Sr. Josephine garrett
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| Are we family? With the dawn of COVID, all these dimensions were tested. The main question we had to answer in our convents was this: Are we family? Do we still pray together, eat together, and recreate together? Since we are not blood relatives, do we retreat to our corners and stay distant? We have multiple houses in our area—are they our family? Should we go to one another’s convents? We have sisters who serve in hospitals in our area; what should our precautions look like there? What are the limits of our household; where do we draw the line? It all boiled down to that fundamental question: Are we family? We decided—or rather affirmed—what was true: we are indeed family. But whereas in many households the parents or care-givers sat down together to decide how to navigate the pandemic, we had to essentially hold large-scale family meetings and decide together how we would all navigate this as a family. Would we take our shoes off when coming into the house? Would we shower and change and not be in the house in the same clothes we wore out to ministry? Should we decrease our common prayer to reduce exposure? Or should we add more Adoration and enter more deeply into our duty to pray for our world and our communities? It was a long and sometimes painful discernment, because our differences were colliding like Mack trucks on an expressway as we dealt with our own fears and uncertainties while trying to live out the call of our common life. Because—not to cause scandal—but the divisions afflicting the world are found under the roofs of convents as well. I remember once helping with early voting during a presidential election year in one of our larger convents. We helped our elderly sisters with early mail-in voting. At that time, they had to declare a party to vote early. I was helping two sisters with the process. I went to the first one and anxiously asked what, to me, seemed like a really personal question: “Sister, are you a Democrat or a Republican?” She responded assertively, “Republican!” as though there was no other response. I thanked her. I then approached the second sister and asked, again very awkwardly: “Sister, are you a Democrat or a Republican?” And she responded, also assertively, “Oh gosh, Democrat, of course!” I thanked her. We had a house divided! The divisions that afflict the world don’t disappear in the convent; we are just tasked with kingdom vision and kingdom responses in the midst of these differences. We are tasked with the duty to strive for oneness and leverage differences to that end, rather than allowing them to create a gap between us. Our differences coupled with fear made the response to and planning for COVID hard, but we had the values of our vows to stand on, and a common love for God and his mission, that they might be one.
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