monastic holiness, the best possible type. But the graces and graces and graces of monastic vocation and Christian experience, and she represents, I think, a very important strand in our monastic tradition, but by no means the only one. This is another thing, the mystery of Christ is so incredibly vast, that it takes in practically everything. And that's what the word Catholic means, katakolon, according to the whole tradition. So it just draws everything together in the unity of Christ. And I'm thinking of my own abbot, whose personal spirituality is really extremely austere. And he loves Karl Rahner, and he speaks a great deal about God's presence by means of his aunts and things like that. And Father Timothy told us that when he was giving a conference down in one of our South American communities of Trappistines, you know, the very austere interior solitude and interior poverty and so forth, at the end of that, he said, well, if that's your spirituality, you can have it, but we go in for this more vibrant kind of joyful end.

[01:18]

And I think both of those attitudes are perfectly valid. So I thought, before I get to Alice's death, I'd just read a poem about a man who I think represents an absolutely wonderful type of monastic tradition, which might be meaningful for some of us. That's our old Father Stephen, whom I miss so much. And when I came to the monastery, he was already really quite old. and obviously in his second childhood, except a number of the brethren who knew him said he had never gotten out of his first childhood. But in those days, we used to have all of our firmans in chapter. We never had any homilies or anything in church during the liturgy. And so the priest used to take turns with their homilies, and they couldn't go beyond a half an hour. And in the old days, before I came, there used to be strict rules about you had to have an exordium, you had to have at least one quotation from St.

[02:21]

Bernard, you had to have one paragraph in which you turned to Our Blessed Mother and had a prayer to Our Lady, and you had to have a certain kind of peroration, and you got proclaimed in the chapter false if you didn't fulfill all justice. But Father Stevens, the last sermon I heard him preach, I only heard him preach a couple of days, They were all alike. I had no reference whatsoever to the feast day that was being celebrated. But he would tell stories, edifying and not so edifying stories, about his days back in the marines in the early part of the century. See, I didn't even know that we had invaded Nicaragua. But I remember telling you about how he gets in the gunboat and he dashes across the sand with all of the other marines. And this is typical of Father Stephen. Then he suddenly realized he had left his gun in the boat. There are wonderful stories about the mascot of his barracks, which was a big gray kangaroo of all things.

[03:26]

All of this I heard about in the chapter room on the Feast of the Blessed Trinity. He loved, he just absolutely passionately loved flowers. And Don James created a special job for him. He made him what he called guardian of the wayside shrines. We didn't have any real wayside shrines. Well, this gave us Father Stephen an excuse to grow flowers and things like that. And then he would make these big bouquets when our families would come. And then he would sneak out without permission to the gatehouse and rush into the room. And there was this flood... My mother is someone else with an enormous bouquet of flowers. Well, let me just begin with it. I think you'd recognize this as a real monk. A man of such simplicity. And I have to explain when he died. He died in a little plot of ground where he had dug a little trench to plant some seeds.

[04:28]

I think he had either a stroke or a heart attack. So he died amidst his flowers. Oh, he's so funny. Remember, Dom James used to distribute the work in the afternoon, and Father Stephen would be there with some special request. I remember one day he was trying to wheedle a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes out of Dom James. And he said, well, Reverend Father, it's only going to cost $125. And Don James gave him some kind of evasive answer as usual, which, of course, Father Stephen took as a yes in the affirmative answer. And then I never will look at it. Don James gave him this evasive answer, and Father Stephen turns around and peens out, and he whispers aloud what you should have done. He says, it's really going to cost $400. So as Teresa of Avila used to say, if you don't have one in the community, you should go out and get one.

[05:36]

This is an algae for Father Stephen written by Father Lewis. And for me, it's especially touching because Father Lewis wrote it at a time when he was writing these, I thought at the time, rather stupid anti-poems. These kind of poems of the absurd. And all of a sudden, something happens that moves Father Lewis deeply. And then there's this beautiful, really deep poetic response that comes out. And maybe some of the youngsters might not understand the opening lines, the terminology. Maybe the monology... Do you know what the monology is? It's the book that used to be read at the beginning of the chapter with a list of saints for the coming day, and we had it read in the refectory to the list of Cistercian saints who were being venerated on that particular day. Maybe the monology until today has found no fitting word to describe you, confessor of exotic roses, martyr of unbelievable gardens,

[06:47]

whom we will always remember as a tender-hearted, care-worn, generous, unsteady cliff, lurching in the cloister like a friendly freight train to some uncertain station. I didn't see him. Master of a sudden enthusiastic gift in an avalanche of flower catalogs and boundless love. sometimes a little dangerous at corners, vainly trying to smuggle some enormous and perfect bouquet to a side altar and the sleeves of your cowl. You see, in those days, we weren't allowed to have flowers in the church, except under very special circumstances. So Father Stephen was always sneaking flowers. and to the church to put out the altar of our lady on the sleeve of this big bow. You always knew what he was up to.

