Signs of readiness for religious community

SINCE THE 1980s I HAVE BEEN TRACKING the signs of readiness for life in a religious community—that is, I’ve studied the signs that vocation directors and formation advisors follow to see that those preparing for religious life are making progress. These signs of readiness reflect the emerging social, cultural, and ecclesial challenges of the times in which we live. It helps for vocation and formation directors to understand the ways that Millennials (25-34 years of age) and Mosaics (18-25 years of age) make sense of their world. These ways will be different, sometimes significantly so, from how other generations understand and experience their worlds. Those involved in ushering young people into consecrated life will want to use signs or markers of vocational progress that are enduring because they derive from the deepest anthropological aspects of the vocational journey, the consonance (or dissonance) between a person’s most salient vocational values and the person’s most troubling and contradictory emotional needs. 

There are three frameworks for looking at the traits our new members need : 1) social, cultural, and ecclesial; 2) generational and 3) anthropological. Let us consider each set briefly.

Communion as the context for religious life

In her presidential address at the 2017 assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sister Mary Pellegrino, C.S.J., indicated that religious communities are shaped by the narratives they use to understand and engage the world in which they live and work. She argues that religious congregations have stalled recently on a “narrative of diminishment,” seeing themselves largely within the constructs and constraints of loss, reduced capacities, and shrinking potentials that come from the reality of fewer new members and significant aging of current members. This sense of diminishment is the culture that has shaped our discourse and altered the perceptions we have of ourselves and that we allow others to have of us. 

Diminishment frames how we think of new members and the formation process and, perforce, the way we understand progress in vocational life. For example, can individuals “survive” in a world shrinking or even “collapsing” all around? Can they live proactively within an organizational system marked by death and dying, motherhouses shuttered, ministries closing and a congregational life having a difficult time “holding on” and holding back the forces of grief and loss? Can an individual find meaning within a community that has significant age differences and distinct orientations toward consecrated life?

Pellegrino argues that this narrative of diminishment has missed a deeper way of understanding what has been going on socially, culturally, and ecclesially. She says we are witnessing the emergence of a critically new and potentially evocative discourse, a “narrative of deepening communion.” She sees in our time a cry and a possibility for a deeper intimacy, a more solid mutuality, and a more critical empathy than the radical autonomy, isolation, and individualism that have marked our religious communities since the Enlightenment. 

In the midst of diminishment, she sees religious women and men developing new ways to break through the separating and secluding boundaries that have kept our communities from understanding and identifying “the others” in our world. It is as if the deaths, the ending of ministries, and other diminishments we have been experiencing have invited us into new coalitions of loving and serving, ministering, and praying. These experiences have allowed us to engage more globally and understand more critically and sympathetically the needs and concerns of those who have lived outside our previously established circles of concern. 

The new narrative of deepening communion calls us across charisms, customs, cultures, and individual concerns. Whereas previous narratives called us “within,” into our particular identities and distinct differences in order to appreciate what we have inherited from tradition, this new narrative, the new paradigm, moves us beyond and challenges us to go across what divides and individualizes us. Here is how Pellegrino describes the dynamic of “crossing over and into”:

We need to collaborate with each other to be reconciled to those with whom there have been rifts, eager to go beyond the polarization of our regions, harshness and anger. . . . we need to leave aside our certainties and learn to intuit with a heart in love and with an eye that sees clearly God’s plans as they unfold in novelty....  Above all, we need to ask ourselves what are God and humanity asking for today? 

What are the signs that a candidate might be right for religious life in a time when religious need to cross rifts, when we must overcome polarization, harshness, anger, and ideological certainties? 
How does one encourage vocational progress so as to embrace what the Magnificat and the Canticle of Zechariah proclaim—a church where the poor are raised up and the mighty are cast down? This vision of the faith must be met by a vocational stance that allows God’s new world order to break through, the world of radical hospitality, a world where all are accepted and included, a world without domination or deprivation, as equal sisters and brothers.

Qualities new members need in an era of deepening communion

How is vocational progress measured in a new narrative of deepening communion? What individual qualities should new members have and cultivate? The individuals we hope will enter our communities would need qualities such as these. 

