Community life

The consciousness of the centrality of liturgical prayer in our community life and of the need to do everything that is in our power so that it be truly opus Dei, “the work of God”, has inspired during the month of January a profound revision of the way we sing the psalms, something that we have felt the need of for a long time. Our goal is to seek a style of psalmody that is more “meditative” and “prayerful”, leaving aside tones that are too “lyrical” or “militant”, which, as we realized, risked being too difficult to sustain from the musical side and did not favor adequately a climate of prayer and recollection. The new tones that we have adopted all have a pause in the middle of the psalm verse (between the parallel hemistichs of which it is usually composed) and seem to us to be more in line with a monastic style of psalmody, according to which, as St Benedict reminds us, the mind should always accord with the voice (mens concordet voci) and vice versa. In seeking this, we realize that we are only at the beginning and that we need help and support from those who have more experience in this field. We have been not a little reassured by observing that other monastic communities too have recently sensed the same difficulties in this area and are on the way to resolving them similarly to us.

Two sisters have finished the phase of their novitiate and have been received liturgically into the community: sr. Chiara on the eve of the Sunday in Albis and sr. Sara during the vigil of Pentecost have pronounced their promises of celibacy and of common life.