What is a religious or consecrated life?
Religion must be like salt in food: neither too much nor too little, only what is needed.
Don António Alves Martins, Bishop of Viseu from 1862 to 1882
Paraphrasing the Sabbath was made for man, man was not made for the Sabbath (Mark 2: 27), religion was made for man, man was not made for religion. Religion is the salt in life, that is, the salt that gives flavor to life; salt is at the service of food, religion is at the service of life; life should not be religion nor living a religion.
What we say applies to everyone. However, there are some who are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-14). Called to be the salt of the earth certainly means to give flavor to the lives of others; called to be the light of the world certainly means to enlighten and guide the lives of others. This is what the consecrated religious must be.
In simple terms, if for ordinary people religion serves life, for the religious or consecrated life serves religion, because he devotes his entire life, to be the salt and light for others. Because he does not live for himself, but for others and society in general, the consecrated or religious has a life set apart.
"To consecrate" an object means to remove it from its ordinary use to set it aside or apart, to reserve it for a particular and exclusive use. When a chalice or other object is consecrated, it is reserved or kept for sacred use, in the case of the chalice, it is for the celebration of the Eucharist.
It is in this sense that one must interpret the "fuga mundi" of the religious of the Middle Ages. It was not about fleeing from the world so as not to be contaminated by it, but answering the call to a Mission that required leaving the ordinary life behind.
Inside the forest we do not see the forest, we see only trees; to see the forest we have to get out of it. The consecrated man departs from the world in order to know it better; in fact, he leaves the world in order to devote himself to the world. He withdraws from his own small world in order to give himself to the whole world in a special way. He sets aside his private life, to enter the service of Life in the universal sense.
How religious life began
The most visible sign, or what draws the most attention to a religious or consecrated person is his celibacy, that is, being a person who does not form a family like all the others. Historically, however, we can say that even before the religious life came about, which in the Church took the term monasticism, from the beginning of Christianity within the first Christian communities, as is still the case today, there have always been men and women who have renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. In my village, I can count up to six women who have remained unwed to dedicate their lives exclusively to catechesis and the education of children.
The first few centuries of Christianity were marked by many persecutions of the Church that being a Christian and being a martyr were practically synonymous. The Christians of that time aspired, like all humans, to die of old age. However, by embracing a religion outlawed by the Roman Empire, every Christian was willing to bear witness to his faith in his life and with his life.
When spirituality, martyrdom, that is, the full and supreme dedication to the cause of the gospel, lost its strength due to the legitimation of Christianity, which became the state religion under the Emperor Constantine, monasticism arose as an alternative form of martyrdom or full and exclusive dedication to the values of the gospel.
This way of life emerged at first as a great novelty in the Church and registered a huge expansion, especially in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. They passed into the history of the Church under the name of the Desert Fathers. While with the legalization of Christianity, many Christians became dull and fell into spiritual and moral apathy, the ascetic monks kept the values of the gospel fresh by leading a life of intense prayer, fasting, celibacy, and detachment from material goods.
In the beginning, these monks were anachoretic hermits, that is, they lived in seclusion; over time, they gathered in cenobians, or in small communities, and thus religious life as we know it today came about. They were also called regular clergy, as we have said, because they were communities governed by rules. The first rule, entitled "Ora ed Labora" was given by St. Benedict, the founder of monasticism in the Western Church.
Religious life in other religions
When some people think of a monk in the Catholic tradition, what comes immediately to mind is the image of a man dressed in a saffron-colored habit – the image of a Buddhist monk instead. Buddhism is a spirituality that lends itself to monasticism, that is, to the exclusive dedication to meditation, to the ascetic life that aims at enlightenment.
As in Christianity, not all Buddhists can be monks. However, many children and adolescents have a monastic initiation for few years of their life, as if it were a service, similar to the compulsory military service of other times, and then they leave the monasteries to go on with their normal life.
The Jewish as well as the Muslim religions are opposed to the monastic life as understood in Buddhism and Christianity. The closest correspondent in the Muslim religion of a Christian monk is a Sufi, for as in Christian monasticism, Sufism is an internalization and intensification of the Muslim faith and practice.
Religious life throughout the history of the Church
According to the canonical distinction, today we have two types of clergy: the regular or religious and the secular or diocesan. The diocesan clergies are more involved with the world, they are the shepherds of the Lord's sheep. In this sense, their role is very similar to that of the doctors of the law and the priests of Jerusalem. The consecrated religious, on the other hand, are called to be prophets, to be the right people in the right place, to be the solution to a problem.
