ARTICLES --- VOLUME 65, 2006 --- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS

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Coda to the Creed: An Appreciation by Brendan Kneale FSC (65.4 RFR)

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Ripeness Is Everything: Wise Discipleship by Thomas G. Casey SJ (65.4 RFR)

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Sexuality and Celibate Chastity: Friends Not Foes by Sean D. Sammon FMS (65.4 RFR)

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The 2004 Consecrated-Life Congress: A Retrospective by Karen M. Kennelly CSJ, OFM (65.3 RFR)
Aspiratory Prayer, a Welcome Addition toContemplative Prayerby Ernest E. Larkin OCarm (65.3 RFR)
These Strawberries Are Divine! Sisters and a Spirituality of Living on Earth by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan ( 65.3 RFR)

Custodians of Franciscan Households by Michael Blastic, OFM (65.2 RFR)
Imitation of Mary and the Religious Vocation by Julius D. Leloczky OCist (65.2 RFR)
Just Because I Said So by Mary Joseph Schultz SCCC ( 65.2 RFR)

Religious Life in the Third World —a Shangri-La? by Anthony Malaviaratchi CSSR (65.1 RFR)
Truth: Religious Simplicity Revisited by Robert P. Maloney CM (65.1 RFR)
Sharing God the Ignatian Way by David L. Fleming S.J. ( 65.1 RFR)

The 2004 Consecrated-Life Congress: A Retrospective

by Karen M. Kennelly CSJ
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

A myriad of thoughts and images come to mind as I look back at the Congress on Consecrated Life held in Rome in November 2004: hundreds of faces, a babble of languages, colorful multinational garb, and icons of the Woman at the Well and the Good Samaritan focusing us on the congress theme, “Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity.” The mixed composition of the congress made it unique. For the first time, leadership from both women’s and men’s congregations met in an international con-vocation to address a common agenda. Representatives of the national and international conferences of religious, groups of young religious and theologians, and editors of religious journals joined religious superiors as full participants.

A further note of uniqueness lay in the process used to prepare for, carry out, and follow up on the meeting. Preparation spanned a four-year period involving “envisioning” and “theological summary” groups. The first group sought to achieve consensus on the actual reality of religious life today by eliciting facts and testimonials from around the world. The second analyzed the collected information from a theological perspective and summarized it in a working paper sent in advance to all congress participants. We all had an opportunity to express our preferences for small-group discussions on topics drawn from the working paper. Theologians responsible for composing the paper came from Norway, Spain, France, Italy, the United States, the Philippines, and Burkina Faso. Others, from Mexico, Germany, and Peru, collaborated via the Internet.

During the congress a third or “Listeners” group gathered impressions and ideas as they were expressed in papers presented by the major speakers, in written reports from groups, and in comments from the floor. This group’s work culminated in a synthesis presented to the congress on the last day.

My experience as a member of the Listeners group made me aware of the congress planners’ painstaking efforts to be as pluralistic and inclusive as possible, achieving active participation by those present to the extent that numbers, languages, and time permitted. As with the other groups, our membership comprised about equal numbers of women and men, drawn from every continent. From day to day our dialogue grew in intensity as we listened, exchanged impressions and observations, and began identifying common threads among the multiplicity of ideas brought to the floor.

The principal speakers brought unique perspectives to the assessment of contemporary religious life, beginning with a joint paper by two Italians, Bruno Secondin and Diana Papa, a Carmelite and a Poor Clare. They invited the 847 participants, gathered at some ninety round tables and aided by simultaneous translations into six languages, to begin the adventure of immersing themselves in the themes articulated in the working paper.

Dolores Aleixandre, of Spain, a Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a theologian, brought scriptural exegesis to the congress’s theme, religious life as passion for Christ and for humanity. She saw in the icons of the Samaritan Woman and the Good Samaritan “a call to center ourselves on the essential, to a different way of relating to each other, of supporting each other intercongregationally, of making room for the laity” (cited from her paper as published in Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity, Pauline Books and Media, 2005, pp. 91-125)—insights that were to be echoed frequently by congress participants in the days to come.

The Brazilian Jesuit João Batista Libânio brought a sociological and liberation-theology perspective to religious life at the beginning of the third millennium. He spoke of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as having significance today only in relation to three elements: an experience of God, community life, and mission. He challenged us to rethink consecrated life from the bottom up in the light of contemporary reality with all its “ambiguity, perplexity, and paradox” (PCPH, pp. 127-171).

The British Dominican Timothy Radcliffe asked “what signs religious life offers” in the wake of the World Trade Towers’ destruction on 11 September 2001, an event he views as symbolic of the world in which religious life exists today, paradoxically bound ever more tightly together by instant communication and ever more deeply divided by violence (PCPH, pp. 173-189). How, he asked, can religious be a “sign of humanity’s common home in God” in a world suffering a crisis of homelessness? What future awaits religious life in a world seemingly offering only a future of violence? What has religious life to offer as the culture of control and the struggle for hegemony intensify?

A North American voice was heard in the person of an Immaculate Heart of Mary sister, Sandra M. Schneiders. She picked up on a topic Radcliffe had noted as fundamental but had not explored, namely, the culture of consumerism and our witness to poverty. Her reflections involved a discussion of how religious incarnate renunciation of the “world” and go about creating “the alternate world generated by the profession of the vows” (PCPH, pp. 191-218). Characterizing the religious lifestyle as one rooted in the “public, lifelong commitment of the members, as individuals and as communities, to a characteristic approach to material goods, power, and sexuality,” she caught the assembly’s imagination early in her talk with her arresting statement that she would discuss, not “the future of religious life,” but rather “religious life of the future.”

Schneiders’s imaginative and theologically profound exploration of evangelical poverty as the “economy of the reign of God,” and of prophetic obedience as the “politics of the reign of God,” gave us much to think about as Vincentian Franc Rodé, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (ciclsal), brought the series of formal presentations to a close with a recapitulation of major themes in recent papal documents such as Vita consecrata and Novo millennio ineunte (PCPH, pp. 219-236).

Participants next divided into continental groups to look at sociological factors touching upon consecrated life in their own continents, noting both positive and negative effects these factors were thought to have on the capacity of religious to be passionate for Christ and for humanity. Some of the most acute observations expressed in the congress — whether from the floor during open-microphone time or in the hastily written reports — flowed from these gatherings.

As Listeners striving to perceive the essence of group contributions, we constantly had to make allowances for the great diversity within the somewhat artificial continental categories. The Europeans prefaced their report by describing it as a “communion of intentions” and “truly an exercise in European communion,” given the different languages and situations in which Europe finds itself. Asians noted the vastness of their continent and its diversity of languages, cultures, religions, and political and economic systems before commenting on their many shared concerns.

The Africans’ preface included this in bold type: “Note: in Africa it is not possible to generalize. There is great diversity in the situations.” Those from Oceania, the smallest segment of the congress, nevertheless noted the extremes they represented: countries with predominantly Western European lifestyles and countries where the lifestyles are indigenous to Melanesia and the Pacific. Only the North American and Latin American groups dispensed with such cautions and addressed directly their shared task of identifying the impact of sociological factors on religious life as they experienced it.

Themes from the continental groups that seem worthy of special attention, whether for their singularity or their commonality, include gender issues; war, violence, and disease; globalization; aging, institution-alization, and rigid structures; and clear signs of new life among religious.

Religious from every continent saw gender issues as adversely affecting contemporary religious life. Europeans referred to “the open question of gender” and felt that, “because of the sexual abuse and the impact on the mass media, consecrated life is reduced in energy and its ability to witness: a sense of desolation pervades and passion is suppressed.” Asians underscored “male domination in society and church” and “machismo and male domination” as sociological factors adversely affecting them. The African report alluded to the problem in rather oblique fashion by noting that “the idea of relations between men and women continues to be very much determined by the culture.”

North Americans were succinct in their assertion that “the sociology within the church is an obstacle to the passion for Christ and for humanity. The lack of inclusivity . . . results in feelings of displacement in the church, a sense of being marginalized by many, particularly in women’s communities.” Those from the Latin American (and Caribbean) continental group cited as important values “awareness of the processes of exclusion and the greater involvement of women.” They felt they were being called to “generate a feminine religious life with more involvement and responsibility for the building of a new history and a feminine consciousness-raising that challenges the machismo in society and in the church.” The Oceania report minced no words in seeing as a problem the “public face of the church: powerful, antiwomen, and hypocritical.”

It came as no surprise that Europeans were the most forceful in pointing out the “aging of the population, the generation gap in religious life,” and “rigidity in structures, even of consecrated life” as sociological factors with negative effects on religious life. In other words, they asserted that the passion of religious for humanity is blocked by the “way in which our structures are closed and in which we are closed towards the world of the laity.” Less predictable was the echoing of this view by other groups. The Asians, for example, felt that institutionalization in their region had created a gap between them and the people, “especially the poor, who identify us with the rich,” and that “religious structures have stifled the spirit and dynamism of religious life. The young feel restricted and their freedom hindered by structures the old always lean on.”

A similar concern shows up in the African report; it lists as negative aspects “the weight of tradition” and “a way of seeing authority at the level of leaders, a traditional conception which still dominates both society and religious life.” This report speaks urgently of a need for reflection on consecrated life that is distinctly African, a need to find an African way of following Christ. Such thoughts question the worth of structures inherited from a colonial past. These concerns surfaced also in the Asian group, which considered it deplorable that “Asian religious have been uprooted from their rich culture.” The report from Oceania, too, alluded to rigid structures when it asserted that “restorationism” in the church, while attracting people looking for security, has caused consecrated life to lose credibility as a radical commitment to justice.

The Latin Americans saw sociological factors to be causes or occasions of religious being “tamed by the institution [of religious life], tired, with little hope, disenchanted, adapting, living in indifference, [possessing] little consciousness of [consecrated life’s] own identity, of its own ability to search, [experiencing] great difficulty in having deep interpersonal relationships with others and with God.” They offered the intriguing possibility of countering this loss of the prophetic and mystic elements of religious life by working with the “small utopias which act in favor of humanity and in collaboration with other ecclesial, intercongregational, and extraecclesial groups that search for the same reality/values/things.”

The impact had on contemporary religious life by war, other forms of violence, and disease was noted by every group but particularly by the Africans, who noted the prevalence of aids, malaria, and other diseases and the instability resulting from wars and ethnic and religious conflicts in that continent.

“Violence is growing: it questions us,” said the Europeans. Asians expressed serious concern over effects of war and violence, especially in the Middle East, and over the “rise of religious fundamentalism, resulting in communal violence.” North Americans deplored the “normalization of violence” and what they perceived as its causes
.
All groups saw globalization as exerting a great influence on society and on consecrated life today.

The Africans saw it—along with urbanization, unemployment, and migration — as contributing to poverty at various levels. They blamed it for “hindering a deep form of communication” and for contributing to a lack of reflection specifically on African consecrated life. Asians saw “elitist globalization” as having destructive effects on the poor and marginalized, on families, and especially on youth.

Latin Americans described “neoliberal globalization” as destroying “what is particular to/in our countries,” as especially damaging to young people, and as a spur to migration, with its multiple social dislocations. Oceania observed globalization as affecting the entire region — countries indigenous in character and countries predominantly Western European — by widening the gap between rich and poor and “elevating greed to the status of a virtue.”

This summary of the continental group reports, brief though it is, suggests a major accomplishment and a major flaw of the congress. Those present heard the voices of religious from every corner of the world with a wonderful immediacy and force. On the other hand, we simply did not have time for much dialogue of a more personal kind. Each of the continental reports, however, concluded with a very provocative section on signs of hope and of new life. Groups cited a growing sense of communion among congregations and between laypersons and religious, of the importance of personal relationships, of commitment, of community and of belonging, of greater interiority along with a lessened grip of institutionalism.

Europeans made the arresting statement that secularization, despite its negative consequences, is also “causing us to love the world as it is with hope.” Asians remarked that our times are ripe with opportunity: “As Asians in Asia, we have our own experience of God. By this, perhaps, we can contribute to the vitality of religious life. It is time for rebirthing our institutes with our Asian identity.” Africans saw themselves as bringing to religious life the gifts of a deep sense of God and of the family which leads to sharing and attentiveness to one another. One young African, during the all-too-brief open microphone time in a plenary session, good-naturedly scolded his European elders for perceiving death for religious life in the future, whereas their “children” from other parts of the world, hoisted on the shoulders of their European parents, can see farther ahead to future life! North Americans ventured the opinion that aging could be looked upon as “saging,” an opportunity to draw new life from the wisdom of the elderly. Diminishment, they thought, provides “a freedom to reshape religious life.”

Participants barely had the continental group reports in hand before moving on to topical discussions in groups ranging in size from six to over a hundred, depending on people’s interests:

• Justice, peace, and the suffering of humanity.
• Inculturation—the embodiment of consecrated life in a culturally pluralistic world.
• Interreligious dialogue.
• The arts: imaging and expressing a new song.
• Mass media and the communication of values.
• Liberating the prophetic: solidarity in a world of exclusion.
• Liberating the prophetic: celibacy and life-giving relationships.
• Tilling the soil of Sacred Scripture.
• Thirst for God and the search for meaning.
• Ongoing formation for personal conversion and corporate transformation.
• Congregational culture.
• Community as mission.
• Partnership with the laity.
• Leadership and authority.
• The ecclesial dimensions of consecrated life.

Although the time allocated for these discussions was brief, each topic was based on material in the working paper distributed well in advance of the meeting. Participants came prepared and were assigned their first choice among the three topics in which they had indicated interest before coming. As a result, they shared many thoughtful insights with one another; a summary appears in Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity (pp. 237-241). Those of us present for the congress received the somewhat longer reports composed by group reporters on site.

Some Conclusions

For me, the challenge posed by the congress was at the time and remains today one of assimilation and communication. The rich papers presented by speakers, along with participants’ voices as reflected in reports by the continental and topical groups, left our table of Listeners with the nearly impossible task of assimilating content and shaping it into a synthesis at the final session. Our summary, “What the Spirit Says Today to Consecrated Life,” compressed into an hour’s oral delivery the reflection and discernment that had absorbed us during the entire congress.

Rather than repeat that synthesis (see PCPH, pp. 243-255), I want to share what stand out for me a year later as the two most significant messages conveyed by this unique gathering. The first is that the Spirit is at work among us today, regardless of how old or young we are as religious, no matter how old or young our congregations, and no matter whether we come from north, south, east, or west. The second is that a contemplative approach is required of the members of our congregations if we are to discern what the Spirit is saying to us at this critical moment of our history, some forty years since Vatican Council ii invited religious to renew their lives in the light of the gospel, their foundational charisms, and the signs of the times.

The Spirit calls us to revive the enchantment, the passion, we had when we first responded, as congregations and as individuals, to Jesus’ call to love God and our neighbor with all our heart. The Spirit calls us to personal and institutional renewal, to inculturation and to interreligious dialogue. The Spirit calls us to an inclusive attitude toward the laity, and this, in turn, calls for new structures and a new language expressive of the inner reality of our consecrated life. The Spirit calls us to esteem personal relations over structure, and to develop ourselves as religious capable of loving human relationships. We are called by Jesus to be passionate and to exercise compassion toward others, particularly toward all who suffer the indignities of poverty, discrimination, and alienation of any kind.

