Yesterday I got an email that held my day.

It was from one of my spiritual sisters.  She is a Benedictine nun living in community at Our Lady of Grace Monastery in Indianapolis.  What she told me was this:  she was praying for me all day.

Sr. Mary Luke is a visionary.  Knowing that clergy women are an often desperately lonely and challenged people, she worked with others to create a program called “Women Touched by Grace”.  Through the program, she brought to the monastery for a span of three years a group of clergy women from throughout the United States and Canada.  While in the lap of community, our lives were changed.  We came to know that we were enfolded in that thing we name often and long to experience more:  grace.

One of her Lenten practices is to hold each of the women she has enlivened.  That number is now fifty, since after watching thirty of us open to the light of love, she offered the experience to another group of clergy women.  Applications are now being taken for the third unfurling of good.

Yesterday was “my” day.  All day, I was aware that in the chapel of Our Lady of Grace, my name was offered.  Even more powerfully, I was aware all day that in the heart of a woman who is light to me, I was bathed and blessed by the intentions of a sister.

Life feels so often a place of shards.  Headlines would have us know that the steady shatter of God’s vision for creation is relentless.

Not so.  Yesterday, Sister Mary Luke prayed for me.  Today, I arise filled with awareness that the Word became flesh and dwells among us that we might know knitting of soul and hope.  We are not alone.  We hold the world in the imaginations of our hearts and in the care of the Holy.

We participate in healing each time we reach into each other with tidings of great joy:  you are not alone.  I am praying for you.