Rev. Sara Kemp Berry MA (Edin), LC

Originally from Great Britain, Sara lives with her family in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. She has a Masters degree from Edinburgh University, Scotland, did her postgraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a veteran of the British Royal Air Force. An experienced educator, she has taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio and at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a certified Stress Management counselor. Sara has extensive experience in hospital and hospice chaplaincy, and as a facilitator for interfaith contemplative retreats. Drawing on her study of Centering Prayer with Fr Thomas Keating, she founded the Common Space Interfaith Initiative, an interfaith community committed to sharing values and contemplative practice across faith traditions.

Sara has been commissioned as Prioress of Sophia’s Grove, a daughter house of the Lindisfarne Community in Spring Branch, Texas, halfway between San Antonio and Austin. The land at Sophia’s Grove was blessed and work begun in June 2017. We offer meditation, yoga, and equine therapy for women dissociated from nature and the Divine Feminine by the stress of a crazy world through our Horses for PeaceTM program. Sara uses her formal training in Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy to find common ground between families of different faith traditions. These programs enable people from all faiths to interact while tending to older rescue horses who are no longer rideable, just senior, loving, grateful, and wise. The Priory setting is a live oak grove, perfect for nature walks, guided outdoor ritual, and meditative connection with creation.

During the past 30 years, Sara has practiced and taught contemplative disciplines drawn from Wiccan, Benedictine, and Sufi spirituality, and is master teacher of Usui Reiki Ryoho. She believes this is a time in history to model multi-faith identity, to reach hands across the faith barriers between us, and to unite in work towards the reunion of the Abrahamic Family and beyond. Her calling as a Celtic Christian priest is to create an interfaith space we can share fully, one that affirms our shared humanity in its context of a rich, beautiful, and diverse planet. She believes teaching about the Divine Feminine across faith traditions is a way to draw faiths together. She aims to create retreat space in nature that becomes for its participants a haven of peace and understanding: a place where they can become, in a very real way, part of the change—and the peace—they wish to see in the world.