At the end of a particular chapter about being a happy religious, Fr Joe Mannath, raises this question for further reflection:
Having reflected over this for quite sometime now and reviewing my own life, I realize that most of who and what we are is what we pick up from our own family, at home. So as an answer to the question above, it would be all the three. But if one were to grade, as being asked (I suppose), I would rate the impact of our family upbringing the most formative. Following that is the role of personal conviction and finally the formation received during our initial years in the congregation.
This certainly has great repercussions on our process of vocational discernment and initial formation. In our desperate need to have numbers and satisfy our false ego that 'during my tenure the number was high' we tend to make great compromises on quality and bypass certain essential processes. These tend to damage not just the future of the congregation but the very life of the individual as well.
When you meet inspiring religious, is their mature and virtuous behaviour (as far as you know) mostly from their own personal conviction, mostly due to their family, or mostly from the formation they received in the order?[Joe Mannath, A Radical Love, A Path of Light: The Beauty and Burden of Religious Life (New Delhi: CRI House, 2014) 100.]
Having reflected over this for quite sometime now and reviewing my own life, I realize that most of who and what we are is what we pick up from our own family, at home. So as an answer to the question above, it would be all the three. But if one were to grade, as being asked (I suppose), I would rate the impact of our family upbringing the most formative. Following that is the role of personal conviction and finally the formation received during our initial years in the congregation.
This certainly has great repercussions on our process of vocational discernment and initial formation. In our desperate need to have numbers and satisfy our false ego that 'during my tenure the number was high' we tend to make great compromises on quality and bypass certain essential processes. These tend to damage not just the future of the congregation but the very life of the individual as well.
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