One hundred and One…Trees

In honor of the 775th anniversary of our Congregation’s beginning back in 1241, our sisters throughout the world have embarked on a Tree project, hoping to have planted 775 trees by the time of next year’s celebration.

Our province here in North Dakota is taking its part…In our past Franciscan Review Newsletter, we advertised that if people would like to plant a tree in honor of the occasion, they are encouraged to let us know.  Somehow I, Sr. Christina, was given the task of collecting the data and making sure information is gathered, etc.  I’m not exactly a “tree-hugger” but hope to do my assigned job well.

I created a spreadsheet and recently reached the 100-tree mark.  I informed Sr. Ann Marie, our provincial superior, of the milestone.

This past week, for my weekly Bible study I hold for our residents at St. Anne’s, I started a unit on the fruits of the Spirit.  Along with reading pertinent scripture passages and discussing them, we also have a tree.  I found clip art of a tree online and printed it on an 11X17 sheet of paper, along with various pictures of fruit, so each week we will be adding one “fruit” to our tree as we study one more fruit of the Spirit. We started with love this past week.

If I include this “tree” as part of our Dillingen Franciscan tree project, we now have 101 trees!  More important than any tree planting, however, I hope we can grow daily in the fruits of this last tree: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.  I guess a daily prayer to the Holy Spirit would be a good place to start.

Sr. Christina M. Neumann