Consecrated Life, A Special Call

“Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord just as is written in the law of the Lord, every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord.”  Shall be consecrated to the Lord.   So this Feast of the Presentation, as I mentioned, St John Paul had also proclaimed that the “World Day for Consecrated Life”, consecrated life such as the monastic life or the contemplative life of monks and nuns, brothers and sisters and religious life and so forth, there’s many different forms.  So this has always been a special day for consecrated communities of consecrated life.  The Feast of the Presentation and in fact in our own community we have a special event tonight which will just be in a private ceremony, but Angel will be making her next step as entering the postulancy of our little Mission of Divine Mercy.   But for those who aren’t called the consecrated life, who cares, right, but what’s the big deal?  Why should you care about it, right?   Remember what St. Paul says, that the Church is a body and so the body’s health depends on the health of each one of its members.  All of us have different vocations which are to help each other in the body.   So the consecrated life is one of these important vocations in the Church.  And it’s had, consecrated life over the centuries, has had such an impact on the Church, especially when they were faithful to this call, like the great saints so many saints and like we have here St. Faustina and all the great messages of Divine Mercy.   And she was a member of a consecrated life and her community religious community.  In fact, we wouldn’t be here right now today if it wasn’t for the consecrated life or this little Mission of Divine Mercy, this poor little Mission of Divine Mercy.  So consecrated life in some places is in crisis.  There’s a lot of communities which seem to be dying out, pretty much in other places it’s flourishing.  But St John Paul said the consecrated life is willed by Jesus Christ Himself and that He Himself has inspired this form of life in the Church.  All of us were consecrated to God by our Baptism and some people Jesus called already from, we see in the gospel, He called them to follow Him in a special way to consecrate their lives entirely to Him.   And this life was marked by what’s called the evangelical councils of poverty, chastity and obedience.  And so there’s a lot of richness in consecrated life to reflect on.   But since we don’t have that much time, I just thought I should focus on a little bit of my own experience, and three points which relate to these points of poverty, chastity and obedience.   So Jesus called some people to make the great sacrifice of a Christian living a Christian life and beginning a family, to follow the same style of life that He Himself had lived.  And I know that my own vocation, if I look back on it I sense that I was already sensing it in a way when I was just a little kid.  And I think oftentimes that Lord plants the seeds of the vocation, very young and I think because a lot of times at that stage in our life we don’t yet have all the distractions and confusions and temptations so we can, we’re often more or more like attentive.  And so oftentimes, the first signs of vocation can very young but then as I became started to grow up and become an adolescent, I was drifting away just the typical stupid adolescent stuff and then the Lord gradually began to bring me back.   And so I was blessed with very good parents and a very happy family life and a very happy experience of the marriage and family that but I began to sense that the Lord was calling me to something different.  There’s something more that no creature could feel. and if when I try to explain this, I think if two things, one is the sense of transcendence as a desire for something infinite that is the Lord has placed in our soul and infinite desire.  And then at the same time it’s a desire for something that touches us and what is deepest in our heart and our soul and our spirit.  So both transcendence and intimacy but in a way that only God can fulfill.   St Paul says that, he says “I longed to go and be with the Lord,” and that’s kind of the sense that wanting to get right to the goal.  The goal is to be with the Lord and to be with Jesus.  And so what I sense the my vocation was I said I wanted to be with Jesus.   So it was essentially, first of all a contemplative call.  I get the call to be united to the Lord, and later on I began to discover that the part of service for me was first of all a desire to be with the Lord, to be entirely for Him and with Him.   So that led me to join a religious community, the Brothers of the Congregation of St John.  So that leads me to the second point, concerning obedience.  I began to have a little bit more experience of the world and noticing how much the world is a wounded world and sensing that the wounds are so deep that evil is so great that only God can save this world.  Only God can respond to what the world really needs.  So what He needs from us is our cooperation or obedience to do whatever He wants, to not put barriers.   Because He wants to act but we’re the ones who put the barriers and so of course consecrate that’s what consecrated life should be like, to let the Lord act, to be obedient to the Lord. But unfortunately since consecrated life is made up of humans, we sometimes begin to put barriers, to obstacles, to what the Lord wants to do.  I was sensing this, and last week I was talking about back in the 90s when I  was in Monterey, two women who came and shared with me what they felt was a letter from the Lord for me.  Then after I talked about that last week, some people came up and said well, what was it in the letter?   And so I should say something about that.   The letter was basically talking about a great mission of evangelization and mercy that the Lord wanted.   And that, for that, what He needed most from us was faith, especially on the part of His ministers.  He said that so often the ministers of the Church place obstacles by their lack of faith to what He wanted to do.   And so that was part of the inspiration that confirming something I already sensed that led to eventually to start in this little Mission of Divine Mercy which is called to the special charism or special mission of faith so that God Himself can act.  And we’ve over these years, we’ve experienced so many times and it’s been a difficult path but His guidance and His help so we founded the Mission of Divine Mercy to obey the Lord and we lived happily ever after, right?  It’s not quite that simple.  And so that leads me to the third point of poverty. So Jesus calls to renounce wealth and ownership so that everything that is given us can be at His service.  