Rant Follow Up

I received a couple of bits of salutary feedback on yesterday's post; I won't say 'fraternal correction,' just fraternal thoughts.

Though we can't always agree with or support certain choices of our brothers and sisters in religious life--or in the faith, for that matter--we can try to understand them and of course we are commanded by the Lord to love them. Probably just as many us around my age find some of the choices of our fathers and mothers in religious life hard to understand, so probably they found their spiritual forebears difficult as well. And probably when I get even older there will be younger friars who think I'm crazy and that my priorities are out of order.

To one degree or another, we are all conditioned by our experience and our historical moment in the world and in the Church as she exists in time (the Church Militant, if the traditional term is still retrievable), and this can have a great effect on the particular things we care about as well as our blind spots. I know well enough that there are aspects of the religious life at which I don't excel because of my deficits and the injuries of my own story.

I am proud of my resistance to the abuse of the liturgy and my unwillingness to participate in it. Once or twice I have had the happy occasion to suffer humiliation for it. But this doesn't mean I don't love or perhaps very much respect my brother. I understand that our choices arise in part from the complex places we come from. And I am grateful for all the ways I am sure that the brothers make similar allowances for me in the areas where my religious life is deficient and less than coherent.