On religious orders, marriage, and types of priests, continued

It breaks my heart when I go into a used book store and find books from defunct convents and orders of priests. If I had money and a place to put these books, I would buy them all. How sad that the gems of the past sit gathering dust while we are starving for good spiritual direction.

Thanks, Wiki

One such book is De State Religionis by Suarez. A version of his treatise

 was done by a Rev. William Humphrey of the Jesuits. Many nuns used Jesuit spirituality in the past and this is largely lost.

I want to continue by information on the different types of priests for this posting. Suarez, via Humphrey notes that St. Thomas Aquinas writes about the means and the ends of religious orders. The perfection of charity is ALWAYS the end and should be ours, as lay people as well.

Diversity of orders comes from the particular call of the founder. For example, St. Benedict and St. Stephen Harding used the same means to come to the same end. So too, the original military orders, of Alcantra and Calatrava, the Knights Templar and the Knights of Malta used similar rules for the same ends.

When I was in the monastery for two months, I was conforming to the Rule of Benedict as interpreted by the Cistercians in the Tyburn mold. The goal should be perfection through meditation and contemplation, in community. That community constitutes a corporate unity. Divine Providence and the directions of the Holy Ghost, states Humphrey, create this variety of ways of the orders, to the perfection of charity.

Marriage would be the normal way for the laity to arrive at such a height of perfection of charity. I was moved by the paragraph of Humphrey where he quotes Scripture..in My Father's House are many mansions.

The entire verse, from John 14.2 is this: In my Father's house there are many mansions. If not, I would have told you: because I go to prepare a place for you.

In 1977, I had a mini-dream regarding this passage. I was struggling being in a lay community which I was in from 1973 to 1979. I had been involved in multiple activities and was burnt out. I was living in common in a large group, broken up into households. The community at that time was over 2,000 people. This was in Minneapolis. The dream revealed a busy urban scene with the building of a skyscraper, very common in the Twin Cities at the time. The steel girders were in place and I saw a crane trying to take a rare, beautiful Louis Quatorze chair up to the top of this unfinished building. Then, I heard this Bible verse clearly. The point was that one does not put an expensive antique chair in an unfinished building. This was not my community, and it took me another 18 months to decide to leave. I am very persistent and committed. Also, my entire life had been given to this for many, many years.  I transferred to another community, and ended up doing my graduate degree at Notre Dame. From there I moved to England as I had fallen in love with the country on a visit in 1980. This, as part of Europe, was my spiritual home. 

The point is this. God has a place for us and only He can lead us. Just as the religious are called to a specific order, so too, we laity are called to a certain spirituality. The means are different, but the goal the same. I have suggested in this blog many times that charity, that is perfected love, cannot be found usually on one's own, living alone. Which is why I have encouraged commitment especially for the young.

My son has said that one of the problems with the generation of youth is that these youth have too many options. I think that is about to change.

I shall go back to the post on contemplation later. As lay people we must enter into some discipline of such in order to be perfected. This is difficult, but the only way to see God. As our state in life is not the objectively perfect state of the monastic orders, or the desert fathers, who as solitaries were still under obedience to their bishops, according to Suarez/Humphrey, we must enter into a perfection without being in the place where this happens most readily.

As Christ said to his disciples, With men this is impossible: but with God all things are possible. Matthew 19.26.