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6 min read

Making vows: How binding promises can lead to true freedom

We make all kinds of vows - to marriage promises, to keep up subscriptions, some even make a vow to live a monastic life. Alex Hughes explores what motivates a vowed life and its often counter-intuitive commitments.

Alex Hughes is Archdeacon of Cambridge in the Diocese of Ely.

A monk in a wheekchair works on an icon in an art studio. In the foreground is a completed icon.
At Mucknell Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine community, Brother Michäel paints an icon.

Quid petis? (What do you seek?) 

What will you commit to, and for how long, and at what cost or for what benefit? And how will you structure your life in order to fulfil your commitments?  

These questions touch on the very mundane – gym membership, streaming subscriptions, etc. – and the most serious aspects of life, such as romantic partnerships and career moves. Do you decide these matters in accordance with an overarching philosophy of life or by some golden rules you follow?  

The same questions are faced with momentous intentionality by people in religious communities. According to ancient tradition, admission to the religious life begins with a ritual answer to the question, “Quid petis?”, and the community rule ensures that its pattern of life supports and fulfils the quest. 

The question of what we most want in life rarely leads people to become a monk or a nun. For most of us it seems impossible to believe that personal fulfilment could be found within the limits of a strictly vowed life. And yet, more people live under religious vows than you might first imagine.  

The notion of a binding, life-long commitment is still quite an alien thought.

The most common vows in many Christian traditions are made at baptism, confirmation and marriage; as well as ordination vows for those who become clergy. But even if this makes the idea of a vowed life a little more familiar, the notion of a binding, life-long commitment is still quite an alien thought. However, a new book on The Vowed Life in the Anglican Church argues that not only do vows demand more attention within the church than they seem to have garnered recently, but they are actually a point of considerable interest and allure to those outside the Church and may be seen as liberating and life-giving for those who undertake them. 

In his most famous sermon (the Sermon on the Mount), Jesus says:  

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  

.At first, this seems counterintuitive. Surely he meant to say:  

“Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also”?  

I don’t think so. There is a romantic idea that people follow their hearts, but if that were the case, advertising would be a fool’s errand. Advertisers know very well that our hearts’ desires are unstable and that they are easily attracted by the treasures of beauty, wealth, fame and so on. And most of us will have had the experience of being led to desire something – a flashy car, a bigger house, a better job, a sexier partner – only to discover that the treasure that captured our hearts does not bring the lasting satisfaction for which we yearned. At the heart of religion is the belief that God is the treasure we seek; that only God can truly satisfy our deepest desire. For Christians, this does refer to the future - to “treasure in heaven” - but not only to that; or at least, not in a simple way. This is where vows come in. 

Our identities, including the pattern of our desires, are to an extent given, not self-made. 

Probably the most puzzling of all religious vows are the ones made by parents and godparents for children at their baptism. How can anyone make a vow by proxy? How can anyone dare to make a vow on behalf of someone else? Surely everyone, especially children, should be free to make their own decisions? Well, it is certainly true that vowing a child to Christian life goes against the modern ideal of the autonomous human subject who freely makes unconditioned choices for themself. But anyone who has ever raised a child will know that whatever its critical benefits, it is also a myth.  

Parents make multiple significant decisions about how their child will grow up, and those decisions have a deep and lasting effect on the child, for good or ill. Such formation is inescapable and no one, not even with the help of skilful introspection or expert psychoanalysis, can step outside their personal history and make unconstrained choices about who they become. Our identities, including the pattern of our desires, are to an extent given, not self-made. This remains true even in the light of postmodern resistance to the idea that people have a fixed identity, rather than one that changes and shifts as it is performed, since the performance does not arise ex nihilo (out of nothing). We are, as Heidegger said, “thrown” into life: we are conditioned, contingent, and no achievement of individual can release us from that. 

In the first act of King Lear, as his faculties begin to unravel, the king famously asks:  

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”  

Christians answer this with reference to the voice of God discerned in the Hebrew scriptures:  

“I have called you by name; you are mine.” 

