Carla Mae's Blog

We are into “ordinary” time, which only means that we are in between the two great mysteries of our salvation: the incarnation and the redemption. But make no mistake. Things are far from ordinary. The light has just been toned down just a bit. We walk by faith. What is faith? We are used to thinking it’s an intellectual acceptance of what we cannot see. But if we go back to the original Greek that the evangelists used, we get a surprise. The word is pistis , and it means “to cling to, to adhere to as with glue.” Now I don’t know about you, but that grabs me, no pun intended. Faith means we cling to God and God’s Word as a magnet clings to the refrigerator door. Faith means we “sniff out” where life is, like the newborn puppy with eyes tight shut, pumping its little legs until it finds where to nurse. Faith is newly hatched baby birds, eyes tight shut, and no feathers, with mouths wide open, waiting for the food that comes after they feel mom or dad land on the branch. Faith is anot...

As we inaugurated our 45 th president of the United States, 600 Dominicans from around the world gathered in Rome with Francis to close the 800 th Anniversary celebration of the founding of the Dominican Order. We are fresh from that wondrous anniversary. The challenges we face now often draw from our charism, from our ministerial situations, or from our cultural realities. I’d like to ponder the “background music” to all of these. I mean the counsels we have taken upon ourselves by vow. The counsels are radical Christian values that identify us as folks living within the lifestyle called consecrated life. Like the married, we have a set of vows added to our baptismal vows. These public vows witness to something, just as the married, by their wedding vows, witness to the faithful love of Jesus for his people. Those in religious life witness to the counsels as signs of the kingdom already in our midst. The counsel of Poverty has nothing to do with destitution. Destitution i...