SEMI-EREMITIC LIFE
Unlike other religious Orders, the Orantes-apostles do not have direct apostolates. More precisely, our apostolate is prayer.
“Contemplative” does not mean inactive; we work to earn our living. This work is done within the Laure Abana. For example, we offer sacred hospitality and retreats.
Among other activities, we create the «Hermits’ Pot» which showcases the fruits of our garden in two dimensions: external (olive oil soap, sales of our fruits, sage elixirs or other herbs, teas, rosary or bracelet workshops with olive pits) , and internal (Laure Abana – Our Father Collection: spiritual writings or audio of songs or teachings).
PRAYER LIFE
A BREATH OF LOVE…
«LThe heart that radiates is better than the mind that shines»The «body to heart» with God finds its place in communal prayer, liturgical prayer, and thepraise of the hours. But we desire to make our whole life a prayer. Presence to God is possible because God mysteriously stands by our side: «our inner heart is His dwelling».
Jesus said: “Remain in me, as I also remain in you. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5).
This presence to God, the attention of the inner heart, shows its authenticity in the quality of its fruits: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).
We pray in “our room” when we completely withdraw our heart from the turmoil and noise of thoughts and worries and in a kind of secret tête-à-tête and sweet intimacy, we cuddle our Jesus, consoling Him for all iniquities and thanking Him for being our inner host. Then He will increasingly introduce us into the Intimacy He shares with His Father.
We pray with the door closed when we implore without opening our lips and in perfect silence the One who does not consider words but looks at the heart: the Divine Lover.
We pray in secret when we speak to God only with the heart and the application of the soul…
Jean Cassien, 5th-century monk.
Personal prayer finds fertile ground in liturgy, lectio divina, silence, and also in work and fraternal relationships. But a specific moment is reserved for it when all other activities cease: it is orison, offering time in silent and gratuitous prayer. Though this practice was formalized in the 16th century, it has roots in a rich and very ancient Christian and monastic tradition. Christians have always held the prayer of the heart in high esteem, a gift of love that seeks no result but love itself.
The most perfect and highest prayer is that inspired by the contemplation of God and the fervor of charity, when the
soul, absorbed in the love it has for its Creator, speaks to Him tenderly and familiarly like a father…
(Jean Cassien, 5th-century monk).
Inner silence or the words of the Our Father can support this prayer; what matters is the orientation of the heart offered to God without division. Then our orison is a loving attachment to God; a kind of familiar and affectionate conversation with the adorable Trinity, in which we become a bit the fourth person, like a dance of fire where the illuminated soul remains still to enjoy God as long as it is allowed.
COMMON PRAYER: LITURGY OR THE PRAISE OF THE HOURS
Jesus tells us
"If two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them"
Common prayer founds and consolidates the Community while also building the relationship of each believer with their God and with their brothers and sisters.
The liturgy or common prayer of the Church includes the celebration of the Eucharist (the Mass) and the praise of the hours. The latter is lived in hermitage at the same time to signify our communion solitude, except for Vespers publicly sung just before Mass; it punctuates the day with Offices mainly consisting of biblical texts: Psalms, Hymns are sung, other important Bible texts are read. We intercede for the Church and for all people.
All this life of prayer—contact with the Living God—prepares us for the Eucharist, which is the center and summit of the life of every Orantes-apostle and more broadly of every Christian. Along with it, the praise of the hours or “Work of God” is of central importance in their life.
DAILY RHYTHM
DAILY SCHEDULE
The schedule aims to give balance to the semi-eremitic life: prayer, work, and relaxation alternate.
As the first desert monks said,
“the bow cannot remain always bent, otherwise it breaks.”
