Profession of Simple Vows

Brother Dismas Warner

February 2, 2008

Homily

Brother Dismas, you have just spoken words of life. They are words you can return to again and again and be able to find something new in them and something encouraging and something to call you back to the ultimate meaning of the gift you are making today.

As a poet you are a wordsmith. You know that words carry meaning. But you are aware they also carry emotion, they carry feeling, they carry the weight of conviction, and they carry commitment.

Our ancestors in the faith knew this well. They used the word dabbar to mean not only word, but also deed. A word not only says something, means something, it also does something. It brings something into being. It makes something happen.

Let's tease this out a little more. You have said that what you seek is the mercy of God and the mercy of your brothers and sisters in the Order. Because of the sacred liturgy we celebrate, those words not only conveyed the desires of your heart, they also accomplished what they proclaimed. We are surrounded by God's mercy. It forms the environment in which we breathe. It is the warp and the woof of all our movements this evening. And this holds not just for God's mercy, but the mercy of your brothers is here present as well. We too surround you and envelop you as we welcome you into our midst in a fuller way.

Never, never doubt this. Not as a club raised over your head, but as a joy in your heart, a reality to delight in. As Father Christian never ceased to remind us when he served us as our second abbot: “Joy is the sign of a Christian.”

Rejoice! Delight! Savor! “Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy are those who find their all in him.”

Part of this savoring is to reflect on how our Cistercian forebears loved to teach that the human person is capax Dei. This means that we are created as a capacity for God. In the core of our being we are open to God, made for a relationship with God. We are fulfilled not in this or that isolated object, in this or that isolated relationship, but in the totality of self-giving which is love. We are ultimately fulfilled as human beings only in the unconditional consent to an unconditional love. That is the way our forebears thought and that is what you are about today.

But we cannot give this consent once and for all. We must learn to open ourselves layer-by-layer, piece-by-piece, here a little, there a little. And so we see the monastery as our ancestors saw it: as a school. As a school in which we learn to serve the Lord Christ. Or more aptly, a school of charity, a school in which we learn in a community of brothers, in a holy koinonia, to give and to take, to learn love by loving, to accept love by being loved.

It is not an easy life you are entering, Brother Dismas. To be loved and to love is the way of the Cross. But isn't that what you have declared you want by the very name you have chosen? Dismas, the good thief, is the one crucified with Jesus, lifted up on a cross just as Jesus was. In the words of the great abbot, Pinufius, quoted by our holy father John Cassian: “Monastic life is nothing else than a manifestation of the cross and of a dying. Therefore you should know that on this day you have died to the world and to its deeds and desires and that, according to the Apostle, you have been crucified to this world and this world to you…. So it behooves us who have been crucified by the fear of the Lord…to have the eyes of our soul set upon the place where we must hope that we shall go.”

So wonder of wonders, we have returned to our beginning. For the cross is the very mercy of God made visible. It is the mercy for which you have asked and that has been made present among us.

And so I ask you, Brother Dismas, are you ready to enter more fully upon this way by taking the step of commitment through First Vows?