LCWR ASSEMBLY 2017
“Being the Presence of Love: The Power of Transformation”
August 8-11 in Orlando, Florida
Summaries. highlights, and videos of the Assembly:
- LCWR Narrative: “LCWR Assembly explores the call to embody love for the sake of the world”
- LCWR Brief video overview 4:30
- Global Sisters Report story: “LCWR looks to the future with openness, communion and contemplation”
- Global Sisters Report video interviews of Outstanding Leadership Awardee Sr. Constance FitzGerald about her own call to religious life and to deep searching into contemplative life (2:51), and about her reaction to receiving the award ("I took about two weeks to say I would accept the award....") (1:51)
- Global Sisters Report video of keynoter Chris Pramuk leading Assembly in "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (1:15)
Statements from the Assembly:
- LCWR “condemns racism in all its harmful forms whether the violent acts of the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, and White Supremacist groups or the daily acts of hate and discrimination that diminish us all.”
- During the week of the Assembly, tensions quickly escalated between the USA and the People’s Republic of Korea. LCWR’s public statement “implor[es] President Donald J. Trump to engage in dialogue and negotiation.”
Advance Media Coverage
- Overall conference plans and context, with lovely insights and quotes about the contemplative approach being used as well as info on theme and speakers - Sister leaders to connect contemplation with real world at 2017 LCWR assembly from Global Sisters Report
8/8/17 evening: Assembly Opening
- LCWR president Sr. Mary Pelligrino, Assembly facilitator Sister Catherine Bertrand, and Assembly “listener” Sr. Liz Sweeney raised powerful questions and insights to affirm the theme and set the tone for the week. Examples (tweets by Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report):
- "The world aches for the presence of love as our planet endures such great pain."
- Think: "How grounded am I in the source of love as I consider? How grounded am I in the source of love as I speak?"
- Reflection must be met with action if contemplation is to be done effectively.
- The goal at this year's assembly is to regard it in its entirety as a justice event.
- "At this time, what is being asked of leaders of religious congregations? What is wanting or waiting to be born in our mission?"
8/9/17 morning - Keynote: Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Leaning into the Mystery of Resurrection Faith - Dr. Christopher Pramuk
- FULL KEYNOTE ADDRESS by Christopher Pramuk
- Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets from the session.
- This morning, @RegisUniversity's Christopher Pramuk speaks to the assembly at LCWR on leaning into the mystery of resurrection.
- For Pramuk, it all started with music. The piano first taught Pramuk the art of discernment and attention, he says.
- Music gave Pramuk the important gift of entry into a community larger than himself, a community of the living and the dead.
- "Something deep in me was unsettled. The longing to study music had never abated."
- Pramuk calls the decision to pursue studying music a kind of unconscious surrender to the hidden elements of grace.
- Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell plunged Pramuk headlong into the deep river of black suffering, resistance, beauty, and grace.
- In being introduced to spiritual hymns at Naropa University, the resurrection of the body ceased to be an abstraction to Pramuk.
- In theological terms, we might say that the words of the spirituals when we sing them together become as sacraments.
- The spirituals become instruments of real presence for people on pilgrimage together in history: our pathos become one with God's.
- Pramuk sits down to the piano to play "Wade in the Water" as he asks the assembled to join him in singing.
- "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" The dead aren't here, but maybe they are here: we simply need to know how to listen.
- To sing the spirituals is to know experientially the transformative power of a resurrection faith, says Pramuk.
- Pramuk returns to the piano to play what he calls a sort of post-modern spiritual: "Mothers of the Disappeared" by U2.
- Pramuk says the U2 song "reverberates in the same force field of remembrance and hope" as the resurrection Gospel accounts.
- "As hard as we may try to disappear it, the past always remains in the present."
- All of the Catholic rituals plunge us into the liminal spaces between life and death, solitude and solidarity, says Pramuk.
- "We stand under a cloud of witnesses: a kinship with all things in God, which includes the rocks and the trees."
- "The hope that we bear is transformative because we come to a God who remembers the least and most forgotten in history."
- In a moving sermon, MLK, Jr. spoke of his own death. Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles said he "preached himself out of the fear of death."
