22 October 1988
Albany, NY

My dear Sisters,

I am happy to have this occasion of reflecting briefly with you on the particular vocation which is yours at the present moment, of Sister Servants, that is, servants of the Servants of the Poor. The topic which has been chosen for this particular talk is the attitude of servant. That topic goes to the heart of the matter. If we really understood what it means to be a servant at all times, we would be excellent leaders of our communities. Since all Christian activity is presented to us by Christ as service, it follows that, if the members of our local communities really understood what it means to be a servant at every moment of the day, to be servants of the poor, servants of each other, servants of the Sister Servant, then our communities would be little paradises on earth. But this earthly paradise is, as we all know only too painfully, overgrown with thorns and briars, which the sinfulness of humanity has sown in that earth which God saw as good. So we suffer in Community. However, we must work with Him Who came to restore all things and, as far as it is possible, to make our community lives resemble more the life of union which is the life of the Blessed Trinity. In that work of restoration to which we are all called by our baptism, you have a vocation within a vocation. You are called to be servants of the Servants of the Poor.

In addressing you I am conscious that many must have spoken to you of this or similar topics relating to your vocation as Sister Servants. It is for that reason that I feel that we are nowadays a little like the Athenians in St. Paul's time. They liked to have new speakers so that they could have new ideas of the universe and about life. I wonder sometimes, too, whether future generations will not think of us as a paper generation. We have turned out enough miles of paper during the past twenty years to carry us to the moon and back. It makes me wonder how much of it has really been read and, more importantly, how much of it has been assimilated and how much of it has influenced us and made us change our lives profoundly.

In making this last observation, I am not opposing that aggiornamento which the Spirit of God through the Council called for, nor am I opposed to the revision of our works, based on a study of the charism of our Founders. However, before we achieve the revision of our works, we must set about the revision of our lives. Continual daily conversion in our personal lives will inevitably lead to that revision of works desired by the Spirit of God and the Church.

We are certainly not without a sufficiency of books, articles, reviews, documents, memoranda, and plans. From time to time I think of the rather pessimistic author of Ecclesiastes who said in his own day that "of making many books there is no end." (Ecc 12:12). I think, if he lived today, he might have decided against writing even his own short work.

All that I have been saying is a digression and a personal opinion, but I am convinced that we must try to keep a proper proportion between the time we give to reading or listening to conferences and the time we devote to reflection and prayer. Perhaps we need to return to St. Vincent's celebrated little method which he adopted in preaching. According to that little method, St. Vincent advised us to consider the nature of the topic, the motive for action and the means of putting into practice the conclusions reached. Perhaps I could apply St. Vincent's little method to the subject which has been proposed to me, "The Attitude of Servant."

First, to be servants. One of the first observations to be made is to remark upon the distinction between service and servant. We give service, but we are servants. It is one thing to serve the poor, and another to be a servant of the poor. Politicians and government officials work in what we sometimes call the public service. They will tell you that they serve the public. Airlines will tell you of the services which they offer to travelers. All these people, however, would not like to be considered as servants of the public. The air hostesses would not like it if, on your entry into a plane and after having greeted them, you said to them: "During this flight you will be my servant." No, they are happy to offer their services, but they would not like to be considered our servants.

One could say that the Christian vocation is at once to be a servant and to offer services. It is certainly the vocation of a Daughter of Charity. She is called to serve the poor in the Company, but what is more important, she is called to be a servant, to have the mentality of a servant, and that is to have the mentality of Jesus Christ. "Have in you," wrote St. Paul, "the same sentiments which were in Christ Jesus....He emptied Himself....He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even to death on the cross." (Phil 2:7-8). The mentality of a servant is one of being humble and of being obedient. Only after we have learned to be humble and obedient after the manner of Jesus Christ can we offer service to the poor in His name.

The motive for being a servant, then, is that Jesus Christ chose to be a servant, and He is our way, our truth and our life. He lived His life as a servant of all whom He met, particularly of the poor. The means of being a servant is to carry out faithfully day in and day out the work that our Superiors ask us to do, however humble and insignificant that work may be.

Our vocation is to be servants in collaboration. Those two words, in collaboration, evoke for us the Community. It is through the Community that we serve the poor. It is also with the Community that we serve the poor. At times we see and hear about poor people who are living in great distress. We experience a strong desire to help them. That may be good, but we have to ask ourselves if the Community is asking us to serve these people. Our vocation is to collaborate with the Community in serving the poor. That calls at times for much self-sacrifice, for we may not find it easy to work with others in the Community for the service of the poor. Those two words, in collaboration, are important.

Our Founders emphasized very much the need of union and unity among the Sisters. Without union and unity it would be impossible to work in collaboration with others. Union and unity are the means of achieving practical collaboration in the service of the poor.

What is our motive for working in collaboration with others? Nothing less than Jesus Christ; the whole mystery of the Incarnation is a mystery of collaboration of God with humanity. St. Vincent liked to contemplate Our Lord's collaboration with the Apostles in the work of announcing the Kingdom of God. It must not have been very easy for Our Lord to work with the twelve Apostles at times. Our Lord Himself always sought the fulfillment of His Father's Will, while the Apostles on many occasions sought selfishly their own promotion and were intent on following their limited and often selfish vision which they had of Him and of their own prospects in life.

