By Cara Buckley – New York Times
The prairie sisters of Wisconsin would never call themselves renegades.
Not in their decision to open their Roman Catholic community to Protestants. And not in their decades-long work restoring 170 acres around their monastery to ecological health, transforming lawns and farm fields into thriving oak savanna and native prairie that is riotous with wildflowers and grasses, insects, rabbits and birds.
The sisters of Holy Wisdom Monastery outside Madison, Wisc., say these actions fulfill their highest calling: to welcome all people and care for the Earth as a sacred place.
The sisters have won awards for their ecological work, and they earned the highest LEED sustainability certification for their main building, which is powered by solar energy and heated and cooled with geothermal wells. In keeping with their pledge of humility, the sisters keep their plaques and awards tucked away in a conference room.
But talk to any of the sisters, and their devotion to the revived land blooming around them shines through.
“We need refugia now for the human spirit where we can come and remember what it is to be human, remember that basically, inside of us, the best of us is kind and generous and compassionate,” said Sister Lynne Smith, 71, the prioress of the monastery. “We want this to be a place, and it already is, where we live humanly and we nurture those human values. Part of that is knowing that we are in a mutual, integral, interdependent relationship with this Earth.”