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Issue 58.2 of the Review for Religious, March/April 1999. ; for rel igious Ch6sfar~ He6tages arid Cer~ter~p~rary L~v~r~g MARCH.APRIL 1999 o VOLUME 58 ¯ NUMBER 2 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, historical, or inspirational, written from a theological 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 correspondenbe 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; Xa, Tashington, D.C. 20017 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. ©1999 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission, is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Jean Read James and Joan Felling ¯ Kathryn Richards FSP Joel Rippinger OSB Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living MARCH-APRIL. 1999 ¯ VOLUME 58 ¯ ¯ NUMBER 2 contents 118 137 communal commitment: a symposium Luminous Traces: The Inbreaking Spirit amid Cultural Fragmentation Michael Downey offers a five-step tour of the culture horizon, pointing out the challenges and opportunities the U.S. culture presents to the communal commitment that lies at the core of most expressions of vowed religious life. Community Living." Beginning the Conversation Doris Gottemoeller RSM opens up a discussion on the meaning of community living in regard to its theological base, its spirituality, the role of leadership, and special challenges today. 150 paschal mystery The Credibility of Jesus' Resurrection: Two Interior Witnesses Leon McKenzie proposes that the voice of the resurrection archetype and the voice of the Holy Spirit provide credibility for Jesus' resurrection. 158 168 From Woundedness to Union Cynthia Bourgeault presents an explanation of the psychology of Centering Prayer. On the Go with Chronic Illness, Sitting Still with Mark Pamela A. Smith SSCM reflects on her own life in the context of Mark's Gospel: What is the Christian mix of resignation and stubbornness, relaxation and fight, that makes it possible to slow down and still go barreling forward? Review for Religious 175 184 the vowed life Friendship and Celibacy: Seeing Beauty from a "Holy Distance" Brian J. PierceOP makes the point that we need new stories and new language to affirm and celebrate the vow of chastity and the goodness and beauty of human and sexual love. Poverty: Now You See It, Now You Don't Elissa Rinere CP surveys the various meanings and implications for living the vow of poverty professed by men and women religious. 195 report U.S. Hispanic Catholics: Trends and Works 1998 Kenneth G. Davis OFMConv, Eduardo C. Fernandez SJ, and Ver6nica M~ndez RCD present a panoramic of the year's events within the U.S. Hispanic Catholic community. departments 116 Prisms 211 Canonical Counsel: Visitation 217 Book Reviews March-April 1999 prisms How are we to observe a year dedicated to God the Father at a time when we desire to be more sensitive about sexist phrases and patriarchal soundings? The male imaging of God, both in our theology study and in our liturgical services, has come under criticism from many Christians, often stimulated by the groundbreaking work of feminist theologians--no matter that Jesus referred most often to God as Father (though he also tised other image words or examples, of course, including feminine ones). Mthough the Hebrew word Abba is used only once in the Greek Gospels--in Mark--and seldom in Paul's epistles, the significant intimacy of this word (and its relevance to Jesus' teaching the prayer "Our Father") has made it central to the Christian understanding of the relationship of ourselves to God-v-One upon whom we can call, by our being baptized into Jesus, with his love-word Abba. God, for us Christians, is above all personal. We talk to God as a persbn. In our everyday life we learn early on to call out to "Mom" and "Dad," but we do not find ourselves saying "O Parent." Parent, much as it blends masculine and feminine, is not used in personal address. So parent and other ways of avoiding the Jesus-chosen name "FathEr" do not tend to keep us true to our Christian faith. Nor is it helpful to use activity names in our sharing in the trinitarian life since all God's activities outside the :Trinity are the work of the one God. In addition, the activity titles of creator, redeemer, and sanctifier are not the warm personal words that elicit and express a love-response on our part. Review for Religious Father Walter Ong SJ, in his book Fighting for Life, makes a helpful observation about how appropriate the use of the Father word is for God. The father metaphor seems more apt for God even than a mother metaphor because of the very way that God relates to us, A mother in carrying a child in her womb for nine months knows well the meaning of "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." In ordinary circumstances, a mother knows and feels how much this child (baby) belongs to her. A father's experience is necessarily different. A father must lay claim to a child. Leaving aside our contemporary scientific DNA testing for paternity, a father has to step forward and begin the bonding process with a baby boy or girl whom he believes is, and accepts as, the one he "fathered." We Christians understand that God steps forward and, in and through Jesus the Christ, claims us as his children. We are "daughters and sons of God," albeit "adopted" because Jesus alone merits the title "the only-begotten Son." True, we are God's creation, but we are not of the "substance" (like "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh") of God. We are claimed by God in Jesus; we are adopted. The gospel metaphor of Father, then, in a transcendent way Of choosing and claiming, has given us the relationship we rejoice in--daughters and sons who rightfully call upon God with Jesus' word Abba. God expends great energy all our life long to convince us that we are beloved ones. Perhaps we glimpse the importance of God's choosing us as beloved in Christ when we consider the criteria of the apostle. When the Eleven were considering how to fill the place of Judas after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, they used the criterion of having been present from the time of Jesus' baptism by John at the Jordan. For all of us followers of Jesus, he shares with us in our baptism what had been the consolation of his own in the Jordan event. We are taken into ¯ the circle of God's inner .life of trinitarian love. A year dedicated to God the Father help~ us appreciate more fully the graced relati6nship which we Christians, through Jesus Christ and our Scriptures and tradition, have been given the privilege of understanding--along with the ha.ppy responsibility of making our response. In balancing our images of God after the manner of Jesus, we Christians hold fast to the fact that our most basic response is our praying to God as "Our Father." David L. Fleming SJ March-April 1999 MICHAEL DOWNEY Luminous Traces: The Inbreaking Spirit amid Cultural Fragmentation "Peggy O'Donnell is dying." My mother was shocked when I, a first grader at Most Blessed Sacrament School, relayed the news. Peggy was a high school senior at West Catholic. She lived down the block from us in our Irish Catholic village in southwest Philadelphia. "What?" my mother asked incredulously. "Peggy O'Donnell looks just fine to me. There's nothing wrong with her." Over the course of the next few hours, my mother found out the real story via the neighborhood grapevine. "Peggy O'Donnell is leaving the world," Mother told me, "but she's not dying." But what was I to think when Nancy O'Donnell said of her sister, "Peggy's leaving the world"? Peggy did leave the world of that Irish Catholic village in southwest Philadelphia. She went to Rosemont, way out in the s~burbs, to the Convent of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a different world indeed from what was known to us in the city. But, however different the Michael Downey is professor of systematic theology and spir-ituality at Saint John's Seminary in Camarillo, California, and is theologian to Roger Cardinal Mahony. He edited the award-winning New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality; his most recent publication is Textual Mysticism: Reading as a Basic Spiritual Discipline. This article is adapted from the presentation given at a symposium at VCernersville, Pennsylvania, in October 1998. He may be addressed at the Archdiocesan Catholic Center Office; 3424 Wilshire Boulevard; Los Angeles, California 90010. Review for Religious world of Peggy O'Donnell and the others out in Rosemont might be from ours, and whatever these words about "leaving the world" might have meant, deep down inside I knew that Peggy O'Donnell was still going to be in the world, part of the world. She was not dying. My mother told me so! I open with this cameo of Peggy O'Donnell because it evokes images of leaving one world and embracing another, shedding the skin of one culture so as to embrace the meanings, purposes, and values of another. But "leaving the world," moving from one world into another, shifting from the culture of an Irish Catholic village within a city to that of a convent in the suburbs of Philadelphia in 1958, was a very different sort of challenge from what religious face today amid the culture, the world, in which they live. I have been invited by the coordinators of this syrr~.posium on religious life to offer a tour of the cultural horizon, pointing out the challenges and opportunities our culture presents to the communal commitment that lies at the core of most expressions of the vowed religious life. I shall proceed in five steps. First, I shall address the question What is culture? (Culture, like experience or community, is a term much used in religious discourse today, but often it lacks precision.) Second, I shall identify certain shifts that have taken place in our culture, making the world a very different place from the world in which many religious were formed as children, as adolescents, and as novices. Third, I shall describe features of this culture that pose serious challenges to commitment of any kind, specifically commitment to a particular community of persons. Fourth, I shall suggest that cultural shifts, often seen negatively, can be good news precisely because they make room for something else to come into being, providing occasion for the inbreaking Spirit in the gift of hope. I shall spell out the conditions or attitudes necessary for receiving this gift of hope in our very dark age. And, fifth, I shall suggest a reconfiguration of hope for religious life and communal commitment in terms of a shift from community to communion. Culture Culture and the world are roughly approximate terms. The story of Peggy O'Donnell is intended to be a gende reminder that, in the not so distant past, religious life was another world, an alternative culture. When Nancy O'Donnell said of her sister Peggy that she March-April 1999 Downey * Luminous Traces, was leaving the world, what she meant was that she was leaving one culture for another. The word culture refers to the various forms by which meanings, purposes, and values are expressed and impressed. Culture is a language. Language here is much more than verbal communication; it is expressivity, and human beings express themselves in manifold ways. Human beings are of necessity always expressing themselves, "speechifying"--and, when they do, they do so in culture. Culture is the whole constellation of means by which human beings expres~ what is deepest and most important to them, for example, about family and progeny, social arrangements and sexual taboos, and how to deal with illness and aging. They do this through art, literature, and ritual. Culture includes the ethos of a people, the central story or vision that gives direction to their lives, the principles and governing concerns by which they gain a sense of order and cohesion in their lives. Culture encompasses economic systems, political structures, and the laws that give shape to a sense of right and wrong. Also included are the many ways in which human beings strive to express their perceptions of beauty in music, dance, architecture, and the fine arts. Because human beings perceive and pursue the gift and task ofself-expression in different ways, cultures differ, sometimes so much so that they appear irreconcilable. In other words, human beings create or participate in creating worlds of meaning, value, and purpose by means of culture. Wherever there are human beings, there is culture. Culture is second nature to humans. Culture is what human beings do with the "stuff" of the created order, the natural world, what might be referred to here as first natui'e. Human beings a{e always taking this givenness of the natural world, this first nature, and doing something with it. The created world in which we live is the "stuff" that is taken and shaped, created. We extend and transform this givenness in accord with particularly human meanings, purposes, and values. An apple is part of nature, but making apple pie is part of culture. While daffodils belong to nature, arranging a bouquet of them is part of culture. Precious metals are mined from nature, but exchanging and wearing rings is a cultural phenomenon, expressing love and fidelity and a whole range of related meanings. Solid marble is quarried from nature's Side. When slabs of it are carefully Review for Religious designed and skillfully chiseled, the result may be a contribution to culture. There are alphabets and dictionaries, but a poem or novel is something else again. There are musical notes, but the ordering and arranging of them in a distinctive musical composition is of a completely different order. It belongs to the order of culture, second nature to human beings. Any cultural form is expressive of multiple meanings, not just one. Flowers may be arranged in a bouquet and set in a place of worship as an expression of reverence and offering. They may be sent from a lover to the beloved as an expression of affection. Flowers are sent to people who are ill in the hope of cheering and strengthening their spirits. And they may be given in times of sorrow and loss as an expression of sympathy. All these are uses of the created order, of first nature, by human beings whose nature is to talk, to "speechify." So semantically laden is the cultural phenomenon of apple pie that, for many people in the United States, to be told that someone is "as American as motherhood and apple pie" precludes need of further description of the person's character and identity. But culture is about much more than nosegays, apple pies, wedding rings, and skillfully crafted marble edifices. As second nature to human beings, culture includes everything involved in the task of being and becoming fully human. Culture, then, refers to the whole sociosymbolic order in which humans live and by which they receive and shape meaning and identity. Here it must he recognized that the extension and transformation of nature for human purposes has a checkered history. Not every cultural expression advances truly human purposes. Not all humanpurposes are worthy as such, that is, simply because they are human. And not every value that human beings perceive as such is in fact so. From a Christian perspective, it is prayerful attention to the Spirit of God present in the world and moving human hearts toward God that opens up, orients, and often reorients culture to authentic human meanings, ptirposes, and values. An observation on "American culture" before proceeding. There is no longer one unified and unifying American culture, if ever there was one. In the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Mass is Human beings create or participate in creating worlds of meaning, value, and purpose by means of culture. March-April 1999 Downey ¯ Luminous Traces celebrated every Sunday in over forty languages and dialects. At Hollywood High School, students speak more than eighty languages and dialects. Whatever may be the sense of "American" character and identity communicated in the rhetoric of "motherhood and apple pie," does this image speak any longer to such a range of people? When, in such contexts, inherited cultural forms begin to fragment, it should come as no surprise. It is no less surprising when traditional forms of the vowed religious life become semantically empty. They no longer "speechify" the meanings, purposes, and values that are perceived and pursued as central to the vowed religious life. Culture: Coming Apart at the Seams Using an image from life in southern California, we may liken our culture to a house situated on a fault line.There is a fissure running down the center of the treasury holding what is dearest to us. The culture in which we were formed seems to be coming apart at the seams. There is seepage and spillage everywhere. Bad news. But the good news is that inherited, deeply cherished cultural forms may be giving way so that something else may come into being. To speak of culture entails talking about 'its prevailing wo~'ldview. What was the worldview in which most United States religious were formed? What was the dominant view of human life and history? What was the view of the relation between God and the world that, I suggest, is now giving way to new ways of perceiving and being? ~ First is the boundless confidence in the capacity of the human mind to know everything by means of the so-called scientific method, an affirmation of the power of reason (very narrowly understood) to think its way through just about anything. Such a lofty understanding of the powers of reason began to wane once appropriate attention was given to the facts of history, to the enormity of human suffering, which baffles and disorients even the most serene exercise of reason.2 Second, in such a worldview, there is the conviction that individuals can make and shape themselves. Together with this, there is an unprecedented affirmation of individual rights and liberties. This affirmation of individual rights and liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution can often eclipse the pursuit of a common good. Review for Religious Third, with roots long, deep, and strong in Christian history, a marked dualism characterizes this worldview. In such a perspective, ¯ all reality in every sphere of life is divided into two parts, with the implication that one is superior to, and dominant over, the other: mind over matter, objective over subjective, intellect over affect, the analytical over the intuitive, prose over poetry, God over humanity, humanity over nature, male over female, white over black, yellow, red, and brown, clergy over lay, American and Western European over the Third World, rich over poor, speech over silence, the strong and powerful over the wounded and the weak. The fourth feature of the worldview which shaped many of us is perhaps the most problematic of all. History is viewed as inevitably progressive. Change is always improvement, and whatever is new is better. Progress is regarded as inevitable and therefore beyond moral adjudication. Whatever can be done must be done and therefore should be done. The horrors of history, the sufferings of individuals and of whole peoples, no matter how large and how utterly incomprehensible, are seen as unseemly wrinkles in the unfolding of an inevitably better future. The sentiment lingers. It is not at all uncommon to hear from undergraduate students something like: "God must have had a plan for eliminating six million Jews. He permitted it to happen to the Jews in order to teach them a lesson for their own benefit and the benefit of humanity. We just have to accept it." Here, no matter what happens, God is in charge, controlling the universe like an absolute monarch. Today we stand at a juncture. In starker terms, we are trying desperately to straddle a fault line. The inherited worldview and cultural contours briefly described above are crumbling. Our framework is in fragments, but much of it is still in our marrow. We are reluctant to relinquish this way of perceiving and being in the world. We are slow to give up. Even though we recognize that it no longer rings true, we nonetheless cling to it tenaciously because we are not yet altogether clear about what is still coming to be. From the perspective of the student of Christian spirituality, the worldview that so shaped us has failed to satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. The worldview that so shaped us has failed to satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. March-April 1999 A Downey * Luminous Traces The construal of the human being as a self-made self and the unprecedented affirmation of the superiority of reason and of individual rights and liberties are not easily reconcilable with present modes of perceiving and being in the world. In contemporary Christian spirituality, there is a deeper realization that the human person is not to be defined principally as a rational animal with separate faculties of intellect and will, a composite of body and soul often at odds with one another.-Rather the person is a whole, a being defined by heart, affectus, affectivity--the capacity to be touched and drawn into relationship and interpersonal communion with another, others, and God. More importantly, people today live with an uneasy sense that there is no longer a big picture. For many people, deeply religious people no less, the world does not hang together, the center does not hold, in the way it was once thought. This puts a bold question mark before our understanding of God and the nature of God's relation to the world. God the all-powerful monarch, manipulating and controlling the universe, is simply beyond belief. It is precisely this understanding of God that cannot be sustained, and with it the worldview that rests upon it. Further, efforts to reach even the slightest measure 0fagreement on the nonnegotiable elements of a coherent worldview seem futile. Consequently, no commonly held values provide a sense of shared purpose. As but one example, over the course of fifteen years of undergraduate teaching, I would ask students year by year: "What do you value most of all? Is there anything that you would be willing to give your life for, perhaps even to die for?" Invariably there was reticence, indeed reluctance~ in the face of my question. But eventually there seemed to be some measure of agreement that "family" is what is to be valued above all else. But, when pressed to speak about the nature o~ "family," all thirty-five or more students would have different understandings of what "family" means and why this slippery term designates or suggests a value at all. It has become increasingly difficult to arrive at a common-sense understanding of "family" or of what "family values" might be. In addition to the loss of a big picture, there is a growing conviction that the future is not inevitably progressive. Today there is clearer recognition that change is not always for the better and that the future is not necessarily brighter. That is to say that history is riddled with interruption, disorientation, and a sense of randomness, indeed chance? Not everything that happens should Review for Religious be assigned to God's providence. As a variation on the theme of a rather tasteless bumper sticker: Things just happen! But the interruptive character of history, thought on first reading to be irreconcilably at odds with God's providential plan, is not of necessity so and may in fact be more in keeping with biblical understandings of God's action in history, specifically in the person of the Christ, than the view of God's providence characteristic of the inherited worldview now passing away.4 Much of what has contributed to our fundamental sense of meaning, purpose, and value is now a shambles, no matter how much we care to think otherwise: family, neighborhood, political and economic institutions, and religious life as we have known it. Efforts at retrenchment and restoration may meet with ostensibly satisfactory results in the short term, but, no matter how big the shoulders trying to hold up these and other elements of a culture-in- collapse, another course is required, not simply desirable. Rather than trying to hold up what can no longer stand on its own, what is called for is a clearing of the house, making room, so that something new can come into being. What is coming to be may find no clear precedent in human or Christian history. And it is precisely because it finds no clear precedent in Christian history that it may come into being by the presence and power of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ. As these outer worlds of meaning and purpose and value splinter, fragment, and shatter, there is a strong tendency to turn inward for stmething reliable. Many currents in spirituality today are characterized by self-absorption, self-preoccupation, and self-fixation. Spirituality is thought to be about interiority, often to the exclusion of the wider spheres of life. The movement inward appears to go faster and faster, if not deeper and deeper, as outer worlds of meaning continue to collapse with increasing rapidity. All of this seems like very bad news, but it need not be. The hallmark of our age is the self-emptying of forms because inherited cultural forms cannot hold God. And, as they are emptied and found wanting, perhaps there will once again be room enough for the God of constant coming, whose gift always and everywhere overspills all our efforts to lock it in, pin it down in tightly knit thought forms, theological systems, and patterns of religious living. There is, then, a reason for the hope that lies within us (see 1 P 3:15): the Christ who is always and everywhere drawing us forward cannot be chained by cultural forms and worldviews, which, March-April 1999 Downey ¯ Luminous Traces however adequate they may be in the service of the truth, are always necessarily limited, partial. They cannot contain God. They are unable to hold the fullness of God. Recall that culture is language and is second nature to us. But no matter how deeply we are indebted to our inherited cultural forms, to the language which is second nature to us, God's giving overspills any and all mediation. Today there is a deepening sense that God is incomprehensible mystery, beneath and beyond all our efforts to dissect, scrutinize, and systematize. From the perspective of a student of Christian spiritual and mystical traditions, even as we are stalled at a cultural crossroads, we are being invited to enter more deeply into the apophatic way, to be educated in the Spirit's school of unknowing, to proceed on the path toward a dazzling darkness at the heart of which is the One whose name above all names is not God.5 For even the name God is no proper name for the One whose name beyond and beneath all naming is Love. And Life. And Light. Even and especially in the darkness. The Rhetoric of Culture: Choice over Commitment Though something new is coming to be, we are still dogged by elements of that earlier worldview that pose serious obstacles to growth and development in the spiritual life in general and the vowed religious life in pa(ticular. These may be thought of as deep wounds inflicted by our culture, whatever one may care to say about its merits. More specifically, they constitute sometimes seemingly insurmountable hurdles to comm. itment of any sort. In the not too distant past, it was common enough to give a good bit of attention to the so-called "enemies of the spiritual life." In approaches to religious formation, "particular friendships" were often viewed in such terms. Today there are indeed enemies of the spiritual life, but they are quite different from those identified in earlier approaches to formation. They must be tackled by a different strategy. As I see it, the three major obstacles that must be hurdled in any approach to commitment, specifically a lifelong commitment to a community of persons, are narcissism, pragmatism, and unrelenting resdessness.6 The first is related to the disproportionate emphasis in the culture on individual rights and liberties. We are inclined to think of ourselves first and finally as individuals who choose; or elect, to be in relationship. The self is thought to be the first and final Review for Religious arbiter, not only of meaning, purpose, and yalue, but also of all reality. Individual fights and liberties and the ability of individuals to make and shape themselves by choosing from among a multiplicity of options is, in the minds of many, of preeminent value. When traveling in different parts of the world, I often ask what impression others have of the culture or cultures in the United States. Invariably the response is something akin to: "You are very practical people. You are achievers. You get things done. You are doers." Indeed we are a practical people, pragmatists. In the mind of the pragmatist, the truth is what works. And, if it works, it must be true. We have become the people of the bottom line. We are governed by a preoccupation with outcomes, assessments, and five-year plans. We all too readily think of ourselves and others in instrumentalist, pragmatic terms. Created goods, even human lives, have become commodities. Everything is considered in terms of what gets achieved, done, accomplished, produced to satisfy the needs of some consumer. It may be useful here to recall: "If you are what you do, when you don't, then you're not." A cameo may convey my meaning here. On a visit to Santa Barbara on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, I strolled from the beach to the caf~ for a cup of one of those designer coffees. Seated near me were two young women, perhaps seniors in high school or entry-level undergrads. They were hunched over huge textbooks with graphs and charts of some sort, reminiscent of those in my sophomore-year geometry book. Basking in the splendor of Santa Barbara's light while sipping away at their Starbucks, the two were studying very hard--judging from their knitted brows. In due course one looked up and said to the other in a tone at once exasperated and apodictic: "Look, if it's not common sense, it's wrong!" Hers is the voice of an age impatient with the speculative, unwilling to stay with an idea for a long time, unable to engage in the discipline of thinking something through, lacking the endurance to follow an argument to its logical conclusion. Unless it cashes out, has empirically verifiable results, some clear practical merit, why be bothered? Speculation, as in the commonplace "ivory-tower speculation," has become a nasty word. We are a people who are unrelentingly resdess. We are. hungry for experience. We live in a culture in which we are urged to keep on going, exploring options, choosing from among a myriad of possibilities. Another cameo: For me as a child in that Irish Catholic March-April 1999 Downe~ ¯ Luminous Traces village within the city of Philadelphia, the trick was to convince Mother and Dad to allow us one half hour in front of the television, after we had been out to play and after we had done our homework. If permitted to watch an evening TV program, my sister and I would sit glued to the television set for thirty minutes without budging. Now when Mikey, my twelve-year-old nephew, walks in the door of my home, I remind him, "No surfing in my house!" It is not the surfboard I have in mind, of course, but the TV remote control. Mikey has learned that in my home he is welcome to watch a TV program, for much longer indeed than half an hotir, but for him this takes real discipline. It is altogether different from channel surfing-~staying with this station for two minutes and that one for three minutes and the next one until it is time for ~he commercial. Mikey's TV wanderlust is not uncommon, and it is symptomatic of a much deeper wandering, squandering perhaps, of the human spirit. Unrelenting restlessness is manifest in many expressions of spirituality today. We tend to move from one thing to the next, from one approach to spirituality to another, first taking some tips from the Ignatian school, then making a retreat at a Benedictine monastery, perhaps a little lec~io divina. The "spiritual quest" can become little more than a cruise down the spirituality superhighway, gobbling up soundbite supplies of spiritual wisdom that "work for me." If it does not work for me, then I move on. Narcissism, pragmatism, restlessness! These are the enemies of the spiritual life today. They are cultural wounds, and you and I carry them with us in making, cultivating, and sustaining our religious commitments. They are in our bloodstream. We think of the individual as first and final in a way that blinds us to the relational matrix of all life.7 We are numb to the simple truth that absolutely everything is related to everything else. We are pragmatists to the core. ~Fhe fact that monks continue to rise at three in the morning to pray to God in the dark long before the dawn is virtually incomprehensible, in our culture. What good does that do? What difference does it make? What are the outcomes, the results, of praying in the dark? Why pray at all? Why live in a monastery? At least go out and do something with yourself in the real world! Make a contribution to society! Make a difference! Do something! Anything! And we are restless, indeed driven. In a culture in which the rhetoric of choice has rendered mute the language of commitment, Review for Religious many of us find it hard to stay at anything for very long. Our age is characterized by impermanence and provisionality. We find it difficult to stay with anything, and be really alive and passionate about anything, day after day, week by week, year by year. Diversion is what is constant. We move on when there seem to be no immediate results. We resist going back to the book every single day, listening long and lovingly to that Word beneath and beyond all the words, staying with it long enough to hear the beating of the heart of God beneath and beyond the cacophony and clutter of our own making, staying still long enough to find ourselves in God and there to rest--even and especially when such staying does not "work for me" or "do" any good whatsoever. The Inbreaking Spirit As cultural forms collapse around us, the appropriate response lies not in trying to hold on to them or hold them up by sheer force of will or by fuzzy references to the will of God. Nor does it lie in accommodation to the individualism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness characteristic of our age. It may lie in the cultivation of forms of life more in keeping with the person of Christ, the presence and power of the Spirit, and the apocalyptic sting of the gospel. Just as Peggy O'Donnell left the world in 1958 and embraced an alternative culture, the new world of Rosemont, so too the future of religious life lies in patterns of living that stand in marked contrast to a culture-in-collapse now increasingly recognized to have been a bad bill of goods. Neither is ready retrenchment or hasty rebuilding an appropriate response amid cultural fragmentation. Rather, the more effective strategy would be to create space, provide room, for the coming of something that is not of our own making. This calls for deep reserves of hope. It is precisely at the moment when our own efforts fail, when we are unable to .make and sustain our commitment, that the Spirit comes in the gift of hope--breaking in on our willful efforts to hold together and hold up what is broken, even and especially our deepest selves. In our times, isn't hope the most important virtue? And the most necessary? And the rarest? We live in a disruptive and disorienting age. On every street, behind every other door, lives someone who is deeply disheartened if not actually despairing. This may be brought on by people's awareness of massive and March-Aprll 1999 --129 Downe~ ¯ Luminous Traces meaningless death and the randomness of violence, by the onset of early illness, by the loss of a loved one or a job or a sense of meaning and value--or the loss of cherished ways of perceiving and being in the world. Our inability to relinquish deeply ingrained patterns of narcissism, pragmatism, and restlessness signals a crisis of hope and beckons us to deeper levels of willingness to be open to this gift. What exactly is the hope that breaks in, amid the shambles, as the gift of the Spirit? As I see it, there is nothing more important to the human being than hope. People can live without faith, and many do. In our own day, certainly, many people live without explicitly religious faith, and evidence of loveless lives abounds. But people simply do not live without hope. They cannot. Hope is "the very center of a human being.''8 Though we need hope more than anything else in life, little has been written about it.9 Compared with faith and love, hope has been given little attention in the traditions of Christian theology and spirituality. Hope may be likened to the proverbial middle child, the neglected one among the theological virtues, sandwiched in between faith, which makes the first move, and love, which is preeminent in most readings of Christian Scripture, tradition, and theology. Hope is the drawing force of all human initiative. It looks to the coming of the new, the never before, the undreamt of. Hope is a pregnant, many-layered .concept. We can distinguish in it shades of meaning that the French language, for example, conveys with different terms--espoir and esperance. We can make the distinction between hope for success (espoir) and something deeper: the anticipation of a desired good, a desire-filled wanting, in a word, esperance. In a more metaphysical and religious sense, hope, esperance, is a movement of the person by which we relativize the present and all its prospects of success so as to be open to something that we realize can come only as gift. The more unpropitious the context in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is precisely what we have when we do not have something. Hope is not the same thing as optimism that things will go our way, or turn out well. It is rather the certainty that something makes sense, is worth the cost, regardless of how it might turn out. Hope is a sense of the possible. It strains ahead, seeking a way behind and.beyond every dead end. Hope moves in three steps. First, what I hope for I do not yet Review for Religious have or see. Hope's object is future. Second, what I hope for may be difficult. But, third, I just might have it! There are no guarantees, but it just might be possible. In short, hope is directed to a future good that is hard but not impossible to attain. Its attainment, though, is in the mode of reception. Hope is the retrieval of possibilities that can only come as gift letting something come into life that is not self-generated. But with the gift comes judgment. The counterpart of hope is the admission of failure; the condition for the possibility of the Spirit's inbreaking in the gift of hope. Indeed hope of the deepest kind, esperance, calls for humility, a willingness to be judged by the gospel, to submit to its apocalyptic sting. Historical events interrupt our sense of order and cohesion. Our educational institutions have lost sight of the purposes for which they were founded. In light of the Lordship of Christ, it becomes clearer that our cultural forms, our sense of the fixedness of meaning, our grand schemes for improvement, have failed. Though hope for the future cannot come unless there is a willingness to admit failure and be judged by the light of Christ's gospel, there is in us a tenacious resistance to accepting the fact that we have failed. Without humility, poverty of spirit, and filial fear of the Lord, we remain unable to face the simple fact that our lives as persons and as a people are deeply fragmented. But the willingness to admit that the way we have done it until now is no way into the future liberates us to attend to other possibilities. It allows us to be open to voices and visions that were never heard or seen in earlier ways of perceiving and being. Admitting failure in light of the Lordship of Christ and by the presence, and power of the Spirit renders us free to receive the many gifts that, even and especially amid the ruins, are still on offer. When we relinquish the big-shoulders strategy of holding up what is falling down, we can attend to the shimmering shards amid the crumbling of our worldview and our culture, even and especially our religious culture. It is not at all uncommon to find that what we have put our energies into, indeed what we have staked our life on, proves unreliable, and that what we have affirmed in faith is no longer believable. What, then, is the reason for the hope? Can we continue to hope in such circumstances? It is precisely when faith crumbles There is nothing more important to the human being than hope. March-April 1999 Downey ¯ Luminous Traces and love grows dim that hope really begins.'° It is in the wonder and weakness of one's faith that we find the real meaning of hope. For hope is the willingness to not give up precisely when one draws no consolation from faith. Hope does not t~ to determine how God's ways will be shown. It remains open for all new and astonishing manifestations of the divine presence. It is in our most vulnerable state that God's gift of the Spirit, in hope, comes. Hope !s indeed God's gift to the vulnerable. It is only when we are exhausted, speechless, impotent--that is, only in our radical brokenness and vulnerability, by which we participate in the kenosis of God--that God can find room enough to enter and sustain us. The hopelessness and emptiness of the darkness of our age is precisely the condition that makes hope possible. And it is in the self-emptying of inherited forms of religious life and communal commitment that we can find room for what is yet to come. Amid the ruins, our consolation and our hope are found in the One who has left behind a trace of his presence even amid the crumbling?' However much we may wish it otherwise, sometimes it is no more than a trace of God's nearness that we have. For those who are rocked and shaken to their core, shattered by the inbreaking Spirit who is the very gift of hope, shimmering traces may have to suffice, enabling us to take the next step, and the next, toward what is yet coming to be--as the gift of God's giving. From Community to Communion It is clear that inherited expressions of the vowed religious life cannot escape the self-emptying of forms that is the hallmark of our age. This gives cause for lament, and for hope. The future of religious life is ineluctably tied to the willingness of vowed members to lament what has been, what is now passing, and-- rather than trying to rebuild from what little remains of the past-- to create spaces where something of God's constant coming as gift can be recognized, named, and celebrated in memory and in hope. Forms of religious life as we have known it are giving way to something new, new forms of religious life, perhaps, but without clear precedent in Christian history. In the midst of the crumbling of forms in which community and communal commitment played a large role, lamentation can give rise to hope. As community identity " seems on the brink of collapse and communal commitments seem stretched to the breaking point, there may be gained a glimpse of Review for Religious the deeper mystery of interpersonal communion. Is it at all possible that what is presently operative in religious communities is a self-emptying of forms so that vowed members may participate more fully in the mystery of communion? The fundamental Christian mystery is that God is a communion of persons in loving relationship: Father, Son, and Spirit toward us, for us, with us, in us. The very being of God is to be in relation, to be toward us, for us, with us, in us. To be created in the image of God is to be created for relationship, for communion, for establishing, cultivating, sustaining relationships based on reciprocity, mutuality, and equality rooted in the mystery of the divine perichoresis~ To say that the whole world is created in God's image is to say that the whole of creation, every inch and ounce of it, is created for relationship. Growing in the divine likeness, reaching our true destiny as persons, is realized as we participate ever more fully in the mystery of this holy communion. And this we do as we seek to establish and sustain right relationship with self, another, others, God, and with every living creature22 Various expressions of religious life in community have sought to embody this mystery of communion. Community life and communal commitment give form to, or bring to speech, the mystery of trinitarian communion. Re!igious communities and communal commitment have been expressive of, embodiments of, a language of communion. But there is no strict equation between community and communion. The relational matrix at the heart of all the living will not pass away. It alone is the ground on which we stand, and which will withstand the splintering and shattering of the forms that have sought to speak its mystery. Butit may now be time to "speechify" this mystery of communion through the articulation of new cultures of communion that express more adequately the emergent understandings of God, human life, history, the world, and the church. It is quite possible tha~ the good word amid all this hard news is that vowed members of religious institutes have occasion to lean into, fall into, the mystery of communion--the very mystery of God whose very being is to be in relationship. This holy communion of persons divine and human is beneath and beyond all the forms. It is Hope is allowing something to come into life that is not self-generated. March-April 1999 Downey ¯ Luminous Traces the gift given by the Word whose name is Love beneath and beyond all other words. Amid the rubble the Spirit of God in hope comes, perhaps offering an alternative possibility to the worldview which shaped us to the core, offering in its place the possibility of creating a culture of communion as a gentle corrective in the face of the narcissism, pragmatism, and restlessness of our age. At this stage it is all too easy to offer forecasts about the forms religious life will take, in view of such factors as greater collaboration with lay associates and the need for a sharper ecclesial identity and a stronger sense of corporate mission according to the charism of an institute's founders. It would be easy to provide practical directives for the reconfiguration of community as participation in the mystery of communion. But doing so might be one more instance of clinging to the culture that is passing, of holding on to a worldview that would offer a consoling sense of certainty regarding an inevitably brighter future--replete with false promises and unreliable guarantees. Forecasts, clear pictures, and precise directions are at odds with the logic of the trace. What is yet to be will be shown as we make our way into the fullness of the trinitarian communion by following the traces, the luminous traces Christ has left in the gospel. Further, to see in Christ the trace of the trinitarian communion in which we live even now. Whatever new forms of religious life and communal commitment are coming to be will be cultivated and sustained only by prayerful participation in this holy communion wherein we may be given the courage to live with just a trace. Then follow it. In the shattering of ~hat we hold most dear, it is possible to see with new eyes, as if for the first time. Everywhere there are luminous traces of the mystery of communion, hidden from those who keep squinting.and straining for a neat and tidy worldview, or from those who want to build a religious culture of the rubble of the past. As religious communities continue to stretch their numbers and splinter yet further, astonishing acts of faith and love and hope continually spring forth between the cracks. Vowed religious go on, convinced that they will find a way forward. And, if there is no clear path ahead, they will make a way by responding to the gift of God's constant coming; they will follow the traces deeper and deeper into the mystery of communion between and among persons both human and divine. The traces shimmer, sometimes so brilliantly as to blind the clear-sighted: a dazzling darkness! At this juncture in the history of religious life, vowed members in Review for Religious communities of commitment are learning from the inside out the wisdom at the heart of the Christian mystic's experience of Light: If you want to be sure of the path you are on, then close your eyes and walk in the dark. It is hope, and hope alone, that takes the next step. And the next. Notes l Though I am describing the shift from "modernity" to "post[-I modernity," I am avoiding use of that terminology here. Helpful descrip-tions of the emergent post[-]modern consciousness include: Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Post-Modern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988); Paul Lakeland, Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragvnented Age (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997); David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: He~vneneutics, Religion, Hope (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987). 2 For a good example of the turn to historical fact in Christian the-ology, see Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980). See also Johann Baptist Metz and JOrgen Moltmann, Faith and Future: Essays on Theology, Solidarity, and Modernity (Concilium; Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995). 3 See, for example, Elizabeth Johnson, "Does God Play Dice? Divine Providence and Chance," Theological Studies 57, no. 1 (March 1996): 3- 18. 4 For a treatment of the interruptive character of history, see The Holocaust as Interruption (Concilium), ed. Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza and David Tracy (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1984). 5 For a treatment of some of the issues involved in naming the God who cannot be named, see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 6 See Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering the Felt Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 1995). 7 While others have emphasized the relational character of God and its implications for human and Christian life, I am particularly indebted to the contribution of Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1991). 8 William E Lynch, Images of Hope: Imagination as Healer of the Hopeless (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965), p.9. 9 Lynch, p. 21. 10 For a fuller treatment of my understanding of the dynamics of hope, see Michael Downey, Hope Begins V~here Hope Begins (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998). ~ Post[-]modernist Jacques Derrida uses .the image of the trace to March-April 1999 Downey ¯ Luminous Traces avoid speaking of presence. The image is also used extensively by Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur. In Ricoeur the term is associated with the distanciation of the text. What is found in the narrative of an event but the trace of the event? There is no immediate access through any kind of historical reconstruction or through the forging of univocal meaning. It is intriguing that Th4r~se of Lisieux drew on the image of the trace in speaking of her faith and confidence even in the depth and dark-ness of her trial as she neared death. The title of this presentation derives from TMr~se. She writes: "Since Jesus has reascended to heaven, I can follow him only in the traces he has left; but how luminous these traces are! How perfumed! I have only to cast a glance in the Gospels . " See her Story of a Soul, trans. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976), p. 258. ,2 For a treatment of the implications of a thoroughly relational understanding of God for the Christian spiritual life, see Catherine Mowry LaCugna and Michael Downey, "Trinitarian Spirituality," in The New Dictionmy of Catholic Spirituality, ed. Michael Downey (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993), pp. 968-982. Easter (at a retreat house surrounded by cemeteries) Our propensity (as part of nature) is to f!ll up emptiness. Graves hunger for bodies and for earth and, in time, more earth as,flesh diminishes to nothing. But emptiness is essential for God. The hollow of a nest is just right for hatching and only when egg and tomb lie empty does life emerge. Eugene Cartier Review for Religious DORIS GOTTEMOELLER Community Living: Beginning the Conversation Fmor several years I have had the growing perception that com-unity living may be the Achilles' heel of contemporary apos-tolic religious life. ("Achilles' heel" means a point of special vulnerability. Referring to the ancient myth, the dictionary defines it as "a small but mortal weakness.") Before I proceed, let me make two clarifications abdut this perception of mine. First, I see a prob-lem not with community in the abstract (an ideal which we all affirm), but with community living, an experience that is tangible and daily. Secdnd, I sense that our vulnerability consists in our inability to see what this commitment, this ideal, really requires of us. Often the mere mention of the topic brings about an awkward silence, embarrassed dismissals, or defensive equivocations. We have all heard, and perhaps even voiced, statements like these: "Community doesn't mean living under the same roof" . "My ministry is so demanding that I need time and space apart just to keep going" . "I don't want to participate in a basically dysfunctional lifestyle". "My parish [or my ministry team] is my community" . "There are no opportuni6es for community living in my locale" . and, from someone relocating her ministry, "I refuse to go from community to community and ask if they are willing to have me." Doris Gottemoeller RSlVl wrote "Religious Life: V~rhere Does It Fit in Today's Church?" in our March-April 1998 issue. The present article was her contribution to the sy~nposium at the Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth in ~,rernersville, Pennsylvania, in October 1998. Her address remains Sisters of Mercy of the A~nericas; 8300 Colesville Road #300; Silver Spring, Maryland 20910. March-April 1999 Gottemoeller * Community Living I believe that our inability or unwillingness to answer the questions of what community living means today and what our common obligation or commitment is weakens our credibility internally and externally. We ourselves have failed to get a clear vision of community that we can agree on and live together in, and outsiders take note of a number of confusing appearances. When we are ambiguous about this significant dimension of consecrated life, can we invite potential new members to explore this life? A number of factors and circumstances have brought us to this point of confusion and uncertainty. The adaptation and renewal mandated by Vatican Council II led us to discard many styles and expressions of community that are no longer relevant to contemporary culture and ministry. Economic factors such as the loss of parish convents, the conversion of former motherhouses to other uses, and the withdrawal from many sponsored ministries (hospitals, colleges, high schools) meant that sisters have had to seek other places to live. These are usually rented (and therefore impermanent), not associated with a ministry site, and able to accommodate only a small number--one, two, or three sisters. In these transitions we were clearer about what we were discarding than what we were choosing. (Indeed, we make choices of living arrangements today amid a flurry of considerations: companionship; cost; proximity to work, family, community members, other friends, and doctors; comfort; witness to simplicity; and so forth. All of them are legitimate, but not all are equally significant to the congregation's mission.) Moreover, after a site for community living has been chosen, there is often no set of expectations concerning behavior in one another's regard. A further indication of the silence that surrounds this issue is the nonreception given the 1994 document on community published by the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL): "Fraternal Life in Community." In my view this document is a clear and sympathetic statement of the present situation of community living, offered "to support the efforts made by many communities of religious, both men and women, to improve the quality" of their community life (§6). Its composition was preceded by co.nsultation with religious in many parts of the world. It has, however, been largely unnoticed or ignored by religious--for several possible reasons. The first is, of course, its unfortunate tide.~ A second possible reason was voiced by a sister in my community: "It gives an excellent presentation of Review for Religious ? the present situation, but the solutions offered are not helpful." Is this not tantamount to an admission that the responsibility for finding solutions belongs with us? A third possible reason is the widespread resistance to any consideration of the topic--in other words, our Achilles' heel. We were not yet ready in 1994 to entertain any discussion of this issue that lies close to the heart of our vocation. Perhaps we are still not ready. But in the interest of testing that premise--and of beginning a conversation--I would offer some starting points. These reflections are offered in response to six questions: (1) What are we talking about when we talk about community life? (2) What is its theological basis? (3) What can we say about a spirituality for community living? (4) What is the role of leadership in community living? (5) What are some special challenges to living community life today? (6) What can we do to renew this dimension of our community life? Note that these questions do not focus on the past, on our previous experience of community living, or on all the factors that have altered it or contributed to our present situation. Some current resources for the reflection are "Fraternal Life in Community" and the apostolic exhortation on consecrated life, Vita consecrata. In addition, and more significantly, each congregation brings its own charism, mission, and experience to the consideration of community living, and the insights shared and directions chosen will not necessarily be the same for each congregation. What are we talking about when we talk about community living? It is impossible to describe community living in a way that anticipates every circumstance, style, and modality. As noted above, we are not talking about an abstract idea, but about a social experience. I would suggest that, put as simply as possible, community living is what happens when two or more people relate to one another in a significant, mutually beneficial, and ongoing way. A significant relationship is one which is weighty, valuable, more than casual; it is multidimensional, not just spiritual, financial, social, or spatial. It is more than spiritual, that is, meeting regularly to pray together. It is more than financial, that is, sharing resources and accountability for the use of Community living is what happens when two or more people relate to one another in a significant, mutually beneficial, and ongoing way. March-April 1999 Gottemoeller * Community Living them, It Jis more than social, that is, gathering for periodic card games, meals, nights out, and so forth. It is more than spatial, that is, living under the same roof or in close proximity to one another. The relationship is significant because all of these dimensions are integrated in a mutually beneficial and ongoing way. A mutually beneficial relationship contributes to the greater integrity and well-being of each participant. It is not crippled by immature dependencies, but strives for a healthy adult mutuality of responsible caring. "Carrying one another's burdens" in time of sickness or special need is an obligfition and a privilege of community life. The benefits sought and exchanged are on many levels, for example, relationship, spirituality, ministry, and, in some cases, mentorship in a new way of life. Finally, I would suggest that a bona. fide experience of community living is ongoing. It is a stable, predictable arrangement, not a succession of sporadic episodes or chance encounters:~ In essence, community members say to one another, "I will be there for youl you c~n count on me," whatever the circumstance or need. Continuity is essential to build trust and undergird mutual expectations. Notice that this description of community living does not say anything about specific situations such as living alone, in twosomes, or in large or small communities. It should be clear, however, that "two or more people in a significant, stable, mutually growthful relationship" does not include busy professionals who only cohabit for the sake of convenier~ce and economic efficiency. It does not include "boarding houses" where anonymity and inde~pendence are the chief values. Instead, .we are talking about good-faith efforts to live a principal value of religious life. With few exceptions it will include a common residence. What is the theological basis for community living? This is a question calculated to make the eyes glaze over, because it sounds so theoretical. It is, however, the fundamental question of motivation. Why do we choose a life of community? Beyond economy, efficiency, convenience, friendship, or natural attraction, what are the reasons that are rooted' in faith, that speak to the core of our identity as apostolic religious? Are there reasons which flow from our commitment toseek God that we call a~religious vocation? I would suggest two lines of reasoning or justification for community living, starting from personal call or vocation and from ecclesial identity. Review for Religious Each of us experienced a call to a way of life, an invitation from Jesus Christ to a life of greater intimacy. We joined our various congregations because membership in that congregation makes pursuit of that way of life possible. A "way of life" is a constellation of fundamental life choices having an internal coherence and consistency. One's way of life is defined by choices about relationship to God, to the Christian community, to sexuality, to possessions, to companions, to those in need. The way of life known as religious life is a radical response to the call of Jesus who says, "I am the way." The internal coherence of a way of life means that all the parts reinforce one another. For example, community life supports and is shaped by the practice of evangelical poverty. Together we share our earnings to provide for our needs and the needs of others. Together we decide how much is enough, whether for today or for our future. A single person living alone in the world could take a vow of poverty, but it would not be the same vow that religious take. It would differ in its expression and its obligations. Similarly, community life supports and is shaped by the practice of the vow of celibacy. Together we can accept the loneliness of unmarried life because of the companionship of one another. Together we witness to the surpassing love of Christ Jesus, who calls us to be for one another in community. And so forth. Obedience, prayer, mission-- all are shaped by and within community. Community living is not an accidental dimension of the way of life we have chosen, but a determinant of the way in which we realize every other dimension. This assertion needs special emphasis with respect to ministry. Before the synod on consecrated life, there was a fear expressed in some quarters that the outcome would be an affirmation of "consecration" over against "mission," of being vs. doing, and that this emphasis would be used to promote a quasi-monastic lifestyle. In actuality, however, the synod document expresses a beautiful integration of consecration and mission: "By the action of the Holy Spirit who is at the origin of every vocation and charism, consecrated life itself is a mission, as was the whole of Jesus' life" (§72). In other words, the life itself, in every dimension and in its totality, is apostolic. Therefore, if the demands of ministry are such as to diminish adherence to the other aspeCts--for example, prayer or community life or obedience--then an imbalance has been created which needs to be corrected. A reflection on the relationship of ministry to community is a March-April 1999 Gottemoeller * Community Living good segue into a reflection on the ecclesial identity of religious life and its implications for community living. Vita consecrata presents community living as an especially eloquent sign of ecclesial community, that is, of the church's fundamental identity. Community demonstrates that sharing in trinitarian communion can change human relationships and create a new type of solidarity, not built on family ties or natural attraction, but on common values and commitments. "In this way it speaks to people both of the beauty of fraternal communidn and of the ways which actually lead to it. Consecrated persons live 'for' God and 'from' God, and precisely for this reason they are able to bear witness to the reconciling power of grace, which overcomes the divisive tendencies present in" the human heart and in society" (§41). Community is described as a "God-enlightened space in which to experience the presence of the risen Lord" (§42). It is a life in communion, which signifies and enriches the church and renders it better able to carry out its mission. Of course, being a sign of something implies a certain visibility. We have to ask: To what extent is our experience of community living visible? Who knows that sisters are present in an apartment building, a neighborhood, or a parish, and what does it sayto them? People in the world today hunger for an experience of community, for evidence that it is possible. In fact, a few years ago a group of intellectuals and public-policy experts formed a new movement called the communitarian movement. Its goal is to strengthen participatory democracy and to call on citizens to balance rampant individualism with a concern for the common good. Healthy religious communities balance individual needs with the common good day after day, in small ways and large. We do it out of love for God and for the sake of mission. If we find ways to share this experience with others, it can make the church more visible and be a gift to the world. What can we say about a spirituality for community? If the theological question deals with the why of community, the spirituality question deals with the how. What kind of spiritual focus, what kinds of practices, nourish and support community life? The first hallmark of community is that it be apostolic or outer-directed. "Not for ourselves alone" should be the watchword. As we said above, consecrated life is apostolic in its very essence. It is not that persons in religious congregations do apostolic works or have individual ministries, but that the whole way of life is for the sake of Review for Religious making visible and attractive the love of God. Community life, therefore, as an intrinsic element of the consecrated life, should be mission oriented in its intentionality and expression. An apostolic community welcomes neighbors and friends and even, at times, aliens and strangers. An apostolic community weaves the needs of the world into its spiritual consciousness and common prayer. An apostolic community shares its resources with the needy. An apostolic community responds to the concerns and priorities of the larger congregation. An apostolic community welcomes new members and introduces them to the way of life. In short, an apostolic community is not turned in on itself, isolated and self-sufficient, but open to receive and share with others. Community life is nourished by dialogu4 and prayer, ritual and celebrations. We are embodied people who need tangible expressions and symbols of shared values and commitments. From time to time we need to say what we believe in, what we question and wonder about, what we care about, and we need to hear others do the same. Every local community will have its own points of intersection, its own rhythm of coming together to speak to one another and together to speak to God. Many of today's religious entered their congregations at a time when the lifestyle was burdened with customs and practices that were no longer appropriate for contemporary life. In rejecting these, however, we sometimes lost sight of the fac.t that we still need tangible expressions of common beliefs and values. In a healthy community life, regular expectations, mutually agreed on, are complemented by spontaneous gatherings and special events. Prayer together furnishes moments of special intimacy. The congregation, in its constitutions and policies, should articulate some expectations that are common to all settings, while leaving room for local creativity. It is too great a burden for local groups to renegotiate everything every year or whenever there is a change in the membership. The common expectations should incorporate congregational feasts, texts, and traditions. Community life requires asceticism. No surprise here! We all Community demonstrates that sharing in trinitarian communion can change human relationships and create a new type of solidarity. March-April 1999 Gottemoeller * Communi~ Living know that community living involves virtues and practices such as self-discipline, generosity, tolerance, and patience. It requires deliberate choices to be available to others, even to be inconvenienced by them. From time to time it gives us opportunities to "bear wrongs patiently" and to seek and to give forgiveness. Community life :is a privileged venue for discernment. The evangelical counsel that is most intrinsic to community life is obedience, not only in the sense of approvals for ministry and residence choices, but also in the sense of holding oneself open to the ongoing promptings of the Spirit in both small matters and large. The place where those prompfings can be heard, the persons who can articulate them, are often found in the local setting. Members in community are not on individual spiritual journeys that only occasionally intersect, but on a shared journey where the challenge or misadventure of one can become an opportunity for all. What is the role of leadership in creating and sustah~ing community? Over the years I have noticed the ease with which we affirm leadership in ministry and the difficulty we have affirming it in community. For example, if someone is an excellent principal or parish administrator or earns an award or grant for a creative ministry project, we are happy to congratulate her and to publish the achievement. We fail to notice, however, that congregations also have members with natural gifts for leadership within community. Here I am not thinking particularly of administrative skills, but of the ability to call the members to unity, to prayer, to responsibility for shared commitments, to celebration, and to reconciliation when needed. Years ago these were some of the responsibilities of the local superior. But now, with that role largely absorbed by province administration and with a collegial lifestyle in the local setting, we no longer have access to, nor honor, these gifts for community building. 1 am not suggesting that congregations institute an annual award for community, but I do want to point out that some sisters have special gifts for bringing out the best in the rest of us. By their example and by their initiative they help us create a more vibrant community life. Further, I suggest that this is not a second-order gift, less important than the ability to create and sustain new or difficult ministries. It is an essential gift that needs to be recognized and affirfi~ed for itself. This is particularly true because the sister Review for Religious who is especially adept at community building is often someone who is especially good at attracting, inviting, and welcoming new members, an activity that is vital to the congregation's future. I suspect that the gifts for community building are more widespread than we realize and that, by honoring them, we may encourage one another to cultivate them. In his book Religious Life as Adventure, Albert DiIanni SM says that the effective regeneration of religious communities depends on leadership from below, arising from the religious instincts at the grass roots. He counters to a degree the Nygren-Ukeritis study indicating the importance of visionary leadership for successful renewal. He suggests that this study may contain a hidden assumption, namely, that the present crisis in religious life is a functional one, a lack of leadership skills. In contrast, he maintains that the crisis has deeper roots, that it is a crisis of enthusiasm and faith, and that, if this is so, nothing will serve but a conversion of heart in a significant number of members at the base, a re-forming of congregations at the level of their faith.2 We all know of places where community is lived with special vibrancy, authenticity, and zeal. We all have women in our midst who live the life with generosity and joy. One problem we face is that too often these individuals are isolated from one another and thus their influence is dissipated. They can grow discouraged and settle into ruts of middle-class complacency--then the congregation's mission and charism are further diminished, less visible. My leadership team once had a conversation about the possibility of bringing some of these sisters together to create a "critical mass." We rejected the idea because we did not want to seem to be recognizing an "elite," or to suggest that what is required of.a Sister of Mercy is beyond the reach of any member. We decided that what is needed for vibrant communities are clear expectations, clearly expressed and honored by all. The goal is for every expression of community living to be intentional rather than associational. What are some special challenges to living community life today? There are a number of them. They are signs of our times, and represent significant challenges for individuals and congreghtions desirous of renewing community life. One is our relationship to the life of the parish and the local church. At one time most local communities were associated with parishes. The parish convent and the sisters in residence there were a symbol of the compassionate face of the church, a center of hospitality and help in time of need, March-April 1999 Gottemoeller ¯ Community Living and a witness to the reality of our way of life. Today there is no common venue where we are present. For those who would like to know more about us, there is no place to "look" for us. Perhaps a communal choice to participate in a specific parish community-- rather than shopping around for liturgies at convenient times or with congenial celebrants--might be a means of community renewal and public visibility. Related to the demise of the parish convent is the general disappearance of congregational properties for community living. As motherhouses are sold or converted to other uses and as sisters are dispersed into varied ministries, congregations have fewer sites that can accommodate a community gathering of more than two or three. Sisters gravitate into apartments because it seems there are no other choices. Congregations favor rentals because they cannot afford to purchase properties or because they have no assurance that" sisters will use congregational properties if they make them available. Of course, if a congregation's commitment to community life includes, for example, common prayer, hospitality, public witness, and multigenerational living, that commitment would involve making suitable residences available and using them. Another challenge is our simultaneous participation in multiple and sometimes intersecting communities. Our parish, our ministry setting, our professional colleagues, our family, and our friends can all make legitimate claims on us. In addition, we may be drawn to specific ecclesial and social groups such as the charismatic movement, the pro-life movement, or Call to Action. These commitments can enrich community life or strain it beyond endurance. It calls for a special discernment to strike the right balance, but participation in community life should enjoy a priority in virtue of its connection to the essence of our vowed commitment. A further challenge is the responsibility for the care of aging parents. Surely no one has a greater call on our generosity than those who have given us life. In some cases it means taking time outside other community and ministry duties to help with shopping, transportation, and similar needs. Occasionally the only way to respond to parents' needs may be to move into the family home in order to provide day-to-day assistance. These situations call for a special sensitivity on the part of community members to different family circumstances. An important question is: How can they share the burden and support one or more individual members in their ministry to their parents? Review for Religious Perhaps the most difficult challenge is the drift towards living alone. There are, of course, some reasons that justify this option. Most congregations have a few members whose psychological health is so fragile that they are unable to cope with the requirements of community living. Sometimes their coping mechanisms involve behaviors that make it extremely difficult for community members to live with them. These conditions warrant living alone, for as long as the conditions persist. It is a special responsibility of leadership to support the well-being of these members. To take another case, some ministry needs would go unmet were it not for some sisters' willingness to live, for a time, apart from the daily support of community life. A question for discernment is whether or not the ministry was chosen precisely to justify .living alone. As in the case of sisters living with aging parents, community members will want to reach out to support the individual who is at a distance. Beyond these two circumstances (and absence for the purpose of study), there is a growing tendency to justify living alone solely on the basis of personal choice. Where this choice has gained a legitimacy on a par with other community choices, the congregation's community life would seem severely compromised. Such a. choice--particularly if the sisters are healthy and actively engaged in ministry--deprives other members of the benefits of their companionship and reduces the number of community settings available. Further, the choice fails to uphold the responsibility to provide communities that can nurture new membership. Unfortunately, in some congregations the issue of living alone is so neuralgic that it cannot even be discussed, let alone challenged. Finally, our experiences and desires regarding community living are affected by intergenerational and multicultural issues. Age and ethnicity (and sociocultural background, education, ministry experience, and other factors too) may condition one's style of participating in community. At times these differences may be experienced as gift, at other times as limitation. The need to In some congregations the issue of living alone is so neuralgic that it cannot even be discussed, let alone challenged. March-April 1999 ,Gottemoeller ¯ Community Livin~ integrate these differences sensitively is one more reason for being clear about the congregation's expectations for community living. Moreover, in a world torn' by division and conflicting interests, "the presence of communities where people of different ages, languages, and cultures meet as brothers and sisters, and which remain united despite the inevitable conflicts and difficulties inherent in common life, is in itself a sign that bears witness to a higher reality.''3 What steps can we take to renew our community life? First, we can break the silence. We need to ask questions like: What would attract a young person to investigate our way of life? How would we welcome a potential new member and show her what our life is like? How is my spirituality nourished from our communal roots? How .does our way of life give visible witness to simplicity, communal sharing, prayer, love for one another, zeal for the gospel? We can no longe~r take for granted that nothing can be said about these matters. We may discover, in the conversation, that there is a hunger among us to talk about expectations, to be challenged out of complacency, and to live our communal life more intensely. In addition to beginning a conversation, we can resolve to "go with the life," wherever it is happening. We can affirm the vibrant communities that already exist, recognizing that they are not just happy accidents, but the fruit of effort and conviction. We can direct our financial and personal resources toward creating new communities among individuals who are willing to take the risk. We can invite other members to join existing communities that are vibrant. We can share our experience of community with associates, parishioners, inquirers, in ever widening circles. But this will be effective only if at the center a group of deeply'committed religious are living their vocation with sincerity and passion. I began these reflections by asserting that our inability to be clear about our understanding of and commitment to community living is a potentially fatal weakness. What followed were some thoughts designed to prompt the discussion and discernment that most congregations urgently need. Let me cite here a phrase that is the subtide of the document "Fraternal Life in Community": "The Love of Christ Gathers Us into Unity." This phrase captures the motive and dynamism of community life. Only the love of Christ is enough to support and sustain this way of life. Love attracts and gathers us. The process is never finished, always calling us to greater unity, greater generosity, greater zeal. This is an ideal from which we will all fall short, but one which will never be approached Review for Religious unless it is articulated in behavioral expectations appropriate to the charism and mission of a congregation. Not everything has been said here, but perhaps these reflections will be enough to break the silence and begin the conversation. The time has come, I believe, for us to consider community living with fresh eyes. The consideration can be the key to our ongoing conversion and our authentic renewal. Notes ~ During a visit with the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life in 1993, the officers of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Conference of Maior Superiors of Men pointed out the unsuitability of the title. The only recognition of our objection, how-ever, is a note saying: "In this text, 'fraternal' and 'fraternity' refer inclu-sively to both women and men and are, in the iudgment of the translators, the words most apt in English for conveying the fullness and warmth of communion which lies at the heart of community." 2 New York: Society of St. Paul, 1994, pp. 96-97. The Nygren- Ukeritis study referred to is "Religious-Leadership Competencies," Review for Religious 52, no. 3 (May-June 1993): 390-417. 3 "Fraternal Life in Community" (1994), §56. How Often Must I Forgive? (Matthew 18) The first purple crocuses of spring forgive your indifference, your neglect of alleluias at sunshine and the reassuring spill of birdsong . from still-bare maples. March forgives your detraction and contempt for its necessary gusts and its mud like that made by Jesus with spittle and now rubbed on the face of your yard to cure it of winter. Pa~ricia Schnapp RSM March-April 1999 1dO - - LEON McKENZIE The Credibility of Jesus' Resurrection: Two Interior Witnesses St. Augustine of Hippo once asked a fascinating question about the believability of Jesus' resurrection from the dead.1 The raising of a dead man to life was as much a mystery of unspeakable proportions then as it is today, and Augustine wondered whether the proclamation of the resurrection is credible or incredible. Suppose bodily resurrection is essentially unbelievable. From Augustine's perspective in the early 5th century, most of the world believed that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. This raised two points for consideration. On the one hand, if millions of Christians believed despite the incredibility of the Gospels, belief in the resurrection would itself be miraculous and a sign from God supporting the Christian message. On the other hand, if multitudes of Christians believed because the resurrection is credible, it would imply the resurrection is essentially believable. Nonbelievers, then, must ask themselves why they find it impossible to believe. The saint's scholarship in the art of persuasion and logic is evidenced in his formulation of the question. After reflecting seriously on the issue, it is with some ease Leon McKenzie EdD, professor emeritus at Indiana University, recendy published Pagan Resurrection Myths and the Resurrection of Jesus: .4 Christian Perspective. His address is 274 Adrienne Drive; Greenwood, Indiana 46142. Review for Religious that one arrives at the conclusion that the proclamation of Jesus' resurrection is highly credible. The Appeal of the Kerygrna The resurrection was credible to early Christians, in part because they heard the Good News heralded by apostles who were soon to suffer for the truth of what they announced. After the last of the apostles died, others announced the gospel, often at the risk of their lives. As historians note, those who heard the testimony of the martyrs and early apologists accepted the Good News of Jesus' resurrection in very large numbers. Beyond the valor of those who preached the resurrection, the message itself possessed its own intrinsic appeal. Evidently something subtle was working in the lives of converts to the Way, as the Christian life was called, something that made the Good News eminently credible. I suggest that two interior witnesses of great power were at work: the voice of the resurrection archetype and the voice of the Holy Spirit. The Resurrection Archetype An archetype is a pattern in the mind and a standard for discerning meaning. The profound depths of each human heart are shaped in such a manner as to influence a favorable response to the message of resurrection. This archetype can be compared, in a manner of speaking, to an instinct for what is true and good, to a natural power to grasp what is tremendously significant for human existence. This meaning structure of the human psyche, I propose, has been learned over countless years of universal human experience. The resurrection archetype cultivates a natural appetite for the central proclamation of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus. The testimony of the Holy Spirit builds on this natural archetype and urges us, at the supernatural level, to affirm Jesus' resurrection as God's decisive word in history. The resurrection archetype takes its form from everyday experiences of members of the human race. The great theme of death and resurrection is etched indelibly on the world. The workings of the world reveal the death-and-resurrection motif in ordinary natural processes. Sometimes our experiences of these March-April 1999 For those who look, death and resurrection themes positively abound in our experience of the world. McKenzie ¯ The Credibility of Jesus' Resurrection patterns of death and resurrection are so subtle that we fail to advert to them consciously. Nonetheless, these daily "texts" spelling out the meaning of the cosmos eventually enter into our hearts. Someone once said, "A perfume of promise is in the air." Even in the natural world, the very air seems to hold a promise of resurrection. Many resurrectiori themes are active in our daily lives. All we need do to discover these motifs is observe and reflect. Five of these experiences of death and resurrection are presented here: (1) the daily death and resurrection of the sun, (2) the burial of seeds in the fall and the resurrection of vegetation in the spring, (3) the death of joy that occurs in emotional depression and the eventual resurrection to a new life of happiness, (4) the promise of resurrection in the life cycles of small crawling creatures, and (5) our death each night in sleep and our resurrection in the morning. It must be emphasized again these are simply representative examples~ For those who look, death and resurrection themes positively abound in our experience of the world. The Daily Death and Resurrection of the Sun Each day the sun is born in the east. On many days the arrival of the sun is accompanied by a spectacular show of its glory. The golden disk goes across the sky and descends into the darkness beyond the western horizon at night. We can only imagine the power of this experience for ancient peoples who lacked a scientific explanation of what was happening. Even for us who have a scientific explanation, the experience is substantial. What dies in the gloom of the western horizon arises again in the glory of the morning sky. The Burial of Seeds and the Resurrection of Vegetation How mystifying it must have been for ancient peoples to watch the burial of seeds in the fall and the subsequent resurrection of flowers, young saplings, and crops in the spring. This universal experience of death and resurrection inscribed itself deeply in the Review for Religious human .psyche and was the cause of festivals of joy and promise. This experience was the source of myths of hope, once stripped of fantastic and sometimes bizarre details. Celebrations of new life and stories of renewed life reinforced the resurrection archetype. The Death of Joy and the Resurrection of New Life Perhaps every normal individual has experienced the death of joy on the occasion of the ordinary depression associated with such events as the death of a loved one, the loss of a friend due to a thoughtless word, the loss of a job, and even the losing of a pet dog or cat. Some persons undergo more serious depression and begin to believe they will never again experience happiness. Eventually the day arrives when joy returns, laughter is possible, and a resurrection of sorts takes place. The resurrection archetype grows stronger in our heart of hearts. The Promise of Resurrection in Small Crawling Creatures There is a hint of the resurrection of Christ, and our own resurrections with him, even in the small crawling creatures of the natural world. The larval grubs entombed in the earth emerge as beeries. The caterpillar wraps itself in a chrysalis only to come forth again as a beautiful butterfly. In its most elemental forms, nature displays signs of resurrection hope. Ancient peoples, much less distracted than we are today, could, not have missed reflecting on what meaning resides in the transformations of the least of God's creatures. The Death of Sleep and the Resurrection to Consciousness Perhaps nothing in our lives comes closer to modeling the death and resurrection motif in our experience of the natural world than the phenomenon of sleep. We lose ourselves in sleep and put aside conscious advertence only to regain ourselves and our consciousness in the daily resurrection that occurs with our awakening. At one level of explanation, we fall asleep because we are tired and arise because we are refreshed. At a more profound level of interpretation, we fall asleep and rise again as a sign of death and resurrection. These repeated experiences, universal in their scope among human beings, wrought profound developments in the resurrection meaning-structures of the collective unconscious of the race. It is not at all difficult to believe that God put resurrection motifs into March-April 1999 McKenzie ¯ The Credibility of Jesus' Resurrection the world as promises of the defining event in human history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Functions of the Resurrection Archetype How has the resurrection archetype functioned? First, after taking form in the hearts of people who lived long ages ago, it found its way into myths that sages and storytellers told and retold about gods who died and came to life again--particularly agricultural gods, in accord with the seasons of growing. How these myths may have come to be is an interesting process, but one that is too complicated to review within this brief article.2 Suffice it to say that the resurrection archetype was the primary guide for the mythmakers who created "once upon a time" stories of gods who regularly descended to the underworld and returned later. Frequently these myths were used to explain why vegetation died in the fall and was reborn in the spring. Second, in accord with divine providence, the archetype worked to prepare the way for the acceptance of the risen Lord. After Jesus' resurrection, it continued providentially to provide, at a natural level, an interior witness to his resurrection. Upon hearing the announcement of Jesus' resurrection, a bystander who was open to God might think, "This sounds very interesting. This message resonates in my soul. The proclamation of Jesus' resurrection is supported by my entire experience of the workings of the world. Perhaps my experience of the death and resurrection themes in nature was God's way of preparing me for this message about Jesus." Now this initial natural attraction to the notion of Jesus' resurrection would probably not be put into words. Instead, the bystander in the preceding paragraph probably experienced an unspoken intuition that stirred a natural feeling favorable to the Good News. For some indefinable reason in the bystander's mind, he or she would have felt drawn to the message. Creation and the Resurrection Archetype One final issue about the archetype must be considered. The resurrection archetype" in the depths of the human psyche grew out of the universal experience of the resurrection theme in the workings of the world. But how did it happen that these Review for Religious resurrection motifs came to exist in the world? The answer is related to the very creation of the world. We read in Genesis that God created the heavens and earth and "the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (Gn 1:1-2). In the act of creation God rescued the world from its own nothingness. From nothingness God brought forth a dynamic world that participates in his own being. This "stamped" the world, so to speak, with the pattern of death and resurrection. The very act of bringing cosmos out of chaos is the fundamental motif of death and resurrection that is repeated everywhere in the workings of the world. The resurrection themes we experience it the world are the "traces" of the first act of creation. They are reminders of creation. The signs of resurrection manifested in the world of our experience are hallmarks of a God who brings forth something out of nothing and life out of death, a God who does things we might deem "impossible." We are heirs of the Father with Jesus, and our inheritance is everlasting life. The Holy Spirit The second interior witness to the truth of Jesus' resurrection is the Holy Spirit. One of the most revealing New Testament passages concerning the Holy Spirit's testimony to the resurrection of Jesus is Romans 8:1-17. The passage speaks to a number of major ideas. It seems as if St. Paul experienced a flood of rich insights as he dictated his letter to his scribe Tertius. "The mind that is seton the flesh is hostile to God," Paul says; "it does not submit to God's law---indeed, it 'cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God." A little further along Paul says, "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you." Finally, Paul concludes this passage by noting, "When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ." The Holy Spirit is our interior witness to several truths, all of March-April 1999 McKenzie ¯ The Credibility of Jesus' Resurrection which are closely connected. First, we are children of God because Christ has set us free from the flesh, that is, from that part of us that is unredeemed. We are, in fact, on intimate, terms with the Father and even address him as Abba or Papa. Second, we are heirs of the Father with Jesus, and our inheritance is everlasting life. This is the life to which Jesus was raised after his death and burial. Third, this inheritance is due precisely to the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead. The Holy Spirit gives witness within us to our adoption, to the risen Christ, and to our inheritance of Jesus' everlasting life. The Holy Spirit testifies to the truth of the resurrection. Credence in the "Incredible" Humanly speaking, and looking only to the surface of things, it seems incredible that someone who is dead could be raised to a new life. Note that Jesus was not merely resuscitated or revived to life in the old flesh. He rose to life in a glorified body (I Co 15:1-47). In the days after the ascension and before the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, some might have thought that the message of Jesus' resurrection had "almost no chance of being accepted. But those who heard the announcement of Jesus' resurrection--the proclamation of an event long before it became a teaching--not only affirmed the resurrection, but did so in large numbers. People believed not only because they heard the words of the aposdes and their successors, but also because they were attuned to what they heard in their own hearts. That so many new people accepted the Good News of Jesus' resurrection from the dead in the 1 st century and that the Christian faith became so widespread in such a short time seems miraculous. The testimony of credible witnesses such as the apostles to something that seemed incredible in human terms, namely, the raising of a crucified "criminal" to a new life, evoked strong affirmations of faith. Such affirmations, however, would have been futile without the interior testimony of the resurrection archetype at the natural level of human existence and the testimony of the Holy Spirit at the supernatural level. The interior witness of the resurrection archetype and the Holy Spirit transformed a . proclamation that seemed incredible into. something utterly . -I-~6-I believable and altogether inviting. Review for Religious Notes ~ St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. G. Walsh et al. (New York: Doubleday Image Books, 1958), pp. 505-508. 2 See my Pagan Resurrection Myths and the Resurrection of Jesus: A Christian Perspective (Charlottesville, Virginia: Bookwrights Press, 1997). The Recital Sacred was the silence as the tiny woman caressed the keys almost~ possessively. This was bliss: seven cherished friends gathered to hear her heart's story, eager to let her bare the glory of a soul poured out in ardent prayer. She knew they knew she met her God through her Magnificat of making music. Anna Marie Mack SSJ March-April 1999 -.157 CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT From Woundedness to Union ~early fifteen years ago, in his now classic Lost Christianity, .&. ¯ Jacob Needleman argued the need for an "intermediate Christianity" that might bridge the gap between the religion's lofty spiritual teachings and the ability of the average Christian to put them into practice. "Stone must become water before it can flow," he writes. "The pathos of Christendom. is that of preaching to stones that they must flow into the ocean.''~ Midway through the book there is a cameo app.earance by the Catholic monk Father Thomas Keating, at the time (1978) abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Here he and a few associates were experimenting with a new prayer form called centering prayer, aimed at expressing the essence of the Christian contemplative heritage in a simplified form accessible to contemporary Christians. In the course of a lengthy interview, Needleman expresses excitement that Keating's experiments might be headed toward recovering that lost link, though he stops short of commending them outright. Among the many debts of gratitude I owe to this book is that it was my introduction to Thomas Keating, who has subsequently become my teacher and friend. In the sixteen years since that Cynthia Bourgeault PhD is founding director of the Maine Monastic Foundation, a network of people attempting to live the contemplative life in the world according to the Benedictine Rule. She is also an Episcopal priest, adjunct professor of spirituality at Bangor Theological Seminary, and a developmental editor for Thomas Keating. The current article has been slightly adapted from one published in Gnosis, No. 34 (Winter 1995). Her address is 526 Isabella Point Road; Salt Spring Island, British Columbia; V8K 1V3 Canada. Review for Religious interview at Spencer, there have been significant developments. A year after Lost Christianity was published, Keating resigned as abbot of Spencer and "retired" to the small mountain monastery of St. Benedict's in Snowmass, Colorado. There local interest in centering prayer quickly snowballed into a national organization called Contemplative Outreach Ltd., now a decade old and some fifteen thousand members strong. In the effort to develop a conceptual framework for the growing ranks of practitioners, Keating has produced a series of books--Open Mind, Open Heart (1987), Invitation to Love (1992), and Intimacy with God (1994)---in which he develops an increasingly cohesive and subtle vision of the Christian spiritual journey, the path of inner transformation that begins when one embraces a regular practice of centering prayer. Keating says, "The method of centering prayer was specifically developed as a dialogue between contemporary psychological models and the classic language of the Christian spiritual path." That "classic language," which envisions a progression through purgative, illuminative, and unitive stages, has guided the journey of many a saint, but for many reasons both good and bad it often fails to resonate with the spirit of our own times, where the prevailing paradigm for transformation consists of woundedness, recovery, and wellness. ls there a way of integrating these visions? Keating's system is an attempt to do just that--to sketch out a road map which begins in woundedness and ends, if one follows it all the way, in transforming union. While most of the elements are individually familiar, the system itself represents a significant new synthesis. Furthermore it is yoked to a powerful meditational praxis through which people change more quickly and deeply than through any other method I have seen. It is not exactly an "intermediate Christianity" according to Needleman's specifications, which he defines as "the accumulation of the force of inner attention" (p. 119). But, functionally, Keating seems to be achieving the desideratum that Needleman described so eloquently: to help stones become water, to take the first steps toward significant inner transformation within a classically Christian framework. Not All Meditation Is Alike Before exploring the intricacies of Keating's paradigm, it is first necessary to understand something of the properties of centering March-April 1999 Bo_ur~eault * From Woundedness to Union prayer. While common understanding might consider all meditational methods basically interchangeable in that they begin by gathering the mind and end by transcending it, Keating's entire teaching rests on the assertion that centering prayer is a distinct method whose most apparent characteristic is a tendency to trigger the unconscious. This discovery, which grew out of direct observation rather than theory, came several years after the progress report in Lost Christianity~ At that time Keating and his associates Father William Meninger and Father Basil Pennington were still thinking in terms of a renewal of contemplative prayer, the creation of an inherently Christian meditation in response to the massive defection of younger Catholics to Eastern meditational paths. Based largely on the 14th-century text The Cloud of Unknowing, centering prayer took its place among other Christian meditational forms sprouting at the time, particularly Christian Zen prayer and the "Christian Meditation" of Dora John Main. It was a devotional method pure and simple, a way of deepening and intensifying the relationship with God. There was at that point no psychological underpinning attached to it, nor even a clue that one might exist. Then in 1983 a charter group of centering-prayer initiates organized the first ten-day Centering Prayer Intensive at the Lama Foundation in San Cristobal, New Mexico, hoping to achieve a more concentrated meditative experience on the general model of a Zen sesshin. While Keating and several others in the group were well-experienced in sesshins, no one was prepared for the volume and vibrancy of emotional outpouring that flooded forth from five hours a day of centering prayer. Tears, repressed memories, deep intuitions all came to the surface in a jumble, along with a sense of catharsis and bonding among the dozen participants that to this day has not faded. From his years as abbot, Keating was used to the gradual sensitizing of the unconscious during the course of contemplative life, but not with such speed and intensity. He recalls seeing "people going through in ten days what it might have taken them twenty years to go through at a monastery." He quickly realized he had a tiger by the tail, and it did not take long to figure out why: it lay in the methodology of the prayer itself. Most meditational methods are concentrative in nature: they start by gathering and focusing the attention, whether by repeating Review for Religious a mantra, following the breath, or focusing on bodily sensation. With centering prayer, however, one starts at the opposite end of the spectrum, "not with attention, but with intention," as Keating puts it. The intention in this case is simply to rest in the presence of God beyond all thought and emotion. A "sacred word" is used in the prayer, but not as a mantra, to be repeated consistently as a focal point .for attention, but simply as a touchstone for intent: when one finds oneself attracted to a thought or emotion during the course of prayer, the sacred word simply serves as a reminder to let go of the thought and rest in the bare presence of God. Thus thoughts may--and do---come and go; the idea is to develop a detached attitude .toward them. One reaches contemplation through the access point of consent, not through focused attention. If meditational methods were arranged on a scale from most concentrative to most receptive, centering prayer would be at the far end of the receptive methods, dropping below even the bare awareness of vipassana (insight) meditation or dzogchen. As Keating suspected--and transpersonal psychology has subsequently confirmed--the more receptive the meditational method, the greater the involvement of the unconscious. Concentrative methods tend to retard this "unloading of the unconscious," as Keating terms it. Receptive methods, on the other hand, foster it, particularly in an intensive group situation such as at that pioneering Lama retreat. But Keating's real intuitive leap was to recognize the import of this observation: this unloading of the unconscious was not an inconsequential side effect, but a significant purification process at work. This was the connecting link he had long been looking for, between purification as traditionally presented in Christian teaching (as a reprogramming of conscious motivation, or the struggle against sin) and the realization by contemporary psychology that such reprogramming goes only skin-deep and in fact can cause serious damage if used for repression and denial of unconscious impulses. "The real ascesis is the purification of unconscious With centering prayer, one starts at the opposite end of the spectrum, "not with attention, but with intention," as Keating puts it. Bourgeault ¯ From Woundedness to Union L ¯ J motives," Keating had long argued--but how to get at them? With centering prayer as a catalyst for the release of unconscious elements, he found his tool and his paradigm. Apophatic Psychotherapy Keating's teaching begins by fundamentally repositioning meditation in the context of a spiritual praxis. Rather than seeing it as a tool for developing concentration, relaxing stress, or accessing higher states of consciousness, he sees it as a catalyst for the purification of the unconscious. This purification is itself prayer. It is not a preparation for relationship with the higher, but the relationship itself. Upon this cornerstone he builds his paradigm of "the Divine Therapy." How does this purification work? As the unconscious unloads during centering prayer, Keating teaches, these small purifications are actually a part of a larger project. One begins to dismantle the "false self,!' the needy, driven, unrecognized motivations that govern most of our untransformed human behavior. Dovetailing classic Christian teaching with contemporary psychology, Keating suggests the false self as a modern equivalent for the traditional concept of original sin. Beginning in infancy (or even before), each of us, in response to perceived thr¢ats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is this driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory "programs for happiness," as Keating calls them. It is this false self .that we bring to the spiritual journey; our "true self" lies buried beneath the accretions and defenses. In all of us a huge amount of healing has to take place before our deep and authentic quest for union with God--which requires tremendous courage and inner p~'esence to sustain--escapes the gravitational pull of our psychological woundedness and self-justification. This, in essence, constitutes the spiritual journey. So far this is orthodox psychological and theological fare. But where Keating takes the boldest step is in his assertion that centering prayer is a direct catalyst for this purification of the false self. As one sits in centering prayer, with the intent to rest and trust in God, the unconscious begins to unload "the emotional junk of a lifetime." Repressed memories, pain, and accumulated dull hurt rise Review for Religious to the surface and are, through an attitude of gentle consent, allowed to depart. As Keating visualizes the process, The level of deep rest accessed during the prayer period loosens up the hardpan around the emotional weeds stored in the unconscious, of which the body seems to be the warehouse. The psyche begins to evacuate spontaneously the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, opening up new space for self-knowledge, freedom of choice, and the discovery of the divine presence within. As a consequence, a growing trust in God, a bonding with the Divine Therapist, enables us to endure the process. Thus. the gift of contemplative prayer is a practi-cal and essential tool for confronting the heart of the Christian ascesis--namely, the struggle with our uncon-scious motivation--while at the same time establishing the climate and necessary dispositions for a relationship with God and leading, if we persevere, to divine union.2 For me the most fruitful connection here is the linking of the "dark night" or "cloud of unknowing" of the traditional apophatic path and the psychological process--the "darkness" of the psyche. If psychoanalysis represents "cataphatic therapy"--using words, concepts, and awareness to illuminate the darkness of our inner ground--Keating is presenting centering prayer as a kind of "apophatic psychotherapy" ("apophatic" meaning that which points one toward the ineffable beyond all words, concepts, and forms). What really happens when one enters the cloud of unknowing--resting in God beyond thoughts, words, and feelings--is a profound healing of the emotional wounds of a lifetime. As these wounds are gradually brought to the surface and released in prayer (one simply lets them go nonpossessively, rather than retaining them for inspection as one does in psychoanalysis), the false self weakens and the true self grfidually emerges. For Keating this is the real meaning of the term "transforming union." As he states in Intimacy with God, "We can bring the false self to liturgy and to the reception of the sacraments, but we cannot bring the false self forever to contemplative prayer because it is the nature of contemplative prayer to dissolve it" (p. 98). Keating does not claim that such a practice replaces the need for ordinary psychotherapy. Indeed, material that arises out of the unconscious in prayer sometimes requires the assistance of psychotherapy, particularly in cases of retrieved memories of emotional or sexual abuse. But in centering prayer this healing and March-April 1999 Bourgeault * From Woundedness to Union purification occurs within the sanctuary of prayer, combined with a deepening trust in God. So, at the same time that healing is going on at the psychological level, a deepening of the spiritual faculties is occurring as well--recollection, vigilance, attention of the heart-- leading to a blossoming of the traditional theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The Shape of the Journey Traditionally we are used to thinking of spiritual transformation as an ascent. The effects of a spiritua~ practice, we expect, are to make us more calm, more able to cope, more filled with equanimity. Keating's model, however, suggests a different scenario. The ascent is inextricably bound to a descent into the ground of our own psyche. Thus periods of psychological ferment and destabilization are signs that the journey is progressing, not that it is a failure. As the. practice of meditational.prayer loosens repressed material in the unconscious, the initial fruits of spiritual practice, may not be peace and enlightenment, but destabilization and the emergence into consciousness of considerable pain. One woman in our group in Maine experienced this process particularly vividly. After only a few weeks of regular practice of centering prayer, she found herself increasingly tense and irritable and frequently went home from meditation to pick a fight with her husband. She was tempted to quit, but with the encouragement of the group she stayed on and cooperated with the process. What was happening (rather quickly in her case) was that a brittle control--keeping everything at a superficial level of "niceness"--collapsed almost immediately in the face of her immersion in contemplative silence. She found herself face-to-face with a deep guilt about, her second marriage and her terror that God would punish both her and her husband with cancer. Needless to say, "resting" in such a God was not a tranquil experience! But with a good deal of courage she has been able to face these feelings, work through them, and reestablish a relationship with both her husband and God on a deeper, fleer level. In my own work with centering prayer, I have learned by repeated experience that the "reward" for a period of deepening practice is often the emergence of a patch of pain long buried followed by several days of emotional turmoil, Keating calls it "the Review for Religious archaeological dig." As trust grows in God and practice becomes more stable, we penetrate deeper and deeper down to the bedrock of pain, the origin of our personal false self. The results are often horrifying to ourselves. Yet, says Keating, this does not mean that the spiritual journey is a failure, but that it is doing its job. The fruits of this unloading are more than worth the pain. In response to each significant descent into the ground of our woundedness, there is a parallel ascent in the form of inner freedom, the experience of the fruits of the spirit, and beatitude. There are several practical implications to this idea, but the paramount one--for both spiritual seekers and spiritual guides--is to recognize that centering prayer is a psychological method and will produce results in that realm, some of them initially painful. In Intimacy with God Keating recounts how a graduate student recendy did a thesis on centering prayer, along with several forms of Eastern meditation, recommending them as a way to reduce anxiety. Keating wrote back to the man saying, "Centering prayer will reduce anxiety for perhaps the first three months. But, once the unconscious starts to unload, it will give you more anxiety than you ever had in your life." For individual practitioners he recommends a limited dosage-- twenty to thirty minutes twice a day is the normal iprescription--to prevent the premature emergence of material into consciousness. Ten-day retreats rely on a trained staff to help handle a more intensive unloading process. Keating insists that the method is safe and that only in the case of serious depression or psychotic symptoms should the prayer be discontinued. By interweaving the contemporary language of healing with the traditional language of holiness, Keating extends the range of both. His synthesis is spacious, with plenty of room for .growth. For those preoccupied with their own recovery from woundedness (and many come to centering prayer by way of the recovery movement), it provides a gende and supportive context in which the process can unfold. But recovery is not the endpoint. For Keating the real goal Keating has bridged the gap between contemporary psychology and the traditional language of spiritual purification. March-April 1999 Bourgeault ¯ From Woundedness to Union of the inner transformation is not one's personal healing, but the ability to be a Christian as measured by the ability to follow the teachings of Christ all the way to mystical union. For in the final analysis it is Keating's own deep mystical spirit that undergirds the entire paradigm, offering .a scale as vast as the cosmos: There remains a further energy, which is reserved for the next life. That is ~vhat theologians call the Beatific Vision. This requires freedom from the limitations of the physical body in order to experience it. This energy is so intense that, if it were not mediated by the ordinary affairs of daily life that distract us from continual contact with the divine energy, we would turn into a grease spot. This is the energy that lights the universe and forms the whirling nebulae. We can receive only a little of it at a time. In heaven we can have all we want.3 Toward an Intermediate Christianity Keating's thinking has evolved considerably since his interview with Needleman years ago, and it is still evolving. Many of his observations bear much more dialogue and fine-tuning, but at this point his appears to be a cohesive new.synthesis that offers a significant first step in the direction of a functional "intermediate Christianity." Clearly gaps are being bridged. The first of these is the gap between theory, and practice: Keating's method seems to provide a way for stones to become water. By restoring a meditational praxis--and one so uniquely consonant with the basic modality of Christianity--he has created an inner laboratory for practicing the basic gesture of faith. I have watched people like the woman in Maine confront their woundedness, heal, and come alive spiritually as they make the connection between their daily lives and what goes on in prayer. Second, Keating has bridged the gap between contemporary psychology and the traditional language of spiritual purification. By repositioning meditation as a tool for purification of the unconscious--and by insisting that people do it, not just talk about it--he can be faithful to contemporary models of healing while pointing the way beyond, toward profound inner transformation in ever deepening surrender. In so doing, he has rescued us both from the vagueness of contemporary psychojargon and from the violence of traditional metaphors based on renunciation, vigilance, and Review for Religious "spiritual warfare" (as if a part of us had to be killed, or at least locked up, in order for holiness to grow). For Keating, spiritual transformation is gentle, ever-so-gentle, and holds always before one the need for integration of psyche and spirit. The one cannot dominate the other; they must proceed apace. If the spirit's role is to be strong, the psyche's is to be vulnerable, and the lion must lie down with the lamb before the peaceable kingdom will reign within. The touchstones of the entire teaching are gentleness, patience, consent, and a willingness to let the process of integration unfold with its own pace and authenticity. Of course there is woundedness, but there is holiness as well. How the two come together--not which wins, but how they join-- constitutes the unique and profound meaning of one's life, the emergence of the true self, transformed in Christ. Of Thomas Keating's many contributions~ this one is for me the most powerful. ~r Notes l Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 119. 2 Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 3. 3 Keating, p. 103. Resurrection Power Behold the slender shoot Reaching for the light, The flower just unfurled, The barren branch Heavy with blossoms. Here is the Force That walked out of the tomb, Conquering our worst foe. Here is Life incorruptible, The Risen One waiting To spring forth in you. Teresa Burleson March-April 1999 PAMELA A. SMITH On the Go with Chronic Illness, Sitting Still with Mark How does anyone with a long-term, life-threatening, complex, and confounding chronic illness stay with it and retain humor and hope for the long haul? How does one take in and make sense of the regular reminders from endocrinologist, internist, and consulting counselor that it does inevitably get less manageable and, yes, worse? How does one stay happily productive in the face of the evidence that most folks in the same situation have long since quit work and gone on disability leave? What is the Christian mix of resignation and stubbornness, relaxation and fight, that makes it possible to slow down and still go barreling forward? These were some of the questions--maybe the most critical ones--which I carried with me on a rainy March day to a hideaway in close proximity to tentatively budding trees and a horse pasture still tinged with the orange and yellow of winter grass. The evergreen shrubs and hedge persisted, drippingly at the moment, around the Michigan country home to which I retreated (with all my griefs in my arms, as Dylan Thomas said of lovers, and all those griefs probably everywhere else too). My IDDM--insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, long ago labeled "britde"--was afflicting me with "diabetic fatigue," I had recently told my boss, the rector of a seminary. He affirmed my request to take some needed time away. I can get a bit gl

Issue 43.6 of the Review for Religious, November/December 1984. ; General Government and Leadership The Benedictine Prayer of Beauty A°n Annotation 19 Retreat Experience Volume 43 Number 6 Nov./Dec., 1984 R~-:v~l~v,' l:or R~!~.~(;~otJs (ISSN 0034-639X). published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428:3601 Lindell Blvd.: St. Louis. MO 63108. Rt.'.v~;w ~:or R~.~(~otJs is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis. MO. © 1984 by Rev~w ~:or R~.~(~otJS. Composed. printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis. MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A. $10.00 a year: $19.00 for two years. Other countries: add $2.00 per year (postage). For subscription orders or change of address, write R~,vl~:w voR R~:H(;~ol~s: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Questions and Answers Editor Assistant Editor Nov./Dec. 1984 Volume 43 Nttmber 6 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REw~:w I.oR Rl-:lol(;~otJs; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108. Queslions for answering should be sent to Joseph F'. Gallen, S.J.; Jesuit Community; St. Joseph's University; City Avenue at 54th St.; Philadelphia, PA 19131. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REWEW I-'OU R~.:t.tGious; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; SI. Louis, MO 63108. "Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. The Spiritual Exercises and Preferential Love for the Poor Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J. Father Kolvenbach was elected General Superior of the Society of J~sus in September, 1983. This article is based on an address he delivered, on February 7, 1984, to the "VII Ignafian Course." an annual program of study/reflection sponsored by Rome's Centrum Ignatianum Spiritualitatis, and was first published in its bulletin, CIS: Vol. XV. no. I (1984), pp. 77-90. Fathgr Kolvenbach, as well as the Center, may be addressed at: C.P. 6139:00195 Roma, Italy. lain very pleased to be here this evening to offer my contribution to the VII Ignatian Course. Not being a specialist, what I shall share with you will be a simple meditation on a theme that is both relevant and important: the link between the Spiritual Exercises and' our preferential love for the poor. Clearly, if not necessarily dramatically, a preferential love for the poor~is contained in the spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises. We find, for example, in the section entitled "Mysteries of the Life of Our Lord"---a text in which the personal comments of Ignatius are rare and thus all the more significant--that a preferential love for th~ poor finds indirect expression in Ignatius' emphatic reference to the situation Of those chosen to be apostles; that they were men "of humble condition" [275]. Likewise the only discourse Iogion explicitly offered for contemplation in the course of the Exercises i.s the Sermon on the Mount, which in the text'begins with.the beatitude concerning the poor [278]. Ignatius also comments that, while Jesus overturned the tables and scattered the money of the wealthy money-changers, "to the poor vendors of d6ves he spoke kindly" [277], asking them'to respect the prayerful purpose of the temple, his Father's house. But these references evidence only an indirect connection with our theme, .the preferential love of the poor. "Rules for the Distribution of Aims": A Forgotten Text There is to be found in the Exercises, however, a much mor6 direct 801 1~09 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec:. 1984 connection between the spiritual urge to follow the Lord and the help that must be offered to the poor. The classic means of giving assistance to the poor had always.been alms-giving. And it is in the treatment of this subject that we shall find the most explicit link between the spirituality of the Exercises and an effective love for the poor, in an oft-forgotten section of the text entitled: "Rules for the Distri-bution of Aimsr' [337-344]. Why has this passage been so often forgotten? Above all because of the very concrete and specific application it makes to a single situation. In fact, ~he document is explicitly addressed to almoners, those who by virtue of their office are supposed to look after the poor, to clerics who practiced charity as their .function. Thus the tone of the text is very. clerical, very priestly. But despite the text's heavy emphasis on ~institutionalism with its many references to ministry, condition, office and function, Ignatius also points to Christ the high priest as the one who is the model and norm for all charitable activity. This particular reference to Christ the high priest [344] expands the horizon of an otherwise purely clerical document, calling every Christian to become a sharer in Christ's ministry through the exercise of almsgiving. In fact, in this document Ignatius takes the office of almoner for granted thus also implic-itly recognizing that not every Christian is called to the direct and immediate exercise of this task in regard to the poor nevertheless he exhorts almoners not to be content to work as mere functionaries, but to be inspi~red by the ministry on behalf of the poor that was exercised by Christ himself. Such an attitude ought to be t.he concern of every Christian without exception, each according to his vocation and state of life. Ig0atius, then, clearly intends this document directly, for a specific group of persons, At.the same time, however, he makes it clear that all Christians ought to have a special bond with the poor. There is another reason why this document is so often overlooked. It is the fact that the practice of aim sgiving no longer has today the honored p lace that this preeminent exercise of charity had in the time of Ignatius. In an older economic order it was principally by means of alms that the good will of the rich helped to correct excessive social inequality--th6ugh of course in a very imperfect.way. Saint Francis. the poor man of Assisi. had his brethren pray every day so that. thanks to therich, they could continue to be poor. Modern persons, however, even if they be poor. are no longer willing to be under anv kind of demeaning economic dependency. They expect and demand to receive from the state the means of a suitable livelihood as their right, not as something subject tb arbitrary distribution, nor dependent upon the mere '~good will" of the "good rich"--an attitude that is the very opposite of what is involved in the practice of almsgiving. Too. the modern untrammeled esteem for the value of work tends to bring almsgiving into disfavor, not just because ¯ the practice is seen as an affront to human dignity, but also because it could so easily,,encourage idleness and sloth. Preferential Love for the Poor / 803 Ignatius and Help for the Poor in his day Ignatius had to face squarely this problem of helping the poor. When in 1535, hating just finished his studies in Paris. he was resting in his native air of Azpeitia. he found himself perforce involved in the overall spiritual renewal of the townspeople. The reform of, charitable works in the area could not but form a part of this general program of renewal. F~r Ignatius. there was a self-evident connection between the two. o On the one hand (and this was to be true of him later in Rome)~ Ignatius did not want to see the poor obliged to beg: all must 'simply be helped according to their need. On the other hand he positively ,encouraged-that all alms from whatever source, whether civic authorities,~'the clergy or the laity, be given to the official almoners (see MI Fontes Docum. 88: De Azpeitiaepaupe-ribus sublevandis: 1535-1542: MI Epp L 161-165, addre~s.ed tO the townspeople of Azpeitia). To avoid abuses, then. the poor ought not to have to seek alms or beg. Rather, the almoners should receive alms to be distributed to the poor. not in their own names, but "for the love of God" (MI Epp Xll, 656: lnsfruction of November, 1554). ~' In reflecting on the m, eamng of this text. there is another facet that is important for understanding the spirituality of the Exercises. It consists in.the fact that for Ignatius himself the significance of aims had gradually taken on differing forms and purposes over the years. The "pilgrim" who in 1523 had wandered about the alleyways of Venice was a solitary mendicant who lived exclusively from alms. But the "companion" who in ! 537 lodged with some of his friends in a Venetian hospice for the poor. and who wished "to preach in poverty." also sought alms for the sake of being able "to help the poor." Heno longer sought alms only for himself, but also in order to help others. From 1540 on. Ignatius the "founder" gradually came to establish two coexisting but radically different regimens of community poverty for the na-scent Society of Jesus. without ever confusing them either in. theory (a relatively easy matter) or in practice (always a more delicate affair). In terms of. this twofold approach to ~community poverty, the "formed fathers." those whose training and incorporation into the Society were complete, would continue to live only from alms. while the colleges for the training of scholastics were tO have stable and~secure incomes in order to respond better to what the Church desired of them. Only in cases of extreme necessity wouM the seeking of alms become the last resort for the colleges, and then all the companions withoul exception would be "ready to beg from door to door" to meet the need. This is still our rule today. Material and Spiritual Poverty Once the "Roman" and "German" colleges had been started in 1550, Ignatius did all in his power to Search out suffi(ient and stable sources ofalms~ what we might call in the parlance of today's economy, "to establish founda- 1~04 / Review f~r Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 ¯ tions." However he was able to find nobody willing to give money liberally: neither princes, nor civic authorities, nor bishops. Even in those days, it seems, money was being squandered on wars--often in the name of religion. In fact Ignatius once wrgte: "After spending so much on material arms to support religionin Germany, it wouldnot be too great a burden if the emperor spared something for spiritual arms which could more effectively gain what is intended" (14 Sept., 1555, to Francis Borgia: MI Epp IX, 614). Considerable sums were being sought and here one sees a further devel-opment in the Ignatian concept of poverty, for these funds were being sought no longer for the sake of those who were economically poor, but for the formation of future priests who were called to help the spiritually poor. The Ignatius who dreamed in 1522 of living off alms alone, like the Egyptian hermit, Onophrius, thirty years later came to discover "God in all things," even in "Egypt"--his expression for the "business dealings" connected with almsgiving that were so necessary to meet the Church's needs. In his spiritual pilgrimage, Ignatius learned to take se.,riously the admoni-tion of the Lord: "He who does not gather with me, scatters" (Lk 1 !:23). For him, alms meant "gathering" with the Lord on behalf of his brothers, the poor. It is no wonder, then, that the Spiritual Exercises should include Rules for the Distribution of Alms. through which their whole, rich spiritual doctrine is applied to the very practical and relevant necessity to help the impoverished and suffering through almsgiving and indeed through the giving of one's very self. The Spiritual Exercises and Aims for the Poor ~ The mere presence of this text On the. distribution of alms in the book of the Spiritual Exercises witnesses to the fact that the Exercises are indeed geared to "the saJvation of souls," but this spirituality faces up to poverty .of whatever sort. Thus material poverty is addressed in these Rules for the Distribution of Alms. [337-344], as is spiritual poverty, for instance in Some Notes Concerning Scruples [345-351]. The contents of the rules on almsgiving also clarifies for us the motivation that led the Society of Jesus from its earliest days to become involved in helping the poor. Already during,the bitter winter of 1538-39, Rome's sole Jesuit house sheltered 400 poor people, Ignatius himself, although utterly absorbed in the government of the young Society, and while still continuing to give the Exer-cises, .also did all he could for the poor and oppressed of Rome. In other words, if its version of the Good News is not proclaimed and expressed in a practical way for the poor, the message of the Spiritual Exercises will rightly be seen as futile and lacking in authenticity. There is yet another document which bears out this characteristic of his spirituality, namely Ignatius' letter to the Patriarch. of Ethiopia. Against the backdrop of Ethiopian asceticism with its .innumerable and excessive penitential practices, Ignatius instructed the Jesuits to work toward lessening the popular Preferential Love for the Poor / 805 esteem for these excessive corporal penances in order to draw more attention to the need of working for the poor. In a nation where social concern was so minimal, Ignatius wanted to found hospitals,.to provide help for the poor by the exhortation to almsgiving both privately and in public, to ransom prisoners, to educate the abandoned, and to help young men and unwanted girls to se.ttle down in marriage. "Thus," he wrote, "the Ethiopians will seein a palpable way that there are better works than their own fasts and suchlike" (MI Epp VIII, 680-690, April, 1555). Such distortions have often been a problem, and not just in the Eastern churches. Aims "for the Love of God" Finally, the pertinence of these rules to the text of the Spiritual Exercises is explained by the simple formula which sums up the only basis for almsgiving that is acceptable to the spirituality of the Exercises: "for the love of God." Jesuits, and all who seek or give alms, should do so "for the love of God." Alms are a way of giving concrete expression to the beatitude ~vhich Was so lovingly addressed to the poor. As they appear in the text, then, these norms guide one's process of discernment for the practice of this concrete e~pression of the love of God. ' ~ Recent commentaries on the Exercises generally judge severely any retreat centered exclusively on a prayer experience that is turned in on the person of the exercitant in some narcissistic fashion. The exp,ression solus cum solo is not meant ,to isolate a person with a solitary God. Rather it is intended to express the appropriate relationship that ought to prevail between a "self" who has received everything from others, who is also called to be for. others, and a God who reveals himself precisely as "God with us~" Despite the frequent use of the first person in the text ofthe Exercises-- which always points to personal responsibility and involvement~the com-mentaries stress the profoundly communitarian character of the Exercises, character which is clearly in evidence right from the Principle and Foundation. Any person's authentic search for God necessarily entails that person's insertion into the human community. Conversely, any person's total commitment to hu .manity could only be the result of that person's discovery of the love of God. The First Rule for the Distribution of Alms Love "from Above . After these reflections on the historical and spiritual contexts of the Riales for the Distribution of Aims, let us now examine the first of these rules: If I distribute alms to my relatives or friends or persons to whom I am attached, there are four things that must be considered: Some of these were mentioned in treating the Choice of a Way of Life. The first is that the love that moves me and causes me to give the alms must be "from above," that is, from the love of God our Lord. Hence I should be conscious within myself that Gbd is the motive of the greater or less love that I bear towa~:d these persons, and that God is manifestly the cause of my loving them more [338]. 80B / Review for ~Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984" This rule immediately situates any gift of alms within agape, the love that, in Ignatius' terms, comes '"from above." In no way, then, should this text be seen as intending to provide merely a psychological preparation for, or .a religious exhortation to, charitable acts. It is not a pep talk for generous giving, nora way of spiritualizing the fundamental human instinct for solidarity. We should also avoid interpreting this rule in a way that merel3i invites to "purity of intention," Taking up anew an Augustinian inspiration which had previously appeared in the First Rule for Making a Good Choice of a Way of Life [184], this norm for distributing alms, while it does not in any way exclude philia (see the reference to "affection for relatives and friends"), does urge that phil[a be caught up and transformed by agape, "the love that,., must descend "from above" [184]. ~ . The expression "from above" also recalls the fourth point from the Con-templation to Attain the Lov.e of God [237]. God, the infinite ~treasury of all good, is in his trinitarian mystery both Gift and Giver of Gifts (see [237]). If, then, the giving of alms is to be divine--and therefore true and authentic--it must find its rationale within the dynamic of this mutual exchange of gifts, this loving movement of the gifts which "descend from above" [237]. There are a number of examples illustrative of this principle in Ignatian literature, Even in the most complicated of business affairs Ignatius kept his vision, of the lov~e ''from above" alive. Thus, for example, he exchanged some ten letters, with a certain Bernardino' Taro from Naples who had offered to sell his house in a complex deal involving some suspicious price fluctuations. A charitable work was involved, the payment was difficult, the Society sought a discount, and the benefactor became irritated. In all the correspondence, though, even while dealing with the complicated finances involved, Ignatius kept the whole transaction within the horizon of the loving movement that comes "from above," as when he wrote: "Let us pray that the Divine Goodness may grant us 'all the grace to be sensitive to his most holy will" (May 17, 1556, MI Epp X1, p, 411). It was not just by chance, then~ that Ignatius wrote on September 16, 1553 tO the, royal treasurer of Aragon, who had generously acted to convey mes-sages between the Jesuits of Spain and of Rome: "May God our Lord, whose love should be the foundation and norm of all love, repay you by increasing his love in your soul to just such an extent . For as there is nothing good witho, ut this love, so no!hing is lacking where it is present" (MI Epp V, pp. 488-489). The norm, then, for the appropriate distribution of alms is not, per se, our human solidarity, certainly it is not just philanthropy, but the agap~ of God himself, which takes flesh, in our human capacity to give and to forgive. The effort expended in undergoing the Spiritual Exercises so as "to rid oneself of all inordinate attachments" [1], is aimed precisely a,! allowing the divine t;gapP to take possession of our capacity to love. Thus t,he Rules for the Preferential Love for the Poor / 1107 Distribution of Alms have no other purpose than to put into practical effect what the Apostle John says in his First Letter: the man who does not love his brother most surely cannot be said to love God; and no one truly loves his brother unless it be with the love of God who first loved us (see l Jn 4:19-21). In this Ignatian concepiion, then, the principal criterion by which to judge one's preferential love for the poor is decidedly on the basis of .whether that love truly comes "from above," and does not rest on the simple fact that one is giving aid to one's poor brother. In other words, thee value of such a charitable act is to be judged in the measure in which me_re philanthropy has been taken up and transformed by divine agape: Service of the poor, to be sure! But before all else, service ,in my name," if it is to be true and authentic. Love "from Above"." for the Poor This first of the Rules for the Distribution of Alms, then, bringsphilia and agape.face to face with each other. "To give to those to whom one is attached by relationship or friendship" is not. automatically "ordered towards the love~ of God that comes from above"~except insofar as such a gift would actually reflect a preferential loye for the poor even in being given to oneYs own. We can find the interplay betweenphilia and agap~ that is evoked by this first rule applied in a realistically practical way in a letter from Ignatius to the Archdeacon of Barcelona, Jaime Cassador (February 12, 1536): "I mean, it. would be better to give to the poor when our relatives are not as poor as those, who are not relatives. But, other things being equal, I have more obligations to my relatives thar~':to others Who are not relatives" (MI Epp I, pp. 93-99). In other words, attachment even to relatives and friends must be caught up into the divine agape: the poor are to be preferred even above relatives unless these are themselves poor. . ' Love 'from Above"." for All the Poor The collection of Ignatian texts we have cited with r6gard to the first of the Rules for the Distribution of Alms raises a delicate question. The preferential love. for the materially poor is quite clearly a manifestation, an "epiphany" of the love that comes "from above," going as it does beyond philanthropy or the love (phil¢a) tha,~t is exercised towards one's relatives and friends. The well-ordered practice of this~ divine love (agape) clearly makes possible many social initiatives in the service of the economically po0~r. The fact that this love is not to be directed exclusively to the economically poor and socially marginalized springs from the Ignatian conviction th.at, in the last analysis, almsgiving is not meant to enable persons merely to become economically rich, but to enable persons to become rich in God's eyes~ to use the expression of St. Luke. Our free response to the love of God makes us deeply sympathetic toward the hopes of poor people under every form and at every level of genuinely human choice, but not in the pursuit of any and every messianic drehm, nor of any and every political or social option. Review.for Religious, NOv,-Dec., 1984 If in the text of the Spiritual ExerHses the use of the word "poor" is quite rare~ it is only at the end of the doc~aments on Election and in the Rules for the Distribuiion,,of"Alms that the term "poor" appears in its strictly social and economic sense (see [344] as an.application of [189]: Directions for the Amendment and Reformation of One's Way of Living in His State of Life). There.is no doubt at all that, after the example of the Gospel, the primary concern of the Spiritual Exercises is the conversion of hearts to the love that is "from bove ;~'w~thout such a conversion, all social activity, even the most generous, would already be found lacking, for its aim would not be "the human person taken as a whole." Why was there already urged insistently in the Old Testament the obligation to help the poor? It was not to make the poor economically rich, but because a person without money--in this sense "poor"--is not a "complete person" in the image of the love of God. A social revolution undertaken without agap~ means, and cannot but rlaean, death and hatred. As is well known, the Old Testament prophets;and finally'John the Baptist, expri~ssed themselves on social and economic matters in radical, even literally violent fashion. On this point, compared to the invec-tives of the prophetS, Christ's message seems like a comedown. And yet his "new Commandment," which should, according to Ignatius [338], be the root s'ourceoof the human love that finds its expression in almsgiving, possesses a r~adicality and an unprecedented newness that are quite capable of tra~nsfoi'ming humanity. In other words, Ignatius affirms in the Exercises that the human search for God is not authentic if it does not express itself in a loving commitment to the world of the poor: but. conversely, there is no perfect commitment to the cause of humanity, and concretely to the cause of the poor, unless it' be the fruit of one's personal discovery of the love of God that comes "from above." Love "from Above"." Opposed to All Poverty The cri/icisms offered in regard to theologies of social justice and of libera-tion do not call into question the urgency of the political, social and economic concerns that inspire these theologies. But the whole of God's revelation to the world cannot ~ever be restricted to a merely political, gocial and economic liberation, nor even to the gen'eral idea of freedom as such. Thes+ theologies do righily present one aspect of theology taken iri its entirety. In practice, theology ought to demand that the Church 'strive to reform the whole wbrld under every aspect according to the spirit of Christ. But the Church's option for the poor:should not be intended in a~way that would jeopardize the offer of salvation to all persons, the offer of that liberation which is the gratuitous gift of God proffered to all humanity. In struggling for liberation and justice, the Christian is called, not to curse those who have possessions, but to encourage theha also toward conversion to Christ. The Exercises ought never be limited to a single apostolic objective, To speak~ for purposes of illustration, of the time of Ignatius,' the Exercises were Preferential Love for the Poor / 809 never .focused exclusively upon the struggle against emerging Protesiantism alone, n6r upon the evangelization of the European masses alone, nor upon the refor~n of a corrupt 'clergy alone, nor upon missionary efforts overseas alone. In the same way in our own day, the Exercises should not be used only to arouse zeal for the social betterment of the oppressed, nor only for the better-ment of peoples who live in subhuman conditions. The Exercises are meant to stir each person who enters upon them to a radical gift of self, and it is going to be through this radical gift of oneself that the Lord is going to be perceived as calling that person "by name." This is the overall vision that Ignatius had. Like the Lord, he too had an evident preference for the poor, but he saw the poor as "persons" rather than as just ',the poor." We shall find in him no trace of any kind of paternalistic pity--itself a subtle but real form of domination. And without this kind of respectful regard for persons, one has no right to approach the poor. The Second Rule I will only make a few brief comments on the Other rules contained in this passage from .the Spiritual Exercises. The second rule to be observed in regard to the distribution of alms [339]:draws ~its inspiration from the second rule for . making a good election [185]. Here again, it is proposed that one abstract from one's :own individuality, .that one c6nsider oneself as an unknown, a person who is met for the first time, but who is esteemed, and for whom there is the desire for all perfection in the exercise of his or her office or state of life. In fact, all the rules to be observed for a suitable distribution of alms contain this same positive and rich outlook on all other persons, on our neighbors. The perfection that we ought to desire for others' as well as our-selves in distributing alms and in the exercise of our preferential love for the poor consists really:Sin wanting us and them to become other Christs. While one can makelife hell forthe neighbor, one can also be a source of living hope as well.! Ignatius' love for poverty was really and wholly a love for the person of the poor Christ (see [ 167]). Ignatius longed to be poor himself because Christ was poor. He longed to be poor as Christ was poor. In the same way, then, he proposes that Jesus must be the one who inspires us in the way that we go about distributing aims and serving the poor. To put it another way, we need to enter into Jesus' own way of exercising his preferential 10ve for the poor. Here the distinction between poverty and riches in the Spiritual Exercises becomes important: Spiritual poverty in the Exercises readily takes on the form of gratuity as opposed to greed. The gratuity urged by Ignatius for Jesuit ministries, for :instance, contrasts, and is intended' to contrast, with even the ¯ appearance of"business" or of the "marketplace'~in our approach to ministries, to ecclesiastical~offices and benefices, to the distribution of alms themselves. Powerful or rich persofls who always have others at their beck and call do 8"10 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 not expect.anyLhing in return beyond a calculated, response based on quidpro quo. TheLord in the Gospel, however, is portrayed as being poor. His:service is always freely given, without a hint of such calculating expectation. To remove the ministry ofalmsgiving, then, from every suspicion of interestedness, to decline gifts 'which automatically elicit gifts in return, to prefer to give .freely to those who count.for little in the world of vested interests--this is to be poor with and for the Lord who was poor. ~Gratuity, then, is a sign expressi~,e ~f the potential for radical change in human societythat could be created~--but only by the love that~is "fromabove." In the Old Testament, the paschal mystery of the Exodus had already given evidence of our human incapacity to chang.e society through our own resour-ces alone, of the impossibility of ever really convening Pharaoh, of ever becoming satisfied with any mere social teaching~that is aimed at bettering the lot of human beings. Only God, through his gratuitous gifts, can create a new humanity, a humanity "without poor people" (Ac 4:34), a society where the "poor~' of the ExoduS will live the "new commandment" of God's free self-giving. The Third and Fourth Rules The third [340] and fourth [341] rules for distributing alms present yet another characteristic of the Lord who is poor. If a person were to consider himself or herself in the light of eternity, the realization would soon dawn that, of all the riches he~ld: nothing really belongs to the~person, that the person is forever receiving, in order then to be able to give, and, in keeping with-the Judgment of the Trinitarian God, ultimately to give oneself t'o others with and through his or her gifts. This ',eternal Judgment" is actually the Lord of the Cross who died stripped of all, in the utter poverty not just the poverty of one who dies bereft of all possessions, but the poverty of one who dies~as a complete failure. , , , Here, then, is another Characteristic of the divine agapP:' a way of giving to another that ultimately comes even to the giving of one's life. It is at this point in the Spiritual Exercises that Ignatius increasingly uses the words "humble," "humility; . humiliation." It is impossible to love divinely in a possessive or domineering way. A preferential love for the poor couM be ideological, patti, san, selective, paternafistic. But as a passage in the Treatise on the .Election (1541) by Pedro Ortiz~explains, Ignatian "humility" is the divine way~ of loving. And the divine way of loving, revealed in Christ Jesus,,(onsiSts inthe humble offering of oneself for others that they may live. It is in this more profound sense that the rules for distributing alms urge a person to "imitate as closely as he can our great High Priest, model and guide, Christ~our Lord" [344]. Our preferential love .for the poor, if authentic, will move .through inevitable humiliations toward a love that refuses to be either condescending or domi-neering, that refuses to imp.ose itself by power or violence. The desire of humble love, of "humility" in the lgnatian sense, is,~then, the prayer toincar-nate the Paschal Mystery in a way that will arrive at this kind of radical Preferential Love for the Poor ] 811 poverty with Christ poor, whether this relates just to desire--the readiness to give oneself as the Lord wants, or to the realization of desire the actual giving of o~eself to those specific poor persons to whom the Lord sends one. The Remaining Rules The rest of the rules proposed by Ignatius for distributing alms explain still more clearly the practice of almsgiving which, in the terms of St. John Chrys- 9stom. was to be the human e?~pression of God's compassion. Ignatius encourages the kind of generous and unstinting distribution of resources that would inevitably require a simplification in the lifestyle of the almsgiver [344]. In this way there is no room in the asceticism proposed by the Rules for the Distribution of Aims for the kind of spiritualizing that would permit an abstract definition of personal spiritual poverty. That person is not poor who shuns the thought of death. Nor is the person poor who ensures his or her own security by storing up provisions for the future. It is rather the person who opts for insecurity through gratuitous giving, who offers out of his or her own necessity personal goods to others, and who giyes, himself or herself in them. "To be poor," then, means not just giving what is superfluous, but the ceaseless calling into 'question, both at the personal and at the community level, one's habits in' the matter of food~ dres~s~: living quarters, en!ertainment-- not just for the sake of thrift,' but in order to be able to, give to others--to the poor. Conclusion In a letter to Father Lorenzo of M6dena (May 16. 1556) Ignatius wrote: "You must understand that our Society, in its ~ractice of a umversal charity towards all nations and classes of men. does not approve cultivating particular affection for one people or for any.individual person.~except in the measure that well-ordered love.requires" (MI Epp XL pp. 408-409). " Guided by such well-ordered love--the love which looks to "the spiritual" works which are more important'~ (Constitutions, [650]), because the goal is the whole human pers, on-~we are to dedicate ourselves to thecorporal works of mercy, among which commitment to the poor takes pride of place. And so in a ~single movement of love. Ignatius,~is both attached a.nd detached. He lives a humble love which, as we have translated it here. is the love that comes "from above." The Exercises. a school of Christian freedom, in leading beyond "philan-thropy," gives to the preferential love for the poor for all the poor_--its truly Christian dimension. It is seen as our free response to that love, for the poor which God revealed in the poor Christ. who is himself rich in the Spirit To Divest or Not to Divest: Moral Investments and Immoral Purposes Michael H. Crosby, O F.M. Cap. Of this present article, Father Crosby writes: "A growing number of Catholic and Protestant groups are deciding to divest from their shares in companies involved in the nuclear armaments ch~iin. The process [utilized by] the Midwest Capuchin Franciscans serves as a case study." This experience can certainly serve as occasion for reflection on the difficult and complex task of bringing spiritual conviction to bear on actual life situations. Father Crosby, author of Spirituality of the Beatitudes, is Project Coordinator of the National Catholic Coalition for Responsible Investment. He is also Corporate Responsibility Agent for the Midwest Capuchin Province. Father Crosby may be addressed at Beatitude Program; 10i6 North Ninth Street; Milwaukee, WI 53233. Durin _the last two weeks of April and the first weeks of May, more corporate shareholder meetings are held than at any other time of the yeai'. High on the list of concerns by church-related groups of shareholders is .the issue of nuclear weapons production. This year, as in the past, the church groups" concerns were coordinated through the New York based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), the action arm of Protestant church,Catholic diocesan, and religious order investors concerned about the social impact 0f'business corporations and the application of social criteria to their own investments. For this spring's annual meetings, eight companies involved in different stages 'of the fiuclear weapons chain received shareholder resolutions from groups affiliated with ICCR. Some resolutions were subsequently disallowed by th'e Securities. and Exchange Commission, but several were to be debated on the floor of the annual meetings. For last year's meeting of AT&T, at least sixty-five groups filed a resolu-tion requesting the company not to renew its contract with the U.S. Govern- 812 To Divest or Not to Divest / 813 ment to manage the Sandia National Laboratories which carries out research and.development on nuclear weapons systems. Yet this year only forty groups filed witli AT&T calling for the company to establish criteria for military contracts and to terminate its nuclear weapons contracts. Similarly, for .the 1983 annual meeting of Geheral Electric, over forty groups, asked GE to consult with experts about and to support the nuclear freeze by declining to accept or to renew contracts involv!ng the development or production of nuclear'weapons~ Yet this year only thirty-one groups filed with GE asking the company to develop criteria for acceptance of military contracts. Why has there bee~ such a decline in the number of fliers in just one year? Has the U.S. Catholic Bishops statemeht The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response fallen on 'deaf ears? Is it due to a lack of resolve and follow-through? Or is it becausethe new SEC rules make it more difficult to return to companies on an issue when the previou~ year's voting has been small? According to Ursuline Sister Valerie Heinonen, ICCR's Military Work Group Coordinator, it is hone of the above. It is, she believes, "primarily because the Roman Catholic agencies in particular carried out divestment statements or were working on divestment positions and were in the process of implementing them." My Midwest Capuchin Franciscan Provinceis one of those groups that filed with 'AT&T and GE (along with Tenneco, Dupont and Rockwell Interna-tional) last year but did notdo so this year because of our newly-inaugurated divestment posture. In rearhing this decision, we joined such Protestant denominations as the United' Presbytbrians and th6 United Church 6f Christ as well as many Catholic dioceses and 'orders, including the Salvatorian Sisters of Milwaukee and th~ Franciscan Sisters of Philadelphia. As early as April, 1982 the Adrian (MI) Dominican Sisters' general congregation declared: The c~ngregation will take a public stand for peace-making by di'.vestin~ itself, within ¯ one year. of stock currently held in the top one hundreff~diffense contractors. The portfolio managers will be instructed by the general council not to invest in these companies unless some stock is requested by the Portfoli6 AdvisofyBoard in anticipa-tion of filing a shareholder resolution. A few years ago, as Corporate Responsibility Agent for my Province, I was against divestment; yetl was concerned about the issue. I recall being part of a discussion group that struggled to define the many complex issues that must be considered in dealing with divestment: How can we balance the "peace statements" of our bishops and congregations with nuclear holdings? How do we distinguish between'.direct and indirect involvement via our stocks? Should we have stock in an), company that is part of a system that many believe is doing so much harm to so many? If we:are to do "good" via our ministries, to what degree can we do so because of "evil" returns' from questionable corporations? Should we distinguish between nuclear and con-ventional arms? Is capitalism morally evil? Or is it inorally neutral, but with some practices that are evil? Why pick on the nuclear armaments companies? 