A November Reflection from CLT

As we come to the month of November we are invited through the feasts of All Saints and All Souls to enter into a time of remembering our sisters, family and friends who have gone before us.

This year we remember

Sr Bernadette Hughes
Sr Dominic Savio Hamer
Sr Una Vaughan
Sr Rose Alfieri
Sr Sheila McNally
Sr Breda Colbert
Sr Melanie Maguire
Family and Friends of our sisters

The members of our Congregation and our family and friends who have died have been a great parting gift to us who live on after them. United in the communion of saints, and in a companionship that endures beyond death let us now honour our deceased members, family and friends and those from whom we are separated by distance. We give thanks for their lives and witness, for their friendship in family or community and their service to the wider community of all life.
‘Our solidarity with those who have died consists not only in a common history, origin and goal, but in the same Spirit who flows through and enlivens all. Their status in our memory is that of a great cloud of witnesses whose efforts, defeats, and victories empower us for the struggle of our own lives to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. Their status in themselves is that of the utterly transformed ones in close communion with the mystery of living God.’

Friends of God and Prophets by Elizabeth Johnson

For all who mourn and seek consolation in their grief
For the innocent whose lives have been cut short
in today’s wars and conflicts in so many places
For all who have died as victims of the many natural disasters
For our Indigenous brothers and sisters, some of whom have died in custody
For women and children who have died as a result of domestic violence
For asylum seekers and refugees who have died seeking freedom
For all who have died in accidents on land, sea or air
For all who have experienced the death of a long-held friendship
For ourselves that at the time of our death we will be at peace

BLESSING OF HOPE

So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:

hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,
hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,

hope that has breath
and a beating heart,
hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,
hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,

hope that knows how to sing
when there seems
little cause,
hope that raises us
from the dead—

not someday but this day,
every day,
again and again and again.

Jan Richardson
The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

‘The symbol of the communion of saints bears the pledge that in and through the wrenching of death, terrible at times, an ever so quiet “Alleluia” can be heard. Having arrived at their destiny, the living dead become our companions in hope.’

Friends of God and Prophets by Elizabeth Johnson

With love and prayers
Therese, Carmen Gloria, Brigid and Mary Ann