Friday, August 7: Community, sisterly relationships, and spaces for mutual accompaniment

Published : 8 August 2015

Today, Friday the 7th of August, we welcomed Sister Lola Arrieta, a Carmelite of the Caridad de Vedruna.

She spoke to us on the themes of community, sisterly relationships, and spaces for mutual accompaniment. To the question of who can bring religious life to our world today, she offered three ways to exercise sisterhood, together with what she called “complicity” in daily life.

She suggested that our vocation calls us women to become midwives of wisdom, caretakers of life, and promoters of the good life.

1) Midwives of wisdom. The midwife exists to accompany a future mother in a relation of trust, with authority and sensitivity. A new life depends on this relationship. As the midwife helps the woman giving birth to regulate her breathing, she plays the role of “pneumatophore” (“spirit-bearer”) able to listen to the other in the deepest part of her heart.

2) Caretakers of life: In the present globalized world, in which God is often superfluous, in which the dignity of a third of the population is threatened, we are called to care for creation with respect for life and peace…. and that is counter-cultural today.

3) The third role is that of women who explain how another world, a better one, is possible, and who offer, in this domain as well, ways of life that are countercultural. It is up to us to make lungs of our communities so that the Spirit can breathe in them, communities in which sisterhood is possible, communities that carry seeds of life.

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