On December 4th it was announced that Sr. Ivone dos Santos, NDS (St. Amaro, Brazil) has passed away. She had a stroke the week before, which compromised her movements, sight and speech. Sr. Ivone was known for her smile, irreverence, simplicity and, above all, for her deep fraternal charity. We Religious of Sion pray for her soul and the comfort of her family and friends, but above all, we believe in the certainty of the resurrection. In July 2014 Sr. Ivone arrived at the international congregational novitiate community established in Ein Karem / Jerusalem just in that year. The formation team and the novitiate community want to express her gratitude for all the gifts you Ivone have made available to help in this mission of empowering young women to become mature Sisters of Sion. We  come to express our gratitude of your dedication to this beautiful and at the same time so demanding ministry of contributing to the formation of our next Sisters. We thank the Lord, our God, for the gift of your existence among …

“…they will call him Immanuel”, which means “God with us”. After finishing our workshop on prayer with Sr. Maureen, we had some time to be in our community after all of us coming back from our apostolic ministries. We are happy to be back to our Novitiate community. We celebrated all our birthdays this year together last week. We did it in a special way for Andrea, since her birthday was on November 29th and we thank God for the gift of her life and vocation among us in our community. We enjoyed our barbeque in our garden. As the Advent season begun, we made our crib to mark this season as part of our preparation for Christmas. We made the image of a globe for our crib as we had “care for creation” as our theme to reflect this time of Advent. As we also see in many of our Scripture texts that speak directly to us about creation; the story of stewardship, vineyard cultivation, shepherding. This theme offers an opportunity to reflect and …