814 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 How do we deal with the balance of terror? How does the Nuremberg princi-ple of .culpability apply that all citizens are responsible, for their govern-ment's decisions, and will be held liable by humanity? Divestment has no impact on companies, except for a one-hour press c0nference~, so why not stay in and fight? Have we exhausted alternatives? If we do divest,.should it be total or should we keep a few shares to "keep the pressure on?" While no papal or episcopal statements tn the Catholic Church have called for divestment in companies involved ih the nuclear armaments chain, there are many pronouncements that touch the issue. In Pacem ~in Terris, John XXIII said, "the arms race should cease." Paul Vlsaid at the UN, "let the weapons fall from .your a os, and, in Populorum Progressio, "every exhausting armaments race becomes an intolerable scandal." John Paul II said at Hir0shima. in 1981, "let us promise our fellow h~man beings that we will work untiringly for disarmament and the banishing of all nuclear wea-pons." In March, 1984, a top Vatican spokesperson warned an international conference on European disarmamgnt that a poli~y of nuclear deterrence (the backbone of the U.S. bishops justificatio, n of the U.S.nuclear arsenal) leads to mistrust and escalation of Lthe arms race. Meanwhi!e, in their pastoral leiter, the U.S. bishops called upon Catholics at every level of defense industries. [to] use th~ moral principles of this letter to form their consciences~. . .°. Those who m conscience decide that they should no longer be associated with defense activities should find support in the Catholic commumty. Those who remain in these industries or earn a profit from the weapons industry should find in the Church guidance and support for the ongoing evaluation of their work. From my reading 9f the bishops' statement, "ongoing evaluation" of involvement in the production of such weapons ultimately should lead to disassociation from-the companies. But what about those dioceses, religious orders and lay investors tha.t are "making a profit from the weapons industry" via their stocks and bonds? What about our "ongoing evaluation" leading to possible disassociation? Stich statements nudged me to begin rethinking my position about possible divestment. The issue, it seems, is not whether churches, dioceses, or congregations support or. don't support unilateral disarmameht on the part of the United States. Divestment has little or nothing to do with disarmament. More and more the question is: Should we be involved in producing more weapons, especially since each side. has enough weapons to kill the other scores of times over?.How can more.weapons be produced when the arms race has been condemned. So on this issue we're not talking about disarmamenti just about not building more. We~'re talking about the three additional bombs built each day, and the ,ever-more sophisticated delivery systems being created. I was beginning to ask questions like these when the provincial council of my Midwest Capuchin Provinc.e ~asked its Justice and Peace Committee, of which 1 am a member, to prepare a position paper on the subject of. our holdings in nuclear armaments manufacturers so that it could determine how To Divest or Not to Divest / ~115 to deal with the provincial portfolio. Some might wonder why the followers of the Poor Man of Assisi should even have a portfolio. Their concern is shared by many of us, yet we find ourselves m a predicament. The Province has almost three hundred men. Because of decisions in the past, it now owns and operates fiv~ retreat houses which need ~provincial maintenance. It owns and operates the largest minor seminary in the United States. While it has many men in white, middle-class parishes, a large number also serve in Black, Hispanic and Native American areas, including the Cheyenne and Crow reservatiohs in Montana. From three of its inner-city locations in Wisconsin and Michigan, it runs meal programs, including Detroit's famous "Capuchin Soup Kitchen." Besides having preachers and hospital chaplains and campus ministers, our members serve in Central America, the Pacific, Australia and the Near East. The dividends from the portfolio, along with salaries and donations, constitute the arinual provin-cial income budget. Since the province is highly involved in work among the poor and for social justice (on.ly one hundred or so members actually draw salaries), the portfolio's dividends are currently needed to meet normal operating expenses. All annual revenues beyond the budget are allocated to the poor or for social justice causes--unless some extraordinary expense'needs to be,met, such as helping to repair a leaking roof in one of our inner city parishes in Milwaukee (which, .by historical happenstance, is incorporated in the name of the pro-vince rather than of the diocese). Two members of.the Justice and Peace Commission developed a position paper on divestment for the provincial council: Francis Dombrowski, who was trained as a moral theologian; l, the second author, have background in Franciscan spirituality and corporate responsibility. We were to investigate the ethical issues and our Franciscan charism to,determine what we might recomm(nd to the provincial council. It was decided that, rather than leave the decision to the council, (which earlier had divested from Upjohn.because of its manufacture of an abortifacient), ~his time the province's membership at large would be asked to become involved in making the decision. The paper was divided into four major sections: I) The facts behind th~ dilemma presented by the province's shareholdings; 2) Basic principles to be used to determine continued participation in the. manufacture of nuclear-re-lated weapons; 3) An application of the Franciscan charism to the signs of our times; and 4) A proposal for action by the province. The Facts The first section outlined the situation of. the. arms race, our participation in it via our stocks and bonds~ plus the fact that the companies at issue also did much good: , Our province has invested over a quarter of a million tlollars in some of these compan-ies with government contracts for nuclear weaponry. Thus we°'~re receiving income ~116 / Review.[br Religious, Nov.-Dec:, 1984 precisely because these weapons are being built at a profit to the company and to us as~ shareholders. Iris true that these companies'make many products and items that promote good for others; For instance, G,~neral Electric is a company in which our Province has 210 . shares (worth $19,924.00 as of December 31, 1982). We also.have $~0,000 in bonds in General Electric Credit Corporation. GE makes a body scanner which hospitals have found invaluable in saving lives; yet GE is one of the seven companies that actually makes components for the hydrogen bomb and is also involved in building the MX missile system. In 1981 GE received $3 billion in military contracts from .the United States government, accounting for I I% of its sales. This, means, in actual fact, that our province is cooperating in the production of nuclear weapons by investing money in the companies that build them. ~ The paper went on to explaiwthat holding shares does not make stock-holders proximate cooperators nor principal agents in the actioi~'s of the companies. Yet it made it clear that "we are remote cooperators in'a very.real way as owners who receive dividends from our investments and interest on ou~ bonds to sustain our way of life. Because we are shareholders and partial owners, we have s6me responsibility to make surethe companies in which we invest are not involved inactivities that counter our Franciscan vision of life." The province has adapted the steps outlined in Mt 19 (go and talk, on the word of two or three; take itto the court)in trying to get companies to change "activities that counter our way of.life,:' especially through its membership in ICCR. Since 1976 it either voted its proxies, filed resolutions, or s~oken at, annual meetings of companies involved in nuclear armaments. It bought ten shares of Rockwell International to dialogue with the company which, along with Allied (Bendix), AT&T, GE, Dupont, Monsanto, Pentax and Union Carbide (at that time), actually produced those components which would " make the nuclear weapons operational. 1 was one of three or four on a negotiating team which has,engaged in ongoing dialogue with Dupont.about its involvement. So, as a province, we had been trying to make our concerns known to the corporations. Having reviewed the way we had tried to bring the Gospel. of Peace to the "~houses" of these corporations (see Mt 10:12-15); we now had to ask ourselves: "Since these companies give no indication of change in policy and ciSntinue to accept defensb contracts that will further build up our nuclear arsefials, the question israised: What is the next step in dealing with these companies: more dialogue -- or divestment? Basic Principles 2) The second section of our position paper developed principles to be used in determining our continued participation in the manufacture of nuclear weapons~ It distinguished nuclear weapons from conventional weapons, and singled out "top" defense contractors because of the difficulty in determining the degree of involvement. Can a company like Exxon or Mobil, which provides gas for military trucks, be put in the same category as General To Divest or Not to Divest Dynamics, which makes airplanes and nuclear submarines that can deliver nuclear bombs? The principles included a lengthy treatment of just-war defense and the. -attitude of non-violence. The next area taken up dealt with deterrence. The paper shared why its ~position differed from that of the bishops by not accepting deterrence as a viable rationale. In this difference~,with the bishops' ,approach, the. paper reiterated the position of the leadership of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, The paper noted: There is also a moral question as to whether or not we can threaten to use nuclear weapons against a country to keep it under control. It is morally wrong to use such weapons even against a limited target because the effects of radiation would be deadly , for many beyond the target. There is no proportion between any good achieved and the untold destruction in the aftermath. If it is immoral to use these weapons, it is also immoral to in'tend to use them as a threat. The mere verbal threat to use them against ~ another nation with the secret intent not to actually use them is unrealistic. The threat is effective only if the intention to use them is real. The position the paper took seems to differ little from the way the Vatican thought seems to have been evolving, especially given its recent, March statement at the European disarmament conference. The final part of the "Principles" section considered principles for cooperation and "non-cooperation in evil. The two traditional points were made quite clear: One who by his/her approval, vote~ consent, together with others causes harm knowingly is guilty of i,njustice~and is obliged to make restitution in proportion to the efficacy of his/her consent. Cooperation means helping or assisting another in the performance of an~ injustice. Whoever takes an active part in an unjust action is guilty of the injustice if his/her efficacious cooperation is formal, that is, intended and deliberate. Material cooperation means not really wanting the injustice, but helping in it or contributing to it without a sufficient reason. Ordinarily, materia, I cooperation is morally wrong. According to traditional Catholic teaching, however, material cooperation is per-mitted if (and only if) two conditions are fulfilled: . a. The manner of one's cooperation is not a morally evil'act in itself, but only some participation or contribution to the evil or injustice done by another. b. The reason for one's cooperation is sufficiently important and proportionate to the ~:vil involved. By the time I r~ad the r~aterial presented by Francis Dombrowski, especially the principles related to (non)cgoperation, I had begun to believe that it would b,e difficu!t, if not impossible, for us t6 justify crntinued holdings in ,n~uclear armaments companies. This growing conviction was reinforced when I realized our portfolio could be diversified without any serious financial loss. We had. no "sufficient reason" to continue material cooperation. When I was definitely leaning this way, it was my research into the Franciscan charism that finally made me convinced that we could no longer hold stock in such companies. 81B / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 Application The third section of the paper noted that the times when Francis lived in Assisi vis~-vis wars and preparation for war were similar to our own era. According to Arnoldo Fortini, a biographer of Francis.and former mayor of° Assisi, war was "a condition of life for every city?: A militaristic way 'of thinking and acting became normative of the way opposing groups settled their differencesl Groups armed themselves to threaten their enemies, and were ready to use those arms to destroy their enemies in order to preserve their way of life, Fortini notes of the Christians of that era that they were so controlled by such an attitude that ?they could~not even imagine a faith that was not sustained by military skill." Within such an environment, Francis began to imagine a f~ith that did not need to be buttressed through armaments. It would be a way that society would p~erceive as totally alien to its way of operating and dealing with opposition. The paper noted: In the face of the militarism of his fellow citizens, Francis realized they were not about to change their ways: So he and his followers had to "divest" themselves of those ways. Thus the friars were not to acquire property, lest they take up arms to protect it. For their part, the laity ~fellow citizens as well) would bring the Franciscan charism to beai upon their lives and society through non-cooperation. They would not be able to bear any ii~thal weapons if they were to be faiihful to Frdncis' vision of life in that militaristic" milieu . it seems quite clear that his society shrouded in faith and religion the manufacture, use and deployment of lethal~ weapons. Francis' "No" must be applied to our day'as well. If Francis said no, and if Jesus said "No" to Peter who wanted to use a weapon of violence for self-protection, our response too can only be "no more of this" (Lk 22:51). What other response can we make, not as citizens of Assisi, but of the United Stfites, but to separate ourselves from this way of settling disputes and dealing with our enemies? We have been born as citizens of~the United States; we have unknowingly accumulated shares in companies manufacturing nuclear weapons. But we can choose now to respond to these realities with the,charism of Francis. ~ Proposal for Action 4) The final part of the paper presented a "Proposal for Action 'by the Province" which built on the previous three sections. After a summary of the main issues, the paper concluded that a nuclear war of defense cannot be morally justified because it,,does not discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, and' damage inflicted would be greater~than the good to be obtained. It noted that the Gospel of Peace and nonviolence, combine~d with the Franciscan call for peacemaking in a way that refused the'~bearing of arms, called us to a stance of nonviolence and nbncooperation. Next, the'~,paper countered '~the present position justifying deterrence on the grounds that it lacked solid moral underpinnings, as well as the evident fact that the possession of weapons did not help ,negotiations, but had instead increased the arms race. Th~ next point called for a freeze of further production of~veapons. ThissuEport for a nuclear freeze was followed by noting that a threat of"first To Divest or NOt to Divest ] 819 strike" is incompatible with the just-war theory and a nonviolent position and "has been directly condemned in the U.S. bishops' pastoral on war and peace." Finally, the paper again presented the dilemma of having stock in nuclear armaments companies and reached the conclusion: Since these nuclear weapons and their systems are being produced by corporations in which we have investments and since we, as a province, are making money on the production of these weapons, we feel it is an unjustified form of material cooperation to continue our investments. The good products these same companies manufacture and sell in no way can compensate for the incalculable destruction these weapons can inflict and forthe tremendous fear, mistrust and intrigue that the possession of such weapons causes between nations and peoples, not to mention the misuse of natural resources. technology and money that could be used for jobs and for the poor and hungry of the World. Given the paper's rationale, the provincial council recommended to the. province's membership a "clear decision of divestment from corporations that have major nuclear weapons contracts from the government." A criteria to determine "major" was fixed at $10 million. . Furthermore, the,council recommended that there should be total divest-ment rather than to keep a few token shares to continue to pressure the companies, as groups like the Adrian Dominicans have decided to do. Whether there should be total divestment or'whether a few token shares should be held to continue to pressure companies can certainly be debated. Sr. Valerie Heinonen believes those divesting should h~ld on to some shares~,or else "we're losing a forum. I don't see how we can reach corporate manage-ment if.we don't have at least some stock." When the position paper was presented to the province along with the recommendations of the Council. a large percentage (77%) of the membership responded, two-hundred and ten in all. Three choices had been offered: 1) we should divest for the reasons indicated in the paper; 2) we should not divest but continue our present corporate responsibility efforts; and 3) we should not divest and not continue our corporate responsibility efforts. One-hundred fifty-four (73.33%) voted for divestment, fo.rty-nine (23.33%) said there should be continued corporate responsibility efforts and a small number, seven (3~.33%), said we should do neither. ¯ The fact that over 96% of the respondents felt Jomething had to be done indicated, a deep concern about .this issue . Given the evolution of thinkin~g about this issue by many of us in the province, plus the growing number of groups th.a,t are beginning to divest, it is clear that this is an issue which won't be going away. In many ~vays, our Franciscan charism might have helped make our corporate decision as one, sided as it turned out to be. Y~t. whether other groups decided to divest or not to divest demands a ~erious investigation, given their charism and/or mission staterfients. All will have to face the dilemma squarely; it is a matter of si .mply bringing our faith to bear on the modern world. General Government: Its Leadership Role Today Gerald A. Arbuckle, S.M. Father Arbuckle's last article was "Planning the Novitiate Process: Reflections of an Anthro-pologist" (July/August, 1984). His duties in the general administration of his congregation keep him on extended journeys, but he may be addressed at his generalate headquarters: Padri Maristi; Via Alessandro Poerio, 63; 00152 Roma, Italy. any general administrations of religious congregations in the turbulent times of the 1960s and 1970s must surely have hoped that the decade of the 1980s would be marked by the tranquillity, security and growth that seemed so obviously to characterize their histories prior to Vatican 1I. But these hopes will never be realized. Religious life, like the Cht~rch itself, was challenged in Vatican II to serve the needs of people in a world that would continue to be in rapid, even turbulent, technological,'econoniic, political and cultural change. The niore religious seek to live up tO their vocation, the more in fact will they be drawn to share the hope~, anxieties and frustrations of people caught up in a world of change,~ with all the consequent stresses and strains of adjustment that this involvement brings. A further reason why the status quo of the pre-Vatican II era will n'ot be reinstated is the fact that many religious congregations ale discovering that their very future is in doubt. In view of the oft-heard prediction that "a reason.able expectation would seem to be that most religious communities the Church today~ will eventually become extinct,"2 religious in increasing numbers are askingthemselves questions ~uch as: Will the apostolate to which I dedicated my life survive when so few professed are entering my congregation? Will my province survive? Who will look after me when I am too old to work? Will my congregation itself survive? 820 General Government Toda.v / 1~21 Viewing these realities and questions from the "center," many of those involved in thework of general administration often find themselves at a loss to know what to do. On the one hand, these administrators would agree with the management expert, Peter Drucker, that all organizations (including religious local com-munities, provinces and congregations) will "become slack, easygoing, diffuse" unless challenged, and that: in turbulent tir~es the enterprise has to be kept lean and muscular, capable of taking strain but capable also of moving fast and availing itself of opportunity. This is particu-larly important if such times follow long years of comparative calm, ease and , predictability.~ Administrative: personnel may also have come to accept the harsh reflection that: when survival depends on change, human institutions often tend perversely towards suicide, in times of social upheaval, clinging to yesterday's images providessolace,a 'But, for religious congregations to su~ive and grow, more than solace is necessary. "It will take l~rave and visionary change, not just solace." On the other hand, the same general administrators may feel thoroughly' inadequate to do the type of brave and visionary "challenging for ch~ange"that~ is necessary. They feel that successive general chapters since Vatican II have so weakened their administrative authority that they have little or no effective authortty and power .to challenge the congregat~ion .or even prrvinces "tO become lean and muscular." In fact, some may even fear to do anything at all, lest tha_t result in a still further whittling away of whatever administrative authority is left them by general ch~ipters. Little wonder, therefore, if such administrations are experiencing frustra-tion, adr~inistrative identity crises, a sense of helplessness. They may even"feel somewhat .marginalized, unwanted, Within the veu congregation they have been elected to serve. Some administrations accept without question a mere figurehead role, feeling that any constructive effrrts'at challenging will achieve nothing at all. Others may initiate a spree of feverish activity, but if they lack dearly worked out goals and strategies based on sound information, then such activity is without value and only serves to intensify a feeling of frustration in all i:oncerned. ~ Unfortunately, a major reason~for the feeling of helplessness and frustration is the failure of'many persc, ns to understand that the obvious exercise of administrative authority or bureaucratic direction i~ not the only form of leadership that is opeh to administrators. In fact, while varying degrees of bureaucrati~ authority are essential in organizations, nonetheless such author-ity will be ineffective if at key points in the administration prophetic leadership is laeking~ No matter how little administratix~e authority general governments have, they can and they must exercise prophetic leadership within their.con-gregations. Paradoxically the lack of bureaucratic or administrative authority can even be an advantage. General administrations should be able to give ~129 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 mgre time to the demands of future planning, to the design of carefully planned visitations of provinces, if they do not have to be involved in the day-to-day turmoil of dealing with special-interest groups and "congregational power politics.". . In this paper, I will set out some ways in which, general administrations can exercise this crucial prophetic leadership. By way of background, I ~will also summarize relevant insights of management experts into the difficulties and challenges that confront administrations of secular organizations and businesses in the 1980s. Religious administrators can learn much from such writers--not the least being that secular administrators have to :face some major issues which are very similar to those which confront the genei~al admin-istrations of religious congregations. Secular organization~ themselves cannot survive and grow without a type of "prophetic" leadership! Models of Contemporary General Administrations Three model~ of general administrations can be distinguished on the basis of a continuum where centralization and decentralization of administrative authority are the two poles of reference. The Maximum DecentraliZi~tion Model The central administration of congregations organized in this fashion have onl); afigurehead role. The superior general and councilors merely symbolize the internationality ot~ tl~e congregation. Whatever administrative powers are left to them are of no real significance at all. The Maximum Centralization Model' Organized with a minimum of decentralization, all important matters in these congregations relat.ing to policies and appointments of key administrators (for example, provincials, formation personnel) are controlled by°the central administration: Delegation of authority to lower levels i~ minimal, only in matters .of little importance. ~ This model may characterize newly founded congregaiions, or congrega-tions which are small in membership and/or have a single, clearly defined apostolic activity, such as missionary activity. The In-betwedn Model: Mininial Centralization with Maximal Decentralization The choice of major administrators and personnel (fdr example provin-cials, formation, personnel) belongs to the~provinces. The role of the general administration in such appoin~tments is of no r~eal significance. However gen-eral administration does retain important supervisory powers, the significance ¯ of Which may.develop only in time. For example, the,superior general in such congregations may have ov~erall direction in matters relating to initial formation, without the legislation spell- General Government Today / 823 ing out precisely what this is to mean in practice. The general council may have authority to approve or reject provincial chaptbr~de~zisions according to guidelines set by the general chapter'decrees. It may have the power to control levels of expenditure within provinces. It may h~ix;e thai power,to stop a hou~;i~ being Opened or closed. The~h~ in ~hich a general administration might use these powers could at times effectively influence policy within provinces. SpecifiE instances of general administration, of course, may not fit precisely . into one or other of these models. But they will tend to approximate one rather than another. The type of frustration and malaise 1 described in the opening paragraphs will be found more particularly in the first and third models. These are the models which are the special concern of this article. Leadership Challenges in rSeculal" Organizations Today In a recent article, Ronald Lippitt stated that, for most leaders and follow-ers in the 1980s, three assumptions must be eradicated.: The first assumption whichmust disappear is that success depends on a vertical model of leadership, acc6rding to which decisions are to be made at the top, and people are to obey without contributing to the decision-making. The second assumption to be removed is the belief that "doing it by yourself" is a sign of strength. The spirit of' rugged individualism must give way to the spirit of ihterde~pendence'and collegiality at all levels of an organization. The third assumption which~has no'place in a "lean and muscular"~organi-zation is the belief that "competition is a necessary motivation for achieve-ment." This assumption,' claimsLippit~ "blocks seeking help, sharing resources, and pooling' complementary abilities--all requirements for survival, growth and development in the decades ahead."5 Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, in his recent analysis of the future of American so~iety,.says very much the same thing: The attribtites we Americans need most for the next generation is an enhanced com-mitment to othei:s and to shared concerns., l say "enhanced" because the commitment has not vanished but waned, and because a larger,measure is required~if.Americans are to do with less government and yet sustain themselves as a community. "rl3e commit-ment required., is for both ego and otl~er to attend to each other and to their shared world. 1 hence refer to it as ~mutuality.TM Again, he states that American society has become caught up with exces-sive individualism: We were affluent and had a sense that we could do anything. This attitude was fed by the pop-psychology idea of self-actualization--that everyone's first obligation was personal fulfillment.7 Taking these insights into account, .we can conclude that for survival and growth, leadership must have the ability to inspire in staffs an.effective will- 1~94 / R. eview for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 ingness to share ideas, skills, in a spirit of interdependence and .collegiality. Goal setting, the commitment to evaluate performance in light of these goals, will take place effectively because managements and.their staffs feel an atmo-sphere of mutuality or interdependence. No command from above will necessarily effect goal-setting, collegiality or a ~spirit of interdependence. This point is stressed by R. K. Greenleaf: "The very essence of leadership, going out ahead .to show the way, derives from more than usual openness to inspiration."8 He asks the question: "why would anybody accept the leadership of another except that the other sees more clearly where it is best to go?" Significantly he comments: "Perhaps this is the current problem: too many who presume .to lead do not see more clearly and, in. defense of their inadequacy, they all the more strongly argue that the ,system' must be preserved--a fatal error in this day of candor.", So the one who aspires to leadership must have the knowledge necessary "to see more clearly." But still moi'e-is required than knowledge. There is needed the spark of drive, of initiative, the call to follow: "A.leader ventures to say: 'I will go; come with me!''9,, ~., The leadership exemplified here is not the monarchical or hierarchical type--types closed to opinions and information of.others--but the type we call charismatic or prophetic. The prophet is a future-oriented person. He has an-acute.understanding of new needs and new opportunities, He opposes the. tendency in all ,human organizations ~t0 treat established institutions or methods of Ol~eration, at a given point in history, as though they were definitive.~0 Leadership of the prophetic type can see beyond the present problems, even temporarY s.uccesses, and can inspire others with a vision for change and with the courage to become involved in. realizing the vision in practice. The leader, says: "'I will go; follow me!' while knowing that the path is uncertain, even dangerous." i i Leaders of this type are rare, but the harsh reality is that unless organiza-tions of all kinds can find them and place them at various key levels so that their talents can be used, the organizations and their administrations will not survive. The organizations will die, for they will cease to b6 relevant. These leaders will, inter alia, help establish the values explained by Lippitt and others as essential for the survival and growth of organizations in the 1980s and beyond. It is not necessary for those in official control of organizations to have to a high degree all the qualities depicted by Greenleaf, but what is the sine qua non of success is the ability to spot people who do have the necessary creative and ~innovative skiils~ and then place these people in the right positions in which they can effect!vely inspire change. This is What Drucker means when he writes that "in turbulent times, my organization. '. needs to control the assignment of its resources. It needs to think through Where !the results are likely to be. It needs to know the performing and productive people." General Government Today But, to utilize such people to their full potential, there needs to be on the part of those in charge a firm discipline. Potential change-agents can easily be pushed aside because people are uncomfortable with their prophetic and innovative voices. There is also the danger that change-agents will dissipate their strengths and abilities over too wide an area. But the use of firm discipline will not be~ popular, for it will demand a "systematic withdrawal of resources--money, but above all, people--from yesterday's efforts,"12 that is, withdrawal from projects that are no longer relevant and/or productive, and the systematic encouragement Of change-agents, who can guarantee the survival and growth of the organization. Patience and courage are key virtues in leadership. In recent years some researchers into how effective leadership emerges in organizations have explicitly turned to cultural anthropology for insights into the nature, purpose and necessity of culture. This has produced some very challenging studies and conclusions. The leader who ignores basic:human needs for meaning, for symbols, for clearly articulated values and goals, for identity, as these are expressed in culture, will fail to achieve a following---even in business. o Hence, A. Pettigrew, reflecting on the interrelationship between leadership and culture, believes that the process of ghaping culture is the first task of management: "The [leader] not only creates the rational and tangible aspects of organizations, such as structure and technology, but also is the creator of symbols, ,ideologies, language, beliefs, rituals, and myths."13 J. MacGregor Burns distinguishes two types of leadership. There is first what he calls "transactional leadership." This type of leadership is concerned with the day-to-day smooth running of the organization. No organization can do with6ut this type. But no organization can survive for long if there is also lacking what Burns calls "transforming leadership:" This kind of leadership is a response to the fact that all people have need of a sense of purpose, of meaning, for a vision that helps to raise them in,their work above the daily grind. Inspired by this leadership people are moved to become more active themselves, more creative in their own work.14 T. E. Deal and A. A. Kennedy in their 1982 publication, Corporate Cul-tures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, assert that every business has a culture which has a major effect on the success of the business. In what they call "strong cultures" everyone knows the goals of the corporation, and every-one is working for them.~s People know clearly what is expected of them. This makes them feel i~ strong sense of belonging and of being valued. In conse-quence, according to Deal's and Kennedy's research, people are more likely to work harder. In companies that have strong cultures, managers "take the lead in supporting and shaping the culture," They give considerable time and energy to ,thinking about the values, heroes, and rituals of the culture," for their primary task is to manage "value conflicts that arise in the ebb and flow of daily events." 16 Such companies have bright futures. They have the resilience 1~96 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec,, 1984 to adapt to changing circumstances.~ When difficulties arise they can "reach deeply into their shared values and beliefs for the truth and courage to see them through."~7 In 1982 also, T.J. Peters and R. H. Waterman produced their best-selling book, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Compan-ies. ~8 This study also draws heavily on the insights of cultural anthropologists. The authors list the three qualities that make for excellence in the compan-ies they researched: bias for action, closeness to the customer, and high pro-ductivity through people. By "bias for action" they mean the ability of the companies.to move very quickly in changing policy and action, "and, more important, to be continuously innovative both in making the product.and providing services.''~9 Their findings on the qualities of the leadership present in the most suc-cessful companies are interesting. Common to all leaders is what the authors call the "hands-on, value-driven style." Such leaders have the ability to articu-late and transmit to others the essential values of their companies. In this they effectively create a strong corporate culture:. "Clarifying the value system and breathing life into it are the greatest contributions a leader can make."~° In order to transmit values the leaders must be mobile, constantly in touch with the grassroots of the company. In order to keep the leadership team active and unhindered by bureaucratic pressures at the tenter, the leadership at the top is kept surprisingly small, lean. The leaders the authors studied had lofty visions which could evoke excitement and enthusiasm for thousands of employees. But they were also people committed to practical detail: "In this role, the leader is a bug. for detail~ and directly instills values through deeds rather than words; no oppor-tunity is too small. So it is at once attention to ideas and attention to detail.TM The leaders of the Successful companies did not depend on a charismatic personality for success. Rather, they made themselves into effective leaders through hard work, sustained perso.nal commitment to the values they believed in, and a certain stubbornness in their efforts to build up a strong corporate culture based on these values.22 By "high productivity through people," the authors mean "the ability top companies have of treating employees with dignity and expecting them to contribute in innovative ways on a day-to-day basis.''23 For the 'researchers this quality appeared critical. New ideas and contented customers would result only when all in the organization--not just the people at the top--were motivated by the right, values.24 In the top quality firms, in consequence, those who innovate are treated as heroes, "even though those employees are occasionally a little bit at odds with the corporate bureaucracy,"2~ The authors refer to successful cdmpanies as having "simultaneous loose-tight properties." By this they mean: that at the same time there is .very firm central direction and maximum decentralization (in fact, some of the firms are radically decentralized). General Government Today / 1127 Firm central direction is achieved by the "hands-on, value-driven" ap-proach. 'The leadership sees its task as one of stressing values crucial to the firm's culture, for example, closeness to the customer, innovation, quality. The more these values are emphasized the more certain it is that they will be realized in practice. Values which are clearly articulated and emphasized them-selves act as the control mechanism.26 Within the clear framework of these values, individuals throughout all levels of the company feel encourage.d to innovate. Leadership and Authority in Periods of Cultural Change All the above authors stress the role of leadership if "weak cultures" are to become "strong cultures." However, no author sufficiently clarifies the rela-tionship between leadership and bureaucratic authority. For example, what role, if any, has authority in cultural change? ~ John R. Sheets. S.J., provides the precision necessary for this key question to be answered. He sees a common denominator in all expressi0.ns of leader-ship. It is an ability "to draw others beyond the point where they presently find themselves to a point of greater realization of their common aspirations. It is a power to draw others toward a center of closer unity."27 He sees the role of the leader very much as Greenleaf has described it or as MacGregor Burns views transforming leadership: "While he stands within the group, he has at the same time a certain transcendence, being ahead of the group, as one who has already realized the goal to a large'extent, and who now acts as a focal point drawing others to the realization of the same goal."28 But, unlike these authors, Sheets pinpoints three fundamental qualities of leadership~ ethos, pneuma and logos. Ethos is that quality o~f leadership that is concerned with values. The leader has interiorized within himself a .set of values, and the living out of these values in his own life draws others to follow and seek the same interiorization. Pneuma refers to the power conveyed by the leader and the power that is aroused in the group. It is characterized by inspiration, enthusiasm, energy. Logos is that quality of leadership related to judgment. It is described in various ways: reason, balance, discretion~ prudence, intelligence, knowledge. Where there is logos the leader has the power of judgment how to give a "constant and consistent shape to the aspirations of the group."~9 As Sheets says, genuine l~adership involves all three of these qualities. Within any one person, the qualities are to be found in varying degrees, "very oftenowith one of the characteristics assuming a particular prominence to the point where one might be designated according to one of these, as a moral or ethical leader, a charismatic leader, an intellectual leader.''3° A genuine leader will build on the particular aspect in which he is strong and call on others to complement his efforts with other qualities in which he is deficient. True leadership then aims to evoke teamwork. "Leadership," as described here, differs from "authority." Whereas leader- ~121~ / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 ship aims to motivate people to interiorize new values and attitudes freely, authority commands people,to act in certain ways. Rather than aiming to attract people to respond freely, authority imposes an obligation on people to act. In periods of cultural change, when people undergo deep value and atti-tudinal alterations, authority is to be used very infrequently, and then only with caution and considerable sensitivity. In-depth and lasting change can occur in and through leadership, but such change is rarely the result of author-ity commanding action. Support at key points, however, may have to come from authority. For example,~the actual placement of a person withleadership or change-agent qualities within a group may require the official use of author-ity. So also would the removal of an ineffective leader be an ffct of authority. In strong business cultures, authority is used very sparingly, but with effectiveness and according to definite criteria. Thus, for example, the selec-tion and appointment of key national, regional and local managers is gener- .ally the prerogative of central administration. Such people are chosen because they have the leadership qualities described. Without people of leadership gifts at key levels of management, the future growth and even survival of the business would be in danger. In brief, therefore, leadership aims to motivate people freely tO change by accepting new values, new attitudes. The new values and attitudes, together with the conseqt~ent alteration in behavior patterns, effect cultural changes. Leadership also aims to develop teamwork, to involve the whole group in ¯pr°blem-s°lving' George Foster concludes his fine analysis of why develop-ment projects in. the Third World succeed or fail, With a description of the qualities needed in ¯a community change-agent: The ethic of helping people change involves restraint and caution in missionary zeal. It means that developmental personnel should be careful not to plan for people, but to work with them in searching for realistic answers to their problems . It means learnirig to be humble, to be willing to lear.n . It means a genuine . desire to help in a realistic way based on full understanding of the nature of culture and culture change . a~ Foster's research findings, and his concluding description of the qualities ~'equired in a community change-agent; confirm the.universal validity of the clarifications provided by Sheets and the other authors above. "Strong, and "Weak, Cultures in Religious Life A religious congregation is not a business organization. The fundamental aim of a religious congregation is not monetary profit to satisfy investors, nor is it to supply the material needs of customers. Neither can a religious congregation, unlike a business enterprise, fully gauge its success or failure by whether or not its "products" are being "sold." Nor ought we to consider a religious congregation to be definable only in terms of a social grouping--one, for example, designed to serve the human-welfare needs of its members. General Government Today / 829 A religious congregation has meaning only in relationship to the kingdom of God. Its members consecrate themselves to God in the Church to offer ¯. to the world visible proof of the unfathomable mystery of Christ, inasmuch as in themselves they really present "Christ in contemplation on the mountain, or proclaiming the kingdom of God to multitudes, or healing the sick and the maimed and converting sinners to the good life, or blessing children and doing good to all men, always in obedience to the will of the Father who sent him" (LG 46).32 Effective consecration demands of religious that they keep on discerning how best to serve the Church with "boldness of initiatives" in accordance with the particular and unique charism of their congregation, being prepared to drop this or that form of apostolate which is no longer responsive to the real pastoral needs of people.33 This does not mean that religious cannot, and must not, learn from all kinds of social organizations---even from business enterprises--about how to improve their efforts to give "to the world proof of the unfathomable mystery of Christ." With St. Paul, we religious believe that "we are only the earthen-ware jars that hold this treasure [our Christian faith].34 Our faith is incarnated in and through people, groups, customs, cultures. On the sociological level at least, our religious congregations, like the Church itself, do show "organizational traits which in many respects resemble those of secular organizations.TM The way our religious congregations or communities are organized may well either hinder or facilitate our efforts to give "the world proof of .the unfathomable mystery of Christ." Discernment, after all, does not consist just in zealous and constant prayer. It also consists in being open to whatever way the Holy Spirit may speak to us--including the. way that ordinary folk live and organize their lives. We should not be startled to learn that the Holy Spirit has something to teach us from what happens in the. mundane actions of the marketplace. Perhaps the Lord is. also telling us to be open to. contemporary research in business methods when he said: ,For the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their kind than are thechildren of light."~6 In businesses which, have strong cultures, goals, objectives, values, are clearly .articulated and interiorized by all concerned. People are accountable for their actions because they know what is expected of them, and they are motivated so to act. There is constant contact with customers, making it possible to see how best to respond to their needs. Business leaders are value-oriented. They value service, not just to the customer, but also to their employees with whom they are in frequent contact. Written communications are acceptable, but personal .presence to staff.at key levels by leaders is far more emphasized. Finally, innovators are 'vigorously encouraged, despite the risks involved, for innovation that is a response to customer needs is seen as ultimately the guarantee of survival and growth: If we look at those religious congregations that are actually moving into a 1~30 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 stage of revitalization, we see that they are developing strong cultures. Mutatis mutandis, these congregations have many of the marks that we have seen characterize strong cultures. There is the rediscovery of key religious-life and congregational values, together with their interiorization and their expression in innovative apostolic action.37 Apostolic innovators are valued and en-couraged as congregational "culture heroes." Leaders have articulated their values, including the values that particularly relate to the charism of the founder. In variou~ ways, and with risks taken in faith, they have communi-cated these insights and values to the others, drawing them also to do the same. They have done this not by multiplying the ~number of documents and letters of exhortation, but by going directly~ to key°groups and personnel in .the congregation, and drawing them by their presence to accept the same values and convictions.38 Through~: cooperative teamwork, these leaders have encouraged a new sense of spiritual purpose to develop in the members of the congregation. A heightened, sense of morale emerges, because clarified and interiorized values and goals give a renewed sense of meaning and direction~to members~ lives. Those congregations that are not revitalizing have weak cultures. There is confusion about values, uncertainty about goals and objectives. Those who ought to be the leaders because they hold official positions in thecongregation are lacking in the know-how and/or the spiritual courage to give leadership. Many of their religious, mainly because leadership is lacking, cannot agree on what values should be retained and acted on. This leads to more and more ¯ frustration. Often the attitude of these religious to authority is ambivalent, On the one hand, there is a cynical or angry rejection of authority in the congrega-tion because it is seen as irrelevant and powerless. On the other hand, there is a hankering ~ifter authority to give direction--but when officials do attempt to use authority they are quickly rejected. There is a failure to recognize the fact that change cannot come through the bare use. of authority, but only through leadership. Since few religious have been trained in the exercise of leadership, it is difficult for members to. understand the distinction between authority and leadership. Potential change-agents or. innovators in the congregation are frequently marginalized, Sometimes this marginalization takes place because those in authority consider them "disloyal" or "troublemakers," for they Question the status q.uo.39 General administrators may maintain a schedule of visitations in the pro-vinces, but' unless the visitations are done with goals based on real needs of the congregation, then the visits only intensify feelings of frustration among members. The exhortations of the general administrators,~and their follow-up letters to the visited provinces, come across as irrelevant, out of touch with real issues, and thus reinforce the view that general administrations have no longer any role of importance in religious congregations. Religious congregations with weak cultures thus described have reached General Government Today what is now called the "breakdownstage." If the situation is left unchecked, these congregations will die--not because the Holy Spirit has failed, nor because the charisms of the congregations have become irrelevant, but because key people in the congregations have not "read the signs of the times" and acted accordingly.~° "Hands, On, Value-Driven" Leadership For several centuries prior to Vatican I1, general administrations often obtained their identity and role-definition from the authority they could exer-cise: the power, to appoint key people, such as provincials and formation staffs; the power to visit and check on whether or not age-old and universally accepted congregational customs were being maintained. The more adminis-trative positions became institutionalized, the more the faithgospel vision of the founding persons became obscured, together with their innovative ability to discern and react to often unattended pastoral needs of the peop!e of their times. General administrations became far more comfortable with their authority roles than with the challenges of leadership. Theologically, the emphasis was often on the need for the changing world to adapt to the unchanging Church. In similar vein, the world had also to adapt to the unchanging cultures 'of religious eongregations~ The stress by administrators, far from encouraging departures from what was done in the past; was to insist on conformity to the tried ways of the congregational culture-heroes of former times.41 With the coming of Vatican II, two interconnected emphases in particular undermined the clarity of this role-definition, and thus the traditional security o~f general administrations. The first was a renewed stress on the mission of the Church to enter and influence a world in rapid change. The second was the move to decentralize the government of religious life. The Church recognized once more that it had a mission to a world in change. Yesterday's methods were not necessarily adequate for new pastoral needs.42 The Church is called to be Christ to the world. Since religious are "to be more radical Christians, in the sense of trying to live the life and holiness of the Church in all its radicalness~''"3 they must seek to excel in cohtfibuting to the pastoral and apostolic innovation that was needed. Now the task of general governments is determined primarily by the mission which religious life and each eongregatiori has within the Church, and not by the authority they may have because the constitutions say so. The role of a general administration is to call the entire corporate body to the realization of its two-fold aim: union with Christ and service to the neighbor according to the particular faithgospel vision of the founding person. The decentralization of religious-life government left many general admin-istrations at a loss to know what to do in administration.On the one hand, the theology of Vatican II insisted that religious should be pastorally innovative and open to change. On the other hand, general administrations had no 839 / Review for Religious, ~lov.-Dec., 1984 experience of how to stimulate and lead such innovation. Especially adminis-trations belonging tO the first and third models above particularly felt con-fused and anxious since, without authority, they could not see what they should do to facilitate this revitalization. Many provinces also seemed quite willing to ignore their general adminis-trations, seeing them merely as innocuous and vague symbols of the interna-tionality of the community. In quite recent years, however, an awareness seems to be growing in some provinces that decentralization has not produced the miraculous renewal or revival that it was expected to evoke. There is a vague, ill-defined turning toward "the center." But unless central governments act with genuine leadership, the opportunity thus given them will be lost. To transform a weak business culture into a strong one there must bea radical change in values, with a consequent and effective commitment to action. And if a religious congregation is to move from a weak to a strong culture, there must likewise be a radical reconversLon to a new set of values, or a return to the original values of the founder. Founders of religious congregations laad the faith and courage to enter on a journey. They attracted others to join them in showing "the Church and the world a quality of life that calls them back to the design of God in Christ Jesus."~ The outcome of the journe~ was never certain. Each religious and each congregation which accepts this new challenge of reconversion begins, as it were. another spiritual journey. This will involve, like the first journey, "an anguished and sometimes perilous exploration,"45 an adventure in faith, hope and love. Similarly, general administrations which summon their congregations to a second journey, to a process of refounding, must expect periods of darkness, misunderstanding, even rejection. Like their founders before them, they will need far more than human expertise or ingenuity to maintain the dynamism and creativity of their leadership. A feeling of identity and security in their leadership will come, not from any authority they may still have nor from any authority newly obtained from their general chapters, but from union with Christ in his life, death and resurrection. In order to utilize resources to the best possible advantage, I believe that these general administrations must concentrate their leadership efforts on four categories or groupings of persons within their congregations: -on themselves as leaders; -on the congregation as a whole; -on groups tha.t hold, or potentially hold, leadership positions; -on all who are involved in the preparation of the general chapter. 1 will no~w take each.category in,turn. Leadership Directed at Themselves "The Church is an evangblizer; 'but she begins by being evangelized her-self." So wrote Paul VI. "She is the community of believers, the community of General Government Today hope lived and communicated, the community of brotherly love; and she needs to listen unceasingly to what she must believe, to her reasons for hoping, to the new commandment of love . [The Church] is evangelized by constant conversion and renewal, in order to evangelize the world with credibility.''~6 These words apply with equal force and validity to general administrations, for these are called to evangelize their own congregations. They can do so only by first evangelizing themselves. General administrators themselves form a group which mirrors the congregation as a whole in that they come from different cultural backgrounds, have different prejudices, both cultural and personal, which interfere with communication, have different formative and educational training, hold different theological orientations. If these adminis-trators are to be welded into a leadership team in which each is encouraged by the rest to use his leadership qualities, one of ethos, another of pneuma, another of logos, then they must face the cold reality that they themselves will have to undergo a culture change. They will have to move from being a "weak dultural group" of the congregation, with each being an individualist, to become a "strong cultural group" in which each person is in fact a ,team member. Each member will have to become increasingly and personally ope~, " not just. to changes in knowledge, information, or the intellectual rationale for action and practice, but to new attitudes, values, skills, the .removal of preju-dices, and the development of mature relationships within the team itself,47 The courage and the honesty to be open as individuals to such radical changes is needed, so that a genuine administration community for evangelizing emerges, one that is credible to the congregation. This will come only if administrators are prepared to commit themselves to deep prayer and asceticism: Only in prayerful discernment will the team members be~able to discover what the Holy Spirit is asking of them and how they can help to disentangle the pure charism of the founder from the accretions of time. Faced with the demands of the contemporary Church and world, they will experience the same sense of shock as the founder did in his day. It is true that there must be serious commitment to study and to scientific methods of obtaining factual informa-tion relating to the works of the congregation and the needs of the apostolate. But such information will be of little value, will be merely "a noisy gong or a clanging bell,"48 if the uses to which it is put are not discerned in an atmo-sphere of brotherly love and prayer. In brief, if general administrators expect to enable their entire congregation to move from weak to strong religious-life cultures, they must themselves first, individually and as a group, undergo the same cultural transformation. The top priority for each administration, there(ore, is to set aside definite periods of the year in which administrators can all be present for planning, for praying together, for sharing personal and corporate faith experiences, for discerning how the Holy Spirit wishes to use them in the service of the congregation. Nothing should interfere with this priority. At times a skilled facilitator may be an invaluable adjunct in helping team members to become 834 ] Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 yet more vitally involved in their own and their team's religious-life cultural change. ~, Leadq'ship Directed to the Congregation as a Whole Superiors general and their administrations, when confronted by the stark reality ofa weak congregational culture, are tempted to react with a strongly worded pastoral letter (or even a series of them) about the need for the members to undergo conversion. Normally, this temptation must be vigor-ously~ resisted. Historically, such letters seem to have little or no effect.49 Generally th6 letters are ignored, or if read, they may evoke yet further cynicism, even anger, directed toward central government. In successful business operations in which the "hands-on, value-driven" style of leadership is used, 'leaders avoid frequent and lengthy communications from the center to subordinates. Theyl prefer to improve communication by personalizing the process on a one-to-one basis or on a one-to-group basis. However, a general administration team, after lengthy and prayerful dis'- cernment, may conclude that a prophetic communication in letter form to the whole congregation is necessary, even though there are good grounds to a~ssume the message will be rejected, even by the vast majority of the congrega-tion. Out of great love for the Church and for the congregation, the adminis, trati0n may feel the need to speak out loudly and clearly, "to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."50 The decision to write such a prophetic challenge should not be. taken lightly: If it is done, then, as far as possible, it should be followed up with personal contact by means of general administrators in touch with key groups in the congregation. Explanations of the letter can be given, and reactions received, in a discerning atmosphere. Leadership Directed to Key Groups ,qt is at the level of key groups within the congregation that the central government's efforts at "hands-on, value-~lriven" and "loose-tight" leadership should be concentrated. In most congregations the following groups would be important to concentrate on: .-p~ovincial councils -formation staffs -provincial chapters -other interest groups ,of various kinds, such as justice and peace commit-tees or spirituality and mission seminars (some of the groups may be of an inter-provincial or international nature). It may, be necessary, particularly in the early stages, to spend considerable time with provincial councils. The aim should be to create a discernment atmosphere similar to the one needed at the general administration level, in which~provincial¢council goals are established, and objectives and strategies worked out to .realize these goals. Considerable prudence and patience are General Government Today required since provincial councils may well consider that the initiation of change is primarily the function of authority, not leadership. Or, despite information to the contrary, the councils may even deny that there are prob-lems confronting their provinces. And they may consider the discernment process simply a waste of time, "something that only general administrations have time for!", Where these _views exist, general administrators may find the challenge to act as catalysts in culture change extremely demanding. George Foster's advice quoted above needs to be recalled: leadership to be effective requires a "full understanding of the nature of culture and culture change." Those of us who take for granted the computer age, and assume cultural changes can occur with the same speed that characterizes computerized travel arrangements and purchasing, will find it very hard to appreciate the fact that radical cultural change is always a very slow process. General administrators, when faced with negative responses from provincial councils, may be tempted, like all change-agents when confronted by rejection or lack of interest, to find escape routes. They may be tempted to return to the generalate in order to "write a report" for the benefit of.the particular provincial council that is hesitant or refuses to respond. This process of writing the report will console the administrator, encouraging the belief that "something is hap-pening." But it is very unlikely that anything at a!! is happening if the adminis-trator still refuses to implement a "hands-on~ leadership approach by being present to the difficult provincial council--with the report in hand if necessary. Prior to working with the provincial council, the general administrator may well need to visit various people or groups in the. province in order to assess the level of cultural weakness or strength of the membership at large. But g~neral administrators should avoid doing what provincials or local super-iors should do. namely, the pastoral, personal interviews of members. The more general administrators become involved on the personal level, the less time they will have to concentrate on leadership at the level of key groups. The general administration's concern should be primarily for the welfare of the congregation as a whole. Normally, whatever is undertaken by general administrators must have this overall aim in mind. I believe the failure of general administrations to be clear about their primary aim has resulted in the administrators suffering from overwork, stress, even burnout. Again. the advice of George Foster makes sense: "The ethic of helping p~ople change involves.restraint and caution in missionary zeal." Formation staffs in the post-Vatican Church are under particular pressure to work out goals and methods for initial formation. The general administra-tor responsible for formation must be prepared to spend considerable time with formation personnel, encouraging them and working with them to clarify what should be done in light of definite criteria. It might also be necessary to work with provincial councils, of several 836/ Review for Religious, No'v.:Dec., 1984 provinces in an effort to develop something like an interprovincial or interna-tional training center where the best formation staff available can be concen-trated. It is increasingly impossible for congreg~.tions with declining numbers of religious and student candidates to have many formation houses. At the same time, the quality of initial formation will be a major influence on the future health of any congregation. If a reasonable development of the forma-tion program is to take place, the general administrator will.~need to exercise considerable patience, all the while being careful never to give up on the "hands-on, value-driven" approach. The closure of a formation house which has existed for a very long time, for:example, can be a traumatic experience for members of a province. The general administrator may well have to be available for a protracted period to enable their passage through this. difficult time. As regards provincial chapters, it is important for the general administra-tion to be involved, not because it wants to use whatever authority it might still have to insist on changes in legislation, but because chapters, if rightly prepared, provide an entire province with the chance to participate in a com-munal discernment process. The general administration's task will be to encourage provincial councils to adopt the discernment process both by way of preparation and during the actual chapter.S~ If some provinces have uged only parliamentary debating and 16bbying systems, it will not be° easy to convince them' of the advantages of communal discernment processes.52 General administrations have the chance also of bringing to the provinces at such times an overview of religious life in general and of the state of,their own congregation in particular, which provinces are m danger of forgetting their discernment processes. General administratoi's, when presefit at chapters, can help to counter narrow nationalistic or parochial attitudes whiizh can so easily develop in provinces to the detriment of their work of evangelization. Meetings of religious from particular interest groups often attract many of thoseoinvolved in apostolic reflection and innovation. These religious can encourage one another at such meetings, and stimulate the prophetic people among them to new forms of apostolic action. At times, the general administration itself can sponsor regional or interna-tional gatherings of concerned religious to reflect on subjects of fundamental importance for cultural change of the congregation, for example, the charism of the congregation, and its history and relevance for the work of evangeliza-tion, the relationship between the congregation's charism and the Church's call for more involvement in justice and peace issues. There is every chance that from these gatherings will emerge individuals with the type of leadership necessary for the survival and growth of the congregation. Leadership in Preparing the General Chapter The general chapter of a congregation is meant to ~:enew and protect the spiritual patrimony of the institute. It should be ~ moment of grace, of the General Government Todqy ] 837 action of the H01y Spirit in a congregation provided there is adequate prepa-ration, an atmosphere of communal prayerful discernment during the chapter itself, and a planned follow-up after the chapter.53 The task of the general chapter is to challenge the congregation to face the future. For this purpose the goals of the institute must be evaluated (and if necessary, reformulated) in ligh! of changing pastoral needs, of the theology of mission, of the charism of the congregation and its human and spiritual resources. The means to realize these goals must be evaluated and, if necessary, changed. ~For example, the chapter must decide whether or not a congregation of the first or third models described above can realize its apostolic and religious life goals if the central government has little or no authority to complement its leadership role. For the sake of the overall good of the congre-gation, should central government have an important role in the choice of provincials and formation staffs--that is, in the appointment of key change-agents in the congregation? Remember, of course, that in successful business operations the leadership rarely uses authority. But it does use authority to appoint key staff throughout the organization, after considerable consultation of those who know the candidates. But a more fundamental question must be answered by the general chap-ter. What form of government and what kind of authority should it have if t.he congregation is to realize its primary purpose of service to the People of God? No general chapter can face such questions, nor do what it is supposed to do~ without thorough preparation. Too often general chapters are considered the work only of the capitulants, not of the congregation as a whole. When this happens, the general chapter will have little or no practical impact on the religious-life cultural change of the institute. There is' little sense in having a chapter if the whole congregation does not own it from beginning to end, that is, from the time of preparation through to and including the implementation stage. The general administration has a most crucial role to play in stimulating the whole congregation to become involved in preparing for the chapter t~hrough prayer, study, reflection, and dialog.54 This will be a demanding and time-consuming task, especially if the failure of previous general chapters has left people feeling cynical, apathetic, even angry about being invited to be involved in preparatory work. For this reason, it may be necessary for the general administration to initiate the planning of the chapter many months, even a year or two, before the chapter is due to ~begin. The follow-through after the chapter has ended is as important as the preparation, though this stage is likely to be overlooked for two reasons. Capitulants may feel the enthusiasm of the chapter experience itself will be enough to guarantee an automatic post-chapter follow-through by the con-gregation as a whole. But enthusiasm alone at a chapter will ensure, nothing. Secondly, an entirely new general administration may be elected at the chapter. It may not immediately have the skills or the coherence for teamwork 838 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 even to see that the follow-through stage must be planned and implemented immediately after the chapter. Hence, as a service to the whole congregation, the outgoing administration, drawing on its own experience, could,suggest to the chapter itself or to the new administration several alternative plans for the post-chapter follow-through. , The purpose of religious government is "the building of a united commun-ity in Christ in which God is sought and loved before all things, and the mission of Christ is generously accomplished."55 With this purpose in mind~ the general chapter must elect the superior general and ~the assistants~ The election is a dramatic moment in the cultural-change process of a general congregation, the process in which the institute is trying to deepen its religious-life values. The outgoing general administration cannot, and must not, seek to influence capitulants to vote for certain people. But, if its evangelizing presence has had an.impact over its years of government, then the capitulants will be aware:of what they should expect to find in members chosen for the new administration~ The primary question for the voters should be: Who ,has the leadership qualities necessary to be of service to the whole congregatio, n?°A .person may be able to speak many languages, but if he or she lacks leadership qualities, then voters should automatically consider other candidates. Since general administrators are to be at the service of the whole congregation, the folio.wing question should not even be considered: Will he or she better represent my province? Summary By way of summary, what particular points should general administra-tions be sensitive to if they are to exercise effective leadership? Firstly, culture change is a complex, slow and often painful process, requiring new values, attitudes and behavior patterns. Since revitalization of a religious congregation involves a cultural change, one in which the institute moves from a weak to a strong culture, the process will be slow and painful. The pain will be salvific if individuals and communities approach change in a prayerfully discerning way. Secondly, general administrations are called to lead their congregations to revitalization. They do this by articulating and communicating the values which form the foundation of the religious-life culture change of the congrega-tion. This means that in implementing the "hands-on, value-driven" and '~loose-tight" principles of leadership, general administrators must .resist the temptation to solve problems for people~ Their overriding task is to communi-cate the values in light of which the congregations' members themselves decide ¯ freely what to do. Thirdly, in order to communicate values and to guarantee that they tak+ deeper and deeper roots within the congregation,general administrators must be in as frequent personal contact with provincial administrations and key General Government Today / 839 groups in the provinces as is possible. They cannot lead by remaining in the generalate. Strong administrative discipline is required to prevent central governments from assuming administrative responsibilities that would hinder or prevent general administrators from being in the field. Planned follow-up visits are required by general administrators to provincial councils and other key groups at various stages after important planning sessions have been held. This would help the development of an accountability process. The more successful, over time, that the communication of values is, the less frequent will the visits have to be. Fourthly, implicit in all that has been said is the assumption that the primary concern of the general administrators is the corporate well-being of the congregation. General administrators should not normally take over the personal, pastoral visitations of each religious by the provincials. The more they become personally involved in this type of ministry, themselves, the less time and energy they have for their primary task. Fifthly, general administrators should constantly be on the lookout for potential or actual innovators, prophetic figures, congregational "heroes," who, ~f rightly placed, would have the ability to summon others to reconversion. Conclusion Many general administrations today are confused about how to lead their congregations through the processes of revitalization. It is true that "leader-ship styles of the past will no longer be functional or useful.''56" But the challenges that general administrations face today are not unique to them. Survival and growth are not automatic for secular organizations and busi-nesses either. General administrations of .religious congregations, especially those which need revitalization or reconversion, can learn much from the style and methods of the leaders of successful businesses and other secular organizations¯ ~ General administrators are to lead, not by taking more and more respon-sibilities from the provinces, nor by trying to coerce people into reconversion through the use of some form of authority, but by clarifying, articulating and transmitting the congregation's values and goals to all members. Their task is to build strong religious-life cultures, in which congregational "heroes," inno-vators, refounders, prophets, are valued people. The stress is on working with, not for members of the congregation. The basic and primary skill required of general administrators as leaders is the ability to work with others, first and most of all with each other, so that teamwork emerges, and then with key groups and personnel in the provincesP7 They will be evangelizer~ to their own congregation to the degree that they, as a team and as individuals, are open to evangelization themselves. They must strive to be specialists in their own congregation "in the sense of expe-riencing God more vividly in the following of Christ and making that expe-rience the basis" for the evangelization of their fellow religiousP8 I]40 / Review for Religious, Nov.-Dec., 1984 General administrators need insights from research into leadership, skills and expertise. But we need to be reminded that, as Paul VI notes, while "techniques of evangelization are good, [nonetheless] even the most advanced ones could not replace the gen.tle action of the Spirit. The most perfect prepa-ration of the evangelizer has no effect without the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit the m.ost convincing dialectic has no power over the heart of man. Without him the most highly developed schemas resting on a truly sociglogi-cal or psychological basis are quic, kly seen to be quite valueless."59 NOTES ~See The Church in the Modern World, I. 2See Raymond L. Fitz, S.M. and Lawrence J. Cada. S.M., ~The Recovery of Religious Life" in REVIEW FoR RELIGIOUS, Vol. 34, No. 5, 1975, p. 706. 3Managing in Turbulent Times (London: Pan, 1980), p. 43. 4E. Ward, "Christian Missions--Survival: in What Forms" in International Bulletin of Mission-ary Research. 1982, p. 8. 5Ronald Lippitt, "The Changing Leader-Follower Relationships of the 1980s" in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1982, p. 397. 6Amitai Etzioni, An Immodest Agenda: Rebuilding America Before the21st Century (N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 26f. 7Amitai Etzioni, "U.S. Needs a 'Moral and Social Recovery'" in U.S. News & Worm Report, 9 Jan. 1984, p. 591- SRobert K. Greenleaf, Servant ~Leadership: A Journey into the Nature "of Legitimate Power and Greatness (N.Y.I Paulist Press, 1977). p. 15. 91bid. ~0See Roger Aubert (Ed). Prophets in the Church (N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1968), p. 2. ~Robert K. Greenleaf, op. cit., p. 15. ~2Peter Drucker. op. cit., p. 43. ~3Cited by Thomas~ J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr: In S~arch of Excellence: Lessons from America's,Best-Run Companies (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 104. ~4See James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1978)., ~5(Reading. Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1.9~2), p. 15f. ~Ibid. p. 141. ~71bid, p. 196. A Similar cultural approach to management analysis is to be found in Richard Tanner Pascale and Anthony G. Athos. The Art of Japanese Management (l:ondon: Allen Lane. 1982). ~sOp. cit. ~gThomas J. Peters, "Well-Run Companies: The Secret of Success" in U.S. News & Worm Report, 10 Oct. 1983, p. 74. -'0Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman. Jr. op. cit., p. 291. e :qbid. p. 287. ~-'See op, cit., p. 288. -'3Thomas J. Peiers. "Well-Run Companies: The Secret of Success," p. 74. 24See Thomas J. Peters and Robert,H, Waterman, Jr. op. cit., p. 310. ¯ ~-5Thomas J. Peters, "Well-Run Companies: The Secret of Success," p. 75. -'6See T.homas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. op. cit. p. 318. 27"A Discussion on Leadership and Autfiority" in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St. Louis: American Assistancy Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality; 1972), Vol. IV. No. 2~, p. 55. ~Slbid, p. 56. -'91bid. p. 58. -~01bid. 3~ Traditional Cultures: And the Impact of Technological Change (N.Y2 ~Harper. 1962), p. 269. This text is further explained by Gerald A. Arbuckle in The Role of Change-Agents in Devel- General Government Today / 1141 opment (Sydney: Action for World Development, 1972). a2Mutuae Relationes (Rome: S.C. for Religious and for Secular Institutes & S.C. for Bishops. !978): par. 10. ~lbid. par. 12 -~2 Co 4:7. 3~Mady A. Thung, The Precarious Organization." Sociological ~cplorations of the Church's Mission and Structur~ (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), p. I. For relevant sociological analyses of Church structures and management, see: Alvin J. Lindgren and Norman Shawchuck, Manage-ment for Your Church: How to Realize ),our Church's Potential Through a Systems Approach (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977); Lyle E. Schaller, Effective Church Planning (Nashville: Abifigdon, 1979); Peter E Rudge, Ministry and Management." The Stud), of Ecclesiastical Administrations (London: Tavistock. 1968). -~6Lk 16:18. 37See Lawrence Cada, 'S.M., Raymond Fit~., S.M., Gertrude Foley. S.C. Thomas Giardino, S.M., and Carol Lichetenberg, S.N.D. de N. Shaping the Coming Age of Religious life (N.Y.: Seabury Pr~ess, 1979), p. 60. ~SFor helpful historical insights ~ee Raymond Hostie, S.J., The Life and Death of Religious Orders: A Psycho-Sociological Approach (Washington: Cara, 1983), pp. 276-281. 39See J. P. Donero, F.S.C. and T. D. Frary, New Responses in Religious Life (N.Y.: Alba House, 1979), pp. 20-22. 4°See Raymond L. Fitz, S.M. and Lawrence J. Cada. S.M., "The Recovery of Rdligious Life." 4~For relevant comments see Thomas More Page, C.F.X., "Managing and Planning Change in Religious Institutes" in REvIEw I:OR REI:~G~OUS, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1972, pp. 386-401. 42The most challenging restatement of this emphasis is to be found in the Apostolic Exhortation of Paul VI, ten years after Vatican II, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 1975, nn. 18, 20, 63. 43Leonardo Boff,,O.F.M~:, God's Witnesses in the Heart of the WorM(Chicago: Claret Center for Resources in Sl~irituality, 1981). p. 226. '~F. J. Moloney, S.D.B., Disciples and Prophets: A Bibfical Model for the Religious Life (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980), p. 169. 45Quoted by Paul V. Robb, S.J. in "Conversion as a Human Experience" in St.udies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St, Louis: American Assistancy Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1982), p. 4. ~Op. cir., par. 15. ~TSee for helpful comments.'John Adair, Effective Leadership: A Modern Guide to Developing Leadership Skills (London: Pan Books, 1983). pp. 159-186. ~Sl Co 13:1': 49See Raymond Hostie, S.J., op. cit., p. 277. 5°Jr I:10. ~ For an explanation of the lg.natian method of deliberation, see John C. Futrell, S.J., "Commu-nal Discernment: Reflections on Experience" in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St. Louis: American Assistancy Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1972). ~2Two studies by W. Biddle and L. oBiddle will be helpful to leaders in cultural change: 7~te Community Development Process: The Rediscovdry of LoCal Initiative (N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) and Encouraging Community Development: A Training Guide for Local Workers (N.Y.: Holt, Rineh

Issue 58.5 of the Review for Religious, September/October 1999. ; f'o r reli i , C~stian Heritages and Contempora~ Living SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER1999 ¯ VOLUME58 ~°~NUMBER5 Review for Religious is a forum for shared r(flection on the lived experience of all who find that the church's rich heritages of spirituality support their personal and apostolic Christian lives. Tbe articles in tbe journal are meant to be informative, practical, historical, or inspirational, written from a theological or spiritual or ~ometimes canonical point of view. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published hi-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 P.O. Box 29260; Washington, D.C. 20017 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 c~)ver for information on subscription rates. ©1999 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Clare Boehmer ASC Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm James and Joan Felling Kathryn Richards FSP Joel Rippinger OSB Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ David Werthmann CSSR Patricia Wittberg SC Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER'1999 ¯ VOLUME58 ¯ NUMBER5 contents 454 perspectives The Self in Postmodern Thought: A Carmelite Response Vilma Seelaus OCD places the biblical God-related understanding of the. self, on which the Carmelite tradition rests, in conversation with the postmodern self. 470 The "World" from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II Frederick E. Crowe SJ examines some major transitions in the Christian attitude toward the world, especially as a new context for the meaning of consecrated life. 490 brothers "Come Closer. I Am Your Brother": Being and Doing Brotherhood Joel Giallanza CSC reflects on the very identity of the religious vocation of "brother" as providing both brothers themselves and the church with a rich and prophetic spirituality. Religious Brothers: One Vocation Director's Perspective Paul Bednarczyk CSC shares his reflections on why fewer people are choosing to be brothers and on some possible countermeasures. Review for Religious 5OO journeying On Promise Making, Leave-Taking, and Becoming Avis Clendenen brings together personal experience and psychological and theological insight in addressing the reality of making and breaking commitments. 515 Charism and Membership: Surpassing the Institutional Limits of Religious Life Deborah M. Cerullo SSND proposes that emphasis on becoming grounded in the charism through a common novitiate experience would create a better synthesis of diverse ways of being members. 524 associates Identity, Purpose, Organization: Ongoing Associate Programs Rose McDermott SSJ presents a brief historical overview of associates and associations joined to religious institutes, reviews church legislation, and then raises issues about sound future development. 537 Similarity and Uniqueness in the Association Experience: Theological Reflection Roberta Archibald SSJ, Joanne Bauer SBS, Mary Mester RSM, and Jean Ustasiewski OSF share their experience of using theological reflection in a regional gathering of associates and sisters. departments 452 Prisms 546 Canonical Counsel: Impediments to Admission 552 Book Reviews September-October 1999 prisms Thy kingdom come The words kingdom and reign sound off-putting to most Americans. We have little tra-dition of kings and queens. What we have of it stems from a relatively brief past of early colonizers looking back to European roots. But when we Christians pray the Lord's prayer, we find ourselves begging God--the one we address by Jesus' word Father--that "your king-dom will come." By Jesus' teaching us a way to pray as he prays, we seem to be using language that pictures God as ruler or king and God's area of influence as a kingdom. What do we mean when we pray "Thy kingdom come"? Perhaps we can gain some cl,arity by identifying first what we do not mean. Kingdom is not to be identi-fied with any political entity. Even the age-old notion of Christendom was not tl~e same as this kingdom, and so the breakup of Christendom was not a dissolution of the kingdom. Kingdom is not a certain physical locale. The Roman Catholic Church as an institutional structure is not identified with the kingdom. The church has an important role to play in the kingdom, but it is not the kingdom itself. The church continues the mission of Jesus in proclaiming the kingdom. The church is at the service of the kingdom; it is meant to be a sign, a sacrament of its presence. The kingdom is not something that we human beings fashion or build. We may sing some songs about Review for Religious our "building the kingdom of God," but there is no reality to be done corresponding to our words. According to the gospel imper-ative, we seek first the kingdom of God. We want what God wants. We desire to be totally available to God, ready to serve, eager to do God's will. Doing the will of God involves discipleship--hear-ing the call of Jesus and responding with the total gift of self. Doing the will of God makes the kingdom present, because we are busy about what God is busy about, and so we are where God is. Above all, as our petition teaches us, we pray for the coming of the kingdom since it is God's doing, it is God's work. Jesus himself never gives a definition of kingdom, and we may be surprised that no one seems to question him. In the synoptic Gospels, he never claims the kingdom as his; it always is identified with the one he calls Abba. Only through parables do we find Jesus giving some description of the kingdom. Our Christian Eucharist anticipates the frequent parable allusions to the eating and drink-ing at the Lord's table in the kingdom. For in every Eucharist we place ourselves with Jesus in his total availability to God as he prays "not my will, but yours be done." So what are we to say about the kingdom? How are we to make this petition our own every time we pray the Our Father? The kingdom is the inbreaking presence of God to our human world and our responsive relating to God's being with us. God continues to pour out divine life--what we name as grace--and, when human cooperation is present, then the kingdom is right at hand. Just as the disciples experienced the transfiguration of Jesus, so too the kingdom is often experienced by our touching into this transfiguration kind of moment of a deeper-down reality shining out through our ordinary world. As we enter into this jubilee year, not through the alarms of some millenarians, but rather through the gospel introduction of Jesus, we hear anew Jesus' call to conversion and repentance, his admonition of obedience and watchfulness, and his appeal to be ready and waiting. We are like members of a wedding party--joy-ful, expectant. But it is no bride or groom whom we serve and cel-ebrate. It is our triune God--shining out as the redemptive presence of the Father in Jesus through the power of their Spirit of love. What do we want for ourselves and for our world? "Thy Kingdom come." David L. Fleming sJ September-October 1999 perspectives VILMA SEELAUS The Self in Postmodern Thought: A Carmelite Response This article was conceived at the end of the Carmelite Seminar of 1997 at St. Mary's College in South Bend. I had an opportunity to browse in the Notre Dame book-store, and two titles in different sections waved for my attention. The first was The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, in which Jungian author James Hillman takes archetypal psychology in a new direction. He claims that, with the soul of the world sick as evidenced by violence and corruption, individuals become sick at heart and suffer heart attacks. To restore the heart's courage and its imaginative power, therefore, the soul of the world needs the same attention that we have been giving to the soul of individual persons. Situating the individual self within the heart of the world challenges the rugged individualism of the modern self.1 The other book that caught my attention was Anthony Thiselton's Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self, in which he offers a hermeneutic of selfhood. Thiselton compares and assesses both modern and post-modern interpretations of the self in relation to Christian Vilma Seelaus OCD made this presentation in June 1998 at the Carmelite Seminar at St. Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana. It is being published also on audio- and videocas-sette by ICS Publications and the Carmelite Institute. Her address is Carmelite Monastery; Barrington, Rhode Island 02806. Review for Religious theology. Postmodern interpretations, he acknowledges, perceive the self as trapped within a network of role performances imposed on it by the power interests of others, but he argues for a deeper understanding of the self and its destiny. Postmodernism de-cen-ters the self; it denies any permanent, integrated reality to the self. It claims that identity is socially constructed and that people in different kinds of societies have quite different identity-forming experiences. Thiselton accepts the force of this, but argues for a deeper understanding of the self in relation to the biblical vision of reality and Christian theology.2 Reading Hillman and Thiselton enticed me into further study of postmodern thought in relation to the self. Before long, the complexity of the topic had my head spinning) Furthermore, post-modern debates about the very nature of reality challenged beliefs that shape my life as a Carmelite. And yet, the more perplexed I became, the more firmly did an inner conviction stand its ground: that our Carmelite mystical tradition has perennial values and insights for our postmodern world and perhaps for many worlds yet to come. In these reflections, therefore, I place the biblical God-related understanding of the self, on which the Carmelite tradition rests, in conversation with the postmodern self. I do this in two parts. Part One brings together important insights from both the mod-ern and the postmodern movements, showing a shift in under-standing the self. Part Two looks into the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross for what they offer by way of chal-lenge, expansion, or depth in regard to the self and in regard to our own spiritual journey.as we enter the new millennium. Part One Walter Truett Anderson's insightful and witty book titled: Reality Isn't What It Used to Be helped me to realize that the self in particular is not what it used to be. What did the self use to be that it no longer is? What are the shifts in self-understanding, which, for better or for worse, postmodernism names for us? How might we as Christians respond appropriately to the challenge of post-modernism? First, what do we mean by postmodern? Postmoderns claim to have superseded, to have gone beyond, previous ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving which developed in the so-called modern September-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought period. It deconstructs them, to use the "in" term. At the same time, postmodernism is far from a developed, coherent social theory. Scholars dispute whether or not it is a form of radical modernism or something distinctive after modernism, or some of each. According to Philip Endean in his foreword to an issue of The Way dedicated to postmodernism and spirituality: As the structure of the word implies, the postmodern cannot be understood for what it is in itself, but only in terms of what has preceded it: the postmodern is a gamut of reac-tions to the modern, swinging between two moods: a mood of disillusionment, as previously unquestioned assumptions and standards are found wanting, and a mood of exhilara-tion, as new and better alternatives are explored, develop&d, and advocated. Postmodern thinking draws on a wide range of sources: from cybernetics to feminism, from literary the-ory to the new physics, from cultural history to psychoanal-ysis and linguistics. Perhaps for this reason its expression can be, notoriously, opaque.4 Although the philosopher Kant back in the 18th century.paved the way, the 1960s are considered the true beginning of the post-modern era. At that time everything came into question, and all belief systems, with their traditional values, came under attack. People in the '60s began to question what they called the myth of objective consciousness: that, when you looked at things, what you saw and described was what was actually there. (At the scene of an accident, eyewitnesses often give conflicting accounts of what happened.) Today constructivists hold that the "real world" is an ever changing social creation. In the 1960s, thoughts about the self were also changing. As Anderson points out: In the '60s, people assumed that, if you developed enough contempt for your old socially adapted self, a new True Self, unsullied by any conformity, would magically appear, that a True Culture and a True Politics likewise stood in the wings--and that when they appeared they would not have to coexist with old selves, old cultures, old politics. Things didn't work that way!6 Though the '60s were the time of eruption, postmodernism con-tinues and radicalizes trends that actually began during the Enlightenment, at the dawn of what philosophers call the "mod-ern period." Descartes (1596-1650), the classical modern philoso-pher of clear and distinct ideas, attempted to provide clear and Revieva for Religious certain criteria against which our knowledge can be tested for truth. He was also intensely preoccupied with the subject who knows these ideas: the knowing person. For today's radical deconstructionists, like Derrida, such Cartesian objectivity is anathema. Derrida holds all reality to be socially constructed. Reality is simply the interpretation of the perceiving subject. Derrida insists that we cannot grasp reality because it slips by before we can catch hold of it. Everything, then, is interpreta-tion. Nevertheless, Derrida and the other decon-structionists are in a way Descartes's descendants. Descartes understands the self as an active agent, whereas for Derrida the self shifts from active agent to passive situatedness. Instead of a core something (called selJ) determining how it will respond to different situations, the situation cre-ates the self. Different situations call forth a dif-ferent self to be expressed.7 On the whole, postmoderns recognize the importance, for its time, of the modern move-ment. It brought new values to the fore. We ben-efit from the knowledge that scientific objectivity makes possible. From it come the many techno-logical wonders that are integral to our everyday life. In the moral and political spheres, modernity made room for personal autonomy and liberty and for the development of a liberal society wherein diversity is possible. Religion, too, has been enriched by modernity. Most Jewish and Christian believers, for example, no longer subscribe to a literal understanding of the Bible's story of creation in six days.8 But the improvements of modernity have a dark side: the exploitation of nature and its resources, the emergence of indi-vidualism and the consequent collapse of the sense of community, the divorce of technology from moral values, and denials of the worth of ethnic, tribal, and religious traditions. While the modern period gave us universal abstract systems and scientific "metanar-ratives," accounts of the origins and development of the universe, these often denied the existence of God or denied that God could ¯ be discovered by the conscious self. As a result, in today's world many lives are governed by efficiency, profit, success, and the will Modernity made room for personal autonomy and liberty and for the development of a liberal society wherein diversity is possible. September-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought to power without regard for ultimate human values. Talk of love, truthfulness, belief, loyalty, and so forth has little meaning. Further, advanced technology, the offspring of the modern period, has introduced a world of ceaseless change. New models quickly replace the old. Things are made not to endure, but to be consumed and replaced. Think of how quickly appliances need replacement or upgrading. Indeed, today we struggle with both the benefits and the dark side of the modern period. As science enabled the modern self more and more to carve out and control its own destiny, the self tended to be assured and opti-mistic. But today, as postmodern thinkers become increasingly aware of the self's arrogant, power-hungry dark side, the self appears to be, in fact, de-centered--no longer an active agent, but instead taking its identity from the variable roles imposed upon it by society and by its own inner drives and conflicts, conflicts which the communications media keep in constant motion. The media, especially the advertising world, tell it who it should be, how it should look, what it should own, and where it needs to travel in order to feel good about itself. Postmoderns see our opinions formed for us by the collective perceptions of the media. Under such conditions, notions of a true self give way to the self as wear-ing different masks to suit the occasion, with little sense of a solid identity underneath. We tend to become who we think others want us to be. In theory, the will of the individual is still supreme, but often it has no strong center, no belief system to serve as anchor. When everything is up for grabs, the self lacks the support of collective meaning. There is too much to choose from; this can leave indi-viduals feeling alone in a sea of options. Many people today feel estranged from others and even from themselves. When people see no value to their lives other than the imperatives of efficiency, success, or serving the power interests of others, when their "real-ity" depends on what the TV screen says is real, no wonder there are high r~ites of suicide and physician-assisted death. Veronica Brady, in an article in The Way, describes it well: "Caught in this ceaseless flow of images, the self almost ceases to exist, breaking into fragments, identifying only with the flow. Right and wrong become a matter of personal taste, depending not so much on what is done but who does it. The center does not hold because there is no center.''9 A character in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses says: "Information got abolished sometime in the Review for Religious twentieth century, can't say just when, stands to reason, that's part of the information that got., abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story . Everything happens by magic. [We] haven't a. notion what's going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it is.'''° Rushdie's world of illusion hangs within the "actual" world of extremes of rich and poor, with millions dying of starvation as nations invest billions of dollars in developing new and deadlier weapons that are then sold to warring ethnic and tribal groups intent on destroying each other. In this context the theories of deconstructionists like Derrida and Lyotard begin to make sense. The absurdity of human confidence in its power to rule the world is becoming more and more apparent as the products of the human mind threaten to destroy us. At the same time, on the positive side, the modern period highlighted one of the deepest urges of the human heart: to be someone. The drift of cultural change is in the direction of human rights, of wanting everyone to be free to create personal identity and experience, even though, for many in our world, resources are not available. No wonder people become dishonest--seeking to have and be and do what the TV ads say they should have and be and do. The struggle to be someone is now a global struggle. Some years ago I had occasion to live in Israel for three months. The incongruities of the struggle became vivid for me when I saw, above Bedouin tents in the desert, TV antennas con-necting them with the modern/postmodern world. As Walter Truett Anderson puts it: "Every morning billions of pairs of eyes open, and billions of societies of mind set forth on the adventures of selfhood. For many the adventure only rarely rises above the level of a struggle to keep the body alive, but even the most mis-erable among us also hear the aspirations of the self---the 'me' craving reassurance that it exists and is good and the modern me that pursues happiness and believes that, whatever happiness it finds, will be what it has taken or created and not what has been handed down by fate.''~ To add a further dimension, the global struggle to be someone is seen with fresh and deep insight by postmodern psychologists who have been influenced by Buddhism. Psychologists Robert Rosenbaum and John Dyckman hold with Buddhism that self/oth-ers are empty. This does not mean that they are void; it means they have no existence other than in relationships that are con- Septentber-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought World and self mutually influence and create one another. stantly arising in the immediate experience of the moment. To say that the self is empty means that the self is not a thing and there-fore has no unchanging core characteristics or essence. It is a way of indicating that self is always completely connected to its imme-diate experience, that in the immediacy of the moment, uncon-strained by past residue or future expectations, self is always free. As the Buddhist Diamond Sutra notes, the past is gone, the future is not here, and the present cannot be grasped. This is perfect freedom.12 As the authors point out, freedom here is not to be confused with a pseudofreedom that seeks to abandon all constraints. Instead, to understand emptiness as being connected to immedi-ate experience can lead to greater generosity and compassion toward the self and others. Past experience no longer has the last word. The empty self, actualized in immediate expe-rience, binds together apparent opposites: the dynamic interchange of oneness and separate-ness. These are not mutually exclusive. The empty self is the connected self which is actu-alized in context and in relationships. Observation reveals self-identity to be fluid and constantly changing according to context and relationships. As the Rosenbaum-Dyckman article puts it, "At work we may be decisive and authoritative; when out to dinner with our spouse, we may be hesitant and deferent about what to order for dinner. Yet we believe ourselves to be the same person.°13 Postmodern psychologists repeatedly make the point that our person is not encapsulated by our skin, but exists in relation. The self is always self in relation, in action, and as such is always con-textual. They hold that emotions are always a reliving in the pre-sent rather than a recall from the dead past. If we do not need to be attached to an unchanging self, and can see change as the only constant, it becomes somewhat easier to image change in prob-lem behaviors24 Although the self may be fluid and constantly changing, it must nevertheless have a boundary, but, according to Rosenbaum and Dyckman, a boundary with infinite length enclosing a finite, definable area, different from the rigid boundaries of lines on a map. Human boundaries are not abstract, conceptual schemas, but are always embodied in constant interaction with a world from Review for Religious which they are not separate. World and self mutually influence and create one another. Such mutual influencing has the potential to stretch present definable boundaries and give glimpses into the infinite. Here the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican comes to mind. If our attitude is one of self-righteousness that places us over against the rest of the world, we will be unable to hear the challenges that postmodern psychologists offer us for continued growth in our postmodern world. Our boundaries become sealed in finitude, and the infinite capacity that is ours becomes rigid, like the lines of a map. Psychologists in increasing numbers address the postmodern shift in regard to the self, and they offer valuable insights for living healthily in today's changing world. At the same time, postmodern philosophers and psychologists do not have the last word, and so now we turn to the mystics for their insights into the self. Part Two Since human boundaries are not abstract, but are embodied and are in constant interaction with the world from which they are not separate, precisely here does the biblically based Carmelite tradition offer timeless help. Back in 16th-century Spain, Teresa of Avila wrote a book to help her daughters of the reformed Carmel relate to one another and to the world, from which they were not separate even in their cloister. In her Way of Perfection, she gives her daughters some advice that flows with meaning into our post-modern age: "I shall enlarge on only three things., for it is very important that we understand how much the practice of these three things helps us to possess inwardly and outwardly the peace our Lord recommended so highly to us. The first of these is love for one another; the second is detachment from all created things; the third is true humility, which, even though I speak of it last, is the main practice and embraces all the others.''~s Many centuries separate us from Teresa and the particularity of her issues, but the interrelated dynamic of love, detachment, and humility are integral to spiritual growth in today's confusing world. Postmodernity challenges much of what we cling to by way of values and beliefs and, in particular, our self-understanding. To understand the self as fluid and constantly changing invites a deeper penetration into the Christian, Carmelite Understanding of Septentber-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought detachment. It would have us be attached to nothing, not even the most innocent of things, for in time of need they fail us com-pletely. John of the Cross insists: "To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not. To come to the possession you' have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not. To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not . This places us in our center of humility.''16 Detachment and humility go hand in hand. They cre-ate an openness to new ideas, a willingness to let go of the past an, d let the context of the present create us anew. The contextual pre-sent is the place of encounter with God. The past, while it may continue to influence present behavior, is in fact nonexistent, and the future evolves out of each passing moment. Detachment opens up roads less traveled; but, if we feel attached to our current road, we may all too readily say, "This is me; this is my self." We have heard people say, "I'm a one on the enneagram or an INFP on the Myers-Briggs, so you have to take me as I am." With such a self-fixated attitude, we will less likely hear God's invitation into the infinite realms of potential self-realization. If we conceive of the self as determined by the pathways already taken, a composite of past experiences, it will be hard to let go when unknown paths beckon us onward. As Rosenbaum and Dyckman put it, "The self, as an accumulation of experience, is a prison; the self as empty, as shimmering potentiality, is a prism that, depending on its positioning, gives forth many different colors."17 In his Spiritual Canticle, John of the Cross reminds us that the woods and thicket in which we find ourselves today have been planted by the hand of the Beloved.18 God's self revelation con-tinues right within the human story. The density and darkness of postmodernity--which holds that there is a multiplicity of per-spectives in the search for truth, which denies a stable foundation of self and of knowledge--can generate extremes of uncertainty. But the de-centered self of postmodernity has its own gift to offer. It invites us, beyond the limits of what can be known and con-trolled, into a self that is mystery, into God as ultimate Mystery. The temptation is either to stay blinded in self-righteous cling-ing to the limitations of human knowledge, or to despair before the uncertainties of life. Detachment itself can be the void of despair, unless it is grounded in faith and in the experience of God. The Dutch theologian Frans Jozef van Beeck, in his contem-porary. Catholic systematic-theology series titled God Encountered, Review for Religious reminds us that "the human subject., is naturally and radically 'de-centered': the mature person's true center does not repose in the person. Authentic persons live on the strength of unfulfillable desire . Grace graciously enables human persons, along with their world, to that most natural, yet most divine of all things: freely to move toward God in total faith and abandon."'gIn the midst of alternative versions of reality, and many different ways of being in the world, with the postmodern tolerance for a plethora of possibilities, choosing to believe in something is vital. We can be respectful of others with differing beliefs and still stand firm in the faith that is ours, a faith that centers the self in God. According to the philosopher Kierkegaard, faith is the pas-sionate embrace of objective uncertainty.2° Faith bypasses the postmodern self that interprets, even cre-ates, its own reality. It bypasses human reason to plunge us into mystical depths where being and nonbeing are held in cre-ative tension by God's abiding presence to human life. At this level Rahner rightly speaks of the experience of God and the experience of self as one.2' In his insis-tence upon the possibility open to all of an immediate experience of God, Rahner writes: "I am convinced that such an immediacy between God and the human person., is of greater significance today than ever before. All the societal supports of religion are collapsing and dying out in this secularized and pluralistic society. If, nonetheless, there is to be real Christian spirituality, .it cannot be kept alive and healthy by external helps, not even those which the church offers., but only through an ulti-mate, immediate encounter ofthe individual with God.''22 The Harvard psychologist Charles Verge names this place of encounter "the divine self.''23 Here the self and God mirror each other.24 The longing of the human heart to be someone issues from God, in whose image we are made and whose love holds us in being. "Beloved of God" defines the self. The Spiritual Canticle of John of the Cross is a text that writes the self of each one of us. In the Canticle, God's passionate love for the soul, enfleshed in Christ, The longing of the human heart to be someone issues from God, in whose image we are made and whose love holds us in being. Septentber-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought stirs a passionate response and gives meaning and direction to life right within the extremes of uncertainty that surround us. To be transformed into the image of Christ, to become like Christ, con-stitutes the heart of the divine promise. Faith enables us to embrace, with passion, the ultimate objec-tive uncertainty that the mystery of God revealed in Christ is. Christ lifts the self out of its predefined situatedness with its self-interest, into love for God and love for others. God's love trans-forms the will to power, to possession, to lust, into will to love. The detachment that faith calls forth issues in genuine love even for those who differ from us. Postmodernism stretches our capacity to love. Life today beckons toward a global embrace of love; love for those who may look different from us, love for those who may think differently from us, and love for those whose values may be different, even opposed to ours. Today, in the face of our differences, love holds the special challenge of intense, respectful listening, which can only happen if the heart is humble. A humble heart is a heart detached from pre-conceived ideas and personal prejudice. According to Teresa, humil-ity is truth, and our truth is that we are all, without exception, finite, fragile creatures capable of sin and that as such we always stand on the threshold of ongoing conversion. At the same time, integral to truth is that each one of us is always infinitely loved and possessed by God. Insofar as we fall short, God invites us to continued conversion and, even more, to divine transformation. Our challenge is to live Christ's gospel of love. Such love dissolves the disharmony of suspicion and distrust, it detaches us from self-interest, and it opens us to others in humility and genuine con-cern. As Rahner sagely asks, "Why should there be any need for deception, which serves to protect the self, if the self is loved, wel-comed, accepted, and reconciled-as-one with the Other?''2s Receiving the self from God in Christ, giving the self to others in love, and serving the other's interests as one's own are mirrorings of God, the divine self-giving Trinity, in whose image we are. In trinitarian theology, love constitutes the ground of selfhood. The gospel account of Jesus at table, encircled by the outcasts of his time, symbolizes the self today cast out from itself and in need of re-centering in Christ. From the horizon of Christ, we see the incompleteness of all that is human in relation to our total commitment to Christ, but in Christ we also see ourselves con-nected with the heart of all that is. Revie~v for Religious The archetypal psychology of James Hillman invites us to this from a psychological perspective. He would have us see ourselves and others as intimately connected with what he calls the soul of the world. Today conversion extends to claiming our part in what Hillman rightly names the sickness of the soul of the world. He claims that the world, because of its breakdown, is entering a new moment of consciousness by having its attention drawn to itself by means of its symptoms. It is becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality. We now encounter pathology in the psyche of politics and medicine, of language and design, of the food we eat. Sickness, says Hillman, is now "out there" as well as "in here.''26 To situate our individual self within the heart of the world not only challenges the rugged individualism of the modern self; it also invites a deeper awareness of our connectedness with others and with planet Earth, whose beauty and balance are today oppressed by our violent consumer world. The world itself is now a patient in need of hea~ling. Postmodernism offers a broader understanding of the redeeming mission of Christ. The entire cos-mos becomes the locus of redemption. Like us, our church and civilization and even planet are all in need of Christ's redeeming, healing, transforming love. Postmodernism is globalism; as such it is the half-discovered truth of the one unity that transcends all our differences. The language of postmodernism would be alien to Teresa, and yet, as she increasingly experienced herself as centered in God, her self became increasingly fluid. She seems astonished as the boundaries of the self continue to expand. There are many exam-pies, but in her Autobiography, her Vida (chap. 15, para. 7), Teresa, experiencing herself infused with the light of God, comments: "And I, though being what I am, seem to be another person." In 23.1, recalling how God freed her from herself, she writes that "here begins another new life." In 27.1, having placed herself com-pletely in the hands of God, she says, "l saw that I was a com-pletely different person." In 27.9 she says, "One of these graces is enough to change a soul completely.''27 In the context of these remarks, Teresa specifically mentions that she is growing in either love, detachment, or humility. At the height of her mystical life, Teresa has a profound expe-rience that, on the level of the divine self, reflects the empty, de-centered, but relational, contextual self of postmodernity. In 40.5 of her Vida, she writes: Septentber-October 1999 Seelaus ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought Once, while I was reciting with all the sisters the hours of the divine office, my soul suddenly became recollected; and it seemed to me to be like a brightly polished mirror, without any part on the back or sides or top or bottom that wasn't totally clear. In its center Christ our Lord was shown to me, in the way I usually see him. It seemed to me I saw him clearly in every part of my soul, as though in a mirror¯ And this mirror also--I don't know how to explain it--was com-pletely engraved upon the Lord Himself by means of a very loving communication I wouldn't know how to describe. ¯ I was given understanding of what it is for a soul to be in mortal sin. It amounts to clouding this mirror with mist and leaving it black; and thus this Lord cannot be revealed or seen, even though he is always present giving us being. In God, Teresa is connected with the world's sin, even as she affirms the ever present graciousness of God always giving us being within the darkness of sin. God is present in Teresa, not with power and might, but in love and with an invitation to self-transcendence that is as pertinent and penetrating for us today as it was for Teresa. In 3 7.11 of her l/ida, Teresa sounds as though she is living in our present age. After lamenting the foibles of her honor-bound society, with its elaborate system of etiquette, she says, "I don't know how it's all going to end up; even though I'm not y.et fifty, I've already seen so many changes I don't even know how to live anymore. What will they do who are now being born and will live for many years?" What will we do, we who have been born in this postmodern era, this era in which we live for many years, often into our nineties? Like Teresa, we do not know where it is all going to end up. Many would say that dark night engulfs our entire world and the times in which we live. The Carmelite tradition, however, assures us that God is in the night. John of the Cross eloquently describes the meaning of the soul's journey into the night of God. In this night of faith, we discover that love is the eye of God and we in turn are to see and interpret all things through the eyes of God. From this perspective we see that we are all one in God's love and that we bear one another's burdens. By the quality of our lives, Christ would have us be bearers of hope for all who suffer the travails of poverty, violence, injustice, and oppression. Right within the many forms of death that surround us is the seed of resurrec-tion impatient for new life. As we work with our differences in families, in our civic and Review for Religious church communities, we can dare to hope that our graced strug-gle will energize efforts toward understanding, toward finding common ground within the extremes of diversity that ctiaracterize our postmodern world. What we see in Teresa's writings is a devel-opment in her understanding of herself and of Christ, who com-panions her journey. Today,. as we find the self anew, we also find new ways of seeing Christ and the Christian mysteries right within our postmodern world, without getting caught in nostalgia for the past. Again, like Teresa, we do not know where it will all end up. What we do know is that the future is present, like a seed, in today's disconcerting moment. Our challenge is to live now, to live fully (but with humility, detachment, and love) what we say we believe. The sufferings of our time are not meaningless, as sec-ular postmodernity might see them. They are integral to the groan-ing of creation in labor until it brings forth redemption, the final triumph of God's love. At its deepest level the self is caught up in the incomprehensible mystery of Love we call God. Notes I James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1995). 2 Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self'. On Meaning, Manipulation, and Promise (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998). 3 It also leaves me with a little anxiety that the many authors that I read be given due credit. As I prepare this paper for publication, I real-ize that much of what I read merged in my thinking as I internalized the material. 4 See The Way 36, no. 3 (July 1996): 175. s According to Anderson, Kant's work in the 18th century began with a problem that was as divisive in its time as the objectivist-con-structivist one is in ours--in this case a conflict between the British empiricists such as Locke and Hume, who saw thought as merely an instrument for understanding or using "real world experience," and the Continental philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz, who saw the mind as the supreme organizer and discoverer of all reality. This was not a postmodern debate. All parties assumed that people could appre-hend unchanging and universal truth. Kant's attempt to resolve the con-flict was his own contribution to the search for "foundational" knowledge or reality--beyond historical and cultural relativism--but it pointed toward a view of the mind as a creator of reality. Kant describes the mind as an active organ that orders and forms the raw data of experience, 1-467-- September-October 1999 Seela~s ¯ The Self in Postmodern Thought imposing upon them its own structure; we do not experience things in themselves but rather representations of them. See Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used to Be (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), pp. 59-60. 6 Anderson, Reality, p. 48. 7 See Robert Rosenbaum and John Dyckman, "Integrating Self and System: An Empty Intersection?" Family Process 34 (March 1995): 26- 27, and Kenneth J. Gergen, "The Social Construction of Self- Knowledge," in Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, Self and Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 372-403. 8 See Max Charlesworth, "Postmodernism and Theology," The Way 36, no. 3 (July 1996): 188-202, for an interesting summary of the devel-opment of modern to postmodern thought. 9 Veronica Brady, "Postmodernism and the Spiritual Life," in The Way 36, no. 3 (July 1996): 181. 10 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), p. 313, quoted in Brady, "Postmodernism." 11 Walter Truett Anderson, Reality, p. 132. 12 Rosenbaum and Dyckman, "Integrating," pp. 28-33. 13 Rosenbaum and Dyckman, "Integrating," p. 26. 14 According to Rosenbaum and Dyckman, "Integrating," pp. 35-37, acknowledging memory as constructive, as a present contextual experi-ence, rather than as retrieval of the past, helps to avoid difficulties such as the controversies over recovered memories of trauma and abuse, which are a sensitive contemporary issue. ~s Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1980), chap. 4, para. 4, p. 54. 16 The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991), p. 150. 17 Rosenbaum and Dyckman, "Integrating," p. 37. is See his Spiritual Canticle, stanza 4, in Collected Works, p. 494. 19 Frans Jozef van Beeck, God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, Vol. 2/1 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1993), p. 238. 20 Soren Kierkegaard, "Truth Is Subjectivity," in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 169ff. "Truth is precisely the con° tradiction between the infinite passion of the individual's inwardness and the objective uncertainty. If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith, I must constantly be intent upon hold-ing fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith . " Review for Religious 2~ See Karl Rahner, "Experience of Self and Experience of God," in Theological Investigations, vol. 13 (New York: Crossroad, 1983), pp. 122- 132. 22 See "The Immediate Experience of God in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola," in Karl Rahner in Dialogue, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons, trans. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 176. 20 See Charles Verge, "Foundations for a Spiritually Based Psychotherapy," in Religion and Family, ed. L. Burton (Hayworth Press, 1992), pp. 41-59. 24 See also her Autobiography in Collected Works of Teresa of Avila, Vol. 1, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh OCD and Otilio Rodriguez OCD (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976), chap. 40, paras. 5 ~nd 10. Teresa here recounts two visions in which God and the soul mirror each other. See also Spiritual Canticle, stanza 12, in Collected Works of John of the Cross, pp. 515-519. 2s Quoted in Thiselton, Interpreting God, p. 160. z6 Hillman, Thought of the Heart, pp. 96-99. 27 With only a quick glance, I found chap. 20, paras. 23, 25, and 26- 28; chap. 21, paras. 8-9; and chap. 25, paras. 18-19--all referring to Teresa experiencing herself as a different person. The Salvation Cup I raise my fragile, broken cup. Accept it empty. Nothing I own can f!ll it. This is the cup of my truth, my faith in the promise, my salvation cup. Fill it with the wine of the Spirit, the river that makes fertile my barren ground, the ocean of never ending mystery. This is my cup. With it I offer my fragileness, my sinfulness and my broken promises. Heal me, Spirit of God, with theelixir of salvation. Virginia Skrdlant SHCJ September-October 1999 FREDERICK E. CROWE The "World" from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II An old proverb, once thought to be scriptural, warns us that where there is no understanding the people perish. Scriptural or not, the proverb itself is sound enough, and I would apply it to the institution of religious life. On all sides the question is heard: Is religious life dying? I refuse to believe that the God who gave us Anthony of Egypt, Benedict, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius, and so many others down to Mother Teresa is a God who intends religious life to perish. But I do believe in the need for under-standing, so that through our input God's operative grace may become cooperative. The Pattern of Human Thinking This essay is, then, an essay in understanding, but much more modest in scope than the preceding paragraph would suggest. It does not attempt td study religious life in its essence, its proper-ties, its various manifestations. It goes back rather to a prelimi-nary question and takes one small point for study: the Christian attitude toward what we call the "world." It is my hope that, if we gain some understanding on this background question, we will have a context for an eventual rethinking of religious life itself. Frederick E. Crowe SJ wrote "The Ignatian Exercises and Jesuit Spirituality" for our July-August 1994 issue. His address remains Lonergan Research Institute; 10 St. Mary Street, Suite 500; Toronto, Ontario; M4Y 1P9 Canada. Review for Religious My approach is historical rather than analytic. It examines the major transitions in the Christian attitude toward the world. It finds a dialectic running through history, a dialectic of to and fro that is not a mere alternation, but a progressively unfolding pat-tern in which each alternation is a step forward. It concludes with the way the church is finding new meaning for its role in the world, and proposes this as a new context in which religious too might find today the meaning of their consecrated life. The advantage of approaching history as a dialectic in the sense described is twofold. First, it may lift us out of our "crisis" mood, in which we think of our present situation as a spiritual fever, as a low point from which the patient may either die or recover and resume life as it was before the crisis. In a dialectical understanding, that is not the case. The low point is an opening on a new high. Second, a dialectic follows an intelligible pattern, with each step part of a natural, though not necessarily logical, sequence. This means that, if we can plot the sequence up to the present, we may be able to establish the direction of movement and discern the path we should take into the developing and unknown future. That "natural sequence" is the pattern of human thinking in time, the way the human mind naturally works as it progresses toward fuller and fuller understanding. In itself the pattern is sim-ple enough. Faced with a problem area of any complexity, the human mind will first find some specific factor of explanation, will tend to make that the whole explanation, but will eventually see that it is insufficient as a total view. It will then discover a generic factor and will in turn make that the full explanation, only to dis-cover that this too is insufficient as a total view. Eventually, in the dialectical oscillation of specific and generic, the mind will arrive at a higher viewpoint and hold the specific and the generic in the unity of a full understanding. The Pattern Illustrated That is terribly abstract. So, before applying it to the history of Christian thinking on the world, let me offer two concrete illus-trations that show the pattern as realized in actual history. First, the natural priority of the specific is easily illustrated in human lan-guage. "So in Homer there were words for such specific activities as glancing, peering, staring, but no generic word for seeing.''1 This is "both the strength and the weakness of'early language";~ it Septentber-October 1999 Crowe ¯ The "WorM"from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican ll The term vocation was appropriated to the religious life (as it commonly still is). has the power of the concrete, but is unable to reason in abstract or generic terms. And so in learning to write English we are told to search for the specific, for the concrete descriptive word, but in the strict reasoning of, say, a legal question we may have to resort to technical and abstract language. What is true of human language is true also of human think-ing, and so my second illustration is taken from the theology of our need for divine grace. Here there was first the discovery of a specific explana-tion, namely, the fall of our first parents. This was largely the focus of St. Augustine's thinking, which centered on the difference between their state before the fall and ours after it. This idea ran its course for about seven centuries, cul-minating in the position of Peter Lombard, namely, that there are in the grace-history of our human race "four states of human liberty: the earthly paradise, fallen man, man redeemed, and heaven.''3 Our need for divine grace is understood in relation to those states. Meanwhile, however, the insufficiency of this specific step was gradually becoming apparent. There was difficulty in defining lib-erty; the doctrine of merit tended to hang in mid air; even grace itself lacked a clear definition, for what is there that is not a free gift of God and therefore grace?4 The dialectic of ideas was prepar-ing theologians for the next step, the discovery of the generic the-orem of two orders with quite distinct status in the universe of being, the supernatural order and the natural: "not only was there the familiar series of grace, faith, charity, and merit, but also nature, reason, and the natural love of God.''5 This was largely the work of Philip the Chancellor in Paris in the early 1200s. It was an epoch-making discovery, and it put the question of our need for divine grace on an entirely new basis, releasing a whole series of developments. But so intoxicating was Philip's idea that theologians made a mistake exactly parallel to the one their predecessors made in the use of Augustine: the view that this was a complete and adequate explanation. Thomas Aquinas himself, in his early writings, shows hints of this one-sidedness, not giving sufficient attention to the moral impotence that is the result of Adam's fall. Nevertheless, it was Thomas who finally Review for Religious brought, the two factors, the specific and the generic, into unity. Peter Lombard's four states remain in the Thomist synthesis, but as applying to a specific question within the genus of the total divine plan.6 The Pattern Verified in the Specific Idea of "World" I have illustrated the way the human mind naturally works in time as it advances in understanding: first, a specific idea; then, exaggeration of this idea; next, a generic idea; exaggeration of this in its turn; eventually a synthesis. I believe the pattern is discernible also in the history of Christian thinking on the idea of the world. There too I find a specific and a generic factor, with the specific the first to be discovered and exploited beyond its potentiality, and the generic the next to be discovered and in its turn exploited beyond due measure. Again let us turn from the abstract to the concrete. Concretely the first step may be located in, or at least represented by, Anthony of Egypt. Toward the end of the 3rd century, "Anthony gave away his possessions, and devoted himself to a life of asceticism, and c. 285 retired completely into the desert . Towards the end of his life, the numbers of those who turned to the solitary life of the desert increased as the result of the secularization of the church.''7 It is possible to see this development in too simplistic a fash-ion, but at least one characteristic feature is clear: flight from the world. So it produced works with titles like De contemptu mundi (On contempt of the world). It filled Europe with hermitages, con-vents, and monasteries. For twelve centuries the idea ran its course with enormous impact on Christian v.alues, Christian living, Christian institutions.8 But it suffered the handicap of being a specific idea attempt-ing to provide a total view. For one example, the term vocation was appropriated to the religious life (as it commonly still is). In this respect the laity of the church and even the diocesan clergy were deemed to belong to a lower class: they did not have a "voca-tion." A reaction was inevitable, but it was centuries taking shape. Many diverse influences were at work promoting it. Its history is a complex interweaving of those influences. There were subver-sive along with legitimate movements. But what was positive and valid in the reaction, and quite natural and basic in the unfolding Septentber-October 1999 Crowe ¯ The "WorM"from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II dialectic, was the emergence of the generic factor in the concept of the world. The Pattern Verified in the Generic Idea of "World" The quite basic event, then, in the. emergence of the generic concept of the world was the discovery by Philip the Chancellor of the two orders: natural and supernatural. I used this earlier to illustrate the pattern of human thinking as it is found in theology (not only was there the familiar series of grace, faith, charity, and merit, but also nature, reason, an'd the natural love of God). I use it now as a basic explanatory factor for the new stage of our dialec-tic. That is no accident. It is an idea so fundamental that it is bound to appear in the history of any theological idea. It underpins all that I have to say in this section and the following. Every discovery makes its way against opposition from an estab-lishment. The recognition of the natural order had to be followed by a recognition of its rightful autonomy, and that could not fail to be a traumatic experience for the church. The history of this strug-gle need not detain us here. In essence the point is that the human race was not only created divine; it was also created human, with a need for hunting, fishing, farming, for song and dance, for math-ematics, science, philosophy, whatever lies within its potency for development. Without grace we are able, Thomas Aquinas would say, using his favorite example, to cultivate our fields and build our houses. But the full extent of that principle means that without grace we can marry and be given in marriage, form guilds among artisans, establish universities, function as nations, join in a world union of peoples, explore the boundaries of space. Further, the natural has its own laws. Natures operate uni-formly: we do not gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles (Mr 7:17). And those natural laws can be isolated in thought and allowed to develop and flourish according to their own potential. For to be human is to learn: to learn that there are human tech-niques for producing good crops, human means for controlling nature, human means of self-government, human means for gain-ing wisdom and educating upcoming generations, and so on through the list. If, then, we take a broad view of the forest, not stopping to study individual trees, we can discern here the generic factor in Review for Religious the concept of the world, the needed complement to the specific factor provided by Anthony. This generic factor is the recogni-tion of the world as good in its own right. God did not create an evil universe, but made all things that they might have being and life (Ws 1:13-14; 1 Tm 4:4). That means that we can no longer be satisfied with the negative connotation of "flight from the world." There is a positive side to Anthony's strategy: its focus on the transcen-dent. The negative side is not repudiated, but it has to be seen in relation to that focus and has to be complemented by a generic view of the goodness of all creation. But the pattern of the dialectic suggests that this step too will be exaggerated, and that is exactly what happened. In the intoxication of this new idea, there was a widespread repudia-tion of the age-old flight from the world. Convents and monasteries were emptied; instead of contemptus mundi, there was a glorification of the secular.9 And so secularism arose: what was legitimate in the discovery of the natural, what was legitimate in the declaration of its auton-omy was magnified to an ism. What was a genetic idea that should have been brought into union with the specific paraded as the full explanation of the universe. A movement for the liberation of the secular became a secularism. The secular and the sacred have to do with human thought and feeling and the human use of creation. Uniting the Specific and the Generic: New Categories Christian thinking on th~ world has gone through the two phases inherent in the dialectic of human learning: the discovery and undue exploitation of a specific factor, followed by a reaction, and the discovery and undue exploitation of a generic factor, fol-lowed in its turn by a reaction. The current need is for the inte-gration of the two factors, and the categories that offer hope of that are the sacred and the secular. This pair of terms has crept into our discussion as related to, but not identical with, the supernatural and the natural. They need more careful definition. The natural and the supernatural provide the framework of creation; they are what philosophers would call Septentber-October 1999 Crowe ¯ The "WorM"from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican 11 the ontological constituents of the universe. But the secular and the sacred have to do with human thought and feeling and the human use of creation; they pertain to the cultural sphere rather than the ontological. The natural cannot be made supernatural: as Isaiah reports the word of the Lord, "my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways" (Is 55:8, NEB). God is the wholly other. Grace perfects nature but does not destroy it. The natural, then, maintains its identity within the unity of God's creative plan. Catholic schools do not use a different mathematics to add and subtract, to divide and multiply. But while the natural remains what it was created to be, it can be invested with the aura of the supernatural, and in this sense the natural can be sacralized, become sacred. Bernard Lonergan provides a context in which to locate this cultural transformation: "The whole world of sense is to be. a token, a mystery, of God"; and again: "the world of sense is. a mystery that signifies God as we know him and symbolizes the fur-ther depths that lie beyond our comprehension.''~° This means that the secular, not only as a world but also in its various aspects, can in human thought and feeling be given the character of the sacred. So in primitive peoples there was a religious ritual for plant-ing and harvesting, for coming to puberty and marrying, for rev-erent remembering of the dead, and so on. All these activities are given a sacred aspect, though their natural basis allows for their secular use. But they are only potentially secular; they are not at first recognized to have that aspect. For the human race is funda-mentally religious, in the sense of being created with a religious consciousness, and has remained religious despite all the protests of unbelievers. One may say: In the beginning was the sacred. That is, what later became distinguished as the two zones of the sacred and the secular was at first all one zone, and it was sacred. Now, just as in the ontological sphere the natural component of the universe had to be recognized for what it was, the natural, so too in the sphere of the cultural the legitimately secular aspect had to escape from the domination of the sacred and assume its independent role in the plan of creation. In the course of this development, there was inevitably a conflict with the representa-tives of the sacred; inevitably too the secular won its rightful inde-pendence. "For this sacralized construct of man and his universe was impugned and impugned successfully by Copernicus, Galileo, Review for Relig4ous and Newton, by Darwin and Freud, and by the swarm of philoso-phies" at least since Descartes.~l So the struggle between natural and supernatural was repeated here, with the same exaggerations. The extremists were not con-tent to liberate the secular; they were driven also to desecrate the sacred. Concretely we might think of the relation between a sec-ular day of rest and the Lord's Day. There has been a strong ten-dency in this matter for the sacral to dictate to the secular, imposing a religious observance so strict as to frustrate the secu-lar purpose of a day of rest. But on the other side there is the des-ecration of the Lord's Day represented in past history by the extremists in the French Revolution and, some would say, by the present Sunday shopping. Uniting the Specific and the Generic: New Strategy Perhaps it is possible now to sketch the lines we might follow to achieve the desired integration of our specific and generic fac-tors. Our question is: How is the church to achieve the unity of Anthony and Aristotle, of Jerusalem and Athens, of the transcen-dent and the this-worldly, and now in particular of the sacred and the secular? Our suggestion is that what had been at first unwit-tingly sacralized was then wittingly secularized. Bur what was wit-tingly secularized can be wittingly resacralized for Christian purposes as the need arises. The pagans of Rome sacralized their meat by offering it to their gods, but the Christians could, in effect, desacralize these meats with a good conscience and, if they wished, resacralize them to their own purpose: "he who eats meat has the Lord in mind when he eats" (Rm 14:6). Again, a game of golf may be just what workers need on their day of secular rest, and present discipline in the church allows them to keep holy the Sabbath and still go golfing. But the new sacralization will be different. There will be a new understanding and a new humility. The sacred will not dictate to the secular in the latter's own sphere. It will be a sacralization through the intention of believers, using the natural end of a nat-ural entity to their religious purpose. They who eat meat have the Lord in mind when they eat; they who golf give thanks alike in the weekly Eucharist and in their outdoor exercise. A final point brings us back to larger issues: sacralization will not be merely extrinsic to the natural world. On this question Septentber-October 1999 Crowe ¯ The "WorM"from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II Marie Dominique Chenu Op has some helpful remarks. He sees a purer presence of the church in the world creating a new kind of Christians in the world: missionaries of the gospel, and not the protectors of a civilization that they themselves have organized. The real vocation of lay people will be to show that Christianity does not despise the world, but lifts it up, consecrates it, and ful-fills it. And this new presence will unite intrinsically with the world, will make it a true partner, for the believers will read the signs of the times and through them discern the elements in the world and human history that are, as it were, naturally open to the sacred, offering the possibility of a new praeparatio evangelica. They now look for a spirituality that will integrate their life in a world that has become the main field where they must seek their sanctifica-tion. 12 Religious Life in the Ongoing Dialectic The focus of my attention has been the new path for the church in the world today, along the lines of the Vatican Council II document Gaudium et spes. We must be clear on the church in the new age before venturing to discuss religious life in the new age, for religious are Christian before they are religious; that is the order of the council in its document on the church, Lumen gen-tium.~ 3 But of course that means that the dialectic we have dis-cerned in history will apply also to the features of Christian living that religious have in common with all Christians. In that context we may anticipate the direction that applying the dialectic to religious life should take. We will understand how the religious state began as a "flight" from the "world," and we will realize that, as our conception and knowledge of that world has changed enormously, so also must our notion of flight from it. We have come a long way from St. Anthony of Egypt. I trust, never-theless, that we have not left him behind. With all reverence we may conceive an analogy with a hymn of Thomas Aquinas that the church uses in Holy Week: "The word of God, proceeding forth / Yet leaving not his Father's side." Our task is not to aban-don Anthony, but "proceeding forth" to retain his insight and transpose it into a realization of Vatican II's "church in the mod-ern world" and of religious life as it is to be lived in the coming millennium. Our task is to achieve in our own way the unity of the specific and ~he generic concepts of the world. Review for Religious Religious, then, will retain their vows, and the vows will have the meaning they had for Aquinas, a revocatio ab affectu temporalium, a withdrawal from affection for this world.14 They will have the meaning also that Anthony's flight from the world had for him in his time of secularization. And that meaning will remain even in the most sacred of times. A focus on the transcendent and the escha-tological state will necessarily involve the reevaluation of the world that the saints have always shown: not a contempt for the good of creation, but a love for the better to which the good is open. Correspondingly, there will be far more attention to the positive aspects of the vows. This movement has already begun, but it should undergo an extensive development. Similarly for the pos-itive counterpart of the "flight": contemplation of the divine. The cloistered will redouble attention to their contemplative role, and the active will redouble attention to their role as contemplatives in action. As we follow the dialectic in its future course, we would do well to consider our starting point. The first word in the gospel message is "repent" (Mt 4:17; and see the same in Mk 1:15, but with a preface, "The time has come . . ."). Our examination of conscience in this respect might ask in what degree, if any, we transferred to ourselves as perfection what belongs rather to the realm of the sacred. Medieval theologians argued at length about holiness and the more perfect state. Should the operative word be, not "holy" in the sense of personal virtue, but rather "sacred" in the sense of "consecrated to God"? Notes 1 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994 reprint), p. 87. 2 Lonergan, Method, p. 87. 3 Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1971), p. I0. 4 Grace and Freedom, pp. 14-15. s Grace and Freedom, pp. 15-16. 6 Bernard Lonergan, "Gratia Operans: A Study of Speculative Development in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas," doctoral disser-tation, Gregorian University, Rome, 1940, pp. 36-37. The preface and introduction, from which the dialectical pattern is taken, were published in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3, no. 2 (October 1985): 9-46. The whole dissertation will he published in volume 1 of the Collected September-October 1999 Crowe ¯ The "World"from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican 11 Works of Bernard Lonergan, soon to appear from University of Toronto Press. This section of my article simply paraphrases Lonergan's position as set forth in that dissertation. 7 The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. EL. Cross (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), article, "Antony, St., of Egypt." s See, for an example, G.J. Engelhardt, "The De contemptu mundi of Bernardus Morevalensis," Mediaeval Studies 22 (1960): 108-135; 26 (1964): 109-142; 29 (1967): 243-272. On the same topic Robert Bultot published widely in books and periodicals of the 1960s under the title La doctrine du m~pris du monde. 9 The turnaround had an interesting development in the Lutheran idea. Lutheranism "does not consider the call of the pastor any more sacred than the call of each Christian to witness to the lordship of Christ in his life and work. The universal priesthood of believers., makes the vocation of every man a holy calling"; see "Lutheranism" in A Handbook of Christian Theology (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company, 1958). Here too there is a valuable insight, namely, the vocation of every Christian, but it is not integrated into the dialectical development on the "world." 10 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 689, 692. '~ Bernard Lonergan, "Sacralization and Secularization," unpublished MS of a 1974 lecture (originally given 1973), p. 23. My whole article relies heavily on this lecture. ~2 Spirituality in the Secular City (Concilium 19), pp. 114-115. I have paraphrased, with frequent verbatim quotations, two pages of "Desacralization and the Spiritual Life" by Claude J. Geffr~ op. ~3 See chap. 6, §§43-47, on religious, in Lumen gentium, the coun-cil's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. 