Agape Community

Founded in 1982, Agape is a lay Catholic Christian Community. We find ourselves living in the urgencies of the 21st century North America; therefore, we seek to create and to preserve a morally coherent life in fidelity to our faith and calling as Christians. While grounded in the practice of our Catholic Christianity, we are all embracing Catholics in that we experience an affinity 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.
Our mission is four-fold:
1. A commitment to community.
2. A dedication to gospel nonviolence.
3. An effort to live in simply and in voluntary poverty.
4. A daily discipline to a solitary and communal prayer life and Sabbath observance.

Our Christianity is a gift, a truth that is experienced, one that is fundamentally stated by what we do every day. In that spirit, we dedicate ourselves to a way of life.

All are welcome at Agape. No one is excluded from participation in Agape’s community life, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious or non-religious affiliation. We rejoice in our shared struggles to conform to the mind of Christ, mercy, love, compassion, and inclusivity.

Educational Programs at Agape

Would you like your students to experience?
• an energizing community service day at a lay, Catholic nonviolent community on 32 acres of land in the Quabbin Reservoir
• a straw bale house, with solar energy, compost toilet and see how vegetable oil is the fuel for the community car
• two houses built from “the ground-up” by over 200 people
• an organic garden, planted, cultivated and harvested for feeding community members and others.
• what the Catholic Church teaches about social justice, issues of war, peace and Conscientious Objection
If you have answered YES! To at least one of these questions, please email or call us at 413-967-9369 for more details.
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Christian Teachings on War and Peace: Is Jesus Enough?
How do Christians respond to these Endless Wars? What Does Christianity say about: The Just War? Nonviolence? What defines a just war? Who decides if a war is Just? Does nonviolence offer practical solutions to war? What is our Christian legacy of nonviolence? Why isn’t it taught?

The Agape Community Offers Days of Work and Reflection on Lifestyle in a Sustainable Community and More
The Agape Community, located on 34 acres of land in the Quabbin Reservoir watershed, is hosting groups of youth and adults for work/education days throughout the summer and into the fall, to encourage people, especially the young, to consider a nonviolent lifestyle that concentrates on sustainable living, prayer, simplicity, contemplation and action.
Students, parish groups, adults will experience, Brigid House, our straw bale house with solar energy and compost toilet, together with an explanation of the building of the community by several hundred people over a two year period.
We will work in and explore Agape’s organic garden which feeds those who sojourn to Agape as well as those in the extended community.
We will demonstrate our “veggie” car, which runs on vegetable oil from a local Restaurant 99, and offer an opportunity for those in the workshops to assist with the work of the community, such as splitting and stacking wood for our wood cook and wood burning stoves.
A talk or workshop, small group format, tailored to the needs of your group, can be added on conflict resolution, compassionate listening, practicing mindfulness, silence and the solitary, nonviolence and the sacred earth, among others.
Adult groups may want to host a retreat of 10 -20 adults, with guided meditations, use of Agape’s graceful hermitage, and solitary walks in the Quabbin, with guided talks by co-founders, Brayton and Suzanne Shanley.
Co-founders Suzanne Belote Shanley and Brayton Shanley have MA degrees in English (Simmons College) and Pastoral Ministry (BC), and have just completed teaching a college course at Worcester State on The Philosophy of Nonviolence. Together, they have led retreats and conducted workshops on the Spirituality of Nonviolence since 1978.

Annual St Francis Day Celebration: Usually the first Saturday in October, this is an interfaith celebration that brings 500 people annually to the Agape Community. Past key-note speakers have included Arun Gandhi, Ingrid Askew, Kobi Skolnik, and Aziz Abu Sarah.

Brigid Day Celebration: This celebration occurs in late January and marks the beginning of the transition from winter to spring.

