Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

The song that best describes my call to religious life is   Amazing Grace . I never felt I had a call to religious life, despite some Ursuline and Dominican Sisters having suggested it to me. So how did I end up here?  First, I had started a novena to the Mother of Perpetual Help because they always did that novena at my church, Holy Names in Omaha, NE.  My intention in making the novena had nothing to do with discerning religious life but was to ask for help in finding me a job because I was just graduating from college at the University of Omaha with a degree in Home Economics and a minor in Education. I was praying to the Blessed Mother to help me find an appropriate job.  As I waited for the bus to “the U”, a young man passed me at the bus stop. He could see that I was going to the University, and I could see by the stack of books in his car that he was, too. He offered me a ride so I wouldn’t have to take the bus. One morning, he had his car radio on, and I...

Driving back to Wisconsin from Spokane, alone but not lonely, became a pilgrimage of sorts for me.   My appreciation deepened for the diversity of Mother Earth, her majestic mountains, rolling hills, bounding and ambling animals, beautiful sunsets.   It was a graced time of reflection, decompression and the processing of time spent with so many really good women and men.   The entire trip became a rolling retreat, an asphalt prayer, a honing of an awareness of the grace that is my life.   I noticed so many things, including this prayer, which I found in the back of a One Year Bible at a Benedictine monastery in South Dakota.   I have no idea why I turned to that otherwise blank page where, in penciled cursive, was written: “Dear Lord, let me be as disturbed about this situation (or person) as you are. No more, no less.   If you are angry, let me be angry, too.   But if you are not disturbed, let me share your Peace.” ~ Fr. Greene I don’t know...