Sister Amanda Marie professed her perpetual vows as a Daughter of St. Paul on June 27 in St. Raymond–St. Elizabeth Parish in St. Louis. When a sister chooses to make her final profession in a parish—a powerful vocational witness for young women and a way for the people of the parish to tangibly touch the beauty of consecrated life—it is our custom to celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving at our Provincial House in Boston. This is very meaningful because several years of her formation took place in this house, and it is also where almost 70 of our Sisters live and carry out the mission. This Mass of Thanksgiving for Sister Amanda Marie was offered on August 30. In the same Mass, all the Sisters of the Boston community renewed their profession, celebrating as a community their anniversaries of profession.
“In response to the love of God …”
When we profess perpetual vows as Daughters of St. Paul, we begin with these words, which explain why we are here in the first place: because God loves us. Because God is love. Our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are inspired by the love of the Trinity, which Jesus made visible when he “emptied himself” in trust, love, and obedience to the Father through his Incarnation and self-offering on the Cross (Philippians 2). It is a sublime call that paradoxically shapes the simplest, most mundane moments of our life in community.
This is the paradox that struck me as I renewed my vows alongside my sisters during the Mass of Thanksgiving at our provincial house. During this Mass, we gave thanks to God not only for the gift of my perpetual profession but for the 34 centuries of consecrated life that we have collectively lived together. When my sisters and I stood after the homily to renew our vows with one voice, we did so as a family whose eyes have beheld the Lord’s goodness for 3,468 years:
“In response to the love of God, who has called me to follow more closely Christ the Master, way, Truth, and Life, among the Daughters of St. Paul, I, in full freedom, totally offer myself to the Father to be consecrated by him in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit….”
These words are radical, and yet there were no fireworks as we spoke them. We uttered them as we were, standing between pews streaked with peeling varnish, hearing our bare voices cut through the still air. Some of us spoke with strength and volume, our words tumbling together in a new Pentecost of accents from around the world. Others read more softly, minds bent by dementia yet still pulsing with apostolic fervor. Nevertheless, we all reached the same line, at the same moment, to renew the same consecration: “I renew the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience for all my life, according to the Constitutions of the Daughters of St. Paul.”
“All my life” isn’t just a duration of time. It’s a fullness of being. It’s our youth and our aging, our health and our sickness, the cultures we come from and the families who raised us, the missions God will ask us to embrace and the assignments we will struggle to understand, the laughter and the tears, the mornings in chapel and the afternoons in our book centers, our writing and editing and designing for the sake of the Kingdom, the dishwashing and the car maintenance and everything in between.
In Christ, everything is holy. In Christ, everything is consecrated, swept up into his sacrifice on the Cross for the salvation of the world. In Christ, I now belong to my sisters and my sisters belong to me: forever. May the grace of God help us to be faithful as we live our response to his love “for all our lives.”