Annual Advent Celebration

Easter Celebration

Summer Work Day: Community members and volunteers gather together to begin to prepare Agape for the winter

We run many retreats for all ages during the year. Please let us know if you'd like to attend a retreat or bring a group here for a personalized retreat

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/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I.  Community:  We are a community.  For those who live at Agape, and for the extended community who do not, our mission of faith, simplicity and nonviolence means community through Jesus Christ.  A true community implies both a way of life and of seeing reality.  The counter-cultural pull of the gospel as we have discerned them, demands that we live at variance with the popular culture and embrace an alternative lifestyle, rejecting the isolation and individualism the culture encourages, as we turn towards community.         Because living for the common good is the most human way to live and because of the apocalyptic toll of violence in our age, we attempt to move out of fear and alienation, into community rooted in faith and a love that is nonviolent.

            A.  Interns and Volunteers—Interns commit to a minimum of nine months, entering and fully living the life at Agape.  In addition, adults volunteer at the community for stays that range from one week to six months.  College students often volunteer during summer months, semester breaks and some have received academic credit for independent study.

II.  Nonviolence:  Our community name, Agape, grounds us in the Biblical Jesus, His nonviolent being and mission in the world.  Agape is a theology of love based on the historical fact that Jesus lived, died and rose from the dead exclusively in the spirit of nonviolent love.  To those who follow him, Jesus reveals the names we give God:  Love, Compassion, and Mercy.  Scripture calls us to the furthest boundaries of charity, to love even our enemies (Matt. 5:44).  It is in these names that we struggle to ground our personal and communal thoughts and actions.  Gospel nonviolence has a profound effect on:

            A. Lifestyle:  The power of nonviolence is determined by how we live our lives every day.  This unarmed love promotes merciful speech and demeanor, especially in the face of violence and fear.  Such love rejects an "eye for an eye" standard of justice, seeking instead the long-haul-power of healing, truth and reconciliation both within ourselves and with our adversaries.  Even in light of our own failures, we attempt to live a family and community life involving nonviolent child-rearing and discipline with love. 

            Living nonviolence changes our entire habit structure, infusing our daily speech, work, family, and community relationship with nonviolent love.  In Christianity grounded in the gospel, we soon learn that the real battleground is within us. 

            B.  Ministry:  Our ministry in education is our effort at "right livelihood."  Agape's education mission in nonviolence and sustainability takes us into arenas of education--universities, parishes, and retreats in various settings, outside of and within the community.

            Our struggle to know the truth calls us "out" to evangelize--sharing struggles, and insights, learning from and supporting those with whom we interact.  The community's main house, Francis House, is the site of frequent days of reflection, prayer, and hospitality for interns, volunteers, and others in need.  Retreatants use our hermitage located behind the main house joining us for community prayer and if desired, for vegetarian meals.

            Agape holds a number of annual events at the community:  Francis Day, fall and spring college retreats, Advent Evening, Feast of St. Brigid, Stations of the Cross at the State House and Easter Vigil.

            C.  Witness:  We are “public” Christians in that we are concerned about the well being of our society.  In that light, our faith and experience leads us to clarify that: "Thou shalt not kill" does not admit to exceptions, that love is at the heart of God. 

            This belief compels us to reject the state and institutions of society when they promote the violence of war, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia and the most lethal of weapons-- unjust economic systems.  When our Christian Churches promote "Just Wars" or "Just Defense" or view injustice with indifference or become complicit in oppression, we call ourselves and the Christian Community to a change of heart.  Our level of conversion comes in the form of active nonviolent resistance, public witness, fasting, and prayer vigils.

            D.   Solidarity with the 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.

III. 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. 

            Attempting to place our lives in the hands of God's Divine Providence, we thereby renounce the privileges of wealth as an illusion of security.  We look "to set our minds on God's reign and Justice," trusting that the "rest will come as well."  (Matt. 6:33).  We find that a more creative life unfolds when we pursue simplicity and discover that the path of gradual divestment from the riches of this world is a joyful one.  Attendant to this choice for voluntary simplicity, we attempt to be faithful by:

            A.   Living Under Taxable Income:  Agape co-founders have a long-standing commitment to tax resistance.  As Christian Pacifists, we 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 non-cooperate with this evil by non-payment of federal taxes, protecting life as Jesus would protect it by living below taxable income. 

