A love capable of faithfulness
Words of Mother Adela on the First Profession
of Sisters Sonia, Michelle and Elena
January 24, 2006
© Only for personal use

Dearest Bishop Agustin Roman; dear priests and deacons; dear seminarians; dear sisters of our Congregation and all other sisters that have come to be with us tonight; dear family members, friends and Apostles of the Two Hearts.

With profound gratitude, I welcome you all. Thank you for being here with us on this day of the first profession of our sisters: Michelle, Sonia and Elena. We rejoice as we welcome into our religious family these three sisters whom, moved by love, have given their fiat to embrace a life of special consecration in order to more closely follow a poor, chaste and obedient Christ.

Sisters Sonia, Michelle and Elena, the Lord has revealed to you the love of His Heart. He has given you the grace to experience from the depths of your hearts the power of His love, a love that is capable of completely transforming human existence and to give human life a new direction. The experience of that gratuitous love of God was so powerful that your hearts were intimately moved to respond in love, to give a worthy offering for so much loved received: the total and unconditional offering of your very selves. And so today you can say with Saint John, “We love Him, because He first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19).

The religious vocation is in essence a call of love and for love. We must find its beginnings in a mysterious dialog that took place between the heart of God and the heart of the human person. The “Follow me” which Christ spoke to your hearts has caused a marvelous interior revolution that moved you to “leave everything in order to go after Him.” That “Follow me” should resound within you for the rest of your lives, making your fiat a constant echo that beautifies the face of the Church, and witnesses before the world to the supremacy of the love of God. The fiat that you have given today should be the key that forever opens your hearts to a willing, unconditional fidelity to the Lamb - so as to follow Him wherever He may lead you.

Fidelity is a concrete and visible expression of love. Fidelity to the love embraced and to the love offered is a mature decision of the heart that moves us to forever remain constant to the fiat we have given. One of the titles attributed to the Virgin Mary in the Litanies of Loreto, which because of its simplicity seems to me so powerful, is that of: Faithful Virgin. How beautiful it is to live and die being faithful! To be able to do this we need to learn from the Virgin Mary’s faithful heart, to have an interior and exterior disposition of fidelity. What is this faithfulness of Mary? What are its dimensions? I would like to briefly mention the words that the Servant of God, John Paul II said about this topic during his first trip to the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico:

“The first dimension of faithfulness is called seeking. Mary was faithful, first of all, when she began to lovingly seek the deep sense of God’s plan in her and for the world. “How shall this be?”- she asked the angel of the Annunciation. There will be no faithfulness if it is not rooted in this ardent, patient and generous search; if one cannot find in the heart of man a question, to which only God has the answer, or better said, to which only God is the answer.

The second dimension of faithfulness is called reception, acceptance. The “How shall this be?” is transformed on Mary’s lips to “fiat.” Let it be done, I am ready, I accept. This is the crucial moment of fidelity, the moment in which the human heart perceives he will never completely understand the “how;” that there are in God’s plan more areas of mystery than clarity. He will never be able to understand everything. It is then that man accepts the mystery, gives it a place in his heart with the willingness of one who opens himself up to be inhabited by something, Someone - greater than his own heart.

The third dimension of faithfulness is coherence. Coherence is to live in accordance with what one believes. It is to adapt one’s own life to the object of one’s adherence. It is to accept misunderstandings and persecutions, rather than permit a break between what one practices and what one believes: this is coherence. Here is perhaps where one finds the most intimate nucleus to faithfulness.

But all faithfulness must pass the more exacting test of duration. Therefore, the fourth dimension of faithfulness is constancy. It is easy to be coherent for a day or two. It is difficult and important to be coherent one’s whole life. It is easy to be coherent in the hour of enthusiasm; it is difficult to be so in the hour of tribulation. And yet only a coherence that lasts throughout one’s whole life can be called faithfulness. Mary’s fiat at the Annunciation finds its fullness in the silent “fiat” she repeated at the foot of the cross. To be faithful means not to “betray in the hidden darkness what one has accepted in the public light.”

I ask our Blessed Mother, the faithful Virgin that she may keep you in her Immaculate Heart so that in the school of her spousal and maternal love, you learn the beautiful lesson of fidelity. A lesson that she, more than anyone else, can give us - since her Fiat at the Annunciation was the same Fiat she gave at the Cross…and it is this same Fiat that the Heart of the Church proclaims to her Spouse - our Lord Jesus Christ, from generation to generation.

In the love of the Two Hearts,

Mother Adela Galindo, Foundress SCTJM