Theologians and liturgists praise the power of rituals at the core of our faith. Rhythms of prayer and traditions of worship orient our lives toward God and set a solid foundation in an ever-shifting world.

Don’t underestimate yourself. God has need of the talents you have been given. Prayer shows us how to use and multiply our gifts.

Perhaps it’s a blessing, then, that the church gives us Lent in midwinter. It’s a season of soul-searching; the gray skies give us no other choice but to turn inward and examine the dark spaces we’d rather not explore.

This Lent, I call on St. Clare of Assisi to show me the way. I need a sister in Christ to lead me through Lent radically different than in Lents past — to embrace penance, conversion and self-sacrifice as Jesus refines me.

On March 2, 1955, Claudette was a 15-year-old frightened Black girl who refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was jailed nine months before Rosa Parks was arrested for the same civil disobedience, but not in the same way.

In a time when we feel deeply divided and we’ve lost so much, what could we add or multiply to help those who need it most?

As our nation and church continue to suffer the lethal effects of their ongoing failures to fully acknowledge and atone for centuries of slavery and segregation, the new Norman Francis Parkway is an important beacon of hope.

The cavalier use of racist language in our public discourse, the rise of an emerging nationalism built upon anti-immigrant sentiments and the disdain for people who struggle with poverty, among other sociocultural misfits in our day, demand a communal examination of conscience.

Inaugurations speak to our innate need to start over from time to time, to express new hopes and fears, to realign our priorities and make sure the path we’re walking on is the right one.

In a racially and economically tumultuous year that saw a significant rise in calls for the church to acknowledge and make reparations for its largely unreconciled practices of slavery and segregation, the loss of Sister Reginald, and her expertise in African American Catholic history, was especially wrenching.