Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

I am a dawn watcher. I like to get up early, when it’s still dark. I like to sit and watch the sky slowly almost imperceptibly lightening. It’s the quietest part of the day. Everything is waiting on this new dawn.   It’s different every day, every minute. Light hits clouds and color reenters the world. Today the horizon suffuses with oranges and pinks and the few wispy clouds turn violet. Everything is impermanent, in flux. The colors change all the time. The clouds mutate, coalesce, move on, disappear.   At last a deep orange lunette shyly appears and in rising transforms into a full bright circle of orange red light. The new sun sits on the horizon line for the merest few breaths before continuing its’ majestic rise into the sky of the new morning, What a gift.   We have been given the gift of a new day. A fresh start. A new beginning for ourselves, our earth for all living beings.   How will I use this gift of life today? What awaits me as I step out int...

For me, September always feels like the beginning of a new year.  It might be those years spent in a classroom where I absolutely loved getting ready for school, setting up my room, eagerly preparing for a new beginning. But it’s the change of the seasons that makes me truly feel a new year is starting.  I loved my years ministering in Alabama and Louisiana but this Minnesota girl always ached for the change of seasons.  That first day I smell autumn, feel it in a cool breeze, savor the warmth of jeans and sweatshirt, I know – it’s time to begin again, it’s time to be open to change, to letting go. The trees teach me this, as do the shorter days, the harvesting of crops I’ve watched grow all summer long, the long shadows at sunset. I can’t stay in the past, but how I need God’s grace to help me move forward!   What challenges do you face this new year? What does Autumn ask of you?  And where do you find the grace that always finds us?...

I saw rolling waves of youthful faces above a sea of Wisconsin red t-shirts, last week as I drove near UW campus.  It was the freshman class of 2017 coming to the Chancellor's Convocation for New Students. There was undiluted energy in their steps, but also concentrated security in their walking with one another.   I wonder what was in their thoughts. A new beginning? like Georgia wrote about in her last blog. Changing the world?  Will they come to ask the question that Tanya asked in her blog, "How do we continue to fight the systemic nature of oppression and injustice?" The sisters and associates that I meet with in circle, and in antiracism caucus groups each month are also  creative waves of life and energy. We come together no longer needing the security of youth but enjoying the strength and challenge that comes from being sisters.  When we come together, we often challenge one another to fight systemic injustice.  There ...