North Guilford, CT
North Guilford, CT
Contemplative nuns have been at the heart of Dominican life from its inception. The first Dominican nuns, converts from the Albigensian heresy in Prouille, France, professed obedience into the hands of Saint Dominic himself in 1206. Ten years before Pope Honorius officially commissioned the Friars Preachers in 1216, the nuns were already embracing these means and ends of Dominican life: prayer, study, and penance for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
The contemplative life is a life of profound union with God; it begins at Baptism, when the Divine Persons begin to dwell in the soul of the Christian. The fullness of this contemplative life will only be arrived at in the beatific vision in heaven. But, even on earth, we experience a foretaste of this union with God for which we were created.
Christianity's first monks and nuns fled from their native cities and villages into the Egyptian desert to seek God. Today as then, the basic impulse of Christian monasticism is a movement away from life in the world toward the eternal life of heaven. And, today as then, it is God's own spirit—the Holy Spirit—who ultimately brings us to the goal by his “groanings too deep for words.”
A Dominican nun is a woman consecrated totally to God within the Catholic Church. Her daily life, lived in community with her sisters, follows the wisdom of the Christian monastic tradition and is structured around classic monastic practices such as work, penance, silence, and separation from the world. As a Dominican, she directs all of these disciplines to God in charity—which is efficacious for the work of the Dominican Friars and the good of souls.
“We belong to God, and we feel the joy of belonging to Him. The uplifting to a higher life necessarily has a joy of its own.”
