Sister Eloise Rosenblatt

The Gospels, like teachers, often propose a contrast – wise and foolish virgins, publican and Pharisee, weeds and wheat, hidden and revealed, light and dark, truth and falsehood, spirit and flesh, sinful and forgiven, blind and seeing, lame and walking, mute and speaking, confused and understanding, first and last.

Sister Suzanne Toolan wrote the hymn “I Am the Bread of Life” within a few years of my joining the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame.

We were a group of biblical graduate students from Jerusalem, fortunate on our trip to Egypt. Our guide was the renowned French Egyptologist Father Henri Cazelles.

I was on a transcontinental flight in 2003, two years after 9/11. A man seated next to me worked at the Federal Bank in Kansas. Two of his colleagues had died in the terrorist attack that brought down the Twin Towers in New York, killed 3,000, wounded thousands more, devastated the city, and shocked the world. The national trauma had touched him personally, even though he lived a half-continent away.