The New Year comes quietly in the Abbey.  The rolling over of a new day isn’t permitted to take too much upon itself.  For us, assessments are made day in and day out, and a new page is turned whenever the old becomes brittle, selfish, or self-satisfied.  Change is never far from us.  The making of resolutions is nothing new to us.  The keeping of them keeps us within these walls, invisible though they are.

Even so, the first day of a New Year is an event, a milestone, and particularly for Cor Unum Abbey.  We were founded on New Year’s Eve, with these words . . .

Every evening, in Bethlehem, Connecticut, forty Benedictine nuns settle into the Grand Silence that follows Compline, the last Office of the day. All speech is curtailed but for prayer and praise during Matins at 1:50 a.m., and the profound monastic silence continues until well after daybreak . . . 

With those words we began a monastic adventure that all of us could travel at home and on the job.  Men and women, married, single, divorced, widowed, all endeavoring to find that place of stillness, that heart’s monastery, where every believer in Christ Jesus may dwell with Him in the fulness of His resurrection.  We set out upon a quest within the cloister of our devotional lives, with the hope of learning to abide in Him as we are meant to do.  Ours is a cyber monastery, and we learn from and help one another.

All over the world, even in countries that don’t promote or even allow the spread of the Gospel, monastics have managed to find one another and to find purpose in prayer, solitude, and devotion.  For several years now, we in Cor Unum Abbey have been taking our place among them without leaving home.  We are real nuns here in this Abbey, because real monastics are those whose vocation is to find God and to dwell Him toward the working out of their salvation with fear and trembling.  Of course we must stay married, raise our children, keep our jobs, continue in the paths that are ours to travel, but we will not miss out on the glories – and the discipline – of cloistered life.  All live alone before God in the recesses of the soul.  While most of us will not have the volume of time or singleness of focus that draws traditional monks and nuns into the “religious life,” ours are true monastic hearts.  We, as hundreds of thousands before us, are marketplace monastics; we can only give what we have to give, so we give it.

As lovely as it would be to be able to devote seven intervals or more to prayer and worship and stillness, day in and day out,  as do traditional nuns in cloister, we have learned to make the most of even seven minutes to call our own. For us, a life too full of everything but devotion is an empty life, or at least a life with a dangerous black hole.  Our persuasions and predilections, our selfishnesses, lazinesses, and even our fears will fight against the fellowship and the friendship we have with God.   Cloistered nuns would be quick to tell us that the same held true for them, sometimes for many years inside doors closed and bolted against the world.  Here in Cor Unum, and like them, we keep wanting a divine friendship anyway, with that purity and simplicity of devotion to Christ that we know can be lived out at our address, somehow, with starts and stops.

Here in Cor Unum we come from lots of different backgrounds, churches, and inspirations.  We are cloistered in houses and apartment buildings and dorm rooms.  Many of us are quite alone; others have husbands and children, jobs and civic obligations.  What we share is a determined search for the Nearness of God in the happy faith that if we seek Him, we will find Him. (Jeremiah 29:12-14)  We aren’t playing at monasticism, not at all.  We have discovered this truth, that no one can live out our lives in Christ for us.  No one can make us worship or pray, no one can hope or love or trust in our place, but then, no one can take any of that from us, either.  To each is given a place in Christ, and that is our monastery, our cloister.  Jesus promised, “I will come to you,” and He is true.  We make of our hearts an Abbey where He is pleased to dwell and where, by His own word, He will abide with us.

We welcome you.  As the days go by, we will see with increasing certainty and joy that the human heart is the monastery where those who love the Lord may fellowship with Him, where He will come and stay, never leaving, never forsaking us.  Married or single, whatever your age, the nuns of Cor Unum Abbey welcome you.  Although we may live thousands of miles apart, what we share is vital and valid.  Whether life for you seems frantic and beyond any hope of order or stillness, or if your life has become so quiet and lonely that you wonder why you’re still living it, there is a habit for you here, a holy habit of worship, of joy and fulness and of the peaceful, powerful obedience of Christ.  (1 Peter 1:2)

Jeremiah 29:14 … And I will be found of you, saith the Lord: and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from all the places whither I have driven you, saith the Lord; and I will bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive.  (KJV)

1 Peter 1:2 … Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied. (KJV)

Entrance to the Community of All Hallows Convent

Evelyn Simak, by permission