Due to a glitch in our system, this morning we accidentally posted a blog post that wasn’t quite ready!
Thank you to everyone who has contacted us about the broken link. This post will be available to you next Wednesday, at our regularly scheduled blogging time.
Thank you for your understanding.
The Beyond the Habit Team
Afternoon tea time, and my thoughts are wandering around in circles between the loveliness of the continued unfolding of spring, in this season of resurrection between Easter and Pentecost, and our May 1st feast of St. Joseph the Worker.
As I walk through our neighborhood each morning, I try to stay present to, and aware of, all the sights and sounds, and occasionally scents, that abound on these warming days. Everywhere I turn trees are budding, leafing; flowers are bursting through the earth, awakening from their winter sleep—which could look like death, if we didn’t believe in the unfailing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth which carries us though each year.
Birds are back, filling the air with spring song, both the permanent residents, and the migrants who come only for the season, to procreate and raise their young before packing up and heading south again. Listening to their daily songs, I can’t help pondering how curious it is that they are unconcerned about, and oblivious to, the artificial borders and boundaries we draw on our maps. They are not stopped for border checks, put in detention centers, or required to prove their “right” to flock across every kind of “border” from south to north and back again. If only all humans had the freedom of birds.
Sadly we don’t. Instead we label those who are seeking freedom, asylum, safety, and just a taste of the abundance we have, as illegal and unwelcome. We detain them (relieving them of shoelaces and belts), sometimes imprison them—we degrade their humanity in our attempt to ensure our own safety.
Shoes at the border – Photo taken by Sister Erin McDonald
It’s not that I don’t want to be “safe”, but as I hear stories on the news, and from our sisters and associates who have given of their time and energy volunteering at our southern border in El Paso, I’m reminded of Jesus telling us that whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters we are doing to him. I am reminded of him surrounded by children, cherishing and loving them when I see pictures of immigrant/refugee children suffering and separated from parents.
And this brings me back to my, now cooling, tea, and to our patron, Joseph—Joseph the worker. The loving parent, who provided safety for his son, both as an infant refugee, and throughout his youth in Nazareth. I have to believe that this is what all children of God deserve, and what we have to work for, as we celebrate resurrection and move toward growing in the gifts of the Spirit given at Pentecost. Safety, new life, renewal whatever the season or circumstances of our lives—I want to remember all of this as I celebrate and rejoice in this season.
Sister Christine Parks formerly served as a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph Leadership Team. Her leisure activities include gardening, long walks in nature, reading, writing, attending plays and concerts, as well as museums.
The children, dressed in their Easter best and gathered with their colorful baskets, waited for their grandfather to give the word that the hunt had begun. I don’t need to tell you what they were looking for on their search. We all know that kids love to find the colorful eggs that are hidden for their delight, filled with goodies and surprises. But what are you looking for these days?
Living in turbulent, unsettling times, where bomb attacks, hate crimes, climate change, clergy sexual abuse, Russian interference, and school shootings seem to constantly confront us, we can easily find ourselves looking for the next awful event that is going to happen. We become cautious, wondering if the person walking towards us on the sidewalk is going to harm us. We keep ourselves behind locked doors at home, in the car, and at work. We are vigilant for our own safety and the safety of our children. Wisdom demands it. At the same time, there is danger in generalizing headlines to our everyday lives. The confirmation bias leads us to find what fits with our beliefs and disconfirm anything that refutes it. In other words, we find what we are looking for. If I believe the world is a terrible place, I will remember all the stories I hear to confirm this belief and forget the positive ones.
What if we consciously looked for what the Easter egg symbolizes? For Christians, the Easter egg originally represented the Resurrection of Jesus. The hard shell was the sealed tomb and cracking the shell was Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection for me means new life and hope. In the days before Easter I was on the look-out for “resurrection moments,” moments when my heart was stirred with joy. They’re easy to find in the springtime, when the natural world is waking up from the winter. A week before Easter, however, we had about six inches of snow and I feared the buds that were ready to burst forth would succumb to the cold. To my delight, they didn’t. The daffodils, tulips, and magnolia trees are in bloom. Resurrection came despite the polar vortex and the late snowfall. My heart sang as I walked around the neighborhood noticing all the bright, colorful flowers.
Another resurrection moment occurred for me when the sister I live with snuck a candy bar into my lunch bag. I could hardly keep from smiling when I saw it. The small gift was a simple surprise that warmed my heart with the love of my sisters in community.
My ministry of journeying with people in psychological therapy affords me many resurrection moments. While I’m trusted with many emotions and stories that are frequently not shared in public, I’m also blessed to give witness to breakthrough moments when people work through painful times or gradually begin to see themselves as being loveable.
