 Let
the Spirit be your guide. Galatians 5:13-25
Please bring
the willingness to learn,
to hope,
to trust,
and to live on Godıs promises.
Good will is more essential than ability.
Please do not wait until you are a Saint before you try. Canonisation
is a life-project. If you are willing to be open to the Lord,
his power will work in you.
 The
Lord makes his choice in his time. It makes
no difference whether you are 17 or 70. When he calls; jump!
Do not let well-meaning people put you off. Very likely,
when they fell in love they did not ask your advice. When
the Lord looked lovingly at the rich young man, that look lingered
on his face. Those who have met God's invitation will be able
recognize its reflection in you. Religious life is not a career,
it is an adventure in love.
Please do not bring
six suitcases of anything,
your entire wardrobe,
every letter you have ever received,
a years supply of household goods,
your cell phone,
an absolute resentment of any authority but your own,
a 2 metre statue of Buddha or a 4 metre statue of the Sacred
Heart,
an intolerable prejudice against any other race, nation or culture,
invincible self-regard
or your scuba diving suit.
It is easier to fly travelling light.
You cannot help bringing your past.
If we say we have no sin we are lying. 1 John 1:5-10
The Lord is tenderness and compassion,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Exodus 34:6-9
In order that you should know this, every three years, your community,
after prayer and fasting, chooses one of their number to help them
discern how the Holy Spirit is leading them. This is meant
to help you, too. On the cross, Jesus could not see his Father
- but he could see his Mother.
It does not matter what you might have had to repent of, your community,
who happen to be human, is willing to forgive your past - and your
future. If your community cannot forgive, it is a fundamentally
unsound investment.
Remember:
every Saint has a past and every sinner has a future!
You are my witnesses. Luke 24: 44-49
Be prepared to stand up and be counted.
Ask and it shall be given you; information, direction, discernment,
survival kit, support, encouragement and challenges.
Be prepared to change and change often.
Be prepared be called by a new name.
 Be
prepared to wear things that mark you out conspicuously as God's
property.
You might be content with, or at least accustomed to yourself as
an egg, but if you hatch there will be an uncomfortable era of uglyducklingness
before you make the front line of Swan Lake. Be open to the gift
of loving appreciation.
It is not that we love God, but that he loves us. 1 John 4:10
He wants to give himself to us, pressed down, shaken together and
overflowing. But before that takes place, his seed has to fall into
our ground and die; then it can bear fruit - a hundredfold.
Pray at all times.
Luke 11:1-13, 22:39-46.
Prayer is learning to listen, to respond and to perceive the actions
of the one who loves you.
Come, if you want prayer with your whole heart.
It does not matter if you think you do not know how to start.
It can be taught and it can be learned.
 Looking
and listening is the beginning of prayer, but you wont see anything
if you don't open your eyes, and you wont hear if you don't take
your fingers out of your ears.
Prayer is the highest relationship with God and others. Sharing
a life of prayer is the ultimate gift. It is becoming part
of the instrument of peace in the hand of God.
Prayer can make you the best friend of someone you have never met.
It can make a life spent doing time-consuming and not immediately
successful things, pass like a gracious dream. It can make
even struggling with your own and other peoples sinful humanness
like living in the antechamber of heaven.
It is the biggest thing that happens to anyone.
I have called you friends. John 15:15
You are going to live in a community. You are going to live
in a family of people with whom you have nothing in common but God
and the nose in the centre of your face. Do not try to love
all people as your brothers and sisters; if you had any, your relationship
may well have been atrocious: Love one another, the Lord says,
as I have loved you. John 15:12. In this way you will
heal the sins of a shattered and broken world.
Loving those whom God has selected for you as your religious family
is the first prayer.
In this world people make relationships and destroy them.
They move on, they get another job, another partner, another divorce.
Now, if your relationships break down you will learn how to repair
them instead of running away from them.
You may have heard this before, but, every three years we beg the
Holy Spiritıs enlightenment to elect one amongst us who can help
us to do this. God makes himself visible in the Church.
