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Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa
Marian Sisters of Santa Rosa
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"Love One Another as I Have Loved You"

10/25/2016

 
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Christ's spousal call of love has led each Sister to this community and has bound us together by our common consecration of the vows and common mission of sharing the beauty, goodness, and truth of our rich faith. This common foundation blossoms into a healthy and active community life. The Church values this stable form of communal living so highly as to consider it the second of the elements essential to religious life.
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Vita Consecrata expresses the heart and spirit of community life beautifully, calling it the place where the passage from 'me' to 'us' takes place. Communal living allows each of us to cease seeking 'my' things and 'my' works and begin living only for 'the things of Christ' the Divine Bridegroom. This orientation toward Christ and the common good is fostered by daily Adoration, communal prayer, and participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The spiritual singleness of mind and heart within the members of community is expressed first in acts of communal charity and then grows into a pervasive spirit of generous and joyful evangelization.
United in Christ, one in prayer, and dedicated to ongoing formation, a stable community naturally forms each Sister, allowing her to more fully resemble Christ, her Spouse. In community, each individual is presented the opportunity to cultivate all the human virtues - respect, kindness, sincerity, self-control, tactfulness, a sense of humor and spirit of generosity - and to develop the ability to see life through Mary's eyes of faith. By the mutual assistance of true friendship super-naturalized by divine charity, each member of the community is daily built up and aided toward a more complete union with Christ in this life and accompanied on the journey toward eternity.
O Mary, Mother of God,
form us into the image of your Divine Son!

"I Take Thee for My All..."

10/22/2016

 
"God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night" (Genesis 1:4-5).
In the beginning, God created time and He created us to live our earthly lives "in" time. By entering time and redeeming us in it, Christ sanctified time. Through the rhythmic praying of the Divine Office and the perpetual re-presentation of the Holy Sacrifice, the Church continues to sanctify each day and all of human activity. Though it is impossible to be formally praying at ever second, there are many ways of participating in the sanctification of time. ​When the convent clock chimes the hour, a quiet murmur of "I take thee for my all" and the response "Give me thy heart, O Mary" may be heard among the Sisters laboring together. This simple aspiration is a small way for us to renew our intention to do all for Jesus through Mary. It is an act of love given to the God of love, an act of confiding trust in the maternal intercession of Our Lady with her Son.
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O Mary Immaculate, obtain for us the grace to continually praise God through our prayers and actions!

The Soul's Response

10/15/2016

 
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Christ calls certain souls to belong entirely to Himself as consecrated religious men and women. As a woman responds to the call of God, her attention turns to consecration to him through profession of the evangelical counsels by public vows. Essential Elements ​states:
Consecration is the basis of religious life. By insisting on this, the Church places the first emphasis on the initiative of God and on the transforming relation to him which religious life involves. Consecration is a divine action. God calls a person whom he sets apart for a particular dedication to himself. At the same time, he offers the grace to respond so that consecration is expressed on the human side by a profound and free self-surrender. The resulting relationship is pure gift. It is a covenant of mutual love and fidelity, of communion and mission, established for God's glory, the joy of the person consecrated and the salvation of the world (EE 5).
Christ became poor for our sake, He loved with an undivided heart, and He came to do the will of the Father. For the sake of all the members of His Body, God gives to some souls "the gift of a closer following of Christ in His poverty, chastity, and obedience through a public profession of these counsels mediated by the Church" (EE 7). Covering the whole of her life in all its aspects, the vows free the consecrated woman to love Christ Crucified and to belong entirely to Him.
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​​Poverty frees her from enslavement to the world and all its attractions. It gives her the ability to pass through this life unhampered by the burdens and concerns of personal possessions, by which we are all too often possessed. Chastity frees her to love the whole Christ, Head and members. Her love is not stifled but expanded until it reaches and embraces the image of her Spouse in every soul. Obedience frees her from the powerful dictatorship of self will. It prepares her to hear and respond joyfully to the whisper of her Beloved. The vows are the soul's response to the call of Love.

