Seeking the One Whom We Love: How RSCJs Pray

How do you pray? Could there be a more personal question? Or one more challenging to answer? Yet, 55 Religious of the Sacred Heart–Roman Catholic sisters—took on the question with their characteristic humility, openness, courage and humor. Their answers are as different as they are. Together, the essays in this book reveal not just the individuality of these women, but the beauty of their relationships with the “one whom they love.” For each of us, prayer is all about a personal, individual relationship with God. Those of us who have not taken religious vows may think Catholic sisters have some secret formula for prayer, or that they have a more direct line of communication to God. What you’ll find in these essays is that we all struggle with the same distractions, the same questions, the same desire for intimacy with our God. Prayer, it would seem, is not so much a skill as it is a journey. This book may not teach you how to pray. But in reading these honest, straight-forward accounts from some veteran pray-ers, you might find the encouragement and reassurance to recognize that you, too, are already on the right path. After all, the desire to be in communion with God is itself a perfect prayer.

The fifty-five contributors to this collection of essays are all members of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Roman Catholic religious order of women founded in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat. The women you will meet in these pages exercise their educational mission in an amazing variety of ways. They have served in traditional primary and secondary schools and in higher education, and they also work with people on the edges of society. They are artists and poets, historians, scientists, theologians, psychologists, spiritual directors, campus ministers and pastoral associates. They are social workers, housing advocates and health care professionals. They work with migrants and prisoners and promote justice, ecological awareness and interfaith dialogue. They are researchers and writers, translators and graphic designers. They are also jugglers and gardeners and cooks! Their ways of praying are equally varied: some use music; others choose silence. Some read the Scriptures; others are drawn to nature. Some write or draw; others attend to their breathing. Some find a sacred space important with icon or candle as focus; others find the Holy One on a morning walk. Different apostolic lives; different ways of communing with the Divine. What binds these women together? For one thing, they share a deep longing for God and a contemplative way of life that was also Madeleine Sophie Barat’s passion. For another, they are committed to a life of prayer, in times of darkness every bit as much as times of delight. Above all, they are bound together in their common search for the One whom they love, in their struggle with the tension of being wholly contemplative and wholly apostolic, and in their desire to make God’s love visible in the heart of the world.