Tying Up This Tiger on An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life, or, The Issue Is Not The Veil

I was on a long car trip the day before yesterday and while I drove along through the snowy Appalachians I was listening to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on my iPod.   And of course I came to one of my favorite passages in that classic, the scene in Stave 3 where Bob Cratchit has just returned with Tiny Tim from Christmas morning church services:  

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.

“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

There is a lot of whining among the Katholic Krazies that what few nuns are left these days are overly involved in “social action” instead of teaching second grade or knitting scarves for tuberculosis patients.  Dickens’ remarks—indeed his entire career—is a reminder that there is nothing new about Christians seeing the intimate connection between the disadvantaged (we might actually choose to say “oppressed”) in our society and the Lord whom we claim—somewhat falsely I fear for some—to worship. 

There is no authentic Christianity that is not rooted in a passionate commitment to work for a just social order.  What I mean by a “just social order” is a society in which each of God’s children has access to the resources that God—who is Father of all—has intended for each of his children.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children go without food sufficient for the day when others of us can afford to waste so much excess.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can have multiple homes while others sleep on the streets.  It is certainly repugnant to Almighty God that some of his children can waste the opportunity for a good education that prepares them to make contributions to the common good of society while others have no escape from a life of drudgery—or even poverty—for no other reason that despite their intelligence, finances have closed the opportunities for learning.  There is much about the way our society is ordered that is fundamentally evil and we need the prophetic voice of Religious men and women to snap open our eyes and see beyond the blinders that the social order has fixed on us from the day we were first able to see.  Religious who shun the role of social prophecy make Religious Life redundant.  But the problem is that Religious today either tend uncritically to buy into the social order, living the lie that charity is sufficient and pursuit of justice is for those in the “secular world” of politics and economics, or they—as Sister Joan Chittester put it so well in her book The Fire in The Ashes endorse “postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now.”  To go back to where this series began and Sister Sara Marks: good heavens, gal, would you put down the latte and stop talking about the cute Calvin Klein dress you found at Good Will and get serious about something.  Nobody says you can’t go to the beach or even stop in at Starbucks—but are you so shallow that that is how you want to describe yourself?  Don’t be trendy—that is the last thing that gives credibility to Religious Life.  Be a pot-stirer.  Point out the turd in the punch bowl.  I don’t care if you wear a veil or not but I do want you to be authentic.

I spend a lot of time with a Religious priest I know who lives in a sufficiently comfortable parish his Order staffs.  Nice guys.  But they should call themselves the Order of Martha Stewart.  Do you really need to drink your single barrel Bourbon out of a Waterford tumbler?  Or if you do, do you have to point it out?    How many sets of dishes do you really need?  Yeah, yeah, yeah—your parishioners live this sort of a lifestyle.  I know the song.  But no, they don’t.  They normally eat in the kitchen, not the dining room.  A lot of nights they grab a bowl of soup or a couple of slices of pizza—shellfish or prime meats are not the everyday event.  I am not saying that you shouldn’t eat healthy, or even well: just be as invested in visiting the sick as you are in doing the shopping. 

On the other hand, for those who criticize the Religious for being too secular: get your own house in order first.  We all have the same call to holiness though we may live it out with some legitimate differences of style.  But God is no more impressed by superficiality in the laity than he is among the Religious. The Martha Stewart/latte bar/trendy life-style is just as vacuous for the lay disciple as it is for the Religious.  No matter who we are in the Church or in Society, in the eyes of God we are each only stewards of the gifts given us to build his kingdom here on earth during our lifetime. 

And as for those newbie Religious Orders who think that it is “evangelical poverty” or “discipleship” to keep their members from having the tools and resources with which to do God’s work—whether it be cars or computers or a good education—stop lying to yourselves and be honest that you are simply playing a manipulative game of control over the lives of your members.  Not everyone needs a car or a doctorate or his own room to achieve the work that God has set out for him or her to do—but there are those who do need things that sometimes cost money if they are to achieve their divinely-called potential.  The virtue lies not in not having but in not having more than we need to do the work that God has called us to. 

