A Question For Female Discerners

[domenica_therese]

I'm not embarrassed -- anymore. I just said it was embarrassing. I just finished reading The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality, and it talks a lot about being drunk on the spirit, and acting as a vessel of joy without inhibition. It's something I've been given a lot of graces to help me begin to overcome, and the result is something I can only gape at and take no credit whatsoever. In this way my relationship with God is very much like a true-to-life relationship because sometimes I look at my heart and I feel like a frazzled housewife who comes home, throws up her hands, and says "You did what with the living room sofa?"

 

 

One last point:

 

In the beginning stages of my discernment I deliberately ruled out orders like the School Sisters of Christ the King or others with a charism for spreading a devotion to a specific image or personal form of Jesus, because I felt that sort of love for the person of Jesus just wasn't me. My mom once asked me how I saw God. I thought about it a bit, and said fire. She was a bit concerned because I think she saw fire as destructive, whereas for me fire has this irresistible dynamic, contagious, vivacity. For me, my primary image of God can't be just a man. One of my favorite thoughts I ever read talked about how poetry helps us express the inexpressible because in poetry the meaning lies in what is unsaid: in the spaces between the lines. My God is a God of poetry.

 

I still don't feel called to cultivate a love in others towards Christ as a King or Christ as Love or Christ as a Shepherd -- for me it has always been Christ as Truth -- and I think my faith will always be very cerebral, but the reason why I love the Dominicans so much is because I saw that I wasn't broken. It's not bad to love Christ as the answer more than the giver of the answer, it's how my soul sees, praises, and loves him. And I can, and do, love an Answer just as romantically as someone else loves a Shepherd.

 

[maximillion]

I like what you said domenica-therese .

 

In French there is the expression 'Dieu Est La Toute Autre'

 

meaning that God is everything else....everything else that is left after the words, the art, the impulse of human desire, nature, the universe, etc etc etc......

 

Il Est tout Cela. 

 

God is what remains after the whole of everything has passed away, because He Was.........and Is, and will Be.

[Antigonos]

I share your puzzlement, FP, as someone who believes in an omniscient, omnipresent, incorporeal God.  It is perfectly true that there is imagery in the Old Testament where Israel is regarded in an intimate relationship with God -- in Hosea, for example, chapter 2, verses 21-22 "I will betroth you to Me forever, and I will betroth you to Me with righteousness, justice, kindness, and mercy. I will betroth you to Me with fidelity, and you shall know God".  These verses are said every morning when a man lays tefillin [dons phylacteries], and the Hebrew "know" has both the meaning of obtaining knowledge and sexual intimacy.  There isn't any doubt that the Sages were uncomfortable with a literal reading of the Song of Songs, which is heavily erotic, and insisted that it was meant as allegory instead.  And the various forms of Jewish mysticism play with the fact that certain of God's attributes are words in Hebrew which are feminine in gender [such as shekhina, or God's radiance] while others are masculine and the possible implications of that in a purely spiritual sense.

 

But we don't have any doubt we are dealing in a spiritual realm in Judaism since we do not have any pictorial depiction of God.  The man Jesus therefore presents a problem.  I admit I've seen photos of nuns cradling statues of the baby Jesus as one would a doll, and have read so many descriptions of the spousal relationship that could be mistaken for a particularly gooey romance novel [the young women who make them have no real idea of the realities of married life, or indeed the sexual relationship, although the allusions can be quite explicit].  Jesus, the perfect spouse, would not, to paraphrase a Tom Lehrer song, squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube.  Many of the great Christian mystics described their visionary experiences in erotic terms [look at Bellini's statue of St. Theresa] because they simply could not find any other words for it.

 

It makes me all wonder about some of the underlying motives in some young women who believe they have a vocation.  One presumes that those who are "in love with love" and see the celibate life as a way to have one's cake yet remain untouched by the messiness of a sexual relationship with a real person, get winnowed out during discernment or postulancy.  Yet one has to ask why so many religious left their convents after V2, and so many married subsequently.  I don't pretend to know the answer; indeed, I don't know if anyone has done any serious research on this.

 

I think it would be natural for a man to relate more to the concept of Christ as king rather than spouse.  In fact, the military imagery pervades a lot of the language used by certain orders, as if priests constituted a sort of spiritual army.

