Prayer is central to the life of a Sister of Mercy. At our last Congregational Chapter we expressed this as being ‘centred in the God of Mercy’ and with a desire to explore together and with others how to ‘nourish the hunger for God’. Since the beginning of the Congregation we have prayed together – in silent contemplation, meditation or through sharing the Prayer of the Church, the Eucharist, and many other forms of prayer. We have also prayed with others. We prayed with those we worked with and for in classrooms, hospital wards, in people’s houses or wherever we shared life with others.

Down through the years our ways of sharing prayer developed as did other areas of life. We prayed with people through the charismatic renewal period after Vatican Council II, through ‘At Home’ retreats as well as through traditional silent retreats and days of recollection. As the needs of ourselves and others grew we began studying and practising the ways of spiritual direction and guided prayer, of deep communing with God through the practice of mindfulness and recollection, and as you will see in another part of this website through providing hermitages in the old monastic Valley of Glendalough which is hallowed by centuries of prayer since the time of St. Kevin and beyond.

Sisters nurture their own prayer lives and walk the paths of prayer with others in whatever method or style suits the one who searches so that we may all discover that place where with St. Catherine of Siena we can say with utter conviction ‘….my deepest me is God’; or can know with Hildegard of Bingen that with God we are ‘as needles to a magnet’.