Monday, September 25 “Amidst all this tripping about” Catherine McAuley 1840
Catherine McAuley could have been writing about Detroit Mercy as our new year cranks up in this memorable saying from her over-busy life leading the fledgling Sisters of Mercy. The Mercies were born in an Ireland made brutal by the Industrial Revolution of British textiles when the Enclosure Movement evicted subsistence farmers from small plots to open broad spaces for sheep grazing. Dublin became a city where wealth flourished in the center while its growing periphery packed in desperate poor people driven off those small village plots. She named her fast walking and flipping from task to task “tripping about.” Lovely expression, “tripping about.” Better to trip about, I guess, than to just trip. Better to hustle and scramble with a moment of breathing here and there in the day.
“Amidst all this tripping about: our hearts can always be in the same place
centered in God, for whom alone we go forward, or stay back.”
Catherine McAuley (December, 1840)
The Catherine McAuley door at the University Chapel
Have a blest day,
john sj
Today’s Post “Enough”
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.
David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet
p.s. My mother lived for some years embarrassed that she was 3 years older than my dad (she 1903, he 1906). When we all went out to dinner for her 75th she told us to tell people that she was only 60. She got over it, though, and aged with a glad heart.
Today is her birthday, the 114th.
In her mid 20ies she drove a sporty car.