News

Change of Stability

26 January 2010

On the 26th January 2010, Sr Stephen Thattil was welcomed as a full member of the community as she changed her vow of stability to Glencairn from Makkiyad in India where she entered Cistercian life in 1990.  Sister Stephen came to Glencairn in 2006 and she is the first Indian sister to become a fully professed member of St Mary’s Abbey, Glencairn.

The following is an extract from Mother Marie’s Chapter talk for the occasion on the feast of the Holy Founders of the Cistercian Order;

My dear Sister Stephen, it is with great joy that we welcome you as a full member of our community here in Glencairn.  You have been a kind of gyrovague for a few years now, and it is great to see you putting down roots and committing yourself to a new monastic community.  Our holy founders, Robert, Alberic and Stephen did something likewise in 1098.  They uprooted, discerned God’s call and gift, and then settled in a new environment.  They wanted to live a peaceful life according to the Rule of St Benedict; and that desire to be free of tension and misunderstanding, to be free to live the purity of the Rule motivated them to go to the Papal Legate, Hugh, and get the necessary permissions to move from Molesme to Citeaux.  They changed their stability, took great risks, and God blessed the Church with a new Order.

The charism of our Order which continues to attract you is simply following the Gospel teaching through an intimate union with Christ who is the “Bridegroom” of the Church and of your soul.  You wish to emphasise the primacy of God which means that every activity and interest is subordinated to gaining the Lord’s friendship and then reaching out in service to others so that through you others will come to know the Lord’s goodness.  Your hidden life, your secret self-offering, quietly living the observances, your prayer and praise bring great graces to the Church.  “Because of their monastic profession, the monk or nun’s interior life is not merely a private practice of spirituality, although that is highly praiseworthy in itself, but it is a Church mission and service which they fulfill for the good of all the members of the people of God and of all humanity.  In them it is the Church herself which meditates, contemplates, prays and offers herself for the salvation of humankind.”  - John Paul II, 1990.  Whether you live in Glencairn or in Makkiyad your mission is universal, it is a church mission and service.

Robert, Alberic and Stephen chose…especially to recover solitude and poverty, and simplicity.  They knew from their own experience that poverty and solitude if lived in faith and love bring us to a purity of heart which prepares us for an experience of God.  It wasn’t just zeal for regularity, for the observances, for the integrity of monastic practices that brought them to Citeaux.  It was what lay behind all that: an ardent personal devotion to the Lord Jesus, a fire kindled within their hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Today as you change your stability I pray that your capacity for excellence and your consent to the call of God will become one, and that your quiet determination to follow Christ will be expressed in a growing ability to love and be loved, to be happy in the Lord.

Return to news list +