14 On "revocatio ab affectu temporalium," see Thomas Aquinas, De perfectione vitae spiritual#, chap. 6. Review for Religious JOEL GIALLANZA "Come Closer. I Am Your Brother": Being and Doing Brotherhood In Genesis, chapter 45, Joseph, one of Jacob's sons, has the delicate task of revealing his identity to his brothers. Having sold him into slavery several years before, they do not recognize him now in this powerful Egyptian official, second only to Pharaoh. In his self-revelation Joseph tells his brothers, "Come closer to me. I am your brother" (Gn 45:4). To be convincing, Joseph has to do more than tell his brothers who he is; he must demonstrate this through his attitudes and actions toward them. If he was truly to be their brother, then he had to do what brothers do. Only then was he gen-uinely recognizable to them. This story has a valuable reminder for religious brothers today. The name by which we identify our-selves in life and in the church reflects a rich and prophetic spirituality. "Brother" is not only a title, it is what we are. Even more, it is what we are called and committed to do among ourselves, among the people, and for the church. Also, it is ever a reality we must become: it cannot be fully and finally accompJished at the time of our religious profession. In my experience of the church and sodety today, several forces outside lay religious life often contribute Joel Giallanza csc wrote for us as recently as our May-June issue. His formation work continues at Charles Andersen Residence; 320 Brahan Boulevard; San Antonio, Texas 78215. Septe~nber-October 1999 brothers Giallanza ¯ "Come Closer. I Am Your Brotber" We need one another to be who we say we are and to do what we say we do by our very vocation. to making brothers unrecognizable, unknown, or unappreciated. One of them is that the church's administration emphasizes-- implicitly and explicitly--the clerical state as normative for min-istry and governance within the church, while brotherhood tends to become invisible or at least peripheral. Another is that in a vari-ety of cultures the term brother is used to designate seminarians and other candidates for presbyteral ordination. From this perspective brotherhood tends to be inter-preted as a transitional stage. These outside forces, how-ever, are not alone in influencing the public perception of brothers. Two internal forces come to mind. Sometimes we define our-selves or allow ourselves to be defined in negative terms, that is, by what we are not: unordained or nonclerical men religious. To go through life with "un" or "non" as the beginning of our self-iden-tity is not a good basis for explaining our vocation. It is even a less good basis for promoting vocations. And sometimes we do not reflect upon sufflciendy and articulate clearly our own identity, including the challenges we face simply because we dare to call ourselves brothers. Being Brother Immediately striking about the term brother is its relational character. It expresses both a specific relationship and a way of being in relationship. For us it assumes that we are willing to enter into relationships with others. It assumes we choose to be involved, not isolated. Though Vita consecrata does not speak extensively about the vocation of brothers in the church, it recognizes four relationships that are to characterize our way of life. These religious are called to be brothers of Christ, deeply united with him, "the firstborn among many brothers" (Rm 8:29); brothers to one another in mutual love and working together in the church in the same service of what is good; brothers to everyone in their witness to Christ's love for all, especially the lowliest, the neediest; brothers for a greater brotherhood in the church (Vita consecrata, §60). Review for Religious I would like to comment on these four relationships and on their prophetic implications. Brothers of the Lord Whatever else we may do, whatever our ministry, the rela-tionship that defines and shapes religious life is our relationship with the Lord. This must be the first and deepest of all our rela-tionships. Jesus says to the disciples, "You are my friends, if you do what I command you . I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father" On 15:14-15). Our relationship with the Lord, our friendship with God, is rooted in knowing and doing what we have learned from the Lord. To be brothers of the Lord is to know the ways of God and to do what the Lord asks of us. To be brothers of the Lord, we must be people of discernment and people of fidelity. We must probe God's will ever deeper and then faithfully put into action all that we discover. We must be skilled in seeing God in all and in seeing all in God. We thereby proclaim and live the intimate closeness of God to this world, even when global events or personal experi-ences provide no evidence or apparently contrary evidence of such intimacy. Brothers with One Another Everything we say about ourselves and about our life together will not be authentic if we do not live in such a way that our com-mon life is marked by love, mutual care and concern, courtesy, hospitality, and a genuine interdependence. Jesus tells us that we will be recognized as his followers if we love one another (see Jn 13:3 5). Note that Jesus does not say what we would be recognized as, if we did not love one another. Could we become completely invisible, thereby rendering impossible any kind of recognition? To be brothers with one another in a religious community is much more than merely getting along; it must go beyond friendly tolerance. There are two important elements here. First, to be brothers with one anothdr is to recognize and accept that we do not live this way of life alone. We need one another to be who we say we are and to do what we say we do by our very vocation. There must be a mutuality and an interdependence among us by which we September-October 1999 Giallanza ¯ "Come Closer. I Am Your Brother" strengthen and support one another. Second, to be brothers with one another is apostolic. The quality of our life together commu-nicates something about God's presence and activity in our world. In some areas of the world, we may be the only witnesses people see, the only evidenc~ they have that God is alive and active in their lives and in their culture and society. Brothers to the People Our very title brothers excludes distinctions among us. Nationality, culture, ethnic heritage, education, ministry, natural and acquired skills--all these are gifts that are to unite us, not dif-ferences to be made into walls of division among us. So too our presence among the people must communicate without compro-mise that we make no distinctions, that we welcome and are hos-pitable to all people. To be brothers to the people also influences the way we approach ministry, whatever our ministry. Our apostolic activity among the people must be a model and a means of unity for them. We must be skilled in guiding people to work together, to appre-ciate one another's gifts, and to share those gifts with one another for the good of all. Regardless of the specific nature of our min-istry, this task of facilitating union among the people is a primary aspect of our mission and message as brothers in the church and society today. Brothers for the Church There are many unnecessary distinctions in our church today. Among the most dominant are those between women and men, between lay and ordained persons. Our presence and activity in the church must strive to communicate a perspective free of the kinds of distinctions that can and sometimes do deteriorate into divisions. To be brothers for the church is to live and proclaim, in St. Paul's terms, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male 6r female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Ga 3:28). We know it was a risk for St. Paul to preach such a message two thousand years ago. In truth, it is still a risk to preach this today precisely because people can and do establish their identity in distinctions. Any message that seeks to Review for Religious remove distinctions tends to disrupt that identity, thereby stimu-lating responses that range from simple admonition to sharp antag-onism. I believe it is part of the mission of brothers in the church today to preach and to live such a message regardless of the con-sequences. Doing What Brothers Do What I have said so far pertains to being brothers, pertains to our basic identity as lay religious in the church and society. To be brothers of the Lord, with one another, to the people, and for the church will have a definite influence on our doing what brothers do. Doing what brothers do is the prophetic dimension of our life as lay religious. In terms of these four basic relationships, what do we do as brothers? Through our relationship to the Lord, we demonstrate the possibility of living the example of Jesus in today's world. Jesus' example of selflessness, of compassion, of service to others is not popular today. We observe the sustained promotion and tenacity of an individualism which condones and constructs self-contained and closed styles of life that do not readily respond to the influence or needs of others. The danger is that Jesus' example could be placed on the shelf of items that are no longer realistic or useful for our world: items that are fine for museums of ancient artifacts, but not really relevant for everyday life in contemporary culture. To do what brothers do is a clear expression of the importance, necessity, and urgency of Jesus' example for today. Through our relationship with one another, we demonstrate the possibility of love and reconciliation. In a world where self-ishness and self-containment become the ways of relating to one another, love and reconciliation become ever more rare. Personal histories, past mistakes, and present weaknesses become conve-nient excuses for not reaching beyond ourselves to love, to for-give, to be reconciled with others. And yet it is only through our humanity--with our histories and mistakes and weaknesses--that we can love one another. To do what brothers do means commit-ting ourselves to love and forgive and reconcile, and to take up whatever means are necessary to live that commitment every day. Through our relationship to the people, we demonstrate the possibility of living in peace and unity. The rich diversity repre-sented in social, political, religious, cultural, and ethnic differ- September-October 1999 Giallanza ¯ "Come Closer. I Am Your Brother" ences is too often used as a basis for creating divisions among peo-ple. And as the barriers supporting those divisions become stronger, mutual destruction appears more effective and efficient than coop-erative dialogue. Conflict, violence, war then become the usual ways of dealing with differences in life. To do what brothers do means making every effort to show that the differences among people are graces and blessings to be celebrated, not burdens and bothers to be shunned. Through our brotherly relationship with the church, we demonstrate the possibility of living and ministering in equality. This equality is not uniformity; there can and must be distinctions among the many necessary ministries within the church. The important and imperative idea here is to help maintain the link between those many ministries and the common good of the Body of Christ. To create and then vindicate situations in which peo-ple are excluded or treated slightingly is not acceptable. Ignoring such situations is also not acceptable. To do what brothers do means pointing out injustices and inconsistencies--in our society, but most especially in our church. We will not be popular for iden-tifying such realities, but to neglect doing so would contradict what we profess to be and to do. The Haunting Question Male lay religious are often confronted with the simple but haunting question "What is a brother?" Brothers themselves, as well as other church ministers, struggle with formulating a satis-factory response. I do not believe that any response, however elo-quent and theologically sound, will ever be satisfactory. Indeed, it cannot be. If being a brother and doing what brothers do is at heart a matter of relationship, then our identity as brothers will be found in our actions, in our witness and our way of relating to the Lord, to one another, to others, and to the church. Thus, the only worthy answer to "What is a brother?" is simply "Watch us! Watch what we do, how we behave. Observe our love, care, concern, com-passion. Watch us. Then you will see and know what being a brother is." Are we willing to make that response? Will the integrity, consistency, and quality of our lives withstand such close scrutiny? The precedent for this response has been established already. When asked by John the Baptist's disciples, "Are you the one who Review for Religious is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus responds, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the leper~ are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them" (Mt 11:3- 5). Jesus' response invites a simple and direct method: observe, then report what you see. Could it be that we work to enhance the eloquence of our language and the soundness of our theology in responding to "What is a brother?" because we hesitate to say "Watch us"? Obviously, to invite close observation is to imply an integrity and a quality of life that are beyond question or com-promise. Writing to the Corinthians, St. Paul is boldly explicit in continuing Jesus' precedent: "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Co 11:1). In fact, no less than seven times does Paul make this recommendation in his correspon-dence with the early Christian commu-nities (see 1 Co 4:16 and 11:1; Ph 3:17 and 4:19; 1 Th 1:6; 2 Th 3:7 and 9). We might wince at the bluntness--almost arrogance--of his recommendation. Nevertheless, the only way to avoid rel-egating Jesus' example to the realm of theoretical ideals is by a practical demonstration of it. Only a living example can accomplish that demonstration effectively. Brothers must live in such a way that we can make this Pauline recommendation with confidence and integrity. If we believe that our God is incarnational, then the example of our own lives must be the first of all our responses to the simple question "What is a brother?" Again, we must ask ourselves about our willingness and ability to make that response. Any other response, whether from an individual religious or froma general chapter, will fall short of the convincing and transforming power inherent in a living example. Being brothers and doing what brothers do involve decisions regarding a belief and a behavior. The belief is that the example of our brotherhood, as a reflection of Jesus' own, is necessary for society and for the church today--and tomorrow. The behavior is our effort to follow Jesus with integri.ty, simplicity, and fidelity. Through our brotherly .relationship with the church, we demonstrate the possibility Of living and ministering in equality. September-October 1999 Giallanza * "Come Closer. I Am Your Brother" This belief and behavior must stem from deliberate decisions, for they will not and cannot come into being by themselves. If they do not find explicit expression in our daily lives and activities, then they do not exist at all. If we cannot invite the world to "Watch us" when we are asked about the identity and meaning of our life as brothers, then we have only words. Such words die in thin air without living exam-ples to certify their truth. Action verifies articulations; witness confirms words. When action and witness are separated from artic-ulations and words, credibility is compromised. To speak and to act, together, must constitute our effort to define who and what we are as religious brothers and, being brothers, what we do. All else is shifting sand. All else contributes to the continued invisibility of religious brothers within the church and society. Being and Doing To be brothers and to do what brothers do are inseparable. We must strive for consistency in our life so that what we per-ceive and profess ourselves to be and what we do become a single reality. Otherwise we compromise the quality of any prophetic presence and activity we would have in the world. To be and to do as brothers of the Lord, we must be men of integrity, firmly rooted in the Lord. To be and to do as brothers with one another, we must be men of communion, who willingly choose the interdependence necessary for a healthy and whole life. To be and to do as brothers to others, we must be men of mis-sion, who love others through compassion and service. To be and to do as brothers for the church, we must be men willing to pro-vide challenge, whose commitment to the church enables us to question its inconsistencies even as we continue to love it. In the Book of Genesis, the challenge confronting Joseph is both to reveal his identity and to witness to the truth of that rev-elation. He begins with a simple invitation, "Come closer to me." He invites closer scrutiny and careful listening, confident that he will be recognized and accepted for who and what he claims to be. We religious brothers, by the very nature of our vocation, must extend the same invitation in all our relationships. The witness of our integrity, our sense of communion and mission, and the chal-lenge we present will confirm or contradict the truth of what we claim to be and profess to do. Vita consecrata says that brothers participate in the "mission of proclaiming the gospel and bearing witness to it with charity in everyday life" (§60). Such proclamation and such witness are responsibilities we bear and services we provide. They are the heart of our invitation to "Watch us"--to "Come closer" and see ¯. "I am your brother." Questions for Personal and Communal Reflection These brief reflections need fi~rther refinement from the particular cultures and contexts in which brothers live and minister around the world today. In fact, the most sound theologies of religious brotherhood today will conte from within those cultures and contexts. Generic theologies of religious life, by attempting to speak to everyone, run the risk of speaking to no one. As we continue to reflect on and discuss various dimensions of our religious life, we must remain ever attentive to the specific culture and context in which we live and minis-ter. The following questions are offered as a starting point for individuals and for communities. For us as brothers of the Lord, what aspects of Jesus' example and teaching are particularly striking and significant, given the heritage of our religious congregation and the particular culture in which we live and minister? As brothers with one another, what do we desire people to see in us through our life together? What do we believe our wimess communicates to people? What evidence do we have to support that belief?. As brothers to the people, what means do we use to foster peace and unity among them? How do our ministries serve towards dialogue and reconciliation? As brothers for the church, what efforts do we or could we make in our local area to emphasize the equality of persons within the church? With what specific challenges does our heritage as a congregation con-front the church? In which aspects of our life are we confident in saying "Come closer"? In which aspects of our life fire we hesitant about saying "Watch us" in response to people's questions about our vocation? What are the principal gifts we bring as brothers to this cultural set-ring? What are the principal social and ecclesial challenges confronting us today as brothers in this cultural setting? What is the most attractive quality about our religious life in this cultural setting? What is least attractive? What means would be effective in the particular culture where we live and minister for educating the people and the church about the voca-tion of brothers? In addition to the witness of our life, what are effective strategies for promoting vocations to religious brotherhood today? Septentber-October 1999 PAUL BEDNARCZYK Religious Brothers: One Vocation Director's Perspective Religious congregations of brothers can no longer ignore the question of new membership. The "vocation crisis" is staring us in the face. We can debate more effective governmen-tal structures, we can plan new mission orientations, and we can write more documents about solidarity with the poor, but, unless new members join our communities, what will it all mean fifty years from now? The membership crunch seems to be hitting home more now than ever. In many dioceses and religious congregations, the vocation question has been moved to the forefront. At their annual national meeting three years ago, the United States bishops agreed on a comprehensive strategy for vocations to the priesthood and reli-gious life. In June 1998 the U.S. bishops' committee on vocations sponsored a national symposium that had an overwhelming atten-dance. In addition, both the men's and women's religious leader-ship conferences--the Conferences of Major Superiors of Men (CMSM), the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), and the Conference of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR)--are exploring how leadership corporately can be more active in promoting the priesthood and religious life. For the past thirty-some years, we have quietly and sometimes unconsciously watched more brothers leave our corigregations than Paul Bednarczyk CSC, of his congregation's eastern province, first published this article in Horizon, a journal for vocation directors. His address is Congregation of Holy Cross; 85 Overlook Circle; New Rochelle, New York 10804. Review for Religious enter them. We prayed for vocations, and many communities even maintained their commitment to a full-time vocation director, but few prospects have joined our prenovitiate programs. Although over the years there was a general concern about the lack of new members, still--because numbers of brothers remained in the "work force"--we felt somewhat comfortable regarding our num-bers. These days are now gone. Our congregations are aging, men are retiring, and fewer members remain in full-time ministry. Our younger members continue to be few. We must confront the new-membership question. Much has been written about societal factors that create a cli-mate unfavorable to religious vocations. Family and neighborhood structures are no longer what they once were. We are witnessing changing definitions of family: single-parent homes, blended fam-ilies, children being raised by gay or lesbian couples. In addition, physical, sexual, drug, and alcohol abuse have greatly impacted the trust and stability that families need. Individualism and mate-rialism have consumed our American culture. Authority is looked upon cynically and institutions are considered suspect. Combine that with young people's inability or reluctance to make commit-ments, and religious vocations become an uphill battle. The changing face of the American Catholic and the tension between Catholic teaching and American values also have an impact on the numbers of religious vocations. The rising multi-culturalism of U.S. Catholics challenges us. Many Hispanic peo-ple continue to abandon the Catholic faith of their ancestors for fundamental and evangelical groups. Polls claim that many Catholics believe that the church's teaching on contraception, homosexuality, and premarital sex is outdated. Although young adults in general do not see the difference between clerical and religious celibacy, they will say that celibacy is the primary rea-son why they would not be a priest or a religious. Likewise, given our democratic values, American Catholics must reconcile them-selves with a church that does not function democratically. I believe it important to mention these factors at the outset because, although they are beyond our control, they have an effect on our religious-vocation promotion. In this paper I intend to share my own reflections on why fewer people are choosing to be brothers. Although I belong to the Congregation of Holy Cross, I have shared some of these ideas with brothers in other religious congregations. We are not alone in our struggle. After five years Septentber-October 1999 Bednarczyk ¯ Religious Brothers as vocation director, I offer thoughts I have gleaned from numer-ous vocation talks I have heard and given, from many meetings and discussions withadolescents and young adults, from direct-ing men and women on both personal and group discernment retreats, and from my association with other vocation directors both regionally and nationally. 492 A Question of Visibility We religious brothers are invisible. To put it more precisely, people generally have no clear idea about who or what we are. I say this neither cavalierly nor despairingly, but as simple truth. Part of this is the reality that we are fewer in number. In the United States, according to thd 1998 official Catholic Directory, the number of religious brothers dropped in 1997-98 by 178, resulting in a national total of 6115. Of course, many of these are retired or infirm and therefore no longer engaged in part- or full-time min-istry- and so are even more invisible. Brothers in teaching congregations cannot assume that the freshmen entering our high schools in September know what a religious brother is. Even though some come to us from Catholic grade schools, many have not met a religious brother or sister and know little or nothing about religious life. If they do have a min-imal understanding oic our life, most likely their perceptions have been influenced by what they see in the media, which is often dis-torted, stereotyped, and scandal ridden. Their parents, too, a generation that had greater exposure to religious in classrooms and parishes, have limited understandings of religious life. They may have romanticized notions of who we once were or, on the other hand, may endlessly repeat stories of brothers and sisters maintaining uncompromising discipline and inflicting harsh corporal punishments. In addition, people are con-fused by the polarization of the various religious lifestyles. How do lay people find a balance among various extreme "liberal" and "conservative" positions taken by religious men and women? How do they understand community when the religious they know live in private apartments or are in scattered communities of twos and threes? Although there are justifications for various places on the spectrum, the average persons in the pews just do not understand. I think it safe to say that they are confused, just as we are at times. The question of visibility is more complex than the reality of Review for Relig~o~!s fewer members. It is, I believe, also related to a greater issue in the church. Without a doubt, within the past twenty years our church has become increasingly clerical. At a time when there are fewer and fewer priests, lay religious life is not always promoted in the church as enthusiastically or emphatically as it could be. In litur-gies all of us have heard public prayers for vocations to the priest-hood and privately wondered why we were not also praying for vocations to the religious life. I do not think these omissions are intentional. When I have respectfully asked presiders to include in their future prayers of petition a mention of an increase in candi-dates for religious life as well, I was usually met with sincere apolo-gies and a response such as "To tell you the truth, I didn't even think of it." Such admitted forgetfulness is disarming, but the response remains a telling one. Another reality is that many bishops and priests are "gun shy" of religious men and women. Since many of their dealings with us have been confrontational and neg-ative, it seems they may be choosing to either ignore or avoid us in order to avoid future hostile situa-tions. Likewise, we religious have suffered from our own antago-nisms with the clergy and the hierarchy, and we too may choose to either ignore or avoid them. My point is not to say that we are right and they are wrong, but rather that stereotypes and false generalizations held by either party only lead to further break-downs in communication and in understanding one another's voca-tions in the church. If we assume an "us and them" mentality, we add to the divisiveness that already exists here and there in our church, and it is the church, the people of God, that ultimately suffers from such internal strife. To pin the blame of our invisibility solely on the church would be both unjust and inaccurate. We brothers must own the fact that some of us have chosen to be invisible. In the neighborhoods of some of our communities, I would conjecture that most of the neighbors are unaware that there is a religious community of men living on their block. Instead of participating in the life of our local parish community, some of us have chosen instead to par-ticipate anonymously in a nearby parish that may provide a better liturgy or choir. At a time when many teaching congregations have made concerted and successful efforts at connecting the mission of We religious brothers are invisible. September-October 1999 Bednarczyk ¯ Religious Brotbers their schools with the mission and charism of their community, some brothers choose not to participate in school activities, often to the dismay and wonder of lay colleagues, parents, and alumni. Although reasons for these examples may be acceptable to us, we must realize that such choices promote further invisibility and anonymity, something which we brothers can no longer afford. Without a public presence, our hope for future vocations is dim. The old clich~ has much truth: "Out of sight, out of mind." Not being part of the clerical hierarchy has given us a unique freedom that is comfortable. I heard one brother say about the hierarchy: "It's good that they forget about us--this way they leave us alone!" We come to a religious community not to dis-tance ourselves from the existing tensions or authority in the institutional church, nor to find a supportive haven for our anger against church authority, nor, for that matter, to promote our own church agenda. As consecrated religious we are men of the church and in the church. Our vocation by its very nature calls us to deepen our baptismal commitment and our relationship with the people of God. The faithful see us and look to us for who and what we are: men who through our vows have consecrated ourselves totally to God and to service within the church. They expect us to be integral to the church: when they do not see this, they are surprised and confused. If we are going to welcome men into our communities, I believe that we must all realistically deal with our feelings and beliefs about the church of today--not the church of yesterday or tomorrow, but the church of today in all of its glory and weakness. Generational Differences The majority of us have lived through the social, political, and ecclesial turbulence of the 1960s. We experienced the devastation of political assassinations, the power of the people in working for justice, and the sense of betrayal and shame that resulted from Watergate. We mourned the violence and casualties of the Vietnam War and of the racial wars that were erupting in our city streets. We underwent our own personal and spiritual transformations after the drastic changes set in motion by the Second Vatican Council. Suddenly our equilibrium was shaken. We experienced a shift in values from uniformity to diversity, from authoritarianism to collegiality, from commonality to individuality. Review for Religious We dealt with these dramatic events and changes in a variety of ways. Some simply left religious life. It seems to have been a good decision for some, once they discovered they .may have become brothers for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, oth-ers left and we still wonder why. Regarding these departures we still grieve. And, into the bargain, some of us have stayed. What are our reasons for remaining? After these radical shifts in church, society, and culture, has our dependence upon God and one another deepened, or have we learned instead to place more trust in our own self and in our material security? Have our vows increased our joy and appreciation for life, or have they regretfully only made our life burdensome? Do we face the uncertainty of the future with excitement and hope, or with cynicism and despair? If we are to witness to an attractive lifestyle option, we must answer these questions honestly and reexamine our own commitment to religious life. Unlike many of us who were brought up with the order and constancy of a triumphal church, our young people today have experienced conflicting messages from a church in transition, and they seek, simply, truth. In the face of New Age spirituality and watered-down Christianity, there are those who, in their desire to know more of what it means to be Catholic, resort to tangible, traditionally Catholic symbols. I find it fascinating that Exposition and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is making a comeback on college campuses. In the midst of the noise and rush of their aca-demic lives, students appreciate the hour of silence in the pres-ence of Mystery. Similarly, young adults are rediscovering the virtue of Mary, and have found the rosary to be an attractive form of prayer that is identifiably Catholic. Some ofos may be quick to categorize these young people as conservative or wacky, but these are students who volunteer weekly at local soup kitchens and par-ticipate in "alternative" spring breaks with Habitat for Humanity. They are also class officers, athletes, and students on the dean's list. As I have discovered, our younger people defy the neat and tight boxes in which we tend to categorize them. Have our VOWS increased our joy and appreciation for life, or have they regretfully only made our life burdensome? Septentber-October 1999 Bednarczyk ¯ Relig4ous Brothers To live with the ideals, hopes, and dreams of the young is inconvenient and at times even uncomfortable. In my meetings with men who are exploring a vocation, I have found that it is not because of ministry, education, or social-justice convictions that they are drawn to religious life. Our church has evolved to where, if this were their primary desire, they could eas-ily do this in a Catholic institution as laypersons. They are com-ing to us first and foremost for the religious life itself. To live in the secular world as a committed Christian espousing Catholic values is difficult for them. They admit their need for a community of like-minded individuals who could strengthen their love for God and their Catholic convic-tions. They are not looking for just a nice group of people who do good work. They are looking for men who know and can lead them to God and who can give them a sense of hope in a world that has become increasingly pessimistic and destructive. They want to pray together, share their faith, and bring the Good News to people through their ministry. They acknowledge the Eucharist as central to our faith, and they have devotion to it. Since they often come from an unchurched, nontraditional back-ground, they seek structure and definition. From our community perspective, that is quite an order to fill! Some of you who are reading this are probably wincing and saying, "I thought we got away from that years ago!" To put it simply, I believe we find ourselves in the middle of a generation gap. Thirty years ago some brothers retained their habits, sat in their pews, and looked with distaste upon those who wore jeans and colored shirts and prayed on throw pillows. They thought that, for sure, religious life was quickly going down the tubes. The younger brothers, however, challenged the older brothers to renew their zeal for religious life by adapting to a different lifestyle, one that was based more on shared expressions of faith and on more interpersonal, communal living. Likewise, the younger members were taught by the elders to appreciate the tradition of our life and consequently were enriched by their fidelity to their vows in the face of change. Since some of us have lost a younger generation in our con-gregations, we have forgotten what it is like to be challenged by the young. The lively community dynamic that occurs with the mix- Review for Religious ture of generations--the elderly, the middle-aged, the young--does not happen in many of our local communities. As a result, many of us have grown comfortable with one another and in our life together. For the majority of us, the mutual challenges and exchanges that we all remember from our earlier years and that occur naturally between the young and old do not happen anymore. At forty-one years old, I am still considered one of the "young" brothers in my community. I realize that much of my religious life has been lived with men older than myself. Although I am thank-ful for the benefit of their example and wisdom, as I enter my own midlife I realize that I have been deprived of living with the con-tagious energy and enthusiasm of much younger religious. I know that I need at times to be challenged to think in new ways and to experience life differently. Most of us are middle-aged or older. If we are to have a newer generation following us, we must--even if it becomes increasingly more difficult as we age--be open to the renewal of our basic val-ues: prayer, community, and lifestyle. Ironically, those who are considering religious life look for deeper community experiences while some veterans of thirty or forty years say they are tired of the routine and demands in community. How do we bridge this gap? To live with the ideals, hopes, and dreams of the young is incon-venient and at times even uncomfortable, but I know of no other way. Although youthful idealism may need some tempering, we must admit that at least it is refreshing. We have now become the "older" brothers of yesterday, and, like the older ones of thirty years ago, we too are invited to new ways of thinking and being as we look to the next generation in religious life. I do not believe that age has to be a deterring factor. When I hosted discernment retreats for prospective candidates at our retire-ment facility, I would invite three of our elderly brothers to tell their vocation stories. The combined witness of almost two hundred years of faithful religious life is better than any vocation brochure I could ever design! Their authentic fulfillment in Holy Cross and their continuing joy and vitality were always evidence to these interested men that this life can be lived and can be lived well. Our young people look to their elders for inspiration. They hunger for the wisdom that comes from living a prayerful and reflective life with God. If, however, they see stagnation, apathy, and cynicism, they are left disillusioned and wanting. For many of us, our lives as religious have been deeply enriching and grace filled, and yet some September-October 1999 Bednarczyk * ReligiousBrotbers of us are reluctant to share these experiences with each other. We underestimate at times the power of our stories. In many religious congregations it has been the tradition to respond to "the signs of the times" and to the contemporary needs of the church. I maintain that we need to continue this spirit of openness not only to our mission and ministries, but also to our religious lives as well. The Answer Is in the Present I do not claim to have the answers for the future. To be truth-ful, my worry is not for the future, nor is it for the past. It is the present that is my concern. We can only theorize about the future, as we can only reminisce about the past. Such intellectual exer-cises tend to distance us from the responsibility of making neces-sary choices about our lives and our community in the present. In general, given the societal changes and challenges discussed above, some recerit shifts in our culture seem to coalesce with our lives as religious brothers. For example, our society displays a renewed interest in spirituality. Celebrities from Oprah to Madonna have made daily meditation chic again! With the pro-liferation of self-help and support groups for every issue imagin-able, people long for connection and belonging. They desire "to share their story" and to be validated by a group. Corporations are supportive of community service, and some school systems have included service components in their curricula. As a result, volunteerism is at an all-time high. Ironically, many authors are making lots of money with their best-selling books on how to sim-plify one's lifestyle. It would seem that religious brotherhood would somehow fit into this picture. Our life is a wonderful secret that needs to be shared more now than ever before. As religious brothers we bring, I believe, a special gift to the church. Our faith teaches us about a God whose love is uncondi-tional and whose mercy is unlimited. If faithfully and genuinely lived, our vows attest that fulfillment is to be found more in the transcendent than in the transitory. Where division and broken relationships characterize many families and marriages, our com-mitment to community life, despite its inherent struggles, myste-riously witnesses to welcome, order, acceptance, and equality. I have read many books and articles detailing futures for reli-gious life in temporary vowed commitments, lay associate mem- Review for Religious bership, satellite communities, blended communities, and so forth. All of that makes for interesting reading and good discussion, but I return to the question: What about now? How do we live now the vows we professed, however many years ago? Do we do so with the passion, zeal, and love of our early years? I do not believe that the answer to the challenges of our pre-sent situation is as simple as the reconstruction of past external structures. Our lives are much more complex today than they were thirty years ago. No one can deny that our traditional structures served us well, considering the church and spirituality of the time, but it would be naive to expect the former ways to meet our con-temporary needs. We can romanticize about the past, but we know that it is impossible to turn the clock back. I am, however, not convinced--at least in my own congrega-tion- that we are at present compelled to create new models and forms of vowed religious life. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We need to insure that the wheel we already have is on the right track. Besides, since Vatican II, a number of experimental lay and religious communities have already been formed, imple-menting exciting new models of lifestyle and commitment. How they will fare in the future, only time will tell. I am convinced that as brothers we need to reclaim who and what we are. We are men of the church vowed to a life of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. We commit ourselves to a life of prayer and mission with each other in community. Given today's society and culture, these core values are what make us countercultural. Our vows are meant to be lived joyfully, with hope. This life was meant to be lived in relationship with God and with one another. Our challenging times invite us to probe and to enter more deeply into the essence of our vows and the mysterious grace that comes with this life. I believe in the gift of religious life, and particularly in the gift of religious brotherhood. I want a future for us because I believe the church would b6 lacking without us. Knowing how much I have been enriched by my own vocation to Holy Cross, I desire to share this gift with a new generation of religious. I am sure that the majority of members in our communities desires the same, but to do this requires conversion and a courageous open-ness to the Spirit that speaks to us today--and not yesterday and not tomorrow. [--z~00 September-October 1999 AVIS CLENDENEN II On Promise Making, Leave-Taking, and Becoming journeying It has been sixteen years since I requested and received a dispensation from my religious vows. The following reflection explores--from ethical, psychological, and theological perspectives-- the experience of malting and breaking promises and leaving the vowed religious life. Principally I will be drawing upon the ethical con-siderafions of Sister Margaret Farley RSM, the psycho-logical insights of Dr. Carl Rogers, and the theological depth of Father Karl Rahner SJ. These pages reveal a slice of an experience shared by many--that is, the mak-ing of a religious commitment, living in a vowed reli-gious community for years, developing bonds of trust and friendship, experiencing a crisis of fidelity, discov-ering the personal inability/choice to sustain the orig-inal commitment, and ultimately breaking the commitment and leaving religious life. A suspicion I had as I thought about examining the psychology and theology behind the making and break-ing of promises was that Rogers and Rahner had more than their first names in common. I sensed they shared a fundamental understanding of the human person, the Avis Clendenen PhD, associate professor of religious stud-ies and director of the Pastoral Ministry Institute, teaches pastoral theology and ministry at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, where she can be reached: 3700 West |03rd Street; Chicago, Illinois 60655. Revie~v for Religimts human dilemma, and the graced and flawed human quest of becom-ing whole and free. The following reflection reveals some signif-icant connections between Rogerian psychology and Rahnerian theology and offers a way of viewing the painful process of leave-taking and becoming. The painful and hopeful contours of this all-too-familiar experience can be traversed again in openness to the possibility of deeper revelations about the choices we make that sustain our word of love. Sixteen years from my departure after a thirteen-year commitment gives me perspective and a desire to return and examine the process of making promises, breaking promises, and becoming. In the fall of 1969 at nineteen years of age I entered the Sisters of Mercy. My letter of request to enter was all of two paragraphs composed by a nineteen-year-old touched and transformed, as late teens can be, by the turbulent events of the 1960s: My reason for choosing religious life as my way of life is because this in the only life that makes sense to me, as an individual. I want to express my life as a commitment of love to God and His Church. I am not quite sure why there is an attraction to the Mercy order in particular, but I believe my potential for giving and receiving, of freedom and ful-fillment, lie within this community. By the time I would profess my final vows in 1978, all refer-ences to God in the masculine pronoun were to be stricken from my vocabulary. By 1978 1 would be a graduate of the Jesuit School of Theology, having been the first woman admitted to its master-of- divinity program. Throughout the 1970s I struggled with the weight of a patriarchal church, including the graces and conflicts surrounding the inclusion of women in all ministries of the church. I would, over the expanse of years, come to greater clarity as to my "attraction" to the Sisters of Mercy as women of valor and vision, with a deepening sense of gratitude for the reciprocity of our rela-tionship. The issues of freedom and fulfillment became bemus-ing, and the turbulent times never did seem to abate. At thirty-three years of age, thirteen years after my entrance and less than four years after my final profession, I received a dis-pensation from my vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. The following are excerpts from the letter I wrote to the provincial administrator, initiating the formal leave-taking process: To try and summarize all the spiritual and psychological investigations I have done would be an injustice to all that has September-October 1999 Clendenen ¯ On Promise Making, Leave-Taking, and Becoming gone into this decision. To say too little would be an injus-tice to the quality of relationship I have shared as a Sister of Mercy throughout these years. I feel great pain as I accept responsibility for breaking my promises. But it was the pain of remaining in religious community that finally made the decision. I have asked myself again and again about the truth and integrity of the final commitment professed in 1978. That moment expressed the insight and honesty that was available to me; and while only four years ago, it's been a lifetime. In the months I have lived alone, I have read all the journals from my thirteen years as a Sister of Mercy. I saw the patterns of my struggles repeated year upon year. I read and remembered delightful times in community. My loneli-ness lines many pages. Notes from numerous retreats reminded me of my love for God. And, oh, the growing rage at the institutional church as it demeaned me and our efforts for women's voice and body to be celebrated all places, including the altar. I do not believe that in asking for a dispensation from my religious vows I am walking away from the vision of Catherine McAuley, the works of mercy, the body of Christ, or the commitment with feminists to liberate ourselves from the patriarchy. I am stepping away from a vowed relationship among you. I promised to persevere for life. I believe I per-severed until there .was no more life for me. I am so very sorry. I do not look for understanding, I~ut I will always expect compassion for that is why we bear our name. For the compassion that has been shown me and I have shared with you, for the years of service given expres-sion to as a Sister of Mercy, for the treasured moments and persons, I will always be grateful. I remain a believer and a daughter of Catherine McAuley. I hold now with courage and trepidation her legacy, my Bible, and I turn a corner. And trust. To Give One's Word Yale University Professor of Christian Ethics and Sister of Mercy Margaret Farley's tough thinking on the meaning of fidelity and its claim of obligation form an important frame of reference in analyzing whether one has the moral sanction to end a com-mitment. Sister Margaret Farley wrote her book on commitment in the late 1980s, when the permanency of commitments in American marriages teetered at a fifty-percent divorce rate and when "defection" from the priesthood and religious life in the Review for Religious American Catholic Church continued to deplete the ranks of ordained and vowed Catholic ecclesial leaders. For many years I successfully avoided Margaret Farley's 1986 book Personal Commitments: Beginning. Keeping. Changing. Research for this article inevitably led me back to her work and the challenges to think hard about why we give our word in mak-ing commitments, why we are obliged to keep them, and under what circumstances we may be morally released from them. Farley suggests that the rise of the human-potential movement served to shift the goals of many from the challenges of permanent commit-ment, fidelity, and responsibility, toward the increasing warrant of the call for per-sonal growth and self-actualization. It was as if these two venues for being and becoming were mutually exclusive. Those who had previously interpreted their life in terms of a religious vocation began to claim the. need to transfer voca-tion from one locus to another. "It was not always easy to tell whether these were expressions of faithfulness or of irresponsibility and betrayal."' What does it mean to say you make a promise with a sense of its truth and integrity and then years later suggest that your insights and sense of integrity have changed so signifi-cantly as to justify a breaking of the bonds and a release from obli-gation? Is emotional pain and lack of personal fulfillment sufficient cause to be dispensed fr6m the vows professed in an act of freedom, a free action always given into the hands of an uncertain future? As Farley eloquently explains, commitment has to do with the free action of free persons who give their word as part of them-selves. Commitment m~ans to give my word because that word belongs to me and I freely choose to entrust it to another's keep-ing. In a sense, commitment means to share with one or more per-sons claims on my being there in a promised way with and for them. While my word is "given away," paradoxically I still pos-sess it because it is myself. In commitment we freely take on an obligation to do as we have promised. The motivation for the kind of commitment we are discussing here is always love. "By assuming certain frameworks for love, we Is emotional pain and lack of personal fulfillment sufficient cause to be dispensed from the vows professed in an act of freedom, September-October 1999 Clendenen ¯ On Promise Making, Leave-Taking, and Becoming commit ourselves to whatever we understand essentially to con-stitute this framework."2 The profession of religious vows to be lived in the mic

Issue 56.6 of the Review for Religious, November/December 1997. ; Living NUMBER 6 Review for Religious is a forum for shared reflection ~n the lived experiehce of all who find that the church's rich" he~'m_ges .of spirituality ~upport tbei~ personal and apostolic Christian li6es. . The articles in the journal are meant to be informative, practical, or inspirationM, written front a~ tbeoflogical or spiritual or s6metimes canonical poin~ t of view. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis Universit3, 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.EI)U Manuscripts, book~ 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 McDonot, gh 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 o,1 subscription rates. ¢1997 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 nse, 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 [br 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 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 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1997 # VOLUME56 ¯ NUMBER6 contents virtues Solidarity--More than a Polish Thing Marie Vianney Bilgrien SSND sheds light on the importance of solidarity as a virtue, especially in the preparation of the Synod for America. The Paradoxical Courage of Ananias John L. Barber draws a picture of the disciple Ananias in which the various attributes of his courage guide us in our Christian following. working together 578 587 A Quilt, a Council, and a Church Margaret Mary Knittel RSM proposes that the processes of quiltmaking and the processes of organizations call for an ever active interdependence among equal people before a loving God. Community--Healthy or Dysfunctional? Joel Giallanza CSC makes some practical observations about the choices we make for a healthy community life and describes various causes of dysfunction. 599 The Elderly among Us Eagan Hunter CSC reflects upon the importance of the elderly ~x~ among us for the vital continuity of our religious life. Revie~v for Religious 605 614 being missioned Interreligious Dialogue and the Jesuit Mission Thomas Michel SJ explains the beneficial implications of interreligious dialogue and describes the personal transformation that results. Misery Meets Mystery in Montenegro: A Survival Guide for North American Religious Annette M. Pelletier IHM pictures the "reason" for hope in the flourishing of consecrated life in North America by describing her experience of the people of the Peruvian pueblo Montenegro. perspectives 623 Itinerancy, Stability, and the Freedom of No-Where Brian J. Pierce oP examines the ascetic freedom common to apostolic itinerancy and monastic stability, the freedom both to go wherever God's Spirit moves us and to stay put wherever we have come to see that God dwells. 636 642 Grass-Roots Religious Jeanne McNulty OCV presents reflections on some new ways of living consecrated life. Jesus, Frogs, and Dancing Eileen P. O'Hea CSJ tells of the rich experience of an ever developing relationship with Jesus that deepens our love of God and love of neighbor. departments Prisms Canonical Counsel: Habit and Habitus: Current Legislation Book Reviews Indexes to Volume 56 November-December 1997 prisms Jesus Christ is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, Lord of the new universe, the great hidden key to human history and the part we play in it. --Paul V-I, homily in Manila, 29 November 1970 ~esus presents us Christians with two inestimable gifts: familial intimacy with God and a share in divine vision. St. Paul speaks of God giving us wisdom to understand the mystery, "the plan he was pleased to decree in Christ, to be carried out in the fullness of time: namely, to bring all things in the heavens and on earth into one under Christ's headship" (Ep 1:9-10). Overwhelmed with the vastness of the vision, we rightly focus on the gift of intimacy. But, as we come to the end of each liturgical year, we receive reminders about the twinned vision which our relationship with Jesus entails. The many Gospel incidents of his curing blindness imply our need for Jesus to give us ever greater sight along with a deepening love relationship. One of the Gospel titles which Jesus elicits from us throughout our lives is "Teacher." As we continue to reflect on the Scriptures and receive graced insight into relationships and situations of our daily life, we become aware that Jesus remains our teacher as he was for the people during the time of his public ministry. A teacher provides information, presents new ways of seeing things, and makes connections with previous experiences, allow-ing further insights to develop. Through the gift of the Spirit, Jesus. continues giving all the richness of divine perspective. The Spirit's action gives hope to the church, whose vision is always in process of renewal. Through the focus of scripture readings during this changeover from Ordinary Time to Advent, the church faces each of us with our personal responsibility to examine whether we continue to deepen our relationship with Jesus and Review for Religious whether we allow Jesus to keep expanding our vision. The ques-tion for us: Do we seek out Jesus as our Teacher? If we enter into Matthew's final-judgment scene, how does Jesus find us "seeing" and dealing with our fellow men and women? With our aware-ness of ecological balance, how responsible are we to an envi-ronment given over to our care? Does "all things being created in him" affect our attitude of reverence in exploring Mars or some galaxy in the future? We talk about "getting stuck in our ways." We sometimes car-icature it as a special problem for the older person, but it has no age boundaries. We see children quickly get into certain ritualized ways of playing. We certainly know such patterns in our own behavior. In fact, prejudice is a fixed way of seeing or of relating. In the face of personal and historical evidence, it is a paradox to be engaged in a growing relationship with Jesus and at the same time to cling to prejudice. Does prejudice signal to us that we may be trying to focus myopically on the Jesus relationship without let-ring Jesus be Teacher for us? We may forget that faith vision is a grace always to be prayed for. Perhaps we have placed ourselves more in the position of Peter refusing to let his feet be washed, and we too need to hear Jesus' reprimand that unless we allow him to wash our feet (that is, allow our relationship with Jesus to affect our way of seeing and of acting) we will end up having no rela-tionship with him. We need to be challenged by the Pauline vision to enter into the divine pleasure of reconciling everything--both on the earth and in the heavens--in Christ. At the close of a liturgical year, as we listen to the Gospel accounts of end times and final-judgment scenes and then move on, in Advent, to the careful preparations for God's entering into our human history in Jesus, we realize anew how we are called to play our part in the cosmic vision--what St. Paul called "the mystery of Christ," the divine de, sign of salvation. Like St. Paul, we too want to make Christ known, hoping to make every human being complete in Christ, since in him--the image of the invisi-ble God--we see God's image of what it means to be human. And in our Christmas awe we continue to pray that we may have eyes to see that Mystery Incarnate, "the fullness of him who fills the universe in all its parts.'? David L. Fleming SJ The editors and staff of Review for Religious wish all our readers a most blessed Christmas and New Year! Noventber-Decevnber 1997 MARIE VIANNEY BILGRIEN SolidaritymMore than a Polish Thing virtues For too long, people have equated the concept of solidar-ity with the Solidarity Union Movement in Poland in the 1980s. On the other hand, many people have not paid any attention to solidarity because they thought of it either as a Polish thing or as just a passing event. For a few years solidarity generated written articles and symposiums after Pope John Paul II named solidarity a virtue in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis. Can one birth new virtues in our religious tradition? I suspect one can, if one is pope and writing an encyclical. So maybe sol-idarity is a Polish thing! In any case, interest in the virtue soon died down. I know this because in 1994, when I was in Rome writing my dissertation tided Solidarity: d Principle, an Attitude, a Duty, or The Virtue for an Interdependent I4rorld, I seemed the only one interested in it--especially as a virtue. Yet there is a new surge of interest, due to the linea-menta prepared for the Synod of America titled Encounter with the Living.Jesus Christ: Vday to Conversion, Communion, and Solidarity. In the lineamenta, solidarity is referred to as a principle, a duty, and a virtue. Individuals and groups are urged to practice solidarity "to channel effective aid to groups and nations which suffer from poverty." Solidarity as a virtue is "a morally necessary reaction to the exis- Marie Viarmey Bilgrien SSND, director of the Hispanic ministry office in the diocese of Baker, may be addressed at P.O. Box 823; Madras, Oregon 97741 Review for Religious tence of injustice in social conditions" that affects many individ-uals and nations. Emphasizing the fact of interdependence, the lineamenta stresses that solidarity must be practiced not only by individual persons, but by entire peoples and nations, inasmuch as the world is economically, culturally, and politically more and more interconnected. What one country does regarding migra-tion, the use of natural resources, the drug trade, genetic manip-ulation, international economic relations, and so forth affects many other countries. The lineamenta stresses that solidarity is part of the church's social teaching and is to be practiced by everyone (§55); it explains as does Sollicitudo rei socialis that, if we want to undo the structures of sin so prevalent in our world, the solution lies in the moral realm. Just as sins of individuals create structures of sin that take on a hideous existence of their own, "an all-consuming desire for profit and thirst for power," so too acts of the virtue of solidarity by individuals, groups, and nations can build up structures of virtue that have a "decisive influence on economic programs and policies, on social communication, on culture, on healthcare, and so forth" not only locally but also nationally and internationally. It will be interesting to see how the idea of solidarity plays out in the meetings and documents of the Pan-America synod. Solidarity has a longer history than most people realize. It appears five times in the Latin of the Vatican II documents: twice in Apostolicam actuositatem, §8 and §14, and three times in Gaudium et spes, §§4, 32, and 57. In reading the texts one can glean that solidarity has an important spiritual dimension. It is a part of charity and has an individual and a universal dimension. It creates a responsibility to act. Jesus' incarnation shows his and God's sol-idarity with humanity. Our response to that gift is the practice of solidarity, recognizing that we are one family, that we have received gifts and talents to be used cooperatively--for the good of the whole family. Paul VI used the idea of solidarity extensively, especially in Populorumprogressio (see §§17, 43, 44, 48, 62, 64, 73, 80, and 84). It also appears in the Italian translation of Pius XII's encyclical Summipontificatus in 1939. He understood solidarity as the unity Jesus" incarnation shows his and God's solidarity with humanity. November-December 1997 Bilgrien ¯ SolidaritymMore than a Polish Thing of the human race, our.common origin from our Creator, sharing a "common habitation, this world of ours whose resources every-one has a natural right to enjoy., as they are needed for preser-vation and self-development." John Paul has been writing about solidarity since 1969. In his book The Acting Person, in describing personal development, he devotes a whole chapter to the necessity of attitudes of both oppo-sition and solidarity for the true and complete development of mature persons. In naming solidarity a virtue, he gives it greater importance. What does that mean? Solidarity as an attitude, duty, or principle only helps people to do the right thing, but as a virtue it helps them to become good. Duty implies decision and action, but virtue implies a disposition, a power, a perfection. Duty asks, What should I do? Virtue asks, How should I be? Virtue helps us do the right thing for the right reason. Solidarity is a virtue not only for individual persons, but also for groups working together and for nations in a world that is ever more interdependent. Solidarity is the virtue that can move society to the good. Solidarity is the virtue that can transform persons and society. In describing the virtue in Sollicitudo rei socialis, John Paul says that it is the response to relationships in a world that is inter-dependent; "it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good" (§38). He adds that the virtue is valid only when we recognize others as human persons, equal in dignity; when we feel responsible for those who are weaker--the poor (§39). In two paragraphs he lays out the components of the virtue of solidarity: interdependence, the common good, the dignity of the person, the preferential option for the poor. Solidarity recognizes that people, nations, all of creation are interconnected. What happens in one area of the world can have tremendous effects in another part. The actions of individuals, nations, and blocs of nations either increase the structures of sin (thirst for power, all-consuming desire for profit, ethnic wars, unjust wages, inhuman working conditions, patterns of violence and sexual abuse) or can build up structures of virtue (cooperative efforts to bring about a more just world and preserve the integrity of creation: the United Nations, groups concerned about ecol-ogy, peace-and-justice commissions, and so forth). Solidarity as a virtue recognizes people as equal in dignity and worthy of respect. Solidarity as a virtue sees each person as a Review for Religious member of the world family, as an image and likeness of God. Instead of looking at others as simply other, solidarity helps us to see them as neighbors, as brothers and sisters. From this flow the importance and necessity of working together to preserve the human family and the integrity of creation. Some of this can be seen in the work of the U.N. as it sends groups to work with refugees or promote peace between warring eth-nic groups. One sees the virtue in Doctors with-out Frontiers, who work in many parts of the world, and in other volunteer groups promot-ing health, education, and housing in poor coun-tries of the world. In accepting and recognizing the human dignity of each person, there must be a focus on those who are poorest. Both John Paul and Paul VI noted that their eyes were opened to the poor during their travels to Latin America and India. When one stands in a different place, one sees differently. Moving out from the Vatican palace to the streets of Calcutta and the barrios of Rio de Janeiro changes the view. Their eyes were opened; their awareness of people's suffering intensified. After those journeys, both popes talked more and more strongly about the necessity of "an option for the poor." In Sollicitudo rei socialis John Paul explains that a preferential option is not an exclusive option, but is a "firm and irrevocable option." Solidarity with its component of an option for the poor helps us to see the wider issues, the intertwining of systems and structures that oppress the poor rather than raise them up. Somewhere, in solidarity's judgment, the poor have a role. It is not true solidarity if the poor are overlooked or treated with conde-scension. In each judgment that is made, each action taken, one should ask: How will this affect the poor? The real goal of an option for the poor is to move beyond helping them and provid-ing care. The goal is for the poor to be authors of their own actions, to make their own decisions, decisions that are effective in moving them from poverty to participation in society. The goal is for them to be no longer .treated as children incapable of tak-ing care of themselves, but to participate in decision making so that the effects of solidarity are felt by all and begin to reshape the unjust structures that keep the poor poor. Only when the poor Solidarity recognizes that people, nations, all of creation are interconnected. November-December 1997 Bilgrien ¯ Solidarity--More than a Polish Thing are treated with full dignity will the virtue of solidarity begin to flourish in all its splendor. What is at stake is the common good, the good of all and the good of each individual, and solidarity is the virtue that commits everyone to the common good. Solidarity directs nations to sub-ordinate their national interests for the good of the planet, for the good of all. Solidarity directs individuals to transcend their greed and selfishness and focus on the good of the whole. Our years of selfishness, of greed for power and money, have caused havoc in the environment and have placed future genera-tions in jeopardy. No one can quash worrisome questions about the "greenhouse effect," about the dangers of the ozone level in the atmosphere, and about unknown effects of massive deforesta-tion and the continuous piling up of industrial waste. We continue to kill our planet. The widespread experimentation and manipula-tion in the biological sciences has outrun our ability to make moral decisions. Those decisions or indecisions will have for future gen-erations repercussions that we cannot predict. Solidarity is the virtue that can bring us to a greater consciousness of the importance of our moral decisions. Solidarity, by focusing the common good, reminds us that the differences of race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and economic status do not have to be divisive. Solidarity is the virtue for the third millennium. It has the capacity to inform interdependence in such a way that persons, peoples, countries, and nations will relate to each other equally, as members of the same family. Solidarity as a virtue orders actions and relationships towards the common good. It is the virtue that can transform a world of unjust structures, structures of sin, into structures of virtue, structures of justice, family structures. The general secretariat of the Synod of Bishops in its working paper has begun to answer the call of John Paul to unite all peoples of the Western Hemisphere and offers the practice of solidarity as one of the ways to solve the massive problems and inequities of the two continents. Conversion, communion, and solidarity in, with, and through Jesus Christ will be important on the journey into the third millennium. Solidarity is only the beginning. Review for Religious JOHN L. BARBER The Paradoxical Courage of Ananias anlthe pages of the sacred text, we find many courageous, but so human, people. One .such bold, authentic person was Ananias of the Book of Acts. The prelude to his encounter with Paul (then named Saul) is recorded as follows: A disciple called Ananias who lived in Damascus had a vision in which he heard the Lord say to him, "Ananias!" When he replied, "Here I am, Lord," the Lord said, "You must go to Straight Street and ask at the house of Judas for someone called Saul, who comes from Tarsus. At this moment he is praying and having a vision of a man called Ananias coming in and laying hands on him to give him back his sight." When he heard that, Ananias said, "Lord, several people have told me about this man and all the harm he has been doing to your saints in Jerusalem. He has only come here because he holds a warrant from the chief priest to arrest everybody who invokes your name." The Lord replied, "You must go all the same, because this man is my chosen instru-ment to bring my name before pagans and pagan kings and before the people of Israel. I myself will show him how much he himself must suffer for my name." Then Ananias went. (Ac 9:10-16)~ We know very little about Ananias, other than what we glean from this short account in Acts; he was "a disciple" of Jesus and lived in Damascus. Rather than being a longtime citizen of that city, our Ananias may have been a refugee from the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. Though this is uncertain, we will John L. Barber, a lawyer, married and the father of two college-age sons, is also a lay minister at St. Paul's Episcopal Church. He writes to us from 600 Nokomis Court; Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27106. November-Decentber 1997 Barber ¯ The Paradoxical Courage of Ananias Saul is not only a real person, but also a symbol for the challenge to move from what we know, from safety, into the unknown and risk. --y-72J assume that he was indeed one who had fled from religious oppression. From Paul's address to the Jews of Jerusalem, we learn he was also "a devout follower of the Law and highly thought of by all the Jews living" in Damascus (Ac 22:12). Apparently his name was a common one, for in Acts we meet two other Ananiases. The first appears in chapter 5--Sapphira's husband, who lied to the Holy Spirit--and in chapter 23 we encounter the other, the high priest who ordered Paul struck on the mouth. In the same type of human plight in which our faith is tested, the constancy of Ananias was tried. In this sense Saul is a metaphor for those predicaments into which we must walk, involving a difficult or dangerous person or situation and presenting some risk from which we fear harm. The potential injury we face may not be as grave as the arrest and imprisonment that Ananias dreaded. Nonetheless, to us it feels and seems harmful, and we are afraid. As we journey on our Christian pilgrimage, all of us must face our own fear-provoking Sauls. Who are these Sauls for us? They are those places and people to which we would not go, were it not for God leading, moving, and stirring us and urging us to grow. They are life passages and problems we would not engage in, were it not for God inviting us or interrupting our lives. Saul may appear in life passages such as a midlife crisis or that time when the last child leaving home creates what is commonly called "the empty nest." In these interruptions we lose our bearings. Our "Saul" in them is the challenge of finding our direction again and reorienting ourselves. They might be crises like a divorce or the death of a spouse or loved one, the loss of a job or dissatisfaction with one's career. In these situations we face Saul when we are forced out of our ruts to seek new or renewed meaning for life. Saul is not only a real person, but also a symbol for the chal-lenge to move from what we know, from safety, into the unknown and risk. He is a sign for that time in life when our devotion to God demands concrete but hazardous action. We may find our Sauls in people with whom we have some Review for Religious confrontation, particularly if we are conflict avoiders. On the other hand, the Saul could be a confrontation with our own selves as we meet the challenge of seeing the truth in our own failings and weaknesses, limitations andsins, and dysfunctions and addic-tions. The dangerous Saul might be the challenge of learning healthier ways of relating and living. These types of self-con-frontation, in which we face the painful reality in our own hearts, can require even more courage than conflict with others. Typically, life's Sauls, in the guise of hard and risky challenges, involve both types of encounters: encountering self and encountering another person or some passage or crisis. For both of these, fortunately, we have a guide in the person of Ananias: he faced his own fear and Saul as well. A pattern for a bold Christian spirituality, he presents, when viewed from dif-ferent angles, a multidimensional courage. What, then, were some of the facets of his intrepidity? His Christian courage involved at least five attributes: openness before God, obedience, reluc-tance, calculated surrender, and the gift of grace. Openness before God The characters of the Bible portray many different stances or postures vis-~a-vis God. The prophet Jonah tried "to get away from Yahweh" (Jon 1:3). In Genesis, after Adam and Eve suc-cumbed to temptation, they hid from the Lord God who came to them "walking in the garden in the cool of the day." Ananias, on the other hand, was neither taking flight nor hiding. While he may have fled the persecution in Jerusalem, he did not flee from God. The Lord did not have to say to him, "Ananias, where are you?" as he did to Adam (Gn 3:8-10) or unleash "a violent wind on the sea" as he did against Jonah (Jon 1:4). Instead, Ananias had laid, himself bare before God, saying, "Here I am, Lord. Speak, your servant is listening." This "I-tere I am, Lord" stance in the presence of God is the courageous spirituality. Living "out there," in front of God, is the stalwart posture of discipleship. It is scary to live openly before God. What sins will God allow us to see? How will the glow of his love and the heat of his righteousness feel on our faces? What sufferings that our broth-ers and sisters endure will we, too, be privileged to face? What will the Lord ask us to do? For example, we pray earnestly, longing to hear God as clearly as Ananias did. Then, L.f-73 November-December 1997 Barber ¯ The Paradoxical Courage of Ananias when we do, we are hesitant to do what God has asked of us. We question God, saying, "Lord, did you really say what I thought you said?" or "God, I wanted you to speak to me, but I really don't want to do what you asked." Hiding from God among the trees of the garden is the spir-ituality of fear. Taking flight from God is the spirituality of escape. Openness before God is the spirituality of Ananias. Obedience The obedience of Ananias flowed out of his openness before God. This aspect of courage led to another, that of obedience. Courage for the Christian is different from bravery in other con-texts. For the believer, courage is connected to our obedience to God. An outgrowth of Ananias's openness was his vision in which he heard God speak, a time of intent listening for and to the voice of God. According to author Henri Nouwen, there is a com-monalty between obedience and intent listening. The word obe-dience springs from the Latin ob-audire, which signifies intent listening? Such intent listening is an act of courage in itself. For, if we begin to listen, we may come to know the sound of God's voice. And, if we come to know the sound of the voice, we may actually hear it. And, if we hear what God has to say to us, we are left in a dilemma of response and answer, as was Ananias. Reluctant Courage In our society we tend to view brave people as those who have no fear. In fact, the word "fearless" is a synonym for "courage." Yet, if we wait until we have no fright or consternation before we take a particular action, we will never act; for who among us is never afraid? This, however, is all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of being either valiant or afraid, we are simultaneously both3--valiant and afraid. Bravery, in truth, is action in spite of fear. In the face of the terror which looks us straight in the eyes, courage is a life stance or attitude which enables us to go to that dreadful place where God may be leading and we otherwise would not travel. For Ananias, bravery existed coexisted with his fear. He was obviously afraid of Saul, who journeyed to Damascus "still breath-ing threats to slaughter the Lord's disciples" (Ac 9:1). Having ReviewforReligious heard the Lord, Ananias responded by saying, "But, Lord, let me point out a few things to you. This Saul is a dangerous man. He might arrest me and put me in prison. I've already fled Jerusalem to get away from persecution, and now you want me to walk straight back into it." There is no evi-dence that Ananias ever got over being afraid of Saul. Although he was reluctant in his fear of Saul, Ananias nevertheless responded in faithfulness to the voice of God. He went to Saul in and with his fear. Following the example of Ananias, courage for the Christian exists not in overcoming our human- Courage for the Christian exists not in overcoming our humanity, but in our humanity. ity, but in our humanity. For the Christian, courage lives where there is obedience to the voice of God in spite of a very real dread. A Calculated Surrender For the Christian, courage is also an ambiguous place of ten-sion between knowing and counting the costs of our obedience, on the one hand, and, on the other, surrendering to consequences of our listening to God that are yet unknown. It is action flowing out of a paradoxical wisdom and foolishness. Whatever we might say about Ananias, he counted the cost of obeying God. He knew the risks. About our Ananias, there was a certain sophistication and wisdom. He had a firm grip on life as it really is, including the ugly part, particularly if he was a refugee from the persecution in Jerusalem. As a realistic person, his brav-ery was not a gullible one. Arrest, prison, stoning, persecution-- he knew very well what he might be getting into if he obeyed God and went to Saul. He was regardful of the reality of this man, who "entirely approved of the killing" of Stephen and "worked for the total destruction of the Church" by going "from house to house arresting both men and women and sending them to prison." (Ac 8:1 and 3). While he was well acquainted with the kind of man he was, his encounter with Saul also held a very real terror of the unknown and unfamiliar. Ananias did not know whether he would survive this ordained meeting or be stoned to death. Though we count the costs of our obedience, we still cannot know the ultimate out- Noventber-December 1997 Barber ¯ The Paradoxical Courage of Ananias come. The future cannot be envisioned. An old Jewish proverb says that "man plans but God laughs." Despite our best planning we cannot eliminate all surprises and exigencies. For the Christian, courage involves surrender into the hidden outcome of our obe-dience. In our confrontations we must know the risks we face. We are called to be wise as serpents. At the same time we cannot fore-see all the risks, and so our courage must have some element of surrender in it. In facing others we miglit lose our jobs, endure retribution, or suffer alienation in relationships. In the passages and crises of life, we might be forced from our comfortable lifestyle to one of greater risk as well as service and deeper mean-ing. In discovering ourselves as we really are, we may feel the heat of God's gaze with an intensity similar to the sun shining through a magnifying glass. Discomforting it is to see both the chaff and the wheat of the ripening crop of our own lives. Ananias's intrepidity was not naive, but one rooted in reality. Nonetheless, it involved a letting go of his life and relinquish-ment to God. If we are to be brave Christians, we must enter the place of tension between counting the cost and surrender. Gift of Grace We return to the name Ananias. For actors in the Biblical drama, a name was significant. So it was for Ananias. His name is derived from the Hebrew name Hananiah, meaning "the Lord is gracious" or "the Lord shows grace." For us to hear God's voice, the Lord must speak--which in itself is a special grace. With its limited resources, our own courage can take us only so far. Then, in order to heed the sound of God's voice, we come to the point where our humanity needs a healthy dose of grace. God's gra-ciousness is our access to Christian courage that is required of us if we are to be disciples. Grace is the window through which we step from hiding before God to the presence of God. Grace is the threshold which we cross from a fearful inaction to an obe-dience of reluctant courage. The irony of Christian courage is that it requires both a personal achievement and a gift from God. Living openly before God, Ananias of Damascus exposed him-self to hear whatever the Lord might say. Once he heard the voice of God, he responded in obedience. But his response was a human one of courage in its reluctance and hesitancy in its bravery. Review for Religious Realistic in his intrepidity, he both knew the risk and counted the cost of going to Saul. At the same time, he abandoned himself to the unknown consequences. Then he relied on God's grace so that he might be obedient to his voice. To varying degrees we are all Ananiases, whom William Barclay called "one of the forgotten heroes of the Christian Church." The mystery is that we are persons of paradox--as was Ananias; reluctantly courageous, calculated in our surrender, and obedient through grace--as was Ananias. Notes ~ Scripture quotations are from the Jerusalem Bible. 2 Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader, ed. Robert Durback, p. xxix. 3 I am indebted to Maurice Briggs MA for this insight about "all or nothing" or "either!or" thinking ove? and against "both/and" thinking. Rev. Briggs is a member of the faculty in the Department of Chaplaincy and Pastoral Education at North Carolina Baptist Hospital, Winston- Salem, North Cai'olina. Advent Cave Plato knew about the dark, how we prisoners face the wall in chains, only the fire b~hind us letting us see the m~oving shadows we call real. Far above, looms the door to light, reachable only by those who turn ~ away,from all they know. Wisdom, who lived in the cave at Nazareth where parents made a home and carried water to thefire, sitting at night in quiet, thoughts and the animals dozing near embers, the dying light, after a day of learning the real, calls us to turn and face the door. Evelyn Mattern November-Deconber 1997 MARGARET MARY KNITTEL | A Quilt, a Council, and a Church working together The quilt movement should be preserved as a col-lective enterprise with an ethical concern. If taken seriously as women's art, quilts cannot be perceived and enjoyed as isolated aesthetic objects divorced from the relationships of women to each other and to the rest of humankind. Quilts emin~ently pose the question of how one behaves in the asking and viewing of art. --Radka Donnell, Quilts as Women's Art Twenty years ago I took several tries at developing skills "for the home," sensing at first blush of midlife that my. more productive impulses would require something for my hands to do in my old age. Firs~t, there were the needlepoint classes, ~e.~n quilting. Quiltmaking is not for the faint of heart. As a dropout from Advanced Quilting, I can attest to the shaky feeling in the knees when faced with what appears to be an infinite number of steps. This quiltmaking episode would be instructive. As I have come to understand them, both quiltmaking and organizations involve mutuality and interdependence as essential pro-cesses within their respective collective enterprises. A Collective Enterprise In quiltmaking, the mutuality and interdependence of the women are reflected in th~ final product. Design, tex- Margaret Mary Knittei RSM works as a grants consultant for nonprofit organizations. She may be addressed at P.O. Box 634; Geneva, Illinois 60134. Review for Religious ture, color, and template come together through their hands, through their spirit shaping. "Quilts are healing because they accept the uniqueness, the positive difference, and the mortal limit of each human being."1 A quilt's design, texture, color, and template over a period of time will collect these human beings and express their individualities anew. Design, texture, color, template .become interdependent, one with the others, to bring beauty to the whole. The overall design of a quilt needs a working principle, a template, to express the color and'the texture, to specify the difference. One shape, a tri-angle for example, can be the basic design of countless quilts~ The textures of various fabrics add to color and design, with the template giving the basic shape. Color in all its bold or modest hues as textured by the various materials gets a specific shape and then is pieced'into a growing design. The mutuality and interdependence among the quiltmakers affirm them all. Positive differences go somewhere into a future, not wasting time with empty words of control; rather, they speak of vision. Limit recognizes this is a bordered piece, this quilt, and we its .shapers affirm the grace of the moment~, knowing it could be the grace of a lifetime. .Quiltmaking is a healing image, one that includes authentic conversation, meaning-filled relationships, among the people sharing the brganizational life of a parish, a religious community, a church. "Religion here is the sensation of being one with the whole, of belonging, not of subjection.''~ The virtues of quilt-making are the virtues of a healthy human organization. A Demo~cratic and Affirming Mission . Radka Donnell says in her perceptive book: "To the work of piecing quilts I was silently called, and i( took me years to sort 6ut the problems it revealed and the-difficulties it created. The early groups of contemporary quiltmakers were inspired by a sense of mission. If not expressly feminist in each case, this mission certainly was democratic and affirmative of each individual quiltmaker a'nd each quilt. (p. 6) The metaphor of quiltmaking can remind us of the Second Vatican Council's challenge to the church to accept both its divine mission and the human organization called to participate in thLa$t-7-9 November-December 1997 Knittel ¯ A Quilt, a Council, and a Church mission. Facing problems and difficulties, it is an organization capable of error, of hurt and pain, in search of truth, in sea.rch of healing and grace. During the thirty and more years since the council's call, at times its substantive energy seems depleted and diminished; but ultimately, in the hearts of people, the message will never be muffled or suffocated. The post-Vatican church as organization, as. human organi-zation, seems destined for democratic and affirming conversa-tions. That kind of, change and growth lies in the hands of all believers, as people seated as equals around a corporate quilt. If we are quiet.like the quiltmakers, we still hear, from the heart of the council, that call, that sense of being missioned, to the inclu-sive and respectful goodness of lives lived to the full in the sight of God. Our lives continue on, and as we look desperately for mileposts we acknowledge we are still on the way. Concerns for democratically and respectfully affirming connections become earnest calls for better ways of being together, whether it be in a parish, a religious community, or the church universal. Religious organizations, as human organizations, need to face their corporate humanity. A corporate way of being human is important, whether we admit or deny the fact, whether we like it or not. The foibles of people's human interaction can be acutely felt at an individual level. Often, however, corporate humanity recognizes the problems only after many have been hurt. Words like "low morale" or "uncooperative" become blame tags. The dilemma for leadership is that, when you blame, you do not lead. The nature of bureaucracies is to maintain power, no. matter what the cost. The church needs to ask itself just how bureau-cratic it wants to be. If it chooses to be increasingly pastoral, it will find that parishes, religious orders, dioceses, and the church uni-versal will raise new questions, demand new ways of~behaving. Within a bureaucratic church organization, the individual-- parishioner, ~priest, vowed religious, bishop, employee--will mat-ter less than the maintenance of power: posturing, identifying totally with power, seeking to dominate. To survive, members might feel they must be subservient in one way or another. Within a bureaucracy the common good is co-defined with the maintenance of the organization itself. More time and energy are given to protecting a bureaucratically bungled decision than to thinking through afresh what is happening. Things as we hard known them remain the same. In the face of an entrenched Review for Religious bureaucracy, the better educated, the more aware, may leave. Feeling tokenism and lack of care, they may go off, re,searching for their soul. For those who stay, the mission seems dissolved within the bureaucratic. Doing the task mindlessly and relating to self, oth-ers, and God make it all bearable. Fair Dealing Radka Donnell makes this observation about quiltmaking: To be interested in the theory and practice of quiltmaking means to look for fair dealing between women, as well as between men and women. It indicates a readiness to fight against all obstacles preventing us from creating a better world together. (p. 72) One systems view of organizations sees them as made up of four equal subsystems, mutually interdependent in their rela-tionships. These four separate and different subsystems are called the task, the structure, informal groups, and the individual. These four separate and different subsystems function optimally when all are equal to one another in importance and mutually interde-pendent in their relating. If one of these subsystems puffs up, the whole system is affected. The other subsystems get leaned upon, diminishing their contributions within the whole. If one of these subsystems withers, the functioning whole likewise suffers, gets skewed. Parishes; religious communities, and the church universal as human organizations are distinct systems. Each could be said to consist of the four subsystems of task, structure, informal groups, and the individual. The Task as Subsystem. The task in a. religious community would be its charism, the unique mission of a community as per-ceived within the Catholic tradition in its particular context. Similarly, a parish has a particular local task to accomplish. A contemplative group of religious women varies from an active one, and0an inner-city parish from a suburban one. While each participates in a still larger system, locally they are themselves separate organizations. Over time numerous activities accrete to any organization, but its central mission remains. Confusion, dif-ferences, outright hostilities occur when an important question is not acknowledged or goes unasked: "Just who does the sending, November-December 1997 Knittel ¯ A Quilt, a Council, and a Church the missioning?" Is it God, a founder or foundress, this hospital, a church, the history of a town or city? The Structure as Subsystem. The second subsystem to be looked at here is structui'e or governance. Within a community or a parish, we all know the persons making up the structure. Vv'hether community government be elected or discerned, it finds itself in Whether community government be elected or discerned, it finds itself in a quandary of expectations from membership, and from itself. a quandary of expectations from mem-bership and from itself. Likewise, a new pastor looking around for the first time feels various expectations arising. Leadership needs to lead, but, when it does, its performance may not fit pre-conceived notions. Then leadership may be tempted to resist the future; to lean back and maintain the present, and hence to end up reissuing the past. Leadership in the ideal sustains the vision of the common good, which in itself is a process both democratic and affirming. A structure ideally assumes lines and processes of accountability that are at .once just and active. Leapfrogging .and micromanaging from a0distant central office can bypass managers and commit-tees on the scene and violate the rights of the organization itself. Again, if local people .spontaneously blurt out their evaluation of an associate pastor at a parish council meeting, they bypass proper procedures and strip away the individual's right to an appropriate evaluation of job performance. The structure, we need to remem-ber, is one of four equal and interdependent, subsystems contex~ tualized within an organization. Informal Groups as Subsystem, The informal groups in an orga-nization would be various clusters of individuals espousing simi-lar norms and sanctions among themselves. They appear neutral in a well-functioning organization, manifesting as they do a nat-ural affinity of persons. Sometimes, however, an informal group skews an organization, a company, a religious community, or a parish by losing sight of the larger task, the mission, the com-mon good, and seeking its own way of goverfiing the whole. The informal group may try to impose its own values on the majority in any number of ways: by inclusion, exclusion, intimidation, and oppression, by pushing to be the most holy, the most dedicated to Review for Religious the poor, the most attentive to keeping the church intact, the most pro-life. Many masks can disguise the will for power over others, and an informal group in any organization can obscure and even obliterate the vision. The Individual as Subsystem. The fourth subsystem within this model of organization is the individual. Individuals and the moti-vations they bring to the organization impact the entire system. The recognition of the variety of motivations at play within any group can be a sobering and staggering realization. From studies on the impact of opportunity in organizations, we know that the "anointed" in organizations, those high flyers who move quickly through ~the ranks, are given life through our desire to observe them as winners. We endow their ideas and words with more credibility. We entrust them with more resources and better assignments. We have already decided that they will succeed, and so we continu-ally observe them with the expectation that they will con-firm our beliefs.3 The anointed individual in this language of organization-as-system distorts the life of the organization, overshadowing struc-ture, informal groups, task or mission, and other individuals. Other members give over their .truth, their experience, and, in thus surrendering their individual dignity, they suffocate the pos-sibility of democracy or the achievement of the common good. The anointed individual becomes a god. Within a church or reli: gious organization the confusion of gods for God needs contin-ued sorting. Self-Healing Among her comments about quilting, Radka Donnell says: The.more the system gets into high gear, the more self-he~ aling is needed. (pp. 126-127) In church organizations, isolation and wrongly constructed obediences sometimes intensifies the claim of the few to be anoint-eds. A particular organization's structure, informal groups, and task or mission could conceivably be dominated by an anointed; in this mix, religious language might be used to cover ambition, to anoint the anointed. A wonderful scene from the movie Richard 111 swipes at the capacity of religious language to cover up. Richard, pretending to be secluded and hard at prayer, emerges to be "convinced." to November-Dece~nber 1997 Knittel ¯ A Quilt, a Council, and a Church accept the English throne he has serpentinely plotted and mur-dered to acquire, Knowing that people consider him in some way the anointed one, he now considers himself a god. He becomes increasingly foreign to those around him, and later he meets defeat in battle. Have we ever looked on when a locally anointed individual (now apparently feeling godlike as well) strongly inserted irrele-vant and impertinent opinion into a community or parish com-mittee, spilling the work of months down the drain? Numbers of those very committee members, still ~motionally inclined to attribute greater knowledge and perhaps even a cosmic wisdom to the anointed one, may find themselves recoiling in disarray. Can we recall an experience in our lifetime when an individual crashed through the lines of accountability appropriate to structure, manipulated informal groups by feeding them what they want to hear, and used language of mission or church or patriotism to keep the advantage? Is this the call of the prophetic, we. wonder, as we give over our own individual power to this other individual, the anointed? "Prophetic ministry consists of offering an alternative perception of reality and in letting people see their own history in the light of God's freedom and his will for justice.''4 The test suggested is whether the anointed gives space for us to reflect courageously on our 'individual histories "in the light of God's freedom." To con-tinually strive to see one's own history in God's light will be to know our own history, our own experience, anew each time. This is not a blaming game, an unhealed existence, or a quick fix with aphorisms, but a genuine opening in my life, your life, for healing, for Jesus the Christ. Self-healing is not a plastic therapy for believers, but an engagement with a living. God. The question remains: Does the message of an. anointed one leave room for all these variables, for the lights of a freeing God? Margaret Wheadey contrasts the "anointed" individual within an organization to the "dead" individual. Others in organizations go unobserved, irrevocably invisi-ble, bundles of potential that no one bothers to look at. Or they receive summary glances, are observed to be "dead," and are thereafter locked into jobs that provide them with no opportunity to display their many pote.ntials,s A post-Vatican II church unfurled to Catholics a new way of being, and we need to revisit those challenges. Dying to self, we Review for Religious have come to increasingly realize, never meant not unbundling our own gifts, our own graces, as we become acquainted with them. Our own baptismal anointing as Christians, no longer a vague memory, becomes a constant call. But, alas, we knew that struggling to be "undead"--not be to an anointed, just to be undead--would have its own price, Declaring the king to be naked in a bureaucracy brings life-mark-ing, career-reversing implications. A question, a deviation, could bring death-dealing expulsion from the informal life of the group or from the larger organization itself. Each person having and wanting to have influence, each want-ing to "see their own history in the light of God's freedom," becomes incessantly difficult if declared or assumed to be among the "dead." The equality of persons within an organization is the paradigm for the equality of each subsystem in the model offered here. Puffing up one impinges upon all the others. Withering one depletes all. Equality equates to mutuality among members. The Incessant Pursuit The church, embracing sinners in her bosom, is at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, and inces-santly pursues the path of penance and .renewal. (Lumen gentium, §8) The processes of quiltmaking and the processes of organiza-tions call for an incessant pursuit of mutuality and interdepen-dence among women and men equal before a loving God. The Second Vatican Council invited the church of the 20th century to know both its humanity and its wonder. If parishes, orders of women and men religious, and the church universal in a post-Vatican II church accept themselves as corporate human organizations, they will steadily come to under- Stand the strengths and pitfalls that accompany such aggregate groups, The rich heritage of the church cannot afford to forget that it is an organization of human persons. Such forgetting rehearses feudal futility. There is both frailty and strength in its organizational life. At the level of shared humanity, frailties and strengths within any group will always be fa!i'ly evident. To deny this shared humanity is to set up the religious organization as exempt from the foibles and frets that indeed call on God for its life principle. Novetnber-Decentber 1997 Knittel ¯ A Quilt, a Council, and a Church "The church, or, in other words, the kingdom of Christ now pres-ent in mystery, grows visibly in the world through the power of God" (LG §3). To deny the church's humanness is to deny the power of God. As we continue to unpack that sublimely historic event we fondly call "the council," there is more to do, more to remind others about, more for ourselves to be .reminded about. The Roman Catholic Church as a religious organization, ceasing to gloss over its frail corporate humanity, will come to understand its corporateness at a more profound level. The church as a human organization will come to truly trust in the mystery of its shared life of faith in Jesus the Christ. This living quilt we call "church" calls to a people deeply conversant with a living God. Notes I Radka Donnell, Quilts as Women's Art: A Quilt Poetics (North Vancouver, Canada: GaIlerie Publications, 1990), p. 425. 2 Dorothee Soelle, Theology for Skeptics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 28. 3 Margaret J. Wheadey, Leadership and the New Science (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1994), p. 60. 4 Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p. 110. s Wheatley, pp. 60-61. Subscriptions to Review for Religious can now be ordered or renewed by I~AX and.paid for by MasterCardor ~sa. FAX the order form inside the back cov~r~ or CALL our office with, you~r.tcgedit carol numbi~r:.? o. FAX: 314-~-7-7362 ¯ PHONE: 314297727363 Review for Religious JOEL GIALLANZA Communitym Healthy or Dysfunctional? ~or these reflections about community living in religious .~. orders and congregations, I propose what may seem a curi-ous biblical passage, the one that concludes with "Very well, pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar--and God what belongs to God" (Mr 22:21). We are more accustomed to texts on loving one another or bearing one another's burdens or remaining united and at peace among ourselves or reconciling with one another whenever necessary. All those principles and practices are very important for the life of a healthy community. From this text, however, two :practical norms can be drawn which also are impor-tant for life in community: appropriateness and balance. These two norms are tightly intertwined, like a fine weaving; in fact, both can be drawn from those same words of Jesus: "Pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar--and God what belongs to God." First, appropriateness: We do not give to Caesar what belongs to God or to God what belongs to Caesar. In community we can bring realities into~our life together which are not really appro-priate precisely because they are misplaced: for example, unfair expectations of someone or of one another as a group; unwill-ingness to share or communicate something which by our pro-fession we commit ourselves to share and communicate; personal agendas, with their accompanying attitudes and perspectives, and emotions, which may really belong in ministry or to only one of our relationships or somewhere else altogether. Joel Giallanza CSC writes for us once again from: Congregation of the Holy Cross; Via Framura, 85; 00168 Roma; Italy. November-December 1997 Giallanza ¯ Community--Healthy or Dysfunctional? Serious personal reflection and realistic self-knowledge bring with them the ability to answer this simple question: Where does what I am experiencing--this issue, this feeling, this concern-- belong? Where will it be most appropriately articulated and addressed? Inappropriate placement of issues, feelings, and con-cerns generates an inadequate response. Then all frustrations sur-rounding them will be intensified as they continue to be unaddressed. Second, balance: We give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God at the same time. Of the two points, balance is the more challenging, even on a daily basis. Most of our time and energy as apostolic religious are invested in ministry. This is important, given who we are as religious com-mitted to continue the mission of Jesus in the spirit of our founders and foundresses. Nevertheless, we do need to remind ourselves from time to time that each of us has only one limited pool of time and energy. Too easily we can fall out of balance by expending the maxi-mum of our quality time and energy in ministry--or on some-thing else--and simply neglect community or prayer. While that might never degenerate into complete negligence; we may grad-ually adopt a very minimalist approach to community. Then, from time to time, we may feel shocked that those with whom we live every day have changed or rearranged this or that without our having been consulted. Conveniendy we might forget to ask our-selves if we were sufficiently present, available, and interested when those decisions were being formulated and then imple-mented. Community life can be joyful and it can be painful; at times it can be the greatest of blessings and at times the heaviest of burdens. But never has there been a guarantee, that it would be easy. As long as we are human, working to live closely with other people, appropriateness and balance in approaching our commu-nity life will continue to be significantchallenges. "Pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar--and God what belongs to God." We may not always make that payment perfectly, but we are responsible for making the effort 'to live community with the appropriateness and balance which can facilitate the love and unity we seek. Though other things must also be included, these are principal ingredients that determine the quality of life and health within a community. Review for Religious Quality of Community: Healthy or Dysfunctional? Very little, if anything, about community is theory.It is work to live with one another. But through our commitment it is meant to be a work of the heart. The alternative is that members care lit-tle about one another and about the space in which they live. Gradually each individual b~comes the center of a personal uni-verse which has minimal contact and communication with the other personal universes in the vicinity. Then all the theories about community and loving one another constitute little more than fine words carried on hot air. , Community life, then, can be healthy or dysfunctional. These present thoughts will focus on some characteristics of a healthy community and on some earmarks of a dysfunctional community. The following sets of contrasting characteristics represent spec-trums present in all communities. They are presented here only as a stimulant for further reflection and discussion vis-h-vis the specific experiences and contexts of actual local communities. The health or dysfunction of a community is evident from its location on the spectrum. Determining that location is not a random, arbi-trary exercise; it emerges from the members' individual and com-munal self-knowledge, hgnesty, self-examination, and willingness to adapt. Only then can the members decide what adjustments will facilitate living more effectively as a healthy community. Community or Computer? Communication, sharing and processing information, has a major influence on the health or dysfunction of a community. Healthy choices and decisions are based on sufficient and appro-priate, information and clear communication. This assumes gen-uine listening, not simply hearing. Attentive listening enables us to analyze and respond to. someone's words with understanding and love. , , The alternative is not :merely a failure to listen, though that will be part of it. Much more, the alternative strips the entire interchange--the information sharing and the personal decision making--of any affective, human quality. We may react mechan-ically to what we barely hear, quickly making preliminary and sometimes permanent judgments. As individuals and as a com-munity, we may focus,only on facts, with little regard for how all this decision or this expressed opinion will affect the people involved. Then we are no longer a community, but a computer. November-Decentber 1997 Whether the members are a "community or a computer depends upon how they share and deal with information among themselves, how they communicate with one another. A healthy community remains focused on people; it puts information at the service of people. A dysfunctional community operates much like a computer, focusing on the precision and,.processing 6f infor-mation; it tends to view people as servants of that information. A healthy community strives always to choose and decide wi.th understanding and love. By contrast, a dysfunctional community may be efficient, but is not likely to be person oriented. What needs to be done gets done, but with little regard for the vari-ables of human personality, for people's preferences and per-spect. ives, for the rich nuances that the talents and experience of the individual members could provide. Efficiency may be an important value, but it is no guarantee against dysfunction; only love can prevent that. The quality of communication among community members colors the atmosphere, the climate, the spirit, of their residence, marking it as either a home or a hohsing facility: In turn, that atmosphere affects the quality of relationships among 'the mem-bers and thus the witness,they present to'the world around them through their presence and ministry. Assessing the quality of com-munication within a community is among the mos~t effective and direct means of improving the overall health of that community. Community or Condominium? When the members actively establish and actually engage in their communal lifel the community's ;health benefits d.ireetly. Several elements are involved: first, common call and mission. The healthy commianity understands its call and articulates its mission. This becomes a source ofenergy and provides meaning and direction, with far-reaching implications for every dimension of religious life, from personal and communal lifestyles, to voca-tion promotion, to decisions concerning ministries and the use of financial resources. By contrast, a dysfunctional community drifts without a clear sense of where it is going or how it wants to present itself to the world around it. As a result, irreconcilably wide gaps develop among the lifestyles and philosophies of the various members and local communities and jeopardize the very fibers holding the com-munity together. Efforts to identify and maintain any common Revie~v for Religious call and mission are not a priority among the members of a dys-functional community. A second element of community health is mutual respect. Members have a certain maturity and respect one another's per-sons, possessions, and perspectives. This is not to imply that there will be constant and. consistent agreement; that is not realistic. Respect has more to do with recogniz-ing, accepting, and even honoring the differences among the members than with arriving at some superficial level of agreement. By contrast, a dysfunctional commu-nity has replaced respect with recipe. Its members work hard to redesign one another according to some image or stan-dard' they hold which may have nothing to .do with the ideals put before them by the life and example of the founder, or the constitutions, or the experience and capabilities of the members. Redesigning one another consumes much time and energy that should be directed elsewhere., ~ Third--this expands the preceding point--a healthy community celebrates " the 'members' giftedness. Rejoicing in one~ another's gifts is a concrete expression of respect. This assumes that we have made the effort to know one another's gifts; further, this effort involves sharing and communicating with one another. The challenge here is to go beyond knowledge toward: affirmation and even promotion of one another's gifts. This is possible only if we are secure and comfortable with ourselves, with our own individual gifts and goodness. By contrast, the members of a dysfunctional community tear down one another, not so much through specific hatred or dislike, but because of personal insecurity, being uncomfortable with one~ self. Jealousy and envy emerge from .low self-esteem and superfi-cial self-knowledge. If we feel and come to believe that Our gifts or talents are insufficient and inadequate, we may be tempted to build up ourselves by tearing down others. This may be quite subtle: a roll of the eyes, .a nod of the head, a sigh that commu-nicates "There he/she goes again!" In time the only comfort zone The quality o.f communication among community members colors the atmosphere, the climate, the spirit, of their residence, marking,it as either a home or a housing facility. Nov~nber-December 1997 Giallanza ." Communi~--Healtb~ or D~Cunctional? we may experience is when we maintain our distance from one another. We are polite, but politic: never disturbing or unsettling one another, but also never challenging and ultimately, never really knowing and loving one another. Fourth, a healthy community does, of course, provide and allow space--physical, psychological, and spiritual--for the mem-bers, as individuals and as a community, to be alone and silent, to pray, think, reflect, and relate to God. Maintaining and respect-ing such space requires a level of maturity and comfort that does not equate community with constant togetherness nor reduce it to comfortable superficiality. By contrast, a dysfunctional community sacrifices environ-ment and atmosphere to organization and structure. Though everyone has space, the community does not seem to be alive. There is no sense of an appropriate ambiance, a balance between the private and public forums of the members. Privacy tends to degenerate into secrecy, and public times together become safely and securely sociable. Shared prayer and significant interaction among the members are minimized or routinized to assure the completion of requirements without the responsibilities of com-mitment. Fifth, a certain spirit characterizes a healthy community. The atmosphere, the spirit, of a healthy community encourages the members to feel at home with one another, with the physical space, and with the rhythm of life. This spirit speaks more loudly to prospective members and occasional guests than any other aspect of the community's life. If our guests do not perceive that we .feel at home in this space and with this rhythm of life, then they are not likely to feel at home either. The questions confronting us are direct: Do we feel at home here? Is this an atmosphere which encourages~us to contribute, to be open, to trust? If not, why?- By contrast, a dysfunctional community has a climate from which members try to escape in one way or another. This is most clearly observable when the balance between presence and absence collapses. Personal activities of the demands of ministry are allowed to expand and overflow so that it becomes difficult if not impossible to be present for the community meetings, common meals and prayer, and other gatherings and celebrations as well. Away from the community, members feel more alive, and they feel a heaviness when it is time to return. They find it emotion-ally and spiritually draining to live in this community setting. Review for Religious Sixth, efforts to preserve unity indicate a healthy community. Recognizing the work and the sacrifice involved, the members enter willingly into one another's lives through appropriate self-revelation and compassionate listening. And they willingly make the time for that work and sacrifice. By contrast, a dysfunctional community no longer invests time and energy in the quality of its life. Its members may be quite civil and sociable, but they do not form significant affec-tive and spiritual bonds with one another. Their residing together is merely a coin-cidence of time and space rather than a reflection of a deeper commitment to one another. Given the importance of these six characteristics of a healthy community, when dysfunctional cl~aracteristics are dominant, we no longer have a commu-nity but a condominium. Everything appears to be in order, well organized, running smoothly, and comfortably .appointed--but the place is merely a habi-tation, not a home. Everyone is self-con-tained. People pass one another and exchange all the acceptable courtesies and If our guests do not perceive that we feel at home in this space and with this rhythm of life, then they are not likely to feel atohome either. appropriate pleasantries, but maneuver away from any deeper sharing. Obviously, a dysfunctional community can neither attract nor nurture healthy vocations. Those who desire to live in this way could easily find what they want in a well-managed and efficiendy operated condominium. Community or Cold Storage? Life in community necessitates some personal and communal qualities. Though any list is somewhat arbitrary, I would suggest that members of any healthy communit~ have some basic quali-fies that facilitate and sustain their relationships with one another. In their personal qualities, the individual members of a healthy community will have a rich diversity. These qualities, moreover, will vary from community to community. They will, however, include mutual affection and affirmation, willingness to apolo-gize and to forgive, fostering friendships, generosity, compassion, and joy. All these and others communicate a distinctively posi- Novetnber-Dece'mber 1997 Giallanza ¯ Community--Healthy or Dysfunctional? tive response to two simple questions: Am I / Are we happy in this way of life? Would others perceive that we are happy and enthusiastic as they observe our everyday life? This is not to deny the human reality of the striving of us all, with various ups and downs in community life, prayer, ministry, the vowed life, and personal relationships. Admittedly, these qualities may not always be fully evident in us, but it ig essential that we have a commitment and a willingness to make constant efforts to develop them. By contrast, a dysfunctional community seems only to exist, to survive. It does not give the impression of flourishing with all the warmth and beauty of human relationships. It appears to be merely a group of people occupying the same space together, but never encountering one another on a deeper level that calls them to life. A dysfunctional community does not and cannot commu-nicate that the members are truly happy to be living and carrying out their everyday tasks and responsibilities. Communal qualities do not differ significantly from the per-sonal qualities necessary for healthy community. In fact, they reflect the interaction of those personal qualities among the mem-bers. The health of that interaction is especially evident when community members genuinely enjoy one another's company and are generously hospitable to others. They plan for time together on a regular basis, and they safeguard that time as a priority. VChat they do during that time together is not as important as their tak-ing the time to be present and attentive to one another. That attentiveness will overflow so tha.t guests feel welcome to activi-ties of the members' common life. By contrast, the members of a dysfunctional community find time together to be a chore, and so they reduce it to a minimum, either by unchallenged design or through the deterioration of relationships. It would not be uncommon to find much loneli, ness in these situations, loneliness that is compensated for by hav-ing all or most of one's primary friendships outside the local community. In a healthy context, loneliness can teach us and chal-lenge us to deepen .our relationship with the Lord and sharpen our compassion for and sensitivity to the loneliness of others. In a dysfunctional community, however, loneliness takes a very dif-ferent direction: it tends to breed discouragement and depres-sion which lead to compensatory behaviors. Vv'hen a group gives little or no evidence of these personal and communal qualities, they have cold storage, not community. Review for Religious They live together, but only as if in suspended animation, with-out those human qualities and interactions that bring life and happiness and growth to a community. Even if the members of a local community are not aware of this and do not acknowledge it, their guests will see it, and, most certainly, so will those who are considering a vocation to their way of life. Given the realities, of society,today, many of those considering a vocation to religious life come from environments that have little human warmth, little sense of family. It is. unlikely--if they truly want to live in a healthy way--that they would commit themselves to a life of cold storage in a dysfunctional community. Community or Committee? Community is a straightforward reality. If we do not take the time and energy to create it, if we do not take responsibility for it and take initiatives for it, then it will not really exist. Community is never the result of spontaneous generation, nor does it work by automation. The mem-bers of a healthy community do not abdi-cate their right and duty to make, maintain, and monitor the quality of their common life. They accept the idea that reflection together, sharing, and bonded-ness are key elements in the health of community life. By contrast, a dysfunctional commu-nity seems to drift as the members wait for someone to do something, to take responsibility for moving the community forward. On occasion, some issue or sit-uation becomes a crisis before the members mobilize enough to respond reasonably. For instance, the demands o.f ministry may have been allowed to control the scheduling of regular times together for reflection and sharing, or some members' manipu-lative behaviors may have been left unchallenged for so long that the community now manifests a growing collective passivity. The challenge here is to decide if people's lives together will be a community or a committee. "Committe~" here means a tem-porary group formed for a particular purpose. Its members address an issue or perform a task and then they disperse. Maintaining relationships is not a committee's function; in fact, that could Community is never the result of spontaneous generation, nor does it work by automation. Noventber-Dece~nber'1997 Giallanza ¯ Community--Healthy or Dysfunctional? hinder its efficiency and effectiveness. In the case of a community, however, failure to maintain relationships compromises its capac-ity for being a prophetic presence and witness in and for our world. Community or Convenience? There is a genuine asceticism involved in building and sus-taining a healthy community life. This asceticism has some com-ponents. First, the qualities of love and unity in a community must be personal and individual before they can exist commu-nally. If as individuals we take personal responsibility to foster these qualities by helpful activity, then the group we belong to will do so too. In a dysfunctional community there is a wide gap between talk about responsibility and the reality of what is actually done. Everyone may say "we" do such-and-such, but, in reality, only a few take any initiative or action in response to the situation or issue at hand. Second, within a healthy community, care and concern are given generously and appropriately. Generously, because they are directed to each individual within the community. Appropriately, because they are adapted to the particular situations, personalities, and needs of the individual members. The sensitivity and aware-ness at work here are mutual, respectful, and inclusive. Third, individual, active participation is essential to healthy community life. If individuals do not participate in community meetings or contribute to common decisions, they get in the way of healthy community life. Really, there is not much middle ground in this regard. Silence and passivity are not automatically harmless to the quality of community life, Members of a dysfunctional community are passive partici-pants. Every dimension of their consecrated life--prayer, daily interactions, conversation at meals, attentiveness to guests-- reflects a general lack of energy and interest. The members put their energy and interest outside the community. Two means for facilitating this asceticism are personal accountability and effective conflict resolution. Calling one another to accountability is never easy to do, but it does mark the care and concern, the participation and love, of a healthy community. In a dysfunctional community, life together is lived at Review for Religious the lowest common denominator. Community members do not challenge one another, either because of fear or because no one wants to be challenged. Then the whole community will be only as strong as the weakest member; it will make progress only at the pace of the slowest one. Effective conflict resolution is indispensable. A community with absolutely no conflict is not perfect, it is dead!_How con-flict is dealt with in community can weave the members together into a magnificent tapestry of healing and love, or it can tear them into so many scattered pieces of cloth with no common threads. Often a small event or issue, left unaddressed, becomes infected over time, changing a community from health to dys-function, from bondedness to brokenness. If we are unwilling to practice the components of this asceti-cism and use the means that help us do so, we are no longer speak-ing of community, but of convenience. The dysfunctional community protects and promotes and projects a life of conve-nience. Therefore, whatever is inconvenient--whether it is related to prayer or practicalities of living together or personal relation-ships-- never reaches the level of consideration as a community priority. Convenience can assure that no one is upset, but it also guarantees that people will grow in only minimal ways. The Choice before Us The quality of our community is not a onetime choice; we must choose to live in love with one another day in, day out. If we do not make that choice daily and affirm it by our actions daily, we begin to live something else. Eventually our life together becomes ~omething else: a computer, a condominium, cold stor-age, a committee, or a convenience. We become something, but not community. We give witness to something, but not to unity and love. The choice is ours. We know well the words of Deuteronomy 30:19 calling us to "choose life." Sirach, too, .expresses bluntly the choice before us: If you choose, you can keep the commandments, and to act faithfully is a matter of your own choice. God has placed before you fire and water: stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Before you are life and death, and whichever you choose will be given to you. (15:15-17) November-December 1997 Giallanza ¯ Community--Healthy or Dysfunctional? Three questions can assist us in reflecting on our individual and communal response to that life-or-death choice which is ever before us. First, what brings us together? VChy are we here? Is it our faith in Jesus and our desire to live that faith through this religious community and its mission? Or is this life simply a way to do a ministry--teaching or nursing or social service or pas-toral work or whatever? Admittedly, our faith in Jesus and the work we do are not mutually exclusive; but the question here con-cerns the foundation of our life's identity and meaning. Second, what keeps us together? Is it our love for one another and our efforts to support one another in living the way of love? Or is it that we have no alternatives and have become comfort-able? Or are we afraid to consider any alternatives? Having no alternatives and being unwilling to consider other options are not good indications that we have made a healthy and mature choice of what we are doing. Third, what flows from our being together? Is it the prophetic witness of our faith in Jesus and our love for one another? Or is it: our accomplishments? The compliment paid to the early Christians was "See how they love one another!" not "See how much they get done!!~ Healthy community is built and sustained by faith and love and witness. Dysfunctional community is concerned only with the work to be done, the status quo, and the results of what is done. Only a healthy community can project Christian life and human warmth and prophetic witness. These thoughts will close with the Gospel te~t which opened them: "Very well, pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar--and God what belongs to God" (Mt 22:21). Because he is referring to a Roman coin, Jesus speaks in terms of payment. His words remind us that healthy community costs something--we will have to pay. A healthy community costs each of us individually because we must constantly give of ourselves,° thus making our commitment to one another real in our attitudes and our actions. COmmunity costs us collectively because we must commit ourselves to make our life together a witness of love and peace and unity. Together we must call one another to this commitment. Dysfunctional com-munity is free of charge. Healthy community costs something. Individually and collectively, we must determine our willingness to make the necessary payment. Review for Religious EAGAN HUNTER The Elderly among Us Tue, we always have had elderly religious among us. But ~ two factors have changed the emphasis. First~ everyone is living longer, in the secular world and in the religious life as well. In 1900 only four percent of the total general population was over the age of 65--one in every twenty-five. By the year 2000 it is projected that as much as thirteen percent of the total :general population will be over 65. Life expectancy has been extended. It is projected that those arriving at age 65 today can expect to live approximately 16.3 years beyond that age. Second, the median age of religious communities is getting older, changing the dimen-sions of the concern. These two factors have made aging in reli-gious communities a more visible, more widely known concern. The problems faced by elderly religious are not necessarily a matter of increasingly poor health. Even though more vulnerable to ill health than in their earlier years, many continue to live healthy lives into very advanced years and some almost until death. Growing old is physiologically and psychologically inevitable, but these changes vary from individual to individual, with no pre-dictable'pattern emerging. Physiologically, advancing years bring problems of lessened mobility, gradual diminishment of the senses (especially sight and hearing), weakened ability to think and remember, Increasingly, heart problems and strokes occur, bones weaken, and arthritic and other impairments increase. Most older religious seem able to adjust more rapidly to various changes in their physiological world than in their psychological one. Eagan Hunter CSC is professor of education at St. Edward's University; 3001 South Congress Avenue; Austin, Texas 78704. Novonber-Deconber 1997 Hunter ¯ The Elderl~ amon~ Us Many times the decline of physical powers causes a brother or sister to remain somewhat isolated within his or her religious house, out of the "mainstream" and interacting less frequently with others. In the religious life we have been taught that one of the major facets of our existence is our contribution to the ministry and apostolate. Our religious formation tends to make us become self-sufficient. When the necessity asserts itself of cutting back on former activities once managed quite easily, older religious may experience feelings of depression, of uselessness. They may feel themselves a burden to others and no longer able to do their fair share. They seek ways and means through which to make some form of contribution to the common life and to the ministry. Sometimes there is a tendency for younger people to assume tasks which the elderly could do if provided sufficient extra time. In the interest of efficiency and effectiveness, we may become impatient and take the tasks out of their hands. Thus for the elderly the depressing feeling of 'not being able to contribute their part becomes magnified. Younger religious must seek ways to continue incorporating the elderly into the community's daily activities. The contemplation of retirement involves a psychological state, a sense of psychological withdrawal from the demands of one's ministry or occupation and the entry into a totally new ori-entation towards oneself and one's work. The taking of this step in our work-oriented society indeed is a milestone event and a very sensitive process. It marks a turning point in one's adult life, a shift from the middle years to old age. The extent to which retirement is viewed as a positive life transition depends much upon the attitudes of the individual. Some have more difficulty adjusting to retirement than others. Some are reluctant to retire, for their work seems to give their lives structure and meaning which is seen as becoming void in the future. What decisions need to be made when facing this stage of one's lifespan? What choices are available to the individual? Such a transitional adjustment incorporates a process of con-templation and evaluation of life's meaning and purpose, one's vocational call to service. It involves integrating the many expe-riences, meanings, and facts of one's life. It brings into focus one of the most incomprehensible concepts of all--one's own human. mortality. Such an adjustment involves acceptance of one's life with dignity and without too much regret for things not done, roads not followed. This reorientation phase of adjUstment should Review for Religious involve exploring new avenues and ways of being involved. The elderly who are well educated and who have enjoyed their work life will desire to continue some type of positive experiences related to that former occupation, but with lessened participa-tion and responsibilities. I had a great-aunt who was a nun. For some sixty years she was a successful teacher and administrator. With the limitations of advancing old age and the resultant physical losses, it became necessary for her to surrender one by one those things which she loved doing and did well. I can remember visiting her in their infirmary before her death. While we were talk-ing, a younger nursing nun entered the room with a tray containing a stack of small plastic cups used to give medication and a small bowl of soapy water. My aunt had insisted that she still could make a contribution, and this was her way. As we talked, she carefully and slowly washed and dried each cup. A contented smile of pleasure filled her face when the nursing nun returned an hour later to pick up the tray and complimented my great-aunt on the help she was to them. Even this litde bit meant much to my elderly aunt. She still was a con-tributing member of her religious community in her own little way. In my own religious community, we have a brother who cel-ebrated his hundredth birthday in 1996. For many years he was an active teacher, administrator, religious superior. In addition to the task assigned him through his ministry, he reached out in other ways to those around him. Before entering the religious life, he had been a member of the Souza band. It was this gift of music he shared with others over the years of his religious life through playing in various civic musical groups and symphonies. After a major stroke, one of his primary goals was to rehabilitate his muscular coordination to the degree that once again he could make joyful sounds to the Lord on his cello. Prayer, music, and his community became the center of his retirement. He continues to have many gifts to share with others, and share he does. Many of us feel the limitations that the ac6ve demands of our ministry place on our personal time. We sometimes feel there is not sufficient time to pray. But, for many of our retired religious, Younger religious must seek ways to continue incorporating the elderly into the community's daily activities. November-Decentber 1997 Hunter ¯ The Elderly among Us time is what they have most of--so we must plug into this spiri-tual "powerhouse." We must stress to the elderly religious that their contribution is to storm heaven in behalf of the concerns and problems being encountered by those in the active ministry. They can pray and are happy to assume this role of petitioner. Seen in the proper perspective, the lives of our older reli-gious need not be brooding or unhappy. We must give them our support and understanding, realizing the emotional tensions, phys-ical trauma, and disease which have become so much a part of their lives. We must remember that these are the community's elderly of today, and that the elderly of tomorrow will be us! How would we want to be treated? Younger religious must be careful not to participate in a form of age stratification within our religious communities. Such strat-ifying may be seen in the general society, with people being divided into classes and castes of various sorts. In such a society it becomes the norm administered to qualify or disqualify indi-viduals for desired roles and positions. Age is a significant variable in such social stratifications and becomes an operative factor in the qualification or disqualification process. Many of our elderly once held leadership roles in commu-nity undertakings. Through age discrimination such religious may feel that their expertise and experiences are no longer sought, that their role in community has been terminated. We must real-ize the symbolic value of their witness roles. It is their footprints that led our various religious communities to the roles we fill today. The elderly hold a vital position in the continuity of our religious life. Vatican Council II speaks, of the heritage of our various religious orders and congregations. We are asked to turn~ to the sources of Christian life, to the inspirations, conceptions, traditions, and ideals of our founders, as well as to those who fol- ¯ lowed later in our histories. We are asked to restore these to our religious life through modifications that meet contemporary reli-gious and social needs. The elderly among us are those who helped mold our particular institute into what it represents today. They,:are our living heritage, our legacy. Thus we must continue to reach out in order to -benefit from their years of knowledge and understanding of our particular mode of living the religious~ life. Their guidance and insights form a treasure which we cannot afford to ignore or'discredit. The elderly religious among us have seen their family mem- Review for Religious bers as well as their religious associates die. More and more of their generation is disappearing. Feeling the loss of these loved ones, they come face-to-face with their own mortality. The pos-sibility of one's own death becomes a factor of life. When young, we tend to believe we are indestructible--death is something asso-ciated with old age, and we are young. Time passes and the pos-sibility of one's death becomes a reality. Our religious beliefs provide us with a solid and positive creed. The Vatican Council stresses that we have been created by God and that, through the passion and death of Jesus, the terrors of bodily death have been conquered. If we live this life fully, we will be restored to whole-ness and a sharing in .the divine life which lies beyond all corruption. "Hence to every thoughtful man a solidly established faith provides the answer to his anxiety about what the future holds for him. At the same time faith gives him the power to be united in Christ with his loved ones who have already been snatched away by death. Faith arouses the hope that they have found true life with God" (Gaudium et spes, § 18). The resultant insights make it easier to develop one's own coping mechanisms for dealing with the future. Yet death remains a mystery. Our goal should be to assist the elderly to reflect upon their life's achievements done in the name of our Lord and to reflect upon the truths of Christianity related to the meaning of life and death. As Erikson points out, the last stage of the human life cycle encompasses old age and the retirement from the pro-ductive years of life. He sees this last stage as ego integrity.versus disgust and despair. The positive outcome of this last stage is an acceptance of one's self and one's life without bitterness or regret. It is a coming to terms with i:he approaching finality of one's life. It incorporates the avoidance of the negative feelings that one's life has been wasted, the avoidance of discontentment about one's limited accomplishments, the "road not taken," the task not done. Upon going blind, Milton feared that God would chide him for wasting talents and gifts that were now lying useless in him. An inner struggle went on until Milton reached the conclusion that, rather than rejecting the role given him by God, he simply needed to accept it. He phrased this acceptance exceedingly well The elderly among us are those who helped mold our particular institute into what it represents today. November-December 1997 Hunter ¯ The Elderly among Us when he said, "They also serve who only stand and wait." This quiet acceptance is difficult, for most people are action oriented. In the declining years of our lives, God is not asking anything heroic. Rather, he is asking for the quiet acceptance of one's infir-mities, one's physical disabilities and limitations, one's sufferings and pains. St. Paul expresses this acceptance when he says, "I find my joy in the suffering I endure for you. In my own flesh I fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the church" (Col 1:24). This submission and acceptance can be raised as one's gift to heaven. This is a task we all can do. These elderly religious have preceded us in the labors of our ministries. The burdens ~they carried frequendy were heavy. They did not trudge; they strode onward, for they were people of faith and hope. Approaching the end of their individual journeys, they need our support, our understanding, and our willingness to assist. This we must be willing to give them in their time of need. Simply this is all they are asking of us. To Mary, Journeying (A Visitation Song) "For all your ways~ are beautiful . " Be with us in the morning as with joyful hearts we travel tq carry Christ within us in silence and in song. Be with us as we labor on the hills and in the valleys with your care and with your mercy to all within our world. And when evening shadows lengthen, be our strength as still we journey to our God whose arms await us in the darkness of your peace. Louise Finn CND Review for Religious THOMAS MICHEL I Interreligious Dialogue and the Jesuit Mission "All good theology is autobiography" is a phrase often repeated today. If theology is a reflection on our faith and its implications, then the personal history of how God has acted and is acting in the life of each of us is the starting point for theological understanding. Moreover, as Jesuits, it has been a part of our communitarian spirituality from the beginning to "share our desires," that is, to speak with each other about the great things we want to do for the Lord. From this starting point I would like to share the spiritual desire that has dominated my relationship with God in prayer and work for the past quarter century. It is the desire for greater understanding and love between Christians and Muslims and my desire to make a contri-bution to that end. being missioned Transformation through Dialogue As a Jesuit and a priest,I am today a product of inter-religious dialogue. The way I live my Jesuit vocation is the result of twenty-five years of sharing life with Muslims, discovering the spiritual riches they possess, learning from them, being challenged by them, and at the same time Thomas Michel SJ, secretary of the Vatican Secretariat for Interreligious Dialogue, originally presented this article as a talk to young Jesuits in both Manila and Rome. He may be addressed at Curia Generalizia; Compagnia di Ges~a; C.P. 6139; 00195 Roma PRATI; Italy. ¯ November-December 1997 Micbd ¯ Interreligious Dialogue and the ~esuit Mission having occasion both to bear witness to my faith in what God has achieved for all people in the person of Jesus Christ and to explain to them my understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. In more recent years my apostolate has taken me beyond encounter with Muslims and more and more into dialogue with Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and the followers of indigenous religions. When I reflect on what has been going on in my life, I see God forming me and transforming me by his grace, over and over, into a person different frbm what I "alas at the beginning of my interreligious journey. I am conscious that, when I teach courses on Islam or when I speak about Muslims, what I say and how I say it are different from the words of someone who has not had my experience of coming to know the Muslim community from the inside. When someone says something tha( pu~ts down or denigrates Islam unfairly, I ~nd myself reacting spontaneously and even emotionally, because they are talking about people that I know, people who have welcomed me into their lives, people whom I love and who have shown love to me. When Muslims are insulted, I feel insulted; when they are wronged, I feel wronged; when they undergo a tragedy, I suffer with them. When something good happens to them, I rejoice with them. When Muslims do wrong, to themselves or to others, I feel ashamed and beg God's forgiveness. When real dialogue occurs, no partner is left unchanged. When I see how much God has enriched my life and deepened my faith through my being in dialogue with others, it is a great source of hope and encouragement to me. For the same Holy Spirit who has been active in my own life is also at work in the lives of my friends of other faiths, using our encounters to touch them too and transform their lives. Most of the time we do not see evidence of this. We work in hope, which is, after all, trusting that God is invisibly active in this world. But God knows that we need encouragement from time to time and gives us "feedback" to keep our hopes alive. About four years ago I received such a .response from Said Khorramshahri, a pious Iranian Qur'an reciter. I had gone to Tehran to represent the Vatican at a national function and was staying about two weeks. Said, a graduate student in English, was assigned to interpret for me at the meetings and conferences that made up my schedule. Review for Religious During this time Said and I had many opportunities to talk about all sorts of things: life in Iran and in Rome, sports, politics, music, our own personal hopes and desires~ and, of course, what is deepest in our lives--our faiths. We shared deeply and hon-estly, and I could often feel the presence of the Lord when we were in conversation. When I returned to Rome, he wrote me a long letter saying that he never imagined that God would use his encounter with a Catholic priest as the instrument by which to pro-foundly change and deepen his outlook on life, faith, and his relations with others. I real-ized that I was not the only one who recog-nized that God was present and active in our encounters. This pious Muslim also saw that God was with us and that "our hearts were burning within us" from the movement of God's grace: I offer this experience merely as an exam-ple. Every Jesuit--every Christian--who has been involved in interreligious dialogue to any extent can tell comparable stories. If my experience has been mostly with Muslims, others could testify to some strikingly similar" experiences of God's activity gathered over the course of their years in dialogue with Buddhists or Hindus, Jews or Baha'is, or followers of the tradi-tional religions of Africans or Native Americans. The point is that, when we truly open ourselves to God in dialogue with another, the Holy Spirit takes over and guides the encounter. As the document "Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue" puts it, "Open and sincere interreligious dialogue is our cooperation with God's ongoing dialogue with humanity (OMID §5). When we truly open ourselves to God in dialogue with another, the Holy Spirit takes over and guides the encounter. The Need for a Document The document of th~ 34th General Congregation "Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue" is remarkable. For the first time in Jesuit history, the Society as a whole explored the inter-religious dimension of our Jesuit mission. Certainly, there were always some Jesuits who were involved in various forms of inter-religious dialogue. For a few it was their main apostolate, but for most it was something in which they were involved when they Novetnber-Dece~nber 1997 Michel ¯ Interreligious Dialogue and the ~esuit Mission had extra time, an apostolate they added on to their main duties. Dialogue was often considered a kind of luxury in the Society, of secondary importance to works such as schools, seminary and theological education, parishes. It frequently happened that stu-dents who were interested in carrying out studies on other reli-gions were assigned to other, "more important" fields of study like Scripture, theology, and philosophy. Most of us .involved in dialogue have had the experience of hearing a fellow Jesuit tell us we were wasting our time. "Why do you bother with Muslims?" I have been asked; "you will never convert them." Some comments have seemed to presume that interreligious dialogue and proclamation of the gospel are incom-patible activities, or that dialogue somehow undermined or com-promised the church's mission of evangelization. These questions show that the goal of dialogue was not well understood. It was confused with a type of soft sell, a way to insinuate ourselves into another religious community in order to make converts, or it was seen as a lack of commitment to bear witness to our Christian faith. Dialogue and PrOclamation One of the first issues that the general congregation had to take up was the way int.erreligious dialogue is related to the work of evangelization. It is in this context that the goal of dialogue can be understood. In the one evangelizing mission that Christ gave to his disciples, dialogue and proclamation of the gospel are two distinct aspects. Neither can replace the other. "They should not be confused, manipulated, or regarded as identical, as though they were interchangeable" (OMID, §7). Just as dialogue is not meant to replace proclamation of the gospel, so the duty to pro-claim the gospel must never preempt or negate the work of engag-ing in dialogue. The document describes dialogue as "a new way of being church," in which we discover the "deeper dimensions of our Christian faith and wide~ horizons of God's salvific presence in the world" and engage in activity that "grasps the deeper truth and meaning of the mystery of Christ in relation to the universal his-tory of God's self-revelation" (OMID, §7). What this dense the-ological statement means is that God is at work in the lives of all those who sincerely seek him and that sometimes God's grace Review for Religious produces anyplace in the world people of great holiness, gen-erosity, and love. God carries out this saving work among people of other faiths through the Holy Spirit, who makes use of the religious tradi-tions that people follow to lead them farther and farther along the path of true holiness. Sometimes a person's knowledge of God's saving work in Jesu's Christ precedes: the person is bap-tized and receives the fullness of the Holy Spirit. More often the Holy Spirit precedes people's knowledge of Christ. There is no contradiction here: it is the One God who is at work, whether in Christ'or in the Spirit. Quoting the bishops of Asia, the GC34 document says: "It is the same Spirit, who has been active in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and in the church, who was active amongst all peoples before the incarnation and is active amongst the nations, religions, and peoples today." We see, then, that the deepest motivation for dialogue is to recognize the Spirit of God wherever the Spirit is at work in the world today and to praise God for the generous action of the Spirit. When we meet Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and others who bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit in their lives, our reaction should be to praise and thank God. Time spent with sincere believers of other faiths is time spent in discovery of the many and varied fruitsalove, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control--~at the Spirit continues to produce in the lives of other believers. Four Types of Dialogue and Their Goals "Interreligious dialogue," as the document points out, is not one thing, and the document outlines four basic types of dialogue. The goal of each type is not exactly the same. The dialogue of life is a dialogue on the plane of being, and the goal i~ living together in peace, mutually enriching each other by bearing witness to the values we stand for. The dialogue of action is on the plane of doing--working together to oppose whatever enslaves and degrades people, defending the weak, accompanying the poor in their struggle for justice. Its goal is to build together societies formed in accord with the will of God and in reverence for human dignity. An example of the dialogue of religious experience is what was going on during my time with Said in Iran. The goal is for those November-December 1997 Michel ¯ Interreligious Dialogue and the ~esuit Mission in such dialogue to open themselves fully .to God's movements (God's personal history in the life of each person) so that the Spirit can use them to touch and transform the persons. The dialogue of theological'exchange is to .clarify points of con-vergence and divergence, to overcome misunderstandings, half-truths, and distortions, and to come to a greater appreciation of each other's spiritual values (OMID, §4). It is not meant to arrive at a common formulation, to gloss over the differences between religions, or to find a common denominator on which we can all agree. The irreconcilable differences that we discover should nei-ther surprise nor discourage us, since we acknowledge from the start that each religion, is unique and offers its particular com-plex of doctrines and way of life. Dialogue in Patience and Hope If dialogue is about love (OMID, §6), then it is by examining the qualities of love that we learn the attitudes that must accom-pany our efforts at dialogue. In his great hymn on love in the First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul lists some of the qualities of love. It is. significant that the first quality on Paul's list is patience: "Love is patient, kind . oIt is important to spend time reflecting on the quality of patience, because lack of patience, in my opinion, is one of .the great causes of failure in dialogue. Patience includes more than not looking for quick results. I would rather say, "Do not look for results at all." In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Do your duty conscientiously, and do not be concerned about suc-cess or failure?' We might paraphrase this advice by saying that the document "Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue~' challenges Jesuits to "throw yourselves into this activity, without counting the cost or trying to measure the results." We engage in dialogue because it is our duty as disciples of Christ. As the OMID document puts it, dialogue is an integral element of our Jesuit mission in the world. We are people of hope, .one of the three greatest gifts that God has given us. We work in the hope that God will use our efforts in a way pleasing to God to advance the comingof God's reign in the world. Sometimes we hear people say, "What have you accomplished after all these years of dialogue? There are still religious tensions, ,conflicts, and wars." Review for Religious ~ The same could be said of other aspects of our mission. Those working for justice know that--despite years and years of tireless effort, sacrifices, even martyrdoms, despite vast amounts of time and energy spent--we are still confronted with countless forms of -injustice, oppression, and exploitation in the world. Recent years have even produced new forms. The occasional victories seem few in comparison with the rampant injustices still existing in almost every society. Does this mean that all those efforts at building more just societies have been in vain? No, we recognize ~that we have to keep on struggling in every age, culture, and nation to oppose injustice and defend the oppressed and marginalized. , It-is a similar case with interreligious dia-logue. At the same time that relations between the followers of various religions become better in one place, new conflicts and tensions break out elsewhere. Regions that have had long tra-ditions of people living together in peace sud-denly find themselves enmeshed in religious wars. On the other hand, reconciliation does occur where there has been conflict. People do learn to forgive and move beyond the past. Some peo-ples do find, often through much painful searching and with many setbacks, ways to live together with their neighbors of other faiths. We have all inherited two attitudes that make the effort at dialogue more difficult: One is the modern business ethic of quick and concrete results. In business, people feel they do not have time to wait. If they do not get the job done and done fast, a com-petitor will get an edge on them. People have graphs and tables .and prbjections to show how soon they can expect results. If they fail to achieve them in the time allotted, they go back to the draw-ing board to revise their policies. But it does not work that way with human relations. Things take time, and our efforts may be building a basis of fellowship whose benefits can be seen only in the future. The second attitude that makes dialogue difficult is an attitude of historical optimism that has dominated the philosophy of his-tory in this century. In this view, humankind, through education and technology, is continually evolving towards greater maturity, openness, and well-being. Obscurantism, ignorance, and violence are characteristics of primitive society and bound to be super- We engage in dialogue because it is ourduty as disciples of Christ. November-December 1997 Michel ¯ Interreli~ous Dialogue and the Jesuit Mission seded. In interreligious terms, many Catholics saw the period of the Second Vatican Council as a time when the old religious con-flicts would become a thing of the past. Dialogue would be the instrument of an inevitable result, putting an end to the misun-derstandings and divisions that kept us apart. Patience and Dialogue It seems to me that, if we Jesuits are going to make a contri-bution towards greater interreligious harmony, we must have a more realistic attitude. Dialogue will not solve all the religious conflicts in the world, just as our struggle for justice will never put an end to all forms of injustice and oppression. Rather, dialogue is something that must be carried on in every, society, in every age. Understanding and respect must be built anew in every gen-eration. The challenge will never come to an end, because sin is a part of who we are as humans and, where there is sin, there will be suspicion, hatred, and conflict. The need for patience is not only seen at the macro level of societies and nations. It is also the case in our personal dealings with people of other religions. We are all so full of suspicions, fears, and preconceptions. It takes much rime to get beyond these, to break down the natural resistance that we all bring to dialogue. If people seem unwilling, indifferent, or even hostile to invita-tions to dialogue, we should not be surprised. The burden of his-tory that we all bear is an obstacle that cannot be overcome quickly. We should also not be surprised if dialogue encounters seem superficial or seem to be characterized by an insincere politeness. This indicates that a level of trust at which we can relate hon-estly and deeply has not yet been built. That too takes time and much patient effort. We human beings are not willing to share what is deepest in our lives with people whom we are not yet ready to trust. Until we are convinced that the others will .treat our sharing with due respect, we tend to keep things at a nonthreat-ening, surface level. Only through the slow and laborious pro-cess of forming friendships and building trust do we arrive at the point where people can break through their latent distrust to begin to share frankly and honestly. But, if we Christians are motivated by Christ's love, we will find the determination and perseverance we need, for; as St.Paul says, "Love is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.?' Review for Religious I mention these negative factors, the effects of sin, because interreligious dialogue, although an exciting adventure of dis-covery of the manifold ways in which God lavishes his grace upon humankind, is also a path on which we encounter obstacles, set-backs, and frustrations and painful forms of self-discovery as well. When we are rebuffed, it is not easy to forgive. When we are misunderstood, it is not easy to go back again and again. When confronted with our own limitations and those of our commu-nity, we are tempted to give it all up and retreat to easier ways of life. However, as Jesuits we have a source of strength that we did not have even four years ago. We have the commitment of our whole Society--of our friends in the Lordmto engage in this aspect of our mission. We are helped to do so by our Ignatian vision that comes from our personal relationship to Jesus Christ. We are urged by the 34th General Congregation to develop a "culture 'of dialogue in our approach to believers of other reli-gions that should become a distinctive characteristic of our Society, sent into the whole world to labor for the greater glory of God and the help of human persons" (OMID, § 17), ' What a tremendous ideal to live for! What a challenge we have set for ourselves! ~Ours is the .generation, living immediately after and formed by General Congregation 34, that can make its document "Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue" a vibrant part of our Jesuit mission in the world. Many foreign missionaries depend upon,people like you who donate subscriptions for them to Review for Religious. To start a subscription for a deserving missionary, please send $24 to: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Blvd. ¯ St. Louis, MO 63108 To pay by credit card, phone: 314-977-7363. November-December 1997 ANNETTE M. PELLETIER Misery Meets Mystery in Montenegro: A Survival Guide for North American Religious oes consecrated life possess the latent power to continue evangelizing North American culture? Current literature on the topic suggests that the "holy experiment" of founding a culture on evangelical values has turned ominously unholy. The pioneer barks that brought (he Pilgrims, Quakers, and Shakers are saidto be aimlessly adrift, having lost their orientation to the Holy. On the other hand, the heritage of integration evident in the cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, where Santa Fe (Holy Faith) was the principal colonizing feature, suggests the power of the sacred to perdure despite a history marked by gore as well as glory. Upon returning to the United States after a time of mission-ary experience in the cultures to the south, one senses how deep the ache for the Sacred is in North American culture. The pro'- gressive deconstruction of the core values and virtues that made the experiment holy suggests that our culture may have lost its. :heart.~ ',Although you express tous what is most precious to you, you do not realize how far we are from where you are," remarks Fred, Henri Nouwen's "world!y" friend for whom he composed his profound reflections, on what it means to be the beloved chil- ~ren of the Holy,G~od present in secular culture. "You speak from Annette M. Pelletier IHM c0nsid~rs this article, following upon her 'contributions to our Septembe~:-October 1993 and July-August 1994 issues, to be the conclusion of a trilogy on Mystery in relation to conse-crated life. She may be addressed at Convento Santa Rosa de Lima; E. Montenegro; Apartado 18-0703; Lima 11, Peru. Review for Religious a context and tradition that is alien to us . Many, many questions need: to be answered before we are able to be fully open to what you say about the life of the Beloved.''2 What is to be the role of us who are called, consecrated, and sent to proclaim such "belovedness" in this deconsecrated world; of us whose specific task it is to offer radical eschatological testi-mony of the coming of the kingdom? 3 Peter, a designated, author-itative witness of that kingdom (realized 'in the presence and per-son of Jesus), reminded his early Christian community "to always be ready to give a reason for their hope" (1 P 3:15). What, then, would be the reason for our hope that the consecrated life will con-tinue to exert a positive influence on a heart-less culture, one that seems no longer to have experience of the "Holy"? The "reason" for my hope. for not just the survival bat the flourishing of consecrated life in North America escapes the concrete directions suggested by the many and various scientific analyses of consecrated life that appear fis part of a search for a definitive future, The "reason" for my hope springs from what I and many oth-ers have "seen and heard" (1 Jn 1:3) of the Mystery of God made manifest in the misery of the absolute poverty in one of our sis-ter cultures in Latin America, Peru. Montenegro, a densely pop-ulated pueblojoven or asentamiento humano (shanty town) situated about forty-five minutes by bus from Lima, owes its misery to both Shining Path terrorism and the disastrous effects of "fujishock" economics on those who have fled from terrorism in the Peruvian sierra during the last decade. No sociological anal-ysis explains why the pueblo children still danced for the fiestas in their school, Fey Alegria 37, and the sisters and the teachers and families stuck together in hope despite the extreme poverty and the designation of the zone as "red" during the darkest days of the reign of terror.4 One "reason" for hope, then, can be the simple fact that this pueblo and its fragile institutions have survived, despite the unholy One "reason" for hope, then, can be the simple fact that this pueblo and its fragile institutions have survived, despite the unholy cultural influences of terrorism and hunger. November-December 1997 Pelletier ¯ Misery Meets Mystery in Montenegro cultural influences of terrorism and hunger. Here is hard:evi-dence, provided by real people who survived' to live, instead of living to merely survive. The madres solteras (single mothers) who raise children of partners who abandon them for another; the youth who are old before they have a chance to be young; the knot of little children who play on the step of the mission-house door--none of these Montenegro dnawim have access to analyt-ical research charting their survival or demise. They simply live their reality, struggling to survive, struggling to find. meaning. Without the luxury of an education, they meet Mystery in their misery on Mystery's 6wn terms. Even though most of them will never really better their lot in life according to North American standards, they seem not to have lost. the reason for their hope. Yes, large numbers may eventually resort or succumb to every vice that a culture of absolute poverty provokes. Yet there :are those who do survive with their dignity as human beings intaci:. Who are they? How are they able to survive? What do they have to say to the religious missioned to the first world, who also seek to survive, but in a culture whose very richness impoverishes the attractiveness, the beauty, the dignity, and the grace of a way of life in love with Life itself?. Could the observation ofMircea Eliade, the famed scholar of religious anthropology, be true: that the evo-lution of modern cultures has generated an atmosphere of intel-lectual elitism in which detachment from the patterns of traditional religion severs Western culture from its core values and belief systems? 5 So what recourse do persons consecrated to the Holy have if they are to survive the consequences of Western culture's demise? The Word had a special word for the religiously lettered and learned Who came by night to ask him questions about signs seen hinting the advent of a new world within the world. To the Nicodemus-like, Jesus counseled that the lettered and the elite turn and become like a child. Anyone privileged to see, hear, and touch the children who, despite the misery of their absolute poverty and the scourge of terrorism, sing and dance in the desert cannot help marveling at the mystery of their "unreasonable" rea-. son to hope. What do they, the "little ones," the ones immersed in the misery of absolute poverty, have to say about the mystery of their survival? Could it be that their link to traditional popu-lar religion provides them with the treasure which cultures to the north have lost: a reason for hope?6 , Review for Religious Who are these ragtag "children of the dust" gathered on the luxurious slab of cement gracing the mission-house front door? From early in the morning until late in the night, this mob of ragamuffins never seems to wonder about "survival," despite the dubious nature of their next meal. They do not have time to worry. They are obviously too busy creatively constructing their own livable-in-the-now reality. The ever plentiful stones and rocks are transformed in,their imagination to sports cars and trucks. Rags and bits of scrap paper adorn a gringa-faced "Barbie" in highest fashion. So actively engaged in living life to the hilt, these tawny tots are too busy having fun to be concerned about surviving. Sure, they are hungry and ill clad. By our standards they are woefully abused by family systems that claim "the more I beat you, the more I love you." But they are too resiliently cre-ative to let abuse or malnutrition get in the way of living. The ".proper7 things they deserve as fundamental rights--healthcare, education, food--hardly get a thought. One hesitates to say it, but, to almost every visitor, these kids on the step are definitely having fun. Their joy, laughter, unsuppressible desire to befriend anyone, especially foreigners visiting the mission house, betrays the secret entry of Mystery into their absolute misery. Their grasp on an unseen reason for their hope renders ridiculous the first-world worries about where God and religion and the church might fit in a deconstructed culture. "Multiphrenia" is one malaise the Montenegrinos never get. The inner' chaos caused by too much input from too many conflicting media sources promoting ever changing values is a postmodern misery they miss.7 Take, for example, ten-year-old Lorenzo, a victim of his father's abuse. Every so often Lorenzo is whacked in the face. with an iron pipe for not bringing in his share of the family keep. How could little Lorenzo, every visitor's fast friend, keep smiling, jest-ing, and joking despite the ugly scarson his ever dirty face? The Mystery of God peeks through his misery in his nonconcern for predictable "survival." That unerasable smile insists that God's Mystery is manifest even in this most undeserved misery. Just what is it that keeps that smile on his face--and so many others like his!--in this desert valley of so many, many tears? Does his smile betray a reason to hope that we cannot, yet, see? These stepkids also deal with the reality of too few resources and personnel to assure them of a viable future. Most children are without parents until late in the night, when Mom or Dad or November-December 1997 Pelletier ¯ Misery Meets Mystery in Montenegro live-in mate come