These words are spoken to those who are confirmed, when they renew their baptism vows, which (as I have said) were often made for them when they were too young to speak for themselves. The invitation at confirmation is to take mature responsibility for those solemn promises, which is easier to understand than the earlier vows made by proxy. But even this is not entirely straightforward, because while someone might joyfully receive the gift of a God-given identity – “I have called you by name” – which is not subject to successful performance, how could anyone agree honestly with the divine claim, “you are mine,” since even the greatest saint knows that their daily performance is largely governed by self-interest? This leads us to the crux of the vowed life, where we can begin to see how it is possible, and even desirable, to bind oneself to something despite the risk of failure. 

This is the deep context of our lives, into which we are “thrown,” not by blind chance but by divine choice. 

I have already alluded to the matter of choice in our lives and the conflicts that may arise between a religious, a modern and a postmodern perspective; but there is something more, and much more important, to be said from a Christian point of view. The Christian view is that it is not so much our choice about God that matters than God’s choice about us. God chose to create the world and God chooses each one of us, which is the only choice that matters ultimately. This is the deep context of our lives, into which we are “thrown,” not by blind chance but by divine choice. Fundamentally, therefore, all religious vows are about choosing to be who we already are; choosing to live as one who has been chosen by God. Every other choice is made in this light so that whatever happens, no matter what choices we make in the future, good or bad, God’s fundamental choice of us never changes. And the experience of living under this promise is one of liberation.  

The (post-)modern ideal of complete personal freedom necessarily entails total responsibility, so that the overall success or failure of our lives lies in our hands alone. Perhaps a few narcissistic individuals can easily accept this – “He was a self-made man, and he worshipped his creator!” – but it is a heavy burden of responsibility. The religious alternative does not deny the importance of responsibility - the Bible is concerned from beginning to end with the demands of justice and righteousness - but it does not make our performance the final measure of our worth, and therefore of our identity. If we have bound ourselves to the identity God gives, any account of ourselves such as, “I am a failure … a loser … a disappointment” is covered by “I am a beloved child of God”. It is by living into the divine indicative – “I have called you by name” – that we can begin to let go of self-reliance and welcome and inhabit the sustaining power of God’s “you are mine”.  

For sure, the idea of binding, life-long promises may be countercultural today but, rightly understood, they can be seen as joyful and liberating. Those who seek this way of life seek a heavenly treasure that enriches life at every step. 

  

Further reading

The Vowed Life, eds. Sarah Coakley & Matthew Bullimore (Canterbury Press, 2023) 

Article
Attention
Culture
5 min read

Dispatches from the battlefield of imagination

The Age of Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination.

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A collage image shows a person holding their head, with a wash of warm colours over the scene.
Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Twenty years ago today, I crossed the threshold of the Christian faith. It was a baptism of fire in a more literal and mystical sense than I care to describe (or indeed would be able to). And unlike many, I really can point to a day and a time and a place.

That night, perhaps unlike CS Lewis, I was not quite “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” But I was certainly the most bewildered. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ I wondered as I walked away from that church on a dark, wet January night. I was certain that in crossing that threshold I had entered a new world. Even if it was true, as I believed – or as I now knew - I sensed that it was dangerous too. There was a wildness to what I had just witnessed that was both thrilling and disconcerting. And yet, after that encounter, I could no more have turned away from what I had discovered than stop the world turning. As the mathematician Blaise Pascal discovered in his own ‘night of fire’ – “certitude, certitude!” is a very precious gift, and one worth holding on to.

Twenty years later, the landscape of faith in this country looks very different to the one in which I stumbled my way over the line. (Or through the back of the wardrobe might be a better metaphor.)

Back then, in 2005, the War on Terror was raging. If religion was discussed at all, it was generally reckoned a pretty rotten sort of institution. A regrettable historical hangover, an inheritance bequeathed to us by our more credulous ancestors of which we were doing well to divest ourselves, albeit too slowly for some. In this brave, new secular world, it was an increasingly commonplace view that religion ruined everything; beside which, it wasn’t true anyway.

