When we do it, we want to enlarge the subject of it and talk about commitment in general. It's useful to do this to sort of wrap it up, at least on the level of commitments themselves, before we go back to Roberts and try to see some unity in the whole process the way he does, because his last couple of chapters are trying to find a kind of synthesis of monastic spirituality, which will be useful for us, but it's a little apart from this question of commitment itself, which is what we want to talk about now. So today I'd like to enlarge the subject of it and just talk about commitment, not just about local stability or stability to the community, but that's always implied. First of all, there are different ways that we can think about this. You can think about it as we've often been accustomed to do, just from the point of view of the commitment that one makes, from the point of view of the contract or the promise, because we've got a kind of a thing in us which turns on, which says, well, if you make a promise you ought to keep it, if you make a value ought to keep it, if you make a commitment,

[01:03]

then that commitment is an absolute for us. Now, we can say, well, that's just a legalistic way of thinking, it's just a juridical way of thinking. It can be. But there's something in us that wants to do that too, there's something pretty deep that wants to do that. In other words, that thing is in us, that principle is in us of the absoluteness, the permanence of a commitment, and it has to be, it sort of holds the field until it is out-argued. It has a certain validity to it. But the principle of absoluteness must not itself be allowed to be an absolute, in the sense that it's got to verify itself, it's got to prove its validity. Let me sound a little vague. There's this idea of not going back on a covenant, and of course we can't go back on our covenant with God, we can't go back on our fundamental covenant with God, because that's just death, and that's just non-being. But it's a question of the secondary commitments that we make in order to realize this fundamental

[02:07]

commitment with God, this fundamental covenant that we have. Okay, one way is from that side, from the principle of fidelity, or of a commitment. Another way is the existential side, the humanistic side, in which we ask, well, is this thing working? What is this producing in my own experience? From a human point of view, what's happening in this relationship, in this commitment? Is it producing a kind of fulfillment, a kind of realization? Am I growing? Is something happening in my life? Or am I standing still or going backwards? And this is the point of view from which people are most likely to look at commitments today. And there's certainly a lot of good in that, but the obvious danger of not allowing for that factor which is beyond our own experience. In other words, if you take it the first way, just according to the principle of commitment, the covenant that's been made, what we call, you can't call it a juridical way, the danger

[03:09]

is you never relate it to what's happening in yourself, so you can just die, you can just wither in a fruitless commitment without ever even making a move to get free of it and to find the sources of life once again. But in the second way, what you can do is, if you judge everything by your experience, you can live from day to day and never allow your experience to deepen because you never allow anything to get out of sight, because you're always just gauging yourself, engaging your commitments and therefore sort of the size of your life and of your growth by the day to day feedback, the day to day input. That's obvious enough that it needs to be thought about. So these two different points of view, each of them has its limitations and in some way they have to be worked together. Our ultimate question, of course, would be, well, what's God's will? But that's another one of those just opaque questions, you know. What's God's will? It doesn't usually have an answer in its own terms, okay? Because God doesn't tell us, this is my will, or whatever. We have to get it from somewhere else and we have to laboriously work it through.

[04:11]

In fact, we seem to be doing God's will while we're trying to find it. That's one of the consolations of this whole thing, that the search for God's will, when it's painstakingly undertaken, is itself God's will at that time. Because what are we looking for? We're not just looking for God's will as something distinct from him, rather. God's will is kind of an object. We're seeking him. And if we're seeking him, then we're already doing his will. So we don't have to get disconsolate about not knowing precisely what his will is for us. Sometimes that's that effort to have some concrete anchor, some concrete hook, on which to hook my life to give it significance. In other words, to want to make my life worthwhile by giving it some external guarantee that says I'm doing something good, I'm doing something worthwhile, you know. I'm in the right category, I'm in the right place, I'm plugged in correctly, and therefore I have significance, therefore my life has meaning. Yeah, but if I'm seeking God, that's true. It's not that I have to have a will of God, which gives me the satisfaction of knowing

[05:14]

that I'm fulfilling it. Because in a way that can be the Pharisaic thing, can't it? It can be the thing of the scribes and Pharisees, to have an external standard by which to guarantee their rightness, their righteousness. And that's exactly what we're not given. So that insecurity of not being sure that I'm doing God's will, if it's the right kind of, if it moves us in the right way, to a search, a really painstaking search, to work out our salvation of spirit and family, as St. Paul says, is our doing of the will of God. And it's always going to be that way to a greater or lesser extent in this way. We know that even the saints have to go through a great insecurity, even the saints have to go through a real purgatory of suspension, of not being sure that they're doing the right thing, and of all kinds of fears about their own salvation. But it's the very tension that we preserve in the fear, the tension that we preserve in that insecurity,

[06:15]

the tension of intensity and intentionality and movement towards God that keeps us going. And that maybe just keeping the end of one finger above the whatever, that is the guarantee that we're doing the will of God. Because the will of God is not a thing, and we're not going to get there and do it and then say, I've done it. It's not that way at all. The will of God is our life, which is straining towards him. Okay. I want to spend some time with this book by Father Hoy. I ought to have learned how to pronounce his name, but I'm going to write to him and ask him. It's a beautiful book. I finally went through it again. I read it several years ago. It's a marvelous book. The whole question of... I don't think you can find anything better on it. He takes it, first of all, from the existential point of view. And his criterion is going to be communion.

