Notes and reflections #2

Here is the answer I can give at this point to the first question I posed in the last "Notes and reflections."

What is the spiritual nature of a call to a religious life?  

I believe a call to the religious life is not distinct from the Gospel call that is upon all Christians.  It is, rather, one way (or, more correctly, many various ways) that the Spirit gifts and moves within the Church to bring about the Reality of the Beloved Community.

All four canonical gospels place the story of John the baptizer at the beginning of the narrative about Jesus' ministry.  Picture this: John stands in the river Jordan, the symbolic border to the Land of Covenant Promise.  It is at the Jordan where Jacob wrestles with the Angel of the LORD and is named Israel.  Whenever the Jordan is crossed, by Jacob, by Joshua, by David, the issue of the Covenant and what it means to be God's people is front and center.  So here is John, an outsider to the established political and religious structures within the land, calling people "out" to the wilderness to reset their participation in the Covenant in a way that fully realizes God's dream for the Beloved Community. 

This is what is at play in the beginning of the Gospel story--the relational Reality of God with the Beloved Community enacted within the Community itself (see Luke 3: 10-14).

Like John's message, the Prologue to St. Benedict's Rule calls us to reset our participation in the Covenant.  Benedict paints a beautiful picture of the relational Reality of a soul fully at home in God's house, and of God fully at home in a soul.  In order to realize this relational Reality, Benedict states at the end of the Prologue that it is his intention to establish a school for God's service, which is enacted within community.

A call to a religious life, I believe, is a call to enroll in one such school in order to reset our participation in God's dream for the world.