Religious Living as Communities of Hope
Looking at the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine from north gardens in mid-February of this year.
With fewer consecrated Catholic women Religious today, their witness to a world searching for meaning is more difficult to both see and understand for many Catholics. This month I will briefly highlight one part of a Catholic theologian’s view of religious life since it ties in with the Jubilee 2025 theme of Pilgrims of Hope. The theologian is Sister Maria Cimperman, RSCJ, who wrote Religious Life for Our World: Creating Communities of Hope (2020). Another Catholic theologian I will reference, who is also quoted in Cimperman’s book, is Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM.
This book by Sister Maria Cimperman, RSCJ, was published in 2020.
My reflections are centered on a diagram Cimperman uses to connect the call to religious life, charism, and vows on page 67 of her book. She writes that “Our call from God and the cries around us move us to act in response through the lens of charism. We respond then through our vows, which are each lived out in prayer, community, and ministry.” At the top of the diagram is God’s call, which is a unique personal story. Something happens to us and we become aware of God’s passionate love for us and feel a call to deepen that love relationship. For a religious, God is enough. As Sandra Schneiders writes, “Religious life is a life, a total self-gift, all that I am with nothing held back, from the moment of my profession to my last breath.”
From Maria Cimperman’s book on Religious life, page. 67.
Religious live their call in a particular congregation or institute with a particular charism. Charisms can be understood as a particular lens looking at Gospel values or virtues. The reality/context are the cries of the people and the cries of the world at this time. For Maria Cimperman, the cries were seen as the following: (1) violence, (2) migration, (3) poverty, (4) earth sustainability, and (5) hunger for meaning and belonging - a “holy longing” in the words of Ron Rolheiser, OMI.
I will conclude this month’s blog with a quote from Sister Sandra Schneiders on religious life which I find both challenging and beautiful. You may need to read it more than once as it is rather long and deep!
“The vocation to the single-hearted, life-long, exclusive-of-all-alternatives quest for God above and beyond and through and for all that one human life has to offer will continue to arise and to reverberate in some hearts. And that some will be enough - not, perhaps, to run a countrywide school system or even a diocese or to socially transform the world or society, much less the Church - but to witness in this world to the absolute intimate transcendence of a God who delights to be among humans and needs humans whose incandescent love of that God will manifest God in the world.”
The view of the Motherhouse grounds from the second floor of the Motherhouse in mid February 2025 on a cloudy day.