- "What did King know that we do not know? What could he see that we cannot see?" - Rev. Kyles
- Perhaps King could see and feel something of what the slaves sensed: the beginnings of a broken world made whole in God. – Pramuk
- Think of Sr. Dorothy Stang. Think of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine. Think of Sr. Paula Merrill and Sr. Margaret Held.
- Pramuk thinks of Sr. Helen Prejean, who says "the Bible Belt and the Death Belt are the same."
- "What do you do with your grief? You take that outrage, you take that sorrow and sadness and work for justice." - Helen Prejean
- In these martyrs, in these who work for justice, we see that dreams that once seem impossible have a way of breaking into reality.
- "For my part, I have come to believe that life is too short to play in small, self-enclosed circles." – Pramuk
- “We sing our way from fear to courage and fresh hope. We make the path forward together by walking." - Christopher Pramuk
8/9/17 afternoon: Sharing from earlier contemplative dialogue groups
- Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets from the session.
- Contemplative group leaders are now sharing feedback from this morning's deepening groups.
- "There was awareness that the Spirit speaks through everything and maybe particularly in our history of pain and suffering."
- "That's where our power might be...in that vulnerability. There's a gift and challenge in vulnerability." - @susanfrancois
- "How can we go beyond our congregations and beyond associates to expand our ministry as we experience diminishment?"
- "In communion, we bring in the suffering world, the joyful world, every piece of what's going on in the world."
- A Spanish-speaking sister says she struggles with knowing others at the core of their being because language can be a barrier.
- "Perhaps we're being called to finding and naming that voice we developed during the doctrinal investigation."
- "Hope and courage was a felt experience in the room this morning. Solidarity was present in the room."
- There's a freedom in thinking, What do we have to lose? There is energy and excitement in that, sisters say.
- "In the future, the call is to live; yes, we're called to action, but not to fix the problems, that's not ours."
- This morning's evocative keynote address felt like the perfect approach to thinking about religious life, says Liz Sweeney.
- "Perhaps we need to sing in a minor key for a while and not in a major key, to really dwell in the minor key as long as we need."
- How present are we right now to the Spirit? @susanfrancois remarks that the quiet in this ballroom reflects on presence.
- "Perhaps we're living into the future that God intends."
- The next part of the afternoon at LCWR is an executive session, so we're signing off until this evening.
8/9/17 evening – Thanks to Global Sisters Report for tweets:
- Sisters reflect on today's programming: "At the end of Chris' presentation, it felt like we were in the presence of the divine."
- "There's a blaze of light in every word / It doesn't matter what you heard / The holy or the broken hallelujah" - Leonard Cohen
- Bishop John Gerard Noonan, of the Archdiocese of Orlando, joins #LCWR2017 now.
- That's a wrap for day one at #LCWR2017. We'll be back tomorrow with more updates!
8/10/17 morning – Keynote: We Stood in the Place of Death and Heard the Living Call Our Name -
Jan Richardson
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/10 Assembly sessions.
- To be undone and remade by grief's hand is a messy, scary and cathartic process, said the keynote speaker for Aug. 10, Jan Richardson, an artist, author and ordained Methodist minister.
Richardson discussed her emotional journey following the unexpected death of her husband, Gary; he died in 2013 just three and a half years after they had married. In him, she both found and quickly lost her creative partner and "co-conspirator."
She invited the sisters to consider what it means to "be the presence of love" (the theme of the assembly) even when it seems that the "love that's been present seems to have left us." She said death is a process that can come in many forms: a physical death, the death of a dream, loss of a familiar lifestyle, or "the ending or changing of a community that has held our hearts...."
"When absence erupts in our lives, how do we call upon the presence of love that goes deeper than our loss?" she asked the LCWR attendees. "How do we open ourselves anew to the presence of love that endures far beyond death?..."
- To be undone and remade by grief's hand is a messy, scary and cathartic process, said the keynote speaker for Aug. 10, Jan Richardson, an artist, author and ordained Methodist minister.
- TWITTER: Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets from the session:
- Good morning from #LCWR2017! We're back for day two, where this morning sisters prayed for places of pain in the world.
- This morning's keynote speaker is Methodist minister Jan Richardson, author of "The Cure for Sorrow" and many other books.
