Twelve baskets and more

Our early summer has oozed into a midsummer heatwave. Here at L's bend the air is oven-hot and heavy, the magnolia has already started its second, less abundant flowering, and roses seem somewhat exhausted, having bloomed their little hearts out for several weeks already. The heady scent of jasmine hangs, languid, in the air outside my window, while every time I brush past the overgrown lavender, or spray it with water, it releases its fragrance, as if in thanksgiving. These delights are all compensations for the hot stickiness of intense heat in a city, in buildings designed to conserve warmth in order to withstand our more habitual cold.

It was even hotter and sultrier in Rome, when nine of my probation-sisters and I professed our perpetual vows, twenty-two years ago today. Then, as today, it was Corpus Christi; a lovely day for making our own eternal offering to the God who gives himself daily to us. Today's Gospel, of the feeding of the five thousand, seems especially apt: twenty-two years ago, God accepted my five loaves and two fishes, poor as they were, but all I had; and God has spent the past two decades blessing, transforming, using and stretching them - blessing, transforming, using and stretching me - in ways I could never have imagined. And God continues to do this... and true to his promise, there is always a hundredfold, always an abundance, a plenitude - as in the Gospel - of blessings and graces, encounters and tiny joys, God's constant fidelity and the love of my sisters... my own twelve baskets and more.

I prepared for my profession, and share this anniversary with my companions, now living across the world and a dozen or so time zones. With them I also share a name and devise (motto), given to us at the end of our time together: it set a seal on our group experience and character, calling us, individually and as a whole, into our new identity as professed RSCJ. My prayer for them is always filled with gratitude, but today I am especially conscious of the increasing darkness of our wounded world, and what this calls us to, in all our different contexts and ministries. And so today, my prayer for my sisters, as for myself, is that - wherever we are - the Open and Welcoming Heart of Jesus, through whose wounds we are all healed, may continue to be our mission, our strength, our hope and our centring grace, for the life of a world so, so in need of Christ's tender, healing, welcoming love.

Please pray with and for us, and for all the women God is inviting to become his Heart on earth.