What Resurrection moments come alive for you today? Let your internal headline be: Jesus is Alive! And be on the lookout for when he brings joy to your heart. Remember, we find what we are looking for.
Sister Ann Letourneau, PsyD has been a Sister of St. Joseph for 29 years. She is a staff psychologist at Central Dupage Pastoral Counseling Center in Carol Stream, IL where she sees individual clients and offers educational presentations on various psychological and spiritual topics. Sr. Ann is fascinated by nighttime dreams and runs a monthly dream group at The Well Spirituality Center, a sponsored ministry of the Congregation of St. Joseph in La Grange, IL.
Can you remember a time in life when you were challenged in conversations to find a simple answer to the question “What do you do?”
This question typically aims to elicit the nature of your work or ministry. While it’s up to your discretion as to how to portray the adventures of your waking hours, I find that if I don’t put it into a succinct phrase or two, the questioner usually begins to shift and fidget, or worse, look back at me like that RCA Victor dog.
For almost three months now, my response to that question has usually included the mention of the words vocation ministry, and in so responding I’ve come to some new awarenesses. First, vocation ministry has little chance of making sense to anyone until the inquirer knows about my identity as a Sister of the Congregation of St. Joseph. And that awareness has led to another: I’ve actually been implicitly on call as a vocation minister ever since I’ve become a Sister of St. Joseph.
Some of us have had the lived experience of being explicitly on call in their work, and so have a head start on this concept. Sister Paula Terese Pilon, CSJ, for example (left), works as an at-home hospice caregiver through Cleveland Clinic on weekdays, but is also on call on rotating weekends. As we know, life happens outside of a Monday-Friday schedule, and someone needs to be ready to respond. When on call for hospice care, Paula Terese is in a kind of ready-to-respond consciousness that differs from when she’s “clocked out” on a free weekend.
Calling on God
So, does God ever “clock out?” Dutch theologian D. Erasmus (d. 1536) asserted a response—in Latin, as he was wont to do—that coheres with the theology of all Abrahamic faiths and more:
Interesting, isn’t it, that this phrase (as well as its various translations) have been showing up lately in contemporary graphic art. There are several posters and wall art that feature it in connection with famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung (d. 1961), who had had this phrase carved over the door of his home. Jung is the one, by the way, who proposed that we humans share a collective unconscious.
Called by God
So, what is it we believe that God is up to in this omnipresence?
Isn’t God always calling us in some way to participate ever more radically in God’s own flourishing life and outpouring love? Haven’t our own “vocation stories” been written out from day-to-day encounters with the God of Life and Love, through the ones who have made God manifest in our lives? As you may have guessed, my answers to these questions are Yes, and Yes!
Being implicitly on call means to me that I’m alert to how God may be acting in my life and in other’s lives, and inviting them to take a step in joining the divine mission of unifying love. Simultaneously, God is calling me to model, invite and welcome.
Calling Others
Last June, attendees of the Skowhegan Moose Festival which takes place in Skowhegan, Maine, attempted to set a world record for the most amount of people calling moose at the same time. Did you know there wasn’t a record for this yet? Well there wasn’t, but now there is because the Bangor Daily News recently announced that the effort was confirmed by Guinness World Records. A total of 1,054 people, “grunted, wailed and otherwise channeled their inner moose” according to the official press release. If you have to know more about this you can read the story here.
What does this have to do with vocations? Let’s just say that it got me pondering how we Sisters and Associates of the Congregation of St. Joseph could muster our individual and collective consciousness to call people to our mission of unity and reconciliation. I’ve realized that I need to sit prayerfully before God and a mirror and ask which of my own attitudes and behaviors nurtures an invitational and welcoming disposition, and which inhibit the same? Borrowing from St. Ignatius, I might call this question a vocational examen.
We as followers of Jesus are on call every day to deepen our atunement to God’s calling. This is certainly the Lenten Gospel message! Jesus promises that our own deepened responses to his call to unity will bear much fruit, which could mean becoming the stuff of someone else’s vocation story.
Mk 4:8-9; Mt 5:15-17; Lk 24; Jn 4:39
Sister Mary Jo Curtsinger, CSJ, D.Min. is a practical theologian who is co-ministering in vocation work with Kate Theriot, M.S., CSJ Associate Director. Whenever Mary Jo visits her sister’s family in Vermont, she is always hoping to sight a moose (from a safe distance of course).
Learn more about the Congregation of St. Joseph here. Meet a few of our Sisters including Sister Mary Jo here. To learn more about our vocation ministry, click here.
NOTE: The following was originally written and posted in January, 2017. It was our first ever blog post so we wanted to explain the title, Beyond the Habit, and what that means to us. For those who started following us later and sometimes ask about the title, we are re-sharing this.
