"EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE, NOTHING IS CERTAIN"
RELIGIOUS VOCATIONS IN POST-MODERN TIMES

1. The ‘Now’ Society?

We are standing on the threshold of a new age and a new millennium. These are bewildering, but fascinating times. We are living through unexpected cultural upheavals; we see how far-reaching social and cultural processes are changing the world and we are present at the birth of new cultures and subcultures, of new symbols and ways of life. All that brings into play anthropologists, experts on culture, sociologists and specialists in media and digital globalization. It is also high season for prophets, poets, cults, doom merchants and futurologists of all kinds. Recently I read somewhere that "everything is possible, but nothing is certain". Even some Christian authors speak of a "turning point". So now the following questions become even more urgent: From which sources do we drink? What is left? Is it worth committing our whole lives to? The intention of "Vita Consacrata" (= VC) is to seek and live out something that retains its value, even if everything has to change. We want to know what it is important so that we can do what God expects of us at this stage of history.

In the following reflections I hold dear the fundamental question regarding the meaning and identity of Christian life and the sequela of Jesus in the midst of cultures which are becoming increasingly diverse. Are the plans for long-term and radical ways of living the sequela, and, above all, the sequela within the consecrated life (VC), still plausible in a context that many call the "now society", with its rapidly changing short-term "options"? Which options support the VC? Which paradigms make it transparent? What are the perspectives it gives to our Institutions? In the future will we still young people amongst us?

Many nations, not only in Europe or North America, find themselves particularly faced by these phenomena, which many people point to as the dismantling and disintegration of the great values that used to characterize western culture. For example, the vacuum left by socialism; or the competition-oriented "philosophies" of commercialism, neo-liberalism, and individualism, that devalue humans, are opposed to solidarity and are common in much of the world. Nor must we forget that in many parts of the world, even in Europe itself, militant powers still operate and that in several places on our planet countless people are refugees. So, let us examine the theme of our future and of vocations to the VC, not in a vacuum, but against a background of great changes and the apparently contradictory trends of our one world. We must try to tell each other how, in our faith in the Risen Christ, we read this new situation; what we want to retain as an inheritance of our history; how we are experiencing the present crisis in the Church and the consecrated life and with what hopes we are heading into the future.

The essential condition for us to face the path ahead for the Church and the VC with hope and reasonable optimism, is to be open to the active spirit of God and His works, to the Spirit that maintains the life of the Church and of the world, indeed of all creation and the cosmos, transforming them continually, renewing them and guiding them towards new times. We can only interpret, understand and live out the present if, with belief in the Risen Christ, we are convinced that our time is no worse for the VC than others in the past. If, moreover, we put the accent on the trinitarian and pneumatological aspect of ecclesiology and the theology of the consecrated life, as well as on the hitherto predominant christological argumentation of our path (as sequela and imitation of Jesus in the sense intended by our founders). For the "Spirit" is the living reality of God in us, the source from which we drink, the ray of light that illuminates us and the one and only authority that takes us into the full truth of our life, our history and our God. An important and fundamental model for the consecrated life in the future will be the "communio" of men or women who will bear witness to the presence of God, His loyalty to the world and His love as the power that transforms history and the world.