[07:16]

Is communion verified in this particular commitment, in this particular vow or whatever it may be? And then, in the end, the first part of his book is a kind of analysis of the whole matter of communion and commitment and how they fit together. And then the second part of the book is purely theological, where he takes the New Testament. And, first of all, he takes the Trinity, the commitment of the Father to the Son and the commitment of Jesus to the Father. And then he takes certain people in the New Testament, a few of the parables. He takes Mary. He takes St. Paul. And I thought that was particularly rich. And then some of the people that Jesus invites to follow him. And then, finally, he winds it up with a discussion of God's fidelity, which is really the basis, the core of our fidelity. So it's a very good treatment. And for that reason, I'd like to spend some time with it. I think it helps to put this whole question in perspective. Whereas, with Roberts, we don't find that same unity or that same power.

[08:18]

And can anyone say, or should anyone say, forever? The title doesn't do justice to the content. Like his book on the Holy Spirit, he entitled it The Conspiracy of God, which is a pun. Conspiracy means breathing along with, you know. So, I don't know why he chooses those terms. Okay, so be a little bit patient with this, because I think he gets it all pretty well together. He starts talking about what's involved in a commitment. He talks about choice and the ability to make a choice. And then he talks about promises. And the way that so much importance depends on promises. These are things that are not so much prized today. In fact, we're in a climate which tends to put promise a little bit in disfavor, a little bit in shadow.

[09:25]

But we really couldn't live without it. It would be superficial to let an analysis of the promise rest merely in terms of the obligations that promises entail. By making promises, a person goes far beyond the obligatory and beyond the here and now. He is saying to those to whom he gives his word that he is in charge of his own life and that he freely chooses to use his freedom to project himself into the future in the specific manner which he determines. He gives his word because he is free to do so and does so freely. But the word he gives puts him in communion with others. His word given takes on flesh. His future and the future of others are now intertwined by his own determination and intention. So, the relationship between freedom and a promise, it's not that we give up our freedom by making a promise. We determine our freedom in the sense of specifying it, in the sense of rooting it in the reality around us, and especially in the lives of other people. But that only makes our freedom real instead of merely an abstraction, instead of merely potential.

[10:27]

Our freedom becomes real. Rather than see this in a negative light, we should realize that the capacity of human beings to make and keep promises is also the surest way they have to free themselves, to determine themselves rather than be determined. As long as somehow we don't have a purpose which can be sustained, we are passive. We are determined by what hits us. We are determined by impressions and what we want. See, that's a mysterious thing. That what we feel that we want, the desire that arises from moment to moment, or the things that attract us, are not really our real freedom. Our real freedom has a different rhythm to it, a different rhythm which is deeper and which somehow moves through the center of our own being, the center of our own person. And so it's an all-at-once thing in a sense. It's a thing which, it's a total yes or a total no in some way. And it involves the whole of our life in some way. Which doesn't mean that we commit the whole of our life in each particular choice,

[11:29]

but somehow that it's all supposed to fit together on that basis. So there should be a kind of choice which engages, and a kind of promise, a kind of commitment which engages the whole of our life. Now we know there is on the purely religious, say on the purely theological level, on the level of commitment to God, the baptismal commitment. But our question is going to be, what does that involve on the secondary level? Commitment to a community and so on. To hold that one should not project oneself into the future by promise and suggest that a person must be imprisoned in the present. In other words, we make ourselves free even of our own future. But if you cut yourself off from the future, you're not one person anymore. And not to be one person is not to be free really. You're a bunch of different people. You're a different one at every moment. The paradox there makes it hard to see because the continuity of our person and the freedom of our person seem to be at one moment opposites, but they're really two ends of the same thing.

[12:30]

One puts oneself and others at the mercy and whim of the moment. By withholding one's word, one withholds oneself. One becomes a bystander in the drama of human existence or a participant on a merely provisional basis. So it's the difference of the freedom of non-engagement or the freedom of engagement. The freedom of non-engagement can be a pretty pitiful freedom because we're not alive. The freedom which does not allow the freedom of being alive is not much freedom. The other kind of freedom of engagement permits us to be alive. But our difficulty, our risk, of course, is to commit ourselves to something which then narrows us down and ties us to something which is too particular and which lowers us beneath the level of our own personal freedom, lowers us beneath the breadth, the sweep of our own freedom, our own person. We have those two ends. Non-engagement, which leaves you totally free and totally helpless,

[13:35]

totally, in a sense, in a suspended kind of life. And too particular engagement, which involves you intensely in life but in too narrow a way so that it really clips the wings of your freedom. One becomes a bystander in the drama of human existence or a participant on a merely provisional basis, even if one does not subscribe to these statements theoretically. In practice, one shows agreement with them by refusing to project oneself into the future by making promises. One is equivalently prizing isolation over communion and preserving oneself rather than giving oneself. All of one's treasure then must come from the present rather than the future. And, of course, the future is very important in a religious commitment because we're committing ourselves to something which is a future on our level even though it's present and eternal on God's level, on Christ's level. We're committing ourselves to our future. Now, he's brought in the term communion already here. One is prizing isolation over communion. Notice the two dimensions of that isolation.

