David QuinnSecular individualism is the biggest threat to religious life in Ireland, writes David Quinn
There are now only 19 Cistercian monks left at Mount Melleray, Co. Waterford. They once numbered 150. Of the 19 who are left, two-thirds are above the age of 80 and the youngest is in his 40s.
The Cistercian monks, or Trappists, are contemplatives. They believe in silence, that is, silent contemplation of God.
There are other contemplative communities dotted around the country, both male and female. Some are doing marginally better than others in terms of their ability to attract new members – the Poor Clares in Galway come to mind.
But, like every religious order, all struggle to attract vocations in the numbers they would like.
The contemplative life is a particularly ‘extreme’ form of the religious life in that contemplatives are not ‘active’. That is, they don’t engage in pastoral ministry like teaching or working in hospitals or with the poor.
Of all the types of religious life, it is most out of step with modern society. But that is only because modern society is so out of step with contemplation. I’ll come back to this.
Unusual
period
Irish religious, like religious all over the Western world, are living through a very unusual period. They are witnessing the demise of their orders.
A priest once told me that the average religious order lasts about 100 years. There is an initial burst of energy at the foundation. A charismatic founder will attract followers and a clear purpose will attract followers.
This effect will last for a few more decades after the death of the founder. But then it tends to dissipate and the purpose for which the order was founded might be no more, or it might have been taken up by others.
It is very unusual for an order to last for centuries. Orders like the Poor Clare sisters, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Benedictines or the Franciscans are rare.
But what is unusual about today, in the West at least, is that so many orders are dying out. It’s not just that some orders are reaching the end of their natural lives. Almost all are dying out at the same time.
There are probably multiple reasons for this. When no-one is joining an order, it must be easy to become defeatist or fatalistic. Defeatism becomes self-fulfilling. The end comes that much sooner when you become disinclined to do anything about it.
Another reason might be that some religious have lost faith in the religious life itself. They wonder what they gave their lives for. This is why so many left the religious life starting in the 1960s. They decided there are other ways to serve God, and maybe they found their own formation to be dehumanising and overly strict.
But the biggest reason has to be that Western society has become so secular and so individualistic.
The secularism means that God has faded from view. The individualism means we are much less inclined anymore to join anything that requires a lifelong commitment. That includes marriage in many cases.
Secularism doesn’t only mean the separation of Church from State. It is much bigger than that. In a secularised society, not merely the organs of State have become secular – which is defensible. Life itself has become secular. God starts to disappear from our minds and our conversations.
Jesuit priest Fr Michael Paul Gallagher has said: “God is missing, but is not missed.” That is true up to a point. God is not consciously missed. But we still try to fill the void with other things. We want something to give our lives an overarching purpose and meaning. For very many of us, that is found (we think) in materialism.
When I wrote near the start of this piece that modern society is out of step with contemplation, this is partly what I meant.
Materialism doesn’t only mean an interest in money and what it can buy. It means we can barely look beyond what we can see, touch, taste, smell, hear to any other kind of reality.
Where does contemplation of God fit in here? How can highly materialistic people in this bigger meaning of materialism, possibly appreciate the contemplative life?
But when you believe in God, it makes perfect sense. It will remain a calling only for the very few, but it will make sense to practically everyone who believes in God because, if there is a God, then God is the ultimate reality we must connect to, and the contemplative life is one way of doing this.
This is why, even in secular Ireland, there are still tens of thousands of people – people who barely exist for the media – who greatly appreciate that there are contemplatives among us.
This is why Mount Melleray and other similar communities still receive many visitors and prayer requests. But in a way, even modern, secular, materialistic Ireland, or a section of it anyway, still appreciates contemplation. Hence the popularity of Eastern meditation techniques. Hence our appreciation of Buddhist monks and yoga. Hence our appreciation of any form of asceticism that isn’t Christian.
But this appreciation of Eastern forms of contemplation doesn’t seem to lead to people joining the contemplative life either in its Eastern or Western forms.
Can we really say that a society which can find very little time for contemplation of God, or even of things of the ‘spirit’, or which often scorns contemplation, is making progress?
How can it be ‘progress’ if we can hardly look beyond what our five senses can detect? How can it be progress if we have become so worldly that withdrawing from the world is seen as merely ‘unworldly’ instead of what is it, contemplation of the ultimate reality?
In the end, a society that produces no contemplatives is an impoverished one.
After the colossal failure of the Celtic Tiger to deliver on its promises, you’d imagine there would be more appreciation of another, radically non-materialistic of life.