School Sisters of Notre Dame, cont'd

Sisters at chapel

Sister Katherine: This place ... this is a place where I think God just rests. He rests in the hearts and the minds and the souls of the many women who walk this ground and the wonderful lay employees. So it makes this place kind of "holy ground" in its own way.

Many of the sisters are elderly. Is this place designed for caring for the elderly?

Well, I think the design - while the physical plan may not be the best designed - I think what is designed is the way that we kind of live intergenerationally with the young and the middle-aged and the elderly. Many of them here on the campus are senior sisters, are elderly sisters. So I think that the way that we design our community life and the way that we design our connections with one another is the basic design. That our real respect for one another, our care for one another and our own kind of prayer life - our own spirituality is probably God's great design for us and how we live that design.

The population is getting older. We need role models. We need to learn how to care for our aging parents, our friends, our aging spouses. What can you impart?

I think pay attention to each other. Just pay attention to the little things in life, to the bigger things in life that each one is experiencing. I think part of community life is sharing the joys and the sorrows that are part of our life. We kind of have an inbred opportunity to do that with so many women around, living together. So, it is rare that you can't chance upon someone with whom you can share just the latest thing that happened to you that morning. Whether it be something great that happened or something that wasn't so great - something that was sad.

A brief hallway visit

So our community life where we share the ups and downs of life are just opportunities to pay attention to one another, to pray with one another. So, I think a solution to life and the aging of life is to really stay networked with one another in the whole intergenerational… grandkids with grandparents and children with grandparents and that we're not afraid to do that. Not to put aside the elderly and even though in some cases the elderly all live together, they don't have to only interact together - that they can interact with all of life's ages. I think that's important and we try to do that here.

"And thou shalt honor," I think, means that all people and thou shalt honor the gift of people that God has given to us. For me honor means respect and love. In honoring, there's a great reverence for all of creation really but honoring is that wonderful humble stance of receiving you into my life and receiving what God has given me in life and reverencing it. Appreciating it and giving thanks for it. Not doing anything that's going to destroy that.

Next: The challenge of numbers