[07:52]

In the dark, now this tells about his death. In the dark before dawn, on the day of your burial, a big truck with lights moved like a battle cruiser toward the gate, past your abandoned and silent garden. You see the way out. front entrance works, the delivery trucks went into an entrance down an alley in front of the monastery. And that's where Father Stephen had his garden. Okay, so this big truck with lights moved like a battle cruiser toward the gate, past your abandoned and silent garden. The brief glare lit up the grottoes, pyramids, and presences one by one. Then a date swung to, and it clattered shut in the giant lights, and everything was gone, as if Leviathan, hot on the scent of some other blood, had passed you by, and it never saw you hiding among the flowers.

[09:03]

And that is so incredibly typical of our Father Stephen, thinking of this big truck, that represents the monster Leviathan and everything, just searching out his prey. And there's Father Stephen, hidden simplicity and absolutely overlooked. And so I think this is the type of sanctity that we have in our monastic tradition, too. Very, very simple, wonderful people who have a kind of childlike purity and aren't involved. Maybe the big dramatic things of life have no particularly... gray type of spirituality that you could identify, but just have returned to a kind of a real innocence and are deep in the mystery of Christ without them even being aware of it, maybe themselves. So Leviathan just passes them by and he never sees them hiding away among the flowers. So that's a very valid strand of our Sustertian and Benedictine tradition too.

[10:09]

But to get back to Alice now, There's a terrible description of her now and her state of leprosy. She's literally rotted away. And she has a somewhat morbid sense of humor, I guess. She quotes lines from the Song of Thongs about her condition. Now, I don't know that much about leprosy, but it describes her hands as being like wooden and like bark. The bark is peeled away. and just a terrible condition. She was accustomed to seeing in transports of joy my hands are the work of the Turner's last, or ladies, I don't know how to pronounce it, full of blue flowers. The skin of the chest, head, and arms was equally similar to the bark of a tree, bearing its various fur from excessive dryness.

[11:10]

The legs were quite like an ox calf, after the head had its skin removed, and they and also the feet were swollen. From her body, flesh and pus flowed abundantly. And then it speaks about her blindness. So not one member did she retain, still restful, not one still unpossessed by infirmity, except for this one, her tongue. With her tongue, or as long as she was able, she ceaselessly chanted, Praises to God. And, you know, just a theme of praise is something that you can spend a couple of retreats on. This is one of the things, you know, that we really miss nowadays. It's a little problematic, especially in communities where people are really intent on, say, contemplative prayer or the things of the Spirit. or are interested in Eastern techniques for a good reason.

[12:13]

Because their attention is almost centered on themselves. But in the medieval tradition, it was very clear that there was a relationship between God and us, but God was the determining starting point. And when you get to the Renaissance, it's man, the measure of the universe, and God almost as a means of man's perfection. In the Middle Ages, maybe the tendency of the really authentic Christian tradition was not so much centered on our own perfection as just on recognizing God's goodness and God's mercy and more leaving, as Tom Damaskis would say, the particular degree of our perfection up to God. And I remember Dom Damos as being somewhat irritated because among the many hundreds of people we had when he gave us our retreat, he said that there were a couple who expected him to tell them exactly where they were in their spiritual ascent, which mansion they had entered into, according to raise his structure, and he was just constitutionally opposed to any counting in your detail like that.

