What We Do:

Christian Community and Lifestyle

We live in the urgencies of the 21st century.

At Agape we seek to create and to preserve a morally coherent life in fidelity to our faith and to the calling of people of all faiths. While grounded in the practice of our Catholic Christianity, we experience an affinity for and connectedness with sisters and brothers from other faith traditions, and those who follow no particular faith tradition, learning from them and seeking to live in harmony with them.

Radical Nonviolence & Public Witness

Agape’s co-founders live below taxable income to withdraw support of taxes for war. Resistance to violence is part of our lives. We witness publicly against unjust and unsustainable practices including war, pollution, nuclear energy and weapons, and the death penalty.

Eco-theology & Organic Homesteading

Reverencing the Earth is the art and practice of living as devoted stewards of God’s Earth. We grow our own food, harvest and freeze our vegetables for nourishment throughout the year. In our attempts to discover a sustainable way of being on this earth, we humans must look to invest ourselves in the fullness of life by giving back to the earth and her creatures more than we take from them.

Faith & Daily Prayer

At Agape, the deep stillness of the morning dawn is broken by readings of the Hebrew Scripture and The New Testament. Lunchtime with the community begins with silent meditation. We pray daily together as a community, honoring a contemplative call for periods of silence and meditation. Poetry, music, interfaith readings and celebrations are key to such prayer.

Interfaith Dialogue and Solidarity

Agape has been committed for years to Interfaith Dialogue and Solidarity. Over the years, the community has participated in various Pilgrimages sponsored by our sister communities, The House of Peace and The Buddhist Peace Pagoda, including an Interfaith Pilgrimage to Massachusetts Prisons, and an act of Civil Disobedience, on the second day of the bombing of Iraq in March, 2002 at Westover Air Force Base.

Another act of Civil Disobedience during the initial days of Shock and Awe at a Natick, MA army weapons facility became known as The Peacechain 18, both witnesses involving year long trials and eventual rulings of dismissal.

Over the years, Agape has initiated or has participated in efforts to call the church back to Christ’s teachings on nonviolent love, including a national petition entitled The Catholic Call to Peacemaking, which accrued thousands of signatures nation-wide, calling for the American Catholic Bishops to abandon their support of the War on Terror and the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/ll. Witness included vigils in front of the Cathedral in Boston with members of various peace communities in Boston.

Solidarity with the Involuntarily Poor

We struggle to live our Christianity on the margins where we meet the involuntary poor, the rejected, the broken, and the children who have been abandoned. In sharing our lives with those in extremity, we come to know our own complicity in their suffering, experience our own woundedness, our common bond with those in need and better recognize the face of God. For twelve years, Agape has fostered a relationship with Bethany Hill School, Framingham , MA, a residence for those who are in recovery, unable to find housing, suffering from Aids, and their families, some of the children pictured here at Agape. A tree was planted at Agape by the children as a reminder of our community solidarity.

Voluntary Poverty and Living Simply

The core community at Agape has decided to live in the mystery of poverty as Beatitude and as a “voluntary” choice. Such a choice is an economic one that begins to open us and our community to share some of the inconveniences of the “involuntary” poor.

Agape co-founders are committed to resisting violence, wherever we encounter it in our institutional settings — political, legal, economic and social. Preparations for war are impossible without tax money. The United States military requires tax revenues to deploy troops or invade other countries, to build and deploy nuclear and other weapons in flagrant denial of the teachings of Jesus. Conscience informed by faith has led the co-founders to protecting life as Jesus would protect it by living below taxable income.