The Joy of Being Anna

by Mary Ann Zollmann, BVM

Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Mary Ann Zollmann, BVM, originally presented this reflection on August 12, 2026 at the Leadership Collaborative's "Sweet Conversations - Courageous Leadership" event during the LCWR Assembly.

My connection with the Leadership Collaborative began in 2017 when I served as a reflective listener for a summer gathering of participants in the Collaborative. Then, in 2024, I served as a member of the planning committee for Hope-Esperanza, as a wisdom elder during the gathering itself, and authored a chapter in the book, Leaders of Hope, an inner chronicle of that event.

Sometime during this past year, I was pulled by the Spirit’s tug toward Anna in the Temple.  Wanting to keep her close, I found a piece of artwork with Anna smiling broadly into the laughing eyes of the infant Jesus she held in her arms. At 85, a year older than Anna, that image speaks to me. Here in this holy space, this temple of religious life right now, the young and the old, the new and the seasoned, meet. Looking into the faces of one another, we create and recreate relationships for the flourishing of the whole human and natural creation.

Now, ten years since my original experience of the Leadership Collaborative.  I come with the question: What do I hold in my heart from this significant relationship? And I come with the joy of being Anna as described in the poetic words of Mary Lou Sleevi:

Anna comes to this moment,

her face the free expression

of all that’s inside.

Anna’s Jesus-Moment

is an elder’s consummate Belief

in a dream come true.

Participating as an elder in the Leadership Collaborative and relating with newer members across congregations and cultures has awakened my attention to what is happening among all of us currently living religious life. No matter what our age or stage in religious life, we are in something new. Midwifing this birth together, we may be embracing the most powerful moment of authentic community in the unfolding story of religious life. As I see it through the eyes of Anna, we are meeting intergenerationally and interculturally in a grace-filled space of mutual longing.

All of us have been drawn to this life from a common longing to love and to be loved. We are committed to this vocation worthy of a lifetime investment. We count on and want to be a part of its enduring beauty and believe whole-heartedly in the necessity of its call. Some among us have lived this life for decades treasuring it through multiple transformations and loving who we have become in the living of it. Others among us experience our life as institutionalized and seek ways of living community for mission that transcend current structures and processes. Moved by love for this life, we challenge what it has become and who we have become by living it in this form.

This reality of differing experiences carrying differing visions for the life we love has evoked in all of us a desire for interactions with one another that sink us beneath the superficial. We are beckoned to courageously enter the places of difference and let our honest being, speaking, and acting stretch us across spaces of potential division toward mutual understanding. At community assemblies I see diverse groups leaning close to one another, naming what each sees as the call from the future, the gifts each brings in response to that call, and never wanting the conversation to end. I witness communities asking hard questions about capacity to welcome new members, generously finding ways to support the evolution of religious life beyond membership in their own congregation, and experiencing the peace that comes from being real. In meetings focused on mission, I sit among communities enlarged by the active presence of associates, lay staff, partners and friends as all give voice to the cries of the world, let those calls guide congregational direction statements, and treasure the gift of a more impactful community for mission. I companion leadership teams as they undergo the asceticism of dialogue among seasoned elected leaders and new leaders to assure that, in the diversity of what they bring and the range of their perspectives, all feel valued. I minister with congregations moving into relationship with a Canonically Appointed Leader, listen as younger and older check on the well-being of one another, as the two congregations discover a common spirit of community and mission, and celebrate their part in the expansion of sisterhood. I am present at congregational Chapters where all are engaged in thoughtful divestment of land and buildings, financial planning into the future, integrating lay partners into the life of the community and recentering their attention in the essence of their vocation. In conversations with individual sisters, I hear how these times of vulnerability are tossing them into God, engaging them in doing their inner work, are seeing one another through eyes alight with the divine, and letting their souls shine through in the undeniable apparition of tenderness and affection. I glimpse sisters in moments of mutual intergenerational affirmation, elders assuring the young that no matter where this life takes them, they are with them in unconditional support, the younger speaking words of heartfelt gratitude to the elders for their love, and both knowing that all will be well. And in all these experiences, I feel the tension of the yet unresolved, the growing edges of the unfinished, the longings that compel our continuing return to the radicality of community and take us into a still waiting vast open and unknown future.   

Grateful to the Leadership Collaborative for inviting me into ever-widening intergenerational and intercultural relationships and making me more alert to signs of emergence in this life we love, this is what I, a contemporary Anna, see. Now, firmly seeded in authentic synodal processes, the transfiguration of our life and of us who live it will continue beyond what we can only imagine today.  As we stand together on the threshold of something more, this is the sisterhood from which that future will continue to be birthed.  As Anna holds the newness in her arms, Mary Lou Sleevi reflects:

Stretch marks from

solitude and solicitude and solidarity

show in The Wrinkling,

giving her face a certain lift.

She shoulders the newly born,

absorbing its heartbeat,

experiencing a Benediction of Years

between them. 

To the Leadership Collaborative, I thank you for the immeasurable gift of absorbing your heartbeat, experiencing the Benediction of Years between us, and for the joy of being Anna.