Sr Christina's Solemn Profession
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August 26, 2018On August 25th, 2018, Sr Christina made her solemn profession of vows and was consecrated as a Cistercian nun. This was a day of great joy for us, as we welcomed our sister as a full and permanent member of our community. It was also a day of celebration for Sr Christina's many friends and family members who were able to attend, especially her grandparents.
Read Mother Maureen's Chapter talk for the day here >
Here is Sr Christina's account of how she came to this point in her life:If there is such a thing as an obvious candidate for monastic life, I am not it. I do not come from a religious background. Prayer, Scripture and liturgy were not part of the landscape of my childhood, and church seemed like a foreign country to me. Yet I was born with a deep and insatiable longing for God. I believe we are all born with such a longing, whether or not we are given the language to express it. As I grew up, this longing persisted and evolved into a long and difficult spiritual journey that began during my college years and continued as I graduated and moved to Boston. It was there that I began, without really knowing why, to explore the Catholic Church.
During that time of exploration, I gradually realized to my astonishment that the God of my heart, for whom I had longed all my life, had a name, and his name was Jesus Christ. I learned that there were other people who loved him, too, and that I could journey with them from now on—no longer alone on my quest, but joined by fellow travelers who knew the road better than I did. I knew great happiness and peace in the parish community that embraced me as their own during the Easter Vigil of 2007, when I was baptized. But it was not long before I discerned, within my Christian vocation, a call to monastic life, which led me to Mount St. Mary’s Abbey.
The monastic life, as I have learned it from my sisters, is a life that asks nothing less than the transformation of one’s own heart into the heart of Christ. Our violence must become his patience; our fear must become his faith; our selfishness, his self-giving love. All our practices—our prayer and our work, our reading and our early rising, our silence and our community life—are directed to this end. This conversion is not just a self-improvement project. It is our offering to the Church and to the world. It is our conviction that this life, lived to the full, can touch hearts and change lives well beyond our cloister walls, in ways mysterious and unknown to us. Perhaps I owe my own unlikely vocation to the hidden monastic life of another. Perhaps it will be my turn, one day, to pass on to others the inestimable gift I have been given. The grain of wheat in today’s Gospel reading (cf. John 12:24-26) is not what I am, but what I hope to become. Today is only a beginning.
And so this day is about much more than me and my life. It is about those who have gone before me, whose lives have been the seed for my own planting. It is above all about the One who is both Seed and Sower—the One Love who holds each of us in the depths of his unfathomable heart, who holds all of us in communion with one another.
