Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

Well, hello. It’s Monday, January 4 and I was just very gently reminded that my blog post is due today!   There is a real ‘thing’ called pandemic cognitive ‘slippage’. It’s been documented by psychologists across the country who themselves have suffered from it. In my particular case, I am finding that days run together and melt into weeks, even months. I lose track of time.   When I made my perpetual profession two short years ago, I placed my hands in the hands of our prioress and asked, “for the mercy of God and yours.” Never has that been more true than now.   One gift of this unusual time is the opportunity to become more self-reflective, more self-forgiving, more merciful to ourselves and to each other.    My wish for you is to be gentle with yourself, to practice compassion and empathy toward others, and to breathe mercy into a world so desperately in need of it.   Kathy Flynn OP Madison, WI

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...

By now we are used to signs outside of hospitals and skilled care facilities that state “Heroes Work Here” (and they do).  But as these weeks of Advent have gone by and we have experienced losses, deeper worries, greater anxiety about an unknown future, I think we need to put that sign on our own hearts, on our front doors, on our bathroom mirrors.  To me a hero is a person who exhibits courage without first weighing the cost.  A hero takes a leap of faith and turns it into a tumbling routine of courage plus faith plus love.  Isn’t that what we are all trying to do every day so that the Word of God can be born anew into our world?  So that the Word of God can be born within each of us, and so dwell within us, and help our ordinary lives always proclaim the extraordinary mercy of God?  Let us pray for the courage to give life to that Word, to be midwives of hope and deep peace. Priscilla Wood, OP Dubuque, IA 

When I was a child I loved the song that began “All I want for Christmas,” and the answer was “my two front teeth…so I could wish you merry Christmas.” This got me to thinking, what do I really want for Christmas this year, this year that has been so challenging for everybody, a year that has called for patience, for reconciliation, for hope, for new ways of imagining being together.    I guess what I really want is what is on the front of the cards I am sending:  Peace—inner peace, peace in families, in our country and in our world.   May God’s peace surround all of us, despite the difficulties. LouAnne Willette, OP Austin, TX  

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 ...

  REALIZE DEEPLY THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL YOU HAVE.  MAKE THE NOW THE PRIMARY FOCUS OF YOUR LIFE.       Eckhart Tolle COVID-19 has stolen so much from so many.  How many had an empty chair at the Thanksgiving Day table?  Who had to search for food or shelter this Thanksgiving because of the economic crisis this disease has brought upon us?  The Center for Disease Control tells us that long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial and ethnic minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19. This week begins Advent, the liturgical season in which our church joins together to wait for the coming anew of God in our midst.   It is such a struggle in our COVID-ridden world to wait for anything. Eckhart Tolle, spiritual guide and author, calls us to stay in the present moment.  All we have, he says, is the “now.”  Looking...

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 ...