[[Sister Laurel, why would you, or anyone really, want to make vows to or be consecrated by a bishop instead of God? Why accept someone who is merely a "stand-in" for God? Why not let God consecrate you directly as a hermit if that's so important to you? Do you love the temporal Church more than the spiritual? What happens when you grow spiritually enough to let God act in your life?]]
Where to begin? First, thanks for your questions (and, despite the borrowed language and accusations, I am assuming they are your own). They are timely for Christmas, as I hope to be able to show you. Let me begin by correcting some significant misunderstandings. First, my vows are made not to the bishop but to God. They are made in the hands of the bishop, yes, but they were and are made to God and represent part of an official act of worship in the Roman Catholic Church. The others witnessing my profession and receiving this act on behalf of the Church serve God in this way. In other words, they participate in this act of worship in their unique roles. Everything that happens does so in the Name of God.
To say this is not to point to people doing something instead of God, but to people acting because of God and in and through the very authority, power, and presence of God. Secondly, I have been consecrated by God, not by the bishop serving as a "stand-in" for God. God is certainly mediated in many ways in the Mass and in the Rite of Profession, including in the actions of the bishop, but it is still God doing the receiving of vows, or consecrating, and commissioning me as a hermit of the Local (Diocese of Oakland) and Universal Church. There is a difference between standing in for God, in the way you seem to be using the term (i.e., as somehow opposed to or other than God acting himself) and acting to participate in the actual mediation of God's presence.
It is important, I think, to realize that each person standing with me at the chair during my profession or nearby me as the solemn prayer of consecration was prayed over me was participating in an act of worship and mediation. God was actively present within, among, and to everyone in that Church that day. In fact, the entire Church in heaven and on earth was present and worshipping God as they heard, supported, and rejoiced with me that day. (I was keenly aware of this, especially during the Litany of the Saints!) This was very much about what we pray for in the Lord's Prayer when we ask that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Similarly, this was an experience of heaven and earth interpenetrating one another, because this was the historical Church open to the transcendent God and the entire Communion of Saints and choirs of heaven acting in surprising and awesome ways right here in space and time. This is a hint of what the new heaven and new earth will look like, and it is not divvied up, as the Gnostics might have it, into the temporal and the spiritual, or the human and the divine!
You see, I love the Church, the WHOLE Church in heaven and on earth. I recognize that God has chosen to reveal himself exhaustively in a historical (spatio-temporal) human person and to continue doing so to everyone who, in Christ, allows him/herself to incarnate God in our world. If you take anything away from Christmas this year, I hope it will be the fact that God did not eschew the historical, the spatio-temporal. He made it his own, not for a brief period of "slumming" as one author of a book on the Ascension put the matter, or an act of docetic play-acting, but in an act of costly kenosis and incarnation for eternity. Because of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and ascension, there is no merely spiritual or merely spatio-temporal Church. Because of the Christ Event with its bodily resurrection and ascension, heaven and earth interpenetrate one another. God is not yet all in all, as Revelation puts the matter, but we cannot forget the way reality was changed in this Event --- both earthly and heavenly reality!! This is what God's reconcilation looks like. This is the way God does justice in mercy. God became Emmanuel in Christ and invites us, in Christ, to become Emmanuel as well. There is more to say about the importance of canonical acts, but I think this is good for now. Best wishes for a profound and profoundly revealing Christmas!
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