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Community Life: Reflections

A Call to a Common Heart |Being Community

Community life, for me, is centred on relationships – relationships that are loving, supportive, honest, forgiving and challenging; relationships that demand something of me, that urge me to be better, more whole, more welcoming, more loving. As I respond to the call to be a better ‘me’, I have more to offer to community. Similarly, as I become a willing and energetic member of a variety of different kinds of community, I grow in my inner being. My individual growth and the life of the community mutually support and challenge each other. I chose to belong to a religious congregation where community is a daily-lived reality – and that is much, much more than living under the same roof! Actually, today community is global! It’s about loving one’s neighbour and, in turn, being loved – and that in the everyday ‘wear and tear’, joys and sorrows, pain and grief. That’s not always easy nor simply routine. But it is always worth the effort and struggle. Lauretta



I have lived community life for over forty years and one would expect that I might have something really wise or inspirational to say about the experience. I don’t but our constitutions do! But what I can talk about is the reality of community living. It has been for me the source of great joy and great struggle. It has sustained me in the living of my religious commitment, enabled me to become the woman I am and has propelled me into ministry. Beverly

My hopes for Religious Life are increasingly centered on new ways of commitment to living one’s faith radically in the world, not separated from it. Community Life is an important part if this, a community of care and support of others at home, while sharing with them the same spiritual values (i.e charism). I hope to see communities of priests and lay people, some called to celibacy and some to family life, sharing the one spirituality or, if you like, the same ‘deep story’, which nourishes them on their faith journey. They will engage in ministry in the world as their formation through this ‘deep story’ prompts them. Perhaps our own sisters will be the nucleus of forming such groups. Carmel