Individuation And Liberation In Religious Life by Phil Aaron

After living fifty seven years as a vowed religious, I am haunted by the fact that we religious are a dying breed especially in developed countries, unable to recruit new members even to replacement levels let alone able to recruit for growth. While at the same time no organized, grassroots and fundamental critique and analysis of the phenomenon of religious life is taking place.


For over forty years we have been in a process of renewal which has been concerned with externals such as dress, daily schedule, living situations and so forth without making a critical analysis of the religious life itself using new theories of human behavior which were unknown to all of us during the hundreds of years of development, growth and living of vowed religious life, personal growth theories which today are accepted as essential to living a fully human life. We have renewed but not revolutionized religious life.


What appealed and made sense for good people hundreds of years ago no longer attracts nor makes sense for good people in the postmodern world. Now men and women in the developed world have education and a new sense of themselves and their relationship to the world. Educated people no longer flee from the world nor look for life beyond this world. They rather embrace the world as good and use its good to develop the reign of God in this world. In order to survive, religious communities must address issues related to a need for a new understanding of the notion of the self while being vowed religious in this world.


If a much traveled bridge suddenly collapsed, engineers would immediately organize to find the fatal flaw in the design that caused the rapid destruction of something that they had designed with the best knowledge and planning available to them at the time, something they expected to last longer than it did. What is the fatal flaw in the design of religious life as we knew it?


The classic story of the widget business which faced extinction when widgets were no longer needed should be a learning model for religious orders. Some businesses have had to make radical and revolutionary changes in their identity to survive. This is no less true for individual religious and for religious orders. Changes made thus far have not been sufficiently radical to lead from death to resurrection. Why is there this resistance to radical change even in the face of organizational death? Is there something about the relationship between self identity and the nature of religious life that we need to address to survive?


Some make the survival of religious orders a divine issue related to God's call to vocation but, - call me a heretic - I believe vocation is a human call from the community, the culture and the church and that religious orders are human organizations subject to the same forces and dynamics as any organized group.


There are human issues involved in the demise of religious life which have to do with our self identity as religious and our lack of freedom to change fundamental aspects of our life, aspects which appear to be inherent in the very understanding of religious life but which may not be, and which are threatened when renewal is attempted, especially with reference to the notion of obedience and the responsibility to take charge of our own lives.


I wonder how we have let ourselves get to this situation in which we are spiraling down to extinction and unable to reverse the trend. Has personal identification with the norms of religious life (for example, obedience, humility, abnegation, uniformity, silence…) served to produce individual members who have no interest or ability, nor power to critique the culture of the religious community within which they live? None of this is said as an indictment or criticism of any individuals or leaders of religious communities. Individual religious and leadership have for decades been working hard at renewal. What seems to have been lacking is a loving critique of some fundamental values related to the system of consecrated life. This present critique faults no individual religious or superior nor does it assign blame to anyone. It is meant as an objective analysis of the notion of what we call vowed religious life in the Catholic Church.


To analyze the notion of religious life, I look to two theorists: a psychologist, Carl Jung, and a philosopher, Paulo Freire. Jung was concerned with the notion of individualtion, the process whereby a person develops a sense of self in relation to the other, to the world. Freire was concerned with the notion of freedom especially among oppressed peoples.


Individuation


Jung's idea of individuation is discussed by psychotherapist, Mary Watkins:
Jung focused on the emergence of individuality out of collectivity. For him, individuation “is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology:”. (Jung, 1871 p757). I read “collective' here as the culture(s) one is residing in psychologically. Jung understood the power of a culture's dominant ideas over the individual and saw that simple identification with these norms provided no critique of them, no interest or power in resisting them, no moral center apart from them. (Watkins p 207)


In his 1957 work, The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung writes about the loss of self identity under communist governments and the subsequent loss of moral responsibility. He contends that the fatal flaw of communism is that this political system suppressed the individual. To what extend can the following quote from The Undiscovered Self be applied to the notion of religious life as we know it?


"The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d'etat). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of living standard. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in the individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine." (p22)


Have we religious “given ourselves” so much to the notion of religious community that at this moment we do not have a strong enough sense of self to sufficiently critique the system which formed us and which does not seem to make sense to modern thinkers and those good persons who might think about joining us in our life?
Jungian analysts Howard W. Tyas, Jr. and Karen O. Hodges in one of their lectures describe the importance of individuation: “Jung understood individuation to be something that began in the second half of life, when individuals reach the zenith of their lives and suddenly find themselves facing an unknown vista or some unforeseen upheaval. Sometimes this turning point takes the form of a crisis: such as . . . a health problem, a broken relationship, or a change of residence or profession - something which upsets the status quo. Sometimes this experience assumes the form of a profound self-doubt, a loss of meaning or religious conviction, a questioning of everything previously held so dear. Sometimes it presents itself as a deep yearning or a call to change direction. And many times, it can manifest itself in powerful dreams and fantasies”.

