Who we are

Sara Kemp Berry

MA (Edin), LC+

Sara is an ordained and professed member of the Lindisfarne Community, a lay monastic community in the Celtic Christian tradition. She is Director of Sophia's Grove, a daughter house of  Lindisfarne offering interspiritual meditation, yoga, and equine therapy for women dissociated from nature and the Divine Feminine. Sara is a Registered Yoga Teacher, and uses her formal training in Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy to find common ground between families of different faith traditions. The Horses for Peace program at Sophia's Grove enables people from all faiths (and no faith) to interact while tending to older rescue horses who are no longer rideable, just senior, loving, grateful, and wise. Horses for Soil encourages horse owners to compost horse manure for better carbon sequestration.

Sophia's Grove is also home to Sophia Wisdom Circles: these provide safe, interspiritual contemplative space for women and are led by two women from different faith traditions.

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 commissioned 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, is a Stress Management counselor, and is certified in Soil Management. Sara has extensive experience in hospital and hospice chaplaincy, and as a facilitator for interspiritual contemplative retreats. Drawing on her study of Centering Prayer with her teacher, Fr Thomas Keating, she founded Common Space Interfaith Initiative, a community committed to sharing contemplative practice across faith boundaries.

For the past 30 years, Sara has practiced and taught contemplative disciplines drawn from Benedictine, Wiccan, and Sufi spirituality. 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 is to create interspiritual space we can share fully, space which affirms our shared humanity in its context of a rich, beautiful, and diverse planet. Sara aims to create retreat space, especially in nature and with our hands in the soil. These retreat spaces become for participants havens of peace and understanding: places where they can become, in a very real way, part of the change—and the peace—they wish to see in the world. She believes teaching about the Divine Feminine across faith traditions is a way to draw faiths together: her model for this is Holy Sophia, revered as Divine Wisdom across the Abrahamic faiths.

Amma Sara is the founder of Sophia's Grove, Sophia Wisdom Circles, Common Space Interfaith Initiative, Horses for Peace, Horses for Soil, and terra Symmetria. She writes under the pen name, Sorche Nic Eòin.