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What is
meant by "the Law of the Lord"? Psalm 118 which we pray every Sunday
and on solemnities at Prime, is entirely filled with the command to know the
Law and to be led by it through life. The Psalmist was certainly thinking of
the Law of the Old Covenant. Knowing it actually did require life-long study
and fulfilling it, life-long exertion of the will. But the Lord has freed us
from the yoke of this Law. We can consider the Savior's great commandment of
love, which he says includes the whole Law and the Prophets, as the Law of the
New Covenant. Perfect love of God and of neighbor can certainly be a subject
worthy of an entire lifetime of meditation. But we understand the Law of the
New Covenant, even better, to be the Lord himself, since he has in fact lived
as an example for us of the life we should live. We thus fulfill our Rule when
we hold the image of the Lord continually before our eyes in order to make
ourselves like him. We can never finish studying the Gospels.
Collected Works Vol. IV. Part 1 : Before the Face of God, Ch.1 :
"On the History and Spirit of Carmel"
from "The Ethos of Woman's Professions" (1930)
Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything
inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in
abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
Only the person blinded by
the passion of controversy could deny that woman in soul and body is formed for
a particular purpose. The clear and irrevocable world of Scripture declares
what daily experience teaches from the beginning of the world: woman is
destined to be wife and mother.
Everything abstract is
ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the
living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate
service to a living whole.
The motive, principle, and
end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a
self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's
life.
Every profession in which
woman's soul comes into its own and which can be formed by woman's soul is an
authentic woman's profession.
For a wholesome
collaboration of the sexes in professional life will be possible only if both
achieve a calm and objective awareness of their nature and draw practical
conclusions from it.