4 JAN 2020 Feast of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
What is a Nun ?
A nun is a lady all consecrated to God.
She arises a five in the morning and goes to bed at almost nine at night.
Before she has breakfast, she has at least two hours of prayer, including Holy Mass.
Every moment of the day in which she is not occupied with some necessary task,
she is bettering her soul by way of spiritual reading, examination of conscience, and the like.
A true nun has no world ambitions, desires no fame, seeks no romance, asks no reward offered on this earth.
She is poor, chaste, obedient, anxious to be always the maximum of service to her sisters and to her neighbors and the minimum of annoyance.
She has the loveliest of manners existent in this world, is modest, soft-voiced, invariably gαy. Laughter comes easy to her as easily as sunlight. She is most tender in her affections, but chastity gives her a strength that is almost masculine.She talks easily and freely because the practice of contemplation has taught her what is valuable to speak. She holds more fondness for her parents in a single thought than most daughters might in a thousand. She retains her girlishness longest and at forty, fifty, even sixty, it is hard to guess her age. Yet she is never coy.
She is as much at home discussing a new furnace for the cellar with the janitor as she is discussing the virtues of Saint Gemma Galgani with her sisters at recreation.She wears a dress that clearly distinguishes her from the world, yet has her precision as to how it should be arranged in an attractive manner.
She is most responsive to affection, but will not allow herself to be spoiled. Compliments please her, but she banishes them with a gesture, and prefers to shine in one's eyes in simple appraisal.
She feels safest and most at home in her chapel and will spend hours on end unmindful of any distress in her back or knees before the Blessed Sacrament.
She calls Our Lady "Her Mother" and Our Lord "Her Spouse" and she secrecies with them that no one dare inquire or conjecture.She is beautiful in sickness and capable of bearing pain as silently as any creature on earth.She is modest and undramatic in her death, asks only to be laid in the graveyard of her community as "one of the sisters" and with a tombstone indistinguishable, save for the name, from any other.
In death she rejoices most in those hours of life that were lived through pure faith, in which she took Christ's revelation literally, and did not question or doubt.
It usually cost but a few dollars to bury her and there are no flowers. The Requiem Mass is said fervently for the repose of her soul, and the nuns chant the Benedictus, and weep when they are not being observed.
The last thing she asks before she dies is pardon from those she may have offended or dis edified and forgiveness for any failure in her rules.
She then vanishes out of this temporal scene, to be disposed of in eternity, as God sees fit. She rather expects a long purgatory, and is insistent on having prayers said for her after her death. The Sisters never fail her in this.
Sometimes she will be prayed for by some old faithful of her community for fifty years or more, when it might be confidently expected that her Purgatory had long been fulfilled.But, God is innocent, and just and holy and human nature very frail and weak, so one never knows.
From Father Leonard Feeney, “Mother Seton,
St. Elizabeth Seton of New York” Page 152~154.
Topic: Feast of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (Read 287 times)