Dear friends and family of the Sacred Heart, We, Religious of the Sacred Heart, are blessed by the generosity of you, our partners in mission. We appreciate you – your commitment to mission, your expressions of encouragement, your gracious support, your kindness. Our relationships with you are charged by mutual respect and spiritual kinship rooted in the shared conviction that God who loves us counts on our revealing love to others. Adopting a loving awareness of one another and of God’s creation enables us to live the mission. Such attentiveness necessitates our pausing long enough to notice sparks of goodness around us. When I was a child living in New York City, one of our Jewish neighbors told me a story about the beginning of time. Th e story speaks of the invitation to each human being to be a beacon of light. Later, I heard Rachel Naomi Remer tell the same story to Krista Tippett on the On Being radio program: In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand, thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand, thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day. Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and in all people, to lift that light up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew.
I love this image: thousands of fragments of light surrounding us in nature, in one another and in ourselves! Th rough acts of kindness, through declarations of gratitude and through our attentiveness to creation, we can repair our broken and blessed world. Th is is our call as human beings, as those who desire to discover and reveal God’s love. At the center of this mission is our fundamental call to be a light, a beacon of hope, simply by inviting those who cross our paths into relationships of respect, kindness, graciousness and thankfulness. In this issue of Heart, we offer some stories of light and words of gratitude. You will also find our Mission Advancement Annual Report. To all who have supported us through sharing your talents, your time, and your treasure, we thank you. Let us continue to pray for one another and to encourage one another to practice tikkun olam. With love and prayer,
Suzanne Cooke, RSCJ Provincial United States – Canada Province
2021 | Vol. 18, No. 3
Heart
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