Sr Ashwini's First Profession

Thank you for such a beautiful, heartfelt petition.  Your words remind me of something Edith Stein once wrote about the religious life as the answer to our deepest yearnings to love and be loved:
 
“The motive, principle and the end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one’s own life in order to make room for God’s life.  The more perfectly this is realized, the more richly will God’s life fill the soul.  Then, God’s love is an overflowing love which wants nothing for itself but bestows itself freely; mercifully, it bends down to everyone who is in need, healing the sick and awakening the dead to life, protecting, cherishing, nourishing, teaching and forming; it is a love which sorrows with the sorrowful and rejoices with the joyful; it serves each human being to attain the end destined for it by the Father.  In one word, it is the love of the divine Heart.
The deepest longing of woman’s heart is to give herself lovingly, to belong to another, and to possess this other being completely.  This longing is revealed in her outlook, personal and all-embracing.  But this surrender becomes a perverted self-abandon and a form of slavery when it is given to another person and not to God; at the same time, it is an unjustified demand which no human being can fulfill.  Only God can welcome a person’s total surrender in such a way that one does not lose one’s soul in the process but wins it.  And only God can bestow himself upon a person so that he fulfills this being completely and loses nothing of himself in so doing.  This is why total surrender which is the principle of the religious life is simultaneously the only adequate fulfillment for woman’s yearning.”
Edith Stein, On Woman
 
So great a desire calls out for expression, and you have asked to express your desire by making monastic vows.  The concept of a vow runs deep in the human heart.  When a man and a woman love one another with life-changing intensity, such a love cannot simply remain on the level of feeling; it calls out for a formal recognition, a permanent and public commitment, a lifelong binding together in one flesh.  You have been blessed to witness such a faithful union in your parents.  From an early age, however, you began to sense that Jesus was calling you to another kind of union and a different form of vow.  The vows you make today express a formal recognition, a public commitment and a binding together of your life with Christ’s.  You are committing yourself to walk as Jesus walked: in poverty – trusting his Father in all his needs, in chastity – loving the Father with every facet of his being, in obedience – doing the Father’s will in all things, in stability – remaining true to the people given to him by the Father, and in fidelity – faithful to the way of transformation laid out for him by his Father.
 
Remember that the vows you make today are expressions of a deep desire that calls out to be made concrete and lived out in daily life.  As you embrace a life of poverty, you give yourself to trust in God’s providence, but also to the dynamic of giving and receiving in the interdependence of community life.  Your commitment to celibate chastity will expand your heart to a greater capacity for love of God, but you will also be stretched to love other people more purely, honestly and unselfishly.  As you pledge your obedience to the Father’s will in all things, expect to be asked, directed and led by those around you to greater self-gift.  As you set up the altar you place your whole life into the hands of God, but also into the hands of your community.  As you set out on the way of monastic conversion, realize that we travel together on this road, the weak and the strong working together on our slow progress toward the kingdom.
 
Does this sound scary?  Sure it does!  But isn’t this just what Jesus did?  He let himself fall into the hands of men.  Isn’t this just what Jesus does every day?  He puts himself into our hands, literally.  Today you hold your life in your hands, to be given away, and in so doing you will find happiness.
 
Jesus called Ashwini as an eleven-year-old altar server at the Passo service which introduced you to the mystery of sacrificial love.  He called you by your beautiful, meaningful baptismal name: ‘the first star in the sky’, and I have no doubt he gazes upon you today as the first star in his sky.  Because this calling of your own name is so precious to you, you have asked to embrace this name once again as you profess your simple vows.  So, from now on you will be called Sr Maria Ashwini (with the name Maria kept in silence as most of us do).
 
Sister Ashwini, I now invite you to profess your simple vows.