[Untitled]

Issue 29.1 of the Review for Religious, 1970.

EDITOR R. F. Smith, S.J. ASSOCIATE EDI.TORS Everett A. Diederich, S.J. Augustine G. Eilard. S.J. ASSISTANT EDITOR John L. Treloar, S.J. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS EDITOR Joseph F. Gallen, S.J. Correspondence with the editor, the associate editors, and the assistant editor, as well as books for review, should be sent to R~wEw vog l~uG~ous

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Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. GEORGE WILSON, S.J. Community... and Loneliness Not another article on communityl Haven’t we all heard enough on that subject to last us through our next ten general chapters? Perhaps. But I hope the reader will excuse me if I muse a bit out loud on some questions in this area which I feel we have neglected in spite of the deluge of analyses, anathemas, and recipes to which we have been treated in recent years. The reflections which follow will have only the merest semblance of any order. I make no apology for this. It happens to represent for me the state of the issues, which recurrently bob to the surface of my consciousness like the flotsam from a variety of experiences with religious men and women over the past six years. It strikes me, incidentally, that flotsam may be a particularly apt word inasmuch as some of these experiences involved rather disastrous shipwrecks. We might make a good beginning by taking eight giant steps backwards to a typical religious community in the year 1962. (We now know that such a thing never existed, of course

beneath the surface each com-munity was really very different. In those idyllic days, however, we might very well have lived under such an illusion.) We heard about the Council---the typical first reaction was "I wonder why?"--so we prayed for the gentle rain of the Spirit. We prayed for the success of the Council more or less as we would have prayed for a Eucharistic congress. We prayed for rain and we were treated to a ty-phoon. And not least in the area of what we came to call "community." We might even have to remind our-selves now that the word "community" was hardly ever heard before the Council. And certainly if we used it at all, it was not with all the psychological baggage with which it is currently burdened. In those ÷ + George Wilson, $.J., teaches theol-ogy at Woodstock College in Wood-stock, Md. 21163. VOLUME 29, 1970 + 4. 4. George Wilson, REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS days we might have spoken of "common life"--but that was such a different thing. I hope I will be for-given the whimsical reflection that in those days "com-mon life" was frequently used to engineer the rigidity which precisely destroys all life, whereas today our more likely mistake is to invoke "community" in order to perpetrate all the most bizarre diversities which haven’t the foggiest connection with the people with ¯ whom we live. Lest this latter remark be misconstrued, let me .hasten to add that it is not in any way a plea for more togetherness. I suppose at this point I am just suggesting that we abandon the futile gesture of trying to baptize the many sensible, good, and apostolic things done by religious with the tag "community." If indeed they are sensible, good, and apostolically profitable, they will remain so even without the tag, as long as the religious lives up to his or her basic commitment to the group. At any rate, I think we would all admit that "com-munity" has taken on new burdens in the renewal years. The new factor consists in the conscious emphasis on personal enrichment of the life of the individual through the intimate sharing of life with similarly dedi-cated persons. This is not to suggest that religious life in previous decades did not bring rich personal satis-faction to the lives of many wonderful and wonder-fully human beings. It is one of the cruel illusions of some of our fiery reformers to think that they dis-covered the category of the personal--cruel to others because it seems to cast a shadow over the accomplish-ment of their great lives of service, but even more cruel to the reformers themselves because, being, an illusion, it prevents them from seeing precisely the beauty of lives lived for years at a steady, if less ro-matically intense, warmth. One is tempted to think of beams and motes and so forth. Be that as it may, the difference between then and today is not, I would submit, that between coldness and warmth, but rather between a then in which the warm personal successes and the cold impersonal failures were just lived, and a today, in

which they are consciously sought after (warm personal relationships) or consciously and ruthlessly knocked down (the merely functional, computerized, impersonal civilities). People were always warm (some) and cold (some) and they still are today (some of e~ch). Wheat and cockle and all that. It is just that we religious have as a group grown more reflective about how it happens

we have evolved a new set of forms which define and give contemporary expression to warmth and coldness (and we .are evolving even newer forms at a dizzy pace)

