I am privileged to have this opportunity to reflect on the 50 or 60 years as women religious for the 4 of us.

I have entitled my reflection “The Drawing of this Love and the Voice of this Calling” borrowing from TS Eliot’s The Four Quartets.   For the four of us it has been as Eliot says “the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling”, over the past 50 or 60 years which has never allowed us to cease from our exploring in our search for the radical freedom of  God’s kingdom.

In the Gospel reading we heard that Mary set out “proceeding in haste.”  It was the same drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling, I believe that sent Mary “proceeding in haste”. 

Today we are celebrating the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling of not just the four of us celebrating our 50 or 60 years but of all of us gathered here.  Maxine, Edna, Monique and I are just a good excuse to get us all together so we can celebrate and give thanks for the gift of all of our lives.

For the four of us I can safely say we have spent most of those 50 or 60 years like Mary “proceeding in haste” with the constant “drawing of this Love and voice of this Calling.”  And like Mary believing that the promise made to us by our God will be fulfilled. 

  And you may ask why?  

Well, we were all very young Sisters when Vatican II was convened.  Sometime prior to that, before I paid any attention to what Popes had to say, Pope Pius XII, I believe said that “sisters could be a powerful force for the healing of the world if they shed the accretions that had left them an anomaly in current times”. Catholic Sisters in Transition,  Lora Ann Quinonez, CDP and Mary Daniel Turner, SNDdeN.   

 Sisters took that advice to heart and later responded to the call by Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes which states clearly that the Church is for the world, that its mission is to be in the world and that “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the “men”(and I would add women) of this age, especially those who are poor or in anyway afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”

 Vatican II invited Sisters to reclaim the original intent of our founders.  Vatican II reminded us that many of our Orders we were founded as a corrective criticism to both the Church and society.  Vatican II urged us to reclaim our prophetic edge for the sake of those who were poor or disenfranchised.

As a result then, even though we are 4 distinct Congregations with our own distinct charism, our Constitutions, all re-written since Vatican II, which you heard read at the beginning of Mass are very similar.  In our response to Vatican II, we Sisters found ourselves over the years in most unexpected places of ministry, whether in New York, or Puerto Rico or Pennsylvania or Alabama or eventually for all of us in lovely North Carolina we each of us saw that our future was never for our own sake or for any legacy we might leave but for all our brothers and sisters on this fragile planet.  And that our lives are somehow a witness to God’s presence in a society alienated from God’s kingdom.

And while we may go about carrying out our ministry in different ways we always saw it as our privileged call to be uncompromising and unrelenting in our efforts for peace and justice and bringing hope to a broken world because we know that God’s promise to Jeremiah:  “a prophet to the nations I appointed you….see I place my words in your mouth” was not just to Jeremiah but to each of us individually.

As Catholic Sisters who have had the privilege of serving over the past 50 or 60 years we have tried to live the dream of passion for the Gospel that impels us to live the vision courageously.  We have been emboldened, with the support and encouragement of our Sisters to put our lives on the line, to speak truth to power and as our opening hymn says: “dare to dream the vision promised and shape the circle ever wider, and a people ever free.”

Usually when a person celebrates some milestone in their lives they are asked what if anything they have learned over the years:  I would like to share a few of our learnings from the four of us and a couple of my own.

We learned: that our actions without prayer can be shallow, that the contemplative journey is necessary if we are going to be able to engage in the great issues of our time (discrimination of all kinds, racism, war and peace, devastation of the planet, unjust immigration laws, exploitation of immigrants, violence of all kinds, just to name a few that challenge us today). 

I learned: from some wonderful people in West Tennessee with whom I did community organizing, that God is more about serving than being served, is more compassionate than we can ever imagine accepting those who are looked down upon and those considered “different” from ourselves, that as Mary proclaims “God is about scattering the proud hearted and exalting the lowly”.

We learned:  that when we have to face situations of power and conflict that could be daunting that as Etty Hillesum facing a Nazi concentration camp reminds us, our moral

duty is to reclaim areas of peace in ourselves so that we can reflect it towards others.

And that the more peace there is in ourselves, the more peace there will be in those around us.

J.G. Garland: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43.

We learned from our Dominican brother, Albert Nolan that if we are truly faithful to the call to follow Jesus of the need to detach ourselves from our possessions, our reputation, and even from things good in themselves, not necessarily giving up everything, but being willing to give up anything when called to do so.  This is the voice of this Calling to true inner freedom that we strive for in order to bring about God’s kingdom.  

I learned: from my wonderful colleagues at the NC Justice Center and from my friends at Catholic Charities as well as all the Sisters I have known over the years that working for the rights and dignity of all people can only succeed when those who are excluded are part of the process, that such a process helps us to overcome the boundaries of our prejudices and fears, and requires a great deal of humility, a deep faith and much love. That we don’t act for rewards or for gratitude, that we are indeed called to be the very best we can be in our areas of expertise, to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to overcome, prejudices, discrimination and all types of injustice that oppress our sisters and brothers throughout the world.  And most of all that we recognize that these efforts are at the center of God’s kingdom of justice.

I learned: from friends with whom I share faith in a discussion group that if we think we know God, what we know is certainly not God, who is beyond what we can grasp or imagine, that this God, who is Mystery, causes us to move out of our place of comfort and into a space that is uncharted and unknown.  And that if we are true to the voice of this Calling we must continually decide whether we will stay in our safe place of comfort or “proceed in haste” on the journey of exploration.

I learned:  over the years first of all from my Mother and Father who instilled in us the need to respect all people by quoting to us from an old Irish rune which says:  “Often, often, often goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.”  And later I learned from the experiences of very simple people who have been able to recognize and trust God’s presence in the simplicity of their own lives that the Holy One says not only to Jeremiah but to each of us, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” And that all of life is a process of self-transcendence, cooperating with the Holy Spirit so that we can say our “yes” to the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling over and over.

And to return now to TS Eliot:

“What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from…. With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling, we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” 

   My prayer for all of us, no matter how young or how old is that we never cease our exploring … so we will “arrive where we started” and know the radical freedom of God’s kingdom which is truly our home.  

I would like to acknowledge some of the authors whose contemplative writings helped shape my reflections: Thomas Berry, Marcus Borg, Judy Cannato, Elizabeth Johnson, Thomas Merton,  Albert Nolan, Diarmuid O’Murchu,  Brian Pierce,  Elaine Prevallet, Ronald Rolheiser, Joyce Rupp, Evelyn Underhill.

-- Sister Attracta Kelly, O.P.