Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

This week is a very special week in our congregation because two of our sisters are making their final, or perpetual, profession.  This is a most joyous event, but also a solemn one.  We are filled with joy that God has chosen them to join us for the rest of their lives, but we also stand in awe at their courage in this time of uncertainty. Since I live with one of these sisters, I have been personally involved in her discernment process, and because of this, I have reflected on my own commitment made more than 50 years ago. What a gift and a grace it has been in my life, and I pray that our two sisters will always see this as gift, too. Our whole congregation joins together in asking God's abundant blessings on them.   Marie Lucek, OP Madison, WI

One would think that this extended time of sheltering in place might teach me more about patience. However, I am finding that once again my garden is teaching me about taking time. One instance of this was planting my cucumber seedlings outside too early. I was so eager to get parts of my garden in that I placed my light-grown cucumbers in the soil before they were strong enough to deal with the outdoors. Hmmm…back to planting more cucumbers beneath my grow light. I have begun to see this grow light to be like grace in my life. Aren’t we all invited to settle in and let the Light of God’s time nurture us and invite us to grow stronger in love, patience, listening? I have also discovered another value of God’s Grow Light. Rather than chide myself about my impatience, I was able to grin and know I can keep on learning and rest assured that God’s Grow Light is ever with me.   What teaches you about gently watching your patience and presence grow? What do you know about God’s Grow Ligh...

This beautiful tree and friend of mine can be seen from almost every window in the home in which I live.     I have had the great privilege of watching the tree move into spring.     What a gift to see the dormant beauty of winter turn into springtime splendor.     First were the buds, then the flowers came, and now, the green leaves are moving in… I am reminded that each part of our journey holds grace.  Each step we take is crucial and needed.   As  Dominicans, we are called to be open to finding God everywhere.  During springtime, that means being open to finding God in the sunshine and in the rain, in the warm weather and in the colder days…wherever we turn, God is there.   How about you?  Where are you seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting, or touching God these days?     Peggy Ryan, OP Dominican University River Forest , IL 

This week the university where I minister is celebrating graduation.     And, it is also the week in which the United States celebrates Mother’s Day.     I saw so many ties between these two events in the past few days.  Students remembering and praising their mothers (and fathers and other family members) for the love and support they received.   Gratitude, study, and the sharing of life with another are examples of what we are called to as followers of Christ.  It is dates like graduation and Mother’s Day that remind us of the gift and privilege that is ours when we pass on what we receive.   When we allow the hope and grace and goodness that we are filled with to overflow onto and into the lives of those around us.  The Catholic Worker Founder, Dorothy Day, said, “the best things to do with the best things in life is to give them away.”   This past week I saw such great examples of what our lives can...

I live in a four unit apartment building own by my congregation.   There are eight Sisters here. When the shut down came last March - we declared we would be together in the building.  We didn't have a name for it but later came the term:  Covid Bubble.  Grace appeared! During this time we have supported those who would need to come and go in ministry, found creative ways to celebrate, and had the great opportunities to practice patience!  Grace appeared! Each of us had to find ways to cope that fit our personalities.  Two of us love doing jigsaw puzzles and have passed along hints with a puzzle the other had not done.  Some play cards - win or lose - it didn't matter. Grace appeared! I continue seeing people for Spiritual Direction, thanks to technology.  And, because of this same technology, have "attended" Mass & panel discussions, taken classes, joined events with people around the globe as well as p...

In a terrifying way, the twin pandemics of Racism and Covid-19 may bring us to the brink of all that could save us as a people. Jan Richardson’s reflection in  Circle of Grace , invites us to see a blessing in this moment. “This Grace That Scorches Us” Here’s one thing you must understand about this blessing: it is not for you alone. It is stubborn about this. Do not even try to lay hold of it if you are by yourself, thinking you can carry it on your own. To bear this blessing, you must first take yourself to a place where everyone does not look like you or think like you, a place where they do not believe precisely as you believe, where their thoughts and ideas and gestures are not exact echoes of your own. Bring your sorrow. Bring your grief. Bring your fear. Bring your weariness, your pain, your disgust at how broken the world is, how fractured, how fragmented by its fighting, its wars, its hungers, its penchant for power, its ceaseless repetition of the his...

