On April 11, Divine Mercy Sunday, the Dominican nuns of Our Lady of Grace Monastery in North Guilford, CT, rejoiced in the solemn profession of their sister Sarah David of Truth (Sarah J. Eddy). Fr. Kurt Pritzl, O.P., Dean of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, was the principal celebrant and homilist of the Profession Mass. Dominican friars from St. Mary's in New Haven, CT, the House of Studies in Washington, D.C., and Providence College concelebrated the Mass.

Sr. Sarah David entered Our Lady of Grace Monastery as a postulant on January 1, 2003, and made her first profession in December of 2005. Before entering, she majored in civil engineering at The Catholic University of America. There she met Fr. Pritzl, who became her first ever philosophy teacher. After graduating with highest honors, Sr. Sarah David she went on to earn a Master's degree in Geosystems (planetary science) at MIT in 2002.

Sr. Sarah David's younger brother and sister served as lectors at the Mass of Solemn Profession, which was also attended by her parents and grandparents and numerous cousins, aunts and uncles.

By their way of life, lived entirely within the monastic cloister, Dominican nuns "build up in their own monasteries of the Church of God which they help to spread throughout the world by the offering of themselves" (LCM, 3.II). Saint Dominic himself associated the nuns with the work of the Order, his "holy preaching," by their prayer and penance (LCM, 1.I). The nuns' contemplative prayer and life of observance, "inasmuch as they are truly and properly Dominican, are from the beginning and by their very nature ordered to the apostolate which the Dominican family exercises as a whole, and in which alone the fullness of the Dominican vocation is to be found" (Letter of Br. Anicetus Fernandez). The nuns bring before God the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anguish of the people of today (LCM, 45).

Sister Sarah David wrote the following in regard to her profession:

The Lord has given me blessings and blessings throughout my whole life, and ‘how can I make a return to the Lord for his goodness to me?' It was as if God was saying to me, ‘See all these talents I have given you, such that you can do whatever you want in life, and I will be with you. What do you most want? - It is I who made you, who gave you your deepest desires. Choose.' And I found that what I desired was ... to belong to Him. I cannot repay Him for his goodness, mercy and love: no creature can. But what I can give - my life, which is itself His gift - I will. As St. Bernard wrote, ‘It is true the creature loves less because she is less. But if she loves with her whole being, nothing is lacking where everything is given.'

God is worth a life, and by solemn profession the Dominican nun consecrates her whole life unto God until death.

What follows is the homily Fr. Pritzl preached during the Profession Mass:

Profession Mass Homily
Fr. Kurt Pritzl, O.P.
April 11, 2010

The psalm for today's Mass tells us perfectly and succinctly about today, about what kind of day this day is: "This is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it."

Today is (still) Easter Sunday, for we complete today the octave of Easter. The Lord's resurrection, "the day the Lord has made" beyond all our hopes and imaginings, needs more than one single Sunday for the church's celebration to begin to express adequately what God has done for us. And we need the extended time to us to do what the psalm says, "to be glad and rejoice in it." In the opening prayer for today's Mass we asked God that "as we celebrate Christ's resurrection increase our awareness of these blessings," namely, the blessings of the washing away of our sins in water, our new birth in the Spirit, and our redemption in the blood of Christ. We need to be more and more aware of these blessings, of being cleansed from sin and evil, of becoming a new person on God's terms, of having the freedom of redemption. For becoming increasingly aware of theses blessings in our lives brings a gladness and rejoicing unlike any other we can know in this life. In addition, we addressed this prayer to "God of mercy" and in the church we celebrate this Easter day as Divine Mercy Sunday.

So "this is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it."

There is, of course, still more that God is doing today. Today is the day of Sister Sarah David's solemn profession as a Dominican nun in the Monastery of Our Lady of Grace. We must not fail to understand that Sister Sarah David's complete consecration that happens in a few moments is God's doing, to which she freely gives herself. In the second reading we heard how the Risen Lord touched John and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives." The Risen Lord Jesus has also touched Sister Sarah David and she determined not to be afraid and to answer his special and personal call to her. Saint John "found" himself "on the island called Patmos" because he answered Christ's call and proclaimed His salvation. Each one of us, whatever our vocations are, in some way or other "find ourselves" somewhere we would not have expected, when we answer the special and personal call of Christ that we hear in our hearts. Sister Sarah David first "found" herself in a family, a loving family who taught her Christ. Eventually, and as the fulfillment of all that has happened in her life, Sarah Eddy found herself in this place, this monastery. There is no greater joy, a joy that pervades all the difficulties, challenges, and disappointments of life, than being right in that place where God wants us to be. "This is the day the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it."

I first met Sister Sarah David in the fall of 1997. She was a member of a philosophy course that I taught in the University Honors Program at The Catholic University of America called "Aristotle: the Desire to Know." Sister Sarah David was a freshman (I was younger, too). In this course, with the help of Aristotle and other great philosophers, we pondered the possibility for humans of gaining not just expertise or learning, but wisdom. We considered whether Aristotle was right when he claims that the best form of knowing is contemplation, knowing for its own sake, and that humans are capable of attaining truth, truth that is contact with real, including the ultimate realities, and a deepening articulation of the meaning of the real. Sister Sarah David got an A grade in that course (in fact, she earned an A grade in every course that she took at Catholic University as an engineering student who minored in philosophy). And somewhere along the line (I am not claiming this for the course that I taught) Sister Sarah David recognized that, indeed, there is something to this business of truth. She joined an Order, one of whose mottos is veritas, truth, and she took Truth as part of her name. In doing so, she has gone far beyond Aristotle, as genuinely profound as his recognition of the nature of truth is. Her doing so is a matter of encountering Truth Itself, the Lord God, and His only-begotten Son, Jesus, who is "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14.6). She thereby came to learn the truth of her own life.

Human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, are built for truth, just as they are built for love. We cannot be happy without these two things in our lives, and the yearning is that truth and love will last for us, and not just last, but grow. God alone, God who is Truth Itself and who is Love, gives us, shares with us, such truth and love-truth and love that lasts and that is for us inexhaustible. A Dominican monastery of nuns is a unique place to encounter and to contemplate for a lifetime this inexhaustible Truth, who is God Himself, and to relish and to share the infinite and unconditional love of God. We rejoice today that of all the good places where God brings us to know Him as Truth and Love, that He has seen fit in His mercy to bring Sister Sarah David of Truth to her solemn profession and total consecration to Him.

It is Divine Mercy Sunday, after all. When she makes her solemn profession, Sister Sarah David will be asked what she is seeking, and she will reply that she is seeking God's mercy and the mercy of her prioress and this community. When we hear her say this, and as we witness her solemn profession, a vow made for the rest of her life, let the repeated lines of this Mass's psalm resonate in our hearts: "‘His mercy endures forever,' . . . ‘His mercy endures forever,' . . . ‘His mercy endures forever.'"