religious Life
Religious life is very much like the idealized Church portrayed in Acts. Religious life is hard to catch hold of, or to describe. it doesn't have territorial boundaries. It doesn't fit inside a diocese or parish. Religious are sent from their homes, from their own territory, all over, including other countries, as in the Acts of the Apostles. Religious have freedom to go anywhere, and always with a sense that the impulse of the Spirit somehow does all this.
Older religious may remember the days when they found their sending forth, not from the laying on of hands and fasting and praying, but in a little slip of paper under their dinner plate.
But, with a sense that somehow God worked in this mysterious way, that slip of paper sent them to places they otherwise might not have gone, to do things they might otherwise not have chosen to do, and to do things that people might have wondered how practical they really were.
That spirit of religious life, that freedom to go anywhere and do anything is what characterizes religious life.
- Little White Book, Diocese of Saginaw