The class assignment was a three-page paper on the theology of religious life. My first reaction was, “What theology? Consecrated religious women and men take the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and then live the charism of their order. That’s one sentence, not three pages.”
But, as with most aspects of the Catholic Church, things are more complicated than they first appear. The three evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience are meant as guides in a life lived in imitation of Jesus Christ. This isn’t a surprise – all Christians are called to follow Christ’s example, and he lived a life of poverty, chastity and obedience to the Father, as numerous Scripture verses attest. Looked at in this light, we all are asked to live by the counsels; to each of us Jesus says, “go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and come, follow me.” This doesn’t mean that we all are meant to enter religious life, but a closer look at the counsels reveals that they require sacrifices that open us to God’s grace.
Take poverty: We tend to think the word means to own no worldly goods, but that’s only one sense of the word. Jesus tells us that the poor in spirit will inherit the earth. Theologians tell us that to be poor in spirit is an acknowledgement of our dependency on God for everything from our very existence to our daily bread. Therefore, poverty can mean freedom from being ruled by material things.
This concept brought to mind an incident that occurred a few years ago. A Dominican friend loaned me one of his books, and on the inside flap was a label with a Latin phrase followed by his name. When I asked for a translation, he said the Latin meant “for the use of” – as a Dominican, he didn’t own the book, it was simply for his use. That was a lesson I try to keep in mind: Like him, like us all, I own nothing. Everything is simply for my use; and if I follow Christian principles I use wisely and for the purpose of bringing about the Kingdom and giving glory to God. In this way, poverty also opens us to spiritual goods, for if we are sated with what the world offers, we have no room for the gifts of God.
Chastity, too, has spiritual connotations. The word isn’t a synonym for celibacy; as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, it’s a form of self-mastery that can be applied to people in all states of life. Spouses can be chaste by remaining faithful to each other; single people can be chaste by not looking at others as potential sexual partners. In a sense it’s a sort of sexual poverty: By being chaste we renounce the allure of sex so that we can concentrate on other things.
Of the three evangelical counsels, obedience is the one with which I struggle most. I don’t want anyone to tell me what to do, to have power over me, and that includes God. Yes, I realize this contradicts what I just said about acknowledging that I and every other living thing on this earth depend on God for our very existence, but like Eve I’m tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I choose myself over God, repeating the original sin.
This desire to be goddess of my own life is, in fact, what adherence to the evangelical counsels guards against. I’ve always known that consecrated religious take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – what I didn’t know until now was that those counsels also apply to me. By practicing them I, like those in religious life, can better witness to the Kingdom of God in the world.
Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic.
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