This year, Sr Teresa Lau from the Sisters of St Paul de Chartres Australia congregation is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. She reflects on the joys and challenges of life in a religious community, offering a beautiful testament to faith, service, and perseverance. May her 60 years of devotion inspire us to trust in God’s grace and live out our Catholic mission with love and humility.
Transcript
I am Sr Teresa Lau. For my sixty years of experience in community life, I found challenging to start with, because I start in an international formation and there were ten of us in my group. And we have different people from Thailand, Philippines, Hong Kong and other places. And I learned how to adjust to each other. First for me, was a language because I didn’t speak English much so it was an effort. The next challenge is that we have the lessons, we have to recite certain parts of the scripture, which was a big thing for me. But apart from the challenges, I think there’s a lot of joy in the community because we love, we share, each other’s experiences because a lot of us have been working and some of them have been just finishing their study. And there was so much joy throughout the world and all through my sixty years I worked in about and I live in about five different communities, a different number, the highest number I live was about twenty of us in the community, and the lowest one was about five. So there was a big adjustment but there’s one thing that is in common was we learn to love each other, share with each other’s joy and support each other, because some of us find it difficult to talk because of the personal differences and language was another one. But it’s always joy out of that, even with different language skill and the experience was once the sister came home and said, ‘I ate a computer.’ So we asked, ‘what do you mean by you ate a computer?’ And we all laughed because she said, ‘I ate cucumber today.’ So that was a joy that we shared. And then there’s among many other things like that. But also we have shared the worries, the work that we work together, the studies that we share and the formation that we receive. Of course in a community, we also share the housework, we pray together, because in prayer we join in union not only the local community that I live but also the other communities in the district and in the whole congregation. So we share each other’s prayer, joy, for example if a sister passes away in other countries they send us a notice, we pray for them. So that great support that you have in the community which I do treasure very much. And for us we also have time to be silent, that means to respect each other’s place and union with God during prayer, recreation, study. It is a school of loving and learning and which I do appreciate very much and I thank God for this. So no community is perfect on this Earth. And be all the challenges and graces, a community is a place that we learn to love, to grow, to accept each other. A community member is like a jigsaw puzzle, complimentary to each other, no piece of the jigsaw puzzle is less important or more important, they complement each other to make the beautiful picture of God’s service.