- Jan Richardson begins: "This blessing does not have it all together. This blessing sometimes wakes up anxious and afraid."
- "This blessing knows, too, how you keep turning yourself toward mystery, how you keep turning yourself toward hope." – Richardson
- "This blessing has been waiting for you. This blessing has been watching you. This blessing has been wanting to see your face."
- "This blessing meets you with fierce love that is ancient and present." – Richardson
- Richardson reads a fortune from a cookie that, she jokes, foretold this meeting: "Something spectacular is coming your way."
- In the wake of her husband's sudden death, Richardson says she was undone by intense grief, altered at a cellular level.
- The process of grief holds many graces, but that unmaking and remaking can also be hideously messy, says Richardson.
- Richardson withdrew from public life after her husband's death to explore in her studio, to write and make messes and weep.
- Richardson's husband was also her collaborator, her "creative co-conspirator." They often traveled and presented together.
- Richardson says she knew she needed time to discern what it would look like to offer public events on her own after Gary died.
- Richardson had to stop making assumptions, she says. Nothing after Gary's death felt like a foregone conclusion.
- So when the invitation came from Annmarie Sanders, Richardson says she found it irresistible. The word "yes" bubbled up in her.
- "I could not pass up the opportunity to stand up here with you and say thank you. Thank you for who you are in this world."
- "I will say about blessings that I am fascinated by them."
- "A blessing has the power to convey God's desire for our well-being and wholeness."
- "A blessing has the power to transform us even when, or especially when, the path has become difficult or dark or dangerous."
- "What does it mean to be the presence of love when the love that has been presented to us seems to have left us?"
- "There is a deep, deep, deep river that connects all our losses and that links us together in all the sorrows that we carry."
- "When absence erupts in our lives, how do we call upon the presence of love that goes deeper than our loss?"
- "How do we open ourselves anew to the presence of love that endures far, far beyond death?"
- "When the wall between the worlds is too firm, too close, when it seems all solidity and sharp edges..."
- "...then, then, may you be given a glimpse of how weak the wall and how strong what stirs on the other side."
- "A blessing has the power to work within time and within chronology, but a blessing is not a particularly linear thing."
- "We sometimes ache with that sense of separation between this world and the next world, between now and eternity."
- "We have to learn how to live with those places where the wall feels most present and painful."
- "This is not a problem to be solved with intellect. The instinct is to lean into the wall, to listen for presences."
- "The wall might not be a wall, but maybe a veil, or a threshold that we will never fully cross in this life."
- "It has been crucial to me to attend well to the grief, to give it time and space to say what it needs to say."
- "We grieve because we love. And though we can try to hurry the grief along...we risk missing the presence of love."
- "One of my prayers has become: May my love be more fierce than my grief."
- "It is this love that calls us to this life, that enables us to keep living this life, that is so much wider than we ever knew."
- Richardson shares another blessing: "Now, Beloved, we live."
- "When Gary died, I lost my relationship with pronouns. I could no longer say 'we' and 'our' and 'us' in the way I once had.
- "I also lost my relationship with tenses. Trying to speak of Gary in the past tense has been...heartbreaking."
- "When our hearts break and loss comes, where can we say 'we'? Where can we still say 'now'?”
- "I loved living in that ongoing conversation that became so crucial, so integral to the way that Gary and I both created."
- "Over time, I began to move my studio into Gary's studio. It's a process that I'm still feeling my way into."
- "Where can we still say 'we' in a way that enables us to feel that we're not alone?"
- "Blessing for the Brokenhearted: Let us agree for now that we will not say the breaking makes us stronger."
- "Let us promise we will not tell ourselves time will heal the wound when every day our waking opens it anew."
- "Perhaps for now it can be enough to simply marvel at the mystery of how a heart so broken can go on beating."
- After Gary's death, a nurse said, "His heart beats in you now." Many nights, Richardson says, the beat of her heart is a prayer.
- "[It's] as if something in me knows the only way to meet an endlessly deepening love to is to have an endlessly expanding heart."
- Richardson says she finds herself fascinated by Mary Magdalene and the threshold she found herself upon.
- "She knows what it means to let go in a way that will change her on a cellular level."
- The Magdalene's Blessing: "You hardly imagined standing here. Everything you ever loved suddenly returned to you."
