Today Brother James Fitzgerald is taking an important step in his life. He’s making his final religious profession as a Passionist at Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the mother of the Jesus.

It’s traditional in our community to make our religious vows at Mass. We do it because we seek by vows to enter more deeply into the mystery of Jesus. The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are ways of saying, “I want to be like him,” and so we make them in the presence of our Lord who gave himself so fully to us on the Cross. As Passionists we want to share as deeply as we can in the mystery of his Passion and Resurrection.

Usually, too, we make our vows on a feast of Mary, because she appreciates, more than anyone else, what it means to be called by God and how mysterious that call can be. She knows how to follow her Son.

The gospel today is the story of her call. That morning in Nazareth, Mary got up and was expecting to get married to Joseph and go into his house and bear children with him. Then the angel came. “How can this be?” Mary asks simply. God will bring it about, the angel says, and then leaves her.

That call radically touched Mary’s whole being: who she was, what she was used to and what she did. It was a lifelong call that raised questions all her life. “How can this be?” she said more than once. “Be it done to me according to your word.” She also said that more than once.

Mary’s experience was uniquely her own, we think, and it was. But we may also think that human life, our own lives included, go on in only human terms and God only occasionally has a hand in it, and there we would be wrong.  An infant is baptized, two people get married, someone makes religious vows, and that’s it, we may think. But God’s call is dynamic; God is with us continually and God pursues us all our lives.

“Lord, you have probed me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I stand.  All my thoughts are before you,” we say in the psalms. God’s call is an everyday, lifelong call.

I think Jim offers us a reminder of that mysterious, lifelong aspect of God’s call. In his early years he joined the Passionists and then that call seemed to be interrupted. “How can this be?” Yet, all through the years, he’s felt its thread pulling him back to a vowed life in a religious community he’s always loved. His profession today may be a good reminder of God’s steady, quiet, mysterious involvement in the lives of each of us.

We may tend to think that God calls only the young, but he calls us in our older years as well. In Advent we remember Zachariah, the priest, and his wife Elizabeth, who conceived a child in her old age. The Christmas story wouldn’t be the same without them.  Then, there’s Simeon and Anna who hold the Infant in their arms in the temple. God calls at every age. Whether we are young or old, we’re called to keep listening and questioning and responding:  “Be it done to me according to your word.”

Those great gospel figures remind us that it’s not age but faith that counts with God. It’s faith that gives life to religious vows and to communities where we live our vows. Faith moves mountains and changes the world, Jesus says, and he doesn’t limit faith to a certain age.

That’s important to remember today as we experience the phenomenon of aging in our church and our religious communities. What’s more, we’re living in an aging society; we’re living longer in our western industrialized world. It’s a phenomenon that’s increasingly affecting our economy, health care, immigration and so many other areas of our life, and we don’t like paying attention to it. We like to think young. A critical challenge for us is how we live these added years. “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart,” we pray in the psalms.

Our church is a pilgrim church, the Second Vatican Council says. In its sacraments and institutions it “belongs to this world of time.” The church bears “the likeness of this passing world.” Certainly, in our part of the globe, it bears the likeness of a changing, aging world.

Does our community–I think of this wonderful community of Passionists here in the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, for example–have a role helping an aging world live in the spirit of the gospel.

As Jim Fitzgerald takes his vows today he’s not taking a step to security–certainly not in a religious community like ours. Religious vows don’t bring you safety, they spur you on to give yourself to God and his Kingdom. The make us ask like Mary: “How can this be?”  “Be it done to me according to your word.”

Any of you who know Jim, know that he doesn’t think he’s old. He works harder and longer that a lot of people much younger than he. But I would like to offer him a few words from the poet, T.S. Elliot as he makes his vows today, words that don’t’ state a fact, but like the vows challenge to something more.

“Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation.
In my end is my beginning.”

Victor Hoagland, CP                                                                            December 8,  2011