Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

June is my usual month for my annual retreat and so it was last month.   I try to NOT have expectations - to be open to the Divine Spirit’s surprises. During my years in Florida, it has sometimes been a challenge to find a retreat house for myself –   I minister at one all year!   In Tampa I found one that hosts a week long silent directed retreat every June.   Perfect! Yet summer in Florida can be like winter in the northern states.   How so?   The weather – and bad driving conditions.   In Florida?   Each year – as I drive back and forth across the state for my retreat – I drive through torrential downpours.   There is a whiteout of a different kind that happens.   Everyone puts on their car flashers.   I talk to God a lot during these episodes. Something else happened this year and with the support of my director, I attended to it.   I have had a long relationship with many Iraqi Dominicans – Sisters & Friars – be...

I went to our motherhouse at Sinsinawa this weekend to help thirteen of our Sisters celebrate 50 years of vowed life.   We call them Golden Jubilarians!   And what a group they are!! There’s probably not a single one of them that could have predicted where they would end up after 50 years.   And over those years they have been places and done things and met people they never would have imagined when they started out as young women! Like anyone else they’ve had experiences over the past 50 years that have shaped them as faithful women – just as their mothers and grandmothers had.   Like everyone else, Sisters suffer failures and losses as well as successes.     Every Sister and every family knows in their hearts what those sufferings were.   Even if we do not know what is carried in the privacy of each heart, we have only to look back at the 50 years of history in our church and in our world to know the truth of what they have been through! ...