By Sister Michele Morek, OSU

The two words caught my eye: “Union Differentiates.”  What is this, Civil War trivia? But then I focused on the second word. Because in my area of specialization in graduate school – Embryology – “differentiation” referred to one of biology’s most interesting processes: how do the cells in one part of an embryo “know” to go on to become your eye, whereas the cells in another part become your heart? How do they know to become different?

I’m reading a book by Louis Savary, The New Spiritual Exercises (in the Spirit of Chardin). Based on the Exercises of Saint Ignatius, it “transposes the thought of Teilhard de Chardin into another key.” Savary began by listing some basic principles from Chardin’s thought and writing, and that’s where I saw “Union Differentiates.”

What Savary meant was that the more you give yourself to creating union with another (with a spouse, with a religious community, with colleagues in a job setting, or with Jesus) the more clearly your own identity is clarified. Being part of a greater whole, of a greater complexity, helps you become conscious of your own true and unique identity.

Being part of the Ursuline family of Associates, or a parish family – has that helped you see more clearly who you are?

The image that came to my mind was a tree I saw a few years ago in a Kentucky field. It had once been growing alongside a companion tree – which was gone – but whose image persisted in the shape and pattern of branch growth of its surviving friend.

I have thought about that tree for many years, and I always wished I had taken a picture of it. But I was so moved by the image that I wrote a poem for my recently widowed Aunt Sue, and here it is:

 

Who has shaped me? How? How is my “shape” different than it would have been if I had been growing alone? What if I had never met Saint Angela or the Ursulines?