[14:39]

Isolation from other people and from the environment around us. In other words, non-engagement means isolation. But isolation also from our future, in the sense that this moment becomes autonomous. So we become atomic individuals, in the sense of isolation from space, from other people, from life, isolation from time. What people mean when they say, I promise, determines the quality of social existence. Society is as fragile or as durable as the meaning people assign to promise words. In her book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt pinpoints the two factors that she finds essential to preserving life from chaos. The first deals with the past. Forgiveness is needed for the undoing of mistakes of the past. The second concerns the future, the faculty of making and keeping promises. The two great institutions of Western society were built on promises.

[15:40]

The Judeo-Christian religion grew out of the covenant promise God made to Abraham. And the Roman Empire built a legal system based on the inviolability of agreements and treaties. Our Western thing is really built on that basis. And so we're going to see later on that the stability element in Western society is extremely strong and factually overwhelming. And because it's so strong, we have this present movement away from it, this present climate which makes us even reluctant to think about these things very much. But we need to re-value them. We need to discover the value of them, in spite of the climate. The trouble is that you can never talk about the stable element, the static element, without bringing in the dynamic element soon. You can never talk about the particular without bringing in the mystery. You can never talk about the stable element without the becoming element. Never talk about the word without the spirit, in a sense.

[16:41]

And when we're talking this way, we're always talking about one and then bringing in the other one afterwards. So the discussion is always unsatisfactory. We always seem to be unfair or unbalanced or favoring one side over the other. It's only that you can't say everything at once. Okay, he talks then about the criterion of commitment, which is going to be for him love or indwelling or communion. The notion of indwelling, as he has it, you can see what he's pointing to, but I didn't find one concise expression which sums it all up and makes it intelligible. But for him it's the experience of falling in love, that's what it is. It's the experience of being sort of carried beyond yourself by being in love with somebody else. And that for him is the criterion of the validity of the commitment. And so the man-woman commitment and the religious commitment in monastic life become very parallel. One becomes the mirror image of the other, in a sense, the symbol of the other. I suspect that the image we have of indwelling operates as a paradigm

[17:47]

by which we measure the value of all commitments, both the ones we have made and those that might be made but which do not yet exist. This paradigm does not operate in a fully conscious manner, but I believe it does operate nonetheless since indwelling, the reality of love, is the milieu we were made for and seek. Being in love, that's hyphenated, completes being and is its raison d'etre, its reason for existence. Until we get there, our dissatisfaction will make us feel that we are not yet where we want to be. We'll talk a little more about that later. When it gets to Marcel and his notion of communion, that's just a beginning. I think it's kind of indisputable that that's what Christianity is about, is that experience of communion, if you read in the Testament. I think especially the first letter of St. John where it's everywhere.

[18:48]

We can also talk about freedom, but somehow here we seem to need to talk about communion. Then he talks about the possibility of over-commitment, and he might have found a better expression than over-commitment, but I don't have one in mind. It would be inappropriate commitment, something like that. In other words, it's not enough to make commitment. It's not enough to throw yourself into something. You can make a mistake, you can make a bad mistake, and a lot of evil is done by inappropriate commitments, or as he says, by over-commitment. The question arises from the opposite end of the spectrum. Can one be over-committed? Obviously one can have too many commitments and forfeit the possibility of being a free and integrated human being for that reason. But the over-commitment I have in mind here is of a different sort. It occurs when people pursue a commitment so exclusively that their lives become brittle and their horizons narrow,

[19:49]

even a good commitment. Their lives become brittle and their horizons narrow. By over-commitment I mean the investing of more of the self in the object of one's commitment than the object can or should deliver. This kind of over-commitment is much more socially destructive than non-commitment. And then he talks about fanaticism and so on. This whole business of the law in the Old Testament is in case of over-commitment. And every time you hear about idolatry of some kind, or the transference of all value to a limited object which is not able to have it, and therefore the total commitment of ourselves to some limited value, that's what's happened. And the cult phenomenon, you know, is a question of over-commitment, a kind of idolatry. Whenever something takes on the aura of God and we commit ourselves to it totally and it can't bear that commitment, that's what he's talking about. Now, can that happen in the monastic life?

[20:53]

Or can it happen in the church? It happens all the time in the church. And it's not that people, what should I say, are inappropriately committed to church structures and so on. It's only that they expect too much of it. If we expect too much of the law, if we expect too much of a community structure, if we expect too much of our asceticism, if we expect that that's going to get us there, you see, if we absolutize the fruitfulness of anything, anything less than God, then we're over-committing ourselves in a way. The basic commitment may be okay, but our expectations are exaggerated and so we're in for disappointment. Or we're in for a kind of slavery to that object to which we've over-committed ourselves. So you see, the thing that's in the background of our thinking here all the time is freedom when we're talking about this. If it takes away your freedom, then you've over-committed yourself. The real commitment eventually gives you freedom. At least it doesn't lead you into a narrowing thing, which permanently narrows down and never opens up.