And if Religious are the first and foremost the People of Prayer whom they have been called to be by their vocation to the Religious Life they will come to a love for the poor, for the sick, for the disadvantaged in whose face they see the face of Him who became poor for our sake.  And they will not be satisfied with the false piety of a phony charity that thinks it is sufficient to alleviate today’s pangs of poverty by throwing some crumb or other to “comfort” the poor or the sick.  True charity realizes that while we must minister to the immediate need before us, we must also work to eradicate the evils that cause the poverty and suffering.  I can only think of Dom Helder Camara, the saint-Archbishop of Recife in Brazil, who challenged his critics with the words: “When I feed the poor you call me a Saint; when I ask you why they are poor, you call me a Communist.”   No,  Religious belong in the forefront of Social Justice, armed with the Gospel of Christ and with the Word God spoke through the Prophets.  If they don’t do that we really don’t need them in the Church today.  

More On The Renewal of Religious Life or It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in a few days but the combination of an impending Christmas and a wicked winter head cold has conspired to keep me from doing only the bare necessities and then heading for life under the covers.  I do want to tie up this matter of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and then move onto topics old (Church of England) and new (Pope Francis’ remarks to the Curia and his role in the shift of American policy towards Cuba.) 

Perhaps spending so much time on the renewal of Religious Life strikes readers as an undue amount of time and energy spent on a topic of concern to a small—and increasingly elderly—audience.  But I think that the renewal of Religious Life is crucial for the Renewal of our entire Catholic Church for several reasons. 

1.    Religious Life represents a facet of the Church that is both institutional and charismatic and could well model ways in which the institutional aspects of the Church could be renewed and reformed in radically fresh and innovative ways.

2.    Religious, while having ties to the clerical institution and even having ordained among the members of their communities, are essentially part of a lay movement in the Church and can pioneer paths of spiritual revival for all of us in the Church

3.    The great spiritual traditions of the Catholic Church—Ignatian, Carmelite, Benedictine, Franciscan, Salesian, are in the custody of the Religious and Religious provide the resources for a process of spiritual maturation.  How much is the new energy and vision which Pope Francis brings to the Church rooted in his Jesuit spirituality?

4.    Religious communities have the luxury of being spiritual laboratories where new models of community, prayer, apostolate and evangelical lifestyle can be explored and developed.

  According to the schema we have been working on in looking at what an evangelical renewal of Religious Life looks like, the penultimate key to an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is a friendship with Christ rooted in a life of deep personal prayer.  To a certain extent I have covered this in the two previous postings—the one on an immersion in the scriptures and the other as a life that draws on the riches of our Catholic Sacramental and Liturgical heritage.  But perhaps there is a need to explicitly unpack the idea of personal prayer beyond what was said under those two topics, though I stand firm in my claim that all Christian spirituality is essentially a Scriptural spirituality as one cannot be sure of the authenticity of one’s encounter with God except as we encounter God in his Word. 

I want to go back to my quote from Sister Joan Chittester: “The only reason to come to Religious Life is to find God.”  I agree with her that the search for God is the very Raison d'être for religious life.  Indeed, as I believe that the Religious Life is actually the model or what I earlier referred to as the pace-setter for all Christian life, I believe that as we mature in the faith, the search for God becomes the primary characteristic of human life. 

Now when I talk about prayer, at this state I am referring to contemplative prayer.  Devotional prayers and pieties have their place and even as we mature in the spiritual life they continue to have a place.  But as we mature in the spiritual life we also learn that there is a world of unsurpassable intimacy with God that opens up to us as we learn to let the devotions slide into the background of our prayer and let God take us by the hand and lead us to ever deeper and more secret places in our own soul where God communicates God’s Self to us in a solitary silence. 

Such prayer, if authentic, is not an exercise in spiritual self-pleasuring.  To the contrary, like all maturing, the spiritual journey  requires that we strip ourselves of so much of our religious childishness and come to the maturity that God’s Spirit awakens in us—a transformative maturity in which we wordlessly learn that we are here for purposes great than our own personal agenda.  Like Christ himself we undergo that kenosis, that self-emptying that allows us to be refashioned in Christ, so that Christ may live in us, so that we may participate in his divinity even as he has shared in our human nature. 

This transformation is a life long process.  It can’t be rushed.  For most of us it is years before we come to even see the journey ahead much less to make significant progress on the road.  But it takes long and solitary time with God in Christ and we must make that time a priority.

