Servant Life

We are a public charity of the State of Hawaii. No one here receives any kind of salary — neither the nuns, their chaplain, nor the members of the board of this non-profit corporation. The purpose of the Farm is ministry plain and simple. We provide food for families in need in our community. And we partner with the Natural Resource Conservation Service of the USDA, our local Soil and Water Conservation District, and the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (University of Hawaii).

We did not choose this Island. We believed we would complete our lives of ministry in Haiti, where the sisters had begun decades earlier. The naked children wandering through squalor, the men squatting beside make-shift fires, the dead and dying seen everywhere. We knew the hopelessness of their lives, and we were there to offer whatever friends can offer.

People have asked if this life were hard to bear. We reply that the greater burden is the fog and indifference of "affluenza," which is the pervasive spiritual disease in the United States. Lately, life in the bubble of affluence has been blighted with an additional plague: the prideful pronouncements and ruthless depredations carried forward by exponents of a "woke world."

Meantime, the world suffers. 800 million people go to sleep each night hungry. Half the world's people live on slightly more than $2 a day. 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 per day. The facts of life crowded in: three-quarters of the earth is covered with water; a tiny fraction of the land is arable; a very small minority of the world's inhabitants control nearly all of its wealth; and most humans live in poverty, want, disease, or suffering. The world suffers, and once you are joined to the suffering of the simple and the sincere, you cannot imagine returning to a daily routine of outsized egos, narcissism, pervasive delusion, and the effrontery to impose these delusions upon an entire society.

But we did leave Haiti. The apostolate we served, developed by one of our nuns, caring for a quarter-million people per year with medical care, food, clothing, and education, was taken over by woke partisans. A new CEO was appointed who immediately suppressed our chapel. She appointed a founder and former director of Planned Parenthood, who stripped our walls of anything suggesting religious life. And she forbade us to represent ourselves as serving God.

We were forced to seek another place where our little community might remain together and survive. This place ended up being Oceania, in a northern corner of Polynesia. Here we would face no heat bill, no AC bill, no property tax, and no limits on growing food year round. Here we also would have quality medical care, free-of-charge courtesy of Medicare.

None of us had received any kind of salary check for decades. Our longtime leader had entered religious life at age seventeen. Nonetheless, the God of all found a way.

We did not seek the Farm. What developed into Hermitage Farm sought us. Yes, the aching need of Haiti was no longer around us. Yet, everywhere you go, you meet people in need.

At Hermitage Farm, we protect the sacred Creation. We grow healing foods. We provide God's bounty to neighbors in need. Net profits go to charitable purposes. Operating costs include rent on the farmhouse; our groceries beyond what we grow for our table; our tools, equipment, and supplies; and rent on the land we don't own. That is, what we grow is what keeps us alive.

Many people do not understand that the Church — neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Eastern Orthodox Church — does not subsidize monasteries, parishes, or general ministries. These little religious houses may support the Church in the form of assessments paid to a diocese or to a general fund. But the flow of money never goes the other way. This was true in Haiti, and it is true today in Polynesia.

We at Our Lady of the Angels Hermitage depend upon individual donors and upon sales of our produce to provide food, shelter, and the necessities of our spartan life. We labor 50-60 hours per week for no pay. Our prayer is that those who read our weekly reflections, who are encouraged by lives given to God, and who count themselves to be friends of God as we are, will patronize us or will donate to the Hermitage. May the God Who loves us all, Who provides for us all with His marvelous Creation, continue to bless you wherever you might be.

Home