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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