Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Co-creating the Future God Desires

By:  Rita Woehlcke, Sister of St. Joseph
From:  The Associate, Spring 2017


As sisters and associates of our various congregations, we enter 2017 more sure of and committed to God’s  desires  for our world, especially as they are expressed in our various charisms and missions. Like our first sisters, we are meant to live “eyes wide open, ears attentive, spirit alert, sleeves rolled up” to address the miseries of our day. 

We look at the world God loves and see a country divided, a crisis of what media to trust, a world of devastating piecemeal wars, orphaned children, persons trafficked, countless refugees, festering pockets of hate and a resistance to what science is telling us about the plight of Earth. Violence and threat are palpable. It is easy to be overwhelmed and paralyzed by the scope of the needs that can block us from the seemingly small but great good we can accomplish where we are.

We believe God desires a different future and that we sisters and associates are exactly who God wants to help make God’s dream a reality. It is entrusted to us. We hear the challenge.

And so the question looms, “How big is my soul?” Our first sisters physically felt the hunger, the 
miseries of the people they served. They shared their hardships.

Our lives prepare us for the same heartfelt connections. What heartbreak and loss have stretched our hearts so that we feel and know the grieving parents and widows of the Mideast? What personal trauma creates solidarity in us with all who suffer oppression, derision or shame simply for being who they are? What debt of gratitude for the unmerited blessings we have received binds us to those in need of our blessing?

While the sisters of the past are grateful for our appreciation of their spirit and good works, they are longing for more than admiration. They are longing for us to be in our day what they were in theirs, persons inspired by the Gospel to attitudes and actions of unbounded love. They long for us to join them in “exploration into God” – not through big projects but by daily building of relationships of reverence through the practice of non-violence.

The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
Christopher Fry
Dark and cold we may be, but this 
Is no winter now. The frozen misery 
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes.
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere, 
Never to leave us ‘til we take 
The longest stride of soul men ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake?

A SLEEP OF PRISONERS,” from the play with that title,
By Christopher Fry, 1951


Reflection Questions:
  • How do the challenges of today’s world resemble those faced by our first sisters?
  • What graces do I need to respond as generously as they did?
  • How can we support one another and practice together non-violence in thought, speech, action?

Suggested Spiritual Practices:
  • Set the daily intention to let your mission and charism permeate all you do, asking God’s help and the intercession of our founder, Catherine McAuley.
  • Ask for the grace to be stretched in love and notice at the day’s end how God answered that prayer.
  • Practice gratitude.  Thank God for the opportunity to “fill up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ.”


Glory be to God whose power working in us can do
Infinitely more that we can ask or imagine.         Ephesians 3:20



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