Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

On the return home from a very long international flight I found myself standing at O’Hare baggage claim with the rest of the passengers waiting for my bag to slip down the chute onto the carousel. I became alert once the mechanism activated and the first of the bags started their descent onto the carousel. Everyone crowding around the edge, eyes all focused on each piece of luggage. Would mine be there? Did it make the tight connection?  Hundreds of bags slowly presented themselves, slipped down the chute and onto the carousel. All bags as different as the passengers. Different sizes, shapes, softness, colors. Each containing the belongings of those tired travelers. No sign of mine.   Slowly bags are claimed and removed. Less people now and I’m trying not to worry. I’m looking for a large, soft sided, dark blue case with some red yarn tied to the handle. Lots of dark blue cases but  not mine. I found myself mesmerized by the slowly circling bags and reflecting ...

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...

I learned to value and appreciate the liturgical year when I first entered the convent.     Those early days of training focused a lot on the liturgical seasons. We steeped ourselves in the Scriptural readings of the day   and seasonal music.     It was there I identified the grace of longing.     Ahh, I thought. I am an Advent woman.     Longing and waiting have been a key faith identifier within me to this day. Whatever does that have to do with this Christmastide?  Again, in the Novitiate years, I came across a great spiritual writer:  Rainer Maria Rilke and his ‘Letter to a Young Man.’  I have leaned into this quote of his for decades now.   “. .   celebrate Christmas  in this  devout  feeling, that perhaps God  needs  this very anguish of yours in order to begin, . . .  It has not always been ‘anguish’.  Though this year there has been ple...

Can it really be that the Advent Season has already come upon us while we have been waiting and watching – waiting for this horrible virus to die out, watching in horror as the numbers of people infected soar.  As we continue to wait and to watch.  I reflected upon the words “wait,” “watch,” and “alert.”  It seems to me that we human beings spend a good amount of time waiting.  As a child, I waited for my birthday, for Christmas, for my turn, for “hurts” to heal.  As the first born in a large family, I remember watching my mother wait for the arrival of the next child to be welcomed into the family.  We then were alert to that child’s first tooth, first steps, first day of school.  We hear in the Advent readings from the prophet Isaiah the Israelites waited for release from captivity in Babylon for 50 years.   That was a lifetime for most.   About 20 years ago, the Sisters in our congregation committed ...

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 ...

It has been such a strange Lent Everything seems turned on its head. I have been home for four weeks  socially distancing. Privileged to have a home in which to stay safe. I have been out for a solitary walk each day noticing as the signs of Spring begin to show themselves. Robins come to my balcony,  still the juncos and chickadees and woodpeckers and purple finches and nuthatches. I’ve seen green creeping into the tops of trees, buds  barely visible, yet all waiting. I have been trying to focus on what is important.  Staying connected through FaceTime.  Praying with our sisters via Zoom.  Trying to connect with and teach my students online. It’s still surreal.  Watching the liturgies streamed from our mother house Praying for their safety and for all who are working so hard to support us during this pandemic. No end in sight. We wait. We all wait as we move through these holiest of days. We wait in expectation...

I was away over the Christmas and just came back late on Sunday. One of the first things I did was to turn the page of my calendar from December to January. My calendar is an old one, I bought it in 2003 at the Monastery in Prouille when I made the Lands of Dominic trip. I keep it because it has large beautiful Fra Angelico images for each month. January is an image of the Annunciation. It is a detail of the original fresco. It does not show the Angel, just Mary seated with her posture open, face and hands upturned. Waiting. We have crossed the threshold into this new year, this new decade. I look at the image and wonder. Do I sit poised with anticipation, with openness to receive whatever this new year brings? Time is a precious gift and such a mystery. At the threshold of each new day...

This time of year has mixed messages for me. “Hurry up and get ready for Christmas.”  “Slow down and “be” attentive to the season of Advent waiting.” This week the message is “Rejoice!” My heart likes the feel of finding joy. In our Dominican congregation we are in a time of transition. How blessed we are to have assistance in how to “be” in transition in a healthy way. In September we had a virtual assembly, an opportunity to tend to our heart and spirit in our transition. Our facilitators, Dominican Sisters Joye Gros and Teresa Tuite,  inspired us in a process of prayer, reflection, with music and story. At the end they left us with a song: “We Can Be Kind.”  This song is taking root in me. In my pastoral ministry at the Mound and Villa I promote  Mindfulness.  One of the aspects in living in the NOW is to have a daily intention. Since our September assembly I have encouraged the sisters to set an intention to “Be Kind.” Focusing on kindne...

