Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Every other week I meet with a group of 8—10 women and men.  We are all working in various nonprofits focused on serving others.  We gather for 90 minutes to reflect together what our work is teaching us and what we might wish to learn.  This trust circle includes quite a mix:  a woman who coaches 4 adults who have cerebral palsy, another is a man who nurses a 97 year-old woman and who worries a lot about his family in India.  Yet another is a retired physician doing infant and toddler medical check-ups, another reads to refugee toddlers who do not know English.  Recently we were reflecting on a poem of Mary Oliver’s “At the Pond”.   The last stanzas read so powerfully:   “And this is what I think   everything is about:          the way        I was glad for those five and two         that flew away, And the way I hold in my ...

The “New World Symphony,” written by Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, was one of the first symphonic pieces I enjoyed listening to as a kid. Later I heard “Goin’ Home,” a song based on a movement of that symphony and arranged in the form of a Negro spiritual. I loved it as well. Since becoming a Dominican sister and living in three different cities in ten years (community life, study, ministry), I have been prompted numerous times to reflect on what “going home” means and feels like. Home is no longer simply the city where I grew up. It is also the city I lived in for many years and where I return to spend time with family and old friends. Our Sinsinawa Dominican motherhouse, “the Mound,” has felt like home since my first visit. There are people, scattered throughout this country, who also feel like home to me. Yesterday morning, a Sinsinawa sister-friend passed away and has now ‘gone home’ to God. In life and in song: “…It’s not far, jes’ close by, Through an open door; Wor...