These were the days when a certain form of atheism was ebullient and on the march. The Four Horsemen of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris held the cultural conch for a time, and they weren’t letting go. The God Delusion came out in October 2006, quickly followed by God Is Not Great in early 2007. Religion (not sin) was the root of all evil. ReasonTM was the exclusive intellectual property of the unreligious mind, untainted as it was by visions of that laughably silly Sky-Fairy in the heavens. The battlefield of apologetics was a much-contested landscape at the time. Truth was the prize - which both sides could at least agree upon - and many a debating hall was filled to bursting to watch each side’s sharpest minds slug it out.

God only knows how in such an intellectual atmosphere, I survived the shelling and carried through to the other side. But it’s telling that I had as my guide through the intellectual carnage, not voices of that age, but rather voices from further back in time. My old friend, CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton, St Augustine, Dostoyevksy, and the potent words of the gospels to which they led me. Like wily old corporals, they saw me safe across No Man’s Land.

Even if I made it through, there’s no doubt it was the secularists who gained the cultural ground back then. That their intellectual case was unsound, it didn’t matter. Their propaganda was better – it was what people wanted to hear – and so Christianity was shoved out of the public square.

And now, two decades on, the war has moved into a very different theatre of operations. The Age of the Intellect has given way to the Age of Imagination as, unwittingly, the dry vacuum of secularism has sucked in contending spirits of another kind.

These days proponents and adversaries of the Christian faith jostle not in the dusty debating halls of our great universities, but on the battlefield of cultural consumption. Its topography formed of the movies we watch, the streaming channels we look at, the podcasts, music and media we endlessly gulp down.

Truth itself is no longer the prize, since the logical outworking of atheism’s ascendancy was to get what perhaps its proponents never bargained for: a post-truth age. What matters now is not so much what you believe, as what you attend to. The words and images which you consume. (Or which consume you.)

Walk the streets of any city and witness every passer-by glued to the screen nestled in their hand. Earphones clamped over their head. Distraction, saturation, enchantment: a cacophony of sound, a barrage of images overrunning the imagination to the point of madness. Until we have forgotten what it is like to sit patiently in silence with a still and empty mind. What it’s like to observe the world around us, to be available for the people around us.

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle. 

But with what do we fill our imaginations now – that is the question? There lies the battle.

And so we find ourselves now moving through a world in which our capacity to create and consume is loaded with inestimably high stakes. It harkens back to Dostoyevsky’s famous line in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

He’s right. Although the heart, the mind, the imagination cannot in any true sense be de-coupled from one another. (Is ‘soul’ a more encompassing word?)

 And yet, of the two, the truly subversive combatant is God and not the devil. (Consider the Cross: the most subversive act in all reality.) It is God who is the invader here after all. He is the one taking back ground. His weapons are Truth, Beauty and Goodness. On the face of it, these are mild, even benign, abstractions. And yet in each is wrapped a potency as explosive as dynamite. Because with them, the spells that hold our imaginations captive can be broken. In an unguarded moment, He can slip through the enemy lines.

Witness the ear of culture’s recent harkening to the ancient truths and wisdom of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Nick Cave sings of a “Wild God” and to everyone’s surprise, people are starting to listen again. But he’s not the only one.

The inescapable wildness of God is that He cannot be contained; if His will is to break through, then He cannot be held back. As Mr. Beaver said of the lion Aslan, in answer to the fear: “Is he safe?”

“Who said anything about safe? ’Course, he isn’t safe. But he is good.”

As little image-bearers of this Creator, indeed as little creators in our turn, our creativity teeters on a knife-edge – it always has. An edge sharp enough to cleave heaven from hell. We’d do well to remember that. And that, being image-bearers of this wild God, no wonder we have a wildness of our own.

Yep. Twenty years has already been one heck of an adventure. But I suspect it has only just begun.

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