Living Waters from Within:
by Associate Leah Curtin The North American Conference of Associates and Religious (NACAR) was established in 1996 by affirmation at a national gathering of associates and religious held in Marriottsville, MD. Today, the North American Conference of Associates and Religious finds itself actively involved in the growth of the associate movement throughout the United States and Canada. NACAR also plans a yearly conference during the first weekend in May in various geographic areas of the U.S. and Canada. In 2006, in Cincinnati, OH, NACAR's annual meeting focused on “Rivers of Living Water from Within.” Eight Franciscan Sisters of the Poor and five Associates attended to help NACAR celebrate its 10th Anniversary.
The keynote speaker was Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, who addressed prophecy in terms of trying to name our faith and our Ecclesial Moment. He pointed out that prophecy is not predicting the future, but of properly naming the present moment, and finding the finger of God in it, both in terms of consolation and in terms of judgment. An exercise in analysis and in prayer. A process that is both difficult and important. Rolheiser began his address by reminding us that we are living at the beginning of the 21st century in what is a secular culture, both for good and for ill. Both the right and the left have misdiagnosed our moment. The right views the culture as a cesspool of relativity – the left as a moral high ground. Neither is accurate. Secularism is not the enemy of the church: it is the child of the union between Judaism and Christianity. Like a child, it can sometimes be belligerent but it is not our enemy. Rolheiser went on to name eight characteristics of our culture – and our faith moment: • Radical Freedom: In terms of opportunity, we are the freest people to ever walk this planet. Our options and opportunities are so great that they become a burden, an over-choice. We find it difficult to commit ourselves to marriage, to a vocation, to a career, even to a friendship precisely because we have so many choices. While Freedom is a great gift, we have all hurt others and ourselves through its misuse. However, freedom remains the greatest gift God has given us, even though we don't always use it maturely. It is not uncommon to hear sincere, good hearted people hold that freedom should be restricted in the name of God, church, and morality. While they are sincere, they are also misguided. Something doesn't become bad just because it's misused. What's needed today is not less freedom but more maturity. Freedom should not be rolled back in the name of God and morality! Simply put, we are often too immature to carry properly the great gift of freedom that God has given us. But that does not mean that we should try to force people to live according to God's Word: that's the mistake Christians made in the Inquisition – and it's the mistake that Al-Qaeda is making today. To walk in freedom, but not compromise ourselves in doing so, we must invite a deeper maturity so as to more properly honor the great gift that we have been given. • Atheism and Agnosticism : We live in a culture where agnosticism and even atheism are part of our everyday consciousness. What does that mean? It means that neither culture nor family carry the religion for you any longer. Many of us grew up in a neighborhood where everyone went to church, and family expected it…Parents led grace before meals, and children prayed before going to bed. Stores closed on Sundays. It was like God-consciousness was woven into the fabric of daily life. The point here is that family, school, and even the marketplace, supported a God-centered world. Now we have to seek God on our own – consciously. We can still find God-consciousness in today's culture, but confined to only a few special places and times. God is not in daily life: our super-busy, activities-centered family lives are by and large, free of any vestige of God. And malls, TV, money markets, and so forth operate as if there is no God. Today, then, nobody carries the faith for you any more …and that means that you need to develop for yourself a deep inner directedness. • An Intoxicating Culture: Western Culture is the most powerful narcotic ever perpetrated on this planet. It is overpoweringly materialistic: the imperialism of Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Disneyland and the Rock industry is taking over the world. One of the great prayer images is found in Daniel where the prophet writes about a time of great debauchery. Three young men resisted it…so the king tossed them into a furnace stoked to seven times the usual heat. But when he opened the furnace, the young men were fine, walking around and singing sacred songs. So an astonished king says ‘Truly your God, must be a Living God!' In today's culture, the flames of ambition, restlessness, greed, sex, notoriety, jealously and anger are seven times hotter than in the past because we are exposed to them sevenfold in TV, movies, advertising, money, books, newspapers and on the internet. The behaviors associated with these emotions are thus universalized -- and presented as ‘expected' behaviors. Hyper-stimulated, we become hyper-restless, and it does things to us. Restlessness makes our lives empty even when they are full . It's important to name this, own it, and deal with it. The flames are indeed seven times hotter and unless we are singing sacred songs, these flames will scorch us. • A powerful individualism: Excessive emphasis on individuality is leading to the death of public life. There is an ingrained belief that no one -- not church, parents, society or anybody else -- should interfere with my life -- which has little to do with the ideals of interdependence or of the Mystical Body of Christ. Locked in our own egos, we wonder why we are lonely! We've lost all sense of community, and we want family around only for certain occasions and for prescribed lengths of time. The fabric woven of time and friendship and love and community has given way to a private cloak of threadbare selfishness. This is why parish, community, church and public life are suffering. And it is what leads to intense loneliness. • Moral Loneliness: Loneliness lies at the very center of our lives. Feeling lonely, restless, and set apart isn't something we experience at the edges of our lives. It's a fire that burns at the heart. We aren't restful beings who occasionally get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience rest. And this is true at every level of our being: body, psyche, soul, and sexuality. But where we are most alone is in the moral center of our souls: that place where all that is most precious to us is held, cherished, and guarded. Your moral center is where you are most real. It's where you ‘remember' that you were kissed by God. It is precisely in this place, that we feel violated when what is precious to our integrity is attacked. Our deepest loneliness is for a kindred soul, a soul-mate in the truest sense of that phrase. Great friendships and great marriages always have moral affinity as their real basis. In the experience of moral affinity we have the experience of "coming home." Most of us spend our lives looking for this and never quite find it. What's to be done? If we choose the radical individualism as described above, we condemn ourselves either to promiscuity (using others, taking what we want) or to life-long isolation. Therese