• The individual is able and willing to cross over and into the work and worlds of others without defensiveness and without losing his or her own unique identity. The candidate doesn’t lose interior confidence in engagement with others. Instead the person’s well-being is strengthened, not threatened, when crossing over and into other cultures.

• The individual demonstrates empathy, sensitivity, and respect in the presence of other people’s personal meaning and distinct cultures. The candidate is humble, not superior.
• The individual works constructively with the anxiety that develops within while crossing boundaries in the service and care of others.

• The individual remains engaged and enlivened in the process of collaborating and cooperating with others in the pursuit of God’s justice in the world today.

• The individual has a history of neighborliness and a demonstrated desire to become an engaged global citizen in the kingdom of God, eager for unity and willing to learn how to move beyond and even to mediate “the polarization of our regions, harshness and hatred.”
Qualities new members need based on  generational differences

Turning now from the social, cultural, and ecclesial framework for looking at new members, let us consider how generational differences matter. The generational markers of vocational progress for Millennials and Mosaics are decidedly different from those that measured the vocational growth of people in the Boomer and Generation X eras. 

Millennials and Mosaics have experienced change across every sector of their lives (social, cultural, technological, psychological, spiritual and emotional) more rapidly, more intensely, and more globally than any previous generation. They expect change; they require change; they are impatient for change because change is in their psychological DNA. They are not as accommodating to custom and convention as previous generations. Their experiences have been shaped by the secularizing forces of our society, and young people are more seriously and substantively peer-oriented than any generation we have seen previously.
What are some qualities young, new members need, keeping in mind their generational differences? The following come to mind.

A CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRIT—Vocational readiness will be apparent in the construction of a true contemplative spirit that allows God the space now almost exclusively occupied by friends. Sensitive spiritual direction and formation advising will help individuals widen the circle of concern that God occupies in their consciousness. Questions emerge. Can individuals allow God longer and stronger moments of conversation? Do individuals over time reach for time alone with God more often and with more enthusiasm than they reach for their cell phones? Do they reference what they have learned in prayer (both individual and common prayer) more than what they have gleaned from social media about life, the world and themselves? Is God becoming the One Thing Necessary, more than their friends and peers? Can they love their peers but realize and cherish that they love Christ “more than these?”

Millennials and Mosaics who are attracted to religious life tend to be socially-oriented. They have grown up being introduced to “causes” and the benefits of becoming socially involved in changing the situation of injustice in our world. In many ways, this is a generation that is impatient and intolerant of injustices, especially racism, sexism and homophobia. They expect and even demand progress and are disappointed in communities that are still insensitive in these areas. For reasons far beyond the scope of this article, this generation of young people struggles mightily with the evils of economic classism and with evils that derive from a severely polarized  economy. One concern that looms large over the consciousness of Millennials and Mosaics is the power and force of the economy and its concerns. And this is true in ways that previous generations often cannot understand and largely do not acknowledge.

Millennials and Mosaics are shaped by the economic trauma of our times. They are the children of the Great Recession of 2007-2008 and everything that ran up to it and all that derives from it. Harvey Cox, in his latest book, The Market as God, argues that our world has become enthralled by a business theology of supply and demand that excludes, sidelines, diminishes, and excommunicates all other divinities, including the Christian God, from almost every sphere of modern influence. Increasingly Millennials and Mosaics have unwittingly become the Market’s acolytes and they have been taught that the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Because the Market knows the value of everything, determines the outcome of every transaction and can build nations and ruin households, this generation of young adults has become complicit in the commodification of their own deepest desires and has watched how everything and everyone in their lives has been given a price tag and a value that is limited and quantifiable. 

ABILITY TO PERCEIVE INTRINSIC VALUE BEYOND THE VALUE OF THE MARKETPLACE—Vocational readiness or progress requires helping these young adults in the sensitive work of “valuation.” What I mean here is that, unlike other generations, these adults must re-learn the value of life itself. Because their world has been quantified, commodified and defined exclusively on the economic scales of verifiable profit and loss, our communities need to help these young adults see the hidden and non-quantifiable value of things. The earth, for instance, that used to have infinite worth and exclusive rights as “God’s creation,” has been demoted since the Enlightenment to the devolving status of “nature,” “matter” and then “stuff,” which can be bought and sold, polluted, destroyed and eliminated at will and whim. Vocational progress, once again in the “narrative of a deepening communion” must be measured by a new love and a deeper commitment to God’s good creation. Vocational progress will evidence a growing refusal to be complicit with a strategy that seeks dominating profit and power over and against creation. 

