Celibacy is not absolutely essential to the developm'ent of a rich prayer life. ¯ The gospels apply to all persons of whatever denomination; within them, God lives for all. God reveals himself to whoever wholeheartedly searches. Protestants, by their eagerness and uprightness, can challenge Catholics. .Catholicism does not have an edge on the ecclesiastical market: I learned to share my prayer, my closeness to God, my silences in his presence, my ecstasies in the love of his sheltering arms, and to feel myself totally accepted and understood in what I would formerly have considered an.inappropriate company: a circle of Protestant ministers! That experience has been one of the most important, most radical in my life. It lifted me suddenly and freed me from the parochialism in which I had been reared. In many ways the CHOICE churches have cooperated to make God better known, more real, better served in our area and neighborhood. All of. this I have found enriching to our congregations, as well as truth-reveal-ing to me. God is found in truth, not in error. We must reach out, beyond ourselves, to discover where those unknown errors lie. Social Justice When I was less wise, I attended some social justice workshops at a large university and came back, I thought, permeated with an urgency 'for social justice in the world. I preached a couple of sermons on the subject and was disappointed to discover that my congregation was not totally with me. Figuring that I must be, in some way, stumbling about in wrong turns, I decided to let the matter drop for the time being. Then I discovered a group of parishioners who wanted to form a social justice committee, another grouWwhodesired to organize for Bread for the World, a third who wanted to create a St. Vincent de Paul Society to care for the poor, the hungry, the frightened, the homeless, especially in the area contiguous to our parish. I assisted each group in its formation, and met with them. There I discovered hard-headed; practical Christians who cared about the hungry homeless men and women next door, in preference to those a continent away to whom they were not sure they could get bed and ~board. Meantime, I discovered that our parishioners were ready to pour money into the St. Vincent de Paul Society when they knew it was immediately transferred into relief for the very poor; they were delighted to contribute food to a neighboring parish in the Central Area for its Food Bank; they were eager to organize to provide legislatively for the food needs and ap-propriate distribution centers with adequate safeguards for the hungry of the world,, They had been turned off by sermons~which revealed to them a naivete and lack of pragmatism inherited by me from Academe. "534 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 , Because money, efforts, work flowed freely to the really poor, I found myself involved with the impoverished. The ideals of social justice and the thundering of. Isaiah had sounded out like trumpet calls, but dealing with the querul.ousness, and the unrealistic, improvident needs of the poor, first-hand, became a different and much, more challenging matter--one which I would gladly., have ducked. But Jesus lives hidden in the difficulties, de-mandings, despotisms of the poor; and, with the aid of our laity who give of their time without counting, I have found him there. I must admit it: it was easier, more pleasant, more justifying to h~ave discovered God in. social justice workshops on broad grassy campuses among .nice people ~dressed in clean clothes than among the very poor, improperly dressed, poorly housed, querulous, and sometimes "ungrateful" impoverished. Contemplation Finally, this article closes where it began: with the quest for contempla-tion. Contemplation is not, as once I thought it was, a way of prayer, Contem-plation is a way of fife. Truly, in embracing .a religious life devoted to cloister and to .prayer, I chose a life-style immediately preparatory of contemplation. I had not, how-ever, counted on the life-style changing radically from one of cloister ~0 one of intense apostolic activity in interaction with the ,world. When that hap-pened, I scarcely knew which way to turn. Now, I realize, it didn't even matter, God lives, in the world. God created that world, and made of it his' own cloister. The more we know and interact with God's world, provided we. keep aware of what, in fact, we are about, the more imbued with God we be-come. On silver trumpets, my parish has called forth the name of God from every cornet wherein I have sought him and his people, and from other corners into which, unseeingly, and unknowingly, Ihave wandered. J I have found God vibrantly alive in people's homes; on the deserted city streets which I may be walking at midnight; in ch6i'ch; in poverty; in fasting as well as in restaurants; in priest and in people; in the hitchhikers I have picked up; in the cold, wet weather and the .Seattle sun; in the puddles I have plodded through and on the dry, comfortable kneelers in church; in the pants I wear,to keep warm and in the skirts I adopt to look good; in the faces of parishioners and in the stranger's' smile I meet at an intersection when-we bump into each other and apologize; in Protestant ministers and in Catholic laity. ' God encompasses me. He attends my lying down°and my getting up. His shadow cools me in the day and ~warms me at night. He guards my "waking hours and my broken dreams. He loves me alone in the midst of crowds. God is my be-all and end-all; he is my life. And that, I think, is contemplation. I have reached it, at last. Prayer and Freedom of the Spirit Maria Edwards, R.S.M. Sister Maria is Secondary Rdigious Educ'ation CoOrdinator ,for the diocese of Nash-ville. Her last article in these pages appeared in the July, 1976, issue. ,Her office is located in the Catholic Center;. 