and we are more consciously searching out the ways to increase the successes and minimize the failures in the process. All of which is good. Religious communities not only should be places in which the full development of human personal potential for life and love and happiness takes place, they should also be evidently such. Signs which don’t communicate are worse than anomalies: they have the fateful chameleon capacity to become counter-signs. Let it be proclaimed once and for all: a man or woman giving his or her life to Christ in a religious society should find there the ac-ceptance and warmth and affection which any hu-man being has a right to look for in his commitment to any other person or group of persons. Unfortunately this still does not get us out of the woods. I say unfortunately, because I am afraid that many religious feel that the mere affirmation is enough by itself to answer all difficulties. To draw a bold caricature which probably never happened, I ~aave the recurring fantasy of a contemporary religious say-ing: "A religious community should be an intimate group of people who are in love with one another. I don’t feel that way about any of the eight people I live with and I certainly know non~ of them feels that way about me. So this isn’t a community, and I’m get-ting out of this farce." Put in such a starkly simplistic form, some of the ambiguities which lurk within our thinking about community are thrown into a new light and some finer honing of our questions is called for. What degree of intimacy can a person realistically hope for with eight people selected more or less at random by somebody who won’t be living with them? Yes, the community should supply warmth and personal sup-pol: t--but just who is the community when I say that? Does the community commit itself to being my only source of deep personal relationships and human ful-fillment? Need it always and in every instance even be the primary source? Is it possible that by failing to face these questions we have created a thought pattern in which the individual religious is unwittingly taught to have entirely unrealistic expectations and then when these cannot be met he or she is compelled to seek their fulfillment elsewhere? It has been observed in the case of marriage that our current high divorce rate can be directly attributed to the fact that modern man’s ex-pectations from marriage are, contrary to a superficial view, actually much higher than in the past

would the increasing rate of departures from religious life be say-ing the same thing about our expectations concerning it? I would not pretend to answer all of these difficult questions in the space of a brief article. But perhaps we + 4. + Loneliness VOLUME 29, 1970 5 + ÷ ÷ George Wilson, $.1. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 6 may move the dialogue along a bit by examining a couple of areas: (l) the people with whom I should expect to find "community" when I commit myself to Christ in a religious group, and (2) one of the false understandings of community under which we may have been unwittingly operating. First, to the people. The operating principle of many religious today would seem to be that I should be able to attain to deep intimacy with all the members of my local community or else it is all a sham. I will leave aside the question which the older religious, often quite legitimately, is frequently heard to ask, namely, what in the name of all that’s holy do they mean by "deep intimacy"? My presumption for the moment is that the people in question are attempting to point to something real of which they have already had some experiential taste and which they do expect to find in religious life, however halting they may be in articulat-ing what they mean by it. In other words, I can also sympathize with their common response of "if you don’t even sense what I’m talking about, that’s even sadder than the fact that we don’t have it here." At this point the meaning of "deep intimacy" is not my con-cern. But leaving it descriptively for the moment at the level of a vague but real experience whose presence or lack can be grasped by any sensitive human being, my question is rather: With whom should I reasonably expect to achieve it? There is a "tradition" (of very recent vintage, I sus-pect) which would be shocked that the question is even raised, since sell-evidently this kind of relationship has to be achieved with one’s local community. To which my question in return would be: is it all that self-evident? I ought to find a~ceptance and warmth and affection in the community of people to whom I have committed myself, but does this lead me realistically to expect a relationship of deep intimacy with the eight members of my local community? At about this point in the dialogue it is not unlikely that someone will be thinking: "But just look at the community of our first foundersl They had this kind of deep relationship, but we’ve lost it." The comparison is frequently made and I would like to suggest that it masks a fateful equivocation. To use the word "com-munity" to describe a handful of people who freely and individually sought each other out through a proc-ess of long personal contact and testing, and then to make this a model for one’s expectations when one is assigned to a random collection of eight individuals out of a 500-man (or 35,000-man) congregation to which I commit mysel/-~this is surely courting intellectual con- fusion and psychological disaster. The founding group had a sense of community and generally very intimate relationships. (Would one seem too cynical if one were to suggest that we have probably romanticized even the latter element? A sober reading of our early histories would suggest that for all their vision and charisma our founders generally had to be very hard-headed, down-to-earth wrestlers in order to. survive the fierce opposition which their vision generated.) The fact that they had both these elements in one integrated, lived way should not make us forget that they are two different things. Perhaps a parallel drawn from a related area may be of some assistance here. The movement known as the Teams of Our Lady (or by its original French title, Equipes-Notre Dame) consists of married couples who are established into communities of six couples each. It is important to note that the couples do not as a rule choose the other couples with whom they will de-velop as a team

the leadership of the movement usually gathers them on the basis of factors such as geographical proximity and so forth. The goal of the team is to help one another grow in holiness, which involves assisting each couple to find the ways to express love in the various situations into which their marriage and family life call them. The forms and practices of the spiritual life vary from couple to couple. The role of the other couples in the team is to foster the individual couple’s unique growth, not to dictate a particular recipe for conjugal sanctity. The point of the parallel is that the testimony of the couples in the movement reveals that they have discovered experientially the distinction be-tween a successful team and what they call a "cozy team." A given team which is functioning well may gradually develop also into a cozy group

