#5 Awakening Consciousness
Paschal Paradox:
Reflections on a Life of Spiritual Evolution
By Diarmuid O’Murchu
From the Precis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
The First Part of Chapter 3
Engaging the Paschal Journey of Religious Life
As a seminarian in the early 1970s, I did research and read everything I could find on religious life, its meaning, and its history. Within a few months I was blessed with a significant breakthrough — seedlings of resurrection on my hill of Calvary! In a little-known religious journal, an Irish sister offered an overview of the history of religious life, based on the historical anal-ysis of a French Jesuit, Raymond Hostie.
According to this research, religious life evolved in cycles of approximately 300 years each, from meager beginnings, maturing into significant presence and achievements, and then moving down the other half of the curve, to eventual completion (not for all, but for many). And with the present cycle commencing around 1800 CE, now in the closing decades of the 20th century, things were already moving down in a progressive process of decline and diminution.
This way of understanding religious life made sense to me. It felt like a light in my soul, illuminating future possibilities full of hope and promise. Intuitively, I knew that I was not dealing with mere rational information, nor was I discouraged by those who dismissed Hostie and his perceived historical limitations.
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Something deep within told me that here was a truth that would become enormously significant for the rest of my life. I kept on reading and doing further research. I began to obtain a clearer perspective on what was happening in the current phase (known as the missionary cycle). It had peaked around 1960, and statistics from Rome confirmed that, thus indicating the current missionary model of religious life will decline, but not for at least another 100 years.
The deeper meaning of the paschal journey became so much more transparent. Facing even the worst possible scenario—that my own religious congregation might die out—did not undermine my faith or hope. As each former cycle disappeared, there rose up a range of new groups (resurrection) carrying religious life to new heights of fervor and mission. My congregation may die out, but religious life is sure to survive! I was saddened by the fact that so few religious were aware of all this, and nobody, it seems, wanted to know. Business as usual seems to have been the veneer, covering a great deal of denial.
The Vowed Life in Global Crisis
In 1991, Ave Maria Press, in Notre Dame, Indiana, published a more elaborate version of my original thesis, titled Religious Life: A Prophetic Vision. On the strength of that book, I got my first invitations to work in the United States, predominantly with female congregations and a vast spectrum of lay associates. By the mid-1990s, invitations came from Australia, Africa, and Asia.
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The truth of the paschal journey of religious life was beginning to ring true. Numbers in the West were rapidly declining, and the diminishing impact was often rationalized by noting the still large numbers entering in South/Central America, Africa, and Asia.
As we moved into the 21st century, even numbers in the southern hemisphere revealed the beginnings of a downward curve. In the case of Africa, entrants are still quite abundant, but rarely are we told of the hemorrhaging taking place in the increasing numbers that subsequently leave.
My discerning hunch is that the decline that previously affected the West, will, in the course of the 21st century impact the entire Catholic world. This time around, the paschal journey of the vowed life is likely to have global implications. The personal and practical consequences are being explored right across all parts of today’s Catholic world. Dealing with decline and diminish-ment has been surfacing in chapter meet-ings and assemblies ever since the 1980s.
How we might embrace this option proactively and engage with it creatively remains a substantial piece of work still awaiting our attention. For religious life in the Catholic Church, we evidence the setting sun, the fading light, the journey into the vast darkness beyond which we know not what exists. There will indeed be a new sunrise, a fresh dawn, and the challenge of other possibilities, many of which are likely to be entirely new. Another cycle will unfold, and in due course another paschal journey will plough a sacred furrow.
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From the Personal to the Transpersonal
My education in secular and ecclesiastical history was a memory test regarding outstanding wars and heroic victors. It was my encounter with the underside of history, first introduced to me through liberation theology, that opened up other vistas. The patriarchal preoccupation with the winners, and their often-violent exploits, drew my attention and curiosity to the losers! After all, those were the ones with whom Jesus stood in solidarity. The history of religious life too has its winners and losers.
Much has been written about the great founders (Anthony, Benedict, Francis, Ignatius), but practically nothing on the great foundresses (Scholastica, Angela Merici, Mary Ward, Mary McKillop). Individual congregations, including my own, lauded their individual achievements, but we were never invited to see the prophetic charismatic power of the vowed life as a global movement.
For me, the empowering breakthrough came not by a deeper understanding of my own religious congregation but by the enlarged vision spanning a global context. It was that expansiveness that created the resurrection threshold of my hope and the dream of a more promising future.
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A Person-Centered Faith
Throughout my religious life, I have encountered several allusions to the need for a personal relationship with God (and Jesus) as the basis of every authentic vocation. Here we encounter a Christological horizon that, despite 2,000 years of theological development, still requires substantial discerning attention.
A dysfunctional anthropology gets in the way, preventing us from evolving from the personal into the transpersonal. The anthropology in question is that of classical Greek times, as developed particularly by Plato and Aristotle.
For both of these philosophers, the ensouled creature that can stand over against, and superior to all other creatures is what constitutes authentic person and personhood. For many of the Greek Fathers (inspired by Aristotle), the imago Dei (image of God in the human person) resides in the nonsexual soul, not in the fully embodied human, and much more so in the man than in the woman!
It seems to me that Jesus never adopted this Aristotelian understanding of the human person, opting instead for relational becoming, rather than the Greek view of the person as a single unified entity, subsistent in its own right, and deemed to be superior to all other earthly creatures.
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Jesus made a significant shift beyond that appropriation of individualized identity. For Jesus, personhood is embodied and realized in terms of a relational horizon best encapsulated in the phrase:
“I am at all times the sum of my relationships, and this is what constitutes my identity.”
For Jesus, the primary relational matrix is that of the companionship of empowerment, understood in the transpersonal realm of all creation.
Even Jesus belongs to a reality bigger than the individual person of Jesus himself.