Sisters

I’m not one to discuss my faith and spirituality much. Sometime it is because words cannot begin to capture my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. More often, though, it is because the simple act of speaking or writing about these things will push people away. I’m a bridge builder and connector, and knowingly doing something that would separate me from others is not something I do.

Yet connectedness is the very thing that is compelling me to write now. My own religious background is pretty vanilla. My current religious affiliation is Methodist, which is a state I married into. As a junior high school student, I was confirmed Presbyterian. When I was a young child, we went to what I like to think of as a New Age/hippy church. I was baptized EUB. Religion to me is an institution, a set of beliefs and practices perpetuated by a hierarchical structure inhabited by very human individuals. I have never had the feeling that a religious institution is telling me what to think or believe, although I do understand why many people feel that way. Religion is not the same as faith, although quite frequently the two intersect in my life.

The most meaningful experiences for me are the ones in which I feel part of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, believing that we are all children in the process of learning and growing, turning our faces toward our shared spiritual being. Faith for me is about my internal barometer’s response to what happens around me. It is the part of me that yearns for the connection of something greater than myself and my world, and it is the part that feels called by that greater something. It is an awareness that I matter and that I am connected to something that matters even more than I do.

I have now finished my first academic year at a Catholic women's college. It has been a nine-month-long culture shock. By choice, I have attended several masses at work, the most recent being the Baccalaureate Mass this past Friday evening. Being in a worship service with colleagues is a unique experience. We have all the usual stresses of higher education—end-of-semester grading/testing/crying, students desperate to improve a grade, various offices continuing to offer their regular services amidst all the end-of-semester-ness around them, and so on.  Yet Friday night, there we were. We’d been able to set aside the gritty details of our individual jobs and gather. I sat with my boss. We sang together and prayed together.  We wept together. We hugged each other. For that one hour, we were connected to each other and to the world beyond ourselves in a way I’ve never before experienced in a workplace. It was a reminder that our work is for a larger purpose. It is, indeed, a blessing, to be where I can use the strength I find in my faith to add to my work rather than feel I’m supposed to suppress or hide that part of who I am.

Four of the five people sitting closest to me were Sisters, the nuns with Ph.D.’s who serve on the faculty and administration. At that moment, I could feel in my heart that we were all sisters, together.