Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

  How I love and admire our teacher Nature. She always invites me to insight, change, and integration. I have been preparing my garden for winter’s approach and found myself digging in a much, overgrown area of tangled, immersed Japanese Irises! When was the last time I did this, I asked myself?!     The tangled root system indicated to me that it had been 5, 6, 7? years! Whew! The Iris roots resisted being moved. They were so woven together and tangled they did not take well to my spade and shovel. It was obvious they ‘liked’ being close together and yet I knew that they all did not have the breathing space to bloom. Once broken up I could move some clumps to other spots in my large backyard for future growth. Our Congregation is just beginning preparations for our every 5-year Chapter meeting where we review how God’s Mission has us and how we are responding to this. It is a graced time of paying attention to our growth and opening ourselves up to where the Spirit is le...

Last week we gathered at the Mound. For me, it is going home. At first it seems it will be overwhelming seeing 200 good friends all at once.   Spending time thinking and praying together about future directions. Discerning together where God is calling us now. “So who is making you go?”   My friend asked.   ‘“ I am going because it is my place of belonging, my family. It is a responsibility that I promised long ago.   I vowed that I would listen to God through this community of sisters.” Through our time of gathering we sang together, prayed together, listened together.   We were blessed by sharing our longings and our concerns. We were blessed by being present together when one of our wise sisters came to speak to all of us.   She told us to remember to love beauty and to always preach the Gospel.   She went to be seated, and then died of a heart attack in the presence of all of us. The next day we celebrated with two new sister...

This is my second attempt at blogging and I wish to share today a very special experience I had over the Easter weekend.  My brother, John, is a priest for the Sioux City Diocese and has always worked in small parishes in rural Iowa.  After 46 years of ministry, he will be retiring.  Saturday, I drove to Wall Lake, Iowa where my family gathered to celebrate this occasion.  John and I are less than a year apart in age and we grew up like Irish Twins. There were six children in our family and we were blessed with loving parents and a marvelous education by the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters.  Both John and I began our religious vocations right after high school and I celebrated my final vows at his first Mass. The prayer card that we created for this occasion expressed our hopes. Dark and cold we may be, but this is no winter now. The frozen misery of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move; the thunder is the thunder of the floes, the thaw, the flood, the upst...