Counsels for the baptized

...Such a makes possible a fundamentally different experience of the world which allows one to see it differently...

...To what degree can hierarchical prerogative be shared by the lay person...

...What is being said is that the vows of religious are one of many forms that the evangelical repudiation of the dominance of money, sex, and power can take...

...What is required is not a clearer defimtioja of die virtues in terms of an enlarged but still precisely defined repertoire of behavior, but die ability and willingness to see beyond die basic to what more may be involved in a particular situation...

...Emphasizing more clearly die universal call (to die evangelical virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience) would be a significant force in communicating to the laity their binding obligation to realize such virtues in their own way...

...These developments have had major consequences for the church...

...The laity and their spirituality ought to be characterized by this Christian understanding of "this-worldliness...

...Our culture's "this-worldliness" assumes scientific "neutrality" — that it is possible to put aside the values and meanings which are necessary in order to live in the world in such a way that they will have no effect on the ability to know die world...

...the human pursuit of knowledge and truth strips them of their traditional urgency...

...The refusal to shirk such demands by forcing diem onto one's spouse, on sexual grounds, manifests one form of chastity's willingness to forego the advantages which the exploitation of another's sex may still afford...

...It is important to emphasize that none of the foregoing is calling die lay person to "become a Tiappist-Cistercian monk while living in the World," as Dom Aelred Graham caricatured 560 the young Thomas Merton's message many years ago...

...These questions are rarely asked, probably because an answer is assumed...

...There are a great many laity who are becoming very tired of being told, directly or indirectly, that these are not only different forms of the virtues represented by the evangelical counsels but that they are second-class forms as well...

...In short, there is pervasive in family life the call to the subjugation of self-will, the sharing of resources, and sexual integrity...

...poverty meant financial contribution...

...On the other hand, and this is the crucial-point,' the evangelical counsels do not pertain solely to the individuals who choose them as a way of life...

...Only the stories of particular lives can do justice to the diversity of concrete forms that the virtues can take, which is what the church's sanctoral cycle is all about...

...The church's Way of being "present to the world" is built upon the ascetical control of selfinterest in the cause of making one's own die Gospel and die experience of die world which die Gospel allows...

...The reality of most lay, lives is aot a cherch careferxw direct ecclesiastical work, not...

...The great sign of detachment from the worfcfand devotfon W God in the primitive church was martyrdom' When the legalization of Christianity put an end to martyrdom, monasticism, which had been developing since the third cerittiry.filled die vacuum...

...Perhaps the business* of the layperson ought to be to expose the limitations of the culture's view of the world...

...Questions about what these data...

...The attentive layperson today finds him or herself called to bring the church to a world which is increasingly uninterested in the church...

...The evangelical counsels are capable of symbolically embodying this apostolate for the laity...

...It is against this background that the extraordinary synod on...

...HUNTER BROWN Achurch which used to talk a great deal about heaven now talks a great deal about "the world...

...Family circumstances — like all other kinds of circumstances in all other* vocations — need not necessarily occasion a response of evangelical integrity...

...The willingness of parents to accept decades of constant interruption and demand entails the surrender of a good deal of self-will...

...The, basic characteristic of the church's "thisworldliness" is detachment, which aims at freeing the truth about the world from subservience to human self-interest...

...Second, it has been increasingly called upon to shove over and make more room on that back seat...

...The church's "this-worldliness" is built upon the willingness to allow the revelatory event of Jesus of Nazareth to destroy conventional and usually self-serving assumptions about what (and* who) is important, good, holy, powerful, meaningful, and even true...

...On the one hand, the apostolate of the laity — understood by the church in terms of bringing the Christian vision of meaning and value to human society — has acquired a much greaterurgericy in view of the intellectual, technological, and social developments at work today...

...The 558 flip side of die empiricist coin is the privatization (and relativization^of value and meaning...

...A reduction to only certain life states causes a disenfrancbisement of the laity and die form that such virtues take in their lives...

...The reality of most lay lives is not reflected in the activities of those who have a church career or are even directly involved in ecclesiastical work...