[13:30]

And rightly so. At any rate, now, here is Alice, able to praise God in this incredible situation. And I just, it's so wonderful when you find a real community of praise. But it's nothing that's the least bit superficial. You know, so many of our songs now are hymns and contemporary liturgical music. It's just filled with these kind of superficial formulas of praise, it seems, sometimes. But when you can praise God in the midst of all the things that are happening, and the horrors of the wars, and the decline of our culture, and the deaths of people from AIDS, and the inner cities, and the violence, and everything, you really have to really think about this. And still, God has to be praised. I won't read the text from Thornton Wilder, but in a

[14:30]

strange and wonderful early novel of his called the Kabbalah he has some flashbacks he's writing as a young college student or postgraduate when he got a scholarship in Rome in I think a school of archaeology and so he wrote about his various experiences in Rome but conflating with his present experience there's a lot of things from history from the past so you really don't know what period you're in and he tells in one episode about he and a friend of his visiting a dying English poet who lives near the Spanish steps actually on the Spanish steps and so it's a poet who's very poor and he's being taken care of by a guy named Francis so they go just to pay a brief visit to this dying poet and he's dying of TB And Francis is away, so they walk into the room, and they see the room, bandages and handkerchiefs and cloths just covered with blood that he spit up, and this oppressive, nauseous smell.

[15:41]

And so they introduce themselves, and of course, you know right away that it's the poet Keats. who died of TB in Rome, and his little house is still there as a little museum right on the Spanish steps. And so they begin talking, and Thornton Wilder asks him, is there anything I can get you, any book that you might like? And Keats replies, well, anything. And then he says, well, what specifically? And Keats says, well, perhaps Chapman's Homer... And then the American Thornton Wilder says, oh, but Chapman, he's not really a translator. And then Keats breaks out into tears suddenly. And all of a sudden, Thornton Wilder realizes that he's hurt this dying man. And what this dying man really wants in all of this misery...

[16:46]

And in all of the horror that comes from the fact that he's dying before he's an established poet, before he's recognized, and just at the point when he felt he was going to begin his real writing, at this point he has to die. And what he wants to hear before he passes out of this fearful human existence is things praised. And so then it's working wilder, just begins talking about random about this and that, and just praising life. And just absolutely beautiful. And then only then after that passage, Keith says, upon my tombstone right, my name was writ in water. And that's what we read on his tombstone now. And then Thornton Wilder says, when I came back a few weeks later, he was dead. And only then did his name become well known in all places. But this thirst, you know, out of all of this misery and this existence, to hear things praised.

[17:52]

And this takes insight and it takes courage. There's another book of Thornton Wilders, which is an early work, if I can find it, which I love very much. It's called The Woman of Andros. And it's based on a Latin play by Terence, but it gives it a new twist. Now, the island where this woman lives is actually a place called Kios, I think, and she comes from a different island, so she's an outsider, someone who's not accepted, and also the village or the town on this island is just filled with kind of bourgeois ordinary people like the families in our town. You know, good people, basically, but they have their little businesses and their family concerns, and they're worried about getting the daughters married and the boys established in business and things like that.

[18:53]

So they're bound up in a kind of a material type of experience. And she's an outsider. And also, she's what they called a hetera, which was not a prostitute, but but a woman who was very cultivated, and she would gather intellectual people around her and youngsters and so forth and read the great poetry and the dramas and so forth. So here she is having an influence, particularly on the young men of the island, and she's a total outsider. She's an incredibly wonderful woman. Her name is Crisus. So, for example, this is one of the stories she tells, just like the story about Emily in our town, about the hero who was able, after his death, to return to earth and be with his family for one brief time. And suddenly the hero saw that the living two are dead and that we can only be set to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure, for our hearts are not strong enough

[20:02]

to love every moment. That's the question of love. And not an hour had gone by before the hero, who was both watching life and living it, called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream. The gods heard him, but before he left, he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized. And then the text goes on. It was with such eyes that Pamphilius, this young man who comes from this merchant family and whose father and mother wanted him to get married off and so forth, but he was just trying to find the meaning of life and floundering around. It was with such eyes that Pamphilius now saw his father pass into the house and that he had seen his mother moving about, covering the fire and going about the last tasks of the day. And it was in the light of that story that his eyes had been opened to the secret life of his parents' minds. It seemed suddenly as though he saw behind the contentment and the daily talkativeness into the life of their hearts, empty, resigned, pathetic, and enduring.

[21:15]

It was crisis's reiterated theory of life, and she's the woman who's dying, dying of cancer. It was crisis's reiterated theory of life that all human beings save a few mysterious exceptions who seem to be in possession of some secret from the gods, those the mystics, the saints, you might say the poets, the visionaries, that all human beings except these merely endured the slow misery of existence, hiding as best they could their consternation that life had no wonderful surprises after all, and that its most difficult burden was was the incommunicability of love. To have a love that you can't manifest and communicate. Certainly that explained the humorous sadness of his father and the dreadful affection of his mother. And now, as his father passed him in the courtyard, this interpretation shook him more forcibly than ever.

