Carla Mae's Blog

As lent blooms into Easter, we are very aware that we are being saved by God’s love. This is a fact. It’s right before our very eyes. The truth of the fact is one thing, but how it happens is another. We are not used to asking the how question, because it is asking for the explanation of functioning rather than the simple description of a fact of truth. So let’s take a stab at it…let’s explore how we are saved by a magnificent Love. First, Love bends down. Bending is a function. Here is this poor Cinderella-soul, which finds itself in a drudgery state not of her choosing. Love bends down to her, and she “turns” at Love’s touch, her drudgery gone, and transformed into a princess in a party dress and at a “dance.” Locked in Love’s embrace, she follows Love’s lead on the dancefloor of her life. When she becomes “oh-so-tired-to-death,” Love sweeps her into its arms and carries her across the threshold into the safety of his Father’s “castle.” Notice that even before bendi...

                                  The context for all we are and do – charism, Spirit Marks, common life, common prayer, study, mission and ministry – is set by our vows, our commitments. Our lay associates witness to us their baptismal vows, and some, their marital vows of faithful loving. Sisters vow the counsels in addition to their baptismal vows, to witness to the entire Church a non-consumerist, wild loving, and obedient life-style in community. So what is so distinct about vowing the counsel of religious obedience? We all seek to obey the voice of God in our life-styles, right? Indeed. Yet that voice of God asks different things of different folks. Marital vows ask a listening heart for the needs of the spouse and family. The sister pledges a listening heart for the voice of God coming through her religio...

If vows added to the baptismal promises identify certain life-styles, and the counsel of poverty vowed publicly reminds the whole Church that “You can’t take it with you when you go,” what is this celibacy thing all about? The married must be chastely celibate to all except their marriage partner. They sign the fruitful love of Christ Jesus in their marital love. But what does total celibate chastity mean for religious   who vow this counsel publicly? What does their vow of chastity mean in an age of recreational sex? Catherine of Siena believed that poverty was the most basic of the counsels, for if the human heart if fixed on a relationship with the Holy One as its one non-negotiable, then celibate love and a listening heart fall right in place. Sandra Schneiders, IHM, takes another view. She is convinced that only someone wildly in love could vow poverty and obedience as a life-style. I think they are both right. Catherine, from the angle of a basic value, a...

It’s here. Lent has come. We’ve been here before. What might be different this year? What might be different is that we are different. We are in a different place. This is most obvious nationally and politically. But what about spiritually? What about the hidden garden of my heart? Lent is the time for cleaning out the garden…of the soul. It’s time to get rid of the trash, the old growth, the dead stuff. Why? Well, if you look carefully, you will see all sorts of new growth starting underneath the trash. So, clear it away…give the new a chance to grow! But if I’m honest, I may not want to go there and do that. So, where am I going to go in this garden of mine? The wise Mother-Church takes us by the hand in the scriptures and leads us through the gate. First, there will be the desert, and we will learn that this is going to take work, and forces are going to gather to stop us. Then we climb a mountain, and surprise! We are shown what we will look like when the work is done...

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...

Pioneering in 2017...? In a recent article on religious life sent to us by the Executive Team, the word “pioneer” is used several times. It brought back an image that was used after Vatican II to describe what was happening in the Church as a result of the Council. From being quite “settled” as a result of colonization, writers were calling us to become “pioneers,” a “Church in the World.” So we roused ourselves from our security and “got on the road.” We began to go to public universities. We started talking to folks in other faith traditions. Dominicans founded Network in Washington, D.C., and the term “political ministry” became part of our vocabulary. Women’s Dominican communities took this pioneering call very seriously.  We are entering a new year. It is 2017. What might the term “pioneer” mean for us now, 52 years from the close of the council? In a time in our history when religious life as we have known it is not receiving candidates? Where are we to “go?” Wha...