24~00 21st Ave. S.; N~shville, TN 37212. One day Jesus stood up in the synagogue and read the~following passage from Isaiah: "TheSpirit of the Lord has been given to me;°for he'~has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclai~m freedom to captives, and new sight to the blind, to set all captives free, and to proclaim the Lord's year of favor" (Lk 4:17-19). As ~eligious are we able to affirm the statement that the Spirit of the Lord has .been given to and accepted by us; are we certain that he has anointed us and called us his own? The more certain we are of his love and his presen~e~ the clearer do we hear his invitation to. proclaim .the good news, to be his special ministerg,'to be his disciples. As we allow the.Spirit room to move in our lives, we begin to feels, the urgency to help others to be more aware and more open to the working of the Spirit. within them. People are yearning to hear that this is the year of the Lord's favor for them, that now is the day of salvation. Prayer is our proclamation that Jesus is risen and is living, among us--that he not. only exists but that he is present and alive in all who believe in him. Prayer is our expression of hope in times that to many ~people seem hopeless. It is our conviction ,of faith, lived in'a world that seeks proof for everything. It is our experience of love reaching out and touching persons who are the abandoned, the forgotten;° the bitter, the disappointed, the poor, the disgruntled, the spiritually blind. Prayer is freedom! It is life lived in the fullest manner, for through, prayer we are healed and set free again and again. We are con-stantly being formed into new creations, into the very image of God, How many of us have been set free by the love of the Lord and then 535 536 / Review [or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 have allowed ourselves to be bound up again? How many of us are like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to call us forth again from the tomb of our own selfishness, our own complacence, our own indifference to a world that needs our help in order to be set free? How many of us are still bound up by our past lives, our past experiences, experiences which may have hurt us so deeply that we have vowed never to open ourselves to love again for' fear of being crushed again in the process? How many of us have wrapped our-selves up in our own burial cloths and have settled down for a long, slow, comfortable death? To live as Christians in complete freedom demands too much effort, too much dying to selfishness. "If today you hear my voice, harden not your hearts." In God's eyes it is never too late to begin again. He wants us free to love and be loved. Will we give the Spirit full reign in our hearts and lives? Are we willing to risk being a part of what we pray for: peace, love, joy, hope, freedom? Are we ready to take responsibility for our prayer, no matter what the cost? Can we honestly place our lives freely and unreservedly in God's hands? If we refuse to take the risk with Jesus, our prayer will become a selfish enslavement rather than a real liberation in the Spirit. "For freedom Christ has set us free; remain free therefore, and do not submit again to the slavery of sin . . . for you were called to freedom, brothers, but do not use your freedom to do. wrong, but use it to love and serve each other as the Holy Spirit directs . If you are living by the Spirit's power, then you will follow the Spirit's leadings in every part of your liv.es" (Ga 5: l ; 13; 25). What Is Freedom? Freedom is being open to new awarenesses of who we are, who God is, and what life is and holds. Persons who are truly free are persons who are able to live in faith. They are in touch with, and willing to share their weak-nesses as well as their strengths; they are able to grow with the pain as well as with the good times. Since they are people of faith, people who believe in the now, they are also people of hope, people who believe in the tomor-row. They admit that they do not have all the answers, that they do not possess all the truth, and this very admission sets them free to grow in the spiritual life. ,. Definitions or descriptions of freedom are as varied as the persons en-deavoring to explain them. But to Jesus "freedom" meant everything. It meant his very life. "I have come that they might have life and have it to the full" (Jn 10:10). He came to free the captives. He never forced freedom on anyone; he generously offered it to everyone. With his life, death, and resurrection he freed us all from sin and guilt, anxiety and fear. Are we daily allowing him to heal and free us in prayer--from loneliness, a sense of rejection, lack of self-respect, narrow-mindedness? How difficult it often is for us to choose life over death! "I have set before you life and death, Prayer and Freedom of the Spirit / 537 the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendents may live by loving the Lord. " (Dt 30: 19). Jesus daily reminds us that he is the way, the truth and the life as he gently calls us to follow him. God is infinitely patient