[22:21]

What can one do for them? What, to be equal to them, can one do for oneself? He was 25 already, that is, no longer a young man. He would soon be a husband and a father, a condition he did not invest with any glamour. He would soon be the head of this household and this farm. He would soon be old. Time would have flowed by him like a sigh, with no plan made, no rules set, no strategy devised that would have taught him how to save these others and himself from the creeping grey, from the too easily accepted frustration. How does one live? He asked the bright sky. What does one do first? And you know, for those who are sensitive in contemporary society, things haven't changed very much, haven't they?

[23:23]

Actually, this is this immersion in a life that we don't understand, and there's just no strategy of life, no plans made, and death coming, and what does it all mean? Well, a lot of things happen. But on the last page, after young Ken Filius has lost everything, the woman he loved, the baby that was still born, that's okay, so that's just everything. He learned from this woman crisis. to accept all things. When she was dying, she had told him, perhaps we shall one day meet beyond life when all these pains shall have been removed. I think the gods have some mystery still in store for us. But if we do not, let me say now, and her hands opened and closed upon the cloths that covered her, I want to say to someone that, gosh, I have known the worst that the world can do to man, and that nevertheless, I praise the world and all living.

[24:31]

That's a quotation straight from Tobit. I praise the world and all living. All that is, is well. Remember someday, remember me as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark. And you will. Likewise. The gods have some deep mysteries in store for us. And then on the very last page, the same paragraph that this wonderful work opens with, just a description of the geography. On the sea, the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high pasture, the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him. On the hills, the long, dried stream beds began to fill again, and the noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones in the way filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds, the moon swore radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking mountains.

[25:40]

And in the east, the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called holy. and that even then was preparing its precious burden. So this novel of classical antiquity stands with a pointing towards the incarnation. And this suggestion, the meaning of all of this, is going to define some kind of fulfillment when God becomes man and takes all of this on himself. And so the answer to, you know, how does one live? What does one do first? You know, for us Christians, it's so ridiculously simple in a way, because the answer has been given us in Christ. Jesus has taken the initiative. God has taken the initiative. His love is prior. And so after all this wonderful period of classical antiquity about this waiting and this straining towards this fulfillment in the incarnation, we're the ones who live after this.

[26:50]

And we should be able to rejoice with so much optimism and joy and live in this new age and this economy and be able really to praise if this woman... crisis, you know, could praise to God for the dark and the bright in that way, how much more, you know, we, well, so at any rate, one of my criteria, I guess, when I'm with at least a Cisterci community, is if there's a spirit of drawing praise in that community, no matter what the suffering and the pain and the historical circumstances, that's the community that's really living the mystery of Christ in a very deep way. Okay, so now, Alice. It's now the vigil of the feast of St. Barnabas. And she's anointed with the holy oil, and she knows this is the day she's going to die. So it's getting towards Copland, and she says to the young nun who's sitting next to her bed, she says, it's on this day...

[27:57]

Or rather, it's the young nun who says, this is the day, Friday, in which the Son of God was handed over for our redemption, and was scourged, and was condemned to crucifixion. And then, this is the eve of St. Barnabas' day, and as she said this, and Alice says, and kindled with an even deeper desire, she answered her in this way, tomorrow, towards dawn, I shall go forth from this world. And in the Latin, so simple and so beautiful. And it happened exactly as she said. After Compline, the Virgin of God, like a bride adorned with her jewels, you know, a bride, just a living corpse, a bride adorned with her jewels and ready for the nuptials, hastened towards the gate of death. And saying, farewell, to her friends. That's interesting. She doesn't say to her sisters or to the other nuns. These are her friends, the way Jesus calls us friends.

[29:03]

That's one of the most beautiful words. Maybe sometime you can have some conferences on what it means to be a friend. Saying her well to her friends, she commended her soul to God and to their prayers. And then towards dawn, as though flumbering and taking her rest, and that's straight from Psalm 3, I shall lie down and take my rest, a psalm which is interpreted of Jesus' death and burial and the resurrection. As though flumbering and taking her rest, she lay back in her little bed, Lector Lossua, and this is contemplative terminology, St. Gregory the Great points out that the bride in the Song of Songs doesn't have a bed, but a little bed, a narrow bed, because this is the bed of contemplation. It has a certain constriction about it, but it opens up into something wonderful.

