3 Pillars Of MGL Life
Yesterday I fixed our slow cooker. It’s been sitting in our cupboard with one leg missing for at least six months. To use it, you have to locate the missing leg (usually somewhere else in the cupboard) to prop it up in the gap where there should be a third leg. It’s pretty elementary knowledge that three-legged objects won’t work unless all three legs are stable and strong!
The same goes for MGL life. We have what we describe as “three pillars” to our life, and if any one of the three isn’t functioning properly, it isn’t what it should be. They are: prayer, sisterhood and mission. And although the three all work together and need to be equally strong, I’ve always thought that you need to think about them in that order too: prayer, sisterhood and mission.
You see, our whole life and vocation flows out of our living relationship with God. So without prayer, we lose the source of grace and motivating force for our sisterhood and mission. Then our shared life of sisterhood, empowered by prayer, is the school of love where our mission is discerned, formed, encouraged and tested. And when we finally hit the road on mission, what we have to share is the real relationship with God that we experience in our prayer and learn to give and receive in sisterhood.
As you can see, there’s a real sense of integration and dynamism at play here, which is only partially imaged by the analogy of a three-legged object. But we came up with another one recently: - in our house, we have a little homemade table that sits under our coffee table so that we can store newspapers and magazines somewhere when we want to play games on top. Being homemade, it’s a little fragile, and the legs are often, shall we say, a little wonky!
We were looking at it the other day, still standing on three legs, with the fourth folding shakily underneath, and commenting that if we were going to further our lifestyle analogy, we’d describe the fourth leg as joy. When joy is present, along with all of the pillars of our life, our MGL life is at it’s best. But when joy is a little bit wobbly, or has even fallen through altogether, the three pillars of our life remain enough to keep our life stable and fruitful.
Actually, though, it’s closer to the truth to say that joy is not a pillar, but a fruit of our MGL life. And even that the presence of joy is a good sign that the three pillars of prayer, sisterhood and mission are present and working together as they should be. That’s not a surprise, really, is it? The presence of joy is a good indicator in any vocation that we are living it fully and fruitfully! Our prayer is that our joy flows out through our individual relationships with God, into our sisterhood life and from there to the world!
Katherine Stone
