By Sister Genevieve Sachse, OSB

Because of the many changes in religious life in recent years many people wonder what is different about it since the externals by which most people recognized religious life have been altered or abandoned.

We have cars, live in apartments, find our own jobs in many cases, socialize freely, etc., where in years past we begged transportation from long-suffering parishioners, lived in large convents, and filled assigned jobs for which many were not adequately prepared.

“What,” many ask, “has become of poverty, chastity, and obedience?”

Many reasons are involved in any explanation of the vowed life and all such reasons play a part; however, unless these are seen in the context of the real essence of religious life these reasons tend to become purely utilitarian and sometimes even offensive to the layman.

In a recent issue of Review for Religious, David Knight, S.J., examined some de facto situations in community life and raised questions about the dichotomy between contemporary theory and fact, and his article forms the basis for this column.

Prayer is our professed priority and yet often our professional responsibilities take precedence in spite of the fact that the thrust of our life makes it easier for us to find time for prayer than many laymen.

Living in community is a definite value and support, but many people live in community – from marriage itself (Knight comments that marriage is definitely a form of community!), to the communes of married couples, singles, fraternities, etc.

Celibacy does free us for apostolic service, but this motive alone would mean many lonely people who had banded together to make the best of things through personal sharing and Christian concern.

Knight says: “The romantic love of marriage can grow into deep love of commitment, expressed in a multitude of ways; or a marriage can degenerate into mere living together for want of an offered alternative. When this happens mature married couples will make the best of the situation and live together as pleasantly as possible, an easy camaraderie helping to distract from the aching loneliness of unshared depths. Religious celibacy can go the same way.

In principle, religious life, like all earnest Christian lives, has a transcendent dimension and should be a total dedication to service of the Kingdom; in principle, it is permanent, just as marriage is. The religious, like all Christians, are committed to loving all men and God above all.

Knight draws a parallel of spousal commitment which avoids the theological problems of the earlier “Bride of Christ” concept. The Bride of Christ is the Church; it is in the Church that Christians are brides in the Bride of Christ, but not all Christians give explicit expression to this spousal relationship in their lives.

Married people do not simply promise to “love one another,” they commit themselves to give particular, concrete expression to their love, to mean what they express. As Knight states: “The reality which we call spousal life is not really a commitment to love someone more than another. It is rather the commitment to do those things that of themselves tend to bring about perfect, experienced union of mind and will and heart with another. Spousal love may not be the greatest love in a person’s life; for example, a man might live his spousal relationship in a very mediocre way with his wife, yet be heroically loving in his gift of self to his fellow men. The perfection with which the spousal – or any other – commitment is lived determines the perfection of love achieved through it.

“There are acts which are explicitly spousal, such as the determined effort to share one’s deepest self with another, not on an occasion or because one feels moved to do it, but as the expression of a lifelong commitment to this individual.”

In religious life, this spousal commitment is expressed by first, a lifelong commitment during which the expression is given. Secondly, it implies a life not dedicated to achieving the same union with other individuals (although life is certainly not limited to this one individual); rather it commits to a single individual the time, the efforts, the constant presence required to grow towards total union of mind and will and heart.

To know Christ through one’s spouse is truly to know Christ – but in a spouse, not as one. Thirdly and primarily for the religious, it means a “commitment to the kind of prayer which has as its purpose a growing familiarity with the mind and will of Christ, and the total surrender of self to sharing His individual life in all of its joy and pain.

“The religious has committed herself in this life, and for all her life, to interact with Jesus Christ on the specifically personal level in those ways which constitute between human beings the particular relationship of spousal love.”