By Luke Bulley CP
Since joining the Passionists in 2015, I have slowly re-evaluated some of my earlier desires to have massive numbers of young people magically come rushing forward to join us. As wonderful as that would be, I understand that religious life in Australia is undergoing a radical reimagining. As the ACBC’s Pastoral Research Office report, Understanding Religious Vocation in Australia Today, states, “[We are left with] no doubt that religious life has a future in Australia, although the future will not look like the past, or even the present.” We are all being forced to step back and re-look at what God, through our charisms, is asking of us, and how we can move more efficiently into this future.
Jesus reminds us, quiet clearly, about how we are to deal with such change: “No one puts new wine into old wine skins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wine skins”. (Mark 2:22) This reimagining isn’t just about re-branding what we’ve always done with a shiny new label followed by the “same old, same old”. It’s about completely new structures, for our new ministries. It is in this spirit that a few of we younger religious based in Melbourne, have started organising joint ventures that cross individual congregational lines. While it feels strange, and sometimes scary to be venturing into unknown territory, we know that the Spirit which gives life to all things (cf. John 6:63) is at work in our midst.
We realise that as young, Australian religious, we are on the ‘Endangered Species’ list, and as the aforementioned report states, diminishment of religious life in Australia is inevitable. For us, this means that by necessity our focus cannot be our individual congregations, but must rather be about how we are able to work together. We know that we must seek out our similarities rather than our differences in order to promote our counter-cultural, communal way of living. As individuals, we are Franciscans, Dominicans, Capuchins, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Blessed Sacrament, Carmelites, Passionists. However, together we are religious. This is the life that we want to promote, and this is what we did at the beginning of October at Holy Cross Retreat Centre, Templestowe.
A few of us (Passionists, Franciscans, Dominicans & Capuchins) hosted a ‘Religious Life Discernment Weekend’. Our intent was not to promote our individual charisms, but rather we desired to promote our collective vocation, which we have each vowed to live in different ways. There were six men who attended the weekend, ranging from 18 to 46, all with a desire to question, rather than to join. We made sure that they knew that we weren’t there to pressure them into a certain way of living, to try and ‘poach’ them, as it can sometimes feel like on these retreats. God is the true Vocations Director, and we were simply attempting to give a bit of colour to the possibilities that lay before each of them.
We provided only two talks during the weekend, as well as a ‘Q&A’ session at the end. Seeing as though this is what our lives are based on, we also had a strong emphasis on prayer. We gathered three times each day for communal prayer from the Divine Office, and there was plenty of space and time for private prayer and meditation.
One of the most successful moments during the weekend was the Saturday afternoon, where there was an opportunity to have a conversation with any of the religious present. This went on for nearly four hours. It was powerful not in what was said during those conversations, but more that they happened. As philosopher Charles Taylor remarks, “Humanity is constituted in conversation”. It was the conversations themselves, rather than their contents, that enabled many of the participants to find some degree of clarity. Their vocational discernment continued to deepen through new questions. One of them remarked, “My questions have been answered, only to be replaced by a hundred more!”.
For a long time, the benchmark of ‘successful’ Vocations Ministry has been about numbers: how many joined? How many are interested in joining? Over this weekend, we challenged this notion. Each of us present acknowledged that the success of the weekend was determined by the clarity that the men had gained as to where God is calling them, rather than their desire to join religious life. If all six of them left thinking “religious life definitely isn’t for me!” then we would still consider it a successful weekend, because we helped them in closing one door, so that they might open another. That being said, there was certainly a sense of hope amongst us that over the coming years, working together rather than separately, we might guide those with a vocation to religious life (of which I have no doubt there are still many) to where God is asking them to be.
We have hope. We know that religious life won’t return to how it was in past decades. However, we also know that it is through our hope, and through our joy in living our own vocation as religious, that others are able to consider more seriously this way of living. This is reflected in the same report I mentioned above: “If it [joy and fulfilment] is evident from the lives of those already involved, then religious life becomes far more attractive to those on the periphery who are thinking about embracing this vocation”.
So, here we are, pouring our new wine into our new wineskins, and what a party it’s shaping up to be!