In Horizons, younger sisters reflect on their lives, ministries, spirituality and the future of religious life.
Horizons - Last Friday, I joined my co-workers in wearing orange to stand for a future free from gun violence. The next morning, I logged on to social media only to discover that Anika Browne, my own high school classmate, had been killed, a victim of gun and domestic violence.
I have no doubt that the many forms of membership in our congregations will (and do) play a monumental part in the lives of religious congregations into the future. Yet, for all the hope these forms present, the cultivation and preservation of vowed membership must not be lost.
Horizons - Since I was young, I've been a person who asks questions like it's my job. My parents still lament that I would debate with them about curfews and chores, that I always wanted to know why they made the rules they did and always had good follow-up questions and rebuttals.
Through the Spirit, God gifts us with peace unlike the peace the world gives. This year the need for this kind of peace seems much more urgent to me than in the Pentecosts of years past.
Horizons - It's normal to hold out hope that things will go back to what we once knew, what made sense to us. Yet, I also struggle with the longing for things to be as they once were. What if God is changing the way things work right in front of us, and we're not paying attention?
Horizons: Every winter yields to spring. It happens in due time, slower in some places than in others, but always and everywhere eventually. This is the promise of the spring; this is the promise of the empty tomb. This is the puzzlement, but this is also the joy.
Horizons - As the pottery wheel of time whizzes on, God lovingly molds us with expert hands into what — and who — is needed for the present. Even as we grieve, we can rejoice in the goodness emerging. Instead of "diminishment," I choose a paradigm of "transformation."
Horizons - I always love the Scripture readings during the first week of Easter, when the church prays with the appearance stories of the resurrected Jesus. What I especially appreciate is the human reality.
Horizons - The sacred spaces of our lives, after all, are spaces that have always just been waiting for us to enter. It is not our presence that sanctifies them. Each moment is holy. Our recognition of the Sacred in our midst, though, opens up a space to receive the sacred deep within us.
Horizons - In reading about our community's founder, Mother Theodore, what I observe in her interplay of real risk and humor is a lightness and freedom of heart that only comes from deep faith. I've come to the conclusion that we may need humor in these times more than ever.
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