Read the first installment of this piece here.
If you have made a vow of any sort that binds you for life, you know that in the crossing of that threshold, the life held in store for you from the foundation of the world became yours, yet in a whole new way. The audacity to make a vow opened the gates to a new world, in which the rest of us, and all God’s angels and saints, could rejoice in it with you—because you gave yourself away.
If you happen to be discerning your vocation, or a facet of vocation within vocation, or seeking a sharper edge to a vocation that may have grown dull with use over time, it may help to hold something in mind regarding this posture of oblation.
One approach to discernment of vocation begins with the question “What kind of life will make me most happy that also aligns with God’s purposes?” The theological emphasis is “God desires my happiness.” That is absolutely true! But it is only half of the story.
Discernment of vocation within the church begins with a theological emphasis on Christ’s mystical Body, of which we are each a part. The question people of God asked for centuries, especially as they discerned the call to religious vows, did not begin with self. It did not begin with self-fulfillment as its primary reference point. It began with the question “How can I best offer my life back to God in a form of service that will best glorify God in the world?” There is alwaysfullness of life on the other side of that question, but it comes by way of self-offering: Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
IV.
In the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, as in most traditional religious orders, it takes about five and half years of formation to become eligible to make life vows, which inaugurate what our Rule calls “a lifetime of developing response.”
It is our custom to go on retreat several months before we are to make our vows, either as a final confirmation of God’s call, or as a means of deepening our own anticipated self-offering. I made my retreat at an Anglican Benedictine monastery called Mucknell Abbey in Worcestershire, England. The retreat began well enough, with idyllic days of sunlit peace and quiet. But about midway through, I had a dream that disturbed my spiritual equilibrium. In the dream I was preparing for a wedding. The arrival of my spouse-to-be was delayed, and everyone was becoming anxious. Finally, my beloved arrived—only to reveal a shattering diagnosis with a terminal illness. Would I still go through with the wedding? All eyes were on me, awaiting my response.
I awoke in a cold sweat. In my life of prayer, I was accustomed to cast my cares on the mercy of Jesus—the bridegroom of my soul. Countless times I had prayed in response to Christ’s question: “Do you also want to go away?” with the words of Peter: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
But the spouse that appeared in my dream, with that eleventh-hour diagnosis, presented a message from the Spirit moving in my subconscious mind: a rearrangement of the traditional imagery in a subtle but significant way.
If I was prepared to marry Christ, the Head of the Body, was I also prepared to marry Christ’s Body, the church—no matter what the future held in store for the life and health of the church as I knew it?
If love was love, what other choice could I make?
Perhaps some of you reading this now are contemplating just such a commitment. You may also be in the thick of it already. Little about the outward metrics of its vitality are certain. Much about its accustomed way of being is precarious and waning. “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28–29). Any temptation to boast in the choice that lay before me on that pre-profession retreat had been chastened from my tongue. What remained was the unadorned truth of the calling.
As I prayed about that dream, I heard a clear voice say: I cannot die. The spouse of my dream is not a human institution, though the church is liable to forget this, and my waking psyche clearly needed the reminder. The Body of Christ is a mystical organism—in and through whose living stones a spiritual temple upholds God’s presence and purpose in this world.
My vows and yours, however they differ, bind us to yet another mystery: as often as she dies, she rises. This second mystery is also a paradox: two truths thrown together, from whose collision a truth of a whole different order is disclosed. By the vowed life we die and rise with her, the always-pilgrim church, and our faithfulness to God’s future is renewed. The crucifed-and-risen Christ longs for us to embrace our ongoing creation in his likeness: members of a crucified-and-risen church.
V.
A common question asked of religious brothers and sisters under fifty goes something like this: “You’re rather young to have chosen this life. Do you think monastic life is likely to die out in your lifetime?” It can be a hard question to face over Sunday dinner. As a recently elected, forty-three-year-old Superior of a small monastic community, I would be lying if I told you that that question didn’t occasionally keep me awake at night.
But that’s not how I answer the question in the moment. I have made it my practice to say, with as much equanimity and humility as I can: “I don’t know.”
The answer the questioner is looking for (and sometimes the questioner is me) belongs to the sociologist of religion or the expert on demographic trends or the religious news journalist.
And although the question is perfectly natural to ask, I think it ultimately belongs to the same species of question as that litany of anxious “what ifs” competing with Christ for the sovereignty of my heart when I was a novice. Implicit in the question is the all-too-human impulse toward protection and preservation of the self—whether of the individual, or of the collective, denominational self that is the Episcopal Church as we know it.
Who am I to venture the prediction “No”? And if the answer, in God’s time, proves to be “Yes,” would that change anything about the clear call of God?
Like a monastery or convent, is the church in our age meant to fulfill its highest calling by owning explicitly who she has always been in the deep truth of her vocation: a place where individuals go to lose themselves in God?
And is the great promise of being a member of that Body in our age the always-new discovery which dawns on the saints of every generation: that life lost for that high calling is a life given back one hundredfold?
As a novice, I clung to these words of SSJE’s founder, Fr. Richard Meux Benson (1824–1915). They have only become more meaningful to me with each passing year since I made my vows.
It is for us to be living in constant watchfulness of the progress of the divine life within our souls, and not to imagine, when we seem to see things clearly, that “Now there is no more for me to see.” When does the noonday come for the true Religious? When does the Novitiate end? Only with this world’s life. Yes, as long as we are in this world we have to go on learning and learning, watching and watching, receiving and receiving, as from time to time God gives us more and more. However bright things may seem, we are not to mistake the harshness of our clearest intellectual sight for the glorious vision of that which we are to see eventually. When the whole being is filled with the Holy Ghost, how marvelously shall we then look back upon this world, and our clearest sight shall seem to us as nothing. (The Religious Vocation, p. 77)
The profound hope animating this new segment of Earth & Altar, which we call A Silent Rebellion, is none other than the promise of Jesus Christ and the refrain of this reflection: Those who lose their life for my sake will find it. The reflections, articles, and essays you will encounter here will all, in some way, express facets of the vowed life as it is lived in traditional religious orders of the Episcopal Church. On behalf of all the sisters and brothers who live this vocation day by day, I pray that our words may nourish, inspire, challenge, and sustain you on your own journey in Christ.
