“To the degree that we are present to ourselves, we are in the very same act present to and with the Greater Than Self.”

In both Gospels of Matthew and Mark, a story takes place in Bethany, “in the house of Simon the leper.” A woman comes “with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard.” The writer tells us that this woman breaks open the jar and pours the perfumed ointment on Jesus’ head. Some present protest, naming it a waste, but Jesus defends the woman’s act. In fact, he says that, “wherever the Gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”

As Global Sisters Report celebrates our one-year anniversary, we are also celebrating the connections we have made with sisters in Africa. While in Kenya in January, I ran two writing workshops for more than 100 sisters. Here is one final essay about facing the extreme challenges of "where to begin" in ministering to people living in the Kipsongo slum in Kitale diocese. You can read more of sisters' work from these sessions here at the Writing Workshop series page.

Sr. Lisa Perekkatt is desperate and depressed. The superior of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth convent in Kathmandu is doing what she can to reach out to Nepal’s earthquake victims but feels handicapped because of local rules and a lack of transportation and relief coordination. A 7.8-magnitude earthquake ravaged Nepal a little before noon on April 25. Some 100 large and small aftershocks over the past five days, along with rain, have added to people’s woes and hindered rescue and relief work. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth are among 15 women religious congregations, most of them based in India, engaged in various ministries in Nepal.

“In the desert I make a way . . .”

Somewhere in the decision made by the teenage Thea Bowman lay a paradox worthy of a biblical epic. A Protestant child of the Deep South and childhood convert to Catholicism, she chose one of the whitest places possible to work out who she was as both a vowed religious and a black woman. The significance of her decision and the consequence of the meeting of those seemingly incongruent worlds was on display in late March when some 85 followers and devotees from spots as distant as Seattle and Camden, New Jersey, gathered in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, for an observance of the 25th anniversary of Bowman’s “homegoing.”

See for Yourself - Besides being an iconic actor, Jack Lemmon is also a philosopher of sorts. Although others sometimes get the credit, it was Jack Lemmon who said, “If you’ve been successful in your chosen path, then sending the elevator back down is your obligation.”

Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, a quiet nun with a keen wit who led a very public life as a journalist and a longtime spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, died on Tuesday after a tough battle with cancer. She was 67 and died after five days in a hospice in Albany next to the regional convent of the Sisters of Mercy, the religious order she entered as a 17-year-old novice in 1964.

Mercy Sr. Karen Schneider stepped off a two-passenger plane in the middle of the jungle and walked into a malaria epidemic. It was 1995, and sickened Amerindian people, who populate this small South American country's interior, lined the floor of a two-room clinic. A 15-year-old boy died a few hours after she arrived. Schneider, at the time a fourth-year medical student at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn, had never seen a case of malaria before. "It was my own personal first disaster. It was me and easily 60 or 70 patients, and here I was a fourth-year medical student," Schneider said. "But nobody else died." Twenty years later, she's still saving lives here.