the couples and their children may begin to socialize apart from the explicit team structure, they may begin to gravitate to-ward other team couples in deep friendship. Or they may not. The point is that couples find that this factor is not essential to the success of a team. Teams can reach great depths of spiritual sharing and mutual assistance and growth without a great deal of socializ-ing or what one might call camaraderie. Indeed there are teams whose rating on the latter scale is very high but in which nothing of significance with regard to the goal of the movement is happening. It will be instantly objected that the supposed paral-lel is fallacious because of course these couples already have their primary needs for intimacy satisfied else-where, prior to entry into a team. The objection has some merit

certainly the parallel limps. On the other hand, it would be a bit cavalier to dismiss it out of + 4, VOLUME 29, 1970 4. 4. 4. George Wilson, S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS 8 hand simply on those grounds. We must face the fact that when we admit the inadequacies of the parallel we are not thereby justified in ignoring the facets in which it does touch home in spite of its hobbling gait. Nor--more importantly--may we thereby surrepti-. tiously insert the assumption that the religious must of course find his or her admitted needs for intimacy satis-fied within the local cgmmunity. Despite the weak-nesses of the parallel I submit that this notion remains at this point in the case exactly that, just an assump-tion. What are we to say of its value? It occurs to me that we might make a better assessment of it if we pose some specific situations for ourselves. Suppose that a given sister or brother or priest, were to discover that he or she finds it much more pleasant to be with, say, a member of the lay faculty or some parishioner or fellow nurse than with members of the local community. A deep and rich friendship has evolved through sharing important experiences together. There may be several such relationships. The religious may honestly face the fact that he shares a deeper level of friendship with people beyond the community than with those inside ~t. Should this be a disturbing discovery? Should it lead to the conclusion that this religious group ~is only a hollow facade and that honesty dictates a resignation from the group? My own personal answer would have to be negative. If I might take a stab at describing the stages of the re-cent development of community life styles, I would suggest that it has proceeded along the following lines: (1) the "lived" stage mentioned above. There were de facto some rich friendships in religious communities. There was also an explicit doctrine which inculcated fear of any human warmth. The healthy were always able to put this doctrine in psychological brackets and go on about the business of living, which is to say, trying to be human. The less healthy were more crippled by the tradition or, as a perhaps harsher judgment would have it, allowed themselves to be crippled by it. At this stage relationships outside the community were the ultimate no-no. (2) The explicit doctrine was gradually battered down by the new openness to in-sights from the human sciences, if it did not simply crumble from the weight of its own unreality. Friend-ship, warmth, openness became values to be consciously striven after. Rather ironically we rediscovered that fusty old English word "Thou~’ (as .in "I-hyphen- Thou"

but never in hymns, pleasel) and eyeball-to-eyeball became the image of the day. But this was all to be within the community--it is no accident that our word "pagan" has as one of its earliest meanings simply "an outsider." And although the explicit doctrine of suspicion of friendship was finished, an unwritten tradition had evolved very quickly, according to which the community where friendship had to be discovered was the local community. In the meantime a third step was taking place, one which deserves a separate paragraph because it repre-sents the present for many religious. Having been con-sciously opened to the value of the human, they discovered that it existed outside the religious group as well. They inevitably began to experience the rise of friendships with persons outside the group. In some communities the explicit tradition quickly adjusted to this new fact by seeing it as a natural consequence of openness to personal relationship and accepted it as a good thing

in others the notion has had a more bumpy ride. For all, the -~ituation became more tense when father or brother or sister found that there were many more inviting people outside than in. The new tradition has created an intolerable bind for many. They are being told in effect (1) that every human being needs some deeply fulfilling human re-lationships, (2) that these should not be fostered out-side the community, or at least (3) that even if outside relationships are acceptable one should be able to reach that same level of intimacy with those religious with whom one happens to live as a result of the need for a teacher of remedial reading---a placement deter-mined by someone who in all probability will not be sharing the local community situation. At this juncture I am not. sure whether I have more .to fear from my. friends than my attackers. I can imagine one group hailing me because I have shown that they were right all along, that all this deep relationship business was exaggerated and all we really have to do to have .community is to be civil. (Sometimes things get so bad in dealing with this mentality that one is almost tempted to agree and settle for that, but civility seems to be one of those things you cannot have all by itself