All religious orders arose as the solution to a problem: the Jesuits as the force of Counter-Reformation, the Franciscans to exalt the value of poverty in a Church that was too rich. With the Crusades, military religious orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers emerged. Later religious orders were founded to care for the physically sick, others were founded to care for the mentally sick, and still others were founded to provide education, especially to the disadvantaged who could not afford schooling. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, my religious order and many other religious orders were founded to dedicate themselves exclusively to the evangelization of Africa and later Asia.
In the Old Testament tradition, the prophet was the right man at the right time; he was the one who knew how to interpret the present moment in the life of the people in the light of God's will. He was the one who felt that he was a messenger and sometimes also an intermediary between God and men. He was always a natural leader and a charismatic person; he criticized a behavior that was not appropriate in God's eyes, as well as comforted and infused hope in the people during hard times, like the Babylonian exile.
Religious life in general is associated with the Prophetic Mission of the Church. In the Middle Ages, while the states were fighting among themselves, it was in the monasteries that culture was preserved; it was there that schools, universities and hospitals were born. The civil registry itself was born with the registration of those baptized by the Church; that record that the State, with the Republic revolution in 1910, stole from the parishes in Portugal and elsewhere.
Symbolic acts or playacts of the prophets of Israel
The behaviours of the prophets in the Old Testament were so bizarre that under the current secular standards of sanity, they would surely end up institutionalized or at least in some form of intensive care.
These prophets were not only spokespersons of the word, they also incarnated it in their lives, in their talents, in their behaviors and deeds; everything in them was part of the message; their choice of clothing and even their bodies and body language. Therefore in their own flesh, they bore witness to how transformative and disconcerting the Word of God can be. "Words are scattered by the wind," the symbolic and dramatic acts of the prophets spoke much louder and were harder to forget or ignore.
• Isaiah, took off all his clothes and wandered around naked (Isaiah 20).
• Jeremiah hid his underwear under a rock, and after a long time came looking for it (Jeremiah 13).
• Hosea deliberately married a prostitute and named their daughter Lo-ruhamah or the unloved one (Hosea 1).
With the coming of Christ, we can look back and see these prophets as forerunners, not only through the prophecies that spoke of his coming, but also through their prophetic actions. Christ is, after all, the word made flesh in the richest and most complete way possible. And like that of the prophets, Christ's behaviour was utterly bizarre, disconcerting, and confusing regarding the social and conventional standards of the time.
He was, after all, someone who guaranteed that he would rebuild the temple in three days, who ate with prostitutes and tax collectors, who cast out demons into a herd of swine, who healed a blind man by rubbing his eyes with mud mixed with his saliva, and who walked on water. The most shocking and dramatic action was undoubtedly washing the feet of his disciples. He wanted to perform the most servile act so that they would never forget what he had already spoken in word: the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45).
The religious as a symbolic or playact
The consecrated person lives in the here and now the life we are all called to live in Heaven. By embodying the values of the gospel, he or she is like the polar star that indicates the true way to God, like a finger pointing toward Heaven. By relativizing certain realities of this world that man is tempted to absolutize, the religious is also a beacon that exposes the dangers of navigation, dangers of losing our life during our pilgrimage to the heavenly homeland.
In this way, the three evangelical advices can be seen as gestures or symbolic acts that speak for themselves, in the manner of the dramatic and symbolic acts of the Old Testament prophets, or a way of being salt and light in topics such as power, material goods, pleasure and love.
Vow of poverty – Relativizes ownership because apart from maintaining our vital functions, material riches are a hindrance to spiritual growth. As the gospel says, where our treasure is, there our heart is also; whoever gives his heart to riches, sells his soul to the devil, and no longer possesses himself, but is possessed by what he thinks he possesses.
Vow of chastity – Relativizes sex because, contrary to what society would have us believe, sex is not an individual need, but a need of the species; it is not even intrinsic to love, it is only one of the many expressions of love. If love, in its natural expression, creates the family and family ties, love, in its sublimated expression, creates universal fraternity and solidarity.
Vow of obedience - Relativizes power and freedom. For the gospel, power is service, that is, to obey the needs of others. I am free until I find my fundamental option; once found, life boils down to being faithful, or obeying, the commitments made. If you keep the rule, the rule will keep you, and give you a sense of identity, purpose and security.
