Religious Life: 2 Years Later

I was reading one of the blog posts by one of our new postulants about the beginning of orientation in postulancy. I remember how much I disliked the postulancy orientation. As a matter of fact, I thought of leaving all through the orientation. There is so much that needs to be done and said in one's orientation into a religious community. I had never really lived in a community with obligations before. Sure, I lived at home with mom and there were certain expectations, but my freedom far exceeded my obligations. I was flabbergasted and frustrated when we were instructed on how to use a washing machine and a dryer... I knew how to do that!

There is so much that is awkward and uncomfortable about those first few weeks of living in a religious community (and once you're in the Order, the first few weeks of a new assignment are equally uncomfortable). You have to relearn things you thought you knew: yes, you know how to use a washing machine, but do you know how to use it the Capuchin way? I think that for a lot of people, living in a religious community is their first time really living in an intentional community, one in which you follow a deliberate set of rules and obligations that are not imposed from outside but rather arise from within as part of a desire to follow the Gospel. But part of the tension coming in is that no one really ever expects that the Gospel requires so much of you.

If anything, I think that has been the central theme of my religious life from the beginning. It all started with a prompting from God to live the Gospel and really that's what the core of the call is all about, I think, to live out the Gospel in a unique and deliberate way. Yet time and time again I've come up against brick walls in my own life as a Capuchin in which I thought I had done enough, I'd given up enough to live the Gospel, and nothing else needed to be changed. In those moments God always provided the grace to see the difficulty of a given situation, how my response or my attitude was not in line with what He expected of me and that a change must necessarily take place.

I have fought against that tendency toward complacency or stagnation in my Capuchin life and continue to fight against it. Even now there are parts of my life which remain outside of the healing touch of God and which remain sinful, broken, incomplete. Today, as two years ago, I take to heart the words of Pope Benedict XVI who prayed, "May the example of the Apostle St. Bartholomew, who we are commemorating today, help you look with trust to Christ, who is our light in difficulties, our support in trials, and our guide in every moment of life."


Pax.