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Religious
Life A
woman stands at Mount Nebo
By CAROLYN OSIEK
The view is breathtaking. On a clear
day from the terrace outside the church, you can look down upon the whole
Jordan valley, Samaria and the southern end of Galilee to the north, and the
top of the Dead Sea to the south. Straight across, there are small Jordanian
villages just below, then the strip of green that marks the course of the
Jordan River, then the rising hills that contain the road from Jericho to
Jerusalem. At the top of the hill, you can just make out the towers and tall
buildings astride the Mount of Olives, and you know that just on the other side
lies East Jerusalem.
Mount Nebo is, of course, according to Deuteronomy 34, the place
from which God showed Moses the Promised Land. Moses had toiled for 40 years to
bring the people of Israel there, but once he had seen it, he was told that he
was not to enter it. I frequently have occasion to bring groups of people
there, groups composed largely of loyal and dedicated laborers in the church:
lay ministers, priests, women and men religious. It is a teachable moment, and
so after recalling the story of Moses, I ask them if they are willing to do the
same: to spend the best years of their life working for a vision that probably
they themselves will never enjoy, but only glimpse from a distance.
Invariably, most of the women religious get it (as do
many of the men, too). It puts them in touch with the experience of memory and
grieving for hope lost. Those of us who are baby boomers and
pre-baby boomers, who remember Vatican II, Good Pope John and where we were
when John F. Kennedy was shot, thought we had arrived in the Promised Land when
the aura of Vatican II broke through what was seen to be the remnants of the
long, dry desert of the Counter Reformation church.
That church was still holding on during the first half of the last
century, until the springs of water suddenly began to flow, the windows were
opened (to use Pope Johns image) and a breath of fresh air began to flow
through the old building. The church began to notice the signs of the times and
to try to make sense of them, even to respond to them. The exuberance and
optimism were overwhelming. There was hope and even assurance that everything
could be different: structures of authority and justice, the grip of
patriarchy, patterns of exclusion.
There were hopeful beginning signs: the liturgical reform, the
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the Declaration on Religious
Liberty. Priest and altar turned around to face a congregation now addressed in
its own language. There was a new fervor of ecumenism, a willingness to speak
of Protestants as our separated brethren rather than heretics.
There was the promise of reform of canon law. The laity began to feel as if
perhaps they had a real place in the church after all. There was an
over-idealization of Vatican II. Its legacy would heal all wounds and bring
about all desired changes. Anything that seemed like a good idea was ascribed
to Vatican II, whether or not it was really there. But Vatican II says
... or in the spirit of Vatican II were catchwords for
whatever we wanted to see happen.
In womens religious congregations, the call was to return to
the original spirit of our foundation. That agenda required serious reflection
and experimentation. Already before Vatican II, something of this had begun,
for example, with simplification of the religious habit. But after the council,
we entered into it with gusto, re-examining original documents, trying new
forms of community life and relationships, new structures. Eventually the
habits mostly disappeared, the inhabitants of convents emptied out into small
groupings and individuals in apartments. Exciting new forms of inclusive
government were inaugurated. New forms of ministry were more effective in
reaching people where the need was. Sisters appeared on the picket line, in law
courts and even in political office. Laity and religious alike, we stood at
Mount Nebo glimpsing the Promised Land and were confident that just down the
hill we would enter into it. We had forgotten what happened to Moses.
Moses saw it and died. In this exciting new vision of a renewed
church that we thought we had created, something had to die. Old forms gave way
to the new. The familiar presence of habited sisters in schools and hospitals
disappeared, to the dismay and disorientation of many, both lay and religious.
There were other kinds of death, too. Some found that they could no longer cope
with this brave new world and abandoned it. Some left the church, and sisters
left religious life in droves. At the same time, vocations that had boomed in
the 50s suddenly vanished in the late 60s, as many more options
were opened for young people who wanted to serve, and those in religious life
seemed no longer capable of knowing, much less saying, what they stood for.
Slowly but surely, other experiences of dying set in. The new
church did not live up to expectations. The ecumenical movement went about as
far as it could go without introducing radical change, then cooled. The
expanding role of the laity was carefully curbed at important junctures.
When women religious took seriously the churchs mandate to
experimentation and reform, they were often greeted with a cloud of suspicion
on the part of hierarchical authority. Patriarchal entrenchment in church
structures did not budge noticeably, in spite of a few cosmetic changes. The
church simply did not change in the ways that in the late 60s we were so
sure it would.
But the problems for women religious did not all come from outside
religious life, and they could not all be blamed on ecclesiastical structures
or persons and the lack of change in them. We found to our dismay that more
democratic structures and egalitarian relationships in religious life did not
change us as people. Community life actually became harder, because two or
three sisters living together in an apartment could not hide their relational
difficulties, as they had been able to do in a larger, more structured group.
Without the support of that larger group and the religious habit, it was now up
to us as individuals to maintain prayer and religious identity.
In the rigid authority structures of the past, many had suffered
hurts that had lain buried for years because it would have been
disloyal even to admit them. Now without the withholding structure,
they surfaced and brought new levels of suffering that many of us have not
known how to heal. The disillusionment with community life has led to a general
movement, of the majority in some congregations, to live alone because it is
simply easier and forestalls the possibility of more hurt. (I recognize that
there are many complex reasons for living alone and do not intend to
oversimplify.) However, young women and men today enter because of community.
They are attracted by the radical possibility of adults trying to live together
and so witness to reconciliation and peace. Celibacy they can practice on their
own, ministry they are doing. It is community they are looking for.
Many of us now seem entrenched in our patterns of life that are
based not on the embrace of the future but on the rejection of the past. We
seem to be oblivious to what the next generation wants in religious life if it
conflicts with what we have come to settle into as a comfortable pattern. In
some ways we are stuck between letting go of the past and living for the
future, in a kind of bitterness, angry with the church for not changing as we
had hoped, angry with God for getting us into this situation, angry with each
other for not being the perfect community members we had wanted and angry with
the next generation because they often want forms and ways of thinking that we
have rejected from past experience. They seem conservative, a bad
word anathematized at Vatican II. We have stood on Mount Nebo, we have glimpsed
the Promised Land, but we did not realize that entrance into it would be
delayed beyond our lifetime. Sometimes we have not accepted our dying
experiences as gracefully as did Moses.
Though it meant death for Moses, it meant new life for a new
generation that would indeed enter the Promised Land. Heirs of the desert
generation, they could listen to the stories of the past but had to create
their own future in entirely different circumstances. They had to rely on the
wisdom of their elders and continue to share life with them, yet they must have
known that the future would not be at all the same. Young religious and those
entering religious life today rely on the wisdom of the elders, yet must create
their own new ways. The elders can only continue to stand on the mountain and
cheer them on, but that role is essential.
National Catholic Reporter, February 18,
2000
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