Sally Stephens, Margaret Munch, Nancy Kehoe, Mary Pat Ryan, Fran Tobin and Tita Lapeyre
June 13, 2009

A Jubilee of Profession, like a wedding anniversary, is a time of great rejoicing. A fiftieth jubilee is a time of amazement as well – so many years, so much love, so much faithfulness, such a collection of memories when you look back…and you’ve each lived to tell the tale—as you have been doing with each other for these last several days. Of course, all of us surrounding you join in marking this jubilee with great joy.

Yet as I thought about offering a reflection I was reminded of a very sobering experience I had many years ago in Chicago. It was the day of another RSCJ jubilee celebration, a 25th jubilee of one of our sisters and she had asked a good friend to give the homily. I don’t remember the readings at all, nor do I have clear memories of the homily though I believe that it was a celebration of all the good things in his woman’s life, her ministries, her accomplishments, the satisfactions of twenty-five years. It was all very upbeat.

There were two people in the pew behind me who had attended another liturgy earlier in the morning, a wedding which had taken place after much anguish in both families. The pending union had been a source of deep suffering and misunderstanding for parents and friends alike but it had ultimately become possible because the couple and the families had worked through the suffering and had come to a point of acceptance and even of hope. The liturgy named that journey from darkness to light, and the continuing challenges that would be present as the couple moved forward.

And this is what I overheard from the couple behind me who were comparing the two liturgies: “where was the paschal mystery at the RSCJ celebration?” The wedding homily had reflected on the conflict and the coming to peace of two families. But the reflection on 25 years as an RSCJ seemed to them all too easy, and maybe even a little trivial. Where was the acknowledgement of the many ways that suffering has shaped our lives? Where was the presence of Christ, risen and victorious after setting his face to Jerusalem and going down to death, a death so that we might rise to newness of life? Only joy hung in the air, but it appeared to them without substance because there didn’t seem to be any of the paschal mystery—the dying and rising—which marked the life of Christ and forges each one of us into Christ’s image.

Madeleine Sophie Barat would have been in complete agreement. She wrote once: To love is to suffer. But not to love is to die.

To love is to suffer…And you have loved. And your lives for all these years have been a combination of joy and pain as is true in any life, deeply lived...

You entered a religious community you cherished only to see it undergo radical change, at least in nearly every external particular of habits, cloister and silence, of an order of day and assigned ministries, of comforting structures and hours of prayer and a certain clarity about what God wanted.

You hung on for dear life as waves of renewal swept the Church and the Society of the Sacred Heart, perhaps some of you with enormous energy and enthusiasm and others with a greater reluctance about the wisdom of abandoning familiar ways for new, untested paths. In the process you died to the way of life you thought you had chosen—even vowed—until death. And mistakes were made along the way and confusion sometimes reigned…and pity the poor superior trying to exercise leadership in now foreign territory…and some of you had to exercise leadership of one kind or another in these turbulent times.

And in the midst of your fruitful and varied ministries and the amazing range of professional competencies among you, exercised over fifty years, you have known other sufferings as well…the sufferings of loss, of change, of transition, of diminishment; the sufferings that happen in every life: the disappointments, the misunderstandings, the sacrifices, the failures (at least in your own eyes).

You have probably known, too, the deep darkness of prayer when that which had once fed your soul now felt so empty, when God seemed absent, when you were filled with fear or doubt or near despair.

You have known first hand the paschal mystery of Jesus. You have experienced fifty plus years of dying and rising.

Surely you have had some intuition about the way joy and suffering have forged you in about equal measure. After all, you chose the Gospel reading of the vine and the branches…and what else is the pruning than a kind of death for the sake of life?

The vine and the branches is the perfect image of the holy life, the years it takes to tend a vine so that it continues to be fruitful, the pruning of dead branches, the pruning of even vibrant stems so that other possibilities, still dormant, may blossom. And it is all so mysterious…this life joined to Christ, this life to which you were invited so many years ago, this deep rooting, knowing to whom you belong, to whom you cling as branch to vine.

So we can rejoice this day with you. You have loved and you have suffered. Your lives are a great witness to all of us. You have grasped the breadth and length, the height and depth, of Christ’s love. You have experienced this love which surpasses all knowledge. We can exclaim with great conviction the words that Jesus used in the Gospel: the Father has been glorified in you, in your bearing much fruit, in your becoming his faithful disciples.

Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