Religious life, a life committed to God under the traditional vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, is facing a crisis. In today’s increasingly secular societies, the value of a celibate life in community, attempting to follow the ‘evangelical counsels’ or ‘gospel precepts’, is being openly questioned and frequently discarded. Monks and nuns, sisters and brothers in religious institutes, can be seen as irrelevant to the needs of modern society. Are they not just living a life of withdrawal from the complexity of the 21st century and attempting to reconstruct the simple certainties of a medieval theocracy? Many would say similar things, if they even consider the issue at all, and not just in the churches. Religious, at least in the industrialized West, and increasingly in the developing East, are voting with their no-longer sandaled feet. It is not so much a case of ‘casting their dust off your feet’, as they flee the world, rather it is a matter of casting off the dusty restrictions of the religious life, realizing that, for many, dust is all that remains – ‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’ as the liturgy of the penitential season of Lent proclaims each Ash Wednesday. As the average age of religious gets higher by the year, the prospect of joining a religious community gets less appealing to the young people who once sought a life of devotion and service in the religious life. Who wants to run an infirmary wing for aged community members or be part of a system that all too often de-humanized its members or abused the children entrusted to its care?
But is it as simple as that? Paradoxically, there are pockets of resistance to the general rout. Sr Judith Merkle addresses her latest book on the theology of the religious life to the question of how the sacred and secular realms can be seen to work together, informing each other, holding on to the irreducibly unitive vision that sees the seemingly secular as itself sacred and infused with value.
In part 1 of her book, Merkle excavates the foundations of her appraisal, searching for ways in which wholeness may be experienced in an age of contingency and a wounded world of fragile interrelationships. In this way, she examines how the path of the vows may be rooted in this rich earth of communal living. Her interlocutors on behalf of the (Roman Catholic) church are primarily the theologians of the time of the Second Vatican Council: Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan. Readers unfamiliar with these worthy thinkers may struggle, but there are undeniable resources here, albeit from an earlier age of the church. Rahner, for example, in his statement that if there is to be a church surviving into the future then it will have to be rooted in a mystical awareness of God’s presence. This shows the enduring offering of religious life, as it seeks to preserve the patterns and skills learned in the patient forbearance of the fragility of life together in communal belonging, that enable the handing on of the hidden life of a mystic to the next generation.
In the sociological corner, Merkle threads through her argument repeated responses to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor and his book ‘The Secular Age’. Taylor insists that the qualities so valued by post-modernity, such as autonomy and authenticity, are themselves in need of commitment to communal boundaries within which the individual can be formed. I cannot be myself without knowing what I am a part of. Negotiation and communal formation are necessary skills in the development of individualization. Also quoted are sociologists such as Max Weber, who insist that without institutions to stabilize innovation the initial energy of charism will inevitably burn out. But Merkle’s primary starting point is the (Franciscan) charism of Pope Francis, explicated in his encyclicals ‘Laudato Si’ and ‘Fratelli Tutti’, and it is to this vision of the reconciliation of all people and all things that she characteristically returns.
Such debates are focused more clearly on the three vows of religious life in part 2 of Merkle’s book, where she seeks to respond to the challenge of autonomy and plurality to the vow of obedience; the challenge of agency and finitude to the vow of poverty; and the challenge of singularity and the Other to the vow of celibate chastity. To take the vows in this order gives a slightly different perspective from the traditional sequence of poverty, chastity and obedience. It is probably the last of the three – obedience – that forms the greatest stumbling block to religious, especially in the current ascendence of the self-affirmation of autonomous individuals. The old practice of seeking permissions is all too easily an infantilization of the adult responsibilities needing to be taken in caring for oneself and others. ‘An obedience of collaboration’ is the only way forward to realize the true agency of the adult self.
This agency expresses itself in poverty – not as deprivation but as restitution for past wrongs and awareness of the crucial moment in which the possibility of sustaining life on this planet is fast receding in a wanton disregard for the finite resources of the earth. How important is it to live an ascetic life, in the midst of corporate extravagance?
And finally, celibacy as a response to the call to unity with others and with God is still necessary in today’s world, not as a freedom from committed relationship but as a freedom to live in a generous and caring way with all others, witnessing to the transcendence that finds God through one’s neighbor, not in rejection of the friendship that can be found in affectionate mutuality.
All in all this is a complex book, intertwining insights from sociology, psychology and theology rooted in the debates of Vatican II and the subsequent reformations of religious life in the church. Reading it I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Surely religious life is simpler than this!’ Probably it needs re-reading two or three times to get a clear sense of the debates involved. After all, it is a great matter for the whole church. Can she live and thrive without some being prepared to commit themselves to this paradoxical choice of discipleship in company with others? Are we ever going to be whole without this expression of joy known as the vows of religious life?