The congress experience brought home to me anew that we are living through a period of vast and deep change in consecrated life — a sort of gestation period heavy with the promise of new birth. The seeds have been planted in good ground and are being warmed and watered by the life-bearing winds of the Spirit. We have only to tend the garden and pay attention with a discerning eye to the sprouts of new life lest we uproot them as noxious weeds before they have a chance to flower and bear fruit.

Our congregations are being called to collaborate with the Spirit in bringing to birth the consecrated life of the future. It was apparent at the congress—its participants a cross section of more than six hundred congregations of women and men from all over the world—that the vision, the hopes, and the sense of urgency are widely shared. The modes of discernment and dialogue will necessarily differ from country to country, depending on culture and opportunity, but the desire for intra - and intercongregational reflection and collaboration is present among religious in every continent.

As a practical matter, I would urge congregations to take advantage of their forthcoming chapters to follow up on major themes explored at the congress. Chapters are periodically convened by every congregation; agendas and processes can readily be shaped to facilitate the kind of individual and corporate reflection we need and desire. Although successful use of this option is not without difficulties, it would seem to offer the best chance for congregations to address the congress message in a timely way, and to seek the implications of that message for themselves.

Clearly there are a few obstacles to surmount if we are to facilitate contemplative chapters that make good use of the theological and sociological perspectives offered at the congress. International congregations, whose members often constitute a microcosm of the multicultural 2004 gathering in Rome, in many cases still experience subtle Western attitudes that prevent the kind of dialogue modeled by the congress. Smaller local congregations may need to push beyond parochial concerns to help members achieve a broader vision and seek greater goals. But all must beware of a tendency toward activism, the preoccupation with doing rather than being that marks our contemporary world.

Whether we come from large or small congregations, from apostolic, monastic, or contemplative “families” of religious; whether we can trace our history back for centuries or only a few years; and whether we are Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, or Oceanians, we are all called by the Spirit to use the congress and our own experience as a springboard to dive into the deep pool of Holy Mystery in which we religious live and move and have our being. It is for us at this crucial point in our history to delve deeper, to listen, to reflect, to dialogue, and to discern the spiritual realities of the life and mission we share as religious, to ask ourselves how we need to be if we are to do the works of persons passionate for Christ and passionate for humanity.

Suggested Reading

Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity, Pauline Books and Media, 2005.

Reflection/Discussion Questions

1. As I/we read the responses from the different continental groups regarding the future of religious life, which response gave me/us new insight and which response would I/we want to discuss further?
2. How can we take advantage of the “aging” of religious life members in our country to draw upon their wisdom (“saging”) for our apostolic life and direction?
3. What practical steps do I/we need to take in order to adopt a more contemplative approach to listen to and follow the movements of the Spirit within our religious life context?

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by Ernest E. Larkin OCarm
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

Aspirations (aspiratory prayer) were a treasure in European Christianity in the late Middle Ages and one of the great legacies of the Touraine Reform in 17th-century France. This reform took place in “les Grands Carmes,” the popular name in France for the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance (OCarm). The style of prayer that goes by the name of aspirative or aspiratory prayer, or simply aspiration, is almost unknown in contemporary spirituality. The present article is a move to fill this lacuna and to suggest how the prayer of aspirations can contribute to the contemplative renewal of our times. I will first give an overview of the prayer in tradition and highlight its three outstanding proponents: the 13th-century Carthusian Hugh of Balma, the Franciscan Henry Herp (+1477), and the Carmelite John of St. Samson (1571-1636). Finally I shall make some suggestions on how to revive the practice.

What Is Aspiratory Prayer?

Aspiratory prayer is a warm, human approach to God that is inexorably affective. It proceeds by way of fervent desires of the heart. It was considered a shortcut, a direct route, to intimacy and oneness with God. Its structure is simple: frequent and intense desires breathed out to God. It has only one goal, union with God, so it ceases to have a role when mystical union is achieved.
Aspirations are not the same as ejaculations, though they are like each other. Ejaculatory prayer describes any and all brief prayers sent like darts to heaven for help, thanksgiving, adoration, or any other good motive. “My Jesus, mercy” is an ejaculation. Aspira-tions are only and always passionate desires or fervent acts of love of God. They are expressed in words or sighs or silence. “My God, I love you” is an aspiration. To aspire means to breathe out, with the connotation of breathing hard after something. In aspiratory prayer one breathes out heartfelt desires for God. It is yearning for God, like gasping for God.

Aspiratory prayer is simple and focused, though in the beginning it may cover a wide sweep of emotions and feelings. Practice simplifies and unifies the faculties to give them a single thrust, much as the prayer of simplicity consolidates the multiple affections of affective prayer into a single attitude of loving presence. Aspiratory prayer sets the heart on one goal, divine union, and is a positive step in that direction. Not everybody can use it. It is not for beginners, but for those who have come to know God and themselves through Bible reading, reflection, and loving conversations with God. When a person has put her house in order and has come to love God in truth, she is ready for this prayer. For those who love God, it will become as natural as breathing.

Catholic teachers in the past were sticklers in assigning different prayer forms to different stages of growth. The prayer of beginners was discursive meditation and affective prayer, that is, first much thinking and then many affections. The next stage was contemplative, and it featured forms like simply looking at the tabernacle as in the Curé d’Ars’ “I look at him and he looks at me,” or today’s resting in God in centering prayer, or saying the mantra as in Christian Meditation. Today we probably pay less attention to the degrees of prayer, though we still honor them. Centering prayer and Christian Meditation have democratized contemplative prayer. Certainly some knowledge and love of the Lord is presupposed for contemplative prayer, but a little knowledge and love go a long way. Those who are comfortable with centering prayer and Christian Meditation will be at home with aspirations.

Who, then, are called to this prayer? Those who are fervent and serious about their relationship with God and have a great desire for intimacy with God. They are looking for the “more.” The classical teaching placed the prayer in the illuminative way as part of the contemplative life. Two categories are involved here, and both are second stages: the illuminative comes between the purgative and the unitive way, and the contemplative life between the active and the mystical life. The three divisions correspond to beginners, the proficient, and the perfect. Active life has to do with external behavior, contemplative with inner prayer, and the mystical life with high sanctity. The purgative way is concerned with conversion and purification, the illuminative way with enlightenment, and the unitive with union with God.

The three ways and their content are criticized today for being too dependent on Neoplatonic philosophy, the system that canonized the immaterial and denigrated the bodily. (1) Aspirative prayer rises above this controversy and in fact is a corrective against exaggerated spiritualism and minimizing the physical and bodily in the spiritual life. Aspirations welcome and embrace the emotional and the sensible; these human qualities lead to the highest realms of the spirit. They move the experience of God away from the intellectual and into the realm of affection and love. (2)

Aspiratory prayer comes out of the same tradition as centering prayer and Christian Meditation. The latter two are contemporary constructions from that contemplative tradition, a development that aspiratory prayer has yet to find. But all three systems appeal to the same sources, the same authors, and even the same texts for their grounding and justification. (3) This fact and their constant location in the middle stage of spiritual development argue to their commonality.

Centering prayer and Christian Meditation seek silent presence and quiet resting in God. At the same time they are active prayer, rightly called meditation of a nondiscursive or contemplative type. They are not classical contemplation in the sense of infused prayer, but are products of human effort and ordinary grace. Aspiratory prayer is obviously active in the same sense. It uses the language of intense, passionate love and expresses the yearning of the heart and delights to rest in the Lord.

Aspiratory prayer is more than loving conversation with God. It expresses a strong act of the will that desires to experience God. So it is more than a tête-à-tête, even in the loving language of affective colloquy. The difference is intensity. Affective prayer engages the feelings but in a diffuse way, whereas a strong will and urgent longings for intimacy dominate aspiratory prayer.
Aspirations fit nicely into the perspectives and practice of “love mysticism,” which is a form of relating to God in spousal love. The language of spousal love is very human, amorous, and passionate. Its biblical source is the Song of Songs or St. John’s Gospel, and it is a frequent feature in medieval women mystics and also in writers like St. Bernard or St. John of the Cross. Janet K. Ruffing has written a guide for the spiritual direction of those called to this way. She gives many examples of its language, one of which is the following conversation in Mechthild of Magdeburg, who says to God: “God, you are my lover, / my longing, / my flowing stream, / my sun, / and I am your reflection.” And God replies: “It is my nature that makes me love you often, / for I am love itself. / It is my longing that makes me love you intensely, / for I yearn to be loved from the heart. / It is my eternity that makes me love you long, / for I have no end.” (4)

Aspirative prayer is not limited to spousal love. It is at home with a nonspousal love of God, which Janet Ruffing calls simply apophatic. The mysticism of the more matter-of-fact Cloud of Unknowing features wholehearted love, often without obvious passion. In this latter case the love is sublimated into disinterested love in a style of relationship that is reserved and controlled. Mystics in this pattern will practice their own brand of aspirations.

Aspiratory prayer is thus a technical term, but it is not “one size fits all.” Its normal form is sensible-spiritual love. For Henry Herp only this love qualifies as aspiration. For him its follow-up, which is pure spiritual love, is not aspiration, but unitive love. John of St. Samson, however, treats pure spiritual love as a form of aspiration, and for him this higher aspiration leads one into the furnace of God’s love in transforming union. For both authors the will is the driving force for aspirations and for unitive love. In sensible-spiritual love the sensibility is the carrier, but the momentum comes from the will, which makes the love truly spiritual.

Do not think that the practitioner lives on a perpetual high. The expression of loving desires for God continues in down days and dryness as much as in times of sweetness and sensible consolation. The feeling element is still there. It must be genuine, not faked or pretended or forced. Thérèse of Lisieux is a perfect example of the expression of passionate desires of love for God in the darkest moments of life. (5)

There are degrees of the practice corresponding to the person’s habitual love of God and the grace of the moment. John of St. Samson sees it as leading directly into a mystical expression, in which the Holy Spirit breathes out enflamed desires for God. His conditions for practicing this prayer are demanding. Persons who take up the practice must be mortified, humble, and self-effacing as well as robust in health. In his view aspirations go beyond the enthusiasm of a newly baptized Pentecostal or charismatic and belong to persons advanced in the love of God and on fire for the summit.

The History and Theology of Aspiratory Prayer

Aspiratory prayer flourished in the late Middle Ages in northern Europe, especially the Rhineland and France, from the 13th to the 17th century. At the time of the Touraine Reform, the practice was common in popular religious culture. Aspirative prayer appealed to the architects of Touraine because they saw the practice as dovetailing with their view of the goal of the Carmelite order, which was to live continuously in the loving presence of God. (6)

Intimations of aspiratory prayer are found in the New Testament, in St. Augustine and John Cassian, who were contemporaries, in St. Benedict and Guigo II, and in other early authors. The first to give aspirative prayer a central place in the spiritual life was Hugh of Balma, whose Theologia Mystica exerted wide influence, partly because it was thought to be the work of St. Bonaventure. Hugh of Balina taught the way of the heart, and aspiratory prayer was its chief expression. First one must know one’s weak self and the goodness of God, since anyone filled with self is unable to yearn for God. This knowledge prepares one to rise up to God in “anagogic contemplation.”

Anagogic contemplation means moving from creature to Creator, from the text of Scripture to the living God, enflamed with desire and love. Such is aspiratory prayer. The love is both natural-spiritual and purely spiritual, and God is the direct object. The love increases with the simplification and unification of the faculties until ultimately there is mystical union with the Trinity in the high point of the soul called the apex mentis. Henry Herp and John of St. Samson will pick up on these perspectives and expand them with the help of Jan van Ruusbroec’s theology (1293-1381).

Hugh had many imitators, especially among the Carthusians, who promoted and developed this teaching so effectively that Everard Mercurian, an early general of the Jesuits, warned the Society about “the Carthusian method of prayer” for fear that its popularity would marginalize Ignatian prayer in Spain. (7) The 14th-century anonymous English text The Cloud of Unknowing is likely a Carthusian document, both because it can easily be interpreted as a full exposition of aspiratory prayer and because its anonymous author may well be a Carthusian. (8) A number of familiar quotations from the book are obviously formulas of aspiratory prayer.

Henry Herp OFM (+1447)

Henry Herp wrote the first synthesis of the whole spiritual journey around the topic of aspirative prayer. His map is the structure of the soul as delineated by the great Flemish mystical writer Jan van Ruusbroec. The soul is three concentric circles, each of them representing a different level of human activity. Herp offers a detailed plan for moving through the outer two levels and arriving at the inner circle of highest union with the Holy Trinity. He lays down instructions for each of the phases of the journey, but his chief contribution is to show how aspirative prayer moves one through the middle circle.

Ruusbroec calls the three circles “spheres” or “unities,” whereas Herp names them mansions or dwelling places like Teresa of Avila. The first is the region of the senses, the second that of the spirit, and the third the “fond” or ground, the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity.

One must traverse each level to get to the center, and the way is introversion, a concept that goes back to St. Augustine. Herp calls it “ascension.” Persons “ascend,” that is, they are lifted up by a sweeping action that carries them through the given circle and toward the center; the searcher for God leaves behind the lesser level or part of it in favor of the higher one. This process of introversion means making the powers on each level converge toward the center. The activity of each level is collapsed into the next step. In this imagery the outer circle of exterior behavior is introverted into the middle circle, and in the middle the lower faculties of the irascible and concupiscible appetites, and of reason and free will, are introverted into the spiritual faculties of intellect, memory, and will. These latter will finish the task and bring the soul into mystical union in the center.

The introversion or ascension starts with the outer or exterior circle, which represents the active life. The means set down by Herp for this first introversion are “truth and compassion.” Truth means understanding the goodness of God and the bankruptcy of the human, and compassion is appreciating God’s love and attractiveness.

The middle level is the field for aspiratory prayer and unitive love. Aspirations address the “interior inferior powers,” especially the concupiscible appetite, which in Herp’s view has a spiritual quality about it. Unitive love is exercised by the spiritual faculties. Understanding guides the process: hence the importance of regular meditation and of the use of prepared ejaculations that recall the supreme attraction of God and serve to inflame the soul with love. The awakened will moves the sensory faculties to yearn for God, progressively spiritualizing the person for the work of unitive love. For Herp, unitive love takes over the task begun in the lower interior faculties. The acts of pure, unitive love finish the task of the introversion of the spirit level and open the way to the center. In the center the love is fruitive love. The contemplative way is left behind, and the soul now lives the “super-essential life” of oneness with the Trinity, a union that is not ontological but psychological.

Herp offers some good pastoral advice. The stages are to be addressed in order and none can be skipped. Basic conversion is presupposed for undertaking aspiratory prayer, and that means an adult knowledge of God and one’s self and the acquisition of the moral virtues. Aspiratory prayer begins with rote expressions of love and fervor. According to Herp, these feelings crescendo into what he calls an explosion of love, which has its own danger of entrapping the person in the delightful, sensible sweetness. The love is gradually purified and becomes the unitive love that will lead the soul into the center. Unitive love, too, undergoes its own purifications, and the follow-up experiences may be as dark and dry as the initial entry was exalted. The challenge at this point, as at every point in the spiritual life, is marginalizing the self, that is, letting go of everything that is not God. The holy soul practicing spiritual love will continue to work at the total gift of self to God, and its tasks are listed by Herp as self-offering, searching for God’s will, letting God’s love destroy all defects, and being united with God.