POVERTY
When a religious, being able to be rich, chooses to be poor, what is he saying to the world? What prophetic message does he embody in his life of poverty? What truths does he reveal? What dangers does he warn against?
We are stewards not owners
In not being owners of anything, not even of our own life, we must sincerely consider ourselves stewards of both our life and the resources we own. One day we will need to give an account of this stewardship.
When in our mind we can replace the concept of "ownership" with that of "stewardship", a sense of indifference and detachment from material goods invades our mind. This new mentality is indispensable for spiritual growth, as a free and independent person, but at the same time being part of a community and being children of God.
Since God is the sole owner of everything and everyone, we are only administrators and not owners: things are made to be used, not loved or possessed; people are made to be loved, not used. Those who aim to possess more and more have the tendency to use people, to see them as a means to get what they want. People should never be a means to anything, but always an end in themselves. Things are the means, a means of life. Things are at the service of life and not life at the service of things.
Means of life, not ends of life
For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. Mark 8:35
To live and to be alive are one and the same for animals, but not for humans. It is true that to live one must be alive, but the meaning and purpose of human life is not to stay alive, it is not to retain life; on the contrary, it is to lose it, it is to give life, it is to detach oneself from life, to give oneself to a cause, to use all the time and energies of which our life is made up of, for an ideal, a dream, an ambition. Life is therefore not an absolute value, but a relative one; the absolute value is the reason why I live.
Material possessions, therefore, have nothing to do with life, but only with being alive, with maintaining vital functions. Whoever dedicates his life to accumulating wealth is dedicating his life to maintaining life only. He may even have what it takes to maintain the vital functions of two and more lives. But he will continue to have only one life which he will end up wasting it away.
The rich is poor, the poor is rich
The poor man who is happy with what he has, and does not seek material wealth, is rich. Whereas the rich man who is never satisfied with what he has, who always wants and seeks to have more, is poor.
It is like an anorexic teenager who deceives herself with a false perception of reality; she is so obstinate in becoming thinner that every time she looks in the mirror, she sees herself as fat. Because she does not focus her attention on the thinness she already possesses, but on the thinness she wants to possess thus seeing herself still fat. This false perception of her reality forces herself to lose more weight, risking death if she is not cured.
The rich man is poor because his attention is not focused on what he already has, but on what he can still have, investing all his time and energies on this objective. As there will always be someone richer than him, he will always see himself as living in a state of want and therefore, for all intents and purposes, he is poor. The poor person, on the other hand, is rich because he is satisfied with what he has and invests his time and energies in "being" while the rich person is poor because, by not thinking that he has enough, he invests his whole life in "having more".
Possessors or possessed?
If riches increase, do not set your heart on them. Psalm 62:10
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Luke 12:34
Unfortunately, the rich young man in Matthew’s Gospel (19:16-23) decided to keep his riches when Jesus confronted him and gave him the choice between material wealth and spiritual wealth. The gospel says that he was saddened with his own choice; riches can give pleasure, but they do not give joy and pleasure is almost always followed by sadness.
The rich young man refused to follow the teacher because, faced with the prospect of losing his riches, his false sense of security paralyzed him. To follow the Master is what moved him to go to Jesus in the first place, he wanted to follow Him, but he could not --- not because he possessed many riches, but because he was possessed by them. He was not free, he did not possess himself, nor was he the master of his own destiny. What happened to the rich young man, and happens to all who give their hearts to riches, is similar to selling one’s soul to the devil.
Where your treasure is, there your heart is also, warns the gospel. Therefore, when we give our heart to riches, we sell our soul to the devil; from that moment on, we possess only from the accounting point of view because from the psychological and spiritual point of view, we are possessed.
If the object of one’s love is material goods, then a strange symbiosis takes place between that person and the material goods he loves. Symbiosis is defined as a relationship of mutual benefit and dependence between two living beings.
There is an exchange or sharing between the two: the material goods share their matter, through which the person who loves them becomes materialized; the person shares his spirit, through which the material goods become spiritualized. The subject who previously said he possessed the object is in turn possessed. It is not the rich young man who possesses the material goods, it is the material goods that possess the rich young man.
Because money is a good slave but a bad master, the one who is seduced by wealth loses his freedom. In reality, it is that begins to "command" his life and not he himself. When the only goal of life is to possess, and possessing only serves to maintain vital functions, the person lives only to be alive, that is, he vegetates.
