"Beyond the storm is a place of peace."

In her keynote address at the Fourth International Oblate Congress in Rome, Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister spoke about the charism of Benedictinism, the way forward for monastics and Oblates, and how both need each other. According to Sister Joan: "Life is the world’s greatest spiritual director. And each of us learns from it. Each of us — lay as well as religious — carries within us a piece of the truth — but only a piece."

For nine years, 83-year-old Frances Joseph Piazza, a Sister of St. Francis of the Neumann Communities and a former pediatric nurse, has spent her days as a baby cuddler at the Sisters of Charity Hospital neonatal intensive care unit in Buffalo, New York.

We want to change, but we cannot seem to get beyond a cultural depression. Although we mark this new year as "2018" maybe we should mark it 4.5618 billion years (the approximate age of Earth) or 202,018, the approximate age of the Homo sapiens species.

"We can weather the storm. We can love our way through this. Let's just keep calm, contemplate and resist."

GSR Today: In the Philippines, the Religious of Mary Immaculate run a hostel and training center for house helpers — young girls whose parents send them from small islands to cities to earn money for their families.

Once, in a store parking lot, I witnessed a white man suddenly harass an African-American mother with two small children, before speeding away in his car. I did not express any support to the woman. To this day I am ashamed.

A look into what happened in the community of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, Pennsylvania, in 1960: a story of racially motivated rejection, the pain that followed, and an eventual present-day apology to Patricia Grey.

Following last August's presentation to LCWR about anti-black racism among Catholic sisters in the U.S., historian Shannen Dee Williams has been invited to see the archives of and speak directly to a number of congregations. For her, interest in her work epitomizes the complex relationship white women religious have with anti-black racism, as they are now trying to learn more and do the right thing.

Read next: A sisters' community apologizes to one woman whose vocation was denied

"Getting in touch with our own sense of call is an important form of prayer as it both reminds us of past moments of grace and attunes us to those to come."