Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

I live on the third floor and have a wide view of the Eastern horizon. Lately I have been setting my alarm for 5:45 a.m., just so that I can sit in that predawn darkness and just watch out my window for those first hints of light. It is a slow but spectacular process and different every dawn. Sometimes there is a great thin slash of orange that slowly widens and changes and casts light purples across dark grey clouds. So awesome each morning. Enough to get me out of a warm and comfy bed to sit sentinel by my window appreciating the quiet predawn anticipation of the new day.   So much promise. I sit at this edge, at the closing of the Liturgical year. I anticipate a Thanksgiving whose celebration will be like no other as we remain sheltering from the virus and I look forward to the beginning of Advent, the season of waiting. Seems like we have been waiting since March. What am I waiting for? I am waiting for the dawn. And I know It will come. I have already seen it.   What are ...

So begins the prayer of our morning group on Wednesdays. It comes from the pastoral of the US Catholic Bishops,  Brothers and Sisters to Us ,  1979. So many traumatic things are presented to us lately—virus, violence, climate change and on and on.  “Wake us up, Lord”  is a good prayer for  2020. The above traumas can be related to the next phrase of the prayer—"so that the evil of racism finds no home within me.”  Through listening and discerning with anti-racism groups, I wake up.  I realize that power over others is a disease that is part of all the traumas of our lives. If I think and act as if I am better than another it causes violence. If the organizations to which I belong are based on being more deserving and hoarding energy and material goods, they contribute to climate disasters. Even virus is exacerbated when some people’s dignity and health are regarded as less important than others. How can our waking up bring healing to ourselves and...

I could never have imagined back in March that here, in August, we would still be sheltering from the virus. A necessity to protect each other.  It has changed how I register time. I used to look at my calendar for the whole week or month. Now I am much more cognizant of each separate day. I am aware of the blessing of life anew each morning-of the challenge to do my best each day - to love in the light of the Gospel and when I fail I ask forgiveness and start afresh with the morning light. FaceTime and Zoom have become necessities, as we stay connected while physically distancing.  The sisters I live within our complex meet formally twice a week on zoom to pray and connect. And right now our annual gathering of the Congregation is being conducted via Zoom.  Not what any of us would have wanted, as we yearn to gather, to greet each other in person. But for now - the little mosaic of zoom squares allows us to see and hear, conne...