What Matters to Us
- Liturgy: our spirituality is firmly rooted in Scripture and liturgy. We chant the Divine Office three times daily (see Worship Schedule).
- Time set aside in the early morning and evening for profound silence and recollection, for prayer, reflection and lectio divina (prayerful reading).
- Informal adult education in the form of retreats and days of recollection; involvement in our local community in the Southern Tier of New York.
- Interreligious and ecumenical work: the monastery has helped to further the work of AIM, a group of Benedictines and Cistercians promoting interfaith dialog and understanding.
From: "The Monastic Spiritual Journey" by Sister Donald Corcoran in Word and Spirit.
"The early Desert elders were called pneumatikos or pneumataphore—spirit-filled or spirit bearer. Odo Casel portrays St. Benedict as a consummate example of the spirit-filled elder. The call to monastic holiness today is precisely to become pneumatikos—spirit-filled. Russian Orthodox layman Olivier Clement, in a challenging presentation of monastic spiritual theology, argues that monasticism today is "called to receive fully its charismatic, or to put it more fundamentally and humbly, its pneumatic vitality." If Esther de Waal is right, that the heart of the Rule or Benedict is the Paschal Mystery, then we would do well to focus on the fullness of the Paschal Mystery. One does not become a pneumataphore (a spirit-bearer) unless one is first a stavraphore (a cross-bearer). One short phrase of the Apophthegmata Patrum came to summarize, especially in the later Eastern Christian tradition, the whole significance of the spiritual quest of the monks: "Give your blood and receive the Spirit."
