I can't get over it.

Every year, she takes the towel and dries between my toes. She lifts my foot to her lips and kisses it, ever so gently.

Each Holy Thursday, our community follows a beautiful tradition of having our sisters in leadership wash the feet of the sisters whom they serve. One by one, as we come forward to sit in the first pew in our chapel, our Reverend Mother and her four councilors kneel, ready with pitchers of water, a basin and a towel.

When you think about it, it might seem strange that a community of women would do such a thing. It would be more natural for a family - spouses, parents, children - those joined by bonds of blood. It is strange that Jesus chose 12 different men, from such a variety of backgrounds, to whom He gave a new commandment of universal love. The love we find in Christian community transcends earthly bonds. It goes beyond what we can understand. "It was not you who chose Me, but I who chose you," Jesus says (John 15:16).

Every Triduum, it seems, as I enter into the liturgies of the Church with my sisters, I am made aware of my separation from my own blood family. My father and mother, brothers and sisters are thousands of miles away, celebrating the same liturgies. It is natural to miss them. It can be painful.

My sisters and I have left our families behind to answer the call of the Lord, just as His apostles did. We did not choose one another; we were chosen by the Lord for each other. He hand-picked our community, just as He hand-picked His apostles.

As I watched my sisters go up to have their feet washed, I wondered at the great work He accomplished in getting us here. I wondered at the kind of love that can embrace a stranger so that she becomes a sister in Christ. I wondered at the tenderness of such a love - a love that dries between the toes.

Later that evening, we celebrated the Mass of the Lord's Supper. In an even deeper way, we experienced the communion we find with one another in Jesus. In the Eucharist, all who receive Him and believe in Him are ONE in Him. At that last supper with his apostles, Jesus prayed to His Father "that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and You in Me" (John 17:22-23).

The Lord promised the hundredfold to those who gave up brothers and sisters, father and mother, for the sake of His name. He gives us that hundredfold in the Eucharist, where all our hearts meet. There every human and divine bond is sealed in His love.

As I received Him Thursday night, I was so consoled, knowing that, in some mysterious way, Jesus brings us all together - my family, my sisters, myself, and even the countless others He has chosen for his own. He has invited me here to love in this particular community and, by proxy, to love the whole world!

I know that when I wash my sister's feet tomorrow in the daily sacrifices of our life together in community, I wash the feet of each of my brothers and sisters in the Lord. "I give you a new commandment," Jesus says. "Love one another" (John 13:34).

- Sr. Mary Gemma, T.O.R.


“If you build it, they will come.”  These words echoed through my mind as I looked out one of our windows this past Saturday morning and watched car after car turn into our driveway and make their way to our motherhouse. 

Yes, these words are from the movie Field of Dreams but they are also words that God has spoken to us throughout the short history of our community.  From very early on, the Lord began to show us He desired a place where His children could come and find healing and His love; and as our chapel and motherhouse were being built in 2010 God continued to speak these words with more intensity and frequency.  If we build Father of Mercy Chapel, His children will come!

And come they did!  On March 21st, we hosted our first day retreat at Father of Mercy Chapel.  The theme was “Joyful Surrender to Christ Crucified” and around 90 retreatants gathered for a day of talks, testimonies, small group sharing, Mass, and more!

With talk titles “Joyful Surrender” and “Suffering as a Means of Intimacy with Christ” and testimonies to accompany them the sisters provided retreatants with numerous things to think about and take to prayer. 

I shared a story of surrender about a little girl and her pearls (Read the whole story here: http://www.godswork.org/emailmessage21.htm ) and invited everyone to an encounter with Christ, and through Him the Father.  After all, when we know God wants the best for us we can more readily hand over what we are clinging on to. 


Sr. Carrie Ann helped us all to have a better understanding
of suffering and how to concretely “offer up” our sufferings with Christ on the cross. 

At the end of the day all of the retreatants were able to spend an hour before the Lord in Eucharistic Adoration and through times of silence and a few songs, they were invited encounter the Living God and offer Him what was on their hearts.

While the entire day was filled with countless graces, many were particularly blessed by a time of being prayed with individually.  It was such a sacred time for each retreatant to hear God speaking words of encouragement just for them. 

Healing tears were shed, hearts were lifted, and lives were changed.


