RE-MEMBERING

(09/22/15)

Reflections on Sept 20.

Some important thoughts, sharing as we walked that I want to ponder and re-member.

As we walked to Carrion or perhaps the village before Carrion, I wandered into places and feelings that I had left abandoned years ago.  I have no idea what brought it all to awareness.

I recalled and then re-membered vividly the years that I was blessed to live, love and learn during the years of my life enriched by my experience of convent life.  Recalling is just that: bringing the experience(s) to mind.  Re-membering is taking the recall into a place of healing, organizing the dismembered fragments into the bigger picture that encourages a deeper clarity.  So as we walked I shared some poignant moments of my lived experience.  I was so young and so very vulnerable.  Trusting and believing that all around me was saturated with goodness that I was shocked when my life which I so dearly loved at the Villa was turned upside down and inside out by circumstances that were beyond my ability and naïveté of youth to manage.

These events tore me away from the farm work to which I had been assigned and loved.  I was sent to Cleveland and the damaging, diminishing, destructive rumors/untruths followed me.  When I realized the destructive nature of the circumstances I feared that my dream and cherished reality of convent life had been destroyed beyond re-membering, beyond reconstructing - at least for this time on my life.

I was sadly right about that and chose to leave this expression of my Call.  I know that Mother Superior was distraught at my decision and attempted on three occasions to influence my decision.  She went so far as to invite my mom and dad to a meeting where she expressed to them her sadness and disapproval of my choice to leave.

The Universe is good.  That loving force of the Universe that some call God, the Holy Spirit, was preparing me for a lifetime that I could never have imagined.   I have been blessed with hard lessons that I could not understand at the time and sometimes even waved my fist at God. What I know now is that these lessons have been my most profound teachers and the expression of God's deep abiding love and presence in my life.

Now, this is a Camino moment.

#pilgrim