The nomadic life

While the focus is on academic production some digression is inevitable.....

I recently recorded another podcast, this time with a good friend who happens to be a Dominican friar. We talked Dominican life, discernment, and being a lay Dominican. If interested you can listen to it on the Light from light podcast. Now most people hear Dominican and think the white habit (female or male version) but there a quite a few lay men and women who are also Dominicans. The most famous of course is St Catherine of Sienna but most lay Dominicans work a regular 9 to 5, are married and have children. In some cases they win Nobel prizes of literature, as Sigrid Undset did back in the day. You never know where the combination of study and prayer lived in community (slightly different for the laity) will take you.

As I have led a fairly nomadic life, with the exception of covid-tide that had me in one place for the first time in like 4 years, I have begun to wonder how positive this nomadic life can be. It is true that the human heart is ever expanding to include all those God brings into our lives, the familiarity of seeing each other over a very extended period of time is lost. Nonetheless I was recently reminded, during an unexpected and intense conversation I had with a young lady, of the type of chance encounters that happen more often when living the nomadic life. St Dominic and Dominicans in general lead an apostolic life that resembles the nomadic life, it is nomadic in order to preach. St Dominic would send brothers out and yes they would settle some where, many times at universities, but with the readiness to begin again somewhere else. 

At the moment I am in Notre Dame and this place many call a little midwestern Vatican or catholic Disneyland has its special place in this nomadic life. 

Somehow along the way I have landed in place that bizarrely feels both a hiatus in regular life and a permanent place to return to (if that is even possible).

While I am arguably here for theological reasons, research and classes, I suspect there is more to it, I just don't yet quite know what. At the turn of the year I rather doubtingly decided to use Jen Fulweiler saint of the year and word of the year apps. I got St. John Bosco and connect. Other years possibly this would have given some space for meditation, this year it just felt puzzling. How when I was stuck in CA? Some months into the year I am not in CA and it looks like the nomadic life has begun again. To where next? Only God knows.





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