When the Lord says in the Gospel that Peter - an incompetent, over-excited
and unstable Average - was the Rock on which he built his Church,
he meant what he said.
Jesus promised to build his Church on the person of Peter, not simply
on the faith he professed.
Obedience to the Word of God has a human face.
A community has to be built on truth and justice. To maintain
this, God's will inevitably manifests itself with a human face.
We call ours Mother (and, very, very occasionally, Abbess) she is
necessary to our fidelity to the Gospel.
Saint Peter was a liar, a fool and a coward; yet after he experienced
the death and resurrection of Christ the Son of the Living God they
put sick people where even just his shadow might fall on them for
healing.
Self-regulating communities do not work on the stock market - or
anywhere else on this earth. Where there is no objective authority
- obedience, truth, freedom and justice have very little hope to
survive in the life of a community.
Do not lay up treasures on earth.
Matthew 6.16
Sell what you have and give it to the poor.
Mark 10:17-19
Take nothing for your journey.
Eat what is set before you and
proclaim the Good News. Luke 10:5-9
You are the salt of the earth:
salt prevents good things from rotting,
it makes bland things taste interesting,
bleaches out stains,
dissolves easily,
imparts buoyancy,
appropriately applied, it filters smoke out of the atmosphere
- and you can be all these things!
 You
will not make heaven on less than the ten commandments.
This life is not for minimalists who just want to do enough
to be saved; it is for lovers who want to do as much as they
possibly can.
You made need a whole new set of manners and you will at least
need what you've got tuned to a new frequency. Nicely
veiled malice and covert vindictiveness are unacceptable.
Ridicule, contempt and all the other little techniques for cutting
your neighbour down to size are out. You have to want
to weave your life on forgiveness; your friends need it and
you absolutely demand it. This is not optional.
 No
community will let you get away with part-time religious life.
Live for others. Go out and meet trouble half way.
Go the extra mile.
Calculated revenge is the most destructive of all reactions.
Leave it outside the door.
Seek the kingdom first, and every thing you need and hope for
will be given to you.
Build your life on the rock of God's Word; read him, pray
him, sing him, stand on him, eat him, adore him, wrap your heart
around him and nothing will knock you down.
 This
is what poverty, obedience and chastity work out as. If
this sounds like the Sermon on the Mount - it is. Read
Matthew 5:1-7:29 and look up the other references in this handbook,
too.
The Lord is with you. Luke 1:28-35
Religious life, married life and the single secular state
are vocations. Shoemaking, bookmaking, matchmaking, teaching
and professional boxing are jobs.
The things required to make a good wife, single person and nun
are exactly the same. Choosing to act justly, love tenderly
and walk humbly is just as necessary in religious life as in
married and single life.
 The
same qualities of generosity, courtesy, chaste-mindedness, self-forgetfulness
and creative energy come off equally well in all three, just
as selfishness, greed, manipulation and arrogance are equally
trying.
There are no special extras that nuns need and mums don't.
What mums and nuns both need is a specific directive from God.
A vocation. A call. An invitation to that line of action
with which he wishes to privilege them. The choice is
his. Many are called but few are chosen.
This does not mean that the Lord hauls in the old fishing net
and, after inspecting the catch, arbitrarily throws the majority
back into the sea.
He gives his vocation to the many, just as he gives his Body
and Blood for the many. All but the incorrigibly bone-hearted
get called - of those called a few get chosen for something
else. The called are no worse off than the chosen.
The many are called to the Good News. The chosen are selected
from them for the purpose the Lord has in mind. Potential
nuns frequently look and sound like everyone else. But
they have been endowed - a fact possibly hidden even from themselves
- with a heart big enough to take on God's plan for them.
 The
door is open.
By reading this book you have conceded that God has something
to say to you.
The next step is walking on water.
When the two disciples asked our Lord where he lived he said:
Come and see. John 1:35-43.
Practically speaking -
you have to be free to act,
and you must be doing so from good motives.
This is your bit.