Periodically, the Orantes-apostles return to the hermitage where the Beloved awaits them, who founds their life and actions.
| SCHEDULE: SANCTIFICATION OF TIME | |
|---|---|
| Praise of thanksgiving, orison in hermitage | Upon rising |
| Breakfast | 7:00 |
| Morning praise in hermitage (1) | 7:30 |
| External garden work | 8:00 - 10:45 |
| Midday praise (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)(1) public | 12:00 |
| Lunch Angelus, grace before lunch Thanksgiving after the meal |
12:30 |
| Relaxation. Internal garden work in hermitage (Word of God, reading the life of a saint...) possible manual work. | 13:15 |
|
16:00 |
| Maronite Mass (WINTER: Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Feast Days) | 17:00 |
| Dinner | 18:30 |
| At bedtime: Compline in hermitage | |
The Laure Abana is closed from Thursday after evening prayer until Saturday 8:00 am because Friday is a day of Desert.
Open participation based on 20 dollars per day (deposited in the box in the Cenacle room under the gaze of Blessed Stephan Nehmé).
Friday is a Day of Great Silence and complete Desert
THE LAURE ABANA IS CLOSED
OUR SPIRITUALITY DRAWN FROM THE SYRIAC TRADITION
The term “Syriac” refers to the Aramaic used in Edessa and the kingdom of Osrhoene, which became the cultural and liturgical language of Near Eastern Christians to this day.
The mystical tradition was richest in the East, flourishing in Mesopotamia and along the shores of the Arabian-Persian Gulf in Bet Qatraye, where famous writers such as Isaac of Nineveh, Dadisho of Qatar, Martyrios Sahdona, and John of Dalyathaemerged. Yet, who knows Shubhalmaran, Hananisho of Beth Qoqa, or Beh Isho of Kamul?
A FOUNDING VISITATION
One day in 1996, just after my temporary vows at the Abana hermitage, plunged into a frigid night[1], two men came to meet me accompanied by the faithful abouna Boutros Khalifé[2]: Father Pierre Humblot[3] of the Prado school, and Robert Beulay. The latter looked at me and said after listening to me: “You have been struck down like Saint Paul, and your mystical experience and direct contact with Christ seem so close to those of the Syriac mystics. See Saint John of Dalyatha and Joseph Hazzaya. Take courage, I will pray for you; pray for me.” At that time, I had only the Bible and the consecrated Host on a piece of tree trunk. In 1999, my spiritual father Jean Slim (General Abbot of the Antonine Monks) introduced me to the Syriac mystics.
It was truly through their acquaintance that I managed to remain in an “attitude-altitude” on the wings of the Holy Spirit in the face of almost universal misunderstanding: a crucifying and determining experience that threw me into the fiery embrace with Our Lord Jesus Christ: Oh delightful founding Cross!
THE DETERMINING INFLUENCE OF SISTER LAURENCE DELACROIX
This fundamental orientation drawn from this Syriac breath was confirmed by the arrival of Laurence in 2001, who recognized in this breath the very source of her vocation.
In the context of our life of union with God and our call, we walk with John of Dalyatha, an 8th-century monk of the Syriac church in Iraq, also called the Ancient Spiritual or John the Elder. This author is one of the many spiritual writers who marked the 7th and 8th centuries, like Saint Ephrem, Dadisho of Qatar, Simon of Taibutéh, Isaac of Nineveh or the Syrian, Joseph Hazzaya, Sahdona, and many others. His pen and consciousness are influenced by the spirituality of Saint Paul, the apostle to the nations, with an uncommon mystical experience.
John of Dalyatha: “Glory to you! How wonderful are your mysteries! Happy are those who love you, for at every moment they shine in your beauty, and you give yourself to them! It is the anticipated resurrection of the dead in Christ, as the blessed Paul spoke of. Happy are you, O solitaries, for you have become with the only Son a single Son of God by union with him! That is why the mysteries of the Father are revealed to you, and you say with confident freedom: ‘the mind of Christ is ours’; He has appeared in our hearts, and they have been illuminated by the Glory of God.”
John of Dalyatha shows us how one who has died through asceticism and inner work fully enters the eschatological dynamic of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, through which God Himself gives Himself to us. Beauty being the antonym of the ugliness of the state of sin, the inner union of the heart prefigures union with the Son Himself, to the point where there is no longer a single Son, Jesus Christ, and each of us.
