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JUIiV, 1894. PUBLISHED BY THE STUDENTS OF PENNSYLVANIA (GETTYSBURG) COEEEGE. "STAH ANH SKHTINKI." Office, Gottynl)urj.-, Pa. ADVERTISEMENTS. Fraternity Jewelry ICHQICLFAMILYGROCERIES J J | Sugars, Coffes, Teas, Dried Fruit, Syrups, OF EVERY DESCRIPTION. X X -•* -K- *s- A FEW SUGGESTIONS: fBADGES, o i | SCARF PINS. HlfiY^ SLEEVE BUTTONS, a a/ I LAPEL BUTTONS. l_RINGS. fCHARMS, | FOB CHAINS, i COURT PLASTER CASES MOUSTACHE COMBS ^LOCKETS. fSOUVENIR SPOONS, I " MATCH BOXES. STAMP BOXES, SCENT BOXES, BOOK MARKS. I " GARTERS. Factory 611 & 6I3 S. ;'—3) Simons Bra. &. Co, Street / Salesrooms, 616 & 618 Chestnut St , Phila. I9 Maiden Lane, New York. 96 State St., Chicago. -r"\ §>~a No. 3 MAIN STREET, GETTYSBURG, PA. Out new Enameled Aristo Pot traits are equal to Photos made anywhere, and at any price. Dried'Fruit, Flour, Butter, Eggs, Potatoes, Apples; all of the best quality. Persons in need of anything in the above line, can be accommodated at my store at the very lowest cash price. Give me a call and be convinced of the fact. D/\VlD TROXEL, York St., Gettysburg. SPECIAL TO STUDEBTS, Hfifig vbml®rm®. Merokaaat Tailor, (Below Eagle Hctel) GETTYSBURG. pA (Rear of Washington House, Opposite W. M. TUB BATTLEFIELD' (Publishers, (Booksellers and -^A SPEGIALTY,*- Stahoners, — - 335 MARKET ST., HARRISBURG,PA. I DAVID McCLEARY. Prop. ADVERTISEMENTS. Colombia' f the World, graceful, light, and strong, this product of the oldest bicycle establishment in America still retains its place at the head. Always ■well up to the times or a little in advance, its well-deserved and ever increasing popularity is a source of , pride and gratification to its makers. To ride a bicycle and not to ride a Columbia is to fall short cf the fullest enjoyment of a noble sport. A beautiful illustrated catalogue free at any Columbia agency, or mailed for two two-cent stamps. 4 BALTIMORE ro STREET. Samuel Faber, Fine Cigars and Smokers' A rticles, CHAMBERSBTJRG ST., GETTYSBURG. L M. BUEHLER, SUCCESSOR TO A. D BUEHLER & CO., Headquarters for STATIONERT AND BLANK BOOKS, THE CHARLES H. ELLIOTT CO., 910, 912 Filbert St., 108 South 13th St J1 Commencement, Visiting Cards, Class Day, Address Dies, Society and Monogram, Wedding Invitations, Coats of Anns, College Catalogues, Class Awards, Diplomas, Exterior and Interior Views, and Groups in half-tone, wood, Photo Type or Steel. aptstoutn JH& *mt *W *NT jiW N. W. Corner Public Square, m -autubg iM HAGERSTOWN, Maryland. LOWEST CASH PRICES. WE will endeavor to give satisfaction In the future as we have done In the past. Special rates to students. Give us a trial. J. E. SCHINDEL, Proprietor. W. G. Brnbakor, College Agent. Ssars. HOLLY Stationery!Priatintt MANUFACTURERS AND DEALERS IK SCHOOL SUPPLIES A SPECIALTY-The Company has excellent facilities for issuing Periodicals, Catalogues, Invitations, Announcements, Letter Heads, Thesis and Examination Tapir and all College work. Old Books and Magazines re-bound. A full line of School Sup-plies kept in stock. Agents wanted. All work guaranteed. ADVERTISEMENTS. iutltewilk jfrtmimw. •*? Here are some patrons of the school: Rev. Dr. Valentine, Rev. Dr. McKnight, Rev. Dr. Scholl, Rev. Dr. I^illy, Rev. Dr. Henninghansen, Rev. Dr. Holloway, Rev. Dr. Bntler, Rev. Dr. Earnest, Rev. Dr. Repass, Rev. Dr. Peschan, Rev. Dr. Seip, Rev. Spieker, Rev. Dr. Enders, Rev. Dr. L. G. Miller, Rev. Dr. Bernheim, Rev. Dr. Fox, Rev. Dr. Sadtler, Rev. Dr. Morris. Send for Catalogue. AscMrress,, ffiew. 5, ^~ BOOTS« SHOES. G55=Satisfaction Guaranteed.i^) No. 6 S. Baltimore Street, GETTYSBURG. PA. ADVERTISEMENTS. 0:'EC BW Iiuporters and Jobbers of «1DRUGS,I» Nos. 16 and 18 W. German Street, BALTIMORE, Offer to the trade their large and well-selected stock of Make a specialty to have on hand everything required by Pharmacists. A complete stock can at any time be selected or wants supplied. ALONZO L, THOMSEN,^ EAOE, WINDEK, SHAItP AND LEADENHALL STS., P. O. Box 557, Baltimore, Md. I beg to call to the attention of the Trade that I have re-cently added to my Plant a complete set of Drug Milling Ma-chinery of the most Improved pattern. GEORGE SMGLES, Successor to J. W. Eicholtz & Co., DEALER IN No. 127 Chambersburg St., GETTYSBURG, PA. JOHN E. PITZER, MEMBER POST 9, G. A. R. [C^SHI9, —DEALER IN— Hats, Shirts, Shoes, Ties, Umbrellas, Gloves, Satchels, Hose, (pocket ^ooks, Trunks, Telescopes, Rubbers, Etc., Etc. AMOS ECKERT. W HOTEL, Gettysfofcifa, Pa. J0HI2 E, HIMHE2, PRorft THIS Hotel is situated on Main street, one square from I', and II. and W. M. R. K. Depots and within one-half minute's walk of the Diamond. Every room is heated, and lighted by electricity. Parlors on first and second floors. Bath and Toilet rooms on second floor, gratis to guests. Hates $1 50 to $2.50 per day. Booms without Hoard 50 cents and upward according to location. Excellent accommo-dations for 250 people. Electric cars stop at the door eveiy half hour. Livery Connected, with first-class Teams, and Battle-field Guides at Low Rates. Dinner with Drive over the — attle-field $1.: 5. Commencement Number. The College Mefcufy. VOL. II. GETTYSBURG, PA., JULY, 1894. No. 5. THE COLLEGE MEftCUfiY, Published each month during the college year by the Students of Pennsylvania (Gettysburg) College. STAFF. Editor : WALDO D. MAYNARD, '95. Associate Editors : SYLVESTER C. BERGER. '95. WILLIAM A. KUMP. '95. J. EDWARD BYERS, '95. GRAYSON Z. STUP, '96 WILMER A. HARTMAN/95. HORACE M. WITMAN.'gs. ROSCOE C. WRIGHT, '95 Alumni Association Editor: REV. n. FRANK GARLAND, A. M , Baltimore, Md. Business Manager: MORITZ G. L. RIETZ, '95. Assistant Business Manager: HENRY E. CLARE, '95. m*.,,™, fOne volume (ten months). . . . $l.ro IEKMS-\Slngle copies : . . . .15 Payable in advance. All Students are requested to hand us matter for publication. The Alumni and ex-members of the College will favor us by sending information concerning their whereabouts or any items they may think would be interesting for publication. All subscriptions and business matters should be addressed to the business manager. Matter intended for publication should be addressed to the Editor Address, THE COLLEGE MERCUKY, Gettysburg, Pa. CONTENTS. ABSTRACT OF BACCALAUREATE SERMON, - - - - 85 ABSTRACT OF Y. M. C. A. ADDRESS, 87 CLASS DAY PROGRAMME, - - - - - - - - 89 CLASS PROPHECY, 89 SCIENTIFIC Srmrr, - - - - 92 IN THE CONFLICT, - - 94 IVY POEM, 9s LOCAL GOVERNMENT, - -96 JUNIOR ORATORICAL CONTEST. - 98 OUR MENTAL LIVES, - - - - 9S ROLL OF HONOR, 100 COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT PROGRAMME, - - - - 100 CANDIDATES FOR DEGREES, --- 100 COMMENCEMENT NOTES AND COLLEGE LOCALS, - - - 101 ALUMNI, 103 TENNIS, 104 SEMINARY NOTES, - - - 105 ABSTRACT OE PEES. MoKNIGHT'S BACCALAUREATE SERMON, Matt., 17:14 : "Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Ellas." Peter was one of the three disciples who were permitted to be with Christ on the Mount of his transfiguration. The glories of that scene which was like a sublime coronation hour dazzled and entranced him. He was awe-struck—dazed by the strange magnifi-cence. It was to him a moment of supreme privilege, and the very place where he en-joyed it was converted into sacred ground. IvOngiug to remain and to continue the vision, and experience he uttered the request: "Mas-ter, let us build and stay here, let us make a resting-place of this mount of vision, and not go down again to the valleys of common ex-perience where toil and tears and weariness and suffering await both thee and us.'' It was a natural request which he had thus expressed, but, for his own good and that of the great and needy world to serve and help which he was being prepared by that very vis-ion, it conld not be granted. Instead, Jesus led him and his fellow-disciples down the slopes of the mountain at whose base a stricken boy and his heart-broken parent awaited them, and where a miracle of mercy and deliverance was to be wrought. By his act, therefore, He taught Peter and teaches us that, while privi-lege is good, duty is better; that the valleys of waiting and watching, of toil and sacrifice are to be preferred to the summits of ease and re-ceptivity and enjoyment; that privilege, the highest and most transporting, serves its true purpose only when it acts and re-acts upon daily duty and ordinary life, transfiguring all that we are and do. No doubt, my young friends, you are able 86 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. to sympathize with Peter this morning, and are ready to breathe his prayer: "Let us j stay.'' You have been on a mount of special i privilege, enjoying what is permitted to but few. The years of liberalizing study you have spent here have afforded you opportunities of growth and enrichment beyond the possibility of exact calculation. And now that they have ended, and you are to go out from us and be, in the old sense, of us no more, there must be ' a quickening of 3'our appreciation of what you have enjoyed. As others crowd you out of the places you have held, and forward to the scenes of stern and responsible action, you may feel like drawing back and pleading: "Let us stay." But believe me when, speak-ing to you in the name of those who have been . your instructors and friends, I say to you, in these parting words, it is better for you to go. God himself commands you away to duty, and ' in the service to which he appoints you. Your { gains will be greater and richer than they can be on any heights of mere receptivity and ease. Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." This truth so hard to ap-prehend and appreciate in advance, we wish to emphasize and illustrate for your encourage-ment and guidance as you now face outward towards your respective spheres of experience and activity. The superiority of service over privilege or of productive energy over mere receptivity was then shown in the discussion of the following points : i. In its relation to the right and full development of God-given powers, and fa-cilities. 2. In its relation to character. 3. As the condition of all true greatness. 4. As the source of true blessedness. After discuss-ing these points, the Doctor addressed the class as follows: "My young friends of the class of '94: We have sought thus, in a practical way, to impress you with the dignity and im-portance of earnest and unselfish work. It is more needful than any circumstances or special privileges for the best and fullest development of your powers and faculties. It bears a vital relation to your character, calling.for the^exer-cise of those gifts and graces which are es-sential to a worthy manhood and womanhood. It must form the basis of all true greatness you can ever achieve, and condition the enthrone-ment you would gain in the esteem and confi-dence and love of your fellow men. It is the real source of the blessedness which sweetens life and gives foretastes of "the joy that is un-speakable and full of glory." We have sought to impress you with the truth that in entering on an earthly, you are in reality entering on an eternal career, and to set before you aims which belong equally to the life that now is and to that which is to come. Let not the gains or pleasures of time obscure and hide your better portion. Let not the engagements of earth so absorb your attention that you shall forget the claims of heaven, or your cares so overshadow you that the light of a better world cannot reach you. Let yours be the holy am-bition which filled the heart of David and con-trolled his aims and actions—"to serve your generation according to the will of God." Let the thought, not of ease or pleasure, or posi-tion, or gain, but of usefulness determine your occupation or profession in life, and control you in it. Not what you do, but the spirit in which you do it shall fix the actual and abid-ing results of your living and working. This spirit—the spirit of all right action—has been forcefully indicated in the device and motto on the seal of a well-known Missionary So-ciety. The device is an ox standing between a plough and an altar, and the motto is: "Ready for either." Readiness for service or sacrifice, or for both! What noble spirit can control a human life, or give impulse to human activity! God himself has approved this ideal, and marshalled all the forces and agencies of the universe to it. It makes the music of the spheres, and gives harmony and majesty to the ceaseless song before His throne. Serve or suffer in the spirit of that holy enthusiasm which made Christ's mission to Him "more than his meat and his drink," and, whatever may be your allotted sphere, humble or high, THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 87 it will be found at last that you have neither lived nor labored in vain. Your glory and joy will be, not that you have possessed talents and had high and peculiar privileges, but that you have used them aright. Let this spirit of service be carried into the commonest of duties and minutest details of the spheres you ma)- fill, for, if you reach for the stars, and forget the flowers that bloom at your feet, you will miss much, perhaps all. He, who waits for great occasions tq display his talents and prove his serviceableness, neg-lects the real conditions of success, and his plans are likely to come to naught. Little tilings, common duties, ordinary occasions con-stitute the larger portion of every life, and he who despises these, misses the choicest oppor-tunities for filling his mission and serving the world. The world's greatest servants and most honored chieftains have been wiser and nobler. In business, in literature, in art or in war, they have been distinguished for their conscientious attention to details. Carry a similar spirit of fidelity into all that you do. Serve in everything, if you would reach the only distinction that men will lastingly recog-nize and God eternally approve. "He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much, and he that is unjust in the least is un-just also in much." Fidelity to all your tal-ents and opportunities, whether they be few or many, great or small, only can and surely will gain for you the plaudits of the skies—the ulti-mate welcome: "Well done, good and faith-ful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord Thou has been faithful over a few things. I will make thee, ruler over many." ABSTRACT OF Y. M. C, A. ADDRESS BY REV. FISCHER, OK EASTON. I .Tollll -2 : l(i Solomon says "the glory of young men is their strength" and we are born with an in-stinctive admiration for ph\'sical power. It was the primary glory of the race. The first picture the live boy hangs upon the walls of his room are not those of apostles and martyrs but of athletes and heroes, so in the world's pic-ture gallery, we find Hercules, Theseus, Sam-son and David. Although the days of giants and Olympian games are past, time will never destroy man's admiration for strong muscle and mighty sinews. The popular idol to-day is the pitcher of the champion nine, the rusher of the winning foot ball team, the bowler of the eleven that holds the cup, or the stroke oar of the successful crew. But Christianity has lifted and proposes still more to lift these things to a higher plane. She recognizes that physical culture is conducive to mental health. Hence she has equipped her gymnasium with every apparatus to accomplish this purpose as a means to an end. She desires to subordinate the material to the mental. Brain not brawn tells in this age. The prize-fighter is an out-law and plies his business in barns and unfre-quented places. "There is nothing great in the world but man. There is nothing great in man but mind." Three elements are in the strength referred to in this message: 1. That zvhich character-izes the period of life here addressed '' Young men," those who occupy the golden mean be-tween childlike weakness and the period of wakening manhood. "Fathets": There is a strength peculiar to young men to which is at-tached a corresponding responsibility. This is the period of life never affected by drought. The channels of vigor run bank-full with the greatest force of life. The growth of a year is soon accomplished. Little growth is made in the branch after the spring days are gone. But this stream must be regulated or it will ruin. Man is God's workmanship, hence his life dare not tear its own channels or spread in miasmatic waste over this period of his being, but flow in channels of divine ordering. This is the strong period of life because it has not yet felt the chill of disappointment. They have not yet been the victims of betrayed con-fidence. The child-like spirit of trust marks every approach. Their future has no failures in it. When Napoleon asked for 100 young men out of a regiment who were ready to die, THE COLLEGE MERCURY. all stepped forth. They never doubted their ability to take the battery or their readiness to die. This spirit is not to be despised, for con-fidence is the very essence of achievement. 2- Second element of strength is Education. The Greeks soon discovered that physical de-velopment was not the true line for a man to follow. In this the brute was his superior. Soon the glory of the athlete was conferred on the poet and philosopher and the school was sought as eagerly as the arena. The college is more than a ' 'crew," a ' 'nine'' or a "foot-ball team." Mind rules the world and education is the great social equalizer. As you cultivate your minds you add to your strength and give breadth to your sphere of usefulness. 3. Tim de lement is strength of soul. '' Finally my brethren be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might." This lifts man above self and unites him to an unfailing source of power. Religion gives sight, direction, trend to what you have by natural endowment. Seneca says: "No mind is good without God." The world recognizes the superiority of this. To keep your body under places you in the final and real conquest way above the athlete and the mental genius. "Ye have overcome" does not mean that you can neglect watchfulness and lay aside your armor as if all life's work were done. No! But as the acorn contains the oak, so your faith has in it all its fruit, "For this is the victory that overcometh even your faith." That faith made Luther a conqueror. All the liberties of our day, civil and religious, were wrapped up in germ in the faith of that one man. Without this new life in Christ you will only be a sort of refined, highly developed animal. The' electric car will not budge an inch unless connected with the power-house. Man is a creature of two worlds. Your spirit can never grow by sticking its roots in the soil that nourishes your flesh. Without a sun this world would be an iceberg revolving in space. Your spirit must be warmed by the Son of Righteousness. A living, growing faith is neces-sary, for life without faith is an earth without a sky. Your institution has not neglected this part of your training. Education and Chris-tianity are sisters. It is more important for the student to practice virtue than to decline virtuse; to form his character along the lines of righteousness than to demonstrate all the prop-ositions of plane geometry. What now is the duty that arises from this trinity of endowments f Blessed with trained bodies and minds and added grace, what will you do with them? "Stand fast in the faith." "Quit you like men." "Hold fast what thou hast, lest any man take thy crown." You must call up all the power you can command in order to hold the advanced posi-tion which by nature and grace you occupy. You dare not waste an ounce of your strength. Only the fittest survive. You must have the whole armor or you will go clown. Do not tamper with evil because you want to know something about it. "Only once" has ruined many a soul. Let God direct your steps into the right track and keep them there. Keep yourselves pure. You may repeitt, but a whole garment is better than a patched one. "The greatest spiritual strength is born out of that moral strength which has never been broken by vice." Ireland's great leader, Par-nell, from lack ot moral strength, was ruined in the very hour of victory. Meeting his De-lilah he was shorn of his locks, and his strength departed from him. Great self-denial is required. To be any-thing you must deny some part of yourself. To be a ttiie man you have only to deny that part of yourself which is unworthy of you. You must live for others. This is best done by a consistent life. We need not less preach-ing but more practice. The professor makes the college more than does the curriculum or the library. The teacher is often of more value than his teaching; no name is more fra-grant in the long list of teachers of this cen-tury than Arnold of Rugby. His tenderness of conscience, his sympathy with the heart of youth, his self-forgetfulness, his hatred of the mean, his love for youth and God made him the great teacher of- our time. Not Hopkins THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 89 I the teacher or philosopher, but Hopkins the man formed the character of the graduates at Williainstown. Nor can we refrain from re-ferring, in part, to a late vice-Pres. and Pro-fessor in our own Alma Mater; whose sweet, courteous Christian life did more to mould character, and kindle aspiration for a nobler and truer manhood than all the sines and tan-gents of his department could do to strengthen the mind. And "being dead he yet speak-eth." Such is the power of a true life every-where. Do not lament that the professions are over-crowded. The world is not'overcrowded with such men. There is room in the business world for men who despise a false balance and love a "just weight." There is room in the political world, swarming with a hungry crowd, for young men whose back bones will not bend though a whole party try to do it; whose knees will not bow to the "boss's" will, though ejectment from office and political ob-scurity be threatened. There is room for more than "four hundred" in society, where the Christian Sabbath is degraded into that of the continent, and where men through intem-perance are dammed body and soul by "dtce process of law.'' There is not only room but need for you in the sphere of the pulpit where a rationalizing tendency is seeking to rob relig-ion of its faith, into which secularism with its blighting influence is slowly creeping, and which is being changed into the platform, the sermon into the lecture and the preacher into the lecturer. We need ' 'not echoes but voices.'' This is God's message to you. Will you heed it and find your true strength in Him or waste even the strength you have ? Your suc-cess, position and usefulness depend upon the characters you are forming now. Be true men. Do not disappoint the God who made you and the Redeemer who bled to save you. Live for God and humanity. Such a life will be beset by dangers, but also arched with flowers and palms of victory. By living it boldly and in faith many a sweet blossom and green palm will be shaken down to gladden you by the way, and the joy and safety of your strength will be to you a taste of that great reward that awaits the victor when the final goal of this earthly life is reached. _ ♦ ♦ ♦ CLASS-DAY PROG-RAMME. TUESDAY EVENING, JUNTE 19. 1804. 0 P. M. Maser of Ceremonies. - - W. O. NICIILAS. IVY EXERCISES. Iny Poem, Ivy Oration, Miss HAKTMAN. R. W. MOTTERN. CLASS EXERCISES. Class Boll, - - - - C. F. KLOSS. Class Hi.stoty, - JOHN HOFFKR, JR. Class Poem, - Presentation Oration, Pifiphecy, Miss HIMES. F. BARNDT. J. S. ENGLISH. CLASS SONG. CLASS PROPHECY. To write a prophecy a man ought to be a prophet. To be a successful prophet he should be inspired; but we lay claim to inspiration neither infernal nor divine, and we are just going to run off your futures in grind organ style. Now, we might begiu this prophecy by making some allusions to the old Greek and Roman Gods, but this thing of referring to the mythological dieties has become so old and chestnutty, so antiquated and mossbacky, so kindergarden like and so universally prev-alent among the would-be crack orators of to-day that we raise our hands in holy horror and say, begone, vile thought begone! You know I might say that I laid my Adonis like carcass down on the banks of a beautiful sylvan stream and as the crystal waters danced musically over the beautiful pebbles Minerva scratched my scalp with the point of her helmet and lo and behold prophecy seethed from between my teeth in a perfect stream. But we are not going to indulge in any such nonsense. To some extent we are going to draw upon our imagination, and if we don't predict future greatness from present indica- ^^^^^^■^^^^^^^■■■H ^^^^■■■■^■l^H^^^^H^H ■■UHB^^B 9o THE COLLEGE MERCURY. tions yon can draw all the hair from our heads with a pair of tweezers and make switches for your wives. (Bush please take notice.) Now there are the ladies. What future too grand or brilliant can be predicted for those who have extended such a beneficial influence upon the masculine element of " '94?" Even now Miss Hartman is looking wistfully toward the Seminary, and in the near future, present indications will be realized. The marriage bells will proclaim the bliss of two more mor-tals, and after that will follow a life of great usefulness in teaching poor fallen humanity what is best for their own eternal interests. Miss Himes will be the possessor of a beautiful home in sunny Florida and will set the world on fire with the products of her literary genius, and Julius won't be in it at all. In the near future Allison will no longer kick the stones from off the country roads in Adams county with his copper-toed boots. He will become the 20th century Ward McAllis-ter, of New York City. He will be distin-guished far and wide for his social ability and will be nightly sought after during the but-terfly season to lead the Germans. The future Oscar Wildes will be laid under the willow trees mud-pies at Call Piatt. The reformer will then begin to admire himself in his usual style, and say: '' What a dandy good looking fellow I am! Don't I have a dandy personal appear-ance?" The native Chief observing this will say: "Him makey heap ob good soup." Put him in de kettle, and lo and behold the calcium light of Bastian's intelligence will be extermi-nated forever. Bloomhardt will write a book entitled ' 'The World and Freddy Bloomhardt.'' It will con-tain three chapters of a thousand words each. Chap. I. Why Bloomhardt was born and why the world was made for him. Chap. II. Why all creatures should bow the knee to Bloom-hardt. Chap. III. What's the matter with Fred Bloomhardt becoming the ruler of the Universe. The work he will affectionately dedicate to himself, the only man fit to live. He will finally metamorphose into a bird of Paradise, and will be placed on public exhibi-tion at the Phila. Zoo. Bush will become a Professor in the Chicago University, and will make his fortune by writing a text book on International Law. He will squander this same fortune in seeking a divorce in the Chicago courts, and will finally settle down to collecting rags and when this Adams county farmer with his i bones in the streets of Gettysburg. silken mustache shall spring into prominence. Now there is that man Barndt. Ah, ye iron Fates and Chinese Gods, please deliver us! Once crazy, always crazy. He will study medicine but will be expelled from the pro-fession because of his attempt to saw the toes off the feet of a club-footed man. He will then join a wild-west show in the capacity of a clown, and when the circus monkeys die he will take their places and ride the ponies. Here is a sample of his circus jokes. A trained dog will come in the ring with a piece of stove wood on its back and Sumneytown will say: "You would better take that off." He will die in the Montgomery county insane asylum. Bastian will go to Africa as a missionary and immediately on landing, the natives will throw Duttera will become business manager of the St. Louis Fake Opera Company. In at-tempting to introduce his company to a Phila. audience he will make so many breaks that the gallery gods will shoot a volley of anti-quated eggs at him, and he will retire in dis-gust to a Home of the Friendless for the rest of his natural life. Fickinger and Fair will enter the ring as champion prize fighters and hair pullers. Jimmy Gladhill will sprout a great pair of wings and will be so anxious to get to the Golden City, that he won't take time to die, but will fly there. Hoffer will be employed by all the leading colleges and universities of both this and the old world, to teach the young students how to recite. The first lesson will consist of a drill, THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 9i in teaching the young student how to sprawl his hands all over the face of the young man directly in front of him, when he is called upon to tell what he knows. Lesson No. 2 will be to teach the student to say everything the Prof, says, in a regular parrot style, and then when he does make an attempt to say something of his own accord, to so jumble his words together, that no earthly man can un-derstand what he says. Ibach will study for the ministry, but will give that up, and make his fortune pla3'ing a hand organ. Kemp will spend his whole life-time in writ-ing a book, entitled "A Proof that the Human Species is capable of Hibernating." The facts will be deduced from his own experiences while a college student. Kloss will be the fond possessor of a sheep ranch in New Mexico, and will make $20,000 the first year. He will never have enough music in him to be able to call the sheep, so he will get an old Mexican Shepherd to sing in his graphophone, and after that you will be able to see ' 'Shorty'' strolling over the pasture with his talking machine on his back. Kohler will go West as a Home Missionary, but he will fall away from the straight and narrow path;will take to stealing Indian ponies "and will finally be hung as a horse thief. Count Lantz will become a noted lecturer on Geology. He will pick up wrinkled potatoes and use them as good examples of sea urchins. However his crack lecture will be on the Archegosaurus. The following is an extract: "Gentlemen this is a wonderful thing. Some say it is a magnificent tree, 50 feet high, in the branches of which the Bald Eagles build their nests. Others say it is a big animal with a heteorical tail with a curve on the end, and that it had big feet; which is proved by the foot-piints which it has left in the sands of time. It has its habitat in a con-duit and feeds on that custard material known as ice cream. Lutz will study for the ministsy under the direction of your worthy President, and will some day become an awful factor for good in the world. Miller will work 011 a farm for 50 cents a day, and it will keep him scratching to get that. . Mottern, the fiend of originality, will in-vent a perpetual motion machine, and in mak-ing experiments with it will be carried to the moon. There he will be encased in a great thickness of ice, and in the 30th century will be dug out and exhibited as a crank. The day after his departure from earth the Presi-dent will issue a proclamation, stating that a day of rejoicing will be observed on account of the nation's deliverance. "I don't think this here man," Billy Nick-las will make much of a lawyer, but Dr. Martin has promised to will him the German Chair when he dies, and Billy will make a howling success as a teacher of Dutch. Big Nick will make a reputation as an orni-thologist, and his hobbies will be the dear lit-tle wren and the cute little sparrow. Although Stahl is old and gray there is still time for him to become a Mormon preacher. The subject of his discourses will be the Ark. 1 'And the sides thereof were tight as unto a dish, and the top thereof was tight as unto a dise, and the ends thereof were peaked." Dearly beloved Julius, the idol of his class-mates and the pet of the College at large, will metamorphose into a foxy detective and champion leg-puller of the world. He will be-come the satellite of dark schemes, and will breathe his last in Sing Sing. Sorrick will publish a book entitled "The Bitter Experiences of a Man pursuing a college course and at the same time burdened down with household cares.'' Clyde Bill Stover will become a Chauncey Depew, after dinner speaker and a golden ton-gued orator. Further he will become a female heart-breaker and woman fascinator and will finally turn his brain in trying to make an im-provement on Edison's graphophone. Dave Van Camp will become a foreign traveller; but the curse of his cast iron walk Q2 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. will finally be the death of him. While walk-ing through the streets of St. Petersburg he will be mistaken for the Czar of Russia and will be blown to atoms by a dynamite bomb. And now our melancholy task is ended. May the fates be with you—you monsters of "94" and may the divinities smooth the rough road of your future experiences. SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT. When we speak of the sciences we generally mean the natural sciences such as geology, chemistry, natural history, and the like; but when we speak of a scientific spirit we mean more. The idea it awakens is a comprehen-sive one. It includes the idea of method and purpose and is the animating spirit not only of the natural sciences but also of philosophy, history, the languages, and indeed of all the prominent branches of learning of to-day. In all of them we find the student observing, com-paring, classifying. The spirit of this age is truly scientific. The so-called rivalry existing between the classics and the sciences is not a justifiable rivalry. It is only the result of bigotry and short-sightedness and we are glad to see that it is gradually disappearing. Both are neces-sary but it was through the proper study of the natural sciences that we have been led to apply practical methods and practical purposes to all branches of learning. The scientific leaven has permeated and modified our entire system of education. That it should have done so is but natural on account of the sub-ject matter with which science deals. "And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good." This is what science offers to man for contemplation, and is it not infi-nitely better than what man can offer? By studying the imperfect works of man we may be led into error, but the close observation and proper interpretation of nature, God's work, cannot help but lead us to the truth. The methods and purposes of science are such as will naturally lead us to good methods in all our work and inspire us with the true spirit of progress. Science takes us directly to nature where we find progress stamped on every side. The purpose of science is ever the same. The watch-word is truth, truth, truth. This may be seen in the character and meth-ods of the men who pursue scientific investiga-tion. They are beyond a doubt among the most honest and truthful of men. One of our leading educated men said a few years ago that he never heard of but two cases where a scientific man willingly said in scientific re-search what he knew to be untrue; and this was in regard to the classification of two shells. Can this be said of other professions? The scientific man is required to put aside all pre-conceived notion and theories and prepare his mind for the reception of the truth. He has no more victory to gain; for so long as victory and not truth is the primary object the contest is sure to be bitter and unjust. In his experi-ments he works carefully, he observes closely, he interprets according to the best light and knowledge that he has and announces the re-sult to the world whether it agrees with a the-ory that he may have advanced or not. If the facts do not sustain his theory he rejects it and turns to what the facts seem to justify. Thus he approaches nearer and nearer to the truth. This may be seen in the long series of experi: ments made to establish or overthrow the the-ory of spontaneous generation. And in giving the arguments in favor of a theory the scien-tist also gives its objections, and indeed some of the strongest objections came from the very men themselves who advanced the theory. And again, the methods of science are such as lead most surely and directly to the object sought; to express the unknown in terms of the known; to lead to a truth not before realized. "Science above all things demands personal concentration. Its home is the study of the mathematician, the quiet laboratory of the ex-perimenter, and the cabinet of the meditative observer of nature." Science realizes the truth that to accept a fact on mere authority means intellectual death. Man has been THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 93 termed, "Das rastlose ursachenthier," the rest- \ less cause-seeking animal. The intuition of causality is in man and will assert itself. Rec-ognizing this fact, science is ever striving to bring to man's notice secondary causes which, when viewed aright, point us on and on to a great First Cause which true science not only requires but demands. Scientists have also had to learn many things by experience, and one of these is not to form a conclusion until the facts justify it. They have made many errors in this way and have been taught that there are times when the judgment must be held in suspense, the data upon which the decision should be based may be just what is wanting. The high aim of scientific work, its practical methods, and the high order of subject matter with which science deals have furnished a suit-able basis for the growth and development of scientific spirit. It began to manifest itself very early but its progress for a long time was slow. It was thought to lead to error and for this reason stifled and suppressed from the be-ginning. Probably the greatest and most act-ive agent in suppressing scientific research was the church. The conclusions reached by science seemed to contradict the teachings of the Bible. The theory of the antipodes was not found in the Bible. Evolution contra-dicted the doctrine that the world was created in six days, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still. The ideas of scientists with respect to these were looked upon by the church as false. But it may be said of them in the words of Gamaliel: "If they be of God, ye cannot overthrow them; if they be of man, they will come to naught.'' The victory thus far seems to have been on the side of science. The re-sult of this attempt to suppress the searching after truth has been just the opposite from what was expected. Instead of restraining it by the rigid envelope thrown about it they in reality gave it explosive force, and when it did burst forth it was with a power that was con- ! vincing. And to-day we find these very theo- \ ries advocated by many Christian teachers, j Indeed they are no longer looked upon as the-ories but as facts. It is also often urged that scientific research leads to atheism. While it is a fact that many of our leading scientists were not professed Christians, yet is science entirely to blame for this ? May not much of the blame lie with the church rather than with science ? The church was at variance with what science knew to be true. Her conduct toward these was such as would drive them to renounce the church and make them hate religion. Bruno, for believing in the doctrine of Ca-pernicus, was burned at the stake. Galileo, thirty-three years later, to save himself from the same fate, was obliged to abjure, on bended knees and with his hands upon the Holy Gos-pels, the heliocentric doctrine which he knew to be true. No wonder that these men were led to hate the church and through the errors of the church to spurn Christianity. It put science and religion at war with each other. But to-day we are glad to see that this difference is gradually disappearing and the church is willing to accept many of the teach-ings of science as in harmony with the Bible. And in turn we find that many of our leading scientists are now professed Christians. Kep-ler gave voice to the true scientific spirit when he said: "Oh, God, I think thy thoughts after Thee!" Science is ever striving to know God's thoughts as expressed in nature. Although the growth of scientific spirit was slow until quite recently, yet its practical ben-efits have been many. It has been applied to the study of history. By its methods we are enabled, as it were, to get back of the histor-ian. We wish to learn his character and his methods of working; we wish to know whether he used the best material at his command, whether he suppressed any of the facts or took them out of their connection, thus giving them a wrong interpretation. We wish to know whether he had some political purpose in view or not; whether he told the whole truth as he saw it for the truth's own sake. It has also been of advantage to history indirectly through 94 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. the comparative study of language. By its methods we have been able to bridge over chasms between nations, thus establishing the nation's origin which would otherwise have been imposssible. It has also been of value to the church. A proper application of scientific methods tends to eliminate many of the errors which man has read into the Bible. Sin has dulled man's per-ception and a struggle is necessary for him to regain his lost position. To accomplish this man's nature requires that science and religion •go hand in hand; that scientific methods be complemented and enlightened by Christian revelation. We can thus see scientific spirit playing an important part in every department of daily life. It is the motive power of the age. It brings about invention after invention. It enthuses the age with its true progressive spirit and urges us on and on to a higher state of civili-zation. E. M. STAHL. IN THE CONFLICT. Perfection is the aim of all true manhood; perfection is the moral, intellectual, and phys-ical qualities which we possess. We turn over history's pages, and we see tier upon tier of anxious faces in the arena with eager eye set upon the gladiator, physically perfect, as he strains every muscle to win the conflict. Year after year he has trained those brawny arms for the final encounter. At first it seemed that this would be a fitting representa-tion of the "Conflict of Life," into which the class of '94 is to enter. But second thought suggested (with no intention of making any plea for athletic sports,) that the modern ath-lete as he contends for glory and victory is more fitting because a more familiar represent-ative. 'Tis a perfect day in autumn on which the final contest upon the field of manly sport is to take place. Thousands of anxious faces are watching for the heroes of the hour. In that great throng are friends and relations of each participant, who have come to cheer their favorite on to victory. But they need not wait long, for here comes that well-trained band led by its alert Captain, who thinks thoughts worthy of a Napoleon or a Washing-ton, while planning for victory in the struggle. Can you faintly hear those words of exhor-tation from the lips of that captain, as his men are gathered about him, drinking in those final words intended for no other ears than theirs: "My men, we must win. Glory, honor, supremacy, lie in victory, while these will all be lost if we lose. I want every man to do his very best; remember what you are contending for, never give up until the last moment is gone, and if it brings defeat, I want to feel that every man has done his duty. This is all I can expect." I dare say those noble words of Nelson, "England ex-pects every man to do his duty," awakened no nobler sentiments, no truer courage. But the conflict begins, yet it is not one of brute force, for these are gentlemen who con-tend to-day for victory and for nothing else. The great masses of human strength heave to and fro. But see! At the moment when every man's best is needed, the one from whom much was expected, lags behind or makes a blunder, because he is not the true athlete, because he has shirked some duty or scorned some word of advice. The conflict intensifies, victory is seated on the banners of neither contestant as yet and the precious moments are flying. Ere long, the contest must be decided; if hopes are to be realized, now is the time. Summoning every particle of strength, and the whole power of will, they make one grand movement, one united effort and the victory is won. The hour has brought reward for toil. "This is the only part of an athlete's career of which the public knows anything, this brilliant climax of half a year's daily work and sacrifice." People know nothing of that self-denial, which has given up pleasures in-numerable, which has declined solicitations THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 95 to self-indulgence, which has given up things which made College life what it is. There is no more room for the indolent man in athletics than there is for the lazy bee in the hive. He is stung by the piercing words of ridicule until life is made a burden for him. But energy alone does not make the victors. Mental discipline is no less a factor to his suc-cess than physical power. Brawn and will, a cool, calm intellect, these are the requisites. Were I making a plea for athletics, I could point you to example after example, where the man who led his team to victory, also led his class; where the fingers which pitched the winning game, penned the grandest words which won the prize. Manly self-respect and refinement are im-portant requisites in an athlete's training. Evil habits and wrong ideas, which mar many a life, have been given up, because it was ab-solutely necessary. These having been given up, and the man having been made a man, cruel appetite and seemingly irresistible desire .lost their sway and he remains a man forever. Many harsh words of criticism have come to his ears from the lips of superiors, who have shown him his faults, and who have plainly told him just what was expected of him. But these only give a tenderer tone, a sweeter sound to the final words of exhortation and are forgotten in the moments of victory. If there is one thing which towers high above everything else, it is courage. The coward, no matter what other qualities he may possess, is not wanted. He is a hindrance. It takes a Heffiefinger to stand by a poor, for-lorn man, who is at the mercy of an angry lynching mob and defy them to carry out their awful purpose. It takes a Frederick Brokaw to plunge into the angry, roaring waters to save a servant girl and to give his own young, promising life in the attempt. These are some of the stages of the athlete's training. I trust that you have been able to see the analogy of our own lives, but a few words of application may make it plainer. Not unlike this training has been our own. For four years we have been in preparation for the conflict upon which we enter to-day. As the true athlete learns to receive the kindly criticism of his superiors, so we, too, have learned to be grateful to those who point out errors to us. Although it is not pleasant to stand up to be criticised, yet when we think of it, we really ought to congratulate our-selves, every time we learn of a new fault, not because we have such a fault, but because we have now discovered it. For the discovery of a fault is to anyone who is living worthily, an opportunity for fresh conquest, and for a new advance in the evolution of a noble character. In our preparation for Eife's Conflict, refine-ment in word and manner, has been an im-portant factor. "True nobleness is always gentle. Eove is the law of life, and whatever is unloving is a blemish." We may not be familiar with the rules of etiquette, may not be able to appear gracefully in a drawing room; and yet we may have a grace and gentleness of heart, which will give to our bearing and acts the truest refinement. Have you ever known a true athlete to be a coward? Has the true man ever shown cow-ardice ? No, it is he who can bear the scorns and sneers of those who oppose him in his de-fense of truth and right. Energy. especially has been a part of our training. Some men who never get on in life blame their failure on unfavorable circum-stances. They think if their conditions had only been different, they would have been suc-cessful. But the way to make the most of life is not to get easy conditions, it is to take the conditions we have and by energy, faithful-ness, indomitable courage, and unsparing, un-relaxing toil, to make our conditions and circumstances serve Us in doing the work of life well. The ambition to win the contest has been a powerful influence. Without enthusiastic am-bition, we are not worthy the lofty name of men. God did not make us to grovel like worms. He made us to rise to glory. The world has neither .use nor room for men who 96 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. are without energy and persistence. They can only be dropped out and left behind while the conflict rages. People do not dream them-selves into grand characters and lofty posi-tions. And there never was a time when it was grander to live than now, when true men have larger opportunities to do noble deeds and make a worthy record for themselves. The ambition of the athlete is to win. "The desire of every true-hearted and worthy young man is to reach that vision of beauty and nobleness which he himself earnestly desires to attain. It is radiant and spotless." Some one says "God never yet permitted us to frame a theory too beautiful for his power to make practicable.'' The conflict is not to be won in a day; a lifetime alone is sufficient. Yet the victory should be kept before the eye all the time, and the effort to obtain that victory should never faint nor lag for an instant. Through all experiences, through trial, temptation, discouragement, opposition, defeat and failure, the eye should rest unwaveringly upon the goal and the purpose to conquer should never be abandoned. "The thoughts of victory dawning on the soul Are glorious heaven gleams; And God's eternal Truth lies folded deep In all man's lofty dreams. F. H. BLOOMHARDT. IVY POEM. BY COKA B. HAKTMAN. oh, green twining Ivy, true emblem of friendship, That friendship which lives through all sorrow and care, That spurns the rude thrust ot the blast of misfortune And grows still more dear, be the sky dark or fair. Oh, bright glossy Ivy with silver-veined foliage, ' That ever is green and ne'er becomes sere, How like to fond memory thy very existence, Hemembrance of life and of things that were dear. Oh, small Ivy sprig, with thy dainty young tendrils That tell of the ties of devotion and love, We look on thy beauty and think of the future. We trust thee our sentiments nobly to prove. By the side of this hall, the Chapel Memorial, We plant thee with joy and an uprising prayer That dear mother Earth may love thee and cherish. And give thee the best of her motherly care. Grow onward and upward, dear plant, on thy mission, Cling close to the wall with a gentle embrace, Heed not the loud threat of the nearing dread tempest, Nor clouds darkly hiding the sun's smiling face. Enshroud this high wall with thy evergreen mantle, Adorn every part with thy tap'stry of life; Preserve from decay and shield it from ruin, Protect from the storm and from time's ruthless strife. Then, emblem of friendship, remembrance, devotion, Speak fervently, lovingly, words sweet to hear, Recall to the mem'riesof those who shall follow The class '94, the class of this year. Tell how all its members are faithful and earnest In the struggle of life as onward time runs, Tell how they are loyal to dear Alma Mater, Now devoted to her are her daughters and sons. LOCAL G-OVERNMENT. It is our favorite boast as American citizens that we are the freest people on the face of the globe. And such, indeed we are. This is the sentiment of the political philosopher, as well as the patriotic citizen, filled with a par-donable pride. Here liberty, in the truest sense of that much misused term, has found a secure abode. Our government was "conceived in lib-erty." This was the spirit that animated even our pilgrim forefathers who, to secure it, left home and country to brave the mighty deep. This was the spirit of the heroes of the revo-lution who poured out their life-blood upon the altar of their country. This was the spirit of the framers of our Constitution, which was established, as they said, "to secure the bless-ings of liberty to ourselves and our poster-ity." In the government of a people so jealous of their rights, so filled with the love of liberty and self-government, it is natural to expect that they would keep a large part of the power of government as near to themselves and as directly under their own immediate control as possible. So we find it in our coun-try to-day. A local government has been es-tablished in our midst, forming a most im-portant part of our governmental structure. It is not the purpose, at present, to point out the wisdom of this course on the part of our ancestors, to show how necessary this step was to the securing of real liberty, but rather to point out the importance of this branch of our government to the welfare of the citizen THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 97 to-day, and the necessity of a wise and eco-nomic administration of our local affairs. It is the function of local government, broadly speaking, to administer the laws. These the State government for the most part enacts while with the local government it re-mains to carry them out. In other words, the State Legislature enacts laws for the benefit of the people, the local authorities determine how much benefit they shall be to the people and how much such benefit shall cost the peo-ple. The local government thus has virtually under its own control, matters that are of vital concern to the welfare of the people, matters that are of practical importance to the every-day life of every citizen. Education, high-ways, the care of the poor and taxation to pay the expenses incurred are some of the matters in the hands of the local authorities. Educa-tion, for instance, is mostly in the hands of school boards, who erect and furnish school buildings, employ teachers and exercise a gen-eral supervision over the schools. The high-ways are in the hands of road supervisors whose duty it is to keep the roads in repair. The care of the poor is in the hands of poor directors whose duty it is to see that those un-fortunates among us, who are no longer able to care for themselves are comfortably fed and clothed. And so through a long list of officers and duties to describe, which would be ex-tremely tedious and at the same time unnec-essary for the present purpose. The impor-tance of the local government, as seen in these offices, is unquestionable. It is concerned with matters that are of immediate interest to every citizen, and it follows naturally, as be-ing of importance, that it should be adminis-tered well. It is important, in the first place, that it should be administered efficiently—that the ends for which these laws were designed should be accomplished. We see the impor-tance of this in the school management of the borough or township where the condition of our public schools depends largely upon the in-telligence of the school board. We see it too in the care of our public roads where, upon the intelligence of the supervisor—only too often a minus quantity—depends this most im-portant factor of civilization and progress. It is important, in the next place, that it should be administered economically; that the expense connected with such administration should be as little as possible. This consider-ation has been left for the last because it is the one that perhaps most needs emphasis at the present day. We hear, occasionally, of the im-portance of limiting our State and National expenditures "to the necessities of govern-ment, honestly and economically administered. And that is right. But if it is true of our State and National governments how much more is it true of our local government ? It is to the citizen, by all odds, the most expen-sive of all. To the National government we pay no money in direct taxes, and to the State government we pay comparatively little. It is to the local government that we pay the larger part. While economy in our State and Na-tional affairs, it is true, is highly desirable, in our local affairs it becomes essential to the welfare and progress of the citizen. Taxation, though necessary to the carrying on of all government, is none the less a burden, and if a heavy one, may seriously cripple the welfare of a community. Especially is this question of taxation of importance in boroughs and cities, where the burden of taxation often be-becomes almost unbearable and often proves a serious menace to business prosperity. There is economy in government as well as in the home, and it should be practiced as rigorously in the one place as in the other. Extrava-gance in government is robbery. If, by reck-less expenditures on the part of our local of-ficials, the citizen is compelled to pay taxes for which he receives no benefit, he is no less being robbed than if he is met upon the highway and made to give up his money un-der the threat of death as the alternative. Ex-travagance in government is a baneful evil that should be removed as speedily as possible wherever found. As a means of checking reckless expendi- BSBKBHT 98 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. tures on the part of our local officials the local office-holders should be made to feel that he is directly responsible to the citizen for every dollar that he expends. The spirit of those local papers which are disposed to acquaint the citizen with the manner in which our local affairs are being carried on is highly com-mendable. The citizen has a right to know what his money goes for and at the same time the honest, conscientious official will not fear publicity. Above all, that our local affairs may be ad-ministered well, we must place good men in charge. To this end let us use our best ef-forts. Let us not stay at home on election day under the mistaken impression that our local affairs are of little importance. But let us go to the polls and vote. Political apathy has no right among a self-governing people. Let us throw aside party prejudices. "Principles, not men," may be a good motto for a Na-tional election but it certainly is not for a local one. Let us vote for the best man regardless of party differences. Let the men who have charge of our local affairs be the most honest, the most intelligent, the most energetic that the commvmity can offord. H. A. ALLISON. * ♦ ♦ JUNIOR ORATORICAL CONTEST. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20TH, 18 ♦Progress and Triumph of Democracy, tThe Courage of Conviction, - *Our Present Peril, - - - - tThe True Shekinah, - ♦Ships that Go Down in the Night, - ffrue Greatness of Man, - *Our Mental Lives, - tSeeking the Goal, - J. E. BYERS. W. A. HARTMAN. M. G. L. RIETZ. H. E. CLARE. • W. A. KUMP. W. D. MAYNARD. - H. M. WlTMAN. A. R. LONGANECKER. •Phruiiiikoxmiiill. tl'llUumatlitoan. OUR MENTAL LIVES. "In the world there is nothing great but man; In man there is nothing great but mind." This is an aphorism of Sir William Hamilton. What sublime truth! But we may go yet further and say that man is the world. All forms of matter and of life were created for him, to serve his ends. The world is his, he rules it—he is the world. Again, we may as-sert that the mind, or more strongly, the soul is the man. By natural conclusion, therefore, the mind, the soul is the world. And truly, indeed, is the soul man's real world. We are to treat of this world, more particu-larly of the mind. What a symbol of power in very grandeur! Crowning endowment of man, God's noblest work! The image of the Divine mind, its faculties and powers approach those of the Creator. Designed to comprehend and interpret His thoughts and His laws as written on the tablets of nature and in man himself, it thinks over again these thoughts of the great uncreated Thinker. Vast and ex-haustive sciences and philosophies has this thinking mind established, wherein are re-corded its analyses and explanations of the laws of nature, of man and of God. Un-checked by the narrow confines of the world, the bounds of space, or the limits of time, it may wander at pleasure amid empires and wonderlands of its own creation, and even pierce the woeful borders of Hell or enter the blissful gates of Heaven as did the inspired soul of Milton. Reason, Understanding, all the capacities for thought and for knowledge! What pro-found powers are these ! Dominating influ-ences of the world! Imagination, Memory! What wonderful and delightful kingdoms! Girt in such robes of majesty, with a dignity both grand and sublime, adorned with almost angelic graces, the lofty soul of man, acknowl-edging its Lord and Maker and gaining its mighty power from that divine source, by its soul-quickening, soul-inspiring personality, has conquered the world and reigns supreme in its vast realms. What wonder that Plato called the faculties gods and that France was led to worship Reason! In the infinite wisdom of God, and in the divine harmony of the creation, all minds were not endowed alike, but each with its peculiar talents and capacities. Again, Mr. Emerson says: "It seems as if the Deity dressed each THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 99 soul which He sends into nature in certain vir-tues and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote, 'Not trans-ferrable' and 'Good for this trip only' on these garments of the soul." Each soul, in its sov-ereign freedom and in the exercise of its di-vinely appointed prerogatives, may use and develop its talents for its own betterment and the good of mankind, or it may consign them to decay and death, abandoning itself to sen-sual pleasures, the glamours and enchant-ments of the world. Man's talents are the gifts of God, the signature of Divinity written on his soul. To despise them is to despise God Himself. What cowards, what robbers we are! What very pigmy souls in compari-son to the grandeurs possible to us? What soul has ever attained to its highest possibility? Yea, how many attain to even a middle de-gree ? What a world of wasted power! No less a mind than that of Mr. Emerson thus observes: "There is an American dis-ease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls on young men of this country, as soon as they have finished their college education, which strips them of all manly aims and be-reaves them of animal spirits; so that the no-blest youths are in a few years converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of con-vention. Is there not room, then, for a most serious consideration of our subject? Mental j paralysis, mental lethargy, mental loafing are diseases which have blighted and ruined the powers of many thousands of minds. From non-use, disuse, as well as abuse of the facul-ties of the mind, men become intellectual sui-cides and the evil is a most prevalent one. De-based and degraded, the soul is dragged from its throne, the sceptre, which is conscience, is broken, and the crown, which is reason, is thrown away. We make our lives the fulfillment or the failure of a grand purpose. According to his individual concept of this purpose so will each man fashion his life. Some merely live, es-teeming only health and bodily sustenance; others esteem wealth; others worldly power; others social distinction; and of a great major-ity pleasure is the highest aim. With such use the higher faculties of the mind must be-come dwarfed and well-nigh lost. How many mere sentient beings there are in the world, who go by the name of men, but who know not the higher intellections of the soul ? Says Bovee : '' Mind unemployed is mind unenjoyed." And Spenser : "It is the mind that makes good or ill That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor." Our lives, then, are truly our thoughts. If we have beautiful and happy thoughts, our ' lives are beautiful and happy. If the resources of our souls are marked with richness or pov-erty, our lives are virtually rich or poor. It is in the quality of our pleasures not in the amount that the soul is truly and lastingly happy. Oh, the dignity and joy of the true life of the soul! Happy indeed was Sir Wm. Byrd, who could muse thus : "My mind to me a kingdom Is; Such perfect joy therein I And, As far exceeds all earthly bliss, That God and nature hath assigned." "Every mind,", says Channing, "was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance. We owe it to ourselves, our fellowmen and our God to cultivate and develop our indi-vidual powers. The responsibility is tremen-dous, and, in contemplating it, even souls that are most brave in the heat of life's battle grow coward. Were it possible to resign this life for that better, even without having accom-plished anything in the world, how many of us would have the courage to stand forth and say : I will live out and accomplish the pur-pose for which I was created ? What miserable courage we have-! It is said of Michael Angelo, that, when he had finished his statue of Moses, and the figure stood there in its perfect form and beautiful S3'mmetry, seeming to beam forth a living soul, yet lifeless, in his desperation he struck it on the knee with his hammer, saying in the intense feeling of his soul : "I can do every-thing for you but give you life." And we IOO THE COLLEGE MERCURY. can well understand his despair. Oh, man that hast life, that art "so noble in reason, so infinite in faculty, in form and moving so ex-press and admirable, in action so like an angel, in apprehension so like to God, the beauty of the world, and the paragon of animals," shalt thou not be more than statue, not more than caryatide ! If there is no other reason why we should develop our individual powers of mind, then for a defense: If we would escape a life of comparative blankness and loneliness, of con-tinued dissatisfaction and endless despair, we would lay up in our own souls stores of knowl-edge and truth, that we might ever find in their rich resources an abundance of wealth and precious stones of inestimable worth, of ever newer and more delightful form, and in our own noble and beautiful thoughts most pleasant and congenial companionship. Let each fact which we attain be, as Mr. Emerson calls it, "a fulcrum of the spirit," and let the will in its purity be the lever by which to raise the spirit higher. Let each expansion of the soul be as an invitation from heaven to explore loftier regions of thought. Finally, we are each of us writing a book of our lives, which shall be opened on that Great Day in the presence of the angel hosts and the multitudes of earthly souls ranged before the Judgment Bar of God. In it shall be found a strict record of the soul as to every thought and every deed. Shall its pages be filled with beautiful and refined thoughts that shall shine forth in characters of living light ? Shall the pages be written in dull monotony ? or shall they be blank ? We are each day numbering them. H. M. WITMAN. BOLL OF HONOR. FIRST GRADE. MARGARET R. HIMES, DAVID W. VAN CAMP, - HERBERT A. ALLISON, JULIUS F. SEEBACH, FRED H. BLOOMHARDT, - SECOND GRADE. FRANK E. FICKINGER, PAUL W. KOLLER, Gettysburg. Plainfield. Gettysburg. Waynesboro. Altoona. New Bloomfield. Hanover. GR^FF PRIZE, For best Essay on Tennyson's '-Princess." CORA E. HARTMAN, - - - - Mummasburg. HASSLER GOLD MEDAL-Junior Latin Prize. NATHANIEL C. BARBEHENN, - - Gettysburg. WITH HONORABLE MENTION OF WALDO D. MAYNARD, - - - Schoharie, N. Y. M. G. L. RIETZ, - Amsterdam, N. Y. HERBERT F. RICHARDS, - - - Zanesville, O. BAUM SOPHOMORE MATHEMATICAL PRIZE. LUTHER P. EISENHART, - - - York. DAVID E. RICE, - - - - Chambersburg. WITH HONORABLE MENTION OF EDNA M. LOOMIS, . - Troy. MUHLENBERG FRESHMAN PRIZE, For best general Scholarship. HENRY WOLF BIKLE, - - - Gettysburg. WITH HONORABLE MENTION OF GEORGE F. ABLE, - Philadelphia. ELKANAH M. DUCK, - - - Spring Mills. REDDIG PRIZE IN ORATORY. HORACE M. WITMAN, - - ' - Harrisburg. WITH HONORABLE MENTION OF WILLIAM A. KUMP, - - - Hanover. HONORARY DEGREES. Doctor of Divinity, Rev. Frank Richards, Zanesville, Ohio. " " " " J. A. Singmaster, Allentown, Pa. " " " " J. L. Smith, E. End, Pittsburg, Pa. " " " " M. G. Boyer, Aitch, Pa. " " Science, Prof. Geo. W. Gross, York, Pa. Master of Arts, Clarence J. Reddig, Shippensburg, Pa. Doctor of Philosophy, (on examination) Rev. M. M. Kinard, Columbia, S. C. COLLEGE C0MM2NCENENT PROGRAMME. THURSDAY, JUNE Latin Salutatory, - Scientific Spirit, - . - - National Sentiment, The Retirement of Gladstone, The Benefits of Opposition, The Lesson of the Mountains, Lynch Law, its Cause and Cure, - Local Government, - The Academic Atmosphere, In the Conflict, with the Valedictory, 21ST, 1894. - DAVID W. VAN CAMP. ELMER M. STAHL. - WILLIAM F. LUTZ. BENJAMIN R. LANTZ. - FRANK E. FICKINGER. JULIUS F. SEEBACH. - PAUL W. KOLLER. HERBERT A. ALLISON. - MARGARET R. HIMES. - F. H. BLOOMHARDT. CONFERRING OF DEGREES. H. W. MCKNIGHT, D. D., LL. D., President of the College' CANDIDATES FOR DEGREES. Rev. John M. Axe, " Thomas B. Birch, Garnet Gehr, Esq., Rev. Samuel G. Heffelbower, Rev. John E- Hoick, " Albert O. Mullen, " August Pohlmann, " William G. Slifer, MASTER OF ARTS. Rev. Stanley Billheimer, " Wilton C. Dunlap, Robert N. Hartman, Ph. D., William Hersh, Esq., Rev. J. B. Markward, Luther C. Peter, M. D., Rev. Charles L. Ritter, William L. Smyser, THE COLLEGE MERCURY. IOI Rev. George F. Snyder, Charles W. Walker, Esq., Rev. Robert B. Wolf, F. P. Whitmer, '90. Rev. Martin L. Tate, " Edmund J. Wolf, " Noah Yeiser, '90, BACHELOR OF AKTS. Herbert Allen Allison, - call Platt Bastlan, - Fred Herman Bloomhardt, Frank Barndt, - Luekctt Ashton Bush, William Babylon Duttera John Super English, John Sherman Fair, - Frank Flcklnger, - James Whit e Gladhlll, Cora Elizabeth llartman, ■ Margaret Rebecca Hlmes, William Oscar Ibach, - Matthew Kemp, Charles Froneileld Kloss, Paul Warren Roller, Benjamin Eelgle Lantz, William Filler I.utz, Richard Warren Mottern, Jacob Crayton Nicholas, Julias Frederick seebach, Samuel Blddle Sorrlck, - Elmer McClellan Stahl, Clyde Bell Stover, David William Van Camp, - Gettysburg, Pa. Maple Hill, Pa. - Altoona, Pa. - Sumneytown, Pa. Harney, Md. - Gettysburg, Pa. Harrisburg, Pa. - Altoona, Pa. New Bloomfleld, Pa. - Jersey Shore, Mummasburg, Pa. - Gettysburg, Pa. Philadelphia, Pa. - Hazleton, Pa, Tyrone, Pa. Hanover, Pa - Hagerstown, Md. Bedford, Pa. Watsontown, Pa. - West Falrvlew, Pa. Waynesboro', Pa. Willlamsburg, Pa. - Hay's Mills, Pa. Hagerstown, Md. Plain Held, pa. BACHELOR OF SCIENCE. John Hoffer, Jr., Ralph Eaton Miller, William otterbine NIcklas, Harrisburg, Pa. Plnegrove, Pa. Chambersburg, Pa. COWIMENCEWIENT NOTES AND COL-LEGE LOCALS. The old officers of the Alumni Association were re-elected, at the meeting held in Brua Chapel, on Wednesday evening of Commence-ment week. The annual address before the alumni was delivered by George J. Benner, '78, of the Gettysburg Bar. His subject was: "The Signs of the Times.'' H. M. Clabaugh, Esq., '77, was elected alumni orator for next Commencement. Rev. Daniel Garland was re-elected alumni editor of THE MERCURY. Notices were read by the chairman of the obituary committee, of nine Alumni who died during the year: Rev. W. H. Lilly, '71; Rev. Dr. C. A. Hay, '39; Rev. J. Phillip Willard, '39; Rev. C. G. Focht, '87; Rev. H. M. Bickel, '48; Rev. A. C. Stup, '91; Rev. Henry Baker, '41; Rev. Henry L- Ziegenfuss, '66; J. Cassatt Neely, Esq, '56. FOUND.—A gold watch chain, the owner may procure the same by calling upon or ad-dressing Dr. P. M. Bikle, Gettysburg, Pa. The beautiful new flag that now wave from our dormitory merit and receive the admira-tion of every college man. The purchase of these flags is the accomplishment of a general student's movement. It is gratifying to see the patriotic spirit of the boys manifested in this way, especially here where all the sur-roundings call forth the highest and noblest feelings of patriotism. The college wishes to extend its thanks for the following contribu-tions:- From the Faculty, $7.50; class of '94, $5-Oo; '95. $4-5o; '97, $5-oo. The Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity held a banquet on Wednesday evening of Commence-ment week. The large and beautifully fur-nished halls of the new "Eagle Hotel" were used. Rev. D. Frank Garland, the alumni editor of the MERCURY was toast-master for the evening. The following toasts were pro-posed and ably responded to: "Welcome,"—E. H. Wert. "The Fraternity Idea,"—Rev. H. C. Alle-man. "Our Fraternity,"—Sterling Valentine. "The Early Days,"—Prof. E. S. Breiden-baugh, Sc. D. "Reminiscences,"—E. G. Miller. "The'Alumni,"—Geo. J. Benner. "The Active Chapter,"—F. H. Knubel. "The Ladies,"—L. A. Brewer. Some other addresses by the visiting Alumni followed. A very pleasant and enjoyable time was had by all. The annual banquet of "Philo Debating Club" was held on Thursday evening, June 7th, in Minuigh's parlors, on Baltimore street. A very pleasant time was enjoyed by all pres-ent. About 10 o'clock, were served, in a very tasteful and inviting manner, all the rich deli-cacies that go toward adorning the tables of modern Epicureans. After the voluptuous re-past was enjoyed, Mr. Rietz, President of the Club and toastmaster for the evening, called fe 102 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. upon a number of the boys, who kept the merry ball rolling for more than an hour by their witty and much appreciated responses. The boys then returned to College highly pleased, and with a secret vow to be more faithful and to do better work for old Philo. in the future. On Tuesday evening, the 19th inst., the Glee, Banjo and Mandolin Clubs of College, gave an entertainment in Brua Chapel. A new programme was rendered upon this occa-sion, and the performance throughout was es-pecially fine, meriting and receiving much praise from all who were present. The organ-izations are much indebted to Messrs. Nicho-las, Seminary, G. C. Baum, '93, for their act-ive interest in, and highly appreciated serv-ices for the several clubs. The second annual banquet of the Peisel-fannish Deitsch Gesellschaft was held in Min-nigh's parlors, on Chambersburg street, on Thursday evening, June 14th. The attendance was large and the evening was pleasantly spent by all. Toasts were responded to by a number of the members. The President, Mr. E. N. B. Erb, acted as toast master. The organization is in a nourishing condition. The President's reception was held on Thurs-day evening. It was a brilliant and successful affair. The recitation Hall was beautifully deco-rated with flowers and palms. The attendance was larger this year than it has been for a long time. The large number of Alumni and friends present was a gratifying feature. The Metronome Orchestra of Harrisburg furnished the music for the occasion as well as for the other exercises. They have received many compliments for their fine music. The Junior Annual, "The Spectrum," was put on sale last week. The book is the finest annual ever published here. The artistic finish as well as the nature of the matter has been deservedly commented upon. The class is to be congratulated upon its success in getting out such a meritorious annual. We hope other classes will meet with the same support from our loyal Alumni and friends, and that succeeding annuals will even surpass this one in beauty and elegance. The Board of Trustees met on June 20th 1894. Pres. McKnight's report was read and was very satisfactory, showing the college to be in a flourishing condition. The recommendation of Principal Klinger for the appointment of C. B. Van Ormer, as Tutor in the Preparatory Department was con-firmed by the Board. Rev. C. M. Stock, Rev. H. B. Wile, Mr. T. B. Patton and M. G. Boyer were elected members of the Board of Trustees to fill va-cancies. Mr. Benjamin Kunkle and Rev. Dr. Conrad were re-elected. Mr. McPherson succeeds himself as a mem-ber of the Executive Committee. The question of considering the advisability of establishing additional courses of degrees was referred to the Executive Committee to be reported next year. Among the visiting Alumni who were pres-ent at Commencement are the following: '46. Rev. W. M. Baum, D. D. '47. Rev. L. E. Albert, D. D. '48. Hon. Edw. McPherson, E. E- D. '50. Prof. M. Valentine, D. D., E. E- D. '51. Hon. David Wills. '55. Jacob Rinehart, M. D. '56. Robert E. Sibbet, M. D. 57. Rev. Prof. C. E. Keedy, M. D., Rev. D. McC. Gilbert, D. D. '58. Rev. E. S. Johnston. '59. Rev. J. G. Goettman, D. D. '61. Andrew T. Kistler. '62. Rev. M. L. Culler. '63. Prof. E. J. Wolf, D. D. '64. Rev. Frank Richards. '65. Rev T. C. Billheimer, D. D., Rev. M. G. Boyer, Rev. J. C. Roller, D. D. '66. Rev. H. S. Cook. '67. Hart Gilbert, Esq. THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 103 '68. John W. Hay, M. D., Prof. J. W. Richard, D. D. '70. Rev. J. T. Gladhill. '71. Rev Charles E. Hay, Rev. D. T. Koser, Rev. John Wagner. '72. George N. Acker, M. D., Rev. J. A. Koser, S. McC. Swope, Esq. '73. Rev. E. H. Leisenring, Rev. J. A. Singmaster. '74. Rev Chas. M. Stock, G. E. Titus, M. D. '75. Rev. E. D. Weigle, D. D., Rev. M. L-Young, Ph. D. '77. Rev. W. M. Baum, Jr., H. M. Cla-baugh, Esq., Rev. Harry B. Wile. '78. George J. Benner, Rev. J. A. Hart-man, Rev. J. F. Mackley. '79. J. F. Graff, Rev. Luther Kuhlman, H. C. Picking, A. C. Wentz, M. D. '80. Rev. A. H. F. Fischer, Rev. J. A. Metzgar, Rev. W. E. Stabler, Sterling G. Val-entine, Ph. D. '82. C. S. Duncan, Esq., Rev. M. H. Val-entine, Rev. H. H. Weber, G. M. Walter, Esq. '83. L. A. Brewer, Esq., J. B. McPherson, Esq., J. E. Musselman. '84. Rev. A. S. Fichthorn. '85. Rev. Edgar Grim Miller, Rev. Ed. Everett Hoshour, Rev. C. Reinewald, Rev. R. Stare. '87. Rev. H. C. Alleman, Rev. Amos A. Parr. '88. Rev. L. S. Black, Rev. D. Frank Gar-land. '89. Donald P. McPherson, John Reed Scott, Esq., Ira L. Tipton. '90. Rev. H. Anstadt, Rev. H. C. Bixler, Rev. E. E. Blint, Rev. F. S. Geesey, Rev. J. F. W. Kitzmeyer, George B. Kunkel, M. D., Rev. W. G. Minnick, Wm. B. Small, M. D. '91. Rev. Stanley Billheimer, Rev. T. B. Birch, Rev. S. G. Hefelbower, Wm. Hersh, Esq., Rev. E. J. Wolf, Rev. R. B. Wolf. '92. H. E. Berkey, C. G. Bikle, M. T. Brown, W. K. Damuth, D. P. Drawbaugh, Frank Hesse, C. H. Huber, G. J. M. Ketner. '93. G. C. Baum, J. J. Brallier, G. M. K. Diffenderfer, H. E. Gettier, A. A. Kelly, F. H. Knubel, J. R. Plank, A. J. Rudisill. Many other Alumni were present whose names could not be obtained. ALUiviNl- '68. Rev. J. W. Richard, D. D., of the Seminary, delivered the Baccalaureate Sermon to the graduating class of Kee Mar College, Hagerstown, Md., on June 3rd. '71. Rev. Dr. E. F. Bartholomew, of Au-gustana College, Rock Island, 111., will spend a year abroad for study. 'Rev. W. E. Fischer, of Shamokin, Pa., de-livered the Baccalaureate to the graduates of the High School of that place on June 3rd. The class numbered twenty-six and their com-mencement was a most creditable and delight-ful affair. '75. Rev. E. D. Weigle, of Altoona, Pa., received the title of D. D., when degrees were conferred at Selins Grove, Pa. '76. Rev. Prof. Jacob Yutzy, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran church, of Selins Grove, has issued a "Memorial Jubilee Volume," con-taining a history of the church for the past half century. The work is a valuable acqui-sition to the history of the Lutheran church. '78. Mr. George J. Benner, Esq., of Gettys-burg, delivered the address before the alumni of the College on Wednesday evening, June 21st. '82. Rev. A. R. Steck, of Indianapolis, Ind., who preached a trial sermon lately in St. James church, has accepted the call extended to him by the congregation to be the successor of Dr. Swartz. Mr. Steck will soon enter upon his duties. '86. Rev. Prof. O. G. Klinger, Principal of the Preparatory department of College, deliv-ered the annual address before the Irving Col-lege C. E. Society, Sunday evening, June 3rd. '90. Rev. S. T. Nicholas, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran church, of Allegheny, io4 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. was married to Miss Elizabeth Spangler, of Areudtsville, Pa. '90. Mr. George P. Kunkel, who has been engaged in the Reading Hospital for the past year will now set up practice for himself in Harrisburg. '90. Rev. W. G. Minnick, who was with us during commencement, is meeting with good success in his new field of labor, Harney, Md. Mr. Minnick had charge of the exercises at the dedication of the new cemetery in that place. '90. The many friends of Rev. J. W. F. Kitzmeyer, were glad to welcome him here again. Mr. Kitzmeyer has been engaged in Davis, W. Va., for the past year as a Lutheran pioneer and has been so successful that he has built a beautiful church. '91. Rev. W. C. Dunlap, of the graduating class of the Seminary, was married on June 6th, to Miss Irene Beck. Mr. and Mrs. Dun-lap will reside at Duncannon, Pa., to the pas-torate of which Mr. Dunlap was called. '91. Rev. C. L. Ritter, of the Senior Class J at Gettysburg Seminary has accepted a unani-mous call to the Fayetteville charge in Frank-lin Co., Pa. '91. Rev. A. O. Mullen, of the Seminary, has been elected pastor at Altamont, N. Y. '92. Mr. Maurice T. Brown, who is mer-chandising with his brother in Waynesboro, Pa., visited his many friends here during com-mencement. '92. Rev. G. Albert Getty, of Baltimore, was married to Miss Alathea W. Bernard, of Harford Co., Md. Rev. Milton Valentine per-formed the ceremony. '93. Mr. W. H. Ehrhart, of the Theological Seminary, is supplying a mission charge at Red Lion, York Co., Pa. '93. Mr. George Baum, for the past year a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of their Banjo Club, was with us prior to commencement coaching the Instru-mental Clubs for the concert. '93. Mr. Wm. J. Gies, of Manheim, Pa., who has been a student at Yale for the past year, acquitted himself so well that he has been awarded a special scholarship by the University as an inducement for him to con-tinue his studies there in the cause of Biology, leading in two years to the degree of Ph. D. In addition, he has been offered the position for the coming year of assistant to Prof. R. H. Chittenden, the greatest Physiological Chem-istry expert in the United States and Professor in the Biological Laboratory of the University. '93. Mr. Wm. F. Bare, of the Seminary, will supply the mission charge at Greenmount, York Co., Pa., during the summer vacation. '93. Mr. Marion J. Kline, of Frederick, Md., a student in the Seminary, recently preached a very able sermon in his own church, of which Rev. Luther Kuhlman is pastor. Mr. Kline will supply St. Paul's Luth-eran church, Washington, D. C, during the absence of Rev. Dr. Domer. We congratu-late Mr. Kline on this excellent opportunity. JENNIS. DOUBLES—FIRST SERIES. Bloomhardt and Wheeler vs. Stover and Keffer. Dloorahardt and Wheeler: 6-1, 6-3. Barndt and Forney vs. Graff and Danner. Graff and Danner: 3-6, 7-5, 6-2. Baum and Byers vs. T,oudon and Stup. Baum and Byers: 6-4, 6-4. Fair and Monath vs. Carty and Bixler. Fair and Monath: 6-3, 6-4. Gladhill and Kain vs. Wiest and Hollinger. Gladhill and Kain: 6-4, 7-5. Kloss and Wolf vs. Hoffer and Feldman. Kloss and Wolf: 6-1, 6-4. Herr and Apple vs. I^antz and Heindel. I^antz and Heindel: 6-4, 4-6, 6-4. Fickinger and Moser vs. Keefer and Enniss. Fickinger and Moser: 6-1, 6-2. Crilly and Brosius vs. Eckels and Auckerman. Crilly and Brosius: 7-5. 6-2. SECOND SERIES. Graff and Danner vs. Kloss and Wolf. Kloss and Wolf: 3-6, 6-2, 6-1. Bloomhardt and Wheeler vs. Crilly and Brosius. Bloomhardt and Wheeler: 6-2, 6-1. Fair and Monath vs. Gladhill and Kain. Gladhill and Kain: 63, 6-4. Baum and Byers vs. Crilly and Brosius. Crilly and Brosius: 6-2, 2-6, 6-4. THE COLLEGE MERCURY. 105 RECITATION HALL LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY GETTVJ5URG, PENN'A y A DeMPWOLF. ARCH'T. YORK, PENN'A. VIEW mOM THE NORTH THE NEW SEMINARY BUILDING. THIRD SERIES. Kloss and Wolf vs. Fickinger and Moser. Kloss and Wolf: 6-2, 3-6, 6-4. Crilly and Brosins vs. Gladliill and Kain. Gladhill and Kain: 6-i, 6-2. FOURTH SERIES. . Bloomhardt and Wheeler vs. Kloss and Wolf. Bloomhardt and Wheeler: 6-1, 5-7, 4-6, 6-1. 6-2. FIFTH SERIES. Bloomhardt and Wheeler vs. Gladhill and Kain. Bloomhardt and Wheeler: 6-2, 6*1, 9-7. SINGLES—FIRST SERIES. Gladhill vs. Barndt. Gladhill: 6-3,6-2. Lantz vs. Crilly. Crilly: 6-4, 6-4. Bloomhardt vs. Graff. Bloomhardt. (Forfeited.) Fair vs. London. Fair: 6-2, 6-0. Fickinger vs. Kloss. Fickinger: 6-2, 6-4. SECOND SERIES. Gladhill vs. Miller. Miller: 12-10, 6-4. Fickinger vs. Crilly. Crilly: 6-2, 6-8, 6-0. Bloomhardt vs. Fair. Bloomhardt: 6-0, 6-4. THIRD SERIES. Bloomhardt vs. Miller. Bloomhardt: 6-4, 6-2, 6-i. FOURTH SERIES. Bloomhardt vs. Crilly. 1 Bloomhardt: 6-4, 6-2, 6-3. INTER-FRATERNITY TOURNAMENT. Phi Delta Theta vs. Phi Gamma Delta. Phi Gamma Delta: 7-5, 6-3. Phi Kappa Psi vs. Sigma Chi. Phi Kappa Psi: 6-1, 6-0. Phi Kappa Psi vs. Phi Gamma Delta. Phi Gamma Delta: 4-6, 6-2, 6-3. Phi Gamma Delta vs. Alpha Tau Omega. Phi Gamma Delta: 6-0, 6-0. SEWIINARY NOTES. We are pleased to present to our readers a view of the new Seminary building, taken from plans submitted by the architect. The view is from the north-west side. The esti-mated cost of the new building and re-mod-eling of the old is sixty thousand dollars. On Sunday, May 27th, Rev. Dr. M. Valen-tine preached the baccalaureate sermon, tak-ing as his text: "The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee." On Monday evening the Rev. Frank Man-hart, of Selin's Grove, delivered the annual lecture on "Christian Worship, its Forms and Spirit," and on Wednesday evening the ad- io6 THE COLLEGE MERCURY. dress to the Alumni was made by the Rev. E. D. Weigle, of Altoona. Thursday evening the regular graduating exercises were held in Christ church, and ora-tions were delivered by the following: "Ap-plied Christianity," John E. Hoick, Oswego, N. Y.; "Spener and his Influence," Harry Anstadt, York; "Christianity's Conquest of the World," G. Albert Getty, Baltimore. Dr. Valentine then delivered diplomas to the fol-lowing graduates: Harry Anstadt, York; John McM. Axe, Bellville; Fuller Bergstresser, Middletown, Md.; Johannes S. Braren, Brecklum, Ger-many; Stanley Billheimer, Gettysburg; Thos. B. Birch, Bloomsburg; Milton C. Dunlap, Pine Grove Mills; George Albert Getty, Bal-timore, Md.; S. Gring Hefelbower, Newville; William W. Hess, Gettysburg; Henderson N. Miller, Salisbury, N. C; Albert O. Mullen, Baltimore, Md.; Robert E. Patterson, China Grove, N. C, Charles E. Ritter, Keysville; William G. Slifer, Rohrersville, Md.; H. E. Sloop, China Grove, N. C; George F. Sny-der, Port Royal; Martin E. Tate, Everett; Robert B. Wolf, Edmund J. Wolf, Centre Hall. Nearly all the members of the graduating class have received calls and many have al-ready commenced their work. At a special meeting of the Board of Di-rectors, held on Thursday morning, the con-tract for the new building was given to Geo. S. Yinger, at $34,240. The following propositions, which the com-mittee wished the Board to consider, were recommended by them: I. The plans and specifications for re-modeling and re-constructing the old building. It is to be turned into a dormitory with 59 rooms, steam heating introduced, the middle stairway taken out, roof replaced with slate, and walls and chimneys repaired. These re-pairs to cost not less than $8,000. II. The completion of the dormer story of the new building. There are to be nineteen rooms in it and the sum is to be $3,559. III. Plans for the heating by steam. The time for opening bids was extended. IV. The erection of a boiler house, the bid of C. H. Stallsmith being the lowest at $2,- 591-93- V. The placing of steel shelving in the li-brary. The price is $2,550. VI. The water supply for the building and the houses of the professors. It will be neces-sary to get water from the town supply or pump it from the well to a tank, to be placed in the old building. VII. The erection of a house on the Sem-inary grounds for Prof. Richard, who has been living under discomforts and disadvantages, the cost not to exceed $4,500. Rev. P. G. Bell, of Altoona, has been ap-pointed Financial Agent of the Seminary, at a salary of $1,000 and traveling expenses. Messrs. P. H. and W. E. Gladfelter have con-tributed $3,000 towards the fund for the new building; Dr. Charles Baum and Mr. Getty have each contributed $250. ''Takes First (Place." The ramn stands for just what it is, flUje tot Biejefe built ~% for $125.00. »9 1032 Chestnut Street, PHILADELPHIA. BASEBALL AND LAWN TENNIS SS5S-? used exclusively through-out the U s. and Canada. Spalding's Trade mark is a guaran-tee that the goods are the best, complete Illustrated Catalogue ready. Sent free. ADVERTISEMENTS. EATON & BURNETT'S ENGLISH, BUSINESS, SHORT HAND UNO TYPE1IIING, (Training School FOR YOUNG MEN fl^D WOMEN-YOHN BROS., ^>-Sol© j\cjonts FOP-V JAUIGV, Hardrqan,, Voso, ©oqoVop, Sol'^ubept, AND OTHKR PIANOS. Harqli'n, F^aol-^ard, ©l^ieago ©ottage, AND OTHKR ORGANS. 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The study of the military veterans' experience in higher education has coincided with the history of the GI Bill® and the various iterations of the benefits of this program, beginning with the original version following WWII. With the latest version, the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, institutions of higher education have experienced the highest enrollment numbers of veterans since the conclusion of the Vietnam Conflict. Institutions have historically been reactive in support of new waves of veterans entering higher education. This study sought to gain the perspective of veterans, as to how the institutions have been serving veterans by creating a veteran friendly campus through the admission, enrollment, and veterans services processes. The study also sought to gather the veterans' perspective related to how well faculty and staff understand the military experience, and how well veterans have been integrated into the classroom environment and into higher education in general. In addition, the study sought to measure the perspective of veterans with disabilities and their specific experience in higher education. A survey of the veteran experience was conducted in 2-year and 4-year institutions in a western state. Results indicated that although improvements have been made in relation to veterans in this study, there are still areas that need addressing in order to improve the veteran experience in overall. The veteran, the institution, and the community in general can benefit immensely as veterans use their GI Bill® benefit to pursue higher education, and then put that education to work upon graduation. It is incumbent on institutions of higher education to ensure that a veteran friendly process is in place, in order to attract and retain veterans through graduation. ; MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my parents, Robert E. and Janice D. Czech, for their sound example, for instilling proper values, and for exemplifying good character. Without them and who they were, I would not be where I am or who I am today. I would also like to express appreciation to my family and friends for their unwavering support to me during the process of completing my graduate degree. Without their support I do not believe I would have endured my many struggles to meet this goal. My appreciation to Dr. Peggy Saunders for her guidance throughout this process, and to my many professors for their patience and understanding throughout each semester. Their wisdom and intuition allowed me to flourish as a non-traditional student, in an environment that seemed foreign. I would like to acknowledge the foundation of hard work, leadership, and service that I learned during my 22 years in the United States Anny. It was not always easy, but the lessons learned have helped me to endure this graduate degree process. Finally, thanks to my graduate committee chair Dr. Natalie Williams. She was my guide, advisor, and champion during this final project. Without her outstanding patience, understanding and depth of knowledge I would have never made it to my goal. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 3 Table of Contents NATURE OF THE PROBLEM . 7 Literature Review . 9 Introduction . 9 Historical Foundations . 10 WWII Era GI Bill® (Original) . 10 Korean Era GI Bill® . 11 Vietnam Era GI Bill® . 12 Post-Vietnam Era Veterans Education Assistance Program (VEAP) . 12 Montgomery GI Bill® and Reserve Programs . 13 Post 9/11 GI Bill® (Current) . 13 GI Bill® Use (as of Fiscal Year 2013) . 14 Effects of the Post 9/11 GI Bill® on Higher Education . 15 Veterans with combat related disability issues . 19 Accommodating veterans with disabilities on campus . 20 Veterans' with disabilities . 25 Reintegration into Society . 28 Higher education: Weathering the perfect storm . 30 Summary . 32 PURPOSE . 34 METHOD . 36 Participants . 37 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 4 Instruments . 38 Procedure . 3 8 Data Analysis . 41 RESULTS . 43 Demographic Data . 43 Overall Experience in Higher Education . 44 Website Navigation . 44 Admissions . 45 Enrollment Services . 46 Veterans Services Office . 47 Faculty Awareness, Classroom Environment, and Campus Life . 48 Service-connected Disability . 51 DISCUSSION . 53 Implications of Results . 55 Limitations . 61 Future Research . 62 Summary . 63 REFERENCES . 65 APPENDICES . 69 Appendix A: Veterans Survey . 70 Appendix B: IRB Approval . ; . 74 Appendix C: Survey Results Spreadsheet. . 76 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 5 List of Tables Table I. Respondents by branch and years of service, and by branch and gender . 37 Table 2. Summary of Survey Responses by Section, with Totals by Section and Response Type . 52 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 6 Abstract The study of the military veterans' experience in higher education has coincided with the history of the GI Bill® and the various iterations of the benefits of this program, beginning with the original version following WWII. With the latest version, the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, institutions of higher education have experienced the highest enrollment numbers of veterans since the conclusion of the Vietnam Conflict. Institutions have historically been reactive in support of new waves of veterans entering higher education. This study sought to gain the perspective of veterans, as to how the institutions have been serving veterans by creating a veteran friendly campus through the admission, enrollment, and veterans services processes. The study also sought to gather the veterans' perspective related to how well faculty and staff understand the military experience, and how well veterans have been integrated into the classroom environment and into higher education in general. In addition, the study sought to measure the perspective of veterans with disabilities and their specific experience in higher education. A survey of the veteran experience was conducted in 2-year and 4-year institutions in a western state. Results indicated that although improvements have been made in relation to veterans in this study, there are still areas that need addressing in order to improve the veteran experience in overall. The veteran, the institution, and the community in general can benefit immensely as veterans use their GI Bill® benefit to pursue higher education, and then put that education to work upon graduation. It is incumbent on institutions of higher education to ensure that a veteran friendly process is in place, in order to attract and retain veterans through graduation. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM With the passing of the Post 9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act (2008), also known as the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, colleges and universities are seeing higher enrollment by military veterans than they have since the conclusion of the Vietnam Conflict (Cook & Kim, 2009; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009), and the intricacies and implementation of this new GI Bill® has caused confusion and frustration for both the veterans and university staff. After WWII, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (or GI Bill®) granted unprecedented educational and economic benefits to veterans. Other GI Bill® programs and adjustments have been made over the years, but the Post 9/11 version was said to be the most generous since the WWII era GI Bill® (Radford, 2009). 7 With the most recent changes to the GI Bill®, veteran presence was expected to grow on campuses across the country and therefore schools have had to adjust to meet the new demand (Cook & Kim, 2009; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). Many of the veterans, active military and active military reservists (92%) currently enrolled in university indicated that education should play a role in post-service transition (Zoli, Maury, & Fay, 2015). Many veterans currently enrolled in higher education were exposed to direct and indirect conflict and suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and other physical and psychological challenges. Church (2009) said that "returning veterans will have a wide range of medical diagnoses and related health problems that will have a temporary or chronic impact on their living, working, learning, MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE and relationship functions" (pg. 44). These issues make it difficult for veterans to adjust to a higher education setting, and cause tangible problems for their academic progress. 8 Although there are many positive qualities that veterans bring to an institution of higher education, many also bring with them these battle related issues. These issues make it difficult for veterans to adjust to this setting. The American Council on Education (ACE) found that veterans reported problems meeting academic expectations, while managing service connected injuries, including PTSD and TBI (Steele, Salcedo, and Coley, 2010). Not all veterans will openly disclose the visible and invisible injuries they have, so it is incumbent on colleges and universities to develop welcoming programs that meet these challenges (Church, 2009). This lack of self-disclosure could lead veterans to underutilize traditional campus disability services and therefore not receive the accommodations that may make their experience more manageable. Unfortunately, most post-secondary schools are ill prepared to meet the needs of these Veterans, creating lost opportunities for both the Veteran and the institution. Schools that are slow in meeting the challenges that the veterans present, find they are reacting rather than being proactive in meeting veteran needs. If institutions of higher education do not work to understand this veteran population, then it is likely to lead to an unsuccessful experience for the veteran and the institution (Brown & Gross, 2011). There are areas where higher education is generally meeting the needs of veterans, like including veteran issues in strategic planning, offering specific programs and services for veterans, recognizing prior military experience with college credit, assisting veterans with finding counseling services, providing financial accommodations, and providing counseling on veterans' educational benefits. But there are many areas that still show MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE room for improvement including assisting veterans' transition to college, developing faculty and staff awareness of veteran specific issues, meeting the needs of veterans with military related disabilities, assisting re-enrolling veterans, and providing peer to peer experiences for veterans (Cook & Kim, 2009). Literature Review Introduction This literature review will first establish some historical background relating to the GI Bill®, including changes that have taken place since its establishment following WWII. It will highlight the benefits of each version, especially the original version and the most recent version known as the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, and demonstrate the problems caused by the large influx of new veterans in higher education. Next, it will highlight some of the issues veterans have in a higher education setting related to their combat related disabilities and experiences, and the lack of preparation and forethought by colleges and universities related to these new veterans. Historical IFoundation~1office1] 9 The relationship of higher education and the military dates back to the 1862 Morrill Act, which established military training programs at land-grant institutions (Rumann & Hamrick, 2009, 2010). Subsequently, just prior to WWI, Congress passed the 1916 National Defense Act (NDA) which provided colleges a leading role in training soldiers. The NDA also established the three components of the military: the active duty military component, the military reserve component, and the state National Guard component. In addition, it created the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) that standardized what had been solely independent military training programs at colleges and MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 10 universities. These were the fotmdations of the relationship between the military and higher education. Even though the NDA was established prior to WWI, many veterans were unsatisfied with the benefits offered to them, which resulted in significant economic and social unrest. This dissatisfaction prompted the writing of Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). WWII Era GI Bill(RJ (Original). With the large numbers of military veterans returning home after WWII the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (i.e., GI Bill®) granted unprecedented educational and economic benefits to these veterans. After much strnggle, this act was passed by congress and signed into law by President Roosevelt on June 22, 1944 (Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). When signing the GI Bill®, President Roosevelt said "It gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down" (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013, para. 24). This trnly generous WWII era GI Bill® provided many financial and educational benefits to veterans and their families. Additionally benefits included living stipends, Veterans were given loan guarantees for homes, farms and businesses (e.g., nearly 2.4 million loans from 1944 to 1952), as well as unemployment pay and employment assistance (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013). By the time the original GI Bill® had ended in 1956, 7.8 million of the nearly 16 million WWII veterans had used education benefits to some extent. In the peak year of 1947, veterans made up 49% of all college admissions. One interesting fact is that although there was an unemployment benefit available, less than 20% of the funds set aside for this benefit was used by the veterans. The total cost of this original version of MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE the GI Bill® was $14.5 Billion (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013; Military.com, 2006). 11 Many names have been given to this generation of veterans that served in WWII, such as the Greatest Generation, the G .I. Generation, and the Civic Generation. Regardless of the label, the impact of this generation due in large part to the GI Bill® education benefits, is immeasurable and can be felt to the present. In her book, Mettler (2005) stated that ''.just as the G.I. Bill transformed the lives of veterans who used it, they in tum helped change America" (p. 11 ). This GI Bill® opened up educational opportunities to those other than the privileged in America. Higher education that had previously been reserved for mainly white, native-born, Protestant Americans prior to WWII, was now a possibility for those that were Jewish, Catholic, African American, immigrants, and the working class. This changed the landscape of America forever (Mettler, 2005). Korean Era GI Bill.® The Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1952, or Korean Conflict GI Bill®, was instituted to carry on the tradition of taking care of those who served and fought for their country. It was approved by President Truman on July 16, 1952. It was available for use by veterans who served between June 27, 1950 and Febrnary 1, 1955. Although this GI Bill® still provided education benefits and living stipends, as well has loan guarantees, it left the employment assistance up to the individual states. By the time this program ended in 1955, some 43% of the over 5.5 million veterans of the Korean Conflict had used their education benefits to some extent. Total cost to the country was $4.5 Billion and over 1.5 million loans were guaranteed, meaning the MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE government guaranteed a portion of the loan to the lien holder in case of default (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013; Military.com, 2006). Vietnam Era GI Bill.® 12 The Veterans Readjustment Act of 1966, or Vietnam Era GI Bill®, was signed by President Johnson on March 3, 1966. It retroactively covered post Korean Conflict veterans who served after February 1, 1955 and continued for veterans who served until May 7, 1975. It again provided education benefits, for the first time including active duty military members, and again loan guarantees. Between 1966 and 1989, 6 million Vietnam veterans, 1.4 million Post-Korean veterans, and 7 51,000 active duty military used this education benefit to some extent. More than $42 Billion was spent on this version of the GI Bill®, and 4.5 million loans were guaranteed (Military.com, 2006). Post-Vietnam Era Veterans Education Assistance Program (VEAP). VEAP was a transitional program that bridged the gap between the Vietnam Era GI Bill®, and the Montgomery GI Bill®. Veterans, who entered after December 31, 1976 were eligible for education benefits under this version, but unlike the previous versions this one required a contribution by the military member and they had to choose to participate upon enlistment. The participant contributed through payroll deductions up to $2700 and the government then matched two dollars for every dollar contributed for a maximum of $5400. If one chose not to participate, then they had no money for education available at the end of their service. In addition to this money for education, the loan guarantees continued (Military.com, 2006). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 13 Montgomery GI Bill® and Reserve Programs. The Montgomery GI Bill®, named for its sponsor Representative G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery, was established in 1984. Representative Montgomery was the chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and worked to support veterans. For the first time a version of the GI Bill® also included education benefits for those serving in the reserve components, although at a reduced benefit to their active duty counterparts. A reserve member had to enlist for 6 years, and after serving 6 months they could begin using their education benefit. It again required the active military member to contribute toward their future education, with matching funds by the military. An active duty veteran was eligible if they served after 30 June, 1985 and had to enlist for a minimum of 2 years. This program continues to be used by veterans up to this day, and overlaps with the new Post 9/11 GI Bill® (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2013; Military.com, 2006). Post 9/11 GI Bill® (Current) The newest of the GI Bill® education and benefit programs is called the Post 9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Program (Post 9/11 GI Bill®). It was signed into law in July of2008, and became effective August 1, 2009. The Post 9/11 GI Bill® is the most comprehensive bill since the original in 1944. It provides benefits to service members, both active and reserve, who served at least 90 aggregate days of active military service after September 10, 2001. This means that an active duty member and a reserve component member serving the same amount of active duty time will receive the same benefit. The benefit can be used while still in the active military or reserve component and after discharge (Post 9/11 GI Bill Overview, n.d., Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 14 The Veterans Administration (VA) pays up to 100% of the student's tuition and fees for their education, based on the amount of service after the date of eligibility. The tuition and fees provided under this version of the GI Bill® are sent directly to the educational institution. This GI Bill® also includes up to $1000 per year for textbooks, a living stipend while emolled in school, based on cost ofliving which averages $1368 per month nationally, a one-time relocation payment of $500 for those relocating from a rural area to attend school, and for those still on active duty in the military the opportunity to transfer some or all of the benefit to their children (Post 9/11 GI Bill Overview, n.d.; Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014). The benefit is tiered depending on how much active duty service was rendered after September 10, 2001. For instance if the member served at least 36 months of active duty service, then they receive 100% of the benefits. For 30-36 months it is 90%, 24-30 months is 80%, 18-24 months is 70%, 12-18 months is 60%, 6-12 months is 50%, and 90 days to 6 months is 40% (Post 9/11 GI Bill Overview, n.d.). GI Bill® Use (as of Fiscal Year 2013). With the increased benefit of the Post 9/11 GI Bill® came a new wave of college bound military veterans and reserve members, and in some cases their family members to whom they have transferred benefits. The higher educational institutions around the country will need to prepare for this new wave, just as they had to prepare and react to the wave of veterans entering school following WWII. The Institute for Veterans and Military Families, at Syracuse University, conducted a multi-pronged study to gain a better understanding of social, economic, and wellness concerns of the newest generation of veterans. There are over 3.9 million MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 15 veterans identified as disabled by the Veterans Administration (VA). Of those, 43% were from the Gulf War era and beyond. Additionally, of the more than 8,500 respondents in that study 58% reported a service related disability. Of those in the survey that reported service-connected disability, 79% said that the disability created obstacles for them when they transitioned to civilian life. In fact, 12% indicated the disability hindered starting higher education, and 28% said the disability created obstacles in completing their higher education. These same veterans indicated that of the many motivations to join the military, 53% said that educational benefits were a reason they joined, followed by a desire to serve their country at 52%. In the research 92% of respondents indicated that education should play a role in post-service transition. The response to this particular question indicated how overwhelmingly important education is to the most recent service members and veterans, and showed intent to further their education. A study of GI Bill® usage by veterans was published providing data through fiscal year 2013. The study indicated that in the Fiscal Year (FY) of2009 the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) reported just 34,393 students using the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, but in FY 2013 the total was up to 754,229 students. If all of the current GI Bill® benefit programs are included, there were 1,091,044 students (FY 2013) using benefits. Payments from the Post 9/11 GI Bill® in FY 2013, to students and colleges, was over $10 billion, with the total from all GI Bill® programs being over $12 billion (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014). Effects of the Post 9/11 GI Bill® on Higher Education. Military veterans are likely to enroll or reenroll in higher education following military service. It is incumbent upon these institutions to be prepared, in order to make MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 16 the veterans' transition easier (Rumann and Hamrick, 2009). This is especially the case with the advent of the generous benefits of the Post-9/11 GI Bill®. The researchers further pointed out that because of generational and societal perspectives, many current administrators and faculty have most likely not experienced military service. This has caused issues with how faculty and staff at institutions relate to veterans. Rumann and Hamrick (2009) suggested that building relationships with outside veteran organizations could bridge the gap that may exist. In addition, they suggested that campus administrations could provide opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to better understand aspects of military service, complimenting a broader focus on diversity on campuses. In their more recent study, Rumann and Hamrick (2010) focused on a small group of National Guard and reserve veterans who had returned from wartime deployments to re-enroll in school. The veterans experienced things such as lingering high stress levels related to their deployments, a maturity gap that had developed between them and traditional undergraduate students, personal relationship issues, and identity related issues. Cook and Kim (2009) took a broader look at easing the transition of service members on campus. Their study involved surveys returned by 723 institutions across the country. The study found that there was a varied approach to serving veterans, with no obvious pattern as to which programs and services were provided, or what entity on campus was responsible, and reported that nearly two thirds of colleges and universities that did offer veteran services have increased those services since September 11, 2001. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 17 In the same study, researchers came to the conclusion that there were areas where higher education was generally meeting the needs of military students, and areas where institutions could improve. Some examples of areas where institutions met veteran needs were including veteran issues in strategic planning, offering specific programs and services for veterans, recognizing prior military experience with college credit, assisting veterans with finding counseling services, providing financial accommodations, and providing counseling on veterans' educational benefits (Cook & Kim, 2009). Areas that needed improvement included helping veterans transition to a college environment, providing professional development to faculty and staff on veteran transition issues, training of staff on meeting the needs veterans with brain injuries and other military related disabilities, streamlining of administrative procedures for veterans enrolling or re-enrolling, and providing opportunities for veterans to connect with peers on campus. With the expected influx of students using the Post-9/11 GI Bill®, institutions need to address these areas of weakness when it comes to veteran services and programs. In their report, Brown and Gross (2011) stated that successful management of military students brings benefits to all involved: the student; the academic institution; and the community. Part ofthis management includes understanding the characteristics of veteran and active military students. Radford (2009) detailed many characteristics of veterans and military undergraduates. The study states that: Slightly more than 3 percent of all undergraduates enrolled during the 2007-08 academic year were veterans, and slightly more than 1 percent were military service members. Among these military undergraduates, about 75 percent were MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE veterans, 16 percent were military service members on active duty, and almost 9 percent were military service members in the reserves. (p. 6) 18 The researcher also detailed issues faced by military undergraduates who wished to attend college: Difficulty transitioning to life after military service; experiencing psychological and/or physical post-war trauma; readjusting to personal relationships; and adapting to a new lifestyle. Radford also highlights that veterans can face bureaucratic red tape from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) relating to their education benefits as well as from the college or university staff who were often not well versed in the details of those benefits. Many veterans face obstacles and challenges in using the Post-9/11 GI Bill® and transitioning to college (Steele, Salcedo, & Coley, 2010). Challenges noted included expectations different from their military experience, balancing academics and other responsibilities, relating to non-veteran students, managing service-connected injuries and disabilities. They also noted institutional efforts to adapt to the new GI Bill® benefits. Schools reported increased staff workloads of 50% to 200% related to the new influx of veteran students. The researchers (Steel, Salcedo, & Coley, 2010) noted some of the reasons behind this influx were, increases in total GI Bill® enrollment over previous years, lack oflmowledge in details of the new law, coordination with student accounts offices with respect to receipt of payments, the need to submit enrollment verification of each veteran student, and the need to assist veteran students in understanding their benefits. Institutions could more effectively serve veteran students according to the results ofa focus group study (Steel, Salcedo, & Coley, 2010). Institutions that encourage MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 19 veterans to self-identify early, ensure veteran program administrators are adequately trained, and that other staff and administration are trained on the new GI Bill®, tend to have more effective programs for veterans. The institutions should employ disability and mental health staff who understand veterans' issues, have consistent policies for college credit for military training, have veteran specific orientations and informational sessions, and encourage veteran student organizations on campus (Steel, Salcedo, & Coley, 2010). Veterans with Combat Related Disability Issues One challenge America faces as the more recent conflicts wind down, is that there will be more veterans with disabilities returning from military service, and these veterans will be seeking higher education. It will be important for staff and faculty of associated schools to be prepared to assist these veterans with disabilities in their transition (DiRarnio & Spires, 2009). The veterans that find it especially difficult to adjust to higher education are those with combat related disability issues, including hidden issues such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Survivability from combat injury has increased and therefore an increase in veterans with disabilities on campus is inevitable. In the most recent conflicts, nearly 85% of those receiving combat injuries are surviving due to advances in protective body annor, use of coagulants, and advances in the military medical evacuation system (Madaus, Miller II, & Vance, 2009). The Veterans Administration (VA) reported that in 1986 there were 2,225,289 military veterans with service-connected disabilities. By 2013 the number of veterans with service-connected disabilities had climbed to 3,743,259, mainly due to exposure to the MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 20 most recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the increased survivability from combat injury (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014b). Researchers from a study of veterans with three major conditions (e.g., PTSD, TBI, and major depression) reported that 18.5% of those returning from the most recent conflicts had PTSD or depression, and 19.5% reported experiencing TBI during their deployment. Of the veterans responding to the study, 11.2% reported PTSD or depression but no TBI, 7.3% reported PTSD/depression and TBI, and 12.2% reported just TBI (Tanielian & Jaycox, 2008). More recent casualty statistics reported to congress indicate that, approximately 118,829 military members/veterans deployed between 2000 and 2014 were diagnosed with PTSD. During the same period 307,283 were diagnosed with some form ofTBI (Fischer, 2014). Colleges and universities across the country need to find ways to accommodate these new military veterans that may be coming to their institutions, but especially those with these sometimes unseen disabilities. The Disability Services (DS) offices on campus will need to take a leading role in this accommodation. Accommodating Veterans with Disabilities on Campus. In a study of the role of the DS staff in accommodating veterans with disabilities, 237 members of the Association on Higher Education and Disabilities completed a survey, responses indicated that only 33% were comfortable or knowledgeable about campus efforts to serve these wounded warriors. Additionally, only 17.3% felt they had above average ability to serve these veterans (Vance, Miller II, 2009). There is a need to develop veteran friendly programs that reduce red tape, and have a designated point person or office. Other recommendations were to have an ongoing campus dialogue MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 21 which includes members of the DS staff, work on collaboration with other campus professionals, and work to collaborate in educating faculty and staff on the unique needs of these veterans (Vance & Miller II, 2009). There have been many discussions on how to accommodate veterans with disabilities on college and university campuses. The American Council on Education (ACE), with support from the Kresge Foundation and the Association on Higher Education and Disability and America's Heroes at Work conducted a "Veterans Success Jam" in May of2010. The "Veteran Success Jam'', was a three-day online collaboration that brought together thousands of veterans and their families, active service members, campus leaders, nonprofit organizations, and govermnent agencies from around the country. Recommendations were generated for colleges and universities accommodating veterans with PTSD and TBI (American Council on Education, 2010). During discussions at the Veterans Success Jam it was determined that overall veterans bring a lot of good qualities with them to campus, such as a higher degree of maturity, experience and leadership qualities, familiarity with diversity, and a level of focus not seen in their peers. Unfortunately, these qualities have been earned at great personal expense, and may well affect their educational goals. Campuses that are prepared to handle these challenges will rnake the transition of these veterans much easier, and the schools will benefit from being seen as veteran friendly (American Council on Education, 2010). Part of preparing to properly serve and accommodate these veterans is to understand what PTSD and TBI are, and what effect they may have on the academic MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 22 progress of these students. It is imperative that faculty and staff be educated and aware of these possible challenges (American Council on Education, 2010). Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in veterans usually involves a blow or concussion to the head which may include a penetrating head injury, which disrupts the function of the brain itself. These are most often associated with contact with an improvised explosive device (IED). Generally TBI can result in long and short-term issues, but most people get better over time. For those with mild cases of TB I, about 80% of the cases from the most recent conflicts, the recovery time can be as little as 3-6 months (American Council on Education, 2010). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychological injury that develops in response to exposure to an extreme traumatic event or events over time. PTSD trauma may include threatened death of oneself or others, serious injury, and even just the constant threat of personal injury. This creates a feeling of fear and helplessness that actually changes the brains chemical and hormonal balance. For some victims the symptoms will disappear when they are no longer exposed, yet for others they persist over a long period of time. Flashbacks or reliving events can happen in PTSD cases, which bring the stresses back to the forefront. These victims can sometimes avoid these feelings by avoiding events or situations that may trigger them. Usually PTSD symptoms manifest themselves within a few months, but they can take years to appear (American Council on Education, 2010). Staff and faculty may find it helpful to know what cognitive difficulties may be manifested in a veteran with PTSD or TBI. Each person manifests symptoms differently, so it hard to generalize. These symptoms can be things such as: difficulty in MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 23 concentration and attention; challenges processing infonnation; learning and memory deficits; sluggish abstract reasoning; and slowed executive functioning including problem solving, planning, insight, and sequencing. These veterans may also experience stressors outside the classroom involving home life, work, sleep disturbances, trouble managing time, and panic attacks (American Council on Education, 2010). When considering how to accommodate veterans with these types of disabilities it is best to understand that PTSD and TBI .symptoms are expressed in very unique ways. Standard procedures for accommodating a student with disabilities may not work with these veterans. In addition, in extreme cases, PTSD and TBI may also lead to depression and suicidal thoughts. These symptoms can be aggravated by academic pressure, health concerns, relationship issues, sleep problems, and substance abuse issues. Some factors that may have a positive effect on these veterans are social support by other veterans, professional medical treatment, good health and eating habits, and participation in recreational activities (American Coimcil on Education, 2010). Institutional faculty and staff should also be aware that not all veterans with PTSD or TBI will require disability accommodations to be successful in education, while others may. If they do require and qualify for special accommodations they will normally fall under either the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or Section 504 of the Vocational and Rehabilitation Act of 1973. So adjustments may be made for these veterans, as they are with others with disabilities, as long as the accommodations do not change the overall academic program in question (American Council on Education, 2010). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 24 Another factor to consider is that these veterans are less likely than their peers on campus to access special accommodations for which they may qualify. There are many reasons this may occur such as pride, lack of understanding campus resources on their part, or the feeling that faculty and staff do not understand PTSD or TBI. It is necessary to realize that most staff and faculty have not experienced anything close to what these veterans have been exposed to in combat (Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). Faculty and staff must be informed in other ways because of the lack of exposure to military experiences and lifestyle. Increased awareness by faculty and staff can also meet the needs of broader commitment to diversity on campus (American Council on Education, 2010; Rtunann & Hamrick, 2009). Faculty and staff should know that the manifestation of symptoms, and even the diagnosis of these conditions, may not occur until well after they leave the military. Therefore, they may come to the campus undiagnosed. Becoming aware of the outward signs of PTSD and TBI could present opportunities to counsel veterans on possible accommodations, for those that have not already made arrangements with the DS office on campus. Of course, veterans must be willing participants and never be coerced (American Council on Education, 2010). Faculty and staff would also find it useful to become aware of other veteran resources on campus and in the community that may be helpful in the veterans' transition to the college or university setting. These could be resources such as the Veteran Student Services office, Veterans Upward Bound (VUB), the local Student Veterans of America chapter, or various community veteran resources like the Veteran Service Organizations (American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), and Disabled American Veterans MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 25 (DAV)), the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital, and others. Partnering with outside organizations would help university staff in handling veteran specific issues (American Council on Education, 2010; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). In general faculty and staff should understand that most veterans are new to their disabilities as well and may be unaware of their rights as disabled students to receive accommodations for an identified disability. The process of getting and accepting help can take time for these veterans. Sometimes their military background can hinder them, mainly due to the stigma of weakness that can be placed upon someone in the military with disabilities or shortcomings. Faculty and staff should also be aware that there are many other disabilities that veterans may bring to campus in addition to PTSD/TBI such as loss oflimb(s), severe burns, deafness, vision issues, and general learning disabilities (American Council on Education, 2010). Veterans with Disabilities. In a study published in 2012, focus groups were held involving 31 veterans who had self-reported PTSD symptoms. Transcripts of the sessions were analyzed to establish dominant themes in the responses of these veterans. Findings indicated that veterans with PTSD. needed services in a variety of different areas, and they also had some specific recommendations for easing their transition (Ellison, et al., 2012). The veterans in the study found it important for the schools to provide services for educational planning, including helping them to prepare for the rigors of higher education. The reality is that many of these veterans went into the military because they felt they were not ready for college. The veterans felt they needed help with counseling on the educational goals, and in choosing an appropriate major (Ellison, et al., 2012). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 26 Another concern for these recent veterans is being able to reintegrate into society after their military service. Many of them left from their parents' homes right after high school without learning to live civilian life on their own. The veterans indicated the sudden change in social, psychological, and environmental norms from the military to civilian life created concerns. These concerns included homelessness, lack of family support, medical and/or addiction needs, physical disability needs, financial difficulties, and the how to balance their education and living needs (Ellison, et al., 2012). One theme that manifested itself across the veterans was the need for guidance and counseling regarding their GI Bill® and VA benefits. The veterans indicated that when calling veterans services they had difficulty reaching an actual person who could answer questions for them. When they did reach an individual, this person lacked proper knowledge of benefits, or could not properly cotmsel them on the pitfalls of choosing one educational benefit over the other. The staff at these offices need to be knowledgeable and infonnative (Ellison, et al., 2012). These veterans were concerned over the impact that their PTSD would have on their educational attainment. They indicated high anxiety dnring classes which could be triggered by things such as loud and sudden noises, hypervigilance while traveling to school, or anything that might remind them of their combat experience. Some indicated that they coped with these difficulties by using medication, positioning themselves at the back of the class, trying to choose classes with fewer students, or even evening or online classes. The veterans also expressed concern with perceived difficulties in memory and concentration in class, and the need for special accommodations (Ellison, et al., 2012). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 27 The veterans provided some possible ways that institutions could mitigate some of the difficulties that they face. They indicated the need for on campus outreach services from VA facilities where the veterans normally gather. The younger veterans also expressed a need for more outreach by veterans their own age and not just by groups of what they perceived to be veterans old enough to be their fathers (Ellison, et al., 2012). Peer support was another area where they felt services could be utilized to their benefit. The veterans felt that being able to interact with veterans who have had similar experiences, would help them to navigate the difficulties of the environment. There is an unseen trnst bond that fellow veterans feel from each other, especially if they know they have each served in similar combat situations. The veterans thought that a program of veterans providing counseling to veterans would be ideal and that one-on-one service settings would be best (Ellison, et al., 2012). These veterans also suggested that there should be some coordination between services received with their VA education benefit and with the clinical services related to their PTSD treatment. Veterans were concerned with the logistics of managing their schooling and the case management involving their treatment. The veterans suggested that there be some coordination between the schools and the VA to have school representatives available at the VA facilities for question and answer sessions related to higher education, as well as maybe some workshops related to college preparation. The veterans also wondered if it were possible to have individual advocates that would walk them through the processes such as admissions, financial aid, and enrollment (Ellison, et al., 2012). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 28 The veterans also suggested that there is a big change between the structured life of the military and the less structured civilian culture. Veterans felt in the military they had less autonomy and flexibility, and were concerned that their dependence on the military structure could hinder them in college persistence. Veterans felt that the process on campus needed to be streamlined and clear in order for them to better cope with the process. A one-stop-shop for veteran student services was suggested (Ellison, et al., 2012). Another concern was the perceived disconnect from the social networks the veterans relied upon prior to serving in the military. Having experienced many traumatic combat related experiences, and feeling a veteran no longer fit into groups or social settings that veterans may have been included in prior to their service. The veterans' social networks had become those that were fonned in the military and the transition back to civilian social networks was difficult. Veteran student groups on campus and national student veteran organizations could help ease these concerns (Ellison, et al., 2012). Reintegration into Society As veterans return from conflicts they have difficulties reintegrating into work environments, educational environments, social interactions and relationships, general physical functions, and sound emotional well-being. This is especially true for veterans that return with disabilities such as PTSD and TBI (Ostovary & Dapprich, 2011). As related specifically to (re)integration in education, veterans find both challenges and opportunities await them. The challenges come in many different forms and veterans need help navigating them upon entering the higher education environment. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE The opportunities depend on the approach to veterans established in each school (Ostovary & Dapprich, 2011). 29 One of the challenges faced in educational (re )integration is the loss of the direct benefits veterans were used to receiving in the military. Veterans are used to their day to day needs being taken care of for them with relative ease for the most part. Veterans' educational benefits can sometimes be delayed. The veterans are encouraged to apply for their GI Bill® benefits soon after discharge, yet the process of receiving these benefits is not immediate. This urgency in using the education benefit may cause the veteran to feel rushed into college enrollment and amplify things such as anger, irritability, and poor concentration in school. Classroom settings can also be a challenge and veterans may be affected by class size and noise, placement in the room, and attention and concentration issues. The veterans themselves report problems with the rigors of the curricuhun, social interaction with other students, and their perceived limits to services on campus (Ostovary & Dapprich, 2011). Educational satisfaction of veterans relates to how the respective institution of higher education works to become veteran friendly. Colleges and universities need adapt to the needs of new veterans as they transition. A veteran friendly campus is one that collaborates all services related to the (re)integration of veterans with disabilities. The services should include veteran centers on campus, veteran specific orientations, intramural programs for disabled students, and a campus-wide focus on veteran services. In addition, a student veteran organization should be established on campus. These organizations may improve interaction between veterans and traditional students, and between veterans and faculty and staff (Ostovary & Dapprich, 2011). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 30 As has been the pattern of past generations, social and political change has occurred when veterans return from the fight, including those that return with disabilities. Following WWI the change came in the form of what was called the Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education and Disabled Veterans Act. Following WWII the change was known as the Serviceman's Readjustment Act. Then after Vietnam the program was called Veteran's Readjustment Assistance Act. Our newest veterans with disabilities are covered under the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendment Act (AD AAA) of 2008 (Ostovary & Dapprich, 2011 ). Higher Education: Weathering the Perfect Storm. It has been said that the return of veterans from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the passage of the ADAAA, and the comprehensive benefits of the new Post 9/11 GI Bill® have created a so-called perfect storm that higher education has to overcome (Grossman, 2009). How higher education reacts will detennine how well they navigate the storm. Veterans with disabilities have historically been seen as assertive when it comes to their civil rights and educational benefits earned during their service. Many have been through traumas of the battlefield and will have been diagnosed with PTSB, TBI, and other issues (Grossman, 2009). Institutions of higher education will have to adapt to and learn to accommodate these veterans. Postsecondary institutions can become overwhelmed by this new influx of veterans with disabilities, or it could see this as an opportunity for positive changes. These new veterans could become the wakeup call that higher education needs, or a stumbling block. To weather the storm they will need to look at this challenge from a MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 31 new perspective and come up with new solutions that include a campus-wide response to accommodating veterans, and a Universal Design (UD) approach to their education (Burnett & Segoria, 2009; Grossman, 2009). The researcher (Grossman, 2009) lays out the challenges that come along with this perfect storm, and that higher education institutions will have to decide how they meet the challenges. First, they have to decide to prepare for this new population of veterans, of which they have had little if any experience dealing with. This will require training of faculty, staff, and DS staff on the characteristics and needs of these veterans. Although the AD AAA makes it clear that institutions are not required to fundamentally change their programs, but when it comes to veteran accommodations they may need to determine what really is fundamental. Veterans with PTSD and TBI require adjustments (accommodations) to the status quo, yet at the same time they do not want to be coddled (Grossman, 2009). The second challenge for colleges and universities is to develop veteran outreach activities that encourage them to enroll in college, take advantage of earned accommodations, and persist to graduation. They will need to address veterans with disabilities that hesitate to self-identify, that bristle at even being called or considered disabled, but that still need to be informed of campus benefits. Outreach activities should take place at locations where veterans may congregate (on and off campus), on social media cites, and at local military base education centers where possible. Veteran-specific student organizations, clubs, and fraternities may also be developed to inform veterans. For the most part these veterans are not used to the academic culture surrounding MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 32 disability accommodations and need help reviewing their documented disabilities or help obtaining proper documentation (Grossman, 2009). The next challenge noted is that veterans need someone on campus that can support them when the challenges and rigors of academic life arise. Ideally this would be someone with military experience generally similar to the individual veteran experience. Veterans with disabilities need to have someone they know can relate to their specific needs, and challenges, and be sympathetic to their cause (Grossman, 2009). Finally, colleges and universities need to be up to the challenge that this is an ongoing opportunity to help these current veterans and those that may come in the future. The higher education institutions should realize that America has made a commitment to these veterans and that part of that commitment is to their proper education. The commitment to this opportunity has to stay consistent, perpetual, and always focused on meeting the needs of these veterans with disabilities (Grossman, 2009). Summary There has been a long history established of federal assistance for veterans leaving military service, especially since WWII concluded. The GI Bill® has become a major part of those benefits. The original GI Bill® was a very generous benefit that provided an educational opportunity to millions of veterans following WWII, and literally changed society for generations. The newest version, the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, once again offers a tremendous benefit to veterans transitioning from the military and entering higher education environments around the country. This new GI Bill®, along with the large number of veterans leaving service following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have facilitated the need for change MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 33 and adaption of student services at these institutions of higher education. Some of these colleges and universities have done better at adapting than others, but the need for all to make the change is required. Reintegration of these veterans into society, and more specifically into education, is critical for their well-being. These veterans almost always need help navigating the challenges faced in a higher education environment. Colleges and universities must change and adapt as society does in relation to veterans. Many of these new veterans coming to higher education have been exposed to combat and may have disabilities, including PTSD and TBI, which will need to be accommodated. Adjustments will need to be made by faculty and staff in order to address the educational needs of these veterans with disabilities. How these adjustments are made, and how effective they are in helping the veterans transition, will impact the experience of both the institutes of higher education the veterans they serve. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 34 PURPOSE With the passing of the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, colleges and universities have seen the greatest influx of veterans in higher education since the end of the Vietnam conflict (Cook & Kim, 2009; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). This new GI Bill® benefit is the most generous since the end of WWII (Radford, 2009) which has resulted in higher veteran enrollment, and has required colleges and universities to adjust policies and procedures to meet the needs of these veterans. In research by Zoli, Maury, and Fay (2015) of more than 8,500 military members and veterans, 92% said that education should play a role in post-service transition. Unfortunately most colleges and universities were inadequately prepared to meet the needs of this new influx of veterans and have been reactive in making the necessary adjustments to meet their needs (Brown & Gross, 2011). Many of these new veterans have returned with disabilities related to their wartime experiences, such as PTSD and TBI, which require additional considerations and accommodations. These veterans with disabilities have both temporary and chronic health issues that have affected their educational experience (Church, 2009). Faculty, staff, and related student services offices need to work together to meet the needs and special accommodations of these veterans with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to detennine veterans/veterans with disabilities perspectives on how well they have been integrated and accommodated at the community college and university level in a western state. The study sought to determine how veterans with disabilities perceive overall services for injured veterans on campus, accommodations and disability services for veterans, and supportive services that allow veterans to persist and graduate from a post-secondary school. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 35 The primary research questions were: 1. To what extent do veterans feel that their respective college or university has developed a veteran friendly campus by streamlining the admission, enrollment, and veteran services processes? 2. To what extent do veterans feel faculty and staff have an adequate understanding of the experiences of military veterans and are faculty and staff aware of helpful ways of integrating or reintegrating them into the classroom and into higher education in general? 3. To what extent do veterans perceive that colleges or universities adequately understand and accommodate veterans' with disabilities, specifically those disabilities related to combat related issues such as PTSD and TBI? MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 36 METHOD To address the purpose of this study, a needs analysis through survey research was conducted using the perspectives of veterans at both a university and community college in a western state. Veteran attitudes and perspectives were gathered related to their experiences during the admissions and emollment processes at their institutes of higher / education. Additionally the participants considered disabled, due to PTSD or TBI, were further queried relating to their specific experiences on campus. The study was conducted using a survey consisting of 4-point Likert scale questionnaire (Appendix A), with follow-up open-ended questions. The Likert scale questions were used to measure the overall perception of veterans' experiences in higher education. The open-ended questions were used to identify common themes and opinions from these same veterans. Additional survey questions were provided for veterans who self-identified as having PTSD and/or TBL The study was of particular interest to the researcher due to past experience in the military, work experience serving veterans on campus, and experience as a student having used GI Bill® benefits for graduate studies. The researcher served in the U.S. Army for over 22 years retiring in 2005, was grandfathered into the Post 9/11 GI Bill® benefits after retirement, and used those benefits in pursuit of a Master of Education degree at a university in a western state. Additionally the researcher is a service-connected veteran with disabilities. The researcher worked with veterans at a university as a staff member in a Department of Education program called Veterans Upward Bound (Department of Education, 2014), and was a member of a university committee of concerned faculty and staff, dedicated to creating a veteran friendly environment. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 37 Participants The study surveyed veterans attending a university and a community college in a western state, who were associated with the Veterans Upward Bound (VUB) program at each campus. The survey was distributed to 158 veterans who participated in VUB between 2013 and 2015. Total respondents to the survey were 33, a 23% response rate. As with the military in general, it was anticipated that the majority of the respondents would be male (see Table 1). Part of the survey allowed the veterans to identify whether they had a service­connected disability for PTSD and/or TBI. Those that identified themselves as disabled due to PTSD/TBI were further queried, to gather information related to their particular experiences regarding disability accommodations and services on campus. Table I. Respondents by branch and years of service, and by branch and gender. 0-5 years 6-10 years 11-19 years Retired 20+ Male Female Army 4 4 1 1 8 2 Navy 2 1 NIA 1 3 1 Air Force NIA 4 NIA 4 5 3 Marine Corp 5 2 NIA NIA 6 1 Nat. Guard NIA NIA NIA 1 NIA 1 Reserve 1 2 NIA NIA 3 Total 12 13 1 7 25 8 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 38 Instruments This research was conducted using a survey of questions related to the veterans' experiences and satisfaction level with campus services, including questions specifically for those veterans who identified themselves as having a service-connected disability (Appendix A). The questionnaire measured levels of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each topic. No neutral response was offered to the respondents. The researcher's rationale being that the veterans were either satisfied or not with each aspect of their experience on campus. The open-ended questions required a written response that allowed the respondents to express deeper feelings related to the topics. These were used to further identify common themes. Procedure The study identified veterans enrolled in VUB using program specific database software known as Blumen® (Compansol, 2012). The database is used to track the progress of veterans in VUB and was readily available to the researcher. Although the researcher had access to the veterans in the VUB program, Institutional Review Board (IRB) permissions were requested in accordance with institutional procedures. The IRB request included all survey instruments and informed consent forms required for the study. Once approval of the study was given (Appendix B), the researcher obtained a current number ofVUB participants served between 2013 and 2015, and began the survey process. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 39 An email was sent to 158 veterans emolled in VUB between 2013 and 2015. The initial email introduced the study and asked each veteran to participate in the survey. The email made clear that their participation in the survey was consent for their data to be used in the study. The veterans were instructed that these surveys would include descriptive information such as background, age, and sex, but that no identifiable information would be published in the results. Of the initial 158 emails sent, 15 were rejected due to invalid emails, and two veterans specifically requested not to be contacted further and were removed from the participant list. The final pool was 141 veterans. One week after the initial email, a second email was sent to each veteran with a link to the survey and they were asked to complete it as quickly as possible. After a two week response period the researcher sent the link again, to offer those veterans who have not yet responded the opportunity to participate. Due to minimal response, the survey link was then sent out two additional times before it was determined that the maximum voluntary response was likely reached. There were a total of 33 completed surveys received, or a 23% response rate approximately. Of those received, eight women veterans completed the survey, or 24%. Unfortunately researchers have found that response rates to online surveys are significantly lower than paper surveys, despite various practices used to lift total responses. It was reported that online surveys had response rates 23 % lower than that of paper surveys (Nulty 2008). Nulty suggests the following procedures as a way to boost response rates from online surveys such as: MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 1. "Pushing" the survey using an easy access URL sent directly to the participants. 2. Frequent reminders to the participants, at least 3, however some researchers in the study were concerned with irritating the survey population. 3. Involving academics with a vested interest, to remind possible participants. 40 4. Somehow persuading participants that the data from their responses will be used usefully and taken seriously. 5. Providing rewards of some sort, prizes, points, extra credit, etc. But some cautioned that students should do it because it is worth their time, versus extrinsic motivators that may skew the sample. 6. Help students to understand how to give constructive criticism, which can help their open-ended responses. 7. Create surveys that seek constructive criticism, which encourages participation and avoids the pitfalls of simple numerical rating surveys. During the data collection process, some of these tactics were employed to increase response rates. As indicated earlier in this research, multiple emails with an easy to access URL were used, providing frequent reminders, participants were informed that their data would be used to improve the situation of current and future veteran students, and the survey was constrncted in a way that would allow the veterans to provide constrnctive criticism using both a Likert scale survey and follow-up open-ended comments. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 41 Based on the researcher's work with veterans for over 10 years prior to this study, the response rate for the current research was not a surprising. Most veterans have been reluctant to participate in extracurricular activities and assignments given through VUB, due to their busy life and their focus on the requirements of their education which effect their grades. In addition, female veterans seem more likely to participate than male veterans. Female veterans made up only 16% of the initial pool of veterans to whom the survey was sent, but responded at a rate of 24%. Additionally, of those who responded 33% indicated they had been diagnosed with PTSD and/or TBI. Data Analysis The survey was administered and gathered over the course of a semester and the results were analyzed. Data were reviewed on a regular basis as the surveys were returned by the respondents. The researcher reviewed the responses for overall concepts, emerging patterns, and overarching categorization. The data were described and interpreted to answer questions posed by the research on the military veteran experience in higher education in a western state. An ecological psychology approach was talcen to analyze the participant's perspectives related to their environment (Boudah, 2011). Ecological psychology is the study of the relationship of humans and their environments, and how that enviromnent affects the inhabitants. In this case the higher education environment and military veterans. The researcher collected the data over time and then coded the data for analysis. During coding the researcher worked to identify patterns, developed categories, and MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE looked for common themes and trends. As new responses crune in, patterns categories and themes were changed and adjusted as necessary. 42 The researcher then moved beyond the patterns, categories and themes to develop a theory based on a review of the causes, consequences, and relationships of the veteran perspective. The researcher brought a theoretical sensitivity to the subject based on past experience in the military and current work with veterans on college and university crunpuses. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE RESULTS 43 The survey questions were broken down into demographic data, and seven survey sections: (a) overall experience in higher education, (b) website navigation, (c) admissions, (d) enrollment services, (e) veterans services office, (f) faculty awareness/classroom enviromnent/campus life, and (g) service-connected disability. Likert scale answers were gathered, and the respondents were also given the opportunity to comment on each section as well. See the Likert scale results (Appendix C). Demographic Data Based on the survey answers in this section, the researcher received a good mixture of military veterans. Of the respondents, seven indicated they were retired military (typically a minimum of20 years served), one had served 11-19 years, 13 had served 6-10 years, and 12 had served in the military 0-5 years. As to the question of how long each veteran had been out of the military before starting college, nine veterans had been out just 0-6 months, only three 7-12 months, seven had been out 1-2 years, three had been out 3-5 years, and 11 had been out of the military over five years. Of the veterans who responded, 25 were male and eight were female. Combat zone experience was high among respondents, which reflects the fact that the military has been involved in one conflict or another for over a decade. Of the 33 respondents 25 had been deployed to a combat zone, including six of the eight female veterans. There was a fairly even mixture of veteran students attending two or four year postsecondary institutions as well. Of the respondents, 10 were attending a 2-year institution and 13 were attending a 4-year institution. The rest were either imminently MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 44 graduating, starting school the following semester, or were just not enrolled in school at the time of the survey. The military branch breakdown of the respondents were 10 that had served in the Army, four from the Navy, eight from the Air Force, seven from the Marines, and four who had served in a reserve component. Overall Experience in Higher Education When asked iftheir overall experience in higher education had been positive, nearly 73% either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, and the remaining 27% disagreed or strongly disagreed. As to whether their school was working to accommodate veterans, 66% either agreed or strongly agreed and the remaining 33% disagreed or strongly disagreed. And finally as to whether veteran programs/benefits have improved since they have been at school, nearly 56% either agreed or strongly agreed, while 44% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Open ended comments from this section included one from a veteran who said, "Seems to be more difficult once you've been identified as a veteran." Another veteran commented, "Some departments are set up in such a way that Veterans who use their G .I. Bill do not get the full benefits. ([e.g.] the Automotive Department) Some of the classes have 25 hours of seat time for 1 week with homework and is considered part time." Website Navigation The respondents overwhelmingly agreed that their respective college/university website was easy to find online, with 100% that either agreed or strongly agreed. Once they found the site 75% either agreed or strongly agreed that the site was easy to navigate, MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 45 while 25% reported a negative experience and either disagreed or strongly disagreed that the website was easy to locate. When it came to veteran-specific webpages, 60% either agreed or strongly agreed that it was easy to locate veteran-specific webpages and that they were either in one location or easily linked. Yet 40% disagreed or strongly disagreed, and found the webpages more difficult to locate. The respondents that either agreed or strongly agreed that veteran webpages were clear and understandable was about 73%, with about 27% that disagreed or strongly disagreed. Finally, over 93% of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that contact information for Veterans Services was easy to find on the website. When asked to comment about website navigation, one veteran said, "Veterans Services website need[s] a complete makeover. Veterans Upward [B]ound need[s] some life to it, graphics. Still have very old pictures. Out of date. Its 2015 folks." Admissions A clear 100% of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that online admissions application was easily fotmd, clear, and understandable. Over 68% either agreed or strongly agreed that the application clearly asked them to identify as a military member or veteran, with approximately 31 % that either disagreed or strongly disagreed that the application clearly asked them to identify as a military member or veteran. The vast majority of the veterans, over 96%, either agreed or strongly agreed that the admissions office was easy to locate on their campus if needed. Approximately 63% either agreed or strongly agreed that the admissions staff was helpful, were able to answer MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE veteran related questions, and understood veteran related procedures while over 36% disagreed or strongly disagreed. 46 Just over 53% of the veterans either agreed or strongly agreed that the procedure to transfer in credit for military experience was clear and understandable, while nearly 47% disagreed or strongly disagreed. As to whether their respective school offered veteran-specific orientations or information sessions, approximately 53% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Nearly 47% agreed or strongly agreed. When asked whether the overall admissions process was veteran friendly, nearly 70% either agreed or strongly agreed that it was, while about 30% disagreed or strongly disagreed that the process was veteran friendly. Comments on admissions included one veteran who said, [About the application] "the box that asks if you are a vet is a small box that most vets don't see." [As to whether the staff was helpful] "When you ask any questions on the phone, as soon as you say you're a vet, they transfer you to Veteran Services, even though your question is about admissions." [In reference to veteran orientation] "Some orientations include a portion for vets, but most don't." Another veteran commented, "I honestly can't remember if Veteran status was an option on the application. The local VA office had to add me as Veteran with school. There is a disconnect somewhere." Enrollment Services When asked about enrollment services, over 85% ofrespondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the online registration process was clear and understandable, with just over 14% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Nearly 94% of the veterans either agreed or strongly agreed that the registrar's office was easy to locate on their respective campus. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 47 The veterans were also asked if they had access to an advisor for help planning and choosing courses, as well as assistance in enrolling. Approximately 74% of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed, with just about 26% that disagreed or strongly disagreed. As to whether the registrar office staff were familiar with veteran­specific needs, only about 45% either agreed or strongly agreed, and 55% didn't feel their needs were met. Over 78% of the veterans surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed that enrollment deadlines, add/drop periods, and the semester schedules were made clear, while approximately 22 % disagreed or strongly disagreed. One veteran said concerning enrollment services, "I specifically had to ask for an adviser with a military background to assist me. It was difficult to process to figure out what classes I needed to finish my degree with the military. The other advisers gave a generic tutorial on general education classes which was helpful to a point. To be fair it was extremely difficult to get assistance from the military." Another veteran commented, "I could find no specific counselor to meet with to plan a course schedule. That was left up to the advisor for the degree you majored in. Getting a meeting with that person is absolutely ridiculous and time consuming. Not easy in the slightest." Veterans Services Office When it came to ease of locating Veterans Services on campus, almost 85% either agreed or strongly agreed that it was no problem, with the remaining 15% who either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Some 78% ofrespondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the staff was friendly, welcoming and knowledgeable on GI Bill® benefits, but the 22% remaining either disagreed or strongly disagreed. The majority of the veterans, just over 77%, either agreed or strongly agreed that procedures for certification of GI MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE Bill® benefits clear and understandable, or they were explained adequately. The remaining 23% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Nearly 81 % of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that the Veterans Services staff helpful in giving guidance for registration each semester, with the remaining 19% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. 48 When asked if problems with GI Bill® benefits were resolved for them in a timely manner, over 84% indicated that they either agreed or strongly agreed, with 16% that either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Comments about Veterans Services Office included one veteran who said, "The Veterans Student Services were very helpful, lmowledgeable and professional." While another commented, "The Veterans Services Office was able to answer my questions and refer me to the appropriate services I required, however, I wondered why other school officials hadn't referred me to Veterans Services first. I could have avoided a lot of confusion and wasted time." Faculty Awareness, Classroom Environment, and Campus Life When asked about whether their school had offered a reintegration program to help with transition, about 57% indicated that their school did not offer this type of program, and either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Only 43% either agreed or strongly agreed that a reintegration program was offered. Over 63% of the respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed that their professors were aware of veteran resources on campus, with the remaining 3 7% who agreed or strongly agreed that professors were aware. Some 70% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that their instructors/professors interacted well with them, and MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 49 honored the veterans' confidentiality requests. The remaining 30% disagreed or strongly disagreed. When asked if veterans were aware of instructors being trained about what the military experience is like, over 60% either disagreed or strongly disagreed that the instructors had been trained, and only 40% agreed or strongly agreed that they were. As to whether the respondents felt they were treated fairly and respectfully on campus, almost 82% agreed or strongly agreed. The remaining 18% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. About 87% agreed or strongly agreed that they were allowed to share their military experiences when appropriate, while the remaining 13% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Of the veterans that responded, 80% agreed or strongly agreed that allowances were made for specific veteran seating needs. Nearly 82% agreed or strongly agreed that classroom populations are manageable in size and encourage learning, while the remaining 18% veterans disagreed or strongly disagreed. Peer mentoring programs allow veterans to get assistance with coursework, directly from other veteran students. Just over 64% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their school had a peer mentoring program for support of veterans, while almost 36% disagreed or strongly disagreed. In addition, over 65% of the veterans agreed or strongly agreed that their school had a relationship with veteran service organizations, such as The American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, and the Veterans ofForeign Wars, that can assist veterans in obtaining further benefits, with the remaining respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed. Also, about 87% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their school allowed the Veterans Administration (VA) to have a MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE presence on campus to assist with things such as mental health counseling, education benefits, veterans with disabilities' benefits. 50 In regards to Student Veteran Organizations (SVO), about 47% agreed or strongly agreed that they were aware their school had a SVO on campus, but about 53% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Many colleges offer a "one-stop-shop" for any resource on campus related to veterans, such as Veteran Services, VUB, Admissions, Registration, and Disability Services. This helps the veterans by providing a streamlined process for administrative offices and support resources needed while applying for and attending college. Just 58% of veterans agreed or strongly agreed that their school offered such a resource, while the remaining 42% disagreed or strongly disagreed. When asked to comment on faculty awareness, classroom environment, and campus life, a veteran commented "A one-stop shop for veterans/military issues would be very beneficial." Another veteran commented, "The VA office was moved from the student services building to a building on the outskirt of campus. It should be co-located with other student services. Their current facilities are inadequate for study or parking. I pushed hard to assist and establish a veteran student organization with no luck. Finally, it was hard transition from the "military life" and it would have been nice to have a fellow Vet as a mentor." Another veteran said, "Veterans services are on opposite ends of the campus and not located "on campus" per se. The Veterans Services Office used to be located in the administration building on campus and it was more convenient to walk between the registrars, cashier, and Vet services when problems or questions arose, but MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE last summer is was moved outside of the building and it now seems disconnected from the school." Service-connected Disability Of those that responded to this question of the survey, just over 35% (11) indicated that they had been diagnosed with PTSD, TBI, or a combination of the two illnesses. Nearly 83% of these veterans with disabilities agreed or strongly agreed that the staff of Disability Services, at their campus, were friendly, welcoming, and had an understanding of veteran-specific disabilities. 51 About 71 % of the veterans with disabilities agreed or strongly agreed that Disability Services staff had an understanding of the cognitive difficulties related to PTSD/TBI, and were trained to counsel veterans, while the remaining veterans with disabilities disagreed or strongly disagreed. As to whether Disability Services helped veterans deal with the stigma related to being "disabled", almost 74% agreed or strongly agreed, and the remaining 26% either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Over 82% of the veterans with disabilities agreed or strongly agreed that Disability Services coordinated with the VA to properly accommodate the veterans with disabilities on campus, while almost 18% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Just over 83% of veterans with disabilities agreed or strongly agreed that classroom accommodations are given to veterans with PTSD/TBI diagnoses, while nearlyl 7% disagreed or strongly disagreed. About 84% agreed or strongly agreed that test-taking and test location accommodations were given to veterans with these diagnoses, with the remaining that either disagreed or strongly disagreed. Finally, when asked whether Disability Services collaborates to educate other campus professionals MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 52 about veterans with disabilities' needs, 80% of the veterans with disabilities agreed or strongly agreed that they did, and 20% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Of those veterans that indicated they had either PTSD or TBI, one commented "If provisions are available at Weber State University for Disabled Veterans I am not aware of them." And finally, another commented "I experienced Sexual trauma in the military and received disability accommodations finally after three years at college. It would be helpful to have a female Psychologist for female veterans. I don't feel comfortable sharing my anxiety issues with a male." Table 2. Summary of responses by survey section, with the totals by section and response type. Section Strongly Agree Disagree Strongly Survey Sections Responses Agree Disagree a. Overall 93 27 34 14 18 Experience (3) b. Website 155 36 88 22 9 Navigation (7) c. College 224 48 111 43 22 Admissions (7) d. Enrollment 152 29 86 26 11 Services ( 5) e. Veteran Services 153 57 67 20 9 Office (5) f. Faculty 388 82 167 92 47 Awareness/ Classroom Environment (13) g. Service- 147 64 53 12 18 connected Disability (7) MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE DISCUSSION 53 As seen in the review of previous research on this subject, the study found that with the passing of the Post 9/11 GI Bill®, colleges and universities have seen the greatest influx of veterans in higher education since the end of the Vietnam conflict, some 40 years ago (Cook & Kim, 2009; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). In research by Zoli, Maury, and Fay (2015) of the more than 8,500 military members and veterans who participated, 92% indicated that education should play a role in post-service transition. This new GI Bill® has resulted in higher veteran enrollment, and has required colleges and universities to adjust policies and procedures to meet the needs of these veterans. The previous research found that most colleges and universities across the country were inadequately prepared to meet the needs of this new influx of veterans and had been reactive in making the necessary adjustments to meet their needs (Brown & Gross, 2011). Research also showed a need for improvement in areas related to veterans such as assisting veterans' transition to college, developing faculty and staff awareness of veteran specific issues, meeting the needs of veterans with military related disabilities, assisting re-enrolling veterans, and providing peer to peer experiences for veterans (Cook & Kim, 2009). Previous research also suggested that institutions that encourage veterans to self­identify early, ensure veteran program administrators are adequately trained, and that other staff and administration are trained on the new GI Bill®, tend to have more effective programs for veterans. The university should employ disability and mental health staff who understand veterans' issues, have consistent policies for college credit for military MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE training, have veteran specific orientations and informational sessions, and encourage veteran student organizations on campus (Steel, Salcedo, & Coley, 2010). 54 The current study provided an opportunity to obtain the perspective of the veterans, in one western state, as to how their respective college or university was adapting to this change. The study sought to determine veteran/veterans with disabilities' perspectives as to what extent they have been integrated and accommodated at the community college and university level. In addition, the purpose of the study was to also determine how veterans with disabilities perceive overall services for injured veterans on campus, accommodations and disability services for veterans, and supportive services that allow veterans to persist and graduate from a post-secondary school. Specifically the study sought to determine to what extent the institutions of higher education have developed a veteran friendly campus, determine to what extent does the institutional faculty and staff have an adequate understanding of the military experience, are reintegrating veterans into the classroom and into higher education in general, and to determine to what extent do the institutions adequately understand and accommodate veterans with service-connected disabilities such at PTSD and TBI. What the current study demonstrated is that progress has been made in relation to this study group but there is still room for improvement, and that colleges and universities should continue to move in a positive direction. These institutions should focus on improving all aspects of interaction with military veterans to include improving the veteran experience through proper integration, user friendly web-based resources, veteran-specific admissions and registration procedures, proactive veteran services, faculty and staff awareness and training, developing a welcoming classroom MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE environment, improved veteran integration in campus life, and also improved disability services and accommodations for veterans witb disabilities. Implications of the Results 55 There are very meaningful reasons why institutions should do tbe best job possible when serving, managing, and educating veterans. As pointed out in the previous research reviewed, Brown and Gross (2011) showed that successful management of military students brings benefits to all involved: the student; the academic institution; and the community. The study sought to measure how the veterans felt that the institutions of higher education were doing in that respect. Overall, the results of tbe current research on the veteran perspective was quite positive. The survey results indicated that, in general, there were 949 (72 % ) positive responses to survey questions and 363 (28%) negative responses (Appendix C). This by no means indicates that there have been no negative impacts on veterans at the institutions involved, but it demonstrates tbat strides are being made in a positive direction when it comes to the veteran experience at the these schools. A portion of the survey addressed the research question related to how the veterans felt their respective college or university had developed a veteran friendly campus through streamlining the admission, enrollment, and veteran services processes. When it came to the admissions process, most of the survey participants felt that the admissions process was generally smooth and could be viewed as veteran-friendly, but over one-third of the veterans thought that the admissions staff was not helpful and lacked understanding of veteran-specific issues. Also a clear procedure for transferring credit for military experience is warranted, based on tbe nearly one-half of veterans MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 56 unsatisfied with that process. This would indicate that staff training related to veteran­specific issues and problems that arise could reduce that level of dissatisfaction. Another possible option would be to have a staff member with military experience available to assist veterans. The admissions process is likely the first stumbling block that these veterans have in starting their higher education journey, so it is incumbent on the institutions to ensure veterans are welcomed, treated fairly, and that veteran needs are being addressed. Once admitted to an institute of higher education, veterans must tackle the enrollment process and find coursework suited for their chosen academic major. This can be a daunting task for veterans, many of whom have never been in a higher education environment. Over one quarter of the veterans responding to the survey felt that they did not have access to an advisor that would work with them in choosing and enrolling in courses. It is critical that veterans are advised properly, given the fact that their GI Bill® benefits are finite. Veterans cannot afford to waste time or money on coursework unrelated to their major. In addition over one half of the respondents felt that the registrar staff was unfamiliar with veteran-specific needs. If a staff member is unaware of the VA policy (e.g. against paying for courses unrelated to the veteran's major) and improperly advises the veteran, then it may create financial for the veterans. Again, training on veteran related issues and/or the presence of a veteran staff member may mitigate these kinds of problems. Veterans Services is a critical part of the veteran experience on the community college and university campus, especially for those veterans using GI Bill® benefits. It can become financially difficult on veterans if they have issues with receiving their MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE educational benefits, so Veterans Services must be efficient when certifying veterans' benefits. 57 Most survey responses relating to Veteran Services were positive, but some found that veteran services was hard to locate, that the staff was unfriendly, and that the process for obtaining GI Bill® benefits was not clear or explained properly. Some also had trouble getting proper guidance from Veteran Services during registration each semester, or when veterans experienced problems with receiving GI Bill®benefits, the problems were not resolved in a timely manner. Not all veterans will be satisfied with how a particular process unfolds, but veterans utilizing Veteran Services on campus should feel that the staff there are on the veterans' side to the best extent possible. Veteran Services should viewed by the veterans as an ally on campus, and staff should do the utmost to accommodate veteran needs. This office should be a safe haven where veterans can come for support when they are frustrated by other campus services and procedures. Interaction with instructors and professors make up most of the personal contact veterans have in higher education. Ideally they should have some knowledge about veteran issues and resources available. The second research question attempted to determine if veterans felt faculty and staffhad an adequate understanding of the experiences of military veterans. Additionally, the study attempted to determine veterans' perception as to whether the faculty and staff were aware of helpful ways of integrating or reintegrating them into the classroom and into higher education in general. Some of the difficulties that veterans face in higher education involve under informed MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE faculty, their negative classroom experiences, and general non-involvement in campus life and activities. 58 The researcher believes that it is critical to the long-term viability of veteran students, for them to be understood, accommodated, and integrated into these institutions. Over one half of the veterans indicated that their respective school either did not have an integration program, or if it did they were unsatisfied with results. In addition, nearly two thirds of veteran respondents indicated that their instructors and professors were unaware of veteran resources on campus. All staff and faculty should be aware of resources that benefit veterans, which can serve to make things easier on the veteran, staff, and faculty. The study results indicate that over one half of the veterans in the survey perceived that the faculty were not adequately trained to understand the military experience. Some colleges across the country have establish a "basic training" type program for faculty to help them be more aware of different aspects of the military experience, to help them to understand and be sympathetic. For example Purdue University, and the Veterans Success Center there, offers "Green Zone Training" to discuss what it means to serve and what veterans bring to campus. With fewer and fewer staff and faculty having military experience themselves, a program like this would be beneficial and enlightening as more veterans pursue higher education. On a positive note, the veterans overwhelmingly felt that they were treated fairly and respectfully, and were given the opportunity to share their experiences when they felt comfortable doing so in class. Approximately 30 % of the veterans who responded did not feel that the faculty honored the veterans' confidentiality requests. Some veterans really want to blend into MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 59 the fabric of the campus and do not feel comfortable being singled out or identified as a military veteran. Faculty should be sensitive to this on an individual basis, and avoid calling attention to a veteran who may not want to be identified that way. Some veterans are uncomfortable speaking of their military experiences in class, or relating it to their education, especially if it involves combat experiences. Although if comfortable in sharing, veterans' experiences can contribute to classroom learning environment and to the learning experience of all students overall, so faculty need to be sensitive and aware. Peer mentoring and student veteran organizations are other programs that have been beneficial to veterans on campuses across the country. Veterans learning and being mentored by other veterans can be another way to increase retention of veterans at the respective college or university. Organized student groups can give similar kinds of support to veterans (e.g. Student Veterans of America). An experienced veteran in college can help newer student veterans get through the difficult times by showing these fellow veterans how they survived themselves. Over one third of the veterans in the survey did not feel that there was a sound peer mentoring program, or at least an effective one at their respective schools. In addition, over one half of the veterans in the study indicated that their school did not have an adequate student veteran's organization. This study also attempted to determine how veterans with disabilities perceived their college or university understood and accommodated veterans' disabilities, specifically those related to combat related issues such as PTSD and TBI. Recent casualty statistics reported to congress indicate that, approximately 118,829 military members/veterans deployed between 2000 and 2014 were diagnosed MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 60 with PTSD. During the same period 307,283 were diagnosed with some form ofTBI (Fischer, 2014). In the study by Zoli, Maury, and Fay (2015), the researchers reported over 3.9 million veterans had been identified as disabled by the Veterans Administration (VA). Of those, 43% were from the Gulf War era and beyond. Additionally, of the more than 8,500 respondents 58% reported a service related disability. Of the veterans that reported a service-connected disability, 79% indicated that the disability created obstacles for them as they transitioned to civilian life. In regards to pursuing higher education, 12% indicated the disability hindered beginning higher education, and 28% said the disability created obstacles in completing higher education (Zoli, Maury, and Fay, 2015). It is critical that colleges and universities across the country find ways to accommodate these military veterans who may be attending to their institutions, but especially those with these unseen disabilities. The Disability Services (DS) offices on campus will need to take a leading role in this accommodation. The DS staff should be at the forefront when it comes to service-connected veterans with disabilities. In this study, of the veterans who identified as being disabled due to PTSD and/or TB!, over 82% agreed that DS staff at their campus were friendly and welcoming, and had an understanding of veteran-specific disabilities. It was by no means unanimous, with about 18% disagreeing, so there is room for improvement. The DS staff also seemed to have at least some understanding of the cognitive difficulties of those veterans experiencing PTSD/TBI issues, and these veterans felt the staff had adequate training to counsel them in relation to these issues. The DS staff was also widely viewed as being helpful to veterans struggling with the stigma that is felt by being called "disabled". MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 61 The results indicate that most of the veterans with disabilities were receiving accommodations in the classroom, and for test-taking, as well as these veterans feeling positive about how the DS staff educated other campus professionals about veterans with disabilities' needs. There were some veterans that disagreed, but the majority seemed to have had a positive experience with Disability Services. There were 14 7 combined responses to survey questions related to veteran disability, with 117 (79%) being positive in nature. The DS office and staff seem to be serving veterans adequately, with room to improve. Limitations Although the surveys were conducted in only one western state, the researcher believes that the results can be viewed in the broader context in that improvements are being made in higher education for this new influx of veterans. Others may argue that the results of the research are not adequately generalizable based on the sample size. The researcher agrees that the response rate for the survey was not ideal, but given that overall response rates for online surveys are traditionally low, the researcher felt that there were enough data to proceed. Veterans tend to focus on what directly effects their education, and therefore if the veteran does not see a relation to coursework and grades they tend to be less interested in extracurricular inquiries (Quaye & Harper, 2014). In reviewing the demographic data, it appears that there was a well-represented sample of our military, in years served, branch of anned service, deployment to combat zones, and gender. There appeared to be few if any over-represented veterans in the specific categories, other than females (see Table 1). MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 62 Future Research The study can be expanded by conducting future research to include more colleges and universities in different regions of the country. Including more veterans in varied geographical and demographically diverse areas of the country would build a broader picture of how higher education is doing in serving, managing, and educating veterans. Future research could also include the use of varied survey tools including online surveys, mailed surveys, convenience surveys, one-on-one interviews, and group discussions. The study sought to measure only the perspective of the veterans from the beginning of the research project, using a convenience sample of Veterans Upward Bound (VUB) participants. Future research could also measure the perspectives of institutional staff and faculty as well as a broader spectrum of veterans, in order to identify any possible disconnects and common ground between veteran and institutional perspectives. An institution of higher education may believe that it is doing all it can to adequately serve veterans, whereas the veterans feel that there is room to improve. This needs analysis was undertalcen to inform the institutions of higher education regarding the perspectives of military veterans. It will infonn universities, and the entities that support those veterans, ways to improve the veteran experience. Additionally, the results will provide a veteran perspective in hopes of better meeting the needs of college and university veterans. It is recommended that future research will review these data and aslc additional questions of the veterans and university faculty and staff to better support those who have served on the country's behalf. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 63 Summary The study began with historical background and context on the GI Bill® from the beginning in 1944, to the present configuration. With the newest iteration of the GI Bill® and the generous benefits to veterans, colleges and universities are seeing higher enrollment by military veterans than they have since the conclusion of the Vietnam Conflict (Cook & Kim, 2009; Rumann & Hamrick, 2009). The literature review showed that institutions of higher education were ill prepared to meet the needs of this new influx of veterans, and had been reacting to the challenge rather than being proactive and anticipating changes that needed to be made. In addition, due to higher rates of survivability in combat, many of the veteran students entering higher education now have returned from conflict with injuries and illnesses such as PTSD and TBI. Previous research showed that nearly 85% of those receiving combat injuries are surviving due to advances in protective body armor, use of coagulants, and advances in the military medical evacuation system (Madaus, Miller II, & Vance, 2009). In the current study, the researcher sought to measure the veteran perspective as to how the institutions of higher education are doing in relation to serving veterans in general, as well as veterans with disabilities. The study findings were more positive than expected, based on prior research, with 949 (72%) positive responses to survey questions and 363 (28%) negative responses (see appendix A). This could plainly be an indicator that the institutions of higher education in the western state involved are doing better than elsewhere, or a broader indicator that the veteran experience is improving generally. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 64 The current research showed that improvements were being made, based on the perspective of the veterans involved. The responses to the research survey were generally positive, with some exceptions. This indicates that the institutions where these veterans have attended, are making strides in a positive direction. Responses from the survey participants did show that there are many areas relating to veterans that have room for improvement though. It is the intent of the researcher to make these results available to higher education institutions, in order to facilitate the needed improvements. The results also indicated that most of the veterans with disabilities were mostly positive about the institutions meeting veterans with disabilities' needs. There were some veterans that disagreed, but the majority seemed to have had a positive experience with Disability Services on campus. As reported earlier in the study, there were 14 7 combined responses to survey questions related to veteran disability, with 117 (79%) being positive in nature. The DS office and staff seem to be serving veterans adequately, with room to improve. The researcher has concluded that there are still challenges ahead for veterans in higher education, but that the process in moving in a positive direction. Veterans are seeing these improvements and are becoming more optimistic in their outlook. The more optimistic that veterans become, the better the retention and graduation rates will become. Colleges and universities must work hand-in-hand with the veterans to improve the experience for faculty, staff, and student veterans in the future. The individtial veteran student, the higher education institutions, and the community at large will benefit from these improvements. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE REFERENCES 65 American Council on Education (2010). 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Retrieved from http://www.acenet.edu/news­roorn/ Documents/Service-Mernbers-in-School-Executi ve-Surnmary-2010. pdf Tanielian, T., & Jaycox, L. H. (2008). Invisible wounds: Psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist Recovery. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/content/darn/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND MG720.pd f Vance, M. L., & Miller II, W. K. (2009). Serving wounded warriors: Current practices in postsecondary education. Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 22(1 ), 18-35. Zoli, C., Maury, R., & Fay, D. (2015). Missing perspectives: Servicemembers' transition from service to civilian life. Institute for Veterans & Military Family Members, Syracuse University. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE APPENDICES Appendix A: Veterans Survey Questions Appendix B: IRB Approval Letter Appendix C: Survey Results Spreadsheet 69 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE APPENDIX A Veterans Survey Questions Veteran Experience Questions and Comments All survey questions (except open-ended comments) will have one of the following responses: Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree, Not Applicable (N/A). a. Overall Experience in Higher Education 1. My overall experience on the campus has been positive. 2. My school seems to be working to accommodate military veterans. 3. Veteran programs/benefits have improved since I've been at my school. b. Website Navigation 4. The website for the college/university was easy to find online. 5. Once fmmd, the website was easy to navigate once found. 70 6. It was easy to find veteran specific web pages, they were one location and/or were easily linked. 7. Information on the veteran pages was clear and tmderstandable. 8. Contact information for Veteran Services was easy to find. c. Admissions 9. The online admissions application was easy to find, and was clear and understandable. 10. The application clearly asks individuals to identify as a military member or veteran. 11. When needed the admissions office was easy to locate. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 12. The admissions staff was helpful, able to answer veteran related questions, and understand veteran related procedures. 71 13. Procedures for military experience transfer credits were clear and understandable. 14. The college/university offered veteran specific orientations of information sessions. 15. Overall the admissions process was veteran friendly. d. Enrollment 16. The online course registration process was clear and understandable. 17. The registrar's office was easy to find on campus. 18. Veterans have access to an advisor to help plan, choose proper courses, and enroll in classes. 19. Staff from the registrar's office is familiar with veteran-specific needs. 20. Enrollment deadlines, add/drop periods, and semester schedule were made clear. e. Veteran Services Office 21. The Veterans Services Office was easy to find on campus. 22. The Veterans Services staff were friendly and welcoming, were knowledgeable with all aspects of the GI Bill®. 23. Campus procedures for GI Bill® certification were clear and understandable or were explained. 24. The Veteran Services staff were helpful in giving guidance for registration each semester. 25. Problems with my GI Bill® benefits were resolved in a timely manner. f. Faculty Awareness/Classroom Environment/Campus Life MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 72 26. The college/university offered a (re)integration program to help veterans transition into higher education. 27. Instructors/Professors are familiar with veteran resources on campus. 28. Instructors/Professors interact well with veteran students and honor veterans' confidentiality requests. 29. Instructors/Professors have been trained on what the military experience is like. 30. Military veteran students are treated fairly and respectfully on campus. 31. Instructors/Professors allow veterans to share military experiences when appropriate. 32. Allowances are made for specific veteran seating needs when necessary. 33. Class populations are manageable in size and encourage learning. 34. The college/university has a peer mentoring program providing veteran to veteran support. 35. The college/university has a relationship with Veteran Service Organizations (American Legion, DAV, VFW, etc.). 36. There is an established veteran student organization on campus. 37. The college/university allows the Veterans Administration (VA) to have a presence on campus. 38. The college/university has a "one stop shop" where veterans can go for services. Disabled Veteran Experience Questions and Comments g. Disability Services 1. The Disability Services staff was friendly and welcoming, and understands veteran specific disabilities. MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 2. Disability Services staff understands cognitive difficulties related to PTSD/TBI, and have been trained to counsel veterans with PTSD/TBI. 3. Disability Services helps veterans to deal with the stigma related to being "disabled". 4. Disability Services coordinate with the VA to properly acconnnodate disabled veterans. 5. Classroom acconnnodations are given to veterans with documented PTSD/TBI diagnoses. 6. Test taking and testing location accommodations are given to veterans with documented PTSD/TBI diagnoses. 7. Disability Services staff collaborates well with other campus professionals to educate them on disabled veteran needs. 73 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE APPENDIXB WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Institutional Review Board April 29, 2015 Daniel Czech MC 4401 Weber State University Ogden, UT 84408 Daniel, Your project entitled "The Military Veteran Experience in Higher Education" has been reviewed and is approved as written. The project was reviewed as "exempt" because it involves using curriculum and assessments which would normally be used. Subjects are considered adults and may choose not to participate. Informed consent is required for participation. Notification of the study and how data will be reported are appropriate. No individual subject data will be revealed. All subject information will be confidential. Dr. Williams is the chair of the committee who will oversee this study. Anonymity and confidentiality are addressed appropriately, and the type of information gathered could not "reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability or be damaging to the subjects' financial standing, employability, or reputation" (Code of Federal Regulations 45 CFR 46, Subpart D.) You may proceed with your study when district/site approval is given. Please remember that any anticipated changes to the project and approved procedures must be submitted to the !RB prior to implementation. Any unanticipated problems that arise during any stage of the project require a written report to the !RB and possible suspension of the project. A final copy of your application will remain on file with the !RB records. If you need further assistance or have any questions, call meat 626-7370 or e-mail me at lgowans@weber.edu. Sincerely, Linda Gowans, Ph.D. Chair, Institutional Review Board, Education Subcommittee 74 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE Title of Project: Primary Investigator(s): Approval Number: Reviewer: Date: April 29, 2015 The Military Veteran Experience in Higher Education Daniel Czech 15-ED-088 Linda Gowans, Ph.D. Chair, Institutional Review Board Education Subcommittee COMMITTEE ACTION YOUR PROPOSAL (PROJECT) AND CONSENT DOCUMENTS HA VE BEEN RECEIVED AND CLASSIFIED BY THE HUMAN SUBJECTS IN RESEARCH COMMITTEE AS: _High Risk __ Moderate Risk _X _Low Risk BY THE FOLLOWING PROCESS: _Full board review_ Expedited review_X_Exemption THE PROJECT HAS BEEN: _x Approved __ Not Approved COMMENTS: See Attached Approval Letter Linda Gowans, Ph.D. --- IRB EDUCATION SUBCOMMITTEE CHAIR INVESTIGATOR'S RESPONSIBILITY AFTER COMMITTEE ACTION 75 The federal regulations provide that after the committee has approved your study, you may not make any changes without prior committee approval except where necessary to eliminate apparent immediate hazards to the subjects. Further, you must report to the committee any changes that you make and any unanticipated problems involving risks to subjects or others that arise. 4/29/2015 REVIEW DATE MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 76 APPENDIXC Su rvey R esul tsS > prea ds heet Survey Section Question Strongly Agree Disagree Strongly N/A Total (excluding Number Agree Disagree N/A) a. Overall . . ·· .·.I ••••• . ·:· ' -' . ·. .·· .· . . . Experience . · . . ' . . . . .·· . . • 1 12 12 5 4 0 33 2 11 11 4 7 0 33 3 4 11 5 7 6 27 b. Website . . . . ·. ·.· . . . · . . •. Navigation . ··. . . . . . 4 10 22 0 0 1 32 5 5 19 8 0 1 32 6 5 13 9 3 3 30 7 6 16 4 4 3 30 8 10 18 1 2 2 31 College . ·. . · . c. . . . ' • . Admissions ·.·. . . · . . I . .· . 9 7 22 0 0 4 29 10 6 16 8 2 1 32 11 10 22 1 0 0 33 12 4 17 8 4 0 33 13 6 11 10 5 0 32 14 7 8 10 7 1 32 15 8 15 6 4 0 33 d. Enrollment . I . . ' ': < ·. I . I ' I . Services . .• . · . . .· . . . ·.· . ' . 16 5 19 2 2 4 28 17 9 21 2 0 0 32 18 7 16 7 1 0 31 19 1 12 11 5 3 29 20 7 18 4 3 0 32 e. Veteran Services Office 21 11 17 4 1 0 33 22 12 13 5 2 1 32 23 12 12 5 2 2 31 24 13 12 4 2 2 31 25 9 13 2 2 7 26 MILITARY VETERAN EXPERIENCE 77 f. Faculty Awareness/ Classroom Environment 26 1 11 9 7 5 28 27 3 8 13 6 3 30 28 8 13 4 5 2 30 29 2 5 14 6 6 27 30 6 21 5 1 0 33 31 8 19 3 1 2 31 32 7 13 4 1 8 25 33 11 16 4 2 0 33 34 7 11 8 2 4 28 35 5 14 8 2 3 29 36 5 10 10 7 1 32 37 9 18 2 2 1 31 38 10 8 8 5 1 31 g. Service-connected Disability 1 10 9 1 3 9 23 2 9 6 3 3 11 21 3 9 8 3 3 9 23 4 10 9 1 3 9 23 5 8 7 1 2 14 18 6 10 6 1 2 13 19 7 8 8 2 2 12 20