Finding greater wealth
Princess Diana of Wales had everything a young woman could ask for in life: youth, beauty, power, money, fame, "blue blood" and two precious children, and yet she was not happy because she lacked the most important thing that money cannot buy: love. In search of this, she abandoned everything and it was in this search that she lost her life. There are others who having the essential, love, do the opposite of the princess, eagerly seeking everything she despised. They spend their lives doing this, often losing what they had beforehand: love.
Like Diana of Wales, St. Benedict of Norcia, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis Xavier, St. Anthony of Lisbon, St. Elizabeth of Portugal, St. Nuno Álvares Pereira, St. Beatrix da Silva etc., the saints of the Catholic Church, for the most part, were from upper-middle class, cultured, young, beautiful, rich, some from nobility, and they all abandoned everything for Christ. As St. Paul had once said – because for his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ (Philippians 3:8).
These saints were not fools: no one trades a greater good for a lesser one. If they embraced poverty, it is because they found in it a greater wealth than the one they left behind which they could not be satisfied, because the Bible is clear, one cannot serve both God and money (Matthew 6:24). You cannot, at the same time, cultivate spiritual values and material values.
It is true that money is very important, it is in fact the god of this world, because it opens many doors for us and gets us many consumer goods; but it does not open the door to spiritual world for us, nor does it get us human values. It does not buy us the most important good and without which human life makes no sense: love. Love is the most important need in life and money can in no way meet this need.
Whoever spends his life cultivating temporal and lapsed values is, in some way, cultivating death. When he eventually dies, not possessing a spiritual body and not having accumulated treasures in heaven, he will be dead forever, suffering from eternal death. Whereas he who spent his life cultivating spiritual and human values that are eternal, has accumulated treasures in Heaven and when he eventually dies, he will be resurrected with the spiritual body he has built in life and will enter with it into eternal life.
Vow of poverty
Since the religious vows of chastity, poverty and obedience refer to eternal values, those who embody them become sacraments, ambassadors, symbols of eternity for the rest of Christians. By living here and now the values that we are all called to live in heaven, they relativize realities such as money, power, and pleasure.
As for the vow of chastity, since there is no death in heaven, there is no need for marriage, as Matthew 22:30 suggests. Living in chastity or universal friendship is what awaits us all.
As for the vow of obedience, what the religious wants to relativize is the love of power that so many have. The craze of wanting to get to the top, thinking that once there they won’t have to obey anyone. By obeying, the religious wants to show that doing the will of God is best for self-realization.
The need for material goods is related to having to sustain life in its biological implications. In heaven, we will have a glorious body (1 Corinthians 15: 44) or spiritual body, made in the image and likeness of our physical body, without it being our physical body. Since it is an immaterial body, there is no need to possess and store material goods.
Many people live under the illusion that by having more means of living, they have more lives, or that they can prolong their one life. By living under the vow of poverty, we proclaim the truth that one cannot love both God and money; possessing beyond what is necessary to keep us alive prevents us from "storing up treasures in heaven" (Matthew 6:19-20), that is, from applying our life to cultivating human values. It is these values that give meaning and relevance to our life, both from an individual and a social point of view, and sustain it into eternity, being part of our spiritual body, with which we will live with God.
In living the vow of poverty in the context of a religious community, we highlight the value of sharing the common goods, as well as the value of using and administering them responsibly, without owning them. We believe, in fact, that God alone is the true owner of everything that people think they possess. We do not own anything, not ourselves, not even our life; we are only administrators of time, talents, resources and we will be accountable for this administration one day.
CHASTITY
If poverty has to do with our relationship with things, and obedience with our relationship with ourselves, chastity has to do with our relationship with others.
Chastity and sublimation
Eros & Thanatos are life instinct and death instinct, affection and aggression, ying and yang, centripetal force and centrifugal force, love and hate, positive and negative poles of electricity or energy with which we do everything that we do. Without energy nothing works in a society and the same is true of us.
In his book, Civilization and its discontents, Freud argues that both unbridled aggression and affection, that is, abandoned to themselves, have an immeasurable destructive potential; they can destroy what they helped to build. The human being abandoned animality when he gained power over these two forces, when he managed to domesticate them, when he put reins on them to harness them in a positive way.
Seeing things in this light, human civilization can be considered as a story of sublimation of Eros & Thanatos, that is, the intelligent use that humanity made of these basic forces or instincts. Similarly, our own personal story also consists of our efforts to divert our natural affection and aggression from their natural and primordial target in order to promote the cultivation of human values.
