znak OP
Monastery of Nuns of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
Prague - Lysolaje
English

Prayer

“The nuns should keep before their eyes by day and by night Christ the Lord who, during his life on earth, offered up prayers and supplications to God with loud cries and tears, and now sits at the right hand of the divine majesty, always living to make intercession for us.”
(From our Constitutions)

Prayer is one of the main parts of our life, the most important one; all our life should, in fact, become prayer. We have been called by God, like Mary, to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to his words (cf. Lk 10:39), like Moses, during the battle of the Israelites with the Amalekites, to stand before God with stretched out hands when our brothers and sisters fight their everyday fights. (Exodus 17:8-13)

Since all our life should be permeated by prayer, our day is organized in such a way that nothing would keep us away from “preserving the continual remembrance of God”. (From our Constitutions)

The most important point of our day is the Mass. During it we glorify God in union with Christ and intercede with him for the Church and for the needs and salvation of the whole world. Several times during the day we sing praises to God in the Liturgy of Hours (i.e. the breviary – an ancient monastic prayer composed mainly from the Psalms, other Biblical texts, hymns and intercessions). Here you can listen to samples of our liturgical singing. We also say the Rosary and some other prayers daily in common. Beside that, each sister devotes some part of her day to meditative reading of the Scripture (Lectio Divina), to private prayer, adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and spiritual reading.

Our meditation and dialogue with God are nourished by regular and systematic study of the sacred truth, done by each sister in community in a way suited to her individually. Beside study, another source of our prayer is the voice of all our brothers and sisters, in whose name we stand before God. The voice of the poor, of the distressed, of the sick, of the oppressed reaches us; the voice of sinners calling for God’s mercy, the voice of the helpless, of those desparately seeking the truth and the meaning that ultimately can only be found in God. Just as our founder, our holy Father Dominic, we try to carry them all in the “inmost sanctuary of compassion” of our hearts.

You, too, can approach us with your worries, sufferings, but also joys, and ask for our prayers. We know about the sufferings and the difficulties of many people and carry them all before God, asking Him to relieve the pain and transform every evil into the boundless good.

If you want to have a clearer idea of how prayer penetrates our daily life, see our daily order, please.