Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Dear Lent, You snuck up on me early this year, old friend.   I wasn’t quite ready for you!   But here you are again, and this year, you’re asking me an important question: how well do I really know you? I admit, you aren’t everyone’s favorite season.   You don’t have a reputation for being cheerful, after all.   But the more I get to know you, the more I realized that you aren’t all about sinfulness and sacrifice, though those are realities you speak.   The practices you invite us to embrace – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – are really about mercy!   If we embrace them well, they can nourish us, bring us outside of ourselves, and help us be more merciful with ourselves and others. Through fasting you invite me to take a break – either temporary or permanent – from the non-essentials.   This can help me to root out the parts of myself that get caught up in destructive habits or selfish behavior.   It can nurture gratitude and en...

I live in a community composed of two Vietnamese and two Sinsinawa Dominicans.   That means we’re all learning about one another’s culture all the time. So within one week, we celebrated Tet (the Lunar New Year, which fell on February 8 th this year) and then Mardi Gras on the 9 th .   Vong and Lien decorated and invited a dozen guests for prayers and supper before Tet, but our Mardi Gras was relatively subdued.   Our house is, after all, a house of study and we’re weeks away from mid-term break.   Tet was an eye-opener for me.   I’ve learned that for many Asian countries, it’s the beginning of spring.   (When I check the newspaper, I find that from now on, the average high temperatures do actually rise.)   In Viet Nam and China, the celebration promises, or at least hopes for, abundance.   People give friends and family money and feast on the best foods they can find—a sort of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years combined.   Having b...

As Dominican Women, we strive to live our lives grounded in the Word of God.  Lent becomes an opportunity for deeper reflection on our relationship with the Source of All Being.  One of our sisters, Marta Alken, OP recently wrote an article in which she highlighted four points that reflect a life centered in God: -  we strive for relationships that are enlivened by creativity – the ability for self-reflection, for change, for giving and receiving, for solitude; -   we have a capacity to experience a wide range of emotion – feel all of life for ourselves and others, -  we have the ability for self-transcendence—the capacity to lay down our lives for others and work for the common good, -  we recognize a healthy self-esteem – we understand that we are part of God’s web of life. ¹ I have used these four points as my daily reflection during Lent.   A life centered in God is a life that inspires joy, vision, imagination, detachment, disposs...