The Religious Life

What could I, a family man living in the world up to and sometimes above my eyebrows, have to say about the religious life, through which men and women are led to serve God and their neighbours in poverty, chastity and obedience? Perhaps I should confess ignorance and let the matter drop.

But I am led to consider it, partly because in the modern world there is a sense of mystery, almost of incongruity, in many minds, when people consider the religious communities – the contemplative energy that lies at the heart of even the most active Orders is, as it were, a sign of contradiction in an exhausted and narrowly activist society – and partly because I have met and loved the members of a number of religious communities, and what one loves is always what one can write about with the best hope of making sense of it.

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Truthfully, though a little solemnly, one can repeat the words of the Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of the Religious Life, set down among the documents of Vatican II:

From the very infancy of the Church there have existed men and women who strove to follow Christ more freely and imitate Him more nearly by the practice of the evangelical counsels. Each in his own way, these souls have led a life dedicated to God. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, many of them pursued a solitary life, or founded religious families to which the Church willingly gave the welcome and approval of her authority. . . .

But whatever the diversity of their spiritual endowments, all who are called by God to practise the evangelical counsels, and who do so faithfully, devote themselves in a special way to the Lord. They imitate Christ the virgin and the poor man, who, by an obedience which carried Him even to death on the cross, redeemed men and made them holy. As a consequence, impelled by a love which the Holy Spirit has poured into their hearts, these Christians spend themselves ever increasingly for Christ, and for His body the Church. . . .

Even as I set down those words in which the Fathers of Vatican II made a broad preliminary definition of the nature of the religious life, a fictitious anecdote comes to my mind told to me a few years ago by a Redemptorist priest. It seems that the monks of a certain Order were sitting out one day in the back garden of the monastery, enjoying the sunlight, talking and reading, and to their mild astonishment they suddenly saw one of their fellow monks streak across the garden in a state of complete nudity, and vanish behind a hedge. There was a brief but heavy silence. Then one of the monks stood up and said to his neighbour: ‘Come on, Brother James! Let’s grab him quick before someone gets hold of him and makes him the next Superior!’

Without humour I doubt if any religious community could survive any more than a family can. And the humour of this particular anecdote springs from the secret sense of incongruity, that Superiors are not always wholly wise, and that behind the formal order of every community the human tendency to chaos remains unextinguished. There is also a witty and charitable acceptance of this incongruity.

I would like to say a little about the human side of those religious communities with which I have come in contact. But first it is necessary to look a little more closely at what the Fathers of Vatican II said.

One notices that the impulse which leads to the formation of religious communities is essentially a desire for freedom in the service of Christ. The monk or nun is not in fact putting chains on himself or herself; his or her desire is rather to throw off the chains of the world, to free the will and the affections in order to come nearer to Christ, and this too is a pilgrimage of self-discovery, since those who find Christ also find their truest selves in His keeping.

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In the infancy of the Church many who were drawn to the religious life became hermits; and perhaps their choice may have been conditioned by the sense then widespread among Christians that the Second Coming of the Lord was very close at hand. Their prayers and example must have greatly enlivened the youth of the Church; but there are dangers in solitude.

As Thomas Merton once wrote, the man who becomes a monk simply to get away from the world will find he has isolated himself with an army of devils; in fact his deepest motive should be to come nearer to his fellows, not physically but spiritually, so that his solitude is in no way detached from their communality.

This motive is in fact inseparable from a grasp of the meaning of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Our Lord – namely, that we are all members of one another, since our life comes to us from the same Head, and that what benefits one member of the Mystical Body will inevitably benefit all, whether they know it or not.

But whether they become hermits or whether they lived in communities, those pioneers of the religious life were looking for freedom – freedom from sin, freedom from the spiritual exhaustion that comes from materialism, freedom from a hedonism that had its roots in vacancy and despair, freedom from the ugly chaos of self-will – and thus, above all, freedom to become good lovers of God and man.

One judges the tree by its fruits. And the fruits of monasticism in the Church have been undeniably healthy and vigorous. A vast number of charitable works, and the deepest currents of the life of prayer that nourishes such works, would never have come to life without the monastic tradition.

Again, the religious Orders have been a means by which the intuitions and spiritual power of particular saints have been prolonged far beyond their own lifetime on earth. The statements of the Fathers of Vatican II mention this specifically. We can all eat the bread of Francis when we come as guests to a house of the Franciscan Order, and I myself have drunk the clear water flowing from the spring of Bernard, when I found my way to the Church with the help of the Cistercians who continue the life of Bernard in our own country, those praying farmers who live at Kopua.

