Never Less Than I Imagined

"To the extent of my power, I wish from now on to become conscious of what the world loves, pursues, suffers. I want to be the first to seek, to sympathize, to toil: the first in self-fulfillment, the first in self-denial - I would be more widely human and more nobly of Earth than any of the world's servants." - Teilhard de Chardin SJ 

Joe M, one of students at Lancaster Catholic, loved to talk about anything except class work. One day he started, "You could have been a doctor, you could have been a lawyer, you could have been a politician! Isn't being a nun boring?" (Tells you what he thought of my English class!) My honest answer then and now is, "My life has been a lot of things, but boring isn't one of them."

Rather, my life is more like the title of Raissa Maritain's memoir, We Have Been Friends Together and Adventures in Grace. To be a Sister of Saint Joseph is to experience friendship with God and others, adventure with God and others. My adventures don't amount to much geographically, but traversing the terrains of the heart, my own heart and the hearts of others is a journey beyond compare.

For me, there is nothing more precious than being trusted with part of another's life-story, another's heart-journey. As "Sister" I have prayed to be worthy of the trust people place in me as they share what they can't say in most places: family heartache, ups and downs of first love, addictions and recovery, faith crises, betrayals, histories of abuse, not being able to have children, "coming out" to family, trying to figure out how to respond to a beloved child's "coming out," living with HIV, job loss, depression, bulimia, abortion, all kinds of grief and shame...and the glorious joy as someone finds his/her way through pain to new life.

What would I say of SSJ life, of the God I have come to know through prayer, ministry and community? Never less than I imagined and always more than I bargained for!...more beautiful, more real, tenacious, tough, tender.

With the poet Mary Oliver -
"I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world."
New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 

Rita Woehlcke SSJ

Rita: 50 years in a nutshell: Rita Woehlcke SSJ is presently the Director of the SSJ Associates in Mission. She has taught in elementary and high school. She has worked with pregnant and parenting teens, homeless, pregnant, addicted women, court adjudicated teens, gay and lesbian Catholics and their families, and infertile couples. Her recent work was in spiritual direction, retreats and programs for personal and ministerial growth. As a Sister of Saint Joseph, she seeks to live her Congregation's mission "that all may be one" by inviting people to become more deeply aware that we live and love together, held in the unbound hospitality of God's broken-open and poured-out heart. This heart is manifest not only in Jesus, but also in the glorious cosmos that reflects and embodies God's dream and design: "a unity that is not uniformity and a diversity that is not division." (Eric Doyle, OFM)