When we talk about the decline of religion in modern life, religious orders are not often our first topic of conversation. Shrinking Catholic religious life is a relatively specialized concern affecting a relatively small number of people. What use are orders of priests or nuns when 30 percent of U.S. adults belong to no religious denomination at all?
From one perspective, the religious life can seem like a refuge for men and women holding too tightly to an outdated mode of existence. From another, it can seem like the last refuge against a secular world firmly opposed to the truths of religious tradition. Sensing the Spirit: Toward the Future of Religious Life, Judith A. Merkle’s intervention into the question of the religious in a secular frame, is neither a surrender to the secular world nor a retreat from it. In fact, Merkle is not making an argument for the continued relevance of religious life at all. She insists that it is relevant and important because it still exists—and it must now adapt to the changed landscape of religious belonging in what Charles Taylor (one of her main interlocutors) calls the “secular age.”
The book is divided into two sections. The first utilizes Taylor to contextualize religious life in our current world. Taylor argues that we are a population of selves buffered against each other by extreme subjectivity; we live in a world that has lost its ontological commitments to a divinely ordered cosmos, and so we now have many different ways of creating meaning. If Taylor is right, then the ideas and identities that characterize religious life have to be rethought. The idea of a charism, monastic identities like virtuosi, and other concepts whose purpose is “attaining, or helping others to attain, some sort of spiritual perfection” must be reinterpreted for today’s world. Doing so can help better articulate the space that religious life must occupy.
Merkle invokes a biological metaphor: seeds. As religious congregations face the realities of a secularized world, they must unfurl in contemplative action like slowly germinating seedlings. They must adapt and settle into their niches, shift and grow as plants in hostile climates do to survive. It is a metaphor from nature and Scripture: from small beginnings emerge large trees in which “the birds of the air come and make nests” (Matthew 13:32). When it comes to religious life, the pope has a green thumb, too: in a message on the 2023 World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Francis called the gift of vocation “a divine seed that springs up in the soil of our existence, opens our hearts to God and to others, so that we can share with them the treasure we ourselves have found.”
Merkle even has a specific plant in mind: the ice plant, whose bright color against the dull desert sand shines like ice. These plants have a distinctive “flexing and packing mechanism,” intricate folds that only open when enough water has saturated them—a sort of time-release to ensure hydration in dry climates. Merkle uses this metaphor to “gain insight into the adaptations possible for religious congregations today.” She highlights four ways that religious congregations can act in our world: “As a bridge between the sacred and the secular; as a religiously focused lifestyle; as a trajectory of becoming holy and finding wholeness, and as a witness to values which matter—the coming of the Kingdom.” As her title suggests, the Holy Spirit, which both destabilizes and renews, will guide those who are seeking to reimagine religious life.