“Come and you will see.”
To become a member of a Catholic religious order one normally must go through a novitiate for a year or two before being accepted as a professional member. During that period the emphasis is not so much on one’s formal education, one’s intellectual growth, but on laying the groundwork for one’s spiritual life. And so there is much silence, chapel time, training in meditation, spiritual reading, restraining one’s ego, becoming a saint. Of course the cloistered environment of the novitiate is far removed from the world and its temptations – and so when one graduates one is naively resolved to soar well above the worldliness of ordinary people. In my case the resolve lasted three months before I became reconciled to all my prior faults that guarantee I will never be a candidate for canonization. This is not to say that the novitiate experience was a waste of time. I still think it was a good idea – I mean spending a whole year in a quiet, lovely and comfortable location to dwell on the meaning of one’s life, probing one’s relationship to God and creation. But like so many things it became kind of “mechanized” through centuries of use.
For instance, the entrance ceremony required that one appear in the chapel and ceremoniously lay aside one’s secular clothing and don the medieval habit of the order; then lay aside one’s civil name and adopt a new one – of some saint. What a simple way of demonstrating one’s leaving aside one’s old self and adopting a new and truly holy self! But in my generation and at so early an age the ritual was done not as consciously as it might have been – there was no pondering. It was a “ceremony”, edifying to one’s family, but whose implications, like many an “initiation”, were not deeply probed. No wonder we slipped back into the fellows we used to be – later on.
For instance, I don’t remember our being encouraged to meditate even upon the simple biblical episodes read in today’s Mass – the call of Samuel, the renaming of Simon. I mean, meditating upon the call of the boy Samuel would have alerted us to the fact that the novitiate was only the beginning of our being called again and again by God throughout our lives – called out of our tendency to doze, to sleep, called out of the nightmares imposed on us by the media, by habit. Like Samuel, we hear the first call and say “Here I am” and we run to the priest Eli only to be told to go back to sleep, even to dream bad dreams about ourselves. But the call comes once more – and we wake up, even while our culture says, “You must be suffering from some illusion, go back to sleep, stop waking people up, it’s business as usual tomorrow.”
Or look at Simon in today’s Gospel. He’s curious about Jesus, even wants to know where he lives, what dimensions he occupies – and Jesus says, “Come and see” (as he does to you and me). And not only that but Jesus also anticipates that name change we later ritualized in the novitiate: “You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas – the Rock!” A close reading of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles reveals it took Simon a long time to live up to that new name. There were many starts and stops before he overcame his skittishness regarding his relationship to Jesus and matured into the solid foundation of a community that confronts ignorant terrorism with a defiant faith, hope and love.
When did you first hear God’s call? Was it by way of a childhood hymn, the remark of a teacher, a cousin’s kiss, a sunset, or when after hearing them Sunday after Sunday you heard as if for the first time: Take . . . and eat: for this is my body which will be given up for you. What is your new name?