Poverty, Chastity and Obedience and the Christian Life.

The following is a talk given at our most recent vocations weekend. If you are interested in attending a similar event, please Contact us

If there’s one thing that “everybody knows” about religious life it is that monks, nuns, brothers and sisters are those members of the Church who are experts in living lives of poverty, chastity and obedience: after all, they’ve self-identified as such, standing up in public and taking vows to that effect: we’ve all seen the movies after all.

Unfortunately, like most things that “everybody knows” this is at best a half-truth. For one thing, not all religious in fact do vow poverty chastity and obedience, at least not in so many words. Some religious orders make other promises in addition to these three: the Jesuits, famously, have a fourth vow of fidelity to the Pope for the sake of the missions; others have a completely different sounding formula: the Benedictines for instance promise something along the lines of (the wording differs slightly from place to place) stability (ie living forever in the same community) and fidelity to the monastic way of life as well as obedience, without mentioning either poverty or chastity explicitly; the Dominicans, as in so many ways, have our own unique way of doing things (but I won’t spoil the surprise for anyone who doesn’t know what that is, because we are going to be talking about it later in the weekend) So, not all religious take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But, much more significantly, poverty, chastity and obedience, the Evangelical Counsels, as they are known, are not only of relevance to religious. Rather, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church insists, poverty, chastity and obedience are central to the Christian life as such:

Christ proposes the evangelical counsels, in their great variety, to every disciple. That’s paragraph 915 of the CCC

And the clue as to why that should be the case is, of course, in the very name evangelical counsels: the reason that poverty, chastity and obedience are called evangelical counsels, gospel counsels in other words, advice on living the gospel, is that they each point us to a facet of the figure who is at the heart of the Gospel, Jesus himself, so that the claim would be that the more we live in their spirit, the spirit of poverty, chastity and obedience, the more closely we come to resemble Christ, and we’re going to be thinking a little bit later tonight about how they do this. But from the outset it should be obvious that Christlikeness isn’t intended simply as a job description for some special elite within the Church: it’s just what it means to belong to the Church at all, to allow God to work in us so that we might become ever more truly what we are made to be in baptism: members of Christ’s body, living lives utterly in conformity with his. So, if Christ was poor, chaste and obedient, so in a certain sense must all Christians be.

Now, at this point you may well be asking yourself where I’m going with all this. You’ve come along, after all, to a weekend in a convent, where you might reasonably expect to be told something about the distinctiveness of our way of life as religious and indeed as Dominicans, because, on some level and with a greater or lesser degree of clarity and maybe to your own surprise, you’ve found yourself asking whether or not it’s at all conceivable that the Lord might be calling you to this, and you’re keen to find out a little more about what it involves. Over the course of the weekend the other sisters will indeed be talking about each of the three Evangelical Counsels from the perspective of living them out as Dominican sisters, and of course at any time while you’re here you’re all very welcome to ask any of us anything you like about our lives. But it’s important to begin, I think, by stressing less what makes us different from other Christians than what we have in common with every other baptized person, because this will, I hope, help to clear away some common misconceptions about what religious life actually is, and therefore about what kind of people might possibly be called to be religious, which can get in the way of listening to what the Lord is asking of us. Put briefly and a bit crudely: it’s all too easy to assume that religious are NOT like other sorts of people, , which can either give religious life an alluring glamour which makes us feel it’s not for the likes of us, or make it seem so weird that we rather hope it’s not.

Religious Profession, significantly, isn’t a sacrament, which sometimes puzzles people when it’s pointed out to them. Why should it not be when marriage and ordination, both of which, like religious profession involve making public promises in church, are? Partly, of course, because unlike marriage and ordination, at least as Catholic theology has classically understood them, RP can’t be directly traced back to Jesus either instituting or validating the practice as he does at, amongst other places, the wedding feast of Cana in the case of marriage and the upper room in the case of ordination. But, more positively, as the teaching of Vatican II and of the Popes subsequent to the council are insistent, RP isn’t a sacrament because it’s a making visible of the effects of another sacrament, the sacrament of baptism. But what are those effects? Well, in a word, holiness.