[21:56]

The authentic commitment may narrow down, but then it will open out again. You know, it's like the narrator in the Gospel of the Kneeler's Eye, or whatever you like. It's a paschal experience. The one guilty of over-commitment places the object, a position, an organization, an ideology, a vocation, or whatever, in a position where it is asked to perform the functions of integration and direction and meaning, of identity almost, that the person alone should bear responsibility for. One loses all perspective. The object of one's commitment becomes all-consuming. One's identity merges into, rather than develops from, the commitment. One is not conscious of this, of course, at the time the commitment is made. I think there's always a mixture, usually a mixture of this in our commitments, and then gradually we have to learn that we've expected too much from what we've committed ourselves to, and the what I'm talking about is less than God, obviously, in this case.

[23:00]

The only person to whom total commitment is really justified is God, the only thing, the only object, and he's no thing and he's no object. We gradually wake up to the fact that we've had a kind of over-commitment, that we've expected too much, and then we gradually ourselves take over and begin to do what we were supposed to do in the first place. That is, we take back our responsibility. Because this thing is an effort to hand over our responsibility for living to something else, to hand over our freedom. That whole thing of the Grand Inquisitor, you remember, and Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus, who arrives at night, he tells him how they've arranged to take over all the freedom from the people, and the people have been just delighted to hand over their freedom. Their freedom to totally commit, over-commit themselves, by handing all of their freedom over to these governments, over to this institution, which is a kind of caricature of the Church.

[24:02]

And that happens only too much. And what happens then is that simple people remain immature. They don't grow because they really don't want to. And then there's always somebody there who will accept that freedom, accept that commitment and just keep them in that position, because there's a certain advantage on both sides. Also the guru thing, the whole guru phenomenon has a lot of this in it. The other person who seems to just bear that aura of power, has all the answers for you, and if you submit yourself to him, you're going to get the same power that he has. But what you do is you hand yourself over, you give your life to somebody else. And at the same time, hand over all that risk and that fear of having to discover and having to use our own freedom. Okay, then it gets into the question of permanence.

[25:04]

Why permanence? We've argued about that enough already. It shouldn't be necessary to say more, but I'll read his words about it. Permanence Apart from the intention of permanence and apart from the fact that the forms of most vows profess forever, what is the justification for so total and irrevocable a disposition of one's life? I believe the justification for this kind of human behavior comes down to this. A better way of growing has not been discovered than to put down roots. Adolescence is a time of inevitable, if awkward, growth. You've heard this said already in several different ways. But always coming back to this image of the seed and the ground. The physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the individual cannot but grow. It is a time of disengagement from the family. It is a period of diffusion. Possibilities are many but disjointed. Energy is dispersed in a zigzag way. One has to be an adolescent for a while. One shouldn't be an adolescent for long.

[26:09]

One can remain an adolescent throughout life, however. The perpetual adolescent withholds himself, refusing to put down roots. He dabbles with life rather than living it. This has a lot to say to our present culture, I think, especially the spiritual scene, I think, in California and such places. The possibility of remaining an adolescent forever. The possibility of remaining a student forever, too. Always a learner and never getting the truth. It's impulsive. And so many psychological things have to do with this. So many things that people get into. I think including the phenomenon of homosexuality is often connected with this business of being a perpetual adolescent and never really surrendering oneself to life. Never really surrendering oneself to the commitment, the obligation,

[27:11]

the self-donation of life. Some people get into a pattern and they remain kids until they're 50 or 60. With a kind of surface life. And then he goes into this parable of the seed and the soil and the soul. The problem can be with the seed or the problem can also be with the soil. The context within which the commitment was made. It could be too cluttered and incapable of sufficiently nurturing the commitment made. There are communities which really cannot allow the growth that's potentially, that's inside the seed. But there are those who have given their word whose lives show the fruit of a permanent commitment. They need no justification for the totality of their self-gift.

[28:13]

It authenticates itself. The most convincing evidence of the value of the irrevocable disposition of one's life must always be in the fruit that it produces. By contrast, one can reflect on the effect on those who have withheld themselves throughout life from self-donation. A permanent commitment is justified only if the object of one's commitment is consonant with fulfilling the transcendent that each person is capable of attaining. The only objects that can measure up to this qualification are persons. You can make a temporary commitment, maybe there's something else, or a partial commitment. You can't make a total and permanent commitment to anything except a person. That means either a human being or God. It follows from this that love is the only justification for the permanent disposition of one's life. Love is the only intentionality that warrants the outlay of one's total self. Only in love can the needs and capacities of human beings be fulfilled.

