An Invisible Love for Neighbor: The Spiritual Charity of the Abbey of St. Walburga's Nuns
- André Escaleira, Jr.
- May 5
- 5 min read
Loving God can be tough enough, but loving your neighbor? Even tougher sometimes.
The Apostle St. John tells us, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).
It’s hard to say you love God, whom we haven’t seen in the flesh if we say we hate our neighbor, whom we have.
But what if we rarely saw our neighbor? What does spiritual charity look like from a distance?
For the Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga, that hidden love for neighbor is at the core of their vocation. In the “middle of nowhere,” nestled near the Wyoming border, they have dedicated their lives to love of God — charity — which overflows to a deep love for his people.
“We’re not here to be known,” said Mother Maria-Michael, O.S.B., the abbess of the community. “We’re here to love and to pray, so that’s secondary in a sense. Whoever God sends us, we’re happy to greet them as Christ. But our first order is to love God in everything. It’s really a life of prayer, of coming back and forth to say, ‘I love you, Lord. You are not forgotten. We want to love you every moment.’ That’s just the joy of our life.”
Because they love God so deeply — so much indeed that they have given their entire lives to him in a union like matrimony — the nuns can’t help but love his people.
“I love the Church because it is the Body of Christ, and it is what he loves,” Mother continued. “If you’re married, you love what your husband loves, and your husband loves what you love.”
Part of that love for God’s people, Mother said, is to bring them to him, though from a distance. Though far removed from the world, the nuns have prime real estate next to the Sacred Heart of their divine spouse. They who have dedicated their lives to prayer and praise of him who loves us first see themselves as privileged intercessors for God’s people.
“It’s sort of like the bride next to the king, saying, ‘You know, your people need this.’ ‘You know, I want to just mention this to you.’ You feel that you bring these people to Christ in your prayer,” Mother explained. “If your husband’s the King, you bring people to the King. You implore God, your King, ‘Please take care of your people. Show them the way.’”
From their quiet campus of prayer and work, the heart-front property beside their divine spouse, the nuns of Walburga lift up the Church — especially the local church in Northern Colorado — in a special way.
“We’ve always had a very clear intention that we are here for the archdiocese,” one Walburga nun said. “In many ways, we are just so happy to carry the archdiocese in prayer and to feel that our presence as an abbey within the archdiocese does make a difference. There can be fruit from our presence. Just our presence before God will bear fruit within the archdiocese. In just the last two years, we’ve had many priests come up and visit whom we’d never met before.”
But what fruit can the cloistered community really bring to the Church? The nuns of Walburga don’t seem to be all that active in works of charity or mercy. They don’t receive many visitors, so how can they love their neighbor if they don’t see their neighbor?
For the nuns of Walburga, their vocation is one of love for God, for the Church and for all his people, a love that bears great fruit even at a distance. Though their vocation may not have many “practical” metrics for success, their love for their neighbors — across the archdiocese and beyond — is mysteriously transforming the world.
“If you’re running a hospital, teaching or feeding the hungry, you have that sense of ‘I’ve done this. I’ve saved this person from starvation or put a roof over their heads.’ But if your mission is to feed the world or the archdiocese spiritually, that’s really hard for someone who doesn’t have faith to understand,” said another nun from Walburga.
“But that’s what makes it powerful,” she continued, referencing the Gospel story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet at Bethany (see Matthew 26:6-13). “If you don’t believe, it makes no sense. She just emptied out a whole year’s worth of wages. For us, it’s our whole lives and everything else we could have been doing. It all hangs on faith. And we do it because we love God. God has asked this of us for his people. We’re called to be like the Blessed Mother and to hold the Church, the Body of Christ, with our prayer. That’s what he asks of us. We don’t do it to be seen or not to be seen. It’s our mission, but we think of it less as a mission and more as our response of love to Christ, who is our Bridegroom.”
Through their devoted prayer and their holy hospitality, the nuns of Walburga help to foster a “thin place” where the faithful can encounter him to whom they’ve given their lives. And, by encountering Jesus, Mother said, the faithful grow to love him and to hear his voice.
“I think when we pray, we look for God’s voice, and we start looking for him to guide us, and by doing that, we shall be following Christ. When you have a relationship that has grown into love, you’re very quick to hear the voice. You’re very quick to hear the whisper,” she said, referencing Jesus’ own words in John 10:27.
The more closely we follow Jesus, the more our love for him will overflow into love of neighbor, Mother explained.
“All you have to do is look at the fruit,” Mother continued. “Is it the Scripture? Is it what God would be asking? He asks us to sacrifice. He asks us to love. How much are you willing to help others? Where is your charity? You know, charity is the test. Can you stop what you’re doing and help somebody? Even if it’s very important, even if you’re right in the middle of something and somebody comes up. Can you do it?”
Whether they receive visitors or not, the nuns at the Abbey of St. Walburga bring forth tremendous fruit from the vineyard of God. Their ever-deeper unity with the Trinity — charity — and constant intercession for the Church somehow wins great graces for the rest of us across Northern Colorado and beyond. Somehow, mysteriously, their yes makes possible so many of our little yeses, as we seek to love God and neighbor in our own ways.
In short, another nun from the Abbey said, “My constant seeking of the face of Christ, my constant praising of God in my life as a contemplative, is what I know gives people in the world their ability to do their missions as lay apostles and busy people in the world.”
“It does feel like we are very much a part of your life in busy Denver,” the first nun concluded. “Our prayer, we do definitely hope, sustains you and promotes your mission.”
