Cathedral of the Incarnation, Nashville Tn., July 25, 2026
A comedy about several young singles sharing accommodation, coffee, a couch, and their twenties. Sounds like the Nashville Dominican Sisters’ novitiate, but I have in mind the sitcom Friends, that ran for 236 episodes. In its final season, its six actors were drawing even bigger crowds than Bishop Spalding and certainly being paid more — $1m each per episode to be precise, with 52 million people looking on.
The plot, for anyone who missed the nineties, was straightforward enough: Rachel, Monica, Phoebe, Joey, Chandler and Ross navigate romance, work, and whatever else life throws at them, whilst meeting on the same coffee shop sofa. It was easy viewing: no need to follow intricate plots or catch every episode. In a lonely era characterized perceptively by Robert Putnam’s bestseller Bowling Alone,[1] it proposed happiness through sex, career, and a close-knit group of friends.[2] Barely three minutes into the pilot episode, Rachel Green bursts in, still in her wedding dress, having left her fiancé high and dry at the altar. After running away from marriage, her school friend Monica Geller encourages her to cut up her father’s credit cards also, severing all ties to family.
Some probably think that’s what religious women do, forsaking marriage, family, and credit cards for a choose-your-own-family and do-your-own thing lifestyle. But that would be way off course. The evangelical counsels are not rejections of God’s good gifts of fortune, family, and freedom: rather, they order those things in radical service of God’s kingdom. And as every sister knows, far from choosing your own family and doing your own thing, you never know what Christ — and Mother — have in store for you. Soon-to-be-finally-professed: be warned!
Our Gospel today (Jn 15:9-17) makes clear that Christian friendship is not picking from a smorgasbord. Jesus tells His friends, “You did not choose me: no, I chose you”: friendship is more a gift received than a project chosen. But then He says, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Sounds transactional, like so much of life today. Is religious life doing things for God in exchange for eternal life insurance?
No, “Do as I say to get my favor” is not Christian friendship. Caritas is not about doing deals. But love does come with an inherent shape or grammar. If someone beats his wife with a baseball bat, we do not say, “That’s just his way of loving.” It is not loving at all. There is a logic proper to love, which is why Jesus can say if you really love me, you will live a particular way.[3] In First Corinthians, Paul famously sings love’s praises, but he also lists the virtues and norms by which we judge love authentic (1Cor ch. 13). We may not command our feelings, but we can cultivate a certain character, put some order into our affections, commit to pursuing goods, like those of the Church, Order, sisters, students, whatever the cost to self.
Some things are unreasonable or incompatible with friendship, others are needed, others optional. Christ long instructed His disciples on loving well: loving as He loved, with a self-giving love; loving God, self and an ever-widening group of neighbors as other selves; loving the neediest, even those who do not return our love.[4] Aquinas identified a proper order to charity: God before men, souls over bodies, kin above kith, spouse and children more than other relatives…[5] There is much to learn at the Perfectae Caritatis Academy that is religious life.
For the ancients, intimacy with God seemed impossible: we and God are just too unequal, too far apart. For many moderns, too, God seems distant and perfect, not needy and muddled like us.
In “The King and the Maiden,” the Danish father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, told the tale of a powerful ruler who fell for a humble maiden.[6] How could he declare his love for her and be sure it was genuinely reciprocated? As Kierkegaard remarked, “In an odd sort of way, his kingliness tied his hands.” He could make the girl a princess, but that would testify more to his power than his love, and he could not be sure of her motives. He could disguise himself as a beggar and woo her as his pretend equal, but that would attest to his cunning more than his affection, and you cannot build love on a lie. The only way to court her as his equal was to resign his kingdom…
So, Kierkegaard says, if God was to woo humanity, He had to choose whether to maintain His glory and distance as God, to share that glory by making us like gods, or to renounce His divinity to court us as His equals. Kierkegaard says the Incarnation is God choosing the third (cf. Phil 2:5-8). But I say He chose all three, as only God can do!
God had long been trying to be our friend. It started with Him walking in the garden with our first parents and lavishing so many gifts on us. It continued with His Law and covenants, prophetic word and loving interventions in history. It was fulfilled in the Incarnation and Passion. As our Ephesians hymn celebrates (Eph 1:3-14), He was in love with us even before the foundation of the world. He wanted us for His children, His brides, His saints. “You are my friends,” God says to us from all eternity, says at His Last Supper, says in today’s Mass of Perpetual Profession.
