We just had to share this beautiful reflection with you...

The Sisters have heard me talk about a phenomenon that I have never been able to forget. When I was a young priest teaching school I would take students into various segments of the “real world”. I would always take them, among other places, to a steel factory to see men working very hard under terribly demanding circumstances. It was a fascinating thing. All over a huge floor that seemed to go on forever were these great big stacks of twisted, broken pieces of metal. The metal was rusted and repulsive looking. Great big scoops would come, hanging from a crane, and pick up big mounds of metal and lift them up and hurl them into an open hearth furnace. You couldn’t look into the furnace without dark glasses on. The heat was incredible and the light blinding. That same metal would be scooped out and poured from a giant ladle into containers. As it would be poured down from fifty feet above, it looked simply like a stream of fire when it was actually molten steel. All of the ugly scraps of metal had been transformed by the fire, now in liquid form pouring down into the ingots. You couldn’t tell where the fire left off and the metal began.

That’s what happens to the soul that is caught up in the furnace of Divine Love. This is what it means to be in Christ. We become so transformed that people aren’t sure, and ultimately you’re not sure, where Christ leaves off and you begin. Don’t we need that in this tired world? Don’t we need that in this culture that we read about? Sister’s you’re the ones thought to be melancholy and gloomy! You’re the ones thought to have deprived yourselves of so much by leaving what the world has to offer  so that you can offer the world infinitely more---the Light in the virginal womb.

We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness

-From the Sister's of Life, 6th Annual Discernment Retreat led by Fr. John Cardinal O'Connor