The new novice has learned an important convent skill: choral office in a habit. At the end of the first Lauds after her clothing, she leaned across to me and tugged at my sleeve. “How are you meant to . . . sit down?” she whispered in a tone of awed bafflement, and I demonstrated: a complex operation of breviary-balancing, scapular-tucking, choirstall-flipping, and the raising of the heart and mind to God which has taken me nearly a decade to master.

Despite all that, it’s a grand time to be a novice. The weekend of her clothing also saw the perpetual profession of the sister two seats up from her (and one seat down from me) in choir. The novice witnessed the profession unencumbered by any particular responsibilities—receiving the vows, playing the organ, singing the litany of saints—free simply to watch, pray, and bask in the knowledge that together, she and the newly professed were entirely responsible for the tidal wave of balloons, cards, and party food that had crashed over the convent and would take nearly a week to recede.

It is quite something to witness a final profession in the first flush of one’s initial formation. For all the crises and difficulties the novitiate brings (including, but not limited to, learning how to sit with dignity in choir) the process of handing oneself over to God is, thankfully, all in God’s own hands—and this fact becomes unignorable in a liturgy as profoundly, visually striking as the perpetual profession of religious vows, where a sister literally lays herself at Christ’s feet in the act of prostration. This self-giving prostration is, in Dominican tradition, the place in which she receives from her superior the question, “What do you seek?” and gives the answer: “God’s mercy and yours.”

Final profession is not the first time we are asked that question. It is also asked at first profession and at clothing, and each time receives the same answer: we seek nothing but God’s mercy and that of our community. That call-and-response is a reminder to all present—not just the sister prostrated—that what God requires of the one called to this life is not any particular gift, talent, or natural competency but simply the desire to find Him, and to find Him in and through this particular community. That desire is itself His gift, and only He can bring to completion. We learn this lesson in repeated, ever-deepening ways over the course of our formation in the consecrated life, and speak it forth as we commit ourselves to it unto death.

Is there a spiritual lesson to be taken from this bookending of convent events—a weekend beginning with a beginning (clothing) and ending with an ending (perpetual profession)? At times I wanted to think so. But in the days afterwards, I was gently corrected.

In our community clothing takes place between the reading and the Magnificat at Vespers, replacing the responsory. This means that our first act in our newly received habit is standing with the entire community and chanting the Magnificat, making Our Lady’s canticle of praise our own. I can assure readers there are few experiences comparable to singing, “The Almighty has worked marvels for me,” barely a minute after having received a religious habit, to find oneself putting words—God’s words—on a situation that, to our human reasoning alone, seems so strange and joyful as to be entirely beyond them. At every clothing I have witnessed since my own, I have made a point (and perhaps this is a little nosy of me) of looking over at the newly-clothed sister at that particular point in the Magnificat, to experience a little of that strange joy again.

Giving thanks for the newly-clothed sister as I tidied up popped balloons and cake crumbs, I was reminded of a line from Pope St. John Paul II’s apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem, in which he uses that very line of the Magnificat—“The Almighty has worked marvels for me”—to conclude his meditations on Mary’s vocation as the new Eve. “These words [of the Magnificat] certainly refer to the conception of her Son,” the pope writes, “but they can also signify the discovery of her own feminine humanity.” They testify, he says, not only to the revelation of the Incarnation, but also the revelation of Mary’s own identity in God: a woman who is, like each of us, “a person for her own sake, who discovers herself by means of a sincere gift of self.” The discovery to which Mary gives voice in her canticle of praise is a discovery which, he concludes, must “continually reach the heart of every woman and shape her vocation and her life.”

At many clothings over the years, I have reflected that the Almighty works marvels for each of us. But of course the prayer of the Magnificat is not simply for great occasions; we pray it every day, just as we rediscover and recommit ourselves to our state of life every day.

This, I think, is the real lesson of our festive convent weekend: that its simple, satisfying symmetry is merely a tempting illusion. It is true that our desire to seek God’s mercy in consecrated life is given a particular expression on the day of our clothing and our profession—but that desire must, as Pope St. John Paul II would put it, “continually reach the heart” of every sister in the daily living of it.

God’s work of forming a consecrated religious does not begin with her clothing, nor is it completed when she makes profession unto death. Our new novice will have far more lessons to learn over the course of her life in the convent than simply how to comport herself in choir. The process of seeking God’s mercy and the community’s is lifelong—and so the Magnificat which she sang on the day of her clothing will not find its fulfillment on the day of her final profession, but only in the halls of Heaven after a holy death.