How great a need our tormented and exhausted and divided century has of their sources of peace and spiritual knowledge. How fortunate we are these sources exist!

The Fathers of Vatican II have also made it clear that the first spiritual movement or impulse which may lead to the birth of a religious community comes from the Holy Spirit Himself at work in the hearts of the faithful; the ‘welcome and approval’ of the Church’s authority comes later; or, to put it in metaphorical terms, the seed is planted obscurely by the Holy Spirit, by charismatic means, and then the same Holy Spirit tends and perpetuates and strengthens the new plant by hierarchical means.

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I have often thought that the problem for Protestants is not that they lack charisms – since the Holy Spirit will inspire any soul that seeks His guidance – but that their hierarchical pattern is defective, and so the perpetuation and nurture of the Protestant religious movements, however bravely begun, tends to be deeply inadequate.

It was the voice of God Himself that told Francis to rebuild the Church. When Francis tried to obey this voice he was still working in darkness. Sincerely he began to build up stone by stone with his own hands a wayside church that had fallen into ruins. He interpreted the charism in too material a way. No doubt this was a necessary symbolic prefiguring of the role he was to play.

But I believe his vocation truly began to take shape on that extraordinary occasion when he stood naked before the Bishop (thus symbolically putting aside dependence on all secular help) and the Bishop threw his own cloak over him. Francis did not forsake the world in order to follow his own will, even though he was a saint and very likely the Bishop was not; he forsook the world in order to pursue his vocation under the direct authority and guidance of the Church (symbolised by the cloak of the Bishop) – and so to poverty and chastity he added the indispensable virtue of obedience. A monk without obedience is a monstrosity.

Conversation with members of religious communities has shed some light for me on the meaning of the evangelical counsels. I remember a few phrases in a recent letter which I received from the Mother Superior of an English religious community, in which she had some penetrating things to say about the virtue of chastity among the religious:

. . . I liked your thoughts on marriage. Writers seem to find it difficult to give a balanced view of things, to be realistic, to state the truth, and tend either to paint an idealistic picture or else, showing the seamy side, overlook or ignore the beautiful. The same applies when they write about the religious life. It is true that the negative aspect of this life has been over-stressed in the past, but today so many write as if it were all joyous fulfilment. It does mean joy, but it also meant negation. It was quite refreshing to read a recent article in which the somewhat courageous author commenced by saying that religious chastity is negative, that it means loss and aloneness, Of course, it does, but one gains through the loss. . . .

I found this sane and balanced comment very cheering. At times – in particular when they are speaking or writing about Catholic schools – critics within the Church give the impression that they feel that nearly all members of religious communities who are also teachers are somewhat dualist in their view of chastity. In fact, I think that such divided individuals are probably in a small minority; though undoubtedly they may have an effect out of proportion to their actual numbers.

The balanced and sober view expressed by my correspondent seems to page 513 me much nearer the central thinking of the ordinary mature religious and with this maturity they are often able to give counsel even in matters that lie outside their range of personal experience.

It seemed to me that this nun was unlikely either to glorify the vocation of religious chastity at the expense of marriage – the chief failing of the dualist – or to develop a theory that most nuns would do best to combine their religious vocation with the life (let us say) of a married female librarian with a rigidly planned family of two-and-a-half children. She knew what she was doing – that she was losing something real in order to gain something real – and this would enable her to maintain a more than adequate psychological balance.

We know the various human limitations of the priests, nuns and Brothers whom we meet, as, I sincerely hope, we know our own. A reaction of excessive scandal if some of them prove to be narrow-minded or heavy-handed may simply show that we have absurdly supposed them to be exempt from the effects of Original Sin. Then, what begins as excessive praise ends as excessive blame. To be like this is to be stupid and unkind.

Yet we do expect that a religious vocation will show some supernatural fruit; and the really astonishing thing is how often our expectations are fulfilled.

Nobody can have regular contact with members of religious communities without having from time to time a sense of awe. Whatever their various intellectual limits – and these are likely to be changed radically as the Church opens up new horizons to meet the demands of a new age – so many of them are indeed very holy people.

We can agree wholeheartedly with the Vatican Fathers, that – ‘adorned with the various gifts of her children, the Church (becomes) radiant like a bride made beautiful for her spouse. . . .’ And it is by accepted personal losses that these supernatural gains are made possible.

