A Message from Our Presiding Archbishop-Abbot
Order of the Most Holy Mary Theotokos (O.SS.T.)
“A Monastery without Walls”
There is a part of each of us that is a monk or a mystic. We yearn for perfect peace yet live our lives far removed from traditional monasteries, yet most of us would not want to give up our personal and spiritual freedom to join monastic life. We seek wholeness but realize that wholeness is not possible without sacredness. Sacred life takes root in solitude, in the time we take to develop a relationship with our inner life, in the kind of setting a monastery would offer. O.SS.T. speaks to the monk or mystic within us. It affirms our place in the sacred silence of solitude and inner reflection, showing how even everyday life is filled with opportunities to live fully in the world, as if it were a holy monastery. Here we learn to live within the limits as well as the spirit of everyday life, how to appreciate our most human self as the path to explore the divine. How we encounter a world that is clearly available to us, a world filled with nothing less than the gift of sacred silence within the monastery without walls.
One of O.SS.T.’s defining characteristics is that we are a Marianist Order living our lives according to Benedictine spirituality. In ways both obvious and subtle, Benedictine spirituality permeates all that we do. As “A Monastery without Walls” we are a disbursed non-cloistered religious community who don’t live in monasteries, yet have learned to incorporate aspects of Benedictine spirituality and the Benedictine wisdom tradition into our lives. The calling is in each of us. Our lives are only different in form, not in substance. We need at least one foot or one hand into something sacred! Life must have purpose and real joy. The monastery without walls for each of us may look different but every monastery of the heart has much in common.
Drawing from the Benedictine Tradition our core values animate the life of Benedictines – love, prayer, stability, conversatio, obedience, discipline, humility, stewardship, hospitality and community. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list but rather an invitation to “listen with the ear of our heart” to what God is calling and asking us to be no matter if we live in a monastery or not.
Totus Tuus
Dom ++Robert, O.SS.T.
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