an emerging spiritual community
After five years of drawing hope and inspiration from the counter-cultural lifestyles, lifelong commitments, spiritual practice, and prophetic action modeled by women religious and other guides across faith traditions, the Nuns & Nones collective began to incubate a new, experimental community.
In early 2022, in response to the profound yearning we’d heard for accompaniment amongst people wanting to orient their lives to spirit, community, and justice, we embarked on an 18-month formation period with a multigenerational, multireligious, multiracial group of twenty-seven “mystic misfits.”
Making the path by walking, our emerging community aspires to tend to a common hearth of spiritual friendship and courageous action that honors the lineages and wisdom traditions that we come from, and that transcends religious boundaries or institutions. In service of this vision we’ve entered a Community Covenant, rooted in shared rhythms of study, prayer, action, and celebration—and in three orienting commitments:
Remember
We commit to living in awareness of the sacred.
Repair
We commit to bringing healing to the web of life.
Renew
We commit to
ongoing transformation.
During our first 18 months, we are learning together, deepening relationships, aligning around shared visions, and laying the groundwork for longer-term leadership, governance, and economic structures that can support the evolution of the community. We envision that this may lead to more community infrastructure in the form of place-based hospitality hubs, mutual aid, and more—as well as the launch of other collectively resourced initiatives, projects, or organizations rooted in the work of social, ecological, and spiritual repair.
We anticipate sharing more publicly about our next steps as a community in the second half of 2023.
“We covenant in order to name and visibilize the ways we are beholden to one another, to the web of life, and to our highest calling. Countering the hyper-individualism of the society we live in, we covenant together to create new capacities and courage to walk away from imperial culture and toward kinship culture—away from extractivism, racialized capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and human-centrism, and toward sacred, loving, life-honoring ways of being in relationship and reciprocity with all beings.”
Community photo from gathering in Pecos, New Mexico, with: Nahum Ward-Lev, Shelley Mann-Lev, Alan Webb, Serena Bian, Eddie Gonzalez, Judy Carle, jazmín calderón torres, Deepa Patel, brontë velez, Kendra Avila, Tanesia Hale-Jones, Tori Kuper, Sarah Bradley, Alicia Forde, Christina Tran, Jiordi Rosales, Elsa Menendez, Elizabeth Garlow, Diana Marin, Lydia Strand, Aden Van Noppen, Katie Gordon, Brittany Koteles, Adam Horowitz. Not pictured: Michael Poffenberger, Milicent Johnson, Mary Kay Dobrovolny
walking together
Amidst the collapse of social and ecological systems, we know that bringing peace, healing, and justice to the world requires more than just good organizations doing good work; it requires committed communities of spirit in service—visible, counter-cultural models of other ways of being, listening, and responding together for the common good.
This experiment is one among many emerging efforts to create new community structures of belonging to meet the moment. We are excited to learn with and from others and are committed to sharing our learnings, with the hope they can be a small contribution to a much larger evolution and transformation in how the religious impulse—and the prophetic, mystical, and monastic traditions from which it sprouts—are being lived in our time.