In her book, Selling All (Paulist Press 2001), Sandra Schneiders writes of the courage which making a life commitment requires.
The commitment envisioned by profession [i.e., religious vows] is total and irrevocable and consequently is a very serious move that intends to take in a person's entire life. It is not surprising that it raises all the questions about the possibility and the desirability of commitment that have always plagued human beings but which are especially acute in the context of postmodernity. Commitment is both the highest achievement of and the greatest challenge to freedom that we face. Making a life commitment, especially in our fragmented and relativistic context, requires enormous courage but also also allows for the expression of a love that knows no bounds.
While we tend to think of commitment as curtailing our freedom, Schneiders points out that commitment is the "highest achievement" of freedom. And paradoxically, commitment makes possible a deep freedom that would be impossible to one who clings to the "freedom" of leaving all options open.
At its best, religious life witnesses to an untamed quality which is the freedom of the Holy Spirit. It is a life which can be disturbingly unyielding to the expectations of polite society. Religious life, and in truth any Christian life lived to the deepest and fullest, is ideally free of the constraints and fears that social tyranny would place on us and therefore, in a practical way, it looks very odd to the rest of the world and serves as a model of liberty for those who have eyes to see.
"The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you
do not know where it comes from or where it is going; so it is with everyone
who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)
The untamed nature — wildness even — of religious life (or of the spiritual life in general) is expressed, strangely enough, through a discipline which permits it to remain unfettered by the conformist pressures of modern civilization. It is a wildness suggested by and supported by some of its customs:
Praying the Psalms together.
The Psalms are wild prayers if there ever
were any, especially when we move beyond the beautiful old favorites like
Psalm 23.
Consider Psalm 58, which begs God: "Let [the wicked] be like the snail which dissolves into slime..." (58:8a).
Or the strange but tender plea of Psalm 56:8, "Put my tears in your bottle."
Are there any of us who have never felt like crying out, "Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck" (69:1)?
The Psalms are wild prayers because life itself can be wild.
Praying the whole psalter also requires of us the freedom to pray in union with the whole world, rather than just from our personal feelings — for example, to exclaim, "Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song!" (149:1), when our whole being wants to join with Jesus as he calls out:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me,
from the words of my groaning? (102:1)
Or on the contrary, it asks of us to lament with those who are suffering, when we ourselves are feeling joyful.
Times of silence. Silence
reminds us that we are not the ones in charge and allows us to remain in
touch with the undomesticated Spirit within us and around us.
Living in community with people to whom we are not related, whom we
did not choose, and with whom we may have little in common except love for
the untamable, incomprehensible Mystery who is Love itself. And
finding that this is sufficient.
Sister Rose Hoover, rc
Email: sister-rose"at"vocationquest.org
(Replace the "at" by @.)
