Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP

Jesus, I Am Coming to You (Matthew 11:28-30)

Published on July 17, 2025August 6, 2024 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Matthew 11:28-30

Not so long ago a woman approached me while I was exiting a church and asked me to pray with her. When I asked her what she would like me to lift up in prayer with her, she started to cry. Just days before the only daughter of a dear friend of hers, a deacon serving in her parish, had taken her life. She was in shock. Her heart was broken. She was still grappling with the reality of what had happened. That woman’s heart was simply crushed at the news, knowing how much her friend was suffering the loss of their daughter.

She came with her heavy heart for prayer. She came with a burden that was too much for her to carry to ask Jesus for his rest and his peace.

Sometimes the burdens we carry are so heavy we fear they will overwhelm us. They can be physical burdens of health, financial struggles, devastating ruptures in relationships or losses from which we fear we will never recover.

We can grieve under the weight of spiritual obstacles and moral dilemmas.

Jesus calls us to himself. He calls us away from anxiety and the way it keeps us fixated on things we can’t control.

Jesus calls us to himself as the only certainty in life that we can absolutely trust. Worries shake our confidence in what we know to be true of God.

Jesus calls our mind to himself and away from the fearful imaginations of worst-case scenarios that paralyze and defeat.

Jesus calls us to himself to rest, far from the stress of the to do lists and endless tasks to remember and complete.

When we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, Jesus calls us to himself because he wants to give us a clear mind and a peaceful heart from the assurance that he has overcome the world (John 16:33).

So when conflicts rock a relationship, remember Jesus is calling you to himself so he can carry you in his arms.

When hearts are broken and you have no real way to make things right, remember Jesus is calling you to himself, and he will calm your heart.

When you are lost in the darkness of what-ifs and defeat, remember Jesus is waiting with open arms for you to lay down your head on his heart.

Going to Jesus can be our first response instead of what we do when nothing else seems to be working. One of the most powerful prayers you can say is simply this, Jesus, I am coming to you. Help me!

Image Credit: Leiloeira São Domingos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Praying with this Passage of Scripture

Lectio Divina is a way of listening to God as he speaks in his Word. It is a practice of communicating with God through Scripture and attending to God’s presence and what he wishes to tell us. In this slow and prayerful reading of the Word of God, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the Spirit who forms us into the image of Christ. There are four movements in Lectio Divina: Read (lectio), Meditate (meditation), Pray (oratio), Contemplate (contemplation).

Begin by finding a still space to pray. Breathe deeply and become quieter within. Abandon any agenda, worries or thoughts you bring to this prayer and entrust these things to the merciful care of God. Ask for the grace to be receptive to what God will speak to you through this Scripture reading. Grant me, Jesus Divine Master, to be able to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God and your unfathomable riches. Grant that your word penetrate my soul; guide my steps, and brighten my way till the day dawns and darkness dissipates, you who live and reign forever and ever Amen.

Read (lectio)
Begin by slowly and meditatively reading your Scripture passage out loud. Listen for a particular word or phrase that speaks to you at this moment and sit with it for a time.

Pray (oratio)
Read the text a third time. Listen for what God is saying to you. Speak heart to heart with God. Notice the feelings that this conversation with God raises up within you. Share with God what you notice about your response to this conversation. You may wish to return to repeating the phrase quietly and gently, allowing it to permeate you more and more deeply.

Contemplate (contemplatio)
Read the text a final time. Now be still and rest in God’s embrace. Ask God to give you a gift to take with you from this prayer. You might ask God if he is inviting you to do some action, for instance, make some change in your thoughts, attitudes or reactions, in the way you speak or how you treat others. Thank God for this gift and invitation as you conclude your prayer.

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Being the Child God Made You: How Beautiful You Are

Published on July 10, 2025June 20, 2025 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP4 Comments

Lunch period was always my most dreaded class period in school. While others couldn’t wait to be set loose for 40 minutes to be with their friends, this favorite part of most kids day was for me a torment. For many reasons I won’t go into here, I didn’t sync with the other kids in my class.

I knew when I walked into the cafeteria that it would be an embarrassing experience scanning the tables crowded with jostling and laughing kids for a place where I might be able to fit in. I wasn’t friendless, certainly, but I knew I wasn’t the one that everyone wanted on their table. Far from the life of the party I always felt outside and boring. It is an image I have had of myself that has remained with me through the years.

