Two Paths for Expanding True Love: Information and Skills for Discerning Communal Life

Two Paths for Expanding True Love

Information and Skills for Discerning Communal Life

I. Introduction

II. Two Paths to One Goal:  True Love and Narrative Appropriation

A. Which Two Paths

B. Marital Narrative Appropriation: The Trinity and the First Parents

C. Consecrated Narrative Appropriation: The Eschaton and the Body of Christ

D. The Bridge Narrative: The Holy Family

III. Methodology of Each Path

A. The Highest Calling: An Analogical Analysis

B. Methodology of Each Path

IV. Discernment Skills for Community Living

A. Two Spiritual Approaches of Vocational Discernment

B. Step by Step Process of Vocational Discernment

C. Personality Traits

V. Conclusion

“You know, I never thought being a nun was even a possibility, but you showed me that it’s not a ‘crazy’ choice”  About once or twice a year I get a statement such as this and I consider it a big victory.  Most people see entering consecrated life as something far removed from anything they could ever conceive of doing.  As someone who teaches vocations to young women in my diocese, I see it as my responsibility to make real for them the possibilities before them.  My goal is to get them to uncheck their default setting (marriage) and manually consider their goals, their personalities and how to best achieve a joyful life in service of the Lord.  In doing that I see it as necessary to overtly frame married life as a religious calling, because they do not see it as such.  At the same time I see it as my duty to make the choice of consecrated life seem extremely pragmatic, because they do not see it as such.  This is the reversal of the pious narrative, but the effect is to allow for balance when it comes to understanding that the two paths seek to lead to the same place, love of God above all else and love of neighbor as one’s self.         

The purpose of this treatise is to explore two methodologies for communal living in the Catholic Church, married life and consecrated life.  We will frame the goal and archetypal narratives for each path, lay out the methodology of each path, and offer discernment skills considering one’s personality traits.  The end hope is to offer food for thought for those who are in a process of discernment and reflective material for those already set on their path.

In the first section we will discuss the two paths themselves.  We will theoretically divide various ways of understanding the vocational path and come to an understanding of two paths, married life and consecrated life.  We will explore them as two differing approaches to the same goal of learning love.  Each path presents a safe community for learning trust, respect, mutual sharing, mutual goals, and mutual joy.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we will review the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.  Each narrative has a celestial component and a terrestrial one.  For married life, the celestial narrative will be Trinitarian love and the terrestrial manifestation will be the First Parents in the Garden who image that love.  For consecrated life the celestial component will be the Eschaton and the terrestrial component will be the Body of Christ, a simple and manifold organic unity, mystically present as the Church.  Lastly we will explore the bridge narrative of the Holy Family, where two “first parents” raise the Body of Christ, as a way to see how all stories can work in unison.  

In the second section we will explore the methodology of each path.  The point of each path is to offer a community where one is free to explore, learn, and make mistakes in the pursuit of the practice of perfect love.  We will begin by discussing which path is the “higher calling”.  After discovering that each path is superior only for the one called to is we will explore how each path is suited to different learning styles.  We will discuss how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we will explore how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.  

In the final section we will lay out the discernment process for each path.  Each process will include an opening gambit of basic data gathering, a process of partial commitment to explore the life and an event of firm commitment to the path.  Next we will explore the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path.  We will explore how the married path is dynamic, while the consecrated path is singularly focused.  We will also consider religious virility as a factor to consider when discerning the path one will want to choose, marriage being for the religiously virile and consecrated life being for those who need the protection of an overtly religious culture.             

Two Paths to One Goal:  True Love and Narrative Appropriation

In the first section we will discuss the two paths themselves.  We will theoretically divide various ways of understanding the vocational path and come to an understanding of two paths, married life and consecrated life.  We will explore them as two differing approaches to the same goal of learning love.  Each path presents a safe community for learning trust, respect, mutual sharing, mutual goals, and mutual joy.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we will review the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.  Each narrative has a celestial component and a terrestrial one.  For married life, the celestial narrative will be Trinitarian love and the terrestrial manifestation will be the First Parents in the Garden who image that love.  For consecrated life the celestial component will be the Eschaton and the terrestrial component will be the Body of Christ, a simple and manifold organic unity, mystically present as the Church.  Lastly we will explore the bridge narrative of the Holy Family, where two “first parents” raise the Body of Christ, as a way to see how all stories can work in unison.  

In the second section we will explore the methodology of each path.  We will discuss how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we will explore how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.  In the final section we will lay out the discernment process for each path and  the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path.  

Which Two Paths?

Traditionally in the Church the two ways of going about life have been called “religious” and married life, but there are several possible options for dividing up the participants in the Body of Christ.   We may want to divide it between those whose vocation has a sacramental charge (the married and those taking holy orders) and those whose vocation is simply a vow to a rule (consecrated) .  Remember that the vocational sacraments change the character, or nature, of the one who is enters into it.   Becoming a priest by holy orders changes one to be the type of creature who can effectively stand in persona Christi and effect the sacraments.  The married couple is effectively changed also into a bonded unit according to Christian ontology.  What God has put together let no man put asunder.    As we shall see, sacramentally, the person or people become living icons of their invested story and their lives become grace giving sacraments.  A person in a vowed institute is not ontologically invested, simply invested by volitional honor of their sacred vow to the rule.  Once you are a priest you are a priest for life.  Once you are married you are married until one member dies.  Once you are a Franciscan you are a Franciscan until you die, are released from your vow, or dismissed by a superior. Interestingly the sacramental distinction is not the way Catholics have traditionally drawn the line.  This is possibly for the best, life in an order is “consecrated” because the sacredness of holy orders and marriage is sacramentally evident and all of these paths are equal for humanity.  They only break down as better or worse depending on what the particular individual is suited for or called to by God.  The problem with dividing things this way is that you have priests who are also members of religious orders, thus the division becomes convoluted.

 Another way to make a good division of the two paths would be priests and laity.  But here we have a problem.  A priest is anyone who has experienced the sacrament of Holy Orders.  According to this way of making the division, brothers, sisters, monks and nuns would be laity.  And actually for the vast majority of history they have been viewed as such.  Only within the past century has any church document defined the laity as all Catholics except clerics and those in “religious institutions” and even those documents are scarce.  But this seems to be the way that most Catholics today make the division of the church.  When they refer to “religious life”  they are talking about priests, brothers sisters, monks, and nuns and specifically not married or single life people.  The question still remains if you want to split it that way, what is the commonality between priests and those who live according to a rule as opposed to those who are married?  It certainly isn’t sacramental.  It seems for now there is only one difference, one group is married or able to get married and one group by their promise or vow is not.  It is also important to remember that the celibate priest is celibate because of his promise, not because of the sacrament.  The day may come when priests get married again in the roman rite, rendering this distinction even more confusing.

We will not distinguish between “religious” and “other”.  We will draw the distinction of the two paths between married life and consecrated life, consecrated meaning those who vow to an order and non sacramentally consecrate their lives to God.  It may be the best distinction because the day comes when priests are allowed to marry again, they would be able to choose married life or vow to an order.  

The two paths are not oppositional.  They are members of the body of Christ, if functioning as intended, complimenting, balancing, mutually serving and edifying each other. If it is true that we all have a vocational calling, neither vocation is better or worse generally, only for individuals who would have been called to the other.

Each of the two paths as we have defined them ends in the same place.   Each in their own way involve the participant in a dynamic that offers a living Icon of a Christian mystery to the world.  The goal of each path is to introduce and acclimate the practitioner to true love as well as offer a safe place for the practitioner to develop the needed acquired virtues.  

Each path offers a different way to live Christian ontology as was defined in the treatise Christian Ontology.  These paths offer a space to seek to truly experience simplicity and multiplicity simultaneously in one's lived experience.  Each is a place to be an individual and to be part of a larger whole.  Marriage through the individual forming part of the family and consecrated life through the individual forming part of the congregation.  Each way seeks to help the individual move from an I to a We.  To reshape their thought processes from absolutely self centered to being centered on a larger whole with a sense of self that serves that whole with individual gifts.  

The wise novice master of an order is always looking for the novice to stop calculating his experience by a personal metric and to start by a metric of how his experience fits with the order.  The same is true in marriage.  The first years are fairly traumatic as one accommodates to communal living.  This is a situation one has never had before.  Now as an adult one has a co-partner and together they must formulate their conception of the marriage and family.  Most couples are probably not methodological about this, thus the missteps are seemingly infinite.  But after a few years of living as a fairly healthy married couple the shift from I to we has taken place.  In each situation there is no longer only I, there is also we. 

The more one moves into this way of life the more one one learns by experience to live a life of self emptying love.  The communities of marriage and orders give safe places to practice, practice, practice.  They give a safe place to practice trust, for we are by concupiscence mistrustful creatures.  In each path, by promise and vow, we are allowed to let go of our mistrust and move forward acclimating ourselves to trust.  In each way of life we are allowed to act selflessly for the sake of the other.  In each path we are afforded to opportunity to make mistakes in our calculation of how to practice these things with the assurance of committed partners who will not abandon us from being imperfect, but help us through our imperfection and rely on us to do the same for them.  Each time we practice such virtues it becomes easier to practice them appropriately outside of our safe place.  First and foremost with God and then with our neighbors and the wider community.  

Due to how consecrated life has developed over the centuries, most life goals or desires that are good can be achieved in either path.  It may benefit us to explore how the two paths have come to offer much of the same things with a different starting point.  As we shall see, the main question is whether one wants to start small and work big or start big and work small.

When consecrated life first got under way, it was by means of hermits in the deserts of Egypt, who then bonded together and formed the first Christian cenobite communities.  It was quickly obvious to the early hermits that Christianity is not a religion of the solitary.  At the very least one needs to come into relationship with Christ, another human being.  There are many ways to come into relationship with Jesus, but one of the fundamental ways is by means of his Church as his mystical body, that is, by means of one’s fellow Christians.  As it says in Ecclesiastes 4, 

Two are better than one: They get a good wage for their toil.  If the one falls, the other will help the fallen one. But woe to the solitary person! If that one should fall, there is no other to help.  So also, if two sleep together, they keep each other warm. How can one alone keep warm?  Where one alone may be overcome, two together can resist. A three-ply cord is not easily broken.

It is interesting that this passage moves from examples of two people, to the example of a three-ply cord.  As we noted in  Christian Ontology the way to understand that reality is simple and manifold at the same time is to recognize that objects and relationships are real, that two people in a relationship of love is three things that are one thing.  Our two paths will take different approaches to living this reality.  The early hermits did not desire to engage the world, but rather escape the world and become experts in prayer.  As they arranged into cenobite communities, the great monastic structures of medieval Europe organized, gaining secular power by acquisition of land and serfs.  The treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent briefly discussed how the history of consecrated life played out,

. . . [U]nlike Buddhism,Christianity does not work in solitary.  One at least needs Jesus, and also one needs the Church community.  These hermits quickly realized this and bonded together and formed the first Christian cenobite communities.  Even then they did not desire to engage the world, but rather escape the world and become experts in prayer.  These cenobite communities became the great monastic structures of medieval Europe, gaining secular power by acquisition of land and serfs.  The spirituality of cloistered orders such as the Benedictines was one of escapism from the world and seeking the Eschaton by self sufficient life according to a perfect rule.  Then as urban centers grew there was a shift from monk to mendicant.  The monk realised that walling themselves away from society was not truly fulfilling the great commision of the gospel.  From this one sees the rise of orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, who see their job as preaching the gospel to those who are disposed to hear within Christianity and ultimately outside of it.  These orders originally own no land and were located in the urban centers as opposed to the rural tracts of the monastery.  The members begged their bread and engaged the populace out of a sense of evangelical zeal.  Their attitude reflected the zeal of the Son who comes to sinful humanity, not escapes it.  Once the New World was discovered there arose a host of missionary orders who engaged in the work of God.  They went beyond the scope of reinvigorating Christian lands and missionized foreign lands.  As the industrial revolution ramped up, they began to integrate into society completely on the secular level running hospitals, schools, serving the poor and orphans where they lived. 

