Fruit in Due Season

​The bluebirds, looking bright as sapphires in their Springtime best, chirp happily all about the convent grounds. A hummingbird has delighted the Sisters by choosing to build her nest in the crook of a Japanese maple tree that hangs fondly over the Pieta statue in the patio. Audacious daffodils smile brightly at the blooming world around them, while tulips demurely peak out from behind the curtain of earth. The world fairly hums with the expectation of oncoming rebirth—and it would seem that nature can tend herself and usher in a delightful Spring and a fruitful Summer and Autumn without our Sisters so much as lifting a finger.

However, if one looks more closely, there becomes apparent the dying vines, that oppress the growth of new shoots beneath them. 

One sees that, if the weeds are not plucked while their roots are shallow, those roses will not thrive; and the berry brambles, left unchecked, will stifle all other growth. To become aware of these needs however, one must go up upon higher ground and, in silence and solitude, observe with sobriety the state of the things as a whole. Furthermore, one must stoop to the level of the rose bushes and lift up the thorny branches in order to see the weeds that may rob the bush of its potential beauty. Then, to assure that all the promised grandeur of springtime can fully flourish, one must rake, hoe, pluck, cut and, by the sweat of one’s brow, labor to bring forth fruit from the earth

It is in this spirit that a Marian Sister approaches the holy season of Lent. She examines her soul, like a gardener surveying his domain. ​

She sees what virtues and graces Our Lady has tended in it and rejoices in the handiwork wrought for her Divine Son’s delight. But Lent is precious ante-Springtime of the soul, and the Religious must not be content to applaud Our Lady’s good work and return to her life as normal—she must cooperate and participate in her own sanctification. She must set aside time, more than usual, for silence and solitude, so that she may see the untended brambles, weeds of vice that may choke the flowers of virtue; places in her heart where the cockle of imperfect intention mixes with the wheat of True Charity, or where the soil wherein Our Lord would plant new graces is undocile, rocky ground

Lent is the fresh opportunity to enact with greater fervor our Advent aspiration: to make straight the way of the Lord. From the ashes of Ash Wednesday, reminding us that we have but little time in this life to perfect our love for God to the heart wrenching Improperia of Good Friday, forcefully recalling the Innocence of Jesus, Whom our sins have crucified, Lent is a time to pull out vice and sin by penance, plant seeds of virtue by alms and fight against being dominated by our fallen nature by fasting. Above all these, it is a time to water the garden deeply with divine grace, by pursuing with union with God in prayer with a special zeal. 

And, so good is the Lord Jesus to His Brides, that even in the (primarily interior) pains that penance, fasting—and alms!—brings He gives us, through them, the penultimate joy of a Religious vocation: union and identification with the Crucified Beloved.

Our prayers are with you all this Lent—may what you till by penance and fasting and plant by alms bear a hundred fold fruit in due season. ​