[abrideofChrist]

Well, I'm no longer a discerner... but what I did say in the Bride of Christ thread I would proffer for your consideration.  The whole Bride of Christ imagery is most properly said of consecrated virgins and the Church herself and only to lesser degrees for religious men/women, etc.  I think the reason why so many sisters today refer to themselves as brides of Christ is because they mistakenly believe they have the same bridal relationship as consecrated virgins since the spousal dimension of consecrated life has been hammered into their heads over all these centuries when all nuns were consecrated virgins.  At any rate, it seems to me that it is appropriate for men to believe in the spousal or bridal dimension with less emphasis and more on the discipleship which constitutes religious life. 

[ToJesusMyHeart]

....................

[AuthorOfMyLife]

Well, I'm no longer a discerner... but what I did say in the Bride of Christ thread I would proffer for your consideration.  The whole Bride of Christ imagery is most properly said of consecrated virgins and the Church herself and only to lesser degrees for religious men/women, etc.  I think the reason why so many sisters today refer to themselves as brides of Christ is because they mistakenly believe they have the same bridal relationship as consecrated virgins since the spousal dimension of consecrated life has been hammered into their heads over all these centuries when all nuns were consecrated virgins.  At any rate, it seems to me that it is appropriate for men to believe in the spousal or bridal dimension with less emphasis and more on the discipleship which constitutes religious life. 

 

Forgive me, but I don't quite understand what you are saying here. I understand that the vocation of Consecrated Virgin is not the same thing as the vocation to, say, the Sisters of Life, or an order of Carmelites, etc. However, it doesn't make sense to me to say that these sisters / nuns are not consecrated virgins. They are consecrated (they are vowed to a particular life) and they are virgins (most of the time, anyway, I think--at least they are definitely all vowed to celibacy). So why wouldn't they be considered brides of Christ?

 

 

[EmilyAnn]

Forgive me, but I don't quite understand what you are saying here. I understand that the vocation of Consecrated Virgin is not the same thing as the vocation to, say, the Sisters of Life, or an order of Carmelites, etc. However, it doesn't make sense to me to say that these sisters / nuns are not consecrated virgins. They are consecrated (they are vowed to a particular life) and they are virgins (most of the time, anyway, I think--at least they are definitely all vowed to celibacy). So why wouldn't they be considered brides of Christ?

 

 

They are not Consecrated Virgins. They may have made religious vows, but they have no received the Consecration of Virgins. They are separate things. 

That being said, there are a few orders where the sisters also receive the Consecration of Virgins. 

[the171]

They are not Consecrated Virgins. They may have made religious vows, but they have no received the Consecration of Virgins. They are separate things. 

That being said, there are a few orders where the sisters also receive the Consecration of Virgins. 

 

Do you have a list? I'm really interested in that.

[EmilyAnn]

Do you have a list? I'm really interested in that.

Any Solesmes Benedictines should. In English speaking terms, the only one I can be 100% about is St. Cecilia's. 

[OnlySunshine]

Do you have a list? I'm really interested in that.

 

The Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut uses the Rite of Consecrated Virginity.  :)

[ToJesusMyHeart]

Women in religious order are consecrated women, even if they don't receive the Rite of Consecration for Virgins. 

 

They're still consecrated to God and share a spousal relationship with Jesus. 

[EmilyAnn]

Women in religious order are consecrated women, even if they don't receive the Rite of Consecration for Virgins. 

 

They're still consecrated to God and share a spousal relationship with Jesus. 

Of course they are still consecrated, but it is not the same consecration as the Consecration of Virgins.

[ToJesusMyHeart]

Of course they are still consecrated, but it is not the same consecration as the Consecration of Virgins.

:like:

The way it was talked about made it sound like religious women are somehow less special, and their spousal relationship less legitimate than CVs simply because most nuns don't receive the actual Rite, which of course is nonsense.

[PhuturePriest]

:like:

The way it was talked about made it sound like religious women are somehow less special, and their spousal relationship less legitimate than CVs simply because most nuns don't receive the actual Rite, which of course is nonsense.

 

I believe you mean "nunsense". ;)

[Evangetholic]

I see Christ as my spouse, I'm breathlessly in love with the Man. Yes he's God, Lord, Judge, Brother, Savior, High Priest, King, etc. but the primary way that I emotionally respond to Him is as Lover. He is my ever wooing Bridegroom. He is (mostly) my Gentle and Sweet Spouse--this is how He chooses to come to me.