As our median age continues to increase, it seems we need to analyze and critique the same list: self doubt, loss of meaning, and a questioning of everything in order to see a new future for religious orders.
Bert Chapman, former religious, has recently published A Monk's Tale, his recollection of his religious formation days and the characters and situations involved. Having lived these early days with him, I can appreciate his reflection on how his formation relates to the notion of individuation: Reflecting on the influence of his spiritual director he writes:

"Reflecting on his influence on me at this time (1997), I can feel the sadness experienced throughout my entire religious life as a Marianist. It's a sadness developed and, might I say, cultivated to neurotic perfection within religious orders prior to Vatican II. Religious superiors, as they themselves taught and trained, assumed life for candidates began the day they entered the monastery, that their lives before were to be forgotten, renounced, denied, and expunged. References to one's former life were frowned upon and any sharing of former experiences were considered possible temptations to return to that life, thus renouncing the call made by God to a new life as Brothers of Mary. As a result of losing our histories, all of us--postulants, novices, Scholastics, temporary professed Brothers, and those with perpetual vows--would deny to others something very precious, something revealing their identities, something to reveal for lasting friendships. Religious superiors preferred a house of strangers. They never would understand friendship as something to ground the natural grace of charity. Intimacy in all its senses was unknown."


"The denial of a person's history was a denial the person ever existed, he once moved in time and space, he loved and was loved, he was somebody in another city and hour who meant something precious to others and who possessed value and received unconditional love because he simply was who he was."


"Religious communities were convinced such histories had to be expunged in order to make religious life work efficiently and safely for the common good. Identities were an obstacle to the common life. (I saw a movie's depiction of battle-scarred soldiers in Vietnam not bothering to learn the names of new recruits they statistically thought would not survive long enough to merit their remembrance. To me it was an analogue to the real aloofness and abstract context of human relationships in religious life.) We danced as skeletons a danse macabre because flesh and blood -- these essentials to human beings--we denied having in order to imitate the angels and, along the way, in order to abuse and mangle Christ's meaning to "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."
I bought into the system. I swallowed, in the beginning, all the premises of religious life. I kept the Rule and, I truly believed, the Rule would keep me. It became evident in college and especially "out in community" in Trinity (January, '53, Brooklyn) and Cathedral Latin (school year '54-'55, Cleveland) that the Rule and I were at odds in profound ways and "keeping one another" meant two different things."


Some will argue that the ideas about which Chapman writes have been addressed, reform has taken place, and that we are beyond the issues he mentions. The few new members joining religious orders are frequently quoted saying that the conditions which he writes about are no longer in vogue and religious orders are beyond and past those ways of acting and the values implied. My contention is that the issues he addresses are still within us, rooted deep within the notion of religious life and myth, and that failure to adapt some basic values related to the self and modern life does not make us attractive to a large segment of potential recruits. Valuing the self identity and individual difference of present members is the place to begin. A majority of members present in religious orders today were formed under the values expressed above by Chapman and these still operate in their lives.

Liberation

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire was concerned with the process of liberation in a communitarian context. He developed educational methods to raise the consciousness of oppressed groups by leading them from a position of being an object to that of being a subject.


Freire's theory is concerned with the process of liberation where by an individual, lives and takes action as a subject and names the world rather than to be an object, something which is acted on. Freire is concerned with the masses of people in Latin America who suffer oppression, have no voice and participate in a “culture of silence.” He taught that humans, in order to be fully human, must liberate themselves from oppression in whatever form it is experienced.


Friere defined oppression in this way: “Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence, even when sweetened by false generosity, because it interferes with man's ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun.” (p40)


Many accept Freire's theory when applied to economically oppressed masses in Latin America but fail to apply it in situations where oppression is less recognized and acknowledged.


A culture of silence is characterized by lack of horizontal communication in a situation in which individuals feel something is not right but do not openly express their concern because of fear that by speaking out their situation will become worse and that others know best. They are made to feel that the situation is due to fate or that, in the case of the poor, their reward will be received in heaven. In a culture of silence, the voice of the silent is not sought by those in charge.


My thesis is that religious orders and their members participate in a situation of oppression and live in a culture of silence, a situation experienced by all people in general no matter what their state of life. Our task as persons is to continually identify situations of oppression in order to achieve human freedom. This is no less true for members of religious orders than it is for persons living in oppressive marriages.


At this time, members of religious orders live in a culture (the religious order) which could be analyzed for its negative influence on the development of the self of individual religious. I think that good, educated individuals today understand intuitively that religious communities are not a good environment for the development of self, and for this reason are not motivated to become vowed members. They may be interested in being lay associates but they find no motivation, no attraction to live as vowed religious.


Within religious orders the self is submerged to the point where good religious do not criticize their life sufficiently to change it. As a result, very old myths and perspectives on the world, love and the self prevent the adoption of new practices and new identities which will be attractive to new recruits.


That religious live in a state of oppression and in a culture of silence may be examined by taking a critical look at the myths, rituals, language and practices that have shaped religious life from the beginning. In so many cases religious life and virtue is described in terms of submission, abnegation, obedience, rule and authority in language frequently related to practices of childhood. This notion of childhood influences many practices associated with the traditional three vows and this does not allow the energy inherent in a strong self to critique the practices of the order.


How to reconcile humility, detachment, and responsibility with a spirituality of the development of self is the key to the resurrection of religious life. Others have written extensively about how to rename and refocus the three vows so that the self and the energy inherent in a strong self may influence our practice. That the self has to be submerged in order to practice virtue and to do good is a myth that has to be challenged through dialogue.


Dialogue among oppressed people is the key to overcoming oppression. Dialogue about the development of new myths about the self and its place in community and the practice of virtue is the process which must be encouraged
to put a new and more attractive face on the vowed life.