This Thanksgiving, we are so thankful for the strong women who came before us. Prairiewoods was founded by six Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, an order of sisters out of La Crosse, Wisconsin. One of our foundresses, Sister Betty Daugherty, wrote the article below on spirituality in a newsletter that was published in the spring of 1995, before our doors even opened in July of 1996. This Thanksgiving, we are grateful for the memory of Sister Betty and all the guidance she provided this eco-spirituality center. We invite you to join us as we reflect on spirituality with gratitude in our hearts.
Spirituality: What does It Mean?
Part of each individual’s answer, I believe, rises out of the response given to many other questions: Who is God? Who am I? How do I relate to the Creator? What is the meaning of my life? How do I live in harmony, justice and compassion with other people on this earth? In asking these basic questions, we are attempting to make sense out of the whole picture of existence, trying to see how and where we fit into the flow of life.
The word spiritual comes from the Latin Spirltus and is related to the Greek pneuma referring to air or breath. The spiritual experience, therefore, is not something rare and extraordinary, but is as close to us as our breath. It is not separate from the ordinary day-after-day details that make up our existence.
The spiritual also refers to the capacity we have as humans for transcendence, the ability when called by the Holy to reach beyond the ordinary, to escape from ourselves to connect with the sacred.
But spirituality has another dimension aside from the individual’s pursuit of God’s presence. Deep in our hearts is a yearning for connection, a desire to belong somewhere, to be included in some sense of community.
Spirituality involves relationships with others, relationships in which we struggle to be just and decent. It includes the responsibility we take to share our resources and secure justice for the poor and exploited. And it is certainly concerned with the ecological care of the Earth, for we and all of creation are part of one great web of life.
The Franciscan tradition places humans in a deep and respectful relationship to all of creation. With growing clarity, we see our present ecological crisis of the human soul. We need to respond to that crisis by doing the honest “soul work” to learn about who we are.as humans, our place in the universe and our connections to the God within.
In all of this there is so much mystery since there is so much we cannot know. What we are learning is that we humans are part of one sacred community of life, that we belong and that we are loved. God’s graciousness and bounty surround us.
What we can offer at Prairiewoods is a place apart, a place to reflect on how God is speaking in our lives. The center will offer a quiet place for rest, for prayer and ritual, and for the creation of art and beauty. It will be a place to connect with people of many traditions, a place where one can spend time simply being in awe of the trees, the stars, the small creatures that inhabit the woods and all the wonders of the natural world.
We invite you to be a part of that plan.
—Betty Daugherty, FSPA, spring 1995