 

By the end of this unfolding, consecrated congregations have become another way of doing Christian life, just as marriage is.  They rise to serve the need of the Church. Any moral job one would want to have one could have as a consecrated.  “Moral Job” is important for consecrated, but not more so than in married life.  

Married persons are not supposed to engage in immoral livings either.  Each vocational path should see its work as it’s “evangelical mission” on earth.  Neither married or consecrated would have the blessing of the church to be a chemical weapons expert or consultant on “enhanced interrogation tactics”.  But either could be a hospice nurse, graphic designer, artist, farmer, auto mechanic or any of the innumerable jobs that seek to build up the Body of Christ, healing the world and bringing it to beauty and perfection.  The only desires you may have that would necessarily channel you into married life, would be the desire for a spouse, the desire for a fulfilling sexual life, and the desire to make human beings out of your body.  Notice I don’t say have and raise children, because consecrated have been doing these things for centuries by running schools and orphanages.  Other than that the two paths offer much the same opportunities, just from two different directions.  How the consecrated communities have come around to action is seen in the dramatic shift in names for that way of life, from hermetic life to monastic life, religious life, and finally what orders are officially called now, religious institutes or “secular institutes”.  The differences between consecrated life and married life are often quite over played.    

This leads to the scripture story that most is most often used as a delineator between the two, the story of Martha and Mary.  Here is the story as relayed in the gospel of Luke,   

As they continued their journey he entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.  She had a sister named Mary [who] sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.  Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.’  The Lord said to her in reply, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.  There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.

 

Of course the standard interpretation of this story is that Martha represents the secular minded married person who runs around, presumably ineffectively(?). Meanwhile, Mary sits at the feet of The Master and through the contemplation and withdrawal of consecrated life, chooses the better part.  For obvious reasons, given the roots of consecrated life, this story has been used as validation that consecrated life is somehow preferable.  It could be argued given the development of consecrated life, especially over the past three hundred years, that very often this interpretation is no longer applicable.   If one is in a cloistered contemplative order that seeks withdrawal as part of their charism there is no problem with using this story to give you strength and solace in that way.  But for a Sister of Mercy to do this seems off.  Such a consecrated is as involved in shaping and changing worldly society as any married person and this is true for most congregations these days.  

There are many valid interpretations of this story that extend it beyond a chastisement of married life.  In fact using it as a chastisement of the sacrament of marriage is almost certainly an invalid interpretation.  As with all of the scriptures, this story is meant to bring help to all of humanity, not an elite few.  In this case the help offered is the same asked for in the Embolism of the liturgy.  In that prayer the priest states,  “Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”  One may not be able to find a better interpretation of this passage than that.  It obviously centers on relief from anxiety and attunement to the proper time for rest.  Given the amount of levitical laws that have the exact same concern, it is the clearest and most universally applicable interpretation.  It is also a story about proper beatitude that allows one to recognize the presence of the Lord, verses a distracted attitude that would not.  

This interpretation is usable for all married people, who do need a reminder to rest in Jesus.  It is also helpful for modern consecrated who often collapse their religious vocation with their evangelical mission and live out their mission as the totality of their lives.  This is as unacceptable for a consecrated as it would be for a married person.  The narrative doesn't disparage good work, just anxiety about that work when standing in the presence of God.  After all, someone has to cook dinner whether you are in a married community or a consecrated one.  In marriage each partner will have to have a job, whether it be in the home, as a career or most often both.  In consecrated life every member has a ministry.  The reality is that these should be conceived of as the same.    

Marital Narrative Appropriation: The Trinity and the First Parents

 

Each vocational path has a narrative that has a heavenly component and a terrestrial manifestation.  For the path of marriage the heavenly component is God as trinity and the exercise of divine love as trinitarian love. As the catechism states, married love is caught up in divine love.  What we mean here is that marriage in its ideal perfectly images God, as is made clear in the terrestrial manifestation of this story.  We read of this in the first story of creation.  When God creates humanity in Genesis chapter one he specifically says, “Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. . . . God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  The imago dei is not just stamped onto the individual, but also onto the married couple.  We discussed in Christian Ontology how to understand trinitarian existence by an analogy of object/object/relationship and then go on to understand all of reality by that same interpretation.  Here we have marriage, object: male, object: female, relationship: nuptial love.  The archetypal terrestrial manifestation of Divine self love (the trinity) is human mutual love in the persons of the first parents.  First let's reflect on the trinitarian dynamics that nuptial love is meant to be a sacramentally manifest.       

Again, in Christian Ontology we noted that the Trinity is the Father and Son in the loving relationship of the Spirit, three making one, just as the man and woman are  bound in nuptial love the three making one.  

The Trinity is the self love of God, because a loving relationship needs a Lover and an Object of Love to exist.  Without at least two in a relationship the relationship cannot exist.  Each person of the Trinity is necessary if you want to use John’s definition of God, “God is Love.”  If the Spirit is not there they are not one and there is no love.  If either the Father or the Son are not there the Spirit could not spirate, to use Thomas Aquinas’ term.  The dogma of the Trinity states that God self loves from all eternity; in that God begets himself and loves himself.  Those are not illusory distinctions, or the Love itself would be an illusion, they are real distinctions.  The Father and the Son are truly distinct.  They are just bound into one by the relationship of Love that is the Spirit, making God one.   Remember of course that objects and relationships are equally real, thus the Spirit is also truly distinct and truly real. But all are one God.

But here we can extend that analogy further in an attempt to get a grasp on how we as married people can live the Trinitarian analogy through our marriage.  In order to do this it may help to review some of the Trinitarian dynamics we discussed in Divine Gender Transcendence and Incarnational Divine Presence.  We will quote it at length as it fundamentally pertains to our subject matter,

 In the first creation story the man and woman are created simultaneously and it is proclaimed that they are in the image and likeness of God.  Now, that image and likeness is obviously meant to be understood as borne by each individual human, but I don’t think it is at all out of place to see it borne in human relationships as well, especially the unique relationship of man and woman.  The humans created here are perfectly mirroring the loving relationship that is the Father and Son in the loving relationship of the Spirit. It’s probably out of place to ask who symbolizes who.  Love is love and the Spirit is the Spirit, but of the humans, which is the Father which is the Son?  At a certain point all analogies break down, but let’s go ahead and push it as far as we can and see if we hit a breaking point.  

The quick answer here is obviously neither, the Father and Son are both male, so there’s no need to go further.  But as was pointed out previously the unknowable God is beyond sex and gender so those names and sex or gender identifiers are useless.  Are we at a standstill?  Maybe, but we do learn something about each trinitarian person from the creed that may be of help.  The Son is eternally begotten of the Father.  That is, their relationship is one of begetting, the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten by the Father.  In chapter two of Genesis the creation of humanity is retold  in a more temporal and terrestrial way.  Eve is pulled out of Adam’s side, the female birthed from the male, in a gender twist that harkens to begetting more than birth and, when grounded in a trinitarian lens, hearkens to equality.  The odd part of this story is that she is pulled out of his side and then from that point on all other humans are pulled from her and her biological sex, but only after they are instilled by the male.  Indeed that installation in the ancient mind was of the complete human into the woman by the man, the man who makes people through the woman.

This leads us to another interesting piece of creedal information about the Trinitarian Godhead.  According to the creed and the prologue of John’s gospel, the Second Person of the Trinity is the one “through whom all things are made.”  This is extremely feminine in nature.  

It is helpful to point out the trinitarian dogmas relate to a functional marriage.  It seems that both narratively and functionally marriage lines up perfectly with the Trinitarian love story.  This should not only be pointed out, but couples should use it to draw meaning in married life.  They should use narrative appropriation  in order to experientially to know God as love.  The monastic uses the story of Martha and Mary in a very technical way to draw meaning for their contemplative life.  There should be no problem with a married couple drawing solace from the Trinitarian love story in order to bring their married life the next spiritual level.  

Here is a short story married persons can apply to their specific vocation.  Mt 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  The footnote on this sentence in the New American translation points out, “This saying is similar to one attributed to a rabbi executed in A.D. 135 at the time of the second Jewish revolt: “…When two sit and there are between them the words of the Torah, the divine presence (Shekinah) rests upon them”   Which is an interesting spin on the words.  The interesting question for me is why these numbers?  “Two or three” seems really specific.  Add to that the tidbit noted in the footnote to the New American translation and it seems something more could be going on here than just praying together.  The third in that saying was the Torah and it noted that divinity was present.   A useful marital interpretation may be that the two or three are present simultaneously in the two people and the relationship that is also present (making the three).  The third present is the nuptial relationship a loving relationship, just as the third present in the trinity is the loving relationship of the Holy Spirit.  God is present because God is love.  Here we are shifting from the standard very literal translation of the numbers to a Christian ontologically based translation by shifting the meaning of the word “or” from an atomistic view of reality where one has a choice between two objects Or three objects, to a trinitarian focus reminding one that there can be two things “or” at the same time three if one acknowledges the relationship.  In this interpretation “or” does not mean “make a choice”.  In this case “or” means “as well as”.  Consequently married people can self apply, “wherever a married couple and their marriage is present, there you find God in that they present a living icon of the Father and Son in the relationship of the spirit.”  Our relationship, sacramentally invested as it is, becomes a conveyor of grace by being two OR three depending on how you want to count.  It is a very narrow reading of the passage, especially considering the passage's main focus is prayer.  But then again so is the monastic reading of Martha and Mary, a passage about anxiety.

This divine love is sacramentally and perfectly expressed in the First Parents in Paradise.  As we shall see throughout this treatise, this is the terrestrial story that orders and gives meaning to a heavenly reality that is hard to access by direct knowledge.  

Consecrated Narrative Appropriation: The Eschaton and the Body of Christ

For consecrated life, the story will be the Eschaton and the Body of Christ, where all is accomplished, humanity is socially completed and order is established.  The heavenly reality of the Eschaton is integral to the way those who take the consecrated path define their lives when they choose a non sacramental solemn vow for their mode of being.  The story of the Eschaton is sometimes understood as the end of the world, but it is more helpful to understand it as the culmination of salvation history.  In Christianity there are a series of deaths and rebirths that are undergone.  First there is the death and resurrection of Christ.  Then, after that is the individual Christian being baptized into that death and resurrection, the individual Christian then dies and undergoes the particular judgment.  Assuming a good grade there the person’s soul goes ultimately to heaven to enjoy the beatific vision.  After that the entirety of creation undergoes a final judgment and is destroyed.  It is then remade into a new heaven and new earth.  This part of the story is where the resurrection and glorification of the bodies of all the saved happens and they are reunited with their glorified bodies, as described in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15.  Reality itself is actually redeemed in a death and rebirth scenario dramatically explained in Revelations chapter 21.  Where we end up spending our everlasting life is right here where we have been this whole time, but all of reality is glorified and functioning sacramentally as it did in the beginning, as a paradise.  There is no longer a need for the seven sacraments, once again reality is the sacrament.  That state of affairs in the Eschaton, “the end time”. 

One thing a person experiences as part of the beatific vision is a keen awareness of the Christian ontological worldview.  You really do understand yourself as an individual, yet truly identify as part of the whole, that whole being all of reality with is one with God through the Holy Spirit.  You truly see yourself as one with God, one with your neighbor and one with the cosmic system. Reality is simple and manifold at the same time, and now it is understood and lived as such.