John of St. Samson (1571-1636)

John of St. Samson is an immensely important figure in the Carmel of the Ancient Observance. He was a mystic of profound experience, and, in spite of the blindness that afflicted him from the age of three, he was well educated and well read, keeping in touch with currents of spirituality in the very rich 17th century. He has been called the French John of the Cross and is highly esteemed by religious historians like Henri Bremond and Louis Cognet.

John of St. Samson lived a century and a half after Herp, but Herp’s work was well known to him in the numerous Latin and French translations and in the plethora of spiritual writings that popularized aspiratory prayer. John of St. Samson became expert in the teaching of this way, building on Herp but adding his own points of view. There had been a lot of writing, but little development since Herp. After a careful comparison of the two authors, Canisius Janssen concludes that John’s doctrine is Herp in a new packaging. “Certain things have been left out,” he writes, “others developed; in short the whole has acquire
a new face.” (9)

John belongs to the same Dutch school of mysticism as Herp, both of them appropriating the worldview of Ruusbroec. We come from God as created images in the Uncreated Word, and our life goal is to return to our place in the Word in full consciousness of our unity in God. The goal is put rather abstractly as “the state of consummation of the subject in the Object” in a “union without difference or distinction.” Such is the transforming union, in which the soul is caught up in the fire of the divine life. The way to the goal is introversion according to the same divisions as in Henry Herp, but with the adaptations in nomenclature.

John is particularly eloquent is explaining how spiritual love guides the whole process of introversion once aspirations become the way. Spiritual love is at the heart of sensible-spiritual aspirations, and it constitutes the spiritual aspirations that lead one into the center itself. Aspirations have the genius of putting our full humanity to work by engaging our feelings and emotions as well as our spirit. Sensible love is the starter, and it houses the spiritual love in sensible-spiritual aspirations. When the aspirations become “more vigorous, more on fire, and more detached from sense,” they are pure spiritual love. This spiritual love, with or without a sensible component, is the engine that drives the introversion process into the furnace that is God.

Aspiration thus has a mystical quality in John, as is clear from the following quotation:

Aspiration is not only an affectionate colloquy. . . ; that is what aspiration is born of and comes forth from. Aspiration, then, is an outpouring of the whole heart and spirit on fire with love. By it the soul quickly transcends itself and all of creation, becoming intimately united with God in the intensity of its loving expression. Expressing itself quintessentially in this way, the soul transcends all tender, sensible, cerebral, and comprehensible love, reaching by the vehemence of God’s spirit and its own effort, not just any divine union, but a sudden transformation of its spirit into God. In the abounding and ineffable sweetness of God himself lovingly embracing one’s spirit, it transcends, I say, all familiar and intelligible love. This is the essence of aspiration, in itself, in its cause, and in its effect. (10)

Note

1. Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and History (New York: Orbis Books, 1995), pp.186-189.
2. Aspiratory prayer is more at home with the language of love than with the Greek categories of contemplation. The literature of the Touraine Reform seems to prefer the evangelical language. One of my esteemed Carmelite teachers and mentors over a lifetime, whose life and studies were dominated by Touraine, frequently showed annoyance at the ambiguities of the vocabulary of contemplation. He preferred to speak of “love” and “loving” as the true measure of prayer rather than different forms of “contemplation” or “contemplative.” Instead of describing Carmelite life as “contemplative,” he preferred the simple word “prayerful.” I interpreted his attitude as a reflection of the viewpoint of Touraine.
3. Canisius Janssen OCarm surveys the sources of aspiratory prayer in the first of two excellent articles on the history and theology of aspiratory prayer, “Oraison aspirative chez Herp et chez ses prédécesseurs,” Carmelus 3 (1956): 19-48. It lists the sources of this prayer in earlier times before its first major exponent, Henry Herp. These sources turn out to be the same texts cited in studies on the roots of centering prayer and Christian Meditation. An example of the latter is Robert W. Ginn’s defense against critics, “Centering Prayer: Reviving the Ancient Christian Tradition in Modern Times,” a manuscript dated 5/26/05 and circulated by Contemplative Outreach. Janssen’s second article is titled “L’oraison aspirative chez Jean de Saint Samson,” Carmelus 3 (1956): 185-216. I wish to express my gratitude for these two studies and my indebtedness to them in the formation of the present paper.
4. Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings (New York: Paulist, 2000), pp. 9-10. Christian mystics from Origen on applied the imagery of the Song of Songs to their relationship with God. St. Thérèse of Lisieux belongs to this group, and a dominant feature of her prayer was aspiration. See Romero de Lima Gouvea OCarm, “Vivre d’amour: la prière aspirative chez Thérèse de l’Enfant Jesus (l873-1897),” Carmelus 47 (2000): 19-40.
5. See Ernest E. Larkin OCarm, “The Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux,” Review for Religious 59 (September-October 2000): 507-517, at 514-515.
6. The Touraine Reform is not as well known as its counterpart, the Discalced Reform begun by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross in 16th-century Spain. Touraine began in Brittany in northwest France in the next century. Like the Discalced Reform, it was a radical return to the primitive spirit of the order. Unlike the Discalced Reform, Touraine did not become juridically separated from the old order, but remained in the trunk and spread to every province as the “strictior observantia.” See Kilian J. Healy OCarm, Methods of Prayer in the Directory of the Carmelite Reform of Touraine (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1956), pp. 15-21.
7. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 27.
8. This is the conclusion of James Walsh SJ in his introduction to the Classics of Western Spirituality edition of The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Paulist, 1981).
9. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 210.
10. Jean de St. Samson, L’éguillon, les flammes, les flèches, et le miroir de l’amour de Dieu, in Oeuvres complètes I, edition critique par Hein Blommestijn (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1992), p. 98. Aspiration donc n’est pas seulement un colloque affectueux. . . ; c’est d’icelui que nait et procede l’aspiration. Aspiration donc est un poussement amoureux, enflammé de tout le coeur et l’esprit; par lequel l’ame surpasse prontement elle mesme et toute chose creée, s’unissant étroitement à Dieu en la vivacité de son expression amoureuse; laquelle ainsi Essentiellement exprimée, surpasse tout amour sensible, raisonnable, intellectuel et conprehensible; arrivant par l’impetuosité de l’esprit de Dieu et de son effort, à l’union de Dieu, non tellement quellement, mais par une soudaine transformation de l’esprit en Dieu. L’esprit, dis-ie, surpasse en lui même tout l’amour connessable et intelligible en l’abondante et ineffable suavité de Dieu mesme, auquel il est amoureusement englouti. Voilà que c’est que l’aspiration Essentielle en elle même, sa cause et son effet. (The passage is cited by Janssen in the article on John of St. Samson, p. 195. The translation has been made from the text in the critical edition cited above.)
11. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 204.
12. The translation of the Directorium Carmelitanum was made from the Latin by Leo J. Walter ocarm (Chicago: Carmelite Press, 1951). See also Kilian J. Healy, Walking with God (New York: Declan X. McMullen, 1948), reprinted as Awakening Your Soul to the Presence of God (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1999); see also his chapter in Methods of Prayer, pp. 60-75.

Reflection Questions

1. What have I learned about aspiratory prayer as I have read Larkin's article?
2. How might I begin to make aspiratory prayer a daily part of my prayer life?

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These Strawberries Are Divine! Sisters and a Spirituality of Living on Earth

by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

I live in rural western Minnesota, three hours west of the Twin Cities. Three hours is a good long drive. Once you get about forty minutes out, you are past the suburbs, and Highway 7 is a pretty empty stretch of road. Small towns pop up here and there, but mostly it is a sea of corn, soybeans, and sugar beets for miles on end. Occasionally, strangely, you will see a long, low building on the horizon-windowless, enormous, oddly isolated. Signs nearby will say, “Keep Out! Disease Control Area.” I wondered for the longest time what on earth these buildings were, and then one hot summer day I found out. Sections of the walls of these buildings are louvered, and on this day they were raised up and you could see in, and what you could see was this: turkeys, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, a veritable sea of turkey heads. This is, of course, modern industrial agriculture: confinement production. I know it would be an anthropomorphism to suggest that the turkeys longed for the freedom of the great outdoors, but I do know that they were clustered by the openings — for the fresh air, I suspect, and the light.

I will not torment you with the details of a turkey’s life on a factory farm, but I will say that it is amazing how far technology, medication, and standardization can push living beings, and how easy it then becomes to see them as “products” or “units of output” instead of animals. This is, I think, a great loss. Animals are not people; I do not believe they have human rights or turkey rights. I know, though, that they are animals, not machines or inert materials. They breathe and smell and taste and see; they are connected to the earth. To deprive them of that is a symptom of our own refusal to understand ourselves as part of creation.

Factory farming is “normal” in the United States. Small farms with a few cows, some pigs, a few hundred acres of this and that, a big garden, and a henhouse do not really exist anymore — though the change has come about so quickly that many living people in America grew up on farms like that. In a little over a generation, farming has been completely transformed — and rural life with it. “Get big or get out” became the rule, and many farmers left rural America. My town, Montevideo, is typical. People remember when there were three women’s dress stores on Main Street, but now the only place to buy clothes in town is Wal-Mart. The Hollywood theater is grand, glorious, and has been shuttered for years. The town is shrinking, and struggling. The Catholic school closed years ago, and our parish shares a priest with two other towns. We are not bustling. We are not growing. And we are, for the most part, invisible, even or perhaps especially to most mainstream environmentalists and conservationists.

It is easy to ignore farming communities. From an enviromnentalist’s standpoint, it is easy to drop us down to the bottom of the list. Cities have far more people, more pollution, more egregious examples of destruction. Wilderness — unpopulated, undefended — clearly needs friends and defenders. But farms? In fact, we ignore the countryside at our peril. Farming affects all of us — or at least all of us who eat and drink. The way we raise our food has polluted our rivers, devastated our soil, and saddled us with food that we must always treat as if it has been contaminated or is diseased, because too often it has been, and is. Mothers are warned not to let their children taste raw cookie dough — you never know about the eggs. Instructions about how to kill the E. coli that your ground beef may well contain are printed on every package. Raw chicken is treated almost as if it is radioactive. Do you have a separate cutting board? Don’t cut your vegetables with the same knife you used on the chicken! The growing popularity of and interest in organic food is directly tied to these warnings, and these dangers.

It is true that I live in the land of confinement agriculture, but I am also lucky enough to be in an area populated by small organic farms. I get my beef and butter from Audrey at Moonstone Farm, my bacon and pork chops from Cindy at Pastures A Plenty, my vegetables from a lovely place called the Easy Bean. And Sister Annette Fernholz ssnd brings me eggs every other Friday. Sister Annette has a hundred chickens running free at EarthRise Farm, a wonderful organic farm about a half hour west of me. Annette’s chickens have names. When you drive up to the farm, they scatter and squawk and glare at the car. There are several different breeds; they are many marvelous colors; some lay green eggs, some brown. They wander the gardens; they flap awkwardly up to the top of hay bales; they run from me when I try to see what exactly they are up to. No one has removed their upper beaks or their toenails. They are not fed antibiotics to keep them healthy, nor are they confined to a small area covered in their own waste. They are not egg-producing machines; they are not widgets. They are Annette’s chickens. Annette’s sister, Kay — also an SSND — runs the vegetable garden, which provides everything from broccoli and spinach to strawberries and potatoes for about forty families who buy a summer subscription to the farm’s produce. What on earth, you may ask, are two School Sisters of Notre Dame doing running a farm? Shouldn’t school sisters be teaching? In fact, Kay and Annette are doing what Catholic sisters have always done: getting out in front of the rest of us and showing us where we need to be going.

We should not be surprised, of course, to find Catholic sisters out on the leading edge of a justice issue — and our relationship to creation (to the land, water, and other animals) is a central justice issue for our time. Religious life, Sister Joan Chittister reminds us, was always meant to be “a searing presence, a paradigm of search, a mark of human soul, and a catalyst to conscience in the society in which it emerged.” (1) From the challenging form of equality in community and the generous hospitality modeled by the Benedictines to the poverty embraced by the Franciscans and the practical service given to the poor and the sick by later apostolic congregations, religious orders have cultivated virtues much needed in the ill and ill-functioning societies around them. Today is no different. And while religious hospitality, community, and poverty continue to challenge our individualistic and materialistic society, and religious service to the poor continues to witness to the human dignity our consumer society dismisses and denies, the most startling, searing, prophetic activity in our world today is that which brings love of God and love of God’s creation together in a new model of living humanly on earth. This is happening on farms and retreat centers and at motherhouses of Catholic religious women throughout the country (and, indeed, the world). It is by no means limited to Catholics or women or vowed religious, but the contribution of Catholic sisters to eco-justice and eco-spirituality cannot be ignored. They have not only begun a great work that more and more of us need to participate in; they have also shown that it is part of the human quest for God, that it addresses the questions our age has about who God is and can be in our lives.

EarthRise Farm, then, is not the startling anomaly it might at first appear to be. In fact, it is one of dozens of earth centers and ecology centers run by Catholic women religious. In Ohio the Sisters of St. Dominic of Akron farm at the Crown Point Ecology Center, whose mission is to “reconnect humans to the sacredness of Earth and challenge society to live simply, mindful of the disenfranchised, including the natural world.” The four principles of community, spirituality, sustainability, and justice guide their work. In Pennsylvania the Sisters of the Humility of Mary support EverGreen, a ministry that “fosters a spirituality of humility, simplicity, nonviolence, and justice and promotes a sustainable future for the whole Earth community.” The ministry of EverGreen incorporates gardening, education, prayer, ritual, and networking for global environmental action. It is similar to Prairiewoods, a ministry of the Franciscan sisters in Hiawatha, Iowa. “Prairiewoods is a sacred place in which people of all faiths can join together to explore relationships with God, the Earth, themselves, and others. Located on seventy acres of natural beauty, the center combines spirituality with care for the Earth.” Sisters are raising alpacas, sheep, cattle, and beefalo (3/8 bison); they are working in partnership with local communities and state and national governments in restoring wetlands and prairie lands and tending woodlands; they are growing organic food for subscribers, soup kitchens, and food banks; they are experimenting with alternative waste management, energy generation, and building construction; and they are opening their farms, prairies, and woods for the education and spiritual development of those who would visit. Many seek out ways to connect with the children of their community. One year EarthRise set aside space for a children’s pizza garden, in which the children grew their own basil, tomatoes, and peppers. EarthRise also works with local social services so that adolescents performing “community service” for various infractions can serve on the farm.