...To what extent, for example, can an exclusive association of the material implications of die Gospel with church support conceal ti» materialism of our culture or die susceptibility of all possessions to being means of establishing superiority over die people and functional independence from God...

...For example, until recently, poverty, chastity...

...For all this generation's disinterest in the church, it is intensely interested in the world and how human beings can live together in it...

...the laity will take place later this month...

...The poverty of religious is not just their personal poverty but the church's...

...Christian poverty, chastity, and obedience are elusive realities...

...that what puts one in contact with this world is the concrete encounter with, it, whether intellectually through toe, social sciences or politically . One constantly finds a basic cultural commitment to die primacy of empirical evidence yielding, truths which can be secured by the sheer weight of publicly verifiable data...

...Poverty, chastity, and obedience are die flip side of die coin of money, sex, and power, the three principal means by which we try to force the world to center upon ourselves...

...A Christian understanding of the nature and meaning of the world is but an equal among a wide variety of ¦ possible worldviews...

...Roman Catholicism, throughout its history, has hail a perennial commitment to symbolizing publicly — to incarnating — the values it embraces within itself in a mole hidden way...

...So varied and so subtle is such manipulation that die corresponding virtues must be afforded considerable flexibility if they are to flourish...

...This shift may make some lay people uncomfortable...

...The vast majority of dollars realized by the labors of family members ire spent on objects which are possessed and used in common...

...only be known as it truly is when it is known as ordered to God...

...obedience meant submagfcaft to church authority...

...Materially, family life is largely a surrendering of individual private property...

...It is important for the church to establish the distinctive character of its "this-worldliness" more clearly...

...even any desire for these,, but is the more elusive and difficult matter of figuring how their many commitments can be in some way suffused with which would give them a character different from what Jftey otherwise might have The issue is not how to add something more...

...It will judge the world which the Christian claims to have discovered in Christ on the basis of how that Christian lives...

...What exactly is it that allows for contact with this world, however...

...In other words, contact with this world is a function of religious faith, an effort that has traditionally involved a certain amount of asceticism...

...Lay passivity has for centuries relied heavily upon die stereotype diat mose in cdunsels have been called by God to satisfy the rigors of me Gospel on behalf of die rest of the community who cannot rise to such demands (and so need not seek what is beyond diem...

...They are capable of occurring under an extraordinary number of different conditions...

...If "what is true for you is true...

...Perhaps the distinctive apostolate which the laity will be called upon to exercise in the last years of the twentieth century will consist not so much in possessing a ready arsenal of explanations to appease a bewildered world already drowning in explanations, nor more formal,programs and activities...

...Christianity is expected to take its place alongside many other possible conceptual alternatives...

...My proposal is not meant to undermine the significance of religious life, but to call attention to that slate's role in representing the toil of an incalculable lay effort hidden in offices, factories, hospitals, and homes, etc...

...But it is wrong to reduce virtue to particular behaviors...

...obedience does involve respect (of mind and will) for church teaching...

...the ability to repose in the mystery of the world...

...Such hiddenness is related to the fact that obedience to die Gospel takes on a vast number of different forms, far beyond the simple absence of formal ownership and of physical sexual relations...

...The first step is to recognize that Christian spirituality, however perennial its basic features, has to be lived out under concrete circumstances, which give it a particular shape and a particular character in different generations...

...The counsels, in die end, can-give a public focus to a Christian ascetical "this-worldiness," quite at odds with our culture's empirically dominated and self-centered "this-worldliness...

...Chastity meant keepj«g.yottr hands from, if not your mind off, die body of someone to whom you were not married...

...Most of the ' efforts of lay people to maintain a Christian character in the material, sexual, and other dimensions of life go unseen...

...The lay apostolate may be the capacity to see in the world more than just a reflection of individual interests...

...For laity there are other forms...

...The Counsels still Carry such associations from the past, suggesting scparateheiii notil^ ministerial and sacerdotal, but alsospiritual Such an understanding of the counsels, however, does the do justice either to them or to the church as A wiiotfe...