[30:04]

So in monastic literature, it's always a lectulus rather than just a plain old bed. Lying back on her little bed... At the rising of the sun, and that's straight from the Gospels, this is the Christ, the Son of Justice, with a gentle sigh, she breathed forth the Spirit. The same terminology that we find in the Gospels about the death of Jesus. And so this takes place towards the dawn, when Jesus rises from the dead. And so it's clear... that the author is placing the death of Alice in the context of the death of Jesus. And the resurrection of Jesus is towards dawn. And the sun is rising. And this has got to be true of the death of absolutely every one of us. We've had dozens of monks die since I've been in Gethsemane.

[31:05]

And I guess I can truly say that there's just no... There are two deaths that I would say are exactly alike. There's many deaths, Christian deaths, as there are individuals. And I guess the Damasters talk very much about Christian death in the monastic communities. I remember how wonderful he was with us. He spoke, what a beautiful thing it is when a monk dies, that you're going to be judged by the same God who died for you, who redeemed you, and your judge is your saviour. and that there's nothing in our lives to worry about that's been done under obedience and with faith and with love. The only things for which God can judge us are the things that are contrary to love, contrary to obedience, contrary to faith. And so that to die as a Christian, as a monk, really means just to give oneself over wholly to this defending love of God. So this is from Alice.

[32:07]

So she put off the tunic of mortality and misery and donned the tunic of immortality and glory full of happiness and joy. So she breathed forth her spirit on the 11th day of June towards the rising of the sun as I have said before prime in the year of the Lord 1250. And then there's a little epilogue which is It would be marvelous if you know your liturgical rites for the burial of the dead. The response that was sung, you had it in your monastic ritual too, was the response, O come all you saints of the Lord. And then there's an enumeration of the patriarchs and the angels and so forth. So you're asking the court of heaven to come and escort the soul that has just departed from the body, to the heavenly Jerusalem, into the heavenly Jerusalem before the throne of God.

[33:11]

Okay, so get in your mind this image of this heavenly cortege with all of the patriarchs and everyone coming out to meet Alice to take her into the holy city where the Lord Jesus is going to be waiting to welcome her. Well, what these two people see is something rather different. Okay. It's Jesus himself with her Blessed Mother who is heading the procession that comes out from the heavenly Jerusalem to welcome Alice. She doesn't have to wait to find him inside the heavenly Jerusalem. He takes the initiative to come forth himself from the Holy City. I mean, this is just a beautiful little doubtful point. And so then he welcomes her and he embraces her and he says, well done, my daughter. And you'll receive, you know, the crown of martyrs and the crown of virginity. And I'm going to place you now with the seraphim. And remember, in the hierarchy of the angelic spirits, the seraphim are those who are closest to the friend of God and whose essence it is just to burn with the praise of God the whole being, is to witness and stand before God and just to be consumed without ever being consumed for the love of God.

[34:28]

So all of this fire and light and glory now, she has been absolutely transformed. And she has become herself. She has this living flame to God's glory and God's praise. And so it's just an absolutely wonderful, wonderful life. I guess beyond us all. But this type of spirituality, I think, is something that's very valid. for our communities to this day, to think of being this living flame of praise and love that stands before God forever and ever, and to have gone so deep into the mystery of Christ and to be identified with him. See, in the monastic setup and monastic spirituality in the 12th century, their idea of contemplation was somewhat different, maybe, from what we read in a lot of contemporary books on prayer and contemplation. For them, they had a funny idea about the nature of sense knowledge. So then the idea, for example, of seeing something is that a ray of light goes out from our eye, and it hits the object that we're looking at, and it returns to us, and it creates within us the likeness of the reality that we see outside us.

[35:46]

So that if we hear something, We create what's outside us, inside us. If we see something we have within us, that which we're looking at. So if the object of your contemplation is the glory of God, that means we receive the glory of God within us, and it transforms us. And so the object of their contemplation would be, for example, the Passion of Jesus. And this means that they have that reality within the interior and it's something that really transforms them. And so when they're contemplating, and it's based on the word of God, and it's not some kind of a blanking out in a Zen type of experience or a concentration on one's inner faculties as an objective contact with Christ in his mysteries in such a way that you interiorize it and make it your own. And this has a transforming influence on Europe. And so when these people, for example, are just absorbed by the passion of our Lord, you shouldn't think that it's any kind of a gloomy type of spirituality unless you think that the mystery of Christ is something that's extremely gloomy.