Collaboration itself is a form of service. More to the point, the person who sincerely and humbly collaborates can be said to have an attitude of a servant. I have stressed the importance of collaboration because one of the challenges that faces the Sister Servant is to secure that collaboration from the Sisters of her community. The Sister Servant may be most willing to collaborate with the community, but not each Sister willing to collaborate with her. There is a continuing challenge for the Sister Servant to try, while manifesting an attitude of servant, to secure the maximum collaboration for the apostolates of the community and for living life in accordance with the letter and spirit of the Constitutions and Statutes. Much of your work as Sister Servants is a work of persuasion. Your task is to persuade the Sisters that their peace lies in a joyful acceptance of the simple message of the Gospel, that is, in a faithful carrying out of our Constitutions. Persuasion is not always easy, but it succeeds more often than direct commands. The foundation of all effective persuasion is humility. It is humility that helps us to respect the dignity of the individual Sister, while at the same time giving us the strength to put forward to her the ideals of our vocation.

Up to this point I have not evoked St. Vincent. So let me introduce him. For many years I have often reflected on an appointment he made in the year 1656. In that year, when he was already seventy-five years of age, he appointed Superior of a seminary a young man twenty-seven years of age. That says a lot for St. Vincent's confidence in youth. The young priest went to St. Vincent and asked him for some advice on being a Superior. St. Vincent commenced to offer him some counsels, at the end of which the young man had the good sense to go to his room and write what St. Vincent had just said to him. We still have this jewel of writing among St. Vincent's works. It is not a very long piece but it is full of spiritual and practical wisdom. Let me just quote a few sentences from it:

Perhaps I should continue along that line of St. Vincent in offering you some counsels which perhaps might be of help to you. Let me offer you one negative and one positive one.

Negatively, do not force the growth of your community too much. A farmer cannot force the growth of wheat in the field. We cannot force the spiritual growth of other people. It is important for a Sister Servant, as it is for everybody, to accept people as they are and to help them to grow, but not to force them to grow. It is significant that Jesus said: "And I, if I am lifted up, will draw all things to Myself." "I will draw all things to Myself." (Jn 12:32). He did not say: "I will force all to do as I want them to do." Positively, try to create around you the conditions that will help people to grow in faith, and in hope, and in love of God and the poor. The gardener can remove obstacles that prevent the growth of the seed in the ground. He can shelter, and when necessary water the ground, to assist the growth of the seed. So, too, with us, we should try to create around us the conditions that will enable people to come out of themselves into the light and sunshine of God's grace. I sometimes think that all of us underestimate what we can do to create within our communities the atmosphere that will allow, not only ourselves, but others to mature in the love of the Community and of our vocation to serve the poor.

One of the most practical pieces of advice any of us could receive in authority is to start by taking things and people as we find them, and not as we would wish them to be. Apropos of that, one of the most practical pieces of advice in the New Testament is the letter of St. James. You will find much in it to help you in your task. "My brothers, you will always have your trials, but when they come, try to treat them as a happy privilege." (Jas 1:2). All of us know that Sister Servants have often much to suffer, precisely because they are Sister Servants. St. James speaks of suffering as a happy privilege. I think it is important that, whatever our sufferings are, we try not to talk too much about them, at least to our communities. If we speak too much to our communities about our difficulties as Superiors, our communities will not be happy ones. An air of gloom will settle down upon them. I am not saying that a Sister Servant should not confide her difficulties to a prudent person. Indeed this meeting should afford you an opportunity of talking in general about some of the difficulties that you experience in guiding your communities, always respecting the law of charity. St. James would say that whatever your sufferings are as Sister Servants, through them you are becoming "fully developed and complete." (Ibid.).

To be a servant, to have the attitude of a servant at all times, is not easy. You have much need of the grace of God and of mortification. Mortification, does the word sound a little outdated to you? It certainly is not one of the mode words in today's spirituality. Yet I feel that it must be rediscovered if religious life is not to be emaciated and devoid of relevance in today's world. All of us need to reflect more on some of those great sayings of Christ: "I came, not to do my own Will but the Will of Him Who sent Me." (Jn 5:30). "He that saves his life will lose it." (Jn 12:25). "Unless you deny yourself and take up your cross daily and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple." ((Ibid., v. 24). "Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, itself will remain alone." (Mt 16:24).

If our local communities are not meditating on these great utterances of Christ and concretizing them in our personal and community lives, we will slowly and almost imperceptibly seek more and more comforts. We will become less and less interested in the poor. We will become, within the walls of our little community houses, ever seeking to expand our personal enterprises. We will hardly avert to the fact that proprietors are not servants.

That is a rather downbeat note which I have just sounded and I do not wish to conclude with it. I would like rather to end on a note of appreciation and thanks to each of you personally for what you are doing in enabling the Sisters of your communities in the Province of Albany to be what St. Vincent would like them to be and to do at the present time. Let me say here that during the last eight years I have admired the spirit of humility which I have noted among the Sister Servants throughout the entire Company of the Daughters of Charity. Many times in visiting communities, I could not guess who was the Sister Servant, which is proof that Sister Servants in the Company are authentically humble people. For that with St. Vincent I say, "Blessed be God!"

Let me end by reading you a few sentences from a letter which St. Louise wrote to a Sister Servant: "I praise God with all my heart for the graces He has bestowed on you.... Those to whom God gives the charge of others must forget themselves entirely and in all things, but especially in spiritual matters and in the little satisfactions that may assist our Sisters to advance toward perfection. Remember that those in authority must be the pack-mules of the Company. Please join with me in asking Our Lord for this spirit for you and for me." (Spiritual Writings of Louise de Marillac, ltr. 376, p. 458).