Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

One of my favorite spiritual writers is Dorothee Soelle.   Thinking about winter, weather, the cold, the angst and suffering in our world, I came across a line from her book,   The Silent Cry.     In this work she writes that amazement includes ‘a bleak side of terror   and   hope’. She muses that: ‘This ability for wonderment brings about consenting to amazement and is a way of praising.’ These juxtapositions move me outside of the ‘gray’ and invite me to really hear longing to be part of the whole from an immigrant knocking at the door of our border.  I hear awe and wonder in the yearning with the call for voting rights for all in our nation and in our countries as well.   One small Washington town received three feet of snow in one day this month. What a climate change statement! Those who came to help dig this village out brought their hunger to serve and their shovels were praising!  What amazes you these days? What m...

The gardener in me is always grateful for the resilience of Spring. Each springtime I marvel how plants that in their dormancy looked nearly dead rebound back.     However, this year with the merciless reality of climate change I have discovered another side of nature’s resilience.     This summer with 108 plus degrees I have witnessed both the cruelty and tenacity of earth.     As I sit in silence with plants unable to receive their fill of moisture I   pause to enter more deeply into the mystery of recovery.     We are all learning more about recovery from a devastating pandemic.  We are actively pondering the devastation of centuries of white supremacy.  We are engaged in understanding the fragility of our republic.  Where do you find your resilience these days?  Me?  I gently observe how even a little water is slowly healing my garden.  And you?   KC Young, OP Kirkland, WA

So begins the prayer of our morning group on Wednesdays. It comes from the pastoral of the US Catholic Bishops,  Brothers and Sisters to Us ,  1979. So many traumatic things are presented to us lately—virus, violence, climate change and on and on.  “Wake us up, Lord”  is a good prayer for  2020. The above traumas can be related to the next phrase of the prayer—"so that the evil of racism finds no home within me.”  Through listening and discerning with anti-racism groups, I wake up.  I realize that power over others is a disease that is part of all the traumas of our lives. If I think and act as if I am better than another it causes violence. If the organizations to which I belong are based on being more deserving and hoarding energy and material goods, they contribute to climate disasters. Even virus is exacerbated when some people’s dignity and health are regarded as less important than others. How can our waking up bring healing to ourselves and...

Over the last months, my prayers have included in a particular way people in cities and towns along the might, muddy, murky Mississippi River - and especially for residents of Davenport, Iowa, my hometown, which has experienced devastating record flooding. Experts fear that while the waters will wane, flooding could continue throughout the summer if rainfall is heavy, both locally and upstream. Businesses will, and are, experiencing losses - physical, financial and emotional. And, as is always the case, here and globally, those who suffer most are the materially poor who do not have the financial or human resources to rebuild and move on. Clearly climate change is part of the problem, with polar ice caps melting at alarming rates under the ever warming blanket of earth’s atmosphere, the product of human activity more than anything else. Yet there is another voice crying out in the midst of this ‘natural disaster’...the voice of the river, whose plaintive cry is, “Where would you hav...

Already this month, two have written about experiences of the Dominican Sisters Conference Convocation.   This was/is my plan as well. My perspective comes as part of the planning committee.   We began our work more than 2 years ago and as it took form and focus, I came to the event excited and hopeful that those gathered would experience a deepening of our Dominican life and mission across 18 congregations of Sisters. We prayed, studied, celebrated, reconnected to friends and made new ones, we acted as one voice around the issue of Climate Change and blessed four Sisters who will be attending the global conference in Paris later this on this issue.   We did this in the context that as part of the Order of Preachers our upcoming 800 th Jubilee Year calls us to continue the Holy Preaching begun by St. Dominican and the early women and men who joined him. As the days have unfolded since the convocation, I hear from attendees how the experience continues to stir th...