Monday, March 3, 2014

Religious LIfe: Keeping Alive the Value of Transcendence



VITA CONSECRATA: RELIGIOUS LIFE

REFLECTION III

 

Religious Life: A life focused on the Transcendent while fully engaged in working to help others discover their blessedness, deepen their commitment to live as Jesus lived, cope with life’s difficulties in constructive ways, develop their intellects and realize their God-given potential; live compassionately, affectionately, lovingly and unselfishly. Religious life is a way of life that keeps “the value of transcendence” alive in cultures that strive to hide any semblance of the Transcendent One. Religious life is a God-centered life while society fosters secular lifestyle that threatens “the value of transcendence” with “extinction.”  The spiritual or transcendent dimension of life is, for many engulfed in secularism, repressed. Men and women religious, on the other hand, nurture the spiritual or transcendent nature of their beings and of life itself. Through a contemplative presence in the world, bringing God into their work, bringing work to God  and by setting time aside each day to contemplate God, they know the joy and the peace that flows from living life at the deepest level of existence, namely, the level of Spirit. Their work flows, not from the ego, “an agent of the unconscious, that is motivated out of fears and compulsions”, but from a heart filled with love for God and others, a heart that thirsts for the coming of the Kingdom here on earth.  (Source: Adapted from Brother John D. Hamilton’s article in Horizon, Vol. 39, Number 1,  Winter 2014, “The built-in tensions in apostolic vocations, p. 6)

 

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