We are relational people. What defines us primarily is that we are in relationships: we live in families, in groups, in nations, in communities, in religious communities. Isolated we die; isolated we can’t exist as humans. Those who are mentally ill are primarily isolated people: either can’t relate to others or they are dead to relationships. Life takes a bit of time, and a lot of relationships.
We are called to love, love like God himself. We are the
“Fourth Person” of the Trinity. We are called to create families and communities
like God himself, based on love.
Is religious life only for mediocre people? Losers? Non-achievers?
We see a lot of immature, ungrown, self-centred people in religious communities.
Maturity? Dennis the Menace: “Mr Wilson is just a big kid with all of the fun taken
out of him.” We need to face the truth: Many immature, mediocre people in our communities.
People living together does not necessarily make
a religious community. We may stay together for various reasons, but staying together
itself does not make a community. It is also possible that we may stay and live
together in order to achieve a purpose, but that is not a community, leave alone
a religious community. The only reason for a religious community is God Himself.
Nothing else, no one else. God is the one who calls us together. It is He who puts
us together (as sisters) in a community.
Three Russian
monks lived on a faraway island. Nobody ever went there, but one day their bishop
decided to make a pastoral visit. When he arrived he discovered that the monks didn’t
even know the Lord’s Prayer. So he spent all his time and energy teaching them the
‘Our Father’ and then left, satisfied with his pastoral work. But when his ship
had left the island and was back in the open sea, he suddenly noticed the three
hermits walking on the water – in fact, they were running after the ship! When they
reached it they cried, “Dear Father, we have forgotten the prayer you taught us.”
The bishop, overwhelmed by what he was seeing and hearing, said, “But, dear brothers,
how then do you pray?” They answered, “Well, we just say, ‘Dear God, there are three
of us and there are three of you, have mercy on us!’” The bishop, awestruck by their
sanctity and simplicity, said, “Go back to your island and be at peace.”
The Process of Community-Building
Moreover, community is a process itself, not
an achievement. Even a religious community is not a finished, final product but
really a process. Today I’d like to highlight a few indicators with regard to the
community being a process, it is not an attainment.
Scott Peck, a popular and renowned
author, a psychiatrist himself, speaks of four stages in a community.
(1) Pseudo-community.
(2) Chaos.
(3) Emptiness.
(4) Community.
When a group of people come together, they don’t
form a community. They form a pseudo-community. This is the first and initial stage in the process of
community-making. When people say, “It is very nice, everything is so sweet in our
community,” then they are probably in this first stage. Here people use the “we”
language, instead of the “I” language. They use generalizations and blanket-statements.
Here people attempt to purchase community cheaply by pretence (very often unconscious).
They go with feelings and emotions. In fact, many of us do think that loving people
in a community means feeling good about one another. That “feeling” may be present,
but that is secondary. Oneness in a community life is not a feeling, it is not about
feeling good about each other. That is why when religious say that we feel very
good in our community, it is most probably a lie, or just that they are in the stage
of pseudo-community, the very first stage of “community-making.”
Now, what breaks pseudo-community, or eventually
makes a community is Chaos. Chaos, implying conflicts, is necessary and inevitable
in this process. It always centres around well-intentioned but misguided attempts
to heal and convert. This second phase
of chaos towards community is a make or break stage. Either communities are born,
or they are destroyed in and through chaos and conflicts. But conflicts as such
are necessary. If there are conflicts in a group then the people are better off
than the first stage. Better to have conflicts than not to have them; better to
have conflicts than to be stuck in the pseudo-community of niceties. Having conflicts
means we are closer to the truth, we are closer to community. Conflicts can take
various shapes and sizes and colours: arguments, anger, hatred, fights, quarrels,
or very simply as in most religious communities of India: passive aggression. Who
will think that conflicts are needed in the process of a community? Many of us ask
for transfers the moment we see unpleasant things brewing in our community. It is
at that time that we need to stick together, and take advantage of the conflicts
in order to become a community, in order to grow and mature in our religious life.
How many of us have the energy and courage to do this? Not many I’d like to think.
The way out of chaos (conflicts) is through chaos
(conflicts). Avoiding conflicts will be a way to go back to immaturity and to pseudo-community.
So the way out is not to avoid conflicts, but to face them, even cherish them. They
are opportunities for growth. Without a crisis, I don’t think great leaders or personalities
are born. Without problems there is no life; without conflicts there is no family
or community life. Life is not a bed of roses. And community life is certainly a
bed of thorns.
