What Is Emerging?
Posted on February 1, 2020, by Loretto Community
By Mary Ellen McElroy and Cathy Mueller

In the December 2019 issue of Interchange the Emerging Forms Committee invited us to enter into that deeper state of consciousness so that we begin to see with the eyes of our hearts what the future is calling us to be.
During these two winter months we invite you to continue this contemplative process with us.
Below are quotes from two mystics whose words may help our souls with the insight needed to explore what is perhaps the most important evolutionary task now: to raise the powers of love upward.
“Our role is no longer to merely ease suffering, bind up wounds, and feed the hungry, but through every form of effort to raise the powers of love upward to the next stage of consciousness.” (Teilhard de Chardin)
“To make a place for God within is to enter into the heart where God lives and evolve in greater unity in Love. God is born from within when we come to know ourselves in the divine love that lives deep within us.” (Ilia Delio)
Let us ponder quietly, going deeply within, leaving ego and “figuring it out” behind and listen in the silence where the Spirit whispers to us what it is that needs to happen here.
If you’d like to share any of your reflections with us, we’d be happy to receive them. Winter blessings!
Sources: LCWR Occasional Papers, Winter 2016, “The Evolutionary Task Now” by Liz Sweeney, SSJ; “The Unbearable Wholeness of Being” by Ilia Delio.
Thank you for sharing these extraordinary insights from Teilhard de Chardin and Sister Ilia Delio. From the time I learned of Pope John Paul II’s investigation into the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), prolonged through Pope Benedict’s tenure and ended by Pope Francis, I have believed that LCWR holds a special leadership charism for the universal Roman Catholic Church. I am in awe of the grace with which Catholic women religious not only maintained their faith but deepened it through an investigation best-described as scandalous. I’m still immensely grateful to Cardinal Joseph Tobin for his public comments that if the Vatican wanted to investigate corruption among Catholic leadership, they would have been well served to begin with the bishops, many of whom live like nobles of old, rather than Catholic women religious, who lived simply and in close proximity to the working and poor people they serve and accompany.