Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Meeting sometimes can be pretty boring!!  Not the one we're participating in these days.  About 240 of the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa and some of our associates are gathered at Green Lake Conference Center in Wisconsin for what we call a General Chapter.  A Chapter is an important event in the life of our community.  Every five years we gather to review the past five years, decide on our focus for the next five years and elect our leaders to help take us there.  In addition, we have a chance to re-connect with one another, pray together, and enjoy one another's company. Today is Day 3 of 8 days!!!  There's lots of energy in the group!!  Yesterday, today, and in the days ahead, we are engaged in "sacred conversations," deep listening to one another and speaking from our hearts about what is most important to us.  It's through those conversations that we decide our common direction or focus.  As we listened to summaries from each table at...

Two weekends ago, I joined a couple of Springfield Dominican friends to spend time at our motherhouse and to attend the “Women and Spirit” exhibit touring parts of the country. The weekend was just what I needed! My friends and I began Saturday spending prayer time in our beautiful chapels, enjoying the quiet of each one. We also visited the softly lit reliquary, the current art exhibit, and were greeted each step of the way by hundreds of brilliant flowering plants placed in every window and hallway warmed by sunshine. That afternoon, we ventured out to see the “Women and Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America” exhibit at the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque. If you haven’t yet seen this extraordinary exhibit, please do! Women and Spirit is a traveling exhibit that tells the story of women religious and our 300-year history in this country. The stories represented are nothing short of phenomenal and capture U.S. sisters’ involvement in education, hospitals and health care, social...