This story is the primary analogy of those who seek the consecrated life.  They seek to live this reality now as opposed to waiting for the final days. The creation story is one of unity becoming distinct, the creative process of division and binding through relationships, hence the married love story of the Triune God creating man and woman in his image, who go on to create children in theirs, the distinctification continues.  In this story it is the story of the end, when all is one, thus the operable image here is the Body of Christ, perfectly functioning.  The Church is the physical manifestation of the divine mystery in the world, which foreshadows in an imperfect way the perfect community with at the end.  The foundation for understanding thiswas laid  in the treatise Christian Ontology,

As part of Christ’s mission he founds The Church, a group of people who are one and bound to him as his mystical body. With the Holy Spirit sent out after the ascension The Church is established as one with Christ and yet distinct from him, bound by the relationship of Love.  This is a collective reality for its members, but works on the individual level as well.  Each of us is bound to The Church as a whole and through that bond to Christ, in the Love we experience.  The preceding sentence is absolutely non-controversial, but interpreted with a Christian ontological view the depth of the bond is understood as more profound the more the loving relationship is present up to the point of being absolute oneness in a perfectly loving relationship.  Since relationships are as real as objects, what you have in the end is an entire system that is completely manifold and absolutely simple at the same time. 

We are mystically bound to Christ’s body by our baptism to this unit.  In the Eschaton, the “body” will be complete.  Consecrated life seeks to present to the best of their ability what that may look like in this life by living a life of communal unity.

Each path seeks an example of anthro-authenticity to model their life on, Jesus’ perfectly integrated body, as he ushers in the eschaton, and the First Parents as the abide in paradise.  The easier access for the married is the terrestrial story, where as the heavenly cosmic story is hard to access.  At the same time, the easier access for the consecrated is the heavenly cosmic narrative, whereas the terrestrial story comes off more analogical, going off of Paul’s famous analogy.    The consecrated community seeks to order it’s life not by the personal relationship, but by the structured society.  Each religious institute constructs its rule to live by and they seek to perfectly adhere to that rule.  These rules could be viewed as a form of lived utopian literature.  Once again, hopefully, we all seek to live perfection now and we can all draw on the hope of the world to come in order to seek it.  But the consecrated life draw on this story as a primary mode of finding meaning in how they live and why they do the things they do. 

Bridge Narrative: The Holy Family

 Luke’s Gospel offers a perfect narrative of the Holy Family as a domestic church that incorporates both a “first parents” story, as the first parents of a new phase in salvation history, and of course a “body of Christ” story. In this Gospel there is the very famous story of the finding in the temple.  The boy Jesus, who seems to have been just bar mitzvahed, goes into the yeshiva school in the temple.  The picture that is painted is often Mary and Joseph finding him and he is “the all knowing boy Jesus” impressing the scribes and pharisees with his all knowingness.  But that’s not what the Gospel actually says.  Luke chapter 2 actually says, “After three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions and all who heard him were astounded at his understanding and his answers.”  It seems that he was actually a really really good and profound student who asks profound questions, grasps the answers and answers questions asked with a unique depth.  To develop a christological sense of Jesus needing to learn his religion and spirituality gives a sacramentally bound married couple a great sense of investment into their family.  It also gives a consecrated congregation a good angle on how they need to develop as a community gearing toward perfection.  

“But Jesus was divine!  He didn’t need to learn his religion!  He knew everything!”  Maybe . . .  It is impossible to know the inner psycho-spiritual dynamics of Jesus Christ.  Christologically we can only know what the gospels indicate to us.  In the gospels Jesus does seem to have specific knowledge from time to time, but he definitely seems ignorant at times.  When the centurion begs a healing from Jesus and then has faith the he can heal him on the spot Jesus is surprised.  To be surprised he must have been ignorant of facts.  If that disturbs piety, remember, Jesus is one like us in all things but sin.  So to know if a situation or state is possible for Jesus there are two questions to be asked:  1) is this situation or state common to humanity throughout its history?  2) is this situation or state sinful?  If the answers are 1) yes 2) no, then mostly likely Jesus experienced that situation or state, though not necessarily, everyone is a unique individual after all.  Let’s apply our test.  Ignorance, is it common to humanity? Yes! Is ignorance sinful?  For example is it sinful to not know the temperature of the surface of the sun or is it sinful not to know the thoughts of you sister as she sits next to you?  Absolutely not.  What about having to learn?  Specifically, what about having to learn your purpose, develop and grow your faith, deepen your relationship with God, 1) is having to learn and develop common to humans? Yes!  Is it a sin to have to learn? Absolutely not.  So in any given christology there must be room for the possibility that these things were true of Jesus, he is after all like us in all things but sin.

What a great weight and a great opportunity for any parent to know that their child may have similar potential and that it may be their job to foster and develop those skills.  If as a parent you may be inclined to think that it is “the Church’s” job to religiously educate your child, I would first direct you to Oscar Romero’s quote, “The Church is all of you.”  Then I would remind you of your role as a familial domestic church.  Lastly I would remind you that the institutional church may not be best equipped to translate the faith to your child.  The institutional church speaks broad truth to humanity it is your job to translate that truth to your domestic church.  Once again let’s look at Luke Chapter 2.  When Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the temple Yeshiva school they seem horrified.  They take him out of that place immediately.  It’s not that Jesus never has anything to do with the temple again, he seemed to quite enjoy hanging out there later in life, but  apparently the feeling of his parents was that he wasn’t ready for all that yet, that his family was the better place for him to develop spiritually.  “He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart.  And Jesus advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man.” 

What a great humility and a great ability for a congregation to know that in this world, even the body of Christ needed to develop toward eschatological realization and glorification.  The terrestrial story for the heavenly reality of the Eschaton is not in and of itself the Eschaton, just as the first parents are not God.  One cannot sculpt a perfect static community here and now and ignore the rest of the world as it goes to hell in handbasket.   

The story of the Holy Family is certainly the bridge between the first parents and the Eschaton, and the analogical narrative bridge between married and consecrated life.  It involves first parents, in this case Mary and Joseph as opposed to Adam and Eve.  It involves perfect development and order, in this case of a particular human, Jesus, as opposed to humanity as a whole.  

So it is a great story for either vocational side to bridge into the analogies of primarily used by the other because Jesus himself is the bridge between paradise and the Eschaton.  Jesus is the shift between a trajectory of dynamic seeking from a fallen state through an individual who presences perfection toward a guided order culminating in a completed creation.  The narrative of the Holy Family is a  pivotal point of salvation history; offering a specific example of originating parents developing culminating perfection that embodies the entire human narrative from Adam and Eve to the Eschaton.  The married couple can use the parents in the story, Mary and Joseph, and notice their organization of the family begets and actualizes the Body of Christ, a body which humanity IS in the Echston.  The consecrated can look at the Body of Christ present in the story and trace it back to the family, a oneness connecting that body to the parents whose binding nuptial love, in our analogy, sacramentally makes present the binding divine love of the Holy Spirit between the Father and the Son, making all of  these realities one, just as eschatological humanity is one with God.

Each path is seeking a story of anthro-authenticity.  One is looking back to the simplicity of Paradise and the other is looking forward to the cohesion of the Eschaton.

 In the first section we discussed the two paths themselves.  We theoretically divided various ways of understanding the vocational path and come to an understanding of two paths, married life and consecrated life and explored them as two differing approaches to the same goal of learning love.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we reviewed the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.   For married life, the celestial narrative was Trinitarian love and the terrestrial manifestation being the First Parents in the Garden who image that love.  For consecrated life the celestial component was the Eschaton and the terrestrial component being the Body of Christ, a simple and manifold organic unity, mystically present as the Church.  Lastly we explored the bridge narrative of the Holy Family, where two “first parents” raise the Body of Christ, as a way to see how all stories can work in unison.  

In the next section we will explore the methodology of each path.  We will discuss how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we will explore how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.  In the final section we will lay out the discernment process for each path and  the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path. 

Methodology of Each Path

In the first section we discussed the two paths themselves.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we reviewed the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.  We connected marriage to Trinitarian love as expressed by the First Parents and consecrated life to the Eschaton as expressed by the Body of Christ.  Lastly we brought all stories together with a reflection on the Holy Family. 

In this section we will explore the methodology of each path.  The point of each path is to offer a community where one is free to explore, learn, and make mistakes in the pursuit of the practice of perfect love.  We will begin by discussing which path is the “higher calling”.  After discovering that each path is superior only for the one called to is we will explore how each path is suited to different learning styles.  We will discuss how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we will explore how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.   In the final section we will lay out the discernment process for each path and  the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path. 

The Highest Calling:  An Analogical Analysis

We begin this section with a reflection on whether or not there is a generally “better” path.   Both paths are seeking what Jesus calls us to seek.  As stated in the introduction, our purpose here is to invest marriage as a religious vocation and present consecrated life as a practical choice.  The point here is to rebalance some biases that cloud vocational discernment.  This section will be the greatest effort at that part.

   Traditionally consecrated life has been viewed as the path for the more religiously devout and the harder path to follow.  Since they are seeking the Eschaton they are seeking perfection and since married people are doing what everyone has done since Adam and Eve marriage has been traditionally seen as the spiritually “outdated” path, the path that is doomed to failure according to the trajectory of the Eschaton.  This may be true for humanity according to some calculation of finality, but it is certainly not true for individual humans as they (or humanity as it) struggle(s) with postlapsarian reality.  In the Catholic church there is an unfounded spiritual bias against married life, which is seen as somehow a lessor spiritual calling.  Though as of late the hierarchical church has made halting attempts to correct this bias, it has deep roots and is slow to fade. 

 In 1 Corinthians 7 St. Paul advises virginity as the preferable state, and this is where one get most arguments about consecrated life being the higher calling.  The Christians at Corinth were a rowdy bunch and needed much instruction.  They are obviously prone to misunderstanding his teaching and prone to expressing that misunderstanding by immoral means.  So Paul’s advice to them is to use marriage as a stopgap measure to stave off sin.  He is very clear that this is his personal opinion. In the end he judges that the way he is happens to be the preferable way, an assertion which should not be shocking for anyone to make.  

Paul’s opinion and its use to interpret the encounter of Martha and Mary with Jesus can be balanced by the story of the transfiguration.  In this situation Peter James and John are struck by the Glory of God present in Christ. What better time than on that mountain top to sit and bask in reflective contemplation.  Peter suggests such, offering to set up three Sukkots, and begin a stable monastic community of prayer and mystical union as one may find in Qumran or of the variety that developed in European Christianity from Egypt.  Instead they are awakened from their stuppor by the booming voice of the Father and hustled off their mountain top back down to “reality”.  In Mark’s account this is directly followed by a reminder that Jesus’ redemption is achieved by entering the hustle and bustle and facing the suffering inflicted by the secular world.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is portrayed as extremely engaged and active.  It is the prayer times, when he retreats from the crowd, that come off as a stopgap measure, offering brief respites in order to accomplish the task of redemption.  In the end Saint Paul states the truth for anyone who is discerning, “everyone should live as the Lord has assigned, just as God called each one. I give this order in all the churches.” 

Jesus also seems to take a different position than Saint Paul in Matthew chapter 19, but when his opinion is read with St. Paul in mind it is often twisted to Paul’s point of view of marriage and celibacy.  When asked whether it is lawful to divorce Jesus throws Moses under the bus and reminds the pharisees of the physical exemplar of Trinitarian love, 

“Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ . . .‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate . . . I say to you, whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful) and marries another commits adultery.”  [His] disciples said to him, “If that is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”  He answered, “Not all can accept [this] word, but only those to whom that is granted.  Some are incapable of marriage because they were born so; some, because they were made so by others; some, because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it.”

