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God's grace, Sharing of the heart and order of the house, Sisters of St. Joseph, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, to do list
Up at 6:30 because I was awake and already had a “to-do list” growing in my brain…I have been up now for over an hour watching the wind push the clouds out of the way in promise of a very blue, sunny sky. It’s like a race to the east where some grey clouds are still holding the lead in the south but a very energetic tree keeps urging on the blue and white to what is predicted as a win for today….Armchair quarterbacking was about all I could muster for my first hour so I made a list that became 20 tasks for today. There is no possibility that all will be accomplished but just making the list is a start and tomorrow, as we all know, is another day!
Last night I was on a zoom call with 186 Sisters of St. Joseph. It was an introduction to a Lenten process of assessing our “Sharing of the Heart and Order of the House,” a practice that our first Sisters in 17th century France created to assure a weekly assessment of their lives together. It helps a group—living together or not at this moment in time—to talk about what it means to “move always toward profound love of God and love of neighbor”—assuming that talking about it will become a means for achieving the goal, if even “one step at a time.” It’s a bit more daunting for us than it was for those six Sisters who sat to do the practice in a kitchen in LePuy, France in the mid-1600s. Not only do we have more people to deal with but we live from Japan to New York and Peru to Minnesota…Chile to Hawaii and many points in between. It’s a monumental task that we will hope to achieve, meeting weekly in groups of six—native speakers of our languages serving as translators as necessary—all to bring us closer in service to a world in need.
Just the thought of this process gives me a motivation to achieve today. Certainly every item on my list will not be checked off by nightfall but the clouds are racing faster across the sky, the tree is waving them on and the sun has just arrived in my bedroom full-force! And with all of that motivation, my first item on the list is completed. This blog post is ready to go. May your day hold the deep peace of God’s grace for you.
The Sophia Center for Spirituality 