It’s a special thing to have a sister, and I’m blessed with two of them. My relationships with them are different, and have been since childhood. Maureen, three years younger, and I talk about deep thoughts and what ifs and spend perhaps too much time dissecting our parents and why they did what they did. Kathy, eight years younger, tends to bring out my goofy side. She takes a joke better than anyone else in our immediate family.
I have friends who are close, who over the years have known things about me that one or the other of my sisters don’t. The intensity of my relationships with them ebbs and flows, just as it does with Maureen and Kathy. But whether it’s blood or experience, the connection is always there. Sisterhood is powerful, as Robin Morgan said back in the 1970s.
In the past year, I’ve been privileged to connect with 366 other women, none of whom I will ever meet in this life. They were the saints and blesseds I included in a daily devotional book for Franciscan Media. Most I had never heard of before I started the project. Each of them moved me in a special way because, as I wrote in the preface, “no matter whether they lived in the first century or the twenty-first, whether they lived in India or Peru or Italy or France or Germany or Mexico or the United States or Canada, they loved God. And even more importantly, they knew he loved us, through the good times and the bad. They didn’t always understand him or the situations he put them in, but they knew he was love.” They taught me a lot, those nuns and mothers and wives and widows and single women.
I was thrilled, therefore, this week when Franciscan told me what the title would be for the book, due out in September: Sisterhood of Saints: Daily Guidance and Inspiration. These women became my “sisters” in the same way some of my friends have. And I am sure that in some corner of heaven, they’re discussing deep thoughts together, or laughing at gentle jokes. I pray I have the opportunity to join them when God picks the time.
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Mel, I’m the oldest of three girls, too! My middle sister is 3.5 years younger and the baby is 12 years younger. I didn’t know we had that in common. My sisters are my best friends and it’s so hard being far from them, rarely seeing them. But we keep in touch online.
Love the title! Very profound how who you wrote about changed you. (Inspires me to look outside of my own “little” life for writing topics.) Even though I have a sister, I haven’t considered “sisterhood” for a while and how broad that word can mean. My sisterhood of friends is a special joy that I treasure more as the years pass.
Thanks, Lora!
Wow, I did not know that! (But I would have guessed you were a fellow oldest! :))