The Community of the Incarnation is a new monastic community which embodies and teaches engaged contemplative spirituality in response to what Father Bede Griffiths called “the universal call to contemplation.” We affirm that intimacy with God does not belong to a special group of religious professionals but is available to all. Our practice democratizes the gifts of monastic spirituality and translates them into a form that can be lived in everyday life.
Our Community is dispersed and currently includes members from across North America.
We find ourselves rooted in:
The Benedictine Rhythm of life that sanctifies the hours of the day.
The Carmelite Ways of silence and friendship with God.
The Franciscan Way of hearing the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.
In these ways, members of our community — clergy and lay — accompany and support each other in living our vocations faithfully. We also create spaces and programs that welcome and support seekers from all walks of life, holding each others’ spiritual needs in Christ’s transforming care.
While firmly rooted in tradition, we also take seriously the insights of contemporary psychology, art, ecology and science to address some of the realities of life that historically have been ignored by religion and yet are integral to human development and the creation of a just world. Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that, “Just as we are all meant to be contemplatives and to hear the voice of God in our lives, we are all meant to answer God's call to be His partners in transfiguring the world. This calling, this encounter with God, is always to send us into the midst of human suffering.”
Given today’s crises the world over, we can no longer afford to hide all our contemplatives in monasteries. We need to reunite contemplation and action, we need spiritual activists and, indeed, spiritual warriors on the streets of our cities and in all our professions and institutions who can reinvent them with spiritual virtues and see every person in need, every structural imbalance, every cry, including the cry of the earth, as a call to be answered.
Our goal is to create initiatives and opportunities for service that integrate contemplation and action and approach just action as a spiritual practice and a fruit of contemplation.