But then, how to resolve conflicts? There is
no way to resolve conflicts. This is the paradox of community-making or community-living.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. There seems to have
been a fly in the ointment from the beginning, but the key is recognising and dealing
with the fly rather than throwing out the whole ointment. The only way to face our
conflicts is to acknowledge our humanness, to acknowledge our imperfections, to
acknowledge and accept our limitations, boundaries and incapacities. When we do
this we have entered the third stage
of community building. It is called emptiness. It is about emptying ourselves. It
is kenosis.
According to Scott Peck, there is another way
to get out of Chaos stage: it is into organization—but organization is never community!
Instead of facing the problems, we can adopt an artifical way of solving the problems:
start organising things. Wanting to put order is, very often, not love. It is only
a cosmetic arrangement to avoid problems. We try to change events and programmes
in order to avoid changing ourselves. But, if we are interested in a deeper community
life, then we must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without
conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark
path towards transformation and maturity.
With regard to emptiness: our growth
is connected to the letting go of our fear and our attachment to self-image. We
grow by subtraction much more than by addition. We grow by emptying ourselves than
by filling ourselves. Growth is accomplished by the release of our current defence
postures—ego (self-image) and fear. Humility and honesty are really the same thing.
A humble person is simply a person who is brutally honest about the whole truth—about
oneself, first of all.
A while ago we mentioned about “imperfections,”
we return to it. The reality of a community living or common living is imperfection.
How do we deal with imperfection? How do we deal with mistakes and failures and
sins, negativity, unhappiness and grumbling? If there is such a thing as human perfection,
it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere,
especially our own.
Religious communities are not formed for the
purpose of gathering together perfect people but those who have the courage to grow
and mature, and even change and transform their lives. We should not be surprised
if I say that no one has a right to expect a perfect community, just as no one has
a right to expect perfection in any individual human being. To accept imperfections
not only in others but also in oneself is an essential part of living together.
Progress, not perfection: that is the mantra.
But are we prepared to see beyond imperfections?
Many of us also might inevitably think that all of us are on the way towards perfection,
but mind you, many of us are not even remotely concerned about perfection or holiness
or sanctity (though we might pretend otherwise). To accept this as reality is also
kenosis, emptiness. Emptiness is the most
crucial stage of community development; it is the bridge between chaos and community.
In this context, sharing our weaknesses and difficulties
is more nourishing to others than sharing our qualities and successes. That’s a
surprise, but that’s what common life is about. The more I am vulnerable, the more
I am united with others. Yet most often we were told in the church and in our formation
days to do away with our weaknesses and difficulties. But did we ever realise that
the energy spent for dealing with our weaknesses and imperfections, with our sufferings
and difficulties is the same energy that makes us human, that makes us grow and
mature day by day? A simple example. When television sets made it to our living
rooms, we thought and debated if they were good or evil. Some thought they were
designs of the evil one. Similarly, when mobile phones and internet and WhatsApp
and other social network media made it to our daily living, we were wondering how
to deal with the evil and the negative impact they had on our lives. But throwing
away our cell phones or banning the internet are not the solutions, as we might
know. The same energy to abuse an instrument or gadget is the same energy that we
need to respond to love and selflessness.
Did you ever imagine that what we call “vulnerability”
might just be the key to ongoing growth and transformation? Healthily vulnerable
people use every occasion to expand, change, and grow. Yet it is a risky position
to live undefended, in a kind of constant openness to the other—because it would
mean others could sometimes actually wound you. But only if we choose to take this
risk do we also allow the exact opposite possibility: the other might also gift
you, free you, and even love you. But it is a felt risk each and every time that
can lead you to love and to compassion.
So the question is: Are we able to have a compassionate
heart in dealing with sins and imperfections in community religious living? Don’t
we ourselves see in many of our own communities some slavish mentality, a lack of
freedom of expression, unhealthy hierarchy, groupism, or other evils? We are called
not to discard the community itself in order to deal with these and many more evils
among us. The only way is compassion. All the conflicts and contradictions of life
must find a resolution in us before we can resolve anything outside ourselves.
Community is born out of a struggle. A human
struggle worth living. A religious community too is born out of a struggle, where
we see pain and suffering as redemptive. The fourth and final phase in the process we are speaking of is the birth
of true community. A long and winding and narrow road indeed. That is how and that
is where you will meet God, you will encounter love. Compassion and loving one another
is fruit of hard work, not mere feelings. When love reigns, true community is born.
