Our parish started up a lay Carmelite group this past year. I haven't joined up, but it got me thinking about the lay associates with the various orders. What's the difference between a lay Carmelite and a lay Dominican? What are the requirements of becoming one? Things like that.
I stumbled across this informative article about lay Dominican spirituality not too long ago. I'd like to read more about what is unique to other Orders and Societies and especially to their lay associates.
There are so many different ways of spirituality and even of worship within Church Tradition. Truly mindboggling.
Sometimes you hear people, even Catholics, trying to be all positive and ecumenical and referring warmly to the great diversity of people's paths to Christ, as if it's actually a good thing that we have Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans and what-have-you all doing something different, all believing something different, all contradicting each other in so many places. True, much that is good has come of the work of fine people who live and worship and believe in various traditions outside the Church. But it's a false dilemma, to think that we must disagree to have diversity, that somehow the Protestant Reformation has freed us from stifling uniformity. It has occurred to me that in a world without heresy, all that energy and vitality that has gone into building the various denominations would have found its expression in an outblooming of wholly unique, wholly individual, wholly Catholic spiritualities and devotions.
Maybe in some alternate, Reformation-free universe we'd see the mirror-images of wholesome practices that are today associated only with certain denominations, bearing fruit and finding their full expression in full unity of faith and belief with the Apostles. Who knows, those vines may be grafted back on someday.
