Monday, January 10, 2005
From chaos
From Neil
In 1948, the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray wrote, “Christian faith asserts its own supernatural ideal of human unity. It asserts, too, that this ideal will never be achieved on earth; it will always be blocked by the disorganizing action of Satan, by the divisiveness of sin, by the never completely healed disorder in the nature of man that makes him strangely tend to chaos.” But the “chaos” might seem to be much worse, even unbearable, recently. How do we avoid falling into despair?
Mother Josephine Mary Miller, OC, Prioress General of the Bernadine Sisters of Esquermes, has written an article on “Chaos and Peace” (Alliance for International Monasticism Bulletin no. 82 [2004]) that might be helpful in difficult times. She begins by saying, “I don’t need to tell you that we are living in an era of change, that we have to change, and that we are changing, whether we want to or not.” But she recalls the words of John Henry Newman – “Abraham obeyed the call and journeyed, not knowing whither he went; so we, if we follow the voice of God, shall be brought on step by step into a new world, of which before we had no idea.” Mother Josephine says, “He is reminding us that, in the apparent confusion of our days, there is a pathway that we can discover if we are content to go one step at a time, and do not insist on having all the answers immediately.”
The “confusion of our days,” this “chaos,” is very real. Many of the Church’s concepts have become “meaningless and void of sense” to people today, and, even within the Church, “many of our communities no longer have daily Mass; this situation will certainly become more widespread in the coming years.” But Mother Josephine turns to the Biblical definition of “chaos” as the “primeval forces that can be brought back into some kind of order and from whence can spring new life.” “Chaos,” though it may seem hard to believe, can actually become the source, after a good deal of suffering and patience, for renewal and purification.
But we do need a pathway, and Mother Josephine suggests three values to guide us. The first is fidelity to an essential charism, which includes “relativizing everything that is indeed secondary, that we can point to the really essential values that endure forever.” She points to a group of Canadian monks who made the hard decision to establish their monastery in a new location, after 120 years in one place, because, as they said, “We want to give ourselves and our energies to the heart of our Christian and monastic commitment rather than maintaining a patrimony which does have a beauty and a value in the context of history.”
The second value is to maintain a strong belief in eternal life – that “there is something beyond our present experience, something much greater that we call eternal life.” The third value is celibacy, because, for female religious, celibacy “is the way we show that for us, nothing in this life except Christ can ultimately satisfy us. We try to accept the ‘absence’ in the depths of our hearts, not just as a sterile emptiness, but as the sacred place where we await and meet the Risen Christ as the women did outside the tomb on the morning of the Resurrection.”
Grasping these values, we can, like Abraham, journey not knowing whither we go. It will not be easy, but, counsels Mother Josephine, “We can find real peace in accepting our personal limitations and weaknesses, give up trying to be God, pretending to be able to cope with every conceivable situation, and allow God to do his work precisely through our faults and weaknesses, letting him answer the questions for us, on his terms.” But, remember, “There must be no nostalgia, no lamentations, no evasion of the needs of the present …”