In line with this way of thinking, the religious vow of chastity consists of diverting the natural affection of man and woman from their primordial objective, of marrying and having children, and channeling it towards a more cultural purpose. Priests, men and women religious choose not to have spouses in order to establish a broader fraternity; they choose not to reproduce biologically and have children of their own in order to amplify and extend their fatherhood and motherhood beyond blood ties.
Examples of sublimation: the dam and the steam engine
With the construction of a dam, the water level rises to the point where it can irrigate the fields and transform a desert into an oasis, creating and feeding an agricultural and rural society. On the other hand, it can also be used to produce electricity, creating and feeding industrial cities where urban culture flourishes.
It is clear that the dam represses and compresses the water, preventing its natural flow; that is why its walls have to be strong and concave. On the other hand, done within the limits of what is possible, the added value and benefits that are obtained from the driving force of water to produce energy and its channeling for irrigation, fully justify the dam or the repression.
Like the concave and strong walls of the dam, the sublimation of Eros requires the person to possess a strong and robust character in order to contain the natural impulse of Eros that manifests itself in sexual desire and natural fatherhood, and so be able to channel his energy to a more universal fatherhood and brotherhood. The good that is done to others, in the context of this universal fatherhood and brotherhood, echoes back to him in the form of joy; seeing that others are better off thanks to his action, far outweighs the effort and sacrifice involved in the process of sublimation.
The principle of sublimation is also verified in the steam machine, which was the first machine that humans built. This first artificial driving force that man invented transformed heat produced by using burning coal to boil the water inside a boiler with the resulting steam being used to move the pistons of the engine. Basically, it turned heat into mechanical power. Sublimation is possible and without it human society as we know it would not exist.
Chastity is the relativization of sex
"All you need is love" was what the Beatles used to sing in the ‘60s. In fact, after the basic needs, which sex is not part of, to love and to be loved is the only need and condition without which human life does not exist or subsist. No person will ever reach full maturity as a human being if he or she is not loved unconditionally during childhood and love unconditionally as an adult.
Those who as adults seek to be loved, more than to love, behave affectionately as a child. And since society does not tolerate adults behaving like children, this adult will seek to be loved in a distorted way, with deception, manipulation, and psychological games; that's what soap operas are all about. Those who are affectionately mature can do without being loved, but cannot do without loving. Jesus, in his earthly life, was always seeking to love and serve the poorest and most disadvantaged, he did not seek to be loved, but he also did not reject the love that some gave him.
Love can exist and subsist, and can make sense without sex because there are an infinite number of loving situations where sex does not apply, does not enter and should not enter into them. On the other hand, sex without love should not exist, it makes no sense because it transforms the person into an object of pleasure, instrumentalizing and degrading the person, even in the case of consensual sex between adults where both are, at the same time, treated as objects of each other’s pleasure.
To love is, as St. Thomas Aquino says, to want the good of the other. That is why the Spanish proverb says, "obras son amores y no buenas razones", love manifests itself in works just as faith does. Contrary to popular expression, having sex is not "making love", because love manifests itself in works, it grows or decreases with them and through them.
Far from being the only way, the sexual act is just one of the many ways to say "I love you"; and it is neither applicable, nor licit, nor moral in many forms of love. However, even in loving situations in which sexual expression is correct and appropriate, it does not in itself take away or add anything to love, it only expresses or does not express the love that is or is not there.
Private love versus universal love
In my childhood and adolescent days, I was very fond of watching cowboy movies on television. Today, thinking back, it is clear to me that these films influenced, I would even say forged, my future in some way. I was fascinated by the fact that after the cowboy had freed the town from the bandits who were holding it hostage, even if during the time he had been there some maiden had fallen in love with him because of his bravery and he had or had not reciprocated that love. In the end, the cowboy never stayed in the town or accepted the love of the maiden, nor the power symbolized by the sheriff star offered to him. He left instead riding off into the sunset, so that in another episode we would see him liberating another town, always fighting for justice and freedom at the risk of his own life.
Every man and every woman have a natural vocation to be a father and a mother. The consecrated person is called to fulfill it, not in the biological or physical way, but in the psychological and spiritual way. Even for those who are parents in the biological sense, the most important thing is not the short duration of the conception process, but the long years of the educational process. Mother Teresa of Calcutta was never a mother in the biological sense, and yet no one would deny her the name Mother Teresa.
