Secular vs Secularism and Consecrated Virginity

[[Dear Sister, what is the difference between secular and secularism? When you say that a consecrated virgin is a secular it makes my stomach clench some. It just sounds so wrong. Totally!]]

Hi there! Yes, it is hard to shake off the connotations or associations with the term secular that have been inculcated for such a long time, isn't it? You sound relatively young to me in your post, but I am sure you are used to thinking of secularity as irreligious just as most folks who have been around since before Vatican II. I admit that to hear someone say "x or y is a secular," causes a similar gut reaction in me (though partly because it sounds demeaning to me). But, we really have to get beyond this because "secular" in its most general sense simply means that whatever we describe this way has to do with the world. Since "the world" is a multivalent or "tensive" symbol it is not generally a pejorative term.

It can and does refer first of all to God's good creation. After this it refers to the human world which is ambiguous --- God's good creation distorted by human sin and the powers of evil and death which is still called to reconciliation with God and the fulfillment of its deepest potentials. Only then does it refer some of the time to "that which is resistant to Christ." As I noted before then, a secular vocation means a call to live out one's discipleship within the world. In a sense the original disciples can be said to have been called to secular vocations; Mary Magdalene as apostle to the Apostles was called to a secular vocation. It is possible to argue that Jesus' own vocation to incarnate the Word of God exhaustively in every moment and mood of sinful reality was a secular vocation (though he clearly transcends any single category as well). Obviously such vocations were not irreligious or second class. They were countercultural, apostolic, and prophetic; indeed they were all profoundly Godly and sacred --- but carried out in the saeculum in a way meant to transform and bring it to a transcendent fulfillment, and for this reason, secular. Today, in a church where roles and forms of life are more differentiated than in the primitive Church, when we refer to secular vocations we mean calls to discipleship which are lived out in the normal structures, and institutions of the world in order to transform those: the political, economic, familial, corporate arenas, etc.

Secularism is a different animal though. Secularism, in the present context, refers to an ideology where the values of the world distorted by sin rather than the values of the Kingdom of God (that is, reality under the dominion of God) are the ones that defines one's life, one's way of seeing, thinking, relating, etc. It means that we look at these things as separate from God and seek to be ultimately fulfilled by them. As I wrote in another post on secularism as a disease of the heart, [[It is common to think of secularism as an inordinate esteem for the profane, something that reaches idolatrous proportions at times. But contrary to part of this analysis, I think that at its root secularism has more to do with the failure to regard reality, ALL of reality, as fundamentally sacred, as gift of God, as that which is to be honored and regarded in light of the One who grounds and gifts it. Secularism occurs precisely when we compartmentalize reality into the sacred and the profane. It occurs when we refuse or are unable to see the innate tendency [and capacity] of all things to reveal to us the God who grounds them, or to participate in and contribute to the goal of human and divine history: that God might be all in all. In short, it is a failure to take a sacramental view of reality.]]

When the Church affirms the vocation to consecrated virginity as a (consecrated) secular vocation she says it is precisely a vocation which 1) regards all of reality as potentially Sacramental, which 2) refuses to compartmentalize it in terms of sacred and profane, and which 3) works from within it to realize the world's profoundly holy potential. In this sense the consecrated virgin in the world is not only an icon of the Church, she is an icon of the world as it is called and meant to be by God.

Which of You Would Not? The Parable of the Woman and the Lost Coin

>


Today's Gospel is one of those which causes ambivalence for me on several levels. In Luke 15:1-10 Jesus is faced by Pharisees who grumble because Jesus eats with sinners and tax collectors. They have a point. How, they ask, are we to maintain the purity or integrity of the People of God if we allow the unclean or active sinners to join in our table fellowship? The Pharisees have their eyes on one version of "the big picture" and their approach to reality is a defensive one. Preserve the larger reality even if it means that individuals are treated as expendable or less precious. This is classic pragmatism, the greatest good for the greatest number!

Luke's own community is facing some of the same issues. Persecutions have led to defections and the nascent Church needs to determine how they will treat these people who, after all, are members of their own families and friends. How will Luke's communities be Church in such a situation? How should they feel about and act towards those who have betrayed them and Christ? In some ways we tend to face the same questions even today. Consider Eucharist. We wish to prevent defilement of the Eucharist and have it witness to unity, both completely appropriate concerns, and so, we do not allow certain people to receive the Sacrament even if they desire it, even if they wish to participate as fully as possible in our table fellowship. If Paul's language from the first reading was applied here, this whole approach to reality, this way of seeing the "big picture" would be called "the flesh". In monastic life it is called "worldly." In everyday parlance we call it "common sense" or being practical or reasonable.

