Profession Homily
 
 
Personal Love
Fr. Sergius Propst, OP
I. Experience of Love!
What we are celebrating here today is often a confused mystery for many people. For my own parents, who were devout Southern Baptists, what we are celebrating was not only a confusing mystery but a very disturbing development in my life. When I announced to them that I was going to join the Dominican Order, my father immediately engaged me in an argument: “Can’t you be a good Christian without becoming a monk? Aren’t marriage and family also pleasing to God? Remember that in Deuteronomy, God commands us to have children! And why spurn success and a profession that will make you monetarily secure? Some of Jesus best and most courageous disciples were successful and wealth … such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.” My father’s description of what we celebrate today sums up his confusion and pain: “Choosing to be a poor and un-influential eunuch is sheer madness!” My mother was a little more diplomatic and simply said: “It is a mystery to me.”
 
The heart of this often confusing mystery is not an ideal or an ideology but a concrete person… Jesus! Although Jesus calls many of his disciples to marriage and the sharing of life and love within marriage… there a few whom Jesus touches with such exquisite Love that His Love becomes more entrancing and inebriating than family or power or wealth. This Love becomes all consuming. A very imperfect and shadowy description of this wholly captivating Love by means of which Jesus calls some to belong to Him in a unique and singular way is described in today’s first reading from the Song of Songs:
 
Song of Songs 8: 6-7
  1. Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away. Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love, he would be roundly mocked.
 
It is almost impossible to give some slight taste of this love in the flavors of this world. But, it is worth the try. When I was a teenager, my image of feminine pulchritude was Sophia Loren! She was a real woman, having all the right curves in the right places. I was so infatuated with Sophia that I went to all her movies, not because of the quality of the acting or the intensity of the drama although both were there but just to see Sophia and dream of a never to be love affair. Not only did I see all her movies, but I saw the same movie over and over again… just to worship at her image. When the first movie was over, I would go to the restroom and hid in a stall, crouched on the top the commodes so that ushers who would never, never open the doors of the stalls would not see my feet … and when the next movie started to sneak out to see the movie all over again. All for Sophia! My fixation on Sophia is but a very pale, empty and fleeting shadow of the confusing mystery we are celebrating… the Love whose name is Jesus!
 
Why is Jesus so alluring, so wholly engrossing? Because, where Sophia was an unreal dream, infatuation, Jesus is a living reality! In Jesus, God’s Divine Love, Actual Love, Creative and Redeeming Love is made present and active to us, here and now. In Jesus, the Divine Love is fully present in a concrete way… and we can experience that most powerful rapture of being fully, wholly, completely loved, here and now, over and over again! It is very difficult to explain this mystery to others who have not themselves been as deeply touched and changed by this Love. While I was serving in the United States Navy, I finally acknowledged this mystery in my life and decided to give myself without compromise to Jesus as a Dominican priest. When some of my friends on board ship heard about my decision, they gathered to save me from myself. A group of my friends were Jehovah witnesses and they confronted me, demanding an explanation for my madness… I soon realized that for every explanation I could give them, they had a ready, pre-made answer and objection. Finally, I summed up this mystery filling my desire and experience in one simple statement of faith/experience … GOD LOVES ME! I WANT TO SPEND MY LIFE BEING LOVED AND LOVING IN RESPONSE. This was the only answer they could not respond to… it is the only full and real witness… the conviction: GOD LOVES ME AND SEEKS MY LOVE! This is the mystery in all its power and glory… God loves me and chooses to be loved by me… in a most intimate and exclusive way.
 
The mystery we are celebrating is also the mystery at the heart of each human being… it is the one thing every human being is made for, desires in an almost frantic way, we seek it in sex and power and wealth… and all we want is just to be fully and wholly loved. As the Song of Songs sings out again and again…
 
Song of Songs 8: 6-7
  1. Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; For stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire. Deep waters cannot quench love, nor floods sweep it away. Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love, he would be roundly mocked.
 
II. Simple Profession
But, something seems fishy here! The Song of Songs speaks of this love as being
 
  1. stern as death, relentless as the nether world
 
so why vow this love for only a year or two or three? Is not simple profession a hypocrisy that gives the lie to what we have been saying about this Love?
 
The profession of simple vows, vows taken for a limited period of time, is not about this Love which makes us the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters of Jesus so that Jesus becomes for us our mother and father, our sister and brother, our son and daughter, the all in all, as the Gospel asserts today:
 
Mark 3:33-35 - Jesus becomes all in all to us:
  1. [Jesus] said in reply, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" And gazing around him at those seated in the circle [Jesus] continued, "These are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is brother and sister and mother to me."
 
Simple profession, vowing the Dominican way of life for a limited time, is not about our radical commitment to Jesus but about the ability of the Dominican Order to support and foster my Love for Jesus and allow me to manifest my joy in being Loved by Jesus to others… for if I cannot witness this radical love,
 
  1. stern as death, relentless as the nether world
 
according to my own way and nature, I will be frustrated beyond endurance. The mystery is more than Love. It is Love lived and shared… witnessed! When my brother-in-law asked my sister Cindy to marry him, to allow him to spend the rest of his striving to make her happy, Cindy was compelled to literally tell the world of this mystery she was experiencing. When she and David came home that evening, the first thing that Cindy did was show us all her wedding ring (as her brother, I was not impressed with the size of the diamond) and tell the story of David’s proposal. Cindy was so caught up in the mystery that every time she encountered you, she showed you her ring, expecting you to admire it all over again, and repeated the story. In time, I was even trying to avoid her so I would not have to admire that ring again and listen to the story. Ah, but if only we Dominicans lived the mystery we are celebrating today as my sister lived her mystery!
 
But the question is not about the mystery we are celebrating but about the Dominican Order. Is this mystery we celebrate, the life of Loving and being Loved according to our personal capacity of loving and being loved supported and encouraged by the Dominican way of life? To answer this question, the Church has established simple profession. So for a limited time, the ability of the Dominican way of life to enable the growth and manifestation of the mystery of this radical ‘Love’ in the unique nature and character of each of these three men making simple profession will be tested.
 
It is my prayer that each of the men who takes simple vows today will find in our community everything necessary to support and deepen this radical Love to which Jesus calls him… but if the Order fails to do this, I pray that he will seek another way of life that makes this mystery we celebrate possible… makes this life of Love a living and actual reality. It is this being Loved by Jesus and Loving Him in return that is the mystery, not simple profession.
 
“It is my prayer that each of the men who takes simple vows today will find in our community everything necessary to support and deepen this radical Love to which Jesus calls him…”