Issue 64.1 of the Review for Religious, 2005. ; Biblical Helps Maki ng Co nne c tion s QUART~:RLY 64.1: 2005 Review for Religious fosters dialogue with God, dialogue with ourselves, and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according to cbarisms of Catholic religious life, As Pope Paul VI said, our way of being church is today the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-977-7363 ° Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: review@slu.edu ¯ YVeb site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ St. Joseph's Provincial House 333 South Seton Avenue ¯ Emmitsburg, Maryland 21727 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ° Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2005 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy an}, material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. ~gournalof Catholic ~piri~uali~y eview for religious Editor Associate Editor Canonical Counsel Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Webmaster Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Clare Boehmer ASC Steve Erspamer S~I Kathleen Hughes RSCJ Ernest E. Larkin OCarm Louis and Angela Menard . Bishop Terry Steib SVD Miriam D. Ukeritis csJ QUARTERLY 64.1 2005 contents prisms 4 Prisms religious life refocusea Religious Life: Naturally Sacred vs. Graced Sacred? Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR proposes a sacramental perspective as a corrective for religious institutes to employ in bringing a harmony between the apostolic service inspired by the graced sacred of their chrisms and that same service adapted to the naturally sacred of human invention. 22 Mixed Communities' Gift to the Church: Analogical Considerations Edward Foley OFMCap suggests that, when we look at lay-and-clerical religious communities through the lenses of biculturality and double religious belonging, we will find an untapped resource for the church and the world to which we minister. 37 bib icaO he ps Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament Colleen Vogt offers a pastoral solution for reclaiming the lament tradition, using lectio divina as a model to show how one might inhabit one of the p~alms of lament. Prayer / Reflection Review for Religious 51 The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey Matthias Newman OSB reviews the gradual increase of Bible reading in the everyday spirituality of Catholics and gives some guidelines for a person's spiritual journey. Prayer 65 making connections ~ Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Spiritual Exercises Frederick E. Crowe SJ describes two ways of our human growth--the way from above downwards (belief) and the way from below upwards (personal acquisition)--and applies these ways to the Ignatian Exercises. 76 Ignatian Colloquies: Their Surpassing Value A. Paul Dominic SJ reflects on the ease and power of the prayer time known as the Ignatian colloquies. Reflection and Discussion 89 94 99 departments Scripture Scope: Death and Resurrection: Patterns of Loss and Hope Canonical Counsel: Salus Anirnarurn Book Reviews 64.1 200~ What you are now holding in your hand is the first issue of a carefully revised Review for Religious. Our new subtitle, as you see, is A Journal of Catholic Spirituality, a description that has always been true of our journal without being expressed explicitly. One is slow to modify an esteemed sixty-three-year- old journal, either in its title or in its format. A number Of factors have led me as editor, with the consultation and approval of my advisory board and my editorial staff, to introduce this subtitle and a slightly different format, adapted from our experi-mental issues called Spirituality Review. From its beginnings Review for Religious had as its primary audience the many men and women reli-gious- priests, brothers, and sisters--now more accurately called members of the consecrated life-form in the church. At the same time Review for Religious had readers who were diocesan priests and seminarians and men and women belonging to "third Orders" or secular associations of traditional religious orders such as the Benedictines and Franciscans. But the very title of the journal referred only to "sisters" and "brothels" and some priests. Today, in view of the women and men who are now formally associated with the spirituality and min- Review for Religious istries of various religious congregations and the many others who are coworkers in the mission, it seems appropriate to make our name more inclusive. Our journal desires to share the charisms of consecrated life with all who hope thereby to enhance their Christian lives. Review for Religious has always been a journal for mem-bers of all religious congregations, without focusing on just one of them. Now this journal continues along this path with renewed mindfulness of how laypersons can benefit from the richness of the church's various spiritual traditions. Review for Religious will continue to publish articles that are theological, pastoral, spiritual, historical, and sometimes canonical. As in our Spirituality Review supplement, we will have some articles that invite interaction, both through per-sonal reflection and through conversation with others. At the same time, we will continue to publish articles that demand more attentive reading and slow personal assimilation. We will have the more interactive articles in full on our website () along with synopses of other articles from the current issue. They will be easily acces-sible via the "icons" that grace particular sections of each issue. We ask you, our readers, to spread the good news about Review for Religious. David L. Fleming SJ 64.1 2005 NIHAL ABEYASINGHA Religious Life: Naturally Sacred vs. Graced Sacred? religious life refocused The World Bank has initiated a dialogue with faiths and cultures. One of its aims is to maximize the effectiveness of its projects.' Underlying the dialogue is this institution's supposition that it needs to look carefully at the beneficiaries of its projects. Their perceptions and viewpoints could be more relevant and practical than those of its own administrative personnel. The question is twofold. Are the World Bank's assumptions a hindrance or a support to the projects it sponsors, and can there be a mutually beneficial dialogue (teaching and learning hand in hand, "evangelizing and being evangelized") between the financing partner (World Bank) and the beneficiary (the nation and its people)? In the present article I pose and try to answer those two questions in the .context of religious life. Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR has degrees in law, philosophy, Buddhism, and Catholic and evangelical theology; has recently retired from university teaching in Sri Lanka; and is spending time away from his country. He can be contacted c/o L.N. de S. Wijeyerame; 25, 2nd Lane; Ratmalana, Sri Lanka. Email: nabeyasingha@yahoo.com. Review for Religious If a religious institute can be considered the repository (the bank) of its charism and the "marginalized" the beneficiaries of its charism, the issues are, first, whether the methods of the institute are a help or hindrance to what it seeks to accomplish and, second, what mutual benefits of dialogue and interaction might we be talking about (evangelizing and being evangelized). I preface these reflections with a brief reference to Vatican Council II. When the decree Perfectae caritatis was being finalized, the forces in the council that were in tune with its renewed thinking had lost their theological battle to incorporate the vision of Lumen gentium (Constitution on the Church) into Perfectae caritatis (Decree on Religious Life). So they decided on a strategy. They outlined a method of reform and adaptation of religious life and left the actual adaptation to the religious institutes themselves. Perhaps no other council document (except Optatam totius in §16) describes a method so explicitly. The hope was that religious institutes would bring to their adaptation the vision of Lumen gentium. The method included two steps and five principles. The steps were for religious life to return to the sources of all Christian life and to adapt community living to meet the conditions of today. The five principles are (1) that the purpose of religious life is to follow Christ more closely, to live his story as it is told in the Gospels; (2) that the unique contribution of a religious institute to the church comes from the spirit and customs of its founders; (3) that all religious communities contribute to the church by taking up needs of the apostolate; (4) that communities' keen awareness of the human condition in today's world will help them serve more adequately; and (5) that all the external changes in the world mean nothing without a renewal of heart that never forgets that the goal of religious life is closeness to Christ through the vows. 64.1 2005 Abeyasingha * Religious Life The charism of the institute is a graced gift of the Spirit that~ is not available to all. A Challenging Counterfeit Probably all religious institutes have adapted their constitutions and statutes in accordance with these two steps and five principles, but problems arise amid this very renewal. In addressing them I offer this first hypothesis, namely, that sometimes what makes for the personal fulfillment of the members of a religious institute may hinder the effective functioning of the charism. The paradox of human existence is that we are spiritual and bodily at the same time. The paschal mystery touches the very depths of our being (see Rm 6). But the problem is: Can we ever fully know what our full potential as humans beings is and what depends on the gift of the Holy Spirit? Almost every spiritual gift has what has been called "a challenging counterfeit"-- spiritual healing-psychic healing, prophecy-psychic knowing, divine ecstasy-self-induced trance, and so forth) The one comes from the Spirit, the other from human nature. No one denies that what comes from human nature is good. But the problem comes when the natural is identified as not merely from "above," but as a gift of the spirit beyond questioning by mere mortals, including those entrusted with the task of "discerning spirits" within the religious institute. Natural gifts are good, even sacred, because they ultimately derive from the Spirit. But religious life bears witness to the following of Christ according to the charism of the founder. Following Christ is a call to all people without exception; the charism of the institute is a graced gift of the Spirit that is not available to all. Review for Religious The charism is different from the naturally sacred. Rudolf Otto wrote of the numinous. Jung discovered a religious component in mental health. The charism, on the other hand, is what can be called the "graced sacred." This graced sacred brings us to a greater awareness of our difference from God, seen in our particular personhood and historicity, and leads us to communion with God and with our fellow human beings. This is the point of Lumen gentium, the constitution on the church, describing the church as a sacrament, a sign and instrument of intimate union with God and the unity of the whole human race. Harmonizing the Naturally Sacred and the Graced Sacred What I suggest in this article is that the harmony comes about from the meaning of sacrament. The sacramentality of the church is expressed preeminently in seven different aspects (the sacraments) and many other practices (sacramentals). One sacrament cannot be substituted for another; the fruit of each is specific. That specific fruit is symbolized by specific natural elements and the orientation given to those elements by specific words. Similarly, I suggest, religious life and its institutes may not be in a position to use all of the naturally sacred (all of the multiplicity of good gifts) along with the graced sacred of their specific charisms, but must keep a sacramental perspective: the bread and wine of Eucharistic celebrations are no substitute for the water of baptism. To think and do otherwise is like something described by Eric Gill (1882-1940): "The clergy seem to regard it as their job to support a social order which as far as possible forces us to commit all the sins they denounce. ¯ . . A man can be a very good Catholic in a factory, our parish priest used to be fond of saying. And he was very annoyed and called us bolshevists when we retorted: Yes, 64.1 2005 Abeyusingba ¯ Religious Life but it requires heroic virtue and you have no right to demand heroic virtue from anyone and certainly not from men and women in thousands and millions." A Specific "Grace" for a Specific "Need" of a Specific "People" Here is an example from the secular world. Why do business corporations exist? To make a profit for shareholders by serving their clientele. Coca-Cola marketed a soft drink with a particular flavor for nearly a hundred years. Many felt it was time to change. A new flavor was developed. For four years there were market surveys and discussions about whether the new flavor would be accepted. Experts thought it would. But, when the new flavor was introduced, sales began falling, Coca- Cola dealers began complaining, speculators were buying up the old brand and reselling it at a premium. Once the facts were established, the management was quick to do a flip-flop. As always in the marketplace, even the cleverest ideas surrender unconditionally to reality. To express this in the language of sacraments, Coca- Cola is the church. The drink it produces and advertises (the external sign) is intended to get specific results: popular refreshment and financial profit. When adaptations are made for greater effectiveness and that effectiveness is not forthcoming, the company goes back to its original specific success. (The analogies here are, of course, rather loose.) Both business effectiveness and sacramental effectiveness may have something that religious institutes could well learn from. Another analogy would be: As any fisherman knows, the bait has to be attractive to the fish, not to the fisherman. A group of teaching brothers came from Europe to a mission country many years ago and established a small school primarily for Catholics in the town, but others were Review for Religious admitted if there was room. The brothers received no salary; their founding province supported them. Because of their sheer dedication, the school prospered. Years passed. Graduates of the school did very Well and soon held many of the better jobs. More and more students applied for admission. The school expanded. Fees were raised. The result? The poorer Catholic children for whom the school was originally intended could no longer afford the school, and, with the shortage of vocations in Europe, the brothers could no longer staff the school and so they pulled out. The diocese now runs the school. The question is whether the school and its activity and reputation are still effective signs producing the particular good result it was established to produce. Less than ten percent of its students are from poor Catholic families. I raise another question. A religious who was a popular teacher and preacher (let us call him Jack) asked and received permission to study for a doctorate in his own country. During his studies he wanted to continue with some teaching and preaching, his institute's main work; that, too, was approved. When he asked for a computer, however, he was told, "We cannot afford to give you a computer, but if someone gives you one you may keep it." At that same time his institute was spending a great deal of money on other things, including computers for others studying elsewhere. What sense does this make? What is the "sign value" of this refusal, especially when it is the institute's policy to provide members with what they need for their mission and apostolate? Priority of Insight over Orders: Problems of Transition An institution is always in danger of taking care of itself first and finding reasons for continuing to do what it has begun doing. Before Vatican II one hardly thought of the 64.1 2005 Abeyasingba ¯ Religious Life church and religious life as sacramental. They were institutions and functioned like clockwork on orders given from above rather than by options freely made by the members. The only option members had was to join the institute or leave it. Leaving An institution was not really an option, for is always in danger of it was considered putting oneself in danger of dam-taking care of itself first nation. But with Vatican II the idea came to the fore and finding reasons for-o that God's revelation is not continuing to~do so much the communication ~ of his will by commands, but what it has begun doing:., rather the manifestation of ___ I his call in Christ. Options took priority over orders--not that orders did not have a place. Life always has to function with some insights and orders from above. In the period of transition, option often came to mean a choice for oneself and for one's own pleasure and convenience. The result was some new terminology and some misunderstandings. Many religious who had worked tirelessly in the mission field were convinced of their mission's importance, but their success (judged especially by the love of the people) began to be criticized from the perspective of social-justice issues. Critics said it was more important to root out the causes of evil than to treat the victims of it. (When a drunken driver is knocking people down, one stops the driver first and then takes care of the injured.) 12 With democratic elections of superiors, numbers counted. Lobbying for candidates became a virtue supposedly for the good of the insftute. Advertisements in Catholic publications, and much more the talks of vocation promoters to prospective candidates, pointed Review for Religious out the benefits of joining this or that institute. One such promoter of vocations says, "If you join, you will get a good education, two degrees, never be without food, shelter, and clothing, take trips abroad" and so forth. The Ironic Priority of the Naturally Sacred over the Graced Sacred Twenty or thirty years ago a certain pastoral initiative was to be voted on. Some thought it was going astray. An insightful religious defended the initiative and argued that negative votes would probably be motivated by envy more than prudence. My interest now, though, is in the conclusion of what he said at the time, a short section titled "Tips to Younger Members." Today it seems to make a great deal of sense. I present an edited version of what he said, so that the individuals and the institute involved may not be identified. Those who have followed the recent efforts to block the pastoral initiative will surely have picked up some guidelines for their future. Some of these could be: 1. Concentrate on becoming popular. This is more important today, when decisions depend a great deal on the community, than when the superior was all-powerful. If you are accepted by the confreres, whatever you do will be accepted. If you are unpopular, you could be a hundred percent right, but people will find flaws. 2. Develop your apostolate outside the congregation, rather than do something that will redound to its name. 3. Spend more time on creating public opinion than on the actual work. Opportunities for this are many in the work you do and in community gatherings. Every vote you win can help. An 64.1 2005 Abeyasingba ¯ Religious Life excellent way of becoming popular is to caricature someone else, preferably someone who is out of favor at the time. 4. Note that some institutes operate like prima donnas and cannot tolerate another getting the limelight and tend to undermine those that succeed. 5. Note that, beneath all the spiritual talk, we use the same tactics that politics does; for example, we eliminate those who threaten our position. 6. Note that some confreres are skillful in getting people transferred, projects closed, and houses rethought. Enlist their help if you find that your present house or a particular confrere does not suit your taste. 7. Remember that, if you muster a sufficient quantity of emotion, it can carry more weight than rational arguments. 8. If you have a foreign degree and good contacts abroad, use arguments camouflaged by spirituality to prevent others from acquiring similar advantages: 9. Do not forget to choose scapegoats. They provide safety outlets for group frustration. If possible, pick on the more talented ones, for that will give you a head start in the race. It is easy to see that this man's irony points out the danger of the naturally sacred taking priority over the graced sacred and, worse still, acquiring institutional approval. Where to focus? My Contention is that the sacramental perspective, as outlined earlier, could function as a corrective. In this regard I recall two axioms that were used in sacramental theology: "Sacraments are for people" and "Sacraments are to be celebrated in a Revie~ for Religious human way." The corrective is people, learning from them even as one teaches and serves them and letting the normal dynamic of human interactions operate. Introducing a Corrective Based as they are on people's memories and often on their catering to their own selves, mentalities cannot be changed by decree. It is possible, however, to improve one's memories by expanding one's horizons. It is possible to lessen one's selfishness by increasing it, by including others within the ambit of self-love and self-fulfillment and thereby making pleasures of longer duration available to them and oneself, by loving your neighbor as yourself. In our day the horizons of memory are constantly being expanded. There is the effort to draw from Christian and pre-Christian thinkers principles that could be used in management. There is fascination in the variety of cultural patterns, even though unfortunately the principle of "might is right" sometimes operates. Other problems arise when people do what they consider good for others without paying enough attention to cultural patterns. Technology has expanded, and now there is the marvel of the global village. People cannot survive in this "village" by excluding others and looking out only for themselves. But that does not mean following others blindly. It is by contributing one's particular insight that one benefits from the global environment. How the Corrective Could Function The principle is that all people have specific contributions to make in the service of others. That is the reason for the very existence of religious institutes. In the global village the interconnections among people can help in the sharing .of benefits, but, if people simply remain members of the crowd and do not offer something 64.1 200Y Abeyasingba * Religious Life specific, the benefits to be shared are nothing special and what each person receives is even less. How the religious charism functions is not much different. Those who bear the charism today have to be fully aware of both providing and receiving benefits, benefits that are not necessarily measurable in money or any other numerical way. The benefits are in the life of the community of believers and in the life of the religious institute. In the history of Christianity, when many believers, sometimes the majority, deviated from gospel values, almost always it was a religious institute that initiated the reform. Eric Gill said that the "social order" which his parish priest supported (namely, values which well-meaning people usually support) often forces people to commit all the sins they denounce. This was the point made in the satiric novel The Ugly American, which showed how unintended negative results often come out of well-intentioned and generous works of U.S. foreign policy.3 One can perhaps draw from it some ideas for religious to take into account today. 1. If you manipulate people or achieve results using unethical means, the people at some point use these same means against you. Because unethical means often yield quick results, it is easy, when human rights are violated, to focus on some beneficial result being achieved at the moment. The words of a British politician are relevant: "We have no perpetual friends, no perpetual enemies; we have only perpetual interests." Western religious orders with dwindling numbers are tempted to take in members from wherever they can in order to continue the works they have set up. But have they ever asked themselves whether what they are doing caters to the self-interest of the recruits. Are the new members interested in religious life and the ministry of the institute? Or do they consider it a way of getting access to the more affluent world? By Review for Religious getting new members accustomed to levels of creature comforts well above those of the upper-middle class in their own countries, are religious institutes providing the means for a more effective ministry or are they creating a self-serving inward-looking membership? When higher superiors support blindly the actions of lower superiors, regardless of whether such actions are ethical or not, what message are they conveying to observers who have offered criticism and to others who see or hear about what is going on? The ironic "Tips to Younger Members" mentioned above are all-too-accurate a list of what religious institutes, sometimes knowingly, sometimes with naive good intentions, actually do. They seem not to ask themselves pointedly whether tolerating (or even approving) such conditions Wh nstarting lO al m-o ement, local resources. and arrangements almost inevitably causes amoral and even immoral practices to increase in the general membership. 2. When starting a local movement, use local resources. First discern the spirit of the locals that one chooses as collaborators. Then let the locals decide clearly and exactly what it is they want. When the project takes a life of its own, know that it is time to bid goodbye and let the locals manage.it. In The Ugly American a priest who wanted to do something for the locals has been so successful that the U.S. ambassador in the country writes about him, "If the report is accurate, this man is an agitator of the most extreme skill, and combines with this the typical Jesuitical command of dialectics. The priest is rumored to speak Burmese, eats native food, and is obviously engaged in some sort of papist plot. I need not remind you of Lenin's warnings about the skill of the 64.1 2005 Abeyasingba ¯ Religious Life papacy when its interests are threatened. I should appreciate receiving whatever dossier material you might have on this man.''4 If any project initiated by an outsider is to endure and not be considered a foreign imposition, it must take on a life of its own in the new soil. When people have forgotten who started a given project, that is a good sign. It means it has become part of themselves. In Bombay, India, the vigil Mass for Sundays was started relatively recently. But in Sri Lanka it has been functioning for over thirty years. The same is true of the paschal vigil celebrated after nightfall and not at midnight. If asked who initiated the changes in these places, people would probably have no idea. The fact is that they were introduced by one priest after he found that some people had difficulty coming to Sunday Mass and the Easier Vigil celebrated at midnight. Many of his fellow priests, however, were very negative about his initiative. If a project is to take a life of its own and continue beyond the lifetime of those who set it in place, it must operate according to local norms, use local resources, and harness local technology. The general temptation is often to go high tech, but in the less-developed world high tech often flounders. How many computers have been damaged when the electricity fails without warning or when voltage fluctuates? How much equipment lies unused in hospitals, either because the technician who was trained to operate the instrument has retired or because the materials required to operate it are not easily available? When high-tech equipment needs repair, who is at hand to repair it or who has the money to replace it? How few are those who think ahead and avoid such problems! How many projects fail to take account of the real needs of the people here and now and the present state of development! Are they projects that the people Review for Religious can contribute to and participate in? 3. If one can move with the "native" majority-- haltingly at first and with more confidence later--and come to share their way of life, one comes to understand their hopes and fears and expectations. That is an excellent basis for an apostolate that the majority will feel part of. With all their limitations and biases, they will bring also their native wisdom. On the other hand, if one begins with a minority elite that shares one's own cultural background and lifestyle, the apostolate is likely to move in an elitist direction and result in efforts "owned" mostly by the few and largely for their own benefit. 4. One can learn even from those who oppose one's efforts. In The Ugly American the exchange between two characters--both of them in the armed forces--is interesting. One is French and the other American. They are both involved in fighting the communists in Vietnam. The Frenchman believes that beyond the classical authors there is little to learn. But the war is going badly for those who are following classical methods. The American comes along. He proposes that some of the principles of Mao Tse-tung be included in their war effort, and he proposes fighting a battle on those principles. The Frenchman is surprised and even pleased at their success. The lesson is clear. One can learn tactics and strategy even from the "enemy"--those espousing false doctrine, unconscionable goals, and so forth. The Reassertion of the Graced Sacred Early in this article I pointed out the relation and the difference between the naturally sacred and the graced sacred. The interplay between them comes to the fore in Advent, when one reflects on the significance of Jesus' incarnation. It occurs in the prayers after communion on the four Sundays of Advent: "May our communion teach 64.1 2005 Abeyasingba ¯ Religious Life us to love heaven. May its promise and hope guide our way on earth"; "teach us to judge wisely the things of earth and to love the things of heaven"; "may this Eucharist free us from our sins and prepare us for the birthday of our Savior"i "in this sacrament we receive the promise of salvation; as Christmas draws near, make us grow in faith and love." It is not that the things of this world are evil. The statement "Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in [Christians'] hearts" (GS §1) sums up the spirit of Vatican II. The point is the balance. While we appreciate and enjoy the things of this world, how do we express our faith in Christ? We seek a balance between the things of earth and those of heaven. The prayer in Proverbs 30:7-9 is relevant to ordinary human affairs and to the charism of a religious institute: "O God, two things I beg of you; do not deny me them before I die. Keep lying and falsehood far away from me; give me neither poverty nor riches; give me just as much food as I need lest, satisfied, I deny you and say, 'Who is Yahweh?' Or else, being in want, I steal and profane the name of my God." It is easy to begin well and end up doing all-too-well for ourselves. If, however, we live with and work for the majority and, more particularly, the lower end of that majority, then there is a good reality check on whether we are incarnating the charism to address today's needs or manipulating the charism for ourselves. An Italian missionary in Sri Lanka was known for his love for the laborers in his parishes. Eventually he became bishop and was known as the "coolie bishop." He traveled by public transport and, when asked why, said he liked to meet the ordinary people. Beggars walked in and out of his office. When celebrating Mass for the laborers, he went to them in full episcopal attire because, he said, he wanted to Review for Religious honor them. When I was a young priest, he was already retired. When I visited him soon after my ordination, he told me, "Look after the poor. If you do that, the rich will automatically come to you." Notes ~ See www.worldbank.org. 2 See Robert T. Sears, "A Christian Approach to Discerning Spiritualities," Journal of Christian Healing 21, no. 1 (spring 1999): 17-18. 3 William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (London, 1958). By 1961 it had gone into thirteen printings. 4 Lederer and Burdick, Ugly American, p. 41. Be Still Be still, very still, and know that I am God. Listen to the steady breathing of a baby fern just before dawn. Listen to the high blue air calling to a distant cloud. (Do not try to woo me with your words. My heart already aches for yours - oh, if you but knew!) Listen to a cornstalk's shadow singing to the sun. Listen to ants chuckling, scratching their ears, to seeds throbbing with life. Listen long with your whole being. My voice is a whisper. My voice is silence. Be very, very still. Louise Finn CND 64.1 2005 EDWARD FOLEY Mixed Communities' Gift to the Church: Analogical Considerations An intriguing outcome of the 1994 Synod on Consecrated Life was the definition of a new genre of religious life, '~mixed communities." In Vita con-secrata Pope John Paul II has described "mixed" com-munities as institutes that originally "were envisioned as a brotherhood in which all members, priests and those who were not priests, were considered equal among themselves" but "have acquired a different form with the passage of time" (§61). Two distinct yet 0ppositional fac-tors in this picture are the clericalization that had occurred in many men's religious communities before Vatican Council II and the call of the council's Perfectae caritatis (§2) for communities to return to the original inspiration of their founders.1 Edward Foley OFMCap presented a x;ersion of this article in Assisi in March 2004. He is professor of liturgy and music at Chicago Theological Union, where his address is 5401 South Cornell Avenue; Chicago, Illinois 60615. Review for Religious When my Capuchin Franciscan order addressed these two factors, it became clear that brotherhood and fra-ternity, rather than ordination, are the "specific kernel of the gospel form of life revealed by the Most High to Francis." Capuchins have declined to introduce "clerical institute" language into our constitutions, appealing this matter directly to Pope John Paul II in 1987. The pope's 1996 message to our minister general, in which he stressed the link between our identity as brothers and the nature of "mixed institutes," seems to affirm the non-clerical nature of our order.2 Despite such official clarifications, however, there continue to be tensions among Capuchins regarding the appropriate relationship between ordination and reli-gious profession. Such tensions manifest themselves gov-ernmentally around the questions of electing lay brothers as provincials and of the proper role of concelebration in Capuchin life. Initial formation also is a point of con-tention: formators struggle with balance between for-mation for Capuchin life and formation for ordained ministry. Such tensions are not limited to Capuchins or Franciscans; many "mixed communities" struggle with them. More broadly, the Roman Catholic Church itself could be considered a "mixed community" comprising lay and ordained persons, persons of equal dignity in dif-ferent ecclesial states of life. And so I offer this study of "Capuchin priesthood" not only as a way to rethink the nature of ordained priesthood within institutes of consecrated life, but also as a way to reenvision the relationship of ordination and baptism, of the clergy and the laity. If a community of equal members can consider the juxtaposition of its Franciscan "minority" and its sacerdotality less as a prob-lem to be solved than a grace to be lived, maybe its think-ing can help other religious communities and the church 64.1 200~ Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gift to the Church 24 itself to think about appropriate complementarities among the mix of lay and ordained members. I propose this reenvisioning through two unexpected analogues to the relationship of priesthood and member-ship in an institute of consecrated life. These two ana-logues are biculturality and double religious belonging. Biculturality One of the characteristics of 2 lst-century society is a heightened multiculturalism. Cultural commentators and especially cross-cultural psychologists have begun to explore the phenomenon of biculturality. Sometimes it is defined as "the ability of people in a minority culture to understand and work within the dominant culture in order to improve their economic and/or physical well-being .[while retaining] the knowledge and behaviors of their own indigenous culture." 3 Some contend that bicul-turalism is only a transitory phase.4 Others believe that biculturality is by definition the marginal experience of not being in either culture, but trying to understand and change that situation,s Recently, however, some researchers have argued that biculturality is not necessarily a matter of marginalizafion or dislocation nor an uncomfortable step toward assim-ilation. Rather, it is a healthy and even ideal stage in which one's original cultural worldview remains while one acquires other cultural views.6 According to these researchers, then, biculturality can be the integrated life stance of belonging to two cultures at the same time.7 This view of biculturality suggests that living what some have called "a hyphenated existence" successfully does not mean achieving a perfect equilibrium between cultures, but engaging in a continuous negotiation between them. Researchers have found that bicultural persons do not embrace elements from both cultures to Review for Religious the same degree at the same time. Instead, as their self-identities adjust to various social situations, they seek various cultural balances.8 They seem to achieve an advanced degree of acculturation, becom-ing adept at drawing upon varied aspects of their cultural identities as needed. I think that this more positive and dynamic understanding of biculturality pro-vides a useful analogy for thinking about religaous profession vis-a-vis the priesthood. In particular, I think it makes three distinc-tive contributions to thinking about this relationship. First of all, biculturality suggests that being an ordained religious does not force one to choose either the religious life or the priesthood as primary or foundational. Unfortunately, this choice is often made: men describe themselves as "first a Capuchin, and only then a priest." Such words imply that one vocation is not as important or as privileged a voice in the identity as the other. Chronologically, of course, formation as a Capuchin ordi-narily comes first and then formation for presbyteral min-istry, but this does not prevent a friar from living an integrated life, with religious profession and ordination as equal dialogue partners in the lived "culture" of his vocation. If one were to find theological meaning in this chronology, a meaning that would supersede "cultural" considerations, that could introduce a kind of colonial-ism by suggesting, for example, that Capuchin priesthood must somehow be tamed by Capuchin life--or vice versa. Biculturality, however, suggests another way. Individual Capuchins and Capuchin communities that 64.1 2005 Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gi~ to the Church welcome both profession and ordination can model-- because of that lived reality--a mutual "inculturation" (not an "acculturation,''9 but a constructive bicultural-ity), an integration without denigration. This would be a turn to what some theologians call "complementary dualism," a kind of East Asian yin-yang symbolic think-ing-- a "both/and" form of thinking distinct from the "conflicting dualism" and "either/or" thinking that mark so much of Western thought.1° Biculturality reveals that, in the hyphenated reality of the friar-priest and in the reality of ordained and nonordained members in mixed communities, there is actually grace: for the individual, the community, the church, and the world. Biculturality suggests that there is here a gift to be accepted, not a problem to be solved.~ There is, as Jung Young Lee asserts, an invitation to be not only "both/and," not only "in-between," but also "in-beyond," transcending the present and finding a new identity, a new understand-ing, a new relationality epitomized as a "harmony of dif-ference." 12 A second contribution of biculturality to our under-standing of ordained religious and of communities that comprise both the lay and ordained vocations is aware-ness of the dynamism present there. As previously noted, various studies have shown that bicultural persons make various adaptations according to various social situa-tions. 13 This insight is useful for mixed communities and for their individual friar-priests. Just as a bicultural African American woman knows when to adapt to one or other circumstance or keep a balance between them, so can individual Capuchin priests and Capuchin communities acquire sufficient integra-tion to know what to do when. An example would be concelebration. When they concelebrate, ordained friars emphasize the presbyteral facet of their ecclesial identity. Review for Religious Sometimes this is most appropriate, as at the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday, when priests celebrate receiv-ing their priesthood from Christ in union with their bishop. At a Mass of first profession, however, concele-bration is inappropriate, for it would emphasize the priesthood of some of the friars at a ritual moment when our Capuchin identity is the focus. Concelebration is not an absolute right; it needs to be regulated in accord with various sensible considerations.14 Note that the goal of people's inculturation is alertness to relevant consid-erations and wisdom in weighing them in various cir-cumstances. One-size-fits-all responses (such as "No concelebration, ever" or "I always concelebrate") are not adequate. The goal is not to ignore or suppress prefer-ences and other considerations, but to find the appro-priate dynamic balance in various circumstances. A third contribution of bicultural understandings is that they can put us in solidarity with the many sisters and brothers around the world for whom biculturality is not an option, but a fact of their everyday life. The last thirty years have brought a 230-percent increase in the number of people who live outside their countries of birth--an estimated 185 million people,is Growing numbers of today's people are of mixed race. As V]rgilio Elizondo has aptly noted, "the future is mestizo." 16 Of course, biculturality and mixed race are not nec-essarily synonymous terms, especially if one thinks of biculturality as an advanced state of acculturation. Unfortunately, many immigrants and people of mixed race live in circumstances of marginalization and forced itinerancy, not integration. Such pilgrims long to move in from the margins, finding a society that allows them to live their own lives--woven of disparate social and cultural strands--in integrated and peaceful ways. If we are to be on mission to these displaced and dis- 64.1 2005 Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gift to the Cburcb traught people, we must acknowledge that our first step in evangelization is "the example of our lives.''~7 The ecclesially "mixed" ~8 nature of international communities such as the Capuchins is an untapped resource for our mission to those caught between countries, languages, We are a hybrid community, a conjunction of lay and ordained, disparate str~ands woven together into a single, yet not homogenized identity: ? and cultures, for we embody an ecclesias-tical biculturality and are a religious paral-lel to what some post-modern scholars call "hybridity." We are a hybrid community, a conjunction of lay and ordained, dis-parate strands woven together into a single yet not homogenized identity. We are living examples-- or at least potential examples--of ecclesiastical incul-turation, of the integration of clerical and lay cultures into better relationship. Double Religious Belonging Another contemporary form of hybridity is double religious belonging.19 This, too, may help lay religious and ordained religious reimage their togetherness. Double religious belonging--that is, being an adherent of one religion while incorporating the teachings or prac-tices of another religion--may be attributable to increas-ing globalization. In the West and in a church such as ours, this appears to be the case.2° In countries like Japan, however, double religious belonging is not only widespread but also a traditional, preglobalization real-ity. Recent government statistics indicate that, in a coun-try of 126 million, 100 million Japanese identify Review for Religious themselves as Shinto adherents, and 95 million identify themselves as Buddhists. The only conclusion one can draw is that a majority of Japanese consider themselves both Shintoists and Buddhists.2~ Not only is double religious belonging the rule in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka;22 it is also at the root of Christian origins. Claude Geffr~ writes: "At first the Jews who had become disci-ples of the path of Jesus found it completely normal to continue to visit the synagogue, to be circumcised, and not to eat certain forms of impure meats. Thus they believed in the possibility of remaining Jewish while becoming Christian.''23 Despite this history, however, double religious belonging has emerged as a theological problem "in reli-gions that demand an absolute and exclusive commit-ment on the part of their adherents to their founders and/or faiths." Peter Phan numbers among such reli-gions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He notes that "these three religions consider themselves not only mutu-ally incompatible but also irreconcilable with any other religion whatsoever, so that 'conversion' to any one of them is often celebrated with an external ritual signaling a total abjuration of all previous religious allegiances." Despite such official stances, some Roman Catholic and other Christian scholars believe that double belonging-- being a Hindu Christian or a Christian Buddhist--is increasing and may even be desirable.24 1 will leave that debate to theologians concerned with religious plural-ism, but I want to examine two contributions that dou-ble religious belonging brings to our rethinking of the "mixed communities" of priests and lay religious. First, double religious belonging is a catalyst for a particular and promising type of dialogue across notori-ously difficult terrain. Vv'hen individuals and communi- 64.1 200Y. Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gi3~ to the Church ties simultaneously identify themselves with two distinct religious traditions, they enable dialogue marked by unusual openness and absence of acrimony. In describing effective interreligious dialogue, Jacques Dupuis says that, "in order to be true, interreligious dialogue between persons of different faiths requires that both partners make a positive effort to enter into each other's religious experience and overall vision insofar as is possible.''2s Such empathy is a particular gift of those individuals and communities who live not between but within two dif-ferent religious experiences. Their dialogue is actually a dialogue with themselves, and it has a ready capacity for honesty and authenticity in a complementary rather than exclusionary manner. It is, in effect, a public self-exam-ination requiring a particular humility and honesty. Such dialogue is not only a technique for survival but a powerful form of witness and evangelization.26 It reveals Christianity in its most hospitable mode, allowing for "mutual complementarity" that enriches all partners in the dialogue.27 It is a rejection of colonial forms of mis-sionary activity where the goal is to impose one's reli-gious beliefs on another community, and an exquisite example of a new kind of missiological dialogue--a "mis-sion in reverse"--in which a true mutuality between mis-sionary and community develops,z8 Analogously, 2 lst-century Capuchins--like other mixed communities--embody a kind of double religious belonging, both within individual friars and within our communities. The graced invitation here is to a public dialogue of the self, a new response to our constitutions' call to "mutual dialogue" in a spirit of fraternal under-standing and sincere esteem,29 a call to a continual self-examination marked by empathy, honesty, and hospitality. If we can sustain such humble dialogue, not so much for resolving some perceived problem in our Capuchin iden- Review for Religious tity as for continual self-reflection, Capuchin life will freshly give gospel witness to people outside the Roman Catholic community. Simultaneously, such Capuchin Franciscan dialogue will become a poignant form of "new evangelization," not only (in Pope John Paul's words) as "reawakening traditionally Christian countries to the urgency of the gospel," but also as struggling with the alienation that faithful Catholics often feel as a result of clericalism in the face of yearnings for new models for the ordained ministry. A second contribution of double religious belonging to our rethinking of Capuchin priesthood is its invita-tion to reconciliation. Few forms of violence are more heinous than those perpetrated in the name of religion. Holy wars, a disturb-ing human reality, are a particularly unset-tling legacy among Jews, Christians, and Muslims.3° In his clas-sic work Violence and the Sacred, Ren4 Girard ,i A secon~ d. contribution of idouble religious belonging ' :o~o to o.urreth~i~tking ~ ,,~"~ ~i~of Capuch~n priesthood ::~ ,:is i~s invitation to r~coffciliation, has demonstrated how religion and violence are wed together in ancient religions.31 As recent events in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Israel, Afghanistan, and other places demonstrate, however, the inseparability of religion and violence has not been relegated to some ancient past. Sadly, many today embrace violence as a "sacred duty." 32 As Christians we are called to confess the horrors we have perpetrated under the banner of Christ. As John Cobb summarizes, "our history is replete with persecu-tion of Jews and heretics. We have sanctioned and sanc- 64.1 2005 Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gi3~ to the Church dried conquest and slavery. We have undergirded patri-archy in extreme and horrific forms. We have ignored the consequences of our actions for the well-being of the natural world, thus threatening the human future on this planet. We have used political and economic power to force our beliefs on others." 33 Few have modeled our need to confess such sins of commission and omission as much as our H01y Father, who throughout his pon-tificate has confessed the wrongs that the church has perpetrated against Jews, the Orthodox, minorities, and others.34 This is an essential move towards reconcilia-tion. Yet forgiveness is not a power that belongs to the perpetrators, but a gift that belongs to victims, and it is a gift they can give only when they are no longer demo-nized, colonialized, trivialized, or in some other way dis-missed as the "other.''3s Those who experience the grace of double religious belonging can show us the way. They have embraced the other to themselve~ and become living icons of interre-ligious dialogue. As dynamic models of integration, they clarify that reconciliation is not an act once and for all achieved, but an abiding prophetic stance.36 Individuals and, even more so, communities of double religious belonging are symbolic antidotes for the poisons of reli-gious ignorance and hostility, and show the way to "shalom." A minorite community of lay and ordained members can be similarly iconic. Individual ordained fri-ars and, even moire so, communities of lay and ordained brothers also manifest, in a sense, double religious belonging. They show clearly that there are no aliens or strangers in our midst, that otherness is to be welcomed. What a potent witness to a church in which there is considerable feeling of alienation. Many feel that prob-lems of a clerical culture significantly contributed to the sexual abuse that has rocked the church in my own coun- Review for Religious try and others. The clergy and the laity feel some alien-ation from each other. In a recent study of newly ordained Roman Catholic priests in the United States, the respected sociologist Dean Hoge reports that sev-enty- five percent of diocesan priests in the United States ordained between 1995 and 1999 believe that ordination confers on priests a new status which makes him essen-tially different from the laity; sixty-nine percent believe that a priest must see himself as a "man set apart" by God; and thirty-six percent think the laity need to be "better educated to respect the authority of the priest's word.''37 This suggests that considerable numbers of Roman Catholic priests and laypersons may view each other as different, unreconciled strangers, even aliens. Like all those who embrace otherness even in them-selves, we Capuchins too must be agents of reconcilia-tion, in the church and for the church and the world. In the image of the Crucified, we are called to break the circle of violence, to model a new way of being church, a new way of being priest, no.t predicated upon separa-tion and sacralization, but rather in solidarity with oth-ers and in humble service. A Gift to the Church Often communities like my own consider the issue of lay friars and friar-priests an internal one. I would contend that mixed communities are not an intra nos "problem," but a gift to the church and the world. The meaning, the reality, of that gift is well illustrated by its analogy with the contemporary phenomena of biculturality and double reli-gious belonging. Such reenvisioning is useful not only for mixed religious communities, but also for a the contem-porary "mixed" church. In a world and church wounded by violence and oppression and abuse, it is only through collaboration, mutuality, and an openness to understand- 64.1 2005 Foley * Mixed Communities' Gift to the Church ing and abiding with each other that we can prevent vio-lence and become true collaborators in God's reign. Notes t For help on this article, I am grateful especially to Professors Stephen Bevans SVD and Robert Schreiter CPPS of Catholic Theological Union and to my Capuchin brother Patrick McSherry. 2 Analecta OFM Cap (2002): 338-342. 3 Jerome Hanley, "Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg," Reaching Today's Youth 3, no. 2 (1999): 10. 4 See M.M. Gordon, Assimilation in American life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). s Visweswaran Kamala, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 127, as cited in Ravneet Tiwana, "Hyphenated Identities and the Space 'In- Between': Construction of the Sikh-American Identity." http://depart-ments. oxy.edu/anthropology(31.xii.03). 6 J.M. Bennett, "Multiculturalism and International Education: Domestic and International Differences," in Learning across Cultures, ed. Gary Althen (Washington D.C.: National Association of International Educators, 1994), pp. 157-158. 7 See Jean Phinney, "Ethnic Identity in Adolescents and Adults: Review of Research," Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 501- 502. s See K.A. Noels, G. Pon, and R. Clement, "Language, Identity, and Adjustment: The Role of Linguistic Self-Confidence in the Acculturation Process," Journal of Language and Social Psychology 15, no. 3 (1996): 246-264. 9 This is an intentional move from the term "acculturation," used by social scientists, to "inculturation," used by theologians. ~0 Jung Young Lee, The Trinity in Asian Perspective (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), pp. 33-34. ** See the stories of "hyphenation" as 'an exploration of grace in Peter Phan and Jung Young Lee, eds., Journeys at the Margin: Toward an Autobiographical Theology in Asian-American Perspective (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999). ,2 See Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). ,3 See Inga Jasinskaja-Lahti, "On a Way toward Integration: Russian-Speaking Immigrant Adolescents in Finland." http:// www.utu.fi(15.xii.03). Review for Religious 14 See John Huels, "Concelebration," in Disputed Questions in the Liturgy Today (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1988), pp. 39-45. ,5 This is a conservative estimate (9.i.04). ~6 Virgilio Elizondo, The Future Is Mestizo (Oak Park: Meyer-Stone Books, 1988). ~7 Third Plenary Council of the Capuchin Order (Mattli, 1978), The Path of Renewal: The Documents of the Five Plenary Councils and the First Assembly of the Order of Capuchin Friars Minor, ed. Regis Armstrong, p. 44. ,8 Letter of John Paul II to John Corriveau (18 September 1996) as cited in Analecta OFM Cap 112, nos. 3-4 (1996): 566. ~9 Though some speak of "multiple religious belonging," we opt for "double religious belonging." As Claude Geffr~ explains, multiple religious belonging is a postmodern form of syncretism in which con-sumers consider the living religions as supermarkets from which they choose. It is "believing without belonging," with little attention to "the credibility of this or that belief, its necessary connection to this or that religious system, and its incompatibility with other beliefs. The only criterion is the enhancement of my being and most inti-mate potentialities." See "Double Belonging and the Originality of Christianity as a Religion," in Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christianity, ed. Catherine Cornille (Maryknolh Orbis Books, 2002), p. 94. 20 See Catherine Cornille, "The Dynamics of Multiple Belonging," in Many Mansions? p. 1. 2~ Jan Van Bragt, "Multiple Religious Belonging of the Japanese People," in Many Mansions? p. 8. 22 Peter Phan, "Multiple Religious Belonging," Theological Studies 64 (2003): 498. 23 Geffr~, "Double Belonging," p. 102. 24 Phan, "Multiple," pp. 498 and 504. 2s Jacques Dupuis, "Christianity and Religions: Complementarity and Convergence," in Many Mansions? p. 64. 26 Sung-Hae Kim, "An East Asian Understanding of Mission," in Mission in the Third Millennium, ed. Robert Schreiter (Maryknolh Orbis Books, 2001), pp. 16-17. 27 Dupuis, "Christianity," p. 65. 28 See Claude Marie Barbour, "Seeking J~astice and Shalom in the City," International Review of Mission 73 (1984): 305. The Third Plenary Council of the Order (Mattli, 1978) affirmed this notion of "reverse mission" in Path of Renewal, p. 61. 64.1 2005 Foley ¯ Mixed Communities' Gift to the Church 29 Capuchin Constitutions 84:2; see 145:3,157:4, 162:1,175:2,175:4. 30 See Leo Lefebure, "Sacred Violence and Interreligious conflict: The Background of a Tragedy," Chicago Studies 41, no. 1 (2002): 8- 25. 31 Ren~ Gerard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 32 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 81- 120. 33 John Cobb, "Multiple Religious Belonging and Reconciliation," in Many Mansions? p. 25. 34 Many of these are chronicled in Luigi Accattoli, When a Pope Asks Forgiveness: The Mea Culpas of John Paul II, trans. Jordan Aumann (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1998). The book could not include more recent papal gestures such as the 12 March 2000 ceremony in Rome calling for forgiveness for the sins committed by members of the church, and the May 2001 trip to Athens, where the pope asked for forgiveness for sins against Orthodox Christians. 3s Robert Schreiter, Reconciliation: Mission and Miniswy in a Changing Social Order (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992), pp. 45-46 and 52-53. 36 While John Cobb does not think that "multiple belongers" can lead the reconciliation process, I think he overlooks the iconic role of such believers in that process. See Cobb, "Multiple," pp. 26-27. 37 Dean R. Hoge, The First Five Years of the Priesthood: A Study of Newly Ordained Catholic Priests (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 28. cloister space curves softly into silence here a solitude like trees becomes the smooth line of bench or table even the edge of longing breathes a blessing curving back into flesh and bone Lou Ella Hickman IWBS Review for Religious COLLEEN VOGT Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament Prayer has been described as "an exercise in dialogue with a deity that holds simultaneously great hope and immeasurable risks.''1 Christians, at least popularly, are taught to ask for what we need and to praise God for what we are given, bearing pain and pleasure just the same, as God's will. While there is, of course, value to prayer in a "Thy will be done" stance, we lose much if we cannot hold God accountable for our suffering as our Israelite ancestors did. Walter Brueggemann articulates well this "costly loss of lament." 2 This paper addresses a loss of lament and suggests that lectio divina can show how one might "inhabit the psalms of lament,''3 in particular Psalm 69, and thus enter into dialogue with God while feeling pain and anger. Costly Loss of Lament Much in today's world calls for lament: violence and war, our complicity in social sin, Colleen Vogt has a graduate degree in divinity and is in ini-tial formation at Mount St. Benedict Monastery; 6101 East Lake Road; Erie, Pennsylvania 1651 I. biblical helps 64.1 2005 Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament slander of one another, and even petty disagreements. We need to be able to bring such laments to prayer not only in petition and confession to be rid of them, but also from the very midst of our feelings of anger and anguish. Without lament in our prayer and worship, we live an impoverished relationship with God. We lose an element of authenticity in our prayer if we do not honestly face our faith's bewilderment at evil that still exists when God is all good and all powerful. Prophets offer us examples. Jeremiah speaks of being overpowered by God (Jr 20:7). If he does not take up this concern of his with God, he cannot grow in his relationship. Brueggemann suggests object-relations theory about mothers and their children as a parallel, but any human relationship can show this human concern for authenticity. When people feel trampled upon, they must speak up or risk not being a full person in relation to the other. As Brueggemann says, "the absence of lament makes a religion of coercive obedience the only possibility.''4 A pattern of coerced obedience is likely to think "If I am suffering, it must be God's will, and 'his will be done'" without us liking it, and in fact smothering some truth. At this point we need not become violent or abusively assertive, but we can ask for respect. Lament leads to asking questions of theodicy. By lamenting we express that all is not well with the world, that this state of affairs is changeable, and that it seems to be God's responsibility to change the situation. Just to form this thought has a benefit all by itself. Brueggemann points out that Jeremiah seems happy simply in the hope of having his say, without expecting anything to change: "You will be in the right, O Lord, when I lay charges against you, but let me put my case to you" (Jr 12:1, NRSV throughout). Jonah, however, clearly expects God to respond. He asserts that God has "cast [him] into the Review for Religious deep" and declares as an accomplished fact that God brought him back up from the pit (2:3-6). God is the one responsible for his downfall and the one who can restore him. "Deliverance belongs to the Lord" (Ion 3:9). The ancients reasoned that in a world without an evil God, and ruled over by an all-powerful God, if something is wrong it must be because of God. Speaking to God about this, or "holding God against God," is risky, but it allows one to continue.5 Otherwise, without admitting one's true feelings of lament, one could not truly express praise as a free person: "praise can retain its authenticity and naturalness only in polarity with lamentation." 6 If we admit this need for lament, how do we go about restoring it? There are a number of ways in our tradition. I suggest lectio divina as a help to inhabiting a lament psalm prayerfully. Lectio Divina Several recent books introduce lectio divina in an accessible manner. They provide slighdy different ways of prayerfully reading the Bible (or some other text). The following is an amalgamation of these sources and my own experience. Lectio: reading. What does the text say? What do the words actually say? Also, what is its literary or historical setting? One may read several translations or glance at the accompanying notes. Cross-references may provide insight into the text at hand. For those familiar with Scripture, connections may occur of their own accord. Lectio divina is not the time for more extensive research. Meditatio: meditation. One explores the text further, making room for it in our hearts. What word or phrase stands out? By focusing on short sections, we have time to mull things over. We may learn small parts by heart, to help our heart to become more involved.7 We reflect 64.1 200Y Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament prayerfully, drawing personal meaning from the text.8 We trust in the grace of God to lead us. These first two .steps are closely tied to each other and are similar to what I learned about exegesis as a theology What happens in us we trust in the gra ce of God to lead us? student. Lectio, however, is private prayer, and exegesis seeks more universal and communal insights. It is best not to double up and intermingle these two practices.9 Oratio: prayer. Once we have become familiar with the text, we are ready to relate it to our life. Perhaps the words invoke our deepest desire; they may help us find meaning in suffering. They may have reminded us of others who need our compassion. Other words, too, may come to mind at this moment in a prayerful way. Contemplatio: contemplation. Here, more or less beyond words, one sits in the presence of God. During prayer these stages are not always clearly delineated, but they have a general movement toward contemplatio. Often one reads slowly and mindfully until a word or phrase catches one's attention or tugs at one's heart. Then one pauses for a shorter or longer time. Vv'hen attention wanes, one returns to the same text or moves on.|° Lectio and a Psalm of Lament Let us now apply this to a psalm. I chose a psalm because, as a postulant in a Benedictine community, I look to know them more deeply and because the "psalms invite us to be honest." ~ They give us scriptural language to express and transform deep and dark emotions such as anger, self-righteou.sness, and sorrow. And I have come to appreciate the special relationship between the psalms Review for Religious and lectio. Bernard of Monte Cassino says, "In psalmody we speak to God, in lectio God speaks to us through the Scriptures. In the first we ask him about things, and in the second we understand the answer." 12 Lectio/Meditatio I put these two steps together to bring some exegesis to the prayerful reading, for it can provide enrichment. When one has great familiarity with Scripture, a kind of exegesis arises spontaneously in prayer, but beginners can use help in making connections and understanding the psalms' literary style. In Psalm 69 there are many graphic images: "waters have come up to my neck," more enemies "than the hairs of my head," poison and vinegar for food and drink, and enemies "blotted out of the book of the living." These give readers pause and invite them to react. The images of distress may stir compassion for the psalmist or a memory of having felt like that. One may think of examples of unjust sufferers: prophets of the gospel, persons falsely accused of crimes, the church itself, or Jesus, the ultimate innocent suffering servant. The strong curses may evoke immediate resistance because Christians should "love your enemies"--or perhaps agreement with the vindictive sentiment as personal enemies come to mind. But any of these reactions may signal that God is trying to say something to our heart. The reactions may be invitations from God to go deeper. They may suggest that we pause and ponder. What is God saying through this text? Alternate translations may help. The words quoted above from the New Revised Standard Version are almost the same as those in the New American Bible, except that "poison" becomes "gall." Are there cross-references provided for this text? This is, in fact, the psalm most quoted in the ~4.1 2005 Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament Cursing enemies is a difficult_.th ei one with which many modern ,Christians are uncomfortabie. What is my res ponse? New Testament.13 "Gall and vinegar" appears in the Gospel accounts and in Romans 15:3 and Hebrews 11:26. Verse 25 about a camp made desolate is used in Acts 1:20 to refer to Judas. Revelation 3:5 mentions "the book of life" of verse 28 (and elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures). Seeing the psalmist's words reinterpreted on Jesus' lips in the Gospels or used in explaining theological concepts in Paul's letters brings new levels of meaning. Christological interpretation of the psalms is very much a part of the patristic tradition. Biblical notes and commentaries offer background information on several phrases and themes. The "deep waters" of verse 2 suggest the chaos engulfing the earth itself along with this innocent person. In the praise at the end, even the sea, which was a threat in the beginning, offers its praise to God. The water reference could also refer to a river ordeal, a trial by water to test the innocence of a person.14 This ancient practice was revisited in European medieval and American colonial witch trials. Praise as a sacrifice or offering to God is another theme in this psalm. This usage helps scholars to date this psalm. Because verses 30-31 say that a song of praise is worth more than an animal (or grain) sacrifice, the psalm is probably exilic or postexilic; there is no temple in which to offer sacrifices.~5 Prophets and psalmists determine that God does not want animals ("Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?" Ps 50:13), but prefers people's obedience and songs of praise instead. Cursing enemies is a difficult theme, one with which many modern Christians are uncomfortable. The strong Review for Reli~ous words are frequendy omitted from the lectionary cycles even when the rest of the psalm appears. They are sometimes excised from communal prayer. But it is important to understand this literary device in its context. Hebrew is a particularly metaphoric and graphic language. Though desires for punishment are certainly expressed, the words are not all meant literally,16 nor are the psalmist's words a decree of punishment--this is no vigilante justice seeker. In the Israelite understanding, the curse was only to be effective upon God's judgment that the person was indeed guilty. This was helpful to Israel as a people without a modern justice system as we know it. This is the reasoning behind trials by ordeal. If God finds guilt in someone, he or she will die. This practice is not in accord with modern thought and sensibilities, but, in many cases, allowing God to do the punishing is an idea needed as much today as ever. Many a lawsuit or personal vendetta might be prevented if those involved brought their laments to God and left the case in the hands of divine justice. Another relevant aspect of cursing is that there is indeed evil in the world that needs to be exorcized. Though the Israelite understanding did not easily distinguish between the sin and the sinner or between the individual and the community, we can take a cue from the psalmist and curse the sin, asking God to purify this blot in our community. We can curse an evil on behalf of those who cannot, namely, the victims who have been so dehumanized that they can no longer pray themselves.17 Claus Westermann has noted the following elements in biblical laments: address or introductory petition, lament, turning toward God (confession of trust), petition, and vow of praise.~8 We see them to some extent in this psalm. "Save me, O God" invokes God in verse 1. Then there is a long lament to God over the psalmist's 64.1 200Y Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament 44 situation: false accusations, desertion by friends and family, ridicule for religious practice (vv. 2-12). There is a confident petition to God for help (vv. 13-18). "Answer me, rescue me, let me be delivered," verse 13 cries out. After more lamenting about his sorry situation (vv. 19- 21), the psalmist expresses a desire for God to punish his enemies (vv. 22-28). This cursing is especially graphic and invites us to admit our own inner violence. A final petition for salvation in verse 29 makes way for a song of praise that calls all the earth to praise God (vv. 30-36). This praise ends the mood of sadness and vindictiveness and moves the psalmist to trust that God will make salvation known by vindicating him in the here and now. Westermann offers another helpful observation. Three subjects or characters have a part in many of the lament psalms: God, the psalmist, and the enemies. Westermann traces the history of the lament psalms by noting the balance between the three subjects. Accusations against God become more and more subtle, perhaps representing a trend like the one we know today of being hesitant to accuse God. As this is. a later psalm, the small accusation against God in verse 17 is couched in restrained terms: "Do not hide your face from your servant"--words that hint that God be not silent or absent.~9 This close and prayerful reading of the psalm helps us see how others prayed this psalm in the past. We understand the situation and the words and phrases better, sharing in the tradition. But we do this in order to communicate with God better, and so we turn now to oratio and contemplati0. Oratio Looking again at the text, we pray it with new eyes and a new heart. Perhaps, by God's grace, we are inhabiting the psalm, or perhaps the word dwells in us. Review for Religious God spoke to us as we came to understand the psalm more deeply. Now we speak to God as we understand our own relation to the psalm. We pray as the innocent sufferer, declaring anger at God (a little) and at enemies and problems (a lot). We trust in God to restore our fortunes, sure that it will happen. We may repeat our prayer, perhaps going deeper. More understanding may come, or more earnest petition. At some point this dialogue is finished, and we are left without words, or "we read under the eye of God until the heart is touched and leaps to flame.''2° Contemplatio We may image contemplation as gazing at God or just being in God's presence.21 No deep searching of our own into the text can force this. Our reflection on the text is mere preparation, tilling the soil and watering the seeds. It is God who brings forth the fruit of the land and the fruits of contemplation. We move forward, changed by this encounter with God through the word of God. We ha~e followed the traditional lectio model for expressing and transforming deep emotions. By inhabiting the words and the world of the psalmist, we are brought into relationship with our tradition and with God. We go forward by witnessing to the Word as committed Christians, in a stage one writer calls operatio.22 Notes ~ Samuel E. Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 168. 2 Walter Brueggemann, "The Costly Loss of Lament," in his The Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). 3 Michael JinkJns, In the House of the Lord: Inhabiting the Psalms of Lament (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998). 4 Brueggemann, "Costly Loss," p. 104. 64.1 200Y Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament s Balentine, Prayer, p. 146. 6 Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms, trans. Keith R. Crim and Richard N. Soulen (Atlanta:John Knox Press, 1981), p. 267. 7 Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, trans. Edward Hagman (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998), p. 109. 8 Thelma Hall, 7bo Deep for Words: Rediscovering Lectio Divina (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 9. 9 Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Liguori, Mo.: Triumph Books, 1996), p. 80. 10 Charles Cummings, Monastic Practices (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1986), p. 8. 11 Elizabeth Canham, Praying the Bible (Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 2001), p. 33. 12 Quoted in Columba Stewart, Prayer and Community: The Benedictine Tradition, Traditions of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (Maryknolh Orbis Books, 1998), p. 34. 13 Carroll Stuhhnueller CP, "Psalms," in HarperCollins Bible Commentary (rev. ed.), ed. James Mayes (HarperSanFrancisco, 2000), p. 420. 14 John Kselman and Michael Barrd, "Psalms," in New Jerome Biblical Commentmy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 537. 15 Kselman and Barrd, "Psalms," p. 537. 16 Stuhlmueller, "Psalms," p. 420. 17 Stuhlmueller, "Psalms," p. 420. is Westermann, Praise, p. 170. 19 Westermann, Praise, pp. 169, 170, and 181. 20 Dom Marmion, cited in Hall, 7b0 Deep for Words, p. 44. 21 Hall, 7bo Deep for Words, p. 9. 22 Mario Masini, Lectio Divina: An Ancient Prayer That Is Ever New, trans. Edmund C. Lane (New York: Alba House, 1998), p. ix. Prayer / Reflection Let us use the fourfold traditional approach of reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation as we enter into Psalm 69. Review for Religious In the Spirit of Psalm 69 Come and save me, O God, for the floodwaters rise, and my body has sunk in the depths of the mire; There is no footing left in this bottomless pit, which keeps dragging me under to make me expire. I am wearied from weeping and crying aloud, and my throat has dried up like a desert of clay, And my eyes swollen shut are consumed by my tears, while I wait for the Lord and continue to pray. They are numerous, more than the hairs of my head, they who hate me, unjustly, insisting I die; They are many and mighty, who force me to pay what I never did steal, which they claim, but they lie. O my God, you have known all my follies and sins, for my guilt I have never concealed from your sight; I admitted my faults and confessed them to you, and for these you have punished me, that is but right. But that they who have trusted in you, O Lord God, should be shamed, and through me, how could that ever be? How could they who have sought only you be disgraced? God of Israel, never permit it, through me! It was only for you that I suffered reproach, every insult and shame they could throw in my face, Like a stranger to brothers, an exile from home, by the sons of my mother cast out in disgrace. For the zeal of your house had consumed me with fire; these reproaches I bore were intended for you; When I wept for my sins and I fasted for days, those reproaches were mine, and the insults were true. I repented my ways, put on sackcloth for clothes, 64.1 2005 Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament and became like a fool for my sins which I grieved; How the mouths in the marketplace laughed me to scorn, and the drunkards reviled me with songs they con-ceived. But for my part, I sought only you, O Lord God! Come and favor mb now, come and answer my prayer! O my God, in your greatness, be tender and kind! Come and show me you love, show me how much you care! Let your faithfulness come to my aid even now, lest I sink ever deeper and deeper in mire; Let my enemy fail, as you rescue my life from the bottomless waters before I expire. Let the waters abate and not sweep me away; let the ocean not cover and choke me to death; Let the depths not rise up and then swallow me down, nor the grave close around me and smother my breath. Hear and answer me, Lord, in your bountiful love, all the mercy and goodness befitting your grace; Turn your face to me, gently, with deepest concern; take me into your arms with your fondest embrace. Turn your face not away from your servant in need, but have pity and answer me quickly instead; Draw me closer and closer to you, O my God, as you ransom me back from the fate of the dead. You have known all my shame, my abuse, my disgrace, the reproaches which crushed me and wasted my soul; This disease has consumed me and broken my l~eart, and my spirit, now helpless, has lost all control. When I looked for somebody to comfort my pain, there was no one With mercy or pity around; Wh6n I looked for consolers to share in my grief, Review for Religiou~ there was no one who cared, there was none to be ¯ found. But they poisoned my food and they sickened my thirst, when they gave me the dregs of their wineskins to drink; May their tables be turned into deathtraps for them, their companions, the pits which they fall in and sink. May their eyes grow too dim and distorted to see, and their thighs never cease from convulsing with fear; May you pour out your just indignation on them, and in fury destroy all the things they hold dear. May their camps be deserted like desolate wastes, no inhabitants left who could live in their tents, For the one you have wounded, they wounded the more, with their slanderous stories of sins he repents. Take account of the crime upon crime they commit, lest they enter your meadow, the pasture you tend; May their names be erased from the record of life, with the just be not listed in life without end. As for me, in my pain and affliction, 0 God, be my help and my bulwark of strength from on high; Only let me sing praise to the Name of the Lord and give thanks for His glory extolled to the sky. For what pleases the Lord, more than oxen or bulls, with their horns and their hoofs, is. the praise of His Name! So, take courage, you faithful ones who are oppressed, and your heart will rejoice in the God you proclaim! For the Lord in His love hears the cry of the poor, and He never forsakes those who cry out in need; They are bound unto Him who created their lives, who has bound Himself to them, His creatures, to feed. 64.1 200~ Vogt ¯ Reclaiming the Prayer of Lament Let the heavens declare it, their God is the Lord! Let the earth sing His praise for its life that He gives! Let the sea that is full of the creatures He feeds praise the Name of the Lord, their Creator, who lives! Know that God will save Zion and bring exiles home! They shall dwell in the cities of Judah restored! Know the seed of His servants inherit the land, all who love Him and trust in the Name of the Lord! Joseph E. Brown SJ, Jesus Sings the Psalms in Your Heart (1980) YO Review for Religious MATTHIAS NEUMAN The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey Tena lB sipbilreit huaasl lpilvaeyse odf a C vaatrhieotlyic o Cf hrorilsetsi ainn st hthe rpoeurg-h the centuries. In the immediate pre-Vatican II church, the Bible had little impact on ordinary Catholic spiritu-ality; Mary, the saints, and popular devotions held the dominant places. The Bible was certainly revered as a source of religious truth, and many good Catholic homes had a family Bible, but not many Catholics read it reg-ularly for their own spiritual nourishment and their rela-tionship with God. Students in my theology classes over the past twenty years--who have been mostly of the post-Vatican II generation--are amazed to learn that the Bible seldom played a direct role in the religious forma-tion of their parents and grandparents. Since the coun-cil the Bible enjoys a larger role in everyday spirituality, but usages still vary widely among Catholics. Matthias Neuman OSB last wrote for us in 1997. His address is 1414 Southern Avenue; Beech Grove, Indiana 46107. 64.1 200Y Neuman * The Role, of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey In a course called "The Documents of the Second Vatican Council," one assignment I give is to conduct a number of personal interviews, some with Catholics who lived through the years of the council and can remember the pre-Vatican II days and some with persons born after the council. A key question of the interviews concerns the role of the Bible in the personal spiritual life of the respondents. Their answers range widely, but three groups typically appear. One comprises those Catholics who still have little.awareness of the Bible, who do not read it even occasionally or consider it a guide for their own spiritual lives. (Many of these same people can make little sense of the lectionary readings at Mass.) A second group reads the Bible in a fundamentalist way. It func-tions in their lives about the same as it does in the lives of Protestant fundamentalists--as the literal source of all religious truth. Their interpretation of many passages tends to be simplistic. A third group consists of Catholics who have developed a significant and balanced practice of Bible reading. Scripture functions in their lives as a source of spiritual direction and nourishment. Other variations could be identified, but these three suffice to show what a complex situation exists among the Catholic faithful with regard to the Bible and its role in their lives. In this article I want to explore the connections between a prayerful reading of Scripture and the appli-cation of that reading to a person's spiritual life journey. My intent is to get at a number of ways in which the "meanings" in the Bible help people set and seek their spiritual goals and make practical decisions. Beginning with a historical overview of the Bible's role in Catholic spirituality through the ages, I move to the church's cur-rent teaching on Bible reading as a personal spiritual practice. In a final section I suggest some specific ways the Bible can guide a person's spiritual journey. Review for Religious The Bible in Catholic Spiritual Life through the Centuries Private Bible reading was not much encouraged throughout much of Catholic Christian history. Vatican II stands as a refreshing new beginning in this regard. Make no mistake--the Bible has always been crucial to the Catholic Christian tradition, all the way back to the 2nd century, when the various books of the New Testament began to be collected. But the Bible was usu-ally seen as the source of authentic religious truth for the church as a whole, rather than as reading material for individuals. In the liturgy the "meaning" of the Scriptures that were read or sun'g was usually "given" through the spoken word of the preacher. Personal read-ing for meaning and application seldom occurred. There were, of course, exceptions. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Egyptian desert monks used the Book of Psalms as a "manual of conversion." The individual monks wanted their reading to effect a gradual conver-sion of their raging emotions, a principal goal of theirs. The practice of lectio divina that developed later, in cenobitic life, continued and broadened this application of the Bible to the monks' personal lives, but the prac-tice was not widespread in the church.1 A second excep-tion was the use of Scripture in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Scenes from the Bible served as start-ing points for many of his exercises. But here again the practice was confined to limited numbers of directors and retreatants. Over the centuries, of course, personal reading of the Bible was encouraged by particular spir-itual directors. In the late 6th century, St. Gregory the Great, in his letters, often recommended the reading of Sacred Scripture to his correspondents? But these peo-ple were generally wealthy persons who could afford manuscript copies of a book or books of the Bible. This 64.1 2005 Neuman * The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey luxury precluded its use by the general populace until the invention of printing in the 15th century. Before then, not many individuals or families possessed a Bible. The cost was prohibitive. An entire parish con-gregation might have only one copy of the Sacred Scriptures (usually locked up, except for services, or chained to the lectern). When the printing press began to make books more affordable in the early 16th century, the strong connection seen between printed books and the "private interpretation" of the Protestant Reformation made Catholic leaders try to limit Bible reading while Protestant leaders--with numerous Bibles printed in the vernacular languages--encouraged the reading of the Bible by everyone. The famous Catechism of the Council of Trent or Roman Catechism (1564) made no mention at all of reading the Bible as a spiritual practice for Catholics.3 In short, good Protestants read the Bible; good Catholics did not, for it could lead to doctrinal or moral error. Another change had been gradually happening in post-Reformation Catholic circles that also moved atten-tion further away from the Bible. As Catholic leaders became increasingly concerned with "correct doctrine and teaching," catechisms became the primary ways to teach people the true faith. Moreover, since some of those Catholic teachings (on the priesthood, the seven sacraments, and the Roman primacy, for example) were not clearly apparent in the Bible itself, catechisms became the immediate basis of instruction, without, of course, claiming to replace the Bible. In the long period between the close of the Council of Trent (1563) and the opening of the Second Vatican Council (1962), Catholics were sometimes counseled against reading the Bible personally. A New Perspective The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Review for Reli~ous (Dei Verbum) of Vatican II stands, therefore, as a strikingly new statement of the Catholic Church. It encourages ordinary believers to read the Bible regularly for their spiritual nourishment. Chapter 6, "Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church" (§§21-26), forged a new direc-tion for Catholic spirituality. How that chapter came to be is an amazing story.4 The preliminary schema of the constitution contained warnings about laypersons read-ing the Bible. They were reminded to approach the sacred text with the church's teaching in mind and with careful preparation. They were to be ready to accept willingly any definite assertions of meaning the magis-terium made about individual passages.5 There was no mention of personal.spiritual nourishment. Two factors seem to have brought about the radical shift that occurred in the writing of this chapter of the document. The first was the comments and testimony of several Protestant observers about their own personal and communal church experiences of Bible reading and the many spiritual benefits it brought to people/The second factor was a principle from the patristic era, one that had slipped out of modern Catholic awareness, the strong parallelism between Sacred Scripture and the Eucharist. Several Catholic theologians had persuasively brought this idea to the committee's attention. In the end the drafting committee included a strong encour-agement of Scripture reading for believers' personal spir-itual benefit. This decision ranks as one of the major achievements of the council. Let us review this pivotal chapter, "Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church."7 It begins by noting that Scripture along with Tradition is the supreme rule of the church's faith (§21). But then the text goes on to assert that the word of God also serves as "strength for faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting fount of 64.1 200~ Neuman ¯ The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey spiritual life" (§21). This reading is for all believers. "Access to Sacred Scripture ought to be wide open to the Christian faithful" (§22). There are no restrictions. This practice is not limited to the clergy and to scholars, but is for everyone. Church leaders are to see that ade-quate translations in vernaculhr languages are available for the faithful (§22). Preachers, patristics schol-ars, exegetes, hnd catechists are to help people under-stand God's word (§23). The ordinary faithful them-selves are encouraged to pick up the Bible and read: "Let them go gladly to the sacred text itself, whether in the sacred liturgy, which is full of the divine words, or in devout reading, or in suitable programs and various other helps" (§2 5). Here the council fathers begin claim-ing Scripture reading as a spiritual practice for the Catholic Church. This section of Dei Verbum ranks among the more important of the council's pastoral decisions, because it led to many changes in the practical spiritual life of the church. Soon after the council, dioceses and publishing houses began to develop "biblical study programs" for groups and parishes. Interest in these programs ran high and gave many lay Catholics their first real familiarity with the sacred texts. Renew, the Little Rock Bible Study, the Paulist Press Bible program, and other endeavors began to make the Catholic faithful better acquainted with the Old and New Testaments as a resource for liv-ing their faith. Small neighborhood groups started meet-ing regularly to read and discuss the Bible. The spiritual How do We experience, preachers, patristics scholars, exegeteS, and catechists helping people under tand God's word? Review for Religious lives of innumerable Catholics were deeply affected by these developments. Almost thirty years after the council, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a document to assist such developments. Although this document, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, is intended primarily for schol-ars, it has several pages that are relevant to us.8 Its sec-tion IV, "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Life of the Church," advances beyond Dei Verbum. First, it iden-tifies a specific purpose of reading the Scriptures spiri-tually, a purpose it calls "actualization." Actualization means putting the meaning of the Bible into action as a value or norm of behavior. It is not sufficient to read the Bible and merely understand its meanings; those mean-ings must begin to make a difference in how the reader perceives, judges, and acts as a believing Christian. Second, actualization presupposes a correct exegesis (explanation) of the text, part of which is the determin-ing of the literal sense--what the historical writers intended to communicate in their time, place, and cul-ture. Rejected here is any literary theory or assumption that the only real meaning is what the text immediately means to each reader. There is, however, a recognition that every text contains more meanings than the literal one; the richness of a written text is not limited by the lit-eral sense alone.9 This richness is part of the spiritual guidance of Sacred Scripture. The document recom-mends especially the Scriptural texts used in the liturgy as excellent for both personal and communal reflection. Finally, the document promotes the ancient monas-tic practice of lectio divina (divine reading), which is "a reading, on an individual or communal level, of a more or less lengthy passage of Scripture, received as the word of God and leading, at the prompting of the Spirit, to meditation, prayer, and contemplation.''~° We have come 64.1 200Y Neuman * The Role of Scripture on tbe Spiritual Journey a long way from the wariness of pre-Vatican II days, with its warnings about the dangers of false interpretation. Applying the Bible's Meanings to Personal Life We can now proceed to three specific ways of read-ing Sacred Scripture as nourishment or companion on our personal spiritual journeys. The first way is to exam-ine and apply the large patterns and themes which the books of the Bible offer. This knowledge can guide or challenge us into new areas of faithful Christian living. Sometimes these patterns will be quite obvious, for exam-ple, Job's struggle with God's justice. Sometimes a sec-ondary book can help us get off to a good start on one or another biblical theme. Andrew Ryder's Follo~ving Christ: Models of Discipleship in the New Testament can help us discover the various ways in which the following of Christ is depicted .in the New Testament and might be pursued today.~ Afterwards we will be ready to read and understand various suggested passages of Scripture more carefully. I have used this book in spiritual-direction ses-sions; it has helped people find a pattern of discipleship that fits their own life circumstances. In Matthew's Gospel, discipleship is expressed in community building; a beginning parish minister found in that Gospel a sense of direction for his spiritual jour-ney. Luke's Gospel sees discipleship more as an individ-ual stance in a large society; a young adult new to a large city reflected and prayed over that Gospel as a welcome way of maintaining strong faith in an unfamiliar setting. Another example of large Scriptural patterns guiding people's faith would be the contrasting Christologies of the Gospels of Mark and John. For those with too "divine" an image of Jesus, reading Mark slowly and meditating on its descriptions of Jesus' weaknesses and struggles can help towards appreciating the full down-to- Review for Religious earth humanness of Jesus (3:20-30; 6:1-6; 7:14-23; 8:16- 21; 11:12-21). On the other hand, John's Gospel will definitely strengthen people's view of the divine nature of Jesus and his mission (1:1-18; 5:1-47; 6:35-58). Various attitudes toward "law" are reflected in the writings of Paul and Matthew. For people struggling to overcome a paralyzing sense of law, Paul's letter to the Galatians high-lights Christian freedom, especially 5:13-26. That passage was of great importance in my own spiritual maturation as I began theology studies. On the other hand, peo-ple who need a deeper appreciation of the place of law in Christian life can benefit from sustained reflec-tion on the Gospel of Matthew (5:17-20; 12:1-13; 15:1-14; 19:16-24). Sometimes struggles dealing with anger, espe-cially towards God, are a problem. Reading the sections of Jeremiah called "Jeremiah's confessions" (11:18-12:6; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 18:18-23; 20:7-13; 20:15-18) assist people to see how anger can change into improved prayer. One advantage of large Scriptural patterns and var-ious contrasts is that they can help Christians to be more sensitive to the differences in people's spiritual lives. Today many legitimate spiritualities exist in the church, many ways of actualizing the gospel in one's life. Instead of acting like competitors, all can benefit from a healthy exchange of ideas and practices. To acknowledge and cel-ebrate these differences and similarities remains an ongo-ing challenge for everyone in our variously pluralistic church. 64.1 2005 Neuman * The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey A second method of reading the Bible personally uses individual passages as answers to personal questions or as directives for daily living. Christian history provides many examples of this. In late-3rd-century Egypt the young man Anthony, hearing in church the words "If you would be perfect, go sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven" (Mt 19:21), took them as addressed directly to himself. Thereupon he sold his many belongings and took up the life of an ascetic. Over a century later another famous African, Augustine of Hippo, torn by internal turmoil, picked up Paul's Letter to the Romans and read: ". not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts" (13:13-14). He describes its effect on him: "At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled." 12 This method is often used in modern Catholic retreat practice. Individuals or groups are assigned a passage for them to reflect on and pray over, listening for how it "speaks" to them. The contemporary spirituality movement Focolare makes a monthly practice of reflection on a specified Bible passage. Some potential problems with this method need to be addressed. People may take the ideas that come from these passages as special divine messages, divine answers to some difficulty of theirs. Such interpretations need to be balanced with other factors: discussion with a spir-itual director, prayerful reflection, practical "testing," and so forth. People need to be cautious of "absolute" interpretations, taking them as God's direct inspiration. Some of Benedict Groeschel's guidelines for evaluating "private revelations" would apply: (1) Keep all claims of Review for Religious revelations in perspective; (2) no private revelation comes directly from God and therefore none can be assumed to be inerrantly true; (3) a private revelation by definition is personal and therefore must be carefully applied and must never be considered an infallible guide in any sit-uation.~ 3 Still, this use of Scripture can be beneficial. Biblical quotations often grace calendars, diaries, and notebooks. Using them as thoughts for the day or week or month can be a helpful spiritual practice. A third method of using the Bible for personal spir-itual nourishment is lectio divina. For years lectio divina was seen as a uniquely monastic spiritual practice. In recent decades it has come to be used widely in the church. The document mentioned earlier, The Interpre-tation of the Bible in the Church, encourages all Catholics to consider lectio divina as a way of reading the Sacred Scriptures.~4 The lectio divina of the monastic tradition differs from "spiritual reading," as a practice of the 16th and 17th centuries came to be known. Spiritual reading has meant a "set time" for reading a variety of religious books. Its primary purpose is religious information. Lectio divina means an in-depth reading of the Scriptures that challenges readers to personal conversion. The text is read slowly, more than once, and its meanings are mulled over in an effort to see their application to one's life. Lectio divina demands unbiased and receptive read-ing. It demands prayer and concentration. Focused atten-tion demands discipline of body and mind, and one prays for honesty, openness, and insight and for the grace to bring them into one's daily practice. The Bible has always been the favored material for everyone's lectio divina, but that does not mean it is an impersonal generic record. The books of the Bible are the word of God, but also are the faith accounts of real men and women, and so lectio divina is a unique form of 64.1 2005 Neuman ¯ The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual :yourney listening. The reader continually asks: What do these particular words coming down to me from these partic-ular people say to me? Those spiritual experiences are allowed to challenge my own. My faith is confronted with the faith of another, and in that encounter I may glimpse my own need for conversion. As I read St. Paul's words to the Philippians, "I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying in every one of my prayers for all of you" (1:3), I am led to explore thank-fulness in my own life. How often do I thank God, even for my best friends? How often do I pray for them? At this point we have arrived at the heart of lectio divina. By these questions in this context, the Christian feels hap-pily invited once again to conversion; God's grace to change for the better is there. A succession of such moments becomes a conversa-tion between the Christian and the Lord, a loving inter-change between ourselves and the Mystery of God, mediated by the faith-filled words of the Bible. Many use the daily lectionary passages for their lectio. In any case this conversation with God should be continued day by day. In it we will find ourselves noticing our motives, the effects our attitudes and actions are having on our-selves and others, and the shape our hopes and dreams are taking. The Second Vatican Council blazed a fine trail for Catholic spirituality by encouraging more reading of the Bible. Many have been following it with enthusiasm, but much remains to be done. The Bible and its many stories and poems of faith have the potential to guide people's faith life amid today's formidable challenges to it. Many need to become more aware of how much they need this treasure trove of Christian tradition for their own peace and happiness. The council says it well: "Such is the force and power of the word of God that it can serve the church Review for Religious as her support and vigor, and the children of the church as strength for their faith, food for their soul, and a pure and lasting fount of their spiritual life" (DV §21). Notes ' Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art ofLectio Divina (Liguori, 1995); Matthias Neuman OSB, "The Contemporary Spirituality of the Monastic Lectio," Review for Religious 36, no. 1 (January 1977): 97-110. 2 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 137. 3 [Addressed to pastors of parishes, the Roman Catechism (1566) does, however, cite explicitly about a thousand short Scripture pas-sages throughout--somewhat like the references made on pp. 59-60 above--and quietly weaves another thousand biblical allusions into the discourse. There are some twenty-five pages explicidy devoted to prayer and eighty-five more pages on the Our Father, all of them laced with Scripture. Ed.] The ten-year-old Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes eight pages specifically to the importance, place, meaning, and use of Scripture in the church (CCC §§101-141) and seventy-five pages to prayer (§§2558-2865), with considerable Scripture weaving in and out and the Our Father given pride of place as in the Roman Catechism. 4 Stanislas Lyonnet SJ, "A Word on Chapters IV and VI of Dei Verbum: The Amazing Journey Involved in the Process of Drafting the Conciliar Text," in Vatican 11: Assessments and Perspectives, ed. Ren~ Latourelle, Vol. 1 (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988), p. 187. s Lyonnet, "Word," pp. 198-199. 6 Lyonnet, "Word," pp. 178-179. 7 Texts of Dei Verbum are taken from Vatican Council 1I: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, Vol. 1, ed. Austin Flannery OP, rev. ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992). s Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Washington: USCCB, 1994; also in Origins 23, no. 29 [6 January 1994]). 9 This issue is dealt with in detail by Sandra M. Schneiders IHM, The Revelatory Text, 2nd ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, Michael Glazier, 1999). See especially pp. xxx-xxxiv. ,o Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, p. 38 (IV.B.2). II Andrew Ryder, Following Christ: Models of Discipleship in the New Testament (Franklin, Wisconsin: Sheed and Ward, 1999). 64.1 200Y Neuman ¯ The Role of Scripture on the Spiritual Journey ~z Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 153 (Book 8, no. 29). ~3 Benedict Groeschel CFR, ,'I Still Small Vo#e: /1 Practical Guide on Reported Revelations (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). ~4 The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, p. 38 (IV.B.2). Prayer Litany to the Holy Spirit Come, Spirit of wisdom, and teach us to value the highest gift. ---Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of understanding, and show us all things in the light of eternity. --Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of counsel, and guide us along the straight and narrow path to our heavenly home. --Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of might, and strengthen us against every evil spirit and interest which would separate us from you. --Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of knowledge, and teach us the shortness of life and the length of eternity. --Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of godliness, and stir up our minds and hearts to love and serve the Lord our God all our days. ~Come, Holy Spirit. Come, Spirit of the fear of the Lord, and make us tremble with awe and reverence before your divine majesty. --Come, Holy Spirit. -Viterbo University-Book of Prayers Review for Religious FREDERICK E. CROWE Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Spiritual Exercises In the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the grace I ask for in the third prelude of the first contemplation (on the incarnation) is an intimate knowledge of the Lord that I may love him more and follow him better (§104).1 That establishes a pattern. In the next exercise (on the nativity) I make the same petition in the same form (§113). And so throughout the Second Week the grace I ask for is always the same, and is asked for in the same form.2 The aim is to know Christ and so to love him. This is in full harmony with the point that the actions of Christ we have been contemplating were performed for me; the Lord's nativity and all of his sufferings leading to his death on the cross were undergoneJbr me (§116). Love follows on knowledge: to know such self-sacrificing love calls for a return of love. Frederick E. Crowe SJ, a contributor to our pages in 1994, 1999, and 2004, is editor of The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. His address is Lonergan Research Institute; 10 St. Mary Street, Suite 500; Toronto, Ontario M4Y 1P9; Canada. making connections 64.1 2005 Crowe * Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Spiritual Exercises The order from knowledge to love not only stands to rea-son and appeals to our common sense; it is also thoroughly Thomist, possibly reflecting what Ignatius learned at the University of Paris. At any rate, he could easily find this doc-trine in St. Thomas and make it his own. The will, Thomas holds, is a faculty that follows the direction of intellect. Few doctrines of his seem better established than that.3 Its position in Thomist thought is further solidified by its role in Trinitarian theology: as will follows intellect, as decision fol-lows understanding, so the Holy Spirit proceeds from the divine Word.4 No doubt the doctrine is true, central, and important, but it is not the whole truth, nor does Thomism exclude other ways of thinking on this question. One other way, especially, is nowadays coming to the fore. In current literature we repeatedly find a quotation attributed to Pascal: "The heart has reasons that reason does not know," and there has been a growing movement to explore those reasons of the heart that are not reasons in a strictly cognitional sense, and do not depend on prior knowledge. There even is a kindred doctrine in Thomas: what he calls knowledge by connaturality. The context for Thomas was the question whether wisdom resides in the intellect. In response he says that wisdom implies a rectitude of judgment, and that this rectitude can be had in either of two ways: either through the full use of reason.or through a certain connaturality with the matter under judgment. Thomas gives an example. In regard to chastity one person may have right judgment through moral science, but another person who has the habit of chastity may have right judgment through a certain con-naturality with the matter to be judged,s If we turn to Lonergan, we find him remarkably reticent on knowledge by connaturality, at least on knowledge so termed: it is missing from the indices of most of his major works. There is, however, a mention in a late lecture, where Review for Religious he says, "God's gift of his love is the cause of our knowledge of God by connaturality," and adds a reference to Aquinas.6 There is also his interview, again late in life, with Pierre Robert, where Robert brings up for discussion "knowledge of God by connaturality" and Lonergan responds: "[The knowl-edge of God by connaturality] comes about through charity. No created being provides a solid analogy (St. Thomas). There is an order: a wisdom that is sapita (savory) introduces an enlightened goodwill, which yields good practical or theoret-ical judgments.''7 But let us, like good Thomists, avoid slavery to words. Under another heading Lonergan has a full doctrine of his own that achieves the same purpose as knowledge by connaturality, that in fact includes in other terms both knowledge by connaturality and the usual Thomist order. And, because the unity of this twofold pattern could become such an important theme in the science of our spiritual life, and possibly in our practice of the Spiritual Exercises, I will try to Lonergan sees two patterns ff advance in human development, describe it in more detail and in simpler language. The thought of Bernard Lonergan may not be the simplest, but I am familiar with it, and it has the advantage of being a real fac-tor in his spirituality and his theology. The Two Ways of Human Development Lonergan sees two patterns of advance in human devel-opment. 8 I propose to see them first in their unity and con-trast, and then take each by itself. There is a movement from below upwards: from experience through understanding and judgment to decision and the commitment of love, and this is the order of the Ignatian Second Week. But there is also a process from above downwards: from love through commit- 64.1 2005 Crowe * Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Spiritual Exercises 68 ment and judgment to understanding and enriched experi-ence. This second process gives us knowledge resulting from love, knowledge by connaturality, and it is the more funda-mental and the chronologically prior process. I believe that these two ways of development have much to contribute to a science of Christian spirituality. Do they relate also to the Spiritual Exercises? That is an intriguing question, and the pursuit of an answer is the main task of this essay. We must therefore take a closer look at Lonergan's doc-trine on each of these two ways. The Way from Below Upwards First, the order from below upwards: from experience through understanding and judgment to decision and the com-mitment of love. One simple way to see this "ordinary" way, in its elements and in their coherence, is to think of the "lev-els" of activity in a court case. There are witnesses who bring their experience to the case: what they saw, what they heard, and any relevant experience they had. There are attorneys, at least two of them, with their two different explanations of what the witnesses described; they represent the level of understanding. But understanding is a fickle instrument in the search for truth, and so, third, there are the members of the jury, who have to decide on the truth of the matter: Which attorney is right? Is the accused guilty or innocent? Finally, there is the judge, who not only presides over the whole oper-ation, but must take action, imposing an appropriate sentence or declaring the accused flee. This pattern of four steps, so sharply outlined in a court case, can often be observed in the give-and-take of family life, though there it is obscured by the chaotic flux of conversation. Somewhat more systematic than conversation and less sys-tematic than legal proceedings, this is the pattern we follow in the Second Week. We interrogate the witnesses in the way Ignatius describes: What are they saying? What are they Review for Religious doing? and so on (§107). In this way we come to understand and know our Lord better and, in response, to choose to love him and take appropriate action. In the words of the First Week, anticipating the response of the Second, what have I done for Christ? what ought I do for him? (§53). The Way from Above Downwards The way from below upwards is only half the picture. As time went on and the tableau of the two ways of development became a regular reference in Lonergan, the way from above downwards emerged more and more clearly as the way most of us live our lives. Its beginning is found in children, maybe even more than in adults. It coheres with the role of love in religion and theology. It descends from the gift of God's love through religious conversion to moral conversion, and per-haps-- though this step is more academic than spiritual-- through moral to intellectual conversion. The process from above downwards, thus briefly indi-cated, is not spelled out as fully as the way from below upwards, and so for an integral picture I have to piece together remarks from various places. My procedure is similar to what I believe prospectors for gold do: panning for nuggets and discarding the sand (though the "sand" may in this case have its own value). Lonergan starts as always with the gift of God's love. On our side there is the transformation of falling in love. One no longer is one's own. A life has begun in which the heart has reasons which reason does not know. A new world has opened up. In some kind of analogy, perhaps a rather distant one, this applies also to the Lord Jesus. We have to think of him "as developing from below as other human beings and from above on the analogy of religious development.''9 Here is a sweeping view of the process. Children are born into a cradling environment of love. The process begins in the affectivity of the infant, the child, the son or daughter, 64.1 200y Crowe ¯ Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and ttse Spiritual Exercises ¯ 7o the pupil, the follower. On this affectivity rests the child's apprehension of values; as educators know, values are caught, n6t taught. On these apprehended values, belief rests. On belief follows the growth in understanding of one who has found a genuine teacher and has been initiated into the study of the masters of the past. Then, to confirm one's growth in understanding, comes experience made mature and percep-tive by one's developed understanding. One can recognize these terms as fitting into one or another o~: the four levels of human activity, but note that the experience at the end of the way down is not identical with the experience at the start of the way up. The experience at the start is rather raw material, but at the end of the circle it is experience "made mature and perceptive by one's developed understanding." Implications are many. One is the role of community. It is all-important in this process that we are born into and develop and live out our lives in a community, that our insertion into community and history includes an invitation to accept the natural process of development. In that process one belongs to a hierarchy of groups and so owes allegiance to one's home, to one's country, to one's religion. Through the traditions of the group, one is "socialized," finding that one's home is an exist-ing society. One is "acculturated," learning and accepting the values of one's group. One is "educated" to become in time a fully inserted member of the tribe or clan, and eventually a participant in the modernity that each generation must create for itself and for its posterity. (The trio of words in q~otation marks recurs over and over in Lonergan.) There are further implications. Of special impo~tfince is the healing factor. The transformation of falling in" love (domestic love, human love, divine love) is a healing',force. Where hatred sees only evil, love reveals values. In one sweep it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out. Where hatred reinforces bias, love dissolves it. We see this in our Review for Religious Catholic history. Christianity possessed the spiritual power to heal what was unsound in the imperial domain of Rome. But it was unaccompanied by its natural complement of creating, for a single development has two vectors: one from below upwards, creating; the other from above downwards, healing. Of similar importance is the factor, already mentioned, of tradition. The community receives and adds to what it has received and hands on the tradition. In this transmission, belief plays a key role. Through belief personal experience is filled out.by reports from others, one's insights are complemented by insights of others, and one's own judgments--what one has been believing from childhood or in school or in college or in university or in the press--are formed within the context of the judgments of others. These two sources of growth (personal acquisition and belief) are not in separate compartments; the two are inter-dependent, there is a symbiosis. Both begin from infahcy. But only through the second does the first take one b~yond the earliest prehistoric stages of human development. Only through the first:is there any real assimilation and appropri-ation of the second. From the cradling environment of the infant to the professor consulting the encyclopedia, our lives are filled with trust and eventually belief. Applying the Way from Above. to the Spiritual Exercises I began my .sssay with the Ti~omist pattern, from below upwards, as seen.iri the Second Week of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. It is a familiar pattern,, arid I need not go through it again. The application of the opposite order to the Spiritual Exercises, the process from above downwards, is, however, not so simple. 'A useful preliminary is to note a parallel between the secular and the religious, between day-to-day liv-ing and the world of revelation and faith. Here is Lonergan's position on this point. "What holds in general for self-under- 64.1 200Y Crowe ¯ Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Spiritual Exercises Where the Second Week focuses on knowing and, therefore loving, the Third and Fourth Weel~s focus on communicqtion between persons already in lovei , standing in our world mediated by meaning and motivated by values holds also when that world is transfigured by God's self-revelation in Christ Jesus. The one revelation was made to many and thereby brought about a new type of commu-nity. For that community Christ prayed to his Father that 'they all be one.' It remains that a community is one not only by God's grace, but also by a consequent union of minds and hearts. Again, it remains that that consequent union can be troubled, disturbed, undergo an identity crisis; and the solu-tion to that crisis will be a common confession of faith."1° The present task, therefore, is to apply the process I have described to the Spiritual Exercises and to our Catholic spir-ituality. There are particular applica-tions, as when the rules for thinking with the church (§§352 -370) suppose the role of tradition. But what we seek here are applications within the heart of the Exercises, appli-cations built into their structure. We ask whether this contrasting position on knowledge and love is found there, either in the form given it by Pascal or in the Thomist knowledge by connaturality or in Lonergan's two ways of development. How do these ideas enter, if they do, into the Spiritual Exercises? My tentative answer is that they do enter the Exercises and in a way that considerably enhances our understanding of the Exercises. The Third and Fourth Weeks illustrate this most clearly. Where the Second Week focuses on knowing and therefore loving, the Third and Fourth Weeks focus on Review for Religious communication between persons already in love. That is, they presuppose love, love expressed in being with Christ, being with him in his suffering and being with him in his glorifica-tion. It is "being with" that matters. Whether we are with the Lord in his suffering or in his glory is secondary. What is pri-mary is that we are with him. Thus, although point six of the exercise on the Last Supper (§197) does not mention love, it is integral to love, a love that is grateful, a love that is a return of love. We are to ponder the way Christ suffers all these things on account of my sins (§ 197). The story is told of a mother who, on finishing her kitchen chores, went out to her child in its cradle on the verandah. She closed her eyes and sat there. There were loud voices next door, but she did not open her eyes t

Issue 62.4 of the Review for Religious, 2003. ; Church Dii~ection D evo tion a 1 Life Religious Life Pers 3ectives QUARTERLY 62.4 2003 Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bimonthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: review@slu.edu ¯ V~Zeb site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP Mount St. Mary's Seminary; Emmitsburg, Maryland 21727 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2003 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for th~ personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. MI copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the crehtion of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. fo r religious LIVING OUR CATHOLIC LEGACIES Editor ¯ Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming sJ Clare Boehmer ASC Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Sr. Raymond Marie Gerard FSP Eugene Hensell OSB Ernest E. Larkin OCarm Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ Miriam D. Ukeritis CSJ QUARTERLY 62.4 2003 contents 340 church direction Alphonsus's Perspective in the Post-Vatican II Church Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR highlights the God-given perspective of St. Alphonsus Liguori and suggests that such a perspective can be pgeserved even though the content of the Christian message has new dimensions after Vatican II. 354 Belief, Augustine, and the New Religiosity Paul Graham OSA enters us into a reflection on the shape of our faith, as opposed to its content, in contemporary Western society. devotional life 363 Rediscovering the Rosary Dennis J. Billy CSSR reviews the pope's apostolic letter on the rosary as a venerable form of prayer that will help Christians "to contemplate with Mary the ffice of Christ." 37O Mirroring Jesus: The Luminous Mysteries and Religious Life Mary Joseph Schultz SCC reflects on the luminous mysteries of the rosary not only as a new graced opportunity to deepen our faith by bringing the public life of Jesus into the rosary, but also as a special gift to vowed religious to reflect on essential elements of consecrated life. Review for Religious 379 reOi ious perspectives Why Newly Professed Religious Leave Peter Cantwell OFM reflects not only on what younger people are disillusioned by in religious life but also on what current members might provide as helps in a mutual effort to live the charism. 402 Ignatian Insights into Evangelical Poverty Donald C. Maldari SJ explores the richness and relevance of evangelical poverty and its relationship to theological hope in the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. departments 338 Prisms 423 Canonical Counsel: Papal Enclosure 431 Book Reviews 440 Indexes L33-7-- 62.4 2003 Te naturalized British writer Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) came to the United States for the first time with hope of winning a young lady's hand. He had met her and her mother earlier, when they were visiting England. Sometime during his unexpectedly 16ng and difficult land trip west to California to propose to her, Belloc was stimulated to write the following light verse: Kings live in palaces, pigs in sties, youth in expectation. Youth is wise. Despite Belloc's idealistic inspiration, we might hesitate to agree that such youthful expectation is wise. When our hopes, our expectations, are not realized, we can become disillusioned or bitter and angry or, perhaps, if we have a certain psychological makeup, resilient. As it happened, Belloc's marriage proposal was rejected by the young lady's mother, but he returned to England with his expectations intact. A year or so later, he took another trip to the United States with the same purpose in view, and this time he was successful. He married the young lady. Undoubtedly he felt that he had made his own the truth he had expressed in his verse. Our Catholic faith seems to agree with youth, even finding that living in expectation is a divine way of living. Jesus, after all, taught us to Review for Religious pray daily "Thy kingdom come." Certain times of the year, like Advent, and holy days like All Saints, All Souls, and Christmas highlight for us the virtue of hope or expectation. God has such divine expectations of each one of us that there is no limit to how often he forgives our wrongdoing. Likewise there are no restrictions on the graces of God's intimacy with his sons and daughters in Christ. Scripture would have us believe that God expects to delight in us. Expectation, then, considered in a Christian light, is not just for the young, but it is the graced quality of those who are called to be young in heart by their Christian baptism. Living in expectation, we look forward to growing in holiness. We have expectations about ourselves as saints, just as God does. Living in expectation, we look for the ways that God shines forth in the world he created and leads us towards God's reign. Entering into St. Paul's heart, we have expectations that God keeps working at the century-by-century fulfillment of his creation in Christ. We as members of Christ's Body expect to play our own part, with God, in bringing about this fullness of redemption. Of course, we all have our natural fear of dying, especially faced with its unknown pain and circumstances. But we as Christians can at the same time look towards death with expectation, welcoming our further identity with Christ in receiving death as one more gift of the Father so that we can rejoice in resurrected life forever. As we say in our Creed, we expect the res-urrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Yes, to live in expectation is a profound Christian calling. Such living is rooted, not in youthfulness, but in God, and is sustained by God. We the baptized are meant to live in expectation. We devoutly pray for God's presence gracing us in this way. Then we are youthfully wise. David L. Fleming SJ 62.4 2003 church NIHAL ABEYASINGHA Alphonsus's Perspective in. the Post-Vatican I! Church direction Redemptorists were for a considerable period of their history called "hellfire preachers." And so indeed they were. At the time of Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorists, the preaching was accompanied by "audiovisuals" that would be considered macabre today--the exhibition of a skull, an imaginary dialogue with a damned soul, and thepreachers going around the town in the dark crying out "Save your soul!" Obviously, these procedures cannot and should not be duplicated today. But, if what he did represented a God-given perspective, I think it would be a pity to lose the perspective even today. In this article I intend to highligh,t Alphonsus's perspective and suggest tentatively that it can be preserved even though the content--or the awareness of the content--of the Christian message has new dimensions after Vatican Council II. Nihal Abeyasingha CSSR lives at 454/9 Piachaud Gardens; Peradeniya Road; Kandy, Sri Lanka. Review for Reli~ous Background of the Ministry of Alphonsus The Council of Tren.lt (1545-1563) met to counter the effect that Luther's andI other Reformation perspectives were having on the church. The perspectives were primarily doctrinal. They had serious implications, however, for the institutional and disciplinary structure of the church. There was pblarization: Scripture alone versus Scripture and Tradition;'I faith as commitment alone (tides fiducialis) versus faith ificluding content; only God and grace versus God in Christ acting through human ministry and grace being mediate.d through the church. When the council met in 1545, the attendance was poor, some forty bishops, most of the~m Italian. They began with disagreement, but by 1546 they decided to deal simulta-neously with both doctrifial and disciplinary issues. . The shadow of thel Reformation cast a permanent shadow on the council's deliberations. The result was an emphasis on 'what the Reformers had gotten wrong by Catholic criteria, ignorin, g altogether what they got right. (In the words of G.K. Chesterton, every heresy is the revenge of a forgotten ~r_~-uth.) Among other things, Trent stressed the veneration iof the saints, devotion to Mary, the Mass as sacrifice, th~ importance of suffrages for the dead, and other matters! against the Reformers, Spin-offs of these lines of thought in Catholic culture included stress on Euchanstac ad.orataon, a deemphasls of the role of the laity, and undu~e emphasis on the role of the . ordained minister who c.onfects the Eucharist. In the Catholic trad, ition the theology that followed was highly systematized, the disciplinary structure rigid and centrahzed. But the, ology also reflected attempts to find places of accord with Luther. For example, Michel de Bay of Louvain (+1589) thought of original sin as depriving human beingi of what constitutes the human condition--another vergion of Luther's understanding of humanity's "radical corruption." Bay's position was 62.4 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Alpbonsus's Perspective Alphonsus's ministry was "popular," directed to the masses who lacked competent pastoral care. defended by Cornelius Jansen (+1638). Even though views such as these were repudiated by the church, they had effects on requirements for receiving the sacraments. I suggest that Alphonsus used the "last things" (death, judgment, heaven, and hell), which had a major impact on Luther, as a call to conversion for those in sin. The response of conversion that he sought was oriented towards the sacraments of recon-ciliation and the Eucharist, the ecclesial communion that is based on the true faith and true sacraments. Alphonsus's ministry was "popular," directed to the masses who lacked competent pastoral care. These people were steeped in superstition and magic, and lived in fear of frightful evils such as the devil coming into their lives. That is where Alphonsus started; he addressed their emotion of fear by proclaiming the last things. Beginning his preaching of the Christian message here, he le~l individuals to the sacraments. He wanted to make it as easy as possible for sinners to confess to a priest (in contrast to the Reformers' idea of confessing directly to God). He advocated a gentle manner with those who committed sins by almost unconscious habit and with those who fell again and again into the same sin (consuetudinarii and recidivt). In his time the laxist view allowed absolution as often as penitents confessed, while the rigorist view demanded thorough amendment of life before they could receive absolution. Mphonsus proposed a middle path of sound common sense. He said that absolution should be refused to consuetudinarii and recidivi unless there were clear signs of repentance, which he listed: tears, weeping, a lessening of the number of sins, notable efforts at amendment such Review for Reli~ous as fasting or almsgiviOg, evidence of a search for new means of improvement, spontaneous confession, special motivation such as the fear of some impending disaster, confession of sins previously and culpably omitted, prior restitution, new awardness, of guilt. He advocated that absolution be deferred only when the confessor was morally certain of the penitent's wrong disposition; that is, .for deferral he needed to make a prudent probable judgment about ,tpheen'i te"n t s' fundamental lack of sorrow. He said, too, ~at absolution is not to be deferred if there is danger of more harm than good being done.1 Through reconciliation followed by the Eucharist (the emphasis more on Holy Communion than on the Mass), people were weaned ,away from sin. What was taking place is pictured on thd cover Alphonsus designed for his book Selva: The Digni~ and Duties of the Priest. The priest is hearing confession .'in front of a large crucifix. Rays from the crucified Lo,"rd stream towards the penitent. Alphonsus's pastoral r~alism saw God's action in Christ reaching penitents thro.'ugh the sacramental mediation of the church. The perspelctive is close to that of Irenaeus of Lyon (+202): "God is~ man's glory, but it is man who receives the effect of Gbd's activity, who is the recipient of all God's wisdom and power. Just as a doctor proves himself in his patients, ~o God reveals himself in men." 2 Alphonsus facilitated reconciliation with a bias in favor of penitents because of his own trust in the power of God's grace. He-k~ew that generally the habitual sinners would fear death, judgment, hell, and the loss of heaven and so would approach sacramental recon-ciliation. He knew thht fear as a motive does not last long. He knew that "~erfect love casts out fear" (1 Jn 4:18). So, to lead therfi beyond fear and enable them to remain converted, to p'ersevere, he offered the motive of love and a support structure of prayer and fellowship, namely, confraternities. 62.4 2003 Abeyasingba * Alpbonsus'sPer~ective To sustain people's effort and stir up love in them, he presented considerations that would naturally lead to love. Look how much God loved you, sending his Son in human .form; that Son died for you amid unspeakable suffering; that intense love continues in his abiding presence, especially in the Eucharist. Will you not return love for love? In such works as The Practice oft be Love of Jesus Christ, he would go further into the qualities that true love for Jesus entails. He knew, of course, the sinner's obvious objection: I am too weak to respond with any degree of intensity of love. He forestalled that objection by his teaching on prayer. Christ has said, "Ask and you shall receive." Ask God--that is prayer. Because God has said it, you will receive. Everyone and anyone can do this much. He bolstered this position by citing respected authors and by telling stories of how sinners who did not stop praying " received a final chance to repent and be saved. Even daough many of the stories would be laughed at today, in those days they made his point effectively. Parish missions were considered finished only when all had had an opportunity for confession. After the mission Alphonsus established some ongoing programs: regular mental prayer in the church and confraternities where people supported one another with fellowship, prayer, and regular instruction to stay on the path of their conversion. There is a clear overall perspective in these programs. Today one can object that in this model popular piety and liturgy merely coexist and that the former can even take precedence over the latter.3 It is likely that Alphonsus knew of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, a 17th-century writer who in Della Regolata Devozione dei Cristiani (Norms for Christian Devotion) proposed a religiosity that drew from the liturgy and the Scriptures to offset superstition and magic, and that he also knew of Benedict XIV's important initiative of permitting the use of the Review for Religious Bible in the vernacular. But Alphonsus did not bring these perspectives into his work for the pastorally most abandoned, chiefly uneducated people inclined to superstition. It would make little sense. They might give a symbolic assent to the matter presented and engage in a symbolic act of conversion, but their lives would not be much changed. Alphonsus said that the test of a good sermon is when the people leave the church striking their breast and not talking about the preacher. A New Context As the church in mid-20th-century Europe was facing something of a crisis of neglect and indifference, some new theological perspectives and initiatives in Scripture, catechesis, and liturgy were appearing. Without intend!ng to imply that Redemptorists were in the forefront of the pre-Vatican II theological scene--in fact, they were not--I venture to suggest that two Redemptorists made a significant contribution to this evolving theology. They did this by examining the existing perspectives in the light of Alphonsus's call-response perspective (fear as initial stimulus leading to love in the long term). This was obvious in the German Bernard H~iring.4 EX. Durrwell, from France, highlighted the grandeur of the resurrection in God's redemptive plan so that believers could more attractively show those who were ignoring the Christian message the way to conversion and growth.5 After all, the motto of the Redemptorist congregation is "With him is plentiful redemption." Paul Hitz CSSR, of Switzerland, even though he did not receive much international notice, contributed to catechetics, which too is a call to grow as believers. Vatican II bro,ught into focus several aspects of theology for which 'Isome theologians had been disciplined. It rediscove~'ed the paschal mystery and, with that, found a new view df the ¯church: its being sacrament, I 62.4 2003 Abeyasingha ¯ Alphonsus's Perspective the common priesthood of all Christ's faithful (and some consequences of this), and a renewed liturgy.6 Alphonsus's Perspective in a Post-Vatican II Context Can Mphonsus's perspective fit in this post-Vatican II context? I do not know whether this question has been posed in this way. It is claimed that Alphonsus's perspective is embodied in a story that is loved, remembered, and lived by Redemptorists. Without assessing that claim, perhaps articulating some contemporary dimensions may not be out of place. In his Confessions Augustine (+430) made this prayerful observation: "Since the time I first learned of You, there is nothing of You I have discovered that I have not discovered by remembering." And what he discovered in responding to the Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians of his time has influence even in our day. Perhaps one may suggest that a hint of a Vatican II perspective was already present in Alphonsus. In his Duetto (Dialogue with the Soul) he imagines a soul meeting Christ going to his death. The soul asks: "Where ¯ are you going?" Jesus replies: "I am going to die." The soul wants to follow him. Jesus asks the soul to give him his heart and then go and live, always remembering his (Jesus') love." In practice, one emotion seems dominant in the Redemptorist recognition of, and conversion from, sin, and that is joy, thankfulness that one is forgiven. "Father, you show your almighty power chiefly in your mercy and forgiveness" (opening prayer, 26th Sunday, Ordinary Time). Put this grateful joy felt by Redemptorists into the picture of alertness for clear signs of repentance--fear as a starting point of conversion, tears, fewer sins, fasting or almsgiving, seeking new ways to improve, and so forth--and perhaps you have something that at least resonates with the perspective of the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil, stemming from well Review for Religious before Vatican II: 'iWhat good would life have been for us had Christ not come as our Redeemer? Father, how wonderful your care for us! How boundless your merciful love! To ransom a slave you gave away your Son. O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" Does this Redemptorist picture from before Vatican II fit in with post-Vatican II theological reflection? I think it does. After being careful to identify those who are in the greatest pastoral need, we must remember a few basic principles. First, it is important to touch people where they are. Where Muratori proposed drawing popular piety from Scripture and the liturgy, Alphonsus's program was to meet people where they were and then lead them beyond it. Second, a clear distinction needs to be made between stimulating conversion in the short term (Alphonsus used fear for this) and maintaining conversion in the long term. (For the latter, Alphonsus had only one prescription: love.) Third, how does one propose love? The short answer is: as a call that evokes a response, or an offer that invites acceptance. It is important to keep God's initiative in mind, as in the picture of rays from the crucified Jesus shining on the penitent. Alphonsus's call to love focuses on Jesus' passion: "Greater love than this.no one has, than that a person lay down his life for his friends." But this emphasis should include the following: "Therefore does the Father love me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again" On 10:17-18). Death and resurrection are inseparable. Psychologically, selfless suffering unto death is deeply evocative of response, but it is not complete by itself.7 Rather than being isolated from the resurrection, Jesus' passion should be presented as a step on the journey to fullness of life. "The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God," says Irenaeus of 62.4 2003 Ab~yasingha ¯ Alphonsus'sPerspective Lyon. Incorporation into Christ's deat[h and resurrection in baptism should be the basic paradigm for preaching about death and resurrection. For there to be resurrection, there must be passion (suffering) and death; one chooses this journey because of the hope of resurrection. "Christ has passed beyond our sight, not to abandon us, but to be our hopE. Christ is the beginning, the head of the church; where he has gone, we hope to follow" (Preface 1, Ascension). The grandeur of that goal makes the call to conversion attractive today: "With him is plentiful redemption." It is well to remember that even on Good Friday, when the liturgy focuses on the suffering and death of Christ, it is not separated from the resurrection. (The Via Lucis, Stations of the Resurrection, may be one way to maintain the link between death and resurrection.) Note, too, that the apparitions of the risen Lord involved some renunciation (of previous expectations) and often a call to mission as a condition for recognizing the "stranger" as the very Jesus whom the disciples had known. This is the version of the resurrection as call to death and call to love that needs to be worked out in popular idiom for people today. The resurrection is contingent upon the Son's having taken human flesh. If the incarnation had not taken place, no death-cum-resurrection would be possible. This mystery highlights the incarnation as an emptying (Ph 2:6-11), the rich one becoming poor for our sakes (2 Co 8:9). Jesus' life in the flesh meant sharing our condition and emotions. But, because it was not a life limited to the flesh, he was raised to life in the Spirit (Rrn 1:1-4). In the liturgy we pray, "May this sacrament [Eucharist] restrain our earthly desires and enable us to grow in love of the things of heaven" (After Communion, Tuesday, First Week of Lent). The child Jesus shared in the development that every child goes through--from the first stages, whei'e self- Review for Religious reference is the norm, to the point of total unselfishness in love ("He loved them to the end" Jn 13:1). The incarnation is the call to grow. Here one does well to keep in mind that excellent training in a particular discipline (medicine, accountancy, or whatever) does not automatically mean that one is an adult in regard to one's religious growth (the commitment based on content that Catholic faith requires). Many adults remain at the level of children (often the faith content they had at confirmation) and think that a vague "feel good / do some good" religion is growth. God's invitation is to deeper growth, an incar-national growth guided by the Spirit. The journey from the Father to this world and back to the Father is the program for all Christians. It is eriacted (as a "today") in the Eucharist. There is a continuing call to recommitment, to baptism's death and resurrection themes. The Eucharist is a third focus of Alphonsus. For him, Jesus is the prisoner in the tabernacle, awaiting, calling, and welcoming those who come to visit him. But the Jesus of the tabernacle is first the Jesus who was born, lived, died, and rose again, who celebrated that Passover with his disciples and continues to do so in the community of believers. And this is perhaps the high point of the call: to recognize that we are betrayers who are called by the one betrayed (Jesus) to share a meal with him. For this he accepts what we offer (bread and wine, products of the earth and of human hands) and returns them to us transformed (his risen body and blood, the new creation). One can add some glosses to the Eucharistic narrative to highlight this perspective: "On the night he The journey from the Father to this world and back to the Father is the program for all Christians. 62.4 2003 Abeyasingba ¯ Alpbonsus's Perspective was betrayed [by his disciples, with whom we are all complicit], Jesus took bread [that supports life---he was not seeking revenge] and gave thanks [for everything, including the betrayal, life and its support, death, because this is the prelude to resurrection and glory] and shared it with his disciples [betrayers become .companions, "bread fellows"], saying [not only in word but in deed]: 'This is my body, which is broken for you' [the principle enunciated in the Gospels: 'Unless .the grain of wheat dies' and 'Take upyour cross']. Do this in memory of me [the call addressed to all his followers, sinner and saint alike, a call to 'do this' not only in word but also in deed].''8 Finally, for continuing the journey of conversion over the long haul, Alphonsus proposed a program of prayer. He emphasized, not the amount of prayer, but fidelity to it. A short prayer every day is better than a long period of prayer occasionally. Prayer means recognizing one's limitations, acknowledging one's need for God. Beginners in mental prayer need some method, but, as they grow, they should not let the method become a hindrance to prayer. When difficulties arise, they can fall back on the method. This advice of Alphonsus remains valid and relevant in our day, but support groups are needed too. For the community as a whole, Alphonsus proposed confraternities, which were support groups. Today's psychological research has identified the roots of various problems. Lay people should be encouraged to use .their skills to help others in various difficulties, even if it means merely lending an ear to one other person. When people feel that they havebeen heard and understood, they are often able to work their way through their own problems. Such support is very much in the competence of laypersons, and those devoted to pastoral care would do well to keep encouraging them to fulfill their special role in the world. Review for Religious Charisms as Life-Giving Roots The present article indicates the need for religious institutes not to take their agendas from current theology. Theology has its place, but institutes have their own particular orientations and perspectives. It is in rediscovering and living according to their foundational perspectives that religious institutes can make their authentic contributions. These solidly rooted agendas are indeed their very reason for existence. When Cyprian (+258) became bishop of Carthage, he made it a rule to do nothing on his private opinion without the counsel (consilium) of the presbyterate and the agreement (consensus) of the people. The two Latin words are significant. As the one who presided over the presbyterate, Cyprian needed their counsel. Often it would be far more "advanced"--aware of many more theological perspectives, one could say--than the laity. But he also wanted to have the consensus of the people, a fellow feeling of where they were. I suggest that Alphonsus started with the consensus of the laity and, as preacher of repentance, led them to commit their lives in love to Jesus, supporting one another along the journey. The challenge is to be "popular," to meet people where they are, but also to lead them beyond, in terms of call and response, invitation and acceptance. There will be changes in the content and style of post-Vatican II proclamation and ways of celebrating the sacraments, but the apostolic perspectives of Alphonsus and other founders can, I am convinced, well remain unchanged. Notes ' See Raphael Gallagher, "The Fate of the Moral Manual since Saint Alphonsus," in Histo,3v and Conscience: Studies in Honour of Father Sean O'Riordan CSSR, ed. Raphael Gallagher and Brendan McConvery (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), pp. 212-239. 2 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 3.20.2. 62.4 2003 Abeyasingba * Alpbonsus's Perspective 3 See Directory on Popular Piety and the Litu'rgy: Principles and Guidelines (Vatican, 9 April 2002), §41: "The 'popular missions' emerged at this time and contributed greatly to the spread of the pious exercises. Liturgy and popular piety coexist in these exercises, even if somewhat imbalanced at times. The parochial missions set out to encourage the faithful to approach the sacrament of penance and to receive Holy Communion. They regarded pious exercises as a means of inducing conversion and of assuring popular participation in an act of worship." 4 See Bernard H~iring CSSR, The Law of Christ, 3 vols. (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1961o1966), and his later work, which is more diffuse and wide-ranging, Free and Faithful in Christ, 3 vols. (New York: Century, 1979). 5 EX. Durrwell CSSR, The Resurrection (London: Sheed and Ward, 1960). 6 See Directory, §§48-49: "History shows, first of all, that the correct relationship between the Liturgy and popular piety begins to be distorted with the attenuation among the faithful of certain values. essential to the Liturgy itself. The following may be numbered among the causes giving rise to this: ¯ a weakened awareness or indeed a diminished sense of the" paschal mystery and of its centrality for the history of salvation, of which the Liturgy is an actualization. Such inevitably occurs when the piety of the faithful, unconscious of the 'hierarchy of truths,' imperceptibly turns towards other salvific mysteries in the life of Christ, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or indeed of the angels and saints; ¯ a weakening of a sense of the universal priesthood, in virtue of which the faithful offer 'spiritual sacrifices pleasing to God, through Jesus Christ' (1 Pt 2:5, Rm 12:1), and, according to their condition, participate fully in the church's worship. This is often accompanied by the phenomenon of a Liturgy dominated by clerics who also perform the functions not reserved to them and which, in turn, causes the faithful to have recourse to pious exercises through which they feel a sense of becoming active participants; ¯ unfamiliarity with the 'language' of the Liturgy--that is, its language, signs, symbols, and ritual gestures---causing much of the meaning of the celebration to elude the faithful. This unfamiliarity can even make them feel like outsiders to the liturgical action, and so they are quick to manifest their preference for pious exercises whose 'language' is closer to their own cultural development, or Review for Religious else for private devotions more in keeping with the details and demands of their daily life. "Each of these factors, and both in certain cases, not infrequently produce imbalances in the relationship between the Liturgy and popular piety, to the former's detriment and the latter's impoverishment. These should therefore be corrected through careful and persistent catechetical and pastoral work. "Conversely, the liturgical renewal and the heightened liturgical sense of the faithful have often recontex~ualized popular piety in its relationship with the Liturgy. Such should be regarded as a positive development and in conformity with the most profound orientation of Christian piety." 7 See Sean O'Riordan, "The Human Psychology of Repentance," Studia Moralia 21 (1983): 79-102, and "The Nature and Function of Pastoral Psychology," Studia Moralia 1 (1963): 348-387. 8 Karl Rahner, "The Episcopate and the Primacy," in Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961), p. 25: "Essentially the church is the historically continuing presence in the world of the incarnate Word of God. She is the historical tangibility of the salvific will of God as revealed in Christ. Therefore the church is most tangibly and intensively an 'event' where (through the words of consecration) Christ himself is present in his own congregation as the crucified and resurrected Savior, the fount of salvation; where the redemption makes itself felt in the congregation by becoming sacramentally visible; where the 'New and Eternal Testament' which he founded on the cross is most palpably and actually present in the holy remembrance of its first institution. Therefore the celebration of the Eucharist is the most intensive event of the church." I would add that the consequence is that every word in the church must be understood in connection with the memorial dimension of the Eucharist (see I Co 11:26). It is like the prism which separates light intoits constituent colors and also refocuses the different colors into a unity. 62.4 2003 PAUL GRAHAM Belief, Augustine, and the New Religiosity ~/ nd what remains when disbelief has gone?" That striking line from Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going" poses a question that is characteristic of the times we live in. The problem today is not so much disbelief or unbelief, but belief. The onus is now on those who claim they do not believe in God. According to the European Values Study for 1999/2000, 77.4 percent of the sample surveyed believe in God. Even in secular Sweden, which has the lowest number of believers in God in Western Europe, the number is 53.4 percent. Clearly, unbelievers are in the minority. The agnostics, according to this scenario, are not those who are unsure about their belief in God, but those who are not sure they disbelieve. The line from Philip La~'kin's poem cap-tures beautifully the anxiety of the unbeliever who has a nagging suspicion that perhaps there is a God after all. The present-day anxiety, the anxiety of a post-Christian society, is in the possibility that there is a God. Paul Graham OSA is provincial of the English-Scottish province of the Augustinians. His address is Provincial Office; 15 Dorville Crescent; London W6 0HH; United Kingdom. Review fbr Religious In these circumstances, those of us who through our faith have been freed from the burden of unbelief--and it is a burden--have a corresponding responsibility not to take our belief for granted. Belief is something that grows and deepens; it is not static. In the famous words of St. Augustine: "Make progress, my brothers and sis-ters, examine yourselves honestly again and again. Put yourselves to the test. Do not be content with what you are, if you want to become what you are not yet . Always add something more, keep moving forward, always make progress" (Sermon 169). An important part of reflection on faith is its social context. The shape of our belief, as opposed to its con-tent, is influenced by the world around us. If we lived in 13th-century Italy, for instance, unbe-lief would not have been a problem; even the gross sinner would be expected to believe in God. Faith was characterize~l by an intense devotion to the person of Christ in his passion and in the Eucharist. Belief had a tangible feel about it then, and peo-ple were not afraid to express it publicly. In Poland during the Communist times, faith was shaped by the need to take a firm stand against state-controlled atheism. Belief in God was caught up in nationalism: to be Polish was to be Catholic, as being Irish in Ireland was until recently. The object of faith in these differenttimes and places remains the same: God in Jesus Christ. This leaves us with the question: In contemporary Western society, what is the shape of our faith? It is now fashionable to have a "spirituality" in these 2 l st-century "postsecular" times. The problem is not so much religious belief as what to believe in. People today have become spiritually gullible. G.K. Chesterton noted perceptively that, when people stop believing in the true People today have become spiritually gullible. 62.4 2003 Graham ¯ Belief, Augustine, and the New Religiosity God, they start believing in anything. One of the charac-teristics of this new religiosity is its individualism. People now pick and choose the bits of religion they want to believe in and reject the distasteful parts. It has become a lifestyle choice: a bit of Zen here, a bit of Feng Shui there, a touch of white magic perhaps, and even some aspects of Christianity--the nice bits. This is nondemanding, non-threatening religion, a pick-and-mix spirituality. It has become fashionable to make a distinction between "religion" and "spirituality." By "religion" is meant institutional religion, the church; by "spirituality" is meant the "good" things about religion without the awkward bits like the hierarchy and the church's teach-ings. One can now have a spirituality, even if it means rejecting or sitting loose to the institutional form of the church. The problem is, once you detach spirituality from religion, it can quickly become self-seeking and inward-looking. Belonging to the church prevents that from happening. The Latin word religio implies "ties," ."obligations." We are bound to one another and to God, in the church. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, has an interesting observation to make here (see Credo in The Times, 24 August 2002). He challenges those who claim to have a "spirituality" but reject organized reli-gion. Spirituality, he says, marks the beginning of a search for God, leading on to religion, to belonging to a community of believers; otherwise it tends to be escapist and self-indulgent. He illustrates this by referring to Robert Putnam, the Harvard sociologist, whose recent book Bowling Alone (2000) is about the breakdown of community in the United States as a result of growing individualism. The metaphor for this breakdown is to be found in ten-pin bowling. In the 1950s bowlers belonged to leagues and clubs and went bowling together, as teams. Today those leagues are no longer so Review for Religious popular, and people prefer to go bowling on their own. Sacks therefore declares, "Spirituality is what happens to religion when it goes 'Bowling Alone.'" Britain faces a similar problem of individualism. A recent sociological study (Changing Britain, Changing Lives, (London: Institute of Education, 2003), involving three birth-cohort studies of people born in 1946, 1958, and 1970, found that in the last fifty years there has been a marked decline in social cohesiveness and awareness, evidenced in the universal decline in voting, community activity, and church activity. The political philosopher Eric Hobsbawm is quoted in this study as saying, "Prosperity and privatization broke up what poverty and collectivity in the public place welded together" (p. 9). This individualizing tendency in society as a whole, I suggest, is influencing deeply the way we believe. St. Augustine understood this very well. Father Tom Martin OSA, in Our Restless Heart: The Augustinian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003), takes up this issue: "Does Augustinian spirituality lead to a privatized spirituality? While it is clear that Augustine privileges the heart and the journey within, he would be the first to decry any reading of him that would turn the Christian life into a solitary journey. It is always a shared pilgrimage, a community of fellow believers on a journey of faith to God" (p. 47). In another passage, speaking of the need to "return to one's heart," he says: "Yet for all this talk of 'heart,' this empl~asis on interiority, its inten-tion is never meant to lead to an introverted spirituality. What is fundamentally interior to me is, for Augustine, the point where I am also closest to my brothers and sis-ters in the human family. From the heart I come to Christian faith, become a member of the church, the Body of Christ . [Augustine's] insistence upon the heart is thus not a self-serving escape from responsibil-ity into interior religion and privatized faith" (p. 43). 62.4 2003 I believe this to be one of the greatest challenges to Christian faith today, the challenge posed by the privatization of belief. I have labored this point because I believe this to be one of the greatest challenges to Christian faith today, the challenge posed by th4 .privatization of belief. As Cardinal Hume once said, "faith is always personal but never private." Augustinian spirituality is one of the greatest safeguards we have. However, because of its emphasis on interiority and the need to find God within, it can very easily be hijacked by the "privatizers" of faith. Martin makes it quite clear that such an interpretation of Augustine is a distortion of his spirituality, which is at all times ecclesial, rooted in community, rooted in the church. "To remove or isolate or separate God or self or community within the thought of Augustine," he says, "would only result in a profound distortion of his spiri-tual vision" (p. 49). So, as we struggle with belief ina society that wants to reduce everything--whether fast food or spirituality-- to individual choice, Augustine provides us with a nec-essary corrective to the "McDonaldization" of religion, as a Scottish theologian calls it (John Drane, The McDonaldization of the Church, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000). Return to your hearts by all means, but not to stay there, rather to encounter the God who opens up our hearts to those around us. Augustine himself was only too aware of the temptations of interiority. His first experiment in community life was with like-minded friends near Milan just after his bap-tism. He established a community apart from the hustle and bustle of life in order to spend time in contemplation and reflection: otium sanctum, "holy leisure." He brought Review for Religious this idealized form of Christian community back to North Africa, to Thagaste, where he established a lay community, but he had a.rude awakening. Visiting a church in Hippo one day to look for a candidate for his community, he was grabbed by the congregation and presented to the aging Bishop Valerius for ordination to the priesthood--and he wept. Augustine knew that from then on his life would no longer be his own. Gone for the rest of his life was any notion of otium sanctum. The life of contemplation would lead him now to share that contemplation with others. It is a paradox of his life, and indeed of the Christian life in general, that the journey within becomes at a certain point a journey outwards, to God and to others. Hence his famous observation in the City of God: "For no one ought to be so leisured as to take no thought in that leisure for the interest of his neighbor, nor so active as to feel no need for the contemplation of God" (xIx. 19). The current resurgence of interest in religion and spirituality is evidenced in the number of books in the "Mind, Body, and Spirit" sections in most bookstores. Often the Christian section is quite small in relation to other religions. Clearly, many are hungry for a spiritual view of life. It has become obvious that people cannot survive for long on unbelief and on a purely secular view of the world, in spite of the predictions of the proponents of the "theory of secularization," who are now eating humble pie. Harvey Cox has said: "Today it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction" (Fire from Heaven, London: Cassell, 1996, p. xv). People yearn for enchantment. Secularity does not feed the human spirit, which is made for God. The Vatican has responded to this phenomenon by publishing Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian Reflection on the "New Age" (Pontifical Councils for Culture and Interreligious Dialogue, 2003). It 62.4 2003 Graham ¯ Belie, Augustine, and the New Religiosity This new religiosity is largely non-Christian. acknowledges that this renewed interest in spirituality and religion in general is evidence of a spiritual hunger in the contemporary world. There is in people a deep desire for the transcendent. "Our hearts are restless," says Augustine, restless for the true God (Confessions, I. 1). The document sees in this new religiosity "a genuine yearning for a deeper spiritu-ality, for something that will touch their hearts, and for a way of making sense of a con-fusing and often alienating world" (1.5). It also notes many positive aspects of this religiosity: its criticism of materialism, its sense of the sacredness of life, and its concern for the environment. But there is a difficulty. This new religiosity is largely non-Christian. As the document says, "it is on the wh61e difficult to reconcile it with Christian doctrine and spir-ituality" (2). It is important to remember that we are all subject to these influences in society at large. One has only to mention the example of Cherie Blair, the wife of the British prime minister, who has publicly declared her allegiance both to the Catholic Church and to forms of New Ageism, such as the use of crystals. I have no wish to judge an individual case, merely to cite her as a very public example of what I believe to be a common misapprehension: that you can mix Christianity with alternative spiritualities and think there is nothing amiss. Some of it may be harmless, but one needs to be dis-criminating. The current tendency towards the privatization of faith and spiritual individualism is also picked up by the Vatican document, which refers to "spiritual narcissism" and the "private world of ego-fulfillment," quoting a well-known commentator On New Age (3.2). It also cautions against looking for religious experiences "engen- Review for Religious dered by turning in on oneself." This leads on to the fundamental point that "Christian prayer is not an exer-cise in self, contemplation, stillness, and self-emptying, but a dialogue of love" (3.4). Certain kinds of religion can easily become an ego trip, and this document is not afraid to say so. Augustine's search for God, expressed in his Confessions, appears on one level to be the classic "journey within," and indeed he gave succeeding generations the spiritual vocabulary for that necessary journey. But he is at pains to point out that, unbeknownst to himself, God was with him at all times on that journey. It was not so much a search for self as a search for the Truth outside of self. In a sense, it was God who went in search of Augustine, not the other way round. It was grace that prompted him to seek God in the first place: "You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself . You called me, you cried aloud to me, you broke the bar-rier of my deafness" (X.2 7). As Jesus says in John's Gospel, "you did not choose me; no, I chose you" (Jn 15:16). It is important to mention this, as Eastern forms of prayer and meditation are very popular. While there are many rich insights to be gained from these traditions, like the need for stillness and proper bodily posture, one has to remember that these are not Christian forms of prayer. They are mainly exercises to bring about an expe-rience of peace and enlightenment. But Christian prayer is not fundamentally about such experiences, unless they come as a grace from God. It is a relationship more than an individual experience of heightened consciousness or awareness. As the Vatican document points out, "life in Christ is not something so personal and private that it is restricted to the realm of consciousness. Nor is it merely a new level of awareness" (3.5). To quote a contemporary theologian speaking about Augustinian interiority, Christian prayer is not a "diving expedition into the soul" 62.4 2003 Graham ¯ Belief, Augustine, and the New Religiosity (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, London: Blackwell, 1990, p. 291), but an encounter with the living God in the person of Jesus Christ, the bearer of the water of life. Dry Rain It is as if a great party is under way: with every wind falling leaves, multicolored, natural confetti, gigantic golden snowflakes fr6m a sycamore. Autumnal dry rain in its festive, roundabout fashion waters next spring's growth, rots its way to fruitfulness, an ordinary embodiment of mercy, another promise of life from death, another reason to hope. Bonnie Thurston Review for Religious DENNIS J. BILLY Rediscovering the Rosary On 16 October 2002 Pope John Paul ~I promul-gated an apostolic letter on the rosary titled Rosarium Virginis Mariae. The purpose of the letter is to help Christians rediscover the rosary as a venerable form of prayer that will lead them "to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ" (§3). Addressed to the church's bishops, clergy, and faithful, the letter is continuous with the pope's earlier reflections in his apostolic letter on the new millennium, Novo millennio ineunte, where he insists on the importance of developing "schools of prayer" for helping the members of Christ's body to "set out in deep waters" (duc in altum) and experience the fullness of the gospel message. "With the rosary," the pope says, "the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate th6 beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths Of his love" (~1). In order to help this process of reclaiming along, he has officially proclaimed a "Year of the devotional life Dennis J. Billy CSSR writes again from Collegio Sant'Alfonso; C.P. 2458; Roma 00100; Italy. 62.4 2003 Billy * Rediscovering the Rosary Rosary" spanning from October 2002 to October 2003 (§3). A Path of Contemplation In this letter the pope reiterates a statement he made in his letter on the new millennium: "What is needed is a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer." He presents the rosary as a "path of contemplation" that developed in the West and represents a counterpart to Eastern Christianity's "prayer of the heart" or "Jesus Prayer." It numbers "among the finest and most praiseworthy traditions of Christian contemplation" (§5). !n order to reclaim its full meaning, however, the rosary must be prayed meditatively against a backdrop of solitude. It sustains rather than conflicts with the liturgy. If properly revitalized, the prayer will be in touch with its Christological center and will aid rather than impede ecumenical efforts (§4). The rosary, moreover, is proposed as a preeminent prayer for peace and as a way of helping families cope with the forces of disintegration that threaten them on both the ideological and practical levels (§6). Mary is presented in the letter as the model of Christian contemplation par excellence: "No one has ever devoted himself to the contemplation of the face of Christ as faithfully as Mary." Mary's gaze would at times be % questioning look," as when she found Jesus in the temple (see Lk 2:48). It would also be % penetrating gaze" capable of understanding Jesus and possibly even anticipating his decisions, as at the wedding at Cana (see Jn 2:5). It could also be % look of sorrow," as when she stood beneath the cross (see Jn 19:26-27) or % gaze radiant with the joy of the resurrection," as on Easter morning, or "a gaze afire with the outpouring of the Spirit" (§10), as on the day of Pentecost (see Ac 1:14). Re'levy for Religious Because the rosary starts with Mary's experience, the pope describes it as "an exquisitely contemplative prayer." Without this contemplative dimension, it would lose its meaning and risk becoming nothing more than "a mechanical repetition of formulas" (§12). When prayed with reverence and a reflective heart, the rosary enables believers to remember Christ with Mary, to learn Chris~ with Mary, and to be conformed to Christ with Mary, to pray to Christ with Mary, and to proclaim Christ with Mary (§§13-17). A Compendium of the Gospel "The rosary," for John Paul, "is one of the traditional paths of Christian prayer directed to the contemplation of the face of Christ" (§18). It is sometimes referred to as "a compendium of the gospel." To further emphasize its Christological depth, the pope has proposed five new mysteries, from Jesus' public life. In addition to the traditional joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries, these "mysteries of light" are "(1) Jesus' baptism in the Jordan, (2) his self-manifestation at the wedding of Cana, (3)' his proclamation of the king-dom of God, with his call to conversion, (4) his transfiguration, and (5) his institution of the Eucharist, as the sacramental expression of the paschal mystery" (§21). These mysteries span Jesus' public ministry. The first is traditionally understood as the first action of his public ministry. The second and third present him respectively as a miracle worker and as preaching and teaching with The five mysteries lead us from the beginning to the end of Jesus' public ministry and focus on the key elements of his message. 62.4 2003 Billy * Rediscovering the Rosary authority. The fourth foreshadows the resurrection and presents Jesus as the culmination of the Law and the Prophets. The fifth is traditionally considered the last action of his public ministry. The five mysteries lead us from the beginning to the end of Jesus' public ministxy and focus on the key elements of his message. As prophetic actions that effect what they signify, Jesus' baptism and his institution of the Eucharist encapsulate the whole of his ministry and serve as fitting bookends for all that comes between. Although the pope leaves people free to follow the traditional format (§19), he is quick to point out that these five new mysteries round out the contemplative focus of the rosary by adding Jesus' .public life to the profound mysteries of the incarnation, the passion, and the resurreEtion that the other three series highlight. In doing so, he roots the rosary even deeper in the Gospel narratives and encourages the faithful to see the intimate unity of the whole of Jesus' redemptive mission. Because the mystery of Christ also reveals something "about the mystery of man, the pope goes on to point out the important anthropological significance of the rosary for believers: "Contemplating Christ's birth, they learn of the sanctity of life; seeing the household of Nazareth, they learn the original truth of the family according to God's plan; listening to the Master in the mysteries of his public ministry, they find the light which leads them to enter the kingdom of God; and, following him on the way to Calvary, they learn the meaning of salvific suffering. Finally, contemplating Christ and his Blessed Mother in glory, they see the goal toward which each of us is called, if we allow ourselves to be healed and transformed by the Holy Spirit" (§25). When reflected upon with care, each of the mysteries of the rosary says something significant about the mystery of human existence. Review for Religious Assimilating the Mystery The.pope also devotes considerable space to how believers should pray the rosary. He highlights the constituent elements of this method of contemplation, one rooted in "the inner logic of the incarnation," namely, that in Jesus God wanted to take on human features. It is well to announce each mystery, perhaps with a suitable icon that will open up the biblical scenario for those praying. The announcement is meant to lead the imagination to focus on a particular moment in the life of Christ (§29). A reading from Scripture, long or short depending on the circumstances, can follow, and then a brief period of silence (§§30 and 31). After these preparatory exercises, those praying lift their minds to the Father with the words of the Our Father. Then come ten Hail Marys followed by the Trinitarian doxology (and sometimes a short prayer) to conclude the decade (§§32-35). Beginning and finishing the rosary as a whole is done in a variety of ways. Some people begin with a verse of Psalm 70: "O God, come to my aid; O Lord make haste to help me." Others begin with the Creed, an Our Father, and three Hail Marys (§37). Some people habitually pray all twenty decades of the rosary in a single day. For those who say five decades a day, the pope suggests the following format: the joyful mysteries on Monday and Saturday, the sorrowful mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, the mysteries of light on Thursday, and the glorious mysteries on Wednesday and The rosary invites believers to open their hearts with Mary to the Word of God seeking to be born within them. 62.4 2003 Billy ¯ Rediscovering the Rosary Sunday (§38). The beads themselves are more than a mere counting device. Flowing from and converging upon the crucifix, they remind believers that their lives must be centered on Christ, and can be seen as "a chain which links us to God," a symbol of "the bond of communion and fraternity which unites us all in Christ" (§36). The pope makes one point very clear: "Although the repeated Hail Mary is addressed direcdy to Mary, it is to Jesus that the act of love is ultimately directed, with her and through her." The repetition suggests our ongoing desire "to be conformed ever more completely to Christ, the true program of the Christian life" (§26). As a "method of contemplation," the rosary invites believers to open their hearts with Mary to the Word of God seeking to be born within them. Like the liturgy, it is a prayer which engages "the whole person in all his complex psychological, physical, and relational reality" (§27). Ten Purposes The pope's apostolic letter serves ten basic purposes: (1) it provides a fitting Marian complement to Novo millennio ineunte, his earlier apostolic letter on the new millennium; (2) it emphasizes the contemplative dimension of the rosary and encourages believers to use it "to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ"; (3) it reviews the method typically used when praying it and shows how it corresponds to the inner logic of the incarnation; (4) it draws out the Christological basis of the rosary and asserts that, when used appropriately, it will further rather than hinder ecumenism; (5) it highlights the anthropological dimensions revealed in the various mysteries and shows how the rosary can lead to a deeper understanding of human, existence; (6) it affirms that the rosary sustains the liturgy rather than being in conflict with it; (7) it breathes new life into the rosary by adding new mysteries that will root it even more deeply Review for Religious in the Scripture; (8) it shows parents that the rosary can help hold their family together in the faith and can foster their children's spiritual growth and development; (9) it presents the rosary as a prayer that by its very nature can advance peace in the world; and (10) it designates the year October 2002-October 2003 as a special time for rediscovering the power and beauty of this ancient and venerable form of prayer. The goal in all of this is to help the faithful recognize the grea( gift they have in the rosary and use it in new and creative ways as they face the challenges ahead of them. In his conclusion, the pope asserts that the rosary is "a treasure to be rediscovered." It has something to offer to everyone: bishops, priests, deacons, religious, and laypersons. He asks all members of the church to take this old and venerable form of prayer once again to heart: "I look to all of you, brothers and sisters of every state of life, to you, Christian families, to you, the sick and elderly, and to you, young people: confidently take up the rosary once again. Rediscover the rosary in the light of Scripture, in harmony with the liturgy, and in the context of your daily lives" (§43). soundings for one of the sisters in the infirmary little does she know she teaches me how to eclipse her deafness. i am brief, no, spare in my attempts. at eighty, she is the poem: words are few mixing with her grief which ebbs like the tides at twilight Lou Ella Hickman IWBS 62.4 2003 MARY JOSEPH SCHULTZ Mirroring Jesus: The Luminous Mysteries and Religious Life TRhosea rHy-o-lOyc Ftoabtheer r2'0s0 n2a tmo iOncgt oobfe trh 2e0 Y03e-a-cr aomf et,he certainly not coincidentally, during a time of profound unrest, conflict, and anxiety. Our world and our church are in labor, struggling for a birth, a release, new life, The feelings of fear, hopelessness, and anxiety that have invaded the lives of all of us call for healing and a new vision. The luminous mysteries of the rosary offer all Christians a new perspective, a new graced opportunity to deepen our understanding and love of our faith, namely, by bringing the public life of Jesus into the rosary. Here we can find refreshment for our souls in these complicated and strife-filled days. We can also find here an additional special gift as vowed religious. I would like to examine the new mysteries in relation to ~onsecrated Mary Joseph Schultz SCC is president of Assumption College for Sisters, the only rerfiaining sister-formation college in the United States. Her address there is 350 Bernardsville Road; Mendham, New Jersey 07945. Revie-w for Religious life, reflecting on how each one can be linked to an essential element of it. The Baptism of Jesus--"You are my beloved Son. On you my fax;or rests" (Mk 1:11). Baptism the Foundation of Religious Life. By virtue of our baptism, all Christians are consecrated for evangelization. We are reborn in Christ; our life is no longer our own. This exalted reality of the indwelling, always challenging and sometimes downright scary, takes a lifetime, indeed an eternity, to grasp. We have been chosen by God to take on the image of his Son, to be his child in our world today. And naturally we cannot attempt this alone, but God's abiding presence, the surpassing gift of grace, enables and ennobles us from within. What does being reborn in Christ imply, particularly for a religious? We are doubly chosen. Cradle Catholics were first called by God through our own particular birth circumstances; converts to Catholicism followed a circuitous adaptive route to being cleansed, empowered, Christified. Whatever the circumstances of our baptism, we have been called and sent, challenged by the Spirit to put on Christ. But as religious our further call is yet more radical. By our call to religious life, the fire that burns in the heart of all Christians is ignited into a new flame of desire for deeper union, deeper consecration, through the gift of our lives. As John Paul II tells us in Vita consecrata, "in such a life baptismal consecration develops into a radical response in the following of Christ through acceptance of the evangelical counsels" (§14). Apart from the consecration of our baptism, it is unlikely that we would .have heard any call to religious life. It is baptism's sacramental spark that ignites the steady flame of Christianity. But, for the steady flame to be strong, it requires of everyone the living of the evangelical counsels. For religious there is a renewed 62.4 2003 Scbultz ¯ Mirroring yesus commitment to them. This is a new source of fuel, our life newly offered to God in all its aspects, like so many grains of incense. The religious life, often symbolized by burning candles too, takes on a new intensity and brings the baptismal vows into a concentrated focus. Perhaps this is why the profession of the evangelical counsels has never been elevated to being a sacrament in the Catholic Church (which some have proposed). It is so obviously an efflorescence of the permanent sacramental character of baptism already present. It is also a deepening of that already living root. The Wedding Feast of Cana--"Do whatever he tells you" (In 2:5). Obedience. In this wonderfully human and touching scene from the life of Jesus, we hear the only recorded words spoken by Mary during the public life of her Son: "They have no wine" and "Do whatever he tells you." Indeed, these words inaugurate his public life. And, for religious women and men, this scene and these words teach a lesson on the vow of obedience. During the thirty years or so since I began learning about the vows in the novitiate, obedience, of all the vows, has undergone the greatest transformation. It has also held the most difficult challenges. (As in most paschal realities, these are not unrelated developments.) My juvenile understanding of "blind" obedience and merely "doing what your superior tells you" has unfolded into a passionate desire to seek the will of God in all its manifestations. Let us face it, how many direct injunctions do community leaders issue during a year to the group as a whole or to me individually? My obedience must be daily and personal. It cannot be relegated to a once-a-year acceptance of my assigned apostolate, though that has sometimes been traumatic enough. Because of the gift of my vow of obedience, I Review for Religious must strive each and every day to hear God speaking to me in a multitude of people, places, and circumstances. I must keep my heart attentive to all of God's calls and then responsive, doing "whatever he tells you." The response could be as small as picking up the phone when I am already engrossed in another task, or lovingly setting aside my own agenda when a sister needs my help. It could be as large as accepting a call to community leadership, or adjusting to the death of a loved one. I laid down my will at my profession. The "freedom" I renounced back then has given rise to a new deeper freedom of spirit. I am free to pursue holiness through the directives of God mediated by my community leadership, other community members, and the circumstances of my life. United with my sisters in community, I stand before God's will, ready to discern and accept. This requires an ongoing grace of faith, a sense of responsibility for myself and others, and a growing awareness of my gifts and limitations. In due time Jesus takes the water of my desire and turns it into the wine of his desire for me. Because of the gift of my vow of obedience, I must strive each and every day to hear God speaking to me in a multitude of people, places, and circumstances. Proclamation of the Kingdom--"The kingdom of God is at hand" (Mk 1:15). Chastity. In the eyes of society today, chastity for the sake of the kingdom is perhaps the most mystifying and countercultural of the three vows. It has been much written about in the past two years alone. Vv'hy give up marriage and the practice of a holy sexuality when it is 62.4 2003 Scbultz ¯ Mirroring yesus such a gift of God, when the witness of true marital fidelity is so sorely needed in today's world? Precisely to proclaim the kingdom! As John Paul II tells us in Vita consecrata: "Yes, in Christ it is possible to love God with all one's heart, putting him above every other love, and thus to love every creature with the freedom of God!" (§88). Not only is it possible, if one has really been called to it and possesses the graced capacity for the vow, but it is a most powerful means for proclaiming the message of the kingdom. The pure love called forth by this vow flows .from the very life of the Trinity, a communitarian life and love revealed to us in Christ. This life, this very same love, is the "stuff" of the Good News that we are called to proclaim, first by our lives, then by words if necessary, as St. Francis would say. By the evangelical counsels consecrated persons are immersed in the life of the Trinity, freed from the constrictions of an exclusive love, able to be totally available for the mission of the church as lived according to the particular community's charism. My chastity enables my obedience to come to fruition as I am called from one ministry to another, one house to another, even from one moment to another. I can and should live my life unattached, in the light of faith, with the joyful freedom of the new heavens and the new earth (see Rv 21:1). I have died and risen with Christ, and I am called to live in the now of the kingdom. The life of a religious man or woman symbolizes what it in fact is, a contact point between Christ and his church--and God's kingdom is truly at hand. The Transfiguration--"And he was transfigured before them" (Mt 17:2). Poverty. This mystical event in the life of Jesus gives his three apostles a glimpse of who he really is. His Review for Religious divinity shines forth, and they behold the glorious face of the Son of God. In reflecting on this incident afterwards, did it not strike them over and over what a tremendous emptying had taken place when Jesus assumed our human nature and for thirty-three years walked the earth as ordinary as themselves? These apostles, unlettered though they were, could not help reflecting on what they had witnessed. They were able to surmise the real identity of the One who called them to follow, the One for whom they too were emptying themselves, relinquishing things in their discipleship. During the vision Peter had exclaimed, "Lord, how good that we are here!" (Mt 17:4). Then he wanted to install three tents and make the experience a more permanent one. Jesus, however, drew them out of their mystical reverie: "When they raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone" (Mr 17:8). He walked with them down the mountain, back to ordinary reality. This was the ordinary-looking Jesus, the man they knew and were used to, the friend they were leaving their ordinary lives to follow. He was "himself" again, and asking them to say nothing of what they had seen. For religious women and men who have left all things to follow the Master, the transfiguration can serve as a meditation on our vow of poverty. Jesus in his divine frugality "left behind" his Godhead to assume humanity, but how divine this poverty is, this incarnation, this "taking the form of a slave and being born in the likeness For religious women and men who have left all things to follow the Master, the transfiguration can serve as a meditation on our vow of poverty. 