Answering Jesus' Question: The Old Big Picture

It is into this situation that Jesus tells several parables about the lost. Each is effectively prefaced or bracketed by the rhetorical question "Which of you would not?" We know what the answer SHOULD be, the answer Jesus believes is natural, the answer which makes Jesus' question rhetorical. This answer commits us to extravagant and even apparently imprudent actions on behalf of the lost. But how often do we really answer the question honestly (if of course we pause to truly answer it at all)? Consider the situation: if Jesus said, There are 100 sheep in the desert, all in danger of wandering off, dying of thirst, starving or being set upon by predators without their shepherd. One wanders away. Which of you would NOT go after it for as long as it takes and at whatever cost?" How many of us would enthusiastically wave our hands in affirmation that indeed we would act just that way? I suspect if we were to lose such a sheep we would be more inclined to write it off as expendable, part of the acceptable risk of doing business in a dangerous world, a sad but sustainable loss.

And if Jesus were to say to us, "A woman lost one of ten similar and ordinary coins. She was frantic to find it it was so precious to her. She swept the whole house, lit all the lights, turned over the furniture, and when she found it she threw a huge party for family and friends. Which of you would not do similarly?" How many of us could really say we would naturally feel or act as she did? Granted, we might look as hard as we could for a while, but throwing a huge and expensive party when it is found? How likely would THAT be? How foolish would THAT look? So, when Jesus says, "which of you would not?" it is more likely most of us would have to raise our hands to say, "Not me!" than would nod in happy agreement with him. Most of the time we live in a world of different values than this, the world of common sense, expendable goods, and sustainable loss. Our hearts and minds are not really geared in the same way Jesus' are. We don't see or evaluate things in quite the same way usually. Again, as Paul puts it, ours is ordinarily the perspective of the flesh not of the spirit.

So Jesus, consummate psychologist that he is, tells us these parables to disorient us and shake us loose enough from our usual way of seeing, thinking and feeling to allow us to choose another way. He seeks to inspire a change in our minds and hearts, to convince us that this is the way GOD approaches the smallest bit of reality, and certainly, he seeks to help us feel the urgency and pathos the loss of a single person to sin is to God. He wants us to know a God who searches for us with great urgency because we are never expendable to him, never a "sustainable loss." But something is missing for contemporary readers in these parables because they really do not compel in the the way they compelled Jesus' hearers. (Here is another source of my ambivalence.) And I think the parable of the woman with the lost coin is the key to renewed hearing.

The Significance of the Lost Coin

Most commentators focus on the fact that the coin might have been a drachma or a denarius. In either case it would have equaled a day's wages or a bit more. Thus, its worth is established: large but not inestimable. But there is another way of reading this parable -- far more challenging and also more inspiring. Consider that when a woman was married she was ordinarily given a gift of a headdress into which was woven or sewn 10 coins. The headdress with the coins (usually a gift of her father) was to be worn in public at all times and was a symbol of the woman's faithfulness to her husband and marriage, to her people, and to the covenant and God Himself. Should a coin be lost, her husband had the right to conclude she had been unfaithful. Should she actually be unfaithful, her husband could remove a coin and send her out to public shame and disgrace. What was at stake here was not simply a day's wages, but the honor of Israel, the integrity of the covenant, and of course, the woman's very life itself! Consider her search for the coin then in this light! Can we feel the pathos? Are we convinced of the value of what has been lost? Does the urgency of what is at risk clutch at our stomachs and our hearts? Do we feel a compassion and desire to help her in her search, or, if the coin is found, to rejoice with her and help her throw a party the likes of which the neighborhood has not seen? If so, Jesus' parable has done the larger part of its job.

Moved to a New Answer? The New Big Picture

If so, we know a little of what God feels and wishes us to feel in regard to the meanest sinner. Not least, we know a fraction of what God feels in our own regard and for nothing we have done, created, achieved, etc. Simply because he is God and we are his own. If so, we have, at least briefly, felt and seen as the Spirit inspires us to see and feel. The worldly calculus of expendable goods and sustainable losses has been short circuited for the moment and we have adopted the world view of Christ. This single sinner, this meanest person is not just a coin, an expendable fraction of the whole, any longer. S/he is a symbol of God's completely gratuitous love and sovereignty, his unceasing faithfulness and stewardship, his very nature as God --- and s/he is a symbol of our share in all of that and how well we assume these things in our own lives.