Carla Vogel, October 1, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Carla Vogel. The interview was conducted on October 1, 2013, by Caroline Olmstead. Carla discusses her memories of Ogden and 25th Street. ; 31p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Carla Vogel Interviewed by Caroline Olmstead 1 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carla Vogel Interviewed by Caroline Olmstead 1 October 2013 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Vogel, Carla, an oral history by Caroline Olmstead, 1 October 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Carla Vogel October 1, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Carla Vogel. The interview was conducted on October 1, 2013, by Caroline Olmstead. Carla discusses her memories of Ogden and 25th Street. CO: Today is October 1, 2013 we are giving an interview to Carla Vogel pertaining to the Mount Ogden area. I'm the interviewer, Caroline Olmstead, and my assistant is Lorrie Rands. So, Carla first of all where and when were you born? CV: In Ogden Utah, 1932. CO: Where did you grow up? CV: In Ogden on Darling Street just below Harrison. Then we moved to 32nd and Iowa when I was about twelve, lived there until I got married in 1953. CO: How many people were in your family? CV: My parents and my brother and myself. CO: Your father, what was his occupation? CV: He was a dentist. CO: The Vogel's Drive Inn in Ogden, he was the owner to that? CV: Yes we built that. CO: So how did, why was that started? What made your father want to own a drive inn if he was a dentist? CV: Oh he always was interested in everything. He had that little piece of land, it was a garden at that time with apple trees. He thought that would be nice to have a drive inn and four little apartments upstairs. We had car hops, that was my first job. 1 CO: So if your dad was a dentist who managed the drive inn? CV: My uncle Ken Burrows. CO: On the drive inn there's a really big sign, how did you guys end up being able to get that… CV: Oh, because Tom Young the man that started Young Electric Sign Company that has done most of the signs in Las Vegas. He's one of my dad's very best friends so he said George I'm going to fix you a really nice big sign. That's how we got that. CO: Where did you go to high school? CV: Ogden High School CO: And did you play any sports or anything? CV: Yes, yes I was involved in all the sports they offered. CO: Did you break any records? School records? CV: Oh well in junior high I did for the pole vault, the high jump, and the long jump. Unfortunately I didn't keep the newspaper article. CO: Did you have any pets? CV: Always had a cat and a dog. One time we even had a little goat. CO: What about your horses? CV: Yes started out with a Shetland pony that had a colt. So I had two Shetland Ponies and from there all of the horses I got were because some of my dad's patients couldn't pay for their dental work. If they had a horse I would get another horse. CO: How many horses do you think you had throughout your childhood? 2 CV: Oh, well I worked up to about five. Pretty much all the time, I had two mares that would have a colt each year so the previous colts you know I'd train them and break them and sell them and then get new ones. So I usually had four or five horses all the time, but over the years the total I don't know. I may have had twenty that might be. I did have a great grandson of Sea biscuit one time. The government sent a stallion out to Syracuse and I got a colt from him. So he's a great grandson of Man of War and a grandson of Sea biscuit. CO: And you said that you broke the horses by yourself and you sold them? CV: Yes I'd train them then sell them. CO: Would you get to keep all the money even though your dad helped care for them. CV: Even though it wasn't a lot. I don't really remember if I kept the money or not. I know I sold that particular colt for two hundred dollars and I probably used it for school. CO: Did you have a favorite horse that was your horse that you wouldn't sell? CV: Well pretty much Goldie. She was a thoroughbred race horse from Roosevelt and her father couldn't pay for his false teeth so he gave us this horse and yeah. She was fast. CO: So she was a race horse, did you ever take her out, did you ever race her? CV: No there was really no place big enough for her to run full-out. I would race her with neighbor kids once in a while, but that was all. There were no race tracks around here. CO: Can you tell us about the time when you took her to Hill Field Road? 3 CV: Oh yes. I was probably in junior high last part of junior high and she never was able to run as far as she wanted. Once she started running she never wanted to stop and it was kind of a problem around here on 32nd street. So one day I just was a little bit cool so I didn't put a saddle on and I just rode her out from 32nd out up the hill to the Hill Field Road. There used to be great big huge hayfield, just huge. So I let her just run as fast and as far as she wanted and by the time we got clear down to the end she was pretty much was satisfied. Then I rode on home and never told a soul. 40 years later I mentioned it to my mother when we were on that road and I told her and she just, she started shaking she says good grief I can't believe you did that, but it was pretty fun. CO: Did you ever take Goldie on night rides? CV: Yes, sometimes. Not a lot, but two or three that I remember. If it was a full moon and clear, I had a friend out that lived by 37th and Harrison. Well, her house got torn down when they built the college. We would meet after my folks were asleep I would go out. We would meet and ride around in the hills. CO: So you never told your parents that you were going out? CV: No, no. CO: So right next to your house was the Mount Ogden Park? CV: Well this present house, yes. CO: Do you remember when Mount Ogden Park was built or has it been around forever? CV: No because I think it was built probably when we were away. We were away for 23 years, from 72 to 95. So it was built sometime in that period. 4 CO: Just a little bit farther down from the Ogden Park is Wagon Wheel Road. Did you ever hang out around there? CV: Oh yes, yeah one of my good friend Beverly lived on that road and I remember once in a while picking her up early in the morning and just putting her on the back of my horse. We'd just go riding around up in the hills. CO: You mentioned one day you found a distillery? CV: Yes it was all underground. I would say a couple hundred feet up from 32nd. We just kind of dug around a little bit and here was this great big underground room with all these old wood stoves and barrels and buckets and yeah even though we were young we knew what it was. CO: Did you guys ever try to light it up? CV: Oh no. We never told anybody about it either. If we had told some adults they probably would've come and caved it in. That was probably really dangerous to be under there. CO: Do, so you never told anybody. Do you think that there would be a chance it would still be there or probably not? CV: I think it is. I could show you where it was. I imagine you know there's grass over it now. It's part of the playing field of Mt. Ogden Junior High School. CO: So you wouldn't know where it is unless you had seen it before? CV: Right, yeah. My friend Penelope Dovenspike lived right close to it too. So we went to Polk School together. CO: So skipping forward quite a few years, did you attend Weber College? CV: Yes 5 CO: What was your major? What were you studying? CV: Psychology and secretarial. CO: How would you get to school each morning? CV: Well I had access to a little old 1937 Ford Coup and that's pretty much what I drove. By then a cousin was living with us her mother had died so she would go too. She took cosmetology so she only went for one year. CO: So you got to drive to school? Was that common for most students? CV: Actually I drove to Ogden High School in that little car because it was my brother's and he was away on a mission. So I think I was practically the only student that drove a car to Ogden High School. I parked right in front of the south door on 29th street. CO: So after your college education you said you were trying to study being a secretary. Did you ever get a job with that? CV: Oh I got a very good job for Makesson Robins Drug Wholesale Company. CO: Where was that? CV: Down on 24th and Lincoln. It's been torn down since, but it was national drug wholesale and I was the secretary to the manager, Mr. Tinney. CO: Do you know about what year that was that you were a secretary about what time? CV: 52 CO: Just out of curiosity do you know about how much you were making as a secretary for them? CV: Yeah I think I got about 65 dollars every other week. 6 CO: How many hours were you working? CV: Oh full CO: Full time? CV: Probably either 8-5 or 9-5. CO: So speaking of that part of Ogden, so you were a secretary on 24th street right next to that was 25th street. Did you ever spend a lot of time there? CV: Not in those days, it was very run down and there were so many men around that were drinking and sitting on the gutter. So we drove by, in fact my cousin more than once saw her father down there because he was an alcoholic. So she would say there's Frank Taylor. My dad became her dad. CO: Are you familiar with electric alley? CV: Oh yes CO: Can you tell us a little bit about that? CV: Yes, it started on Wall just a little north of 25th street in the back of the buildings. There would be lights burning in some of the windows, upstairs windows. So one day I picked up my two friends and their mother came with us, she was very worried when I turned up electric alley because she said I don't have my girdle on I shouldn't be down here. She was a very proper lady, but we survived the little two or three block trip. We wouldn't have ever thought of getting out of our car down on 25th street back in those days, no not at all. It was just bars and saloons and yeah. Later yes, when they had nice restaurants years later we would yes. CO: But not during that time? 7 CV: No. CO: I would like to know how you met your husband. What was the story with him? CV: Okay, well like I mentioned my brother who was three years older than me was up in Oregon serving a mission for the church. He left a book of Mormon next door to the boarding house where my husband was living, he was about 19 or 20. The lady didn't want to keep the book so she asked bob if he would keep it for a week which he did. He's always read everything he could ever get his hands on so he had it nearly half read when they came back a week later to pick it up. So they said, "Well did you read the book?" "Yeah I read some." "Would you like to know more about it?" He says, "Yes I really would." That's where it started, they taught him all about the church and he joined the church and then not too long after that one of the missionaries was finished with his mission and came home to Salt Lake. My brother was still in Oregon, but this other got a job at Sear's and also got a job for Bob. So Sear's called Bob one day and said you're to report to Sear's store in Salt Lake on such and such a day. It was a surprise to him, but every time he applied for a job he applied for Bob too. He got a job, he packed his little suitcase and took the bus to Salt Lake and started working at Sear's. I think it's on about 7th and State or Main. Anyway once he was there, now he not only didn't have a car he'd never driven a car. He was 19 or 20 and so I basically taught him how to drive. So Cliff brought him up to dinner and then you know I thought he was cute and Lola didn't care for Cliff too much unfortunately because he really liked her. 8 Then they went home and I don't know if we'd have ever seen him again except that mother and dad went to Salt Lake, seemed like it might have been a few months later to a missionary farewell and there was Bob. They said to him and Cliff well why don't you come up next Sunday for dinner? So that's really where it all started. CO: Then it's interesting I noticed that your husband's last name was Ellis. CV: Yes he was Bob Ellis. CO: So can you explain how Vogel became your married name as well? Can you explain the situation behind that? CV: Yes we did start going together, but then Uncle Sam called. He had to go in the army and he's been blind in one eye from birth, but when they gave him the eye exam and I have to say that's one of the only two times I've ever been mad at him. When he covered up the good eye he said he couldn't see anything. They said well look harder, he says well I guess there's an E up there. So they said okay you're in the army. Oh when I heard about that I just about went through the ceiling. CO: Were you already married to him at this time? CV: Oh no, we had been going together but I didn't know if he was the one or not. He went to Fort Lee Virginia for boot camp and while he was there my brother came home. He married his sweetheart that had waited for him, Gwen Fronk. She went to Weber too. So he wanted Bob to be his best man and he told mother that you know that there's no one else I want to be my best man. Well he's back in boot camp. Mother says I'll see what I can do and she did, she was quite the lady. 9 She could pretty much do anything. The next thing Bob knew his orders were changed and he was to go to this private airport and was going to be picked up by a private plane and flown to Ogden the day before the wedding. So he was at the wedding. They were going to go to Sun Valley for their honeymoon. Anyway, the next morning Bob was at our home, that three level home over on 32nd, he was in the basement. He came up the next morning and here was the whole family there including the newlyweds and he wondered what was going on. Mother said, "Bob would you like a family?" He says, "I don't know what you mean." "Would you like us for your family?" He grew up in an orphanage and many foster homes. That was the only prayer he ever had was for a family. So he says, "Well usually you adopt little kids and raise them." Mother said again, "We would like to adopt you." So anyway, half an hour later we were down in the judge's quarters and got him adopted. The next day he had to leave for Seattle to take the troop ship. Probably what saved his life is he could type. So he was over there typing throughout the Korean War and he would accompany the dead bodies to Japan where they could be shipped home, that was his job. So the fact that he could type probably saved his life because not many of them came back. So he came back April 15, 1953 and we were married May 15, 1953. CO: Didn't waste any time then CV: So the second time I got mad at him I didn't see where he needed to change his name because I kind of wanted to change my name when I got married. So he 10 was good to write nearly every week. Private Ellis was on the envelope and pretty soon it was Sergeant Ellis, but then the date came it said Sergeant Vogel. I just about went through the ceiling again. Years and years later I found the adoption papers where it said that he was required to change his name and I didn't know that all those years ago. He did the right thing because Ellis to him meant all these broken marriages, all these drunken fathers, it was nothing good. My mother and dad was the first happy marriage he ever saw in his life, my mother and dad. He was very determined to be a good father, more so I think than most people. CO: After he got home and you guys got married. What did he do for a career? CV: Well something he was afraid to tell me that he didn't have a high school diploma. He was afraid if he told me I would kick him to the side. Well I didn't care, but he just took some odds and ends jobs. He worked for a T.V. repairman for a while. He took the GED test? He took that, he did so well he got a scholarship to the U, but we had just moved into little duplex in Ogden and we didn't want to move down there. So he turned it down. He started at Weber and he went days, nights, and summers. Graduated fairly early and then he worked at Baker's Shoes on Washington Boulevard and helped the folks with those four little apartments where Vogel's Drive Inn was. Bob was their handyman and their painter. He became a good painter so he would clean and paint the apartments and work at the shoe store. Kind of barely got us through. CO: You also mentioned that later on he would go around and he would speak to people and tell his story. 11 CV: Yes he did get his master's. He had to go up to Logan to get it in Elementary Education. So his first teaching job was at Polk School, that was in the early 60s. He taught some pretty famous people like Rocky Anderson, Doug Felt, the Frishneck, and a lot. He taught with Edna Hardy, she was quite a fixture at Polk school for many many years. I think she taught until she was about 72. Then he went on to, he became a principal down at Washington which has been torn down, but it was on Washington. His secretary Elaine Richins, I believe it was her, one day brought in an article about Charles Mansen. Bob said, "Well I know him quite well. He was in the next bed to mine in the orphanage." She said, "Oh my gosh." He had never told people much about it, but he told her a little. She said, "Oh would you come and speak in my ward?" So he did and every time he spoke a couple of people would come up after and ask him to speak in their ward. It just grew really big. He was pretty soon speaking every Sunday, well it lasted for years until eventually we decided that we would just ask them if it was out of town if they would come and get him and bring him back after. They were happy too, even somebody in Blanding they wanted him. So they came up and got him, took him to Blanding, got a place for him to stay and brought him home the next day. People would take him to Provo and bring him home. One time they flew us both down to California for him to speak to a big group in La Canyada California. People just kept telling him you need to write your story, you need to write a book. He started several times over the years to write his story and he just couldn't seem too. So I don't know if you want me to mention a little bit more about that or not. 12 CO: Yeah feel free CV: Well one of our friends when we lived in Price just before we moved back here. She was good on the computer and you know this was back in like1989, not many people were. She really wanted to write his story and so she would call him, get together with him, take notes, record his stories until she had, she actually wrote his story. She would call him, she moved to Texas we moved here. She would call him to get all the details so she finally did finish it. She mailed it to us and he set it aside, wouldn't even look at it. I know why now because I found that manuscript last Friday. So it gives his story in his own words up until the day he was adopted in 1951—61 pages actually—telling about the vision of him, his sister, and his brother. The mother bathing them, putting clothes on and telling them this lady is going to take you for a ride in her car. These three little kids being taken to the orphanage it was a huge big building called The Widows and Orphans Asylum. That little detail I had never heard, I knew he went to the orphanage, but I didn't realize it was like that. The mother never even said goodbye. She was very mentally ill so maybe you have to be happy she knew she couldn't take care of them. Anyway this friend also made another manuscript, same story but changing all the names because they thought in case they made it into a novel they would call it a novel based on fact. Fiction based on fact and all the names were changed. So that was kind of what we thought, but she had a couple of different people read it and they both said this can't be true. This can't be true, all these coincidences. How he finally left the orphanage at 18 and went to Mesa, 13 how he got to Oregon when my brother was there. They just said all this can't be true. She did submit a small version of it to the New Era Magazine, but the editor says, "I find it very fascinating, but I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you need to find a professional writer." Well I have a granddaughter just graduating from Weber College that has specialized in writing so I found this 63 pages Friday. Saturday I read it, it took two hours and I gave her a copy. She said she will write it and I think we'll use the version with all the right names because everybody in it is dead except for me. So I guess I think that as a family we need to self-publish the book. Anyway guess I'll be putting it together over the winter. LR: That's quite a coincidence having a granddaughter that writes. CV: Yes and I didn't know it. I was telling my one boy about it yesterday and he says well you know Amy graduated in writing. She was there last night, we had us a great big family night here at the park last night. I made root beer and they brought treats. So yeah Amy will help me do it and I have a friend that's a printer, has his own printing company here in Ogden. You know what? It kind of had to happen after he died. He didn't like dealing with it and you can just see why. How horrible, he says Charles Manson would cry himself to sleep every night. His mother was alive too. Anyway I think finally it's going to be a book and I think everyone that knows him is going to want a copy. Won't be a big book. LR: That's great thank you for sharing that. I think it's fantastic. His story will finally be not just something that's told, but you can read about it. CV: It will be in print and I know it's all true because over the years he's told me all. See he wouldn't tell me some of the little details that he did with his friend when 14 she would just have him talk. It's not full of extra wordage at all, no. It's pretty much fairly precise. It's not overly wordy. I visualize it being in the neighborhood of maybe 85/90 pages, something like that. Some of the people that read the one manuscript where they changed the names wrote to Ann later said whatever happened to Bill and Connie? Did they get married? She made him Bill and me Connie. So I don't know where it might lead, but I have friends that think it should be made into a movie. It would be one of the LDS movies I know because it's a fabulous story, but it's all true. One little thing I didn't know at one point after he'd been in the orphanage for a couple of years they brought him home. He was so happy but guess why they brought him home? His mother remarried another man named Ellis and had a little child so they took Bob out of school—the orphanage—and brought him home to tend the little boy, his little half-brother. That was bitter sweet because he had grown to love him. He felt like he was the only person that loved him. He didn't ever know his brother loved him so here was this little half-brother, but he really missed school. He did love school. So I don't know long that lasted, maybe a year or two. That was what he never mentioned, but it was in the 61 pages. He ran away a couple of times, but he'd end up back in the orphanage so he was going on 18 before he actually got away. Anyway I guess the recording's stopped. LR: No it's still going. CO: There was only one other question that I was going to ask that I forgot about. You mentioned that you had a Korean brother. 15 CV: Korean? CO: Yes CV: Oh yes, Sun Chu. That's his picture, he's my age. CO: How did you become acquainted? How did he become part of your family? CV: Okay there were a bunch of young Koreans that wanted to learn English really bad and the young men really wanted to go to American universities so they got permission to teach them English. Bob a couple of other soldiers would teach them English. The only book they had was the Book of Mormon so some of these, I don't remember how many. It seemed like five maybe five or six, I have the picture up there. See they all had to have their heavy coats on—it was winter. Some of these kids wanted to join the church and when Bob baptized Sun Chu in the China Sea, they kind of had to sweep away the ice. Bob and Sun Chu became very close, like brothers. They were refugees from Seoul, they had had to run and leave everything behind and there they were just living in Puson in very shabby conditions, but his family would have Bob over for rice and fish. So then later when three or four of these young men wanted to come to America so bad they each had to find a sponsor. Well of course my folks sponsored Sun Chu so by the time he came over Bob and I had been married three or four months so he lived here. Lola got married a month after us, but they had taken another girl in, Betty. She was still living with them so Sun Chu and Betty were there and he went to Weber for two years, then he went down to University of Utah. Got his engineering degree and when the Korean government knew that, the minute he got his degree they whisked him back. We didn't get a 16 forwarding address or anything. It was just kind of so fast, didn't get to say goodbye. He maybe didn't even, well anyway he went but he was just here part of the family. I mean he would tend our first little baby and he was very close with my brother and their two little babies too. We trusted him completely to tend our little baby. So then all these years went by and in October of 2010 fortunately it was 2010 and not 2011. He came over to the U.S. and picked up his son in San Francisco, came from Seoul. His son Don who's an architect in San Francisco. They drove up to Salt Lake for general conference and a little while after it ended the phone rang. It was our boy George that lives in my family home now. He says, "Sun Chu is here." I just couldn't believe it, he had to keep repeating it. He says, "He's here at our house I'm going to bring him up." So I started down the stairs and halfway down the stairs I just started to bawl. It was just so unreal, I mean happy. I just started to bawl so bad I couldn't talk. Poor Bob he knew the phone had just rang he thought surely somebody had been killed. Finally I was able to get it out, "Sun Chu is here he's coming to our house." The whole evening was like a dream. I'd never had one like that. It just kept feeling like I'll wake up in the morning and none of this happened. All of the grandkids that were available that could come came and they all sat in a big circle around on the floor here. Bob and Sun Chu sitting here reminiscing and talking. It was so special, so special. He wanted us to come to Seoul the next summer. I wish we had, but we had all these grandkids getting married that summer. We were kind of a little bit tied down. We've been in contact ever since 17 and it's just been a wonderful friendship. He married Dr. Kim's daughter, she was one of the other ones that was baptized. Beautiful woman, I have their colored family picture when they had their 50th wedding anniversary. They were all in their Korean clothes, it's a beautiful family. So I e-mail him, I never hear from him unless I e-mail him first then he'll message right back. He won't ever take the first step, but very sweet lovely man. He was a handsome young man, now he's just a sweet older man. LR: So you mentioned the name Lola. CV: Yes, my grandmother and her grandfather were brother and sister so we're second cousins. When her father (well her mother died) had these two little girls her and her sister he just gave them away to a lady. I think her name was Mrs. Moon out in Roosevelt and they were just doing all the work for her. Herding the sheep and doing the gardening and all that. Lola was about 12, I was 12. The little sister was about 9. Well the dad needed false teeth, didn't have any money so he said he had a thoroughbred race horse so we hooked up our trailer and went to Roosevelt. It was such a long ride in those days that we had to get a hotel. The next day we met Lola and Dorothy. Two little rag muffins you know. So what I really don't remember now is how we went home and mother said I can't leave those girls there. She asked me if they could bring Lola home I said, "Yes," so we went back out. I'll have to ask Lola how long it was, I just don't remember that at all. She felt like she went from rags to riches. She had appreciated that so much and she's had a wonderful life. Her sister went back to New York to live with the older 18 sister that was married and my mother regretted that the rest of her life because she led a pretty bad life. They weren't religious at all and just very sad. They're both still alive too, but one's paralyzed in a wheelchair for many years and the younger one is divorced and poor, very sad. Lola has had a very good life in California. LR: The last time we were here you talked about over where Mount Ogden Park is now. The little shack that had that little family in it. CV: Oh the stone house? LR: Yes CV: The rock house, yeah. It's where the club house is. It's just barely a stone's throw east from that. It was just square inside, probably about the size of half of this room and they had either three or four children. The Crosley's, the Crosley family and they were feeble minded. So the state automatically sterilized their children even though I have a friend that went to school with a couple of them at Polk School and she said they were totally normal. Kind of sad so yeah they were just so poor. I guess most poor people I ever knew. LR: Oh the house that is down on 32nd. Now didn't your father build that? CV: Yes, but Art Grix did the place LR: My question is, it's kind of a new art deco home. Was that one of the first art deco homes in Ogden? CV: Yes I could show you about eight of them that Art Grix did. There's another architect that did a couple, but Art Grix mainly did most of the art deco in Ogden. LR: He's the one that designed that home? 19 CV: Yeah and all of them are white except for ours. Mother said no I have to have yellow brick. So it was yellow brick and the upper part was yellow stucco. Self-cleaning stucco and to this day it's beautiful stucco. The people we sold it to in the 70s while we were in Louisiana put a pitched roof on it, kind of ruined the look oh dear, so sad. They didn't need to make it quite such pitched because they had to cut into the windows and make the windows little, it's very sad. The only improvement inside they did was in the kitchen and they made it so you couldn't have a kitchen table and chairs in the kitchen anymore. So the one improvement they made was not very much of an improvement. So they had to eat in the dining room for all their meals. We ate in the kitchen when Bob and I lived there. We had five boys, we had room. Then Sundays we ate in the dining room. They have to eat there every day so kind of sad, but it's still a lovely home. LR: So you mentioned that in 72 you moved to Louisiana. When you came back how had things changed? CV: Well we came back every summer so it wasn't like a big change. LR: Wasn't a big CV: Every single summer we came to Ogden because in Louisiana it was so miserable in the summer. The humidity just killed you so the minute school was out and if Bob wasn't through university we came and he would fly home. So we would spend the full summer here and in the basement of the home because it had its own kitchen and bath and living room and all that. It was kind of run down, you know renters they wouldn't mow the lawn. So it was kind of sad so that's why in a few summers I put it up for sale. Bob wasn't real thrilled with the idea, but he 20 knew we had too. An older couple bought it. When they died, this was about in 1999, I think, 2000, right around there. We went by one day and there was a for sale sign out in the yard so man we stopped. The realtor was inside so we didn't tell him it had been our home and we knew every nook and cranny we just let him show us around. Anyway we told mother about it and she helped George get a down payment to get it as he needed a bigger house. She was thrilled to have it back in the family. LR: I just kind of have one more question. Having been up here the majority of your life, up here meaning in the Mount Ogden area, all but those 20 years in Louisiana. Well you were in Price too right? I'm thinking of someone else. CV: 6 in Louisiana, 17 in Price LR: So you were in Price okay. CV: When we first got married we lived in Salt Lake for three or four years. LR: For the most part I mean the majority of your life has been spent up here in Mount Ogden. You've watched it go from a really rural area to more of an urban area. Has the change been something that you've liked or is it been more of a you wish it would go back to the old ways? CV: Oh dear. Well like I say, we were here every summer all those years. We noticed changes every year. Yes I remember like in Salt Lake we wouldn't see much change, but up here we would see year to year quite a bit of change all around town. Of course like I told you I have a photograph taken from our house on 32nd to St. Benedict's and Ogden High without one single house in between. I may have to get those printed, that was on slides. I was very happy that dad didn't sell 21 any lots over there between Iowa and Tyler, between 32nd and 30th until after I was married. I had all my horses until I got married and sold them. I had to sell them, but people over the years were always begging for building lots. All those little houses on Harrison, 48 I watched all those 48 houses get built. They sold for like 6,000 dollars, cute little homes. Some of them have fixed them up nice and some of them have let them go. We were kind of sad when they built those because I was still at home, didn't seem right to have all those houses so close together. Then finally dad relented and started selling a few lots and then a developer/builder George Stettler I believe his name was, Mr. Stettler. He pretty much bought all of them and built all those homes. Those are nicer homes, but the city has a master plan to take all those little houses on Harrison down and put up high density housing. I hope they don't, those are cute little homes. That is in their master plan for someday. You can go anywhere like out in Clinton where one of our boys live. Every time I go out to visit there's 50 more homes and over the winter there's a 1,000 more homes. I mean it's incredible, but once you get past Harrison Boulevard life just kind of slows down, traffic slows down. So I really appreciate living up here and especially having Mt. Ogden park there. There will never be homes right in front of me like most people have. So I'm very fortunate. Two of my boys live within walking distance and two are ten miles away and one is in Price. All the grandkids, everyone is in Utah. I don't think I have a friend that doesn't have kids all over the country. 22 LR: I lied, I have one more question. Where St. Benedict's is now, last time we were here you mentioned that the LDS Church was thinking of putting their temple there? CV: Yes at one time. They debated whether to put it there or downtown. LR: Do you know why they chose not to put it up here? CV: No, but I heard that they thought it would kind of help the downtown area. LR: If they built it down there? CV: Yeah LR: I just think it's interesting, it's a perfect spot. St. Benedict's is huge, you can see it CV: From all over, the freeway. It would've been nice for me, very nice for me. LR: That was it. CO: Thank you Carla for your interview LR: Unless you have anything else you'd like to add. Sorry I forgot to say that. CV: Oh, well other than you know the two years I had at Weber gave me wonderful jobs. A secretary job here because of the shorthand and typing that they don't need that anymore, but it was wonderful back through those years. Then in Price I got a good job. In Louisiana, I got a good secretarial job. In Price I worked as a law secretary for a number of years. So you know the training I got at Weber look how valuable it turned out to be for me. Plus I took all the psychology classes I could get for two years and I couldn't put a price tag on how valuable that has been, especially in raising five boys. Knowing how to interact with them that has positive outcomes, I mean you just can't put a value on that. So I really am very grateful for Weber and especially Dr. Stratford, William Stratford. He lived up into 23 his 90s I believe. Yes Weber's been a big part of our whole family and still is. I've got a lot more grandkids that will be going there. I have a 30 year old grandchild that just started there last year and he's found out he's so good in math that he just got a scholarship. So he may meet Mrs.Right there. LR: You never know. CO: Thank you Carla for your time CV: You're welcome. 24

.The subject of my thesis has as its starting point a didactic aim: that of the qualitative improvement of the teaching/learning of French to/from an audience of Reunionese children. In pursuit of this goal, I have set myself the goal of developing a benchmark for assessing the morphosyntactic skills of children in Reunion Island's large kindergarten section. Enriched in particular by recent research related to the theme of the contact of languages in Creolo-French-speaking lands, my work as a didactician has tried to reconcile, or at least to confront, a sociolinguistic variationist posture with that, classically more structuralist, of a grammarian "standard-setter" in a school setting. I thus deal, from a theoretical and pragmatic point of view, with the problem of a binarized grammatical evaluation, in a diglostic context of close language contacts, where interlectal practices are legion. By considering, from a holistic perspective, questions relating to the development of reference standards and the collection of oral data from small non-reading schoolchildren, my research is actually at the crossroads of sociolinguistics, language didactics, educational sciences but also psycholinguistics and descriptive linguistics. The report of my work is divided into four parts. PART 1: Following a general introduction, the first part of my typed text shows the need for an assessment of the linguistic skills of Réunionese pupils at the end of nursery school. It also describes the general objectives, postures and intentions underlying this evaluation. The gap between the language of the school and the language of the home is considered on Reunion Island as an aggravating factor in the educational difficulties encountered by many Reunionese pupils from the very beginning of their schooling. It would seem that to become good readers, many of them do not have sufficient skills as speakers of the French language. Among the remediation proposals proposed so far by researchers who have dealt with the subject, it is often recommended that the skills acquired by students in Creole, considered their L1, be used as a basis from kindergarten onwards to compose a strategy for teaching French as a second language. Recently, the educational policies officially posted for the Academy also suggest, in a more or less vague way, the need to take into account Creole. In this perspective, which is certainly commendable if one refers to the work of didacticians and psycholinguists on strong forms of teaching in a bilingual context (e.g. Baker, Hamers and Blanc, Cummins), two central questions nevertheless appear which should therefore be raised, but which until now have hardly been asked: -What is the quality of Creole spoken by "Creole" children today? Do the little schoolchildren from Reunion, and especially those who encounter difficulties in French, really master Creole? The analysis of recent sociolinguistic works relating to language contacts and the expansion of the use of interlecte in the Reunionese community (Prudent, Ledegen, Watin, Souprayen-Cavery, Rapanoël.).), taking into account the remarks of local primary school teachers on the shortcomings of young pupils not only in French but also in Creole, and the results of surveys declaring an increase in the "transmission" of French by Reunionese mothers, led me to think that doubt on this subject is permitted or at least that the assumption "Creole L1" is to be qualified. In order to better situate the purpose and goal of my work, I therefore began by demonstrating that the situation in terms of language practices is complex and, consequently, that the didactic orientations would become more sensitive and anchored in the local situation if they were based on concrete points of reference concerning the actual degree of mastery of the two codes in question by the students. How, in fact, can we claim to be able to exploit the knowledge acquired in one language (a priori L1-créole) in order to better appropriate the other (a priori L2-français), without having taken full measure of the degree of mastery of the two languages involved? While work has begun on the communicative skills of kindergarten students (Fioux and Marimoutou), my research on local "assessments" conducted so far reveals that researchers have no relatively detailed assessment of the current language skills of Reunionese children, on the one hand in French, before the transition to written French, after three years of schooling explicitly focused on acquiring the basics of oral French, and on the other hand in Creole. Equally disconcerting, given the educational challenges, it appears that there are also no assessment tools designed for the local situation, and therefore adapted for the collection and analysis of these oral language skills among young children, whereas we are in a former French colony with a sociolinguistic situation rooted in diglossia. On what basis can we then rely to affirm that the Reunionese students of today, who are referred to en masse as "Creolophones", possess solid language skills in Creole and gaps in French when they engage in the systematic process of learning to read? It is on the basis of these questions and observations that I draft a first constituency of the objective of my work. It is a question of asking the prolegomena of an assessment assessment, linguistic, comparative, in Creole and French, whose methodological foundations would be explained, argued, but also contextualized and updated for a public of learners at the end of a large nursery section in Reunion. The aim is to provide teachers of languages working for and with small schoolchildren in Reunion with a tool that is sufficiently detailed to enrich reflection on French teaching/learning strategies, "possibly" based on the knowledge of these pupils in Creole. Although the delimitations I am proposing to establish are an integral part of the evaluation process, they are upstream of the act of evaluation. More specifically, it is a question of building an operational evaluation frame of reference presenting evaluation criteria, reference standards and pre-tested tests with a sample of children of large section, in French and Creole. Once this purpose has been clarified, I set the initial parameters of this evaluation process. Understanding it above all as "a reflection on relationships to values", I then position myself, after an epistemological approach to this not insignificant act, in favour of an evaluation that makes sense. Following in particular Hadji, Lecointe, Bonniol and Vial or Ardoino and Berger on their questioning of the technicality of docimology in search of an illusory objectivity, I undertake, like them, to shift the priority of the correctness of the results towards the logic and transparency of an objectivized process, leading to a relevant result that can be understood, located, relativized according to a transparent reading grid and the intentions underlying it. To do this, I then borrow from the educational sciences, and in particular G. Figari, the concept of referentialization, with its triple status, operational, methodological and scientific. If they were originally designed to carry out evaluations of systems (schools, training systems, curricula, etc.), I show that the general principles of referentialisation are in fact entirely transposable to the study I am conducting. Having this common thread, my referentialization begins, in a first step, with a work of reflexivity, to try to explain and situate my own posture as an evaluation designer, which engages me in an ethical responsibility. It is above all a question of taking a step back from the power held and to which I am subjected in this work of gathering and using information of social value. I therefore strive to pose and understand the social and individual issues related to this act, but also, in reference to the subjectivity inherent in any research in the humanities (de Robillard), to self-position myself in relation to my own representations and inclinations regarding the choice of a referentialization activity. A second step arising from the first also allows me to clarify my intentions in this evaluation. After a review of the pathways available to me, I conclude that in relation to the objectives, they are closer to evaluation-appraisal than evaluation-measurement and lead me to favour a qualitative approach. PART 2: The second part of my thesis, which relates the exploratory phase of my referentialization, is entirely dedicated to the modelling stage of my evaluation object. First, I report on the theoretical investigations I conducted in order to define the object to be evaluated, namely the object language. The first step is to position myself in the debate on the (im)possibility(s) of delimiting boundaries between Creole and French, which opposes structuralists and variationists, and even variationists between them. To do this, I approach the history of the contact of the languages of Reunion, from the plantation society to the departmentalized society, and compare the concepts that served as filters to describe the contact of Creole/French languages (diglossia, continuum, interlecte, macrosystem). Finally, I come to find in de Robillard's arguments, in his broader reflection on the definition of a language, the bases that push me to adopt, for the precise needs of the evaluation I am aiming for, a solid conception of the language, leading me to see Creole and French from a binarized angle. For all that, I do not abandon the study of the phenomena of mixtures noted by the Reunionese teachers among their pupils and that some (didacticians and pedagogues) praise as an asset or, on the contrary, criticize as a handicap, or even associate with the manifestation of a "semi-linguism", compared to the speeches of monolinguals. If my inclination for sociolinguistics leads me to see mixtures as some kind of discursive mode in their linguistic repertoire and to refute a treatment of mixtures from the point of view of parasitages, the question I ask myself as a didactician seeking to improve the teaching/learning process of French is the following: in the end, how can evaluators be allowed to determine, independently of recognition of the linguistic and pragmatic ability of these young pupils to "juggle" with two codes to arrive at communicating, whether the mixtures made are indicative of a) tactics of "compensating" for gaps in one language and/or the other (the skills then being better in one language than the other or insufficient in both languages), or b) relatively good "mastery" of the two codes (the skills being good in one language as well as the other), which calls for different remediation and/or teaching methods? With this in mind, I have decided to draw up an inventory of research focused on the language and linguistic evaluation of "bilingual" people. I am particularly interested in the treatment of the problem of mixtures, from the most "closed" (cf. the works of Titone, Fioux, Genelot et al.), to the most "open" (cf. the works of Moore, Cavalli, Stubbe and Peña.). By weighing them against my objectives, it seems to me that, for my type of comparative assessment, requiring quite distinct target languages, the binarized approach that can answer my initial questions proves to be relevant. Continuing my theoretical investigations, I refine my research framework by determining what a good speaker of a language implies. By approaching the notions of competence vs performance, by reviewing the points of view of language didacticians (Canale and Swain, De Pietro, Cuq, Beacco, Springer, Castellotti,.), interactionists (Hymes, Vasseur), psycholinguists (Lentin, Florin, Gombert.), pedagogues (Boisseau), researchers specializing in language evaluation (Rondal, Comblain, Piérart, Muller.).), but also by taking into consideration the directives concerning the mastery of language (Ministry of National Education) and the recommendations concerning the appropriation of foreign languages (Council of Europe), I decide to focus my reference frame on the evaluation of morphosyntactic skills, and to privilege as well the collection of samples of induced language as of spontaneous language. My exploratory phase also includes field investigations. I begin by describing the places of investigation (located mainly among Benedictine pupils of large nursery section but also at Tampon and Pau), the sampling (choice of schools, classes, children) and the means I used (ethnological approach, filmed interactions, activities carried out, protocols followed). In addition to providing me with a better knowledge of the characteristics of these young witnesses, thanks in particular to a participant observation, and to testing the relevance of different supports, tasks, evaluation approaches and inter-electoral speech transcription systems, I show that this field work allows me to make several observations that corroborate the hypothesis I had formulated during my theoretical investigations. By crossing various salient factors that I was able to identify, such as language practices (which I label without hierarchy "bi-linguisme", "mix-linguisme", "dominance in Creole" and "dominance in French"), linguistic representations, attitudes towards the school norm and the ability to discriminate between the two linguistic codes, both by the witnesses and by myself in the role of evaluator, I was indeed able to measure, in parallel with promising results, the complexity and the limits of a binarized evaluation in terms of data collection and analysis, particularly when the evaluator is faced with certain language profiles of children in this context of close language contact. Indeed, if a binary apprehension, deliberately and "classically" smoothed for teaching purposes seems appropriate for assessing and comparing the quality of children's skills in Creole and French, the local context of contact of close languages, marked by diglossic representations and far from being limited to well delimited and delimitable binary practices, leads me to think that a reference of this type is likely to have a limited scope. It is a hypothesis that it will then be up to me to verify in the continuation of my work. PART 3: Informed by a better knowledge of the potential, limits and concrete constraints of a binarised approach, the next stage of my referentialisation begins with the choice of criteria and indicators that will make it possible to evaluate young children who are not readers, orally, in French and Creole. This is the subject of the third part of my typewriting. Before getting to the heart of the matter, I begin with an indispensable preamble, it seems to me, on the balance of power at stake in normative activity (between prescription and description, priorities, relativity and arbitrariness, legitimacy(ies).). On this sensitive subject, subject to strong polemics, as well in the scientific community in general as among speakers evolving in the Reunionese community, I present in a double posture of sociolinguist and didactician, my own positioning in relation to the notion of "norm(s)". In order for my approach to be better understood and because I consider it essential to step back from a concept that often marginalizes those who use it (outside practitioners), I explicitly state the relative, constructed and yet necessary character, in my case, of the standard for this frame of reference. I also explain my legitimacy as a designer of normative references from a variationist point of view, within the theoretical framework chosen for this evaluation work. To construct the normative references of my tool, the methodological protocol that I decide to borrow is the following: 1. from already recorded descriptions of uses, - in Creole (then exist only scientific articles, grammars, dictionaries that describe only the norms of adult use (Staudacher, Watbled, Chaudenson, Ramassamy, Cellier.)), - and in French (including work on standard French (Riegel et al., Arrivé et al.)), Wagner and Pinchon.), spoken French (Gadet, Blanche-Benvéniste, Sauvageot.), regional French (Carayol, Ledegen, Béniamino and Baggioni), French spoken by children (Florin, Boisseau, Comblain.), 2. synthesize and compare these works, not only with each other but also with my own research and native speaker skills on the morphosyntactic items in question, 3.in order to be able to then proceed to a choice of criteria, whose relevance will be justified each time, for the language provoked and the spontaneous language, 4. to propose reference standards (indicators) making it possible to evaluate these criteria. For Creole, at this stage it is a question of provisional standards, 5. adjusting and updating the latter for an audience of young children, by analysing the spontaneous speech in Creole of Reunionese kindergarten children ("reference informants"), dominant in Creole or in two languages. A little more than three hundred pages of my typewriting report on the development and choice of these criteria and indicators. They quickly reveal a clear qualitative and quantitative imbalance between the state of knowledge in Creole and French. In a grammatical work, descriptive but also prescriptive, which must sort and complete, for Creole, existing descriptions certainly interesting but often contradictory, relieved of emerging varieties and completely incomplete as regards child forms, I approach the updating of the verbal theme (flexional system, analytical system, index i, truncation rules), personal pronouns, the valence of verbal themes, interrogative modality and negative modality. PART 4: The fourth and last part of my referentialization is first devoted to measuring the general parameters of designing assessment tasks and collecting data for and from children. Following a review of the literature on the subject (notably the work of Rondal, Moreau and Richelle, Khomsi, Florin, Brédart, Gombert, Marquillo.), I then put forward two considerations relating to relevance and validity criteria in an evaluation, when collecting data. They concern the types of activities generally proposed in language assessments (comprehension, production, detection and correction of statements), and the tasks making it possible to collect observable behaviours (with a focus on their scope, bias, supports and instructions). I close this review with my own remarks, criticisms and impressions on the experience of developing data collection tools that I was able to develop on the ground in Réunion. In a second step, I present and comment on the pilot tests I pre-tested with a hundred children of large section, during individual evaluation sessions, filmed and analyzed. This test bank is composed of 39 sheets classified according to whether it is a question of assessing competencies in Creole, competencies in French or "bilingual" competencies (translation, codic discrimination). These sheets present the evaluation tasks I have developed and pre-tested for feasibility, relevance and sensitivity. They detail, for each syntactic item evaluated, the criteria taken into consideration, the type of activity chosen, the expected performances, the supports of the test, the indications on its organisation, the instructions, but also the primer statements possibly provided for the evaluator, an analysis of examples of "correct" and "incorrect" answers collected from the pre-tested witnesses, and finally general comments on the test in question (difficulties, variants, precautions.). CONCLUSION: my typewriting ends with a general conclusion. First of all, it summarizes the different steps of my referencing as well as their results, and comes back on the improvements that could be made. It then presents the contributions of this research work, which also raises questions and allows proposals to be made. The contributions include in particular : -Theoretical but also field research with a hundred Reunionese children which allows the provision of an operational assessment tool, adapted to the characteristics of small Reunionese schoolchildren of large nursery section and proposing detailed tasks, tested and concrete normative benchmarks. These cards can be used as they stand, in the end as much by researchers in language didactics as by practitioners, who assess the oral grammatical skills of young children in Reunion Island. - In general, a methodological perspective concerning the collection and analysis of oral data from young non-reading schoolchildren in a diglostic context, and in a situation of contact with nearby languages. - An enrichment of the work of synchronic description of the peripheral French morphosyntax, but especially of the Creole of Reunion Island, in particular, a) by taking into account the intrasystemic and intersystemic variations (the current emerging forms due to the internal dynamics of Creole and to the contact with French, the childlike forms, the language of the young people), b) by the synthetic approach adopted (comparative analysis of work, elaboration of summary tables). But this work of referentialization also raises questions for research, on several points: On the didactic level : - This study showing the essential consideration of linguistic representations, language practices, pragmatic skills of students during the process of collecting oral data, what validity, what relevance can have smoothed evaluations, hermetic to the situation of contact of close languages and the specificities of children in Reunion, such as academic evaluations in French, duplications of a-contextualized metropolitan evaluations, designed for an already French-speaking monolingual public? What relevance do the proposals of didactic and explicit use, "as is", of Creole "L1" as a springboard to reach French L2, whereas the pre-tests carried out during my research already show a majority of witnesses presenting basic grammatical skills in French deficiencies, but also schoolchildren (even dominant Creolophones), encountering difficulties of expression, even comprehension, in Creole? Wouldn't most of the grammatical descriptions currently available hardly take into account the intra- and intersystemic variations of Creole, have repercussions on the scope of the didactic proposals for teaching French in partnership with Creole?In terms of research on language assessment: -The binary perspective chosen in this work, considered relevant for comparing language skills in Creole and French, has limitations and cannot, in particular, take into consideration, as it stands, all children's language profiles (for example, non-discriminatory mix-linguals). Beyond a Creole/French assessment, what alternative do we have to assess the language skills, especially morpho-syntactic, of these children whose (a)meshed speech and without a target "language" cannot be analysed in this framework? Should these "bilingual" skills be measured for themselves, without reference to Creole and French, as some researchers try to do relatively marginally in other linguistic contexts (e.g. Stubbe and Peña for American-Hispanic bilinguals in the United States)? But is what seems possible for "non collateral" languages possible for genetically and structurally related languages? Indeed, is a bilingual evaluation taking as a normative reference the morphosyntax of the entire Reunion macrosystem, thus a "fluid" language, where the evaluator does not have explicit/explicable reference standards a priori and therefore justified/justifiable, conceivable? Although it allows its pedagogical relevance to be seen, and meets the search for meaning criterion, how would it justify its objectivization when the evaluator only"feels" that it is being said and thus holds within himself "moving" rules, elusive as a native speaker of the interlecte? How can this unavoidable involvement, which derogates from the basis of any evaluation, be managed when normative references are internalized and a priori not externalisable?This research work finally makes it possible to make recommendations and proposals for areas of work concerning the teaching of French in partnership with Creole: - To endeavour to identify the conditions of awareness of codes by currently discriminating children (without school guidance), for the study of ways allowing schoolchildren, from the small section, to discriminate prototypical traits of Creole and French. - To take greater account of the heterogeneity of the language profiles of Réunionese children, who should not be considered as a linguistically homogeneous mass (even in schools in so-called disadvantaged neighbourhoods), and to continue the reflection on taking into account the Reunionese language macrosystem. – To complete the research on Creole currently spoken by the Reunionese population (children, youth, adults) and open these descriptions to all variations. - To make current the grammatical description books and to encourage the publication of scientific works (not purist), "accessible" to the public of students (future teachers) in training but also to that of teachers already in post. – To take more into account and change the negative representations of the local population (especially the parents of pupils) concerning the partnership (direct or indirect) with Creole. This subject being the object of strong tensions on the school ground, to study possibilities of alternative approaches (exploitation of the television medium, creation/exploitation of parallel educational structures as associations of the "ti lékol maron" type or leisure centres), privileging the mastery of language with a playful aspect, in a "calmed" context. ; Le sujet de ma thèse a pour point de départ une visée didactique : celle de l'amélioration qualitative de l'enseignement/apprentissage du français à/par un public d'enfants réunionnais. Dans la poursuite de cette finalité, je me suis fixé pour but l'élaboration d'un référentiel d'évaluation des compétences morphosyntaxiques d'enfants réunionnais en grande section de maternelle à La Réunion. Enrichi notamment des récentes recherches liées à la thématique du contact de langues en terres créolo-francophones, mon travail de didacticienne a tenté de concilier, ou du moins de confronter une posture de sociolinguiste variationniste à celle, classiquement plus structuraliste, de grammairienne « poseuse de normes » dans un cadre scolaire. Je traite ainsi, d'un point de vue théorique et pragmatique, la problématique d'une évaluation grammaticale binarisée, dans un contexte diglossique de contacts de langues proches, où les pratiques interlectales sont légion. En considérant, dans une perspective holistique, des questions relatives à l'élaboration de normes de référence et au recueil de données orales auprès de petits écoliers non lecteurs, ma recherche se trouve en réalité inscrite à la croisée de la sociolinguistique, de la didactique des langues, des sciences de l'éducation mais aussi de la psycholinguistique et de la linguistique descriptive.Le compte rendu de mon travail se scinde en quatre parties.PARTIE 1 : suite à une introduction générale, la première partie de mon tapuscrit montre la nécessité d'une évaluation bilan des compétences linguistiques des élèves réunionnais à la fin de l'école maternelle. Elle décrit également les objectifs généraux, les postures et les intentions qui sous-tendent cette évaluation.L'écart entre la langue de l'école et la langue de la maison est considéré à La Réunion comme un facteur aggravant des difficultés scolaires que rencontrent de nombreux élèves réunionnais dès les débuts de leur scolarisation. Il semblerait que pour devenir notamment de bons lecteurs, beaucoup d'entre eux ne disposent pas de compétences suffisantes en tant que locuteurs de la langue française. Parmi les propositions de remédiation proposées jusqu'à présent par les chercheurs ayant traité du sujet, il est souvent préconisé de prendre appui, dès la maternelle, sur les compétences acquises par les élèves en créole, considéré comme leur L1, pour composer une stratégie d'enseignement du français, qualifiée de langue seconde. Depuis peu, les politiques éducatives officiellement affichées pour l'Académie laissent entendre également à leur tour, de manière plus ou moins floue, la nécessité de prendre en compte le créole.Dans cette optique, certes louable si on se réfère à des travaux de didacticiens et de psycholinguistes sur les formes fortes d'enseignement en contexte bilingue (ex : Baker, Hamers et Blanc, Cummins), apparaissent cependant deux questions centrales qui devraient dès lors être soulevées, mais qui jusqu'à présent n'ont guère été posées : -Quelle est la qualité du créole parlé par les enfants « créolophones » d'aujourd'hui ?-Ces petits écoliers réunionnais, et notamment ceux qui rencontrent des difficultés en français, maîtrisent-ils vraiment le créole ? L'analyse des récents travaux de sociolinguistique ayant trait aux contacts de langues et à l'expansion de l'usage de l'interlecte dans la communauté réunionnaise (Prudent, Ledegen, Watin, Souprayen-Cavery, Rapanoël.), la prise en compte des remarques d'enseignants locaux du premier degré sur les lacunes des jeunes élèves non seulement en français mais également en créole, et celle des résultats de sondages déclarant une augmentation de la « transmission » du français par les mères réunionnaises, m'ont amenée à penser que le doute à ce sujet est permis ou du moins que le postulat « créole L1 » est à nuancer. Afin de mieux situer la finalité et le but de mon travail, j'ai donc entrepris dans un premier temps de démontrer que la donne en matière de pratiques langagières s'avère complexe et par conséquent, que les orientations didactiques gagneraient en sensibilité et en ancrage dans la situation locale, si elles s'appuyaient sur des points de repères concrets concernant le degré de maîtrise effective actuelle des deux codes en question par les élèves. Comment, en effet, prétendre pouvoir exploiter les acquis dans une langue (a priori L1-créole) pour mieux s'approprier l'autre (a priori L2-français), sans avoir pris la pleine mesure du degré de maîtrise des deux langues impliquées? Si des travaux ont été entamés concernant les compétences communicatives des écoliers en maternelle (Fioux et Marimoutou), mes recherches sur les « évaluations » locales menées jusque-là révèlent en effet que les chercheurs ne disposent d'aucun bilan relativement détaillé des compétences linguistiques actuelles des enfants réunionnais, d'une part en français, avant le passage au français écrit, après trois années de scolarisation pourtant explicitement axées sur l'acquisition des bases du français oral, et d'autre part en créole . Tout aussi déconcertant, eu égard aux enjeux scolaires, il apparaît qu'on ne dispose pas non plus d'outils d'évaluation pensés pour la situation locale, donc adaptés pour le recueil et l'analyse de ces compétences linguistiques orales auprès de jeunes enfants, alors qu'on se trouve dans une ancienne colonie française présentant une situation sociolinguistique ancrée dans la diglossie. Sur quelle base peut-on alors s'appuyer pour affirmer que les élèves réunionnais d'aujourd'hui, qu'on qualifie en masse de « créolophones », possèdent de solides compétences linguistiques en créole et des lacunes en français lorsqu'ils s'engagent dans le processus d'apprentissage systématique de la lecture ? C'est à partir de ces questionnements et de ces constats que j'ébauche une première circonscription de l'objectif de mon travail. Il s'agit de poser les prolégomènes d'une évaluation bilan, linguistique, comparée, en créole et en français, dont les soubassements méthodologiques seraient explicités, argumentés, mais aussi contextualisés et actualisés pour un public d'apprenants en fin de grande section de maternelle à La Réunion. Le but est de doter les didacticiens des langues œuvrant pour et auprès de petits écoliers réunionnais d'un outil suffisamment fin pour permettre d'enrichir la réflexion sur les stratégies d'enseignement/apprentissage du français, « éventuellement » à partir des acquis de ces élèves en créole. Bien que s'inscrivant en amont de l'acte d'évaluer, les délimitations que je propose d'établir font partie intégrante du processus d'évaluation. Plus précisément, il s'agit concrètement de construire un référentiel d'évaluation opérationnel présentant des critères d'évaluation, des normes de références et des épreuves pré-testées auprès d'un échantillon d'enfants de grande section, en français et en créole. Une fois ce dessein explicité, je pose les paramètres liminaires de ce processus d'évaluation. Le concevant avant tout comme « une réflexion sur les rapports aux valeurs », je me positionne alors, après une approche épistémologique de cet acte non anodin, en faveur d'une évaluation qui fasse sens. Suivant notamment Hadji, Lecointe, Bonniol et Vial ou encore Ardoino et Berger sur leurs remises en cause de la technicité de la docimologie à la recherche d'une objectivité illusoire, j'entreprends, comme eux, de déplacer la priorité de la justesse des résultats vers la logique et la transparence d'un processus objectivisé, amenant à un résultat pertinent qu'on peut comprendre, situer, relativiser en fonction d'une grille de lecture transparente et des intentions qui la sous-tendent. Pour ce faire, j'emprunte alors aux sciences de l'éducation, et notamment à G. Figari, le concept de référentialisation, au triple statut, opératoire, méthodologique et scientifique. S'ils ont été pensés originellement pour mener des évaluations de dispositifs (établissements scolaires, dispositifs de formation, curricula, etc.), je montre que les principes généraux de la référentialisation s'avèrent en réalité tout à fait transposables à l'étude que je mène. Nantie de ce fil rouge, ma référentialisation commence, dans une première étape, par un travail de réflexivité, pour tenter d'expliciter et situer ma propre posture de conceptrice d'évaluation, qui m'engage dans une responsabilité éthique. Il s'agit avant tout de prendre du recul sur le pouvoir détenu et auquel je suis soumise dans ce travail de recueil et d'utilisation d'une information à valeur sociale. Je m'attèle donc à poser et comprendre les enjeux sociaux et individuels liés à cet acte, mais également, en référence à la subjectivité inhérente à toute recherche en sciences humaines (de Robillard), à m'auto-positionner par rapport à mes propres représentations et inclinations concernant le choix d'une activité de référentialisation. Une deuxième étape découlant de la première me permet par ailleurs de préciser mes intentions dans cette évaluation. Après une revue des cheminements qui me sont offerts, j'en conclus qu'en rapport avec les objectifs visés, celles-ci se rapprochent au final plus de l'évaluation-appréciation que de l'évaluation-mesure et m'amènent à privilégier une approche qualitative.PARTIE 2 : la deuxième partie de ma thèse, qui relate la phase exploratoire de ma référentialisation, est entièrement dédiée à l'étape de la modélisation de mon objet d'évaluation. Je rends tout d'abord compte des investigations théoriques que j'ai menées afin de circonscrire l'objet à évaluer, à savoir l'objet langue. Il s'agit dans un premier temps de me positionner dans le débat sur la/les (im)possibilité(s) de délimitation de frontières entre créole et français, qui oppose structuralistes et variationnistes, et même variationnistes entre eux. J'aborde, pour ce faire, l'histoire du contact des langues de La Réunion, de la société de plantation à la société départementalisée, et confronte les concepts qui ont servi de filtres pour décrire le contact de langues créole/français (diglossie, continuum, interlecte, macrosystème). J'en viens finalement à trouver dans les arguments de de Robillard, dans sa réflexion plus large sur la définition d'une langue, les bases qui me poussent à adopter, pour les besoins précis de l'évaluation que je vise, une conception solide de la langue, amenant à voir le créole et le français sous un angle binarisé.Pour autant, je n'abandonne pas l'étude des phénomènes de mélanges relevés par les enseignants réunionnais chez leurs élèves et que d'aucuns (didacticiens et pédagogues) encensent comme un atout ou, au contraire, fustigent comme un handicap, voire associent à la manifestation d'un « semi-linguisme », comparativement aux discours de monolingues. Si mon inclination pour la sociolinguistique m'amène à voir les mélanges comme un quelconque mode discursif dans leur répertoire langagier et à réfuter un traitement des mélanges du point de vue de parasitages, la question que je me pose en tant que didacticienne cherchant à améliorer le processus d'enseignement/apprentissage du français est la suivante : en fin de compte, comment permettre à des évaluateurs de déterminer, indépendamment d'une reconnaissance de la capacité linguistique et pragmatique de ces jeunes élèves à "jongler" avec deux codes pour arriver à communiquer, si les mélanges effectués sont indicateurs :-de tactiques de « compensation » de lacunes dans l'une et/ou l'autre langue (les compétences étant alors meilleures dans une langue que dans l'autre ou insuffisantes dans les deux langues),-ou d'une « maîtrise » relativement bonne des deux codes (les compétences étant bonnes dans une langue comme dans l'autre), ce qui appelle des remédiations et/ou des pistes pédagogiques différentes ? Je décide dans cette optique d'établir l'état des lieux des recherches axées sur l'évaluation langagière et linguistique de « bilingues ». Je m'intéresse notamment aux traitements de la problématique des mélanges, des plus « fermés » (cf. les travaux de Titone, Fioux, Genelot et al.), aux plus « ouverts » (cf. les travaux de Moore, Cavalli, Stubbe et Peña.). En les soupesant en regard de mes objectifs, il m'apparaît alors que, pour mon type d'évaluation comparée, requérant des langues cibles bien distinctes, l'approche binarisée qui peut répondre à mes questions de départ s'avère pertinente. Poursuivant mes investigations théoriques, j'affine mon cadre de recherche en déterminant ce que sous-entend être un bon locuteur d'une langue. En abordant les notions de compétence vs performance, en passant en revue les points de vue de didacticiens des langues (Canale et Swain, De Pietro, Cuq, Beacco, Springer, Castellotti,.), d'interactionnistes (Hymes, Vasseur), de psycholinguistes (Lentin, Florin, Gombert.), de pédagogues (Boisseau), de chercheurs spécialisés dans l'évaluation du langage (Rondal, Comblain, Piérart, Muller.), mais aussi en prenant en considération les directives en matière de maîtrise du langage (Ministère de l'Education Nationale) et les préconisations concernant l'appropriation des langues étrangères (Conseil de l'Europe), je décide de centrer mon référentiel sur l'évaluation des compétences morphosyntaxiques, et de privilégier aussi bien le recueil d'échantillons de langage provoqué que de langage spontané.Ma phase exploratoire comprend également des investigations de terrain. Je commence par décrire les lieux d'enquête (situés en grande partie auprès d'élèves bénédictins de grande section de maternelle mais également au Tampon et à Pau), l'échantillonnage (choix des écoles, des classes, des enfants) et les moyens dont j'ai usés (démarche ethnologique, interactions filmées, activités réalisées, protocoles suivis). En sus de me fournir une meilleure connaissance des caractéristiques de ces jeunes témoins, grâce notamment à une observation participante, et de tester la pertinence de différents supports, tâches, approches d'évaluation et de systèmes de transcription de la parole interlectale, je montre que ce travail de terrain me permet de faire plusieurs constats qui corroborent l'hypothèse que j'avais formulée lors de mes investigations théoriques. En croisant divers facteurs saillants que j'ai pu relever, tels que les pratiques langagières (que j'étiquette sans hiérarchie « bi-linguisme », « mix-linguisme », « dominance en créole » et « dominance en français »), les représentations linguistiques, les attitudes face à la norme scolaire et la capacité à discriminer les deux codes linguistiques, aussi bien par les témoins que par moi-même dans le rôle d'évaluateur, j'ai pu en effet mesurer, parallèlement à des résultats prometteurs, la complexité et les limites d'une évaluation binarisée en termes de recueil et d'analyse de données, notamment lorsque l'évaluateur est face à certains profils langagiers d'enfants dans ce contexte de contact de langues proches. En effet, si une appréhension binaire, volontairement et « classiquement » lissée pour des besoins didactiques semble convenir pour évaluer, comparer la qualité des compétences d'enfants en créole et en français, le contexte local de contact de langues proches, empreint de représentations diglossiques et loin de se restreindre à des pratiques binaires bien délimitées et délimitables, m'amène à penser qu'un référentiel de ce type est susceptible d'avoir une portée limitée. C'est une hypothèse qu'il m'appartiendra alors de vérifier dans la suite de mon travail.PARTIE 3 : éclairée d'une meilleure connaissance du potentiel, des bornes et des astreintes concrètes d'une approche binarisée, l'étape suivante de ma référentialisation s'engage sur le choix des critères et des indicateurs qui permettront d'évaluer de jeunes enfants non lecteurs, à l'oral, en français et en créole. Ceci fait l'objet de la troisième partie de mon tapuscrit.Avant d'entrer dans le vif du sujet, je commence par un préambule indispensable, il me semble, sur les rapports de force en jeu dans l'activité normative (entre prescription et description, priorités, relativité et arbitraire, légitimité(s).). Sur ce sujet sensible, soumis à de fortes polémiques, aussi bien dans la communauté scientifique de manière générale que parmi les locuteurs évoluant dans la communauté réunionnaise, je présente dans une posture double de sociolinguiste et de didacticienne, mon propre positionnement par rapport à la notion de « norme(s) ». Pour que ma démarche soit mieux comprise et parce que je juge essentielle cette prise de recul face à un concept marginalisant souvent celui/celle qui y a recours (en dehors des praticiens), je pose explicitement le caractère relatif, construit et pourtant nécessaire, dans mon cas, de la norme pour ce référentiel. J'explique par ailleurs également ma légitimité de conceptrice de références normatives d'un point de vue variationniste, dans le cadre théorique choisi pour ce travail d'évaluation. Pour construire les références normatives de mon outil, le protocole méthodologique que je décide d'emprunter est le suivant :1.partir de descriptions déjà consignées des usages,-en créole (n'existent alors que des articles scientifiques, des grammaires, des dictionnaires qui ne décrivent que les normes d'usage d'adultes (Staudacher, Watbled, Chaudenson, Ramassamy, Cellier.)),-et en français (comprenant les travaux sur le français standard (Riegel et al., Arrivé et al., Wagner et Pinchon.), le français parlé (Gadet, Blanche-Benvéniste, Sauvageot.), le français régional (Carayol, Ledegen, Béniamino et Baggioni), le français parlé par les enfants (Florin, Boisseau, Comblain.)), 2.synthétiser et confronter ces travaux, non seulement entre eux mais également à mes propres recherches et compétences de locutrice native sur les items morphosyntaxiques en question, 3.afin de pouvoir procéder ensuite à un choix de critères, dont la pertinence sera à chaque fois justifiée, pour le langage provoqué et le langage spontané, 4. proposer des normes de références (indicateurs) permettant d'évaluer ces critères. Pour le créole, s'agissant à ce stade de normes provisoires,5.ajuster, actualiser ces dernières pour un public de jeunes enfants, en analysant le discours spontané en créole d'enfants réunionnais de maternelle (les « informateurs de référence»), dominants en créole ou bi-lingues.Un peu plus de trois centaines de pages de mon tapuscrit rendent compte de l'élaboration et du choix de ces critères et de ces indicateurs. Elles laissent rapidement voir un déséquilibre manifeste tant qualitatif que quantitatif entre l'état des connaissances en créole et en français. Dans un travail de grammairienne, descriptive mais également prescriptive, qui doit trier et compléter, pour le créole, des descriptions existantes certes intéressantes mais souvent contradictoires, délestées des variétés émergentes et complètement lacunaires en ce qui concerne les formes enfantines, j'aborde l'actualisation du thème verbal (système flexionnel, système analytique, indice i, règles de troncation), les pronoms personnels, la valence des thèmes verbaux, la modalité interrogative et la modalité négative. PARTIE 4 : la quatrième et dernière partie de ma référentialisation est d'abord consacrée à prendre la mesure des paramètres généraux de la conception de tâches d'évaluation et du recueil de données pour et auprès d'enfants. Suite à une revue de la littérature sur le sujet (notamment les travaux de Rondal, Moreau et Richelle, Khomsi, Florin, Brédart, Gombert, Marquillo.), je mets alors en avant deux considérations relatives aux critères de pertinence et de validité dans une évaluation, lors du recueil de données. Elles concernent les types d'activités généralement proposées dans les évaluations langagières (compréhension, production, détection et correction d'énoncés), et les tâches permettant de recueillir des comportements observables (avec un centrage sur leurs portées, biais, supports et consignes). Je clôture cette revue en apportant mes propres remarques, critiques et impressions sur l'expérience d'élaboration d'outils de recueil de données que j'ai pu développer sur le terrain réunionnais.Dans un deuxième temps, je présente et commente les épreuves pilotes que j'ai pré-testées auprès d'une centaine d'enfants de grande section, lors de séances d'évaluation individuelles, filmées et analysées.Cette banque d'épreuves est composée de 39 fiches classées selon qu'il s'agit d'évaluer des compétences en créole, des compétences en français ou des compétences « bilingues » (traduction, discrimination codique). Ces fiches présentent les tâches d'évaluation que j'ai élaborées et dont j'ai pré-testé la faisabilité, la pertinence et la sensibilité. Elles détaillent, pour chaque item syntaxique évalué, les critères pris en considération, le type d'activité choisi, les performances attendues, les supports de l'épreuve, les indications sur son organisation, les consignes, mais également les énoncés-amorces éventuellement prévus pour l'évaluateur, une analyse d'exemples de réponses "correctes" et "incorrectes" recueillis auprès des témoins pré-testés, et enfin des commentaires généraux sur l'épreuve en question (difficultés, variantes, précautions.). CONCLUSION : mon tapuscrit se clôt par une conclusion générale. Celle-ci synthétise tout d'abord les différentes étapes de ma référentialisation ainsi que leurs résultats, et revient sur les améliorations qui pourraient y être apportées. Elle présente dans un deuxième temps les apports de ce travail de recherche, qui soulève aussi des questionnements et permet de faire des propositions.Les apports comprennent notamment : -Une recherche théorique mais également de terrain auprès d'une centaine d'enfants réunionnais qui permet la mise à disposition d'un outil d'évaluation opératoire, adapté aux caractéristiques de petits écoliers réunionnais de grande section de maternelle et proposant des tâches détaillées, éprouvées et des repères normatifs concrets. Ces fiches sont utilisables en l'état, au final autant par des chercheurs en didactique des langues que par des praticiens, amenés à évaluer des compétences grammaticales orales de jeunes enfants à La Réunion.-De manière générale, un éclairage méthodologique concernant le recueil et l'analyse de données orales auprès de jeunes écoliers non lecteurs dans un contexte diglossique, et dans une situation de contact de langues proches.-Un enrichissement des travaux de description synchronique de la morphosyntaxe du français, mais surtout du créole de La Réunion, notamment :»par la prise en compte des variations intrasystémiques et intersystémiques (les formes émergentes actuelles dues à la dynamique interne du créole et au contact avec le français, les formes enfantines, le langage des jeunes), »par l'approche synthétique adoptée (analyse comparée de travaux, élaboration de tableaux récapitulatifs).Mais ce travail de référentialisation soulève également des questionnements pour la recherche, sur plusieurs points :Sur le plan didactique : -Cette étude montrant l'indispensable prise en compte des représentations linguistiques, des pratiques langagières, des compétences pragmatiques des élèves lors du processus de recueil de données orales, quelle validité, quelle pertinence peuvent avoir des évaluations lissées, hermétiques à la situation de contact de langues proches et aux spécificités des enfants réunionnais, comme les évaluations académiques en français, duplications d'évaluations métropolitaines a-contextualisées, conçues pour un public monolingue déjà francophone ?-Quelle pertinence ont les propositions d'exploitation didactique et explicite, « en l'état », du créole « L1 » comme tremplin pour atteindre le français L2, alors que les pré-tests menés lors de ma recherche laissent déjà entrevoir certes une majorité de témoins présentant des compétences grammaticales de base en français lacunaires, mais également des écoliers (même dominants créolophones), rencontrant des difficultés d'expression, voire de compréhension, en créole ?-La plupart des descriptions grammaticales actuellement disponibles ne prenant guère en compte les variations intra- et intersystémiques du créole, n'y aurait-il pas des répercussions sur la portée des propositions didactiques pour l'enseignement du français en partenariat avec le créole ? Sur le plan des recherches sur l'évaluation linguistique : -La perspective binaire choisie dans ce travail, jugée pertinente pour comparer des compétences linguistiques en créole et en français, présente des limites et ne peut notamment prendre en considération, en l'état, tous les profils langagiers d'enfants (par exemple, les mix-lingues non-discriminants). Au-delà d'une évaluation créole/français, quelle alternative avons-nous pour apprécier les compétences linguistiques, notamment morpho-syntaxiques, de ces enfants dont la parole tellement (a)maillée et sans « langue » cible ne peut être analysée dans ce cadre ? Faut-il mesurer ces compétences « bilingues » pour elles-mêmes, sans référence au créole et au français, comme tentent de le faire de manière relativement marginale certains chercheurs dans d'autres contextes linguistiques (ex : Stubbe et Peña pour des bilingues américano-hispanophones aux Etats-Unis) ? Mais ce qui semble possible pour des langues « non collatérales » l'est-il pour des langues génétiquement et structurellement proches ? En effet, une évaluation bilingue prenant comme référence normative la morphosyntaxe de l'ensemble du macrosystème réunionnais, donc une langue « fluide », où l'évaluateur ne dispose pas de normes de référence explicitées/explicitables a priori et donc justifiées/justifiables, est-elle envisageable ? Bien qu'elle laisse voir sa pertinence sur le plan pédagogique, et réponde au critère de recherche de sens, comment justifierait-elle son objectivisation lorsque l'évaluateur ne fait que « « (re)sentir » que ça se dit » et donc détient en lui-même des règles « mouvantes », insaisissables de locuteur natif de l'interlecte ? Comment gérer cette incontournable implication dérogeant aux bases de toute évaluation, lorsque les références normatives sont intériorisées et a priori non externalisables ?Ce travail de recherche permet enfin d'émettre des préconisations et propositions pour des pistes de travail concernant la didactique du français en partenariat avec le créole : -S'attacher à identifier les conditions de conscientisation des codes par des enfants actuellement discriminants (sans guidage scolaire), pour l'étude de pistes permettant aux écoliers, dès la petite section, de discriminer des traits prototypiques du créole et du français.-Prendre davantage en considération l'hétérogénéité des profils langagiers des enfants réunionnais qui ne sont pas à considérer comme une masse linguistiquement homogène (même dans les écoles de quartiers dits défavorisés) et continuer la réflexion sur la prise en compte du macrosystème langagier réunionnais.-Compléter les recherches sur le créole parlé actuellement par la population réunionnaise (enfants, jeunes, adultes) et ouvrir ces descriptions à toutes les variations.-Briser le caractère ésotérique des ouvrages de descriptions grammaticales actuels et encourager la publication d'ouvrages de vulgarisation, non puristes, « accessibles » au public des étudiants (futurs enseignants) en formation mais également à celui des enseignants déjà en poste.-Prendre davantage en compte et faire évoluer les représentations négatives de la population locale (notamment les parents d'élèves), concernant le partenariat (direct ou indirect) avec le créole. Ce sujet faisant l'objet de fortes tensions sur le terrain scolaire, étudier des possibilités d'approches alternatives (exploitation du médium télévisuel, création/exploitation de structures éducatives parallèles comme des associations de type « ti lékol maron » ou des centres de loisirs), privilégiant la maîtrise du langage avec un aspect ludique, dans un contexte « apaisé ».

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 51.2 of the Review for Religious, March/April 1992. ; 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. Manuscripts, books for review, and correspondence with the editor: Review for Religious ¯ 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393. Correspondence about the "Canonical Counsel" department: Elizabeth McDonough OP ¯ 5001 Eastern Avenue ¯ P.O. Box 29260 ~,¥ashington, D.C. 20017. I}OSTMASTER Send address changes to Review for Religious ¯ P.O. Box 6070 ¯ Duluth, MN 55806. Second-class postage paid at St. Louis, Missouri, and additional offices. SUBSCRIPTION RATES Single copy $5.00 includes surface mailing costs. One-year subscription $15.00 plus mailing costs. Two-year subscription $28.00 plus mailing costs. See inside back cover for subscription information and mailing costs. ©1992 Review for Religious for religious Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Assistant Editors Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Michael G. Harter sJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe David J. Hassel SJ Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden SSND Se;in Sammon FMS Wendy Wright PhD Suzanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living MARCH / APRIL1992 ¯ VOLUMES1 ¯ NUMBER2 contents 166 182 191 2O6 217 229 236 ministry and ministries The Spiritual Exercises as a Foundation for Educational Ministry Walter J. Burghardt SJ reflects on the vision and values given to educational ministry when it is permeated by the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Going the Distance, Sustaining the Gift Melannie Svoboda SND suggests some concrete ways that people can joyfully exercise their ministry over the long haul. Newman's Living the Oratory Charism Halbert G. Weidner CO explains the Oratory foundation of Philip Neri in order to highlight values significant to John Henry Newman's life. theology and spirituality The Resurrection Kernel Dennis Billy CSSR outlines the basic principle of the doctrine of the resurrection in order to show its influence in our way of living. The Fragile Connection between Prayer and Suffering Matthias Neuman OSB speaks from his own experience of how human suffering affects our prayer. To Choose Jesus for My Heaven Donald Macdonald SMM finds Julian of Norwich's insights into the maternal love of Jesus expressed in the Blessed Sacrament. religious life and renewal Seeing in the Dark Janet Ruffing RSM finds light in John of the Cross's description of the Dark Night for understanding the current turmoil in reli-gious life. 162 Review for Religious 249 260 267 Memories of the Future Thomas McKenna CM shows how eschatology as a style of thinking provides understanding for the renewal efforts in reli-gious life. Integrating Postmodernity and Tradition Reid Perkins OP encourages the greater use of narratives in reli-gious life to connect us to the tradition and at the same time to help us overcome the obliviousness of postmodern life. Religious-Life Issues in a Time of Transition John A. Grindel CM and Sean Peters CSJ summarize the results of various studies of U.S. religious life funded by the Lilly Endowment and point to issues still to be dealt with. living religiously 276 Cultivating Uselessness Rose Hoover RC proposes that in the very experience of useless-ness and foolishness lies the gift of religious life to a pragmatic society. 282 Therapy for Religious: The Troublesome Triangle Joyce Harris OSC offers some suggestions for a collaborative rela-tionship among therapist, the individual religious, and the com-munity and its representative. 289 294 Prenovitiate: Theory and Practice Anthony Steel SSG believes a prenovitiate program can help meet the challenges of contemporary cultural attitudes toward religious life and outlines the plan for his community. report U.S. Hispanic Catholics: Trends and Works 1991 Kenneth Davis OFM Conv reviews the various events and writ-ings in the Catholic Hispanic experience. departments 164 Prisms 303 Canonical Counseh Hermits and Virgins 309 Book Reviews March-April 1992 163 prisms Teilhard de Chardin in The Divine Milieu observes that the larger half of our lives is made up of what happens to us. His observation comes home to us each year as we celebrate the great high holy days of Christianity-- Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Paradoxically Jesus accomplishes the work of redemption, his life's purpose, in what happens to him in his suffering, death, and resurrection. We enter into this paradox by our celebration of these days. We cannot change history, we cannot undo what has happened. Our celebration allows us in our own time to enter into what happened to Jesus and to be with him, to stand alongside, to feel com-passion- as helplessly as we listen to someone tell of being tortured by a totalitarian regime or as we sit at the bedside of a dying loved one. No activity of ours changes the event; compassionate presence is the difficult but precious gift we can give. Of course it is also our privilege to share in some-one's joy and happiness, as we do when we celebrate the res-urrection victory of Jesus. Despite the fact that so many of us are spectator-sports people, whether in the stadium or in front of the TV set, we are not comfortable being spectators of an evil we can-not eliminate and sometimes even of a happiness which lit-tle touches our lives. We may find other people's parties empty of fun for ourselves, and we may dread visiting a neighbor in the hospital.We would rather not drive through derelict inner-city neighborhoods, we would brush past the homeless person sleeping over heating grates in our down-towns, or we would switch TV channels if the images of starving Sudanese children with distended stomachs are too graphic. The problems seem too large for our efforts to make a difference. Our activity and our emotions seem 164 Review for Religious frozen. Even though we are members of the Body of Christ, we often choose not to see and not to hear. When hostages return exuberantly to waiting families, when a comatose girl revives to the joy of her parents, when government agencies extend unemployment benefits for those hurting in a reces-sion economy, how often do we feel a thrill and utter a prayer of thanks to God? Too often we keep ourselves emotionally distant even from the joys of others around us, probably because they just "happen" and leave us personally unaffected. St. Paul could state, by analogy with our human bodies, that if one member suffers all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members share its joy. The Easter events challenge us always in what we do and in what happens to us. If God is truly the God of our life, then we find the opportunity of meeting God both in what we set out to do and in what happens to us. Jesus' crucifixion confronts the activist in each of us to question our judgment about our most valued "work." All of our dyings become not the entropy of exhaustive waste, but graced moments of freedom to embrace another givenness of life from our God of life. When St. Paul challenged death--"Where is your sting?"--he did not close his eyes to the evils and losses which all the forms of dying represent. He trumpeted the Easter message that the Christ-redemption event changes not only our attitude but also our ability to value the whole of our life--its successes and accomplishments, its apparent waste matter of sin and failure. As Gospel models, Mary Magdalene (who may have confused sex and love) and Peter (who has grabbed for success and lied for survival) are the first among the evangelizers of this new creation event. Pope John Paul's appeal for a new evangelization takes form in us by our renewed attempt to integrate the active and passive aspects of our daily life. By living faith-lives as "other Christs" we make a dif-ference in what we do and in what we suffer. The call to a new evan-gelization invites us to explore further the struggles of justice and poverty and human living both at our doorstep and in our larger world. Making a difference often seems like planting seeds and hav-ing to wait for things to happen. Easter faith stirs us up in hope, moves us out in action, and integrates us in a compassionate patience. This Easter may the risen Lord embrace us anew with the grace of his passion for life. David L. Fleming sJ March-April 1992 165 WALTER J. BURGHARDT The Spiritual Exercises as a Foundation for Educational Ministry ministry and ministries To speak of basing an educational ministry on the Spiritual Exercises is something of a paradox, an apparent contra-diction. Two things simply do not seem to fit. Are not the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola an experience of the spirit, a thirty-day or eight-day retreat centered on the movement of the Christian soul to heaven, conducted in solitude, far from hustle and bustle, and preferably in silence? And is not a university or college a citadel of the intellect, where the stress is on knowledge, on books, where minds meet in constant conflict, where ideas clash, where noise is in the air, where silence is reserved for a corner of the library? I am not saying that the Spiritual Exercises and the groves of academe are interchangeable terms, that a col-lege or university is a retreat experience, that the class-room is a chapel, that learning is worship. My thesis is that the Spiritual Exercises can be, indeed should be, an exciting foundation for education Jesuit-style. More specif-ically, I see the Spiritual Exercises as a process of conver-sion which in an educational institution aims at altering in students, faculty, and staff (1) their world of learning, the Walter J. Burghardt SJ is director of the Woodstock Theo-logical Center Project Preaching the ffust Word. This article retains the flavor of its original oral presentation made at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, in April 1991. Father Burghardt's address is Manresa-on-Severn; P.O. Box 9; Annapolis, Maryland 21404. 166 Review for Religious life of the mind; (2) their world of loving, their human and reli-gious imagination and affection; (3) their world of living, the life of social realities. Let me explain what I mean in each of these three cases. First, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of learn-ing, that is, the life of your mind. You see, basic to the life of the mind, at the root of a university's existence, is a momentous mono-syllable: Why? Why study art and the arts, physical science or political science, law or business or medicine? Now Ignatius does not ask that question in those terms. But "spiritual exercises" he defines as "every way of preparing and disposing" ourselves to remove "all disordered attachments and, after their removal, of seeking and finding God's will in the way we direct our lives.''1 And there definitely are disordered approaches to the life of the mind, strange reasons why some go to college or university or professional school. I am not thinking of the more superficial reasons--college as a four-year Hammer dance2 interrupted by class. I am thinking of an approach to business education guided by a powerful principle: what makes the world go round is economics, and what makes the economy work is greed, the almighty dollar. I am thinking of gifted music and drama students whose aim is fame, the lust for applause, even the TV laugh machine. I am thinking of political-science students whose primary purpose is political power, the thrill in manipulating other men and women. A heart-rending example in this area is Lee Atwater, the manager of George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign who almost single-handedly turned the tide against Dukakis. Not long before his death at forty from a brain tumor on 29 March, this gifted man~ with an incredible instinct for the jugular made this poignant confession: The '80s were about acquiring--acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know, I acquired more wealth, power and pres-tige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.3 Not that money, fame, power are immoral in themselves; they are not. Without money a university would have little to offer to anyone. Fame makes it easier for the deprived to know you, to beg for the crumbs that fall from your table. Political power makes March-April 1992 167 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry possible not only a Persian Gulf war but legislated housing for the poor. Ignatius forces on the retreatant that insistent mono-syllable: Why? Even more radically, the Spiritual Exercises can keep you from segregating learning into a pigeonhole of its own, divorced from the thrust of the spirit towards God. I do not mean that all of learning becomes a religious enterprise. Vatican II made that quite clear. With Vatican I, it distinguished "'two orders of knowl-edge' which are distinct," declared that "the Church does not indeed forbid that 'when the human arts and sciences are practiced they use their own principles and their proper method, each in its own domain.'" In consequence, the council "affirms the legiti-mate autonomy of human culture and especially of the sciences.''4 My point is, the life of the mind is perilously impoverished if knowledge does not lead to wonder. Not sheer questioning: I wonder if Israel should continue populating the West Bank. In the grasp of wonder I marvel: I am surprised, amazed, delighted, enraptured. It is MaW pregnant by God's Spirit: "My spirit finds delight in God my Savior" (Lk 1:47). It is Magdalen about to touch her risen Jesus: "Master!" (Jn 20:16). It is doubting Thomas discovering his God in the wounds of Jesus. It is Michelangelo striking his sculptured Moses: "Speak!" It is Alexander Fleming fascinated by the very first antibiotic, America thrilling to the first footsteps on the moon. It is Mother Teresa cradling a naked retarded child in the rubble of West Beirut, a crippled old man in the excrement of Calcutta. It is the wonder of a first kiss. Such, sooner or later, should be your reaction to the life of learning, such the wonder that should permeate the life of your mind. Not a new methodology for biology or psychology; simply awe in the presence of a fascinating four-letter reality: life. The multifaceted, myriad miracle of life. Amazement at what breadths and depths there are to being alive--from the architectural artistry of the ant and the grace of a loping panther, through the blind-ing speed of a white marlin and the majestic flight of the bald eagle, to the beating heart of a unique fetus, the inspired imagery of Shakespeare, the fantastic forty-eight measures of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker," the transforming insight of Einstein. With such wonder you may hope to touch the pinnacle of knowledge. For, as philosopher Jacques Maritain discovered, the height of human knowing is not conceptual; it is experiential. Man or woman feels God. Yes, feels" God. 168 Review for Religious Am I ignoring Ignatius? Have I been distracted from his Spiritual Exercises? Quite the contrary. The Spiritual Exercises are an adventure in experience, in wonder. With all the power of your mental faculties, you enter the kingdom of contemplation--what contemplative William McNamara called % long loving look at the real." The real: all there is--the things of God, the people of God, God's very self. And the high purpose of all this? To be struck, surprised, stunned by the wonder of it all--from the ecstasy of Eden unspoiled, through sin's rape of the earth and earth's dwellers, to the unique love of God-in-our-flesh pinned to a cross, and our rebirth in his rising from the rock. The net effect? Ignatius's final contemplation, the acme of the Exercises: Learning to Love Like God. Here you touch the heart of Ignatius, his awareness of the ceaseless presence of Christ to our earth--now. "Consider," he counsels, "how [Christ] labors for me in all creatures.''s Not a vague, ultrapious generality. Christ behaves like a worker, a laborer, in each and every creature of his creation. How is it that the Rockies still rise in breathtaking splendor, Venus shines brighter than any star, and oil gushes from the fields of Nebraska? Because a risen Christ gives them being. Not once for all; continuously, day after day. How is it that forsythia can herald the approach of spring, corn turn into hot buttered popcorn for your theater, giant red-woods stalk the California sky? Because an imaginative Christ gives them life. How is it that your Irish setter can smell the game beyond your ken, gulls scavenge your ocean, the shad ascend the waters? Because a sensitive Christ gives them senses. How is it that you, this wondrous wedding of molecules and spirit, can shape an idea or send a skyscraper soaring, unveil mystery in a microscope or telescope, join with another--man or woman or God--in deathless oneness? Because Christ labors in you to give you intelligence and love--intelligence that mimics the mind of God, love that stems from a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A thing of beauty and a joy for ever, this life of the mind. But only if the arts and sciences, if professions like law and medicine and business, that legitimately engross you open you to the still richer reality that surrounds you, invades you, transcends you, gives fresh life to the mind you treasure so rightly, the mind you The life of the mind is perilously impoverished if knowledge does not lead to wonder. March-April 1992 169 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry accept so lightly. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises are not the only "way to go." But for openers in two senses--a beginning and an opening--as a basis, a foundation, for the life of the mind, the Spiritual Exercises are an experience difficult to exceed. Second, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of loving, that is, your human and religious imagination and affec-tion. Basic to this affirmation is a realization: The life of the human spirit is not circumscribed by reason, by your ability to grasp ideas, to draw conclusions from facts and premises. If your intellectual existence is simply a model of Cartesian clarity, you are limping along on one leg. What is the lamentable lacuna? Imagination. What is this strange creature we call imagination?6 To begin with, what is imagination not? It is not the same thing as fantasy. Fantasy has come to mean the grotesque, the bizarre. That is fan-tastic which is unreal, irrational, wild, unrestrained. We speak of "pure fantasy": It has no connection with reality. It is imagination run wild, on the loose, unbridled, uncontained.7 What is it, then? Imagination is the capacity we have "to make the material an image of the immaterial or spiritual.''8 It is a cre-ative power. You find it in Rembrandt's self-portraits, in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in the odor of a new rose or the flavor of an old wine. You find it in dramatists like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, in poets from Sappho to Gerard Manley Hopkins, in storytellers like C.S. Lewis and Stephen King. Now, when I say "capacity," I do not mean a "faculty" like intellect or will. I mean rather a posture of my whole person towards my experience.9 It is a way of seeing. It is, as with Castaneda, looking for the holes in the world or listening to the space between sounds. It is a breaking through the obvious, the surface, the superficial, to the reality beneath and beyond. It is the world of wonder and intuition, of amazement and delight, of fes-tivity and play. How does imagination come to expression? Let me focus on specifically religious imagination. I sketch five ways. 1. A vision. I mean "the emergence either in dreams, trance, or ecstasy, of a pattern of images, words, or dreamlike dramas which are experienced then, and upon later reflection, as having revelatory significance." 10 Examples? Isaiah's vision of the Lord in the temple (Is 6); Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus and the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-9); Joan of Arc's "voices"; St. Margaret Mary's vision of the Sacred Heart. 170 Review for Religious 2. Ritual. The form of ritual is action--public, dramatic, pat-terned. A group enacts the presence of the sacred and partici-pates in that presence, usually through some combination of dance, chant, sacrifice, or sacrament.11 3. Story. I mean a narrative, a constellation of images, that recounts incidents or events. As Sallie TeSelle put it, "We all love a good story because of the basic nar-rative quality of human experience: in a sense any story is about ourselves, and a good story is good precisely because somehow it rings true to human life . We recognize our pilgrimage from here to there in a good story.''12 For the religious imagina-tion, three types of stories are particularly impor-tant: parable, allegory, and myth; the parables of Jesus, Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia," and the Creation myth.13 4. The fine arts. I mean painting and poetry, sculpture and architecture, music, dancing, and dra-matic art. I mean da Vinci and John Donne, the "PietY" and Chartres, Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis," David whirling and skipping before the Ark of the Covenant, the mystery dramas of the Middle Ages. I mean films. 5. Symbol. What symbol means is not easy to say, for even within theology it does not have a univocal sense. Let me define it, with Avery Dulles, as "an externally perceived sign that works mysteriously on the human consciousness so as to suggest more than it can clearly describe or define." 14 Not every sign is a sym-bol. A mere indicator ("This way to the art museum") is not a symbol. "The symbol is a sign pregnant with a depth of meaning which is evoked rather than explicitly stated.''is It might be an artifact, a person, an event, words, a story--parable, allegory, myth. The importance of symbols, of imagination, in a university? I make three points. First, imagination is not at odds with knowl-edge; imagination is a form of cognition. In Whitehead's words, "Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts; it is a way of illuminating the facts.''16 True, it is not a process of reasoning; it is not abstract thought, conceptual analysis, rational demonstra-tion, syllogistic proof. Notre Dame of Paris is not a thesis in the-ology; Lewis's famous trilogy does not demonstrate the origin of evil; Hopkins is not analyzing God's image in us when he sings Imagination is not at odds with knowledge; imagination is a form of cognition. Marcb-April 1992 171 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry that "Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men's faces.''17 And still, imaging and imagining is a work of our intellectual nature; through it our spirit reaches the true, the beautiful, and the good. Second, imagination does not so much teach as evoke; it calls something forth from you. And so it is often ambiguous; the image can be understood in different ways. Do you remember the reporters who asked Martha Graham, "Miss Graham, what does your dance mean?" She replied: "Darlings, if I could tell you, I would not have danced it!" Something is lost when we move from imagining to thinking, from art to conceptual clarity. Not that imagination is arbitrary, that "Swan Lake" or the Infancy Narrative or "Hamlet" or the Transfiguration is whatever anyone wants to make of it, my gut feeling. Hostile to a valid imagina-tion is "the cult of imagination for itself alone; vision, phantasy, ecstasy for their own sakes; creativity, spontaneity on their own, without roots, without tradition, without discipline.''1~ Amos Wilder was right: "Inebriation is no substitute for paideia.''19 And still it is true, the image is more open-ended than the con-cept, less confining, less imprisoning. The image evokes our own imagining. Third, religion itself is a system of symbols. As sociologist Andrew Greeley saw, "religion was symbol and story long before it became theology and philosophy and., the poetry of religion was not inferior to its prose but rather anterior to it and, in terms of the whole human person, in some ways superior to it.''2° Biblical revelation is highly symbolic. Skim the Hebrew Scriptures: a burning bush, the miracles of the Exodus, the theo-phanies of Sinai, the "still small voice" heard by Elijah, the visions of the prophets and seers. Scan the New Testament: the circum-stances surrounding Jesus' conception and birth, the descent of the Spirit in the form of a dove, the transfiguration, Calvary, the res-urrection. Take key themes like the kingdom of God, its expres-sion in Jesus' proverbial sayings, in the Lord's Prayer, in the Gospel parables. The kingdom is not a clear concept with a uni-vocal significance. It is a symbol that "can represent or evoke a whole range or series of conceptions or ideas.''21 Turn from Scripture to the Catholic-Protestant problematic. Greeley's research persuades him that "the fundamental differ-ences between Catholicism and Protestantism are not doctrinal or 172 Review for Religious ethical" but "differing sets of symbols.''22 Take the central symbol: God.23 The classical literature of the Catholic tradition assumes a God who is present in the world, disclosing Himself in and through creation. The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be somewhat like God. The Protestant classics, on the other hand, assume a God who is radically absent from the world and who discloses Herself only on rare occasions (especially in Jesus Christ and Him cruci-fied). The world and all its events, objects, and people tend to be radically different from God.24 Even more concretely, Greeley insists, their different images of God account for different religious behavior between Catholics and Protestants. In the Protestant imagination God is perceived as distant (father, judge, king, master); in the Catholic imagination God is perceived as present (mother, lover, friend, spouse).2s Another crucial example: two approaches to human society shaped by different imaginative pictures. The Catholic tends to see society as a "sacrament" of God, a set of ordered relationships, governed by both justice and love, that reveal, however imperfectly, the presence of God. Society is "natural" and "good," therefore, for humans and their natural response to God is social. The Protestant, on the other hand, tends to see human society as "God-for-saken" and therefore unnatural and oppressive. The indi-vidual stands over against society and not integrated into it. The human becomes fully human only when he is able to break away from social oppression and relate to the absent God as a completely free individual.26 A final example from Greeley's sociological research: The image that most sharply distinguishes the Catholic tradition from other Christian traditions is Mary the mother of Jesus. No one else has Madonna statues in church. MaW is essen-tial to Catholicism, not perhaps on the level of doctrine but surely on the level of imagination, because she more than any other image blatantly confirms the sacramental instinct: the whole of creation and all its processes, especially its lifegiving and life-nurturing processes, reveal the lurking and passionate love of God.27 Once again, have I been distracted from Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises? Not really. The Exercises, for all their appeal to the Christian intelligence, are not a head trip. They are first and foremost an experience. An experience of Catholic symbols: Adam and Eve and Eden, angels and Satan, hellfire, a virgin and a crib, March-April 1992 173 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry The events of Jesus" earthly existence must be seen as a 'today." Egypt and Jerusalem, the transfiguration, bread and wine, blood and water from the side of Christ, nail marks in risen hands, an ascension into heaven. But the experience is not cold reason. Take the experience of sin's devastating impact on angels and humans, sin's ravishing of God's good earth. When you go through the Spiritual Exercises, you do not simply define sin, recall a traditional definition: any thought, word, or action against God's law. Your senses get into the act: you smell sin's stench. Even more importantly, you see sin's cost, image it, weep over it; for sin's cost is a cross, the pierced hands of a God-man. The God-man. The Exercises are a constant contemplation--contemplation of Christ. Never abstract theology, though theology informs it all. In Bethlehem's cave you are a servant; you not only listen to Mary and Joseph, you "smell the infinite flagrance and taste the infinite sweetness of the divinity.''28 You flee with that unique family into Egypt, feel what it means to be a refugee in the Middle East. In a decisive meditation you not only contrast "two standards," two scenarios for orienting your life. The standards take flesh in two persons: in a Satan who inspires "horror and terror," who makes you lust for riches, for honor, for pride; and in a living Christ who attracts you to poverty, insults, and humil-ity.: 9 It is not only Jesus who is tempted in the wilderness; you wrestle with your personal devils, sweat through the temptations that jolted Jesus: Use your powers, your gifts, your possessions just for your own fantastic self, for the sweet smell of success. Like the sinful woman, you wash our Lord's feet with your tears, feel your sins forgiven because you too have "loved much" (Lk 7:47). And so into Christ's passion, which you no longer study with scholarly detachment, comparing different traditions, reconcil-ing inconsistencies. Ignatius wants you to feel: grief and shame indeed, "because the Lord is going to his suffering for [your] sins,''3° but even, if possible, the kiss that betrayed him, the nails that held him fast. And finally, joy in the risen Christ. Not sim-ply a sense of relief; rather your whole being bursting with new life, his life, as you share his rising with his Mother, try to touch him with Magdalen, munch seafood with him and the Eleven. This is not simply your own picture show, on a level with 174 Review for Religious Kevin Costner "Dancing with !/Volves.''31 Ignatius playing with your capacity to imagine is attempting something terribly signif-icant psychologically and spiritually. This "application of the senses" goes back to a medieval tradition that reached Ignatius through a book he read while convalescing from cannon wounds back at Loyola.32 The unknown Franciscan author had written: If you wish to draw profit from these meditations., make everything that the Lord Jesus said and did present to your-self, just as though you were hearing it with your ears and seeing it with your eyes . And even when it is related in the past tense you should contemplate it all as though pres-ent today. VChy is this highly significant for an intelligent spirituality? Because you are no longer looking at the life of Christ sheerly as history, something that took place in the past. The events of Jesus' earthly existence must be seen as a "today," the historical hap-penings drawn into your own world here and now. That is how you achieve not abstract knowledge but what the medievals called "familiarity with Christ," an understanding that takes hold not only of discursive reasoning but of the whole person. Imagination leads to love--a direct experience of love. Ignatius films in living color what Aquinas phrased in attractive abstraction: There are two ways of desiring knowledge. One way is to desire it as a perfection of one's self; and that is the way philosophers desire it. The other way is to desire it not [merely] as a perfection of one's self but because through this knowledge the one we love becomes present to us; and that is the way saints desire it.34 Third, the Spiritual Exercises should alter your world of liv-ing, that is, the life of social realities. Here three facets call for clarification: social realities, the Exercises, and you. What do I mean by social realities? I mean the life of a soci-ety, the life that moves beyond the individual in isolation to com-munity, people interacting, impacting one on another, human persons depending on one another. How do the Spiritual Exercises touch social realities? After all, did not Ignatius himself describe the Exercises as "every way of preparing and disposing" ourselves to remove "all disordered attachments and, after their removal, of seeking and finding God's will in the way we direct our lives"?3s This sounds rather indi-vidualistic, does it not? Or, at best, quite vague. March-April 1992 175 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry I am aware that in 1975 the 32nd General Congregation of Jesuits declared, "The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.''36 And it went on to assert a bit later: Every sector of our educational works should be subjected to constant review, so that they will not only continue to form young people and adults able and willing to build a more just social order, but do so ever more effectively. Especially should we help form our Christian students as "men [and women]-for-others" in a mature faith and in per-sonal attachment to Jesus Christ, persons whose lively faith impels them to seek and find Christ in the service of their fellow men [and women]. Thus we shall contribute to form-ing persons who will themselves multiply the work of world-wide education.-~7 But our specific question remains: Granted that our colleges should prepare women and men to construct a more just social order, how do the Spiritual Exercises lay a foundation for the social-justice component of Jesuit education? Almost a half century ago, a young Jesuit who had not yet taken his final vows in the Society was asked by his provincial to direct the annual eight-day retreat for the Jesuit theology stu-dents at Alma in California. In the course of the retreat, director Father George H. Dunne reflected on a number of social issues. Dealing with the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and the two great commandments, he "talked about poverty, peace, war, not in the abstract but in the concrete." He "talked about anti- Semitism, Hitler's holocaust, racial segregation, the rat-infested tenements in New York, the exploitation of migrant farm work-ers, the Spanish Civil War, the anguish of the world's poor . -38 Not long after, he received a letter from the representative of the Jesuit superior general for the American provinces during World War II. Father Zacheus J. Maher charged Father Dunne with substituting for the Spiritual Exercises a series of "brilliant talks on social subjects." "Such subjects," he declared, "have no place in the Spiritual Exercises.''> Let us make an admission: Our neighbor, the wider society, is not explicit in the text of the Exercises.4° Not surprising; for the Exercises "are addressed to individuals, and they seek to enable a person to have the interior freedom to serve God . -41 But if you delve more deeply, you discover how profoundly social, societal, the Exercises are. 176 Review for Religious You see, the Ignatian meditations point you ceaselessly to Christ, to the Christ of the Gospels, in that way to absorb the mind of Christ. And so you focus on the programmatic scene in Nazareth's synagogue, where Jesus makes his own the announce-ment in Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release for pris-oners and sight for the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the Lord's year of favor" (Lk 4:1 8-1 9).42 Through the Exercises that program ceases to be pecu-liarly Jesus'; it becomes your own. What Second Isaiah announced to the people of his day Jesus announces to the poor and impris-oned, the blind and deprived of his day. And this is what Christians in the mold of Ignatius announce to the downtrodden of their day. With Ignatius in the final Contemplation for Learning to Love Like God, you ponder profoundly how Christ "labors for [you] in all creatures on the face of the earth, that is, he behaves like one who labors. In the heav-ens, the elements, the plants, the fruits, the cattle, [man and woman], he gives being, conserves them in existence, confers life and sensation, and so on.''43 And you ask to labor with Christ as he ceaselessly creates, recreates, redeems a fallen world. Last Easter a Catholic professor of history ended his regular column in a diocesan newspaper with two puzzling sentences: "When Jesus rose from the dead, he did not go about lecturing on the social problems of his day. Instead he manifested himself in glory to his disciples in a manner that empowered them to go forth as his courageous emissaries.''44 But neither did the risen Jesus go about celebrating the Eucharist and fingering his rosary. And what did he empower them to go forth to do? To baptize indeed; to preach what he preached. But did he not preach loving your sisters and brothers as Jesus loved you? Does such loving have nothing to do with war on the womb or war in the Middle East? Nothing to do with inhuman poverty or child abuse? Nothing to do with racism or the rape of the earth? What you should experience through the Exercises is that by God's design and initiative human existence is fundamentally social, societal:4s we are "we" before we are "I" and "thou." This By God's design and initiative human existence is fundamentally social, societal. March-April 1992 177 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry is central in Christian revelation and of primary importance for our contemporary culture of individualism, where we think first of self and then how we can join with others in community--as though community did not precede the individual genetically, psychically, socially, and spiritually.46 Even Catholic social teach-ing frequently fails to position this fact front and center, because it lays down as primary in its social ethics the "dignity of the human person, who is made to the image of God." From there the teaching argues to the God-invested rights of the individual which other individuals and institutions must respect. This misses the point of the Genesis story (on which it is often based) that the "Adam" who is given such dignity is not an individual but "the hmnan," our whole race in personification.47 How does all this touch us? Very simply, a university or col-lege ought to be not only the seedbed of learning and imagination; it should be the boot camp of our societal existence. The Jesuit educational ideal is not the intellectual mole who lives almost entirely underground, surfaces occasionally for fresh air and a Big Mac, burrows back down to the earthworms before people can distract him. No. A college is where young men and women who may one day profoundly influence America's way of life touch, some for the first time, the ruptures that sever us from our earth, from our sisters and brothers, from our very selves. Not simply in an antiseptic classroom, for all its high importance for under-standing. Even more importantly, experience of rupture: experi-ence not only of ecology but of an earth irreparably ravaged, not only abstract poverty but the stomach-bloated poor, not only the words "child abuse" but the vacant stare of the child abused, not only a book on racism but the hopelessness or hatred in human hearts. To yearn for such experience, I know no better introduc-tion than experiencing the Christ of the Spiritual Exercises, the conversion consequent on seeing Christ more clearly, loving him more dearly. Can you get a 4.0, be learned, a scholar, without such a con-version? Undoubtedly. Can you make megabucks in business or law, in medicine or government without such a conversion? Undoubtedly. Can you marry well, raise two and a half children, treat them to an Ivy school education without such a conversion? Undoubtedly. Can you be deliriously happy without such a con-version? Undoubtedly. Can you live an integrated human and Christian existence without such a conversion? I doubt it. 178 Review for Religious Notes i Spiritual Exercises 1; translation partially mine. 2 Reference to a type of dancing currently in high favor with the young and involving amazing hyperactivity. 3 Thomas B. Edsall, "GOP Battler Lee Atwater Dies at 40," Washington Post, 30 March 1991, 1 and 7. 4 Second Vatican Council, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, no. 59. s Spiritual Exercises 236. For Christ as the "creator and Lord" of this contemplation, see Hugo Rahner SJ, Ignatius the Theologian (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968 / San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 134. 6 Here I am drawing largely, but not entirely, on material in nay book Preaching: The Art and the Craft (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1987), pp. 19-25. 7 I am aware that fantasy does not have to mean the bizarre; I am speaking of a com~non current usage. The development was concisely expressed in l/Vebster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed. unabridged; Springfield, Mass.: Merriam, 1958), p. 918: "From the conception of fantasy as the faculty of mentally reproducing sensible objects, the meaning appears to have developed into: first, false or delu-sive mental creation; and second, any senselike representation in the mind, equivalent to the less strict use of imagination and fancy. Later fan-tasy acquired, also, a somewhat distinctive usage, taking over the sense of whimsical, grotesque, or bizarre image making. This latter sense, however, did not attach itself to the variant phantasy, which is used for visionary or phantasmic imagination." See also Urban T. Hohnes III, Ministry and Imagination (New York: Seabury, 1976), pp. 100-103. ~ Holmes, ibid, pp. 97-98. Here Holmes is a&nittedly borrowing from Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, n.d.). 9 See Holmes, ibid, p. 88. 10 Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Introduction to Theology: An Invitation to Reflection upon the Christian Mythos (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 49. 1~ See ibid, p. 52. 12 Sallie M. TeSelle, cited by Holmes, Ministry and Imagination, p. 166, from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (1974): 635. ~3 Lest the reader be unduly disturbed, myth is not opposed to fact or to fancy. Its raw material tnay he fact or it may be fancy; in either case it intends "to narrate the fundamental structure of human being in the world. By the concreteness of its imagery, the universality of its intention, its narrative or stoW form, the myth evokes the identification and par-ticipation of those for whom it functions as revelatory" (Jennings, Introduction to Theology, pp. 51-52). ~4 Avery Dulles SJ, "The Symbolic Structure of Revelation," March-April 1992 179 Burghardt ¯ The Exercises for Educational Ministry Theological Studies 41 (1980): 55-56. Dulles studies the five dominant approaches to revelation: the propositional, historical, mystical, dialecti-cal, and symbolic--with greatest stress on the symbolic. He asks how in each theory revelation is mediated and what kind of truth it has. He con-cludes that in Christ the five aspects coalesce in a kind of unity, but insists that the first four are reconciled and held in unity through the symbolic facet. ~s Ibid, p. 56. 16 A. N. Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 139. 17 Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As kingfishers catch fire. ," Poem 57 in W. H. Gardner and N.H. Mackenzie, eds., The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University, 1970), p. 90. ~ Amos Niven Wilder, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 57. ~') Ibid, p. 67. ~,0 Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (New York: Scribner's, 1990), p. 37. 21 Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 33. ~2 Greeley, The Catholic ~Vlyth, p. 44. 23 Here Greeley (p. 45) admits his dependence on David Tracy's The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981). 24 Greeley, The C)ttholic Myth, p. 45. ~5 See ibid, p. 55. 26 Ibid, p. 45. Hcre, too, Greeley is indebted to David Tracy. Note Greeley's warning to his readers that the word "tend" is "used advisedly. Zero-sum relationships do not exist in the world of the preconscious" (ibid). -,7 Ibid, p. 253. See p. 254: "I argue., that the obvious functional role of Mary the mother of Jesus in the Catholic tradition is to reflect the mother love of God." For detailed presentation of the origins and func-tion of the Mary symbol, see Greeley's The Mary Myth (New York: Seabury, 1977). 2~ Spiritual Exercises 124; text from Louis J. Puhl sJ, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (Chicago: Loyola University, 195 I), p. 55. 29 Spiritual Exercises 140, 146 (Puhl, pp. 60, 62). 30 Spiritual Exercises 193 (Puhl, p. 81). 31 A current fihn that made off with a number of Academy awards. 3~ The book was Meditationes vitae Christi, long attributed to St. Bonaventure but actually composed by an unknown Franciscan of the fourteenth century; see Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian (n. 5 above), pp. 192-193. Quoted from Rahner, ibid, p. 193. 180 Review for Religious 34 1 have not been able as yet to document this text. 3s Spiritual Exercises 1 ; translation partially mine. 36 Documents of the Thirty-second General Congregatio,z of the Society of Jesus, 2 December 1974--7 March 1975 I, 4 (Washington, D.C.: Jesuit Conference, [1975]), p. 17. 37 Ibid, I, 4, pp. 35-36. 38 King's Pawn: The Memoirs of George H. Dunue, s.J. (Chicago: Loyola University, 1990), p. 70. 39 Ibid, pp. 69, 70. q0 See useful material in Dean Brackley SJ, "Downward Mobility: Social Implications of St. Ignatius's Two Standards," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 20, no. 4 (January 1988): 53; also in Thomas E. Clark SJ, "Ignatian Spirituality and Societal Consciousness," ibid, 7, no. 4 (September 1975): 127-150. 4~ Brackley, "Downward Mobility," p. 12. 42 On this episode see Joseph A. Fitzmyer SJ, The Gospel according to Luke (I-IX) (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981), p. 529: "Luke had deliberately put this story [4:16-30] at the beginning of the public min-istry to encapsulate the entire ministry of Jesus and the reaction to it." 43 Spiritual Exercises 236; translation partially mine. 44james Hitchcock in St. Louis Review, 29 March 1991, p. 11. 4s See Clarke (n. 40 above), pp. 128-129, for the advantages of the adjective "societal" over "social" in reference to apostolate and ministry. "Social" efforts "seek immediately and personally to alleviate the misery of those individuals who are deprived." "Societal" activity "concerns itself immediately with the healing and transformation of those human struc-tures, institutions, processes, and environments which draw persons into misery or make it difficult for them to emerge from it." 46 See Matthew Lamb, "The Social and Political Dimensions of Lonergan's Theology," in Vernon Gregson, ed., The Desires of the Human Heart (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 1988), p. 270. 471 owe this paragraph to notes of James L. Connor sJ, director of the Woodstock Theological Center, Washington, D.C., prepared for the inau-gural retreat of my project Preaching the Just Word, an effort to move the preaching of social-justice issues more effectively into the Catholic pul-pits of the United States. March-April 1992 181 MELANNIE SVOBODA Going the Distance, Sustaining the Gift an one of her newspaper columns, Ellen Goodman describes pheno~nenon called "compassion fatigue." This occurs when people who are normally sensitive and generous get "tired of caring." Most Americans, Goodman maintains, are very caring in emergencies. She writes: "We are great at performing the one-night stands for causes. Christmas dinner for the poor, collec-tions for victims of fire or flood or famine." But if the emergency situation becomes chronic, many of us find it difficult to sustain our initial level of concern. When compassion fatigue sets in, says Goodman, "A gift can begin to feel like an obligation, generosity can turn into resentment, and sympathy can turn hard." I think Goodman's article has definite implications for those of us involved in ministry in the church. Let us face it: most of us are in ministry not for a one-night stand. We are in it for years, maybe even for life. The problems we deal with every day--igno-rance, poverty, injustice, sickness, violence--will not go away overnight--or even in a matter of a few years. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: How do we keep our compassion alive over the long haul? How do we fan the flame of enthusiasm for a lifetime of service in the church? Before I suggest some ways of doing this, I would like to say a few words about why. For everything I say is based on the premise Melannie Svoboda SND, with whom our readers are well acquainted, resides at Notre Dame Academy; Route One, Box 197; Middleburg, Virginia 22117. 182 Review for Religious that coinpassion and enthusiasm are essential for ministry in the church. Without them, ministry is at best a mere show and at worst a perversion of the very Gospel we claim to proclaim. To illustrate this fact, I tried to come up with an image of ministry as compassionate, generous, and enthusiastic--and not something performed out of a sense of obligation and even with resentment. The image I came up with may appear an unlikely one: feeding chickens! But let me explain. Feeding Chickens I was born and raised on a small goose farm in Willoughby Hills, Ohio. That rural "initial formation" continues to influence my outlook on life. On our farm we had hundreds of white Emden geese. It was my father and brothers who had the job of feeding them. But we also had a couple dozen chickens, and the task of feeding them usually fell to my mother, my sister, or me. Now what is the connection between feeding chickens and ministering in today's church? Simple. The way I see it, there are three essential elements to proper chicken feeding (and, I might add, to proper church ministry). First, there is the feed itself--the corn, the mash, whatever. The feed is the gift we bring to the chickens. More than that, it is their source of nourishment, of life itself. Without too much of a stretch of the imagination, we can say that the chicken feed is the "good news" we bring each day to our chickens. The second element of chicken feeding involves calling the chickens. We have to get their attention, alert them to the feed we have for them. But a good chicken feeder goes beyond merely calling the chickens. He or she establishes a relationship with them. The feeder talks to the chickens, even thanking them for the fine eggs they have been laying. For a good chicken feeder (like a good church minister) is always aware of being a receiver as well as a giver. The third element of chicken feeding (and of ministry) is the actual broadcasting of the feed. How does an experienced chicken feeder broadcast the feed? Eagerly, generously, unsparingly. Now that is an image of ministry at its best, ministry with compassion and enthusiasm. Ministry at its worst would be the person who sets out to feed the chickens grumbling and mum-bling the whole way to the chicken coop. "I have got to feed those March-April 1992 183 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance stupid chickens--again. I just fed them yesterday. They're never satisfied. All they do is eat, eat, eat. What good are they, any-way?" Such a feeder might not even call the chickens, thinking: "If I don't call them, maybe they won't come, and then I won't have to feed them." But, of course, the chickens do come, called or uncalled. And how does this kind of feeder broadcast the feed? Perhaps sparingly: "A kernel for you, a kernel for you . " Or angrily, throwing handfuls of feed down on the ground in dis-gust. Or hastily, dumping the whole pail of feed in one spot, just to get the job over with. That is an image of ministry when compassion fatigue has set in. I maintain that ministering in such a way is a contradiction of the Gospel. For we are called to proclaim the good news, not the "ho-hum" news, not the "halfway decent" news. We are called to love the people to whom we minister, not "put up with" them or view them as a nuisance. If we can no longer minister with gen-uine compassion or with vibrant enthusiasm, then maybe we should not be ministering. Years ago I had a Scripture teacher who made this point very clear. He said that on a given day we might wake up crabby, dis-couraged, depressed, mad at the whole world and every human being in it. On such a morning, maybe we should call the office, the school, or the parish and say in all honesty and humility, "I won't be in. I cannot in conscience represent the Gospel today." The suggestion, though perhaps a little extreme, does make a salient point: an anti-sign to the Gospel is probably worse than no sign at all. In other words, if our words, attitude, and whole bear-ing contradict the Good News we represent, then maybe we should not be representing it. Compassion and enthusiasm are requisites for effective min-istry. What, then, are some ways we can "go the distance" and "sustain our gift" of ministering? There are, no doubt, many ways. Here, I suggest four. Retaining the Big Picture The first way is to retain the big picture. Sometimes we lose enthusiasm for our ministry because our perspective becomes too narrow, our vision myopic. We lose sight of the big picture and get enmeshed in the near at hand, the petty, the nitty-gritty. In his book The Art of Choosing, Carlos ~Galles SJ reminds us how impor- 184 Review for Reli~4ous rant it is in life to have a sense of direction. He describes "a lovely little habit" that Ignatius had of stopping himself physically in the middle of a hall and asking himself, "Where am I going? And what for?" That habit was one way Ignatius had of connecting a seemingly insignificant action--going to the dining room to eat, heading for chapel to pray, or walking down the hall to a meet-ing-- with the bigger picture of ministering to God's people. The practice is a good one: regularly and consciously to make ourselves see our daily small actions as part of a greater whole. Recently I watched an artist painting a large mural of a sunrise. I noticed how frequently she stepped back from her work to gain a broader perspective. Then she would step forward, add a few more strokes with the paint roller, and step back again for another look. We must do the same thing in our ministry. Sometimes God seems to provide us with opportunities to do this: after a suc-cessful activity, after an apparent failure, at the time of a transfer or change in ministry, or during a serious illness. But we can also do this more regularly: during an annual retreat or a monthly day of recollection, in the morning before we begin our day, or in the evening before we crawl (or fall) into bed. The habit of ask-ing "Where am I going (or where have I been today) and what for?" will put us in touch with the real zvhat and v:hatfor of our ministry, thus enabling us to catch at least a glimpse of how our "daily chores" fit into the big picture of God's grand design. Seeing Babies A second way of retaining our compassion and enthusiasm I call: seeing babies and not diapers. A priest told me once that a young mother came to him very discouraged and worn out. "I'm sick and tired of changing diapers," she cried. The priest thought for a moment and then gently suggested, "Next time don't change the diaper. Change the baby." He was not being "celibately sar-castic." He was pointing out to her a lesson in perspective. We have to see the tasks we do in relation to the individual human beings for whom we do them. During a retreat another priest told this true stoW. A teenage boy was seriously injured in a car accident. When the parish priest was notified, he immediately went to the hospital to see the boy. When the priest walked in, the boy said, "Father, if you've come here for God's sake, then for God's sake, get out! But if you have March-April 1992 185 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance come here because you think I am worth it, then please stay." The priest stayed. Maybe for too long we overemphasized "All for the greater honor and glory of God." That phrase certainly encapsulates a marvelous truth, but, like most truths, even that one needs another truth to balance it. In our ministry we do not bypass the human beings we serve. We do not overlook them. We do not use them to win God's favor. We must remember, we minister not to parishes, schools, hospitals, or dioceses. We minister to individ-ual human beings--to Vera, Frank, Carlos, Heather--and each of them is worth it. Getting Support A third way we sustain our gift of ministry is: We get sup-port. The venerable tradition of rugged individualism that helped found this great nation will not "cut it" in ministry. The truth is, we cannot "go it alone." Fortunately, our contemporary times, with its emphasis on support groups, reminds us of this truth. I came to appreciate the importance of support groups when I became a flee-lance writer. Before that I had been a full-time high school teacher for many years. As a teacher I had a built-in support group: the other teachers on the faculty. But when I seri-ously began to write as part of my ministry, I suddenly felt terri-bly isolated and alone. It became difficult for me to sit in front of my typewriter (and later tny computer) for two or three hours a day and write, for I would recall working for hours on a piece only to have it fizzle into nothingness. Or I would send out arti-cles and stories enthusiastically only to have them lost, mutilated, or rejected. Finally I knew I needed support in my ministry--and more than the occasional acceptance letter offers. So I attended some writers' conferences and hooked up with a few other people who write for publication. I rely on these friends for the under-standing and encouragement that only a fellow writer can give. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes beautifully about the origin of a friendship. He says a friendship originates when two people, often engaged in a common task, disclose some-thing of their inner selves to each other. They turn to each other in amazement and say, "You, too?" We in church ministry need to experience that "you-too?-ness" with others who are engaged in the same or similar ministry. 186 Review for Religious Being More than a Minister A fourth way we can go the distance in our ministry is to be more than a minister. We probably all agree that we are more than we do, and that we are far more valuable than what we pro-duce. But an effective minister does more than give intellectual assent to that truth. He or she makes decisions based on it. He or she takes time to be more than a minister, knowing how pathetic it is if a minister's identity is restricted to a particular job or title. There is always a danger of turning even church work into an end in itself. Workaholism is alive and well in most business organizations and (we have to admit with sadness) also in our church. The problem is, workaholism, though a real addiction, looks a lot like dedication. If a minister in the church is addicted to alcohol or gambling or food or sex, chances are someone (or someones) sooner or later will intervene to help that person. But if a minister is addicted to work~staying up all hours of the night, never taking time for a break or vacation, never socializing with people in a nonwork setting--we sometimes let him or her go on. Or even worse, we praise that person, thus encouraging the addiction. In this regard, we should recall that the primary biblical image of heaven is not an office, not a school, not a parish. It is a party, a banquet. If all we do our whole life is work, work, work, chances are we are going to feel extremely out of place in heaven. We will not know what to do, how to let go, how to have fun. No, we ministers should learn how to be party people while we are still here on earth--even as we minister. We work hard, yes, knowing full well that our ministry cannot always be restricted to certain office hours. But we also know how to get away, how to enjoy people and have fun. The Cross, the Cost So far we have looked at four ways to help prevent compas-sion fatigue in our ministry. But there is one more word I wish to say about compassion fatigue: sometimes it is the cross we bear, the cost we pay. Our fatigue is not always a sign that we are doing something wrong. Sometimes it is a sign that we are doing some-thing right. Our periodic fatigue and occasional discouragement put us in touch with our limits. And experiencing our limits is vital to effective ministry. Otherwise we run the risk of living in March-April 1992 187 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance illusion, of beginning to think that we are responsible for the good we do or that we are the "good news" we proclaim--and not Jesus. Our ministry, in order to be authentic, must cost us some-thing-- in time, in energy, in love. I am reminded of that seem-ingly insignificant incident in the story of David at the end of the second book of Samuel. David, nearing the end of his life, goes to a man named Araunah and asks to buy his threshing place in order to build an altar there for the Lord. Araunah tells David, "Take it, Your Majesty." And he offers to give several oxen, too, all free of charge. But David refuses to accept Araunah's gifts. He insists on paying for everything, saying, "I will not offer the Lord my God sacrifices that have cost me nothing." At times we all get weary in our ministry. Our fatigue, loneliness, or discouragement are part of the cost of our love and service of others, part of the sacrifice we make regularly to God for the privilege of serving in the church. The Ministry of Jesus How does all of this relate to the person of Jesus? How did he remain loving and alive throughout his ministry? First of all, Jesus had the big picture. He possessed an amazingly expansive view of reality. He looked at a crude fisherman and saw a great leader. He observed the birds in the air and comprehended God's provident care. He beheld a sinful woman and recognized her as a woman who loved much. Jesus was always ready to adjust his perspective, to align it ever more closely with that of the Father. Nowhere is that more clearly seen than in Gethsemane. Jesus' initial reaction to his impending crucifixion was "Please let this pass!" But by let-ting go of his limited perspective, he could say, "Your will be done"; in other words, "I embrace your point of view." Jesus saw babies and not diapers. That is, he focused on indi-vidual people and not on the immense task he had to perform. The Gospels show Jesus speaking to large crowds, of course, but more often they show him relating to individuals: the twelve apos-tles, the man with a withered hand, a centurion, a demoniac, Simon's mother-in-law, a particular deaf man, a grieving widow, an epileptic, Jairus, Nicodemus, Mary and Martha, and so forth. The clear impression is that Jesus ministered to individuals. Even more important, individuals were his legacy. Jesus did not leave 188 Review for Relig4ous behind a spiral notebook on how to run a church. He did not write a curriculum nor even one encyclical. Instead, he left behind people--individuals--whose lives he touched and radically altered. Maybe we have to ask ourselves: How do we measure the effectiveness of our ministry? By the number of reports we fill out? By the neatness of our office? By the thick-ness of our files? Or by the individuals we have ministered to and with--and those we have allowed to minister to us? Jesus liked support groups. In fact, he even started one: the apostles. He also went outside that group for the kind of support that those dozen men could not give him. He seemed to need and appreciate the feminine encouragement of a Mary and a Martha, the unique devotion of a Mary Magdalene. The Gospels show Jesus enioying people. He was not always preaching or teaching or giving workshops. He was relaxing in the company of his friends and colleagues. Even in his darkest hour in Gethsemane, he did not "go it alone." He took part of his support group with him: Peter, James, and John. They disappointed him, yes, as people sometimes disappoint us, too. But Jesus understood their weakness and forgave them, knowing his ultimate support group was the Father and the Spirit. Lastly, Jesus was more than a minister, much more. Van Gogh supposedly said, "If you want to know God, love many things." One reason Jesus was so close to God was because he loved so many things, so many varied aspects of life. Jesus was perhaps a carpenter. What can we deduce from that simple fact? He had a "good eye," a highly developed aesthetic sense. He had a steady hand and knew and appreciated wood. Jesus was a storyteller, too, and a fine one. His "Good Samaritan" and "Prodigal Son" are masterpieces. 