God is Enough for Us
Sister Deborah Cerullo, provincial councilor
Looking back on my first year in provincial leadership, I am reminded of the reflection I wrote at the end of my novitiate when asked the question, “What do the vows mean to me?” I had studied the sections in You Are Sent that spoke of our vowed commitment and was poised to go out into the world to actually live them. What little I knew, but how great was my idealism and commitment!
Twenty-eight years later, I once again faced the prospect of stepping out into the unknown in faith, trusting in God’s love and support. One early journal entry even had Jesus’ promise that He would be with me all along the way.
True to that promise, the overarching experience of my first year in leadership has been the closeness and constancy of Jesus Christ, reminding me every day of Divine Love’s presence and support through all the newness and challenge of ending my former ministry and home life, moving to a new city to live with new people, and doing new work, often with little experience or sufficient knowledge. God’s love has sustained me through it all.
So what does this have to do with the vows and “what the vows mean to me”? In “Selling All,” Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, tells us that the vows are first and foremost poetic language: “they are world-creating metaphors. They intend, by their literally impossible extravagance…to capture the totality of the commitment being expressed.”
She goes on to say, “Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect. It uses extreme language to evoke what is beyond expression. The person who makes religious vows is saying, ‘I commit my whole self, everything and forever to the underlying love that has claimed me for the transformation of the world.”
By vowing to live poverty, chastity, and obedience in our contemporary era, where money, sex and power are promoted as the ultimate means to happiness, each of us individually and together give witness to the truth that God alone is enough and that God’s sustaining love is at the heart of life. Just as marriage vows give witness to God’s faithful and generative love, religious vows give witness to the sufficiency of God. Of course, for both marriage and religious vows, the virtues which they contain are sometimes very difficult to live.
Just as there are times when we experience estrangement or self-absorption in our lives rather than faithfulness and generativity, so there are times when we do not experience the sufficiency of God. Sometimes God does not seem to be enough for us, and we are tempted to fill the void in any way that works. And that is the time we are most called to live out the paschal mystery and trust that all shall be well.
When we can trust God’s saving love in our struggles, then our desires concerning this thing or this person or control in this area of our life, need not overwhelm us. When we can say that our fundamental security lies not in wealth, or another person, or power and control, but rather in God, we proclaim to the world the ideal that we will only experience in its fullness when we are with God forever in eternity, that God is enough.
When we aspire to give God everything through the extravagance of our whole self-commitment, everything and forever to the love that has claimed us for the transformation of the world and we recommit each time we fall short, we ground our lives in the eternal sufficiency of God. God indeed is enough for us, and through our vows, we proclaim that truth with our lives for ourselves and for our world.
