International Awards for CSJ Archivist

To receive one major award in a lifetime is special but to receive two awards in one week is amazing!  This week Mary Grace Kosta, Archivist for the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada received The Archives Association of Ontario’s (AAO), James J. Talman Award at their annual general meeting.  She also was the recipient of The Sister Claude Lane, O.P., Memorial Award to be presented virtually in August 2021 at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. This is the biggest award for religious archivists in North America.

The Sister M. Claude Lane, O.P. Memorial Award, created in 1974, recognizes an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of religious archives.  In Mary’s case, she continues to be involved in three religious archival organizations in the U.S. and Canada and has shown leadership within the wide-ranging religious archival community.

In being chosen for The James J. Talman Award, Mary showed an exceptional level of imagination and innovation in establishing and managing a student practicum program at the Sisters of St. Joseph in Canada Archives.  In presenting the award, Rodney Carter, Chair of the AAO Awards Committee commended Mary for “providing invaluable hands-on experience to over a hundred students and (her) program is worthy of praise and emulation as a model for other archives of how practicums can benefit both institution and students”.

In addition to the work Mary undertakes for which she received these esteemed awards, she shoulders mounds of archival work every day.  Most recently, she has been responsible for successfully amalgamating the archives of three of our four congregations, which involved travelling between London, Hamilton, and Pembroke as well as supporting the Peterborough archives. We are proud to sing Mary Grace’s praises and call her our celebrated archivist.

-Sister Jean Moylan, csj

Below, pictures from our CSJ Archives. Please visit the CSJ Archives website for more!

Seeking to Know God’s Spirit

The Feast of Pentecost has long been my favourite celebration of the Christian calendar.  I was a nursing student attending mass after a long night shift when the priest who celebrated mass in our hospital chapel one Pentecost Sunday was a patient with terminal cancer. He queried the nature of school or team spirit and invited us to consider what the Spirit of God might be like. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the Holy Spirit descended on the frightened apostles and disciples of Jesus in the form of the sound of strong wind and of tongues of fire.  People from “every nation under heaven” in Jerusalem gathered at the sound and were bewildered to hear Galileans, speaking in their own language, yet were understood by each of the diverse hearers in his or her own language. My love for Pentecost has been long-standing. I learned that this Spirit of God, is love, God’s first gift. The Holy Spirit gifts us with the traditional seven gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear (awe) of the Lord.

“this Spirit of God, is love, God’s first gift”

The Holy Spirit is spoken of as wind, the breath of God, and fire. The Holy Spirit is the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth whom Jesus promised the Father would send to teach the apostles “everything” and be with them forever. (John, Ch. 14). This Spirit is the bond uniting the Father and the Son in our trinitarian Creator. Laurence Freeman in Jesus, The Teacher Within, (p. 183) states that the Holy Spirit is essentially a relationship and makes all relationships holy. While living and working among the Dene and Inuit in northern Canada, I came to appreciate the awareness of spirit in people who were close to nature and lived in unity with the spirit world. Before missionaries arrived on our shores, indigenous people were immersed in the Spirit present in animals and all of creation. They knew that all relationships were grounded in the presence of the Creator. 

Pentecost is indeed a day of rejoicing.  I pray in the nine-day novena following Ascension Thursday, that on Sunday, Pentecost will bestow on us each of these seven gifts – blessings which our world so urgently needs.  May our consciousness of all peoples and all creation being unified in our Creator help us to heal our divided world.

- Sister Patricia McKeon, csj

The traditional novena for this feast starts on May 14th and continues for nine days before Pentecost Sunday on May 23, 2021.

A Man of Integrity

People in South Africa celebrate Freedom Day on April 27 to commemorate the first democratic post-apartheid non-racial elections that were held on the day in 1994 and saw Nelson Mandela elected.  On 10 May this anti-apartheid activist, lawyer, and former political prisoner was inaugurated as President of South Africa. 

Photo: Matthew Willman

My friend Matthew Willman, a renowned South African photographer, is known for his amazing photos of President Mandela.  One day, while visiting his friend Madiba, he was inspired to ask if he could take his red office chair out into an open field. In the photo he took out in the field you can see children run by the chair into the distance, to symbolize the impact Mandela would have on future generations of South Africans.  What might these children, now adults, most remember about the great Mandela? This well-known story, shared many times on social media and elsewhere, illustrates what made this exceptional man so great.

“After I became president, I asked one day some members of my close protection to stroll with me in the city, have lunch at one of its restaurants. We sat in one of the downtown restaurants and all of us asked for some sort of food… After a while, the waiter brought us our requests, I noticed that there is someone sitting in front of my table waiting for food. I told them one of the soldiers: Go and ask that person to join us with his food and eat with us. The soldier went and asked the man, so the man brought up his food and sat by my side as I asked and began to eat. His hands were trembling constantly until everyone had finished their food and the man went.

“Go and ask that person to join us with his food and eat with us”

The soldier said to me: the man was apparently quite sick. His hands trembled as he ate!! “No, not at all,” said Mandela. “This man was the guard of the prison where I was jailed. Often, after the torture I was subjected to, I used to scream and ask for a little water. The very same man used to come every time and urinated on my head instead.”

Credit: South Africa Archives Online

So, I found him scared, trembling, expecting me to reciprocate now, at least in the same way, either by torturing him or imprisoning him as I am now the President of the State of South Africa…

But this is not my character nor part of my ethics.” (SoulAlchemy Facebook)

Every year on 18 July, we mark Nelson Mandela International Day not only to commemorate this great man but to emulate his amazing accomplishments by making a difference in our own communities. Perhaps we are not as magnanimous as Mandela as depicted in the story above, but we all have the ability and responsibility to change the world for the better, especially during this pandemic.

-Sister Magdalena Vogt, cps