One of the most important emphases of the Second Vatican Council was that all the baptized were called to holiness, which means, let’s be clear, not moral rectitude, still less sanctimonious misery as perhaps many of our contemporaries fear, but the more abundant life promised by the Lord in the Gospel, the joy of knowing the fulfilment that comes from living in accordance with our true nature and our deepest desires, our restless hearts finding rest in God, and then, in love and gratitude spilling out in worship of God and the service of his children. Becoming holy is not a once-for-all thing; it’s a process; our hearts have to come to rest in God and then we have to learn how to use those restful hearts in his service. It is a process that will only be truly complete in heaven, but it begins with baptism. Why must that be so? Fundamentally, because we have to receive this holiness as a gift: it’s not something we can achieve, though it’s a gift we’re meant to use. It’s about being incorporated into Christ who IS already perfectly holy, of course. That happens at baptism when we are literally incorporated into Christ, becoming part of his body the Church. We’re given, so to speak, the DNA of Christ, but, just as with a natural organism, the various limbs and organs are made up of different kinds of cells with specialised functions, so too the Christian genetic code expresses itself differently in different Christians, in the different vocations – to ordained ministry, marriage, service of the Lord in the single state and consecrated life – that make up the life of the Church.

During the rest of this weekend we will, obviously, be thinking in more detail about one of those kinds of vocations, religious life, and about some of the practical implications of being called to exercise our baptism in this way. But to return to the question of what this way IS, how religious life relates to the other vocations within the Church, we need to be clear. It’s not what religious do that makes them distinctive. Everything I do as a Dominican sister I could have done without having taken any vows: Christians in all states of life, to use the old fashioned terminology, pray and attempt to live in charity with their neighbours, honouring the image of God in them and frequently make a far better job of it than I do; more specifically there are priests and married and single laypeople whose work for the Lord takes a very similar form to mine: I do pastoral and catechetical work in a university chaplaincy, and I try to teach theology to young men studying for the priesthood. You don’t have to wear a long white dress to do any of that, nor to teach in school, nurse, prepare children for the sacraments, any of the host of bringing God’s love to his people that our sisters are involved in. It’s true that there are things about the way religious live their lives that give them a special kind of freedom and flexibility for the Lord’s service as well as providing them with precious resources to support them in this ministry. Of course, for instance, a married woman with a family would not necessarily be at liberty to cross continents in the service of the gospel as a missionary brother or sister might be asked to do, and of course living in a community structured by prayer, work and relaxation in common is a strengthening as well as a challenging experience and both the strengthe But, again, as the variety of new movements and lay communities which enrich particularly the contemporary church shows, as well as all the quiet unsung ways in which individual Christians and Christian families live out their vocations, these things don’t constitute the essence of religious life because they are not, in fact, unique to religious. What IS distinctive is the fact that we are, by virtue of having taken public vows, publicly marked out as baptized people in whom the common vocation to holiness of all the baptized ought to be, as it were, visible with particularly crystalline brilliance. That obviously means that religious have an immense responsibility as well as a huge privilege. But it’s important to understand that it’s not one that puts us apart from the rest of the Church. People ought to be able to look at us religious and say not “there’s a holy person; an expert in holiness, I’m glad there are people like that in the Church…at a safe distance”. Rather, they ought to be able to say “there’s a person who has offered him or herself to be a constant witness of what it means to allow the grace of Christ to shape a human person into himself: I’m glad there are people like that in the Church because it encourages me to believe that Christ will work in my life too”. As St John Paul II puts it, in Vita Consecrata a document written at the conclusion of an extraordinary synod on religious life in 1995 (check)

The consecrated life is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it "manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling”, the calling, that is of every Christian. (VC 20)