as he waits for his people.to make choices. He is in-finitely patient as he waits for his chosen people to choose him. The type of freedom that the Lord offers us is so special that no indi-vidual or group can take it from us. It is essentially an inner 'attitude, a whole orientation toward life that is deeply implanted within those who believe. The well-known Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frahkl has written about this type of freedom from his own experience in his book Man~s Search for Mbaning.1 During the horrible years spent in a concentration camp in World War II, he often meditated on the meaning of freedom in his ~own life. Everything was taken from the prisoners---family, possessions, status, and identity itself (they were known as numbers). But after months and years in such an environment he was able to say that everything can be robbed of a man but one thing, the greatest of human freedoms: to choose one's own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own life, one's own way. In the midst of his suffering, God and prayer became living realities to Frankl. It was the "freedom to be" that prayer gave to Frankl. He was a prisoner on the outside, but a free man on the inside. No person, no torture, no enticement could motivate him to give up his God-given freedom. Many people have the tendency to think that the two words, "motivation" and "causation," have the same meaning, but that is not true. No one can cause us .to be or do what we do not wish; people can only motivate. There are some religious who state that their bitterness or lack of interest is caused by hurts that they have received in the past. If they are bitter it is because they have chosen bitterness; they have chosen not to forgive and forget; they have chosen not to be healed and set free. This may seem a hard saying but after reading Frankl~s life it seems more evident than ever. No one is to blame for our lack of freedom but us ourselves. We can never anticipate what we might do in any given circumstance of the future, but we can make prayer such a part of our very .being that we can always be assured of being able to pray, and hopefully we will always have the courage to pray. It is this quality of courage, this growing awareness of our constant need to, pray,, that enables us to be listeners to and followers of the Spirit, to step into the uncertainty of the darkness knowing that God's presence is ever with us. The more we pray the more certain of his presence we become. Doubts will never cease to drift into our lives, but doubts give rise to the opportunities we need to choose the Lord: It might be well to remember that the Lord wants to be chosen, that he does not wish to be taken for granted in our lives. 1New York: Washington Square Press, 1959. 5311 / Review for Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 Freedomand Commitment W~hen talking about freedom in a Christian ~context, by necessity the aspect of commitment must be touched upon. Some of the major crises in our .lives and in our times occur because of lack of meaning, lack of purpose, lack of hope, and especially lack of love on the part of individuals and of groups. If' we are living as committed Christian religious we should be filled with purpose, with meaning, with love. Commitment implies total giving of self on a. daily basis; it implies new discoveries of faith and love. Each of us has, forfeited certain freedoms in preference for a particular freedom-- Jesus Christ himself. We have chosen a definite life-style, we have chosen a vowed life. .In :searching the gospels there is one thing we can be certain of: Jesus wants committed followers. He never minced any words on the subject: "He who is noLwith me is against me, and he who does not ~gather with"me scatters" (Mt 12:30). Either we receive these words with joy or we live our lives as religious in misery. All the~.rationalization in the world cannot blot out the bold pass, age: "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!" (Rev 3: 15-16). He asks us to make a choice daily, either be hot or cold~ but for God's sake make a choice. Are we setting any captives free; are we allowing others who love us to set us free; are we feeding ~any poor people; do ~we have something and Someone to give to the spiritually blind; are we signs, of faith and hope to the people.with whom we live and the people we endeavor to serve? We must not wait until, we are "perfect" before we begin to live out the gospel message. We must try to live the gospel message even in our profound weak-ness and°then we will be on the road to perfection!: How many minutes a day do we spend reading and praying over the Word of God; how ~any minutes a day do we spend living it out? .How many minutes a day do we spend growing closer to the One with whom we will live for all eternity? God needs our commitment; God so needs :our lives. The whole history., of God's chosen ones is the story of a people claim-ing to have responded fully to God's words to follow him in freedom, while in, actuality most were too bound up in their own sicknegs and powerless-ness to let the Lord, call them forth and free them. But Jesus° makes the process "too" simple: "Give up all that you have and come follow me!" What a risk that kind of freedom involves. It seems so frightening and yet all we have to do is to, let ourselves be filled .with God, to empty ourselves in prayer, so that .he can fill us with himself. Prayer can lead us to