Notes from the Field - We have been organizing learning stations for tutoring children at the Immigrant Outreach Program. Through the stations as well as field trips, we hope to teach the children social and emotional skills to succeed on their own or in a group, so that they can navigate the world independently.

Congregational meetings about aging. Loss of loved ones. My 70th birthday. The U.S. political climate. All of these have focused me on the spirituality of loss. "Who am I now? Who are we now?" I ask. While I search for meaning as American women religious close ministerial institutions and motherhouses, everyday images unexpectedly grab me.

"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.