And what I have been suggesting is that one way of fleshing out what we mean by talking of this universal Christian calling is by way of the so-called evangelical counsels. The Christian is one who is called to practice poverty, chastity and obedience: the vocation of the Christian who embraces Religious Life is to remind their brothers and sisters of this by being, as it were, a living icon of these qualities. And I suggested earlier that the reason why these qualities should characterise every Christian life is that they characterised first of all the life of Jesus, who is not merely the example we follow as Christians but rather the one in whom we find our deepest identity as members of his body. However, all of this is clearly very far from being uncontroversial outside these four walls. None of the evangelical counsels enjoy the best of reputations in our culture. It’s unlikely, after all, that any candidate of any party in the current General Election is going to attempt to win votes by campaigning for more poverty, on the contrary it is the frequently stated goal of politicians of left and right alike to “lift people out “ of poverty. Obedience has had an appalling press at least since the 18th century Enlightenment with its talk of the need for mankind to find freedom from the slavery imposed by a doctrinaire church telling us what to believe, and perhaps especially since the end of the Second World War: phrases used by Nazi war criminals at their trials about “only obeying orders” as they stoked the chimneys of concentration camps have entered the cultural consciousness and can’t easily be unsaid . Chastity, meanwhile, is commonly understood and ridiculed as narrow minded, killjoy prudishness about sex in short, all three might be regarded as the very opposite of life in abundance that Jesus claimed he came to bring. What can such things possibly have to do with the glorious liberty of the children of God?

Of course, the answer is nothing, which should be obvious. If poverty, chastity and obedience are indeed Christlike qualities, whatever they are they cannot be qualities which reduce people to degradation, mindlessness and joylessness. It’s worth stressing this just a little for the very reason from which we began thinking about how the religious vocation relates to others in the Church: people are often unsure what to make of religious, and even among very good Catholics there can sometimes persist the assumption, which is certainly extremely common outside of the Church, that the last thing the religious life might be expected to bring is joyful fulfilment. This assumption can sometimes take ludicrous forms: when I lived in London, I was once in a bookshop, in the habit, looking for something to read on holiday. A woman approached me and said with perfect seriousness and evident surprise “good heavens, I didn’t know they allowed you to read novels”. It is perfectly true, and I’m sure that this will be more than touched on in the other talks, that living poverty, chastity and obedience involves sacrifice, but if, as we’ve been saying, all Christians are called to be in some sense, poor, chaste and obedient, this is not only true of religious. And, in any case, truly Christian sacrifice is not incompatible with joy, because it is a free offering to the beloved, rather than a payment made grudgingly to a tyrant.

But I’ve been saying repeatedly that poverty, chastity and obedience are Christlike, and deliberately NOT saying in what way I think this is the case. So, to conclude this part of the talk, here is another quotation from Vita Consecrata which gives some clues to how and why this might be so. In fact, St John Paul suggests, exploring the meaning of the counsels leads to a contemplation not only of the human life of Christ, but of the mysterious and fruitful life of the Blessed Trinity itself.

Chastity, as a manifestation of dedication to God with an undivided heart (cf. 1 Cor 7:32-34), is a reflection of the infinite love which links the three Divine Persons in the mysterious depths of the life of the Trinity, the love to which the Incarnate Word bears witness even to the point of giving his life, the love "poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit" (Rom 5:5), which evokes a response of total love for God and the brethren. Poverty proclaims that God is man's only real treasure. When poverty is lived according to the example of Christ who, "though he was rich ... became poor" (2 Cor 8:9), it becomes an expression of that total gift of self which the three Divine Persons make to one another. This gift overflows into creation and is fully revealed in the Incarnation of the Word and in his redemptive death. Obedience, practised in imitation of Christ, whose food was to do the Father's will (cf. Jn 4:34), shows the liberating beauty of a dependence which is not servile but filial,marked by a deep sense of responsibility and animated by mutual trust, which is a reflection in history of the loving harmony between the three Divine Persons.

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