Self-Generative
Anxiety and Irony:
Unstable Religious
Life-Narratives
Narrative Identity (1)
Dialogical Meaning-Construction: “selving selves”
The Sources: Sophia and Mythos
Cultural frameworks or languages
Evaluative self-interpretation of experience
2. The Process: Drama and Poiesis
“The Quixotic Principle”: Writing my Self through reading
The dramatic and the dramaturgic dimensions
3. The Phenomena: Personae
The storied nature of human agency: feeling and expressing oneself as Being-in-stories
The story-telling animal: webs of narrative interlocution
Narrative Identity (2)
Coherence and conflict: “reading” and “writing”
Coherence and cohesiveness (harmonic belongingness):
semiotic homogeneity, obedience to the “letter”
organic unity between communal practices and individual expression or actualization (“Dostoevskyan villages”, Lukács)
Polyphony and conflict (critical anomie):
semiotic fragmentation, hermeneutic transgression
process of differentiation, increase of reflexivity, generation of selfhood through anxiety and irony
Virtual infinity of degrees and modes:
tension between “typical” extreme poles opposing the follower and the founder, the erudite scholar and the revolutionary poet
“Types” as socially constructed and interiorized habitus
Selfhood as the Poiesis of Meaning
Religious meta-narratives as “possible worlds” of meaning and action
1. Transcendence (“originality” and “ultimacy” of being)
2. Holism (cognition, emotion, motivation, personality, relationships)
Becoming religious or embodying a theory of human happiness: Living Mimesis and Semiosis
1. Self-referential and self-intelligible metaphors
2. Faith as passion for meaning: creativity and passivity
The Vocational Metaphor:
Mythbiography and Bildungsroman
Myth-mimesis: active embeddedness in a “cultural pre-text”
Learning a standard of exemplarity
Narratives of “Religious heroes”
Drama-mimesis: personal identification
Felling under the voice of Calling
Relational and critical process of self-definition
Poiesis-mimesis: existential recreation
Radical christomorphism as categorical imperative
Ethical commitments and projects
Vocation as dynamic metaphor:
adopting a life script
Scripted lives: the structure of vocational story-lines
foundational experience
series of revealing crises and prodigia
life-long commitment
Religious responsiveness
the ability to use the metaphor of the Vocation (“interlocution with a divine person”) as the idiom in which a meaningful life-story can be told
Seminary: a ten-year threshold
A cross-sequential design
Methodology
Anonymous and volunteer questionnaires (motivation-biased “sample”: extreme opposite poles)
Follow-up (use of personal codes)
Group meetings
Questions:
4.1 Theoretical definition of vocation
4.2 Multidimensional profile of an ideal priest
4.3 Present degree of decision
4.4 Life-story
Definition of a Moral Space (1)
Solving a paradox
The inner tensions of the “vocational anxiety”:
Origin: Autonomy and/or heteronomy (theonomy and eclesionomy)
Content: Psychological capabilities (self-knowledge) and/or theological relationship (discovery of God’s will)
Process: Free agency and/or obedience (surrender to God and to the Church)
Purpose: Self-actualization and/or self-effacement (sacrifice and service)
Means: Human love and/or divine love (chastity and universal brotherhood)
Definition of a Moral Space (2)
QUOTATIONS
“Vocation is something that emerges within the human being, something we feel and that leads us to make decisions in life.” (HS1-A)
“Vocation is a calling […], that is, a pathway to which God calls us and through which we must follow freely. ”(HS2-A)
“Vocation is a calling made by God to be his children and to be happy. God wants us to be happy, he loves us.”(HS1-B)
“Vocation is the calling that God have made us. God calls us to be happy, free. He wants our happiness. And in this road of full joy and happiness, God calls me specifically to be a priest – particular way of serving God. To be a priest is to follow Jesus Christ and, acting like him. It is to do Father’s will. […] On the other hand, it is to feel accomplished and happy.”(HS1-B)
Definition of a Moral Space (3)
QUOTATIONS
“Vocation is to be called to fulfill a function in a given community.” (HS1-C)
“By vocation, in my personal perspective, I understand a kind of person’s ‘destiny’, in which lies the secret of her happiness. Every person is born with a vocation, which is the only way she can follow in the future in order to reach the maximum of possible happiness. Vocation is also something hidden that must be discovered and thought.” (HS1-D)
“Vocation is the best way of actualizing ourselves. […] Vocation is the deepest thing we feel in ourselves and leads us to happiness and well-being during our whole life.” (N-A)
“To my mind, vocation is a person’s feeling to be called to fulfill herself within society. Every human being has a vocation, be it religious or not. Thus, vocation is the discovery of my self, that is, my finding out my skills and how to orient them.” (N-B)
Narrative rewriting:
vocation as self-generative irony
1. Orthodox irony
1. Orthodox irony
QUOTATIONS
N-F: “Besides becoming a priest, I do not see any other possible future. For this was my decision since my childhood…”
αω (T1-A): “The story of my life has nothing extraordinary. Like any life, however, it is original in its singularity. […] I feel completely free to decide. If I embrace the priesthood – and I hope so and God either – or if I follow a different path, I will do it freely and happily.”