It is not a material or even a structural reality, but a spiritual reality. As Jean
Vanier affirms, “When people love each other, they are content with very little.
When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don’t need material wealth. The most
loving communities are often the poorest. If our own life is luxurious and wasteful,
we can’t approach poor people. If we love people, we want to identify with them,
and share with them.”
A community is made when the people in it acknowledge
or empty out the various preconceptions, prejudices, expectations and other ready-made
solutions that they have in them. A community is made when people stop trying to
heal the other, or fix the other, or convert the other, or solve the problems for
the other. That is why we said, all the conflicts must find a resolution in us before
we can resolve anything outside ourselves. A community comes to maturity when we
give up the need to control, when we let go of our “selves,” our egos, when we are
able to sacrifice our own ideas and principles. Our brokenness is that which makes
our community whole. Isn’t that a paradox?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes a puzzling statement
(I put into the feminine): “She who loves the community destroys community; she
who loves the sisters builds community.” We can also, for instance, put it in this
way: One who loves the country destroys the country, but the one who loves the people
within it builds the country. And you know, that is what is happening with our government
at the centre and at most of the states in our country. There is patriotism and
culturalism in the abstract, but destroying and killing innocent people continues.
Applying to our situation (a bit painful to hear this): She who loves the province
destroys the province; she who loves the structure of the community or of the province,
destroys it. The only way to build the community or the province or the family is
to love the members inside of it. Imagine a religious superior who is so concerned
about the community’s image that she has no time to think about the growth of the
individuals, their inner freedom. Such a superior is likely to destroy the community.
This may be seen in the arrangements of the community timetable or programme. From
pillar to post – from programme to programme, from event to event with not time
for interiorization or privacy or freedom for spontaneity. Remember, organization
is never community! Jean Vanier adds, “Some communities tend to suppress individual
consciences in the interest of a greater unity. They tend to stop people from thinking,
from having their own consciences.” Many of our communities and congregations seem
to have fallen in this trap. Thus, community is where people care for each other;
the focus is the individual persons in the community, not the community in the abstract,
not the province in the abstract. The community takes steps to care for the persons
in such a way that they grow and mature according to the plan of God.
In other words, community must never take precedence
over the individual person. Community is for people and for their growth. It should
aid the process of conversion or transformation in a person. Trust me, many of us
are just trying to play to the gallery. Many of us are just trying to keep up to
the pace and rhythm of the community or the province, and cope with the needs and
at times even the madness of the community, and not the other way round. We need
to slow down. We need to slow down enough to catch up with our inner selves, and
to catch up with the great mysteries that are revealed only to the simple and the
childlike—love, confidence, creativity, hope, acceptance of oneself and others with
all the weaknesses, integration of light and darkness, sin and grace, foolishness
and wisdom.
Now, this is not a call for individualism or
isolating ourselves into individual islands. This is not even an invitation to aspire
for individual holiness without the community, or for individual greatness or heroism.
No. Rather, this is an invitation to respond to God’s call within a community. Shouldn’t
we start thinking of a community of saints, not merely individual saints or heroines?
From pseudo-community
through chaos and emptiness to community. This is the journey (the process) of becoming a community.
Let us take the courage to make time and space in order to fully bloom into a community
wherever we are.
Trinitarian Dimension
One of the discoveries we make in prayer is that:
When we more and more surrender to God, the closer we come to all our brothers and
sisters in the human family. God is not a private God. The God who dwells in our
inner sanctuary is also the God who dwells in the inner sanctuary of each human
being. If we see God in our hearts, we will
see God in others. But if we see only demons within ourselves, we can see only demons
in others. Thus, intimacy with God and solidarity with all people are two aspects
that can never be separated.
The universe is like a web; touch it at any point,
and the whole web shivers.
This may sound theoretical, but very true: When
we pray we will increasingly experience ourselves as part of a human family infinitely
bound by God who created us to share in the divine light.
We often wonder what we can do for others, especially
those in great need. We can pray for them. It is not a sign of powerlessness when
we say: “We must pray for one another.” It is acknowledging human solidarity, God
is our Father/Parent, we are brothers and sisters. We are children of one God, not
partisans of different gods.
Prayer gives us the sense of abundance and connectedness.
The community is a reflection of the mystery
of the Trinity: there we find a response to the deep aspirations of the heart, and
we become for the others signs of love and unity. Mystery makes many of us to shut
our minds. But mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something
that you can endlessly understand!