The last two sentences have been taken as a judgment call on Jesus’ part against married life in keeping with St. Paul, but the reader could to take the wider context into account.  This passage has been myopically interpreted by the consecrated for the elevation of consecrated life and toward the minimization married life.  Again, our purpose is to frame marriage as a religious calling and consecrated life as pragmatic in order to instill a sense of balance to the discernment process. 

For our purpose, the interpretation of the passage hinges on the antecedent of the word “it” in the last sentence.  It is pretty standard to go for the most recent noun as the antecedent, in which case “it” is a way of life that renounces marriage for the sake of the kingdom.  This is a very good interpretation especially when coupled with Paul, but may not be the only valid one.  The context here is the question of divorce and Jesus’ fairly hard line regarding the indissolubility of marriage.  As is evident in the passage, the Jews were allowed to divorce as long as it was public and validated, thus the wife was free to remarry without shame.  Jesus brings the dialogue back to the creation story and reminds the audience of the material exemplar of our primary analogy of trinitarian love, the first parents.  The Trinity and trinitarian love is unbreakable, and thus so should the bonds of marriage be.  

The important point for our interpretation of  “Whoever can accept this ought to accept it” is the disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ teaching.  When this or any other passage is proclaimed in church the effect is monotone and the cadence is neutral.  This affect, or lack there of, gives the apostles reaction more the feel of a reasoned response to Jesus’ just proclamation.  But when read as a bedtime story, that is with a true narrative tone and cadence, taking into account the trajectory of the narrative, and the outcome is quite different.  It is very important to remember that stories are alive and have emotion behind them.  One can change the meaning by changing the tone, and as long as it suites the facts of the whole narrative, that should be okay.  The former treatise Relativism, Conscience, and The Magisterium noted,

When training to be a lector, one is often told not to intonate the voices, not to read it like a story.  The scripture must be “proclaimed”, by which they mean monotoned solemnity.  That actually seems fair enough, to intone is to interpret.  When we read the stories of Jesus the tone could be very different from reading to reading, and that can very much change the meaning.  Some meanings may be wrong, but doubtless many are valid and good.  

It is the job of the magisterium to be the voice of Christ for us.  They set the tone of voice for Christ’s mystical body on Earth.  The Word of God, through whom all things are made, is eternally spoken and does not change,  It has spoken from alpha to omega and has said everything that needs to be said.  But the tone changes depending on the situation, and “in time” (as opposed to eternity) certain things need to be emphasized over others at varying times.  This malleability shifts across time for the universal church, but is even malleable from nation to nation, diocese to diocese as the bishop sees fit.  

So in an alternate reading the disciples are reacting to a radical change in the standard and acceptable way things are done, a change which makes extremely hard demands.  Here’s the story, the pharisees ask Jesus a tricky question, “can you divorce for ANY reason whatsoever”.  The trap is if he says yes, he has no respect for marriage.  If he says no, he is not respecting the Law of Moses, which is vague and does not offer specification for divorce. Either way they pounce.  Typical of Jesus he is more than prepared for the trap and takes them to a higher authority, the creation story, and uses that to offer a narrative of salvation history which points to an imperfect state seeking perfection.  In this case he is offering the married path’s methodology, look back at the perfect beginning and seek that perfection.  The disciples’ response to this, when realizing they would be stuck with their wives no matter what is, “GOOD GOD, WHO WOULD EVER WANT TO DO IT!” [Paraphrased].  The caps are important since this is also a written medium and we want to get tone across.  In this reading they are not overly pleased with the hardships being demanded and want to escape it.  Jesus’s response is that not everyone can accept this but only to those whom it is granted.  A classic assertion that everyone is called to a certain vocation, but which one.  The usual interpretation is that Jesus is eloquently explaining how right the disciples are in their reasoned response to his assertions on the ineffectiveness of marriage and beauty of consecrated life.  But if they are actually reacting to a difficult demand of perfection in marriage with escapism, then Jesus’ words mean something completely different.  The “difficult teaching” being expounded upon is not the disciples’ teaching, but Jesus’.  Not everyone can accept marriage without divorce, it is a call that demands certain graces.  

What follows from this point on are the situations of people who, for one reason or another, aren't up to the task. Either because they were born not able or because they were made that way by society or their environment.  Nature or nurture could be the problem.  Either of these may result for example in the inability to consummate a marriage.  Consummation as technically defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition means that the male “finishes the job” in the proper location without barrier.  Consummation after proper ratification are the two things necessary for a marriage to be considered sacramental in nature.  So one may be born or made into a person with a homosexual disposition, who may not desire to technically consummate.  One may be born or made into a non-sexual person, for example men who are permanently impotent or people who are not sexually driven at all.  Another disqualifier for married life may be people who are naturally averse to one on one intimate relationships.   An example of people made unsuited for marriage specifically by their environment could be people who were abused in such a way that loves expressed sexually is not possible in their lives or people who cannot respect the bond of marriage because of inordinate concupiscence temptation brought on by an enabling culture.  As an aside, the alternative for those people is not a life of loneliness bereft of love.  There are a host of binding interpersonal structures in the church that edify loving relationships in all kinds of ways for all kinds of people.  We have collectively referred to these structures as “consecrated life” and the interpersonal love they offer to develop is as real and fulfilling as married love.  This was discussed as a possibility at length in the treatise Same-attractive Dyadinal Solemn Relationships.   

Jesus then says some people have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Meaning they could marry or not and be successful, however they discerned that marriage is not for them.  BUT, he goes on, “whoever can accept this [the vocation of  marriage without divorce] ought to accept it.”  This last sentence is not seen under this interpretation as the conclusion of the paragraph explaining those who do not marry for one reason or another, but as the conclusion of the whole conversation concerning Jesus’ most controversial assertion that needs acceptance, being marriage without divorce.    

It is important to note that Jesus, under this interpretation, does not make a value judgment on either way of life. The disciples do make a value judgment, it is better to take what seems to be the easy way.  Jesus in reply makes a point about discernment.  It is better to discern what is the best path for you.  If you are not suited to married life then take the unmarried route, if you are suited, you ought to do it.  Either way Jesus demands perfection, that perfection could be the perfection of Eden or the perfection of the Eschaton, Trinitarian love or the body of Christ, depending on how one is suited.  Either way the lesson remains the same, take the path best for you.  Because of this I don’t feel the classical interpretation is wrong it serves those in consecrated life well.  But to bolster my position I would add lastly that marriage is specifically mentioned as the topic of the passage.  The Essenes, a celibate monastic variety of Judaism around in Jesus’ time, are not.

Once I was discussing what it means to be consecrated with a friend in a rather prominent order.  In the course of the conversation he stated, typically, that those who choose a consecrated life are following a the higher calling.  The argument here being that they live now for the end point whereas those who are married are mired in earthly concerns.  It is typical of any group to assume superiority, it helps one internalize their story.  And of course once the story is appropriated it is natural to defend it at all costs.  But Christian love stories are not mutually  exclusive.  The argument for the consecrated life as the higher calling is two fold.  As stated it draws on the fact that consecrated life seek to live the kingdom now and secondly consecrated life lives out life as Christ did while walking this Earth.  When consecrated individuals start talking this way they usually insist that “higher is not better” or “superior”  just higher . . .   

The same trope works for clergy.  They invest in the incarnation, an analogy that bridges between God and creation.  Since it is well known marriage takes its analogy from creation and the garden it stands to reason that the clerical analogy as a bridge is, once again, “higher” and once again, “higher is not better” or “superior”  just higher . . . The consecrated calculation as a higher calling works horizontally and the clerical works vertically.    

First, it may help to remind anyone who would claim the higher calling of Christian power dynamics.  Given that the first are last and the last are first in our religion, anyone claiming the higher, if they are correct, immediately becomes the lower.  And that is as it should be in Christianity.  The treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent discussed how the eucharist simultaneously presences all elements of the narratives we are playing with now, such that none are higher or lower,

By Becoming food, the Son of God is taking another step toward humiliation so as to demonstrate inversal unity, that the greatest serves the least and in the beginning we were all one one level even though there existed a hierarchy.  In effect, the first two descents drag divinity through the entire hierarchy, binding it all into the inversal unity of Paradise.

One can begin to see that the species of the Eucharist itself contains all elements of the original hierarchy of Paradise within it, yet it abides as one reality, a perfect example of the true inversal unity of Paradise.  It contains the soul and divinity of Christ, thus it contains the nature of humanity and the nature of divinity.  It also contains the accidents of the sustaining elements of the environment of the Garden that sustain humanity, bread and wine, grain and fruit, which the man would gather from the soil. One will notice that at the reception of the Eucharist all elements necessary to sustain the Church is present according to how we discussed the matter in Sacramental Cosmology.  

  Married life, clerical life, and consecrated life like to borrow each others analogies, consecrated and clerics talk about being married to Jesus or the bride of Christ the Church.  Married people like to focus of the priesthood of all believers and point out how our families are domestic churches etc.  But with regards to stories each is extremely high minded.

So, do married people seek to live the end now?  No, married people seek to live the beginning perfection laid out in Genesis chapter one, which is the same scenario as the end when it comes down to it.  As Leo XIII states in Arcanum Divinae, 

From the beginning of the world, indeed, it was divinely ordained that things instituted by God and by nature should be proved by us to be the more profitable and salutary the more they remain unchanged in their full integrity. For God, the Maker of all things, well knowing what was good for the institution and preservation of each of His creatures, so ordered them by His will and mind that each might adequately attain the end for which it was made.

Married people are simply more conservative (looking back), consecrated life tends to be progressive (Looking forward) and priestly life is focused on the task at hand (reconciliation and redemption).  All this sounds absurd when you look at reputations of each group, but when you look at operable analogies it’s perfectly correct.  

  

Do Married people live as Christ lived?  Well, if one looks for evidence of Christ being married under Hebrew law, then no, but that’s a mis-analogy for married life.  Married life isn’t looking to future developments, the Eschaton, and what the Eschaton says about matrimony for it’s analogy.  Frankly married life is looking, well, “higher”; at God’s existence in God’s self as a relationship of loving persons.  That is, as the Father relates to the Son in the Spirit, as image by the First Parents in the first creation story. Did (or does) Jesus live that life?  No Christian would deny it.  Jesus as the second person of the Trinity is one with the Father in the loving relationship the Spirit.  The same ontological point is made with regards to the fact that Jesus is two natures in one person.  The lives of married people seek to be icons of these exact relationships, the unity in diversity of realities, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”  

These analogies are as valid and “high”, though one may want to say complementary or compatible as opposed to higher.  Consecrated life asserts the “higher” angle because how the two paths line up regarding what we try to live in the ideal “as humans” in the ideal.  But, when it comes down to it, they are not more or less likely to truly live the Eschaton now as a married couple is to truly mirror the Trinity as the first humans did in paradise.  The judgment comes because consecrated people basically say, “We seek to live the Eschaton, and since no one is married in that state, marriage is not as high a calling.”  It is tantamount to a married person saying, “We live the trinitarian relationship, so any vowed non sacramental relationship that isn’t dyadinal, thus comprising a three in one reality falls short of ultimate Truth.” 

But that is ridiculous, both ways seek the perfection of God.  From God’s point of view time is a unit and therefore the first parents and the Church at the Eschaton form a unit.  Anything in between is humanity's striving to maneuver between ultimate simplicity, through fracturing, to coexisting, unity, and diversity (Christian ontological realization).  Neither married persons nor consecrated live perfect lives.  The point of the structure is to allow for development of persons and relationships.  All individuals are called by God to a vocation best suited for them and for them that vocation is their highest calling, and in this sense we do mean “the best”  for them personally.  So now it could be fruitful to look at some of the general patterns of each path in order to get a sense of how they operate.    