            B.  Reverencing the Natural World:  For centuries, Christians have been deaf to the Divine speaking through the voice of the natural world.  We chose to locate our community on 34 acres of wooded land to immerse ourselves in the urgent and experimental task of learning the language of nature with her many voices, walking amid the untamed forest, working the rich earth, breathing the undefiled air, drinking water from the well and communing with creatures, great and small.  We endeavor to live on Mother Earth as a "Thou" and not plunder her as if she were an "It."

            C.  Vegetarian Diet:  The grace of good health celebrates our bodies as temples of the Divine.  Because grace builds on nature, health is more likely to be maintained within wholesome living habits.  We follow a simple vegetarian diet and fast to clean and rest the body. 

            D.   The Arts:  To reverse the addictive effects of our electronic age, computers and television, Agape periodically gathers people in a circle to share poetry, song and story.  This great and necessary work of the imagination, telling our human story, is one of the joyous celebrations of living life creatively.

            E.    Sustainable Living:  The real work of reverencing the earth involves living within it and reading our Christian Scripture in light of the wisdom learned from natural things.  Working the earth with our hands is an antidote to the frantic pace induced by our technological age and grounds us in the simple joys of being human.

            Our homesteading activities incorporate the elemental basics: house building and repair, cutting wood for heat and organic gardening for food.  We have intensified our efforts to live an ecologically wholesome life by building Brigid House, a straw bale house with solar energy and a compost toilet.

            We are committed to implement progressively, the use of sustainable energies, i.e. wind and sun, by weaning our community from dependence on fossil fuels, especially oil.  Hence we drive a Jetta which is fueled by grease from a Restaurant 99, and supplied by a member of the extended community.

IV.  Prayer Life:  "Pray ceaselessly." (1 Thess. 5:17)  This command reminds us that if our efforts at hospitality, the ministry of service, and resistance to evil are not deep and filled with the spirit of contemplation, then our actions will not be loving enough or radical enough.  Therefore, we seek knowledge of God which can only come from direct experience, so our prayer reaches up to God and out to our neighbor.  Because the Christian life and community are filled with ambiguity and hardship, our daily prayer strengthens us, fills us with courage and perseverance for the long haul.

            A.  Communal Prayer:  Common life under the spirit of God's word begins with common worship.  For centuries, back to the ancients, seekers have risen at dawn to pray together.  At Agape, the deep stillness of the morning dawn is broken by readings of the Hebrew Scripture and The New Testament.  Our noonday prayer the "Angelus," is an historic prayer for world peace and reconciliation.

            In the evening, we pray the Psalter, the psalm prayers of Jesus, which have become the prayer book of the Church.

            B.   Silence: The simplest, most honest and direct prayer we pray is the prayer of silence.  In our daily periods of meditation and silence, we seek to become still enough that if we are to submit to the call of Jesus, we need silence.  In our silence, we become "still" enough to listen to a speaking God, a voice that is alive in our very midst.  Jesus rose before dawn and went out to a lonely place (Mark 1:35).  The word uttered by the Divine is a word filled with silence.

            C.  Sabbath:   To fully experience the blessing of being alive, enjoy leisure and rest, is to observe the Sabbath.  This ancient practice finds its origin in the Genesis Story and is loved by People Israel for thousands of years.  In observing the Sabbath, all work ceases from Sundown on Saturday through Sunday.  We encourage leisure activities, fellowship, hikes, recreation, music and days of solitude.

            D.  Liturgy:  As Catholic lay community, we maintain a devotion to the liturgical traditions.  At the same time, we remain open to the creative tension of new movements within the church and the uniqueness and power of our experience as lay Catholics.  We are open to diversity of religious expression by those of different faiths who visit, volunteer or intern at Agape.

            We rejoice in the inner authority with which women and laity inspire a new vision of the church as together we build authentic Christian communities for the 21st Century.