Ann Marie

1. Why do we have to work so hard to promote vocations and recruit people to religious life when calling is ultimately in God’s court? When I first started discerning two years ago, I was surprised and somewhat taken aback to realize there was so much infrastructure behind the vocational call. Sometimes the beautiful unpredictability of the Holy Spirit is hard to see when the discerning arena is so self-conscious and so anxious…. vocation directors whose sole job is recruiting people, vocation director conferences like NRVC, people doing CARA studies to analyze those entering, orders spamming discerners with Come and See invites on email and Facebook, etc. If I do enter religious life, how do I know for sure that I discerned it with God and didn’t just get caught up in this whole framework of promoting vocations? While the websites and studies and whatnot are interesting, sometimes I wish it was more peaceful and less desperate.

2. How much do religious orders pay to be involved in advertising themselves – on vocationmatch.com, religiouslife.com, the magazines, et cetera?

3. As Jean mentioned above, the politics of religious life can be horrible to watch played out among Catholics. Why is there so much unattractive tension between various expressions of religious life, and why is it so apparent? Sometimes I get impatient with the bickering and subtext and, if I didn’t feel somehow inexplicably drawn to loving God through religious life, I would probably say ‘to h-e-double hockey sticks with this whole mess’ and then get on with with my life loving God some other way. Oftentimes discussions of religious life seem to pit LCWR and CMSWR as enemies, which is just really weird. How can we start talking about this stuff like we’re the body of Christ?

3. Do you think it would be feasible for religious life to scrap this partisan format of LCWR on the left and CMSWR on the right and start over from scratch as one community? After all, this is church. Having two parties allows things to get snarky and immature because supporters on one side can objectify and talk about the other ‘side’ instead of loving and actually interacting with their fellow Christians, and it happens in both directions. I propose a totally new council… how about something like CALL – Council of All Loving Leaders – or something like that?

Sign me up for the “thing” tomorrow, please. Thanks.

I am wrapping up a beautiful Book, “Catherine of Siena: Vision Through a Distant Eye”, By Suzanne Noffke, O.P. from The Liturgical Press in 1996.

Here is one great passage she quotes from “The Dialogue” between God and Catherine:

“I ask you to love me with the same love with which I love you. But for me you cannot do this, for I have loved you without being loved. Whatever you have for me you owe me, so you love me not gratuitously but out of duty, while I love you not out of duty but gratuitously. So you cannot give me the kind of love I ask of you.This is why I have put you among your neighbors: SO THAT YOU CAN DO FOR THEM WHAT YOU CANNOT DO FOR ME – that is, love them without any concern for thanks and without looking for any profit for yourself. And whatever you do for them I will consider done to me…

Just as the soul loves me in truth, so also she loves her neighbors in truth. Nor could she do otherwise, for love of me and love of neighbor are one and the same thing”.

One of the most powerful Catholic prayers, hands down, for me in my own relationship with God and with all the people of the world in which I live is “The Penitential Rite”:

“I confess to Almighty God and TO YOU MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS that I have sinned through my OWN fault. IN MY THOUGHTS AND IN MY WORDS, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. And I ask the Blessed Mary ever virgin, all the angels and saints and YOU MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS TO PRAY FOR ME TO THE LORD OUR GOD”

I believe that each of us must stay very clear that our Catholic faith does not cut us slack with how we choose to use our own God-given mouths in speaking.

I am looking forward to the thing tomorrow (drawing a blank here).

Jean

I think of that passage as I read a lot of the ongoing and critical dialogue online about new discerners and entrants to Religious Life. I am quite sincerely shocked every single time I read a defense of LCWR sisters that takes the form of an attack against CSMRW (and I assure I do not shock easily; in 20 years of social work in the fields of child abuse/neglect, homelessness, domestic violence, I have seen some of the worst stuff that humans can do and say to each other. What continues to shock me – and I hope it always will – is when people defend God through emotional, spiritual, verbal and physical violence against others. In this country, physical violence as a form of spiritual battle is rare. But we are skillfully vicious in our religious battles nonetheless: we simply do it with language. And the ease with which we commit that violence against each other ———————- the ease with which we deny how violent we are with our words ———shocks me and, as I said, I hope I will always be shocked by that ease.

Whenever we speak in belitting or diminishing terms about the vocational choices of any woman (or man), we are engaged in nothing less than a verbal attack against God. Nothing less. Perhaps much more than an attack against God but absolutely nothing less than attack against God.

http://www.hbgdiocese.org/Admin/Uploads/The%20Catholic%20Witness/Documents/AUGUST%2014%202009%20ISSUE.pdf