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Submit your reflections, poems, artwork, photographs or favorite memories of the Sisters for possible inclusion in theCanticle of St. Gertrude and/or on this website.

GUIDELINES: Submissions must be electronic. Text = 300 words or less; typed into the body of your email. Graphics = 300 dpi; JPEG or TIFF format. Thank you for being a part of our work!

A Reflection For those Who Serve

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings a perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

The Transmigration of Sister Herman

“If you weren’t a person, what would you be?”
I asked an old nun they called Roadrunner.
She laughed at the thought of being anything else
except a bride of Christ, trudging streets
in rusty habit, castoff tennis shoes,
scorning permed hair and polyester

Brought to the Convent as an orphaned toddler,
she never left, rendering menial work
as dairymaid, cook and sacristan.
The blighted apples from abandoned trees,
outdated food from markets,
she brought the worthy and the profligate,
leaving behind a vintage joke
and a blessing.

After a moment she reconsidered,
announced with snaggled grin,
“I’d be a horse. When you get to Heaven,
look for me among the horses.”

I dream of her now in the tree-ringed meadow blue
with camas, frolicking among playful fillies,
the great stallions, the gentle geldings.
A mare, loose in her skin of glossy black,
shivering in the spring chill
but lost in the heaven of another sun.

Carolyn Frei, Lewiston, ID