I was questioned one day this past week by an acquaintance of mine about my spirituality. I began to wonder what this person understood spirituality to be. While it’s true that I go to the chapel three times a day for prayer with my Community and spend time each day in private prayer and reading, I see spirituality as something that comes from experience of God and how God is expressed. My sense of spirituality leads me and causes me to respond to God’s promptings. At times our prayer can lead to mystical experiences, but most of the time it doesn’t. Even though prayer is essential to our lives as Christians, and especially to my life as a woman religious, I for one tend to encounter God in everyday situations like interacting with children and contemplating nature and its elements. Certainly, people throughout time have been called by God to do some amazing things that bring about changes that will shape or have shaped history in unmistakable ways. Yet, most often, God directs us to do what is right and to be responsible for what we know as truth. If we see injustice, we are called to do our part to correct it. And, I believe that part of doing justice is educating others, especially in their privileges, rights, and responsibilities, in case they are unaware, in order to alleviate the cycle of oppression. Spirituality would be incomplete if all it involved was going to church and reading the Bible. God is much bigger than that. Because we’re in relationship with God, we need to apply what we know of God to the rest of our lives in order to grow in that relationship. We must be awake, stay awake, listen, learn, and then act.
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Sister Mary CarlaSister Mary Carla Flood, OSB is a Minnesota state-licensed Master level social worker. She holds a BA in psychology and MSW both from Arizona State University. She moved to Duluth in 2007 from Phoenix while discerning with the Duluth Benedictines. She is originally from upstate New York, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, moving to Phoenix with her family in 1984 shortly before starting high school. She has diversified ministry experience. See all of Sister Mary Carla’s posts. |