...Mdnasticism's concrete1, physical abandonnientrof normal life - with its attendant commercial, D0 domestic dimensions — became a powerful symbol of tian commitment, tt was a symbol, however*, which relied upon certain Platonic assumptions about the necessity of looking beyond this transient, material world to pursuit of unteft with an impassible God lying outside change amHiistory...

...Poverty does involve church support...

...mean- or what they are worth - are left up to the individual to decide-privately...

...On the other hand, such urgency has run headlong into a cultural attitude which has so relativized the Christian message that die layperson' feels dutybouhd to remain neutral (even about religion...

...to "be with" another in a society increasingly committed to manipulation...

...First, the church has been more and more forced to take a back seat to the empirical sciences' quest for understand' ing...

...After being up all night with a sick child followed by a ten-hour shift in a mine, who canes about therights and powers of lay ministries in relation I© those of the hierarchy...

...arid obedience tended to be identified almost completely with a relatively narrow range of behavior...

...Until very recently, the spiritual ideal of detachment and devotion was represented for the lay person by the priest, the monk, and the religious...

...here is a very ancient strand of Christian thought, Texemplified particularly by St...

...From |f»e Christian base communities in Latin America, to the economic pastorals of die Canadian and U.S...

...Its temptation is to do the same thing it has criticized religious and celibates for having done in the past: imposing a self-interested agenda on everyone else — in this case, on the rest of the laity...

...It has been largely relativized...

...The reality of most lay lives is characterized, rather, by the altogether consuming business df trying to get and keep a job, pay the bills, sit up with sick children, battle with leaky pipes, and generally keep body and soul together...

...559 The traditional tendency for the symbolic force of the evangelic to be represented exclusively by the religious . wftb ^according to them is, however, an unwarranted limitation of the counsels' full ecclesiastical significance...

...For Augustine, the world can...

...Augustine, which stands in direct opposition to the cultural assumptions which demand such neutrality...

...An aggressive lay leadership which reads into the lay renewal Us preoccupation with its own place, vis a vis the hierarchy in the running of the church, risks falling far short of the needs of the hour...

...To what extent does a similarly narrow view of chastity as focused upon physical1 sexuality conceal die tendency to exploit the sex of anomer to gain influence over their personality, expectations, *nd" will...

...When members of the laity sometimes seek to live the counselsoorc publicly — ' the same counsels which are socially applauded win reaped to religious, — they are often regarded as fanatics, within as well as outside the church, derided for their efforts and summarily marginalized...

...It is also a generation with a keen nose for duplicity and ideology...

...This distinction between ascetical detachment and intellectual and moral neutrality is at the heart of the matter concerning the laity...

...It is important to recognize that the church's increased level of involvement in the world since Vatican rests on a significantly different set of assumptions fromthose which underlie the woridliness of modern, culture...

...Who is stepping on whose toes...

...One of the pitfalls lying before the coining synod is the ease with which the importance of this unique Vantage point can be obscured by a preoccupation with how the laity should behave...

...if the "people power" of the Philippines and the Uuy offered demonstrators at Seoul's Myongdond cathedcrf, recent events reflect a church deeply immersed in the sgnerijngs and joys of these distinctive times...

...It is this symbolic aspect of the counsels which needs to be brought into much greaterprominence today as a means of promoting the laity's as well as the clergy's proper collective self-understanding...

...As a colleague put it recently: "Nobody loses sleep over the question of God anymore...

...chastity does involve physical self-control...

...The church insists that individual self-interest does effect intellectual life — that we both see and act upon the world in accord not necessarily with what the •world itself is but in accord with what we want it to be, given our own individual interests...

...i K What does all this entail concretely...

...The exclusion of such matters from the mainstream of...

...Some religious might balk at an approach which seems to undermine die status of their calling...

...The wtilingftess to allow Christ's life to shape expertef however, requires the additional willingness fo set aside the private/interest which will be jeopardized by such0 areunderstand|{?gvit is a matter of asceticism, of de'tec|fn]|ntga detachment aimed not at escaping the world-but at awrdmg access to it, to being with the world rather than just using it...

...This distinguishes it from the cultural "this-worldliness" of intellectual and moral neutrality...

