Jerusalem, Israel

A “media clip” has a gentle way of distilling the essence of a story. I invite you to re-visit briefly with me the calls that persist in enlarging my horizons, refining my gifts, revising my priorities, and giving meaning to my life, in ways I could not have imagined.

 

 

Canada was my original home, in the wonderful expanses of forests, lakes, and rivers in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan that still speak to my yearnings for silence and space and a certain kind of beauty. At age 13, the absence of a high school where my family was living, brought me to Saskatoon and Sion Academy, and instilled within me a conviction about lack as opportunity, inviting alternative thinking and options. At seventeen, I crossed the academy’s tennis court to enter the Sion Novitiate. In university and then teacher’s college, the basic paradigm of my ministry took shape, in education; and I was called to teach in high schools in Edmonton and Saskatoon, in the Vatican II years, when the whole Church was into aggiornamento, and religious education was an adventure in creating the path as you walked it. Two years of study in Israel and then an MA in Theology reoriented my focus to adult religious education and ecumenical / interfaith dialogue / relations, in Toronto and Montreal. Along the way there were calls into leadership: on the Provincial Council in Canada-USA for three terms, on the General Council for a six-year term in Rome, and more recently, in Jerusalem, on the Mediterranean Provincial Leadership Team for one term, and now as the last “Provincial” of this province, facilitating the planning of our reconfiguration in this part of the Congregation, for January 20, 2012. What characterizes, inspires and sustains this story is the vocation of Sion–its charism and mission–rooted and centered in the Word of God in Scripture and enfleshed in Jesus, which calls us into a unique relation with the Jewish people, and into a commitment to justice, with them whenever possible.