The educational aspect of these earth centers and eco-spirituality centers is central to their mission. The sisters are not creating tiny Edens and walling the rest of us out, but rather inviting the rest of us in to learn, to share, and, most important, to seek God in a new and unexpected way. For we live in a secular and very urban culture, one that cuts us off from the land and the sources of our food, and one that compartmentalizes religion into “something done on Sunday mornings.” The idea of perhaps finding God while digging in the dirt on a hot summer afternoon is not a familiar one. And, though we still give lip service to the idea of the goodness of creation, we also keep striving to mechanize and domesticate and control it — like the turkeys in the windowless buildings near me, bred to fulfill the American desire for white meat to the point that the animals are so deformed as to be unable to mate naturally; they exist only through artificial insemination. In a world where meat comes from the grocery store, hygienically wrapped in plastic, and where vegetables, too, come in plastic bags — prewashed, prechopped, uniform in size and color — it is a surprising and sometimes disconcerting thing to visit a farm. Sisters who invite children to their farms know this. Their curriculums take advantage of the surprise and wonder it is so easy to elicit, and then they raise that wonder to new levels. The Sisters of St. Francis at Michaela Farm in Indiana offer classes titled Incredible Insects, Farmyard Adventures, and, perhaps most important,
Developing a Sense of Wonder.

It is this wonder that most of these farms and earth centers are most eager to share. It is a sense of wonder and awe directed at God, at the beauty and mystery of God — directed, that is, where our human wonder and worship must be directed. But it is a wonder and an awe that springs from contemplation of the Earth and its gifts. The sisters at Crown Point speak of the sacredness of creation, and at Genesis Farm their ecological and agricultural work “is rooted in a belief that the universe, Earth, and all reality are permeated by the presence and power of that ultimate Holy Mystery that has been so deeply and richly expressed in the world’s spiritual traditions.” To help alter the regrettable fact that Christians have often thought of God “up there” and us stuck “down here,” these remarkable women are emphasizing Christianity’s incarnational truth. “Creation is a revelation of God, a home for God, a temple of God,” Meister Eckhardt tells us. “All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses and reveals God, but the existence of a stone does the same.” (2) Sharon Therese Zayac, a Dominican sister at Jubilee Farm, cites Eckhardt and others as she explores the Dominican roots of Earth spirituality in the first volume of a series titled Dominican Women on Earth, published by Sor Juana Press. (Sor Juana is a project of Santuario Sisterfarm, yet another Earth center, this one in Texas.) The recognition that Earth spirituality is indeed part of the Catholic heritage is an important one. Even more important is the recognition that that tradition, in combination with the specific problems and gifts of our day, is opening up for us in new ways.

One of the marks of the newness of this Earth spirituality is its embrace of modern science. After the various difficulties that science and Christian theology have had with each other for several centuries, this turn to modern astronomy, biology, and ecology as necessary sources for the spiritual life may seem shocking. Yet the conviction that science can feed our sense of wonder, and our understanding of our place in creation, is apparent in the educational mission of all of these Earth centers. Many offer classes or retreats based on The New Universe Story, which is a shorthand way of talking about the creation story as scientists and astronomers know it. There is a strong conviction that knowing and living consciously within a new creation story can and should change people’s lives; this is what differentiates what the sisters are doing from simple environmental activism. This is why I see them as doing far more than raising chickens and vegetables; they also present us with a lived, practical spirituality for living on Earth. The key here is that they are rooting their actions in a new creation story. Creation stories are only nominally about creation-in-the-past; they are far more about what is today: what society is supposed to be like, what our relationship with God should be, what the human place in the created order is. So to adopt a new creation story is not just to adopt a new understanding of the past; it is also to embrace a new understanding of the present, of God, of what it is to be human. It is a huge move.

Let us explore it in more detail. The idea that the Genesis account of creation is accurate science has been under assault for generations now, even though many still think it is, and that it intends to be. For those who see it as myth or metaphor, or as a quaint but misguided ancient attempt to fathom the depths of reality, science offers an alternative account of the origins of the universe and the place of human beings in it. Scientific knowledge, especially about the stars and the universe beyond our Earth, has been growing at a wild and head-spinning pace in the past few decades — and yet there is still much we do not know. What is generally agreed upon, however, is this: The universe is a little less than fourteen billion years old. To give us a sense of that time scale, and our place in it, John Haught of Georgetown set it out in terms that book lovers like ourselves can grasp. Imagine that the history of the universe is written in a series of books. It would take 30 volumes of 450 pages apiece, with each page accounting for a million years, to cover the full scope from the beginning until today. Now, on that scale, the Earth does not come into being until volume 21, two-thirds of the way through the story. Life begins in volume 22. The dinosaurs show up in volume 30, the last volume, about halfway through, and are extinct by page 385. Modern humans show up on the bottom fifth of the last page of the last volume. (3) In other words, our entire history as human beings rates a short paragraph at the tail end of the concluding volume of a set of encyclopedias. If nothing else, that thought is rather disconcerting — so why do the sisters not see it as threatening, overwhelming, and disorienting? Why instead do they see it as powerful, exciting, and one of the most important revelations of the truth of God that we have ever confronted?

I chose the word revelation deliberately. The age of the universe and the long story of its unfolding reveals God to us in ways we never imagined, and never could have imagined before now. A Biblical history of the created universe, once thought of as encompassing about 6000 years, is graspable by the human mind; it is big, but it is not staggering. My little rural town has almost 6000 people in it, and it is a small town, barely a neighborhood by the standards of the big cities of the world. Fourteen billion years, on the other hand, is staggering. And then the slow — achingly slow, unimaginably slow — movement towards the universe as we know it: the emergence of hydrogen and helium, the gradual formation of stars, their life and death, and in their deaths, by supernova, the creation of complex, heavier elements . . . eventually the formation of our own star, the sun, and the aggregation of enough rocky debris nearby to form our own planet. Recently scientists announced that the formation of planets is much like the formation of dust bunnies under your bed. Scott Kenyon, a planet-formation theorist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachussetts, notes that planet formation begins with dust particles about the size of sand grains. “These collide and merge into rocks a mile or so across,” he says. “The dust bunnies under your bed grow in a similar way — and after a million years or so, a dust bunny could get pretty big.” (4)

Once the “dust bunny” we now know as the Earth reached its present size, about four billion years ago, there was still quite a long and strange journey before Earth became hospitable to life — and then many different forms of life began, changed, died out, and began anew before human beings finally made their debut on the cosmic stage. This incredibly long story, full of chaos, full of accidents, undirected and violent, showing a shocking lack of design, order, and control — a story in which life is both fantastically powerful and terribly fragile — this is the story of evolution, the story of creation, the story of (in Sallie McFague’s thought-provoking phrase) God’s body.

As John Haught argues in God after Darwin, the evolutionary story of the universe is, in the end, the story of the humble, vulnerable, self-emptying God we first met in Jesus. As we learned in Jesus that God’s humility and vulnerable, suffering love were powerful enough to conquer evil, death, and sin, so we find the universe showing us a God humble enough to share creation with human beings, not coercing them. Haught says:

[If we think] of nature in terms of how it might appear if the creator of all things is, in essence, suffering love . . . then we should already anticipate that nature will give every appearance of being, in some sense, autonomously creative. Since it is the nature of love, even at the human level, to refrain from coercive manipulation of others, we should not expect the world that a generous God calls into being to be instantaneously ordered to perfection. Instead, in the presence of the self-restraint befitting an absolutely self-giving love, the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement at its own pace and in its own particular way. The universe would then be spontaneously self-creative and self-ordering. And its responsiveness to the possibilities for new being offered to it by God would require time, perhaps immense amounts of it .(5)

Notes

1. Joan Chittister OSB, The Fire in These Ashes: A Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995), pp. 2 and 8-11.
2. Sharon Therese Zayac OP, Earth Spirituality: In the Catholic and Dominican Traditions, No. 1 (June 2003) of Conversatio: Dominican Women on Earth series (Boerne, Texas: Sor Juana Press, 2003), p. 50.
3. John Haught, “God after Darwin: Evolution and Divine Providence,” lecture given at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, 21 April 2004.
4. Robert Burnham, “Building Planets Is a Slam-Bang Art,” Astronomy magazine, 21 October 2004. Available on the web at astronomy.com.
5. John Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 53.
6. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower Press), p. 16.

A Prayer

I kneel, Lord, before the universe that has inperceptibly, under the influence of the host, become your adorable body and your divine blood.

I prostrate myself in it presence, or better — much better — I recollect myself in that universe.

The world is filled by you!

O, universal Christ, true foundation of the world, you who find your consummation in the fulfillment of all that your power has raised up from nothingness, I worship you, and am lost in the consciousness of your plentitude permeating all things.

Teilhard de Chardin, "The Priest," Writings In Time Of War

Reflection Questions / Group Discussion

1. How does my Christian spirituality touch into my care and concern for the Earth and its resources?
2. "God so loved the world that ... (Jn. 3:16) What actins do I take to express my love for God's world?

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Custodians of Franciscan Households

By Michael Blastic OFM

From the 65.2 issue of Review for Religious

In a Newsweek web article posted on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger wrote that “Katrina has reminded us that Christian morality should be about responding to the wretched and loving the unlovable—not about other people's sex lives” (14 September 2005). While the United States describes itself as a Christian nation, in the aftermath of Katrina we have seen that this label is deceptive. Citing Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox” (Harper's, August 2005), who pointed this out, she wrote that American practice really rewards dependency, and so it is better to hold on to your cash. McKibben himself reported on a poll concerning religious practice in the United States . He noted that only four in ten Americans can list more than four of the Ten Commandments, and only five in ten can name the four Gospels. He said that these statistics really do not matter, but what does matter is that three out of four think the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves” (actually a proverb of Ben Franklin's). Approximately 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, with about 75 percent claiming they pray to God daily and 33 percent going to church weekly.

McKibben points out a number of paradoxes. We are second to last among developed countries in government foreign aid; nearly 18 percent of American children live in poverty—here we come in last among the rich nations—and 26 percent of households lack sufficient food. We are the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate of four or five times that of Europe . We have prison populations five or six times Europe 's rate. We are the only Western democracy that executes its citizens; our marriage breakup rate is more than half, and higher than Europe 's. If one measures Christian identity by Jesus' teaching of helping the less fortunate, we come off poorly indeed.

Given these statistics, McKibben argues that Americans have replaced the Christianity of the Bible with another creed which ignores Jesus' radical and demanding focus on the other—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus made it clear who the neighbor is—the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. “On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love,” to quote McKibben.

I know I am not reporting something you do not already know. But I believe that this social context of North America as described by McKibben, visible in the unjust social reality revealed in Katrina's aftermath, is important for reflecting on our Franciscan life. In fact, such a social context was the occasion for Francis of Assisi's conversion. Here I want to be very clear. Francis of Assisi's conversion was not explicitly and primarily religious. It was a movement from a social order based on the creed “God helps them who help themselves” to a social order based on sharing and sacrifice and “Love your neighbor as yourself”—in other words the creed of Jesus. In his conversion Francis first and foremost experienced what it means to be human, and what it implies for social life. The Franciscan movement results from Francis and the brothers learning what is required for human beings to flourish as God intends. From the opposite perspective, it is the medium of fraternity that is the message. A Franciscan fraternity evangelizes to the extent that it embodies human flourishing on the personal, social, and ecclesial levels.

First I will describe briefly the early Franciscan experience and vision of fraternal life, and then I will suggest how this may help all of us live our lives as brothers.

A Place for Human Flourishing

I would describe Franciscan fraternity in this way. It is (1) a life lived in brotherhood, (2) experienced in a household, and (3) qualified with patience. I deduce these elements from the Rule of 1223, the Rule that we profess as our form of life.

(1) It was the Italian scholar Raoul Manselli who identified Francis's encounter with lepers as the turning point in his conversion. As Francis records in his Testament, that encounter radically rearranged his values and led him to leave the commune of Assisi in order to live with those lepers. He was drawn out of himself so that he could see, perhaps for the first time in his life, the reality of human beings who according to the definitions of life in the commune of Assisi simply did not exist. There was no place in Assisi for the unclean, the unworthy, the unholy, the unbearable, the unlucky, the untouchable, and the unloved. Encountering these suffering human beings, the lepers, Francis showed them a merciful heart. He looked at them and touched them, he stayed with them and shared life with them, he comforted them and served their needs. And Francis tells us he did not do this for himself. He did not go to the lepers to make himself better. He did not use them as objects in an ascetical exercise to overcome himself (though this is how hagiographers will understand it). Francis gives the credit for this experiential truth to God: “The Lord led me among them, and I showed them a merciful heart” (Test 2).1 With God's nudge, Francis recognized the lepers as brothers and sisters, as creatures of the same God, as having equal dignity in the eyes of God the Creator. While Assisi 's values and practice denied this truth, Francis was led into it by God's grace (what was bitter became sweet), and he left Assisi to live among these newly discovered brothers and sisters. Leaving the world of Assisi , Francis thus stepped into God's world—creation—where everything was estab-lished by the Creator in relationship. This is the truth that he would later celebrate in the Canticle of the Creatures. Creation sings, creation flourishes, simply by being what it was created to be, by being in relationship with all that exists.

In his Testament Francis says, “The Lord gave me some brothers” (Test 14). Experienced as the reality of relationship as established by the Creator, brotherhood is embodied in the rule in terms of obedience. According to chapter 2 of the Earlier Rule, after those who come have given everything to the poor as they were able, and after the year of probation has ended for them, “they may be received into obedience” (LR II:11). Once received into obedience they may not wander “outside obedience” (ER II:10). The rule speaks of obedience as a place, the space into which the brothers are received. While monks are received into a monastery after their novitiate probation, Francis's brothers are received into obedience. Obedience becomes a synonym for the space in which the brothers live. What characterizes obedience then is that it is the space of relationship. One could substitute the term relationship for the term obedience throughout the early Franciscan writings and not change the meaning of the texts. The relationships of brotherhood define the space in which the brothers live. This is especially significant given that the rule understands the brothers to be itinerant, even though by 1223 this was beginning to change somewhat. Brothers began living in convents in cities. Brotherhood, then, or better our relationships as brothers, is what defines the space in which to live our life according to the Rule. And, as Francis makes clear, brotherhood is only possible if one turns toward the other, only if one gets out of oneself and willingly places oneself in relationship to the other. This turning toward others is the basis for contemplation in the tradition; it does not imply separation or solitude, but rather engagement and an ecstatic way of being in the world.

A second defining element of Franciscan fraternity is Franciscan mission. After lepers, probably the most recognized symbol of Franciscan life is San Damiano and the speaking crucifix. While this story appears rather late in the hagiographical tradition (1246), it expresses a fundamental purpose of Franciscan life. Francis received a mission to repair God's house, which was being destroyed: “Francis, don't you see that my house is being destroyed? Go, then, and rebuild it for me” (L3C 13). While in the past we translated those words from the Legend of the Three Companions too simplistically as “Rebuild my church,” the hagiographical tradition consistently uses the term house in accounts of this event. And, while Francis initially understood that invitation from the cross to mean the broken-down building of San Damiano, he would come to understand that the mission was rather one of repairing a space in which the lives of men and women who have been broken and destroyed as human beings can be rebuilt and flourish.

