Chastity Poverty and Obedience by Mother Mary Francis

Author:Mother Mary Francis [Francis, Mother Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586171193
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

VI . . . And Possessing All Things

In the very real poverty of the beginning years of our Roswell foundation, we were blessed with the gift (immense to us) of an open-reel tape recorder. As we would occasionally listen to tape recordings, we reflected on our advantage over those who had only depersonalized tape recorders. Ours was highly personalized, by which is meant that unless a living person turned the reels, they would not revolve with any predictable dependability. The ancient recorder, today a relic in the convenience-oriented world of recording technology, served the community with laudable devotedness. It brought us the voices of our sisters in other monasteries at home and abroad, ushered the outstanding theologians of our age into our cloister, gave us bonus retreats, and played in our refectory return engagements of Blackfriars’ production of our plays. The day finally came, however, when we had to admit that its old mechanical heart simply wasn’t what it used to be.

After a dozen valiant turns, it would shudder from the effort and stop to rest. And the machine’s frequent salubrious pauses tended to produce such very odd auditory effects that we found it necessary to call in an engineer. That is, one of the nuns, perched on a high stool next to the tape recorder in the middle of the refectory during our evening repast, would insert her right index finger into the left reel’s chest cavity and stimulate the heart action. These constant manual revolutions would rouse Seraphim (the name given to our tape recorder in salvation history) to new efforts. Each evening at the beginning of collation, I would announce the names of the sisters who were to take ten-minute turns at this engineering feat, and thoughts inevitably arose in my heart as I did so. One was satisfaction that no one ever laughed. Even today, it does not seem in any way ludicrous for a Poor Clare tape recorder to function only with sisterly aid. Another was the happy contentment of knowing that the gift of a new tape recorder, should God provide it (and he did indeed do so eventually), would fulfill a real need, and not be a mere convenience to clutter our life. A third was a serene joy that both these things were true.

It seems safe to say that most religious have sincerely sought for a new and realistic witness to the voluntary poverty that Perfectae Caritatis says in number 13 is “highly esteemed especially today as an expression of the following of Christ.” Anyone who has had the opportunity to speak personally to many young religious in this generation will have discovered the holy unrest among them as they reach out for sincere and timely expressions of poverty. Sometimes they sound critical. They question. They summon the community before the tribunal of their desperate need to find us genuine. Actually, they are not usually critical so much as simply seeking to be part of the constructiveness and the resurgence that are churning within the very heart of Holy Church herself in these wonderfully challenging times.

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