In the previous issue (July 2022) of MAGNET, I presented some of the challenges involved in helping formees to grow in emotional maturity. In this article I shall present ways and means to enhance this maturity, especially by helping to meet their basic emotional need for relatedness.
Fear of Relationships
Relatedness (the need for belongingness and connectedness, to feel accepted and loved) is fostered through close relationships or friendships and through an environment that encourages the fulfilment of these needs.
While religious settings tend to encourage good relationships with people in general, exhorting formees to be kind, generous, serviceable, forgiving, etc., they have also promoted a strong suspicion of close relationships.
After I had written about the subject in 2010, a Sister Provincial wrote to me as follows.
“Dear Fr Jose, I read your article in the July-August issue of the CRI Magazine, on Religious Formation. On the whole, it is a fine article. But I disagree with your statements on relatedness. I think that will affect Religious Formation adversely. Too much psychology instead of spirituality will do no good in religious life. If you spread such ideas, you may be responsible for the loss of many vocations. The relatedness must be between Jesus and the formee. Only then the religious formation will take root. When I read the article, I felt sorry, so I am writing this. Hope the Holy Spirit will guide you.”
I think there are many in religious life and formation who have held, and I guess continue to, hold a similar view. However, in the recent past, a gradual change in view has been happening. The pervasive fear of “particular friendships” has diminished. But vestiges still remain. Any budding friendship among candidates, especially one that involves a person of the other gender, used to, and continues to, be frowned upon. At the National Conference on Religious and Priestly Formation held in New Delhi in 2013, a Sister who had many years’ experience as a formator acknowledged: “We are still very judgmental about heterosexual friendships.” Such negative attitudes stand in the way of candidates’ meeting their basic emotional need for relatedness and stunts their healthy development.
Intimacy: Right & Wrong Understandings
An aspect of relatedness that needs to be rightly understood is intimacy. It refers to a relationship where I can be myself, where I can disclose my innermost thoughts, feelings and desires, without fear or embarrassment.
Intimacy can be experienced without a romantic or genital involvement, although it needs to be romantic or genital in some cases, for instance, in courtship and marriage. In a good marriage, there is both emotional and genital intimacy. In the case of celibates, what we renounce is genital intimacy, not our ability or the need for deep and transparent relationships. According to psychoanalyst and developmental theorist Erik Erikson, intimacy is the crucial developmental task of young adulthood (18 to 35 years). Most candidates are at this stage of development. Hence, great harm is done by cutting off their opportunities for developing close relationships with peers of both sexes.
FR JOSE PARAPPULLY SDB
To read the entire article, click Subscribe
