The Perfect Community

One of the attractions to religious life is living with others who have the same values and desire to seek God.  One of the challenges when discerning religious life is finding the ‘right’ community.  There are hundreds of different communities with their own charisms.  

It’s easier to get information about communities here in the 21st century due to the world wide web.  I had to rely on people recommending communities or handing me vocation booklets/magazines where communities advertised.  I actually had to handwrite a letter, put some postage on it and walk down to the mailbox...imagine!

Sometimes discerners can be trying to find the PERFECT community.  However, spiritual directors will tell you, “If you find the perfect community, don’t enter it because you will ruin it...because you ARE NOT perfect.”  And actually, perfect communities don’t exist, just like perfect marriages/families don’t exist...there is the all too human element in these revered institutions.

I wasn’t naive at the age of 29 when I entered, but I realized I had harbored subconsciously the ideal that sisters/nuns were always kind and cheery when I was surprised by witnessing 2 sisters arguing my first week as a postulant.  But then I saw them reconciling, which was what I usually did NOT see out in ‘the world.’  I asked our maintenance man back when I was a novice if he thought we sisters were any different than regular people.  He thought about it carefully and then said, “You sisters try harder.”  

The community that is a right fit will still have people who for want of a better way to describe it are...annoying.  St. Therese of Lisieux was no stranger to this.  She writes: 

Being charitable has not always been so pleasant for me.  At meditation I was for a long time near a sister who never stopped fidgeting with either her rosary or something else.  Perhaps I was the only one who heard her but how it irritated me.  What I wanted to do was turn and stare at her until she stopped her noise, but deep down I knew it was better to endure it patiently--first, for the love of God and secondly, so as not to upset her.  So I made no fuss, though sometimes I was soaked with sweat under the strain and my prayer was nothing but the prayer of suffering.  At last I tried to find some way of enduring this suffering calmly and even joyfully.  So I did my best to enjoy this unpleasant little noise.  Instead of trying not to hear it-- which was impossible--I strove to listen to it carefully as if it were a first-class concert, and my meditation, which was not the prayer of quiet, was spent in offering this concert to Jesus.  

The beauty of living in community is that, if we let it, it can teach us to love those around us we find unlovable.  If we love those who love us, do not the pagans do the same?

John of the Cross wrote:  In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human success, but rather on how much we have loved.  

So finding the right and perfect community is really about learning to love those you live with...which is sometimes the hardest thing of all to do!