- "Now you do not know how to abide this ache in the center of your chest as this door swings open and shut at the same time."
- This is an invitation, a choice, a threshold, a gate. This is your life calling to you from a place you could never have dreamed.
- "So let the tears come, as anointing, as consecration, and then let them go. Let this blessing gather itself around you."
- Richardson shares a video that she created with her husband Gary, "The Hours of Mary Magdalene".
- Richardson offers final words: "May we carry these blessings. May we live these blessings. May we be these blessings."
- "I hold your heart that you hold in my heart. Bless you."
8/10/17 afternoon – Presidential Address: The future enters us long before it happens - Opening space for the emerging narrative of communion - Mary Pellegrino, CSJ
- FULL TEXT of presidential address by Mary Pellegrino
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/10 Assembly sessions.
- It's high time for women religious to take ownership of the narrative that has dominated their vocation for the past half-century, said St. Joseph Sr. Mary Pellegrino.
As president of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious, she made an emphatic call to almost 800 women religious Aug. 10 to begin shifting the focus from diminishment to communion. The address, which was both challenging and comforting, was part of LCWR's annual assembly, held Aug. 8-11 in Orlando.
By highlighting the power of storytelling, Pellegrino noted the need to make room for emerging, more accurate information and experiences that are disrupting the age-old stories surrounding religious life.
"This is hard work, long work, and undefined work," she said, but, "I can think of no other time in my life when the need to be honest toward reality has been so urgent." More on the presidential address
- It's high time for women religious to take ownership of the narrative that has dominated their vocation for the past half-century, said St. Joseph Sr. Mary Pellegrino.
- TWITTER: Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets below.
- We're back: this afternoon, @LCWR_US outgoing president Mary Pellegrino is delivering her presidential address. Stay tuned.
- "Stories are the glue that hold societies and cultures together." - Mary Pellegrino
- Think of the narratives that shape us, says Mary Pellegrino. These narratives create a certain reality for us.
- For example, Pellegrino believed she was named "Mary" because of a promise her parents made to God after the birth of her brother.
- Pellegrino wanted so badly to believe in the drama of the story about her name, she says. It was a great story!
- "I had to allow a former narrative to pass in order to be able to create space for a newer, fuller story to emerge."
- In many ways our culture, our church, and our country are living in this space in which narratives are being interrupted.
- Narratives like American exceptionalism, Western dominance, and moral leadership are passing, says Pellegrino.
- The work ahead of us is to assist passing narratives about ourselves to pass in order to open space for what's emerging to arrive.
- How do we help "patient re-elaboration" to happen? How do we live and lead at a time like this?
- One way is that we allow incomplete or former narratives to be disrupted by new experience and information.
- Consider the presence of Dr. Shannen Dee Williams at last year's assembly, says Pellegrino. Hard truths about racism disrupt.
- Williams' research demands that women religious reframe the narrative around their actions toward POC.
- The "problem of honesty toward reality stems from the problem of being honest toward one's one reality." - Jon Sobrino, SJ
- "I can think of no other time in my lifetime when the need to be honest toward reality has been so urgent." – Pellegrino
- It seems that the diminishment narrative about religious life is being disrupted by a narrative of deepening communion.
- Pellegrino offers her assessment of the diminishment narrative: A post-World War II boom led to increased vocations.
- Sisters left schools after Vat. II, but this renewal led to the end, says the narrative. The corrective is a return to the past.
- This narrative is reductive, says Pellegrino. The diminishment narrative sees death as punishment for perceived infidelity.
- Nearly every challenge currently facing vowed religious can be traced back to the lives and labors donated to the people of God.
- The diminishment narrative reflects our fears and our uneasy and unresolved relationship with death, says Pellegrino.
- This narrative of diminishment created undue conflict which led to the Apostolic Visitation and Doctrinal Assessment.
- The emerging narrative, one of communion, is being shaped by new information and experience, both liberating and challenging.
- This emerging narrative of communion expands its focus to the vitality of consecrated life and the eruption of spiritual energy.
- Messages written by men and women religious to Pope Francis and the wider church speak eloquently of communion.
- These messages, gathered during meetings hosted by CICLSAL during the Year for Consecrated Life, speak about the need for healing.
