Being a Franciscan Sister of the Sorrowful Mother: What does it mean?

        

What does religious life mean to me?  Sister Jeanine Retzer, a Sister of the Sorrowful Mother writes:

“I have been deeply affected by my Franciscan roots. I love being part of something larger than myself--the spiritual teachers and example of both St. Francis and Clare and of our foundress Mother Frances Streitel. Over the years I have studied and grown in my practice and appreciation of our congregation’s Franciscan heritage. The last several years I am daily reminded of the Franciscan virtues as prayed in the Franciscan Morning and Evening Praise: conversion of heart, poverty, contemplation, and minority or humility. Through the Franciscan Federation I am in touch with Franciscans throughout the U.SA. and Caribbean, as part of my efforts to bring what I believe into action. My Franciscan roots have greatly enriched my life and daily living.”

Religious LIfe: Keeping Alive the Value of Transcendence

VITA CONSECRATA: RELIGIOUS LIFE

REFLECTION III

 

Religious Life: A life focused on the Transcendent while fully engaged in working to help others discover their blessedness, deepen their commitment to live as Jesus lived, cope with life’s difficulties in constructive ways, develop their intellects and realize their God-given potential; live compassionately, affectionately, lovingly and unselfishly. Religious life is a way of life that keeps “the value of transcendence” alive in cultures that strive to hide any semblance of the Transcendent One. Religious life is a God-centered life while society fosters secular lifestyle that threatens “the value of transcendence” with “extinction.”  The spiritual or transcendent dimension of life is, for many engulfed in secularism, repressed. Men and women religious, on the other hand, nurture the spiritual or transcendent nature of their beings and of life itself. Through a contemplative presence in the world, bringing God into their work, bringing work to God  and by setting time aside each day to contemplate God, they know the joy and the peace that flows from living life at the deepest level of existence, namely, the level of Spirit. Their work flows, not from the ego, “an agent of the unconscious, that is motivated out of fears and compulsions”, but from a heart filled with love for God and others, a heart that thirsts for the coming of the Kingdom here on earth.  (Source: Adapted from Brother John D. Hamilton’s article in Horizon, Vol. 39, Number 1,  Winter 2014, “The built-in tensions in apostolic vocations, p. 6)