[29:15]

Any commitment dynamic that intends permanence and yet fails to flow from love, or at least give promise of leading to love, will prove to be a deceptive commitment. It is a deterrent to growth and transcendence. Commitment is the most natural way of both expressing the love one has for another, or the Other with a capital O, and of proving as well as preserving that same love. All other things being equal, permanence will be a property of every commitment that flows from love and continues in love. Okay, I don't want to read this stuff to you all day long. And he finds the essential thing in this commitment is yielding somehow our freedom, yielding our self to another. The ground of the obligation of commitment is in the being of the person of the Other to whom we commit ourselves, according to him. And as soon as we drop back from that,

[30:18]

focus on the Other and drop back to ourselves, then the commitment begins to get doubtful, because we begin to wonder whether we're fulfilling ourselves and so on, whether we're really advising ourselves. When we try to evaluate a commitment, it's got somehow to at least include the Other, and therefore it needs to be in terms of something which unites both of us. It needs to be in terms not just of my freedom, my self-realization, my fulfillment, but of communion. Because otherwise my point of view is already misdirected to the extent that I won't be able to perceive nor experience that fulfillment anyway, if it's circled around back to myself. It's sort of excluded the fruit of the commitment anyway, when I make my judgment. Then he goes on to talk about why we have problems with commitment. First of all, he talks about the images that we conjure up of commitment, the first image being that of a choice which is once and for all.

[31:21]

We choose something and then we're tied to it. But that's not what commitment is, because in some way a commitment is something that permits us, it goes along with growth, it permits us to become. If it's a personal commitment, and there's a person on the other end, especially the person of God, then it's not a fixity, nor is it a choice which sort of points us in one direction. It's not a direction that we're pointed in. It's something else, it's something broader than that. Once one's life has taken a definitive direction, one should be more, not less, capable of growth. For among other things, people will know where one stands and can begin to relate more deeply to the person. The individual ceases to be ambiguous, he is coming from somewhere, for growth for him builds on the strength already accumulated.

[32:25]

Since one's life is rooted, growth can be expected, as fruit is expected only from a plant that is rooted. Second reason for our problems with commitment are the social situation, because a lot of things have changed, a lot of things have disappeared in our scene. The tradition of rootedness to one place, the tradition of doing one thing for your whole life, that is, lifelong performance of one's skills, as he puts it, and a kind of family-centered context of relationships. All those things are mobile to men. The third source of our ambiguity comes from our history, whether cultural, intellectual, or religious. Esteem for permanence in human commitments is part of our heritage as Christians and as Westerners. It's a part of our heritage that's rapidly disappearing. So he says we'd better examine it before we say goodbye to it. We could also conclude that we ought to be doing better

[33:28]

than we have been doing lately at preserving it. Then he talks about Greek and Roman culture and how they're so based on stability, so based on fixity. This is one of the things that hurts us nowadays. We want something that seems to be more dynamic. We find dissatisfaction both with Greek philosophy and with Roman law, insofar as it's gotten into our religious picture. And then scholastic metaphysics, with Aristotle and his fixed categories. There's not much room for becoming and not much room for the person. But then the Church takes this over, and something happens here, and it's very important the way we judge this. Whether the Church has simply adopted a philosophical product, which doomed it to a kind of fixity, and put a stamp on it. In other words, whether that's an intrusion of philosophy, this stability, this fixity thing, or whether it comes from somewhere else. The Church reinforced with the seal of her authority

[34:31]

the cultural esteem for permanence that her children had inherited from their respective cultures. She began to attach fixed parameters to each of the vocational forms her members chose to live in. Now this is characteristic of the Catholic Church and of our religious life. Membership in monastic life, for instance, came to be sealed by perpetual vows, something unheard of in Buddhist monasteries and Hindu ashrams. The philosophical option made in Buddhist and Hindu societies was for becoming over being. This is something we've got to think about. Is that a mistake? What accounts for that difference between our Catholic thing with its... Remember that article by Knight on the desert, and commitment talks in the same terms. The strong point of Christian spirituality resides, I believe, in its emphasis on commitment. This is Knight. From the very first days of his novitiate, a Christian candidate to religious life,

[35:34]

monastic or otherwise, knows that he is faced with the choice of a lifelong commitment, the challenge of an unconditional covenant with God. All is geared towards this, all builds towards this, all follows upon it. No Christian enters a monastery or enters into marriage either, but the idea of continuing in this state of life for as long as it is meaningful, satisfying or fulfilling. Every Christian way of life, holiness, is a response to a beckoning personal God. It calls for binding commitment to God precisely in His otherness. It is not simply a way of personal growth, an enlightened path of wisdom, something we are into because of a resolution made to ourselves. It is a deep choice made in faith to follow Christ into the desert beyond the point of no return. That desert business. Now here we get into the whole Jewish thing once again. Because it seems to me that the Jewish experience basically has these two phases, the phase of exile or desert and the phase of fulfillment. I think we were talking about this yesterday. That is, the Jewish experience is the experience of the person who is able

