24 March 1984
Paris, France

Mother Rogé, Father Lloret and my dear Sisters,

Towards the end of the last century there died an English Jesuit priest who earlier in his life had been converted to Catholicism. He lived his religious and priestly life with great dedication and suffering. He gave expression to the intensity of his experience as a religious and as a priest in poems which during his lifetime he never published. Some twenty years after his death his poetry was published and the excellence of some of his religious poetry was acclaimed by literary critics who neither shared the priest's faith nor understood the meaning and significance of the consecrated life.

One of the poems this Jesuit wrote (his name was Gerard Manley Hopkins} centered on the person of Our Lady and her experience of the Incarnation. In one line of that poem the priest makes this request of God: "Make new Nazareths in us."

The little prayer comes to my mind this morning when I think of the new Nazareths that are being made all over the world as the Daughters of Charity renew their vows. Each of you this morning has tried to say yes to the messenger of God who has invited you to surrender yourselves to God and to His Will anew, so that you can serve his poor. Each of you has echoed this morning the words of Our Lady: "Be it done unto me according to Thy Word." (Lk 1:38). Because there are new Nazareths this morning, Christ, Our Lord, is breaking into the world in a new way, and particularly into that world which is so close to His heart, the world of the poor.

You are new Nazareths and your concerns must be those of Mary. It is not difficult for us to imagine what must have been one of her preoccupations when she had renewed her dedication to God by giving her consent to the Incarnation. She must have been concerned that she would not only safely bear the Holy One of God in her womb, but also would bring Him forth to the world. As a new Nazareth today, your primary concern must be to bear the Lord Jesus in the intimacy of your own heart and then to bring Him forth to the poor of the world. The first gift we can offer to the poor is something of the holiness of Jesus Christ. The poor, whether they articulate this request or not, are asking you to introduce them to Jesus Christ. They are saying to you what the Greeks said to Philip on Palm Sunday: "We wish to see Jesus." (Jn 12:21). What those Greeks wanted from Jesus Christ, we do not know. Of this we can be certain, that before they received anything from Him, the holiness of His person would have touched them. I have often reflected on this observation of W.H. Auden: "I have met in my life two persons, one a man, the other a woman, who convinced me that they were persons of sanctity. Utterly different in character, upbringing and interests as they were, their effect upon me was the same. In their presence I felt myself to be ten times as nice, ten times as intelligent, ten times as good-looking as I really am."

Over the Nazareth of the Gospels there lies a great silence, and in that silence "the Child grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man." (Lk 2:52). As new Nazareths, try to secure times in the day when silence will lie upon your heart and mind. When St. Vincent said that the street must be your cloister, I like to think that he was inviting you to bring the silence and recollection of the cloister into the street. In his conference on Holy Communion, St. Vincent remarks: "The most Blessed Virgin went out to provide for the needs of her family and to solace and console her neighbors, but she always did so in the presence of God....Ask her, my Daughters, to obtain for you from God this interior recollection by which you will prepare yourselves for the most Holy Communion of the Body and Blood of her Son, so that you will be able to say: "My heart is ready, O my God, my heart is ready." (Conf. Eng. ed., 18 Aug. 1647, pp. 303-304).

It is over twenty years now since Paul VI made his historic visit to the Holy Land. When he reached Nazareth, he told the people that Nazareth was a school where, even as Pope, he had much to learn. In describing Nazareth, he used a very daring phrase. "It is," he said, "the school of the Gospel." The first of the three lessons, which he felt should be learned in this school of the Gospel, was silence. What he said on silence was brief and to the point. "May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, be revived in me, besieged as we are by so many uplifted voices, the general noise and uproar in our seething and oversensitized modern life." (cf. Office of Readings, Feast of the Holy Family). For us, who live busy lives, it is difficult to provide for silence in our lives. In large measure, however, it is the use we make of silence and reflection that forms us into the sort of persons we are becoming. To dig continually a well of silence in our lives is to have an assurance that the living water of God's grace will keep springing up, especially when we need it to help the needy who thirst for God's grace and kindness and seek it from our hands and lips and hearts.

In consenting again this morning to become servants of the Lord and servants of the poor, it is good to think of your vocation as something simple and humble, as simple and as humble as those things which Mary did for the Child of her womb in the home of Nazareth. Perhaps it might help us in the living of our vocation to think of ourselves as servants of the Lord, rather than as in the service of the Lord. Many people give service to others; much fewer, however, think of themselves as servants.

Yet it was as a servant that Our Lady thought of herself when she consented to become the Mother of God. Indeed, the word Our Lady used, according to St. Luke, was "slave." "I am the slave of the Lord." In an age in which much is said and much is being done for human rights, such language seems old-fashioned and out-of-date. Still, this great reality remains: that the Incarnation took place because a simple, humble, loving Virgin in Nazareth could think of herself as the slave of the Lord. Your Constitutions do not use the term "slave," but they do reflect, if we prayerfully meditate on them, the mentality of Mary: "Authority and obedience commit them (the Sisters) to both a common seeking and a humble, loyal acceptance of God's Will....The obedience that the Daughters of Charity have freely chosen entails sacrifices. Far from diminishing the dignity of the person, however, obedience enhances it by increasing the freedom which belongs to the children of God." (C. 2.8). "Make new Nazareths in us." Perhaps in some countries we hear voices like Nathanael's saying, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (Jn 1:46). There are people who see no point in there being "new Nazareths" in the world and who question the value of the consecrated life. Let us not spend too much time arguing the point. Rather, let us take a hint from St. Philip who did not argue with Nathanael, but simply replied: "Come and see." Let your lives be of such dedication and love that they will be an invitation to all to come and see Jesus Christ, to Whom this morning you have surrendered yourselves with all your strength, with all your heart and with all your mind. Draw confidence from these words of St. Vincent: "...if God bestows a blessed eternity on those who give only a cup of water, what will he not give to a Daughter of Charity who has left everything and makes an offering of herself to serve them all the days of her life?...She has good grounds for hoping to be of the number of those to whom He will say: `Come, blessed of My Father, possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you.'" (Conf. Eng. ed., 13 Feb. 1646, p. 224).