When I applied to be a substitute English teacher for the last 10 weeks of this school year, I had no idea I'd be the one getting educated, as the COVID-19 lockdown came unbidden in my first week of teaching.
Participating in "Religious Life for Women in East and Central Africa: A Sustainable Future" was an eye-opener, helping me to go deeper into understanding religious life and consider new ways to be of service.
The acts of compassion and love we take notice of now prove that the depth of spiritual connection is a part of who we are. We must carry the lessons of silence learned through enduring the struggles and losses of the pandemic.
Horizons - I imagined it would only be natural for all of us to sacrifice our comforts once body bags began to line up in our counties and towns. It was hard for me to imagine that we'd become divided about this.
This is the heart of intergenerational life, I think: that I do feel a real sense of kinship with the women who came long before me, whose names and tiny fragments of their stories are all that are known to me.
The blame-game typically takes a narrow slice of the truth and substitutes it for the whole. It suggests there is no need for us to act because responsibility for the problem has been given to another. By contrast, contemplative awareness tries to open us to the whole picture.
The pandemic has led to exploitation. I can't imagine why taking advantage of the misfortune of people comes so easily to others. How did a human person made in the image of a selfless God come to a lonely place of selfishness?
There are people we encounter who transform our lives. We meet them by a grace that we neither expect nor deserve. For me, Benedictine Sr. Macrina Wiederkehr, who died April 24 at age 80, was one of those people.
Horizons - I know exactly what I want, and I try my best to communicate that to God. When God "hands me back" something else, I feel like cwying like my 3-year-old niece and saying, "Why do you not unduhstand me?!"
In India, in the name of development, the government is simply "evicting" people who live in substandard housing, leaving them with no shelter. But those people are part of communities, and local women leaders are trying to assert their rights.
The Indianapolis Carmelites co-authored, as a community, what eventually evolved into the 1997 People's Companion to the Breviary, which included women as members of the Catholic Church and beyond.
The Africa Faith and Justice Network-Nigeria successfully advocated for a state anti-trafficking law. Our next step is to put the law to work by involving Edo State residents in fighting against human trafficking.
South Korea was the second country that suffered from the coronavirus crisis, after China. Masks and food support are small but heartfelt activities of sisters who only can do so much but want to share even a small amount of their love.
Horizons - Who among us has thought upon waking, or at any other time of day for that matter, that this is a propitious time? That's the word Pope Francis used for this strange moment in history.
The days continue to bring new lessons to medical providers fighting for our patients. Alleluia will be different this year, and I pray that this time will bring us to a greater understanding of who we consider as "other."
St. Francis wrote "The Canticle of the Creatures" in the early 13th century; 795 years later, I joined him in thinking about the night sky in its changelessness and with its "precious and beautiful" stars.
The land in Litchfield, Connecticut, which was home to the novitiate of the Daughters of Wisdom, has evolved into a common home shared by many, by means of a land conservation easement.
I fell, got up and made my slow way, looking for what I had no idea. I felt like Dante, lost in a "dark wood, a wild and rough and stubborn wood." Which was a fair description of the coronavirus, as well.
Horizons - Without having our days filled with bustle and activity, we are being confronted with the same question posed by the novitiate in religious life: Who am I apart from what I do?
