A life of commitments: On making vows.
This week, after a journey of something like five years, I’ve made my first vows with the Order of the Common Life (OCL). This timeframe isn’t typical—ordinarily, postulancy is six months, followed by a novitiate closer to 18—but my protracted and sometimes circuitous path of discernment was doubtless timely and formation. OCL’s goal is not membership; it’s discernment. And as OCL’s lead abbot has grown fond of saying, “We’re moving as fast as you’d want a monastic expression to move.” So it is with our formation.
I can share much about my distinctive formational path over the last half decade, but here I’d like just to look at the vows I’ve offered into the next year—and why.
Why take vows?
Religious vows are completely unnecessary. Some would say any vow, even a marital vow, is impossible, a lie we make ahead of time. Some, that it’s a human-made burden superadded to what should be a life of freedom in grace and in the Spirit. I don’t believe God has ever asked me to take a vow—or to commit to anything other than to belong to and follow Christ with my whole self.
Yet this gratuitousness is, I think, so much the point. Where God has asked no such thing of me, has required no such thing of me, I wanted to make a gift. In love, I carefully discerned and elected a particular gift I might make of myself, a self particularly formed such as I might not be formed without certain commitments. These commitments I name below, but among them is the idea of a rule of life—not a “rule” like a law but a “rule” like a ruler, a true straight-edge by which I can measure the alignment of my present life with the kind of flourishing and formed life I’ve identified I want to offer to God in service. By committing myself to a rule of life—the spirit of which is contained in my three vows, the practical aspects of which I’ve outlined and shared in my community—I’m merely staking the trellis along which my vines with grow and flourish.
With all of that said, certainly I can live into such commitments without vowing them. And I wouldn’t particularly care to dispute this. Ultimately, however, without God asking me to make vows, I sensed over the unfolding of five years an invitation from God to do so. And so I did, with joy.
What did I vow?
Because the text of my vows below is long, let me summarize. I adopted the Evangelical Counsels, to which I’ve felt especially invited: simplicity (traditionally “poverty”), chastity (here referring to intimate faithfulness and space created for God and others) and obedience (here referring to the Holy Spirit and to the discernment of community, rather than to a single person). I am, ultimately, a Protestant evangelical after all. But I do take these seriously as virtues I desire to lean firmly into.
Under each of these I identified the commitments we share in the Order of the Common Life—and the vision I have of how these might bear unique, personal invitations for my particular formation.
To whom did I vow?
This is important. I didn’t merely make vows in the privacy of my living room. I made vows in community, specifically a community I’ve journeyed with in relationship and which makes vows alongside one another in order to create shared, common commitments.
I made my vows formally and appropriately to God. Yet, as Cistercian monk Thomas Merton writes must necessarily be true, making my vows to God in the company of my religious order enables me to make my promise to them. My promise is that I’ll keep my vows to God, even as I count on them to keep their promises of vows to God, that together we’ll share a common life of formation and commitment. Thus my vows, which are a gift to God, become also a gift to my brothers and sisters. Likewise, because I hope by them to be better formed for God’s service, I offer them to God also for the world. It is a hope that who I offer myself to become, God might make me in this school of love (the vows), to be for others that soul of gentleness and generosity.
Abbot: What do you desire?
Brian: (1) I desire to offer a vow of simplicity, as my response to an invitation to center upon “the one thing necessary.” May I receive in it freedom from my bend toward complexity, which binds me within the unfreedom of indecision and inaction.
Under this grace I affirm my commitments to:
Simplicity and (when possible) poverty — that I might be unhindered by material and technological clutter; that I might be free in what I possess and what I use;
Silence, solitude and the contemplative life — that I might be unhindered by the clutter of noise, distraction and vain hurry; that I might be free in the darkness of the senses;
Shared economy — that I might be unhindered by the insulating determination toward self-sufficiency, which leads to the accumulation of privately held goods; that I might be free in mutual dependence;
Restorative peacemaking — that I might be unhindered by unresolved conflict and fractures or the patterns of relationship that might prevent me from being an agent of peace to others around me; that I might be free in all my relationships; and
The expression of faults and affirmations — that I might be unhindered by the fear of being seen in my faults or known in my vulnerability; that I might be free in being transparent and simple to all.
(2) I desire to offer a vow of chastity, as my response to an invitation to spiritual marriage with Christ. May I receive in it freedom from my bend toward insulating, counterfeit intimacies and my withholding in my relationships.
Under this grace I affirm my commitments to:
The celebration of singleness and faithfulness — that I might joyfully receive in the “emptiness for God” both God and others; that I might be free in my unfulfilled desires for intimacy; and
Hospitality — that in the space faithfulness affords I might invite the presence of friends, family and strangers in my life; that I might be free in the private spaces I yield to others, including my home and my time.
(3) I desire to offer a vow of obedience, as my response to an invitation to belong unreservedly to Christ and his kingdom. May I receive in it freedom from my bend toward a false freedom in which I reserve my internal and external resources for arbitrary, self-focused ends.
Under this grace I affirm my commitments to:
Obedience in the context of a discerning community — that I might offer my will to the discernment of others; that I might be free by acting in community;
Spiritual direction — that I might offer my will to the testing of spirits with one who knows me inwardly; that I might be free by acting with discernment;
Service and submission to the Church — that I might offer my will to the larger mission of God’s people beyond my own; that I might be free by acting beyond my own interest;
Shared work — that I might offer my will to the collaborative labor of a shared vocation that extends beyond my own; that I might be free by acting in concert with co-laborers; and
Theology and practice of the Kingdom of God — that I might offer my will to the mission of the Spirit, which continues the mission of Christ; that I might be free by acting beyond myself and my capacities.
Therefore, to Christ our Lord, his Kingdom and, through the community of this Order, to all peoples, I, Br. Brian, promise my simplicity, my chastity and my obedience, according to a rule of life which I hold with the Order of the Common Life, Abbot, before God and all the saints and in the presence of __________________________, for a period of one year.
Abbot: [Personal prayer and blessing]
Brian: Take and receive, Lord,
all my liberty, my memory,
my understanding and my entire will.
All I have and call my own, You have given to me;
to you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace—
that is enough for me.
Abbot: Amen.
How will I live my vows?
A year-long rule of life outlines the daily, weekly and monthly rhythms that I’ve discerned will likely help me to live into the larger commitments I’ve made vows toward: the 12 common commitments of the Order of the Common Life and the three vows that contain them. But the vows themselves are central, and the daily rule of life isn’t meant to become something I serve but something that’s useful to the extent it helps me grow in simplicity, chastity and obedience for God.
Having now organized my commitments in these vows, I’m so far mindful each day of these vows—simplicity, chastity, obedience—and what they’ve come to mean. How am I leaning into them today? How have I resisted or evaded them? I bring this into my daily prayers of review, my examen, and I monitor with eager attention: how are my tendrils being guided along the trellis?