THE GIFT OF COMMUNITY
The vocational director listens:
I want to share my life with people who have a common goal and values. I want to feel at home with the spiritual aspirations of those with whom I live.
The listening sister may or may not try to explain. Yes, we share a common goal and aspirations. Yes, the Cistercian monastery is what our founders called “A School of Charity.” But monastic community is more like a jigsaw puzzle than a wall painted all one color.
People don’t have to be extraordinary to differ from one another. They need only to be human.
We have come to seek God. In that shared belief and longing we are deeply bonded. But we are not clones of one another. God has picked our sisters for us. Each is an instrument of the Spirit, the Spirit who is drawing each individually and all as a community into the baffling mystery of God.
To be a tool of the Spirit means to become a rich and developed individual, but also to contribute one’s individual personality and experience to the making of something greater than any one's self--a forming community. Those who create a forming community draw one another along new and uncontrollable roads of virtue.
Our sisters are agents of support, but also of the demand for personal change. They are places of reassurance but also of confrontation with our essential aloneness. Community is the matrix in which the Benedictine person is brought to birth.
The Rule touches just about every possibility in community life, as it asks us to bear one another’s burdens, to serve and to reverence one another, to immerse our common life in the love of Jesus Christ, that he may bring us all together to everlasting life.