What was so beautiful for me (and I think I can speak for all of the sisters in this) was to have the opportunity to open our home and share our place of prayer and see before our very eyes God’s faithfulness to His words “If you build it, they will come” .  We pray that many more will come and encounter God’s merciful love!
-Sr. Sophia Grace Huschka 
All of the talks were recorded!
Click here to listen
This afternoon I was walking along our driveway with Sr. Sarah Marie, enjoying the beautiful sunshine. At one point, we saw a sister walking toward us, fixing all her attention on the precious object in her hands. As she approached, we realized she held a ciborium in her left hand and a tall tabernacle candle in her right.

She was processing with our Eucharistic Lord from our main chapel to a hermitage chapel down the road. Sr. Sarah Marie and I knelt and silently adored as He passed.

It was only later that I realized - today is Palm Sunday. Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on a colt. "Many people," according to Mark's Gospel, "spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out: 'Hosanna!'"

We were part of this procession! Jesus, the King of kings, is worthy of a royal welcome. But He chooses to come to us humbly, just as He did in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. He comes silently, hidden and small. He lets us carry Him in our human hands and even consume Him as food.



At the name of Jesus, at the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, may every knee bend. May we be especially grateful this week for Jesus' astounding humility as we commemorate the first Eucharist. "We who have been baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before him," the second reading from Matins says today. Let us lay down our very lives in worship of this humble God.

-Sr. Mary Gemma, T.O.R.
”The old traditional fairy story is the story of God and the world: the King’s son who comes dressed as a beggar to win a poor girl for His bride, putting off his crown and His royal robes and coming empty-handed, in order that she may receive Him without fear and may love Him for Himself alone”. – Caryll Houselander
Today the greatest wedding that has ever taken place and that ever will take place happened in the womb of Our Lady. Divinity emptied Himself into the bridal chamber of her womb and she welcomed this humble seed with a receptivity like no other in the name of humanity.

Humanity and divinity are ETERNALLY wedded and entwined today and will FOREVER be inseparable in the tiny embryo of Jesus Christ!

Do we really know what this means? HE HAS MARRIED US!

I can never stop marveling at this great mystery. It is why I became a sister- to witness that He is in love with us as a bridegroom with His bride!

Do we really know the depths to which our God lowered Himself? I don't think we will fully understand until heaven.

I LOVE how Caryll Houselander describes this:

Christ asked Mary of Nazareth for her human nature. For her littleness, her limitations, flesh and blood and bone, five senses, hands and feet, a human heart.

 He who was invulnerable, asked to be able to feel cold and heat, hunger and thirst, weariness and pain. He who had all things and had made all things, asked to be able to be poor and to labour with His hands and look with wonder at the wild flowers. He who was wholly sufficient to Himself asked Mary to give Him a heart that might be broken.

 Mary answered "yes". To make His body she gave her body, for His humanity, her humanity. Our Lady answered "yes" to Christ; she answered for us all; she was quite human. Had He asked her for anything other than her littleness she could not have given it, because she had nothing else. 

I cannot read this enough ... it never gets old to me. Her littleness and limitations provided a home for the King of the universe. This is also true of ME (and you)! My littleness and limitations can be wedded to the divine-such a beautiful mystery! He MUST be in love!

May we welcome Him into our littleness and limitations today, opening our hearts wide so that new life may be conceived within us... allowing heaven to enter earth and transform our reality!

Stay tuned for the rest of this romance which will unfold next week beginning on Holy Thursday...

 -Sr. Thérèse Marie Iglesias

Sr. Eliana and Sr. Therese Marie with some of the Brothers of Hope.
This was taken in 2008, the first year that our sisters began
doing periodic ministry at FSU.

NEWS RELEASE!!
With gratitude for the support of our Bishop Jeffrey Monforton of the Diocese of Steubenville and Bishop Gregory Parkes of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, The Franciscan Sisters Third Order Regular of Penance of the Sorrowful Mother joyfully announce that we have been given permission to be present in the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Florida and to minister at the Catholic Student Union at FSU, TCC, & FAMU (CSU) of Florida State University alongside the Brotherhood of Hope and the CSU Staff in order to receive training for campus ministry on secular college campuses.

  Our intention is to keep a consistent presence at the CSU for the sake of the ministry there, while rotating sisters through for training purposes. In a few years, we hope to have enough sisters trained and ready to begin a mission house at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio at the request of Bishop Monforton, and at the same time to be ready to begin a full mission house at FSU with a more stable presence there.

We are happy to announce that Sr. Della Marie Doyle and Sr. Eliana Day will be the first sisters assigned there beginning in the fall semester of 2015. We ask for your prayers for our communities as we begin this new adventure!
“What are you giving up for Lent?”  Among Catholics on or around Ash Wednesday, this question could be a typical conversation starter.  Many of us are familiar with the typical answers, such as chocolate or other sweets, our favorite show on TV, smoking, alcoholic beverages, etc.