When I was three years old, I met my first real-life nun. Or at least, the first one I recognized. She was dressed in a dark habit, her rosary dangling at her side. I was, in a word, ecstatic. I grabbed my grandmother’s hand the minute this sister walked in our front door and whisper-shouted to her in awe, as only toddlers can, “It’s a nun from The Sound of Music!” Both my grandmother and the sister laughed, and in a few weeks I received a gift from this sweet sister, a small music box that played the Sound of Music classic “My Favorite Things.” That music box sits on my shelf, still one of my own favorite things today.
These are the nuns that many of us recognize. The sisters we see on TV and in movies, from The Sound of Music to The Flying Nun and Sister Act, appear to us all in black, their habits a veil of secrecy, their lives a mystery of prayer. As I got older, I met many more Catholic nuns, but I quickly learned a long black habit and veil were seldom signs that I was speaking to a sister. In fact, the majority of the sisters I’ve had the pleasure of knowing do not wear a habit at all.
So why is the habit still what we associate with when we think of sisters? And why did sisters of the Congregation of St. Joseph start wearing habits at all? When the Sisters of Saint Joseph were founded in 1650 in France, the garb they chose was the dress of the widow. By wearing this “habit”, sisters could move around freely in their community without the accompaniment of a father, brother or husband and safely do good works without being questioned. They blended in. But as widows stopped wearing black and times changed, the habit became a symbol that separated sisters from everyone else.
What’s ironic about this is that Sisters of St. Joseph believe that all people are ONE with God and one another; that no one should be singled out as being better or worse than any other person. While the habit told the world who the sisters were, it also encouraged this feeling of “otherness,” that sisters were somehow different. Thanks to guidelines established by the Vatican in the 1960s, sisters were encouraged to return to their roots and consider their original intentions as a congregation. For Sisters of St. Joseph, this meant a return to “blending in” with those with them they live and work in the world. In hopes that all people could work together, with no distinction between sisters and ordinary individuals, sisters in the Congregation of St. Joseph stopped wearing the habit and started wearing plain clothing.
Today, our “habit,” the thing that guides us and connects us to our mission of oneness, is love. It is because of this habit of love that we are starting this blog today. In a world that often feels filled with separation, in which anxiety about the future and fear of “otherness” prevails, we start writing today to bring love to the world. You won’t see us in the traditional habit, but you can still find us in the habit of love, writing and working for the good of the world.
As Maria Von Trapp sang, “when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.” We hope that this blog will become one of your favorite things, a place to come to find love, understanding about the sisters and their work in the world, and fun sister stories to brighten your day!
Elizabeth Powers is the Electronic Communications Manager for the Congregation of St. Joseph and manages Beyond the Habit. She sometimes acts as a contributing writer when faced with a particularly poignant, sister-inspired moment. She loves reading, writing, and Harry Potter.
If the title of this blog caught your eye, chances are good that like me, you’ve lived through many Lents. Over the years it’s easy to start having embedded ideas about Lent; to fall into long-established practices and cultivated expectations of what we should accomplish or achieve. This year, I wonder if it is time for me to take a fresh look at the season before Easter.
I am caught by a line from the first reading from the Book of Joel for Ash Wednesday: “Return to Me with your whole heart.” What an extraordinary Scripture with which to begin Lent. It seems to me it is a call of profound yearning that rises deep from the heart of God. It is a call toward ardent intimacy. The first word of God with which we are to begin this 40-day journey proclaims the passion with which God desires our whole being.
When I was younger, the image I had of what I was to do during Lent was similar to the actions of a sculptor. I wanted to be my own Michelangelo. I thought through my Lenten practices I could chisel myself into a holy woman, that if I was faithful enough to prayer, penance and acts of charity, I could arrive at Easter a transformed woman. Instead I always arrived at Holy Week a little disappointed. I was never quite faithful enough to become as holy as I longed to be. It seemed I was left with the same flaws and faults I had on Ash Wednesday. It took me a long time to realize that growing into the fullness of who God created me to be is primarily the work of God, and not accomplished through my own efforts.
I once had a memorial card of an artist friend. On it there was a simple prayer: “May my clay be ever moist that I may not lose the impression of Your fingers.” It seems to me this is a better image of Lent – not of myself as sculptor with a hammer and chisel in hand but of God as a Potter with tender and knowing fingers gently shaping the clay of my being. The Lenten practices of prayer, penance, and acts of charity do not make me holy but are simply the watering that makes me moist so God can have Her way with me. “Just like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand.” (Jeremiah 18:6)
It is good to discern what Lenten practices God is calling us to. But life is messy. There are daily frustrations, misunderstandings, irritations and annoyances. There may also be great sorrow, disappointment, pain or loss. Though I do not believe God causes any of this, the messiness provides opportunities to respond with humility, patience and love. There have been times I was so intent in being faithful to my prayer that I overlooked someone who needed a listening ear or helping hand. How do I recognize those occasions when I am presented with an opportunity to love not as I choose, but as life presents to me? As God presents to me?
