My favorite liturgical feast is Pentecost! It announces itself with aliveness, zeal, and spirit—a wildly untamed Spirit that is—and one cannot commit their life to this Spirit and expect to remain in control. This has been a lifelong learning of surrender for me! (I can feel Godde smile as I write.) I made my final profession on the eve of Pentecost in 1988. It was a wonderful day full of commitment, community, and celebration! I continue to be enlivened by this memory each spring when Pentecost arrives to fire me up anew.

The theme I had chosen for this celebration of profession was “Passion, Desire, Freedom.” Each word had grown in me over the years as I discerned my religious vocation. I had them written on the liturgy programme’s cover and engraved on the inside of my profession ring. I even went so far as to tattoo them on my body when I turned 65! It is the word “passion” that I wish to explore here.

I love this word “passion.” Whenever Euphrasie Barbier uses the word “zeal” in her writings, I can feel a resonance swell in my heart, a reverberation of the “passion” for life, learning, and God that I cherish as an RNDM. She wished that her sisters be animated by a truly humble and generous zeal; this zeal should be a dominant force of their whole life; it should fill them with a hunger and thirst for justice and nourish their prayer life, their aspirations, and their spirit of sacrifice.¹ Euphrasie wanted us to proclaim a vow of zeal in addition to the traditional ones of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But when she presented her Constitutions for approbation in 1888, a vow of zeal was not approved. She chose then to make a private vow of zeal in the depths of her own inner being, perhaps in conversation with her confessor; this private vow was renewed constantly throughout her life.

So my contemporary understanding of “passion” has been something akin to élan vital, a vital source of aliveness and inspiration. Alas, of late, I read of its more ancient spiritual meaning of “being stuck, grabbed (by the passions), and blindly reactive.”² The passions divide the heart, and “the heart that is divided, pulled this way and that by competing inner agendas, is like a wind-tossed sea, unable to reflect on its surface the clear image of the moon.”³ The contemplative call of the Gospel is to live with an undivided heart. And that remains the longing of this heart on her trek from passions to passion to zeal—for the glory of God and the sanctification of souls (Euphrasie Barbier on zeal).

Perhaps zeal expressed by a divided heart is more akin to becoming a zealot; I have known this energy within me. The humble and generous zeal of a unified heart is to become prophet-like in the world. I love Euphrasie’s zeal and encouragement; every Pentecost, her prophetic voice sings to me anew.