This was the question I was pondering for quite some time now over the years. Consider this: Never in the history of mankind that people have the freedom to choose the kind of life they want to live. Compared to throughout history until some 70 years ago, there is no virtual stumbling block any more for anyone to have a career of his or her choice. We cannot deny the fact that before, people have a limited career or passions to pursue. Options for women were very limited. For example, in the Middle Ages when an intelligent woman wants to have a career and not get married, the only option was to hone her skills by entering the convent. Today, women can be anything and everything all at the same time. In a world where there is an unprecedented emancipation, we see a declining trend in religious life. Every year, there are more priests and religious men and women who die than those who enter. In many parts like in Europe and North America, religious life is in decline. Which brings me back to the question “Does God still call people to live this way of life?”
For to become a religious these days is an absurdity. Taking from Camus, absurd means illogical or unreasonable. The world is absurd because there is value whether we do good or evil, or if one decides to become a lawyer or a businessman. The world is indifferent to our lives and is not personally involved in anything about each individual person. To Camus, an absurd world is utterly meaningless. Applying the principle, so why would someone who is perfectly full of potential give up everything to enter the seminary or the convent where in fact, one can perfectly serve God (should one insist there is one at all) in equal respect as a married or a single person? Vatican II has made it perfectly clear that all states of life are equal in holiness. One can reach heaven without being a priest or a nun. (And I may add, it may just as well be easier to enter heaven as a lay person given the number of scandals Catholic Church face right now).
According to Camus, there are two ways to confront absurdity. First, he suggested suicide or ending one’s life since it is meaningless anyway. We were not consulted by the universe should we want to be humans in the first place! But the alternative way to escape meaninglessness is by doing another absurdity: by insisting a value and a purpose to one’s life. That resistance to accept meaninglessness is itself the antidote. It reminds me a famous line from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I had three friends who were some of the most passionate, intelligent, and courageous women I ever got acquainted with professionally. One is a social worker, another a professor, and another a youth minister. I have been teasing them for many years that maybe they would like to consider becoming a Good Shepherd Sister since they have been actively involved as lay mission partners. They kept on giving me the same excuse I used before – they can still serve the Lord as lay people, without necessarily becoming a religious.
But lo. Few days ago, I learned that they all entered the postulancy. How absurd.
Does God still invite people to become religious? Asked about the relevance of religious life these days, Sr. Sandra Scheiders had this answer:
“The vocation to the single-hearted, lifelong, exclusive-of-all-alternatives quest for God above and beyond and through and for all that one human life has to offer will continue to arise and to reverberate in some hearts. And that some will be enough — not, perhaps, to run a countrywide school system or even a diocese or to socially transform the world or society, much less the church — but to witness in this world to the absolute intimate transcendence of a God who delights to be among humans and needs humans whose incandescent love of that God will manifest God in the world.”
I look at my three friends and I see hope. They remind me to keep going myself.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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