- These gatherings, these messages offer a powerful witness to the catholicity of our church and to global communion and solidarity.
- Consider what it means to make visible intercultural diversity and inclusion when nationalist movements are threatening societies.
- International Catholic sisters in the United States are coming from 83 countries across six continents.
- International sisters add to and complement the already growing cultural and ethnic diversity of religious life in the U.S.
- "Consider what God and humanity are asking for today." - Mary Pellegrino
- There are currently 150 emerging lay movements and communities of consecrated life in the United States.
- "The congregations of our conference have centuries of experience in discernment, spirituality, human and religious formation."
- Consider what it might mean to bring the historical depth of centuries-old spiritualities and charisms to bear on new communities.
- Collaborations and gatherings taking place in this country signal a deepening communion into which we are being drawn.
- Men and women entering religious communities are already living elements of the emerging narrative of communion.
- For example: Consider an upcoming book, written by 13 women religious under the age of 50, coming from @litpress in February.
- The book, "In Our Own Words," is written in collaboration, with intentional attention to diversity and inclusivity.
- Similarly, the @Young_Nuns gathering in New York last month represented the growing diversity of religious life in North America.
- These emerging realities disrupts some dimension of the diminishment narrative which we need to help pass.
- The source of our deepest communion with God and the world is the deep, unrelenting grief that marks our lives and communities.
- The emerging narrative of communion is essentially a paschal narrative, shaped by the pattern of Jesus' life.
- "We've vigiled at the deathbeds of far too many of our sisters. We've buried far too many of our elders."
- "We've wept far too many tears or we've simply grown numb from the almost daily reminder that life certainly has changed."
- Our communal sorrow and sadness goes deeper each time we transition one more cherished ministry, divest of a beloved institution.
- "Please consider whether these great sadnesses have not gone through the center of yourself?" - Rainer Maria Rilke
- "All of our sadnesses are moments of tension...because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing."
- "Signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens." – Rilke
- "Our future has already entered us, is already transforming itself in us." – Pellegrino
- Inviting others to tend our grief with us is one of the most generous & generative acts of service that we could possibly render.
- "Our own grief is a gateway to grace, not only for ourselves, but also for our world."
- "The grace that will come from embracing this paschal narrative of communion will be costly but it will not diminish us."
- "While our grief is remaking us, we will remake the world." - Mary Pellegrino
- "Let's remake the world with words. Not frivolously, nor To hide from what we fear, But with a purpose." - Gregory Orr
- That concludes Sr. Mary Pellegrino's presidential address to the LCWR assembly.
- Standing ovation for LCWR President Mary Pellegrino as thoughtful, sensitive address concludes on religious life emerging as "communion"
8/10/17 afternoon – Conversation with Christopher Pramuk and Jan Richardson, facilitated by Liz Sweeney
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/10 Assembly sessions.
- "...The two discussed how each other's different approaches to the subject moved or provoked the other, each having bared their soul differently: Pramuk at the piano, Richardson with the poetic blessings she wove through her address...."
- TWITTER: Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets from the session, below.
- In the last session of the day at #LCWR2017, we'll hear again from Chris Pramuk and @JanLRichardson as they come together in conversation.
- "I almost took my shoes off before I came up...it's a little like Moses approaching the burning bush." - Chris Pramuk
- Pramuk says he's been reflecting on the word "conspire," which means to breathe together.
- The root of "conspirare" is what we've been doing here together: breathing and loving and asking difficult questions.
- The radical call of the Gospel is subversive, says Pramuk. We're in a moment that calls for a certain degree of risk in our work.
- "Despite how important they are to our hearing one another, engaging one another, words can only carry us so far." – Richardson
- "If we're to descend to practice whatever God is calling us to, words will sometimes fail us." – Richardson
- "What is the work we need to do between the words? What is the work we cultivate to move into nonverbal places?"
- Richardson asks Pramuk how the practice of playing music has shaped him and his work.
- Playing the piano takes Pramuk out of his head and back into his body in a very generative way, he says.
- "I had a lot of shame around the body. I was taught to separate the spirit and the body. Implicitly, mostly." – Pramuk
- Pramuk says that the piano and the black church gave him permission to use his body, to celebrate his hands and feet.
