Dear Friend

Thanks to Cay Gibson at Cajun Cottage for inviting me to contribute to her recent seasonal "graced by the liturgical" planner. A nice place to begin or end your prayer time, and an incentive to take this prayer time regularly!Dear friend,We know each other, as all women striving for the good, the true, and the beautiful do.We know each other’s eager hearts and aching desires, the burning embers of our strengths and struggles, the eternal call to spiritual and emotional and physical motherhood, and the power that keeps us whole when the world around us is falling apart.We know each other’s need for true and deep emotional nourishment and spiritual friendship, which is why we can become “long-lost sisters” to women we just met an hour ago. That’s the beauty and charism of real womanhood: the glory of our need for one another’s presence and support so that we can become all that God creates us to be.We are created to love and nurture and encourage, to bring light to every darkened place, including the hollow spaces within each of us.Sometimes, nourishing relationships are lacking in our lives: we feel we must compete with others rather than complete one another, or our days are filled with pressing needs that only we can fill so that we cannot carve out the time to feed ourselves through real encounters, or we are afraid. And we feel alone.But it is only a feeling of aloneness, because we are not alone. Even if our particular circle does not support us right now because they can’t understand, they don’t have the time, they cannot see or hear our need. Sometimes we have simply outgrown that circle; sometimes God is calling us upward, into His own circle, and so the threads that bind us to our earthly circles must be released.This is uncomfortable ground. But it is an excellent spiritual place to be, because it forces us to look beyond what we have leaned on and relied upon until now, and begin encounter Him anew, and learn to trust. And when we can’t see Him, we can look to His Mother and ours, who understands our motherly hearts and knows better than we do what they truly need to fulfill our calling to nurture others, which enlarges our hearts to hold more of what He longs to pour into us.I hope we can meet and share and support one another soon. Meanwhile, we can pray for one another.km