There Is a Season for Everything

THERE IS A SEASON FOR EVERYTHING

The first level, which might aptly be termed, Essential Discipleship, is the struggle to get our lives together, to achieve basic human maturity (which itself might be defined as the capacity for essential unselfishness, the capacity to put others before ourselves).  The second level can be called Generative Discipleship and is the struggle to give our lives away in love, service, and prayer.  The third level can be called Radical Discipleship and consists in the struggle to give our deaths away, that is, to leave this earth in such a way that our deaths themselves become our final gift and blessing to our families, churches, and society.


The first stage, Essential Discipleship, is precisely about essentials, about getting our lives together by properly channeling our energies through discipline (the origin of the word, discipleship). By definition, that task is mainly conservative: learning proper teaching so as to have a healthy vision, submitting to rules of behavior that ground us and move us beyond our instinctual selfishness, and being a learner within family and church community.


But, once this stage is achieved with a certain proficiency, the challenge becomes different. Now the task is to give our lives away – and to give them away ever more deeply and to an ever-widening circle. That’s a more liberal task and it becomes even-more liberal as we move towards that truly great unknown, death, where all that we have grounded ourselves in must be left behind as we are opened to the widest circle of all, cosmic embrace, infinity, and the ineffable mystery of God.


In our discipleship, our spiritual journey, there is an important time to be conservative, just as there is an important time to be liberal. We are not meant to pick one of these over the other.

(Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI)