Perhaps you have come for just such a time as this. Throughout our common experience of COVID, and all that has come after it, these words from the fourth chapter of the book of Esther have continually come to mind. Was I born for this time? Were we all born for this time? If so, what gifts am I called to contribute so that God’s love might reign? What will happen if I refuse? As I mulled over these questions, my mind continually returned to the gift of religious life—particularly our vows and our common life. I am certain we were all born for this time, and I am also certain that religious life was born for times like these: to speak of the will of the Father, the hope that comes through Jesus, and the work of the Spirit. We religious are called to be a sign that peace is always possible because Jesus rose from the dead.
Walking dead
Early in my formal discernment and formation to be a religious sister, I was sitting with my formation director on one of our patio swings. The time was approaching for me to move from the stage of affiliacy to postulancy, and we were discussing religious garb, likely because the postulancy is when a woman begins to wear some form of religious attire. She looked at me, and in her usual matter-of-fact manner, she made this point: our religious garb is a sign that we are walking dead. The color black signifies this and reminds us of this. The conversation was not going where I thought it was going! Walking dead? She went on to explain. Religious, in a way, are walking dead in the world, since our life is (or we hope it to be) a sign of the life to come, a sign of eternal life, which we enter into through the door of death. Religious life is a sign that God’s endgame is a wedding banquet, and the marriage is between God and the Church, brought to fulfillment when we respond fully to God’s gift of himself in his Son, Jesus. So we walk as though dead; we walk as a sign of that ultimate marriage that all are called to in heaven. That day, she was opening my mind to the prophetic dimension of our life as religious sisters. I would go on to learn that our life, and the pillars it stands on, always have something to say in the world, and should always be a sign and beacon pointing toward the mission of Jesus and the will of God the Father. The prophetic dimensions of religious life flow from the vows and the common life. The three vows taken by most religious are the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The vow of poverty proclaims that we have nothing of our own power; that all is gift, so we stand, gratefully, like the anawim of the Old Testament, the poor of God. The anawim were open and receptive before God, who provided for all their needs. This is true for us, and God even provided the breath we just drew. This flies in the face of our self-sufficient culture, which often asserts that what I have I got on my own because I am a self-made man. The vow of chastity—which I prefer to speak of as celibacy—unleashes a deep and radical belonging. Celibacy asserts that I belong to no one person so that I might belong to all, and call everyone my family. Celibacy flies in the face of the lies of division and tribalism. The vow of obedience (from the Latin obedire, “to listen to”) proclaims an ongoing deep listening to God and one’s religious superior. Obedience is then a sort of listening that goes so far and deep that it enters the will and becomes action. The action of doing what God wants us to do. This flies in the face of our culture, which has plugged its ears to God’s law and will, much like those who martyred the deacon St. Stephen, reject the fatherhood of God and say, “I will do what I want, be what I want; I will do what pleases me, not God.” And then there is the crown, the common life. People who did not handpick one another live, work, serve, pray, and strive and struggle for holiness together because of their belief in the Gospel. When the world says we will never see eye to eye, that we will always be at war, that we should respond to oppression with oppression, and that we should fight fire with fire, the common life says the opposite. The common life says, “I will become family with strangers. I will share life with people I did not personally choose, but that God chose for me. I will learn to love across cultures and across families of origin. I will learn to forgive, and I will learn to receive forgiveness.”
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