House and family are central to the brothers' experience of the Christian life. Their relationship to God is expressed in terms of the household. For instance, in the Second Version of the Letter to the Faithful, we read:

And the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon all those men and women who have done and persevered in these things, and it will make a home and dwelling place in them. And they will be the children of the heavenly Father, whose works they do. And they are spouses, brothers, and mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are spouses when the faithful soul is united by the Holy Spirit to our Lord Jesus Christ. We are brothers, moreover, when we do the will of his Father who is in heaven; mothers when we carry him in our heart and body through love and a pure and sincere conscience; and give him birth through a holy activity, which must shine before others by example. (2LtF 48-53)

How does Francis envision rebuilding God's house? Bonaventure's insight in his Major Legend of St. Francis is right on the mark here. He comments that, after receiving this mission in San Damiano, he eventually moved to St. Mary of the Angels; he “lived there in order to repair it” (LMj II:8). The repair of God's house is not so much the action of preaching or teaching. The repair is accomplished by life in brotherhood itself, by living among and with brothers and sisters. The term conversatio is used to describe this “living among” in two places in the Early Rule. Francis encourages the brothers to rejoice when they “live among ( quando conversantur inter viles . . .) people considered of little value and looked down upon” (ER IX:2); and “they can live spiritually ( possunt duobus modis spiritualiter inter eos conversari ) among the Saracens” (ER XVI:5). Using the Latin word conversatio , the root of the term conversation, the Rule envisages life as a conversation, and depends on the monastic sense of conversatio as manner of life. The brothers' manner of life is thus to be conversational—sharing life with brothers and sisters in this conversational manner rebuilds the house of God.

In another text of the Later Rule, this conversation is described more concretely:

I counsel, admonish, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ not to quarrel or argue or judge others when they go about in the world; but let them be meek, peaceful, modest, gentle, and humble, speaking courteously to everyone, as is becoming. . . . Into whatever house they enter, let them first say: 'Peace to this house!' According to the holy gospel let them eat whatever food is set before them. (LR III:10-12, 14)

Here we see how for the brothers the manner of being with others is the primary means for accomplishing the mission, and is itself the message. The gospel is about life, a way of life, a way of being with and relating to others with the peace that is God's gift freely given in Jesus. The brothers simply speak the gospel honestly with everyone, beginning with one another. But, before the brothers can speak the word of the gospel, they must live the word of the gospel. Here recall the emphasis Celano gives to this fact in his Life of St. Francis, “[Francis] was no deaf hearer of the gospel” (1C 22). Coherence of life and message is the norm. The brothers' honest conversation and engagement with the world and people invites recognition of the presence of the kingdom already in their midst. Conversation, though, is a skill that must be learned, and many of the prescriptions of the rule that describe behavior in a negative way can be read as impediments to the quality of conversation that the brothers engage in as part of their mission.

This understanding of household and conversation can be seen in chapter 6 of the Later Rule. There poverty is described as “not making anything one's own” and living as “pilgrims and strangers in this world” and “never seeking anything else under heaven.” After describing the brothers' poverty this way as modeled on Jesus Christ, “who made himself poor for us in this world” (LR VI:3), the Rule spells out the implication of this poverty for the life of brotherhood:

Wherever the brothers may be and meet one another, let them show that they are members of the same family. Let each one confidently make known his need to the other, for if a mother loves and cares for her son according to the flesh, how much more diligently must someone love and care for his brother according to the Spirit! (LR VI:7-8)

Literally the Rule suggests here that the brothers should demonstrate that they come from the same “household,” the same family (ostendunt se domesticos invicem inter se). Thus, having nothing, living itinerantly, and desiring only this, the brothers can be at home in their relationships. The brothers should feel at home in the love and care they have and express for one another.

Poverty is the condition for brotherhood. This is an important consideration because poverty can dehumanize. Rebuilding God's house implies offering an alternative to the dehumanizing effects of poverty. Today we can include everything from forms of work, to abuse, to social structures. The life of brotherhood should provide for humanizing relationships, expressed in turning toward others in their real needs, and their responding with real and mature care. This house is built by God's Spirit as a place where human beings can flourish. Our fraternal life is meant to help human beings prosper, grow, and thrive as “human persons fully alive” and thus to fulfill our mission to repair God's house.

A third dimension of fraternal life has to do with what it means to be human. For me, this knowledge comes with the stigmata of Francis. The stigmata involves unanswered questions. Thomas of Celano in his Life of St. Francis supplied the time, place, and context for the event of the stigmata, but while doing that he was much more interested in unraveling its meaning. Celano recounts that, while at La Verna two years before his death, Francis “saw in the vision of God a man having six wings like a seraph, standing above him, arms extended and feet joined, fixed to a cross” (2C 94). Celano's words suggest that Francis's vision was of a human person taken up into God, burning with desire (like a seraph), and crucified. They suggest the divinization of the human person. Celano is not describing history here. He is interpreting an event whose full meaning was beyond history . He understands the stigmata as demonstrating the fullest potential of being human embraced by God in the incarnation. In Jesus, God embraced the human condition with all of its limitation, fragility, weakness, and vulnerability and, in this embrace of the human condition, revealed God's own divine nature. In other words, the crucified flesh of Christ revealed the nature of God. The event of the stigmata reveals both the meaning of God and the meaning of Jesus Christ's human nature. The humanity embraced by Jesus is the same as Francis lived, to the point of knowing it in his own wounds. Marked with the wounds of Jesus, Francis becomes the leper, an icon of the crucified Jesus. Celano says: “While he was unable to perceive anything clearly understandable from the vision, its newness very much pressed upon his heart. Signs of the nails began to appear on his hands and feet, just as he had seen them a little while earlier on the crucified man hovering above him” (2C 94). Francis becomes what he sees, that is, what he has been seeing from the moment God turned him to the lepers to contemplate humanity there as a living icon of Jesus Christ, crucified and fixed to a cross.

What does it mean to be human, then, for the early Franciscans? It means to embrace the full reality of the human condition as frail, weak, fragile, and vulnerable, and even scarred and wounded. The human person is an image of the Lamb who was slain, who carries even now in glory the scars of the passion. Being scarred and wounded like Jesus is not about imitating Jesus' suffering and pain on the cross. Rather, it is the consequence of self-sacrificing love, of being totally for others, without holding anything back. To be truly human means to bear patiently the human condition of weakness, fragility, and vulnerability. In the stigmata Francis demonstrates that it is possible for a human being to be Godlike, to love as God loved, to be totally and completely for the other, and in addition he demonstrates that human persons are capable of compassion, human persons are capable of bearing the pain of the other.

This, it seems to me, is what the Rule describes as the action of the Spirit of the Lord in one's life:

I admonish and exhort the brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ to beware of all pride, vainglory, envy and greed, of care and solicitude for the things of this world, of detraction and murmuring. Let those who are illiterate not be anxious to learn, but let them pay attention to what they must desire above all else: to have the Spirit of the Lord and its holy activity, to pray always to him with a pure heart, to have humility and patience in persecution and infirmity, and to love those who persecute, rebuke, and find fault with us. (LR X:7-10)

The eight vices that are listed at the beginning of this text are social vices; they have to do with how one relates to others and to the things of this world. These vices describe one who is living “from the outside in,” that is, one whose meaning and behavior are determined by things, by social position, by prestige, power, and clout, all of which lie outside a person. The Rule admonishes the brothers to a life of poverty, having nothing of one's own and desiring nothing more than the action of God's Spirit. They are not to live from the outside in, but from the inside out, by expressing the Spirit of the Lord in outward behavior. The Spirit transforms us flesh and blood into an image of Jesus, the suffering servant of God.

Another way of expressing the action of the Spirit here is in our bearing with everyone and everything in patience and humility. The Saying on True and Perfect Joy, recorded as a conversation between Francis and Leo, says that, as they arrive back at the Portiuncola one night, they are refused entrance because of the time of day and because they are stupid and not needed. They are told to go to the Crosiers for lodging. Francis says that, “if I had patience and did not become upset, true joy as well as true virtue and the salvation of my soul would consist in this” (TPJ 15). The experience of the presence of God so transforms human existence that even persecution and sickness become ways to follow Christ. The experience of the Spirit of the Lord thus expresses itself in patience. The Latin term patiens indicates a willingness to endure or undergo something, to be capable of bearing hardship; it implies that one is vulnerable, able to be wounded. For Francis, patience is an attribute of God. In the Praises of God, written shortly after he experienced the stigmata on Mount La Verna, he says to God: “You are love, charity; you are wisdom, you are humility, you are patience, you are beauty, you are meekness, you are security, you are rest” (PrG 4).

Francis sees Jesus as the face of God, who made himself vulnerable in this world, who exercised patience through life and death. But it is the incarnation even more than the passion and death that Francis looks to, because in the incarnation Jesus put himself into the position of weakness, frailty, vulnerability, and limitation and in this revealed the full potential of being human, showing that the acceptance of human vulnerability is salvific. Here the Rule gets to the heart of Franciscan fraternity because it challenges the brothers to be simply human, to live from the inside out, to be patient in suffering and sickness, to be vulnerable and open to the other, in short, to follow the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Authentic human life can flourish in Franciscan households that are built by brothers who turn toward each other, who engage in honest conversation as a way of life, and who patiently embrace their humanness in weakness, fragility, and vulnerability.

Guarding the Franciscan Household

The term “guardian” does not appear in the text of the Rule of 1223. It will appear in later writings such as the Letter to the Entire Order and the Testament. No job description can be found in the early Franciscan writings, but it is understood that as guardian a brother exercises a ministry among brothers on the local level. What the Rule says about the ministry of “those brothers who are the ministers and servants of the others” (LR X:1) certainly applies to guardians. They are to “receive [the brothers] charitably and kindly and have sufficient familiarity with them that these same brothers may speak and deal with them as masters with the servants, for so it must be that the ministers are servants of all the brothers” (LR X:5-6). The ministers must deal with the brothers as family. While this quality of service must characterize the ministers, those who are subjects must also live the sacrificial nature of obedience in their relationships with the ministers and others. This sacrificial quality of obedience Francis learned from Jesus, especially in his agony in the garden as described in the Second Version of the Letter to the Faithful:

Then he prayed to his father saying, Father, if it can be done, let this cup pass from me. And his sweat became as drops of blood falling on the ground. Nevertheless, he placed his will in the will of his father saying: Father, let your will be done; not as I will, but as you will. His father’s will was such that his blessed and glorious son, whom he gave to us and who was born for us, should offer himself through his own blood as a sacrifice and oblation on the altar of the cross: not for himself, through whom all things were made, but for our sins, leaving us an example that we might follow his footprints. (2LtF 8-13)

Jesus' obedience to his father was a struggle to say yes to his father's will, and this is really the only thing Francis says about the passion. Francis never speaks of the pain or suffering of the crucified Jesus, as if the entire passion took place in Jesus' struggle to accept his Father's will. And the Father's will, as Francis describes here, is that Jesus be completely for others, that Jesus be for us. The passion is about struggling to be for others, and this brings us back to the very nature of what it means to be brother. The brother is one who turns toward others, who is totally for others without holding anything back for himself. This is true obedience, because it is the fulfillment of what it means to be in relationship with others.

Given this general sense of service, caring for the Franciscan household might be practiced in the following ways.

I. I began with the common American Christian belief and practice that “God helps those who help themselves,” a creed that can affect us in various ways. This creed is not authentically Christian, and it is eminently un-Franciscan. It supports behavior and practice that become destructive of God's house. All the brothers are responsible for calling each other to lives of genuine other-centeredness, to lives of authentic obedience experienced as fraternal relationship, and to the poverty of having nothing as one's own. Interdependence rather than radical independence, mutuality rather than self-centeredness, and healthy need rather than the fullness of isolation are true qualities of fraternal life. This kind of fraternity is not a given, nor achieved easily or quickly, but remains the goal toward which we live. The guardian's task of caring for fraternal life implies attention to the absence or presence of creeds that conflict with real fraternal life.

II. One hard-to-retrieve aspect of fraternal life today, given our institutional structures, is itinerancy. Francis and his brothers lived as pilgrims and strangers in this world. They were itinerant brothers, literally. They were “houses” on the road—perhaps medieval versions of mobile homes! Itinerancy was a clear aspect of Franciscan identity in contrast to monks—monastic institutions were terrified of wandering monks, called gyrovagues in Benedict's Rule. The monastic ideal was stability, and part of the difficulty of fitting mendicants into the structure of the church had to do with their itinerancy. The friars were often perceived mistakenly (?) as monks gone bad.

How do we recover that dimension of our life? Perhaps by recovering the meaning of itinerancy as metaphor—by not remaining fixed in one place, by taking different perspectives on the same reality, by always being on the way without ever believing that we have arrived, by not claiming the center for ourselves, and so forth. It is easy to get bogged down in our ministry or work, and to disconnect ourselves from the fraternity for reasons of ministry or work, though there can be valid reasons for this. An important aspect of itinerancy is that while moving about we are still at home with each other; our friaries are parts of a much larger provincial fraternity. For fraternity to be healthy and life-giving, it has to be on the move, never settled into stubborn custom or settled convenience or old fears of anything new or different. The fraternity must be on the move in a metaphorical sense in order to stay healthy and focused on its purpose. The fraternity has to be kept on its toes, and the guardians' care for households is an appropriate way of keeping the brothers on the move.

III. As we have seen, Francis's mission to repair God's house had to do with the quality of human life. It had to do with a style of life or conversation that was inclusive, respectful, honest, and engaging. Conversation does have guidelines. In his book Plurality and Ambiguity , David Tracy says: “In conversation we find ourselves by losing ourselves in the questions provoked by the text. We find ourselves by allowing claims upon our attention, by exploring possibilities suggested by others” (p. 19). He suggests some guidelines for honest conversation:

Conversation is a game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if the evidence suggests it.” (pp. 18-19)Conversation is a game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if the evidence suggests it.” (pp. 18-19)

To paraphrase Tracy in Franciscan language, we might say that, to have an honest conversation, one must act according to the real demands of being brothers in relationship, one must be for the other in honesty, in integrity of life, in respectful listening. But Tracy 's words, too, have already described the dynamic of a healthy fraternity.

Real fraternal life is possible only if the brothers can have honest conversations. This is a real challenge because I can be so convinced of my truth that I cannot hear anyone else's truth. Conversation brings into play the truth about being human that Francis witnessed to in the stigmata—being vulnerable, being able to be touched by another. It takes much effort and practice to engage in honest conversation of this kind. Well worth the effort, the honest and earnest conversation in my fraternity will affect the quality of my presence and ministry outside the fraternity.

Honest conversation in fraternal life will also improve another central aspect of our life together, our prayer. To move beyond communal vocal prayer to faith sharing or shared prayer, honest conversation is important. If I cannot engage my brothers in honest conversation, how will I share my faith deeply with others. Perhaps there is a correlation between the friary chapters that demand honest conversation about life and ministry and the friaries that have much, or at least some, quality faith sharing. While the guardians cannot force this to happen, they can challenge the brothers to develop friary chapters as an exercise in honest conversation. Moving from honest conversation into shared prayer is a logical and easy step.

IV. Perhaps the best description of the guardians, given this description of Franciscan life, is that they are mentors. They support, challenge, inspire, and foster discernment of what is true, worthy, and life-giving among the brothers. You can find a fine description of the mentor in Big Questions, Worthy Dreams by Sharon Daloz Parks (Jossey-Bass, 2000). She describes a mentoring environment as one that “can and necessarily must assist in creating norms of discourse and inclusion that invite genuine dialogue, strengthen critical thought, encourage connective-holistic awareness, and develop the contemplative mind” (p. 142). Sounds like a tall order, but we have all experienced a mentoring environment. Franciscan fraternity is similar to what she describes: “Mentoring environments are communities of imagination and practice. Humanizing practices, as we use the term here, are ways of life, things that people do with and for each other to make and keep life human” (p. 154).