total commitment; prayer can free us sothat we can continually make total commitment~ As religious we need one another to support us in our choices, in our prayer and in our commitment. Although our lives as religious do not depend solely on whether or not those around us live in a Christian way, Pr~ayer and Freedom~o]~ the Spir!ti~ / 539:. we have to admit that living with those persons who are kind, loving, and service-oriented naturally encourages us to be and do likewise. The Lord told us to form community, to carry one another's burdens freely. We must nev.er give up trying to make Jesus the center of our community life. We may be "a voice crying in the desert" but if we cease to cry we may soon cease to care. The cry says that we need one another; the cry says that we are almost dying on the inside and we want to live again'; the cry says that we have not yet arrived. "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (Jn 8:31-32). To be free, then, is really to be able to follow our quest for the truth, to be able to fulfill our potential for spiritual growth. Conclusion Prayer is our witness to an unbelieving world that the Lord is present and living within us. Prayer opens us up to choose freely God and life over nothingness and death. We must .decide in what ways' we are bound, in what ways we.need to be set free. We must believe'that God loved us so much that he sent his Son to take on our flesh and our weakness in order that we might be led to freedom in the Spirit. The Lord wants his religious to be free. In his eyes each a~ad every living person is special and beloved. As religious we should know this even though others do inot .know of their specialness. In prayer each day let us hand over to the Lord all '.of our fears, our dreams, our burdens, our insecurities, our hopelessness, and even our faithlessness, If we want to be free we can The,.Lord not .only accepts us and loves us unconditionally, but he gives us the~freedom to choose to be changed. This change begins the moment we say~a total yes to.him and allow him to set us free in the Spirit. Off COmmitment to the Poor Gerald R. Grosh, S.J. Father Grosh, in addition to teaching theology at Xavier University (Cincinnati), also gives retreats and resides at the Jesuit Renewal Center; P.O. Box 289; Milford, OH 45150. We live in a divided society. We live in a society in which the clamor of the oppressed rings forth to all people to struggle, for love and justice and peace in our world. The poor, especially those in the Third World, cry out that they cannot live as human beings, that they have no sense of their own value as persons, because the structures of society keep them from feeling their own dignity. Many men do not earn enough to provide the basic necessities for wife and family. Many do not receive an honest day's pay. Often the system is such that a man cannot even get a job; or, if he does get one, it is only through political favoritism and not on his own merit as a man and a worker. Today the poor are crying out that they are op-pressed by the system--political, social, economic, and cultural--and thus are robbed of their dignity as human persons. As religious we have a choice, just as all people have a choice in the face of this reality. We can shut our ears and refuse to hear, we can close our eyes and refuse to see the misery and suffering of the poor. Or we can let this reality sink in. "The poor we have always with us"; but today men and women are shouting that this poverty is unnecessary, that it is the result of the evil and greed of men---even of so-called "committed Christians." The poor and the hungry throughout the world are calling for brother-hood, freedom, justice, love and sharing. These are the values of the kingdom which Christ preached. Meditation on the gospels reveals Jesu.s as a man of love, as a man who entered into our situati0n--the human situation, the concrete situation of the people of his time. He, too, lived in a divided society; and in this divided society he drew close to those who were weak and oppressed. He challenged those who were: the organizers 540 On Commitment to the Poor / 541 within this society; he preached the kingdom. He preached the reconcilia-tion of man; he effected justice. The values of his kingdom were brother-hood, freedom, justice, 10ve and sharing; and in order to realize these goals he found himself in conflict---especially in conflict with money, honor and power. If a religious is one who espouses the values of Christ's kingdom he must espouse brotherhood, freedom, justice, love and sharing. Like Christ, he too must draw near to the poor, the weak, the oppressed. And it is impor-tant for him to reflect on why he commits himself to the poor. There are many possible reasons: ideological, political, reasons arising from sadness because of the sufferings of the poor or from guilt because of the injustice they suffer. As religious, our primary motivation is simply Christ and the desire to announce Christ and his kingdom. We believe in the values which Christ preached. Jesus committed himself to the poor and the oppressed. The ~call to religious today, as well as to all Christians, is to follow Christ, doing in our day what he did in his, that is, doing justice and effecting reconciliation. Frankly, some of us do not want to do this because we are too attached to the comfortable life-style in which we now live. Others are afraid to abandon the security that the system provides them. For