"I am often angry. I don't accept criminality, death, torture, bombings. I can't cope with that. I have a desire to see something else. I am impatient. I want the Kingdom now. I want the peace now."

It is May, and like every good Catholic girl of a certain age, I remember this as the month we celebrate Mary, the mother of Jesus. A lot of terrific recent scholarship is helping my generation recover from earlier interpretations of Mary as a revered (if impossible to imitate) virgin-mother role model often portrayed as silent, passive, and obedient.

GSR Today - Most of us know migrants as numbers or through stories we read; recently, I had the opportunity to go on a Border Witness Program retreat and, with four Mercy associates, see several ministries in the Rio Grande Valley firsthand.

Last summer, Sr. Melinda Pellerin stood before friends and parishioners at Holy Name Parish in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she serves as a pastoral minister, and professed her first vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Springfield. Pellerin — then 57, a widow and retired — made history as the congregation's first African-American sister.

"You must go to the people and really understand their needs. If you do that, people can change."

Notes from the Field - Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I like noise. The weekend of May 14, all of the East Coast Good Shepherd volunteers spent their time at a retreat center in New Jersey. This particular retreat happened to be a Silent Spirituality Retreat, which could also be referred to as my worst nightmare.

"Concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society."

Because of my ministries I have never lived near relatives or my grade school friends as their children grew up. Recently my cousin moved to Lansing, Michigan, not too far from Detroit. One of her many grandchildren was making his first Holy Communion, and I was invited to attend. I accepted, and as I drove on this beautiful Saturday morning I found myself filling up with tears.

GSR Today - In working for peace — in assisting refugees from both Syria and Iraq with no partiality as far as religious affiliation, for example — Nassif and other women religious I met in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon, and in Jordan, see life with a different lens than most of us.