Please join us in celebrating our dear Sister Constance FitzGerald’s 70th anniversary of profession today, May 4!
Connie entered Baltimore Carmel on September 8, 1951, when the monastery was still located on Biddle Street. Congratulations and thank you, Connie! We hope your story and your life’s work will continue to inspire other women to consider a Carmelite vocation:
“When I dreamed at a very young age of becoming a Carmelite nun, I saw it as the way to give myself totally to God. I could have no idea then of the depth and breadth of such radical self-dispossession, nor of the wonderful, multifaceted, expansive journey that would open before me in Carmel: the desire for God growing and changing over a lifetime, the long, gradual renewal of my community following Vatican II and the development of a contemporary, contemplative Carmelite life with vibrant new members, the association with other national and international groups of contemplative women as we struggled to find our voice in the Church, the joys and trials of leadership, the cost and the rewards of forming new members, my intellectual life of study and reflection coming together with the experience of prayer to interpret our Carmelite tradition and particularly my beloved spiritual mentor, Saint John of the Cross, and finally the precious, tender friendships that have graced and sustained me – and so much more. While all this flows now into the memory of God, I, myself, feel enormous gratitude for such fullness in my 9th decade. All these past and present strands of my contemplative life and prayer converge in a profound hope in the God who is always approaching from the future and promising the transformations, intimate love and generativity that will influence, by a deep spiritual energy, humanity’s crossing the threshold into a new level of consciousness and empathic community, a new epoch of evolution.”
