Sister Christer

si, yes, oui, uh-huh.

risking my heart (because I believe that's what it's for.)

To Praise, To Bless, To Preach.

Blessings on the Feast of St. Dominic.

from Timothy Radcliffe:

From the beginning Dominic gathered together a family of preachers, men and women, lay and religious, contemplatives and preachers who took to the road. We can see inscriptions in S Sabina which talk of the Dominican Family which go back to the beginning. It has always been part of who we are. But now we claim that something new is happening. All over the world, sisters and lay Dominicans are claiming their identity as preachers.

. . . .

The friendship that Jesus offers is wide and open. He welcomes in everyone. He gets impatient when the disciples try to stop someone preaching because they do not belong to the group of the disciples. He does not shut doors but bursts through them. Let us embody that big hearted friendship. Let us be a sign of that welcome, so that we may all be at ease in Dominic’s Family and know that we belong. May Dominic liberate us from the fear that locks the doors.

God of Truth you gave your church a new light in the life and preaching of our Father Dominic. Give us the help we need to support our preaching by holy and simple lives. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.

From my family to yours, whoever you are.  Peace and Friendship.

happy easter (all season long)

Thanks to the   Diana Macalintal, Associate for Liturgy of the Diocese of San Jose
(She does an amazing job!)

Take Easter Home

ideas for celebrating the season at home

• Take an Easter Walk
  Sometime during the week after Easter Sunday, take a walk around your neighborhood, in your garden, at the park, or even at the local shopping center. Look for signs of new life all around you. Remember the neophytes—those who were baptized this Easter—who are “new plants” in the household of God.


• Do a Baptism search
  Search for photos and other mementos of your own baptism, for example, your baptismal gown or certificate. Place these in a prominent spot in your home during the season. Bring home some holy water from the parish baptismal font, and use it to make the sign of the cross each morning on your forehead.

• Wear white and dress up
  On Sundays during the season, try to wear lots of white or something more “Easter-y,” for example, a flower corsage on your wrist or lapel. If you don’t usually dress up for Sunday Mass, wear dressier clothes each Sunday of Easter. Each time you dress, remember that you have been “clothed in Christ.”


• Light candles  Buy some nice candles for your home. Place them in your living room and on your dinner table. Light them at night and whenever you sit down to eat at home. Use a match to light them, and as you strike the match, say “Christ, our Light.”


• Dress up your dinner table Throughout the season, use a table cloth on your kitchen or dinner table if you don’t already. Use the nicer plates, utensils, and glasses that you save for special occasions. Commit to eating at least one meal at home on Sundays. Light candles, turn off the TV, and put on some nice music for these meals. Every time you eat, begin by saying, “Jesus, Lamb of God.”

• Make bathing a time of renewal  Whenever you shower or bathe, remember your own baptism. Recall how the neophytes were bathed in the font. Make it a special time of prayer by saying, “Christ, the Water of Life” when you begin. Pamper yourself with soothing oils or lotions. Remember how you have been anointed with the Spirit of Christ.


• Let each day be a little Easter  As you wake up each day, consecrate that day to God by saying, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” This comes from the traditional psalm for Easter (Psalm 118). If you can, give yourself some quiet time before the busyness of the day. Sit in silence with your morning coffee, light a candle, and let God speak to you in that moment.

• Write a thank-you note, just because “Eucharist” means “thank you” in Greek. Each week of Easter (there are seven), write a thank-you note to someone you appreciate but don’t often get to thank. Send it to them, and say a prayer for them as you seal the envelope or click the “send” button.

 

am i not here?

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

"Let not your heart be disturbed.  Do not fear any sickness or anguish.
Am I not here, who is your Mother?  Are you not under my protection?
Am I not your health?  Are you not happily within my fold?  What else
do you wish?  Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything."
(Words of Our Lady to Juan Diego)

Prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe

O Immaculate Virgin, Mother of the true God and Mother of the Church, who from this place reveal your clemency and your pity to all those who ask for your protection, hear the prayer that we address to you with filial trust, and present it to your Son Jesus, our sole Redeemer.

