I’m back. I was pretty busy during December, so I did not have a chance to post anything. I wish I did have the time because St. Augustine wrote wonderful things regarding the birth of Christ.
I hope all you who read this blog, had a wonderful Christmas season, and I hope for you an increase of hope, faith, and love this 2009.
The topic of this first post for this year is religious vows. Religious brothers and sisters make vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Fr. Tom Whelan OSA, gave a great meditation of the vows last year in June during the first profession of vows of Br. John Payne OSA. Here are his words:
The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience which you make for the first time today, John; and which you renew again today Tom, Kirk, Ronnie and Mark, are vows which don’t make much sense to the greater part of our nation and (if truth be told) even to some Catholics.
The readings you chose throw some light on the meaning of the vows. In the Gospel passage, Jesus says, “my yolk is easy and my burden is light.” A yolk is a wooden piece put on the shoulders of an ox. It is measured and made just for one particular ox’s shoulders to make it as easy as possible for him to pull the burden. The burdens which the Lord gives you are light because his yolk to help you carry them is fitted just to you: not someone else’s graces, but graces just for you.
Some think of it as privation that you take a vow of poverty. Yet or first reading from the Acts of the Apostles pictures the Apostolic community, the small band of early Christians, as being happy: calling nothing their own but having all things in common. It pictures them as having meals happily together, and praying together. That is the life you are pledging yourselves to.
This is quite different from looking at the vows as a path to a sort of Buddhist type of self-protection: which would have a vow of poverty to become personally detached from worldly possessions; and would have a vow of chastity to become indifferent to the natural desire to have human affections; or a bow of obedience to counteract overbearing self-will.
And it is also quite different from a kind of utilitarian approach to the vows: not being attached to the worldly goods or being attached to a wife or to self-direction, in order to be available to the Church – to be able to move quickly from one ministry to another or from one country to another, because we are free of all human attachments.
Rather, I think the responsorial psalm might be closer to the meaning of your pledges today: “Taste and see how good the Lord is. Happy the one who takes refuge in Him.”
My friends, the love which we have for other humans, whether it is for a partner in marriage or whether it is love for a friend, is a love which tends to leave us at times with a tiny bit of dissatisfaction… we always feel that there could be something more. That is what led St. Augustine to say to God: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
My brothers, I think it is probably your growing personal relationship with the Lord which makes you say: “All worldly goods are nothing in comparison with possessing the Lord” …and so the vow of poverty is easy. The growth of your personal relationship with the Lord might make you say, “No other relationship is as important as my relationship with the Lord,” and so the vow of chastity is possible for you. And the Lord of your personal relationship with the Lord makes you feel that you would rather do his will than your own, and so, the vow of obedience becomes possible. I think that the vows for you are a way of drawing closer to the Lord.
Carlos J. Medina
Pre-Novice
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