 The Common Life?
Along with prayer, study, and preaching,
“common life” is one of the “pillars” of Dominican life. These four elements are so important to us that, like a house without a solid foundation, we’d sink into the muck if one of them was missing. Common life is possibly the most invisible of these pillars on which we build our Dominican life.
Here, we try to make it visible to you through reflections on common life in three of our convents. We hope you will enjoy this glimpse into what is at the very foundation of our life together as Dominicans.
Accepting That Which Is Living the Word in Community The Ordinary and the Profound
Living Together . . . with Jesus in the Center
Sister Elyse Marie Ramirez, OP
Trying to explain what it means to live as a sister in Religious Life to a room of Junior High students can offer some amusing scenarios. The question answer period was going quite well. “If you weren’t a sister what would you do?” “Does chastity get easier over time?” “Is being a nun fun? Until one question brought a hush to the room. A class full of anxious junior high faces sat with the question hanging in the air, “Do nun’s fight?” Little did they know this question did not solicit the terror they seemed to think they had unleashed by asking it. It was my threshold into talking about our common life our “holy preaching”.
As Dominican Sisters of Springfield, we hold dear the understanding and the lived reality of community life and living in community. Any preaching, any worthwhile preaching literally takes the words of the gospel and breaks them open for all of us to see inside them. Our living together is just that. We pray together, eat together, play together, study together, and work out our budgets together – we basically share together the responsibilities of any household. And we do it with Jesus in the center. We strive for our lives together to be more than a sorority. Take for instances the time we plan for our prayer. We pray together the Liturgy of the Hours twice a day, pray before and after meals, and even pray our Traveler’s Prayer aloud as we drive away from the house. Prayer, however, is more than words. So in each local house we give witness to this belief by deciding together what part of the day we will keep silent in the house to allow each other the time and space to be with God. Hopefully the grace of this silence and this common prayer seeps into our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our world as part of what is healing and allows wholeness to be nurtured.
 We live our common life keeping aware of the issues and concerns that grab the headlines and make up the lives of the people in the margins of society, and our world. To this end, in any of our houses you will find a bulletin board with updates about the social justice issues facing the state legislature and the Congress in Washington. Phone numbers, addresses, house bill numbers are all at the ready for a sister to take the time to make a call or jot a note in support of a legislative action or a social issue. Once a month each local community takes a few hours to read about and discuss some common theme, which can better, inform us and challenge us to be vigilant for the poor. We call this time our “dialogue.”
Prayer and Study might be considered the more serious sides of our lives together, but we also love to have fun!! You may not find us starring on Celebrity Poker, but you will find many of us gathered around a hot game of Hearts, or a rousing game of 500 Rummy. Playing Yahtzee has a whole new experience when the dice is being tossed in the convent!! Some of our sisters take dancing lessons, and join parish volleyball teams. The bottom line… we like to have fun together!
“Now“ I turn to my audience of Junior High students, “You tell me. We live together every day, forever, trying to keep Jesus in the middle of everything we do. Do you think we fight? “Yes” came the answer quick as lightening. “Of course we do! But we fight nice!” |
