Sr Rosemarie's First Profession

Dear Sr. Rosemarie, your hour has come, the hour of your consecration to God by religious vows.  Thank you for sharing your dreams and discoveries in the stages of growth according to St. Aelred, a Cistercian Father you love very much.  All of these stages are a participation in the path that Jesus himself chose on this earth, and all of them lead to the fullness of love and of transformation in him.  As Pope John Paul II said in “Vita Consecrata”:  The consecrated life, deeply rooted in the example and teaching of Christ the Lord, is a gift of God the Father to his Church through the Holy Spirit.  By the profession of the evangelical counsels the characteristic features of Jesus---the chaste, poor and obedient one---are made constantly “visible” in the midst of the world…In every age there have been men and women who, obedient to the Father’s call and the prompting of the Spirit, have chosen this special way of following Christ, in order to devote themselves to him with an undivided heart.”

As you shared, Rosemarie, the first stage was for you an immersion in the mystery of the spirit of poverty, the mystery of Christ the poor one, as lived and loved by  Cistercians who longed, from the very beginning, to be poor with the poor Christ.  Their poverty was shaped by the Rule of St. Benedict with its special marks of non-possessiveness, non-superfluity, sharing everything in common and, particularly characteristic of our Order, working manually to earn one’s living.  When faithfully practiced this poverty forms in us an interior poverty that is very close to both humility and prayer.  As Abbot Delatte wrote in his commentary, “We do not become poor to be poor, but to be rich with God.”

Now you are looking forward to the next stage, to growth in humility, obedience and loving service of the community.  There will be no lack of opportunities, Rosemarie.  Obedience is, as St. Benedict says, the first step of humility, and it is easy to understand why given our attachment to our own preferences.  To yield these in faith and love to what is asked by the person appointed by God or to those whom she delegates opens one’s life fully to Jesus who became the loving servant of all of us and who humbled himself even more by becoming obedient unto death.  Yet obedience is not only the first step of humility but also the first step of prayer.  As Dom Andre Louf said so beautifully,  “One cannot talk about prayer without also referring to obedience…Obedience effects something in the one who obeys.  It lays his life entirely open to the requirements of an Other and binds him fast to that Other.  More, much more even than that.  It can engender new life.  By laying someone open to an Other, it alters him in the deepest sense of the word.”

In all these stages of our monastic journey it is the vow of stability that roots us in the community of our profession as we enter more deeply each day into the mystery of the poor, humble, obedient One.  Your journey will take on the shape of a “we” rather than a “me” as you become rooted in our community’s efforts to find God’s will for us.  Our Cistercian Fathers loved to call this the common will.  You will also find yourself becoming more rooted in the mystery of the chaste Christ in whose presence your prayer will become a secret place of exclusive and undivided love beyond all other loves.  Sr. Rosemarie, I invite you now to pronounce your vows for one year, and may St. Aelred bless you in a special way today as you begin your vowed life.