Thank you for the invitation to reflect with you today at this wonderful celebration of fifty years of national and international leadership of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men in the Church. I was asked to reflect on “the challenges of religious life in the US today.” I am imagining that some, many, all of you are pretty weary of hearing about “challenges for religious life in the United States.” Some of the older members have been hearing about those challenges for nigh on to 40 years. Just when we think we might have a handle on them, the ground shifts again, and things get out of focus. Maybe if the ground would stand still for a little bit, the challenges could be dealt with. But often we’re left feeling like we’re living in one of those play areas for kids at McDonald’s. Those places where kids try to walk on floors covered with balloons with nothing to hang on to. Each step is precarious and off balance. Apostolic religious life has felt that way for some for a long while now.
My intuitions tell me that the ground isn’t standing still anytime soon. So we are left with two choices. We can sit down in some comfortable space on the ground that we imagine isn’t moving, and hold on for dear life. And many are doing that these days. Or we can look deep inside ourselves to see to what type of transformation we are being called in order to move, however unsteadily, onto new ground. I will speak to this second option.
For the past year and a half I have been a member of a wonderful committee that has been planning this 50th anniversary of the Conference. Early on in our discussions we searched for an image from scripture that would speak of who/what male religious life is today. We settled on the story of Joseph and his brothers from the Chapters 37 to 45 of Genesis. Abbot Jerome Kodell, OSB has unpacked the story for the assembly in a masterful fashion. But, as I have been steeped in this story for a year now, I would like us to focus on a piece of the story that the Abbot Jerome only touches on very briefly: how is it that Joseph is able to move from being a spoiled brat to becoming second in command of the vast kingdom of Egypt?
I think it has very much to do with the experience of the pit. So for a few minutes allow me to walk with you through the beginnings of this tale, which forms one of the great stories of scripture.
Joseph
is Daddy’s favorite and Joseph even thinks that he is God’s
favorite.
He is gifted with seemingly invulnerable charm and visionary dreams. He is
dressed differently in clothes that make him stand out from his brothers.
Joseph’s special-ness is daily flaunted in front of his brothers. He
revels in his favoritism. Joseph seems totally unconscious of their jealousy
because he is completely enclosed in his self-delight. He even flaunts what
he perceives as his favoritism in the telling of dreams. He suggests that
God will have his parents and his whole family bowing down before him. The
storyteller of this part of Genesis calls Joseph a “youth;” he
is 17 and hardly a youth in his culture at his time. He has long been of
marriageable age. Joseph is a youth psychologically and spiritually.
If we paint a canvas with broad strokes, we can begin to see our religious life of some years ago in some of those strokes. Religious accepted from the Church community a perceived special-ness, and dare we say, that we perceived even a special-ness from God. We were the beloved sons: singled out, set apart from our brothers and sisters, (we even dressed in special robes/usually more monochromatic than “of many colors!”). We heard God’s voice in the visions we told the Church, but they were largely visions centered on ourselves that under girded our perceived special-ness. We were a youthful, largely unconscious lot. We were busy about important tasks (we thought) like Joseph bringing food to his brothers who were doing all the real work of sheep-herding out there in the hills!
And then, like Joseph, the ground shifted swiftly, and we found ourselves in the pit. Confused by the anger of our brothers and sisters for sins kept hidden to protect our special-ness. Stripped of our special robes, we were plunged into darkness, suffering, and our own unique brand of slavery.
But the darkness of the pit takes an unexpected turn of light as Judah, in one version, tells his brothers that Joseph should not be killed; he should be just put on another journey. And so, from the darkness of the pit, Joseph is shaken into a new consciousness for a new journey.
There are four elements, I believe, that transform Joseph from the unconscious youth in the pit to the respected household slave to the revered assistant to the Pharaoh of Egypt. Those elements are: (1) changing the focus of the journey; (2) giving himself to the journey, even if it seemed to be going in a direction that made no sense to him; (3) learning a new language so that people to whom he was speaking understood what he was saying, and (4) because the journey was unknown, being open to allies and friends from unexpected places.
These four elements are the elements of our journey also. I am convinced that if we come to understand and integrate these four elements in our religious life in the United States, we will be a new and vital voice in the Kingdom of Egypt.