Recently on retreat I found myself asking Jesus: “Will you leave me, drop me, because I am not interesting enough?” Isn’t that the fear we all have. That somehow God won’t be so captivated with love for us that he’ll decide we are not worth being with for the long haul?

These were Jesus’ words I felt that he said in my heart:

“It is I who have planted my tent on your land. It is I who have desired to possess your soul… It is I who have chosen you. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story—all of it. It is not a journey from bad to good. It is a life from seed to blossom. You have survived the blights and bugs, the storms, the bending and breaking, MY mending and molding. And now in MY garden, you are blossoming. It is ALL good.”

“Acknowledge your journey and all you’ve survived….”

In the Song of Songs the Lover whispers his love to his Beloved repeatedly: “How beautiful you are.”

This little book of the Bible is really all about her beauty, a beauty that the Lover has bestowed on her. Her beauty, even a passing glimpse of this beauty which he has given her, captivates his heart. As I was reading the Song of Songs on retreat, it struck me that the Lover, God, tells the Beloved, the soul, that she is precisely this, only this: beautiful. This is the one thing most of us in this culture want where so many are fixed and tucked and airbrushed to appear more beautiful.

When I heard my Dad say of my Mom, who had lived four years in memory care with late-stage Alzheimer’s, “Mom is so beautiful. She is still beautiful. She was always beautiful,” I am deeply moved. At that point, Mom wasn’t interesting to be with, she hadn’t done anything for him in a decade, and she most likely didn’t actually know who he was when he faithfully visited her at least twice a day.

After sixty years, Mom had gone from seed to blossom. She had become entirely the one God loves and cares for and fusses around, like a mother would a child. Her journey has taken her through many sufferings and much heartache, joys and laughter and love and sacrifice and care. She has survived. Indeed, she has triumphed. She passed into eternity several months ago, and now she enjoys what we struggle to understand and so often get wrong.

One thing that will help you become the Child you are…

For the Church, we are persons who live before God. What constitutes us is our relationship with God, the fact that God loves us, that God loves ME, that God loves ME with such a singular, passionate love that he called ME into being, each of us, called into being to exist forever before him.

The child who can do nothing but cry, the mature woman or man at the peak of their life, the person sunk in old age, or even lost to the world in dementia, are all the same person before God: beautiful.

We are beautiful when we are successful and when our lives seem torn apart into shreds. We are beautiful when we are surrounded by love and when we wander along, fearing no one wants us. We are beautiful to God, as Mom was still and always beautiful to Dad, as we survive the blights and the bugs, the storms, the bending and the breaking, God’s mending and molding… We are beautiful in God’s beautiful garden. And it is all beautiful.

One thing you might do in a moment of prayer with Jesus after Communion or before the Eucharist in adoration, is to make a list of the things that you try to hide even from yourself, those things that you have decided “aren’t beautiful.”

At the bottom write:

“It is I who have chosen you, I, Jesus. My choice is irrevocable. I choose to love your story… All of it… Every last inch of the woven tapestry of your life is beautiful to me.”

Is there one thing on your list that Jesus begins to open up for you to see in a new way? Allow Jesus to say to you these words,

“I enjoy being around you. I want to spend time with you. I love wasting time with you. From forever I have lavished my Heart’s attention on you.”

Image Credit: Photo by Garon Piceli

Being the Child God Made You: Royal and Loved

Published on June 29, 2025June 20, 2025 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP2 Comments

One of my sisters likes to post on Instagram stylized pictures of Jesus. He is often depicted as a King and the “soul” as a princess. There is something endearing and captivating about this artistic way of depicting something so true about who we are: we are adopted into the family of the King. With our baptism we truly are royalty. We are princes and princesses who are loved by the King of Kings.

So amazing! Yet this reality, this truth that is hinted at on every page of God’s word, is so hard to remember about ourselves and about others. Jesus, the Son of God, loves us. Jesus chooses us. We belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of the Universe. In Isaiah there is more than a hint:

“You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

…You shall be called My Delight Is in Her” (Isaiah 62:3, 4).

And in the Psalms there is a beautiful psalm that speaks of the marriage of the King and the princess:

My heart overflows with a goodly theme;
    I address my verses to the king;
    my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe.

You are the most handsome of men;
    grace is poured upon your lips.

The princess is decked in her chamber with gold-woven robes;
    in many-colored robes she is led to the king (Psalm 45:1-2, 13-14).