And the Lord has started the mission with almost nothing but the Lord has been very generous to us and supported us and taking care of our material needs and in great part through the support of you all.  But there’s another sense of poverty that the gospel speaks of poor and spirit, because one of the big dangers maybe the biggest danger in consecrated life is spiritual pride.   You know the Pharisees started out as something very good it started as people who wanted to live fully the law be completely dedicated not live it lukewarm there half heartedly but fully, that we know that gradually became corrupted and to what we see in the gospel.  And pride is always that danger of consecrated life and so the Lord needs to lead us into humility and into an interior poverty.   And so I wanted give you a chance to look a little bit behind the scenes in a sense of MDM, because the path He’s called us to, what He is forming us for, because I didn’t know what the Mission Divine Mercy was for.  I mean I just wanted to be obedient to the Lord, but I didn’t know what was really the particular path.  And it was gradually that He revealed to us that it was faith so that He could act.  So that was not our choice that was something that He revealed to us.  And as I look at how He’s led and guided the Mission, I see how much that He’s been forming us in faith and it’s been such a trial of faith, so mysterious.  You know like St. Faustina and St. Faustina, it was striking, very early on in her novitiate, so right at the very beginning of her religious life she experiences this terrible interior trials, terribly intense experiences of anguish, of rejection from God, of His absence.  And it wasn’t because of anything exterior it was the Lord was permitting, her leading, her through this interior trial and then at certain point He led her out of it.   Or Mother Teresa, people didn’t know till after her death that almost all her life and her community she was living this dry barren interior experience, of desert of bareness of absence of not sensing the Lord not sensing His joy not sensing in His presence, not sensing anything, feeling just so human, not something anything spiritual.  And so these are signs of this interior trials that the Lord can lead us to.  St John of the Cross spoke so much of that dark night but the Lord leads can lead souls on the experience of darkness and obscurity and confusion.   And so in these trials are so they’re hidden, they’re not because of some external circumstance.  It’s not like because there’s not enough to eat or there’s an external persecution, it’s interior and it just depends on the Lord when and how long that lasts.  How it is it just depends on Him, but it can be so difficult and so mysterious, so hard to put into words or even explain.   And I was thinking that today we have the example in this Gospel and it seems providential of Simeon and Anna.  Simeon and Anna who receive a promise from the Lord.  The Lord it says, clearly that the Holy Spirit gave Simeon this promise, that it had been revealed to him.  Well, first of all as he was awaiting the consolation of Israel and it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit, so directly by God, that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.  So as they received this great promise but then he had to wait.  How long did he have to wait?  How long was that wait?  The Gospel doesn’t say how long he had to wait.  Doesn’t say how hard that waiting was.  How many trials that were to try to hold on to that promise, when nothing seemed to be happening for so long, until that day when he came into, it says, in the spirit in the temple and then receives this great prophetic message, “now master you may let your servant go in peace according to your word for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the sight of all the peoples a light for revelation to the Gentiles and glory for your people Isreal.”  Anna, it said she was a prophetess, so it says very clearly she was a prophet as we spoken so much of the importance of the prophetic charism for the Mission.  And she got married and then she was a widow for many years. And it said that she was dedicated to praying and fasting always living in the temple.  And then she also discovered this great moment of revelation of the presence of the Savior, and then began to proclaim it.  So there are examples of those who have received this promise from the Lord, and have kept it faithfully during all this long trial, and then are faithful until the fulfillment of that.  And I think that is part of this, this call for the mission to receive these promises, and then try to hold on, and the great mystery and often dark night and long desert of the Lord, which is like St. Paul says, “that Jesus emptied Himself.”  And this interior desert is like, a gradual emptying of our interior, even letting us experience our poverty, our weakness, our sinfulness, our misery, as St. Faustina says, letting us feel the intensity of our emptiness, so that that can be like draw the presence of the Lord.  And so, on this world day of consecrated life, and on this Feast of the Presentation, it’s a day also which we think of gratitude for you and all those who have supported and encouraged this little Mission.  It was very difficult, it’s been very difficult.  But as we were just beginning, not knowing how we’re going to make it and then Lord brought us to a place that we didn’t know at all here at New Braunfels.   And then gradually all the support and encouragement help this little Mission?  Yeah, well, we were lighting those little candles at the, at the beginning.  And we had to come in here because it was too windy, and even in here is pretty windy and you know, sometimes a struggle to keep those little flames lit.   And that’s kind of like, what it was for us a struggle to keep this tiny little flame going of the mission but now it’s little by little grown a little bit.  So this is the day to pray for all those who have been called to consecrated life.  People often ask them what they should pray for us. And I said, pray that we be faithful to the Lord, and pray also for all that the Lord is calling right now, that they have the faith, because so often I’ve seen so many times so often the Lord, calls someone and they turn away, they don’t listen, because it’s very difficult. So pray for all those that the Lord is calling right now in this very difficult time of the world.  But in a time where it’s the Holy Spirit is calling more than ever, the Holy Spirit has not stopped calling.  But it’s very difficult that there’s so much wind and a sense that the ones to put that little flame of a vocation out.  So we need to pray and encourage and support them.   And today is also a day to recognize the concept that all of us, through baptism are consecrated to the Lord and so this day is also a day to help each one of us on our own path, be faithful to being consecrated for the Lord.