Prayer

Liturgical Prayer

In Christian tradition it [liturgy] means the participation of the People of God in “the work of God.”5 Through the liturgy Christ, our redeemer and high priest, continues the work of our redemption in, with, and through his Church. – Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1069
 
Being monastic, our prayer is liturgical. A monastery is like a microcosm of the Church, dedicated to offering the prayer of the Church to the Almighty Father through the Son, the head of the Church, in the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Jesus Christ saved us, and in his blood made us “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (1 Peter 2:9) A personal relationship with Jesus is necessary, and a monastery is a place where those who enter are personally pursuing the call to seek the face of God, but it cannot be said to be sufficient if he made us his people.
 
We belong to Christ’s body, the Church, with Christ as the head and we are His members. Each one plays a part in the life of the body. When we worship as a body, we act in a like manner. Each person plays a role, and each liturgy has its parts that fit in an ordered whole and play a certain function in the service of God.

Monastic

What’s the difference between a prison and monastery?
 
There are quite a few similarities.
  • They live in cells.
  • Everyone is kept on a strict schedule.
  • The residents get accounted for several times per day.
The difference:
  • the monastery is a prison of your own will.
A monk freely binds his will to belong to the monastery and submit to its rule and his superiors. We have encountered many men asking if they could become a priest or a deacon or a monk when they get out. Our founder intuited that men who discover the Faith and a possible calling from God in prison need a similar environment to support them when they are released because it was in the prison environment that they discovered those things.
 
This is counterintuitive to the reigning philosophy that wants to rehabilitate individuals to be productive members of society, but the re-entry experience— the sudden freedom, the weight of responsibility, the loss of institutional/community structure, the desire to connect or reconnect, the inability to relate to others in polite society, the fear of the unknown, the grief of having missed so much time and the fear that it is all slipping away, the ingrained habits and guardedness of the prison mentality, the social and legal hoops, the lasting repercussions of one’s past, in short “the cares of the world” –work to choke out the word of God planted in them while in prison and lead most on the path back to prison. Just as a prison is a separate world, so is a monastery a separate world, and those who enter are called by God out of the world, and away from its cares, for His holy purposes. Our end goal is not productivity, but faithfulness and fruitfulness, where one is able to order his will rightly to the love of God.

Contemplative

Prayer is the air of the soul. If a person stops breathing, he will die. If a Christian stops praying, he will die spiritually. A monastery is a place dedicated to making sure prayer is a lived reality among the brethren, and which nourishes prayer in the Church. We strongly encourage you to read the many beautiful things the Catechism of the Catholic Church says about contemplative prayer in paragraphs 2709-2719 and meditate upon each paragraph individually. Though few realize it, everyone is called to contemplation. Some are called to it as their whole way of life, while others are given moments of contemplation and lead more active lives.
We have discerned with our local bishop that our monastic community, the residence, is called by God to be contemplative, that is, dedicated to the interior, hidden life of prayer and sacrifice, and not to exterior/active apostolates. The reason for this is because the nature of our charism, which is discussed below, requires the spiritual work that no active or human effort can achieve. It is also because of our charism and the population we are opening ourselves to dictating that they ought not to be sent out into the world. While we are without a doubt dedicated to the forgiveness of sins, that does not mean we do not act with prudence. If a man with a violent past or sexual crimes is being released from prison, and if he desires to enter our community, and if our community accepts him, he will serve the Church best through a penitential life of hidden prayer and sacrifice as Alessandro Serenelli did. His life is hidden with God in Christ Jesus within the confines of the monastery walls and the monastic community surrounding him.
Our contemplative life may confuse some, because Serenelli Project sprang from and supports prison ministry, but there are a few things to keep in mind:
  1. The prison is still a hidden place that contains cells and follows a regimented schedule. An inmate in a prison is capable of spiritually participating in our monastic life and spirituality, and visiting our brothers in prison, especially those who become oblates, is an extension of the life of the monastery.
  2. If we send someone from the monastery, we do not send everyone from the monastery to visit the prison, and we do not assign residents as chaplains to the prison. The role that our brothers play in the ministry is one of prayer and accompaniment in conversion.
  3. People might also be confused and think our residents will have no interaction with the world. We are not a community of silent hermits. The contemplative life is ordered towards prayer as the most important thing, but there are necessities of life and engagement with the world, that have to be attended to. In our case, we have a special openness to vocations coming from prison, and as such have dealings with them.
  4. The more active aspects of Serenelli life are attended to by our lay members: oblates, staff, and volunteers. Serenelli was started by a married layman who directed the prison ministry to create a home, the environment, for a contemplative community to grow in the Church that welcomes the formerly incarcerated. There are always going to be lay men and women involved in the life of our community.

