Monastery of Nuns of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans)
Prague - Lysolaje
“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.”
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)
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.