With a heart full of gratitude to you and to God, greetings from our home to yours!
We have lived in new home now for eight months and not a day goes by that we do not whisper a prayer of gratitude for the blessing of our new convent. For the first time, we are living in a home that was designed and built to help us express who we are and to aid us in departing to you and all of our visitors that same charism. These months have been filled with untold and multitude blessings.
Without realizing it, Father Raymund Snyder, OP, in just a few words summed up what I have been trying to articulate since we begged God’s blessing upon this building endeavor. As a former student of our Sisters, Father Raymund graciously offered to celebrate Holy Mass for the Sisters while he was in Wichita following his ordination to the priesthood. As I thanked him for coming, he simply said, “I wanted to be in the house the Memorares built.”
It hit me immediately! Yes, this is what it is all about! All of us, sons and daughters of the Immaculate Heart, want to be in Her house, in the house the Memorares built! Not only that, but in doing so we want to venerate her and give her honor, we want to fulfill the requests she gave us at Fatima, live our consecration to her and flourish under her mantle of protection. We know, as St. Louis de Montfort says, “She is the safest, easiest, shortest and most perfect way of approaching Jesus, that whoever surrenders himself to her, body and soul without reserve, will belong entirely to Jesus.”
Our Blessed Mother makes the house a home, a suitable place for Her Son to dwell, and draws her children together under her loving gaze, assisting their approach and propelling them to her Eucharistic Son. Our Chapel, the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, is very Marian, but Marian primarily in the sense that the center is Jesus. How blessed we are to have a convent, a home, that expresses what we strive to live!
This reality was brought to our attention forcefully when a young woman called and said that she watched our convent being built as she drove by to and from her brother’s home. She was drawn by the building and wanted to visit, to see what was inside and to see how we lived. Three other young women have submitted their applications for entrance; three young women, all from Kansas, have felt the call to be in Our Lady’s home, sensing that perhaps Jesus is calling them to be His brides. Our Lady is showing them, and us, the way and we joyfully and with full confidence, entrust ourselves to her motherly care.
This is our lived experience and it is exemplified this summer by Sister Joseph Mary O’Brien’s Silver Jubilee (August 15, 2016), by Sister Mary Guadalupe Bergkamp and Sister Rose Marie Weber’s solemn consecration and perpetual profession (August 20, 2016), and the reception into the novitiate of Maggie Schaeffer in September.
You have helped us so much by “building our house with Memorares.” Thank you for the thousands of Memorares you and all of Our Lady’s friends have showered upon her, all for the conversion of sinners, for the Sisters, and for your own needs. Thank you for being an instrument of Our Lady.
May Mary’s Heart Immaculate be forever praised, that Her Son may be glorified, now and forever.