I am not sure that I see this spirituality in many of the new communities that are emerging in the Church in an attempt to re-invent religious life.  I see devotional prayer.  I see a certain amount of liturgical prayer, or at times a liturgical formulaicism.  (By formulaicism I mean a focusing on precise formulas and rituals that often reduces the actual prayer to somewhat of a minimal amount).  On the other hand, I continue to be saddened by how any focus on genuine contemplative prayer seems to have been bypassed in some of the long-established communities.  I have heard too many Sisters from the various Apostolic Communities told that they should go off to the Carmelites or the Trappistines if they “want to pray.”  

I believe that it is the baptismal call of all Christians to grow in contemplative prayer.  Karl Rahner’s famous dictum that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be anything at all is spot on.  Among the ravages of a post-Christian culture, it will only be being rooted in an intense personal friendship with Christ that can give a compass to our existence.  As in so many ways, I believe that Religious need to pioneer the way.  

Still More Reflections on an Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life

The monks at Weston
"back in the day"

The next element to look as we look for opportunities and challenges for an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is drawn from Weigel’s idea that friendship with the Risen Lord—the basis of all Christian Life but the sole reason for one giving oneself in the consecrated life—is nourished by a rich sacramental life. 
We have already examined the idea that friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the Scriptures which is the only foundation for a sound Christian spirituality, now let’s look at how a lively sacramental life can bring us into a deeper friendship with Christ.  I think the biggest challenge here is that the Western Church has long emasculated its Sacramental heritage leaving us not with the splendid banquet of rich foods and choice wines promised by Isaiah but with crumbs and dregs that has left most of us spiritually emaciated.  While I will be the first to admit that a lot of babies went out with the Vatican II bathwater, the real problem is not that we lost much in the conciliar Reform of the Liturgy but that not enough of our rich heritage has been restored to us as was promised in Sacrocanctum Concilium
I remember—case in point—teaching a class about fifteen years ago in which I had a number of students from a local Anglican seminary which was involved in renovating their collegiate church.  During a break in the class they began to discuss whether or not the baptismal font should be constructed for pouring or for full immersion.  I told them that I was a bit nonplussed that  this would be even be an issue.  Once one has seen baptism by immersion one can understand what the Sacrament of Baptism is all about and one would never advocate “pouring” as the means of baptizing.  At the time I was attending an African-American parish where all baptisms were done by full immersion—they had a permanent baptismal pool built into the sanctuary—and I had become used to seeing the Easter Baptisms where the whole idea of going into death with Christ so that we might be raised with Christ was not simply a formula but a profound sensory experience in which the rite was actually able to symbolize effectively its meaning. 
I also recall often attending the Liturgy at Weston Priory and seeing the one bread fractured into the many pieces by which we would actually be nourished (it was real bread, not a unsubstantive disk of bleached flour and water) and reminded us that though we are many we become One in Christ by sharing the one loaf and the one cup.  Similarly I once attended the Easter Vigil of a neo-catechumenal community and while I was somewhat taken aback by a strong Gnosticism in some of the texts and in in the homilies, the visuals of the beautiful golden loaves of bread and silver basins of wine set aside for the Eucharist and the full immersion baptisms empowered the Liturgy to be not simply a formulaic exposition of our belief in Baptism and Eucharist but a portal into participation in the profound Paschal Mystery at the center of our faith.
I do not know why Roman Rite Catholics are such sacramental minimalists.  If our churches before Vatican II were ugly (and more often than not they were) too often they are sterile now. While we rarely heard music—good or bad—before the Council, now we too often are subjected to the most banal of Church music.  (If I hear “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Be Not Afraid” at one more funeral, I will offer to switch destinies with the corpse.)  And I am sorry, but the latest translation/revision of the Roman Missal is a “dog’s dinner” of unintelligible English, convoluted syntax, occult vocabulary, and ambiguous theology.  If we are to be nourished by the Liturgy we need liturgical forms that are actually prayerful. 
And if the Mass is bad, the breviary is even worse.  While it can serve well as a book for private prayer—as long as one doesn’t feel a need to complete any liturgical hour but wants to use it as a springboard for meditation or lectio divina—it is piss-poor for communal prayer.  We have to slog our way through the psalms and canticles only to get to scripture lessons that are way too truncated.  And while I like antiphons in general, the need to keep going back and forth from one ribboned part of the book to another is just far too distracting.  Why can’t our prayer be more simple?  Read the mystics—read people like Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or Brother Lawrence—prayer just isn’t that complicated.  Don’t make it complicated.  Whether it is liturgical prayer or private prayer let’s just keep it simple so that we can give our attention to the prayer and not be preoccupied by the how we are praying.  Don’t get me wrong—I like the psalms.  I like canticles.  I like antiphons.  I just want something that lets me pray without overwhelming me in a bizarre combination of verbiage and ribbons. 
All that being said, I love the Liturgy.  I love how it guides us through the days and through the seasons.  How mornings are mornings and nights are nights and one tastes the hopes of the Advent and the introspection of Lent and the long lazy aimless passage of Ordinary Time.  And I want to see us as Church—not only the Religious but all of us—swim in the moving currents of Liturgical prayer.  We need to find ways to bring what we already have—the Eucharist and the Sacraments—to far greater vitality in our parish communities and also to revive the Prayers of the Hours so that we can all be nourished with that splendid banquet of fine meats and choice wines.  And it is not unfair of us to expect that the Religious—who supposedly have kept and preserved at least the bones of this one fine Tradition—to guide us on reviving a full rich Sacramental life.
Perhaps we need to remember that Christ is the fundamental Sacrament—the Visible Presence of the Invisible God.  And the Church which makes Christ visible present in his Body is the spring from which the seven sacraments originates.  Above all we need to recover  a strong sense of community.  Religious need to take this with a particular seriousness.  Again, it is the vocation of the Religious to set the pace for the rest of us.  Both in common prayer and common life, not only the rest of the Church but the rest of the world has the need of the witness that Religious can give.  Community means something different to a Benedictine than to a Jesuit—and I can appreciate that—and we don’t need Jesuits to live like Benedictines or Franciscans like Redemptorists.  Religious can give us not only the witness of community but the witness that there are different models for common life.   But in our culture of rampant individualism, the chief Sacrament of which we have need is the visible sign that in Christ people of different ideas and different backgrounds and different personalities can still be knit together by the Holy Spirit into One. 

Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life --It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun V

So the report came out on American Religious women from the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of the Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and gave the Sisters a clean bill of health.  This investigation and report needs be differentiated from the ongoing investigation and concerns of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which is not nearly so positive.  The “difference of opinion” between the two Congregations says more about Roman politics and infighting over curial reform than it says about the Sisters, but that is somewhat beside my point in this posting.   The harassment of the Sisters has been political from its inception and now very much reflects the stress between the pro-Francis faction in the Curia and the anti-Francis faction.  This will make it all the more interesting to see if Archbishop Lori of Baltimore gets a red hat in the upcoming February consistory as Lori, along with his mentor Cardinal Law and with Cardinal Burke, has been one of the primary movers in the persecution of the Sisters.  I am not saying not to expect Lori to be made a Cardinal—Pope Francis can be very unpredictable when it comes to balancing out his supporters with opposition members—but just that it will be interesting to see what happens and how it plays out.  But let me get back to the subject of an evangelical renewal of the Religious Life.

In earlier posts I drew eight principles for the renewal of Religious Life from George Weigel’s description of what he means by Evangelical Catholicism in his book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform for the 21^st Century.  I am not advocating Weigel’s program for reform, either for Religious Life or for the Church in general as I think it is in fact anything but evangelical.  I do think, however, that his basic description of Evangelical Catholicism is superb and it is from that description that I picked the eight principles.  We have looked at the first three in previous posts and more recently have been looking at the fourth which is that the integrity of Religious Life—and thus the success of its evangelical renewal—comes from the Religious having a friendship with Christ.  Of course, for any of us to live out our baptismal vocation with any degree of integrity means to live in friendship with Christ.  In the previous post I differentiated piety and spirituality with the claim that piety alone is not sufficient to sustain a truly intimate friendship with Christ and that the Religious—or any Christian—who wants such friendship needs to mature beyond piety into a genuine spirituality.  Now the question arises: what do I mean by “spirituality” and this segues into the next principle which is “This friendship with the Risen Lord is nourished by an immersion in the scriptures.”

There is no authentic spirituality in the Catholic Tradition that does not find its principal foundation in a prayerful approach to Sacred Scripture.  Dom Jean LeClercq, the great historian of Christian mysticism wrote that in the literature of the Desert Monks the most important source for learning the virtues was the Scriptures and that the goal of the monastic in his or her search for God was to come to know the scriptures by heart.  Now some Religious will argue that they are not monks and that such a principle of spirituality does not apply to them, but as I wrote in an earlier blog that if Religious of any Order or Congregation hope to have any purpose at all it must be that the principal drive of their vocation is the hunger to find God.  And indeed, as I agree with Karl Rahner, that the Christian of the future will either be a mystic or be nothing at all, let me express my opinion that each and every Christian—if they want to persevere in their baptismal vocation—must set themselves on this path to find God.  And there is one language and only one language in which this search can be pursued and that is in the Scriptures.  The Scripture is the Word of God, it is the means by which God communicates God’s Self to us.  A prayer life that is not closely tethered to the reality of the Sacred Scriptures is all too likely to drift off into the lalaland of religious fantasy.  Every acknowledged mystic in the history of Catholicism from Saint Paul to Origen to John Cassian to pseudo Dionysius to Gregory the Great to Gertrude of Helfta to Teresa of Avila to Ignatius Loyola to John of the Cross to Thérèse of Lisieux and all those in between peppered their writings or sayings with words from Scripture.  They knew the scriptures inside out because the scriptures provided them the vocabulary of their prayer.  

But beware the Word of God is a two-edged sword and an encounter with the Word will challenge and change one.  It is like a mirror in which we both see ourselves for whom we truly are and for whom we can be if we take that Word seriously and let it refashion us in its own image. 

In the years since Vatican II Catholics have been exposed to the Word of God much more than we had ever been before.  There was a day in which many Catholics were discouraged from reading the Scriptures for fear that they would fall into “Protestant heresy.”  (Talk about not trusting in the Holy Spirit.)  But since the Council we have been accustomed to hearing Scripture read to us at Mass.  Many Catholics belong to Bible Studies or Bible Sharing Groups.  Even more read the scriptures on their own daily or at least several times through the week.  And while we, as a Church, still have a long way to go until exposure to the Word of God reaches each and every Catholic “where we live,” the effects have been incredible.  Reading the Scriptures we see that “Social Justice” is not only the legacy of the prophets, but part of the very warp and woof of Christ’s own Gospel.  Reading the Scriptures we see a vision of Church which is—as Pope Francis speaks of—A Church for the Poor.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the humility of a contrite heart is an even greater gift than one’s own moral righteousness.  Reading the Scriptures we see that the self-appointed judges of others are liable to judgment themselves.  In other words, reading the scriptures we see that God has taken all the fun out of being churchy people and instead challenge us to a personal conversion where we have to leave all we cherish behind if we are to be disciples.

I think this is a huge challenge for Religious today—indeed a huge challenge for any and all who want to lead a full Christian life.  Joan Chittester writes a scathing critique of her fellow Religious that all Religious should take and examine with self-searching honesty.

We started renewal and then left it in mid-flight.  We know that renewal has “slowed down”  we do not realize that we abandoned it.  …we live within all the rules …docile and dutiful, and risk very little to get it, not our reputations, not our clerical connections, not even the peace at our dinner tables.  We want the ministries of the congregation to continue, we tell ourselves, but too often we concentrate more on funding our retirement programs than on subsidizing the ministries that are needed and trusting our retirement programs to take care of themselves if we take care of others, as our foundresses did before us.  We vote in chapter after chapter endorsing postures, positions, and actions that are wildly prophetic and prophetically wild, and then we retire to our separate little worlds and wait for someone else to do them on the grounds that we ourselves are too old, too unprepared, too tired, too involved elsewhere in more important things to shift direction now. Or worse, we support nothing at all that would in any way damage the reputation or the security of the group because “What good will it do to irritate people?,” or so that we can challenge without confronting.  We want the future without having to pay the price to get it.  We regard the local prophets with great suspicion and sink deeper and deeper into ourselves every day. We become old religious sissies, far from the quality of the visionaries who withstood social, political and theological resistance of their time so that we would do the same in ours.