Methodology of Each Path

In many ways the path one chooses with vocations has a lot to do with how one is called to approach the problem of sin and alienation from God.  One difference between the two paths is the focus of will or grace.  This can be analyzed by noting that consecrated people make a vow and married people make a promise.  A promise is generally seen a relating between human persons and a vow is seen relating to God.  Marriage and Holy orders as vocations are sacramental.  For sacraments one does not technically take a vow, but makes promise.  The responsibility placed on a person between a vow or a promise should be about the same.  One would not expect any sort of leniency or lacadazicallity in effecting their baptismal (technically) promise.  But as a sacrament it enters one into the church, a community of people, and as a sacrament it de facto recognizes God’s effective grace.  Consecrated persons take a vow to God.  One aspect of that vow is obedience to a superior of a community.  The vow relates them to specific people, not by and sacramental bond, but by their will, or submission of their will, to God and community.         

In this part we are going to discuss how each of the two paths one can take a person to one final goal, True Love of God and neighbor.  Each path is suited to a different type of person.  Since the point of each path is to place one in a community in order to learn true love there two pertinent questions, The first is “how do you learn best?” When you learn, do you like to start small and work big, or do you like to start big and work small?  The second question is “how do you make friends?”  How do you move from knowing yourself to investing in an other? I.e. How do you “move from I to We”?   

Consecrated life looks at each of these questions and works big to small.  It takes as its starting point the communion of the Eschaton, billions of humans in one accord living life in oneness with God.  It is the complex working to the simple.  The Eschaton is humanity fully developed and aware of its ontological relationship internally and in creation.  So it is a complex that is working toward the simplicity of God. Thus in consecrated life you enter a group operating on a principle of order and stability for a mass of people.  The consecrated life starts with loving the mass of humanity by loving its organization and way of existing.  The member is drawn to the community by that communal understanding and charism, not primarily by any specific individuals in the group, though how they specifically portray the rule may play a part.  People attracted to consecrated life are attracted to formality and social structures.  It works big to small because the social structure as a way of life, according to the rule, is lived in community and through the day to day interactions and years and decades the lover of the rule can learn to authentically love the other individuals participating in the rule as individuals.  This way of life moves from ideal to particular relationships or from structured to personal relationship.  

The way of consecrated life is the way of the socialite.  It is the way of people who prefer group activities and group work and groupthink rather than one on one relationships.  This type of person goes into a situation and makes friends by means of the institutions.  For example, when starting a new school, such a student would join all the sports teams, clubs and activities in order to use those institutions to make friends.  They are people who love humanity easily but for them it is not so easy to love individual people.  

Sometimes consecrated people come off as a little socially awkward one on one to those not invested in this path.  The consecrated person seems harder to relate to because when a non-consecrated person engages them there’s a miscommunication of rules.  Consecrated people are naturally attuned to the formal ritual of the large group, communal prayer, communal meals, community time etc.  Thus when sister walks in the room with you personally and you try to interact on what a non-consecrated person feels is a “deeper level”  it comes off strange on all sides.  The one accustomed to formality and definition feels disrespected and the one used to personal authenticity feels unfulfilled.  It’s like they're in two different worlds.  And they are, but the two different worlds are not the world of the “religiously minded” and the world of the “profane minded”.  The two different worlds are the worlds of those who practice the socialite path and those who practice the best friend path.  

So in consecrated life takes a society and forces those who more comfortable  following a social rule book to come into deep connection with the individuals, because they are forced to live move and have their being with these other individuals.  If life were a game, they would be the type of people who want to learn the rules and then play the game.  As opposed to the type of person who plays the game and by that experience learns the rules.  Over the long haul, one moves in this path from loving the abstract (loving the rule) to loving the individuals (loving persons).  And whereas they may have seen God as the grand artificer at the beginning, the acquired interpersonal skills of long term ordered life will help them come into contact and become best friends, personally, with a particular individual, Jesus Christ. 

Married life approaches the question of learning and friendship working small to big.  It takes as its starting point God in God’s essence, absolute simplicity and seeks to participate in that life sacramentally as our first parents did perfectly in paradise.  From there it works out to the group, the dyad grows into a family by the begetting of children and from there pushes out into manifold creation.  Just like God starts perfectly simple in the first creation story with the division of light and darkness and then makes from that simplicity creation, a seeming infinity of immeasurable distinctions.  

The married person is initially drawn to intense personal sharing.  And thus it is a best friend model based on simplicity.  For example, this type of person comes into a new school and latches onto a best friend and slowly over their tenure expands to a small close knit group. In this group, they are comfortable engaging in social structures.  The best friend model works like Eden where Adam is best friends with God and then best friends with Eve.  Thus the married person binds himself to one another through sacral promise (ratification) and sacral action (consummation).  This exclusive relationship is the height of interpersonal intimacy, where formality is completely shed for the sake of existential interpersonal vulnerability.  The formalities that are formed come over long practice in married life.  Such that after decades together the couple has a way they formally interact with each other and with those outside the relationship.  But these relationships have to be built together.  

Socially speaking a consecrated order is more like a centuries old marriage that one merges with and the structures are already set and the novice arrives in what is a long established comfortable set of circumstances.  But a married couple has to start all of this from scratch.  It’s the personal relationship you love, and from there you learn to love the order.

The way of marriage is the way of the best friend.  They are a person who loves people but not necessarily humanity.  It’s the way of people who want to quickly invest in deep personal sharing, deep secrets and deep vulnerability, possible to shield themselves from what they feel is uncaring, over rigidly organized or even chaotic human structures.  It’s why people who are suited to married life are often inappropriate one way or another in social settings.  The boundaries of social structures seem superfluous, pointless or unfulfilling compared to the deep personal relationship of their marriage.  Married people are anxious and impatient to know a person as they are in themselves and not as they relate to the group.  A person suited to marriage is the type of person in a social situation who point blank asks about the elephant in the room and makes everyone uncomfortable.  Or conversely they are the people who are overly reserved because they don’t trust and use the social institutions and customs that mitigate their unfamiliarity. 

This is why it is helpful to have the gift of children in a marriage.  By them the couple starts to extend your commitments beyond the dyad to a larger group.  Though the relationship is intense, it is not the same relationship.  A parent must be the authority over their children and that takes a bit of formality and organization that married people don’t need to employ in their primary relationship.  A good parent has to learn to use formality, rules, discipline in ways that previously were agreed upon in the dyad, but are now enforced compassionately and pedagogically.  Otherwise the community will fail.  Through this community the married persons learn to more effectively love the group and the masses, as well as learn to be a little more trusting and patient and a little more effectively loving with each of one’s neighbors as an individual.  The community built, in the form of the family, helps the married person learn to love the order of the group, and ultimately learn the order of humanity, and the cosmos.  Whereas the married person may have started off with a great personal relationship with Jesus, married life over the long haul will give the practitioner an appreciation of the great artificer who brings order out of chaos and nothingness.  The skills learned in marriage will help the practitioner bow to God as The Great Loving Transcendent.

Each path leads to a greater love than the person knew before.  A way of loving neighbors that one is not accustomed to and because of that, each path offers great skill for loving the almighty God.  The goal of each path is perfect love of God and perfect love of neighbor from all possible points on the spectrum of reality. The two paths bridge the Bible from the first parents, living exclusively in the pastoral garden, free of structure and naked without shame to the New Jerusalem, a bustling urban setting ordered and populace, but presented in the somewhat faceless manner of humanity’s relationship (as an ordered unit) with God.  These two paths signify two ways of loving our neighbor as our self.  First to love humanity or human groups and second to love individuals.  Each path starts one where they are comfortable on this spectrum and draws them to the center, gradually teaching them to love humans differently, all the while drawing them to love God above all else.

In the first section we discussed the two paths themselves.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we reviewed the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.  WE connected marriage to Trinitarian love as expressed by the First Parents and consecrated life to the Eschaton as expressed by the Body of Christ.  Lastly we brought all stories together with a reflection on the Holy Family. 

In this section we explored the methodology of each path.  The point of each path is to offer a community where one is free to explore, learn, and make mistakes in the pursuit of the practice of perfect love.  We began by discussing which path is the “higher calling”.  After discovering that each path is superior only for the one called to is we explored how each path is suited to different learning styles.  We discussed how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we explored how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.  In the next section we will lay out the discernment process for each path and  the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path.  

 

Discernment Skills for Community Living

In the first section we discussed the two paths themselves. In the second section we explored the methodology of each path.  We discussed how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we will explore how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.  

In this final section we will discuss some general personality types for the consecrated verse the married path.  We will then go on to lay out the process of self discovery and discernment that is built into each path, which will help one understand if the path is correct in the first place, and then how to go about treading the path in life.

Two Spiritual Approaches of Vocational Discernment

There’s no one indicator of which vocation is best for a person.  One’s vocation is a call, not an answer on a  personality type quiz.  There are many factors that play into one’s call, not the least of which is grace.  Sometimes God puts us in the exact opposite situation of what we seem suited to because we are actually best suited to learn by hard examples and tough challenges.  This is certainly the lesson of the punishments in Genesis chapter 3.  But here we may point out the importance of the process of vocational discernment in general.

To engage in discernment is an attempt to shine light on one’s default assumptions and analyze their validity.  As a culture we see marriage as the default, but this should be not the case.  Priest and consecrated are either seen as those who could not, for one reason or another, get married or those who actually took their religion seriously and put off the “lessor path”.  Each person is called one way or another and it is up to us to make our best effort to intuit that call.  So I tell young people disable default mode and begin working to consciously know yourself.  This is about where you are going to be most joyful, where you will develop best as an individual and where you will be of best service to God and if you have priorities right that’s where you want to be.

 Any manual or dissertation on vocational discernment always takes time to remind the reader that everyone really has the same vocation, to love God above all else and to love their neighbor as themselves.  If these are one’s priorities then one will be theocentric in the way one lives. Such a person will ask God for the gift of Christian joy, and if this is humbly requested it will be receive.  If this is one’s disposition, theocentric as opposed to being self centered, one will be joyful following either vocational path.  But there still remains the question “which path am I most suited to?  On which path will I be most effective? And which path will be most effective on me?”  This is the discernment. 

Vocational discernment is really learning to become who you have always been and learning to connect, to paraphrase Frederick Buechner, where you deep joy meets the world’s deep need.  So the first knowledge to have or develop while discerning one’s vocation is self knowledge.  We have already begun this process when in last section when contemplated different learning styles.  It is helpful to understand one’s learning style.  So one must learn where one finds joy, then one must identify a deep need of the world where one can fulfill that joy.  The meeting of this need will be a moral and positive thing that becomes the persons ministry or job, in this treatise we use these terms interchangeably between consecrated and married life.   This process facilitates the development of the person according to God’s call.  For our part we will be focusing on the more general vocational path as opposed to the specific ministry.  

There are two approaches to the discernment itself, the rational/cognitive and the intuitive/imaginative.  Both are equally helpful and I would argue that along with deep prayerful consideration, both should be employed even if the individual leans on one more than another.  The rational/cognitive approach is the basic “list making” approach.  It involves comparing and contrasting the pros and cons as well as the outcomes and consequences of each path.  Since we are mainly dealing with self knowledge, we would also want to note fears and hesitation and analyze why we would have them.  Lastly, we would want to take considerable time prioritizing what would would need to attain deep joy in our lives.  When doing this it must be remembered that we are not talking about “happiness” here.  That would be a sudden and intense burst euphoria that fades relatively quickly. We are talking about “joy” an abiding sense of peace and fulfillment. One could say of Christ on the Cross, that he was not happy, but even then, he was joyful.  The sense of fulfillment is seen in his last words in John's gospel, “It is finished [accomplished].”

