Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

In the Northwoods where I live it is starting to be the season of Fall – my favorite season. I love the chill in the air and the crisp leaves on the ground, but most of all I love the colors of the trees as they change from green to brilliant red or yellow. Often, as I’m driving along a wooded area I see green, green, green, and then a splash of red. Only one branch has turned red on an otherwise green tree. How does this happen? This phenomenon speaks to me of Mother Nature’s sense of humor and sensitivity to our human appreciation of surprises. People can be like trees, too. We can rub shoulders with someone day after day and never really notice their gifts until, all of a sudden, they do something or say something that is so thoughtful that it leaves us almost breathless – like a splash of red in the midst of green. I am challenged to pay attention to these otherwise ordinary moments and let my mind and heart be open to the new story that I’m being told. What or who has surprised yo...

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 ...

A professor teaching a class to medical interns wanted them to develop compassion and so asked them to reflect on three questions each night: 1) What inspired you? 2) What touched or moved you? 3) What surprised you? This exercise helped the interns to be more aware of their patients as persons and led them to be more caring and compassionate doctors. I decided to try this myself.  On some days it took me a while to think of what surprised me, but often it was something small, such as a smile from a stranger walking by or a pleasant conversation on the phone with customer service.  I didn't have a hard time with happenings that touched or moved me--there were many, such as parishioners warmly welcoming a stranger into their midst, a teenage boy offering to clean the church, a man tenderly assisting his disabled wife from the car.  And what inspired me most was the way a woman who is a pancreatic cancer survivor lives her daily life. Her faith and her courage ...