Who are we?

Sisters

“…nothing else than a work of love”
L.sr. Magdeleine

Our first mission is to live together. We want our communities, made up of three or four sisters from different generations and cultures, to be laboratories of unity. We wish to witness that God’s dream is possible. Listening, dialogue, sharing, forgiveness…are the foundations of that unity which we build every day, throughout our lives.

Being sisters goes way beyond our little communities: we are connected to fraternities all over the world by letters and by meetings. The communion we experience among us is the force driving us to become sisters to those whose lives we share, and to whom we wish to speak of God’s closeness just by our being there.

We live all this at the heart of the Church. And at the same time, we are called to be sisters to those at the Church’s margins—unbelievers, or people who belong to other churches or other religions. In faithfulness to our origins, we have a special, preferential love for our brothers and sisters of Islam.

Little Sister to all

L.sr. Katharina-Ruth

I found a job in an industrial laundry, a very large business: there were nearly 100 of us workers. My co-workers welcomed me warmly, and I was surprised how quickly some of them opened up their hearts to me. We came from many different countries…In my good moments, it was a beautiful variety of colors, with much joking and teasing. In my less happy moments, getting so many mentalities, languages, and cultures to find ways to compromise was simply exhausting. Very slowly, I came to understand the various networks of friendship between the workers, as well as their hostilities and who disliked whom. Yes, that is Nazareth too: poisoned relationships between workers, old stories and wounds that can’t be forgotten; jealousy and feelings of being treated unfairly; also racism and resentment between ethnic groups…I bathe in all that too, trying to listen, to give support without judging—I don’t always succeed very well. I try to make it clear that I’m not going to let any one side use me to their advantage. After all, I want to be a little sister to everyone!