Yet I think there is still a more profound perspective by which I am to walk the Lenten journey. I could live the season as I usually do – out of my “shoulds”, my desire to be holy or my yearning to yield to God. Yet with age comes wisdom, and I’ve come to realize it is not about me. It is about God.
Early on in my life, martyrs, missionaries and saints became my heroes and heroines. I wanted to imitate them, be like them. It felt to me that they knew a divine secret. A hidden mystery from which all else flows – how tenderly, deeply, fully and unconditionally God loves me. I can never fully grasp this profound reality, but it moves me to extraordinary gratitude, humility and love.
It is not by chance that we begin this sacred journey of Lent with the ardent, longing cry of God. This year, may we hear more deeply this divine secret silently pleading in our hearts: “Return to Me…I want nothing less than all of you.”
Sister Marcella Clancy, CSJ, has degrees in nursing and theology. In the past she ministered in hospitals, taught nursing and theology at the college level and served in parishes in the Archdiocese of Detroit. Currently, Sister Marcella ministers as a spiritual director, facilitates retreats and offers presentations through Transformation Spirituality Center at our Nazareth Center in Kalamazoo.
Sisters of Saint Joseph are amazing. I don’t say that to toot my own horn, even though I am a sister.
I first discovered how remarkable sisters are when I entered religious life in 1997 in Wheeling, WV. I was in my mid-forties, so I was a late vocation (very late. Tardy, even). Once my entrance ceremony was over, and moving day neared, I was both excited and nervous. I had asked to live at our Motherhouse in Wheeling (aka “the Mount”) where most of the retired sisters I knew lived because this was my chance to get to know them more deeply.
Thankfully my request was accepted, and then panic set in. I remember thinking, “I am completely disrupting the flow of life for these sisters, most of whom are in their late 70s to 90+. Adding even 1 more woman changes everything!”
And it did change everything, for them and for me…and the change was generous and wonderful. I was welcomed with open arms, and the shifts made to welcome me into prayer circles, laundry schedules, conversations, think tanks and more seemed effortless on their parts. When I exclaimed to my sisters how grateful and astonished I was at how easily they created space for me in their lives, one sister remarked, “This is who we are. This is what we do.” I felt so loved and welcomed. I felt at home.
Then, beginning in 2001, merely four years after I entered, conversations began to occur among seven independent congregations of Sisters of St. Joseph about joining together and becoming one congregation. A merger of sorts. We began to consider what we could do together to move our mission forward that we could not do alone. What were we willing to sacrifice in order to do that? How would we share our resources?
Once again, I watched sisters ranging in age from late 30s to 90+ dive deeply into their lives and hearts to make a decision that would launch changes in nearly every aspect of life and ministry. But I knew by then that sisters were pioneers. Regardless of age and despite the aches and pains of saying goodbye to life as they had known it, sisters from more than seven different areas of the country affirmed the decision to move forward together as one, and in 2007, the Congregation of St. Joseph was born. From the very first moment, our eyes were shining – some with tears as we let go of the familiar – but also with love and hope as we began this new adventure together.
Since then, the congregation continues to make bold decisions regarding the best use of our land and resources both for our sisters and the communities we serve. Many of our founding congregations have built new buildings to house our “retired” sisters (fact: sisters never really retire). These buildings were built to high assisted living and environmental standards.
One such new building is in Cleveland, where I now live and work. Our sisters moved just this month, and I offered my help on moving day. How can I describe the excitement, joy, deep gratitude and enthusiasm of these women as they were uprooted and replanted into another building? Sure, there were also moments of frustration, exhaustion, grumbling and confusion. But the grace and gratitude I saw that day moved me to tears and reminded me again of what I’ve experienced so many times with our sisters. “This is who we are. This is what we do.”
What a gift to have entered this Congregation almost 22 years ago! So much has changed, but one thing has not – home is wherever love lives. Love for our God, love for each other and every dear neighbor, love for all of creation, and love for our mission of unity, “that all may be one.”
Love is our home…and all are welcome in this place!
Sister Judith Minear currently serves as part of a 3-member team for CSJ Ministries as Coordinator for Mission Integration. CSJ Ministries is the umbrella organization that works with our 25 sponsored ministries. In her free time, she loves drawing zentangles, stalking birds and savoring poetry.