62.4 2003 Scbultz ¯ Mirroring Jesus of men" (Ph 2:7)! While on his earthly mission, Jesus downplayed his divinity or kept it to himself except for this sacred moment when his human poverty became apparent by contrast. Later Calvary was seen as the ultimate of human pain and humiliation, not by contrast as on Tabor, but in the depths of its willing self-sacrifice. By religious poverty we voluntarily give up personal accumulation and full personal use of worldly goods, even such things as time and talent. This emptying for the sake of Christlike availability is a way of doing something radical for God. It is true imitation of Jesus, "who made himself poor though he was rich" (2 Co 8:9). Where better do we see this stark reality than on Tabor? Living this vow, following the pattern of Christ, calls us to be poor in fact as well as in spirit. Religious need to give evidence of a simple lifestyle, with variations according to community charisms. We need to follow the call to empty ourselves radically, in imitation of the One who for our sake modeled a life of emptiness perfecdy. We face the challenge, especially in a materialistic society, of opting not to have, not to be caught up in the consumer mentality that is so suffocating and numbing. This voluntary self-renunciation makes sense only with the humble Christ before our eyes as ideal and strength. The Institution of the Eucharist--"This is my body to be given for you" (Lk 22:19). Community and Holiness. Religious life without a focus on the Eucharist is, to me, unthinkable and unlivable. How better can we be Christ, fulfill our baptismal consecration, and live the evangelical counsels than by daily receiving our nourishment from his very body and blood, by becoming what we eat? The gift of the Eucharist is the divine imagination's chosen way to be with us always, even to the end of time. Tending toward the holiness to which all founders and foundresses Review for Religious aspired, whatever their historical milieu, the members of religious communities must seek the Source of their graced desire for holiness in their Eucharistic communion. Finding it there, they also nurture one another. The bond of community is one of the distinguishing marks of religious life. We came to accomplish together what none of us can do alone. As members of the Mystical Body by virtue of baptism, we draw strength, light, and urgent zeal for evangelization from the sacramental Christ. "In the celebration of the mystery of the Lord's body and blood, the unity and charity of those who have consecrated their lives to God are strengthened and increased" (Vita consecrata, §95). In communal worship, community members reflect on Jesus' act of servitude in the washing of feet, his giving of himself in service. Turning to one another, we daily echo his words about his body being given for us (see Lk 22:19). To you, my sister, to you, my brother, in community, I give the gift of my personhood. Becoming bread and wine for the world, becoming nourishment for God's pilgrim people through our various ministries, is what consecrated persons are called to. No matter what our apostolic works entail, no matter where or how we minister to God's people, whether through prayer or action, we as religious are called and consecrated for holiness. We owe it to the Mystical Body. We owe it to the world. Our call, though individually discerned and individually professed, is lived in common. Our holiness can never be a private matter. We must be and become ever more really what we have publicly professed. While I am by no means suggesting that religious are on a pedestal, we surely are in a fishbowl, especially in the last few years. We must be who we say we are. Today's people have the right to expect that, when they look at religious, they will truly catch a glimpse of 62.4 2003 Schultz ¯ Mirroring Jesus Christ and the gospel values he preached and lived. It is he who must shine forth publicly. It is he who mysteriously and subdy works thi'ough our dull and sinful human selves, alone and in community. For putting on Christ, for living our vows and making ourselves receptive to communal Eucharistic holiness, we can hope to find the rosary's luminous mysteries providing us with fresh encouragement. Mary, our mother and guiding star, will be there as we begin, and at the end, and in between. Exchanging Gifts Even then, in that first star-guided Giving of gifts imported from lands afar: Not the most practical or the most useful For a young household, those gifts are That they offer: gold (of course, money Matters at any season of any year), . But however richly boxed, their potpourris Of high-priced frankincense and myrrh Fail to feed a family; still, nothing At all was ever expected in return, Unlike our ritual passings back and forth Of pricy imports and baubles, meant to earn More than mere admiration: the like exchange Endlessly of acquisitions from off the shelves Of shops, while that first starlit gift-recipient Gives us back endlessly our ransomed selves. Nancy G. Westerfield Review for Religious PETER CANTWELL Why Newly Professed Religious Leave This article was written to assist Franciscan lead-ers. They and others found it helpful.Without rewriting .it at the risk of losing some of its orig-inal flav~r, I offer it to other religious in the continuin~ conversation about this vital issue. As Francis of Assisi neared death, he said to his brothers, "I have done what is mine to do; may Christ teach you what is yours to do.''1 Implied in these words is a challenge for his followers to discover anew in each generation how to express his ideals. There can never be one fixed expression of such a rich gospel charism, nor should there be. Every age, every season of life, and every culture requires us to dig deep into the gospel as Franci~ read it and find new ways to live his simple but demanding religious perspectives Peter Cantwell OFIM, a Franciscan friar, has been a lecturer and practitioner in individual, couples, and family therapy for thirty years, and is director of ongoing formation for the Australian Franciscan province. His address is St. Francis Xavier Church; 1087 Whitehorse Road; Box Hill, Victoria 3128; Australia. 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Wby Newly Professed Religious Leave message. Failure to take up that challenge condemns us to irrelevance and extinction. Over recent years I have often reflected on why some young friars who join us with enthusiasm and excitement depart from our community soon after final commit-ment. Just at that moment when possibilities for min-istry open out, when there is the exciting chance to walk the path of Francis in our world, some choose to leave us. (Incidentally, I believe the following reflections also apply to why more young men do not join us.) These are my own personal musings on this vexing question, musings with which you, the reader, might dis-agree. Behind them lie some of my own story in the Franciscans and several of my deeply held beliefs about our life. For thirty years I have been involved in renewal programs for religious and in the screening program for candidates for our Australian province. As a professional counselor I have helped many religious and priests at the moment of their departure. Visiting other provinces of the order, I have observed similar phenomena. My teaching of counseling in secular and religious tertiary settings has enabled me to talk with adults about how they see religious life. Behind my reflections are one deep personal convic-tion and one fact. My conviction is that the message and ideals of Francis--of bringing the gospel's peace mes-sage to the world, of seeing beyond the allurement of consumerism, of having a special concern for the poor-- are what is most needed by today's world, particularly today's youth. There is no malaise in the ideals proposed to us by Francis. They are as radiant and relevant as ever they were. The fact about Franciscan religious life today is that there is a gap--though perhaps it is narrowing-- between Francis's ideals for us friars and the lived real-ity of our fraternal lives and ministries. We express 6ur ideals in ways that have lost their relevance. Because of Review for Religious this, some young religious cannot recognize the fire of Francis in our daily structures, and they seek to imple-ment their ideals elsewhere. I do not share the pessimism of friars who say they would not invite young people to join us. I find such defeatism thoroughly unlike Francis; it betrays an unwill-ingness to make changes that we need to make. I write these reflections with hope and rising excitement. Hope and possibility are being shown by those with daring and vision. Baggage We Still Carry with Us In thinking and (alking about why young friars leave, we have often focused on only part of the picture. Thus, some have said that young friars leave because their gen-eration is selfish and not willing to make a commitment. Recent developments in family therapy suggest looking to the big picture--the whole family or, in our case, the whole "system"--for the cure. Formerly, acting-out ado-lescents were usually treated with individual therapy, on the theory that there was something wrong within the adolescent: correct that and all would be fine. But often there was a relapse. Therapy began to realize that the problem might be a reflection of what was happening in the entire family--and that the entire family might need to change its way of operating. Certainly there are times when the difficulty is mostly within the individual, but people cannot not be affected by the systems in which they live. Can these insights help us understand why some friars leave? Is saying that young brothers leave because their generation is "selfish and unwilling to make com-mitments" being fair about the part the system of reli-gious life plays in their departure? When I joined religious life in the mid 1950s, it somewhat resembled what is sociologically called a "total 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave Francis founded his brotherhood as complementary to the monastic movement. institution," one where the identity of the institution assumes priority Over the identities of the individuals who make it up. We dressed identically; we were exhorted to behave the same. To stand out or be "sin-gular" might indicate pride. Community life was the con-veyer of grace, so conformity to a detailed daily regimen was expected. Personal relationships were discouraged because they endangered celibacy: We were trained to be self-contained and to let our conformity and work express our commitment. Though much is now chang-ing, the nonrelational tone of some communities can cause isolation in young friars. Contemporary research says that religious life had become caught in a monastic lifestyle that many founders did not want) Francis founded his brotherhood as com-plementary to the monastic movement. He deliberately did not want to be absorbed into monasticism. He founded us to be a stark challenge, even a shock, to both civil and ecclesiastical society through living the gospel in a radical and transparent way. After his death the brothers, channeled into the monastic movement, lost mobility, lostpublic visibility, and lost a credible lifestyle. One writer says that we were tamed by the insti-tutional church. We do not live on the edge anymore except by courageous individual choice.3 Young friars find these monastic remnants quaint and a block to their ide-alistic vision. Do we provide opportunity for them to live out their dreams, or are they merely educated to fit in? After the departure of a young brother, I have heard such remarks as "He lost his vocation. I could see it coming. He had all those friends outside community." l~eview for l~etigious These words may reflect a theologically crass way of describing a vocation, absolving the community of any contribution to the departure. The vocation seems to be pictured as something in a hermetically sealed container, given to the recipient by God, and totally immune to and separate from fraternal influences. On one level there is nothing mysterious about the growth of a vocation. I had never met a Franciscan till I did a retreat during the last year of high school. I was impressed by the Franciscan who gave the retreat. He had been a professional reporter with a bright economic future, but he gave it up to be a friar. I thought there must be something pretty good in that life. I approached him. He was interested in me, came to visit my family, kept contact, became a friend (with a big age difference). He nurtured my interest and fanned the small flame of inquiry. He gave me literature on Francis, and I discov-ered that Francis had made a similar decision seven hun-dred years earlier. Francis had everything he wanted, but realized it was not enough. Wow! I could feel excite-ment when I left home to join thefriars. My three broth-ers had all married and were pleased with their choices. I felt I was making an equally exciting choice. It was the start of an adventure, an adventure that has never stopped. Friars supported me and cared for me; I formed deep friendships over the years. These friends offered me opportunities, and they challenged me to live the life. Would my vocation have .grown without them? Could I have nurtured my personal "grace of vocation" without them? I doubt it. A vocation is a delicate seed. It needs warmth and careful watering, especially during the early days. The atmosphere, the environment, affects its interior and exterior development. In a recent article a young per-son says that "true rapport, indeed a real friendship, with one religious is more valuable in discernment than one 62.4 2003 Cant'well ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave IIll hundred religious asking me if I am interested in their order . It is very important that religious communi-ties develop friendships with us that nurture growth in faith and commitment to God.''4 In looking at the place of larger systems in the devel-opment of a vocation, we must say a word about the church. As is the case in the order, there are many seeds of hope within the church today. But ~here is something else as well. In a secular university where I teach coun-seling a couple of days a week, I have wonderful students on the whole, postgraduate students of mature age. About a third of them are nonpracticing Catholics. We often have interesting discussions at lunch breaks. They find it hard to understand how someone who is more qualified in their profession than they are can be both-ered being highly involved in church matters. They are not angry with the church. They just find the church irrelevant. The church sometimes gives the impression that it does not need to listen to people's .needs, that it knows the questions they should be asking. But, as Giacomo Bini says, the church can spend its time answer-ing questions that people are not asking. A Change of Culture The worst way we friars can live our Franciscan com-mitment is to ape in our time what Francis did in his. Our age presents challenges different from his, and here lies the rub. As friars we are called to be mobile, not only with our dwellings and our phones, but with our thinking. Change is of the essence of decent physical, emotional, spiritual, communal growth. The strange thing is not that yeligious life is changing, but that it managed to stay the same for so long. "It is equilibrium, not change, that is fatal." 5 The challenge is that we need to change. Are we Willing? The following thoughts try to catch the spirit of our Review for Religious times, point out the needs that we have to answer, sketch the cultural milieu to which we have to be relevant with our exciting Message. To be relevant, we will have to make 180-degree turns in many areas. Years after we ourselves grew up, what are some of the characteristics of the culture in which our new friars have grown up? One dramatic change in today's society is a shift from a work world to a relational world. Recent research in Australia society shows that around one-fourth of the people between the ages of thirty and sixty are "down-shifters"; that is, they have changed careers or reduced work hours and taken a pay cut in order to have more time for family and friends: "The lifestyle has given them a wealth of new friends from a wide cross-section of backgrounds, and the dis-tinction of knowing the names 0f everyone who lives in their street.''6 Obviously not all people are choosing to make this shift, nor should they, but it represents a new emphasis in modern life, a move away from workplace efficiency toward the full growth of the human person. The young writer quoted earlier supports such adaptation: "One of the most com-monly found features of Generation X is its sense of iso-lation and its yearning for stable companionship . We Xers are drawn wherever we feel welcome and find friendship.''7 "Intimacy" (how I relate to another human being) is an important element of human growth, occurring in early adulthood and building on people's sense of iden-tity (who I am). In popular parlance, intimacy is often wrongly identified with sexual intimacy. Intimacy tech- One dramatic change in today's society is a shift from a work world to a relational world. 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave nically means the capacity to function "up close" to another person in any situation of life. There is no evi-dence that physical sexual intimacy is "necessary for mature development, but there is a wealth of evidence that having close friends, feeling cared for and loved, and being able to relate to others without unnecessary barriers are central to happiness. Closely allied to having healthy relationships is the search for true community. More so than previous gen-erations, today's young people meet many of their inti-macy needs by belonging to a group. A young person observes that in his view "religious life is special in pro-viding everyday community practices that foster spiri-tual growth in ways that are difficult to find on one's own.''8 The young today value being in a supportive envi-ronment more than having job security. The breakdown of traditional neighborhoods and the mobility of Western populations are the causes of much loneliness and isola-tion. The multitude of support groups--from therapy groups to reading groups--witnesses to contemporary culture's hunger for community. Young adults do not Seek community as a soft option: "We do not want community just to comfort, us and give us a sense of security. We want to be stretched and chal-lenged to serve God and others with the community life serving as a support that allows us to reach beyond our-selves in the service of God through prayer and works.''9 And they actually seek structures in community, but ones that are alive and thoughtful and provide human and spiritual support. Among the tertiary students I teach, I find it.easy to initiate a discussion on "spirituality," but mention the word religion and the energy for the discussion dimin-ishes. "Religion" is seen to be connected to mainstream churches, which are often experienced as irrelevant. The young seek a spirituality that builds on human whole- Review for Religious ness. For them being "fully spiritual" is being "fully human." They often experience mainstream church life as a spiritual desert. "Xers are known for their great spir-itual hunger. When this deep hunger for religious mean-ing has not been satisfied within the religious practice of families, many of us have looked outside of the tradi-tional familial practices to come into contact with the transcendent meaning that we crave." 10 Young adults today are perceptive about genuine-ness: the medium is the message. "Religious need to present, themselves as people who have benefited immensely from their vocation and have found peace, mission, love, and a passion for the gospel and for God through their decision."11 The culture of the young has little time for the phony, for performance that does not come from the heart. They are very sensitive to any gap between what we ask them to profess and what they observe us living. Do we ask them to profess "poverty" and then live like upper-middle-class people? "In sum, Xers are not going to make a radical countercultural decision unless they see a radical lifestyle being lived out, one that has benefits that married life does not.''12 We ask them to give up everything. What is the excit-ing challenge we offer them? I am convinced that the issue for today's world is "justice," especially for disenfranchised groups and par-ticularly those without a social voice. Issues of church dogma--while not in any sense unimportant--evoke lit-tle energy compared with issues of people's rights to just treatment. Daily newspapers are full of human-rights and justice issues. "Experience indicates that [young adults] have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective social and civic responsibility.''13 They have little truck with cover-ups and social dishonesty, and find the behavior of some church officials in recent sexual-abuse issues obnoxious. 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave Today's young adults demand authenticity of person and action. Seeds of New Life My hope for the future of our brotherly life comes from my conviction that Francis calls us to a style of fra-ternal living and mission for which there is a thirst in our culture. If our young adults are calling for transpar-ent authenticity in personal life, for communal life that is supportive and challenging, for relationships rather than material efficiency, for spiritualwholeness, and for engage-ment with justice and peace in our world. Are these things not the message of Francis of Assisi and the ideals that today's Franciscans have at heart? It would take us beyond the present article to elabo-rate on these five emphases, nor is it necessary. I would like simply to quote from our Rule, from the contem-porary document Priorities of the Order, and from sev-eral other sources to show that what the young seek has always been and is now central in theory to our life. Today's young adults demand authenticity of person and action. Nothing characterized the life of Francis more than his untiring personal conversion, his belief that the best message he could offer to people was the transparency of his own life, being a "living memory of the gospel ofJes.us.''14 His journey to La Verna was a call to purify his own life, to make it as close to his Lord's as possible. The stigmata was the recognition, the physical manifestation~ of the union of Francis's spirit with that of his Lord. For Francis, fraternity is the first witness of the apos-tolate. For him, our relationship with our brothers and, of course, with God is the foundation of our way of life. What statement on fraternity could be better than the one in our Rule (chapter vI)? "And wherever the broth-ers may be together or meet [other] brothers, let them Review for Religious give witness that they are members of the one family. And let each one confidently make known his need to the other, for, if a mother has such care and love for her son born according to the flesh, should not someone love and care for his brother according to the Spirit even more diligently? And, if any of them become sick, the other brothers should serve him as they would wish to be served themselves." 15 The recent publication from our general chapter offers the same challenge for fraternity: "The Project of Fraternal Life. should be drawn up. so as to help the ministers, guardians, and friars to build up a real and profound fraternal life, to cultivate human values like dialogue, deep-level communication, a family spirit, mutual friendship, courtesy, willingness to serve, joy, jus-tice, transparency." 16 And Giacomo Bini says: "What a paradise . . . the atmosphere of the community becomes when the mem-bers have learned how to get to know one another and to engage in dialogue with themselves, with God, and with the others . We must therefore invest all our talents in promoting a formation to fraternal relationships and to relations with God. No excuses are acceptable: neither age nor temperament nor 'venerable' tradition can dis-pense us from this duty.''~7 One of the most delightful characteristics of both Francis and Clare was their abil-ity to relate to the high and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the powerless and the powerful, with equal com-mitment of spirit. The primacy of the spiritual in young people's search is highlighted in one simple quotation from Francis's Rule: "Those brothers to whom the Lord has given the grace of working should do their work faithfully and devotedly so that, avoiding idleness, the enemy of the soul, they do not extinguish the Spirit of holy prayer and devotion to which all other things of our earthly exis- 62.4 2003 Cantwell * Wb~ Newl~ Professed Religious Leave tence must contribute." 18 And in Priorities of the Order we are told: "The contemplative dimension must be that priority which orientates and animates our whole life: the manner in which we seek and live the presence of God in every day also determines our concrete style of life and our manner of pastoral action in the Fraternity.''19 Francis has been strongly identified with the peace movement, and his peace prayer is recited by many inside and outside the church. Francis devoted his energies to the justice and peace issues of his time. His attempts to mediate between local warring towns and his journey to speak with the Sultan of Egypt are just some examples of his commitment to and preoccupation with peace between peoples. The present pope gathered religious leaders in Assisi when he wished the world to pray for peace. The increasing concern with justice and peace throughout our order--seen in recent publications from our JPIC office in Rome and in the heavy involvement of friars in different parts of the world--witnesses to the clear focus of our communities on these issues. Priorities of the Order sums up the same idea: "The friars in their lives and in their words should be promoters of justice, and heralds and builders of peace and reconciliation, so as to be prophetic signs which fearlessly denounce all that which destroys the dignity of man and of creation." 20 How We Can HelpClose the Gap I believe that some friars leave our fraternity soon after final commitment because the gap between the "lived experience" of fraternal life and ministry and the ideals that were fostered and experienced during initial formation becomes too broad. Great work has been done on initial formation in our order over recent decades, but with final commitment the friar experiences the more ordinary lifestyle of the brotherhood. This older system with its more impersonal tone, overly routinized prayer Review for Religious life, and rugged individualism leaves them feeling iso-lated and unsupported, and they become work-oriented. After years of counseling numerous religious who have left, it is hard for me to remember someone who departed because interesting ministry was unavailable. The common comment has been that life became "too damn lonely." How can the different parties help to close the gap in this time of transition? Times of transition involve cri-sis, and any crisis has two possibilities: opportunity if the crisis is faced, danger oth-erwise. Facing the crisis means avoiding any split by keeping the conversation going, talking of differences and commonali-ties. No one side ever has the whole truth; the truth is a shared truth. I note much good-will on the part of older friars and enthusiasm on the part of the younger ones. There is much "good wine" in both generations. Given this good environment for cooperation, how can we work together? Are there practical moves we can all make? The follow-ing are some of my random suggestions, and maybe you can come up with others: We need to continue moving away from monastic-style buildings towards more ordinary homes. We need to find more visible, credible, and transparent ways of living. For many friars brought up on the older model, where relationships were discouraged and closeness was taboo, this change could present challenges. Contemporary research on religious life indicates that there is a move towards small groups immersed in local communities where there can be a more relational life. "We have need in our society for a countercultural way of life that wit- No one side ever has the whole truth; the truth is a shared truth. 62.4 2003 Cant'well ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave nesses to the gospel call to transcend hedonism, greed, and the desire to dominate.''21 Living in more ordinary houses also makes us more mobile. If we need to do something different, we just sell and buy an ordinary house and are not stuck with a monastery to sell. But young friars .are often looking (like Francis) for a deeper challenge than "living in ordinary houses." They would like to live more simply than their ¯ surrounding culture. They are looking for a palpable sacrifice expressed in our way of living. Smaller houses also demand some of the ordinary decencies of day-to-day living that can be avoided in large houses: "How was your day?" "Sorry!" "Thank you." "May I--?" (Incidentally, the increasing tendency for religious to live alone in ordinary dwellings avoids, in my view, one of the fundamental witnesses of religious commitment.) My own picture of future community life has us liv-ing in ordinary houses and going from there to work. This provides some kind of boundary between work and fraternity. The very acts of leaving home for work and returning home after work are important symbolically. There is no reason why a parish community could not live in an ordinary house within the parish. Friars whose ministry is giving retreats or giving parish missions or working with the poor in the immediate neighborhood or teaching in a nearby school could live fraternally in an ordinary house. We should be slow to build homes or offices specifically for ourselves. If we need office space, we can always buy or rent--then move more easily if the need arises. The move to smaller community living requires more "conscious formation in relationships. Many of the broth-ers in my age group missed out on the "intimacy" stage of formation. There was no encouragement towards friend.ships, towards closeness, towards just ordinary con-nection with other friars. Often those who joined reli- Review for Religious gious life as late vocations have already experienced this stage of development. Gentle encouragement for older religious towards a more relational life can be a big help. Larger communities are sometimes necessary, espe-cially for those who are ill or need more attention, but a large building does not have to impede good fraternity. Attitude is the ruling factor. For instance, even a large din-ing room can be made homey through the use of smaller tables and random seating. House meetings can address, besides strictly busi-ness agendas, matters such as "How are we with each other?" Simple questions like "What is going well in the community?" and "What needs to happen for our life together to be even better?" focus on the positive and require friars to look ahead rather than grumble about difficulties. Such questions create space for friars' needs to be attended to regularly--a good principle of group dynamics. Having a community night--no scheduled work and no work" unless urge.nt--can really help to build frater-nity. Make the night a little special. The meal might be special or served differently or eaten later. The spiritual aspect of our lives should be present. A Eucharist that is thoughtfully prepared is one option, or a special variation on the prayer of the breviary. We need to keep reviewing our commitment to our min-istries, Youth are looking for an exciting ministry that gives witness to our Franciscan values. No ministry is excluded for us, but each ministry must flow out of who we are. The area of our lives which has been most tamed by the institutional church is that of ministry. We have become very mainstream. "Is the societal need that moved us into these works many years ago still relevant? Is the countercultural stance that characterized the socially radical and politica!ly subversive vision of the founders still operative?''22 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave Why are we doing what we are doing? One reason offered is "We have been doing it for a long time." Not good enough. Another is "We are doing good work and the people love us." I hope that the people will always love us, but that is not a sufficient reason to stay or.go. One danger is that, as priests become fewer, we will be tempted to fill slots for demanding bishops. We speak much about preferential option for the poor. Some of the exciting ventures in our order--and quite ordinary ones as well--are focused on this societal need. In my own province we have a small community of friars living in a housing settlement. They are doing great work in ordinary ways: forming neighborhood groups to keep the suburb clean, finding furniture for the needy, helping build local community support groups, being resources for addressing neighborhood troubles. Young men who are thinking of joining us rightly ask: "Why are you Franciscans doing that particular min-istry?" Can we answer them? I believe the recently introduced custom of mentoring younger friars is an excellent idea that deserves being imple-mented. Being a mentor has been challenging for me, and I believe that it has helped build bridges. Being mentored by more experienced friars has helped me enormously. Meetings of young friars and even meetings, of young reli-gious from different congregations provide support through the sharing of experiences and thus getting a sense of solidarity in a common venture. When the meeting has involved only friars, they have appreciated the presence of the provincial administration for some of the time during the meeting. Meetings of friars in which the experiences of the differ-ent age groups are shared can help build bridges. Recently in my province we asked our two newly professed friars, who had completed a very good novitiate in another Review for Religious pro-~ince, to share with us their experience of the novi-tiate. The theme was expanded to include what young people seek in religious life. Young and old enjoyed the experience. Often what seems like bad will is lack of information. I believe that young friars benefit enormously from hearing the experiences of the older friars, and that sharings like these help close the gap between generations. The proviso is always the priority on listening, coming to learn and understand, rather than being a know-all on either side. In particular, are we attentive to the promptings of the Spirit in the young friars? Do their contributions have their rightful effect on policy decisions? Have we helped them to be skilled at the culture gap? I want to make special mention of the great wisdom and contribution of the older friars. Often in this paper I have referred to age gaps. More correctly, they are cul-ture gaps. Some of the most up-to-date, psychologically flexible, and spiritually wise friars are those who have borne the heat of the day and who are able to offer their wisdom to any who listen. Keeping the conversation going between the different age groups is important in a time of transition. If we do not talk to each other, we build up fantasies of what "that other group" is thinking or doing. I believe we all have lo~s of goodwill, and behind our unwillingness is often fear. When I was prenovitiate director, I used to invite any friar who was passing through the area to "come and talk to the prenovices." The common worry was: "What will I talk about? I don't understand young people?" My response was: "Simply tell them what it has been like for you to be a follower of Francis." We had many enjoy-abl. e evenings, and imagined barriers were broken down. A prayer life that is simple but refreshing is the core of my fraternal life. There are many simple ways to vary common prayer: sing the hymn or play a CD, have some-one read the canticle reflectively, have silence instead of 62.4 2003 Cantwell * Wby Newly Professed Religious Leave Youth hearken to religious callings that offer a countercultural witness to the cultural trends of greed, power, consumerism, individualism. one of the psalms, omit a psalm and have a longer gospel reading or a nonscriptural reading. These suggestions do not require hours of preparation, but they draw us out of a numbing routine that certainly does not refresh my spirit. Faith sharing, too, deepens the experience of fraternity. There is often fear when faith sharing is mentioned: par-ticipants feel they will be asked to bare their souls before the brethren. I like to begin such sessions by saying that it is fine for any friar to be totally silent if that is his wish. One group with which I meet has a simple shared prayer that goes like this. First of all a text is read, usually from the Scriptures. After a short silence anyone who wishes shares just a phrase or word that stood out for him (no embellishment). The text is read a ,second time followed ¯ by a few minutes of silence. Then anyone who wishes . tells briefly what that text means to him or her. Finally we round off with a prayer. I always come away with some small inspiration. We will probably become poorer as a fraternity. Youth hearken to religious callings that offer a countercultural witness to the cultural trends of greed, power, con-sumerism, individualism. One of the most difficult chal-lenges I personally find is not taking the standards of average Australian society as the ones-for my own life. Some young friars have said that, when they joined the order, they went "up" in their standard of living. Can I live in such a way that, when lay people visit the com- Revie~ for Religious munity (or my room), they would find a simplicity of lifestyle that would make them think? Can we use for others the money people generously give us for our min-istry- and maintain a simple lifestyle in our fraternities? I believe Francis would want us to. As our numbers become smaller, we will probably become poorer as an order. I believe that will not do us any harm. When people--of whatever culture or race-- find that we are actually living side by side with them and are in need, they will provide for us. Finally, dare we do something new and exciting when numbers are going down--or even because numbers are going down? If young friars experience only the closing down of houses and nothing else, they might just feel they are on a sinking ship. If I Were a Young Man. If I were a young man with many bright opportuni-ties in Life before me, what kind: of Franciscan religious life would inspire me to join the fraternity? ¯ When I met individual friars, I would want to see the light in their eyes (like I found in the first friar I met) that would tell me they lived life with a passion. ¯ When I visited the communities~ I would want to feel genuinely welcomed (and I reckon I would quickly work out whether it was genuine, or not), not just another statistic. As I joined in community prayer, I would hope to find it fairly simple and thoughtful, not a rushed ver-sion of monastic prayei'. I would not want a lot of prayer--rather a quality about what I experience. And a certain atmosphere of silence at some times of the day would appeal to me. ¯ At recreation I would want to feel that the friars really wanted to have fun together and were not just going through another routine. I would be listening for such ordinary comments as "How was your day? What 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave were the results of Brother Juniper's visit to the doctor? Who has a new joke to tell?" ¯ I would want to talk to the older friars, to find out how they had experienced following Francis, to learn from their endurance and patience. I would want them to pray for my young journey and have confidence that I could make a contribution, even though different from theirs. I would want them to listen to my hopes, and I would want to hear theirs. Could they translate their struggles into something meaningful to me? ¯ I would hope the kitchen is a place where we all contribute--simple good food and good wine being essential to life. ¯ When they told me about their works, however simple, I would want to ask them why they did those particular things. How does the fire in their belly moti-vate what they do? I would be particularly excited about working for justice, for those without a social voice, for those who feel abandoned by our society. ¯ I would want to experience a rich diversity of min-istries: parishes (why this parish?), retreat work, work with the disadvantaged, skilled individuals doing some unusual ministries. The common denominator v~ould be the "Franciscan need." ¯ I would want to think that there is a certain mobil-ity about the brotherhood, that the friars have their ears to the ground ready to respond to new needs. ¯ I would want the accommodations to be simple yet comfortable--and that the rooms not be so self-contained as to be able to survive a nuclear attack. I would want the neighbors to call in when they think it important--and to be able to share our prayer life. But I would also hope there was a certain sacred space just for the community. ¯ I would want to feel encouraged to give rein to my dreams, to feel there is space for new wine as well as old. ¯ I would be most affected by friars who palpably Review for Religious enjoyed and passionately lived their lives, and who felt fulfilled as human beings and followers of Francis. Franciscan Fire I believe our world today is crying out for precisely those human and spiritual attitudes that Francis of Assisi lived so courageously. Through no bad will, we seem to have lost some of Francis's fire through excessive struc-tures and institutionalization. There is excitement in rediscovering it today, seeing the spark in people's eyes when they hear of Francis. Why do young friars leave? The ultimate answers are all individual. But some leave because the gap between the ideals of Francis and the lived experience of Franciscan life is or appears too great. Rather than blame either side--for blame simply darkens the space between us--can we see these departures as a call to stir the fire in our own lives? Numbers do not really mat-ter. Whether we are few or many is irrelevant, provided that friars are not leaving our midst because we are uncertain trumpets of truly good news. Our task is to echo credibly the ringing values of the poor man of Assisi. Francis and Clare became living and prophetic words to the people of their time. We are challenged to do the same, not alone but in tune with the Spirit. Let the last word be Oscar Romero's: This is what we are about. We plant the seed that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. 62.4 2003 Cantwell ¯ Why Newly Professed Religious Leave This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Notes 1 Murray 8odo, The Way of St. Francis (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1995), p. xvi. 2 Michael J. Breen (ed.), A Fire in the Forest: Religious Lift in Ireland, survey by John A. Weafer (Dublin: Veritas, 2001). 3 Johannes Baptist Metz, Followers of Christ: The Religious Life and the Church, trans. Thomas Linton (New York: Paulist Press, 1977). 4 Matthew T. Eggemeier, "Generation X and Religious Life: A Personal View," Review for Religious 59, no. 5 (September-October 2000): 485 and 484. s Breen and Weafer, Fire, p. 61. 6 Sydney Morning Herald, 11-12 January 2003, p. 12. 7 Eggemeier, "Generation X," p. 482. 8 Eggemeier, "Generation X," p. 482. 9 Eggemeier, "Generation X," p. 483. 10 Eggemeier, "Generation X," p. 481. 11 Eggemeier, "Generation X," p. 486. 12 Eggemeier, "Generation X," pp. 486-487. 13 Lori Spanbauer, "Snapshot of the Millennial Generation," Horizon 27, no. 2 (2001-2002): 15. ,4 Giacomo Bini, Clare of Assisi: A Song of Praise (Rome: Franciscan Press, 2002), p. 15. is Rule and General Constitutions of the Order of Friars Minor (Pulaski, Wisconsin: Franciscan Publishers, 1974), p. 29. 16 Priorities of the Order, General Chapter 1997 (Rome: Franciscan Press, 1998), pp. 8-9. 17 Giacomo Bini, Clare, p. 55. Review for Religious 18 Rule and General Constitutions, p. 28. ~9 Priorities of the Order, p. 6. 2o Priorities of the Order, p. 11. 2~ Breen and Weafer, Fire, p. 68. 2~ Breen and Weafer, Fire, p. 106. Seminary Woods The oak leaves quietly drift from the tall trees, landing softly on the lake, their edges curled skyward as they float along, blown by a gentle breeze. Father, may my hands ever be lifted to you in prayer, as I am blown about life's surface, a little leaf made to glorify your Name. Christine Diensberg OSF 62.4 2003 DONALD C. MALDARI Ignatian Insights into Evangelical Poverty Over the centuries Christian spirituality has, ironically, valued the practice of poverty as an aid to becoming rich in holiness. The inspiration for this evaluation of poverty comes first from its most limpid example, that of the kenosis (emptying) of the Son of God in the incarnation (Ph 2:7) and then from the lives of every person whom Christianity considers a saint. Catholic tradition recommends the practice of the "evangelical counsels" to all Christians as aids in their growth in holiness.~ They are manifold ascetical practices, especially obedience, poverty, and chastity, designed to counter sinful tendencies. They aim at checking human delusions of independence from God, such as pride and self-centeredness. They promote a relationship with God animated by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.2 They all appear oddly paradoxical, like pursuing wealth by way of poverty. Ignatius Loyola's spirituality sheds light on this paradox for all struggling to find hope. The young Ignatius sought fulfillment in the ways that conformed to the values of his or really any Donald C. Maldari SJ is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies; Le Moyne College; Syracuse, New York 13 214. Review for Religious materialistic society: in riches and honor. His life was driven by the pursuit of courtly honor and of physical gratification. His convalescence from a serious wound at the battle of Pamplona forced him into a poverty of sorts: a lack of distractions that afforded him the opportunity to find authentic fulfillment in a newfound relationship with God. Upon reflection Ignatius concluded that the riches and honors that people seek may lead to a pride that is self-destructive. This pride obstructs a life-giving relationship with God. In order to battle against the suicidal temptation to self-sufficiency that riches, honors, and pride offer, Ignatius turned to evangelical poverty. Along with the great tradition of Christianity, the mature Ignatius understood evangelical poverty neither as destitution nor as austere disdain for material goods to earn divine favor. Destitution wounds the inherent dignity of human persons by depriving them of what they require to develop as God desires. Disdain for material goods denies the goodness with which God endowed creation. As is evident from the First Principle and Foundation of his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius, on the contrary, rejoiced in the vocation to fulfillment that God extends to all people and recommended using created things for that purpose (SpEx §23). He grew to understand evangelical poverty as a spiritual attitude and material lifestyle that promotes the most fulfilling creaturely relationship with the Creator. That relationship is made possible by the life that flows from God to creatures, that is, by grace, and the hope that animates creatures and draws them into participation in the very life of God. There appears, therefore, to be a relationship between evangelical poverty and theological hope in the spirituality of Ignatius. Ignatius pursues evangelical poverty as a means of cultivating theological hope. This hope puts Ignatius in direct contact with God, as is 62.4 2003 Maldari ¯ I~natian Insights into Evangelical Povert~ Ignatius's spirituality of poverty and hope is countercultural, as is Christianity itself. characteristic of the theological virtues. One can trace the development of Ignatius's embrace of evangelical poverty in his Autobiography, and one can glimpse the results in the fragments of his Spiritual Diary that have survived. In these fragments one is privy to Ignatius's growing relationship with the Holy Trinity, which he perceives as a community of love that shares all it is and has. It, too, lives evangelical poverty! In his Spiritual Exercises Ignatius invites exercitants to develop their own relationships with the triune God. Ignatius's spirituality of poverty and hope is countercultural, as is Christianity itself. The Gospels assert that those who wish to live authentically need to lose their lives whereas those who selfishly cling to their lives destroy them. Sacrifice, the root meaning of which is "to make holy," seems inevitably to involve some sort of renunciation. The Christian tradition believes that this renunciation is necessary because of the sinful and selfish inclinations of humankind. Evangelical poverty is one of the sacrifices which Christianity values. The hope which it cultivates nourishes people, allowing them to participate even now in the life of God. Ignatius's Understanding of Evangelical Poverty Ignatius's Autobiography reveals a man who grows in his love for God. He attributes to God the initiative in their relationship, but recognizes that people can cooperate with God by taking graced action in developing the relationship. Ignatius grew in his recognition of the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, as the mediator between God and humanity. He encounters the Son in all creation, Review for Religious which, created through him, is charged with his presence. He encounters him in a privileged way in the incarnate Christ, the fullness of the revelation of God. In Christ Ignatius experiences the dynamic of salvation: the descent of the Son into the human situation in order to effect the ascent of humanity into the life and work of God. As mentioned above, Ignatius relates to God not only in his divine unity but also as the divine community of the Holy Trinity. Poverty, which he refers to as a "mother," plays a crucial role in the development of Ignatius's relationship with this community (Constitutions, §287). As Maurice Giuliani opines, he even recognizes it in the Holy Trinity and in each of its members: The poverty of Jesus who does the work of his Father, the poverty of the divine Persons whose richness is the love which they have for each other, the poverty of the creature who wholeheartedly desires "reverence and respect" along with fidelity and service. How could Ignatius, thus interiorly instructed, henceforth choose anything else but this way of material poverty, a visible sign of human poverty vis-a-vis God and participation in the poverty of God himself?.3 Poverty was an ascetical practice for Ignatius. He understood asceticism as the exercise a person undertakes to attain a goal. His understanding of it developed from an integration of the insights of Christian tradition with insights drawn from his own experiences.4 He used it as an aid to his relationship with the Trinity.5 Javier Osuna Gil suggests that one consider Ignatius's understanding of asceticism from three perspectives: (1) as an effort to remove all disorder, all impediment, whatever makes us less free to receive the transforming action of God, who embraces us with his Love; (2) as a task for transforming oneself into an agile and flexible "instrument" of God, 62.4 2003 Maldari ¯ Ignatian Insights into Evangelical Poverty with increasing availability; and (3) as a way of "carrying the cross," the necessary cost of the historical impact between the project of Jesus and the project of this world.6 Ignatius uses ascetical practices in order to promote the disposition of sinners who seek to respond to Jesus' invitation to follow him and to cooperate in his mission.7 The Spiritual Exercises themselves are ascetical in character in that they are means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God's will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul. (SpEx §1) They propose to facilitate the self-communication of God to the exercitant (SpEx § 15). In 1544 Ignatius penned a short document titled The Deliberation on Poverty that provides an insight into his discernment regarding the prescriptions on poverty in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. In this document one perceives Ignatius's use of evangelical poverty as an ascetical practice intended to promote his relationship with Christ. Manuel Ruiz Jurado distinguishes three motivations for Ignatius's choice of absolute poverty in this text: ascetic-mystical, apostolic, and Christocentric. The ascetic-mystical reasons include the recognition that poverty promotes absolute hope only in God because it separates one from reliance on secular things.8 The apostolic reasons include giving greater edification through example, having freedom to travel in imitation of Christ and the first apostles, whom Christ charged to live in poverty, and relying for consoling hope, not on secular goods, but on God alone.9 The Christocentric reasons include the desire to imitate Christ, who was poor and faced great adversities and who contin

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

Issue 55.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1996. ; Revi for Retig ous i, a fo .m for shared res ea on on the lived experience of all who find that the church's rich heritages of spirituality support their personal and apostolic Christian lives. The articles in the journal are meant to be informative, practical, or inspirational, written from a tbeological or spiritual or sometimes canonical point of view. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis UniversiD, by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 E-Mail: FOPPEMA@SL UVCA.SLU.EDU Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP 1150 Cedar Cove Road ¯ Henderson, NC 27536 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1996 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religiou$ Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read James and Joan Felling Iris Ann Ledden SSND Joel Rippinger OSB Edmundo Rodriguez SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JULY/AUGUST1996 *VOLUME55 *' NUMBER4 contents 342 symposium - part 3 Religious Life: Directions for a Future Albert Dilanni SM reviews three stages of religious-life renewal and sets forth those areas for future efforts. 365 expanding vision Internationality: Consciousness Raising and Conversion Janet Malone CND highlights six stages of consciousness raising in the process of a religious group's becoming purposefully international. 373 Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community Finian McGinn OFM presents the challenge of multicultural diversity in religious-life communities and some directions towards resolution. Review for Religious 388 396 new life It's Summer! A Letter to Young Religious Robert P. Maloney CM encourages those who are young to enjoy and use well the gifts of this summertime of life. Emerging Forms of U.S. Religious Life Marlene Weisenbeck FSPA identifies the motivations and the relationships between charism, mission, and ministry in the formation of new communities and styles of consecrated life. 414 425 340 431 436 witnessing I Guess and Fear Donald Macdonald SMM suggests some clarity points in the midst of current confusions in religious life. Force of Habit William Jud Weiksnar OFM reflects upon the sign and symbol value of the simple brown tunic of a Franciscan. departments Prisms Canonical Counsel: General Chapters: Current Legislation Book Reviews .~uly-August 1996 prisms FVhenT/~7 is "enough" enough? It is the common question: Did you get enough to eat? enough to drink? Is the room warm (cool) enough for you? Enough is a hard concept to define in our practical living. If people's perception of their own worth as persons is tied up in their work, when have they worked long enough or hard enough? Some people find it difficult to turn over responsibility to others or "to retire." Enough seems not to have a place in their vocabulary. Others at a younger age let work consume their days and evenings and weekends. They, too, seem oblivious to the possibil-ity of freely chosen limits. We have heard the phrase "get a life" and we know that it can be a criticism to the quick for such people. Besides questions of food and drink and work and rest, enough plays a similarly difficult role in determining security. When are there more lights outside and more locks and alarm systems than we need for reasonable secu-rity? When do we have enough money for travel and its surprises and emergencies? When is there enough money put aside for care of the elderly--others or ourselves? The danger with a money-focus is, as Jesus describes in a story, that our barns are never quite big enough to hold our piled-up wealth. When we consider healthcare in the industrialized countries, we find again the difficulty of knowing when enough medical care has been called upon and when we are moving into extraordinary and sometimes minimally enhancing medical procedures. The subtlety of enough allows us morally to steer our way between the always immoral assistdd suicide and the decision to refuse any extraordinary means to prolong life. Review for Religious For each of us, in our uniqueness, to know how to live enough and move enough and have being enough remains a rich grace-gift to be prayed for. We call the gift which helps us to say "enough" Christian discernment. To be a person who discerns demands that we be people attuned to the working of God's Spirit in our lives. Discernment is not a process of decision making that we stir up on a moment's whim. When we think of people (per-haps including ourselves) as being attuned to God, we mean that they have a serious and ongoing relationship with God in prayer and in reflecting on the Scriptures and God's workings in the world. Such people find themselves growing in a sensitivity, as all lovers do, to the ways of seeing, the desires, and the ways of acting of the one loved. That kind of sensitivity is the power source of our Christian discernment. Because sensitivity is involved, it is not something we learn by rulebooks although Jesus reminds us that "I have come, not to abolish [the law and the prophets], but to fulfill them" (Mt 5:17). As we can appreciate, the process of discerning is not a sometime thing that we can blithely manage at short notice unless we are sensitized lovers of God. The dailyness of prayer and Eucharist are privileged ways for us becoming lovers growing in sensitivity. Today we seem to live with the question of Enough? in many areas of our lives, and our personal decision about enough does not come easy. We need to enter deeply into our Catholic faith and experience Jesus' promise of "another Paraclete." Yet there is one instance of enough which remains a paradox. Can we ever grow enough in God's love that our sensitivity for discernment can say "enough"? David L. Fleming SJ NOTE: On our inside front cover we provide our E-mail address. For some of our domestic and international subscribers, it may give convenient and helpful access to our editorial office. ALBERT DI IANNI Religious Life: Directions for a Future symposium part 3 Today we often hear a question seldom asked before Vatican Council II: "How is it going with your congre-gation?" And We know immediately that the questioner is interested in vocations. Nearly always the answer is: "Quite good in the third world, but bad in the first world." After thirty years of renewal efforts, the average age of most congregations founded before the 20th century is in the 60s for male l~eligious.and in the 70s for female reli-gious. Patricia Wittberg speaks of "catastrophic decline," "collapse," and "probable demise," and Markham, of "mas-sive denial." In the 1960s religious women in the United States numbered over 200,000. They have suffered a 55 percent decline and now number about 90,000. Given their average age we can expect further decline. Male reli-gious have suffered a decline of over 30 percent. We can hedge about these cold facts, but they are a cause for deep concern. A moderate decline in vocations would be man-ageable, but such a steep decline demands that we ask searching questions about the process of renewal. There are disparities within the vocation situation. In the first world, some communities are attracting significant numbers of candidates. They are the newer communities like Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity and the Albert Dilanni SM last wrote for us in September-October 1993. He is now superior of the Marist novitiate, Our Lady of Mercy, at 15 Notre Dame Avenue; Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140. Review for Retigio'us Legionaries of Christ. In Mexico the Legionaries are referred to as the. new Jesuits and are subjected to criticisms similar to those launched against Jesuits in an earlier age. (A new group with a similar name, Cruzados de Cristo, has sprung up in Mexico and is enjoying similar vocational success.) The Fellowship of New Religious Communities had sixty-three new Catholic congrega-tions on its 1993 mailing list. There are at least two dozen oth-ers) Most of these groups are traditional in theology, but creative in developing community structures and prayer forms and in their integration of the laity. Even in the third world, vocational growth is not homoge-neous. The .main areas of growth are sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, especially India and Indonesia. Brazil, on the other hand, is either stable or on the decline. The crucial factor seems to be that the churches of Africa and Asia, often surrounded by strong Muslim groups, tend to be more "conservative" of classical Catholic practices and spirituality, while the Brazilian church more than all others has adopted liberationist tendencies. Three Stages of Renewal I believe that we are in the second' phase of a three-step pro-cess in the renewal of religious life since Vatican II. The first step was the explosion immediately after Vatican II, an explosion pro-voked not only by the council but by the secular cultural revolu-tion. It was a time for rejecting all categories and trying to live in the in between. It was a time'of high experimentation in theology and lifestyles, of reexamination of all institutions including the family, traditional morality, and etiquette. In religious life we moved away from whatever seemed rigid, artificial, and stiflingly traditional, in favor of what seemed more dynamic, new, and life-giving. No longer defensive regarding the democratic ideals of the West, we sought to integrate them into our congregational existence. We dismantled structures that were in place for cen-turies, emphasized interpersonal dialogue and individual needs, decentralized authority, created leadership teams, redefined poverty, chastity, and obedience, abandoned institutional aposto-lates in favor of small-group work with the poor or the marginal, and reinterpreted community in terms of sharing quality time together. It was the best of times and the worst of times. It was a time of great creativity especially in the founding of new types J'ul),-./lugust 19~6 Dilanni ¯ ReligiousLife The second stage of the renewal, is the time of the winnowing fan, the stage of sober reassessment. of apostolate--Joan Chittister often stresses this and women's role in it--but also a time of great confusion, of loss of identity, of abandonment of loyalties, of many departures and few arrivals, of decline in morale and fear of the future. The second stage of the renewal, in which we presently find ourselves, is the time of the winnowing fan, the stage of sober reassessment. Recent books and articles from all "over the ideo-logical spectrum are calling for self-criticism and evaluation of the directions taken .by the renewal: Avery Dulles, Elizabeth McDonough, Joan Chittister, Patricia Wittberg, Martin Tripole, Mary Jo Leddy, Judith Merkle, David Nygren and Miriam Ukeritis, and on and on. Almos~ all urge a move beyond the individualism apparent in the so-called "liberal" model. They speak of the need of "common vision" and a "corporate sense" and "criteria by which the validity of their lives can be measured." The authors do not agree on the solution. Some call for a deeper retrieval of the community's charism (if it has a charism); others, for a real communal commit-ment to helping the poor and the oppressed; and still others, like MaryJo Leddy and Joan Chittister, for a move beyond liberalism to something even more radical or revolutionary. The third stage in this renewal process will be, I believe, a time of greater peace, when the good features of the new have been institutionalized and its excesses discarded and Catholics once again view religious life as a way to follow Christ in a more literal way. In this symposium, however, we are still at the stage of sober reassessment, discussing whether we need to shift into a new gear and or just stay on cruise-control. I approach this challenge not in despair but in hope, a hope that arises out of reading the his-tory of religious life. Before the French Revolution (1789) there were 300,000 male religious "in Europe. Forty years after the Revolution this number had decreased by more than two-thirds to 70,000. But in the 1830s a great revival began. Some 600 new Roman Catholic religious congregations were founded in the 19th century, more than at any other period, and the actual number of religious attained historic new heights. The Jesuits, who had been suppressed from 1773 to 1814, flourished as never before. A similar reflowering is not impossible in our time. Review for Religious o The contemporary crisis of religious life has been very deep. It is related to the .attempt to restate the Christian faith for an age called postmodernity. We have been adapting with great strain to a new kind of need for God, not a God of the gaps who fills in for the weaknesses of science, but a God at the center of life, a God who provides depth of meaning and answers our ultimate concern. Directions for a Future: Background Considerations ., George Aschenbrenner SJ felt that in my 1994 book I had set down criteria that might guide a reevaluation of the renewal and an effective move to the future.2 So for the present symposium he assigned me this topic: What are the criteria for judging whether a .proposed change of direction or structure in religious life will be a profitable change? What are the signs of a good change? I have interpreted his question as asking: In what directions should we move, and why? But, before we can entertain the question of directions, some background considerations are necessary. First, we must realize that the theological backdrop to religious life has shifted dra-matically. Up to thirty years ago, all religious, irrespective of their style of life, shared a theological consensus that dated back to the early church. Whether they were hermits, monks and nuns, medieval mendicants, apostolic Jesuit-type religious, or religious of the newer 19th-century type, all religious viewed themselves as primarily engaged in saving souls, their own and those of others. Christianity in general and religious life in particular were given a mystical and eschatological interpretation and were concerned with union with God and "the four last things." Intellectual activ-ity and teaching and care of the sick were important, but were subordinate to a concern for eternal salvation, the "one thing necessary." Since Vatican II, however, chinks have appeared in this higher unity, this sacred canopy, and basic questions have been asked about the meaning of Christianity and the place of religious within it. While the media and some religious focus on controversial issues of church polity like clerical celibacy and women's ordination, the deeper questions are: How should we conceive of our relationship to God? Does salvation begin on earth? What is the meaning of the kingdom of God? Within the mystical-eschatological emphasis, the dominant metaphor for women's congregations was that of becoming a ~uly-Aug~st 1996 Dilanni ¯ Reli~ous L~e "spouse of Christ." To some people of today, this may seem intol-erably sexist, patriarchal or "kyriarchal," but the image contains a core of meaning valid for both men and women. It underscores the need for an affective union with Christ and with a personal God. Mystical language was its common coinage. Commentators spoke of "spiritual marriage" and "transforming union." Many books were written about progress in mental prayer, contempla-tion, and the three stages of the interior life. Today a hunger for spirituality is still alive among religious, witness the popularity of directed retreats and the Ignatian Exercises. It is part of what David Tracy calls an "amazing resurgence in spirituality.''3 Nevertheless, our consuming interest has been elsewhere. Whereas previously religious sought to move outward from a deep interiority, we have preferred to begin with exteriority. Like behaviorists, we have been convinced that action shapes hearts and that congregational renewal would come from movement into relevant apostolates that reexpressed our charism. The "spouse of Christ" model was criticized as a "beautiful soul" spir-ituality, and its practitioners were compared to birds preening themselves. Salvation was brought down to earth, and holiness was linked with wholeness--becoming a well-integrated person-- and with service to others. "Crazy" saints like Philip Neri (who did outlandish things out of humility) were out. The fasting of Catherine of Siena and others has been understood as "holy anorexia" (Rudolph Bell's term), a subconscious protest against male domination. Unless mortification was relational--a sacri-fice involved in one's work for others--it was conside~'ed unhealthy. Better to work for and with the poor than to fast in adoration of God. As a result, a new metaphor for religious life replaced spouse of Christ. It was the image of the prophet at the cutting edge of social and political issues,, breaking new ground in the liberation and humanization of peoples, especially through systemic change in favor of the poor and oppressed. After the Jesuits' dramatic shift toward faith and justice, the charisms of most other active congregations, no matter how diverse, were suddenly found to center on these same concerns. The Roman synod of 1971 called social justice a "constitutive" part of the Christian apostolate, and many interpreted this as meaning that it was to be a necessary component of each apostolate. Most recently, however, a reac-tion has set in. Jesuits like Avery Dulles and Martin Tripole, while Review for Religious agreeing .that social justice should be a fundamental concern of religious life, resist the notion that it is an essential ingredient of each Jesuit apostolate. It is now reported that even Pedro Arrupe SJ, its principal protagonist, had second thoughts about how it was absolutized.4 Strangely, the metaphor of religious as social prophet did not attract numbers of vocations, certainly not in the first world. Marie Augusta Neal admits this and attributes it to fear of its inherent difficulty and risks. But, historically, danger did not deter but rather whetted the appetite of people intent on the religious adventure. Nineteenth-century missionaries like St. Peter Chanel boarded rickety ships on precarious one-way trips lasting eleven months to preach to peoples who had not yet emerged from can-nibalism. Could the resistance to the new prophetic stance be due to something other than fear? Could it be that, however admirable, it is not perceived by Christian consciousness to be at the center of the religious project? In what follows I will set out three directions in which we must move in future efforts toward renewal. The first two are sociological and could apply to almost any social group or cor-porate entity. They are actually dialogues with Wittberg and with Nygren and Ukeritis, whose studies I find revealing. The third direction is theological and addresses some of the questions just raised. Directions for a Future The first direction: An effective religious community must be visible. Recent authors have sounded the alarm that religious life, especially among women, is disappearing as a visible corporate entity, as an institutional presence. Joan Chittister writes that religious communities have "done a great deal to foster the prophetic individuals in their midst," but "at the same time, they have done very little to function as prophetic groups.''5 Elsewhere she dramatizes: "Religious must ask themselves what they stand for as a congregation and who knows it, because if nobody knows it we don't stand for it." She continues: "When we stood for edu-cation, health service, and the care of innocent children, everyone knew it. When we stood for insertion of Catholics into the white Anglo-Saxon world, no one called that political, and everyone knew what we were about, Religious congregations stood as bul-j~ uly-dug~st 1996 Dilanni ¯ Religious Life warks against ignorance, illiteracy, disease, abandonment, and secularism. We turned our resources in those directions. Now we have the best-educated groups in the world, each member of which is regarded with professional respect, and the most invisi-ble congregations.''6 " This is an important point that should guide future planning. If as religious we desire truly to influence others and attract new candidates, we cannot act as disembodied spirits, noncorporeal freedoms, anti-institutional angels. We must witness not only as individuals but as a collective unity. And to do so we must be vis-ible as a collective unity. Clearly, religious were more visible as members of a group when they worked in institutional commit-ments and wore an identifiable religious habit. When they left these institutions and took on secular jobs in social service, when they declined the habit and were absorbed into the crowd, they tended to lose corporate impact of all kinds, even the new one of being socioreligious prophets. "The more its members became unidentifiable," says Wittberg, "the more difficult it became for any order, as a corporate entity, to fulfill its newly defined prophetic role.''7 Another major cause of the current invisibility of religious congregations has been our readiness to embrace contemporary democracy's postmodern move toward absolute egalitarianism and nonelitism. Eager to abdicate every hint of triumphalism, we have become levelers. This is seen in the way we have interpreted Lumen gentium's universal call to holiness, which, according to Wittberg, hit like a bombshell and robbed religious of a sense of distinctive identity. It had this effect because theologians and reli-gious interpreted it politically rather than theologically or spiri-tually. "We are all called to holiness," said the commentators, emphasizing the word all, as if the point of the doctrine were to rule out all talk about more or less effective roads to holiness or about religious life being a way of perfection aspiring to something higher. But is the political point the central thrust of the decla-ration? Should we not place less stress on the "all" and more on what we are all called to, that is, holiness? Should religious not be less worried about standing out (or failing to stand out) and more concerned about redoubling their efforts to achieve holiness within their life and lifestyle? In fact, what happened was that the idea of striving for personal holiness dropped out as the cen-tral concern for religious. Review for Religious The reason for this overemphasis on the political may be due to the church's relative inexperience with democracy and moder-nity. In her sociological study of religious orders; Wittberg con-tends that the 19th-century religious congregations, sharing the restorationist mentality of the church, never really came to grips with the modern thrust toward liberty, fraternity, and equality. Rather, these congregations retreated into a fuga mundi (flight from the world), reinstated 17th-century practices, and lived in a time warp for years. In America this was exacerbated because most religious sprang from and ° worked in isolated immigrant subcultures. It is perhaps because of this that, when Vatican II opened the doors, the congre-gations went overboard in their embrace of the new forms of participative democ-racy. We eagerly adopted its absolute horror of distinctions for fear of elitism and played down all differences between religious and laypersons. As a result we vanished as visible corporate groups purporting to be on a different road to holiness.8 But can this continue? Can the concept of religious life long endure in an atmosphere of hyper-egalitarianism? Would reli-gious life ever have sprung up at all if some persons did not desire to be different and follow Jesus in a more literal way? Wittberg describes religious life as a form of virtuoso or (less frequently) heroic religiosity. Practitioners of virtuoso religiosity are those within a religion who want to go the extra mile. They want to create a zone of intensity within the field of holiness. They p(r-ceive themselves as different and, to some degree, as exemplars. Prospective virtuosi come together, says Wittberg, "in the expec-tation that their participation will help to maintain some collective good--the health and welfare of the destitute, or the conversion of heretics, or even the establishment of a utopia of saints on earth that can serve as a beacon to others.''9 Christianity and other religions have always spawned such virtuosi. Luther dissolved the vows of the monks and declared everyone equal in the quest for holiness, but soon Protestantism was crowded with Pietists, Mennonites, and Anabaptists. Later it was the Shakers and today the Pentecostals. Recently, new virtu-osi groups have mushroomed Within Catholicism: the Legionaries of Christ, the Missionaries of Charity, the Lion ofJuda, Les Fr~res We must witness not only as individuals but as a collective unity. July-August 1996 DiIanni ¯ Religious Life de. St. Jean, the Opus Dei, the Neo-catechumenate, the Focolare, the Sant' Egidio community of Rome, Comunione e liberazione, and so forth. All model themselves on the early Christian com-munity in Acts or the seventy disciples commissioned by Jesus (Lk 10), both of which seem to represent Christianity lived in its highest purity. Like the early Christians, these new groups believe that forming Christians is not easy, but requires being challenged to live one's baptism; requires a formation process, a "way" (some form of RCI& program), a sustaining community, and a partici-pative liturgy. We must accept the fact that as religious we desire to be dif-ferent and follow Christ in a distinctive way. If we are to influence others, to witness as prophets, our commitment must be in some way public and Visible. If this is perceived as a higher way, so be it. Chalk it up to diversity. We cannot blur all distinctions out of a fear of elitism. All groups that aspire for something more are in danger of elitism and must be warned against it, but their enthu-siasm should not be crushed. Members of religious congregations purport to live their Christianity in a way that is differently orga-nized, more regulated, more intense, and at times more difficult than that of other Christians. They will have an impact on oth-ers to the degree that their sacrifice is real and their corporate witness is visible. Whether through all this they always succeed in becoming men and women of God is another question. The second direction: Effective religious community should be inten-tional as opposed to merely associational, and this demands a transcen-dent corporate goal and adequate commitment mechanisms. An intentional community is a community with a purpose for the sake of which members are willing to make significant sacri-fices of their individual preferences. Examples are sports teams and the military. An intentional community is different from an associational community, which admits a plurality of goals and calls for a lesser degree of sacrificing of individual preferences. Intentional communities have a strong sense of direction. This is due to at least two things: a transcendent corporate cause and a set of commitment mechanisms, that is, common sacrificial prac-tices that reinforce commitment at a level deeper than rational persuasion. We will consider these two elements in turn. A transcendent corporate goal: Discussing visibility, we have already dealt with the need for a goal, for being clear on where the Review for Religious group stands. Here I make the further point that the goal must be one that transcends the community itself. I say this because some authors seem to believe that the goal of a community can be inter-nal to ~the community itself. Edwin Keel and Susan Beaudry, for example, propose a third ruling metaphor for religious life, beyond those of the spouse of Christ and prophecy. For them, religious life is best presented under the image of a journey together toward God. They maintain that "what religious have been seeking, whether they realize it or not, and what religious community can offer, is neither surrogate family life, nor friendship, nor the intio macy~of small groupings, but faith companionship on the spiritual journey." 10 They describe the common spiritual journey in terms of a discovery of one's personal vocation before God and an integra-tion of it with that of others. Spiritual maturity is achieved by getting in touch with what Jung calls the Self, which lies deeper than the ego and is the place where we truly meet God. The old perfection model of holiness with its rigid rules tended to flat-ten individual differences and to foster immaturity. The journey image with its new and democratic skills--province assemblies, mission statements, corporate reflection processes, confrontation techniques (all now permanent parts of religious life)--may seem messier, but is psychologically healthier. Community life is like a family going on a trip in a crowded van, constantly negotiating, sometimes bickering, always arriving, never reaching. Some of these spiritual-journey elements are valuable; but I wonder whether the journey can be the dominant metaphor of religious life. Does it not tempt us to remain in an associational model of community, which, to believe tl~e experts, does not endure beyond one generation?I' Does it not come too close to what Gerald Arbuckle has called the "therapeutic" community? Can it generate the needed intensity and direction? For all the benefits of psychology, are not psychological self-absorption and an overly intense regard for the internal aspects of community part of the cause of our present decline? Wittberg says, "'The dominant language of religious life., shifted from theological constructs to social and psychological paradigms,' that were inad-equate to explain what was distinct or desirable about the lifestyle."~2 This has gone so far that in some congregations com-munity members who desire entry into a new local community must first present a written evaluation of themselves from the July-August 1996 Dilanni ¯ Religious Life community they are leaving. In other congregations the .concern for personal autonomy and consensus has at times resulted in the election of effete leaders at the local level. Is there nota middle ground between the not-in-touch-with-their-feelings religious of the past and some present-day religious who have become too self-involved as individuals or as community? In order to form an intentional community, people must come together for the sake of a cause that transcends both themselves and their experience of journeying together. A clearly articulated spiritual or apostolic vision and ideal must draw them on. Each member must partially relinquish his or her personal, vocation in favor of the vocation of the congregation. One's personal project must be trimmed in favor of the community proiect, Older reli-gious tell stories of pioneer days in schools and hospitals when they roomed together in classrooms and toiled almost slave hours. They may stress the pain and suffering, but from the glee with which they tell the stoW we know they would not have exchanged it for the world. Their reward lies in having been part of some-thing greater thanthemselves, protagonists together in a great religious adventure. Commitment mechanisms: Historically, intentional religious groups have been sustained in their resolve not only by clear tran-scendent goals but also by a number of practices that sociologists call commitment mechanisms. These are practices, customs, or rituals that reinforce motivation by solidifying the affective ties between the members. Sociologist Benjamin Zablocki contends that the commitment mechanisms discarded by congregations after Vatican II were actually essential for community survival.~3 The primary types of commitment mechanisms were first developed in the monasteries and then adapted to other forms of religious life. They are (1) common rules and rituals, (2) boundary maintenance, (3) shared sacrifices, and (4) mortification practices. 1. Common rules or rituals include the daily horarium and schedule, spiritual exercises, meals :in common, reading at meals, and grand silence. They are found in the constitutions and in books of customs. 2. Boundary-maintenance mechanisms Fiave the purpose of maintaining a clear distinction between members of the group and other people. Examples of such mechanisms are: wearing a common habit, living together in cloistered convents, bestowing new names, and reducing the visits of family and outsiders. (Today Review for Religious the lack of vocations has spawned the phenomenon of associative membership, which renders the boundaries more fluid and lessens the sense of identity. Most recently commentators are beginning to bemoan an excessive fluidity. Their plea is that such a religious congregation cannot long endure unless there is a strong core group of full-fledged members who are strongly distinguished from others.) 3. Shared sacrifices arise out of involvement in common works of the congregation. Historically there was no stronger source of cohesion than shared sacrifices in behalf of an institute's common apostolates. 4. Mortification practices include such customs as culpas, the chapter of faults, receiving monition, fasting on certain days, taking the discipline, wearing a common habit, and wearing a veil. These worked to strip off an old identity in favor of a new one and in the process helped to cement people into a higher unity. In reviewing these mechanisms I am in no way advocating a return to all or to any of them. On the other hand, religious life cannot prosper without some structures that reinforce motivation at the affective level. To move beyond individualism we need to invent common rituals and symbols that speak to us at the level of the subcon-scious. We cannot build community by teaching a charism only conceptually while leaving it to each member to embody it in his or her own way. If our religious life has no face, our communities will end up being only comfortable hotels. In replacing outdated commitment mechanisms, we must employ new psychological insights and provide adequate room for personal differences. But these new mechanisms must have some relation to past ones. In creating them we must carefully study the older structures to see what purpose they had in the mind of the founder, to discover what aspect of the charism they expressed. The new structures must be more suited to our times, but they must also connect with and incarnate the charism and spirituality of the institute. The role of the superior is a commitment mechanism of tra-ditional religious life that is not often mentioned. We must admit, People must come together for the sake of a cause that transcends both themselves and their experience of journeying together. ~dy-AuKtwt 1996 Dilanni ¯ Religious Life however, that nothing worked better to reinforce collective unity than Mother Superior. The traditional superior, especially when he or she was also the founder, was considered a voice of God. Today, conversely, some 75 percent of religious communities of women have no superior in any traditional sense. Mother Superior has been replaced by the "director" or "animator" or by a "lead-ership team." Such language, it seems to me, confuses two dif-ferent realities, authority and leadership. The first is the attribute of an office; the second, the quality of a person. In some congregations the role of superior has been largely taken over by an appointed middle-management bureaucracy with tendencies to perpetuate itself.~4 One sister has written to me say-i. ng, "Our best leaders are in our cemetery." Without desiring to turn back the clock, I ask: Was there a resonance present in the traditional role of superior that has been lost? If past superiors were legalistic and overbearing, were the best of them not the true spiritual leaders that We still hanker for? Were they not per-sons who loved the congregation and its charism and knew how to stir hearts and shape a vision? Commitment mechanisms are making a comeback in the new congregations and in the new lay religious movements in Europe and Latin America. The Neo-catechumenate, for example, invites members into a "way" (camino), which comprises certain distinct steps, a kind of RCIA for Catholics, through which each mem-ber must pass before they are considered "formed Christians." Some of their techniques involve confrontation and mutual crit-icism. New seminaries using Neo-catechumenal techniques, all called Redemptoris Mater, are springing up in many parts of the world. The Sant' Egidio lay community of Rome invites its mem-bers to sung vespers and a commentary on the Scripture every evening. Many religious congregations use directed retreats and the renewed thirty-day Ignatian Exercises as a more personalized form of commitment mechanism. Other communities have intro-duced formal faith-sharing sessions, a kind of lectio divina in which members Ponder scripture passages or the constitutions together and then discuss them. Patricia Wittberg suggests that it might be profitable to explore the new religious movements to see how traditional Catholic frameworks for "religious virtuos-ity are being reworked, whether consciously or unconsciously. ¯ in order to address the assumptions and values of the late-20th-and early-21 st-century American culture." 1~ Review for Religiou~ Visibility, intentionality, a clear and transcendent goal, and some commitment mechanisms--these are the sociological aspects necessary to be effective as a group. For Wittberg, their lack has been the major reason why the new metaphor of religious as reli-gious prophets has not truly taken hold. Ithas failed to galvanize religious communities, she believes, because contemporary indi-vidualism and pluralism have been allowed to dominate religious life. As a good sociologist, she remains neutral with regard to the desirability of the new metaphor itself. I wonder, however, if this goes far enough. Are there not other and deeper reasons why the new metaphor of religious prophet has not really caught on? If prophecy means being on the cutting edge, the question remains: On the cutting edge of what? of politics? of social betterment? of all this, plus something more? I accept and welcome the model of prophecy, but I do question its content as expounded by many religious at the pres-ent time. I believe that the prophet must identify the deepest assumptions of the age and try to respond to its deepest hungers. Have we; aspiring religious prophets, truly engaged our culture at its deepest levels? This brings me to my third and last statement of direction. Third direction: Effective religious community demands a concept of prophecy that engages the surrounding culture at its deepest levels and responds to its most profound hungers. Wittherg and others believe that because of restorationism the 19th-century church and its many new religious orders did not come to grips with the problems of modernity. My question is: In the prophetic model as currently understood, do we do so even now? I concur with Nygren and Ukeritis, who say that those con-gregations will be revitalized that are "rooted in their relationship with God, and that, in a spirit of fidelity to their founding purpose and responsiveness to absolute human need, confront the current gap between Gospel and the culture.''16 1 agree with Chittister's formal principle that religious congregations must "release every-where in society, at every level, through every individual member, wherever the members are, and whatever separate things they do, the white heat of those congregations' charism in one great cor-porate mind and one easily seen communal heart.''17 We must engage the dominant first-world culture and do so as corporate .t~uly-August 1996 Dilanni ¯ Religious Life entities. We cannot run from it or remain indifferent. But, because we are religious, we must be careful to engage it at its deepest levels and not merely superficially. Historically, religious life flourished precisely when it was perceived as countering a culture's expressed values while answer-ing its deepest hungers. St. Francis of Assisi attracted followers, not because he was in conformity with his times, but because he challenged his times and in this way spoke to its heart of hearts. As we move toward the future, we must ask ourselves: What are the deepest hungers of our culture? Judith Merkle says that "the question which faces religious congregations today is what aspect of reality has the power to most deeply call us to life." 18. This is really the same question, for we are part of our culture, and our own deepest hungers will not differ much from those of the general culture. Some authors answer this question by insisting that we will be called to life by moving away from individualism and becoming a transformative community bent on creating a better world. In their eyes, the deepest need of contemporary culture is to achieve better rela-tionship with the poor, the oppressed, and the marginal; and this will be achieved by eradicating unjust social structures and oppos-ing oppressive ideologies like patriarchy, sexism, and racism. But is such a project sufficient? Is it at the center of religious prophecy? Is it where we address the deepest needs of our culture? Certainly, many of these ethical issues are important. They are a response to Gaudium et spes and in tune with the attempt of the-ologians to develop a more earth-centered interpretation of the kingdom. This new notion of the kingdom does not contradict the traditional view, but complements it. It asks us not to allow our desire for heaven to blind us to our duty to extirpate crass injus-tices in this world. In this view, the kingdom is not only a future heaven but the actual presence of God's power for transforming the world. So the religious project, the kingdom, has two loci. But, in many religious congregations, has the sociopolitical not become the solitary day-to-day focus? Is this not why the so-called prophetic model attracts so few first-world candidates? Have we not gone the route of liberal Protestantism, which in its social-gospel emphasis is fast losing ground to the Pentecostals and Evangelicals? In their nonparticipation and shifts of loyalty, are not lay Christians trying to tell us something? Review for Religious Can a religious congregation survive if its primary, all-inclu-sive goal is to solve complex and intractable social and moral issues? I doubt it. This is so especially when, in practice if not in theory, God is reduced to being a ground for human generativity or creativity in the social arena. Sociopolitical issues are impor-tant and can even be construed as religious in nature, but they are not at the center of the religious project. The center of the religious project is clear and simple: to affirm the existence and the love of God. This is true especially in our times, in which the major event has been the "death of God," the conviction that the idea of God is either meaningless or even detrimental. The first attitude comes from the side of science and the second from an existential-ist philosophy of life. The scientific picture as taught in many universities is one of a world that evolved by sheer chance from a big bang to con-scious, reflective beings. If through some. accident all conscious beings are destroyed, the Godless universe would be bereft of consciousness, and being would be a perpetual winter, In the sci-entistic worldview, sheer chance takes the place of God, and human life is voided of any objective meaning or purpose. Moral ¯ systems' become games contrived by human 'beings to bring about the maximal satisfaction of desires while avoiding conflict. The moral game is born of an enlightened egoism. For existentialists, following Nietzsche, religion must be ban-ished because it is repressive and life-denying and robs us of rad-ical freedom. It imposes an objective moral system that does not allow us to create values. We must choose between a life of free-dom and a God of enslavement. "Man dies at the touch of the Absolute," says Merleau-Ponty. One way in which existentialist atheism shows up in our culture is in its penchant for absolutiz-ing choice. No matter how dire the consequences, Americans will plump for choice on any issue. If there is no God, then each indi-vidual can be God, not only in general but at every moment and in every decision. This combination of scientific atheism and an existentialist absolutizing of individual power and choice has given rise, as Nietzsche predicted, to a sense of meaninglessness, to nihilism, to The center of the religious project is clear and simple: to affirm the existence and the love of God. July-August 1996 DiIanni ¯ Religious Life the banalizing of life, to the "unbearable lightness of being," The death of God has ushered in the death of man (and woman). Choosing and consuming, consuming and choosing, modern men and women are stranded on the anorexia-bulimia line--on the endless shuttle between fullness and emptiness." Is this all there is?" they ask. And many teenagers commit suicide or random murder, and others just keep on dancing. "Even more than athe-ism," says Walter Kasper, "the nihilism that flows from atheism is the real mark of the age."~9 This nihilism or voiding of meaning has its positive side. It is the modern expression of the hunger for God. It is in providing a lived response to this hunger that contemporary religious life will achieve its true prophetic role. Beyond all else, religious life must be a drumbeat proclaiming that God exists, that God's love for us through Jesus is unconditional, that it sustains us in suffering and continues beyond our death. The way for religious to engage the surrounding culture effectively is to witness that, far from crush-ing life, God alone gives it ultimate meaning and sense. I believe that at least two things must be retrieved by religious to help them achieve this truly religious end: interiority and, along .with it, an ardent desire to relate to the personal God who transcends the world. By interiorityI mean a new emphasis on the life of prayer and reflection and on being teachers of the spiritual life. Pierre Hadot, a French historian of philosophy, is influencing sophisticated the-ologians like David Tracy into bringing spirituality into the cen-ter of theology. He criticizes modern theology for its sharp division between theory and spiritual practice. Hadot insists that, unlike people of earlier times and of non-Western cultures, we Western moderns have not allowed theology to express itself in spiritual exercises. The old Stoics had spiritual exercises for com-ing into contact with the Logos, and this was one reason why Simone Weil loved the Stoics. The modern segmenting of the-ology and praxis--seen, for example, in the dropping of devo-tions since Vatican II--is one reason for the deep hunger for spirituality today. R~ligious must once again emphasize growth in personal holiness and speak to people about their experience of prayer, about their interior praxis with God. Our formation pro-grams must not fail to impart a sense that each person has 'a spir-itual life in which it is possible to make progress through prayer. Joan Chittister is correct when she insists that we cannot "confuse work with prayer, good intentions with the spiritual life:''2° Review for Religious We must regain a sense of the personal God who transcends the world, but with whom we can enter into intimate union. In a 1989 America article I spoke of our need to love God as well as our neighbor and said that the love of God cannot be totally expressed through neighbor love, Several weeks later, in a letter to the edi-tor, J. Robert Hilbert sJ wrote that "one must be careful" in draw-ing a distinction between love of God and love of neighbor. "God," he says, "is not an 'other' in the sense of a categorical object to be spoken of in parallel with other objects of my knowl-edge and love. It is rather precisely in God's transcendentality as the absolute Other that love of God and love of neighbor come together in a unique and necessary oneness.''2~ I do not know if such talk of God as the "absolute Other" does the job of maintaining the necessary balance between the immanence and transcendence of God. I am sure, however, that in their return to spirituality contemporary Christians are rebelling against attempts to blur the distinction between the love of God and the love of neighbor, even though both are absolutely necesshry and intimately intertwined. Classically God has been conceived of as higher than and dis-tinct from the world, a Creator who does not need us but who loves us even beyond our death and asks us to requite that love. In ~our effort to rethink the notion of God in a way acceptable to modernity, we must avoid the danger of turning God into some underlying catalyst for our doing :good, an ~lan vital or wisdom force. In the last thirty years, so many theologians liberationists, feminists, process theologians, all striving to develop an idea of a God who is intrinsic to our lives--may have fallen into just this trap, Have they not carried too far the idea that we are God's project for social betterment, that in some Hegelian way the Absolute is working through our creativity to achieve a world of peace and justice? I have two problems with the current political and this-worldly interpretations of the kingdom. The first is with the type of pol-itics it generally espouses, and the second with the primacy of politics itself. ¯ First, does not the particular type of politics espoused by some religious carry a great deal of questionable ideological baggage? A "politically correct" reading is .given to work with the poor and oppressed. The abortion question is often studiously avoided. Feminist publications of the most radical sort are taken seriously. 3~uly-August 1996 Dilanni ¯ Religious Life Environmentalism is fast becoming a new religion among some religious, while they fail to realize that it has become extremely big business filling many already fat pockets. A listening ear is not lent to the arguments of those who distinguish between good and bad ways of helping the poor, arguments presented in thoughtful books like Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion. And yet anybody who is truly concerned about the poor should also be attentive to the ways in which, with the best of motives, we may be locking them into a perpetual victimhood. But, beyond these particular issues, I think there is an overem-phasis on the sociopolitical in general. Social justice and the fos-tering of the earthly kingdom is not the whole gospel nor even the center of it. The hunger for another justice beyond social justice is never altogether absent from the human heart, Social justice is important, of course, because it is the minimum, upon which an earthly Christian community can be built. When it is dramat-ically absent, we cannot remain passive. When it is dramatically absent for many years for great numbers of people, it can for a time even be a consuming passion. But we must be careful that the gospel not be totally reduced to it. For the fact remains that we die eventually and that no program of social justice exists that can prevent our death or provide meaning to our dying. Beyond social justice, the church must have something to say also, perhaps especially, to those who are about to conclude their earthly life.22 Most religious, no matter how radical their politics, do retain a strong belief in a transcendent and personal God and a faith in the resurrection of the dead. But often this does not appear to be the main focus of their life and action. Unsure of the existence~ of the devil, many religious are very adept at naming the demonic. They are sure that sin has changed and we now better understand what constitutes real sin and real virtue, Evil, they think, is not located primarily in personal sins of commission, but in 'political and economic structures and in the sins of omission that keep these structures in place. Along with this perception, they have the conviction that the new technological possibilities available to us bring new responsibilities. Thus, they are fond of repeating that, since it is now possible for the first time to feed everyone, we have a special duty to create political structures and delivery sys-tems to implement this possibility. There is doubtless much to be said in favor of this, but, religiously speaking, it contains little that is new. Systemic and structural change is simply a new aspect Review for Religious that the perennial Christian demand of love of neighbor and of the stranger has assumed today. There remains the caveat of humility: that we not think we possess the answers to complex structural problems of politics and economics and that we curb the thought that we can ever build utopia on earth. In spite ofmy theoretical recognition of social justice's impor-tance and in spite of my practical efforts, past and present, in behalf of civil rights and of the poor, I believe that, from a reli-gious point of view, the social project remains ,superficial. Metaphysically, it is ultimately uninteresting. Cornel West, the brilliant black theology professor at Harvard Divinity School, often discusses social issues on Boston television. One day he was especially aroused and ended his speech with: "My brothers and sisters, this is the real important stuf!!" I shook my head and thought: Millions of people are dead and everyone is going to die. How can a theologian give such ultimate importance to this transient consciousness show we call the world? I am more in tune with Wilfrid Duffy SM, a priest-poet friend of mine afflicted with Parkinson's, whom I took to visit Michelangelo's statue of Moses in Rome. Disappointed with Moses' worldly appearance, he wrote a poem called "The Death of Moses" which ends with these words: ~ There was no dirge-- Just hard marble, noble features, Well-spaced fingers and toes, a certain strength, and some magnificence. But no d~sert; no voice of God, Unless I was not listen.ing. Perhaps it was I who had died. In the sociopolitical vision of the kingdom as practiced by some, where is the magic Of Bernini's sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila in rapture with God? What is the meaning of fasting, prayer, personal mortification, the Eucharist, confession, the drama of conversion and grace, justification, of Jacob wrestling with an angel? Interiority and mystery seem to get short shrift in the cur-rent version of the prophetic vision, as do original sin and personal sanctification and, yes, even ultimate salvation. Have we learned the Marxist lesson too well? Annette Pelletier IHM asks some poignant questions in this regard. "Have any., of the adaptations since Vatican II pro-claimed to the people of God the basic message that grace works? yuly-August 1996 Dilanni ¯ Reli~ousLife Politics, justice, and even morality cannot be the absolute center of the religious-life agenda. What else will or can ever change the present identity crisis of consecrated persons and their various congregations into an opportunity for reform, revitalization, and renewal if not the power of Mystery to fascinate but also to convert? Has this pri-mal experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition fallen by the way-side?" She continues: "Since Vatican II, adaptation and renewal have bridged the gap between the world and the consecrated life, but of what metal has that bridge been forged? Could it be that in bridging the gap an essential element of the identity of persons consecrated to God some-how got lost? What credible and clear evi-dence do religious women and men give to show that contact with the Holy somehow, mysteriously, does make a difference?" She quotes Richard Fragomeni saying that "the Christian tradition ultimately stands in silence before the operation of grace, the wonder of surprise, and the movement of a power beyond that of human consciousness and performance.''23 To be truly prophetic in the religious sense, religious life requires an integration of these two points of view about the king-dom-- the mystical-eschatological and the sociopsychological-- both of which have their roots in the gospel. The first rightly stresses the need for a mystical union with God' in this life and the hope for ultimate union with God hereafter. The first com-mandment, said Jesus, is that we love God with our whole heart. On the other hand, the Jesus we meet in prayer and in the Scriptures is the very embodiment of a God of compassion. Jesus reveals that Yahweh is not a "generic" God (Brueggemann), but a God who is interested in justice. To be involved with the God of Jesus is to be involved with the poor and the marginal of this world. We cannot be satisfied with urging them to suffer in the hope of an eternal reward in heaven. And yet secularism remains the deepest problem of the dom-inant culture, and it is at the center of the religious project. It is in grappling with this aspect of our culture that religious ,;rill truly and most deeply engage it. The deconstructionists are hard at work trying to be rid of all "metanarratives," and the pragma-tists are banishing any attempt to ground any~statement as true, A valedictorian at Harvard recently said: "At Harvard they teach Review for Religious you that you can hold any value you want, as long as you don't hold it to be true." Television is not far behind. It continues to dis-place the deep and serious with celebrity, with hi-tech gossip, and with the tolerance morality of the talk shows. I strongly applaud Joan Chittister's suggestion that we must be corporately visible, but the principal goals she sets--educating the world about °the new social questions of the age, about sexism, racism, the environment, and multiculturalism, about the whole agenda of political correctness--all remain at the level of politics and sometimes debatable politics. There is justice and justice. Politics, justice, and even morality cannot be the absolute center of the religious-life agenda. But coming to grips with an atheis-tic secularism can, for it is a directly theological and religious issue. What is more countercultural, to say that we are going to save planet Earth or to say that Jesus rose from the dead and that this makes all the difference? Which answers our deepest and most ultimate concerns? Which, metaphysically speaking, and which, from a religious point of view, is more interesting? Perhaps the last thirty years of religious life have been fruit-ful after all. With T.S. Eliot we may be able now to cease our exploration, return home, anddiscover the place for the first time. For in thirty years we have changed and perhaps only now have the wisdom to plan a renewal and a future. In our planning for the 21st century, can we not truly join action and contemplation, this-worldly love and the inystical-eschatological--envisage, that is, a close friendship between oneself as prophet and oneself as spouse of Christ? And can we not then send them both off on a splendid quest that we might call, according to the metaphor Qf Keel and Beaudry, "a journey together toward God"? Notes * See Patricia Wittberg, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 269. 2 See Albert DiIanni, Religious Life as Adventure (Staten Island: Alba House, 1994). 3 William R. Burrows's interview with David Tracy in America, 14 October 1995, p. 16. 4 See Martin R. Tripole, "The Roots of Faith-and-Justice: Critical Assessment," Review for Religious 54, no. 5 (September-October 1995): passim. s Joan Chittister, "Religious Life Today: Response to Kerkhofs," Religious Life Review 32, no. 4' (1993): 203. Dilanni ¯ Religious Life 6 Joan Chittister, "Religious Orders," National Catholic Reporter, 18 February 1994, p. 16. 7 Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. 239. s The findings of Nygren and Ukeritis also seem to confirm that the flight to democracy was not well thought out: "Assumption~ regarding the applicabilit~ of democratic forms of governance to religious life were made with little or no conversation regarding the appropriateness of this move. Centuries-old notions of obedience were dismissed and replaced with concepts such as ,listening to the Spirit' which, while challenging, lack a history of experience to provide a context that produces consis-tency in form or process" (David Nygren and Miriam Ukeritis, The Future of Religious Orders in the United States [FORUS] [Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993], p. 240). 9 Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. 27. ,0 Edwin L. Keel SM and Susan Beaudry PM, "Journeying to God Together," Review for Religious 53, no. 3 (May-June 1994): 441. 1, See Elizabeth McDonough, "The Past Is Prologue: Quid Agis?" Review for Religious 51, no. 1 (January-February 1992): 82, and also Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. 193. ,2Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. 256. 13 See Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. xi. 14On developments of this sort, see Elizabeth McDonough, "Beyond the Liberal Model: Quo Vadis?" Review for Religious 50, no. 2 (March- April 1991), pp. 172-173 and 176-177, and her "Past Is Prologue," pp. 79- 82. In the latter article she is using material from Patricia Wittberg, Creating a Future for Religious Life (New York: Paulist Press, 1991). ,s Wittberg, Rise and Fall, p. 270. ,6 .Nygren and Ukeritis, FORUS, p. 244. ,7 Chittister, "Religious Orders," p. 16. 18 Judith A. Merkel, Committed by Choice (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), p. 54. ,9 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. ll. 20 Chittister, "Religious Orders," p. 17. 2,America, 2 September 1989, p. 127. 22 It is unjust to ask some to struggle to the death for a future utopia to be enjoyed only by others in the future. Even the Marxist philosopher Theodore Adorno was exercised by this problem and insisted that there must also be a justice for the dead. 23 Annette M. Pelletier, "Fascination with the Holy--and Conversion," Review for Religious 53, no. 4 (July-August 1994): 562-563,565. Review for Religious JANET MALONE Internationality: ConsciousnessRaising and Conversion nternationality in religious congregations has a price, and .l. congregations that in recent years have called themselves inter-national are now in the various stages of conversion requisite to being purposefully international or what Catherine Harmer has called intentionally international. At this point it is important for them to keep their eyes open to internationality's richness, for the changes and conversion that are requisite to being truly interna-tional bring the difficulties--the price--very much to the fore. Ways of Coping Change can be scary, and becoming an international congre-gation has been quite difficult for many communities, to the point where certain resistances have surfaced as ways of coping with this new "crisis." In working with such congregations, I have noted various ways of coping. Some groups want to downplay the full connotation of internationality in its mission sense of supra-nationality even when in fact, with acceptance and incorporation of some different cultures and nationalities, a new congregational culture has already come into being that, in many ways, goes well beyond being the mere sum of its older and newer parts. Other congregations that have called themselves international by reason of their physical expansion into other nations now deal Janet Malone CND wrote "Coming Home: The Journey Within" for our May-June 1995 issue. Her address is 24-1002 Dufferin Avenue; Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; S7H 2C1 Canada. ~uly-August 1996 Malone ¯ Internationality with subtle and varying aspects of resistance throughout their congregations. In still other congregations, the resistance has been quite subtle, with efforts by some members to have their congregations refer to themselves, not as "international," but as "multicultural" or "intercultural" or as congregations "with an international character." Some congregations seem ready to rescind the appellation of internationality because of the cost in terms of both personal and corporate conversion. They would justify this retrograde step by emphasizing that they are not really international because they are present in only.a few other nations. On the other hand, if a congregation purposefully decides to become or to remain an international one, it most likely must go through, both personally and corporately, an actual step-by-step process of conversion. This involves consciousness raising. The Process of Consciousness Rai sing In this article I want to highlight the different stages of con-sciousness raising. Being consciously aware of these stages can help change "hearts of stone to hearts of flesh" (Ez 36:26) in the process of becoming purposefully international. In my January- February 1992 article "Internationality--At What Price?" I spoke about conversion; herein I shall elaborate on what I now see as the intermediate steps of consciousness raising in the conversion process. Sometimes the dominant culture is replaced by another group's culture with the result that the oppressed become the oppressor. When that happens, a congregation--using power in a way that creates scarcity, and marginalization--plays'the game of musical chairs. Whether the oppression is conscious or not, those with power marginalize others and continue the injustice. It is normal for there to be resistances, biases, prejudices, and stereotypes as a congregation becomes truly international, for various members are at different stages of consciousness awareness (and conversion) in their own. enculturation, acculturation, and inculturation. It has been my experience in worki.'ng with inter-national groups that resistance to change in the form of preju-dices and stereotypes comes from very sincere people who feel threatened by the unknown and wonder how the proposed changes will affect them. Like most things in life, consciousness Review for Religious raising does not happen all at once. Rather, it is a process of awareness and evaluation of hitherto unperceived injustices that preclude the changes necessary for conversion. The rhythm of consciousness raising is different for different individuals, and it holds a particular challenge for those in lead-ership roles in a congregation. These need to be somewhat com-fortable with the unknown, with taking risks. Only then can they encourage the members to take some requisite steps toward becoming comfortable with the attitudinal and structural changes that can eliminate subtle oppressions of which many members may be quite unaware. In so doing, they model equality and mutuality. Consciousness raising he.lps to bring about real change in the attitudes of individuals and in congregational structures that reflect the dominant culture. Consciousness raising gradually brings a group to an honest evaluation of the ways of being and doing in the group that, in many instances, are distinctive of the domi-nant, founding group. Such an evaluation can then lead to the necessary changes in praxis. Stages of Consciousness Raising Adapting the work of Gaylor and Fitzpatrick, I will now high-light six differeht stages of consciousness raising in congregations becoming purposefully international. Not linear, these six stages in consciousness raising tend to overlap in a helical fashion. The first stage, the "no big deal" stage, is characterized by per-plexity and sometimes denial that there is a problem, This can be experienced by both sides of the internationality challenge: those who are the majority and see no oppression whatsoever and those who--unaware of it or only minimally aware--are the receivers of such oppression. Thus, there can be outright denial of the injustice and dismissal of any claims of it or a trivializa-tion of the injustice. For example, in a mixed-language group where there is "whisper" translation, people in the majority group may interrupt a minority speaker in midsentence and demand immediate translation. On the other hand, members of the major-ity group may carry on a full conversation among themselves while translation is being provided for the minority group. Members of a majority find it difficult to see this kind of problem even when it is pointed out. The minority group may see this as ,the way things have always been and display a certain ffuly-August 1996 Malone ¯ Internationality passivity or resignation. In both instances there is no awareness or almost none in this "~no big deal" stage. If, however, a congrega-tion is really serious about its internationality, then each language group, regardless of numbers, deserves a sacred space to under-stand and be understood. At this stage, discrepancies between the majority's demands and the needs of the minority can be trivialized by the majority with such statements as "Oh, it wasn't intentional" and by the minority with "They don't mean to be rude." In both instances there is no consciousness or only a minimal awareness of injustices and oppression, subtle or otherwise. The second, "eye-opening" stage occurs when a member of either group, the majority or the minority, experiences such types of oppression with some discomfort. Itis very easy here to revert back to the "no big deal" stage, but at .this second stage both groups can see previously status-quo experiences in a new light. Consciousness is being raised; as Ecclesiastes 3 observes, the "sea-son" for it has come. Experiences that were seen as normal are now evaluated some-what differently. Still, this evaluation is fragile. If, as a member of the dominant group, I am not much impressed by this new eval-uation, then I. may become ambivalent and protective of the sta-res quo. If I am a member of the minority group, I may not speak out on an injustice for fear of being rejectedand labeled a trou-blemaker. Members of the majority may realize for the first time that they refer to a minority group from a developing nation as "cute" and "innocent," with "so much to learn." In this stage they come to a deeper insight into what they are really saying. The third, "on the fence" stage is that point where, although: individuals or groups in an international congregation now se,e unequivocally the injustices within the congregation towards cer-tain groups, they still do not have the courage to "walk their talk." They still try to curry favor with both sides. Being "on the fence," they maneuver between the two sides without taking a firm stand on the side of the oppressed. Although it is important to see both sides of any situation, still it is critical at certain times to get "off: the fence." The warn-ing of Jesus about being lukewarm resounds here. For example, in a congregation which has called itself international, a particular group lobbies to change that term to something like intercultural because it thinks, that will solve the discontent of some of the Review for Religious majority group. Without a critical analysis of the issues involved, many congregation members may stay "on the fence" and not try to explore possible resistances underneath. The fourth, "coming home" stage of consciousness raising is that point where an individual or a group in the international congregation moves to making public various convictions on issues integral to internationality. It is the point where the personal convictions expressed heretofore only in safe, private spaces are now shared in more public places within the congregation, although still in rather circumspect ways. This stage is both diffi-cult and challenging because "the medium becomes the message." For example, a per-son or a group may submit to the congre~ gational leadership a proposal for specific structural changes to enhance the congre-gation's internationality. The private has become public, but not as yet within the public forum of a chapter or assembly of the total congregation. The fifth, "passion" stage of conscious-ness raising is a .more integrated stage involving both head and heart. Persons immediately come to mind who have had a passion for certain truths: "I have a dream."; "Ask not what your country can do for you."; "Go and gather up the drops of blood . " This stage challenges individuals and groups to lace their reasoned and dispassionate discourse with some emotion, such as anger at instances of oppression and injustice. When expressed construc-tively and nonviolently, such anger can be an energy and .catalyst for change. For example, at international meetings where an impasse has been reached because of fears and resistances, a spe-cial meeting might be called to get at these fears and blocks to any change. The danger here can be that the only interventions rec-ognized in the group are those which focus solely on "defini-tions," "constitutions," and "canon law." The challenge is to get underneath the words to the energy of the emotions. Only when the stories of personal experiences around such feelings are shared is there any movement in the group toward some deeper con-scious awareness. Members of the majority may realize that they refer to a minority group from a developing nation as "cute" and "innocent," with "so much to learn." Malone ¯ Internationality Patience and waiting are also critically important in this stage; planting the seeds of change and waiting for them to blossom is what being prophetic is all about. It is the process of going from "mine" to "ours." For example, an important component of being international is to have an international communications office and journal, both of which are grassroots and decentralized so that inculturation can gradually occur from the bottom up. It may take some time for that dream to move from being "mine" to "ours" in an international group because of many different variables, some of which may be subtle efforts to hold on to the status quo. The sixth and last stage, "acceptance/appropriation/incorpora-tion," is the crux of consciousness raising. It is that season in the life of a congregation where being international is not just the decision of a chapter or decision-making body. Rather, it is the season where internationality is the lived reality in the group. Such acceptance/appropriation/incorporation leads to a sense of equality and mutuality in the congregation and is reflected in both personal and corporate attitudinal and structural changes. Personal Conversion Having surveyed the stages of consciousness raising about biases, prejudices, stereotypes, and resultant injustices and oppres-sion, we now explore their implications for conversion. Personal conversion may take many different shapes including intellectual, moral, and spiritual conversion. Although conversion, like con-sciousness raising, is not a linear process but in many ways a gift of the grace of G6d, yet this helical process has some distinct aspects. Intellectual conversion interfaces directly with the stages of consciousness raising. It is a seeing with new eyes that continuing to support or collude with oppressive structures and ways of being in one's congregation is wrong. Now morally aware of behaviors in these matters that are actually sinful, the members of the dom-inant group must become morally aware also of their passivity in not speaking out about an ol6pressive status quo. An attitudinal shift must occur that moves them to do something about the injus-tice, be that something ever so small in the large scale of things. When people perceive the general pattern of increased aware-ness and its call for moral conversion, they may notice the :pattern in groups not only where they oppress others but also where oth- Review for Religious ers oppress them. They should notice, too, that it is very easy for the oppressed to become the oppressors in other circumstances. Unless there is a conscious intent to break the cycle of oppression, ¯ it is likely to continue. Spiritual conversion calls members of a congregation to live the gospel in .a radical way, such that there can be true love, for-giveness, and reconciliation as the different ways of oppressing come to light. Such conversion is countercultural when there is reconciliation and not revenge. "Love is patient, kind, not jealous, does not seek its own interests, is not quick-tempered, and does not brood over injury. It does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with.the truth" (1 Co 13:4-6). Corporate Conversion Corporate conversion requires changes within the organiza-tional structures of the congregation so thfit the sense Of mutuality and equality will exist both in word and in the lived praxis. Catherine Harmer details the structural changes required to become intentionally international. These changes are summa-rized here: 1. Each of the different provinces/regions/cultural entities in a congregation has the necessary autonomy to make local decisions regarding ministry choices, personnel changes, formation, and finances. 2. The leadership in each province/region/area should normally be made up of the people of that country. 3. International congregational committees and task forces must include representatives from all areas. 4. General chapters must also be representative of the total congregation not bnly in attendance but also in plan-ning and staff. 5. Provision must be made to accommodate diverse lan-guage groups at such meetings. 6. The members of the central administration of the con-gregation must reflect its internationality. 7. The founding group should eventually cease to domi-nate in all aspects of the congregational life. Conclusion Some congregations, ~n their beginnings, were not founded as international groups.~ In recent years they may have called July-August 1996 Malone * Internationali~ themselves international because of their "physical" expansion to different nations. They go through birthpangs when this acci-dental internationality becomes a purposeful or intentional inter-nationality. This article has affirmed that various resistances to the new and the temptation to go back to the "good old days" are a nor~ mal part of such a new birth. This process, for both personal and corporate conversion, has been clarified by the application of Gaylor and Fitzpatrick's stages of consciousness raising to the matter of becoming a truly international congregation. References Jean Alvarez. "Prejudice in Religious Congregations." Human Development, Winter 1983. Christine C. Gaylor and Annelle Fitzpatrick. "The Stages of Consciousness Raising." Human Development, Fall 1987. Catherine Harmer. "Internationality: Intentional or Accidental." Review for Religious 52, no. 1 (January-February 1993): 111-118. Janet Malone. "Internationality--At What Price?" Review for Religious 51, no. 1 (January-February 1992): 109-117. Dorcas Surely, there was time to miss what might be missed: garments made, acts of charity attested to by friends and neighbors, the complexities of a simple style, feel of wool well-woven, the breathless moment prior to a newborn's angry cry. Then, did you hesitate at all on that gruff apostle's word before, gazelle-like (how else), you leapt from there to here? Leonar~i Cochran OP Review for Religious FINIAN McGINN Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community ~nheaot happens when a community evolves from a homoge- us ethnic group to a heterogeneous ethnic group? Do the inner structures of the group change? Do they have to change; if so, how far? How can we change structures to meet the multi-cultural needs of the members? Do we have any models of recent attempts toward multiculturalization of institutions? With more Hispanic and southeast Asian membership in U.S. religious com-munities, what are the areas of greatest tension? How do we pre-pare our members for a multicultural institution? Is there a different type of preparation for the older members than for the younger? Does the same phenomenon happen to public educational institu-tions, businesses, and large corporations? These are but a few of the issues confronting provincials in the United States as they realize that they have been writing more letters in Spanish to their members than those of the previous administration and that they see more and more Vietnamese-- survivors of the fall of Saigon in 1975--in their houses of forma-tion. What has happened to the province we entered in the 1950s? At that time most of us were German, Italian, Polish, and Irish-- predominantly Westerners of European descent. Now, in the mid 1990s, we have become pluralistic, much more ethnically diverse, and the old ways of doing things have begun to change. As ministers of the local :church, most of us have witnessed our parishes and other apostolates change demographically, but we Finian McGinn OFM serves as vicar provincial for the Santa Barbara province of the Franciscan friars. His address is 1500 34th Avenue; Oakland, California 94601. ffuly-August 1996 McGinn * Toward Multiculturalizin~ a Reli~ous Communi~ have failed to look inward at our own religious communities. We have tried to prepare the people in our areas of work by inviting experts to give inservices and workshops to inform the parish-ioners about the new reality they face and to help them understand the new refugee and immigrant neighbors in their midst. We have applied multicultural solutions to our apostolates, but we have failed to prescribe them for our own religious communities. Immigrants and Refugees in General What are the differences of today? Ethnographers tell us that the Hispanic, the southeast Asian, and the African American have different ways of looking at the family, at community life, work, interpersonal relationships, prayer; recreation, decision making, and at many other issues which are essential to religious life. Even though 'we see out communities beginning to change demo-graphically we continue to do what we have been doing for years. Superiors are becoming aware that many of the strategies that were used before are no longer effective today because of the dif-ferent cultural values held by the members. Is there agreement on a common hierarchy of values? How does a superior take into consideration the Asian notion of "sav-ing face" in his or her decision making? If the culture affirms dependence and docility, how does one teach independence, assertiveness and confrontation? If the culture emphasizes family, interpersonal relationships with persons of the same culture and close-knit ingroupings, how does it embrace a larger community of muhiethnic members? How do different cultural groups view the vows; how do they see religious obedience? How much does a province change to accommodate the new cultures? .Multiculturalizing in the United States presents a rather polit-ically sticky problem. At present the United States offers a con-text where xenophobia is quite present. Historically we have gone from the melting pot model to a nonwelcoming model and from: "Come but assimilate quickly" to "Don't come and, in fact; you're not welcome!" Today movements against immigration are strong; foreigners are looked upon as inferior, their culture deficient, their language an obstacle to the acquisition of English. The province is aware of and perhaps may even pick up these negative attitudes by contagion or osmosis. Minority candidates who lived in the society where antiimmigration propaganda is prevalent Review for Religious approach the province wondering in what manner they will be received. R. Otheguy, commenting on the melting pot notion of the United States, remarks: "Because of their experience with racism in this country, many Hispanics have long ago given up hope of disappearing"--of blending into U.S. society. Baker takes the reasoning a step further and concludes that Hispanics found in multiculturalism a way to become at least somewhat American and keep their cultural values at the same time. He states, "Because of the [Hispanic's] history of being the victim of racism, the result may be the prevention of assimilation and integration with a consequent need to embrace some form of multicultural-ism for survival, security, status, and self-enhancement." Ethnic minorities themselves speak of additive biculturalism and bilingualism (Cummins, 1989). The melting pot paradigm has stressed a subtractive aspect: "Acquire English and lose your native language! Assimilate into U.S. society and forget your own culture; it's a deficit." Ethnographers and multiculturalists, on the other hand, speak of English-plus and acculturation to the host cul-ture. "ApprEciate your own language and learn English too. Take on the good U.S. cultural values, but don't lose your own culture in the process!" Most minorities lean toward maintenance of their language and culture as they adapt them-selves to the U.S. resettlement process (Lambert & Taylor). Paulo Freire describes the approach whereby the dominant culture wit-tingly or unwittingly attempts to impose the mainstream culture on new arrivals as "cultural invasion . a form of cultural domi-nation." Hopefully today's religious community advocates the addi-tive approach. As in many of these issues, however, it is much easier to speak about it than to do it. How do different cultural groups view the vows; how do they see religious obedience? How much does a province change to accommodate. the new cultures ? A Pluralistic Religious Community in Missionary Lands After some years in a missionary area, the superior general of a congregation in Rome insists that groups of a congregation 3~uly-August 1996 McGinn ¯ Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community from different nations in a foreign missionary country form one province. Each small group initially came to the mission country and received a portion of the mission territory within which to work. Members of the same ethnic group struggled with the lan-guage together, worked together, prayed together, evangelized the territory together, and accepted and formed native vocations. After some years this group and others in the missionary nation are asked to begin to form one entity together with the native religious of the area. This is an extremely difficult process and almost always poses a threat to both the foreigners and the native-born religious. The foreigners are no longer the majority in the group. They brought the faith, founded the missions, trained and even baptized and formed the native religious. In fact, they are still held in awe by the native religious members of the congregation. The foreigners are older and have been trained in a different the-ology of mission. The native religious, members of the host cul-ture, know the nation and its culture much better ,than do the foreigners. They have definite ideas on what should be done in their own country but are afraid to offend the foreigners who have given them the faith in the first place. This leads to a cultural impasse. To form the one entity from many disparate groups and to agree upon a common set of values is fraught with tension. In the United States In religious communities of the United States, however, usu-ally the majority membership of the institution is of white west-ern European stock; they are members of the host culture who have been living religious life for some time and have reached a consensus or implicit agreement upon certain common values of the institution. The tension arises as other multiethnic members become a sizeable minority, become visible, and begin to make their voices heard within the membership. How do the new mem-bers fit in? How does the larger group make room for them? What interior and exterior changes must take place to allow this to happen? How Other Institutions Meet the Challenge Businesses are learning new strategies to capitalize on inter-national markets and to improve communication with foreign Review for Religious nationals. Many public school districts, impacted by the influx of immigrants and refugees, offer classes, inservices and workshops on understanding cultural differences to relate with parents and members of the minority community and to enhance crosscul-tural communication. Business and education are presently publishing ma6~y books and articles dealing with multicultural differences and ways of adapting to and understanding people of other cultures. We, as religious, have not yet tapped these sources for our own com-munities. Business Since the Peace Corps in the early 1960s, many types of cross-cultural training programs have been designed to prepare indi-viduals for life in another culture. The goal of such programs is to help the business organization reduce and' prevent business losses and personal trauma. Harris and Moran. describe at least four models of training in cross-cultural orientation programs, ranging from lectures and readings about the culturel through simulation activities and sen-sitivity training to a cultural awareness model which seeks to develop one's ability to recognize ~cultural influence~ in personal values, behaviors, and cognitions. The goals of any training in cultural awareness are the following: a)to develop one's skill in diagnosing .difficulties in intercultural communication, b) to teach one when to suspend judgment when confronted with behavior which appears odd, c) to help one become aware of one's lack of sufficient knowledge of the other culture, and d) to increase one's motivation to learn more about the culture and the people. Public School Districts Public schools train cultural staff persons in cross cultural com-munication and hire. experts of the target 'cultural groups to present orientation and inservice to administrators and both certificated and classified personnel. These inservices and workshops are offered to both new and veteran teachers and staff. The host culture is compared to the immigrant or refugee culture. Culture brokers and the cultural specialists explain the areas of possible tension and/or misunderstanding; differing'values are examined, discussedL, 3-7-7- .~dy-Aug~tst 1996 McGinn ¯ Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community and understood. The goal of the process is twofold. It seeks to offer awareness and understanding of the newly arrived ethnic group and to examine the behavior of the teachers, administrators, and staff toward this group. James A. Banks distinguishes between two types of curricula in the schools: the manifest curriculum and the hidden curriculum. It is the hidden curriculum which is more cogent and which impo.ses the implicit norms and values of the school. Hopefully, the process of cultural awareness will shed some light on the hidden values and norms of the institution. Steps Religious Groups Are Taking By far one of the most multicultural communities in the United States and elsewhere is the international community of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. From its very foundation it has been international and universal in scope. It has no set policy governing ethnicity in the local house, yet from the beginning of the institute, its communities have been from different countries, ethnic groups, and cultures. Members of the institute have con-sistendy affirmed the intention that wherever possible, their com-munities be international in membership. Although they do not have formal courses in international living, the administration does try to provide the members with experiences locally, provincially, and at the general level that will expose them to the reality of living in a multicultural commu-nity. In recent years, two continuing formation programs have helped the members deepen this expression of international, mul-ticultural living in community: They also have regional meetings and meetings of administrators. "All of these gatherings, while addressing specific questions, give the opportunity for the sisters to get to know one another and to build up understanding and relationships. [The gatherings] deepen the sense of our being from many different places and our unity in diversity" (MOtte). It should be noted that in the gatherings the sisters use three linguae francae--French, Spanish, and English as official languages dur-ing the meetings. Maryknoll , Maryknoll has developed its Cross-Cultural Training Services for those who wish to discern theircall and prepare for cross- Review for Religious cultural ministry. A team of experts directs a month-long, inten-sive preparation, including a week retreat, for those planning to work abroad. The topics discussed during the training include culture and society, adjustment to a new culture, strategies for surviving culture and language shock, spirituality, inculturation, and discernment. As always, Maryknoll continues to offer a realistic prepara-tion to both religious and lay persons who find themselves called to a global ministry. Much of the content studied in the training sessions is vital and, with a little adaptation, can easily be used in workshops for religious institutions in the United States which are in the process of becoming multiethnic. Content of a Multicultural Awareness Program Should any province wish to set up a program to make itself more multicultural there shoul~t be certain key components of the content area. The actual training program could range from lectures, workshops to an institute, or any combination of the three. The speakers at the events should be experts in various areas of ethnic studies, preferably not members of the partici-pating religious group. In the world of language-minority students, J. Cummins speaks of certain "dimensions" necessary for the empowerment of minorities. The dimensions mentioned in Cummins's paradigm for empowerment touch the very center of multicultural living. They can easily be adapted from an educational institution to a reli-gious community. Cummins stresses four essential dimensions: language, collaboration, reciprocity, and advocacy. A. Language. The language issue is important. Theoreticians speak of language shock as. they describe, the early years of a person's resettlement in the United States. Bilingualists stress :the incor-poration of one's home language into the life of the school and its curriculum. The inclusion of the minority language and culture into the school has significant effects on the personality, attitudes, and the social and emotional well being of the students and their parents. The language issue in a religious community is also of impor-tance. The minority candidate must feel at ease in the language of the .host country. At times, both community and ministry err by failing to allow sufficient time f6r the acquisition of higher cog- 3~dy-.4ug~t 1996 McGinn * Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community The emotional drain of trying to live in a society that speaks one's second language is stressful for the minority religious. nitive and academic vocabulary to emerge in second-language acquisition, and, satisfied with the conversational idiom which we hear daily, tell the newly arrived religious, "There's a great need in the ministry for a Spanish-speaking religious. You know enough English now, get to work in a barrio parish. Fulfill our need in the Spanish-speaking ministry!" (The language learner, too, may become impatient with the slowness of the acquisition process and, in his or her impatience, opt to begin ministry sooner than he or she should.) This may be a great boon for the ministry of the province, but not for com-munity life. We have deprived the candi-date and the religious community of the depth and the wisdom which both can bring to community living. In this area it seems much better to err on the side of more English. rather than less. The'emotional drain of trying to live in a society that speaks one's second lan-guage is stressful for the minority religious. No matter how proficient one is in L2, there are times when learners simply shut down. Teachers, those who have studied abroad, and linguists describe the state of one who has paid attention all day to academic discourse in the weaker language and in the evening simply blanks out and is unable to comprehend even the simplest of phrases in L2. Larson and Smalley describe language shock as a component of culture shock that has profound effects on one who is trying to acquire the lan-guage of the host society. Rese~irchers point out that the disori-entation caused by language shock can induce a whole syndrome of rejection. The newly arrived must cope with the new stress and therefore must divert attention and energy from learning the second language. The learner begins to reject speakers of the tar-get language. These speakers become the source of his or her dis-orientation and, therefore, he or she has difficulty forming identifications necessary to learn the language of the host coun-try. The problem becomes even more complex if the learner per-ceives, erroneously or otherwise, that the speakers of the target language reject the learner and his or her culture .and language. Language has many paradoxical uses. Instead of opening doors, it can close them. It can,; at times, be used as a wall, or a Revlew for Religious defense to unite a group or to keep others out. Knowingly or unknowningly, fluently bilingual speakers will use the language which other members of the community do not understand to keep them out of the circle or to provide a feeling of belonging for themselves. Unless one knows the linguistic code--he or she can-not enter the inner circle. Opportunities to study the languages of the members of the community should also be offered and even encouraged for the majority members of the religious congregation. Bialystok and Hakuta treat the types of motivation in second-language learning and come to the conclusion that few of us learn a second lan-guage as an end in itself. Most of us learn it "to gain access, through verbal interaction, to cultural dealings with people who lay claim to that language." As most of us can read a language better than we can speak it, community liturgies and prayer of the hours could be said on alternate days in either language if the members of the local com-munity were in the process of~becoming bilingual. Fine language courses with new, nonthreatening and nonbelittling methodol-ogy are offered in practically every large city of the country. Corollary 1. Spending the time and energy in the attempt to learn a language used by a large number of the religious congregation (that of the host country and that of the minority cultures) is a good investment by the province in community life. B. Collaboration. Cummins claims that where the culture of the family is not given status in the school and communities and parents are kept powerless, then inferiority and lack of school progress may result. When there is parental collaboration with the teacher there is usually success. Religious communities at times tend to take the culture of origin of the member for granted and in no way envision it as a factor in the religious formation of the individual. We tend to think that their mother and dad are like our mother and dad and that their home is like our home. With the advent of people from many diverse areas of the world, the assumption no longer works if it ever did. The following is an example from education of this type of reasoning. A successful middle-school teacher recently remarked: "I just assumed that their home was like my home and for two years in middle school I demanded at least thirty minutes of written homework. Then I visited one of the homes. It was a revelation. ~dy-August 1996 McGinn ¯ Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community The.home and local community of the culturally different are areas that the religious province cannot afford to ignore. In a two-bedroom apartment three families were living (around 16 individuals). There was no quiet space, very lit.de furniture, and little ones were scurrying all around. If any homework could be done, it would be done at the kitchen-table, the only table in the home. This would be done while the five elders were watching television at the same time in the same room. I began to realize that doing homework in'a home such as that one was notan easy task. The example was not characteristic of only one family but of the vast majority of families of Hmong students at that school." Awareness of the culture and the val-ues of the minority religious is essential. Conchita Delgado-Gaitan has many stud-ies that analyze learning experiences in the home and parental strategies used to impart knowledge and values to the chil-dren. She compared the home strategies with those used by the school of the dom-inant culture to discover convergence or dissonance. She studied the linkage between the culture of the home and that of the school. The home and local community of the culturally different are areas that the religious province cannot afford to ignore. Culture shock, discussed in most cultural orientation work-shops, is not as easily remedied as one might think. This psychic ~hock is the anxiety which results from the disorientation encoun-tered upon entering a new culture. Larson and Smalley describe how essential characteristics of good mental health are often lost just by moving into a new culture. Extreme symptoms of culture shock may pass relatively quickly as ways of coping with the new environment are acquired. More subtle problems, however, may persist and produce stress which can last for years. Paul Pedersen, in his recent book, A Handbook for Developing Multicultural Awareness, confirms that culture shock is likely to last over the visitor's entire stay in an unfamiliar culture, reappear in a variety of forms, and not be limited to an initial adjustment. Spindler and Spindler, of Stanford University, have been train-ing people in ethnographic evaluation of educational environ, ments for many years. Cultural therapy, the term the ,Spindlers use to describe a procedure of reflective, cross-cultural analysis of Review for Religious individuals of different cultures through personal encounters, has become quite famous. The aim of the therapy is to promote cross cultural and intracultural behavioral understanding. The process involves open dialogue between people of different cultures (teacher and student or a member of the host culture and one of the cultural minority). It seeks to reveal to the educator and to the minority student unconscious biases and cultural ethnocentrism. Trueba shows how culture shock experienced by the culturally diverse can have an effect on the members of the host culture, and he observes: "Therefore, it is extremely important for teach-ers to realize that they are experiencing cultural shock when they try to function effectively with children who do not share their values and expectations. Academic success requires, then, that both teachers and students build learning environments in which success is possible for both." How can we make the local reli-gious communities places which assure success and fairness for all members of whatever culture? With each of the four dimensions paternalism on the part of the member of the host culture is a temptation, Among members of the religious institute, the environment should be one of equal-ity. A paternalistic attitude in this process would promote a depen-dency which would impede empowerment and fail to promote success. On the other hand, members of the religious commu-nity who have lived in other countries and those who have strug-gled to acquire another language--of host country or of the language minority--are equipped to act as culture brokers and even cultural therapists in helping to make the new culture more familiar and less strange and in creating an atmosphere which insures fairness and success. Corollary 2. Awareness of the new cultures in the religious community should be encouraged. Study of one's own culture and that of other members of the community should be pro-moted. Appreciation of the ethnic diversity of the community by listening and telling stories without ethnocentric bias and judgment will hopefully develop respect for the legitimate cultural differences of the religious community. C. Reciprocity. Cummi~as's third dimension stresses the fact that the language minority student must not simply receive the new knowledge passively but there should be a reciprocal inter-action, a dialogue in which the minority students bring their rich-ness to the process. 3n~uly-August 1996 McGinn ¯ Toward Multicultu~alizing a Religious Community In a religious community this type of sharing appears to be difficult to attain. It demands that those who have lived in the host country all their lives and have been in the religious com-munity for many more years must begin to listen to the new ones and look at the goals and mission of the congregation from their perspective. It requires a change of attitude. In a nonjudgmental manner, one can begin to act as an ethnographer and discover new realities and appreciate the vibrant faith and the beauty in approaches to the sacred which have not been part of one's own history. To do this one must allow a forum for the culturally dif-ferent and listen to them with respect. They become the teachers. Bilingual members and members who have lived in mission lands are an asset to the religious community. Religious of diverse cultures are at different levels of acculturation, and the bilingual and former missionary members of the community are equipped to act as bridge makers in opening the dialogue between the older religious of the host country and those who are culturally diverse. Corollary 3. Reciprocity is a step toward healing the rem-nants of cultural shock. "I struggle to understand and appre-ciate the minority religious' culture, language, approach to the divine, family, and community, and the newly arrived struggle to appreciate my culture, language, approach to the divine, family, and community." ~Many demands are involved in the process, but the struggle leads to mutual respect and understanding. D. Advocacy. In a school setting, Cummins insists that the majority teachers become advocates for the language minority children. Many of the instruments used in the evaluation of minor-ity students are based and standardized on the language of the majority population, and it is often easy to detect types of insti-tutionalized racism in the school and even in the hidden curric-ula. Therefore, the minority student needs someone who is able to open doors, give advice, and accompany him or her in situations which involve power and status relationships between dominant and dominated groups at different levels of a society. When we apply this to a religious community, we can begin to consider the customs of the congregation and its particular provincial statutes to discover cultural differences which could render harmonious living difficult. Advocacy involves seeing that house libraries have sufficient current books and periodicals in the mother tongue and insisting upon minority representation at Review for Religious various levels of formation and administration even to the actual selection of superiors who are open, tolerant and appreciative of other cultures represented in the community. Benjamin Schwarz states: "Dissatisfied minorities want, at a minimum, a real voice in determining their future--but a real voice for the minority means real sacrifice for the majority." Corollary. 4. Those who enjoy acceptance in the dominant society and who are comfortable with the everyday life in the religious community spontaneously offer direction and knowledgeable advocacy. They also help to provide a voice for the ethnic minority members of the community. Toward Multiculturalization Developing multicultural awareness in a community requires many changes. Pedersen concludes his work for cross-cultural counselors by stating that the many changes involved "will pro-duce a widening ripple effect as these changes bring about other changes." He continues: "We are moving toward a future that requires us to understand persons who are different from our-selves, whatever our culture might be. Developing multicultural awareness is the strategy for our survival as well as our growth in meeting the diverse needs of a multicultural global village." In a recent letter to all the friars, Herman Schaluck the gen-eral of the Order of Friars Minor, told his brothers that the new projects which the order has embarked upon in Africa, Thailand, and the former Soviet Union were intentionally international and multicultural in makeup to sign a new way of thinking. In spite of the difficulties inherent in the understanding of an international, multicultural fraternity, the order seeks this new quality of liv-ing together. The general explains: "Paul insistently states (Ga 6) that it is not a matter of being Jews or pagans, of being cir-cumcised or uncircumcised, but of being a 'new creature.' Life in an international [multicultural] fraternity is therefore not some-thing of secondary importance or a question of strategic maneu-vering: it is rather already evangelization itself by way of example." An Apostolic Challenge We considered a number of apparently hypothetical ques-tions about a religious community evolving from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous grouping. What happens? What changes ~uly-August 1996 McGinn ¯ Toward Multiculturalizing a Religious Community occur? Can it be done? Suppose we did design workshops and planning sessions on cross-cultural awareness for the total com-munity from the insights offered by education, business, and the training programs~for foreign missionaries. Suppose, to.o, we set up processes within the provincial structures for dialogue, reciprocity, and advocacy. Would the program be successful? Certainly many changes would occur, and change is almost always tension-filled and difficult to accept. However, it would be quite exciting to embark upon such a journey. It would demand much tolerance, patience, and charity on the part of the total member-ship to ensure that the program would succeed. What a sign of forgiveness, openness, trust, and conversion such a religious com-munity could offer the world around it. The approach would cer-tainly be countercultural. Only the members themselves know whether they are willing to do this. Perhaps a religious community is the only institution which can meet this challenge. I have spent many years trying to con-vince public schools, public school districts, and even welfare departments to become more multicultural but to no avail. Conversion, forgiveness, sacrifice, patience, understanding, and charity are woven into the very fabric of religious life. These are the same virtues required to make an institution multicultural. We religious are called to be a sign. Perhaps we Can be a sign to U.S. society that actually e pluribus unum is realizable. Bibliography Baker, C. Foundations of Bilingt~.al Education and Bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1993. Banks, J.A., and McGee Banks, C.A., eds. Multicultural Education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1989. Bialystok, E., and Hakuta, K. In Other Words. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Cummins, J. Empowering Minority Students. Sacramento: CABE, 1989. Delgado-Gaitan, C. "Traditions and Transitions in the Learning Process of Mexican Children: A Ethnographic View." In Spindler, G. and L. (eds.) Interpretive Ethnography of Education: At Home and Abroad. Hillsdale: Laurence Erlbaum, 1987a. Delgado-Gaitan, C. "Parent Perceptions of School: Supportive Environments for Children." In Trueba, H. (ed.) Success or Failure? Learning and the Language Minority Student. Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1987b. Review for Religious Delgado-Gaitan, C~, and' Trueba, H. Crossing Cultural Borders: Education for Immigrant Families in America. New York: Falmer, 1991. Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1970. Freire, P. The Politics of Education. Boston: Bergin and Garvey, 1985. Hanley, K., csj. Cross Cultural Training Services. Maryknoll, New York, Harr.is, ER., and Moran, R.T. Managing Cultural Differences. Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1991. Lambert, W.E., and Taylor, D.M. Coping with Cultural and Racial Diversi~y in Urban America. New York: Praeger, 1990. Larson, D.N., and Smalley,'W.A. Becoming Bilinguak A Guide to Learning Language. California: William Carey Library, 1972. Law, E.H.E The VVolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1993. Motte, personal correspondence, 1995. Otheguy, R. "Thinking about Bilingual Education: A Critical Appraisal." Harvard Educatiorial Review 52 (3), 1982. Pedersen, P. A Handbook for Developing Multicultural Awareness: Alexandria: A~. erican CounselingAssociation, 1994. Schaluck, H., OFM. "On the Way Towards a New Era," May 8. Prot. 083!.19. S'chwarz, B. "The Diversity Myth: America's Leading Export." The Atlantic Monthly 275 (5), 1985. Spindler, G., and Spindler, L., eds. Pathways to Cultural Awareness. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. Trueba, H.T., Jacobs, L., and Kirton, E. Cultural Conflict and Adaptation: The Case of Hmong Children in American Society. New York: Falmer, 1990. JUST PUBLISHED-- The Best of the Review - 5 The Church and 'Consecrated Life (see insert at back of book for ordering) "At a time when hope for religious life and its future is once again on the rise, the articles in this book offer an exceptional and much needed panorama of the critical issues of renewal faced by contemporary men and women religious. Elizabeth McDonough and David Fleming have done us an enormous favor in bringing together the Best of the Review in this area. I recommend this book enthusiastically; its authors take us another step along the journey to that future for religious life for which we all long." --Se~nSammon FMS Vicar General Marist Brothers, Rome 3~uly-August 1996 new life ROBERT E MALONEY It's Summer! A Letter to Young Religious J My dear brothers and sisters, It is wonderful to be young. At least, most of us who have grown older think so! Young adulthood is the summer of life; autumn and winter follow only later. In the vibrant years of youth, heart, respiration, and physical strength are at their peak efficiency. Our inner drives, too, are fully alive: our quest for meaning, our longing for deeper rela-tionships, our yearning to create a better future. I am writ-ing today to encourage you who are young to enjoy, and use well, the gifts of this summertimh in your life. Youth has many striking advantages. As the superior general of a community, I often see these in the lives of young religious, both men and women. Let me describe some of them briefly. First, youth has drive and enthusiasm. It is good to rejoice in youth's vigor. I can remember a period in my life when I could interview ~tudents all day long, prepar.e classes until late at night, be up again at five the next morning for prayer and the Eucharist, and then teach a full schedule. The day arrived when I could no longer do that. But I still look back with happy memories on the vibrant energies of youth. Young people can give with zest. And they want to give their lives to something'worth-while. They seek a cause, and when they find one they Robert P. Maloney CM serves as superior general of the Vincentians. His address is Congregazione della Missione; Via dei Capasso, 30; 00164 Roma, Italy. Revie~ for Religious ? launch into it with enthusiasm. ,Their dreams, their~hopes, their vision of the future have not yet been dimmed by bitter experi-ences, or failures, or the harsh fact' that much of reality changes quite slowly. Young people gaze at the world's needs and believe that they can make a contribution. Second, youth has imagination and spontaneity. Young people bring new horizons to communities~ They have the capacity to envision new solutions, They often feel free from rigid categories or structures that have become creaky or clumsily reinforced over the years. They find it easy to identify with the words of Vincent' de Paul that "love is inventive even to infinity.''1 They are willing to "dream the impossible dream." Spontaneity is one of the refreshing aspects of youth. Young people say unexpected things. They question practices that some of us older people never had any doubts about. At times we may find that. their questions make us uncomfortable or defensive. But we should by no means be quick to interpret youth's spontaneity as a sign of aggres-siveness; rather, it often comes from a genuine desire to seek the truth. Third, youth is able to change. Those of us who are older have ploughed deep furrows. It becomes increasingly harder for us to climb out of the ruts we have dug. The furrows of the young are shal-lower. They can be ploughed over. Their direction can be changed so that new waters run through them and new life sprouts up. That is why good initial formation is important for the young. They are pliable enough to ~hink new thoughts, learn new.ways, and create new things. Of course, youth has its struggles too, its gnawing problems. Let me dwell just for a moment on a few of these. Because youth is searching, it is often uncertain about its goals or even its values. Experience tells us that, today especially, young people have diffi-culty making a permanent commitment. There is so much rapid change in society, there is so much disillusionment with those whose values the young may once have prized, that they find it hard to decide where to sink their roots. This means that young people are often confused. They are grappling with the meaning of their live~i They are hesitant about making a definitive commitment. Experience tells us that, today especially, young people have difficulty making a permanent commitment. ff~uly-August 1996 Malone~ * It's Summer? One of the greatest challenges in ministry today is to present attractive, even risky, alternatives to young people and accom-pany them in the difficult task of deciding, Several recent studies point out that young'people seek explicit religious goals, intense community life and solidarity, and explicit and worldwide service to the most needy. Young people can certainly find these goals realized in the call to follow Christ faithfully and to give them-selves to the church's preferential option for the poor. Young people often struggle with thei~ sexuality. Of course, those of us who are older are engaged in the same~struggle too. But the young experience in an~ awakening way strong physical drive; sex-ual energy, a desire for close, intimate relationships. And, unfor-tunately, the turbulent years of adolescence often do not come to a calm, peaceful resolution, but rather to a negotiated truce, after which war may soon break out again. It is~helpful for those of us who live in community to recognize that this is a basic human story, not just ours. It is also important for the young to speak about their sexual struggles with great simplicity with a wise spiritual guide. Youth lacks experience. This is an inevitable fact. All of us expe~ rience life's joys and its sorrows only gradually. Growth takes time. Yet there is a deep knowledge and love that come only from experience. There is gold that can be refined only in the fire. Of Course, not everyone who experiences life's joys and .suf-ferings grows, But, on the other hand, no one grows without a healthy dose of realistic experience. Our ongoing formation pro-grams must. help young people reflect on their experience and grow from it. Having said all this, let me acknowledge that I have painted with broad strokes. Some of the gifts that I have described as characterizing young people are often found in good measure in those who are older too. Likewise, some of the problems that have briefly touched on above plague not just the young, buvalso their elders. Today let me lay before you, young religious, a series of chal-lenges. As .the superior general of an apostolic community, I find that these are the most important things in my heart as I think of the many young men and women who long to live religious life generously today. I call them challenges because my own per-sonal experience, with its frequent failures, tells me they are not easy to respond to deeply. Review for Religious Be deeply rooted in the person of Jesus. This seems obvious, but there is nothing more important that as an older brother I could say to you. "Remember," St. Vincent de Paul once wrote, "that we live in Jesus Christ by the death of Jesus Christ and that we ought to die in Jesus Christ by the life of Jesus Christ and that our life ought to be hidden in Jesus Christ and full of Jesus Christ and that in order to die like Jesus Christ it is necessary to live like Jesus Christ.''2 The Gospels ring with this conviction: Jesus is the absolute center. "I am the way, the truth, and the life," Jesus says. "No one comes to the Father except through me." "I am the vine." "I am the gate." "I am the shepherd." "I am the light." "I am the true bread come down from heaven. The one who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood will live forever.''3 Let me simply recall to you today the wonderful prayer attributed to St. Patrick: Chri]t be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in c~'uiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. I recommend two principal means for focusing on the per-son of Jesus, The first is daily meditative prayer. Make Christ the center of that prayer, especially the crucified Lord. Engage in a well-defined period of reflective prayer each day (for example, a half hour), and let the Lord capture your mind and your heart. The second means--and it is not completely distinct from the .first--is to find, love, and serve Christ in the person of the poor. They are our lords and masters. Jesus li~es on in them in a special way, particularly in the crucified peoples. It is so easy for the "world," and for us too, to become numb to their plight: the 5.7 million people of Haiti, who have been so poor for so long that their pain is no longer news; the 2.5 million Bosnian refugees, victims of "ethnic cleansing"i the 1.5 million Somalians on the edge of death by starvation; the countless Rwandans who have been brutally slain. Our contemplation of the crucified Lord can-not remain merely a pious exercise, nor can it be simply medita-tion on a past event. The Lord lives on in his members. He is .~uly-Auffust 1996 Maloney ¯ It's Summer? crucified in individual persons and in suffering peoples. The call is to see him and to serve him there. "When I was hungry you gave me to eat. When Iwas thirsty you gave me to drink.When I was naked you clothed me" (Mt 25:35-36). Learn from. the poor, and be inventive in serving them. I say this to you very directly: it is only the simple and hum~ ble who really grow in the Lord's life. Only0 they can learn the depths of God's wisdom. The saints knew this very well because they had made the gospel teachings their own. That is why the founders of communities urge. all their members to grow in sim-plicity and humility. Learn especially from the poor. They can teach all of us about gratitude for small gifts, about patience in waiting, about hoping against hope, about loving those around us, even in the midst of suffering and oppression, and about shar-ing the little that we have with our brothers and sisters. It is only when we have learned from the poor that we can be inventive in serving them. It is they who will explain to us their deepest needs, and then we can bring them gifts that will really be helpful. Your creativity and imaginativeness as young people will be nourished by what you can learn from them. They will be a life-giving source in your ongoing formation. I encou

