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Creed

Weirdness

20 June 2023

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

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

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

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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