Sister Josefa Menendez: First Vow When a Child

Yes, it is true. She made a vow to God when she received First Holy Communion and repeated this vow. Her confessor told her to tear it up, that a young child should not make such vows.

She kept the vow. It is extant in her childish script, a century or so later. She repeated the vow for her Communions.

She was not infiltrated by evil spirits. She did not need years of counseling or deliverance. She was a victim soul, a mystic, and no doubt at some point in time will be canonized a saint--if her religious community can keep her cause promoted and has the funds to do so. Regardless, her life was one of suffering after her father died, and especially after she became a religious sister, entered the convent, was transferred from her native Spain to Poitier, France, suffered much physically, had many mystical experiences, wrote them, and died at an early age.

She died on December 29, 1923.

I celebrated her death date as I do each year since I read her book The Way of Divine Love. Had made vows privately, myself, on this date, in 2000. Renewed them each year. Was vow to live as religious solitary. This year did not renew. Rather, avowed to even less, to be far less. But to suffer, yes. Suffering vows to be renewed, and the other, the life that goes with suffering--it unfolds in God's will.

Confessor the other day, in trying to reason and calm, said among other thoughts, "It is not easy to be sick." No. There is much that goes along with suffering when one does avow to suffer what one suffers for God, for souls, in Christ, with, through, in Him.

It is not easy. Mystery is not easy. Mystical love is not easy.

But it is worth pursuing. Yes.

[The rose, photographed in Agnus Dei Gardens in warmer, sunnier season, is for you, Sr. Josefa, with gratitude for your intercessions, and for your life example of victim soul suffering of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.]