[36:38]

to go through darkness, who is able to go through the unfruitful place, which is the desert, where your life is not blossoming, where nothing has happened. On the basis of the Word of God that he has received, until he gets into the Promised Land, until the desert itself blossoms, finally, with the water of the Spirit. So this goes together with the permanent commitment thing. Now, this is not totally... It is the permanency, I think, that is unique. It is not the long-term thing, because lots of ascetical traditions will require a long period of ascetical preparation, something that staggers us sometimes, to reach a certain kind of enlightenment. But the permanency thing, I think, is pretty characteristic of Judeo-Christian thought. And the permanency, of course, in celibacy and in monastic life, and that kind of stability is a Christian thing. And this is largely the reason for it. It is commitment to a kind of transformation, a kind of death and resurrection, which is a realization of the paschal mystery,

[37:40]

which is based in the Jewish experience of desert and then Promised Land, or exile and liberation, and which is based on the relationship of Word and Spirit. The fact that we are led into the desert by the Word and in the Spirit to persist in the desert, in the unfruitful place, with just the Word of God, with just the promise of God, and with no experience of the Spirit perhaps, no water in the well, until finally, following the Word, the Spirit comes up through us and in us, and we blossom from inside. That's that thing there. Yes, sir? It's one of, maybe, the differences in the religions, I think. They look at us, maybe, because they're different ways of looking at it. I'm talking to a Christian. It's like, our commitment is not really going to be to Philippians, but we're going to be committed to Jerusalem. That's a kind of commitment to it, for Philippians.

[38:43]

And for them, not for any people, it's a diaspora, so why not move on to the Christians? Yeah, that's connected. That's right. Somehow the death is incorporated into the Jewish and Christian scheme. Like in Catholic religious life, the death thing is swallowed into the spirituality. In St. John the Cross, for instance. So it's swallowed into it and becomes part of this permanency. It's a commitment unto death, because death somehow is not the end. It becomes part of the thing. In fact, it's a matter of going through death, and that desert that he's talking about is a death thing. So the commitment goes through that, and is supposed to bring you out to the other side. That's right. It's a death experience, on one level or another, into one depth or another. And unless one goes through that, if it's seen in those terms, unless one is committed in a way which permits him and holds him straight to go through that,

[39:46]

he won't go through it. He'll stop. He won't go through the desert of death, because he'll be pulled back simply by reason, simply by common sense, on his own experience. Heeters out completely. There's a whole other question now, how do you know whether you're going to the flower? How do you know whether to keep plowing on through the desert? Which is not an easy one to answer. The most frequent vocational choice of Christians, of course, was marriage. It, too, took on the same character of permanence when it was determined that the marriage bond was indissoluble. In addition, it was determined that the priestly character of one who received holy orders was indelible. So this thing is really built into our Catholic Church. And that's one of the things that people are just butting their heads against right now, the permanency of all of these things. And a lot of people will choose to think,

[40:47]

well, you know, that's just something that was taken over from Roman law, from Greek philosophy, from Aristotle, or something like that, or it's just, you know, it's maintained for bureaucratic reasons and so on. You've got to ask yourself, what's the real reason? The Church has unmistakably affirmed and baptized the relative immobility of the cultural experience of the past. She has made what we now see was a philosophical option, part and parcel of her self-understanding. Her predilection for that option has never been withdrawn and is not likely to be, as we shall consider in the last chapter. The reason for her option was not merely philosophical. She has sought to mirror the fidelity of God himself in her determinations. We've got to ask ourselves, is that just a symbolic thing? I mean, is it kind of a poetic or a good, honest attempt to reflect God's fidelity so that it could be this way or it might be another way? Or does it really express God's will? That question seems to be there. It's not enough to bind you to a commitment like that

[41:49]

when the going gets really rough. If it's just the Church's more or less arbitrary way of mirroring God's fidelity, somehow it has to manifest God's positive will, it would seem. In other words, it has to be really a covenant with God. It has to be the manifestation, the expression of one's relationship with God. It's not enough for it to be a symbolic representation of the response to God's fidelity. The contemporary thing in the Church, the marriage moment, how it determined that you weren't psychologically fit, how you made the commitment. So you were never married. How does this say? Because we're more psychologically aware. Right. But we find there are incommitments that they weren't really capable of making in the first place. Yeah, I think that his book goes pretty deep into that question. So probably in a lot of cases it's done rather rashly

[42:50]

and without real insight into the interior situation, which must be extremely hard to grasp. Because these people are all embattled when they get into these things, right? When they're trying to get an indulgence or something, they're deeply involved emotionally. And how to get the real initial experience of those people clear is really a problem to a third person. You really have to be a Solomon, I think. A Solomon in a crystal ball. I think for one thing... Exactly. You're never going to be absolutely sure. I think it's impossible to arrive at complete certainty about one of these things if you look back at it. Unless you know that somebody was simply out of his mind when he made a particular commitment. Because he's always going to tend to interpret and even to describe his previous thing in terms of the way he feels right now and what he wants right now, whether he wants to stick with it or get out of it,

[43:51]

that kind of thing. So it's almost impossible. But the principles at least can be stated and can be seen pretty well. But somehow in all of these things the principles never solve the question. They only give you two poles and then somehow the Holy Spirit has to guide you as to the discernment to make between those poles. We're synthesizing, harmonizing those two things. Now the one thing is the possibility of a total actual lack of commitment or lack of vocation or lack of understanding or somehow just failure of contact between the two parties. Say the call of God and the response of the person. Either in some way those two hearts do not come together and there wasn't an initial word of the Spirit that awakened the person's heart for some reason. So that's a possibility. In other words it may have been a simulated vocation,