How do you say “Thanksgiving”? “THANKSgiving” or “ThanksGIVING”? According to an article in  Mental Floss , if Thanksgiving, which is thoroughly an English word, actually behaved like an English word, the stress would be on the first syllable. (Think of words like SEAfaring, BABYsitting, HANDwriting, ALMSgiving, etc.) Linguist John McWhorter believes a shift to stressing the second syllable of Thanksgiving is reflective of the way our view of the holiday has shifted, that we “don’t truly think about Thanksgiving as being about thankfulness anymore.” I don’t know if I buy that…the word has always been “ThanksGIVING” for me and about gratitude. Maybe it’s a Midwestern thing.  However you pronounce it, Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for the grace and abundance in our lives. In these turbulent times, it’s often easy to overlook our abundance and focus on scarcity and what we think we need. I am reminded of this quote, attributed to a variety of people:...

Each moment of each day I can tap into the grace of my life. I try to be aware of the ordinary blessings and my gratitude grows. Sometimes the blessings are so commonplace that I take them for granted. As I write to you today I have a visitor with me who comes each month and makes a “mini” retreat at Sinsinawa Mound. Her presence here makes me aware of many aspects of my daily blessings. She articulates the blessings she notices: . . . the beauty of our land, . . .the friendliness of our community, . . . our daily chanted community prayer and meaningful Eucharist. The more she comes the more blessings she expresses: . . . the broad experiences of our Sisters, . . .the wealth of our education and the opportunities we have to grow as life-long-learners, . . .our awareness of critical concerns of our world and cosmos. . .commitment to peace and justice. Most of all she notices the love and care of our Sisters for one another. When she leaves, my heart is filled with gratitude for my ...

Did you ever have “one of those days”?  When you think “ if one more thing goes wrong I’m going to…” Fill in the blank!  Recently I found myself stressing out about all the interruptions at work, growling at a driver so slow and overly cautious he/she braked driving UPHILL, and trying to smile at someone who walked in with “You’re not doing anything right now, are you?”  When this happens I remember the words of one of our wise women, who, when I was complaining years ago, said to me, “The interruptions ARE your work, often more so than what you think you are about.” Thank God, with those words, grace steps in.  Writer Ann Lamott  quotes a friend of hers:  “Grace is WD40 for the soul.”  When soul/spirit gets stuck, gets painfully locked in a negative place, grace appears and offers a way up and out.  It is stronger than any problem, more present than any deadline, more soothing than zooming along at top speed.  How do I know it is grace? N...

Surprises happen to us all the time. Sometimes they are small, like walking into a Ben and Jerry's and finding out they are giving away free samples of their newest flavored ice cream. But sometimes they are significant, and then you wonder if God is behind the surprise. This is what I experienced recently. I had moved to the Mound, our motherhouse, last November, expecting to  live there for a number of years. I had settled in and was beginning  to be asked to help in various ways. But then, unexpectedly, in April  I was made aware of a need for someone to move to a house in another  city. What was this about? Was I really being asked to be uprooted so  soon? I went to visit the community, I prayed about it, and in the end  I felt God was calling me to answer this need. Was it hard to leave the motherhouse? Yes, but I knew that if God was  behind the surprise I would receive all the graces I needed to begin  anew in another location. And that ...

Do you ever have a moment of ‘communion’ that you know you must take notice of?  It is not quite an ‘ahaa’ moment.  Rather it is a sort of soul-stirring that can make one ponderous, curious, scratching one’s head and insistently aware. Easter Wednesday I kept thinking about my friend ‘Pam’.  She was a thousand or so miles away from me.  She lived with a debilitating and life-threatening disease. It was no longer easy for her to talk on the phone.  So occasionally I would send her a phone text.  Easter Wednesday morning I sent her a text writing ‘a gentle hug and my love. . .no need to reply’.  The very next day I learned that she had requested an ambulance ride from the hospital back to our Motherhouse.  Once ‘home’ Pam quickly and quietly breathed her last. What I failed to recognize is that Pam had in fact ‘initiated the contact', this communion.  It was her life-loving spirit who had...