Issue 51.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1992. ; Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1992 ¯ VOLUME 51 ¯ NUMBER 1 Review fl)r Religious (ISSN 0034-630X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-535 3048. Manuscripts, books fi)r reviexv, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious. 3601 l,indellBoulevard. St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Correspondence about the "Canonical Counsel" departmeut: Elizabeth McDonough ()P ¯ 5001 Eastcrn Avenue ¯ P.O. Box 29260 Washington, I).C. 20017. P()S'I'M~XSTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid a~ S~. Louis, Missouri, and additional offices. SUBS(~RIPTI()N RATES Single copy $5.00 includes surface mailing costs. ()he-year subscription $15.00 plus mailing costs. Two-year subscription $28.00 plus mailing costs. See inside back cover fl~r subscription infl~rmation and mailing costs. ©1992 Revieu for Religious review fre° [gii ous Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor . Assistant Editors Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer sJ Michael G. Harter sJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe David J. Hassel SJ Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden $SND Sefin Sammon FMS Wendy Wright PhD Suzanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY / FEBRUARY 1992 ¯ VOLUME 51 ¯ NUMBER 1 contents 18 24 church and ministry Ecclesial Burnout: Old Demon, New Form Richard Sparks CSP suggests some remedies for overcoming a new strain of burnout which tends to afflict church ministers. Vincent Pallotti vs. Polarization Erik Riechers SAC shares some practical steps suggested by Vincent Pallotti for spiritual regeneration in a polarized church. The Ecumenical Kernel Dennis Billy CSSR explains how church unity involves a process of committed encounter between religious traditions whose very existence implies a relationship of concrete mutual dependence. 34 46 56 direction and discernment Elements and Dynamics of a Spiritual-Direction Practicum James Keegan SJ presents a successful way of putting together a spiritual-direction practicum and the personal and clinical issues involved. On Becoming a Discerning Person Charles Reutemann FSC describes in practical terms the meaning of spiritual direction, the person of the director, and the process of the direction session. Discernment and Decision Making Brian O'Leary SJ outlines elements for a pedagogy of discernment so necessary for our contemporary human and Christian situations. 2 Revie~ for Religious religious life 64 Making Sense of a Revolution Se~in Sammon FMS assesses the present state of religious life and sets an agenda for the process of renewal. 78 The Past Is Prologue Elizabeth McDonough OP identifies three interrelated phenomena which have significant influence on the direction of religious life. 98 An Experiment in Hope Mary Carty CND and MaryJo Leddy NDS report on a carefully planned intercongregational exploration in revitalizing religious life. 109 community and missien Internationality--At What Price? Janet Malone CND challenges any community which identifies itself as international to realize the concrete demands made on every aspect of their life together. 118 The Perils of Polarity Julia Upton RSM focuses upon the common roots from which both monastic and apostolic religious life take their growth. 134 Evangelizing Community William F. Hogan CSC suggests that religious who share faith in community are the best evangelizers. 140 4 144 149 Vocation as a Journey Brother Andrew shares a personal reflection on vocation as a crucifying walk in intimate union with Jesus. departments Prisms Canonical Counsel: Clerical Institutes Book Reviews January-February 1992 3 prisms As you page through this issue, you cannot help but notice the new appearance of Review for Religious. The development of this new look involved the staff, the members of the advisory board, and the Jesuit design group called Studio J in a critical assessment of everything from the important areas of content and edi-torial policies to the nitpicking aspects of the letterspac-ing of our new typeface. Our entire effort was to launch into our second half century of publication by enhancing our traditionally fine content and presenting it in a way that is truly "reader friendly." When Review for Religious began to be published in 1942, its very title gave evidence of its intended audi-ence- women and men consecrated in a special lifeform in the Catholic Church commonly called religious life. Yet even the first editors encouraged diocesan priests to use the journal articles as helps both for growing in their spir-ituality and ministry and for appreciating the various reli-gious- life traditions. Early on, too, lay women and men, especially those identified with third-order and sodality movements, were regular subscribers. With the burgeoning of lay ministries after Vatican II, there have been a growing number of lay readers, inter-ested particularly in developing their prayer life, under-standing their own roles as ministers of Christ, and even searching for better community models for family and parish, inspired by the internal efforts of religious com-munities. Our journal's contributors, too, illustrate the wide range of our readership--women, men, lay, religious, priests, even a bishop now and then. The question arose: Should the very name Review for Religious be changed to reflect its wider audience? 4 Review for Religious After much discussion we agreed that the religious-life empha-sis retains its central place because it focuses so well the rich spir-ituality traditions within the church. A secondary title, now evident on our cover, clearly highlights this aspect. But the pur-pose of Review for Religious remains just as current and necessary after fifty years: a forum for shared reflection on the lived expe-rience of all who find that the church's rich heritages of spiritu-ality- Augustinian, Benedictine, Dominican, Carmelite, Ignatian, Franciscan, Salesian, and many others--support their personal and apostolic Christian lives. For readers coming from whatever spiritual tradition, the articles in the journal are meant to be infor-mative, practical, or inspirational, written from a theological or spiritual or sometimes canonical point of view. The journal's look, then, is meant to reinforce its purpose. While you may miss the easily scanned backcover table of con-tents, we hope that you will find our Contents pages more infor-mative by their brief indication of an article's theme and by the grouping of various articles under sectional titles. The new sec-tional titles will keep changing from issue to issue, depending on the relationships among articles published in any one issue. Both the variety of sections and the variety of articles within a section are indicative of the vision and purpose of Review for Religious. In its 1942 beginnings this journal provided a com-munication forum which was almost nonexistent among various traditions represented by religious orders. Still today the mix of articles contributes to the ongoing understandings, critiques, and movements in our religious-life heritages so that we find new insight, expand our horizons, and collaborate more effectively for the good of our church life. I find a growing tendency among church people in the United States to read only the articles or books which reinforce their own views and to ignore or condemn out of hand an alternative or opposing approach. As an editor I find myself seldom (if ever) in total agreement with any one article--even in this iournal. For the healthiness of our life in Christ, we all need to appreciate and evaluate differences, changes, and developments in and among the various traditions which, contribute to the present makeup of the church. The articles in this iournal are like prisms which sub-tly nuance light into colorful and unexpected patterns. For exam-ple, some articles present contemporary ways of understanding our traditions; others probe new community forms, prayer prac- January-February 1992 5 Prisms tices, and models of ministering. You as reader may be inspired, surprised, or even annoyed by a particular theme or approach. For me the image of a prism suggests an application of the ministerial wisdom of St. Ignatius Loyola written at a time of church his-tory rife with excommunications and denunciations. Ignatius says: it should be presupposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor's statement than to condemn it. Further, if one cannot inter-pret it favorably, one should ask how the other means it. If that meaning is wrong, one should correct the person with love; and if this is not enough, one should search out every appropriate means through which, by understanding the statement in a good way, it may be saved. Sp Ex 22 (Ganss's translation) As the task of dialogue in the church takes on even greater importance, we want Review for Religious to remain a valued resource for people serious about their spiritual growth, for those involved in ministries, for members of religious congregations, and for spiritual directors and those seeking guidance. Review for Religious is privileged to play its role in that dialogue now as it has since its beginnings. Do let us know whether you find our newly designed journal "reader friendly." David L. Fleming sJ 6 Review for Relig4ous RICHARD C. SPARKS Ecclesial Burnout Old Demon, New Form cal, emotional, intellectual, social, and even spiritual energy--is reappearing among pastoral team members with alarming frequency. In those heady years immedi-ately following Vatican II, there appeared a strain of this self-induced dysfunction among zealous priests, sisters, brothers, and lay ministers who too literally tried to fol-low Paul's injunction "to be all things to all people." In their well-intentioned attempts to "be there" for the old and the young, the churched and the unchurched, parish-ioners and strangers alike, many in pastoral ministry "burned out." But it is not this "workaholic burnout''1 that I intend to discuss--though it still exists. I intend to discuss what I call ecclesial burnout. Most of us professed,, ordained, or hired in the last ten to fifteen years were schooled in a revised, more col-laborative model of ministry. This model is marked by job descriptions, staff meetings, attempts at collegial dia-logue, claiming one's personal needs and space, in short, Richard C. Sparks CSP is an editor at Paulist Press. He holds a doctorate in moral theology from Catholic University, with a specialty in biomedical ethics. He serves as an ethics consultant for several healthcare facilities and regularly offers professional and pastoral workshops on bioethics, sexuality, and moral deci-sion making. His address: Mount Paul Novitiate; Ridge Road; Oak Ridge, New Jersey 07438. church and ministry January-February 1992 7 a greater appreciation for the need of each minister to set limits and to nurture both professional and personal relationships. Ideally this leads to happier, healthier pastoral ministers, men and women who have found a better balance of work, play, prayer, exercise, rest, good nutrition habits, and so on. However, as most practitioners will admit, the team model in its all-too-human incarnations is no panacea. The lived experience of rule by com-mittee and collegial discernment does not always match the ideal. If the workshops I have given in various pastoral settings around the country are any indication, there is a new strain of ministerial burnout. It began in the early 1980s and seems to be immune to the simple correctives of prioritizing one's schedule, keeping in touch with friends, and religiously taking one's day off. The power of this ecclesial burnout to corrupt and to debil-itate formerly effective pastoral ministers (lay, clergy, and reli-gious alike) comes not from an overzealous commitment to work nor from an inflated sense of Lone Ranger ministry. Rather, I think, it is rooted in an erroneous, or at least inadequate, sense of church (that is, one's assumed ecclesiology). For the last five years I have been battling a mild-to-moderate case of it myself and am now slowly on the road to recovery. I feel it, I see it, others confide it, newcomers discern it, col-leagues transfer or leave church ministry altogether because of it--ecclesial burnout. No doubt much of it parallels other forms of psychological burnout. It certainly seems to fall within psy-chiatrist Herbert Freudenberger's classic definition: % state of fatigue or frustration brought about by devotion to a cause, way of life, or relationship that failed to produce the expected reward.''2 The symptoms are the same--long-term sullenness, a cynical edge, an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion, dissipated energy, forgetfulness, and depression (clinical or the everyday variety). People who suffer from ecclesial burnout frequently cite the cases of Charles Curran and Archbishop Hunthausen or the recent Vatican treatment of Rembert Weakland as precipitating their low mood. The suppression of certain catechisms, the removal of longstanding imprimaturs from books, the influence of CUF (Catholics United for the Faith) in Vatican curial circles, and the decidedly juridical tone of some CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) documents contribute to a certain fear that "the party's over." For some, particular diocesan, chancery, or intracommunity ev~counters contribute to a general feeling of 8 Review for Religious malaise. It might sound like a simple case of the liberals' lament, revisionist Catholics being disheartened by what some see as a mid-course conservative correction following a quarter century of Vatican II experimentation.3 But many who placed great hopes in the church after Vatican II increasingly feel that aggiornamento (renewal) may be short-lived, that this era of church renewal may be the aberration and not the norm, and that we may soon be back to church history's "business as usual"--politics, legalism, inquisitions, and all. Those who suffer workaholic burnout are depressed that they personally did not measure up, could not be all things to all people, fell short of some impossible agapeic ideal. By contrast, among those who suffer ecclesial burnout, there is less a question of antipathy about personal imperfections and more of a sense of dis-illusionment with the church and its abil-ity to really be "the kingdom come." I hear story after story of frustration, that no-win Ecclesial burnout does not come from an overzealous commitment to work rlor from an inflated sense of Lone Ranger ministry. feeling of being the person caught in the middle--between the Vatican and people in the pew, between liberals and conserva-tives, between pro-school and pro-CCD proponents, between the "townies" and the university students, between right-to-lifers and everybody else, between the diocese (or one's generalate) and the parish, between Catholics and the wider society, between a pas-tor and other team or council members. Many feel drained, impo-tent, frustrated in their attempts to mediate, to get the church's act together, whether locally or in some larger arena of the church universal. While there are many contributing factors to this experience, I am convinced that one help toward navigating the shoals suc-cessfully is for each of us to reexamine our own ecclesial presup-positions and expectations. The insights that follow may be self-evident to some, but for me they have been eye-openers, a tremendous help on the road to recovery and reinvigoration. Much literature has been written expounding the theory that the dominant image of church in the decades, even centuries, pre-ceding Vatican II was the institutional model. In his often quoted January-February 1992 9 ~÷~s ¯ Ecclesial Burnout Models of the Church, Avery Dulles noted in 1974 that, while all five models--hierarchical institution, mystical communion, sacrament of Christ, herald of God's word, and servant of secular society-- coexist in the church, during any given era one or another tends to dominate.4 In the two major Vatican II documents on the church, as well as in the Final Report of the Synod of 1985, one can find all five models vying for central place,s Despite several decades of the-ologizing and deferential homiletic bows to the notions of church as people of God, mystical body, sacrament of Christ's ongoing presence, and herald of Gospel justice, it is my contention that our pastoral efforts after Vatican II expressed, for the most part, the same model fostered earlier, namely, the institutional model. Sure, we were going to do it better: more effective liturgy in the ver-nacular; more participatory parish, diocesan, and community gov-ernance; more developmental, story-laden religious education; more process-oriented evangelization (RCIA); more experiential approaches to reconciliation; and more social-justice-oriented ecumenism. But we were still about the task of running an insti-tution, making our little corner of the vineyard the best-struc-tured parish, Newman Center, diocesan office, or apostolate around. It seems to me that many of us made a subtle shift or trans-ference. After some initial flirtations with personal workaholism and its consequent form of burnout, we no longer expected our-selves to be supermen or superwomen, serving selflessly twenty-four hours a day, in season and out. But at the same time we did not reject the drive for perfectionism altogether. Rather, we trans-ferred it to our rejuvenated image of the church, expecting our post-Vatican II ecclesial structures to be or to become what we individually could not achieve. The church would or should become wholly Spirit-filled, renewed at all levels, from the Vatican curia, through the USCC, chancery, and intracommunity offices, right down to our own parish or center in Name-Your-City, USA (or Canada). If we all worked hard enough, whether as Lone Rangers or as collaborative partners, we could "pull this Vatican II thing off," making the Roman Catholic Church what some supposed it was intended to be, the kingdom of God incarnate on earth . . . as it is in heaven. "Oops," as one of my Catholic U. professors would have screamed, "you collapsed your eschaton." In such hopeful 10 Review for Religious expectation there seems to be no room for human sinfulness and finitude, too little room for well-intentioned visionaries, reform-ers, and sincere counterreformers to make mistakes. If we really can successfully create the reign of God on earth, then who needs redemption? We could cancel Christ's second coming. There would be no need for his break-through return at the end of time. In our newfound Camelot-like enthusiasm, I fear that we plotted a course destined to dis-appoint. Ask those priests, religious, and lay ministers who opted to leave. Ask those who had physical or emotional breakdowns. Ask those who are now recovering alcoholics, fooda-holics, adult children of alcoholics, or victims of other addictions and dysfunctions. Ask those who joined a religious order or diocese, only to be disillusioned when real life in community did not match vocation brochures or one's own idealistic expectations. Some of them are still searching for the diocesan, religious-order, or denominational "promised land." For the most part we seem to have faced the fact that none of us individually is Jesus Christ (and that even he faced his own doubts, fears, and temptations). By acknowledging that worka-holic perfectionism is wrong, some of us have conquered the demon of "works righteousness," allowing God's tender mercies to bathe us and to begin to heal our brokenness and wounds. Workaholic burnout seems to be waning, at least in the Catholic community.6 However, I do not think we have made great strides in grant-ing a similar benefit of the doubt and benevolent forgiveness to the church and its leaders (including ourselves) for not measuring up, for not ushering in the fullness of the kingdom of God. Hans Kiing, echoing the pioneering ecclesiology of Yves Congar, con-tinues to point out that the church is sinful as well as graced.7 Martin Luther, credited with coining the adage simuljustus etpec-cator, would hardly be surprised to hear that twentieth-century Roman Catholics are having trouble accepting that their church not only was, but is, and always will be sinful, in need of God's abiding assistance, patience, redemption, and frequent forgive-ness. If we really can successfully create the reign of God on earth, then who needs redemption ? January-February 1992 11 Sparks ¯ Ecclesia~Burnout Thus, the warning sign of ecclesial burnout is the sadness, bordering on depression, that has deeply affected many idealistic pastoral ministers upon their discovering that the church is not, and likely never will be, synonymous with the kingdom of God. But does not church teaching say that they are supposed to be one and the same, that the church (especially in its Roman Catholic incarnation) equals the kingdom of God? No, the bish-ops and theologians gathered at Vatican II rejected such a notion in an earlier draft for Lumen Gentium, in which the church in its fullest sense (that is, God's reign or kingdom) was to be equated with the Roman Catholic Church. In its place, the church's official magisters declared that the "church, established and ordained as a society in this world, sub-sists in the Catholic Church''8 (emphasis mine). Despite arguments to the contrary by some dissident conservatives, most ecclesiolo-gists take this to mean that, while the Roman Catholic Church manifests to some degree Christ's cosmic presence, it is not the sum and substance of church nor of the kingdom of God in their fullness. The visible church, at any point in its history, is never a spotless manifestation of the "mystical body," church in the ideal. Lumen Gentium goes on to propose that all Christians, the chil-dren of Israel, Islamic believers, other monotheists, as well as all who seek life's source and meaning with sincere hearts are some-how "related to the People of God," kin in some concentric sense in this family called church.9 The church then, in its most cosmic and echatological sense, is not synonymous with any denomination, though some churches--more than others, and in some historical eras more than others--better embody the call to be communion, sacra-ment, herald, servant, and institution. For those of us tempted to shrink the meaning of church to the institutional denomination or subset in which we have been professed, hired, or ordained, it is well to keep reminding ourselves that the kingdom to come, on earth and hereafter, is bigger. You might be tempted at this point to remark, "What you're saying is fine, but it doesn't apply to me. I already learned in ecclesiology class that the church is the imperfect pilgrim people of God and that it in some sense includes a wide variety of ecu-menically related brothers and sisters." My response is yes and no. I think most of us comprehend this broader ecclesial vision academically (in our heads) and even present it fairly effectively 12 Review for Religious in inquiry or RCIA programs. But I am not so convinced that we have let that broader vision of church, that benefit of the doubt about what can and cannot be accomplished in our lifetime, sink down into our souls, our intuitions, our feelings, our expectations about life as pastoral ministers in the real church of the 1980s and 1990s. I suggest that many of us could benefit from prayerful, per-sonal, and communal reflection on and attempts to incarnate a broader vision. The "kingdom of God" is not an institution, but a designation for any and all people of goodwill who are about God's business. Whether one views this in the language of Rahner's "Anonymous Christian" or in any of a number of more traditional categories (for example, mystical body, invincible ignorance), the community of believers, those who will share in the fullness of redemption, is not coterminous with card-carrying Roman Catholics or even avowed Christians more broadly considered.1° If I measure the coming of the kingdom with myopic vision, focused solely on institutional success or the extent to which my ministerial locus is perfectly fruitful and personally satisfying, I am destined to be disappointed--by my own impoverished "institu-tional" ecclesiology and by a graced but sinful church that always falls short of the ideal. In such a way, I think, many professional Catholic ministers (lay, religious, and clergy alike) are spinning their wheels, burning up psychic energy on form and parochial structures, not Gospel substance. Either we invest too much time and talent trying to create the perfect institutional program, or else we spend time bemoaning the fact that many of our best-laid parochial plans come to naught or go awry. In the process, frus-trations mount, leading to personal and ministerial dissatisfac-tion, depression, departures, and so on. Voile, ecclesial burnout, or maybe I should say burnout induced by unrealistic ecclesio-logical expectations. It seems to me that any proposal for recovery from this form of burnout entails an attitudinal shift. We can change our atti-tude in either of two ways. First, we can expand our definition of church in the light of Lumen Gentium, allowing that no denom-ination or institution can or will incarnate it fully. It takes a lot of The warning sign of ecclesial burnout is sadness, bordering on depression. January-February 1992 13 Sparks ¯ Ecclesial Burnout self-reminding to allow this ecclesiology to sink in, to become our true modus vivendi. We need to reconceive ourselves as min-isters not solely of the Vatican-based Roman Catholic denomi-nation, nor even of the Christian tradition explicitly professed, but of the elusive, ever evolving church of Pentecost, mindful that the fruit of our labor, though real, will be limited at best. Our whole identity as a church employee or minister ought not to be caught up in structural successes and programmatic gains. This broader view of church, if taken to heart, can free us to relish grace incarnate wherever we find it, being less obsessed with insti-tutional achievements and shortcomings. The second change of attitude, in some ways a semantic vari-ation on the first, involves constricting our definition of church, letting it be a referent for various institutional efforts to incarnate faithful and Christ-like living, while conceiving of our ministry more broadly, focused on the wider kingdom of God. Thus we see ourselves less as minions of the institutional church (though not denying our sacramental role and ecclesial responsibilities) and more as ministers or facilitators of the kingdom, God's reign in time and space in all its manifestations. As Patrick Brennan phrases it in his recent best-seller Re-Imagining the Parish: Is the church an end in itself?. No! In this more traditional view of church, the church as movement, as people in a sacred relational bond of faith, exists as servant and instru-ment of something larger, more important than itself--that is, the reign or kingdom of God.11 The kingdom comes in myriad ways, some explicitly religious, many only implicitly so. We can and do find God incarnate in Paschal Triduum liturgies as well as in rather routine daily Masses; in powerful sacramental moments as in exquisite sunsets or a deer crossing the road at some country retreat; in the warmth of old friends, comfortable clothes, and mellow music as well as in the discovery of new relationships and the unexplored terrain of new ideas; in the gathering of colleagues and friends for professions, ordinations, anniversaries, and even funerals; and in vacation times far away from community members and parish life. Wherever there is love, life, and hope (that is, resurrection) in the face of life's limits, including death, we who are Christian ministers should point and say, "There is God's kingdom at hand." When those life-giving moments are in church (liturgy, Scripture, religious education, a retreat weekend, social-justice ministry), 14 Review for Religious let us sing a full-throated alleluia. But when such moments are part of church in its more cosmic sense or beyond the church in a kingdom-coming sense (symphony orchestras, art, nature, Windham Hill albums, even in Leo Buscaglia tapes and some New Age con-cepts), there too we should point to God's incarnate grace and voice praise. Over a decade ago I heard Richard McBrien use the parable of the ten lepers (Lk 17:11-19) as a type for this broader concept of church vis-h-vis the kingdom of God. He noted that all ten lepers were made clean, that is, all ten were redeemed. All ten were made ready for the heavenly banquet. The tenth leper, the one who realized what had been done to and for him, returned to give thanks, to praise God, and to be a herald of this good news. That tenth leper, McBrien suggested, is the church in its institutional manifesta- The community of believers, those who will share in the fullness of redemption, is not coterminous with card-carrying Roman Catholics. tions. We avowed Christians realize God's mighty and merciful deeds. We give thanks (Eucharist) not only in our own name, but in behalf of all creation. We praise God not only for our own lot in life, but also for the blessings bestowed on all of creation and especially on the human family. We strive to live, to speak about, and to incarnate the good news of God's benevolent creation and offer of redemption in every time and place. But it is crucial to remember that the healing of the ten (that is, redemption of the whole) is not primarily dependent on our success. God's healing Spirit blows where it will. Christ's invitation, redemption, and healing touch are not limited by our personal or institutional efforts. In this motif, the kingdom of God is bigger than the church which participates in it and attempts, more and less suc-cessfully, to proclaim it. Whether one equates the kingdom of God with "the church" in its ideal form and uses the same word "church" for those graced but imperfect institutional efforts, or whether one conceives of the kingdom of God as a fuller reality and all institutional churches as more and less successful attempts to embody kingdom or Gospel values, the result seems to be the same. We approach our institutional church--with its papacy, curia, national conferences, January-February 1992 15 generalates, dioceses, parishes, centers, and committee struc-tures- with more realistic and modest expectations. Sin abounds, but grace abounds more. Successes mount up, but so do failures. We have peaks and valleys in our efforts to "do ministry," whether as rugged individuals or as team players. For those who are not intimately bound up with the institu-tional church, these reflections may seem self-evident. But for those of us so imbued with an institutional sense of church, pro-grammed by our own socioethnic heritages and an underlying, intuited, and almost infused Roman Catholic ethos, it may be lib-erating to be confronted by this challenge to broaden our hori-zons, to stretch either our image of church or our sense of ministry to be more kingdom-oriented, less ecclesially confined. As one minister phrased it, "only recently have I been able to proclaim honestly that I cannot save myself. My salvation [and the church's] is only in the gift of God's grace through Christ.''Jz Keep your chin up, your chest out, your personal and com-munal relationships nurtured, your prayer life deepened, and, for God's sake and your own, do not lose your sense of humor. Do not let worries and disappointments about church or parish or com-munity shortcomings dampen your hope. You are not perfect, we are not perfect, they are not perfect--and never will be. So lighten up. Take care of yourself physically, emotionally, intellectually, socially, and spiritually. No use getting "burned out" by unful-filled and unrealistic expectations, personally or ecclesially. "Do not collapse your eschaton." Notes I See, for example, Jerry Edelwich and Archie Brodsky, Burn-Out: Stages of Disillusionment in the Helping Professions (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980). Recent theological studies into the meaning of genuine Christian love suggest that agape alone, wholly other-centered love, is not only a human impossibility, but most likely a mythical unreality. Not even God, despite treatises to the contrary, is wholly other-centered, sola agape. In the Trinity there seems to be some measure of philia, mutual love one for another, within the Godhead, as well as some degree of eros, personal satisfaction in eternal life and in relationship among each of the divine Persons. Add God's involvement with and seeming delight in creation and we profess a God who is love in all its dimensions--selfless, mutual, and personally fulfilling. The varied literature on ministerial burnout includes a classic text and 16 Review for Religious a new volume: John Sanford, Ministry Burnout (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1982); Robert R. Lutz and Bruce T. Taylor (eds.), Surviving in Ministry (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990). 2 Herbert J. Freudenberger, Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), p. 13. 3 Bernard Hiiring sadly labels this the curial process of "restoration." For further analysis of these trends and H~ring's insights, see Bernard H~iring, "The Role of the Catholic Moral Theologian," in Charles E. Curran (ed.), Moral Theology: Challenges for the Future (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 32-47; "A Letter to the Pope," Tablet (30 June 1990); "The Church I Want," Tablet (28 July 1990); "Life in the Spirit," Tablet (4 August 1990). 4Avery Dulles SJ, Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, 1974); A Church to Believe In (New York: Crossroad, 1982). s Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church); Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). Synod of Bishops, "The Final Report," Origins 15 (19 December 1985): 444-450. The ecclesiology in each of these is discussed in Avery Dulles SJ, '% Half Century of Ecclesiology," Theological Studies 50 (1989): 419-442. 6 The 1990 Lutz/Taylor anthology, Surviving in Ministry (note 1 above), was written primarily for a Protestant audience, indicating that what I have called "workaholic burnout" is a current issue for many mainline Protestant ministers. The book, however, has application for religious, clergy, and especially lay ministers in the Catholic Church, people striving to balance ministerial work with a reasonable home and social life. 7 Dulles, "A Half Century of Ecclesiology," 423-425, 433-434; see also Hans Kiing, Reforming the Church Today: Keeping Hope Alive (New York: Crossroad, 1990). ~ Vatican II, Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constinltion on the Church), no. 8. 9Ibid, nos. 14-17. 10 Some more conservative readers might think that I am flirting with heresy. After all, there is an ancient patristic maxim that "outside the church there is no salvation." Seniors and church-history buffs may remember that Boston's Father Leonard Feeney tested the Catholic Church's interpretation of this in the 1940s by asserting that outside the Roman Catholic Church no one could be saved. He suffered excommunication for this ahistorical denominational overreaching of the definition of church, receiving reconciliation only after a nuanced recantation in later life. ** Patrick J. Brennan, Re-Imagining the Parish (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 12. 12 W. Benjamin Pratt, "Burnout: A Spiritual Pilgrimage," in Lutz/Taylor, Surviving in Ministry, p. 108. January-February 1992 17 ERIK RIECHERS Vincent Pallotti vs. Polarization o say that we live in a polarized church is to state the painfully obvious. The church is full of some very angry people, and this anger is dividing it into many factions. All around us we find examples of the growing polarization which is sepa-rating brothers and sisters in the Christian community. In our parishes we find different groups struggling for control over the direction of the community. In the dioceses different interest groups push their agenda without concern for the legitimate con-cerns and problems of segments of the local church. On the national and international levels, we can find the same struggle among opposing factions with only an increase in the amount of power and control that is being fought over. To be brief, polar-ization based on anger is a horrible and prevalent reality in our church. We are rapidly becoming people who fight for our ideo-logical causes and, therefore, are filled with an ideological anger towards those who disagree with us. Thus, liberation theologians are angry with classical theologians, classical theologians are angry with conservatives, conservatives are angry with progressives, the youth with the older generation, the laity with the clergy, and the clergy are angry and suspicious of the laity. Finally, there are those who are angry at everybody in the church. Our polarization often comes from anger that stems from ideology and not faith or theology. Ideological anger is based on real pain, be it mental, spiritual, or emotional. But it is an anger justified on ideological grounds. This anger feeds on itself, refuses to seek healing and reconciliation. It enjoys perpetuating itself, Erik Riechers SAC wrote "Love and Apostolate" for our November/ December 1988 issue. His address is 321 90th Avenue S.E.; Calgary, Alberta; Canada T2J 0A1. 18 Review for Religious enjoys no reflective moment. Instead, the knee-jerk reaction becomes the norm of response. Gradually our perception of the issue is clouded, and we replace individuals with neat stereotypes. Finally, we justify our anger by hiding it behind our "cause" and then declaring it righteous, when in fact, by this time, it is often pure hatred based on a gut reaction. Such a polarization, how-ever, has a price tag, and an expensive one at that. The first victim of polarization in the church is our sense of humor. When we are ideologically angry, we are no longer able to laugh at ourselves or with one another. The same humor which used to ease the tensions of our disagreements now adds to them. The foibles and weaknesses that once were laughed at because of their absurdity are no longer funny, for adherents of ideology tend to make no distinction between the allegiance they demand for their cause and that which they claim for themselves. This does not make for easy self-critical observation which is the root of humor. The seriousness which was once preserved for the issue itself is now extended to the proponents, so that not just the cause is on the line, but their very persons are at stake. Honesty is the second victim of polarization based on ideo-logical anger. As our anger grows, our honesty begins to shrivel. The real issues are soon forgotten and fall by the wayside. Personal animosities enter the arena once reserved for the matter at hand, and the issue has become a chance for us to vent our spleens. There is a willingness to see every form of evil in the others, but to ignore or justify the same attributes in ourselves. The best example is the parishioner who bemoans the stubborn-ness of another person in the parish, but describes his or her own intransigence as tenacity in the cause of justice. Sullenly we refuse to acknowledge even the smallest positive sign in the others, yet deem ourselves to be the last bastion of virtue and truth. Here the truth dies an ignominious death. Therefore, it becomes pos-sible for people in the parish to complain that their fellow parish-ioners do not listen to the authority of the pastor, but then refuse to follow the same authority when they themselves disagree with it. On the national church scene, there are some who decry the heavy-handed authority of those in positions of power, yet actu-ally advocate the same methods to further their own cause. In each case, the people who are caught up in the throes of ideo-logical anger have lost the ability to see and recognize the truth. But those who cannot recognize the truth cannot recognize Christ, ~anuary-February 1992 19 Riecbers ¯ Pallotti vs. Polarization the Truth. As a consequence it becomes easy enough to resort to stubbornness and call it fidelity, to savagely attack the integrity of another and call it defending the faith, or to speak with vitriolic cruelty and then label it righteous indignation. Charity is the final victim of our polarization; especially here we pay a heavy price. This is the devastating moment in which brothers and sisters refuse each other table fellowship. Parishioners will not associate with one another, and parish coun-cils replace dialogue with diatribe. Every motive is impugned as we expect the others to be as rotten and nasty as we have made them out to be. No longer is there a willingness to grant the ben-efit of the doubt or to assume the best. Distrust becomes the rule as the grip of our anger slowly squeezes our hearts dry. Yet the bleakness of the picture I have drawn is not a neces-sity and can be overcome. The dreariness of polarization can be lightened with the brilliance of the spiritual life. The polariza-tion of the church we live in can be seen as the result of our sin-ful brokenness, but it can also be seen as a call to a new fidelity. It is our spiritual lives which are suffering most from the atmo-sphere of poisoned debate and mistrust. Recognizing that we have strayed from the path of Jesus Christ, we always have the oppor-tunity to respond anew to the call of the Lord. There are cer-tainly many ways of achieving this, but I would like to suggest the way of a very special man, St. Vincent Pallotti (1795-1850). A man of incredible spiritual stature, he is to this day an effective and powerful teacher of the spiritual life for thousands of members of the Union of the Catholic Apostolate. It is my firm conviction that he has a great deal to offer all of us in the polarized church and that he can point out to us a way of spiritual regeneration. Pallotti's first response to a polarized church is to emphasize the need of putting our focus on God. He is a staunch proponent of such a focus. Repeatedly he calls upon his listeners to channel their energy and effort into God. In one of his most famous prayers, he lists the many things in life that people pursue, but then admonishes us to seek God alone. "Not the intellect, but God. Not the will, but God. Not the heart, but God . Not food and drink, but God .Not worldly goods, but God .God in all and forever." In another passage he writes, "I want nothing but God: nothing, nothing." It is in this God-centeredness that Pallotti offers us an antidote for the self-centeredness which is at the root of all our polarization. When we focus on God and the 20 Review for Religious magnificent work of redemption wrought for our sake, we see our causes and our self-interest for what they truly are: petty and insignificant. The God-centeredness of Pallotti would root us again in the essential mission of Christ and wean us from the pre-occupation with our own agenda. The more we fill our lives with God alone, the less room is left for our own narrow and selfish ideological causes. Pallotti goes on to offer us a second response to polarization in the church by emphasizing the Pauline challenge to become all things to all people. If in the first instance Pallotti prays for a focused heart, in the sec-ond he prays for a responsive heart. As Father Francesco Amoroso, a leading Pallotti scholar, points out, the closer Pallotti draws to God, the closer he draws to his creatures and the greater is his yearning to become responsive to the infinite love to which he has drawn close. "I want to help the poor as well as I can . I want to become food and drink and clothing in order to alleviate their need. I want to be transformed into light for the blind, hearing for the deaf, and health for the sick." In these touching words of prayer, Pallotti shows us the result of a heart aimed at responding to the need of our brothers and sisters, namely, a shattering of the bondage to egotistical and ideological anger. For Pallotti it is per-fectly clear that a heart made responsive by God's infinite love destroys polarization because it is more concerned with the need of the other than with the desire to be successful or right. Pallotti was a man who cherished the communion of the church. He saw our communion as something of an essentially sacred nature because it is rooted in love and built upon that love. Pallotti describes love as the substantial constituent of the church, without which all things decline. Thus, Pallotti challenges us to heed the call to live as church. The church is a communion of brothers and sisters united by their shared life with God and one another in the power of baptism. This shared existence is nour-ished by their participation in the one bread and one cup offered on the one altar of the Lord. They share a common calling in Christ and are led by the same word which calls them to com-munion and demands of them a common sharing in the fate and destiny of one another and of Christ. In God-centeredness Pallotti offers us an antidote for self-centeredness. ~anuary-February 1992 21 Riecbers ¯ Pallotti vs. Polarization We seem to have forgotten that there is no opposition party in the church. Yet we are rapidly losing this understanding of ourselves as church, a loss Pallotti considered intolerable. Instead, we have replaced the image of church as communion with the image of church as parliament. In parliament many parties fight for power, each interested in furthering its cause and hindering the policies of the other parties. Nothing binds individuals together save the desire to be the party in power. In the search for power and the realization of their cause, they constantly belittle, demean, and devalue the efforts and ideas of those they oppose. Above all, a par-liament does not have love as its substantial constituent. Sometimes we seem to have forgotten that there is rio opposition party in the church. We all belong to the community, we are all moving in the same direction. There are no enemies to beat off, only brothers and sisters we must struggle to understand. We belong to the same family, even when we are of dif-fering mind-set. Naturally, this does not deny the possibility of disagreement and differing opinions. Yet, when we disagree or differ, it is as parts of one community that we do so. The force of our differences must be balanced by the strength of our love for one another as brothers and sisters. If getting our own way, winning the argument, or being proven correct becomes more important than preserving our bond of love as community, then we no longer heed the call of Christ. Pallotti was a man of great humility, always struggling to rec-ognize the reality of his life as a sinner who was redeemed by infinite love. This too is part of Pallotti's challenge to us today: to heed the call to live in humility and reconciliation. Humility means that we are rooted in reality, that we perceive reality as it is and not as we would have it. Upon recognizing our reality we abandon exaggerated self-assertion, give up self-righteousness, allow the truth of our sinfulness to stand before our eyes, and we rid ourselves of the illusions of our grandeur, power, and perfec-tion. Only in humility do we find the ability to serve God and neighbor because it is in humility that we see them both as they truly are. Reconciliation becomes possible because we recognize both grace and sin in ourselves and in others. We can be a peo-ple that lives mutual complementarity in the Body of Christ 22 Review for Religious because with the clarity of humility we can acknowledge the charisms in the other members of the church, even if they should not agree with us in every question. Like Pallotti, we are in good shape when despite our differences we realize that we would be impoverished without the gifts and talents of the others. Finally, Pallotti can offer us the simple lesson of humor. If we possess humility, we can laugh at our vanity and pride. The positions we once defended with such venom remain important, but our actions often look as foolish as they actually were. The sweeping generalizations made in the heat of angry debate sud-denly bring a sheepish smile to our lips and a somewhat rueful laugh from our hearts. Thomas More put it well when he prayed for a sense of humor and the grace to understand a joke so that he would know a bit of joy in this life and pass it on to others. That gift of humor is very much a part of our calling, and it is a criti-cal part of the healing needed in a polarized church. For when we are able to laugh at ourselves and one another, we are able to leave behind the anger and the pain and to invest our energy, dedication, and commitment in the only cause that really mat-ters, the kingdom of God. Pallotti's sense of humor is not often described since the hagiographers had other interests in mind when writing about him. But there are subtle hints of a gentle humor in the man, and there is no doubt in my mind that his humor helped him to overcome the many daunting obstacles he faced in his lifetime. For, if Pallotti did not have a sense of humor, we would be hard pressed to explain the gentleness, patience, and kindness which marked his entire ministry and life. Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke with eloquence of his dream of a world without social injustice and racial hatred. Pallotti too had a dream of a new reality, a dream he called many to share with him. We dream of a church which has been swept clean of polarization and ideological anger by the refreshing wind of the Holy Spirit. We dream of a church of mutual complementarity where the ordained and the laity cooperate rather than compete; where young and old are fulfilled rather than frightened by each other; where women and men complement rather than contra-dict each other; where diversity does not mean division and learn-ing can replace lambasting. We dream of a church where the pure waters of coresponsibility will extinguish the burning flames of power, domination, and polarization. .~anuary-February 1992 23 DENNIS J. BILLY The Ecumenical Kernel call for Christian unity an authentic and wide enough theological basis for diverse doctrinal and moral opinion. Such a finding can be arrived at only through a close examination of the various assumptions of that call, not the least of which concerns the very meaning of the term "oneness" itself. This, in turn, must be inte-grated with the whole of theology and in such a way that the integrity of each of the Christian traditions is maintained. The Theological Basis of Ecumenism Theologically the call to Christian unity can be traced to a number of well-known New Testament texts. Jesus' priestly prayer for solidarity among those who believe (Jn 17:21), Paul's chal-lenging description of the oneness of those baptized in Christ (Ga 3:27-28), and the eloquent call to unity in faith, baptism, and Spirit expressed by the author of Ephesians (4:4-5) are but a few of the many texts which come to mind (for example, Jn 14:20, Ac 4:32, Rin 10:12, 1 Co 12:13, Col 3:11, Heb 6:12). When taken together with Irenaeus's understanding of the church's unity of faith in both heart and soul (Adversus haereses, 1.10.2), Cyprian's notion of the unity of the church as the source of salvation (De ecdesiae unitate, 6), and Nicea's definition of the signs of the church Dennis Billy CSSR, who has often contributed to our pages, continues to reside at Accademia Mfonsiana; Via Merulana, 31; C.P. 2458; 00100 Roma, Italy. 24 Review for Religious as "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" (italics mine), these texts support the classical theological claim of the church's indivisible nature. Such evidence, however, must not be taken at face value. Beneath it lies the question why the call for unity holds such a prominent place in the texts of Christian antiquity. Do these texts portray a historical reality or a theologized hope? Do they reveal a concrete picture of the ecclesial circumstances of their times? Or do they point instead to the discouraging and often embarrassing experience of disunity within the ranks of the early church com-munities? This latter possibility seems more than likely. To sup-port this claim, one need merely point to the first-century tensions between Jewish and Gentile Christians over the need to adhere to the letter of the Mosaic law (see Acts 15), or to the Gnostic threat within the early-second-century church of Antioch which led Ignatius to see the value of a strong monarchical episcopacy, or to the third-century controversy between Carthage and Rome over the rebaptism of the lapsed, or even to the hostile division between Catholic and Arian camps in the pre-Nicene church of the early fourth century. It must also be remembered that so-called hereti-cal ideas often develop within existing ecclesial structures and are labeled as such only when circumstances push the church's teach-ing authority to articulate for its members a more precise theo-logical doctrine. In this respect, heterodoxy occasions the historical context within which orthodoxy struggles continually to refine itself. This relation of codependence in the history of Christian thought needs much further study and clarification. It comes as no small surprise, then, that one of the greatest feats of the Second Vatican Council was its dogged attempt to invert the historical dynamics of ecumenical relations from neg-ative contrariety (that is, heterodox/orthodox codependence) to cooperative dialogue. While acknowledging that the one church of Christ subsists visibly in the Catholic Church (Lume~ Gentium, 8), the council fathers recognized varying degrees of incorpora-tion into Christ's Body and, for the first time ever, the existence of other churches or ecclesiastical communities (Lumen Gemium, 14-16). They also called for the restraint of prejudicial attitudes, dialogue between competent experts, more cooperation in work-ing for the good of humanity, prayer undertaken in common, and the ongoing task of renewal and reform (Unitatis Redintegratio, 4). The intention of these challenging doctrinal innovations was January-February 1992 25 Billy ¯ Ecumenical Kernel to foster within ecumenical relations: (1) a conciliatory attitude towards the divisions of the past, (2) a realistic attitude towards the possibilities of the present, and (3) a hopeful attitude for the future. The immediate result has been more than two decades of intense dialogue between the Catholic Church and virtually every major Christian denomination and non-Christian religion. The Meaning of Christian Unity From these discussions a number of questions about the nature of Christian unity have arisen. Is the sought-after unity something which exists in the transcendent, other-worldly dimen-sion of Christ's Mystical Body? Is it to have visible expressions in the world in which we live? Must these expressions be of a structural or institutional nature? Are these expressions neces-sary to the nature of the church? Is an absolute uniformity of doctrine and morals essential to the rule of faith? Is it something that people can and should experience in the concrete expres-sions of their daily lives? Is greater cooperation in social-justice issues enough? Is it sufficient for the Christian churches simply to agree to disagree? If so, then in what does the distinctive Christian witness to the world consist? Since the answers to these and sim-ilar questions vary as much as the theological starting points of the numerous denominations involved, it is no small wonder that, on almost every front, ecumenical dialogue is slowly moving towards (and, in some cases, has already arrived at) a discouraging and uneasy state of theological deadlock. What is the worth of present attempts to break through this apparent confessional impasse? Is the standstill itself a sign that the ecumenical process has been moving in the wrong direction? The latter seems worthy of exploration. Rather than being thought of as mutually exclusive, perhaps the relational models of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue can be juxtaposed--held in tension, if you will--in such a way as to enable the churches to understand the meaning of Christian unity in more dynamic and creative terms. Perhaps the Catholic Church needs to examine its tradition of dependence on the classical Protestant theologies (that is, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism) as a means of refin-ing its insights into the richness of its own theological tradition. The various Protestant denominations, in turn, should do the same with Catholic theology and perhaps even with each other. 26 Review for Religious The point being made here is that a theological concept can be fully appreciated and understood only in relationship to those ideas it was originally meant to negate. The history of Catholic dogma, in other words, should be written in the context of its own "antihistory," that is, in relation to those who, ultimately, could not accept the consequences of its teaching. But how is this to be done? How is a balance between ecu-menical relations based on negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue to be maintained? Are they not mutually exclusive? Do they not stand in open contradiction to one another? How could they ever be reconciled? Plato's description of justice as well-tem-pered harmony of contrary forces (Republic, IV, 443) proves an invaluable guide in this respect. Unlike Aristotle's rather static rendering of virtue as the mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency (Ethics, 2.6), Plato's understanding allows for a dynamic yet creative interplay of wild and unwieldy forces. True, mistakes will be made from time to time: one horse may over-power the resistance of the charioteer, resulting in his loss of bal-ance and eventual fall. But with the perfection of the skill comes a mastery of these contrary forces; movement is eventually achieved with ease and grace. The point here is that, rather than struggling to reach a theological middle ground acceptable to all concerned, those working for Christian unity should be more involved in trying to help people acquire the skill of dialoguing in the midst of intense confessional conflict. In doing so, future ecu-menical efforts will be less threatened by those in the churches who, somewhere along the way, have let themselves be swayed by one or the other extreme. The Ecumenical Kernel From what has been said thus far, the fundamental principle of ecumenical theology (the ecumenical kernel) may be described as an acquired interior disposition of individual Christians and believing church communities who, seeking to understand the historical and theological significance of their oven religious tra-ditions, maintain an ongoing, balanced relationship of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue with traditions (both Christian and non-Christian; secular and nonsecular) other than their own. The goal of these relationships is to increase, on both personal and communal levels, a deeper appreci.ation of the mutual January-February 1992 27 Billy ¯ Ecumenical Ke~ ,~,,,~ dependence these traditions share in the historical dimensions of space and time. They are to determine as far as possible the extent to which their stated differences prevent them from remaining true to the most basic tenets of their respective faith traditions. Given the above formulation of the ecumenical kernel, a num-ber of observations arise: 1. As "an acquired interior disposition," the principle resides within individual members of the believing faith community. This habitual attitude of mind looks upon other faith traditions not as a threat, but as a challenge to question and, hopefully, to grow in the knowledge and love of one's own tradition. Acquired by human cooperation with the intricate working of God's grace, it repre-sents a level of maturity which cannot be presupposed for all members of a particular tradition. The principle must be thought of as existing in varying degrees among the members of the faith community. Numerous internal tensions are likely and are to be expected. 2. The principle contains an important social dimension. The above-mentioned interior disposition of mind is not confined to private piety, but is oriented, by its very nature, towards being shared with others and towards growth within groups--often across denominational boundaries--for the purpose of achieving its stated relational goals. A person's own interior disposition of mind is strengthened by the growth of this attitude within his or her community. The more this disposition grows in its social ori-entation, the more it will affect the doctrinal outcome of ecu-menical relations among the churches. 3. The principle asserts that the Christian search for self-understanding must be carried out in the context of the relation-ship a particular faith tradition has to those traditions outside of its official confines and which the thrust of its doctrine was orig-inally intended to negate. This "knowledge by negation" forces the believer to delve ever more deeply to the roots of his or her own theological tradition and to try to determine the precise histori-cal basis of church doctrinal statements. 4. From a doctrinal perspective, precedents for the theolog-ical balancing Of opposing extremes are found in both the classi-cal trinitarian doctrine established in the fourth- and fifth-century councils (that is, three Persons in one God) and in the way the divinity and humanity of Christ were balanced in the definition of Chalcedon (451). In each instance the orthodox position emerges 28 Review for Religious only in contrast to certain teachings encountered within the ranks of the church which the authorities ultimately sought to negate (that is, Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism). In such a way the principle challenges the church to adapt its classical theolog-ical approach of balancing opposing extremes to the pressing ecu-menical concerns of the present. 5. The balancing of the relationships of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue also points to the capacity of an individual or group to maintain a steadfast internal equilibrium between two very different ways of dealing with the lack of religious unity in their lives (that is, polemics and irenics). Rather than seeking to compromise or to water down one doctrine with the other, the aim here is to develop within believers suffi-cient latitude of mind not only to chal-lenge and confront, but also to see the intrinsic worth of faith traditions other than their own. By helping believers to recognize the extent to which their own tradition is dependent upon and has, in fact, been enriched by various opposing ones, these relationships should evoke a unity of respect that will go a long way in the pursuit of further ecumenical exchanges. 6. Since various religious and secular traditions are likely to be involved, the extent and scope of these relationships will vary from place to place, even within local churches of the same tra-dition. Stronger and more fruitful relationships of negative con-trariety will exist between those traditions sharing a long history of doctrinal controversy. Relationships of cooperative dialogue are constrained only by the limits of constructive theological reflection and exchange. Since each tradition will obviously look within itself for its measure of orthodoxy, progress in ecumenical relations is to be measured not so much in terms of a movement towards doctrinal uniformity as in the mutual commitment of each tradition to keeping the balanced relationship of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue alive. 7. The goal of appreciating the mutual dependence of con-flicting religious traditions challenges the members of each com- Other faith traditions are not a threat, but a challenge to question and, hopefully, to grow in the knowledge and love of one's own tradition. January-February 1992 29 B~I~ ¯ Ecumenical Kernel munity to take the risk of letting go, if ever so briefly, of some of the most precious presuppositions of their faith. They do this, on the one hand, in order to look at their own tradition from outside its own self-limiting confines and, on the other hand, to experience the conflicting tradition from within its own framework of hermeneutical preconceptions. The result should be an inter-pretative turn back to their own tradition with eyes opened anew to both the strengths and weaknesses of their most basic doctri-nal positions. 8. From this deeper appreciation of mutual dependence, there arises a concern over the extent to which the differences now articulated between each opposing tradition prevent them from remaining faithful to even more basic tenets of their faith which each tradition may very well share with the other. The stated goal is and must always remain a person's faithfulness to his or her own theological tradition. Disagreement between mutually depen-dent religious traditions is to be expected and cannot be over-come in all instances. VC-hat is more important is (1) that these mutually dependent religious traditions support each other in the beliefs and values which they share and (2) that they remain com-mitted to maintaining an open relationship of contrariety, one which will insure that each will continue to refine its own positions and grow in a deeper understanding of their final consequences. These observations do not exhaust the richness of the fun-damental principle of ecumenical theology as set forth in this essay. They seek merely to draw out some of the implications of the principle and to provide a context within which the current efforts of ecumenism may be renewed. Religious have an impor-tant role to play in such a renewal. Religious and Ecumenism Characterized by a communal lifestyle dedicated to the evan-gelical counsels, the religious life provides an environment that can foster the interior disposition of the heart and mind needed to maintain a balanced relationship of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue. In their vow of poverty, religious seek to empty themselves not merely of an inordinate attachment to material goods, but even of those immaterial attachments of the mind and heart that may get in the way of their service of the Lord. In an ecumenical context, 30 Review for Religious this would mean a willingness to hold one's own theological opin-ions "in check" so as to cooperate with other faith traditions with a view towards experiencing them for their own intrinsic worth. Such an interior disposition should culminate in a deeper aware-ness of the various strengths and weaknesses of one's own theo-logical perspective. In their vow of obedience, religious choose to accept the will of their superiors as a con-crete sign of God's design for them in their lives. In an ecu-menical context, this would translate into a strong identifi-cation of one's own desire for church unity with the approved ecumenical directives of the Catholic Church. Religious would thus stand as staunch defenders of their church's theological tradition who are able and willing not only to confront other reli-gious traditions with challeng-ing questions and observations rooted in a sound knowledge of their own faith, but also to The risk of letting go of some of the most precious presuppositions of their faith to look at their own tradition from outside its self-limiting confines should open one's eyes anew to both the strengths and weaknesses of their most basic doctrinal positions. refine their own theological positions in the light of challenges and observations received from without. In their vow of chastity, religious forgo the goods of marriage in order to give witness to the existence of a life beyond the con-fines of the present earthly reality. In an ecumenical context, this translates into a constant reminder to the various proponents of church unity that the ultimate source of that unity cannot be human efforts alone, but is the trinitarian harmony of "unity in plurality" within the life of the Godhead itself. Religious thus urge their fellow Christians to be aware of the eschatological dimensions of their struggle for church unity. God's kingdom, in other words, is established on earth only to the extent that the oneness and peace found in the divinity's inner life manifests itself (1) within the communal assemblies of the faithful and (2) in the human society where these faithful assemblies gather. January-February 1992 31 Billy ¯ Ecumenical Kernel Even more important than the above considerations is the fact that the religious life asks its members to strive constantly towards achieving in many areas of their lives a delicate balance of opposing extremes, for example, action/contemplation; personal needs/community life; the ideals of the evangelical counsels/the experience of human weakness and the tendency to sin. Such a life of balanced extremes should make the balance of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue spoken of in this essay that much easier to incorporate within one's own spirituality and approach to life. This is not to say that a similar balance cannot be developed in other states of life within the church (for exam-ple, single, married, priestly lives), but only that the religious life is especially suited to it. To be sure, the eschatological orientation of the vows themselves moves the religious to maintain a contin-ually balanced perspective between life in the present and in the beyond. Realized eschatology refers not to a collapse of the latter into the former, but to the balanced and simultaneous movement of each, bringing the Christian to his or her ultimate end in God. Conclusion This essay deals with the present deadlock in ecumenical progress by reexamining some of the basic premises of the dis-cussion and by suggesting a redirection of many current efforts for Christian unity. As put forth in these pages, the fundamental prin-ciple of ecumenical theology (the ecumenical kernel) calls for the balancing of the opposing extremes of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue. While the former refers to the relationship of heterodox/orthodox codependence prevalent in the early church and in the Catholic Church's relation with dissident Christian traditions down through the centuries, the latter represents the more conciliatory, irenic approach employed since the time of the Second Vatican Council. The essay argues that the movement towards Christian unity lies not so much in a calculated agenda for doctrinal uniformity as in the commitment among the churches to maintain the balanced relationship of negative contrariety and cooperative dialogue. The bonds resulting from such a relation-ship of opposing extremes give rise to a healthy respect for tra-ditions other than one's own and to a deeper consciousness of the mutual dependence which so many traditions share but so sel-dom advert to. 32 Review for Religious Religious can play an important role in maintaining this bal-ance of opposing extremes. Their commitment to the vows pro-vides them with a deep spiritual basis from which they can develop the necessary internal disposition of mind and heart required for the principle to take effect. Since their way of life already asks them to sustain a similar balance of opposing extremes in many areas of their lives, they give witness, on the one hand, to those who believe it cannot be done and set an example, on the other hand, for those seeking to embody the principle in their own lives. The faithful dedication of religious to their calling not only serves as a leaven for themselves and others (both within and without the Catholic tradition), but also can make those who are deaf to the call for church unity sit up and take notice. Religious should be in the forefront of the church's attempt to maintain with other religious traditions a balanced relationship of nega-tive contrariety and cooperative dialogue. In sum, then, the fundamental principle of ecumenical theol-ogy (the ecumenical kernel) states that church unity involves a pro-cess of committed encounter between religious traditions whose very existence implies a relationship of concrete mutual depen-dence. The goal of ecumenical theology is to highlight this rela-tionship and thus provide, for all concerned, a deeper understanding of the issues which unite and separate them. Since such under-standing will take place only in the context of the above-mentioned balance of opposing extremes, it would seem that the churches have much to do before the long-yearned-for unity "in faith and morals" becomes a reality for future Christian generations. January-February 1992 33 JAMES M. KEEGAN Elements and Dynamics of a Spiritual-Direction Practicum direction and discernment the West Coast to talk about their common concerns in training spiritual directors, has discovered itself large enough to form a separate East Coast "symposium." In the years of religious discovery after Vatican II, a num-ber of institutions in North America established them-selves as centers for the training or development of spiritual directors. This sudden evolution, or fission, into dozens of programs is startling. It seems the training of spiritual directors, almost without being noticed, is becom-ing a significant commitment of church-related institu-tions. While the methods and goals of these ventures are as diverse as the people who manage them, there is a signifi-cant difference between practicum programs and those which do not involve such an element. Even among practicums the variety of ways and means can be dizzy-ing. To stimulate and encourage those engaged in the adventure of developing spiritual directors--or thinking James M. Keegan sJ has been involved in the training of spir-itual directors for a dozen years, first in New England and now in Kentucky. His present work is in the Spirituality Office of the Archdiocese of Louisville: Flaget Center; 1935 Lewiston Place; Louisville, Kentucky 40216. 34 Review for Religious about it--this article will describe some of the facets of a suc-cessful practicum and then present two important issues which seem inevitably to arise in this kind of work. The Need for Practicums At the center of its pedagogy, a practicum program includes the actual doing of spiritual direction with directees over a period of time, plus staff supervision of that work. Under this definition falls a wide variety of actual plans, courses, and organizations ranging from year-long full-time programs to part-time one-to-four- year courses, as well as those shorter arrangements designed for one to four months which may include individually directed retreats as the practicum element. The abundance of programs answers a new demand for spir-itual directors, a demand arising from a felt need as well as from the increased visibility of spiritual direction as an attractive, pos-sibly even faddish, discovery in the current atmosphere of the churches. Increasingly, professional ministers are recognizing their spiritual hunger and lack of regular nourishment in the central relationship of their lives and opting to do something about it beyond an annual retreat. Furthermore, as lay men and women are encouraged and educated to claim their particular gifts of min-istry, many are realizing the concomitant need for stronger spir-itual grounding. So they seek out competent spiritual directors. The quality of training which those directors receive seems of paramount importance if they are to be accurately helpful to these men and women, as well as accountable for what they do. While a reading knowledge of spiritual direction or an understanding of some of its theoretical schemata can be important in preparing one to do the work and especially in reflecting on it later, such an approach without the practical element of working with individ-uals can be counterproductive and even dangerous. The theories of spiritual life that one reads have been developed from many an individual case over long periods of trial and error. They acknowledge, of course, the rough edges and ambiguities one meets when face-to-face with a directee, but they cannot predict how any one of us will react in that circumstance. For instance, one can understand that change and development in prayer are often signaled by inner darkness, and yet have no idea how to understand and respond to a directee's yearning pain. One may January-February 1992 35 Keegan ¯ Spiritual-Direction Practicum have theories about the termination of spiritual direction, but be completely thrown when a particular directee wants to quit. A program involving a supervised practicum should be considered a sine qua non at some point in the development of a qualified spiritual director. Those who run successful programs usually have articulated their beliefs and pedagogy in a model of spiritual direction which they attempt to impart to the participants. For some, the heart of the model is conversion; for others, religious experience or the incorporation of social awareness into one's life and prayer. The strength of the practicum, however, comes not from a model of spiritual direction, but from the experience of God at work in the directee, the director, and the supervisor--and from their suc-cesses and mistakes. If it is genuinely at the service of its partic-ipants' experience of God, a successful practicum program is a continuous test of the model upon which it based. Change and development in spiritual life may look quite different from what is expected; God's action may outfox the supervisor as well as the director and demand that the staff reflect critically upon its assumptions in the light of its experience. Elements of a Practicum A practicum is composed of a staff and the participants. "Staff" here means supervisory staff, even though other staff persons may be vital to the functioning of the program. The staff oversees the participants in at least six basic and essential elements. 1. Active engagement in the work of spiritual direction. Nothing substitutes for each participant's seeing several directees on a reg-ular basis if the core of learning is to be the recognition of God's action in another's life. Other elements of the program are more or less useful as they help participants become better at recog-nizing and facilitating another person's relationship with God. Directees most often come through the sponsoring organization, with staff members conducting a first interview to determine their readiness for spiritual direction. In other instances, participants in the program bring their own directees. In any case the staff should determine its role in the admission of directees so as to insure that these persons' real needs may be met and that the practicum's participants may best learn from their experience. Their work with a number of directees regularly over an 36 Review for Religious extended period of time provides them with learning that cannot be acquired in briefer time or with only one or two individuals. They may learn from dealing with the slow development of one person's contemplative ability, or with people at different stages of spiritual life or in different socioeconomic conditions, or with various dynamics of change in people's relationship with God. Whereas some beginning directees may already be at home in their inner lives, others will need patient help in discovering an inner landscape, noticing and then articulating interior events, and continuing to pray when things get dark. The way in which such variety challenges or affirms assumptions that the partici-pants have provides an invaluable arena for their formation as spiritual directors. 2. Regular supervision of actual cases. Confidential supervision using verbatim reports (or taped interviews) is the central learn-ing arena. Supervision begins when the participant prepares a detailed ("verbatim") report of what actually occurred in a par-ticular spiritual-direction session, and is furthered in the encounter with a staff supervisor. The focus is on exploring the participant's responses and reactions rather than on diagnosing the directee, and the goal is twofold: assuring the welfare of the directee and promoting the personal and professional integration of the par-ticipant, the fledgling director. Many programs include group supervision to provide insight that may not come from a single supervisor, and to encourage participants in the program to think in a supervisory manner. Learning through supervision to reflect on the particulars of their work with a directee, participants can become aware of their particular strengths and weaknesses as spiritual directors. Rather than simply offering tools or techniques for the work, a super-vised practicum can help directors to discover their own distinc-tive style and abilities, taking as their goal the development of the person of the spiritual director as a director. Supervision helps to develop a discriminating mind-set, a love for criticism, and the healthy skepticism about one's own work which allows God to be the creative one in the lives of directees. 3. Regular personal spiritual direction. It is clear that one of the greatest helps or hindrances to growth in a practicum program is the participant's personal experience of receiving spiritual direc-tion. We shall see in the final section of this article that partici-pants' personal lives and prayer may hit rocky ground in the January-February 1992 37 Keegan ¯ Spiritual-Direction Practicum course of this kind of program, and personal issues may cloud their ability to learn. At least during the practicum, participants should be encouraged to receive direction from directors whose practice is known by the staff to be based on principles similar to those being taught. Furthermore, without an experiential awareness of those principles active in their own life, participants may well find the focus of a particular program either intellectu-ally confusing or, worse, negligible. 4. Study: Courses, Workshops, Reading. A tragic flaw in many practicums is the attempt to accomplish so much that the essen-tials are lost; more material is covered at the expense of contem-plative depth and reflection on the work. No staff wants to certify ignorant or uninformed directors, but the body of knowledge with which a good spiritual director should be familiar is growing so rapidly that it could ease an experiential pedagogy into sec-ond place. Each staff will have to determine for itself how much time and energy should be given to at least these four areas: the-ology (Scripture study, Christology, moral theology), psychology (developmental theory, study of the unconscious, diagnostic cat-egories), spirituality (history, traditions of prayer and discern-ment), and culture (religiopolitical history, issues of social justice). Some will set certain prerequisites for entrance into their pro-grams while others will encourage concurrent workshops, courses, and reading. A rule of thumb might be that academic work in a practicum should illumine the participants' experience of doing spiritual direction and whet their appetite for further investigation rather than just provide familiarity with a broad range of material on spirituality. 5. Reflection. Development of spiritual directors demands con-templative time for participants to remember, think and pray about, and otherwise mull over with their directees. Reflection is a value that needs to be built into the program, or competing forces will eat it away. It is possible to design a course whose aca-demic elements unite around and illuminate the participants' experience doing the work of direction. While the goal of a grad-uate program might be the students' command of the history of spirituality and the works of its major authors, a practicum seeks to help its participants understand their experience in the light of the tradition. Reading assignments, for instance, will be differ-ent than in academic programs: participants may be asked to famil-iarize themselves with the cultural background of a spiritual classic 38 Review for Religious and then read only a few pages of the actual work, imagining the experience described, comparing it with what they have seen, noticing their reactions to it. Questions like the following might be pursued after a reading of the first three chapters of the Life of Teresa of Avila: What do you understand (or not) of her expe-rience of God? Have you seen anything like it in any of your directees? How is it different? What do you make of the cultural influences on Teresa? on your directee? What is God like for these people? Where does Teresa's experi-ence lead? your directee's? Some programs provide retreat week-ends for their participants, or other kinds of shared prayer. Journaling can be built into group time, along with some sharing of that journaling with the group. Finally, the staff's reflective lifestyle, or its absence, speaks most loudly of the values inherent in any program. 6. Evaluation. However it may make us cringe, a supervisory program is inescapably evaluative. Supervision, as described here, is a means of critical self-evaluation. Further, if participants are progressing toward some kind of certification, clear develop-mental criteria must be communicated and maintained. It is essen-tial that the staff have understood these criteria uniformly and agreed upon them and that it apply them equitably. Furthermore, the staff needs to talk at length with one another about their atti-tudes toward evaluation, both of participants' performance and of their own. The more clearly the staff understands the foundational phi-losophy and pedagogy of the program, the more clearly it will communicate the goals and objectives of each term or semester, and the more helpful the evaluations will be for those in the pro-gram. If, for instance, a goal of the first segment is a demon-strated ability to listen to a directee with empathy, acceptance, and genuineness, both the staff and those being evaluated would have to understand and recognize the working definitions of those terms and agree on their place in the work of spiritual direction. A positive evaluation would encourage participants by helping them to own their strengths and successes and would challenge them with specific directions for growth in the next segment of the Reflection is a value that needs to be built into the program, or competing forces will eat it away. ~anuary-Felrruary 1992 39 Keegan ¯ Spiritual-Direction Practicum work. In deciding what constitutes a negative evaluation, how-ever, and what the next steps should be, a staff may run into ques-tions and disagreements rooted in the subjective nature of much of their work, and will need to fall back on their previous inter-action and their togetherness as a team. Evaluation is also a means by which a program can measure its own success in the short term. If the learning goals for each term or semester are not achieved by participants in a demon-strable way, evaluation time 1nay signal a need to rethink parts of the program. 7. Summary. As described here, a practicum program focuses its energies and its various elements on the concrete work of spir-itual direction and on its supervision for learning purposes. Study, reflection, group process, even individuals' own prayer and spir-itual direction are variously related to what happens when the participants engage with a directee. The supervisory staff need a shared understanding and experience of the basic elements of such engagement which they want to develop in those who come to them for training. Because the heart of the practicum is the meeting of persons--the directee, the director, and the supervi-sor, all carrying their own inner wounds and scars, and the supremely free person of God--the entire endeavor stands on precarious ground. The following section will discuss two events which, unlike earthquakes, may be predictable. Some Dynamics of a Supervisory Program. Although a practicum is a clinic for ministerial development, personal as well as clinical issues will inevitably arise among the participants and call for attention. V~hen strongly felt psycho-logical and spiritual change begins to happen to individuals in a group, the forces at play can be simultaneously shrill and very subtle, and a staff ought to be prepared to listen beneath the noise lest their program be derailed. Below I will discuss two issues, a personal issue which often has profound impact on the practicum as a whole and a clinical one which arises from the nature of a practicum. First, if the program presents a refined focus or a particular understanding of the nature of prayer or spirituality, it will prob-ably confront to some degree the spiritual lives of those enrolled in it. People will be challenged to confirm their own experience 40 Review for Religious anew, to look into it more deeply than before, or to criticize and possibly jettison their old assumptions about God, prayer, and spiritual life. They may expose the inadequacy of former spiri-tual directors or may encounter their need for counseling or ther-apy; anger may arise and get directed at staff, peers, friends, or directees. Because of new material about spiritual life or new experience of it, the participants themselves begin to change--some-times radically. This is usually an important and welcome development, signaling real engagement in the pro-gram. However, such personal expe-rience can be so strong and so generally felt that, unless a staff expects and understands it, the oper-ative goal of the program can subtly shift from ministerial to personal growth. A practicum can subtly change into a personal-growth rather than a ministerial endeavor if the staff does not keep the emphasis on the work to A practicum can subtly change into a personal-growth rather than a ministerial endeavor if the staff does not keep the emphasis on the work to be done. be done, always conscious of helping the participants to bring their personal growth to bear on their work with directees. Here the staff itself may well need supervision. Elements of the program can be imperceptibly skewed away from the ministerial issues cen-tral to it. Because the person of the director is the focus of super-vision, for instance, supervisory sessions may subtly become therapeutic rather than clinical and professional. If participants are consistently asked to consult their own experience of life or prayer in reflecting on their work, they may not develop the ability to remember and look critically at other people's experience, which will inevitably offer them a wider and more surprising range. Material can be presented in a way that favors the participants' personal application of it and neglects the further step of apply-ing what they have learned to what they have seen in their directees. Since participants often experience the "personal-conversion phenomenon," it can become a group issue which may be best addressed if there is in place some group function where they are encouraged to talk with one another about what is happening to January-February 1992 41 Keegan ¯ Spiritual-Direction Practicum them personally. Further, the staff may need to be flexible enough to modify the syllabus or calendar, to adjust the presentation of material to the ability of individuals in the group to hear and absorb it. The second issue I intend to discuss, for which I borrow the term "narcissistic crisis,''l occurs in some form in most clinical programs and is complicated by the highly personal and value-laden religious material of spiritual direction. People tend to enter such programs with some infection from the cultural stereotype of the spiritual director as wise, holy, and powerful. Whether they measure themselves positively or negatively against this icon and its expectations, participants very often exhibit regressive behav-ior when a supervisor starts to look at the details of their work. Initial confidence or self-doubt may turn into their opposites when otherwise successful and competent people find themselves scrutinized as they assume their new roles. For our purposes it is important to notice that (1) participants may extraordinarily and unrealistically accept or challenge the foundational elements and philosophy of the program; (2) this is an expectable and wel-come development, rather than something to be avoided, and demands staff understanding, unity, and participation; and (3) this "narcissistic crisis" is primarily an individual issue (in that it will configure itself quite differently in each person's experience), but it can easily--and erroneously--be generalized into a broader dis-satisfaction with the program when it catches similar issues in other participants. The resistance of this phase of practicum training often sounds like rebellion or despair: "I have heard all this before." "I am never going to do this right." "There are lots of ways of doing spiritual direction that you're not giving us." "Tell me what I should have said to this directee." At heart these are often state-ments about the personal difficulties individuals are encountering as their self-esteem experiences some dismantling in supervision or in their comparing themselves with more polished perfor-mances from peers or the staff. So the staff must be keen not to mistake them either for genuine criticism or for signs of genuine understanding of the program's foundational elements. This resis-tance, when felt by a group (either the participants or the staff), can swamp and drown gentler voices of moderation and carries within itself strong "we versus them" projections that must be understood and treated as such by the staff lest they polarize the 42 Review for Religious program. Supervisors need to look beneath the manifest behavior to the personal and professional issues that are awakening. Successful negotiation of this "crisis" can be difficult for a staff, testing its team cohesiveness with urges to side with or against certain participants, and its willingness to recognize and respond flexibly to genuine criticism. Supervisors are idealized, identified with, then ignored or renounced--made into idols and then melted down! Erosion of his or her own self-esteem and professional identity can tempt a staff member to clear up a super-visee's anxiety and confusion rather than work with it as appropriate to this stage of learning, or perhaps to respond in anger, or to exaggerate or minimize the real demands of the program. The very survival of the supervisory staff may hinge upon its having done its work in the following two areas. First, a shared understanding of and desire to work with the foundational philosophy and pedagogy of the program is impera-tive and should not be taken for granted. While diversity of background and ideas can enrich a training program, all mem-bers of the staff will need to understand A participant who finds support, challenge, and growing peership in supervision will grow away from dependence on the supervisor and the institution represented in the practicum. the particular goals being sought when the going gets tough. New staffs need to put aside valuable time to discuss and haggle over what they mean by spiritual direction and training directors, and ongoing staffs could profit from a devil's advocate brought con-sciously into their midst. Second, it is of critical importance that the supervisory work of each staff member be open to the others, and in some detail. For the welfare of the program's participants and for the profes-sional development of the staff, the work they do with partici-pants needs itself to be supervised with the same focus on the presenting person as described earlier. They will need to know and trust each other's work when some of the dynamics detailed here begin to operate, or at least to have a forum in which to challenge and change one another. If the goal of a practicum is the integration of supervised January-February 1992 43 Keegan ¯ Spiritual-Direction Practicum learning into one's own personal style of doing spiritual direc-tion, then the participants' success or failure in resolving this cri-sis could be crucial to their development as spiritual directors. If supervisors maintain only a mentor's stance and never allow their own mistakes and biases to be dealt with, or if the program appears inflexible, participants may perceive little room to blend what they have learned into their particular personalities. The result can be either a defensive posture against the program and its goals or a need to maintain one's connection with it in order to feel competent. On the other hand, a participant who finds support, challenge, and growing peership in supervision will grow away from dependence on the supervisor and the institution repre-sented in the practicum. Toward the end of a successful year, for instance, a supervisee said with some force, "I am going to park this whole damn program and get out and walk!" The remark, articulating his desire to integrate his learning with his own stride, would have told quite a different story--and been far less wel-come- at the beginning of the year. At some point any trained spiritual director will have to ques-tion the basic principles of his or her training, experiment with them, and integrate what is of substance into a personal, distinc-tive style of doing spiritual direction. A practicum can impart the skills and qualities needed in a spiritual director. A better practicum can aim to help qualified directors to be themselves in the practice of direction. Conclusion Inasmuch as we are heirs of the Judeo-Christian legacy, spir-itual directors are face-to-face with an extremely delicate task: to facilitate the self-revelation of the incomprehensible God. While we know that anything we assert about this unsearchable God must be taken back immediately as inadequate, human words and gestures are what we have to work with in the place of awed silence. The God who is omnipresent is also most concrete. The unknowable God has chosen to be known and has, in our Scriptures, revealed a personality, desires, and hopes. God has a divine Name and entrusts it to Moses and Israel (Ex 3). God is tender and caring as a mother or a father (Is 43, 49; Ho 11), pas-sionately angry (Am 5), or desperately sad (Jr 14). Able spiritual directors are women and men who have explored and become 44 Review for Religious responsible for their own personalities and have, to some degree, integrated that with the ministry to which they have been called. They can dare to approach the intimate experience of another person and, above all, the Person of God, with humility and expec-tation. Before them is the task of reverencing the mystery while exploring the everyday events in which the mysterious personal-ity of God becomes incarnate, in a sense continuing by that very work the loving thrust of God into even the smallest details of earthly life. Our tradition makes clear that such discernment arises from and is verified in the community of believers. A practicum in spir-itual direction, then, can be more than a training ground. At its best it can be a microcosm of the People of God, an instance of the kind of critical believing community without which we dare not claim to know in our own lives--nor to help others know-- what God is saying here and now. Note ~ See Baird K. Brightman PhD, "Narcissistic Issues in the Training Experience of the Psychotherapist," International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 12 (1983). Narcissism is discussed as a dynamic element in the struggle for psychic growth, involving "a positive libidinal feeling toward the self" or the maintenance of self-esteem in the face of the erosion of one's grandiose professional self and of one's pro-jection of perfection onto others, namely, the staff, the supervisor. Brightman sees a clinical program "as a developmental period of adult-hood with its own characteristic tasks and demands, and therefore the potential for evoking the conflicts, fixations, and defenses of the preced-ing life stages (as well as the potential for further growth)." January-February 1992 45 CHARLES REUTEMANN On Becoming a Discerning Person Through Spiritual Direction hese reflections are a practical commentary on a short passage from the prophet Jeremiah: "More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it? I, the Lord, alone probe the mind and test the heart" (Jer 17:9). The image of "journey" as a way of describing day-to-day movement towards self-knowledge, towards intimacy with God, and towards a generous love and service of neighbor has been popular in most ages and many cultures. Among written descrip-tions are The Pilgrim's Progress, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Road Less Traveled, the journey into The Interior Castle, and the four-week journey of the Exercises of St. Ignatius. Even the life of Jesus is presented to us as a journey: with Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem; from Bethlehem to Egypt and then back to Nazareth; from Nazareth to other parts of Galilee and to Judea and Samaria; and finally that fatal last journey up to Jerusalem, and then out to the whole world. In particular, the Gospel of Luke-Acts is cast as a splendid journey story. In the Gospel it is like a great bus ride, with Jesus as driver, gathering up all the poor and the outcasts: smelly shepherds, tax collectors, prostitutes, fishermen, cripples, widows, the blind, the possessed-- all are gathered and brought on the journey to that symbolic holy Charles Reutemann FSC is on the staff of the Center for Spirituality and Justice, a training center in the Bronx for spiritual directors. For six-teen years he was director of Sangre de Cristo Renewal Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He resides at Manhattan College and his address is 5050 Fieldstone Road; Riverdale, New York 10471. 46 Review for Religious place Jerusalem. Then in Acts there is another bus ride, and the driver is the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus, gathering more outcasts: eunuchs, sailors, tent makers, prison guards, merchants--all on a bus ride leading to Rome, that symbol of the whole world. Life is a journey, and the most engrossing part is the interior journey of our soul. Our soul's journey--what is it like? Is it merely a random alternation of ups and downs, of going forward and falling back, and then more of the same? Or is there a pattern and a meaning to it? One major spiritual tradi-tion sees our journey as a line, a kind of one-direc-tional climbing of a hill with many slippings and risings. Another and perhaps better spiritual tra-dition sees the spiritual journey as a spiral, as something like the liturgical-year cycle in which we keep moving through the seasons, the seasons of the year, the seasons of our life, the seasons of the life of Jesus, ever moving deeper. With Jesus we move through his birth, early years, public life, conflict life, death, and resurrection. As we touch and live through the seasons of Jesus' life, never boring nor repetitious, we live through the sea-sons of our life, a kind of spiral journeying, touching the same places inside us, but never really the same, as we go deeper, ever trying to find the answers to those two great questions of all life: What does it all mean? and what shall I do with my love? No, we never remain the same on our soul journey, even though our days pass one after the other in twenty-four-hour regularity. This is our interior spiritual journey, fascinating and mysterious. Are there things that we notice as we circle slowly about, things that are happening to us, things that move us forward? and other things that seem to block our way? Of course! First of all, one of the things that all of us recognize and that spiritual guides are most attentive to is our freedom. How much inner freedom do we find in us as the years go by: freedom from our compul-sions, addictions, fixed ways of looking at things? And somehow we also recognize that we cannot will our freedom--it is some-thing that happens, like Topsy, or the Velveteen Rabbit. Another thing we may become aware of as we move along, and it is much akin to freedom, is detachment: Are we really beginning to lose our ego, to lose that self-regarding self?. I cannot forget some- Life is a journey, and the most engrossing part is the interior journey of our soul. January-February 1992 47 Reutemann ¯ Becoming a Discerning Person Our prayer shows us what road we are and what direction we are facing on that road. thing I heard many years ago from an English university profes-sor. We were doing a workshop in Dublin, and one day he casu-ally mentioned that he was teaching history to Mother Teresa's novices in a convent outside of London. "Oh," I said, "and what kind of woman is Mother Teresa?" He paused a moment and then slowly said, "She's a woman who has lost her ego." I have never forgotten that. What a marvelous achievement, and what a lifelong process! A third thing we might begin to notice as we move along on our journey is what motivates us. Are we really begin-ning to live more and more by faith, seeing things through Gospel values and truths, gradually find-ing ourselves more like St. Paul when he cries out, "I live! no, not I, but Christ is beginning to live in me"? There may be other signs that we notice about our inner selves: a certain simplicity, a movement towards integrity--but wait a minute! Are we aware of what we have been saying: ing freedom, noticing detachment, noticing living by faith? Now that is something to notice! Is it possible to become a more noticing person? And there we have the magic word, discernment! Noticing is discernment; a noticing heart is a discerning heart. Or is it a discerning head? Or is it both? Let us pause to look at the other expression in our reflection, "spiritual direction." We all need direction, especially if we find ourselves in an unknown land of many roads, like some parts of the Bronx, or downtown Boston, or Jersey City. And the same is true of our interior life, our spirit life. Most of us know exactly what St. Paul is talking about when he exclaims: "I don't know where I'm going. I don't do the good things I want to do; instead, I do the evil I don't want to do. My inner being delights in the law of God; but I am aware of a different law that is at work in me, that fights against the law that my mind approves of. It makes me a prisoner to the law of sin which is at work in me. What an unhappy person I am! Who will rescue me from this road that is taking me to death? Who will show me the way?" (Rm 7:15-24, adapted). Everyone on the spiritual journey of life needs direction, needs some guidance for the spirit. We know there are various maps to help us find this direction: spiritual books and magazines 48 Review for Religqous that we can study and learn by, especially that great map, the Holy Bible, which has directed more people in the whole world than any other--and still does. Another source of direction is our own prayer, our struggle to be quiet and to reflect, our crying out "Give me guidance today, O Lord!" Our prayer shows us what road we are on, and what direction we are facing on that road. And then there is another source, something that has been practiced in all cultures and religions, namely, the conversation between two people about the interior life and its ways. This con-versation is frequently called "spiritual direction." To a woman coming to me for such direction, I once said, as we faced each other in a relaxed setting, "And zvhy do you want spiritual direc-tion?" She was startled, but after a moment's silence she leaned forward and said, "I want to become more real." I was startled by the beauty of her response. Then I said: "And what would it mean for you to become more real?" Again she was thoughtful: "Well, I have this friend whose mother has Alzheimer's disease. Every time I see her when she's walking with her mother, she is smiling." So it is that some people seek spiritual direction, a conversa-tion with another adult about their values and their God, because they have seen something beautiful in another person and they want to be like that. They are challenged to fill up what is want-ing in themselves, to grow, to go deeper, to become more real. Other people, like myself when I first sought direction many years ago, recognize that, although they want God in their lives, they get careless and easily become distracted, even choked, by the anxieties and cares of the world. They need someone to talk with about their desire for God, someone to be accountable to--so that, in the very telling of their stow, they may be strengthened in their resolve and receive clarity about the paths to God. Others seek spiritual direction because they are troubled: there is a crisis in their lives. It may be a relationship, it may be a major decision about a vocational choice, it may be an addiction. But always this crisis is affecting the sense of God in their lives: Does God understand? Where is God? Am I on the right path? More tortuous than all else is the human heart. Where is the direction? They need the Lord to probe their mind and test their heart. For others, things are not all that clear. There is no crisis, but there seems to be something missing. The refrain "Is that all there is?" rings through their lives. They have had no other adult January-February 1992 49 Reutemann ¯ Becoming a Discerning Person with whom they can talk values. And so, finding themselves drift-ing, uncertain, lacking meaning, they seek direction. From all of this, can we now say that we have some sense of what spiritual direction looks like, at least in a Christian setting and in today's world? It is a conversation between two adults in which one is seeking some guidance on the path to God and the meaning of life. It is not idle chatter, nor even problem solving, though it is about the ordinary things of life: communication, liv-ing situation, working conditions, relationships. It takes time, honesty, and a spiritual sense. It is one of the gifts of the Spirit for forming the Christian and the Christian community. Can we say anything about the guide, the spiritual director? Like all guides, it would seem that the guide should have some training, some expertise, and that he or she should also be receiv-ing spiritual direction on the pilgrim road. We would want a knowledgeable person, someone familiar with the inner move-ments of the heart, the roadways, possessing some skills that might avoid pitfalls, especially the skill of listening to where the person wants to go--listening is so important, and it is a listening that goes beyond ideas and words and focuses on feelings and desires. Every pilgrim on the spiritual journey is best known by his or her desires and feelings, and the guide must be attentive to them. The director need not be a holy person, but he or she must be a seeker of God, one who prays regularly and who has a vision of faith. Lastly, the spiritual guide must really have the interests of the pilgrim at heart, and thus must be patient, humble, and under-standing. It is God who gives the increase, it is God who sends down the rain to water the paths. Can we say anything about what a spiritual-direction session would look like? Well, obviously, the directee would come pre-pared, that is, ask herself beforehand: Where has God been in my life since last we met? What have been some of my responses? As 1 reflect, what might I like from this session? Can I say any-thing about my prayer or about something that has struck me? The session itself can last forty-five minutes to an hour, but no longer than that and possibly shorter. When someone begins direction, it is helpful that the meetings be somewhat frequent: each week or every other week. Then, after three or four meet-ings, the space can be lengthened to three or four weeks. And, of course, to get the most benefit, the directee would take time to write down and even pray over what has been noteworthy in the 50 Review for Religious session. Let me illustrate this point. It is rare that I receive letters from my directees, but recently I did receive one that reads in part like this: "Mainly just want to tell you how much I have come to value our sessions. Thanks very much for your interest, atten-tion, and care in helping me to come to know the Lord better in my life. I believe it is also helping me to communicate that kind of experience to others whom I meet in the course of my own work and ministry, my own life. I guess what occasions this, in addition to the gratitude, is that I just wrote up for myself, as I usually do, a little summary of the points that we talked about . And I was surprised to see how wide-ranging it was, and the depth too, and the com-monalities among the points .Certain themes do begin to appear after a time . " Of course, a director or guide prepares too, by prayer, by reflection, and sometimes by written observations that help chart the inner movements on the directee's journey and the basic direction. Let me now say some more about "discernment" and then try to relate it to how spiritual direction ought to be helping us become more discerning persons. Frequently individuals and even whole groups, when faced with a major decision, will say, "You know, I (we) have to discern that"; and then they start some pro-cess to which they give the name "discernment." Is that what dis-cernment is, something we do when we have to make a big decision? Yes and no. I like to call decision making a "choosing" that gets into the will and into the feeling part of me. Of course, as I do that, I need to weigh things before I say yes to what I choose. I also like it when Karl Rahner says, "There are no big decisions; there are only bundles of little decisions." He seems to be suggesting that we are making little choices all along, choices coming from our feelings and our thinking, perhaps more from one than the other. So discernment is something we can practice in those little choices that might eventually get into a bundle for a big choice. And discernment therefore could become some kind of a habit of noticing my feelings and testing their reasonable-ness,~ that is, whether or not they are leading me to my better self and to my God or leading me away, down some primrose path to my ego self. We should try to become a discerning person in the ordinary times and in the little choices, for discernment is 'There are no big decisions; there are only bundles of little decisions.' January-February 1992 51 Reutemann ¯ Becoming a Discerning Person not the kind of thing we can start practicing when we need to make a big decision. When asked "Who is the holy person?" the Lord Buddha answered: "There are sixty minutes to the hour, and sixty seconds to each minute, and sixty fractions of a second to each second. If anyone could be fully present in each fraction of each second, that person would be a holy person." Awareness leading to rightmindedness. Noticing, testing, leading to choice. For most of us, growth in self-knowledge occurs when we take more notice of our feelings and name them. For, although we may be deeply feeling people, most of our conscious life is taken up with thought: making observations, giving our opinions, try-ing to figure out what we are to do. But does this get down to the deeper self, the desiring self, the hoping and choosing self?. Spiritual directors need to assess this so that they come to see the necessity of helping directees uncover feelings and name them. But it is equally necessary that people test with their heads the inner reasonableness of their feelings: W~here are they coming from? Are they leading to or away from God? Can we conclude then that in discernment it would be a mis-take to separate our feelings from our knowledge-insight? that it would be a mistake to consider our feelings as better criteria for discernment and decision making? and, finally, that we make a mistake when we overlook the possibility that, although operat-ing out of our heads can distort the spiritual journey, living only by feelings or feeling-insights, "spiritual hunches" if you will, can be equally distortive? ~ But perhaps we are getting too theoretical. Let me give some examples of how spiritual direction can help someone become a more discerning person. Peter is an ordained minister who is beginning spiritual direction. He says he is overburdened by the work of an inner-city parish. In several sessions he mentions his hope that the spiritual direction will give him an answer to his "burnout." The spiritual director can help Peter examine his day, note areas that might be curtailed, and perhaps even recommend that he change ministries. Another way to go is to examine with Peter his feelings about his situation: What are the feelings? anger? sadness? self-pity? feeling abandoned and alone? He might then be asked whether the different feelings (not his work nor the situation in general) are leading him to God or away from God. This question needs to be asked with careful nuances. It is here, too, that the exchange can become prayerful. Most people 52 Review for Religious never examine their feelings with God. They may mention them to God, but they never explore how God reacts or even feels about their feelings. It is almost as though God were "over there," observing things, but never really empathetic, never really involved in their feelings, especially "negative" ones like anger, sadness, and self-pity. Is it possible that, as Peter explores his feelings about his burnout, he might become more aware, more discerning about his inner movements and the direction in which they are taking him: to God? away from God? Is it possi-ble, too, that out of this awareness some clarity about practical decisions affecting his burnout might come to him? Can we see how some kind of disciplined willing-ness to look at our feelings and testing their reasonableness with God is central to dis-cernment? Can we also see that it is a chal-lenge to the spiritual director to encourage directees, especially those who operate out of their head (as most of us do), to take this route? It is indeed a real challenge, even hard work. Maria has been coming for direction for several years. She is energetic, has a sense of humor, and talks with verve and rapid-ity. She actively seeks God, even seems to wrestle with him in a verbal kind of way. One day she comes and blurts out: "Where am I in my relationship with God? I am becoming more and more clearly aware of my sinfulness--not vague sinfulness, but specific sins and definite sinfulness. I realize I can do nothing good. I wonder why he bothers with me. And yet I am at peace with this; I don't feel upset by this. And then, when I go into poor neigh-borhoods and see all the people and the poverty and suffering, I wonder if there is a God. I doubt that there can be a God. No, I just don't believe there is a God." She stops and looks at the direc-tor as though to say, "Now solve that!" Clearly, the spiritual director cannot solve anything, nor should she try. Yet there is a "way out." In listening to Maria, the director needs also to listen to herself, noting any movements that are taking place within herself as she listens to Maria. She notices a twinge in her heart when Maria says, "I wonder why he bothers with me." Acting on that, and by patient questioning, the All growth in the spiritual life is strongly rooted in desire, and it is from desire that commitment flows. January-February 1992 53 Reutemann ¯ Becoming a Discerning Person director explores: "Why do you wonder? What is that like? What are you feeling as you wonder that? And God, what might she be feeling as you realize within yourself that you can do nothing good by yourself?." Following this, there might be the opportunity to look closely at the poor, the suffering, and the abandoned and to wonder with Maria whether God bothers with them as she does with her. And then it might be possible to ask Maria: "Are you aware of God asking anything of you in all of this? Do you and God have anything in common here?" Helping a person sort out movements within, even seemingly contradictory movements like peace and sinfulness, compassion for the poor and disbelief in God, is exactly what spiritual direction and its discernment is all about. Other examples of this sorting-out process could be given; but perhaps it is time to make some summary observations about spiritual direction and becoming a discerning person. 1. Formal spiritual direction allows someone to articulate experiences. The central element in experiences, however, is feel-ings and, ultimately, the desires associated with those feelings. All growth in the spiritual life is strongly rooted in desire, and it is from desire that commitment flows. 2. When spiritual direction is focused on discerning the inner movements, then ordinarily connections can be made, themes and tendencies become apparent, and a sense of a desirable direc-tion becomes clear. When this occurs over time, a feeling of ener-gized peace develops on the journey. This becomes evident when remarks like these are made at the end of a direction session: "You're the only one I can talk with on this level--it means a lot to me." "This has been a very insightful session today--it hangs together." "My retreat experience has become more real to me after our talking about it. Things are working out." 3. When discernment is being practiced in spiritual direc-tion, there frequently occur corrections in judgments that directees make about themselves, especially negative judgments. In other words, a positive realistic outlook about the self develops. In addition, the Achilles' heel--that blocking, negative orientation which keeps recurring--generally gets discovered, and this allows for appropriate strategies to deal with it. 4. Practicing discernment with the assistance of a spiritual director encourages a disciplined willingness to check out feel-ings, name them, and test them against reality, that is, test their Review for Religious inner rationality. In this way we discover whether our feelings and what underlies them are leading us to God and our better self, or away from God into darkness and confusion. 5. Insight alone rarely changes people. Action, or commit-ment to trying to live differently, often does change people. Hence, it is not sufficient that our discerning be merely an aware-ness. Motivated desires and even specific tasks need to follow awareness, and so it can be said that discernment and decision making work together for growth in the spiritual life. 6. From all of the above, hopefully we can see that the goal of spiritual direction is to develop a discerning person who func-tions thus outside of the spiritual-direction relationship, some-one who moves with clarity in the direction of active love. Hopefully, too, those two basic questions of the life journey: What does it all mean? and what shall I do with my love? will find bet-ter, clearer answers. Note 1 See pp. 36-37 of Michael J. O'Sullivan sJ, "Trust Your Feelings, but Use Your Head: Discernment and the Psychology of Decision Making," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 22/4 (September 1990). I have been helped in my thinking about the interrelationship of feeling and thought in discernment by this article. The Light at the End of the Year Snow has fallen. Day is dark With the early coming on of night; December's darkness fin& its only spark Of brilliance in the Christmas light. Gray as our winter lives become, and stark With harshest turns of weather, bright Is the year's blessed ending. Mark! Now the starburst at earth's Eastward height. Nancy G. Westerfield January-February 1992 55 BRIAN O'LEARY Discernment and Decision Making Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing, and perfect will (Rm 12:2). exposing the influence that a projected course of action will have on one's relationship to God in Christ. It is not, therefore, some kind of generalized awareness of God or of his presence, but an insertion into a process--the process of finding and owning the will of God or, in other words, of Christian decision making. A dis-cernment which does not lead to a decision is incomplete, has been aborted at some point along the way. When a decision has been reached, it becomes a concrete expression, an incarnation of one's desire to respond to God's love and to serve his kingdom. Personal Freedom In spite of the laudable wishes of many Christians to move away from an

Issue 68.2 of the Review for Religious, 2009. ; Mission and Ministry Renewing Religious Traditions Reviewing Outward Signs QUARTERLY 68.2 2009 Review for Religious fosters dialogu~e withGod, dialogue with ourselves~: and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according ~ iocharisms of~Catholic religiouslif¢. As Pope Paul Vl said, our way of being Church is todqy the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034o639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Mail: reviewrfr@gmail.com ¯Web site: www.reviewforreligious.org Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ° St. Louis, MO 63108-3393 Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ Pontifical College Josephinum 7625 North High Street ¯ Columbus, Ohio 43235 POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Periodical postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2009 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any inaterial (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. ~ gournalof Catholic ~pir~ual~y Editor Associate Editor Canonical Counsel Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming sJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp . Paul Coutinho sJ Martin Erspamer OSB Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen HughesRSCJ Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib SVD QUARTERLY 68.2 2009 contents prisms 116 Prisms 118 132 144 mission and ministry ~ ~_ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principle,s: A Missioner's Reflection James H. Kroeger MM shares with us ten "mission principles" valid for Paul of Tarsus and for today's Pauls as well--the result of his own reflections as a missionary and a meditative reading of St. Paul. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion A Franciscan Approach to Ministry Daniel P. Horan OFM ~eflec~s on Francis of Assisi's life and writings and suggests that the five characteristics that emerge provide a helpful parad!grn for all pastoral ministers in the church. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion Discipleship and Walking by Faith Damian C. Ilodigwe, along with Abraham and the apostle Thomas, shows that discipleship needs deep faith daily. Review for Religious 152 168 renewing religious traditions Reparation and the Sacred Heart: A New Intrepretation Virginia M. Herbers ASCJ suggests a new understanding of reparation which speaks to the lived reality of the Body of Christ in a global community as well as to the Christian mission to live a life of service. Being Heard, Being Healed: Learning from the Quaker Tradition James H. Schimelpfening SM shares his refreshing experience of community that came from a series of six seasonal retreats based on the Quaker tradition and the work of Parker Palmer. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion 181 192 reviewing outward signs Religious Habits Reconsidered Doris Gottemoeller RSM looks over changes of habit and other changes and raises some thoughtful questions about what is now past, having been passed with a view to the future. On Wearing a Habit, from My Perspective Patricia McCarthy CND shares her experience of responding to God's grace in giving witness to her religious consecration in order to help us all to question our freedom in responding to God's grace in our own call. departments 204 Scr.ipture Scope: The Gospel of St. Paul 208 Canonical Counsel: Response to the Role of Law in the Church 214 Book Reviews 68.2 2009 prisms 116 T celebration of the Pauline Year has stimulated a large number of books on the person and writings of St. Paul. As a theologian I have been most taken by the importance of the Holy Spirit in Paul's Letters. In dogmatic development, it will take a few centuries before the church can articulate a theology of the Trinitarian God, and so Paul's writings about the working of the Spirit are all the more arresting. One of the titles that we give to the Holy Spirit in our Nicene creed is "Giver of life." That title is one of the best summaries for how Paul describes the Spirit in the life of the individual Christian and of the Christian community. In his Letter to Titus, Paul makes a summary statement about how much the Spirit is truly the Giver of life. "[God] saved us through the bath of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he richly poured out on us through Jesus Christ our savior." Through the image of the Spirit being poured out, all the specifics of this new life find their font. Early on in his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul asks "Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" He then goes on to say "for the temple of God, which you are, is holy." But Paul becomes more creative and copious in his description of the Spirit's gifts when he employs the image of the human body. That we all are members of the Body R~vie~ for Religious of Christ receives its most detailed description in this Letter of Paul's. We are all baptized into the one Body in the one Spirit. The Spirit is the Giver of the many different kinds of spiritual gifts, and at the same time "to each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit" (1 Co 12:7). What we might take for granted, Paul assures us, is the Spirit's gift. Paul's example is "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Co 12:3). Surely our sacramental words, "I absolve you," "this is my Body," "I baptize you," are Spirit-filled and Spirit-given words. But more simply, our expressed desires--"teach me to pray," "Lord, for-give me," "Lord, here I am"--are the continuing daily pouring out of gifts of the Spirit. That the total health of the Body depends on each and every one of us being open to the gifts of the Spirit and so sharing this divine life remains central to Paul's theology of the Spirit's gift-ing both to the individual Christian and to the Christian community. In Paul's Letter to the Romans we receive the rich-est understanding of our prayer as Christians. "The Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings" (Rm 8:26). Our very effort to pray--sometimes feeling so dry and empty--is always a gift of the Spirit. Perhaps our own sense of futility in praying excites the gifting of the Spirit's groans within us all the more, and within the groanings of the community praying as well. Paul's insight gives us consolation in our daily effort to pray. From these few examples, perhaps we will be stirred to greater gratitude for Paul's own gift of in.sight into the Spirit as the Giver of life as we celebrate.the Pauline Year. David L. Fleming SJ 117 68.2 2009 mission and JAMES H. KROEGER Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles: A Missioner's Reflection ministry The apostle Paul is considered the greatest missionary of all time. He is called the Apostle of the Gentiles since he was mainly responsible for the spread of Christianity into the Gentile world. The church owes much to Paul for its growth; he pioneered its early expansion by his mission labors and his theological reflection. A brief synopsis of Paul's life includes the following approximate chronology: 5-10 (birth at Tarsus), 15-20 (studies in Jerusalem), 36 (conversion), 36-39 (Damascus, Arabia, Jerusalem), 39-43 (Tarsus), 43-44 (Antioch), 44-48 (first missionary journey), 49-50 (Council of Jerusalem; Antioch confrontation with Peter), 49-53 (second missionary journey), James H. Kroeger MM, a missionary in Asia (Philippines and Bangladesh) since 1970, is professor of systematic theology, missiology, and Islamics at the Loyola School of Theology; Ateneo de Manila University; Katipunan Avenue, Loyola Heights; Quezon City 1108; Philippines. jkroeger@admu.edu.ph 53-58 (third missionary journey), 58-60 (prisoner in Caesarea), 60-63 (voyage to Rome, prisoner in Rome), 64-66 (Spain? Rome? elsewhere?), 66-67 (prisoner in Rome), 67/68 (death in Rome). This brief chronology provides the context from which Paul's dynamic mission principles emerge; they are the result of both mission praxis and deep theological reflection. Paul's letters and the Acts of the Aposdes provide much insight into Paul's missionary thinking and methods. Over the centuries many authors have tried to digest Paul's mission thought and praxis, emphasizing the "central ideas" of this aposde. This effort may be admi-rable, but can result in a certain selectivity. Thus, this author is chary of claiming to capture the "essence" of Paul's insights. One cannot compose a "CliffsNotes" or abbreviated version of Paul's thought. His letters were written over a span of ten years; they were based on a lengthy ministry of preaching the gospel message in an extraordinary variety of circumstances and to diverse groups of people. Readers, consider this pie.ce a long-term ad gentes missionary's :personal reflections based on a medita-tive reading of St. Paul. Through an interaction of this writer's personal experience and the profound thought of Paul, ten "mission principles" took form. Emerging from Paul's life and refracted through the experience of a contemporary missioner, these insights are, I think, valid for the church's missionary activity today, twenty centuries after Paul's birth. Depth Awareness of Vocation. In Paul's mind there was no iota of doubt about his calling, his vocation; for Paul and all missioners, mis-sion originates in the call of God. Several passages in the 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles book of Acts portray this: "The Lord said to [Ananias], 'Go, because this man [Paul] is my chosen instrument to bring my name before Gentiles'" (Ac 9:15). "The God of our ancestors has chosen you . . . because you are to be his witness before all humanity, testifying to what you have seen and heard" (Ac 22:14-15). "I have appeared to you for this reason: to appoint you as my servant and as witness of this vision in which you have seen me" (Ac 26:15). In addition, the majority of Paul's letters begin with a firm assertion of his identity as a chosen instrument of God. "From Paul . . . an apostle who does not owe his authority to men or his appointment to any human being, but who has been appointed by Jesus Christ and by God the Father who raised Jesus from the dead" (Ga 1:1-2). "From Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus who has been called to be an apostle, and specially chosen to preach the Good News" (Rm 1:1). Several other let-ters begin with almost the same words: "From Paul, appointed by God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus" (2 Co 1:1); see also 1 Co 1:1, Ep 1:1, Col 1:1, Ph 1:1, and others. Writing to the Corinthians about Christ's resur-rection, Paul categorically states: "I am the least of the apostles; in fact, since I persecuted the church of God, I hardly deserve the name apostle; but by God's grace that is what I am, and the grace that he gave me has not been fruitless" (1 Co 15:9-10). Radical Commitment to Christ. Paul's experience on the Damascus road was, in fact, only the starting point of a lifelong relationship; mission envisions a totally Christ-centered life. Paul expresses this in various ways: "Life to me, of course, is Christ" (Ph 1:21). "None of us live to ourselves, and none of us die Review for Religious to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Rm 14:7-8). "I have been crucified with Christ, and I live now not with my own life, but with the life of Christ who lives in me" (Ga 2:19-20). All of Paul's writings speak of his love for Christ, his identification with Christ. So intimate was his rela-tionship that he could even advise the Corinthians: "Imitate me as I imitate Christ" (1 Co 11:1). Paul tells the Thessalonians that they can follow his example: "You observed the sort of life we lived when we were with you, which was for your instruction; you were led to become imitators of us and of the Lord" (1 Th 1:5-6). Paul, writing to the Philippians, makes a moving com-parison of his previous life to his newfound existence in Christ: "I believe nothing can happen that will out-weigh the supreme advantage of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For him I have accepted the loss of everything, and I look on everything as so much rubbish if only I can have Christ and be given a place in him" (Ph 3:8-9). Voluntary Acceptance of Suffering Not relying on words alone, the apostle Paul preached the gospel by his life and example. In a par-ticular way, vulnerability and acceptance of the cross authen-ticate mission. In imitation of Christ who gave himself up to death even for sinners (Rm 5:8), Paul considers his suffering for the sake of the gospel to be a participa-tion in Christ's sufferings (2 Co 1:5-7). Paul saw him-self as sharing in Christ's kenosis (Ph 2:6-11). Writing to Timothy he says: "Join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling" (2 Tm 1:8-9). 121 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯Paul'$ Dynamic Mission Principles Paul recounts his numerous trials in the service of the gospel; he mentions his imprisonments, beatings, shipwrecks, travels, robberies, hard labor, sleeplessness, hunger, thirst, and nakedness (see 2 Co 11:23-27). Paul also mentions that he had to bear "a thorn in the flesh" (2 Co 12:7). Yet, he notes, "I am quite content with my weaknesses, and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and the agonies I go through for Christ's sake. For it is when I am weak that I am strong" (2 Co 12:10). Of course, this vulnerability is intimately linked with the paradox of the cross: "Continually we carry in our bod-ies the.dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may also be revealed" (2 Co 4:10). Like Paul, all missionaries need to say, "May I never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Ga 6:14). Insightful Mission Methods One can affirm that all Paul's energies were mission-focused, yet one can also point out that he employed dis-tinct methods to achieve his purposes. Mission demands creative, inculturated, ever-renewed approaches to evange-lization. Paul sought various occasions which would facilitate his proclamation; he attempted to connect his preaching with people's daily lives and worldview. Paul's approach at Ephesus (Ac 19) is exemplary; he would preach in a synagogue or a nearby house and attempt to link th~ Jewish faith with Christian revelation (see Ac 13:5 & 14, 14:1, 17:1). Acts 17:22-31 narrates Paul's famous speech in the Areopagus, the central assembly place in Athens, the cultural capital of the Greek islands. Paul mentions their altar to an unknown god; he refers to the philoso-pher- poet Epimenides (vv. 23 & 28). Although many mocked Paul, his intelligent method won some followers Revie~v for Religious for Christ. Paul, the "practical" missioner, moved from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the unknown to the known. Pope John Paul II has exhorted missionaries to move into new mission frontiers, "the modern equiva-lents of the Areopagus" (Redemptoris missio, §37). Paul's missionary sensitivities are manifested in his conviction that adaptation (inculturation, in today's parlance) is essential when mission meets a new situa-tion (Ac 15). He vigorously opposed the imposition of Jewish legal traditions, cultural observations, or external religious practices on Gentile Christians; these could hinder the spread of the gospel into the Gentile world. Paul even withstood James in Jerusalem (Ac 15) and Peter in Antioch (Ga 2:11-14). Paul articulates his "inculturated" method of becom-ing "all things to everyone" (1 Co 9:19-23). He adapts himself to the Jews, to those outside the law, and to the weak. His vision is crystal clear: "I have made myself the slave of everyone so as to win as many as I could. ¯. I made myself all things to everyone in order to save some at any cost; and I still do this, for the sake of the gospel, to have a share in its blessings." Urgent Gospel Proclamation ~. Paul did not understand "preaching" as giving a spir-itual reflection in a liturgical assembly. Integral procla-mation means heralding an urgent message from God that profoundly affects the destiny of all humankind. Mission has lost none of its urgency in the contem-porary world. Paul's words possess an authentic ring-- even in our ears today: "For, if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Co 9:16). For all Christians, evangelization must be a 123 68.2 2009 Kroeger ¯ Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles "daily preoccupation" (2 Co 11:28). As Pope Paul VI noted, "the presentation of the gospel message is not an optional contribution for the church. It is a duty incumbent on her by the command of the Lord Jesus" (Evangelii nuntiandi, §5). This Pauline "mission principle" is actually a call for an examination of conscience on the part of the church. Have many local churches placed too much emphasis on administrative efficiency, pastoral management, eco-nomic accountability, liturgical practice, canonical and catechetical orthodoxy--all to the detriment of dynamic programs of renewed evangelization? Have inward (ad intra) concerns vitiated the church's outward (ad extra) mission commitments? Paul's words contain a challenge to all churches and religious communities: "All the way along, from Jerusalem to Illyricum, I have preached Christ's Good News to the utmost of my capacity" (Rrn 15:19). Paul wrote these encouraging words to Timothy: "Make the preaching of the Good News your life's work, in thoroughgoing service" (2 Tm 4:5). 124 Deep Love of the Church In examining Paul's apostolic methods, it is enlight-ening to probe his view of the church. Paul primarily understands the church as a local community of baptized followers of Jesus Christ; he was not opposed to a uni-versal church, but in his day the local congregation was central to his experience. Mission and love of the people who constitute the church go hand in hand. This principle echoes the thought of an elderly Maryknoll missioner who never tired of repeating: Mission is people. Paul had great love and concern for the ecclesial com-munities he founded with painstaking effort. His writ-ings frequently and spontaneously express his affection: Review for Religious "It is only natural that I should feel like this towards you all, since you have shared the privileges which have been mine: both my chains and my work defending and estab-lishing the gospel. You have a permanent place in my heart, and God knows how much I miss you all, loving you as Christ Jesus loves you" (Ph 1:7-8). When the churches Paul established with patient apostolic ministry were in trouble, he shared their pain; he speaks of his "daily anxiety" for them (2 Co 11:28). He wonders aloud: "I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted" (Ga 4:11). "My children, I must go through the pain of giv-ing birth to you all over again, until Christ is formed in you" (Ga 4:19). Although the Corinthian community had many internal problems (divi-sions, immorality, idolatry, etc.; see 1 Co 1:10-13, 5:1-5, 10:14- 22), Paul, the affectionate missionary, loved them dearly: "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all" (2 Co 3:2). "Keep a place for us in your hearts . As I have already told' you, you are in our hearts--together we live or together we die. I have the very greatest confidence in you, and I am so proud of you that in all our trouble I am filled with consolation and my joy is overflowing" (2 Co 7:2-4). His writings frequently "and spontaneously express his affection. Close Collaboration with Coworkers The apostle Paul, though a strong personality, was a team worker in the task of evangelization. He under-stood that all apostolic ministry is enhanced through collab-orative efforts. Some few examples show that Paul saw 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles great advantages in working together with other apos-tles. On his first missionary j6urney, Paul was accom-panied by Barnabas and Mark (Ac 13-14). Timothy and Silvanus were his trusted coworkers in Corinth and else-where (2 Co 1:19). Titus was his appointed deputy in dealing with difficulties in the Corinthian community (2 Co 8:23), Among other coworkers and fellow aposdes were Luke, Erastus, Aristarchus, and Tychicus. Paul considered teamwork and collaborative minis-try important for a variety of reasons. Apostles working in partnership presented a visible image of the church as community; it gave the people an example of common witness. A variety of apostles working for a common goal presented a more balanced picture of the church than Paul alone could have given. In addition, the gifts of vai'ious individuals were put at the service of gospel proclamation. Paul frequendy expressed his admiration and appre-ciation of his collaborators; he called Timothy his "coworker" (Rm 16:21) and tenderly describes him as "my dear and faithful son" (1 Co 4:17) whose "worth you know, how like a son with a father he has served with me in the work of the gospel" (Ph 2:22). Paul referred to Titus as "my brother" (2 Co 2:13) and "my partner and coworker" (2 Co 8:23). Even if disputes occasionally arose, Paul sought to promote communion in mission. Paul offers contemporary ministers a model of cooperative ministry. Commitment to Social Transformation Paul preached a gospel of freedom and liberation along with his manifest concern and love for the poor and the suffering. The gospel message of human dignity and equality, if embraced, leads to social transformation. Revie~v for Religious Paul firmly believed in the transforming power of the gospel message, and he proposed to his communities the model of Jesus Christ: "Remember how generous the Lord Jesus was: he was rich, but he became poor for your sake, to make you rich out of his poverty" (2 Co 8:9). And, for gospel credibility, Paul himself imitated Christ. Though he possessed citizenship in the Roman Empire, to show his social concern and commitment he chose the lot of ordinary working-class people and labored with his own hands for his livelihood (1 Th 2:9, 1 Co 4:12). Paul challenged many of the social, racial, religious, cultural, and economic barriers of his times. One brief example illustrates Paul's social message. In ancient times, there were three great blessings pronounced in the Jewish synagogue: "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, . . . who hast not made me a Gentile, . . . who hast not made me a slave,., who hast not made me a woman!" Paul certainly had these barriers in mind when he expressed the new unity of those baptized in Christ: "There are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Ga 3:28). All, without dis-tinction, are to gather around the Eucharistic table, that great center of unity. Numerous additional examples of Paul's social con-sciousness readily come to mind. He struggled to alleviate the suffering of the Christian communities in Jerusalem and Judea during a severe famine (1 Co 16:1-4). Paul laid down ~a clear apostolic principle: "The only thing insisted on was that we should remember to help the poor, as indeed I was anxious to do" (Ga 2:10). Paul converted the runaway slave Onesimus and then demanded that he be accepted "no longer as a slave but something much bet-il, 27 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles ter than a slave, a beloved brother" (Phm 16). In a word, Paul preached authentic liberation: "When Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free" (Ga 5:1). 128 Effective, Exemplary Lifestyle The apostle Paul was always careful that .his per-sonal life would encourage and facilitate the spread of the gospel and never become counterproductive. The witness of a Cbristian life is the first and oj~en most effective proclamation of the gospel. When Paul speaks of imitation in his letters (he is not being arrogant), he believes that Christians can encourage one another through their Chrisdike words and deeds. An exemplary lifestyle is a very effective mode of proclamation. "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Co 11:1). Paul commends the Thessalonians because "you were led to become imita-tors of us and of the Lord" (1 Th 1:6). Paul, the exem-plary missioner, is seeking to draw people to Christ, not to himself, through his encouragement to imitate model Christians: "I have sent you Timothy. he will remind you of the way that I live in Christ" (1 Co 4:16). Several of the foregoing sections of this presenta-tion refer to key elements that coalesce to form Paul's life-witness as an apostle: Christocentric spirituality, voluntary vulnerability, innovative mission approaches, evangelical urgency, collaborative ministry, social engagement. To these elements one could add additional virtues, as Paul himself does in his lists of spiritual gifts (see 1 Co 12 & 13, Ga 5:22). In a theology of mission today, the holistic approach to mission that Paul's life shows would be termed "inte-gral evangelization." Paul consistendy strove to run the race successfully and fight the battle successfully (see 1 Co 9:24-27). He kept his eyes fixed on Christ; he told Revie~v for Religious the Philippians: "I am still running, trying to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me" (Ph 3:12). Total Reliance on God's Providence Paul had full confidence in God's everlasting love and fidelity; the guarantee of God's salvific love is Jesus Christ. Paul asks: "If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?" (Rm 8:31-32). Mission always remains "God's project" and evangelizers seek to be God's faith-filled, humble instruments. Paul cooper-ated with God's grace so willingly and generously because he was firmly convinced that he was doing God's work. He asserts that he is only a servant of the gospel: "I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow. Neither the planter nor the waterer matters: only God, who makes things grow" (1 Co 3:6-7). Paul lived his apostolic life with great confidence and full trust in God, whom we can call "Abba" (Rm 8:15, Ga 4:6-7). His life wasfilled with many sufferings, hardships, and challenges; he even faced Spirit-given "roadblocks" in his missionary journeys (Ac 16:6-10). Fully convinced that his life and mission were dependent totally on God and the Spirit's guidance, Paul labored unceasingly, always ascribing any missionary success to God. "By the grace of God I am what I am . I worked harder than any of them--though it was not I, but the Paul labored unceasingly, always ascribing any missionary success to God. 129 68.2 2009 Kroeger * Paul's Dynamic Mission Principles grace of God that is with me" (1 .Co 15:10). Paul asserts: "The love of Christ urges us on" (2 Co 5:14), "I can do all things in him who strengthens me" (Ph 4:13), "The Spirit comes to help us in our weakness" (Rm 8:26). Paul was a man of faith. The dynamic aposde Paul is undoubtedly the great-est missionary of all time. Based on his mission experi-ence and profound theological insights, this presentation has proposed ten "mission principles," valid for Paul of Tarsus and for today's Pauls as well. Paul burned' with the flame of God's love that was enkindled in his heart at his conversion; that flame pervaded his whole existence, even to the final hour of his martyrdom in Rome. It is good for us to notice that, even in the face of all the afflictions and sufferings he endured, Paul was a fulfilled, joyful, Spirit-guided missioner. Paul over-flowed with the Good News, and spread God's saving love everywhere. His awareness of God's transforming grace given to him in abundant measure enabled him to joyfully proclaim Jesus as Lord (see 1 Co 15:10). Paul, exemplifying a genuinely missionary attitude, was filled with deep joy, not because of personal grati-fication or external success, but because he saw many communities accept the person of Jesus. He wrote to the Philippians: "My brothers and dear friends, do not give way but remain faithful in the Lord. I miss you very much, dear friends; you are my joy and my crown" (Ph 4:1). To the Thessalonians Paul wrote: "What do you think is our pride and our joy? You are; and you will be the crown of which we shall be proudest in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes; you are our pride and our joy" (1 Th 2:19-20). The Corinthians received this message from Paul: "I have the very great-est confidence in you, and I~ am so proud of you that in Review for Religious all our trouble I am filled with consolation and my joy is overflowing" (2 Co 7:4). Paul's exhortations need to be heard by the mission-ary church today: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice" (Ph 4:4). "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Th 5:16- 18). "My brothers, rejoice in the Lord" (Ph 3:1). "Shine in the world like bright stars, because you are offering it the word of life" (Ph 2:15-16). Pastors, missionaries, catechists, religious, all ministers of the church, imitate Paul, the joyful evangelizer. Selected Resources Alien, R. Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962. Grassi, J. The Secret of Paul the Apostle. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1978. Grassi, J. A World to Win. Maryknoll: Maryknoll Publications, 1965. Matera, E Strategies for Preaching Paul. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001. Murphy-O'Connor, J. Jesus and Paul: Parallel Lives. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2007. Smyth, B. Pauk Mystic and Missionary. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1980. Srampickal, T. "The Secret of Paul's Missionary Success," Third Millennium 10 (2007): 41-66. Witherup, R. I01 Questions and Answers on Paul. New York: Paulist Press, 2003. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion What principle(s) of Paul, identified by Kroeger, most caught your attention for use in your own mission? If you were to list your own mission principles, how would they compare with Paul's? 131 68.2 2009 DANIEL P. HORAN A Franciscan Approach to Ministry 1321 During his final days St. Francis of Assisi reflected on how he had lived his life and spent God's time. To preserve his recollections of the birth of his new religious order and leave a record of his hopes for the future, he dictated his Testament to some of the fri-ars who were caring for him. In it he recalls his conver-sion to follow Christ and shares what it means to be a Franciscan: to live the gospel. Today Francis continues to inspire people in all parts of the world and every faith tradition. His Testament is the last of a series of writings by Francis that reveals his vision of ministry. Beyond what people often call "Franciscan spirituality" stands his vision of ministry in the church. It is a manner of living in the world, being in relationship with God, and serving our sisters and brothers. The year 2009 marks the eight-hundredth anniver-sary of the order's founding. As we celebrate this mile- Daniel P. Horan OFM has written on Franciscan theology, philosophy, and spirituality. His address is Holy Name College; 1650 St. Camillus Drive; Silver Spring, Maryland 20903. horandp@gmail.com Review for Religious stone, it is good to consider Francis's example and reflect on his vision, which serves as inspiration and guidance. In this article I will highlight five themes that emerge from Francis's writings to form a ministerial ethos that is particularly Franciscan. One does not need to be a Franciscan, a Poor Clare, or a secular Franciscan to adopt a Franciscan approach. Any pastoral minister can benefit from the insights of one of the greatest saints and reformers in Christian history. Everything Done in Humble Service When Francis started his work for God, having renounced his worldly possessions and aspirations, he did penance and followed the gospel as he felt led by God.~ Soon others sought to imitate his efforts and fol-low him in what Franciscan scholar Thadd~e Matura calls the "Franciscan project." This project, while ini-tially not the goal of Francis himself, quickly grew to include thousands of friars and hundreds of sisters,z What made them follow in the footsteps of this medi-eval man and renounce property and adhere to a life of obedience and chaste celibacy? One element of the Franciscan project that emerged early was radical adherence to subordinate positions in society. Francis's early followers saw the humility of a man who left behind the life of a wealthy merchant to live among lepers and outcasts. In his Earlier Rule, Francis had instructed them where among the social strata they should strive to live. He says, "Let no one be called 'prior,' but let everyone in general be called a lesser brother. Let one wash the feet of the other." Francis continued by enjoining his brothers to be "lesser ones" always "subject to all.''3 This spirit of humility is the foundation for all the 133 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ ~ Franciscan ~pproach to Ministry characteristics of a Franciscan ministry. Francis was less concerned about what someone did in the world than about how someone did it. Here we see his admiration for Christ's humility as central to his spirituality: to be Francis was less cbncerned about what someonedid in the world than how someone did: a Franciscan is to live the gospel by following in the footprints of Jesus Christ. Michael Blastic summarizes this well: "As Jesus turned toward those around him, so Francis and Clare in contemplation and com-passion incarnate the praxis of Jesus as they follow him in their world by turning to those around them.''4 From his incarnation and birth to his death on the cross, Jesus' life served as Francis's model for humble service. Perhaps the most succinct articulation of Francis's image of humble service is found in Admonition XIX. Here Francis says: Blessed is the servant who does not consider himself any better when he is praised and exalted by people than when he is considered worthless, simple, and looked down upon, for what a person is before God, that he is and no more. Woe to that religious who has been placed in a high position by others and [who] does not want to come down by his own will. Blessed is that servant who is not placed in a high position by his own will and always desires to be under the feet of others,s 134 Humility is a virtue of ministry, being of service to and among people, that Francis often wrote about. Besides being a reoccurring theme in his Admonitions, humility becomes a constitutive characteristic of the Franciscan way of life when it appears three times in his Review for Religious Later Rule. In chapter 3 we read, "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 rrieek, peaceful, modest, gende, and humble, speaking courteously to everyone, as is becoming." Two chapters later in the same document, Francis exhorts his followers to always work humbly as servants of God and disciples of poverty. Toward the end of the Rule, Francis again reminds his followers that even amid persecution, hardship, and infirmity they are to have humility and patience while loving those who persecute them.6 Francis echoes the theme of humility at every opportunity because in this way Christ served his brothers and sisters and in this way he desired to serve. Thaddte Matura makes a keen observation about the importance of humility in Francis's way of life and in the movement he gave rise to. Matura believes that Francis was.well aware of the temptation, perhaps within him-self, for pastoral ministers to consider themselves better or above those whom they served.7 It is possible that his concern about friars judging others and seeking special privileges was rooted in his own experience as the son of a wealthy merchant, a well-off young man who was disgusted by lepers and people of lower social status. Regardless of Francis's initial motivation, we are the inheritors of a vision that inspires ministers to always put others before themselves.8 In a world that is fraught with self-centeredness and material accumulation, where even devoted ministers are tempted to seek personal reward, a humble approach to ministry remains prophetic. Relationship Takes Priority Francis's way of being-in-the-world followed the example of Jesus Christ. Michael Blastic insightfully 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ A Franciscan Approach to Ministry connects the divine humility that Francis recognized in the incarnation with God's outward movement toward humanity.9 It was in humility that God incarnate, Jesus Christ, entered into relationships with the people around him. All four Gospels tell of Jesus' encounters with many people: the marginalized, outcast, wealthy, powerful, average, violent, peaceful, and so on. Because he lived a perfectly humble existence among his sisters and brothers, Jesus could meet people as they were, rec-ognizing the inherent dignity of each human person. For Francis, this became a major component of his way of life and remains a Franciscan characteristic today. Vv'hile most of the preserved writings of Francis are letters, prayers, and admonitions or guidelines addressed to large numbers, we have one letter that was written to a particular minister. His identity remains anonymous, frustratingly so for many, but the anonymiW allows us to stand in his place and receive personally from Francis his wisdom concerning ministry, a touching wisdom straight from his heart. Francis is concerned about this friar's attitude and disposition, and he says: I wish to know in this way if you love the Lord and me, his servant and yours: that there is not any brother in the world who has sinned--however much he could have sinned--who, after he has looked into your eyes, would ever depart without your mercy, if he is looking for mercy.~° Mercy trumps justice. Relationship remains the pri-mary way for people to understand all their encoun-ters. Vghile this observation may appear obvious, the reason is that we are already familiar--if only subtly and indirecdy--with the Franciscan way of seeing ministry. This was not always the case. The Franciscan historian Joseph Chinnici describes the early Franciscan move- Review for Religious ment as a radically new form of "penitential human-ism." He applies this term to the Franciscan movement's effort to bring people together peacefully amid "social discord and violence." This approach to ministry puts relationship and com-munity above per-sonal journeys of faith and conversion. One's own conversion, if it is a Franciscan one, should lead toward others and away from one's own self.~ It ~ is for precisely this reason that Francis insisted that the friars be mendicants, not monks, and live with the whole world as their cloister, not limiting it to a monastery's four walls. Franciscan ministries are not simply good methods, skillful implementations of model practices. Rather, they are a project that seeks to unite those who are separated by the violence of social, political, and ecclesial dissent.12 To stress relationship as the primary approach to minis-try, Francis often used familial terms. In his Earlier Rule, he says, "Let each one love and care for his brother as a mother loves and cares for her son."13 In Francis's spirituality, such a familial understanding of relation-ship extended even beyon.d human relationships to include all of God's creation. In his most famous work, The Canticle of the Creatures, he addresses all elements as brother or sister. In an age of heightened ecological awareness, our relationship with the earth and the rest of creation can influence our ministry positively. We are called to minister to all with a deepened sense of our One's own conversion, if it is a Franciscan one, should lead toward others and away from one's own self. 137 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ ~l Franciscan ~pproacb to Minisl~ interdependence and relatedness as children of God and brothers and sisters of all God's creation. Avoid Attachment There is great wisdom in a mendicant model of life. In a life of detachment from personal property, pasto-ral ministers become less preoccupied with their status, their control, their "things." If a particular ministry does not "belong" to a particular minister, one becomes a curator, a caretaker, one who takes good care of some-thing of value not one's own. This contrasts with the oligarchic approach, a small group's limited vision often preventing a ministry's expansion or creativity. Francis was quite convinced that appropriation of anything, including one's work as a minister, would lead to other problems. His Earlier Rule is filled with admonitions and warnings about the danger of attachment. In chap-ter 7 he says, "Wherever the brothers may be, either in hermitages or other places, let them be careful not to make any place their own or contend with anyone for it." He goes on to say, "Guard yourselves against the anxieties of this world and the cares of this life," and summarizes by saying: "Let all the brothers strive to follow the humility and poverty of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let them remember that we should have nothing else in the whole world except as the Apostle says: "Having food and clothing, we are content with these" (1 Tm 6:8).14 While today most ministers, including professed Franciscan women and men, would find it difficult to live in this world strictly observing the instruction above, the key to Francis's insight is found in the word "strive." We understand this as a more perfect vision of an imperfect manner of living in this world. It is the Review for Religious model that pastoral ministers should have in their work, striving in humility and poverty to not appropriate the work as their own. Thy Will Be Done Naturally, the divestment of property and ownership of even one's ministry leads to the question: Then to whom does it belong? For Francis the answer is simple: M1 good things come from and belong to God. It is in the perfect prayer of Christians that we find the source and purpose of our ministerial endeavors, "Thy will be done." When our efforts in ministry become more about our will, our ambition, or our desires, then we have left the realm of ministry and entered some level of self-centeredness. Closely linked to Francis's view of attachment is his understanding that all ministry is the work of God for God. This understanding affirms and renews people's vocation to service. It directs the gaze of ministers from themselves back to God as the source of their inspiration to follow their ministerial vocation. Francis often wrote about God's will in connection with his own ministry and that of the Friars Minor. In his Letter to the Entire Order, Francis reminds his broth-ers of their vocation and its connection to God's will. He writes: "Give praise to him because he is good; exalt him by your deeds; for this reason he has sent you into the whole world: that you may bear witness to his voice in word and deed and bring everyone to know that there is no one who is all-powerful except him.'ns Matura highlights this thought of Francis when he says, "Anything good that we have or do, no matter how personal it is, comes to us from God, and we are only administrators of that good, as it were.'n6 In addition to the proper attribution of our gifts and vocation to 139 68.2 2009 Horan ¯ A Franciscan Approach to Ministry God, this thought frees us of the weighty burdens of self-sufficiency and responsibility. Unhampered by the pressure ministers frequendy put on themselves, we are free to be God's instruments, working in partnership with Christ and others. In this way we leave the world of "lone rangers" and enter the community of Christians working toward the kingdom. I'40 Pray without Ceasing A Franciscan approach to ministry must always flow from a life of prayer. Those who adopt this approach are not just people who pray, but people whose words and actions are also prayer. This lived prayer is con-stant openness to conversion, allowing God to enter and transform lives from worldly concern and triviality to authentic gospel living--in Christ's footsteps, as God's instruments of peace today. In a brief letter to St. Anthony of Padua, Francis responded to his request for permission to teach the-ology. This was a new initiative, for up to this time Franciscans had largely avoided academic ministry. Francis was cautious of higher education because of the tendency of the educated to think better of themselves, look down on others, and move away from the charac-teristics of ministry we have examined above. Francis knew of Anthony's gifts, however, and knew that many friars had asked for his instruction in theology. Francis told Anthony, "I am pleased that you teach .sacred the-ology to the brothers providing that, as is contained in the Rule, you 'do not extinguish the Spirit of prayer and devotion' during study of this kind.''17 Even a ministry as basic as training other friars for pastoral ministry was viewed as secondary to prayer and devotion. Francis writes in his Earlier Rule that those who Review for Religious come after him are to love the Lord God, who has given everyone everything, with their whole heart, soul, mind, strength, understanding, powers, effort, affection, feel-ing, desire, and wish. This is not to be an occasional experience or portion of time apart from the rest of life, but the modus operandi of ministry. Later in the same text Francis writes: Wherever we are, in every place, at every hour, at every time of the day, every day and continually, let all of us truly and humbly believe and hold in our heart and love, honor, adore, serve, praise and bless, glorify and exalt, magnify and give thanks to the Most High and Supreme Eternal God, Trinity and Unity.'s This is another echo of the Franciscan understanding that one's entire life should be given back to God as prayer. Such a life naturally nourishes a vocation to service and ministry. When one's actions are directed back to God with humil-ity, with relationship as the priority, without encumber-ing attachments, and with recognition of everything as God's work, then life is transformed into prayer. Ministry then is not a person's self-motivated effort or effectiveness, but the outpouring of God's gifts received prayerfully and gratefully and sharbd with others. Eight hundred years after the first Franciscan began to do ministry in the small town of Assisi, we find our-selves inspired by Francis's example to continue the mission of God's work in our world. Regardless of our particular manifestation of God's work, all pastoral min-isters can find renewed life and purpose by reflecting A Franciscan approach to ministry must always flow from a 'life of prayer. 141 68.2 2009 Horan * .4 Franciscan AIqn'oacb to Ministry on a Franciscan approach to ministry. Humility keeps us approachable and ready to give loving service. The priority we give to relationship brings us to places where we can best foster loving unity among our sisters and brothers and grateful respect for all of creation. Detachment helps to seek the right things, without being distracted by worldly concerns. Recalling that God is the source of all our gifts and our personal voca-tion puts our work into perspective, while bolstering our purpose to work hand in hand with God. Finally, more than just say prayers, we strive to live lives that are prayers, lives that help bring God's love to our world. Notes i Francis of Assisi, "The Testament," verses 1 and 14, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), pp. 124 & 125. Further citations of this first volume will be noted as FAED followed by page numbers. 2 Thaddde Matura, "Francis of Assisi and His Posterity Today," in Gospel Living: Francis of Assisi Yesterday and Today, ed. Elise Saggau (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1994), pp. 263-267. Matura compares Francis to Jesus while explaining similarities of the Franciscan orders and the church. While Francis is held as the founder and model for the three Franciscan orders (much as Jesus is for the church), he is not credited with intentionally founding a new movement in the proper sense (see p. 264). ~ Francis of Assisi, "The Earlier Rule," 6:3-4 and 7:2, in FAED, p. 68. 4 Michael Blastic, "Contemplation and Compassion: A Franciscan Ministerial Spirituality," in Spirit and Life, vol. 7, ed. Anthony Carrozzo, Vincent Cushing, and Kenneth Himes (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1997), p. 172. s Francis, "Admonition 19: A Humble Servant of God," in FAED, p. 135. 6 Francis, "The Later Rule," 3:10-11 (emphasis added), 5:4, and 10:7-10, in FAED, pp. 102-105. r Thadd~e Matura, Francis of Assisi: The Message in His Writings, Review for Religious trans. Paul Barrett (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1997), p. 167. s St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan saint and doctor of the church, later wrote about the importance of humility in the evangelical life, beginning his treatise Disputed Questions on Evangelical Perfection with that topic. See Works of St. Bonaventure, vol. 13, trans. Thomas Reist and Robert Karris (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 2008). 9 Blastic, "Contemplation and Compassion," p. 153. 10Francis, "A Letter to a Minister," verse 9, in FAED, p. 97. 11 Joseph Chinnici, "Penitential Humanism: Rereading the Sources to Develop a Franciscan Urban Spirituality," in Franciscans in Urban Ministry, ed. Roberta McKelvie (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 2002), pp. 119-122. ~2 See Chinnici, "Penitential Humanism," p. 123. 13 Francis, "Earlier Rule," 9:1 I, in FAED, p. 71. ~4' Francis, "Earlier Rule," 7:13, 8:2, and 9:1, in F~IED, pp. 69-70. is Francis, "A Letter to the Entire Order," verses 8-9, in FAED, p. 117. 16 Matura, Francis ofAssisi, p. 132. 17 Francis, "A Letter to Brother Anthony of Padua," verse 2, in FAED, p. 107. 18 Francis, "Earlier Rule," 23:8 and 23:11, in FAED, pp. 84 & 85. Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion 1. What model or approach do I currently use in my pastoral ministry? 2. In what ways do Francis's insights speak to me today? 3. What characteristics of a Franciscan approach to ministry do I live particularly well? Where could I strive to improve? 68.2 2009 DAMIAN C. ILODIGWE Discipleship and Walking by Faith God never deceives us. When we entrust our life to him and allow him to direct us, he ensures that all goes well. We may not know where he is lead-ing us. We only see the present, and nothing beyond it. Indeed, even the present is sometimes not clear, and in any case it reaches beyond itself into the future. The present invites to us to keep moving despite perplexity. Here our faith is our strength. Faith propels us forward. So long as we know that God is with us, we can afford to take the next step. We need not be apprehensive. We can be certain that we shall reach our destination even if we have to move slowly and sometimes with some frustradon. Without faith we do not see that God is leading us. If we step out into the unknown future at his bidding, it is likely that we will persevere to the end (see Heb 11). Damian C. Ilodigwe last wrote for us in early 2008. He is a priest and lecturer in philosophy at Ss. Peter and Paul Major Seminary; P.M.B. 5171; Secretariat P.O.; Ibadan, Nigeria. dammychuks2000@ yahoo.com Review for Religious We should trust God at each step, even when we do not know what lies ahead. He shows us his plan piecemeal. An aspect of faith is trust. We can think here of chil-dren and mothers. Usually young children are wholly dependent on their mother. She gives instruction, and the child wonders about it. But this wondering does not prevent the child from carrying out the mother's bidding. He may ask questions, of course, but unless he is simply seeking some clarification he will not get very far. He will not be permitted to ignore or resist what his mother asks him to do. Usually children know, for their own good, when they had better obey. Usually they carry out their mother's instruction even when they do not fully understand. What is true of the relation between children and their mother is true of our relationship with God. Like little children, we need to give God our utter trust (Lk 11:5-13; 18:1-8). Because our faith tells us that God acts in our best interest, we can afford to follow his bidding no matter the inconveniences we feel to be associated with it. A childlike simplicity in our relationship with God is an index of vibrant faith and of maturity in this relationship (Lk 12:22-31). The' Case of Abraham In the life of Abraham we find an example of this childlike faith. He is ready to do the Lord's bidding even when this involves a great deal of sacrifice. Many instances in his life illustrate his utter commitment to God. Consider the divine request to leave his country for another land: "Leave your country, your family, and your father's house, for the land I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name so famous that it will be used as a blessing. I will 68.2 2009 llodig'we ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith In the life of abraham we find an exa ple ff bless those who bless you; I will curse those who slight you; all the tribes on earth shall bless themselves by you" (Gn 12:1-2). How could God ask Abraham to do a thing like this?1 The demand appears extravagant and even ridiculous. Is it reasonable to leave his native place, where all his friends are? He is established here. He has security here. To leave means leaving good memories and property behind and beginning all over again. As the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. It is foolish to abandon what has proved itself over the years without a good clear reason. That rea-son would be that the change will certainly make things better. But, for Abraham, the future is a clouded certainty. All that is certain is that he should leave and that he will be shown another land. Regarding the particulars of the promised land, he knows nothing. He is told, though, that from him will come a great nation. That promise appears less attractive than it might because of its general vagueness. Yet at another level it provides a certain motivation because it comes from God, from Abraham's faith in God. It is only faith that can quickly overcome the disenchantment pr0~oked by lack of information about this promised land. Abraham is certainly a man of faith. For, in spite of the obvious per-plexities associated with this directive, he. takes the bull by the horns. He understands that it is the Lord speak-ing and that he knows what he is doing. Consequently he sets out as the Lord has told him to do. Scripture tells us that Abraham is seventy-five years old when he Review for Religious leaves Haran. He takes his wife, Sarai, and the people they.have acquired in Haran. Their journey takes them to Canaan (Gn 12:4-5). Abram's age of seventy-five is significant, emphasizing the great inconvenience of this movement. He is not a young man eager to be off on his own. So in a sense it is a blind journey. God guides him. As is always the case, the Lord does not ask us to do something and then leave us to our own design. He does not leave us on our own. He provides for us one step at a time. The entire picture can never be available to us all at once. As Abram journeys, he comes to Shechem's Oak of Moreh, in Canaan. The Lord appears to him and says he will give this land to his descendants. Abram builds an altar there. He proceeds to the hill country east of Bethel and then to the Negeb (Gn 12:7-9). Although Abram has stepped out into the unknown, he is never alone. He knows in faith that the Lord is with him through all the stages of his journey. And so he is our father in faith (Heb 11:8). He is wholly sub-missive to God, and God does not fail him. Abraham becomes the father' of a multitude of nations. The Challenges of Discipleship and Our Contemporary Situation At this juncture we may ask what we can learn from Abraham's experience. We can learn much regarding the challenges of discipleship. Our life, too, is a journey, a journey of faith towards God's kingdom. God calls each of us out of our various backgrounds to pursue a special life journey, a pilgrimage to a distant destination. The fundamental truth about this is that God is with us all the time, even when we do not take cognizance of him. His presence empowers us to be what he wants us to be. '147 68.2 2009 Ilodig~ve ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith Without evidence we are likely to feel discdnnected, His providence sustains us and guides every.aspect of our life. We need to let this truth have an impact on the way we live our life each day. We need to entrust ourselves completely to that providence. "For those who --~ love God, all things work together unto good." We may not understand just how they fit together now or will fit together in the end, but we cannot doubt that they do fit together. God's love, acting as a redemptive principle, inte-grates every aspect of our experience, bringing every-thing into God's ultimate plan for us all. The practical implication of this truth, then, is that we must learn to walk by faith rather than by sight.2 There is a world of difference' between walking by faith and walking by sight. When we walk by mere sight, we are all the time looking for visible, tangible, measur-able evidence of what we should do or should have done. For many purposes and many aspects of reality, there is such evidence, but for other purposes there is none. We may feel that without that kind of evidence there is no reality. If so, we are likely to feel disconnected. We are likely to feel we are living within limited horizons, likely to have a vague feeling that we are missing something. Not enjoying that feeling, we give oursel~es a warrant to deny there is any reality behind our vague feeling. We decide not to let ourselves be affected by what we claim is unreality. We refuse to be open to it. On the other hand, our admittedly limited knowl-edge even of the physical world should persuade us to see and affirm that the fullness of reality is far broader 148] Review for Religious than, say, the empirical data we have of the astrophysi-cal universe or the jungles of Brazil. We may lack the resources to fully penetrate such real worlds, and the world of faith as well, but we do not have reason to deny their reality and the impact they can and should have upon us.3 We need not deny spiritual reality even though we lack tangible and visible data that serve as empirical evi-dence. Spirituality's reality is accessible to faith. Faith transcends the evidence of the empirical sciences. When we walk by faith, we find ourselves in some sense at home in all of reality. The experience of Abram challenges us. Because he walked by faith, he was able to see far beyond the lim-ited reality of his time and place. Ready to journey with the Lord, he stepped out into the unknown that in some way he could actually see. In time he realized much of the promise he had. received. Abram's faith was his sav-ing grace. In our dealing with the Lord, some tension remains between the way of faith and the way of mere sight. . Sometimes we may walk ahead of the Lord or far behind him, and thus miss some of what we would have received from him. When our faith is stronger, we are better able to synchronize our mind and heart with God. We see better what he sees; we dream better the dream that he dreams for us; we see a road even when our ordinary sight sees no road. In short, our world of possibilities becomes larger; we live our lives more abundantly. Thomas's Encounter with the Risen Lord Consider Thomas. He did not believe when the other apostles told him they had seen the Lord. He insisted that unless he touched Jesus' wounds he would 149 68.2 2009 llodigwe ¯ Discipleship and Walking by Faith 1501 not believe (Jn 20:24-25). His predicament is under-standable. He cannot transcend the inclination to walk by sight. He demands empirical evidence in a matter that requires faith. The reality of the risen Lord is not accessible to, cannot be contained in, the limited world of empirical evidence. This becomes clear to Thomas when the Lord grants his demand for evidence. "Put your finger here, and look at my hands; then stretch out your hand and put it in my side. Stop your doubting and believe." Thomas says, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus says to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe!" On 20:26-29). Thomas wants empirical evidence in order to believe, and he is granted the rare privilege of touching and seeing. But the Lord does not fail to make clear that this privilege is not really necessary. Indeed, it is argu-able that it is not the empirical evidence that generates Thomas's confession. Thomas could have touched the Lord and still not believed. There is another factor, the factor of grace. One cannot come into the presence of the risen Lord without being positively affected. That is what seems to have happened in Thomas's case. It is clear that what really matters is faith, not sight: "Happy are those who believe without seeing me." Without empirical evidence they believe, and this is what makes them blessed. The experience of the risen Lord is paradoxically a reward for their faith. It is their faith, not empirical evidence, that opens them to the reality of the risen Lord. Faith is a gift. through and through. God's gift, the presence of God, is received and perceived through faith. If we turn again to the experience of Abraham, we note that he avoids the tension between the way Review for Religious of faith and the way of sight. He does not ask for evi-dence as Thomas does. He is ready to step out into the unknown simply because he believes it is the Lord speaking. Faith sustains him on his travel. Faith brings him to the promised land. But before this ever comes to pass in time, faith has already enabled him to realize the promised land spiritually. The claim of faith is certainly one we cannot afford to ignore in our everyday struggle. We need to keep in mind the distinction between the way of faith and the way of sight. So as to realize our full destiny in the Lord, we must cultivate the habit of walking by faith rather than by sight, bringing faith into every aspect of our existence. It will enrich our vision of life and increase our ability to deal appropriately with all that occurs in our day-to-day living. In carefully fostered faith, the unthinkable becomes thinkable, the impossible becomes possible, and our entire life will be lighted by the glory of God. Notes I Even more extravagant is the later demand that he sacrifice Isaac, the child of promise. Here, too, Abraham's response marks him as a model of faith. See Genesis 22. z See Ralph C. Martin, Called to Holiness (Mumbai: St Pauls, 2001), pp. 101-117. 3 Faith and reason complement each other. Indeed, as Pope John Paul I! famously remarked, "Faith and Reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth" (Fides et ratio, §7). 151 68.2 2009 VIRGINIA M. HERBERS Reparation and the Sacred Heart: A New Interpretation renewing religious traditions The conciliar decree Perfectae caritatis was pro-mulgated in 1965 to guide renewal "in order that the great value of a life consecrated by the profession of the counsels and its necessary mission today may yield greater good to the church" (PC §1). Thirty years later John Paul II affirmed that "the consecrated life has not only proved a help and support for the church in the past, but is also a precious and necessary gift for the present and future of the people of God" (Vita consecrata, §3). In fidelity to the council's call and in response to the pope's call for authentic interpretation of founding charisms, the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus have in recent years striven to understand Virginia M. Herbers ASCJ is vocation director of the Aposdes of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and director of Queen of Apostles Spirituality Center; 800 Montebello Camp Road; Imperial, Missouri 63052. svhascj@yahoo.com Revie~ for Religious authentically the role and relevance of reparation within the Sacred Heart devotion. This effort has led me to believe that, just as religious consecration still has significance in the world today, so too does reparation. I affirm Karl Rahner's claim in 1966 that devotion to the Sacred Heart is not a dated, old-fashioned piety, but rather is quite relevant today. He later insisted that this devotion is indispensable "since the future of the church was decided by the love of the heart of Jesus in dying and depends on the final decision of Our own hearts."' I think Rahner is correct. I would add that consecrated life itself can be understood as a lived interpretation of Sacred Heart devotion, and that the religious profession of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart demonstrates the proper understanding of repa-ration in the Sacred Heart devotion. This community's charism illuminates a unique aspect of God's love, pro-viding for the entire church a renewed understanding of our baptismal vocation (see PC §1). To appreciate this charism of reparation, a brief look at the religious vows and the Sacred Heart devotion will provide helpful background. Let us take them in turn. The Evangelical Counsels Vita consecrata asserts that religious vows are not an initiative of the individual religious, but a response of the individual to God's call: "The experience of this gracious love of God is so deep and so powerful that the person called senses the need to respond by unconditionally dedi-cating his or her life to God" (VC §17). The profession of poverty, chastity, and obedience is the consecrated person's response of love to the One who loves her infinitely. Hearing the call and responding to God's love is not unique to those in religious life; it is implicit in 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart baptismal consecration. Profession of the evangelical counsels does not set religious apart from the body of the faithful as holier, closer to God, or more perfect. It is not a consecration differing in essence from baptismal consecration. Rather, it is rooted in baptism. It is an intensification of baptismal consecration for mission; it is a specification of the baptismal call.2 As such, it is a sign to all the baptized of what and who we are called to become as followers of Christ and members of his Body. "Religious life 'clearly, strikingly, astonishingly' ¯ . . leads the church to see what the whole church is called to by baptism, to see it clearly and strikingly in a public and communal embodiment that helps people toward realization.''3 Profession of the evangelical counsels is thus a rec-ognition by religious of the fullness of God's love for all, and a response to that love with the gift of their entire lives. Through the vows of chastity, poverty, and obe-dience, religious center their lives on the "God-quest" and proclaim that "I commit my whole self, everything and forever, to the undying love that has claimed me for the transformation of the world." Profession of vows is thus "a unitary and unifying act, a solemn, formal, and public act, by which a person takes her whole life into her hands and freely disposes of it in self-gift to Christ and his Body within the congregation."4 Sacred Heart Devotion Devotion to the Sacred Heart has traditionally been understood as an icon of God's love for humanity, devel-oping direcdy from incarnational theology,s Humanity recognizes God's love in the love of the God-man, Jesus Christ, as shown specifically in his heart. The incarna-tion allows human beings to experience God's love in Review for Religious tangible human ways. The heart of Jesus reveals the heart of God, embodied and enfieshed. This capac-ity has implications for all who follow Christ, for "the only Son of God, in becoming incarnate, takes on a human heart [and] we are called to share in this love and to receive through the Holy Spirit this extraordinary capacity to love.''6 Devotion to the Sacred Heart, then, is not devo-tion to an abstract symbol, but devotion to the per-son of Jesus and his love for each human being. The incarnation gives humanity access to what was formerly inacces-sible, God's very self, during Jesus' earthly life and now in his Mystical Body, the church. In the heart of Jesus, God calls us to "become what we receive"7 and to incarnate God's love ourselves as members of Christ's Mystical Body. What, then, does the heart of Jesus teach us about the incarnate love of God? Devotion to the Sacred Heart encompasses four characteristics of God's love: (1) Christ's heart shows us that the incarnate love of God is a continuing, dynamic reality, not an abstract theory or historical event; the heart of God is enfleshed in the body of Jesus and continues to beat in his Body, the church. (2) Christ's heart is a heart wherein two natures--human and divine-~coexist in perfect harmony. (3) Christ's heart is on fire with love for all humanity, both in general and in particular. (4) Christ's heart is an Devotion to the Sacred Heart has traditionally been understood as an icon of God's love for humanity. 68.2 2009 Herbers ¯ Reparation and the Sacred Heart open, broken heart--opened by the soldier's lance after the sacrifice of his human life, and broken by human sin, weakness, and error. The Religious Vows: Returning Love for Love Given the understanding that religious vows are a response to love and a sign for all the faithful of our common call to share in Christ's mission, and given the understanding that Sacred Heart devotion is (a) an ongoing dynamic expression of God's incarnate love, (b) exemplified in the love of Jesus' heart, which is in perfect union with the Father and the Spirit, (c) con-tinually on fire with love for us, and (d) still wounded by humanity's rejection of divine love even while revealing through the open wound the ultimate gift of his life, we now turn to the modern relevance of the religious vows as a distinct and poignant means of living Sacred Heart devotion. The consecrated religious professes vows as a return of love for Love, as a response from her heart to the outpouring~of God's love upon her. The very act of con-secrated profession can be interpreted as a profound act of Sacred Heart devotion, as attested by John Paul II: "Through the consecration of the religious vows, you desire, through the love of total giving, to fill your souls and your bodies with the spirit of sacrifice . In this way the likeness of that love which in the heart of Christ is both redemptive and spousal is imprinted on the religious profession" (Redemptionis donum, §8). Acknowledging and accepting the love of God and responding "in kind" are not enough, however. The Sacred Heart of God incarnate is not a mere image to be worshiped or just a pious practice to be encouraged. The encyclical on Sacred Heart devotion, Haurietis Review for Religious aquas, quotes Thomas Aquinas on this point: "Religious worship is not paid to images, considered in themselves, as things; but according as they are representations lead-ing to God incarnate. The approach which is made to the image as such does not stop there, but continues towards that which is represented.''8 In a similar way, professing vows in the church as a response to God's love commits religious to loving service of the church and, not stopping there, to loving service of the incar-nate Word of God. Our acceptance of God's love in baptism transforms us; in religious profession this baptismal transformation shapes our likeness to Christ, compelling us to return his love by following his example of ministering self-lessly to all those in need. Pope Benedict XVI expresses this directly: "When we practice this devotion, not only do we recognize God's love with gratitude but we con-tinue to open ourselves to this love so that our lives are ever more closely patterned upon it . The experience of God's love should be lived by men and women as a 'calling' to which they must respond. Fixing our gaze on the Lord. helps us to become more attentive to the suffering and needs of others.''9 Interior devotion is thus manifested in ministerial outreach. The three vows constitute a unique expression of Sacred Heart devotion, corresponding to specific char-acteristics of incarnate love. The heart of Jesus is a heart both human and divine, the heart of a man and the heart of God. Within one heart, two natures coex-ist in a mysterious unity that leaves each distinct yet undivided. Jesus' human heart beats in rhythm with the heart of God; his human will is perfectly synchronized with the will of God. The desire of the man corresponds completely with the desire of God for the man. 157 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and tbe Sacred Heart In this lies the kernel of religious obedience--to have our hearts beat in time with the heart of God. Consecrated persons who vow obedience strive to desire what God desires, to will what God wills, to attune their hearts to the heart of God. "To want the same thing, and to reject the same thing, was recognizeff by antiq-uity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought,m° Genuine obedience is not confor-mity to an external authority nor submission to a will foreign to our own. The vow of obedience "in its deep-est roots is a dedication to freedom, not to subjection or servitude . True freedom is to be found in union with the will of God."1' The vow of chastity expresses devotion to the heart of Christ by expressing his love for all people. Just as the Sacred Heart is "a heart on fire," so by vowing chastity do religious enkindle the fire of love in their own heart. Sandra Schneiders insists'that the vow of chastity "must be based on a deep religious experience of being loved by God in Jesus and an experienced per-sonaL fulfillment in returning that love." She adds that this vow "leads the person toward personal transforma-tion in love and allows the person to participate mean-ingfully in the emergence of a new, whole, and loving world characterized by equality, responsible intimacy, and mutuality."12 Clelia Merloni, the founder of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart, describes the "fire of love" kindled by the apostle's vow of chastity as holy zeal: "You see, daugh-ters, wherever the fire of divine love is, it cannot remain hidden or idle, but at once it manifests itself as the liv-ing flame of a holy zeal . Remember, daughters, that zeal must be active, untiring, gentle, and prudent: zeal Reuiew for Religio~.s does not inflame the heart without manifesting itself in works."13 By vowing lives of consecrated celibacy, reli-gious perpetually submit to the consuming fire Of God's love, which in turn impels them to share that love with everyone she encounters in an inclusive, not exclusive, way. Professing chastity enables religious to fan into flame a love that embraces all, recognizing in each face the face of God. As Benedict xvI wrote in Deus caritas est (§ 15), "The concept of 'neighbor' is now universal-ized, yet it remains concrete. Despite .being extended to all mankind, it is not reduced to a generic, abstract, and undemanding expression of love, but calls for my own practical commitment in the here and now." The vow of chastity calls us to embrace each while embracing all, to love particularly w~ithout loving restrictively, to love universally and specifically. Pierre Teilhard de Chardifi described the source .and the consequence of this type of loving as fire: "Under the symbol of the Sacred Heart, the divine assumed for me the form, the strength, and the properties of an energy, of a fire . Through its power to become universal, this fire proved able to invade and impregnate with love the whole atmosphere of the world in which I lived.''~4 By professing poverty, religious make yet another return of love for Love, mirroring the woundedness of Christ's heart. John Paul II says that "on Golgotha Jesus' heart was pierced by a lance as a sign of his total self-giving, of that sacrificial and saving love with which he 'loved us to the end'" On 13:1).15 By accepting death at the hands, of humanity, the God-man sacrificed all for love. "From the infinite power proper to God, the heart of Christ did not retain anything except the unarmed power of the love that forgives . In the heart of Christ are encountered divine riches and human poverty."~6 68.2 2009 Herbers ¯ Reparation and the Sacred Heart In the profession of poverty, devotion to the broken heart of Christ is made tangible also through responding to the suffering ofhis heart in the poor of .today's~worl~d. 160 This kenosis, this. self-emptying, is the expression of Love to which the vow of poverty responds. In accept-ing death Christ accepted all and gave all. In professing poverty religious do likewise--accepting all that is given them from the hand of the Father and giving all in a return of love for Love. This is devotion to the open heart of Christ. In the profession of poverty, devotion to the broken heart of Christ is made tangible also through respond-ing to the suffering of his heart in the poor of today's world. For vowed reli-gious, devotion to the Sacred Heart includes recognition that his heart remains broken, suffering as people continue to betray and reject love, to ignore and neglect the hurt-ing, to strike first. The world's physical, emo-tional, psychological, and mental pain con-tinually shows the heart of Jesus suffering in his Body. Clelia Merloni insisted that "The heart of Jesus, disguised as this particular sick person, calls you to a mission of charity, since the sick make up the very body of Jesus.''17 Clelia exhorts her sister apostles to recognize that where there is sickness, pain, or suffering, there is the open, broken heart of Christ. The profession and living of poverty expresses solidarity with all those who are wounded in and by society, and expresses union with Christ's broken heart suffering today. By professing evangelical poverty, con- Review for Religious secrated religious commit themselves "to eliminating structures of oppression and to promoting projects of solidarity for the benefit of the poor" (VC §89). Only as the poor can we hope to alleviate the suffering of the poor.~8 Through their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedi-ence, consecrated religious express their love with the entirety of their lives. This threefold consecration uni-fies all religious communities. Their distinctive charisms are demonstrated by their various ways of expressing this consecration. The founder of my congregation, Clelia Merloni, was entrusted with a particular charism within Sacred Heart devotion--a charism to be apostles of the Sacred Heart. Her apostles were to be characterized by zeal and charity, but more importantly by one aspect of Sacred Heart devotion: reparation. She pleads with her apostles to make their lives relevant to the church's mission in the world: "Our congregation needs subjects who are strong and robust in virtue, not pious statues!''19 Sacred Heart devotion, for Clelia and her apostles, always implies responding to the living heart of Christ through lives of reparation. Zeal and charity are insufficient for those professing vows as Apostles of the Sacred Heart. Only when we are motivated by a spirit of reparation can we be seen clearly as apostles of the Sacred Heart devo-tion. What, then, is the nature, meaning, and relevance of the reparation this congregation fosters? A New Interpretation of Reparation Theologically reparation has often been mistakenly equated with atonement and expiation. Atonement is "an act of divine love that effects a new state of things, the peaceful relationship between God and man. Man is reconciled to God. atonement is effected through the 161 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart blood of the cross . man is placed in a new relation to God.''2° Atonement, therefore, is effected once and for all in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ's death and resurrection made humanity "at-one" with God, reconciling a broken relationship, correcting and reversing the effects, of human sinfulness, thus mak-ing humanity's "atonement" not only unnecessary but impossible. Expiation is closely related to. atonement in that it is appeasement by sacrifice, specifically the sac-rifice of Jesus' death, which appeased God's justice and "remove[d] the cause of the sinner's alienation from God in. order to restore him to holiness and divine favor.''2' Taken to their logical ends, these notions of atone-ment and expiation .seem to perceive "the love of God given us in Christ Jesus" as either correction of a rela-tionship gone awry or Christ's willing acceptance of the penalty of death due us. In this context, the practice of reparation seems to be about "repairing" broken-ness, "atoning for" sinfulness, and "making up" for wrongdoing as we model our life on Jesus Christ. This is the vision of reparation in Pius XI's 1928 encycli-cal Miserentissimus Redemptor (§18): "Whosoever of the faithful have piously pondered on all these things must needs be inflamed with the charity of Christ in his agony and make a more vehement endeavor to expi-ate their own faults and those of others, to repair the honor of Christ, and to promote the eternal salvation of souls." This "atoning" and "expiative" sense speaks of a need for humanity to repent, convert, and wor-ship, but nowhere does it speak of the invitation given to humanity to love in the face of brokenness, that the heart of God may be loved and not rejected. I propose that, in the context of Sacred Heart devotion, reparation speaks direcdy of this invitation: "The focus of God's Review for Religious ¯ forgiveness in Christ is less on a word that is spoken to assuage guilt and more on a transformation of relation-ships-- with God and with other human beings."22 As seen above, religious consecration is a response of love prompted by the recognition and humble accep-tance of the unconditional, sacrificial love of God. Each of the vows has been shown to uniquely manifest, in the light of devotion to the Sacred Heart, a particular aspect of our loving response. Reparation, as a dis-tinctive response of love, is a particular expression of Sacred Heart devotion. It is a response of love to the broken heart of Christ, as when we see someone we love (and also Someone) hurting, broken, bleeding, and in pain, and want to--need to, are impelled t0--respond in manners worthy of love. William Temple, archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, claimed that the motive for reparation is that we not "go on wounding one who accepts our wounds like that; we are filled with fear, not the old craven fear of punishment, but the fear of wounding the tenderest of all hearts.''23 Reparation does not necessar-ily seek to repair the wrongdoing (for we may not be responsible for it), but seeks to respond to the broken heart of our loved One by offering concrete, tangible acts of love. This authentic healing power of reparation '~"The focus of God's forgiveness in Christ is less on a word that is spoken to assuage guilt .and more on a transformation of relationships-with God andwith othe~r human beings." 