Our Charism

Besides monastic and contemplative, our particular focus of prayer is forgiveness. Forgiveness is so important to the Gospel that the early Church put it in the Apostle’s Creed so that every Christian would profess their belief in it on a weekly or daily basis. Our Lord gave us three sacraments that directly pertain to forgiveness. Forgiveness is perhaps the most misunderstood teaching of Jesus, though it comes up all throughout the Gospels, and it is one of the hardest for the world to accept exactly what He taught about it, much less to receive it and practice it. With our community springing from prison ministry and designed to welcome the formerly incarcerated (though not exclusively), we see regularly and in the most dramatic fashion both the need and power of forgiveness. Although many want to say some people simply can’t be forgiven, Our Lord’s teaching and example couldn’t be clearer.
The Church teaches, and so we believe, that the grace of God, because it is a participation in the life of the Trinity, is not merely the removal of a legal debt and the sentence of death, but it heals and restores and lifts up our nature. True repentance from the heart, conversion, is necessary for this effect to take place in us. The monastery is a place of continual, daily penance or conversion, of turning oneself back to God more and more. We do not perform penance merely for ourselves, but for the whole world. We see so much evil, hurt, and unforgiveness in the world and in our own hearts, and it causes us great sorrow. Therefore, our prayer is offered to God, giving Him our contrite and afflicted hearts, as a sacrificial offering in order to implore His Divine Mercy to come upon the world, to open hearts, perhaps even you who read this, to forgiveness and mercy.
We pray for that mercy and grace to come to the people in the most evil acts of crime:
  1. For the salvation of victims who perish in crime
  2. For the healing and consolation of survivors of crime
  3. For the conversion and forgiveness of sinners and criminals, especially the most hard-hearted
We took our name from Alessandro Serenelli because he lived the very life we are pursuing ourselves, and to which we have opened ourselves for those coming from a background like his. The story is never only Alessandro’s. It is always the three of them: St. Maria Goretti, Alessandro Serenelli, and Assunta Goretti. We named ourselves after Alessandro because his acceptance of Maria’s forgiveness, his conversion that he proved daily until his death, and his transformation and example in holy seclusion from the world in contemplative life, all set the template of the life of our community.

Reparation

Most of us are unaware of the offenses we commit against God and our neighbor, and if we saw what that was really like, we would be crushed with despair. We would not be capable of even beginning to repair the relationship. Jesus Christ came down in humility and mercy to take on our flesh, and in the flesh, as true man yet still truly God, made reparation to the Father on behalf of all men for their offenses against God, and obtained for us pardon and mercy. Now we, his disciples, participate in his work of redemption on behalf of the sinners, especially those who commit the most heinous crimes, those who sit in jail and prison and those who do not but should, by offering ourselves in reparation to the Father in order to bring mercy and the grace of conversion and forgiveness to them through the acceptance of all of our sufferings, trials, and labors of this day. We invite you to join us in this work of God.

For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you;

Matthew 6:14

Prayer Request

Prayer for others, especially for the conversion of hearts and for the victims of crime, is at the heart of what we do.

Please share an intention with us.  We will assign it to a Serenelli, whether currently incarcerated or released, to pray for it. During the First Friday Sacred Heart Procession, we will light a candle for your prayer request.

Prayers are free, but a donation will help fund the restoration of the church and our community’s work.