What does one need in life to be joyful?  I ask students to list their top five from a list I compiled:        

        

Financial Security Owning a Home Meaningful Career Fulfilling Career Having Children Having Lots of Children Having a Spouse Having Friends Having a Social Life Staying in My Hometown Living Outside My Hometown Leaving My Hometown Travel WORLD Travel Having a Strong Prayer Life Connection to Your Parish Living Morally Being Famous Being a Recognized Expert in a Field Being Smart or Intelligent Having Meaningful Conversations Being Well Rested Having a Stable (Predictable) Life Having an Exciting (Unpredictable) Life Having Standard Routines in Your Life Staying Connected to Your Family Staying Connected to Your Friends Having Money in the Bank (Savings) Maximizing and Utilizing Opportunities Personal Autonomy (Freedom) Self Sufficiency Having a Self Sustaining Family Living a Generally Solitary Life Being Your Own Boss Owning Luxury Goods Supporting Charitable Organizations Expressing Creativity in Your Life (Art) Joining Social Organizations Maintaining a Healthy Body Maintaining Physical Beauty Continual Romance A Fulfilling Sexual Life Keeping Athletic

Being a Recognized Member of the Community Continually Learning New Things Being Committed to an Ideal Fitting in with Your Peers Portraying Elegance Living for the Moment A Well Planned Life A Life of Good Memories Having Good or Meaningful Traditions Being Practical Having Good Self Esteem Making Others Feel Respected Bringing Others Joy A Life filled with Humor Cultivating Sympathy Feeling Safe Feeling Useful Being Well Read Having Companionship Proper Beatitude Understanding Jesus’ Teaching Living Life as Christ Did Having a life that is Minimal or Simple Making a Difference in the World Creating a Legacy for Yourself Eating Well Living a Unique Life Living a Life People Find Interesting An Immediate Sense of Having Helped People Trying to Change the System Minimizing Drama in Your Life Evangelizing (Spreading the Gospel by word or deed) Sharing Goods Being Competitive Having Priorities and Meeting Them Spontaneity Mending Relationships Managing People Building Trusting Relationship(s) Being Surrounded by Beauty Making Human Beings out of my Body A Life of Honor

This list is always interesting to discuss because there are, at most, only four things on it that would keep one from consecrated life.  Those things are the desire for sacramental marriage (a spouse), as noted above, the desire for a fulfilling sexual life, the desire to make human beings out of your body and perhaps the desire for continual romance.  Noticing the subtle differences between items on the list is extremely helpful for coming to know your true desires.  Often things students think are a fast track to marriage happen to be more suited to consecrated life.  The best example of this is “having lots of children”.  If “making human beings out of your body” was not on your list, nor was “spouse” nor was fulfilling sexual life, then being a consecrated in an order that runs schools or orphanages is much more suitable for that goal.  To analyze such a list and pro and con it out for one’s self is an analytical process that can be helpful for discernment.  Often what we think we want in life is a series of disconnects items ranging from the super specific to the over general.  Often our desires compete with each other.  To lay them out and prioritize them is very helpful.

The second approach one should take when discerning is the intuitive/imaginative approach.  This approach makes use of the practitioners healthy fantasy life in order to discern where one would find joy.  The tactic here is to imagine one’s self in fabricated situations and notice, in ignation language, consolation and desolation of the soul.  In practicing this with students I’ve noticed they are ill adapted to exploring their imaginative landscape.  To help I went online and researched “how to develop one’s fantasy life”.  Lo and behold, there are no places to learn this skill, only a lot of webpages that help you figure out if you have a disorder, or that tell you how to “get your head out of the clouds”.  The treatise Digital Evangelization discussed the concept of introspective reimagination,

The skill of introspective reimagination hinges on the recognition that our mind is programed for such a simple construction of reality . . .   In a certain Kid’s in the Hall skit “Daryl’s Oompah Band”, Daryl has only ever imagined an oompah band in his head when he daydreams.  When he is caught off guard by his date in the middle of a daydream his reaction assumes all people daydream the exact same thing. At the slightest suggestion of an alternative he is able to leave the cave, so to speak, and enter a world of imagination limited only by how lame his character seems to be.  

One’s fantasy life is a gift of God and is extremely useful in many situations in life apart from temporary escape from stress.  One’s fantasy life comes from one’s self, so the ability to interact with it, analyse it ,and understand what it means helps one learn about one’s deepest self.

To start, “what do I fantasize about?”  For example, I ask my students, “do you fantasize about being consecrated?”  the answer is invariably “no”.  Why not?  It doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t commit one to any path.  It is a beautiful way of intuiting how one reacts.  Why did I fantasize about that particular thing?  What other things about this life, even the most random can i fantasize about? What happens if I play the fantasy a few minutes longer? What if I skip a few hours forward or back?  One should note the course of the thoughts and pay attention to the beginning, middle and end.  Notice whether or not the content one conjours is inclined toward good or whether it ends in something bad, a distracting tendency, or less good than how it started. On should observe if the fantasy takes away one’s peace, tranquility or deepjoy.  Then I ask students,  “how often do you fantasize about married life? Not finding a spouse, not qualities of spouse, not getting married, but married life.”  The answer turns out to be shockingly little because most of our focus as a society is on courtship, not marriage.  As part of an exercise I would send them through fantastic meditations and just play with their imagination when it comes to vocations. 

What you would be doing at 3:00 in the afternoon on an average thursday as a married person?  What would your prayer life look like, specifically as a consecrated person? What would it look like if you had a disagreement with your spouse about what color to the nursery when you are expecting your first child? You want your congregation to make better attempts at living up to their ideals.  How does it look to play that out? You have a decent career, friends, and a life here, but your spouse gets a job offer in a different city. How do you feel about it? Is there conflict? You want to change careers, what does it look like when you approach your spouse about it? You had some sort of experience of God by means of the relationship you have with the sisters in your congregation, how did that come about, what did it look like? You had a really good day with your husband and kids, what happened that day? You feel like your relationship is lacking, how do you fix it? The car needs an oil change, what does it look like when you and your husband work it out? It is the 3 weeks after you have taken your final vows and you are sitting down to dinner with your congregation.  How does the scene play out?  How do you feel about the situation?

You have an extremely stressful day working with your sisters.  How does that look? It is the 3 weeks after you get back from your honeymoon and you and your spouse are sitting down to dinner.  How does the scene play out?  How do you feel about the situation? You worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure that you have no student debt, but your husband has $80,000 worth. It sucks up whatever extra money you have and has kept you from buying your own house. Does that cause resentment? How does that conversation go? What you would be doing at 3:00 in the afternoon on an average thursday as a consecrated person?  What does it look like to deal with a stressful situation together with your spouse? You experience loss and seek consolation from your fellow sisters.  How does that look?  How does it feel? You doubt if you made the right vocational choice. What does it look and feel like? You had a really good day with the sisters in your congregation, what happened that day? You are dying and look  back on your vocational choice,  how does it measure up? You want your marriage to be better.  How does it look to play that out with your husband? You get into an argument with your spouse but eventually makeup. What’s the argument about and how is it resolved?

You had some sort of experience of God by means of the relationship you have with your children, how did that come about, what did it look like? What would it look like if you had a disagreement with your fellow sisters about where to go out to eat together on a weekend? What would your prayer life look like, specifically as a married person? You live in your dream city, and walk outside on your day off. Look around you. What does it look like? How does it feel walking outside? What do you do on your day off? You want to change ministries, what does it look like when you approach your superior about it? You have an extremely stressful day working with your husband.  How does that look? You share an interesting experience you had at mass with your companion, how does it unfold, what’s their reaction? The hot water heater in the house is broken, what does it look like when the community solves the problem? You experience loss and seek consolation from your husband.  How does that look?  How does it feel? What does it look like to deal with a stressful situation together with your congregation? You had some sort of experience of God by means of the relationship you have with your spouse, how did that come about, what did it look like?

                

         These meditations run along both paths of vocation, but some are purposely vague to allow the practitioner to be able to spontaneously envision where they would end up.  Once one gets the hang of the process one can begin to expand their creative abilities and utilize their own fantasy life to the end of greater self knowledge.  

Step by Step Process of Vocational Discernment

Each path has its own discernment process.  As one would expect the process for the socialite path is much more formal, whereas the discernment process for the best friend model is less so in our culture.  But the basic process is the same for each.  There is an initial step of data gathering, followed by temporary and breakable investment in the relationship and finally full commitment to one’s vocation.  The initial data gathering would be called postulancy in an order, and in the married world it is what we will call dating.  It’s a time to see if you connect to that lifestyle but not necessarily any particular instance of that lifestyle.  A postulant is not vowed into a community yet, they are simply doing basic learning.  The same should be true of people in a dating relationship.  It’s not about deciding whether or not you are going to marry that person.  It should be about figuring out what type of person is compatible with you.  For each side, compatibility is the key, not similarity or uniformity.  The question one should ask as one engages in preliminary social interaction with members of the opposite sex in an attempts to discern for marriage is, “could I spend the rest of my life with that type of person?”  Whatever dating looks like as a social phenomenon it should not, my definition, involve exclusivity. The same is true of postulancy.  At this point the recruiter’s job is to help the postulant to find the community that best suits them, even if it is not their community.   Once again, this is preliminary data gathering about either members of the opposite sex or of the types of congregations available.  

The next phase of discernment is the novitiate in the religious order or what we will call the “exclusive relationship” in the path to married life.  For a novice this means taking temporary vows, continuing to learn and living as a member of the community, but if those temporary vows lapse and the novice or the order feels this isn’t the place for him or her, then they are not bound to stay or may even be jettisoned by the community.  This is similar to an exclusive relationship, but the difference is the manner of sharing.  Being geared toward the Eschaton and following a rule as they are, the novice tries his or her life life by trying the pre established rule of the community.  

In married life the couple must discern if they can successfully create a rule for their community so to speak.  They must discover whether or not they have compatible goals and dreams for their lives.  Do they have the same moral outlook, compatible views on how to run finances, how often it is acceptable for a family should move about geographically, what careers are acceptable, how much time a person should work verses spend with the family, compatible views on child rearing and gender roles, do they have the same sense of priority in their spiritual lives, do they have compatible spiritualities?  Do they have the same religious vision for their lives?  A couple, toward the end of the exclusive relationship, heading into marriage, would be wise to deeply discuss the inner workings of their families, because those two completely foreign cultures are about to be carried into their marriage.  The task in an exclusive relationship is not to practice for married life, it’s to discern if this particular person is compatible with me.  It is important to note again that compatibility is not necessarily similarity, to be compatible does not mean to be the same.  It means the two can work together, and possibly edify each other, or at least not work against each other.  Where there are incompatibilities the next question for each individual would be is there room for compromise?  

Once again discernment is self knowledge, and the best thing a person seeking marriage can do is know their deal breakers.  It’s stressful, but if one knows one’s priorities, one should have a finite set of deal breakers.  These are things one needs for one’s life to be joyful.     

The last point concerning exclusive relationships is to remember it is a finite time and the couple will not be able to “figure everything out”.  Married existence is about figuring everything out together for the rest of your mutual life.  Exclusive relationships are about testing compatibility in the broadest sense possible, but even there people change and life is not certain.  In any discernment process you make your best guesses based on the data and trust that God is with you in your choice.     

The last step is full commitment to the path, either by sacrament or solemn vow.  For the consecrated life, this means taking a solemn vow to live one’s life according to the rule of the order and to pursue virtue by means of the evangelical counsels, poverty chastity and obedience.  For a married couple this means entering the marriage by means of the promises of ratification and the “manipulation of sacramental matter” during consummation.  Ratification is the “promising ceremony” known as a wedding and all that it presupposes.  Consummation is the sacramental sign of the married couple, which is private in nature.  That shouldn’t come as a surprise.  For the consecrated person, being socially geared, a social ceremony would be appropriate.  For the married couple public profession is necessary because the couple itself is going to become a sacramental sign for the community of the Trinitarian God.  But this is the best friend model so after the volitional binding, which is the form of the sacrament, there is a binding in “deed”, which is the matter of the sacrament. This happens in private, because best friends are most intimate with each other, not in the public sphere.  For each of these paths, this is the point that you are committed, whether big to small or small to big you have found your safe place to practice and work toward the common goal.  The commitment of each path facilitates safety and creates a space for the type of person suited to the path. 

