Sr Karla's Solemn Profession

Sr Karla, today, on the day of your Solemn Profession, you are united in a gesture of supplication with the sinful woman who weeps at the feet of Jesus and dries them with her hair – she who has been forgiven much, and so loves greatly.  She loves because she is loved, and this has never been clearer to her than at the moment of her greatest abasement, her deepest bow.  She teaches you that it is amid the shards of our self-sufficiency that we discover our indestructible loveliness.  She who has touched bottom, knows misery, owns it, and so unlocks mercy.

You are asking for mercy.  What is mercy?  For you, as you have described it in your petition, it means to be caught, awakened, enkindled, sought, forgiven and forborne, as well as to be guided, corrected, held and healed.  All this you ask from one in whose hands you place your life.  In a few hours you will sing, with heaven and earth and all of us as witnesses: “Receive me, O Lord, according to your promise and I shall live.  Do not disappoint me in my hope.”  There is only One, who can receive you to the fullest extent of your creaturely magnificence, only One whose promise contains all you ask for and more than you can imagine, only One whose provident care will never disappoint.

And yet, as you make your promise of obedience until death, you will place your joined hands between those of another human being and so be bound irrevocably to a community of sisters.  We who receive your oblation in the name of God, bear covenant responsibility for it.  Your abbess and your community, your Lady Wrentham, is meant to be Christ for you, and you for her.  But I think you already know that the Christ you meet here will more often be the poor Christ than the glorious one.  Your Lady Wrentham needs to be washed and anointed so as to reveal the hidden lineaments of the divine likeness.

Today, you are united in desire with the Jesus who kneels at the feet of his disciples and washes them, drying them with a towel tied around his waist – he who loved not only greatly, but to the end.  His is the image into which your life of faithful obedience will draw you, so that not only will your life be his, his will be yours.  The mercy we have to offer you is that of drawing close to the poor and humble Christ and becoming one with him.  One who loves greatly, forgives much.

Today, we pray with you that your hope and ours will not be disappointed, that Christ’s mercy will be revealed to you in the midst of his people, here at Wrentham.  This is a mystery grasped in the darkness of faith illumined by the light of grace.  May this monastic community become for you, like Mary, a womb of the divine.  As the poet John Donne puts it:
“Thou hast light in dark, and shut in little room,
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.” (John Donne)
And may the mercy given and received in this place overflow for the nourishment and healing of all people.

One thing is clear: in you, Sr Maria Karla, Lady Wrentham has met her match.