[44:51]

a simulated call of God, a subjective impression. Now somebody else is forcing him on something else and his mother made him become a religious person. That's another case. But on the other side there's this other thing which makes it very difficult which is no matter where you start this other fact that your initial experience may be a very dim prefiguring of the ultimate fruition that there should be of that vocation. In other words you don't have to have an overwhelming initial experience of vocation in order that your vocation be valid. It can only be a little flicker, a little sign enough to lead you into the life and then it begins to enlarge. So there's a whole history there. There may have been a valid but not extremely strong but not an overwhelming experience of vocation in the beginning which the person later smothered.

[45:53]

But if he smothered it or if it just disappeared for some reason later on even though it was valid and should have been permanent the person is not going to know it because in his ceasing to become conscious of it he also ceases to become conscious of that memory of the way that it was in the beginning. He can't remember that because if he did it would be the same experience in his heart. In other words he's got to lose sight of it. So it's as if he were a different person later on. Now how can you get back through that thicket and find the original thing? It's extremely difficult. These people tend to have the idea that they become more psychologically aware as you mature. So a person can say I'm more mature now. That can be true but he can still be betraying an original grace that he had. Because you don't have to be all that smart to say yes to God. You don't have to be all that mature or conscious or aware or anything like that. In the past, this shocks us nowadays but in the past there were a lot of saints who entered the monastery when they were

[46:54]

nine years old. Things like that. Valid vocation. God just touches somebody without their having all this maturity without their having all this power or free decision. He does not break that word. He's a sample. His mother took him to to heal out of it. It's that kind of thing. It's inscrutable. It's impossible to be certain of this thing. And in the end it's got to be left to the individual conscience. In other words, it's left to the freedom of the individual in the end to say did God talk to me or didn't he? And is he talking to me now or isn't he? Or did I just beat that up? There's this other thing that God manifests his call not so much in something that we experience but in something we want. They used to say, if you're not called, make yourself called. There's something about this that the religious vocation the biggest sign of the religious vocation is a person's desire. But somehow it's got that progressivity to it and it's got that matter that

[47:55]

it's almost as if you want it bad enough at a certain point God will say OK. And just count you in. That's ridiculous. That can't be so because God's grace precedes it. But it's manifested so much by it determined so much by our response and there's that kind of history in it. And I think see we keep talking about the relative commitment but what we should be talking about actually is in the relative vocation we should be talking about the deepest vocation which God makes to each of us just to come closer to him. Now that vocation is a really inscrutable thing because he's continually giving us more grace than we're responding to. In other words we're continually receiving more than we're perceiving and we're perceiving more than we're responding to and depending on our response it could almost be infinitely greater than it is at a given moment. So it could develop in so many ways. Now that proximity to God

[48:56]

that comes from our responding to his grace is the real key to what we're talking about here. It's almost as if if you get close enough to God he doesn't care that much what you do. Just think of this for a moment. It may not be true. But if you get close enough to him he doesn't care that much what you do. This or that vocation. What he wants is that closeness. Now that's not true but it's true in a way. What he's really interested in is that proximity to him. Now that may lead us through certain channels lead us through certain ways but what he really wants is us. It's not some kind of action. He really wants us to be united with him. That's the thing. And so the real question in the beginning after all is well in what situation in what particular vocation can I find that best? Can I get closest to him? Can I realize that one vocation best? And in the way in which I feel it. That's an indication of the way I should be following to get there. And then the second question is solved in the light of that one. And that's our criterion after all. Is it community? Is it union with God? Is it closeness with God?

[49:58]

We should intensify somehow the experience as we get closer but there are these periods where it gets darker and worse instead of brighter and better. It's almost that God is always giving us more than we're receiving. He's always willing to give more than we're willing to receive. So when we boil the vocation question down to these I don't know to that analytical kind of thing it's almost as if it's not the right light to look at it. It's almost as if he's always there present asking us well come, are you ready to come? And the whole thing has to be considered in that light. The light of his continually beckoning presence rather than in the light of this or that. Anyway, excuse me. . . .

[50:58]

. [...] The point that we left there was that there's something else in all this besides the cultural legacy of Greek philosophy and Roman society and that is the revelation thing, the thing that comes in with the word of God and finally with the event of Christ. And then somehow our individual vocation must have in it this element of permanency. It must be a call to permanency really. It must be a commitment of God to us in some way which asks for a corresponding permanent commitment on our part if this thing really is to hold up. Because otherwise if it's just something that the church decided on it really can't bind us up to death not in our own experience, not when the door gets broken. It has to come from God. . [...]