- "As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate that I am an embodied spirit." – Pramuk
- Pramuk refers to Philip Glass' "4:33" and how revelatory it was in revealing our discomfort with silence.
- "I think the more that we can model comfort with silence, to young people especially, then a kind of music emerges out of that."
- Jan recalls the gift friends gave to her after Gary's passing: "We give you extravagant permission to do what you need to do."
- On stage: @JanLRichardson, Chris Pramuk, and Liz Sweeney join in conversation.
- "What we need in our grief can change, does change, needs to change." - @JanLRichardson
- "I had to get over the compulsion to apologize for not answering emails promptly and not showing up where people expected me."
- Richardson says seeking solace and comfort and also getting into the stretched-out places of fear are all a part of grief.
- Pramuk says that Richardson's witness has helped him gain some insight into parenting adopted children from Haiti.
- "I never thought about his emotion in terms of grief. It occurred to me that I think he's grieving a family he never knew."
- "Henry grieves because he loves and because he desires to be loved, to know and to be known."
- Pramuk recalls Richardson's earlier quote of Henry David Thoreau: "There is no remedy for love but to love more."
- Richardson remembers the Irish poet and priest John O'Donohue: "Absence is the sister of presence. The imagination loves absence."
- Richardson asks Pramuk how he experiences absence and presence living together.
- Pramuk often took his kids to Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. "I've always felt a palpable presence in spaces of absence."
- "[In this room], there is a fierce commitment to love and to tell the truth and to write your story," says Pramuk.
- "You have cell memory in this room that extends back centuries and the courage to move forward. I urge you to trust it." – Pramuk
- "Listen for the heartbeat," Richardson says.
- "This feels like the celebration of a new moment, of our hearts burning within us," says Liz Sweeney.
- "Where are you sensing a synchronization of hearts?" Catherine Bertrand sends sisters out at the end of day two of #LCWR2017.
8/11/17 morning – Our Commitment to be the Presence of Love: A Conversation Among Religious Life Leaders including Yesenia Fernandez, MSGsP; Virginia Herbers, ASCJ; Ann Jackson, PBVM; and Alba Letelier, SP
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/11 Assembly sessions.
- Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets.
- Good morning, #LCWR2017! We're starting the third and final day of the assembly with a panel of women religious speaking on the future.
- The panel is asked: After the experience of this assembly, what do you see as you look ahead?
- Ann Jackson: "Some days I live this call, and some days I pray that this call to religious life is living me."
- Ann Jackson: "The future begins in this very moment, by me allowing that Spirit of this life to live me."
- Yesenia Fernandez: "The future is in front of me. It's all of you. We are admiring one another in our charisms."
- Fernandez: "By living the present in loving presence today, we are making our future."
- Alba Letelier: "I cannot imagine the future, and that is my problem. I discovered some years ago the future is coming to us."
- Letelier: "How can we be one? How can the Spirit help us to be in communion with all of the world?"
- Virginia Herbers: "I was very taken by the notion of vision. We can all look at the same thing and see very different things."
- Herbers: "To be able to come into communion with a diversity of thought is beautiful."
- Herbers: "In listening, together we can say, 'Do you hear that? It's beckoning, let's follow that and move toward it.'
- Letelier: "I don't want to be a voice for the voiceless. I want to give the voiceless the opportunity to use their own voice.”
- The panel is asked: What do you want the members of LCWR to come away from this assembly with?
- Fernandez: "We need to trust, to let go of the old narrative so that we can live the narrative that God is creating for us."
- Herbers: "We have to trust that future that is already coursing in our veins."
- Letelier asks the assembly to stand and look around the room. More than 780 sisters rise and turn to their neighbor.
- Jackson: "It's no longer 'our motherhouse.' It's a center of mission wherever we are, our responsibility to steward collectively."
- Liz Sweeney asks the assembled to reflect on this conversation, on how LCWR is being drawn forward.
- After a period of reflection, the panel is asked to again respond: What do you see here? What do you want members to take away?
- Hernandez: "To move forward, we have to bring the diversity of cultures, of backgrounds together to form a beautiful bouquet."
