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Sister Mary Jo Nelson celebrated her Silver Jubilee – 25 years as a missionary in our Congregation. Having been elected to Leadership Team at the March Chapter, it also meant she had to leave the Diocese of San Bernardino where she was Chancellor. Following are excerpts from her reflection shared during the celebration there on May 3, 2000:
“Many years ago when I lived in Denver, CO, I did some volunteer work at a shelter for the homeless. One night Dorisel, a 7 year old girl, came into the front office and started talking to me, asking all kinds of questions. The conversation went something like this:
“She asked my name - I said my name is Sister Mary Jo. She asked ‘do you get paid for working here?’ I said no – I come because I want to be here. But she went on to say, ‘you get your dinner when you come here.’ I said yes, that’s true. She then asked me, ‘where do you live?’ After trying to explain to her that I lived with 4 other Sisters, she stepped back and concluded, ‘I know, you’re all Sisters, but you don’t have the same Mom. You’re a Church Lady!!’ As she was walking out she turned around and asked a final question: ‘Sister, do you know God?’
“In many ways Dorisel had caught the meaning of my life. . . more than anything else my life as a woman religious has been a life committed to the search for God, and letting God search for me.
“Our Gospel speaks intimately of Jesus’ love and desire for us. Jesus says: ‘I call you friends because I have made known to you everything. You did not choose me, no I chose you;
and, I am commissioning you to go out and bear fruit – fruit that will last.’
“These words are spoken to each of us over and over again during our lifetime. Any vocation, any life-commitment, takes a lifetime. What was essential when we were 25 years old changes at 40 and shifts again at 50 – 60 – 70 years. Faithfulness is not just about keeping the promise of 25 years ago. It is more a commitment to stay in the conversation – to keep listening to the voice of God through every success and failure, hope and broken dream, friendship and struggling relationship, through loneliness and betrayals, through the passion and imagination for ministry and service, through the questions, inner poverty and learning of life, and through silence and solitude. To listen for this voice, to keep in conversation with a God who first chose us and to keep in dialog with companions is core to all life-commitments.
“Consecrated life – the life of public vows and public ministry in the Church is essentially a commitment to search for God, and to return the gift of this searching, questioning, and longing to the Church and society. I came to religious life at a time when hundreds of young women were leaving it. To be sure my desires and dreams were tested when dear friends and companions chose other paths, when others would ask ‘why do you stay?’ My own Victory Noll Sisters have known me as a searcher and questioner and I suspect that might be God’s name for me as well. And, as I look back on my 25 years as a woman religious, this Diocese has also been recipient of my searching, questioning, and imagination – I have often asked Why? What if we thought about this differently? What needs to change? What is our reality challenging us to rethink? How do you let some things die, so new life can be born? I have lived in the in-between all my religious life – I never knew the old ways of religious life and I probably will not see the new image and new model emerge. But what I do know is that God has been faithful to me in my time.”
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