LIVING IN SOLITUDE AND LIVING IN COMMUNITY

 

 

 UCRC, 1988 General Assembly (Rougemont, Quebec)

 

 Jean Lévêque, o.c.d.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Introduction

Individual Growth Based on the Community

The Growth of the Community Founded on the Individuals

The Role of the Community Coordinator

The Role of the Formation Director

The Future

The Mission

Conclusion

Appendix: Issues for Group Meetings

 

 

*

 

In a way nothing has predisposed me to participate in your deliberations, for outside contemplative prayer which is my primary responsibility as well as yours, my first responsibility in the Lord's service within the Church is above all that of an exegete.

It is true that since my ordination in 1959, I tried, as Saint Theresa of Avila would have wished, to be of service to my Carmelite Sisters; but I did this without any particular mandate, since I was not yet an assistant of the other Federations in France. But, I have striven for almost thirty years to listen to sisters and to understand them. That is how I met the Carmelite Sisters and worked with them on the subject of on-going formation in France, Rwanda, Belgium and Haiti. Then I continued to collaborate with them in the development of formation directors and the organization of several assemblies.

Now, here I am about to speak to Sisters whose day-to-day life I ignore. I shall try to deal with worthwhile problems applicable to all cloistered nuns and cast light on them by extensive references to Scripture, and eventually by elements from theology and the sociology of small groups.

 

The theme you have chosen is:

Living in solitude and living in community.

 

This is the plan I am proposing to you:

 

1.    The growth of the individual based on the community;

2.    The growth of the community based on individuals;

3.         The role of the community coordinator;

4.         The role of the formation director;

5.    The problems of the future;

6.    The mission;

7.    Conclusions based on reactions communicated to me regarding your most important concerns.

 

A certain number of questions have been proposed for each of your afternoon workshops, and for each of the three groups: the community coordinators, the formation directors, and all the other sisters. You will deal with these questions in the manner you wish. Of prime importance is that every day you find the menu to your liking.

 

I have given you these details to explain my presence among you and to tell you once more that I come to you in a spirit of service and simplicity.

 

As early as tonight I would like to leave a few words of Jesus and one attitude of Mary for your meditation.

 Words of Jesus, because it is he that we have come to seek. Words of hope, for the Spirit of Jesus wants to renew this hope in our hearts and in our communities, through us, through our communal sharing during these days.

 

The words of Jesus will be taken from the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, verses 23-27:

 

"If anyone loves me, he will keep my word,

and my Father will love him

and we shall come to him and make our home with him.

Those who do not love me do not keep my words.

And my word is not my own:

it is the word of the one who sent me.

I have said these things to you while still with you;

but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,

will teach you everything

and remind you of all I have said to you.

Peace I bequeath to you,

my own peace I give you,

a peace the world cannot give, this is my gift to you.

Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid."

 

"If anyone loves me," said Jesus. These words reverberate in our hearts, both as a call and as a question. The call is the one that so long ago decided our path in life; it has remained as powerful as on the first day. The question is the one that instinctively rises in our heart after 10, 20, 30 years of monastic life dedicated to the contemplation of the mystery of God and Christ.

When we recall with enthusiasm or with sorrow, and sometimes with both simultaneously, this long fidelity of the Master towards us and towards the community, we cannot help but ask: "What have we done, Lord, with your Presence among us? What have I done, Lord, with your offer of friendship? After all these years, Lord, what do you want me to do?"

Without silencing this question, the Gospel, which can very well be bearer of joy, turns us inward and downward to the core of our being, deeper than the question level, even deeper than all anxiety, all fear. Jesus comes to tell us again that in prayer as in mission God is always the beginning, God always takes the initiative. It is God who speaks. It is God who comes. It is God who remains. It is God who saves the world.

 

"If anyone loves me he will keep my word," said Jesus; "he will keep the words of the Father who has sent me". To love Jesus is to believe that through him God has spoken and to welcome in him the overture the Father is making to the world. Our love for Christ is always a response to God's love given us through his Son. But at the least response we give, God rushes in with all his tenderness: "If anyone loves me he will keep my word and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him."

 

Then, in every person and every community, what was for the old Covenant an impossible dream becomes a reality, as Solomon says in his prayer in the First Book of Kings, Chapter 8:27: "Yet will God really live with men on the earth? Why, the heavens and their own heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built !"

 

My dear Sisters, God does not wait to give himself to us until we can offer Him a finished house of prayer. We will never finish it ! Looking closely at what God wishes to do for us, in us, and with us is more important than what we can do for Him personally and communally, in solitude or as a group.