And in the Song of Songs we hear the voice of the King and Bridegroom as he speaks to his bride:

You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride,
you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes,
with one jewel of your necklace.
How sweet is your love, my sister, my bride! (Song of Songs 4:9-10)

These prophetic words are fulfilled in Jesus who says in the Gospel of John: “You did not choose me but I chose you. I have chosen you out of the world” (John 15:16, 19).

“Remember you have been made a ‘partaker of the divine nature’….”

Baptism is what makes us royalty. I follow the royal family in Great Britain. There people are born into royalty. We, instead, through Baptism, having no claim on being a part of the Royal Family of God, have been made a “partaker of the divine nature,” member of Jesus Christ and a temple of the Holy Spirit.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Baptism … makes the neophyte ‘a new creature,’ an adopted son of God, who has become a ‘partaker of the divine nature,’ member of Christ and co-heir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1265).

“Baptism is God’s most beautiful and magnificent gift. . . .We call it gift, grace, anointing, enlightenment, garment of immortality, bath of rebirth, seal, and most precious gift. It is called gift because it is conferred on those who bring nothing of their own; grace since it is given even to the guilty; Baptism because sin is buried in the water; anointing for it is priestly and royal as are those who are anointed; enlightenment because it radiates light; clothing since it veils our shame; bath because it washes; and seal as it is our guard and the sign of God’s Lordship” (St. Gregory Of Nazianzus, Oratio 40,3-4:PG 36,361C., quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 1216).

One thing that will help you become the Child you are…

This old adage is actually not true: “The memory is the faculty that was made to forget.” Yes, the memory forgets a lot, a lot of the time. But it was not made by God to do that. That wouldn’t make sense.

We were given a memory so that we could remember God and remember who we are. Instead, it gets really good at remembering past hurts or grievances, has little recall of how God has been present in our life and how he has shaped us and our lives in his love. We have hardly the focus and intention to call to mind that the infinite and transcendent God is always calling us to become more, to become our true identity, united with Christ in God’s own life. We are called to union with and within the divine life itself.

These things just seem to vanish from my mind. It doesn’t help that the Enemy is determined to wipe away any remembrance of God’s mercies from our mind, and to fill them with distractions and remembrances of grievances. I have to really work at using my memory the way it was made to be used. Do you find this to be true?

One thing you can do then is simply this: remember! Read these passages of Scripture and the Catechism over and over again day after day. At the beginning of the day visualize the situations you know you’ll encounter and picture yourself going through them as royalty. At the end of the day bring clarity to your soul by clearing out any memories that don’t reflect the truth of who you are and renew your commitment to live as one who is loved.

I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you (Jeremiah 31:3).

Image Credit: Photo by Church of the King on Unsplash

What does your grieving heart need? “It is time…”

Published on June 17, 2025 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP1 Comment

I keep asking: why so many doors?

It’s a strange thing. One door closes. My Mother passes into eternity. A relationship changed. Memories left to be sifted through. A love to reimagine and rediscover and re-embrace. It was one door that closed and certainly opened for her into eternity.

But why so many other doors clamor now for my attention?

Doors of loss. Doors of ungrieved sorrow. Doors that closed too soon and doors that closed too late.

When someone passes into eternity, we don’t go with them. Our love and friendship and future and shared dreams are no longer the same. What we had built together collapses in a great sigh. The memories that structured our day and our togetherness simply disappear, or we need to carry them forward on our own. The memories that once made us laugh, now bring up tears. Even their name, so beautiful, catches in our throat.

Why do so many doors these days haunt my dreams and fill my prayers?

Grief tends to open wounds that had been long forgotten and passed over, tucked away and wished away….

Grief shows us the many doors that hide deaths still not mourned, losses we’ve experienced along the way of life.

An illness that changed the direction of our life, a path taken that plunged us into unexpected sorrow, the sting of rejection and the pain of failure.

Losses that often had been bravely soldiered through. Now, in great tenderness, our heart hears the whisper, “It is time.”

The long empty hallways where something of ourselves had died… It is time to walk them. To listen to our steps… To hear our own breathing… To be led by wisdom and mercy down the labyrinths of broken dreams to reclaim our life. To meet ourselves now ready to live. To find the secret of inner harmony and integration and serene peace and an ever-living hope, a flame that does not die.

I prayed with this image one morning. The empty, sterile, too-tidied halls that represented the many losses of my life were quietly frightening. But with my hand in Jesus’ hand, we did not run from them. “Something in you died here, when you had your stroke at twenty-one.” He was kind and tender and gentle. He knew. He always knew. And now he was helping me to find again what had been taken from me by what happened.

