Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

My son did a bit of ‘guerrilla gardening’ in Iowa City some years ago, planting a variety of plants and seeds in what was once a trash-strewn concrete slab next to an alley. Acorn squash grew up the chain link fence separating this ‘plot’ from a transforming station. Neighborhood residents and passersby were fed. An older brother had a pumpkin vine growing in a crack between his concrete driveway and the side steps to his house. The vine bore fruit. In New Orleans, I remember seeing beautiful oak trees upheave sidewalks to continue their growth. Today, March 14, signals the end of Catholic Sisters Week, a week highlighting the vocational call to vowed religious life. Honest, intentional discernment in the company of supportive communities may lead a woman to vowed religious life or it may lead her to another vocation, another relationship altogether. Each of us is called to bear good fruit. Discernment is a lifetime call to listen to the voice of God. When we do that with trust and fai...

The seed catalogs have arrived!  This sign of Spring never ceased to thrill me as a kid and continues to be exciting even today!  There is a joy in choosing seeds to plant in the earth, believing that by burying them in the dark loam, life and color and fragrance and even food will be the result. Jesus reminds us of that paradoxical truth in an honest, visceral way.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain.”  The seed must be planted, must be buried, must face an unknown future to ultimately find the nourishment and energy it needs to break open to the light it seeks.  This metaphor, offered for our reflection on this 5 th Sunday of Lent, never grows stale, never lets us off the hook in our need to reflect on the mystery of dying and rising in our own lives, in our Earth, in our universe.    This past year we have all learned something about dying; now we face new beginnings in a changed landscape.  H...