Saints painter Leslie McNamara and wood-worker Cassian Heath stand in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe beside the shrine they co-created.

The saints art project was made possible due to the generous contribution of $30,000 by long-time Dodge City resident, Phyllis Minet.

By Sister Gemma Doll upon the dedication of the "Patrons of Religious Orders" shrine at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, March 17

Look at the varied gifts we have expressed so beautifully before us! There are writers, preachers, creationists, pray-ers, martyrs, humble workers, mystics, soldiers, teachers, missionaries, and monastics, each one revealing the image of God creatively and imaginatively for their times, and inspiring those who came after them to carry that spark of imagination into new times and new places. Today we celebrate the spark that has enkindled a fire in Southwest Kansas, those who lived consecrated life and served one another as good stewards of God’s grace and preached with the words of God so that God may be glorified. Today let us be in touch with our own ground, to be in touch with the God that resides within us, and to receive humbly and gratefully the gratuitous gift that what is in Christ – is in us – and so we walk into an unknown future, inexperienced, young, but vital.

Pope John Paul II addressed a congress of religious men and women last November with the plea that consecrated persons are called to offer humanity, which is worn out and deprived of memory, a credible witness of Christian hope. And so it is by our service and word, religious men and women witness the logic of the free gift of self without reserve. With service and word, religious witness loving the neighbor as He has loved them. With service and word, religious have Christ’s same sentiments in our hearts. Thus we are called, urged, to be a transparent manifestation of the loving face of Christ. We are called and gifted with a charism that is to be used as good stewards of God’s grace.

Today there is often a confusion between those who are professional religious, and a vocation. A professional religious is a social position – a liturgist, a canon lawyer, a pastor, a pastoral associate, a professor, a catechist, etc., whose work is judged by one’s performance and is rewarded by money. And there are certain criteria to meet standards of care. That is one’s profession. Whereas a vocation as a religious man or woman, a vocation to live consecrated life, has no social standing, but is a call from God heard in the silence of one’s heart. Its performance is experienced as vulnerable, powerless, fragile, and the reward is often suffering flanked with joy.

The challenge of consecrated life today is immense, but may not be what seems at first obvious. Let us not be alarmed at smaller numbers, older members, and decreased energy. Has it not been God’s pattern to use the weak, the miserable, the remnant, to be the vehicle for God’s work in the plan of salvation. What we are living out, a vocation as consecrated men and women today is, I believe, an urgent need is to find new ways of speaking, to find enough words to bring about reconciliation, union, communio, to find a common language where everyone is at home. This is the call for consecrated life because we have all left home for the stranger, the other, for the Christ. We are committed to embrace differences and to reach across the chasms.

In a few weeks the Diocese and the Dominican Sisters will sponsor a workshop by Eric Law. This is a great opportunity to further the Kingdom of God because we will better learn how to be touched by the other, to be willing to be wounded and changed. It is not the hair shirts and the steel-tipped whip that we need for asceticism in the 21^st century. Rather our asceticism for consecrated life and for all baptized Christians is to go beyond our narrowness and to stay at the table – what we just did at the Chrism Mass, where we again take bread, break it, and share it; where we take the blessing cup and share it. We celebrate a most poignant sign of our call to communio, unity, to stay at the table and find words large enough to bring about reconciliation. This is a sign of Christian hope. This is what we are to be about.

Do you not think the disciples were surprised, stunned, when Jesus took bread and said, "This is my body. Eat it. This is my blood. Drink it"? We have a God who is full of surprises. So, yes, it makes sense to hope. These saints found out how terrible it was to fall into the hands of God, and yet we as consecrated men and women cast our lives into the footsteps of Jesus Christ with abandon. No one can safely speculate what will be the outcome. For sure, it will not be where we started. We have cast our life into the hands of a God of surprises.

And so we, by obedience, accept God as the author of life. It is God who is in charge. By chastity we promise to be open, having no idea open to whom or what. We promise by poverty to live on the edge, to be precarious, because no one owns God. By our very life we live and witness Christian hope.

And so my prayer as we celebrate these our founders is to allow our hearts to burn, to burn with love as the hearts of our founders did and to live with an inner attitude of learning, knowing that we do not have the answers, that God will always surprise us, to be willing to be martyrs – if not the bloody kind, the everyday martyrs to witness the joy of a life lived in Gospel freedom. These icons help us to open our story for the 21^st century, to scrutinize the present moment for that spark of imagination in which the future lies. As these saints walked frontiers in their time, let us follow them walking the frontier of Christian hope.