Virgin of Guadalupe, Mother of the Americas, Mother of Mercy, Teacher of hidden and silent sacrifice, to you, who come to meet us sinners, we dedicate on this day all our being and all our love. We also dedicate to you our life, our work, our joys, our infirmities and our sorrows. Grant peace, justice and prosperity to our peoples; for we entrust to your care all that we have and all that we are, our Lady and Mother.

Grant to our homes the grace of loving and respecting life in its beginnings, with the same love with which you conceived in your womb the life of the Son of God. Blessed Virgin Mary, protect our families, so that they may always be united, and bless the upbringing of our children.

Our hope, look upon us with compassion, teach us to go continually to Jesus and, if we fall, help us to rise again, to return to Him, by means of the confession of our faults and sins in the Sacrament of Penance, which gives peace to the soul.

We beg you to grant us a great love for all the holy Sacraments, which are, as it were, the signs that your Son left us on earth.

Thus, Most Holy Mother, with the peace of God in our conscience, with our hearts free from evil and hatred, we will be able to bring to all true joy and true peace, which come to us from your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns for ever and ever.
Amen.

Excerpted from the prayer of Pope John Paul II

Basilica of Mexico City, January 1979

my newest favorite poem

special thanks to this fabulous new bloggy friend.

Star-Silver

by Carl Sandburg

The silver of one star
plays cross-lights against pine-green
And the play of this silver cross-wise against the green is an old story.
Thousands of years.

And sheep grazers on the hills by night
watching the woolly four-footed ramblers
watching a single silver star.
Why does this story never wear out?

And a baby, slung in a feed box back in a barn in a Bethlehem slum
A baby's first cry,
mixing with the crunch of a mule's teeth on Bethlehem Christmas corn
Baby fists, softer than snowflakes of Norway

The vagabond mother of Christ
and the vagabond men of wisdom
all in a barn on a winter night
and a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay
Why does this story never wear out?

The sheen of it all--is a star, silver and a pine, green
For the heart of a child asking a story
The red and hungry, red and hankering heart
Calling for cross-lights of silver and green

living always in advent

In the comments, Songbird raises a question related to the use of blue or purple candles for the Advent wreath.  Why, she wonders, has there been some shifts toward blue rather than purple. Because I wanted to be as accurate as I can in my response, I did a little research.  And I intend to do a little more, but here's what I found out so far.

Purple, in the Catholic Church, is the prescribed color for the vestments used during both Advent and Lent. There is no mention of blue in the documents which are intended to help us, as a communion, celebrate the liturgical seasonsin communion with one another and the whole church.

Protestant churches and communities, however, experience more freedom in their choices of celebratory vestment colors.  And so, for many protestant communities, the shift indicates, among other things, a desire to differentiate the penitential nature of the Lenten season (and the purple color used to express it) with a "spirit of expectation, of anticipation, of     preparation, of longing." (Dennis Bratcher) And so using a deeper purple, an indigo or more "blue-ish" purple may sometimes be chosen.

In the Catholic Church, which as I mentioned is more regulated in its worship, the Advent Wreath is not a strictly liturgical element.  It is "a pious practice that is not regulated by the Church as the liturgy is.  However, if it is thought that the candle colors should be that of the sacred vestments, purple or violet, not blue, should be selected." (Eric Stoutz)

According to some Catholics, the desire to have the wreath match the vestments, overrides the desire to represent a spirit during Advent that is different from the spirit with which we celebrate Lent.  And to other Catholics, the use of a deeper purple for Advent (and purple as a secondary color is almost always rooted in blue), is chosen to represent that spirit of expectation, anticipation and longing.  It's a time to prepare ourselves, which does indeed invoke a personal and communal practice of penance, for the next coming of Christ.  (I like to think the next coming of Christ is not only the Second coming, but also the next time I, in wisdom and humility, actually welcome Christ into my heart and life: a process that is repeated daily, weekly, sometimes hourly...)

