Because the time I set aside for writing this article has unexpectedly been spent at the bedside of a dying sister, the original opening I had planned—eye-catching, articulate, and witty to a fault, as you can well imagine—rings a little hollow now. Put briefly, my thesis is that freedom, not love, is the foundational witness of consecrated religious life. I had assumed that when the time came to write down my thoughts in an ordered manner, I would do so on a laptop in the quiet and privacy of my cell. Instead, I found myself doing it on scrap paper beside a deathbed. Religious life, I have found, is a typically Catholic “both-and” of high ideals and unpoetic realities, and I have become used to reflecting on such weighty matters as the three evangelical counsels and conformity to Christ in and through the everyday cycle of floor-scrubbing, essay-writing and spreadsheet-adjusting. Thus it has been simply a welcome and fitting variation on a theme to reflect on freedom while unable to leave the bedside of a sister incapable of anything much at all.
For the most part, she is asleep. I must admit I am
asleep some of the time as well. What I dream—as I believe is fairly common for
religious—is lines from the Divine Office. In particular, I return to a line
from a hymn we sing at Lauds: Father of Christ, of Him whose work
was done. The religious life, as Saint John Paul II wrote in Vita Consecrata, is a life of “conforming one’s whole existence to Christ.” There are
many ways to understand this and to live it out, for His depths are great, but
what has struck me in the past few days is that the Christ to Whom we are
conformed is the Christ who had a work: a work which was carried out in obedience to the Father and, crucially,
in perfect freedom. “No one takes [my life] from me,” Jesus proclaims in John’s
Gospel, “but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I
have power to take it up again.”
Christ is both totally free and truly obedient as He
carries out His work. As Christians, we are called to share in that freedom; as
religious, we are called to share in it fully and profoundly, without limit or
compromise. It is this true freedom, which cannot be stymied by physical
frailty or suffering, which my sister has preached in her last days, and on
which I wish to offer some thoughts to you now.
Consecrated religious are witnesses. “To bear witness to
Christ by one’s life, works and words,” Saint John Paul II tells us, “is the
particular mission of the consecrated life in the Church and in the world.” In
the popular Catholic imagination, this witness to Christ is pre-eminently a
witness to Christ’s love. After all, it is by love that the Christian life is
known—“by this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus tells us,
“if you have love for one another”—and the religious life is intended to be nothing
other than the fullness of Christian life itself. It is not separate from or
opposed to the calling that each of us receives at baptism; it is instead, as
the Catechism tells us, “rooted in” that baptism and intended to be the deepest
and most radical expression of its grace.
In the Church’s teaching, the life of the baptized
Christian is indeed characterized by love. But it is also quite clearly
characterized by freedom. To be incorporated into Christ by baptism is to be
“brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God,” which is “true
freedom.” Just as God gives faith as “an entirely free gift,” so human beings,
made in His image and likeness make their response of faith in “a free act.”
“It is for freedom,” Saint Paul says, “that Christ has set us free”—and “if the
Son sets you free,” we read in John, “you will be free indeed.”
God acts freely and, by His grace, draws from us a free
response. The freedom which inheres in us by virtue of our human nature is not
destroyed by that grace, but brought to its perfection and completion by it.
This fundamental compatibility between human freedom and the divine nature, and
its preciousness in the eyes of God, we see fully and most clearly in the life
of the Word made flesh. To be a witness to Christ, living in the fullness of
baptismal grace, is therefore to live in Christian freedom in witness to the
freedom of Christ.
As a Dominican sister, I have spent the last five years
living by the Rule of Saint Augustine. The final paragraph of the Rule exhorts
us to follow not only “with love,” but also “as free women under grace.” My
dying sister has ably witnessed not only to the love, but also to the graced
freedom of which Augustine writes. When various physical disabilities removed
many of her external choices—the choice of when to get out of bed, of where to
move, of what to say—her interior freedom enabled her to respond to these
challenges with regular gestures of thanks, an attitude of patient acceptance,
and a keen perception of small joys, unfettered by the interior bonds of
despair, anger, or resentment. Thus, in various subtle ways, she demonstrates
that freedom is the seed-bed of authentic love: a freedom that could be
practiced even in the absence of external choice. When the two of us are side
by side in her cell—the frail elderly woman in bed, using each minute to accept
her Savior; the young able-bodied woman in the chair next to her, bound up in
distractions, tied up in worry—it is clear which one of us is living in greater
freedom.
In Orientale Lumen the religious is described as one who “learns detachment from externals,
from the tumult of the senses, from all that keeps man from that freedom which
allows him to be grasped by the Spirit.” All the external observances of our
religious life—cloister, silence, and so on—are intended to be a school of
interior detachment and recollection in which we come to know and to desire
what is truly good and to fix our eyes upon it. This interplay of the intellect
and the will and the resulting movement of the human person towards God is what
the Christian tradition terms freedom.
It is worth drawing a little more attention to the
fact—especially since it is now so profoundly misunderstood—that freedom in
this view does not depend on the conscious possession of external choice. In
fact the great paradox of freedom is that the more one lives in it, the less
one perceives life as a series of choices—box A or box B—from which one must
coldly and disinterestedly select. The piano virtuoso does not “choose” for a
right note against a bum note, nor does the archer ‘choose’ between the
bullseye and the outer ring, nor the dancer “choose” whether to pirouette or to
trip over her own ankles. Yet it would be absurd to see these people as
piteously trapped in narrow, restricted lives. They are free in their
particular sphere of excellence: they know and desire the good and they simply
move towards it, and the alternatives are no longer serious alternatives at
all. So it is with the religious, whose life seems narrow and restricted only
because it is free of the clutter of lesser goods, excessive attachments, and
false promises of happiness which cloud the human desire for God.