If Religious return to a monastic spirituality in which they forge a friendship with Christ rooted in an ardent attachment to his Word, they can fight this tendency to be “old religious sissies” and their communities can be lively and  life-giving. 

 But if they stay rooted  in the spiritual apathy of some communities or the quasi-spiritual silliness of others or the unhealthy pieties of a revived past that some of the newer communities have embraced, they are ultimately doomed for death.  

Beyond Piety: More Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life

Today is the Feast of Saint John of the Cross.  Well, actually yesterday was his feast day but for Discalced Carmelites the Solemnity was transferred until today so as not to interfere with an Advent Sunday.  I say this because I spent a good chunk of the day with a community of Discalced Carmelite Nuns and it lets me pick up on the theme of the need for an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and in particular on where I left off: namely my observation that the pieties of the past are not enough to sustain Religious in a genuinely evangelical life and what is needed is a substantive spirituality.  I mentioned in the my previous posting that many Religious today are either spiritually and psychologically burned out for the lack of a proper formation in the past or, at the other end of the spectrum, are being formed in and for spiritually and psychologically unhealthy systems.  Both the dying communities of the pre-Conciliar Church and the unhealthy communities of what might be called the Conciliar Reaction have this in common: they feed their members spiritual pabulum that is sufficient for beginners in the spiritual life but they have not given them (the old groups) or do not give them (the new groups) the tools of an authentic spiritual life suited for self-realizing (that is to say self-realizing under grace) Christian discipleship. 

Some years ago I had in class a woman who had been a cloistered Dominican Nun for over twenty-five years.  In our conversation she told me that for those twenty-five years her spiritual life consisted in daily Mass, the Divine Office in choir, her participation in the monastery work of a perpetual rosary before the Blessed Sacrament (where she spent approximately 2 hours a day and said about ten rosaries.)  She was told that there was no need for mental prayer beyond that that could be accommodated by her obligatory rosaries and that there was no time for Lectio Divina.   In other words, her entire prayer life was active prayer, either liturgical or devotional.  She had matured more in the spiritual life, she told me, under a Cistercian Spiritual Director in the three years since leaving the monastery than she had in her 25 years inside the cloister.  And “if this is what happens to the green wood, what will happen to the dry?”

For many communities founded in the 19^th century a typical prayer life was Mass, the rosary, and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary along with assorted litanies and devotional prayers.  Sisters and Brothers and even priests were told that meditation or mental prayer was unnecessary and even that it was dangerous.  Many of the newer communities are little better.  The Little Office has been replaced by parts of the Divine Office but there is still either no training in mental prayer or inadequate time given to it.  People are encouraged in some communities to fill their meditation time with devotional prayers. 

Piety is a good thing but it is not spirituality. “Piety” comes from the Latin word pietas which means the duties that one has towards ones parents, mentors, elders, and God.  In the context of religion, piety is what we do, led by grace, for God. It is our taking responsibility (always by grace) for our relationship with God.  We initiate and sustain the relationship. Spirituality, on the other hand, is the relationship that God, in his grace, works in us.   God takes the initiative and sustains (with our response) the relationship.  In piety, we are the principal active agent; in spirituality God is the initiator.  It is the difference between active and receptive prayer.  For the heart that is bent on searching for God, whether a Religious or a priest or a lay person, piety, in and of itself, is a dead-end path.  Piety can lead one to genuine spirituality and indeed most great spiritual journeys begin in piety.  But they must mature and the soul must yield the reins of the spiritual life to God. 

Today watching the Carmelite nuns prayerfully sitting in their choir or going about their roles in the liturgy, or greeting their guests, or sharing their celebratory dinner with nuns from several other communities, I was struck by the grace—on both the natural and supernatural meanings of that word—with which they live.  There was nothing artificial about how they did things, nothing “nunny.”  A low note of celebration pervaded the prayer and a constant tone of prayer pervaded the celebration.  One could see a certain depth of meaning, an integration of all the diverse facets of life, that is too often missing in both the spiritual fuss-budgeting of some of the newer communities and the tired cynicism of the established groups.