My Heart Continues to Soar
Sister Patty Caraher, OP
Rose McBride, my grandmother from Ireland, surrounded me with nurturing stories that formed and grounded me. One such was that Jesus was among the depression men who came to our small back apartment porch looking for food. In her gracious wisdom, Grandma McBride invited me to sit among them as they ate her freshly baked bread and drank her Irish tea. Sitting with these companions, I searched for the face of Jesus. This early communion table initiated a lifelong search for God and planted the seeds of my vocation to religious life.
Early on in my life, this story merged with the Dominican dream and caught my soaring spirit. The Sinsinawa Dominican women who taught me in high school and college were women of joyful hospitality whose lives mentored me into searching for God beyond my Irish ghetto. Among them were women who dared to question the norms of racial separation, who knew people like Dorothy Day, who wrote letters of protest, and who dared to speak where women’s voices were rarely heard. It was among these Dominicans that I saw the Gospels in a new light as a beacon for social transformation. The joy-filled, contemplative, and bold lives of these women helped usher in God’s profound call to a life commitment as a vowed Dominican.
As a young vowed Dominican, I had the privilege of sharing community life with a group of Dominican women who continue to inspire me to this day. We ministered in segregated Mobile, AL, where my young ideals came to the test of reality and commitment. This time in history and this place in my then world of a close African-American community was a crucible that ignited the growing embers of yearning for creating community and finding God. There I ministered among people who loved and laughed from a place deeper than I ever knew. Then, I felt the pain and shallowness of my own privilege and knew the blindness of my own white-mindedness.
Now, in my later years, Grandma Rose’s back porch has become a round table where my Dominican community continues to nourish and challenge me in prayerful support to an even wider and more diverse world community. My heart continues to soar.