See following year: Transitional irony “I live poisoned with empty concepts, hypocritical attitudes, false gestures. Or maybe my eyes see it because they are poisoned. […] The essential thing is not to belong to the ‘machine’ of the Church nor to master a dogmatic system, but to serve God and Humankind.”
Orthodox irony (cont.)
QUOTATIONS (CONT.)
T5-A/T6-A:
“Then I asked myself: Why not me? And I said: My life is in Your hands. […] I only need a sign to see clearly Your will. […] My application was not accepted by the University. […] For me it was God’s sign. Was it really or not? […] I felt more seduced by the idea of having a family, a job, etc. And yet I had the strength to overcome many sacrifices and privations till the present commitment. Otherwise I could not. […]
I owe my becoming a priest to many people. It is a huge beautiful mosaic where my new face emerges with their presence and support – specially my mother’s unconditional love.”
2. Transitional irony
QUOTATION
Bruce Willis/E=mc2 (HS2-D)
“Vocation is a calling to a happy life. To be priest means to be father of everyone. In the Seminary very few things fascinate me. What disturbs me the most is the cynicism and hypocrisy that exist sometimes. […]
The ideal priest: mature, beard, barefoot. Signs of poverty, wisdom and devotion. […]
When I was born I did not know what kind of vocation was reserved to me – and presently I am still ignorant. […]
Like any other boy I went to school where I happened to be a person of unstable temperament: nervous and calm. […] Then, there was the ‘age of emptiness’ in which I let time pass by and I only thought about girls, tobacco and drinks. ”
Transitional irony (cont.)
QUOTATION (CONT.)
“However, at that point there was a very strong moment for all my life. One day, a priest went to my village and in the middle of a conversation he asked to a group of young people who would like to be a priest. Nobody wanted and suddenly they pointed at me and said: He wants. Keeping my distance I only replied: Not me, never. The truth is that the idea did bite me. I applied to enter the Seminary and here I am. (FRUSTRATED) ”
Kappa (HS3-F): “My opinion about priests is increasingly nega-tive. […] Very often they are not a good example, being too much focused on their image and wellness. […] I went through the application process without being fully aware of the consequences. Then I was accepted. At first I did not know what I should do but afterwards I was pushed by the stream and six years later here I am. […] ‘To be or not to be’ – that’s my question.”
3. Heterodox irony
QUOTATIONS
Perone [“needle”] (HS3-C):
“I have no time to write about me. It is almost 11 pm. It is time to switch off the lights. I have not used the blank sheets of paper because they were precious to do other things… I appreciate your work very much, but the questions are beyond my understanding!”
H2O [“open-air, freedom?”] (HS3-D):
“To my mind, vocation is something one discovers over time and, in the right moment, one becomes sure of her own will. […] At this point, it is very difficult to tell my story and say how I have discovered my vocation. For this reason, I cannot answer.”
Heterodox irony (cont.)
QUOTATIONS (CONT.)
Clix (N-G):
“My current vocational situation is very fragile owing to spending many years [9] in several Seminaries. This is how I interpret my vocational reality. I feel more and more undecided about the way to follow. There are no significant people in my story. Jesus Christ is the only one.”
GMBXJP (N-H):
“As strange as it can seem, since I came to the Seminary four years ago, I feel very disappointed and I have already undergone several crises. I daresay that my vocation decreases every day.”
Self in a liminal community:
institutions of meaning
Being-in-the-Threshold: the “chronotope of metamorphosis” vocation as “passage rite”
1. Differential landscape of time
ritual rhythms (theological time embodied in liturgy)
critical periods (specially between cycles)
2. Stages of belongingness
long-term progress towards change
abrupt “catastrophe”: instant qualitative change
3. Merging time and space: symbolic motion
social and organizational architecture
physical architecture – “progressive approaching”
Dialogical or polyphonic
self-understanding
Anxiety
Stabilizing the text: self-recognition as called
Quitting the text: self-recognition as non called
2. Irony
Orthodox irony (questioning the past)
Transitional irony (uncertainty)
Heterodox irony (questioning the present)
3. “Liminality”
Dialogical confrontation and sharing
Institutional negotiation and sanction
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