- Herbers: "We were told, 'Don't prepare. Listen. It will be a response to what happened that hasn't yet happened.'
- Herbers: "We have become co-conspirators in accompanying whatever is. It's scary. It's filled with question marks."
- Herbers: "But in time, as we move forward and listen to the Spirit, we are building something we could have never imagined.”
- Jackson: "Sometimes the margins are as close as the tip of my consciousness."
- Letelier: "We are very good at expressing a lot of ideas. We need to go from [head] to [heart]."
- Letelier: "Sometimes we forget how to lose ourselves in time. We need to be counter-cultural in wasting time, to listen deeply.”
- Letelier: "It's not knowing, it's loving what you are. That's the thing now: how we love each other enough to waste time."
- Assembly listeners are now asked to reflect on the panel so far. One says: "This is a very unique LCWR, and I've gone to many."
- Listeners express gratitude for the panel speakers, for the reminder that "the future is coursing through our veins."
- One listener said she was surprised. She expected to hear stories of burden, which she's used to hearing.
- Instead, she hears to call to be drawn into an even deeper diversity.
- "We are called widen and overlap our circles, to be big together, just as we become diverse, smaller parts of the holy whole."
- "[We are] to be good news in a world longing to hear even the faintest whisper of inclusive love, extravagant love."
8/11/17 morning – Reflections from Deepening Sessions after morning panel
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/11 Assembly sessions.
- Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets.
- As the assembly comes back from a morning break, Catherine Bertrand asks leaders to remember Jan's "synchronization of hearts.
- Reflection: What do we want to be born right now? What future do we want to create? What questions do we want to explore?
- After a period of discussion, group leaders at #LCWR2017 are sharing reflections from this morning.
- One leader expressed the desire to expand dialogue and communion with @WomenReligious (CMSWR).
- One group adopted the image of a bridge: a bridge connecting the old and new, with new listening skills and leadership skills.
- Another group would like LCWR members to partner with members of the black and Hispanic sisters' conferences and @Young_Nuns.
- One table expressed the need to grieve the proliferation of violence in our country in order to be drawn to deeper action.
- Like the @NETWORKLobby petition, what are the practical ways we can address the ills of the world with the influence we have?
- A table of Spanish-speaking sisters focused on diversity: "It's in stepping on each other's toes that we learn to dance."
- "New congregations are being born in our midst. The 'nones' have discovered us. We want to find ways to enter into relationship."
- A table discussed how DNA tests at http://Ancestry.com reveal that there is no American DNA. "Think about that today."
- "Birth is painful and messy. We should push, but not push too hard."
- We'll be back with live updates from #LCWR2017 at 2:00 Eastern for the concluding process and blessing of leadership.
8/11/17 afternoon -- Committing to Be the Presence of Love: An opportunity to determine the commitments participants wish to make to better the world
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/11 Assembly sessions.
- Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets.
- This afternoon we're back in the ballroom to close the day's portion of the assembly by reflecting on what we've heard this week.
- Friday is Horizons: @sinsinawasister Christin Tomy on the importance of stopping, resting - Sabbath - in the garden.
- Once more during the #LCWR2017 assembly, table leaders are invited to share reflections from the day's conversations.
- "We are called to create circles of communion for the sake of peace and for the earth, to be a fierce force for peace."
- Another table would like to implement ways that @LCWR_US and @WomenReligious can model the presence of love in the world.
- "We are called to communion - a sense of communion that reaches beyond our congregational, national, and faith borders."
- "We believe it is time to take our contemplation to the public square, from a place of vulnerability with and among others."
- The communal fields of energy being created in this room are available to us beyond this moment, says Liz Sweeney.
- Catherine Bertrand quotes Marie McCarthy "This does not mean that we sit back in some kind of pious fog and hope for the best."
- McCarthy: "The love we are called to demands extraordinary discipline and extraordinary engagement."
- McCarthy: "We must think more than ever before and we must act more boldly than ever before.
8/11/17 afternoon -- Installation of LCWR officers 2017-2018
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/11 Assembly sessions.
- In the three-person presidency, Sister Mary Pellegrino is now Past President, Sister Teresa Maya is now President, and Sister Sharlet Ann Wagner, CSC is incoming president. Sister Marcia Allen, CSJ (Past President 2016-17) is now a former president. 8/17/17 Global Sisters Report interview with Sister Sharlet Wagner.
