Rejoice with Me!

Editor’s Note: In her first FMS blog post, lay missioner Mary Liepold, OFS describes her season of formation through the lens of joy.
This phase of my new life is called formation, a spiritual, intellectual, and even physical preparation for the mission ahead. My Franciscan Mission Service formation began in August of 2023, with the excellent FMS Fellows program. For this current phase, I’m with Lay Mission Helpers (LMH) in Los Angeles. Founded in 1955, LMH was the first American Catholic organization to send lay missioners – often entire families – to serve where their help was needed outside the U.S. LMH includes a corps of medical missioners (the Mission Doctors Association) as well as a group of lay people with other skill sets. This year that includes my new friend Sally, a nurse who has worked in a children’s hospital for six years and is headed to Sierra Leone.
Both here and at the Casa in DC, part of the prep is learning to live in community, in a new house and a new neighborhood. For someone who didn’t even go away to college (because I could hop the bus to Viterbo, and later to Catholic University) it IS an adjustment. The people are delightful, but I miss my own kitchen. This one has no pepper grinder, heaven help me!
My focus, right now – between meals – is classes delivered here in the Mission House by teachers like Daniel Smith Christopher, who’s providing a top-notch survey of biblical history, and Audrey Lucier, with whom we spent several packed, introspective days discovering our Enneagram types and how to use them. The surprise and delight of Daniel’s class – aside from his engaging style – is how much has been learned about the context of our scriptural heritage since I last studied such things, 60 years ago. With Audrey, it’s the surprise of putting ourselves in context.
The Enneagram (as you may know) invites us to locate our own way of being within a system of nine possibilities, then consider how to grow in wholeness by balancing that with other, equally valuable approaches. I did the initial test quickly and without much thought, and at first I was dubious about the result. The more I learn, though, the more right it feels – especially because my daughter gave me the gift of naming the same trait not long ago.
Am I a good person, a loving person, a peaceful person, a wise person, or any of the other possibilities? I hope so. But in my essence, according to this analysis, I am joyful – what my sweet girl called an appreciator. This tree full of ripe pomegranates, in my pro-tem back yard, is one of the gifts I am most en-joy-ing right now. The staff in DC and LA who arranged this opportunity, this city of the angels with its glorious trees and plants, this house, its lovely inhabitants, its adoration chapel (with this afternoon light from the stained glass windows), and its bountiful bookcases are just some among many.
A book by James Martin on the place of joy and humor in our spiritual lives (Between Heaven and Mirth, 2011), popped up on a shelf last night, the way the right thing so often pops up in my lucky life. Martin reminds me that joy gives rise to gratitude. As I prepare to bring my joyful, grateful, still-growing self to learn and be helpful in Kingston, Jamaica, I am thanking God and all the people God has given me to love. Rejoice with me! Deo Gratias.
Question for Reflection: How are you rejoicing and finding joy in your current season of life?
- a tree full of ripe pomegranates
- the adoration chapel with afternoon light from the stained glass windows