By Sister Beatrice Ste. Marie, SSND
Sister Honora Nicholson, RSM, both challenged and opened the hearts of the Sisters at 3030 Park during our annual retreat.
Early on in the retreat the question: “Why did God make you?’ received a strong chorus answer right out of our Baltimore Catechism days. “Wrong!” Honora said as she quoted Fr. Charlie Mulholand’s homily, “God made me so that God could know me, love me and be happy with me in this life and in the next.”
This up-side down answer focused on the passionate and unconditional love of God, and set the tone for looking at God in new and grace-filled ways.
This love reset some of our old thinking even about the Incarnation!
Quoting John Duns Scotus, we were challenged to embrace the idea that “God would have become human even if Adam hadn’t sinned, because God has fallen irretrievably in love with us. The driving force of the Incarnation was a free act of the Creator to move closer to the creatures, not to blot out sin.”
But perhaps some of the greatest insights came from being challenged to look at God and to pray to God not as the “all-mighty One” but as the “all-vulnerable One.“
God, through Jesus, fully embraced the vulnerability and limitations of humanity, to be with us and to show us how to embrace and accept our vulnerability and limitations.
God was a master of letting go in order to be with us.
Furthermore, God invited us to continue the work of creation; to be co-creators, as God works to bring about the fullness of life for all.
This “all-vulnerable God” comes to us at our most vulnerable times in our brokenness, our illness, and, yes, in our aging.
One of the high points of the retreat was the invitation to see our aging years as the profound call of God to embrace our lives and the whole world in contemplative love.
As we let go of the more active ways of engaging in ministry, we were reminded that through our Baptism, “Our original and primary mission is to be a lover.” (Sister Barbara Ann Mullins. CSJ)
Sister Honora lifted up ideas about the great grace of embracing our aging years and the fullness of life of contemplative love. She captured those ideas in a video presentation formed of pictures taken here at 3030. Pictures of us and this place rolled by on the screen, accompanied with music which echoed the refrain: “This is holy ground.”
All in all, the retreat left us with much to ponder, not the least of which is the call to live in the present moment.
We began each day making the intention to pray for some part of the world that needed our prayers. One of the last questions for reflection invited us to ponder: "What parts of the world cry out especially for the transformation we can offer through our contemplative presence?"