I am probably the fifth Catholic author you have read
today quoting Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, but I feel Father Jacques Philippe’s
observations on one particular (and perhaps underappreciated) aspect of her
spiritual writing are relevant here. In his book Interior Freedom, Father Philippe calls attention to “the unlimited dimensions of the
spiritual universe [Thérèse] inhabits: ‘infinite horizons,’ ‘immense desires,’
‘oceans of graces,’ ‘abysses of love,’ ‘torrents of mercy,’ and so on.” He goes
on to ask: “Why does Thérèse’s world—humanly speaking, such a narrow and poor
one—give the sense of being so ample and spacious?” The answer is that this is
quite simply what it is. The grandeur of Thérèse’s spatial analogies speaks
directly of the grandeur of an interior life characterized by freedom. The
little cell and cramped choir stall of the religious hide vaulted cathedrals of
liberty which rise above the external restrictions in which they operate.
The religious witness to Christian freedom comes from a
group of people who, by the lights of modern culture, cannot be anything but
hopelessly oppressed. We live in a time when being your best self and you doing
you (and all the other slogan-friendly worldviews I’ve missed out on in my
half-decade off the Internet) require a plethora of choice untethered from any
object but the actualization of one’s own entirely personal sense of self—and
so who honestly thinks he can learn anything from an impoverished, obedient
celibate? Who seriously wants to entertain the possibility that there might be
more freedom within a convent’s walls than outside of them?
One way to do it—and I have been at the receiving end of
this kind of thing myself—is simply to recast religious life as another means
of self-expression among the many. You want to be a nun? That’s great! Don’t
let anybody stop you! Your life is your life. These
comments, though almost always meant well, speak to a view of the religious
life which is just as pernicious as the idea that we are all brainwashed
victims of tyranny. The freedom of the consecrated religious cannot be
whitewashed and repackaged to the world as a quirky lifestyle choice. It is a
freedom which has as both its object and its impetus a reality outside
ourselves, one which we do not control and did not create—namely, God. It is a
freedom which reveals human life to be a journey ordered towards an objective
truth, in which we are called to be co-operators rather than instigators. When
religious grow in freedom, they “show that they are growing in the full truth
about themselves, remaining in touch with the source of their existence.” Such
freedom, when spoken forth to the modern world, should be intriguing and
unsettling in equal measure; but if it can be dismissed as just a nice thing to
choose to do with your life, then either the world is not paying attention or
we are not living it properly.
Do you feel, good Catholic reader of this publication,
that you can pass by this witness to freedom unscathed? You shouldn’t. By
preaching a freedom that is rooted in God, the religious is a witness also to
the rest of the Church. After all, the apparent paradox of the freedom of
religious—that we are free and yet also obedient—is, or at least should be,
simply the ordinary state of all baptized Christians. The “obedience of faith”
which Saint Paul speaks of in Romans, and to which all members of the Body of
Christ are called, is “to submit freely to the word that has been heard”
through the Scriptures and the teaching of the Church. Hence religious live by
the evangelical counsel of obedience not to remove ourselves from ordinary
Christian life, but to live it more fully.
The idea that Christian life is one
of freedom and obedience in equal measure might sound like disingenuous
theological acrobatics to some, but for me it is a straightforward description
of everyday life. Religious obedience is simply not true or real unless it is
sought and lived out in the state of human maturity and self-possession that
freedom brings. Otherwise it is nothing more than a morally neutral
submissiveness. The Rule calls us free “women” under grace—not little girls. Obedience is not a retreat into childish
dependency but a mature acknowledgement of the fundamental truth of our
creation: all that we are, even our free will, has God as its origin and
finality. Like the other two evangelical counsels, obedience proceeds from a
recognition of this truth—and the truth, as we know from John’s Gospel, “will
make you free.”
This is a lesson for the whole Church. Taking one’s own,
bespoke view of the Catholic faith, whether expressed as outright rejection of
Church teaching or as subtly arch I-know-better skepticism regarding valid
hierarchical decisions, can seem like an expression of freedom. In fact,
without obedience to the truth to which freedom orders us—the truth of who we
are as Christians, and the truth of how God has chosen to communicate with us
and mediate his grace to us—it is merely a flashy parody of freedom. To live in
the free obedience of faith is the call of every Christian—but if anyone us
needs example or encouragement, he should be able to find it in the witness to
free obedience given by consecrated religious.
Father of Christ, of Him whose work was done. My sister is still here; the work which the Father has given her—the
work of a lifetime of obedience, freely accepted and freely carried out—is, in
some mysterious way, still ongoing. That she has witnessed to love in her sixty
years of religious profession is undeniable; anybody who knew her could attest
to that. But living under the same roof and the same Rule with her, for however
short a time, has convinced me that her love grew from a foundation of
authentic freedom. Of all the ways which religious life witnesses to Christ,
the witness of freedom is certainly one of the most theologically
significant—but for today’s world and today’s Church, it is also one of the
most practically necessary.
Sister Carino Hodder is
a Dominican Sister of Saint Joseph based in the New Forest in England.