white male seeking religious community
"Thirty-three year-old male, computer systems analyst, likes baseball, devout Catholic seeking a monastery that is orthodox but not dour, between 15 and 45 monks, in a warm climate, where I can be ordained. Must have great liturgy. Please call..."
If you pick up any free paper in a big city such as Chicago, you will find pages and pages of personals. I often wonder about these, inasmuch as I don’t know anyone personally who has actually met the man or woman of their dreams through these ads. Yet they are clearly immensely popular.
I suspect that part of their popularity is that they promise a kind of control: there is a kind of pre-relationship quality control built into the notion that personalities can be fitted together based on certain extrinsic qualities. Of course, we all know that when persons fall in love, all bets are off. Some of the happiest married couples I know would seem at first glance to be the least compatible!
It is also the case that no matter how well we dress ourselves up and no matter what our strong points, we all have failings that eventually come to the attention of the people with whom we live. At that point, we need their compassion and kindness and good faith. When a spouse or brother in community puts the milk back on the wrong shelf for the fourteenth time, we tend not to be so interested in whether or not they like baseball, even if that once seemed attractive!
The point is that God has given us the project of life so that we can grow in love, not so that we can arrange everyone else around our personal likes and dislikes. To be able to love, we must be able to make a gift of ourselves to others. A gift is always free. When we put conditions on our gift it ceases to be a gift: as Paul writes in Romans 4:4, "when someone works, his wages are not regarded not as a favor but as his due." We live in a hard-working society of persons who tend to look out for ‘getting their due’. But "it must not be so with you."
I have not actually ever received a message from a candidate that reads like the personal ad above, but often times the inquiries can be driven by the same idea. A relationship that begins this way, I fear, does not have much of a future. Let us examine ourselves to see if we are really ready to trust God’s promises enough to make a gift of ourselves. Let us also encourage the young persons we know to consider whether God is calling them to make this gift.
If you pick up any free paper in a big city such as Chicago, you will find pages and pages of personals. I often wonder about these, inasmuch as I don’t know anyone personally who has actually met the man or woman of their dreams through these ads. Yet they are clearly immensely popular.
I suspect that part of their popularity is that they promise a kind of control: there is a kind of pre-relationship quality control built into the notion that personalities can be fitted together based on certain extrinsic qualities. Of course, we all know that when persons fall in love, all bets are off. Some of the happiest married couples I know would seem at first glance to be the least compatible!
It is also the case that no matter how well we dress ourselves up and no matter what our strong points, we all have failings that eventually come to the attention of the people with whom we live. At that point, we need their compassion and kindness and good faith. When a spouse or brother in community puts the milk back on the wrong shelf for the fourteenth time, we tend not to be so interested in whether or not they like baseball, even if that once seemed attractive!
The point is that God has given us the project of life so that we can grow in love, not so that we can arrange everyone else around our personal likes and dislikes. To be able to love, we must be able to make a gift of ourselves to others. A gift is always free. When we put conditions on our gift it ceases to be a gift: as Paul writes in Romans 4:4, "when someone works, his wages are not regarded not as a favor but as his due." We live in a hard-working society of persons who tend to look out for ‘getting their due’. But "it must not be so with you."
I have not actually ever received a message from a candidate that reads like the personal ad above, but often times the inquiries can be driven by the same idea. A relationship that begins this way, I fear, does not have much of a future. Let us examine ourselves to see if we are really ready to trust God’s promises enough to make a gift of ourselves. Let us also encourage the young persons we know to consider whether God is calling them to make this gift.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB at 8:53 AM
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