…you find yourself guided by some mysterious providence on an adventure full of unpredictable twists and turns.
Fifty years seems like a long time. By most measures of human reckoning, it is.
Well, 50 years ago this August 15, several of us in Madonna House made our first promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It was a sunny, warm, August day, the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption into heaven. My classmates looked young and beautiful, and those visiting us that day seemed happy for us.
Father Eddie Doherty, 83 years of age, blessed our new crosses immediately after Mass. This was to be the last time he would do this, as he passed away the following May 4.
Yes, on that day we made promises and officially gave our lives to God; on paper, for one year only, but in our hearts, it was forever. Some of us have taken other paths since that beautiful day, but all within the context of giving our lives to God, from whom we had received the gift of life in the first place.
We did not know what the future would hold, and we did not care much anyway. After all, in the Gospels God promised to take care of us if we would seek first the kingdom of heaven and his righteousness. That’s what we were doing, right? So, no worries!
I suppose each one of us could write a testimony that would spell out in more detail the various ways that God has indeed been with us, guided us, protected us, purified us.
I could recount the ensuing years at the farm, followed by seminary and ordination, followed by years as director of training for priest applicants and as editor of Restoration.
Then there was a time spent in England at our house in Robin Hood’s Bay, succeeded, in turn, by a return to Combermere and years of carrying heavier responsibilities, then poustinia, and now yet another phase.
All of us go through different stages of life, of course, something that we all share as human beings. But the paths we take to live out those stages can be very different, one from the other.
Some go through intense suffering of the physical kind. Others suffer more in their emotions, or in the seemingly random events that marked their lives.
Yet, I would have to say quite clearly that suffering, for all its reality in various forms, is not the last word on the consecrated life or any other Christian vocation.
What most marks our life is its relationship to our faith in God. Always, the Lord is leading us, shaping us, forming us to be the disciples he desires.
We can resist that shaping, we can struggle with that formation according to God’s mind, but in the end, if our lives are to be true to those promises of long ago, we surrender to the wisdom that created the universe and also created you and me for a purpose in life.
Today our world is very enamored with teaching people to find their own purpose in life. To create one’s own meaning is encouraged, as long as that meaning and that purpose are not opposed to the ideals that proponents of self-creation are currently in favor of!
Just don’t step out of line while you enjoy your new-found freedom! Don’t include traditional values as part of your vision of life! And above all, don’t turn to prayer and listening to God as your primary means of discovering your purpose in life!
However, if you should find yourself tempted to pray about these things, a whole unseen world will open up to you.
Instead of a false kind of adulthood that purports to create its own meaning, you find yourself being guided by some mysterious providence on an adventure full of unpredictable twists and turns.
Somehow these will draw out the best in you and challenge you not to “make yourself” but to discover your true self. This is the person you somehow always knew you were but could never become on your own.
After I made those first promises in 1974, I went home to Maryland for a holiday. A couple of weeks later I was back in Combermere to continue my assignment to the cheese house.
I had a lot of time alone there making cheese for the community. It turned out that I needed just that combination of intense community living with plenty of time and space to mull things over and to pray.
I myself would never have thought that making cheese in an isolated rural area of eastern Ontario, Canada, combined with living with a group of dedicated men at a farm, would be just the thing I needed to deal with certain areas of immaturity in my life.
The kindness and patience of these people toward me was such a gift, making possible the vulnerability I needed to open up areas of my life that I had ignored up to then.
The healing and the graces I received in those years at the farm have stayed with me throughout my life. Until this day they assure me of God’s providence guiding all things to good in our lives, even intense suffering, of which we all have our share.
It is faith in a Higher Power, trust in God as a loving Father, that opens the doors to true wisdom being offered to us on the road of life. And in Madonna House it was the experience of a loving community of faith that made possible belief in such a God and in such a Father.
So many today have no experience, or very little, of brothers and sisters dedicated to the Lord and filled with the joy and the peace that accompany such dedication.
It is all very down-to-earth, just as that heavenly celebration of 50 years ago was at the same time very down-to-earth. It was the simplicity of everyday folks who had heard a call from God somewhere along the road of life and were trying to respond.
Paradoxically, such heavenly experiences only confirm us more deeply in our true humanity. We are children of God, and that frees us to cast our cares on the Lord, who teaches us, as the poet said, “to care and not to care.”
The dedicated life is hardly carefree, as we have many responsibilities and many burdens to carry, but these are in turn given to the Lord as part of our offering. It is he who makes all things light and joyous.
