Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Recently 5 of my sisters made a you tube video entitled “Living a life with Passion.” They are relatively new to Dominican life, not to life itself. They are filled with energy, love, commitment and joy. They are following their hearts. I am nearing my golden jubilee. I was a teacher, administrator a hospital and a hospice chaplain. I loved each of these ministries and gave them my all. Three years ago, I retired due to illness. Since then I have had to live in an unknown space, one that I often listened to others talk about. I had to remember my words, tell them to myself and live into a new form of Dominican life. As this unfolds challenges abound. I am a woman living on oxygen 24 hours a day. I have slowed down but have not stopped. I have rediscovered the still small voice within me. She tells me to breathe, to write, to pray, to listen as others share theirs and prayer with me. She tells me to keep going and not to give up. She says that slowing down and not being in ac...

I haven’t felt like writing these past days.  Like many others, my heart has been sick and saturated with the pain we seem so easily able to inflict on one another.  Polarity reigns, fed from our sense of right pitted against your equally adamant one.  As we each stand up and speak out, I wonder how it is that we can look at and listen to the same things, but see and hear them so differently?  In the midst of all of this turmoil, I am grateful for the sunrise, for the heaving of the Earth as she slowly slips off her frozen blanket and prepares, once again, to rise.   I am grateful for the wonder of the stars and the moon and for delicate fingers of frost, for bird songs.   I am grateful for smiles and kindness and forgiveness and compassion.   As St. Augustine said, “My heart is restless, O Lord, until it rests in you.”  And so, I am most grateful for the chance to hold all of this while hanging with God, who is Constancy and Love, with ...

"How are you going?" People asked when I lived in Trinidad and Tobago.   "How has your week been?" A person asked today hoping to make conversation. "Where has God called you this week?" Is not often asked, but it is good for reflection as we come to the end of a week.  For me?              •    To mourn with one whose husband had recently died.              •    To plan with a pastor in how to share the social gospel, but also have compassion toward those who do not share his passion for justice.              •    To be a peaceful presence in a moment of controversy at a board meeting.              •    To listen to one whose almost adult daughter is trapped in mental illness. So how has God called you  this week?  We might see how these calls fit the "blesseds" we heard J...