By Sister Genevieve Sachse, OSB

Never shall I forget the experience of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter which my community shared with me when I was a fledgling novice struggling to come to grips not only with my own vocation but with the whole mystery of redemptive love which was being unfolded before me.

The impact of panorama of live and death with which the Holy Week and Easter liturgy confronted me was one which I might never have experienced outside of the contemplative setting of the traditional novitiate.

That experience is with me still and shapes and molds what I see as a very important aspect of the Christian vocation: that of proclaiming to the world that there is so much more to life and death than the here-today-gone-tomorrow-what’s-the-use philosophy that through the ages has haunted men imprisoned in the struggles of everyday existence.

This is what every Christian must do, and yet we as religious are called upon to underline that concept by the very fact of our public profession of vows. Our very way of life proclaims that we believe that there is a meaning to life and death that transcends the obvious.

(We Benedictines even take an additional vow of conversion of life by which we promise to strive continually to make our individual lives better. In so doing, life itself is made more whole and we inch a little closer to the day when ‘death shall be no more.’)

Today, being caught up in the busy activities of the apostolate, the religious experiences of life and death of Christ more strongly perhaps in the problems and concerns of those around her than in the symbolic liturgy of the Church, even though the latter plays an important part in constantly reminding her of the origin of her values.

She contemplates the agony of a mother over her injured child lying still and suffering in a hospital bed and wonders how Mary ever made it through Good Friday.

She spends her energy hour after hour in relating to the needs of those whom she is committed to serve and, in her fatigue, slowly begins to understand what Jesus really meant when he taught service by washing the feet of his disciples.

She stands mute and helpless before the death of a friend and yet realizes that she has an advantage of knowledge of the Resurrection that the apostles were without.

She knows the burning hope of the presence of the Holy Spirit working in her and the jubilant exultation of Easter when a despondent teenager tells her: “I can see some meaning is left because of what you have shown me in your life.”

To share that Easter life is the greatest gift of any vocation.