The Call of the Divine Spouse

10/10/2016

 
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The Sacred Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, a Congregation that has been in existence for almost 500 years and is responsible for everything concerning the government, discipline, studies, goods, rights, and privileges of these societies issued a document in 1983 that clearly listed and examined the essential elements of authentic consecrated life. This document, titled Essential Elements in the Church's Teaching on Religious Life as Applied to Institutes Dedicated to Works of the Apostolate, states that:
​​The Church regards certain elements as essential to religious life: the call of God and consecration to him through profession of the evangelical counsels by public vows; a stable form of community life: for institutes dedicated to apostolic works, a sharing in Christ's mission by a corporate apostolate faithful to a specific founding gift and sound tradition; personal and community prayer; asceticism; public witness; a specific relation to the Church; a life-long formation; and a form of government calling for religious authority based on faith. Historical and cultural changes bring about evolution in the lived reality, but the forms and direction that the evolution takes are determined by the essential elements without which religious life loses its identity (EE 4).
Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M., in his classic "...And You are Christ's," reflects on the call of God, the first of the essential elements of a vocation to consecrated life. He gives four signs that together indicate an authentic call from God. First, the soul called by God has a greater than usual bent toward Him. It readily sees that a worldly life is insufficient and unfulfilling. The pleasures of this life are attractive and enjoyable, but the heart is yearning for more, much more. It may for a time plunge itself into seeking the goods of this world, but eventually if it is true to itself and to God's beckoning, it joyfully casts them off as unsatisfying.
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​Father continues, "This first sign will be accompanied by a second: an attraction to a particular celibate lifestyle and/or a persuasion that God wants them in that form of dedication." Some young people know immediately whether they are called to the strictly contemplative or active contemplative life and even to what community they are called. For many others, however, the call is fundamentally the intellectual persuasion that God desires them to fulfill His holy will in a particular form of consecrated life and their reciprocal desire to give themselves fully to Him.
"Sound motivation is the third sign of the virginal charism." A religious vocation is to be head over heels in love with the Divine Person as a result of His personal invitation. Religious life can never be an escape, or a despising of the good of marriage, but a renouncing of that very real and tangible good for Good Himself. She is by her choice completely free for Him, available to do His will and to serve His kingdom. She lives now as all will live in eternity and is entirely enthralled by the goodness, generosity and fidelity of her Spouse.
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Father Dubay ends his reflection by considering the necessary ability to live the consecrated life. "The final sign is capability. When God gives the celibate gift, he also gives the physical, mental, and moral health necessary to actualize it in a specific lifestyle. Necessary health need not mean absolute perfection, but it does mean a basic sufficiency. Each institute determines the minimal capabilities required for its life and work." Each of these four signs is a necessary component of that call of God of which the soul's response is the profession of public vows.
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Queen of the Holy Rosary, Pray for Us!

10/7/2016

 
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October is the month of the Holy Rosary and today we honor Our Lady as the Queen of the Holy Rosary. St. John Paul II writes in Rosarium Virginis Mariae that "To recite the Rosary is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ."  A great lover of Our Lady, he encourages each of us to discover the beauty and power of the Rosary anew, saying that "to rediscover the Rosary means to immerse oneself in contemplation of the mystery of Christ who 'is our peace.'" In contemplation of divine things, we are renewed to live the Christian life. Today, and every day, we pray  that we may imitate what the mysteries of the Rosary contain and obtain what they promise. Through meditating on the mysteries, we learn that in Mary's life everything is judged in relation to God. She begins to help us to penetrate into the mysteries and apply the lessons that we learn to our daily lives. We pray that she may share with us her eyes of faith so that we too will be able to see all things in light of God's plan, that we may rejoice in what gives Him pleasure and abhor what displeases Him.
Teach me, O Mary, to know and love Jesus as you knew and loved Him!

Monthly Devotion: Our Lady of the Rosary

10/3/2016

 
"The Rosary of the Virgin Mary, which gradually took form in the second millennium under the guidance of the Spirit of God, is a prayer loved by countless Saints and encouraged by the Magisterium. Simple yet profound, it still remains, at the dawn of this third millennium, a prayer of great significance, destined to bring forth a harvest of holiness. It blends easily into the spiritual journey of the Christian life, which, after two thousand years, has lost none of the freshness of its beginnings and feels drawn by the Spirit of God to 'set out into the deep' (duc in altum!) in order once more to proclaim, and even cry out, before the world that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, 'the way, and the truth, and the life' (Jn. 14:6), 'the goal of human history and the point on which the desires of history and civilization turn' (Gaudium et Spes, 45)....
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​"The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium. It is an echo of the prayer of Mary, her perennial Magnificat for the work of the redemptive Incarnation which began in her virginal womb. With the Rosary, the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love. Through the Rosary the faithful receive abundant grace, as though from the very hands of the Mother of the Redeemer."  ~ St. John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, 1-2
Queen of the Holy Rosary,
Pray for us, obtain for us all the graces of which we stand in need!

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