The Community
How this story can be told by an Olive Tree
I had stood there for three hundred years, alone, in the middle of nowhere. I spent my days dancing my leaves to the song of the breeze.
Suddenly I saw an enormous building rise around me, stone upon stone. A group of women –white and black, with Truth for a banner– began to move about this place. They looked at me, they marvelled; their eyes shone before my green majesty. I have seen them laugh and weep –break–; enter and leave. I have felt the weight of the world in their hearts.
I can still hear the murmur of the warm oven they lit barely forty years ago, when they also set about opening the doors so that not only they, but anyone drawn by Truth, might meet the silence of this cloister that is my world and feel their wonder stirred. And at the memory of a cream bun, the sweet shop grows grey with years.
I, who am only a poor thousand-year-old Olive Tree, keep in contemplation the memories the monastery hides: the cries held back before Beauty; the silent prayer of an Order called to bear witness to the eternal, in this small corner of the world where silence speaks of that Truth.
Values
History
As guardians of the Middle Ages, we keep and pass on the evolution of society across the centuries to the present day, bringing history up to date without losing its essence, so that the past may keep illuminating the present.
Art
Tradition, sacred art and the architecture of the monastery convey a beauty that lifts the spirit and invites us to reach beyond the physical walls, joining the human and the divine through contemplation.
Spirituality
Silence is essential inside the monastery; a silence that invites us to go deeper and to connect with what is revealed beyond oneself, as an experience of transcendence and communion with the sacred.
The Community
The Monastery of Sancti Spiritus el Real has been inhabited from its origins by contemplative sisters of the Order of Preachers, living under enclosure. Their spirituality has evolved over time, adapting to social change without ever losing its essence, sustained by prayer, contemplation and the perfection of charity.
The religious community is currently made up of eleven sisters. In an increasingly complex society, the Dominican nuns face many difficulties in combining a wholly contemplative life with the safeguarding and conservation of the heritage they have inherited. This, however, does not diminish their pride at having received it, nor their wish to keep promoting and sharing the heritage in their care as a living memory that explains the past, speaks of the present and projects the future with hope.
This tension has, on more than a few occasions, led to situations in which structure and furnishings were given priority over the safety and wellbeing of the sisters themselves. Hence the need to understand the Museum – Monastery of Sancti Spiritus el Real as an inseparable whole in which both dimensions –museum and community– are given their true value, always preserving the way of life of the sisters, based on the papal enclosure proper to a wholly contemplative vocation.
Four pillars of Dominican life
Study
Lectio divina, theology and ongoing formation, an inheritance of the Dominican charism.
Prayer
The liturgy of the hours, lived in common, gives shape to the day and to the year.
Preaching
The silent preaching of contemplative life, offered for the Church and the world.
Common life
Work, table, recreation and silence shared under one same rule.
Would you like to know us?
If you would like to know more about the community or about Dominican contemplative life, or if you need spiritual accompaniment, write to us.