Carmelite Monastery Quidenham
Quidenham
Norwich
Norfolk
NR16 2PH
Welcome to the Carmelite community at Quidenham
The community consists of Catholic women who have come together from many different backgrounds and previous religious experience to live together the Teresian Carmelite vocation. Its aim is to enable us to support each other in our endeavour to witness to the gospel by lives of service and self-giving. Inspired by the spiritual way marked out for us by Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), its primary mission in the Church is one of contemplative prayer.
In these pages you will find an introduction to our Carmelite way of life. Its tasks are ordinary ones and we are very ordinary people. But we believe that the vocation we share teaches us how God can make use of even the most ordinary things to bring greater love into the world.
'The vocation to Carmel
is a vocation to prayer and contemplation:
this is "the first principle of our Order".
Everything in our lifestyle is for the purpose
of preparing us to receive
the gift of transforming prayer,
and this "not for our enjoyment
but for the sake of acquiring the strength
that fits us for service"'.