Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience

I know it's been a while since I posted anything substantive. It's mostly just been so busy--the last week of the semester is upon us (thankfully), and I have papers to grade!

I'm in a good place generally. The good news is that I have been given permission to move forward with my application. I'm so happy! There is a lot of work to do with it, and a lot of discernment still in my path.... But it is work that helps me grow, and so I'm thankful for it.

One of the things on my mind lately is that last vow -- obedience. I've thought a lot about the other two, and I think for now they are settled in my mind. I don't think they will be easy to follow all the time, but I think I can come to terms with them and have started to already. I know that living them is freeing, that it leaves me open to love and to serve more completely.

Obedience is coming up now, as I realize that I want to decide where I go for my candidacy year (God willing that I am accepted). There are certain things I want to do and certain places I would rather spend that year. I am so accustomed to making all the decisions about my life and my job, about where I live and what I am doing, that I think it only just dawned on me that I need to let that go.

I think that the Society generally listens to its members and works with their talents, so I don't imagine that I will be completely excluded from the process. But I want to be in complete control! That is what I need to let go of.

I guess, what I am praying for now, is the freedom in my heart to walk away joyfully from university teaching, if that is where the Spirit blows.

Holiness and Responsibility

A friend just gave me a copy of Life and Holiness by Thomas Merton, and I was struck by this sentence from the introduction:

Christian holiness in our age means more than ever the awareness of our common responsibility to cooperate with the mysterious designs of God for the human race.

This reminds me of some of the things I have been talking about with my spiritual director. He speaks of doing God's will in the sense of knowing that what I do is the will of God. It's hard to express (he is much clearer than I am), but I get the sense that he means this type of cooperation with God's designs. We cooperate with God and follow his designs when we do God's will.

I also think about how freeing this must be--to focus so completely on God's will that we lose our desire for material wealth and earthly acclaim. As I look more deeply into myself and my desire to follow God's call into religious life, I begin to see that these things bind me in ways that I never realized. I don't even think that I am particularly ambitious, yet those bonds are still there. I know that I am bound by my desire to be successful at my job in a way that is somehow quantifiable. Once I "name" that desire, I recognize that in it I will never find happiness, that ultimately my happiness is in doing my job well because it is the will of God that I do the job!


Those are my small thoughts tonight.