Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Time is a funny thing. They say that the best hitters in professional baseball (GO CUBS!) can actually see the seams of the ball as it hurtles toward them at 80, 90, even 100 miles per hour. For the batter, time – in space – almost stands still. At that very same instant, however, what is happening in the stands, the parking lot, in the city, state, country, and world is often going by in a blur. Time moves at warp-speed for some while creeping for others. The paradox of time is that it is both shared universally yet is particular to individual lives and circumstance. While we are all experiencing a time of pandemic, we are not all experiencing it in the same way. Often, those who are hungry, homeless, lonely, and despairing – those on the very margins of society - find the concept of time almost meaningless because they do not have the luxury of hoping or dreaming or thinking of a space in time beyond the moment in which they find themselves often struggling for survival.  ...

One surprise of religious life, for me, has been getting to sit with sisters who are dying – that very sacred time of keeping vigil. Sitting with a couple of our sisters recently caused me to reflect more deeply on what it actually means to “vigil” - to stay awake, pay attention and to simply offer a constant presence to the one approaching that very thin veil between this world and the next.   To vigil is to sit with love and gratitude in the presence of Grace. If true, then aren’t we called to vigil every single day? At the sound of the wind, the rain, children’s laughter and bird songs, we are called to vigil, to pay attention with a posture of gratitude. At the brilliance of a starry night sky, the glow of the moon, in the warmth of the sun, we are called to vigil with a posture of gratitude. Yet we are also called to vigil in solidarity with those among us clinging to the margins of society, people who are dying - physically, mentally, and spiritually - as a res...