Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

I confess, I use them.  I use hashtags.  Doesn’t everyone? One I use with frequency is:   #IHaveFamilyInIraq.   But when that phrase was first used hashtags weren’t a ‘thing.’   The person who spoke those words was an Iraqi Dominican Sister giving a presentation to Dominican leadership in the US.   She was telling the story of her family (relatives and congregation of Sisters) in her homeland at a time when US political rhetoric was ramping up a plan to invade her country. US Dominicans at that time and since have kept that phrase before ourselves: “ I have family in Iraq” reminding ourselves that our Dominican life stretches beyond a congregation or a country.   We are a global Order in the Church. The phrase also reminds us that we have a particular family in the Order that has been suffering with their people for a very long time.   For us in the US, it reminds us of our need to be vigilant in being informed, to be active in our pursui...

A theme has emerged in my short life as a Sinsinawa Dominican. As a candidate in Madison, I lived with a woman who was a knitting fiend (using ‘fiend’ in the very best sense of the word!)   She doesn’t know it, but I loved to sit and watch as her needles clicked away. As a novice in St. Louis, I was part of a little knitting circle of Dominican sisters and brothers who occasionally met at the priory to knit … and to talk. Last year, at Women’s Hearth in Spokane, I could always find groups of women sitting together, knitting extraordinarily beautiful pieces of work.   What I loved most, though, was just sitting with the women, listening to the banter that accompanied the whir of their knitting needles. Now, in Whitefish Bay/Milwaukee, one of the places I’ve started volunteering is at the Cathedral of St. John, where parish outreach is trying to get a knitting circle off the ground for parishioners and women in a nearby shelter.   In my short time with this...