Benedictine Sisters of VA

We, the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, as monastic women are called to seek God in community through prayer and ministry.

This is a simple statement which drives our daily lives and reminds us to what we are committed. To seek God is our overriding ultimate goal. We strive for union with God by being imitators of Christ. As Christ called twelve apostles to be the nucleus of the Church, we believe that our community is the church in miniature where we serve under the Rule of Benedict and the Prioress in dialogue with each other. We go to God in and with community, knowing that we need human companionship for mutual support.

Our lives without prayer would be barren, thus we have daily formal and structured prayer in the Eucharist and the liturgy of the hours. We observe the liturgy of the hours three times a day as we pray the psalms together in the morning, at noon and in the evening. Besides prayer together, we enrich and broaden our communal prayer with sacred reading, meditation, and reflection in solitude.

Through our monastic profession, we are vowed to this Benedictine way of life by promising through stability to be faithful to and with this particular community. We must respect, care for, and be open to each person in community for our lifetime. Through conversion of life through the monastic way, we are faithful to whatever the community asks of us, knowing that we are working out our salvation in common, helping each other to find God. And through obedience, we daily take up the challenge to become God-centered, acting as Christ would act in a given situation, ever listening with the “ear of our heart” to the voice of God expressed in each daily encounter.

Seeking God through service or ministry is a necessary component in the life of any follower of Christ, and because a small community such as ours is not able to carry out the ministry alone, we look to our employees to share in our ministry of service, thus enabling us to reach out to the broader community to do all that we can to help those whose needs we can meet.