Parks describes three practices of a mentoring community: (1) the practice of the hearth, that is, places that invite reflection and conversation and times for doing this (hopefully the chapter provides this); (2) the practice of the table, not something that Franciscans have problems with generally, but is table time really a priority, or do we do what most Americans and families do today, simply eat on the run and alone in order to get on to something else? (3) the practice of the commons, a place where people meet and share their interdependent lives, a practice of learning how to stand with each other over time. That is a description of the recreation room, “a place within which to confirm a common, connected life . . . that conveys meanings and orients purpose and commitment” (p. 157). Practices like these facilitate fraternal life and build up the Franciscan household.

For me, the religious genius of Francis and the early brothers lies in their ability to appreciate and value the human as the religious. The brothers understood the Gospels as showing us what it means to be really and simply human as brothers and sisters in contrast to social structures that are often antihuman. To be a healthy human brother or sister is to be a holy human person. Our way of being human is the message Francis was called to share. God's house is repaired and renewed in brotherhood and sisterhood, where human life in its weakness, fragility, and vulnerability is embraced and celebrated and endured and supported in patience and healthy relationships, and where honest conversation is practiced and promoted. This is the vision of fraternal life that the early Franciscan writings set out. By our common profession we are all responsible for seeking this goal. The challenge is, I believe, to live that common profession, not in an ideal place, but in the “space” of the brotherhood that God has given us.

With his brothers, the guardian has to be an expert in being human in order to be an effective servant. The guardian is charged only with calling us to be faithful to what we say we are. The guardian thus invites and challenges us to be fully human and to flourish in fraternal life. The guardian cannot do this or be responsible for this by himself. It takes all of us just as we are in the glory of our frail, weak, limited, and vulnerable humanity. Our life is not about rapid perfection. Our life is about truth, the truth of the gospel which we embody together as brothers following the example of Francis and his brothers, who simply tried to follow the footprints of Jesus.

We are called to be brothers to our brothers, to turn toward each other, to engage each other in honest conversation, to embrace our own and our brothers' weakness, limitation, frailty, and vulnerability. Desiring nothing else but this, we are heirs of the kingdom of heaven, the place God has created that we may flourish as human beings! (see LR VI).

May God give us peace!

Note

1 All citations of the early Franciscan writings and of the Franciscan hagiographical texts in this paper are taken from Francis of Assisi : Early Documents, Vol. 1, The Saint, and Vol. 2, The Founder , edited by Regis Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William Short (New York: New City Press, 1999 and 2000).

Questions for Reflections / Group Discussion

1. Michael Blastic OFM was addressing guardianship in a particular Franciscan Province . What elements from his presentation do I find applicable to my own life?

2. What do I need to do to make practical in my way of living some of his reflections on living together?

3. Have I ever been mentored by someone? If so, what are the effects of my being mentored? Have I ever considered my own role of being a mentor? What would I need to do ?

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Imitation of Mary and the Religious Vocation

By Julius D. Leloczky OCist

From the 65.2 issue of Review for Religious

The great Carmelite martyr St.Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, better knwon as Eduth Stein, wrote somewhere: "The imitation of Mary includes the imitation of Christ because Mary is the first Christian to follow Christ. Indeed, that is why the imitation of Mary is relevant not only to women but to all Christians." Let us meditate briefly on how religious life can be an "imitation of Mary."

From all eternity Mary was chosen by God to be the mother of the Redeemer, and she was called at the annunciation. We, too, have been chosen and called: "God chose us in Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him" (Ep. 1:4). By this call and here response, Mary became a daughter of God in a special way; she became the new, obedient Eve. Just as Mary must have wondered why was she chosen, we, too, can ask ourselves: "Why me? Out of the millions of people, why me?" The answer is that it is a mystery, the mystery of love. What happens to us is what happened to the rich young man: "Jesus looked at him, and he loved him" (Mk. 10:21). The call for each of us is a call for a unique, special task, one that no one else can accomplish. Out response should mirror the love of the One who called us, but we are called not just to do a job; we are called to give a loving response. The call has, like a coin, two sides: we are called away from something and we are called to do something, called for something. From the moment the angel appeared to Mary, here whole life was changed. She was no longer her own person, she belonged to Someone else. We have been called away from the average or "normal" way of life, from starting a family, from haveing a civilian job, from having our own home, car, property. Whe have been called to a loving undonditional surrender, offering ourselves as Mary did: "I am the maidservant of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word." We have been called for a lifelong adventure of love, and we do not know where this love will take us.

As religious, we have been called to conceive the Word of God in our heart and soul. This conception is “virginal” because it takes place entirely between God and ourselves, without the intervention of anybody else. We have been called to give the Word of God, the Son of God, to others. We can do it only if first we ourselves have conceived Him, carried him in the womb of our soul, nurtured him, let him grow inside us, from ourselves—if not from our flesh and blood, certainly from our personality. Just as Jesus must have had much likeness to his Mother, the Word growing within us will take on our likeness. This Word, however, is not just an intellectual idea. It does not reside only in our intellect; it must penetrate our entire being, our whole existence. Disciples are not tape recorders to replay the words exactly as we heard them. Sifted through our personalities, God's words have to take on the special shade or tint of what we are as persons, just as the gospel of Jesus Christ is different from the pen of Mark and John.

Mary's virginity was fruitful; the unmarried state of a religious also must be fruitful. Members of religious orders, when answering God's call to an unmarried way of life, do not choose to live in lifeless sterility. They do not give up either love, passion, or motherhood or fatherhood. They just practice them in a different way, living, by God's grace, their ability to love on a higher level. Their fruitfulness realizes itself in two ways. Like Mary, they become mothers of the Word of God, and mothers or fathers of many spiritual children.

The birth of a child is preceded by birth pangs. No one expressed more dramatically the pain of giving birth to God's word than Jeremiah: “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I let myself be deceived. You are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day. Everyone mocks me. . . . If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,' there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot bear it” (Jr 20:7,9). To give birth to God's Word is a painful but irresistible duty. It is painful to communicate the Word to others; it is difficult to put Christ's message into human words, to pass on to others Jesus himself and not just our own ego. It can be painful to give Jesus to others, because some people will not accept him, will show a hostile attitude toward him and us, will resist and reject him and us. Yet we have to go on, to continue undeterred, remembering God's word to Jeremiah: “And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land” (Jr 1:18).

If we proclaim God's word, we become parents, and those who listen to us will become our children. This is so even in the case of contemplative religious. It is not by accident that St. Thérèse of Lisieux has been chosen the patron saint of the missions. If we think back to our young years, we can recall some special persons in our lives whom we can consider our spiritual mothers or fathers. As we advance in age, the roles become reversed, and we should be spiritual parents for others. But it is a frightening realization that we proclaim the Word more by our deeds than by our words; our words and deeds should communicate the gospel message in perfect harmony. St. Paul dared to set himself as a model for the early Christians. “Imitate me,” he wrote. We may shy away from saying the same, but we know that our words will be credible only if they are lived and made a reality in our daily lives.

Just as Mary was with Jesus at the wedding at Cana , so she is with us in our apostolic prayer and activity. When we are in any special need, she will tell her Son: “They have no wine.” Just as in Cana , with the refined sense of a woman, a housewife, a mother, she perceives if something is missing, if there is a problem, and she will intervene. And, even if Jesus showed some reluctance first, Mary knows that her Son will help, and she will tell us to “do whatever he tells you.” The intervention of the saints is powerful, but the efficiency of Mary's intercessory prayer is unparalleled. Just recall the words of the famous Memorare prayer of the great Cistercian saint Bernard of Clairvaux: “Never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection was left unaided.”

A mother's life is an unstoppable process of gradual separation from her child. Only during pregnancy can she have the feeling that the child is completely hers. After the baby has been born, as the child is growing, it will spend more and more time away from home, away from its mother. During adolescence the child will claim an ever greater independence. After he or she finishes school and starts a family, the separation will be complete. Mary, too, had this painful experience. The twelve-year-old Jesus remained in the temple: “I must be in my Father's house.” During his public ministry Jesus called his disciples mother and brothers and sisters, thus in a way pushing away from himself his biological family. On the cross, Jesus gave a mere disciple to his mother in place of himself. Look at Michelangelo's Pietà, this Magnificat prayer carved into marble, and see Mary's generous surrender. Even after all her trials and sufferings, she was still the humble handmaid of the Lord. There are two ways of experiencing this separation: (a) to live without the experience of Jesus' presence or closeness and (b) to allow our spiritual children to grow up and go off and live their lives.

Mary, by her suffering and agony, added something to the redeeming sufferings of her Son. Similarly, by carrying our daily crosses (their heaviness may change from time to time), we complement “what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the church” ( Col 1:24). Our sufferings can be physical or spiritual or emotional. They may take the form of sickness, exhaustion, frustration, or burnout. They may be caused by the very people for whose sake we are spending our days and burning our energies, as when the crowd shouted at Jesus, “Crucify him!” We may be attacked or accused without reason, we may be slandered, or we may feel abandoned as Jesus did when he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But we should not forget that the sadness lasted only three days. Imagine Mary's joy at Jesus' resurrection, at her encounter with her risen Son. The same joy is waiting for us. We just have to persevere, to continue imitating Christ by imitating Mary faithfully, day after day.

Prayer

Slowly and meditatively pray the Memorare prayer.

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help, or sought your intercesson
was left unaided.

Inspired by this confidence,
I fly unto you,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.

O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer me.

Amen

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Just Because I Said So

By Mary Joseph Schultz SCC

From the 65.2 issue of Review for Religious

Shifting numbers, median ages, and the geography of religious life over the past several decades and today as well do not cause me to pause and reflect on whether we have a future, as many religious have recently been wondering. I believe that religious life most definitely does have a future. For each individual community, where that future goes must be carefully discerned in the Spirit. But there are other questions with less clear answers. What impels us to go on? What can we offer new members to quench their thirsty hearts once they join us?

I would like to reflect on one word as the answer to both these questions—commitment. It is not a popular word today in a mobile and disposable society such as ours. The word commitment is at one and the same time a sign of contradiction to some and a challenge and cause for hope to many others. In some circles a lifelong commitment to religious life has fallen under examination in recent years. For my part, I cannot buy into the notion of a limited commitment to religious life just as I cannot buy into the idea of a temporary marriage commitment. As religious we vow ourselves to a God unseen but not unknown. We embrace centuries-old charisms of people whose lives and lifestyles were shaped by grace amid definite historical settings and cultural needs. We set aside wealth, sexual activity, and the disposition of our own will in freely choosing poverty, chastity, and obedience for life. It is imperative that we study our own commitments in gratitude—and that we find ways to convey its challenge, meaning, and joy to Generations X and Y—if we truly have hope in our communities' future.

Our brothers and sisters in community who celebrate fifty, sixty, and even seventy-five years of religious life overflow with peace and joy in their long, faithful, and fruitful commitments, just as their married counterparts do who celebrate their golden anniversaries. What is their secret? Why and how have they survived and thrived in a world of instant gratification, noise, infidelity, moral weakness, and faltering leadership and through forty years of post–Vatican ii experimentation, discussion, renewal, and change in their communities? They would probably answer the question very simply: “I am still here because I said I would be.”

Seán Sammon, in his wise and prophetic book Religious Life in America , speaks of the impact of public commitment to the evangelical counsels: “In carrying out our ministry in a spirit of selfless service, we witness further to countercultural values. How? By avoiding the all too familiar and tragic betrayal of consecrated life that occurs when we give our heart away generously at the time of first commitment, and then take it back, bit by bit, with each passing year” (p. 92).

Commitment is not widely modeled for today's youth, either in families or in society at large. Hedonism and materialism erode the very notion of a committed life. The rapidity and challenge of change surround every aspect of our culture today. Opting out of anything disagreeable or tiresome is only a mouse-click away. Young people are constantly in and out of hobbies, activities, and relationships without so much as a glance backward. Often parents try to be supportive by signing them up for lessons, buying instruments and sports equipment and providing taxi service to and from appointments and games. For the young, broad arrays of opportunity and experience soon become boring—or become irritatingly impossible when parental money or patience runs short.

Entering my community as an aspirant in my teens in the late 1960s, I truly aspired to living religious life. It was hard for me and for those my age to understand all the post–Vatican ii talk about “returning to your foundress's charism.” Certainly we should already be who we say we are! Why wouldn't we be, and how could we not be? Naïve teenage questions. But, from the moment I left home to enter as a sophomore, my heart was committed to my dream, and I was just a little puzzled by what I saw and heard going on around me. Wasn't every sister as committed as I thought she was or should be?

Through the difficult weeks of homesickness, a certain degree of stubbornness and a huge amount of grace sustained me. I knew my choice was right. From my early years my family realized that I was serious about being a sister. It was all I talked about and I only had to wait (impatiently) until I was old enough to be accepted. My older siblings at times “tested” me and offered their opinions about my leaving home at fourteen. But my parents were supportive in their quiet and undemonstrative way. They were proud of me, I knew, loved the sisters, and backed me up at each step. One day shortly before I was set to leave, my mother said, “You know, you really can change your mind. You don't have to go just because you said so.” I believe she wanted to give me a last chance to back out with minimal embarrassment. My reply was simple: “I know, Mom, but I want to be a sister.” From that day on no more was said. My father died a year later, and my mother was proud of my life choice. She later became a lay associate in my community.

Mom's words often ring in my ears: “Just because you said so.” Certainly I am not the same person I was at fourteen, but there are traces of that determined girl still inside. I am not the same person I was at final profession twenty-five years ago. But there is one thing I pray never changes, that I am a woman of my word. To me this is a very positive quality. While “just because I said so” can deteriorate into an authoritarian dictate held over the head of a student (and I confess to having resorted to it more than once in a classroom of questioning teens), these same words are to me a sign of fidelity and commitment. I gave my word and I intend to keep it, not grudgingly but joyfully.

Whether from genetics or my serious temperament or both, when I tell someone I am going to do something, I make it my business to follow through. This can lead to scrupulosity or unhealthy guilt if I am not careful. I can place unrealistic expectations on myself (or on others through transference) as I strive to pray for all the prayer requests, write all those notes, make those phone calls, or do those favors that I promised I would. As I have noticed, other temperaments seem to have no problem breaking those promises, skipping those phone calls, or never getting back to me, but they also have fewer sleepless nights.

I believe that giving my word to others is about the best I can give them. In this I share God's own view—giving God's Word was the best of gifts. Giving my word to God on my profession day symbolized all of me with nothing held back. This perpetual commitment, lived out one day, one moment, at a time, is a beautiful gift that I hope to never take back or take for granted. Not knowing the trials, temptations, or dryness that lay ahead could not lessen the fullness of the gift. In fact it only served to increase the value. God took me at my word, and the journey of religious life has been remarkable. Unlike in a marriage vow, I am guaranteed the fidelity of my Partner, and if there is any cooling in the relationship it can only be on one side!