0nly a person in touch with the core of life could have spun such magnificent yarns. Jesus was well acquainted with other components of life: bread baking, barbecuing, wine making, and farming, to name but a few. He was keenly aware of the political situation of his times. He was in touch with the prejudices of his day as well as the hopes and dreams of his people. He was something of a naturalist, too, sen-sitive to the changing seasons and to the flora and fauna of his Our ministry, in order to be authentic, must cost us something.- in time, in energy, in love. March-April 1992 189 Svoboda ¯ Going the Distance immediate environment. Little wonder Jesus was so effective as a minister--for he was so much more than one. He was a person fascinated by life, and thus he became a source of fascination--and salvation--for others. Yes, Van Gogh said it: "If you want to know God, love many things." But Jesus lived it, leaving an example for all of us who would follow in his footsteps: "If you want to minister, love many things!" The Long-Distance Runner When I taught high school in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the late 70s, I had a senior girl who was a top-ranking long-dis-tance runner. Julie taught me that there is a world of difference between the sprinter and the long-distance runner. The training and techinques are vastly different. The sprinter's goal is near, often clearly visible. He or she relies on a quick burst of energy to reach that goal within a matter of seconds. Because the dis-tance is so short, the sprinter runs side by side, neck and neck, with other runners who provide an impetus for the sprinter to run hard and fast. Not so with the long-distance runner. This runner's goal is miles away, not even visible. He or she must take steps all along the way to conserve energy for the long haul. Pacing becoInes critical. Although the runners in a marathon start out together, toward the end of the race they often find themselves running alone and forced to rely on deep inner resources and not the near-ness of fellow runners to keep them going to the end. The image of the long-distance runner is an appropriate one for those of us engaged in ministry. For most of us are in ministry for the long haul. We do not want our loving service to deterio-rate into a stoic sense of duty, but to remain a joyful gift. We do not want resentment to contaminate our pool of selfless giving. Instead we want our generosity to be alive and well, our com-passion tender and strong. And we wish to carry our enthusiasm for the Good News all the way to the finish line. Thank God, we do not run alone: God, our God, goes with us--the whole distance. 190 Review for Religious HALBERT WEIDNER Newman's Living the Oratory Charism As the biographical approach to writers and thinkers pro-liferates, so does the controversy over its historical worth. I am taking a biographical approach to John Henry Newman with some trepidation because of the length of his life, his great contributions to thought, and the complexities of the issues. Still I am encouraged in the enterprise by Newman him-self, who insisted on the validity of personal influence in the pur-suit of truth) I intend in this essay first to introduce readers to the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, which Newman brought to England, and then to discuss the Oratory as important for understanding certain values in Newman's life. Newman arrived at these values and maintained them at some personal cost. That cost represents for this author, another Oratorian, the personal drama of grace and conversion of a founding father among English-speaking Oratories. The Nature of an Oratory of St. Philip Neri The first thing that should be said about an Oratory is what it is not. It is not a religious order. There are no vows, no oaths, no promises of any kind public or private. There is no Rule. You will see a Rule mentioned in the time of Newman, but actually what you have are constitutions representing the practice of the Roman house in the latter part of the sixteenth century.2 Philip Neri was a reluctant founder who refused to write a Rule or con-stitutions. Halbert Weidner CO sends these reflections from the Spiritual Life Center; 2717 Pamoa Road; Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. March-April 1992 191 This irregular founder lived from 1515 until 1595, coming to Rome as a young Florentine in 1533. He was not ordained until he was thirty-six years old. He had been a student, a hermit and mystic, and a member of a reforming confraternity which served sick pilgrims, that is, the poor who became ill while visit-ing Rome. He lived in a set of apartments with other priests as part of a complex named San Girolamo della Carit~. It was in a prayer room at this church that the crowd who could no longer fit into Philip's rooms began to gather daily at the siesta hour for prayer. It was this afternoon gathering of laity which was the first Oratory.3 Perhaps the best description of St. Philip's intent is given by Newman himself in The Idea of a University: He [Philip Neri] was raised up to do a work ahnost peculiar in the church--not to be a Jerome Savonarola, though Philip had a true devotion towards him and a tender mem-ory of his Florentine house; not to be a St. Charles, though in his beaming countenance Philip had recognized the aure-ole of a saint; not to be a St. Ignatius, wrestling with the foe, though Philip was termed the Society~ bell of call, so many subjects did he send to it; not to be a St. Francis Xavier, though Philip had longed to shed his blood for Christ in India with him; not to be a St. Caietan, or hunter of souls, for Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.4 Those who gathered around Philip found a mystic, a reformer, and a humanist, but they did not find him in a cloister or in any religious order. They found him in his rooms with the doors wide open to the public and surrounded by laity. This is why the Oratory is first and foremost secular. It was this laity that formed the original gathering for prayer in a place of prayer (that is, an oratory) and these same laypersons who preached, led prayers, sang in the vernacular, and studied together each afternoon under Philip's guidance. The Congregation of the Oratory is a secondary group of secular priests and laity which gathered around Philip as the Oratory became less of a movement and more of an institu-tion. But before this, Philip carried on the ministry of prayer and reflection from 1551 until 1575, more or less activating the laity as the leaders. It was in 1575 that a secondary group of priests and brothers had gathered sufficiently to be formally organized 192 Review for Religious with papal approval. But this Congregation was without any con-stitutions and was still primarily organized for the initial group of laity,s Constitutions for the Congregation were not finished until 1612, seventeen years after Philip's death. Later the institution of the congregation became more clericalized as not only the pri-mary group of laity disappeared, but even the brothers were no longer accepted, leaving a congregation of secular priests who lived together in community. While the Oratory is unique within Roman Catholicism, its values represent a mind-set present among many reformers of the early sixteenth century. This reforming spirit is symbolized by the values St. Jerome came to represent within a church loaded down with religious orders heavy on structure and low in spirit. Erasmus had noted that, in the days of St. Jerome, "the profession of a monk consisted in no more than the practice of the original, free, purely Christian life.''6 The summary of Erasmus's thinking about the ideal religious given us in Eugene Rice's St. Jerome in the Renaissance could also be a description of the spirit animating the early Oratory of St. Philip: Monks then were men who wished only to live with willing friends in liberty of spirit close to the teachings of the Gospel. Their lives were sweetly leisured. No ceremonies or man-made regulations fettered them. No single dress was prescribed. No deference was paid to total abstinence. They studied, they fasted, and sang psalms as the spirit moved them. They took no vows.7 This being said, we can note some positive elements in the Congregation of the Oratory: A. It is a center of prayer by nature. The classical form that this prayer takes dates back to the more intimate group that gath-ered in the evening around Philip. This amounts to about a half hour of silent prayer or meditation concluded with vocal prayers. The two-hour prayer sessions led by and for the laity at the time of St. Philip have been the casualty of time. Likewise the primary group of laity called the Oratory has also passed away except for a remnant often called "the Little Oratory." This name is quite ironic since what has become "little" was in fact the biggest and the first of the founder's works, not to say the very reason behind it all. Except for a directive to somehow maintain the secular or "Little Oratory," the ministry of the Congregation is otherwise unspecified and unspecialized. Each house tends to the work at 21/larch-April992 193 The life of an Oratory is said to be built on a deep regard for "well-known faces.' hand, and assignments tend to reflect the talents of the members. Philip Neri was against centralization and so put on its own every house that wished to follow on his general pattern. He believed that duplication was impossible and that each situation called for its own approach. B. Face-to-face association is essential to the Oratory. In a phrase going back to the community's origins, the life of an Oratory is said to be built on a deep regard for "well-known faces.''8 There were no fears to be engendered in an Oratory over friendships, and such a pol-icy militated against large sizes and the anomaly of "communities" of religious who have to resort to books with mem-bers' pictures for help in identification. C. Relative permanence is an ideal even though there are no vows or any-thing else holding a person to an Oratory. Perseverance is a fundamental aspect of the house spirituality and is often prayed for aloud at community prayer. Note that members cannot be transferred from one house to another and that, if they leave a house to go voluntarily to another that has freely accepted them, they must usually transfer membership as well. This means that problems with and among members must be worked out within the house since, obviously, transference cannot be the solution. Dismissal from a house is a rare and difficult pro-cedure. D. Small numbers, then, are the consequence of Oratorian living. The Constitutions of the Congregation go so far as to say that the power of an Oratory resides in such a small membership. Large numbers would weaken a house, which is supposed to be built on interpersonal relationships. When Newman wrote The Present Position of Catholics in England, he was addressing the men of the secular or Little Oratory. Towards the end, he applies this Oratorian principle of strength despite small numbers when he tells them: Your strength lies in your God and your conscience; there-fore it lies not in your number. It lies not in your number any more than in intrigue, or combination, or worldly wisdom. God saves whether by many or by few; you are to aim at 194 Review for Religious showing forth His light, at diffusing "the sweet odor of His knowledge in every place": numbers would not secure this. On the contrary, the more you grew, the more you might be thrown back into yourselves, by the increased animosity and jealousy of your enemies. You are enabled in some mea-sure to mix with them while you are few; you might be thrown back upon yourselves, when you became many? The Oratory, then, exists to embody the ideal of koinonia, liv-ing together as a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a sign of God's rule. The Oratory is very conscious that only the Spirit can keep it together faithful to the charism and that a life of prayer and open-ness is the only way to persevere with any kind of fruitfulness. Community in this context is not a utility, but an end, the pres-ence of each person's final destiny in the communion of saints somehow present now. E. The Oratory is collegial to a unique degree. All major pol-icy decisions are made by the entire congregation of members who have finished six years. Personnel and financial decisions on a smaller scale are decided by a deputed congregation elected by the membership. The provost is the title of the "superior" who holds the office as first among equals. He is chiefly an adminis-trator and his authority rests in moral persuasion. His only clear power is that of proposal since neither the general congregation nor the smaller deputed congregation can discuss or vote on any-thing without this proposal. Since the provost serves only three years, any provost resisting the majority can only hold out for a certain time. E The Congregation of the Oratory is also juridically pon-tifical. Today each house is now part of a very loose confederation, but each is still a complete pontifical congregation. Each superior is a major superior. In Newman's time there was no confederation at all, and so each house was directly involved with the Roman Curia. This gives each small house a double relationship. They are rooted in their diocese and have a special relationship to the local church and the bishop on one hand, and yet on the other look to the Holy See for the preservation of the charism. We shall see how each of the elements of the Oratory Congregation played a role in the life of Newman. Newman and the Oratory I have chosen five aspects of Newman's life where I believe the March-April 1992 195 Oratorian charism was arrived at and purchased at some cost to him. These are: (1) the elasticity of the Oratory and Newman which was tested in his assumption of the rectorship of the Irish Catholic University, (2) the choice he had between a university apostolate and the Oratory during the Irish Catholic University founding, (3) the promotion of the laity in fields rightly theirs that had been co-opted by clericalism, (4) the resistance to foreign cultural aspects of Roman Catholicism in favor of an indigenous English religious life, (5) fidelity to community life in one place and one people. 1. The Elasticity of the Charism I have said that each Oratory has a great deal of elasticity to it as the congregation has no specific work to which its members are bound. This elasticity is from time to time tested within an individual Oratory, and Newman's assumption of the rectorship of a yet-to-be-founded university in Dublin was a very grave exper-iment in just how flexible an Oratory can be. But the flexibility had a true Oratorian origin. First, it was the result of consultation with both Birmingham and the not-yet-independent London house. Father Faber's letter indicates that the London community thought it good for the congregation that Newman assume the rectorship rather than anything less demand-ing, but less powerful.~° Secondly, it took a papal brief confirm-ing the arrangement before the attempt was made to do the impossible, that is, allow Newman to bilocate as provost in Birmingham and rector in Dublin.11 Thirdly, it was specifically for the purpose of starting a Dublin Oratory, and Newman's build-ing plans indicate he gave priority to the Oratory in that the uni-versity church built there was for the sake of a potential foundation.12 But Newman knew how precarious it was for an Oratorian to be away from his house. In a letter to Ambrose St. John he says, "I trust we shall have an Oratory in Dublin--which is the only thing I can bribe St. Philip with for coming here.''13 That it was a disaster emotionally for Newman and a serious drain on the Birmingham Oratory does not make it any less Oratorian for all that. Because of its lack of structure, it is typical of an Oratory to try to do too much rather than too little. It is easy enough to document other Oratories trying to stretch too thin. Thus we have the Oratory of Goa, India, sending Joseph Vaz to Sri Lanka at a time of persecution and in the clothing of a Hindu 196 Review for Religious holy man. There he labors with other Oratorians scattered around the countryside more like clerks regular than sons of St. Philip.14 My own Oratory in South Carolina had members scattered throughout the state during half of its history and only recently and with great difficulty has been able to return all of the mem-bers to a community life.Is During the time of St. Philip, the Oratory took on dependent missions for a while until St. Philip and the community abruptly called a halt to this development.Is So it is Oratorian to push the Oratory to the extreme and perhaps beyond. It is also Oratorian to eventually return to saner limits and the grace of a life closer to the original charism. 2. The Preference for Obscurity If Newman's acceptance of the rectorship pushed the Oratorian charism beyond limits, his fidelity to an Oratorian voca-tion is demonstrated by his resistance to a classic temptation against the life to which he believed God called him. The asceti-cism of the Oratory is a rigorous egalitarianism. Each member has one vote and all are equal and most aspects of the life are governed by the majority when not regulated by the constitu-tions. It was not uncommon among the best and brightest of St. Philip's followers to leave the Oratory, usually under papal "obe-dience," for higher positions in the church. That St. Philip him-self managed to escape or refuse such offers does not seem to be a grace extended to many of his followers. One of St. Philip's aphorisms was "love to be unknown,''17 but it is a hard saying. And it was a grace extended to Newman. Simply put, when presented with a full-time rectorship of the Irish university, Newman chose the small, obscure Oratory of Birmingham, England.I8 He was consistently resistant to any compromise on this point even though the choice seemed impenetrably obscure to both friends and foes. This disregard for the existence, rights, and potential of the Birmingham Oratory was one of Newman's great crosses. Newman complained, "Me they wish to use--me they wish to detach in every way from my own Fathers.''19 Separating an Oratorian from his community has not always been difficult, and there is evidence to indicate that some of these peo-ple thought they were doing Newman a favor by trying to detach him from the Oratory. Another fear of Newman's was the bad effect an absent provost would have on attracting new members to the Birmingham Oratory. This made the arrangement with the March-April 1992 197 university and Archbishop Cullen finally untenable.2° From inside the Oratory, the sacrifice of an outside position seems to be the heart of a vocation that embraces the asceticism of simply being one among many. 3. Maintaining the Preference for Laity The University episode also exemplifies another Oratorian principle, the importance of laicity to church and Oratory. As I have said, in the nineteenth century much of the lay character of the Oratory was atrophied. Only the little Oratory existed in some places and in some forms. Within some of the Congregations there were lay members or "brothers," for want of a better word, but as in most societies defined as congregations of priests, these brothers had no vote and seniority depended on holy orders first and seminary status second; only third came the brothers, who followed the youngest seminarians. But at a time when brothers in clerical communities of priests were treated as second-class members and even much like servants, Newman wrote to the act-ing superior of Birmingham the following directive: I am somewhat pained, my dear Edward, to hear you speak of us as 'Gentlemen--' We are not Gentlemen in con-tradistinction to the Brothers--they are Gentlemen too, by which 1 mean, not only a Catholic, but a polished refined Catholic. The Brothers are our equals . The Father is above the Brothers sacerdotally--but in the Oratory they are equal2~ This is indeed the spirit of St. Philip, whose esteem for the lay members of the congregation as well as of the religious orders was well known. But making this point about equality is still a struggle today within the congregations. In my opinion, if you ask many Oratorians what the Oratory is, they will simply say that it is a community of priests, without communicating at all the possibility of full lay membership and, since the Second Vatican Council, full voting rights. Newman's second contribution as an Oratorian to laicity was his emphasis on the secular Oratory or the Oratory as a lay move-ment. The revival of the secular or Little Oratory was "more important than anything else," at least in his own eyes. He real-ized that this was not a burning isst.e among the other Oratories, but he himself believed that, if the secular Oratory was not estab-lished, then the Congregation of the Oratory should be consid- 198 Review for Religious ered a faih~re.22 It was, as I said, for the secular Oratory that Newman wrote the lectures now called The Present Position of Catholics, and it is this volume I would call Newman's literary con-tribution to laicity. Perhaps Newman would agree with me, as he believed it in his old age to be his "best written book.''23 It is at any rate, in the opinion of Ian Ker, a popular, even Dickens-like piece of wit and rhetoric introducing the grander themes later developed in his explorations of the nature of a university.24 And, finally, it must be noted that for Newman laity meant men and women. Women had not been his-torically part of the secular Oratory, and so he petitioned Rome for a secular Oratory for women. Even though it did not develop, the rescript obtained estab-lished a new precedent.2s It was this regard for laity as essential to the religious enterprise of the Oratory that informs Newman's Idea of a University, where laicity is central to the educational enterprise. In my reckoning, this is his third contribution to laicity, but probably the best-known outside the Oratory. Newman believed that it was his struggle to appoint a lay vice-rector, to define the university as the province of the laity, and to develop self-moti-vated students with a minimum of authority which led to the ruin of the project.26 It was such "dreadful jealousy of the laity," Newman also believed, which led to the rejection of another planned Oratory at another university, this time no less than Oxford itself.27 Secularity and laicity, principles at the heart of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, made it impossible for Newman to spread the congregation when both such principles were feared and rejected by church officials who felt the church to be under siege. That the ability to act and to be respectful of church author-ity were compatible seems to be exemplified in the life of the very independent personality Philip Neri. But, when Newman wished to prove the principle by anecdote, he very cleverly chose the most authoritarian of religious societies, the Jesuits, to make his point: "Nothing great or living can be done except when men are self governed and independent: this is quite consistent with a full maintenance of ecclesiastical supremacy. St. Francis Xavier wrote Regard for the laity as essential to the religious enterprise of the Oratory informs Newman's Idea of a University. March-April 1992 199 to St. Ignatius on his knees; but who will say that St. Francis was not a real center of action?''-'s 4. Preference for the Local Culture Around an Oratory Besides preserving laicity, Newman desired also to preserve English culture within the Roman Catholic Church. St. Philip Neri's emphasis on autonomous houses or congregations was rooted in his belief that each locale had its own culture and that the needs of the place had to be met through this culture. There could be nothing more contrary to the spirit of the Oratory than for any of the congregations to see themselves as the importers of foreign customs. The Italian devotionalism of such an Oratorian figure as the famous Father Frederick Faber of London was really a misguided attempt to re-create not only another culture but also another time. Ironically, the culture and time chosen by Faber was the Baroque era--when the Oratory was spreading through Europe, but a century later than Philip's own time and work. The extravagances of Faber and some other members of the London Oratory would not have been as effective as they were without the backing of the Dublin Review (seen to be the voice of London's Archbishop Manning)29 and W.G. Ward. When Newman had a chance to defend Roman Catholicism against some charges of his old Anglican friend E.B. Pusey, there was also the possibility of distancing that same Catholicism from the foreign enthusiasm of converts like Manning, Ward, and Faber. Newman could declare: "I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the same causes, and by the same right, which jus-tifies foreigners in preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less singularity, and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish with what is novel and exotic.''3° "What is novel and exotic" to many English Catholics was for the London Oratory the true renewal of Catholicism and of the Congregation of the Oratory at the same time. Father Bernard Dalgairns left the Birmingham Oratory for the London house with a condemnation of Newman and his fellow members who had adopted a position paper which has been called an "Apologia pro vita sua--Oratoriana." 3~ Newman had insisted earlier that an Oratory is "the representative of no distant or foreign interest, but lives a~nong and is contented with its own people.''~-~ The con-troversy with Dalgairns assisted the Birmingham house in defin-ing itself against the London clai~n to be normative)3 200 Review for Religious Birmingham did not issue a counterclaim as the true measure of Oratorian life, but it did insist that its own very English adap-tation to education and culture in its own time and place was cer-tainly an authentic version of Oratorian life. The Idea of a University, with its marvelous panegyric of St. Philip Neri, is the public version of these private Oratory position papers which were worked on at the same time. In short, the Birmingham com-munity saw the idea of the Oratory and the idea of the university as complementary and consistent with each other. That authority within another Oratory, authority in the English Catholic hier-archy, and authority in Rome saw this as dangerous eventually prevented Newman from a university ministry and the founding of two Oratories, the one in Dublin, the other in Oxford. If he had not been thwarted--we can ask not only what effect this would have had on the Catholic Church's presence in higher education, but also what kind of model the Oratory would have become for that presence. ~. Fidelity to One Place and Community If Newman's devotion to the Oratory as a humanistic Christian community making the best of its own time and place cost him considerable loss of influence, it also explains why Newman was always hoisted between the limitations of the local hierarchy and Roman authority. As small as an Oratory usually is, it is nevertheless a community of pontifical right. But, because the members never move out of this small community, it is inti-mately involved in the local church and becomes specially related to the bishop. This arrangement was meant to allow the Oratory to serve both worlds best, but it also means that the Oratory is vulnerable to the worst of both. And it was the worst that Newman often had to suffer. Suffering at the hands of both local officials and Curial bureaucrats was the fate of the Oratory's founder, St. Philip Neri, but it took Newman some time to realize that such was his own unavoidable fate.34 In 1856 he could be sanguine about Roman love of an English house of St. Philip ("Be sure," he wrote, "that, if we are really doing work, Rome will never be hard on us, even if we are informal, imprudent, or arbitrary").35 By the 1860s he had suffered enough to be afraid of Rome calling him to the Curia for trial of his opinions and judgments. He was so afraid that he considered such a prospect as the threat of death.36 The March-April 1992 201 bishop of Birmingham was of no help in the face of Roman threats. Newinan wrote privately in 1867 that Ullathorne "wishes to be kind to me, but to stand well with people at Rome super-sedes in his mind every other wish. So he is a coward.''37 We can be considerably grateful that the insight into the abuses of church power led him to write in 1877 the great preface to the ¼"a Media in which he developed a theology of abuses in the church. He asks us to contemplate the implications of Matthew 13 and to choose the complexities and shortcomings of a world church rather than the narrow confines and perfection of a sect. That is, for the sake of Catholicity, we must realize that sanctity will not always be an equally prominent mark of the church.3s Conclusion The burden of this short paper has been to indicate some areas where Newman cannot be completely understood without a direct reference to the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. I would say several areas have been directly touched on. First, there is the mystery Why Birmingham? Why would such a talented person remain faithful to this city when he had been born in London and had adopted Oxford and its university? If living in Birmingham is of any consequence in understanding the mystery of Newman, then only the Oratory suffices for an explanation. Newman consciously rejected the London option because his absence from Birmingham would have been the death of a community wishing to live around him.39 And it is within the mystery of a providence that settled the Oratory in Birmingham that we have the mystery of Newman's fidelity to St. Philip, a fidelity which certainly shaped the field of Newman's activities which we have now inherited. Secondly, knowing the Oratory helps us understand how Newman was able to function as pastor and theologian. He had no official standing in a seminary or a university, and his membership in the Oratory cut him off from preferments in the diocese. Yet, despite the fragility of the Oratory and Newman's vulnerability to his enemies with real power bases, he was able to accomplish much. As a pastor he was perpetually available to a local people, and as a teacher he could, in the Congregation, exercise his tal-ents and find reinforcement of his values. Thirdly, the prophetic stands which he brought to the Roman 202 Review for Religious Catholic Church found a congenial place within the tradition of Philip Neri and the Oratory. Laicity, education, and culture were not feared in the Oratory, but promoted. Certainly the Oratory could accommodate the interests of such a person as Newman, and this I think says a lot for the Oratory. Finally, the Oratory provided an emotional complementarity for Newman. Newman had written that he had "never liked a large Oratory. Twelve working priests has been the limit of my ambition. One cannot love many at one time; one cannot really have many friends.''4° The rather intimate expression of this is found in the well-known conclusion to the Apologia, but I would beg an indulgence to cite a lesser-known example found in Meriol Trevor's Life. Late in life some parishioners brought Newman a portrait of himself as a gift to the Birmingham Oratory. Newman replied to them in these words: You ask for my blessing and I bless you with all my heart, as I desire to be blessed myself. Each one of us has his own individuality, his separate history, his antecedents and his future, his duties, his responsibilities, his solemn trial, and his eternity. May God's grace, His love, His peace rest on all of you, united as you are in the Oratory of St. Philip, on old and young, on confessors and penitents, on teachers and taught, on living and dead. Apart from that grace, that love, that peace, nothing is stable, all things have an end; but the earth will last its time, and while the earth lasts, Holy Church will last, and while the Church lasts, may the Oratory of Birmingham last also, amid the fortunes of many generations one and the same, faithful to St Philip, strong in the protection of our Lady and all Saints, not losing as time goes on its sympathy with its first fathers, whatever may be the burden and interests of its own day, as we in turn now stretch forth our hands with love and awe towards those, our unborn successors, whom on earth we shall never kFIow.41 From the Oratory of Birmingham, England, Newman gives a blessing because he believed his life as an Oratorian was itself a blessing. For this reason the Oratory might merit a considera-tion when we think of Newman and what it cost him to be a Catholic and what it was like for him to rejoice as an old man after a long time not only in the Catholic Church but in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. March-April 1992 203 Notes ~ NewInan's classical exposition of this is found in University Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 75-98, and elucidated very well by Stephen Dessain in The Spirituality offfobn Henry Newman (Minneapolis, 1977), pp. 31-55. But see this theme repeated in an Oratorian context in Newman's Oratory Paper No. 6 in Placid Murray, Newman the Oratorian (Leominster, England, 1968), pp. 215-216. -' For the documentation of the constitutional development of the Congregation, see Antonius Cistellini CO, Collectanea Vetustorum ac Fundamentalium Documentorum Congregationis Oratorii Sancti Philippi Nerii (Brescia, 1982). ~ The more detailed history of this development can be found in Louis Ponnelle and Louis Border, St. Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Times (London, 1932), pp. 166-173. 4 Idea, Discourse 9, no. 9. ~ Ponnelle and Bordet, pp. 287-381. 6 Erasmus, Ep. 164, in Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmii Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H.M. Allen, and H.W. Garrod (Oxford, 1906-08), quoted in Eugene Rice Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1985), p. 133. 7 Rice, p. 133. 8 The 1969 Constitutions of the Congregation read in no. 15: "The Congregation follows the primitive Christian community that its char-acteristic power consists not in the multitude of its members, but rather in mutual knowledge--so that there may be a regard for the well-known faces--and in the true bond of love, by which those of the same family may be bound together through the practice of daily customs." See Newman the Oratorian, p. 329, for Newman's familiarity with the con-cept of well-known faces or countenances. ~ Prepos., p. 388. ~o Autobiographical Vt~ritings (AI/V), p. 281. 11AW, p. 286. ~2 Ian Ker, John Henry Newman (Oxford, 1988), p. 433. 13 Letters and Diaries (LD), vol. 14, p. 377. ~4 See S.G. Perera SJ, Life of the Venerable Father Joseph Uaz, Apostle of Ceylon (Galle, 1953). Newman indicates a long-standing knowledge of this special case in a letter written in 1867. ~s There is no history written of this first of the Oratories in the United States, and the archives of the house are very sketchy. There is no written rationale of the house for the scattering of the members, but some effort was made to rotate them back to Rock Hill if they were some distance away. There is an article describing the Rock Hill house written by Edward YVahl, one of the earlier members, in Oratorium, Ann. III, S.I-N. 1, Ian-Iun. 1972, pp. 23-32. ~' Ponnelle and Bordet, pp. 471-474. 204 Review for Religious 17 E A. Agnelli, The Excellencies of the Congregation of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri (Venice, 1825), translated and abridged by F.A. Antrobus, London 1881, chapter 1, section V. is LD, vol. 18, pp. 478,483. 19 LD, vol. 17, p. 447. '-OLD, vol. 18, pp. 114-115. z1 LD, vol. 16, p. 267. 22 LD, vol. 14, p. 274. ,~3 LD, vol. 26, p. 115. 24 Ker, pp. 365-372. 25 LD, vol. 17, p. 137. See Newman the Oratorian, p. 311, for his appre-ciation of the Oratory and women. 26 A~17~ p. 327. 27 LD, vol. 21, p. 327. 28LD, vol. 21, p. 331. ~'9 Ker, p. 579. 3o DiffT, ii, pp. 20-21. 31 Placid Murphy calls these papers another apologia (Newman the Oratoria~l, p. 299). -~'~ Newman the Oratorian, p. 196. 33 Newman the Oratorian, p. 358. 34 The 1848 paper in Newman the Oratorian lists the persecutions Philip suffered (see p. 163). In 1862 he can compare his troubles to the founder's (see AW, pp. 256-257). 35 LD, vol. 17, p. 151. 36 LD, vol. 20, pp. 445-448. ~7 LD, vol. 23, p. 296. 38 See R. Bergeron, LesAbus de L'~glise d'apr& Newman (Paris, 1971), and the annotated edition of Newman's ~a Media (Oxford, 1990), ed. H.D. Weidner. 39 LD, vol. 13, pp. 51-52. 40 Newman the Oratorian. p. 387. 4~ Meriol Trevor, Newman, Light in I:Vinter (New York, 1962), p. 582. March-April 1992 205 DENNIS J. BILLY The Resurrection Kernel theology and spirituality Is there a fundamental principle of the resurrection? The answer to this question depends on the way in which one understands the relationship of history to the reality of the risen Christ. This relationship, in turn, depends on the stance one takes towards the possibility of a transhistorical event and the type of impact it would have on the continuities and discontinuities of historical change. However understood, the impact itself would have vast ramifications for the whole of theology. Resurrection: Distinguishing Idea from Reality At the outset, it may be helpful to distinguish between resurrection (1) as a particular item in the history of ideas and (2) as the reality experienced among the earliest fol-lowers of Christ. The former may be separated from the viewpoint of faith, compared with other ideas about the nature of the afterlife, and evaluated on a rational basis for its various strengths and weaknesses as a viable expla-nation of the nature of life after death. As a transhistori-cal event with historical consequences, the latter is intricately bound to the faith of the primitive Christian community and cannot be studied in such a detached, ana- Dennis J. Billy CSSR continues his reflections on various cen-tral tenets of our faith and their relationship to the vowed life of religious. His address is Accademia Alfonsiana; Via Merulana, 31; C.P. 2458; 00100 Rome, Italy. 206 Review for Religious lyrical manner. Any effort to formulate a fundamental principle of the resurrection must be careful to take both sides of this dis-tinction into account. The Idea of Resurrection. A well-grounded discussion of an idea should begin with an attempt to identify its most distinctive char-acteristics. With respect to its general mean-ing, one could accurately describe the term "resurrection" as a belief common among Christians that, at some point after death, an individual is transformed by the power of the Divinity on every level of his or her anthro-pological makeup--the corporeal, the psy-chological, the spiritual, and the social--and thus raised to a higher level of human exis-tence in a way that always remains in funda-mental continuity with his or her historical, earthly life. The most distinctive marks in this short yet exact account of the idea of resurrection include: (1) personal life after death, (2) in a The idea of resurrection alone safeguards the inviolate dignity of each human being on every level of existence. transformed state, (3) embracing all the anthropological factors of human existence, and (4) in a way continuous with an individual's concrete, earthly life. Each of these elements is essential to the idea of resurrection as it is used in this essay and as it exists in the major Christian traditions. These characteristics also set the idea of resurrection apart from the related idea of bodily resuscitation (for example, the raising of Lazarus, Jn 11:44), as well as from the other major philosophical and religious explanations of the nature of life in the hereafter (for example, the immortality of the soul, reincar-nation, nirvana). When these are compared, the idea of resur-rection distinguishes itselfi (1) from bodily resuscitation, in its emphasis on a transformed existence in life after death; (2) from the immortality of the soul, in its inclusion of all of humanity's anthropological factors in the nature of that existence; (3) from reincarnation, in its rupture of the cycle of time and its insistence on the fundamental continuity of life in the hereafter with a per-son's earthly existence; and (4) from nirvana, in its avowal that final beatitude does not involve the extinction of individual con-sciousness. The greatest strength of the idea of resurrection is March-April 1992 207 that, of all of the ideas about the nature of life after death, it alone safeguards the inviolate dignity of each human being on every level of his or her existence. That is to say that it alone keeps human nature eternally intact while, at the same time, saving the individual from ultimate personal extinction. Its greatest weak-ness is that, in representing the fulfillment of one of the deepest and most profound hopes of the human heart, it seems almost too good to be true, an attractive but highly unlikely possibility. For this reason, of all the ideas of life in the hereafter, resurrec-tion is the one most difficult to accept on the simple basis of faith. The Reality of the Resurrection. Rooted in the hopes of Jewish apoc-alypticism during the centuries just prior to the appearance of Christ, and promulgated during Jesus' own lifetime by the reli-gious elite known as the Pharisees, the idea of resurrection devel-oped to its present form as a result of theological reflection on the nature of the Christ event, most especially in the primitive Christian community's interpretation of the meaning of the apos-tolic experience of the risen Lord. This reflection is intimately tied to the trust that community placed in the validity of the apos-tolic witness and to the experience of faith upon which it rested. It is also the context within which one may speak of the resur-rection not as an idea, but as a reality and a hope. \Vhat precisely happened on the first Easter morning remains shrouded by the subjective awareness of the earliest followers of Jesus. That awareness probably ran the gamut of several emo-tional states--from depression and fear, to suspicion and isola-tion, to incipient faith and the lingering yearning for the retrieval of lost expectations--and most likely varied in each of the persons involved. That is not to say that the event had no basis outside the experience of Jesus' followers, but only that there is no way to determine what it is with any accuracy. It is for this reason that, down through the centuries, the Easter event remains primarily an experience of faith in the lives of Jesus' followers. A distinction must still be made, however, between the faith of those who witnessed the Easter event personally and those whose faith relies on the testimony of the apostles. The procla-mation of the church rests upon the eyewitness accounts of the apostles, that is, on those who made the startling claim to have experienced for themselves the reality of the risen Lord. Their experience of faith remains qualitatively different from that of 208 Review for Religious the believer in the pew, for they claim to have experienced a real-ity outside of themselves, rooted in the objective order, distinct from their own subjectivity, and identified with the person of their Master, Jesus of Nazareth. Without the unprecedented bold-ness and resiliency of these claims, the Christian project would have nothing distinctive in its message and probably would never have gotten off the ground. These apostolic claims emerge from one of two possibilities: the experience of the risen Christ was with or without a basis in the person of Jesus in the external order. That is to say that the experience of the apostles corresponds to a reality outside of themselves or remains entirely subjective in all respects. If the former is true, then the further question must be asked regarding the nature of this basis in the external order. If the latter be true, then the only conclusion to be drawn is that the apostles suffered from self-delusion, that their testimony is false, as is the religion to which it gave rise. The fact that neither of these possibilities can be proven highlights the underlying quality of faith inherent in the conclusions of both the believer and non-believer alike. Still more can be said about the position of the believer. If the apostolic experience of the risen Christ does have an external basis in the person of Jesus, then this affirmation, when combined with the idea of resurrection developed earlier in this essay, nec-essarily points to an event of singular historical significance. Indeed, this event could be measured by the instruments of his-torical observation only by its effects (for example, a missing body) and, for this reason, must be placed in a category unique to itself and understood as a transhistorical event with historical conse-quences. This is so precisely because the risen Christ, existing in a transformed state but in a way continuous with his earthly life, does not lead "a historical existence" in the way in which the phrase is commonly used. That is to say that space and time no longer set the limits for his physical existence. In his resurrected state, Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, a singular dimension unique unto himself, who recapitulates, both now and forever, all The Easter event remains primarily an experience of faith in the lives of lesus" followers. March-April 1992 209 of creation within himself, into the love of the Father and the joy of their Spirit. The Resurrection Kernel From all that has been said, a sound formulation of the fun-damental principle of the resurrection (the resurrection kernel) would consist in the affirmation of faith that the idea of resur-rection has become a reality in the risen Christ. This reality is rooted in the transhistorical nature of the Christ event, whose historical consequences linger even to this day in the ongoing proclamation of the church. Based on the testimony of its apos-tolic forebears, the church has, in its ministry down through the centuries, kept alive for humanity the fervent hope that the deep-est yearnings of the human heart will one day be fully realized. That is to say that the transformation wrought by God in Christ promises to extend itself to all who are incorporated into his body, the church. In this respect, a sharing in the life of the risen Lord may be looked upon as the ultimate destiny of all of humankind and will be impeded only by a stubborn individual or corporate persistence in the life of sin. Given the above formulation, a number of important obser-vations arise: (1) To affirm that an idea has become a reality is to utilize the well-known philosophical distinction between the internal (that is, subjective) and external (that is, objective) orders. The limitations of this distinction are well known, and care must be taken not to stretch the analogy beyond its avowed usefulness. Indeed, special care must be taken not to project the concerns of the so-called critical problem back to a time before its signifi-cance was entirely known. (2) God the Father is the primary agent in bringing about this realization in Christ. Since idea and reality are intimately connected in the Divinity's vision of itself, the resurrection of Christ may be viewed as a providential movement on the part of the Father to bring the plan of redemption in accord with the working of the Divine Mind, that is, the Logos. In this respect, Christ's resurrection is that event which, touching upon history but transcending time, initiates the ultimate return of all created things back to God. (3) This view of Christ's resurrection also sheds light upon 210 Review for Religious the development in the early church of the doctrine of the incar-nation. If it is true that, in Christ's resurrection, flesh has been divinized and lifted up into the reality of the Word, it follows that, at some point prior to this momentous occasion, the Word itself had descended into the reality of human flesh and had become a human person. Putting aside for the moment the vari-ous intricacies involved in discussing the Christological contro-versies in the early centuries of the church, it seems quite appropriate to say that the doctrines of Christ's incarnation and resurrection form two aspects of a single salvific event which, if one were to borrow the Neoplatonic exitus/reditus structure adopted by Aquinas, represents the recreatio,z of all things going out of (exitus) and going back (reditus) to God. It is in this sense that all things are recapitulated in Christ, the New Adam. (4) As described above, the resurrection is not merely the state of Christ's postmortem existence, but an intricate part of the whole process of redemption. If Christ's exitu} from the Father reaches its furthest extension in his passion and death on the cross (described in the Creed as his descent into hell), his reditus is ush-ered in by the events of Easter morning, and his Spirit is the prin-ciple by which all things continue to be gathered into his body and thus into the presence of the Father. (5) As a transhistorical event with historical consequences, the resurrection of Christ exists outside of but in relation to the realm of historical inquiry. In this regard, it lies beyond the realm of scientific investigation and can be affirmed only through faith in the testimony of those claiming to have actually experienced Jesus after his death. That is not to say that the apostles did not experience outside of themselves in the exter-nal order, but only that the basis for their experience cannot be verified. (6) Indeed, probably the only historical consequence of mea-surable scientific value would have been the disappearance of Jesus' body at the actual moment of his resurrection. Since the precise whereabouts of the body was a point of contention even in the initial aftermath of the Easter proclamation (Mt 28:13), one must conclude that, although its disappearance could have been verified, if not scientifically, then at least through pagan eyewitness accounts, it obviously was not. (7) On all other points, the detached observer would not be able to separate the subjective experience of the apostles from March-April 1992 211 the reality of the risen Christ. There would, in other words, have been no way of determining whether or not they were actually experiencing anything beyond their own intensified inner aware-ness. The singularity of this experience would be expected if a transhistorical event were to occur and be experienced in its his-torical consequences. (8) To the extent that it is not based on direct experience but on the testimony of others, the faith of the church is qualitatively different from the faith of the apostles. Not only does it point to the conviction of those who claimed to have experienced the risen Lord, but, in one respect, it is even a purer experience of faith: "Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe" (Jn 20:29). (9) Belief in the risen Christ keeps alive in people the hope that, after death, their lives will not end, but merely change. Because of Christ's resurrection, they look forward to a trans-formed existence in the hereafter, one in continuity with their own lives on earth. Sustained by a believer's prayerful response to the contetnporary challenges of Christian discipleship, this hope forms the basis upon which life in the resurrection is anticipated even in the present. (10) Through their participation in the ministry and life of the church, people receive a foretaste of this transformed exis-tence, especially when they partake of the sacraments around the table of the Lord. It was at the Eucharist where Jesus' disciples recognized him in the breaking of the bread (Lk 24:30). It is there where Christians, even to this day, gather to do the same. This is especially true for those who dedicate their lives to Christ through the following of the evangelical counsels. Religious and the Resurrection In their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, religious strive to center their lives upon the reality of the risen Christ. They seek to do so by virtue of their firtn conviction that they are called to share in the life of the resurrection by making the idea of the vows a lived reality in their day-to-day existence. Christ, who exhibited both before and after his resurrection a life dedicated to the Father through the eschatological signs of the evangelical counsels, asks religious to do the same. The strength to do so comes from Christ and is mediated by his Spirit through his church and its ministry of the sacraments. While such dedi- 212 Review for Religious cation is never fully realized in the present, religious are called to imitate Christ throughout their entire lives. It is for this reason that, at the end of their earthly lives, they hope to share in the full-ness of his transformed existence. In their vowed life in common, religious pledge to give them-selves over entirely to the life of the risen Lord. In their vow of poverty, they seek both physical and spiritual detachment from material goods, doing so not out of a suspicion about the fundamental good-ness of creation, but from the convic-tion that it too will undergo a transformation in the fullness of Christ's kingdom. In their vow of chastity, they promise to forgo the goods of marriage, children, and sexual pleasure, thereby accepting Christ's Gospel declaration that there will be neither husband nor wife in the life to come (Lk 20:35) and that, even in the realm of relationships, all who abide in him will live a trans-formed existence. In their vow of obe-dience, they promise to accept the will of their superiors as a manifestation of God's plan for their lives, thus hoping to estab-lish within themselves a continual movement of accord between their own wills and that of the their risen Lord. Finally, in their communal existence, they hold each other accountable for the way of life they have chosen and seek to reflect in their mutual relations that dignity and care appropriate to those who are called to be members of Christ's body. By means of their individual and communal dedication to the evangelical counsels, it is clear that religious seek, even in this present life, a deeper share in the life of the resurrection. Through their vowed life in community, religious thus provide a faithful witness for themselves, the rest of the church, and the entire world that the idea of resurrection has not only been made a reality in Christ but that it is striving, at this very moment, to be realized in the lives of those who believe. In this respect, their witness affirms the movement of Christ's Spirit in the life of the church and provides a foretaste of the life to come. That is not to say that religious embody this charismatic dimension of the church better or more faithfully than any of the other vocations within the Belief in the risen Christ keeps alive in people the hope that, after death, their lives will not end, but merely change. March-April 1992 213 church (for example: single, married, priestly states), but only that their way of life is especially suited to it. Of its very nature, the religious life forIns a part of the charismatic dimension of the church. Indeed, to the extent that religious communities do not manifest to both others and themselves the gentle yet challenging presence of the Spirit, they fall short of the explicit nature of their call to center their lives entirely around the reality of the risen Christ. He it was who first imparted the Holy Spirit to his body, the church. He it is who continues to do so even to the present day. Through their faithfulness to the vows, lived in community and in the Spirit, religious seek mainly to nourish their relation-ship with the risen Christ. This personal relationship to the Lord motivates all of their activity for the establishment of God's king-dom; it is also what draws others to follow their particular way of life. Indeed, the care with which they tend this relationship is itself a sign that the reality of Christ's resurrection is meant for all to share and experience in all its fullness. In this respect, reli-gious must be ever conscious that their vowed life in common has little meaning if it is separated from life in the Spirit of the risen Christ and seen as an end in itself. To be sure, there is noth-ing sadder in the life of the church than to see individual reli-gious and, at times, entire communities lose sight of the meaning of their vocation. When people of such great promise and poten-tial compromise themselves and begin to believe that the Spirit is no longer active in their lives and that things will never change for the better, when men and women, who are called to be signs of hope, begin to believe in the voices of hopelessness, then the time is ripe for a prophet to arise within their midst to challenge them to come back to the Lord and to live the life to which they have been called. At the same time, there is nothing more joyful in the life of the church than to see men and women who, out of love for their Lord, renounce the very things for which they most actually strive during their sojourn on earth. To live in poverty, without children or spouse, and without full personal liberty provides oth-ers with the constantly needed reminder that the fullness of riches, family life, and freedom is ultimately found only in one's rela-tionship to him whom the apostles acclaimed to be truly risen. 214 Review for Religious Conclusion This essay has sought to outline the basic, underlying principle of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. It has done so, on the one hand, by describing in as precise detail as possible the mean-ing of the idea of resurrection as under-stood in the church's teaching and, on the other hand, by looking into some of the fundamental presuppositions regarding the resurrection of Christ as experienced by his earliest followers. Bringing these two currents of inquiry together, the funda-mental principle of the resurrection (the resurrection kernel) was described as the affirmation of faith that the idea of resur-rection has become a reality in the risen Christ. Seen as a transhistorical event with historical consequences, the acclaimed res-urrection of Jesus of Nazareth lies, for all practical purposes, beyond the scope of scientific verification and remains inti- Through their faithfulness to the vows, lived in community and in the Spirit, religious seek mainly to nourish their relationship with the risen Christ. mately tied to the internal, subjective event of faith to which it gave life. That is not to say that Jesus' resurrection has no ground in the external order, but only that it ultimately lies beyond the scope of controlled observation. In this respect, the faith experi-ence of those who experienced the risen Lord is qualitatively dif-ferent from that of those whose faith rests upon their testimony. Blessed precisely because they believe without seeing, today's believers share in the hope of their own transformed existence which, through their experience of the Spirit in the church com-munity of the faithful, may be experienced even now in the quiet anticipation of the fullness of a reality yet to come. They bring their hearts' deepest yearning for the fullest presence of the risen Christ to the table of the Lord, where they are blessed with a glimpse of

Issue 44.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1985. ; REVIEW FOR R ELIGIOUS(ISSN 0034-639X), published every two months, is edited in collaboration with the faculty members of the Department of Theological Studies of St. Louis University. The editorial offices are located at Room 428:3601 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis,-MO 63108-3393. REVIEW FOR R ELIGIOOS is owned by the Missouri Province Educational Institute of the Society of Jesus, St. Louis, MO. © 1985 by REVIEW FOR R El.IGlOOS. Composed, printed and manufactured in U.S.A. Second class postage paid at St. Louis, MO. Single copies: $2.50. Subscription U.S.A. $10.00 a year: $19.00 for two years. Other countries: add $2.00 per year (postage). For subscdpllon orders or change of address, write REVIEW FOR RELIGIOOS: P.O. Box 6070; Duluth, MN 55806. Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Iris Ann Ledden, S.S.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editor Jan. / Feb., 1985 Volume 44 Number 1 Manuscripts, books for review and correspondence with the editor should be sent to REVIEW FOR RELtGIOOS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. Correspondence about the department "Canonical Counsel" should be addressed to Richard A. Hill, S.J.; J.S.T.B.; 1735 LeRoy Ave.; Berkeley, CA 94709. Back issues and reprints should be ordered from REvlEw FOR RELIGIOUS; Room 428; 3601 Lindell Blvd.; St. Louis, MO 63108-3393. "Out of print" issues and articles not published as reprints are available from University Microfilms International; 300 N. Zeeb Rd.; Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Review for Religious ~,'olume 44, i985 Editorial Offices 3601 Lindell Boulevard, Room 428 Saint Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 . Daniel F. X. Meenan, S.J. Dolores Greeley, R.S.M. Iris Ann Ledden, S.~.N.D. Richard A. Hill, S.J. Jean Read Editor Associate Editor Review Editor Contributing Editor Assistant Editor REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is published in January, March, May, July, September, and November on the twentieth of the month. It is indexed in the Catholic Periodical and Literature Index and in Book Review Index. A microfilm edition of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS isavailable from~University Microfilms International; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. Copyright © 1985 by REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS. A major portion of each issue of REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS is also regularly available on cassette recordings as a service for the visually impaired. Write to the Xavier Society for the Blind; 154 East 23rd Street; New York, NY 10010. Religious Life as Unchanging in a World of Change John E Whealon Archbishop Whealon of Hartford addressed the Fall Meeting of the Consortium Perfectae Caritatis in October, 19.84. He may be addressed at his office: Archdiocese of Hartford; 134 Farmingtoh ~v~nue; Hartford, CT 06105. he theme of your meeting, my dear sisters and brothers, is "Religious Life as Unchanging in a World of Change."Th~ medieval~scholastics taught us that distinctions are necessary for ~good thinking, for good logic. So I make a necessary distinction here between the essentials and the accidentals of the religious life. As a Father of the Second Vatican Council (andotherE are precious few of us left :as active bishops these days), I point,out with sortie authority that the council did call'upon religious to change--or at least to consider.changing --the accidentals ofiheir religious life. The operative text is Paragraph 2 of the council's decree Pe~fectae Caritatis, which lays in effect: "The: appropriate renewal of religious life involves two simultaneous processes: (1)'a continuous return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration behind a given community;, and (2) an adjustment of the community to the .changed conditions of the times." ~ " So the council expected every religious community to fix one eye on the Gospel and on its founder, and the other eye on the modern world, and to update those accidentals which no longer made sense in the modern world. I do think that all communities, nineteen years after that council decree, have done what they were asked to do. The real question is whether some communities have lost some of the essentials as well in their efforts to update. Returning, then, to that basic distinction, I am thinking now of religious life as "Unchanging in E~sentials in a World of Change." 3 4 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 I wish to do twothings this afternoon: first, to speak about these essentials; second, to read to you some quasi-private correspondence. What are the essentials for us in our living out of the Christian life? Forgive me, not a religious, for listing her~ some of the items that are essential in my life--I suspect, though, that they are quite essential in your lives as well. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew gives us the Lord's teaching about the person whose house is built on rock. It is a useful metaphor to describe the person who has certain fundamental convictions which carry through the years. Let the tides and eddies and swirls and winds come, the rock-foundation of these convictions is there, unshaken, unmoved, unaffected by what goes on around. So you and I should be solidly based on the rock of our certain convictions, on the essentials of our lives, so that we are not really shaken by what other people say or do, by the spirit of the age, by the shallow currents of our shallow times. I will now list for you five unchanging elements in this world of change. They have carried me through some years which have been very difficult for any bishop. Perhaps the listing of them will find an echo in your own lives as well. The first essential is God. As the years go on, I "become even more convinced that the incredible design in nature, the intricate and intertwined design of the human body and psyche, and the very continuation in being of this world and of us humanbeings in this world and in.life must be explained by God. How a person can go through, life and not accept a Designer, God, who alone explains life, the world, and the universe, I fail to fathom. The second essential is JeJus Christ, the climax of Revelation. By Revelation I mean that truth from God which we know frrm Scripture and the Spirit-guided Tradition of the Church. From Revelation there are many things God had not ~old us and which we can only wonder about and theorize about in theology. We know so little about heaven and ~hell and purgatory, about what Jesus Christ knew,~ about what the Blessed Mother knew, about how she came to the end of her life, about the Apostles, But we know all that we"need to know to save our souls and to lead a good and fruitfully human life --and whatwe know is summed up in one word, because it is the Word-- Jesus, our Lord. Our life isto be the imitation of that Perfect.Life: Our life is to be our acceptance of the One who is the Way, the Truth, the Life. So, as St. Paul said, life is Christ and death is Christ. In thefirst reading, from Galatians, of today's Mass we have the same lesson: we are baptized into Christ, we live totally in Christ. St. Ignatius of Antioch over eighteen centuriesago described Christ as "our inseparable life." This is what it means to have Jesus as our Lord. For us the ~iimax of God's Revelation is Jesus Christ: in what Jesus was and is, and in, what Jesus has taught us and teaches us. So this is a.second solid essential on which to base a life: Jesus Christ, after God. The third essential for living is prayer, mainly personal prayer, but also Religiou~ Life as Unchanging public or liturgical prayer. One of the standard definitions for prayer is -conversation with God. In my life prayer has not been a. conversation at all with God. My prayer is a poor, one-sided effort to speak to the Almighty and to praise the Almighty. I trust and I believe that God is listening. Prayer is a necessary dimension of living,. I believe, so that a day spent without an attempt at mental prayer, a little move towards contemplation, minutes spent in praise and thanksgiving, would be a ,day somehow lost spiritually. I know that prayer does more good for me than I will ever know, and so prayer is the third foundation for living that I list. A fourth essential is community with others. I am not a religious, but I would have a' very difficult time living alone as an anchorite or a hermit. I need to be with others who think and pray and live as I do, and that is why I live with a community of priests. It seems to me that for much the same reasons the religious life is an element in the Catholic Church that will be present until the Lord comes again. So long as the faith is strong, some will want to live out their Christian lives in a community form of life. Some will be called by God to put themselves under vbw in order to live their lives in Christ more fully, in order to do more for Christ and for his Church. So in .a world of change--and I suspect that the prominence of the electronic, media in our society will make inevitable an atmosphere of continuous change in the: years ahead--religious life will be a constant, an ever-available way of life for those with a vocation. A fifth essential element for any Catholic is the Church itself--the Catholic Church possessed, of a teaching authority or rnagisterium that is a part of the Christ's Church. We are the Church, we People of God. But we are also a Church which has a teaching authority. The Lord Jesus gave a universal shepherd and other shepherds to guide his flock. The Lord Jesus, who taught with authority, told his apostles to use his authority and to teach and baptize all nation's, even to the ends of the earth. One of the dominant characteristics of the Catholic Church is its magisterii~m. We have in the Church an authority to tell us what is right and " wrong, what is true and false, what is to be done and what is not to be done. The test of theomagisterium, and of Our acceptance of it, occurs precisely when we are told to believe something or to do something that we personally would prefer not to believe or not to do. The "obedience of faith," then, calls for some humility. And in a proud and indulgent age, neither the concepts nor the words "obedience" and "magisterium~ are very popular. So, specifically by reason of the magisterium in the Church, the Catholic today should know and hold clearly that racial discrimination is wrong, abortion is wrong, contraception is.morally wrong, liberation theology is in some forms dangerous, and ~o forth. I do not see how a person can live the Catholic life fully without following the magisterium. In saying that, I fully realize that there are distinctions which have to be made about the voice 6 '/ Review for Religious, Jan.-~eb., 1985 expressing: magisterial teachings, the clarity and loudness (so to speak) of that voice;, the.topic taught, and so forth. But my point is that the gentiine ~Catholic is to follow the teaching of pope and bishop, and not turn Somersaults so as to avoid accepting magisterial teaching. It is in the context of this acceptance, of magisterial teaching that I see the various reactions (really only two) to the Holy'Father's letter of April 3; 1983, addressed to the diocesan bishops of the United States. The Holy Father asked the bishops to: give special pastoral.service to religious in their dioceses, with a view to express gratitude for all that religious mean for the Church and also to convey concern over the future of this charism in the Church because of the decline in vocations. The papal letter mad~ reference to the Ten Essential Elements .of Religious Life and to their further explanation in an accompanying document drawn up by the Sacred Congregation for .Religious and Secular Institutes. ,, There.,has been much voiced opposition by some U.S: religious to that document and to the Ten Essential Elements. 1 have heard presentations, that go. into a lengthy exegesis of the document, that anal~,ze the mind,set, the limited world-outlook and limited theology o~ its authors, that criticize the ten points for this or that reason. I can only say to such criticisms that it seems to me to,be improper to attempt to separate the document or the Ten Essential Elements from the Holy Father. In September of last year, in company with~a hundred U.S. bishops, I made the obligatory ad limina visit to Rome and presented a quinquennial report~ on the archdiocese. In talking to me, and to,each of the.other U.S. bishops, the Holy Father asked with concern and worry about.the religioias in our dioceses and about their reaction to :his letter. On the basis of my experience, then, it seems tome that the way to read and interpret this letter is to see that the Lord's Universal Shepherd is'worried about a most.important part of the universal flock, the ireligious in the U,S.A., and wants to tell them what religious life should be: in the past, and now, and in the future. A hypercritical or narrowly analytical reading of that letter will offer, I believe, a wrong interpretation and, in view of the magistegium, not a fully Catholic reaction to it. This question of magisterium is of critical importance today for Catholics seeking to understand more fully the dimensions of their faith. During the past twenty years the underlying question in many news stories relating to Catholics has really been about magisterium. And magisterium is the real question un~derlying the recent discussion regarding two Catholic legislators and their pro-choice stance concerning abortion. I conclude this presentation by summarizing the :several points which we need to hold to as basic for living, as Christians and Catholicsand religious, in an ever-changing world: '1) God; 2) Jesus Christ as Lord; 3) prayer,or our aRempts at prayer; 4) religious community; 5) the magisterium' of~the Catholic Church Religious Life as Unehanging / 7 Come what may in future years, may we hold to these essentials and find strength as. we base our lives, build our house, on them; My second purpose this afternoon is to read to you, for whatever wisdom it holds, my answer to the Holy Father's request for special pastoral service to the Leligious of the archdiocese. A copy of this letter has been. sent to Arch-bishop John Quinn for~reference to the Pontifical Commission which he heads and the committee which he appointed. ~ , My answer was dated August 14, 1984, and reads as ~follows: Most Holy Father: This letter is in response to the request of Your Holiness to the U.S.A. diocesan bishops, asking each to give special pastoral service to the religious in the dioceses. After receiving the letter of Your Holiness, I met with either the provincial or council or community of each of the ten communities of religious with provincial houses in the Archdiocese of Hartford. With each group I discussed the esteem of Your Holiness for these religious, your concern for their future, and religious vocations, and their experience of renewal after the Second Vatican Council as seen in the light of the ten "Essential Elements." ~ I learned that of the ten communities, seven [and here I list,,their names] see the ten essentials as expressing their religious life. Most of these have already had their constitutions approved. Of the ten communities three have experienced renewal in. a different way. In general they have experienced a reduction of centralized and local authority In favor of a more collegial approach, an openness to difference and individual apostolates, a willingness to permit smaller groups to live apart from the larger community, and.a replacement of religious garb with a simple secular dress. In these three.communities, however, a minority of the community has kept the religious garb and traditional customs. These are mainly older members of the community. From these interviews, and from meetings with religious outside the Archdiocese, I conclude: 1. We have today in the U.S.A. two sharply different approaches to religious life. The one approach follows the Ten Essentials. The other approach follows some of the Ten Essentials, but has adopted a noticeably more democratic approach to authority, work, living arrangements and religious garb. 2. These two approaches' are irreconcilable. There is a painful division between the two groups, and a more painful division within a community in which the leadership and most younger members have followed a progressive approach to renewal, while most of the older members have remained conservative.* 3. Some; not all, consei'vative communities are growing. The more progressive communities, our largest communities of women, are Review .for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 showing no growth. 4. Because of these two different approaches to religious life, there is widespread confusion about the identity of religious life. 5. The progressive group,, includes many of our best, brightest, most dedicated religious. Their lifestyle and works of religion are to the credit of their community and Chui'ch. And that they are not growing in numbers is cause for lamentation. 6. The progressive group is concerned that its approach to renewal will be judged as not valid, and they will lose their status as religious in the Church. One answer to this is that they have .already effectively ~ converted the community to the status of a secular institute. The picture is extraordinarily complex. My best thinking is that the Holy See could respond in two possible ways: 1. Following the Gamaliel~principle, do nothing. In fifteen years, a brief time in the life .of the Church, the picture will be much more clear. At the end of the century a decision can be made. 2. Designate the religious following the Ten Essentials, including individuals in progressive communities, as "religious. of strict ob-servance," and designate the others by a different terminology. The conservative in progressive communities should be given special consideration.~ ' ~ My conclusion is that there is in the long run little difference between these two approaches. But, for the purpose of identifying the religious in the. Church' and for encouraging religious vocations, the second approach is probably preferable. With respect and fraternal affection in the Lord. That is the end of my letter tothe Holy Father, and end of my presentation to you. And I am grateful~ for your attention. *In response'to a listener, Archbishop Whealon offered the following clarification: By the terms .progre~ssive and conservative 1 intend nothing other than the more or less conventional way used to describe different extremes in the body p~61itic. I am consciously irying pot to use loaded terms in any way, and so am open to any more successful way of expressing these differences. Future Directions in Ministry Barbara Kraemer, 0 S. E Sister Barbara Kraemer is Vice-President of the School Sisters of St. Francis. This article is based on a presen~tation delivered to the, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the course of their.Assembly (August 6, 1984). Sister may be addressed at her generalate: 1501 S. Layton Blvd.; Milwaukee, Wl 53215-0006. Our future directions in" ministry are rooted in our history and in our current context. We are members of apostolic communities in the United States. Our spirituality is rooted in our western culture. The experience of growth and renewal these past years has been basically positive for Changes have not been made lightly, nor have they been made without mistakes and difficulties. Renewal is an ongoing process. My community was founded at a time when ~Catholic schools were being established to teach religion and to giv~ people the skills they needed in an irfimigra~society. Over the years, the needs have changed and also our responses ~m ministry. Todaywe must ask: "What is our unique contribution in education?" Today the descendants of~the German immigrants are members of the middle and upper classes. Do we continue to have a mission to them? What is its new focus? Do we have a mission to new immigrants from Southeast Asia, from Latin America and the Caribbean? There are several areas of blatant need in the U.S. today that help to direct out: efforts in ministry. They are the real needs of real people and they must be part of our consideration as we shape our present and future responses. First, Poverty. Not the t:oncept, but thepeople who are poor. How can we keep in touch with the devastating reality of the poor people around us?.How can we keep our hearts open to them? What can we do so that the distribution of wealth and opportunity will be more equal? "~ ,. Second, .Violence. There is a lack of respect for life in our country, and I'm not speaking only of abortion or capital punishment, but also about child and 9 10 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 spouse abuse, prison conditions, war-making. Are we aware of the violence within us? What steps can we take so that in the future our country and our people stand for a nonviolent world? Third, Inequality of Women. Women in our country receive contradictory messages. Are we convinced that further changes need to be made? What is my or your personal commitment to equality for women? Fourth, Economic Exploitation, There is the philosophy that says we should have more because it's available, that we should sacrifice nothing and enjoy our abundance. And there is the undeniable fact that someone can make a living by exploitation, later beginning a respectable enterprise, made more respectable by donations. People are happy to accept the money because they need it. Playboy Enterprises now has a charitable foundation. Do we scrutinize the source of donations we accept? The response we make to these and other needs is important not only in terms of the what but also the how. The value of our future contributions in ministry depends as much on how we live out our beliefs and values, as it does on the work itself. Therefore, I would like to emphasize three characteristics of ministry that are extremely important for the future: insertion into the lives of people; public witness; and effective use of resources. Insertion Insertion simply means that .we must be part of the people we :serve, part of the society we live in, identifying ourselves as much as possible with the people. Sometimes that seems easy, especially when we come from the same class and a similar background. It is harder when a person with ~a middle-class background goes to teach in a wealthy suburb or to work~at an inner-city shelter for the homeless. It takes careful looking and searching to see the people around us and to recognize what they have to contribute to our lives. Not many, if any, of us rea!ly know what it is to stand in a line at a government office waiting'for an unemployment check,.to personally face the question of abortion or divorce. But iLwe let people teach us, our ministry will not be superficial and it will not be judgmental. Recently,someone. questioned the priorities of a small group of our sisters living in a village in Guatemala. "They spend so much time buying food and " preparing the meal," she said. Their work is basically with the .women of that village and the surrounding area. What better way to understand the life of those women than to identify with how they spend their day! And whose time priorities do we use to measure the value of our presence with these people? Henri Nouwen has spoken about how difficult it is for us to receive from people; we 'always want to give. He pointed out: a servant doesnt decide how h~/she is going to serve. He/she comes to work for people and observes and graduall3i learns how to serve them.~ It.seems that this is something we learn slowly in life. New teachers believe that everything depends on them. They prepare and prepare, presenting a day's work in the first half hour of class and Future Directions in Ministry then wonder what they will do the rest of the day. With time they learn that they don't even know what to prepare or what to give until they learn from the students what they need. Teachers must receive from their students in order to be of service to them. There are some consequences to the approach to ministry: We can't as easily deceive ourselves, believing we are in control. Not to be in charge can be very frustrating! Neither should we be an elite group in the Church anymore, on a pedestal, separated from the rest of the faithful. There is no work religious do that laity cannot do. And maybe the laity can do some things better. We may learn that lay leadership can be far more effective than our own in a parish or a school. We may need to stay for years in an area before we are really accepted by the people. This is often true in places like Appalachia where people are suspicious 6f"here-today, ,gone-tomorrow" outsiders with projects. The people we work with who are poor, who have little, help us examine our own lifestyles. We see what we actually need and what we have accumulated because consu-merism has crept in. One sister, speaking about the poor she encounters in the cour~ system, said; "They keep me honest." In our society and in our wo~:ld, the values that are a.ccepted and carry weight are: competition, power, domination, control--what we would characterize as "masculine" values. What our world needs is an alternative vision: not domination, but in,terdependence; not control, but freedom; not individualism, but collaboration. Within the Church, as religious persons, we already bring many gifts. We have the potential to do more. Sometimes lay women see sisters as rivals .for positions or recognition, rather than seeing them as sisters working with them to make the Church receptive to the contribution of women. Collaboration requires us to leave our ghettos, wherever they are, however comfortable. We need to stretch ourselves, to be with those who are different from ourselves and who can complement the gifts we have to bring. For such collaboration, coalitions can be formed so the power of action for good can be strengthened, i have belonged to the Central America Solidarity Coalition in Milwaukee since I returned from Nicaragua in 1980. ~.There are Catholics, atheists, Lutherans, students, union workers, socialists, democrats, medical personnel and many others in that coalition. It takes us time to come to agreement on directioqs or actions. But there, is respect for the differences, which is cbnstantly an example to me. I ~m convinced that it is worth the effort to make the coalition work because we can reach out to more people. We are not only talking to ourselves, to those convinced of the need to stand with the peoples of Central America. We also talk to the Catholics who are indifferent, to the union workers who want to see the relation of Central America to their jobs, and to many others. Our mission as a coalition is served by our diversity, even though this same diversity can be an obstacle, because people tend to categorize others by their associations. That may be what we are afraid of in taking such a step. 12 / Review for Religious, Jan,-Feb., 1985 To summarize, insertion into people's lives calls for a ministry with them, a -ministry which is reciprocal. It calls us to collaboration with other religious, with laity, with people who have the same goals as we, no matter what their background. There is one other point to be considered, and it is a sensitive one. Why would a musician take a practical nursing course and work in a nursing home? Some would say she is wasting her talents. Why would a Ph.D. go to work in a refugee camp or in a Catholic Worker house when~ she could be teaching? Most often these changes occur because the ministers have inserted themselves into the lives "of the people around them, and are listening to the needs of these pepple. Most often these.people are poor. We continue to hear the phrase, "the preferential option for the poor," and it has a foreign ring to it. The expression comes from Latin America, not from the United States. What does it mean? This preferential option for the poor basically is not about the type of people w~e work with, or where, or what type of work we do. It has to do with our hearts and with the values that inform all we do. It has to do with our priority concern in ministry. The term "preferential option for the poor", does. come from Latin America. The Latin American Conference of Religious-(CLAR) has explained its meaning, declaring a priority for certain poor, those who have these three characteristics: (l). they have nothing, no opportu, nities, no resources (2) they can do nothing, i.e. they have no power, and (3) they struggle in faith and love for justice and for a better world.2 The Church in Latin America has made a preferential option to accompany this group of people. And these are the poor 'who evangelize, who convert us. The question is: can We p~rsonally, can our religiou~s-institutes, make such an option in ministry? Can we support those who make this option? Public ~Mi~ "nistry For'some missionaries the preferential option for the poor has led to their persecution, torture, even death, the same consequences that the poor face in their daily lives. By thifir choice these missionaries give public testimony to Gospel values and to their following of Christ. This'is a second characteristic of ministry, public witness. In the United States our bishops have exercised a public ministry through their positions on racism, the threat of nuclear war, abortion, capital punishment and Central America. They' have not been persecuted, but they have been criticized and wooed. They have generated opposition and reaction. J. Bryan Hehir in the commencement address at Catholic University this past year coffcisdy presented.the meaning of public witness for us in the U.S. Church: In the.end a public church is a community which stands for something--indeed, which Future Directions in Ministry v stands f9r many things. It is the product of people who shape their personal lives in such a way that they make a public d~ifference. In concrete terms, that is the challenge of a public church: to live with a vision which makes a difference for the world.3 In this country we have a unique opportunity to 19e a public church. We are guaranteed freedom of expression and freedom from religious persecution. But many times Catholics do not understand this role for themselves or for the Church. Our tradition of separation of Church and state, designed to guarantee freedom of religion and prevent the establishment of any one religion, has been interpreted to mean that religious concerns are private, and that the Church should stay out of public life. The spirit of the Second Vatican Council is just the opposite. Gaudium et Spes calls the Church tO be a permeating rather than a parallel presence in the world. The mandates of Vati.can II must be carried out in the market place, in political cgnventions, in schooi~, in nursing.homes, in international meetings. To move in this direction is a risk. Bishops, Church people, may lose support and privileges. Religious institutes might lose their tax-exempt status, especially if the message they.speak is a threat to the status quo. Yet how ¯ important it is to hear Church representatives and organizations say no, as Bishop Hunthausen and others .have, to weapons production; ~ say no, as Archbishop Weakland has, to the deportation., of Central American refugees. More and more the Church must be known for upholding the vision of a better world and thus announcing the Reign of God on earth. It is unfortunate that at times we hear more from .our bishops than from our parish priests. There is such a need to awaken a consciousness of injustice. Who is doing it? Are we? Just as we say an institution has a mission or a sponsored program has a mission, so the total religious community or institute has a mission and can make a corporate response to the needs of the world. The community can take a public stance on certain issues, not because they are fads or the latest cause, but because of the values that we believe in as religious persons, as Catholics, as Christians. Furthermore, the leaders of a religious community, by their writing and other.actions, can call attention to injustices and to needs in society and in the Church. For years, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky, have been using a corporate reflection process in their community. They reflect in small groups and then in larger groups on a certain need or concern, for example, racism. Most of their sisters are located in the south. Publicly they are known as a community tha~ stands against racism. What are our communities known for publicly? How can the Gospel affect the world through our 9ommunities? Another dimension is the public witness of individual members of the community through writing, public appearances, participation in demon-strations, lobbying for reforms, holding prayer vigils, even civil disobedience. Our beliefs and values as a religious community, stated in our documents, are a guide to us as members examining the need for public witness. Increasingly, 14 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 this area of action l~as become more controversial within the Church. as we face the question of public office. It may not always be appropriate for individuals to speak publicly or take political stands. One of.our sisters in'Honduras, Maria Rose Leggol, directs a program for orphaned and abandoned children. The success of her efforts depends on support from all sectors of society and from the Government. Another ' sister in Central America works in a refugee camp. If she wants to continue to work there, she cannot criticize or even complain about anything that happens. This is especially difficult for her because of her background in union organizing in the south, but she makes this choice in order to continue her ministry. What is important is that some of us are present in the public arena--as legislative aides, as members of UN commissions, as writers for national publications and as artists who call to mind the beautiful in this world. Through some of our members we can be present where decisions are made, where values can be influenced. One caution in all of this: we must avoid dichotomies. Rather, we must see the connections. There is not only one way to look at anything. So, we are not all ptiblic figures or writers or artists. But some of us are. And weare all called to be leaders and prophets in our own ministry. The choice is not between direct service and structural change, between education and social justice, between the individual and the corporate. The choice is between cooperation and competition. The challenge is for us to see the connections among all of these types of ministries, and to be a public witness in the spirit of 1 Co 12:4-5: There is a variety of gifts but always the same spirit; there are all sorts of services to be done, but always to the same Lord . Effective Use of Resources As members of religious institutes Wer share in their personal, financial, institutional resources. We do have some money at our disposal and perhaps, as religious communities, more money than many individuals in our society, because the money is held in common. At the same time we also have needs within our-communities, including retirement needs. Therefore, there has to be a balance between the use of inonies to meet those community needs and to respond to ministry needs. A question to ask, as a community, is: What are the ministries that we believe in so much that we are willing to make sure that they continue? We can make sure that they continue in different 'ways. One is~by giving personnel, maybe even sacrificing someone we would like to see in internal community work so that ministry needs can be met. Another by allowing our members to work by contributing services, that is, working for a stipend or lower salary. A third is giving real money, on a one-time or an ongoing basis. Maybe those earning more can contribute or be assessed a certain amount annually to support those who do not earn enough. Future Directions in Ministry ] 15 An example of how to insure an ongoing program, in this case one that meets the immediate food needs of the poor, is the St. Benedict Meal Program in Milwaukee. This program has been organized citywide with many parishes and organizations providing the meal one day a month for the people who are poor and homeless. It is a program that does not drain resources, because different parishes and groups sponsor one day a month. They can afford to do that. It is a program that is systematized so that people are fed every day of the month. Therefore, it is a program that is ensured a long life and is a real service to people. St. Benedict the Mror Parish also had the idea for,the project now known as the Benedict Center for Justice, which helps women in jail through a program of v!siting, of education, and of job counseling. This program is dependent on outside financial resources to be able to continue. There are limits to financial commitments, and the parish may not be able to do much, but they have established a brainstorming group to consider the long-term. Over the years, our religious institutes have made some institutional, Commitments. We must evaluate these to determine whether they continue to respond to the fieeds of people, and whether we have the resources, personal and financial, to maintain them. Institutions can give a service that individuals cannot. Because of the size of an institution and its very existence, it has a certain amount of clout, or power. An institution can have an effect on a political issue, for example. We have been looking at this questirn in relationship to our health care institutions in the United States. We have one rehabilitation hospital, one nursing home, one psychiatric hospital and one general hospital. We have been asking whether we should maintain the one general hospital, and until now the answer has been "yes" because having a general hospital allows us to speak in a forum that would otherwise be closed to us. . An alternative tO owning and operating an institution is to sponsor an institution or a program. For example, our community sponsors the LaFarge Lifelong Learning Institute, a separately incorporated organization, serving the needs of over one-thousand elderly people each semester by providing classes, a place to visit, h.chapel, and a hot meal at noon. The community has no financial obligation to this institute, but some of our sisters, active and retired, work within it. Another example is a project our community sponsored some years ago in the Walker Point area of Milwaukee. It is still bearing fruit, even though the project as such has ceased to exist. A small group of sisters researched the needs of the Walker Point neighborhood community. Three of them began to live and work there. One worked with a handicraft cooperative, another helped to establish a neighborhood newspaper. They all served within a local parish. At the present time, only one of those sisters remains, but now there is a tri-college outreach project, with our college, Alverno, participating, to help women in that area of the city who have not had the opportunity to continue in school, to complete their basic education. So needs change, responses change. If there 16 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 is some ~commitment to an area, sponsorship ofa new program, even though that program h~is a time limit, m~y be one way to serve people, Many of us are familiar with discussions about the meaning of "corporate th.rust~ or ',corporate commitment." Institutions and sponsored programs and parish schools are clearly ',corpora, te" commitments. But there are other ways of serving ,that amplify :our undei'standing of the corporate dimension. For example, the Capuchin priests ~nd brothers have some intentional communities, In one the priests are in different w.brk but they are all committed t~ being part of the inner-city neighborhood the~ live in; and they share the same values and concerns about justice. Another w,ay of looking at the corporate dimension is to see it present in each member,of the community. One member may say about another, "Oh, she is just going off to do her own thing." What that person may not know is that this itnd~vldual may have internalized v~ery well the vision of her foundress and theigoals of her community. Se.eing a need, she might, respond as an individual but very much as part of the community Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, MI, said to the religious of his diocese that the measure of the val,ue of religious life is the impact of our lives upon others. He says, ~ ' Today your witness is more individuali Today we notice how each of you prays. Today we notice how each of you finds ways to :live out the vow of poverty. We notice how celibate commitment is expressed through your own person. We notice your attempts to be obedient to the Lord's call, to the work of your community, to the needs of the Church. Your respo~nse unfolds in ma~ny different ways . You are aware, I'm sure, that this p~laces different demands upon ~ou. It is One thing to be a member of a community whose Collective life makes an impact. It is quite another thing to make an impact through your own individual life. The Church needs both . 4 If this trend is true, and we know from our experience that it is, then it continues to be exceedingly important that each one of us develop ourselves, our own resources through study, reflection, education and through other ways :of ~keeping ourselves open, to learn more an~l to become more. Experiences of people very different from ourselves can be broadening if we are open to them. One of our sisters, participating in our mission exchange program, went to Peru to develop her Spanish and her understanding of Hispanic people. She works with learning-disabled children in Aurora, Illinois, many of whom.are Hispanic. This year she is back in Aurora, her h~art opened to the pastoral needs of the Churc~h in another part of the. world. We are all aging and though x~e might be happy with .the work we are doing, we have less choice about, what else we might do. The Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in LaCrosse .~ponsored a hostel last summer for their sisters age fifty'five ~nd older. It ~;as a program of theological reflection, in which participants looked at their own futures and possibilities for new directions in their lives, recognizingithat with aging come physical Limitations. The contribution of new members also needs to be drawn out and appreciated. When we think about~lspecific ~vorks, we need to recognize that new members are not necessarily in education or health-care fields in which Future Directions in Ministry many of us have worked. What do they bring? What kind of ministry directions do they point us toward? We had a meeting of all our formation directors from different countries during December, 1983. One of the points mentioned at that meeting was that the new members help to form the community. If we really believe that, we have to find ways of putting it into practice. Sometimes they are so new that they do not take much initiative, or they are drowned out by the initiative of other members. We need to look for ways to hear their voices so that they can really shape the community, which is theirs, in the future. Each one of us must: Consider the treasure that w~ arer the gifts and skills and abilities we possess. We must recognize our own freedom or lack of freedom to make changes, to start on a new path, to "let go." We must take into account our limitations, our personal needs. The deeper our awareness of our own selves, the more we can be in ministry. We, in the United States, in the Catholic Church, have a unique opportunity to be prophetic. We belong to a Roman-based Church that, at the present moment, emphasizes hierarc~iy at the exPense of the prophetic dimension, and the Church needs both. We know that at times our contribution is not recognized. Thdt does not mean that it is not valuable. The Church needs the dimension we bring just as the body needs both arms, each finger and toe. To be prophetic in ministry may mean nothing more (or less) than that each of us and all of us pursfiE our goal as members of our communities, which at root is the goal of the Church and' ultimately of the Gospel, to transform the earth and promote the Reign of God. ' We express our fidelity to that goal through our ongoing willingness to reexamine our ministry priorities. As :we crntinue that reexamination, we must keep before us the people we serve. We must ask ourselves about our awareness of reciprocity and our efforts to collaborate. About the quality and the fearlessness of our public witness; individually and corporately. About the creative and effective use of our many-faceted resources. Then we will be prophets in the Chui'ch of today ¯ and tomorrow, true in our following of Jesus and fa'ithful to the heritage of our communities. NOTES t Henri Nouwen, "The Spirituality of Struggle," a presentation at the annual meeting of the U.S. Catholic Mission Association, May 6, 1984. , 2Cited by Anthony Bellagamba, I.M.C., "The Preferential Option for the Poor," Alba House Cassettes, Canfield, Ohio 4440~6, to be released in Spring, 1985. 3j, Bryan Hehir, "A Public Church," Origins, May 31, 1984, p. 43. 4Kenneth Untener, "The Rich Abundance Within an Earthen Vessel," Origins, June 7, 1984, p. 61. Focused Freedom: To, Someone in Formation Desmond O'Donnell, O M.1. ; Father o'Donnell, is a General Councillo~r of his congregation, and may be addressed at the generalate:~ Oblati; C.P. 9061; 00i00R o m~a-Aureh"o; Italy. His last article in our pages, "The Problem Member in Community;~ appeared In the issue of March/April, 1981. Agood friend confides in you that he or she is considering adopting a way of life which will guarantee reasonable security but no significant material rewards, in which Considerable mobility of residence may be foreseen, in which work-preference will not always be,given, in which marriage and family life ar~ forgone and for which a seven or eight year training period, will be necessary. What would you sa); to your friend? What sort of questions do you think he or she should consider? Is there~ one big question which your friend should face deeply? Before you read further, in this letter, it could be useful to jot down the sort of questions you think you~r friend should think about before he or she gets into this unusual way of life. t No deep reflection is necessary to discover that your friend is thinking ~bout giving up a great deal nor to see that the demands of this way of life are unusual. Can you do it? Is it worthldo~ng? Has anyone the right to ask all this of you? Why are you doing it anyway? What do you hope to get out of it? These are some of the spontaneoqs questions which might come to mind in responding to you~ friend. It is clear that at base there is question not merely of material prosperity, marriage or m~obility but of your friend's very self, of his or her core freedom. Your friend h~s to face the issue of exercising or of losing his or ~her freedom in a very radical way. You are aware~that I am talkin~ about your own respofise to priesthood or to the vowed life. Looking at either from this human point of view that of using.or losing one's freedom---can~,be a good starting point. The questions are 18 Focused Freedom / "19 important for you at this time and they cannot be answered theoretically nor by another person for you. Your own very personal freedom is at stake, The exercise of freedom at any level is personally demanding but at the level of priesthood or the vowed life, one's entire personhood is involved. 31,000 priests asked to be dispensed from their way of life between 1963 and 1978; 60,000 sisters have changed their way of life during approximately the same period. Did these sincere people have freedom? Did they lose their freedom? Did they give it away? 'Did they have it taken from them? Or did they find it only in later life? What does the fact of their presumably painful experience of staying, then leaving and readjusting to a new way of life, say to people life yourself? The failure to deal with this sort of question could mean that you become an additional statistic. Keeping Your Options Open There is a very obvious, and attractive temptation today to avoid the risk and exercise of freedom at any depth. It is to avoid completely all deep and permanent choices like marriage, priesthood or the vowed life. It is to sidestep all unconditional decisions. Besides being aimless, this if-perhaps-maybe-for-a- while exercise of freedom is purposeless, as we are~ reminded by Dag HammarskjiSld -- "The man who is unwilling to accept the axiom that he who chooses one path is denied the others must try to persuade himself, I suppose, that the logical thing to do .is to remain at the cross roads."1 We can understand and admirea married couple very fruii-fully renewing their choice of each other, at regular intervals, but constantly revising or reassessing their choice would hardly make for a deepening relationship any more than regularly uprooting a flower and replanting it would help it~ growth. As Karl Rahner reminded us, freedom is not exercised in the constant revision of choice but in the, ability to make one choice and follow it. Experiencing Freedom . 4, To be free is to be untrapped, free from han/~-ups which could hinder a chosen directioning of one's life. It presumes the ability to shake off anything which might limit the power to say yes in the direction of a deeply-chosen goal. More positively it is the power to surrender one's whole self, to lose oneself even one's life--for a chosen cause: It is the ability to bring oneself together, to collect one's frequently scattered parts, to point them and trigger them all in one important direction. Freedom at its best enables the momentous launching of one's life in a morally irreversible .direction. "Man is free when he is able to make up his mind in conformity with the highest values and the ultimate aims" (John Paul II to the Faculty of Frib~urg University, June I3; 1984, quoted in L'Osservatore Romano 2/7./84 p.3). Maximilian Kolbe was most frbe when he walked out of his cell in 20 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 Auschwitz to take the place of another prisoner about' to be killed:" .Dag Hammarskj~ild tells us about his '.freest moment--"To be free, to be able to stand up and leave every, thing bfhind--without looking back. To say yes" (p,88). ~ Jesus .summa~:izes his life thusT--"I~ lay down my life., no one takes it from me. I lay it down freely" (Jn 10: 17, 18). While this deepest exercise of freedom can sometimes be socially supported and encouraged by less than totally selfless motives, it can come ultimately only from someone who i~ rich indeed--a real adult. No wonder (Jordon Allport reminded us that only adults can commit themselves and that commitment and adulthood arrive simultaneously. Appreciating Freedom It seems to me that one blessing of this age of totalitarian regimes and mind-manipulating techniques is ttlat it is leading to an increased appreciation of freedom. In the past the conscious awareness of freedom was lower because it was less necessary, or less encouraged but now there is a growing sense of human rights and freedom everywhere. Some would see a need to recall St. Paul's words today even in the Church: "Some who do not belong tO the brotherhood have furtively crept i,n to spy on the liberty we enjoy in Christ Jesus and to reduce us all to slavery again" (Ga 2.4): To which he opposes the fact that "When Christ freed us, lie meant us to remain~free" (Ga 5.1). Paul surely appreciated hisfreedom agai.hst those who would limit it even within the Church. ', It is only in freedom that we c.an become our best selves by transcending ourselves in an act of kenosis and thus reflect the justice-fidelity of God by the power of his Spirit---"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Co 3:17). When we use our freedom toldo what w6 know is right or what we know we are called by God to do, we arellike God whose dabar was his word-event, his word-acted-upon in freedom. Our freely acted-upon word no~t only expresses us but it makes us what we are,. as Karo.l Wojiyla, later Pope John Paul II, emphasized in his Acting Person. Thus it is that freedom involves your deepest you. Your free acts express you, and they also make you---especially those rare acts of dedication which influence your life'~ direction deeply. While you can be forcibly limited by others whenexpressing it externhlly, this core freedom can be touched only, and used only, by you. The full and, fruitful exercise of this freedom calls for an ever-deepening appreciation of it. Conscious Awareness Since thefinal choice of priesth~aod or/and of the vowed life is. going to be an expression of your deepest freedom, it is important that you get the feel of this freedom now. You cannot lose yourself unless you have found yourself. It will only be when you have exp'ressed and felt the satisfaction of lesser Focused Freedom / 21 :freedoms that you can gradually appreciate the deeper ones. and finally the deepest one of being "ready at any moment to gather all into one Simple sacrifice"2 as Hammarskji51d put it. -~, Have you recognized yet that every choice is a little death; that every choice makes you in a way that can never quite be unmade? Or have you ex;er thought and reflected upon how prominent people in the Chuich, in your own congregation or in history have exercised their freedom? Why not organize a seminar or write a paper on one of these people and then line it up with the oarticioants' own experience of freedom? And to flex your~own freedom muscles in the exercise of everyday actions such as eating, drinking, fasti~g, going to bed, getting up, keeping to study or prayer exercise/schedules can be a revealing and helpful exercise. This recognition of' the primacy of the practical--just doing it--will add authenticity to the reading and reflection you do on the subject. Your failures to be free can teach you as mu(has your hard won victories. From these you can discover and list--it is good to write them down--the areas of your freedoms and unfreedoms and what it is that contributes to'each. Your freedom to finally choose the vowed life or. to accept priesthood will be on sand or on solid ground depending on the type of soil you have prepared over these early years. The fact that. you fail or succeed in exercising your smaller freedoms could be less important than ~,our discovery of what motivated the success or failure. That iswhy the habit of monitoring your.freedom in a daily examen of consciousness is important. Heightened physical and mental aware-ness has great benefits for richer living: Try to grow in a similar awareness of your freedom by learning to look at it reflectively. Discerning Freedom , ~ To help you in monitoring your freedom-efforts as you grow into~your vocation, may I offer you a guideline or norm? As you find yourself growing in peacefulness, ease, harmony or even enjoyment of your way of life, you can know that you are moving into real freedom in your vocation, This, of course, allows for rough spots and moments of doubt but not for a constant series of such. You will grow into thefeeling that paradoxically you are beco .ming less free to choose outside that way of life as a happily married couple becomes less free to part, with the years. In a way, your growing vocational choice can be compared to an onion with its many layers~ If the core is sound, then each layer originatingfrom the core fits around it and strengthens' it~ As time passes, the healthy core becomes safer with its close-fitting layers protectingly around it~ And a time comes when the core cannot be touched unless the layers are gradually and destructively removed and the entire organism destroyed. That is why. it is difficult to lose a genuine vocation and impossible to lose it suddenly or without gradual and long infidelity. If a person's vocational choice has been sound in the beginning and 22 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 succeeding choices emerge from it and fit it, then what is called loss of vocation has tb be more a partial disintegration of the personality than a departure from something which was part of it. If, !on the other hand, the core has been poorly motivated, the later layers are more like wrapping paper which can easily be removed b~cause ~they do not really belong; they, were put on rather than having emerged from the core. Thee vocation was not lost; it was never there. So it is vital in these early years to beaware of your core freedom, to reflect on it and to relish it.~Each day of ygur life over these early years cannot be a review, a revision nor a momentary rejection of your basic choice just as the layers of a healthy onion cannot be !removed even for constant clinical analysis. On the contrary, each~act is a renev~ing and deepening of what you know was a healthy initial choice. It will help you perhaps in ~onltonng your grdwth into freedom to consider Ivan Illich's question about schooling--,'Is it a place where the child . is~,chasing knowledge or where knqwledge ~s chasing the child?" In these early years, do you increasingly get the feeling that this way of life is something you are pursuing more comfortably eac.h year or do you have the feeling that it .is something clumsily pursuing you and with which you are increasingly less than comfortable? Or to put it another Way, can you see and feel yourself enjoying this way of life freely in, say, tweniy years' time? Is this way of life becoming more "good news" to ~ou each year? If you answer these questio.ns in a clear no or with a hesitant yes, you have reasons to doubt the presence of freedom in your present way of life. . I ~ Spiritual directors now exercise their role less as directors than as someone who accompanies--a sort of spiri.tual friend. And who better to help you monitor your growth in freedom? ~With this friend, you can, as it were, take your freedom out to look at it in the only way possible--how you use it from day~to-day, In the presence of such~ friend, you can bring yourself to account gently and even ask him or her to do it for you. Formators, too, have an important role to play in our growth in the external use of freedom. You can 'r.easonably ask, then, that they fulfill their contractual role- that of leading you into a life'form which they themselves are already living. In recent years .,there may have been a sort of suicide of leadership in reaction to an earlier bver-authoritarian model. But laissez-faire leadership is not a Christian model and if your formators use this, they do you an injustice. If you feel theyare faili,hg you in this way, yo.u can reasonably ask them to encourage, challenge and confront you on your external behavior in such matters as presence at commgn prayer, availability to the community, academic results, interpersonal behavior and pastoral work. Both your spiritual guide and your formators are important, in helping you find your response-ability in freedom. ~ ~ Focusing Freedom ,~ .~ It seems very significant that s~]ch a diverse group as a Dutch spiritual Focused Freedom writer, a Jewish psychiatrist, a French philosopher and an American psychol-ogist stress that focusing is an indication of adulthood. Van Kaam says that permanent commitment is entrance intopotential maturity after the indecisiofi and dispersion of adolescence, while Viktor Frankl stresses that the human person actualizes him or herself only insofar as he or she becomes committed to life's meaning. Gabriel Marcel adds to this by reminding us -- "Man can know himself only if he is committed and only the man who knows himself is ready for ~ommitment." Gordon Allpo~t seems to summarize it by saying that it is only when youth begins to plan for life that the sense of self is complete. Like a river which gathers force when it is channeled, freedom is at its best when it is focused. A man is never so free in his relationship with women as when he deeply chooses and marries one. Freedrm is maximized when. it 'is purposefully pointed in one direction. Because all freedom is ultimately situated in a pla,ce, time'and activity, it must be focused to be full and fruitful. You are now looking seriously at one life-form on which you consider it worth centering your freedom. Your diocese with its people, its structures and its leaders or your congregation with its charism, community living and mission, offer you an opportunity to express yrur freedom in and through them. The question before you remains -- "Is this the structured life-form in which and through which I can freely b~come my best self?. Is this where I want to focus and express my deepest freedom unconditionally?" Hume said that reason must always serve passion and Lonergan described emotion as the mass and momentum of human existence. True, to follow feelings or to be driven by emotions is not necessarily to find one's vocaiion, but feelings and emotions experienced over a time can help us find our personal truth." Despite-the partly foreseen sacrifices entailed in your con-sidered way of life, do you feel that this is where you want to express~our personal gifts;' that the mission of this diocese or congregation is increasingly getting hold of you? Do you feel even somewhat driven as St. Paul expressed it in speaking of his own mission: "It is for'this that I struggle wearily on, helped only by his~' power driving me irresistibly" (Col 1:29) or lik~ Jeremiah: "You have seduced me, Lord, and I allowed myself to be seduced"or like Jesus when he said: "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already" (Lk 12.49)? Do you feel a conviction that something important will remain undone if you do not do it because,no one else can make your unique and irreplaceable contribution?' While. this experience has come to some people in one momentarily very strong impulse, it comes~to most of us in a calmer and more prolonged way. But come it must and pres~ent it must be, if you are to launch your life freely into the life-form you are now consideiing. Freedom Through Community One good way to determine the quality of your choice now and throughout your life will be your attitude towards and your actions for or 24 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 against the community you join. ~her.e will ever be a healthy tension between your individuality and the community. Dialogue and discernment will have to ¯ be a permanent part of this interdction but from the point of view of the new member like yourself, he or she can reasonably ask: "Will this presbyterium or c~ngregation give me the experience of a community of believers so that the exercise of my freedom in faith arid love will be supported or am I just being invited into a busy bachelors' club or into a same-sex group of social workers where interaction is generally SUl~erficial and mostly for the sake of smooth interpersonal relationships?" On 'the other side of the dynamic, a modern Jewish scholar poses questions t6o: "The proper use of autonomy begins by repudiating the self as a monad! I am individual and unique but likewise inseparably part of all mankind. More, by my finitude I am necessarily more intimately linked to some of its vast number than to others. I am therefore morally obligated to live my life,in community with them and exercise my personal autonomy in terms of them . I understand that to mean that my community .may reasonably demand of me that 1 discipline my will so that the community can function and persevere . It can also legitimately expect me to sacrifice my conscience when its promptings conflict with central affirma-tions of my group . .Our com¯munities and traditions bear a wisdom far more profound and embracing an,d certainly more enduring than anything we could create on our own. In conflict with it we must often bow to what, against our private judgment but in due humi.lity, we accept as.its superior understanding.'3 I have consciously omitted mtich explicit reference to God in this letter so far. I thought it best to isolate the ~,experience of any focused freedom without naming the central motivation which would inspire it in our case, namely faith in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ. To return to your im~ aginary friend of the first paragraph, sure!y the deepestland most inclusive question for him or her will be: "Why are you doing this?'? Because priesthood and the vowed life are meaningless without faith and a real experience of God. the choice of these vocations without faith would beiself-destructive and ~]ltimately harmful for others also. It is not easy to define priesthood or.~ the vowed life with theological precision but one t6ing remains clear, namely that a deep experience of God must be the motivating force. Even positive motives such as preaching good news or changin~ political structures for the sake of God's poor, will not sustain these life-f0rms. While this faith-motivation does not usually come to us as it did to Paul en route to Damascus, it must be there just the same, despite the often-present doubts which are part of any adult faith. "Father, if it be possible." was i .fiamediately followed by nevertheless spoken in faith and freedom by Jesus. Freedom and Uncertainty The .quest for total certainty iis self-defeating whether it is about hang gliding or about God, whether it i~i abou.t someone we love or the significance Focused Freedom of our own lives. Caution cannot be a substitute for action; it can only accompany it. We must beware of theorizing too much about certainty and freedom in a veiled attempt to eliminate the risks of action. Lot's wife was almost persuaded to leave Sodom and Gomorrah; Agrippa was almost persuaded by Paul to become a Christian and the rich young man was almost persuaded to leave his wealth and follow ,lesus. Their search for certainty paralyzed them. Again, Dag HammarskjSld helps us: "Once I answered yes to Someone or Something. And from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life in self-surrender, has a goal.TM He acted in freedom despite the uncertainty expressed in his "Someone" or "Something." It is surely important to be as free as possible before making important life decisions but this is not to say that we must await the chimera of perfect freedom. Carl .lung reminds us: "Life itself flows from springs both clear and muddy. Hence all excessive 'purity' lacks vitality. A constant striving for clarity and differen-tiation means a proportionate loss of vital energy, precisely because the muddy elements are excluded. Every renewal of life needs the muddy as well as the clear. ''~ Muddy freedom will become clearer #s it is exercised just as the str~earia gets clearer on its journey from its muddy source. Conclusion I find that Robert focused' freedom: Frost offers people like us an ideal, as we grow in But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite my avocation and my vocation as my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one and work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever re.ally done for heaven and for future sakes. NOTES ~Dag Hammarskjtild. Markings Ed. W.H. Auden: Faber and Faber Ltd, London 1966. 2Dag Harfimarskji51d. op. cit., 1. 3Eugene Borowitz Theological Studies. March 1984, "The Autonomous Self and the Commanding Community." 4Dag Hammerskji51d. op. cit., 1. 5Carl .lung Psychological Types Bollington Series (Princetown), 1974, p.244. Trusting in the Providence of God Mary Ann Fatu~a, 0. P. Sister Mary Ann is well. known to our readers by reason of her earlier contributions, the most recent of which was "Catherine of Siena on the Communion of Friendship" (March/April, 1984). She may be addressed at her office as Chairperson of the Theology Department of Ohio Dominican College; 1216 Sunbury Roadi'Columbus~ OH 43219. "Cast all of your cares upon the Lord, for he cares for you" (1 P 5:7). A key figure in the political and dcclesial crises of her day, the fourteenth-century Dominican and doctor of the Church, Catherine of Siena, lived a' spirituality which embraced this radical trust in the providence of God. In her Dialogue she expressed with unique insight a central truth experienced by men and women of faith before and after her: far from providing an escape from the reality of human life, it is precisely such a trust which provides the focal point for a key human conversion. It is a conversion to placing one's trust not simply in one's own limited resources and efforts, "but" in the abundant and intimate providence of God. Paradoxically, it is also this conversion which founds a spirituality capable of nourishing an authentic personal autonomy and mature interdependence. Early in Catherine's life the Lord pledged that he would make her his concern if she would make him her concern. Experience of her helplessness in situations which her efforts proved powerless to change faced Catherine daily with the same choice 'which in some way confronts every human being: either to trust or to despair. "Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his or her life? If then you are not able to do even this, why are you anxious about the rest?. Yo~.ur Father knows your needs. Seek first his kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well" (Lk 12:25-26, 30-31). Toward the end of her life, Catherine reflected on the Lord's faithfulness to his promise made in her youth. The result is the section in her Dialogue which stands as a hy, mn of praise to the infinite mercy of a provident God. Her close friend and 26 Trusting in the Providence of God / 27 biographer, Raymond of Capua, wrote that this chapter was an explication of the very foundation of her spirituality, the experience of the frailty of what is Created, and the absolute power of the love of God. °The Choice~to Trust In life's most precious experiences there is perhaps the wordless recognition of,.the fruit of trust. It is the paradox of security in the presence of what we cannot ,unequivocally verify. Around us are alluring traces of the kind of trust which makes human life possible at all: in the vulnerability of a child asleep in a parent's a~:ms; in the secret shared between friends; in the vow that is said and then lived, to love faithfully until death. But life leaves also its scars. Those who know what it is not to trust or to be trusted, who know what it is to be betrayed, recognize also the fruit of distrust in the sense of worthlessness which eats away at their identity, in the anxiety and fear which rob them of peace. ~For each of us, in the face.of what life has held out to us, a deeper question and choice inevitably presents itself in the decisions of everyday. Has life ultimately been gracious to us, or has it cheated and betrayed us? To ask this is to ask the meaning of our life experiences taken as a whole, an6 holy vve will choose to live out the future in the light of that meaning. More than most, Catherine knew what it was to live through the bitterness of life. She knew what it was tO have those for whom she had poured out her life energy turn against her. And yet Catherine made her choice. In and through the weak and often twisted ways of the human heart, she found the reality deeper than all others and which she learhed to trust absolutely. For Catherine, the entire universe is ruled not by forces' which rob and deceive us, but by the provident mercy of God. She learned to trust that all of creation is made for humanity, and it is this fragile and precious work of his hands with whom God ~has fallen "insanely" in love. He has given everything with love and care: every facet of creating, every gift and faculty of our unique persons. In every event of history he has unfolded his mercy, until finally, he did not spare even his own Son. What he wantsqs only our good, and having provided for our every need in the past, he will continue to do so to the end.* Catherine realizes that it is only those who see with eyes of faith and hope, who make the radical choice to trust in God'sprovidence, who are able to receive its fullness. The God who infinitely respects the human persons he has authored will not force his love on .their freedom. His providence will never fail those who place their hope and trust!in him (280): But it.is a trust Which cannot exist side by side with a contrary hope. To trust in oneself is to trust in "what is not." To trust in God is to cling to the one alone "who is." The choice to trust is finally the choice to let go, to entrust oneself, to receive the gift Contained in *The Dialogue: 136; in Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue, translation and introduction by Suzanne Nofke, O.P. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 180-181. Other references to this work will be cited in the text by page number. 211 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 every moment of life. Yet how can one receive with love and reverence the tragedies which life holds and which evoke in us only :anger and bitterness? Are not '~life's experiences of disappointment and pain empty of the providence of God? ~On the contrary," the Lord tells Catherine. "No matter where they turn those who trust in my providencewill find nothing but mydeep burning charity, and the greatest, gentle, true, perfect providence" (290). It is not that his providence causes tragedies. Rather, even in life's inevitable tragedies, his providence is great enough to bring life from what is material for death. Itis not that we are to deny or repress human feelings of anger in the face of pain. But working through anger and pain is meant to bear fruit finally in the peace and even joy " which recognize the gift of God given in every event. The Wealth ltidden Within Catherine's experience taught her that what human beings find particularly bitter is the discovery that all that is created will eventually~fail us. The temptation then is to cry out against the God whose providence has .abandoned and deprived us of what our plans had fashioned. We "lift up our heads against the goodness of God," writes Catherine, and draw death from what was intended to give life, because we "do not recognize the wealth hidden within" (219). How is the "wealth hidden within" every human experience to be discovered? One dimension of sin is the human resistance to change,-the unwillingness to grow. "How can you lift your head .against my goodness? Because you do not see that all things except my grace are changing and. because you . are constantly changing, I am constantly providing what you need at any given time" (282). The refusal to olet go of a present and yet outgrown security is so. strong a temptation in us that unless it.is removed from us, it can become an obstacle to the deeper security which alone founds human maturity and autonomy. God permits what is created to fail us so that, in the absence of previous supports, we may cling to the one alone "who is," and so be given the means for deeper growth. The "troublesome thorns" of life God permits not out of hatred but love for us (290). In this way we are forced to learn what we would rather not: that what is created can never be God for us. In the collapse of hope in what is created, we are given .the invitation to see and to turn to the one who will not fail us: "I wanted her to learn that although everyone else might fail her, 1 her Creator would never fail her. and that with or without the help of another person, in any situation or at any time whatever. I know how to and can and will satisfy her in wonderful ways" (296). Those who place their trust not in themselves but in God, eventually experience the fruit of this trust. God himself becomes their provider and gives them his "merry," the Holy Spirit, as their mother to nurse them at the breast of God's love (291). Gradually their fear and insecurity starve for want of food. Trusting in the Providence of God / 29 The Spirit, their mother, feeds them with the milk of gratitude and love. The ones so nourislied become with time strong and confident, able to see life with new eyes in a light given by the Spirit. Slowly they learn to hold "all things in reverence, the left hand as well as the right, trouble as well as consolation." Even in painful situations they learn to reverence the gift "hidden within" as the material for deeper growth. Thus, the Lord tells Catherine, in situations 0f great labor, he gives the gift of even greater strength (292). The "Holy Tricks" of Providence In order to make his people "drunk" with his providence, the Lord devises "holy tricks" perfectly suited to meet their needs at any particular moment. To those caught fast in sin he gives his providence by "plucking the rose" from their thorn. One kind of "thorn" is an enslaving sin; the rose, the lack of satisfaction he gives in the experience of that sin. "They set their affection on something,., but they find nothing there" (297). This gift of his providence is meant as an enticement away from the emptiness and pain of sin by means of the sweeter gift of peace and freedom (297): In other circumstances, the Lord employs still other "holy tricks" of his prowidence. He finds ways to humble the pride which bears fruit in judging others, gossiping, and using the tongue to complain and "spit out hurtful words." As healing, the Lord permits emptiness in a person's feelings, darkness in her mind, and temptations which besiege the senses. "Why do I keep her in such pain and distress? To show her my providence so she will trust not in herself but me." The person who is humbled through these struggles will learn the contrast between her own weakness and the provident love of God for her. In these struggles is contained her liberation, for the Lord himself eventually will free her in deeper ways than she could have imagined. Serenity and peace come unforeseen, not through her own effort alone, but through the Lord's "immeasurable charity, which wanted to provide for her in time of need when she could scarcely take any more" (301). The struggles which humble are in fact the gift of God: "The soul comes to perfection by fighting these battles, because there she experiences my divine providence, whereas before this she only believed in it" (302). For those formed in virtue, the Lord provides in still other ways by using a "pleasant trick to keep them humble.," Often, after they have borne the weight of burdens and sufferings with patience and gentleness, he allows them to feel passion or rage at a mere trifle: "In something that really is nothing, that they themselves will later laugh at, their feelings are so aroused that they are stupefied." At other times, his providence leaves his servants a "pricking" as he did with Paul: "I left him., the resistance of his flesh." Is the Lord able to remove the weakness of his servants? Certainly, he tells Catherine, but his providence leaves his loved ones "this or that sort of pricking" so that they will become humble and "compassionate instead of cruel to their neighbors." For those who suffer from their own weakness will have cause to be all the more 30 / Review for. Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 compassipnate toward the weakness of others (305). .- The Chain of Charity According to Catherine, the most tender means which the provident God has designed to care for us is one anothi~r. The God who in his being is trinitarian communion of love has fashioned us in his image. The inescapable truth etched into our own beings is that we are made by love, and we are made for love. We are, in fact, made to need and care for one another. "In this life I have bound you with the chain of charity. 1 in my providence did not give to any one person or to each individually the knowledge for doing everything necessary for human life. No, I gave something to one, something else to another, so that each one's need would be a reason to have recourse to the other" (31 l). Could he have given, everyone as an individual all that he or she needs? Yes, he tells Catherine, "But in my providence I wanted to make each of you dependent on the others,'so that you would be forced to exercise charity" (312). Thus, for example, the poor who place all their trust in him will experience for themselves his providence.Sometimes in their .need they are brought almost to the brink of despair, only so that they may see all the more clearly the miracle of the Eord~s care for them (314). Sometimes the provident God acts directly, as he did with Dominic, causing bread to appear for his brothers who had nothing to eat. Usually, however, he inspires his loved ones to pray for and to come to the assistance of the poor themselves. In many ways he touches his servants' hearts to provide' for those in need. Even those dedicated to solitude cannot escape the chain of charity with which the Lord has bound his people together. Thus, he inspires a hermit to leave his or her solitude in order to giqe help to another hermit (324). He "stretches out" his providence to his poor by inspiring his servants with compassion for the needs of their brothers arid sisters (315). "The whole life of my gentle poor is thus cared for by the concern I give the world's servants for them" (314). In still another way, the Lord cares for our deepest needs through one another. He tells Catherine that he uses a ~holy trick" of his providence to inspire people with a "special love" for another. It is this "special love" which eventually brings to light hidden insecurity, jealousy, possessiveness, manipula-tion, selfishness. The inner struggle uncovered through the pain of these relationships is meant to lead to humble self-knowledge and dependence bn his healing. As a person grows through these struggles into deeper personal autonomy and inner freedom, "a greater and more perfect love for others in general will follow, as well as for the special person my goodness has given her" (303). Thus, his providence has inextricably bound and woven itself into our care for one another. Our 'own~ persons are the lixJing sacrament of God's providence given to us in one another. As his friends grow more and more one with him in prayer, they become identified with him and live out the Trusting in the Providence of God / 31 experience ofPaul: "It is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20). And as with Jesus, those whose love grows will know both deeper joy and deeper sorrow. The pain of the friends of God is not finally that of offenses done to them, but rather the grief they feel for sin against, the Lord and the destructiveness of sin for the sinner. Those who learn to love "know how ineffably I :love my creatures., and so they have fallen in love with my creatures' beauty for love of me." Through the chain of charity with which the Lord binds his people together, he provides in a marvelous way at one and the same time for both sinner and those his love inspires to intercede for them, The sinner's heart is touched through the prayer of his servants, and these latter are in turn all the more united to the Lord through their p~rayer~ Through their love and yearning for others' salvation, "they are another Christ crucified ,. they have taken his task on themselves" (306-307). Catherine compared God's people united in charity by his providence to an orchestra. The Lord is the "maestros" and each person is an indispensable instrument. Without each of the otl~ers, no instrument,alone is sufficient. The more sweetness with which each one plays his or her instrument the gift of each one's own unique life--the more those who hear are allured by this music to the Lord. "Consider the glorious virgin Ursula," writes Catherine of the legend of Ursula and her companions. "She played her instrument'so sweetly she caught eleven thousand from the virgihs alone." The entire orchestra together is meant to grow more lovely in its sound, swelling to make this music worthy to fill heaven and earth with the praise of God. For those who trust in him, everything which happens in their lives is a gift f~rom God as a way of refining their instruments and rendering the music they play more beautiful. It is his infinite providence which cares for each one and all together, teaching each one what and how to play (311). The chain ofcharit~ with ,which the provident God has bound us to one another will not be loosed even in death. The life of heaven will be a rejoicing not only in him but in one another, and this very joy.will be a continual praise of his providence~ "I have so brdered their charity that no one simply enjoys his or her reward in this blessed life that is my gift without its being shared by the others." The joy of all adds to the joy of each, and the joy of each is the joy of .all (312). ~ To live one's life in trust is a gentle ~'0retaste on earth of the life of heaven. The fruit of trust in the proEidence of God is a joy and peace more secure than what human missteps and failures can destroy. The One who trusts learns to rejoice "in what she sees and experiences in herself and others," and finding joy ~in God's goodness to l~er, she learns to rejoice without jealousy in the goodness of God to others. She "is not afraid thaf she will lack the lesser things because by the light of faith she is guaranteed the greater things" (293). Conclusion For Catherine, trusting in the providence of God is not a spec~c kind of 32 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 "spiritual exercise,~ but the entire content of a life lived in 10ve. The more one lives in hope and trust, the more lavishly will God's providence in fact provide. To live in trust is not something mere human willing can attain; it is rather a gift the provident God most deeply wants to give, and for which he wants his people to ask. Catherine learned that what best nourishes trust is a good memory, a heart and mind that have learned to remember and to reflect upon the experiences of one's own life, and to find there the indisputable evidence of the personal and intimate providence of God. In this way, one's own unique life story becomes the inspiration and encouragement to ask for even deeper trust for the future. To trust in this way is not imprudence nor immatu(ity. It is, rather, a depth seeing which increasingly frees one's energies from inner forces inhibiting personal autonomy and mature interdependence. It entails the paradox of a radical inner poverty and inner contentment. To trust, in fact, is to live secure in the care of the one who can be trusted absolutely. It is to have the peace and freedom and courage to dare, to take risks inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is, ultimately, to have the heart to let go. It was not the fourteenth-century Catherine of Siena alone who had the personal call to live a life of trust in the providence of God. Today also, it is the witness of lives lived.in the maturity of trust in the one who alone is Lord over all, which perhaps will be the most radical statement a contemporary world will hear. From Tablet to Heart: Internalizing New Constitutions I and II Address: by Patricia Spillane, M.S.C. Price: $1.25 per copy, plus postage. Review for Religious Rm 428 3601 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, Missouri 63108 Christian Conversion: Suffering Out of Love John Navone, S.Z Father Navone is well known to our readers. The idea of this article is developed at much greater length in his recent Gospel Love: A Narrative Theology (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, Inc.). Father Navone is professor of biblical theology at the Gregorian's Spirituality Institute, where he may be addressed: Piazza della Pilotta, 3; 00187 Roma, Italy. In the seventeenth century, Samuel Crossman wrote that Christ in his passion has:° Love to the 16veless shown That they might lovely be. The passion story is both the good news of God's unconditional love for us as well as the mirror by which we can judge the authenticity of our own life and loves. It changes us from being °unlovely to being lovely (and loving) by showing us what true loveliness could be. Christ is the author and communicator of authentic communion with God. His claim that all authority belongs to him (Mt. 28:18; .In 17:2) and his communication of that authority to others are based on his power to transcend the limitations imposed by human desires and feelings to suffer freely and gladly out of love, When someone truly loves us, we respond to that love by investing our lover with the authority to initiate elements in our life story. When that love is absolute, as in the love of God for us, the absoluteness of that love claims an absolute authority. The story of Jesus reveals that God is Love, and it summons us to share in God's dynamic state of being-in-Love.I The trinitarian imagery of Scripture presents us with the symbolism of transcendent and unrestricted love where the persons are persons by virtue of their relationship to one another. ,iesus is the human incarnation of that loved and loving reiationship to God and the Spirit. Being-in-Love (Father) with 33 ~!4 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 Jesus Christ (Son) entails our accepting a relationship to the Love that transcends every human Ioye.2 We, however, do not establish that relationship; it is given to us. We do not possess it by nature, so it cannot be taken for granted .3 Our self-deception is the failure to accept the gift of God's love and the call to be transformed into God's children in the Son. We merely pretend that our communion with God is authentic, that we share his being-in-Love, if we are not willing to undergo the suffering that is entailed in meeting the demands and total claims of Love. In meeting the demands of L6ve, suffering demonstrates our authentic acceptance of the gift of God's love. The sovereign transforming power of God's love, as opposed to self-love, is manifested in the sufferings of the just. The Drama of Suffering Love The Synoptic Gospels tell the story of Jesus as a drama in four acts. The first act prepares us for what is to come (Mt 3:1-4, ll= Mk l:l-13 = Lk 3:1-4:13); the second act tells the story.of Christ's ministry in Galilee (Mt. 4:12-18:35 = Mk 1:14-9:50 = Lk 4:14-9:50). In the third act Jesus journeys to Jerusalem (Mt 19:i-20:34 =. Mk 10:1-52 = Lk 9:51-18:43) while the fourth act tells the story of Christ's passion and resurrection. As in every good drama, the story invites the onlooker to join in the dramatic action. We are called to become actors within Christ's dramatic story rather than to remain as onlookers marveling at the drama of what is happening to someone else. The evangelists want their hearers to be trans-formed by authentically sharing Christ's life and his Spirit by dying and rising with him. The life of the Spirit is a sharing in the whole life of Jesus, his dying and rising, his self-emptying and his self-fulfilling glorification in God. We cannot be filled by the Spirit unless the self has been emptied to make room for the Spirit's gifts. The mystery of the Cross and resurr6ction expresses the true nature and power of Jesus' being-in-Love, the power and freedom to .be able to love to the end. The disciples, who share their Lord's de~tiny, are also called upon .to suffer. As his ,followers, we must expect suffering, rejection and persecution (Mk 8:34-35; Mt 10:24-25; Lk 6:22; 14:26-27; .In 12:25,26), for the kingdom of God that comes to us in the myster3) of Jesus Christ's dying and rising is a sign of contradiction. Fidelity to the Master means that the disciples must enter into the same struggle that Jesus entered to fulfill God's plan for creation. Opposition to Jesus is manifested within all his human contexts. Mark structures his Gospel to underscore human resistance to the arrival of the kingdom in the person, work and ministry of Jesus Christ. Society resists Jesus (l: 14-3:6)~ Pharisees and scribes, the leaders of the people, engage him in five controversies (~2:1-3:5) and decide to destroy him (3:6). His family, relatives and townspeople are disturbed by him (3:7-6:6), and they fear for his sanity (3:21). Despised in his own country, among his own relations and in his own Christian Conversion / 35 house, he could work no miracle there (6:4:6). Jesus meets with the incompre-hension of his own disciples (6:6-8:33), and he rebukes them for not understanding the miracle of the loaves (8:17) or the necessity of his passion and death (8:31). Fidelity to the will of God meets with human resistance and incompre-hension. If the kingdom of God was ours by nature, Jesus would not encounter incomprehension, hostility and.rejection. His harmony with the will of God entails his disharmony.with all that is opposed to it. His being-in-Love entails his suffering and death out of love that all persons might be-in-Love. He loves his people, fami]3i, disciples and all others with whom his life, vision and mission are in conflict. He suffers out of love for them with the compassion that leads to his passion and death, in order that all might have the fullness of new life in the kingdom. Especially in Mark's story of Jesus, we see that as God's will for Jesus is being progressively fulfilled, he becomes increasingly unpopular until he dies alone--rejected and abandoned by all. Mark's narrative structure makes the theological point that God alone is the fulfilling origin, ground and destiny of Jesus Christ's living, dying and rising out of Love. The coming of the kingdom in the person of Jesus Christ is the ,revelation that God is in love with all human persons and summons them to become a new creation in God's Love. What is demanded of us is repentance and faith in his love given to us in his Beloved Son (Mk 1:11, 15; 9:7). Such repentance and faith entail the suffering out of Love which the Beloved Son himself experienced i.n his prayer at Gethsemane (~Mk 14:36). Jesus experiences suffering out of Love in every human context, the intra-personal as well as the interpersonal; this is evidence for the community of faith that the integrating center of his life transcends every human context. God's lordship in love is a creative goodness which makes others good. When God begins his reign as Father in Jesus Christ, all things are made new in his love,.all things are possible (Mk 10:27; 11:36; Mt 19:26; Lk 18:27). Conversion: Becoming Persons-in-Love Through the example of Jesus' being-in-Love, ~he Christian community sees that God compassionately demands all persons to find and accept their true fulfillment in the gift of his Love so that all might forever be persons-in- Love. God is not indifferent to what weare and become. To accept his love for all is to learn to suffer with his compassionate and passionate love for all, ¯ overcoming our intrapersonal and interpersonal tendencies to remain impersonal. The new life of the kingdom that is given to us in Jesus and his Spirit entails the suffering out of Love for others that manifests our being-in-Love with others. This new life transforms us by making us willing and glad to suffer for others in the service of the kingdom. In the context of the Last Supper, John's gospel implies that Jesus gladly and voluntarily lays down his life that his friends might know the joy of being able to do likewise. ~16 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 True disciples love as the,Master loves. They share a life that is rooted'in God's community-creating love for all, the only love that constitutes the community of divine and human persons which lasts forever. True disciples have solidarity in that invincible love which, despite suffering and death itself, makes them glad to pour out their lives for others. They do not consider themselves to be martyrs or victims; rather, they suffer for others (divine and human) as true friends in the power of that love which alone grounds the eternal friendship that is life in the kingdom, Central to the notion of Christian conversion as suffering out of love is the fact that God wants all human persons to enjoy his life as their own. The gift of God's love is not so much a giving away as a sharing. In loving, God shares himself and all that he is. Jesus Christ enjoys the life and love of his Father; therefore, he is glad to suffer out of that love so that all human beings might share what he most cherishes. But what is perfect in the Master is imperfect in the disciple. The life that Jesus Christ fully enjoys is the life that his disciples are learning to enjoy. The disciple knows the Master to the extent that he or she enjoys the same life and is glad to suffer out of love to secure that life for others. The. solidarity of Master and disciple in suffering out of love for others consists in their enjoying and cherishing the life that they want others to enjoy. Christian conversion is not only an event but also a process that deepens this solidarity through fidelity to the grace and demand of God for responsible lives. Christian conversion, both as event and as process, is participation in the befriending love that Jesus Christ received and accepted from his Father as the integrating center of his life, mission and death for 6thers. Lived Christian conversion entails suffering out of a befriending love that affects all our conscious activities, directs our attention, pervades our imagination, release~ symbols that penetrate to the depths of our psyches, enriches our under-standing, guides our judgments, reinforces our decisions and motivates 0tii~ actions. To enjoy the transforming, benefit of God's befriending love in Jesus Christ and his Spirit implies a gratitude that actively accepts it and makes a religious and moral commitment to sharing it with others. Gratitude for the gift of God's befriending love reflects a humility that takes nothirig for granted. Such humility'brings an appreciation of others and a commitment to them, even when they are superficially unattractive. If we truly appreciate others, we are glad to suffer out of love for them and to befriend them as disciples of ~the Master who lived and died to make his joy ours and to make our joy complete (see Jn 15:11). Some Principles and Practical Points of Reference 1. Being-in-Love is the motivating power for suffering out of Love. 2. If, as Jesus reveals, God is befriending Love, being in befriending Love is the motivating power foi" suffering out of befriending Love for others. It makes us glad, despite difficulties, to befriend others. Christian Conversion 3. Suffering out of befriending Love for others is the self-transcending activity that frees us from self-absorption, self-pity and self-idolatry (i.e., from being impersonal). It frees us for the fulfillment that is being-in-Love with others (i.e,, for being personal). 4. For human beings to be fully personal is, ultimately, for them to be-in- Love befriending others. Sin is the refusal to be personal, the state of the impersonal subject. 5. In lived Christian conversion, suffering is not sought for its own sake; rather, it is embraced only when it is a condition for commitment to the grace and demand of God's befriending love. 6. If lived Christian conversion entails suffering out of befriending Love for others, suffering is not a univocal sign that something is wrong with a person. It may be, as the teaching of the beatitudes implies, the sign that something is profoundly right with a person. 