Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

What?   Happy New Year?   Yes, this is how I always feel when a new school year begins.   As a long time teacher, I still love the opening of school, the anticipation of a new year ahead, new faces, new ideas, a new season.     It always feels more like a new year than January first!    This is a time of endings and beginnings, a goodbye to summer and hello to autumn – change is in the air.   It’s a good time to ask myself what changes I need to make, to see what needs to be renewed in me as this year moves forward.    I’m very good at prolonging a project.   How often I say to myself, “I’m going to read that book (or article or website or…) soon” and then realize how long it has been ignored.   Or I realize how I promised someone who was temporarily in a rehab center that I’d be over to visit soon – only to discover those days have passed and she’s been discharged.   This new term, new season, new week asks only o...

I’m not referring to the weeks in the year when Sundays in the Church year are counted by the ordinal numbers 1 through 32, but I’m speaking of those times to be expected in the normal course of living.  In our world at Sinsinawa Mound, 2017 Summer Jubilee celebrations are history, and 2017 Community Days are past.  Now during our everyday days, all of us live into the experiences we had during those stirring, inspiring, and uplifting events of the summer doing what we usually do on an everyday basis. In the midst of those ordinary days, I’ve found highlights animating, heartening, and supporting me.   Several of my sisters came for a visit this past weekend, and we enjoyed each other’s company in the midst of ordinary events.   We really didn’t have any great plans; mostly we sat around the dining room table playing games, telling stories, and laughing a lot in the midst of sharing meals and snacks.   When I came into work this morning, someone greet...