Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

It is a cave of sorts. A Global collection of people are crammed together with luggage piled floor to ceiling.  Unlike the donkey, trains were on strike.   All faces glued, to the fine print of the ever changing billboard, announcing arrivals and departures.   People with a mission and a purpose like Mary and Joseph. The door swung in, edging us closer together, and the door swung out, making room for anyone who came knocking.   Are you waiting for an arrival, or for a departure?  Is your purpose being lived?   Here is what I gave birth to, as I waited to depart:   Like Mary and Joseph, we carry a call.   All we know, is something beyond our womb is calling us.   We find ourselves whether male or female pregnant once again!   Do we abort? Do we carry to term?   We worry.  How will we feed this call?   Wakening, we hope all is a dream.   It is a reality.    We've been here before. Over and over throughout our...

Visiting Our Motherhouse Recently With Dominican University Students During this Lenten season, I have spent time in prayer trying to name what makes me privileged.  One huge privilege for me is my ministry.  As a college professor, I hang out all day with young people.  I am so privileged to learn from their ways of looking at life and their openness to our world. Sometimes, my prayer offers me the invitation to get in touch with the privilege that is mine as a white woman.   Whether it is while driving down the suburban streets where I live or trying to buy food at the grocery store or even trying to engage in conversation with someone else in the waiting room, I am so aware that being a white woman offers me privileges.   The students of color with whom I teach and learn from do not experience these opportunities in the same way simply because of the color of their skin. I am praying this Lent to be more aware and to deepen my ...