pblc word cloudThough there are times when questions regarding our spirituality and charism seem redundant and cause some to get “lost in the clouds,” the Precious Blood Leadership Conference (PBLC) recently found remarkable similarity in the understanding of our spirituality among the participating congregations.
You may recall that earlier this year the Precious Blood Spirituality Committee asked community members of the participating congregations to list five words that express for them the meaning of precious blood spirituality. The committee combined those words into word clouds so that they could “see” what our words say to us. A word cloud generator actually counts the number of times a specific word has been used in a document. It takes those words and makes them larger in size according to their frequency of use. This allows one to look at a document and receive a pictorial representation of that document.
From the words that were sent in from each community, the committee developed word clouds for the six Precious Blood communities, for the men’s communities, the women’s communities, and for all of the communities combined. The Kansas City Province had one of the highest rates of response as 95% of the membership contributed to this process.
The committee encourages members, companions, and volunteers to have conversations around these word clouds. Here are some suggested discussion points:

  • What words are most predominant? What were the smaller facets of each page?
  • What are the top 5 words from each group? How does that compare to the total group?
  • What surprises you about your community’s word cloud? What surprises you as you compare the word clouds?
  • What do these words say about our Precious Blood spirituality today?

The committee encourages you to include these word clouds in your prayer and invites you to send any insights you would like to share to the representative of your community on this committee. Fr. Jack McClure, C.PP.S. represents the Kansas City Province on the spirituality committee.