Sister Deysi Nohemy Ordoñez Ordoñez dj, shares with us the experience of the first territorial meeting of 2022 in Honduras. The Sisters had been waiting a long time to hold this event.

The eleven Sisters in Honduras gathered in Tegucigalpa from the 20th – 21st of May to meet again and celebrate life together. The meeting was the fruit of the great desire expressed by the Sisters of the four communities that make up the territory.

“It did us a lot of good!”

The meeting began on Friday evening with a sharing of each one’s mission, where we noted that our mission had continued, despite the difficulties encountered.

A time of prayer together

We began the following day with a time of prayer, and what better way to pray than with the text that came to us from the Superior General of the Congregation in September 2021 :

“At this time in our history (we are called) :

• to listen to the Lord who calls us as Daughters of Jesus and Associates, to enter into a spiritual experience that roots us deeper in Christ and makes us available to the work of the Spirit.

• to rekindle the gift of the charism that God gives us. In Him, we recognise ourselves as members of the same “body”. Through Him, we allow ourselves to be converted to be more missionary.

• To ask for the grace of a free, humble, unselfish, decentred heart to discern better the urgent calls and to respond with audacity, creativity, and dynamism”.

 

 

An anthropology of community life

We continued our meeting with a videoconference with Sister Blanca Cecilia Cely Ruiz, a Colombian and member of the Company of Mary, on the theme of “The anthropology of community life”. She began her reflection by inviting us to take three keywords as a guiding thread : “maturity, assertiveness, and equanimity”.

In her accurate and concrete reflection, she evoked several elements, including :

• Before speaking of God, we must speak of the human (Karl Rahner), in the sense that if we do not work on this subject, religious life has no meaning.
• A religious Sister of the 21st century shows through her gestures and words, whether she is happy or not in her vocation. She also carries with her the face of the community in what she shows.

And so she invited us to ask ourselves two questions :

• Your community shows what image to the world?
• Personally, when others see us, do they want to be a religious Sister?

She also added that there are two things in religious life that are non-negotiable :

• Prayer

• Speaking the truth

We concluded this part of the meeting with personal time to reflect on two questions :

• How do I feel today and why?

– In a general way

– In the community

– In my mission

• How is my prayer life?

Factors that mark our life

After a time of sharing, Sister Blanca continued her reflection by reminding us that the life of each Sister is marked by three factors: family, education, and culture. These three factors, however, are only defined when there is good communication which implies that it is direct, effective, and affective.

Finally, she emphasized that the future of the Congregation lies in the community and in the people we receive.. She thus invited us to revisit our roots as Daughters of Jesus roots in Honduras

In their life and mission,

are the Sisters as passionate about the person of Jesus of Nazareth

and as lucid in the face of reality

as their founders were?

It remains for us to continue to pray that the Spirit will do his work, that he will comfort us and help us not to relax, but “wake up”.

Time to celebrate life

They say that every good meeting includes a party: how good it was to celebrate birthdays again, to tell stories, to laugh out loud…!

On Sunday, when we all attended the Eucharist in the parish, we were pleasantly surprised by the care that the parishioners and the priest still took regarding biosecurity measures. We were glad because Covid is still present here.

The meeting ended with a delicious lunch, after which we returned home in a light but pleasant rain.

Sr Deysi Ordoñez dj

Community of Choluteca, Honduras