Opening prayer: “The human heart plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps.”
Proverbs 16:9
Leader: Our formation sessions for 2025-26 will be inspired by Jane Cruthirds’ talk on Associates and Sisters Day, titled “Angela: A Pilgrim of Hope.” This session will focus on “Experience.”
If you know why you are making a pilgrimage – either physically or internally – are you still open to experiencing something unexpected? Will you be open to going where God wants to take you?
Reader 1: “We always know which is the best road to follow, but we follow only the road that we have become accustomed to.”
Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
Reader 2: “Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.”
Anita Brookner, English novelist
Leader: Consider these questions with your group.
- Can you think of a time when the best experience you had was something completely unplanned and unexpected?
- Where did you find God in that experience?
Reader 3: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Reader 4: “Sometimes life takes you on unexpected paths, and those paths aren’t always in the same direction.”
Jonathan Scott, Canadian entertainer
Leader: In the late Sister Martha Buser’s book, Also in Your Midst, she said this about Angela: “Many of us find consolation in the way her life unfolded without her having a clear idea of all the things she was going to do. She was just like all people who don’t know what will happen next week, next month or ten years from now. We talk about making long-range plans, but we don’t know what is going to happen to us in the next hour. Angela didn’t know either. She was well past 40 before she began what could be called an active ministry, when she moved to Brescia.”
Consider these questions with your group:
- Is there a time when you’ve been very resistant to change, even when you suspected God was calling you to do so?
- What was your obstacle to being open to a new path?
Reader 5: “I have this firm and unquestioning faith and hope in infinite divine goodness, that not only shall we easily overcome all dangers and adversities, but also, to our great glory and jubilation, we shall defeat them.”
Saint Angela Merici, Prologue to the Rule
Reader 6: “My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”
Jack Layton, Canadian politician
Leader: Angela was a “Pilgrim of Hope.” Sister Martha Buser tells us this in her book Lover Of Us All, written in 2012: “What keeps Angela’s charism, her gift, alive today and why does it speak so to those born in a time of unrest and questioning? Then, as today, such a period holds fear as well as opportunity, confusion, and anger as well as hope and courage. … Angela had a gift of finding another way of facing the alternatives named above. Always her contemplative stance before life led her to turn away from anger, confusion, and fear and to find a way to live in the midst of these realities not only with equanimity but also with joy and hope.”
Consider these questions with your group:
- How can you be a “Pilgrim of Hope” like Angela – keeping your heart open to joy while living in our world of uncertainty and injustice?
- What is your first step?
Closing prayer: “For I know well the plans I have in mind for you – oracle of the LORD – plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.”
Jeremiah 29:11
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