163 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart 164 was understood by Aquinas: "When one. is in pain, it is natural that the sympathy of a friend should afford con-solation., because, when a man's friends console him, he sees that he is loved by them, and this affords him pleasure. Consequently, since every pleasure assuages sorrow, it follows that sorrow is mitigated by a sympa-thizing friend" (ST I-II.38.3). To extend this idea to how human acts of love serve as loving reparation to Christ, John Paul II said in another place: "In the heart of Christ the human heart comes., to unite filial love for God with love for the neighbor. In this way--and this is the true meaning of the reparation asked for by the heart of the Savior--on the ruins heaped up by hatred and violence can be built the civilization of love so greatly desired, the kingdom of the heart of Christ.''24 For the Apostles of. the Sacred Heart, it is imperative that they understand rightly their mission in the church and their ministry in the world. Their witness of repara-tive love can show all the faithful what their response to the brokenness of our world must be. Reparation, far from being an obsolete relic, is an essential component of Clelia Merloni's charism, and a unique way for her apostles to live their vows of poverty, chastity, and obe-dience. Experiencing Jesus as God's incarnate love, they are called to respond as incarnate love to his open heart still broken in the woundedness of his loved ones. In respond-ing, they are not merely practicing their own personal spirituality; they are engaging in their ministry. As Pius XII said in Haurietis aquas (§112), "In show-ing devotion to the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the external acts of piety have not the first or most impor-tant place; nor is its essence to be found primarily in the benefits to be obtained." Rather, reparation must be a dynamic response of love, reaching out to the broken- Review for Religious ness of humanity--at any given moment, in any given circumstance. "The practical good that emerges in the event [of reparative love] is seen not only in the inward realm of personal and spiritual values, but in the trans-formation of the material order through which the val-ues are expressed.''25 Living her congregation's motto, "Caritas Christi urget nos!" (2 Co 5:14), consumed by the love of God given her in Christ Jesus, an apostle the Sacred Heart "returns love for Love" by the gift of her life of vowed chastity and reaches out to ev.eryone in selfless service. By her vowed obedience she matches her heartbeat to the heart of God. By their vowed poverty she is free to give her all to the broken hearts around her. She accepts humbly the gifts she receives from the incarnate, inflamed, obedient, and open heart of Jesus and returns them as her gift to his Body, the church. The reparative value of these gifts lies in its heal-ing power for the broken heart of Christ in the church and in the world. Reparation from this n~w perspective is most assuredly, then, not merely valuable for those among the faithful who may be attracted to it as a pious practice, but a vital mission entrusted to each mem-ber of the church. Reparative love is the love of God poured out through us, incarnate in the members of Christ's Body, embodied in real hands and real hearts. Reparative love speaks a word of selflessness to a world broken by hatred and individualism. It lives a life of generosity in a world broken by selfishness and fear. It breathes a promise of forgiveness for a world broken by resentment and injustice and gives a hand of compassion to a world broken by suspicion and greed. Reparation is anything but old-fashioned piety entrenched in sen-timentalism or self-derogation. Rightly understood in the brokenness of our contemporary experience, repa- 165 68.2 2009 Herbers * Reparation and the Sacred Heart 166. ration is the tender answer of hearts on fire, yearning to express themselves boldly, so that brokenness and woundedness may always and only be answered with all-consuming love, centered in God, reaching out to every one of God's beloved people. Notes I Quoted in Annice Callahan, Karl Rahner's Spirituality of the Pierced Heart (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 108, 110-111. 2 See Patricia E Walter, "Religious Life in Church Documents," Review for Religious 51, no. 4 (July-August 1992), and Nadine Foley, "The Nature and Future of Religious Life," Origins 19, no. 13 (1989): 212. 3 Michael Himes, "Returning to Our Ancestral Lands," Review for Religious 59, no. 1 (January-February 2000): 18. 4 Sandra Schneiders, Selling All (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), pp. 108, 114. s It is important to be aware of this rich history as we examine Sacred Heart devotion from a modern perspective. For a more com-prehensive examination of the history of the devotion, see Timothy O'Donnell's Heart of the Redeemer (Manassas, Virginia: Trinity Communications, 1989) and Joseph Stierli's Heart of the Saviour: A Symposium on Devotion to the Sacred Heart (New York: Herder and Herder, 1958). 6john Paul II, "Letter to Bishop Raymond Seguy, Bishop of Autun, Chalon, and Macon, June 22, 1990," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, ed. Carl J. Moell SJ (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 210. 7 Augustine, Sermons on the New Testament 7(7). s Thomas Aquinas, ST 1/-1/.81.3 ad 3. See Pius XII, Haurietis aquas (1956), §103. 9 Benedict xvI, letter on the fiftieth anniversary of Haurietis aquas, 15 May 2006. 10 Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est (2005), §17. '~ Sandra Schneiders, New Wineskins (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 109. ,2 Schneiders, New Wineskins, pp. 105, 106. ~3 Clelia Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, ed. Pierpaula de Farias (Rome: privately printed, 1992), pp. 167, t73. Review for Religious ,4 Quoted in Christopher E Mooney, Teilhard de Chardin and the Mystery of Christ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Image, 1968), pp. 28-29. 15 John Paul II, "Homily during Sacred Heart devotions and beati-fication of Father Stefan Wincenty Frelichowski, at the Aviation Club in Torun, June 7, 1999," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, p. 112. 16 John Paul II, "Homily at the Polyclinic of the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital in Rome, June 28, 1984," in Holy Father, Sacred Heart, p. 47. 17 Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, p. 167. ,s James Alison poignandy elucidates this idea with his concept of the "intelligence of the victim." See Knowing Jesus (London: Ashford Colour Press, 1998). 19 Merloni, Spiritual Anthology, p. 334. 20 Kenneth E Dougherty, "Atonement," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), vol. 1, p. 837. 21 Lucien Richard, "Expiation (in Theology)," in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 565. 22 L. Gregory Jones, "The Craft of Forgiveness," Theology Today 50, no. 3 (October 1993): 356. 23 William Temple, The Faith and Modern Thought, quoted in Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of Atonement (New York: Scribners, 1951), p. 80. 24 See the letter of John Paul II to Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach sJ on the Canonization of Blessed Claude la Colombi~re SJ, in UOsservatore Romano, English edition, 27 October 1986, and referred to by Benedict xvI (see note 9 above). 25 G.W.C. Thomas, "Reparation: The Sevenfold Pattern of Redemption," Church Quarterly Review 158, no. 327 (April-June 1957): 165. ,167 68.2 2009 JAMES H. SCHIMELPFENING Being Heard, Being Healed: Learning from the Quaker Tradition We cannot change the world by a new plan, project, or idea. We cannot even change other people by our convictions, stories, advice, and proposals, but we can offer a space where people are encouraged to disarm themselves, lay side their occupations and preoccupa-tions, and listen with attention and care to the voices speaking in their own center. --Henri Nouwen1 168 Community is a word that is tossed around a lot, but is hard to define. My own religious order and those who share in the Marianist tradition embrace community as a constitutive part of our mission and identity, and thus we engage in countless conversations discerning its meaning, the place it has in our lives, and how it is to be an instrument of mission. After thirty-five years of religious life and after living in communities on four continents, my experience of community is all over the board. Sometimes I am most grateful for it, but other times it has been quite the opposite. James H. Schimelpfening SM lives at Marianist Community; Meyer Hall; 4435 East Patterson Road; Dayton, Ohio 45430. Review for Religious Recently I experienced community in an utterly refreshing and transformative way. I participated in a series of six seasonal retreats based on the Quaker tradition and the work of Parker Palmer. The Center for Courage and Renewal, partially funded by Lilly Endowment, offered these retreats for clergy and con-gregational leaders) The approximately twenty partici-pants represented a variety Of religious denominations, including a young Jewish woman and myself, the only Catholic. That in itself made the retreats interesting and delightful. These retreats, spread over eighteen months, opened up and stretched my idea and sense of community. I want to share with you something of the enriching, grace-filled, contemplative experience that the retreats were for me. Welcoming the True Self One of the principal resources for the retreats was Parker Palmer's A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey toward an Undivided Life. He portrays community as "one that knows how to welcome the soul"--or true self--and how to hear its voice within oneself. He refers to this kind of community as a circle of trust, a revealing name. Such a community, he writes, allows us to reach in towards our wholeness, out towards the world's need, while living at "the intersection of the two.''3 This intersection is sometimes a daunting place to be. One needs to be with others who, in the right sort of way, support and encourage each other in their moving inward and outward. Often, at least in my experience of community, issues and concerns are discussed, debated, and at times argued; then votes are taken, and there are winners and losers. Tensions, often subtle but barely hidden, may 169 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed remain. As a result, people keep trying to fix each other or straighten the others out. Advising and rectifying implies that one knows what is good for others if only they would acknowledge it. Community harmony and peace become elusive, and passive-aggressive behavior comes to the fore. Life in community has taught me that violence has many forms that give pain and raise suspicion and result in protective walls. Often persons are diminished and given less respect in favor of group-think or the institution itself.4 Life in community some-times fails to lead persons to wholeness or holiness, and when such failings occur the mission too falters. Touchstones In the series of retreats that I was part of, there was a quite different style of community and way of being present to one another and ultimately to oneself. I have experienced it also in other religious and church com-munities, but only rarely, and even more rarely as an intentional way of being together. In each retreat of this series, one of the first things we did was review the Circle of Trust Touchstones, the guidelines for all of our time together, not only when we were "sitting in the circle." We would: ¯ presume, extend, and receive welcome. ¯ be present as fully as possible. ¯ offer by invitation, not demand. ¯ speak our truth in ways that respect other people's ¯ not fix, save, advise, or set each other straight. ¯ learn to respond with honest, open questions. ¯ turn to wonder when the going got tough. ¯ attend to our own inner teacher. ¯ trus~t.and learn from and in the silence. ¯ observe deep confidentiality. ¯ know that it is possible to leave the circle with Review for Religious whatever you needed and that the seeds planted could and would keep growing. To live these touchstones intentionally takes work and demands attention, but something good happens and a different environment is created. These touchstones were practical and crucial for our community because we were so diverse. We were men and women, ordained and nonordained, Christian and Jewish, various races and ages, formed in different religious traditions with different doctrines and creeds, coming from all over the country, and having various personali-ties and committed relationships. It was only by living these touchstones that something new and deep could be born, so that we could move beyond differences that would normally keep us separate. Living these touchstones introduced ways of being together that led to deeper respect for persons and enduring bonds of friendship and trust. It is all too easy to focus on what is different and what is perceived to be "wrong," instead of expe-riencing what is right. This environment made it pos-sible to speak and listen in a gender and more attentive manner. It is all too easy tofocus on what is different and what is perceived to be "wrong," instead ,of experiencing what is right. Circles of Trust Parker Palmer calls such a community a circle of trust. The name, in my experience, is descriptive. We would sit in an unbroken circle with no one coming first or being 171 68.2 2009 Schimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed 172j last, no beginning or end.In the center of the circle would be a small table with a candle and flowers that would serenely hold our attention, and hold us together like the hub of a wheel. When speaking we would "speak to the circle," not across the circle as groups may do and thereby tend to debate and break down the sense of the whole, of community. That happened to us once, and the feel of the group changed and became charged with something that we recognized as not helpful, not what we desired. We returned to speaking to the circle, not across it, and the environment healed. "Speaking to the circle" is speaking from one's own inner self to the center of the circle, where all that is said is held attentively and respectfully. There is no speaking from one ego to another, nor is it about try-ing to impress or persuade. It is simply about expressing oneself, a kind of sharing that is less stressful and much more peaceful,s Trust is what constitutes the circle; without trust there is no circle. Trust makes the space safe for sharing one's truth without fear of judgment or criticism. This trust grows deeper over time. As I share these reflections, I realize that a circle of trust can seem like avoidance of conflict, blind acceptance, lack of discernment, or some such idea. It might even seem "new age" and shallow. My experience, however, is just the opposite. A circle of trust and living the touchstones allow for something deep to emerge and grow and bear fruit. Circles of trust allow more truths to come to light and authentic relationships to form. It is interesting and even important to note that Quakers do not avoid diffi-cult situations, but instead are present to them differently. That is why historically Quakers have often been present where thorny social issues like justice, peacemaking, and reconciliation are being pondered and evaluated. Review for Religious A circle of trust forms a community that allows per-sons to be attentive to their inner self, what we often refer to as one's true self. This true self can surface in an enviroriment that is encouraging, one that is respectful, silent, attentive, and caring. As Parker Palmer points out, a circle of trust is focused on an inward journey and invisible yet very real pow-ers. The purpose of the circle is to support each person's inner journey. A circle of trust lives the paradox of "being alone together," of being present to one another as a "community of solitudes."6 Solitude and community, rightly understood, go together; they are not opposed. In truth, everyone needs both the interior intimacy that comes from solitude and the otherness that comes from life in community. The purpose of this community is to allow the true self, the self in God, to present itself. Unfortunately, however, too many "communities" do not provide this environment; instead, they scare the true self away. It withdraws into the shadows because it does not feel safe to come forward. We wear masks and do not share what is most truly our own. Too often we do not even know what is most true within us. A circle of trust community is made of people who know how to sit quietly and wait for the soul, the true self, to show its face. The relationships within it are "not pushy, but patient; not confrontational, but compassionate; they are filled, not with expectations and demands, but with abiding faith in the reality of the inner teacher and in each person's capacity to learn from it." In my experience, it is atypical to find a community that has people who have the capacity for this kind of presence to each other. "The people who help us grow toward true self," Parker Palmer writes, "offer uncondi-tional love. They don't judge or try to change us. They 173 68.2 2009 Schimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed do offer and hold hopeful expectancy, creating the space that safeguards and encourages the inner journey."7 This is an incredible gift to offer one another, and within this form of community we find, I believe, the greatest potential for growth and transformation. What most people desire is to be heard and honored. As one fellow retreatant commented, "To be heard is to be healed!" Too often in community and in conver-sation we do not feel we have been genuinely heard or respected, and this only deepens wounds and pro- ~_ duces greater alienation. In the circle of trust, deep ¯ .~.L listening to one another, as well as to oneself, is paramount and happens rather naturally. Listening deeply is a nonviolent act; it is an amazing gift to offer. Patient listening, and forming circles of trust according to the touchstones, moves against the .grain of our habitual culture--both secular, and religious. Circles of trust are about listen-ing, expectant listening. This kind of listening only goes deeper with time and is all about God. God is the one who makes such listening possible and who gives us the hunger and thirst for it. God beckons, and we soon dis-cover that all that is good comes from the hand of God. Ultimately, God is the goal of our listening, for in so doing we can discern and do the work of God.s The content is simple, and its purpose is to open us to deeper listening and reflection. We would use poetry, stories, songs, or reflection. Metaphor plays an important part in this kind of sharing because images, allegories, allow us to approach from a slant, not head- What most people desire is to be heardand honoredl , Review for Religious on; they bring into play much more than the intellect. Metaphor has a way of surprising, even seducing the heart and soul, while tricking the mind into taking another look and discovering mystery in the process. We all belong to numerous kinds of groups and com-munities, each offering something unique and respond-ing to different needs. Circles of trust, however, generate within me a longing for such a community within the church and in religious life. Such a community, it seems to me, creates an environment that encourages and sup-ports deep growth and leads to holiness. Circles of trust might not seem to be as useful or as practical and func-tional as other groups might be, and so one considers circles of trust idealistic, utopian, unrealistic, even for religious or church communities. I would disagree. If we strove towards such deep trust and respect, many of the functional things we now squabble about would sim-ply disappear, and other practical details of life would take care of themselves. If they had to be dealt with, conversation and decision making about them would be quite different. We too easily forget that even our busi-ness meetings have a spiritual component and, hope-fully, necessitate a listening for truth.9 The experience and outcome would be a lot healthier, and life together would be more amiable, more authentic, and even more reflective of the gospel and Christian living. Circles of trust and community are not about numbers, but about the quality of the space created and shared. As Parker Palmer notes in A Hidden Wholeness, we live divided lives. We live alienated from our true selves, and end up feeling depressed, aimless, anxious, or angry. We feel the pain of being alienated from our own truth. We yearn to be centered,1° and a circle of trust creates the space where centering can happen and foster wholeness. 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed A Spiritual Experience Although not always described this way explicitly, circles of trust are a spiritual experience, and the retreats I participated in were, beyond doubt, retreats. They were days of communing with God, with the Spirit of God very much alive and present within us and among us. The retreats were distinctly reflective and contempla-tive, with time for being alone and time for sharing with another or with the entire circle. The environment of the retreat center itself was ideal,ll The Tibetan chime would draw us into silence and into the circle. I found it easy to recall that, where two or three are gathered in God's name, God is truly present. The entire environ-ment was charged with the holiness of God. It was an experience of the shekinah of God. Clearness Committees Those familiar with the Quaker tradition know that forming Clearness Committees is an important part of their life. Each of our retreats set aside time for the work of Clearness Committees. I found myself refer-ring to them as Quaker discernment, a way of listening for truth, truth that is .not imposed from outside, but arises from within. This was one of the most important experiences of discernment that I have ever engaged in, most especially with a group, and was for me a highlight of our time together. This discernment is not done fir us, as sometimes occurs. Instead, in a circle of trust, in a safe, reflective space, we are engaged in our own dis-cernment, in our own way and time, with the encourag-ing and challenging presence of people who really and truly care for us)2 Clearness Committees help the focus person (who has asked for its help)13 to walk an inner iourney. They do so by their presence, asking open and Review for Religious honest questions, not interpreting or offering advice, not judging or fixing, but treating the person carefully as he or she looks and listens deeply. There is no con-flict of agendas or egos; there is only one focus person with one agenda. Just as the circles of trust offer a new way of conceiv-ing community, so the Clearness Committees offer a new way of helping persons make decisions about the direction of their life. I found here an incredible respect for the person and belief in the action of God. Instead of decisions, especially the more personal decisions, being made by others, a Clearness Committee allows for a form of listening and obedience that holds promise of greater life for the person and also, in the long run, for others and for ministry. Clearness Committees were a primary factor in draw-ing me to the seasonal retreats, for I was doing discern-ment in my own life. A series of circumstances along with much that was moving within my own heart and soul had made me wonder where the Spirit might be leading me. I needed and desired some form of guidance, and I needed to enter more deeply into a process of discernment, but I did not want someone or a group telling me what to do. I was desperately seeking someone or a group willing to walk with me, providing the safe place where I could be open and vulnerable in my discerning reflection. In my own religious community this did not seem possible. My superiors were likely to approach my questions as an administrative concern and decision, but did not seem able to walk with me in the way I needed. The seasonal retreats, however, with the circles of trust and the blessed opportunity to be the focus person of a Clearness Committee drew me like a bee to nectar. I asked for a Clearness Committee to sit with me not 177 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening * Being Heard, Being Healed Such d cision ,making; demands great patienee, and a strongcom i m n once but twice. The experience was powerful because of the safe, caring environment and the confidentiality, the love and faith, that were present. The immediate experi-ence was powerful, but I was surprised and delighted by how it continued to reveal truths in the following days, weeks, and months. Did I receive an immediate answer? No. Were there "aha" moments? More later, than at the time. Was clarity received? Yes, but much more came long after the experience was over. Such decision making demands great patience and a strong commitment to the process: it can take time for the truth to come to light. Quakers are good at waiting and supporting one another in this invest-ment of time and pres-ence, doing so in the belief that a truth can and will come to light and, when it does, can be embraced with one's whole self. One lets the work of God pro-ceed and reveal itself. This "Quaker discernment" takes as long as is needed. It is exceedingly countercul-rural in our quick-fix, fast-food, I-want-it-now culture. If, as religious communities, church, and church min-istries, we could learn to discern in this way, I believe that both community life and ministry would be a good deal richer. Going Home As a high introvert when I first began attending the retreats, I was uncertain about it, but, having read A Hidden Wholeness the year before, I was curious enough Review for Religious to give it a whirl and see what would happen. After the first couple of retreats, I felt completely at home, and, although I never knew what the experience of any particular retreat would be, I soon learned to trust the Spirit, believing that whatever would happen would be grace--and I was never disappointed. It seemed that each retreat was its own "peak" experience that helped me go deeper and deeper into my soul while being sup-portive of others doing the same. Many retreats, even when powerful, are one-shot experiences, but this series of retreats, organized accord-ing to the seasons of the year, allowed for sacred remem-bering of what happened previously and delving into it once again from a slightly different slant, so that further truth could be discovered. On top of everything else, this was a wonderful ecumenical and interfaith setting that opened many wonderful doors. The most difficult part of each retreat was returning home to community and ministry. Although I would return deeply renewed, I saw that my recent experience of community would not be present back home. Every three months, as the next retreat drew near, I would look forward to it with great anticipation. My challenge now is to live the expe-rience and find ways to invite others into these circles of trust so that they too may have the joy and benefit of entering them that I have had. As I noted earlier, there are many different forms of community and many different definitions of commu-nity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, "Community is not an ideal; it is people."14 1 believe that what the Quaker tradition and Parker Palmer offer is worth exploring and experiencing as a very practical way of forming and being community. "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn 13:35). r179 68.2 2009 Scbimelpfening ¯ Being Heard, Being Healed Notes ' As quoted in Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live An Authentic Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005). z Center for Courage and Renewal, www.couragerenewal.org. 3 Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: TbeJourney toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004), pp. 22, 25.4 The word person is used intentionally; not individual. The distinction is critical. 5 Palmer, Hidden I~oleness, pp. 118-119. 6 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, p. 54. 7 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, pp. 59, 60. 8 Michael Waida, Expectant Listening: Finding God's Thread of Guidance (Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill ~ublicationsi 2007), p. 16. 9 Wajda, Expectant Listening, p. 22. ,0 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, pp. 45-46. " Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, California. 12 Palmer, Hidden Wholeness, p. 27. ~3 The focus person asks for Clearness Committee assistance regard-ing a question or issue that he or she is struggling with and seeking light about. ,4 Jean Vanier, From Brokenness to Community (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 35. 180] Personal Reflection and/or Group Discussion What has been your own occasion of experiencing the kind of "words of trust" that animate community life? Have you or has your community developed your own special ways of deepening the trust and faith-sharing integral to religious community living? How would you describe it and how often is it used? Review for Religious DORIS GOTTEMOELLER Religious Habits Reconsidered Years ago, when we were just beginning to wear secular dress, a sister friend remarked to me that she never noticed what anyone else was wearing. The remark struck me because I thought she was missing an important commu-nication from others. But, upon reflection later, it seemed likely that she meant that everyone deserves our respect, whether clad in rags or riches, in style or out--a conviction that I share. Also, I thought, she ,was probably indi-cating she is less sensate than I. As the years passed, however, with religious habits less and less in ,evidence, I have occa-sionally thought of investigating the topic more deeply. Comments such as these persist: "If you wore a habit, you'd get more vocations" and "Real sisters wear habits." They imply that our Doris Gottemoeller RSM last wrote .for us in 2005. Her address remains Catholic Healthcare Partners; 615 Elsinore Place; Cincinnati, Ohio 45202. 1181 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller * Religious Habits Reconsidered transition in dress is symbolic of an abandonment of val-ues or identity. It is hard at times not to feel defensive. No doubt there is scholarly literature available about the significance of dress through the ages. Dress as an indicator of social class and status, the change from toga and tunic to trousers and dresses, the influence of climate and occupation, and the development of new fabrics and methods of production--all of this has prob-ably been studied. I have not consulted any of it. First, I want simply to recall and describe this period of change. Then I will reflect on the significance of a religious habit for women and of the many decisions to forgo it. I will close with some questions for reflection and dialogue. Some readers may assume that there is noth-ing to be learned from the decisions made so long ago, but I think that some reflection can bear fruit for our present and future. What a Habit Is Not A religious habit is not a costume, a dress that tempo-rarily provides a new identity, either for dramatic effect or for fun. Costumes are worn in stage productions and at Halloween parties. A disguise is another form of temporary identity, one intended to deceive people. A vestment is worn to temporarily designate that one is performing a sacred function. Nor is a religious habit a uniform. Commentators ask, "Vv'hy don't you wear a uniform like airline atten-dants, nurses, and police personnel?" These uniforms signify professional qualification and a certain authority. In given situations their wearers are entided to respect because of their official function. Note, though, that uniforms often admit of variations. The attendants on a plane may be wearing slacks, shorts, or skirts, with or Review for Religious without coordinating jackets or sweaters. They are all in uniform, but they choose different forms of it. Nursing uniforms, too, admit of variation, even within the same department or on the same floor of a hospital. In contrast to any of these options, the religious habit was a permanent and unchanging garb. The cloth-ing ceremony at the beginning of novitiate signified a new identity, which one intended eventually to make lifelong. As we dressed each morning, we said prayers specific to each item of clothing. For the habit itself we prayed, "Clothe my soul, 0 Lord, with the nuptial - - robe of charity that I may carry it pure and undefiled before Thy judgment seat," The prayer for donning the cincture was "0 Lord Jesus Christ, who became obedi-ent unto death, even the death of the cross, grant me the true spirit of religious obedience." In my experience there were no optional choices around color or design or style, very litde adaptation to climate or occupation. Permission to wear a white habit in nursing care and in the tropics is the only possibility I can recall. The clothing ceremony at the beginning of novitiate sig nified a new identity. The Mandate to Change Before the mandate of Vatican Council II to update, our habit was the only dress we wore. In my experi-ence each sister had two habits, a heavy pleated wool serge version for Sundays and feast days and an every-day version in a lighter fabric. Neither was really wash-able. We wore a knee-length black veil, inner and wide outer sleeves, a leather cincture to which was attached a 183 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller ¯ Religious Habits Reconsidered 841 long rosary, and a starched white cotton coif and guimpe which we changed on Sunday and at midweek. Heavy black stockings and black oxfords completed the ensem-ble. Going out in winter required a shawl or a long black cloak with a heavy black veil pinned over the house veil. This habit was worn 365 days of the year, from rising in the morning to retiring at day's end, in the convent, the classroom, or the hospital, at work or recreation, at home or abroad. The habit was everywhere recognizable and, when clean and pressed, somewhat graceful and attractive. It was also economical: the daily habit lasted several years and the Sunday habit for many years. Thus it was a witness to poverty. The design had remained essentially the same for over 130 years. But, despite its familiarity and attractiveness, the habit was unsanitary, unsafe, and ill-suited to the climate in many places. It was also impractical for many occupations such as housework or recreational sports. Furthermore, all of the parts had to be sewn by hand. Keeping perspi-ration from the starched linens which encircled the face in hot weather was another challenge. Considerations such as these prompted the conciliar directive: "Habits should be simple and modest, at once poor and becoming. They should meet the requirements of health and be suited to the circumstances of time and place as well as to the services required by those who wear them. Habits of men and women which do not correspond to those norms are to be changed" (Perfectae caritatis § 17). This directive prompted the first genera-tion of modified or updated habits. Chapters reviewed designs, and each congregation chose one which seemed to embody the desired improvements. For the Sisters of.Mercy of the Union, this transition occurred in the summer of 1968. The new habit was mid-calf in length Review for Religious and could be purchased from a manufacturer's catalogue in an array of sizes. A veil which came just below the shoulders was attached to a white cap which left some hair exposed in front. The habit was washable, and nothing was starched. From Modified Habit to Secular Dress Why didn't this updated habit, which responded to the conciliar mandate, last? Here the story becomes more complex. As the decades passed, most congrega-tions loosened or eliminated their requirements that everyone wear a habit, even for professional or formal occasions, I would suggest that the following are some of the f~ctors that led to this evolution. First, the change of dress coincided with other changes that brought us into new settings and new cir-cumstances. Permission to travel without a companion and to drive an auto-mobile were two sig-nificant changes. No longer~did we have to depend on employ-ees or volunteer lay-persons to chauffeur us to professional meetings, doctors' appointments, the library or grocery, or a museum, movie, or sporting event. Freedom from the need for a sister companion encouraged individual choices about where to go or what to do with one's discretionary time. Some outings were with only lay friends or relatives. Individuals did not necessarily want to stand out in such settings. The introduction of personal budgets was another change Why .didn't this updated habit, which re.sponded to the conciliar mandate, last? 68.2 2009 Gottemoeller ¯ Religious Habits Reconsidered that facilitated variation in dress, as individuals could choose where they wished to shop and what they wished to buy. Another limit to the success of updated habits was the matter of style. As long as we were in 18th- or 19th-century garb, there was no relationship to any contem-porary style. But an adaptation to "circumstances of time and place" suggests at least some relationship to what other people are wearing. Hemlines are a case in point. Should they be adjusted upward and downward with changing styles? What about the size and proportions of the individual sister? The traditional habit swathed her in so many yards of fabric that her figure was effectively concealed, but the modified habit was more flattering to some than to others. Does everyone have to wear the same color? Do you wear the same thing for scrubbing the kitchen floor, lecturing before a class, attending a board meeting, and playing tennis on Saturday after-noon? Considerations such as these meant that individ-uals almost immediately began modifying the modified habit and also acquiring supplementary wardrobes for occasions when a habit was deemed inappropriate. The question of a veil comes in for special consid-eration. Questions of comfort, ideology, and style inter-mingled. In the old habit, when no hair was visible, we usually cut it very short for comfort. As soon as some hair was visible, it had to be styled. And not every style looked good peeping out from a veil. Keeping a veil anchored on one's head was sometimes a challenge. More significandy, the veil signified for some a femi-nine subservience to men. (Around that time, women gave up wearing hats and veils in church, and nurses stopped wearing caps with their uniforms.) Some argued that the veil was intended to symbolize virginity. Well, Review for Religious if it did, then shouldn't male religious who take a vow of celibacy also wear them? As we began to experiment with lay dress, some continued to wear the veil for a time, leading to some unfortunate combinations of flowered dresses topped off with veils. (Interestingly, the appearance of Islamic women clad in burqas and veils in Western cities was still too rare to invite a com-parison.) Another circumstance that promoted individual choice of dress was the movement toward individual-ism overall in Western culture. This is a phenomenon that would require books to chronicle and critique both its lights and shadows, but the point here is khat we were not immune from its influence. Religious life is essentially a communitarian commitment, but in many ways--not only choice of dress--it has embraced, or at least permitted, a wider expression of personal choice. While we were experimenting with dress, we were also exploring new ministries, new living arrangements, and new prayer styles. Much of this was a healthy reaction to practices which had encouraged immaturity, but some of it has diminished our corporate identity and witness. Nevertheless, choosing how to present oneself on a particular occasion or in a particular setting can be a revelation of one's personal judgment and self-iden-tification. Looking Back on the Changes in Dress The first thing that can be said is that the changes described here proceeded without a lot of self-reflection. We lacked the critical distance necessary to analyze the consequences of our choices or their interaction with other choices we were making. At times we hesitated to raise the issue in community for fear of seeming

Issue 54.4 of the Review for Religious, July/August 1995. ; Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Mis'souri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-977-7363 ¯ Fax: 314-977-7362 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ° 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ° Washington, DC 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ° Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1995Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library, clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for com~nercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read Joann Wolski Conn PhD Iris Ann Ledden SSND Joel Rippinger OSB Edmundo Rodriguez SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JULY-AUGUST 1995 ¯ VOLUME54 ¯ NVUMBER4 contents 486 499 5O8 mission Twenty Inner-City Years Joanna Bramble, CSJ explores feelings, questions, and insights from her effort to revitalize an inner-city neighborhood and empower its people. Corporate Sponsorship: The 1990s and the Fruits of Our Labor Margaret MaW Knittel RSM raises some questions which suggest a fluidity of vision and a loosening of ties in regard to corporate sponsorship and the fruits of our labor. Retirement's Wisdom Years Catherine M. Harmer MMS proposes that retirement for religious may be a time of deepening wisdom and individuation and a time for a greater spirituality to emerge. 519 531 guidance The Enneagram Tad Dunne examines understandings of the enneagram and suggests ways of moving to a larger world of meaning and values. Imaging Spiritual Direction Mary Vginifred CHS discusses guidelines for spiritual direction and presents three images illustrative of the relationship between director and directee. 535 56O heritage The Brazier That Is My God: Teresa on True Prayer's Dispositions, Gifts, and Signs Mary C. Sullivan RSM highlights the prayer of personal conversion wi{h its many gifts as captured by Teresa of Avila in her rich metaphor of "dwelling places." Playing with Edged Tools Donald Macdonald SMNI allows the thought of John Henry Newman to enter us into a richer appreciation of vowed public profession as a part of radical gospel living. 482 Review for Religious spirituality 566 How Am I Doing? Signs of a Healthy Spirituality Melannie Svoboda SND suggests some indicators for checking on how healthy our spirituality is. 573 Appreciating God through Creation Roderick Payne OFM illuminates the heritage of St. Francis to draw attention to some aspects of prayer through creation. 585 589 594 6OO religious life Individualism and Rel!gious Life John Gallagher CSB reflects on three options dealing with the compatibility of contemporary individualism in relation to religious life. Psychological Screening for Religious Life Kevin E. McKenna reviews the help given by the Code of Canon Law for religious congregations attempting to form a consistent policy regarding psychological reports at the time of admission and the maintenance of personnel records. Reformulating the Religious Vows William Reiser SJ reviews the meaning of vows in religious life and suggests that an option for the poor might be a promise for our times. Let's Talk Again about Poverty Richard J. DeMaria CFC probes the meaning of poverty for religious-life practice today. ¯departments 484 Prisms 615 Canonical Counsel: Cloister for Nuns: From the Early Centuries to the 1917 Code 622 Book Reviews ~tuly-August 1995 483 prisms Pope John Paul's two recent docu-ments offer vision and direction: the apostolic letter Orientale lumen (The Light of the East) and the encyclical Ut unum sint (On Commitment to Ecumenism). More than helps to enter into the third millennium, they issue a call to conversion. In Orientale lumen the pope emphasizes that our Eastern Catholic and our Orthodox brothers and sisters are earnest bearers of a venerable and ancient tradition integral to the church's heritage. He calls for all members of the church's Latin tradition to become fully acquainted with this treasure. He desires us all to be fired by a pas-sionate longing that the church's catholicity become man-ifest to church members themselves and to the world, a catholicity comprising the several traditions together rather than in opposition to one another. John Paul uses monasticism as a special vantage point from which we can identify values important today for expressing the contribution of the Christian East to the journey of Christ's church towards the kingdom. In the East, monasticism, which did not experience the differ-ent kinds of apostolic life as in the West, is seen not merely as a separate category of Christians, but rather as a refer-ence point for all the baptized, according to the gifts offered to each by the Lord. John Paul singles out the common traits uniting the monastic experience of the East and the West and forming a bridge of fellowship, "where unity as it is lived shines even more brightly than may appear in the dialogue between the churches." lie empha-sizes the splendid witness of nuns in the Christian East: "This witness has offered an example of giving full value in the church to what is specifically feminine, even break- 484 Review for Religious ing through the mentality of the time. During recent persecu-tions, especially in Eastern European countries, when many male monasteries were forcibly closed, female monasticism kept the torch of the monastic life burning. The nun's charism, with its own specific characteristics, is a visible sign of that motherhood of God to which Sacred Scripture often refers" (9). Among the values reflected in monasticism for the life of the church, the pope highlights 1) a balance in Christian life lived as a personal response to an individual call and as an ecclesial and community event; 2) a liturgy revealing the proper harmony of the baptized-in-Christ and the eucharistic meaning of all creation; 3) a maturing journey in terms of knowing self and being free and able to love as Jesus loves; 4) a tradition of spiritual guidance from brothers and sisters to whom the Spirit has granted this gift; 5) a community showing us a life of communion and service beginning in the family and extending to the wider community; 6) a unity of theology and spirituality deriving from the triune God--the principle and foundation of the Christian understand-ing that the human person is meant for and made for relation-ship; and 7) an all-pervading mystery, enveloped in awe, with which the face of our God presents us. In still wider ways the encyclical Ut unum sint continues the call to deepen the unity we seek with one another and with God. Insisting that the unity of all Christians is God's will and is at the heart of the mission Christ entrusted to his followers, John Paul begs forgiveness for times when Catholics and the papacy itself have contributed to the divisions among Christians and calls for discussion about ways in which the pope can exercise power and authority in a reunited church. He notes that a heritage of saints belonging to all communities provides hope for the dialogue of conversion. "When we speak of a common heritage, we must acknowledge as part of it not only the institutions, rites, means of salvation and the traditions which all the communities have pre-served and by which they have been shaped, but first and foremost this reality of holiness" (84). The urgency of building for the future out of the strengths of Christian heritages marks both of these papal writings. We, like the pope, need to set our sights on this unifying and evangelizing mission of all Christians, thereby living up to religious life's own spiritual heritages. David L. Fleming sJ a~uly-August 1995 485 rnissJon JOANNA BRAMBLE Twenty Inner-City Years After almost twenty years of working towards the revital-ization of West Oakland, a depressed inner-city neigh-borhood, I took a year's sabbatical of travel and spiritual enrichment. In the middle of that year, I decided not to return as director of Jubilee West, the Community Development Corporation I had helped to create. I real-ized that I had unresolved feelings about my years in West Oakland, feelings and questions that I needed to work through before I could move on to the next steps in my work for justice. The reflections below document my liv-ing with those questions. What are my usual feelings about Jubilee West? I feel proud of what it has accomplished, but often I feel deep sadness for the people whose lives have changed very lit-tle, especially the ones I knew well and tried the hardest to help. I feel deep sadness at the unemployment, the drugs, the depressed people, and the piles of garbage that are evident with only a brief drive through the neighbor-hood. I often have an overwhelming sense of failure and powerlessness: so much of my life, love, work, anxiety, joy, hope . . . and so many people still with such con-stricted lives! I feel sadness and grief that the neighbor-hood where I worked for so long was worse after twenty Joanna Bramble CSJ is a consultant to nonprofit organizations in management and program analysis and a member of the provincial council of the Los Angeles province of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet. Her address is 529 Jean Street; Oakland, California 94610. 486 Review for Religious years than it was before. It is not that our work did not change anything or made it worse; it just could never do enough. But the main cause of continuing disintegration in that neigh-borhood is not my and others' lack of effort or creative ideas. It is high unemployment and the increasing sale and use of drugs, along with other systemic oppression. How do I keep aware of the interrelatedness of many situations and people and things and somehow see my place as both important and unimportant? What was the situation I came to in 1973? And what did I want to achieve? The 1970 census and the Oakland 701 Study gave the following statistics about the West of Cypress area: ¯ 80 percent black and 18 percent Mexican American ¯ median family income: $3,941 ¯ unemployment rate 26.3 percent for men, 35.7 percent for women ¯ 50 percent of families on welfare; mean welfare income $2,110 ¯ 90 percent of the houses had been expected to be unusable by 1969 (most of these houses are still standing in 1995) ¯ median number of school years completed: 8.4 ¯ 24 percent of people over twenty-five years of age were high school graduates Residents listed their major problems as limited incomes and a high rate of unemployment, extremely poor housing, and poor-quality education. All of these problems still exist and are complex and interrelated. I chose to come to this depressed environment from eleven years of teaching English in white, suburban Catholic high schools. I had interest, concern, compassion, energy, enthusiasm, high hopes . . . and two months of training in community orga-nizing. I remember walking through the neighborhood and mentally singing the words to "Anatevka" from Fiddler on the Roof, newly popular then. The song speaks of the nothingness of the town: "people who pass through Anatevka do not even know they have been here., someone should have set a match to this place years ago." That is what West Oakland looked like to me. But the song goes on to describe Anatevka as home: "where else could Sabbath be so sweet., where I know everyone I meet." That too was West Oakland. It did not take me long to get to know friendly people, many of whom had lived there for years. I walked the streets and .~ly-August 199~ 487 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years sat in people's kitchens to discuss neighborhood problems. Soon some longtime residents and I started the West Oakland Improvement Association. What did I want to achieve? Mainly, I did not want a repeat of Anatevka; I did not want people displaced to make room for gentrification or other forms of development. In 1974 I wrote that my major goal was to help increase the peo-ple's awareness of their power to direct their own lives. Over the next twenty years, I became more deeply aware of the immense problems in people's lives and in the physical neigh-borhood. What I wanted to do both stayed the same and evolved, as did the strategies we used. Always there was the goal of empow-erment. As a community organizer I wanted us to win on issues that people had chosen as urgent concerns. More importantly, I wanted to build an organization that could continue to empower people and revitalize the neighborhood. We won on many issues. Our victories brought pride and increased self-confidence to a number of neighborhood people. But building an organization never really happened. People seemed too concerned with per-sonal survival to stay involved very long. It became more and more difficult to talk with people about community problems when they were concerned with getting enough food for their kids, paying the rent, and dealing with drug problems. These survival issues prompted me and my good friend Sister Pat Sears to start St. Patrick's Center at the Campbell Village Housing Project, where we saw to basic necessities, providing food, clothes, counseling, and a youth program. But decent afford-able housing remained the most urgent problem. Concern about people who were being displaced or were living in substandard housing, inspiration from Jubilee Housing in Washington, D.C., lots of participation from neighborhood people and suburban friends, and awillingness to step into the unknown with faith and hope led me and Pat to start Jubilee West as a nonprofit Community Development Corporation in 1980. We immediately began to buy and fix houses for poverty-level people even though we knew nothing about real estate or construction and had almost no money. Jubilee West also continued and expanded the com-munity services and youth programs begun at St. Patrick's Center. What successes can Jubilee West celebrate over the last fifteen years? Eighty units of scattered-site housing, most of it perma-nently affordable to poverty-level families: five million dollars in property assets removed from speculation and able to be con- 488 Review for Religious trolled by the community far into the future; hundreds of children helped with tutoring and enrichment; many others helped with mentoring and private scholarships to attend college; hundreds of adults placed in jobs, coming to literacy and ESL classes, or receiv- .ing emergency food, clothing, and needed counseling; and an his-toric building rehabilitated to accommodate various community events and to house the offices for other services. When I left, Jubilee West had a committed board of directors, a staff of varying degrees of competence, and a good funding base, although financial crises were and continue to be frequent. So why do I frequently feel like a failure? Mainly because I very much wanted to do something "for the people in the houses" more than just fixing houses and lowering rents and because I feel that most people's lives are not changed very much from what they were before. As I grew to know West Oakland people, I came to be most concerned about what I experienced as the "typical" resident. She is a woman about thirty years old, never mar-ried, with three or four children from different fathers. She has about a tenth-grade education, has never held a paying job, has very poor nutrition, and probably has an alcohol or drug problem. If she is not in JW housing or other subsidized housing, she may pay as much as 60 or 70 percent of her AFDC income in rent, leaving her less than $200 per month for all other expenses. She has no car, and so her experiences and those of her children are mostly limited to the West Oakland neighborhood. She appears depressed and apathetic or else quite hostile. So what did I wantJW to do for this woman? I wanted us to empower her to enrich her own life. What did I mean by this? How would I hope to be able to describe her after a .few years? I have thought a lot about my hopes for her, and I recently became aware that they are similar to my unrealistic goals for myself: As I grew to know West Oakland people, I came to be most concerned about what I experienced as the "typical" resident. She is a woman about thirty years old, never married, with three or four children from different fathers. .~uly-/lugust 199~ 489 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years I want her to have succeeded in or be in the process of get-ting off drugs, getting more education, finding a job and then a better job, stabilizing her family, getting enough income to move out of subsidized housing, deepening her spiritual values, becoming more psychologically whole, building community with her neighbors, keeping her house clean, taking care of her kids, and working for change in the neighborhood through participating in JW and other organizations. I want her to stay in the neighborhood or come back after she succeeds in order to help the commu-nity work for justice. As I write this, it seems so unrealistic that I want to add face-tiously that she should also be thin and beautiful, but not care too much about her looks. Obviously, one reason I feel like a fail-ure is that I had very unrealizable expectations. Only a few peo-ple could achieve the hbove, and only with superhuman effort or lots of good luck. I wanted my "typical" person to be aware of her power to change and control her own life. That sounds like a good goal. But perhaps my biggest mistake was that I did not give enough conscious acknowledgment to the reality of systemic oppression. When she tries to change in other than very small ways, she runs up against huge obstacles that make it exceedingly difficult if not impossible for her to "control her own life." Only a few really "win" in her situation; but, because those few do win, she feels that she too should be able to win. She blames herself and society also blames her, telling her in many ways that it is her fault. In some ways I contribute to this when I talk about "self-help" without at the same time talking about systemic oppres-sion. Her self-blame does not give her more energy to "fight the system" and to make small and then larger changes in her life; instead it leads to depression, apathy, or hostility. Similarly my self-blame, my feeling myself a failure for not being able to empower her, does not give me more energy to fight the system; in me also it leads to depression, apathy, and sometimes hostility. Issues of injustice in economics, politics, and education are profoundly interrelated. A minimum wage that inserts working people into the poverty level without enough money to pay the rent, a business economy dependent on a certain percent of unem-ployment, thousands of job layoffs so that even many people with good educations are unlikely to keep their jobs that pay a living wage, unjust distribution of wealth including "hidden" subsidies 490 Review for Religious for the rich (whereby more money is "spent" on tax write-offs for interest on home-ownership loans than on all the housing programs for the poor), drug traffic that brings huge profits to a few wealthy people, a welfare system that discourages work, the worst schools usually in the poorest areas, housing thought of as an investment for profit rather than a home to live in, pervasive discrimination against minorities, especially African-American males--these are only a few examples of the interconnected sys-tems that cause my "typical" person's situation. I have known all this for a long time. Did I fail to keep it in my awareness because I felt I could do little about it and I like solvable problems? In any case, I concentrated on self-help pro-grams-- how soon I found that often they do not succeed either! Each person in any self-help program must "choose life" for her-self, of course, and begin to act on her own behalf while at the same time society, "the system," must stop oppressing her. Both are interrelated. But as I reflected on my Jubilee West experience, I still heard the same familiar inner voices of my own self-blame. If only I had been smarter, worked harder, tried something more creative, then I could have made a bigger dent in solving these problems. At this point I was fortunate to come across the book Surplus Powerlessness by Michael Lerner. Lerner first talks about real pow-erlessness, the reality of an unequal distribution of power in this society: If a small number of us try to change things, we will run up against a brick wall. In fact, even if millions of people were to engage in activity to change things, in the short run we would find our society very difficult to change. The brick wall is not just a subjective illusion. The basic fact is this: American society is a class-dom-inated society. A small number of people have vast eco-nomic power while the overwhelming.majority has almost no power in the economic realm. Economic power gives that small group a huge amount of political power. While the rest of us have some political power, it takes vast expen-ditures of energy and time to win small victories. But to say that the elites of wealth and power have over-whelming power is not to say that they have absolute power. Things could be quite different if many people were to engage in the struggle for change. It would be a real strug-gle- and there would be many difficult defeats.~ After talking about realpowerlessness, Lerner describes surplus ~uly-Augus~ 199Y 4.91 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years powerlessness as "the set of feelings and beliefs that make people think of themselves as even more powerless than the actual power sit-uation requires, and then leads them to act in ways that actually con-firm them in their powerlessness." He is describing me when he shows how many activists continually manage to redefine the con-ditions of success in such a way that they always feel "one down" for not having accomplished enough; they redefine their victo-ries as failures and do not credit their own real accomplishments. I certainly do that often. Lerner reminds us that when society claims it is set up in a fundamentally fair way, in which people can make it if they really try, powerlessness is seen as a product of the individual's personal failures. Thus self-blame becomes the central element in surplus powerlessness. It grows stronger every time we blame ourselves for having failed in some important way and have no compassion for ourselves in view of all the ways that reality pushes us to be less than we want to be. Taking responsibility for one's own life works only for the part of the population and for the societal issues where objective conditions allow for real change. People need help to distinguish between factors out of their control about which they could be legitimately angry and factors that would change if they changed how they thought about themselves and how they lived their own lives. Surplus powerlessness, self-blame, deflects attention from the real problems and hence from any real solutions. The anger that might be reasonably directed against a social order which gener-ates personal unhappiness is instead directed inwards and becomes depression or a dangerous buildup of repressed violence. But Lerner's next point is also part of my" experience. Once people are no longer disempowered by self-blaming, they are in a better position to change their environment. Surplus power-lessness can be lessened by supportive group interaction and by developing compassion, showing people that the problems they face do not come from personal inadequacies, but are faced by others as well, and that people need one another's help in facing these problems. My reflection on Lerner's concept of surplus powerlessness shows me that I have been blaming the victims, both my typical West Oakland person and myself. I have definitely internalized the American way that tells me that, if I have a problem, I should take care of it, work to change it, and not blame someone else. 492 Review for Religious But, to avoid the extreme of blaming others for my problems, I frequently go to the extreme of not giving much acknowledg-ment to the real powerlessness in my life, to the real systems that are oppressing me as well as my typical West Oakland person. At this point in my reflection, I read Joanna Macy's books Despair and Personal Power and World as Lover, World as Self about the need to feel pain, experience it, work through it: my pain and the pain of others. I see that as a big clue for me. I went back to my sabbatical journal written in Washington, D.C., in 1992. One of the questions in Mary Cosby's class on "call" was "What is your deepest pain?" I wrote, "I'm not aware of very much personal pain. Actually my greatest pain seems to be feel-ing the pain of others: so many homeless people on the street, so many hurting children, so much violence in the world., and feel-ing powerless to do very much about any of this." A few days later at a creative-movement session I felt overcome by sorrow and tears. I kept feeling, saying, crying to myself: "I didn't know how to make it better for people. I am so sad about that ¯ ¯ . sad because people were not helped, not so much that I couldn't help but that they weren't helped., thinking of Sylvia, Spring, Connie, Deedee, Charetta, Pat, A1, Brenda . . . tears because I couldn't do it, but more because life did not change for them . " I remember feeling that I must be avoiding some deeper personal pain if the major pain I was aware of was pain for the world, for other people. Now I see that a major need for me is to feel my pain, which greatly includes pain for the world. Joanna Macy says in Despair and Personal Power: "We have trouble cred-iting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be acute enough to cause distress., but pain for our world touches each of us, and this pain is rooted in caring., our apparent pub-lic apathy is but a fear of experiencing and expressing this pain, and once it is acknowledged and shared it opens the way to our power." 2 I have definitely internalized the American way that tells me that, if I have a problem, I should take care of it, work to change it, and not blame someone else. July-August 199Y 493 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years During that semester in 1992, I picked up an old journal from 1988, specifically looking for how I dealt at that time with my pain over the distressing situations I experienced daily at Jubilee West. A pattern seemed to be: I would run into a small or large problem that was usually a symptom of a larger systemic problem; feel frustrated and ptwerless; think I should be able to solve it; blame myself because I could not; go to bed depressed, wake up with somehow more energy ready to try again, to think up some new way to address the problem . . . but rarely allow myself to really feel my own pain and sadness. Although many people were involved in Jubilee West, I always felt myself ultimately respon-sible. I also frequently neglected my deep need to gift myself with beauty and nourishment for my soul. I have always felt a great desire for silence, solitude, beauty, prayer--for finding ways to experience the sacred in all of life. But I often let compulsive efforts to solve problems rob me of the centeredness necessary for living and acting from a contemplative way of being. As a step in the process of"living the questions" and of writ-ing this article, I walked around the West Oakland neighborhood visiting some of my longtime friends. I had not been able to do this since leaving Jubilee West three years ago; when we moved away last fall, I just disappeared without telling many people that I was going. So this walk was a pilgrimage for remembering and finding cause to grieve and cause to rejoice. What do I learn for myself from all of this reading and reflec-tion and from my recent pilgrimage of walking in West Oakland? What does my inner wisdom tell me? What follows are some exploratory answers as I live the questions: 1. Feel your pain, take time for it. your personal pain and that of the West Oakland people that you care about, and the world that 'faces the possibility of total destruction. Allowing myself to feel pain is hard to do; I am more used to giving thirty seconds to pain and then moving on to possible solu-tions. But, on my walk through West Oakland, I was more able to be with the pain of what I experienced: my own fear when I went into Campbell Village by myself because of what I know of the violence, drugs, and crime that are always there; the usual mounds of garbage everywhere, especially in front of my friend Sally's apartment; Sally's son in jail for using and selling drugs--I remem-ber him as a cute, loving eight-year-old; the fifteen or twenty men on the corner of 14th and Peralta as they always are--drink- 494 Review for Reh~ious ing and buying drugs; Trisha's house boarded up because she was evicted for drug activity, when she had been one of Jubilee West's most promising tenants. 2. Feelyourjoy also and others' joy as well: celebrate small suc-cesses, continue the lifelong task of dealing with your inner judge that says, "but it isn't enough." My walk through West Oakland gave me many opportunities for experiencing joy. It felt good to remember all the times I have been in people's houses having coffee and conversation. My friend Joanne greeted me with a big hug, and we laughed over old times together. Two of her children are doing very well, she is enjoying her job taking care of hand-icapped people, she still feels empow-ered by the victories we achieved together many years ago, and her sense of humor is still spectacular. Annie also greeted me with open arms; she is an elderly woman who owns her own home and several oth-ers in the neighborhood, though all of them are in various stages of disrepair. As I sat in her tiny kitchen, she asked me who she could get to help her change her will, and I remembered how hard it was, many years ago, to convince her to make a will at all. My last stop was Charles Garcia, who because of our orga-nizing efforts scraped up $1,700 twenty years ago to buy the falling-apart house he was living in--a small amount, even in 1974, but monumental to him. Although he was not home, his pride of ownership was evident everywhere: lots of beautiful roses in the front yard, a stained-glass window over the door; his daugh-ter spoke of wanting to. move her own growing family back to that neighborhood. I was pleased to see that there was only one burned-out house on Chester Street, when there had been many a few years ago, and I felt pride as always at Jubilee West's twenty-two new-con-struction apartments on Goss Street, definitely the ~best-looking housing anywhere in the neighborhood. My experience of joy on my walk through the West of Cypress neighborhood brought home to me the truth of Joanna Macy's Celebrate small successes, continue the life-long task of dealing with your inner judge that says, "but it isn't enough." jUuly-August 199Y 495 Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years words: "When we open our awareness to the web of life, we con-nect not only with the sufferings of others, but to the same mea-sure, with their gifts and powers . . . if we can grieve with the griefs of others, so, by the same token, by the same openness, can we find strength in their strengths, bolstering our own individual supplies of courage, commitment, and endurance."3 3. Acknowledge real powerlessness and systemic oppression. Deepen awareness of this as a reality check, as the main reason for not continuing self-blame, as a step to determining at which point to try to intervene. Catch yourself when you are blaming the vic-tim, whether that victim is yourself or someone else. 4. Acknowledge surplus powerlessness in yourself and in others, and try to find ways to deal with it, mainly by group sharing and by compassion for yourself and others. 5. Give up the myth that there is one key to changing the world. I have had the fantasy hope that there is one key to changing oppres-sive systems and that, if I could just find it, I would know what to do. Now I am more aware that transformation is happening on many levels at once and that it is not necessarily more important to work on one rather than another; I have lots of options for where I can best use my gifts to work for change. 6. Give up the myth that I am totally responsible (even when and if it is my job to be in charge), that I necessarily have the power to create the changes I want. Sometimes I have that power, often I do not. Any transformation will take many people working in many ways. A friend told me recently that she has become passionately committed to nudging the world toward justice and ecological san-ity. The idea of nudging shows a good grasp of reality and the pos-sible, and many people are doing this all over the world. 7. Give as much time as possible to the beauty, silence, and soli-tude that I so long for and know is essential to the life of my soul. My greatest desire is to act from a deeply contemplative stance. I do not always live that way, but I become more and more con-vinced that it is the only way to be who I am, to be at peace with myself and the world. Many questions remain as I come to the end of these reflec-tions, but hopefully every deepened insight leads to new possi-bilities and changes in my way of being, feeling, and acting. My questions will take more than my lifetime to answer. I am reminded of a vivid memory from a few years ago. I was in the midst of a crisis at Jubilee West, and I went to walk around the 496 Review for Religious lake to try to think of what to do. As I walked, I would come up with an idea about a next step, bu~ a voice in me kept asking, "What if you can't solve the problem?" I would be with that ques-tion for a few minutes and then start again to plan strategies. But the voice was persistent: "What if you can't solve the problem?" I have been brought up to believe that, ifI have a problem or see a problem, I should try to solve it. In fact, I very frequently have been able to find solutions to problems, to achieve what-ever I put my mind to achieve. Similarly, in World as Love~; World as Self, Joanna Macy quotes Lyndon B. Johnson as saying during the Vietnam War: "Don't come to me with a problem unless you have a solution." She tells of some colleagues in France who, ridi-culing our American culture for demanding instant solutions to problems, said we should "let the difficulties reveal themselves first before rushing for a ready-made solution, or else you will not understand them.''4 And so, as I walked around the lake struggling with the com-plexities of my crisis, the persistent voice asking "What if you can't solve the problem?" was actually a blessing. It pushed me to experience that often I cannot solve the problem. What is needed then is not more strategies, but waiting in openness: openness to the unfathomable presence, power, energy, connectedness in the universe, in me, in other people, and in all situations--which I call God. What is needed is sitting with open hands and open heart in deep silence and solitude, or dancing with abandonment to powerful music, or walking on the beach feeling the immensity of the ocean, or remembering my redwood tree. What is needed is anything that brings home to me the sacredness of all beings. I am remembering also the poem by Wendell Berry that I first saw on the kitchen wall at Genesis Farm, the environmental study center where I spent six weeks in the spring of 1992. It moved me deeply then and still does, giving me a powerful image of commitment to the possible in the darkest of times: "In the dark of the moon, / In flying snow,/. / The world in danger. / I walk the rocky hillsides / Sowing clover." I wonder what forms my clover will take? In looking through my 1991-92 .journal, I rediscovered another powerful image, a dream I had on 1 February 1992 and had forgotten. The image of wholeness in my dream links with Joanna Macy's wisdom about the interconnected whole in Despair and Personal Power: "What is it that allows us to feel pain for our Bramble ¯ Twenty Inner-City Years world? And what do we discover as we move through it? What awaits us there on the other side of despair? To all these ques-tions there is one answer. It is interconnectedness with life and all other beings. It is the living web out of which our individual, sep-arate existences have risen, and in which we are interwoven."s Deep implications of this dream are gradually surfacing as I continue to reflect on it more than three years later: I am in a house with many people., much chaos., there is a cupboard with a lot of jigsaw puzzles., suddenly they all fall out and come crashing down . . . so there are hun-dreds of puzzle pieces all over the floor., all from differ-ent puzzles . . . instead of feeling hopeless, like I would never be able to sort out the pieces and put each puzzle together again . . . in the dream I feel hopeful . . . like what was individual puzzles is now one big whole . . . and the challenge is to make a new picture in a new way. Soon after I wrote the pages above, my friend Sister Pat, cofounder of Jubilee West, died unexpectedly while we were vaca-tioning in Vermont. We had worked, argued, dreamed, planned, and enjoyed life together in West Oakland for nineteen years of a longer close friendship. Pat was "home" to me; now I feel like a homeless person. In my grief I have felt that God is burning himself into my soul, in intense pain and intense beauty. Was it in another lifetime that I wrote, "I'm not aware of very much per-sonal pain"? I am amazed that "Feel your pain" was one of my "exploratory answers." It has helped me take time for the sadness of my loss. I am hopeful that my pain will give me strength and wisdom to respond to the world's pain in new ways. My under-standing of my own "answers" is deeper than when I wrote them. Hopefully, I am more ready to keep working to create a new pic-ture, a new wholeness. Notes ~ Michael Lerner, Surplus Powerlessness (Oakland: Institute for Labor and Mental Health, 1986). These and other quotations from Lerner are a combination of a variety of pages in this book. 2 Joanna Macy, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (Baltimore: New Society Publishers, 1983). These quotations are a com-bination of a variety of pages in chapters 1 and 2. 3 Macy, Despair, p. 32. 4 Joanna Macy, World as Love~; World as Self(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991), p. 18. s Macy, Despair, p. 24. 498 Review for Religious MARGARET MARY KNITTEL Corporate Sponsorship: The 1990s and the Fruits of Our Labor I alternate between thinking of the planet as home--dear and familiar stone hearth and garden--and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. --Annie Dillard, "Sojourner" Mey mother had lived in this home, built by her father, ver since she was eighteen, and now sixty years later she was selling the stained-glass windows, the hardwood floors, everything. All went well but for that last moment holding all the pain. We walked away bearing the image of strangers in that beloved doorway, frame of four generations. Doorways of insti-tutions, too, owned and operated by generations of women reli-gious, hold countless emotionally freighted moments, and near the close of the 20th century the terms "corporate sponsorship" and "fruits of our labor" have become and remain inextricably bound. In one ethical frame come three questions that are relevant to these two realities, corporate sponsorship and fruits of our labor. The three questions suggest a fluidity of vision, a loo'sening of ties. The questions are: Who are we? Who are we becoming? Who are we called to be? Who Are We? Over successive generations the corporately sponsored institutional ministry increasingly became for Catholic women religious in the United States their "hearth and garden," Margaret Mary Knittel RSM served as director of personnel services at Saint Xavier University in Chicago from 1981 to 1987. Presently, as a consultant for nonprofit organizations, she writes to us from I 1 Simpson, H; Geneva, Illinois 60134. ~uly-Aug~st 1995 499 Knittel ¯ Corporate Sponsorship the consummate fruits of their labor, our labor. Hospitals, nurs-ing homes, orphanages, .high schools, and colleges together form a litany of dedicated achievement, of the brick-by-brick accom-plishments of many dedicated women. Annie Dillard's feelings about this planet as hearth and garden and land of exile help identify three groups or generations of women religious who for a hundred years have owned and operated those institutions.1 These generations we shall call the exiles, the arrived, and the The first generation, the exiles, traveled from countries like Ireland, Germany, and Italy to North American mission lands. The second generation, the arrived (or arriv&s), lived in an at-homeness within their institutions in the burgeoning years. Now, in these closing years of the 20th century, we have a third gen-eration, the sojourners, seeking a new way to live their profes-sional commitments and their personal lives as vowed women religious upon finding themselves living in smaller and smaller groupings on a planet presenting challenges and opportunities their pioneering sisters in exile--their grandsisters--would not recognize. For the exiles--pioneers, all of them--the missions of the late 19th and early 20th century meant lives of physical sacrifice and economic deprivation well beyond the virtue or vow of poverty. Those women pieced together budgets, scraping their ingenuity for survival. Having come intent upon working hard, they strove to build hearths and gardens and kept striving and struggling, remaining and reminding themselves to be exiles at heart, women in a foreign land. Echoing the economy at large, the institutional ministries they had founded and maintained boomed after the lean years of the Great Depression. The second generation, the arrived, brought forward personal and corporate energies to build up edu-cational, social-service, and healthcare institutions surpassing the dreams of the earlier immigrant generation, the exiles. With increased settling in, this hearth of the religious women's profes-sional lives, this sponsored work, began for some to take on near-salvific powers. This hospital, this academy, began to hold terrestrial hopes and dreams, promised a salvation, and hinted of a this-side immortality. Plaudits, awards, and status were afforded to this generation of women who had arrived, who in some cases had left a humble family circle for what was increasingly becom- 500 Review for Religious ing an educated, secure middle-class community. They, we, by one definition indeed had arrived. For the arrived, their hospital or academy chapel began to localize the garden of the spirit. Here each morning and evening, all, regardless of professional status, gathered together at prayer. Here the contemplative "side" sought nourishment as the apostolic "side" waited just outside the chapel door. Hearth of work and garden of spirit, these became fix-tures within the corporate institu-tions cared for by the members of this second generation. Who Are We Becoming? In the movie "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" the central figure, an exceedingly obese mother of four, says to her teenage son in a moment of reconciliation, "I never wanted to be like this." She had eaten her way to virtual immobility after her husband walked away from her and their children. Do we women religious, as this 20th cen-tury of ours draws to a close, gaze at our corporate body and say to ot~rselves, "We never wanted to be like this"? The founders of mis-sions here in the United States began on an inspiration to do good The second generation, the arrived, brought forward personal and corporate energies to build up educational, social-service, and healthcare institutions surpassing the dreams of the earlier immigrant generation, the exiles. in the sight of the God, and now, one or two hundred years later, their legatee corporate body has perhaps come to he something overly substantial: substantial hearth and garden, substantial fruits of our labor. These places, these institutions, became the symbolic body of our corporate identity within the church and the symbolic immortality within our destinies. Boards, philanthropic individ-uals, committees, friendships have been cultivated in the name of a hospital, an orphanage, or a school, and individual women's identities have been formed by and dedicated to bricks and steam pipes and windows. And then, as a distant window opened in the early 1960s and Vatican Council II convened, the corporate body ~ly-August 1995 501 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship began to be looked at and came into question: "Is this who we are becoming?" For some women and men, in and out of religious life, the signs of the times appealed to in the council documents began to replace the signs of success. The prophet Jeremiah's call to voca- Women religious know that an additional thirty years, like those since the council, will not be afforded them. A sizable amount of post-Vatican time has quickly become history, and religious can recite lists of classrooms already vacated, hospital beds unused, and doors closed. tion describes a people God observes burning incense to strange gods and "adoring their own hand-iwork" (Jr 1:16). The prophetic began to ease itself forward. The work of our hands, the fruits of our labor, came into question. Now, in these late days of the 20th century, the hearth lies gray with embers and the garden shows signs of late-summer exhaustion. Women religious know that an additional thirty years, like those since the council, will not be afforded them. A sizable amount of post-Vatican time has quickly become history, and religious can recite lists of classrooms already vacated, hospital beds unused, and doors closed. Worse, we know in our aging the lists of needs more acute, more violent, than our grandsisters might have dared imagine. With abuses crowding our culture into corners that seem to offer no choice, we acknowl-edge there has to be more to this journey. Who Are We Called to Be? Our third generation, the would-be sojourners, wonder at this late-20th-century hour: "Is this our time of exile? Shall we be graced to select to become sojourners. Selecting to be sojourners, to move from being securely settled to securely unsettled, recalls the, sweep of the Hebrew Scriptures showing us a people finding centers other than God. The king-dom, the temple, the land--here was the answer. No, not here, there. No, not there, here. Efforts to restore the earthly kingdom kept centering on realities other than God. But Yahweh contin-ued to insist. 502 Review for Religious Selecting to be sojourners calls us to know how to go into exile, how to travel. Traveling, what shall we pack? Timing, how to schedule transportation, stopovers? And we cannot forget those allowances of minutes and hours, those sponges of time, to absorb this unfamiliar territory, this plan, these new connections. We will not know the language, but will need to interact and relate with others in order to continue on the journey and will have to search our imaginations for ways to communicate constructively. Life will move more slowly even as we continually need to cope with myriad details. Knowing exile, we will know ourselves anew. A clock continues to tick, and while many individual women religious hear it, the instinct to muffle its sound remains. "Enough!" we hear. Our alternative thoughts drift to sojourning, but graying embers say "Enough." We lived through the changes of the 1960s and '70s immediately after the council. No more traveling, turning, leaving, remembering, forgetting, previsioning, refashioning, or paradigm shifting for us! Just leave me alone. Enough. Give me the basics for survival and let me live out my life, here. Give me my job, my position, my power. Give me space. But a clock continues to tick. Learning to Mourn Henri Nouwen has said, "Yes, we must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything constantly shifting and changing.''2 At issue here is whether or not women religious have the energy to mourn. There have been deaths--countless funerals, remembered rejec-tions, and downright hostilities and hatreds. Yes, death seems to have been an integral part of this life once so much idealized--the youth and the joy! But, through all of these deaths, have we short-circuited a certain human pathos, admixing theologies and spiri-tualities, being at times more stoic than Christian? Several weeks after the death of my mother, an acquaintance asked, "How are you doing?" An incident, fresh that day, helped me to describe a way of being that I would later learn is common to us and may be where the corporate person of religious life .~ly-Auguyt 1995 503 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship finds itself today. I told him of my standing in the middle of a room that morning, about to clean, but not knowing what to do next. My emotional energy was somehow separated from me as a person. As women religious, do we stand in the middle of a room and not know how to clean it, with our individual and corpgrate emo-tional energy elsewhere? Solneone has said, "Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.''3 Is there a sense that somehow our corporate energy has separated itself from the corporate body so that with our corpo-rate leadership we continue doing things right rather than doing the right thing? Walter Brueggemann has observed that "reli-gious practitioners are often easy and unwitting conspirators with such denial. We become the good-humor men and women, for who among us does not want to rush in and smooth things out, to reassure, to cover grief?.''4 Rush in, smooth out, reassure--sounds familiar. What and where are the deep-down places in which we will individually and corporately rejoin our emotional energies, find ourselves? While sometimes we feel sublimely practiced in the various forms of grief, having experienced death in many forms, have we mourned? Have we cared enough about ourselves individually and corporately to let in the slow, mysterious loneliness, the ever changing healing of life after a death, a shocking, numbing death, has occurred? This work of mourning looks not only to the past but also to the future, fully realizing that new steps must be taken. The ability to bear wholesome and healing grief is every bit as much a fruit of our labor as the most imposing achievement of our corporate endeavors. Who are we called to be in this late 20th century, and is God directly and immediately in charge? Given our status and our connections, have we--women religious who have arrived--cor-porately capitulated to others' being in charge, someone else's agenda. "The task of the prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.''s We come through the numbing to learn from a God in charge that the fruit of our labor may be "only" to know Jesus the Christ once again as way, as truth, as life. In this late 20th century, the fruits of our having arrived carry the exotically sweet flavor of success taken for granted and of 504 Review for Religious controlling power. In some instances we think it necessary to cling to these fruits with an even tighter grip. What sadder use of our time than participating in meetings with unseen forces with a view to reconstituting yesteryear rather than working with hope for tomorrow! Is there true conversation within our communi-ties, or merely some talk while waiting for followers to follow? Whether we would speak with Brueggemann's "prophetic imagination" or Philip Keane's "moral imagination," can we imag-ine imagining? Keane has said, "Communities as well as persons need t6 develop moral character and exercise moral imagination as they seek to address the great issues of our times.''6 When a loved one dies, a significant part of our grieving may involve imagining the future without them. We have known and loved them, but deep down we grieve for ourselves in an unknown future--a birthday or a Christmas--without their presence. We deeply miss this lost past. The exile has begun, with or without us. We need to acknowl-edge it, learning more and imagining more about what it means to mourn. We will be sojourners, like our grandsisters before us, leaving the comforts of home, however we currently define and hold on to them. "A number of factors can hinder persons from being genuinely reflective and playful in their moral thinking," says Keane; "power or force is one such factor.''7 Shall we become more reflective, more playful, and imagine leaving our present "homes" of wrongfully constructed political power, of oppressive behaviors? What prevents us from asking: Who are we? Who are we becoming? and Who are we called to be? The answer from some, if not all, may lie in these processes of the prophetic, these questions. Land of Exile: Corporate Sojournership "Fairly often," says Keane, "I run into persons whose image of God is that God is out to get us. Such persons want to be told what to do, and they are afraid of using their moral imaginations. Their religious or prayer lives will often be quite limited because their fear keeps them from really being open to the power of the Gospel stories.''8 As women religious we seek the courage to imag-ine and do corporately what many individual women and men have already wrestled with in their lives. We need, corporately, to turn in the keys, have a good cry, and move on. 3~uly-Al¢g'ust 199Y 505 Knittel * Corporate Sponsorship Turning in the keys does not necessarily mean a wholesale closing of eacli and every institution. Some would like that, but it could indeed prove shortsighted and definitely unimaginative, even though some say the community's need for money is a good reason for selling this hospital or that academy and others say, "If we sell, we would be doing something holy." Abandoning an inner-city hospital without recourse to imaginative possibilities of how this long-cared-for space--the land's square feet and the buildings' cubic feet--could now serve the poor better might well become a new urban tragedy. We will need to go after anew, with all the civic clout that our years of being respectable arrivges can muster, the neighborhood's endemic and systemic problems. The friends of our institutions of the past may not choose to be the companions of our sojourning in the years ahead. But, together with those who would stay with us, we n~ed to find out who we are called to be. In any new land such as the future, there will be questions, then some answers, and then new questions. Our bequest, the fruits of our labor--whether embodied in our present corporate buildings and our present apostolic endeavors or not--must always be directed towards common goods that our corporate resources and corporate energies can hope to accomplish. People reflecting on the conversion to which all of us are called expect that the hearth and garden that halve come down to tis from a former time, these substantial signs of our having arrived, will increasingly suggest to us new common and corpo-rate lives of sojourning exile. These and similar questions will keep occurring to us: How will we use the power and influence we have? What could the prayer of our community be like? How will we imagine and live appropriate ways of coming together and being together--or of being together and going out together? What can we do most effectively for the coming of the kingdom? Shall we be women of vision, corporately attending to the good? Shall we corporately prepare in earnest to live in exile, to be sojourners, persons consciously and deliberately ready for the journey that begins and ends in God? Notes l Annie Dillard, "Sojourner," in Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), p. 150. 506 Review for Religious 2 Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Hearts Burning (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 27. 3 Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can't Lead (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1989), p. 18. 4 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic hnagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 49. s Brueggemann, p. 49. 6 Philip S. Keane, Christian Ethics and Imagination (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), p. 104. 7 Keane, p. 107. 8 Keane, p. 107. Tourist Your T-shirt's stamped in letters large across your chest: KATMANDU. Your bike is labeled with a hundred road resorts. Your car is dotted round with all your touring triumphs . So, why not take another route today? A low-cost tour to that other inner world inside. Stay quiet by that vast unbounded inner ocean in your mind. Dive, swim and surf. Fly free. Ride high the inner waves of thought and feeling endlessly exhilarated, or delve into the dark and secret untrod cavern of your soul. Discover now the mystery of creation; confront the abyss unending of your own nothing-self becoming. And meet in that remote mysterious empty temple, far inside, your God. Cothrai Gogan CSSP .y~uly-August 199Y 507 CATHERINE M. HARMER Retirement's Wisdom Years One of the recurring discussions at assemblies and chap-ters of religious revolves around the rising median age, the need to care for our elderly, and more subtly the growing costs of such caring. The issue is an important one in that most United States congregations have median ages over sixty. An examination of congregational budgets shows that increasingly large amounts of money are dedicated to the care of the elderly. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops has been sponsor-ing a special collection for aging religious that people contribute to with great generosity, but it covers only a small part of the actual costs. A visit to the motherhouse of almost any group of sisters will show that a large part of what was housing for novices in the past is now dedicated to the aging members. Some motherhouses have very fine infirmaries for the sick elderly. There is no question that religious leaders are making great efforts to provide the best they can for their members through all stages of life. I would like, however, to examine two aspects of that effort. The first has to do with the nursing-home care that many of the sick elderly need. The second has to do with the concept of retirement for religious and the way it has been handled over the last twenty years or so. The Sick Elderly The first topic is the simpler one and will get less treatment in this article. In the care of our sick elderly, the emphasis has Catherine M. Harmer MMS wrote "Election: A Call to Service" for our September-October 1994 issue. Her address is Medical Mission Sisters; 300 W. Wellens Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19120. 508 Review for Religious been changed from the simple caring for them "at home" that was possible when the median age was much lower and the num-ber of elderly religious was either smaller or relatively smaller. When that was the case, at the motherhouse a small staff assisted by novices and postulants could care for them in much the same way that a family could take care of any sick or elderly member of it. Gradually, as the numbers increased and the sick elderly lived longer, a more professional model, that of the nursing home, became more common. As this was happen-ing, the percentage of vigorously active members was decreasing. At present, in most of the retirement facilities I have visited over the years, the staff is largely lay with very few religious among them. In some very large congrega-tions, with several hundred sick elderly members, the facilities com-pare well with any licensed nursing home, often providing much better care and definitely offering more loving care than in the average nurs-ing home for the laity. In smaller congregations the attempt to pro-vide quality nursing care results in Some small congregations in a given area are studying the feasibility of establishing an intercon gregational nursing home. A few religious leaders are looking at ways to provide for their members in general nursing homes in their area. small facilities that are as expensive to maintain as considerably larger ones would be. In some cases a nursing staff (composed mainly of nurse aides) that could care for thirty patients is taking care of ten or fifteen, sometimes fewer. As congregations face the heavy financial drain, there is a movement toward collaboration among the congregations in a geographic area. This is a positive development that could lead to good care for the religious and lower financial costs. Some groups that have larger facilities are opening them to other congrega-tions. Some small congregations in a given area are studying the feasibility of establishing an intercongregational nursing home. A few religious leaders are looking at ways to provide for their mem-bers in general nursing homes in their area. All of these steps are difficult. Often the members of a con-gregation are very unwilling to have their elderly cared for away .~dy-August 199Y 509 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years from their own motherhouse. At times the elderly themselves feel that they are being mistreated by being separated from their tra-ditional homes. Only a few consider it a good thing to be in a nursing home of mixed patients, men and women, religious and lay, in spite of the pastoral potential of such a model. The efforts of leaders and the combined efforts of congrega-tions to deal with both the physical realities and the psychologi-cal and religious values are important ones. Key for the leaders will be understanding, patience, and collaborative stances. For the members, those who are elderly and those who are not, it is important to develop an acceptance of the reality they face and a willingness to keep their last days congruent with what has gone before. I suggest that this requires ongoing education for every-one and a spirituality that looks at one's last days as continuous with the dedication of earlier days. Religious Retirement In our efforts to prepare one another for "retirement," we may have bought into a model that was emerging after World War II and continues to develop in terms of what aging and retir-ing are all about. This brings me to the second topic, the one which will constitute the major portion of this article. It is all the more important because it bears upon the first as well. It has to do with how we are viewing retirement. I believe that we have accepted a way of looking at retirement which is increasingly being challenged in the population at large and that we need to study it in the light of what our entire religious life is about. Several aspects of this model of retirement raise new questions. The current model in the United States assumes that people will retire at sixty-five if not earlier. When Social Security became a reality in the 1930s, life expectancy was lower, many people did hard physical labor and had relatively poor nutritional histories, and their hope was simply that at retirement they could stop working without worry about becoming dependent on their chil-dren or "ending up in the poorhouse." Today life expectancy is much higher, and the reality is that many people stay active, healthy, and alert for twenty years and longer after they retire. A second aspect, then, is that retirement is a time of not work-ing and, instead, spending one's time and energy at play of one sort or another. (Married women often have less of the play since 510 Review for Religious they are still expected to do the work of keeping up the home.) A problem here is that many retired people soon become bored with the play aspect. Some move toward part-time jobs or vol-unteer work, while others become captives of the television or the endless bingo games of our less creative senior centers. A third aspect of the current model that deserves examina-tion is the tendency to move away from the place where most of life was spent. This sometimes has to do with seeking a warmer climate or more economical housing. The result is that, as peo-ple age, they are out of regular con-tact with their family and must develop new friends. Even the elderly who manage well on their own in their original home are often under pressure from relatives and friends to find a smaller place-- which often takes them away from the community in which they have close ties and away from some sig-nificant activities that they could otherwise keep up. People are living longer while remaining physically and mentally vigorous, and yet the model of retirement continues to treat them as if they cannot do anything but play. What is being lost is the opportunity for them to contribute to family, to friends, to com-munity, in a different way than during their working years, but a way that is significant and needed. What is being lost to society at large is the accumulated wisdom of the elderly, a loss our soci-ety cannot afford. It would be a shame for religious congregations to follow the national model for retirement too closely. While few if any con-gregations have fixed ages of retirement from major involvement in ministries, there has been a subtle movement over the last few decades to start "thinking about retirement" while the religious are in their fifties. Without necessarily meaning to do so, this has too frequently led to a mentality that places retiring somewhere in the sixties, even if there is no real reason to do so. I have vis-ited motherhouses where some of the sisters appear to have retired Although the idea that play is the major activity of the retired has not taken hold so completely in religious congregations, what has developed is a sense that this is my time to do with as I wish. J-uly-dugust 199Y 511 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years far too soon and are desperate for some way to be involved in ministry. Mthough the idea that play is the major activity of the retired has not taken hold so completely in religious congregations, what has developed is a sense that this is my time to do with as I wish. Especially in motherhouses, which tend to be out in the country or relatively isolated, this leads to a combination of small tasks around the motherhouse, activities that mimic the senior citizens' centers, and some increased emphasis on the spiritual life without much attention to how that might be different at this stage of life. Often when I talk with the retired themselves I find a deep longing for two things: to find some meaningful part-time min-istry and to explore what spiritual life means at this latter stage of life. When retirement takes place at a motherhouse, you find the same isolation from community that the lay elderly experience who move to Florida. While most religious have lived and worked in a number of places, there was always the parish, the school or hospital, sometimes the neighborhood, as a framework for involve-ment and support. This is now gone, and the beautiful grounds of the motherhouse, the special facilities, and sometimes the large numbers (for those, notably, who were used to smaller groups) are no substitute for what has been lost. Religious do not, on the whole, do a lot of complaining, but the sense of loss is often heard in the undertones of a conversation. We hear ". everything is so nice here., everyone is so kind . . . but."--and the long-ing is very real. I am increasingly convinced that elderly religious should, whenever possible, have the same choices as the younger members. This stage of life is important, and it needs to be rec-ognized as such. In the remainder of this article, I want to address two impor-tant things about aging and retirement for religious: (1) the sec-ond half of life as a time of deepening wisdom and individuation, a time for a greater spirituality to emerge, and (2) the role of elderly religious in continuing the mission of Jesus. For many ideas here, it will be evident that I am indebted to Carl Jung, but also to a fascinating book by Jane R. Pr~tat on the croning years (1994). As I read her book, I found myself dwelling on several ideas: that our society wastes the wisdom of the elderly at a time when we need it most; that aging is not just something that hap-pens, but a part of the whole picture of life; and that much of 512 Review for Religious what is wrong in contemporary ways of looking at and dealing with aging in general are found also in regard to aging among religious, especially in how we treat the reality we call "retire-ment." The Second Half of Life Some years ago a large number of articles, workshops, and counseling programs focused on a particular transition seen as noteworthy, the "mid-life crisis." This concept seems, from a Jungian point of view, relevant to the developmental model's tran-sition from the first to the second half of life. This division into two halves does not have a chronological point, just ~s mid-life cannot be tied to a specific number of years of life. The first half of life is devoted to infancy, childhood, and young adulthood inso-far as these parts of life have to do with coming to know the world around ourselves, coming to an understanding of who we are as separate from our parents, learning, developing a working career, and moving to success within that career. At the midpoint, we might wake up in the morning and ask: Is this all there is to life? How we answer that question may indicate if the second half of life is about to begin. If the answer is "Yes, this is it!" we could spend the rest of our life simply as a continuation of the first half until death. If the answer is "No, there is something more!" we could enter into the second half of life. In the second half of life, the tasks shift to integration of the parts that have been separated during the first half, the move-ment toward individuation, coming to know ourselves in a dif-ferent way, and the decision to move toward wisdom. The "wise old man" and "wise old woman" archetypes begin to emerge dur-ing the early part of this second half of life. I believe that many people make the shift to the second half of life without ever hear-ing about Jung or his developmental theories. They recognize that something is changing in themselves, and they move with those changes. Some of the "play" elements of retirement--the programs for senior citizens that involve bingo, excursions, and hobbies--could be considered a return to an early part of the first half of lifel Now that we have done our work, earned our pension, we can again become the children whose task is play. For people with a limited field of interests, this may mean watching television for ffuly-August 1995 513 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years As we age; there is often a longing for a deeper understanding, a greater closeness to God. It is a normal part of the second half of life. long hours of the day and night. This is to remain in the first half of life, possibly until death, without ever taking the step into the second half. For other people, the leisure activities are part of their under-standing of where they are in terms of age, but other aspects also begin to emerge. Spending time with their children and grand-children can be a way of being the elder who is communicating the lore and the wisdom of life. This is a second-half activity and one much needed in today's culture, in which single-parent families and families with both parents working are becoming the norm. Contact with the older generation, with grandparents, . uncles, and aunts, which for long years was the norm, now is the excep-tion in many families. Wisdom also has to do with com-ing to a deeper knowledge of God, a greater and deeper integration of the spiritual life. For many people, life has been so busy, so full of duties, that the spiritual life was relegated to a set of rituals honored on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. As we age, there is often a longing for a deeper understanding, a greater closeness to God. It is a normal part of the second half of life. In some cases it is connected with daily Mass for people who during their working years were quite con-tent with the Sunday Mass; it may mean a return to some of the religious practices of childhood; sometimes it is :a search for deeper intimacy with God. This longing belongs to the wisdom quest of this second stage. Religious, hopefully, have not stinted on their attention to the spiritual and to God's presence all through the active first half of their life. Yet the sense that the latter half of life has some-thing special to offer is found among them as well. One cannot deny, though, that some religious at this stage seem to put i:he haain emphasis on play. Their way of playing may be different, but it is still play and may involve television, novel reading, trips to the casino with the senior citizens' group, and considerable family visiting. 514 Review for Religious As a country we have to explore how to make the wisdom of the elders available to our children and to our busy adults. In the extended family of the past, this happened very simply. At one time in my childhood, I went every Friday after school to my grandparents' home so that on Saturday morning I could help .my grandmother with some of the cleaning she found difficult to do. What I remember most is conversations after supper on Friday with my grandfather, who told me the stories of his youth when he was an organizer of the unions in the steel mills of Pittsburgh. I also remember listening to music on the radio, and all three of us reading our separate books or magazines. Elderly religious off in motherhouses and retirement centers lose their easy contact with yoilnger religious, lose casual opportunities to share their wisdom with them, just as grandparents nowadays are often in other states where spending time with their grandchildren is no longer 'possible. In some motherhouses there are now prayer centers and renewal centers that give workshops and courses for sisters and lay people who are interested. At one point I had a constant flow of their catalogues coming across my desk. Fine as many of these centers are, I rarely saw anything that addressed the need for exploring the spirituality of the latter half of life, of the retirement years. Yet in those same houses I often met older sisters who longed for scripture study, for prayer assistance, for some way of understanding and developing the spirit life for this special part of their earthly sojourn. Some Strategies for the Second Half of Life It seems to me, then, that there are two things leadership would do well to do~ (1)to make it possible for elderly religious (granted their varying degrees of diminished energy) to continue to be involved in meaningful ministries that connect with the congregation's charism and mission and (2) to make conscious efforts to help the elderly religious move through the integrative work of the second half of their life in a way that is just as appro-priate as the novitiate training was for the first half. ., I live in a parish at present where more than half of the sis-ters in the local convent are well into the second half of their life and thus are no longer able to be involved full-time in the min-istries of their congregation. The congregation is a teaching one, jg~uly-August 1995 515 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years staffing many parish and,diocesan schools. A few of the sisters teach in the parish school, others commute to diocesan high schools, and the older sisters are engaged in time,limited but very vital ministries, These include teaching and tutoring in the adult literacy center, tutoring children from the grade school, and vis-iting elderly shut-ins 'in the neighborhood. None of these are full-time involvements. In some cases the sisters go to the school, in others the students come to them in the convent. Whenever I meet with these women, I am struck by the joy and peace that are obvious in them. Not everyone can be placed in a parish convent. Some of our elderly need to be in places like motherhouses where their greater physical needs can be provided for. It is sometimes possible to bring ministries to these motherhouses and at the same time pro-vide a wonderful service to others. I have been to motherhouses where there was day care for children in some parts of the build-ing and day care for ~he elderly in other parts. Two wonderful things happened there daily. The children and the elderly spent some time together every day, and both benefited by the experi-ence. The staff of both facilities had "assistants" from among the retired sisters who, like the women in my parish, could not work full-time, but could be counted on for blocks of time on .a regu-lar basis to help with both groups of day-care clients. o To keep our religious involved as long as possible has another imp.ortant benefit. Most o£ the research on the aging process shows that, if people stay physically and mentally active, they stay healthy longer and age more slowly. We have wonderful examples of very elderly people maintaining their mental and physical capacities long past the expected time and making contributions to art, 'literature,. and the commonweal. Even more important, this is a time when .religious can begin to share the wisdom that has come to them with age, experience, and deep reflection on the meaning of life. This is a wisdom that is very much needed in our culture, a wisdom that too often the children and young peo-ple do.not find around them. Religious can become, in~ a very real way, the grandparent figures ifi their parishes, neighborhoods, and institutions. This is the wisdom of experience joined with reflec-tion upon that experience. 0 The second thing needing attention from leadership is the effort to help religious .use their latter years creatively in order to move toward the union with God that has been such a part of our 516 Review for Religious thinking throughout life. Many of the forms of prayer and spiri-tuality that are helpful to members of active religious congrega-tions during their early and middle years are apostolically oriented. Appropriately, the religious appreciate seeing a close connection between their ministry and their spirituality. The inner life and the outer life are integrated, ideally, in a rich and vibrant way. Changes take place as religious move through the early years of the second half of life. Spending less time and energy in direct apostolic efforts, they have more time for more leisurely ways of praying. They are ready for the next stage of devel-opment of their inner life. Their focus at this stage is somewhat different from that of their early and middle years. It has within it many of the same elements, but also some new ones. In this stage the elderly may desire to recall or renew some of the things they learned in earlier years, but did not have time to savor and assim-ilate. Frequently they speak of their desire for scripture classes, for prayer workshops. These can be useful, but they need to be focused clearly and carefully on the latter years. Now the emphasis is not on quantities of information, but rather on depth, on quiet composure and integration within each individual's inner reality. The wisdom years are the time when the. "wise old woman" and "wise old man" archetypes come to the fore. While the wis-dom can be for oneself, it is even more for others. At this stage there is not likely to be any necessity to go out and preach or teach, but there should be a simple and peaceful realization that the wisdom being garnered is also for others. This is why it is important during these years: for religious to have two areas of concern: one for the continuing development of the wisdom that has been growing in them over the years, and the other for shar-ing that wisdom, very simply and directly, with others. As religious move along through this final stage of life, it is essential that they have the assistance they need to foster the growth of their inner life, to be more open to wisdom, and that they have opportunity to share it with others. Thus, the ending of Most of the research on the aging process shows that, if people stay physically and mentally active, they stay healthy longer and age more slowly. ~uly-August 199Y 517 Harmer ¯ Retirement's Wisdom Years life can be as full and as rich spiritually as any of the earlier stages, and it can be lived out in a truly mission-centered way. This will enrich the lives of the elderly religious themselves, but also of those who are yearning for that wisdom and do not yet know where to find it. It will bring a fullness to the lives of the "retired" and of those around them. It will be a far happier period than one given to play, television, and various excursions. Religious have frequently been the pacesetters in ministry. Perhaps it is time for the "retired" religious to begin to model to other retirees a richer, fuller, and more outwardly directed wisdom retirement. References Johnston, Charles M. Necessary Wisdom: Meeting the Challenge of a New Cultural Maturity. Seattle: ICD Press, 1991. Pr~tat, Jane R. Coming to Age: The Croning Years and Late-Life Transformations. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1994. Exposition Bless you, caress you~ enfold and possess you. Blessed by you, caressed by you, enfolded within you. Possessed. Chris Mannion FMS 518 Review for Religious TAD DUNNE The Enneagram Since the. early 1970s, religious educators, spiritual men-tors, retreat directors, and, most recently, management trainers have been talking about the "enneagram." 1 The theory proposes that each person is hooked by one of nine psychological compulsions--similar to the seven "capital" sins in classical Christian literature? Dozens of authors. and lecturers nowadays are teaching the theory to help people discover which of the nine compulsions is theirs and bow to accomplish their psychological liberation from it. The nine types are often referred to in caricatures: the Perfectionist, the Helper, ~he Status Seeker, the Sensitive Artist, the Observer, the Accuser, the Planner, the Bully, and the Slug.3 To edch of these descriptions, enneagram teachers attach longer descriptions of phobias, ambitions, expectations, learning style, sexual dynamics, management style, virtues, prides, blind spots, fixations, senses of time, and so on. The r~lations among the com-pulsions are represented by a circle whose circumference is numbered, at nine equidistant points. Within the circle is a triangle drawn from points three to six to nine. Also within the circle is a folded hexagon drawn through the Tad Dunne is an adjunct professor of medical ethics at Marygrove College, Detroit, and a management consultant for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan. He has published Spiritual Mentoring (HarperSanFrancisco) and Lonergan and Spirituality (Loyola University Press). He may be addressed at 2923 Woodslee; Royal Oak, Michigan 48073. guidance July-August 199Y 519 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram cycle 1-4-2-8-5-7-1. This strange figure has become the logo of the enneagram system. Enneagram and Myers-Briggs People often compare the enneagram to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies sixteen personality types accord-ing to one's preference for ways of noticing experience and mak-ing decisions. The chief difference between them is that the Myers-Briggs instrument indicates personal preferences, all of which are psychologically normal, while the enneagram indicates pathologies. That is, in the Myers-Briggs'all the types are healthy, while in the enneagram all the types are sick. So the Myers-Briggs is useful for accommodating one's own thinking style with col-laborators'; it helps groups identify the preferences for ways of learning and evaluating that exist,among their members and to deploy their relative .strengths accordingly. The enneagram, in contrast, is useful for identifying neuroses, mostly in oneself. The Myers-Briggs indicator, rooted in Jungian psychology, carries a positive attitude toward human consciousness, whereas the ennea-gram, rooted partly in Freudian psychology, takes a more suspi-cious stand. Few psyqhologists, however, rely on either tool for diagnostic purposes, because of an absence of empirical studies that correlate with validated' tests. Among other helping professionals, the Myers-Briggs indi-cator enjoys a wider and less controversial reputation than the enneagram. The sixteen preferences are easily understood; one can readily find Jung's comments on people's preferences between extraversion and introversion, between sensate observation and intuition, and between thinking and feeling.4 The enneagram, in contrast, has sources shrouded in arcane knowledge from a cor-ner of the Sufi tradition unknown to most Sufis and from George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a self-styled visionary from Russia with dubi-ous credentials. The many enneagram books and tapes that have been published in the last decade tend to describe each of the nine compialsions in dogmatic terms--a style of presentation that allures some but alienates others,s 520 Some Positive Aspects of the Enneagram One of the most disturbing claims made by enneagram devo- Review for Religious tees is that these nine types cover the total human range of com-pulsions. Not ten, not eight.6 There are subsets among the nine, but these supposedly cover all possibilities. Devotees base this claim on an unfamiliar model of personality and on the ennea-gram logo, whose origins are untraceable.7 But what is really dis-turbing is that, despite the dogmatic claims of the theory and an absence of experiment-based research, it is difficult to find any-one who fails to fit one of the types. Enneagram fans in the help-ing professions, after years of working with the tool, feel that these nine are just about right. And individuals claim that the enneagram has helped them to reach a deeper understanding of their personal compulsions than any other self-help system has, In other words, this weird, unempirical, upsetting, gnostic, and mys-tifying map of the psyche seems to work. In 1990 Claudio Naranjo MD published Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker. Enneagram students were eager to read what he had to say, since he led the development o_f the the-ory among English-speaking publics. His book, the smallest I know of on the subject, builds the theory on much more solid ground. That book is now out of print, but has been incorpo-rated in Naranjo's new and expanded volume, Character and Neurosis, published in 1994. Naranjo lends legitimacy to the theory in several ways. Unlike most other enneag.ram authors, who tend to pile adjective upon adjective and style upon style to cover the many variations possi-ble within each compulsion, Naranjo,keeps the set of descriptors limited. He wants these descriptors to function the way they func-tion in clinical manuals such as the DSM tli, namely, as a list of discreet phenomena sufficient to distinguish one type from another? By describing diseases with as little overlap as possible, he enables therapists to spot the core problem more quickly and waste less time on manifestations of the problem shared with other compulsions. Naranjo also takes pains to make a distinction between pas-sions (anger, envy, gluttony, and so forth) and the cognitive errors that underlie each passion. These errors amount to uncrit-ical assumptions about what life is like--the kind of oversimpli-fied worldview (and subsequent inappropriate adaptive routines) that Ellis deals with in his rational-emotive therapy.9 By pin-pointing cognitive errors, Naranjo believes, a person can iden-tify and dissolve his or her pet myths in order to rob the j~uly-August 199~ 521 Dunne * The Enneagram corresponding passion of its rationale and thereby weaken its grip on the psyche. Another contribution Naranjo makes to the theory is that he consistently explains the psychological dynamics at work in each compulsion, rather than just stating them. By appealing to his readers' understanding rather than their memory, he invites them to consult the workings of their own psyches to verify the pres-ence of certain subconscious routines. This is no small achievement. The mind is easily content with a notional familiarity with terms. Only under the whip of intel-lectual desire will we push forward to uncover for ourselves some of our psychic gremlins that have never seen the light of con-sciousness. Likewise the heart is easily comforted with comfort-able feelings; it takes an inner discipline, responsible to no one but oneself, to face up to the discomforts of acting responsibly. In my limited experience of teaching the theory, I found that many students find it too difficult to allow the teaching to break through their automatic defenses and deal with their hidden fears and cravings. The enneagram doctrine just feeds a ravenous compul-sion. So the Status Seeker uses the enneagram to advance her own reputation. The Observer uses it to gather yet further infor-mation before he ventiares out into the world. And so on. Enneagram work is particularly difficult for teachers. They are tempted to devour the lore with teaching in mind, not learn-ing. The work, however, is for people on a personal mission-- those who possess enough self-knowledge to know they are learners in the school of self-knowledge. Much of Naranjo's prose envisions a therapeutic setting in which a seeker looks to a men-tor for guidance. The aim of the therapy is not to settle what our basic compulsion is, as if from that point on we know what box we are in. The therapeutic outcome is not to identify a conceptual scheme that sometimes describes our behavior. The desired out-come is to understand specific experiences of being not our best selves, using conceptual schemes as initial indicators of what may be causing the trouble. This is why it is important to hold the enneagram types at arm's length. Although some people seem to fit a single type per-fectly, others seem to fit several types. Are these latter persons-- whose self-deceit eludes everyone's analysis--all the while being victims of only a single compulsion? Or have they really developed several distinct alternatives to authentic living? Practically speak- 522 Review for Religious ing, it makes no difference so long as users rely on the ennea-gram as nothing more than clusters of fixations and behaviors that logically hang together. Their conceptual consistency is merely a model to help people raise relevant questions about the inner events that possess a slippery logic of their own. Besides his economy of description and his reliance on per-sonal understanding, a further significant contribution Naranjo makes to the theory lies in how he has analyzed the connection between psychological difficulties and exis-tential decisions about being human. Going beyond Oscar Ichazo, from whom he first learned the theory, as well as beyond the people who had already published his enneagram material, Naranjo bases each psychological dynamic in a fundamental spiritual crisis he calls "ontic obscuration," which is a kind of a deafness to our inner drives to be authentic persons. He proposes that, just as certain cognitive errors under' lie each passion, so certain existential fail-ures underlie each cognitive error. This is significant because it puts the focus directly on the inner work of being fully human. Other authors settle for cate-gorizing people by behavior patterns or look to childhood trau-mas to explain present weirdness--the kinds of analyses commonly found in popular psychology. Indeed, popular psychology usually lacks the words and ideas with which to reflect on that innermost work of authenticity. But, by paying direct attention to "ontic obscuration," individuals can discover that a major driver behind their compulsive responses lies in how seriously they take those quiet impulses to be fully human or else how consistently they have avoided the inner work involved in staying human. This "ontic obscuration" underlies each compulsion in its own manner. The Slug stands at the center, having thoroughly obscured inner voices about how to be one's truest self. The Bully and the Perfectionist hear the voices dimly, but respond through a focus on externals, especially through various forms of anger they feel because things are not what they should be. The Helper, the Status Seeker, and the Sensitive Artist hear the voices, but they divert their desire to become fully human persons into Enneagram work is particularly difficult for teachers. They are tempted to devour the lore with teaching in mind, not learning. ~uly-Augtwt 199Y 523 Dunne ¯ The Enneag'ram becoming just persons whose image carries clout in the lives of o.thers. The Planner, the Accuser, and the Observer also hear the voiceS, but they divert a fear of not becoming fully human into strategies designed to protect the little bits of personhood they believe they possess.l° ¯ Naranjo refers to this approach as his "Nasruddin" theory. The story goes that this mullah was crawling around in an alley near a marketplace, searching for the key to his house. A friend joined in the search and, after finding nothing, asked the mul-lah, "Are you sure you lost the key around here?" The mullah responded, "No, I lost it at home." The friend naturally asked, "Then why are you looking for the key here?" The mullah replied, "The light is much better here." 1, The point is that we often look for the key to our house out under the sun, where everything seems clear. But the key is in the house, an~l the house is dark. The Existential Questign: How Should I Be? For all the benefits ofNaranjo's "ontic obscuration," he does not explain in precise terms what being human involves; he set-tles for a description of some effects of"obscuration." For exam-ple, "loss of a sense of I-am-ness" and "something missing inside.''12 At times he presumes that deep down people really know the experience of "ontic obscuration." At other times he claims that the obscuration itself prevents people from realizing that any kind of obscuration has occurred. So, while it is appro-priate for him to recommend that the seeker find a mentor to help recognize a compulsion, the theory would benefit also from a positive understanding of just what it is that "ontic obscura-tion" obscures. To uncover this prize, we need to reflect on how being human happens to be obscured ifi the first place. Most psychologists agree that the intellect of children develops not only in the amount of information they learn but, more significantly, in whether or not they learn certain higher-level intellectual skills for understanding their experiences. So Naranjo's "ontic obscura-tion'? indicates, not a breakdown in mental development, but rather an unfinished development. It is not a matter of having obscured what once was clear; it is a matter of having been born blind and gradually learning how to see. 524 Review for Religious The developmental problem is how to move from a world of images, behaviors, symbols, and external sensations to the larger world of meaning and values. As children we were able to pose questions about being human only by using images. Should I be pushy? Compliant? Generous? Teacherly? Observant? Like a lion? A turtle? A bird? A monkey? Early successful functioning of one of these styles sets up a habit and provides evidence that the world around us must be of such and such a nature--the one that matches our chosen strategy. To the Bully, then, the world is dog-eat- dog; to the Accuser, the world is ridden with crooks. We build up a behavioral style and support it with a cognitive belief in a par-ticular strategy like one of those described in .the enneagram: being correct, being related, being impressive, being the victim, being retentive, being wary, being pleasing, being pugnacious, or being deaf. We become capable of noticing our compulsions as such only later, when we learn that proper use of our minds and hearts is more important than proper behavior and that intelligent analy-sis and reasonable judgment put us in touch with the real world far better than myths and symbols can. Only p~ople who have learned to think about inner acts of meaning can make a statement such as "There I go again" as they catch on to unreal thinking and feeling. ~ .~ This learning represents a major jump in thinking skills. A person discovers that the world is not just "already out there.''Is The real world is also the invisible world made up of the acts of meaning that occur in people's minds and hearts: the agreements, the plans, the guiding ideas, the reigning values, the loyalties, the spites, the memories, the laws, and the internalized language of the place. Former precepts such as Be corre'ct~ Be connected, Be suc-cessful, and Be the martyr were established in the mind of a~child who had no alternative but to think with pictures and symbols. Bht, in the world of meaning and values, learning how to be human ought to transcend these image-based precepts and adopt precepts based on the functions of the mind and heart. Bernard Lonergan, the late Canadian philosopher whose Insight and Method in Theology have influenced many practitioners in the human and natural sciences, has identified five such func-tion- based precepts. They are: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible, Be in love.'4 These voices are in all of us. They are active long before we notice them as distinct July-August 199Y 525 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram impuls.es. Although they still escape the notice of many psychol-ogists as being the most fundamental impulses that make us fully human, they are the living source of our ability to notice, under-stand, realize, take responsibility, and love, For Lonergan, these five precepts support a highly-structured method for the human sciences. But, for people seeking to under-stand their inner compulsions, they can also provide a normal way of referring to the task of being fully human. They can rep-resent the very operations that "ontic obscuration" obscures. These are the events that promise to bring a person to what Naranjo, in a more descriptive and less precise mode, calls "the integrated wholeness of one's experience"; "true aliveness, a sense of existing, a plenitude"; "finding value in the present and the actual.''ts These function-based ~precepts not only transcend image-based precepts; they also enable people to transcend who they are and to rise toward being who they are to be. Lonergan refers to these precepts as "the transcendental precepts." A Therapy of Love The question of how we should be does not end there. While people might rely on a diagnostic tool such as the enneagram to recognize self-defeating thoughts before they become actions, they also need a therapy to help recognize self-transcending thoughts and feelings. This means learning firsthand the differ-ence between the transcendental precepts and their opposites: between being attentive and being oblivious, being intelligent and being stupid, being reasonable and being silly, being respon-sible and being irresponsible, and being loving and being hateful. While anyone can recognize abstractly the contrast between these words, the right-hand members of the pairs conspire quite suc-cessfully to obscure their own functioning right behind our eyes. Fortunately, this conspiracy can be caught in the act. By know-ingly paying attention to the transcendental precepts, we can be more attentive to inner experience. We can be more intelligent about how certain cognitive errors and existential decisions sup-port our compulsions. We can be more reasonable as we admit the truth of how thoroughly our fixation may have dominated our psyches. We can be more responsible in accepting guilt that belongs to us, in shunning guilt that is unreasonable, and in sup-pressing what compulsions we can as they arise. Most wisely, we 526 Review for Religious can let our love for others take the lead more often, including and especially our love for God. When a person falls in love, he or she suddenly sees the exter-nal world as more beautiful, more full of potential, more worthy of respect and care. What has occurred, though, is not a change in the external world one views; it is a self-transcending change in the viewer. Being in love heals much of ~' what was crippled in the other four levels of the person's self-transcendence. That is, being in love gives courage to respon-sibility, realism to reason, insight to intel-ligence, and acumen to attention. The person has risen above the imprisoned self and realized something of the profound marvels of life, nature, and the friendly character of the universe. Love's healing power is evident in the love between friends, within a family, and among fellow citizens and members of a group. It is also evident in the love of God. People who have undergone a religious conversion, whether in a sudden inner revolution or a gradual takeover, experience three new powers. The~y see goodness where the unconverted see only evil. They feel a power to reach out to others at a higher risk to themselves than self-protecting reason would allow. And, after the worst setbacks, they find themselves soon on their feet, mys-teriously alive and submissive to the impulse to love again26 More can be said about the healing effects of religious love, but this milch illustrates how an analysis of our self-transcending acts clar-ifibs'what "being human" means and reveals the available powers that "o'ntic obscuration" obscures. Further analysis along these lines would complement any instance of healing with a thera-peutic theory consistent with religious love. Notice especially how the addition of this account of self-transcendence avoids the typi~cal trap of self-help psychologies. It makes clear that people do not help themselves all by them-selves. When i't is the self that needs help, "self-help" is a con-tradiction in terms. Genuine help must be imported. We rely on each other and we rely on God. In order to let go of our worries that our failures will be someh6w held against us, we rely on the fact that we are loved. Being in love gives courage to responsibility, realism to reason, insight to intelligence, and acumen to attention. Ju~-August199y 527 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram The work of making all this real for oneself is long and hard. It might go something like this: Suppose I typically play the Sensitive Artist, envious of the personas of others and absorbing my injuries in quiet melancholy. I should first keep a diary to log the times I notice my compulsion at work, in order to grow in the habit of noticing, t~nderstanding~ and gradually realizing how precisely my frustrated desire to be a notable person works. (Naranjo suggests that this work on autobiography may take three or four months.) ~7 At the same time, as I grow in self-realization, I should grow in self-responsibility. When I hear the inner voice saying "Be sensitive, be like so-and-so," I should say "Shut up!" and then bend an ear to the quieter voices of authenticity whis-pering, "Just be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and in love. Being that is a quite good enough way to be your best." Then, alongside the inner work of self-reflection, I should let myself connect with others. Although Naranjo believes that his book can help a person avoid high-minded and patronizing therapists, I find it hard to imagine people really benefiting from it unless they talk about this inner work with others. Being con-nected to others means obeying the transcendental precept to Be in love. That means letting my love for others be the light that revdals what is truly worth doing, rather than mere consistency or some private ethical principle. Because genuine love heals irre-sponsibility, silliness, stupidity, and inattention, the test of genuine love will be just that: Does it make me more responsible, more ready to face truth, more functionally intelligent, more on the lookout for what really counts? If it does not, it is not love. The inner work also means letting myself be loved. For most of us, with our distorted self-images, this means facing the fact that despite our faults, despite the injuries we have caused others, the person who claims to love us is telling the truth. It means dropping the flimsy defense that "you don't really know me" and admitting that the point is not whether we are fully known, but whether we are appreciated and valued for ourselves. It means realizing that we will never be perfect, that we do not need to expend that much energy defending ourselves, that we do not even need to "fix" ourselves through diligent self-therapy. Unless we rely on God and other people for forgiveness, tolerance, and patience, no pathology or self-help therapy will work. This is only an example of finding our way home. Different people will find different paths. But at least knowing what being 528 Review.for Religious human is about shows us what our home looks like. Gradually-- never fully being, but always becoming, human--we will have returned. We can come in and go out as we please. We will have found our home's key: the house is no longer dark. Notes ~ Enneagram, coined from Greek, means "ninefold marking." 2 Capital means that the sins are principal or "head" (capita) sins from which people's other sins flow. Althofigh the enneagram seems to have arisen independently of the Christian tradition, seven of its compulsions match the seven capital sins. The remaining two are bogus morality (Accuser) and bogus success (Status Seeker). 3 No two authors agree on these generic names, but there is general agreement about the descriptions of each type~ Devotees often refer just to the number, as in "She's a raving Two!" (a Helper). 4 See C.G. Jung, Paychological Types (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1926), chap. 10. Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine C. Briggs, developed the fourth pair of preferences, judging and perceiv-ing, based on further observations made byJung. Note that they realize that its usefulness applies mainly to the young. See Isabel Briggs Myers, Introduction to Type (Gainesville, Florida: Center for Publications' of Psychological Types, 1962), p. 8. s The works on which I have based my remarks are: Maria Beesing et al., The Enneagram: A Journey of Self Discovery (Denville: Dimension Books, 1984); Kathleen Hurley and Theodore Dobson, What's My Type? Use the Enneagram and My Best Self (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991 and 1993); Claudio Naranjo, Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker and Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View (Nevada City: Gateways, 1990 and 1994); Helen Pahner, The Enneagram (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988); Don Richard Riso, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I have also relied on various notes taken by students participating in workshops given by Naranjo and others who derive the substance of their doctrine from him. 6 An exception'is Hurley and Dobson, My Best Self, identifying two distinct compulsions in both the Status Seeker and the Accuser, making a total of eleven compulsions. In .any case, there are no enneagram the-orists I know of who have dealt with the fundamental problem of how to set a limit to types. If there is such a limit, then the types will have to be defined by a set of psychological conditions that are limited and verifiable. For example, Karen Horney's division of three reactions to conflict (against people, toward people, away from people) might be matched against three I-world comparisons (bigger than, equal to, smaller than) to generate exactly nine types. Or against the trio Denial, Overconfidence, Underconfidence. The trio Ignorance, Craving, and Fear seems to under-lie Naranjo's thinking. There are many possibilities. This kind of work will 3~ly-August 1995 529 Dunne ¯ The Enneagram be necessary if the professional psychological community is ever to give credence to the theory and, more to the point, if the theory is ever to be shown to explain the actual range of human compulsions. 7 Gurdjieff, the teacher of this model of personality, claims to have discovered the enneagram in the Sufi tradition, but there is little evi-dence in Sufism of any of the heavy interpretative overlay that it now carries. Gurdjieff's confidence in the diagram seems based on numerol-ogy rather than experiment, and he expected that the diagram could rep-resent any human or natural process. 8 Diagnostic and Stat#tical Manual of Mental Disorders III (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987). 0 9 See Albert Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1963), chap. 3, "Irrational Ideas Which Cause and Sustain Emotional Disturbances," pp, 60-88. l0 The reader should note inconsistencies in the enneagram designs. In Naranjo's Character and Neurosis, pp. 199 and 245, and throughout his Ennea-Type Structures, the triangle arrows run clockwise. Everywhere else in Character and Neurosis, they run counterclockwise. tt Naranjo, Ennea-Type Structures, pp. xix-xx, and Character and Neurosis, p 36. Hereafter page references will be to Ennea-Type Structures, with corresponding references to Character and Neurosis in italics. ~2 See pp. 30/61 and 63/219. He also describes ontic obscuration as: "obscuration . . . of the natural, original, and truest support for one's sense of personal value" (45/196); "the universal pain of fallen con-sciousness, beyond type-bound characteristics" (45/196); "lack of ground-ingin being" (107/197); and "loss of wholeness and sense of being" (138/150). o 13 Walter Burghardt SJ notes that John Courtney Murray relies on this distinction to clarify how weak the old Catholic reliance on dogma-tism really was. See "The Richness of a Resource," in A Spirituality for Contemporary Life, ed. David L. Fleming SJ (St. Louis: Review for Religious, 1991). Murray may well have relied on Lonergan's Insight (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958) for this notion (for which, see real in its index). 14 See Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 53, 55, and passim. I have developed these notions more at length in Lonergan and Spirituality (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985) and Spiritual Mentoring (HarperSanFrancisco, 199 I). Is Naranjo, pp. 47/197, 92/94, and 125/173. 16 These powers are traditionally called faith, charity, and hope. I have avoided the traditional terms in an effort to avoid conceptualism and to make clear how religious love heals the injured psyche. 17 Naranjo, p. 158/275. 530 Review for Religious MARY WINIFRED Imaging Spiritual Direction Ipn spite of a plethora of spiritual direction programs pur-orting to train those who would be spirithal directors, it remains a fact that gifts of direction are just that--gifts, not learned skills. Spiritual direction involves listening and hearing, discernment, clarity of vision, and assistance in the development of a relationship between an 'individual and God. While learned skills may assist a spiritual director, it is only deep sensitivity devel-oped through years of personal prayer that enables true spiritual direction. It is often easier to say what spiritual direction is not, than to describe what it is. For example, spiritual direction is not psychotherapy; it is not life skills taught by a social worker; it is not catechistic training for specific church membership. " In a pamphlet entitled Spiritual Direction, Henri Nouwen says: "It is of great value to submit our prayer life from time to time to the supervision of a spiritual guide. A spiritual director in this strict sense is not a counselor, a therapist, or an analyst, but a mature fellow Christian to whom we choose to be accountable for our spiritual life and from whom we can expect prayerful guid-ance in our constant struggle to discern God's active presence in our lives, A spiritual director can be called 'soul friend' (Kenneth I2eech) or a" 'spiritual friend' (Tilden Edwards). It is important that he or she practice the disciplines of the Church and the Book and thus become familiar with.the space in which we try to listen to God's voice. The way we relate to our spiritual director depends very much on our needs, our personalities, and external circum-stances. Some people may want to see their spiritual director Mary Winifred CtlS is the Sister-in-Charge of St. Cuthbert's Retreat House; Federal Hill Road; Brewster, New York 10509. ¯ July-August 199Y S31 Winifred ¯ Imaging Spiritual Direction biweekly or monthly, others will find it sufficient to be in touch only when the occasion asks for it. Some people may feel the need for a more extensive sharing with their spiritual director, while others will find seeing him or her once in a while for a few short moments to be sufficient. It is essential that one Christian helps another Christian to enter without fear into the presence of God and there to discern God's call" (8-9). Because the singular aim of spiritual direction is to assist in growth toward God, there are no set guidelines, no conventional measuring sticks, no right or wrong answers, and no concretely attainable goals. While training in prayer and meditation may certainly make one a more articulate spiritual director, neverthe-less spiritual direction remains a vocation unfettered by rules and regulations, by industry standards, or by a financial fee scale. Most spiritual directees practice St. Paul's suggestion in the Letter to the Galatians, "Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher" (6:6), by making some gift to their directors: homemade bread, flowers from the garden, a book or tape, or some other item; money does not usually enter into a spiritual direction agreement, nor should it. Unlike therapy or counseling, which are professional relationships between a ther-apist or counselor and a client, spiritual direction is a relation-ship of charity and generosity between fellow Christians. Spiritual gifts cannot be purchased; they are not for sale. Three images of the spiritual life may help to indicate ways in which the presence of a director (or mentor or soul friend) may effectively aid us in our growth Godwards. The first image, offered by Thomas H. Green, is :that of a marketplace. The marketplace--or, as Green also labels it, the ldtchen!--is the part of our lives that encompasses a multitude of small, necessary, sometimes tedious tasks which can seem to draw us away from the richness and quiet of our interior lives. "Frequently," Green says, "the demands and frustrations of the apostolate, or of raising a family and earning a living, seem to be merely obstacles to a genuine and deep prayer life. But if I am right in explaining the way the Lord works through these exter-nal activities and events, then we should see them quite differ-ently. Far from being obstacles to our interior growth, they become for us the very sandpaper of our sanctification, at least as important to our growth as what happens in the solitude of for-mal prayer" (121). 532 Review for Religious These are not particularly comfortable thoughts, especially for those of~us who would like to discover a large block of unin-terrupted quiet. Often it is only with the help of a wise spiritual director that we can begin to uncover and acknowledge the wealth of spiritual graces hidden in our routine daily tasks and to see opportunities in what have earlier appeared to be only obstacles. Another, who listens with detached concern, will not only listen to the occasional frustration, tiredness, or boredom in our every-day tasks, but will also hear the voice of God calling to us from what may, on the surface, seem to be 'merely dull routine. As surely as God works in this world, God is also available to us in our work, however .tedious and distracting our marketplace--or kitchen--may feel at times. Another ancient and popular image for the spiritual life is that of a journey or pilgrimage. John Gorsuch describes such a spiri-tual journey as a moving out from a place of assumed comfort, beckoned on by God into the unknown. The image of a journey is particularly apt if considered in its various stages: there is a beginning, with its preparations and planning; the travel itself; and the goal of the journey. In the early stages of beginning a journey, there may be excitement and feverish planning--a guide is helpful here in focusing our attention and helping us to leave behind our unnecessary baggage. I once watched my sister prepar-ing for a backpacking trip: with the advice of an experienced back-packer friend, she was encouraged to take only the essential objects, leaving her backpack light enough to carry and yet stocked with exactly what she would need. But traveling, no matter how well it is planned and prepared, is nevertheless an adventure into the unknown. Often we must stop to ask for directions or other help. In traveling this may be as simple as "Yes, you're on the right road" or "Two more blocks Because the singular aim of spiritual direction is to assist in growth toward God, there are no set guidelines, no conventional measuring sticks, no right or wrong answers, and no concretely attainable goals. July-August 199Y 533 Winifred ¯ Imaging Spiritual Direction and then turn left"; on a spiritual journey, as simple as "Keep lis-tening in your prayer" or "Look in the mirror every morning: you will see a person God loves profoundly." If we are fortunate enough to have a good and reliable guide or director, we are soon back on track. At times, too, the journey's route may seem long and wearisome--turning aside or even giving up altogether may look like the most positive option. Then a wise mentor's word of encouragement may challenge and enliven us to continue with new energy and zeal. And then there is the goal to our journey. Sometimes we are so caught up in the travel itself that we lose sight of the goal. A friend and I once planned to spend a restful week together; iron-ically, we also planned too many sight-seeing activities, with the result that the true goals of the week--to ,rest and enjoy each other's company--were lost. So, on a spiritual journey, it is easy to be distracted by circumstances and surroundings from our true goal of knowing God. We need a wise and discerning director to help us in maintaining a clarity of vision about our goal. A third image is that of epiphany. Adrian van Kaam, from whom I have borrowed this image, describes an epiphany as the "shining forth of eternity in daily people, in often unnoticed events and things" (8). It is an epiphany that comes through in the openness and vulnerability of spiritual direction. Van Kaam goes on to say: "The risen Lord is our life now. Our life must become a hymn of praise to Jesus rising in us . Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is at hand in each of us. It is already here and now, for we are called to share his resurrection in humanity and history" (65). And surely this is the heart of spiritual direction, that one Christian shares freely with another a word of help, a message of encouragement, a glimpse of eternity. Bibliography Gorsuch, John R An Invitation to the Spiritual Journey. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990. Green, Thomas H. Darkness in the Marketplace. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1981. Nouwen, Henri. Spiritual Direction. Cincinnati: Forward Movement Publications, 1981. Van Kaam, Adrian. The Music of Eternity. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1990, 534 Review for Religious MARY C. SULLIVAN The Brazier That Is My God: Teresa on True Prayer's Dispositions, Gifts, and Signs It is 2 June 1577. Teresa of Avila is, in effect, under house arrest in the convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Toledo, Spain--a community she founded in 1569.1 She has been on the road for almost ten years, establishing reformed monasteries of Carmelite women and even of Carmelite men committed to the poverty, silence, soli-tude, penance, prayer, and detachment she believes are envisioned in the primitive Rule. But now for the last year she has been ordered to remain in one of her convents (she chooses Toledo) because of political tensions between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites. She is regarded by the Calced as a ringleader who must be kept out of cir-culation. To add to her isolation, on 18 June 1577 the papal nuncio Nicol~is Ormaneto, who has been friendly to the reform, will die, and his successor, Felipe Sega, will come to Spain in August already prejudiced against Teresa and her work. He will later call her "a. restless gadabout woman, disobedient and stubborn, who under the cloak of devotion invented wicked opinions, going about breaking enclosure, contrary to the decree of the Council of Trent and the orders of her superiors, teaching as if she were a doctor, in contempt of the teaching of St. Paul, who com-manded women not to teach."2 Mary C. Sullivan RSM works in the College of Liberal Arts of Rochester Institute of Technology. She may be addressed at Sisters of Mercy; 18 Upton Park; Rochester, New York 14607. heritage j~uly-August 1995 535 Sullivan ¯ The Brazier That Is My God Prologue But now, in early June 1577, during her enforced reclusion, Teresa is in Toledo, writing a book on prayer at the request of her confessor, Jer6nimo Gracifin, a Discalced priest. By the end of July, after one month of work on Las Moradas (The Interior Castle, or The Dwelling Places3), she will be recalled to Avila, where against her own desire she has again been elected prioress of Incarnation, the Carmelite convent she entered as a young woman and from which in 1562 she will found San Jos4, the first convent of the Reform, across town in Avila. But the Carmelite authorities do not want Teresa to be the prioress of Incarnation. They will call for a second vote, and when fifty-four sisters at Incarnation persist in electing Teresa, these sisters will be ex-communicated and denied the sacraments. On 3 December of this same year, John of the Cross, the confessor and spiritual director at Incarnation, will be abducted from Avila at night by Calced friars and taken to the windowless closet cell in the Toledo monastery of the Calced Carmelites where he will remain impris-oned for six months. Simultaneous with all this, the modern form of the Spanish Inquisition is in full swing in Seville, having been operating as a powerful ecclesiastical tribunal for almost a hundred years. The manuscript of Teresa's Life has been in the Inquisition's possession for two years, after being denounced to it by the dis-appointed and vindictive Princess of Eboli.4 In the midst of all this difficulty, most of which deeply dis-tressed her, in the six-month period from 2 June to 29 November 1577 (which will actually amount to only two months of writing time), Teresa will start and complete her masterwork, The Dwelling Places, the treatise on prayer and virtue which more than any other of her writings led Pope Paul VI in 1970 to declare her a doctor of the universal church. Not once in this volume does Teresa refer explicitly to the external affairs which weigh so heavily on her mind and heart, though her letters of this period amply demon-strate her concern, and dismay. Rather, in this magnificent book about a human person's gradually increasing communion with the God dwelling within her, Teresa speaks about the prayer of per-sonal conversion, the prayer of reordering and reordered charity within the human heart. And so The Dwelling Places is a book which may contribute immeasurably to the present-day conversion of the church, of religious life, and of the hearts of individual Christian women and men. 536 Review for Reli

Issue 53.2 of the Review for Religious, March/April 1994. ; OUS Christian Heritages and ContemporaryLiving MARCH-APRIL 1994 ¯ VOLUME 53 ¯ NUMBER 2 ¯ Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Telephone: 314-535-3048 ° Fax: 314-535-0601 Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the Canonical Counsel department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ° P.O. Box 29260 ¯ Washington, DC 20017. POSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ° P.O. Box 6070 ° Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional mailing offices. See inside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©1994 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. review for religious Editor David L. Fleming Associate Editors Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Canonical Counsel Editor Elizabeth McDonough OP Assistant Editors ¯ Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Advisory Board Joann Wolski Conn PhD Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden SSND Edmundo Rodriguez SJ Se~in Sammon FMS Susanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living MARCH-APILIL 1994 ¯ VOLUME 53 ¯ NUMBER 2 contents 166 feature In the Midst of the Times: Religious Life and the Ever-Present Experience of the World John W. Padberg SJ presents three historical perspectives on religious life to aid in imagining and planning for the future. commitments 182 Vowed Witness in a Church Intent on Love 189 196 David Maria Knight suggests that religious are examples and models of that dramatic gesture which is a key element in launching anyone into passionate relationship with God. Quest for an Undivided Heart Theresa Mancuso ponders a heart focused on God in a life of consecrated chastity. Imaged Celibacy: A Reflection for Priests Brian C. Yates proposes a way of imaging that allows us to enter more freely into the reality of celibate living. challenges 200 Needed: An Ethic of Memories 208 214 222 Joanne Marie Greer suggests various ethical aspects that need to be considered when sharing memories, especially those which are a part of therapeutic counseling. ADiscipline of Self-Respect William Mockus describes the need for spiritual discipline as a function of self-respect. A Transformational Journey Annete Adams SND observes the cycle of the monarch butterfly to gain understanding about the spiritual-direction process. Community for Today and Tomorrow Janet Roesener CSJ sets forth the call and challenges for reli-gious to live a covenantal community life. 162 Review for Religious 231 238 254 263 directions Fruitfulness versus Achievement Peter G. Van Breemen SJ reflects on the distinction which we Christians need to make between achievement and the biblical notion of fruitfulness. Old Brothers and Young, Dreams and Visions Robert C. Berger FSC uses images of the Hebrew Scriptures to shed light on the action of God and the relevance of brother-hood. Just Look at the Lord Joel Giallanza CSC presents a simple and practical melding of our desire to pray and our praying from Teresa of Avila. Pray Always: John Cassian on Distractions Kenneth C. Russell applies the insights of John Cassian to help us live a life focused on God amidst the distractions of the modern world. reflections 273 Genesis Continued Mary Michael McCulla CDP poetically reflects a kind of Genesis account of woman. 278 Called to the Harvest Vera Gallagher RGS enters us into her experience of God's healing grace in people's troubled lives. 285 report U.S. Hispanic Catholics: Trends and ~7orks 1993 Kenneth G. Davis .OFMConv presents a panoramic of the year's events within the U:S. Hispanic Catholid community. departments ¯ ¯ 164 Prisms 303 Canonical Counsel: Norms for Renewal and Reflections on Its Progress 309 Book Reviews Marcb-/lpri11994 163 prisms ~edo not necessarily compliment our-selves when we compare ourselves to the first disciples of Jesus. For example, the two disciples on their way to Emmaus do not symbolize either gospel people (evange-lizers) or apostolic people (on a mission). In a way, of course, they are pilgrim people, journeying, although they are running away from Jerusalem, where their lives are meant to be centered. They know a lot about Jesus-- enough to k6ep talking about him at least between them-selves or privately with an amiable stranger. Yet what stands out in their telling of the Jesus story is their own disappointment. Disappointment may be the common cross that afflicts us followers of Jesus all the more because we like to describe ourselves as Alleluia people. These two disciples symbolize disappointment immediately after Jesus' pas-sion. During the active ministry of Jesus, a rich man with much fervor wanted to lead a holy life, but walked away from Jesus--disappointed with his kind of "Beatitude" challenge. Other disciples caused Jesus such pain by their leaving that he asked Peter and the others identified as the Twelve, "Will you leave me too?" People had left cha-grined by all this foolish talk about Jesus being the food and drink of their lives. They were unwilling to live with promise in such incarnate guise. Disappointment can certainly be a difficult cross to bear for us Christ-followers. For us present-day disciples of the one who has overcome death, it somehow seems "not right" to have to continue to face defeat, failure, and betrayal, especially from agents that speak or act in Christ's 164 Review for Religi?us name. How can we not be disappointed when the Vatican is the only agency among all the world's states which recognizes a repressive government in Haiti? How legitimate the disappoint-ment is when we face the problem of certain clerics or religious who betrayed a trust by their sexual abuse of a child! How disap-pointing for us as a community is the high percentage of failed marriages, often within our own families--marriages celebrated with all the beauty and solemn commitment of the wedding Mass! Are we ever disappointed with ourselves--after years of striving to be Little Flowers--at still feeling more like the scrubby weeds found along abandoned railroad tracks? Disappointments come in all sizes--some so big that they seem insurmountable, but others so small and daily that we suf-fer them as the necessary "colds and flu" of our spiritual life. Disappointments come at all stages of life development. Young and old and all the in-betweens face unrealized or shattered dreams, an if-only sense of things left undone, feelings of aban-donment by ones they love. Where does the event of Christ's resurrection touch most directly the practical living of our lives? I would suggest that we need to look towards our experience of disappointments. We test quickly the firmness of our faith in the resurrection by our lived response to disappointment. Among us followers who want to distance ourselves from this hierarchical church or to walk away from a disheartened priesthood or to dismiss a seemingly anachro-nistic religious life or to reject a cumbersome parish structure, we find an identity with the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. The question we face is whether we will take the time from all our talk or activity to listen to and recognize the call to believe what is central to our faith: Jesus is risen, and our response to disap-pointment need never be a time without grace, an experience without new life. The Easter e{r~nt translates into our creedal "I believe in the resurrection of the dead." But the daily disap-pointments that make us die by inches are where we all need to let our resurrection faith have.its effect. As with the two disciples on that first Easter evening, it is in our hurrying back into a dis-appointing Jerusalem--with our faith in the risen Lord--that we truly act as evangelizers arid people on mission. David L. Fleming SJ March-April 1994 165 feature JOHN W. PADBERG In the Midst of the Times: Religious Life and the Ever-Present Experience of the World The reader of these reflections by an historian will have noted at once that their title is a variation on the immediately preceding theological essay by Elizabeth Johnson csj, "Between the Times: Religious Life and the Postmodern Experience of God." That reprise is quite deliberately meant to introduce the reader to the com-plementary. intent of these remarks, in accord with the overall structure of the Religious Life Futures Project. That comprehensive, study of "the future of religious orders in the United States" included six independent ele-ments or "research units" in its work. The first five were a national survey, leadership studies, studies of caring peo-ple and of visioning groups, and a series of individual interviews. The sixth unit was to be a two-part theologi-cal/ historical monograph, of which the first part was to provide a theological framework for interpreting the data gathered in the study and this second part was to be "an historical postscript" or a set of reflections on that theo-logical essay from an historical perspective. John W. Padberg SJ is director of the Institute of Jesuit Sources in St. Louis. This article will be part of a companion book to The Future of Religious Orders in the United States: Transformation and Commitment (Praeger Publishers, 1993) by David J. Nygren and Miriam Ukeritis. His address is Institute of Jesuit Sources; 3700 West Pine Boulevard; St. Louis, Missouri 63108. 166 Review for Religious The theological essay concludes saying, "For religious life in the United States it is now Advent, the most honest season of all. ¯. What is needed is vigilant patience, profound prayer, and the ability to act boldly toward that future where new forms of evan-gelical life will develop" (Johnson, p. 24).1 This essay will take off from that judgment, which is both correct and important. Advent is a new beginning, but it comes after the conclusion of the year-long liturgical season during which we first await and long for the arrival of Jesus and then in turn remember and cel-ebrate the impossibly good news that he himself is: a hidden life of long duration, the preaching of the good news in person and in word, his seeming defeat in his terrifyingly real passion and death, and then the paschal triumph. We might be tempted to think it is all just a cycle, but then the year goes on beyond the life of Jesus, like an arrow into the future, to tell us that the spreading of that news and the imparting of that life take place in the down-to-earth reality of the post-Pentecostal church which, if we stop to realize it, still lives on as our present church. And then the year begins again with another Advent. The history of the church has recorded many such Advent and subsequent varying seasons. So has the history of religious life in the church. As the theological essay notes, "the evangeli-cal following of Jesus in the church, traditionally called 'religious life,' has been incarnated in a great diversity of forms [which] have consistently emerged from the insights of individuals and groups responding to the Spirit in the crucible of cultural change" (Johnson, p. 7). If it is true that "the only reason for religious life is the experience of God" (Johnson, p. 16), and that such experi-ence is a "postmodern" one "between the times," it is true in another sense that the only way such religious life is lived is "in the midst of the times" and in the context of "the ever-present experience of the world." Hence the complementary title of this essay and the tenor of its remarks. The theological essay suggests that the emerging "under-standing of [religious] life is primarily that of persons and com-munities called to prophetic ministry embedded in a contemplative relationship to God" (Johnson, p. 12). It maintains that beneath changes in structure are changes in attitude and that underlying such changes in attitude is a postmodern experience of God. "Postmodernity is conscious of the end of progress, the limits of reason, the sad isolation of the unconnected individual, and the March-April 1994 167 Padberg ¯ In the Midst of the Times Spiritualities significantly influence the ways in which °religious congregations remain faithful to their original purposes and the ways in which they respond to human need. catastrophe that results when nature is disrespected," while wish-ing to keep from the modern era such goods as "the emphasis on human dignity and human rights and their expressions in liberty and equality. Postmodernity is awake to the egregious failures that the modern ethos has wrought. It wants to go Away-From-Here" (Johnson, p. 18). But meanwhile it is absolutely nec-essary to remember that the "Here" from which postmodernity seeks to escape still mightily influences our cur-rent life. And while the contexts of pre-sent and past are inevitably different, the reactions to past contexts might yield clues as to how we shall react to the pre-sent context. Religious life has of neces-sity existed in several such past contexts of a world changing around it. Often enough that life took on a particular character from the ways in which its members, men and women religious, looked both on change "in the midst of the times" and on the "ever-present experience of the world" around them (to quote again from the title of these present reflec-tions) and from the ways in which they judged both world and change or history. The body of this essay will deal especially with those two matters. It will, firs.t, present several such modern changes in reli-gious life in the midst of changing times, in other words, several examples from history. Secondly, it will reflect more generally on the ways in which religious life responds to change and to the experience of the world, because the nature of those responses characterizes in part the dominant spiritualities which inform either religious life in general or a particular form of that life. Such spiritualities, in turn, significantly influence the ways in which religious congregations remain faithful to their original purposes and the ways in which they respond to human need. As the executive summary of the study concludes, "fidelity to the spirit of the founder and responsiveness to critical and unmet human needs are basic to the original mission of religious com-munities" (Summary, p. 42).2 168 Review for Religious Three Times in the Midst of Change In its fifteen-hundred-year history in the Latin Church of the West, religious life has experienced upheaval more often than is realized. To look only at the modern world, such upheaval has happened in a major way three times in the last four hundred and fifty years: during the time of the Reformation (beginning in 1517), during the time of the French Revolution (beginning in 1789), and in the renewal which was asked for by the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965. First, the Reformation. The whole notion of religious life was rejected by the Protestant reformers. This rejection had its foun-dation in their theology, but it gained popular support because religious life had lost much of its credibility. The scandalous rep-utation of many religious congregations and their members-- especially male religious--was all too often deserved. One does not have to read Chaucer (before the Reformation) or Rabelais (dur-ing it) for examples of why that reputation was well deserved. The church documents in those years, calling for reform, are vivid enough. Over and over those calls for reform were made, and over and over again they were ignored. The effects on religious life in the lands of reform were dev-astating. In England men and women religious had already been brutally driven out of their houses. In other countries monks and nuns left their orders in droves. Even in lands that stayed Catholic, the numbers of persons entering religious life dropped drasti-cally. So bad had the reputation of religious life become that more than once during the Catholic reform it was proposed to the Holy See that all but four orders of men, and most orders of women, be suppressed. And yet, in the midst of this seemingly impossible situation, during the Catholic reform new orders and congregations arose, grew in numbers, and flourished. Older orders gradually took themselves in hand, reformed, and prospered. Why? The second major upheaval took place at the time of the French Revolution. While the religious orders in general had been far more faithful to their rule and to the furtherance of the spiritual lives of their members than at the Reformation, still many, even the most active of them, had often lost touch with the changing world around them, a world influenced in many ways by the Enlightenment. The Revolution brought chaos to the church and to religious March-April 1994 169 Padberg * In the Midst of the Times life. Europe was the home of most of the members of the church. It was the place where the administrative structures, the finan-cial resources, the educational establishments, the charitable apos-tolates, the seminaries, the religious congregations had existed for more than fifteen hundred years, all in aid of the preaching of the gospel and the celebration of the sacraments. Quite simply, the Revolution swept away most of these realities upon which the church depended and in which religious life had embodied itself. The properties from which many of the dioceses and orders drew their support were secularized by the new governments and sold to the highest bidder. (For example, Cluny, the acme of Romanesque architecture, the glory of. the Benedictine Order, the second largest church in the Christian world, was destroyed, in part by revolutionary ideology and frenzy but mostly by several good middle-class families who bought it after the state had con-fiscated it and then had it taken down, stone by stone, to be sold for their profit as building material, all in the name of the sanc-tity of private property.) Many of the religious orders were officially abolished in the lands reached by the Revolution; members of almost all of them were turned out of their houses and left to fend for themselves. In 1789, as the French Revolution began, there were some two thou-sand Benedictine establishments in Europe; by 1815 only about twenty were still functioning. In fact, of the many religious orders of men in existence before the French Revolution, only two, the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits, have ever again grown to be as large as they were before the Revolution or larger. And yet, the hundred and fifty years from the Revolution to the beginning of Vatican II were for religious congregations and orders the most unusual years in the history of the church. More new congregations were founded than in any comparable period in the history of the church. More new congregations of women were founded in that century and a half than in the whole previ-ous history of the church. The older orders grew again. More missionary congregations were founded than ever before, and more women and men went to the foreign missions. Why? To turn now to our own histories, and the third upheaval, the Second Vatican Council brought undreamt-of change to the church and to religious life. Many in the church had hoped for change, but no one could have imagined the depth and breadth of the change which did occur. This is not the place to rehearse 170 Revino for Religious those postconciliar events of the past twenty-five to thirty years. The theological essay has well noted many of the changes that took place. Perhaps, however, the quantity and especially the qual-ity of that change can be evoked by recalling ten words or phrases from Vatican II. With the two exceptions of the words "liturgy" and "revelation," none had been common in the church before the council. The other eight are: aggiornamento, collegiality, dia-logue, people of God, inculturation, religious liberty, joy and hope (gaudium et spes), and ecumenism. The realities behind those words raised expectations and produced changes which often have gone beyond either the worst fears of those who wanted no change or the best guesses of those who hoped for it. But whether we now react with dismay, delight, or doubt, many of the details, good, bad, or indifferent, of the world of the church and the world of religious life in the church of thirty to forty years ago have changed irretrievably or even vanished. In and through those changes since Vatican II religious life has been in tur-moil, as it was in the two other great Changes were not introduced from some source external to the church such as the Reformation or the Revolution, but came about internally, from the church itself'at Vatican II. modern upheavals. A very great difference, however, is that these changes were not introduced from some source external to the church such as the Reformation or the Revolution, but came about internally, from the church itself at Vatican II and from what has been truly in its proportions a paradigm shift in the church's self-understanding. The notion of "tranSformation" in the organiza-tional realm, as described in the Religious Life Futures Project, is utterly apt here for what has happened in the~ church. "It refers to qualitative, discontinuous shifts in members' shared under-standings of the organization, accompanied by changes in the organization's mission, strategy, and formal and informa| struc-tures" (Summary, pp. 9-10). In the midst of all this, religious orders and congregations were themselves directly asked by the church to review and revise their own way of life in the light of the council's teachings, in accord with their originating charism, and in adaptation to the March-April1994 1 ~1 Padberg ¯ In the Midst of the Times needs of today. In general, they have taken this request seriously and generously, often at great personal and institutional cost. They, too, have been caught up in the process of transformation. And yet, in this case, the optimistic aftermath of the two ear-lier upheavals has not occurred in the wake of Vatican II. Why? A brief response to the why asked at all three junctures will come later in this essay. The Experience of the World and of History The second major part of this essay will include some reflec-tions on the particular types of spirituality that inform the inner life and the external activities of religious orders. Again, why? Because on such various types of spirituality which inform reli-gious life in general.and specific orders in particular will depend religious life's understanding and judgment of the times in which it lives and of the world which it experiences. "Spirituality" is here understood simply as the way an individual or a group habit-ually acts in learning about and loving and serving God in accord with God's self-revelation in and through God's deeds, especially the greatest of those deeds, Jesus Christ himself. The heuristic structure used here to describe a variety of spir-itualities3 distinguishes four possible ways in which they view the world and history in the midst of a particular time and space by the responses to this question: Does a spirituality.view or not view the world and history as positive means to express itself and to practice a growing relationship to God? "World" includes not only the obvious natural, material world but also human society and institutions. "History" includes especially process, develop-ment and change. In practice, of course, no one of the four resul-tant types of response exists in its absolutely pure state, and obviously in real life they all exist in. particular sociocultural con-texts. In addition, all four types are always intermingled. Perhaps most importantly, each of them is in itself a good. To distinguish them however is, in general, useful for clarity and, in particular, for helping us to see where our contemporary religious life stands and how we might be inclined to move to the future. The first response to world and to history says no to both of them. The second says no to the world and yes to history. The third says yes to the world and no to history, and the fourth says yes to both world and history. 172 Review for Religious Particular examples may clarify these categories. The first response, a spirituality that says no to the world and no to history, might be called an apophatic spirituality, one which comes to a knowledge of God by way of negation. This is the type of spiri-tuality often and somewhat misleadingly known as mystical, for example the kind expressed through such works as The Cloud of Unknowing, or through the works of John of the Cross, or more recently through some of the writings of Thomas Merton. It is important to note that such a spirituality does not necessarily see the world as evil or history and change as meaningless. Rather, such an apophatic spirituality emphasizes that God is beyond any concepts and that the most authentic expression about God is negation of any specific image from world or history. A person goes to the love and knowledge of God through unknowing or through darkness. In our present and our immediate future, in .what the theological essay describes as "the dialectic between divine absence and presence" (Johnson, p. 23) such a spirituality and the postmodern experience of God may increasingly find sup-port in each other. A second type of spirituality finds an expression of the authen-tic not in the world but in history, that is, in change and conver-sion. In saying no to the world but yes to history, it is a prophetic type of spirituality. For example, the Old Testament prophets offer both judgments and interpretations of history. Through his radical poverty, Francis of Assisi said no to the abuse of material wealth that his world of the early 13th century was involved in; in so doing he gave to the poor a sign of hope in a God faithful to his promises. Such a prophetic spirituality is often characterized by living one or more of the gospel values to an extreme. Such a spirituality surely informed the first examples of religious life among the desert fathers and mothers of the Egyptian Thebaid. Other examples of such a prophetic spirituality, in addition to Francis and his poverty, would be early Christians spurning the world and awaiting the call of martyrdom and contemporary Christians motivated by the gospel to practice civil disobedience. Today, as the theological essay puts it, when accepted "forms are breaking down, interpretive support systems, are collapsing, rift~ with the institutional church exacerbate the darkness, [and] many members are in distress" (Johnson, p. 24), we may have a situation in which religious congregations say no to a world that is passing and say yes to a hoped-for change to a more fully gospel-inspired March-April 1994 173 Padberg ¯ In the Midst of the Times future "in the risk that God is faithful in judgment and grace" (Johnson, p. 14). ¯ Third, what might be called a "locational" or a "city of God" spirituality says yes to the world and no to history. But here the When we seek a stable world and way of living in it or when we focus on a particular community or place or on our own hearts, we localize ideal, unchanging circumstances, bringing a changeless "city of God" dimension to our spiritual lives. world may be a world. Th~ authentic is located in one special place, in a world, geographical, psychological, temporal, theological, to the exclusion of other place's, with the changeless-ness that the fulfillment of that king-dom implies; that place then becomes a reflection of the kingdom of God. For St. Benedict it was the monastery as the place in which to live out the Rule. For The Imitation of Christ it is the safety of our own hearts where "you will see the kingdom of God come into your soul." For some it is the familiar church of pre-Vatican II observances. This type of spirituality may be the most common type throughout Christian history. It has also been one of the characteristics of every other type of spirituality and a force for stability in the midst of chaos, It may be an especially inviting and understandable spiri-tuality for those who have just come through a revolution. VChen we seek a stable world and way of living in it or when we focus on a particular community or place or on our own hearts, we are highlighting a way, or place that has worked for us. As a conse-quence we localize ideal, unchanging circumstances, bringing a changeless "city of God" dimension to our spiritual lives. Finally, there is a spirituality which answers yes both to world and tb history. This can be called an apostolic spirituality. To avoid misunderstanding the term and its application to religious life, let it be~ clear that everyone, of course, even in the most con-templative order, is called in some way to apostolic endeavor, to a life committed to the spread of the kingdom of God. But not everyone is necessarily called to an apostolic spirituality, a'spiri-tuality which seeks God primarily through involvement in the world and the transformation of its history. Ideally, such an apos- 174 Review for Religious tolic spirituality sees the world and history as a locus for trans-formation and for self-transformation. Most of the orders and congregations founded since the Reformation, and especially since the beginning of the 19th century, have been inspired by the ideal of an apostolic spirituality. But because the church since the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution has often made quite hostile judgments of the world and of history or change, this is a difficult double stance to maintain. One can easily multiply examples of church mistrust and con-demnation of the world as a source of self-transformation. And even if we have often thought the world could be such a source of self-transformation provided it had a different history or pro-vided we managed to change it, we can easily multiply examples of church mistrust and condemnation of change as a source of self-transformation, especially if it were suggested that change should apply to religious orders and more especially to the church. The way in which to give positive answers to both world and his-tory can vary greatly. Several of the 16th- and 17th-century Catholic reform reli-gious orders of women are examples of an attempt to do so. Mary Ward had a vision of such a spirituality for her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and attempted to put it into practice. But the apostolic group, of "that incomparable woman," as Pius XII called her in praise, was forced out of existence by an uncompre-hending Vatican in the 17th century, only to be papally approved in the 19th century. The Sisters of St. Joseph, of the same 17th century, quietly and obscurely flourished, in part because while liv-ing such an apostolic spirituality, they called no widespread atten-tion to it. The members of the Society of Jesus, for the end proposed to them by its founder, Ignatius Loyola, who could "find God in all things," were supposed to find the self-transformation of holiness through an involvement with the world in spreading the ldngdom of God. It was a world that Ignatius and his first companions knew by experience was changing and needed new ways of living and preaching the gospel. But it was very difficult to get across to many of the next gene?ations of Jesuits that both present world and inevitable change were to be taken seriously as part of a Jesuit apostolic spirituality. In its more recent his-tory, the Society of Jesus in its spirituality continues to seek for "the conversion of the individual," but it also wants to help "to transform the world into a fit habitation for justice and human- March-April 1994 175 Padberg ¯ In the Midst of the Times ity." In so choosing a double yes, it recognized the need to take seriously both the world around it and history, process, develop-ment, and change. In the 19th century, when the Society of Jesus was univer-sally restored after the French Revolution, it could not and did not For all of the 19th century, religious, life inclined heavily not to an apostolic spirituality, with a yes both to world and to history, but rather to a locational or "city of God" spirituality, with a yes indeed to the world but with a no to history or change. both the real successes wish to deny the world itself as the locus of its endeavor. It could hardly do so and be authentically Jesuit. But that world was in the midst of great change, and the church and all religious orders, including the Jesuits, were acutely uncomfortable with change and reluctant to respond pos-itively to it. In the midst of a world in which they had never been more active and thought they had an apostolic spiri-tuality, the church and religious orders were not only uncomfortable with that world as they found it, but also often nos-talgic for a past world and in fear of a world changing yet more before their eyes. In such circumstances, for all of the 19th century, religious life inclined heav-ily not to an apostolic spirituality, with a yes both to world and to history, but rather to a locational or "city of God" spirituality, with a yes indeed to the world but with a no to history or change. This fundamental attitude may help to explain and the real failures of the 19th-century structures and activities and spirituality of religious life with which most orders'and congregations lived until Vatican II. More gen-erally it also may help to explain the puzzlement; the ambiguity, even the dismay with which religious life looked around after Vatican II and could not fathom where it stood or how it expressed its relationships with the world and with history. Which one of the four sets of responses to the world and to history best characterizes the spirituality of most religious life today? When the question is put that way, there is not and should not be a single, monolithic answer. Fidelity to the originating charism and "to the spirit of the founder and responsiveness to critical and unmet human needs" imply and indeed mandate both 176 Review for Religious such a diversity in religious congregations and such an overriding purpose that, as a result, each congregation, in order to be true to itself, will have a response particular to itself, a response which at the same time will always look to those needs. There is a yet deeper question. Why answer.at all? Why reli-gious life at all? What was quoted earlier in this essay still remains the fundamental answer: "The only reason for religious life is the experience of God." It is not only in religious life, of course, that a person experiences God, but that fundamental experience, how-ever dark or bright, however tumultuous or serene, however unin-terrupted or intermittent, has to anchor our experience of the world in the midst of time and our responses to the world and to history or change. The Response to Need Let us return now to the three points at which the question why was raised, the three times in the modern world at which religious life experienced major change in church and world and thus also in itself. Just as at the beginning of religious life in the Egyptian desert and through its earlier centuries, so also, in the post-Reformation church and the post-Revolution church, reli-gious life was a response to a need. For the monks and nuns of the desert, it was a need to live out the gospel and to follow the Lord more faithfully than they thought they could in a society in which the Constantinian church and empire had made peace and had come to rely on each other. In the counter-Reformation century, religious congregations, of direct apostolic service especially, arose in response to the Catholic revival that emphasized a renewed preaching of the gospel (hence congregations for urban retreats and country missions); works of charity (hence religious commu-nities that worked in orphanages and hospitals and prisons); the centrality of the sacraments (hence congregations devoted to urg-ing the reception of confession and Communion); the outward expansion of the gospel to newly discovered worlds (hence for-eign- mission congregations)~ and Christian education (hence con-gregations that took on schools and colleges and seminaries and the publishing of pious books and pamphlets and tracts of all kinds). "Active" religious congregations, both new ones and reformed and revitalized ones, arose in response to specific needs, religious and secular, of church and civic community. As for the March-/ltrri11994 177 Padberg * In the Midst of the Times more cloistered or so-called "contemplative" orders, while they did indeed grow, growth was much slower and reform of the inter-nal life of the community was more the norm. When one asks why the apostolic-service orders grew so dra- When one asks why the apostolic-service orders grew so dramatically in the 19th century, response-to-need again seems the fundamental answer. matically in the 19th century, response-to-need again seems the fundamental answer. In Europe a shattered institutional structure had to be rebuilt. Many of the old and formerly religious educational and social institutions had been confiscated by the state, which was often at least determinedly secularist and often actively anticlerical. The second great wave of European colonial expansion into Asia and Africa took place, with the consequent open-ing of mission fields. Meanwhile the church in the persons of its highest officials and of .most of its members was determinedly con-servative and often actively hostile to the polit-ical, social, c~altural, and intellectual currents of the age. Frequently, then, European Catholics thought that only institutions parallel to but indepen-dent of the state would "protect the faith." To respond to those needs as thus perceived, new religious congregations arose locally, regionally, and nationally. Their founders and their members had maps, the almost unchanged Tridentine rules and regulations, expressed and implied and still unquestioned, of church and reli-gious life. They had the experience of present but traditional unmet needs. They responded, generously and heroically, within the boundaries of that map. They had little imaginative ability to see unmet needs that were new. But neither did the church, for example, in the case of the socially unjust consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In the,United States of the 19th century, the circumstances were somewhat the same, somewhat different, The rules and reg-ulations of religious life were the same as in Europe, but the insti-tutions of Catholic life had to be built up from the beginning, and, as the century went on, the building had to take place right in the midst of an immigrant flood of poor, uneducated Catholics coming into a vastly different and somewhat hostile environment: Here, too, the need seemed to be for institutions to protect the faith of the immigrants and to introduce them into American 178 Revie'w for Religious society. To respond to those needs, here, too, new apostolic or "active" congregations arose and old ones established branches in the United States. They too had the same maps; they knew from experience that those maps had to be modified, simultane-ously felt guilty when they did so, and were often unable to offer to Rome a theoretical basis for the changes. While apt at devis-ing new strategies in traditional apostolates, those congregations, too, lacked the imaginative ability to see unmet needs that were new, for example, in the case of the black population and the unjust institutions of slavery and then of segregation. But at least through the 19th century and up to the end of World War II and the assimilation of the Catholic population into the economic and social mainstream of American society, the active religious congregations responded visibly and successfully to the immedi-ate educational, social, and economic needs of American Catholics. At the third major upheaval in religious life, the one follow-ing Vatican II, religious were called on not, of course, to tear up the old maps and discard them, but surely to revise them thor-oughly in the light of:the council's teaching. But such revision is not a short-term, easily~done task. Religious life in the United States is still at it and, from an historian's point of view, has not been at it very long yet, not even quite a full human generation. For Americans, used to quick results, this seems both intolerable and discouraging. And the analogy of map ~revision can only be partial, since not simply documents but also attitudes, insights, and patterns of practice enter into such a revision. As for experience, the theological essay describes well the "social, economic, and political forces at work in the culture of the United States [as] contributing to changes in religious life" (Johnson, p. 10). All of those forces, even those least direcdy con-nected with the church or religious life, have been part of the context of our experience of that life since Vatican II. They have modified both our reading of the maps of the past from which we came and our tentative responses to the present. The imagi-nation to see how to put those experiences to positive use in con-temporary religious life is still in short supply. What we need most is the imagination to conceive of what we want that future to be. ' March-April 1994 179 Padberg ¯ In the Midst of the Times Something is going to happen to religious life in the United States over the next ten years. What will it be? Future History as a Conclusion An historian is really not a prophet in any of the usual dic-tionary meanings of that word. He or she neither "utters divinely inspired revelations" nor is "gifted with more than ordinary spir-itual and moral insight" nor "foretells future events" nor necessarily is "an effective and lead-ing spokesperson for a cause, doctrine, or group." But near the conclusion of these reflec-tions, an historian might urge on the readers of this essay an exercise sometimes called "future history," an exercise within which one can think about the future with realism and imagination. Briefly, taken literally, the exercise asks present participants in an activity or institution to write here and now but as if from a particular point in the future at least part of the history of what "has" happened in order to get to that future. It thereby requires the participants to imagine what might have happened and to select those things which they think most likely to happen to bring about that imagined future. The purpose, quite frankly, is to provoke people to turn their minds to the future decade. Something is going to happen to religious life in the United States over the next ten years. What will it be? That exercise in future history begins by looking back from the year 2005. What will have happened to religious life in the United States? For example, imagine the community of which you are a part enjoying in the year 2005 a successful existence in the service of the gospel, the church, and the human community. What characteristics describe that success? How did the com-munity achieve that success? Most importantly, what five impor-tant decisions were made by the community in 1994 to 1999, the first five of those years, to make it the success it now is in 2005? On what five things in those five years did you and your com-munity and the ministry you work in and your coworkers come to a consensus which contributed to making your community, its inner life and its exterior works, the success that it is in 2005? The future is in the present in such decisions. This framework for imagining and planning can bring us quickly to concrete details and can gently force us to face up to what we think realistically possible. 180 Review for Religious Where does one start in developing.such a future history? Perhaps with three questions: First, how would I describe to myself what I think my religious congregation fundamentally is? Second, what are the absolutely essential characteristics of its reli-gious community life? Third, what are the absolutely essential characteristics that any work it undertakes should have, be that work contemplative prayer or civic networking or anything in between? With the best answers in hand that we can presently give to those questions, derived from our present experience of the world in the midst of the times in which we live as religious, we might go on to imagine what ideally we want to be in 2005 and to plan what practically we can do to achieve that goal. Neither an historian nor anyone else could have predicted what as a matter of fact did come after the original Advent. What did take place in the coming of Jesus was a deed that was faithful to God's original purpose and to the origins of our salvation in the fulfillment of God's promises. It was an experience of God between the times, surely thus a postmodern experience in that it broke out of all past and present categories, and also a deed that con-tinues to be active even in the midst of times in the presence of the Holy Spirit in a world still "charged with the grandeur of God." That post-Advent deed and its consequences are the foundation for the yet unimagined post-Pentecost future of religious life. Notes ' Page numbers refer to Elizabeth A. Johnson CSJ, "Between the Times: Religious Life and the Postmodern Experience of God," as pub-lished in Review for Religious 53, no. 1 (January-February 1994): 6-28; hereafter Johnson. 2 Quotations from the Executive Summary of the study will refer to the text in Review for Religious 52, no. 1 (January-February 1993): 6- 55; hereafter Summary. 3This structure is taken from an article by E. Edward Kinerk SJ, "Toward a Method for the Study of Spirituality," Review for Religious 40, no. 1 (January 1981): 3-19. March-April 1994 181 DAVID MARIA KNIGHT Vowed Witness in a Church Intent on Love commitments I spent several years in the confused and glorious hey-day after Vatican II writing and speaking on the goal and value of the re.ligious vows. Inspired by the theology of Karl Rahner, I presented them, in a nutshell, as the "real-symbolic expressing (and therefore experience) of response to the transcendent call of grace." In English this meant that each vow was a way of realizing, of "making real," both to ourselves and to others, the truth of the faith, the hope, the love we were giving to Jesus Christ and his gospel. Poverty is a "real-symbolic" expression of the fact that we have set our hopes for fulfillment and security not on material possessions, but on the riches of the kingdom. Real poverty, voluntarily embraced, is a way of saying we really hope in God's promises, we really place our trust in God. Celibacy is an expression "in the flesh" of our belief that anyone who accepts "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" can have with God, now, on this earth, a rela-tionship of love as real as marriage, as satisfying as mar-riage, and as developmental of us as loving persons as the most ideal marriage could be. One does not have to be a celibate to be in spousal relationship with Christ--it is implicit in our baptismal consecration as "brides in the David Maria Knight is a priest of the Memphis diocese. He is a well-known author and speaker. His address is Sacred Heart Church; 1324 Jefferson; Memphis, Tennessee 38104. 182 Revie.w for Religious Bride" who is the church--but the commitment to voluntary celibacy is one way to realize, to make real in flesh and blood and action, the truth of this relationship that our faith tells us about and to experience interiorly the passionate intensity of the love we are giving to God in Jesus Christ. The vow of obedience is a real way of expressing our faith in the active presence of Jesus in the church as true head of his Body on earth, and an expression of confidence that he is able to use us and will use us effectively for the work of the kingdom through the government of those who speak for him with authority in his Body. This was new. It was a departure from the traditional way of explaining the vows as means for overcoming attachment to pos-sessions, desire for sexual pleasure, and pride. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church, although it takes a much more inspiring and positive approach to religious life elsewhere, still describes the "evangelical counsels" as "having as their goal the removal of any-thing which., could be an obstacle to the development of char-ity" (no. 1973). I believe that even if nothing within us were an obstacle to the "perfection of charity" the vows would still be inestimably desirable as passionate expressions, in flesh and blood, of the reality of ourfaith, our hope, our love for God in Jesu~s Christ. Their primary value is not in what they remove, but in what they give: the deep, personal awareness (and witness in the church) of relating to God in passionate faith, hope, and love. I find myself now, however, immersed in lay spirituality. As pastor of a parish--a position I requested precisely to "field test" a plan for.spiritual growth in parishes which I have been devel-oping for ten or fifteen years-- I am fc~cused on preaching and teaching the spirituality of the laity as they are defined in Vatican II (a definition which distinguishes the secular laity from lay reli-gious): those who "live in the world; that is, in each and all of the secular professions and occupations [and who] live in the ordi-nary circumstances of family and social life, from which the very web of their existence is woven." Vatican II not only makes clear, but assumes it is "evident to everyone," that "all the faithful of Christ, of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the per-fection of charity." This, I believe, is the key to all the aftermath of Vatican II. Pastoral ministry has had to refocus.The goal of parish life is no longer to provide the laity with those services they need March-April 1994 183 Knight ¯ Vowed Witness in a Church Intent on Love to "save their souls." It is to lead the laity, all of them, closer to the "perfection of love." Parish ministry has changed from store keeping to intensive marketing, from a "maintenance spiritual-ity" to a spirituality of growth. Gone are the days when parishes Religious have the personal experience of committing themselves to total response to the gospel and have training and practice in living it which should make them the natural "coaches" for the laity. existed just to provide a preordained set of services, and the only stress on the priest was concern about providing them well. Now every parish is, or should be, a center fomenting desire for "the fullness of the Christian life" in all of its members and pro-viding the motivation, instruction, and sup-port necessary to keep every member growing toward the "perfection of charity." Now every pastor faces the challenge of dis-covering how to do this. And it is not easy; the paths a whole parish can follow to greener pastures are neither familiar nor well -worn. But the goal is clear: parishes exist to support that kind of living in their members which makes the life of every single one of them a "way of perfection"--a term we used to reserve for the vowed life of religious. The life of every Christian should be avis-ible, lived-out response to the first of all commandments: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength, with all your mind." Jesus' words "If you would be perfect." are addressed to all. To every one of his followers he says, "Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect., strive first for the king-dom of God." How does religious life fit into all of this? There are some obvious answers we need not dwell on, because they should be evident to everyone: Religious have the personal experience of committing themselves to total response to the gospe.1 and have training and practice in living it which should make them the natural "coaches" for the laity as the whole church turns toward this goal. Also, the "fullness of the Christian life" includes involvement in ministry, which is explicit in our bap-tismal commitment. There is no question about the fact that reli-gious, the majority of whom are nonordained women, are the most experienced and effective "lay ministers," taken as a body, that the church has ever known. In the historical context of what 184 Review for Religious is and not only in the abstract context of what theoretically ought to be, it is still true to say, "If you want it done, get a nun!" But there is another way in which religious life fits into this picture of the "new church" striving en masse for perfection, and I think it is something which must be recognized if the conversion of every Christian way of life into a way of perfection is going to succeed. Religious are examples and models of that dramatic ges-ture which is a key element in launching anyone into passionate relationship with God. When Jesus said to the young man in Matthew's Gospel, "If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor. ," he was giving, not a command and not a "counsel," but an example. The young man came out of a legal-istic tradition. Jesus acknowledged this in the beginning by meet-ing him on his own ground and saying, "If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments." The young man was still thinking legalistically when he said, "Which ones?" so Jesus gave him a list. But when the boy said, "I have kept all these; what do I still lack?" and showed that there was something in him impelling him beyond a religion of law observance, Jesus recognized in him a kindred soul, someone who could learn what he came to teach. Then Jesus said (and now I am paraphrasing), "Well, if you want to live by my 'new way'--if you want to be perfect, to 'live life to the full'--here is something you can do to start with which will show that you understand what it is all about. Go, sell everything you have, and give the money to the poor. Then you can come and follow me." What Jesus was calling for was a dramatic gesture--something that would catapult the young man into another orbit of response to God. He may have been thinking explicitly of the gesture Elisha made when Elijah the prophet called him to be his successor: Elijah set out, and came upon Elisha, son of Shaphat, as he was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen; he was following the twelfth. Elijah went over to him and threw his cloak over him. Elisha left the oxen, ran after Elijah, and said, "Please, let me kiss my father and mother good-bye, and I will fol-low you." "Go back!" Elijah answered. "Have I done any-thing to you?" Elisha left him and, taking the yoke of oxen, slaughtered them; he used the plowing equipment for fuel to boil their flesh, and gave it to his people to eat. Then he left and followed Elijah as his attendant (1 K 19:19-21). March-April 1994 185 Knight * Vowed Witness in a Church Intent on Love Jesus asks all, takes all, is worth all. Why did not Elisha just have one of his workers lead the oxen back to the barn and put up the equipment while he left with Elijah? The answer is obvious: After what he had said to Elijah and Elijah to him, Elisha felt the need to make a dramatic gesture, just to show how willing he was to leave everything immediately and give himself to the service of God. This gesture was necessary, not only to win Elijah's confidence, but so that Elisha himself would know, without any shadow of doubt, that he was sweeping everything out of his heart in undivided dedication to what he was called to do. What Jesus said to the rich young man about "selling everything" was just one example of the kind of dramatic gesture which would show that the man understood, before he started to follow Jesus, what the terms of discipleship would be. In a nutshell, Jesus asks all, takes all, is worth all. What he offers is the "pearl of great price" and the "treasure hidden in a field" for which we must be willing to sell every other pearl, even everything we own. What he said to this young man was no dif-ferent from what he said in several places elsewhere. And essentially what Jesus tells the young man is the same thing he proclaims to all when he says, "whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple" (see the whole of this passage, Luke 14:2 5-3 3). Another translation miti-gates for modern ears the Hebrew starkness of "hate fath+r and mother" by making it "turn your back on father and mother." This puts the interior attitude into the form of a dramatic gesture again, but the meaning is the same: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And if you want to know you do not love father or mothei" more than me, make a dramatic gesture that proves it." Jesus could just as well have told the young man, "If you want to embrace my way, show it by leaving home; abandon your father and mother!" Or he could have used the example Matthew cites right before this and said, "Go make yourself a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom; that will prove you are taking me seriously!" Jesus is a teacher; he.is trying to make a point. It is of no concern to him whether his followers are rich or poor, married or celi-bate, living with their parents or missioned a thousand miles away 186 Review for Religdous from them. They can be living the "perfection of charity" in any of these situations. What Jesus is saying Ks that anyone who authentically follows him must be, in fact, total and undivided in love for God, or at least be consciously committed to such total and undi-vided love. And it is characteristic of human beings that we do not really know what is in our hearts until we express what is in them externally. As 'Karl Rahner puts it, "We do not know that we really believe in the two birds in the bush until we let go of the one bird in the hand." We cannot know that our treasure is in heaven unless in some way we renounce the treasure we have stored up on earth. And if we want to know that we really believe in the invis-ible God in our heart, one effective though rad-ical way to discover it is to give up the visible man or woman in our arms. To launch ourselves into a "way of perfection," we need to make some dramatic, radical gesture which says to us and to others from the outset that we are for real. This is what religious know, what they have experienced, and what the centuries-old tradition of religious life has demonstrated: To launch ourselves into a "way of perfection," we need to make some dramatic, radical gesture which says to us and to others from the outset that we are for real. Jesus Christ is not real to us until we take him for real. And to give up things which are very, very real to us, such as money, marriage, and independence, is a very powerful, passionate way to take him for real. It is authen-tic, it is legitimate, and it works. In the "new" church, which is consciously oriented toward the "perfection of love" as the go.al of every Christian's way of life, religious have the role of witnessing to the need and to the efficacy of expressing dramatically one's commitment to this love. Religious need to understand their vows as the dramatic expres-sion of their own intention to live single-mindedly--in "purity of heart"--in total, passionate, undivided love for God. The vows are a dramatic gesture, but a real one, like that of the bride strip-ping herself for the bridegroom. They are a gesture given daily-- every day, all day--as the expression of enduring, faithfully passionate love. The purpose of the vows is to focus our hearts on the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ offers himself daily in the dramatic gesture of March-April 1994 187 Knight ¯ Vowed Witness in a Church Intent on Love the Eucharist--"This is my body, given up for you." He asks us to open ourselves physically to him, to receive him into our bodies in the dramatic gesture of Communion which pledges us to be one with him in heart and mind and soul, in the living of our lives and in the offering of our lives together with him, the Lamb of God, for the life of the world. Religious have understood for centuries the significance of this language of love. Whatever else they did or did not do, religious, whenever it was humanly pos-sible, participated in the eucharistic celebration daily. Those men and women who daily lived their lives in love, who daily gave expression through their vows to their passionate intention of loving the Lord their God with their whole heart, whole strength, whole minds, grasped without need of explanation the appropri-ateness of joining themselves to Jesus Christ in the passionate daily expression of his love in the Eucharist. Sometimes people ask, "Why is there no sacramental conse-cration to religious life as there is to marriage and priesthood?" Perhaps an answer is that religious ire not consecrated to a par-ticular function in the church the way priests and married people are; their function as religious is that of all the baptized: to bear witness to Jesus Christ and his gospel in the total, passionate, daily oblation of themselves. But religious, by their particular and different way of life~ do this in an explicitly recognizable way. Religious life, when it is authentically lived, is a visible, convinc-ing sign (as martyrdom is) that total dedication to Jesus Christ is possible, that the grace of undivided love is present and active in the church. Sacraments are "visible signs instituted by Jesus Christ to give grace." Perhaps we can say that religious life is "grace made visible in a total commitment to Jesus Christ that is a sign," In this case the sacramental expression of religious life--as of every Christian life which actually aims at the "perfection of love"--is the eucharistic celebration. Religious, who have .been called to make their lives a dramatic gesture of love, celebrate the meaning of their vocation when they join themselves to the dramatic expression Jesus gives to his passion, to his passionate love, every day in the Mass. 188 Review for Religious THERESA MANCUSO Quest for an Undivided Heart On a dark autumn night in Far Rockaway, the rough Atlantic lurches and rolls up the sand. The tide is coming in. Foamy waves crash along the shore, filling rocky crevices with a salty spray, dislodging, sometimes, the fearless gulls that perch precariously on the jetty's edge waiting for their prey, regardless of season, regardless of cold. High up on a boulder overlooking the surf, I perch myself, silent in the coming night, watchful as my three German Shepherd dogs dart back and forth into the water playing tag along the beach. A ripe harvest moon hovers above, the only source of light as the gathering darkness wraps the shore in stillness. Alone now except for the roaring sea,which seems alive in its noisy motion, we are sandwiched here between heaven and earth, time and eter-nity. It is a good place to think, a great place to pray. In this deserted cathedral of earth and sky and sea, I often find renewal for my soul. Solitude, silence, and surrender calm and soothe when I am lonely or afraid or when, perchance, I have momen-tarily lost sight of the vision that impels me. Many-splendored master that it is, the sea is both healer and challenger and the everlasting Face of the Deep is forever a reminder of human lone-liness, longing for God. Many years ago in the romanticism of adolescence, like many others, I was drawn and fascinated by the ideals of religious life and led to embark on a spiritual journey on which celibacy, con- Theresa Mancuso's article "Prayer, Memories, and God" was published in our July-August 1993 issue. She'lives at 448 Seventh Avenue; Brooklyn, New York 11215. March-April 1994 189 Mancuso ¯ Quest for an Undivided Heart secrated chastity, was considered the pearl of great price. For the crown of Sponsa Christi, the young religious was inspired to sac-rifice the heart, forgetful of every, human longing--not knowing for sure all it entailed. To the precious star of chastity we set our sails so long ago and far away, willing to journey through the per-ilous waters of life, armed only with faith and emboldened by the little we knew or understood about reality or ourselves. Maturity was far off, then, as we took ,.the golden chalice of chastity with both our hands, intent on draining it to the dregs. Time folded round about us like the arms of the sea as decade by decade we were washed in the flood of human experience from which there is no return. There is a solitude and silence deep in the heart of conse-crated celibacy, a surrender that echoes in the still point of the soul. Despite the changes time inscribes on the idealism of youth, it is a refreshing experience to meet today's consecrated virgins, men and women of various ages for whom religious chastity has never lost its meaning. Of their lives and their experiences, let us take note. The consecrated virgin is rather little understood and even less appreciated in the modern world. Nevertheless, religious chastity is still the sign and seal of the kingdom of God among us. We try not to forget where we came from or where we are going. There is something indelibly written in the human heart by the vow of chastity. Regardless of all the changing cultural mores in the world about us, regardless, too, of our own restless hearts, the unspeakable beauty of this vow is bound up to the essential integrity it sustains, the quest and achievement of an undivided heart. When those of us who vowed our lives to consecrated chastity long ago and far away confront the reality of today, who we are and what we. have become, deep questions await us. Have we emerged through the years with undivided hearts? Have we found the pearl of great price? Has chastity given us power to love all God's chil-dren, to nurture the world in the spirit of faith, to sustain great and noble friendships without losing the balance of a virginal heart? Is celibacy still our pearl of great price, or has it become an embarrassment to us in a world of sexual adventure,., excess, and casual alliances? Doe's chastity still shine within us with the light of happiness that shone in the promises of youth, or is our love for 190 Review for Reli~ous the celibate ideal so damaged by time and tarnished by temptation that it is long forgotten, pushed to the back of our mind as if, indeed, we had never given ourselves to God? Have we grown tired of trying? Have we lost our precious pearl? The.monk (monachos) or nun (monache) stands in the breach of the universe, a marginal person, monos-- alone. In that desert there is solitude, silence, and surrender, but there is also tenderness, joy, freedom, and peace, the gifts of the Spirit and the happiness of an undivided heart. To be alone with God in the vastness of time is sometimes frightening. We came to religious life burning with desire for union with God. The spiritual goals of enlighten-ment and self-giving called us to surrender our entire existence, everything,, right down to the deepest longings in the human heart. How shall we know if the promise has been fulfilled within us? Eschewing too much analysis, it is not with-out merit to examine ourselves with regard to chastity, for what we paid the greatest price for shall indeed be our sweetest con-solation. The reality of celibacy takes us into solitude, not once and for all, but over and over again. Every time we face the silent stillness of an unencumbered life, we recognize the act of sur-render (for there is really no other alternative), an act that leads time and time again straight to the heart of God. Along this way the saints have gone, and we may follow. Monks and nuns are not alone in celebrating the joy of the undivided heart. Many others, to be sure, in the world about us, have sacrificed sexual expression for the love of God, the practice of intensified religious living, the service of others, and the deepening freedom of the human spirit. Why be celibate in a world exploding with sexuality? Why be chaste in a society glutted by sensual allurement? Why refrain from instant and immediate gratification? The promise of chastity remains today what it has always been, an uninterrupted, pro-foundly unifying discipline of the heart, a calming of emotion. Apatheia. Passionlessness. The emptying of explosive divisive attachment. Our long journey-to God is a quest for an undivided The reality of celibacy takes us into Solitude, not once and for all, but over and over again. March-April 1994 191 Mancuso ¯ Quest for an Undivided Heart Chastity for the kingdom of God shines beside marital chastity as a vocation complete and magnificent in itself. heart, stripped of attachment to all that is not he. Kenosis. Emptying. But we do not strive to abandon passion in order to be phlegmatic zombies. We do not strive to over-come attachment so that we can be cold, mechanical people, devoid of love. Instead, chastity is the baptism of all our feelings, all our emotions, the freeing of all the power within us, zest for life, creative energy. Chastity is the focus of our vision on God,or it is nothing. Celibacy asks its practitioner to pour out its most intimate being, not into the void, but into the Total Ultimate that is God. Chastity calls for continual repentance, continual surrender. Metanoia. Change of heart. The surrender of sexual distraction and satisfaction removes from a human being those concerns about intimacy that. often eat up the larger portion of human consciousness and creative preconsciousness. The heart that is focused on God is empowered to love and embrace the entire world, not for self-satisfaction, but with gen-uine and authentic interest and care. Our consecrated celibacy should make us more loving, more caring, more gentle and tender, compassionate and kind. That is the reality of an undivided heart. To be all things to all for the love of God, unselfishly, with purity of heart--that is the joy of chastity, the empowerment of the virgin. When today the world scoffs at virginity, it acts and reacts without understanding or knowledge of what it truly is. Our quest for an undivided heart is not futile, not wasted. It is the journey of courage that takes us into the fullness of God's abiding presence, more and more revealed to us proportionately as we lay aside all that is not God. The whole point of celibacy is union with God, nothing more and nothing less. Chastity is free-dom from the pursuit of pleasure and popularity, freedom from encrustations of endless self-adornment for the sake of vanity or "sex appeal," freedom from uncontrolled emotion and undisci-plined desire--indeed, freedom from self in areas where self may be the worst enemy. We do not posit'the beauty of consecrated chastity over against marital chastity, but beside it, its sister state. Chastity for the kingdom of God shines beside marital chastity as a vocation 192 Review.for Religious complete and magnificent in itself. Monos, alone. The splendor of the celibate heart is not servile frigidity nor some holier-than-thou imagined adornment of the soul. The consecrated virgin is not opposed to the married; the virgin lives as ultimate marriage of the spirit. The splendor of celibacy is the quickening of abil-ity to embrace the world unselfishly and bring God's love back into it. By surrendering one's right to nurture one's own offspring, one is free to take the children of humanity into one's deepest embrace and to love and serve them forever. Celibacy is a font of energy in the undivided heart, a direEting of the life force to the Life Giver. We need never be ashamed for having made this choice--indeed, for having been chosen for it. Most religious have tasted the price of celibacy. Many have traveled far from the safety of religious communities in which the vows were made, those havens where temptation was kept very much at bay. Unexpqsed and untested, we thought ourselves pure. Later, mind and heart were tested by the real world. The promise of celibacy is far deeper than all the dreams 'and aspira-tions of our youth. Life has a way of sweeping away illusion. One by one we find ourselves devoid of excuses, alone in the wilder-ness wfiere we must do battle against the pull of desire. But God teaches us quietly with relentless compassion until we understand the vigorous truth of what it is all about. And then the years are gone. Single-mindedness in the undivided heart bears fruit in quiet happiness. One finds, after all, that God is always with us, his love underpinning everything we are, everything we do. All earthly delights pale beside the effulgence of God reveal-ing himself to those who seek him with a pure heart. Immersed in him completely, we are given a new ability to focus on the things that really matter. Nor should we think of celibacy as just a physical state. It is more a state of mind, a field of completion for the soul, a refin-ing instrument that fine-tunes emotion. Chastity with diligent constancy chips and chisels all the corners of the human heart. It makes us who we are, but slowly, slow. We are forever becom-ing. As the sea chips and chisels the shore, so does celibacy remove the dross of selfishness as it refines the heart. Not without pain. Not without suffering. But, most importantly, not without joy. I watch a gull swoop down into the waves, taking his catch from the sea. The small fish is caught, devoured, by the power-ful beak of the gull, for this is nature's way. Then the lonely sea March-April.1994 193 Mancuso ¯ Quest for an Undivided Heart Our quest for an undivided heart seems to take a whole lifetime. gull flies up out of the wave and is lost to sight in the evening sky. It reminds me that I, too, fly alone over the'ocean of life, single in the world, without a mate, for one great purpose, God. The gull and I are one for this single fleeting moment as the night steals on and the only sound in the darkness is the song of the sea. Two beings in the universe, separate and complete, starkly alone. Somehow in thavfleeting moment I come to understand why I choose .celibacy. All the props have disappeared since the day on which I promised chastity to God. It is very different now, the life I am leading, Those who inspired me have vanished from the earth in the sweet embrace of death or are far away from me. Our destinies, once so closely entwined, grew separate through the years. The whole world has changed, but the heart remains the same. Over time we face our dragons, such as they are. There is no exemption. Life batters the foundations on which religious vows are built. Suffering and sin touch everyone. The best we can do is to keep on choosing God first, for he has chosen us. To keep on choosing God is to celebrate the vow of celibacy for the love of God and for no other reason. To keep one's eye on the goal is to remain in an undivided heart. All along the way we just keep fac-ing ourselves, as we are, for better or for worse. Staggering truths reveal themselves, but they do not come home to us all at once. As the years unfold, bit by bit we uncover the truths of who and what we really are. Life insists that we go beyond the images, far beyond our misconceptions and imaginings. Sometimes it is a painful, searing journey. Our quest for an undivided heart seems to take a whole lifetime. It was not the work of the novitiate nor completed in the ceremony of vow day. The richness of the vowed life dawns slowly a long way down the road from where we started. As the moon rises higher in the sky over Rockaway, the dark-ness fills with a luminous aura. The sea quiets down as the tide rests inland. The dogs hunker down beside me, digging deep cav-erns in the sand to lie down in. Questions of celibacy have long challenged me, not just tonight, but many nights for more than a quarter of a century. Now, in this luminous nightfall on the shore, all inne~ rhythms find themselves attuned to the sand and sea and sky. One with the universe for a single moment, the burdens of a 194 Revie~ for Religious lifetime fall silently into the waves. Configured in stark simplic-ity, it suddenly makes sense, lt's all about an undivided heart. I did not notice the stars coming out slowly in the black dome of sky as the evening wore on. They twinkle now light years away, far above me. There they are just as they have always been. But I didn't notice them, not until now. Only now do I see them clearly, a starry quilt across the heavens wrapping land and sea in the blanket of their glory. The whole point and purpose of religious chastity seems suddenly at last so clear, so complete. The quest for an undivided heart. Through it we are called to create an interior environment free from the remnants of undisciplined love, unrea-sonable attachment, self-centered emotionalism, and the display of ego. Celibacy re~noves distraction from the undivided heart. One consecrated to celibacy still stands in this troubled world as a sign of the kingdom of God as the stars stand from age to age, forever. Gathering my things, I descend the rocks and leave the beach, dogs at my side. The stars are twinkling high above and the sea's roar is silent. Everything is still as the fullness of nighttime falls. The burden of loneliness is gone; commotions of the mind are silent. With renewed conviction I head for home, focused, for a while at least, on the pearl of great price that once was mine and calls me still to the undivided heart that finds its all in God. Vocation Poets and prophets Are born to bleed And orily lesser ones weep. To have heard and held in hollow heart a word Seared lips al~ne may speak Is glory enough--is glory indeed! Janet Benish March-April 1994 195 BRIAN C. YATES Imaged Celibacy: A Reflection for Priests This reflection on celibacy considers the imagination in e life of a celibate. To put the theme bluntly: Do I see and imagine myself as a celibate? Do I see my celibate self as a lov-ing and lovable man? The apostolic exhortation "I Will Give You Shepherds" (Pastores dabo vobis, 7 April 1992) says, "The gift of self, which is the source and synthesis of pastoral charity, is directed to the church" (§23). My query is this: Is the self that comes to mind in these questions and in this statement my real and true self, or is it in practice my false self?. My false self--using Thomas Merton's distinction--is what may be described as my mask, my shadow, my empirical self, the self I develop in my own likeness rather than in the likeness of God. I develop the false self to cope with the trials of life; it is the self I project and display to the outer world of people and experience. The true self, on the other hand, is that deeper new reality which lies hidden within me as the image of God, the word of God that I am, the new man described by St. Paul. To paraphrase Merton, the real I is simply one's self and nothing more, one's self as it is in the eyes of God. First, then, do I as a celibate try to work at making my false self celibate? Do I attempt to accomplish the task of making who I think I ought to be celibate? Such an approach is all of my own doing--granted all the goodwill in the world--and is prone to utter frustration. Why? Because celibacy needs to be linked not to Brian C. Yates, a diocesan priest, writes for us from Galilee House; 60B Blair Street; Bondi, N.S.W. 2026; Australia. 196 Review for Religious the false, unreal, pretended self, but rather to the real self. I am firmly of the opinion that many of us celibates have tried to make our false selves celibate. It is, however, only when we get in touch with our real selves by honest and true self-knowledge and awareness that we accept ourselves as created by God in his own image and likeness. We then accept the word of God that each of us is. Only when we discover our true self and discover the real-ity of God dwelling within us can we admit that our identity rests on our being loved by God who dwells within. By throwing off the hold the false self has on me, I become open to the gifting of the Holy Spirit. The "Come, Holy Spirit" invocation is a cry from the true self, not the false self. Second, do I image myself as a celibate loving and lovable man? I propose that celibacy thrives as a reality in our lives only when our graced active imag-ination never lets us forget that we possess it as a gift of the Spirit of God. In other words, if celibacy is not imaged as a desired gift, it will not continue to be there as a gift or in any other way. The invitation to image is suggested by Jesus' question "What are you looking for?" (Jn 1:38). Men who have been ordained to the priesthood have been so gifted because, over the course of years, they have imaged priesthood and celibacy as the gifts they are. The art of imaging is not fantasy or mental picture making, nor is it a means of escaping reality and life's demands. Rather, it is the way which Providence uses to get us into the real. It is the energy and power of one's mental faculty that operates through the medium of images, symbols, myths, stories, and parables--for example, the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl of great price, a dragnet, a hidden treasure, a festive wedding banquet. Imaging is a way of knowing--it is beyond mere reason and rational thought. When we image, we intuit and we use our feelings, emotions, and memories, without excluding logic and planning. In fact, these latter ingredients prevent us from sinking into mere reverie or daydreaming. The process of imaging has been aptly caught by the saying that "we tend to create what we love." Do I love celibacy? That is the question. The desire, under grace, to image is encouraged by St. Bernard's remark "The desire is the pledge of the fulfillment of the Imaging is a way of knowing-- it is beyond mere reason and rational thought. March-April 1994 197 Yates * Imaged Celibacy The image of celibacy has a life of its own, a life to be subsequently realized in practice. desire" and by Ricoeur's observation that to change behavior we .need to change the image. I propose that celibates will find their lives greatly enhanced by the practice of imaging celibacy. If one does not image celibacy as a gift to the true self, much energy will be exercised on the task of avoiding temptation, of coping, of excessive concern about the quality of interpersonal relationships, of asking "How far can I go?" or expressing one's sexuality in inappropriate ways, of offering up dif-ficulties, of living encumbered by suppression and repression, of merely tolerating the law of celibacy from outside as a technical requirement of ministry. When a man images celibacy as a gift to himself and practices a celibate lifestyle as a loving and lov-able person, he authors his own life as a free disci-ple of the Lord. Freedom and life are the results of such imaging and such practice. The image of celibacy has a life of its own, a life to be subse-quently realized in practice. As long as it stays healthy by being consciously lived, this life of celibacy prevents a takeover by outside factors. On our spiritual journey the passionate energy of imaging is aptly expressed in Luke's preamble to the Last Supper. Jesus' image is proclaimed: "I have greatly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." This image, this desire, was acted upon by Peter and John: "Go and prepare our Passover for us" (Lk 22:7-16). The imaged desire of Jesus became a reality--it hap-pened. The Beatitude "Blest are the single-hearted for they shall see God" (Mt 5:8) further captures the imaged energy of the celi-bate. This blessed "sight of God" is shown again in the imaged and vigorously implemented desir~ of Zacchaeus to see Jesus. His running out in front and climbing the sycamore tree secured the presence of Jesus in his house that very day (Lk 19:1-10). Annie Dillard, in her story of the Weasel in Teaching a Stone to Talk, writes of "people taking vows of poverty, chastity, and obe-dience by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling., to grasp your one necessity and not let it go." If their vision has become blurred, celibates need to regain appropriate ways of imaging their choice of celibacy--they must stalk their calling. They must do this in conjunction with their own self-knowledge and aware-ness, their conscience and their value system, They must not shun 198 Review Jbr Religious the effort involved in such imaging and such living. They must keep looking in the right direction, in season and out of season: "They shall look on him whom they have pierced" (Jn 19:37). The Sacred Temple You will find your way by the grace of God over the broad dirt road through the merchant mob: the press of children selling holy cards, the pretty, gypsy girls and brown, drunken bards yelling: "No. no plaster., alabastert." as the ocean air fills with rum and laughter rum and laughter Scattering seagulls like failed prayer's fruit in a once quiet place the mob is upon you pushing, tugging, pulling at your jacket with old gum and bloody, sad gods of plastic their playfully wild dogs between your feet looking, whining, growling for something to eat something to eat But, then your senses blur. You are taken into, away, beyond the soul awakens where the bright sweetness of eternal Light consumes that crazy mob of our false delights where the Word of God draws with gentle bands and you know and are known where the birds fly home to the holy land. John Boyd OSB March-April 1994 199 JOANNE MARIE GREER Needed: An Ethic of Memories challenges In my current careei- I teach and supervise religious who are in training as pastoral counselors in M.A. and Ph.D. programs. Personal memories, memories of inter-personal exchhnges and relationships, are very live issues for these trainees, both in their emerging clinical compe-tence and in their own processing of their own pasts. This article is a result of my reflections deriving from my work with the students. Those reflections were crystallized by the following incident. Quite by accident I met Maria, someone who turned out to be a link to my past of almost forty years ago. I found that Maria was a close current friend of Anna, some-one I had known rather well in high school and also been with in the novitiate. I had moved to another part of the country and had not seen Anna since. Further exchanges ensued: "Well, do you know X?" "Did you know Y? . Did you also live under Mother Z, and what did you think of her?" "Did you visit such and such a place?" and so forth. Then my new acquaintance said, "Oh, by the way, my friend Anna is sometimes called [a slightly salacious nickname] within her community. No one will tell me the story behind it." With a moment's reflection on my part, I was able to supply the embar-rassing information, which came from Anna's life around age sixteen, When she and I were schoolmates. Joanne Marie Greer PhD is director of research in the Pastoral Counseling Department of Loyola College; 7135 Minstrel Way, Suite 101; Columbia, Maryland 21045 200 Review for Religious Later I was reporting this incident to Susan, a current-day friend. I had felt troubled by the exchange with Maria about Anna's nickname, but could not put my finger on the reason. I was certainly not jealous of Anna's friendship with Maria. Anna had not been a close friend of mine, and I had not thought of her in years. My friend Susan reproached me for telling the mean-ing of the nickname, saying: "What you remember of Anna does not belong to you. It belongs to you and Anna together. If Anna had wanted her current-day friend to know this about the past, she would have told her herself. Besides, when Maria tells Anna what she knows, Anna will be troubled. She will wonder what else you may tell Maria about the past." I conceded that Susan was right, and felt 'there was some deep wisdom in her comment. I continued thinking about it off and on for several days. I finally concluded that this apparition from my past had caused me to momentarily regress in my judgment in a way which I still regret. But it may be useful to describe how I reached this conclusion. In this way my medium--this article--becomes part of my message, that memory is a volatile and indeterminate thing. As a psychoanalyst I have learned the professional discipline of analyzing my own thoughts carefully whenever I feel troubled, lest my lurking disturbance throw me off balance in my clinical work. Initially I set out to trace my own free associations to the exchange about Anna's nickname and to Susan's subsequent reproach. The first thing I recalled was working in the novitiate of my order, and the secrets I had painfully held within. I then moved on to the memory of seeing the pain of the novice mistress when it got back to her what gossipy and critical-things the departed trainees had said about her to their relatives and friends. I had found the novice mistress a very difficult work supervisor, and I understood the diffuse anger of the disappointed, disaffiliated postulants and novices. I resolved, however, that if I ever left the order (as I afterwards did) I would keep its dirty laundry to myself. I simply did not want to cause such pain, and I cut off all mem-ories to guard against remembering and talking. I went so far in this that none of my in-laws even knew that I had spent ten years in the convent. Memory .is a volatile and indeterminate thing. March-April 1994 201 Greer ¯ Needed: An Ethic of Memories Another association that came to mind was to a recurring cur-rent- day announcement in my parish bulletin, inviting people to join a counseling group entitled "Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families." The invitation listed several questions. If one answered yes to these questions, the implication was that one should join this discussion group. I recalled that I always read the list of ques-tions with rising irritation and impatience. I am well aware that the answers to these questions can indicate a multitude of subtle or gross psychological difficulties. I also know that these diffi-culties are unlikely to be helped by ten sessions of parent bashing, however ghastly one's parents may have been. In fact, my experi-ence has been that such discussions often give persons with seri-ous characterological difficulties a new excuse to indulge in self-pity, instead of helping them to effect in themselves hard psy-chological changes. My thoughts then went to some students in my pastoral-coun-seling classes who seemed unable to learn anything abstract because their own memories were so enlivened by the class mate-rial. I had to work against the tendency of these few to turn the class into group therapy. This led my thoughts to my admiration for a student who came to me and said simply, "I don't want to go into details, but I'm dropping your class because it's getting me too upset. I'll take it again in two years, after I've done some work in therapy." I also connected my associations to my original contact with psychoanalysis. At that time I was aware of being quite depressed at the impending death of my mother-in-law and the illness of my young son. I went to my HMO (health maintenance organi-zation) for the twenty sessions of psychotherapy included in my employer's contract. After ten sessions the supervising psychia-trist threw up his hands and said, "Go have psychoanalysis. You spend half your energy avoiding mourning over the loss of your friends in the convent, so you cannot stand up under the pres-sure of the present. We cannot do anything for you in ten more sessions." I took his advice, found it helpful, and became so inter-ested in analysis that I ultimately became an analyst myself. So I had become a "specialist in memories," as a roundabout result of my original avoidance of memories! How did this con-nect to my indiscretion in sharing my memory of the meaning of Anna's nickname and to my subsequent discomfort? I spend part of each day listening to memories that are eatin, g 202 Review for Religious at my clients, my analysands. For their own personal benefit, I almost always discourage them from sharing these memories out-side the sessions. They would dissipate the emotional power gen-erated by private reflection and structured therapeutic work on their memories if they broadcasted them to friends and relatives. That emotional power would then be less available for real per-sonal change. Anger, grief, and disappointment are powerful emotions. In the psyche they are similar to oil or coal that can be converted to fuel, used as energy for action and redirection. Endless talk dissipates rather than concentrates this energy. But I have a second reason, an important ethical one, for discouraging people from sharing these old memories that they discover as we work in therapy sessions. Memory is a tricky thing. What we empha-size, and what we forget, depends not only on what happened, but on our intellectual capacities at the time of the event and on our ability to endure the truth. What we remember is seldom the whole story. Here is the advantage to keeping these memories within the therapy sessions. If kept within the treatment relationship, this potential discrepancy between past facts and current memories is simply more grist for the therapeutic mill. If we discover together a suppression of some aspect of the past, within the ses-sion we can very usefully explore why that bit of information was so carefully forgotten and what change has made it possible to remember now. The layering of memories is such a common-place that psychoanalysis has a special name, "screen memory," for a memory that hides behind it yet another, more traiamatic mem-ory. In a full-length analysis of a person with a traumatic but largely forgotten childhood, I have seen the "screen" layers turn out to be more than two deep. This constitutes an excellent i'ea-son for those in treatment to hold their tongues while continuing to trace the red thread through the tangled skein of their mem-ories. There is, however, yet another ethical aspect to the question of sharing a memory from treatment. Suppose the person in treat-ment decides to give a sibling a play-by-play description of the current status of the therapeutic work. Several major problems ensue, which seem to me to have important ethical dimensions. First of all, the listener may have shared some of the experiences What we remember is seldom the whole story. March-April 1994 ]03 Greet ¯ Needed: An Ethic of Memories in the recovered memories. But the listener may not have a ther-apist or other suitable confidant with whom to work through the feelings stirred up by these confidences. Even if the listener is a current-day friend who did not share the speaker's experiences, the friend .may have had similar experiences which are suddenly brought into working memory. In either case, this recollection occurs, not when the listener chooses and feels ready, but when the speaker thoughtlessly imposes this unexpected psychological task. This is one good reason that therapy per se is a profession and not a friendship task. Professional therapists have been trained to attend to their own intrapsychic reactions to the client's dis-course. The client realistically depends upon this aspect of the therapeutic contract in order to be free of the burden of caring for the therapist's psyche during the sessions. Moreover, the client need feel no guilt at all about burdening the therapist, because the client is paying the therapist to perform this intrapsychic task. It is the therapist's job to have recourse to self-analysis, peer supervision, or a resumption of personal treat-ment if a client's discourse about traumatic memories then arouses troubling feelings and memories in the therapist. To expect this same degree of accommodation from a friend would be exploita-five. Such concomitant self-care cannot be appropriately forced on a nonprofessional in order to make one's friend more "useful" in working through one's past. To force this task upon a friend would be appropriate reason to feel quite guilty. A very serious problem may follow the sharing of one's mem-ories outside of therapy as if they were firm fact. The uncon-scious operates by a set of "primary process" laws. The psychoanalytic term "secondary process" refers to our rational, adult way of thought processing and is roughly equivalent to "rea-soning." In contrast, primary process is the more primitive and imaginative way of thinking that takes place in dreams, creative productions, and memories. In primary process the part may be substituted for the whole, or vice versa; one person may be sub-sfituted for another, or one event for another, because of some yet unnoted logical connection between them. In dream analysis these connections can often be recovered by asking the analysand to systematically free-associate to each element (noun, verb, or adjective) of the dream narrative until the stream of associations runs dry. But in memories per se, often the missing or substituted elements become clear only much later, when the remembering 204 Review for Religious person overcomes resistance to a more accurate memory. The dangers of sharing the "interim drafts" of the final memory should be obvious. Terrible hurts may be imposed on the innocent. But suppose the memory is accurate and stands fast over time in the face of careful analysis? There still seems an ethical prob-lem in broadcasting such a memory. Memory by definition refers to the past. The persons in the memories have current-day rela-tionships with other innocent people. For example, suppose a sib-ling who molested you now has a wife and children. What good would be served by venting one's rage within the family and destroying the peace of the newer family members? One would be obtaining revenge, or at least emotional ventilation, at the expense of the innocent. Certainly the person who recalls experiences of victimization and exploitation has every right to establish a psychological dis-tance from the past abuser. But this can be done without sharing one's thoughts. Further, over the course of a long mental-health treatment or course of counseling, the analysand usually arrives at a position of compassion towards those who caused them suffer-ing in childhood. Even in cases of former physical or sexual abuse, the termination of treatment finds the survivors in a position of forgiveness combined with appropriate self-protection, rather than a position of vengeful attack. This psychological disposition is serendipitously not only more Christian, but also more life enhancing. As we approach the end of treatment, I have sometimes been thanked for insisting on the confidentiality of the ongoing treat-ment. In the heat of remembering, one may wish to confront one's torturers. But later, after the pain has been alleviated, an analysand is often grateful that some small but meaningful rela-tionship remains, for example, with parents who are now under-stood to have been pitifully impaired by their childhoods. After the incident of Anna's nickname, one result of my asso-ciative process was a new realization that middle-aged people who have been, or still are, in a religious order have not one but two families of origin. The usual past practice of admitting very young candidates means that many candidates completed adolescence and entered young adulthood with a second set of parents, the training staff. Moreover, the drastic changes involved in enter-ing a religious order could be expected to cause, and did cause, massive regression in many candidates. This means that, in effect, March-April 1994 205 Crreer * Needed: An Ethic of Memories they spent not only some of adolescence but even all of adoles-cence and some of a second latency period within the cloister. It would be theoretically likely that the usual mechanisms of for-getting childhood trauma, recovering it in garbled form, and feel-ing a need to work through it would be present When is a memory private, and when is it community property? When must it be told, when may it be told, and when must it be kept secret? in such people with regard to t~0 childhoods and two sets of parents. My reflection led me to include myself among those who had such a past and to recall that my main dissatisfaction with my training analyst had been his utter incapacity to imagine my life experience as a young religious. Thus Anna's nickname pointed me to a new task in my ongoing self-analysis. My second realization was a personal grasp of a dilemma'I have listened to many times from the victims of family crimes. When is a memory private, and when is it community property? W-hen must it be told, when may it be told, and when must it be kept secret? I had learned that this question may surface about something as large as incest or as small as a nickname. As in many of the subtle ethical dilemmas in life, there is no pat answer to this question. It is well to keep this in mind. Here a final memory linked with Anna emerged, and I under-stood another of the roots of my early resolve against giving pain by narrating private memories of my past convent experience. In this memory I was a novice, on vacation at a rustic seaside camp connected to a rural high school owned by the order. Along the length of the washroom wher~ I was brushing my teeth, there was a ventilation space just under the eaves, open to the cloister walk outside. Out on the cloister walk I recognized, among a group of visiting major superiors, the voice of the nun who had been principal of my school when Anna and I were students together. Another superior who did not know me mentioned my name. My old principal, who had not spoken to me in three years, remarked, "Oh, yes, that one is full of the Old Nick." My eyes filled with angry tears. I felt it was unfair to judge me at age eigh-teen by my behavior three years before. At that point in my current-day reflections, I realized that each of us is in a process of becoming. Those who have remem- ~06 Rwbiew for Religious bered us only by some static moment and then have passed out of our lives do seem to have an ethical obligation to keep their own counsel. After all, persons being impugned via the narration of memory may, in effect, no longer exist; they may be thoroughly different from the persons called to mind by the reminiscence. In any case, they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Participants in therapies which focus upon memories of years ago need to keep this in mind. So do ordinary folk, particularly as they age and their store of memories becomes larger and larger. Easter Lily Your bell is poised for announcement, green-white at first, the color of music not yet tongued. We have come to expect drama: spring's green entrance, the dandelion invasion, snow in the orchard, and those housewrens concealing their nest in the ivy-veiled oak. This morning you trumpeted six gold notes from your ivory cave, a fanfare for the resurrection from the dead. Avis Kunca Kubick March-dt~H11994 207 \~ILLIAM MOCKUS A Discipline of Self-Respect Forthose seeking direction in their spiritual journeys and for .1_ .those who journey with people seeking God's direction, how we use the word discipline needs to be given attention. Our assumptions about discipline significantly affect our spiritual exer-cises and practices. A few years ago a cartoon depicted one man saying to another, "Yes, I'd like to reach spiritual perfection as soon as possible; then move on to bigger and better things." Obviously, this perception of "spiritual perfection" relates more to ego achievement than to true spiritual growth. But, like most humor, what makes it funny is its nearness to truth. We desire to grow spiritually, but we are not sure of how or when the goal is reached. When asked what they desire at the beginning of a retreat or a spiritual-direction relationship, many people say a closer or more intimate relationship with God, a more faithful practice of prayer, or a sense of security around what they are already doing in prayer even though it may "feel dead" to them. Often, from what we have been taught and have come to believe about spiritual perfection, we assume that greater disci-pline, meaning greater self-control, will produce the desired spir-itual fruit. To pray well, we believe we must control our wandering imagination, our body, even our breath. We believe that, if we fdil ai' our discipline ot[ self-control, then we or someone else may judge our spiritual life, if not our entire self, to be a failure. William Mockus, a diocesan priest from Paterson, New Jersey, currently serves on the. retreat team at Bon Secours Spiritual Center. His address is Bon Secours Spiritual C.enter; 1525 Marriottsville Road; Marriottsville, Maryland 21104. 208 Review for Religious We have long recognized that, in developing most worth-while skills, some type of discipline is required. We assume, then, that living Christian lives "skillfully" must involve the "discipline" of putting the Jesus story into our everyday activity. But our image of God should not ignore Jesus' own activity at work within our lives as they are. Having such an image involves a different sort of discipline. Rather than straining to achieve a degree of spiritual perfection that will allow us to feel secure by sheer force of will, we need to seek a "disciplined faithfulness to our own advancing StOry." In the spiritual life the essential ingredient is relationship-- our individual relationship with God and our communal rela-tionship with one another in God. It is for the sake of these relationships that discipline is important, but only secondarily. In our growing-up years, it is important to learn some discipline, some self-control. Without "boundaries of behavior" for impulses and emotions, we would do much harm to ourselves and others. Good boundaries are important for developing ego identity and strength. For adults, however, it is a mistake to confine one's thinking about discipline to self-control. For people beyond young adulthood, viewing one's need for spiritual discipline as a function of self-respect can be more help-ful than striving after an unrealizable degree of self-control. In fact, spiritual (and emotional) growth may be more hindered than helped by too much of it. Mature Christians realize this. Increased self-respect comes from patient growth in God, not from aggres-sively building oneself up to self-perfection. Discipline for the journey is more a matter of trusting in the Spirit's movement than of standing tall or standing one's ground. We do not arrive at "spiritual perfection" as much as journey toward it in hope and faith. Here a healthy discipline of self-respect can prevent us from abandoning the quest for spiritual perfection in frustration because we lack enough self-control to arrive at some idealized point of our own choosing. This adjustment in our understanding of spiritual discipline can help us move from a success/failure model of spiritual life to one of ongoing progress. It is a call for respect of one's "true self" rather than control over one's imperfect self. The practice of self-respect, like most spiritual tasks, requires a real commitment to discipline. But it is a discipline that has patience for the grow-ing self's time of maturation and integration. March-April 1994 209 Mockus * A Discipline of Self-Respect People often perceive their lives as somehow overshadowed by what they have come to understand as their vocation or calling: the idealized notion of being a Christian, to be perfect as their "heavenly Father is perfect." Traditionally we have been taught to strive toward spiritual perfection in prayer and spiritual practices. Unfortunately, for us limited human beings, the reality of our many imperfections is often contrasted too harshly with the ideal. No matter how we struggle we always fall short of our desired perfection, and the ideal always eludes us. If self-perfection is the goal, the flawed reality of our lives usually confronts rather than comforts us in our spiritual quest. In terms of God's perfection, and our own expectations, we always fail. Nevertheless, thanks to the desire that God places at the core of our being, we keep. striving in one way or another to deepen the relationship with the One who is the source of all our desire. Yet, when we do not respect our own truth and wisdom, we too fre-quently seek some magical prayer discipline or some miracle that will deliver us from our failure-ridden struggle. If God wants us to be perfect, then more fervent prayer, or Jesus, or some spiri-tual director will help us finally achieve it--right? For those who seek "spiritual perfection," reaching the goal is constantly frustrated by human limitations. One's prayer disci-pline or acts of charity, one's responsibility to family or commu-nity, fulfillment of one's commitments or vows can never be as they should be because perfection moves as soon as it appears within reach. Considering what might be years of frustration in attempting to reach an idealized image of oneself, it is easy to understand some people's difficulty in determining how to improve their spir-itual practice or in ever finding the "comfort zone" of a commit-ted daily prayer practice. The built-in danger of a self-perception based on an ideal is that the reality of our limitations causes us to judge our efforts harshly, no matter how hard we try--unless in frustration we give up the quest. A typical response to what often feels like constant failure is grief or, worse, despair. In Vital Spiritualities Jerry Broccalo explains the distinction between a spirituality of the real and a spirituality of the ideal while recognizing the value of each. As with the rest of life, when it comes to our spirituality there is a radical difference between the ideal and the real. We too often confuse the difference. Despite the God-life within us, we are not God; weare not 210 Review for Religious perfect and cannot control everything in our life, especially its limits. A discipline of self-respect allows us to see the truth of our humanness more clearly. It requires that we discard the belief that our perfection is within our power. God is God; we are not. Our spiritual growth does not depend on our ability to control reality, but rather on our ability to surrender con-trol. ~ This surrender depends on our recovering what may be termed our "firsts." Making the shift from a discipline of self-control to one of self-respect is a matter of taking the right steps in sequence. One cannot skip the first step in the" process. We need to recover our appreciation of the first commandment, the first beatitude, and the first three steps of any twelve-step program thfit deals with addictions. Each of these firsts points to several parallel truths. We are not in charge, we need God, and we cannot control everything about our lives. The truth behind all of these firsts is that we are mor-tal and limited, as well as graced and saved. We cannot assume the power to judge or condemn ourselves for failures or wrong choices. Although we may judge an action or the lack of action as evil or sinful, it is God's domain to judge the person: Poverty of spirit, the first beatitude, requires that we real-ize exactly who is and who is not God in the human/divine rela-tionship. Because I know that prayer, exercise, and setting boundaries around my appetites are all essential for my well-being, for my "true self" to grow strong, I know that I need discipline, but not the discipline of self-control based on an ideal image of myself. Perhaps the most common temptation to idolatry is the ongoing desire to see myself only through others' .eyes. Butmy holiness depends on being my true self and worshiping the God in whose image I was made rather than a god made in my image. The discipline of self-respect compels me to do these things because .of what Christ has taught me about the reign of God within me. When I do not practice the discipline involved in liv-ing the Good News, I am being respectful of neither nay true self nor the gospel. If I do not pray or care for my body with proper diet and exercise, I need to look again at my spiritual discipline. But even then I have no right to condemn and crucify myself. A discipline of self-respect allows us to see the truth of our humanness more clearly. March-April 1994 211 Mockus ¯ A Discipline of Self-Respect Instead, in honest humility I can admit nay lack of self-respect and recommit myself once more to following the Lord rather than pursuing my idealized self. A discipline of self-respect calls me to constant conversion and does not allow me to assume divine authority over my own, or someone else's, failures. This discipline is one of true humility, and holds that human beings may not usurp God's authority. Maybe this is why the first commandment is the first, and the first beatitude is first, and why the same three steps are put at the beginning of every twelve-step recovery program. The first step is the need to recognize our dependence on God. The first steps in recovery, like the first beatitude and the first commandment, contradict the common belief that, if only we exercised enough self-control, we would pray better and live better and thus become more holy--and, pre-sumably, this level of spiritual perfection would make us more loved by God. This may be more a form of spiritual consumerism than a spiritually mature relationship with God in Christ Jesus. One may object that this type of spiritual discipline sounds too much like those theories which so casually justify the selfishness and self-centeredness of contemporary culture. From teachings learned in our growing-up years, it is easy to believe that all talk of self-respect promotes attitudes that are too self-centered. Admittedly, the danger of self-righteousness always remains with us, but it may be worth the risk to use the spiritual discipline I propose in the hope of gaining a more God-centered rather than self-center.ed view of what discipline is meant to be. The phrase "discipline of self-respect" may suggest imma-ture self-centeredness. People often assume that, if a spiritual dis-cipline does not involve self-denial, then it must be some form of narcissism. But such an ego-driven and immature sense of self is not what we are speaking about. We are advocating respect f0r one's "true self," as Thomas Merton uses the term, where the egoless self encounters the reign of God within one's life. In a conversation several years ago with Dr. Frederick Franck, I inquired about the Buddhist notion of decreasing one's ego desires and the Christian notion of dying to oneself. Dr. Franck responded that "first one had to have an ego." Before one dies to oneself, one must be a self or have what may be termed a' healthy ego, a sense of one's own true self. For the believer, Christ' is not only the image of the invisible God; he is also the image of our true self encountered within the reality of our lives, not in 212 Revie~v for Religious some unrealizable ideal. A discipline of self-respect is not self-ishness. It is a way to understand spiritual discipline as a call to die to one's false self-centeredness in order that one's true Christ-centeredness may be more fully realized in our lives. It is God's reign rather than our own that this discipline seeks. This call to be our "true selves" is always new and meaning-ful, no matter what age we are or in what stage of life we find ourselves. Whether we are young and need to control our impulses and urges, or mature and need to respect the truth of our real but limited lives, our spiritual discipline must reflect our experience of life and God. What is required in the spiritual jour-ney, if it is to be more God-centered than ego-centered, is a healthy and humble discipline towards one's true self. This disci-pline involves an ongoing quest for self-knowledge and self-respect and an openness to God's constant and loving call for conversion. If one's discipline of prayer or exercise or eating or working is to be tru!y healthy and whole, it must be balanced and con-gruent with one's true identity. It cannot be mere conformity to the images and masks we have held before us, whether these are images of perfect beauty or perfect sanctity. One's spiritual per-fection, then, is not a goal to be chalked up on a self-actualiza-tion chart. It is not a matter of self-mastery, but of self-surrender. The discipline of self-respect is a matter of surrendering to one's true self, encountered at the point of contemplative union with the God who made us just the way we are. Correction Do you know what the word KUMASI becomes when the spellcheck of a computer program encounters it? It becomes CHUMPS. Our apologies to the KUMASI diocese of Ghana mentioned in Susan Rakoczy's article "Charismatic Renewal and Consecrated Life" in our November- December 1993 issue, page 913. March-April 1994 213 ANNETE ADAMS A Transformational Journey May living room can be a cozy place in the winter. Making fire in the fireplace, watching the flames, listening to the crackle of wood, catching a glimpse of a spark breaking away, all move me into a very reflective mood. There is some-thing about a fire in a fireplace that captures my spirit and invites me to quiet. I began to think about images: fire, sun, wind, water, animals, insects. Since images have played an important part in my spiri-tual journey, I looked back to see what image has spoken most powerfully to me. That image is the butterfly. I began reflecting on the monarch butterfly about ten or eleven years ago. Did you know that in its caterpillar stage it can resist moving into the next stage? It can postpone moving into the chrysalis until the fol-lowing spring. This experience reminded me of a time I had been resisting a change in my own life and thinking of all the reasons why I was not the person for this new ministry. Why me? Why now? Why not someone else? I struggled for a long time and finally one day, too tired to fight anymore, I just sat and listened to some reflective music. As I listened, someone came into the room and told me of a wonderfulsight she had just seen. She had watched a beautiful monarch emerge from its chrysalis. She had never seen such a wondrous transformation. For me that was a very powerful moment, for it spoke to me of my own moment of surrender. It was not until I surrendered that I could begin to be free enough to say yes to what I was being Annete Adams SND has been a teacher and a formation director. Currently provincial secretary, she also gives retreats and does spiritual direction. Her address is Notre Dame Educational Center; 13000 Auburn Road; Chardon, Ohio 44024. 214 Review for Religious invited to do. Was this the beginning of another time in my life that was beckoning me into my own chrysalis, to a state of fertile emptiness, to a time of waiting, inviting a transformation? That image .and that symbol are still with me on my journey. I sit here now, in the midst of another transition time in my life, knowing it is time to let go, to move on, uncertain about what is ahead, and yet excited about what might emerge and bring new life and energy. I remember being on a week-long retreat and feeling as though I were a chrysalis. There was not a thought, a prayer, a song, or a gesture that spoke to me. I took a walk that day through a very quiet neighborhood and got lost. A monarch butterfly on the ground caught my eye. I went to look at it. It was dead. I remember picking up this fragile bit of creation, too beautiful to leave there, and holding it in my hand as I walked on, seemingly forever. I came to a park and sat on the grass, opened my journal, and drew what I saw; somehow it became a priceless gift for the day. At the end of the time I took it to a "safe place" where it would not be trampled on and then began my journey back. I remember sharing the incidents of the day with my director. I told her I could not even imagine why I was carrying, so care-fully, a dead butterfly. Her question to me was simple and yet profound: "Did you ever think that the dead butterfly was you-- the part of you that died, that is no longer--and that is why you carried it with you until you could let it go? I knew at once that the suggestion in her words and eyes was true. I had been look-ing outside myself for the answer when in fact it was within. As I reflected on this image later, I noticed near the fireplace a small sand castle. It had been given to me as a gift because of my great love for Teresa of Avila and her Interior Castle. I wondered if each dwelling place could be like another cocoon--a place of darkness, a place pregnant with all the possibilities of newness and a place of deep union between the lover and the Beloved--as it awaits its moment of transformation. Such a simple image and yet what profound insights! All this reflecting brought me to con-sider my own journey and' that of those on the road with me. I reflected on spiritual direction for this journey of ours. Have you ever watched the cycle of the monarch butterfly? To me it seems similar to what happens in spiritual direction. The journey is one of wonder and joy. The journey is one of searching, watching, waiting, mystery, and transformation. Marcb-.4pri11994 213 Adams ¯ A Transformational.yourney The egg of the monarch butterfly looks like a very, very tiny pearl. The Searching To get yourself a monarch-butterfly caterpillar, you would do well to look in a field, along the road, or in a garden for the milk-weed plant and then to examine its leaves and stalk carefully. The egg of the monarch butterfly looks like a very, very tiny pearl. You can take the leaf on which the egg rests and place it on a moist sponge; in time you will see a tiny caterpillar emerge to begin its new life. If you cannot find an egg, then you should look for an already hatched monarch caterpillar--with its eas-ily spotted black, white, and yellow circular bands--wherever it has left a trail of partly con-sumed milkweed leaves. Directees do their own kind of searching in spiritual direction. They search for a director who will help them unfold their real selves, one who will help them search out the truth, one who will love them for who they are and continually journey with them as they come to know a God who nourishes them on their journey. In spiritual direction directees search and find; they search and sometimes do not find; but they do not stop searching, no matter how painful it becomes. It is not the director's demand that makes this contihued search happen. It is their realization that God's search for them is much greater than their search for God because God's love for them is unconditional. The Watching If you really want to watch the monarch caterpillar in its var-ious stages, then you need to put the portion of the plant that the caterpillar is on into a large glass jar and cover it with some fine netting. The caterpillar moves all over the plant, continu-ally eating bits of leaqes, taking in all the nourishment it can for the journey. In very quiet moments, with your ear over the top of the jar, you can hear the sound of each bite. It is that kind of posture of attentive listening that is part of being a spiritual director. It takes many quiet moments to notice what is happening in a directee's journey. It takes the right setting, an atmosphere for growth, openness, and readiness for the jour-ney. The directees need to place themselves in a setting where spiritual direction can take place, to prepare themselves to be 216 Review for Religious receptive to however our God wishes to feed them with words, prayers, songs, or silence. The Waiting The caterpillar needs leaves from the milkweed plant every day. You can watch in silence each day for its constant growth-- watching it become larger and larger until one day it stops eating and begins searching for a place to attach itself so as to begin the mysterious and won-derful work of forming the chrysalis. I have watched for many hours in utter amazement at how care-fully the caterpillar walks around and around its container until it finds the place to fasten itself securely. Th

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

Issue 37.4 of the Review for Religious, 1978. ; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS iS edited in collaboration with faculty members of the Department of Theology of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. It is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute; St. Louis, Missouri. © 1978 by REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri. Single copies: $2.00. Subscription U.S.A. and Canada: $8.00 a year; $15.00 for two years. Other countries: $9.00 a year, $17.00 for two years. For subscription orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS; P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Robert Williams, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Joseph F. Gailen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Associate Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor July, 1978 Volume 37 Number 4 Correspondence with the editor and the associate editors, manuscripts and books for review should be sent to REVIEW VOa RELIGtOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph's College; City Avenue at 54th Street; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19131. "Out of print" issues and articles not re-issued as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. The Prayer of Darkness Carol Jean Vale, S.S.J. Sister Carol Jean is on the staff of St. Joseph Academy; Main Street; McSherrystown, PA 17344. An earlier contribution of Sister Carol Jean was "God, Community and the Religious Person" (September, 1976). The prayer of darkness shadows the human spirit after a moment of unparalleled, penetrating, haunting luminescence. For a moment God's life blazes in the center of the heart with an energy and vitality never previously perceived. So intensely does he reveal himself that it seems as though we are for the first time entering into life. Present existence appears dulled and unreal in the advent of so dynamic a presence. Dt~ring this experience we f~el so free that we could willingly surrender all to him and enter forever into this extraordinary existence so strangely, familiar and familiarly strange. The whole of our person ignites into a Conflagration of burning love and flaming longing for the living God. With false certainty, our intellect assures us that, finally, we have arrived at the. point of union with the transcendent Being] A radiating peace suffuseg our person and joy explodes in the rhythm of our hearts. " Such an experience may occur only once with tremendous power and potency, or it may recur over a relatively brief period of time for a few minutes dispersed through the c~3urse of several days or weeks. In the latter case, a loving Father gentles us along' slipping in and out of presence. Then--all goes black. Night descends. What remains of the experience is a living memory so real, so vivid that it charges the absence with an almost physical anguish of longing. This memory sustains us .through the darkness as it reminds us of the presence we seek and cannot now perceive. The keen remembrance of his presence is God's gift--it is spiritual food for the desert 481 482 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 of purification, for the night of daikness. The intense experience of God imprints on our spirit a knowledge of the destination to which we afe journeying. Indelibly inscribed in our hearts is the memory 0fthe presence of the God towards whom we are on pilgrimage. As the light within us to darkness dims, the flicker of the flame of his presence fires our minds with the knowledge that even in the darkness his Unseen presence shines. The memory of the light gives a vision of the journey's end though the way is charged with dark uncertainty. The value of this prayer of darkness is that it stretches us to the very limits of our being. It calls forth the essence of the energy of life even as it empties us of the essence of the power of death. Darkness breeds out the selfish desires, the egotistical goals, the hidden plottings of the covered and unknown subconscious. This prayer reveals us to ourselves as we are in God's sight and it empowers us to surrender to his transforming vision. While the sensible presence of God evades our questing, his unper-ceived presence burns our spirit to new depths of holiness. To view this process would be to die from too much revelation, so the darkness conceals the blinding fires of God's blazing furnace. The prayer of darkness is de-signed to lead us to a faith that slowly reveals the Fa~her--a gentle light glowing in the core of our inmost being. This light fires itself into the "living flame of love" only at the price of total surrender, absolute denial, con-summate purification. It seems strange that what is supposed to be so good pains us so terribly. The healing touch of God, like the knife of the diligent surgeon, stabs pain into the firm skin of our insidious sinfulness. Each moment of intense touching leaves the recipient reeling in a vacuum of tenebrity and agony. This darkness, which grows seemingly more and more impenetrable, slowly tempers us to withstand a light eqiaal in luminosity to the density of its opaque blaCkness. Phototropic like the seedling, we grow lightwards only at the cost of piercing the dark earth, dirt grain by dirt grain. The process of ascent proceeds slowly, and demands a careful scrutiny of each grain of sin and imperfection before that minute piece of earth moves aside and allows us to pass on to the next invariably different grain. The darkness of this night uncovers the darkness lurking within our own hearts. We behold ourselves as sinners even as we behold God's holiness as it floods the shores of our minds with the incredible truth of its potency. Such knowledge leads us deeper into the night where we know instinctively that we will be bared to the dark rays of a light powerful enough to eradicate the effects of sin~s tenacious grasp. It becomes clear to us that each at-tachment or need must be displaced. All that is not God must be relin-quished. EvEn our most secret loves must be released. Those attachments to which we cling unaware must be cauterized by a dark and unrelenting fire which flames secretly within us. Aware only of the darkness, we often fail to see the new light that slowly emerges as even those sins we knbw not become purified by the heat of the furnace of God. Such darkness is the price of vision. The Prayer of Darkness / 483 Early in formation we learned that the absence of God's consolation in prayer is an experience that everyone undergoes to a greater or lesser intensity. Yet, no matter how much we have read, heard, or pondered, when the night descends panic and question envelop us as well. We knew it would be painful, but never did we expect this degree of agony. We knew it would touch our lives with trials, but not that it would pierce into every corner of our lives demanding conversion. We knew that we needed purification, but not that we required the intensity of an inferno to burn away our ingrained loves. We knew that it would last a long time, but not that it might stretch out over years of molding, remolding, and molding yet again. For some reason, we do not actually believe that we are as sinful as the degree of purification would indicate. We fail to understand that he wants all, really all, and that he will stop at nothing to strip us of the affections that hold us back from the vision of his face. Perhaps the cross tests a dimension of man never explored by joy. Suffering and joy meet only in the moment of God. Joy draws us to the heights while suffering carves in us new caverns of depth. It is analogous to the. reflection of a high mountain in a limpid blue, crystal-mirroring lake. If the mountain's height could be perfectly scaled into the waters of the luminous lake it would, accurately represent the effect that suffering has on joy. The deeper the suffering the higher the'joy, reaching into the altitude of God. The cross tries the ability to endure, to expand in consciousness, to sail the seas of unknown mystery and to chart the oceans of unexplored inner space. Suffering is the vehicle that alone lets us enter and safely travel in the atmosphere of joy that.transfuses the divine milieu. It is the quality of our dying that determines the quality of our living. To the degree that we have been stripped and emptied will we be inner-directed and unshackled. The more deeply God has penetrated the uncircumcised regions of our hearts, the more freely will we be able to enter into the current of life unencumbered by our own dreams of success and hopes for self-glorification. The existential moment holds untold opportunities for life-choices birthed out~ of our death to callousness, indifference, and egoism. The death of the prayer of darkness draws Us out of ourselves. To survive the struggle it becomes imperative to forget self. If pain turns inward we become small, selfish, bitter, and self-pitying. Only an outward movement insures growth and new depths of holiness. Pain drives us be-yond the confines of the narrow world of "I" to consider, embrace, and compassionate with others. The' night of darkness bestows a new sense, of oneness with all other people for it puts us deeply in touch with the ground of their being. As we come to understand who we are, and who God is we learn to understand who others are and who God is in them. Our outward orientation toward God in pr.ayer seeps over into our everyday lives, be-coming an outward orientation toward others. ,. Trials which tear at every area of our lives characterize this dark 4~14 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 prayer--rejection by, or difficulties in community, lack of understanding on the part of friends, dissatisfaction with our apostolate, family difficulties or deaths, poor health, self-doubt, scrupulosity, lack of fulfillment even in those areas where we once met fulfillment. No created thing seems to be sufficient. There is a gnawing emptiness with the temporal and transient, even the eternal God rests silently in the dark impenetrable stillness of our being. This is but another way that the Lord strips us and shows us the emptiness of an existence apart from him. It is his way to mold our value system. In this state of dark uncertainty, he shapes us to image the design of his heart as each aspect of life reduces or enlarges to its proper pro-portion. Gradually the heart comes to cent(r solely on Jesus as Lord rec-ognizing him as the focal point of all living. The deeper we journey into the night the more we become absorbed in God. Indeed, we continually search for him in the midst of the darkness. At every turn, in every corner of ourselves we quest for some glimpse of the presence that more and more preoccupies our waking and even sleeping moments. The more elusive this lover the more ardently we seek him. Fear that we are not serving him stalks the inner caverns of our minds and we strive more totally to be faithful in the smallest details of our daily living. We are driven to perform voluntary acts of love knowing that such acts will draw us more deeply into the fire and more totally into him. Willing, joyful choices of self-death insure willing, joyful life-choices. Fasting, penance, self-giving constitute forms of self-immolation that seed new life in the fertile soil of the human spirit. The desire to fast from food is a form of death that disciplines the will to choose to fast from death-dealing words and actions. Penance forges in the deepest person a new desire to go beyond the narrow confines of self in an effort to direct our energies in service to others. Each time we transcend ourselves to serve the other we die a little more to that spirit of selfishness that holds us back from God and from those he loves. These active forms of voluntary self-death cannot even begin to approximate the depths of new found freedom wrought by the power of God's purification, but they are our contribution to the night of fire. Blessed is he or she who can call the darkness holy, who can desire its purification, who can rest in the question of its presence. This person will grow rapidly because the process of purification is facilitated by generosity. The more we submit to the fire of tempering the sooner we will find the inferno subsiding. If such generosity does not characterize our attitude, we can ponder the authenti(ity of the prayer itself. The night should birth in us greater service, increased prayer, deeper love of others, As the darkness washes the spirit with new life that life should begin to emerge and become visible to those whom we meet. It is a fire whose by-products are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. All the gifts with which we were endowed at baptism and confirmation become activated as the night of fire frees them from their The Prayer of Darkness / 41t5 resting place in the well of our person. New energy is released and life pours forth to the surface of our lives. The inward darkness more and more manifests itself as outward light. It is a pain that stimulates active concern for others as it burns away the self-concern that is an integral part of our sinful condition. The prayer of darkness is, then, a consuming, non-consuming fire. Our sinful and secret affinities are incinerated and purified while our spirit is filled with a new energy and power for creative living. At the night's be-ginning, we see the fire of God in a moment of intense, indwelling presence. Throughout the night itself the fire's action is so volatile that the flames are hidden from the eyes. The living God ravishes the heart and turns it toward himself. As the night ends we again behold the fire within--the fire that is the God of light dwelling in the ground of our being. This prayer teaches that the vision of God is given only to those who have endured the night of the cross. The prayer of darkness delivers ou~: bodies to the instrument of puri-fication. On this wood we are scourged, immolated, and ultimately con-secrated. To be crucified one must stretch out the whole length of his body. Such a body defies the power of death. It cannot be held. The tension toward life is too great. The body has been stretched beyond the point of death's power. Powerless, defenseless, and weak, the crucified body re-linquishes itself in an act of total faith. "In weakness, my power reaches perfection." This body enters the state of total surrender and in that stance the Lord of life invadeS the human spirit and fills it with the power and strength and light of the life of God. This action constitutes the purpose Of the prayer of darkness. It crucifies the human spirit and purifies it so that once faith becomes the habitual attitude of personal presence to God and others, the Trinity may reveal its dwelling.place in the now light-filled inner space of the heart's secret chamber. God himself has carved out his kingdom in our hearts. Suffused with an atmosphere of faith, irradiated with the light of Jesus Christ, powered by the energy of the Holy Spirit, sacralized by the presence of the Father, this secret room pulses with divine presence. To this dwelling place of God comes the person readied for betrothal. The night of darkness ended, the human spirit basks in the light of God gently flaming in the secret chamber of his fire-tendered heart. The night of darkness is the furnace of God, the birth-bed of life, the dark forger of light. Endured in all of its terrible intensity it creates new space for living. Once ended the night heralds the dawn of the day of forever, the momentless moment of visionless vision. Two Models of Christian Spirituality Val J. Peter Father Peter, a priest of the Archdiocese o.f Omaha, is currently associate professor of theol, ogy at Creighton University; 2500 California St.; Omaha, NE 68178. A I. Case Studies in Confusion young religious complains of problems of vacillation in his prayer life, his relations with others, and his self-concept. These three are generally good when he is performing well. But he has discovered since leaving the novitiate that virtue is not virtue unless there is a realistic alternative. So when his performance inevitably falters, so does his ability to pray. And because his self-concept is also diminished, he really cannot relate "to anyone on a deeper level. At times he is so gripped with a sense of un-worthiness and shame that he is not open to people around him. Because of this he feels intense loneliness and really feels ashamed to express his difficulties to anyone. Often he is paralyzed by an intense introspective-ness, constantly questioning his motives for every'thing. A retired religious finds herself becoming increasingly angry and bitter at her religious order. She was told in the novitiate to strive for perfection, "never be happy with yourself,." andalways try to please. During her long teaching career she was what many considered a model of obedience, piety, and hard work. Now she is old and sick and shunted off into a corner of a retirement home. Since she has outlived her usefulness, she findsJ herself shorn of any self-worth. Her source of securit~ is shattered. She is bitter and angry at the way she was trained, the way she lived, and the way she is now treated. A religious in her thirties has been in counseling for some months. She complains of being increasingly unable to deal with the guilt she feels as a Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 4117 result o fan intense romantic affair of short duration some years previously. She blames a book she read on sex and celibacy for the trouble she got herself into. In her mind God simply will not forgive her so she cannot forget. A former religious talks cynically of his experience in the order as alienating, unhealthy, and destructive. He says he became alienated from himself in that despair and self-hate were the result of his poor perform-ance. He says he became alienated from others beause his daily decision making was inevitably based on trying to conform the world to his need for security. He says it alienated him from God, in that God was seen as master and man as slave, no matter how much official rhetoric denied it. Because of this threefold alienation he has rejected his former order as well as its religion completely. These cases illustrate a central problem of Christian spirituality today. What in truth is God's relationship to his creatures and how does man's behavior fit into this relationship? The gospels tell us of the depths of God's love but they are also filled with urgent moral demands. There are even dire threats and apocalyptic promises. How does all of this fit together? Many of us first faced this issue as children in the context of totalitarian religious control and puritanical restraints. Some still do not see the need to grow beyond it. For the many others who have already freed themselves from this rigid control of behavior by threats and promises, the real issue is no longer how to achieve freedom from such control but rather what this freedom is for. Where do we go from here? Is the on!y option an irre-sponsible permissiveness that sentimentalizes God's love and reduces sin to a series of petty misdemeanors? The answer to these questions may seem ob, vious to some, But they are not so obvious to the anguished people in the cases citedabove. In an age of anxiety and uncertainty it is the obvious that is most in need of exegesis. To illustrate the problem and answer these questions, let us contrast the results flowing from two models of Christian spirituality. We are not seek-ing proof but rather understanding. The evidence brought forth by modern scholars, not to mention the great spiritual masters, is simply too massive to be overlooked: in Christianity ethics is secondary to the central religious affirmation of God's gift of self to ]as in Christ Jesus, So our purpose is to~ understand the relationshiP between divine and human initiative and re-spon. se ~by spelling out the consequences that result from rightly and wrongly understanding ttiis relationship between God and man. Model A: Human Initiative and Divine Response This first model is familiar to all who can relate to the cases cited above. It makes Christianity first and foremost into an ethic. Here the primary source of our security as God's creatures is our performance which God awaits before deciding what attitude to take toward ~us. To rest our security 41111 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 before God on our performance is an easy mistake for us to make. After all, we judge others on the basis of their performance; our attitude toward our fellowman reflects our reaction to his performance. And we expect the same from others. In addition, the mistake is congenial to our American culture with its heavy stress on results and on efficiency. So if a person desires that God love him very much, then he will have to perform very well indeed. ~ What If Your Performance Is Poor? If such is the case, anyone serious about his spiritual life will feel an urgent need to change his behavior, to move from insecurity to security before God, to avoid the wrath that is sure to come, and to advance along the path to perfection. Go to the spirituality section of your library and see how many tomes have the word, perfectio.n, in their titles. Acting on the desire to perform better, one of four things is likely to happen: i. You could change the criteria for good performance, now declaring that the behavior which you had thought was morally evil is in reality very good. ii. You could change the criteria for good performance, now declaring that this troublesome behavior is in reality neither good nor evil but rather of no moral consequence, insignificant and irrelevant to the Christian moral life. iii. You can try to change the poor performance, and fail in the effort. In other words, convinced that your criteria are correct, you embark on a program of moral renewal and fail miserably. You simply cannot change. iv. Or you can try to change your poor performance, and succeed in that effort. Examples of the~e four possibilities come quickly to mind. i. You should be proud of it, not sad. In this approach one changes the moral evaluation of acts to diminish the burdens of guilt. The religious who complains of being unable to deal with the guilt she feels as a result of a brief but intense romantic affair is a prime candidate for this approach. She has performed poorly--by her own evaluation. But feeling the weight of this poor performance and the resulting negative attitude of her God, she may decide (in fact she may be mistakenly encouraged in this decision) upon further reading and reflection that her criterion has reversed itself: God would surely be very displeased if this affair were morally evil; but what if it is not? Was not her loving this man a most important awakening of her humanity as a woman, a maturing of her love psychologically and spirit-ually? Did it not relieve her loneliness, support her faltering ego, moderate her frustrations, and bring a refreshing experience of closeness? Is not God proud of her? Should she not also rejoice and be proud? With this change in criteria comes relief from the agonizing burden of guilt and a new attitude on the part of God. The main point here is that Model A sharply reduces the odds of making sound judgments about criteria for morality. Why? Because the central concern of this religious and others operating under Model A is not to discover the truth of the affair but rather to come to grips effectively with Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 41t9 the guilt and insecurity built into this situation by the model itself. What she is really doing is searching not for truth and genuine value but for a way to eliminate guilt and achieve good performance. The heart of Model A is manifest: "All is well because I perform well." She mistakenly assumes that the divine and human initiative and response are best understood by way of this model. Thus if there are authority figures who assertx andy are worthwhile~ this religious may be persuaded to accept what they say, not because it really is so, but because the security of good performance results from her acceptance of their words. It takes a certain degree of skill and desire for truth to sort out the opinions of various theologians on any topic. If you rummage through their opinions to find one that eliminates guilt, then you.may think you have found a bargain. But like most bargains you only get what you pay for. ii. You're worrying about the wrong things. In this second way of handling poor performance, one simply ceases to worry about a heretofore troublesome area of :morality. The young religious who complains about vacillation in his prayer life, his self-concept, and his relations with others is a prime candidate for this second approach. His problems are impatience, anger, jealousy, and revenge. Feeling the weight of his poor performance, and thus God's displeasure, he is strongly motivated by an urgent need to. stem his reversals and resume his advance along the path to perfection. Here too he can; after study and reflection, come to the conclusion that morality is not so much concerned with "keeping oneself unspotted by the world",as it is with "caring for widows and orphans." He can conclude that impatience and petty jealousy--and .even casual anger and a little re-venge- are pretty much morally indifferent especially in an age when there is so much social injustice in the world: racial prejudice, nuclear blackmail, grinding poverty, overpopulation, and pollution. This certainly makes him feel a lot better about himself. It improves his prayer life and his relationships with others. This is a tremendous benefit in anybody's book. But the point again is that Model A severely limits the chances for making correct moral judgments because its central focus is the intensely felt need to get rid of insecurity and unhappiness. Changing cri-teria can be sound and balanced, but it is seldom so if strongly motivated by the felt insecurity of poor performance in following Model A. For in this model, changing moral criteria can be basically a technique for dealing with guilt rather than the result of a successful search for truth. One of the "benefits" of living in a time when there is both an "old morality" and a "new morality" is that these first two ways of dealing with poor per-formance are more readily available and much more attractive. It's like a gigantic theological "sale." You can find a bargain or two without ever coming tO grips with why you are at the bargain counter in the first place. iii. The darkness of despair. The third way of dealing with poor per-formance is to try to change our behavior and fail miserably in that effort. 490 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 The cynical former religious who considers his experience in his order as alienating and destructive is but one tragic example. He simply could not change his behavior. So he then found himself facing an even more dis-pleased God than before. He was literally in a "hell of a mess." This route is a well-traveled one, worn smooth with the tears of depression, the fa-miliar terrors of the night, and the deep-seated angers of countless an-guished pilgrims. For many, sin-sickness now sets in, not infrequently leading some to the local psychiatrist. A more moderh version of sin-sickness is manifest in the ever increasing need for some to employ various forms of sensitivity training and make them into a way of life. The other option, chosen by the alienated former religious, is to reject altogether the religion of such a Tormentor-God in order to preserve one's mental health. If these are the only choicesmmental breakdown or rejection of religion--it is understandable why the latter would seem attractive. In these circum-stances, who would be so insensitive and cruel as to threaten such a person with the biblical consequences of an atheism he now embraces as a last resort? One certainly gains an insight into the problems of Model A by analyzing the despair one is led to under these circumstances. One cannot .turn to God. One is rather driven away from God who has become not the source of all security and all care but the very opposite. , iv. I have fought the good fight and won the race. The fourth way of dealing with poor performance is to try to change our behavior and succeed in that effort. What are the problems that loom large for such a person as he strives to live the Christian life? What If Your Performance Is Good? If such is the case a Model A person is sure to feel secure in the knowledge that God is pleased with him, loves him a great deal, and has a commensurate reward waiting for him in the life to come. Three problems, however, plague the success of a Model A Christian, problems built into the model itself: i. problems of self-righteousness and self-Sufficiency ii. problems of self-deception iii. problems with ongoing conversion. Examples come quickly to mind. i. Lord, I thank you that I am not like the rest of men. A man who has achieved considerable success in his priestly life may feel his consistently good performance to be a source of great security and happiness. But since his security is in his performance and not in God as a result of using this model, he ~pays a high price for it. He feels self-righteously superior to others; he looks down on them; he tends not to listen very much to their ideas (after all if they were so smart, why aren't they more successful?). This priest seldom, if ever, seeks spiritual advice and does not need a Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 491 spiritual director. He is self-sufficient. He is his own counselor--and con- ¯ sequently has a fool for a client. This priest sees no problems in living out his permanent commitment since he is particularly strong-willed and has highly developed coping techniques. He is convinced that all those who break their permanent commitments are simply weak-kneed and callow, lacking willpower. ii. Using the publican's words while praying the pharisee's prayer. Take the case of a highly successful religious who believes that his good performance really and trulyis due to God's grace. He does not merely ask God foi" good fortune while attaining virtue on his own. No, he says, it is God's grace~that makes him both want to perform well and actually do so. But, he says, God has given his grace indifferently and impartially to all, only to be fair, to give everyone a fighting chance. Life is for him much like a race in which God, as 'referee and judge, to be fair and impartial, gives everyone a fighting chance. So this religious could not have been successful without God's help, just as a football team cannot win the game if the referees are not fair. Yet now he has won so God owes him the promised reward. He is deceived by his success--not only about permanent com-mitment but also about success and failure, his own and others'. And h~ peddles his products to a ready-made market where they are in great de-mand. So by using the publican's words as packaging, he deceives himself and his customers into thinking they are buying something other than the pharisee's problems. ~ iii. If today you hear his voice, do not harden your heart. Take the case of a dynamic, n0-nonsense sister who has achieved considerable success as principal in an affluent parochial school. She has always been a winner ever since the novitiate days when she was singled' out as a future leader. She does.not tolerate--and neither does God--failure~in her own life nor in the teachers under her. On this tight ship they either produce or walk the plank. Success has long secured for her the status and acclaim that God and her public have in store for winners. She's got the world on the end of a string. Mother Teresa is scheduled to talk in town, and this principal out of curiosity makes a special effort to go and see for herself what this "living saint" has to offer. But she gets more than she bargained for. In a:totally unexpected flash of. insight she sees Mother Teresa surrounded by success yet seemingly oblivious to, and immune from, what are now clearly seen as its seductive effects. By comparison she suddenly experiences just for a moment the spiritual shabbiness of her own small love for God and his people. How was she to know? What must God think of her now? Thus does her long established but~tenuous security vanish in the intensity of the moment. What is she to do? Either she puts these thoughts out of her mind by explaining them away (something not too hard to do) or she will be thrown back into the insecurity before God which she has seen so often in others 492 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 and which, she thought, her complete success had vanquished. The former is clearly a much more attractive option. In other words the security of good performance is a very tenuous security indeed. It lasts only as long as good performance lasts. It finds immense difficulties in acknowledging the need for an ever deepening change of heart, an ever deepening realization of our sinfulness and our inability to love God more--the ongoing need for a Savior and Redeemer. Let us conclude with a brief look at the case of the retired religious who, having outlived her usefulness, noff finds herself increasingly isolated in lonely bitterness and resentment. She is suffering from an ailment prevalent in.Model A, a pathology which Rollo May once called "the divine right to be taken care of." When she wasstill young in the religious life she entered into a contract with God which read as follows: "I, Sister Alice, the party of the first part, agree that I shall always and forever permanently give up the following activities for my entire lifetime: worshipping other gods, taking the Lord's name in vain, dishonoring parents, killing, committing sexual sins, stealing, cheating, lying, and coveting. I further agree to relinquish my right to make moral judgments to God, the party of the second part, and his lawful representatives. And I, God, the party of the second part, in return for the faithful obedience of the party of the first part, do hereby grant Sister Alice the right to my special care; and I, God, do further promise that if she keeps her promise, I will reward the party of the first part with success and happiness." Well, Sister Alice, retired and shunted off to a corner of a rest home, is not as happy now as she thinks she should be. So, she feels, God has not kept his part of the contract. He has not honored her "divine right to be taken care of." What happens? Confusion, anger, and resentment take hold and spiritual collapse is near. "I was promised that I would always be taken care of if I were obedient. Look how obedient I have been all my life. So why am I not being taken care of?." Notice how different this is from the genuine Christian response: "Lord, I love you no matter what." Notice too thatthis kind of contract is also popular in the postconciliar Church. Only minor modifications are necessary. First, substitute the char-acteristics of love listed in 1 Co 13 for the Ten Commandments. Secondly, substitute the duty always to follow one's conscience for the duty always to obey religious superiors. The rest of the contract is the same, as aie the results. ~ For many people accustomed to living by Model A there is an under-standable reluctance to leave it behind. Although their behavior is rigidly controlled by threats and promises, they suspect that the only alternative is a model which whitewashes all activity no matter how morally atrocious by saying: it doesn't matter what you do because God loves you no matter what. They see Model A as at least remaining faithful to the radical de- Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 493 mands of the gospel. And they suspect that the only alternative is to abandon these radical demands in favor of a watered down gospel of sen-timental love. They rightly see a gospel of sentimental love as doubly defective, unfaithful as it is to both the radical love of God and to his demands as well. Where do we go from here? Is the only option an irre-sponsible permissiveness that reduces sin to a series of petty misde-meanors? That is the question which.we shall directly address in the second part of this study. II. Case Studies in Confidence We have been looking at the gospels. They tell us of the depths of God's love for us but they are also filled with urgent moral demands. We even find their pages filled with dire threats and apocalyptic promises. How does all of this fit together? Many of us faced thi~ issue as children in the context of authoritarian religious control and puritanical restraints. Many still do not know how to grow beyond this context. For others who have already freed themselves from this rigid control of behavior by the threats and promises inherent in Model A (described graphically in Part I), the real issue is no longer how to achieve freedom from that totalitarian control but rather, what is this freedom for? What is this freedom grounded in and oriented towards? Where do we go from here? Is the only option an irre-spon, sible permissiveness that sentimentalizes God's love and reduces sin to inconsequential misdemeanors? Model B: Divine Initiative and Human Response So we will look at another model of moral performance. This one does not ground our security in our performance but rather in the Good News of God's self gift. A word of caution is in order here. As mentioned at the conclusion of Part I, for many people accustomed to living by Model A there is an understandable .reluctance to leave it behind. Although their behavior is rigidly controlled by threats and promises, they suspect that the only al-ternative is a model which whitewashes all activity, no matter how morally atrocious, by saying: it doesn't matter what you do because God loves you no matter what. They see Model A as at least remaining faithful to the radical demands of the gospel. And they suspect that the only alternative is to abandon these radical demands in favor of a watered down gospel of sentimental love. They rightly see such a gospel as doubly defective. It is unfaithful not only to the radical moral demands of the gospel but also to the radical nature of God's love as well. Unfortunately so many examples of people abandoning the radical demands of the gospel for a watered down version of the love ethic can be cited that these seem to be the only two options available---one even more defective than the other. Model B, as we shall call it, goes beyond these two options. It is a higher 494 / Review for Religious, Volume 37,~ 1978/4 viewpoint arrived at by way of a deeper understanding of the relationship between God and man. In this model one tries to be faithful to the truth of both the immediacy of God's care (his radicallove no matter what), and the immediacy of God's demands which flow from this divine love. Unlike Model A, this model does not make Christianity into just an ethic. It rather understands that Christianity is first and foremost an effec-tive affirmation of God's relationship with his creation: it is the revelation in Christ Jesus of God's own gift of se!f, his love--sacrificial love--no matter what. Unlike the sentimental love posture, this model takes God's love so seriously that there is an urgent, radical call to respond. It is out of this incredibly serious gift of God's own self that the radical demands of the gospel arise. These ethical demands are not radical because of threats and promises; they are. radical because God's gift of self is at the root of divine and human existence. Whatever threats and promises there are in this model, they are not controlling. They are not the kind of threats and promises found in a dictator-slave relationship as in Model A. They are rather the very special kinds of threats and promises that inevitably accompany any genuine movement toward self-absorption and toward self donation. These kinds of threats and promises are inherent in the kind of.relationship we call agapeic love. And the more intense the love, the more it penetrates to the depths of our being, the more it is both promising and threatening at the same time. This dizzying balance of joy and dread, fulfillment and anxiety has much to do with the fact that love is so exciting. The stirrings of this kind of love are the first stirrings of hope. So in Model B, a person listens to the Word of God and is moved genuinely to wonder what is so unheard of that it is proclaimed in such a startling style. One hears that God's attitude toward us is not grounded in our performance in such a way that God simply reacts to that performance. One wonders how that can be so, since we so often find it not so in our dealings with men. In fact a person comes to anticipate that others will treat him in a way that is a manifest reaction to how he treats them. If it is so that God's ways are not man's ways, then that would be good news indeed. He hears further that God initiates and does not simply react. God so cared about men that he sent his Son; his Son so cared about them that he gave his life for them. And having given his life he still so cared about them that he sent the Spirit who would flood their hearts with so deep a care that it would flow over into the lives of others. That man Jesus, who knewGod as "my father," loved his father "no matter what." And he knew that his father loved him "no matter what," simply because he was his son. The immediacy of his father's care that daily dawned on him in, ever different ways in the face of daily different experiences was an immense wellspring of security. It was not the security that is grounded in performance: "All is well because I perform well." Indeed he performed well and his father Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 495 rejoiced in that. No, it was a security grounded in the fact that he was simply his beloved son. It was not a security stemming from a senile,~ grandfather-like care toward an immature child who can do what he feels like doing without fear, without demands made on him. No, he understood that out of that care flowed the most urgent need to do the will of his father. It was not a security that Would immunize him from loneliness and terror. He found in the desert the courage to stand alone and not throw himself down ("God will bear you up!"). He had no contract resulting in "the divine right to be taken care of." What he had was the assurance of his father's care no matter what befell him. What he had was not the as-surance that there would be only success and acclaim--no numbness of defeat, no sorrow, no pain, no indifference, no enmity, no fears, no be-trayals, no rejection, no death. But rather the assurance that even in all of the~e there was at work his father's care which was strong enough, effective enough, loyal enough to be trusted. It was a security born of love--with all that this entails. So, too, you and I hear that our Father is radically in love with us; that he is our Father as well, one who loves his sons and daughters no matter what, simply because he has set his heart on us and spoken our names. He calls us to a human life so deep that it is somehow divine. A man wonders ¯ how this can be so. But he begins to realize how when it begins to dawn on him that he is himself falling radically in love with God. He will now have to throw away all old contracts with God and learn to get along without such. In Model B the source of security for the Christian is then in the first instance the immediacy of God's care~ Because this care is not plastic, there flows from i~ the immediacy of God's demands. It is all the more intense because our very being thirsts for the living God. "Our souls were made for thee, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in thee." Thus mankind, bent on denying its own meaning while it cries out for it, encounters its sole source and destiny in this divine sel(donation. Operating under this model the possibilities are twofold, as in Model A: either my performance is poor, by whatever standards, or it is good. Here too we shall examine each of the alternatives. What If Your Performance Is Poor? If such is the case, anyone' serious about his spiritual life will be moved to change his,behavior. But the motive will not be the conviction that I am not keeping my part of the contract. Nor again will the motive be the need to escape the loneliness and terror that poor performance brings in Model A. In Model B the proper formation of conscience begins with worship; the will of God is best seen in the work of God, our redemption. It is his will that we accept wholeheartedly 'his gift of sell his fidelity and love no matter what. Am I doing God's will? This is the first place where the question must 496 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 be answered. Am I accepting his redemptive .love, his steadfast and loyal love? Note here that even in Model B there is insecurity in poor performance. The insecurity even functions at the same primordial level as the security flowing from God's steadfast love. It functions within the controlling horizon of God's saving fidelity. So the insecurity found in Model B is of a different type than in Model A. It is not founded on the false premise that God values me only for my utility. It is not the insecurity flowing from the supposed conditional nature of God's self gift. So the realization in faith that God is faithful "no matter what" eliminates the root problem central to morality in Model A. In this redemptive relationship, poor performance is simply that, poor. Surely I am sorry; I have not cared enough. And the inability by myself to care enough turns me back to the source of all care. But the poor per-formance remains. What shall I do about it? Four possible choices come to mind: i. You could change the criteria for good performance, declaring that the behavior which you thought was morally evil is in reality very good. ii. You could change the criteria for good performance, declaring that this troublesome behavior is in reality neither good nor evil but rather of no moral consequence, irrelevant to the Christian moral life. iii. You can try to change the poor performance, and fail in that effort. iv. You can try to change your poor performance, and succeed. i) and ii) The search for the truth. Let us take some examples. A mid-dle- aged religious finds herself haunted by the specter of world famine. She feels so troubled by the miseries of mankind that she cannot even enjoy a fine steak-dinner. In fact she just returned from a home visit and could hardly sit through the family Christmas dinner where the table groaned under the sheer weight of the sumptuous repast. She felt guilty for having participated in such. In fact she feels guilty about being born in such a family and in such a country where the wealth is simply "loot stolen by an imperialist, racist society." She half believes that she is stealing food from the nomads in Sahel when she drives her car. She half believes that by eating steak (which costs twenty times as much protein to produce as we get from it) instead of soybeans she is directly taking food out of the hands of Bangladesh children. The main concern and principal need of this religious is to discover the truth of the matter and that is no small undertaking. But it is surely a different undertaking than the illusive search for security for a way to appease an angry God, so characteristic of Model A. Her search is for truth and genuine value rather than simply seeking a way to eliminate guilt. To do God's will, to love effectively is a movement toward what is truly good, and not just apparently such. So one searches for what is really true and truly worthwhile because one simply, and really, wants to know, no matter Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 497 what the other consequences. There is a terrible need to find out. Such a need for truth does not guarantee results. But it does improve the odds of making better judgments about what is right and wrong. This need for the truth provides an openness which is the beginning of a self-corrective process. There are many areas of our lives where our criteria for right and wrong need ongoing revision, and sometimes even radical reversal. There are many areas of our lives where, due to misunderstanding, values are de-valued and disvalues are valued. The misunderstanding is not merely due to lack of information or education but also due to lack of love. Sexuality comes quickly to mind as an area little understood. But it is not the only, nor even the principal arena for ongoing autobiographical revision of cri-teria for right or wrong. Self donation and self-absorption, authority, and autonomy, justice and charity are much more critical. Now moved by a deep hunger for the truth, one can still make mistakes in judgment, but the felt need to be open to the truth in whatever arena (lying, stealing, world hunger, sexual behavior, and so forth) tends to countercheck our biases which predetermine the results of our investigation. iii. Lord, to whom shall we go? The third way of dealing with poor performance is to try to change our behavior, and to fail miserably in that effort. Take the case of a priest who struggles with ambition for status and higher office, with an insatiable thirst for public honors and recognition--a problem common to conservative and liberal alike. He now sees that he has lived too much of his life bartering half-truths for favors, service for ac-colades, compromise for advancement. He gave too many people lies when they asked for truth and he half convinced himself that he was helping the Church by populating her with' scoundrels and liars. But of late he has been deeply troubled by questions such as those St. Thomas More put to Sir Richard Rich, a man who bartered perjury for the post of Attorney General of Wales: "For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . But for Wales!" Like Israel as seen through the eyes of the prophet Osee, this priest had through the years pursued the desires of his own heart. His life, like the history of Israel, was a sordid and shameful story of the betrayal of Yahweh's hesed, his steadfast love. And now, try as he might, he finds himself caught in the coils of a sinful history from which he cannot extricate himself. Is there any light in the midst of his terrible darkness? Is there any radical source of hope to vanquish despair, that frightful footsoldier quar-tered in his house? "Lord, to whom shall I go?" The answer is to turn to the Lord as the source of all care, all strength, all healing. So here failure can be acknowledged for what it is yet it is not conducive to despair. With Augustine we can still say: "Late have I loved thee, O Beauty, so ancient and so new!" Perhaps most people do not experience such a massive case of failure 491~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 as this priest. But there is no doubt whatsoever that most people do ex-perience pernicious and persistent failure in at least one or two special areas of their lives: pride and prejudice, lying and cheating, sexual infidelity and inordinate self-seeking. In all these cases failure does not force one to turn away from an angry God but rather toward God as the radical source of all healing and care. Failure does not make you search out magic rituals of the latest psychological variety nor of the more traditional kind. (Wouldn't that be a relief and wouldn't it allow us a better chance of judging and applying the techniques of modern psychology in a more appropriate and refreshing way?) Here one realizes that God really cares no matter what; that he seeks to break the chains of our bondage and to emancipate us for a new life; that he sets out to win our hearts: "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards, and make the valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt" (Os 2:14-15). "Lord, you can do all things; you can make me whole." This is God's purifying love. Yet it is apparently far easier for many people to believe in a god who dislikes us than in one who loves us no matter what, who seeks to bring his creation and redemption to fruition within us. The latter is far harder to believe than the mystery of the Holy Trir~ity itself. For not a few people really dislike themselves, and so they shape God to their own image. Or at best they imagine God pounding his gavel and saying at the Last Judgment: "You people on the left, there, are going to hell. You people on the right, there, are going to heaven. And I am going out to lunch because I am sick and tired of the whole business."' God, the indifferent Judge, more ~nterested in lunch than in us! The New Testament .is good news indeed, most surprising to us in the midst of our failures. If it is lived, then there need be no convulsive efforts to achieve, efforts which first direct us back to the source and font of all care. iv. I have fought the good fight and won the race. The fourth way of ' dealing with our ~erformance is to try to change our behavior and succeed in that effort. How does such success function for a person who, calling God "Father," strives to live the Christian life? What If Your Performance Is Good? Now God rejoices in man's good performance. But the Christian's se-curity does not rest in any infallible guarantee of its c6ntinuance. In this situation there is a quiet joy and a considerable desire to share one's inner peace. But there is also fearand sometimes even trembling.Yet the fear is not a neurotic anxiety of a mere performance-relationship. Rather it is a healthy respect for the inconstancy ofourhearts, not God's. One is not sure of one's continued good performance, but only sure of G0d's healing care. Two Models of Christian Spirituality / 499 The problems that plague the success of a Christian operating out of Model A (problems built into the model) are transposed by the remedies inherent to Model B: i. problems of self-righteousness ii. problems of permanent commitment iii. problems of ongoing conversion Examples come quickly to mind. i. Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. It is not for naught that the greatest saints proclaimed themselves very great sinners. Because the source of security and strength is God's care, there is less opportunity for self-righteousness, self-sufficiency and pharisaism to enter the picture. This is because the more one loves, the more one realizes the need of the beloved. The priest who has achieved considerable success in preaching and hearing confessions realizes that God uses the weak to heal the strong, the little ones of this world to confound the proud. He tends to listen to others because God speaks in strange ways and in unexpected places. He realizes that his greatest strength lies in his very weakness. He needs a spiritual director because self-deception is an old friend. As he goes through life he realizes that every stage of age. and wisdom and grace is accompanied by new and different temptations, all of them new and none of them quite expected, thus presenting ever fresh insights into our complete and radical dependence on God. The wisest man of all is one who at the end relies only on the mercy of God and in all honesty declares himself an unprofitable servant. ii) All I know of tomorrow is that Providence will rise before the sun. For those who mistakenly ground the feasibility of permanent commitment in man's fidelity and not God's, there are only two alternatives, both equally unenlightened and unattractive. Either permanent commitment be-comes no problem at all for me because I am particularly "strong willed" and have highly developed coping techniques. In this case I tend to view all those who do not keep their commitments to be, without ex~geption, weak-kneed and callow, somehow lacking willpower. Or permanent commitment becomes an agonizing problem to be resolved best by denying even the desirability of that kind of commitment since I could only commit myself if I were sure of my future performance. But given not only my track record but also everyone's potential for change, growth and development, then permanent commitment is risky at best and ludicrously dishonest at worst. In this case those who look down on lives of broken commitments are simple souls at best or rigid elitists at worst. For those however who ground permanent commitment in God's fidel-ity, these tortuous alternatives are unnecessary. A higher viewpoint opens up. I can commit myself permanently not because I am sure of my per-formance but because I am sure that, "with God, all things are possible." 5111~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 This changes my whole set of expectations about the future. I expect growth and development as well as my own failures to radically affect my life--to bring unheard of dilemmas and opportunities. I'm not sure how I will react to these but I do know this about tomorrow, that Providence will rise before the sun. iii. Lord, the sea is so wide and my boat is so small. A person's good performance arising out of response to God's steadfast love often makes him experience again and anew how poor this good performance has been. This experience may make him realize his inability to love God more. Thus the need for ongoing conversion. Here again one is turned to the source and font of that care. If the source of security for the Christian is God's own self gift, then the dawning awareness of being a sinner can really be accepted without neu-rotic anxiety on one hand and without a "who-gives-a-damn" or even despair attitude on the other hand; without withdrawal from an evil world and yet with appreciation for moments of withdrawal; without convulsive efforts to achieve and yet with the most wholehearted efforts to achieve, efforts which first direct us back to the source and font of care. Then one might,find the courage to accept his shortcomings for what they are and, in the healthiest sense, strive mightily to move forward. The Christian has no need to become overly anxious about his d~epest instinctual drives which rise to the surface of his life in the forms of desires for self-aggrandizement or self-destruction. Instinctive impulses are not taboo. There is no need to live in Hesnard's I'univers morbide de lafaute. If it is true that God cares "no matter what," then the individual can recognize his instincts as both a possibility and an opportunity to be laid hold of. He can accept himself as he is--the beginning of inner freedom. He can deal with his anxieties as they arise because he is sure of God's care. And he is sure that this care is creative. Thus good performance becomes not the singular source of security but the fruit of security and a cause for rejoicing and gratitude. Perhaps he does not understand very well what performance is asked or required or called for. But he will begin where he is and do what he can, confident that some answers, however partial or tentative, will be forthcoming. So he listens, is attentive, is alert to them, is open. Once we are aware of the graciousness of God's concern, we become aware too that we will grow in further recognition of values. The choice between Model A and Model B is a clear one. Model B takes its stand with the New Testament. Where do you take yours? Community Living: Some Options Barbara Hazzard, S.N.J.M. Sister Barbara is the principa, l of Holy Spirit Elementary School in Fremont. She offers spiritual guidance and, for the past five years, has been directing retreats and has been on the summer staff of the Jesuit Retreat House, Los Altos. She resides at 3930 Parish Avenue; Fremont, CA 94536. " During the past few years, my concern about community life has become acute. Being a spiritual director and retreat guide for sisters of many dif-ferent communities has made me very aware of the problems which exist in community life today. The greatest problem seems to be the indifference or fear which members of a group have with regard to helping one another lead a deeply Christian life. There are all .kinds of things which can and do serve as anesthetics against this problem: overwork, socializing, formal religious exercises, meetings, professional commitments, family commit-ments, television--and time passes on, and the frustration grows. The following remarks are one person's perception of a need, and one way of dealing with that need. They arise out bf my faith in and hope for the future of religious life--in gratitude to the religious who have shared a similar faith and hope with me. An active, in opposition to contemplative, religious congregation is founded primarily to fulfill a need of the times; i.e., caring for the poor, caring for the sick, instructing the ignorant, and so forth. A religious con-gregation is a group of people who come together to live out the gospel with a certain emphasis on a particular facet of the gospel message. The under-lying purpose of coming together is twofold: to support and encourage one another in living a faith life, and to work together to proclaim the gospel to others. The first part, the support and encouragement of one another in 501 51~2 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 living a faith life, remains constant. It should become deeper and richer as the group grows in faith. The second part, the particular work of the group, is subject to change as the needs of the times shift. The concern here regards the first part of our purpose. Our pragmatic, materialistic culture has not left religious communities untouched. Most active congregations in the United States live on the level of the upper middle class. They do not want materially for much. This is not a reflection on individuals, but rather a reflection on the life-style and image which organized religious groups live and project in today's world--and on the need to look at that life-style and image. Does the nourishment of our faith-life in fact vivify our witness of the gospel, or are we a group of educated, efficient people running institutions with only a "flavor" of Christianity? Are the demands of the gospel too risky? Do we hide behind "prudence" and "practicality" as an excuse for not living our beliefs more radically? The values of Jesus seem contradictory to the values of some of his followers. He led a poor life, dependent on his Father and those around him. He was not identified with aspecific "cause" of his time, yet dealt with the problems at hand. Much of his ~problem" concerned organized religion and its ministers, those who were more concerned with the letter than with the spirit, who said one thing and did another. If Jesus were to walk this earth today, he would most likely have a similar experience. Jesus' only desire was to do whatever it was his Father wanted of him. He often sought time for prayer, alone and with his disciples, in order to know his Father's will. How often do .members of religious orders come together today in prayer specifically to know the Father's will for them, being open and ready to accept whatever that may be? There is always time for chapters, com-mittee meetings, renewal meetings, and more. Where is the time for cor-porate prayer? And how many would come if the time were provided? Is there a fear of the changes that might reveal "the Father's will"? The words uttered by so many religious today are phrases like: "I'm not surewhat we are about any more." "'I'm so tired most of.the time I can't pray.' . I feel as though I live in a boarding house. What kind of~:ommunity life do we have?" There are no simple answers. But such statements must be heard as symptoms of a condition which needs to be treated. What is necessary in order to begin the process? The primary condition is a willingness to change on the part of the individual religious, a will-ingness to say, "I am willing to try a different life-style or to adjust my life-style-- and to risk failure in trying--in order to improve the quality of my life." Time is needed, which means curtailing other commitments, to pray, to talk, to listen, to plan, not in the context of a chapter, but by coming together in small groups, for those who are willing. A clarification of val.ues is necessary. For some, the priority is the apostolate which feeds their Community Living: Some Options prayer, and their community life. For others, the priority is prayer which nourishes both community and apostolate. For still others, community life nurtures prayer and the apostolate. Certainly prayer, community life, and the apostolate are not separate entities. All three should flow together, but the emphasis will vary according to the movement of the Spirit within the ¯ person. Which emphasis? This is where, in honesty, individuals must recognize a need in them-selves and choose one of these emphases. This does not mean that only people who think alike should form local communities, but that those who live together should have a common value-base on which community life may build. The types of support needed by individuals vary. It does not have to be the same in every living situation, but it has to exist in some form in each local community if community life is going to be something more than a glorified sorority or fraternity. Pluralism seems to be the angle from which life in active communities is being re-thought. The above suggestion is a form of pluralism in life-style. Yes, this will create tension. But does not tension already exist in the living of religious life--a tension which is not always growth producing? Religious cannot use the excuse of "obedience" as a reason for what does or does not happen in a religious congregation. Each one is responsible for the quality of life within the community, and cannot let others bear the burden of that responsibility without himself becoming involved. This is a danger, especially in large, congregation.s. There are many discontented religious, discontented in the sense of looking for something more in religious life, a challenge, a way of life that is more meaningful. Just being identified with a large institution is not meaningful or necessarily religious in the sense of living and/or proclaiming the gospel message effectively. This is not to suggest a way of life that is inbred, but rather a means of nurturing the spiritual life in a way that will help to make the apostolate more joyful and perhaps more fruitful. It is a way of giving a support, encouragement, and real Christian freedom cen-tered on the gospel and a communal experience of helping each other to grow into the fullness which is Christ. 504 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 To initiate this process, two or three people who feel comfortable with one another might come together and, after some time taken for reflection, answer the following questions: 1) Why (have I come) am I still in religious life? 2) In which area have I channeled my energy (or let it be channeled) over the last 3, 5, 10, 15 years (prayer, community, apostolate)? 3) What experiences in religious life have freed me to be who God wants me to be--before him, with my confreres, in my apostolate? 4) What has impeded my ability to respond to what I feel the Spirit has asked of me? 5) If I am really honest, what ~teps do I need to take in order to align my life more closely with gospel values? Sharing one's thoughts and feelings about these questions, or others in a similar vein, will begin to help the individual to see the direction God is leading him or her in a communal effort to deepen one's living out of religious life. This paper has only made a small dent in the problem; but, hopefully, some who read it will be creative in finding other ways to begin to act. I would be grateful to have some practical suggestions, ways of im-plementing what. has been suggested in these pages. Perhaps there could follow an article incorporating these practical suggestions at a later date. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS HAS MOVED! As of June 19, the editorial office of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS has relocated from its Grand Boulevard location to its new address: Review for Religious Room 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108 Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism Bede Thomas Mudge, O.H.C. Father Mudge is novice master for his Anglican community, the Order of the Holy Cross. He resides in Holy Cross Monastery; West Park, NY 12493. The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century embarked on what they considered to be a radical "renewal" process on behalf of the Church, a process which is not without some parallels to the renewal of contemporary Christianity. Before their energy had spent itself, the Reformers called into qupstion nearly every important institution of European Christianity, and demanded searching, justification, and often, change or abolition. Any institution or custom that was judged to be valueless or hurtful from the point of view of reformed theology was thoroughly rooted out. Among the casualties of this rooting-out were the religious commu-nities. The reasons for their abolition were usually stated in theological or social categories, the most frequently quoted being an abhorrence of cel-ibacy as "unnatural," and a dislike of any lifelong vow other than that of marriage. But there were other, not quite so noble reasons, as well. Many of the religious communitieg were conservative and anything but welcom-ing to the "New Theology," and so served as centers of resistance to the Reformation. In addition, the great wealth of some of them was a scandal to the Reformers, and a temptation to the keepers of government coffers. In every territory where the Reformers' theology gained ascendancy, an intense campaign was launched against the monasteries and conventg, in which the State usually lent its coercive power to the Reformers' fervor. In a remarkably short time, the communities were disbanded, their members 505 506 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 dispersed, and monasticism as an institution ceased to exist in the Re-formed churches) But, alone of the Reformation bodies, Anglicanism never rested easy with the absence of religious orders in its structure. Almost from the time when the Reformation struggle began to quiet, there were voices raised in defense of the reestablishment of religious communities in England, and various public and private proposals were made and discussed. In the seventeenth century an extraordinary community experiment was actually begun by Nicholas Ferrar at LittleGidding, which has exercised a great fascination for Anglicans ever since. Nicholas, together with his extended family, established a quasi-monastic community in which a form of Office was observed that involved the recitation of the entire Psalter twice each day, and a vigorous social apostolate was maintained in the neighborhood. The community did not survive Nicholas' death, however, and suspicion, and anti-Roman prejudice, made it necessary for the reestablishment of traditional monastic com.munities in Anglicanism to wait until the mid-nineteenth century. Even then, religious communities were not established easily or without trials. Persecution, slander and occasional imprisonment rewarded those who dared to import "Romish" doctrines.or institutions into the Church of England, and many of the early experiments in com-munity life had quietness and obscurity forced on them as the price of their survival. But some of the founders did persevere, and eventually their communities grew, and even prospered. In the century and a quarter that have.passed since the reestablishment of religious comriiunities in Anglicanism, these communities have spread and become an accepted part of the Anglican Church scene. Though not numerous nor particularly large by Roman Catholic standards, the Anglican communities have nevertheless been influential, particularly in matters re-lating to the ~piritual life and to social concern. Though it is still not unusual to find people, both outside and inside the Anglican Church, who are only vaguely aware that "there are Episcopal nuns," the communities have gradually gained~ the trust and affection of their Church at large, and are now welcomed and encouraged, whereas at their inception, rejection and persecution were more normal reactions.2 The Spirituality of Anglicanism Any discussion of spirituality in Anglican .religious communities must necessarily take place in the context of the general spirituality of Angli-tThe sixteenth century was, to be sure, a period of low ebb in community life. Very few of the dispersed religious chose to flee to a Catholic territory where they could continue their life. They appear mostly to have settled down quietly, often supported by a government pension, and often they marred. The Carthusian martyrs of London were as remarkable for the rarity of their example, as for their fervor. 2An excellent historical summary of this'period, and histories of the foundations of the various communities can be found in Peter Anson, The Call of the Cloister, SPCK, 1956. Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism / 507 canism. But, in turn, it would not be possible to speak of Anglican spir-ituality without speaking of monasticism, because Anglican piety, depends heavily on the pre-Reformation monastic influence in England, and par-ticularly that of the Benedictine communities. It has been said that Ben-edictinism influenced English society to a greater extent than was true anywhere else in Europe. England was converted, in large part, by Ben-edictine monks. Its principal schools were operated byBenedictines, its cathedrals and principal churches were largely Benedictine foundations, and Benedictines were widely influential in the government. The Cistercian reform of Benedictinism was also influential in England, and its monasteries large and popular) The influence of the Benedictine tradition was part of the air that every medieval English person breathed. From one's earliest years, through education and into whatever station in life a person be-longed, the influence of the Abbey or Priory was never far away. And this influence was nowhere more pervasive than in the piety of the English people.4 The monastic offices and masses were commonly attended by the public; monastic spirituality was respected; and abbot and monk were part of the common scene, and likely to be respected or even beloved. Though definite Augustinian and Franciscan strains can be discerned in historic Anglican devotion, the example and influence of the Benedictine mon-astery, with its rhythm of divine office and eucharist, the tradition of learn-ing and the lectio divina, and the family relationship among abbot and community were determinative for much English life, and for the pattern of English devotion. This devotional pattern persevered through the spiritual and theological upheavals of the Reformation. The Book of Common Prayer, which was composed during the course of the Reformation, and has been the primary spiritual source-book for Anglicans ever since, continued the basic mo-nastic pattern of the eucharist and the divine office as the principal public forms of worship, and Anglicanism has been unique in this respect. Con-tinental Catholicism developed a devotional pattern centered around the eucharist, with extra-liturgical devotions such as the rosary and benediction filling the needs of most laymen. The office was, in most places, considered the business of the clergy and religious, and since, in its full canonical form, it could only be recited in Latin, it tended to disappear from popular use, except in some of the forms of a "Little Office." Protestantism developed, in most places, a worship pattern that included .very infrequent celebrations of the eucharist, as it was a Reformation principal that the eucharist should. not be celebrated unless the congregation received communion, and most aCudously enough, the purely English communities, such as the Gilbertines, while they did exist, never attained anything like the popularity of the communities which observed the Benedictine Rule. 4This influence of monastic spirituality on Anglican devotion is fully discussed in Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, SPCK, 1963. 5011 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 laymen of the time could not be persuaded to receive frequently. The worship pattern that developed was either a truncated form of the mass, as in Lutheranism, or a more informal worship service, retaining some ele-ments of the office, and supplemented by meetings for free prayer. In England alone it was the divine office that came to occupy a central de-votional position. This development was a direct carry-over from the days in which many people had attended celebrations of the office at the local abbey or priory, particularly Lauds and Vespers. But it owed much of its success to the liturgical genius of Thomas Cranmer, who in his compilation of the offices of Morning Prayer and Evensong produced what Louis Bouyer has referred to as "one of the purest forms of Christian common prayer to be found anywhere in the world."5 The devotion of Anglicans to the office has continued up to the present time. In some parish churches, though admittedly not all by any means, the office is recitedmorning and evening each day, as the Book of Common Prayer has traditionally re-quired. In some places, it is still the principal service of worship on Sun-days, and when groups of Anglicans gather, whether clergy or lay, whether for worship, business or social purposes, it is not unusual to begin the gathering with the recitation of Morning or Evening Prayer.6 The framework supplied by eucharist and office was supplemented, in Anglicanism, by an informal sort of lectio divina, characterized by a de-votion to the reading and pondering of the scriptures and other dex, otional material. When English editions of the Bible first began appearing in parish churches it was often necessary to chain them to the wall or lectern, to prevent people from stealing them for their own use. Later, when the spread of the printing press made the scriptures more available, there was also an extraordinary development of spiritual writing by men such as Jeremy Taylor and William Law, characterized by biblical and patristic inspiration and warm human feeling, and these works were widely circu-lated and read. There is also a deep current of devotion to the writings of the Church Fathers in Anglicanism.It is an Anglican maxim that Anglicans refer to the Fathers in the same way that Roman Catholics refer to the Pope, and Protestants to the Bible. A large proportion of English editions of patristic writings has historically been the work of Anglican editors. There has also been found in traditional Anglican piety, a distinct strain of "homeliness," as it is sometidaes called. A warm, tolerant, human de-votion based on loving persuasion, rather than fiery oratory is part of the Anglican temper. Historically, the Anglican clergy, being family men them-selves, have been very much part of the domestic scene in the villages and 5Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety, Notre Dame, 1955, p. 47. 6This is somewhat less common at the present, as under the influence of liturgical r~form, more frequent celebrations of the eucharist are being held, and often supplant the office. But it is worth noting that many Anglicans, including those most eager to center worship around the eucharist, are still uneasy at the loss of the office as a popular form of devotion. Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism / 51)9 parishes where they served, and have often been loved as well as revered. The Anglican liturgical calendar has more commemorations of faithful pas-tors, such as George Herbert, than of fiery missionaries, and even Anglican martyrs have commonly been of gentle disposition. Anglicanism has always been more attracted by the image of the Church as family, rather than militia, and the similarity evoked to a community of monks, living as a family, under an abbot who leads them as a father, is far from accidental. There is little extravagance in the English temper, and Anglican de-votion is usually characterized by a basic simplicity and directness that shun~ much of the emotionalism and the devotional frills of post-Refor-mation continental piety. In this, the English temper ~naturaily joins hands with the emphasis on biblical centrality that was a chief Reformation prin-ciple~ There is devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and to the saints in Anglicanism, but it is most often drawn from a scriptural and patristic outlook, with an emphasis on simplicity and emotional understatement, and later devotions have had small appeal for Anglicans. Thus, the pattern of Anglican devotion which developed was a modified form of monastic piety; the celebration of the eucharist (though sometimes quite infrequently),7 the regular recitation of the Psalter and proclamation of the scriptures in the office, fleshed out by private pondering of the Bible, the Fathers and other devotional writings, usually of a sober and gentle style. The Restoration of Monasticism The founding of specifically monastic communities in the Church of England began in the middle of the nineteenth century, shortly after the commencement of the "Oxford Movement," whose proponents wished to restore elements of Catholic belief and worship to the Anglican Church. Several communities for women were founded in the 1850's and 1860's, after some faltering starts, and the first lasting community for men followed shortly thereafter. The first communities lived under the suspicious eyes of a public still steeped in anti:papalism, and so the beginnings were cautious and semi,private. Little publicity attended the foundings of the commu-nities, and the public stir raised by even a little publicity was considerable. Against this background, it is not surprising that the first communities went out of their way to justify their existence by a great devotion to works of charity. Social work with the poor, the operation of "penitentiaries" for wayward women, and nursing were favorite occupations, and among the nursing sisters that Florence Nightingale took with her in her famous mis-sion to the Crimea were several sisters of the newly-founded (Anglican) 71n the eighteenth century faith and devotion fell to a very low ebb, and it is related that there was no eucharist on Easter Day in St. Paul's Cathedral in London one year, because the Prayer Book requires that at least two or three members of the congregation receive communion, if there is to be a celebration, and that many communicants could not be found. 510 / Review for Religious,,Volume 37, 1978/4 Society of the Holy Trinity. The often heroic work accomplished by the first members of the communities in slums and with people in desperate con-ditions did much to allay suspicion, and to create an atmosphere of tol-erance for their existence, if not of actual devotion to them. But while the works of the early communities were important and needed, it was the spiritual and communal life which drew applicants, and in this atmosphere the basically monastic pattern of Anglican spirituality, which had survived three centuries after the Reformation, had its inevitable effect. No matter how active the apostolate of the community, thecor-porate recitation of a full form of the office was present in all of the com-munities from the very start,8as was the cultivation of a personal devotional life which was more characteristic of cloistered communities in Roman Catholicism. It is an unusual Anglican community which has not had as part of its tradition the singing of the office to the plainsong melodies, a good deal of corporate silence, and a tradition of the cultivation of an intense devotional life, based on scriptural and patristic sources. The traditional emphasis on monastic learning and writing also appeared, even in very active communities, and a sizeable number of works on prayer and spiritual direction have been produced, which is all the more remarkable considering the relatively small number of Anglican. religious. Nor is it unusual for Anglican laymen to expect that any member of any community will be able to speak about prayer and give spiritual direction. It should also be noted that, with no experience of monasticism closer than three hundred years, and with the traditional freedom of Anglicanism, some of the early experiments in the monastic life were distinctly unfor-tunate. Some were merely bizarre, such as in the excesses of Fr. Ignatius' Benedictines of Llanthony in Wales, .or the Benedictines of Caldey Island, who attempted to recreate a wildly romanticized version of a medieval abbey, but some were unwise in other ways. The combination of heavy and demanding work, coupled with the expectation of full participation in choir and in long hours of prayer with a sometimes rigorous asceticism taught several communities the lesson of moderation the hard way. But such mistakes were largely unavoidable. Few bishops would have anything to do with the developing communities, for fear of being labeled "Romanist," and the ecumenical movement was far in the future, so the only advice to be gained from Roman Catholic religious was: "convert!" Experienced guidance was simply unavailable. The lessons of the Desert Fathers and of medieval monasticism had to be learned again, by experiment, in nine-teenth century England. But in spite of mistakes and misjudgments, the monastic experiment in Anglicanism took root, prospered and spread. There are now a large num-ber of communities in England, and others in former English colonies, as SUsually an English translation of the Roman Breviary. Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism well oaS indigenous communities in Africa, the Far East and the South Pacific. !n the American Episcopal Church there are approximately twenty communities, about two-thirds of them for women. With time came not only numerical growth, but also a gradual acceptance by the mainstream of the Church, and with this acceptance a freedom to adopt usages and customs to taste. But whereas it might have been expected that this freedom would lead to a divergence of types of religious life, the pattern has, in fact, remained surprisingly consistent and true to traditional mo-nastic roots. Anglicanism has not, to this time at least, developed "active" com-munities, and the expressions of the religious life that presently attract the largest numbers in the Roman Catholic Church are completely absent from the Anglican scene. There arena few cloistered orders for men and for women, but the majority of the communities are classified as "mixed" in the traditional terminology. All have a tradition of a corporate Office, often an English translation of the Benedictine breviary, and the office is com-monly sung to plainsong where the numbers permit it.9 All have a deep commitment to the life of prayer, and have developed timetables and physical surroundings that enabled them to foster this prayer. A family style of government usually prevails, with a superior who is elected by all of the professed members, and a chapter that usually consists of all of the mem-bers of the community. This has been possible because of the small size of most of the communities. Anglican communities have never grown in num-bers beYond about four to five hundred, and the vast majority have had less than fifty professed at any one time. The family ethos has been carried over into the apostolate of the community, which has nearly always been carried out in a community context, and rarely by individuals outside the com-munity. But a wide latitude has usually been available inside the family context, with individuals often encouraged to develop their own talents and abilities. It may be objected that the absence of the figure of the abbot or abbess would make it difficult to classify a community as "Benedictine." Most Anglican communities do, in fact, have a regularly elected "superior," with a limited term of office, and not much of the mystique of abb, atial dignity. The Anglican. communities would, admittedly, need to be classified as a hybrid form of Benedictinism on this a~count. But it is also true that ~he size ¯ of most Anglican communities, together~ with their traditional family ethos, have conspired to make the superior much more of a "mother" or "father" than an executive. We can also note that a limited term of office is more and more characteristic even of abbots in the Roman Catholic communities 9It is sometimes surprising to Roman Catholics how few may be "required." If they have good voices (and sometimes if they don't) a house composed of three or four Anglican religious will sombtimes maintain a full sung office. 512 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 these days. The title of Anglican superiors has usually not been "abbot," but the reality is often not far removed from the traditional abba. The pattern of community life that has been described has had one development that came as a surprise to many of the early religious, and runs counter to the .historical development of western monasticism. The first religious in the west were contemplatives, with active communities de-veloping only later. In Anglicanism, the first communities were forced to be active in order to justify themselves, but always maintained as much touch with the monastic tradition as circumstances allowed. With such an im-petus, some of the religious quickly developed contemplative vocations, and the communities eventually responded by making room in their struc-ture for living ,such ,vocations, after suitable testing. More than this, several entire omr~nities have gradually been called to an exclusively contem-plative vo.cation after° a very active beginning. The Society of the Holy Trinity, ".the Sisters of the Precious Blood, and the Community of the Holy Cross, all .English women'.s communities, had very active beginnings, with demanding social apostolates, and all have given up most of their external works and become .contemplative communities. Side by side with this de-velopment, there have been several attempts through the yeffrs to establish traditionally "Benedictine" ,communities, properly so-called, and several of these attempts have been successful. There are, of course, exceptions to the pattern outlined, as for instance, the sizeable Society of St. Francis, and the Community of the Glorious Ascens!on, which is based on a model roughly similar to the Little Brothers of Jesus. But these are more recent developments, and have necessarily .bee6 ch~ aracterized by a certain self-.consciousness about their ethos, which has, served as a battlement against the tides that have swept most Anglican religious communities into a remark.ably similar pattern and style. Cow,temporary Renewal It is obvious from this analysis that the history of religious life in the ~.n.glican Church has several marked differences to that in the Roman C,a.tholic communion. Anglican com~.unities are of relatively recent date, .and many of them have older members who are within memory, or at least within one gbneration, of their foundin, g. Having often begun on an active pattern, the communities have grad~a,!!y developed a more traditionally monastic life, and this has been done as .the result of a consensus of the members 9f the community. The offiC.~'~ habit, times of silence and such, have been deliberately chosen, often against a background of some per- .secution. This necessarily means that'ii~e pattern of renewal in Anglican communities has been quite different from most Roman Catholic com-munities. Since Anglican communities are reasonab.ly close, historically, to the decisions that formed the pattern of their. !ife, and since these decisions Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism / 513 have usually been made by consensus of the community, there has been little reason to view the details of their lives as imposed by an outside authority. In addition, the religious orders have never been seen as a pri-mary source of personnel for social or missionary work. Anyone whose real calling is to a social ministry or a missionary vocation has always had many other options in the Anglican framework, and few people have entered the communities without some leaning, at least, toward monastic observances. This has caused the outward forms of .the recent renewal to appear con-servative by Roman Catholic standards. Though members of the men's communities have, on occasion, worn secular clothing for some years, all of them retain their habit at least for corporate worship and for formal occasions. Among the women's communities habits have usually been modified only slightly, if at all, and the number of women religious who regularly wear secular dress is very small. The office continues to be said by all communities, and if four offices a day rather than seven o~' eight is becoming a common pattern, they are often quite traditional in form, and continue to be sung to plainsong. A wider variety of work or ministry is often now available, but many of the traditional works continue, and some of the communities are moving, if anything, in a more contemplative di-rection. Anglican religious have, for the most part, deliberately chosen the observances of traditional monasticism, and are not eager to be rid of them. But it would be a mistake to assume, since renewal has not changed Anglican communities much externally, that their reform has been shallow. In many communities there has been a deep and searching process of change in the spirit that lay behind the observances. This has occurred, not surprisingly, in a direction dictated by the tradition that lies behind most Anglican communities. The. urge towards deeper and more authentic prayer has already been alluded to. There has also been a movement toward the deepening of the "family" ethos which has always been the ideal. Various structures of behavior, largely from the Victorian era (when many of our communities were founded) have been laid aside, and an emphasis on human relationships, the possibility of deep friendships, and an increasing emphasis on government by consensus have been common. Above all, there has been a struggle to advance the priority of the human element over legalistic requirement. In addition, Anglican communities have often been the centers of creative change in the liturgical field as well, and, while their experiments may seem somewhat conservative in comparison to similar situations in Roman Catholic communities, they have not infrequently been quite advanced by the standards of an ordinary Anglican or Episcopal parish. There has been at least one additional change in the past decades that is more difficult to chart or document, but it is of great importance to Anglican religious. A growing sense of'confidence in their own identity has gradually made itself felt. Born without parents, so to speak, Anglican 514 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 communities had to develop with little outside advice and no Anglican tradition to guide them, and all of this in an era when "doing it right" was very important. Anglican~ engaged in the founding of religious communities were surrounded by fellow Anglicans, on the one side, screaming "heresy," and by Roman Catholics, on the other, accusing them of being inauthentic imitations of no consequence; and the accusations were some-times, at least, half believed. This caused the adoption of many curious and sometimes inauthentic customs because "the Romans are doing it." But a century and a quarter of maturing, and the recent currents of change have brought relief from the concept that there was only one way to be correctly religious. A feeling of solidity and authenticity is beginning to pervade Anglican communities, where before there was some glancing over the shoulder to see if we were still doing it correctly. The history of religious communities in Anglicanism has been different from Roman Catholic com-munities; their problems have been different, and so the course of their renewal has been different, as will be their future form. Anglican com-munities have been called by God to serve a Church which is characterized by conservative liturgies, a deep sense of the awe and mystery of worship, and great freedom in doctrinal and social matters. The communities reflect this pattern, as they must, if they are to be authentic servants in the An-glican communion. "You're Benedictine, of course" Not infrequently these days, Anglican religious are invited to meetings of Roman Catholic religious, and often asked to describe their community. Normally the reply is that there is no exact counterpart to our life in the Roman Catholic Church, but that we have found our own expression of the religious life. But when asked to describe that expression in detail, it is interesting to note how often the reply is: "Oh, you're Benedictine, of course." Though only a few of our communities have sought to identify themselves as Benedictines or even tried consciously to imitate a Bene-dictine pattern, this reaction can hardly be a surprise. From their inception, Anglican communities have operated under the influence of a devotional pattern that took its'inspiration from Benedictine and Cistercian ab-beysmthe pattern of a family, deeply united by prayer and the liturgy, pondering the scriptures and other writings, and overflowing from its de-votional life in a gentle, caring ministry to those around them. It is a pattern that has been inherited fi:om a nation whose monks, scholars, teachers, historians, rulers, missionaries and martyrs were often either Benedictines themselves or under direct Benedictine influence, and the pattern has proved surprisingly stable, through the changes and reforms of several generations:' The pattern which Pope Gregory the Great hoped to plant in England when, in the seventh century, he sent. Augustine to Canterbury to convert the English people still perseveres, not only in England, but in large Monastic Spirituality in Anglicanism / 515 parts of the world. And this pattern, to which the name "Benedictine" is often given, has proved sturdy enough that it served as the model and guide for religious life when it was revived after three hundred years of absence in Anglicanism. Reeds The wind is voiceless until it finds an instrument: the long-drawn sough and sigh of conifers the maples" glee the oaks" deep diapason untutored symphony. I stood apart to hear them all together: acaccia sprinkled bells upon the air and chaliced elms' glad notes all spilling exultant as the skylark's trilling The beech clapped drily cadence keeping Only my song was still. The Spirit came in wind, then, (I had long known .the fire fed by the oils of my anointing) I listened there upon the hillside: "'Peace," said the wind upon me Peace unto all whom I meet "Peace," and the winds grew quiet "Peace! I am with you-- Know my peace." Mary R. Quinn 1201 Canton Ave. Baltimore, MD 21227 Compassion: A Spirituality for Today M. Corita Clarke, R.D.C. Sister Corita, a Sister of the Divine Compassion, is Chairperson of the Religious Studies Department of Preston High School. She resides at the school; 2780 Schurz Ave.; Bronx, NY ! 0465. ~nterest, concern, even fascination for the quest for a viable personal spirituality is as old as the history of primitive religions and as contem-porary as today's newspaper. To some persons the renewed interest in spirituality in this decade of the twentieth century seems an anachronism or a fad. Yet even a cursory study of the experience of people today, whether viewed through the eyes of the historian, the psychologist or the theologian, indicates that the phenomenon of such a renewal is a very natural devel-opment. Both an older generation which has survived the effects of worldwide wars, nuclear holocausts, genocide attempts and concentration camp realities, and a younger generation which has grown up in the more affluent yet tension-ridden, de-personalized milieu of the computerized world of technopolis, are responding to their deepest human yearnings in their search for a spiritual dimension to their lives. Centuries ago St. Augustine shared the insight that "God is always more." I think that the conviction born of human experience and the Judaeo-Christian revelation is that "so is man, always more," called to become, to grow, to move beyond wherever he is, to realize his human potential--also for intimacy with the divine! Spirituality is concerned with this search for the transcendent dimension to life both beyond and within the person, and with the mode of living which flows from its apprehension. We have the capacity ~to live a "spiritual" life because as human persons we possess an inner spirit which is the principle of our conscious life and 516 Compassion: A Spirituality for Today / 517 the source of our integration as persons. Through this spirit we are capable of an intuition of the transcendent, of a reflective awareness of ourselves and of a depth dimension within ourselves, and are conscious of our ability for self-transcendence. In our Christian experience spirituality flows from an awareness of the Spirit of God within us, and our spiritual life is a lived response to this Spirit within, in an attempt to facilitate or mediate the further presence of that Spirit of God in the world. It is my conviction that the basis for a relevant Christian spirituality for today is to be found in a clear understanding of the quality of compassion. It will be within the scope of this paper to look at compassion from various angles in order to see the richness contained in this human virtue and to realize more clearly its relation to our experience of transcendence and our challenge to live our spirituality as compassionate persons. The Experience of Transcendence Any attempt to elaborate a contemporary spirituality comes up against the enduring tension between transcendence and immanence, between that which calls us beyond and that which cries out for recognition in the here and now. I would like first to strive for a greater clarity in our understanding of the category of the transcendent, and then proceed to an analysis of compassion as providing the key to reconciling these seeming antinomies. James Fowler has defined faith as "the knowing or construing by which persons apprehend themselves as related to the Transcendent.''~ For Fowler, the Transcendent is the ultimate condition of existence, the Being we have in religious faith called God, and a person's relationship to the Transcendent involves power, limitations, and the sources of value and meaning of existence. In the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition this has involved a personal relationship to a God whose presence has been ex-perienced by individuals and by the community. In addition to this specific religious terminology, the adjective transcendent and the noun transcen-dence have wide usage in a more secular sense. Abraham Maslow has given thirty five definitions or explanations of transcendence which can be sum-marized in his statement that transcendence."refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than as means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.''z And even here, in those who can experience such full humanness, those whom Maslow calls "transcenders," there is the "ability to perceive the ~James W. Fowler III, "Toward A Developmental Perspective on Faith," Religious Ed-ucation, LXIX (March-April, 1974), p. 207. ZAbraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York, Viking Press, 1971), p. 275. 511~ / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 sacred within the secular, or the sacredness in all things at the same time, ,,3 Within this notion of transcendence are all those movements, experiences or realities which beckon persons on, which disturb complacency and call us beyond, which alert us to the "more" in human life and our own personal existence, which sociologist Peter Berger has called "hints" or "signals" of the Transcendent,4 and which are the source of~Augustine's "restless-ness" of heart. When the noun transcendence becomes converted to a verb, we have also the notion of self-transcendence, that movement of a person beyond self-interest or concern because of a focus on another~person, an ideal or a goal. In its richest manifestations, self-transcendence is an act of love, the highest form of human activity. Viktor Frankl has written that "Human existence is essentially self-transcendence not self-actualization,''s and contemporary psychology b~ars witness to this capacity for self-sacrifice as an essential norm of full human maturity. We will return to this aspect of self-transcendence in our treatment of compassion. When a person becomes aware of the transcendent dimension of life, and especially when that awareness leads to the Transcendent God, the result is, in the words of Abraham Heschel, awe. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infiniti~ significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.6 For Heschel, faith is, as it is for Fowler, an attachment to the Trans-cendent, to the attractiveness of a God Who hides himself in mystery. Yet ¯ the biblical revelation tells us that beyond all mystery is meaning. "God is neither plain meaning nor just mystery. God is meaning that transcends mystery . meaning that speaks through mystery.''7 When the God who is, by the very nature of his being, Transcendent, attempts to speak through mystery and reaches out into the realm of human experience, we speak of tiis becoming immanent to us, to his creation. How does this mystery express itself?. Heschel says it is the destiny of human persons "to articulate what is concealed. The divine seeks to be disclosed in the human."s In our discussion of spirituality we have stated that our spirituality flows aIbid., p. 283. 4Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (New York, Doubleday, 1969). ~Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York, Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 175. 6Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1969), p. 89. 71bid., p. 77. 6Ibid., p. 77. Compassion: A Spirituality for Today / 519 from our apprehension of the divine, of the Spirit within and 'without, and is our mode of living which attempts to incarnate the presence of God. It is precisely in this understanding of God which we discern from the biblical revelation, and in the consequent imperatives for our Christian life, that I believe an understanding of compassion plays such a central role. It is my conviction that the divine (the Transcendent) has revealed itself as com-passion, and that therefore the human discloses the divine through a spirituality that is founded on compassion. While subsequently I will de-lineate our experience and exercise of compassion as an expression of spirituality, I would like first to examine compassion as formative of our spirituality through an analysis of the divine compassion. Human com-passion and divine compassion are not dichotomies nor polarities, they are rather reciprocal concepts. There is only one real source of compassion and that is God's compassion. As Henri Nouwen has reminded us, "Our com-passion is nothing more or less than a participation in and a reflection of this divine compassion,''9 The Divine Compassion: The Bridge In his penetrating study, The Prophets,1° Abraham Heschel analyzes with depth and clarity the Old Testament revelation of the divine pathos, which he sees as the bridge between the transcendence and mystery of God and Israel's grasp of his love. For the Israelite, pathos is the expression of the attitude of attentive care and concern of God for his people. When Moses asked Yahweh his name, he received the reply, 'Yahweh, Yahweh, a God of tenderness and compassion" (Ex 34:5-6). In a recent issue of Spiritual Life, Kevin O'Shea suggests "that the divine nature is Com-passion, that God is to be defined by the heart of tenderness he has opened out tb us."11 This portrayal of Israel's God as a God of Pathos (the opposite - of apathy) is in sharp contrast to the gods of other nations of their t!me, who were distant (like the god of the philosophers), or impersonal, or presented as having human limitations such as jealousy and vindictiveness. The ex-pression of Yahweh's compassion was not mere feeling or emotion on the part of God, but was displayed in his active reaching out toward Israel--a God "in search of man.''~ The initial experience of Yahweh's concern was the covenant, which not only manifested God's mercy and great love, but also challenged Israel to grow as God's people through her response to his love. When Israel faltered or failed in her fidelity, the divine pathos re-vealed itself in anger and correction. In Heschel's words, God's "pathos is 9Henri Nouwen, "Compassion: The Core of Spiritual Leadership," Worship Jubilee (January, 1977), p. 21. 10Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Vol. II) (New York, Harper & Row, 1975). nKevin O'Shea, C.SS.R., "Enigma and Tenderness," Spiritual Life, 21 (Spring, 1975), p. 18. 590 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 both a disclosure of his concern and a concealment of his power."12 The mission of the prophet in Israel was to articulate the nature and extent of the divine pathos, and to call the people to live the reality of their election. It was through his privileged insight into the experience of the pathos of God that the prophet developed his sympathy.(sym-pathos) for the concern of God. Seized by the power of this revelation, he was com-pelled to speak Yahweh's wrrd. Though his sympathy had as its source and focus the divine pathos, it was like that of Yahweh's, directed towards the people, the object of Yahweh's love. As Yahweh had identified himself with Israel (e.g., "My people," what was done to Israel was done to "Us"), so the prophet identified himself with the people, and each, from Moses to the last prophet, lived his vocation within the limitations and struggles of his time and history. God's involvement with Israel can be found on every page of the prophetic works. As with Jeremiah they experienced his word as a burning fire within, ~ind usually endured great personal suffering to deliver what was often an unpopular message. The hardheartedness of Israel is in sharp contrast to the loving relationship God was offering them: You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth and summoned from its far-off places, You whom I have called my servant whom I have chosen and will not cast off-- Fear not, I am with you; be not dismayed; I am your God. I will strengthen you, and help you, and uphold you with my right hand of justice (Is 41:9-10). In return, Yahweh asked a response of love; a love which when directed toward him would be fidelity and when shared with one another would flow out injustice. Micah encapsuled the covenant call in the beautiful text from 6:8: This is what Yahweh asks of you: to act justly to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God, The psalmist who sang over and over that Yahweh's compassion and mercy endure forever, the prophet who spoke for Yahweh, "with ever-lasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer" (Is 54:8), and Abraham Heschel who insists that the biblical message is not an abstraction but the "certainty that the Creator is the Redeemer"~3--all point to a reality which can only be understood in its fullness by one who has come to know Jesus. The pathos of God gave its utmost expression of love and concern in the incarnation and redemption of Jesus. Jesus comes as compassion incarnate, ~2Heschel, The Prophets, Vol. II, p. 12. ~albid., p. 47. Compassion: A Spirituality for Today / 52"1 as the prophet who not only fully apprehended the divine pathos, but is himself its visible embodiment. "God in search of man" becomes man himself and bridges .the gulf between transcendent mystery and human experience. Jesus, like the prophetic types before him, embraces the reality and consequences of being truly human. As Paul records in the early Chris-tian hymn: He emptied himself and took the form of a slave being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross! (Ph 2:7-8). Against the background of old Testament prophecy, Jesus is presented in the New Testament as the Prophet, one caught up in the message he has received from the Father, as he reiterates frequently in the Johannine tradition. His life is a lived experience of the reality of his perception of the Father's love. God's concern and love are his own, and he lives the im-plications of his message to their ultimate consequences. Jesus expresses his mission in the vision of the Isaian prophecy: He has come for the poor, the captives,, the blind and the.downtrodden, to proclaim the good news of the Father's love'(Lk 4:18; Is 61:1-2). He teaches his followers how to love one another (Jn 14:34-5), to be compassionate as their Father is compassionate (Lk 6:36-38), and gives concrete examples in his parables: the forgiving father of the prodigal son (Lk 15:11-32), and the compassionate Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37). He chal-lenges them to the self-transcendence involved in taking up one's cross daily (Lk 9:23-25), and gives them the witness of his own loving response to all whom he encounters along the way. He eats with sinners, embraces little children, weeps over Jerusalem, and identifies with the feelings and needs of the sick, the bereaved, the hungry, the repentant. His ministry is one of healing, forgiving, challenging, and total self-giving, and he suffers and dies for the truth of his message. In the life-giving power of his death and resurrection, the compassion of God has its supreme expression. In contrast to Rudolph Bultmann, who sees the Cross of Jesus as a stumbling block of Christianity, a contemporary Anglican writer, Alistar Kee, sees it as the most meaningful challenge to the Church today in its role to embody the life of Jesus in our time. Kee opts for a reinterpretation of Christian theology which would focus on J~sus as "the way of trans-cendence, in contrast to the way of immanence which characterizes the lives of individuals.''14 He believes that Jesus' total self-transcendence in his acceptance of the cross provides persons today with a powerful example ~4Alistar Kee, The Way of Transcendence (England, Penguin, 1971), p. 159. 522 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 which is "a consistent option" for human life, and which in reality is the only road to fulfillment. A Theology of Compassion Among the New Testament writers, perhaps none has presented this centrality of the cross to the Christian message more clearly than St. Paul, who saw his vocation to "preach Christ crucified" (1 Co 1:23). The cross for Paul was the. basic paradox of Christianity, and I think his compre-hension of its meaning both in the life of Jesus and in his own life formed the foundation for his theology of compassion. Paul personally experienced the compassion of God in his call from Judaism to preach the gospel of Jesus. "I am the least of the apostles; in fact, because I persecuted the Church of God, I do not even deserve the name. But by God's favor I am what I am. This favor of his to me has not proved fruitless" (1 Co 15:9-10). In his missionary work and sufferings, he was aware of the Lord's constant support and love. His mission and his letters to the Corinthian church are among the clearest loci for elucidating his theology. It would take many pages to elaborate on Paul's experiences and his teaching, but perhaps a brief outline will be sufficient. Like the prophets before him, Paul was captured' by the Word of the Lord. He became aware of God's mercy and love for him, and desired to share this love and this message with others to whom he was sent. Preach-ing the gospel was often surrounded With sufferings of all kinds, yet Paul could testify: He comforts us in all our afflictions and thus enables us to comfort those who are in trouble with the same con-solation we have received from hiha. As we have shared much in the suffering of Christ, so through Christ do we share abundantly in his consolation (2 Co 1:4-5). Paul, like Jesus and the prophets before him, identified with the people to whom he ministered, and this identification was chiefly in their weakness and sinfulness, where the presence and power of God was most clearly evident. For Paul, this power of God was revealed uniquely in the death and resurrection of Jesus (1 Co 1:18~25). For the Ch.ristian, the death of Jesus has become the source of life--weakness has triumphed in God. Christ ". was crucified out of weakness, but he lives by the power of God. We too are weak in him, but we live with him by God's power in us" (2 Co 13:4). This conviction that it is in the experience of weakness that he meets the compassionate Lord, is also expressed by Paul in one of the rare glimpses he gives us into his personal prayer. After three times begging the Lord to remove a source of temptation, he received the response, "My Compassion: A Spirituality for Today / 593 grace is enough for you, for in weakness, power reaches perfection." Paul concluded, "And so I willingly boast of my weakness instead, that the power of Christ may rest upon me" (2 Co 12:9), ". for when I am .powerless it is then that I am strong" (12:10). The outgrowth of Paul's experience of God's love and grace is a powerful sense of gratitude. "We seem to have nothing, yet everything is ours" (2 Co 6:10). This sense of being gifted by God is the foundation not only of thankfulness to God, but also the basis for the kind of love for one another that Paul believed should characterize the Chris.tian community. Among all the Lord's gifts, none is as important as love, which is a gift of divine power. In Paul's famous description of Christian love in 1 Corinthians 13 we have the supreme challenge to respond to God's love. This agape which involves such geotleness, forbearance and selflessness can only come from one who has come to terms with his own weakness and his strengthening through God's love for him. It is the bond uniting the ¯ community and it results in a shared compassion: "If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members share its joy" (1 Co 12:26). Compassion for Paul seems to involve first a participation in the death dimension of Jesus' life by experiencing his own finitude and limitation. Then through faith in Jesus and baptism 'into his death, Paul shares in the life-giving power of God, acting in him as it did in the resurrection of Jesus. To the Christians of Rome Paul sent the powerful reminder: Are you not aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Through baptism into his death~ we were buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life (Rm 6:3-4). Speaking of his ministry Paul writes to the Corinthians: This treasure we possess in earthen vessels to make it clear that its sur-passing power comes from God and not from us. We are afflicted in every way possible, but we are not crushed; full of doubts, we never despair. We are persecuted but never abandoned; we are struck down but never destro.y. Con-tinually we carry about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, so that in our bodies the life of Jesus may be revealed. While we live we are constantly being delivered to death for Jesus" sake, so that the life of Jesus may be revealed in our mortal flesh (2 Co 4:7-11). 594 / Review for Religious, Volume 37, 1978/4 This experience of the divine compassion is in turn the source of Paul's love and understanding of others in their weakness, and of his urging them to share their love with one another. This mutual living in love is the strength of the community which fulfills Paul's exhortation to compas-sionate living: "Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep" (Rm 12:15). With the background of this brief survey of the pathos of God, the divine compassion revealed in Jesus, and Paul's experience and teaching of the centrality of the Paschal Mystery in Christian life, we possess a foundation for the thesis that Christian theology is essentially a theglogy of compas-sion. If the biblical revelation which underlies our Christian faith is of a Transcendent God who bridges the infinite gulf between himself and us by the reality of his divine pathos, then our challenge in contemporary Chris-tianity is to discover ourselves not only as recipients of his compassionate love, but also as called to incarnate that love in our world through living a spirituality of compassion. A Description of Compassion Before discussing some implications for spirituality based on compas-sion, I would like to refine our understanding of the attitude of compassion and consider some valuable insights from a variety of sources and disci-plines. The richness contained in this concept, and its essential role in human relationships can only be touched on in a paper such as this, but hopefully, it will open up further areas for reflection and development. In its Latin derivation compassion literally means "to suffer with" (compatior). We have seen in the scriptural usage that it always implies some form of identification with human suffering. When speaking of God's compassion, the term often used was "mercy," from the Latin, miseri-cordia. Mercy denotes tenderness of heart, felt and expressed toward an-other, but at times its usage implies an attitude of condescension expressed toward an offender or one suffering disfavor or misfortune. In this sense it is closer to pity. When mercy flows from a loving heart which recognizes and identifies with the feeling and experience of the other, and promotes an appropriate response, it is closer to compassion. For Thomas Aquinas, God's mercy was known by its effects, and flowed from his goodness and love: To sorrow over the misery of others belongs not to God; but it does most properly belong to him to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name. Now defects are not removed except by the perfection of some kind of goodness: and the primary source of goodness is God.~ ~Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. I (New York, Benziger, 1947), q. 21, a. 3. Compassion: A Spirituality for Today / 525 God's mercy, which has been called his supreme attribute, is never mere feeling, but always manifests itself in action. The New Testament abounds with examples of how Jesus, when moved with compassion, healed (the blind, the leper, the sick who approached him), forgave (the paralytic, the woman at Simon's house, the soldiers at the foot of the cross), or restored life (the widow's son, the brother of Martha and Mary). In an analogous way, human mercy is not measured by feeling but by concrete proofs, and when this expression of mercy flows from a sense of solidarity with the one who suffers, it is what we call compassion. As Rahner has written, "He who shows mercy receives more than he gives--the clear vision of his own emptiness which alone prevents him from losing the fullness he has re-ceived.''~ 6 Such an attitude preserves mercy from the taint of condescen-sion, and is a recognition of the Pauline theme that it is only in our aware-ness of our own weakness that we can experience God's power and be empowered to be a source of strength for others. The universality of this call to compassion can be seen by an awareness of its importance in many religious traditions in addition to the Judaeo- Christian revelation. A prime example of this is found in Buddhism where compassion is regarded as the highest virtue and is complementary to.the gift of wisdom. The Buddha had discovered the cosmic norm of truth through his attainment of wisdom (Pann6), and it was his primary desire to share this wisdom with those still enmeshed in the world of suffering. This compassion (Karuni~) was an outgrowth of his own contemplation, and hence, Buddha is designated a contemplative in action~ne whose self-enlightenment resulted in good for others. His compassion prevented his wisdom from being mere detached speculation, and his wisdom kept com-passion from being mere sentiment. Buddhism today (e.g., Mahay~tna Bud-dhism) continues this emphasis on the need to effect a liberation for men and women of our time. Because of our common destiny, compassion is viewed as the greatest reality. It is not achieved without great personal detachment, and thus involves the same renouncement and other-center-edness we have spoken of in connection with Jesus and the Christian's participation in the Paschal Myster

