Shanti

As I look back on my spiritual journey I am aware that there are certain elements that run like a thread throughout the growing or deepening process. My growth in spirituality is deeply connected with my personal identity. The more I discovered different facets of myself my identity, e.g. being an Indian, a woman, an rscj the deeper and more inclusive my spirituality became. Being brought up in a traditional Catholic family I had a conscious understanding of myself as Christian but the other facets were not actively part of my consciousness.

Secondly I see relationships as an important element of my spirituality. To begin with my relationship with God was patterned to a large extent on the relationship that I experienced in my family with my parents and sisters. The love that bonded us became the foundational experience for all my other relationships.

Thirdly I have also been deeply influenced by persons, events, situations and environment which formed part of my life at its various stages.

I come from a home that is very religious. Prayer was part and parcel of our lives together. In fact God was like a member of the family. My parents referred to God for everything, spoke of God to each other and to us. I grew up with the security of knowing that we have a God who loves and cares for me. 

In the second year of my novitiate there was a radical change in the formation programme, personnel, life style, place etc. For the first time an Indian Novice Mistress was appointed. At the same time The Church in India had just opened itself to learning about the spiritual riches of our heritage coming through Hinduism. The Society was open to all this and our Novice Mistress Vandana Mataji was in the forefront of this pioneering movement. So we as her novices were the first group who was available for experimentation. We were introduced to Yoga, bhajans (devotional hymns composed by holy men and women who were not Christians,) Nam jap, repetition of the name of God. We were taken to Hindu temples and encouraged to participate in Hindu festivals and pilgrimages. It was a time of experimentation and most of us enjoyed it thoroughly. All of us coming from very traditional Catholic families found great excitement in this new approach.

It was at one such pilgrimage where there is so much spontaneity in song and dance, devotion and joy expressed that I had a very deep experience of God's tangible presence. I felt my heart was touched and opened to a God who is love, who is free and wants me to be free and to love with my whole being body, mind and spirit. This brought me closer to Jesus and drew me to wanting to understand His interior dispositions. From then on I felt I had become a bhakta, a devotee of the Lord Jesus. This experience also put me in touch with my own deep Indian roots. I felt I was part of the spiritual tradition of my country. Somehow this inner experience gave me a sense of oneness with our other Hindu bhaktas or devotees. I felt comfortable using their prayers, their songs to pray to my Jesus. Even though we worship God under different names and forms. I felt one with them, It was as if something within me had been opened and widened and deepened. I found myself being enriched by the Scriptures of Hinduism, especially the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita which we sometimes used for our prayer.

One year after my first vows I was part of the group that launched out to start an Ashram with Vandana Mataji as the Acharya or teacher. This was in the nature of an experimental center where we tried to live Religious Life with the values that are part of the Indian religious ethos. This included a simplicity of life, vegetarianism, several hours of meditation, practice of Yoga, sharing of one's spirituality with people of all faiths, a lived inter denominational and inter religious dialogue, an open house hospitality. The three years there deepened my first enthusiasm and all the seminars that we held at our Ashram were centered around learning to relate and worship God in the Indian ethos. I felt I was in theright waters and swam freely. The spirituality with its focus oneness and interiority was for me the concretizing of the contemplative aspect of our rscj spirituality.

My later years were more an integration and deepening of all that I had experienced, mostly through the practice of awareness. I feel the presence of God permeating the details of my life. God as father and mother are in charge and see to every detail of my life. Often I am overwhelmed by the sensitive and delicate ways God acts in my life. I am filled with a deep sense of gratitude. I am grateful to the Society's call to contemplate the Heart of Christ in the transpierced heart of humanity. For I see the Spirituality of the Society as the Spirituality of the open Heart, a heart that is open to God and open to the world, the open Heart of God calling me to open my heart in love for all, ready to be transpierced in the process of giving life. Prayer and Interior life continue to be the pivotal points of living our spirituality in the world today. This will truly make us Religious of His Heart.

As I look back I am filled with a deep sense of gratitude to the Society's openness in allowing us to explore and express our spirituality in our own way and thus bring and ever greater richness to the way we experience the spirituality of the Sacred Heart. The Spirit blows where it wills and as it wills and this openness of the Society is for me the mark of openness to the Spirit. For after all life nourishes spirituality and spirituality is lived in life, concretized and experienced through our choices, our relations, our decisions, our values.