Gaudete et exsultate: Community

I took some time to read Gaudete et exsultate. Anything I would say about it generally has already been posted here and there, so there's no need for me to repeat it. I do have some personal reflections to share, however, on this exhortation to holiness. This is the first.

In salvation history, the Lord saved one people. We are never completely ourselves unless we belong to a people. That is why no one is saved alone, as an isolated individual. Rather, God draws us to himself, taking into account the complex fabric of interpersonal relationships present in a human community. God wanted to enter into the life and history of a people. (6)

In religious life it's a commonplace to say that the reasons you entered are not the same reasons you have stayed. In the same way, what you anticipated as being the greatest challenges don't turn out to be the things you struggle with the most. Conversely, what seemed like an easy thing when you first professed can become a great struggle. I am sure that those who are married or in any other sort of particular vocation have analogous experiences.

When I made my religious profession, I had not thought much about the line, Therefore, I entrust myself with all my heart to this brotherhood. As time has gone on, however, I realize that this is one of the most challenging aspects of the whole business.


Sometimes I say, only half-jokingly at most, that obedience, poverty, and chastity aren't really the most challenging things in religious life. Rather, what you really miss is privacy. This isn't to say you were doing anything scandalous before you entered that had to be kept secret, but just means that you had a space, like an apartment for example, that was your own. And nobody was ever in it except at your invitation.

There's a spiritual level to the same challenge. In entrusting myself to the brotherhood, I renounce the interior space of discernment into which nobody else can come except at my invitation. After all, the heart of Franciscan life is living sine proprio, without anything of one's own. And in the journey of letting go, the hardest possessions and territories are the interior ones.

This goes with the vow of obedience in the sense that the vow is a confession that God has given me the grace to follow the path of salvation that he wills for me within the brotherhood. This means that my discernment of that path does not belong entirely, or perhaps even mostly, to me.

There can be a great relief in this, in the realization that I am not alone, that I don't have to do it all by myself. But there is also an experience of the Cross when I see how it limits my life; what will become of my earthly life comes to be profoundly conditioned by the realities of the brotherhood at and in my particular historical time and place. And though consent to salvation and cooperation with grace is ultimately up to the individual who decides to surrender to God's desire to make him a saint or not, God does not will that this process of salvation take place in an isolated way or in an abstract kind of community. Rather, salvation takes place by being a member of the Body of Christ, the Church on her pilgrimage through time, a Body that is mysteriously both divine and human in such a way that the two are distinct but indivisible, and in which each of the baptized becomes a member in a particular, unique, and unrepeatable way.

Of course it's very beautiful when you state it in this theological way, and it can be very consoling at the times when you feel supported. But it can be difficult when you think, or are even certain, that you know better than your superiors, or that you could fulfill more of your potential if it weren't for the imperfections of the community. This, however, is the most elementary ascesis of holy obedience. The more difficult moment is when you see plainly the ways your own possibilities are limited by the negligence, failures, and even the sins of others.

But this too can be grace when you realize and embrace it as a small taste of solidarity with the poor of the world, who have no choice but to have their options and lives limited by the indifference and sins of the powerful. And when you let that tiny taste of solidarity turn into into compassion for your fellow poor people, then you have truly come to know the burning love of Christ crucified.

Therefore, I entrust myself with all my heart to this brotherhood.