It is through confident freedom that the apostle hermit—I dare say “every authentic Christian”—can affirm that his intelligence has become that of Christ, referring to Saint Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians (2:16), and that his solitary heart is now illuminated by the glory of God according to the second letter to the Corinthians (4:6).
John of Dalyatha enlightens us on the essence of prayer and prefers above all prayer to the Father: ABBA! He discusses prayer from its interior aspect. The movements of prayer, he says at the beginning of his twelfth letter, are not only the bodily movements that ordinarily accompany it (such as kneeling and psalmody) but also any inner psychic movement in which man plays an active role; that is why he says of prayer that it is a laborious work until, becoming the purity of the intellect, its movements are only interrupted by the rising of the holy light of the Trinity on the intellect. He calls this the wonder caused by the light, which has become for us «the adoration of the Father in the inner cell», our charism[4].
We think strongly here of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew when it is said to Simon Peter that the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven will be given to him; that whoever receives freely gives freely and that we are the light of the world. And we quickly experience—if we pray without tiring—that it is the Holy Spirit who comes to pray in us, and there: SILENT AMAZEMENT before God. And in the desire for union, we cry «Father, Father, Abba, Abba»(Romans 8:15). Continuous prayer does not consist in an abundance of words but in a praise in the heart that springs up without interruption.
What we take—and try to practice—from John of Dalyatha is his continuous intellectual effort, undoubtedly based on his own experience, to internalize prayer and give it a fully mystical and theological sense. Our spiritual progress is made through the practice of increasingly simple, stripped-down, and internalized prayer, that is, by helping ourselves with ascetic and spiritual practices to direct us towards the heart, the place where God dwells..
The journey in prayer is an experience that remains intimate to the very being of each one until becoming a witness of Jesus Christ in his transfigured humanity and in his crucified divinity, accepted with our intelligence in synergy with our heart.
And so we began to love—and make love—our spiritual fathers of the Syriac-Oriental tradition, a spiritual treasure to discover!
- [1] Burned by the Light in a dark human night.
- [2] Priest of the diocese of Batroun, founder of Faith and Light.
- [3] Pierre Humblot will providentially return in 2004 and will write with us the canonical version of the Abana Prayer House which will be officially recognized in 2005 by Monsignor Paul Emile Saadé.
- [4] Voir “Our Constitutions”
THE CALL OF GOD AND THE VOCATION
OFFERING OF THE BEING FOR THE HEART OF THE CHURCH AND FOR WOUNDED HUMANITY
BUT WHAT IS IT EXACTLY?
This Presence is that of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, the Spouse, the Breath of God the Father, a singular Presence that dwells in depth and whose discernment founds the call to embark on the mysterious path that leads inward.
Once this Presence is discovered, you will grasp that the book of mysteries is in the adorable Trinity and offers itself to its deciphering. And it is this deciphering of the book of mysteries that embraces the entire spiritual experience of the apostle hermit of the Laure Abana: lover of the Mystery on the mysterious path that leads inward, whose end is “a hidden treasure”, nothing less than “the Kingdom of God that IS within” (Luke 17:21).
With us, nothing is hidden, but everything is lived in the secret of the heart, of a heart in search of the absolute of love, the absolute of freedom, the absolute of happiness… in a word, of God.
If all this questions you, if this search attracts you, if you wish to graft your life onto that of Jesus Christ, come and see.
My vocation is “where I am called to be happy, to participate in complete Joy.” It is first possible to spend three days for a first glimpse of life at the Laure Abana.
You can then ask to live there for a while. It is the only real way to discover what semi-eremitic life is: to experience it. Experiencing it yourself, even for a short time, already helps to see if it is a desirable orientation or not.
If you understand that the Lord does not call you to this path, be at peace: God is everywhere!
And if you want to go further and discover the stages of your initiation, click on “Constitutions”.