8/11/17 evening -- LCWR Outstanding Leadership Award: Tribute to Sister Constance FitzGerald and her acceptance speech
- ACCEPTANCE SPEECH by Sister Constance FitzGerald
- This ARTICLE by Soli Salgado in Global Sisters Report covers all 8/11 Assembly sessions.
- TWITTER: Thanks to Brittany Wilmes of Global Sisters Report @sistersreport for tweets below.
- Tonight, as the #LCWR2017 assembly draws to a close, the conference honors Sr. Constance Fitzgerald with the Outstanding Leadership award.
- Fitzgerald's classic 1984 essay "Impasse and Dark Night" changed the path of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
- Fitzgerald, born in Utah, has the expansive and adventurous spirit of the American West, say fellow sisters.
- At the age of five, Fitzgerald met a Carmelite nun passing through town and vowed that she would one day become a Carmelite nun.
- Fitzgerald recognized that her Carmelite formation would not give her what she needed, so she initiated her own course of study.
- Led by her keen intellect and propensity to dream big, Fitzgerald soon become an innovative leader in the Carmelite community.
- Thanks to Fitzgerald, the Baltimore Carmelites became known as visionary, prophetic risk-takers.
- Fitzgerald took on a bold enterprise, collaborating with other communities to take on a rigorous course of theological discussion.
- At age 36, Fitzgerald gave a presentation to the Woodstock meeting about opening mystic lives to the lay community.
- Fitzgerald became a sought-after presenter worldwide, taking the stage in academic and theological circles as a peer.
- Out of the Woodstock seminar came the Association of Contemplative Sisters, of which Fitzgerald was an early leader.
- "An important mission was being handed to me, so for the sake of contemplative life, I was ready to [make a] sacrifice."
- Fitzgerald has become a leading speaker on the re-interpretation of the Carmelite lifestyle for the times in which we live.
- Fitzgerald's Carmelite lifestyle has made her "able to understand God's life with us and share that understanding."
- "I deeply believe this is the era of contemplation, and the stakes are very high." - Constance Fitzgerald
- "Contemplation is a love experience." - Constance Fitzgerald
- "We carry the whole world within us." - Constance Fitzgerald
- Friends admire Fitzgerald's "life in and for community...She lives in solitude, yet thrives on collaboration and friendship."
- "You have shown us that this dark time politically and globally is an invitation to pass over into the perspective of God."
- The LCWR leadership team gives Fitzgerald a print with Teilhard de Chardin's words: "Above all, trust in the slow work of God."
- Fitzgerald tells her fellow sisters she wore a red shirt to show the passion "I have for you and who you are in the church."
- Fitzgerald says she has been privileged to "walk closely this journey since Vatican II" with many other sisters, "great women."
- Fitzgerald says she accepts this award as a sign of the value LCWR places on the lives and the contribution of contemplative nuns.
- "In one way, I should just sit down, because everything I am saying, you have already said in some way." – Fitzgerald
- "I didn't know you were going to say all of this, but I hoped. I hoped!" – Fitzgerald
- "Now is the time...to live into a new evolutionary stage of consciousness, communion." - Constance Fitzgerald
- "This [moment] is breathtaking, sisters. It means being drawn into the...communion that constitutes trinitarian life."
- "The great mystics offer us this astounding hope and promise...they have carved into evolution a pathway for us."
- Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius have deepened and widened the channels of human consciousness.
- "We have got to open ourselves to the challenge of living through Jesus Christ into the vibrant life of trinitarian communion."
- "Read as much as you can. Grab a hold of these writings. Let it underpin your prayer." - Fitzgerald on trinitarian study
- "We don't know how long this emergence will take, nor how long-reaching the turbulence will be." – Fitzgerald
- "This union, this gift, is the goal of contemplative prayer, for which you all long." - Fitzgerald on communion with the Trinity.
- "Prophets of communion: This is my dream for us, my sisters." - Constance Fitzgerald accepts the Outstanding Leadership award.
List of exhibitors at LCWR 2017 Assembly
Order audio or video of LCWR 2017 Assembly sessions now.