Consecrated Life Today: A Journey into Hope

By Sister Brenda Dolphin RSM
at the Dublin Diocesan Celebration of Consecrated Life

St Patrick’s DCU Campus, Dublin
Saturday, March 29, 2025

“Look to the past with gratitude; look to the future with confidence; live the present with passion/ enthusiasm)” (Pope Saint John Paul II in Nuovo Millennio Innuente).

These words, comforting, encouraging, challenging are especially fitting as we spend time together to reflect very briefly on the gift of Consecrated Life which is a journey into HOPE

As consecrated persons,

Chosen and called by God’s unfathomable Love

(as so beautifully expressed in our opening invitation)

we are invited and challenged to be

LIGHT (See note below)

• Light for the world in which we live
• which means we are entrusted and missioned to give witness to God’s Love with which we are blessed each moment of each day

In 2 Cor 4:6 we read: “For God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts, to give light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”

It has been the tradition of the Church to connect this radiance/this light with the spiritual journey, with the search for the face of God.

Our life of consecration gives expression to this journey/search in a special way as “philokalia” as the deepening love of the Divine Beauty, a beauty that shines from the face of Jesus Christ.

And again, in Psalm 27: “It is your face O Lord that I seek”

This is at the core of our life of consecration our continuous search for and falling more and more deeply in love with the person of Jesus who is God’s consecrated, God’s beloved from whose face shines the beauty and the glory of God.

• “It is YOU Jesus whom I know with every fibre of my being”,
• “it is YOU Jesus whom I trust with every breath that I breathe”
• “It is YOU Jesus to whom I give witness by my life”

PROPHECY,

(what does this mean for us in our day-to-day lives?)

As consecrated persons we are called to PROPHECY; we are invited and challenged to be prophets for our time.

• When we speak of prophets in the context of our consecrated lives
• we highlight that form of prophecy which recognises the presence of God, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit.

We see this in the Gospel Story chosen for the Feast of the Presentation, Lk 2:22-38

• In the way that Simeon and Anna recognise the presence of the Child and his parents from among the crowd of people milling around the Temple portico.
• In the way that by the power of the Holy Spirit they foresee Jesus ‘destiny of death and Resurrection for the salvation of all peoples and they proclaim this mystery as salvation for the whole world.

So, we learn that true prophecy is born of God. The capacity to recognise God in life’s situations comes from friendship with Jesus, from attentive listening to Jesus the Word of God in the different circumstances of life.

The power of Lectio Divina can never be underestimated.

[All Christians and especially consecrated people are called to listen closely to the Word, because all wisdom concerning life comes from the word of the Lord! In other words, through Lectio Divina, we seek a personal encounter with Jesus the Word of God. Consecrated life “is born from hearing the word of God and embracing the Gospel as its way of life”.]

Let us spend a moment with Anna

Anna was a recognised prophet in her time. A prophet is someone as we noted above  who has the courage and strength that comes from God to be the mouthpiece of God. She demonstrates this courage. She had much experience of life. At eighty-four years she had not lost her longing for the One who was to come, she had not lost Hope. She had not settled for something less than the vision of the Messiah.  She was someone who not only had experience of life; she also seems to have consistently been able to learn and grow from her experience.

She knew joy and she knew loss; she must have wondered at times like the Magi if it was worthwhile to keep on hoping. Above all, she knew how to WAIT; to allow time to take its course; to allow God’s time to emerge when the fullness of His time had come. She had learned to put God at centre stage and to remain open, an empty vessel that awaited God’s intervention.

She lived in God’s presence within his Temple praying and fasting. She was wise, in that she was able to discern God’s moment when it  finally came. She recognized God’s coming. She was ready. Life did not pass her by. Once confirmed in her faith she spoke about the Child, (Jesus, God), to all who were seeking redemption, who were seeking conversion.

Anna is a wonderful icon of HOPE for all of us both women and men especially as we grapple with the joys and the challenges of advancing age in our journey into God, and who struggle at times to keep on HOPING.

On this journey into HOPE, we find ourselves very often in darkness, uncertainty, doubt but with an unshakeable belief and trust in a God who is always faithful to his promises even though he often surprises us in the way He fulfils them.

Like Simeon, like Anna it is Hope that sustains us.

So, what do we understand as HOPE in our everyday lives?

Václav Havel (a Czech poet) has said:

“Hope is an Orientation of the Heart and the Spirit.

It is NOT believing that things will turn out well

But the certainty that things will MAKE SENSE no matter how they turn out”.

We learn from Heb. 6:19: “we have this HOPE a sure and certain anchor for our soul”.

This sure and certain anchor for our soul is something we desperately need in our chaotic world of today!

Pope Francis in a homily at his morning mass in  in Casa Santa Marta (October 2013) asked this question of the people attending.

“Where is your heart anchored”?  adding that HOPE is a risky virtue.

He went on to say that: “HOPE is not optimism which can be very unrealistic but that

“The God given gift of HOPE (the virtue of HOPE) relates the person to their final end”.

So – how do you experience HOPE in your day-to-day life?

From your experience of life how has the virtue of HOPE formed and reformed you?

HOPE in our lives is a many faceted diamond

I will mention just two

1. HOPE anchored in Jesus builds trustfulness and serenity

HOPE arises when we are not sure. It opens us up to God and teaches us to wait patiently, calmly and expectantly for God to come to us in God’s own time.  Like Anna. It also teaches us to be receptive and to rely on God and on God’s promise to us.

HOPE in God makes us trustful, peaceful and at home in ourselves. It is the best antidote to anxiety there is!

1. HOPE and ageing

How strong is our hope especially in those of us who are chronologically challenged?

HOPE can make us youthful

When life grows short then natural hope can grow weary – what “will be” morphs into what “has been”. We are tempted to lose ourselves in the past.

Theological HOPE, however, gives us the capacity to wait “for the not yet” that is immeasurably more distant from us, the more closely we approach it. Supernatural HOPE gives the person such a long future that the past seems short, no matter how long or how rich the person’s past life may have been.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “As we age Beauty steals inward”

and so, our horizon expands to embrace eternity!

We leave the last word to Pope Francis.

“What gives us peace in dark and difficult times is HOPE. HOPE is a constant miracle, reflecting what Jesus is doing in his Church. He is constantly making things new in the life of the Church, in your life, in my life, in the whole of Creation”.

We believe this to be true, we are certain it is true and so

To this we wholeheartedly say

AMEN

 

Note: Candlemas Day (Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple) the day that Jesus is proclaimed the Light of the World. This is the day chosen by the Church to celebrate Consecrated Life each year and on this day we renew our commitment to be witnesses to Jesus the Light of the world