Profiles

“Everything is grace.” This is the sentence which best describes my life and my vocation. I try to live this truth every day, with gratitude for the people I meet and the events that I experience.

As I try to write about the journey that has brought me to the Society of the Sacred Heart, I still feel the impact of the mark I felt within me when I arrived in my first rscj community: home at last! After some years of searching I experienced the joy of arriving in this place where I would be able to learn how to be my most truthful self and allow the Other, God, to change that into gift.

My experiences in life and my practice of the spiritual exercises have helped me to enter deeply into the reality of forgiveness. Even when I wrote my thesis, I focused on "forgiveness as the way towards personal transformation." Through my relationships, especially in the family, I continue to touch the profound mystery of forgiveness. Indeed, all these years, I have experienced the gentle, tender, and forgiving love of God's heart.

I got to know the Religious of Sacred Heart in Montevideo. The first time I visited the community in El Talar, I felt my heart race and knew at once that this was where Jesus wanted me. I felt at home. I knew this was where I could be myself, that it was the place Jesus was inviting me to live from my heart, walking with Him, in community, among the poor.

I come.… following in the footsteps of other Sisters who have offered their lives in this land.

When I was a little girl I was given a present of a picture with a little girl praying, with this text: “Lord, I pray for the happiness of every human being in the world.” It is hard to believe, but God had apparently already planted this desire deeply into my heart.

I am privileged to be engaged in a mission that is connected to the Word -- reflecting on and sharing the Gospel with others, especially with women, allowing them to experience the God of Love. I have been helped by the Society of the Sacred Heart's contemplative outlook towards reality and the richness of our interior life.

"Being privileged to have care, education, health, and opportunities to grow and enjoy life led me to listen to what God wanted of me, to open myself generously to the needs of others in my country and in the Church.... Gradually my life was founded on two pillars: God, and the poor. The Gospel, the Beatitudes especially, were for me a call to announce that nearness of a consoling God in the midst of so much suffering that the poor lived during those years in Chile and in most of Latin America."

When I knew that it would fall to me to introduce you, three Biblical figures came into my mind, three women: Sarah, the Syro-Phoenician woman, and the Beloved in the Song of Songs. - Claire Castaing (BFN)