It was most of all the members of religious communities who showed me that the virtue of poverty makes possible a supernatural generosity. I remember one occasion when circumstances had divided me temporarily from my family, and I was living in one room in a down-at-heel area of central Wellington.

One morning I heard the sound of a car stopping and the noise of laughter outside my gate. I went out; and there I found a bevy of nuns of my acquaintance engaged in unloading various delicacies. I cannot remember what food they brought, but only that there was a great deal of it and it was the best they had.

Their convent had received a windfall from some benefactor, and their first thought had been: ‘We’ll have to call on Jimmy. He may be feeling a bit melancholy. What’s the good of having things if we don’t give them away?’ You may be sure I did not refuse their gifts. Their generosity was so natural page 514 so unforced, so absolutely in tune with the spirit of the Gospel, that it was a delight to take those gifts from their hands.

Then there was another occasion, when I was driving north to the funeral of a relative, and my brakes failed completely just south of the side road to Kopua. It was nearly dusk; we were far from any garage – this time my young son was with me in the car – and all I could think of was to edge the car along the side road, relying on the gears for braking, to the Cistercian monastery where I had once before stayed for six days. I nearly removed the Cistercian gatepost when I skidded round into their driveway.

Ten minutes later I was sitting down to a large plate of eggs and spaghetti, while the guestmaster regaled me with conversation much wittier than I would ever have found in the coffee houses of Wellington.

One of the lay Brothers who was a skilled mechanic was meanwhile fixing the brakes of my car – the temporary job that he did lasted me till I took the car to a garage a week later – and another lay Brother was showing my son the majestic monastery boar.

I could not pay them for their supernatural courtesy. I did try to make a monetary gift to the monastery but they refused it. They told me that they had had the pleasure of helping Saint Joseph and the Holy Child. It was the sense of ease, the sense of homecoming, of relaxing in the Father’s house, that was most evident to me.

Others may show by the most lucid arguments that the Church is the Mystical Body of Our Lord, yet strangely fail to convince. These members of religious communities showed God direct to me in the most natural way imaginable. They had given their suffering and their poverty to God; and He had given them in return His own supernatural generosity to exercise on His behalf. By loving they teach us to love. That is why they are called the powerhouses of the Church.

We have heard a good deal about the renewal of religious communities, centring perhaps too much on superficialities, such as the traditional style of dress worn by the members of various Orders. More stress might be laid on the basic issues that the Vatican Fathers have emphasised:

Lest the adaptations of religious life to the needs of our time be merely superficial, and lest those who by constitution pursue the external apostolate prove unequal to the fulfilment of their task, religious should be properly instructed, according to the intellectual gifts and personal endowments of each, in the prevailing manners of contemporary social life, and in its characteristic ways of feeling and thinking. . . .

Such statements in a sense constitute a new charter for the individual members of religious communities who may have felt unduly restricted by narrow interpretations of the rules and constitutions of their Orders, or by conservatism on the part of their Superiors. Yet, as in all other aspects of the page 515 life of the Church, without obedience, renewal becomes merely a matter of individual enthusiasms and ideas tugging against each other.

Pope John has given us a lead in this matter, when he showed the greatest care and tenderness for the views of conservative clerics.

Since the more progressive and imaginative people have generally a greater capacity to identify themselves with the feelings of others, it is surely their task to be mediators, to show the greatest tolerance and charity. Who is to say which person contributes most in the long run to the life of the Church – a nun who joins in a protest march for civil rights for Negroes, or a nun who stays in her cell and sewing room and chapel and prays for the salvation of the world? Both are to be admired.

But the issue depends on God, and on us, in the sense that we allow Him to establish within our souls a pivot of holiness. Without holiness the greatest cause is lost at its beginning.

Supposing – it is not impossible – that the nun engaged in the protest march is in some way rebuked or restricted by a Superior whose views are less social directed. What is she to do? To refuse obedience? This is to abandon a vocation. To obey grudgingly? This is an imperfect thing. To obey blindly? This is a falsification; since God asks obedience, never that we should voluntarily put out our eyes. To obey merrily? This may seem a strange alternative; yet it includes the sense of incongruities without which neither marriage nor the religious life can well survive.

At the risk of being misunderstood, I suggest that the ground of the religious life is always obedience, and that this is what most gives Catholic spirituality its special strength.

Again, one remembers that Francis was not wholly Francis until the Bishop covered him with his cloak. It is here that the shoe pinches; here that the iron may enter the soul. And it is here that ordinary men and women begin to become saints.

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