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- Who
Are the Capuchins?
|
NewsMURRURUNDI - AN AUSTRALIAN CAPUCHIN HERMITAGE
ONE of the characteristics at the heart of the Capuchin Franciscan Charism is contemplative prayer and life. Francis is well known for his preaching and travelling around Europe and even the Middle East. The Power that nurtured him, that drove him to preach and share the Good News, he gained through his prayer life with God. What is not as well known is that Francis would spend more than half of every year in the seclusion of a Hermitage. At the very heart of Francis’ dynamic charisma was his deep experience of God. This was the same experience for the early Capuchin reform. All their houses were in fact hermitages in the beginning – places where the friars would come out from to travel and preach the Gospel to their society. Places where they would return to; to their seclusion there to be filled with God again so as to able to bring him to the world. At our last Provincial Chapter, the Australian Capuchins voted unanimously to establish a hermitage fraternity in Australia as soon as possible and to that end the Hermitage Commission and the Provincial Definitory have been working. Finally, the site for the Hermitage has been found. The contracts have been signed and all we await now is the final exchange of contracts. The new Hermitage will be located in a narrow ‘high valley’ surrounded on three sides by steep mountains near the town of Murrurundi, NSW. Apart from the breathtaking scenery of the place it is also located near the New England Highway, one of the major roads between Sydney and Brisbane. An added bonus is that a train goes directly from Sydney to Murrurundi. The trip from Sydney is either 6 hours by rail or 4 hours by car.
Following are some thoughts from the talks given by Srs. Hilda and Antonia: Sr. Hilda wanted to tell us that God has invited the friars to the wilderness so that He can reach his people through us. God’s people will want to come with us – we will have them "strapped to our backs"! The friars are to be generous and courageous in this ministry since it is God who has called us into his wilderness because God wants to make his home there with us. Sr. Antonia spoke to us from the documents of the Church, especially from Vatican II. She encouraged us in our response by reminding us that the Church doesn’t just condone the contemplative life but pleads with us who are called to it to live it for the sake of the Church. The life of solitude, silence, prayer and fraternal love gives birth to peace in the friar and those whom he meets. The contemplative life is not an easy one and calls for an enormous capacity of dying to self. Such a life is the Paschal Journey – the very same journey of Jesus to the cross, death and resurrection. It is the journey of Francis with Lady Poverty where he is invited to discard all that is inessential – the ego, achievement, domination – in order to be able to embrace the INFINITE. Sr. Antonia also noted that the hermitage life was something that needed to be inculturated into our Australian society. We Australians live on the edge of a very large continent that is mostly comprised of desert. In our personal lives we too are often content to just live on the edge, never venturing into the heart of our reality; we live superficially. The life of the contemplative is a call to move to the centre, the heart of who we are because waiting for us there is God himself. The life of the contemplative calls forth in all of us the yearning to live more fully, more deeply, more authentically. To come in from the superficial to that deep place where we truly live because there we will find God waiting for us. 1 February 1998 Archived News items:2001
2000 1999
1998
1997 |
Copyright © 2000-2004 Capuchin Franciscan Friars of Australia. All rights
reserved. 
In preparation for the establishment of the Hermitage Fraternity, those friars
who are interested and were able to attend came to Assumption Friary, Plumpton
for a conference on 5th – 9th January 1998. Highlights of the conference
were the visit and talks given by Sr. Hilda and Sr. Antonia from the Benedictine
Abbey at Jamberoo, near Wollongong and the visit of the friars to the site
of the future Hermitage at Murrurundi, NSW.