"They might as well be dead," people sometimes say of the men and women who enter religious orders. In they way they mean it, they're wrong. But in another way they're not right enough. With the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience a person does die to what most people live for: marriage and a family, enough money for a comfortable security, the right to do as they please with their life. But, as in Christian death, the vowed religious gives up good and important things to get something even better. For a Dominican this happens at solemn profession. It is a quick death and it comes after Vespers, in the afternoon.

It takes about seventy-five words. The community is in the chapel, the superior sits before the altar, the candidates for solemn vows kneel facing him. After a short reminder about the obligations of the vows, each comes forward, kneels before the superior and, with hands placed upon the Constitutions of the Order, makes his promise of obedience. Included but not mentioned are the vows of poverty and chastity; it is upon obedience that the other vows and religious life itself are based. When each one has made profession, he receives the "kiss of peace," the fraternal embrace of welcome. More legal than liturgical, the profession is made without chant or ceremony. A few minutes, a few words, and a man has bound himself to God, to the Church and to the Order of Preachers for the rest of his life.

Before he takes solemn vows, a Dominican has already spent several years in the Order. When a man comes to the novitiate, he enters religious life blind-folded; no matter how much he knows about the Order, what he has read, or how many Dominicans he has met, he can't know what living in the Order is like until he has actually tried it himself. During the years of novitiate and simple vows, the friar gets to know what obedience means. He finds that it is not so much being under the eye and thumb of a superior, being told to do this or that, as it is getting used to a community, learning to understand and accept the faults as well as the good points in his religious brothers. When he gets to know the Order better, he looks around and sees the kind of work and the way of life that may be given him in the years to come. He realizes that his assignments may not always be what he likes or thinks he is capable of doing. The difficulties and hard parts come into sharper focus and the more the Dominican faces them, the more precious to him becomes the gift he gave to God in the vow of obedience. But he sees more clearly also the rewards that come with the vows.

In the Gospel when Christ invited men to "come and follow Me," He promised to give then a hundred-fold in return, even in this life. A Dominican may find the chief reward in his brothers. All sorts of people end up in the cloister; college students, doctors, servicemen, football players, teachers, boys who have thought about it for most of their lives, men who a year before would never have dreamed of it. Different backgrounds, different interests, a common life, make the Order a small city of God, and getting to know its citizens can be an experience of a lifetime.

Many Dominicans take their greatest satisfaction in the work of the Order. It would be a rare Dominican who could say that his own job was easy. Yet no matter what he is assigned to do, there is always the knowledge that it is done for God under obedience. It may seem unimportant; it is often quite discouraging. But he know that his work is the work of the Church, the most important work in the world: a confessor hearing someone's first confession in twenty years, the hospital chaplain giving the Last Rites, the Cooperator Brothers who know that the rest of the house needs them to keep going as a community, the pastor baptizing, the preaching, the teaching...

Or it may be the monastic life: the rapid chant of the choir, the white habit proudly worn, the social security of poverty, the silence and study. All these things and countless more God gives as natural blessings, rewards to feel and experience, in return for the gift He receives in the vows. These things you can imagine and even take pictures of and put in magazines. But underneath it all must be the reward that only Faith can see, only Hope can look for and Charity can get. Unless a Dominican makes this the center of his vocation, the whole thing is foolish; nothing else is worth giving up all the vows demand of him. The reward is to be able one day to say to God, and to mean it: "I want You more than anything else; I want to be a saint."

The Dominicans was a magazine published by the Western Dominican Province from 1954-1958. A complete set of the magazines are to be found in the Province Archives.

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