Our Constitutions tell us:
The
organisation of the monastery is directed to bringing the monks into close
union with Christ, since it is only through the experience of personal love for
the Lord Jesus that the specific gifts of the Cistercian vocation can flower.
Only if the brothers prefer nothing whatever to Christ will they be happy to
persevere in a life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.
How appropriate that Saint Joseph is our Abbey’s patron. Certainly he lived in close union with Christ Jesus and Our Lady in their home at Nazareth. And with
Mary he loved the person of Christ most tenderly. And Joseph most faithfully, preferentially cared for Mary and
their Son in a hidden workaday life that was undoubtedly “ordinary, obscure and
laborious.”
Photograph by Brother Brian.
Photograph by Brother Brian.