What is the Purpose of Nuns?

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I forgot to mention someone that might help you to understand to role of nuns in our world - remember Sister Theresa of Calcutta?

Look at her, her work and she did it all for the glory of God and to serve Him without all the trappings of the world. She had what she believed she needed (as far as worldly things) to accomplish the work of God - He provided for her!
 
I am put in mind of something Mother Teresa said to a postulant–I am quoting from memory here–she told her that things like going to movies and having things like clothes and homes and such things are fine, but they are not for those whom God has called to give them up. It’s like the rich young man who wanted to know what he had to do to be perfect and Jesus told him to go, sell all that he had and give it to the poor and then to come and follow Him. The young man went away sad for although he had kept the law all his life, he couldn’t give up physical things to give himself completely to God.

No one should think that nuns and monks and others who give up the things of this world are being gypped. Jesus said that those who give up everything will receive an even greater reward from God. If we believe Jesus and we believe in a life after this one, how can we possibly think that God will not keep his promises?
 
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sparkle:
Still, I find this justification lacking-----this seems to me to be not in the real world --for there are many who tend to the sick, manage parishes, have a goal, and they are not nuns who do it–nor priests for that matter----I find nuns to have none such—am I just misinformed? I still question their ultimate purpose-----
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If all nuns did were love God and worship Him with no other purpose, I’d say they served the greatest and the highest purpose. Look at the Seraphim who surround the throne of God and cry out forever and always, “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.” :gopray: That the world can not understand this as a purposeful existence testifies to the secularity of that world and the need for the witness of the consecrated life be it feminine or masculine.
 
priests are NOT married to the “she” part of God. The priest is in persona Christi, and just as Christ is, the priest is married to the Church. Our fallacy in considering "what good are nuns?’ may be the same we commit by asking “what good is a stay at home mom?” We are confusing the person’s work, career, or economic productivity with the person herself, as if her life can be summed up by the total of her activities throughout the day. We are also forgetting that in living out God’s plan for us we obey his commands and pray to him both actively and contemplatively. Some are called to more active service, some to more contemplative. See the story of Martha and Mary and Jesus’ response.
 
The purpose of most ‘nuns’ I come across is to lead people away from the Catholic Faith by 1. teaching not in accordance with the Magisterium and 2.By running New Age Retreat Centres :mad:
 
it’s an unfortunate thing about the church, and about the world in general, that the examples of just about anything that ‘we run across’ are almost always the poor examples, the exceptions to a huge rule.

yes, there are nuns who are running amok right now, stressing the unimportant, leading people away from the Most Important. but there is a vast majority of them who are humbly, kindly, gently, quietly doing the work of God (prayer, above all, and most importantly). many of these (most?) we will never ‘run across’ because they’re cloistered, separated from the world so that they might pray for it (and i think this, my friend sparkle, is where the real answer to your question lies - the power of prayer. you see this as a ‘running away from life’ and a ‘waste of time’ because, i would say, you don’t really understand the power of prayer.), and we won’t run across them BY DESIGN.

nuns have given up posessions, marriages, etc. to follow Christ, as He called us to. He told the rich young ruler that he lacked one thing to be perfect. to sell all he had, give the money to the poor, and follow Christ. these sisters have done just that.

and i would hasten to add that giving all these things up has in no way made their lives less significant or important. as a matter of fact, it has made their lives free - free to follow Him and do His will, without the encrumbrances of ‘the daily grind’ and needless worry over clothes and money and food and men…

it is a call that we all must face - are we called to marriage, to single life, or to religious life?
 
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Joanna:
If all nuns did were love God and worship Him with no other purpose, I’d say they served the greatest and the highest purpose. Look at the Seraphim who surround the throne of God and cry out forever and always, “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.” :gopray: That the world can not understand this as a purposeful existence testifies to the secularity of that world and the need for the witness of the consecrated life be it feminine or masculine.
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My sister is a Nun and they study the angels and this is correct that many pray and praise God contstantly.
Also her order prays and makes many sacrifices for priests. They teach, they form, and the example of these nuns is phenomenal.
 
I can’t speak for every nun, obviously, I can only speak for the nun I almost was.

Starting when I was 18, I felt a very strong vocation to a Benedictine contemplative monastic community. When I was 23, I joined it for a while, but left before taking vows. That decision was the right one, but I have never ceased to love the monastic life. I’ve never actually seen the movie The Nun’s Story, but I have read the book, so I know a bit of where you’re coming from, Sparkle.

The life of Sister Luke bore very little resemblance to the life I felt called to profess. I did not actually see myself as a “bride of christ” – the bridal symbolism is something that only some are called to, I believe (even when I got married some 10 years later, I had trouble seeing myself as a bride!). I loved (and still love) the Rule of Saint Benedict and its simple way of integrating prayer with work, of making work BE prayer, and of welcoming each stranger as Christ himself. Self-abnegation is another important part of the Rule. My monastic community’s mission was one of prayer and hospitality – and since I had myself experienced the fruits of that on my first visit there, when I had a conversion experience, I felt strongly that that mission was important.

Celibacy is obviously an important part of the life of nuns. I don’t happen to think that celibacy should be obligatory for priests, as it wasn’t obligatory until the late eleventh century, and isn’t in the Orthodox Church. But I do know (from my own experience) that some people are called to celibacy in the service of God, and some of those people are women. Some may be called to an eremetical or solitary life, but others are not. As one Father of the Desert once said, “if you are alone, whose feet will you wash?” Monastic communities are important for those who seek their solitude within a community.

My novice mistress is still a very important person in my life, even though the monastic community I loved so much no longer exists (she is still a nun, however, since she took permanent vows). She is a very holy person, who now works in her diocese in Christian education. She has been and is both Martha and Mary, and her witness is essential for the Church and for the world. When my monastic community disbanded a few years ago, she told me that she received hundreds of letters from former visitors to the community, telling her how much her witness had meant to them.