Issue 29.6 of the Review for Religious, 1970. ; EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Everett A. Diederich, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to Rxvmw Fog R~LmtOUS; 6x2 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63xo3. Questions for answering should be sent to Joseph F. Gallen, S.J.; St. .Joseph's Church; 32~ Willings Alley; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania + + + REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Edited with ecclesiastical approval by faculty members of the School of Divinity of Saint Louis University, the editorial offices being located at 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Lores, Missouri 63103. Owned by the Missouri Province Edu-cational Institute. Published bimonthly and copyright © 1970 by REVIEW SOR REI, mtOUS. Printed in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at Baltimore, Maryland and at additional mailing offices. Single copies: $1.25. Sub-scription U.S.A. and Canada: $6.00 a year, $11.00 for two years; other countries: $7.00 a year, $13.00 for two years. Orders should indicate whether they are for new or renewal subscriptions and should be accompanied by check or money order paya-ble to REvmw sort RELmmUS in U.S.A. currency only. Pay no money to persons claiming to represent REvmw sog RELIGIOUS. Change of address requests should include former address. Renewals and new subscriptions should be sent to REVIEW sort RELIGIOUS; P. O. Box l 110; Duluth, Minnesota 55802. Manuscripts, editorial correspondence, and books for re-view should be sent to REVIEW sog RELIGIOUS; 612 Humboldt Building; 539 North Grand Boulevard; Saint Louis, Missouri 63103. Questions for answering should be sent to the address of the Questions and Answers editor. NOVEMBER 1970 VOLUME 29 NUMBER 6 RICHARD P. VAUGHAN, s.J. Spiritual Counseling and Pra er. Fostering an ever deepening relationship with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitutes a major objective of the religious life. Traditionally the road to such a relationship has been a formal schedule of prayer. The daily horarium of spiritual exercises has been an essential part of almost every congregation's rule or con-stitutions. During the past decade styles of religious life and prayer have undergone change, especially among younger religious. Emphasis on the relationship with God remains, but the way of achieving this relationship and what it means differ. The new religious is more aware of what he is before God and before others. He is more aware of the Spirit working in the secular world; he recognizes God in himself, in the persons and events of his daily life. He encounters Christ in his contacts with others. Formal prayer, such as meditation, recitation of the Office and rosary, seem less impor.tant to him. In some instances, they have been abandoned in favor of a fre-quently renewed commitment. Flexibility. in Prayer In response to changing attitudes, many congregations have started to experiment with more flexible approaches to prayer. Freedom, previously unheard of, has been ÷ granted. Set periods of obligatory prayer have given way ÷ to approaches geared to unique personalities and temper- ÷ aments and to the dem~inds of a particular apostolate. This change has let a breath of fresh air into many communities, but at the same time it has created a vac-uum. Formal scheduled prayer, while it can and has helped individuals to grow in the likeness of Christ, is subject to the danger of routinism. It is relatively easy for a religious to deceive himself into believing that he is growing in the spiritual life because he spends the time at prayer required by rule, whereas little true prayer is ac- 803 Richard Vaughan, S.J.; P.O. BOX 519; Los Gatos, California 95030; is Provincial for Edu-cation of the Cali-fornia Jesuits . VOLUME 29, 1970 .÷ R. P. Va~ghan, S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 804 tually taking place. Some religious have been content to spend the assigned time at daily meditation, Office, or rosary, even though little recognizable benefit resulted, simply because the rule prescribed it. Young religious have come to question such a view. The focus of their religious life is more on the frequently renewed dedica-tion. However, just as the traditional emphasis has its limitations, so too does the recent approach. A spiritual life placing heavy emphasis on seeing God in the world of people and events can gradually give way to a human-ism in which one is no longer actively aware of God and centers rather on the purely human with a subsequent loss of the original commitment. Value of Spiritual Counseling Regular spiritual counseling can counteract this dan-ger, inasmuch as it requires the counselee to face honestly and openly his continuing commitment to the service of God and neighbor and, it might be added, to see the need for some form of regular prayer if an active awareness of God's presence is to continue. The process of spiritual counseling differs radically from psychological counseling and psychotherapy. The latter two are concerned with changes in personality and the reversal of symptoms resulting from the application of psychological techniques, whereas spiritual counseling focuses on the person's life with God. The spiritual coun-selor attempts to help the individual become more aware of his religious experiences. Basically he is trying to assist the counselee in discerning the workings of the spirit, so that he can determine what is the will of God for him in concrete situations. It is true that emotional disorders and faulty attitudes injure this discernment, but chang-ing these personality characteristics is not the spiritual counselor's proper function. Recognizing them, however, and the part they play in blocking discernment is. When personality characteristics are such as to handicap seri-ously any true discernment, then it is the responsibility of the spiritual counselor to direct the religious to a compe-tent professional so that these limitations can be reme-died. Spii'itual counseling serves a number of important functions. First of all, it allows us to have a better under-standing of the nature and quality of our relationship ,with God. It makes us actively aware of our daily reli-gious experiences. In our routine-ridden world, it is very easy to put aside a certain amount of time for prayer but seldom reflect on the efficacy and effectiveness of this prayer. We are apt to gloss over the question: Is my prayer truly prayer? Moreover, spiritual counseling makes us clarify and sharpen our thoughts and feelings about religious experiences in a way we would never do if we settled for a few minutes of self-reflection. When I must explain these experiences to another, I am forced to scrutinize them and then describe them in clear, accurate terms intelligible to my listener, As I talk about such things as the place of Christ in my life, God as a loving Father, prayer, the manifestation of grace, the working of the Holy Spirit, or God's will, I gradually sort out the genuine from the false, and the important from the un-important. I become aware of my openness or.my lack of openness to God. I become aware of the many ways that God is operating in my life--either directly or indirectly. I experience a deeper appreciation for God-'s manifesta- .tions. On the other hand I may well see that a wall seems to exist between God and myself. I may come to the conclusion that I have closed myself off from or denied many of God's manifestations. I may see that I have rejected important graces and c6ncerned myself exces-sively with my own world. If left to myself, it is less likely that I would come to realize my own selfishness and. lack of concern for God and neighbor. Listening Spiritual counseling involves three phases: listening, dialogue, and decision. Listening is an activity .of both the counselee and the .counselor. Even though the coun-selee may never reflect upon the fact, he listens to himself and to the promptings of divine grace within himself. As he talks he becomes aware of God working in and through him. Moreover, it is assumed that previous to the coun-seling session he has listened to God speaking, especially at times of.prayer. These promptings of grace become the subject of discussion. It should be noted that God speaks in many ways: directly through His Spirit, through reve-lation, through others, and through the events 6f everyday life. One 6f the goals of counseling is to determine when God speaks as opposed to the promptings of our sinful nature. Listening is also the work of an effective counselor. It is sometimes falsely considered "lending an ear." If one is present and aware of what is being said, he is thought to be listening. The truth of the matter is that listening is a very active process requiring much concentration and ex-penditure of energy. It demands that the counselor try to be aware of what is taking place within the counselee at each moment he is with him. It also demands that the counselor recognize the various levels of functioning, such as the spiritual, the cognitive, the conative, and the affective, as well as the relationship and integration, or lack of integration, of all of these functions. For instance, the good listener is one who is perceptive enough to see ÷ ÷ ÷ Counseling and Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 805 ÷ ÷ R. P. Vaughan, S.]. REVIEW "FOR RELIGIOUS 806 when emotions have taken over to the detriment of the Spirit or when habitual attitudes block thoughtful reflec-tion. The good listener hears not only the words but the way the words are expressed. He notes the tone of voice as well as the mode of expression; from these he is able to estimate the emotional involvement. The spiritual coun-selor as listener concentrates on any indication of the Spirit working within the counselee. He notes blocks or hindrances to the promptings of grace. At times, he sees that the counselee has a need to unlSurden himself before he can become aware of God's presence in his life. The counselor listens with empathetic concern. He attempts to discover what God means to the connselee, his reli-gious experiences, the depths of his faith, and his atti-tudes. Frequently all of these can be learned by active and attentive listening with little need for probing or questioning. Before the counselor enters the second phase, namely, the dialogue, he makes sure that he has at least an adequate estimate of the counselee's spiritual state. Dialogue The second phase, the dialogue, presupposes a rapport which allows the counselee to talk freely about his reli-gious experiences. Concerned listening often brings this about, inasmuch as it produces a feeling of acceptance, which permits the counselee to express freely his views without [ear of rejection. A dialogue is a conversation in which two persons reason on a topic, exchanging ideas and opinions. They examine the evidence for and against an action or a position. The initial stance is one of open-ness to all possibilities. When the term is used in relation to spiritual counseling, it implies that the counselor and the counselee examine the latter's spiritual condition, re-flecting upon its state. I[ all is well, they evaluate the signs indicating that the individual is following God's will. If there is a problem, they weigh together possible solutions, considering arguments for and against each. During the first phase the counselee describes his spirit-ual condition, which then becomes the topic of discussion during the second phase. The counselor helps the counse-lee enumerate arguments favorable to and opposed to a particular stance; he helps him evaluate the relative mer-its of each. He assists him to see when and how the Spirit is working in concrete situations. He also helps him to-ward a greater awareness of God's presence. Counseling is a learning situation. It is a time when an individual learns more about himself. Often this is accomplished without giving advice or direction. As the counselee talks about his relationship with God and neighbor, he be-comes more aware of divine intervention in the world of grace. He begins to see on his own what changes should be made and what he should do to bring about improve-ment. However, there is still a place for direction and guidance, especially in counseling younger members of a community. For instance, if a religious has never learned to pray properly, the counseling session c,'in afford an opportunity to teach the fundamentals, followed b3) a period of testing and reassessment. It can also be the occasion for presenting the traditions of a community, a time when the religious can consider whether he is fol-lowing these traditions or whether he really wishes to do so. Whether one makes use of advice and. guidance de-pends upon the needs of the individual counselee. It is the task of the counselor to determine these needs and then proceed accordingly. Decision-making At times, decision-making is part of the counseling process. Frequently, however, the purpose of counseling is simply to help an individual come to a greater aware-ness of God's manifestations and to a better understand-ing how he is or is not following God's will. When there is a need to make a decision, it is hoped that the counsel-ing will result in the counselee arriving at a decision on his own. The function of the counselor is to see that the counselee confronts all the options and weighs their rela-tive merits. Rarely should the counselor force a final deci-sion based on his own evaluation of the situation. If the counseling is truly counseling, most counselees can arrive at a decision without undue influence on the part of the counselor. An inability to do so may signify some kind of a psychological problem. dttributes of the Counselor Who can counsel? What should be the characteristics and abilities of the spiritual counselor? First and fore-most, he or she should be a person of faith, aware of the world of grace and the divine manifestations; one who has personally experienced the presence of God in his own life. He should be a person who can and does love both himself and others. He should be perceptive, with the ability to see below the surface and recognize the depths of personality and spiritual growth. He should also be able to communicate well his thoughts and im-pressions. To be effective, he or she will need adequate training in the theology of the spiritual life and, hope-fully, will have previously sought out a spiritual counse-lor for himself or herself. Psychological training can be helpful inasmuch as it offers some procedures directly or indirectly applicable to spiritual counseling. It should be noted, however, that it Counseling and Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 807 can also be a handicap if the counselor, as a result of his training, centers most of his attention on personal prob-lems to the neglect of the spiritual. If young religious are to develop a full spiritual li~e, and if older members are to realize the renewal urged by Vatican II, there is a need for an abundance of spiritual counselors--at least one or two for every large commun-ity, It is quite evident there are too few priests with available time. The most logical solution is for congrega-tions to train the members of their own communities as spiritual counselors. They could select those best suited by previous training, experience, and personality, and assign them to this important task. Many orders or con-gregations of men have already inaugurated such a pol-icy, but they find it impossible to supply priests who can devote themselves fully to the counseling of religious women. Conclusion A perusal of the early history of the religious life re-veals a minimum of structure with a great emphasis on regular spiritual direction. Due to the constant effort of a spiritual counselor each monk grew at his own rate in the likeness of Christ. As members increased individual coun-seling became more difficult and was gradually replaced by the ordered daily horarium of spiritual exercises, the goal of both being the deepening of the monk's relation-ship with God. If contemporary religious congregations are to realize the inner renewal sought by Vatican II, they would do well to consider a return to a style of religious life grounded in regularspiritual counseling. ÷ ÷ R. P. Vaughan, REVIEW FOR R~LIGIOU$ SISTER KRISTIN SHRADER, R.S.M. Prayer Is Listening Several years, ago, Karl Rahner began speaking of the "Church of the Diaspora," the Church which had come of age, which had forsaken the trappings of bourgeois collectivism, which had become the standard, of a commit-ted few. If the diaspora has characterized Chrigtianity, it seems even more so to be characterizing contempoi:ary religious" life. The wane of numerical strength has made it clear that convents and seminaries are in the throes of a crisis of vocation and a crisis of belie[. It is within the context of religiotis life in the Church of the diaspora that I would like to discuss the question of contemplative prayer. Our age, engulfed in a deluge of media and messages, has been characterized as one which "has lost the apti-tude for prayer.'.' 1 If prayer is listening not only to the Spirit as He works in our hearts but as He works in the world around us, then perhaps our age has also lost the aptitude' for listening. Perhaps we are deaf to'entire re-gions of ourselves and our world. I shall try to describe these hidden domains, and, in the process, try to l~rovoke us to hear what we have not heard before. Perhaps we are deaf to that part of ourselves and our world which is beyond that which merely performs "actions. This is the self and the world which do not act, but which are the mirrors in which God acts so as to let Himself be known. This is not the self-made self and not the man-made world, but is that which is passive, which is fashioned and illuminated by God. How are we in the last third of the twentieth century to find a new way to pray, a new way to listen? I suggest that we look at our unhearing selves in terms of two new images: that of pilgrim and that of prophet, instead of in terms of the image of professional or of achiever. This means that to listen, to pray, we must not do, achieve, or accomplish anything as the world accomplishes things, but rather that we must learn to listen by holding our- I Wino~ de Broucher, S.J., "Mortification in Prayer," Cross and Crown, March 1963, p. 13. 4- Sister Kristin writes from Lewis Hall (Box 219); University o[ Notre Dame; Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. VOLUME 29, 1970 809 ÷ ÷ ÷ Sister Kristir~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 810 selves in readiness for something, or rather for someone. This patient readiness is what I think Karl Rahner was describing when he spoke of prayer as "this awful waiting." 2 It is what Augustine meant when he said that the continual desire for God is prayer. I can neither explain nor understand prayer. Perhaps no one can: "There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is required--an experience of poverty and sickness" 3 or, perhaps, of love or of sacrifice. By attempting to describe something, prayer, which I cannot explain, perhaps I can, though, suggest how we "listen." Merton suggests the form that such a preparation for prayer might take: (1) detachment and (2) finding ideas about God in all we do.4 His second suggestion corresponds to what I will describe as living as a prophet, as one who sees the signs of God in all things. His first suggestion, detachment, corresponds to what I have called living as pilgrim, as one who can look inside himself to see that he desires God and God alone, and that this world is b/at one stage of his Godward development. Amid the dissonance of the desires of this world, the pilgrim alone truly knows how to listen. He knows that this world is not his home, that he is journeying to God, and that this very journey is what we call prayer. As Merton says: "The secret of prayer is a hunger for God and for the vision of God, a hunger that lies far deeper than the level of language or affection." ~ Much this same point, that prayer is a desire for God, a consciousness of our being pilgrims, of our listening to what is in, but not of, the world, is made not only by Merton, but also by Teresa of Avila, by Aquinas, by Paul, by Guardini, by John of the Cross, and by Karl Rahner. When John of the Cross wrote that the man of prayer "will desire with all desire to come to that which in this life cannot be known," 6 he was making much the same point as Paul whose prayer was his desire for God: I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us. The whole creation is eagerly awaiting for God to reveal his sons . Creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning until now the entire 2 Encounters With S!lence (Westminster: Newman, 1965), p. 25. a Quoted by Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds o] Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 56. ~Seeds o[ Contemplation (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1968), p. 133. ~ Ibid., p. 140. ~ The Complete Works of John of the Cross (Westminster: New-man, 1949), v. 1, p. 76. creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. For we must be content to hope that we shall be saved--our salvation is not in sight., it is something we must wait for with patience. The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what he means.' These are the words of Paul who longed ~o be deliv-ered from this body of death and to be with God, Paul who wrote to his Philippians: "I want to be gone and be with Christ." s Thus, for a man who really desires God, prayer is no longer problematic, because we pray as we live. As Merton puts it: "As a man is, so he prays." 9 Thus the man who listens is he who is able to hear his own deep desire for God. He, the pilgrim, is able to say: "I want God and I want him more than anything else, and I will wait for him." This is what Teresa of Avila meant when she uttered her Deus solus sul~cit. It is this realization which is the substance of prayer. Following along these same lines, Karl Rahner says that the ulti-mate meaning of daily prayer is the awful waiting for the God we desire: "The prayer that You require of me," writes Rahner to God, "must be, ultimately, just a pa-tient waiting for You, a silent standing by until You, who are ever present in the inmost center of my being, open the gate to me from within." 10 For Rahner, being a listener, a pilgrim, was based on the realization that nothing on earth is worth abandon-ing oneself to it. Thus all life is one prayer, one long aspiring for God, like the lives of the wise virgins of the Gospel, si~ch that our eternal possession by God is the answer to our lifelong prayer, a prayer which basically is like that of John of the Cross: I live, yet no true life I know, And living thus expectantly, I die because I do not die Within myself no life I know And without God, I cannot live.n Out of our Augustinian restlessness-~our restless until they rest in thee--and out of our wholeness and for finality is born contemplati Thi~_ pr_~esupposes, of course, that we can hear~ ' Rorn 8:18-27. s Phil 1:23. ~No Man Is an Island (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1955), p. 42. 10 Rahner, Encounters, p. 24. ~ Works of John oI the Cross, v. 2, p. 450. hearts are ~unger for ve prayer. he cries of and World, 4- 4- + Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 81I Sister Kristin REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 812 our hearts for wholeness. The penalty for failing to artic-ulate our inner longings for God, for failing to risk the often painful encounter with the unseen God within Us, is being doomed to live a boring, supercilious, superficial life. But none of us wants to live a superficial life, just as none of us wants to live a life devoid of prayer. The crucial question, then, is: How do we learn to listen, to live as pilgrims? How do we begin to utter the "I want God" which is the essence of contemplative prayer? Pascal says that we would not seek God unless He had ¯ already found us.12 This suggests that we cannot learn to desire God, because He must find us first. This suggests that John of the Cross was correct when he said thatthe soul that has union with God no longer has any methods of prayer, that within the limits of the supernatural there are no prescribed ways.13 Pascal's remark also suggests that we do not really learn to look for God; rather, we realize He is already within us. Seeking Him should be for us, as it wa~ for Paul, a continual realization that He has already found us, that He dwells within us. "Know you not," Paul virtually shouts out, that "you are the temples of the Spirit?" 14 Paul knew that God had found him, had loved him.15 As John said: "Christ first loved us." i~ Perhaps we do not have a tremendous desire for God because we have not been stripped of all else. That is why we cannot live as listeners, as pilgrims. 1 referred earlier to the necessity of detachment if we were to listen to the cries of our heart for God--lf we were to llve ~'s pilgrims. This emptiness means, I think, that we realize that just as love demands sacrifice, so prayer dhmands discipline, that we cannot live by our feelings and then call it fulfillment, that we cannot live by rationalizing and then call it hearing the Spirit. I think this ~mptiness means, too, that we must bear patiently even our inabil-ity to desire God. Only When we learn to suffer with our own inability to find Christ, only when we discover our own spiritual poverty and our own hunger for God, only when we learn to agonize over the whys of existence and God and self---only then will we have prepared the ground out of which the solitude of contemplation will grow, because on.ly then will we have learned to listen. It is~hard to learn to listen, hard to say "I want God" when we know that the very conditions of our finding God demand sacrifice: the sacrifice of regular, disciplined ~ Quoted by Louis Evely, That Man Is You (Westminster: New-man, 1964), p. 15. ,1, Works o] John oI the Cross, v. 2, p. 76. it Rom 8:9-11; I Cor 3:16. ~ Rom 5:8. 101 Jn 4:19. prayer, the saca-ifice of not trying to rely on an of prayer but only on faith, the sacrifice of "a ihg," as Rahner calls it,17 the sacrifice of reno that we possess, as Luke says,18 the sackifice of o dung what we used to call gain, as Paul says.19 All these forms of sacrifice are" what Cassian "purity of heart," what Christ meant when no man can serve two masters, what Merton using Zen to still the birds of appetite, wh~ Eckhart meant when he said: "To be a proper God and fit for God to act in, a man should a] from all things and actions, both inwardly wardly.20 In saying that detachment and mortification condition for the contemplative prayer ofa li: being a pilgrim, we enunciate the dictum of Jc Cross: Solitude is o;eated by an unsatisfie~ John of the Cross compares wrong desires tc which obstruct the sight of the soul,2~ and says hess that is uncreated cannot enter the soul, not first cast out that other created hunger whk to the desire of the soul; for . two contrari dwell in one person . " Yet, in spite of our knowledge that we will ne union with God in prayer without first emp hearts of other desires, this knowledge does cause us to desire God. On the contrary, it is dous grace, I think, for a person living in th~ lose interest in the things that absorb the discover in his own soul an appetite for po y methods ~vful wait-ancing all )unting as meant by said that meant by it Meister abode for so be fi:ee and out-is the pre- ;tener, for hn of the hunger. cataracts that "ful-l there be h belongs es cannot vet attain Lying our lOt alone a tremen-world to orld and 'erty and. solitude. How can we prepare ourselves to r~ zeive this gift of grace? I think we can begin, as Merton'says, by not trying to understand, explain, or produce a ~lesire for God or for contemplative prayer. Rather, we on ght to .try tq see, to listen . and this seeing and hearin experience, not rationality, out of which pray! How else can we learn to hear the pure ~ which is the threshold for prayer? Paul sugges~ learn to really listen to the Spirit when in th~ chapters of the first epistle to the Corinthians, guishes two types of wisdom. The first is a ~ words; it is rational and didlectical. The secon~ dom of the cross; it is experiential and para6 was the second sort of knowledge that Paul kne about Christ. The word of the cross is self-empt Rahner, Encounters, p. 2~. Lk 14:33. Phil 3:7-9. Quoted by Thomas Merton, Zen, p. 9. Works oI John oI the Cross, v. 1, pp. 42-3. Ibid., p. 36. is pure is born. Cperience how we first two .ae distin-isdom of is a wis- ~xical. It w told us ying, and ÷ ÷ Prayer VOLUME 29, 1970 813~ 4, 4. Sister Kristin REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 814 only it enables us to know in the Biblical sense of know-ing as possessing in the act of love. Those who love have a new logic of knowledge and from this new type of wisdom comes the experience which is prayer. But prayer, listening to the reality of all that happens, is not merely being aware of our desire for God and our condition of being pilgrims. Prayer is not only to love God above all things, but it is also to see him everywhere in all things. This was what Teilhard called "purity of heart." 2a That is, prayer also is a type of listening which looks outward and sees the world as filled with signs of God. It is tlfis type of prayer whose exercise demands that we al! be prophets, revealing the hidden things of God out of tangible happenings. This type of prayer is not problematic if one's world is shot through with God. But how do we listen such that our world is seen and heard as permeated with God? One way, I think, is to build on the crucial experiences of life, since prayer operates by means of issues which are ulti-mate in our lives. That is, prayer operates according to our systems of values. Prayer, or the lack of it, affirms what is, or what is not, important to us: That is, the happenings which drive us to the ground ques-tions about human existence and which elicit our deepest self commitments are., good preparations for deep prayer. We find in the profound experiences of love and creativity an in-tensification of our spiritual self-possession, accompanied by a lucid awareness of the contingency of our world, which is already an encounter with God. From such peak experiences we can slowly learn to feel how God is always present to our human action?~ Perhaps we cannot learn to pray because we cannot really see or hear. Perhaps we are too much a part of an age which is activistic rather than prayerful, pragmatic rather than spiritual, anthropocentric rather than theocentric, compromising rather than disciplined. Thomas Merton once wrote that if we were really look-ing for God,. every moment and every event would sow seeds of contemplation in our hearts.2~ That is, if our hearts were ready, we would see that "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls" as Simon and Garfunkel say. All life would be a sign if we knew how to listen to God. How do we become prophets, so that we can listen to the signs of God that are heard in life? Perhaps one way of listening is conscience. Perhaps another is being aware of a seeking that is unsatisfied by material things. As we =Hymn of the Universe (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 124. -"~ John Carmody, S.J., "Contemporary Faith and Prayer," Sisters Today, November 1967, p. 105. "~ Merton, Seeds, p. 18. passively search, or listen, we become aware of God's work in us and in the world around us and we respond. This response, is prayer, and it was brought about, as Scriptures say, by sleeping with our hearts awake.2~ And our heart is kept awake by love and discipline, by faith- [ulness to the insights of prayer, by watchful attention. This continual search is the 'condition of continued growth, and faith is the condition of continual search.27 For us to be prayerful, then, requires that we learn to see the world as prophets, as full of signs of God, and this requires faith. But what is the object of our faith and how is it attained? Jesus told us to seek and we would find, and yet He did not tell us what we would find. In fact He said there were no close directives for discovering His kingdom. It would come unawares; it was within . His coming would be like a lJlghtning flash.-~s If this is so, then perhaps all we can do is to be like watchful virgins, ready for the hour when His light and His prayer comes. Another way of being "ready" is, I think, to eliminate the defensivensss and self-protectiveness of our words, by opening ourselves to understand, by giving up the secu-rity of set words or positions. If we know how to listen, then a person who confronts us with angxy words is really saying he is afraid to love us. A person who says God does not exist is really saying no one ever made God meaning-ful to him. Listening this way means hearing God. And after all, (lid not God know how to listen? He loved us first, as John says.29 He became a slave so that we could be saved, as Paul says, and He loved us while we were yet sinners.~0 Why is it that we cannot see signs of God, that we do not know how to listen and to pray? Perhaps it is because Christ is not real enough for us . but how is he made real? One way, I think is by the way in which He gives shape to our lives by the vocation that we, with the Spirit, choose. This is because, for the Christian, love is the only absolute, and' our vocational dhoice and our prayer are both concrete ways of expressing this love. When Jesus prayed, it was always in response to His vocation; He prayed before choosing His Apostles, and before His passion and death. To pray in this way, as Christ prayed, demands that we listen to the signs of God in our vocational call. We pray for much ~he same rea-sons that we want to be religious: we want to preach God and to praise Him and to help bring forth His kingdom. ~ Canticle of Canticles 5:2. ~ See Rosemary Haughton, On Trying to Be Human (Springfield, Illinois: Templegate, 1966), p. 42. = Lk 17:24. .o0 1 Jn 4:19. ~o Phil 2:7; Rom 5:9. ÷ ÷ VOLUME 29, 1970 815 Si~ter Kristin REVIEW FOR,RELIGIOUS 816 We want to find Him. For these reasons we pray. For these reasons we are celibates living in community. Thus the surrender to God's will which characterizes listening prayer seems, identical with a resolve to go ahead vocationally with what we know we must do. And what we must do is necessitating precisely because it is a faithful expression of who we are. Prayer and vocation both say who we are; they constitute our identity, and they are both linked together. If we are faithful to who we a~e, then we listen. Then we do not have to run around trying to fill up people with. God, because we know He is already there, that we have already been redeemed. Then we are abl~ to make visible, in daily events, the fact that behind the anxious sincerity and idealism and capacity to love of most people is the face of Christ who loved us so much that He came to liye among us, that behind the dirty curtain of Viet-nam, and racial hatred, and all the ways in which we are insensitive to those with whom we live, is the face of the crucified Christ. This is the raw material of prayer, and knowing how to listen refines it into prayer. If we know how to listen, then we do not have to look at the world as if it were built in two stories: the first floor, the natural level, the second floor, the supernatural level. If we know how to listen, we do not have to try to depend upon laws or habits or practices or veils to speak, of God. Our love will do it for us. Instead, we can take the world as it is, lavished by God's love and our poor attempts to love, and see it as holy. I do not think the person of prayer, as prophet, is pietistic.or aloof or unapproachable; I think he or she is One who is able to recognize in all men the face of the Messiah, the one who, as prophet, is able to make visible what is hidden and hopeful the one who was without hope. Such a person is compassionate and merciful; he realizes that nothing human is alien, that something looks profane only because his eye is not sacred. Out of this human compassion, the heart of a true prophet is opened not only to his sisters and brothers, but to God. In listening to them, he can listen to the man of Galilee who called illiterate fishermen, who talked with learned Pharisees, who wept over Jerusalem, and who, finally,. had nowhere to lay His head. Jesu.s redeemed us, and if we listen, we know that. When we listen, we will become aware of all that is beautiful, that is one, that is in pain and anguish, of all that is holy, in the Body of Christ. With this awareness-- and we have to be aware--we go to the Father in the Spirit, and we praise Him and reverence Him and lift up to Him the suffering members of His Body. It is this awareness which is the door to deep personal prayer. In fact, contemplative prayer is a witness to a special type of awareness: that of faith. Here:, God is present to the self and the contemplative listener is called to live in a more intimate communication with that mystery. Just as de-tachment was the precondition for the prayer which was desire for God, so faith is the precondition for the prayer which sees God in all things. When we can live these two types of prayer, when we are both pilgrim and prophet, we can listen, and we hear precisely because we have stilled our own murmurings and hear Christ in others. When we are all this, we have, as John of the Cross says, both entered upon the road and left the road at the same time.al At this point we will have given God, not our feelings, not even our thoughts, but ourselves. And when we have done this, we can say with Rahner: "Your commission has become my very life. It ruthlessly claims all my energies for itself; it lives from my own life." az We can say with Paul: I am not my own any longer,as At this point, our prayer will be the utterly simple prayer of listening because we will be living and moving and having being in God. Prayer will happen because we pray as we live, and we must live as pilgrims and proph-ets. In the end, all I have said comes down to our living with the unshakable conviction, of those who wait, that now we see a dim reflection in a mirror, but that one day, one day, as Paul says?4 we will see face to face. Works ol John oI the Gross, v. 2, p. 70. Rahner, Encounters, p. 72. Philem I:10; Phil 3:12. 1 Cor 15:12. Prayer. VOLUME 29, 1970 817 JOHN O. MEANY AND SISTER MARJORIE CAREY, B.V.M. Psychology and "The Prayer of the Heart" J. O. Meany is as-sociate professor of. education and Sis-ter Marjorie teaches Russian at the Uni-versity of Notre Dame; Notre Dame, Indiana 48556; REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Incredible as it may seem, there is an ancient Christian tradition of prayer which seems to be almost unknown to Christians in the West. How many Western Christians, for example, have heard of "The Prayer of the Heart"? This Eastern tradition of prayer, sometimes called "Hesy-chasm," may play an increasingly important role in the personal and interior "reformation" which is, hopefully, now taking place in the Roman Catholic Church in the West. There are changes emerging in the Western ap-proaches to prayer and to spiritual formation: a return to a more interior life of prayer and a personalistic and psychologically-conscious spirituality. In order to return to what is more basic and funda-mental in the psychology of prayer, it is essential that we distinguish between those particular aspects of Western Christianity which have been determined by our own unique culture(s) and traditions and, on the other hand, those aspects of prayer and spirituality which are, in an anthropological sense, relatively "culture-free," or more universal and fundamental. It may be difficult to com-pare. our own familiar forms of prayer and spirituality with those which are relatively more independent of our own experience and traditions, but only in this way can we obtain a new view of the primary sources of the basic Christian spirit. There are, of course, as many approaches to G6d as there are (from the human point of view) facets of His Being; and there are as many paths to Him as there are individuals whom He guides along these paths. For God is not limited by our limitations. He draws each individ-ual to Him in a unique way. Yet it seems that, however unique the way, God usually draws a person to Him by using that person's cultural and socio-economic back-ground. Eastern and Western traditions and personality characteristics differ; thus the mode of prayer of an East-ern Christian may seem to be radically different in ap-pearance, if not in reality, from that of a Western Chris-tian. In recent years, however, many young Westerners have turned to the East for new approaches to spirituality; they have found in some forms of Eastern spirituality-- particularly in Zen Buddhism and Yoga--new insights into themselves. Similarly, we, too, may come to see more clearly our own sources of spirituality, through an at-tempt to understand a different Christian tradition. In-deed, one seldom understands his own country until he has left it to travel abroad. | Historically, the Prayer of the Heart d~tes back to the fourth-century desert fathers of Egypt wh~ insisted on the ideal of continual prayer. The Prayer of/he Heart, often called the Jesus Prayer today, began to e~nerge in recog-nizable form during the fifth century; and the full text of the prayer can be found in the life of tl~e sixth-century Egyptian hermit, Abba Philemon. A coln~non~ expression of the Jesus Prayer, rhythmically said froth the heart, has bee,n,: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. This form of prayer can be descr!,b~d as: "Standing before God with the mind in the heart. | The roots of the Jesus Prayer are to belfound in Scrip-ture itself. The Jews of the Old Testarpent so revered Yahweh that His name was considered to [be an extension of His Person, a revelation of His Being.I This reverence for the name of God continues throughout the New Tes-tament: "At the na,m,,e of Jesus every kne~ should bow, in heaven and on earth (Phil 2:10). Indeed, lthe entire Jesus Prayer is existentially, as well as Biblically, oriented. Its similarity to two other Scriptural prayers is apparent: the prayer of the blind man, "Jesus, Son ~f David, have mercy on me" (Lk 18:38); and that of the [publican, "God be merciful to me a sinner" (Lk 18:13). In t!me, a body ,o,f traditio,n, al teachin~ c,a, lled "Hesy-chasm;' meaning quietness' or "reppse, grew up around the Jesus Prayer; and at least 'since the sixth century the tradition of the Jesus Prayer has influenced the spirituality of Eastern Christians. During three peri-ods of history the Jesus Prayer has been particularly in-fluential in the East: during the Golden Age of Hesy-chasm in fourteenth-century Byzantium .under the great theologian,. St. Gregory Palamas; during the Hesychast renaissance in Greece in the eighteenth century when the great anthology of Eastern spirituality, the Philokalia (love of the beautiful), was written; and during nine-teenth century Russia under Theophan the Recluse. To understand better how the Hesychast approach could contribute to the West, one might examine how it ÷ ÷ ÷ Prayer o] the Heart VOLUME 29, 1970 819 4. 4. 4. I. O. Meany and St. Marjmle REVJEW FOR REL]GIO0$ 82O has already contributed to the East; for example, how it has contributed to Russian spirituality, as that spirit has grown out of the environment and "national" character of the Russian people. The Russians are predominantly a silent people; this is evident in an old Russian custom: traditionally, whenever a member of an old Orthodox Russian family leaves on a journey, the entire family gathers in silence to pray. The family remains silent for several minutes; then the father rises to bless the family and each member of the family silently traces the Sign of the Cross on his forehead while facing the. family icon. Afte~ this paternal blessing, mutual blessings are ex-changed. This love of silence may also have led many Russian Christians to a contemplative life. There is also in the soul of the Russian people a primitive, almost naive simplicity; yet in this simplicity profound depths may be fathomed. Russian spirituality has been imbued with this simplicity which is so characteristic of the spirit of the Gospel. Their prayer life, too, has always been simple, without a complicated rational (or discursive) for-mula. Still another characteristic of the Russian peasant is his love of the rhythmic beauty of life--the" rhythm found in the cycles of nature and family life. This is especially apparent in the works of Tolstoy, who so com-pellingly depicted these cycles in his great epics, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This love of rhythm, found also in Russian music, is clearly reflected in the rhythmic breathing of the "Jesus Prayer." One of the most obvious characteristics of the Russian peasant is his yearning for open and unlimited stretches of land. The geography of the land, therefore, influences the national character ofthe people, which in turn, af-fects the forms of their spirituality. The vast open areas of Siberia, the immense forests of the country, seems to have evoked a response to the Infinite which is reflected in personal religious experience. Because of this yearning for space, the Russian peasant has also been somewhat of a pilgrim. This, of c6urse, is true of many cultures and personalities; indeed, the whole history of man can be seen as a journey. Yet as Nicolas. Berdyaev points out, this spirit of the wanderer seems particularly characteristic of the Russian people. Through the centuries Russian pil-grims have traveled from afar in search of peace and spiritual renewal, visiting the famous cathedrals of Kiev, Novgorod, and other places of pilgrimage. They have traveled especially to those places where a "staretz," a man of God, prayer, and discernment, was still to be found. Thus, the innate yearning of the Russians for vast unlimited space has made them a nomadic people. This spirit of the wanderer, in search of truth, is .underscored in The VCay of a Pilgrim, a story of a Russian pilgrim who journeys forth, continually repeating the Jesus Prayer. This unknown Russian pilgrim has made the Eastern mode of prayer more available to Westerners through his personal religious experiences which are de-scribed in The Way o[ a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim ,Con-tinues His Way. The Jesus Prayer is a prayer that comes from the heart. It differs from the current Western and, perhaps, more cognitive approach to prayer; yet as St. Teresa of Avila points out, the important thing is not to have m~ny thoughts, but to have great love. Eastern Christians seem to have preserved the idea of the whole man: body and heart as well as mind and soul. This more total approach to "spirituality" seems to be meaningful for modern Westerners, as can be seen in the new orientation of such books as Harvey Cox's The Feast o[ Fools, Dechanet's Christian Yoga, Dom Aelred Graham's Zen Catholicism and Norman Brown's Love's Body. The difference in modes of prayer, then, between the East and the West is based not only on cultural and personality characteristics, but also on the different atti-. tudes toward man which are prevalent in the East and in the West. For centuries. Europeans and Americans have tended to emphasize man's rational nature; and since the Counter-Reformation, this emphasis has found expression not only in Western scientific methodology but also in various discursive "methods" of prayer, such as the Igna-tian, Sulpician, Salesian, and Ligourian. Descartes' dualism, or Western rationalism, has failed, however, to create in the (non-Westernized) East the head/heart dichotomy that it has fostered in the West. The traditional Russian peasant seems never to have lost his sense of wholeness. Eastern Christians seem to have preserved that broad perspective of "the whole man," an integrated body-heart-mind-soul. Perhaps the Zen scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki was right in contending that Western thought has erected barriers be-tween man and reality; barriers of concepts, imagery, cas-uistry, and reasoning. Consequently, instead of bringing us closer to reality, language has frequently separated us from it. For example, if a person rigidly decides not'to think about sex, he often finds himself unconscio~usly in-volved in it. There is a story of a Western theologian who decided to marry just after writing an elaborate treatise on celibacy; the theologian admitted that all his former theories had been "mental constructs." In terms of depth psychology, this type of theological "construct" might be seen as an intellectual defense, a defense which .broke down under the pressure of previously-denied (emotional and sense) experience. Repression fosters "acting out.:' Similarly, current Western existential "philosophy" can the Heart ,. VOLUME' 29,. 1970 :~" 82L ~. O. Meany and Sr. Mar]orie REVIEW FOR RELiGiOUS 822 be seen as an attempt to break through (defensive) logical constructs in order to come closer to the "living reality." The East, however, is in a sense, already "existential" and has been throughout its long history. Though recent Western theology has tended to be Cartesian or dualistic, the Russian has always been more at home with an existential or phenomenological ap-proach to God and prayer. The writings of Dostoevsky were influenced by Orthodox spirituality; this approach is often viewed as both intriguing and somewhat threat-ening to a Westerner, whose spiritual formation has o.ften been unconsciously conditioned by abstract ideals and logical categories. However, existeritialism and phenom-enology are beginning to have an impact in the West, through such Christian authors as Dietrich von Hilder-brand, Hubert Dom, Adrian Van Kaam, Gabriel Marcel, and Simone Weil. The existential and direct approach to God, although it is found in the prayers of the liturgies of the West, has always been a more living part of the consciousness of the Russian. The best aspects of tradi-tional Russian spirituality would not be interested in a rationalism or nominalism which would tend to separate love from human physical experience. But the worst in Russian Marxism might attempt to separate love from the physical world. Even as the human body can be seen as the outward expression of the inner soul, so also can icons, images, and incense be seen as an expression of the Church's inner spirituality. Thus the Russian prays with a pro-found sense of reverence; he seems to have a deep sense of ritual. In the Orthodox religion there is no Western-like sepa-ration between the liturgy and private prayer; no such Cartesian-like distinctions are made. This ancient Eastern tradition is similar to a relatively new trend in the West-ern liturgical movement which stresses the use of public liturgical prayers for private prayer. The scholarly jour-nal, Worship, has long stressed the value of liturgical meditations. We are not always conscious of the fact that much of our Western liturgy is an existential prayer, existential because it addresses God in the "here-and-now." For. Orthodox Christians there are no logical dis-tinctions between private and public prayer, just as for them there are no class or caste distinctions between monks and laymen. Husbands and wives, monks and nuns, all follow the same traditional and existential way of prayer. Love, not rules, is the focal point. Orthodox Christians do not feel that reading the Bible reflectively is a prayer, though they do not deny its value. Reflective reading often is predominantly a cognitive process unless the words are related to the feelings, fanta-sies, and senses of the "heart." Orthodox Christians re-gard their prayer as more of a total personal relationship to God, by praying "with the mind in the heart." At the risk of imposing Western categories on Ortho-dox spirituality, one might distinguish three forms of Orthodox prayer. First, bodily prayer which uses the pos-ture and the senses of the body. For example, one might bend his head so that his eyes can look at the place of the heart; he may try to become aware of his breathing in order to use its natural rhythm as an aid to concentration as he prays to God. Secondly, mental prayer in which the mind holds the "Word" in inward prayer, so that con-sciousness is expanded; thus one tries to center one's whole being on the "Word of God." And thirdly, there is the Prayer of the Heart. This last form of prayer is for Eastern Christians the highest form of prayer because in this way of praying the mind descends to the heart as it stands before God. The Orthodox feel that it is essential that the mind descend into the feelings and images of the heart during prayer although they realize that the heart, without the attention of the intellect, is blind. As St. Makarios of Egypt (4th century) said: "Descend into thy heart and there do battle with Satan." Thus the mind of the person descends into his heart to view his feelings, fantasies, and sensual experiences in order to choose those which are truly good and oppose those which are not. This process is different from that advocated by some western writers like Tanquerey. This process also pre-supposes a deep psychological openness to oneself, a non-defensive consciousness. Unlike many Westerners, the Eastern Christian does not try to use his intellectual constructs to keep the mind from the heart. Rather, he worships God with his heart and feelings which are, hope-fully, known by his mind. Thus the body and the inter-nal senses play a positive role in prayer, as it can in higher forms of Yoga. The conscious use of the body, as in dancing, could play a more important role in prayer and in the liturgy of the West. The purpose of the Jesus Prayer is to fill one's whole consciousness with the name of Jesus, just as St. Francis of Assisi spent a whole night in prayer rqpeating ever more deeply the Lord's name. Ideally, the head and the heart are thus united; conscious unity in the person is the goal of some modern psychologists and theologians. For example, the psychologist Carl Rogers describes the ide-ally "fully functioning person" as one who knows, exis-tentially, what his "heart" (or organism) is saying, and he can talk about his inner experience if he chooses to do so. The theologian, John S. Dunne, in his A Search [or God Prayer of the Heart VOLUME 29, 1970 823 ~. O. Mean~ and St. Mar]orie~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS in Tim.~ and Memory also stresses the value of a unity of thought, feeling a.nd action in the person, " ' .~ Through the centuries physical~ "exercise~ ~ind disci-plines such as fasting have been used to affect one's sciousness. In prayer, exercises and inner discipli.nes can" be used. to concentrate, one's being on the n.ame of. Jesus. But. one great danger in "prayer" is that words, or thoughts can be compulsively repeated, being motivated by unconscibus inner conflicts;, thus "prayer" could, be used defensively to avoid an inner growth of. conscious-ness and love. As in some forms of Yoga, the Jesus Prayer can be associated with the natural rhythm of breathing. Thus, this Hesychast"method of prayer uses the natural, not [orced rhythm of breathing or the .heartbeat to aid total intellectual and emotional conceritration on the name of Jesus; just.as a Westerner might use the beads of'a rosary ti~ c0ncefitrate on a mystery. By using his breathing to concentrate on the name of Jesus, the person may thus bring prayer more deeply into his ~hole being. Sponta-neous and relaxed breathing is used to bring one's atten-tion repeatedly back to the name of Jesus, which is then psychologically associated with the breath (and life) of the person. It is important to realize that these physical exercises are regarded as an aid to, not~ an obligation of, prhy'er. The Orthodox know well that there can be no physical or mechanical means of acquiring grace. No bod' ily nor physical techniques can be an automatic method of obtaining grace. Furthermore, they do not recommend the use of this form of prayer without proper guidance, or Spiritual direction, because it can cause sexual arousal, or it could possibly damage the lungs or body, if forced o~ used incorrectly. Associating one's prayers with the natural easy flow of one's breathing, however, is'a way of aiding the mind to descend into the body and the heart,' in an attempt to offer lovingly to God one's whole being (emotions, will, and attention) in the name of Jesus. Some practical applications of processes similar to this way of prayer are described in J. M. Dechanet's Christian Yoga. This book is one example of a modern application of "ancient wisdom to prayer. He includes a discussion of practical techniques for the "Prayer of the Heart." "On the Three Methods of Attention and Prayer"'is a treatise often attributed to St. Simon the New Theolo-gian. It makes clear that .there are three ways of prayer. The first way of prayer, used by an emotional person, would stress primarily the feeling approach to God with-out much stress on reason. A second ,,~ay of,prayer would stress the intellectual approach with thoughts-fighting-. thoughts because that person is relatively unaware of his emotions. The third and preferable way is an integration which would have the mind consciously descend into the heart so that the person takes a conscious position toward his own internal emotions and fantasies in order to love God with his whole mind, his whole heart, and his whole soul In recent years many young Americans--like Franny in Salinger's Franny and Zooey---have come to know some-thing of the Jesus Prayer, although it may easily be mis-interpreted as a mechanical spirituality. Its appeal for modern people may be due to several factors: its Christo-centric theme, its Scriptural base, its simplicity. Many may find in this way of prayer a human expression of their adoration and love of God. Others may find in its rhythmic breathing a meaningful way of "physically ex-pressing" their spirit. So, like Yoga, Zen, and other modes of Eastern spirituality, Orthodoxy may offer to the West another approach to prayer, perhaps another way of help-ing us to find our way back to the Christian Spirit. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES Arseniev, Nicolas. Russian Piety. London: Faith Press, 1964. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Prayer. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961. Berdiaev, Nicolas. The Russian Idea. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Chariton of Valamo, Igumen. The Art of Prayer. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Dechanet, Jean Marie. Christian Yoga. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Delmage, L. Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. New York: Wagner, 1968. Diahonia, a journal edited by George Maloney, S.J. New York: Fordham University. Dunne, John S. A Search for God in Time and Memory. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969. Fedotov, George P. A Treasury of Russian Spirituality. London: Sheed and Ward, 1952. Hausherr, Iren~e. "La m~thode d'oraison h~sychaste," Orien-talia christiana, 1927. Loyola, Ignatius de. The Autobiography of St. Ignatius. New York: Benziger, 1900. Johnston, S.J., William. "Dialogue with Zen," Concilium, November 1969. Jung, Carl G. The Collected Worhs of Carl Jung, volumes 5 and 9. Princeton: Princeton University, 1968. Kadloubovsky, E. and Palmer, G. E. H. Early Fathers from the Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. Kadloubovsky, E. and Palmer, G. E. H. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. Mason, R.ussell E. Internal Perceptions and Bodily Function-ing. New York: International Universities Press, 1961. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. Unseen Warfare. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. Philips, Dewi Z. The Concept of Prayer. New York: Schocken, 1966. Prayer " o] the Heart VOLUME 2% 1970 825 Richardson, A. Mental Imagery. New York: Springer, 1969. Sofrony, Archimandrite. The Undistorted Image. London: Faith Press, 1958. Stolz, Karl R. The Psychology of Prayer. New York: Abingdon, 1923. Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. Baltimore: Pelican, 1964. .~. O. Meany and St. Mar]orle REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS JONATHAN FOSTER, O.F.M. Some Notes on Hostility and Fidelity: The Religious Presence One of the most masterful and insightful commentaries on human aggression dates from the years immediately following World War I--Edna St. Vincent Millay's poign-ant little play, Aria da Capo. In the work's "play within a play," two friendly and unsophisticated shepherds under the direction of a stern stage manager set out to play a game in which they innocently build a wall between them and say "that over there belongs to me and over here to you." The game soon becomes deadly serious, however, and their friendship quickly deteriorates into suspicion and mistrust. At one point in the game, Thyrsis has a moment of sanity and beseeches Corydon.: "It is an ugly game. I hated it from the first. How did it start?" To which Corydon replies: "I do not know . I do not know. I think I am afraid of you! You are a strangerl I never set eyes on you before." Their fearful insight into the tragedy of their situation does not hinder them, how-ever, from plunging head-long into the "game" which ends in their mutual killing of each other for what the other has. The essence of the tragedy of human existence there-fore, as seen by Miss Millay, is the deterioration of trust. When man do not deliberately break trust with each other, society can be sweet and peaceful, as the shepherds in the play experienced it. For in the beginning, before the "game," they agreed in simple joy to "make a song about a lamb that thought himself a shepherd." But when .the wall goes up--and in the play it is only a streamer of tissue paper that Corydon cannot even find when he staggers toward his dead friend in his death agony--ignorance and misunderstanding build large, + + 4. Jonathan Foster is a member of St. Joseph's Franciscan Seminary; P.O. Box 449; Oak Brook; Il-linois 60521. VOLUME 29, 1970 827. ]. Foster,~ O.F.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 828 tricksome images that cast dark and suspicious shadows over the land. And it is when we encounter these suspi-cious shadows that:we begin to experience hostility, and too frequeritly this hostility bristles into violence. I would like to suggest here that the situation dramati-cally Conceived in Aria da Capo is .r~pidly coming to characterize the whole of American society and that the current easy attitude toward vows in religious life is con-tributing to this situation. ¯ There is an unease in the land, an .unease that increas-ingly expresses itself in polarized movements, bristles with hostility for its counterparts, and, with a regularity t.ha.t is ~c~asing to. ast.onish; b.reaks out into violence. The reason for this is hardly a simple onE;°but one of the most important factors, I believe, is the demise of trust under-lined by Miss Millay. It has long been known that violence, especially as carried out by children, is the mindless response to a betrayal of trust by those who should above all have been trustworthy--parents, brothers, sisters, friends. Most psy-chotic violence among grown-ups too is explainable in terms of betrayal and subsequent alienation. It is.not too much to suggest that the unease drifting through our country, the. increasing prickle of hostility, the growing threat of mass violence is largely a projection on a na-tional scale of this same betrayal o~ trust. There certainly has been such a betrayal in our public institutions. Our government and political leaders have been. found to be insincere so often and so damagingly that they, have generated powerful counter-political movements based on an-idealism that seeks to actually do that which government and presen( politics only profess tostand for. Business and labor time and.time again have been found out to be playing dirty games behind the bright chintz of public relations, advertising; and noble sentiments. The curtains have been jerked back a few times too often on all levels of education, to reveal admin-istrators and teachers .with their thumbs stuck in a few unsuspected pies. Even the hallowed judicial system has been seen to be as petty and partial as ward-heeling poli-ticians. Bishops and religious leaders with almost monot-onous regularity put on masks in the same dressing rooms with government,, and more and more of their subjects are sbe, ing under the make-up. ¯ Perhaps all this insincerity is not as new as it seems. But what is certainly new is the great number of people who know: about it. Mass journalism and historical schol-arship have had much to do with this public breast-bar-ing, "telling, it like it is," debunking and stripping down even ou~ heroes. And so, I suggest, the great question that expresses the malaise of. our society is: "Who ;can you trhst?" Th~ cynical crack is mor~ and more the language of the land. More and more like-minded'groups, search-ing for trust, turn within and band together. The result is fraCtionalization, polarization, hostility, violence. "I do not know you" becomes "I do not trust you." But this is hardly the whole story. As if it were not engugh that the public institutions of our, society are found not to wash under their public robes, we are facing now the deterioration of trust in the private institutions of our society. Personal rel~itionships 'of all kinds ,have B~en affected by the erosion of trust. The vows of mar-riage, "till death do us part,"'ard taken with increasingly l~gs seriousness. In the steady-dating relationship, too, boys and girls enter into quasi-matrimonial and even Sex-ual relationships, the basis of which is not ~rust, but usefulness ~ind convenience. But where this relationship is easi!y deceived into thinking itself meaningful, the no-torious "Playboy" relationship cynically strips away all pretense and encourages partners to enter the most trust-oriented of all relationships with the most callow mo-tives. And the infamous generation gap is not created just by misttnderstanding. It is created as much by the parents using this deepest and most responsibility-bearing rela-tionship as a means for their own advancement. Finally, there are religious vows. In the past history of religious life, the value of the vow for. society was preemi-nent. Today what is becoming of supreme value is the relevance of the vo;v for the individual religious. And if the taking of the vow, or the keeping of it even for a specified time much less for life, is similarly restricting, then it is not taken, or it is broken in view of some other commitment. The priority of the individual in the reli-gious taking of vows has become paramount in our day. What we are failing to understand at this point in the pendulum swing of religious commitment is that reli-gious life is perhaps the last social institution in which fidelity and trust are basic and honored, and that this perhaps says something about the witness of religious life in contemporary society. The absolute centrality of promises to the preservat~ion of the quality of human existence has been strongly stressed b);' various authors, bi~t none has made the case more' strongly than the philosopher, Hannah Arendt; In her book, The Human Condition, Miss Arendt pinpoints two factors essential to the preservation of~ life from chaos. The first is forgiveness, or the undoing of mistakes of the past. The second is the faculty to make and keep promises. The first obviously deals with the past. The second concerns the future. The ability to make promises and keep them builds on the reality.of forgiveness, and Mi~s Arendt always keeps the two together. But for our VOLUME 29; "1970 ' "" 829 ]. Foster, O.F.~I. ~EVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 830 purposes here, we must look especially close at what she says about promise. The making of promises is an expression of one of the most ancient needs of man. In fact the two great institu-tions of western society were built on promises. The Jew-ish- Christian religion grew out of the covenants of Abra-ham with God. And the Roman empire built a legal system on the inviolability of agreements and treaties. This is not surprising. For man's experience of himself in history has revealed a twofold "darkness." The first is his inability to rely on or have complete faith in himself: The second is the unpredictability of human events. And so man, both to insure his own survival and to make his society an increasingly hospitable one, from the very be-ginning has gone out to his fellowman in promise and covenant. He has come to rely on and count on his fel-lows. Promise is what holds society together and staves off barbarity, barbarity both in the forms of totalitarian domination and in the unstructured freedom of anarchy. Although Miss Arendt's primary purpose in treating the faculty of promise is to show that it lies at the very foundation of society, she does not ignore its value for the growth of the individual, which she sees in the con-text of the preservation of one's integrity: Without being bound in the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be con-demned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradic-tions and equivocalities--a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who con-firm the identity between the one who promises and the one who. fulfils can dispel" (The Human Condition, Doubleday Anchor Books, p. 21B). Promise combines with forgiveness, as Miss Arendt sees it, to form the basis of morality. For "these moral pre-cepts [forgiveness and promise] arise . directly out of the will to live together with others., and thus they are like control mechanisms built into the very faculty to start new and unending processes" (p. 221). It is here also that she stresses the creative and life-sustaining force of forgiveness and promise. For if we could not forgive mis-takes and if we could not re-establish firm bonds through promise, then society would be trapped by the "law of mortality" and would steadily wind itself down to death. Forgiveness and promise together make newness con-stantly possible. And as such they are the foundations for the Christian view of life--faith and hope: faith that is fidelity to the convenant, and hope that is created both in this fidelity and in forgiveness. What is important, I think, about Miss Arendt's com-ments is that they place the taking and keeping of vows not in the context of what it can do for the individual but rather of how the taking of vows enters into the very bloodstream of human society. She speaks eloquently of promise as confronting the "darkness" of human exist-ence, of staving off "ruin and destruction," of the "mira-cle that saves the world." She also cites Nietzsche's com-ment that promise is the very distinction which marks off human from animal life. It is precisely to this larger context therefore that we must shift some of our discus-sion of religious vows. Far from being an anachronistic kind of slavery exercised by religious orders to maintain their survival, religious vows must be seen, in Miss Arendt's perspective, as an expression of man's striving not only for survival, but for dignity as well. To further emphasize this perspective, we must focus very precisely on the kind of promises religious make. It is not a promise to complete the transaction of a deal, to run a hospital, to cook forever, or just to do anything. It is a promise to be, and as such a deep commitment and trust. We can forgive someone who does not keep a prom-ise to do something, and we can perhaps survive in a society in which this failure to deliver is relatively fre-quent. But how much can we tolerate of a society that ¯ does not keep its promises to be? When people make great commitments of personal loyalty and then opt out in large numbers, what effect, we must ask, does this have on society at large? And when they go a step further, frequently in justification, and refuse promise at all, or make expressions of loyalty that are weak, decidedly ter-minal and often vague and open-ended, what, we must fnrther ask, effect does this have on society? Does it weaken the ties between men? Is this abandonment of covenant intensifying in a' way that has not occurred to us at all the increasing lack of trust and rising hostility in our society? Does it raise again on a new front, and per-haps the last one, the question: "~¥ho can you connt on?" I suggest that religious have a serious responsibility to raise these issues. They are perhaps the last people in the world in which the free offering of total loyalty has been taken for granted as a matter of policy. Because of this professed commitment, they have been witnessing some-thing to the world, namely, that it is possible to be loyal and trustworthy on a grand scale. They have advanced the ideals of mankind a great milestone. And now sud-denly they have reversed this witness, first in practice, now in theory. The anger and resentment, shock and frustration of many people over the vast exodus from vows, now settling into a flat cynicism, comes as no sur-prise. Religious cannot simply dismiss this anger and cy-nicism with the comment: "They'll get used to it." This may very well be the tragedy we can least afford~that men should get used to it. ÷ ÷ VOLUME 29, 1970 831 ¯ Perhaps then if there is any validity tO these questions another dimension must be added to the mission of reli-gious today. If, as Miss Arendt suggests, the power of making and keeping promises is our bulwark against chaos or repression, if, as Nietszche asserts, fidelity is what distinguishes us from animals, then the question of vows is not merel.y a question of the internal life of a particu-lar community or of individual religious. It is joined to the very issue of human survival. My suggestion, then, is that as religious weigh' the relevance of taking of not taking vows, of their leaving or dissolution, to the per-sonal fulfilment of the individual religious, they also seri-ously discuss again the impact this same taking or aban-doning of vows has for society at large. The problems of the individual religious in an institute that he or she feels is inhibiting or irrelevant or itself unfaithful to its own profession are real eno.ugh to us. They have preoccupied religious for the past several years. But what about this same religious in relationship to a world in which indi-viduals and groups are drifting further and further apart 'because of the decay of trust and faithfulness? Do not religious perhaps have a mission here too? Today most religious orders, in their renewal, are concerned about "going out to the ~orld," trying to be relevant. It would be most ironic, not to say tragic, if what the world most needs, trust and loyalty, were precisely what religious are s'o busily unpacking and heaving overboard. ]. Foster,~O~F.M. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 832 KATHRYN LINDEMANN, O.P. Toward a Definition of "Communi " The problem. During the past few years there has been much debate among American religious concerning "community." "What is community?" and "What do you mean by community?" are two frequently heard ques-tions. This article does not attempt to totally resolve these questions since any further "total solutions" would only add to the present confusion. This paper does attempt to disentangle the discussion and to introduce clarifications which, will make resolu-tion possibl~. To this end it begins with a consideration of the present state of the issue. Then there is a non-po-lemic exposition of the meaning of "community" as found in current literature. Finally there is an indication of some still unanswered questions concerning "commun-ity" which seem important for continued progress toward a clear definition of "community." ¯ .4 first inquiry and a prol~ered solution. The fact that American religious are asking about "community" seems to indicate that they are aware of confusion and are seek-ing to remedy it. Confronted by this confusion, a normal query is: Why such a difficulty concerning "community"? One proffered solution has been to postulate something about the word itself~some attribute which defies defini-tion. "Community," like patriotism, becomes a Wittgen-steinian "slogan word" which is too ambiguous for defini-tion. Such a proposal is both logically unsound and a breeder of irrationality. If one analyzes it, one finds: 1. It accepts the generalization: "If x is a slogan word, then x precludes definition." 2. The postulation is then argued: since the definition of 'community' engenders much confusion, "com-munity" must be a slogan word. Since slogan words are indefinable, then "community" must be indefin-able. This is viciously circular. It assumes what it claims to ÷ Kathryn Linde-mann, O.P., lives at Mr. St. Mary Col-lege' in .,Newburgh, N.Y. 12550. VOLUME',29, '1970 . ~ ÷ ÷ Kathryn Linde- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 834 prove. The statement of the generalization only acts as camouflage. If one wants to conclude that a slogan word is not definable, one cannot assume it is a slogan word because it is indefinable. In the practical order, the proposal leads to subjectiv: ism and a canonization of irrationality. If "community" is indefinable, then there is no procedure for discussing: what it is; what engenders it; what destroys it. Two indi-viduals have no way of ascertaining if they use the term with the same meaning. They are condemned to unknow-ing or subjectivism. Since rationality depends on com-monness, no rational procedures of discussion or decision are possible. Thus all those groups of American religious now committed to the conscious renewal of community can have no use for rationality in their endeavors. At best, community renewal needs to be relegated to some irrational force. A second proposal. The above is not the only possible explanation for the confusion concerning "community." There is also an explanatory avenue opened by the no-tion of the theory laden texture of terms. In Patterns of Discovery, Norman l~ussell Hanson explores the relation between theory and particular observations, facts, and terms. He contends that scientific observation, fact, and meaning are only possible within the context of a theory. Further, he holds that each of these three are theory determined. Thus, two men experiencing the same sense data of orange color patch moving upward through an orange tinted visual field at 6:50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time in Newburgh, New York, might observe two dif-ferent things. One operating in a Ptolemaic framework observes the sun rising. The other operating in a Coper-nican framework observes the earth turning. If each spoke of the "morning event," "morning event" would have, in a certain sense, a different meaning for each.1 Hanson often cites such theory determination of termi-nological meaning: If, in the blank pages of a next year's diary, we find the word 'fire' in the place reserved for St. Valentine's day, no action would suggest itself. Consider another man shouting 'Fire'; but now he is in uniform, hovering over a busy gun crew. Were we members of that crew, our response would be automatic . In other contexts 'fire' might herald a worker's dismissal, or the entrance of a Wagnerian soprano amid pyro-technics. It can signal a phase in the making of pottery, de-scribe how an actress reads her part, or designate some primi-tive rite . 'Fire' has, in each situation, a propositional force; it is shorthand for complex statements whose nature is clear from the contexts of utterance. We are not born able to recog-nize such contexts., for that we need education.2 X Norman Russell Hanson, Patterns o] Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1965), pp. 7-8. 2 Ibid., p. 63. And again: When the youngster says 'lightning and thunder' he prob-ably means 'flash and rumble.' Again, a lot may follow, but what follows for him is different from what follows for the meteorologist--for whom 'lightning and thunder' probably means 'electrical discharge and aerial disturbance.' 8 ~lpplication to the question of community. In order to see the relation of this theory laden texture of terms to the present confusion among American religious, one needs to know something of the recent intellectual his-tory of religious groups. Since 1949 there has been what Thomas Kuhn would call a "paradigm shift" in religious life.4 Any comparative study of congregational constitu-tions of 1949 and 1969, of the 1949 and 1969 issues of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS, or of books dealing with the theory of religious life from that span of years, gives multitudinous evidence of this paradigm change. In this paradigm shift, the term "community" is one which has been strongly affected. It has moved from a peripheral to a central position and has acquired a new extension. This change in "community" cannot be considered in isolation from the total theory of religious life. The change in meaning actually occurred as a result of changes in other areas of the theoretic system. A change of perception concerning certain areas made for new ways of seeing many other areas. And as the whole theory changed, each specific term was affected. Having noted the theory-laden-texture of terms and the fact of paradigm change in religious life, one can now locate reasons for the present confusion concerning "com-munity." These reasons are embedded in two specific fea-tures of the theoretical change among American religious. First, the change has not been a single-stroke event. Sec-ond, the "new theory~' has not yet reached stasis. First, the change in the religious life paradigm has not been a single stroke event. It is a process event whose history can be mapped. See Figure I. Given Theory A (the paradigm at n) and the innovations (I . I5), one finds a transformation in theory during stages n+l. n+5. The first outlines of Theory B become evident at stage n+5. Most often, one thinks of the theory only at stage n (theory A) or stage n+5 (theory B) since at these stages the theory is in stasis. These two stages represent "para-digms" as Kuhn refers to them and the change from paradigm A to parad@n B is a "revolution" in the Kuhnian sense. It is a fact, however, and one at which ~ Ibid., p. 61. 'Thomas Kuhn, The Structure o] Scientific Revolutions (Chi-cago: University of Chicago, 1962), pp. 43ff. ÷ ÷ + "Community" VOLUME 29, :970 835 Theory elements oO OoOo oo\o o\ o o -o n n-'l-1 n÷2 n+3 n÷4 n-~-5 Figure ] 4. 4. 4- Kathryn Linde. mann REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Kuhn hints several times, that the intermediary stages exist.5 Now, as is normal in the innovation and diffusion o[ ideas, all members o[ religious congregations do not ac-cept theoretic innovation or revision at the same rate.e Since the acceptance of theoretical innovations is not simultaneous and universal, different individuals within the total population o[ religious may be in different ~tages of theory revision at any given time (n+l. n+5). Since terms are theory determined, such members, being at different theoretic stages, mean different things by " com~munity." Since the dynamics of any change are seldom pondered at the same time as the change is occurring, given reli-gious are usually unaware of the specific theoretic stage they are in. Further, they may not realize that theirs is one stage in a process continuing toward a new paradigm and stasis.7 Thus, one has the situation in which individ-uals will notice that there .are apparent differences in meaning concerning "community" (or a number of other ~ Ibid., pp. 84-7, 89, 128-9. e Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1968). ~Note, for example, the many expressions of conviction among religious that there will never again be a stasis in religious life or theory. terms such as prayer, apostolate, or common life) but will be at a loss to either: articulate the differences with any precision, or to explain the differences through an enun-ciation of the theory which determines their meanings. This is a major source of the confitsion concerning "com-munity" at the present time. . Second, it is not until a theory approaches stasis that all the relations among particular elements are enunci-ated with any precision. To the extent that this precision is absent, there is an inescapable vagueness about any term endemic to the theory. Most congregations have enunciated the major outlines of the new paradigm in their constitutions. Yet all refer to their constitutional documents as interim or experi-mental, and all expect to produce a more finished prod-uct in a few years. Congregations have built in a time span for working out the practical and theoretic interre-lations among various elements,s The new paradigm is not yet articulated with full precision, and so a certain vagueness concerning a key term such as "community" is inescapable. Until this full precision is reached, a certain confusion will remain in the meaning and use of "com-munity." Summary. The theory laden texture of terms proposal succeeds in answering the first query concerning the why of the present confusion about "community," whereas the indefinability proposal did not. This theory laden texture notion indicates a double source of confusion: the simul-taneous operation of multiple versions of theories within the groups and the lack of precision in the newest theory because it has not yet reached stasis. Having dealt with the first query, the study needs to move on to the next: "How is 'community' defined in the new paradigm among religious?" ~ What Is "Community"? Method. To avoid arguing some of the philosophical issues attendant upon "meaning," "definition," or "expli-cation" this paper will approach the problem a poste-riori. There will be an examination of the literature for religious to see what meaning is already established in relation to "community." From this information, there will be an attempt at precise definition or explication. The two paradigms. The general accounts of "com- S As established in Ecclesiae sanctae, au apostolic letter issued on August 6, 1966, by Pope Paul VI (reprinted iu REVIEW FOR REL~CIoUS, V. 25 (1966), pp. 939--70. ~The meaning of "community" in the old paradigm has re-ceived adequate treatment by sociologists, historians, and theo-logians. The elements of the new paradigm, however, have seldo~n been subject to collection and analysis. ÷ ÷ ÷ "Community" VOLUME 29, 1970 - 837 + ÷ ÷ Kath~ Linde- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS munity" diverge gr~eatly between the old (1949) and the new (1969) paradigms of religious life. Since a contrast often helps specify a complicated term, a general account of "community" as it appears in each of these basic theo-ries is presented first. When one studies old constitutions, those in effect in the forties and fifties, one finds: 1. The term "community" is rarely used. 2. When it is used it is capitalized as a proper noun-- denoting a particular (person, place or thing). 3. It seems to have a non-personal, "thing-like" quality common to collective nouns used in the "otherness" of the third person. 4. Sometimes the word designates a local group, while at other times it refers to an entire group. In the lat-ter instances, one mentally substitutes the word, "Congregation" or "Institute," both of which occur far more frequently in these early documents. Point four seems to strike the terminological core, for the meaning of "community" is primarily that of a hier-archical organization. Almost every sentence utilizing the Word "community" would retain its meaning if "organi-zation" were substituted. Further, the literary structure of these constitutions of the forties and fifties seems domi-nated by the organizational model. They set out goals; they cite organizational procedures for attaining the goals; and they define each person in terms of her role in the organization. They state the duties of the role (posi-tion in the organization), the prerequisites for possessing this role (be it that of an ordinary member or an officer), and the privileges of the role. The documents join a second model to that of hierar-chical organization. There is an interpersonal ideal of a familial society which is most compatible with that of a hierarcical organizational model. Officers are compared to parent figures. As such they ought to give and receive love and concern in a way which officers of an organiza-tion usually do not. Thus, in a unified model of hierar-chical- organization-family one provides an ideal for the lived situation of religious life. Newer constitutions, those of the sixties, present dif-ferent features: 1. "Community" is a common word; it appears time after time. 2. In most documents there is a definite distinction between community-as-organization and communi-ty- as-people. 3. Most, at least implicitly, deny "community" of the hierarchical organization model. "Community" de-notes, a primary group with strong interpersonal ties. This interpersonal notion is often extended to the congregation-as-community or the larger, civic, community. Although texts vary, the following is typical: Religious life is a loving community of free consecrated persons, sharing their lives, their worship, their service and their celibacy. A distinctive mark of the religious life is to be found in the fact that this living of Christ's life, this witnessing to His values, is lived corporately?° The function of a religious community is twofold. The first is to provide the climate for its members to grow to full stature as free persons in an ever deepening union with Christ, and for the sake of His Kingdom to be available to serve individually and corporately the needs of men. The second is to present a threefold witness in the eyes of the persons it serves: a living witness to Christ and His values, a sacrament of Christ's continued presence among men, and a sign of hope that community, which is the only mode of existence proper to men, can be a reality?1 When one looks for a model to explain this use of "community," one tends toward the community of scholars or St. Paul's my.stical body model. Religious community is the union of equals through interpersonal relationships. Each individual gives some service to the group: the serv-ice of authority, of information, of support, and so forth. Further the community itself is situated in relation to other communities. Religious community is always seen as a microcosm of the larger community of the Church and as such the religious community has an intimate re-lation to the People of God (Church) and the world com-munity.~ 2 Distinction. in terminology. Hence forward this paper will speak of the general account of community as found in the 1949 paradigm as "community1" and that in the 1969 paradigm as "community2". At present few religious make such an explicit distinc-tion. A single term, "community," is used for both mean-ings, although some religious are beginning to say that although both are called "community" only the 1969 paradigm expresses real community. Toward a Definition of "Community2" The term. In analyzing the common use of "community,;', one finds a distinction clearly made be-tween "having community2" and "being a community,". The latter is a wider term which necessarily includes the former. 10Sisters of the Third Order of St. Dominic of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Religious Lile: Lived Reality (Grand Rapids, Michigan: 1969), p. 4. n Ibid., p. 10. ~ Yves M. J. Congar, o.P., "The Theology of Religious Women," REv~w for RELIGIOUS, V. 19 (1960), p. 26. ÷ ÷ ÷ " ommunity" VOLUME 29, 1970 859 ÷ + + Kathryn Linde. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Having community,". The instances in which the term "having community2" is clearly applied reveal three nec-essary elements: a group of persons, united in sharing "goods," and either a resulting witness to Christian values or personal growth of some members. First, intuitions may indicate the last (witness or growth) as non-necessary, but when one discusses specific examples with members of religious congregations, one finds a hesitancy to apply "community2" to anything lack-ing a result in witness or personal growth. Confronted by an example exhibiting the first two characteristics of (1) a group and (2) sharing goods, which lacks, however, the third characteristic of witness or growth, members tend to say: "Maybe the witness or growth was really there but you didn't notice it"; or: "If there was no witness or growth you only thought you had community, but you really didn't." Hence this third characteristic is included as a necessary element for "having community2",is In pressing for precision, one finds that each of these characteristics is a term with its own range or extension: I. group of persons--extends to all persons united in groups, ranging from the smallest group of three to the largdst number so designatable. 2. sharing goods--extends to all goods, both internal and external, which can be shared by humans. In the context of "having community2" at least one internal good must be present, but any number of additional internal or external goods may be present also. 3. witness or personal growth extends to (1) all witness to Christian values and (2) all growth in personal maturity. "Having community2" is the term applied to the event which occurs when all three of these characteristics inter-sect. More formally. One may say that "x has community," if and only if: x is a group of persons; and there exists at least one y such that y is an internal good and x shares y; and either x gives witness to Christian values, or there is at least one z such that z is a member of the group's union in sharing and z grows in maturity as a result of this mem-bership. "Being a community2". When one examines the use of "being a community2" by religious, several crucial cases reveal themselves: 1. If a group "has community.o" frequently for several 18One is struck by the difficulty of making empirical observa-tions of personal growth or witness to othe,~. Yet this is how the term is used by religious. This study proposes to describe, to cite extension of terms, not to evaluate them as "true to reality," "false to reality," and so forth. weeks but then illness or work prohibits this "hav-ing community2" for awhile, no one denies the .group still is a community. All consider the non-hav-ang of community as a temporary condition which does not destroy the being-a-communi.ty of the group. On the othei: hand, all agree that an absence of "having community2" continued for a long enough period, would negate the gr9up's being a community. 2. If a group lives together for some time but shares little more than their domicile, no one designates them as "being a community2". 3. Groups experiencing two or three instances of in-tense "having-community2" are assigned a status of "being a community2" equivalent to other groups which have eight or nine experiences of community on a much lower level of intensity. To preserve these designations of being a community, this researcher proposes a function, C: frequency of having community X intensity of having communityt4 the total duration (or proposed duration) of the group All items having a C result of at least 0.3 are described as "being a community2". They fall in the extension of the tenn. Thus one can replace the externally vague term "being a community2" with the clearly defined one of "any x, where x is an item having a C function of at least 0.3." Some criticisms o[ the above analysis. There is much lacking in this whole analysis. This lack extends both to the theological and to the empirical dimensions of the discussion. First, theological aspects, for example, the cen-trality of Christ in community, are not explored in this rather philosophical approach. Yet these aspects are most important parts of the notion of community. Second, em-pirical aspects are incomplete. The method of finding the intensity of community noted in footnote 14 is inade-quate. Also, there have been no empirical studies to jus-tify, for example, the choice of 0.3 as the limit for "being a community2". Indeed, there is a lack of precise data for much of this discussion. The Task Remaining ÷+ American religious need to continue to explore this + notion of "community." They need to listen carefully to 1, The intensity of community is a function obtained by assign-ing positive integers to the elements contained in the range of each characteristic necessary for "having community.". The product of these integers indicates the level of intensity of "having com-munity.'. VOLUME 29, 1970 841 what others are saying about community and to note exactly where their statements agree and where they dif-fer. And when they find that they differ, religious need to be willing to continue the discussion. They need to find the reason for the differences. Sometimes it will be a false difference caused by incomplete communication of mean-ing. in other cases there may be a real difference. When religious reach the point of finding the exact differences, they are then keady to begin the honest dialogue common to every discipline which is alive and healthy. Out of such dialogue can come a truer understanding of '~com-munity" and perhaps a revitalization of their communal living. Perhaps, too, such dialogue will result in the reali-zation that although "community1" and "community2" have appeared as opposing theories, they are not antitheti-cal notions. They describe two different aspects of the same phenomenon. The above is an ambitious plan for religious. It is also difficult. Yet real analysis, the foe of polemic, is not only difficult it is very necessary. Emotivity makes poor theo-retic justification, and no theory can claim reasoned alle-giance if its advocates are not willing to utilize the pro-cessses of reason. Kathryn Lind¢- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS RICHARD M. McKEON, S.J. Retirement Policy for Religious With an increasing number of people enjoying a longer span of life many religious should be alert to the fact that they too will hit the retiring age before they realize it. Yes, retirement for older religious is finally being recognized formally. To many retirement will come as a shock. They will think that they have reached tlae end of the line and that they will drift rapidly into the hereafter. It is time that all religious orders wake up to this new problem. They must have programs to acquaint their older members with all facets of what retirement means. In this respect a great deal can be learned from the world of industry where programs have been in effect for many years. Later we shall discuss some of these and try to apply their wisdom to our older religious. Superiors who are formulating programs must face this issue squarely. Why should the accumulated experience and developed talent be lost to apostolic endeavors merely because a certain age for retirement is at hand? Here is capital which should be yielding dividends. If older religious are forced to coast along waiting for Ga-briel's horn to summon them to give an account of their stewardship, that accounting will be harder to make. Time has value. Time lost is never regained: "Some secrets of the well-rounded retired life are these: make the most of what you have; wherever you are, go with your whole heart; keep your eye on what's coming up, not on what's slipping by; play your role with comeliness; do not let the minutes rust away" (Bank of Canada Monthly Letter, December 1967). It is presumed after long years in religion one has a true sense of values. Before retirement each one should assess his own possibilities and plan to achieve new goals. Many opportunities will arise to afford an active life within one's mental and physical condition. What do older religious in good health want? They Richard McKeon, S.J., teaches at Le Moyne College; Syr-acuse, N.Y. 13214. VOLUME 29, 1970 8~5 ÷ R. M. McKeon; Sd. REVIEW FOR REI~?IOU~S want to remain active and to do good as long as possible; to utilize their special talents; to receive the same respect they commanded in middle age. Rightfully they expect the functional policies and the traditions of religious life to be practiced in their regard. The older religious must be convinced of being heart-edly in earnest in what he can still do. Discouragement and difficulties will be challenges. He must have a firm resolve to carry on. If he has a reputation for special gifts, rightly may he expect others to approach him. To quote the Talmud: "If you see a man of understanding, get you betimes to him, and let your foot wear out the steps of his door." At least once a year, usually during retreat, he should make an honest appraisal of himself: "How is my health? Have I checked with a doctor? Have I reviewed my work of the past year to see what I have done well? What mistakes .have been made? What are my plans for the coming year? Have I determined to keep my mind alert, to keep feeding my mind by study so as to contribute to my up-to-dateness and the germination of ideas?" Richard Butler, O.P., warns: "Those approaching old age should prepare themselves for the trial ahead by strengthening their faith, patching up the holes in their characters, stiffening their self-reliance, developing new and sustaining interests, discovering orientations of ac-tivity that will endure and will provide some amount of satisfaction for them" (America, November 19, 1966). Good ideas can be picked up from ordinary literature on retirement. For men and women who have been highly educated and employed in apostolic work it would be better to study what is going on in the field of indus-try and business. Special research studies on retirement have been made at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago. The Caltech report suggests "a model program and a variety of ways in which it can be adapted to different company situa-tions." These studies are recommended to religious orders which are preparing programs. A digest of the program at Esso will afford some help-ful suggestions. First, changes in life expectancy are ex-plained. Then it tells how millions in the over 65 age group are non-productive but still consumers. In a word, when a worker retires, he is no longer productive to the country, profitable to the company, and useful to himself. Compulsory retirement is explained together with the benefits offered through social security and pensions. But more accent is placed on the sociological problem--how the retiree can be active, fruitful, and constructive. Esso offers help and counsel to each worker to think through his new situation. The company "feels that retirement is something earned by faithful service, a form of 'graduation' into a new phase of life rather than a 'casting out' process. Re-tirement should be the opportunity for the employee to enjoy the fruits of his labors in freedom, leisure and relaxation as well as an opportunity to serve himself, his family and his community in ways not open to him dur-ing his working career." A year before the set date group discussions are held covering topics such as health, planning for the future, what has been done, and so on. Plenty of appropriate literature is available. Each prospective retiree is pre-sented with a copy of How to Retire and Enjoy It by Ray Giles (McGraw-Hill). The Wall Street Journal frequently publishes articles on how retired executives keep busy, Their prime motiva-tion is not to make money for themselves, but to help others in trouble. Although some go into real estate and others start small businesses, many of the best become consultants as a challenging occupation. They form com-panies to give their specialized skills to small firms which need professional advice. The Mohawk Development Service of Schenectady, New York, has an excellent record of over twenty-five years. It is composed of former General Electric Company executives who have pooled their talent and experience. At Wilmington, Delaware, a similar group of Du Pont managers is engaged in a variety of projects. Charles H. Kellstadt retired as chairman of Sears, Roe-buck in 1962. At 72 in 1970 he is chairman and president of the General Development Corporation, one of Flori-da's largest land companies. He took over when things were in very bad shape. Today the corporation is most prosperous. His goal is to do a $250-million business a year. Religious orders should become a, cquainted with the International Executive Service Corps. Here is a magnifi-cent contribution which American executives are making in helping developing nations to help themselves. Its work should inspire qualified older religious to do some-thing similar to aid the foreign missions. The ISEC is a non-profit organization with headquar-ters in New York. It sends seasoned executives to counsel companies in the poorer lands. There is no salary but travel and living expenses are assured. Within the past five years a total of 1244 projects have been successfully completed in 45 countries. Optimism and the challenge of difficult problems have ÷ ÷ ÷ R. M. McKeon, $.l. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 846 given these men a new interest in life. They work with the native managers, not over them. Their know-how is eagerly sought. Using tact and patience they guide local managers to realize their own great potential Helping others to help themselves, who in turn will help thou-sands more, is certainly a high type of social action. Sylvia Porter in her column for December 16, 1969 paid tribute to the IESC and then put the question which might be put to older religious: "Why couldn't the con-cept be brought back home so that men and women in this age bracket work as volunteers in the ghetto and rural poverty areas of our own land?'" Our religious could make a great contribution here. "Life is only exciting when you are contributing in the mainstream." Keeping in mind what retired executives have done, let us make application to religious. First of all, those who have been superiors for a long time are still human. With a fair record of successful management, there is danger that many will regard themselves as indispensable. Every undertaker will contradict this statement. They have bur-ied too many. But to former superiors retirement does come as a shock. In industry it is maintained that compulsory retire-ment is the only way to clear out executive deadwood. Many of us know that it is a very touchy to mention possible retirement to an old superior: "Top manage-ment generally considers the subject as unmentionable as bereavement." Older religious might take a hint from the remark of a wise judge: "Retirement implies at least part of the motive power must originate in the person whose status is to be changed. Children are put to bed---adults retire." They should also remember that once the tension of their past job is over, arteriosclerosis might hit them with a stroke. Older religious should find comfort of mind if they have done their work faithfully in the past. As the time for retirement approaches, there should be no real repug-nance in letting quaIified younger people take over. If those in authority had signaled out men with executive ability and given them opportunity for training, there would be less trouble. Let us be blunt. Formerly, older people were respected, their advice was sought for, younger folk delighted to learn of their experiences. No longer in positions of au-thority, they soon find they are being ignored. Take a retiree who is removed from apostolic action which domi-nated his past life. Now assign him to a house for retirees as has been suggested. His health is still good. His mind is alert. But there is nothing to challenge it. He begins to feel unwanted, morose, and he gradually loses interest in things with which he was formerly associated. In such a state of mind death is bound to come more rapidly. In many universities and colleges religious teachers must retire when they reach the same age as set for lay teachers. Without a proper program they may be placed in isolation, as just noted, with no demand for their services. Edward F. Heenan, S.J., has written that many religious groups "have been increasingly enticed to adopt the bureaucratic business model in an effort to more effectively operationalize their goals." Retirement need not mean the end of the road. It should be accepted as a challenge. It means an awareness of the personal ability of the religious to perform, to continue .productively, and to make older life worth the living for one's self and others. Longfellow has put this Challenge attractively: For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And, as the evening twilight fades away, The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. In the past a religious, like any other active person, got recognition and identity for the work he was doing. He could possess a just pride in his accomplishments. By the same token, when he does special work as a retiree, he should receive due praise. Many religious are truly hum-ble. Nevertheless all men appreciate recognition for any job well done. It does boost morale. On the other hand, there is the problem of rejection. To feel rejected, especially by those with whom one was closely associated, often causes a heavy strain on the nerves. It can easily make an older religious irritable and upset his health. We maintain it is a fatal mistake to put a healthy, older religious in a home for retirees. It will depress him. With nothing to challenge a once busy person he will rapidly decline in health, mental and physical. For example, if a religious has been at a college for the past ten or more years before retirement age, then we hold there is really a moral obligation to keep him as a member of the community as long as his health holds up. Why? Because to separate him from the familiar atmos-phere where he knows his fellow religious and they know him, from his friends on the faculty and from people in the local community would be dreadful in its conse-quences. It is here that he can continue to do more good than elsewhere: "Familiar things and places are priceless as we grow older--make no mistake about that." Dr. Edmund V. Cowdry, Washington University, St. Louis, an authority on gerontology, states: "More impor-tant than any other single factor is the old person's need Retirement VOLUME 29, 1970 for a community of interests. Nature seems to have or-dained that those who abdicate from life socially will soon abdicate from life physically." Where should there be a better community of interests than in the house where the religious has been living for years? Father Heenan remarks: "The closer the community approaches the communal idea of integrating and providing for the needs of every member, the more successful the aging process." A bureaucracy might be more efficient but it would tend to depersonalize and estrange the members. A mature religious should know that leisure for pleas-ure's sake alone will not bring happiness. But there is that approved pleasure which comes from doing good to others, especially the less fortunate. Instead of the deceits of idleness there can be a modified form of asceticism. There can be early rising with sincere attention to reli-gious duties. Planning for and being prudently busy with the needs of others will improve health. Two qualities will help the retirees: "They do enthusiastically .what-ever they are doing, and they get deepdown joy out of very simple things." Accordingly it is very foolish to think that retirement means the cessation of activities and merely a vegetating process. Retirement should be dynamic. One must beware of tyrannical trifles which can enslave. Too much televi-sion with its many insipid programs can mark a mental decline. In the 1955 Governor's Conference on the Aging in New York it was held that "religion is the key to a happy old age because man is essentially a spiritual and social bbing. The aged turn to religion even if they have been lax in their youth." What, then, Of men and women dedicated to God, who now have the time and conveni-ence to make up for past neglect because of distraction in the workingday world? There can be a renewal of spirit-ual life and a practice of reparation to gain grace to face bravely the reality of their new status. Since Vatican Council II changes in training have been made to meet the needs of younger religious. They have been very frank about what they need to be effective in a challenging new world. By the same token, older reli-gious should be outspoken in presenting their needs and claims. That is why at the young age of seventy-three I am writing this defense. R. M. McKeon, $.]. REVIEW FOR RELI{;IOUS 848 SISTER DOROTHY COONS, B.V.M. Life Style Study: Convent Li g This study of the pattern of religious living as it is carried out in the various convents of the Sisters of Char-ity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was undertaken as a part of a series of such studies of modern religious living that have been made in the past five years (see l~vmw for I~LIG~OUS, March 1970). The instrument used was constructed by Sister Cather-ine Leonard with the help of the other members of the Commission on Experimentation and Research, espe-cially Sister Helen Thompson and Sister Mary Kenneth Keller. The latter was responsible for processing the data on the computer. Questions Examined Four major questions gave direction to this study: To what extent do the sisters living in the traditional con-vent life style feel that this is providing them with necessary support in community living? What are the topics of concern in these convents? ¯ To what extent is there satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the life style, and what changes would be desirable in the cases where there is dissatisfaction? What are some of the general characteristics of the local communities in the areas of common liturgical experiences, in living arrangements, and in financial arrangements? Group Studied The questionnaires were sent to approximately 1800 sisters living in 153 convents. Those living in apartments and the patients in Marian Hall were not included. A total of almost 1300 sisters from 151 convents responded. According to the number of years in the congregation, the respondents fell into the following categories: ÷ Sister Dorothy Coom, BN.M., is chairman of [BVM] Commission on Ex-perimentation and Research at Clarke College; Dubuque, Iowa 52001. VOLUME 29, 1970' 849 Years in the Congregstion Number Percent 0-4 23 1.7 6.6 10-19 953 19.6 20-29 231 17.9 30-39 273 21.2 Over 40 415 32.1 $i~t~r D~rothy REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 850 This distribution is similar to that of the entire congre-gation with the exception of the oldest group who num-ber approximately 42% of the total. To a lesser degree the groups in the 5-10+ years differ from the general distri-bution because it is in these age groups that most of those living in apartments fall. In 49 of the 151 houses 100% of the sisters living there responded; 136 houses sent responses from more than half of the sisters; 15 houses were represented by less than half; and two did not return any of the questionnaires. Support in Community Provided by Convent Life Style Certain items on the questionnaire were included to bring out the general characteristics of "community," es-pecially those which provide mutual support for those living together. These questions and the results for both the congregation as a whole and when subdivided accord-ing to years in the congregation are given in Table I. While there are differences in the percentage responses to the positive questions, on the whole they are clearly above the 50% levels, ranging from 91.3% agreement with "Sisters seem concerned for one another" to 73.9% agreement with "Sisters like to be together" and "Com-munication among the sisters in our house is good." There is a similar picture shown by the disagreement with such negative items as "Money is a source of ten-sion" and "Communi.ty life suffers because the sisters are out doing other things." There is a surprising degree of agreement on the items that reflect a supportive atmos-phere among the various age groups. Figure 1, for exam-ple, shows that there is a high degree of agreement among all age categories on the item, "Communication is good," and that the disagreement is slightly higher among those in the 5-9 and 10-19 year group. There is also a slightly higher rate of disagreement on the part of the sisters in the 5-9 years in the congregation on the item: "Sisters plan together or in groups things that the whole house will enjoy," as shown in Figure 2. On the other hand, one of the most significant items, "Sisters in the house seem concerned for one another," shows fairly uniform agree-ment and disagreement in all age groups. See Figure 3. On a somewhat similar item: "Sisters like to be together," the pattern of responses is different. See Figure 4. + + + % 100 75 50 25 0 [] Agree [] Disagree O- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over 4 9 19 29 39 40 Years in the Community Figure 1. Communication is Eood. % 100 75 5O 25 O, 0- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over 4 9 19 29 39 40 Years in the Community Figure 2. Sisters plan to-gether. % lOO 75 50 25 o 0- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over 4 9 19 29 39 40 Years in the Community Figure 3. Sisters seem con-cerned for one another. % lOOI 75 5O 25 0- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over 4 9 19 29 39 40 Years in the Community Figure 4. Sisters like to be together. + + + Sister Dorothy REVIEW.FOR RELIGIOUS 852 The two items that would ideally be answered by disa-greement, "Money is a source of tension," and "Commun-ity life suffers because the sisters are out so often doing other.things," showed unexpected results. The similarity of the results for both agreement and disagreement as shown in Figure 5 suggests that, at least among those responding to the questionnaire, money is not the prob-lem that it is generally thought to be. Figure 6 shows a higher percentage of agreement on the item, "Commun-ity life suffers because the sisters are out so often doing other things," among the older age groups. While this might have been expected, the actual difference is not as great as could have been predicted. Topics of Concern It was hoped that areas of concern could be identified by the items that are frequently topics of discussion. These were found to cover the whole range of those sug-gested, with the following results according to frequency: % 100 75 5O 25 0 % 1 O0I 75' O- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over O- 5- 10- 20- 30- Over 4 9 19 29 39 40 4 9 19 29 39 40 Years in the Community Years in the Community Figure 5. Money is a source of tension. Figure 6. Community life suffers because sisters are out so often doing other things. religious life (72%), world news (68%), house problems (68%), the Church (67%), problems of the larger BVM congregation (67%), students and their families (57%), peace and war (56%), and U.S. political issues (53%). Others were indicated as being topics of discussion by fewer than half of the respondents, with hair and clothes being in lower positions than the items of general con-cern in the world, in the country, and in the congrega-tion. Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction The question, "Given your preference, and the absence of any practical consideration that would require other-wise, would you continue to live next year under the same life style," was answered "Yes" by 947 sisters (73%) and "No" by 259 or 20%. Those who answered "No" were asked to check the form of living that they would prefer and the item most often checked was "More regu-lar daily schedule of prayer and house activity." This preference was indicated by. 138 or 10.7% of those an-swering, while the second highest condition checked was "With persons who are more congenial." The results of this section of the questionnaire were broken down in a comparison with the items that were thought to reflect "community" and the results seemed somewhat indefinite. In general, those who would prefer to remain in the same life style had higher "Agree" scores on the positive items and lower "Disagree" scores on those that were negative, and the opposite was true of those who wished to change life styles. For example, on the question, "Communication among the sisters is good," of those who would remain in the same life style, 77% agreed to the statement and 12% disagreed, while among those who would change to another life style 36% -I. + + VOLUME 29, 1970 853 ÷ .÷ ÷ Sister Dorothy REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 854 agreed to the statement and 54% disagreed. There were similar combinations of "agreement" and "disagreement" in the breakdowns of this item with "The sisters often plan together or in groups things that the whole house will enjoy," "Sisters in the house seem concerned for one another," and "Sisters in the house seem ~o like to be together." It is not clear to what extent these differences provide explanations for the desire to change life styles. There may be other explanations not touched upon by tl~is study. Characteristics of Local Communities Part I of the instrument was completed by the Com-munity Representative in each of the convents. No pat-tern of common prayer and liturgical experiences emerged. This might be due to the large number of un-answered items and to uncertainty in interpreting them. The most frequently checked item was "Celebration of the Eucharist" but the range of responses suggests that there were different interpretations to the question; for example, 25 Community Representatives checked "Sel-dom or never." This seems to indicate that there was uncertainty about whether it meant convent chapel or parish church, fora response of 100% daily celebration the Eucharist might have been expected. The rosary is still recited daily in 48 houses with an indication in 24 of them that most of the sisters attend. Vespers is said daily in 43 houses with 23 reporting that most attend. The changing pattern of prayer in the congregation is shown in Table II. Responses on the items concerning financial arrange-ments show the greatest possible variation in meeting most of the ordinary expenses. The sources include com-mon funds, personal stipend, parish, and school, and there were few items that did not fall into each of these. See Table III for items that are included, for the most part, in the three most general categories. Discussion--Interpretative Summary The study of the foregoing material and other details that were not included in the present report seem to provide a message of encouragement. It is evident that those who answered this questionnaire are, in large meas-ure, content in the convent living life style and that they feel their living situation provides them with the condi-tions for personal support that are necessary for Christian community living. A further reason for encouragement lies in the fact that, with few exceptions in the 5-19 year groups, there is no marked disagreement among the var-ious age groups in the congregation. Examination of the results of individual convents TABLE II Frequency and Attendance of Rosary and of Communal Prayer as Reported by Comraunity Representatives k,- Occ~-[Se)do=/ ~ost ~ ] Pew "__._~_~" ~ '_____~_~ s ionMl~y N eve_~_r A tten~ A tten~ 2tte2d Communal Prayerl~l~l~[~l~l~[- ~ TABLE III Methods of Meeting Ordinary Expenses as Shown by Responses of Community Representatives Common Fund Personal Stipend Both Common Fund and Personal Stipend Board/room Per capita Cook Mass stipends Gifts Insurance Spiritual reading books Household expenses Education Medical and dental Clothing Personal travel Entertainment Toll/long dis-tance telephone calls Non-prescription drugs Home visits Memberships/dues Refreshments other than meals Books other than spir-itual Carfare Use of car Professional travel showed great variation in tendencies toward general posi-tive and negative impressions. At this time, no definite score for rati

Issue 25.1 of the Review for Religious, 1966. ; Religious Women and Pastoral Nork by J. M. R. Tillard. O.P. 1 Metanoia or Conversion by J6seph Fichtner, O.S.C. 18 The Church's Holine~g and Reh~ous Life by Gustave Ma'~t~lei, S.J. 32 Religious Significance of the T.rinity by Bernard Fraigneau-Julien, ~.S.S. 53 Contemplatives and Change ~by Mother M. Angelica! P.C. 68 The Crisis of Creatur~liness by Alfred de Souza, S.J; 73 Sdence and Renewal by Thomas Dubay,] S.M. 80 Freudian Gloom and Christiah Joy by William J. Ello~, S.J. 95 Freedom to IObey by Mother M. Viola, O.S.F~ 104 The Great Waste by Sister Mary Carl Ward, I~.S.M. 114 A Fresh Look at God by Patrick J. 0 Halloran,, S.J. 125 Poems 130 Survey of RomanDocumi ents 132 Views, News, Prdviews 135 Questions and Ariswers 138 Book Rdviews 142 VOLUME 25 NUMBER I January 1966 Volume 25 1966 EDITORIAL OFFICE St. Mary's College St. Marys, Kansas 66536 BUSINESS OFFICE 428 East Preston Street Baltimbre, Maryland 21202 EDITOR R. F. Smith, ASSOCIATE EDITORS Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Augustine G. Ella~d, S.J. ASSISTANT EDITORS Ralph F. Taylor, S.J. William J. Weiler, S.J. DEPARTMENTAL EDITORS Questions and Answers Joseph F. Gallen, S.J2 Woodstock College Woodstock, Maryland 22163 Book Reviews. Norman Weyand, S.J. Bellarmine School of Theology of Loyola University 230 South Lincoln Way North Aurora, Illinois 60542 Published in January, March, May, July, September, Novem-ber on the fifteenth of the month. REVIEW FOR RELI-GIOUS is indexed in the CATHOLIC PERIODICAL IN-DEX. and in BOOK REVIEW INDEX J. Mo R. TILLARD, O.P. Religious Women and Pastoral Work It is interesting to study fxom a theological viewpoint the history of the appearance in the Church of religious communities of women devoted to the active life. One basic trait clearly distinguishes them: in spite of the immense diversity of their immediate ends, all these con-gregations find their finality in the exercise of evan-gelical charity in the form of what is ordinarily referred, to as "the works of mercy." Whether it is a question of caring for the sick, of helping the poor, of educating youth, of assisting the~ aged, or of accepting and rehabili-tating certain categories of men: and women, rejected bye our society, the central activity of these communities always issues in a direct love of human beings., If one compares, for example, a missionary congregation of men such as the Holy Ghost Fathers and a missionary con-gregation of women such as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny, it will be seen how, in the same human context and with the same apostolic aim, ~the activity of such religious women brings to e~clesial activity a specific note of realistic charity. The priest preaches the gospel and administers the sacraments; the 'lay brother is occupied with the material needs o[ the mission; but the mission-ary sister attempts to incarnate concretely in the here and now the message of fraternal charity which is at the heart of the good news: she nurses, she feeds, she edu-cates. It is.this area that is her ministry, and in it.she finds the certainty of serving her Lord in all fullness. While in non-clerical religious communities of men (such as teaching or hospital brothers) there often ap-pears a kind of tension arising from the fact that these religious experience a sense of frustration at not being able. to exercise a priestly ministerial function, com-munities of women ordinarily find peace in the humble, day-by-day gift of their charity. This point seems to us to be ecclesiologically and pastorally important; and we would like to study it here ÷ J. M. R. Tillard, O.P., is professor of dogmatic theology at the Dominican House, of Studies; 96 Empress Ave-nue; Ottawa 4, Can-ada. VOLUME 251 1966 ! ÷ ÷ ÷ ]. M. R. Tillard, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS from three distinct points of view: first, we shall attempt to point out the theological characteristics of the specific activity of the religious women at the heart of all ecclesial activity; then we shall try to situate that activity of religious women in its direct relationship with the ac-tivity of the hierarchy; and finally we shall discuss the concrete possibilities of enlarging their activities in ac-cord with the needs of the Church today. The Work o[ Charity o[ Religious Women Is at the Heart of the Apostolic Charity of the Church In what does the charity of God's Church for men consist? To this question an answer can be given in the simple statement: the Church seeks to be a genuine in-strumentof grace by which the love of God Himself for men can be effective in the here and now of the human situation. In other words, in her charity the Church does not seek to love merely in her own name; rather she is desirous" that through her and through the mediation of her transparency and of her profound mystery of com-munion with God there may pass the power of the agape of the Father. This is the reason why her love for men is always humble and poor and never triumphant: she of-fers her heart, her hands, her toils, and her goods to the charity of God. It is in this way--and perhaps above all in this way--that she is sacrament in the precise sense that through her and the ministry of her action the One who is defined as Love reveals Himself and acts. He is that Love which does not remain enclosed within itself but which on the contrary radiates out to touch and affect all beings and all the reality of every being. To say that the Church is servant--and this perhaps is her most fitting characteristic in the present time of the history of salvation--is to say that she has no meaning except inso-far as she serves as an intermediary between the mysteri-ous love of the Father and men as they actually exist. More profoundly, it is to say that she is a mystery o[ charity; that is, through the total availability created in her by her love [or God passes the love o[ God Himself. It does not seem to us to be an exaggeration to say that today God wishes to love the world through the heart o[ the Church. In this Iove of God for men transmediated by the Church there is without doubt an internal and essential order. The dominant wish of the Father--and the entire gospel message affirms this--is to lead men to His king-dom, to introduce them already in this life to the inti-macy of His friendship in order that eventually they may share for all eternity in the glory of His Son. Christianity is not to be confused with humanism, however great the latter may be; its aim is always that self-surpassing which we call the "life of grace," and the Church can be faithful to her mission only insofar as she leads men into the fullness of the Pasch of Jesus. This is why at the heart of her action her fundamental preoccupation is always with the Pasch and its two moments of death to sin and of resurrection to newness of life. She exists [or the Pasch; she exists to proclaim the staggering reality of this Day that inaugurates the new times, to make present and active its power in the Eucharist and the other sacra-ments, to keep men in contact with this source of the love of the Father. A Church that would cease to center its life on the Pasch would no longer be the Church of God (Ekklesia tou Theou), the sacrament and the place of agape. Nevertheless, this paschal love is a total love of man in the concrete, and it has nothing of the abstract about it. It does not merely aim at.some small, secret zone of the human person (what is equivocally called "his interior life"). Without effecting an artificial cleavage between the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, it encounters the person as he really is in the unity of his person. On the one hand, it penetrates to the very depths of the human being whom it renews and re-creates by grace; on the other hand, its pervasive in-fluence reaches the entire extent of the human mystery. Between the mystery of the redemption and the mys-tery of creation there exists a profound unity, the link-ing bond of which is precisely the paschal event. The Father of Jesus is God the Creator; and the Son who is incarnated in Jesus is just as truly the One "through whom God created the world" (Heb 1:2). Moreover, if God sends His Son, He does so--it is the living tradition of the Church as expressed by Irenaeus--in order to save and to regain the fix'st creation that has been wounded by sin. The Resurrection is not simply a starting point, the ¯ dawning of eschatological times; it is above all the glorification of creation by the entry of a man (its King) into full participation in the Spirit of God. It is the ele-vation and exaltation of nature by the power of agape. For the Father does not give the resurrected Christ a new Body; He restores that Body of His that was born of Mary but now is flooded with divine gifts. He thereby lets us know--a point that we often forget--that His plan is a single one, that in Him there is not one plan as Creator and another plan as Redeemer with a clearcut distinction between them; there is only one plan of love that envelops all of human destiny. This, moreover, is the reason why baptism which opens the door to the world of grace is also the leavening pledge of the resur-rection of nature (Rom 6:5; 8:11; Eph 2:6). Paschal love--of which the Church is the instrument + + ÷' ÷ ÷ ~÷ J. M. R. Till~rd~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS --is, then, a love that is directed to the entire reality of the human condition and that refuses every form of selec- . tivity with regard to the makeup of the human existen-tial. In its ultimate finality it is eschatological in the sense that its overall concern is with leading man to the glory of the Parousia. Nevertheless, it is concerned with the human situation as this is realized here and now. For here and now God loves man; here and now His Father's heart wishes to give His creature the benefits of His in-finite love; here and now He wishes men to know that in spite of their misery they are loved by Him; and here and now He desires :that the world be infused with the re-creation and healing of nature provided by the Pasch of J~sus. More than this, God the Father desires that this love, immediately directed to the nature of man and seeking to heal sicknesses, to console the troubled, and to succor the poor, should be the atmosphere in which there shines forth the revelation of that other dimension of agape which opens on the joy of eternity. In other words, the eschatological aim of paschal love--the prom-ise and the hope of eternal liIe where .there will be "'no more wailing, no more crying,, no more pain" (Ap 21:4) --can be proclaimed and revealed only by the action of ecclesial charity on the miseries and .sufferings of this earthly life. Charitable action in the today and the tem-poral of the history of men is nothing less than the sacra-ment and the seal o[ paschal love. The Church can pro-claim and prepare the happiness of eternity only if she devotes herself to the .relief of the suffering of mankind. It is thereby--and theologians do not seem to have real-ized this in 'a realistic way--that'she sows in this world the first fruits of the world to come. But it should not be thought that what has just been stated is only the reasoning of a theologian. To be con-vinced of this, it is sufficient to reflect with attention on the way in which Jesus realized His messianic vocation. If He fulfilled the figure of the Suffering Servant (glimpsed in the Servant of Yahweh Songs inserted in the Book of Isaiah), he did so not only by His death of ignominy but also by His pedagogy of mercy and.of tenderness (Is 42:!-7). He preached the gospel of salva-tion by "going about doing good" as Peter said to .Cor-nelius and his friends (Acts 10:38). And this good that He did consisted of simple acts of temporal mercy: healing the sick, consoling widows, giving food to the hungry, treating the poor with kindness, welcoming strangers without any attitude of segregation. The proclamation of the gospel was done in this way, and the death on the cross receives its significance only when situated in this climate which reveals th'at its finality is one o[ love and not of.power. And there are other manifestations of this. As a sign permitting John to judge of His messianic mission, Jesus in Matthew 11:2-6 offers His acts of love for the lowly and the poor, following in this the line traced by the prophecies of Isaiah: it is these acts that are the seal authenticating His vocation. In the merciful act of themultiplication of loaves performed out of pity for the needs of the persons who followed Him, Jesus according to John (6:1-66) reveals the profound mean-ing of the sacrament bf His .lbve, the Eucharist. In that case, once again, the act of temporal mercy, far from being merely an occasion allowing Jesus to speak about His doctrine, provides the climate and the atmosphere in which the proclamation of the Bread of life can burst forth. The gift of material bread and the Eucharist are not two acts artificially bracketed together; they are rather two expressions of the same thrust of agape as Paul well understood when he reproached the Corin-thians (1 Cor 11:17-33). Similarly, the washing of the feet (Jn 13:1-20) is not just a simple illustration of the commandment of charity and of the mutual service de-manded of the disciples; it is its seed. One last indica-tion can be given, one which it seems to us has not been sufficiently recognized: the holy women were the first proclaimers of the Resurrection simply because they were concerned to go early in the morning to give the Body of Jesus the care and the veneration that Jewish custom demanded--an act of humble mercy, but by doing it they became the first witnesses of the act par excellence of the mercy of the Father. We hope, then, that the importance of the above reflec-tions is understood. We do not intend to show here what John has so strongly emphasized; namely, that the frater-nal love of Christians among themselves is the sign of their belonging to Christ and thereby a witness to the power of agape. Our intention is to enable one t.o grasp that mercy shown towards all men, whether Christians or not, is the atmosphere which envelops and normally authenticates the gospel proclamation. In other words, we wish to throw light on the fact that we can bring men the good news only if at the same time and in the name of this good news we concretely show men that we love them "not in words, but in deeds--genuinely." For in the humility of their object these acts are the sacrament in which should gradually appear their infinite originat-ing source with its promise of eternal happiness. But this is an eternal happiness that does not permit flight from the suffering of the present but that, on the contrary, involves itself with that suffering in order to sow there already the seeds of eschatological joy. Once again, it is through the experience of the visible and the tangible that God slowly leads mankind to faith in the invisible; ÷ ÷ ÷ Religious Women VOLUME 25, 1966 ÷ 4. ÷ ]. M. R. Tillard, O.P. REVIEW'FOR RELIGIOUS 6 by the visible dimension of His chitrity H~ leads them to faith in the folly of His, agape." it is when seen in this light that the apostolic actii, ity of religious women of the active life receives its evangeli-cal meaning. Properly speaking, theirs is not the task of preaching the gospel wffh authority: this. fl6ws from the hierarchical function to which they do not have access. Neither are they like militant lay people wiih a inandate to take charge of a milieu and graduMly conduct it to Christ; although these religiohs women are essentially members of the laity, they pertain to a special form 'of lay life officially recognized by the Church and deter-mined by t.h'e directi;c~s of their constitutions which fix the quality of their mandate. Here we should note the confusion that so.me pastors and even some theologians cause by more or le~s fissimilating the life of religious women to that of secular institutes, basing themselves in this. only on canonical texts. Briefly, religious women of the active life do not ordinarily form a part of.what is called the direct apostolate. Nevertheless, they play an essential role in the work of evangelization. For by their day-to-day charitable activity officially done in the name of the Church it is they who assure the gospel of the atmosphere of mercy,, the importance of which we have shown. For. this activity to bear all its fruit, it is evidently necessary that it be disinte~:ested, that motives of the financial interest and of the material prosperity of the community should not take precedence over the apostolic anguish arising from love for men. Let us admit that in this matter there is often room for considerable con-version, especially in countries where religious commu-nities conduct their institutions without any outside con-trol. But under the p.retext of real abuses, one should not make a wholesale condemnation without any distinc-tions. By her religious women the Church creates the visible dimensidn of charity ~which according to the law of the divine pedagogy is an integral part of the work of evangelization. And let us add that their vows add to the activity of sisters an element which married or non-reli-gious militants do not have. For sisters are those who have freely given up human values as fundamental as those of nuptial and motherly love, of the possession of a certain level of comfort; and they have done this in order to give themselves more completely to the universal love of men. Thanks to them if they are faithful to their vocation, poor themselves and hence totally transparent garriers of the love of the Father--the Church is able to reply .to those who question her mission: "Look around and see: the blind see, the lame Walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear., and the good news is proclaimed to the poor" (Mt 11:4-6). Far from being an obstacle to the evangeli-zation of the world, are not these religious, on the con-trary, its advance troops? Day after day they plough the fields in which the hierarchy sows the word and where other lay people lend support to the testimony of the love of the Father. In a word, these religious ~ire the sign of the love of the Father for poor mankind slashed by suffering. The Action o[ Religious Women and Its Relation to the Action o[ the Hierarchy O~icially--and it is told him from the day of his con-secration-- the bishop is charged in a special way with the love of the poor, the suffering, and the lowly of his churches. He is not simply the functionary which man), imagined him to be before Vatican Council II; he has the vocation of a father. And this implies that his heart is anguished by the suffering of his people. But to discharge this duty (and he will have to r(nder account of it on the day of judgment), he cannot rely only on his own powers and his own initiative. Here, as everywhere in his pastoral action, he must act in com-munion with lay people. This does not mean that he seeks to utilize the energies of the latter for the profit o~ his own projects and plans (this would be clericalism). On the contrary, he labors to arouse and nourish in them a conscientious and realistic grasp of the heavy responsibility that, not as pastors but as baptized brothers of Christ, they also have with regard to the concrete exercise of the charity of God in the midst of the needs of their fellow men, especially of those who suffer. For it is the Church as such, in the living union of its leaders and its faithful, which must radiate the paschal love of the Father. No one. can dispense himself from this law of his baptismal grace. Nevertheless, all are not called to live it out in the same fashion: there are special places in the Body of Christ, and even within the laity chari-table action can diversify itsell: in a number of ways. One of these ways will retain our attention here. It will be recalled that at the beginning of this article, it was said that all active communities of women find their definitive finality in the exercise of the works of mercy. But why is this? The answer to this question will intro-duce us into the very heart of ecclesiology. Let us recall that the mystery of the Pasch takes place not over and beyond creation but in it. The former is not the destroyer of the latter; on the contrary, it saves and elevates it. This is why all created values should hormally become paschal values. Accordingly, the gifts of nature considered in the light of the Resurrection appear as graces, primary and structural graces which 4- + + Religious Wdmen VOLUME 25~ 1966 7 ÷ ÷ ]. M. R. Tillard, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 8 find their true meaning only in the Church. Everything human, then, is grace; and hence everything human as such should allow itself to be swept along by the power of paschal love. But in the human as it is concretely and existentially realized the differentiation of the sexes, plays a central role, and to ignore it would be a grave matter. Sexuality is not simply an exterior ~nd accidental wrapping cover-ing a common reality: it penetrates to the deepest mys-tery of man and woman and gives a positive determina-tion to that mystery. Each sex has a positive value that it alone is able to accomplish because sex modalizes the human along a given line. Sex, it is true, carries with it the entire essence of the human being so that nothing which defines and situates the latter will be absent from the one sex when it is in the other. Nevertheless, each human sex is under its own proper, unique, and ir-replaceable mode. In the man the human being is mas-culinity, in the woman it is femininity. And it cannot be in the man without being masculinity nor in the w~man without being femininity. Hence, the act of knowIedge, the act of joy, the act 0f love, the act of giving self are all in the man and in the woman but under a mode proper to each. The same is true of the act of pertaining to the Church of God and the act of serving the gospel. Hence the gift of self for the radiating of paschal love passes through masculinity and femininity. These represent the two positive and complementary values of the human through which the love of the Father sacramentalizes it-self. Man (the male) is above all power. He is power in the gift of physical life, he is also power in the domination of the world. In him cold reason dominates intuition. He structures, he legislates, he constructs, and he judges everything with a certain rigor. He likes to dominate, and his physical strength allows him to do.so. Accord-ingly, his proper collaboration with the agape of the Father is better exercised in an institutional ministry as leader of the community, as pastor, as legislator. But the woman is above all offering, appeal to communion, open transparency to the other. She is characterized by meraory and constantly sharpened intuition more than by logical rigor and deductive reason. She is made to receive love (as a bride) and to permit it to be fecund (by motherhood). She is heart rather than dry intelligence, tenderness and compassion rather than justice and sever-ity. She completely tends to the gift of herself in a con-stant care of little things, in the exercise of a delicacy and a kindness that sow joy. She puts flowers in the house and she sings songs. For her this is no waste, and she should not feel frustrated at not possessing what the opposite sex possesses. On the contrary, all this is her wealth; and this wealth is worth as much as that of the male. Accordingly, her proper contribution to the dif-fusion of paschal love should also quite simply assume this morphological, physical, and psychological constitu-tion which makes her what she is. She consecrates her-self especially to the dimension of temporal and spiritual mercy, of tenderness for the poor and the little--to the dimension which we mentioned above as the sign of the gospel Let us add that she alone can do this with per-fection: it is her charism. To say this is not to imply a right to the hierarchical priesthood which would thus be violated. Ther6 is no question here of such a right but of the assumption of the true quality of her being for the service of the gospel. Diversity of functions in no way signifies diversity in dignity. The charity finality of active religious women, then, appears to us to respond to the realism of the incarna-tion of grace in human nature. In our opinion it is one of the signs of the fact that the supernatural respects and saves the natural. Femininity as such with its own proper chdracteristics and its own special tendencies is thus assumed for the sake of the gospel. The motherhood of the Churcl~ cannot be better expressed. But it is necessary to go even further in our reflection. For by a special title the bishop links to himself this special charitable activity of religious women. They re-ceive from him a quasi-mandate, similar to that of the members of catholic action although it is specifically different. This gives to their commitment an official note: they face the. world as the ones officially responsible for the fidelity of the local church to the paschal com-mand of love for the lowly and the poor. It is, of course, to be clearly understood that they are not the only ones with the duty to radiate this agape just as the members of catholic action are not the only ones to give testimony to Christ in their milieu of life. Nevertheless, for reli-gious women this mission is more pressing for they re-ceive it "quasi ex officio": their entire life should be consumed so that, thanks to them, the Church may exist in an act of love and of mercy in the face of the sufferings of the world. The judgment that the world will pass on the quality of the local church on this point depends preeminently upon them. The bishop links himself to them in a notably special way in order that there might be assured the love of the poor which he is charged to maintain in a living and genuine way in his diocese. This is their ministry. And thereby it is seen how they are inserted into the pastoral work of the Church: they represent a chosen group to whom the one responsible for the ecclesial life of the diocese entrusts the ministry of + + + Religious Women VOLUME 25, 1966 9 ÷ 1. M. R. T~ltard, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 10 charity. Hence they are not situated at the fringe of apostolic action; on the contrary, though not pertaining to the hierarchy, they fulfill one of the essential func-tions of the life of the People of God, for, as we have previously pointed out, charitable action forms the at-mosphere of the proclamation of the gospel. This perspective seems to us to be able to restore the breath of the gospel to the life of many communities that are too shriveled up within themselves and that do not perceive with enough clarity the implications of their mission. Overly orientated toward the perspective of the individual perfection of their members--and this individual perfection is clearly not contradicted by what we have said---, they forget that they are supposed to create in the world an evangelical sign within which the gospel can be proclaimed in all truth. It seems to us to be a serious matter when religi6us women vowed to charity feel that "they are outside of apostolic action," that "they are restricted to an activity of secondary im-portance when the world has such a great need of apos-tles," that "they are condemned to works of filling in for others." In such cases the question must be asked whether such religious institutions do not have need of a great movement of "conversion." The Charitable Action of Religious Women and the Needs of the Church Today There is one fact that has heavy consequences for the problem to be considered in this section: most of the religious congregations vowed to works of charity were founded at a period when the State accomplished nothing or almost nothing for the relief of human misery. In this matter the Church played an evangelical role of arousal and took the lead of the movement of mercy in the name of Christ. But today (at least, in the Western world and in the large socialist countries) the State--with the im-mense means that it often has--is occupied with tasks such as the care of the sick and of the old, the education of the young, the use of leisure, the rehabilitation of certain categories of men and women; for all of this per-tains to its area of competency. In this new situation, do religious still have a place? One thing is clear. Wherever religious parallel public institutions and retain their own ~schools, hospitals, or-phanages, it is necessary that these latter, if they are to remain a sign of the gospel, be distinguished less by the size of their activity than by their quality. Between a religious establishment and other institutions there should normally be perceived a difference with regard to respect for persons and to the attention given to them and also with regard to availability, tact, and commitment. A Catholic hospital, for example, should not be distin-guished from a non-religious hospital only by the fact that it affords a certain climate of prayer, easy access to the sacraments, and the assistance of a chaplain. It is further necessary ~that the very way of treating the physical sufferings be marked with the seal of the Spirit which, as St. Paul says, is "love, joy, peace, good temper, kindliness, generosity, fidelity, gentleness, selbcontrol" (Gal 5:22). This should be so much the case that a non- Christian who is being cared for there should feel him-self enwrapped with the love of God. When an officially Christian institution is no longer capablewthe reasons may be diverse---of giving this evangelical witness, then today it no longer has any reason for existing; and its continuance in existence is a counter-witness. It is clearly evident in our day that even in the institu-tions that belong to them religious women cannot carry out all the functions required of them for the welfare of those who come to them; they have need of auxiliaries and of employees. Moreover, it is frequently the State that confides to a given community the charge of an establish-ment of which the State remains the owner and for which at times it chooses the personnel who are to assist the sisters. This is a situation that at times creates suf-ficiently bizarre conditions. But in any case it increases the apostolic responsibility of the community: the com-munity in such a case has the duty of radiating the power of agape also into the active body of workers of the establishment. This stems from the fact of having taken charge of a milieu in order to flood it with the values of the gospel. This is a genuine apostolic activity bearing fruit on three levels: the personnel to whom the true demands of charity are gradually disclosed; the repercus-sion of this conscience attitude on the action of'these men and women; and those who are its beneficiaries. There is infinite need for tact and for suppleness, for complete openness, and for the absence of all proselytism. It is equally necessary that the community should never forget its primary purpose: the manifestation of the mercy of God for the poor, for the little, for those who suffer. In the case of a group of sisters working in com-mon in an institution (this is the only case we are consid-ering here), this situation restores to the community the meaning of its apostolic vocation, imposes on it a perpetual revision of life, strengthens the bonds of fra-ternal love, and compels it to achieve a state of radical transparency with regard to the gospel. For it feels itself being constantly judged in actual situations in the. close and common work of daily labor. And in the community it is the Church that is being judged. And I would say that the Church is being judged more in such a case ÷ ÷ ÷ Religious Women VOLUME 25, 1966 11 I. M. R. Tillard, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS than it would be in cases where militants of catholic ac-tion work in the same circumstances and in the same milieu. The vows--especially that of poverty the apos: tolic value of which must some day be restudied in depth. .--indicate that the community has chosen to act exclu-sively for the kingdom of God and not at all for any earthly ~;ellbeing however limited it may be. In. the com-munity, then, men expect to find a delineation of the Church. Hence let us emphasize that far from decreasing the charitable finality of religious institutes, the situation in which religious must work with non-religious actually extends it: the community must not only work itself for the service of love but it must also lead others to act in the same way and under the same explicit motivation. Nevertheless, "today's circumstances are constantly obliging us to think more and more of another way of exercising this mihistry of mercy. In this case the com-munity as such does not take charge of a given institu-tion. Each sister in accord with her professional com-petence is employed wherever she finds-a position corresponding to the specific end of her congregation. Dur-ing the day, then, the community is dispersed, each of the .religious going to her own place of work. There, in com-munion with the militants whom she may find there, each sister in her work tries to be both an instrument of the charity,of God and an active leaven within the laity arousing them to the call of the gospel. Unlike the preced-ing case, she does not pertain to a group performing as such a given function in the establishment. She is sim-ply an employee on the same footing as the rest, and her personal competence is the only reason for her holding the position that she occupies. In accomplishing her work she is not immediately attached to a group of religious working at her side. She is alone. Often she is in an indifferent "milieu, even in one agitated by forces hostile to the Church. It is there that the. Lord asks her to live her vocation as a religious vowed to the exercise of mercy and to do so through the quality of her work and in the network of social bonds that she creates with the men and women who are around her. _ This is a difficult and complex situation. The religious must not lose sight of the primary end of her institute which is charitable work itself. Hence, her central pre-occupation must not deviate from this central point of a direct and immediate relationship with a'man or a woman or a child to be cared for, educated, or aided in some fashion. She is not primarily sent to lead a militant life after the fashion in which Christians of catholic action act. Her mandate is another one, although---and we will return to this--like all the baptized she also has the duty of becoming leaven in her milieu. Let us not forget what we have developed above at length: in the name of Christ and of the Church the bishop has en-trusted to her in a special way the responsibility of radiating charity under the form of mercy, compassion, gentleness, and tenderness in the face of the sufferings and needs of human beings. She must above all seek this: that through her actions (materially resembling those performed by her non-believing neighbor) there may pass the entirely slaecial quality that the love of Christ Himself infuses into human activity. This is not easy, we admit. But if she does not do this, then she no longer responds to what the Church specifically expects from her for the sake of the gospel. And in this case through her defect something essential is lacking to the life of the local church; an entire dimension of the mystery of Christ is veiled; men and women will not experience the sweet-ness of the God and Father of Jesus. At first sight this function may appear to be less efficacious and less direct than the fact of militant action in a milieu for the sake of sowing the gospel message; than the fact of sharing in the struggles and the anguishes of the other employees and of thereby working for their liberation. Nevertheless, her function is just as necessary from an evangelical point of view. She responds to a ministry that is essential to the Church and that completes and consummates that of the other militants. For it is a question of a different form of action of the same love, of a mandate obliging her in communion with that of the militants to make the visage of Christ appear in the small part of mankind entrusted to the bishop for salvation. Hence, in the con-crete circumstances of her action the religious must always subordinate the other forms of her apostolic activity to her charitable function. It is easy to see in this kind of situation the new im-portance taken by what is called the common life. When she returns to her community, the sister should find the spiritual and loving atmosphere that permits her to reground her forces, to nourish herself with the gospel, and to judge her activity in open dialogue with her superiors and her fellow sisters. The hours that she passes each day in the milieu charged with providing her the means to grow in her union with the Lord must not become for her a heavy load encumbered with a multi-tude of oral prayers and with confusedly arranged exer-cises. Neither must it appear in her eyes merely as a slack period offering a little leisure. What it should exactly be is difficult to say. But it is clear that the essential should be an atmosphere of true prayer, of simple and loving joy. The witness of charity is so often dissipated by fatigue and by nervous tension that there should be a strong reaction against everything (even those things ÷ ÷ ÷ Religious Women VOLUME 25, 1966 ÷ ÷ ÷ J. M. R. Tiilard, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]4 clone under the pretext of devotions or of ancient cus-tom) which irritates the sisters. And it would be good if superiors, would re'member that to work to create in their houses an unpressured spiritual atmosphere is the first service that they themselves can give to charity. Up to this point we 'have reflected only on the exercise by religious women of their ministry of charity in the usual situation of the Church today. NOW it is necessary to ask two questions which more and more appear to us to be urgent: Should not religious women be more in-timately and immediately associated with the matter of pastoral reflection, their charisms between taken into equal count in this area? And can not their participation in the ordinary pastoral ministry be enlarged? Before answering the first question, we must frankly remark that up to now the Church has been contented to ~ttilize the charitable action of religious women and has manifested a certain suspicion with what they might be able to contribute to pastoral reflection itself. Our present day pastoral has been elaborated by r.elying almost exclusively on the qualities proper to the mascu-line sex. This can be attributed to various causes: to the fact that according to tradition access to hierarchical orders is reserved to men; to the fact that in the West the Church's ministers are celibates and thereby inclined to mistrust women; and above all to the fact that our civilization has not yet considered with sufficient serious-ness what is represented at the heart of the human mys-tery by the genius proper to ~oman. We are just begin-ning to awaken on this point; and the awakening is often accompanied by certain feel.ings of revindication and of aggression so that it can become dangerous and entirely lose its meaning. Up to now pastoral thought has had the tendency to see everything frdm the masculine View-point as 'if the masculine sex alon~ represented the human or as i~and this is still more serious--it were the human ideal to which the feminine should conform it-self in order to attain any real value. Hence, the con-stant temptation of pastors has been (and often still remains) to consider religious women on.ly as so many servants to be smiled at from the vantage point of the superiority complex of the strong sex and to,be employed at.will in any kind of work; and they have not sufficient.ly considered them as women capable of perceiving with the penetration proper to their sex precise objectives that escape masculine psychology and as capable of grasping with an original insight of their own the con-sequences of certain decisions. This points seems to us to be a very serious one. It seems necessary to us that the Church be converted in this matter. This does not mean that the Church. should admit religious women to a priestly ordination as some persons are beginning to maintain basing themselves exclusively on arguments of rights to be redressed and of sexual egalitarianism. But it means that the Church should become conscious of the irreplaceable contribn-ti0n of feminine thought and that she should associate sisters more closely with the effort of investigation, judgment, and criticism that is needed for the ordering of the pastoral activity of a diocese, How is this to be done? It would take too long to treat this in a detailed and precise manner, Nevertheless, let us remark that it cannot be a question only of a consul-tation taking the natnre, as it were, of feeling the pulse of the situation but without passing beyond the stage of the preliminary. The charism of the hierarch~ demands thatiit al~vays act in communion with the laity, men and Women. The ultimate decision is without a doubt that of the leaders, a typical act of their own proper p.astoral judgment. Nevertheless, it should be born of a delibera-tion in which the laity are involved as much as the clergy in a frank confrontation of viewpoints and in a common sharing of apostolic perceptions and of dif-ferent psychologies. There is no qnestion here either of demagogy or of feminism; it is simply a utilization of different vocations and of different charisms in an at-mosphere of authentic communion. And this seems to us to be the meaning of authority in the Church of God,. It is rare that a pastoral decision is a purely hierarchical creatior~. It is most often nothing else than an assump-tion by the hierarchy--thereby bestowing the weight of its authority and the guarantee of its charism--of a perception arising among the laity who are plunged, into the experience of the real and then thought about, reflected upon, and discussed by their pastors. Moreover, from the viewpoint of kingly power the grace of orders ~is more a grace of prudential judgment than that of intuition. Invention comes above all from the periphery, from the precise point where the Church is in contact with the realism of the human situation. In this way, then, the grace of the laity penetrates even to.the inner nature of the pastoral function. Among the laity we place in a special rank not only the militants of catholic action but also the religious women who are 9fficially devoted to the ministry of charity. At one and the same time they are women--hence they can voice the neces-sary feminine viewpoint--and they are involved in the sufferings of human beings, knowing not only the latter's complexities and temptations but also their riches. If it is true--as we have shown above--that the ministry of charity is bound up essentially with the gospel and repre-sents a fi'ont line force of ecclesial action, then it seems in-÷ + ÷ Religious Women VOLUME 25, 1966 15 -b ÷ J. M. R. Tillard, O;P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 16 conceivable to us that religious women should not be fully associated with the work of apostolic reflection that is p]'erequired for all authentic pastoral action. Moreover, why (and this is our second question) could they not receive in certain circumstances (always in dependence on the bishop, rightly understood) the entire responsibility for the organization of the entire chari-table apostolate of a diocese? In the collection of various areas which we group indistinctly under the name "pas-toral activity," is this not one of the numerous domains where women are more naturally competent than men? Why must a member of the clergy always be the head of every diocesan activity? At a time when we com-plain about the lack of priests and exhaust ourselves in imagining the outcome of this situation, it would seem logical to begin by reflecting on our theology of pastoral action and by asking whether as victims of the sin of clericalism, we have not permitted the atrophying of apostolic energies, among them those of religious women. A number of initiatives, undertaken especially in mission countries, show that urgent necessities are obliging the Church to a profound evolution on this point. The right is conceded to religious women to perform certain acts which up to now custom has linked with the person of the priest: they can distribute Communion, take charge of the liturgical assembly on Sunday, and catechize. The somewhat "sensational" cases should not rivet attention on themselves and thus prevent the Church from per-ceiving the numerous, more ordinary forms of activity which she can officially leave to the genius and the con-science of religious women. We have mentioned here the pastoral work of charity, but the same reasons would be valid for the organization of catechetical activity (on the condition that the sisters in charge be truly com-petent and not content themselves, as too often happens, with a hastily acquired and thin layer of catechetics) and for certain aspects of pastoral activity with regard to the family. A few minutes ago we mentioned the example of the women who set out at dawn to embalm the Body of the Lord and become the first witnesses of His Resurrection. Entirely like Mary, the woman who was the first witness of His Incarnation, they are the witnesses of the silent and hidden activities of God which are, nevertheless, His most fundamental ones. Is not woman even on the physi-cal level the first witness and the first receiver of human life as it comes into existence in secret? There is in this a mysterious harmony, sign of a providential vocation. This vocation is accomplished in the Christian bride whose femininity becomes grace and salvation for her husband and their children. It is accomplished in the contempla- tive nun hidden in silence and burning out her life for the Church. It is also accomplished in the religious woman of the active life who bends over human misery to bring it the most perceptible sign of the tenderness of God. The Christian woman has the marvelous and irre-placeable task of becoming the living sign of the Church as Bride and Mother. It is necessary that our pastoral awaken to this vocation of theirs and respect it for the glory of the gospel and the salvation of the world. + VOLUME 25, 1966 17 JOSEPH FICHTNER, O.S.C. Metanoia or Conversion Joseph Fichthe.r, O.S.C., teaches at Crosier House of Studies; 2620 East Wallen Road; Fort Wayne, Indiana 46805. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 18 Since we religious are living .in an age of Chuich re-newal and reform, we can ask ourselves the question: What are we contributing to this movement? Is the movement likely to succeed if we merely let ourselves passively be swept up into it? Religious orders have a precedent of active participation in the many past Church reforms. They can take their cue from a fairly long list of orders who, somehow or other, were in-strumental in either initiating renewal and reform or carrying them through. Perhaps the most famous instance of a religious order undertaking reform of its monastic life and thereby lead-ing the way to full-scale Church reform is that of the Cistercians. As Father George H. Tavard, A.A., already pointed out in a lecture to major superiors at Den-ver, July 1, 1964, the Lorraine and Cluniac monastic re-forms spearheaded the whole Gregorian reform within the Church 0050-1200). St. Bernard wrote De consider-atione, a pattern of reform for Pope Eugenius III to use upon the administration of the Roman See. In the thir-teenth century, the mendicant movement of Franciscan and Dominican Friars coincided with the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council and of Pope Innocent III. It is a fact of Counter-Reformation history that the Jesuits with their military structure and educational purpose and the Capuchins with their simplicity and austerity of life implemented the Trentine reform. This historical precedent comes closer to home when we recall that the canons regular followed in the wake of the Gregorian reform, when, for the first time in history, the idea of reform spread to the whole Church. Charles Dereine, S. J., noted how the canons regular helped to revive eremitical life in the thirteenth century,x The eremitical life did not last long among them because it was encroached upon by lay people, especially the conversi, who looked to the eremitical 1 Les chanoines reguliers au DiocOse de LiOge avant saint Norbert (Louvain~ University of Louvain, !952). groups for spiritual guidance and help (cura ani-marum). At their beginnings, after the example of their leaders was sufficient rule, the groups fell under the influence of the Rule of St. Augustine. But the choice of the Augustinian Kule, whenever it was made, engendered a delicate problem of conscience. Should the charter members adopt the canonical customs then in use or return to the primitive ideal of austerity and poverty? This was the step of capital importance in canonical reform. Carolingian law had granted the canons the right of abandoning private property in order to lead an apostolic life. A few groups opted for the new order (ordo horus in contrast to the ordo antiquus), a way of life which was more austere especially in the matter of poverty. Their option was vitally important, if not difficult, in an age of canonical reform. They had the alternative of affiliating themselves with Cistercian communities. I mention this bit of past history because obviously it stands parallel to our own day. Religious are now in a position to maintain the status quo (which eventually will die and decay); to merge with other religious groups who have similar constitutions, customs, and spirit, or at least associate with them in apostolic works (and this is a conciliar recommendation); or to forge ahead with the Church. It is essential for religious today to recognize and evaluate their role within the context of the Christian life. To fail to do so is to become purposeless and nondescript. They can only begin to reform if they knew beforehand why and how and what and whom they are to renew and reform. One of the aims listed for the present reform, in fact the first on the list, is "to impart an ever increasing vigor to the Christian life of the faithful." s Religious must count themselves among the faithful because of their consecration to God through baptism. Over and above baptism, the profession of the evangelical vows is a super-addition to that consecration . It is indeed a special consecration which per-fects the former one, inasmuch as by it, the follower of Christ totally commits and dedicates himself to God, thereby making his entire life a service to God alone.¯ The role of the religious, then, particularly iri a time of spiritual renewal and reform, is to bear witness for the Church socially and publicly by a way of life which "radiantly shines forth" and shows that "the kingdom ¯ Constitution on the Liturgy, n. 1. ¯ Pope Paul VI, dllocution on Religious Life, May 25, 1964. 4- 4- Cor~erslon VOLUME 25~ 1966 ÷ ÷ Joseph Fi~htner, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS of Christ is not of this world." 4 They bear witness by means of the vows, the three signs "which can and ought to attract all the members of the Church to ~an effective and prompt fulfillment of the duties of their Christian vocation.''