“Just because I said so” is in itself hardly a solid enough motivation for perseverance. These words can easily reflect mere stubbornness or the desire to prove something to myself or others. I have seen some sisters leave the community, even after final profession, because this motivation to please self or a parent was the sole force behind their entering religious life. If love, humility, and grace do not underlie my words, then I am foolish and my life is a sham and an exercise in self-righteousness.

Giving my word verbally and on the vow formula signed on the altar came after long years of trial and preparation. My commitment was not made as a naïve religious wearing rose-colored glasses. I had seen many “heroes” leave the community, had watched the divisiveness of Vatican ii experimentation, and had been asked to step forward and take my place as a responsible member of the community. Publicly pronouncing the words “I vow to almighty God perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience” was the best I could do, then and now. I would do it all over again today, even knowing what would lie ahead. I would once again give my word.

At the time of my entrance, I believe I had it much easier because, while there were hundreds of communities, my familiarity with them was very limited. Many girls entered a community whose members had taught them or with whom there was already a relative or a close association. This is not the case today, especially with so few religious left in the classrooms. A young person discerning religious life today has a greater challenge than I did forty years ago, partly because of the wide array of choices open to her. Even after deciding to become a religious, someone could literally spend years of her life visiting monasteries and convents for “Come and see” weekends. With the easy availability of appealing vocation literature and online access, a serious and thorough examination of multiple communities might even turn her into a delayed vocation!

What is it that makes a young woman decide on a particular community? What makes a heart resonate and feel at home with one group rather than another? I feel that, when all is said and done, communities must simply be who they say they are. Authenticity is the key that will unlock commitment. After forty years of communal soul-searching, it is time for communities simply to move on. It is time to claim who we are, corporately commit to the charism, and put all our energies into authentic living of our foundress's spirit here and now in the 21st century. There can be no going back. Now is the time for simply joining hands, holding tight, and boldly moving ahead according to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This is the gift we have to offer new members, a gift that will enliven our future.

Young people, seeking authentic community, will go where they find the real deal. And how can such a community survive today except through common prayer, deep spirituality, shared vision and lifestyle, corporate witness, and joyful life in the Spirit of Jesus. This is what they seek, hoping against hope that such groups exist and will provide them with the challenge they desire so ardently.

We have a responsibility to live up to our word. We are here because we said we would be. I am here because I said so. And is this not a Godlike quality—giving one's word? God's Word and our own are why we are all here in the first place.

Personal Reflection / Group Conversation

1. What has been my experience of “growing into a commitment”?

2. What led me to joining this religious congregation of which I am a member?

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Religious Life in the Third World —a Shangri-La?

By Anthony Malaviaratchi CSSR

From the 65.1 issue of Review for Religious

The attraction to get into the first world is irresistible to many of the people in the third world. As everyone knows, thousands knock on the doors of the first world's embassies. Arrangements and rearrangements are made to accommodate them, and of course many more find their way into their chosen Shangri-Las illegally.

Throughout its history, religious life and the church itself have often been microcosms of their own social milieu. Religious life has felt the currents and undercurrents of the world around it. However much religious life chooses to insert itself into its milieu, in no way is it called to succumb to the social trends of its place and time. This, however, is all too likely to happen, even when we think we are relying deeply on Jesus' words “Do not be afraid, I have overcome the world.”

The founding fathers of the church in the third world were members of religious orders who came in the company of world-conquering colonial powers. Religious life did not sprout in the soil of the third world. Rather, like Western democracy, it was brought there and planted there by zealous missionaries. It is natural, then, that it bears the features of the first world's status and security. Religious life and priesthood in the third world offer to those who join its ranks the status and security that third-world people seek in the first world, and so it is no surprise that young people in poor countries join religious life by the hundreds.

Two factors are at work in this phenomenon. The first is the poverty of the third world. Since the arrival of television, the “attraction of the eye” has motivated people to go after the goodies of the developed world. What they see with their eyes literally empowers them to go after those material goods. Second, the competition in the job market frightens many. They sense that, if they have neither great talent nor academic qualifications, they will end up as dropouts in the race. A “vocation” is an attractive alternative, a way of escaping such social pressure and yet attaining a position of prestige. Historically, many have embraced religious life and the priesthood for a variety of such ulterior motives.

Vocational Discernment

In this situation, vocational discernment has become next to impossible. Whether they are aware of all their motives or not, those seeking religious formation from mixed motives know how to play the game, what to say and do and whom they need to impress, bishops, provincials, councilors, formators, and so forth. Even honest persons' motivations may come to the surface only after final vows or ordination. Then they may be seen in the lifestyle adopted, which may include having a vehicle of one's own, a personal computer, and a cell phone and being head of an institute that provides plenty of money and freedom for foreign trips, for higher studies in the first world, and so forth. Even those who develop crises soon after ordination are offered the opportunity of settling down in the first world in or outside of religious life. Some congregations do not mind offering these perquisites, these “perks,” as a cost of their institutional survival even though it is a blatant compromise of the meaning of religious life. For how long? History will answer this interesting question in the not so distant future.

Given these circumstances, then, vocation discernment is possible only after final vows or ordination! Discernment can take place only over what is humanly discernible and not over motivations that remain largely hidden from all concerned.

Some formation programs have begun to take the first steps in countering this situation by insisting that those in formation live and be employed like any other young person for a considerable period of time. This is probably the vocation discernment exercise best suited for the situation. But many congregations and superiors still seem to prefer numbers. As long as there is poverty and unemployment, they will surely have “vocations.” The money poured in by the congregations' first-world units positively encourages this situation.

In non-Christian monasteries and hermitages, vocation discernment is a lifelong process. When a monk or hermit does not live the life that he embraced, he is asked to leave. So it is in any human organization. When members of a football club want to play ice hockey, they leave. It is not so in religious life. Members remain in the football club playing not only ice hockey but polo as well. This situation attracts more “vocations.” Not only are prestige, status, and security offered but permissiveness as well.

Remarkably, the situation we are looking at is found largely in the Latin (Western) form of religious life. Eastern and non-Christian “religious” have protected themselves with the help of authority, laws, traditions, and, in some instances, fundamentalism. Religious life of the Western tradition is flooded with evils that surround it: secularism, horizontalism, individualism, and permissiveness. Religious life is thus being suffocated by the very evils from which it is supposed to save not only itself but the world as well.

Present Leadership Style

In the face of these forces, leadership in religious life has largely failed to fulfill its prophetic and pastoral roles by making only innocuous statements, after which it is “business as usual” in the ranks. Absolutely nothing follows till the next innocuous pronouncement. Thus, many third-world religious, who are culturally much more authority-dependent than their Western counterparts, now have to try to be faithful in an authority vacuum.

Leadership paralysis is aggravated by the fact that the modern superior is often an elected one. The ballot directly or indirectly produces leadership according to the voters and their expectations. As seen above, too many voters joined religious life for status and security. Today there are as many private agendas as there are voters. These voters will ensure that the superiors will be past masters at compromise, who will accommodate every private interest. The superiors elected thus will on no account insist on group fidelity to the spirit of the congregation nor demand the self-forgetfulness that the nature of religious life requires. Superiors who do will not be reelected. Hence superiors avoid this public humiliation by putting up buildings and expanding apostolic commitments. They are glad to be blissfully unaware of what is happening at the roots.

It is known today that many third-world nations are culturally unable to handle Western democracy. In spite of that, religious in the third world are expected to rise above cultural barriers and vote for their superior. Western democracy is not the only way in which humans involve themselves and make group decisions for their common good.

Superiors now belong to a generation which follows the path of least resistance, namely, the path of convenience, the first step of which is the avoidance of all that is unpleasant. Confrontation and correction of individual members is unpleasant, embarrassing, and painful and is therefore carefully avoided. Also superiors are aware that frequently their correction will be ignored and erring individuals will refuse to change. These, however, are situations foreseen in the Gospels and church law, and measures to be taken are prescribed. In the situation we are looking at, the superiors may not themselves believe in those measures. People all around choose “the broad highway to hell” rather than “the narrow path” of growth in fidelity.

A Trend and Subsidiarity

Aiding and abetting today's leadership style is the widespread trend of looking and speaking only about what is positive. Thus, all negatives (such as, in religious life, unfaithfulness) are evaded at various evaluations. For any human group that wishes to survive, what ultimately matters is not what is positive or negative, but rather what accomplishes or prevents the attainment of its goals. Superiors who take precautions to avoid what is negative seem to imitate monkeys who “see no negatives, hear no negatives, and speak no negatives.” Thus they fail to keep before them the Leader whose representatives they are and who did not hesitate to speak of “this evil and adulterous generation.” Leaders who religiously avoid facing what is negative among their members are likely to be the first to attend to the negatives when their laptop fails, their cell phone needs recharging, or their dog needs worming.

In this situation the valuable principle of subsidiarity is much abused in our day. The principle means that the lower levels of authority are encouraged and facilitated to perform to the maximum within their ambit. The principle itself, however, demands that higher levels of authority readily step in when lower levels fail in their one and only duty, namely, ensuring faithfulness to the way of life of the particular congregation.

Usually only the first half of the principle is followed today, which amounts to passing the buck. Even when it comes to items vital to religious life, the general chapter leaves it to the superior general and his council, the superior general to the provincial, the provincial to the local superior, and the local superior to the individual. The result usually is that the matter is thrown overboard—“leaving it to the individual” being a euphemism today for “forget about it.” No structure of religious life—nor religious life itself—will survive if it does not learn to evaluate all things with the measure given by the Lord: “By their fruits you will know them.”

Despite all the above, religious life is not without hope. As a radical way of faith, religious life is called at this juncture to be also a community of radical hope, with its only hope in God and in what he will do.

Personal Reflection Questions

1. Have I found that my motivations for ;my religious vocation have changed or been purified over the years since entrance?
2. How do I try to be a help in clalrifying another;s vocation decision?

Group Discussion Propositions

1. In an affluent country, we expect that vocations to religious life will be small in number.
2. In developing countries, vocations to priesthood and religious life have a prestige and security factor that clouds the motivation of candidates and makes discernment more difficult.

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Truth: Religious Simplicity Revisited

by Robert P. Maloney CM

From the 65.1 issue of Review for Religious

Everyone needs a guiding star, but the stars in the sky are countless. Saints have chosen different ones. Jerome focused on the Scriptures: “Love the Holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you.” Francis of Assisi fixed on God's love in the gifts of creation and the crucified Lord, praising God in Brother Sun and Sister Moon and uniting himself with suffering humanity. Vincent de Paul, especially as he grew older, chose simplicity, or truthfulness, as the star to guide him to know what to say and do. “It is the virtue I love most,” he wrote to a priest-friend, François de Coudray. “It is my gospel,” he told the Daughters of Charity, the community he founded with Louise de Marillac.

There are many contemporary ways of describing simplicity: authenticity, integrity, genuineness, realness, passion for the truth. In the two sections that follow, I will focus first on simplicity as “being in the truth” with God, with oneself, with others, and with the created universe surrounding us. Then I will discuss combining the simplicity of the dove with the prudence of the serpent.

Simplicity as “Being in the Truth”

There is a wonderful freedom in those who live simply. They project joy and peaceful confidence. One of the most popular hymns in the English-speaking world, Joseph Brackett's “Simple Gifts,” began proclaiming in 1848: “'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free.” Simplicity involves making God our ultimate concern, identifying our will with what God is asking. Vincent de Paul remarked rather wryly to Louise de Marillac: “How easy it is to become a saint. The only thing necessary is to do the will of God in everything.”

For simple persons the kingdom of God becomes the focal point of their life, the ideal that integrates all that they are and do. Of course, growth in single-mindedness before God, in purity of intention, is a lifelong process. Our sinfulness continually interrupts our unity with God's purposes. Limited objectives like self-promotion easily distract us from our single-minded pursuit of God's kingdom; even worse, they may substitute for it. In our sinful condition, we are never able to pull our lives together into a perfect opus, finished once and for all. Even those who seem to have done so fall often, sometimes badly. Our final integrity comes only from God's forgiving, healing love. It is a gift.

In commenting on the simplicity and purity of intention that he had witnessed in the Shaker tradition, Thomas Merton once wrote, “The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” That sentence is surely worth meditating on. In religious life, many helps have been offered for being in the truth with God: the daily Eucharist, daily mental prayer, and daily examination of conscience are among the most prominent.

Human beings are social beings. Human relationships are not just an add-on. They make us who we are, forming us gradually. Having friends, falling in love, building a family, joining a community, being part of a nation, an institution, a movement—all these forms of union with others are possible only if there is truth-filled communication. In fact, the English word truth is related etymologically to trust, faithfulness, covenant. Older English-speaking readers may recall the now archaic marriage promise: “I plight unto thee my troth,” which we might translate today as: “I pledge to you my truth (my word, my trust, my commitment).” In fact, we still speak of a promise to marry as “betrothal.”

In truthful relationships with others, simplicity has its most obvious meaning: honesty. Trust in the word of another is the condition for life together, for friendship, marriage, community, business ventures, and all sorts of other relationships. Lies bring about the disintegration of communities, the fracture of marriages, the downfall of governments. Lies are not just verbal; they may be present in actions. Marriages collapse through infidelity. Families break down through covert, competing interests. Friendships unravel through secret betrayal. Being in the truth keeps people together; falsehood tears us apart. To put it tersely, simplicity unites; duplicity divides.

Necessary as it is, speaking the truth with consistency in religious life is difficult. We are tempted to blur the truth for our own convenience or to avoid being embarrassed. It is difficult to be enduringly true to our word when circumstances change. In the present our statements are true or false right then and there, but, when we make a commitment for the future, it is true only if we keep it true. Truth is fidelity. It is especially in this sense that Jesus is true to us. He promises to be, and is, with us always, even to the end. We too are called to be true in this way—to vows, to friendships, and to our commitments to serve.

Thomas Merton once wrote: “We make ourselves real by telling the truth.” The truth at the core of each human person strives to emerge. When we express the truth, we construct and reveal our true self. When we distort the truth, we damage not just our relationship with others, but the center of our own being too. Being in the truth with our own self is, of course, vitally related to being in the truth with God and being in the truth with others. But our own truth is nevertheless distinctive. There is a distinctive giftedness, a personal vocation from God, that we may not renounce, but must treasure.

Simplicity calls us to integrity, authenticity. But, as we journey in quest of personal wholeness, most of us experience our own fracturedness. We sense inner contradictions, a broken center, cracks in our personality; sometimes we fall apart. Philosophy, psychology, and sociology have described polarities that people sense within themselves: body/mind, feeling/thinking, heart/ head, unconscious/conscious.

Being true to oneself is not as easy as it might seem. Accurate self-knowledge is rare, as Robert Burns eloquently noted: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad frae mony a blunder free us, / An' foolish notion: / What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, / An' ev'n devotion!”

Knowing oneself accurately is essential in life. The philosopher Wittgenstein observed: “You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.”

Regular confession and the relationship we call “spiritual direction” are very important means toward self-knowledge. A perceptive confessor or spiritual guide can be a mirror, reflecting back to us what we are not able to see on our own. Speaking the truth is especially important in such relationships. We choose a “soul friend” so that, with his or her help, we may grow in the Lord's life and in discerning those things which promote God's kingdom. It is imperative, therefore, that this relationship be characterized by free self-disclosure and by the avoidance of “hidden corners” in our lives. We need others to echo back to us what is happening or not happening on our journey toward the Lord. The quality of spiritual guidance will depend largely upon the simplicity with which we disclose ourselves.