The consecrated person is not a father by bringing more children into the world, but by contributing to the education and humanization of those who are already here. As for the missionary, one can say, as Jesus said: "he went through the world doing good".
Chastity and abstinence
Just as poverty is not the complete denial of material goods, because as long as we possess a physical body we need some, just as obedience is also not the unconditional and total uncritical submission to the will of others, like sheep to the shepherd, so also chastity is not the total abstinence from love personified and the possibility of expressing it sexually.
The total sublimation of Eros is impossible
Of course, the process of substitution or channeling of energy cannot be continued to infinity, nor can it be the transformation of heat into mechanical energy in our machines. Sigmund Freud
According to Freud’s example of the steam machine, it is impossible to transform all the heat produced by coal into mechanical energy; much of this heat is lost in a natural way. He also gives the example of the farmer who trained his horse to live without eating; just when he thought the horse had gotten used to it, it died on him.
The same goes for my dam metaphor: it is not possible to turn all its water into electricity and for agriculture. There are times when it rains a lot, which forces the opening of the floodgates and let the water flow naturally; if we don't do this, we could lose the dam.
Total sublimation of Eros is not desirable
Still using the dam metaphor, when it rains a lot it is necessary to release the water; chastity, in fact, is more difficult in younger years, when it rains a lot, that is, when the hormonal production is at its peak. This is precisely why St. Francis of Assisi, in order to resist temptation, would roll around naked in the snow. Here too there is a danger of losing the dam of our psyche, that is, of becoming neurotic. I have always found it pure hypocrisy that old, decrepit clerics (with an almost zero hormonal production) prescribing sexual morals to young people.
There are, on the other hand, studies that say that both exacerbated sexual practice and total abstinence from it are damaging to physical health. The lack of testosterone production has effects not only on sexual function, but also on the overall functioning of the body. Perhaps Buddha was right to advocate the middle ground, or as the ancient used to say, "in medio virtus" or "in medio veritas".
Sex as a liturgy of love
If sexual pleasure is an expression of the oblative dialogue, then it is clear that the institution of marriage cannot be the "hortus conclusus" of sexuality and we cannot deal with it only within the limits of a doctrine of marriage. Pietro Prini Lo scisma sommerso
Pietro Prini, a much-loved Catholic philosopher in Vatican circles, suggests in his book that in sexual matters, the Catholic world does not follow Catholic morality; there is a schism within the Church between the sexual morality that the faithful follow and that which is proclaimed by the magisterium.
The Irish theologian Diarmuid O'Murchu in his book, Poverty, Celibacy, and Obedience: A Radical Option for Life, comes to the same conclusion as Prini: Whether or not the celibate must totally abstain from genital sexual intimacy, in a world where this intimate expression is no longer linked exclusively to marriage, must at least remain an open question.
In the human species, sexual expression does not exist primarily for procreation, since not all sexual acts are open to life, as is the case in animals. Unlike them, humans are not children of instinct, but of love between two people because one can only live humanly in love and to love. Sexual expression is above all a liturgy, an expression of love between two people, as long as this love happens then the sexual expression of this love is appropriate.
OBEDIENCE
If poverty has to do with loving God above all things, chastity has to do with loving others as yourself, then obedience has to do with loving yourself. The first concept that has to be clear in our mind is that our life is not just about us.
Human life is an absolute value in relation to death, we cannot escape from it. However, in relation to other human values it is a relative one, because human life only makes sense by cultivating human values and each of these values gives worth to our life. Do not use your life for causes that you are not willing to die for.
If in relation to the vow of poverty we said, with regard to our life, that we are not the owners of the things we call ours, not even our life since we did nothing to attain it or nothing we can do to retain it, then in relation to the vow of obedience we are not the architects of our life, but only its engineers, masons, or builders.
Builders, not architects – Everyone who comes into this world comes with a plan. He comes because God willed it that way. The circumstances of his birth do not matter: they neither add to nor take away from the dignity of the person. He is very much a child of God regardless of whether he is born out of love, accident, born of a prostitute, from a night of pleasure and even from a rape; every human life that comes into this world, from its conception to natural death, is viable and therefore inviolable.
God writes straight along crooked lines. For his designs he uses both our goodness and our evilness. For Him, there are no illegitimate children or blue-blooded children; He is Father to all; all, equal in dignity, are heirs to eternal life.
