“Because religious life comes out of a culture to challenge it, it also embodies that culture in the mindsets and personalities of its members, in the agendas and questions of its times. When religious life fails to respond to these shifts in emphasis and content, religious life fails its culture and the culture rejects it. Religious life must be a conscious and creative response to the culture in which it exists or it is at best a pious pretense of the spiritual life, a therapeutic exercise in personal satisfaction.
Through its very immersion in the culture out of which it springs, religious life demonstrates the needs of the society around it, reflects its struggles, becomes a sign of judgment on its questions, or a sign of decadence by its distance from them.”
…
“It is important to realize, then, that one thing religious life is not is a perfect state of life for perfect people. It is not a state of life where perfection is even supposed. It is a state of life where effort is assumed and failure is taken for granted, where the human quest rather than the deluded notion of human flawlessness is the content of life.
A monastic tale, for instance, reminds us of visitors from another age who were trying to determine for themselves the purpose of a monastery. “But what do you do in the monastery?,” they asked the old monastic. And the elder replied, “Oh, we fall and we get up; we fall and we get up; we fall and we get up again.”
Some lessons for ministry today, I think?
Through its very immersion in the culture out of which it springs, religious life demonstrates the needs of the society around it, reflects its struggles, becomes a sign of judgment on its questions, or a sign of decadence by its distance from them.”
…
. . . where effort is assumed and failure is taken for granted
“It is important to realize, then, that one thing religious life is not is a perfect state of life for perfect people. It is not a state of life where perfection is even supposed. It is a state of life where effort is assumed and failure is taken for granted, where the human quest rather than the deluded notion of human flawlessness is the content of life.
A monastic tale, for instance, reminds us of visitors from another age who were trying to determine for themselves the purpose of a monastery. “But what do you do in the monastery?,” they asked the old monastic. And the elder replied, “Oh, we fall and we get up; we fall and we get up; we fall and we get up again.”
Some lessons for ministry today, I think?
From Joan Chittister’s The Fire in These Ashes: A Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life.
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