either we aie going forward to love and warmth or else we are soon back in the cold jungle.) A group .on the opposite side is saying: "Of course that’s not what he means. What he’s clearly shown is that the only solution is to let everyone choose his or her own local group. Then we’ can reduplicate the intimacy of our founding fathers." A third group is made up of the poor harried school,supervisors and provincials, and they are probably muttering in the corner that I have leveled another juvenile a.ttack against that old straw man, the im-personal bureaucratic sturcture, when they have had ÷ 4. ÷ ÷ ÷ 4. George Wilson, S.$. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]0 their insides torn out trying to respect the personal needs of individuals in the face of important com-munity commitments. Which means it is time for fixing our position. I am not going back on my stand affirming the importance of warm and deep human relationships for all human beings and therefore for all religious. Nor on the other hand am I convinced that a group of people which has a job to do can simply let its members form all its subgroups on the basis of free association untram-meled by the facts of broader common commitments. And I have the greatest sympathy for those in the com-munity who have the difficult task of reconciling per-sons, pegs, and holes

their service, far from being mere bureaucracy, is generally one of the most excruciatingly personal ones in the whole community. No, our solution lies neither in shrinking back from personal relationships nor in totally free association. I would suggest that the sources for an answer are in two places: in the broader pool of the larger religious community and in the open personal concourse of religious with the outside world they serve. A religious need not feel especially troubled on discovering that there are no close personal friends among those with whom he or she happens to live, provided that some-where in the larger religious group there are those with whom such a relationship exists. And the com-munity should foster the normal means by which such relationships can flourish and grow: the chance to choose vacation partners, freedom to visit and recreate to-gether without the other members of each one’s local community feeling slighted, trips within reason (proportioned by the same responsible norms which two lay friends might have to use in making such a decision, such as available funds, other commitments, and so forth). Beyond the incarnated friendships of those in different local communities warm relationships with other men and women outside the community should be expected to arise, be fostered when they do, and be given the normal modes of expression which suit such relationships (if sister has to be home by midnight on a particular occasion, it is not because she is sister but because she is an adult human being with a responsibil-ity to perform as an adult the next morning--and that is something she should be free to discover for her-self by trial and, alas, error). In this way we can ease the impossible demand which has been placed on the local community by the tradition of unreasonable ex-pectations. We will of course still have to be open to growth in the depth of our relationships in the local community. We will have to be on our guard lest the needs of more withdrawn members of the local group go unattended. But paradoxically, it is just possible that we may be better able to meet these basic demands of love on the local scene if we do not expect that scene to fulfill all our human personality needs. All of this might become more acceptable doctrine if we were to examine the normal patterns of mature and healthy individuals-in-community. It is quite natural for the mature adult in our society to func-tion within a wide diversity of social circles simul-taneously, to have his own needs met and to meet the needs of others in a variety of ways and on different levels. This is true even of that most intimate of com-munities constituted by the one-to-one relationship of marriage. The husband lives on one level with his wife, on another in his field of occupation, on still another with a few very close male friends (with whom his wife may or may not be on such close terms), on another with more casual social acquaintances

he may even have a select group with whom his only contact may be a weekly game of handball. The wife’s circles will be analogous

in some instances they may range more broadly than his, as for example in the parish or neighborhood. At times their circles will coincide, at times not. They will strive to enlarge the areas they share (which may not necessarily mean that they do the things together

they learn to enrich each other by sharing what they have done separately). But one thing is sure: they know that if they demand even of this re-lationship that it satisfy all their personal needs for intimacy, it will become involuted and shrivel up and die. It is true of the couple

it is true of the family on a different level

and it is true of the individuals in a given local religious community. If we are supposing, then, that a particular religious will not have any really close friend within the group with whom he or she must share years of human life and work, are we not exposing the religious to a frightening risk of loneliness? This very real question brings us to the second area in which it was suggested that we might clarify our thinking, namely, a false understanding of community which may unwittingly be causing a lot of unhealthy departures from religious life. Actually it is really a false understanding of loneli-ness rather than immediately one of community which is at issue

but on a given level these are really correla-tive notions, and our understanding of the meaning of loneliness has its impact on our expectations from com-munity life. The issue was brought home most force-fully to me in a response by Thomas Merton to an ÷ ÷ VOLUME 29, 1970 ]! George Wilson, S.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ’]2 interviewer’s question, as reported in Motive for Octo-ber,. 1967. The interviewer touched on the issue of celibacy and solitude