For the last several years, (since I began getting old) I have been enrolled in a continuing education program for seniors, sponsored by the University of South Alabama. I have enjoyed classes in Art History, Music History, and History. In addition to classes in genealogy, birding, and local aquatic life, my favorites are often those classes centered on poetry and fiction. This quarter I’m taking a class on the Southern Gothic writer, Flannery O’Conner. I love her. Her works and books about her take up an inordinate amount of space on my bookshelves. So you might imagine that I looked forward to enjoying a chance to delve deeper with other Flannery fans. The professor, an Episcopalian priest, and I seem to be about the only people in the class who really appreciate her writing.  I’ve figured out that one of the stumbling blocks is a lack of understanding of the concepts of Grace and living out what we call a Sacramental Life. Those two elements live at the heart of my life...

Waiting…how many times a day do we wait? How much time of our days is spent in waiting? I don’t mean the big things like waiting for a birth or death or news of a new job or a diagnosis. That’s different.  I mean the moments of waiting, minutes or seconds when we have nothing else to do …waiting for the elevator or in line at a store or at a traffic light. I call these “pockets of time.” I try to manage them as opportunities to pray, to plug into the divine energy around me, to pay attention to who and where and when I exist.  Try it sometimes.   Focus intentionally and say a short prayer like this: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, your beloved.”  The moments, then, instead of being an annoyance, become infusions of grace that fill us and shape us for the rest of the day.   Does it change everything for you? Mary Ellen Green, OP Sinsinawa, WI

Saying “yes” has been pretty easy for me, (although the call to religious life later in life mystified and puzzled me. For a while, no response made sense…until ‘making sense’ didn’t matter.) I’ve been reflecting on my ‘yeses’ lately, wondering if some were offered too easily; spoken sincerely but without depth of thought; offered with good intentions but with a failing memory of how the proverbial Road to Hell is paved. There are so many urgent needs in the world today that require a compassionate response – by someone, by anyone, by everyone. Saying ‘no’ seems implausible, cold, unkind, the antithesis of an authentic call to religious life; to any authentic life, really. Yet I am discovering that within every ‘yes’ is often an unspoken ‘no’.  Every ‘yes’ proclaimed contains a benefit, but also a cost; one that can dilute the impact of the ‘yes’.  It might be burnout, frenzied living, a sense of superficiality - of spreading oneself too thin. We simply cannot do ...

For Dominicans, every day should be Thanksgiving Day.   We live in the gospel practice that all we have and all we need comes from God.   Our God offers us abundance everywhere we turn.   This grace comes with a huge invitation to offer to others this self-giving love of God.   We know that all we have and all we are is for others.   So, how do you live the spirit of Thanksgiving Day all year round?   Peggy Ryan, OP Casa Nona McGreal Waukegan, IL                

Have you ever gotten through something difficult and wondered afterward, “How did I ever make it through that?”   Have you ever mustered up an incredible amount of strength, courage, trust, and gratefulness and then wondered, “Where did those inner gifts came from?”   I believe with all my heart that this is the definition of grace.     I recently went through an operation for a cervical disc problem.   I was in the process of finishing a five-year study program, had recently begun a new ministry, and on top of it all, just moved to a new city.   Timing for illness is never good, but this was over the top horrible.   I had to just let go, rely upon those around me for help and care, and trust in a brand new set of medical personnel.   God’s grace got me through it all. Grace comes to us in so many ways.   To just give you one example – a family member, with health issues of her own, spent the whole day of surgery with me in the hospi...

What does it really mean to offer your day to God?  When I was a child I learned a prayer called the Morning Offering.  In that prayer I offered my whole day to God, my joys, my sufferings, my prayers and my works, all to the one who gave me the day in the first place.  I'm not sure I fully understood what I was saying but I do believe that praying this prayer day after day instilled in me a desire to do God's will.  So when at the age of 21 I heard the call of God so clearly that I could no longer ignore it, I sent in my application to the Dominican Sisters in Sinsinawa.  Once I made this decision I promised to try to follow God’s will in all that I do. I offer each day to God.  Some days are better than others.  During the days of loneliness, the times of challenges, the feelings of failure, I continue to offer these to God along with the joys, and acts of service and compassion I am called to do.  On some days I feel I have nothing to ...