Living our Vows
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8 April 1991
Paris, France

Mother Duzan, Father Lloret and my dear Sisters,

Two weeks ago I was in the Greek city of Salonika, where St. Paul preached to the Thessalonians. In that city today there is a small Vincentian presence of three priests and a brother and four Daughters of Charity. On Sunday morning I celebrated Mass with them and with a number of people of the Vincentian parish. In the afternoon my Confreres and I made a brief tour of the city and our first stop was at a medieval Orthodox church.

When we entered it, a baptism was taking place. The Orthodox priest had just concluded the first part of the ceremony and was proceeding from the entrance of the church to the sanctuary, where a large font had been prepared. The subject of the baptism was a young boy about seven years of age. As the little procession made its way to the sanctuary, the boy's mother whisked him suddenly out of the church. A minute later they returned. The boy was wearing a bathrobe. The priest had already begun the prayers at the font, surrounded by the boy's family and friends. On entering the sanctuary the boy mounted a low pedestal and then the mother removed the bathrobe and there the boy stood, totally naked and totally unselfconscious, as the priest continued to read prayers from the Greek ritual. We did not wait to see the actual baptism which according to the Greek Orthodox rite would be one of immersion.

Coming out of the church, the implications of Christian baptism bore in upon me in a new and significant way. St. Paul's question seemed more penetrating: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" (Rom 6:3) and "all of you who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ." (Gal 3:27). For St. Paul, to be baptized is to surrender everything to Christ. To be baptized into Christ Jesus is to become as naked as a corpse that is being prepared for burial. It is to be totally immersed in the cleansing and life-giving waters of baptism and to emerge clothed with new life, the life of the Risen Christ. "If anyone is in Christ," wrote St. Paul, "he is a new creation." (2 Cor 5:17).

To be a Christian, then, is to live costly, for total surrender to anyone, even out of love, is costly. To all who would be baptized, Jesus Christ has said, "If anyone will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow Me." (Lk 9:23). Those who died on crosses in Jesus' time, died naked.

If it is costly to live as an authentic Christian, to live with vows is even more so. That truth is put clearly to us in the document of Vatican II, Perfectae Caritatis: "The members of each Institute should recall first of all that when they made profession of the evangelical counsels, they were responding to a divine call, for the purpose that, not merely being dead to sin (Rom 6:11), but renouncing the world also, they might live for God alone.... This constitutes a special consecration which is deeply rooted in their baptismal consecration and is a fuller expression of it." (p5). To live our vows is to live naked before God. It is to allow ourselves to become so absorbed by His presence, so fascinated by His beauty and His love, that we become in time quite unselfconscious of what the world may think or say.

To live our vow of chastity is to live with our eyes and hearts firmly fixed on the living person of Jesus Christ, with whom we partner everything. What we cannot share in thought, word or act with Jesus Christ is to a greater or lesser degree a failure to live chastely. To live chastely is to live lovingly at every moment of the day with Jesus Christ. And that can be costly.

Our vow of poverty speaks of nakedness. The reality, however, is that I can clutter my life with so many things, with so many vain and worldly desires, that I am wearing protective clothing against the refreshing rain and warm sunshine of God's love and grace.

What of obedience? The nakedness of Christ on the cross was but an external expression of the nakedness of His Will before His Father in heaven. "Not My Will but Yours be done," (Lk 22:42) was His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. In our day, freedom of expression has been encouraged in religious Communities with a view to arriving at a clearer knowledge of what God may be asking of a Community or of an individual. In itself it is good, but it can also be a stretching out for a robe that will cover that nakedness before God which is at the heart of our vows. Obedience is a condition of nakedness before God.

Service of the poor? As Daughters of Charity you live much in the light of that fourth vow. The poor are always close to the hearts of the Daughters of Charity. You, my dear Sisters, from your experience know that to serve the poor you must be continually divesting yourselves of comfort, convenience and prestige. And that is costly. St. Vincent expressed his thoughts on the maxims of the world in one of his conferences: "'What do you say, Sister? Do you not think it reasonable to...keep this rule which teaches us to shun the maxims of the world and embrace those of Jesus Christ?' `Yes, Father,' replied the Sisters. `Do you intend to follow the maxims of Our Lord?' When they replied again, M. Vincent told them that they must ask this grace from Our Lord Jesus Christ. `I beseech Him by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, to grant it to this Company.'" (Conf. Eng. ed., 2 Nov. 1655, p. 766).

To come back to the ceremony in the Orthodox church. We did not have time to wait and see the actual immersion ceremony. We hastened on to visit the site where tradition has it St. Paul preached to the citizens of Thessalonica. Had we waited to see the conclusion of the baptismal ceremony, I have no doubt but that the naked boy would have been covered by a new robe to signify that he was now a new creation in Christ Jesus. I have wondered since, how ornate that robe might have been, probably more ornate than the little piece of white linen that is offered at the end of the ceremony to a person who is baptized in the Latin Rite.

Whether it be in an Orthodox church or in a Latin church, baptism is being stripped naked only in order to be clothed again. Listen to St. Paul as he writes forcefully and impatiently to the Galatians: "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ." (Gal 3:27). The metaphor is one of clothes. Old clothes have been thrown away and new ones have been acquired. St. Paul shows a fondness for thinking of the baptized as people who are very elegantly dressed, spiritually. To the Colossians he writes: "Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.... And above all these, put on love which binds everything together in perfect harmony." (Col 2:12-14).

Our vows, as a fuller expression of our baptism, must be seen as a condition of nakedness before God, so that He can clothe us with the stunning beauty of charity and a perfectly matching ensemble of virtues. Of the virtues that match or harmonize with charity, St. Vincent's eye was attracted very much by humility, and he said so on innumerable occasions. When I reflect on the virtue of humility (and it has been said that humility is not characteristic of twentieth century people), I like to think of a little phrase in St. Peter's first letter when he counsels Christians to "put on the apron (or `overall') of humility" (1 Pt 5:5). Aprons are put on because there is work to be done and service given, or better, service to be offered. But the service offered must harmonize at all times with charity, for if service, however valuable it may seem inside or outside the Community, clashes with charity, then the harmony of the ensemble is spoiled. That may be the moment to present ourselves naked before God in prayer, so that He can clothe us with a robe that is pure love and not synthetic.

When you renew your vows each year, my dear Sisters, you once again immerse yourselves totally in Christ. "Let us live, therefore, as if we were dead in Jesus Christ," wrote St. Louise when reflecting on her baptism. "Henceforth, let there be no further resistance to Jesus, no action except for Jesus, no thoughts but in Jesus!" (Spiritual Writings of Louise de Marillac, A23., p. 786).

Each year, on the day when the Virgin Mary surrendered herself totally to the designs of God for the saving of humanity, you surrender yourselves anew into the hands of the living and loving God. With the Virgin Mary's surrender a new dawn from on high shone upon humanity. With her a new chapter in the history of humanity opened, a chapter that is not yet closed. God's saving work continues in our world, and each of us through obedience writes a line in that chapter, which will only be closed when Christ will come again to hand the Kingdom over to His Father, and God will be all in all. Meantime let us live with the vision of St. Paul, who wrote to the Corinthians: "Always, wherever we may be, we carry with us in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus, too, may always be seen in our body." (2 Cor 4:10). At once naked and clothed.

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