I hope someday you’ll have the blessing that I have had of meeting a truly amazing nun, and discovering just how important that vocation can be. I thank God every day for people like my novice mistress.

Naprous
 
The purpose of all humanity is to know and love God. To do so is the very essence of being human. Cloistered sisters, as well as monks, brothers, hermits, and all who lead a life dedicated to God fulfill that purpose in a most sublime and wonderful way.

So if that is the case, what is your purpose?
 
I think that some of us fail to see the purpose that nuns or monks serve is evidence of how much the world has pushed God and His Church from our lives. Many of us see “purpose” only in a materialist sense. I don’t mean “materialist” in it’s common usage which equates to greed, but in it’s philosophical sense. Philsophically a materialist denies that there is a supernatural or anything beyond the material.

It’s easy in this day and age to allow some materialism to creep into our understanding of things. We can acknowledge the supernatural but still have materialst tendencies. It’s easy for us to see the material as *more real * than the supernatural. We therefore place more value on what seems more real to us. Therefore it’s easy to see less purpose in a life of prayer than in a life of physical service. The results of prayer are not always material or visible, but are they any less real than the results of feeding a hungry child?

I imagine that those who are called to be nuns or monks have very little, if any, of that creeping materialism. To them the supernatural is very real and very literally present. For those of us who don’t have the same calling, it is not necessarily easy for us to understand.

But I think rather than asking what their purpose is, there is probably more wisdom to be gained asking why we struggle with the idea of someone entirely giving up things of the world for things of God. Perhaps at the heart of that struggle is the question of why *we don’t * give up more worldly things for God. Maybe difficulty in understanding their purpose is indicitave of a difficulty in understanding, or even seeing, our own purpose.
 
The purpose of monks and nuns is to Christianize. The Angelus magazine appears to be running a series of articles about California missions. The April '04 issue has one about San Juan Capistrano. From the details it is quite apparent that the Church had a very beneficial impact on the aboriginal populations, whereas history shows that government had quite a harmful effect.

The aboriginals who converted to the Faith lived near the mission, and lived under its guidance. The Church correctly recognized its role as a kind of cultural trainer. The mission probably in some sense laid down the rules, in effect. They married with permission of the padre, unmarried aboriginals lived segregated men from women and boys from girls, and they could not return to their outlying hovels without permission (presumably they were not chained to the mission but if they left without permission perhaps they would have to explain themselves when they wanted to return to the mission). Today the Church is far too cowardly to lay down the rules. Instead she is trying to ‘meet the world half-way’. The Franciscans effectively had made the Indians very productive, and introduced a range of crops into California, for which that state is known to date. The Mexican government destroyed these missions, and the Franciscans’ insistence that the missions and their productive capacity belonged to the Indians was ignored. Aboriginal populations the world over have suffered under secular regimes.

The point of religious is to help people live the true faith. The fact that this is not perceived is a long-term consequence of progressivism and other modern -isms that deny the Faith.
 
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jeffreedy789:
nuns have given up posessions, marriages, etc. to follow Christ, as He called us to. He told the rich young ruler that he lacked one thing to be perfect. to sell all he had, give the money to the poor, and follow Christ. these sisters have done just that.

and i would hasten to add that giving all these things up has in no way made their lives less significant or important. as a matter of fact, it has made their lives free - free to follow Him and do His will, without the encrumbrances of ‘the daily grind’ and needless worry over clothes and money and food and men…
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You make an excellent point. I am considering the sisterhood for my future, and what you wrote expresses my sentiments. I feel such a sense of freedom when I think of the 3 vows that religious take. They are wonderful in the sense that they free people to do God’s work with their entire lives. I do not think it would be miserable at all, but rather the greatest source of JOY to have my life devoted completely to God and His work. That said, don’t you ever feel miserable or enslaved by your possessions? I do at times, and this is not how God calls us to live. In simplicity we find peace of mind.

Sparkle, perhaps it would help to think of it this way. Religious take vows, which provide a holy counterpart to the sins that many people seek. The abuse of these things leads to sin:

Chastity… v. Sexual Immorality
Poverty…v. Love of Money
Obedience…v. Lust for Power

Religious are a living example that the pursuits of the world (money, sex, power) are not what we are to focus on, but rather it is the pursuit of God that should encompass our entire lives!

I also think that my signature quote from St. Augustine says the message that many need to hear:

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others. ~Saint Augustine

If we all were not so selfish and greedy (myself included :o ), then those in poverty around the world would be able to have what they need.

Well I hope that was helpful.
:blessyou:
 
‘That said, don’t you ever feel miserable or enslaved by your possessions?’

every time i move. 🙂

(by ‘move’, i mean change residences. just in case you misread it.)
 
The Nun’s Story was very popular when I was in high school, we all read it, because many of us wanted to become nuns and we thought it would help. Also I love Audrey Hepburn. Sister Luke in this book had a fundamental problem not with her vow of chastity but with her vow of obedience. The life she found herself living was not what she had envisioned when she entered religious life, and just because she could not understand the purpose of the disciplines and rules she worked under, and because the reality did not match her dream, she concluded she was not cut out to continue in her vocation.

This book came out in the 50s and I think accurately portrays the thinking that was prevalent and let to the mass exodus of consecrated and ordained persons from their vocations in the 60s and 70s. The fundamental requirements of religious life, like today’s gospel reminds us, is renunciation of all claims that come before the claim of Christ himself, humility, obedience and taking up your cross. Lay people have the same difficulties in their vocations, which is why Catholics abandon their marriage vows in roughly the same proportion as non-Catholics.
 
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