7. We are not committed to persons or values for whom we are unwilling to suffer. We cannot suffer out of love for others when we have no love for them. 8. Being-in-Love is the efficacious ground of self-transcendence required to live responsibly and to be responsible to the pursuit of the truth, however difficult it may be to discover or to accept. It motivates the will to be responsible and to pay the pric.e of responsibility. 9. The fact that Jesus Christ was willing to suffe~ and die for us grounds the primary dogma that God loves us~ To sense that we are loved is to sense something that is true. It may be that imagination is involved in our sensation, but the truth of the dogma will stand. Being-in-Love and willing to suffer out of love for others should never be identified with the presence or absence of any particular feeling or sensation. Our faith and hope is in God, not in our feelings. 10. Because human beings leave something to be desired that God alone can fulfill, suffering out Of love is the condition for the possibility of friendship. Friendship (marriage, community, society, and more) disintegrates with the refusal to endure limitations arid deficiencies in others. Our incapacity for friendship is related to our unwillingness to be committed to others who do not fully gratify, support or console us. There is no lasting commitment to others apart from the willingness to suffer out of love for them. 11. Having time for others is a form of suffering out of love for them. Religious conversion implies that we are living in God's time, that we have the gift of his time for welcoming and listening to others. Consequently, we do not see others as taking or consuming our time; we are free for them to the extent that we are free from the illusion that the only time we have is our own. Prayer is a form of enjoying God's time and transcending our own. Some seldom find time to pray because they are living in their own time and do not want to lose it for life in God's time. The call to pray always is the call to be-in-Love and to live in God's time forever. Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 12. Sufferingout of love for others is a form of our self-investment in them. Inasmuch as communities are formed and held together by a common faith and hope, there is a community-creating and community-sustaining power and value in suffering out of faith, hope and love for others. 13. Inconveniencing ourselves for others is perhaps the most basic form of suffering out of love for others. Unwillingness to inconvenience ourselves for others is a reft~sal to be personal; it is the failure to befriend others at the most rudimentary level of everyday life. No possibility of a lasting commitment to others exists without our being willing to inconvenience ourselves for them daily. 14. The New Testament demand for human transformation through following Jesus' way of the cross should warn those who are tempted to reduce God to their own measure. The self-abandonment that God's befriending love required of Jesus Christ should correct our tendency to manipulate God. 15. Tothe extent that we are convinced that our importance is in God, as opposed to the illusion of an independent self-importance, we are equally convinced that all others have the same importance and are worthy of self-sacrificing and befriending love. The conviction that we exist because God loves us implies that we-find security and a sense of personal worth in God, rather than in the approval that others may choose to give us. 16. If God's will is done, all human persons will be in his kingdom. Our finite, limited, human love is inadequate to the challenge of loving all persons, apart from the gift of God's all-embracing, all-encompassing, all-sustaining, all-forgiving, all-reconciling and all-fulfilling love. His community-creating love for all is the origin and ground of life in the kingdom. 17. Love takes others seriously. How seriously we take others, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, reveals how seriously we take God. It is the conviction of Jews and Christians that God takes all human persons seriously. How seriously God takes us is implied in the Christian affirmation that God is Love. We know that God is Love because he sent his only Son to live and die for us: We know that such Love transcends words because it embraces human living, suffering and dying. We know that we are truly loved and taken seriously by those who willingly share our living, suffering and dying. We discover the reality of our love for others in willingly doing likewise. NOTES ~See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology. (London: Darton, Longrnan & Todd, 1971), passim, esp. pp. 105-122, 2Although Being-in-Love is the existence of the Father and Son and Spirit, I pareaihesize Father to highlight the filial relationship of Jesus as Son. 3See Charles Hefling's lntrduction to Frederick E. Crowe, The Lonergan Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1980), p. xvi. A Clump of Lichen and Me Kathleen Gallas, OS.B. Sister Gallas is Food Service Director at the Sacred Heart Convent and Conference Center, where she may be addressed: P.O. Box 488; Cullman, AL 35056-0488. What ig contemplative life? Why the nuclear arms race? Why the environ-mental devastation? In the aftermath of "The Day After" my reflectivd moments pondered these seemingly unrelated questions. A combination of spiritual reading, n~ws magazines and discussions on the American Catholic Bishops' Pastoral On Peace surfaced this assortment of questions. While pon-dering the last two questions there eventually came over me a sense of futility. What can any one p.erson do to change the course of events toward possible destruction of life and environment? It can even be questioned as to what will destroy what firs!! Even if there' is a nuclear disarmament it will only be a matter of time before life is destroyed through our irresponsible use of environ-ment and our exploitation of peoples around the world as though they were so many pins on a chart. The question of contemplative life I pondered as an altogether different kind of issue. Ordinarily when one speaks or hears of contemplative life and of contemplative prayer, it is understood in terms describing activities limited to a select few. Contemplative life involved Contemplative prayer, and anyone experiencing contemplative prayer was undoubtedly living a contemplative life--which usually meant living a vowed religious life. Neither combination is necessarily true, nor the total meaning. My own convictions saw a distinction between contemplative life and contemplative prayer. Mother Mary Clare, S.L.G., in her book, Encountering the Depths, gives a difference. "Contempla-tive prayer can be experienced, if God wills it, in any such circumstance as he sees fit to bestow, while contemplative life is the life so directed in its simplicity, and separated from the normal distraction of the active world, that it provides the best preparation for carrying out the work of contemplative prayer." How- 411 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 ever, as Thomas Merton said, "Not all who are vowed contemplative religious experience contemplative prayer." After a while I found myself considering the word contemplative as separated from the terms life and prayer. By itself I couldn't limit the meaning of contemplative to a few but asked the question if being contemplative wasn't a dimension of being human, and therefore per-taining to everyone. What is it to be contemplative? This assortment of questions unexpectedly came together and found its own kind of answer in an experience 1 had on a January afternoon. Everything I had been meditating within the context of each of the three basic questions surfaced and synthesized an experience with a clump of lichen. I had been pondering these questions separately without any thought of relating them. However, my experience of lichen gave me the insight that in actuality the answer to the question of what is contemplative life was the foundation to answering the other questions--and all other questions concerning peace, justice and harmony in our relationships with each other and our environment. I am standing at my special place on a particular hillside with an Alabama version of mountains before me evoking the line: "I lift my eyes to the moun-tains from where comes my help--the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth." At my feet is a clump of gray-green lichen with red dots. Flowers? To see them eye to eye I have to lie on my stomach. Then do I see. The lichen grew finger-like projections and each finger tip is painted red. There am I on the ground "eyeballing" a lichen's painted finger nails! At first I laugh at myself. Then at us, the~lichen~and me. I talk to it. "Aren't we a crazy pair? Somehow, this is a fun moment, isn't it? We share a secret, you and I. Others might question my sanity if I were to tell them of our secret delight in each other. However, there must be others like us, for Goethe back in the eighteenth century said: 'Tell no man, tell wise men only, for the ~vorld might count it madness'," My deepest intuitions say that I am not mad in having fun seeing and listening ~ith a clump of lichen. After a while the humor of the situation shifts in mood to a sense of wonder, fascination and appreciation of so tiny a bit of color on a January day. In this Garden of Eden setting comes the urge to pick up this clump of lichen and bring it home to the prayer room--a winter flower for the Lord. But no! in my position of lying stomach flat to th~ earth comes the awareness that I am hugging great Mother Earth who in Greek mythology was named Gaia--a name personalizes and effects a deeper relationship. Gaia and I became one in this°moment--a moment of union. She and I are gift to each other from our God, the maker of heaven and earth. There is the vista before me, t_he clump of lichen below me, and myself. We are responsible to each other and for each other. So, I am one human being and this under my eyes is roughly a 3 x 4 inch clump of lichen. Yet this clump of lichen and I represent a microcosm of life on planet earth. On the one hand it could be said what harm done to pull up this clump +sp~cially with the motive of offering? But how thoughtless and insensitive to Gaia who needs this clump of lichen to maintain nature's balance A Clump of "~chen and Me / 41 so that I might live comfortably. To be fruitful and multiplyr fill the earth and stibdue it doesn't mean that I ravage it, pollute it, coerce it for my own selfish needs and even worse, under the guise of something good. Whose good? How often our God voiced that he spurned such offerings. Some would say that I have done no harm to another human being in pulling up this clump. But I have. Even if it is in innocence, the innocence of thoughtlessness; I have harmed another in contr!buting to making earth an unfit place to live. Gaia is upset. Mother Nature reacts and there can eventu-ally come a separation, a divorce. I could be a contributing cause in the erosion of this hillside. In being responsible to Gala and for Gala I am also responsible to all other human beings. Each of us is responsible to the other for maintaining a harmonious relationship with Gaia who will respond accordingly. In this total economy of life no one human being is insignificant. Neitheris this clump of red-dotted lichen by my side. Just now 1 suddenly recall a long-forgotten story, The Little Prince. The fox is explaining to the prince what it means .to be tamed. "It means to establish ties." "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world." We were asked to subdue the earth, Wouldn't "to subdue" mean "to tame'~. To establish ties, to create a need for each other? To instill a reverence for the uniqueness of each other? In lying flat on the ground face to face with a clump of lichen, I felt an. interrelatedness. The lichen and I were one. My body pressed to the body of earth were one. As far as the eye could see there was not another clump of lichen to be seen amidst the variety of winter-colored plant life. Yet there was the awareness that while this was so on the immediate level, there was also an awareness on another level that the earth was populated with the likes of me and the likes of this lichen. Each was one in the many and the many in the one. I knew an interrelatedness with all in the universe that was human. The lichen would'feel the same with its kind. However, the sense of harmony, the expe-rience of0neness-and-manyness wasn't limited to recognizing this in our sepa-rateness of plant and human, for at the same time there was the feeling of Oneness with each 6ther. The lichen and I knew a oneness with each other as well as a oneness in the manyness of us. Lichen and me. Plant life and human life. Mother Earth Gaia and me, Gaia and the manyness of me. Each and speaks of union. Each and speaks of a union that is life-creating, life-giving, life-supporting. This life with a small "1" could only be because of the gratu-itous, unfathomable love that is Life with a capital "L." It is from the Life and in this Life that the lichen and I have life. We are gifts to each~ other, responsible to each other from the Gift that is Life--maker of heaven and earth. A dialogue from another story, The Farthest Shore, by Ursula LeGuin Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 speaks of this responsibility. The wise magus explains to his young companion the meaning and responsibility of personal choice. "On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale's sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the .gnat's flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole. But we, insofar aswe have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility." When did we become responsible for each other? In the beginning of , creation Life hovered over the darkness of the deep and breathed over the waters of the abyss. God said, "Let there be . " With each word of God, each breath of Life a living being was created. Gaia is a living being. This clump of lichen is a living being. I am a living being. Within each resides the breath of Life uniting us as one. Gaia and this clump of lichen act unconsciously accord-ing to their nature. The breath of Life that brought me into being included the freedom of choice. But "having choice, we must not act without responsibility." However, if I am not awakened in eye and heart to that breath of Life within me then my actions are likely to be irresponsible and contrary to the nature Life intended me as a ruler of myself and of the earth. Only if I am awake to this Life breathing within me will I be able to make responsible choices that will be in harmony with all other beings until All is in all, a union of One, a oneness in the manyness. Frederick Franck in his Book of Angelus Silesitis says: "For the awakened.spirit there is no longer a split between 'I' and 'other'." Meister Eckhart asks, "When is a man in mere understanding?" "When he sees one thing as separated from another." "And when isa manabove mere under-standing? . When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding." Until one is awakened to the Life within there is no unfolding, no con-sciousness that this clump of lichen and I are responsible to each other, gifts to each other for all others in our oneness. Thoughtlessness, insensitivity, ihgrati-tude to the gift of oneself and the gift of each other have compounded to the magnitude of global disaster at the exp.ense of all that represents the lichen and me. In our insecurities and lack of appreciation of each other's unique gifted-ness-- everything that makes up heaven and earth--we have become envious and greedy. In our drive to be number one in whatever area of life, individually and nationally, we have lost sight of our interconnectedness. We have forgot-ten that the world is round'and not fiat. In our linear vision of life we have forgotten that there is a Center that links us as spokes in a wheel. In our fears and insecurities we can be likened to the schoolyard bullies easily provoked when our power position is threatened. In the global schoolyard we clench nuclear warheads. ° A Clump of Lichen and Me / 43 Or? I was about to pull up the clump of lichen to use as an offering and a decoration but I didn't because ~of an awareness that each of us is connected to a Center and interdependent. But on a global level we have those who thought-lessly, selfishly ravage the earth's peoples and places as so many clumps of lichen and for a variety of reasons--least of all, offering and decoration. On the other hand, when done out of offering and decoration it is far more devastating. It is said that greed brings out the animal in us but that isn't true. Animals act according to their nature as designed when breathed,into life. ,~ dog gnawing on his bone is not envious of the dog next to him chewing on a steak. Each is content. Humans in their greed that becomes exploitation of all living beings act contrary to even animal nature in wanting both, their own and what others have. ~ I feel that my experience with the lichen spoke to the fundamental ques-tion, what is contemplative life--what is it to be contemplative? Am I off the track? I don't think so.-It is for each of us to live life moment by moment deliberately, reflectively, consciously, reverently; awarely, thoughtfully, prayer-fully. The majority claim that this isn't possible. But why not? Walter Burg-hardt in his book Season that Laugh and Weep_:quotes his friend William McNamara in defining contemplative as "a long loving look at the real." Burghardt goes on to explain the "real~" Reality is living, pulsing people; reality'is fire and water;~reality is the sun setting over the Poconos and a gentle doe streaking through the forest; reality is a ruddy glass of Burgundy, Beethoven's Mass in D, a child lapping a chocolate iee-crearn cone; reality is a striding woman with wind-blown hair; r~ality is Christ Jesus. Contemplation~is not an abstraction "where a leaf is no longer green, water no longer ripples, a woman is no longer soft, and God no longer smiles." He goes on to say, "This real I 'look' at. I no longer analyze it or argue it, describe or define it; I am one with it. I do not move around it; I enter into it." When one enters into it one becomes one with it. I am that at which I give a long loving look. Sense of separateness disappears.in the embrace. I am convinced that this capacity is within each of us.As I am writing and ponder-ing this (now a summer morning) I'm aware 0fa buzzing fly. The window has a space between outside glass and .inside screen. The fly flew in by the open middle section. It is now buzzing and frantically dashing itself at the top section of panes. This has been going on for over an hour. If it would just stop long enough to take a long loving look at the reality of its situation, it would come to know that the next set of panes is open. The fly would be free to become one with all that is outside the barrier of closed upper-window panes. To be contemplative is a dimension within each of us that must be responded to in order to live in harmony with one's self, with each other, with Gaia. That dimension is there enabling us to be free, but like the fly we frantically dash our lives on window panes of our own choosing. In all the ceaseless buzzing and frantic dashing about we fail to "see" that the next set of panes is op.en which would free us to be one with all we see but interact with through the glass of 44 / Review for Religious, Jan.-Feb., 1985 fears and insecurities. We are gifts to each other.~As human beings breathed into existence each of us is endowed with gifts we hold in common as well as those unique to each. Gifts can remain latent or be 'used intelligently ~nd responsibly. But this is an unfolding and a growing that starts from a beginning. In the beginning God created the heavens and earth. In the beginning was the Word. In the begin-ning life breathed. The very words "in the beginning" suggest that there is a past, a present and a future. We all have beginnings and are now in process toward endings. But life is a spiral of beginnings and endings gradually open-ing us to greater circumferences. Beginnings proceed to endings only to find that endings become new beginnings. Life is breathing, bringing us to an expanding awareness and fullness. However time past and time future ismean-ingful if I live the now moment attentively, patiently, caringly, lovingly. Other-wise the clump of lichen is just a clump of lichen to be trampled on or pulled up indifferently, carelessly--for there are no established ties. Again, theqittle prince and the fox: "What must I do, to tame you" asked the little prince? "You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me--like that--in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day." In my experience on that January'day, the lichen and I tamed each other. Ties were established revealing secrets visibly to the heart. As I was walking back home filled with the fullness of Life, pain and sorrow entered. I could identify with St. Francis who cried because Love is not loved. Along the roadside was the trash 6f beverage cans and fast-food restau-rant containers. This marring of the creation of heaven and earth is evidence of a lack of awareness of the meaning of life breathing within all created things. Most of the trash along our highways are food containers betraying the pace and emptiness of our lives. Many people claim they are too busy to eat' reflectively, appreciatively, companionably and as an undivided activity. Too busy to take "long loving looks at the real." Busy-ness reflects an emptiness or a fife lived in qu~intity not quality until it becomes a frantic dashing about. There is not the patience to live the now moment attentively, undividedly. From just considering the kinds of trash I saw along the way, it seems that eating has become something we do while in the process of doing something else, on our way to somewhere else--all activities of another kind that are not entered into fully either. Our attention is fragmented; when the activities of each moment are multiple and experienced indifferently and randomly, as a ¯ necessary activity to get over with, it is a natural consequence to open the window of the car and carelessly toss out the trash on the landscape which goes unnoticed. The fox upon saying goodby to the prihce imparts his secret. "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." "It is the time you have wasted for another that makes this tamed one so important'. Men have forgotten this truth but you must not forget it. You A Clump of Lichen and Me / 45 become responsible forever, for what you have tamed." What is it to be contemplative? Whether described as "a long loving look at the real" or "time you have wasted for another," it is a time consumption that a pragmatic materialistic society rejects because for them time and life are mea-su~- ed in terms of money--cash and flow. The contemplative dimension that enables us to be truly human is there but lost. From still another source, Tom Brown, a woodsman taught by an Apache Indian, describes in his book, The Search, his conviction of the contemplative dimension. There is a place I know where everything lives in harmony. Nothing is envied, stolen, or killed. Instead, everything is shared. The land is everyone's and no one's. Life is sacred there. A dweller in this place thinks highly of human life because he lives so close to the earth. He understands his part in the scheme of nature and is not lost or searching for himself. Where is this place? Does it really exist? Yes. It is within me and can be within you. It is a state of mind; it is an awareness; it is an appreciation; it is an understanding; it is a commitment to life. It is the realization that everything I described is all about us every day of our lives, but we miss it. We are blind to the beauty of a sunset, deaf to the music of the wind, callous to rough bark and soft grass. We speak of salaries and war instead of singing songs of life. We taste the bitterness of pollution and miss the sweetness of wild honeysuckle. We smell bus fumes but never the apple blossoms or clover flower. Life is manufactured and marketed. It is, for many of us, something to be bought or sold, and the more we pay, the better off we feel we are. Empty, untamed and fragmented lives are not awakened to the Life within. There is no awareness of interconnectedness, of taming and being tamed. There is no awareness that the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth and everything therein, is at the center of his universe and the center of each of us. One indifference leads and escalates into another: trash out the window by individuals, pollution and exploitation of land, sea and sky by industry, oppression of people around the world by political systems. If lives were lived contemplatively to what is essential and visible to the eye of the heart, then it would be realized that no being is insignificant because each o

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

Issue 69.3 of the Review for Religious, 2010. ; ANew Chal!en~e Models of Spi~rituali, ty Liv, ing Religious Li£e ' Foliow~ing Christ QUARTERLY 69.3 2010 Review for Religious fosters dialogue with God, dialogue with ourselves, and dialogue with one another about the holiness we try to live according to charisms of Catholic religious life. As Pope' Paul Vl said, our way of being church is today the way of dialogue. Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published quarterly at Saint Louis University by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. Editorial Office: 3601 Lindell Boulevard ¯ St. Louis, Missouri 63108-3393 Telephone: 314-633-4610 ¯ Fax: 314-633-4611 E-Maih 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 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. ©2010 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to copy any material (articles, poems, reviews) contained in this issue of Review for Religious for personal or internal use, or for the personal or internal use of specific library clients within the limits outlined in Sections 107 and/or 108 of the United States Copyright Law. All copies made under this permission must bear notice of the source, date, and copyright owner on the first page. This permission is NOT extended to copying for commercial distribution, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. ~ gournalof Ca~ho~c ~piri~ua~y rel Editor Associate Editor Scripture Scope Editorial Staff Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Eugene Hensell OSB Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp Paul Coutinho SJ Martin Erspamer OSB' Margaret Guider OSF Kathleen Hughes RSCJ Louis and Angela Menard Bishop Terry Steib SVD QUARTERLY 69.3 2010 contents prisms 228 Prisms 230 238 a new challenge ~ Koinonia and the Church in the Digital Age Daniel P. Horan OFM reflects on the role technology currently plays in both supporting and challenging Christians in their fellowship (koinonia) as church. Personal Reflection / Group Discussion Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Hear and Far Hedwig Lewis SJ probes the inclusive meaning and reach of frontiers for spiritual enhancement and effective ministry. The term frontiers, contained in Decree Three of the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus has gained popularity among many religious. 226] 255 268 models of spirituality ~ Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of the Cross Judith Metz SC explores a central element of St. Elizabeth Seton's spirituality: her realization of the importance of losing her life for the sake of living in closer union with Christ. A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth Avis Clendenen finds in an aging sister's simple tale a vision of the humility that our dangerously narcissistic culture seriously needs. Review for Religious 281 297 living religious life Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice Robert Nogosek CSC proposes that in order for religious life to be authentic discipleship it demands of us an ongoing reevaluation of what is required to be a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Coping with the Genuinely Difficult Religious Jeffrey Mickler SSP brings together some observations and practical suggestions on how to deal with problematic religious. 3O9 316 following Christ The Liturgical Year: History or Mystery? John M. Samaha SM examines the movement of the liturgical year in order that we might enter more fully into this time of grace. Personal Reflection / Group Discussion Discipleship and Clinging to God Damian C. Ilodigwe writes on how letting go opens us to true discipleship, and we are invited to detach ourselves from wayward affections in order to attach ourselves to God. departments 324 Scripture Scope: Reading and Understanding the Prophets 328 Book Review 227 69.3 2010 prisms 228 In the middle months of a secular calendar year, we find ourselves in what is identified as "ordinary time" in the church's liturgical year. As we likely have been told many times, the liturgical "ordinary time" refers to a way of counting (the Latin word ordo meaning "an ordering") the Sundays from one to thirty-four. These are the Sundays that are outside of the special seasons of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter. Yet for us Christians, there is a kind of lovely paradox in living within what we call the "liturgical season of ordinary time." While in many ways it may seem that all time is ordi-nary (since time is always countable), in other ways we can view all time as rather extraordi-nary. The ordinariness of time is caught up in our usual round of family or community life, of work and recreation, of the accustomed interaction of friends, neighbors, and fellow-workers. Some people try to break out of the day-to-day routine by deliberately scheduling in a special time for a dinner out, a day-trip to an unfamiliar town, or a different recreational activity such as biking or bowling. Review for Religious A number of people find each day an adventure and cannot imagine that there are some who would call life ordinary. These people find a newness in the chang-ing weather of this day, in the surprising interactions with their own children or friends, and even in the mes-sages of the mail, the internet, and the iphone. They have retained a certain childlikeness that retains a won-der,. about life in all its forms. For them life is not so much ordinal, that is, "countable," as it is caught up in "moments" that have no countable passage. For exam-ple, moments of insight and moments of being inflamed by love--spiritually identified as consolations--are truly beyond the countable. We Christians are blessed and graced to recognize these kinds of "moments" in prayer during which we feel caught up outside of time in our relationship with God. Surely it does not happen all the time; in fact, the "ordinary" is our "slugging away" at our prayer time. We can also know these moments when we are engaged in our various times of joy, happiness, and love. The wonder of it all is that these moments for us--those who are caught in finding life ordinary and those who are gifted to live in wonder--are actually moments that happen in the ordinary course of our daily living. Perhaps that is why it is important for us to enter fully into the paradox of our church's liturgical season of ordinary rime. There i~ the reality of the ordinary and there is also the reality of the moment. The church's liturgical year reminds us that God is always present to us both in the ordinary and in the moment. We need only to pray each day of our liturgical year to be gr.aced with the gratitude that finds God in all times and places. David L. Fleming sJ 69.3 2010 a new DANIEL P. HORAN challenge 2301 Koinonia and the Church in the Digital Age If Jesus had been born in 1980 and began his public ministry in 2010, would he have "friended" the twelve apostles on Facebook instead of visiting the Sea of Galilee? While this question might at first seem comical, it reflects concern about how the church as the Christian community relates to the world in which it exists today. The world is very different from the world of Jesus' ministry. The way many people experience interpersonal communication, develop and maintain relation-ships, and share information is strikingly dif-ferent from the ways of previous generations. In an era marked by advances in technology, communication, and virtual space, we must be attentive to how much our church community is being influenced or shaped by its new envi-ronment. To understand some of these matters Daniel P. Horan .OFM has written on Franciscan the-ology, philosophy, and spirituality. He writes from Holy Name College; 1650 Saint Camillus Drive; Silver Spring, Maryland 20903. Review for Religious in what we may call the "digital age," we must look first at what unites us in faith and then at how our changing world affects that unity. What Is Koinonia? Early in the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that members of the nascent Christian community "devoted thems'elves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship (koinonia), to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Ac 2:42). In Greek, koinonia was one of the marks of Christian identity, but what does it mean? It literally means "communal-ness" (community, communion, "in common") and thus fellowship. In the Christian con-text, however, this is more than club mem . bership or casual social connections. The New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson sug-gests that this under-standing of koinonia includes our unity in Christ, which explains how the Christian com-munity was able to maintain unity amid the ~hallenges it faced in the first centuries. In a 1999 lecture at St. Louis University, Johnson offered four aspects of this Christian fellow-ship: fellowship among persons, in writing, in material resources, and in convictions.1 Even in diverse cultures, regions, and languages, Christianity was unified through these four aspects of koinonia. The fellowship among persons is seen in the way net-works of New Testament figures, including the apostles The fellowship in writing is most clearly seen in the way .that. early Christian texts,. were shared among the early believers~ [231 69.3 2010 Horan ¯ Koinonia and the Cburcb in the Digital Age and their successors, helped to unify the various com-munities of believers. Johnson believes that these per-sonal connections helped to maintain coherence in the early Christian movement. The fellowship in writing is most clearly seen in the way that early Christian texts, which would later be canonized as Scripture, were shared among the early believers in different locations. The exchange of these compositions, sometimes letters and sometimes longer narratives, concretized the common experience of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. The communal reflec-tion on these compositions proved to be an important means of developing koinonia. The fellowship in material resources united the first Christians in a seemingly calculable way that was under-stood more deeply as symbolizing a spiritual connec-tion with other believers. We see in both the Acts of the Apostles and in the Letters of Paul references to offerings for the benefit of the local community ("no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common," Ac 4:32), and the greater Christian community spread throughout the land ("conc+rning the collection for the saints., on the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn," 1 Co 16:1-2). Sharing financial resources represented spiritual koinonia. The last form of fellowship is that in convictions. Johnson notes that in the New Testament we see con-flicts arising over interpretations of some mat(ers, but that some convictions are never contested. Three of these are monotheism (identifying the one God as the God of the Torah), knowledge that Jesus was human and died, and belief that Jesus was now living with God and would share in God's triumph in the future. Review for Religious All four forms of koinonia that Johnson highlights contribute to the unity amid diversity in the early.church. We see that they have continued to unite the church. The Possibility of Digita! Koinonia With the understanding that this fourfold koinonia continues even today, we can now look at how it relates to us in our technologically advanced and technologically permeated world. It seems there is nothing that does not have a digital or virtual counterpart: Much of today's communication takes place on the Internet in such sites as Facebook and MySpace. Interacting in a completely digital environment where simple laws of nature, com-mon social mores, and geographical limits are no longer applicable is becoming more common through programs like SecondLife. These new forms of communication and social interaction allow the users to create, modify, and experiment with their identities in unprecedented ways. These new "identities" can participate in what are often called "online communities." Is it possible then to express koinonia in a digital format, to have "church" or a community of believers come together in an authentic way online? It would seem at first glance to be a possibility. The clearest congruency between koinonia and the digital age is likely found within the context 6f the fel-lowship among persons. The Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gen-tium, says: "All of the faithful, scattered though they be throughout the. world, are in communion with each other in the Holy Spirit" (LG §13).2 Earlier in Lumen gentium we are told that the church "transcends all limits of time and confines of race [and is] destined to extend to all regions of the earth" (LG §9). Transcending the 69.3 2010 Horan ¯ Koinonia and the Church in the Digital Age boundaries of temporality and human differences sug-gests that connecting and communicating with others through digital media and the Internet is indeed a con-temporary manifestation of fellowship among persons. Additionally, the "blog" (short for "weblog") and other digital media make written compositions and reflections on normative religious texts more read-ily available. Even in graduate theological schools, the ubiquity of technologies such as BlackBoard or WebCT has reshaped the way students of Scripture and theology read about, reflect on, and share their faith. It would seem that Christians are no longer limited to parish Bible study, adult catechesis, or other forms of faith-sharing face to face. Instead, thecommunica(ion of biblical and theological reflection now transcends the previous spatial and temporal boundaries. You can read about, reflect on, and share your faith at any time and from nearly any place. The fellowship in material resources in contempo-rary Christian communities occurs largely by way of the Internet. Technology enables the faithful to share their material resources directly or indirecdy with other communities at the click of a computer mouse. When natural disaster, crime, or war affects the people of God on any continent or at any time, the Internet has allowed Christians to assist others instantaneously. This has been the case in recent years with aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and victims of hur-ricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. The sharing of material resources in these instances also represents the spiritual unity of the people of God, spread around the world though they are. The final dimension of koinonia that Johnson has highlighted for us, fellowship in convictions, can also be for Reli#ous seen in the new technologies of the digital age. From the beginning of the Internet, digital "communities" formed to share ideas and information. Early on, this occurred in what were called "chat rooms" and "message boards," where one could connect with others and contribute to a continuing conversation about a particular subject. Today the successors to those early formats might be Facebook "groups" and personal blogs. Centered on commonly held beliefs and convictions, these digital "spaces" allow people to connect with others without regard to temporal or geographic boundaries. Given the apparent compatibility of Luke Johnson's fourfold definition of koinonia with the technological advances of our digital age, it seems we could advocate a form of "digital koinonia." There remains, however, a piece of the puzzle that is not accounted for in this digital koinonia. The church is not united in this form of fellowship alone, but is also a Eucharistic community. From Facebook to Eucharist However great the possibilities for increasing koi-nonia among the Christian faithful, we must recall the passage from Acts cited above wherein the community was also devoted to the breaking of the bread. Cardinal Walter Kasper, in his book That They May All Be One,3 reminds us that the church is not simply an organization or club in which we have become some sort of mem-ber, and that we are brought into participation in the mystery of Christ as a part of Christ's Body through the sacrament of baptism. The participation--the set of relationships we enter through baptism and maintain through koinonia--comes to what Kasper calls "the summit," namely, participation in the Eucharist, a theme from Sacrosanctum concilium, 69.3 2010 Horan ¯ Koinonia and the Church in the Digital Age the council's Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. In this light we can understand Christian koinonia as being both a communal or material unity and a sacramental unity. Kasper is in line with Johnson's fourfold koinonia, but reminds us that this koinonia is inherently sacramental, rooted in our shared baptism and Eucharist. Understanding koinonia as being fundamentally sac-ramental while also communal, we see two sets of rela-tionship in the church's koinonia, The first one Kasper calls the horizontal dimension of koinonia. It is what we have seen in Johnson's fourfold framework: fellow- - ship among persons, . , ~ in writing, in material resources, and in con-viction. The second set Kasper describes as the vertical dimension: the explicitly sacramental fellowship of believers, who in baptism are united to Christ and thus brought into the life of the Trinity. This dimension, the vertical or sac-ramental, cannot be replicated on Facebook, MySpace, SecondLife, or any other technological medium. People cannot have their SecondLife avatar baptized online and cannot participate in the celebration of the Eucharist online either. In light of the ideas of'Luke Timothy Johnson and Cardinal Walter Kasper and in line with the vision of the Second Vatican Council, the church in this digital age of ours is clearly aided in living its koinonia, but not, of course, in the matter of baptism and the Eucharist, with their water, bread, and wine. The horizontal dimension We can understand Christian koinonia as being both a communal or material unity and a sacramental unity,° 236 Review for Religious of koinonia could very likely benefit from more engage-ment with online technologies that transcend some of the usual limits of place and time. At the same time, there is a need to move beyond this digital koinonia to fully include the sacramental and vertical dimension in the celebration of baptism and Eucharist. Had Jesus "friended" the Apostles on Facebook, he would have veryqikely sent an "e-vite" to each one for an in-person gathering shortly thereafter. Notes ~ Luke Timothy Johnson, "Koinonia: Diversity and Unity in Early Christianity," Theology Digest 46 (1999): 303-313. 2 All references to conciliar documents are to Vatican Council II, ed. Austin Flannery OP (New York: Costello Publishing, 1992). 3 Walter Kasper, That They May All Be One: The Call To Unity Today (New York: Continuum, 2004). Questions for Personal Reflection and Group Study 1. In what ways do you experience koinonia in today's church? 2. How do you see technology impacting the way we live out our call to Christian discipleship? Are there other positive or negative dimensions associated with this reality? 3. What are the ways we might better use technology to support authentic communion within the Christian community today? 23.7 69.3 2010 HEDWIG LEWIS Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far 23,8 ~reOvarle daStt intuotd oens.l yI nc o2m0m06u,n tihcaet es lmanega n"icnogo blu"t walasso said to be the most popular word of the year. It had acquired a new set of meanings and suggested a specific mindset. The word, however, did not affect Jesuits: they were warming up for a general congregation (GC35) to be held in early 2008. When it was finally in session, the delegates wanted to set the world on fire. A special decree (D2) defined the Jesuit as a "man on fire" at the frontiers of humanity. Decree Three (D3) is tided "Challenges to Our Mission Today: Sent to the Frontiers." "Frontiers" became the theme of several docu-ments and the new buzzword of the Jesuits. It is no longer just a romantic term, but has evoked enthusiasm and captured Jesuit imaginations. It has become popular also among other religious worldwide.~ Hedwig Lewis SJ writes again from St. Xavier's College; P.B. 4168; Ahmedabad 380 009; India. His website is http://joygift.tripod.com. Review for Religious Understanding Frontiers The word frontier has varied meanings: the edge of empires, a place for adventure and heroism, technologi-cal testing for new industries, conquest or rich cultural exchange. In Europe it refers simply to the boundaries between nations. The colonies the Europeans established in the rest of the world became, first of all, European societies and cultures on farther frontiers. In the United States the frontier, in history and popular culture, has meant the setting for adventure and prosperity, valor and villainy. The national character is seen as having been forged in the trials and triumphs of life on the frontier. The pioneer experience supposedly pf0duced the best traits of the American people--their tenacity, individualism, love of democracy, patriotism, inventive-ness, and much more. Many historians today question such views, but few would deny that "frontier," broadly understood, has had an influence not only in North America but in the rest of the world as well. The expansion of European peo-ples brought a variety of complicated changes to human society and to the physical world itself. The frontier was an unsetding force--socially, culturally, politically, and ecologically) No longer just a geographic term implying some restrictions, "frontier" is also used in referring intel-lectual aiad scientific advances and ideological visions. Today "ideas, information, merchandise, technology, and capital circulate freely; persons also circulate, though with many more restrictions. Frontiers have become porous, and in many cases they have disappeared. The world has become multireligious and multicultural. There is no longer a notion of Christendom with delim-ited frontiers beyond which lies mission territory.''3 69.3 2010 Lewis * Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far A New Concept of Frontier Decree Three of GC35 redefines frontier accord-ing to. the interpretation Pope Benedict xvI gave it in his allocution to GC35. It implies "geographical and spiritual ,places where others do not reach or find it dif-ficult to reach . The obstacles challenging those who announce the gospel are no longer seas and vast dis-tances; rather they are the boundar-ies of a superficial vision of God and of man, which place obstacles in the way of faith and human knowledge, faith and science, faith and the commitment to justice.''4 The new frontiers exist everywhere, and we are sent to the frontiers with the very concrete mission of open-ing up passes and of "building bridges" between those who live on pne side of the frontier and those who live on the other. What is more, we are asked to be our-selves "bridges in a fragmented world" (D3 17). The frontiers have to be recognized in their variety and diversity. "The frontier is everywhere--in cyber-space, in the inner space of retreats and counseling, in the depths of depression from infirmity, in the homes that have been broken by separation or misunderstand-ing, in the midst of the secularized globalized post, modern world, in old places that call for new ways of speaking God's word. It is anywhere and everywhere that the joy and peace of the Good News is still not felt. And we are asked to go there, and 'our mode of proceeding is to trace the footprints of God. know-ing that the Spirit of Christ is at work in all places Frontiers have to be recognized in their varietyand diversity: 240 Review for Religious and situations.' . . . We turn also to the 'frontier' of the earth, increasingly degraded and plundered. Here, with passion for environmental justice, we shall meet once again the Spirit of God seeking to liberate a suf-fering creation, which demands of us space to live and breathe" (D2 10&24).s On the spiritual front, particularly for Ignatian spiriZ tuality, "~e frontiers are in giving Spiritual Exercises to every kind of person. There are frontiers in constructing an I'gnatian spirituality that can energize political action and, a renewed evangelization of faithful Christians. And there are ~frontiers in places: Moscow, for instance, and the virtual place called the web. There are older fr.on-tiers too: each human hea~;t that has to decide to follow and serve Christ the ¯K' in"g6. Jesm" t s"pirituality, because it is holistic and inclusive, "sustains the Jesuit at individual and collective, personal and strg.ctural levels for collabo-ration and networking at all levels--provincial and uni-versal in an attitude of solidarity . Jesuits are invited to build a new future in Christ for a 'globalization in solidarity, a globalization without marginalization.'''7 Those who "really try to listen" to, the Spirit end up in strange, surprising places!''s Jesuit Frontiersmen ~ Since the-foundation of the Society of Jesus, Jesuits have considered themselves frontiersmen and pioneers in .the proclamation of the faith. Pope. Benedict alluded to this in his allocution: "In its history; the Society of Jesus has lived extraordinary experiences of proclama-tion and encounter between the gospel and world cul-tures- it suffices to think of Matteo Ricci in China, Roberto De Nobili in India, or the 'Reductions' in Latin America. And you are very rightly, proud of them. I feel 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far 242 it is my duty today to urge you to set out once again in the tracks of your predecessors with the same cour-age and intelligence, but also with an equally profound motivation of faith and enthusiasm to serve the Lord and his church." He was echoing the words of his predecessor Pope Paul vI, who spoke of ~'crossroads" and "the front line" when he addressed GC32 in 1975: "Wherev.er in the church, even in the most difficult and exposed fields, in the Erossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches, there has been or is confrontation between the burning exigencies of humanity and the perennial message of the gospel, there have been and are the Jesuits," The Jesuit historian John O'Malley, writing about "the first Jesuits," said that their ."ministries and how they went about them were quintessential to the Jesuits' self-definition" of being frontiersmen. In their minis-tries, Jesuits excluded no person or place in the world. They operated at the edges of life: they preached, taught catechism., proposed _n_ew liturgical practices, and sought to .help orphans, prostitutes, prisoners, and people in hospitals. They were simultaneously writing plays, teaching in universities~ and acting as theologians at the Council of Trent. Within seven years of their papal approval, they founded and operated schools.9 Today our mission is to, go with both spiritual vigor and intellectual rigor to the "new frontiers" where we learn again that our "Jesuit identity [and mission] are relational; they grow in and through our diversities of culture, nationalities, and languages, enriching and chal-lenging us" (D2 19).1° In keeping with their vocation, therefore, Jesuits are sent beyond all frontiers "to serve faith, promote jus-tice, and dialogue with cultures and religions. The basis Review for Religious for reconciliation is Luke 4:18-19, which announces the good news to the poor, the release of captives, the recovery of sight by the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. In proclaiming God's message of love and compassion, Jesus crosses over physical and socio-religious frontiers. In the same manner, Jesuits are invited to preach the kingdom to those living outside their physical and spiritual frontiers: tax col-lectors; prostitutes; sin-ners; refugees; displaced; trafficked; women; chil- ,To cr, gss frontlers demands a strongfaith, courage, ,open ness others, and a willingness to take risks. dren; minorities; outcasts; indigenous peoples; victims of communal, caste, and ethnic violence; and persons of all kinds who are marginalized and excluded.''~l The frontiers are difficult and often uncomfort-able places. They provide none of the security of one's home turf and often require excursions, into unfamiliar or even uncharted territory. To cross frontiers demands a strong faith, courage, openness to others, and a will-ingness to take risks. It requires the ability to adapt the message of Christ and his church to cultural, linguistic, and religious realities that work with altogether differ-ent categories and reference points, as modeled by some of the great Jesuit missionaries of the past.~2 '.'Going to the frontiers," Father Adolfo Nicolfis pointed out, "means study, research, entering into the life of the people, soli-darity, empathy, inculturation, and respect for others. Going to the whole world turns out to be more difficult than we had thought. We feel like children. Perhaps we have discovered the kingdom of God.''~3 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, when asked to define "catholic" by Georgetown University trustees visiting Rome in May 2007, replied, "I have always understood 'catholic' to mean bringing the experience of those at the frontiers of the church's mission back to renew the center.''14 For the effectiveness of our mission, we need to carefully "discern" the frontiers. This demands "three important qualities: creativity, daring, and great humil-ity!" according to Father Nicolfis. "Every Jesuit work, be it in justice, spirituality, educati6n, or whatever, should ask the question, 'How are we at the frontiers?'''is That is what this article addresses. The full mean-ing and scope of "frontiers" will take much research and extensive reflection. This is, then, an introductory study from three perspectives: (1) interior frontiers, which involve (2) spiritual frontiers and (3) outreach frontiers. 244 Interior Frontiers Saints have implied that the spiritual life is the adven-ture of crossing interior psychological frontiers to reach the ever expanding horizons of the soulscape. Spiritual life always involves letting go so .that, unburdened by self-seeking, one can go forward in communion with the divine. This adventure entails a striving to compre-hend "the 'breadth, and length, and depth, and height" of Christ's love (Ep 3:18). In this regard, and with regard to the papal definition, frontiers envisage inscape and landscape--the personal and the social, the vertical, horizontal, and panoramic reaches within one's power with the help of divine grace. Frontiers can envision our environs, our neighborhood--its breadth and length-- and those living on the edge or at the fringes of our neighborhood or our society. Frontiers can include depth Revieva for Religious and height, interior knowledge that grows and expands to vision and ideals, to community and commitment. As religious men and women, committed to this journey of the soul, we are called to be "bridge-builders" on all fronts. To be effective in this mission of bridging, we have to grow unceasingly in our familiarity with the "territories" at both ends, the spiritual and the worldly. "The church is in urgent need of people of solid and deep faith, of a serious culture and a genuine human and social sensitivity, of religious who devote their lives to stand on those frontiers in order to witness and help to understand that there is in fact a profound harmony between faith and reason, between evangelical spirit, thirst for justice, and action for peace.''16 This spiritual adventure has'its own thrill and attraction. With our inner vision set on new~ and farther horizons that our Lord graciously opens up for zealous seekers, the path is "straight and narrow" (Mr 7:13-14), but along it there are obstacles and frontiers. For those disposed toward Ignatian spirituality, any discussion on "frontiers, will inevitably involve the magis, the openness to being and doing more. "We must discern our mission according to the criteria of the magis and the more universal good" (D2 22). The magis challenges one toward seeking greater depth rather than wider avenues, non multa sed multum (not many but much). The spirit of the magis transforms us into fron-tier persons, desiring to find themselves called to what is greater and better. St. Ignatius, "the pilgrim," explored the dark inte-riors of the cave of his heart before he undertook the journey to Jerusalem to "save souls." His Autobiography describes how the journey inward meant resisting dev-ilish pirates and surviving death-threatening squalls in [ 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far order to cross the frontiers to peaceful havens. An exam-ple from more recent times is that of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, who indicates in her "private writings" that for the last fifty years of her life she had struggled pain-fully to feel God's presence. Through her "dark night of the soul," neverthe- The Ignatian magis brooks no comfoi't zones; it expands ou~ horizons and opens up ever-new frontiers within the heart and the world around it. less, she shone forth as an extraordinary woman of faith, who continued crossing frontiers of a more ordinary kind. The Ignatian magis brooks no comfort zones; it expands our horizons and opens up ever-new frontiers within the heart and the world around it. Only Love can satisfy our inner craving for fulfillment: Love of God, love of self, love for others. Only unconditional love breaks barriers and enables us to cross over life's various frontiers. We will reach the last frontier only when "the soul feels sat-isfied." But this will happen only with our dying breath, for, .as Augustine tells us, our hearts are resdess till they rest in God. 246 Geography of Prayer/Spiritual Frontiers To assist us in our "restless striving" to cross spir-itual frontiers, St. Ignatius has given us his Spiritual Exercises. "One tries to find one's way to the place where one desires to pray now and, when I find my way to that place, I try to stay there 'until I have been satis-fied' before moving on to a new place." This method Review for Religious applies to where I place my body (in the literal sense) and where I give my attention. This discipline of seek-ing the place of my heart's desire and trying to stay there until I have been satisfied makes a powerful disci-pline for living ordinary life as well as for finding guid-ance in prayer. A Jesuit has written: "When I pray, I pay attention to where I am (geographically, professionally, tempo-rally). I try to follow the lead of my inner disturbances (Ignatius's word for consolations or desolations), which can help me find my way to where I desire to meet, and be met by, God. If I pay attention to where I place myself in the world and where my life circumstances place me, my place in the world becomes grace for me. I can form a habit of asking whether I am called to remain in that place or whether I am called to find my way to a new place. 'Place' here can mean a given neighborhood, a particular job, a professional organization, an informal network of friends, and so forth.''~7 Familiarity with this "inner geography" helps us translate our prayer into our ministry as contemplatives in action. Hence we need to deepen our interior lives so as to better integrate our vision and mission as fron-tiersmen. Without a demanding and vigorous interior life, we allow ourselves to let go of the "contempla-. tive" side of our lives, forgetting that "in what we do in the world there must always be transparency to God" (GC35 D2 10). Without seeking and finding the paths of interiority which the Spirit of God oPens up if we are docile, we rian the risk that our apostolic generosity will wither, the meaning of our strongest commitments will become confused. Without seeking God with our inner eyes, we do not recognize how God is working in our efforts. We are likely to stop making them.~8 247 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far 248 Outreach Frontiers Frontiers "beyond geographical definitions await us, 'nations' that today include those who are poor and dis-placed, those who are profoundly lonely, those who ignore God's existence, and those who use God as an instrument for political purposes. Thereare new 'nations,' and we have been sent to them (D2 22). At the frontier, then, we encounter the tragedies of poverty, hunger, thirst, pain, and death--a world in need. But this discovery need not discourage us, for we also discover that God is already there at work, and God will accompany us. Be.cause God is already there, Jesuits and their collaborators will receive new energy and new life, even when mingled with anguish where 'the Divinity'is hidden.'" 19 "Ignatius and his first companions understood the importance of reaching out to people on the frontiers and at the center of society, of reconciling those who were estranged in any way. From the center in Rome, Ignatius sent Jesuits to the frontiers, to th~ new world, 'to announce the Lord to peoples and cultures that did not know him as yet.' He sent Xavier to the Indies. Thousands of Jesuits followed, preaching the gospel to many cultures, sharing knowledge with and learning from others. He also wanted Jesuits to cross other types of frontiers between rich and poor, between educated and unlearned. He wrote a letter to the Jesuits at the Council of Trent on how to behave, and insisted that they should minister to the sick. Jesuits opened colleges in Rome and in the great cities, of Europe, and they taught children in villages across the world" (D3 15). The metaphor of bridge-building is used often' in D3, "signaling a desire to link thoroughgoing incul, turation to a commitment to dialogue. The.strategy proposed is clear: Go to the frontiers, immerse your- Review for Religious selves in the cultures you encounter, and share in the conversation. These orientations are to drive Jesuit and Ignatian activity in the postmodern era.''2° "This tradition of Jesuits building bridges across frontiers becomes crucial in the context of today's world. We become able to bridge the divisions of a fragmented world only if we remember and live from three Ignatian principles: the love of God our Lord, the union of minds and hearts reflected in the personal bond of Francis Xavier and Ignatius across the seas, and the obedience that sends each one of us in mission to any part of this world" (D3 17). The "universal mission" of the Society of Jesus flows from Ignatius's vision at La Storta. He would "deploy Jesuits in a wide variety of apostolic ministries around the world. Jesuits were to go where the need was great-est, other religious were not already there, the good to be achieved was wide and deep, and their service would better society0while giving glory to God (see Constitutions SJ §622).''2~ Christ-centered Many tasks may call on us urgently, but we know that it is not only urgent tasks that define the Society's missions: "it is Christ's mission, of which we desire to be the servants, that is our urgency.''z2 Pope Benedict, in his recent encyclical Caritas in veritate (§20) empha-sized this IZhristic orientation behind all human endeav-ors toward social change for a better world: It is Christ's charity that drives us on: "caritas Christi urget nos" (2 Co 5:14). The urgency is inscribed not only in things, it is not derived solely from the rapid succession of events ahd problems, but also from the very matter that is at stake: the establishment of authen- [249 69.3 2010 Lewis * Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far Our o treach programs must begin from the heart, tic fraternity. The importance of this goal is such as to demand our openness to understand it in depth and to mobilize ourselves at the level of the "heart," so as to ensure that current economic and social processes evolve towards fully human outcomes. Our outreach programs, then, must begin, from the heart._ This demands that we be person-centered rather than project-oriented. Our service must touch hearts. In this outreach we will encounter personal and social frontiers, as" Christ did, but we must cross them all to get to people's hearts; for the kingdom, coming from within God's heart, is within. "The crossing of frontiers is a larger human experi-ence and is not only a matter of religious frontiers. An open church willing to relate to the world, the larger society, and many types of identities will increasingly face the question of how to go about the reality of frontiers. It is the modern version of the question of love of neighbor . Traditional Christian rec-onciliation has to express itself today in the way we face complicated frontiers and boundaries and how we cross over and reach out. :. By negotiating the frontiers and communing across them, Christians will continuously discover new dimensions of their own faith identity. ¯ Much of the Christian future lies on the periphery, in the frontier-zones. Encounter with new identities need not signify a threat to a church that understands itself as universal because it is a communion in difference.''23 "Jesus, in his outreach, embraced difference and new horizons. His ministry transcended boundaries. Review for Religious He invited his disciples to be aware of God's action in places and people they were inclined to avoid: Zacchaeus, a Syro-Phoenician woman, Roman centurions, a repen-tant thief. As water bringing life to all who thirst, he showed himself interested in every parched area of the world; and in every parched area of the world he can thus be welcomed, for all who are thirsty can understand what living water means. This image of living water can give life to all Jesuits as servants of Christ in his mission because, having tasted this water themselves, they will be eager to offer it to anyone who thirsts and to reach out to people beyond frontiers--where water may not yet have welled up--to bring a new culture of dialogue to a rich, diverse, and multifaceted world" (D2 12). The Gospels offer a vivid insight into Christ's modus operandi in his healing ministry. "Look at any healing story: the way Jesus heals the paralyzed man brought in by his friends through the roof; the leper; the woman with the issue of blood. Jesus first responds to a concrete, immediate need: the healing of a sickness. But then he goes on to respond to a deeper need: the burden of guilt or the sense of hopelessness or rejec-tion and isolation. Finally he goes deeper still and offers what they long for most, often without knowing it: the gift of the kingdom of God, of friendship with a God of unconditional love, in a way that transforms them at the core of their persons.''24 "In proclaiming God's message of love and com-passion, Jesus crossed over physical and socioreligious frontiers. His message of reconciliation was preached both to the people of Israel and to those living outside its physical and spiritual frontiers: tax collectors, prostitutes, sinners, and persons of all kinds who are marginalized and excluded. His ministry of reconciliation with God 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far and with one another knew no boundaries. He spoke to the powerful, challenging them to a change of heart. He showed special love for the sinner, the poor widow, and the lost sheep. The kingdom of God which he constantly preached became a vision for a world where all relation-ships are reconciled in God. Jesus confronted the powers that oppose this kingdom, and that opposition led him to death on the cross, a death which he freely accepted in keeping with his mission. On the cross we see all his words and actions revealed as expressions of the final reconciliation effected by the Crucified and Risen Lord, through whom comes the new creation in which all rela-tionships will be set right in God" (D3 14). Words from the Heart We often fall short of being imitators of Christ in our frontier ministries. Our very words betray our attitudes: we "plan," "coordinate," "organize," mostly at the head level. "These are organizational verbs, very important, necessary for moving ahead," Father Adolfo Nicolfis noted. He added that in contrast, when Jesus commis-sioned his disciples to ministry, his words revealed the heart of it. He used "verbs of life, verbs of giving life": preach the gospel to the poor, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, expel demons, raise the dead. This clearly indicates that "the mission of God in Jesus, the business he is about, is making life flow more abundantly for humanity wherever it is lacking or blocked. And the real secret of mission is not to get rid' of the organizational verbs or the gospel verbs, but to somehow make the organizational actions that we have to perform expres-sions of the life-giving actions of the gospel.''2s Words are symbolic. When we set out with the mindset of Christ to discern "how we are at the fron- Review for Re.ligious tiers," is our definitiofi of "frontiers" congru.ent with that of the Church and the Socie,ty? Does the spirit of the magis urge us to seek and find God's presence everywhere--across the frontiers, deep and high, near and far? Notes 1 Adolfo Nicolas sJ, "Challenges and Issues in Jesuit Education," keynote address on the 150th anniversary of Jesuit education in the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, 13 July 2009. 2 Elliott West, Frontier, Grolier Online. 3 Marcos Recolons SJ, "What's New in the Decree on Mission?" Promotio Iustitiae 98-99 (2008/1): 18. 4 Pope Benedict XVI, allocution to the delegates of GC35, 21 February 2008. s Josd C.J. Magadia SJ, homily for the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Philippine Province, 27 July 2008. 6 Joseph Tetlow SJ, "At the Frontiers," Review of Ignatian Spirituality 95 (2000): 17. 7 Joseph Marianus Kuiur SJ, "Sent to the Frontiers--Decree on Mission," Jivan (August 2008): 4-6. s Nicol~is, "Challenges and Issues." 9 John O'Malley sJ, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 3 and 18. 10 Paul L. Locatelli SJ, "To Be Sent: Mission, Frontiers, and Contemplative Action," Review of Ignatian Spirituality 119 (2008/3): 27. 1~ Kuiur, "Sent to the Frontiers." 12 Len Altilia SJ, "The Inspiration for Frontiers," Frontiers 1, no. 1, online. 13 John Borelli SJ, "Frontiers of Dialogue for Discovery and Renewal," National Jesuit News (November 2008). 14 Borelli, "Frontiers of Dialogue." ~s Adolfo Nicolas SJ, "Jesuit Mission Today," address to Jesuits and friends at Gonzaga College, Ireland, 12 September 2009. 16 Pope Benedict XVI, allocution. 17 John Staudenmaier sJ "The Inner Geography of Prayer in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius," UDMcasts on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, The University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit, 7 March 2007. 69.3 2010 Lewis ¯ Beyond Frontiers, Deep and High, Near and Far 18 Franqois-Xavier Dumortier SJ, "The Same Path as Ignatius," Review of Ignatian Spirituality 119 (2008). , ,9 Locatelli, "To ~Be Sent," p. 33. 20 Adria~ Lyons SJ, "From Centre to Frontiers," Province Express, Australia, 28 May 2008. 21 Locatelli, "To Be Sent," p. 27. 22 Dumortier, "The Same Path." 23 Felix Wilfred, "Introduction: The Art of Negotiating the Frontiers," Concilium, 1999/2. 24 Nicokis, "Challenges and Issues." 2s Nicolfis, "Challenges and Issues." Equinox 254 I was once certain of so many things Certain of light and dark life and death f!'lled and empty hatred and love I was once certain of so many things But grief broke me open and they tumbled out as one jumbled mess Certainty tumbled out among them. Kathleen Atkinson OSB Review for Religious JUDITH METZ Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of the Cross In the back flyleaf of her prayer book, Elizabeth Bayley Seton wrote a modification of the Anima Christi: Soul of Jesus sanctify me Blood of Jesus wash me Passion of Jesus comfort me Wounds of Jesus hide me Heart of Jesus receive me Spirit of Jesus enliven me Goodness of Jesus pardon me Beauty of Jesus draw me Humility of Jesus humble me Peace of Jesus pacify me Love of Jesus inflame me Kingdom of Jesus come to me Grace of Jesus replenish me Mercy of Jesus pity me Sanctity of Jesus sanctify me Purity of Jesus purify me Cross of Jesus support me Judith Metz SC is the archivist and historian for the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati. Her address is 5900 Delhi Road; Mount St. Joseph, Ohio 45051. models of spirituality. 69.3 2010 Metz ¯ Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of the Cross Nails of Jesus hold me in life, in death - in time and Eternity - in the hour of Death defend me, call me to come to thee, receive me with thy Saints in glory everlasting.I Elizabeth loved this prayer, writing several paraphrases of it as she contemplated at various times the outpour-ing of Jesus' love in his suffering and death. From when she was young, her spirituality found a focus in his love, shown in his giving of himself, in his willingness to suf-fer for us--and in her wish to return this love. Her father gave her a cross which she often wore, remarking that she loved it "as the mark of my Captain and Master whom I was to follow so valiantly" (3a:514). There are many references in her letters and journals to this cross, such as: "looked at my crucifix"; "Calvary is the rendezvous"; "we must be crucified." As she was nursing her dying husband, she wrote: "Not only willing to take up my cross but kissed it too" (l:257).During a tumultuous time after her return to New York, Elizabeth observed: "When people say 'so much trouble has turned her br~in' - well, I kiss my crucifix, which I have loved for so many years, and say 'they are only mistaken'" (1:401). People sometimes comment that they find little affinity with St. Elizabeth Seton because her spirituality seems negative. For them she dwells so much on suf-fering and the cross--on joy at embracing hardship in imitation of Jesus--that her spirituality does not attract them. ~ Yet the imitation of Christ must be the center of every Christian life. Holy people through the ages have shown us by their lives that the more people recognize God's outpouring love, demonstrated by Christ's sacri-fice on the cross, the more they need to imitate that self-giving love: "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, Review for Religious let him renounce himself and take up his cross and fol-. low me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but :anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it" (Mk 8:34-35). Although Ignatius Loyola did not write the Anima Christi, which we have already reflected on, he placed it at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises and often referred to it. And he did write the Suscipe that most of us are familiar with: ."Take, Lord, ~ receive all my liberty, my mem-ory, my understanding, my entire will; all that I have and possess." In her lnterior Castle, Teresa of Avila observed: "His Majesty could not grant us a greater favor than to give us a life that would be an imitation of the life his beloved Son lived. Thus I hold for certain that these favors are meant to fortify our weakness., that we may be able to imitate him in his great sufferings." Like these great saints, Elizabeth Seton was also com-mitted to living in imitation of Jesus. She wrote in her Journal: "The cup which our Father has given Us, shall we not drink it? Blessed Savior, by the bitterness of thy pains We may estimate the force of thy love . . . and therefore, if thou so ordainest it, welcome disappointment and pov-erty; welcome sickness and pain -welcome even shame, and contempt, and calumny. If this be a rough and thorny path, it is one which thou hast gone before us. Where we see thy footsteps we cannot repine" (3b:21). Elizabeth was able to enter into Jesus' life, to expe-rience his outpouring love in the events of the passion narratives, in a way that made them very real and rele-vant to her life. She recognized that Christ's story was her Elizabeth Seton was O mitted t0 living in ,imitation of ]esus: 69.3 2010 258 Metz ¯ Elizabeth Seton °s Spirituality of the Cross story. Her part was to enter into her own life and joyfully embrace the cross as a way of being in union with her beloved. She experienced overwhelming gratitude at what Christ had done for her, and she knew that her response must be to "drink the cup" and be "baptized with the baptism" of which Jesus spoke. This spirituality of hers permeated her prayer and supported her through many difficult times. One of these was the month she spent in the lazaretto with her desper-ately ill husband and young daughter upon their arrival at Livorno, Italy, in November 1803. She described the experience to her dearly loved sister-in-law Rebecca Seton: "You could not rest in your bed if you saw [me] as [I am] sitting in one corner of an immense Prison bolted in and barred with as much ceremony as any monster of mischief might be - a single window double grated with iron thro' which, if I should want anything, I am to call a sentinel, with a fierce cocked hat, and long rifle gun." "On the ship-mattresses spread on the cool floor my Willy and Anna are sound asleep, and I ~trust that God, who has given him strength through a day of such exertion will carry us on - He is our all indeed -. God is with us - and if sufferings abound in us,his consolations also greatly abound, and far exceed all utterance." "What shall we say - this is the hour of trial, the Lord support and strengthen us in it. Retrospections being anguish - press forward toward the mark and prize" (1:251,253,254). As the Setons passed their weeks, of quarantine, Elizabeth strove to keep her equilibrium by prayer and her "hidden Treasures,;--her Bible, commentaries, ser-mons, and The Imitation of Christ ~that she had carried with her from New York. She poured out her heart in her Journal, where she lamented time and again how she "read, prayed, we.pt, and prayed again" (1:256,257,265). Review for Religious But as she contemplated her situation she was also able to note: "Not only willing to take up my cross but kissed it too . I find my present opportunity a Treasure - and my confinement of Body a liberty of Soul which I may never again enjoy whilst they are united . If I could forget my God one moment at this time I should go mad -but he hushes all - Be still and know that I am God your Father" (1:257,258). With the passing days William Seton's health con-tinued to worsen so that by 5 December a doctor was called. Though he feared that Elizabeth's beloved hus-band "might be gone in a few hours," he continued to hold on. On 14 December, Elizabeth wrote: "The damp-ness about us would be thought dangerous for a pdrson in health, and my W's sufferings - Oh well I know that God is above. Capitano,. if I thought our condition the providence of man, instead of the 'weeping Magdalene' as you so graciously call me, you would find me a lioness willing to burn your Lazaretto about your ears . But O my Heavenly Father I know that these contradictory events are permitted and guided by thy Wisdom, which only is light" (1:270,271). Released from their confinement on 19 December, the lit-de family traveled to lodgings in Pisa. On Chrisunas Day Elizabeth put a little wine in a glass and said differ-ent portions of psalms and prayers which she had marked in her books, hoping for a happy moment. "We took the cup of Thanksgiving setting aside the sorrow of time, in the views of the joy of Eternity," she noted (1:273). Elizabeth then began the deathbed vigil that ended two days later. She recorded, "On Tuesday morning 27th December - [William's] soul was released - and mine from a struggle next to death." She continued, "In all this it is not necessary to dwell on the mercy and consoling 69.3 2010 Metz ¯ Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of tbe Cross 260 presence of my dear Redeemer, for no mortal strength could support what I experienced" (1:274,275). The tears, prayers, and anguish Elizabeth suffered during her long watch with her sick and dying husbandincreased her trust in God and led her to a deeper identification with her suffering Savior. Her experiences became a part of her spirituality. Her continued trust in Divine Providence during her remaining time in Italy led her along paths that she could not have imagined. Impressed with the Catholic faith and practices of her Italian hosts, the Episcopalian Elizabeth entered into a long and anguished discernment over whether to remain in the church of her birth or to join the Catholic Church. For nearly a year she considered the argu-ments on each side, trying to listen to the voice of God. Longing for support and advice, she wrote to her Italian friend Antonio Filicchi: "Judge of my disappointment when only a few lines [from you] rewarded my anxious anticipations - however, at. the foot of my cross I found consolation, and kissing it over and over I repeated and repeat, there only I am never disappointed" (1:326). Elizabeth's uncertainty seemed to grow through the months, and she wrote of being "half dead with the inward struggle" (1:372). Yet, she confided to Antonio, "when some hours of consolation come, I think 'hard as the trial is, yet it is sweet' - I never knew till now what prayer is - never thought of fasting - though now it is more a habit than eating, never knew how to give up all, and send my spirit to mount Calvary, nor how to con-sole and delight it in the society of angels - 'Patience,' says my soul, 'He will not let you and your little ones perish, and if yet your life is given in the conflict, at the last he will nail all to his cross and receive you to his mercy'" (1:339). Review for Religious Elizabeth's decision to join the Catholic Church gained her inner peace and certitude, but led, as she later recorded, to "most painful remembrances now - yet grateful for the order of our Grace, so evident through all" (3a:519). The three years that she remained in New York after her conversion were difficult and gave her ample opportunity to share in the sufferings of Christ. Anti-Catholic sentiment made it hard for her to support her children and deprived her of much that her friends and family had provided. Her choice also occasioned some other troubles. Her two youngest Seton sisters-in-law, Harriet and Cecilia, and their cousin Eliza Farquhar were drawn to Elizabeth's Catholic fervor. When family members expressed disapproval, Cecilia's enthusiasm only grew stronger. Having been raised by Elizabeth from age seven, this young woman felt close bonds that were' strengthened by their shared desire for a devout living of their Christian faith. As she was. departing for Italy, Elizabeth had cau-tioned he.r young prot~g& "If you find that there are any obstacles in.your way, and doubtless you will find many as every Christian does in the fulfillment of his duty, still Persevere with yet more earnestness, and rejoice to bear your share in the Cross which is Our Passport and Seal to the Kingdom of our Redeemer" (1:224). Now, as Cecilia adamantly pursued the course of following Elizabeth into the Catholic Church, the younger woman met with severe opposition and even threats from her family. Elizabeth supported her as best she could, writing on Christmas Eve 1805: "My dear dear child I beg, beseech, implore you, to offer up all your pains, your Sorrows, and vexations to God that he will unite them with the Sorrows, the pangs and anguish which Our adored Redeemer bore for us on the Cross 261 69.3 2010 Metz ¯ Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of tbe Cross "Dwelling under :the Shadow of His Cross we will cheerfully gather the thorns which will be t~urned hereafter into a joyful crown" 262] - place yourself in spirit at the foot of that cross, and entreat that a drop of that precious blood there shed may fall on you to enlighten strengthen and support your Soul in this life and ensure its eternal Salvation in the next" (1:398). When Cecilia joined the Catholic Church, a violent storm broke in the extended Seton family. For a time she was confined to her room, threats were made to send her to the West Indies, and even to burn Elizabeth's house down over her head. Eventually the new convert tied her clothes up in a bundle and went to liv~ with Elizabeth for a time.2 During Cecilia's period of trial Elizabeth kept a daily spiritual jour-nal. In it she shared her own prayer expe-riences, along with offering counsel, and encouragement. In one entry she noted: "Pain and Resignation instead of the Treasure [Eucharist] this day -but He is then most near - while Weeping under his Cross we are there content to stay" (1:470). In another, Elizabeth encouraged her young relative: "May we never leave the sheltering wing, but dwelling under the Shadow of His Cross we will cheer-fully gather the thorns which will be turned hereafter into a joyful crown" (1:473). When Elizabeth Seton made the decision to move her family to Baltimore in spring 1808, her only hesi-tation was leaving her young relative and confidante behind in New York. Cecilia wanted to accompany Review for Religious Elizabeth but also felt an obligation to care for her brother James's children. Elizabeth missed Cecilia terribly and buoyed her-self with the thought that "there is no distance for souls united as ours" (2:6). During the year the two were sepa-rated, Cecilia continued to face difficulties and obsta-cles to her hopes of joining her beloved "Sister," as she referred to Elizabeth, while Elizabeth was peaceful and delighted with her new situation. In this light Elizabeth wrote to her "most precious child": "It is poor Sister who must beg you to pray for her --I am at rest my darling while you are mounting the heights of Sion - often too I sleep in the Garden, while you are sharing the bitter cup, but it is not to be so for long, his mercies are end-less and I shall not be left without my portion" (2:21). The two were joyfully reunited in June 1809 when Cecilia arrived in Maryland with plans to join the newly forming community of the Sisters of Charity. She enthu- ¯ siastically plunged into this new life, but her delicate health continued to decline. By early 1810 Elizabeth wrote to her friend Eliza Sadler: "My heart faints when I think of this separation. No one can conceive of.what she is to me - but - but-fiat" (2:111).,,Cecilia died of tuberculosis within several months, having well learned the spiritual lessons offered by suffering., ,As Cecilia Seton passed from Elizabeth's life, another Cecilia became an intimate companion. Cecilia O'Conway, a young woman from Philadelphia, was planning to travel to Europe to become a nun. Instead, On the recommendation of her. priest-director, she became the first woman to join Elizabeth at her school in Baltimore~ These two women shared many of the same spiritual goals and became friends almost .at once. Cecilia was enthusiastic about becoming a Sister of 69.3 2010 Metz * Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of the Cross Charity, and through the trials of the early years offered loving support to Elizabeth, who referred to her friend as "the angel of the Community. a true. and solid comfort" (2:141). Cecilia was indeed a true comfort as Elizabeth struggled through the difficulties of establish-ing a religious community and bore the sorrov¢ of'the deaths of two of her daughters. In August 1817 the two women were separated when Cecilia was amongthe first sisters sent to take charge 6f the .Catholic orphafi asylum in New York City. She was not happy to be separated from Elizabeth or to be thrust into the bustle of city life. But her spiritual mother chal-lenged her: "My own Cecilia - going on her heavenly errand and to crucify Self- . . . if you suffer, so much the better for our high journey above - the only fear I have is that you will let the old string pull too hard for solitude and silence, but look to the Kingdom of souls -, . this is not a country, my dear one, for Solitude and Silence, but of warfare and crucifixion- You are not to stay in his silent agonies of the garden at night, but go from post to pillar to the very fastening on the cross and mind, my lady, how you dare glahce a thought at pull-ing out a nail which he put in with my hand, while his own so dear will hammer it up to the very head I expect - I beg him with a mother's agony to do it softly and tenderly - would wish so to hold your dear head while he does it, but he answers, 'no one held his'., but yet he will hold it himself supporting with one hand, and fastening with the other" (2i498-499). During Cecilia's years in New York, she and Elizabeth maintained a lively correspondence .chal-lenging each other to an ever deeper union with their Redeemer. In their letters they exhorted each other to accept the sufferings, both physical and emotional, that R~view for Religious they were experiencing, and to receive them in the spirit of participating in the Lord's passion. "May you enjoy true peace in Him who has nailed us," Elizabeth wrote; "I would not pull the smallest nail out for a thousand worlds" (2:682). In her newsy letters Elizabeth kept Cecilia apprised of her declining health, telling her in July 1818, "I have no symptoms now of hastening Death as when I wrote you [earlier] - slow, slow and sure" (2:569). A few months later Elizabeth reminded her spiritual daughter of "how little is all that passes with this life . therefore we must be so careful to meet our grace," She then contin-ued: "Isaac come forth - the wood and fire are here, let not the Victim be wanting" (2:595). And the following month Elizabeth urged the younger woman to "take the abundant sweet heavenly grace from day to day, only seeking and seeing him in all our little duties . . . and taking from. the hands of all around us every daily cross and trial as if he gave it himself" (2:600). After two years in New York, Cecilia returned to the motherhouse in Emmitsburg, where she could again share her days with her beloved friend. With Elizabeth's health continuing to decline, Cecilia became one of her nurses. Staying close by her bed, she made sure Elizabeth had a crucifix available to assist her prayer, and she was present among the mourners when Elizabeth's last hour arrived. Am6ng EliEabeth's writings meditation on "the communion lof the cross." 69.3 2010 Metz * Elizabeth Seton's Spirituality of the Cross 266 Among Elizabeth's writings is a meditation on "the communion of the cross." In it she speaks of "the hap-piness of receiving our Lord and Savior in the holy Eucharist," yet points out that "we also receive him by the communion of his cross." "So," she continues, "when he invites us to come and receive him in afflic-tions' and sufferings, we should receive his chalice with the same ardor, and drink his Blood by faith . The great advantage of the communion of the cross is that we receive it when our Lord himself pleases and at the time he sees best." "Unhappily," she reflects, "we are. apt to think the very least suffering is too much, because we are lovers with our lips rather than our heart, while the true lover of Christ can never have enough of his cross." "All he asks of us is our good Will," but we. also "should bring the burning fire of love and gratitude" (3a:419-422). Elizabeth's burning love of God and desire to imi-tate Jesus was something that grew within her as she matured through her life. It gave her a deep insight into the necessity of losing herself in order to gain union with God: She understood, as had many holy women and men before her, that she was invited to emulate Jesus' self-giving love - that "the true lover of Christ can never have enough of his cross," and as they, carry the cross they "should bring the burning fire of love and gratitude." ~ The spirituality of the cross has been part of the Christian message from the time Jesus taught on this earth. Great saints, theologians, and spiritual guides through the centuries have stressed this same message. Today's Christian leaders continue to stress, as essential of our spirituality, our participation in Jesus' self-giving love, The German theologian Jiirgen Moltmann sees a kind of alchemy of Review for Religious love, where all the negativity and suffering of the world is touched by God and transformed into the victory of life.3 Johannes Metz, in his classic Poverty of Spirit, writes: "The legacy of God's total commiunent to humankind, the proof of God's fidelity to our poverty, is the cross [and] no one is exempted from the poverty of the cross.''4 Jessica Powers, in her poem "The Sign of the Cross," offers this same wisdom:5 The lovers of Christ lift out their hands to the great gift of suffering. For how could they seek to be warmed and clothed and delicately fed, when He the worthy went forth, wounded and hated, and grudged of even a place to lay His head? This is the badge of the friends of the Man of Sorrows: the mark of the cross, faint replica of His. Choose it, my heart. It is a beautiful sign. Notes ~ Regina Bechtle SC and Judith Metz SC, Elizabeth Barley Seton: Collected Writings, 4 vols. (New York: New City Press, 2000, 2002, 2006), vol. 3, part 2, pp. 74-75, hereafter cited in parentheses, thus: (3b:74-75). 2 Annabelle Melville, Elizabeth Barley Seton (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), p. 119. 3 Jiirgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, as described in Elizabeth Johnson, Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1990), p. 121. 4 Johannes B. Metz, Poverty of Spirit (New York, Paulist Press, 1968), pp. 19-20. ~ Regina Siegfried ASC and Robert E Morneau, Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 150. 267 69.3 2010 AVIS CLENDENEN A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth 2,68 Lheard a story a few years ago that got into the arrow of my bones and became a "dangerous memory." This term was coined by Johann Baptist Metz, who described it as an earlier experience breaking into our present lives and revealing new and provocative insights for the future. Such a breakthrough casts light on the deceptive nature of something we considered an evident good. It is a dangerous and incalculable visitant from the past. This memory has future content,~ The memory I wish to share is a story told by Sister of Mercy Betty Barrett on the occasion of her sixtieth jubilee as a vowed religious. Sister Betty Barrett entered the congregation in 1945. She devoted most of her ministerial life to education, becoming the president of Saint Xavier College in Chicago in the turbulent 1960s. In 1966 she supported an innovative idea to invite major Avis Clendenen most recently wrote for us in 2008. She is pro-fessor of religious studies and the Sister Irene Dugan RC Scholar in Spirituality at Saint Xavier University; 3700 West 103rd Street; Chicago, Illinois 60655. Review for Religious theological architects of the Second Vatican Council to the college for the inaugural symposium of the newly formed Pope John xxIII Institute. The tag line of the John xx]II Institute quoted John xxJII's call "to dedicate ourselves to that work which our era demands of us. ¯ remembering we are not on earth to guard a museum, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life." . Imagine this small U.S. women's Catholic college thinking itself capable of hosting at one symposium Yves Congar, Jean Dani61ou, Charles Davis, Henri de Lubac, Johann Baptist Metz, John Courtney Murray, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and others as well. The European theologians would for the first time bring the insights of the council documents to North America. For some, this would be their ~first trip to the United States. They all came. This gathering is exactly what President Sister Betty Barrett accomplished in early 1966, only four months after the council's close.2 The formation of the John xxlII Institute and the plan for the symposium became controversial. Archbishop John Cody of Chicago expressed reserva-tions about the symposium. He wrote to Sister Betty saying that such a gathering of theologians did not coin-cide with his norm for theological activities. He then issued a public decree that all ecclesiastical entities in the archdiocese must first obtain certification of cre-dentials from him before inviting to Chicago any priest from outside the archdiocese. All the council theologians invited were priest-theologians. The situation became an international story that saw the canonical authority of the local bishop as opposing academic freedom in institutions of higher education. The American press described the symposium, which drew more than three thousand participants to the little-known campus, as "an 269 69.3 2010 Clendenen ¯ A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth 270 event of unprecedented proportions," "an intellectual feast," and "a complex and strange event in the history of Catholic colleges at that time in North America." Interesting as it is, this event is not the key story of this essay. It is background for discussing the matter of dangerous memory. Sister Betty saw.the Second Vatican Council as Pope John xxIII did. She saw that aggiornamento was intimately tied,to justice and peace. While president, she became the first woman religious to be named to the Illinois Human Relations Commission. After her presidency she continued to advance the vision and mis-sion of ecclesial renewal and the claims of the social gospel through a variety of positions such as her min-istry with the Eighth Day Center for Justice and the Catholic Interracial Council. In her seventies she went to Central America to work with the poor, Though she tried desperately, she never learned Spanish well enough to speak or truly understand it. In her eighties she was asked at her sixtieth jubilee in April 2003 to share memories with those gathered to celebrate with her~ I shall paraphrase Sister Betty but speak for her in the first person. You know that when I went to Central America I could not speak the language of the people. You know I hold degrees of all kinds and functioned at a tremendous level of responsibility for many years while in the ministry of higher education. Yet, even after years and years of living among these beautiful people and interacting with them every day, I never managed to speak with them in their native tongue. So I was forced, so to speak, to plumb new depths of human communica-tion. While there, I came to realize that "being Review for Religious there"--presence--is what is most important in our ministry. Presence conveys a meaning that tran-scends even the need for words. This I learned very late in my ministerial life. Honoring this jubilee year of mine and know-ing that my ability to travel would only continue to diminish, the community offered me airfare to travel a last time to Honduras to see my friends. So a few weeks ago I took that trip. I went to the home of a family with whom I had been present during moments of joy and pain in their lives over a span of years. I walked into their humble living room and noticed something. There on the wall surround-ing the crucifix, were four pictures, each rever-ently hung near the cross. There was, of course, a picture 6f Our Lady of Guadalupe; a picture of Mother Catherine McAuley, the founder of the Sisters of Mercy; a picture of Archbishop Oscar Romero; and . a picture of me! What can I say to you about that moment in my life? Seeing the cross and our Lady, seeing that this family was so deeply touched by the min-istries of the Sisters of Mercy that they placed a portrait of a !9th century Irish woman near their own beloved Oscar Romero--and then to see my picture in that company! It was a moment of abject'humility, wonder, awe, an'd gratitude I will never forget. I could never really talk with them the way I am talking with you now, yet I was present to them over the long haul of many years. I share this story with you as an act of gratitude and humility for the gift of these sixty years of ser- 69.3 2010 Clendenen ¯ A Rare Humility and a Future-Faring Myth 272] vice, and as a testimony of wonder to 'a God who can do more in us than we can "ask or imagine" (Ep 3:20). I was mesmerized by her tale. In hearing it, my own consciousness was altered forever about ministry and mystery, about growing old yet remaining ever new, and about the lost art of humility. I recognized her story from'the past as a memory bearing future content. This elegantly simple parable resounded in me, taking on the force of a great myth; it became part of the life I desire. I say this not with any intention to mimic her experience, but in the inspiring hope of living the nearly lost art of humility. Sister Betty told a little tale about one family, and they--all unaware--became a dangerous memory precisely because she knew her telling it could break into the present moment and bring us new and danger-ous insights. Such lives disrupt self-interest and ambition by being a vivid picture of largeness of mind and heart, which our noisy egos often do not notice. The mythic story of this elderly nun speaks :to the truth of the poet Mary Oliver's words: What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mosdy myself. Never mind that I had to,. since somebody had to. o That was many years ago. Since then I have gone out from my confinement~s, though with difficulty. And I have l~ecome the child of the clouds, and of hope. I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is. I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned, I have become younger. And what do. I risk to tell you this, which is all I know? Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.3 Review for Religious Living in an Age of Entitlement That last line is not an easy task in today's world. More than a decade ago I read, "The narcissistic per-sonality has become the most prominent~ personality type in the Western world.''4 At that time the statement caught me up short. Now I find it the lens through which I view the world I inhabit. In their new book The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), the psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell have documented and analyzed the troubling cultural trends of the past three decades. They suggest that North American culture itself is in the grip of a narcissism epidemic. According to Theodore Millon, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, profes-sor of psychology at Miami University, and leading authority on personality disorders, "the label narcissism connotes more than .mere egocentricity. Narcissism sig-nifies, more specifically, that these individuals overvalue their personal worth, direct their affections toward themselves rather than others, and expect that others will recognize their unique and special value.''5 While I hesitate to labor the point, I think the fol-lowing list of traits and behavioral tendencies of the narcissistic personality can give us pause, in which to examine human consciousness. Those leaning toward narcissism tend ¯ To grandiosity, haughtiness, snobbishness, arrogance; ¯ To feelings of entitlement; praise for performance; ¯ To exploitation of and insensitivity toward others; ¯ To crave attention, which they see as deserved without need for reciprocity; ¯ To flout conventional rules and expectations of shared social living; 69.3 2010 Clendenen ¯ A Rare I-Iumili~y and a Future-Facing ~4yth ¯ To assume and often find that others feel hon-ored by their relationship, or to quickly train others to admire and obey them, with the result that the admirers insulate, them from self-aware hess of their limitations; ¯ To idealize those who satisfy their needs while treating contemptuously those who do not; the shifting of overvaluation to denigration occurs frequently in the same relationship; ¯ To preoccupation with personal adequacy, . power, prestige, and status; ¯ To heightened sensitivity to any form of criticism; ¯ To intolerance of perceived affronts to self-esteem that question their assumed inherent specialness; ¯ To take liberties with facts by embellishing them to maintain illusion of self-worth; ¯ To exaggerate abilities and accomplishments; to inflate and justify what they feel is due them, while depreciating those who refuse to accept or enhance their self-image; ¯ To use rationalization as a regulatorymechanism to cope with the inevitable personal failures or social humiliations by devising plausible reasons for self-justification and doing so with litde con-cern for others; and ¯ To lack interpersonal empathy.6 This detailed list of a narcissistic character is now embedded in the general population (and culture) where once such a description of human personality would have qualified as clinical narcissistic disorder. Ttie ethos of selfishness, individualism, utilitarianism, and instru-mentalism is taken for granted, not seen as problematic, and thus often remains unexamined. In turn, the values of community, altruism, and the life of the virtues are Review for Religious being undermined. A few years ago I heard the coor-dinator of the Jesuit Volunteers report that there was a lot of interest among young people who wanted to serve on their own terms. He referred to this as narclsslsnc idealism." According to Twenge and Campbell, no single event initiated the epidemic; instead, the values deep in the American psyche shifted Slowly toward individu- ~ alism, self-admiration, materialism, incivility, and entitlement. "Like a disease," they write, "narcissism is caused by certain factors, spreads through particular chan-nels, appears as various ~ ~ ~' symptoms, and might be ° - halted by preventive measures and cures. Narcissism is a psych0-cultural affliction rather than a physical disease, but the model works remarkably well.''7 Six years before The Narcissism Epidemic, Dr. ,Robert Moore, professor of psychoanalysis, culture, and spiritu-ality at Chicago Theological Seminary, in his book Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity, announced the new contemporary crisis as "the epidemic of unregulated human grandiosity." Grandiosity refers to holding fantasies or embracing desires that are greater than your real life can support. According to Moore, either grandiosity makes you manic in running around to meet unrealistic demands or makes you depressed because your desires are essentially unachievable. Moore rallies our intellects and emotions to break through the existential denial of our "naive male" and "naive female" ,Cultural narcissism is d estructively shaping a :collusive and self-promoting ' way of livi g: 69.3 2010 Clendenen ¯ A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth 276] approach to the human situation by courageously con-fronting the aggressive cultural selling of pathological narcissism as a normative vision for human life.s The Narcissism Epidemic is replete with examples that reveal how cultural narcissism is destructively shaping a collusive and self-promoting way of living. In a chapter tided "Superspreaders!" they tell a tale from the televi-sion series "My Super Sweet 16": "Atlanta teen Allison tells a party planner she wants to block off part of Peachtree Street so there can be a parade for 'my grand entrance.' Peachtree is a major thoroughfare, the plan-ner reminds her. She responds, 'My sweet 16 is more important than wherever they have to be.' But there's a hospital across the street, the planner cautions--what if an ambulance can't get to the hospital? 'They can wait one second. Or they can go around,' she says cavalierly. Amid all of this, Allison's mother just listens. When the planner finally turns to her in exasperation, she says, 'If Allison wants it, make it happen.' So much for that dying person in the ambulance." The narcissistic "enti-dement" expressed here by the mother points to the odd perpetual adolescence of many American adults. Twenge and Campbell say that adolescence, the most narcissis-tic time of life, is being extended beyond all previous limits.9 Clearly such happenings are not isolated aberra-tions; they are cultural markers of the superspreading of a distorted collective psyche, that needs attention, fast. In Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change, the physicist and futurist Peter Russell said, "Our power to change the world may have made prodigious leaps but our internal development, the development of our attitudes and values, has pro-gressed more slowly. We seem to be as prone to greed, aggression, shortsightedness, and self-centeredness as Review for Religious we were 2,500 years ago . If we are to survive the critical times we are now passing through, it is essen-tial we undergo a profound shift in values and awaken to our inner truths and our full spiritual potential.''1° Effecting such a shift and awakening has been the mis-sion of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality founded by Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister. Interestingly, Twenge, Campbell, Moore, Russell, and Chittister11 all suggest a return to the lost art of the virtuous life as a way to stem and bring healing to the epidemic of entidement and grandiosity that marks and mars our current North American culture. Risking Humility The final chapter of The Narciss#m Epidemic, "Treating the Epidemic of Narcissism," sees the recovery of authentic humility as the way to lessen the narcissism in our lives and in our culture. Humility is the counter-balance to narcissism, the creative opposite to its viru-lence. Modesty, lack of pretense, absence of arrogance, and refinement of character--so evident in Sister Betty's jubilee tale--are vitally necessary in today's personal and communal reflection. Her unaffected wonder at finding her own picture in the company of Oscar Romero's, and Catherine McAuley's, and Our Lady of Guadalupe's, at the foot of the cross has to make you and me wonder: Do we truly believe that God can do more in us than we ever imagined--or could ever imagine? Her awe at seeing what she and her ministry meant to this poor, loving family puts us in awe, even a feeling of danger. What does this mean for the many in our country whose lives are far too self-focused and comfortable? Has a cer-tain impoverishment accompanied i:he world's material progress? Have we--ourselves, our communities, our 69.3 2010 Clendenen * A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth 278 Humility is the ancient ever-new ~irtue that ke~s us rooted in our earthiness and able to savor our human limits as gifts. culture--settled into a certain mediocrity, an exagger-ated feeling of entidement? Is our ministry simple and un-self-conscious enough to be a wondrous conduit for God's goodness and inspire a needy people's transcendent gratitude? Is the path to greater human success and hap-piness much more toward inwardness than upwardness? Humility is the ancient ever-new virtue that keeps us rooted in our earthiness and able to savor our human limits as gifts. Sister Betty felt her lack of facility with Spanish as a weakness, and therein was her humble open-ness to receive new graces and new skills, even in her seventies. She brought those graces to some of God's people in their times of joy and grief. Twelve-step recovery has something to say about this. It advises people to strive for spiritual prog-ress, not perfection, and to admit their powerless-ness, accept their limits, and thereby find true freedom. Such yielding in honesty to a Power greater than ourselves enables people to risk humility. In that humility they find themselves able to understand the Beatitudes (Mt 5:1-12) and to risk living in meekness, gentleness, empathy, self-donating love, and freely chosen accountability. The word humility comes from the Latin word humi-lis, meaning "low," which, in turn, comes from the Latin humus, which means "earth" or "dirt" or "soil." The 12th-century Benedictine abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen understood the dangers of not paying atten- Review for Religious tion to nature and all natural things. She devoted one of her many writings to virtues and vices. She was con-vinced that virtues are more than moral habits: they are therapeutic forces within human nature that can produce wonderful transformations. In her legendary Scivias (a Latin abbreviation for. "knowing the Lord's ways"), she said, "Virtue is like a warm garment in a cold world; it is the source of charm in a harsh world" (~1.1.4). Hildegard also wrote the following in one of her many letters of advice to religious leaders: Walk through the valley of humility and know peace. Lose your titanic, hard-to-satisfy ego. A greedy self-esteem is just a steep mountain you'll find dangerous to climb. It's also tricky (if not impossible) to come down from such heights, and anyhow the summit is too small for community. Focus on Love's splendid garden instead. Gather the flowers of humility and simplicity of soul. Study God's patience. Keep your eyes open.12 Sister Betty Barrett's humble, warm, and charming story carries a wallop, as myths do. It is much more than an elderly sister's pleasant memory. It is a dangerous memory. It can affect the future. Notes ~ Johann Baptist Metz, "The Future in the Memory of Suffering," Concilium 76 (1972), p. 15. 2 [See The Word in History: The St. Xavier Forum, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New York: Sheed and Ward; 1966). Ed.] 3 Mary Oliver, "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass," Evidence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), pp. 38-39. 4 L. Sperry and H.L. Ansbacker, "The Concept of Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder," Psychopathology and Psychotherapy (Washington, D.C.: Accelerated Development, 1996), p. 349. 5 Theodore Millon and George S. Everly Jr., Personality and Its Disorders: A Biosocial Learning Approach (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1985), p. 70. [279 69.3 2010 Clendenen ¯ A Rare Humility and a Future-Facing Myth 6 Theodore Millon, Personality-Guided Therapy (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), pp. 433-463. 7 Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, Living in the Age of Entitlement: The Narcissism Epidemic (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 2. s Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosi~y (Wilmette: Chiron Publications, 2003), pp. 61, 68, 69, 145-146. 9 Twenge and Campbell, Living, pp. 100.101,234. The TV stoW and other insights in this article also appear in "Book Notes," Horizon: Journal of the National Religious Vocation Conference 35, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 34-35. 10 Peter Russell, Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change (Novato, California: Origin Press, 1992), pp. 38, 154. 11 See Joan D. Chittister, "Pride and Humility," in Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men (Grand Rapids: ~William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 89-106. ~2 Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2007), p. 159. You who calmed. You who calmed the winds and sea, Jesus, calm and center me. Draw me in and hold my gaze Soothe and silence me these days. Deep is calling unto deep. I give you all my cares to keep. You who calmed the winds and sea. Jesus, calm and center me. Mary Jan6 Higgins RSM Review for Religious ROBERT J. NOGOSEK Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice When I was nineteen years old and a university student, I made a weekend retreat in the Gethsemani Trappist monastery in Kentucky. I was ~rying to decide whether or not I should enter religious life. At one of the retreat con-ferences, an elderly monk printed in block let-ters on the blackboard the word success, putting two vertical lines through each S to make it a dollar sign. He said the world sees success as making money, but real success in life is not about dollars. We needed to turn one vertical line sideways and make a cross. ~ This said a lot about the Trappist life I was observing. The white-robed monks seemed to live a foolish life not at all conducive to hap-piness° keeping silence, arising in the middle Robert J. Nogosek CSC has been a ~heology profes-sor and a parish pastor among other responsibilities. His address is P.O. Box 929; Notre Dame, Indiana 46556. liv!np religious life 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice 282 of the night to chant psalms together in a cold chapel, and eating crusty bread in a diet often deprived of meat. But I saw in the monks a remarkable humor I had never seen before. It seemed that for them life was a big joke. I decided I wanted the joy they had, and their way of seeing the meaning of life in this world. Back at college I returned to my sophomore classes. One of the courses was on the four Gospels, printed in parallel columns to show similarities and differences in the story of Jesus. As I s~t in class somewhat bored one spring afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that the Gospels were practical--that living the Gospels made good sense. I saw this in the story of the rich young man in Matthew 19. He already had more than enough money and possessions while keeping all the command-ments, but was still discontented. He asked what more he could do to have a better life. Jesus graciously invited him to join the community, of disciples, but first he must sell all he had and give the money to the poor. This is how the Trappist monk had explained success. It helped me to see that by joining a religious community I could live the gospel in a literal way, like those who had fol-lowed Jesus in Galilee. The greatest day in my life came some months later on my clothing day. Upon receiving the religious habit with many others that day, I saw myself as having left. the world to join with the others in a life centered on friendship with Jesus Christ. It would consist in living a religious rule. That did not seem to be a great sacrifice, but rather the way to be myself, apart from a world that ran after money and other false values. This freedom to be myself did not initially translate into becoming a gift for others, as St. Paul describes it in Galatians 5:13--"you were called for freedom, brothers. Review for Religious But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another through love." Instead, I concentrated on having a direct relationship with Jesus. It was only much later that I realized that God created me to live as a member of the human family, and that this meant sharing my heart with others. Gradually this was extended to seeing myself as a brother to any other human being I might meet. Seeking Perfection I began to see that progress in union with God involved seeking what was called "the perfection of charity." Vatican Council II would state that the pur-pose of religious life is to make the perfection ; of charity a "very clear symbol" (Flannery) or ~ a "blazing emblem" (Abbott) of the kingdom of God (PC §I). Our love for Jesus is to flow out in love of neighbor, which, as Pope Paul VI . . ~, wrote, is to be extended to the whole human race (Ecclesiam suam, §58). As the ancient hymn Ubi Caritas had stated, charity (caritas) united with heartfelt love (amor) makes God present in the world. Vatican II also stated that religious profession of the evangelical councils is to free us from obstacles that might draw us away not only from the fervor of char-ity, but also from "the perfection of divine worship" (LG §4). This perfection of divine worship would be our response to the Orate Fratres at Mass in praying I began to see that progress in union with GOd involved ~seeking what was called ~ '~the perfection of charity. " [283 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice 284 that our sacrifice "be acceptable to God, the Father Almighty." But this perfection of divine worship also requires the perfection of charity, as St. Paul suggests by saying that the loving gift the Philippians sent him is the "fragrant aroma'.' of "an acceptable sacrifice, pleas-ing to God" (Ph 4:18). Vatican II calls the Eucharist "a sacrament of love" and "a bond of charity" (SC §47), not unlike St. Thomas saying that Holy Communion incites into action our dispositions to be charitable (ST III.79.1 ad 2)~ He cites 2 Corinthians 5:14--"the love of Christ impels us." This could be why the new liturgy has shortened the time after Holy Communion. We are not to bury our face in our hands in private adoration of Jesus in our heart, but rather to ready ourselves for reaching out to others. It calls me "to put off the old man" (Col 3:9) of self-centeredness, and put into action the command-ment of loving others as Jesus has loved me. Jesus wants to be loved in his people, as a religious sister once heard in her heart when, upon kissing the crucifix before retir-ing, she heard the words "Kiss my people." Personal Fulfillment Even though I had often heard women religious speak of their quest for "fulfillment," it took years for me to revise my original desire for success in life into a language of personal fulfillment. I had not expected to be "fulfilled" as a person by the sacrifice represented in religious profession of poverty, chastity, and obedience, any more than I had seen the austerity of the Trappist life as a way to personal fulfillment in this world. Making life seem like a joke could hardly be called "ful-fillment." My thinking was changed, however, in part by a parable in C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity (Bk 4, 9). Review fir Religious According to an adaptation of the story, you invite a friend to live with you in your house. After some time, you notice blueprints have been spread out on the din-ing- room table. Inspecting them, you realize your guest has elaborate plans to transform your little house into a great palace--"throwing out a new wing here, put-ring on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards." As C.S. Lewis comments, it is as though your guest wants to make it a home worthy of himself. To think of Jesus as actually living with me in my heart was not something I had learned in catechism. We had been told that the Holy Spirit was the divine guest in our heart, bug the real presence of Jesus was only in the host in the tabernacle, except when Jesus cam to us in Holy Communion and stayed for seven minutes.~ But during novitiate I had read some books of Raoul Plus SJ, especially one entitled In Christ Jesus, showing from the writings of St. Paul that by baptismal grace we have, abiding in our heart,, the real presence of Jesus. It is the same Jesus as resides in the tabernacle--body and blood, soul and divinity. In Holy Communion he does not come for a visit; he comes to stay. Others around me disagreed, but I was sure Plus was right about this teaching of St. Paul. Later I would also find it in St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle. If the real presence of Jesus dwells in us, then we also meet him in others, and what others share in truth and love could well be a gift to us directly from Jesus in their heart. This makes our mutual sharing of life crucial to our relationship with Jesus. It took me beyond the Little Flower's Way of Spiritual Childhood, which long before I had been drawn to by the Trappist monks. There is something more than putting as much love as possible into each action; I am also called to make a 69.3 2010 Nogosek * Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice gift of myself to others so as to communicate the love of Jesus, who dwells within my heart. This amounts to being a grace to others. It is the language of spiritual gifts or charisms. Charisms During formation I. was repeatedly urged to rec-ognize my special talents and gifts, since religious life involves a commitment to strive for personal and spiri-tual growth. I was told that "grace builds on i~ature." So what is my nature as an individual? What talents and personality had I brought with me into religious life? These efforts at self-scrutiny often left me feel-ing quite discouraged. I lacked so much of what others around me had in talents and personality. Only much later would I see this differently, in part because of the parable in Mere Christianity--that inviting Jesus into my heart could result in my being radically changed as a person. In calling me to discipleship, Jesus may well be planning to have me express myself in wonderful ways, just as he had promised his disciples that they would do greater works than he had done (Jn 14:12). We know that by receiving his Body we become his Body, so that, like him (LG §5), our words, actions, and personal presence can reveal the kingdom of God on earth. This could represent the "abundant fruit from the grace of baptism" which Vatican II says we will be enabled to have by religious profession (LG §44). If I am to be a grace to others by charisms, I have to come out ofmy shell. This is like a cartoon I once saw. In the first frame, there is a big egg bouncing up and down. In the next frame a duckling has poked out his head through the shell, and looks around in fright. In the final frame he has dived headfirst back into the egg. It is much Review for Religious the same with charisms. We have to drop our defenses and risk being a person in new ways before others. Walking on the Water Underlying Vatican II's Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World is the story of walking on water in Matthew 14. Jesus is walking on the waters of today's world, and -- - invites us, like St. Peter, to get out of our boat to ioin him. This is to fol-low our discerning "the signs of the times" (GS §.4), which are the ques-tions and yearnings of people today.2 - It means trying something new. In leaving our comfort zone, we will need to keep our eyes on Jesus. St. Peter started sinking only when he looked around and felt the wind blowing hard against him. This suggests that charisms do not form part of our personal identity. Although we have been given the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit at confirmation, these are not graces to give grace to others, but rather a disposi-tion to be sensitive to the breath of the Spirit, which, as Jesus said, may come and go like the summer breeze (Jn 3:8). Our personal defects remain; it is as "earthen vessels" (2 Co 4:7) that we carry Christ's grace to others. Maybe, in our self-gift to others, the power of Jesus will be conveyed, even through our defects and vulnerability. St~ Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:10--"when I am weak, then I am strong." Jesus is walking on the ¯ wafers bf today's world, and invites us, like St. Peter, . "to~et out Of our.boat to join him. 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice The opportunity for that came up early in my reli-gious life. Just as I completed studies in biblical theol-ogy, I received a letter assigning me to teach dogmatic theology. Upon arriving in the classroom a few months later, I steadied my nerves by recalling G.K. Chesterton: "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." But the course turned out quite well. The students enjoyed my attempts to use the Bible to understand dogma in place of the traditional Neo-Scholasticism they had been hearing. Again, many years later, I was invited to join a team in southern California doing evangelization among Mexican immigrants. I told God that if he wanted me to do this, he would have to teach me Spanish. Initially some of the people rejected me because they sensed I did not understand what they were saying. That was quite true, but, when with them, I would repeat a word or phrase they had said just to keep them talking. Since I loved the people, I was quite happy to be able to communicate even a little bit and to keep on listening. After they came to see I really liked being with them, they began showing that they liked being with "Padre Roberto." At the same time I was making a big hit with their children, maybe because I saw each child as just as much a person as I was. With their kids so fond of me, as time went on their parents became more satisfied with me as I was. 2881 Inner Resistance to Grace Like the companions of St. Peter on the lake that stormy night, we are likely to have a lot of reluctance "to get out of the boat" to join Jesus walking on the water. This is typical of the resistance described by St. Paul's discussion of Christian freedom in Galatians 5. He calls it "the desire of the flesh." When I first arrived at Review for Religious Coachella, California, as the new pastor of an Hispanic parish, I was determined to follow the example of St. John Vianney, who had started out as cur4 of Ars by knocking on doors to visit the people in their homes.3 To make this happen, I put it on my schedule for cer-tain evenings each week. As I got into my car at 7 p.m., usually I would not feel like going, but I went anyway, and once I was interacting with the people I enjoyed it--and they did too. In Sunday homilies I would tell the people that, if they wanted to experience the Holy Spirit (and I knew they did), they should do something for someone. I said the presence of the Holy Spirit is felt mainly in our actions. Others say the same: that when they visit the sick, or even someone in jail, they "get more out of it" than they give. We may feel like new persons in our spontaneity of interact-ing with others out of our love for Jesus. People even relate that they have said things that surprised them, things they had never thought of before. This recalls the promise of Jesus about the gift of the Holy Spirit-- that we should not prepare what to say beforehand, for in our witness itself the Spirit would give us the words to say (Mt 10:20). 'The presence of the Holy: Spirit is felt mainly .fin our actionS. Charisms and Renewal In its call to renewal, Vatican II invites us to aspire to have charisms typical of the early church. Both Pope John xxIII and Pope Paul VI called for a "New Pentecost," to restore to the church today the youth- 69.:~ 2010 Nogosek * Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice fulness and enthusiasm it had when it first came from the hands of Jesus. When we look at early Christianity in comparison with the church today, we wonder what caused the rapid growth in the number of believers. Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity estimates that during the first three centuries the number of Christians increased by forty percent every ten years, beginning in A.D. 40 with about 1,000, and' attaining more than 33,000,000 believers by the year 350 (p. 7). As a soci- ,ologist of religion, he suggests that .the best explana-tion for this phenomenal growth was the way Christians responded to the epidemics in. the empire, which would ravage the entire population at least once every century, with mortality rates of up to thir.ty percent (pp. 73ff). Even the emperor Marcus Aurelius was among the vic-tims in the year 180. At such times the pagans would flee in panic from their homes and cities, abandoning without food and water their loved ones who had fallen ill, and even refusing to bury the dead. The Christians, however, by reason of their love of Christ, would care for their sick and with devotion bury their dead. This care was extended not only to fellow Christians but also to the many pagans married to Christians, and to some of their pagan friends as well. Stark concludes: "This meant that in the aftermath of each epidemic, Christians made up a larger percentage of the population, even without new converts. Moreover, their noticeable better survival rate would have seemed a "miracle" to Christians and pagans alike, and this ought to have influenced conversions." Typically at the beginning of religious communities there was a phenomenal growth in the number of new members, who were attracted to the founder's charism in response to a critical need, even at great sacrifice. In Review for Religious founding my own Holy Cross community, Blessed Basil Moreau was responding not only to the secularization of France after the French Revolution, but also to pleas for help from European missionaries serving in Africa, North America, and Asia. After forming a community of men and women committed to the hearts of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he put many of them at risk by sending them abroad with few material resources, saying that as Holy Cross religious "the Cross is our only hope." He meant that, when as a community we suffer great trials while engaged in service of others, it is a sign from divine providence that our efforts will produce fruit beyond human possibilities. With such words derived from St. Paul, Moreau was transforming the French school of spirituality, with its devotion to the mystery of the incar-nation, into a trust in the paschal mystery. This fostered a bold reliance on divine providence in undertaking dif-ficult apostolates in new environments, to which we were being invited as a new apostolic religious community committed to serving the church. A New Image of the Church According to Vatican II, the church today needs a critical reform of its image, that it be much more a sign of the good news of the kingdom of God. By his 1964 encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, Pope Paul vI challenged the council fathers on the eve of the third session "to com-pare the ideal image of the church, just as Christ sees it, wills it, and loves it. with the actual image the church projects today" (§ 11). This entails, he says, "correction of the defects that conscience denounces and rejects, as if, standing before a mirror, we were to examine interiorly the image of Christ that he has left us." These "necessary reforms," he says, will be "delicate and difficult" (§12). 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice 292 One delicate task of the council was that of altering the image of the church that Pope Pius XIl had presented in 1943 in his renowned encyclical Mystici Corporis. Pius identified the church as the Body. of Christ by being "a perfect society" in its juridical structure. Some of the council fathers would describe this image of the church as the "barque of Peter," with the clergy and religious as the crew and the laity their precious cargo to be transported safely across the treacherous waters of the world to the safe harbor of heaven. The council saw, however, that this is not the way the church should be. Gaudium et spes would call us out of the boat, and especially the laity, who were to see themselves as the primary evangelizers of modern society (LG §31). They were called to this and equipped for it in their baptism and confirmation (LG §33). The obligation came from Christ's commandment to love our neighbor, and the equipment would be the spiritual gifts called charisms. Their ordained pastors were to help them discern their charisms, form them as lay apostles, and give them "room for action" (LG §37). As a preferred image of the church, the council chose the biblical term "people of God." It was remi-niscent not only of the Hebrew people freed from the slavery of Egypt and guided by God through the desert, but also of the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fish in Mark 6, where Jesus has the multitude sit down on the grass in groups of hundreds and fifties. Rather than mainly showing itself as a well-defended and highly organized juridical body, the church is to make itself seen in the world as a movement of faith-filled people. The world today needs to experience the presence of God, and that can best happen where mem-bers of the church form small Christian communities Re'view for Religious through "familial love" of one another and collaboration for the faith of the gospel (GS §22). This encourages an "ecclesiology from below" char-acteristic of the way St. Paul in Ephesians 4 describes members of the church being formed into the Body of Christ. By sharing our truth in the spirit of love, we are to "grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ." The sharing is by dialogue, which had been promoted by Pope Paul vI in Ecdesiam suam and would be declared by Vatican II to be the special charac-teristic of the mis-sion of the church today (GS §82): "In virtue of its mis-sion to enlighten the whole world with the message of the gospel and to "r ~ gather together into one spirit all women and men of every nation, race, and culture, the church shows itself as a sign of that amity which renders possible sincere dialogue and strengthens it." By this we are challenged as religious to evaluate how we form ongoing community life, and what sign value it provides for others. Are we living "that amity which renders sincere dialogue and strengthens it"? At Coachella we did receive something of a posi-tive answer regarding the sign value of our community life. Three years after we arrived, the diocese conducted a thorough evaluation of the parish put into our care. One group of parishioners reported that before we came to the parish they were highly critical of one, another as parishioners. But, having noticed that the Holy Cross , 'We are challenged as religious to evaluate how we form ongoing .,community life, and what sign value it prov!des for others. 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice 294 priests and brothers never voiced a word of criticism towards one another, they decided they also should act that way toward one another. This had not happened sim-ply from our faithfulness to prayer and our apostolic zeal as a religious community. We had made the sacrifice of having weekly house chapters, where we shared with one another what was on our minds and in our hearts. Atoleast in this respect, we hhd succeeded in being "a sign which can and ought to attract all the members of the church to an effective and prompt fulfillment of the duties of their religious vocation" (LG §44). Certainly the religious vocation of all the parishioners was to live out the New Commandment byloving one another aiad making it vis-ible. We also knew that the parishioners were .to see us as a sign that "heavenly blessings'? were already present in this wtrld, foretelling "the resurrected state and the glory of the heavenly kingdom" (LG §4). For that to take place, we would have to show the people that we loved them just as they were, and in very concrete ways. The Rich Man and Lazarus According to the council, religious are "to give an increasingly clearer revelation of Christ," which includes his choosing to live as a poor man, as also was chosen by his virgin mother (LG §46). Here Vatican II was not saying anything new. What was new, and espe-cially challenging, was that as members of the church we are to evaluate the image we give to the world in light of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk 16): "Everyone must consider his neighbor without excep-tion as another self, taking into account first of all his life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus" (GS §27). Review for Religious Here again we are challenged to evaluate our sign value as a religious community. According to Gaudium et spes (§88), if we are living in a nation where "a majority of citizens who are counted as Christians have an abundance of this world's goods," we are in grave danger of causing scandal to the many nations where the majority are not Christian, and where the citizens "are deprived of the necessities of life and are tormented with hunger, disease, and every kind of misery." The council says that this is "as if Christ himself were appealing to the charity of his followers through the mouths of these poor people." How will Jesus see our life as a religious congrega-tion when he comes on the Last Day? How certain are we to be among those at his right hand when he comes in glory to judge the members of all nations by the cri-terion of how they served the needy? An Acceptable Sacrifice .Since Vatican II saw the mission of Jesus being con-tinued by the church, Pope John Paul II liked to repeat that the way of the church is to be the way of Jesus Christ. Jesus said we must lose our life for his sake in order to find it (Mt 10:39). He told those who wanted to follow him: "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head" (Lk 9:58). St. Paul wrote that by our bearing affliction "the love of God will be poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Rm 5:5). Like St. Paul, we do not want Jesus to have died in vain, nor that his presence touch only those who believe in the Eucharist. As friends of Jesus, we want to help him make the world better, that the pleasing aroma cre-ated by his presence in us may indeed be, as St. Paul says, not as "an odor that leads to death" where people 69.3 2010 Nogosek ¯ Religious Life as an Acceptable Sacrifice reject gospel values--but rather "an odor of life that leads to life" (2,Co 2:16), where people are attracted to a gift of freedom to be themselves through sharing the wisdom, help, and love of the Holy Spirit. But today, as consecrated women and men "eval-uating the contemporary world wisely in the light of faith" (PC §2), we must ask whether the way we live our religious profession is truly becoming "an accept-able sacrifice." Jesus said that before he returned "the love of many would grow cold" (Mr 24:12), and he asked whether he would find faith upon the earth when he came again (Lk 18:8). Notes ~ It takes about seven minutes for the host to dissolve in the stomach and the consecrated host to be no longer present. 2 Although some church leaders interpret these signs as today's troubles and thus may see the world as especially hostile to the gospel, I would argue that according to Vatican II our times are today's evangeli-cal opportunity prepared by God's Spirit breathing over the world. 3 Francis Trochu, The Curi of Ars (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books and Publishers, 1977), pp. 116f. 296[ Gamble If l but touch his clothes. Mark 5:28 Did the soldier who won and wore the seamless robe allow it to touch him? Irene Zimmerman OSF Review for Religiou~ 'JEFFREY MICKLER Coping with the Genuinely Difficult Religious Itw"googled" the term "difficult people" and instantly o hundred million sites were found. Business managers, owners, and employees are all seeking answers on how to cope with people who are genuinely difficult to get along with. The hilarious 1980 movie Nine to Five told of the revenge three female employ-ees took against their male chauvinist boss. In real life, however, revenge is never a solution, and dealing with difficult people is never really funny. Hence, there are books like Sandra A. Crowe's Since Strangling Isn't an Option. Difficult people drain others' enthusiasm and suck the life out of organizations, as the title Working with You Is Killing Me by Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster suggests.' Dealing with difficult people in the workplace is one thing. Living with them in a religious commu- Jeffrey Mickler SSP has worked in formation and various other min-istries and was provincial of the Paulists' United States Province. His address is Box 595; 9531 Akron Canfield Road (Rt 224); Canfield, Ohio 44406. 69.3 2010 Mickler ¯ Coping with the Genuinely Difficult Religious 298 nity raises the bar. Although all of us can be difficult at times, some religious are chronically difficult and even hostile. Augustine Poulain SJ in his 19th-century spiritual classic The lnterior Graces describes one type of difficult religious: Another trial., is living with an irritable person who finds fault with everything, never speaks a pleasant word . These difficult characters often have the reputation of being very amiable abroad because they are full of attention for those whom they need, or those who would not allow themselves to be bullied. These nervous natures may be likened to torpe-does on account of the charges that they let fly at those who .approach them. It is impossible to arrange any matter with them clearly and quietly. Above all, let no one try to excuse himself when they accuse him of anything or [try to] prove to them that they are mistaken . The volcano will then be in full eruption. Such minds will never be in the wrong; they alone are endowed with sound judgment. This behavior shows., a grave lack of charity. In community, characters of this. nature make life very difficult for others, and are sometimes the cause of abandonment of vocations.2 Father Stephen Rossetti, of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, in his recorded conference Spirituality of Christian Leadership, describes such people as suffering "chronically impaired social functioning." These individuals have "inflexible, maladaptive ways of dealing with other people." Wherever they are sta-tioned, they divide and disrupt communities. Their nat-ural charm ensures that they will have some supporters, but their anger at the world for not revolving around their needs makes them almost impossible to live with. When confronted by authority with a long list of com-plaints, these people blame others and are unable to Review for Religious grasp that they themselves have caused any problems. Father Rossetti points out that they have narcissistic personalities. When confronted, they erupt into a rage that sends shock waves through a community.3 Some of them end up living in their own apartments because provincials can find no communities willing to tolerate daeir divisive behavior. Rossetti says the chances of changing them for the better are extremely slim. Traditional therapies have proven fruitless. He advises giving such persons honest feedback, together with strict and clear guidelines for their behavior. Leaders must be compas-sionate towards them, but firm. ¯ theses.temperaments. The leadership has a responsibility to do all in its power to prevent them from terrorizing the community and running roughshod over people.4 Rossetti's position that modern therapy can do lit-tle to change such characters corresponds to Poulain's 19th-century assessment: "I have seen very religious persons try to cure themselves of this irritability. They have been unable to succeed . I think a miracle is required to overcome these temperaments.''5 Se~in Sammon of the Marist Brothers has done extensive research on dealing with difficult people. Drawing upon the works of Robert M. Bramson, Charles J. Keating, and Robert L. Veninga and James P. Spradley, he has developed a pragmatic and effective ~ have seen very religious persons try t6 cure themselvesof this irritabiiity. I think a miracle 'is rdqyire~:to overcome 69.3 2010 Mickler * Coping with the Genuinely Difficult Religious 300 approach that is presented on tapes from St Pauls/Alba House, Coping with the Genuinely Difficult Person. Like Poulain and Rossetti, Sammon acknowledges that efforts to change truly difficult people are basically fruitless. He suggests, however, ways we ourselves can change in order to better cope with them.6 He lists seven types of difficult people.7 He calls all of the first three types hostile-aggressive: they are "Sherman tanks," "snipers," and "exploders." The Sherman tanks are convinced of their ideas and dominate meetings by discounting out of hand the suggestions of others. They present their own ideas as the only rational, workable thing for the community or committee to adopt. They refer to other approaches as "stupid," a "waste of time," or "ridicu-lous." Sammon suggests meeting the Sherman tanks with calm strength. When the Sherman tanks begin to roll over a meet-ing, the chair should let them go on for a while but then abruptly intervene: "Stop right there; we have heard your objections; now we need valuable input from others." Sherman tanks will most likely add a few new objections until the chair or the presenter interrupts: "We will be covering those objections and discussing them as the meeting goes on!" Participants, present-ers, and leaders need to stand up for themselves against the Sherman tanks, clearly explaining their positions, not backing down, but avoiding a fight. Hostile-aggres-sive individuals almost always "win" in a fight, but the Sherman tanks usually respect such strength. They often do have valid insights that the community can benefit from; it is their ways of behaving that make it hard for the community to consider their input fairly. "Snipers" will make remarks that are just barely audible to the person being targeted. The remarks are Review for Religious biting and sarcastic, and the victim is supposed to laugh them off. These are different fr

