Amazing how much you learn about yourself when you go back and trace how you got to be a cogent, confident self.
Early on I realized I couldn’t make it as a celibate nun without a close friend. The first great gift of friendship in my life was Sister Christopher. I realized you have to work at friendship. It doesn’t just happen. Chris and I cultivated our friendship like a garden – weeding, planting, tilling the soil, and wasting time, giving hunks of time to being together.
Writing the book these last few days have been slogging days. Trying to bring the reader into the seismic shifts of consciousness brought to Catholics by Vatican Council II, which means I’m into stacks of books, refreshing my mind on content. Then, the challenge to keep my book from being “bookish,” and that’s where fresh, lived experience comes in.
In a few short years I went from being a nun who relied on authorities to direct my life’s work and all I had to do was to be obedient… then the realization that the self of me had to search, to discern, and then to choose work from the needs of people. It was their suffering, their pain that enkindled my conscience, my heart and mind to respond.
Annie, the monastery dog, is moping around and is scared to go outside. Dayton, Wyoming has been getting a lot of thunderstorms rolling over the Big Horn Mountain Range right at our back door. It’s the thunder that gets to her, makes her cower inside Sister Josetta’s room.
Because of the long-standing drought in the area, everyone else here in Wyoming welcomes the rain that the storms bring. The pastures are green, green, and the Little Tongue River that runs through the monastery grounds is swollen and roaring.
Near it is a screened-in gazebo where I go to write, and Annie usually runs ahead to show me the way. But not these days, not until the hot weather sets in and there’s no chance of these loud and scary storms. I try to explain to her that it’s the lightning she’s got to watch out for, not the thunder, but I can’t seem to get through to her. I can barely coax her across the yard for a weenie treat, that’s how scared she is, because she just loves weenies (so do I).
I am following the people of Iran in their struggle for democracy closely in my heart and prayer these days. My heart takes fire from the young people risking their lives to help a new nation come.
Take young Neda Agha Soltan, killed by a single bullet this past Saturday, her killing caught on video for all the world to see. Young people writing their souls online. One student saying “I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs…I write these words for the next generation so they know we did not surrender to despotism.”
