Reflective Moments Moments Reflective Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph
August 2012
The purpose of Reflective Moments is to offer you a way to incorporate the spirit of Saint Angela Merici into your own lives. We hope that it enriches you spiritually.
By Sister Annalita Lancaster, OSU
The poet e.e. cummings makes reference in one of his poems to things we “cannot touch because they are too near.” Many of the things we hold dear – life, love, people, God – fall into that paradoxical category. Living life we overlook it; finding love we take it for granted; Christ looks back at us from the eyes of someone across the table, eyes we meet sometimes with only a casual glance. A mark of our strange and wonderful human condition is the need for signs and reminders. So, somebody invented anniversaries to remind us to look at all of life and see its actions and interactions pointing to a reality and making it happen. Life is made of minutes and hours. Time measured like that is ordinary and daily. There are other kinds of measures. Some moments come like gifts and have no place on clock faces or calendars. This year, 2012, the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph are commemorating such moments as we celebrate our 100th birthday as an autonomous Ursuline community. It is the quality of life shared during all those moments over all those years that we celebrate and revere. This centennial is a mosaic of moments when all ordinary things become special, giving new meaning to life. This mosaic mirrors persons who lived life to the full because they held the ‘secret of seeing.’ They knew, and shared with others, that from the core of a raindrop, from the heart of a candle flame, from the eyes of a child, from the underside of a leaf swinging in the breeze, the face of Christ smiles back at us. They nurtured that fullness of life; spread that sense of wholeness; reflected that depth of holiness. Anniversary celebrations point to meaning and memory, the two things that take away our blindness
to life. Those who persevere long enough to celebrate anniversaries are people who make symbols out of ordinary things and label them holy. Because anniversary people see meaning in all creation, they have eyes to read the wind; to see the stars in each other’s faces. They find meaning in mud and sunrise, in neon and concrete, in a weed-grown field and a carefully nurtured vineyard. That meaning is Christ who said, “I have come into this world so that those without sight may see.” In the mystery of that message anniversary people realize that we do indeed see in broken bread, for instance, that our small shatterings are mended by love; that we see in water our biggest thirst is for becoming, that we see in the thousand caring acts of one day of loving what healing really looks like. It is not just by accident that each time we celebrate Mass we are able to more fully understand transition from drinking fountain to baptism, between wheat field and Eucharist. “Do this in memory of Me” means everything is related, is shared and special, celebrated again and again for the sheer wonder of it. Anniversary people value memory as the gathering force of the fragments of meaning. Ursuline Sisters living and deceased, associates, alumnae, family members and friends join together celebrating Centennial 2012 hoping to keep the memories from rusting, the meanings from scattering. Looking deeply and seeing beyond the obvious, all life becomes a living sacrament. We become what we see -- the Spirit of God playing over the face of the world.