Holy Annunciation Monastery
403 West County Road
Sugarloaf, PA 18249
Phone: 570-788-1205
Our monastic community as the heir of St. Teresa’s spirituality is firmly grounded and is faithful to the charism of the Holy Mother. We firmly adhere to her desire of directing our entire attention toward prayer and contemplation of the things of God, of observing evangelical counsels in a small sisterly community in the midst of solitude, prayer and poverty. Our life is dedicated to the contemplative life which reflects the minds of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross who spoke of the need to seek the deepest communion with God and the way that leads there. We strive for a hidden union with God in friendship with Christ, in familiarity with the Theotokos and in existence in which prayer and immolation blend into a great love for the Church.
Being rooted in St. Teresa’s spirituality which is fundamentally an ecclesial one our monastery was founded by and for the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Passaic and the Metropolitan Church of Pittsburgh. Because of it we also share in the great patrimony of the Eastern spirituality and Eastern monasticism. Therefore, being part of such rich tradition we consider ourselves not only privileged but also obliged to integrate into our spiritual life this lavish heritage. The patrimony of the founders of the monasticism such as St. Anthony the Great, and especially St. Basil the Great, the founder of the coenobitic way of monastic life, are of a great importance for us.
One of our big discoveries on the path of our vocation was a genius of St. Benedict and his Rule whose main concern was to find a balance between individual zeal and rigid institutionalism, something that is of a vital importance for monastic life. St. Benedict’s model for the monastic life as the family, where monastics are seen as brothers/sisters and the abbot/abbess as father/mother, helped us to perceive even deeper our community as a family and share an obligation to support each other and accompany each other on the path of our vocation. A very practical formation of St. Benedict’s monastic contemplative tradition which is flourishing today in monasteries of strict observance and addresses the initial and on-going formation in a way that counters the current secularization, the loss of Christian values and often dysfunctional family life proved to be an excellent tool in our own formation process.
