Book: 'A Future Full of Hope?' edited by Gemma Simmonds CJ

A Future Full of Hope?
Edited by Gemma Simmonds CJ
The Columba Press

This collection of essays discusses why young people enter religious orders, charting the split between the prophetic model (living within poor communities, teaching, providing health and other services) and the observant model (more traditionally monastic).

It is argued there is a recent increase in young people committing themselves to holy orders because they are attracted to life "in the desert," rather than at the coal face of social deprivation. They yearn for the certainly of ritual, obedience, prayer and contemplation, and there is disenchantment with religious orders that are not visibly religious.

But Gregory Collins warns, "The attempted re-invention of tradition generally generates kitsch and kitsch in the spiritual life in particularly debilitating... A renewed theology of religious life is needed not to rebuild our holy ghettos but to equip contemporary religious for living and working where they ought to be - on the frontiers of the church's mission to the world..... Yet we ought to make sure that it really is the God of Christian revelation we are serving and not some bland, ersatz, new-age divinity projected out of our own needs." At the heart of this debate is the tension between those who are focused more on being than doing, Collins suggests. "The paths of contemplation and action seem to have become an either/or choice."

Joanna Gilbert interviews young people who are motivated by the boldness of looking different, by the closeness of the community they joined, and its sense of integrity, structure and discipline. They seek a way of life rooted in a relationship with Christ, and a deep encounter with Christ in the silence of personal prayer, study and scared reading. They are attracted by teaching that has not been watered down, even if it is difficult, (something that Anglicans might wish to reflect upon, since they seem to ask less and less of their members).

Gemma Simmonds asks if the desire to be distinctive is an expression of "spiritual narcissism, psycho-social immaturity and world denying ecclesiology, or is there a wisdom within this desire that we would be foolish to ignore?" To those who yearn for visibility and the external trappings, she contends that thousands lived religious life in "heroic fidelity" under the Soviet regime while deprived of all its external trappings. "Most thinking adults in search of the common good live out some version of the vows in terms of limiting consumption, pursuing single-hearted and non-instrumental relationships and being willing to live with the good of the community as well as their own personal preferences."

James Sweeney CP argues that the "cultural 'spirituality' which is much in vogue today is at odds with Christian spirituality." He suggests that prophetic religious, working in the community, attract so few recruits now because the radical mission of Vatican Two was ill-defined. By contrast the newer, more popular movements' stress on "continuity, tradition and less worldly values such as Eucharistic adoration, Marian devotion, and loyalty to the papacy" are more specific.