Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

  I like to swim laps. I love moving through water and reminding myself of Catherine’s words,  ” As the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish, so I am in God and God is in me.”   At the end of my daily swim, I turn onto my back and for a few moments just float on the surface. I allow myself to be conscious of the water supporting me and I practice letting go. I relax my arms and legs, hands and feet, neck, and head.    I focus on my breath, each slow inhale and exhale, and I practice letting go.  For one day I will need to let go of all things. I will let go of my body, of my final breath, deeply trusting that just as the water supports me in this moment so too in my final letting go, I am held and supported always in God’s love.   We humans are born with a prehensile grip and cling tightly to things. No matter how I may try to let go of things, plans, control, I find myself soon grasping and holding on again. I guess it take...

I am blessed to live on a beautiful lake in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. These spring days are breathtaking. When I get up in the morning I open my door to a view of the sunrise. The room is flooded with light, a light so bright that it hurts my eyes. I thank God for a new day, a new opportunity to enjoy creation and to share its beauty with the people in my life. If a spring morning on earth is this awesome, what will heaven be like? Our Dominican sister Catherine of Siena tells us that “All the way to heaven is heaven because Christ is the way.” How are you experiencing heaven today? How are you sharing that experience with others?   Mary Ellen Green, OP Woodruff, WI

Very angry feelings welled up inside of me when I heard and saw news of the insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington D.C. two Wednesdays ago.     I asked myself why?  Why are a few people allowed to flaunt downright inhuman, evil, selfish, rude, cruel, violent behavior in the face of goodness, beauty, truth, innocence, decency and the common good?  This led me to reflect on how I respond in the face of similar atrocities in my sphere of influence.  I confess that sometimes, too often, I choose silence.     Catherine of Siena had something to say about this: “Speak up! It’s silence that kills the world.”  This year, I want to have the courage to seek out truth and to speak truth in the face of lies, to defend  innocence in the face of corruption, to laud beauty where there is ugliness, to acclaim goodness where there is evil and to fight for the common good where-ever I see selfishness and greed.  This has got to stop! Let it be...

Feast day of Catherine of Siena, April 29th I humbly admit to my simple Catholic background; I went to public schools, Sunday and Holy day mass, and rudimentary catechism classes in our rural church on Saturday mornings.  I never opened a Bible until I went to a Catholic college – and even then I slept through a lot of that class!  So when I entered the Congregation I was in left field when it came to knowing my roots.  That was especially true when it came to learning about Catherine of Siena.  A) I’d never heard of her and B) after hearing of her all I could think was “What was she thinking?” – all that solitude and crazy fasting and extreme self-denial and dialogues with Jesus and…I could go on.  So here we are on her feast day all these years later and thanks to great contemporary scholarship by Dominican women and others, I have new and deeper insights into Catherine’s life of faith, her intense and loving service to the Church and ...

That was the big Spring announcement when, as kids, we found the Burpee Seed Catalog in our rural mailbox at the end of winter.   Eager for anything colorful, we poured over those pages - fodder for dreams of garden flowers and foods, for new life and the promise of a new season.   Now, hovering in mid-Lent, my dry soul/garden needs a version of the Burpee Catalog and I realize I have one, we all do   – it’s called the Gospel.   But unlike a package from the seed catalog, we don’t have to wait for it to arrive, we don’t have to be in the best possible condition to plant or harvest.   Because our God doesn’t work that way;     God’s mercy and grace abound even when we feel like we’re in a perpetual February or snowy March.   Gardens of every kind appear everywhere in scripture and the Holy is found there in all times and all seasons.   Take the time to ponder, sit with, and image these words of Catherine of Siena for your...