~ The Decree on Ecumenism dispels any doubt that vows constitute a mere external show; Church renewal demands a change of heart, a renewal of the inner life of our minds, self-denial and an unstinted love.e If religious are to have a leading role in renewing the Church, they must be in the vanguard of :that ',spiritual ecumenism" which amounts to a change of heart, holiness of life, and prayer. One of the characteristics of the present reform move-ment within the Church is the return to original sources, especially biblical and patristic. At the same time that the Church wants to update herself, she is taking a hard look backward at her beginnings. The very idea of reform conjures up the biblical theme of metanoia, repentance or conversion. Throughout salva-tion history, both under the Old and. New Testaments, God repeatedly issues a call to repentance. What re-newal and reform we are experiencing today fits into the biblical background ofmetanoia. The prophets of old--Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel --were reformers. They called upon the people of Israel. wandering away from Yahweh to "turn back" to him, to "repent." Here we have the original Hebrew notion of reform translated by the Septuagint but especially by the New Testament into the Greek metanoia. A few examples will have to suffice. The prophet Amos enumerates the natural calamities which befall Israel for its sins; and then he quickly adds almost like a refrain: "Yet you returned not to me, says the Lord" (4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). "In their*affliction [Hosea is speaking for Yahweh], they shall look for me: 'Come, let us return to the Lord, for it is he who has rent, but he will heal' us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds' " (6:1). "Perhaps," writes Jeremiah, "when the house of Judah hears all the evil I have in mind to do to them, they will turn back each from his evil way, so that I may forgive their wickedness and their sin" (36:3). Ezekiel adds the note that the Israelites must make for themselves "a new heart and a new spirit" (18:31). The general prophetical teaching was that Israel, having personally sinned against the Lord, should per-sonally repent. Return to Yahweh meant that Israel should be orientated toward Yahweh and His will be-cause He is its God. Basic to repentance .was the de- ¯ Paul VI, ~lllocution on Religious LiIe. ~ Constitution on the Church, n. 44. e Decree on Ecumenism, n. 7. mand that Israel direct its whole existence to God and unconditionally accept Him in all events. To repent was to obey His will, to trust Him absolutely and be cautious about human help (alliances with other na-tions). Repentance had both a positive and negative aspect to it. By returning to Yahweh Israel would take up a new direction but likewise turn away from evil. Real repentance must be an inner renewal, a renewal of life, which is not possible without divine assistance. When we turn to the" New Testament, we find that it retains the past teaching on metanoia but lends empha-sis here and there. There seems to be more insistence upon the positive and interior aspect, that of changing one's mentality, attitude, feeling. Metanoia supposes error in conduct, repentance for past fault, and a con-version of one's whole person to a way willed by God in order to. ready oneself for entrance into His kingdom. Baptism, faith, repentance, love, poverty of spirit, all enter into the nature of metanoia. Metanoia requires personal responsibility coupled with the gift of God. John the Baptist was the first to take up the prophetic cry: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Mt 3:2; Mk 1:4). The cry, however, is more categorical because given in view of an eschatological revelation. Conversion is for everybody; it must be authentic, a change of nature from within. Jesus too preaches con-version: "Repent and believe in the gospel"; "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Mk 1:15; Mt 4:17). But he goes beyond the Baptist in realizing the eschatological kingdom in His own Person. The purpose of His mission is to bring repentance: "I have not come to call the just, but sinners, to repentance" (Lk 5:32). The. metanoia which Jesus proclaims is really the will of God, a salvific way of life. One enters into such a way of life by converting or changing into a different man (see Mt 18:3). The close tie between monastic reform and the re-form of the entire Church was never better envisioned than by the early Church fathers. In fact, it is possible to trace historically a progression of the idea of reform from what concerns the individual Christian to monastic life and to the universal Church. The idea of reform became effective as a supra-individual force at a rather early date, particularly in monasticism. Within monasti-cism itself there has been a whole series o1: reforms. Today we tend to apply reform first of all to social entities and institutions rather than to individuals. How effective such a sweeping measure can be, remains to be seen. For a broad, ecclesiastical pattern of reform, follow-ing upon the principles already laid down in the Scrip-÷ ÷ ÷ owoersion VOLUME 25, 1966 21 + ÷ ÷ Joseph Fichtner, O.S.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS tures, we have to resort to patri~tic writings. It is impossible, o[ course, to go into anything like a complete survey of their writings, but one can at least gain a few insights from Gerhart B. Ladner's~ monumental work,' The Idea o[ Reform.~ I am indebted to him fo~ the following all-too:brief summary. Ladner draws this definition of reform from Scriptural and patristic sources: "the idea of [ree, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and evdr repeated efforts by man to reassert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world." The Greek fathers generally regarded reform as a return to paradise. Baptism begins this reform because it is a return to innocence. Because innocence is often lost and because baptism is unrep~atable, reform is mostly postbaptismal, a long process of many starts. If man is to reform himself, he has to make a conscious pursuit of ends. He starts with an intention rather than with spontaneity or urge or response. The key feature then of Greek patristic reform ideology was the return to a state of innocence through a. continual spiritual regeneration. Man has to be reconditioned into a state equivalent to his original state. Gregory of Nyssa in particular, with his mystical bent, accounted for this development of the Pauline.theme of the "new creature" and "new creation." Now the question, how is man to be renewed, brings us to a consideration of the' second salient feature of reform ideology, a feature found mostly among the writings of the Latin fathers. They proposed that man who originally was made in the image of God should be reformed according to and in the image of God (Christ). Although the early fathers felt that reform meant a withdrawal from the world rather than a penetration of it, or at least a juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, and hence relied upon monasticism to bring about reform, the idea gradually dawned that the whole Church should undergo reform. St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine, and St. Hilary of Poitiers were of the earlier mentality. Then under Gregory VII, the idea of reform began to envelop the Church as a whole, and finally Innocent III and Thomas Aquinas extended it to entire Christendom, to the political, socio-economic, and ~ultural milieu which the Church helped to form or in-fluence. Implicit in this idea was the re-imaging of man not only individually but socially. Reforming man to the image-likeness of God was the inspirational idea behind ~Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea o[ Re[orm (Cambridge: Harvard, 1959). all the reform movements in early and medieval Christianity. A third renewal theme, for which St. Augustine was mainly responsible, was that of the kingdom of God. St. Augustine, ,however, had such a high opinion of the Church as the kingdom of God upon earth which was on its way to becoming the heavenly kingdom that he refused to see any need of its reform. That is why he formulated the idea of the City of God which permits into its environs both sinners .and saints until the sin-ners are weeded out at the-parousia. He and Tertullian (before his defection from the Church) struck a more positive and futuristic note by teaching a' renewal for the better. For Augqstine in particular, fourth century Pelagianism was an occasion to take stock of the ideology of reform. Pelagianism represented a reform movement based upon the belief that man can reform himself and the world on his own. Contrariwise, Augustine fought against the temptation of relaxing personal effort and simply trusting in God. His intention was to strike a balance between God's grace and man's will. Reliance upon God and personal responsibility must go together in order to attain the kingdom of God. In the Christian East and West while the Church was building up, the need was ever felt for individual and social reform. But who was to initiate it? ,Only special members and organisms within the Church's body, namely, monasticism. The East and West differed not merely in reform ideology; they differed too in their attitude toward monastic life. The Greeks leaned strongly toward contemplation, the Latins toward the active life of charity for God and man. The western-minded Augustine mapped out a program of reform for monastic and quasi-monastic life for clerics and lay-people. Such was the principal and practical way in which he wished reform to be carried into effect. The monk-priests and laymen were to join together in the City of God to bring about a renewal for the better. ¯ It is evident from thi~ patristic perspective that re-newal and reform must take into account the past and present and future. If we look back over the condition of religious life since World War II, the thought strikes us. that religious institutes have been passing through a phase of de-velopment. Consciously or unconsciously, they have been engaged in a reform movement for almost twenty years. The movement seerhs to have begun officially with the first ~eneral congress 6f religious held in Rome near the close .of the Holy Year, 1950. At this meeting, on December 8th, Pope Pius XII delivered an allocution in + + + VOLUME 25, 1966 23 ÷ ÷ ÷ Joseph Fichtner, O$.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS which he outlined three reasons why religious should update themselves: For the changed c~nditions of the world which the Church must~ encounter, certain points of doctrine touching upon the status and condition of moral perfection, not to mention the pressing needs of the apostolic work which you have so widely and so generously undertaken, all these have called you to devote your-selves to this systematic study and discussion. The same reasons prompted the Sacred Congregation of Religious to summon the First National Congress of Religious of the United States at the University of Notre Dame, August 9-12, 1952. Part and parcel of the whole reform movement within the religious orders were the researches into their past histories. The studies in some instances may not have been altogether conclusive, but at least they pointed out lines of development. They put religious into a position where they have to either retain or reject the essentials of their past, paralleling the present-day Church reform which will not abandon the basic struc-ture of the Church, Religious have to decide what sort of growth they want', homogeneous or heterogeneous. To be or remain a homogeneous body, the religious insti-tute, as the schema De religiosis recommends, must faithfully retain its nature, purpose, special spirit, and sound tradition--everything which constitutes the patrimony of the institute. The historian John Tracy Ellis called attention to this necessity in his address to the Paulists on the occasion of the diamond jubilee celebration of St. Paul's College, Washington, D.C., January 25, 1965. In this era of change he advised "the parallel need of holding fast to a sense of history if we are to escape the consequences, of mere change for change's sake, of what I would call--if the term be allowed---the curse of 'presentism.' " The historical researches accomplished at least one thing: they gave the orders more or less a sense of identity. Erik H. Erikson, the psychologist, defined per-sonal identity as follows: The term identity expresses such a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-same-ness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential charac-ter with others. Although his definition fits personal identity, it is analogically applicable to the "moral persons" which re-ligious orders are. A sense of identity is most important for normal psychological and spiritual renewal. The man who cannot identify himself is either an amnesia victim or is ignorant or leads a schizophrenic existence. If young candidates entering a religious order cannot identify themselves with it because there is nothing to identify with, the more is the pity. As Pope Paul VI stated in his address to religious referred to above, the work of general chapters is to accommodate constitutions to "the changed conditions of the times"; but it must be done in such a wa~ that "the proper nature and discipline of the institute is kept intact." No renovation of discipline is to be intro-duced excepting what accords with "its specific pur-pose." Therefore, until this accommodation of discipline is duly processed and brought into .juridic effect, let the religious mem-bers not introduce anything new 0n their own initiative, nor relax the restraints of discipline nor give way to censorious crit-icism. Let them act in such a way that they might rather help and more promptly effect this work of renewal by their fidelity and' obedience. If the desired renovation takes place in this way, then the letter will have changed, but the spirit will have remained the same, in all its integrity,s The Pope certainly did not have in mind the ,idea of implementing constitutions to the point where they are voluminous, minutely detailed, and unlivable; for such constitutions can easily cramp the style of religious liv-ing. "Multiplicity of laws is not always accompanied by progress in religious life," remarked Pope Paul "It often happens that the more rules there are, the less people pay attention to them." 0 It is particularly irksome to men, and I suppose to women too, to be ruled by many minute prescriptions. But in the meanwhile; while the constitutions are under study or revision, it will not do to adopt or maintain "the practices which are dangerous to religious life, unnecessary dispensations, and privileges not properly approved" 10 which sap the strength of religious discipline. Is there a behavioral pattern, psychological and socio-logical, which religious can follow in order to promote metanoia for the present and into the future? Govern-ment and business have had psychological and socio-logical studies made to 'guide societies and institutions toward self-renewal. They have begun to understand the processes, reasons, and conditions for the growth and decline in societies.11 Of course we cannot accept the complete structure and dynamics of reform which they use; but they have been able to outline a good, comprehensive pattern of reform. The following, then, will be some explanation of the principles of self-renewal pertinent to religious orders. Religious orders s Paul VI, Allocution on Religious Life. 9 Paul VI, Allocution on Religious Life. 10 Paul VI, Allocution on Religious Life. 11 See John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal, the Individual and Inno. vative Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). VOLUME 251 1966 ÷ 4- 4. ]oseph Fichtner, O.~.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS cannot grow as supernatural cells within the body of the Church unless they accept whole-heartedly the natural (that is, psychological and sociological) dy-namics of growth. 1. A society that wishes to renew and reform itself must first of all know itself. It has a sense of identity. As religious we have, more or less, a self-image. Con-fusedly at least all of us have a picture in our minds of the ideal religious, namely, one who lives a Christlike life as distinct and unique. Now self-knowledge is not a still-life picture but a moving picture of self-develop-ment, a continual search for identity. Ordinarily we find knowing ourselves difficult and inconvenient. Yet the more we have a sense of identity, which we can learn in part from our tradition, the more it helps us to plan our future--what or who we want to become. Young members may at times rebel against a tradi-tional heritage, even if it is only the starting point of their rebellion. 2. This brings us to a second principle very closely allied to the first. Self-i.dentity is largely a matter of knowing our past and having continuity with it. Our present beliefs, attitudes, feelings, values arose out of earlier personality formation, earlier learning and ex-perience, all of which is most difficult to shake off. We are more inclined to trust tradition because we experi-enced it. Historians did us the favor of recalling the past and showing how evolution already took place in it. Historians help religious groups to achieve self-knowl-edge, and in this way they serve the cause of renewal. If religious were able to sustain renewal in the past, per-haps they can feel at home with it in the future. With-out ignoring their past, they are oriented to the future and will have a hand in shaping it. The tendency of a society with a past is twofold: to persist or to change. The two tendencies are not diametrically, opposed. In fact, it is wrong to oppose change to continuity; both must be given due emphasis, Our aim should be to endlessly interweave continuity with change. "The only stability possible is stability in motion." ~ Religious do nonetheless face the danger to-day of living in an age when the rate of change has sped up almost to leaving them in the dust. They can expand or grow or change so rapidly and wildly that it will be cancerous and kill the values they want to keep. 3. True religious see and share a vision of something worth saving. This vision is made up of all the motiva-tion, conviction, commitment, and values that give meaning to their life. Only if they believe in something Gardner, SelpRenewal, p. 7. can they change something for the better. Otherwise they will experience a failure of heart and spirit. The self-renewing religious will have something about which they are thoroughly convinced and about which they care so deeply that they will do something about it. Yet each one must beware of being egocentric about it. One little thing that he really cares about deeply, one little thing that he can do with zealous con-viction, gives him extra drive and enthusiasm. That is why long-term purposes or values or goals are so important for us. They have to be relatively lasting in order to determine the direction of change. Should they be fly-by-night visions and goals, they will not enable us to absorb them or do justice to them or will endanger a distinctive character and style of living. The mature religious has a religious commitment larger than himself. He has been given a religious goal not as an accomplished fact; his has to be a seeking and striving for the goal in an ever-renewing way. He will be happy in the s.triving, not necessarily in the attaining of that goal. Small victories will instill in him some satisfaction but never the idea that he has arrived, that his life is fulfilled, or that he can sit back and no longer feel the tension of self-renewal. All of us have built into our nature the hunger for meaningful, goals. They are as vital to our being as breathing. But in a sense we must breathe together. We can live together in a .religious community o.nly if we have some measure of consensus in regard to our goals, beliefs, values. We can come to some rough agreement among the many who share the same ideals. Haggling over details there will always be. No matter how pluralistic our community may be, variety and di-versity and spontaneity should not be allowed to inter-fere with at least a middle ground of ideals, goals, and visions. We do ourselves an injustice if we allow all sorts of individual values to conflict in a careless atmos-phere of freedom and then expect something good to come from them. Such a procedure is equivalent in economics to the false theory of laissez-faire. On the other hand, change for the better is brought about when socially or communally acquired and ap-proved ideals, convictions, goals change. In this way change takes place according to psychological and socio-logical laws. It is possible to change laws, the external marks of a society, without affecting the beliefs, prac-tices, and values of the members of that society. Men commonly live as they think; hence to change their life demands a conversion of their minds and hearts. Their life is bound to change if the set of ideas, feelings, and ÷ ÷ ÷ VOLUME 25, 1966 27 ÷ ÷ O.~.C, R~:VIEW FOR RELiGiOUS attitudes which the individual shhres with the members of the society changes. 4. Any renewal or reform, therefore, ought to be aimed at the individual or person. He must find himself in a ~ort of do-it-yourself movement. He must be free and independent enough, flexible and versatile enough, to be open to change. If he isolates himself from others within his group, if he fails to cross-fertilize with them, he will not change or grow. Anthropologists point out that .much cultural change comes about through bor-rowing from others. Karl Rahner makes the pointed remark in his book, Theology for Renewal: If anyone wants to have the Church changed, he must make himself the starring-point of renewal. For the crldc himself is part .of what the Church is suffering from. For usually his own life is not much of a recommendation for Christianity.~ The same remark may be applied to the religious critic. We are more prone to criticize others than to be self-critical. Each religious has personality traits which favor either change or persistence (conservatism), and no doubt many have a mixture of the two. A characteristic of the self-renewing religious is that he 'has a mutually fruitful rapport with others. He is capable of accepting and giving love and friendship. Without such love and friendship, the person enters into rigid isolation. The loving and friendly person depends upon others and can be depended upon. He discovers common tastes, interests, is accessible, and is willing to lend assistance. He makes others feel important. In so doing he is one of the many within a vibrant society who inculcate mutual trust, affection, and identification (as opposed to carping criticism, character asshssination, and envy). They are the cross currents through which his change for better is possible~ 5. Is there enough freedom in the religious way of life to allow for change? This question has to be asked because psychologists and, sociologists maintain that only a free society is open to inquiry, experimentation, and action. A society where reasonable room is left for personal taste, self-expression, and self-criticism, will grow. Its framework or structure is not such that it throttles thought and discussion of new ideas. Authori-tarian or bureaucratic or legalist.ic societies may not throttle thought and discussion but they tend to chan-nel and control them. Freedom, however, has to be balanced with some ~Karl Rahner, Theology ]or Renewal (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), p. 87. determinism within a society. No individual religious should expect to be left to run rampant, to do as and what he pleases. Freedom may result in license. Or it may alienate him from the community. A religious who is left reasonably free may achieve responsibility; but if he seeks too much autonomy he may end up with self-pride, an inflated ego, and not really fulfill himself at all. Every person has limitations and has to come to terms with his membership in the community at large. The social side of his nature should make him realize values which are grea~er than his individual needs. 6. Change and improvement usually spring up in a community that has felt-needs for them. Felt-needs are the beginning of any renewal and reform. So religious must examine their felt-needs. There can be no metanoia unless the community feels needs, and the needs have to be felt widely enough for the majority to do some-thing about them. The first task of renewal and reform is the always difficult task of facing up to ourselves. What gap do we find between the ideals we profess and the realities we practice? How far apart do our constitutions lie from their fulfillment? We have to give due credit to the prophetic and visionary eyes and minds among us who see and speak out against the unreality or even hy-pocrisy of religious life, to whatever degree they may exist. Young members, especially, who still have the ideals and goals fresh before them, can help the rest to an honest self-examination. We do them a good turn too by telling them that their task is to re-create values in their own conduct and not simply look at them idealisti-cally. We should assure each generation of religious that they have to refight the battle and inject new life into lasting ideals and goals. 7. No amount of organization, law-making, socializing will help a religious society to renew and reform unless men in it have the determination to 'foster renewal and reform. It is men who make up a society, not laws or regulations or structures. It is the personal environ-ment that makes for growth, for between the individual and his environment there takes place something like osmosis. If we do not set a pace by our ideals and ex-ample for incoming members, then they will believe little is expected of them. Of whom much is expected, the chances are that he will expect much of himself. If he is educated and motivated in an atmosphere that en-courages effort, sacrifice, selflessness, it is very likely that he will be affected greatly and respond mightily. We take it for granted that the young religious is a free and responsible individual. He will become in-creasingly responsible if we set up for him a meaning- VOLUME 25, 1966 29 Joseph Fichtner, O~.C. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ful relationship with larger and higher goals. We help him to free himself fr6m the "prison of utter selb preoccupation" by instructing and leading him to place himself in the free and willing service of these goals and the people aiming at them. In !religious life as well as in any other, family li~e' included, deeds speak louder than words~ Authentic religious conduct preaches a better lesson than 'any homily, sermon, conference, or instruction. None o~ us learns much from principles, but we do emulate people who are high-principled and exemplary. Ordinarily we do not analyze or list the virtues we wish to develop, unless it be during meditation; but we identify our-selves with the people who have virtue. That is why all of us~ young and old, need models in our imaginative life and in our immediate environment, models of what we at our best can be. At the risk of too much repeti-tion, it should be said that what we do communicates moral and spiritual values much more than what we say~ Words are cheap. Action calls for assuming burden-some and sacrificing responsibility. It is a summons to spiritual greatness. . ¯ 8. The danger in religious life is tO think we can progress morally and spiritually without changing psychologically, socially, culturally. Change for the better---evolution and not revolution or historic acci-dent- usually is a slow, complex, unpredictable, some-what risky and painful process. It does not happen by leaps and bounds; it takes time and hard effort. When practices change, they will not be acceptable evenly .throughout a whole community. Some will wel-come them, others resist them. So many factors and their interplay go into change for the better that they make change complex. And the complexity of a changing situation .brings with it a risk. It takes prudent analysis and prognosis to decide whether the risk is reasonably calculable. Members of a society who are "on their toes" and not living "in a rutV will forestall wild and revolutionary change. Historians have shown that long-range changes came about through successive small innovations, most of them unobtrusive and anonymous. People who lived through the innovation would probably admit that they did not know it was happening; But innovators who herald a change with a flourish of trumpets should ex-pect to meet up with attack and opposition. That pain accompanies growth is inevitable; everybody wants to grow and progress but nobody wants the pain that goes with it. 9. The locus of metanoia is the minds and hearts of ~he individual members of the community, in those minds and hearts where there is the hidden potential of zeal, dedic~ition, a sense of. mission, leadership, and a willingness to sacrifice. Members who have closed minds and hearts have lost the capacity for metanoia. For the self-renewing man there is no end to the development o[ his abilities. He is not a gold mine left unti~pped or an oil well only partially drilled. Psychologists advise us of the fact that many go through life without nearly salvaging all their ta, lents.~ Nothing can be so decisive for refiewal as the use of G6~l-given talents. Conversion VOLUME 25, 1966 31 GUSTAVE MARTELET, S.J. The Church's Holiness ¯ and Religious Life + ÷ + Gustave Martelet, s.J., is professor of fundamental theol-ogy at 4, Mont~e de Fourvi~re; Lyon (V), France. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS V. RELIGIOUS L~FE AND PREFERENTIAL LOVE OF JEsus CHRIST The* eschatological character of virginity contributes spiritual depth to our understanding of religious life; we must now analyze the latter in still greater detail. Having begun by considering the holiness of the Church (I), which appeared inseparable from her mystery as Spouse (II), we saw that marriage represents sacramentally a mys-tery whose content is spiritually appropriated by virginity (III). This insight illuminated the eschatological meaning of virginity and exposed its motivating drive, a preferen-tial love of Christ (IV). This love throws the greatest light on religious life, and it is in function of that love that our first comprehensive glance at the state must be cast--the concern of the present section. We shall examine the na-ture of religious life'in iiself, its dependence on the mys-tery of the Church, and the significance which consecrated virginity retains today with regard to religious life. 1. Nature o[ Religious Life We do not pretend to supply an exhaustive treatment of this vast subject, for that would simultaneously entail a consideration of the history of the Church, of canon l~aw, * This is the second part of Raymond L. Sullivant's translation of Saintetd de l'Eglise et vie religieuse (Toulouse: Editions Pri~re et Vie, 1964). The first part of the translation appeared in the November, 1965, issue of the REvzE\v; and the rest of the translation will be printed in the March, 1966, issue. When completed, the entire trans-lation will be issued by the REvmw in a clothbound edition. Notifica-tion of the date o~ publication of the clothbound edition will be made to all those who send a request for this notification to R~vmw ro~ R~mmos; St. Mary's College, St. Marys, Kansas 66536. The request for this notification does not constitute an order for the book and in-volves no financial obligation. of liturgy, and of dogma; but we shall present its meaning from the viewpoint which we have set for ourselves.04 When considering the importance of virginity in the thought of the fathers, we must resist the temptation to construct a strict parallel between that state and the re-ligious life and to reduce the one state to the other. The adoption o.f this excessive view is done from a de-sire to augment the grandeur proper to virginity. While we have seen why there is little danger of overestimating its value, still a careful analysis establishes that virginity founds the order of virgins and not the religious life as such. To be sure, the history of consecrated virginity as that of widowhood with whicti it has much in common05 eventually meshed with the history of religious life itself. But regardless of the progressive absorption of the order of virgins into that of nuns, a fundamental difference pre-vents the loss of their separate identities: religious life re-quires and consecrates not so much virginity as chastity. We a,re grateful to Father Mogenet for an unpublished ex-planation of the point: Since St. Paul's day, the Church has had a too sensitive awareness of the virginal dignity of Jesus and our Lady not to recognize its exemplarity. She has exalted the charism of Virginity and has honored Christ's virgins who have been mem-bers of the Christian community since the first century. Never-theless, when religious life developed as the more or less con-scious response to the three evangelical counsels, no one thought of restricting it to virgins. The deserts, as later the monasteries and the convents, received converted sinners, married men, widowers, and the chaste single as well. And al-though virginity is a privileged state in following Christ, it is not an indispensable condition. It would seem that St. Peter had been married. We can almost say that Christ's call takes no account of the past. It draws the hearer from family life, from the project of founding a home, to the sacrifice of human love. The summons commits the aspirant to a continent exist-ence which requires perfect chastity as its normal state. This condition permits religious life to become, for those outside its ranks and most notably for the married, the support and model which it should always be.~0 Conse-quently, it is clear that religious life cannot be reduced to virginity alone. For even as the value of the latter arises ~ On this point a generally recognized role is played at the present time by Father Ren~ Carpentier's book, Li]e in the City oI God (New York: Benziger, 1959); the volume has the merit of never separating evangelical perfection and the mystery of the Church. m Andr~ Rosambert, La veuve dans le droit canonique jusqu'au xiv~ si~cle (Paris: Dalloz, 1923); on the status of consecrated virgins during the fourth and fifth centuries, see, for example, Jean Gaude-met, L'Eglise dans l'Empire romain (iv"-v~ siOcles) (Paris: Sirey, 1958), pp. 206-11. ~ Bishop Huyghe, whose writings on religious life are well known, put a great emphasis on this point in his speech to the Council on re-ligious life; see D.C., v. 60 (1963), col. 1590-1. ÷ ÷ ÷ Religious Li]¢ VOLUME 2S, 1966. ÷ Oustave Marteleg, S.I. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS from the preferential love of Christ which consecrates it, love can vow true chastity to Christ even when virginity has been humanly destroyed. Recognition of the prefer-ential love of Christ is equally important for a proper un-derstanding of poverty and obedience. Christ's call can be directly traced to His command to sell all one's goods (Mt 19:21); and the example of St. Francis as well as that of Father de Foucauld emphasizes the close relationship that unites poverty to love of the Poor One par excellence, Christ Himself. The same can be said of obedience. Whether obedience is linked with the demands of common life lived in conformity with the vita apostolica,6z or whether it is explained (as was done in the Rule of the Master adopted by St, Benedict) with reference to the role of the abbot as Christ's "vicar" in ac-cord with St. Luke 10:16: "Who hears you, hears me," or whether obedience is primarily envisioned as an "imita-tion" of Christ in His dependence on His Father as ex-pressed in St. John 6:38: "I have come down from heaven not to carry out my own will but the will of him who sent me," 68 makes no difference: in every one of these view-points, obedience is an integral part of religious life even though the present canonical form of the vow of obb-dience dates only from Carolingian times.69 Nevertheless, in its case also condition and essence must not be con-fused. Obedience, as poverty and chastity, is a sine qua non condition of the religious life. But can we say that it is its very content? The answer is yes, to the degree that by its suppression religious life would be emptied of one of its specific obligations. But the answer is no, if by mak-ing obedience the content of religious life one comes to forget that religious obedience attains its goal only by as-suring the reign of the will of Christ over our own will. Hence the organized exercise o£ the three counsels truly manifests the nature of religious life but only to the exact extent that this exercise reposes directly upon the love of the Lord, aims at imitating Him, and~emanates from His mystery through the power of the Spirit. The explana-tion, previously established when defining the eschatolo-gical meaning of virginity, should help us understand the ¯ z M.-H. Vicaire, L'imitation des Apdtres. Moines, chanoines, raen. diants (iv~-xiii~ si~cles) (Paris: Cerf, 1963). ~s De Vogii6, La communautd et l'abbd, pp. 128-9. n~ Catherine Capelle, Le voeu d'obdlssance des origines jusqu'au xii~ si~cle. Etude juridique (Paris: Librairie g~n6rale de droit et jurispru-dence, 1959), pp. 153-79, dates the juridical birth o£ the vow o[ obe-dience from a Chapter of 789; but as she remarks on pp. 208-13 it is necessary to wait for Yves of Chartres in the eleventh cer~tury for a theory of the vow over and beyond the practice of obedience. On the . relationship of the three vows to religious life see the discourse of Paul VI given on May 23, 1964 in the English translation, REVIEW KELtg~OUS, V. 23 (1964), pp: 700--1. point, since the spiritual basis of virginity is the desire to belong to Christ in an absolutely exclusive fashion. A point raised by the rule of St. Benedict in its fourth chap-ter, "The Instrument of Good Works," is of utmost per-tinence in this matter: "Nihil amori Christi praeponere," says the great legislator: "Put nothing before Christ's love." The axiom comes directly from the Vita Antonii. St. Anthanasius there depicts St. Anthony "repeating to all that they should desire none of the world's goods in preference to the love of Christ." 70 One wouId search in vain to find this central idea expressed with more lapidary compactness. And who would be better authorized than St. Benedict to condense western monasticism's raison d'etre into a concise formula? The same thought appears in the seventy-second chapter of the rule to explain the ardent zeal which monks should have: "They will prefer absolutely nothing to Christ who deigns to conduct us all to eternal life." 71 And it is the eschatological note that gives such complete fullness to the formula. It is because Christ "is the beginning, the first-born from the dead (that in everything he might be preeminent)" (Col 1:18) that nothing must be put before Christ and that one should die to everything rather than die to Him who is Life itself. Hence His priority as the Lord over all things and over ourselves--"Everything is yours but you are Christ's and Christ is God's" (1 Cor 3:2)--must be trans-lated on the level of love by an exclusive preference for His Person and by an unconditional desire to follow and imitate Him alone. Accordingly, all monastic life, as all religious institutes afterwards, crystallizes around the practice, of the three evangelical counsels with a view to assuring the rigorous ascendancy of Christ's ways over those of the world. Since Christ is completely despoiled of material goods (He "has not a stone on which to rest his head" [Mt 8:20]), since His own relationship with others does not take carnal generation into account ("Who is my mother and who are my brothers?. Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, my sister, and my mother" [Mt 12:48]), and since He does not exercise His liberty except by delivering it up to the will of His Father (Jn 6:38), religious life will accordingly be defined as a ca-nonically determined break (even if it is not always spir-itually accomplished), with the possessions of the world by poverty, with carnal generation and conjugal love by ~o P.G., v. 26, col. 865 A, a citation derived from the previously men-tioned unpublished work of Father Mogenet. On the Athanasian au-thenticity of the Vita Antonii, see Louis Bouyer, La vie du saint ~lntoine (Saint Wandrille: Editions de Fontenelle, 1950), pp. 15'-22. ~ Citations of the Rule of St. Benedict are made according to the text of Dom Philibert Schmitt. + Religious Lile VOLUME 25, 1966 Ousta~e Mar~eleg, Sd. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS chastity, with personal hegemony over self by obedience. This triple rupture defines, by way of three complemen-tary means, a unique and single preference which should e~]ectively animate the religious' entire being, And if man is, in effect, a relation to nature through possession, a re-lation to the other thr~ough love, and a relation to sell through liberty, then poverty, chastity, and obedience are the triple condition of one and the same preference: the preference for Christ over all the goods of the world', sac-rificed to Him who appears as the One Necessity, the pref-erence for Christ over carnal generation, and even more so over conjugal love, sacrificed to Him who appears as Love itself, the preference for Christ over our own indi-vidual liberty, sacrificed to Him who appears as the only Lord. Understood in this manner, religious !ire is the applica-tion of the call: "Come follow me," in which tradition has always seen the principle of life according to the coun-sels. Directed to the rich young man in Galilee (Mt 19:21), Jesus' personal summons is ceaselessly repeated by the Spirit in the ever present reign of the resurrected Christ: On the basis of a love for the Lord of glory alone, the Spirit founds the movement of grace that is religious life. As a way of life in keeping with the evangelical counsels and canonically defined within the Church, religious life is first of all the choice of an end and only secondly a sys-tem of means. It is a response which presupposes a call, a canonical institution commanded by a spiritual love.It becomes an institution only because it was first an inspira-tion; it becomes the letter of a rule only because it was first the spirit of the Gospel. And if it is true that the counsels themselves are still a letter when isolated from the Spirit from which they live,r2 it is also true that the letter of religious life takes form from the letter of the Gospel only by the charismatic mediation of the Holy Spirit Himself. Religious life assumes a bodily form only when the Spirit breathes into souls the soul of the Gospel. This soul is none other than the spiritual preference of Christ over all things in keeping with the words of St. Benedict cited above: "Put nothing before the love of Jesus,Christ." r~ By constructing this formula for his sons and for all of those who would hear the faithful echo of the Gospel through i(, St. Benedict initiated his followers into the well,founded hope of "eternal life," that is to say, of "the life lived forever with the Lord," the anticipation" 7a Dom Lafont gives strong insistence to this point in the work cited in footnote 7, pp. 170-83. ra On the centrality of Christ in the gospel message see de Grand-maison, Jesus Christ, v. 2 and v. 3, pp. 3-346; and R. Guardini, Das Wesen des Christentums (Sth ed.; W0rzburg: ~Werksbund-Verlag, 1958). of which is the proper mission of religious life in the Church. By this preferential love of Jesus Christ, religious life, far from living in isolation from the Church, enters, as does virginity, into her most profound being and shows itseff subject to her. 2. Religious Life's Dependence on the Church We are speaking here of the whole Church for the serv-ice of which religious life exists, as we shall see in the last section. But for the present we wish to consider in a gen-eral way the essential dependence of religious life on the hierarchy and on the Christian community itself. By first drawing attention to marriage and its dependence on the Church, we shall better understand the position of reli-gious life. A. The Church and the Christian Couple Many of the faithful are indignant (and some of them ventilate their dissatisfaction in the daily press) over the fact that the Church through her magisterium wishes to impose a conjugal ethic on them. Although there are sometimes unjustified clerical probings into the private lives of couples, this indiscretion is not the object of the litigation. The latter arises from the Church's right to is-sue obligatory laws in the conjugal order. Contraception is not the only sensitive area; problems of a similar na-ture cluster around the subject. We do not propose here to solve any of these problems but only to indicate the spirit with which the intervention of the Church in such matters is to be accepted. In so doing, we shall contribute to the understanding of the relations that exist between the Church and religious life. Christian marriage is the sign of the 'union of Christ and the Church. The spousal charity of Christ and the Church must consequently be reflected in marriage if it is to obtain the transparency of a sign. To avoid saying that Christ has not assumed flesh in its entirety, we must recognize that all flesh must bear the mark of Christ and exercise that paradoxical docility which the Spirit de-mands of it. Christian conjugal ethic is dominated by this end. It has no other reason for being than to assure to the human love of the partners that spiritual clarity befitting the sacramentality of their love. Christianity assumes re-sponsibility for the most authentic prescriptions of human ethics; but in making them both more urgent and more imprescriptible, it demonstrates the need for transparency which the sign should have and the latter's ability in Christ to follow Him. That is why no home can be more human or purer, more united or freer, more self-sac-rificing or happier, humbler and more transfigured, than the home in which the light of Christ shines and where 4- 4- 4- "Religious Life VOLUME 25, 1966 . Gustave Martelet, ~,. $~1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS His flame burns. It is thu"s apparent ~hat the Church can never sacrifice the conjugal ethic since the human love of the baptized must reflect, even in the flesh, the sanctity which she represents. The objection of those Christians who maintain that the Church cannot pronounce on :subjects which Chris~t did not discuss is indeed fragile. Christ's sile,nce, while ap-parently impressive, is quite relativ6 when one reflects on the manner in which He spoke'of tl~e indissblubility of the conjugal bond (Mt 19:9) a~nd of foregoing the works of the flesh "in view of the kingdom of heaven" (Mt 19:22).' Even if Christ had~ not.spoken, one could not declare the Bride in.competent tq d~e~fine :t,he standards "of the Gyoom to those who represent the mystery itself. Christ. would have shown little respect for His Bride, in fact, He wohld have shown outright distrust for her and lack of faith in the:intuitions of which His Spirit is the .guarantee, if He had not endowed His Church with the. right and the duty "to.speak" in an area where the bridal mysyery which she lives directly orientates the spi.ritua! underst.a.ndin~ of the couple's love. Yet the Church's authority does not sup-plant Christ in His mystery. The 'former relies on the lat-ter; she thus rejoins the profound life of her children--a life which is sometimes resisted but never denied: The latter know that they will never truly communicate with Christ through their love if ~they reject the manner in which the Church forms and guides their consciences. B: The Church and P~eligious Life If she takes so much care with regard to the sacrament of marriage, the sign of her bridal mystery, the hierarchi- Cal Church watches nb less jealously over religious life: If in the free holiness of the married she wishes to see 'the bldssoming of an image of what they become in and by th~ sacrament, she cannot be disinterested in ~hose Who pretend not only to represent but to spiritually actualize the v.ery love. of the Bride as it is directed in its entirety toward the Groom. The Church's ~igilance over the sac-ramental ~ign of her nupti_als in marriage can only be re-doubledin the case of the spiritual~ fulfillment 9f thesd huptials in religious life. The lat~er trul)i exist~ in the .Chu.rch~.only when i.t is discerned; judged, a~proved, con-trolled, 'su~pb.r~ed, afid'criticized.'lS)i hier~irchical action, 1.oc.al" orsupr~me;, of which it ~an neither atiempt nor de-s~ re to be free. ¯ This essential function as judge" and. guardian is never brought t~o fulfillment not only because human weakness is forever prone to compromise :what gener'osity 'in th~ SpirivoHginal]y envisage~l and ~romised but a'l~o b~cause ~ov~'g" ingpi~a~ion Wtiic-l~ giv'e~"-'birfl~ ~0 ~eligioh~ life" ig never dulled and because from the flight to the desert to the ransom of captives, from the highest conte.mplation to the most obscure nursing service, from ancient Carm.el to. modern Nazareth, from the monastic 9rders to the secu-lar institutes, the Bride must al.ways discern the various ways" in which the Groom inspires her through her chil-dren. Let it suffice to state that religious life, charismati-cally given to the Church by Chrigt Himself, exists in the Church only as canonically submissive to her law. More-over, if this strict submission does not des.troy religious life but~ rather makes it flourish, the reason is that throUgh this submission religious life finds its own truth. Publicly "recognized" by the Church as a privileged "way of holi-ness, religious life understands itself as the flowering within the Church of the Bride's mystery of loving re-sponse to the Groom's love. Religious life's dependence on the mystery of the Church is not only hierarchical but is also connected with the entire Christian community. The evangelical coun-sels which mold religious life do not make the pi:eferen-tial love of Christ become a monopoly of the monastery. Every Christian--and, strictly speaking, every man--is called to this love; and the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount are directed to every member of die Church "as the norm for the moral conduct of the baptized." 74 While' it is true that as far as the manner of loving Chri~ alcove all things and of thereby entering into the love of God is concerned religious life represents a privileged state, still it is of absolute necessity for no one. Although pos-sessing a universal value of exemplarity, it is imposed only on some, and then by a determined vocation. Holiness is never automatically assured those who commit themselves to this way of the vows; and there is no doubt that many Christians remain more faithful to Christ in the world than certain religious do in ,their monasteries or convents. Hence, religious have no grounds for' Complacendy or for a disparaging attitude toward those who are not mem-bers of religious life. The person who becOmes a religious enters a state of life which he may be unworthy hence humility is necessary for him--but which of itself initiates him into a perfect love of Christ--hence depre-ciation by Christians of such a life is impossible. Religious life, then, does not exist in order to divide the Church b~ absUrd rivalries over the better and the less good but on!y in order .that, the sovereign love of "Christ may increase and'that the life of the vows may assume at the depths of it-self the evangelical traits of the Lord. Never regarding it-self as opposed or superior to anyone, religious life must always be at the service of all men by means of those who ~* Lafont, "$aintet~ du peuple de Dieu," p. 1~5. + + + Religious Life~ VOLUME 25, 1966 39 ÷ ÷ ÷ Gustave Martelet, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS attempt to live it out and who take care not to betray .its ideals. Such is the dependence of religious life on the Church for the service of which it is born and must perdure. It is judged by the. hierarchy with a view to benefiting the common spiritual good of the entire Church. Like con-jugal life (and because it refers to One and the same mys-tery but in a different way), religious life cannot destroy its dependence on the Church as a whole, whether it be a question of the hierarchy who judges it and supports it in its fundamental inspiration or whether it be a mat-ter of the faithful whom it should stimulate to the love of tile Lord and by whom it is itself stimulated: "God or-ganizes his holy ones for the work of the ministry in view of the building up the body of Christ, until we all attain (o the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph 4:12-~). Hence, despite (or, more accurately, because of) its integration into the life of the Body, religious life retains an irreducible original-ity which we shall have occasion to discuss later. This originality, which integrates religious life into the Body while simultaneously differentiating it, does not suggest separation or exclusiveness. This is why its full canonical development does not prevent the possible renewal of forms which historically preceded it. C. Religious Life and Virginity or Consecrated Widowhood It is easy to understand why the order of virgins and widows was practically absorbed into that of nuns during the course of history. When reading the recommendations to virgins and consecrated widows made by St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, or St. Augustine,75 to limit our consideration to the western fathers, one receives the impression, con-firmed by history, that these women be.longed to a state of life in which equilibrium was maintained with diffi-culty. A certain kind of exterior protection was lacking to many of them, and thht "sweet odor of Christ" which initially stimnlated their resolutions sometimes evapo-rated in lamentable circumstances. By endowing Christian generosity and the desire to consecrate oneself to Christ with a defined monastic framework, religious life quite ¯ naturally almost completely absorbed the order of virgins and that of consecrated widows which were formerly overexposed to many dangers. Spiritual situations, which 75 For example, Cyprian, Liber de habitu virginum (P.L., v. 4, col. 439-62; Ambrose, De virginibus (P.L., v. 16, col. 187-232), De virgini-tare (ibid., col. 265-302); Augustine, De sancta virginitate, (P.L. v. 40, col. 412-28). On widowhood, see Ambrose, De viduis (P.L., v. 16, col. 233-62); Augustine, De bono viduitatis (P.L., v. 40, col. 4~II-50). were still unstable, thereby received a precise form. This was a good thing from one aspect, but frdm one aspect only. For a valuable diversity thus tended to disappear even though there do exist within the Church Christian individuals or groups who without becoming conventual religious consecrate their virginity or widowhood to the Lord. This non-conventual exercise of religious consecra-tion of self has regained favor in our day to an unusual degree. Many Christian women,TM desirous of living their bap-tismal regeneration in the form of absolute consecration to Christ, receive no call to abandon the world where family, children, profession, business, .and situation ex-pect and demand of them a daily, total devotedness. In the minds of these Christians the consecration of their vir-ginity or widowhood to Christ does not necessarily iden-tify itself with the practice of leading a religious life apart from the world's structures. Without criticizing those who follow a more classical road to perfection, they demand little more than the three vows of religious life to express their gift of self to the Lord. Their borrowings may also include certain organizational aspects of life and the tone of a definite spirituality, but they do not usually exceed these features. They desire to take religious life from its conventual conditions in order to implant it in the world --which that state had justifiably abandoned in the be-ginning. The reasons justifying this abandonment of the world and assuring to convent and cloister their incon-testable values (though these have not always been uncon-tested) thus permit the conception of new forms of reli-gious life. The spiritual break with the world which should always characterize religious life can operate in an entirely interior fashion without imposing a rupture that may be described as a sociological or, better still, a conventual one. On the contrary, the structures which are most typical of the world can become the condition of a highly intense though less apparent form of religious life. In all this the ideal of the secular institutes is recog-nized. The latter represent one of the most original ex-pressions of religious life in the Church today.77 Duly 76 Cardinal L~ger reminded the Council of this fact. He also in-sisted on the fact that there should not be too rapid an identification of consecrated virginity with religious life: there are persons who de-sire the first but who perhaps are incapable of the second (D.C., v. 60 [1963], col. 1593). This was doubtless the meaning also of the re-marks of Bishop Huyghe (D.C., v. 60 [1963], col. 1594). r~ For an overall view of the matter see Jean Beyer, Les instituts s~culiers (Bruges: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1954). Consult also the same author's "La vocation s~culi~re," Nouvelle revue th~ologique, v. 86 (1964), pp. 135-57, where complementary data are given On the situ-ation of secular institutes at the present time. On Father Beyer's book see the remarks of Father Carpentier, "Les instituts s~culiers," Nou- 4. 4" Religious Li]e VOLUME 25, 1966 41 encouraged by Roman authority,rs this new state is em-barking, it is our belief, upon other realizations which it virtually contains and which go back to ancient formulas whose significance is by no means exhausted. The term "secular institutes" designates greatly differ-ent kinds of groups.79 Besides such institutes as Opus Dei which has the attractiveness of large-scale dimensions, there are other groupings whose aims and methods are more modest. The members ofthese latter groups think less in terms of vast, extensive actions than in those of an unreserved gift of self to the Lord; their way of life calls to mind more the reed than the oak. Since the end pur-sued in these groupings is less the secularization of reli-gious life than the consecration of profane existence, many specifications of religious life which are and no doubt should be characteristic of secular institutes appear less necessary to these groups. Thus, in the absence of common life, the observance of obedience and poverty is difficult of realization. Furthermore, obedience and pov-erty, even when maintained for good reasons, would imply in these groups a dependence and control which are not indispensable for the spiritual ends envisaged by the members of these groupings. Accordingly, the different positio.n taken up with regard to certain modalities of the religious life formally considered does not arise from a weaker desire for Christian perfection nor from an initial lukewarmness; it is rather the result of a different inspi-ration. It is not a question of criticizing the values of re-ligious life or of protesting the help to be found in reli-gious life, whether conventual or secularized; it is rather a matter of consecrating virginity or widowhood to the Lord while allowing freedom from many determinations which this consecration has assumed within the frame-work of religious life properly so-called ~and which con-tinue to characterize--legitimately so--secular institutes. The desire to return to formulas less rigid even than those of these institutes is the desire (and it is not necessarily chimerical) to return to the ancient formulas of conse-crated virginity and widowhood. Gustave Martelet, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS velle revue thdologique, v. 77 (1955), pp. 408-12. And see the more re-cent remarks of Karl Rahner who clearly shows that members of secular institutes are, in the Church, genuinely religious even though in and for the world they are lay persons (Theology Ior Renewal [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964], pp. 147-83). ~s The two fundamental documents are those of Pius XII: Provida Mater of February 2, 1947, and Primo [eliciter of March 12, 1948; English translations in T. Lincoln Bouscaren, S.J., and James I. O'Connor, s.J., The Canon Law Digest Ior Religious, v. 1 (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1964), pp. 143-55 and 157-61. ~ At the end of Father Beyer's book on secular institutes will be found a list of fifty-eight existing groups with a brief description of each. We have already mentioned the weaknesses shown in the past by this way of life, weaknesses.that necessitate a real sense of prudence in this matter. But the present sit-uation is not entirely the same as that of past ages. Reli-gious life has benefited from centuries of experience; it exercises a decisive influence on the effort of every Chris-tian to reach perfection. Accordingly, what in past ages religious life would have reduced to itself, it can now re-frain from absorbing, allow to grow, and even protect in its own way. In this way virginity and consecrated widow-hood could regain their own particular status outside of conventual or secularized religious life and beyond that life Of the baptized that retains all legitimate Christian rights with regard to marriage. Being canonicaIly more supple than any known form of religious life and at the same time having the spiritual seriousness of a complete giving of self to the Lord in the Spirit of the gospel, con-secrated virginity and widowhood would then represent in our world a way of pertaining to the Lord to which Christians, not well adapted for religious life, could feel themselves called in order to live an intense life centered on Christ and the gospel and based on a total consecra-tion of self which spiritually transforms one's life without modifying it socially. A similar procedure which could revive in the twen-tieth century one of the most venerable but also most threatened institutions of Christian spirituality would suppose a profound renewal of schools of spirituality gathered around the great orders, both monastic and apos-tolic. By remaining or becoming centers of a profound religious spirit aiad by renouncing any control which would in any way limit the freedom of action of the men and women who seek a support that is purely spiritual, religious orders could provide an enormous service to Christian women, to speak only of them, by offering them a permanent and profound consecration of self to Christ in the world without entering the religious life in the proper sense of the word. For the sake of concretizing the matter, is it necessary to say that the matter discussed here is that of a profound renewal of third orders and of "third congregations"? Yes, if one wishes to put it that way; but the renewalmust be a radical one permitting the spiritual training that is given to take complete account of modern conditions of life; furthermore, the spiritual heritage drawn upon must provide souls with a truly profound in-troduction both to the Lord to whom they consecrate themselves and to the world for the benfit of which Christ frees them. Although these possibilties are offered only as sugges-tions, still the preceding considerations concerning simi-larities and differences between consecrated virginity and Religious Liye VOLUME 25, 1966 43 ~ustcwe Martele~ S.I. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS religious life supply a foundation for them. Forms of con-secration to Christ are of an infinite diversity within the Church. Some of them are completely new; others reclaim ancient practices and endow them with :a new spirit. It is to the latter type ~hat adaptation of secular institute formulas for the purpose of consecrated virginity and widowhood is related. In this the approbation of the Church will be necessary; but so also will be the inspira-tion of the Holy Spirit whose preeminent role at the very base of religious life must now be explicitly considered. VI. LOVE OF CHRIST AND THE MYSTERY OF THE SPIRIT The role of the Spirit is irreplaceable in acquiring the love and knowledge of Christ: "No one can say: 'Jesus is Lord' except by the action of the Holy Spirit" (1 Cot 12:3). In order to understand the true sources of religious life in the Church, it is therefore necessary to speak first of the Spirit as the revealer of Christ. The point is an es-sential one in Scripture. After Pentecost, when St. Peter announced the identity .of Jesus for the first time in Jeru-salem, he cried: "Let all the house of Israel, therefore, know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36). But before reaching this conclusion, St. Peter had already ex-plained: "This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise o[ the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear" (Acts 2:32-3). It is thus the effusion of'the Spirit by Christ which reveals His own glorification and which even constitutes it in a certain way. Jesus is riot the Lord with-out being, in keeping with this title, the One who gives us the Spirit. The Son's glorification by the Father in the Resurrection and His dispatch of the Spirit from the Father are two aspects of the mystery that are rigorously correlative as the Gospel explicitly proclaims: "Neverthe-less, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you" (Jn 16:7). And similarly: "But when the Counselor comes whom I shall send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who pro-ceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me" (Jn 15:26). o The dissensions raised by these texts--and others to ¯ which we shall refer later--is well known. The Orthodox interpret them as a guarantee of the complete dependence of the Son and the Spirit in regard to the Father, while we see in them the acknowledgement of the equality which the Son receives from the Father with regard to the eternal procession of the Spirit. It is the Filioque quarrel on which we shall not delay,s° We have mentioned the matter, however, since it is not without pertinence, usu-ally unperceived, to our subject. For while insisting more than our Orthodox brothers on the eternal role of the Son in the procession of the Spirit, we mugt not fail to remember the complementary role of the Spirit in refer-ence to the Son. The point is as vital to the theology of the processions as it is to the economy of the missions,sl And in fact, if it is true that the spiration of the Spirit cannot be understood without relating it to the Son in eternity since the ~piration is nothing else then the act by which the Spirit owes to the Father and to the Son His eternal existence as a divine Person, it is also true that we risk overlooking the light which the existence of the Spirit sheds in its turn on that of the two other Persons. For the Father would not be the Father of such a Son, who is con-substantial, that is, equal in nature to His Father, and the Son would not be the Son of such a Father, capable of communicating His own undivided divinity to His Son, if the One and the Other were not associated "spirators" of the Spirit. It is because the trinitarian life reaches completion in the procession of the Spirit that it can also begin in and by the generation of the Son. The entire mystery of the Father and the Son is found in that of the Spirit who results from their love and who is their very love, the eternal sign of what can be called His transcend-ent possibility. The trinitarian mystery is really conceiv-able only because it is the mystery of a God "who is Spirit" (Jn 4:24). For a better understanding of the trini-tarian mystery, it is not sufficient to say that the Son re-ceives from the Father the power to spir~ite the Spirit un-less one immediately adds that the Spirit, spirated by the Father and by the Son acting in common, is also the meas-ure and the sign of the unfathomable mystery which en-velops both and to which initiation would be impossible unless the Spirit Himseff were given us. It was to arrive at this truth that we took the preceding detour through trinitarian theology, for we could not truly know the Son and through Him the Father, in the revealing economy of the Incarnation and of the Church, unless the Spirit played His irreplaceable role of revealer and witness of Christ for us. It is this central point of view which we shall now attempt to illuminate. 1. The Mystery o[ the Spirit in His Relation to Christ + ÷ A. Necessity of the Spirit in Understanding Christ The temptation to believe that Christ could be reduced to purely human dimensions is not a chimerical one. "Is See Appendix A. See Appendix B. Religious Lile VOLUME 25, 1966 ÷ Gustave Martelet, . $.1o REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS he not Jesus, son of Joseph, whose father find mother we know?" the Jews asked (Jn 6:42). And it is true that Hi~ human accessibility enters into Hisl role of Mediator. "That which we have heard,, which we have seen wi~h "our eyes, which we have looked upon and to~tched with our hands, concerning the word of life, we announce to you" (1 Jn 1:1-2). It is in this way that Jesus reveals to man "what noeye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived--what God hhs prepared for those who,,love him" (1 Cot 2:9 citing Is 64:3). This human accessibility o'f Christ, and through Him of the Father, is the very con-dition of revelation and is in a way identified with it. Not only did Jesus say: "No one comes to the Father except by me" (Jn 14:6); but He made the even more radical statement: ".Philip, who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). Hence,.it is evident that God's revelation in Christ .supposes the humanity of the Son who through that humanity takes on our own. But His humanity is precisely the humanity of the Son; accordingly, one does not enter the trinitarian mystery through it without hav-ing been introduced into it by the Father. "No one comes to me," said Jesus to the Jews, "unless the Father draws him" (Jn 6:44). And to Peter who had just recggnized and confessed Him as "the Christ, the son of the living God," Jesus declared: "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven" (Mt 16:17). It is "not of flesh and blood" but of the Father in the gift which He makes us of the Spirit. Jesus' words concerning the Paraclete in St. John have the same meaning. It is good that Jesus departs in order that the Spirit may come making it truly possible to know Jesus: "These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (Jn 14:25-6). And Jesus also said: "I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things' that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declhre it to you" (Jn 16: i2-4). Without the Spirit Christ will always remain for us in the order of "the flesh" which Jesus said "avails nothing" (Jn 6:63). In his turn, St. Paul affirms: "Even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, at present we no longer know him in this way" (2 Cor 5:16) but only ac-cording to the "new creation" (2 Cor 5:17) which is the work of the Spirit. And the Apostle tells ns in the Letter to Titus: "And when the goodness and loving kin~dness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of deeds done by' us in icighteousness but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and by the re-newal in the Holy Spirit which he poured out upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior so that we might be jus-tified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal li~e" (3:4-7). Similarly, in the Letter to the Galatian's: "BUt when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son~. so that we might receive, adoption as sons. And because' you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying 'Abbal Father!' So through God y0u"are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir" (Gal 4:4-6). It is, then, through the Spirit that the Father attracts us, beyond the ways of flesh and blood, to the very knowledge of the Son, just as one must be re-born by the power of the Spirit (Jn 3:5) if Christ is to in-troduce us into His otherwise impenetrable kingdom. Since such is the case, the truth of Christ, though at-tested by history, is not naturally accessible as a simple fact of our experience. It depends on testimony from above which does not destroy our intelligence but trans-forms it by giving it n

Issue 21.2 of the Review for Religious, 1962. ; FRANCIS J. WEBER The Relics of Christ The spiritual value of a relic is directly proportional to the devotion it inspires in those who venerate it. Apart from this spiritual significance, the relic is merely a his-torical curiosity. It may or may not be of archaeological value to the museums of the world. The official attitude of the Church regarding individual relics is one of extreme reserve. In most cases, the Church prudently withholds definitive judgment on even the most demonstrably ancient relics. In fact, while reluctant to proclaim the authenticity of a particular reli.c, the Church has not infrequently withdrawn from public Veneration relics whose claims were found to be dubious or spurious. In recent memory, this has happened in the case of "St. Philomena," center of a devoted cult for more than a cen-tury, though she had never been formally canonized and nothing actually was known of her life. Despite the many miracles attributed to the relics of this supposed second century martyr, unearthed from a catacomb in 1802, mod-ern research shed doubt on the authenticity of the re-mains. It should be noted that the decree of the Sacred Congre-gation of Rites in 1961 dropping the feast of St. Philomena from the liturgical calendar did not touch on the validity of the miracles attributed to her intercession. They may well have been genuine miracles performed by God be-cause of the faith and devotion of those who prayed for them. The oldest and most cherished of Christian. relics nat-urally are those reputed to have been connected with the holy person of Jesus Christ Himself. Those few that are still extant, for the most part, have sufficient historical documentation to merit scholarly attention. It must be borne in mind that the honor and veneration given to these objects is directed primarily to Christ. Hence, in, some cases where documentation establishes only doubtful authenticity, the Church is certainly jus-tified in remaining silent, if it is understood that in so doing the Church is not giving positive approval and if 4, 4. Francis J. Weber, a dPiorcieesste o of ft hLeo As rAchn-- geles, is presently assigned to Catholic University, Wash-ington 17, D.C. VOLUME 21, 1962 79 4. 4. Francis ~. Weber REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 80 greater honor and glory are thereby rendered to Almighty God. Our approach to this obscure and sometimes contro-versial subject is that of the historian, who presents only the facts, leaving conclusions to the reader, The True Cross The Cross on which our Savior died has been tradi-tionally the most precious of all Christian relics. Tiny splinters of the True Cross have been so widely distributed that, in the words of St. Cyril, "the whole inhabited earth is full of relics from the wood of the Cross." St. Helena is credited with discovery of the True Cro:;s in 327 A.D.1 Early testimony of the fathers, among them Ambrose, Jerome, Sozomen, and Theodoret, recounts this marvelous event in copious detail. The Cross was found in an abandoned cistern near Mount Calvary. Identifica-tion as the True Cross, according to St. Ambrose, was easy enough since the titulus was still affixed. To commemo-rate this great occasion, St. Helena orderd a magnificent basilica to be erected over the H61y Sepulchre. She gave it the name of St. Constantius in honor of her son, the Roman emperor. When Helena returned to Rome, the relics were placed in the Sessorian Basilica, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. A substantial segment, of the. Cross-was left in Jerusalem where it annually attracted thousands of devout pilgrims. It was captured in the seventh century by Khosru II, the Persian conqueror. When the holy relic was returned by Heraclius in 628, the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross was instituted. The Jerusalem relic was divided many times. When certain of these fragments fell into the hands of the Mohammedans, the Crusades were inspired to restore them. An extensive and intensive study of the True Cross was made and published in 1870 by Rohault de Fleury. After examination of all extant fragments claimed to be from the True Cross, he drew up a minute catalogue of them, with precise weights and measurements. His findings proved that if all known pieces of the True Cross were put together, they would consitute less than one-third of the original Cross. This effectively silenced skeptics who had scoffed that the total of supposed fragments was bigger than the Cross itself. De Fleury's calculations2 were based on a cross of pine wood weighing an estimated 75 kilograms. The volume of 1 Louis de Combres, The Finding of the True Cross (London: Trubner, 1907). = Charles Rohault de Fleury, Mdraoire sur les instruments de la Passion (Paris: Lesort, 1870), pp. 97-179. this. cross would have been approximately 178 million cubic millimeters. Known volume of the existing relics does not exceed ,t0 million cubic millimeters. 0 Crux ave, spes unica! The Title of the Cross There are many fanciful legen~ls associated with the dis-covery of the True Cross by St. Helena. The manner of distinguishing the True Cross of Christ .from those of the two thieves is usually related with colorful if not his-torically accurate circumstances. However, St. Ambrose testifies there was no problem in identifying the True Cross as the titulus or title-piece was still intact. Other writers corroborate this account, notably Sts. Cyrils and Jerome. As has been the case with so many holy relics, the titulus was divided into seveial pieces. The Diary of Etheria lo-cates a piece of the titulus in Jerusalem in 380 A.D, Helena undoubtedly brought a part of the title back to Rome with her. Regrettably, there is no further documentation avail-able on the fate of the Jerusalem relic, For some reason, very likely to protect it from invaders, the Roman relic seems to.have been walled up in an arch of Santa Croce by Placidus Valentinian III in the fifth century. In the twelfth century it was accidentally un-earthed by Gherardo Caccianemici, titular cardinal and later Pope Lucius II. The future pontiff placed his seal on the reliquary and replaced it in its hiding place. In 1492 Cardinal Mendoza of Toledo rediscovered the relic which he immediately presented to the then Holy Father, Innocent VIII. A papal bull, Admirabile Sacra-mentum, was issued, after which the titulus was exposed for public veneration in Santa Croce. The title-piece is of wood, about nine by five inches in size, and comprises two-and-one-half lines of faded in-scription. Hebrew, Greek and Latin characters are dis-cernible, all of which axe printed in reverse, a practice common with the Romans of the time of Christ. The Shroud of Turin It is recorded in Chapter 27 of St. Matthew how Joseph. of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus in a "dean linen cloth." No further mention of this funeral shroud appears in Christian literature until the time of St. Nino4 (d. ~38), who relates how Peter removed the shroud from the tomb shortly after the Resurrection. The fourteenth century Byzantine historian, Nicephorus Callista, tells how this 8Philip Gonnet, De Sancti Cyrilli Hiersolymitani Catechismt~ (Paris: 1876). ¯ Edward Wuenschel, C.Ss.R.0 Sell-Portrait oI Christ (Esopus, New York: Holy Shroud Guild, 1954). ÷ ÷ ÷ Relics ot Christ VOLUME 21, 1962 81 4. Francis $. Weber REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS Holy Shroud, soaked with the blood of Christ and bearing an image of His holy face, found its way to Constantino-. pie: "Pulcheria, Empress of the East, having built a basil-ica. at Blachernes in 436, piously deposited there the fu. neral linens of Our Savior, which had just been rediscov-. ered and which the Empress Eudoxia had sent to her." Eyewitnesses to the presence of the Holy Shroud at Con-stantinople are recorded in the Annals of 631, 640, 749, 1157 and 1171 A.D. During the Fourth Crusade, the Holy Shroud was sur. rendered in recompense to Otho de la Roche, Duke of Athens and Sparta. The Duke in 1204 sent the prized relic to his father in France. Soon after, it came into possession of the Bishop of Besan~on. A fire caused minor damage to the shroud in 1349. Later that same year, it was stolen from its case in Besan~on Cathedral and given to King Philip IV who in turn gave it to Geoffrey, Count of Char., ney and Lord of Lirey. There is documentary evidence ¯ that it was at Lirey in 1360. During the Hundred Years War, the Holy Shroud wa:; handed over by Geoffrey's granddaughter to the House of Savoy for safekeeping. In 1454, Pope Sixtus IV directed the Duke of Savoy, Louis I, to build a shrine for the shroud at his Chambery residence. During the troubled war years of the sixteenth century, the Holy Shroud was moved from town to town in France. It narrowly missed being destroyed a second time by fire in 1532, and in fact its corners were noticeably singed. At the request of the aged Charles Borromeo, the shroud in 1578 was brought to Turin where it has re-mained for the past four hundred years. It is presently preserved in the black marble chapel specially built for it behind the city's beautiful fifteenth century cathedral. Several pronouncements by the Holy See leave litth: doubt regarding the Church's official attitude toward the Turin Shroud. An Office and a Mass were formally ap-proved by Pope Julius II in the bull Romanus Ponti[ex issued in 1506. Sixtus IV had previously stated that in thbl Holy Shroud "men may look upon the true blood and portrait of Jesus Christ Himself." A remarkable discovery was made in .1898, when a pho-tograph of the Turin Shroud revealed the faint, blurred image on the ancient linen to be an actual "negative" produced by vapors from a human body covered witll spices. The negative of the modern photo~a negative of a negative, thus producing a positive--offered a far more pronounced picture of a human face than was previously recognizable. ChemiCally, this "vapograph" was caused by the am-moniacal emanations from the surface of the body after an unusually violent death. It has been proved experimen-tally that these vapors are capable of producing a deep reddish brown stain which would vary in intensity with the distance from a cloth soaked with oil and aloes. Hence the image of Christ's face on the shroud is a natural nega-tive. This modern evidence, together with the identification of human bloodstains, prompted Dr. Paul Vignon to read a brilliant paper before the Acaddmie des Sciences, in which he suggested that any explanation denying the authenticity of the Turin Shroud would be scientifically inaccurate. It might also be mentioned that, the impression on the shroud of the Grown of Thorns is in perfect conformity with the "helmet type" of crown displayed at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Further, the nail wounds are not in the palms of the hands but in the wrists. It has been re-alized only in our own times that this was a physical neces-sity, for nails in the palms .of the hands would not have been able to sustain the weight of a human body. One of the major opponents and critics of the Turin Shroud was the anti-pope Clement VII, first of the Avig-non Pretenders. His opposition apparently stemmed from a vague charge made by the Bishop of Troyes that the shroud was the work of a local craftsman skilled in the subtle art of simulating antique handiwork. Other shrouds, thirty in all, each purporting to be the genuine article, have turned up through the centuries. Most notable are thosestill preserved at Besan~on, Ca-douin, and Champiegne. These shrouds likewise bear im-pressions alleged to be those of Christ's face and body. However, the preponderance of ,historical evidence seems to leave no doubt that among all the claimants, only the Shroud of Turin has a valid pretension to au-thenticity. The Pillar of the Scourging The column of the Praetorium to which Christ was bound during His scourging was discovered in the For-tress of Antonia in 373 A.D., according to a chronicle penned by St. Ephrem. St. Paulinus of Nola,5 writing after 409, refers to several relics of the Passion, among them "the pillar at which He was scourged." Philip of Brosserius saw the pillar in the Church of the Holy Se-pulchre in 1285. Some time before the end of the four-teenth century it was broken and one part was sent to Constantinople. An interesting Christian" tradition, dating back to .the See Letter 310f Paulinus. ÷ ÷ ÷ Relics o] Christ VOLUME 21, 1962 83 ÷ ÷ ÷ F~ancis $. Webe~ REVIEW I:OR REI.I~IOUS 84 fourth century, holds that Christ was actually scourged twice. St. John Chrysostom tells us this second flagellation took place at the house of Caiaphas after the mock trial. This tradition finds prominent mention in early chroni-cles. The pillar used for the second scourging was reserved in the Church of Mount Sion, the Cenacle, where St. Jerome reported he saw it. During the Persian invasion, it too seems to have been broken into several pieces. The portion left at the Cenacle was lost in 1537. The other part was returned to a church subsequently erected on the sit~ of the house of Caiaphas. Here it was venerated until the fourteenth century, when it completely disappeared. In 1222 A.D., Giovanni Cardinal Colonna, papal envoy to the Orient, returned to Rome with a fragment of the Pillar of the Scourging, apparently given him by the Sara-cens. He enshrined it in his titular church of St. Praxedes, where it may be seen today. The Roman pillar is of mar-ble, about two feet four inches high. It is.probably one of the parts of the Praetorian column. Its counterpart in Jerusalem is of a different material and may have formed the lower part of the pillar. The Holy Stairs Among the many treasures brought back from the Holy Land by St. Helena was the marble staircase from the palace of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. It is still extant,e The stone steps number twenty-eight and are said. to have been sanctified by the feet of Christ himself when He as-cended this stairway at the Praetorium. The stairway, reconstructed in Rome, originally formed part of the old Lateran Palace, leading into a chapel dedi-cated to St. Sylvester. When the Lateran Palace was torn down by Pope Sixtus V in 1589, the stairs were moved to their present location. Today the Scala Sancta constitutes the entranceway to the Holy of Holies~ an old private papal chapelY In its present site, the Scala Sancta is flanked by additional stair-wells on either side. Traditionally the Holy Stairs are ascended only on one's knees. The last pope to ascend the stairway in this fashion was Plus IX on the eve of his exile from Rome in 1870. Pope St. Pius X decreed a plenary indulgence for those who devoutly ascend the Scala Sancta on their knees as testimony of their love for Christ. Replicas of the Scala Sancta have been erected at Lourdes and other centers of pilgrimage. e Herbert Thursfon, The Holy Year o] Jubilee (Westminster: New-man, 1949). ~ Philippe Lauer, Le trdsor de Sancta Sanctorum (Paris: Leroux, t~o~). The Soldier's Lance Mention is made of the soldier's lance in Chapter 19 of St. John. In his account of the Savior's death, St. John re-lates that "one of the soldiers opened His side with a spear . " The first extra-Biblical.~mention of~,this relic seems to be by Anthony of P~efiZ~, who wrot~'~a~;he saw the Crown of Thorns and "the lance with which He was struck in the side," in the Basilica of Mount Sion.s A miniature of the renowned Syriac manuscript, illu-minated by Rabulas.in 586, assigns the name Longinus to the soldier whose lance pierced the crucified Christ. Gas-siodorus and Gregory of Tours speak of a spear venerated at Jerusalem, which was thought to be identical with that mentioned in Scripture. After the fall of Jerusalem in 615 A.D., several of the major relics of the Passion fell into the hands of the Per-sians. The Chronicon Paschale relates that a piece of the soldier's lance came into the possession of Nicetas, who enclosed it in an icon and presented it to Santa Sophia in Constantinople. In 1241 the Holy Lance was given to King St. Louis for Sainte Chapelle in Paris. No trace of this part of the lance has been found since it was lost during the French Revolu-tion, some time after its removal to the Bibliothkque Na-tionale. The second and larger part of the shaft of the soldier's iance was reported seen by Arculpus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem about 670 A.D. Later it was taken to Constantinople, where Sir John Mandeville writes about it. It was sent to Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 in return for favors shown to the captured Zizin, brother of Sultan Bajazet. At request of the French hierarchy, during the pontifi-cate of Benedict XIV an investigation was conducted to ascertain the .relation, if any, between the two relics, one at Paris, the other at Rome. A papal brief, issued after the inquiry, concluded that both relics were originally parts of the same shaft. Several other supposedly genuine Ho!y Lances are pre-served in various treasuries of Europe, but none of the others offers a valid claim to authenticity. Even the story told by William of Malmesbury about the Holy Lance given to King Athelstan of England is historically in-accurate. Since the tragic loss of ihe Paris relic, only the Roman lance remains. It is exposed each year for veneration dur-ing Holy Week by the Archpriest of St. Peter's Basilica. 8 Francois Martin, Reliques de la Passion (Paris: Lethielleux, 1897). 4- 4- 4- Relics of Christ VOLUME 21, 1962 85 + + + F~ancis ~. Webe~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 86 Veronica's Veil According to the historian Eusebius in his commentary on the Legend of Abgar and according to remarks con-tained in the apocryphal work Mors Pilati, several au-thentic portraits of Jesus Christ were made at various times during His lifetime. The oldest and most authenticated of these images has been known to Romans for centuries as the Vera Icon or Veil of Veronica. So highly has this image been held in Roman esteem, that a Mass celebrating it was composed and inserted into at least one of the early Augsburg Missals.9 There is no reference in Scripture to a woman offering her veil to Christ during His Sacred Passion. But it is highly plausible that there was such a compassionate soul among those who followed Christ on His way to Mount Calvary. The incident itself is undoubtedly worthy of some credibility, since it has found its expression since very early times in the Christian devotion of the Stations of the Cross. Apparently the holy woman in question, known in pious legend only as Veronica, found her way to Rome, where she presented her Vera Icon---True Picture--to Pope Clement I. The veil, ostensibly bearing the image of the suffering Jesus miraculously pressed into it, was vener-ated in several places until the pontificate of John VII who had it enclosed in an ornate reliquary. During the ensuing centuries, the Holy See has exhibited particular solicitude for this precious relic. It had been reserved to the Pope's own chapel, St. Peter's Basilica, where it is ex, posed briefly during Holy Week for veneration by the faithful. The Holy Grail A whole cycle of romantic legends has been woven about the theme of the Holy Grail,1° but the legendary quests, inspiring though they may be, add nothing to the few slim historical facts available. Of the two notable "pretenders" to genuine Grailship, one alone merits se-rious consideration. And while tl~e chalice displayed at Valencia is not generally accepted as genuine by histo-rians, its proponents present a tolerable case in its behalf. An account by Bishop Siuri of Cordoba relates that the chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper was brought to~ Rome by St. Peter soon after the death of Mary. It was used frequently at Papal Masses until the pontificate of Sixtus II. During the persecutions of Valerian, St. Lawrence sent the chalice to his native Huesca in the northern part of o Sainte Veronique, apostre de l'Aquitaine (Toulouse: 1877). a0 Nutt, Studies o[ the Holy Grail (London: 1888). the Spanish peninsula where the Holy Grail remained until 713 when it was removed to San Juan de la Pena for protective custody during the Moslem invasion. A deed of exchange, dated September 26, 1399, testifies that King Martin acquired the Holy Grail for his private chapel in the Palace of the Aljaferia. About 1424 .the chalice was moved to Valencia by King Alfonso V. The chalice has remained at Valencia since the fifteenth cen-tury except for a brief period during the Spanish Civil War when part of the cathedral was burned by the Com-munists. It was restored to its chapel in the Metropolitan Cathedral at Valencia by the Franco government in 1937. Artistically, the Holy Grail is Corinthian in styling,ix made of agate or Oriental carnelian. The handles on ei-ther side are common appurtenances for drinking vessels of its period. The costly pearls, rubies, and emeralds were added much later. The Crown of Thorns St. Paulinus of Nola, writing early in the fifth century, is the first of the chroniclers to mention specifically "the thorns with which Our Lord was crowned." Other early writers allude apparently to this relic of the Passion, but their comments are vague and inconclusive. Writing about 570, Cassiodorus speaks of "the thorny crown, which was set upon the head of our Redeemer in order that all the thorns of the world might be gathered together and broken." The pilgrimage of the monk Ber-nard establishes that the Crown Of Thorns was still at Mount Sion in 870. According to fairly recent studies, the whole crown was transferred to Byzantium about 1063, although many ot the thorns must have been removed at an earlier date. The Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, offered the Crown of Thorns to St. Louis in 1238. After lengthy ne-gotiations with the Venetians, the r(lic was taken to Paris and placed in the newly built Sainte Chapelle where it remained an object of national devotion until the French Revolution. For security, the crown was placed in the BibliothOque Nationale during the bloody days of the upheaval. In 1806, it was restored to Notre Dame Cathedral. It was en-shrined in its present rock crystal reliquary in 1896. All that is left to be seen today is the circlet of rushes, devoid of any thorns. What remained of the original sixty or seventy thorns were apparently removed by St. Louis and deposited in separate reliquaries. The king and his successors distributed the thorns until nothing remained at Paris but the circlet. The Holy Chalice o/the Last Supper (Valencia: 1958). 4. 4. + Relics o] Christ VOLUME 21, 1962 Francis J. Weber REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 88 Reportedly there are more than 700 "holy thorns" scat-tered around the world. But only those traceable to St. Louis, to one of the emperors, or to St. Helena are genu-ine. Such authentic thorns aCe at Cluny, St. Praxedes in Rome, Santa Croce, and at Aachen, to mention but a few. The Nails There seems to be little agreement among Biblical scholars on the number of nails used to fasten our Blessed Lord to His Cross. Religious art of the early Middle Ages almost unanimously depicts the crucified Savior with four nails~ In the thirteenth century, however, it became in-creasingly common to represent the feet of Christ as placed one over the other and pierced with a single nail. Either of these methods is compatible with the informa-tion we have about the punishment of crucifixion as practiced by the Romans. The earliest authors, among them St. Ambrose, speak only of two nails.12 And it is a point of interest that the two oldest known representations of the Crucifixion, the carved door of Santa Sabina in Rome and the Ivory Panel in the British Museum, show no signs of nails in the feet. The most commonly accepted opinion is that there were three nails that actually touched the body of Christ. This is borne out by the evidence of the Shroud of Turin. In addition, there were probably another three nails used for the titulus, the seat block, and the foot rest. St. Ambrose and St. Jerome speak of the discovery of the nails in Jerusalem by Constantine's mother, St. Hel-ena, in the third century. Sozomen notes in passing that St. Helena had no trouble identifying the nails. One of the nails was fashioned into an imperial diadem for the emperor. This Iron Crown of Lombardy is now at Manza. Another nail was made into a bit for the imperial horse. This relic is believed to be the same as the one at Carpentas. A third nail was venerated for many years in Jerusalem before being moved to Rome's Santa Croce by Pope Gregory the Great. Several European treasuries claim to possess one or more of the true nails, but their, authenticity is clouded with the passage of time. Most of the confusion regarding the thirty or more known spurious nails can be traced to the well-intentioned Charles Borromeo who had reproduc-tions made of the nails and gave them out as memorials of the Passion. Conclusion These, then, are the more commonly accepted relics as-sociated with the holy person of Jesus Christ, our Savior. u De Combres, op. cir. If they have served to increase devotion to Almighty God, they have fulfilled their noble purpose. A saintly priest was once heard to exclaim: "Our Savior's greatest bequest to His children was not a treasury filled with mere material relics, but a golden tabernacle in which He Himself resides to be our fo6d~f6r all ~tei'nit~.!: 4. Relics ot Christ VOLIJME 21, ~962 89 EDWARD J. STOKES, S.J. Examination of Conscience for Local Superiors ÷ Edward J. Stokes, S.J., is Professor o[ Canon Law at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Munde-lein, Illinois. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 90 In the summer of 1961 Father Edward J. Stokes, s.J.0 was asked to conduct the annual retreat for a group of local superiors. One of the projects he asked them to do during the retreat was to compose on the basis of their own experience an examination of conscience to be used by local superiors at the time of the monthly recollection, the annual retreat, or at any other suitable time. The ques-tions submitted by this group of local superiors were syn-thethized by Father Stokes who then submitted them to the REvmw. The questions were further revised by Father John E. Becket, S.J., of the editorial staff of the REw~w; the final version of them is given in the following pages. Readers, whether superiors or subjects, who have ideas for the improvement of this examination of conscience either by way of addition, deletion, or emendation are urged to submit their views to the Rzwvw. If enough of such improvements are received, a newly revised version of the examination of conscience for local superiors will be published in a later issue of the R~viEw. Personal Religious Li[e 1. Do I strive to come closer to Christ by leading the life of union and interior peace with Him? Do I do everything in, with, and for Christ? 2. Am I afraid of sanctity because of the demands that it will make on me? 3. Have I forgotten that if I live better, I will pray bet-ter, and that if I pray better, I will live better? 4. Am I firmly convinced of our Lord's words: If you love me, my Father will love you and we will come to you and make our abode with you? 5. Am I convinced that this office of superior, when ful-filled to the best of my ability, is a source of sanctification for me? 6. To be a superior means to carry a cross. How often do I thank our Lord for the privilege of suffering with Him? 7. Am I a superior truly aware of my ownnothingness? 8. When I suffer discouragement, is it because I have not succeeded in doing God's will or because I have not succeeded in pleasing men? ~-,, . ~ °~' ~ 9. Am I deeply convinced that if I have done my best to fulfill God's will, I have succeeded? 10. Do I accept as personal any recognition, privilege, or service accorded me by reason of my office as superior? 11. How often do I make a Holy Hour in petition for the solution of a problem or to obtain a special grace for my fellow religious or myself? Ever a Holy Hour of thanks-giving? 12. Do I make the Sacred Heart of Jesus the King and Center of our religious house and Mary its Queen? 13. Do I take St. Joseph as the advocate and the pro-tector of the interior life of each one dwelling in our house? Personal Recollection and Prayer 14. Am I convinced that recollection is an absolute ne-cessity for any progress in the life of prayer? 15. Is my spirit of recollection such that it provides an atmosphere conducive to prayer? 16. How do I prepare the points of meditation in the evening? 17. What special meditation has drawn me closer to Christ?_ 18. Do I sometimes excuse myself from my prayers by telling myself that this or that duty must take first place? 19. Have I given full time. to my prayers or have I hur-ried through them in order to get to my other work? 20. Does the demand for great activity cause distractions in my prayers or perhaps lead me to neglect prayer; or does it rather make me realize my dependence on God? 21. Have I said common vocal prayers reverently and not annoyed others by my haste? 22. Am I observant of recollection immediately after breakfast? 23. Do I make a special effort to keep recollected on the days when it seems especially impossible? 24. Do I ever revert to God's presence in me throughout the day, to adore Him, thank Him, love Him, speak to Him about the needs of soul and body, my own, and those of my fellow religious? Confession 25. Do I make it a point to confess my added responsi-bility by reason of my office when I confess criticism of su-periors or priests? ÷ ÷ ÷ local Superiors VOLUME 21, 1962 91 4, 4, E. ]. Stokes, $.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 92 26. Do I make it a point to confess my added respons.i-bility as a superior when I confess failure to exercise ju:~- tice or charity in dealing with my.fell0w religioug? 27. Do I take advantage of my weekly confessions to re-ceive spiritdal direction? 28. Have my confessions been hurried due to an in-efficient planning of my time? Particular Examen 29. Is my particular examen specific? 30. Do I make a tie-in of retreat resolutions, the particu-lar examen, and weekly confession? 31. Do I make a daily examination of the motives that govern my external life? 32. Do I make my particular examen a vital part of my day as a religious? Mortification 33. Do I realize that my chief mortification is to tie found in the justice and the charity of my dealings with others? 34. Am I willing to perform one interior and one exte-rior act of mortification each day in order to obtain the blessing of our Lord on my community? Charity 35. Is love for others the outstanding virtue in my life? 36. Have I deliberately practised acting towards Christ in each person I meet? 37. Do I appreciate the importance of my personal charity to this community as a cell of the Mystical Body? Faith 38. Are the mysteries of Christianity the basis of my re-ligious life? 39. Have I made the connection between these mys-teries and the Rule, or have I let concern with the Rule obscure my reliance on broader Christian principles? Hope 40. Am I aware of the need for Christ's help in sanctify-ing myself by governing others? 41. Do I realize that Christ is able to utilize my faults in sanctifying others? Principles of Government 42. Do I realize that the most exalted duty of a su-perior is care for the spiritual life of his subjects? 43. Do I seek to serve God by serving my fellow re-ligious always and everywhere? 44. Do I pray regularly for the spiritual well-being and growth of those in my house? 45. Do I try to help each religious to develop a deep inferior life by my words and by my example? 46. Do I give my fellow religious an example of the love of regularity? . 47. Do I try to help my fellow religious develop a ready and loving acceptance of God's holy will by the example of my own acceptance of it in all my difficulties, trials, and failures as well as in my joys and success? 48. Do I realize and am I firmly convinced that seeing, accepting, and willing all that God wills for me in every circumstance of my life is the essence of sanctity; and do I teach my fellow religious this? 49. Am I trying to establish in my fellow 'religious a sense of the Mystical Body so that they are able to com-municate spiritually one with another? 50. Do I look for Christ in the problem religious? in the impudent child in the classroom? Do I see Him looking at me through the eyes of all my charges, seeking my love and devotion? 51. How often have I passed a fellow religious in the hall without noticing and greeting him? 52. In making use of the aspiration, "Praise be to Jesus Christ" during the periods of recollection, do I really try to see Christ present in that person?' 53. Did I personally visit at least one sick person of the parish or community, or delegate a religious to do so? 54. Have I in any way, by actions or words, shown a mere toleration for lay persons associated with our work? Or have I accepted them as allies in our work? Community Exercises 55. Do I faithfully observe the daily order? 56. Do I realize that as superior I set the tone and the spirit of the house, in recollection, cheerfulness, peace, hospitality? 57. Do I let human respect interfere with the duty I have as superior to insist on charity and the observance of the rules in my community? 58. Do I miss or am I late for spiritual exercises unless for a grave reason? 59. What community exercises have I missed in the past month? My reasons? Did I make them up at another time, or did I let them go through neglect or carelessness? 60. What can be done to make the chapter of faults more effective? 61. Do I create a family spirit? 62. Is my recreation self-centered? Do I do what I want and not talk or .do too much of the talking? Local Superiors VOLUME 21, 1962 95 ]. Stokes, FOR R~:LIGIOUS 94 63. Do I endeavor to make community recreation an exercise of wholesome family spirit? 64. Is my house truly a religious house or does it have the impersonality of a modern railroad station? Personal Qualities 65. Am I even-tempered? 66. Do I show true joy in my work? 67. Have I betrayed immaturity and lack of courage by disproportionate manifestations of disappointment and discouragement? 68. Do I allow my feelings to regulate my actions? 69. Do I have a good sense of humor? 70. How much self-pity does my countenance mirror when things go wrong? 71. Am I approachable? 72. Do I try, as far as possible, to treat all my fellow re-ligious in the same way--not showing any partiality or favoritism? Have I excluded any or passed them over iu the sharing of responsibility or favors? Are the same few always near me? 73. Do I treat as sacred anything that a fellow religious tells me in confidence? 74. How many times in the past month have I been im-patient with my fellow religious? 75. How do I act or react when I know that one of my fellow religious has offended me? Do I~take it in a Christ:- like way or do I hold-a grudge? Do I consider violations of rule as offenses against me? 76. Do I as superior always show exterior peace, calm, and happiness? I must do this if I am going to be the un-derstanding, religious superior that I should be. 77. In the presence of outsiders do I always show great loyalty to each and every member of my community? 78, Am I as reserved as I should be while visiting in the parlor? 79. Am I kind to all lay people, regardless of how much they can, orhave helped financially or otherwise--look-ing to the good of their souls first and foremost? Government 80. Do I run a disorganized house so that my subjects tend to say: "We never know what we are going to do next"? 81. Do I get all the facts before I make a decision? 82. Do I hesitate in making the decisions that I must as superior? Do I harm my fellow religious by my habit of procrastination? 83. Am I under someone's influence in the decisions that I make, an older religious or a former superior? 84. Do I contradict my orders, thus making it difficult to know what is my will? 85. Am I available to my fellow religious? 86. Am I open to suggestions? 87. Do I delegate responsibility and do I trust those to whom I have delegated it? If a duty is not being done as I would, do I give it to someone else or take over myself rather than try to help? Do I show interest without in-terfering? 88. Do I give authority as well as responsibility to re-ligious when I give them a job? 89. Am I a politician in dealing with my fellow religious instead of a Christlike superior? 90. Am I unnecessarily secretive in trivial matters, keep-ing the community guessing? Do I not see that this will cause bad feelings? 91. Do I talk uncharitably or show displeasure to one of my subjects about another subject in the house? 92. Should I not close my eyes to many insignificant petty things? Should I not use tact and by my example bring it about that these failings and imperfections will vanish--al'though perhaps not totally? 93. How have I controlled the conversation at table? Was I alert always to see to it that it never became un-charitable or critical, especially regarding students? 94. Do I initiate conversation regarding worthwhile reading? 95. Do I give the required instruction time to the young religious? Do I conscientiously prepare these instructions? 96. Do I complain about fnoney? Am I overly anxious regarding finances? 97. What is my attitude toward the suggestions, deci-sions, or orders of extern superiors in the institution in which our community works? Fellow Religious 98. Do I as superior treat my subjedts as mature, dedi-cated persons? 99. Do I trust my fellow religious and have confidence in them and show them that I do by the way I treat them? 100. Do I correct all when only one needs the correc-tion? Do I not see that this causes much criticism and irritated discussion? 101. Do all the members of the community feel that they belong and are an important part of the whole? 102. Do I give my fellow religious encouragement and show them gratitude for the good work that they are doing? A pat on the back does not cost much but it means a great deal especially to those inclined to get discouraged at times. 103. Have I within the last month made it a point to 4. Local Superiors VOLUME 21, 1962 95 .÷ ÷ ÷ E. ]. Stokes, .S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 96 compliment or praise or show attention, at least in some small way, to each religious in my charge? 104. Has each of my subjects received some word of praise (not flattery) from me recently? 105. Do I encourage group discussions so that all the community can express themselves? Do I see that such discussions are well-prepared and stimulating? 106. Do I see to it that the rest of the community share,,i in the rich contributions that some of its members can give, those, for example, who have had special oppor-tunities for studies? 107. Do I seek to serve God by serving my fellow re-ligious always and everywhere? 108. Do I show concern for the trials and crosses of my fellow religious? 109. How often do I check and consider the welfare of ¯ each of my subjects--spiritual and physical? 110. Is understanding the essence of my charity? Do I try to put myself in the subject's place and realize his emotions, attitudes, and difficulties--or is my charity based solely on my own attitude and outlook on life? He might not always want done to him what I would want done to me. I must try to understand his viewpoint. 111. Is each religious an individual to me? 112. Do my fellow religious.feel wanted and valued by me? 113. Do my fellow religious find the quality of thought-fulness in me? 114. Do I make it a habit to direct my attention to each religious individually at least once during the day? 115. Have I tried to satisfy each one's basic need to be accepted, the need for belonging? 116. Have I made use of each one's talents (all of them), or do I level them down to an equal share from each? Do I, then, expect only three talents from one who has and can give ten talents? 117. Do I take too much ~or granted the conscientious and well-balanced religious who does not demand my at-tention? 118. Do I give each individual religious my undivided attention regardless of who he is and how often he may come to me in a given day? 119. Do I make a sincere effort to speak to each re-ligious some time each day? 120. Do I give a sufficient amount of time to those who need to talk over with me the question of students who may be a problem to them? This could be a problem of behavior or some method that would help teaching. If a teacher is weak in discipline, this is a good means of gently getting across the fact that the child is not always at fault. 121. How well uo I "listen" when religious come for permissions, advice, and such? With preoccupation? With patience? With haste or annoyance? And this especially at difficult times? Or am I gracious, patient, helpful, Christlike? Have I shown impatience with those who come to me with trifles? Which of them? Do I r~ally listen when a religious is telling me something---or am I finish-ing up this job or starting another? 122. Have I treated each religious the same behind his back as I have to his face? 123. Do I control my hurt when one of the religious tells lies about me to religious of our own house? 124. Can my subjects sway my will by flattery? 125. Do I afford my subjects the opportunity of sug-gesting spiritual reading books? 126. What have I done to encourage professional read-ing on the part of my subjects? Do I give them an ex-ample in this regard? Do I ever check,up on them on this point? 127. Do I seek to prepare my fellow religious for fu-ture responsible positions in the community? ÷ Local Superiors VOLUME 21, 1962 97 KATIE ROCK Restoration, with a Difference 4. + 4. Katie Rock lives at 200 Oak Street, Falls Church. Vir-ginia. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 98 Washington, D.C. is a city of contrasts. There are beau-tiful green expanses and there are dark, depressing alleys. There are massive monuments and tremendous buildingsl and there are rows and rows of shabby, run-down homes. Happily, there is city-wide slum-clearance consciousness; and already in some parts of town the monotonous rows are being converted into magnificent Town Houses with every modern feature. Restoration is taking place for many reasons, but unfortunately the power and profit motives seem the big reason. It is therefore refreshing to know that some are bringing their talents and inspiration to the restoration simply because they want to have part in "restoring all things to Christ." An assignment enhanced by my own curiosity took me to Foggy Bottom, the latest dilapidated section to be-come the site of intensive re-making. Situated only one.~ half mile from the White House, it is bounded roughly by Georgetown, George Washington University, the new State Department Building, and the Potomac River. This was my first visit to Foggy Bottom since it became "fash-ionable," and I was so fascinated as I walked down the narrow streets that I stopped to browse a bit. Gradually tiny broken-down row houses are being transformed into confortable city homes. Interesting colors, small but per.; fect gardens, unique combinations of contemporary and forsaken styling are attractive and appealing. Among the private homes there are apartment hotels arising. ¯ It was fun to speculate about the insides of these color., ful homes as I walked along the old brick sidewalks. Oc.; casionally a brass plate revealed an M.D. was occupant, or a navy captain, or a professor. A baby carriage in a tiny yard indicated there is new life in Foggy Bottom, too; When I arrived at my destination, the corner of H and 25th Streets, I stopped in wonder and admiration. Be-fore me was a turreted three-story structure of brick, painted a soft yellow with black trim which offsets awe-somely the octagon-shaped tower, dormer, and windows. There is a terrace in front, a landscaped yard, and I peeped onto a sheltered patio. A lacy black iron fence surrounds the property and a brass plate announces that this is the home of Melita god~ck,~A.I.A, g: Associates. I was welcomed inside by Melita, who introduced me to her assistant, Bernice, and after' being made to feel at home, I settled down to hear the story of a wonderful new venture into the new frontiers of our faith. Who is Melita? The decor and art work and religious atmosphere of this first floor indicate an unusual life. Melita was born in Milan, Italy, and educated at Vienna Polytechnic. She is a convert to Catholicism. Although she is an artist and sculptress, her professional experience and livelihood have mainly been centered On architec-ture. Twelve years were spent with other firms. Included in her work with those firms were high schools in Arling-ton, Virginia, and Rockville, Maryland, commercial buildings and a shopping center, a drive-in restaurant, hospitals.and the huge Medical Center of the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and many government buildings ranging from a missile base to renovations of Post Offices. Since establishing her private firm about three years ago, Melita has designed the Queen Anne's Lane Town Houses in Foggy Bottom valued at :~1,000,000 (and which won for her a Goid Medallion award), many residences, the Consolata Missions Semi-nary in Buffalo, New York, the Ayles~ord Retreat Center in Chicago, and remodeling of churches in southern Mary-land. For the Government, among other projects, she modified a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. There is another facet to Melita's background. Dur-ing the 1940's she worked for four years in the Harlem Friendship House, engaged in interracial work, apolo-getics, and the practice of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. During this time she had rich experi-ences. She undertook a formal course in philosophy un-der Jacques Maritain. She learned the principles of social justice from the best of its exponents, Father John La- Farge, S.J., Baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the Sheeds, and others. During these years, she developed a great love for liturgical music through the influence of other wonderful visitors to Friendship House, one of whom was Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand. More and more, as years went by, Melita!s ability in. architecture and her various artistic talents became an integrated venture. And the motivating force in her life was her religion. Her love of designing, composing, creat-ing, on the one hand, and her love of God and her fellow-man on the other were beginning to congeal into one idea. + + + Restoration VOLUME 21, 1962 99 ÷ ÷ Katie Rock REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS I00 In 1956, Melita took several months off from work to take a trip around the world, studying and observing the architecture of many lands and plans of other countries to meet the changes of modern life. Her first stop was Australia where she visited her brother, an engineer there. Then she visited the Philippines, Thailand, and India, observing certain unique and desirable aspects of Far Eastern architecture. From India she proceeded to the Holy Land, and this part of her journey provided a re-treat, as she put the world out of mind and became ab-sorbed in the life of our Lord. Her travels continued in Turkey, on to Italy where she lingered in Rome, then to Spain and France. In Germany she studied problems in-volved in regional planning for mining. Because of a serious interest in necessity for inter-diocesan planning, Melita was deeply interested in the episcopal planning bureau in Belgium, by which city churches and rural churches and schools are planned according to needs of city, suburban, or rural life. Here in Belgium, Melita observed the tremendous effect of "Young Christian Workers" in Catholic activity. The last stop was England, then home to sift and appraise the ideas and inspiration from her round-the-world journey. In 1958, Melita began her own firm, specializing in providing for her clients complete architectural, engi-neering, and planning service combined with interior decorating. The firm has the services of excellent consul-tants in engineering and financing. When the firm was first Organized, .Melita and Bernice lived and worked in the Potomac Plaza Apartments. One day a For Sale sign went up on a deserted, dilapidated dwelling across the street from the apartment. Curiosity and vision sent Me-lita on an inspection tour. The unusual lines and the lovely view of the Potomac from the third floor tower captured Melita's heart. And the creaky stairs, plaster-bare walls and cobwebs provided a challenge to Melita's pro-fessional ability. The house today seems to say it was joy as well as work that restored it to its immense liveability and unusual beauty. So much for Melita, the architect, for she is more than an artist and an architect. Melita has vision and percep-tion and appreciation for beauty not touched by human hands. Designing is not only a business with her but a God-given talent in which she expresses the love of God in her soul. Creative art, Melita told me, is the remedy man needs in this age of technology, assembly lines, and automation. These things, cold and impersonal, produce ragged nerves and tensions and strike at man's very soul, leaving him unmindful of the purpose for which his Crea-tor put him on earth. Into all forms of art--painting, poetry, music, and so forth---goes one's own personality, reflecting a personal relationship with the Heavenly Father. The closer to God man is, ~the truer his work, and the more he will choose a good and proper use of ma-terials. In the arts a man may find peace and contentment for he may use his.creativ.e ability' to transform his inner energy in a satisfying manner,~, ~, Happily, Melita sees her obligation to use her creative ability to promote a Christian society, a Christian com-munity life. Melita is taking the giant step of using her profession solely for the glory of God and for love of her neighbor with no profit except the profit of peace in her own heart. Others have done this; for example, Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Dr. Tom Dooley and Geo.rge Washington Carver. Her heart and will having been entrusted to God some time ago, Melita began sifting ideas about putting her philosophy into practice. Then ideas had to be translated into blueprints, and these blueprints needed and received approval from her auxiliary Bishop, Most Reverend Philip M. Hannan, chancellor of the archdiocese. Then came discussions with many wise and prudent friends: spiritual directors, teachers, fellow artists, other archi-tects, and even mothers of children who are awakening to the needs of our frustrated society. Far from relying solely on her own ideas, Melita sought and listened to ~he counsel of all. The result was a plan to begin a secular institute of the design professions to be called Regina Institute. A secular institute is an association of lay people living in the world but bound by the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, performing duties suitable for their talents for the love of God. Though popular and plentiful in Europe, secular institutes are just emerging in our coun-try. Their specific purposes vary widely. In Madonna House, for instance, workers live among the poor, teach-ing crafts and catechism, nursing the sick and feeding the hungry. In the Company of St. 'Paul, members teach, work in the Government, and so forth. This is a quiet life~ there is nothing in their dress to indicate they are an organization dedicated to Christ. Members simply strive to live as "Christs" among those needy in goods or in spirit. Regina Institute is taking another direction. First of all, Melita is concerned with the arts in the service of the Church's liturgy. She would like to assist in setting stand-ards for the quality of sacred art just as Benedictines have set a standard for sacred music. Second, she is endeavor-ing to bring the Incarnation into society by bringing Christian attitudes into the building professions and in-dustry and into city planning. The Christian philosophy of man and the social teachings of the Church are being Restoration VOLUME 21, 1962 ]0! Katie Ro~k REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 102 applied, thus supporting such contemporary projects as open occupancy, adequate housing, and so forth. Third, Melita and associates try to teach all of us the visual arts and their spiritual and cultural values. My visit showed me a great deal about the practice of these ideals and the life of this infant group. Melita and Bernice filled in a picture of a day in Regina House, tak-ing me on a tour of the house as they talked about their Rule. Recently Gwen moved in with Melita and Bernice. For the present they are living according to the Rule of the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Melita has served as novice mistress of the St. Therese Chapter in Washington for eleven years. The Rule seeks to instill in its followers the spirit of constant prayer and love. Early each morning the group leaves for St. Stephen's Church nearby for a halfihour.of.meditation before 7:30 Mass. Breakfast follows, then they recite in ~ommon Prime, Terce and Sext from the Little 01~ce. (On.nice days they do so on the patio which they call their "clois-ter.") At 9:00 work begins. Lunch is at 12:30, followed by None and Vespers, then free time. At 2:00 they go back to work until dinner. At 7:30 comes Compline, Matins, and Lauds, and after that there is recreation-- long walks in nice weather, singing or reading at other times. One day of each.month is spent in retreat. There are three floors in l~egina House. The first con-tains the dining area and kitchen opening onto the patio, Bernice's office, and a music area. Melita plays the piano, and there is also a stereo arid many fine records, including Gregorian chant and classical music. On the second floor, we entered a work and study spa.ce. I was fascinated with the dozens of books and their range of subjects, from the culture of the Far East to the philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright. There are books in German and French and Spanish, books on philosophy, Catholic Action, and the liturgy, books on ancient architecture and books on mod-ern design. Attractive chairs and a lovely view are invit-ing. Melita's bedroom, also on this floor, shows all her separate interests united in her one endeavor. There are beautiful religious objects, side by side with a drawing board (she is currently working on a dental laboratory) and there were several sketches in process, both water colors and oils. On the third floor are more drawing boards. This floor also serves as a workshop for other projects. Bernice finds time to make beautiful cards by a linoleum process fea-turing Melita's impressionistic designs. Bernice has a talent for dress designing and sewing; also she does lovely ceramic tile work. I noticed several clay models of build-ings as well as wooden models; Melita explained these help her visualize her ideas. Certainly the first purpose'of this institute is sanctifi-cation of its members. Theystrive for a four-fold contact with Christ: Christ the Life, through prayer.and the sacra-ments; Christ the Truth, through study and meditation; Christ the Way, through i~bedience; and Christ the Worker, through creative human effort for love of God. Melita invites young people inclined towards the design arts, who would like to dedicate their service to God, to talk to her. Regina House is large enough to house several women. If men apply, perhaps a home close by will be found for them, while work and prayer will be centered in Regina House. The necessity for meals and housekeep-ing means the Institute must attract also "artists" of the kitchen and "masters" of the broom. In fact, Melita is ready to consider anyone who is willing to share her ideals and approach, and invites those interested to con-tact her at 801 25th St. N.W., Washington 7, D.C. So sold was I by my visit that I was ready to apply-- but Melita just won't take a mother of eight growing children. Reluctantly I said "good-bye" and went out the big black door and the lacy iron gate. I looked back with new appreciation at Regina House which today so sur-passes in beauty and liveability its original design. From the ordinary it has become majestic. I left, believing that Melita's plan for it also far surpasses the ordinary Chris-tian way of living and that its tower truly points to Heaven and its eternal history is just beginning. ÷ ÷ ÷ Restoration VOLUME 21, 1962 103 WALTER DE BONT, O.P. Identity Crisis and the Male Novice Walter de Bont, O.P., is a member of the faculty o! the Catholic University in Nijmegen, Hol-land. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 104 Beginners' Failings Father Lacordaire,1 the day after his entry into the novitiate, confided to the master of novices: "Father, I can't stay here; these young men are childish and quite silly. They think everything is funny," "It would be a shame," the priest answered, "if the former preacher of Notre Dame of Paris should, by a hasty departure, give the world the impression that his entrance into religion had not been thoroughly consid-ered. Wait a while, then." Three weeks later the master of novices asked him, "When are you leaving?" "But I do not wish to go, so long as you are willing to keep me." "But what of your young companions who are so silly?" "Father," said Lacordaire, a little embarrassed, "I am the silliest of them all." In all the novitiates of the world since the beginning of monasticism there h~tve been young men, and some not so young, who were "a little silly." No matter how more or less normal they were a few weeks.previously, before they had left "the world," here they become affected by a whole series of strange phenomena which spiritual authors call "beginners' failings" (see especially St. John of the Cross, Dark Night, 1, 1-7). Using the material furnished by the experiment described below, the following section will give a rapid and pseudonymous portrait of certain "types" who betray the curious behavior encountered among be-ginners. *This article is translated with permission from the original article, "La crise d'identit~ du novice," which appeared in Suppld-ment de la Vie Spirituelle, 1961, pp. 295-325. The translation is by the Reverend John E. Becket, S.J. Passing Vagaries Brother Clement suddenly develops a phobia for drafts; underground currents beneath his bed keep him from sleeping; he wonders whether the spinach from the garden has enough iron to supply his needs; the light bulb on his work table endangers his eyes; and so on. No one has de-scribed more humorously than St. Teresa of Avila this kind of hypochondriac novice who seems "to have entered the cloister solely to labor at staving off death." She her-self, for that matter, knew this temptation of seeking "not to lose one's repose here below and still to enjoy God in heaven." John is a real gourmet--in search of spiritual delicacies. All his efforts are aimed at getting the satisfaction of a very sensible devotion from' prayer; In his :better moments he feels inundated with grace and spends hours in the chapel. When consolation no longer comes to him, he is desolate and lamentsin the blackest sorrow. At such times he passes the time of meditation breaking in books. Guy fears to embark on the road to perfection, excusing himself as one who was not meant to accomplish great things. He even thanks God for not making him too in-telligent. Comparing himseff with others, he has already lost all courage. Some suffer from quite peculiar sexual problems. At the very moment of prayer, confession, or communion, sexual feelings and reactions surge up. Cassian has already spoken of a brother "who enjoyed constant purity of heart and body, having merited it by reason of his circumspection and humility, and who was never afflicted with nocturnal emissions. But whenever he prepared for communion, he was sullied by an impure flow in his sleep. For a long time fear kept him from participating in the sacred mys-teries" (ConIerences, 22, 6). And then there are the pilgrims of ,the absolute with pure and perfect ideals. They are so punctual in their ex-ercises that you can set your watch by them; but they easily forget that the rule is merely a means to love God and their neighbor better. Burning with enthusiasm, they seem to have sanctity within their grasp. Lacking patience, they try to force the ascent toward God with Draconian measures. The novitiate is the decisive year in which holi-ness must be achieved. For them profession is a final set-tlement and not a decisive beginning. Or else there are the grim ascetics. In his enthusiasm for purity, Henry Suso did not scratch, nor even touch, any part of his body. Throughout the day he abstained from all drink. In the evening at the sprinkling with holy water, he opened his dry lips and gaped toward the 'sprinkler, hoping that a tiny drop of water would fall on his arid 4. + + Identity Crisis VOLUME 21, 1962 ]05 4. W. de Bont, OJL REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 106 tongue. At the age of forty, luckily, when "his whole na-ture was so devastated that nothing was left for him but to die or leave off his austerities," he opted for life and threw his whole arsenal of instruments of penance into the lake. For most of these novitiate "follies" are only temporary. Sooner or later good sense reasserts its rights, and the spiritual life of the subject becomes more balanced. St. Teresa had already clearly sensed that this bizarre conduct of the novice-beginner was somewhat forced and not genuine: Anything which gets the better of us to such an extent that we think our reason is not free must be considered suspicious, for in that way we shall never gain freedom of spirit, one of the marks of which is that we can find God in all things even while we are thinking of them. Anything other than this is spiritual bondage, and, apart from the harm which it does to the body, it constrains the soul and retards its growth (Book of the Foun-dations, Chapter 6, from The Complete Works ot Saint Teresa oI Jesus, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers, Volume III, p. 32 [London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946]). If "our reason is not [completely] free," then we are not fully on the plane of moral defects, but partially on that of psychic determinisms. And it is precisely the psychic aspect of these, phenomena that we propose to study in this article which has no other aim than to throw some light by the help of modern depth psychology on this strange being whom the masters of the spiritual life have been ob-serving for centuries, the beginner par excellence, the novice, and on his imperfections. The perspective of this article must, then, be clearly emphasized. This is not a work of spiritual theology. The theologian contemplates the events of the novitiate with the eyes of faith; he sees there the hand of God and the conflict between grace and sin. The perspective of this article is much more modest; it is, to put it simply, psychological. Without in any way denying the workings of grace, we shall systematically ab-stract from them; for the designs of God and the ways of grace are not apprehended by the purely human ways of kno~ving which alone are at the disposal of the psychol-ogist. While leaving aside the supernatural aspect of the growth of the novice, we are bound to point out that this aspect tias been amply clarified by the masters of spiritual theology from Cassian and St. Benedict to St. John of the Cross and contemporary authors. Working Hypothesis and Methodology To initiate the psychological study of the novice and of his "imperfections," we took as "subjects" twenty-eight male novices belonging to two quite different communi-ties. We asked for volunteers only, but in each novitiate everyone volunteered. The age of our subjects varied from eighteen to twenty-two years. The level of their previous instruction was for the most part uniform, and they were about equally divided between those, from rural and those from urban backgrounds. The experiment was made dur-ing the fourth month of the/novitiate. i~ A double series of tools was used, since our aim was to clarify certain problems of the spiritual life. of the sub-jects by a study of their personality in the course of evolu-tion. a) For the study of personality, projection tests were used, especially the Rorschach and the Thematic Apper-ception Test (T.A.T.), since these two tests are universally recognized as highly useful for this purpose. The admin-istration of the Rorschach was preceded by the drawing of a human figure, so that the subject might implicitly per-ceive that a creative effort was expected of him. b) For the study of their spiritual life, the novices were asked to write a four-page essay entitled "The Ideal and the Difficulties of My Spiritual Life." c) To complete our information from the character-ological as well as the spiritual side, we conducted inter-views of about an hour with each subject, his master of novices, and the assistant to the master of novices. It was striking, especially in going over the Rorschach protocols, to see the number of signs of anxiety, of ten-sion, and of disintegration. Equally striking, however, were the efforts at synthesis. Given the age. and the situa-tion of our subjects, this called to mind the psychological situation described by Erik Erikson under the name of "identity crisis" (see Erik Erikson, "The Problem of Ego Identity" in Identity and the Lqe Cycle, volume one of "Psychological Issues" [New York: International Univer-sities Press, 1959]). As a matter of fact, the novice is a young adult, around eighteen to twenty years of age. As others become doctors, engineers, and fathers of families, he, at the end of his adolescence, chose in a more or less definitive way the role he wanted to play in adult society: that of religious or priest. This role is the result and syn-thesis of his entire previous development. In this connec-tion, Erikson uses the word "identity" because in this role the young man ought to be able to accomplish the best he is capable of while at the same time promoting the aims of society. The novitiate is his first serious testing of this role; he is vested in the religious habit and he follows the rules of his community as they are adapted for re-cruits. What does this identity of pries.t-religious become in the novitiate? Is the young man able to realize it here in the way in which he dreamed of doing? Does the com-munity he has chosen respect this identity? If these ques-tions receive a more or less negative answer, .a crisis oc- VOLUME 21, 1962 curs, an identity crisis because it is the novice's identity that is brought into question. As with every crisis it is manifested by certain symptoms; and one may assume that the imperfections of beginners are precisely the signs of this crisis on the religious plane. Our hypothesis then is this: The novitiate induces in the young religious a crisis about his identity, about the role he wishes to play in life, a role which is the end prod-uct of all his previous development; this crisis comes from the fact that this role is threatened by the novitiate; and the imperfections of beginners are the symptoms of this crisis. In order to understand this hypothesis better, a more ample presentation must be made of Erikson's notion of identity. This will be done in several of the following sec~ tions. ÷ ÷ ÷ W. de Bwnt, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 108 Identity, Synthesis of the Personality During adolescence all the impulses of earlier life re-appear accompanied by a strong genital drive. It is the characteristic work of the male adolescent to subordinate this chaos of impulses under genitality and find them their proper object, a girl. But this adjustment of one's infan-tile heritage to one's new acquisitions does not confine itself solely to the level of impulsive life; it equally con-cerns the other functions of the personality, the ego and the superego and their identifications. For the young man. must subordinate his previous identifications to a new kind of identification, an ultimate identity learned in so-cial contacts and competitive apprenticeship with his equals. These new identifications no longer have the ca-priciousness of infancy or the experimental fervor o youth; with extreme urgency they impel the young indio. vidual toward choices and decisions which progressively conduct him to a final definition of himself, to an irrev-ocable configuration of rol~s, and then to lifelong com-mitments. The normal adolescent performs this reintegration him. self, using spontaneously chosen adults and older adbles-cents as his models. But the age at which this synthesis is completed varies considerably. The more complicated a civilization is, the longer it takes its members to integrate their personality and find their place in society. At the bee ginning of our era people were married at Sixteen, a thing that rarely happens today. Suso entered the novitiate ar thirteen, whereas nowadays even canon law considers thi.~ too early. Moreover it would seem that workers or farm people come to adulthood before members of the profes. sional classes who have more to integrate and spend a longer time in training. Finally, the presence of acute conflicts can make this integration even more difficult and slow. At the worst, they may even render such integration impossible and the subject becomes neurotic or psychotic. Identity, a Psychosocial Reality This ultimate identity of which we have been speaking is unique for each individual because no two ,develop in identically the same way. '~Id~e'~,er, it is fa~'~O~ being individualistic. A person becomes himself only in a given society and in order to live in that society according to that identity. Ideally, identity implies that one is most oneself when one is most in relation with others and that our personal values and ideals coincide for the most part with those of the environment which is accepted by the person and in which he feels himself accepted. It is of ex-treme importance for the formation of the identity of the young man that society respond to him and that he receive a function and a status which integrates him into the community. In order to take his place in society the young man must acquire the skillful use of his principal ability and fulfill it in some activity. He should enjoy the exercise of this activity, .the companionship which it furnishes, and its traditions. Finally he must receive a setof teachings which allow him to see the meaning of life: religion, philosophy, or some ideology. Speaking psychosocially, the'h, identity is the role, integrated into the character, which the indi-vidual wishes to play in society and for which he expects the approbation of society in order to give meaning to his life. After the psychosexual delay of the period of latency there must, in consequence, be another delay, adolescence, so that the already sexually adult young man may, by freely experiencing different roles, find himself a place in some section of society, a place which in its definiteness seems made uniquely for him. The Genesis o[ Identity Identity must not be confused with identification. The simple addition of infantile identifications (the child act-ing like his parents, his brothers, his uncles, his teachers, his friends.) never results in a functioning personality. These identifications are too disparate and too contra-dictory; they are, moreover, often far from being socially acceptable or realistic, since the child's imagination dis-torts the image of his. parents or other models to suit his own needs. The final identity which emerges in the course of adolescence and which at the end of its development is largely fixed, is rather a new configuration which includes all previous usable identifications while transcending them all. They are transformed to make a whole which is unique and reasonably coherent. This new configuration ought to be achieved in such a way that in it the physical 4. VOLUME 21, 1962 ]~9 ÷ ÷ W. d~ Bont, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS constitution of the young man, his affective needs, his best liked capacities, his effective defense mechanisms, and his successful sublimations find their rightful use. The formation of personal identity, then, has its roots in the most distant past of the individual, a past often lost in the clouds of the unconscious. It begins with the first introjections and projections of the baby whose relative integration depends on a mutually satisfying relationship between the child and his mother. For it is she who must give him that basic trust in himself and in others which is at the foundation of any process of becoming social. Then follow the different identifications of childhood which will be the more successful according as.their proto-types show themselves to be both loving and firm. The last step of the formation of the ultimate identity begins when the usefulness of identifications is over. It consists of the repudiation of some infantile identifications and an absorptive assimilation of others of them into a new configuration, which in its turn depends on the proc-ess by which a society (or the subgroups of a society) "identify" the young man by recognizing him as someone who ought to have turned out as he did and who is ac-cepted as he is. Society in its turn feels "recognized" by the individual who demands to be accepted, or profoundly and aggressively rejected by the individual who seems un-interested in any social integration. Identity manifests itself, then, in the role which the young man is going to play in society. Identity Crisis When the young man, emerging from.adolescence with his newly acquired identity, does not find in society the place he needs in order to continue to be what he has been and to develop still more, he runs the risk of a crisis. His ambitions may be too vast, society too different from his ideal; certain aspects of his identity may be poorly de-veloped in relation to what is demanded by the customs of his milieu from the viewpoint of sex, occupation, or in the area of academic or athletic competition. This constitutes a failure, at least a partial and provisional one. The at-tempt to enter into a relationship with society will piti-lessly reveal any weakness up to now latent in his identity. There results a state of confusion with the following symp-toms: a feeling of isolation, a breakdown of the feeling of personal continuity, shame, inability to enjoy any ac-tivity, a sense of enduring life rather than of actively living it, a distorted perspective of time, and finally, an extreme mistrust of others as if society were in opposition to what the subject wants to be. But no matter how many neurotic or psychotic symp-toms may be discovered, an identity crisis is not a sickness. Rather, it is a normal crisis, that is, a normal phase of sharp conflict characterized by an apparent wavering in the strength of the ego, but also by great possibilities for growth. Neurotic and psychotic crises are characterized by a tendency to perpetuate themselves because o~ a loss of defensive energy and ~i deep social isolation.~ A'grOWth crisis, on the contrary, is relatively more easy to overcome and is characterized by an abundance of utilizab!e energy. This energy, doubtless, causes the reawakening of dormant anxieties and engenders new conflicts; but it supports the ego in the functions it has newly acqtiired or developed during the search for new opportunities or for, new rela-tions which society is more than ever ready to offer. What appeared as the .onset of a neurosis is often only a quite acute crisis which dissipates itself and helps more than it harms the formation of the subject's identity. Some cases, however, reach a less fortunate outcome: derangement, suicide, or a confirmed case of nerves. We have already briefly mentioned the characteristic symptoms of the identity crisis, now it will be worthwhile to give a more ample description of them by contrasting them with the dimensions of an ultimate identity success-fully achieved. The Dimensions of Identity and Its Crisis At each stage of man's psychosocial, development cer-tain criteria allow us to see whether the individual has passed through this phase successfully or whether he has failed. So it is with the baby's crisis of trust (in the oral stage of development); with the crisis of autonomy at the age of two (during the anal phase); with the crisis of in-itiative around the age of five years (the age of the Oedipus complex); with the assimilation of work during the time of schooling; the crises brought about by marriage and the birth of children; and the problems posed by maturity and old age. What interests us here are the criteria which let us evaluate the identity crisis in the passage from puberty to adulthood. Erikson gives eight criteria which show whether the young man has succeeded in building up for himself in accordance with his possibilities an ultimate identity which is both balanced and accepted by his environment, or whether he remains at grips with an outgrown identity which is deficient and replete with conflicts. As has just been said, each growth crisis reawakens sleeping anxieties, the relics of old battles in former crises which were buried but not done away with. In the identity crisis certain con-flicts of preceding stages of psychosocial development are reawakened. This reawakening evidently does not bring these conflicts forward under the shape which they had when the subject was still a baby or a small child, but in a Identity Crisis VOLUME 21, 1962 ÷ ÷ W. d~ Bont, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS way that is colored by his current development. The first four dimensions of the identity crisis mentioned by Erik. son are reawakenings of former crises which, as we have mentioned, have to do with trust in o~hers and in oneself, personal autonomy from others, the ability to take the ini.~ tiatives by which one becomes "someone," and the ability to do one's work well. But the young man is not formed by his past alone; he is also stretching towards the future; The last three dimensions of the identity crisis are then foretastes of the problems which he will have to resolve later on in his life when he marries, when he becomes a fafher, or when he .reckons up the balance of his whoh: life. ¯ Here then are the eight criteria or dimensions of the identity crisis: a) Presence. or absence of a perspective in life. The young man in the grips of an identity crisis manifests a confused attitude toward time which may be more or less grave according to the case. He sees no prospects for him-self in life. Since his identity is not well defined and he is fully confused with regard to his place in society, his con-fidence in the future is completely overturned. He is in despair, even if this shows up as a headlong precipitancy with which he tries to reach his goal, like the student who, for an elementary examination in biology, studies only the most advanced articles. This is a derivative revival of the impatience found in the child who has not yet realized that all human activity realizes itself only gradually in obedience to the progressive nature of time rather than all at once as if by magic. When the young man resolves his crisis and begins 'to become himself, when he synthesizes the different aspects of his character and finds his place in society, this co:a-fused attitude toward the temporal element of his life is changed into a rich diversity of prospects; at the same time he becomes open to the temporal dimension as indispen-sable for every building up of his personality. Moreover, through the temporal dimension of the ideology which it offers him, society can help the young man to rediscover the feeling that his past and his future have a meaning. Most religions, philosophies, or political doctrines teach that there is a meaning and a direction to life. Even though such an ideology may not be altogether realistic and may represent a certain simplification of the order of things, still, in such a situation its pedagogical usefulness is real. b) Self-certainty or self-consciousness. The young man going through an identity crisis is characterized next by insecurity, by a doubting of himself accompanied by shame at what he is or has been. What reappear are the social characteristics of the anal stage. Once he has regained at a higher level the balance which he had achieved before, the new sense of his own meaning gives him the necessary assurance to face life and to assume his chosen role in society. Here again, in the recovery of assurance, social surroundings can be a powerful aid by the uniformity of conduct, arid ,sometimes of~:clbthing, which they impose, often without even demanding them by an explicit code. With the help of this uniformity, the young man, though in a state of confusion, may tempo-rarily hide his shame and his doubts until his identity is sufficiently reestablished. c) Free experimentation with roles or its absence. The healthy young man's entrance into adult society is char-acterized by the provisional adoption of a great variety of roles and initiatives, each of which is tested by a process of trial and error in order to .decide which is better for him so that he may make a final choice which will determine the principal content of his adult life. This is a prolonga-tion of the child play of the Oedipal age in which the child sought to overcome anxiety by his identifications; the child of four who plays at driving a bus attains, in this way, at least in his imagination, equality with the adults he fears, especially his parents (the castration complex of classical psychoanalysis). But in certain cases, especially if adoles-cence is unduly prolonged, the opposite of this free ex-pe. rimentation with roles is found. To characterize this other extreme, Erikson speaks of negative identity, that is, "an identity perversely based on all those identifications and roles which, at critical stages of development, had been presented to the individual as most undesirable or dangerous, and yet also as most real" ("The Problem of Ego Identity," op. cit., p. 131). The 'young man whose mother is always saying, "If you act that wa~ you will turn out like your uncle [a drunkard]" can end up precisely that; he identifies himself with what is forbidden because it is more real for him than the positive ideal which' his mother never spoke of with such eloquence. According to some recent research (that of Adelaide Johnson and her staff) juvenile delinquency (in the area of aggressivity)and perversion (in the sexual area) are frequently the result of such largely negative education. But there are still other ways to renounce a free experimentation with roles; for example, the renouncement of personal identity in an ex-treme conformism which tries to root out everything which goes against even the excessive demands of the en-vironment. Here again the different segments of society offer the young man initiations or confirmations which are apt to encourage the spirit o[ initiative while channeling it and allaying the reawakening of Oedipal guilt. "They strive, within an atmosphere of mythical timelessness, to com- . 4- 4- 4- VOLUME 21, 1962 113 ÷ ÷ ÷ W. ~e Bo~t, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS bine some. form of sacrifice or submission with an energetic guidance toward sanctioned and circumscribed ways of action--a combination which assures the development in the novice of an optimum of compliance with a maximum sense of fellowship and free choice" ("The Problem of Ego Identity," op. cit., p. 144). d) Anticipation of achievement or work paralysis. The next characteristic of the adolescent who is initiating him-self into society is the anticipation of success. He feels able to accomplish something, to fulfill his function in the. community in such a way that the other members will re-pay him by their esteem. This is a prolongation of the ap-plication to school work during the period of latency. When things go poorly, the subject, instead of feeling him-self able to assume his role, is paralysed in the work he is doing either because his ambitions are too vast or because his environment has no place for his special capacities or does not give him the recognition he hopes for. Or he risks everything to gain everything and throws himself." prematurely into an intellectual or social activity which is extravagant and rigid and which may in the end com. pletely destroy his personal happiness, if not his physical existence: At the root of ~ill these forms of work pathology we find, according to Erikson, a reawakening of Oedipal competition and of the rivalry with his brothers or sisters. The different segments of society help those who are the process of learning and of trying out their social role by offering them .a certain provisional status, that of ap-prentice or student--with all that these imply of duties, competition, freedom, and also of potential integration into the hierarchy of jobs and of classes, as in associations for young adults (for example, political parties have their sections for youth which act ~s an initiation into adult life). e) Identity or confusion. The most general character-istic of the young man who has not yet achieved interior and social balance is confusion. This is the global result of all the imbalances set up by the reawakening of old conflicts and of all the confused attitudes which come from the fact that the ~oung man is still unable to take his place in the community of adults. A multiplicity of contradic-tory roles results. Two souls come to exist in one body, as the hermit and the power mad man did in Francisco Jimfinez de Cisneros (Le Cardinal d'Espagne), or ~2z~chiely and Tenebroso-Cavernoso in Father Joseph, the grey emi-nence, "combining in his own person the oddly assorted characters of Metternich and Savonarola" (Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence [New York and London: Harper, 1941], p. 128). Nevertheless, when the conflict has been crystal-lized, that is, become irreversible, we no longer speak of an identity crisis or of confusion, but of neurosis (sympto- matic or characterological) and of psychosis in which the 'T' has become someone else in the complete collapse of the sense of oneself, as in the case of the novice who, having divested himself in choir, appeared on the altar before the community piously assembled for a ho.ly hour and said, "I am the Immaculate C6nceptiofi."'~ The opposite of this confusion, which emerges in a more or less definitive way at the end of a successful ado-lescente, is identity. It is the feeling of having integrated into one's person all the valuable elements of one's child-hood heritage in order to give oneself with all one's forces .to love, to work, and to the social commitments, of adult life. We need not develop this sinc~ it has already been treated in previous sections of this article. f) Sexual identity or bisexual.conIusion. We come now to the ch~aracteristics of the identity crisis which are not derived from old, preadolescent' conflicts reawakened by physical maturation, but which are rather the precursors of conflicts which will find their climax and their.resolu-tion later in the ages of preadulthood, adulthood, or ma-turity, The proper task of the preadult period is intimacy, es-pecially sexual intimacy, with a partner. According to Erikson the "utopia of genitality" ought to include: mu-tual orgasm with a loved partner of the opposite sex with whom one is willing and able to share mutual responsibil-ity and with whom one is willing and able to adjust the cycles of work, procreation, and recreation in such a way as to assure their offspring a similar satisfactory develop-ment. As for the celibate, "a human being should be po-tentially able to accomplish mutuality of genital orgasm, but he should also be so constituted as to bear frustration in the matter without undue regression wherever consider-ations of reality and loyalty call for it" (Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society [New York: Norton, 1950], p. 230). Whoever fails at this stage becomes an isolated personality. In the identity crisis the precursors of these extremes are seen. The one who will later succeed in entering into a true intimacy with another is the one who succeeds in integrating into his personality the true characteristics of his sex, who sees himself both consciously and uncon-sciously as pertaining to his sex, and not more or less to the other sex. In those periods when the personality is less structured, and especially in irreversible pathological cases, there is a clear incapacity to assume the role proper to one's sex, a confusion of masculine and feminine traits which exceeds the relative confusion which' is normal at the beginning of adolescence. Intimacy presupposes, therefore, a sense of one's iden-tity, a capacity to be oneself on the sexual level as on other levels: "The condition of a true twoness is that one must ÷ ÷ VOLUME 21, 1962 115' 4. 4. 4. W. de Bont, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS first become onself" (Erik Erikson, "Growth and Crises of ~he 'Healthy Personality' " in Personality in Nature, So-ciety, and Cultizre, C. Kluckhohn and H. Murray, eds. [New York: Knopf, 1956], p. 222). Anyone who has .not achieved his own identity can not have intimate relations with another. He will take refuge in a sterile isolation for fear of losing himself completely; or else he will turn him-self over to another body and soul borrowing the identity of the other to fill up his own void, in this way vainly seeking to resolve an identification which was not success- [ul in childhood. Different societies have very different means of helping through these difficulties the young man who is already physiologically, though not socially, adult: by demanding complete sexual continence; or by permitting sexual ac-tivities which do not lead to definitive social engagements; or by stimulating sexual play without intercourse (pet-ting). The purpose of this prop is to stimulate and to strengthen the ego and its identity. g) Authority: orientation or conIusion. The adulthood of a truly healthy man ought to be characterized by pro-. creativeness; this means assuming responsibility for' the. next generation by parenthood or by other forms of al-truism and creativity. A failure along this line means that' one is absorbed in his own problems instead of placing his energy at the service of others. This is a victory for narcissism: "Individuals who do not develop generativity often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their own one and only child" (Erikson, "Growth and Crisis of the 'H~althy Personality,' " op. cir., p. 223). What forecasts this approaching procreativeness in the young man is the ability to be either a leader or a follower according to circumstances. The attitude of the subject {n everything that conc(rns authority (exercising it or obey., ing it) is realistic. Any future failure of procreativity be-trays itself in the inability to lead or to follow when one of these two relationships is required. It is especially in sub-groups of his.companionsthat society gives the adolescent the opportunity to try out this strength in the area of aw thority. h) Ideological orientation or conIusion o] ideals. When he has arrived at maturity, the normal man has the sense of having completed his task as far as possible. He accepts responsibility for what he has made of his life and of his personal abilities. Having helped others to become them-selves, he can now pass on this responsibility to the next generation and withdraw from the scene. The man, on the contrary, who has not realized his potentialities for the service of others will experience despair and disgust with himself. He would like to begin his life over but realises that it is too late. His life is a failure whether he admits it to himself or hides it by projecting the blame onto others. This was the case with Father Joseph, that "grey emi-nence" whose double identity was mentioned above. At the end of his life, he felt the bitterness and frustration of a man who has seen God, but who, through his own fault, has lost Him in the attempt t6i'ser~ two mastersJ~loser to us, we have the story of, Sister Luke' and of all those who leave their communities around the age of forty. These two possible attitudes which can emerge at the crisis of maturity are foreshadowed with the'young man by an ideological orientation, "a choice among many val-ues of those which demand our allegiance"; or on the con-trary, by a chaos of ideals without connection or sy.nthe-sis. Society helps the young man here by proposing a variety of ideologies each of which may be useful to him in proportion to its internal consistency. The above paragraphs are a brief presentation of the eight criteria which, according to Erikson, show whether and how the young man succeeds in constructing an iden-tity of his own. If in one or other of the eight areas listed he does not succeed in extricating himself from the confu-sion engendered by this indispensable maturation of his personal identity, he risks becoming the victim of a more or less profound psychic derangement, which may assume the shape of one of the classical forms so thoroughly stud-ied by clinical psychology: symptomatic neurosis, charac-ter neurosis, delinquency, psychosis, and so on. In spite of the interest there might be in studying these personality troubles as functions of the eight dimensions enunciated by Erikson, it is more to our purpose to apply the light of what has been said about the identity crisis of the young man to a study of the problem of the novice, of his quest for identity, and of the crises which this quest may involve. Identity Crisis in the Novitiate The young man who arrives at the door of the novitiate already possesses a certain identity which is more or less well-founded. It shows itself in the choice he has made: to become a celibate instead of marrying; instead of becom-ing a doctor, engineer, or grocer, he aspires to a function in the Church. Moreover, he has chosen this particular community rather than some other. All these factors (cel-ibacy, priesthood, community) are so many aspects of the role which he wishes to play in life. Vaguely he sees him-self in the future as such and such a person, with a more or less specific function, whether it be that of preacher, pro-fessor, pastor, or diplomat attached to a nunciature. This role is the end product of the candidate's total past life, the synthesis of his previous psychic development, But after four months of ttie novitiate (the stage at which the novices who were the subject of our experiment had arrived), the ÷ ÷ ÷ Identity Crisis VOLUME 21, 1962 W. d~ Bont~ REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS great majority o[ novices are plunged into a more or less pronounced Crisis o[ identity. Signs oI the Crisis In the tests a considerable number of confusion symp-toms were.found, many more than in a group of students of the same age and background who were beginning their studies at a university. We cannot enter here into the more minute d~tails of these symptoms because of their too tech-nical nature; nevertheless, the following should at least be mentioned: a) The universal presence of a considerable anxiety. Anxiety is always an experience of the disintegration of the sell when old conflicts renew their attack. b) Equally striking was the great number of poor in-terpretations in the Rorschach, although they ought not to appear in a normal protocol. Even by using the Ameri-can scoring system of.Klopfer who tends to diminish their number, twenty-two out of twenty-eight novices gave them. This indicates a certain loss of contact with reality which is experienced as too hard, a retreat into phantasy which accompanies the identity crisis. c) Almost all the novices suffered from bisexual con-fusion with a reemergence of feminine traits. This was not manifested in overt sexual responses (except in two cases),, for the novitiate for the most part suppresses overt manifestations of sexuality. But it was visible, for example, in the defective sexual identifications given to the human figures on the Rorschach.cards and those of the T.A.T. (sixteen novices out of twenty-eight). d) Besides, seventeen out of twenty-eight subjects had a deficient image of their own body, according to their drawing of a human figure. This should not be surprising, for the image (more or less unconscious) we have of our own body is a visualisation of our identity. It is very sen-sitive to the influences of the environment; for example, to the interpretative power of clothing. The substitution of the religious garb, a skirt, for lay dress (masculine) has, from this point of view, a profound effect on one's sense of one's identity. "We identify ourselves with others by means of clothes. We become like them. By imitating their clothes we change our postural image of the body by taking over the postural image of others. Clothes can thu:; become a means of changing our body-image completely" (Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance ol the Human Body [New York: International Universities Press, 1950], p. 204). The great number of deficient images of the body means that our subjects were in a siate of transition between their former identity (the "old man") and their new one. At the level of conscious behavior the crisis betrays it- self in all kinds of sentimental, per~ectionistic, depressive or even mildly paranoid traits. Brother Claude feels sad-dened by the November weather; another is not at ease working with the lay brothers in the garden; Robert thinks that his companions have something~against him when his prayer is not going well; Josephofeels depressed because he may not go out; and the imagination of John-Paul takes refuge in the past. As' for authority, almost all had a poorly balanced attitude, falling either into an exaggerated sub-missiveness or into revolt, or ifito indiscreet exercise of their own authority. Examples of these will be given later. The majority of the novices, then, manifested the two dimensions of the identity crisis which are at the heart of the religious life, for they relate to the vows of chastity and obedience: bisexual confusion and confusion with re-gard to authority. Catalysts of the Crisis The causes of the identity crisis can be summarized in this way: There is crisis, confusion, and disintegration be-cause the novitiate calls into question the initial identity with which the young man came to the novitiate. a) The young man already had a certain role in life before his entrance into the novitiate; he was president of his class, a member of Catholic Action, a well-known foot-ball player. He had a status in his environment, and be-cause of it he enjoyed the esteem of others. Entrance into the novitiate puts an end to all this. He changes his envir-onment and he must remake his reputation. Former modes of satisfaction no longer exist. A whole network of rela-tionships is broken; and it was precisely within this net-work that he found his own place, that he had realized, provisionally but really, his identity. All this he has to do over again. The impossibility of living out his identity in the old way almost inevitably causes a disintegration. The aspirations of the subject and almost their entire psychic substructure remain in suspension until they can be replaced by others or be reaffirmed. Before his novitiate Claude was in love with a some-what maternal girl who was a great help to him in his dif-ficulties. She forced him to become open, although in his own words he had tried to kill his sensitivity. She made an opening in his armor; he could communicate his ideal instead of pursuing it all alone. Separation from her at his entrance into the novitiate was difficult for him. His mem-ories of tenderness keep him alternating between melan-choly and aggressiveness. Arthur, the son of a farmer, is a young man whose strong ambition was enough to assure his success in stud-ies at the rural high school he attended, though from time to time he got on the nerves of his companions. In the ÷ ÷ VOLUME 21, 1962 ll9 novitiate he is more or less forgotten, for the smarter city boys leave him in the shadows. They take in with ease and naturalness everything that he had to fight hard for with an unremitting labor which had in turn cut him off from his modest origins. He can no longer play the role into which he had thrown all his energy. He has lost his place in society. He becomes depressed, grows still more ambi-tious in doing the Work of the novitiate, and becomes over sensitive to the least remarks of others. As for John-Paul, the role he wishes to play in life can be adequately summed up as that of an important priest, very esteemed by his people. Already at college he had to be first in the class to get admiration; and later, feeling himself crowded too closely by the other students, he plunged himself into extracurricular activities for the same reason. But the novitiate, the first step toward the realization of his identity as a priest, becomes a place of frustration and crisis. There he is far from college where he played a role of the highest rank and equally far from a friend whose affection gave him a sense of personal value. Here no one knows him. Hence his homesickness. During meditation he thinks of his friend, of past times, especially of those scenes in which he played an eminent role; or else he thinks of the future, he sees himself in the pulpit as a preacher. Evidently John-Paul is hypersensitive to the impression which he makes on the other novices; for example, in his reading at table. He takes great care with his hair, gives it a real coiffure, and contemplates himself in the mirror. b) Entry into the novitiate not only deprives the sub-ject of a part of his previous identity, but the community also wishes to change the candidate who comes to it in order to make him into a man who bears the community'.~ image and likeness; in other words, a religious with the spirit of his order. It is far from accepting the candidate as he is. The community has quite fixed ideas about what its members ought to become. Certain aspects of the nov-ice's previous identity, therefore, are necessarily destined for elimination while others must be developed to a more considerable degree. This is a changing of habits with its intellectual accompaniment--indoctrination. The conditions necessary for all indoctrination are (see Erikson, Young Man Luther [New York: Norton, 1958], p. 134): Isolation from the exterior world: family, friends, the old environment. Restriction of the sources of sensory stimulation and an immense value-increase in the power of words. The elimination of all private life, emphasis being placed on common life. Common devotion to the leaders who constitute and represent the community. The novitiate is a closed society; no influence is toler-ated there which would compromise the work of reforma-tion and indoctrination. Consequently no girls, no going out, no radio and television,.rio~,p6cket moridy~V~i~y~ ~ew visits. As for papers and magazines, only the more pious and serious ones will be allowed, In order to occupy the mind of the novice now emptied of worldly concerns, it is filled with spiritual teaching. So that he may be put on. the right road, the candidate is submitted to a daily pro-gram that is rigorous and unchanging and thateventually forms his mind as drops of water wear away stone. He is required to judge his own failings in the twice-daily ex-aminations of conscience. He may have no other company than that of the people who embody or partake of the desired ideal: the master of novices, his assistant, the other novices; there is no other model with whom he may iden-tify. The novitiate is, then, a dosed society in which the voice of indoctrination reverberates like an echo in an empty cave. For a change so profound must be brought about in the young man that once he has set out into the world upon his apostolic mission his' new identity must be the one which prevails over all previous attachments. He must himself become a representative and an incarnation of the spirit of his institute. That the "old man" feels uneasy in this hothouse should not be surprising. For example: Brother Yves states that: the isolation from people causes me some trouble, for I feel the need to be fully accepted as I am and also to be understood . My greatest fear about religious life and particularly about common life is that I may cease to be myself in order to fall into line. I fear a conformity in which all would be superficial and artificial, in which nothing would be assimilated, made per-sonal. I do not desire conformity, uniformity, stoic equanimity in my life. Here we discover an interesting difference between the two novitiates we have studied. In one, spiritual forma-tion is much more intense than in the other. The novices give reports of their spiritual progress to the master of novices, who follows and directs them very closely. The other master of novices, on the contrary, is a proponent of less exacting methods. In the "tight" novitiate, certain of the young men regressed to a point that was not reached by comparable novices in the more relaxed novitiate. Their crisis was more violent, for inevitably the less ac-ceptable aspects of their old identity were attacked with greater force. c) A third cause of the identity crisis in the novitiate ¯ comes from the fact that the previous ideas of the young man about the community of his choice are rarely real- 4. 4. 4. Identity Crisis VOLUME 21, 1962 121 ÷ ÷ ÷ 1¥. 4~ Bo~t, O.P. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 17.2 istic. Most often they are based on an idealized image of certain members of the community whom he knew before he entered either personally or through reading. He may imagine that every Franciscan is a Poverello, every Jesuit a Teilhard da Chardin, and every Dominican a Sertil-langes. He wishes to become like them. But he finds out very quickly that most of the members of the religious community are far from being the incarnation of this ideal, and then the novice frequently wonders whether his place is in the institute he has chosen, since it is of so little help to growth in his present identity. When Brother Irenaeus triumphantly ascertains that certain of the old fatheks do not practice what is demanded of the novices, his pride and his mistrust are the means by which he pro-tects his own high ideal. Francis, on the other hand, criti-cizes his fellow novices: they should be more perfect. He can't understand why they should be looking out the win-dow, why they should quarrel, or why they slip apples into their pockets after dinner to eat them in .their rooms. All this is personally disgusting to him. "If they entered religion to act like that . " And he is sorry that "medi-ocrity is not only found in the world, but also in the cloister." His excessive criticism is a means of defending himself against the temptation to do what they are doing, a temp-tation which is inadmissible because of a too rigid con-science. d) Finally, most communities have a great number of ministries to perform. It is often the decision of superiors which determines what role will later be assigned to the novice; whether he will be a missionary, a professor of apologetics, a parish priest, a teacher of the young, or the treasurer of the house. For one who has set his heart on the role of missionary, for example, obedience may create from the novitiate on a climate of uncertainty, a doubt about the possibility of realizing his role in life, his iden-tity. For we must not forget that one's identity is a synthe-sis of all one's previous development and hence it is not changed as one changes clothes. The novice ought, never-theless, to leave himself open to the possibility that the vow of obedience may make altogether a different thing of his life than what he thought. So it is that John-Paul wonders whether his superiors will let him go to the mis-sion where "the pagans, once converted to the faith of the gospel, will know better than the people of this coun-try the value of a priest." For he seeks everywhere the love and security he has up till now not found, and it was this quest which impelled him toward the priesthood. These four inevitable factors provoke an identity crisis in the novice which can go just "short of psychotic dis-sociation" (Erikson, Young Man Luther, op. cit., p. 134). This is a kind of fragmentation of the ego, a breakdown of the personality synthesis in a clash with the new en-vironment. The breach which the impact of this environ-ment makes in the synthesis is always located at its weakest point; that is, in certain conflicts Of the past Which Were poorly dealt with. In this serise,, the novitiate,brlngg .OUt the worst in oneself; the combined pressure of competition, adaptation to the level of the environment and the very rigid mode of life causes even the smallest weakness in the identity of the novice to burst fortl~. Beginners' Faults as Dimensions of the Crisis We can now parallel" the faults of beginners with Erik-son's eight dimensions of the identity crisis; for, according to our thesis, these faults are their equivalents in the re-ligious domain. As a matter of fact, it is not only the sogial life of the candidate which is troubled, but his spiritual life; all the more so since this constitutes the principal content of the life of the group and its members. We re-peat, we are studying the spiritual life here only under its psychological aspect and not at all under its theological aspect. a) Loss of perspective, the first of the dimensions of the identity crisis, betrays itself on the spiritual plane by a lack of patience, by a failure to apprehend that religious development has both its heights and its depths as does any other human evolution. This quest for the immediate is evident in spiritual gluttony and in its counterpart, dis-taste for spiritual realities when they do not procure a sensible satisfaction. It is equally to be found in those who wish. to push precipitously ahead. In his spiritual life Brother Mark seeks the love and consolation he did not receive enough of when he was little. In high school he created an environment for him-self which answered more or less adequately to his needs. But the change of environment deprives him of this sup-port and obliges him.to seek it elsewhere, in God. He seeks "the divine presence, a mysterious presence which I try to locate in myself without success. Each of my members dis-covers new sensations at this moment.". But when the quest does not succeed, "I feel a kind of di~sgust without reason or apparent motive. At such times Jesus does not seem to satisfy me; I thirst for something else too vague to be men-tioned or clearly defined." For Andrew, the need to rush ahead and a false apostolic zeal arose when common life and the demands of the no-vitiate for a change in his habits simultaneously reinforced a precocious superego and the unacceptable impulseg he was trying to harness] The unrealistic demands proper to these last two "imperfections" cause this novice not to feel at home with his less demanding comrades and his father ÷ ÷ ÷ Identity Crisis VOLUME 21~ 1962 ÷ W. de Bont, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS master who are themselves far from accepting with benev-olence this excess of zeal. To novices who have such difficulties the religious com-munity provides a helpful balancing factor in the per-spective of the future it opens to them. They are told of the various stages of the spiritual life; in the religious life there is a step-by-step education over several years (no-vitiate, philosophical and theological studies, ordina-tion.). There is a daily program set up in detail and firmly enforced. Finally, the candidate is promised cer-tain success in this world or in the next if he perseveres. b) Lack of assurance manifests itself in all those im-perfections which seek to hide certain defects by an im-moderate reaction: excessive shame for faults, a too literal adherence to the rules, indiscrete mortifications. Two ex-amples have already been given (B~'others Irenaeus and Francis). The novitiate offers the novices a provisional protection against their initial clumsiness in the unifor-mity it imposes in observances, clothing, spirituality. With this protection the novice is able to regain little by little the confidence in himself which was upset by the causes listed above. c) Pusillanimity in the spiritual life can be considered a failure to experiment with various roles; and certain forms of jealousy (of the progress of others) and of hypo-chondria (in connection with fasting, for example) can be considered as derivatives of Oedipal conduct. So it was that Henry, who was not able to identify with his dead father in order to attain, at least in his imagination, a superiority over his brothers which would give him a spe-cial title to the love of fiis mother, wished to carry on his apostolate in such a way that "after my departure people will forget completely that I was ever around, and that it was I who handled mattersY Fearing competition he does not dare to push himself forward. By always doing exacdy as the others, by effacing himself, he denies that he is dif-ferent, jealous, guilty of favoritism. In this case, the novitiate tries above all to encourage him to attempt one role, that of the apprentice religious. The novitiate is nothing else but an initiation into this role, begun with the taking of the habit as an exterior sign of the status which will be had henceforth in the com-munity and continued every day in the life of the novice. d) Paralysis about work clearly reveals itself in the dif-ficulties which the novice has from time to time in his spirit.ual exercises, meditation, examination of conscience, recitation of the Breviary. For Henry, for example, exami-nations of conscience remain at the surface of his person-ality. He fears lest his jealousy and anxiety come to the surface. Religious educators do everything in the noviti- ate to allow positive fulfillment, by teaching the novice suitable methods for achieving success in this domain. e) Lack of identity or confusion of roles manifests itself in a vague feeling of not b.eing at home in the novitiate, by nostalgia for the past, by the impo.ssibility of finding a place and a role in the communi~y: Examples Were" given above. The novitiate seeks to remedy this by encouraging the recruit to identify with his community by proposing to him in an exclusive way the spirit of the congregation or the order. f) Bisexual confusion manifests itself by all sorts of dif-ficulties with sex: the sexualization of religious life, for example, in sexual impulses at the moment of communion or confession; in particular friendships unddr the cloak of a spiritual relationship; in scruples about ~bad thoughts." Brother Guy, for example, transfers to Christ and St. John his tender feelings about a friend whom he has left in the world: You must have embraced very tenderly, as gently as do two beloved people spontaneously when one has acquired the other's special admiration; when one wishes to protest more deeply his profound joy in and friendly respect for the other. I would have liked to spend with the two of you those long evenings beneath the stars, as I had the happiness to spend them with James, speaking no doubt of Your ambitions, become those of Jol~n s~nce You loved him so tenderly, and he loved You. This transfer is meant to fill the void left by the impos-sibility of continuing an earthly friendship. What the novice should learn here, with the help of his spiritual director, is to renounce the exercise of his sex-ual faculty while at the same time .developing his manli-ness. This is impossible unless this renunciation is in-spired by valid and for the most part conscious motives ("for the kingdom.of God'i)and as little as possible af-fected by fear, shame, distaste, or guilt. g) The lack of reasonable attitudes with respect to au-thority is expressed by a crowd of symptoms: an extrava-gant docility, revolt against authority, a kind of freezing up in relations with superiors; too great a zeal to convert others where the aim is much more to resolve one's own problems than to help one's neighbor. 'Michael, for ex-ample, is so docile as to worry the master of novices some-what. He wants to be told what to do; he never resists; he has the spirit of. sacrifice; anything may be asked of him. If he is nettled, he gives a start and then merely smiles. His spiritual ideal is~ complete abandonment to God. He wishes to forget himself in order to be concerned only for God and His interests. Michael is a young man Whose mother thwarted him in his desire :for masculine inde-pendence. At the conscious level he submitted but uncon-sciously he rebelled against her. In the novitiate obedience 4. 4. Identity Crisis 1~5 4- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is a most important matter and there are very few possi-bilities for aggressivity (for example, sports) left open to him. His problem, then, is accentuated. It may be under-stood, then, that for him God and the master of novices are conceived after the image of his mother. Peter's sense of his priestly mission still has "some end other than a supernatural one." The reason for this is that by a slightly megalomaniac identification with pater-nal authority, of which he makes himself the prophet, he is protecting himself against a feeling of persecution. The image he has of his father is split into two, and his feelings are equally divided. Everything good about his father is projected into God, everything bad into the devil. Accord-ingly, to save the world by his apostolate means in fact to preserve the connection with the good parent (God) and to eliminate the bad (the devil). Since the novitiate is a completely masculine society and at the 'same time by it.~ nature demands obedience, it further accentuates the con. flicts about sexuality and authority which underlie thi:~ apostolic identity (according to psychoan.alytic theory, the paranoid personality is rooted in homosexualized relation-ships with the father, the representative of authority in the family); but at the same time it makes the experience o[ the apostolate impossible for the time being. One may not go out during .the novitiate, and so the balance of forces in Peter is upset. The master of novices will have the difficult task of teaching the novices the just mean between the docility of a sheep and revolt at the barricades, as in the case of the novice who barricaded his door when the superior knocked to get him to rise (he always got up late). To give the novices certain opportunities for leadership frora the novitiate on may contribute to the development of the orientation which is desirable in this domain. h) Finally, a confusion of ideals is the most obvious thing about the novices who do not yet know whether they want to stay or leave the novitiate to return to the world or who hesitate to choose among several communities, Brother Mark has grave doubts about his perseverance because he is torn between a "worldly" past made entic-ing by the admiration he commanded at school and tile frustrations of his present conventual life caused by the lack of tenderness and esteem received from others. Spir-itual training here seeks to take away all ambivalence by presenting the novice with the ideology of his order and excluding all other ideologies (newspapers are ban-ishedl). A certain simplification results from this which sometimes becomes a caricature; one novice will think he is living the "pure gospel" because he walks .around in sandals as the apostles did; another will think he has found the perfect balance between contemplation and action because in his community Compline is sung in common before sleep. When the new identity of the nov-ice is sufficiently established, this simplification will no longer be necessary. Psychologically speaking, the faults of beginners are merely attempts to maintain'. Or to reestablish 15rovision-ally the psychic equilibrium which has been upset by the impact of the environment, an impact which has struck the novice at the weakest points of his former identity. As Father Mailloux has said, they are not "typically pathological reactions per se, but rather.irrational modes of expression, upon which the psychic apparatus will normally fall back whenever an individual is unable to cope with a stressful situation in some rational man-ner" (Rev. Noel Mailloux, O.P., "Sanctity and the Prob-lem of Neurosis," Pastoral Psychology, 10 [February, 1959], 40). For in successful cases the novice readjusts; he incorporates the identity elements offered him by the religious environment into the best which his identity al-ready has and gets rid of the less acceptable elements. Having provoked the crisis, a well-directed novitiate helps also to heal it. And once the adaptation is made and the novice has regained his place, this time in the community of his choice, his beginner's faults disappear like hay fever when the season has passed. In less successful cases, there is a failure. Concord be-tween' the identity of the novice and the demands or the support of the environment remains impossible: The reasons may come from two quarters: a lack of flexibility in the subject consequent upon an identity too charged with conflict as with the brother of the barricades cited above who left his community a little later,, or on the part of the community which is unable to Offer the novice the place which he seeks for his gifts and his particular abilities as in that sufficiently large novitiaite where .eighty percent of the novices left because of a master of novices still living spiritually in the nineteenth' century. The shock was the greater for them as their previous educa-tion was the more liberal. Conclusion We have studied in this article the psychological side of this night of the senses which the novitiate arouses by its very nature. By uprooting the candidate from his for-mer environment, it deprives him of the support which his identity enjoyed before in order to invite him to a higher spiritual balance. Our perspective, it is true, has been a restricted one; we have described only what the novitiate may have in common with any identity crisis studied by the psychologist. On this plane, the crisis of the novice resembles that of a young man who prepares 4. ÷ Identity Crisis VOLUME 21, 1962 W. de Bo~t, 0~. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]28 himself for army service at West Point, or who leaves hi.q small-town home to go to a large, university--although course the crisis has a different content according as concerns military formation, the situation of a student, or religious training---celibacy and examinations of con-science do not figure largely in a military perspective. For methodological reasons we have left aside that which con~ .stitutes the very essence of the life of the novitiate: the introduction to the life of consecration to God to which by His grace He has invited the novice. It is this properly spiritual aspect which masters of novices are best ac-quainted with, and they can guide themselves in this by a solidly established spiritual theology. Our only inten-tion has been to draw their attention to the psychological side of this introduction to sanctity, a side which it 'is better not to be totally ignorant of. The "follies" of nov-ices should not be seen as faults which are exclusively in the moral order, as pride, for example, considered as the capita) sin. There is question rather of provisional, and unsuccessful efforts to adapt oneself to a new situation; hence they are normal phenomena which always arise under one form or another when a man must remake the synthesis of his personality. Nevertheless, they are real difficulties and not imaginary, often very painful for the subject who undergoes them and annoying for those around him. The wisdom of an alert master of novices will assuage much of this human pain, and this the more so as he knows better the identity of the novice in ques. tion, with its strong points and its weak. This present article is limited to describing the iden-tity crisis of the novice. It does not pretend to furnish the elements of a possible prognostication. If almost all nov, ices undergo this crisis in some degree or other, how, among so many of the "imperfect," can those who will persevere be singled out from those who will leave or merely mark time for the rest of their lives? This is an important question, for the novitiate terminates with a profession which, even though it be temporary, repre-sents a real and very profound commitment. Certain re-marks of St. John of the Cross (Dark Night, 1, 9) coukl provide us with a point of departure for such a consid- ¯ eration; but this task must be reserved to a later article. PAUL W. O'BRIEN, S.J. Introducing the Young Sister to Prayer One of the problems facing the young sister is learning to pray. She h~is probably been pra