On this WORLD DAY OF PRAYER FOR THOSE WHO LIVE THE CONSECRATED LIFE, some words from Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. for all those who are living within promise:

"In our lives we will see people to whom there is almost nothing that we can say, people who have lost a wife or husband, suffered breakdown; people in poverty, who have dropped out of society and can find no way back; people at the door asking for food and a bit of hope. What can we say? What possible sense can we make of their experience?

Sometimes all that we can tell them about is that God has made promises, to heal us, to raise us from the dead, and to bring the Kingdom. And how can we talk of the God who makes promises unless there is a sign? And the sign is the wife and the husband pledging their word; the young monk or nun or sister or friar making a promise. Or there is a single person keeping faith with God, abiding by the vows of baptism or keeping faithful to whatever promises they have made.

In a society in which millions of people have no grounds for hope, no prospect of getting a job, resigned to lifelong unemployment, then the God of promises is sometimes the only God we can preach."

Will you live the promise?

• https://www.carmelitevocation.org.uk/

www.stjudeshrine.org.uk