The third step does not depend on you: it is finding a
community that will discern the Lord's call and his choice in
your life and is willing to accept you and give you a try.
Some footnotes
On getting nipped in the bud
You may find Priests, Religious and even Bishops
who will advise you that religious life, or the style of it
to which you feel called, is a waste of time. Respect such people
and thank them, but do not take their advice.
For scared survivors
You may have tried religious life and it has not worked.
Look first at yourself and the human social and personal luggage
you took with you. Discern what you have learned from
the experience. You can make resounding failure a state-of-the-art
learning tool.
And, you may have hit a pitfall. Matthew 23:27-28.
Pitfall communities generally come in two sorts.
1. Geese painted white
Earnest, sincere, loving, liberal people who
work enthusiastically and often with great generosity at something
that, when really analysed, is not he fullness of the truth,
the Gospel or the teaching of the Church. You should never
stop loving such people or praying for them. Those who
sincerely seek always find. But you may not be able to
stay with them on their journey.
2. Whitewashed groundhogs
Ostensibly all is calm, bright and orthodox.
But it is a self-sustaining orthodoxy built on broken bones
and not on the rock of freedom that is the Good News.
Groundhog communities split into little groups and talk spitefully
behind each others backs. Lip service is paid to authority,
but it is not respected. There are dozens of rules, but
they are for some one else to keep. You may imagine you
could re-form them. You are likely to be wrong, reform
has to come from within. Get out before you go under.
Experiences like these are devastating - but not as devastating
as discovering the truth about yourself; use it to grow closer
to God.
So, whom do you seek
A community worth a try should have For Sinners Only
written (albeit invisibly) over the door. Every one in
it is a potential goose and a potential groundhog. But
they are struggling to work towards truth, freedom and obedience
(yes, they have elections every three years...) Forgiveness
and loving support have a high priority, even when they are
honoured only by repentant failure.
A good community is a community that makes mistakes and can
admit them.
True religious life is directed to an encounter with the Lord.
On this earth we meet him in his Word, in his sacraments and
where two or three are gathered together. Whatever its charism,
a good community will have a good balance of these channels
- because Jesus is there.
Because Jesus is here
Lesser priorities are understood and interpreted differently
by different religious families, in the light of the graces
they receive - especially through their founders (and they may
have elections at longer intervals...) Look for the presence
of the Lord and listen to the guidance of his Holy Spirit.
This book was written by sisters of an enclosed religious community
and it naturally reflects the priorities of their own life which
is, above all, a life of repentance and conversion.
Ty
Mam Duw means, House of the Mother of God. It is an enclosed
community of Franciscan women from different cultures and backgrounds
who try to follow the Gospel in the Poor Clare Colettine way
of Life.
My God and my All - words of Francis to the Lord.
I will always protect you - words of the Lord in the Blessed
Sacrament to Clare.
Set your mind on living well and dying holily - words of Colette
to us.
You are welcome to visit us in person at:
Ty Mam Duw
Poor Clare Colettine Community
Upper Aston Hall Lane
Hawarden, North Wales
CH5 3EN
Phone 01244 531029
Top
Some
Comments on this book by amused friends!
I wish I'd read this book before. A.B. mother of 9.
I got the brochures of all the convents I though might suit
me in all my dimensions, and then I visited them all rating
them 1-10 on my points scheme. After reading this book
I can, now, dimly, begin to see why my approach didn't work!
C.D. ex-postulant.
Until I read this book I though I was too old to try.
E.F. Granny.
Until I read this book I though I was too old to try.
Now I know I'm just too hard-hearted!
G.H. Pedigree Groundhog Breeder.
It makes me very happy to know that there are at least some
places that might consider people who have been married and
divorced. I.K Divorced Marriage Counsellor
This book seems to me to be politically incorrect on numerous
issues.
J.K. a man.
Despair can be very near if you have messed with sex and
drugs and done just about everything you can to run away from
God. Reading this book has given me the courage at least
to ask if there is anyone out there who would let me try to
be a nun. L.M. Magdalen
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