Sr. Josephine Garrett grew up Baptist, so she knows a thing or two about revivals.
But if a Eucharistic revival is going to be effective it needs to stand on two legs: devotion to the Eucharist, and repentance.
With those two legs, “we can walk — and maybe even run forward,” said Sr. Josephine.
Sr. Josephine’s keynote address to the National Eucharistic Congress’ nightly revival session came Friday, July 19, one evening after that of Fr. Mike Schmitz. Fr. Schmitz’s address delivered a call to repentance — one that was met by the audience with applause.
“That concerned me,” Sr. Josephine told the crowd. “When I heard you clapping when Father said we need repentance last night, I was worried you thought he was talking about your neighbor’s repentance.”
The audience laughed. “He is not, OK?” said Sr. Josephine with a grin. “He is not.”
Sr. Josephine was born and raised as a Baptist in Houston, and converted to Catholicism in 2005. She had a successful career in banking before she began formation as a religious sister, professing final vows as a Sister of the Holy Family of Nazareth in 2020. She is a licensed counselor, specializing in trauma and the treatment of children and adolescents, and serving as a Catholic school counselor in Tyler, Texas. She is the author of “Hope: An Invitation” and hosts a podcast, “Hope Stories.”
Sr. Josephine’s message was a passionate exhortation for God’s pilgrim people to not only embrace for themselves the repentance Fr. Schmitz spoke about but to turn away from a “fear of hunger” that can serve as a stumbling block on the path to holiness.
Sr. Josephine told reporters at a press conference Thursday, July 18, that her talk was the fruit of her time in Eucharistic Adoration — a combination of “private prayer, communal prayer and ongoing reflection.”
“When I give a talk, the foundation is prayer,” she said. “Ever since I received a letter inviting me here, and with the topic for the night, I’ve been praying about it since then. When things would come up in prayer, I would pick up my phone and put it in my Notes app.”
Her speech really began to take shape in early June, when she was on retreat. “It was a little, small private chapel. I pulled the chair right to the tabernacle and I just really started to perceive Scriptures that God was putting on my heart for (the keynote).”
One of those Scriptures was John 6:26. “Many of us know that in chapter six, Jesus feeds the 5,000, he walks on the sea and then he talks about the bread from heaven,” she said at the revival session. “And at verse 26, he says, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves.’ And I … was struck with our deep desire to eat to the fill.”
Sr. Josephine said as she prayed with that passage, she also went back to Exodus 16:3. “At that point in Exodus, the people are complaining to Moses because they’re hungry and they say in verse three: ‘Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord of Egypt when we sat by the flesh pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this to wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’”
For a long time, said Sr. Josephine, God’s people “have struggled with hunger.”
“You see the Israelites in chapter 16 — they would rather go be enslaved than be hungry. They would rather die by flesh pots with full bellies than be hungry and be free,” she said. “We have a long history of wanting to be full and not tolerating hunger well.”
We cannot be afraid of the hunger, Sr. Josephine said. The hunger is what revives us.
“Our desire to be full is not faulty,” she said. “What becomes faulty is our struggle with hunger, because we’re supposed to be hungry here on earth because this is not heaven. The kingdom is here, and also is not, yet still coming. And so, I want to ask you fellow pilgrims, can we be at home with hunger?”
Too often we “struggle, and we run to opportunities to be falsely filled, and we find ourselves struggling with sin.”
She shared an excerpt of the writings of Blessed Mary of Jesus the Good Shepherd, the foundress of her order. In the excerpt, Blessed Mary urges her sisters to “become aware of our brokenness, of our sinfulness, of our woundedness, of our need for healing … and once we admit by divine grace our defects, sinfulness and weaknesses, we shall the sooner and more securely attain to God the life of virtue.”
All healing, said Sr. Josephine, “begins with repentance.”
“And so, I wanna beg you tonight, as you stand before God, to do that with hope and joy and confidence like Mother Foundress says, to not be dismayed, to not despair, to not become overwhelmed, to not get lost in yourself,” she said. “Get lost in him because he who made the promise is true. And so, we can be people who repent with courage and joy. What a contradiction: to be people who say I’m broken and I’m thankful and I’m joyful and I’m hopeful.
“What would the world do with a pilgrim people like that?”
Sr. Josephine’s full speech can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=Ct4jNIbXzQVS4MA4&v=uWlgLLmHgkc&feature=youtu.be&themeRefresh=1.
Sr. Josephine Garrett told pilgrims at the National Eucharistic Congress on Friday, July 19, that they should embrace “hunger” because we won’t be truly full until we get to heaven. (Photo by Colleen Jurkiewicz)
