To the Monks and Companions of Southern Star Abbey,

Words cannot truly express my gratitude to you for what I experienced with you last week, but I am going to try. The easiest way to explain why I was compelled to spend time with you is to say that I have recently felt a strong call, within my context, to a life of contemplative prayer and a deeper communion with God. Your existence and space provided an opportunity for me to remove myself from the context I exist in for a brief moment to really connect with the divine towards that call.

Your value of hospitality meant I was made welcome and felt part of the Southern Star community from the moment I sent an email to ask about possibly taking time at the monastery. Your welcoming warmth embodied something that our culture sorely lacks today. You showed no signs of suspicion, no desire to use me for any gain for the monastery, no sense of trying to make me conform to something or sell me anything. The only thing you seemed to have any interest in was making me welcome and making sure I had the space I needed to go on the journey with God that I felt a need to undertake.

Your hermitage provided the perfect space for my journey and what turned into a real wrestle with God that He, thankfully, won. It left me in a space free of distractions and therefore provided a crisis where it was just me and God. I had none of the things I would usually have to distract me from myself and so a mirror was held up to my identity and an ego that ultimately had to submit to God. It became very clear that my identity was largely constructed around what I do in life, what I have and what other people say about me. With none of those things available in the silence, I discovered another seat for my identity – in the words of Henri Nouwen, I discovered that I am the beloved. Now I enter the journey of coming back to that daily and not allowing myself and God’s place in my life to be overtaken by the construction of a false, stressful and ultimately useless self identity. There were many other things to ponder over the coming years as well.

The work of the Companions and the chance to share meals with them, alongside the daily prayer rhythm of the Divine Office and minor interactions with the monks provided the doses of community needed to give me reprieve and affirm my sanity during the time of struggle. The Stations of the Cross I walked every morning from the hermitage to the church grounded me in the need to trust in the slow work of God. Daily being reminded of the Incarnation, life of Christ, his death, Resurrection and his Ascension helped affirm my faith in that work.

Through your work you have given me a firm foundation on which I can pursue a deeper communion with God that will inform the entirety of my life and service to God and neighbour.

In our world the monastery is viewed by many as a strange and other worldly entity and indeed it is and needs to be. Ultimately you, your lives, your service, and your space act as a strongly prophetic voice in a world that desperately needs to connect with what and who you are. You stand at the edge of a culture built on a poorly constructed identity that sucks all of us into poor shadows of what we were intended to be. You tell us that amongst all the busyness, pursuit of ultimately meaningless things, stress, insecurities and the myriad of other image sapping extremities our world place upon us, that there is another way. You show us a way that provides stability; that grounds us in the face of both the joys and pains of life. You call us into a deeper experience of our mortality. You call us towards the One who is calling us. In your quiet, contemplative pursuit you offend every sense of the power and prestige our world thrives on and point to Him whose Kingdom has broken forth in the humble person of Jesus.

In your humility, warmth and service you challenged me to strip away all those things in my life and to surrender to the God who has drawn near. My life pursuit is to now surrender to Him daily and you have helped provide a foundation for that. Prayer is now the very beginning of my way of life. In the monastery I know I have a space I can turn to in order to be reminded of the life I need to be living.

Thank you. Thank you to the Monks and Companions who have committed to the disciplines of the monastic life. Thank you for the hard work you put in, your boundless hospitality and your well of non-judgmental love.

May God make His presence known to you as you seek to draw near to Him. May you know the satisfaction and stability of the lives you have been called to live. May you be supported in your work and may your community flourish in that support. May a world in desperate need of all that you offer hear the voice crying out to us in the wilderness.

May Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have mercy on you, His servants.

Glory to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.