May the history of the Lord's great marvels continue

"When the gift of religious consecration is accepted and takes root in hearts you have chosen and set aside-like the "three" you took up to Mount Tabor, O Jesus-this gift becomes a hymn of praise and thanksgiving, an ardent supplication "to be with you"! This is because you are our only Love and our only Lord, you who are-both the only Son of the Father, in whom he was well pleased, and "the fairest among the sons of men".

With these sentiments we open ourselves to the grace offered us on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the foundation of our Teresian Carmelite community**. Accepting this grace is a way of "being with him"; indeed, if we are to live this gift, this "being" is indispensable. The reason is simple, for it means entering, to the extent granted to us, into a "sacred" history, whose principal agent is the Lord himself.

This history of salvation passes through humble, frail creatures marked with his seal; a history that unfolds in the human flow of the most varied and complex events, those of a little community belonging to the society of its time and which therefore-as Jesus said- must "render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's"!

Drawn more and more by the "beauty of God and the love of Christ, the Beloved", we would like "not only to recall and recount a glorious history", but -humbly aware that everything comes from God-to entrust ourselves to the Spirit, so that the history of the Lord's great marvels may continue in our poverty."

-- Written by a discalced carmelite nun of the Monastero di San Giuseppe a Roma and published in L'Osservatore Romano on 19 February 1997

** Carmel of St Joseph in Rome