of Lisieux suggests … that we can only overcome this loneliness through a certain mysticism, which I describe as ‘sleeping with' each other in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, and fidelity. • Simultaneous Multiple Generations – even within generations: Not everyone alive at the same time belongs to the same generation! Moreover, there are many ‘generations' within each generation. Moderns, post moderns and anti-moderns share the same pews, polling places, marketplaces and airwaves – and that's why our problems are so complex. For example, we now have 2 ½ very separate generations of Catholics since Vatican II…and on top of that, there isn't one ‘middle age Catholic' or ‘young Catholic' or ‘older Catholic', there are generations within generations – with all the concomitant tension that this implies. None of us likes to live in tension and the temptation is always to try to resolve it – which often leads to a resolution that is premature, simplistic, and too much dictated by liberal or conservative ideology. Thus, if I'm a conservative, my sense will be that things are clear, but get confused because false freedom sets itself against truth and community. My itch will be to resolve tension and differences by appealing to authority, dogma, tradition, law, and rubrics, but without an equal appeal to the complexity of life and individual freedom. Conversely, if I'm a liberal, my approach to understanding things will be to start from life's ambiguity rather than from its clarity. My worry will be that complexity and private conscience are not being sufficiently respected and my itch (suffered in the name of conscience, freedom, and the spirit) will be to resolve issues without an equal appeal to tradition, dogma, authority, and law. Who's right here? Neither and both. There is an important place both for authority and conscience, dogma and truth's incapacity to be captured in any one formula, and for the demands of church and the demands of individual freedom. The secret is to respect both, refuse to betray either, and then accept the tension that ensues. • A Bewildering Pluralism: We are becoming multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ideological, multi-everything. This is good , but we are not ready for it and it's bewildering a lot of people. Thus two things are happening, neither of them is good. On the one hand, people, overwhelmed with pluralism, embrace relativity: everything is the same and it doesn't matter what you believe. We are simply wandering around the Sinai Peninsula. In many ways, at least in the Western world, that's exactly where the church is today: in the desert, in a dark night, lost, being pruned, undergoing a purifying alchemy. We're experiencing public humiliation in the sexual abuse scandal, in our graying and emptying churches, and in the strong anti-clericalism inside our culture. We're aging, unsure of ourselves, lacking in vocations, and becoming ever more marginalized. We seem to be lost, but lost is a place, too: a place we sometimes need to be. From the edges, humbled and insecure, we can again become church. On the other hand, and far more dangerous, is that bewildered people yearn for clarity. The need for clarity inevitably takes the form of boundaries and dogmas – and religion by force. Even within the Church itself, liberals and conservatives don't talk to each other any more. You see fundamentalism everywhere. People are looking for boundaries. Anything for an anchor is a sea of relativity. We have to understand that and where it's coming from. We older ones had roots , but today's young people have never had roots, never experienced stability – which leads to a neo-conservatism, a doctrinaire – even militant – fundamentalism. The need for clarity trumps truth every time. God is about justice, wisdom and compassion. Not about dogma, or catechism or even boundaries. Indeed, we all go through a stage where boundaries and rules are essential, but the essence of religion is to have a heart like God's: you can embrace everyone. Charity, joy, peace, patience – these are the gifts of the Spirit – not in bitterness, anger and contention. Only when we embrace the Spirit – and give Its gifts to one another -- will we find a way out of this conundrum. • A Struggle to Stay Centered: This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious in the face of bitterness, jealousy, and hatred? That is the litmus test of love. It's also one of the deeper invitations to maturity. Everywhere in our world - in our most intimate relationships, in our families, in our workplaces, in our churches, and in society as a whole - we find ourselves in situations where we meet suspicion, jealousy, coldness, distrust, bitterness, and withdrawal. Our world is often a hard, rather than an intimate, place. The challenge is to offer a heart that creates a space for warmth, transparency, mellowness, vulnerability, and trust inside of hard places. The challenge is to offer our hearts as a space within which people can be honest, where nobody has to assert him/her self, where no games of pretense need to be played, and where intimacy isn't held hostage to the momentary fears, jealousies, hurts, and emotional acting out that forever assail us. When times are bitter, angry, cold, full of disrespect, and fraught with jealousy, when it seems everyone is withdrawing into his or her own world, when most everything seems a lie, and when we are feeling most hurt, taken for granted, and marginalized, what's called for is not less, but more, attention to the quality of graciousness within our response. What's needed most in a bitter time is a mellow heart. The CARA REPORTS Delegates discussed Rolheiser's speech, shared insights, and celebrated their founding mothers with accolades and awards. We also learned a great deal from two studies NACAR commissioned from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University . The major findings of these include: From Associates: Most associates agree that regular contact with vowed religious and other associates, a formal foundation or orientation program, and participation in the institute's prayer and mission are key to fostering relationships among associates and religious; From Vowed Religious: 40% of responding vowed religious indicate that they never, or only rarely, have contact with an associate, but they are somewhat familiar with how associates are prepared and what they do, and between a third and a half report that they are encouraged to participate in activities for and with associates, but only about one to five percent or fewer say they actually do so. Comparison between Associates and Vowed Religious: Although associates report that a desire to work with vowed members and with other associates, vowed members are significantly less likely to perceive these as being very attractive to associates. In conclusion, I will quote Father Rolheiser: “Loneliness is what makes us poets, mystics, artists, philosophers, musicians, healers, and saints... But those [who]… invite us to believe that we are self-sufficient, that we can have community and family on our own terms, and that we can have God without dealing with each other, are wrong… God is community - and only in opening our lives in gracious hospitality will we ever understand that.” This weekend was an exercise in gracious hospitality and community. Most of us who attended, found God there.
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