Life as Religious in a Contempory Time

My reflections about living a life of being a religious in modern days as a young brother.

“Why don’t you join priesthood rather than just a religious brother? Same, you can’t marry, anyway” Same questions and statements I heard from my own parents and friends when I expressed my desire to join the brotherhood. My family was not ready to understand what religious life means. Even myself, I didn’t really understand the differences of being a lay religious and ordinary layman. It was difficult for me to weigh my intentions since I have always the option to help others as a lay man, same with what lay religious are doing; serving our neighbors in the same way a religious does. Being confronted with the realities of life; poverty, injustice, problems with society in general, I was asked if I was just trying to escape from these, and joining the group of people gathered together inside the intentional communities is one way of running away from these realities. I had the notion of being secured in life inside while enjoying the social structure, but attraction to religious life is more than these.

The earlier belief of security is also confronting young religious like me in general. Maybe this is the reason why we are always send to study more and even outside our seminaries, just like other students do. If before, the young religious were staying in their own cloisters to live the vows, my contemporary time is getting different and more open to change. Somehow there is the gradual change in formation. There are instances in my community to compare the formation between elder brothers and younger brothers when issue of differences and generation gap are raised. As if there is something wrong with the new generation of religious yet at the same time, wrongly understood that there is also something wrong with old formation. Indeed life is getting more difficult as the society changes too fast also. Technology now determine most of the peoples movement and there are difficulty with the Church people to “get in” to it. It seems that its more difficult to live a simple lifestyle just like before the second Vatican Council. Few years back, I was phoned by a nun in a monastery to fix their printer. I was honored to enter in a monastery of nuns, which I’m thinking, no man can ordinarily enter their cloister, I was wrong. Inside their parlor, I saw laptop, desktop and mobile gadgets used for communication. At least, the paradigm I had was getting clearer that spirituality in religious life doesn’t just mean a small life but a very real and challenging life but simple and liberating.