Our class photo shows the five of us: Alma, Mary Ann, Thurston, Bill, and myself.

Eight years later, when she was 33 years of age, Mary Ann of the mischievous grin was killed instantly in a freak car accident. She had been bringing an elderly friend back from the dentist.

Then in 1971 at age 41, Alma died from cancer. She had lived with this disease for seven years in a transforming faith that inspired all those around her.

The two men, after spending several generous years with us, felt called to move on.

So I am the only one left from my class.

My thoughts these days take me back to my earliest years in this family of Madonna House, one of the first in the movement in the Church now called "ecclesial communities." Many years ago Pope Pius XII told Catherine Doherty, our foundress, "Persevere, madam, for on groups like yours depends the future of the Church." It now seems evident that those were prophetic words.

What a privilege it was to work so closely with Catherine, Fr. Eddie, Fr. Callahan, and our other pioneers, and to have taken part in the work of founding of our community! Truly my fifty years of apostolic life have been very rich.

So why do I have no memory of making my first promises, I wondered. It was, after all, a very decisive moment.

Then suddenly I saw clearly that my call to give my life to the Lord had, in fact, come much, much earlier—well before I had even thought about vocation.

Then I remembered what I now see as the key moment in my inner journey.

I was ten or eleven years old, and my brother Donald was probably nine months. It was a Sunday morning, and he was asleep in his crib, all dressed up in his Sunday best, light blue rompers, all ready to be taken to Mass.

He looked so beautiful and so peaceful. I felt awed by the miracle of his being. Then suddenly I felt a surge of envy of his peace, his rest, his unsullied purity.

A wave of pain, of some kind of nameless angst, overwhelmed me, pulling me into a dark vortex. Was it a sense of the meaninglessness of life? Did it come out of my over-sensitivity and my over-identification with the pain of others? Or was it the first intimation of my own sinfulness?

To this day, I cannot identify the feeling or understand what happened. Much less can I explain it in purely psychological terms. I do know there was a taste of the power of darkness.

This experience was not totally new, but that morning, it was sharp and fearsome and seemed endless. I have a vague memory of a fleeting moment of prayer, possibly of saying the name of Jesus.

Then suddenly the feeling broke and was replaced by a realization of something.

Though I did not experience it in words, I would say it was this: "Pain need not destroy you. If you allow it its place in your life, it will shape your heart so that you can stand by others in their pain."

Light had broken through the darkness and terror. I remember thinking that tomorrow at school I would befriend Jim and Blanche, the most unpopular of my schoolmates. I think I did.

Where did that experience come from? Obviously I have never forgotten it. I see it as my Magi’s star which has guided me and given meaning to my life. It even steered me through the process of discerning my vocation.

When I met Catherine Doherty and Madonna House, there was an immediate resonance in my heart. The lines from the Little Mandate struck me powerfully: "Being one with the poor…. Take up my cross, their cross, and follow Me…." The focus of Madonna House on the Cross and Resurrection drew me in a way I could not understand.

Moreover, the strong call to family life for which my own family had well prepared me was already in me—the call towards living sobornost.

I may not remember the day of my first promises, but I do remember very clearly the day I decided to ask to become an applicant.

For the past month or more, I had been torn between going home and resuming a very meaningful relationship, and staying at Madonna House.

I knew I had to make a decision. There were plusses and minuses to both. Back and forth I went until, too tired to try to discern any more, I said to the Lord, "I let go. I give up. Please speak, and I’ll try to listen."

Very soon I heard in my heart, "This is where the deepest desires of your heart will be fulfilled."

This happened on the eve of the Immaculate Conception, December 8th.

Years later, I came across a line—I think it was in a poem by Charles Péguy: "Faith is believing in times of darkness what you have seen in a moment of light."

There has been plenty of pain and darkness during these last fifty years, as there is in every life. What Catherine called, "the journey inward" is indeed dispossessing.

But it has not destroyed me. Far from it. I have discovered God in the stuff of everyday life and, even more, in glimpses in the heart of my being. In the midst of my flailings and failings, I have found one strength. God’s. And I have discovered that one can be at peace in the midst of hard questions, even turmoil.

We live in changing times, difficult times. The words "Culture of Death" are not just words. But I do know that God is greater than any darkness and confusion. I do know that Love does indeed conquers all.