Issue 61.4 of the Review for Religious, 2002. ; Identities Spirituality Community Living \ Profiling JULY AUGUST 2002 VOLUME 61 NUMBER 4 Review for Rellgious hdp people respond aria bkfa thful ~ ° ~ to God's ~niversal call to holiness ~ by making available to t~em the ~piH~l legades that flow~om the'charisms of CathoUdeOnsecrated life. 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 ¯ \Veh 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 iuside back cover for information on subscription rates. ©2002 Review for Religious Permission is herewith granted to COl)}, 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 distrihu-tion, advertising, institutional promotion, or for the creation of new collective works or anthologies. Such permission will only be considered on written application to the Editor, Review for Religious. for religious LIVING OUR CATHOLIC LEGACIES Editor Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Editorial Staff Adv#ory Board David L. Fleming SJ Clare Boehmer ASC Philip C. Fischer SJ Elizabeth McDonough OP Mary Ann Foppe Tracy Gramm Judy Sharp James and Joan Felling Adrian Gaudin SC Sr. Raymond Marie Gerard FSP Eugene Hensell OSB Ernest E. Larkin OCarm Bishop Carlos A. Sevilla SJ Miriam D. Ukeritis CSJ JULY AUGUST 2002 VOLUME 61 NUMBER 4 contents 342 feature Reciprocal Identities: Apostolic Life and Consecrated Life Patricia Wittberg sc oudines the role apostolic institutions had in shaping the identity of religious congregations in the past and describes the role of a person who would be responsible for catalyzing a congregation's reformulation of its apostolic identity in the absence of these institutions today. 352 364 spirituality Diocesan Priesthood: Discerning the Fire in Our Midst George Aschenbrenner SJ describes four steps that are part of a discerning life and three dimensions of the human stage on which the drama of a personal love-relationship with God is played. Desert Spirituality Ernest E. Larkin OCarm examines the ancient traditions of desert spirituality and contemplative prayer and proposes ways to adapt them to our times. for l~eligious 375 community living Three Forms of Community Living: A Survey Report Barbara Zajac makes a sociological survey of sisters in one religious community to explore how they define and create "community." 395 Expert Practitioners of Union: Forming, Living, and Sustaining Community Joel Giallanza CSC reviews the complexities involved in defining or describing religious community and suggests strategies to form and live and sustain community. 407 profiling Merton and the Enneagram: The Ritual Enactment of His Myth Suzanne Zuercher OSB examines Thomas Merton from his journals, considering him as an enneagram 4, his true self more acknowledged over the years, then anguished over, and ultimately embraced. 419 Liberal or Conservative: Temperaments and Faith Edward Krasevac OP proposes that awareness of temperamental affinities for liberal/conservative positions can give us a greater and sometimes much-needed sensitivity to what others are saying and give us at least a partial understanding of why we b~lieve what we believe. departments 340 Prisms 430 Canonical Counsel: Involuntary Departure 435 Book Reviews j~uly-Aug~tst 2002 prisms ~hen we say "We had an extraordinary time," for example, at a family reunion or at a church conference, we imply that the event was better than usual. The ordinary, by contrast, seems to be of negligible value. Ordinary means normal, hav-ing the implications of the usual routine. Often when we say that our time has been ordinary we signify that it has been just "more of the same." When the church makes use of the phrase ordi-nary time to describe a part of the liturgical year, we tend to .bring our everyday meaning to the phrase. We think of the routine of following one of the synoptic Gospel readings in weekday and in Sunday Eucharists. Church ordinary time seems not to emphasize cele-bration, just "more of the same." The church, how-ever, intends only to identify this part of the liturgical year as those weeks of the year proceeding in a long, numerical order (deriving from the Latin ordo) that are distinct from the holyday or holiday weeks iden-tified as Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. And so there are some thirty weeks, liturgically, of "ordinary time" in every church year. But beyond the fact that ordinary time provides us with weeks in a numbered order, I believe that the church in her liturgy plants the seed that ordinary time is meant to be a time of wisdom. Wisdom might be described as "putting it all together," living an integrated life. For us Christians, wisdom means that we put our life together in the light of our being followers of Christ. The scrip-ture readings that flow through the Sunday and weekday read-ings for Mass and for the Liturgy of the Hours are both an inspiration for and a measurement of our living and acting as children of God. Jesus, as we see him living everyday life in the Gospels of ordinary time, remains the paradigm of what it means to be a human being, one created in the image and likeness of God. Being true God and true man, Jesus shares with us, through the Spirit, how to live our lives wisely in our own every-dayness as sons and daughters of God. We are baptized in Jesus' name; we are fed with his Body and Blood. The Son of God, Jesus, incarnate God--infinitely beyond Adam and Eve's mere creation in the image and like-ness of God--is our Brother. With him, we Christians experi-ence the new creation in his life, death, and resurrection. What our Scriptures in the church's ordinary time impress upon us is that we do not turn to the Gospels just for the high points of suffering or triumph or just for some code of rules. The Gospels are written to enter us into Jesus' wisdom way of living. Like St. Paul, we spend our lives trying to make it ever more true that "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me." The church presents us ordinary Christians with a chal-lenging paradox. Ordinary time is wisdom time. Because we are being formed daily by the word of God and nourished by daily bread, we dare to say with Jesus: "Our Father." David L. Fleming SJ July-August 2002 feature PATRICIA WITTBERG Reciprocal Identities: Apostolic Life and Consecrated Life This year my congregation is celebrating its 150th anniversary. In special symposia and lectures, in liturgies and panel presentations, we have been encouraged to reflect about who ,we are as a community, who we have been--and who we will be. Since I have been researching relationship between religious congregations and their sponsored ministries, these events have spurred me to reflect on what it has meant--and what it will mean--that we are an apostolic congregation. I have, however, found it unexpectedly difficult to do this. How does our charism differ from that of an active monastic or evangelical order? In what way do our apostolates define who we are as a community, especially since very few of us still minister in the schools and hospitals we traditionally staffed? These are important questions to ask--and to continue asking--as we rearticulate our apostolic identity for the coming century. But I ,have come to believe that we lack an importfint kind of resource person who could facilitate our reflections. To the best Patricia Wittberg SC last wrote for us in September-October 2000. Her address is 2141 Dugan Drive; Indianapolis, Indiana 46260. Review for Religious of my knowledge, no religious congregation makes provision for such a person in its reflection processes. There is not even a name for her, so I will call her--however awkwardly--an Apostolic-Identity Catalyzer, or AIC for short2 In this paper I will first attempt to oudine the role apostolic institutions had in shaping the identity of religious congregations in the past. Next I will describe the kinds of activities an AIC might undertake to catalyze a congregation's reformulation of its apostolic identity in the absence of these institutions. Who We Were: Shaping a Reciprocal Identity Throughout their history, apostolic religious congregations have developed in an intimate dialectic with the institutions they created, staffed, and administered. On the one hand, Catholic hospitals, schools, and social-work agencies derived their religious identity primarily from the presence of religious congregations. Religious nurses, teachers, and social workers, all fully habited, served as living icons of the spiritual character of these institutions. As owners they also made the key decisions and policies. Their presence on the staff and in the administration meant that the culture of the congregation infused the entire institution. Without pointing to the congregation's presence, it would have been hard for a school or hospital to articulate what made it Catholic. Until the mid 1960s, however, the two were so intertwined that the question never even arose. In a similar manner, religious congregations derived their apostolic identity from the institutions they staffed. As Margaret Susan Thompson has pointed out in a previous issue of this journal,2 most U.S. women's apostolic congregations did not have a distinctive initial charism: rather, they have a "deep story" developed through years of lived experience. The distinctive identity of my own congregation was forged as sisters worked and lived together in our hospitals in Dayton and Albuquerque, Religious congregations derived their apostolic identity from the institutions they staffed. Wittber~ ¯ Reci~n'ocal Identities as they made bulletin boards together for our elementary schools in Detroit and Chicago, and as they cared for children in inner-city settlement houses and orphanages in Denver and Cincinnati. Young women got to know us through our ministries, and those attracted by our witness in these apostolates joined us. The congregation filled with new entrants who came expecting to perform institutional service, which further tied our apostolic identity to these works. Without citing the particular places where we served, it would have been difficult for many of us to articulate exactly what being an "apostolic" community meant. A Parallel: Mission-Effectiveness Offices in Catholic Institutions Most religious communities today have loosened, and some have completely severed, their ties with their institutions. Within their hospitals, colleges, and other agencies, this has led to some serious institutional soul-searching. Bereft of the iconic presence of the religious order, these institutions were in danger of losing their distinctive religious character. "Isomorphic" pressures from government regulations, professional associations, and economic competitors threatened to make them indistinguishable from other private schools or hospitals) The leaders of these organizations realized that retaining a distinct religious identity in the face of such pressures would require a deliberate effort. An institutional religious identity could not simply depend on the private spirituality the individual workers might bring to their jobs. Such spirituality was likely to remain private to each individual, since there are strong American cultural norms against sharing one's spirituality in the workplace. A school's, a hospital's, or a social agency's institutional religious identity had to be developed and shared in a way that would be transformative: grounding the daily operations of each department, underlying the administrative decisions, and spurring an ongoing, institution-wide search for new and creative ways to be a Catholic (or Jesuit or Vincentian) organization. Many religious hospitals, colleges, and other institutions, therefore, created special mission-effectiveness positions to address these goals. The person filling this role--often the last remaining member of the sponsoring congregation still in full- Review for Religious time ministry there--has typically been responsible for activities such as the following: ¯ orienting new staff and administrators to the charism or ethos of the sponsoring religious community (Jesuit scholarship, Vincentian caring, the spirit of Mercy); ¯ organizing periodic retreats and seminars for long-standing staff and administrators, in order to keep the spirit of the founding congregation fresh and alive; ¯ conducting various spiritual "leaven" activities: leading daily prayers over the public address system, organizing liturgies, providing short reflective prayers before meetings, disseminating newsletters or daily bulletins, erecting and maintaining religious iconography, and so forth; ¯ creating psychic and physical spaces where staff and administrators feel encouraged to share their spiritual journeys; ¯ estab-lishing awards for staff and administrators who most typify the founding spirit, and publicizing the winners of these awards; ¯ writing, updating, and promulgating the mission statement; ¯ raising ~ssues of mission and ethics at meetings of the board of trustees and other instances when key decisions are made; ¯ acting .as liaison with the sponsoring congregation, to help define what the implications of congregational sponsorship are for the institunon; ¯ serving as the religious-identity spokesperson to the media, overseeing public relations activities connected to the institution's religious identity. This is the ideal, of course. Many mission-effectiveness directors are marginalized, lacking any real input into the organization's decision making. A recent study found that "even in colleges that maintain the vice-presidential rank for the mission-effectiveness officer, there is no guarantee that the position will enjoy institutional prominence . Frequently the position operates on the .periphery of the college, resulting in compartmentalization rather than integration of mission concerns into daily senior-level academic or administrative decision making.''4 Mission statements may be mere words, Many mission-effectiveness directors are marginalized, lacking any real input into the organization's decision making. July-August 2002 PVi~tberg * Reciprocal Identities uncoupled from and alongside the day-to-day running of the institution. But at least the concept of mission effectiveness exists in our institutions, and we can readily articulate the kinds of activities such a position would involve. Apostolic-Identity Catalyzer: An Unknown (but Necessary) Role The same is not true for the position which I have termed the Apostolic-Identity Catalyzer. In fact, the apostolic congregations I know of do not have such a person. But, if mission-effectiveness offices are important for maintaining the religious identity of a school or hospital in the absence of its founding religious congregation, an apostolic-identity office should be equally important in helping maintain the apostolic identity of a religious congregation that is uncoupled from its institutions. In this section I will try to explain why I believe this to be so. When apostolic religious congregations withdrew from their institutions, they lost a key component of their former identity. Monastic and evangelical congregations, which had been inappropriately conformed to the apostolic model in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, could--and often did--simply revert to their original identities. But, to the extent that apostolic congregations had drawn their identity from their specific institutional works, they have had to devise a new articulation of who they are as a group and why they exist. "Isomorphic" pressures have also influenced this process. These pressures do not come from government regulations, professional standards, or economic pressures dictating what kind of identity an apostolic congregation should assume. Rather, they come from the ideals or "templates" current in the church and in society, which presume a primarily spiritual basis for the identity of religious groups. These spiritual foci commonly fill the void left by the loss of a congregation's institutional apostolate. Some apostolic communities have thus become more like small Christian communities, faith-sharing groups, or even parishes. The members minister in various locations and professions, pray privately every day, and meet regularly as a group for shared prayer and/or socializing: Other congregations Review for Religious have formed intentional communities that more closely approximate the monastic model: the members live and pray communally, but leave for separate ministries during the day. In either case, the conKregation begins to draw its identity more and more from the common spiritual activities of its members, and less and less from any common apostolic character. New entrants are attracted by the spirituality of the congregation, not by its distinctive common apostolates --which no longer exist. The metamorphosis continues. If apostolic religious life is to retain its distinctive identity, apostolic congregations must take deliberate steps to foster it. As with the religious identity of our former institutions, this will not happen automatically. Nor can we assume that our congregation is apostolic simply because we, as individual religious, give witness to God's love in our individual apostolates. (Surely all Christians are called to do that!) A congregation's apostolic identity must be transformative of the entire congregation, grounding the daily operations within the motherhouse, provincialates, and local houses, und.erlying the decisions of the council or leadership team, and spurring the community on its search for new and creative ways to be an apostolic congregation. This is where an apostolic-identity office would be useful. Since I know of no congregation that provides for such a role, the following list of suggested tasks is deliberately modeled on the activities which mission-effectiveness offices perform in our sponsored institutions. Within a given congregation, therefore, the AIC might be responsible for some or all of the following tasks: ¯ Orienting new members to the apostolic tradition of the congregation, as part of the formation program. This might include workshops or presentations, along with arranging visits to the former institutions and interviews with retired sisters who used to work there. ¯ Organizing periodic retreats and seminars for the professed and associate members of the congregation on the way(s) the congregation currently expresses its apostolic identity. This might include facilitating volunteer opportunities (whether single days throughout the year or six-week summer experiences) at some sites. Or theologians might be invited to community gatherings to discuss the various theologies of the interaction July-Augt*st 2002 Wittberg * Reciprocal Identities between spirituality and the apostolate. Or the clients served may be invited to give input on how they see the apostolic witness of the congregation and how it can be improved. ¯ Conducting various apostolic "leaven" activities within the congregation: circulating specially written prayers for specific apostolates and/or designating specific days of prayer for them; writing feature articles on the apostolates in the congregation's newsletter and/or disseminating a special newsletter on the apostolates; organizing the collection of money and goods; erecting and maintaining displays of apostolic artifacts at the motherhouse and elsewhere; initiating letter-writing campaigns to elected officials on apostolic issues; and so forth. ¯ Creating psychic and physical spaces where members are encouraged to share the insights, joys, and sorrows they have derived from their apostolates. The Daughters of Charity, with whom I currendy live, have a special monthly apostolic reflection wherein each member of the local house shares some incident from her ministry through which God has spoken to her that day. In a local house of another congregation where I once lived, we spent an afternoon and evening visiting each sister's work-place so that we could have a mental picture of the setting in which she spent a good part of her day. ¯ Establishing awards or other forms of recognition for individual members whose apostolic works witness to the character of the congregation, and publicizing these awards in the congregation and in the surrounding neighborhood or town or city. ¯ Leading reflections and other activities on the apostolic aspects of the congregation's mission statement (or facilitating the composition of such a statement if one does not currently exist). ¯ Raising issues of the congregation's apostolic identity at council meetings (which implies that the AIC is a member of the council). ¯ Initiating a congregational reflection to define exactly what the "sponsor" relationship requires of the congregation. As at least one critic has pointed out, the duties and obligations of sponsorship are often specified for the sponsored institution, but rarely are similar duties and obligations spelled out for the sponsoring congregation,s The MC might encourage meetings of both the leadership and the membership to outline the responsibilities the congregation has toward its institutions. Once these are determined, the AIC might be the one to see that they are met. Review for Religious ¯ Serving as a liaison with the various sponsored ministries. If the congregation has a separate board of sponsored ministries, then the AIC should be a member of it (and perhaps chair it). ¯ Serving as the apostolic-identity spokespdrson for the congregation to the media, overseeing public-relations activities connected with the congregation's apostolic identity. Again, this is an idealized picture. As with the mission-effectiveness offices in our former institutions, the activities of the apostolic-identity office may be marginalized in a given religious community. Many religious are so heavily involved in their ministries that they may resist invitations to set aside time to do this kind of communal apostolic sharing. Others may wish to forget about their jobs--especially if they find them draining and exhausting--and focus on more spiritual and recreational matters during the congregation's brief time together. Still others, formed in the days of common ministry within large institutions, may not - feel the need to discuss how apostolate is related to religious life today. And, since an apostolic-identity office is such a novel concept, many may not see why one is needed at all. Surely our congregation is already top-heavy with leadership? Why do we need to release another member from active ministry to do this? Perhaps the demise of the apostolic form of religious life is inevitable. Large hospitals, colleges, and other institutions may have become so bureaucratized and professionalized that they can no longer credibly represent a corporate Catholic vision of education, healthcare, or social service (although, of course, individual teachers or nurses--lay and religious--may still bring their private spiritualities to their jobs in these institutions). Fast-paced American culture, steeped in workaholism, may make it difficult to stop and be reflective about the work we do. There Many religious are so heavily involved in their ministries that they may resist invitations to set aside time to do this kind of communal apostolic sharing. Ju~-dugu¢ 2002 Wittberg * Reciprocal Identities may be a greater need for religious life forms focused on community and spirituality than on work--especially work in large institutions. Certainly monastic and contemplative religious communities are showing stronger growth than most apostolic ones.6 Religious life may thrive in monastic, evangelical, or future undreamed-of forms, even if its apostolic version becomes extinct. Perhaps an AIC would be a useless relic of a time already past. Or perhaps not. Perhaps what the world most needs is the witness of a group whose common vision for a transformative spiritual identity permeates the offices, factories, and marketplaces where its members work. Perhaps the reciprocal dialectic of religious community and sponsored ministry, each forming and transforming the other, is a longed-for alternative to the prevailing, "Enronized" corporate culture. Perhaps apostolic religious congregations possess the seed of a new corporate ministerial presence in the world, over and above the scattered individual ministries of their members. If so, then this vision, this dialectic, this presence, must be fostered and nurtured to growth. An AIC would have her job cut out for her. Notes i This is a terribly unattractive name, of course, but I am unable to think of any other. If this article persuades any congregation to establish the office of apostolic-identity catalyzer, they might consider naming it after a founding member who exemplified the apostolic dedication the congregation wishes to foster. 2 Margaret Susan Thompson, "Charism or Deep Story? Towards Understanding Better the 19th-Century Origins of American Women's Congregations," Review for Religious 58, no. 3 (May-June, 1999): 230-250. 3 According to sociologists studying organizations, "isomorphism" refers to the many pressures, both external and internal, which lead them to adopt similar practices. External pressures would include government regulations, professional accreditation standards, and the demands of customers/clients. Internal pressures would include ways of thinking that administrators develop from all of them being trained in the same schools, clinging to established practices in times of uncertainty, and needing to project an image of competence. See Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalfim in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 4 Dennis H. Holtschneider CM and Melanie M. Morey, "Relationship Review for Religious Revisited: Changing Relations between U.S. Catholic Colleges and Universities and Founding Religious Congregations," Occasional Paper No. 47, Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. s Melanie M. Morey, Leadership and Legacy: ls There a Future for the Past? A Study of Eight Colleges Founded by Catholic VVomen's Religious Congregations, dissertation, School of Education, Harvard University, 1995, p. 203. 6 "Monasteries Enjoy Boom, with Some Help from Marketing," Religion Watch 17, no. 6 (April 2002): 2-3. Promissory In early March buds begin to swell on my peach tree. It is too soon. This uncertain month delivers snow and fro~t with its warm, sweet winds. But there they are, small, swelling promises of succulent fruit, nature's resurrective fiat silently shouting down my wintery worry with summer's certainty. Bonnie Thurston July-Aug~tst 2002 GEORGE ASCHENBRENNER Diocesan Priesthood: Discerning the Fire in Our Midst spirituality These are not easy days for the diocesan priesthood. Sexually inappropriate behavior has been making rousing--and saddening--copy in newspapers and magazines. This behavior can be, must be, viewed from a number of different perspectives. I mention just a few: the horrendous injustice and injury done to the victims; the sickness, often, of the perpetrator himself; the lack of honest dealing with sexual urges; the unjust accusation of some priests; the betrayal and undermining of the trust of many members of the church; and the faithful, generous service of many unheralded diocesan priests. I do not deny the seriousness of the present situation, nor am I insensitive to the many serious repercussions of the publicity. We all have much to learn from this difficult time for the diocesan priesthood. Seminary formation programs--indeed each individual priest--must honestly and carefully look at both sexual orientation and the swirling interior cauldron of sexual impulse, fantasy, and urge. Sexuality George Aschenbrenner SJ was cofounder of the Institute for Priestly Fbrmation at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and.is director of the Jesuit Center for Spiritual Growth; P.O. Box 223; Wernersville, Pennsylvania 19565. Review for Religious is only one aspect, but always an important one, of the discerning presence 6f the diocesan priest in the midst of a local people. This article is not about the sexual aspect of discernment, but implications for that area of human experience will be easily recognized. I focus on a central constituent of diocesan priesthood, namely, the priest's discerning presence in the midst of a local people. (In a recent book I develop this and other charisms that are needed in diocesan priesthood.)! The desires and needs of his people seek, from the diocesan priest, discernment, the art of holiness, but these desires and needs may not be easily detected. Holiness, in itself, does not seem something most people are daily concerned with. But reflection may suggest otherwise. Though often thought of or spoken of in other words and with a deceptive indirectness, the longing of the human heart for more--for something beyond what we have and appreciate, beyond our present knowing--stirs in all of us from time to time, especially in quiet moments. If we sometimes find this longing in ourselves, we must assume it in others as well. And, when the glow has faded from life and still we cannot say or put into words what we are missing, we and others may recognize that this longing for more is really a desire for an ever greater goodness, for holiness, in fact a desire for God. The ordinary people of a parish feel this in many ways, but may seldom try to express it. They desire holiness, a relationship that gets them out of the narrow confines of their own self. They seek greater meaning, more happiness, and greater love in the humdrum of ordinary living. Other people in the parish are more explicit and direct. They want to pray better; they want to know God's love more; they want their faith to be more alive. Though some may have a counselor or friend with whom they speak of these concerns, the principal person to whom people bring such stirrings and longings is their diocesan priest. They look to him for help, for answers, for the solution to their dissatisfaction. But what can the priest do? What answers does he have? He is presumed to have the graced art of daily growth in holiness. This is precisely what we mean by discernment of spirits. It is a very human process, God's subtle inspiration enlightening us to interpret, make sense of, the fire of God's awesome love present in the ordinary daily experience of us all. In various ways the human psyche is always encountering our Ascbenlrrenner * Diocesan Priestbood loving God. And these experiences are indeed profoundly human, and yet so much more. In faith they are experiences of a love promising a joy that alone can satisfy our longings, to some real extent here and now, but fully only on the other side of death. This discerning art of holiness is not a catalogue of answers to be learned and then distributed on request. Rather, it is a life to be lived in the uniquely personal part of our hearts, and yet with extroverting implication for all our human brothers and sisters and for our union with them in the transformation of our whole expanding universe. This article, then, is not a minicourse on discernment, nor is it a review of the answers a priest will need for all the people's questions. Rather, I want to present something of what is involved in a priest's discerning understanding, in his radiating the fire of the Holy Spirit for the people of his parish. I will describe four steps that are part of a discerning life and then three dimensions of the human stage on which the drama of a personal love-relationship with God is played. As a spiritual leader in the midst of the parish, the priest must have a reflective understanding of the art of discernment, seen as the dynamics of any mature faith life. This charism prepares the priest to play two important roles of service among the people: as a guide into the mystery of God's fire of love and as a soul doctor for those being healed and purified in that same fire. Discernment: God's Story of Mature Faith Growth Holiness and growth in union with God always involve the full human person alive in his or her concrete circumstances. A person's spiritual maturity, then, involves good actions, but also much more. It involves feeling and emotion, but also much more. Together with concern for actions and feelings, spiritual maturity must go down into a person's inner core. It is from this core that God's love should radiate into holy action and feeling so that people can readily become aware of God's love in the world. This radiation is an invitation to notice and welcome God's love in every situation. Discernment of spirits means achieving such recognition. Sometimes discernment is mistakenly seen as one of any number of approaches to mature spiritual development. Indeed, Review for Religious some schools of faith growth have their own terminology. Under these different articulations, however, is one fundamental process of growth toward mature faith, a sorting of inner experiences. For this reason, discernment of spirits is the story of personal faith growth, God's story of it. This process has two roots: our human reality within God's creation and God's revelation in Jesus. Discernment of spirits is God's story of us, narrated both in our makeup as human creatures and in God's love for us all in Jesus. If only this love shone clearly, brilliantly, beautifully in every situation! At times it does, of course, but at other times the radiance of this love is stained by smog or hidden by a heavy cloud of evil. If all were goodness, grace, and beauty, how wonderful--and surely no need for any careful sorting in such a good world. Or, if all were evil, darkness, and wickedness, we would live on the brink of despair--but, again, no need for any sorting or sifting. But, when the world of human beings is ambiguous and mixed, and still we are c~lled to find the goodness in it and to display it in ourselves in our daily lives, then a discernment of spirits within ourselves assumes an essential importance. We must learn to distinguish our selfish impulses from the radiant inspirations of the Holy Spirit of God. Most people have not developed the skills for expert discerning of spirits, but, if they do no discerning at all, mature faith eludes them. The priest, then, the spiritual leader and soul doctor in the parochial community, must do the hard work of learning the theory and practice of soul doctoring, of discerning holiness. In the midst of such careful inner sorting, we must never forget this: God desires and is committed to each of us in Jesus more than we can fully realize--and the Holy Spirit is constandy active in our hearts and our world. Christian holiness always has its initiative in the fire of God's loving desires for us. It is never a figment of our imagination or a product of our willpower. It is the mystery of God's precious gift for us all. But each of us must The priest must have a reflective understanding of the art of discernment, seen as the dynamics of any mature faith life. 3~uly-du~lst 2002 Aschenbrenn~ * Diocesan Priesthood learn to recognize, receive, and nurture the gift. And we need a guide to lead us, in some special ways, into the fire, into the radiant glow of that mystery: God's love burning bright in Jesus. The Material of Discernment God wants each of us to imitate.Jesus uniquely. The great challenge and invitation that haunts us all is to discover our true self in Christ. For each of us God intends a unique revelation of Christ. Though the enterprise has very complex aspects, the point is as simple as it is startling: God wants each of us to imitate Jesus uniquely. The very self that God intends each of us to be is a unique, living imitation of Jesus. And that life of ours is meant to shine for all the world. This true self, this unique revelation, this treasure is camouflaged in the spontaneous interiority of our daily consciousness. This pearl of great price, this treasure beyond all value, must be searched for and recognized when stumbled upon. Into the daily spontaneous consciousness of the priest and of his people come many images, feelings, thoughts, impulses, and moods, sometimes quietly, some-times shockingly. This inner world has a variety of seasons, bright hopeful springs and dark threatening winters. We might wish we could glimpse our true self in Christ conveniently and directly, avoiding tentative efforts to interpret these various elements in ourselves like the weather. But we do not even have anything like a satellite picture of our ow~ inner world. God takes the complexity of our human condition seriously, and so Jesus usually comes to us at the place where our own consciousness tangles with today's large or small historical realities. To try to avoid this encounter would be to deprive ourselves--and other people, too--of our unique opportunity to reveal Jesus Christ as God intends, that is, in daily circumstances that without our presence may lack the glow and radiance of fire. Whenever one person avoids these opportunities, the radiance of us all is somehow dimmed. The diocesan priest, doctor of souls that he is called to be, must not fail to uncover the treasure in these moments; others, seeing it, will carry the glow far beyond him. Revie~ for Religiou~ This discerning search for the treasure of our true self can be described in four steps, steps easier to describe than to apply to real circumstances. My intention is to describe the steps so that the priest can learn to recognize them in his own experience and then make them his own. This discerning process can then help the priest, the soul doctor, to guide people in discovering and welcoming the mystery of God's love in their own hearts and lives. Turned toward God This first step is most important and profound: an identity in Jesus Christ. Until this identity has been cultivated enough, serious discernment is not possible. A serious turning to God readies the heart for discernment and so initiates any trustworthy searching for the treasure of God's personal, uniquely specific love. This turning is a real change that grades the ground of our heart to a new incline: away from ourselves and toward God. It is more than a passing fancy or a momentary quirk. The realization that we are conceived, marked, and shaped from the dawn of our existence by a God who always and only loves, this realization takes root and changes the landscape of our daily lives. This realization of a Love greater than the love we have for ourselves stops us in our tracks. It invites an about-face. It gets us out of ourselves. A whole new vista opens up. We have discovered and been turned toward Someone more beloved than we are to ourselves. Is this Love for real? Can this Beloved be trusted? What are we to make of all this, of these subtle perceptions. As we pay closer attention to them, the realization can come that receiving and responding to such Love assumes an importance beyond all else. The ground under our feet shakes and radically shifts. At this juncture, there is a clarity; something has clearly changed. A central question has been posing itself in our heart for a long time: Am I the ultimate meaning of my own life? As we heard that question, the winds of our contemporary culture kept howling their answer: "Yes, of course! Of course I am the ultimate meaning 'of my own life! If not I, who else could be?" But now that yes is radically shaken and splinters into a clear no. The tree of my life is changed. I am no longer the ultimate July-Augwst 2002 Ascbenlrrenner ¯ Diocesan Priesthood meaning of my own life. Now my life's meaning is God's Love-- as promised and present in the risen Jesus. A new sun has risen, and it will never set. Now life becomes, more and more, fascination with this mysterious Beloved and radical openness and readiness for whatever that Love draws me to. Something has deepened and developed. An early seedling of religious intuition has become the fragile sprouting of a realization that by being tested becomes stronger and more deeply rooted. An early surmise and semiconscious intuition becomes a resolute desire of will. No tall grass shivering in the wind, but a tree, deeply rooted and still growing. This resolute desire shapes and casts our lives in love: first, God's ever faithful love in the risen Jesus and then our own love, our carefully discerned response of love. From now on, life is about love, at times tough love, but love nonetheless, and always. Make no mistake about that! In some important way, we are no longer in charge of our own lives. God is! Life is not yes to self, but yes to God, as shown in Jesus ("with him it was always yes," 2 Co 1:19). Facing Our Spontaneous Life Insofar as the countercultural movement to God's love has begun to take serious rooting in our heart, a second step beckons. Only honest facing of our inner spontaneous life makes it possible for us to find, in faith, trustworthy understandings about God. This statement is true, but it prescinds from the ingenuity of human consciousness for dishonest avoidance and selfish projection. We must learn, as best we can, to stand clear of these deceits and deceptions, whether conscious or unconscious, if we are to discern God's loving desire in our hearts. This is no easy matter, and invites the priest to an asceticism leading to truth and love. Sometimes this asceticism, always motivated by a growing desire to live in God's consoling love, will involve unlearning some previous training. An overly rationalistic view of Christian spirituality downplays, even scorns, the role of spontaneity and feeling, while on the other hand a supersensitivity to feeling and sentiment can smuggle into Christian spirituality a presumption that proclaims, sometimes quite unwittingly, that whatever we feel is God's will for us. In both of these instances, a previous Review for Religious learning must be honestly acknowledged, judged as incorrect, and gradually changed. As difficult as this change may seem, especially when the previously learned viewpoint has taken deep root, such a conversion is always possible for two reasons: first and foremost, the mystery of God's steadfast desire to get through to us and, second, our own soul's desire for ever greater radiance. If the priest stays in close touch with these two desires, he will be capable of whatever transformation is necessary because it will really be the work of the radiant Holy Spirit of God beckoning him beyond his own depth and into the realm of greater mystery in faith. A Wisdom of Interpretation in Faith In the process of the discernment I am describing here, for someone clearly turned toward God and honestly sensitive to the flow of inner spontaneity, the issue becomes a matter of meaning: Where is God in all of this? The answer requires a certain wisdom and ability to interpret. But interpretation could spring from any number of different vantage points, for example, from lived common sense, from majority cultural opinion, from professional human development, or from Christian faith. All of these different "wisdoms" might overlap to a small or large extent, but each would produce a different conclusion when used as the central focus of interpretation. In discernment the focus is profoundly one of Christian faith, a faith radiating with the experience of Jesus Christ and revealed in the Holy Spirit. How God is present here, now, offering a love beyond all loves--that is the central concern for a person turned toward and identified in God. As we have seen already, God is always present in all of our present historical world and in all of our spontaneous inner experience, but never simply and completely present to us. That treasure of a love beyond all value, that revelation of our own unique imitation of Jesus, must be sought in the mixture and confusion of our inner lives. An enlightenment of the Holy Spirit springing from our experience of God's faithful love alone--that is the gift needed at this point. Such enlightenment and wisdom differ subtly, though sharply, from enthusiastic generosity and simplistic sincerity. By themselves, without graced wisdom, these two qualities lack a North Star and can be dangerously ~Tuly-Au~st 2002 Aschenbrenner * Diocesan Priesthood misleading. The wisdom referred to here has a profound paschal orientation and is found more and more decisively present and operative in Jesus as he moves into the depths of his Passion all the way to Calvary and into his resurrected glory. This wisdom and enlightenment is hot the result of taking an academic course or reading a book. And it is not some sleight of hand or guesswork either. It is a grace the priest must pray for regularly. It has a firm context, and this helps the priest to be sure about the giftedness of his insight. The insight is tested in relation to the polestar of our identity in God's love. The. presence of the Holy Spirit is revealed in anything that conforms to our resolute desire to keep God's love, not self-love, as our focus. And anything that violates this focus is not an inspiration from God, but a nudge, large or small, toward self-idolatry. A pleasure-pain instinct in all of us tries to tilt us toward self-idolatry. This instinct of liking pleasure and fearing pain is understandable and healthy. But, when we let it assume a priority and centrality, when it becomes the focal light for our interpretation, then we become narcissistic. This pleasure-pain principle, in itself, is never fully identified with the paschal enlightenment of God's love. It was not so identified in the experience of Jesus. The pleasure-pain instinct did not plot his course to his beloved Father. Escaping 'the dominance of this instinct demands an asceticism. We are not to renounce this instinct pure and simple; rather, we renounce it as the polestar of our identity. Developing in faith our interpersonal relationship of love with God in the beauty of Jesus will not completely get rid of this instinct, but will weaken it. God's love ~n Jesus has become the treasure beyond all value, and what a grace it is to know indescribable pain when deprived of that treasure. To learn how to stand with Jesus, sometimes in pleasure and at other times in pain--this is the mature wisdom of a person consciously living in God's love. It is to claim the treasure intended by God before the foundation of the world: a radiant true self uniquely imitating the mystery of Jesus. Tactics for Intimacy with God The final step in this process is decisive tactics in accord with the paschal-faith interpretation of the previous step. For Review for Religious someone whose heart is resolutely set on following the lead of God's love, anything experienced as an incarnation of that love (often called consolation) is to be embraced, claimed, and lived, and anything that deflects us from God's love and toward self-idolatry (usually called desolation) is to be rejected and courageously withstood. In this step the issue is courage and decisive generosity, something possible only when illumined and strengthened by paschal wisdom. The issue is whether we will follow, and how wholeheartedly, the revelation of the Holy Spirit. This is the time for the soul's character to be healed and for faith to be annealed in the fire of the Holy Spirit. This process helps the hidden self grow strong, so that the priest can be a discerning presence in the midst of the people. Discernment, a life of mature spirituality, always acknowledges, distinguishes, and then interrelates three different dimensions of human existence: external behavior, what I call the core of the soul, and inner spontaneity. To develop and live out of the core of our true self is never easy, if possible at all in our post-modern world, but is always crucial for responsible, mature living in faith. Today's culture has great need of doctors of the soul who can facilitate the development of this core sense of true self through the integration of these three dimensions of human existence. Though our external behavior is perceptible and often consumes enormous energy, it is nothing more than a superficial part of our being. The activity on this stage poses a question of meaning, a question that it cannot itself answer even though it may seem to contain adequate answers for others and even ourselves. In our daily activity we touch and influence many people. As the New Testament reminds us, the activity of sincere loving reveals the genuineness of our faith. In the midst of our busy lives, the question often rises in our hearts: Are we simply what we do? Some careful reflection is needed to answer correctly and accurately. The question often rises in our hearts: Are we simply what we do? 2002 .~chenbrenner ¯ Diocesan Prie~thood A Hidden Self Grown Strong The soul's core is the unique and deepest part of every human person. This core plays a crucial role in the discovery of our true self in the beauty of Christ. A deep-hearted personal world, a treasure beyond value, is gradually revealed, acknowledged, and then laid claim to, though this whole process is much more one of receiving than of making. This inner core has a depth and a simplicity that is beyond words. As we grow in our appreciation of this personal center, its presence dawns, alluringly shrouded in mist and mystery. In the shifting mists of this mysterious realm, a noisy world is hushed. God breathes eternal love and life into this core of our soul moment by moment and on into eternity. This same creative love, unique to each of us, is in all of us. Our experience of God and of ourselves becomes ever more profound, personal, and unique. Even as you now read, this profoundly personal inner experience, this quiet steady conversation of love at our deepest core, gives the lie to feelings of suffocating loneliness. It gives the lie to the hateful notion that anybody is rotten to the core. Because of Jesus' love, a buried treasure, a pearl beyond pricing, a hidden self waits to be discovered in each human being, to be embraced, and to grow strong. Spontaneity takes place in the "skin" of our soul, in the rational and affective human experience of us all. As mentioned earlier, this experience of spontaneity conceals the deep treasure of our true self in Christ. These spontaneities of thinking and feeling may skitter across the skin of our souls, but do not touch the core. Spontaneities of impulse, image, and mood can flail and crackle and roar across our lives like an electrical storm. Such skitterings, such storms, coming and going, can bother or frustrate or enrage us. But they do, finally, pass. This level, spontaneous unintended experience, has the unpredictability of shifting sands and is not capable of the rock-like dependability of the core of the soul. This skin of the soul poses its own question: Are we simply and wholly identified by what we spontaneously think or feel? Though "what I feel" is never equal to "who I am," in the midst of a temporary storm we can all too easily judge otherwise. These spontaneities, though, really are on a different level. They are part of a process of integration, of coming to spiritual Review for Religious maturity, but they have their meaning only in relation to the soul's core. The presen.ce of these three dimensions of our persons and the four-step discernment process for integrating them should be familiar to the priest. Such integration is the way to mature faith and to appropriate activity that mature faith leads to. This integration is sometimes easy and obvious, sometimes confusing and excruciating. But doing it in love, doing it in our own unique imitation of Jesus' way of loving us, makes it possible, encouraging and strengthening us. This is the realm of service for a doctor of the soul. If the seminary communicates this and if it continues long after ordination, the result of this integration, this purification, will be like gold, bright and not sadly tarnished. To his service of their souls, the priest will bring a radiance that can illumine and develop the bright potential of their own lives. This radiance will be God's love shining from the face of the risen Jesus, still serving in our midst. Notes I George Aschenbrenner SJ, Quickening the Fire in Our Midst: The Challenge of Diocesan Priestly Spirituality (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002). 2 See George Aschenbrenner SJ, "A Hidden Self Grown Strong," in Handbook of Spirituality for Ministers, ed. Robert J. Wicks (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1995), pp. 228-248. "Hidden Self," pp. 236-240. In the Words of Meister Eckhart The soul loves the body tenderly, even when, like a child on edge, it runs rambunctious through desire collapsing at last and won&ring why. Maryanne Hannan ~Tuly-dugv~st 2002 ERNEST E. LARKIN Desert Spirituality Booth Christian Meditation and centering prayer come out f early monasticism, which itself is a development of desert spirituality? Christian Meditation is the prayer of the heart described by John Cassian, the historian of desert spiri-tuality, who brought the wisdom of the desert fathers and moth-ers of Egypt and the Middle East to the West. Centering prayer comes out of the Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century English text that enshrines the contemplative traditions of the desert. It is no accident that both these contemplative prayer forms came to us by way of Benedictine and Trappist monasteries. Desert spirituality was the beginning of Christian monasti-cism and the matrix out of which Western monks developed their lifestyle. Contemplative prayer was at the heart of their life, and desert spirituality was the context. This article proposes to examine those ancient traditions and adapt them to our times. Desert spirituality is a technical term that has biblical and early Christian roots. The desert experience is a staple of both the Old and the New Testaments, for example, in the Exodus story, in the life of Elijah and the prophecy of Hosea, in John the Baptist, the forty-day fast of Jesus, and the three-year novitiate of Paul in Arabia (Ga 1:17). This desert experience was devel-oped into a coherent spirituality by the desert fathers and moth- Ernest E. Larkin OCarm wrote for us twice in 2001. His address remains Kino Institute; 1224 East Northern; Phoenix, Arizona 85020. Review for Religious ers in the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Christian era. These fer-vent Christians fled to Egypt and the Middle East to escape the decadence of an effete Roman empire. The wastelands offered a stark and untrammeled setting for a life of penance and prayer. Its rugged emptiness and its silence and solitude invited the flight from the world OCuga mundi). A special appeal to heroic souls was the belief that the demons infested the wastelands and could be met there in open combat. It did not take long for the desert dweller to discover that the demons were within and to be engaged on the battleground of the soul. Life in the desert was simple. Manual labor broke the monotony of the silence and solitude of the cell and provided .its own asceticism as well as sustenance and something for almsgiving. Desert dwellers spent their days in soul searching and the pursuit of the living God. Community life, especially when the solitary life prevailed, and outreach in ministry were clearly sec-ondary and not really part of the inte-rior struggle. Continuous prayer was the focus, and the abbas and the ammas spent their time in lectio div-ina, reading the psalms and the breviary, celebrating liturgy, and cultivating the prayer of the heart. These are the main fea-tures of desert spirituality. In this setting Christian holiness was a kind of white mar-tyrdom, a total giving over of one's life to God, the shedding of all self-indulgence in favor of a single-minded search for God. The desert was a graphic symbol of the emptiness of life and the otherness of God. The emptiness translated into purity of heart, a heart freed from sinful affections and centered on God. Thus the beatitude that best sums up desert spirituality is "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God." Contemplation is the goal, and letting go of all lesser aims and surrender to the living God the condition. This general principle is abstract and can be lived out in an imaginary as well as a real desert. The desert as symbol universalizes desert spirituality as a possibility for everyone. There is, however, still place for the physical desert in ordinary Christian life. We examine this role The desert as symbol universalizes desert spirituality as a possibility for everyone. ]My-August 2002 Larkin ¯ Desert Spirituality in the next two sections of this paper, and we will return to the symbolic desert in the third section. Our first question is this: What can the desert do for me? In other words, why should I go out into the desert? The second question is a prophetic one: What can I do for a desert that is now under attack by the forces of neglect or consumerism? How do my efforts to protect the environment or my failure to participate affect my personal life? After these two reflections we will return to the overall princi-ple of desert spiritfiality, the call to emptiness and encounter with God. What Can the Desert Do for Me? In Scripture the desert is primarily the wasteland, and it leads to the garden of the promised land, the desert come to life, as in Isaiah 35:1-2: "The desert shall rejoice and blossom . The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon." Both the bleak image and the flowering one apply to the physical desert as we use the term today. The desert means the wilderness, the great outdoors. This includes barren wastelands like sand dunes or the scrubby flatlands of Texas or Arizona, but also verdant gardens, scenic forests, majestic moun-tains, and rolling plains. The desert is all the places on this beautiful earth that are still largely untouched by city sprawl and offer themselves as a refuge for weary people. These lands can be gift for our spirits. They refresh us and challenge us. They beckon us to "come aside and rest awhile," away from the noise and congestion of the city with its polluted air and harried traffic. The desert is the place to hike a trail, fish a stream, pic-nic with friends, or just smell the sage and be with one's long thoughts. " Except for some few families that have declared their inde-pendence and homesteaded in the wild and some rare hermits who have also settled there, people today only visit this desert; they do not dwell there. They go out for physical exercise and emotional refreshment, for meditation and for fun. They enter desert places hostile to human habitation very gingerly, armed with water jugs, proper sun gear, and ideally with companions. Some visit these "fierce landscapes" (Belden Lane) for excite-ment, others to deal with a crisis, a limit experience, a sorrow Review for Religious that overwhelms them. Perhaps unconsciously they are looking for an environment that mirrors their troubled soul. A good example of this kind of match between soul and terrain is a retreat for middle-aged men described in a recent publication.2 It was conducted by Richard Rohr and designed to help men from many walks of life through their midlife crisis. The retreat took place at Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico in the sum-mer of A.D. 2000. The men were challenged to let down their defenses and face themselves squarely. The retreat turned out to be a harrowing rite of passage. The torrid summer heat and the bleak lonely emptiness of the desert combined with soul-search-ing introspection and dramatic rituals to test the most stout-hearted. More often retreats or "a day in the desert" are spent in more friendly spaces. An attractive pastoral setting calms the soul and provides the quiet that people need for facing the real issues of their life. God seems closer in pristine settings. One popular formula for such outings is the poustinia, a concept pop-ularized by Catherine de Hueck Doherty. Poustinia means her-mitage, and folks become poustiniaks for a day, bringing along only a Bible and a bit of bread and cheese. The poustinia can actually be a back room or the attic of one's home, but there are advantages in going out to the woods or the seashore. Getting out in the country, breathing in the fresh air and fragrances of the meadows, walking around the lake or trudging along paths in hilly terrain, can be healthy physical exercise and spiritual refreshment. These are ways of slowing down, of refus-ing to be a couch potato and insuring the balance of mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). Grace builds on nature, so a healthy body and soul are a good basis for the life of God in us. A good health regime works directly against anx-ious, workaholic tendencies or the equally bad habit of inertia and laziness. Recreational activities also develop the playful side of our lives. This is our contemplative side. Visitors to the desert know that God is everywhere and that they do not have. to go up to the heavens or across the sea to find the word of God. "No," Deuteronomy says, "the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe" (Dt 30:11-14). But the desert facilitates the search. The wide open spaces, the silence and solitude, reveal God. July-August 2002 Larkin ¯ Desert Spirituality Silence is the best conta.ct point with God, since God is always present, though beyond speech, images, and concepts. The desert fosters this silence, this emptiness, the letting go of every-thing that is not of God. The desert is built for kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus, who was perfectly open to God and was therefore exalted with the pleroma, the fullness of the resurrec-tion (Ph 2:5-11). The desert way is the way of emptiness and fullness. These reflections belong to the first step on the spiritual journey, the appreciation of creation. Original blessing pre-ceded original sin, and immersion in creation and appreciation and love for this gift ought to precede the work of redemption. This is the thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, Francis Kelly Nemeck, and Marie Theresa Coombs. More recently Dorothee Soelle sees "being amazed" as the first of the three ways or stages of the spiritual life? Instead of the classi-cal ways of purification, illumination, and union, she proposes "being amazed, letting go, and resisting" as the three steps. Amazement and appreciation help us take an objective stance before the earth, and this makes it easier to let go, the second of the three ways for Soelle. This leads us to involvement, to compassion and commitment, regarding the world. She calls this resistance, because it involves working against the threats to the environment and society. That is to say, we resist and work for justice in all areas of life, such as the economic and the eco-logical orders. The unitive way calls to action as well as divine union. What Can I Do for the Desert? The work of saving the earth is a challenge and responsi-bility for people everywhere today. The call resonates among informed spiritual persons. They have listened to the new cos-mology presented by scientists like Brian Swimme and the "geologian" Thomas Berry, and they have heard the plaintive warnings of the environmentalists that the earth is wounded and in danger of collapsing. The universe has become part of today's spiritual journey. The whole universe and its crown, homo sapiens, are seen as one vast living organism in which they depend on each other and rise and fall together. In the past the Revieva for Religious earth was looked upon as an appendage of humanity. Humanity alone counted, and the rest of creation was expendable. Human beings pursued their own desires recklessly, without thought about the effects in the environment. They could trash the earth, abuse it or destroy it, without worry because there were always other virgin territories to exploit in the same way. This was an affront to creation; we see it now as an affront to human life as well, because, in the words of Edward Abbey, "the wilderness is not a luxury but a neces-sity of the human spirit just as vital to our lives as water and good bread.''4 The uni-verse is an integral part of our human life. We are partners, and we participate in growth or decline together. In the abuse or destruction of the universe, we are diminished and dehumanized. The commission in Genesis 1:26 to have "dominion" over the earth did not give humans the right to abuse it. We are only caretakers, not absolute owners; we cannot take the myopic view of looking for an immediate return in pleasure or profit with no thought about the long-term loss to creation and the short-changing of future human beings. One reviewer of Thomas Berry's latest book, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, quotes Berry and then adds some strong words of his own: "'What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world,' Berry avers. 'If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished.' Our inner being will die if we continue to transform natural beauty into the soul-deadening, concrete-laden, box-store landscapes of a consumer society." s The obligation to safeguard the environment has three aspects: personal, societal, and spiritual. Each person needs to treat the desert with love and respect. Some of that concern is cosmetic, like cleaning up after using the land and properly dis-posing of the debris, especially nonbiodegradable material. Respect and moderation mean that we do not harm the plant life by careless trampling, that we obey rules about camp fires and camping, that we leave the natural beauty intact without pil-fering plants or otherwise harming the vegetation, that we Each person needs to treat the desert with love and respect. July-Aug;ust 2002 Larkin ¯ Dese~t Spirituality carefully control toxic substances like pesticides or poisonous chemicals. These are cominonsense suggestions. The societal obligation may take the form of joining groups like the Sierra Club that are dedicated to the environment, or of lending one's name to, say, Robert Redford's campaign to save the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Systemic problems can be addressed only by group action that can effect structural changes. We need to support these causes. There is no other way to stop the pollution of our waterways and atmosphere, to keep indugtrial wastes out of our rivers and lakes, to find ade-quate ways of dealing with nuclear waste, to stop the destruction of the ozone layer, to save the rain forests and wetlands, and to halt the woefully unbalanced overconsumption by the few. Elizabeth Johnson writes: "Every year, the twenty percent of Earth's people in the rich nations use seventy-five percent of the world's resources and produce eighty percent of the world's waste." 6 There is a special spiritual component today because of the crisis in saving the earth. Time is running out, and experts say that there are only twenty-five or thirty years left to turn the destructive spiral around. The problems are over-whelming, and the laborers are few. We can organize and we can work, but the odds are against us. At such times we need overt divine help. Specifically the challenge is to pray con-templatively, to face the societal impasse which Constance FitzGerald, in a famous article several years ago, connected with the dark night of St. John of the Cross: The dark night occurs as impasse in all sectors of human life, whether prayer, human relationships, or societal renewal. One response to impasse is trusting acceptance, silence before God, and lov-ing surrender, which bring wisdom and strength and which are qualities of contemplative prayer. We take our insoluble problems to God. We wait with faith and trust, ready to spring into action in changing what we can deal with and accepting what we cannot change. Contemplative prayer is an admission that our problems may be beyond human resources. But our prayer is full of hope, because contem-plation may stretch our imagination and inspire new creative ways of dealing with the problem. Solid prayer will certainly strengthen our resolve to continue the struggle. The popu- Review for Religious larity of contemplative prayer in our time may well be con-nected with the magnitude of the problems of this age. Desert Spirituality in Its Purest Form We return now to the traditional meaning of desert in the spiritual life, namely, desert as physical place and as symbol. The desert of the first abbas and aromas was the real wasteland. Anthony and Pachormus spurned the fleshpots of the Roman cities and went to the bleak deserts of Egypt to be alone with God and to keep careful watch over the movements of their hearts. The purity of heart they sought meant that they tried to choose only the good, to do everything right, in perfect measure, for the right reasons. They prayed and fasted to put to death the old man within themselves, so that the new man could come alive. They underwent this discipline for one reason: They wanted to see God. This goal was not face-to-face vision, as heaven will be (1 Jn 3:1-3); nor was it seeing God as an object, the way I see a person in front of me. Neither was it simply a new understanding, a new image of God, or a new perception. It was a seeing that meant presence, companionship, walking with God. It was contemplative union with God. Contemplation follows purity of heart as night follows day. We have a window into the thinking of the desert fathers and mothers in the first conference of John Cassian.s The imme-diate objective of life in the desert was purity of heart; this he called the skopos (English "scope"). The skopos is oriented to a further good, which he calls the telos, the end or final purpose. An example of these two aspects of human endeavor is the life of the farmer. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the seed, hoes and manures the field. All this is his immediate task, his sko-pos. But he does it all with a view to the harvest, which is the telos, the real purpose of his work. If the skopos of life in the desert is purity of heart, the telos is the fullness of the kingdom of God, the resurrected life. This program of seeking perfect purity of heart in order to find God can be applied to every Christian life. Purity of heart-- as freedom from every actual sin and as right relationships with self, others, the world, and God--is the immediate task of the daily struggle. Purity of heart is more than chastity; it is all the Larkin ¯ Desert Spirituality Purity of heart is all the virtues in perfect integration. virtues in perfect integration. This marvelous condition is often set in negative terminology. It is called detachment, or indif-ference, or freedom from sinful habits. But it is a very positive condition identified with biblical faith. This faith is the response to the word of God wherever it is recognized. It is the faith of the Virgin Mary in St. Luke's Gospel. At the annunciation, for example, she is perturbed at the angel Gabriel's message. How can she, a committed virgin, be the mother of the Messiah? When the angel assures her that God will provide, she gives her full assent to that word. She lets go of her own project in favor of God's word. A high degree of purity of heart means a heart full of faith. It means a heart full of love. The pure of heart are loving per-sons. They will see God, that is, they will know and love God, as described in the First Letter of John: "Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love . No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us" (1 Jn 4:7-8, 12). For the desert fathers and mothers and espe-cially for theologians like Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa, see-ing God meant contemplation. This gift was the reward for the purification, and it consisted in experiencing union with God. This contemplation was not one particular experience, nor an altered state of consciousness. It came out of transformation. By allowing one's life to be brought under the movement of the Holy Spirit, one was born a new person, a "new creation" (2 Co 5:17). This new creature lived in the world of God and expe-rienced God in the whole gamut of his or her worldly occupa-tions. Contemplation was thus a way of life, not a particular experience. The Carmelite Application The evolution of desert spirituality suggested in this paper has special reference to Carmelite history. Carmel came out of Review for Religious the desert, born on Mount Carmel, home to the Old Testament prophet Elijah and to hundreds of hermits at the time of the Crusades. The Carmelites were one group of such hermits; they sought a rule of life from the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Albert of Avogadro, who held the office between 1206 and 1214. The result was the Rule of St. Albert, a contemplative and eremitical document that was simple, practical, and eminently scriptural. The tides of politics and war, however, forced the Carmelites to leave their sacred mountain and go back to Europe as early as 1238. The eremitic style of life underwent change in the direction of community and ministry, eventually making the order a mendicant one like the Dominicans and Franciscans. One of the early general superiors, Nicholas the Frenchman, tried to stem the move to the city. In 1270 he wrote a strong let-ter, called "The Fiery Arrow," calling the men to return to the desert. But the mendicant form of life had struck a chord in their hearts. They continued to foster their contemplative long-ing, but now they carried the desert in their hearts. The desert was a symbol now rather than the physical reality. A second charter of the order, called the Institution of the First Monks, dated 1370 and written by a Catalonian Carmelite, Philip Ribot, presented a symbolic life of Elijah and the example of the Blessed Mother as both a description and a defense of the new lifestyle. The book incorporated the thinking of John Cassian, especially on the structure of the religious life as the search for purity of heart and contemplation. The desert spirituality of Mount Carmel was adapted now to an active apostolic life. Henceforth Carmelite spirituality was at home in communities of active religious and lay people as well as cloistered contem-platives. The reform of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross two centuries later built on this document and renewed and perfected the eremitical-contemplative ideal of Carmel. They did so, not only by promoting desert houses of total contem-plative life, but by organizing a way in which every Carmelite house could be, in the words of a great Carmelite of the next century, John of St. Samson, another Mount Carmel. The desert spirituality of Carmel's beginnings had become democratized and available to all who espouse the ideals of the Carmelite tradition. 3 73- --- July-August 2002 Larkin ¯ Desert Spirituality Notes t Christian Meditation and centering prayer are two popular forms of contemplative prayer, designed by John Main OSB and the Trappists at Spencer, Massachusetts, respectively, the former promoted by the World Community of Christian Meditation under Laurence Freeman OSB and the latter by Contemplative Outreach, whose leader is Thomas Keating OCSO. 2 Donal O'Leary, "High Noon at Ghost Ranch," Furrow 52 (January 2001): 27-35. 3 Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), pp. 88-93. 4 Cited from his Desert Solitaire by Thomas J. McCarthy, "The Ultimate Sanctum," America (9 April 2001): 6. s Stephen Bede Sharper, "A New Heaven and a New Earth," Christian Spirituality Bulletin 8 (Fall-Winter 2000): 15. 6 "God's Beloved Creation," America (16 April 2001): 9. 7 "Dark Night as Impasse," in Living with Apocalypse, ed. Tilden Edwards (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984). s Conferences, of John Cassian, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), pp. 37-43. Devotion I am twelve, have read of the child Virgin martyrs, and decide it is High time I practice such virtue. At My next confession, after the usual Childhood sins, I say I want to Vow myself to God like a saint. The Assistant pastor, thinking fast, replies That at present I don't know The vocation God has chosen For me, but I may promise him My chastity until I take that vow, Or those of marriage. Satisfied, I rejoice in God's favor, and Make my promise. Mary Hanson Review for Religious BARBARA ZAJAC Three Forms of Community Living: A Survey Report For much of the 20th century, sisters who performed charitable service works lived in convents near the institutions they served. As missions and roles changed after the Sister Formation Conference (1950s) and Vatican Council II (1960s), so did the living arrange-ments, often necessitated by travel considerations. Congregations such as these had called themselves "communities" when they held common missions and residences, and they continue to use this term today even though--wearing few or no common ~ymbols, ministering in widely diverse occupations, and residing in locales favorable to their mission assign-ments- many are barely identifiable as members of a group of sisters. Puzzled that this topic received little attention in sociological literature aside from Wittberg's analyses (see Bibliography), I found myself raising several research questions about the meaning of "community." Does it mean a location-based entity? A process? A set of relationships? A task force? A par-ticular goal or ideal toward which people strive? As part of a larger study (Zajac, 1999b), I studied Barbara Zajac first contributed to our pages in 1999. Her current address is Department of Sociology; Indiana State University; Terre Haute, Indiana 47809. July-Aug£ust 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living one religious order of apostolic sisters. Though from their founding the group provided chiefly educational and medical services, individual sisters now select their own mission assign-ments, which include traditional teaching and parish pastoral work, professional careers such as psychologist and speech pathologist, and social activism and feeding the homeless and hungry. Throughout California over a two-year period (1995 and 1996), fifty members of this congregation were interviewed indi-vidually and in-depth. Although the sample was volunteer and purposive, it is considered fairly ~:epresentative of the order in general (see Zajac, 1999a). Additional information was obtained from the group's monthly magazinE, religious periodicals, and selected participant observation. The group is given the pseudonym Sisters of Reconciliation of JesusI (SRJ). Similarly, individual names and identifying factors have been disguised or altered. What Community Means It is evident that there is no widespread consensus about the word community. Putting feelings into words was difficult for the sisters, and they responded in words they were comfortable using. Some began with what I would call generalized notions of community, and others described what community involves or how it can be formed and lived. Still others spol~e of mani-festations of community and of how community is maintained. Nearly everyone cited some of the qualities I will describe under manifestations of community. Anything approaching near agreement on most of the gen-eralized notions of community was absent. Some sisters attached the term to a specific location, while others denied the impor-tance of a spatial component. Some described community as an ongoing process that is never completed, or as an ability, agree-ment, or commitment. Others mentioned the people involved and the human connections among them. A number of the sis-ters spoke of community as a bond or tie among people, a togetherness, while others used such phrases as "a living-out of the vows," "a unanimity of vision and purpose," and "the charism [of the Sisters of Reconciliation] lived out." Regarding Review for Religious the often mentioned familial nature of community, there was much disagreement. Some denied that it is a family, some described it as "like" a family, and others claimed that it is "more than" a family. Certain sisters told me they think community involves notions of struggle, being invested in the group or having a sense of ownership about it. Some explained the factors by which they create for themselves a sense of "community," ger-mane to the can-be-done category. While at least one sister cited similar ministry as the key to community, others thought the key is personal characteristics such as being open to others, try-ing to understand them, and being thoughtful, prayerful, and considerate. Many said that much communication is needed, and a great deal of give-and-take, exemplified in being open to others, trying to understand them, and allowing for the flow of communication, with its misunderstandings, disagreements, and concurrences. Others talked of the mechanisms by which community can be sustained, such as living or working together, "making it happen," or constantly articulating the meanings. The latter suggestions are rather nonspecific, but the next item is quite different. Certain sisters told me they think community involves notions of struggle. Manifestations of Community Nearly everyone listed one or two qualities in the category called manifestations ofcommunity. A good many used a small number of emotionally laden terms, heartfelt terms: empathy, interconnectedness, sharing. Others used different words, but their intent seemed similar enough that I could not justify putting their statements elsewhere. Examples of this are "living together, not singly" and "working on things together." In this "manifestations" category many talked of the people they encountered, or of the work as being a continual process; some continued an articulation of "what community means to me." Human behaviors and interactions, with their sentiments July-August 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living and attitudes, make up the heart of community. Empathy is expressed especially through concern and caring, through notic-ing and having interest in others. One person termed this a "feeling for" others, and many called it "support." Such senti-ments are displayed in such particular behaviors and actions as showing respect and appreciation or at least acceptance; if not, the reality of the sentiments is questionable. If empathy is pre-sent and expressed, the members of a group develop and main-tain an interconnectedness, an interdependence, a mutual sense of belonging. They develop a social solidarity. Empathy, empathic behavior, and interdependence work together in what is called sharing, which seems to be central. Nearly all the sisters interviewed mentioned the sharing of something, whether faith or prayer, tasks, worldly goods, help-ful services, or expressions of caring support. Sharing faith and the spiritual life was mentioned most frequently, and, along with it, the emotional support this sharing provided. Things like housework, goods, and ministry are shared differently, depending on the specific living arrangements (to be described shortly). The sharing of spirituality and various works rein-forces caring sentiments and behaviors and the sense of being interdependent. It is through sharing even ordinary things that crucial personal connections are created and sustained. Representative Community Groupings Three types of community living groups will be described: a self-named "intentional" community, what I term a residen-tial community, and a community of one. These are composite portraits. They do not describe every type of living situation, but seem representative of the arrangements of active Sisters of Reconciliation. Intentional Community "House of Peace" is the sign next to the doorbell of a large house in a run-down neighborhood of the central city where poverty is endemic and violence is the norm. The home of five SRJs, this intentional:community was formed with express pur-poses in mind. The sisters deliberately chose its location amid Review for Religious widespread desolation in order to identify with and serve the poorest people of the city. The members were selected for their personal and professional qualities, namely, a desire for an intense spiritual life and an unwavering dedication to the mis-sion of the Sisters of Reconciliation in serving the city's need-iest people. There are five regular residents. Sister Elaine Sherman runs a transitional housing program for homeless families. Sister Mary Anne coordinates the sisters' social-justice efforts. Sister Ruth Patrick, retired from a full career of teaching, daily trav-els twenty miles each way to where she cooks and serves meals to transients. Sister Bertina Marie, who is bilingual, is a com-munity activist and pastoral minister in the Spanish-speaking community. Sister Jane Th~r~se, who has not yet taken her final vows in religious life, teaches religion in a local Catholic high school and hopes to study divinity in the future. The house is also the home base of a sister working in a residential house for adolescents and of sisters visiting temporarily from mission lands or elsewhere. Sister Ruth Patrick, the oldest sister and the one longest in the SRJs, was the driving force for starting this new house. She had been aware of the brewing turbulence in religious life since the 1950s and thought then that the sisters ought to be living more adult lives than was possible while rigidly observing detailed rules and daily schedules in sequestered convents. She wanted to live out her own values explicitly, holding prayer in common, sharing with the poor, living very simply, and being concerned about others and accountable to them. And so she looked for sisters that she felt had a strong sense of the SRJ mis-sion and were dedicating their lives to living it. She looked for sisters who knew themselves well and.knew what would equip them well for their ministries. She looked for sisters who were aware of what would personally empower them and what might drain them of apostolic energy. She looked for sisters who were willing to give support to others and to receive it as well. Such sisters she approached with her proposal. Perhaps most important, these women must be open to new forms of prayer such as sharing of the heart rather than recit-ing formulaic prayers at specified hours. This prayer involves common reading of a passage from the Bible' and then individ- July-August 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living ual reflection and comment on what the reading means to each one, how it applies to her own life. It demands a willingness to be open and vulnerable to other people. This sharing of faith and spirituality is not for everyone. Some older sisters, in par-ticular, have been reluctant to engage in it. Now, when a new member wishes to join the house, she comes and talks with the existing group about her hopes and ex.pectations for common life. She learns that, in addition to sharing faith and emotional support, the group divides up the house chores, such as bookkeeping and paying the bills, shopping for food and preparing meals, cleaning and yard work. She learns that she is to live on the allotted personal budget and to reserve some of that money to support foreign missionaries. She learns that "one person's guest is every person's guest" here. Although a sister may dislike or resent such an interview before being admitted to a new house, she needs to remind herself that the present residents consider it crucial that new residents know and agree to support these values and their explicit expression. Sister Elaine, who came to religious life through her vol-unteer work and not directly from her Catholic schooling, explains more about this group's dynamics~ Although they min-ister in diverse fields with varied schedules, they reserve one night a week as their community night, when all will be present for prayer, eating, and sharing. Her social-work background leads her to describe the difficulty of working with people "who are blocked up" by past traumas or interpersonal issues. This form of life, this "microcosm of society," is a difficult life to live. It must enable sisters to go out and minister to the world. They must learn to be communicative and must get to know each other's histories. Since there are various workable arrangements for getting through days cooperatively and smoothly, the sisters must con-tinually strive to accommodate themselves to the others in the group. Sister Elaine thinks that an all-female group can be "really beautiful and powerful or really terrible," depending on how they handle interpersonal relations. The key thing, in her experience, is to keep talking to each other and "not whine." She admits that she had to learn some of these things herself in community living and that it is still sometimes difficult to keep her own "space." She is one of those who prefer not to talk to Review for Religious anyone for a few minutes after arising in the morning, so she now showers at this time to maintain her internal quietude. Pastoral ministry to the poor and immigrant Spanish-speak-ing community is Sister Bertina Marie's specialty. While her day is occupied with teaching English as a second language and running a community center with various offices and activities (Head Start, legal clinic, medical outreach services, and chil-dren's programs), she is an integral member of the House of Peace. Seeking more ways to live out the SRJ vision, charism, and values, its members extend love and hospitality to sur-rounding neighbors. The sisters offer their house as a site for Neighborhood Watch and other meetings. They make sure that flowers are always growing in their yard to symbolize nonvio-lence in a locale where drugs, gangs, and hostilities abound. Sister Bertina Marie stresses the integration of the house goals with individual ministries: all identify with and serve the poor, value deep prayer life in common, and support others with goods and hospitality. Sister Mary Anne, the government-affairs coordinator for the congregation, spends her.time researching, writing, lobby-ing, and educating people about political issues that affect the poor. Working for such structural change where results come slowly if at all is for many an enervating and thankless task. She talks of recognizing one's own needs as well as those of others, and of balancing community life with ministry. She speaks from experience. At one time she held a position that "totally consumed" her. She thought she was in a vocation crisis and should perhaps leave the community. She was so burned out that she" had nothing to give to anyone and did not even want to "bring Jesus" to the people she worked with. An extended retreat, however, provided her with reflection time to realize it was her ministerial position that needed to be changed, not her SRJ affiliation. Now she highly values living with oth-ers who think as she does, all of them giying and getting real emotional and spiritual support. "Community has been a gift to me," she recalls, mention-ing the friends she has made and how they "move together in growth." She says she was one of the first to propose and pio-neer small-group living and that her experience with eight oth-ers proved its value for her. Being honest with each other and .~tuly-August 2002 Zajac * Three Forms of Community Living "I'm not accepted just because I'm capable. I can be a failure and I'm still loved." sharing their deepest values were what she had been seeking. When all members had the "same thirst for God and the desire to live out a faith life in mission," they found they did not fight over little things, but rather worked them out, a quality that is sometimes missing in residential communities. The youngest member of the House of Peace commun!ty is Sister Jane Th4r~se, thirty-something, planning to take her final vows within a year. She was attracted to this house for sev-eral reasons besides its location near where she teaches religion to inner-city children. She was pleased that there were a vari-ety of ages together there and liked their outreach to the neigh-borhood. As a newer SRJ, she appreciated this group's willingness to work with younger members and pass on wisdom and insight from their experience. Sister Jane Th4r~se cites a sentence to describe the com-munity's value to her, a line from the SRJ constitution: "With the strength that comes from our life together, we turn to serve the world in need." "This was not only memorized," she says, "it was lived." She remarks that the constitution holds that SRJs share "all that we have and are," including personal uncertainties, frailties, and inabilities, all of which she knows firsthand. Before her current ministry she was locked into a miserable sit-uation where she had no power or auth.ority. She says that, although her sisters in this local community were in no position to give her help or even offer constructive criticism, speaking about her difficulties and receiving support in return were cru-cial to her fulfilling that assignment. Such unconditional accep-tance comes from being a member of the community. She says, "I'm not accepted just because I'm capable. I carl be a failure and I'm still loved." The ability to be vulnerable and to share one another's gifts helps her "to find God active in the world." In addition to these regular residents, House of Peace is also the local community for Sister Mary Kimball, a member of the SRJs of the East Coast. In Califoi'nia to gain experience in a new ministry, she runs a home for truant and delinquent high Review for Religious school girls who show academic or other creative potential. Because this ministerial unit requires her live-in presence, she affiliates with the House of Peace local community. Ordinarily she will be there every Monday evening to share dinner, prayer, and occasional social activities. Being a member of this group keeps her from feeling isolated and abandoned and allows her to give and get support within the context of her commitment to the mission of the SRJs. Residential Community The convent of St. Junipero Serra sits amid a pleasant res-idential neighborhood in the west side of the city. Next to the Catholic church and school, it once housed sisters of the con-gregation responsible for running the school. Now no sisters teach there. Not needed for parish activities, the building is rented to the SRJs for a reasonable fee. The residential com-munity is home to seven SRJs engaged in various ministries; the youngest is in her forties, and two are semiretired. This convent is run by group government, explains Sister William Joseph, who teaches math at Sacred Heart College for Women, established by the SRJs. Group government, originally an experimental form of living, applies now to almost all resi-dential groups and means participatory decision making in mat-ters that involve all members. The group collectively determines the extent of common prayer life, shared meals, other domes-tic activities, and group celebrations. "Respect" and "acceptance" are two words frequently heard in this group because, as one explains, "not all things can be shared well." This group has decided to share morning prayers Mondays through Fridays, and to gather one evening a week to share experiences and discuss the business of the larger con-gregation. They support the large community of sisters at events and serve as a "presence" in the parish. The group evening may be for holiday celebrations or indi-vidual birthdays or religious feast days. At the time of Sister William Joseph's interview in early January, there was a tall dec-orated Christmas tree in the common living room where we talked. She told me that this community would be celebrating its Christmas that evening, exchanging gifts. During the previ- July-August 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living ous week, all were out visiting their families, so a common celebration was postponed. Sister William Joseph was one of those who did not want to break up the convent into smaller residential groups in the 1970s. She has always appreciated the exposure to many other sisters and did not wish to lose contact with those she might not encounter in her ministry or in small-group living. She says she has always had to "stretch herself" for others, but adds that this is part of the commitment they make to each other. Similar is her opinion of all the congregational events this house supports; she really does not care for so many meetings and events, but attends as part of the duty she upholds. Sister Adia Marie Buckley, too, is involved in academics. An administrator at the same college, she speaks about reli-gious- life community a little differently. "Although there must be people with whom one lives and with whom one must main-tain friendly relations," she says, "community extends to much more than this." She explains the kinship sense she feels with the broad congregation of other SRJs in the United States and else-where in the world, and with affiliate members, former mem-bers, and sisters in other orders. Sister Catherine Tivnan, who runs an office at the congre-gational headquarters, explains why she chose this house: "They're kind of middle-of-the-roaders, and I thought I'd fit in with them. I thought this was what I was looking for in peo-ple, for not heavy-duty intensive living, but just a nice, com-fortable place where I would fit in and would be accepted." By "not intensive" she explains that in some places there are peo-ple who "dissect everything and practically have a magnifying glass on everything you say and do." She says she does not mind such psychological probing on occasion, but cannot take a steady diet of it. She gives an example. A sister with whom she used to live would read every article in the Sunday newspaper and then want to discuss it with anyone in the room at the time. Eventually Sister Catherine would explicitly refuse to talk with her. She preferred to look at the paper rather quickly and then move on to other activities like walking by the beach or going to a movie. Sister Elizabeth Conan is a registered nurse and medical instructor who teaches away from home two or three evenings Review for Religious a week. Dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a plaid shirt, she tells me that she does less of the cooking for the house than some oth-ers because of her split work schedule. Her family also occupies her attention for about one day a month because of some difficult illness. She loves spending time with her sisters in com-munity, however, including their times of play. She likes to barbecue in good weather, and she says that at times she will just put out a sign-up sheet shortly beforehand, rather than planning everything well in advance. "Dressed to the teeth" was the impression Sister Margaret de Lorca made when I met her in her office at the parish hall. She explains that, coming from an artistic family, she had always enjoyed the use of color in her surroundings, although she did not wear it during many years of teaching in the traditional habit. Working part-time now, Sister Margaret works in religious edu-cation, organizing prayer groups, directing occasional retreats, and providing individual spiritual direction. She tells me that the sisters have common prayer in the house at 6:10 a.m. Monday through Friday. They initially prayed together in the evenings, but found it too difficult because of their divergent schedules. She contrasts living here in a small group with living in the congregational center, which is home to about a hundred sisters and was her home for two years. Even though residents here have to work to find time to be together, it takes a lot less energy to relate to this group than it would to everyone in the large community. Life was stressful for her there because, in walk-ing down a hallway, she would commonly encounter ten or twelve different people. By the time the tenth person said "How are you, Sister Margaret?" she would be exhausted. She is "not an extrovert," but also "not a strong introvert," so daily relations with six other people are plenty for her. Another member of this group is Sister Margot Monroe, an educational psychologist who does counseling for individ-ual schools and has a private practice for handicapped children. The sisters have common prayer in the house at 6:10 a.m. Monday through Friday. July-dugv~st 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living Though she loved the children she encountered in her teaching career, she became frustrated by the time required for extracur-ricular events like sports and cheerleading. She wonders if the congregation made a mistake leaving teaching en masse, and thinks the sisters should have taken more risks in starting new schools and programs.' She also expressed her frustration about the church, where "the hierarchy has not accepted our SRJ growth" and women religious are "only tolerated in the church and not really accepted." This leaves her in the painful posi-tion of being more removed from general church affairs than she would like to be. She feels similarly frustrated in her residential community, where not all have grown theologically and personally to the extent she has. Some of the sisters are not accustomed or very open to sharing, which she finds particularly "life-giving." "People can fulfill all their responsibilities," she explains, "and still not share who they really are." Although she tries to encourage certain ones to be more open, she does it in a gen-tle manner. Still, she finds this group to be a little shallow: "I feel I have community with the people I live with, but it's rather superficial. We're nice to each other. Our horarium for the day is not problematic at all, but I wish we had a depth of sharing that would bring us all to a different place." She believes, however, that living in this house is a trade-off. These people are not her best friends, of which she hag a num-ber outside this convent. While she gains depth and stimula-tion from her outside friendships, here she has the freedom and flexibility to come and go as she pleases without making com-mitments for large blocks of personal time and energy. The final resident of this group is also semiretired. Sister Patricia Louise, in her nineties, likes to cook and works in the parish food pantry. She says that "the diversity of ministry now militates against close community life," which they had when all worked together. This way is "harder but healthier"; it keeps people in contact with diverse fields and offers stimulating con-versation. She says: "It used to be that, if you all taught in the same elementary school, your conversation was always about families in the school, problem kids, what was going on in the parish. But this way we also know what is going on at the col-lege, at the high school, and at the hospitals." Review for Religious Despite their interdependence in the common life, how-ever, they are independent about their use of free time. She says that everyone is very "embedded" in what she is doing on her own and that not living with one's best friends is really an advantage. She adds that she never wanted a residence that was "like a hotel" and prefers the interdependence she finds here. Even though these women do not have "a lot of involvement with each other, what they do has value." A Community of One Sister Zo~ Warnercalls herself "a community of one" because no other sisters live or work with her and she does not have weekly contact with members of her congregation. Fifteen years ago she went out on her own with the blessing of the com-munity (but no funding) to create St. Martin's Children's Center, a temporary residential and resource center for children in fam-ilies undergoing major upheavals in their lives. Like an available set of grandparents, this center can care for up to fifteen chil-dren for a maximum of thirty days each, although the staff tries to restrict it to fewer children and shorter periods of time. Sister Zo~ lived in this large residence with a dog as her sole com-panion while the structure underwent remodeling and opera-tions eventually got underway, and she still lives there. Her purpose in inhabiting the building before its operation was to become a "presence" in the town and to begin to get a "community focus" on the center. She is referring not to the SRJ community now, but to the neighborhoods, businesses, and voluntary groups which support the center's activities. Her strat-egy evidently worked, because, as people came to know her and her plans, they wanted to participate and give support in vari-ous ways. One measure of that support is financial. Sister Zo~ "lives on faith" to provide the center's operating expenses of almost a half million dollars a year, because it has no regular income. Contributions tend to be sporadic yet somehow ade-quate for their needs. She says: "The Lord provides when we need it. from the little things to the big things . We just watch the mailbox and say our prayers. We have never run out of money or closed our doors due to lack of funds." Although she hopes to obtain the services of a part-time grant writer later July-Auffust 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living "Community is the same as its core. I am a sister from the core of my being." this year, she has done this and all other duties herself, includ-ing caring for the children and teaching life skills to the parents. Although a few Sisters of Reconciliation have come to work with her for brief periods over the years, Sister Zo~ now sees none of them frequently. Yet her connection to the SRJs is strong, and "our sisters., very much know I'm a community member." She explains that her SRJ area superior holds general gatherings three or four times a year and maybe a day of prayer once in a while. By participating in these activities and attend-ing the funerals of older sisters, Sister Zo~ carries the SRJ charism with her and uses it to create a sense of community with whomever she is working: "There's something I have learned., that, no matter where you go, you bring the sisters with you or you bring your experience of community." In addition to SRJ gatherings and ministry associates, Sister Zo~ has a couple of good friends she sees regularly. One of these is a nun from another congregation; the other is a priest friend. This little group frequently celebrates Sunday Mass in the residence of the non-SRJ, and they sometimes follow it with a potluck dinner, occasionally bringing in other friends or neigh-bors. She had to create this new sense of community herself, however, and she attributes this ability to her long-standing experiences with the SRJs: "By coming out here, community wasn't provided for me. I had to create it, and I used the skills, the tools, the experiences that I had had for all those years. to create a life that was community-oriented. But I had to take the reins and take the initiative and have it happen." Would she like more contact with other SRJs? She says that, although she does not require it, she would welcome another sis-ter if one were to want to live and work with her, and perhaps this new person would help care for her when she gets "old." She emphasizes, "Community is not based on the number of times you see people, but on the feelings and interests to see, hear, and share with others." She also takes he~" identity as an SRJ seriously, having followed the advice of her novice mistress never to abbre-viate the word sister, but always to write it out as part of her name Review for Religious and identity. Sister ZoE puts this together with her feelings about community: "Community is the same as its core. I am a sister from the core of my being, and I am a Sister of Reconciliation." "Good" and "Bad" Community Some sisters gave examples of either "good" or "bad" com-munity experiences, which sometimes held more feeling than the brief descriptive words suggest. One sister said that real community spirit was truly shown when her very good friend died suddenly. She received about a hundred sympathy cards, which told her that the loss of this friend was about more than "my private grief." Another sister described spending some time at a residential therapeutic community for religious congrega-tions. The therapy included the sharing of their life stories, a "first" for this particular sister, where the sharing of those "sad and joyful feelings" created a strong bond within the group. Still another told of the difficult period when she lost her job because of organizational restructuring, but still had had the full support of the community: "I was very glad I was a com-munity woman because otherwise I would have had to get a lawyer. In community I just shared what happened, and they journeyed with me through it." Sister MaryJoyce described her experiences in one of the first experimental communities of group government in 1969. In this new group for which everyone had volunteered, there were between ten and fifteen sisters at various times over several years, and they were trying out new approaches to teaching as well as living. This situation was "life-giving": the participants were all "high energy" types and risk takers as well. They all cared for each other and the outside world, and were concerned about where people were with God, faith, and prayer. Sister Kathryn Ann described something similar. When her ministry took her away from others in her own order, she lived in an apartment house that people came to call The Nunnery because in addition to herself there were six sisters from another con-gregation, a priest, and a brother, all in individual apartments. Although they "lived singly" and ministered in different places, they got together frequently for prayer, meals, and Mass, often signaled by a knock on the wall. July-Angvtst 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Living 3.90 Sister Mary Magdalene has had her share of feeling less than appreciated by other SRJs, yet had a wonderful experience when she lived in a rural area with three other sisters, all teachers, who endured together the crisis of the school's closing. Although one of them was the principal of the school and also the supe-rior of the convent, they interacted as equals and "were just peo-ple together," frequently cooking and sharing meals on the weekends in an era when most convents still had cooks. Although they were together in the school, they also spent outside time together, but "it wasn't mandated. It was a choice we were mak-ing." This relaxed atmosphere where everyone's talents were recognized was contributed to by a pastor who was supportive and friendly and occasionally took them all out to dinner. Another sister, Sister Peg, described an aspect of her first job as a hospital chaplain. Living in an apartment across the street from the hospital, she provided hospitality for visiting sisters and especially those recuperating from surgery or illness. The informality and spontaneous "ease with which the sisters moved in and out of my life" was an exciting and fulfilling period. These positive experiences of community do not necessar-ily require other sisters or vowed people. Sister Benita Rogers shared one such experience when she was leaving an ethnically mixed parish that she had brought together over a number of years. Addressing a large parish group, Sister Benita, who does not speak Spanish, expressed her desire that perhaps now the diocese would assign a bilingual person as her replacement. A Hispanic man stood and spoke for the group: "It doesn't mat-ter whether or not you can speak Spanish. You have the corazon, the heart. That's how you've communicated. You've read us with your heart." It is the major congregational gatherings, however, that sev-eral sisters cited as the "best expression" of community spirit. One of these celebrations is the Congregational Days, when all sisters from the West come together with former sisters as well as affiliate members to celebrate the SRJs as a whole. The other is the jubilee celebration, held anr~ually on the feast day of their patron. Families and friends are invited to participate in the joyful celebration of the anniversaries of their vows as Sisters of Reconciliation. Among these hundreds of people there is a won- Review for Religious derful "spirit that you can almost touch." Everyone feels a part of this group energy and spirituality. It leads people to say that "the most profound experience of community is to experience us praying together." Although Sister Rafaela says she "has never had a bad com-munity experience," this is not the case for many sisters. Sisters described instances where they felt alienated, isolated, or at least not fully appreci-ated in the community, both in their local group and in the larger group. Often the difficulty stemmed from some-one's personality or behavior. When people are too busy to notice others or care about what they are undergoing, those others can feel "deadened" and not supported, making them withdraw from the group. On the other hand, those who "demand too much" from others in terms of time or resources make community living difficult. These people are usually those who have "not done their home-work" regarding their own interpersonal issues. Sometimes, carrying unresolved emotional traumas from their early life, they attempt to hide with the aid of alcohol, a too busy sched-ule, or emotional distancing of others. When people are "afraid of their own spirituality" or are "not willing to be honest" with each other, communal sharing and support are undermined from the start. Sometimes there is a plain lack of openness to others. Sister Joan Claire Mendoza described such a case. She lives in a large convent with eight or nine other sisters, four of whom work in the attached school, while the rest work in various other min-istries. They are together for morning Mass and one evening dinner per week. Although these sisters are "polite" to Sister Joan Claire, it is clear to her that they really do not want her there. Three of them maintain very close relations and actually "make up their own community." Fortunately, Sister Joan Claire has developed a personal and professional network of friends and colleagues from whom she receives most of her emotional Those who "demand too much" from others in terms of time or resources make community living difficult. -201 --- . J~dy-dugust 2002 Zajac " Three Forms of Community Living sustenance. Another sister described a similar case. She felt so rejected that she was "not even sure she was still an SRJ." Others expressed their isolation when they felt that their talents, gifts, or ministry were not appreciated. If community members remain or act unaware or. uninformed about them and their work, those living in common as well as those minister-ing on their own can be affected. Sometimes the personalities of the people living together are too divergent or their schedules too diverse to allow for harmonious living. Highly divergent worldviews in people can also make daily life uncom-fortable. In other instances a quiet person is misconstrued to be someone quite alien to her real self. One sister said she had been surprised to learn that her housemates had thought she was very self-confident and did not need any help or support. In another convent she had been perceived as a threat to others because she had more education than most of the others. The biggest obstacle to community, however, one sister said, occurs when people do not maintain confidences. This causes a shat-tering of trust and pushes people back to isolation. A few sisters expressed frustration or anger with the com-munity at large. One told of an instance when her mother was dying. Although everyone knew about this, there was little inter-est, caring, or support shown. Another sister said that several years ago she was angry with the general community for giving financial support to a foreign political group that she thought was wrong. Another sister said that sometimes lack of equality really bothered her. Because of her age she had been denied permission to study for an advanced degree, yet in that very year three sisters older than herself were approved and funded for graduate education. When this woman protested this as unjust, she received an apology from the president of the con-gregation, but still no approval for further study. In this article we have examined how sisters in one reli-gious community define and create "community." There is lit-tle general consensus about the term, although some common values are evident. In general, all agree that something must be shared and that there is a feeling of interdependence or inter-connectedness. How and what things are shared, however, varies according to the type of living group that is chosen. Individual Review for Religious sisters' stories were interwoven here into three composite pic-tures of community living: intentional community, residential community, and a community of one. Also, some examples of what creates "good" and "bad" community were given. The various types of community exist in various circum-stances and are experienced in various ways by individual sisters. There seems to be no one right way. There is a considerable diversity of views, activities, roles, and living arrangements. This diversity contrasts strongly with the pre-Vatican II con-vents, with their physical proximity to the apostolic work the sis-ters did, their thorough discipline, and their homogeneity of life conditions. Note ~ I later discovered that this was the original European name of a congregation now in the United States with a different name. Bibliography Beane, Marjorie Noterman. 1993. From framework to freedom: A history of the Sister Formation Conference. New York: University Press of America. Eby, Judy, RSM. 2000. "A little squabble among nuns"? The Sister Formation crisis and the patterns of authority and obedience among American women religious, 1954-1971. Unpublished doc-toral dissertation, Saint Louis University. Emerson, Robert M., ed. 1983. Contemporary field research: A collec-tion of readings. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press. Merton, Robert K., Marjorie Fiske, and Patricia L. Kendall. 1990. The focused interview: A manual of problems and procedures. New York: Free Press. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1960. Stranger and friend: The way of an anthropologist. New York: W.W. Norton. Quifionez, Lora Ann, CDP, and Mary Daniel Turner SNDdeN. 1992. The transformation of American Catholic sisters. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Vatican Council H: The conciliar and postconciliar documents and More postconciliar documents. 1975, 1982. Edited by Austin Flannery OP. Northport, New York: Costello Publishing Co. Wittberg, Patricia, SC. 1990. Dyads and triads: The sociological impli-cations of small-group living arrangements. Review for Religious 43, no. 1 (January-February): 43-51. July-August 2002 Zajac ¯ Three Forms of Community Li~ing ¯ 1993. Residence stability and decline in Roman Catholic reli-gious orders of women: A preliminary investigation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 32: 76-82. Zajac, Barbara. 1999a. Becoming a nun: A general model of entering religious life. Review for Religious 58 (July-August): 403-423. --. 1999b. Community suicide: Secularization in Catholic nuns with the manipulation of ritual and symbol. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Riverside. Wounded The unseen spider ripped my flesh, and drew blood, nourishment, afresh, and left a black-red crater there: pink, puffy, filled with pus - not fair. A round wound one inch wide oozing fluid down the side. I've been a meal for a foreign beast, stamped with a bump, a spider's feast. This tiny spider sucked sustenance from me, drew life, left a mark, for all to see - how dare he! Am I any different? Don't I do the same? Feed on the Christ, wound him, without shame? Michael J. Lydon Reviev; for Religious JOEL GIALLANZA Expert Practitioners of Union in Community Once upon a time community was uncomplicated, ever a delight in which to witness and work, a constant joy to be and build. Beg your pardon! Are we talking about reality here? Yes, but only by flashback to the language and imagery of a different era. Let me explain. In researching various writings on religious community--most of them published from the 1930s to the early 1960s--I wondered if the lived experience of community during those decades matched the somewhat romantic and idealistic rhetoric about it. I decided that it prob-ably did not; rather, the rhetoric offered encouragement and hope as supports for the lived experience. Religious knew then and continue to experience now the complexity of community life. The word community itself has a complex meaning. It means more than religious living in the same residence. We know that community members may be scattered across cities and even across continents. Another facet includes the personalities and perspectives of the members. Similarity and unanimity are no guarantee that a community is healthy and thriving or even that the members know one another more than superficially. Community encompasses the members' cultures and customs and their ages and attitudes. And so we can ask: How do we recognize one another as members of the Joel Giallanza CSC last wrote for us in May-June 2000. His address is Province Center; 1101 St. Edward's Drive; Austin, Texas 78704. July-August 2002 Giallanza ¯ Expert Practitioners of Union community? Community also encompasses the unique heritage and history of each religious institute and the cast of charac-ters who have lived that heritage and been a part of that history. And there are our own experiences in life and ministry. The complexity of religious community does not diminish its potential for living up to the rhetoric of earlier eras. In truth, it has all the potential with which humanity was invested by God at creation. And yet, when we discuss the many factors currently influencing religious life, the task of formulating an all-encompassing definition or description of community is quite daunting and sometimes discouraging. This perception, this temptation to invest less time and energy in such discus-sions, can have a detrimental effect on the quality of community we hope to build for the future. These present reflections are intended to resist that temptation and to encourage continu-ing efforts to form and live and sustain community. Forming Community In the apostolic exhortation Vita consecrata (hereafter VC), Pope John Paul II writes: "Consecrated persons are asked to be true experts of communion and to practice the spirituality of communion as 'witnesses and architects of the plan for unity which is the crowning point of human history in God's design'" (§46). This is a significant challenge; to be "true experts" at almost anything in our world is a considerable achievement. Being expert practitioners in the spirituality of communion calls for more. John Paul's understanding of communion is incarna-tional: communion does not exist apart from those who strive to live it daily. The etymology of the word "expert" provides an important insight. Often the term is used in a static way, indicating an acquired ability needing little if any further development. The root meaning, however, is quite dynamic: an expert is one who tries and who learns by trying. As a person's ability matures, there are always new approaches to try and new things to learn. The words experiment and experience have the same root. One way, then, of becoming experts in communion is through our experiments and experiences in community. We must keep try-ing and keep learning. Community is never finished. Review f

Issue 53.1 of the Review for Religious, January/February 1994. ; Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUaRY 199Zl. - V6LUME ~; ¯ NUMBER 1~o Review for Religious (ISSN 0034-639X) is published bi-monthly at Saint Louis Universi~ 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 Associate Editors Canonical Counsel Editor Assistant Editors Advisory Board David L. Fleming SJ Philip C. Fischer SJ Regina Siegfried ASC Elizabeth McDonough OP Jean Read Mary Ann Foppe Joann Wolski Conn PhD Mary Margaret Johanning SSND Iris Ann Ledden SSND Edmundo Rodriguez SJ Sefin Sammon FMS Suzanne Zuercher OSB Christian Heritages and Contemporary Living JANUARY-FEBRUARYI994 ¯ VOLUME53 '* NUMBER I contents feature Between the Times: Religious Life and the Postmodern Experience of God Elizabeth A. Johnson CSJ relates the stress within religious life to the loss of traditional God images and the search now for the hidden face of the living God. 29 43 58 toward the synod The Consecrated Life in Church and World Bishop Jan P. Schotte CICM explains the synod of bishops, with brief descriptions of previous ones and the 1994 synodal process. Charism, Charisms, and Faddism A. Paul Dominic SJ brings clarity to the Lineamenta treatment of the charism of religious life and the charisms of its many con-crete forms in various congregations. Hopes for the Synod and Beyond Joel Giallanza CSC focuses his attention on the identity and mis-sion of apostolic religious congregations and their relationship to the hierarchy. 64 73 82 mission and ministry Images of Hope in an Inner-City Parish George M. Anderson SJ shows God working in unlikely places, making use of humble and broken people to advance the values for which Jesus died and rose. A Bracelet of Elephant'sHair Jo O'Donovan RSM shares her sabbatical experience of an "outer" and "inner" Africa. The Modern Development of Messianic Prophecy Allen S. Maller presents for our ecumenical consideration a deeply felt Jewish view of Messianic meaning and fulfillment. 2 Review for Religious experiencing the spirit 89 Living in the Womb of God Marion Zeltmann PCPA reflects upon her experience of enclosure and prayer as a Poor Clare. 95 Do I Really Believe that Death Leads to Life? Francis Blouin FIC suggests some practical ways of responding to the current dyings manifest in religious life. 102 A Rite for Those Departing Religious Formation Peter A. Lyons suggests positive and wholesome ways in which individuals departing from religious life and ~he community mem-bers who remain might deal ritually with this reality. 107 120 130 religious life issues Integrating Human Needs in Religious Formation Howard J. Gray SJ suggests ways of viewing human needs as "longings," radical desires to be integrated in the art of religious ministry. Chapters Present and Future Catherine M. Harmer MMS reviews the history of chapters in reli-gious life and raises questions about their future functioning. Religious Life, a Continuum Francis Assisi Kennedy OSF examines, historical beginnings of reli-gious congregations for patterns surprisingly serviceable today. departments 4 Prisms 142 Canonical Counsel: The Conciliar Decree Perfectae Caritatis 149 Book Reviews Jan~mry-February 1994 3 prisms 1994--a year still to be lived, a year yet to pass into history. For most people there is a healthy anticipation of "good things" when new begin-nings are made. Perhaps such "anticipation" should be called, rather, a precious grace which interconnects us with God, the eternal optimist. New evangelization is the most consistently optimistic theme of John Paul II's papacy. While his encyclicals and apostolic exhortations are many and weighty (witness the most recent Splendor of Truth), I suspect that his repeated call to a new evangelization will be the most significant and lasting grace for the church. The call is a beginning similar to the beginning of a year; it is not as if evange-lization is any newer than the parade of days which form any year's calendar. The newness in large part comes from the attitude with which we enter into evangelization, just as it comes from the way we enter into another year. The oft-quoted phrase about this call to evangelization being "new in its vigor, new in its methods, and new in its expression" is grounded in the attitude which we bring to our Christian responsibility as evangelizers. Attitude alone is not enough, but unless the grace of optimism warms our efforts as believers in Good News to share it and explain it and to offer people a challenge, little evange-lization is the result. Do members of religious congregations need to see a more intimate connection between the new evangeliza-tion and their own efforts at renewal? Since all forms of Christian life come from our having the gospels in our blood, it would seem obvious that an evangelization effort promotes effective renewal. The gospels not only have 4 R~,iew for Religio~s inspired the different forms of religious life, but also have helped shape its various expressions and methods. Men and women moved by the Spirit of Christ have gifted the church with at least three prismatic "colors" of Christ-following that look monastic or mendicant or apostolic. The question remains for us today who have been illumined by these various Christ-prisms how our gospel-inspired attitude can reveal the graced mystery of this life-form in terms of new depths of meaning and new ways of expres-sion- in the very heritage we claim. The darkness we feel comes not from Jesus, the light-source whom we follow, but from our own self-chosen, squint-eyed angle of vision having so little to do with grace or gospel. So often our efforts at renewal seem more a vain search for one "tree of life" instead of for the God who gives all created gifts for our creatively discerned use. Optimism marks the effort of anyone who begins something. An evangelical optimism seems almost lacking both in internal reli-gious congregation renewal attempts and in hierarchical control efforts. As we begin this year of the synod on consecrated life, our prayer for ourselves and our church begs again for that grace dear to our God imaged as the prodigal parent who expects the son (and daughter) to be coming up the road--the grace of opti-mism. As we begin this new volume, Review for Religious warmly welcomes Regina Siegfried, a member of the Sister Adorers of the Blood of Christ, Ruma province, as associate editor. She serves currently as assistant professor of historical studies and spiritual-ity at Aquinas Institute in St. Louis. Former editor of Spirituality Today, she is well known for her books Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, edited with Bishop Robert Morneau, and In the Company of Preachers, edited with Edward Ruane OP. Review for Religious accepts graciously the loss of Michael Harter SJ as associate editor. In his new role assignment as direc-tor of novices for the Jesuit Missouri provirice, he can assure young candidates' solid formation through their familiarity with articles from Review for Religious. So in losing an editor, I am sure that we are gaining a number of new subscribers. Just as he leaves this media field, his prayer book, Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, has been published by the Institute of Jesuit Sources in St. Louis and is already in its second printing. We wish him well and know that we will miss him. David L. Fleming SJ January-February 1994 5 feature ELIZABETH A. JOHNSON Between the Times: Religious Life and the Postmodern Experience of God As the third millennium of the Western, Christian calen-dar approaches, all manner of assessments are being made about what will fade into history and what will newly flourish in the year 2001 and afterwards. It does not take a new millennium, however, to see that religious life in the United States is passing through an epochal change, the outcome of which in terms of fade or flourish is an open question. The research project "The Future of Religious Orders in the United States," conducted by David Nygren and Miriam Ukeritis under the sponsorship of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, and the Leadership Council of Women Religious, sets out fully aware of this moment in history2 The original proposal for this study underscores the rad-icality of the journey now underway. Religious orders, it notes, are in the midst of a process of transformation, defined in categories from the social sciences to mean: The operation of changing (as by mapping or through strategies) one configuration or expression into another in accordance with a rule, a purpose or mission. Elizabeth Johnson csJ is associate professor of theology at Fordham University. 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 D. Ukeritis. Her address is Department of Theology; Fordham University; Bronx, New York 10458-5165. 6 Review for Religious Such change, furthermore, involves: qualitative, discontinuous shifts in organizational members' shared understandings of the organization, accompanied by changes in the organization's mission, strategy, and formal and informal structures. The most basic questions of group and individual identity, involving who religious are, how they are to live, what they are to do, and why, are all at stake. Religious orders in this country, the proposal continues, are in the midst of a transformative process so profound that it will lead to the demise of some, the revitalizing of others, and the birth of new forms of the evangelical life as yet unimagined. The aim of this research project is to identify factors within religious orders themselves that will contribute to a suc-cessful outcome of this major metamorphosis. Recent historical studies have unveiled a heartening picture of how the evangelical following of Jesus in the church, traditionally called "religious life," has been incarnated in a great diversity of forms. From monastic to mendicant to apostolic communities, to mention but a few of the more widespread models, new forms of this living movement have consistently emerged from the insights of individuals and groups responding to the Spirit in the crucible of cultural change. A compelling interpretation of the present sit-uation holds that in the United States, at least, the present crisis of religious orders signals yet another breakthrough in the many-faceted evolution of forms of the evangelical life. If this be true, this is the first time in the history of the church that members of religious orders in a time of transition have been so self-con-sciously aware of their situation and so equipped with the tools of modern research that they can reflect on and even direct the pro-cess of change. The purpose of this essay is to provide a theological context for the data that follows. It is important to note that this essay was commissioned, designed, and largely written before the research project was completed. Therefore it should not be read as an interpretation of the project's findings. Rather, it is intended as an independently conceived reflective piece on this moment in the history of religious life. To .contextualize the report that follows, this essay first surveys the state of the question in contemporary literature on religious life and then identifies a basic shift occur-ring that affects all the rest and that holds great portent for the future, namely, a change in the experience of God.2 January-February 1994 7 Johnson ¯ Between the Times The living tradition of the change of forms of religious life is still alive; the great cycle of death and rebirth is turning once again. State of the Question Starting in the late 1970s, a number of excellent works have contributed to discussion of the meaning of religious life and have expressed the emerging self-understanding of religious them-selves. Written by or available to members of religious orders in North America, the list includes works on the history, sociology, and theology of the life as lived by both women and men in general,3 as well as works that focus on the experiences of women4 or men5 in particular. The imagery and language of these writings reflect the enormous tension in the state of the question, both as lived and reflected upon. There is a prevalence of "re" words: revitalize, refound, rein-terpret, reimagine, reweave, redefine, rebirth. Metaphors point to new creative acts: pouring new wine into new wine-skins; reweaving the threadbare cloth; standing at the crossroads and discerning the way ahead; planting new seeds; mid-wiring a birth; bringing order out of chaos. The focus is consistently on the future: shaping the coming age, strate-gizing for growth, negotiating the challenge of change, claiming identity, being converted. Individual differences of approach in this literature recede when compared with the convergences that these writings dis-play. Virtually all of the authors are seized by the conviction that in the Western democracies the missionary and apostolic mod-els of religious life, prevalent for the last two hundred years, are dying. Relatively speaking and in some cases literally, "there is no one behind us." But this does not mean that religious life itself is dying, for no one form has ever been definitively lasting as the predominant form for every era. What it may well mean, however, is that the living tradition of the change of forms of religious life is still alive; the great cycle of death and rebirth is turning once again,6 The present malaise and decline, if lived through with discernment, fidelity, and courage, can lead to new, yet-to-be-determined forms commensurate with the cultural realities of the third millennium. 8 Review for Religious This being the case, the literature is replete with enlighten-ing analyses of ecclesial and cultural factors at work in the present changes. It also indicates that a strong consensus is taking shape regarding the way forward. A prophetic stance suffused with con-templation is being glimpsed as the crucial spiritual force that seeks expression in coming forms of religious life. Both the anal-ysis and this key proposal are surveyed here as interesting in their own right and as factors that themselves point further to a foun-dational experience of God. Changes in Church and Society The literature agrees that the most important ecclesial factor underlying the shift in religious life's self-understanding contin-ues to be Vatican II's two-pronged theological articulation of the church's identity and mission. Ad intra (internally) the church is first and foremost the people of God, with every member conse-crated by baptism and empowered to life in Christ. The conse-quent universal call to holiness undercuts the traditional notion that religious life is an elite state of perfection whose members are spiritually set above ordinary lay people. Rather, religious live out their call to holiness as a sacrament or sign to the whole church of its Spirit-filled vocation. Ad extra (externally) the church is to turn pastorally toward the world as God's good creation, marred by sin but redeemed by Christ and worthy of attention. The mission of the church in the world undermines the tradi-tional dualism between the sacred and the secular, along with the concomitant idea that religious should be set apart from the world. Rather, they are to live in relation to the world, not over against but ~vith and for, in criticism and compassion. The conciliar shift from a juridical to a more-biblically-based pastoral identity and mission, still being contested and negotiated in the church at large, undergirds the changes in self-understanding, lifestyle, and ministry that now affect traditional forms of religious life. Since the council, additional ecclesial factors have appeared that continue to impinge upon religious life in the United States. The ongoing efforts by religious orders to reinterpret founding charisms is occurring in the context of postconciliar reinterpre-rations of the Catholic biblical, theological, and liturgical tradi-tions themselves. The infusion of insight from these sources is resulting in new and influential understandings, such as the rad- .January-Febrnary 1994 9 Johnson ¯ Between the Times ¯ ical equality of all in baptismal grace. Furthermore, the postcon-ciliar explosion of lay ministries, both ecclesially sponsored and lay initiated, is multiplying the possibilities open to those who wish to serve in the church beyond the confines of traditional religious life. At the same time it creates a situation of shared, collabora-tive ministry between religious and the laity. In these same years, the original immigrant church in this country has reached mainstream status with the majority of its members moving into the middle class. More options for service and advancement have opened up in the civil sector, lessening the church's attraction as the primary field for a dedicated life. In addition, the economic and educational mores of middle-class life coupled with the availability of birth control has resulted in the reduced size of Catholic families, thus shrinking the pool from which candidates for religious life were traditionally drawn. Meanwhile, a new wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia is presently changing the face of the church; one-third of Catholics in the United States are now Hispanic, half of whom are younger than eighteen years of age. Despite outstanding service on the part of some religious of European descent, however, dif-ferences of culture, race, class, and age, if not overt, prejudice, seem to prev.ent the majority of religious orders from making an effective case for their way of life to members of new immigrant groups. Eras do not repeat themselves. All of these ecclesial factors are playing out in the wider con-text of the church .becoming a world church, less European in character and belonging to all cultures; a church of the diaspora, less supported by a homogeneous culture and more a little flock in a pluralist world; and a church in interreligious dialogue, open to the wisdom of other great religious traditions. Social, economic, and political forces at work in the culture of the United States are also contributing to changes in religious life) These forces are many and complex, but several consistently surface in the literature: democracy, which yields a more partic-ipative rather than authoritative style of governance; global aware-ness, which subverts provincialism; growing consciousness of economic and social injustice at home and abroad, which demands action to relieve poverty and promote justice; pervasive violence, which highlights the need for teaching and modeling peaceful resolution of conflicts; materialism, which calls for a countercul-tural witness to simplicity of life and the value of the human over 10 Review for Religious the product; excessive individualism, which cries out for the anti-dote of a genuine community of free and responsible persons; ethnocentrism, racism, and insensitivity to other cultures, which needs the word of the gospel about the fundamental human dig-nity of every person; and feminism, which advocates the equal inclusion of women in that human dignity. The search in the United States for a new, more humane society among ourselves, between all nations, and between human beings and the natural world of this planet contextualizes and begins to inspire the search for new, vital forms of religious life. In a striking way, ecclesial and cul-tural factors have converged in the rise of Christian feminism and its influ-ence in women's religious orders. It is indisputable that women's insights into how to live the evangelical life have never yet been allowed full scope in the course of church history, even now. Perhaps it was the play of prov-idence that unleashed the conciliar reforms at the very moment that the women's movement was gathering force once again in the United States. It is indisputable that women's insights into how to live the evangelical life have never yet been allowed full scope in the course of church history, even now. In any event, while renewing their lives in the light of the gospel and their founding charisms and while strengthening their witness in the world, especially among those depriv.ed of human dignity, women religious became aware of themselves as women in a patri-archal church and society. They .began to notice the systemic absence and silence of women in church pol!cy-making bodies and ministries, its obvious connection with gender, and the result-ing pressures on the way they lived their lives. Contextualized by the women's movement in church and society, they began to find their own voice and to claim, even for themselves, the respect befitting a human person. Women's experience was affirmed as a legitimate if untapped source of knowledge about religious life and its ministry, prayer, community, and governance, and this found expression in their reflection, dialogue, and new constitu-tions. The result of this awakening was a release of energy that bore and continues to bear promise for the future of religious January-February 1994 11 Johnson ¯ Between the Times life. But it also brings conflict as men church authorities refuse to reverence or dialogue with the insights coming from women's experience, insisting rather on conformity to their own under-standing and law. At this point the alienation of legions of women in the church is a matter of public record. Women religious, too, know this darkness. But among women religious in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, the conviction per-dures that the goals of Christian feminism are fully in accord with the gospel. They continue to grapple with issues of identity and mission with the understanding that through their struggle the Spirit of God is offering a transforming grace to the whole church, although, terrifyingly, grace may always be refused.8 In and through all of this analysis of ecclesial and cultural factors that affect religious life today, authors have been seeking clues as to how this life will be able to flourish in the future. The search appears to be narrowing. Glimpse of a New Form: Prophetic, Contemplative Life In books and essays about religious life and in documents generated by religious orders and the national conferences, a new combination of ancient dements is beginning to define the essen-tial character of religious life. The emerging understanding of this life is primarily that of persons and communities called to prophetic ministry embedded in a contemplative relationship to God. Prophecy and mysticism, prophetic witness and contem-plation, will shape the evangelical life of love of God and neigh-bor in its coming age. The two national conferences of men and of women religious place this insight at the head of the list of ten transformative ele-ments they identify for religious life in the future: 1. Prophetic Witness: Being converted by the example of Jesus and the values of the gospel, religious in the year 2010 will serve a prophetic role in church and society. Living this prophetic wimess will include critiquing social and ecclesial values and structures, calling for systemic change and being converted by the marginalized with whom we serve. 2. Contemplative, Attitude Toward Life: Religious in 2010 will have a contemplative attitude toward all creation and be motivated by the presence of the sacred? 12 Review forReligious In a similar way the visioning groups studied in the Futures Project as well as those identified by the research as outstanding leaders consistently and vigorously endorsed the prophetic/con-templative stance. Far from being an esoteric perspective, this stance brings to light what is most basic in Christian faith and what the church itself needs to emphasize in order to thrive in the future. As Karl Rahner foresaw, the spirituality of the future will arise from rela-tion with the living God at the very heart of the world and con-sequently "will be a spirituality of the Sermon on the Mount and of the evangelical counsels, continually involved in renewing its protest against the idols of wealth, pleasure, and power.''t° This is the calling of the church as a whole, and religious life crystallizes and witnesses to this. The two constituent elements, prophecy and contemplation, can be distinguished mentally and examined separately, but in reality they form one living shape, one wholistic form, one gestalt of life. Asking which comes first is a chicken-and-egg kind of question, with no intelligible answer in sight.1~ Contemplation is a way of seeing that leads to union. It arises from an experience of connection with the sacred at the very core of life. Mediated, as always, by created things such as words, images, and actions, this relationship unfolds as persons and com-munities allow these mediations to lead them into the living pres-ence of the holy. Insofar as the created mediations themselves are transcended in contemplation, this experience counteracts the human effort to control the divine and instead delivers the spirit into the bright darkness of God. From one perspective, the con-nection with the sacred is a result of the inflow of the love of God inflaming and awakening the heart. From another, it entails the discipline of becoming fully conscious, journeying to one's deepest self and to the outer limits of the cosmos in order to touch the divine. In the process, the contemplative "knows" God not in an extrinsic, conceptual way but from within, experien-tially. At the very heart of existence one is in touch with holy mystery, a relation for which the I-Thou relationship among human beings is only a remote analogy. As a result, a certain intuition arises by which one begins to know and love the world as God does. This attitude is totally inclusive of all creation. Everything created is precious and sacred within the cosmic ambience of life and is cause for delight and January-February 1994 13 Johnson ¯ Between the Times thanks. But the evident brokenness of the world and damage done persons and other creatures are cause for grief, compassion, and protest. In some unspeakable situations,, the utter depravity of evil occasions the most profound, wordless hope against hope, without any supports, in the risk that God is faithful in judgment and grace. The contemplative attitude is thus not otherworldly but pro-foundly turned toward this world in celebration and resistance, knowing that the Creator is also the Redeemer. The prophetic lifestyle and action that express this way of seeing are not the result of simple humanism (although the world could use a lot more of this too) but of real belief in God. In solidarity with divine purpose for the world, prophetic persons and communities desire to restore right relationships and so to set right what causes pain and suffering. While this has always been the case, the hermeneutic of prophecy in our day with its sophisticated knowl-edge of systems realizes that the wounds of the heart also afflict culture. Thus prophetic witness includes critique not just of per-sonal acts but also of social, economic, and political structures and values in society. Knowing, too, that we are a sinful church always in need of repentance and reform, this witness is borne toward the values and structures of the community itself. The prophetic stance is marked by a number of characteris-tics. These include attentive listening to the creative Spirit of God, connecting with the suffering in a situation and evaluating its causes, naming what is unjust, being empowered to articulate an alternative future based on the dream of God for the world, bringing compassion and hope to the brokenness, and resistance and challenge to the status quo that would maintain it. In the process prophetic persons and communities strive to empower people in their struggle to live and survive, in turn being taught and empowered by them to continue to seek the face of God. In the Christian tradition this witness is shaped by the fol-lowing of Jesus, in whom the compassion of God takes flesh in the world. Contemplation and prophecy were indivisibly connected in his historical life. As Edward Schillebeeckx explains, "In the prophet Jesus, mysticism and healing came from one and the same source--his experience of the contrast between the living God and the history of human suffering." ~2 The reign of God that he announced envisages an end to exploitation or suppression; his ministry in word and deed enacted practical anticipations of this 14 Review for Religious salvation to come. His own drink from the cup of suffering in torment and execution and the seal of God's graciousness in the resurrection ground a hope in human history that has empow-ered discipleship ever since. Remembrance of Jesus through the power of the Spirit guides and informs the life of prophecy and ~ontemplation in the church. This vision of a wholistic con-templative, prophetic shape to reli-gious life in the future, glimpsed in the literature, is already a living, growing reality in some cases. It also stands in contrast to the overall shape of religious life in the present, which has become domesticated by too close an identification with the law, structure, and spirituality of the institutional church. In a particularly eloquent argument, Diarmuid O'Murchu, taking a clue from reli-gious life as it is lived in Eastern religions, contends that religious life in the west needs to reclaim its liminal identity, a move of genuine conversion en.tailing profound change in spirit and structure. Re!igious would then be known as persons and communities who are in touch with the sacred, passionately committed to just and loving relationships, fiercely resistant against exploitation of the earth and of persons, and willing to live countercultural lifestyles with and for the marginalized. They would stand in church and society a.s liminal, archetypal, prophetic persons, articulating and empowering the deepest love.13 To arrive at this goal, religious must confront many chal-lenges and questions. A key CMSM paper muses: People in general probably do not think of us as genuine prophets. What must we do, what price must we pay, if we wish to embrace a prophetic stance? How can we be prophetic without becoming triumphalistic? How can we be prophetic without losing a ministry .to the middle class which is the social origin of nearly all of us? How can we learn to read the signs of the times and discern more surely the thrust of prophecy? What steps must we take to arrive at solid social and cultural analysis? How can we relate our The contemplative attitude is thus not otherworldly but profoundly turned toward this world in celebration and resistance, knowing that the Creator is also the Redeemer. ~anuary-February 1994 15 Johnson * Between the Times traditional institutions to the prophetic role? How can we motivate ourselves, with God's grace, to accept a materi-ally poor standard of living? We have more questions than answers, but we believe that we are on the way to a new, more prophetic presence within the U.S. Church.~4 The Futures Project identifies "fidelity to purpose" and "response to absolute human need" as the two most basic ele-ments for the revitalization of religious life. As this brief survey of the literature shows, the search for the sacred in resistance to what afflicts the world is being fingered as the purpose that will shape the new form of this life. The move toward a contemplative-prophetic stance augurs well for the future insofar as it grapples with the religious heart of the matter in the context of the suf-fering of the contemporary world. Experience of God My own reflection on these matters brings me to a founda-tional area not frequently mentioned in the literature, namely, the idea of God that undergirds the evangelical life. The fasci-nation with the mystery of God is endemic to religious life every-where and at all times. The varieties of structures and self-understandings that have emerged in the course of history only serve to underscore this fact. As Sandra Schneiders observes, "Whatever unites all these people is more interior and spiritual than forms of life or types of behavior."15 The common thread that unites them all is a search for relationship with the sacred, leading to a certain kind of absorption with the religious dimen-sion of life. "Those who are called 'religious' in the technical sense of the word," writes John Lozano, "have decided to adopt a way of life whose intrinsic, underlying explanation is religious experience.''16 This way of life intends to give daily, concrete expression to the experience of God, to empower its further devel-opment, and to manifest its fruits publicly. Put another way by Ladislaus Orsy, the only reason for religious life is the experi-ence of God. This being so, it seems vitally important to inquire about the idea of God that is presupposed at any given moment, for this structures the experience of God that sustains the entire endeavor. As the primary symbol of the whole religious system, the idea of God is a lodestar. It represents what a community takes to be the 16 Review for Religious highest good, the profoundest truth, the most appealing beauty. Thus it is not a neutral concept, but functions powerfully to shape the personal and corporate identity of believers. A religion, for example, which would speak about a warlike God and extol the way he smashes his enemies to bits would promote aggressive group behavior. By contrast, speech about a beneficent and lov-ing God who forgives offenses would turn the faith community toward care for the neighbor and mutual forgiveness.'7 By definition, the One whom people call God is the recipient of absolute human trust, God being "that to which your heart clings and entrusts itself" in the memorable phrase of Martin Luther (OSA).~s Consequently, the idea of God implicitly guides all of a person's and community's principles, choices, system of values, enterprises, and relationships. The symbol of God func-tions. Neither abstract in content nor feeble in its effect, it sums up a people's sense of ultimate mystery, the proper order of the world, and the right orientation of human life and devotion. Along with many others, I sense that a seismic shift is occur-ring in the experience and idea of God in our day and culture. Fully aware that not all people who live at the same time are con-temporaries, I nevertheless think that a certain culturally condi-tioned cast of mind is emerging in our era that yields an idea of God markedly different from the classical model. VChat is emerg-ing is a notion that coherently supports and strengthens prophetic and contemplative consciousness. Thus it is not just the move from a juridical to a pastoral relation of the church to the world, nor the dissolving of the sacred-secular dualism, nor increased global and ecological awareness, nor growing consciousness of injustice, nor any of the other ecclesial and social factors that alone or together are causing the changes in religious life. Rather, at the deepest level what is transpiring, I think, is new experience of God. The Postmodern World The contemporary mind-set in the United States shaped by conditions of the late twentieth century is frequently described as postmodern. First coined in artistic, literary, and philosophical circles, this term is used in a bewildering variety of ways to describe the sentiment that humanity must go beyond the mod-ern. Like the wanderer in Kafka's parable who, when asked where January-February 1994 17 Johnson * Between the Times he is riding to, responds, "I don't know,., only away from here, away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination,''19. postmodernity points beyond the present to what cannot yet be readily envisioned. Philosopher Stephen Toulmin refers to the world "that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms of what it is, but only in terms of what it hasjust-now-ceased-to-be," namely, the modern world originating from the seventeenth-cen-tury Enlightenment.2° Modern!ty esteemed at least four dynamic forces: the myth of unending progress, the clear and distinct ideas of universal reason, the power of the self-contained individual directed by his soli-tary ego, and the ascendancy of human control over nature. By contrast, postmodernity is conscious of the end of progress, the limits of reason, the sad isolation of the unconnected individual, and the catastrophe that results when nature is disrespected. Not everything originating in the modern era is to be discarded. One would want to keep the emphasis on human dignity and human rights and their expressions in liberty and equality (fraternity in isolation is suspect). But postmodernity is awake to the egregious failures that the modern ethos has wrought. It wants to go Away- From-Here. Perhaps the most felicitous description comes from David Power, who observes that postmodernism is the sensibility that does not try to pretend that the twentieth century has not hap-pened. Sprung from the disruptive, out-of-control evils of this century, postmodern consciousness is aware of the chaotic, con-tingent, threatened character of existence and the fragility of the human project. Two distinct but related positions have developed within this general description. One, the option for deconstruction, seeks to undo the power and securities that produce such evils. In theory and art it pokes holes through the rationalizations of the victors, unveiling their pretensions to righteousness and order. While in its extreme form postmodern deconstruction leads to radical skep-ticism and nihilism, its bracing insights are powerfully instruc-tive as to what should not be. In tandem with this option, a second, more constructive model has emerged. Suspicious of inherited triumphal truths, it seeks out suppressed voices and sto-ries, risking new interpretations of established tradition "from the margins" in order to enable resistance to the forces of destruc-tion. Its aim, unlike nihilism, is a more just and humane universe. 18 Review for Religious It is this latter type of constructive postmodernism, found in intellectual theory, literature, and art as well as in grass-roots movements, that generates a certain kind of spirituality.21 Its char-acteristics are painted here in broad strokes. Postmodern spiri-tuality notes the ambiguous character of progress itself and takes its bearing not from the dream of untrammeled, irreversible progress fueled by a consumerist mentality, but from the suffering of those on the underside of history, keeping in view the gaps and failures of human advance. It seeks wisdom not in the clear and distinct ideas of what is claimed to be universal reason but is in reality the thought of privileged men; rather, it honors the plurality and ambiguity of human con-sciousness, sensitive to the differ-ence that difference makes according to one's social location in gender, race, and class. The com-pass of postmodern spirituality points not to rampant individual-ism and its violent outcroppings but to the importance of community The compass of postmodern spirituality points not to rampant individualism and its violent outcroppings but to the importance of community and tradition, prizing human solidarity and peace. and tradition, prizing human solidarity and peace. It finds life not in human supremacy over the earth but in affective kinship with the extended family of the cosmos. In a word, it prizes not isolation but essential connectedness; not body-mind dualism but the wholistic, embodied person; not patriarchy but inclusive fem-inism; not militarism but expenditure for the enhancement of life; not tribal nationalism but global justice. Our age is witnessing the shift to a postmodern cast of values, in theory if not always in practice. This constitutes a widespread, if not universal, cultural phenomenon in the United States, even among Christian believers. It may well signal the first phase of an axial breakthrough in human consciousness that will shape the next millennium. If so, that is of no little significance for the future of religious life in this country. For the postmodern sensi-bility in its constructive form has a strong affinity with the prophetic-contemplative stance increasingly envisioned as con- January-February 1994 19 Johnson ¯ Between the Times stitutive for the future of religious life. At the very core of that life is the experience of God. And so we come to the heart of the matter by asking how the postmodern matrix shapes the experi-ence and concept of the sacred. Postmodern Experience of God In our era the concept of God developed by rational En-lightenment theology in the context of modernity has become largely unbelievable. Whether drawn from revelation or philo-sophical inference, this by-now-traditional theism views God as the Supreme Being who created all things and who governs all things with inscrutable providence. Perfect in a way that stands in sharp contrast to the finitude of creatures, "he" (the theistic God is always referred to in male terms) is "infinite, self-existent, incor-poreal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omni-scient, and omnipotent.''22 Although architect and ruler of the world, it is essential to God's deity that he be essentially unre-lated to this world and unaffected by what happens in it. This view therefore excels at stressing ,divine transcendence and its human counterpart of spirit, while divine immanence along with the importance of matter and the body tend to slip from view. This God of classical theism is modeled on the pattern of an earthly absolute monarch, a metaphor so prevalent that most often it is simply taken.for granted. As a king rules over his subjects, so God the Lord has dominion over his creatures, a view which, as Sallie McFague has shown, is intrinsically hierarchical, whether the divine reign be accomplished through dominance or benevo-lence. 23 In theory such theism adheres to the truth that the mys-tery of God is beyond all images and concepts. Yet history shows how in practice modernity tends to objectify God, reducing infi-nite mystery to an independently existing Supreme Being along-side other beings, a solitary, transcendent power who together with the world can be thought to form a larger whole. This is the idea of God that is no longer seriously imagin-able within a postmodern sensibility. Factors that contribute to its lack of cogency include the evils of this century, contemporary science and its view of the universe, liberation and feminist anal-ysis, the political disparagement of dictatorship, and the encounter among world religions. Any one of these alone would put a large question mark next to the modern symbol of the divine. Taken 20 Review for Religious together within the cultural shift to postmodern consciousness, they all but bury it. The result for people of faith is the radical loss of their famil-iar God image, along with the experience of divine presence that it mediated. Along with this also comes the loss of their sense of place in the order of the universe. As Janet Ruffing comments on the domino effect of loss of the tradi-tional God image in religious communi-ties, "All the ways we had construed our place in the sun and the meaningfulness of our commitment have been gradually eroding.''24 But this experience is not restricted to religious life; it is culture-wide and has attracted a host of com-mentators. For Martin Buber, the loss signals the eclipse of God. For Karl Rahner, it involves entry into the spiri-tuality of a bleaker season. For Constance Fitzgerald, it means the classic mystical experience of impasse and dark night. For Sandra Schneiders, this dark night is not only individual but a corporate purification. For Martin Marry, winter serves as metaphor for this season of the heart. For Michael Bucldey, it is entry into emptiness, silence, the cross in accord with the dynamic of apophatic mysticism,zs For me, this shift is poignantly summed up in the titles of the first and last books of my friend and colleague William Hill OP, now seriously ill. He broke into print with Knowing the Unknown God, an exploration of how the Thomistic category of analogy could lead the mind to God even in the contemporary world. God might be unknown, but we were possessed of some knowl-edge through the judgments we make. Now his recent essays have been collected under the rubric In Search of the Absent God. We are not in possession at all. Enmeshed in history and its suffering, we can but seek the hidden face of the living God.26 The absence of God experienced through the breakdown of traditional mediations of structure and theory does not mean, how-ever, that there is no experience of God at all. In a profound dialec-tic, what has been taken away is encountered in the ache of its loss. Divine absence itself becomes a mode of divine presence. The unknowing beckons to a deeper knowing. Th~ darkness mediates a brightness that the eyes cannot see. The wintry horizon hints at Enmeshed in history and its suffering, we can but seek the hidden face of the living God. .~anuary-February 1994 21 Johnson ¯ Between the Times new life buried beneath the snow. The cry from the depths signals an affirmation of Life deeper than pain, as did Jesus' cry from the cross. As Maura Clarke wrote from E1 Salvador, "In the very absence of God here, God has never been more present to me." 27 It all depends on the character of God. If God be trustworthy, then we hope that we are grounded and enveloped by a Living Presence even here, in the night of the senses and of the spirit. While there is no universal enactment of salvation, the sacred comes in the form of promise mediated through everyday, small fragments of healing, beauty, liberation, justice, and love. This does not remove the darkness, but it allows us to keep on walk-ing. The ice melts but will freeze again: in history there are only relative victories. Lament and celebration are both necessary. Here there are no easy assurances, no props. We know God through hope and, in the face of starkness, even hope against hope, nourished by remembrance and the circle of community. For many years now I have found the prophet of this experi-ence to be Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his vision God is being edged out of the world and onto the cross, and that is the way, the only way, that God can be with us: "only a suffering God can help.''28 His struggle to believe culminates in the maxim "Before God and with God we live without God.'':9 This is an experience of God in which darkness is an event of disclosure, clearing the decks of a false conception of God and opening contact with the incom-prehensible holy mystery of God who goes beyond all images, all grasping, all ~elling. The manageable God of the modern age who was immediately available and could be counted upon to intervene for our benefit is no longer there. But a new experience of God is already breaking through that intensifies our compassion. Constance Fitzgerald has wisely observed that what is going on in and through this experience is "a progressive hermeneutic of~e nature of God.''3° A full theology of God has yet to be writ-ten in a postmodern context, but the typical spii'itual experience of this age is yielding an unmistakable interpretation.3~ If there be a God at all, then this is absolute holy mystery that can never be fathomed. Not literally a male person writ large, the sacred can be pointed to by any created good: male, female, animal, cosmic. This mystery does not dwell in isolation from the world but encompassesit as the Matrix of its being and becoming. God in the world and the world in God--panentheism describes the mutual relation. Thus related, the Holy One of Blessing is a God 22 Review.for Religious of pathos who participates in the suffering of the world in order to transform it from within. Divine power is the strength of love, rather than raw, monarchical omnipotence. Passionate for justice and peace and compassionate over pain, Holy Wisdom typically self-reveals in the fragmentary breakthroughs of well-being that come about through human partnership with divine purpose. Forever God acts to create a fresh, new future: liberation is her signature deed. A God like this calls for an ethic of critical com-passion. We are impelled so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it. Religious people of all stripes are now in the transitional posi-tion of trying to find words and symbols for this personal and collective experience of God. A common language has yet to come to light. Yet the very way the search is being conducted gives some indication of the outcome. An LCWR paper expresses the efforts of women religious in this regard: God is immanent in creation, in the midst of the web of life. As we bond with the oppressed and marginalized, we know God standing on the side of the poor and oppressed, seeing with the eyes of the poor, leading the oppressed by alleviating oppression. In this context, we see God angry, sad, suffering, marginalized; we see God incarnated in peo-ples of color, in women, in the homeless and battered, the victims of violence and oppression of all kinds. And then the inevitable: Religious find themselves in a "Dark Night." The painful and intense moments of disintegration, which carry the hope for what can break through, characterize our living in this in-between.32 To sum up, the idea of God emerging in postmodern spiritual experience is a contemporary hermeneutic of the God whose reign Jesus preached and embodied: the God of life. If the experience of God is the core of religious life, and if it is this God who is being perceived in contemporary religious experience, then here is a key tt)eological factor shaping the future of religious life in the United States. Conclusion The dialectic between divine absence and presence, in the last analysis, is an experience of the Spirit of God: radically tran- ~tanlmry-February 1994 23 Johnson ¯ Between the Times scendent, like the wind blowing where it will; and at the same time radically immanent, dwelling at the heart of the world to vivify and renew all things. Empowered by the Spirit in our age, people of faith who treasure the living memory of Jesus seek the hidden God of life (contemplation) and live out the passion of God for the world in need (prophecy). It is my sense that religious life is riding the crest of this wave in the postmodern culture of the United States. Internally its forms are breaking down; its interpretive support systems are col-lapsing; rifts with the institutional church exacerbate the dark-ness, especially among women; many members are in distress. Most radically of all, forms of religious life that traditionally medi-ated the experience of God now not only do not mediate this experience but positively block it. At the same time, consciousness of the suffering of poor and marginalized peoples grows; action on behalf of justice continues to attract; women reclaim their human dignity and the voice that goes with it; the vivifying power of God is experienced in and through the human power to chal-lenge, cherish, and set free; the divine mystery is named in new ways. Here and there religious persons and communities begin to articulate the prophetic-contemplative identity coherent with these experiences and act in mission accordingly. For religious life in the United States it is now Advent, the most honest season of all. In my judgment, the times do not call for return to the securities of a previous age. In fact, the very effort to keep alive forms of religious life that have for the most part run their historical course may well be counterproductive to the evangelical following of Jesus. Rather,what is needed is vig-ilant patience, profound prayer, and the ability to act boldly toward that future where new forms of evangelical life will develop. Notes ~ See summary by David Nygren and Miriam Ukeritis, "Future of Religious Orders in the United States," Origins 22, no. 15 (24 September 1992): 257-272. Hereafter cited as the Futures Project. Also in Review for Religious 52, no. 1 (January-February 1993): 6-55. 