For those of us in religious life, many of these things are already not a part of our daily life, so it is necessary to go a bit deeper to find either something to give up or something positive to do.  The professed sisters at the motherhouse this year have decided to focus on one aspect of our life each week of Lent and find creative ways to allow that focus to draw us deeper into our way of life and into the heart of this season of grace. 

A couple of sisters created a little box in which they put paper hearts that have one aspect of our life written on each one. We will draw out a heart each week of Lent and discuss ways we could either individually or communally focus on it.
For example, if we drew out the heart that says “Eucharistic life,” we could look for ways to minimize distractions during Mass or personal prayer.  We could make greater efforts to come to chapel early (not just on time) for prayer.  We could read and reflect on paragraphs from our Constitutions that refer to our communal devotion to the Eucharist.  We could also choose to reflect on passages in scripture that refer to the Eucharist, such as chapter 6 of the gospel of John.  These are just some ideas that came up even before Lent started!

Well, this week we drew the heart that said “Contemplation,” so already in this first week of Lent we are challenged to reflect on ways that we can go deeper in our life of contemplation.  Of course, contemplation is a gift from God, but the more we dispose ourselves to receiving that gift, the more fully we will be able to live our call which is a blessing for the whole Church, and even the entire world. 

Our community was founded to renew the contemplative dimension of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis.  What that means is that everything we do in our way of life and ministries flows out of a deep life of prayer.  We cannot give the love of Jesus to college students, the homeless or jobless persons who come into Samaritan House in downtown Steubenville, or even to each other, unless we have first received His love in our contemplative prayer. 

Maybe our focus on our contemplative life this week can be a grateful reply to the Lord’s generous love which we commemorate in a special way during Lent as we contemplate with greater intensity His Passion, Death and Resurrection.

What are you doing for Lent to reply to Love?


Sr. Mary Catherine Kasuboski, TOR
“Sometimes lovely things are lost. Beautiful things God scatters everywhere as Walt Whitman said, ‘God is tossing down love letters on the street and everywhere, If only we would watch out for them.’” -Jessica Powers

It was Valentine’s Day several years ago and it began like any regular day, with Holy Hour at 5:30 am.   I sat there, as a true romantic, waiting for God to woo my heart all over again as we celebrated this day for lovers. 

But I was a little distracted because I was cooking dinner that night and somehow needed to come up with 1 cup of chicken broth for my recipe.  With no chicken or bouillon cubes in the house this was going to be quite a task. 

So, as I prepared for mass that morning, I read the above quote in the Magnificat, refocused and asked the Lord to help me be open to see these “love letters he is tossing on the street and everywhere”. 

And then the chaos began! 

I heard a cry!  Now, normally we keep silence before 9AM because it is a time for us to be quiet with our Beloved.  So when I heard this yell I knew something was askew.  A sister hollered down the stairs, “The water won’t shut off in the bathtub!” 

Now the house is nearly 100 years old, so all of the shutoffs are in the basement and are not well marked.  She ran downstairs and we began yelling back and forth, “OK, I turned one off.  Did it stop?”  “No, it’s still gushing.”  This continued for several minutes when the doorbell rang. 

It was the priest coming to celebrate mass for us.  He jumped into the pandemonium and became the middle-man relaying our questions and responses.  “Why don’t you call a plumber?” he calmly asks after several minutes.   Yes, a plumber! 

One was called but, alas, there was no answer.  The door bell rang again.  Who could it be this time since the priest is already here?  We weren’t expecting anyone. 

I opened the door and a good friend of our community stood there with a 5-gallon pot half full of…you guessed it… CHICKEN BROTH!!!  Not just a cup of it but several gallons of it!  He explained that he boiled a chicken the day before and just thought we might want to use the broth. 

I took the pot, thanked him profusely, told him how he was an answer to prayer because of my chicken broth woes, and he turned to be on his way.  Then the sister called upstairs, “Who was at the door?”  
When I told her who it was she cried out, “HE’S THE PLUMBER!”

So, in reflecting on the events of the morning I came to understand in a deeper way just how many times His love letters really are “on the street and everywhere”.  They are not just in the whispers He speaks to our hearts in the chapel but in the normal everyday events of life, if only we have the eyes to see His personal love and care for us!  

Two prayers were answered in that one package that God sent to our front door early that Valentine’s morning.


Oh, and yes, I was able to call after our plumber as he walked down our steps and he was able to fix our plumbing issues!  
-Sr. Sophia Grace Huschka
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