Although not speaking from the context of the Joseph story, Sister Joan Chittister, OSB states in a recent book:
“The twentieth century ranks in history as a crossover moment in time. One world – agricultural, nationalistic, parochial, and isolated one – was giving way to a new one marked by instant communications, global technology, pluralistic societies, and seeping boundaries – but we didn’t see it then. We grew up thinking that life would always be what we thought it was then. We expected the country to be white, our political, social and economic worlds to be constant, and the church to be unchanging. Especially the Church, But it wasn’t. In fact, none of them were.
Instead we found all of them in flux and our own attitudes and ideas about all of them in flux as well. It worried us, irritated us, put us into political and ecclesial camps we never before even knew existed, Slowly, in the midst of the impasse, religious began to realize that if we were ever to be able to move forward together again, we all needed two things: some change in direction, yes, but some change of heart about it too. We needed a broader vision, an understanding of change, an experience of conversion. Change and conversion, we finally came to realize, are not the same thing.”
(The Way We Were, pg. 245)
1. Changing the focus of the journey.
It is quite simple: the journey is about God, not about us. It is God who directs; God who supports; God who makes whole. Our special-ness is a fact. But that fact has nothing to do with ourselves. We are special, as all baptized Christians are, because we are beloved by God. When Joseph changes the focus of his journey, the journey takes on new and different twists and turns. The change of focus does not eliminate hardship and suffering; the change of focus toward God changes us, the ones who are making the journey. This is the first and most difficult realization: changing the way we make the journey.
2. Giving yourself to the journey, even if the direction that it seems to be going makes no sense to you.
We religious have staked our lives on a journey. All the neat definitions, the rest stops along the way, and even the destination have become blurred. But there is a deep and abiding intuition that it is God who is leading this caravan to Egypt! Our blissful youth spent among the hills and the tasks that we knew and understood has been ended. We’ve been yanked from the pit and sent on a journey that we would have never chosen. Some of us yearn for former days, even for the pit crying “woe is us!” That’s one option. The other is to notice that this new caravan is loaded with riches that are unfamiliar to us: the myrrh and spices on the backs of the camels. We don’t know much about myrrh and spices, but as Joseph, perhaps we can allow the Ishmaelites of Gilead to teach us! The second step in giving our lives to the journey is allowing ourselves to be taught.
3. Learning new languages so that the people you are traveling with can understand you.
While it might be of great pastoral benefit for us to learn Spanish or Vietnamese for our ministries in the future, I am not specifically talking about linguistic skills here. In getting dragged out of the pit and sent on a new journey, somehow we have to take whatever it is we consider as “the tradition,” whether of our particular congregation or of the Church and make it intelligible to the new folks we are traveling with. The old words don’t speak the depth of what was. We will have to be the creators of new language for the journey. Imagine Joseph, educated in the written and oral Torah: in Hebrew and Aramaic, trying to translate that to the world of hieroglyphics with which the Egyptians spoke and wrote. Again, it is not a matter of linguistic skill, but rather, Joseph became in his life and the way he lived it among new people the embodiment of the meaning of the people of Israel. So, too, we must be living lives that embody for people the Church and the particular charisms that we bring from our reading and living of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a much more difficult task to become what you speak than to just speak it, no matter how fluently.
4. Be open on this new journey to allies and friends from unexpected places.
Even in new circumstances and on new journeys, charm and good-will will only get you so far! Joseph was a slave when he was pulled out of the pit and Joseph was a slave when he was sold in Egypt and Joseph was a slave in the first household he entered. But what Joseph learned was to take his gifts and his traditions and put them at the service of the new people he found himself among. It was no longer about Joseph. It was now about Joseph serving among a new people. So it is not about the glory and heritage of all that our congregations have been , but it is about placing our gifts, insights and charisms at the service of new people.
The allies and friends of the journey in 2006 are especially women and lay persons in the Church, I believe. We need desperately to stop talking to ourselves and to open the conversation to “friends and allies” and ask them what they need us to be for them on this journey of the Church in the United States.
The answers might surprise us; the answers might provide some unexpected clarity for the journey; but assuredly the answers will open us to a new community among unexpected friends and allies.