Personality Trait #1: Stable or Dynamic?

In these last two parts we are going to explore some very basic personality traits that each path caters to.  As we have seen the consecrated path offers a socialite model that works from the group and order whereas the married path offers a best friend model that works from intimacy and dynamism.  First, one may want to consider how stable a life one desires.  When one enters the order everything is known and laid out.  The relationships are set by an established order, as we said before, like a marriage that has been going on for centuries.  Who will be washing dishes on Thursday is set by the congregation as is the process for setting who will be doing it subsequent Thursdays is in place.  All your doing is merging with the pre established relationship, submitting to that order.  Under the model of the Eschaton, one is seeking to participate in a type of stasis of achieving the final goal of humanity, where the Body of Christ with its many parts functions as a beautifully organized whole.  You may have a chance to influence how things are done, but certainly at first, your job is to conform, and there is a beauty in that stability.  If stability appeals to you, then an order is comforting.  

The way an order lives it’s rhythmic life is as varied as orders themselves. The rules and constitutions could be seen as a type of utopian literature that the practitioners seek to put into practice.  Their major communal expression is praying together, and then engaging in their ministry, either literally together, or together by the spirit of solidarity.   

In marriage the story is that of the first parents who must do the ordering of creation, name the animals, have children and figure out how to raise them and through all this figured out their own relationship.  In Paradise there is no rulebook for how to do that, it is only after the fall that God gives any indication of who rules over who and it is not clear whether this is proper order or simply suffering due to sin.  In marriage there is no easily defined pre established order, especially in our culture.  Even in the most patriarchal societies, individual marriages have to be developed in real time.  The culture writes the narrative of how a marriage should be, but each marriage works out according to the two personalities forming it and there is no superior to make rulings on disagreements.  The two people are going to enter the relationship and form it completely.  Picture a modern American couple on the night after the return form the honeymoon, their first meal together in their house.  It’s a beautiful meal that, let’s say, the husband cooked of his own volition just to be romantic.  They share the meal and engage in sweet nothings, but at a certain point both sets of eyes are going to wander over to that sink.  Who is supposed to do those dishes anyway?  There are many legitimate ways to calculate the answer and a married couple has to find an agreed upon way to calculate it in real time.  

There are a seemingly infinite number of other scenarios that will play out the same way in the first years of marriage, making it very stressful, but it is a stress that some people thrive on.  Each member of the community has a completely different point of view and they must be synced for a harmonious life to be achieved.  If you enjoy dynamic collaborative creation as opposed to submission to the established order, then marriage is the place for you.  If a “superior” in the marriage decides the issue, it is the couple’s job to work out who the superior is, in this day and age it certainly can’t be assumed to be the man and with regards to marriage, if it ever could be absolutely assumed.  If a decision is somehow collaborative, how that process would even work needs to be developed by the couple from scratch.  The only pre existing structures brought to bear in such situations are the ones they bring from their familial cultures, and those are not likely to be identical.      

Neither of these comforts, submission to established order versus dynamic collaborative creation, is bad, just different and it makes sense to each path given the story.  The marriage story is set at the creation, everything is about to unfold, paths need to be forged.  The trinitarian God creates and the first parents also stand at a threshold, in the second story Adam has a collaborative part with God in the creation process itself, and they are charged with establishing humanity.  For the Eschaton narrative, it’s the end, everything has played out, the order is obvious and set, God’s plan is known and accepted and all one does is submit and live the plan in the kingdom as the true body of Christ.  But at this point we are neither here nor there, so we must pick the mode by which we live our lives, which paradise is best for us the frenzied work of creation and multiplication or the static peace of order and final fulfillment.    

                  

Another point of stability hinges on one’s vocation in the sense of the tasks one does with one’s life.  A person on the consecrated path practices obedience, thus they need not worry about job training, vocational discernment in the secular sense, or finding meaningful work.  All of these will be supplied to you by the order.  You may or may not have a modicum of say depending on the nature of the order but the fact remains ultimately it is up to your superior.  If you joined an order that primarily teaches and fancied yourself a teacher, but it is the superior’s firm intent that you be the accountant for the school, that’s your lot.  In the Eschaton the Church is the Body of Christ and each part has is designed function.  The will of the individual is at peace with it’s job there and all is fulfilled.  Thus there is a certain peace in the fact that you chose the path of consecration and the events contrary to your desire can easily be interpreted as part of God’s plan for you, you need only bend your will to them.  On the other hand some people would find that stifling.  As a married person it is the job of the couple to work out career (ministry) opportunities and dangers together.  Whether or not one of the marital partners should risk all and open up a business or stay at their steady job has merits and dangers on each side and the methodology for making the decision has to be created by the couple.       

In consecrated life, the task you are given is the task you are given, other tasks are other people’s jobs as a fully functioning body of Christ acting as one unit.  In married life there is no such focus.  The family is the entirety of the community.  The stress of creating the community and the constant flux of an ever changing creative dynamic falls completely on two people.  There is little time for deliberative focus because every challenge must be met and every need supplied for.  In this modern era, especially once children come into being, time becomes a vice the likes of which a consecrated person could not imagine.  

Once I was discussing some health issues one of my children has with a Sister.  In her compassion she counseled me, “in times like these I always find contemplative prayer to be my help and anchor.”  She was trying to help and I agree, contemplative prayer would be a super nice thing to engage in, but to do it right takes constant practice at units measured in hours, hours I don’t have.  

To be married you must seek a living, you must care for beings that are absolutely dependant on you, you must connect in loving ways to your spouse and meet each other's needs, you must care for yourself personally, you must maintain a “house”, pay taxes, get the mischarged water bill taken care of, decide whether this offer of a credit card (or online degree or loan consolidation or land in the Yucatan or new cell phone/internet plan) is a scam or is helpful to your family.  You must deal with the department of motor vehicles, health insurance company EOBs, doctors charges for services you never agreed to or underwent, broken down cars, teachers in schools and daycares who are stressed out by your not so perfect child, or are stressing out your perfect child, deal with pressure to go to parent’s club, parent teacher conferences, school fundraisers of all variety, church missions, retreats and social gatherings.  As a married person you must handle children who need to be monitored hygienically, be dressed, be fed, transported back and forth in due time and at absolutely random times fed again, helped with homework and extracurriculars, bathed, and bedded down.  You must aid children who get sick, get fever, headaches, vomit, poo themselves, get cavities, get lice, knowing the whole time you are holding their head, or cuddling them and telling them it’ll be okay or sleeping in bed next to them because they’re in great pain, knowing all that time families share everything and you and your spouse are next, but since you’re sick days are used, when your body hosts your child’s germs you will still be working and coming home and taking care of newly rejuvenated and very energetic children.  As a parent you will have children who are greedy, covetous, lying, wrathful, envious, slothful, prideful, concupiscent machines that need constant moral direction.  All of this needs to be done and much much more, notice I haven’t even sent you to “work” yet, where, by the way, you will receive no sympathy for any of these things.  Contemplative prayer is not an easy option, the more viable option is the ability to make all these things your prayer.  A married person must be a multi tasker, there is no other choice.  In the garden, the first parents cared for the entirety of creation, just as the trinitarian God takes care of the entirety of creation.  Everything must be taken care of and often everything must be taken care of at once.  

I remember once scheduling a time for a recruiter of an order so that she might talk with a group about her life in the community.  She pulled out a black planning book and opened it the current week and said, “I can do any day but Friday, well maybe that morning, but I have a meeting that afternoon with a postulant.”  I started discussion options and made the mistake of glancing down at her book.  The week was completely empty except for Friday, where the one o'clock hour had the word “Tracy” written in pencil.  I then, internally, fell into a trance like state and saw my Family Google Calendar, in my mind.  On this calendar all of our shared family schedules converge, which my spouse and I must keep track of, lest some child be left sitting on a curb forgotten, or miss a much needed therapy at the hospital.  The only time nothing is logged on any day of the week is between about 9:00 at night and about 7:00 in the morning.  But, don’t be deceived, with young children you're up all night, and we arise around 4:30 in the morning to share a few quiet minutes together before the kids wake up starting around 5:00.  So when do I get contemplative prayer time?  Well to simply pray, that doesn’t happen much, even at church.  Children need to be managed.  Multi tasking is the skill and by that, in this case I mean, making the work your prayer.  

One more story to illustrate.  My son did not really sleep for the first three years of his life due to some sensory issues and so neither did I.  The process to get him to sleep was long, dark and painful for everyone and even when successful he wouldn’t stay asleep long.  I have a clear memory of standing by his crib in a bowed position resting my head on the side exhausted as I “firmly” pat him on the back.  I was doing what you do in that situation, counting, keeping rhythm, singing, thinking, praying etc.  It was at that dark hour that a relevant factoid randomly presented itself to my conscious thought stream, possibly by a demonic force, bent on tempting me to evil.  In the 1970’s the nocturnal prayers of the Liturgy of the Hours were no longer nocturnally required.  The middle of the night prayers known as Matins became the Office of Readings and could be said any time of day.  For centuries the consecrated had risen in the middle of the night and focused their lives on prayer and chant.  They still focus their lives on prayer, but the middle of the night seemed a bit rough I guess.  Now, I know that the invention of the electric light and precision clocks have universally altered human sleep patterns, but my bitterness in that dark hour was that I was up, I was doing my night prayers I was doing my work, and the consecrated were all fast asleep.  I didn’t linger on the temptation too long because to linger on a temptation such as this is to succumb.  I chose a life of dynamic engagement, and they chose a life of focused engagement and that is that.   

  

Personality Trait #2: Religious Virility

 

My frustration with the cancelling of night prayers and subsequent realization that I was doing night prayers with my child leads to the second personality trait that we will consider and that is religious virility.  One may want to consider their religious virility when deciding whether to go into consecrated life or married life.  The way of consecration offers support in every way for those who need it and coddles them in a sense to a life geared toward ease of religious beatitude.  This is necessary, because their vow implies a focus on a disciplined will, and by God’s mercy the church has realized that human will, feeble as it, needs a lot of help with personal discipline.  Consecrated have time to engage in prayer for long periods of time.  Their time is organized for them around prayer and communal worship.  For married life there is no such given structure.  It must be made by the couple themselves around finding sustenance and balancing life.  The way of marriage, in this secular world, leaves one mostly to one’s own devices and because of that one needs to be religiously strong and stalwart if one is to survive, especially given the mission of that way of life.  

 The job of the married person is to utilize the abundant grace of their sacramentally charged life to sacralize the secular world.  As was explained in the treatise Cosmic Evangelization,

The laity is divided into two different types, consecrated and domestic.  Regarding inculturation and cosmic evangelization, the difference between the two is the difference between regular troops and special forces in the military.  Those engaged in consecrated life wear uniforms, congregate in larger numbers, take direction more immediately from high command, they are more suited to occupation than guerrilla war,  but once in the field, need to be able to fight the battle.  Those who engage in the sacrament of marriage are more like special forces.  Our job is to fight the battle by blending in and adapting to our environment as we engage the local population in our struggle.