IDENTIFICATION WITH THE POOR—Vocational progress in a previous age of an evolving and muscular economics in religious congregations could easily lead one to take comfort in the increasing number of ministries and convents, schools, houses and properties that the community owned or held. Religious life once had its own form of the “prosperity gospel.” Not so today! Vocational progress today must account for a new identification with the poor and marginalized, those left out and individuals and groups left behind in our new gilded age of greed. Vocational progress will be measured by a deeper identification with and service to those who are being swept away by the rising tides of economic isolation and discrimination.

FLEXIBLE, EFFICIENT, DEDICATED TO IMMEDIATE PASTORAL CARE—In the past, religious congregations built durable structures of ministry and service. We built formidable edifices of charity and justice: schools, hospitals, and social service agencies. These were buildings that were meant to last. They signaled staying power. They required vocational skills of endurance, patience, survival, stamina, and resilience over the long haul. Accordingly, formators overlooking these fortified ministry sites looked for candidates who could endure and sustain “muscular” ministries, services meant to establish a people in a locale with an education that would secure a career and a character for a lifetime. We are in a different time that requires different skills and distinct signs of vocational progress.

We are in a time where ministries must be flexible and services must be immediately responsive. If Pope Francis’ image of the church as a “field hospital” rather than a fortress is an apt descriptor of our ecclesial situation, then the progress of our candidates should look more like the maturity of an emergency room nurse than that of that financial officer in a paneled office, with all due respect to the creativity and imagination that the latter requires. 

If the times in which we live require a “field hospital” mentality, then the qualities candidates need perhaps must shift to become more dynamic and immediately responsive. The qualities needed in an ER nurse teach us what to expect of our candidates in the fast-paced, complex, and increasingly complicated moral world in which we live. Beth Hawkes describes the qualities and characteristics required of an emergency department nurse. She notes that they must be flexible (able to go rapidly from one patient situation to the next), tough (able to project calm in the midst of drama and tragedy), efficient time managers (managing multiple needs at once without wasted effort), and able to avoid bogging down in detail.

Hawkes’ adapted description of the emergency department nurse may indicate some new traits that women and men religious need in the field hospital of today’s church environment. Obviously, no hospital would survive with only professionals who race and are non-detail oriented, and who triage only at high speed and without tears. This is true of religious life as well. We cannot all be shifting gears constantly. Some of us have to create stability and the controlled and structured environments that make contemplation possible. At the same time, it would do us well to consider the specific traits and distinct characteristics required of prophetic ministry in the 21st century. Our more complicated and globalized world may demand of us flexibility more than staid endurance, agility more than simple perseverance “in the life,” and ability more to triage pastoral situations than to simply transmit the formulas of faith. Under these conditions, the measures of vocational progress would include: faithful flexibility, Gospel toughness, Kairos time management skill, and a dedication to immediate pastoral care.

Spiritual and psychological traits new members need

This final set of “measures of vocational progress” come from the intrinsic dynamics of the very vocation we have chosen, from the tension between our high transcendent call (our Gospel values and congregational charism) and our own developed or under-developed emotional traits (our attitudes and needs). A large body of psychological literature and vocational evidence is now available on how religious life actually progresses and how it is significantly impeded by the emotional traits we establish early in our development and in the tension and challenges of our family life. This literature reminds us that readiness or progress in our lives as religious is more than a process of surmounting the social, cultural, ecclesial and generational issues of an age. 

Religious life is primarily a deep encounter with the Lord. It is a conversation and, one might even say, a “confrontation” with the Lord, the One who meets us on every road to Emmaus with a challenge to return to Jerusalem and face the cross with all its love and humility.

The psychological literature on religious life indicates that its progress is not assured by high ideals alone. The motivation for entering, staying, and thriving in religious life is more complicated than holding and proclaiming the virtues of religion. That motivation is always complicated by emotional needs inside of us for such things as aggression, domination, autonomy, change, dependency, etc. Sometimes these emotional needs are recognized and worked with. At other times, they remain largely unknown, unrecognized, and unregulated. As such, they impede our progress and stifle our development. 