...A stronger emphasis upon the symbolic character of the counsels can bring into greater prominence the church's unique understanding of "this-worldliness" arid its direct relation to spiritual detachment...

...their chastity and obedience are, likewise, not just theirs but die whole church's...

...What enables one to live in the present rather than in an imagined future...

...Spirituality is a matter of ieatajng (or being willing) to see...

...In fact, it is precisely the distinctive vantage point of the church mat allows it, and especially its lay members, to, address the world's historical situation with a unique voice...

...To begin, widi, that all the baptized are bound by an obligation to take responsibility for interpreting their particular circumstances according to faith, and not to material, sexual, and individual self-interest...

...The result is die end- of discernment...

...There is nothing wrong widi associating certain kinds of behavior with such virtues...

...On the one hand, they represent an espousal of certain values by an individual who has felt called to them by God arid has responded by adopting a specific way of life...

...what is true for me is true," then debate is ' superfluous...

...to see not.just the world of one's own preference, hut God's World...

...Tlw evangelical counsels should be considered undtaf two aspects...

...These vocations were given their character, above all, by their avowal of the evangelical counsels ,-yvgoverty, chastity, and obedience Understanding the cal practice of these counsels is fundamental to dichotomy of "other-worldliness" and "this Christian history...

...The first thing which ought to be said about the synod, then, concerns what it should not attempt: its business is not to seek a clearer outline of what the laity should da, however tempting it is to move in that direction...

...any blueprint at alL It is, in other words, a matter of ity...

...When they do, however, they show that the family is included in the symbolic meaning of the evangelical counsels...

...There'corresponds to the public nature of die commitment of religious, the hidden nature of much lay life...

...In the most basic sense, they belong to the whole church because they are symbols of the whole church's call to sexual and material restraint and obedience to the Gospel...

...Etc., etc...

...As such, humanly speaking, the hardship and attendant credit iS owing to' such individuals and throws light back on diem and their efforts...

...Too close an association between die virttesand specific behavior impairs this capacity by fostering dieimpsession that, having fulfilled die minimal requirements* tm is relieved of further responsibility...

...To be more' specific than this is to move from theory to story...

...The distinguishing characteristic of the contemporary period is the emergence of a greater appreciation of the, sacramental value of "this" world...

...How Christians live in today's unfathomably complex world remains a matter of the ability to see the world in such a way that one can live peacefully with it even while trying to make it a more just place...

...What exactly is "thisworidliness...

...Theologically and sacramentally such a perspective is already concretely present in Vatican IPs emphasis on the universality of die call to sanctity and also in die Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which stresses die responsibilities incumbent upon all die baptized...

...It arbitarily circumscribes the full- exercise of die counsels as ' •symbols of what the life of every baptized person is supposed to involve...

...W counsels, as habits of life, also became art- inherent ipart>or' clerical existence, especially in view of me latter Vsacenidtai association with sacred objects...

...i Together, these developments have given a distinctive character to the laity's present situation...

...And to what extent has die traditional association of obedience with ecclesiastical conformity obscured die call to respond to die will of God in all situations, not just diose about which the church authorities have spoken specifically...

...Catholicism seems to have a peculiar penchant for turning potentially worthwhile debates into discussions about itself as an institution...

...Take family life...

...Who has which ministries in the church...

...As the synod on the laity approaches, it seems worthwhile to concentrate upon a spirituality capable of shaping the lay agenda — and of articulating a sense of what is needed given the incalculably diverse array of situations in which the laity find themselves...

...The assumption is...

...An examination of this ideal of detachment clarifies the close connection between so-called "traditional" spirituality and the church's new sense of "this-worldliness...

...The laity does not need a more detailed What we could use is assistance in functioning betite...

...A critical look atsuca a spirituality should, thereftre have an important place on the synod's agenda...

...561...

...What is needed is a shift in die popular understanding of the evangelical counsels, one that moves away from die traditional and almost exclusive association with world-abandonment and separateness from all things secular, and moves towards a recognition of die fundamental unity between the religious and the lay vocations...