Philosophers and theologians have recognized from the earliest times that human existence is inseparable from matter. We are not pure spirit, but have bodies. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty reminds us: “I am my body.” We are also related to and dependent on the earth. In a certain sense, as Genesis suggests in the creation story, we come from the earth. Food, water, air, sunshine, and other elements are nutrients of our human existence.

Consequently, if we are to be in truth with God as the Creator, with ourselves as incomplete beings, and with others, we must also be in truth with the created universe that is our home. In other words, being fully human involves caring for the earth. In broader terms it means caring for the surrounding universe, whose proportions are staggering and even incomprehensible to us.

We do not yet have a comprehensive ecological theology, but some of its foundation stones are quite visible and have been set for centuries in Christian tradition: • the presence of God in all creation; • the goodness of all that God has made; • God's providence in accompanying history and ongoing creation; • the gratitude, wonder, contemplation, and care for God's gifts that people have as a response to God's gifts.

Those who live close to the land often see its importance more vividly than others. When in 1851 the president of the United States , Franklin Pierce, proposed to buy two million acres of land from the Indian tribes around Puget Sound in the present state of Washington , Chief Seattle (after whom the state's principal city is named) reacted. His famous reflections from the 1850s, about which some historians raise doubts, are nevertheless a most eloquent environmental statement:

Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist on the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experiences of my people. . . . We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and man—all belong to the same family. . . .

We will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. . . . You must teach your children that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

These words were prophetic. Polluted rivers, contaminated air, and depleted forests rank high among the problems of modern society. In this matter, as in many others, immediate gratification often wins out over long-range goals. But when the environment is neglected, society pays a heavy price, with the poor suffering most. In many places where religious missionaries serve, ecological deterioration adds to the crushing burdens of the neediest of the needy.

The Simplicity of the Dove and the Prudence of the Serpent

Even for those with a bright guiding star, Christian living is filled with paradoxes: initiative/obedience, flexibility/stability, listening/advising, animating/directing, creativity/humility, trusting/planning, serving/governing, simplicity/prudence. Matthew's Gospel recognizes that the simplicity of the dove must cohabit, in the same person, with the prudence of the serpent. And in life people's common sense and prudence quickly teach them that they cannot simply speak the unabashed truth at all times. Experience teaches us that virtues like truthfulness, charity, and respect for the privacy and good name of others at times “compete” with one another. In moments of apparent conflict, prudence enables us to balance and blend such competing virtues.

Over the centuries moral theologians have written volumes on the dilemmas that arise in the context of truth-telling. Below I simply offer a few reflections on three of the most common moral dilemmas that religious and all those committed to truth-telling face.

Truth derives from God. It is related to beauty. But the expression of “truths” can sometimes be ugly, cold, arrogant, and angry. Declarations like “I'm just telling you the truth!” can be a facile excuse for harsh words or an escape valve for pent-up rage. In the Christian tradition truth and love are inseparable. Growing in love involves penetrating to the deep truth of the beloved, coming to understand others not just on the surface but deep down. Likewise, growing in truth involves moving toward deeper communion, overcoming differences, “looking for the larger truth that embraces my little truth and that of the other,” as Timothy Radcliffe reminds us. There is a delicate interplay between mind and heart in the search for truth. For those with a highly intellectual formation, Pascal's corrective can be helpful: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince expresses the same conviction: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The problem is that we sometimes use “the truth” to massacre others. Under the pretext of being sincere, we destroy truth with “the truth.” In a striking essay, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was himself a martyr for the truth, wrote as follows:

If it is detached from life and from its reference to the concrete other person, if “the truth is told” without taking into account to whom it is addressed, then this truth has only the appearance of truth, but it lacks its essential character.

It is only the cynic who claims “to speak the truth” at all times and in all places to all people in the same way, but who, in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth. He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but, in fact, he is destroying the living truth between persons. He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human weakness which “cannot bear the truth.”

We must learn to speak the truth while taking other truths into account: the dignity of other persons, their human weakness and ours as well, the love that must characterize all Christian relationships. Our statement of a truth must blend with these other truths. Speaking the truth is therefore a delicate art rather than a blunt instrument.

Very early in life we learn that it is sometimes harmful to tell the truth. Our parents teach us as children that some personal and family matters are private; others have no right to know about them. As we grow up, friends begin to entrust secrets to us. As problems arise in our own lives, we ourselves sense the need to talk with someone, but only on the condition that what we say is kept utterly confidential. These universal human experiences have given rise to a whole body of ethical and legal literature concerning truth-telling, secrecy, and confidentiality. Confessors and spiritual directors, doctors and nurses, psychiatrists and counselors, lawyers, secretaries, journalists, and many others are bound, in varying circumstances and within various limits, to professional secrecy.

Paradoxically, we have a moral obligation to tell the truth, but we sometimes have a moral obligation not to tell the truth. This is often the case in religious life, where others frequently entrust us with matters of conscience and where there are also many “family matters” that are private and should remain within the community. So how does one protect private, even “sacred” truths?

Silence, of course, is often the most effective method. In some cases, in the face of inappropriate inquiries, we may be able to communicate, with a combination of gentleness and firmness, the delicacy of our situation: “I am sorry, I am not really free to talk about that. I hope you understand.” Sometimes, too, with a little bit of ingenuity, we may say something that some or all recognize as good-humoredly evasive.

But for centuries philosophers and theologians have pointed out that there are situations where silence or evasion simply make matters worse and where the right course seems to be to dissemble the truth. To resolve such moral dilemmas, Thomists, defining moral truth as correspondence between what we think and what we say, used the “broad mental reservation.” Others, defining truth in relational terms (communication of what is in one's mind to someone who has a right to know), permitted “false speech” when utterly necessary to put off those who have no right to know. Neither theory is ideal. Each, in fact, has notable weaknesses. But both recognize that at times there is a moral obligation to “protect” the truth and to put off importunate, inappropriate inquiries, even by misleading the inquirer.

In the end, strange though it may seem, one must “learn” to tell the truth. Each word has its own place, its own time, its own audience. Much depends on who is calling me to speak and what entitles me to speak. One of the most poignant, and wise, lines in American literature is what Hester Prynne says to her daughter, Pearl , in The Scarlet Letter (chapter 22): “Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl . We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”

Statements involve a relationship with the person being addressed and at times also with third parties. The truth-teller respects those relationships and maintains them. The nosey inquirer seeks to violate truth and intrude on relationships that truth fosters carefully. It is important to learn how to put such inquirers off, and to put them off well.

Truths not only have their time, their place, and their proper audience; they have their own particular pedagogy. Certain truths have their “moment” in history. Victor Hugo once pointed out that, when an idea's time has come, not even armies can resist it. But, until that time, “new” truths enter most minds and hearts slowly. As mothers and fathers instinctively know, the wise teacher must often wait for the right moment and the right place. I once gave a rather pacifist-sounding conference to a group of college students, who loved it. A few days later I gave the same conference to a parish group, which hated it. The time and place were almost the same, but I learned rather painfully that a new audience often requires a new pedagogy.

How to present the truth is the key question. This question becomes all the more important as we grow in consciousness that our goal in speaking is not merely the transmission of data but communication and communion in the truth. From that perspective pedagogy is not just a clever means of packaging a “truth” well; rather, it is an integral part of communicating a truth to the other. Emily Dickinson puts it this way: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant . . . The Truth must dazzle gradually.”

This lesson is especially important for teachers who think they have done their job when they have lectured for an hour, citing all the facts and uttering all the “truths.” But they must ask themselves whether they have communicated truth or simply uttered it in front of an inattentive audience. Method is important. Teachers must often reflect not only on the content they wish to communicate, but also on the means for communicating it. The same is true of parents, friends, counselors, and others who must sometimes communicate truths which they know hearers will find it hard to accept.

The Greek word for truth, alêtheia , means “uncovering.” Speaking the truth opens us out. What lies within us comes forth. In speaking truthfully we disclose what otherwise remains hidden in our depths. In Greek mythology the goddess of truth puts two pathways before Parmenides: one of uncovering and one of hiding. It is only by “uncovering” that one's true self emerges. The New Testament states this very clearly: “Put on a new self, created in God's image, whose justice and holiness is born of truth” (Ep 4:21).

Prayer Reflection

Ponder the words of the hymn (perhaps sing it to yourself):

Simple Gifts

Shaker Hymn Written by Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, Jr., in 1848

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Group Discussion

Share situations where you have found that you are compromised in telling the truth.

What kind of principles did you use in the situation for your way of acting?

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Sharing God the Ignatian Way

by David L. Fleming S.J.

From the 65.1 issue of Review for Religious

In speaking about God, we each have our own way of trying to express our experience. Christian, non-Christian, Eastern, Western approaches differ and yet often point in directions that move in similar ways towards the same goal—a union or an identifying with God.

In this reflection, we are trying to share among ourselves the richness of our experience of God as we have received help from Ignatius Loyola, particularly guided by the experiences of the Spiritual Exercises. There is no doubt that Ignatius has been able to enter us into an experience of God that has some specific characteristics that mark what is now identified as Ignatian spirituality. We need to remember that no Christian spirituality is so unique in its characteristics that we do not find it rooted in the Gospels. But characteristics special to a particular spirituality such as Ignatian include the kind of emphasis given to certain aspects or areas, the interconnections of elements, and the vision and imagery that become the vehicle moving this particular spirituality. Let us review some of these characteristics of Ignatian spirituality from our experience.

We experience a God of gifts. The Ignatian Principle and Foundation is not presenting just a picturing of a creator God. Ignatius provides a fuller picture. In creating, God has chosen us and gifts us that we might choose God through the means of the gifts that are meant to help us to know and to love God. This God has created a human world of gifts—all provided for us that we might come to know and love God the better. Of course, with so many gifts provided, we find it necessary to make choices, even in terms of developing and using the personal gifts of talents and abilities that God has given to each one of us. Ignatius brings home to us that life is choice, and our choosing is always directed towards God. What does it mean for us to choose God in return? Do we share the God that gifts us with this responsibility?

We experience that God is always trying to speak, to communicate with us, through his gifts. As a lover, God does not just speak words to us, even in Scripture. God acts, and his deeds are his expressions of love for us. Ignatius helps us to make the world transparent so that God and God's love shines through the whole of creation. God is not a silent God. For Ignatius, God is always a God in conversation. Are we people who are attentive to God's communicating with us? Do we share with others our experience of this kind of an intimate God?

We experience God as One who is active and involved with his world—a busy God. Ignatius does not literally understand the six days of creation with God being very active on each of six days and then on the seventh day resting. So that, for many people, God stayed that way—resting—ever since! No, for Ignatius, the seven days of creation are all part of God's presence to us. It is all part of God's Now. When Jesus says, “My Father works, and I work,” Ignatius believes him. The dynamic of creation continues and God works. This God, ever active and working with us and with his world—is this the God we share?

We experience God in Jesus inviting us to be with him in his work identified as the coming of the kingdom or the reign of God. In the Pauline mysterious image of the pleroma we know that God intends a certain fullness or completion to his creation, and we human beings—the ones he loves—are called to play our part within this movement. Does our praying “Thy kingdom come” inspire us in our response to God's invitation to work with God so that the kingdom shines out through our dealings and activities in our ordinary world? Is our working with God in the vineyard of the kingdom the God we share?

We experience a God who waits upon our response to this invitation. Just as God waits upon Mary for her response to God's invitation to allow herself to be his mother, so God waits upon each one of us in a similar way to allow ourselves to bring God's life to the world in which we live. Like Mary, we are to have a growing intimacy with Jesus, and because of his risen life Jesus desires an intimacy that knows no boundaries. Do we share a God who is patient, long-suffering, who waits, for our hesitant and often waffling response? Do we share a God who delights in intimacy with us?

We experience our living and working with God. Working does not take us away from our God since God is a busy God, and, being busy, we are right alongside him. Praying, too, flows naturally in a relationship with a God who converses in so many ways, if we but learn to listen—as when we take time to pray. And so Ignatius shares with us a union with God in the contemplative action of praying and working. There is a wholeness—a unity—in our life that does not take us away from God. Do we live, like Jesus, as contemplatives in action? Is this the God we share?

If, in Ignatian spirituality, these are some of the ways we experience God and are moved to share God with others, we need to observe next how this experience flows into how we act. For Ignatian spirituality is above all caught up in a “way of proceeding.” Some spiritualities identify themselves with a certain horarium—a daily order of set prayers at certain time, such as the Liturgy of the Hours, one practice that marks a monastic approach to life. Some spiritualities revolve around certain devotional practices, whether so many rosaries prayed within a day, so many set prayers read or recited, perhaps so many hours spent before the Blessed Sacrament. A “way of proceeding” in Ignatian spirituality does not demand any of these devotional obligations, but it does leave a person free to observe any one of them or any combination of them. Just as the text of the Spiritual Exercises remains free of particular devotional practices, so Ignatian spirituality imposes no artificial boundaries: prayer times, prayer styles, amount of prayer, particular devotional practices, certain life styles, or specific jobs or responsibilities. Ignatian spirituality is an adaptable “way of proceeding” in our developing a relationship with God, with others, and with our world.

From his experience of God, Ignatius wrote the texts of both the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. We find that both these texts are “to be used”; they provide us with a way of proceeding. They are written for the purpose of the practice they generate. Both are written, not just as a rule of life or just a description of a good life, but as an invitation to experience what Ignatius calls in the Two Standards prayer exercise “the true life.” Jesus represents the true life—a life lived in relation with God, with our fellow human beings, with our world.

The practical man Ignatius realized how his own life experiences shaped by the Gospels and God's grace helped give form to this true life, to his following of Jesus. In his working with others, he was made aware that their personal history provided a variety of experiences that are shaped by God's grace into the true life, into their being “other Christs.” As a result, Ignatius structures the Exercises so that the focus is always on the one who is making the retreat. The content of the retreat is not found in the book, but in the experiences of the retreatant brought into the light of the gospel and given over to being shaped into Christ's apostle by God's grace. Through the way of proceeding present in the Exercises, a retreatant comes to experience a new relationship with Jesus and gradually becomes free enough to internalize the rules for discernment that guide a life ever growing in intimacy with Jesus. The daily examen of where God is present or absent in our life today and the process of discerning what action or decision draws us closer to God (makes us more Christlike) are integral parts of an Ignatian way of proceeding. The gift of Ignatius has been his dynamic sense of “being formed in Christ.” It includes (1) a process that is never ending, (2) a process that is affected by historical and cultural circumstances, and (3) a process that necessarily envelops all the experiences which we call our own. And so the Ignatian way of proceeding captures for every age and for people of all types the continuing formation necessary for a growing intimacy or familiarity with God.

Personal Reflection / Group Sharing

For your own reflection time and for your interpersonal discussion, you might want to recall how you do experience God in a way that you identify as Ignatian or coming from your understanding of your own spirituality. You might question what is your experience of an intimacy or familiarity with God. You might ask yourself whether you have a "way of prodeeding in your life with God.

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