“Something in you died there too….” Like an elderly wise one, a grandfather who had seen a thousand years, Jesus opened the doors one after another.

Let the sorrow pound the soul’s shores like the ocean’s tides.

As we walked, the empty halls began to fill up with furniture and flowers, and through the windows the sun’s rays frolicked across the warm floor. And music and dancing and joy and laughter….

Death and loss steals away the carefree trust that life will bless me, that it will never hurt. Grieving, slow and gentle, closes the too many wounds that have been left in their wake with the promise that all is love and all is still loved.

The many doors I have explored, since my Mother walked through the eternal door that awaits us all, have brought me once more to touch the joy and the laughter that was once mine and is still there. In time grieving melts into a larger loving and a newly reclaimed and received sense of identity.

We do not grieve alone.

Feature image credit: Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

I Need a Mother. I Need Mary. (John 19:25-34)

Published on June 9, 2025August 3, 2024 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
John 19:25-34

The day after the Church celebrates the Feast of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit on the apostles gathered around Mary in the Cenacle, we are given this opportunity to take a step back and to prayerfully contemplate Mary as the Mother of the Church, Mother of the Redeemer and Mother of the Redeemed.

Mary brought Christ, His physical human body, into the world and thus gave birth in a mystical way to the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. She stood with her Son in his passion and received his body in death as it was lowered from the cross and laid in a tomb. There is no way to fully appreciate the pain and intimacy of her heart, so pure and so holy, at this moment in which she receives from Jesus this motherhood of the redeemed, this charge to love and provide for his broken and wandering brothers and sisters for whom he offered his life.

I am one of these wandering disciples of Jesus. Sometimes I get lost. A lot of times I’m not able to withdraw my will from the aims and desires of the “old man.” Too often I hold on to this or that in aspects of my life where I haven’t the courage or strength to turn completely to Christ.

I need a mother.

I need Mary.

I need the Church,

Mary did not know any contagion of sin, as she was preserved whole and intact in her created nature from the first instant of her conception. In us holiness is found only in an imperfect way.

Mary, the Immaculate Conception, received, as a gratuitous gift, an original holiness, a holiness that she did not have to pursue throughout her life as the faithful do, who though “called to holiness” only arrive at a measure of holiness at the end of the journey. Mary alone is holy through original gift (Immaculate Conception) and through her own perfect conduct of life.

Mary is the icon of the holy Church. She encapsulates in herself all of the characteristics that the Church possesses. Christ gives holiness to his Mystical Body the Church, and then the Church, as a mother, brings forth children to God in the font of baptism, though we struggle with sin and concupiscence all our life.

Mary is Mother and icon of the Church. She is our Advocate, Mother, Teacher, and Queen. Both Mary and the Church are the source of hope for us who are still on the way to our eternal home.

Image credit: Image by Sr. Maria-Magdalena R. SMCB from Pixabay

Praying with this Passage of Scripture

Image: Myriams-Fotos; pixabay.com

Invitation: Lectio Catolica on ZOOM

Published on June 3, 2025 by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

Has this ever happened to you? Those times when you feel uncertain, upset, or just a little bit unmoored or lonely as you try to understand what’s happening within you or in your life (or in the lives of those you love)?

When you reach out for something, Someone, who knows what it is all about, who knows the whole picture, who knows YOU?

Someone who was there the day you were born? Who has seen your every joy and every loss? Delighted in every smile and suffered with you in your tears?

And you wondered: how do I connect? How do I know? How do I get to the bottom of my questions or my pain? How do I let go…. How do I love myself?

Life’s questions tend to be profound teachers which lead us beyond what we can understand about ourselves to the very arms of Jesus. In our search for answers, we find a Face and a Love.

Lectio Catolica is all about discovering how Jesus evangelizes our hearts with his Word.

LECTIO CATOLICA: Sacred Reading for the Journey of Life is an online prayer gathering held on Zoom where we break open the journey of life in the light of the Scriptures and other spiritual writings.

LECTIO CATOLICA includes a Scripture reading, reflections by the Sisters on the theme of the month, guided prayer, small group sharing, and prayer together.

Would you join me and my sisters for our first online prayer gathering LECTIO CATOLICA?

June 16, 2025
8:00-8:45pm Eastern Time

Theme: Holiness in Unexpected Places: The Promises of God Will Hold You Secure

Find more details and register here.

Friends, I am so grateful that you have joined me on the journey here at touchingthesunrise.com. It would be an honor to gather together every now and then online.

Sr. Kathryn