[52:04]

. [...] and he just sort of stays away. If somebody goes through their whole life trying to serve God, I think that's accepted by God, even if we say that he didn't originally call. I don't have any way of saying what that is inside of itself, because consider the, whatever it is that keeps a person going in the service of God for their whole life, there's something going on, there's some kind of relationship there, okay? It can't be totally their own thing, that would be an extremely rare case that it would be. It really carried the person through,

[53:06]

unless it becomes, it can become a totally egoistic life, and there's a kind of bad religious life that can be of that kind, okay? But if the person is a good religious, God is there. God has somehow accepted that offering, even though he might have had another idea in the beginning, or whatever way we want to express that, because we have trouble talking about God's plans. It's a continuing relationship with that person, between that person and God, whether we're not, or not, we say there was a specific vocation in the beginning, because God treats us where we are, you know? Even if we seem to be in the wrong, in the wrong category. Okay, then just to conclude this history again. Meanwhile, much has happened in the world of men and things. The increasingly strong currents of the world and the currents of modern times are all running counter to the church's option. Process is king. You hear a lot about process theology nowadays. It's sort of the, sort of the vogue, it seems.

[54:08]

Process theology and liberation theology, both of them are very dynamic, aren't they? In two different ways, coming from two different places. One is a metaphysical thing, a philosophical thing, and the other is a social economic thing. But they're both dynamic theologies. Actualization of potencies and the resulting perfection are no longer part of our thought forms. Evolution is our expectation, the popularity of Teilhard. Relativity itself is no longer a matter of dispute. Only how much is. Stability has been unseated by the developmental, and this in every sphere, including psychology. Some of this change came about because of social and technological developments, and some was propelled by intellectual forces. In this latter category, there was Darwin and Freud. We could go into how each one expresses this developmental thing. Hegel and Marx, Einstein and Whitehead. There was existentialism and the development of mythology of the social sciences. Then he goes on to talk about Sartre, who exemplifies the whole thing.

[55:09]

This is important for a whole lot of things. It's a kind of background for so many of the things that we talk about. Virtually everything that we talk about now is against this background of the change in thinking from the static to the dynamic, the static to the developmental. We can't avoid it, and we have to come to terms with it. We have to find a way of relating to it. My particular opinion is that it is a change from this overemphasis on the word to a Trinitarian point of view in Christianity, where the dynamic, that is the dimension of the spirit, is once again accepted, is once again appreciated. And all of these developmental things are in some way echoes or shadowings of the one revolution, the one dynamic, actually, which is the dynamic of the spirit, which moves out of static forms and all those ways of thought, because the philosophy of Aristotle and Roman law

[56:17]

are not adequate to the reality of Christianity, but no philosophy and no law is. There's another dimension that has to come in there. In other words, theology and spirituality has to leave the level of the philosophical and of the legal. It's on another level, it's on another plane, and that plane involves a dynamic just as well as it involves mystery. So our thinking and also our forms in some way, even our structures in some way have to be opened up and make room both for mystery and for the dynamic, for the unbounded and for the developmental, which is what he's talking about. And that is by way of a general background. We talk about these things a lot, but that's important. That's something we really have to study. The general climate of our time, not because we want to adapt to it, but because we want to find what it says prophetically to us about the way that we should have developed. In other words, all these things are kind of prophetic invitations to Christianity to find itself.

[57:18]

You can say that everything that positively happens in the world is a prophetic invitation to Christianity to discover its own identity, to discover its own gift and its own fullness, which in this case is the fullness of the Spirit and of the Trinity. He talks about Sartre, who has a philosophy, he's an existentialist, atheist of course, who has a philosophy of fundamental option, is that what he calls it? Fundamental project. A person's fundamental project is his life taken in a kind of developmental point of view. And basically it's freedom, it's a matter of freedom. And you are your freedom at any particular moment. You are in a dynamic way. It's an exciting kind of thought. And of course there's a lot of truth in it. And when you put it over against the Aristotelian notion of solid substances and accidents and things like that, we may be inclined to prefer it because it squares more with our own experience.

[58:21]

But it's also, of course, an exaggeration because it doesn't leave room for the simple reality of our physical self, for instance, for that whole other dimension. And the dimension of the stable and permanent, also on the non-physical level, on the spiritual level. And it absolutizes freedom, in a way. So he's giving one typical brand of current thought and then he moves into the other form which he wants to espouse, which is that of Marcel. So in place of freedom, then, he suggests freedom as a criterion for the value of a commitment. And in a way, that's a valid criterion of freedom over the year. Your commitment is working. Does it liberate you or does it bind you? But the trouble with it is that it's individualistic, okay? My freedom is not the proof of my commitment. It's not the whole story. It's part of it, but it's not the whole story.

[59:21]

And he prefers to talk about it in terms of communion. And communion, after all, is a kind of freedom. But communion is, in a sense, the womb of freedom, the climate of freedom, but also the ultimate expression of freedom. Freedom in love, after all, freedom in a personal context is the ultimate kind of freedom. It's the proof of all other kinds of freedom. As the gospel has it, your love of enemies is the proof of your freedom. The only proof. Total proof. Love of brethren, love of enemies is an extreme form. Any other criterion of freedom runs the risk of being individualistic. Okay, next time we'll continue with that and I'll try to conclude this, okay? Sorry to read so much stuff to you. I think we need a kind of conceptual basis

[60:24]

to tie this up.

[60:25]

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