Just as one does not build a house in our cities and villages before it is properly designed and planned, no life comes into this world without God having drawn up a plan, a blueprint, for it.
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last… (John 15:16) – We are not therefore the ones who design our destiny; we are called to be a house built on rock, and this is achieved if we hear the word, that is, if we know the plan concerning our life and put it into practice, if we carry it out the way it was designed.
Since we are not the owners of our life, we are not its architects either, but rather its masons or master builders. The architect of everything and everyone, the Creator, is God; the design, the project, or plan of our life is with him, to know it we have to consult him periodically, as we build our life, our home.
The builder who does not periodically consult the architect runs the risk of building something that does not agree with the design or blueprint. How embarrassing it is whenever this happens in our cities, houses that do not receive the permits to be inhabited, are even demolished because they were not built, in accordance with the plan. Worst embarrassment is to stand before God with a life lived against his will. The periodic consultation by which we come to know God's will about us is called prayer. Therefore, within the framework of the consecrated religious, it is 50% of his life according to the rule of Ora Ed Labora.
The fundamental option as a commitment
The fundamental option is a decision we make about the whole of our life, it is the objective, the goal of our living, it is what gives meaning, color and flavor to each and every day of our life. It is the flame that is maintained by the fuel of our life, our energy and time. It is the support for the lever that lifts the world, in the Archimedes Principle. It is the motivation, the inspiration that brings together all our resources that we put at the service of a goal, of a target chosen by us.
Life is made up of many choices and decisions; they are what give color, flavor, aroma and meaning to our life. These small options usually concern one or more aspects of our life; they can affect us a lot or a little, but they do not affect the whole of our life. The fundamental option is the decision of all decisions, the master choice, the mother of all options because it concerns our entire present and future life. Most of the time it is irreversible, it is the reason for our living, it is the cause that we will feed with our time and energy; it is the mouth to which we are the bread.
The cause, or the fundamental option, that Nelson Mandela fed with his life was the end of apartheid in South Africa; for Beethoven, it was music; for Picasso, painting; for Gandhi, India’s independence in a nonviolent way; for some parents, their children; for teachers, their students; for doctors, their patients.... More than a profession, life is a mission.
There is no life without commitment
They live as if they're never going to die… and die as if they had never lived. Dalai Lama
When the time comes to choose our fundamental option, we are at the crossroad of our life, or as they say today in Europe, we are at the roundabout of our life. We cannot stay there forever, not for longer than it is appropriate. Often, when we remain undecided for too long, life or the State ends up deciding for us, as is the case in some countries about the de facto unions of young people: after a while, the State considers them married. In Lisbon there is even a roundabout called "Clock Roundabout". While we remain undecided, time passes and some opportunities do not appear a second time in life.
"I want to keep all my options open"– I used to hear this from young people in the United States and Canada. In fact, during childhood and early youth, all options are indeed open. Keeping all options open would be like being a statue in the center of an intersection or going around a roundabout, like a clueless donkey. It would be like being alive without living and dying without ever having lived.
Obedience is fidelity to our commitment
Since we owe obedience to our physiological nature, we also owe obedience to our supernatural nature, which is our vocation or our fundamental choice, as Jesus did. All our time and energies must be dedicated to the vocation we have chosen.
Whoever looks back after putting his hand on the plough is not fit for the Kingdom of God (Luke 9:62). Obedience means being faithful to the commitments we have made, to what God has called us to do, to what we have decided to dedicate our lives to. Love leads to marital commitment, but later on it is this commitment that keeps and nourishes the love.
The alternative to obedience as fidelity to the commitment we have freely chosen, and which consists of the cultivation of a human value or cause oriented towards the common good, would be not to choose, keeping all options open, camping at a crossroads, not investing or committing our time and energies to a project, as did the foolish servant in the parable of the talents, who buried the talent he had received.
It is true that we would be free, but one day, towards the end of our lives, when we look back, we would have the impression of never having lived, because we would not have written any story and we would have spent time and energy on futilities and on just staying alive.
More than to survive, human life is to be involved, to commit our time and energy to a project of social utility. What is good for the community is good for us. When we are not useful to others we are useless even to ourselves; our life will only be meaningful to us if it is meaningful to others.
Conclusion: The vow of poverty is the "having" at the service of the "being"; the vow of chastity is the need to love and be loved at the service of universal fraternity; the vow of obedience is the personal will at the service of the common good.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
