25 March 1992
Paris, France

Mother Elizondo, Father Lloret and my dear Sisters,

During a recent month-long visit to a number of our missions and communities in Latin America, it was suggested to me one afternoon by my Confreres and our Sisters that I visit one of the most celebrated, historical sites that lies within the territory of our Apostolic Vicariate of El Petén in Guatemala.

The site is historical because it was the seat or capital of the Maya civilization which mysteriously vanished many centuries ago. Of this city nothing was known until some 150 years ago, when it was discovered in the midst of hundreds of acres of tropical forest. The intensive growth of tall tropical trees and dense undergrowth had, over the centuries, grown up and concealed it. What stand now revealed--and only a part of the city has been uncovered--are a number of tall and massive constructions in stone with broad, steep steps mounting to a height of thirty or forty meters. To mount them can leave even the youngest person rather breathless, and a person who has not a head for heights possibly dizzy. These majestic monuments were built solely for the purpose of sacrifice and could be described as altar-temples. Today they command and inspire awe, as they silently witness to an ancient people's desire and need to speak to an unknown god in the language of sacrifice, even of human sacrifice.

As I contemplated these massive altar-temples, built with the strength of thousands of arms and with the sweat of countless human brows, I began to reflect on what the builders of these great altars might say to us moderns and what we might say to them. Clearly the heart of their religion was sacrifice. For them sacrifice was the only language which they could speak to a deity or a power which they recognized to be immeasurably greater than themselves. Whatever we might say about the confused notions they had of God, they certainly had a highly developed sense of the transcendent and of the sacred.

For our part, we would speak to them of the beauty and the wonder of what took place in Nazareth when the one true God asked a Virgin, whose name was Mary, if she would consent to be overshadowed by the Most High and thus conceive and bring forth a Child, Who would be the Saviour of the world and Who would be none other than God Himself.

That announcement to this ancient people would take their breath away, but their astonishment would be all the greater when we would go on to tell them that now there was only one sacrifice in the world, that of Jesus Christ. For, to quote from the letter to the Hebrews: "When Christ came into the world, He said: 'Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for Me....' Then I said, 'Lo, I have come to do your Will, O God.'" (Heb 10:5-7).

There is now, we might continue, only one sacrifice in the world, that of Jesus Christ, and His sacrifice had everything to do with the fulfillment of another person's will, that of the eternal Father of Jesus Christ. It was through the perfect accomplishment of that Will which brought Jesus Christ to death on the altar of the cross wherein lies the salvation of the world.

The ancient people of the Maya civilization might then ask how we today offer sacrifice. We would explain to this highly intelligent people the meaning, uniqueness and centrality of our Eucharistic Sacrifice, pointing out to them that only insofar as our lives reflect and are in harmony with the sentiments of Christ, the High Priest, can they become an acceptable offering to the One true God. We might tell the Maya people that, if all the civilizations of the world disappeared in some nuclear holocaust, what people from another planet thousands of years later might discover most often in the ashes, would be the cross, not in one massive form in one place, but in millions of forms in a diversity of metals on all the continents of the globe. The cross speaks the language of sacrifice: humility, poverty, obedience, forgiveness and love. We would further go on to tell them that a tiny minority of Christ's followers are continually invited to learn and speak proficiently the language of Christ's sacrifice through the vows of chastity, obedience, poverty and service of the poor. A Daughter of Charity could fittingly quote the words of the Inter-Assembly Document and say that: "Immersed in the world, we belong to Christ. Through the radicality of our total gift to God, confirmed by our vows, we want to be for this world a prophetic voice that witnesses to the living God. We want to live the Evangelical Counsels."

Our vows are indeed the language of sacrifice, but it is a language that has no meaning apart from its relationship to the person of Jesus Christ. Some time ago in Rome, two Moslems stopped me on the street, asking for directions to their hotel, and as I walked a little bit of the way with them, they began to speak about religion. They asked me how Jesus Christ could be God if He died on a cross, for God cannot die. I tried to answer them as best I could. Later in the day when reflecting on the experience, I wondered how convincing I would have been if they had followed up their question by asking me to explain my vows to them. Would my explanation be interpreted as a lived experience of devotion to the person of Jesus Christ, poor, chaste, obedient and a servant of the poor? To live with vows is, in the words of St. Vincent, to live in that condition of life "which Our Lord embraced on earth...and which consists, among other means, of living in poverty, chastity, obedience and stability in one's vocation." (Coste V, Fr. ed., p. 316).

To live a vowed life is to climb day by day the steep steps that lead to the altar of sacrifice where we take our stand on that "living stone, rejected by men, but in God's sight chosen and precious...to offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ." (1 Pt 2:4-5). To live fully a vowed life is to take a stand on a height that can make one dizzy. To counteract such dizziness one must always look up and not down. It is only by constantly lifting up our gaze to Jesus crucified that we will succeed in not panicking nor losing our balance. To look down is to compromise and to take back, at least partially, what once had been placed on the altar of sacrifice. Perhaps the ancient Mayan people would have difficulty in understanding us as we tried to explain compromise in sacrifice, for sacrifice with them would seem to have been not only costly, but absolute and irrevocable.

It is not that the world has lost the idea of sacrifice: thousands daily sacrifice themselves for ends and purposes unrelated to religion. What our modern world may have lost sight of is the uniqueness of the sacrifice of Christ and the urgency of our personal participation in it through a life lived with "Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our religion." (Heb 3:1).

To live a vowed life is to live continually in an attitude of surrender and submission to the will of another. Let us recall frequently that it is the same Father in heaven Who invited Jesus Christ to accept His Will, Who now invites us moment by moment to surrender to Him. The agents who manifest that Will and the circumstances in which we live our lives may be different, but it is the same Father. "I am ascending to My Father and to your Father, to My God and your God." (Jn 20:17). The greatest obstacle to living the vowed life is our reluctance to place on the altar of sacrifice our own will and judgment. It was Mary's readiness to place her will and judgment on the altar of sacrifice that made the Incarnation possible, and through it the immeasurable riches of grace lavished on humanity.

The day of the Renovation of your vows, my dear Sisters, is a day of rediscovery. In the forest of your lives you come to see with fresh eyes the beauty of that temple of which you are "living stones." (1 Pt 2:4). Perhaps with the passing of time the undergrowth of selfishness, independence and vanity has been allowed to climb up and conceal the altar of sacrifice. The grace of renovation is a grace to cut back all that is hiding the simple and majestic features of Christ which His Spirit is tracing out in your characters and in your lives.