Finally, the only true road to intimacy with Christ after ten, or thirty years, is to let God love us as much as he wants to and to give him the freedom to inhabit us in the way he himself has chosen. Therein lies the wisdom towards which the Spirit of God unobtrusively guides us by means of Jesus' words. We would willingly await the newness of the Spirit during prayer time or work hours if he manifested himself in ways never seen before, never heard of, at least never experienced. However, for the Church the Advocate is the Spirit of memory, the Spirit of remembrance, of continuity with Jesus. What the Spirit makes us understand and put in practice has already been said by Jesus. To teach us all things, the Paraclete simply and divinely recalls all that Jesus has already communicated to us on God's behalf.

 

To enter as an individual and as a community into the newness of the Spirit therefore means to discover gradually the name of Jesus and his role as Saviour, to open ourselves little by little to reality as God sees it, and to the world as God loves it. This is done in continuity with the revealing words of Jesus.

Imitating the Virgin of Nazareth is not so much a question of awaiting and seeking the extraordinary as of discovering with wonder and thanksgiving the eternal aspect of the underside of daily life.

God is simple; prayer also is simple and simple will be our own outlook after Jesus has purified it. Then our whole being will bathe in light. Finally reconciled with insecurity, with the law of Exodus, we shall be able to discern in our discordant world, in our discordant communities, the place for God to exercise his mercy. Then our heart will cease its agitation, its fear of today and tomorrow, as it faces the responsibilities of the future that, in any case, escape our control; and in the daily events that jostle us, pull us left and right, we shall know how to discern the familiar and faithful voice of the Risen Christ: "Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you."

Then we shall be sages according to the Gospel, because the Paraclete, inhabiting the inner places of our heart, will enable us to hear the language of the cross.

 

Words of Jesus...

An attitude of Mary...

An attitude able to nourish our contemplation throughout these days of reflection during which Christ will ask us to sacrifice a part of our living in solitude in order to live together, as a community, in his presence.

Mary, who lived the greatest of solitudes with Jesus and for Jesus, also knew how to live intensely the encounters with those God placed on her path.

 

"... there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee. The Mother of Jesus was there." (Jn 2:1-2).

 

During the Cana episode when Jesus began to reveal his glory, his indescribable union with the Father, Mary appears as the contemplative, and several of her attitudes or reactions reveal the depths of her inner life.

 

'The Mother of Jesus was there', says the Gospel.

And already the simple presence of Mary is an important example of witnessing. Mary, the ever-silent one, did not shy away from a rural wedding celebration. She was not there in body only, distancing herself from the noisy, animated festivities; she was not there through condescension, impatient to leave, trying to robe herself in a mantle of tranquility. She was there because God had so willed it, so much more present to each person because she was more present to God, placing all her joy in joy given to others, and rejoining in faith God's plan for each person around her. Not isolated in silence, but intensely present because of her silence, just as monastic life is present at the heart of the Church.

 

Another reaction of Mary, the contemplative: she lets Jesus test her faith.

In a first movement, all seems to indicate Jesus judges her intervention as being out of line or at least a regrettable incident: 'why do you trouble me with that?' And yet she had not been mistaken: her words were necessary; she had to tell Jesus about the embarrassment seen on the faces of this young wedded couple: 'They have no wine!'

At Cana, just as in their home in Nazareth, to love also meant seeing to the wine for the feast, and although a guest she felt responsible for it; although helpless she would at least speak to Jesus.

 

Still another incident reveals Mary, Mother of Jesus, reacting as a contemplative: she asserts that Jesus will take action, but without knowing what he will do; she advises (she commands!) the servants to obey, without the slightest proof to encourage her, without suspecting at all the wonder Jesus is keeping in store: 'Do whatever he tells you'.

Filled with great uncertainty and a strong sense of urgency, all Mary can discern of God's ways is to act immediately and unquestioningly, like servants, and wait for Jesus' next words. Jesus does not ask us to succeed on our own in situations of helplessness, but to make, "just for today", those acts of obedience that are within our power.

Sometimes such an act of obedience will seem ridiculous or useless: what is the point in pouring water into jars when the ablutions have long been finished ? But with God and with Jesus, confidence is the winner, the confidence learnt by contemplating Mary, by listening to Mary; and, it is with this water of obedience that Jesus will quench the thirst of the wedding guests.

 

A final attitude of Mary casts a discreet light on our destiny as contemplatives situated at the heart of the Church. Mary, after interceding for others, completely fades away into the background.

The bridegroom is congratulated; Mary, however, follows the events in silence, overjoyed by what Jesus has just done.

 

My dear Sisters, whether it is a question of the Church's deep suffering, or the community's uncertainties, or a personal loss of direction, it is essential to leave in God's hands the building of new roads to salvation; it is essential to let Christ guide us to peace.

Under Mary's loving eyes, let us pour the water... He will turn it into wine.

Let us pour the wine... He will make it his own Blood.

 

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