Vocations Blog

Chapter talk for Sister Scholastica’s Solemn Profession

04 May 2010

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.  Your love is more delightful than wine, delicate is the fragrance of your perfume, your name is an oil poured out. (Song of Songs 1: 2-4).  St Bernard says that the kiss of the mouth is when we read a word of Scripture and it comes alive for us and touches us in a new way.  Christ is the kiss who alone receives the Father’s kiss, we by contrast are kissed by the kiss, that is, by Christ.  This being kissed by the kiss is the kiss of participation in the life of God. 

From your earliest years, Mary Scholastica, the Lord’s love and will and Word have been for you more delightful than wine, a delicate and constant fragrance in your life, an oil poured out bringing you grace, joy and great service of others.  Your parents, family, neighbours lived a God centred life.  Your Catholic faith was the well spring, the foundation of your family life and prayer was and is very much part of your family enviornment…you have taken great risks, and made courageous moves as you follow your heart’s desire.  Christ Jesus has made you his own and we all can see the primacy of the person of Jesus in your life, and all of your activity as a response of confident love to the love of Jesus.

The vows you make today are the means of bringing you to a life of union with Christ.  Love in return for love.  It is Christ who has loved you first and called you to live as he lived.  To be obedient to the Father, expressed in everyday life as simple obedience in monastic life, conversatio morum as being conformed to Christ through the living of monastic practices; and stability as perseverence in your vocation here…but monastic life is not just for ourselves.  The monastic vocation with its obligations, struggles and sacrifices is to be lived as intercession to bring men and women to the knowledge and love of Christ.

All I want to know is Christ and the power of his ressurection and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death…I am still running the race, trying to capture the prize for which Christ Jesus captured me.

Sister Mary Scholastica, the Suscipae, receive me, O Lord as you promised and I shall live, which you will sing today in the church during the ceremony has a strange request…and do not disapoint me in my hope.  What is that hope or expectation?  It is to have your own experience of Christ.  We can expect this deification, to be kissed with the kiss of God.  So, in your former way of life, your inner struggles, your thoughts of God, your thoughts even of yourself…have been accepted and in exchange you have your own inner experience of that kiss, which is Christ.

My prayer for you today as you make your Solemn Profession is that you find great peace and joy in your monastic life here in Glencairn, that you stay close to Our Lady and the saints, and that you experience the wonder and transforming power of the kiss of God.

Mother Marie Fahy,
Saturday, 1st May, 2010

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