The married are the special forces of the church, in that the lives we life operate deep in hostile territory, and special forces must be adaptive or they are destroyed.  The job of special ops is to train native populations to be on your side, and that is the married couple's job, by their lives, through one’s everyday action, and through one’s marriage.  Married people evangelize by living their sacramental lives in a world that is not geared toward facilitating it.  The married vocation finds allies in a given culture and actives or recruits them into the service of Christ.  Thus married life takes the sacramental path that relies on the grace of God, which allows us to take risks and make mistakes.  The married mission is adapting to the culture, going native and bringing the faith to the culture by being a sacramental sign in its midst.  Married people take that world and through creative use of popular piety, shift the meaning of the world, the world itself to be geared toward God. In John’s Gospel it is the dynamic Martha who goes out to meet Jesus, assert his authority, and bring news of him back to passive Mary, who remained sitting at home.   

The consecrated life practitioner is more like a regular army troop, wearing an identifiable uniform (the habit) which constantly reminds them of the purpose and mission, and keeps them true to the cause.  They stay in formation and do the task assigned as an outside garrisoned force.  Their job is to conform society to Christ, not activate Christ within the society.  These two paths together bring any given culture to complete service of Christ in the ways we discussed in Cosmic Evangelization.    

Consecrated life is constructed to accommodate the religiously needy.  The first way one notices this is that it offers a more obvious connection to its operable Christian love story, the story of the Christian Eschaton.  Married life does not connect to a Christian specific love story, but a human one, from which one would need to fill out and develop the Christian part one’s self.  It is obvious when one is looking to the Eschaton proclaimed by Christ as the model for communal living that you are invested in the Christian Way.  Your whole life is geared, narratively to the Message of Christ as he walked this earth and thus you are connected to Christ in every possible way.  Your community by will and discipline is a living icon to the Eschaton, to Christian fulfillment.  

When one is married one is not easily or ostensibly connected to a particularly Christian love until one realizes that all love is Christian love, because God is love and Christ is the perfect expression of that love.  The foundation of marriage runs all the way back to creation, if one buys into the married story, that of Paradise and the Garden with the first parents.  Thus it is an institution that covers the planet in every possible culture and religious institution.  It’s what people do and have done since the beginning, thus it doesn’t seem “particularly” Christian.  However, it is particularly Christian according to our story because it was established as a way of becoming a living Icon of the trinity from the beginning of creation.  It’s just easier to forget the specifically Christian connection because non-trinitarian religions practice the same types of relationships.  So to enter the married way is to enter a way where you have to continuously reinvest your choice with a sense of Christian religious purpose because there are a host of others around practicing something that looks similar yet those cultures aren’t calling marriage a sacrament.  The institution marriage is situated as a panhuman social structure by God to cue into the entire human community.  It is the job of the sacramentally married to make the sacramental and trinitarian connection for everyone, but first they must make the connection for themselves, and married people often fail because, having taken the path for the strong, and the practitioner didn’t even realize it was a call to “religious” life.  Because of this they end up not being strong enough for the task.  Instead of imitating the culture in order to sacralize it and bring it to Christ, they manifest a culture and their religious expression becomes a secondary part of their life, relegated to sunday morning or moral thought.  

The person invested in the consecrated life also publicly vows the evangelical counsels.  That is, they publicly vow to live a life that reflects poverty chastity and obedience.  An order’s rule is just a complex interpretation on how to live these councils given the order’s charism.  By their public vow the consecrated are publicly bound to live the life of perfection.  The public acknowledgement gives one a sense of accountability and investment from the get go.  Those who need this push from the beginning and constant bolstering from designated superiors would do well to enter an order to have the extra buttressing for their spiritual life.  In married life, on the other hand, there is no such public vow of action or disposition, our pledges concern fidelity to each other.  One may somehow draw from this that these are virtues absent from married life, but one who is sacramentally invested will quickly learn otherwise.  

First, all members of the Catholic faith who take their religious journey seriously must practice obedience to the teachings of Christ and conform their understanding to the authoritative teachings of the church.  But each path has a way that it expresses obedience internally.  As I said, with an order the superior is identifiable upon entrance, one is joining an established community.  So obedience in a consecrated community is a continuous flow over generations.  In married life one must work out the authoritative structure in real time.  We must follow the instruction of Ephesians chapter 5 and  “be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  Thus, obedience is a requirement also, but how that obedience works out depends on how you structure your family community together.  Without a sense of subordination one would never be able to successfully navigate a marriage.  The difference is that an order works with the eschatological narrative, thus the Body of Christ model give a top down authority, Christ is the head, we are the parts.  Marital love works on the trinitarian model and so the obedience is mutually subservient as opposed to top down.  Mutually subservient is a hard skill to build, especially if you have to personally build it as you are developing the relationship dynamics.

Married people, by definition of their sacramental bond, do practice chastity, though not by the common definition.  Most people collapse chastity and celibacy together, but celibacy means abstaining from sexual relations, and chastity means practicing sexual activity appropriate for one's station in life.  So in this case there is a public promise with regards to this evangelical council if one follows the technical definition.  But once again there is an added level of responsibility to the married person because how they practice chastity is active instead of by negation.  Thus they must not only act, but act appropriately, and act with maximal sacramental effectiveness.  This is not just a matter of sex, it’s a matter of engaged sexual activity.  So one must fully understand the nature of the married sacramental sign and be able to effectively and willfully practice it in sacred sexual practices that physically demonstrate trinitarian love.  The  treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton discussed at length some of the complexities of sacred sex as a unitive reality .  The ability to correctly and effectively utilize the gift of sexuality is no small task in a secular world that constantly portrays sex as a pleasure sport.  It becomes near impossible when one adds to the secular disparagement, the disparagement of the consecrated and clerical who assume that the nuptial sacramental sign as somehow tainted with sin, even though that is not the official teaching.  

Consecrated life takes a path that is suited for the less dynamic, in this case a person suited to simplicity as opposed to engagement.  It may be important to note here that the consecrated person must be very strong in certain ways, and we are not trying to imply that this life is easy.  The consecrated person must learn to love in all the ways that are non-sexual and understand these as deep loving relationships, as was explored in the treatisess Same-attractive Dyadinal Solemn Relationships and  Compounding Concupiscence and Cross-Spectral Mutual Pedagogy. That these loving relationships are deep and full experiences of love runs against human culture and urges.  

The last evangelical council is poverty.  Married people do not take a vow of poverty. In fact the traditional promises that the couple makes implies the possibility wealth, “for richer or for poorer.”  A practitioner of consecrated life on the other hand does take a vow of poverty and in this they personally own no property.  On the face of it this gives them a harder lot, but as a recruiter for an order once told me, “we take a vow of poverty, but we aren’t poor.”  The simple fact is that most of the married people in the world are poor, because most people in the world are married and most of the world lives in a state of material poverty.  In any given culture the divide between relative haves and have nots puts the vast majority people on the “have not” side, and such people go without material desires and very often without material needs.  

Where as for the consecrated life, one may not get all their material desires, but all of their material needs will usually be met by the order.  It would be rare indeed for a member of a congregation to starve to death unless they were caught in a particularly harsh situation.  That honor is reserved for those participating in the sacrament of marriage.  The sacrifice of the consecrated is taken when they give up the possibility of ever being personally rich.  For the married the sacrifice comes in every little decision to make choices for your family to survive, to sacrifice for your children who will have to sacrifice for theirs.  Once at a recruitment event a student asked about “getting to do fun things” the consecrated mentioned that the order gives its members a small amount each month to do with as they desire.  I remember thinking how nice that must be. My family is part of middle class America, the wealthiest nation on earth, yet there is very little ability to practice personal discretionary spending.  Almost everything I spend needs to be taken to committee with my spouse or else we will overspend.  Even if the amount allocated to those consecrated members if fifty dollars, that would be more than I would comfortably spend without checking in.  We live an absolutely communal existence with our family money or else we will fiscally perish, and no church body will likely step in to bring us back to the lifestyle we had.  

In my observation the tradeoff  is this: the consecrated personally owns nothing, but also has no financial or material cares, no matter what they will be cared for.  This is appropriate, because this life is for people who need religious focus supplied for them and they need no distractions from their task.  Fear for one’s security is a major distraction.  The married path is the opposite, one is able to own goods, but the vast vast vast majority of married people in the world experience material need and often true poverty with no safety net.  To be a married person means that you must be able to trust God in your experience of poverty, not an order or the institutional church.  One is the commitment to the ideal without the experience, one is the constant experience without the commitment.  Because of this, the married person must learn to foster the Christian regard for poverty from the experience, not simply embrace the ideal without the true experience.  So when discerning one’s path one must be honest with oneself.  First, am I making this choice for God or for myself?  Next, am I strong?  Can I go into the world with less support and maintain my religious stamina while standing up to a culture that does not support my religion, and even seeking to dynamically and possibly covertly adapt that culture to my religion?  Or would I be safer surrounding myself with the trappings of religion and seek to confront a culture as a sign of the counterculture nature of the Church?     

Conclusion

The purpose of this treatise has been to explore two methodologies for communal living in the Catholic Church.  We framed the goal and archetypal narratives for each path, laid out the methodology of each path, and offered discernment skills considering one’s personality traits.  The end hope has been to offer food for thought for those who are in a process of discernment and reflective material for those already set on their path.

In the first section of this treatise we discussed the two paths themselves.  We theoretically divided various ways of understanding the vocational path and come to an understanding of two paths, married life and consecrated life and explored them as two differing approaches to the same goal of learning love.  After discerning which paths lay before us, we reviewed the major Christian narrative that each path uses to define itself.   For married life, the celestial narrative was Trinitarian love and the terrestrial manifestation being the First Parents in the Garden who image that love.  For consecrated life the celestial component was the Eschaton and the terrestrial component being the Body of Christ, a simple and manifold organic unity, mystically present as the Church.  Lastly we explored the bridge narrative of the Holy Family, where two “first parents” raise the Body of Christ, as a way to see how all stories can work in unison.  

In the second section we explored the methodology of each path.  The point of each path is to offer a community where one is free to explore, learn, and make mistakes in the pursuit of the practice of perfect love.  We began by discussing which path is the “higher calling”.  After discovering that each path is superior only for the one called to is we explored how each path is suited to different learning styles.  We discussed how the married path works small to big and operates on the “best friend” model.  Then we explored how the consecrated path works big to small and operates on the socialite model.

In the final section we laid out the discernment process for each path.  Each process included an opening gambit of basic data gathering, a process of partial commitment to explore the life and an event of firm commitment to the path.  Next we explored the particular personality traits that would be suited to a given path.  We explored how the married path is dynamic, while the consecrated path is singularly focused.  We considered religious virility as a factor to consider when discerning the path one will want to choose, marriage being for the religiously virile and consecrated life being for those who need the protection of an overtly religious culture.

A major concern when consecrated life is suggested to a young person is autonomy.  It is important to point out that each path offers differing restrictions and differing autonomy.  But Love demands both freedom and submission.  Each path offers freedoms.  For marriage it is the freedom to innovate with one’s religious life, with the relationship one has in one’s community, with the methodologies one has at hand to engage the world.  Consecrated life is seen as more limiting because one lives according to a pre established rule, but the freedom comes in the form of freedom from cares the the stressful demands of the world, such that one does have the stability and protection of the order to develop one’s spiritual life.  The limit to autonomy in marriage is the responsibility of crafting the order and possibly having completely dependent beings under your care.  Each way has much freedom to offer and, if taken seriously, much responsibility that limits autonomy. 

The final thing to remember is that there is no better vocational path for humanity, there is only a better vocational path for an individual who is seeking to learn to love their neighbor as an individual, as human families and as a human family.  This series of relationships only makes sense if one has the priority of loving God above all else.  If one has their priorities straight, one will doubtless be successful taking either path, because one relies of God, and they both lead to the same place.  But our vocational call is suited to our joys and our modes of being, so proper discernment is in our personal best interest.  Apart from that, if we open ourselves to God’s will, he can use us wherever we land.