and Merton’s answer read in part: I think I can say I have experienced levels of loneliness that most people do not allow themselves consciously to admit. From a certain point of view I can say bluntly that to exist as a man without relating to one particular woman-and-person who is "my love," is quite simply a kind of death. But I have enough experience of human love to realize, too, that even within the best of relationships between man and woman this loneliness and death are also terribly present. There are mo-ments in human love in which loneliness is completely tran-scended, but these are brief and deceptive, and they can point 9nly to the further and more difficult place where, ultimately, two lonely and helpless persons elect to save one another from absurdity by being absurd together--and for life (pp. 36-7). This explicitation of the fact that there is a certain kind of loneliness experienced within the most intimate of unions and even in its peak moments can be of in-valuable assistance in clarifying our expectations from religious life in community. Whether we consciously admit it to ourselves or not, we.do tend to interpret the meaning and value of various human experiences by comparing them with expectations from other ways of life. This is a perfectly human process, for man is, after all, a prudential being. But the worth of the process depends on the realism with which we view the two situations. It is my convic-tion that a number of religious have made the decision to leave, religious life on the unhealthy basis of a judgment that the loneliness of religious life would be assuaged by the relationships available in lay, and particularly married, life. It is important to be dear 0n what is being asserted here. It should be evident that there is no criticism of these people intended, and certainly not a condemnation. Nor is there any at-tempt to dispute their assessment that indeed for them life with this particular religious group had become intolerable due to the type of loneliness they actually experienced. What is at issue is the use of a principle according to which religious life itself would involve a loneliness that is unique to it and would therefore be ".solved" by departure from it. This is, I believe, an unreal assumption and any decision based on it is un-healthy because unreal. Clark,Moustakas has written a precious gem of a book .which .should be required reading for all religious in formation. Entitled simply Loneliness (Prentice-Hall ’

Spectrum". :paperback), the brief work makes a valuable contribution to our discussion from two points of view. Moustakas first alerts us to the fact that the one word "loneliness" can actually cover two distinct reali-ties. One consists in the experiencing of my fundamental human uniqueness, separateness, and inalienable re-sponsibility for myself and my decisions, and actions. No one can stand in my shoes, no one can do "my thing." This quality of genuinely human experience, which Moustakas .calls existential loneliness, is quite simply a part of being human: Loneliness is as much organic to human existence as the blood is to the heart.~ It is a dimension of human life whether existential, sociologidal, or psychological

whatever its deriva-tives or forms, whatever its history, it is a reality of life. Its fear, evasion, denial, !and the accompanying attempts to escape ’the experience of being lonely will forever isolate the person from his own existerlce, will’ afflict and separate him from his own resources so thht there is no development, no creative emergence, no growth in awareness, perceptiveness, sensitivity. If the individual does not exercise his loneliness, one signifi-cant capacity and dimension of being hum~in remains unde-veloped, denied (pp2 When we allow ,ourselves to experience this reality in all its dimensions

we discover that is, is a gomplex phenomenon which includes both the painful acknowl-edgment of our igclination to evade responsibili.ty by leaning on someone else as well as the exhilarating discovery of the Ipower of our deepest self and its capacify for respo.hsible accomplishment.-This kind of loneliness, which belongs to every adult’s life, has to be distinguished from ~inottier reality which is call’dd by the same name but is really the anxious fear. of being left alone. Moustakas calls this latter loneliness anxiety: Loneliness anxiety results from a fundamental breach be-tween what one island what one pretends to be, a basic alienation between man and man and between man and his nature (p. 24). Modern man is

plagued with the vague, diffuse fear of loneliness. He goesI to endless measures, takes devious and circuitous pathways] to avoid facing the experience of being lonely. Perhaps the !loneliness of a" meaningless existence, the absence of values, convictions, beliefs, and fear of isolation are the most terribl~ kind of loneliness anxiety (pp. 26-7). The fact that. twqt.very different realities can go by the same name g~ves r, lse to the question: When a religious laments the loneliness of the religious group and de-cides to resolve ~he tension by separating from the community, tehic~ lcind oI loneliness is he or she at-tempting to resolve? Please note that I am not trying to answer the ques-tion in any particular case. It may very well be that the .individual may have wakened to the very valid realiza-tion ’that life in this particular group does involve such a measure of pretense, superficiality, and meaningless Loneliness VOLUME 29, 1970 George Wilson, $.]. REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS ]4 forms that he or she is in danger o~ total self-estrange-ment. When there is the concomitant realization that the individual is impotent to do anything about this destructive communal pattern, it may be the better part of valor to shake the dust of this group from one’s shoes. (What one in such a case makes of his personal commitment to serve God as a celibate-- which need not be in this community--is a broader question whid~ would take us beyond the scope of this article.) On the other hand, there is the possibility that a person may be unwittingly seeking to evade the existential loneliness which he just happens to be ex-periencing