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  • Tapestry in Time: The Story of the Dominican Sisters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1966–2012ed. by Mary Navarre, O.P.
  • Gary M. Eberle
Tapestry in Time: The Story of the Dominican Sisters, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1966–2012. Edited by Mary Navarre, O.P. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. 2015. Pp. xxii, 314. $20.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-9028-7255-5.)

Anyone interested in peering back through time to the heady days following the Second Vatican Council should read Tapestry in Time. The title is inspired by an artwork produced by a congregation of Dominican sisters for the renovation of their motherhouse chapel in 1965. Consisting of several tapestries stitched collectively by members of the congregation, the multicolored wall hangings change with the liturgical season and have come to symbolize the many personalities and roles that have characterized the congregation since the first Dominican sisters arrived in Michigan in 1877.

Like the tapestries in the chapel, Tapestry in Timeis a collective composition that picks up where Sister Mona Schwind’s earlier history, Period Pieces(Grand Rapids, 1991), leaves off. The new book begins with the story of the sisters in 1966, when Sister Mary Aquinas Weber was elected prioress and charged with leading the congregation through the transitions in religious life urged by the Council’s Perfectae Caritatis. Tapestry in Timelets us live through the extraordinary process of modernization and renewal with the sisters, seeing the difficult soul-searching that led to the congregation’s current way of life. Modernism was not embraced by all the sisters, but this extraordinary group of women was committed, above all, to God and one another, and promised to work through the changes in a spirit of true sisterhood.

The resulting story takes us on a journey that traces how they embraced the Council’s spirit of openness and expansiveness, transforming themselves from a rather inward-looking order of teachers staffing Catholic grade schools, high schools, and one college in Michigan to an outward-looking congregation that took seriously the Church’s call to social justice. (Disclosure: this reviewer teaches at Aquinas College, founded by the sisters.) In the process, many of the “monastic” qualities of the congregation’s common life waned to allow the sisters to pursue callings that would include work among the poor and sick in the United States, South America, Central America, and other parts of the world while retaining their roots in the training they received at Marywood, their Grand Rapids motherhouse.

The complexity of the spiritual and psychological transitions undergone by this community is beautifully captured in the various chapters. We see how the changes in superficial things like the habit and substantial matters like the sisters’ place in the world were not undertaken whimsically but were based on careful reading of Dominican and church traditions and documents, the “signs of the times,” and the directives of the Council. Many group histories like this are laundry lists of new buildings and projects, or they become short biographies of as many individuals as possible. This book, however, is something different. Individual stories are told, but this is a biography of a congregation as its members discern, grow, and change together. The particular difficulty of writing this kind of history is that its events and characters are not separated by a long span of time from the present. [End Page 647]Many of the sisters who wrote the text lived through the changes they describe. Rather remarkably, therefore, what emerges is something like a unified narrative about an entire group of women who took the Council’s call to aggiornamentoseriously. Tapestry in Timeis a good book for anyone who wants to understand, fifty years later, what the legacy of the Council was or could have been.

Gary M. Eberle
Aquinas College

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