Waiting…how many times a day do we wait? How much time of our days is spent in waiting? I don’t mean the big things like waiting for a birth or death or news of a new job or a diagnosis. That’s different.  I mean the moments of waiting, minutes or seconds when we have nothing else to do …waiting for the elevator or in line at a store or at a traffic light. I call these “pockets of time.” I try to manage them as opportunities to pray, to plug into the divine energy around me, to pay attention to who and where and when I exist.  Try it sometimes.   Focus intentionally and say a short prayer like this: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, your beloved.”  The moments, then, instead of being an annoyance, become infusions of grace that fill us and shape us for the rest of the day.   Does it change everything for you? Mary Ellen Green, OP Sinsinawa, WI

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation Every year, it’s the same: the intensifying liturgical readings, the weekly lighting of another candle, building anticipation. For all its predictability, Advent is my favorite season. It never ceases to awaken something that lies dormant deep within me. But why? After all, I already know what’s waiting at the end, so why go through the annual charade of suspense? For starters, it’s the way that Advent invites me to practice patience and presence before rushing headlong into parties and presents. It’s the balance between darkness and light, and the reminder that the former is every bit as important as the latter. It’s the silence and the longing. It’s because each Advent takes me deeper into the mystery of a God who loves us enough to meet us on our turf, becoming human so that we might come to know God. It’s the already-not-yet paradox of Advent: even as we stand in awe of past and present incarnation, our souls long for a union w...

This past summer, in Washington State, we continued with the now annual smoke filled air brought to us from wild fires that prevailed all through July and August.  In fact, our air quality rating registered five times higher than China’s.  The smoke from our fires combined with smoke from Russia, Oregon, Canada, and California, as the jet stream blew where it would. Typically, I can see way beyond the local Catholic Church that offers a view of golden wheat and varying shades of green as the sun dances across the lawns, trees, and fields that give way to tree covered hills and mountains. Most notably, Baldy - a sheer cliff of Quartzite that towers over the east side of Chewelah was not visible. It was like where’s Waldo, but this was where is Baldy? We could even smell the smoke inside the hospital, where I serve as a Chaplain.  We saw our natural surroundings only a few times and waited longingly for the light. It was Advent like....

It’s come around again, that lovely liturgical season called Advent.   It is the time when, amidst all the activity of our lives, we strive to contemplate the meaning of waiting, the meaning of time itself, the meaning of the once and always arrival of the Christ into our world, into our lives. I had never really given Advent a second thought before I joined the community; it was simply what I checked off before Christmas finally came.   Only within this Dominican frame of reference did I learn to sit with the dark days of December, to ask myself what was worth waiting for, to open myself to the Spirit of expectancy, of hope, of the mystery of “inbreaking.” Years ago I was given these lines from a play by Christopher Fry which I use every Advent to focus my prayer awaiting the Word.   I invite you to wait with it too. The human heart can go the lengths of God...  Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us...

In this season of slumber… Pregnant pauses… Dormant possibilities… We wait. Grieving leave-takings Celebrating homecomings And Home-goings. In stillness We wait. Longing for His coming And, with His coming, Our awakening. Be still And know He is already here… Peace to you this holy season of Advent. Kathy Flynn, OP Whitefish Bay, WI

During these days, I find myself in the midst of Advent waiting -- waiting to hear good news, longing and hoping for good news.   Again, it seems all we hear and read are horrific stories of people’s inhumanity to other people.   I keep asking myself, “How can a person do that to another human being!”   How can a group of terrorists kill over 140 school children in Pakistan?   How can …?   (The list goes on and on.) How do those individuals live with themselves? During a meal conversation with a sister friend, we spoke of so many sufferings we have witnessed over the past few months.   Our conclusions, if you can even call them that, were several.   Violence begets violence.   Someone in the cycle needs to stop and say no more -- no more violence, no more killing, no more hurting another.   Our faith tells us the deceased are with the living God.   Our hope leads us to believe those left behind mourning their loved ones will find co...