Dear sisters, you are those brides promised today by Isaiah (Isa 61:9-11), clothed in the habit of salvation and adorned with gems of evangelical poverty, chastity, and obedience. You do not run away like Rachel Green, pursuing only your own will. You don’t pick a comfortable friendship group as a faux family. No, today years of discerning God’s will, being formed in the Dominican form of life, and serving the Church culminate in a simple Marian Fiat.
Ironically, Sr. Caterina Joy, you grew up only a mile away from St Dominic’s tomb in Bologna. But it took American sisters in Britain to acquaint you with your neighbour. Now, with a deep peace and joy in your heart, you are sealed as his daughter.
Evelyn Rose, a tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan brought your father to join your Mom’s Catholic faith. It did not take as much to convert you, but study of theology, Eucharistic adoration and a seductive visit to Motherhouse all helped! Now you will devote your life to bringing others to conversion and adoration also.
From a Lebanese Melkite background, you Maria Trinity reverted to your childhood faith through Catholic student events, a Dominican sisters’ retreat, and trips with FOCUS to Mexico and Haiti. These stirred in you a longing to bring the Gospel to the spiritually poor: now you are ready to proclaim to all the world that Christ is your beloved and you are His (Songs 2:16).
Lastly, Agnes Rose, after years of “sister-stalking” various congregations, you realized your black belt in Taekwondo over the white track suit was a sign of a Dominican vocation and would prove useful for self-defence in classroom and convent! Now in the ‘Middle Earth’ of the Pacific Northwest, you are ready to spend your life climbing the mountain of the Lord, seeking His face, and singing His praises.
Daughters of St. Dominic and St. Cecilia, your final profession speaks to everyone here: to the novices and first professed, who see in you light at the end of their formation tunnel; to the other sisters, who quietly recommit to their own vows as you make yours; to the clergy and laity, challenged by your example to sincerely seek and faithfully live God’s will for them. It speaks also to your relatives, friends, and sisters, of gratitude for their support and a promise of your intercession. As you come to the altar, to seal a holy friendship by perpetual vows, you offer God your all. As St. Paul sang of the Ephesians, “You have pinned your hopes on Christ, that you might live to praise his glory, for in him you heard the word of Veritas—the gospel truth of salvation!” In exchange He gives you His Flesh and Blood, His Body and Soul, His Humanity and Divinity, His all. He vows to you: “I am yours, all yours, and forever, so abide in my love!”
[1] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2001).
[2] This was the pitch of the series creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane: Clare Thorp, ‘“When you’re single and in the city, your friends are your family”: Why the key message of Friends endures – 30 years on,’ BBC, September 22, 2024
[3] Jn 13:34; 14:15-24; 15:10,12,14,17; cf. Mt 5:19; 19:17; 28:20; Mk 10:19; Lk 18:20; Jn 12:50; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; 2Pet 2:21; 1Jn 2:3-8; 3:23-24; 4:21; 5:2-3; 2Jn 1:4-6.
[4] Mt 5:43-46; 6:24; 10:37; 11:19; 19:19; 22:37-39; 25:31-46; Mk 5:19; 12:30-33; Lk 6:27-35; 7:34,42-47; 10:27-37; 11:5-8,42; 12:4; 14:9-12; 15:5-9,15; 16:9,13; 21:16; Jn 3:16,19; 5:42; 8:42; 11:3,5,11,36; 12:25; 13:1-20,23,34-35; 14:15-31; 15:9-19; 16:27; 17:23-26; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7,15-20.
[5] St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIa IIae q. 26.
[6] Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The King and the Maiden,’ in Philosophical Fragments (1844); republished in Thomas Oden (ed.), The Parables of Kierkegaard (Princeton UP, 1989); cf. ‘Kierkegaard: A parable of a king and a Maiden,’ Glorious Revolution, February 10, 2009 https://trinitypastor.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/kierkegaard-a-parable-of-a-king-and-a-maiden/; Nick, ‘The King and the Maiden by Søren Kierkegaard,’ Reading Theology, April 18, 2011; ‘Second period: Indirect Communication (1843-46),’ D. Anthony Storm, Commentary on Kierkegaard https://sorenkierkegaard.org/ philosophical-fragments.html