2 1 would like to thank the following colleagues and friends for pro-viding me with materials for this essay: Mary Ann Donovan SC, Patricia Lucas CSJ, Thomas McKenna CM, Janet Ruffing SM, and Clara Santoro CSJ. My deep gratitude also goes to Mary Catherine Hilkert OP, John W. Padberg SJ, David Power OMI, and Sandra Schneiders IHM for read-ing and critiquing the manuscript in outline or finished form. 24 Review for Religious 3 Among the works that have made significant contributions are: Gerald Arbuclde, Out of Chaos: Refounding Religious Congregations (New York: Paulist, 1988). ~. Strategies for Growth in Religious Life (New York: Alba House, 1987). Marcello Azevedo, Vocation for Mission: The Challenge of Religious Life Today (New York: Paulist, 1988). Leonardo Boll, God's Witnesses in the Heart of tbe World (Chicago: Claret Center for Resources in Spirituality, 1981). Lawrence Cada et al., Shaping the Coming Age of Religious Life (New York: Seabury, 1979). Robert Daly et al., eds., Religious Life in the U.S. Church: The New Dialogue (New York: Paulist, 1984). Barbara Fiand, Living the Vision: Religious Vows in an Age of Change (New York: Crossroad, 1990). David A. Fleming, ed., Religious Life at the Crossroads (New York: Paulist, 1985). Mary Jo Leddy, Reweaving Religious Life: Beyond the Liberal Model (Mystic, Connecticut: Twenty-Third Publications, 1990). John Lozano, Discipleship: Towards an Understanding of Religious Life (Chicago: CCRS, 1983). ¯ Life as Parable: Reinterpreting the Religious Life (New York: Paulist, 1986)¯ Johannes Baptist Metz, Followers of Christ (New York: Paulist, 1978). Diarmuid O'Murchu, Religious Life: A Prophetic Vision (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1991). Sandra Schneiders, New Wineskins: Re-imagining Religious Life Today (New York: Paulist, 1986). Jean Marie Tillard, A Gospel Path: Religious Life (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1975)¯ The Way Supplement 65 (summer 1989): "Religious Life in Transition," pp. 1-152. Patricia Wittberg, Creating a Future for Religious Life: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Paulist, 1991). Evelyn Woodward, Poets, Prophets and Pragmatists: A New Challenge To Religious Life (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1987). 4 Works include: Mary Ann Donovan, Sisterhood as Power: The Past and Passion of, Ecclesial Women (New York: Crossroad, 1989). Nadine Foley, ed., Claiming Our Truth: Reflections on Identity by United States Women Religious (Washington, D.C.: Leadership Conference of Women Religious, 1988). January-February 1994 25 Johnson * Between the Times Marie Augusta Neal, Catholic Sisters in Transition: Front the 1960s to the 1980s (Wilmington, Delaware: Glazier, 1984). --. From Nuns to Sisters: An Expanding Vocation (Mystic, Connecticut: Twenty-Third Publications, 1990). Lora Ann Quifionez and Mary Daniel Turner, The Transformation of American Catholic Sisters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Ann Patrick Ware, ed., Midwives of the Futttre (Kansas City, Missouri: Leaven Press, 1985). s "Hope-Filled Deeds and Critical Thought: The Experience of American Male Religious and Their Need to Reflect on It," paper pre-pared for the Third Inter-American Conference on Religious Life and printed in David A. Fleming, ed., Religious Life at the Crossroads, pp. 20- 50; John W. O'Malley, "Priesthood, Ministry, and Religious Life: Historical and Historiographical Considerations," Theological Studies 49 (1988): 223-257. The dearth of works in this category is due, I think, to the fact that for most men authors until recently, male experience, given its normative status in church and society, is simply presumed. Thus gendered experience has not become a major category of interpre-tation as it has among women. 6 L. Cada et al., Shaping the Coming Age of Religious Life, is the ground-breaking study that brought the notion of cycles to present-day awareness. See the excellent fine-tuning of this thesis b~; Philip Sheldrake, "Revising Historical Perspectives," The \¥ay Supplement 65 (summer 1989): pp. 66- 77. 7 Here I have found the following particularly helpful: Howard Gray, "Shapes for the Fut.ure," pp. 289-295, and Helen Flaherty, "Religious Life in the U.S.--A Guess at the Future," pp. 296-309, in R. Daly, Religious Life in the U.S.; Anne Clifford, "Women Missioned in a Technological Culture," pp. 37-55, in N. Foley, ed., Claiming Our Truth; the address by Robert Schreiter, "The Environment of Religious Life in 2010," to CMSM/LCWR Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, August 1989; and the videotape "Religious Life: The Constant Is Change," IHM Sisters, Monroe, Michigan, which is an analysis of societal trends by Amata Miller, Margaret Brennan, and Sandra Schneiders. 8 See Anne Carr, Transfo~wting Grace: Christian Tradition and I, Vomen's Experience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). 9 Joint Meeting of the CMSM and the Lcv~rR, Louisville, Kentucky, August 1989. ,0 Karl Rahner, "The Spirituality of the Church of the Future," Theological Investigations, vol. 20, Concern for the Church (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 145. ~ One of the best contemporary treatises on contemplation remains William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978); and on prophecy, Walter Bruggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978). 26 Revieva for Religious 12 E. Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (New York: Seabury, 1980), p. 821. ,3 D. O'Murchu, Religious Life: A Prophetic Vision, passim. ,4 "Pilgrims and Prophets," paper drawn up by the Religious Life and Ministry Committee of the CMSM for the Fourth Inter-American Conference on Religious Life and printed in D. A. Fleming, ed., Religious Life at the Crossroads, pp. 51-64; quotation at p. 57. is S. Schneiders, New Wineskins, p. 32. 16 j. Lozano, Life as Parable, p. 9. 17 See Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), pp. 187-189. Kaufmann argues here for the importance of the great symbol of Jesus Christ who, as the image of the invisible God, manifests a God who does not act in a violent way but rather creates a community of love and equality in a peaceable and free way. !8 Martin Luther, "Large Catechism," The Book of Concord (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), p. 365. 19 Franz Kafka, "My Destination," Parables and Paradoxes (Berlin: Schocken, 1975), p. 189. I am indebted for this reference to Catherine Keller, "Toward a Postpatriarchal Postmodernity," in David Griffin, ed., Spirituality and Society: Postmodern Visions (Albany: State University of New York, 1988), p. 65. 20 S. Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California, 1982), p. 254. For further descriptions of postmodernity, see Frederic Burnham, ed., Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989); and Paul Lakeland, Theology and Critical Theory (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), chap. 7, "Catholicism and Postmodernity." 21 The essays in the Griffin collection are enlightening, especially his own "Introduction: Postmodern Spirituality and Society," pp. I-31. 22 H. P. Owen, Concepts of Dei~y (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), p. 1. 23 Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 63-69. 24 Janet Ruffing, "Seeing in the Dark: The Present Moment in Religious Life," address to regional meeting of LCWR, Sparkill, New York, September 1991, p. 10. This address, somewhat edited, appears in Review for Religious 51, no. 2 (March-April 1992): 236-248. 2s M. Buber, The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1952); K. Rahner, see note 10; C. Fitzgerald, "Impasse and Dark Night," in Tilden Edwards, ed., Living with Apocalypse: Spiritual Resources for Social Compassion (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 93-116; S. Schneiders, see video-tape, note 7; M. Marry, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983); Michael Bucldey, "Atheism and Contemplation," Theological Studies 40 (1979): 680-699. January-February 1994 27 Johnson ¯ Between the Times 26 William J. Hill, Knowing the Unknown God (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), and In Search of the Absent God, Mary Catherine Hilkert, ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992). 27 Quoted in Mary Catherine Hilkert, "The Experience of Impasse and the Roots of Wisdom," address to Dominican Leadership Conference, October 1991, p. 11. 28 D. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1953), letter of 16 July 1944, p. 220. 29 Ibid, p. 219. 30 C. Fitzgerald, "Impasse and Dark Night," p. 112. 31 For a profound analysis see Peter Hodgson, God in History: Shapes of Freedom (Abingdon: Nashville, 1989); and Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster, 1990). 32 "Reflections upon the Religious Life of U.S. Women Religious," paper prepared for the Fifth Inter-American Conference on Religious Life, 1985, and printed in N. Foley, ed., Claiming Our Tmtth," pp. 173-181; quotation at p. 177. Cana, Meaning Uncertain Wine flowed until there was no more at a wedding in Galilee; Mary, seeing this, turned to her son, one till then like any other, a brother, a carpenter who measured what he said and did. "They have no more wine," she said. He hesitated, questioned her, stirred up feelings between them. In the end Jesus acquiesced, six stone jars, water into wine, a fine line crossed, spirit revealed. Yet the uncertainty remains, was it not a mother's prompting that disrupted heaven's intent or is love so strong even God can be swayed by its openness? Neil C. Fitzgerald 28 Review for Religious JAN P. SCHOTTE The Consecrated Life in Church and World: Toward the Synod On 30 December 1991 the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, called for the gathering in autumn 1994 of the Ninth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops to treat the topic: "The Consecrated Life and Its Role in the Church and in the World." But what exactly is a synod of bishops? What are the various theological elements connected with this institu-tion? What are its pastoral aspects? Practically speaking, how does the synodal process work? And in what way does the treatment of specific topics bring benefit to the whole church? toward the synod A Synod of Bishops Etymologically speaking, the term "synod," derived from the elision of two Greek words, syn meaning "together" and hodos meaning "road" or "way," literally means "together on the way" or "sharing a journey." This idea immediately calls to mind the Vatican II image of the church as the people of God "on the move," always on pilgrimage, led and guided by the Holy Spirit through history to its ultimate fulfillment when the Lord shall Jan P. Schotte CICM serves as the general secretary of the Synod of Bishops. This presentation of his to the May 1993 Meeting of the International Union of Superiors General in Rome was orig-inally published in the UISG Bulletin, no. 92, 1993, pp. 68-78. Bishop Schotte may be addressed at Office of the General Secretary; Piazza Pio XII, 3; 00193 Rome; Italy. January-February 1994 29 Scbotte ¯ The Consecrated Life in the Church come again (see Lumen gentium, §6). The term also calls to mind some biblical associations. For example, in John's Gospel Jesus calls himself the "Way" (see Jn 14:6), and St. Paul makes reference to Christianity as the "Way" (see Ac 22:4). The term's rich theological and biblical associations can be saidto culminate in the concept of the church as communion. As quoted in Cbristifideles laici, "communion speaks of a double, life-giving participation: the incorporation of Christians into the life of Christ, and the communication of that life of charity to the entire body of the faithful, in this world and in the next, union with Christ and in Christ, and union among Christians in the church." Therefore, "communion" should not be looked upon as something static, but an active and dynamic reality which is both a hallmark of the church and the divine force continually enliven-ing her. This mystery of the church's communion is reflected in an unlimited number of ways in the church's life, from its most sub-lime aspect in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, to the var-ious encounters both personal and communal experienced by Christians everywhere. One instrument for celebrating the communal nature of the church on the local level is through archdiocesan and diocesan synods, which are becoming more frequent an occurrence. In convoking such a synod, a local bishop gathers around himself, as the source and foundation of communion or unity in his partic-ular church, various representatives of the church community-- lay, clerical, and religious--to pray and reflect in common and, using the eternal truths of the faith as set forth in the teachings of the church, to seek pastoral approaches and solutions to living the Christian life as a community and as individuals. The church's communal nature on the particular and univer-sal level also exists in the authority over the church which was established by Christ and subordinated to the task of preaching the gospel (see LG, §20 and §21). Therefore, where the synod of bishops uses the same word as that applied to celebrating the communal nature of the particular church, there is a basic theo-logical difference. The synod of bishops celebrates the mystery of church communion on the hierarchical level, that is, among the bishops. The Second Vatican Council describes this unity in the fol-lowing manner: "Just as, in accordance with the Lord's decree, 30 Review for Religious St. Peter and the rest of the apostles constitute a unique apos-tolic college, so in like fashion the Roman pontiff, Peter's suc-cessor, and the bishops, the successors of the apostles, are related with and united to one another'~ (LG, §22). This fundamental unity of the episcopate is the basis for the teaching on the collegiality of bishops (see LG, §22 and §23), which is like-wise an essential element in understanding the synod of bishops. The highest and fullest expression of this mystery of hierarchical communion is manifested and celebrated in an ecumenical council where the whole .episcopal college is convoked by the Holy Father. On various occasions the doc-uments of the Second Vatican Council refer to the episcopal gathering as a "synod" (see LG, §54; Christus Dominus, §36; etc.). But in this sense the word has the same meaning and theological significance as "council." Where the "synod of bishops" might resemble a "minicoun-cil," there is a fundamental qualitative difference between the two. For example, a synod convenes only a representative por-tion of the world episcopate, and unlike an ecumenical council, the synod of bishops is convened by the Holy Father for consulta-tive and not deliberative purposes. Nevertheless, despite the dif-ferences, "the synod of bishops," according to the Holy Father, "expresses collegiality in a highly ifitense way." The institution of the synod over twen.ty-seven years ago was inspired by the collaboration among the bishops at the Second Vatican Council and its beneficial effects for the whole church. Pope Paul VI on 15 September 1965 in the motu proprio Apostolica sollicitudo, establishing the synod of bishops, used these words: "With the aim of providing for a continuance after the council of the great abundance of benefits that we have been so happy to see flow to the Christian people during the time of the council as a result of our close collaboration with the bishops [and] because The institution of the synod over twenty-seven years ago was inspired by the collaboration among the bishops at the Second Vatican Council and its beneficial effects for the whole church. January-February 1994 31 Schotte ¯ The Consecrated Life in the Church of our esteem and regard for all the Catholic bishops and with the aim of providing them with abundant means for greater and more effective participation in our concern for the universal church, on our own initiative and by our apostolic authority we hereby erect and establish here in Rome a permanent council of bishops for the universal church, to be directly and immediately subject to our power." Much more than a structure inspired by the Second Vatican Council, the synod of bishops has proven itself to be an apt instru-ment for the implementation of conciliar doctrine and the appli-cation of its pastoral directives. At the same time it has also been the forum for the interpretation and further development of the teachings and spirit of the council. An Instrument of Continuous Pastoral Renewal Though each session is called to respond to unique pastoral situations, no synod is ever an isolated event, but has a relation to other synodal gatherings. Because each synod calls together a representative portion of the episcopate with its head the pope, each synod has a relation to the whole church. At the same time, because the synod is a unique response of the episcopal college to the mandate or mission entrusted to it by the Savior, each synod has a relation to the fundamental salvific mission of the church through history as well. A brief look at the various synods which have taken place to date is evidence enough of the importance of these episcopal gatherings for the church and their value in bring-ing about the reforms intended by the council. Pope Paul VI stated the goals for the First Ordinary General Assembly, held in the fall of 1967: "the preservation and the strengthening of the Catholic faith, its integrity, its force, its development, its doctrinal and historical coherence." One result of this meeting was the eventual establishment of the International Commission of Theologians to assist the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and to broaden a discussion on approaches to theological research. The same assembly provided the stimu-lus for the 1983 publication of the revised Code of Canon Law and also made recommendations to the Holy Father on various pastoral questions. Two years later, in 1969, the First Extraordinary General Assembly was convoked to seek and examine ways and means of 32 Review for Religious putting into practice the collegiality of bishops with the pope. This meeting opened the door to greater collegiality in the pas-toral care of the universal church and in episcopal conferences and the relations between individual bishops. In 1971 the Second Ordinary General Assembly treated two subjects: "The Ministerial Priesthood" and "Justice in the World." In the former, treatment was centered on the theological nature of the priesthood with the intention of addressing certain diffi-culties experienced by priests in the course of their ministry. On the subject of justice, the bishops stated the need to relate the gospel to existing worldwide and local circumstances. "Evangelization in the Modern World" occupied the work of the Third Ordinary General Assembly held in 1974. At this assem-bly the bishops reemphasized the essential missionary character of the church and the duty of each member to bear wimess to Christ in the world. The bishops' recommendations and proposals sub-mitted to the pope were used in the formulation of the apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi. At the Fourth Ordinary General Assembly, which took place three years later, in 1977, the discussion of the bishops centered on "Catechesis in Our Times," with special attention given to the teaching of the faith to children and young people. Shortly after the synod, Pope John Paul II issued the apostolic exhortation Catecbesi tradendae, which utilized a great many of the bishops' insights and proposals. The First Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, popularly known as "The Dutch Synod," was convoked in 1980 to examine more thoroughly the teachings of the Second Vatican Council on the mystery of church communion and its practical implications on the universal and local level, and the figure of the bishop and his ministry. In this way the synod sought at that time to address its designated topic, "The Pastoral Situation in Holland." The Fifth Ordinary General Assembly in 1980 reaffirmed the church's teaching on the family, in particular defending marriage and the contents of Humanae vitae. From the discussion and the proposals of the assembly, the pope issued the apostolic exhorta-tion Familiaris consortio. In 1983 the Sixth Ordinary General Assembly, held during a specially called Holy Year commemorating the 1950th year of Redemption, appropriately discussed the need of applying the fruits of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection to the individ- January-February 1994 33 Schotte ¯ The Consecrated Life in the Church These different synodal gatherings which have taken place in the course of the synod's history appear more and more clearly as a continuous process of pastoral renewal. ual and society. The bishops' work during the synod served as the basis for the apostolic exhortation Reconciliatio et paenitentia, which for the first time was designated a "postsynodal" docu-ment. The Second Extraordinary General Assembly in 1985 com-memorated the "Twentieth Anniversary of the Conclusion of the Second Vatican Council" and assessed the state of church renewal according to conciliar teachings. The recently published Catechism of the Catholic Church was the result of a proposal by the bishops at this episcopal assembly. "The Vocation and Mission of the Laity in the Church and in the World" was the topic chosen for the Seventh Ordinary General Assembly in 1987. Through a con-sideration of vocation and mission in the context of church commu-nion, the bishops sought to empha-size the distinctive nature of the lay faithful in the church's life and her work of evangelization in the world. The fifty-four proposals of this assembly were used in the formulation of the postsynodal apostolic exhortation Christifideles laici. In 1990 the Eighth Ordinary General Assembly again took up the subject of priesthood. However, where in 1971 the bishops focused on the theological nature of priesthood and its implica-tions, this assembly's attention was more pastoral in tone, cen-tering. upon priestly formation and the "person" of the priest himself-both religious and diocesan--before and after ordination. The forty-one proposals from this assembly were used by the Holy Father in the formulation of the postsynodal apostolic exhor-tation, Pastores dabo vobis. The Special Assembly for Europe was called in the follow-ing year, 1991, to help discern the kairos of the situation on the European continent created by the historic fall of communism and to consider the role of the church in the various programs of renewal and construction. 34 Review for Religious In preparation are two other special assemblies. In his recent apostolic visitation to Africa last February, the Holy Father announced, in conjunction with the release of the assembly's Instrumenturn laboris, that this special assembly will take place in Rome in 1994, just after Easter. In March the Lineamenta of the special assembly for Lebanon was published, initiating the con-sultation phase of the preparation for that synod. These different synodal gatherings which have taken place in the course of the synod's history appear more and more clearly as a continuous process of pastoral renewal, giving opportunity through prayer and reflection to deepen a sense of the church's mission and to stimulate all the people of God to participate in this mission, each according to his or her state. Perhaps our under-standing of the synod of bishops can be further enhanced by fol-lowing the synod process which has taken place thus far in the preparation for the 1994 synod on "The Consecrated Life and Its Role in the Church and in the World." The 1994 Synodal Process The principles governing the synod of bishops and the synodal process are set forth in three basic documents: the motu proprio Apostolica sollicitudo of Pope Paul VI establishing the synod; Ordo synodi episcoporum celebrandae, or the Constitutions of the Synod of Bishops; and the Code of Canon Law, canons 342 to 348 inclusive. For the purpose of our presentation I will limit myself to those aspects of the process which immediately affect the synod topic, its documentation, and the various preparatory phases leading to the synodal gathering. Before the conclusion of the Eighth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, the synod fathers were asked to elect from their number, according to synod regulations, the required fifteen-member council to assist the general secretary in the follow-up work of the assembly and to work on the prepa-ration of the Ninth Ordinary General Assembly. At the same time the synod fathers were invited to make suggestions on a topic to be treated at the next general assembly. There is a certain value to this initial exchange on the topic during the general assembly because the responses are spontaneous and unprepared. In making their suggestions the bishops were asked to keep in mind the following general criteria in selecting a synodal topic: (1) January-February 1994 35 Sctsotte ¯ Tlse Consecrated Life in rise Church that the topic have a universal character, that is, a reference and application to the whole church; (2) that the topic have a con-temporary character and a certain urgency, that is, have the capa-bility of exciting new energies and movement in the church towards growth; (3) that the topic have a pastoral focus and appli-cation as well as a firm doctrinal basis; and (4) that treatment of the topic be feasible, in other words, that it have the potential actually to be accomplished. In retrospect it is interesting to note that even in the initial consultation during the synod itself a con-vergence of ideas was evident regarding the treatment of some aspect of the consecrated life. Shortly after the conclusion of the general assembly, the gen-eral secretariat continued the consultation process by preparing a letter with the above criteria and sending it to the patriarchates, bishops' conferences, heads of offices of the Roman Curia, and the Union of Superiors General--the normal participants in the synod process. This communication requested the submission of three topics in order of preference. The suggestions coming from this consultation were then analyzed and discussed by the members of council of the general secretariat at one of its regularly sched-uled meetings, and a series of formulations of the theme in order of preference was submitted to the Holy Father. Until now the Holy Father has always selected the council's first choice, con-vinced that the consultation process provides a true indication of the desire of the universal church to treat a given subject. Such was the case for the topic of the 1994 synod. The general consultation process revealed a remarkable con-vergence of ideas indicating a preference for the topic of the con-secrated life. Initially some persons made a rather shallow interpretation to explain the choice, insisting that since the laity and the priesthood were treated in the two previous synodal assemblies, it was only logical that the consecrated life should receive attention. The truth of the matter is that in the course of the consultation a great number of reasons were given for calling a synod to treat the topic of the consecrated life. Many argued in the following manner. 1) With the importance of the consecrated life in the church today, there is necessity to reaffirm its true nature in various new social contexts and in the world at large. 2) The flourishing of vocations in some parts of the world 36 Review for Religious and the crisis of vocations in others requires a thorough exami-nation of the consecrated life. 3) After the Second Vatican Council, various efforts have been made to rewrite constitutions, to propose anew the charism of the founder, and so forth, and consecrated life in general has been subject to an overall renewal. Therefore, the time seems right to engage in an evaluative process. 4) The question of the relationship of those in consecrated life to bishops deserves renewed consideration as well as the sub-ject of the greater participation of women and men religious in the overall pastoral plan of a diocese, particularly in light of the unique charism proper to each. Where the document Mutuae relationes has been fruitful and productive on the whole, certain episcopal con-ferences have given indications that there remain some areas still needing attention. 5) The new forms of consecrated life appearing in many parts of the church require evaluation and proper guidance. The nature of religious institutes, secular institutes, and the societies of apos-tolic life needs to be clarified and their role in the church more clearly defined. Many of the new forms of unions and confrater-nities are appearing with the false notion that they are part of the consecrated life according to the evangelical counsels. 6) Some developments and interpretations have caused the common life for religious to be questioned. In some countries there are situations which deserve attention. 7) The prophetic character of consecrated life in certain cir-cumstances needs to be more clearly defined. How is a person in the consecrated life to respond in faithfulness to his or her voca-tion in the face of secularization, the crisis in culture, and the decline in moral values? 8) In some countries religious congregations have abandoned the work proper to them in favor of individual attempts at apos-tolic work. Such a situation raises the concern of religious con-gregations as well as bishops, requiring them to seek the proper pastoral approach to such situations. The above sampling of reasons underlying the choice of topic for the 1994 synod sufficiently indicates its universal appeal, pas-toral relevance, timely character, and feasibility. At the same time, it can be seen that they have a general inter-est for the entire church. In virtue of the church's unity, every part and every member will be affected by the exchange and out- January-Fetrruary 1994 37 Schotte * The Consecrated Life in the Church come. In this sense the synod will not simply treat a topic, but make suggestions to the Holy Father regarding the future. What does the consecrated life have in store for the future? How are those in consecrated life to live out their consecration in the apos-tolic mission of the church? What courageous and bold steps are required to meet the unique challenges made on consecrated life by the present state of affairs in the church and society? Before these questions can be faced by the bishops in syn-odal assembly, the church at large will have time to reflect on them and other aspects of the topic and be invited to make their observations known through the proper channels so that those required to make official responses on the topic to the general secretariat will have current information with which to work. The 1994 Lineamenta The synod process can be divided into four great moments: the Lineamenta, the Instrumentum laboris, the synodal assembly, and the postsynodal document. We logically pause to devote some time to explaining the Lineamenta document, the present stage of preparation for the Ninth Ordinary General Assembly. After the Holy Father's choice of topic, the council of the general secretariat at a regularly scheduled meeting held a roundtable discussion with the secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and with representatives from the various groups associated with con-secrated life, that is, women and men religious, members of sec-ular institutes, and members of the international organizations of consecrated life in the church, namely, the Union of Superiors General for Men and the International Union of Women Superiors as well as the International Congress of Secular Institutes. The observations resulting from this meeting were fur-ther discussed and developed in subsequent council meetings, and with the help of theologians an outline and texts of the Lineamenta were drafted and studied, before a definitive text was submitted to the Holy Father. As its Latin name suggests, the Lineamenta is an "outline" or general presentation of the synod topic followed by a series of questions intended to direct the prayer and reflection of the whole church on the subject. The information resulting from this stage will provide the raw material for the synod's Instrumentum laboris 3 8 Review for Religious or "working document," intended to present a composite picture of the present situation and prevailing attitudes in the church on consecrated life and its role in the church and in the world. The Lineamenta document is divided into three major parts, each treating a specific aspect of the topic: (1) "The Nature and Identity of the Consecrated Life"; (2) "The Consecrated Life in the church and in the World of Today"; and (3) "The Role of Consecrated Life." The document's initial pages immediately address the prob-lem of terminology. Strictly speaking, the term "consecrated life" in Canon Law refers to religious con-gregations and secular institutes only. What, then, is to be done with soci-eties of apostolic life? Since canon 731, § 1, states that the societies of apostolic life are "comparable to the institutes of consecrated life," it was agreed that the synod topic would also include their treatment. Therefore, when the term is used in the Lineamenta, it is meant to be all-inclusive. After a brief introduction, Part I begins with an explanation of the essential characteristics of the conse-crated life, namely, vocation, conse-cration, mission, the evangelical counsels, the common life, eschato-logical witness, its essential values, and the commitment to the spiritual life. The section then proceeds to speak of the charismatic nature of the consecrated life, as wit-nessed in its variety of charisms and multiplicity of forms. In this regard attention is given to the charism of the founder or foundress, the various forms of consecrated life, institutes of con-templative life, brothers, secular institutes, societies of a.postolic life, and the new forms of consecrated life emerging today. The second part of the document describes the present situ-ation of the consecrated life in the church and in today's world, seeking on this basis to suggest various subtopics which merit consideration, for example, the direction to be taken by the con-secrated life with the approach of the third millennium, the fruits of renewal, new values and aspects of the consecrated life, nega- The synod process can be divided into four great moments: the Lineamenta, the Instrumentum laboris, the synodal assembly, and the postsynodal document. Jam~ary-February 1994 39 Schotte ¯ The Consecrated Life in the Church tive aspects (even these must be addressed), the necessity of a clear witness in responding to the challenges of modern society, and finally the situation in various countries and cultures (Africa and Asia come especially to mind). This section ends with a call to those in consecrated life to continue the renewal begun after the Second Vatican Council. The third section speaks in practical terms of the role of the consecrated life in the church and society, beginning with a pre-sentation on the ecclesial dimensions of the consecrated life, its relation to the church hierarchy, its coordinating structures in fostering communion, its place on the level of the local church, and its communion with the lay faithful. With this in mind, var-ious topics related to the role of the consecrated life within the universal church community are treated, including the new evan-gelization, authentic apostolic creativity, acceptance of the call to evangelization, remaking the fabric of society, promoting the unity of all the baptized, and the dialogue with followers of other religions. The concluding portion of Part III turns its attention to the church's mission in the world, emphasizing features associ-ated with the consecrated life, for example, its specific witness to God's love through the works of mercy; its attention to young people and their needs; its presence in schools, hospitals, and social programs; its dedication to work on behalf of the poor; its role--past and present--in the transmission and formation of cul-ture; and its part in the church's work of safeguarding the values of nature and conscience in today's world. The closing pages of the Lineamenta then offe~ a brief look at Mary as the model and mother of the consecrated life and a reflec-tion on the consecrated life in terms of a renewed presence of Christ in the world of today. The presentation concludes with a section containing the document's endnotes, followed by a table of contents. Incorporated in the Lineamenta text and appearing at the con-clusion of each section is a series of twenty-five consecutively numbered questions which are meant to focus the prayer and dis-cussion of the universal church on various aspects of the synod topic. At the same time, these questions and numbers are to pro-vide an orderly structure for the responses from various individ-uals and church bodies which will be formulated and submitted in the lively exchange on all levels of the church community dur-ing the consultation period. 40 Review for Religious Official responses are expected to be filed with the general secretariat by those normally involved in the consultation pro-cess, that is, patriarchates, episcopal conferences, offices of the Roman Curia, and the Union of Superiors General for Men. Given the synod topic, the International Union of Women Superiors and the International Congress for Secular Institutes are also to submit responses. All responsible for such responses are to work on the best possible manner of facilitating the reading of the document by individuals and groups associated with them, and of seeking information from them so that the responses may be truly complete and reflect the richness of the exchange on the various levels of the local church community. With the publication of the Lineamenta on 20 November 1992, a significant and important stage in the preparation for this synodal assembly was initiated. I would even go so far as to say a most critical phase, because the richness and depth of the Instrumentum laboris, the reference point and source of discus-sion during the actual synodal assembly, depends on the widespread participation of the whole church and a thorough-ness in answering the series of questions posed in the Lineamenta. For this reason, it is incumbent upon each individual in the church, no matter what his or her state or circumstance, to con-tribute through the accustomed channels in this presynodal prepa-ration period, thereby providing the necessary information which will be eventually used in the official responses to be sent to the general secretariat. From my experience over the years I am becoming more aware and convinced of the very real contribution and impact of synodal assemblies in the life of the church. These beneficial results come about not simply from a month-long meeting, but from the whole synodal process, from the consultation regard-ing the theme, the prayer and reflection period, the actual cele-bration of the synod, and its follow-up. Not only do the reflection and prayer which are a part of the Lineamenta phase assist in setting the agenda in the Instrumentum laboris or "working paper," but the process itself taps and exer-cises the dynamism of church communion in the listening, shar-ing, and stirring up of new energies on various levels of the church community. And after the synodal assembly, where there is a con-centrated effort at intensely living the communion which has come beforehand, the effects make themselves felt years later. January-February 1994 41 Scbotte ¯ The Consecrated Life in the Church The Lineamenta itself makes reference to this fact when it states that the occasion of this synod will provide the opportunity for "all members of the church, particularly the institutes of con-secrated life, to reconsider the subject of their own renewal in light of the challenges and the opportunities of the present moment," based on the church's appeal in these days "for a renewed endeavor towards evangelical life, towards a profound spirituality, and towards a generous presence in the new evange-lization" (§33). This time of synodal preparation, then, is an occa-sion for hope, a hope that this profound examination of the status of renewal and the prospects for future growth of the consecrated life in all its aspects will be a moment of grace and revitalization, and bring great benefits to all those in consecrated life and to the church as a whole. Message from a Coreopsis Lanceolata (Daisies Do Tell) Some of us are past our prime, And one of us has lost a few petals; Another--will never see the sun. Yet we all rejoice That we reflect our Maker And celebrate a loving God Who signs each one of us With his own life's Blood. Joann Stuever, ASC postulant 42 Review for Religious A. PAUL DOMINIC Charism, Charisms, and Faddism d sexagenarian religious superior who keeps abreast of the times asked me if I had read the recent document on reli-gious life produced by the council of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops. I said yes, adding hesitantly: "But it is not very interesting." Without hesitation she agreed completely. The Point of Departure: The Lineamenta Surely the Lineamenta, the preliminary agenda on "The Consecrated Life and Its Role in the Church and in the World" prepared in view of the forthcoming Ninth General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, is not a particularly charismatic piece of writing. After all, it is not from the pen of a theologian like Rahner, or a biblicist like Elsa Tamez, or a feminist like Ruether, or a third-world figure like Amalorpavadass, or a cardinal like Martini. On the contrary, it is an official document with its strengths and weaknesses, treating the topic "in a complete organic manner, indicating the topic's precise content and its necessary limits''1 and touching upon "only the essential points of doctrine" (§4).2 As such, therefore, it would read somewhat like a protocol without the charismatic cadence or resonance of your fa~,orite author. However, considering that the document is the product of the pastoral office of the church, we would not be wrong if we rec-ognized in it the charismatic teaching included by Paul in his lists A. Paul Dominic SJ can be addressed at Satyodayam; S. Lallaguda; Secunderabad 500 017; India. .~anuary-Felrruary 1994 43 Dominic * Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism of charisms. And so what it says about religious life as a charism that includes many a charism can serve for our mental nourish-ment and impart to us a spiritual gift (Rm 1:11). It can set us thinking about religious life as a matter of charismatic experi-ence, that is, an experience of living a fundamental charism through as many different charisms as there are societies of"con-secrated" or "apostolic" life. Any serious reflection on this mat-ter will prove to be relevant, for the prevailing confusion in religious life concerns partly the lack of clarity about charism and charisms.3 Religious Life as Charism Religious life, like all life, is best observed in its relationships. On the one hand, it is a part of the church; and, on the other, it is itself the church and so serving, like the church, the rest of the world (§3, §25, and §44). In the first perspective, religious life is one of the many charisms of the church; in the second, it is, as we said earlier, a fundamental charism giving rise to a wide variety of expressions of itself. The religious state of life is a "particular gift in the life of the church" (Lumen gentium, §43). As such it can be properly appre-ciated only when we see it in place, beside many other similar gifts enjoyed by the church. That is why the Lineamenta begins the consideration of charisms (§14-§17) recalling the mystery of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ endowed with many gifts, quoting Paul: "There are many different gifts, but it is always the same Spirit; there are many different ways of serving, but it is always the same Lord. There are many different forms of activ-ity, but in everybody it is the same God who is at work in all" (1 Co 12:4-6). By the parallelism of the verses, the different ways of service or activity are all to be understood as gifts in a variety of forms. Paul goes on to list such gifts in the immediate context (i Co 12:8-10, 28) and also in other letters (Rm 12:6-8 and Ep 4:11). A look at all the lists can give us an idea of the wide range of gifts enjoyed by the growing church. Though it would be anachronistic to look for the mention of religious life among the listed gifts of the Spirit bestowed on the church, note that celibacy is proposed as a special gift (1 Co 7:7). In the course of time the church came to recognize many more gifts in its ongoing life, gifts like asceticism, monasticism, vir- 44 Review for Religious ginity, choice of poverty, and social virtues, to speak only of those that have an obvious reference to religious life.4 As the church grew in self-awareness, it came to discover many elements that we now associate with religious life as its specific gifts; and so today we can speak about "the charism of the consecrated life" (§14), that is to say, the consecrated life itself viewed as a gift or charism. However various and heterogeneous the different charisms may be in the manner of their working, they are one and homo-geneous in intent and purpose. They are all meant to build up the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ is built up when the mem-bers are well nourished and so live to the full, reaching unity in faith and knowledge of the Son of God and forming the perfect Person fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself (Ep 4:13). This fullness of Christ is the same as the life permeated by the Spirit ever filling us or even overwhelming us with all her gifts and charisms. Such a life energized by the working of the Spirit is spiritual and holy. M1 the charisms of the Spirit nourish the life of the church, making it ever more holy with the life of Christ himself. Situating religious life thus in the sphere of the church's life of holiness and recognizing in it a universal reality in the church's makeup, the Lineamenta concludes: "With this in mind one speaks of 'the charism of the consecrated life'" (§14). Here is surely an echo of the approach to religious life taken by Lumen gentium, §39-§47. Such an affirmation of religious life, however, is slightly marred by the way the Lineamenta, following of course Vatican expresses it. After describing the way of holiness of religious life marked by vows that establish a special bond to God, Lumen gen-tium concludes: "Thus, although the religious state., does not belong" to the hierarchical structure of the church, nevertheless it belongs inseparably to her life and holiness" (see L §1; see also §14 and §36). One can discover a patronizing voice here, rightly or wrongly. Anyway, what a difference it would make if the state-ment were to read towards the end: "nevertheless, like the hier-archy, the religious state too belongs inseparably to her life and holiness." Does not Vatican II after all state in the chapter on universal holiness, "In the various types and duties of life, one and the same holiness is cultivated by all who are moved by the Spirit of God" (LG §41), and further go on to describe the way of holiness of the different classes of persons and finally end with a clear reference to the life of the religious (LG §41 and §42)? January-February 1994 45 Dominic ¯ Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism There is a good reason why we can parallel religious life and hierarchy in this way. Of all the charisms enumerated by Paul-- who, incidentally, developed the terminology of charisms--the pastoral office of the hierarchy is the only one that concerns a state of life. This idea gets all the greater force because the pas-toral letters signal a development in the idea of charism which continued to prevail in postapostolic times. Paul's reminder to Timothy, "You have in you a spiritual gift which was given to you when the prophets spoke and the body of elders laid their hands on you" (i Tm 4:14), a reminder repeated again in 2 Timothy 1:6, certainly refers to Timothy's charism as one of grace of state or office. If we add to this way of looking at the hierarchical charism the reference to the charism of married life in 1 Corinthians 7:7, where there is a simultaneous reference to the charism of celibacy too, we can discern a line of thinking in which the various particular vocations in Christian life can be considered charisms establishing people in different states of life. So we can now speak in particular of the charism of religious life as the grace of the religious state of life; contributing to the holiness of the church in a particular way. In this context it is enlightening and inspiring to recall an old nomenclature of the religious state of life, namely, the state of perfection, proclaiming visibly the prophetic office of Christ wit-nessing to the kingdo~n here and hereafter. What is basic about states of perfection is the perfection to be acquired by way of the evangelical counsels in a community set-up. The function of any particular way of religious life, contemplative or active, lies. in this: that religious, by their very striving after holiness, call upon all Christians to do the same in their own way. So remarking, Bernard H~iring quotes papal authority in support: "The church would not fully respond to the mind of her Divine Bridegroom, men would not fix their eyes on her as on the 'the signal unto the nations'., if they did not find in her men who reflected the splendor of the gospel more through the example of their life than by means of words.''s All this is not so old-fashioned. A few years ago America carried an article describing religious as those who, unlike the laity, make religion their very career with its own particular structures that not only favor and promote it but also witness to it.6 The charism of religious is to be identified with striving for perfection, as the Lineamenta often repeats (§3, §5, §8, and §16). 46 Review for Religious To speak of the state of perfection is perhaps not a post-Vatican practice. However, in avoiding the falsity of perception possible in the expression, one need not altogether abandon its right use. Rather, we need to rediscover in the correct meaning of the phrase some essentials of religious life. Here is one: "It is not so much we who profess as others (the church, the community) who recognize that we. at least have received an explicit call and have come to a state of commitment to pursue it relentlessly, wholeheartedly; and radically.''7 But even in so reflecting on religious life as a state of perfec-tion, one should beware of a dan-ger. If one were to emphasize the personal pursuit of perfection that religious undertake, one is liable to overemphasize all their many undertakings on the path to perfection, thereby forgetting that any and every charism is a pure and simple gift of God. The story of Peter is apt here, as Bonhoeffer tells it. "Three times Peter heard himself proclaim that Christ is his Lord and God--at the beginning, at the end, and at Caesarea Philippi. Each time it is the same grace of Christ calling Peter to follow, and revealing itself to him in his confession." To reiterate the idea with Bonhoeffer: "This grace was certainly not self-bestowed. It was the grace of Christ himself.''8 Quoting all this, J.M.R. Tillard concludes; "Now, this costly grace., is for Simon Peter and for every religious the charism which makes existence as such a sign of the gospel. This charism comes from the Lord's Spirit . It is truly a gift made by the risen Lord, through his Holy Spirit, to his people. The Lord passes by. his grace seizes certain men and women. Poor sinners, they are nonetheless of those who will say to . . . the world: 'We have found what we were looking for! Come and see!' This is their charism.''9 One may, then, delve into the experience of religious life and discover in its depths not so much a for but a because of. No one enters religious life primarily for some thing or some work, but rather because of the One Who calls. "The for will come later, nec-essarily, but in the radiance and as the evangelical fruit of the No one enters religious life primarily for some thing or some work, but rather because of the One who calls. ~tanuar2/-Febrttary 1994 47 Dominic ¯ Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism because of," as Tillard says.~° Can anything be clearer than this? Yet in the culture shock that religious were exposed to after Vatican Council II, not a few sought their identity in their works and tasks, in their of religious life. But the more they did so, the more elusive they found it. For their real existence as religious was concentrated in the call of Christ to which they had once com-mitted themselves because of the altogether new experience of being seized by the Lord's power. Their existence, therefore, became, or ought to have become, a new existence, a charismatic existence, a charism. Such a vision of religious life as the charism in itself appears distinctly, though in a less charismatic expression, in the Lineamenta when it speaks of the profession of the gospel as the supreme rule for all institutes, whatever their particular ministries may be (§8; see also Perfectae caritatis, §2). The Charisms of Religious Life Once religious life is understood in terms of one unique exis-tential charism underlying all forms of it, one may be able to appreciate the more familiar experience of the particular charisms that at once characterize and distinguish the various institutes. It is in this way that the Lineamenta would seem to interpret the charismatic nature of religious life as taught in the conciliar and postconciliar documents (§ 14). Logically and theologically, the consideration of the charism that constitutes religious life leads to that of the many charisms of religious life. It is the one charism of religious life that begets many a charism in it. Are not the latter "like branches sprouting out wondrously and abundantly from a tree growing in the field of the Lord"? (LG §43, quoted in L §16). Historically, however, what attracted the attention of people was the variety of charisms and not the one charism beneath and beyond all charisms. So, tracing the beginning of religious life from the very infancy of the church, Perfectae caritatis could point out: "Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, many., pursued a solitary life, or founded religious families . And so it happened by divine plan that a wonderful variety of religious communities grew up" (§ 1, partly quoted in L § 16). The mention of solitary life and religious families obviously refers to the twin charisms of original religious life, namely, 48 Review for Religious eremiticism and cenobitism (§9 and §19c). Cenobitism itself in the course of history developed two other charisms, namely, divine contemplation and human service. These in turn became spe-cialized in their ways of focusing on God and on people. In what-ever century religious live out their days, they adopt or develop distinct varieties of direct service of God and humanity, in imita-tion of Christ. Through them, therefore, Christ comes to be shown "contemplating on the mountain, announcing God's king-dom to the multitude, healing the sick and the maimed, turning sinners to wholesome fruit, blessing children, doing good to all, and always obeying the will of the Father" (LG §46, quoted in L §15). Often enough, charisms are considered, or even identified with, graces meant for the common good. Such a consideration is incomplete because it misses something important, namely, the source of the power of service. Charisms are particular graces imparted to us by which we bear or image or reflect or even become Christ in ourselves in a particular limited way, and so are able to render appropriate service in a specific context in a par-ticular part of the world in the manner of Christ himself. So they highlight in us "a specific aspect of the mystery of Christ" (§ 17). However, the gospel, or for that matter Christ himself, if under-stood with proper nuance, is not apart from the church. So the Lineamenta does well in describing charisms as bearing upon a specific aspect, not only of the mystery of Christ, but also of the church's life, and thus manifesting in the makeup of the Mystical Body the multiform grace of Christ (§15). One should not miss here how charisms are at once incarnational and ecclesial (§46). Charisms and Service Once it is grasped that charisms have to do primarily with a fundamental religious way of being, one cannot go wrong in insist-ing that charisms are out-and-out oriented towards service, "des-tined for service of the kingdom" (§3); for surely charisms have an inalienable reference, not only to the way of being, but also to the way of doing. The Lineamenta spells out the nexus between charism and service forcefully thus: "Each charism . . . brings with it a particular manner of faithfully and intensely living the evangelical counsels. In addition, it implies a particular and con-crete style of spiritual life, a determined form of apostolate, a .~anuary-February 1994 49 Dominic ¯ Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism specific experience of community life, and a particular involvement in the world" (816 [emphasis added]; see also $8). What, then, are the specific paths of service in the building of the earthly city (§44)? Not forgetting the contribution of the contemplatives to society through their divine service of worship (§2)--the first permanent foundation of women in the United States was Carmelites~l--the Lineamenta illustrates the service of active charisms thus: "Today the consecrated life is present in our society through the multiplicity of apostolic services rendered to others, each according to its diverse charisms, in one magnificent expression of the charity of Christ on behalf of the integral for-mation of persons; in the education of children and young people, in the care of the sick, the suffering, the elderly, and those in want; and in aid to persons with special needs and those marginal-ized by society" (§44a). What do all such services intend except "to make operative the gospel of the beatitudes and the works of mercy" (§44a)? One particular element of service rendered by charisms con-cerns life of communion within the church. Different forms of religious life characterized by their different charisms do not con-stitute exclusive churches within the church, but, forming part of the one church, ought to feel themselves to be the church and so identify themselves with her (~3 and ~35; see also Perfectae car-itatis, §2c). The charisms of the different religious families, with their charismatic and yet ecclesial-minded founders, belong as much to the whole church as to the religious themselves (~16, §26e, and §46). For not only are they meant for the growth of the chhrch, but they also have their origin, regulation, guarantee, and approval in and from the church (§6, §15, and §16). Therefore, far from being closed in upon themselves, religious offer a rich fare for communion, reflecting ideal church commu-nion (§9). There is every reason, then, to identify the religious living together by the term community. Incidentally, the hierarchy as such can only contribute, in terms of sociology, to the culture of societas with role differentiation; but the religious as such plunge themselves into the heart of society with their charisms of ser-vice (§3, ~42, and §44) and break through segmentations in soci-ety and initiate the culture of communitas in our world.~2 In bringing about this new culture of communion in the world church, the religious, as "experts in communion" (§35), have nec- 50 Review for Relig~otts essarily to act locally in the particular church, but with their hearts spanning universally in the global church (§27a). The exercise of religious charisms "assists everyone--clergy and faithful--to open themselves to the universal and missionary dimension of the church, and., makes the particular churches an image of the uni-versal church" (§39). For a con-crete example of communion resulting from the enduring charisms, the Lineamenta points out the flourishing of lay third orders, lay associations, and lay-volunteer groups "whose mem-bers are bound under different titles to the spirituality and apos-tolic work of various institutes" (}41). Where the charisms do not serve the cause of church com-munion, they are likely to become mere means of some service or religious themselves. other without the underlying spirit. The Lineamenta warns of the danger of reducing the pres-ence of institutes to parochial ser-vice "without encouraging and welcoming the richness of the spirituality and their proper charismatic service" (~40). More plainly, in the church Body each part can do only the service it is meant for. As charisms are vivifying and beautifying graces of the differ-ent members of the Body of the church (§46), they complement one another; and so they cannot healthily coexist without mutual encounter and influence. Perhaps, in the pre-Vatican "ghetto" church, religious congregations developed their own ghettos, pos-sibly without even knowing it. But the time has come, especially in the era of ecumenism, for % better understanding of the sense of communion among foundational charisms" (§27b). It is high time, therefore, for religious to realize how a particularly har-monious communion among themselves, sharing one another's charism, "can and should contribute to express better the full-ness and richness of Christ" (§46), not only in his Body the church, but also in his extended body, the world in need of union. The charisms of the different religious families, with their charismatic and yet ecclesial-minded founders, belong as much to the whole church as to the Jan~ry-Febrz~ry 1994 51 Dominic ¯ Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism As charisms serve the cause of communion in the church, so do they contribute to the unity of the separate congregations them-selves. It is unthinkable that a religious family could maintain its unity of life amid all its committed involvement in the world if it failed to cling to its essential charism for nourishment (§32b). Each particular charism, bringing with it a particular manner of intense eyangelical life, makes the presence of the one Lord pres-ent in space and time (§46) and thus "enriches the legacy of life, history, and spirituality characterizing each family identity, shared in common through the spirit of the founder or foundress" (§16). Keeping Charisms Alive The dynamism of religious life in its variety depends on the vitality of its true charisms. Once charisms turn false, they lose their vitality and spell the ruin of institutes. Present-day insti-tutes can continue their existence faithfully only if they recog-nize, recover, retain, and renew their particular charisms in their past originality and present timeliness (~ 17). What, then, can we say about the renewal of charisms? "In keeping with their proper charism" (§40) and similar phrases recur in the Lineamenta, as in the Code of Canon Law, emphasizing that the charisms are to be preserved with fidelity and continued without alteration, avoiding all subtle deviation from the original spirit (§16). This supposes in religious a healthy appreciation and pride in the early traditions of their congrega-tion, as advocated by Perfectae caritatis. Given the evangelical inspiration of all charisms, one can say more, drawing a compar-ison between keeping to the purity of the gospel and maintaining the primitive charism. As Paul insisted on an anathema for those who dare preach a different gospel (Ga 1:8-9), religious founders and foundresses could do likewise, enjoining their followers to abide by the spirit of their constitutions without any dilution or dissimulation on their part.13 In this spirit, while expressing appre-ciation of the general progress in the awareness of the separate charisms in the different congregations in the postconciliar era, the Lineamenta adds affirmatively: "This consciousness ought to find expression in a spiritual commitment and a working pres-ence which effectively enlivens and makes operative for the good of the church the spirit of the founder orfoundress and the legacy of each institute" (§3 lc). 52 Review for Religious Two modern experiences with regard to charisms are note-worthy. One, the preferential choice for the poor, which has been "a constant feature of charisms in the apostolic life, often inspired by the words and actions of the Lord" (§44c; see also §27d), is becoming more and more a serious concern for religious life, leading communities to share the very life of the poor and the marginalized with all their risks, trials, and problems. Second, reminiscent of the early successes of many a congregation, there is the geographical spread of extant charisms in the younger churches of the third world and in the newly liberated Eastern European countries (§27c), giving rise to new cultural expres-sions of them (§32c). The above-mentioned experiences are two fine examples of how charisms rise to the occasion and serve their purpose today, provided they are ever deepened and constantly developed (Mutuae relationes, §1 i; L ~16) according to the signs of the times (Perfectae caritatis, §2; L §17). The sign today is the oncoming of the third millennium, throwing up opportunities and challenges (§33) and giving rise to the sprouting of new charisms and new forms of evangelical life (§24 and §27c). One aspect of this deepening and developing of surviving charisms lies in the direction of their "being called upon today-- inspired by the spirit of the founder or foundress--to serve as the basis for making new commitments and responses in Christian charity to the new and old expressions of poverty in our world" (§29g) and, more generally, to the changed atmosphere of the world "because of the social and cultural happenings which have rapidly come about in modern society" (§25). This is reminiscent of the call of Mutuae relationes to be innovative enough for bold enter-prising initiatives (§12; L §42). Which persons are inspired enough and thus inspiring enough to make new initiatives and refound their congregations, warding off the subtle temptation to be wise in their own eyes? Only fer-vent people (§29e). Only they can update discerningly for today the expressions of their original charism. But in the absence of such people "a certain leveling in behavior and in the tenor of the spiritual and communal life has brought a certain loss of prac-tical identity in charism and works" (§28b)--as surely happened in India, for instance, when some religious working with the masses wanted no public association whatever with their congre-gation. So the apparently clever and outspoken members certainly ~tammry-February 1994 53 Dominic ¯ Charism, Cbarisms, and Faddism need to be cautioned, against tendential postures, theoretical and practical, regarding charisms that go against their.genuineness (§3 lc). A case in point was that of a Jesuit who spoke of the need to rewrite the Ignatian rules for thinking with the church, to the applause of the gathering of course, with scant awareness of their foundation in the mystical union of the church and Christ that inspired Ignatius's Eharacteristic service of the church. While there have been new, positive, and worthy initiatives-- the switch of women religious in the United States from the ser-vice of the clergy to frontier ministries should be hailed as one such measure though grudged by not a few men even in the highly progressive United States of Americal4--there have also been negative, unworthy, and false initiatives--which brings me to the discussion of faddism. Faddism Faddism, the cultivation of fads, has to do with "a rapid, sud-den, and ephemeral collective adoption of novel behavior which affects only superficial or trivial areas of life.''s It was certainly the fad of hasty paradigm shifting when some persons clamored for implementing changes in religious life at a faster pace than peo-ple could cope with. Even when people were willing to change, it was not without the grief of losing the familiar past or the fear of the unknown future. So whoever rushed their fellow religious into the world of Vatican II without at the same time providing them time to grapple with their fear or to grieve over or even rage about their apparent loss were carried away more by an itch for change (2 Tm 4:3) than by the breath of the Spirit, for whom there are times for everything. It was also a fad whenever an opinion gained ground that this or that particular individual was the resource person for renewal. To venture an example, it would seem that a certain fad of what may be called spiritual consumerism surrounded Anthony de Mello of Sadbana fame, for numbers of people kept looking to him alone for renewal, almost as if he were the director of world-wide renewal. In any case, whenever one individual looms too large in some endeavor, the result tends to be superficial, whereas all renewal worth the name happens deep within people, where the creative Spirit works in the innermost recesses of hearts. Another similax: fad, which coflld be called hybridization, was 54 Review for Religious the adoption of a celebrated model as the sole means of renewal, whether or not it squared with the blueprint of one's own origi-nal charism. If the one-month retreat according to the Spiritual Exercises appeared to be such a fad some twenty years ago, today in certain circles external dialogue--whether with native tradi-tions or modern situations--would seem to hold sway more than inner dialogue within one's own charism. Among all those who were "zealous" about reforms in reli-gious life, precious few resorted to a real praxis. Not only did individuals and small groups indulge in the fad of stylized ideo-logical talk.~6 Even entire provinces, if not whole congregations, could be all talk, adopting popular phrases about the poor, for example, rather than making sincere options for them. How pro-ductive can all this exercise be except for inviting occasional out-right condemnation. A bold village woman responded to a group of young religious whose actions were not as forthcoming as their words, "These are not the kind of shepherds who will save the sheep; they swallow the sheep." What is absent in feverish talk, namely, action, can itself become a fad and go beyond all proportion. The slogan (not the idea itself) "formation for mission in mission" suits such a fad, giving the go-by to minimum privacy and seclusion for necessary growth in maturity and personalization. Showmanship and one-up- manship feed this fad, causing each one's action to be largely unproductive. These things are the very opposite of prophetic action. They may have the imaginativeness of the prophets of old, but not their soundness of inspiration. The craze of using anything and everythin

Jayeson Vance Leading Tour at Alcatraz, 2012 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Jayeson Vance. The interview was conducted on October 10, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Jayeson discusses memories of Ogden and 25th Street. ; 35p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Jayeson P. Vance Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jayeson P. Vance Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 October 2013 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Vance, Jayeson, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 10 October 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Jayeson Vance Leading Tour at Alcatraz 2012 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jayeson Vance. The interview was conducted on October 10, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Jayeson discusses memories of Ogden and 25th Street. LR: Today is October 10, 2013 doing a phone interview with Mr. Jayeson Vance who is currently residing in San Francisco, about 25th street and Ogden. My name is Lorrie Rands and I will be conducting the interview. Jayeson, I, again, appreciate your time and your willingness to help us out with this. Let's begin with the simple basics of when and where were you born? JV: I was born at the old St. Benedict's hospital on 29th and Polk in Ogden, on June 26, 1947. LR: Where did you reside, where was your home in Ogden? JV: Our home was, when I was a boy, we were, first we lived in a post war housing, emergency housing for the GI's. My dad was at Hill Field as an Air Force Sergeant, an Army Air Corp Sergeant. That was at the old Bonneville Park, as they used to call it. It was an old cinder block, post war or emergency housing that, I don't know who paid for, probably the federal government. Then they, at some point around 1950 or 51, they destroyed those homes and we, my dad was able to get a home on 1362 Hudson, between 5th and 6th on, at just above Harrison, and we were just a quarter block below Polk. That's where I spent my early years and then we later moved to 108 Harrison, at first and Harrison. LR: So was Harrison at that time, was it paved all the way through? 1 JV: Yes, Harrison was paved, Hudson was primitive, it was unpaved, thank you for asking. We actually did not even have a phone in the house and my mother had to walk to Hudson and Polk, to a little phone booth as did all the neighbors in order to place a phone call. Actually, it seems funny now, and the street was dirt and it had a curb and gutter but it didn't have the sidewalks and it didn't have, you know, it was very primitive. It was like living out on the frontier in a way, and my grandfather used to say, "You can hear the coyotes at night up there where you live." He lived on 256 Harrisville Road which is still there, that structure is still standing. LR: You grew up then in that part of Ogden? JV: Yea, on that northeast bench, I went to Ben Lomond High and then my dad had gone to Weber and my mother, actually my mother was a USU graduate. I just said, "Well," I couldn't decide what to do after I graduated from Ben Lomond, so I decided on Weber, which was a great choice. I was pleased with, I always thought it had the best—a lot of people say about Weber that we had better professors than bigger schools because you didn't have teaching assistants teaching classes, you had Ph.D.'s teaching classes quite often and so I think in some ways we got a much better education at Weber than people maybe at the University of Utah had in some ways, so anyway, it was a good time to go to Weber. I briefly was the sophomore class president for a brief while, filled in for Mike Howe I believe was his name, cause he couldn't finish his term. My name at that time, I changed my name in 1982, and my born name was Clark Walker. So that's always strange, and I have to explain that, that I 2 changed my name. I was one of those kids that had kind of an identity crisis and so my legal name is Jayson P. Vance. I don't know how much you want to know about my personal life, but just to explain, if you look me up, you'll find me under Clark Walker. Weber State records, well, except I changed my diploma reads Jayeson Vance now, so I had that changed. LR: So, I'm just curious, why did you choose Jayeson Vance? JV: It was just one of those things that I had a friend who was a counselor, which said, "It's time for a change." I had just left a federal job and I wanted a new start in life and she said, "This would be a good time to change." She had done this to, she had changed her name and she said, "I don't know, it's great," and she was able to persuade me that I should do it. Then once you do that, and we'd had a house so we had to change the mortgage records so then and I had to go to court, to district court and officially change my name by law. I can't ever use the old name again and legally, so anyway, I have, for better or worse, that's my name. So I just have to accept that. In some ways I felt shouldn't be changing that because it's my family history, but then as I researched my family history, I found out that my father's father, who was an English immigrant during World War I, which is kind of odd, how do you get to where my father was born in California? It's a long story, but his father deserted the family, his name was reputedly, Sylvester Hodgson Walker. He deserted this mother and this infant boy, who was my father and said, "I'm a British subject, I don't want to have a kid." And he ran off to Canada, and he said, "You can't touch me, I'm a British subject." I don't even really know the man's name, I never saw a picture of him 3 and it's one of these great mysteries of life that I would love to see at least what he looked like and how did he end up in California during World War One. The British would have wanted any young man to be in the Army or something and so it's a—was his name really Walker, you know, all these mysteries like that. I didn't feel troubled about dropping the name Walker, so that's, anyway, we got off on a tangent. LR: No, that's great, I asked so, let's go ahead and go back then. You said that your dad worked at Hill Field as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps, what did your mom do? JV: My mother was a teacher in her later years, well, when they were first married she was a school teacher, then she dropped her job as a teacher to be a house wife and about 1959 she went back to Ogden public schools, worked at Edison school teaching second grade. Her name was Bonnie Ruth Murphy Walker and she passed away this month, just earlier this month, ten years ago the start of this month, she's been dead 10 years now. The family is all gone, my brother, my father and my mother are all gone and my wife and I live here. LR: You're kind of cutting out on me. JV: Oh, maybe if I hold the microphone up closer here. LR: I'm not sure if it's you or if it's me. That seems to be better, okay. I hate it when I get off on my flow. As you were growing up, what were some of the things you liked to do for fun? JV: I used to draw maps of the city actually. I loved history form early on. I read Land Mark Books, I was a boy scout. I got an Eagle Scout Award, I was an Eagle 4 Scout. I was very interested in police and crime, the FBI. I wanted to be an FBI agent at one time and I studied the history of, I was reading adult literature written for adults about the FBI, you know like the FBI story by Glen Whitehead I think it is, when I was twelve. I was trying to—it was not easy to read—but I was trying and I was just obsessed with that stuff and I saw the world very black and white, in a very black and white way. I remember giving—I had some really conservative, very, very conservative opinions about law and order and I wanted to—we had some milk stolen and I wanted my mother so badly to call the police department because I wanted to look at a real policeman in the face and we hardly had any crime in that area. I was so excited that was my amusement, anything to do with law and order or police, any TV show, Texas Rangers or Broderick Crawford, who starred in California Highway Patrol or anything like that. The Lone Ranger and all that stuff, I just loved all that. We played Army, it was post World War Two so we had, almost everybody I knew was the son or the daughter of a GI or a sailor from World War Two or a Marine. We had tons of Army Men and toys about World War Two and I had a whole Army and Navy set of toys that I just spent hours with. Then we would—the little kids in the neighborhood—we'd organize into tiny army, little army training things. Then I would build little model cities in the back yard with rocks and build a highway. I had a lot of fun doing that. I made a model of Ben Lomond peak at one time in my back yard out of clay and rocks and so I had a lot of fun as for Mount Ben Lomond and all that. I tried to make of Ogden out of rocks but it was a little over whelming. 5 LR: I'll bet. So did you ever have the chance to meet any Ogden Police officers when you were younger? JV: Yea, one of my friends, Gary Greenwood, became a police officer in Ogden and he and I were golfing buddies for quite a while, and I met him, just before I moved out of Ogden—I got married and moved away, I remember seeing him in his uniform with his shoes all polished. I was so proud of him and I so wished that I could be like him, be a policeman, but I never became a policeman, I became a park ranger. Not quite the same, but he was just kind of an inspiration when I saw him standing there with his highly polished shoes and his nice neat uniform and he was very proud of it, rightly so. I lost track of him, I would like to talk to him again but I tried to locate him on the internet and he was a probation officer for a while and I couldn't find any more about him. I haven't, if you know him or anybody knows him, I would love to talk to him. He was a great guy. I'm just joining the auxiliary law enforcement team here for the San Francisco police, I just applied to join that. It's a volunteer position, but my fantasy, my interest in crime and law and order has been lifelong. I guess it's no wonder I ended up on Alcatraz. LR: Did you ever hang out downtown? JV: Yea, we did, one of my stronger memories, my father would take me, well my father was a—after he left the Army Air Corps, he became a postman at the main post office and then later Gorder's station as they used to call the post office over there on the bench. He was, his route was the businesses along 25th and along Washington. He was the downtown postman, and he would drive all the 6 packages, they didn't have a UPS, and he would do all the package deliveries all over downtown. He was a gun lover, he loved guns and there was a gun shop on 25th that he loved to go to. He knew 25th very well, he knew the Porters and Waiters Club, he took me into the Depot Drug and there was some girly magazines one time. Oh, it was a little embarrassing, I was going through puberty. Oh we looked at those girly magazines a little bit, but that was among little things like that that I remember. Depot Drug was a hive of activity. It was scary, it was frightening, but it was exciting also. They had these barrels of toys. I loved anything with a plastic army man, or army soldiers like that, and they had just piles of that stuff. Even in the front window, or I think it could even have been on the sidewalk, I could remember my heart just pounding about it, and I only got to go in there a couple of times, but it was a just a hive of excitement. There was also a fear about 25th of course, the legend of all the possibility of heroin and prostitution and all those things that were going on around there. I could even I guess sense it in my father that he was a little bit on edge, but he never had anyone bother him or threaten him in any way while he was delivering mail. He had some rude business people that were pretty rude to him, you know, kind of abusive, but he didn't ever have any threats. He was very close with the black community in Ogden, he knew a lot of the black folks and he was very pro civil rights and he felt that they had gotten the bad end of the deal. The Porters and Waiters Club was famous, of course, for the railroad porters that worked on the Union Pacific that brought Jazz to Ogden. 7 It was also a street of sin certainly. Later in life, my best man at my wedding was Arnie Jacobson and his father was chief Jacobson of the Ogden police. Arnie told me some stories, but these are now second hand stories that he got from his father, so I don't have direct access to that information but it came through Arnie. His father put on black face because they didn't have any black police officers and went down onto 25th to purchase heroine, because the dealers on 25th were black. They did make some arrests and the Ogden police were known as the toughest police in Utah because of the street, because of patrolling 25th street they had to be tougher than the Salt Lake police, according to Arnie anyway. They would have this annual football, I believe football game between the Ogden Police and the Salt Lake police and the Ogden police would always win because they had to be tougher, even though it was a smaller department by far than the Salt Lake department. It really had quite a story there, I mean you could write a lot of, I could easily see someone writing a novel or a historical novel about it. Maybe that's what I should do, I don't know. Then my mother told me about working at the Union Laundry but she did all that Union Pacific linen as a young woman. She was a pretty young brunette and her father, Clarence Murphy, would warn her, he was a Union Pacific engineer. "Now Bonnie, you get down to Washington Boulevard and get on that street car and you run to Washington Boulevard," or somebody told her, or she told me that she was so scared on 25th that she ran all the way from Wall Avenue to Washington Boulevard as fast as she could run to get to Washington Boulevard to where she felt safe, and then get on the street car to go north to 8 Harrisville Road where they lived. She had a palpable fear of that street but she again never had anything happen to her so it just, there's a lot of stuff about that street. I've seen that, I don't know you've probably seen that DVD that that fellow put out about the history of Ogden I imagine. Are you aware of that one? LR: Yes, The one that was in 2007 or 11, not too long ago? Yes. JV: They explained that, I guess they alleged that Al Capone may have been on 25th, which I've never found any—I tried because I studied Al Capone quite a bit having been on Alcatraz where he was locked up for about five years, and I've never found any evidence, have you? To support that he was ever there. LR: I haven't, the only thing I have heard about are the rumors. JV: Yea, it's just legendary. When I worked on Alcatraz we'd have people from Canada and Saskatchewan Province was a place where he was reputed to have been. Oh, Al Capone, you hear this all the time, in Wisconsin he went to honey lodges and it is conceivable that he may have been in Ogden that he was really on, and it was called Little Chicago at one point. It was one of the nick names of Ogden, of that area of Ogden as you may know already. Of course, today, it's a very different street than it was and I'm looking at a picture of it right now, a modern picture. I guess there were some movies made there with that famous noddle parlor sign? LR: Yea, the Star Noodle, the one with the dragon? JV: There was a little China town there too of course, from the Chinese workers on the railroad. My grandfather, as a boy, his mother died when he was a youngster and his father was of course a railroad worker too, an engineer, and he was 9 basically raised himself on the streets. This would have been about 1900 or 1905 around in that era, used to run opium on a bicycle around China, the little Ogden, and helped these opium dealers. It was legal at that time to sell opium, and he would, as reprehensible as it sounds now, would sell opium to the Chinese, and make a little money that way, because they didn't have much money. He and his sister and his father, no mother, were kind of, you know, they had some kind of rough edges in his early years, and he remembered being pretty mean to some of the Chinese as a teenage boy, pulling there queue's. They used to wear their hair in queue's on the back of their head, doing some mean things like that and of course the Chinese were abused everywhere. Out here in San Francisco they were abused even more. The word Chink was frequently passed around. It was a racist time it was not fun to be black or Chinese in those days. It was rough for a lot of people. LR: So did you ever witness any of that discrimination in that part of Ogden? JV: No, that was way before my time. I think it went underground, I'm sure there was a feeling that Asians were odd or you know, they were kind of a curiosity. I don't remember. We used to eat at the Utah Noodle Parlor a lot and have the other—I forget the other noodle parlor name on Grant there. We used to, and we enjoyed all the food, the chop suey and all those things. So you'd hear little remarks like that, that were racists but it was, and of course it was. My grandfather had actually been a member of the Klan when he was a youngster. He had no education, he was brought up on the streets and he picked up whatever he picked up, and he picked up a lot of racists attitudes. I remember he, as a young 10 man—he wasn't that in his older years—but as a young man, there was a Klu Klux Klan Chapter there in Ogden. The Klan was all over the United States if you study the history of the Klan and it was very powerful in the early twenties and that's about the time he was starting his family. My grandfather was out there on Harrisville Road, but he I guess they had some Klan meetings up on the foothills in the early twenties where they burned crosses and stuff up on the foothills above. You can imagine how it must have felt to be a black person and see that going on, especially a tiny minority, there in that part of the world. A feeling, you must have been pretty much an emotional, a very unpleasant emotional experience anyway for a black or an Asian too. I think they were pretty mean to Asians, the Klan was, as well. He never said much about that, he did express racist attitudes which were part of that generation, occasionally. I had that wonderful contrast in my father who just really loved the black folks in Ogden. Marshall White, the police officer who was killed there, who was a hero of the police department. After they finally got a black officer, and then he got killed, but it was a rough town. There was somewhat open prostitution, if I remember, right along parts of Grant Avenue and Lincoln Avenue. Even in my early years, even as late as maybe 19, probably about 1970 even, there was still open prostitution going on, it was very limited, but it was there. As I've studied the street I know there was a back alley that ran heroin and a tunnel that ran heroin from the depot all along, I think on the north side of the street. Maybe that tunnel is still there, I've seen 11 some references that indicate that the tunnel went all the way to the Ben Lomond Hotel apparently. Are you aware of that? LR: I'm aware more of the rumors. JV: I saw something online about historic tunnel tours of Ogden and they, if I remember correctly were going into the basement of the Ben Lomond Hotel and somebody was leading a ghost tour or something like that. They were able to go under Washington Boulevard possibly and they said, "Well, who knows." Of course they want to enlarge everything and make it more exciting so they bring in Al Capone and all that. The danger of history is always that somebody tries to enlarge things or exaggerate things. I was never able to see that myself and I didn't even know, I'd heard rumors about it but I've never been in it. LR: Well I know that most of the businesses now have closed up there tunnels, so most of the people we have talked to, yea, it's possible, but now they're all closed up so. But yea, we've had a lot of references to them, a lot of people that remember being down in them, but none actually going form Ben Lomond to the depot. We can't actually verify that, so. It's fun to hear about though. JV: Well that was the big fancy hotel, I guess the Ben Lomond was built about 1927, and being a big, the highest building in town and anybody who wanted a prostitute probably would have wanted to bring them in underground into the hotel or something like that, or wanted maybe drugs and happened to be at the hotel. It does kind of make sense if you were in the, in the world of vice and you had money enough to stay in a nice room there and you wanted something, knowing the hotel business as I do, because I worked with it for a while here, 12 there are people in the hotels are bribable a lot of times, and if you want—they want some cash and if you have the cash, they'll find a way to get you what you want. Who knows, I wouldn't be surprised, I don't have any evidence of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was something like that going on. LR: I wouldn't be surprised either. Do you remember any of the people that used to live or work on 25th street? JV: Yes. Well, my mother worked at the Union Laundry I guess it was called as a— this would have been—she was born in 1919, so it would have been roughly around the time she graduated from Ogden High in 1938. So she was working at the Union Laundry, and that's where that tale about running down the street as fast as she could run, her heart pounding came from, that era. And then my grandfather, Clarence Patrick Murphy, a real Irish name, half Danish, but in fact his mother was Danish. He was working there from about age 16 and he was born about 1885 I believe, so he would have been there about 1901 and he was already working as a fireman as a teenage boy. He couldn't finish school, at Sacred Heart School on upper 25th where he went. He would bend over all the way to Wyoming shoveling coal. He told a tale later that even as a 16 year old boy of working with his back bent to shovel coal all the way from Ogden to Evanston and back just almost constantly shoveling coal to get up that grade to that high plateau in Wyoming. It was not the life that any of us would want to live I am sure, to spend back breaking hours to make a living. He was a devoted member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineman and Firemen throughout his life and was a lifelong democrat of course, because of the 13 Democrats alliance with the labor unions. He was also one of the shop stewards of the Union Pacific in his later years. He also worked on the old Oregon Shortline Railroad, which was, he fondly would say, "Oregon Shortline," and his eyes would drift off as he thought about it. I guess the Oregon Shortline was, ran from Ogden to Pocatello, if I'm not mistaken, and didn't obviously it didn't go all the way to Oregon. He was the switching engineer which would be, he would build trains by bringing cars from one train and hauling them to join another train and then back and forth all day in the yards of Ogden. He'd go over those yards, and of course today, there's even I guess some activity there, but back in those days the yards were just a hive of energy and the sound of the rails and the squeaking of the iron against iron and you would hear all the noises associated with all that. The station where I went as, this would have been approximately 1955. My grandmother, my California grandmother, my father's mother, would come up from across the Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake on the Union Pacific from Promontory Point to West Weber and she would, we'd meet her at the Union Station whenever she'd come to visit us. That's where I got to see the Union Station quite a bit as a boy. There would be three or four taxi cabs, several cars coming and going and people were dressed—in those days the women wore gloves and hats and high heels all the time and the men wore business suits and big fedora hats. The railway express, REA railway express agency had a large outlet in the foyer of the station. 14 Just going in to the foyer of the Union Depot was to me, one of the most exciting things of my childhood because I would go in there and look around and seeing people coming and going, people making orders and carrying tickets, porters carrying baggage and porters with red caps on and white uniforms and white jackets. All black men, the only black people I had ever seen at that time in my life were down in the depot. Sorry, I get a little emotional sometimes when I'm talking about these things. I have to take a breath here for a moment. There was a very busy barbershop with an old fashioned striped aprons that, or whatever they called those things that they, smocks, that they would put around people being, having their hair cut. They had the talcum powder brushes and the barber clipping away furiously, and people in a hurry to get on, "I don't want to miss my train," and all those things. The station itself, getting inside was just, it seemed like the biggest building I had ever seen in my life at that time, probably was, and it, the big chandeliers and it was just, in its heyday was just packed with passengers and train schedules and the public address system announcing what was going on. I didn't even know what the people were doing as a boy, I had no concept of what riding a train was because we didn't actually get on the trains, so we never went out on the platforms and so all I saw was just the results of all that. What I observed was a little confusing because I didn't put it together that these people are coming from California or Chicago or wherever it may be. This really was the junction city of the Mountain West and it really was a big deal. It was so sad to see the old down town, as I'm sure you've heard from a 15 lot of people, to see what happened to that wonderful downtown on Washington Boulevard. Again, that's another subject for a book you could write about, Washington Boulevard in its heyday. Beuhler Bingham and B and B Clothiers, the Blue Door and all those fabulous clothing stores and Fred M. Nye that were able, because the economy was so powerful then with Hill Field and the Army Depot and the Naval Supply Depot and all those things, and then the railroad. Everybody was making money and it was sort of the golden age of Ogden. I guess from about the end of World War Two till roughly the time I graduated from Ben Lomond, about 1965, for about those twenty years that downtown district was just thriving. There was Watson and Tanner and 24th street was almost equal to Washington and its level of commercial activity and it was a really nice feeling to the town. There wasn't a lot of crime for the most part, you didn't hear about a lot of—we had, my mother had a friend, Officer Keith Burkdahl, who was a policeman. I remember she got—I guess one of the early beat nicks, there were a handful of beatniks I guess, in Ogden, that maybe were smoking marijuana and this guy hit her at 25th and Monroe. It was at night and he had dark glasses on, and he had sideburns and this would have been 1955 or 56 around the time Elvis was big. We just thought that was so bizarre that this fellow was dressed in this leather jacket and he had sideburns and he had dark glasses on and it's nighttime, you know, why are you wearing—it is kind of odd even now. Keith Burkdahl investigated this because my mother happen to. His wife was a good friend of my mothers and he was a patrolman and so he said, "Yea, we caught 16 this guy and arrested this guy." They finger printed him and everything. I was excited by that. It was, there were some rough characters in Ogden and who knows maybe he was using heroin or something too, or maybe he was associated with 25th street, but we never found out. Whenever I would encounter the Ogden police, I can remember in 1956, the Ogden Police had four brand new blue Fords that they got and they all, they had no markings, anywhere on the car. They were painted, I think, if I remember correctly they were a dark royal blue and they had just about the size of a coffee cup, maybe a large coffee cup, on top was a red, just a red light, and that's all, and a radio antenna, and not anywhere on the car did it say police, anywhere. It just is so funny to look back at that, we'd walk through City Hall Park and of course that was the police station back then. It was in the back of the city hall building, and you'd walk through city hall park and I'd see maybe eight or nine Fords with that bubble light on top, and maybe a couple of unmarked cars. That was the, such as it was, the Ogden police at that time. There's another story, you could do the history of the Ogden Police because they must have some tales to tell if you come across one of the retiree's from the Ogden police or somebody, the son of a police officer, I'd bet you'd get some great stories. Arnie Jacobson might be a good source because his dad. I don't know what became of him, I haven't been in touch with him in years, but his dad, I know was the chief about 1970, they had the police radio in their house because his dad was the chief, so he would hear all the radio calls in Ogden as a 17 boy. You get into some personal information sometimes, but he got run out of the house. LR: Well speaking of growing up, did you ever attend any of the theaters downtown? JV: Yes, the movies? LR: Yes. JV: Yea, we loved the Orpheum, thank you for reminding me. The Orpheum and the Egyptian, but the Orpheum even more so, it was sadly destroyed. The most exciting, fun thing we ever did I think was about 1959 and Ogden was just in its glory days at that time. We, there was a girl next door, Susanne Sylvester, who I had a crush on, and I forget who else. Anyway, we were all about 12 or 13 years old and our parents escorted us, and we got all dressed up and went to, I put on a tie and a sports coat and the girls were dressed up and we just, we just thought that was the most fun we had ever had. We went to the Orpheum and saw a movie, I can't remember what the movie was now. It was just going to the theater down, either the Egyptian or the Orpheum was just one of the special things about that time in life when you are coming of age. I think for almost anyone who was there at that time would remember it well. LR: So is that the theater that had the Popeye Club? JV: I don't know. You know, I don't know about the Popeye Club. Actually when you said that it was the first time I've heard that term. LR: Oh really, okay. JV: I must have missed out. LR: It might have been Paramount. I get my theaters mixed up, I apologize. 18 JV: The Popeye Club, maybe the Paramount was, Popeye Copper Club, Ogden, or Popeye—it says here, I am doing a little web search. I remember the Paramount was where the Paramount Bowl was, is that right? LR: I'm not sure. JV: Where the river, by the river bridge? Where the Ogden sign, is that right? LR: I'm honestly not sure, I thought it was downtown myself. I know the Orpheum and the Egyptian were. I thought the Paramount was too, so. JV: Let's see here, we had a friend who lived right by the Ogden bridge, the Ogden sign, where the Ogden sign in on the east side of Washington. There was this very interesting neighborhood there that reminds, as I got older and look back at it, I thought, "Oh my gosh, that's a lot like big city's back east." It reminded me of, in some ways. I remember the Paramount Bowling alley. When you said Paramount I thought more of a bowling alley then I did of a theater. Then there was a drive in too, and there may have been called the Paramount, there was the Riverdale Drive-in, and there was a drive-in on the south end of town was the Riverdale and going up towards North Ogden was, that Harrisville area there was a drive-in out that way, the North Point Drive- In. The drive-ins, of course, when you're a teenager in those days, it was where all the necking and all that went on. Exciting dates or all the wishful thinking for boys mostly was going on. I know there was a Paramount theater, maybe if I put movie theater, Ogden Utah, my search engine isn't generating a lot right now on that. Let's see, as it opened on the, oh, here it says, "The Paramount theater opened as the 19 Alhambra theater, March 17, 1915 with a concert by the Ogden Tabernacle Choir." There's one reference there, its Cinema treasure. Oh, here we go, 2429 Keisel Avenue. LR: Ah, that's right. JV: Oh, the Alhambra. So here is a, I vaguely remember this photo, I mean this store front. It's located on Keisel, just off of, I think just off 24th, because that looks like the Fred J. Keisel building. LR: Yes, it would have been on the opposite, it would have been closer to 25th. It's actually not there anymore, they tore it down. JV: Yea, I bet it's gone. That's my granddad's era for sure, those old street lights and globe street lights and the old early automobiles. LR: What are some of your favorite memories of downtown Ogden then? JV: Well, to be honest, it was the pretty girls you would see. You would see very, very pretty girls, you'd see dozens of girls that would just you know, traffic stop kind of thing where you'd go, "wow." It was also just the feeling that it was exciting, it was a pleasant city. There was a lunch counter near 25th and Washington, Keeley's Café. You'd go in, it was a bustling café, downtown café—going in and having lunch there. There was also a toy shop near there, and my grandfather doted on me, I was his favorite, out of the five grandchildren I was the oldest one and he liked, I don't know, he and I just bonded and he would take me in as a boy and bought me a pistol set, a cowboy pistol set from this store and I don't know the name. It was a toy store near the Broom hotel and it had just all kinds of cowboy toys all 20 over the walls, and this was a pretty big, pretty large, you know, reasonably large toy store and he bought me this holster and toy gun and toy bullets and I think it was probably one of my happiest moments in childhood. Then going on that date to the Orpheum was another one. The Utah Noodle Parlor was always fun to go to and having the big butterfly shrimp that they still make I think, I think they're still there somewhere. LR: No, they actually closed down. JV: Oh, they closed down? LR: Yea, it hasn't been that long, but Utah Noodle is no more. JV: Oh, that's too bad. That was a great tradition, but I guess Jimmies Flower shop is still there probably. That was a great flower shop. I didn't know the Glassman's, I guess you've come across A L Glassman, the name A L Glassman, but he was the operator of the Orpheum it says. Have you come across the Name Ira Huggins? He was the great attorney, probably the most famous attorney in Ogden. LR: I'm not sure. JV: Ira Huggins was—my mother would speak of him very fondly. I found a URL here, its Cinema Treasures, and it has a lot about the Paramount Theater, 2429 Keisel. This might be a page you want to look at it. It's Cinematreasures.org/theaters/26282, [some of the information that follows come directly from this website.] This is a lot of information I wasn't aware of here about the publisher . Glassman, of course, owned the Standard Examiner and apparently owned this theater also at some point and one of its premier 21 attractions was Cecil B. De Mill, The Ten Commandments. In 1925 it was leased by Public Theaters and renamed Paramount Theater so it started as the Alhambra, I guess. Glassman also owned the Orpheum but he bought the Alhambra in 1923 and then, according to this web site, during the summer months, Orpheum Vaudeville moved to the Alhambra, so they had Vaudeville, wow, now that's very interesting. In 1925 the Alhambra was leased by the Publix Theaters and renamed Paramount Theater, so that's where they got the Paramount. It underwent a complete renovation and seating was reduced to 1900 one of its premier attractions was Ten Commandments. Not the one in the 1950s but the original. By 1927 the theater was under the direction of Brooklyn-born Louis Marcus, who also owned major theaters in Salt Lake, including the Capital and other theaters in Idaho. Fanchon & Marco "Ideas" supplemented the screen attractions at the Paramount. With the demise of the American Theatre in Salt Lake in 1929, the Paramount boasted being Utah's largest theatre. Wow, I didn't know any of this. In 1929 Marcus said he was selling his interest to Publix Theaters and retiring. He was elected mayor of Salt Lake from 32 and served four years and died in 1939. 1934 it came under the ownership of Paramor Theatres who also operated the Orpheum Theatre, Lyceum Theatre and Colonial Theatre. The local Ogden Theatre was an independent. So there is quite a story there of just the theater industry in Ogden. In July of 1954, Paramor Theatres completed renovations which gave it all new seating and a 42' by 21' screen. In time for Christmas 1954, a new marquee and Paramount vertical sign in addition to the Formica snack bar 22 was added to the interior. And that's when "White Christmas" came out with Bing Crosby. So, you'll probably want to look at that website for sure. LR: Yea, I wrote it down so I'll be able to. JV: It's not that much information but it has this one wonderful old photo of the Alhambra. LR: Hmm, that's cool. JV: Yea, also, I would recommend to you to see UCR.edu. LR: Right, I wrote that down too. JV: Yea, and if you can't—that website is a little obtuse—it's something like digital newspaper survey and it's California papers, but remarkably, like I say, especially the San Francisco papers, have lots and lots of Ogden's lore and stories, especially around the time of 1890 to 1930, which would be of great value to anyone doing research at the university there. Then you can form a partnership with the UC Riverside, maybe the two schools could maybe get together on helping each other, because I know that educators always need support and they have to help each other and there is always the threats of budget cuts and things like that. I know he was, that fellow at UC Riverside was saying, "Oh we've got to prove to the regents of the university that we are doing something of value to the community so that they won't shut us down." I wrote, personally when I was a park ranger, wrote a couple of paragraphs saying how much value I've gotten out of it. You're able to, or course with your printer on your computer, you're able to print stories up if you want, or photos. They also have photos too, because you're looking at the actual paper and you can see the old historic ads. 23 LR: Right, that's fun. JV: Yea, it's really fun. You sound like you're a history lover too, so you'd have a field day with that probably. LR: I have two more questions if that's alright JV: It's been a lifelong love for me. ___________ being a park ranger, it was one of the great joys of being a park ranger was being able to give history tours, you know how it's just limited to Alcatraz history, which has quite a colorful history of course. LR: I know it's kind of getting, this has kind of gone long, but I have two more questions if that is ok. JV: Yeah, sure. LR: My first one is, you talked about your grandfather being involved in the Klan in Ogden, do you know much about that? JV: No, he was, I think he was a little ashamed of it. He, I know, it's really unfortunate I can't ask any of these folks any questions or maybe my aunt, who is still alive might know something about it. She lives in Portland, Oregon. I could ask her but she would have been embarrassed about it too. I know that he talked in racial terms about when he would watch the prize fights, Gillette Prize fights on television and he would, there was definitely a palpable racism present when he would—see a black man fighting a white man or something in a Prize fight. The only reason I know about the Klan was that my mother told me that, he didn't tell me himself he was a member of the Klan. I think he was embarrassed. He was certainly not proud of it. 24 I heard, now, I'm trying to place where I heard the recollection by some, probably from my mother, that they had put some burning crosses up on, I think the north east bench, up around, somewhere around where Ben Lomond High stands today. Up on 7th or 7th street, upper 7th street probably or somewhere where it would be seen for miles around or hoped anyway. Just to terrorize the poor black folks a little more, and probably it would have been, I'm sure they didn't like Asians either, or Jews of course. There were a handful of Jewish people too in Ogden so those groups would have been not too thrilled, I'm sure, to see that. I could try and ask Aunt Patty, she's Jennings Olsen's sister by the way, my aunt. He was the professor there at Weber for many years. She may know something about it also, and if you want, I could call you back if I'm able to find out more. The KKK was organized in all 48 states in the 1920s per public television documentary. LR: It's just a curiosity. I will leave that entirely up to you. It was just a—really, someone who was involved, so I wouldn't complain but I don't want you to feel like you have to do that or anything. JV: Well, I'm always willing to help, it's fascinating. What I have found with history and the more you dig, the more interesting it is. LR: Well this is true, I agree. JV: You reminded me of that little neighborhood around the Ogden sign there on the east side of Washington that, I wish I could relive that. Also there was something— I went to visit a friend who lived right there. There was a little alley that shot off of Washington and I think it said Paramount Bowl and it was across 25 from Bigler's Desert Inn, which was an old structure that is no longer there either. We fished in the Ogden river briefly, just once, it only happened once, I went to see him and we fished in the river. It was kind of odd, it seemed like, because here it is almost like in downtown but also almost like out in the country at the same time. It was a really nice little district there that I haven't seen any photos of, but I can picture it in my head as I close my eyes I can see it. There were store fronts right the river and I think a concrete fence or something against the river bank itself, but I'm sure it's all gone now. All that's left is the historic sign there now, but it's fun to reminisce anyway. LR: Well, my last question is this, how has Ogden changed since you were growing up here, do you think? JC: It had that timing, you know, 24th and Washington was the heart of the city and it was the heart of Ogden, it really was like the heart. It was just like a human body has a heart, it was the heart of the city and it was a thriving heartbeat. I remember a young boy yelling, "Standard," and he used to actually hold up the newspaper in his arm and wave it and people would run up and buy a newspaper. It was from the Bon Marché store which was at 22nd to about 26th or 27th along Washington, was just bustling with traffic, excitement. The ladies were dressed in their finest clothes and men were dressed in business suits, and not everyone dressed that way, but it was certainly a thriving place and then along 24th, almost the same scene. It's just sad to see that, well it's happened to many cities; it's not just Ogden, that the core of the city got gutted and changed irreparably. It's too bad 26 that it couldn't have been like what was done with Trolley Square in Salt Lake where they at least maybe changed the buildings, but don't gut every, just don't tear everything completely. The W. T. Grant store was a big deal on 24th and Washington and there was the Kiesel building and the Eccles building and the First Security Bank building and it had this little sky line and it was just, I don't know, it just seemed like a really, really positive. Overall, 25th kind of gave you the vice and a little excitement and drama, which was also kind of fun, and it just kind of was a really nice place to grow up. It sort of represented America, to me. I wrote a little article when I was a boy about it and I took a world book and I followed the outline they used to write about Chicago or New York and I just took every element, and Ogden had it all, in miniscule amounts. It had a little Asian neighborhood, it had a black neighborhood, it had everything in America and it was a, in a microcosm, it was the country. It's sad to a, I'm sorry, LR: It's okay. JV: Makes me feel bad to see that all that is lost. I know there is some of it there still. The Egyptian Theater is still there, but, LR: You're right, most of it is gone. JV: We would get, to go down to Washington Boulevard was a big deal and we would put on our best clothes and we would, yea, it was just a big deal. Even when I started working at the highway department on 17th and Wall or near, just off Wall, at the Utah Highway, Utah Road Commission, we looked forward to driving along Washington Boulevard just for the fun of seeing people on the street and seeing 27 all the excitement that it used to represent. I don't know, it's just, thank you for letting me share all that, and if I can come up with some more goodies I'll certainly call you. Also you're always welcome to call me if you need any more that I can provide, and thanks again for what you are doing. LR: Well, thank you for being so willing to help us out, I appreciate that, and for your stories, they've been wonderful and I appreciate you're willingness to work with us and to do this. We've been on the phone now for almost an hour and 20 minutes so I appreciate your time and your willingness, it means a lot. JV: Well great, Okay Lorrie, keep in touch, and any time I can be of assistance, who knows, maybe your or I or both of us may write books about it, who knows. LR: That would be fun. JV: It's worthy of some good books, I can think of three right now that would be worthy books about that era. But anyway, have a great day. 28

Don Garside, August 8, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Don Garside. The interview was conducted on August 8, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Stewart Library. Garside discusses his experience with 25th street. Don�s sister Anne Metcalf is also present for the interview. ; 34p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Don Garside Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 8 August 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don Garside Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 8 August 2013 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Garside, Don, an oral history by Melissa Johnson, 8 August 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Don Garside August 8, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Don Garside. The interview was conducted on August 8, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Stewart Library. Garside discusses his experience with 25th street. Don's sister Anne Metcalf is also present for the interview. MJ: Today is August 8, 2013. We're interviewing Don Garside as part of the Business at the Crossroads 25th Street Project. We are here in the Stewart Library, my name is Melissa Johnson and I'll be doing the interview. Recording the interview is Sarah Langsdon, and also present is Don's sister, Anne Metcalf. So start us off, Don, with where and when you were born. DG: I was born uh May 4, 1934, in Riverton, Utah, on the kitchen table. MJ: Wow, on the kitchen table. DG: On the kitchen table. We moved to Ogden in the late 1930's, probably 1938 or 1939. We had stops in Provo and Salt Lake along the way because we got here in time for my brother to start elementary school, which he would have started in 1938. MJ: Why don't you tell us a little bit about your family as well? DG: I had an older brother, and my sister, and a half-sister. My current family or back then? MJ: As much as you would like to share. DG: I have two children, eight grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. If you add in the step ones that's another fifteen. MJ: Quite the clan 1 DG: Yes, it's quite a clan, quite a clan. We make a lot of noise. MJ: I bet, but that means you're having fun, right? DG: Yeah, yeah. MJ: Well, good. What were your parent's names? DG: My dad was Arlyn Myers Garside and my mother was Ruth Alice Lloyd Garside. MJ: Great, now you got here to Ogden in about 1938. How old would you have been then? What grade were you in? DG: I wasn't in school yet. MJ: Oh, that's right. You said your older brother started. DG: Yeah, I would've been about four years old. MJ: About four years old? DG: Yes. MJ: So what do you remember about Ogden when you were a child? DG: I remember the first place we lived was on Monroe Boulevard between 27th and 28th and then we moved into a duplex on the corner of Monroe and 27th street on the northwest corner—we had the west duplex. Then from there we moved to 25th street, and I was there until I was 19. MJ: So what kinds of things did you do for fun when you were growing up? DG: Well, the war was on, so of course, one of the things we did was play war games. We had several places we could play; the Sacred Heart Academy had a lot of open places. Over on 24th street was one of the Browning mansions and they had quite a yard there and they didn't seem to care too much that we played 2 in there. Then, in the middle of the block there was a construction company. There were a lot of their old trucks. We would go in there and we would make forts, dig trenches, and then cover them all with boards and cardboard and dirt on top of that. Just play war games and usually used war guns. We made them out of wood and shaped them like a pistol, but they had a long barrel. Then we would cut up inner tubes in strips and tie a knot in them. Then on the handle we would put a clothespin and the end of the barrel was notched so you would load it from the barrel to the back but usually you had to do it between your legs so a lot of times there were accidents. One of the rules of the game was no shooting above the neck. Also on the block there was a fellow who had a lot of junk cars. We talked to him and he let us take the liners out of the headlights because at the time all of the headlights were usually on fenders, and we made those into helmets. Then, of course, our wagons, the good old Red Rider was the Jeep and my friend and I would usually end up being the motor. My brother was usually the driver, the commander. We made our own games. We were from that era where if you wanted to be entertained you did it yourself. We played ball in the back alley, we played different tag games, and just anything that amused ourselves. We would create ball teams and challenge another neighborhood to a game. AM: Pineview Reservoir DG: Oh yeah. There was a neighbor who lived by us that every day went to Pineview, and if we had our parent's permission we could go with him. We would go up there and we would play on the beach and he would swim across the reservoir 3 and then swim back—I always thought he was an old man—but then he would bring us home. So that was a lot of fun. About every place we wanted to go around town we either walked or rode our bike. One of the challenges was to ride your bike up 25th Street to about Pierce and then come back down. At that time there was a light on 25th and Harrison, so the game was: we started out, but you couldn't hit your brake—and of course it was all the single speed bikes—so hopefully we would hit 25th and Harrison on a green light. One time we were coming down and one of the guy's the chain broke on his bike so he didn't have any brake, and you figure we were past Harrison so we had come down about a half mile and we still had about a half mile to go to my house. Didn't know what he was going to do so finally he just went up on the sidewalk and went into some bushes. It was better than hitting a tree. MJ: A little bit of a softer land. DG: Yeah, and a lot of times we were over at the Sacred Heart Academy. They had a half block and the west portion of it had fruit trees and there was a canal that divided it. They had apples, plums and all of that, and the other side was fairly open. The grass would get up, well for us it was about to our waists. We would play games in there, but we would have to be out of there by 7:00 p.m. because that's when the nuns went to bed. They would yell at us from the fourth floor, and if that didn't do any good the caretaker came out with his double barrel shotgun. The whole area was surrounded by a hedge—and they were basically piracantha bushes if you know what a piracantha is. We made areas in the hedge that made 4 somewhat of a tunnel. He came out one time and—we found out later on that he had a load of rock salt in shotgun shells—and this one friend of mine couldn't find the opening so he made one. He was a mess when he got out on the other side. We did a lot of things that people would think were nuts, but we had a good time. We enjoyed ourselves On Saturdays we would usually go to the movies. We would go down to the Paramount Theater that was on Kiesel between 24th and 25th. For a dime we could see two full double features, the news, and probably about ten or so cartoons. Then they would have a program in between where they would have a contest for a bike or something like that. If we liked the movie we would stay and sit through it again. Didn't make the parents too happy because we were late getting home, but it was a good way to spend the day. We always went to the Paramount because it was cheaper. The Egyptian and the Orpheum charged a ridiculous price of about twenty cents, so we went to the Paramount. One time we had a basketball team and we were challenged by a team at the Industrial School on 200 North Washington. We were in junior high school so we biked from our house all the way out there, played a basketball game, then hiked all the way back. So we did a lot of walking and biking. It was just natural for us, not like it is anymore. MJ: You mentioned before that your father owned an ice cream shop. DG: Yeah. MJ: That was at the house on 25th? 5 DG: No, that was over on 26th and Monroe on the southwest corner. There was a grocery store there—well it's still there, but on the east portion of it we had an ice cream store and it was called Collins. His partner's last name was Cole and dad went by Lyn so it was Collins Ice Cream. He made all the ice cream for the store and of course we had the local people in the neighborhood as most of our customers. We were also only a block away from Central Junior High so we had a lot of those students coming over. In the winter, Mom would make a big pot of chili and then we would have to get it over to the store. Then she would make sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches, and ham and cheese sandwiches and we sell them. Didn't have to worry to much about the health department at that time. She was pretty good at it. So we sold those things and between the four adults they pretty well ran the store. We would open at noon and then we would close usually about 9:00 at night or so. As we grew older, one time dad let me build a guy a banana split and I thought I did a good job, but one of our chores we didn't particularly care for was when people would come in and stick their gum underneath the counter, and our job was to clean it off. So we would spend a day underneath the counter getting all those people's gum off from underneath the counter. It wasn't too bad. Dad would give me the yard stick and I could get underneath the coolers we had to keep the ice cream frozen. They were off the ground a couple of inches so I could get the yardstick in and any money I could get I could keep. MJ: That was your payment for the day. 6 DG: It was. There was a gas station across the street and kitty-corner. A lot of their customers would come over when they were getting their car serviced and have a sandwich, or have a sundae or a malt. One of the great things was when dad made ice cream. He would put it in the cardboard containers and there was always some left so we got the leftovers. He made all the different flavors, it was interesting to watch him make it. MJ: About how long did he run the ice cream shop? DG: He had a full-time job at the same time. He was a milkman at the time and his partner worked for one of the bread companies so we got a lot of the stuff from them. I would say we had the store about five or six years and they sold it. I think it was about the time he decided he was going to be a police officer because during the war he worked at Hill. Before that he delivered milk and then after the war he started to deliver milk again. One morning he was driving to work, of course he had to be to work at 3:00 in the morning. He was driving the car and he had his milkman's hat down and some guy went speeding past him and slowed down. I guess that's when he figured he should become a police officer. MJ: He was kind of giving the impression he was a police officer? DG: Yeah, I guess so. There were times I went with him on the milk route. He would do part and then pick me up. His route was usually up around Marilyn Drive, 27th and 28th area. Dad had big hands and of course all the milk was in glass, quart bottles. He could carry four bottles of milk in each hand; I could carry two. So I was carrying two and just running up to this house, running up the steps and 7 I tripped. I broke the bottles of milk. He asked me if I wanted to try it again so it was interesting to get out and go around and watch him do his job. MJ: So when he became a police officer you said he started as just a beat cop? DG: Yeah, he was a patrolman. He walked a beat—of course the whole city was patrolled, but most of it was patrolled by car. The downtown area walking beats, and of course the only beat he liked was 25th Street because there was always something going on. He said he would get into those outline areas and it was boring. He said on top of the city county building they had lights and antennas so they had to look there, and if a red light went on they either had to go back to the station or call in to see what was going on. He was always praying that the red light would come on because there wasn't much else going on. But he enjoyed 25th street a lot. Of course they all did, they were all trying to get that beat because it was exciting; there was something to do. MJ: So how long did he have that beat for? DG: I think he was only a patrolman for about three or four years I think was about all. Then he was selected to be on the youth bureau. Back then there was still a drug problem, in the late 1940's and 1950's, and he had a display case that was about that size [indicates with hands] and inside of it he had one of every type of dope pill that was known at that time. He also had a spoon in there where somebody had cooked something. He would go to different functions at churches and talk to kids about all this dope and what it can do to you and show them what it's like. Then of course, well marijuana was starting to go about that time so he figured he would grow a marijuana plant. We had it at the house and it didn't look very 8 good. He would water it and everything, but he finally decided it was ready to die so he took it down to his office down in the city county building. His office faced Washington Boulevard and he put it in the window and that thing flourished. My mom said it was the environment that did it. You could drive down the boulevard and you could pick out his window because it was the one that had the marijuana plant growing. Then he would pick leaves and show what it looked like. It was interesting one time they got a call that a guy was going to kill his son, so they got the address and he and his partner went to see what the problem was. They lived in a house with an apartment above it. They went up the stairs to the apartment, knocked on the door, and announced who they were. The guy told them to go away because he was going to kill him. So Dad opened the door and the guy was standing there with a 22 rifle pointed at his son and then he turned and pointed it at Dad. He told him, "Don't come any closer or I'll shoot you." Dad said, "No you won't." He said, "Yes I will." He was just talking to the guy and slowly inching his way in and the guy says, "What makes you think I won't?" Dad said, "If you shoot me my partner will shoot you." He said the guy had a funny look on his face, but kept walking towards him. Finally, he got close enough where he pushed the barrel to the side and grabbed the gun and took it away from him. He turned around to hand it to his partner who wasn't there—he had decided to try the back way to get behind the guy, but he didn't tell Dad that. He said his knees got quite weak there for a while. MJ: Close shave. DG: Yeah, quite a close shave. 9 MJ: So when did he take over the anti-vice squad? AM: Well, he sort of just moved into it. DG: Yeah, he was doing such a good job with talking to the kids about narcotics, you know, and things like that, and they solved a few burglaries that were committed by juveniles. They decided that they needed an anti-vice squad on the police department so he was selected to go on that. To me, he had a sort of sixth sense about things and was very perceptive about what was going on. So he got on it and he enjoyed it, he had a lot of experiences. He was not only working on anti-vice, but he was also handling a few murder cases, so he was written up in about three nationwide detective magazines on some of the cases that he had solved. Of course his big concern was good ol' 25th street because it was rather notorious. It was pretty active during the war because we had all the troop trains coming through with all the soldiers on there who were looking for activity. After the war the troop trains were still coming through, but not as often, so they were trying to cut down all the vices that were going on on 25th Street. There was all kinds of gambling going on, like slot machines. They even raided the Elk's Lodge at one time because they had slot machines in there. Bootlegging was a big problem because the state didn't like losing their tax money on the booze. The bootleggers usually brought it in from out of state. I remember he said that one time he was a patrolman on 25th Street and he went up one of the back stairways because he knew there was some gaming going on up there. He was in uniform, so he turned his hat around so the badge wouldn't shine and he watched them through the window. He knew a lot of the guys that were in there. He watched 10 them for a while and when he ran into them on the street a few days later he asked them how it hurt to lose that amount of money? Of course, one of the big problems was prostitution because it was more than just Rosie. It was up and down on both sides of the streets; the gals would be calling from the windows. They would organize raids for the gaming and prostitution. He said they would figure out where the gaming was and a lot of times they were in the basements of the buildings. They would go into the building next door in the basement and drill holes through the wall and watch the people there at the gaming tables. They had crap, roulette, and all of those. They would watch them and take notes, who was there that they knew. Then they would go back and plan a raid and as a courtesy they invited the sheriff's department to sit in on the planning. So they would have the planning of the timing, who all was going to be there and what they were going to do. Then they would pull the raid and the tables were gone and nobody was in there. This went on several times so they finally uninvited the sheriff's department and lo and behold they were successful. So they made a lot of arrests. The big problem, of course, was the noted Rosie from the Rose Rooms. He arrested her several times. They would take her in and have her booked, then they would have to turn her over to the sheriff because the jail was his. Dad said the next day he would be driving to work and Rosie's out sitting in the city park doing business. He would go find out why and the sheriff made her a trustee. Trustees could come and go and do different things. He said it just really got to him, that he had a tough time figuring out what he was going to do to circumvent that. He had 11 become pretty well known and he got to know quite a few of the federal officers out of the Salt Lake office. He was inviting them on raids, because they were also breaking federal laws. When the feds got involved the sheriff was a little more reluctant about letting people become trustees. MJ: He was a little bit more careful. DG: Uh huh. One time he was approached by the feds to become an agent, and he had a lot of backing to do that. When application time came and he filled it out they saw he didn't graduate from high school so they wouldn't take him on. He was quite disappointed because he felt he would've been a good agent. He was a good police officer, very intuitive about what was right and what was wrong. He got a phone call and offers that if he would stay out of certain parts of town he would be financially paid off. He just told them, "How the hell cheap do you think I am?" So then they doubled the offer and even when they offered thousands of dollars. Back in the 1950's that was quite a bit of money. So I said, "Why didn't you do it?" He said, "Because I knew that if I agreed to it, there would only be one pay off, but there would be somebody there watching and that would be the end of it. The money's not worth losing your job and losing what prestige you have in the community." He just knew it would be wrong. MJ: Did you ever go down on 25th Street with him? DG: Oh yeah, we went down there. One time we went down there, we were in his unmarked car. We went down and pulled into one the parking stalls and we were just sitting there. I think it was on a Sunday because there wasn't much foot 12 traffic on 25th Street, which was very rare. There were a couple of guys on the street who were conversing and he said, "Watch them." So we sat there and we watched them. Pretty soon the one guy nodded and they went into the doorway to one of the upstairs hotels. He said, "What are they doing?" I said I figured the guy was a bootlegger. He says, "Yeah, he's a bootlegger. He's making a sale." They came out and left and we pulled out. He says, "What was the number on the parking meter?" I said, "I don't know." "Well how can you prove you were there?" You had to remember those things, so it was a lesson. But we didn't go down with him too often. He had a lot of working nights, when all of the activity was going on, so we didn't really get to do too much with him in that regard. MJ: Looking at his notebooks that we have the copies of, he seemed meticulous on his stakeouts. DG: Yes. MJ: Noted everything. DG: They said you had to. You had to prove you were there and you always had to be thinking what are they going to do to mess you up? One time he said they had picked up a guy for bootlegging, and of course he had to be at the trial because he was the arresting officer. The defense attorney was giving him a bad time and he reached over to the table where they had the evidence and they pulled up this liquor bottle. He says, "What's this?" "That's the liquor I took from the guy." He says, "It's not full." Dad said, "That's the way I got it." He said, "There's a line on 13 this bottle, what does that represent?" "That's how much alcohol was in the bottle when I confiscated it." The guy says, "That's interesting because your line's up here, but the booze is down here." So the attorney was going on about how evidence keeps disappearing from the evidence room and all this. We got these upstanding police officers who would never do anything like that. Dad says, "Can I see the bottle?" He says yes and gives the bottle to Dad, who turned it upside down and he lines matched. So he had to plan ahead for everything because they were after you. Then there were two fractions on the police department and they were going after each other all the time because there were a lot of them that didn't want Ogden cleaned up. Dad had a lot of guys on the police department that he also had to watch. So it was pretty tough and you didn't dare make a mistake. MJ: You mentioned before that reputation and prestige that he had in the community, and you mentioned before that people on 25th Street really respected him. DG: They did. He would do his job, but he was fair about it. Once he helped the feds with a guy and they arrested him—his brother owned a bar on 25th street. He ended up in federal prison, but he held nothing against dad. He even wrote him a letter while he was in prison, and when he got out he met up with him. Of course, not all of them were that way. There was one time my friends and I were going to go to Yellowstone for a week and Dad was going to give me some money. I came the morning I was leaving—it was a Sunday morning. I said, "Have you got that money you were 14 going to give me?" He had forgotten about it so he wrote me a check. I said, "How am I going to cash a check on Sunday morning?" He said, "Go down to the club." So my friends and I went down on 25th Street and went into the club. Handed the guy the check and he looked at it and said sure. So he cashed it and he says, my friends were with me and he says, "Do you guys like candy?" We said, "Sure who doesn't?" So he got a brown paper bag filled with candy bars and stuff and handed it to us; said, "Tell your dad hello." Dad had raided him before and closed him down for violations, but there was no animosity. He was doing his job and they got caught. He had a reputation for being honest and fair, but he wasn't totally by the book. There was one fellow who he knew down there. He was a barber and he always went and talked to him. They ran into each other on the street and the barber had a nice new leather jacket. Dad asked him, "Where'd you get the coat?" He says. "Oh I bought it from so and so." "Well I tell you what, don't wear it into this store," and he gave him the name. There had been a robbery there a few nights before, but he had bought it from somebody. Dad couldn't do anything to him because he innocently bought the coat. But he appreciated the warning MJ: I'm just looking over here on my notes to make sure we are covering everything. You had mentioned Rose Davie. What else do you remember about her? DG: Rose was quite a character. She was always trying to get Dad to come upstairs, but he never would. The only time he went up into the Rose Rooms was when she had been taken to jail, then he went up there. One thing that Rose used to do, she would have to replace her linen supply periodically and my mother 15 worked at J.C. Penney's. Rose always asked for her even though mom didn't work in that department. She was on the same floor so Rose would get her to help her out. I think mom got a slight commission on that stuff so it was pretty good. Rose and Dad had their differences, but she had no hard feelings towards him. AM: But Bill did, didn't he? DG: Yeah, Bill did. Bill tried to disparage my father a few times, but he was never successful. He couldn't get any hard facts about him. They even called our house and my mother answered the phone. There was a gal on the phone telling her that Dad was having an affair with all these young girls downtown, and trying to cause problems. I know another time the guy called home and Mom answered the phone and the guy started telling her what he thought of her, you know, not very polite. So the guy finally got off the phone and Mom called the police station and had Dad call home. She told him, so he went down on 25th Street and he said the idiot was still sitting in the phone booth because he knew who it was. But Dad was pretty good. He weighed 225 pounds, was a pretty good sized guy and was quite athletic. When he started out at the police department he had what they called a sap, which had leather with buckshot in the end. It was braided leather and it would spring. It had a strap on it that you'd hook on your thumb and wing it around, because if you put it around your wrist and they grabbed it then they've got you. So you put it on your thumb and just let it go and it hurt. I tried it a few times on my hand. But then they came out with a yawara stick. It fit in his fist and just a little bit above the hand, and it was grooved inside. There were two 16 little spikes but they didn't protrude past the wood. There was a booklet that came with it. If you hit somebody in the shoulder with it would either break the collarbone or numb the arm so that you could turn it and hit them in the chest. It was a handy tool and he always carried it in the inside pocket. One night they were on 25th Street. He said the most horrible thing is to try to arrest a woman because everyone comes to her aid. So they arrested this lady, and they got her out of the bar and out on the sidewalk and some guys decided that they were going to protect her. They came after Dad, and Dad turned around to talk to them and the one guy hit him in the face. So he stooped over, didn't fall down, but as he went down he reached in and brought that out. He was going to hit the guy in the shoulder to numb it but as he came down the guy moved and he hit him in the face. He said the guy hit the sidewalk and bounced. Dad didn't have any trouble after that. They figured if he could hit a guy and make him bounce he must be pretty tough, so he put it back in his pocket and nobody ever saw it. MJ: What was it called again? DG: I think it was called the yawara stick. It wasn't very big. I know I played around with it when it was at home, but that wood was hard. You could hit a guy on the top of the head and it would knock him out. It was a defensive tool that they had come up with. MJ: What else do you remember about 25th Street? Like your interactions down on 25th Street? 17 DG: I didn't go down there very much. Now, I had friends in high school that lived down there. A lot of the Asian classmates lived between 26th and 24th in that part of town. The only time we would go there would be to watch the drunks and see who was going to fight who. We pretty well stayed away from 25th Street because every other building was a bar and there wasn't really much going on. There were some stores up towards the eastern end and that was about it. It was wall to wall bars. Of course, the only thing they could sell was beer and mixer. If you wanted a mix drink you had to bring your own bottles, so they would brown bag the bottle then they would buy a mixer. That's when the bootlegging was happening. People didn't want to go to the liquor store even though it was right there on 25th Street, so they would do bootlegging. I didn't go down there. AM: We used to go watch. DG: Yeah, we used to go watch a lot and that was about it. Especially during deer hunting season because that's when it was really active down there. We were watching one night, there was a steady stream of people going up and down the street and a couple came out of this bar and they stopped. The one gal says, "You S-O-B, you're supposed to be deer hunting." He says, "You're supposed to be tending the kids." So it escalated from there, but things like that were going on. It was interesting to watch, and how some of those people ever made it home I have no idea because they had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. AM: If Dad knew we were down there he wouldn't have been happy. DG: He didn't seem to bother when we went down there. AM: Well I mean we'd just go down and drive around the back alley. 18 DG: Oh yeah check out electric alley. AM: Yeah, look at all the girls and not really know what they were doing cause we were sixteen. MJ: You mentioned when we first met, the segregation on 25th Street. One side was— DG: Yeah, the south side from Wall to Lincoln was for the blacks. The whites would go over there, but the blacks wouldn't come on the other side of the street. I know that the Porters and Waiters Club was on the south side, run by Annabelle Weekly. It catered to the blacks who worked on the railroad, the porters and the waiters. They could go there and stay because none of them could go in any of the hotels in town. So that was about the only place they could stay as a visitor. She ran a pretty good operation over there. She didn't fuss or cause too much trouble, she was actually an asset to the community. That was about the basic on 25th Street as far as segregation. Of course, I think every American community was segregated because I didn't see any blacks in school until I went to junior high. I went to Madison and there weren't that many downtown, but when I went to Central they came from all over and we had a few blacks there, and of course, Ogden High was the only high school, so we had them there too. Our historian in our senior class was a black fellow, quite studious, and a pretty good athlete. I had never really thought about racial things too much until one night there were a group of us who went to a burger place. We went in there and sat at the booth. We had frequented the place quite often. It was usually on a Sunday instead of going to class we would 19 go get something to eat. I knew the owner and he called me over to the counter. I went over there and he said, "I'll wait on him this time, but don't bring him in again." That's when I first realized that there was something going on. I made excuses about how the owner had a punchboard he wanted me to play or something. I don't think he believed me, but that's about the only time I noticed it that much. MJ: So it wasn't just 25th Street that was segregated? DG: Oh no. There would be black entertainers that came to entertain and they couldn't stay in any hotel, not even in Salt Lake. Annabelle would take care of them. The whole state was about that way. It wasn't blatant. I think they in essence knew how things were. AM: Well, there weren't very many DG: No, there weren't too many, but yeah, I think of the ones we had in school not too many finished high school. I didn't think anything about it. MJ: So what do you remember about some of the other downtown areas? Some of the other businesses and people down there? DG: Ogden was a fun town to go down to. Back in those days there were six movie theatres in town and uh now were down to one, two now? Yeah, two. Of course, most of us went to the Paramount because it was the cheapest and none of the others had a double feature. Then we had a lot of nice specialty stores. There must have been five or six men's stores and there were a lot of women's stores. We had, there was Penney's, it was probably the biggest chain store. There was 20 Woolworth's and Grant's and all those others, but they weren't a department store. AM: You say Woolworth's and Grant's like she would know what that meant. DG: J.J. Newberry's. Those stores, they were there, but there were no big name stores. Well there was Sear's and C. C. Anderson's and that, but it mostly local people. All the men's stores were just local people and it was an interesting place to be. I remember at Christmas-time there would be a contest to see who could decorate their windows. It was a fun place, but what was strange about it was mostly everybody was shopping on the west side of Washington. I was talking to a guy when I was working at the post office and he said the difference in the rental fee for the west side of Washington from 25th to 23rd is almost double what it is on the east side of Washington from 26th to 23rd. Everybody's on the west side and what I thought was strange, you go to downtown Ogden and people always wanted to park on Washington, Kiesel, and Grant, but they didn't want to go below Grant and it was only a block. They didn't want to walk up the hill either, but the same people would go to Salt Lake and walk three or four blocks to a store, but they wouldn't in Ogden. If they couldn't park on the Boulevard or on those streets then they just thought it was horrible and ride around and ride around and ride around and wait for a parking place. That brings up another story. There was a group of us at a church function and it was getting a little boring. This one guy said he had a gun, so we made up our plan. We'd have three cars and the first car would come along Washington and the guys would get out (at that time there were a lot of the stores where the 21 store fronts were here, but you had to walk down to get to the door and there were display windows there) then another car would come by and we'd get in a fight on the street and then somebody gets shot and the third car would come by and get the body. So I was the body. We get out of the cars and we start fighting and the guy pulls out the gun and shoots and I fall on the sidewalk. So I'm lying there on the sidewalk and nobody comes, and nobody comes. Then the movie lets out there at the Egyptian theatre, were on right by the Egyptian. The movie lets out and I'm laying on the sidewalk counting pebbles in the concrete. People walking by and nobody came. So finally, I get up, walk between cars across the boulevard, and here comes the car. They decided to go around the block an extra time so we lost the whole thing, but it was mentioned in my yearbook a few times. AM: Did your dad know about that? DG: No, never told Dad about that. There were some things we didn't tell Dad. It was like Dad told us, "Don't ever do anything to embarrass me," and I said, "Like my brother climbing over the fence at the ballpark and getting caught." MJ: Well, was there anything else that we haven't talked about that you'd like to share? DG: Well, I think back in that time we had a lot more opportunities for employment, as far as kids for high school and junior high school. We had the canning factories there were three or four canning factories. Del Monte, out in West Ogden, I worked out there, and I worked at Blackington's on 7th street. For two summers I worked at the ice house. We iced box cars. The trains would come from 22 California and the cars that had ice bunkers on the ends to keep the fruit fresh. They would come into Ogden and then we'd have to re-ice because they'd come across the desert, so we'd have to replace it. We were handling three hundred pound blocks of ice we had an ice pick. It was that long [indicates with hands] and on one side was what they called the pusher. It came off the end to a point and under it was the puller, which curved. Then you would put it on the block of ice and you could pull it to you. It would flatten out and everybody had a file in their pocket because you would file it to keep it sharp. So we'd get a call that there was a train coming in. The ice docks went from under the viaduct to 28th Street and there were two of them, so we could work four rails at a time. One guy would walk down and open all the bunker tops and you could easily ice the one on this side. On the other side you had to put down a skid pad that made a bridge and acrossed to the other side. It got pretty hot out there in June, July, and August, but then all winter long they had been storing ice in a building that was about three stories high, but the only floor was on the bottom so all winter long their putting in these 300 pound blocks of ice and stacking them. They had a place called the Daily. They made ice all the time, but couldn't make enough to service the trains. We'd get a train come in with one hundred icers in it and the ice is lined up on the dock and we used it all up, so then you have to go to the store room. It's 100 degrees out on the dock, and then you go into this store room and it's 28 degrees. We had to ship all that ice out to the dock and when we'd get through with that and they'd say, "RV on three which 23 meant a Roseville train on track three, 100 icers. So then we would go back out to 100 degrees. AM: These are just kids. These are kids doing this? DG: Oh we were in high school; there were older people doing it too. AM: You were saying they were jobs. DG: They were jobs, it was a summer job because in the winter time all they did was put charcoal burners in the same bunker. But when you really would see the excitement was when a train would come in and they would ship wine in tank cars. They would come and you would see all these guys up on the dock looking at it, "There's a leaker." Pretty soon they'd disappear and guys would come out with gallon jugs and their thermos' and all. One guy was assigned to fill them up and the rest of them went into work. We had things like that. I worked at the Weber College for a year-round job. I was a custodian, and in school time we would start at 6:30 a.m. and work until 8:00 a.m. Then on Saturdays we would work from 6:30 a.m. until noon, and when I started we were getting a whole 50 cents an hour. After a while they raised it to 75, we got a 50 percent raise, which is pretty good. It was enough to keep us in spending money. It was interesting work. In the winter time you were assigned a specific area that you'd clean everyday. One time I had the offices that were in the old gym building and we'd clean the offices of the treasurer and the registrar and all that. Then another year, I had the gymnasium and the handball courts. I had to clean those and get all the black marks off the floor that people would put on. One year I had the ladies restroom. I had 18 toilets and 5 wash basins that I cleaned every 24 morning. The worst part about that job was the paper dispenser was in sheets, like out of a box. The gals put on the lipstick, blotted it and dropped it. The floor was always covered with paper, but it wasn't too bad. I would change the towels and all that, but you know an hour and half every morning wasn't too bad. Of course, I'd walk from home down to the college, and then walk back home, change clothes, and then walk from there to Ogden High until I met my girlfriend. I'd walk back with her until about Jackson, then run to school. There were a lot of things we could do and you had all the orchards. You could go pick all the fruit you wanted and just a lot of different things that we could do to occupy ourselves. Then the ice house was a very dangerous place to be. One guy had his ice pick and he was walking along the dock and he would spin it. He spun it, brought it back, and he put the puller in his leg; he went to the hospital. Sometimes, after they found a leaker there would be some hot-headed Hispanics who would get into a fight and use the ice picks as weapons. AM: The good ol' days. DG: Yeah, the good ol' days. I remember one guy, he was pushing on a piece of ice and he brought his ice pick back but the puller caught and it was pulled out of his hands. We watched it cartwheel about four tracks away and hoped there was nobody standing over there. AM: Those jobs couldn't exist today DG: No, they finally did it away. Now they're all refrigerated. We would work a lot of trains and you always took your lunch, but you never knew when you were going to eat. We'd start at 8:00 a.m., sometimes we would have lunch at 10:00 a.m., 25 and sometimes have lunch at 2:00 p.m. It depended on how the trains were coming, but it was interesting work. I know a lot of people who I went to school with worked at the canning factory, making the tin cans. I worked at Del Monte stacking cans and there were just a lot of different things to do. Made life interesting. MJ: Well good. Did you have any questions? I think we covered everything that I had on my notes we had from our first meeting so. DG: Okay. MJ: Do you have anything else? DG: I will give you an example of how things were back then. I was in high school and I was dating a girl who lived up on the 1400 block of Polk Street. We were going to go to the dance at the White City, it was on 25th Street. I walked from my house to her house, from her house to the White City and we danced at the dance. We went down to Keely's on Washington Boulevard, had something to eat, then we walked all the way back to her house. Then I had to walk all the way home. That was the norm. I think one of the things you talked about was segregation, things like that. I lived below Harrison so the rule was somebody who lived below Harrison couldn't date somebody who lived above Harrison. AM: A different kind of segregation. DG: Then you were frowned on. I got told about it a couple of times, "You're out of your boundary." MJ: Out of your place. AM: Out of your league. 26 DG: It was interesting. It was an interesting place to be. Like I say, in high school we had the whole city. We had millionaires and we had very, very poor people. There was one kid in Ogden High—we had 2,000 students at Ogden High because there were three classes. Everybody's wearing Oxford's except one kid, good ol' Charlie. He wore tennis shoes and he was the only one cause he was from a poor family. Everybody liked Charlie. Charlie was a little slow and we'd go up to him, "See that girl she really likes you. You oughta go over there and talk to her." He had buckteeth and blond hair. He'd say, "I can't." We would give him a bad time, but nobody ever teased him about his status or nothing like that because we were all the same. I could probably stay all day with this. 27