these people, a conversion is necessary--a conversion which depends on the Lord's grace. But there are also many religious who do see the need for commitment to the poor, though they are confused as to how they might respond. Many are using their talents in important work, and they are so overwhelmed and overworked that they find little time to reflect on or to act on a commitment to the poor. The question before them is how the way in which they lead their lives can reflect a genuine concern for the poor. The present article will attempt to offer these religious some concrete suggestions as to how they might commit themselves to the poor. Becoming ln]ormed ~ If we are really to help the poor, we must know their needs. We must hear the national and international cries of the poor and oppressed. We must know how the);" want to be helped, rather than how we think they want to be helped. First,hand experience, wit_h the poor will clarify our perspective a great deal. But many of ~us are very busy people and our present commitments m~y not allow much time for this. Most cannot do first-hand investigating. That means we have to choose to whom we are going to listen. As we filter the information we receive, we must always keep in mind what truly beriefits the poor, what helps them grow and respect themselves as persons. Personal Contact We are incarnate people; our physical presence has Significance. The poor suffer from a lack of dignity. They cannot choose where they live; 54~2 / Review ]or Religious, Volume 36, 1977/4 perhaps we can. When some of us religious choose to live in their neighbor-hood, they can gain anew respect for themselves. Yet not all can or should live among the poor. Living among the poor depends on a personal call.and on the different, psychological drives of each person. Furthermore, the ghetto life is already overcrowded; we don't need thousands of people suddenly pouring themselves into homes in the ghetto, though it is obvious that each one of us needs some material contact and sharing in the lives of the poor if we are really to enter into their world and commit ourselves to them and to their struggles. Contemplating th~ Lives o[ the Poor One's stance before the poor should be contemplative--that is, one has to listen, and to listen long. We come from our own cultural and economic backgrounds through which we have accepted many blind biases. We.have to listen long to the poor to discover their values and ways of looking at things, thus destroying our own ideological blocks and preconceived notions. As we listen, we shall discover some values that are quite attractive: simplicity, joy, hospitality, and sharing. We shall also discover their in-security. Their insecurity is not an experience that we can ever enter into fully. We cannot live their insecurity, their closed horizons, their closed present; we can never really lose our status. But we can enter into the way that they try to deal with their insecurity. We can enter into the security that they .can have in material work and in brotherhood in the Lord. We can recognize in their values the presence and action of the Lord in their lives and we can respond, to this in faith. As we contemplate their suffering and pain, we may also discover some attitudes which are very different from our own, attitudes with ~egard to sex, for instance, or violence, or deceit, or the struggle between classes. We need to listen long to understand what their attitudes are really saying. For example, a poor person may try to manipulate you or deceive you in the hope of getting some material gain or economic help. We Can judge this out of our own moral system, applying to it the valu~ that we put on honesty an'd truth, on honest communication. Such a judgment may be perfectly sound according to our own biases and cultural values. But it fails to take into account the real, lived situation in which the poor person exists, a situation that we have never really experienced. If we enter into the world of the poor man, we may discover that what~he is really saying is that h,~is situation is so bad, that the system is so destructive of who he is, that he desperately needs this economic help and will go to any length to get it. Contemplation does not mean a blind acceptance of what the poor say or what they ask for; but it does mean that we really try to listen to them, tO see where they are coming from, and to understand what their experience is. We try to judge their actions and,our response from the gospel: what.helps the poor man to be more a person? On Commitment to the Poor / 543 Questioning Our Own Lives From the Experience of the Poor It is not just simply a presence among the poor or a contemplation of their lives and their values to which we are called. We are called also to look at ourselves and the lives we lead in comparison with the lives and experi-ences of the poor. We need to enter into the suffering that they experience because of the system--the political, social and economic system of our times. Thus it is fruitful to experience the frustrations that the poor endure as a matter of course. Try to experience dealing with the power structures without, using "cc~nnections," and get the same run-around that the poor receive. Travel by bus not in order to save money, but simply because this is the experience that the poor have; Such experiences might enable a per-son to question his life more fully in the light of the experience of the poor. We must be rea