Discipleship is about allowing God to BE God in time and space. It is about mediating God's own presence into those places of sin and death human beings choose to take into themselves where God cannot go by simple fiat. It is about making God present where he wills to be present. It is about protecting HIS INTEGRITY as it is experienced by others because he has entrusted a part in that to us. As Paul tells us in the first lection, we ARE the Circumcision; we ARE the covenant. What affects us affects God and vice versa. This means accepting a very different BIG picture than that of the Pharisees, or than which tempted Luke's community. It means accepting the non-commonsense view that we preserve the church, the very Body of Christ, by seeking out and treating as infinitely precious and God's own each individual life, not by focusing on the 99 who are relatively safe. So, let us consider how well God loves us; consider the woman with the lost coin and the urgency of her quest. Consider our own approach to table fellowship (i.e., to life) with the lost. How now do we answer Jesus' question, "Which of you would not. . .?"

Secularism, a Disease of Heart and Vision

I was most struck by today's first reading (Col 3:7-13) and its relation to what Pope Benedict has described as a crisis of our world --- rampant secularism. It is common to think of secularism as an inordinate esteem for the profane, something that reaches idolatrous proportions at times. But contrary to part of this analysis I think that at its root secularism has more to do with the failure to regard reality, ALL reality, as fundamentally sacred, as gift of God, as that which is to be honored and regarded in light of the One who grounds and gifts it. Secularism occurs precisely when we compartmentalize reality into the sacred and the profane. It occurs when we refuse or are unable to see the innate tendency of all things to reveal to us the God who grounds them, or to participate in and contribute to the goal of human and divine history: that God might be all in all. In short, it is a failure to take a sacramental view of reality.

Once the sundering of reality from its ground occurs, once that is, we begin to divvy things up into sacred and profane`we actually ensure that secularism can gain the ascendancy. Religion occupies a compartment of our lives, business another. Prayer and worship occupies a piece of our lives, sex (or food, or relationships, or material goods and our relation to them) another. And on it goes through all the dimensions and activities of our lives. But the fundamental truth for Christians is reflected in yesterday's Gospel. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. In him the veil between sacred and profane has been rent in two and the distinction no longer holds. As Paul is at pains to convince the Colossians in today's first reading, in Christ all things are reconciled to God. In principle nothing is profane or "outside the temple". In him God (will be) all in all!

Evenso, we are called upon to make this truth real in our own lives, to embody it as fully as we are able. Secularism begins with the divisions in our own hearts, and the end to secularism comes only as we allow God to heal the divisions there and begin to see with the singleness and purity of what the Gospel writers call "new eyes" or with what Paul calls the remaking of our own minds -- eyes and minds sensitized and commited to honoring the sacredness of all of reality.

As Paul turns to the new church in Colossae he advocates "putting to death" all those ways of immorality which were so common as a piece of putting on Christ and becoming the imago christi baptism makes possible. His list of sins fall into two broad areas, sexual sins and sins of the tongue, or affective and expressive sins. What Paul knows I think is that there are two broad dimensions to us which are uniquely human. They are central and pervasive, and they distinguish us from mere animals and constitute us as reflective of the divine. Both are relational dimensions of our existence; they constitute us as capable of loving others, of giving ourselves and receiving the love and being of others in a way which creates abundant and expressive or revelational life. These two dimensions, the sexual and the expressive or verbal, symbolize the whole human being.

What seems clear to me from the list of sins Paul compiles, whether they belong to the dimension of speech or of sexuality is that none of them would exist if we were truly able to regard ourselves, others, and our world as essentially holy. How often sex is used in ways which trivialize it and those who engage in it! How often it is used to demean, exploit, punish, etc. The same is true with speech. How often we trivialize it, distort it, use it to separate, exploit or punish or demean! Our world is innundated in torrents of meaningless "speech," instead of speech which creates community and gives others a place to stand in our world and God's Kingdom; this grows more catastrophic almost daily as people simply treat everything as important to say --- and lose sight of the significance of real speech (not to mention the context required for this which is silence!). Beyond the actual trivialization of speech we have Slander, lies, rage. And yet, how possible would these be if we truly regarded reality, ourselves and others as fundamentally sacred?

Secularism is indeed a crisis today. The solution is what Paul calls putting on Christ, allowing our hearts to be remade, allowing our eyes to see as God sees, acting towards the world, ourselves, and others as they truly are in their profoundest reality. It was the answer and the challenge when Paul wrote from prison to the Colossians. It is the answer today as well.