Take Time to Pause with the Following Reflections 3

1. What is the Religious Vocation?

It is a sign of God’s love of predilection for a soul.

2. What is there in a Vocation?

There is the voice of God Who calls, and the answer of the individual to that voice: what God puts into it and what God expects from His chosen one.

3. Who makes the first advance? The chosen soul, or Our Lord?

Always Our Lord, though in different ways. Often God casts upon the individual a look of love, and, at a certain moment, God calls with a sweet and cautious voice. You, dear little soul, have perhaps turned a deaf ear to that loving voice which seemed to call you from afar, you knew not whence. In vain you tried to not heed it, to decline the Divine and pressing invitation. A day came when you had to fall on your knees and answer, “Here I am, O Lord: what wilt Thou have me do?” That was your first acquiescence (acceptance).

While the world of today is very different from that of 1915 (when Suzanne Aubert wrote the above quotes), the ‘Call of Christ’ to leave all things and follow Him in Religious Life, still bears within it the stamp of the cross, and must of necessity call forth a great spirit of self-sacrifice. Young people (and those not so young), have been responding to that challenge as Sisters of Compassion for over a century. We believe there are still people with the same faith and courage, who will offer themselves today and tomorrow, and so ensure that the work Suzanne Aubert commenced will grow into a ‘Mighty Tree’, so the suffering people of earth can rest in its shade.

Approbation of Thomas Cardinal Williams, D.D. Cum Permissu.
+T.S.Williams, 24 August 1984.

References

3 Taken from Suzanne Aubert’s ‘Letter to the Novitiate

The “Letter to the Novitiate” was written by Suzanne Aubert, Foundress of the Sisters of Compassion, while she was in Rome in the year 1915, attempting to obtain Papal recognition for the Religious Congregation she had founded in Jerusalem/Hiruharama, on the Wanganui River in the year 1892.

The ideals that this letter point to are still the ideals that Sisters of Compassion are expected to live by.

The complete Letter collection is contained in The Directory, and has been published separately as ‘Lord where do you dwell? Come and see!’ and is available on request from the Vocation Ministry.