The God we worship, the God whom we imitate is
a community: Trinity. Changing our perception of God has the potential to change
our lives, especially our community lives. In the beginning was the Relationship.
The God revealed by Jesus is one who relates endlessly, one who loves endlessly.
But most of us are afraid of God: we think God punishes us, we think God takes note
of our mistakes and has no time for us, we think God is isolated from us, we think
of God as a Monarch, unconcerned about His subjects, and who appears only on Judgment
Days. But this perception of God is not God. The God whom we imitate in our community
lives and in our religious lives is a Community: He is relational, a flow, a dance.
In our joy or our pain, true life is always relational, a flow, a dance.
So our God is not an angry God. He is found everywhere
and in everything. Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God
can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything and everywhere becomes
an occasion for good and an encounter with God. God’s plan is so perfect that even
sin, tragedy, and painful deaths are used to bring us to divine union, just as the
cross was meant to reveal. God wisely makes the problem itself part of the solution.
It is all a matter of learning how to see rightly, fully, and therefore truthfully.
“Jesus died outside the sacred walls, outside
the city gates—extra muros. Hanging from
the cross, Jesus made himself present where all the cursed lived, there where the
sinful world lived far from God. Precisely in this way, he offered reconciliation
and salvation to all. The cross of Jesus is planted in the midst of a sinful world.
Therefore, if we want to discover the Lord’s face, we have to look for it among
those who are furthest away. The Crucified One embraces every person, even the most
wicked and desperate. Through the torn veil of Jesus’ body, the boundaries between
the sacred enclosure and the world without God are destroyed. Jesus waits for us
in every human being, whatever be his or her situation, his or her past, his or
her state of life.” (Van Thuan, Testimony
of Hope.)
God is found in all things. In the most hopeless
of situations. He is found in the deep fathomings of our fallenness, of our wickedness,
of our sins too. He is found in the most tragic of situations. He is found in the
darkness and the brokenness that we encounter, especially our own. “First there
is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!” (Lady
Julian of Norwich)
We live in our communities to reflect precisely
this Christian God who is a Family, who is Merciful unconditionally.
It is easy to love people who are far away, it
is not always easy to love those close to us. (Mother Teresa)
The monks of old created communities not for
the purpose of togetherness or oneness, not even for getting the work done. They
formed communities in order to support each other in the rigours of the inward journey,
in the work of interiority and transformation. This is true and original purpose
of common living in religious communities. This inward journey, this journey of
spirituality and interiority is indeed rigorous, demanding, very hard. That is why
we need support. This journey is a “descending into the darkness.” It is a descent
into the hell, an entering into the belly of the whale. Unless one is open to pain,
suffering, grief and uncertainties, she will not be able to taste the fruits of
transformation.
For God darkness is not dark; for Jesus, sin was
not sin. In sin he saw grace, in darkness he saw light. I can’t do it, I need to
allow God to do it. Allowing God to see light, that is the way. (God is found everywhere,
even in the deep fathomings of my failures and sins.) There is no separation. Not
two, everything is one. Everything belongs.
The Other is
My Blessing
God calls
us to live in communities, and He entrusts us with sisters to love. My community
members are put there by God. My sister is the will of God for me. The Sisters whom
I have in my community are put there by God, this is our faith. They are needed
for my growth, for my transformation.
Christian
de Cherge. Movie: Of Gods and Men. The
role of a superior. Very often we don’t see God’s hand in them. Caiaphas the High
Priest.
Christian
de Cherge. At the Visitation Mary
carries Christ, but it is Elizabeth who gives the blessing. Similarly, as Christians
we carry the message of Christ within us, but it is the Other who gives us the blessing
of God. The youngster becomes a blessing for me; she is my Burning Bush, my Mount
Tabor. The poor person whom I serve is
my blessing.
I want connect this
to what Jean Vanier says. He remarks that Jesus did not say,
“Blessed are those who care for the poor,” but “Blessed are the poor.” It is nothing
wrong with the desire to help and care for the poor. “But unless I realize that
God’s blessing is coming to me from those I want to serve, my help will be short-lived,
and soon I will be burned out.” [Henri Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit (Mumbai: St Pauls, 2011) 81.] The Other is my blessing.
I need to become poor: one with them. Only then I can realize God’s blessing in
my life.
As Gandhi said, you have
to dig one deep well, not many shallow ones.
