Who We Are

Our Holistic Lifestyle

God is the origin and destiny of every human person, and from the beginning humankind has been engaged, however dimly or gropingly, in the search for God. The great religions of the world are testimony to this search, and in most, if not all, there has developed some form of monastic life - if we define "monastic" for the present as a life separated from secular society in order to seek after religious values. Men and women who withdrew from society to the desert found a life of freedom: freedom from social and political commitments; freedom especially from all that is false, deceptive, and illusory about the world; freedom finally to seek God alone, to encounter him in the ultimate, transcendent reality. But this did not happen automatically, for they were quick to learn that the most basic freedom and the one most difficult to achieve is the freedom from the false self.

The ethos of the desert, which might be summed up in the values of asceticism, poverty, detachment, and simplicity, seen as indispensable means for attaining the life of union with God, has been found valid in every generation to this day, notwithstanding those periods of decadence when the vision was obscured. The nuns (and monks) of today, hearing the call, the "lure of the Spirit", while yet living in our affluent Western society, struggle to adhere to that spirit of austerity and renunciation in order to focus on the "one thing needed" (Lk 10:38-42). That they discover the Divine Mystery alone makes their lives important for the society in which they live. But there is more. Dwelling in the depths of the Spirit, in Him who is the Ground of all being, they dwell also in the heart of the world, for the world is the heart of God. What greater or more important work can there be than that the world''s heart should be converted from within?