The late Luigi M. Rulla, S.J., was a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist who specialized in the field of religious vocational development. He enumerated several signs of vocational progress, based on years of studying the psychological and spiritual dynamics of those who entered, stayed, or left religious life. His signs of vocational readiness—or vocational progress for those already in formation or beyond—remain a powerful guide today. I have adapted his ideas for this article. They remain his powerful insights and the result of his profound psychological work to which I am indebted.

Ten signs that a person has the qualities needed for religious life are the following.

1. The individual has the capacity to face reality. A person who is confident and assured in a religious vocation doesn’t have to downplay difficulties, avoid problems, cut doubts, run away from issues, or escape into activity to deal with his or her world. A vocationally prepared individual doesn’t downplay the problems he or she sees in others and doesn’t need to exaggerate them either. The individual will confront issues, rather than escape from them.

2. The individual can integrate his or her needs with vocational values and attitudes. Someone making progress toward religious life (or within religious life) knows that he or she has emotional needs. This person has accepted emotional needs as a real part of his or her life and is working to become more mature in the approach to God and others. This person does not have to deny or minimize emotional needs. This individual does not have to make believe that she or he is perfect. The engine of this person’s life is Christian values, and this person works to make sure her or his emotional needs serve those values and not the other way around.

3. The individual can maintain tension when working on her or his spiritual life. The person recognizes that spiritual growth is hard work and that such growth is filled with paradox and develops in fits and starts. This individual uses the tension for his or her zeal and the achievement of vocational ideals. This person does not cut corners or look for quick relief for emotional needs.

4. The individual does not sacrifice principles for pragmatism. These individuals know what they stand for and are strong in conviction but flexible when it comes to the implementation and adaptation to real life circumstances. Those ill-prepared for religious life will be aggressive and angry in the defense of their principles. Mature people don’t have to be. They are secure enough to be firm but charitable, kind and convincing at the same time. They can be pragmatic and principled at the same time, sacrificing neither to expediency.

5. The individual does not need to be propped up or constantly reassured that he or she is doing well. The individual is not frustrated or dislodged when others are not providing a constant flow of affirmation. The person knows who he or she is and what he or she stands for. The individual resists from slacking off when those in authority are not around.

6. The individual knows the difference between essentials and accidentals in the faith. The person is secure in values and willing to put them to work in various settings. The person does not need to hammer home principles at every opportunity; nor does the person fall prey to every new spiritual fad that comes along.

7. The individual trusts others. Because the individual can trust him or herself, he or she has confidence in others. The person is free of inner turmoil between emotional needs and values and does not need to project that turbulence onto others or be defensive. The individual is not aggressive with others, openly or passively, because he or she has accepted that the primary competition of life is inside of ourselves. 

8. The person is dependable. With a realistic self-assurance, she or he makes decisions consistent with her or his values, respecting the freedom of others in the process. Immature people, on the other hand, are either grossly independent or dependent. They feel threatened by superiors or people of more formidable skills and so avoid cooperation or collaboration as a defense against a fragile autonomy. Undependable individuals require endless assurances and so attach themselves to any alternative and supposedly “superior” power source.

9. The individual bounces back after difficulty. It is not that the individual is perfect and never fails. No one, except God, is perfect in all things. The individual fails and stumbles from time to time but is also resilient. The person comes back and has an inner capacity for renewal, knowing that he or she controls his or her destiny.

10. The person has internal flexibility. The individual is not stuck in place, either emotionally or ministerially. She or he can be flexible and move from one situation to the next without falling apart. The person’s inner values provide strength and an ability to integrate emotional needs. These characteristics help the individual to not be blind sided by the maneuvers involved with new people or unfamiliar situations.

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What we need to live religious life well is determined by the times in which we live, the charisms we espouse, and the engagement of our personalities with the transcendent values we hold. We live in a complicated, globalized world that can challenge the stability, endurance, and perseverance that once characterized religious life. Our times require an agile, flexible, attentive and immediate pastoral care, especially with those who are being traumatized and excluded by unforgiving economic forces. 

The personal qualities of our faith and emotional lives also must be healthy to live consecrated life well. May God grant each of us already in religious life and those of us discerning religious life the grace we need to build a stronger narrative of deepening communion with all of God’s creation. 