Personally, I prefer the blue-ish candles; the deep rich purple, the indigo, reminds and evokes for me the night into which Jesus was born.  The night of the world, the night of the stable, the night of my heart.  I adore the Lenten violet as well; but it does hold a different spirit.  Maybe because I came back to the Catholic faith in a community that used indigo in the candles and some of the environment cloths, maybe that is why it holds the spirit of Advent so clearly for me.  Maybe I just like more color, any way I can get it.  I was on the liturgy planning team for a few years at that former Catholic community and we had many discussions around this.  We were interested in providing the deepest, most personal, most communal, most significant, most holy experience for the members of our local community and for the many guests who would visit us during the holidays.  And we, at least at that time, thought using a distinguishing color for the candles and decor was appropriate.  It stuck with me.

All that being said, I need to go set up my Advent wreath for tomorrow!  Blessings on you and yours!

We live always during Advent. We are always waiting for the messiah to come. The messiah has come, but is not yet fully manifest. The messiah is not fully manifest in each of our souls, not fully manifest in humankind as a whole: that is to say, that just as Christ was born according to the flesh in Bethlehem of Judah, so must he be born according to the spirit in each of our souls.
– Jean Danielou

RIP Sister Rita

Last Thursday I received word that Sister Rita died.  Sr. Rita and I lived in the same community (convent) for the past seven years.  We were friends and sisters.  When I moved out of the convent to come live and minister with my mother, Sr. Rita was in discernment about her own living situation too.  Shortly thereafter she moved to Lourdes, our retirement/assisted living community.  Rita had a wicked sense of humor, a delightful wit, a keen intellect and a generous spirit.  She loved beauty wherever she saw it and was a true "lady."  Also she was a 1 on the enneagram.  A perfectionist and an idealist. 

Once she commented to me that she would like to talk to me about a comment I had made at dinner one evening.  Because I almost always assume that when someone wants to talk to me about something I've said it means that I've said something wrong or inappropriate, I told her that sure, I'd be happy to have that conversation and proceeded to avoid it like the plague.  Not her, so much, but the conversation.  About two weeks went by until one day I came home and she was stranded in the elevator of our convent.  She'd been in there for a couple of minutes, had called the emergency folks to get her out and I told her I'd sit outside the elevator until they came and got her out.  As I was sitting on the outside and she on the inside, a large metal door between us, she dryly commented, "Is this a good time for the conversation, Christine?"  Oh, my!   We chuckled about that for weeks. 

We did eventually talk about the comment - it had to do with me saying that when I made my profession of obedience, I meant obedience to the whole community.  She wondered about that as in her understanding our vow of obedience was to the prioress (and her successors).  Since I understand the root of obedience to be in listening... to God, to one another, to God speaking through one another, I said that it was the whole community who elected the prioress general, so it's the whole community to whom I owe obedience.  We had several discussions along these lines and I always enjoyed her perspective and I think she enjoyed mine.  We were two different generations, separated by two other generations.  We didn't always agree on the semantics, but we always agreed to love one another. 

I'm going to miss her.   May God grant that we meet again on the other side. 

happy easter

good friday

a holy thursday prayer

A beautiful Holy Thursday reflection

and a prayer:

Holy Thursday is all about gathering together in love. Jesus gathered with his disciples to celebrate the traditional Jewish Passover meal. During the meal He broke bread and passed it to his friends. Then they shared a cup of wine. Jesus promised that he would be there with them in the bread and wine each time they gathered to share this special meal. Then He got on His hands and knees and washed the feet of the disciples. This was a direct example of how they were to serve each other, an example of what we are called to do as Christians.

Today we will remember the three days the church calls the Triduum, that is Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Our words and actions will be those of Jesus, and should serve to remind us of how important they are in our lives.

Holy God be with us today as we gather as a family to remember your gift to us, the gift of your Son Jesus. He gave of himself, showing us how to love with every action of his life. May today be a reminder to us of Jesus’ commandment to us to love one another as He has loved us.

from: CTN