Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Checks and balances, describes Lent 2013 for me.  The checks and balances of my life are my spiritual life and relationship with God.     I ask myself……Am I allowing God to be in charge?  Am I feeding my Spirit?  Am I nurturing my relationship with the Beloved?     Where do I need a balance of peace, joy, steadfast faith and trust right now? It is easy to get unbalanced in life.  For example, as a sister, it has been easy for me to be caught up in the busyness of my ministry and routine prayer.   In these weeks of Lent as I check and balance, I give God thanks for this desert time to slow down: to be still…God is my center and my refuge; to ask…help me see blessings and joy that I would otherwise miss; to listen… be attentive to prayer in forms I would not recognize; to wait and hope… for Easter Will Come .   How would you describe Lent 2013 for you? Priscilla Torres, OP Jacksonville, Florida

For my study I have been pondering Teilhard de Chardin, SJ’s meditation, “The Slow Work of God’.  I am particularly drawn to the last two lines: “And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete”. This so fits this season of Lent for me this year.  I have paused and visited with God:  what ought I to do this liturgical cycle to grow more like you?  This invited me to step back and do some self- appraisal and, I hope, some spirit appraisal as well.  Ah, yes, I say, at times the transformation I long for within and without seems infinitesimally slow.  And yet what does time have to do with it?  Might I let myself enjoy the suspense, the anticipation of the process of changing?  Even more to learn to honor in creation, in others, in myself the grace of the incomplete.   And so this Lent I am walking slower, enjoying it more and wondering at all that survey.  Would you care to do a similar walk? K.C. Young, OP Kirkland, Washington