~ by Glen Butterworth, SJ

One of the great blessings for most of us is that we’re relatively comfortable most of the time. We’ll give thanks for that in a few weeks as our culture settles into the ‘Holiday Season.’ This general comfort is well-known by people throughout the Northwest as well as Jesuits and the men and women who might be discerning a vocation. There’s enough food, shelter, education, etc. to go around.

Of course, most of us is code for being part of the privileged classes in the U.S. For us, life will be pretty good regardless of whether we make any commitment to this path or that path. In fact, life will be pretty good even if we don’t take any particular path at all but bounce along through various jobs, careers, cities, experiences, and relationships.

Part of this privilege means that even though we pass through periods of struggle, we always pop out on the other side, back into the comfortable life. For most of us, there’s an entitlement to comfort – or at least an expectation of it.

So what’s the impetus to become a vowed man or woman in our culture? And what’s the rush if, in fact, someone does suspect that religious or married life would be a place where they’d flourish? Couldn’t they just wait and see what happens?

My own answer to all this is that even though I personally took my own sweet time entering vowed life, the horizon of my life project was out there far beyond the comfortable life. I was always seeking my way beyond what our culture has to offer and it took me years of experimenting to come upon the simple truth that I was hungry for something that the culture couldn’t provide. I think I tried everything but religious life before I realized that what I was really interested in was something outside the box.

Ultimately, the source of my hunger – my drive – had nothing to do with what’s wrong with the world (the world is actually just fine the way it is) but rather it had to do with looking at life a whole different way.

If there are religious vocations today, in my opinion, they are those men and women whose souls seem to pour out and over the distant horizon, beyond the minutia of the everyday marketplace world we live in. They are those who feel a constant and nagging hunger that cannot be satisfied and a restlessness that will not be silenced. William James once wrote that in his research into the religious life, he wasn’t interested in good churchgoers but in those few who experience the religious mood. Sure, there’s a place for the tame of heart and for the whole spectrum of human experience in the pews of any religion – I wouldn’t want to be un-PC. And yet religious life is specifically the call to those whose souls aren’t just hot and smoldering but burning and aflame and whose dreams for what could be vastly outstrip what’s possible in a single lifetime – and who are resolved, nonetheless, to pursue these dreams. (Don’t pass over that last bit too quickly.)

That’s why for Jesuits our ambitions take on a trans-generational dimension and that’s a part of what makes the Church a force beyond what is human – in fact – it makes it a force of the divine fire. Religious life, in my vision, is a place where dreams open up to their full potential and love rages forward over all the obstacles and opens up into the distant future. What I’m talking about is a life that’s complementary to married life – and you can’t have the one without the other – but it’s distinctive.

And comfort has nothing to do with it.

So by all means thank God this ‘holiday season’ for all the blessings we enjoy. Hopefully one of the things we’re grateful for is a burning heart and a restlessness for life that overflows into commitment and selfless giving. And maybe this commitment will be a tenacious grappling with dreams and a refusal to accept comfort as the measure of any life.