Nell O’Leary joined Liz Kelly to uncover all the details about her mission leading the Word on Fire Institute’s Women’s Formation Community.
Liz is an internationally-recognized speaker, retreat leader, and the award-winning author or co-author of more than a dozen books.
Nell O’Leary: Liz, you’re stepping into the role of leading a Women’s Formation Community here at the Word on Fire Institute. You bring years of experience as a speaker, spiritual director, author, and a holder of many women’s stories. Additionally, you have two Master’s degrees! Can you share a little about your background?
Liz Kelly: I love that you use the expression, “holder of stories.” Our stories are sacred, and they deserve to be held with great reverence and care—and I hope I do that.
I am humbled and honored to be entrusted with this role. The women who are part of the Word on Fire Institute are really impressive and bring a lot of heart and experience to our community already. I look forward to getting to know them better and growing together.
Even as a kid, I was drawn to prayer, to retreat especially. My first retreat was in grade school, and while I don’t remember the topics we discussed, I do remember, even as a sixth grader, being struck by the idea of “coming away to seek the Lord, to listen for the voice of the Lord.” That resonated with me, struck me as something very special and something I deeply desired. If there’s one thing I think I can help women with, it’s this: deepening their life of prayer, particularly with God’s word.
When I served as an adjunct professor in Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, I spent about a decade teaching a course called “Woman and Man: Philosophical Issues.” The reading I did around that course was exceptionally helpful for the work I do now. It gave me a deeper understanding of some critical thinkers in this area, like St. Edith Stein, Pope St. John Paul, Hanna Gerl-Falkowitz, the great German philosopher Sr. Prudence Allen, and many others who are drawing out a timeless wisdom around the unique roles of men and women in the Church. Our complementarity is meant to bring about greater life and deeper unity within the Church. And I think that attribute really plays out in important ways not only in our vocations, but in the life of prayer.
If there’s one thing I think I can help women with, it’s this: deepening their life of prayer, particularly with God’s word.
I also taught a course on theological aesthetics, so the whole notion that beauty is one of the means by which we can come to understand God and just how important beauty is to the work of the Word on Fire Institute, it was a very natural fit for me to join in this enterprise. Von Balthasar was especially keen to tie beauty and a life of prayer together as well, and I see that connection very vividly and anticipate exploring that idea in our community again and again.
The community is focused on specifically Women’s Formation. Would you share with us how this community will flow and what women can expect to see weekly?
I’m planning a three-year cycle: the first year will concentrate on virtue, the second year on prayer and the third on healing. In addition we will run an 8-week prayer practicum in the fall and spring. These more intensive small groups will focus on developing our skill in praying with Scripture.
In the first week of the month, I will share a live talk on, for example, one of the virtues, and I’ll post a worksheet for the month with questions for journaling and discussion, prompts for prayer and additional reading. In the second week, we’ll have a check-in and discussion on the additional reading. In the third week, I’ll post a short reflection on a woman in Scripture who either flourished in the virtue of that month, or failed. We can learn a lot from failure! In the fourth week, I’ll invite women to check in on the month overall. Have they noticed a shift in their understanding or practice of the virtue? How has their prayer with that virtue been going? Where are they experiencing growth? Where do they feel stuck? I hope it will open up organic conversation about what’s happening in the heart of these women.
It’s a very powerful thing: to be heard, to be “listened,” and more than anything, I hope Women’s Formation becomes a place where women will be heard and “listened” into greater understanding and growth in their relationship with the Lord.
There are gifts that women bring to the Church that the world and the Church really need right now.
Why Women’s Formation? What have you seen, heard, and experienced that encourages you that women need a place and space to learn and listen together?
In my work, leading retreats and speaking for women’s groups, I have witnessed again and again: when women come together to seek the face of God together, powerful graces are unleashed. I’d be thrilled to see that happen in our Women’s Formation community. I find we go further together than we do in isolation.
I’ll admit, when I was younger, I was a little skeptical about “women’s groups.” But then, my brother, (now a priest and rector at a seminary), entered seminary. I was really struck by his being drawn into this sacred male space. He needed other men to teach him about fatherhood. And in a similar way, we need time with other women to teach us about and to strengthen us in Christian womanhood.
What is your invitational call for all the Word on Fire Institute members who are women? Why should they join you?
I think women hold a unique and very powerful role in evangelization. There are gifts that women bring to the Church that the world and the Church really need right now. I hope the women who join our community will be strengthened in the knowledge of their gifts and how to offer them to the world around them. More than anything, I hope they will be strengthened just by knowing there are other women like them out there, women on their knees before the Lord, seeking his will, working to grow in knowledge and virtue, women who embrace their nobility as daughters of the King of Kings. I hope we will help one another become women who walk through the world making our faith, hope, and love for the Lord visible and wildly attractive, that we would draw others to Christ.