Vows

The suggestion to the mass of people in the west today that there is something even remotely inviolable to which they are absolutely subject sounds extremely preposterous. Consequently, it is doubtful whether vows of any sort can still mean anything to the majority of modern people. After all, what value is there in making a vow to something that is questionable in the first place? According to Richard Sipe (who as a former monk-and-priest-turned-clinical-therapist and who eventually treated over six thousand priests and religious prior to releasing his findings in a study that was published in 1990) only half of Roman Catholic clergy at the time were celibate. (Many people use this as grounds for derision, missing out on the irony that as people who are not committed to anything other than their own gratification you cannot deride that to which you yourself do not subscribe, namely, either the presence or absence of absolutes.) The utter chaos that reigns in most people's lives today is itself an impressive feat of design blindness to which even the most intelligent and educated blindly and willingly bow. So the question remains: of what value are religious vows in a society of people whose only guiding light is themselves? Given the milieu of infidelity to anything other than one's own self, in order to answer that with both eyes open, you have to ask if there are any absolutes in the world? And in order to answer that when it comes to God then laying yourself bare is the only access route, setting aside society, convention, thought, wants, wishes, desires, ethics, morals, and even words. Nobody does this today with any integrity as proven by their actions.

A former friend of mine killed someone in a bar fight. He used to say that he would forever have direct, carnal knowledge of something that would be an indelible part of his identity forever, even though most people when I knew him called him pastor and knew nothing about this aspect of his past. That came as a later confession to me, which ratified what I had come to realize as an adolescent about people in general, namely, that we are what we do. It is that simple; at least he was honest. That, Thou shall not kill, was lost on someone who knew the words, was a case in point. It only shows up that there is little hope for the common blokes in the twenty-first century who now exclusively seek to find fulfillment in life by living by their own wits in the first place.

When I was clergy people confessed the most ugly things about themselves to me, usually putting a good spin on it. (Sometimes they still do thinking that I have a yet sacred duty since resigning my ordination twelve years ago, which I do not.) In most cases people were seeking to justify/ameliorate/dismiss their past actions through their current thoughts. Over a period of the first eighteen years of ministry I came to see that the common notion of healing, in the sense of getting back to a state of innocence, was a myth. You are stuck with what you have done with your life. (And what most people have done is almost exclusively based on their ego and therefore pretty demented - theft, adultery, cursing, idolatry from an action-based perspective, or psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism from a psychologically-based one.)

What is the point of all of this?

That vows are indeed valid. But they are valid not because of what we bring to the table, but because of the direct, unenculturated, direct experience of God in the world (contemplation), which only opens up to you when you stop trying to justify your life based on lies and deceptions. This interaction is biologically and ecologically based and validated on a breakthrough that occurs from God's side, not your own. The direct experience of God is quite possible without being regulated by religious systems that have over millennia alternately ignored this invitation to directness and prescriptively imposed repressive morays, in spite of ourselves, but without trying to sidestep our selfishness, and sometimes, even ironically using that selfishness to transcend our selfishness, without forgiving it.