[37:03]

It's something that's extremely profound. But we don't choose... the object of our contemplation all the time. It's God who chooses it for us and disposes it for us. So we just have to pray the way God gives us the grace of praying. And if we're not called, if we're more like our Father Stephen, to be hiding there among the flowers, just praise the Lord and just live that type of monastic experience to the full. But I have a suspicion that in a modern culture... in modern conditions now, there is an enormous amount of suffering going on that needs to be redeemed. And that more and more people within the cloister are going to be experiencing the sort of things that poor people have to experience outside the cloister in a kind of way that they don't understand and can't. And somehow we're part of this redeeming process.

[38:06]

I'm sorry, I'm just floundering all around it, something just too deep to express in very clear terms. I remember, for example, when I went to Le Seur for just a half a day, one time many years ago, and I just went into the crypt where they were showing a documentary of Thérèse, a very well-done documentary, and in one part of it, they put on the screen photographs of important people in French culture and civilization towards the end of the 19th century, when a little flower was living. And people like Paul Claudel, before his conversion, when he was still a pagan, no faith in God or anything, and important musicians and poets, government figures, who didn't have the faith. And then they suggest, with the pictures of Thérèse, that when she went through her last year and a half, When she had the experience, it was as if she said she didn't have the faith.

[39:12]

Everything was as if. She had to act as if she loved God, as if she believed in God. That this poor little innocent Norman bourgeois girl in the cloister, who had never had any contact with these things, atheism, agnosticism, anti-clericalism, and all those horrible things typical of the French culture at the time, that she was experiencing what those people outside were experiencing. But in the final analysis, she dies saying, Jim, I love. It's love, God's love for her and her love for God that finally triumphs over everything and all the temptations to infidelity. One of her sisters was praying like mad. that she would die without having lost her faith, it just seemed to be touched and go for a while. It was so terrible, so heart-wrenching. And I think that type of experience can affect people sometimes in the cloister. So at any rate, we just have to be in the cloister in the heart of the mystery of Christ and just love the whole world passionately and as much as God gives us the possibility of doing so.

[40:24]

And, you know, Don... Odecafell, whom all of you I'm sure know about, you know how much he loved classical antiquity, and I'm just translating clumsily from the German, an inscription, a funeral inscription that he talks about in one of his essays. And so this is an inscription of a man whose wife has died, and the woman's name is Paulina. And the man's name, her husband, is Vetsius Agoris Praetextatus, almost as nice a name as Grisoginus. At any rate, the funeral inscription says that her husband had allowed her to be initiated into all of the mystery religions in his presence. And the inscription reads, in your presence, I was initiated into all the mysteries. So, a second... Funeral Stone explains that she was initiated in Eleusis, in Greece, to the god Bacchus, to the god of Ceres and Korah, and Laerna to the god Liber, to Ceres and Korah again, and Aegina to the demons.

[41:43]

And then further, she had received the Tower of Bolium, a kind of baptism in the blood of a bull. And she was a devotee of Isis, and I don't know how to pronounce it here or font, a kind of a priestess of the goddess Hecate. And so here is this poor woman, with probably great sincerity, just floundering around, looking for some kind of meaning in her life and her redemption, and all of these mysterious cults. And of course, for us, we realize that whatever was good and noble in these history cultures handed to the Lord Jesus Christ and the mystery of Christ which we have with the first and fullness even now. So, my brethren, we suggest that you're so happy that God's love has brought us all together here in Christ and put us where the action is real and where our lives are filled with meaningfulness and where we can be in contact with the whole world and it's just...

[42:48]

a great thing. So just be grateful and live the life to the full. And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being able to be with you and share your life with you. I'm just grateful as I can be. So God bless you. Thank you. We're grateful. And we're also grateful for the mechanics that can bring you back. Oh dear God, I forgot about that. No, no, no. I hope you find out later that it wasn't set up, right? And I have a blank day. So, I guess we go to comp then. Oh, we have about 17 minutes, 18 minutes. Well, any questions or anything? Any objections? I guess that. Good. So, until the next time. What was it that led you to Gethsemane? Oh, just the grace of God. It's his fault. No, I just, in fact, I received into the church a year before I went to Gethsemane.

[43:54]

And I did that tie a few times, and sometimes I don't know whether any of them have taken. But anyway, when I was received into the church, I just wanted to go all the way. And I didn't know anything about religious life, you know, really about monasticism. But the priest who received me said I'd have to wait a year. And so I waited a year and then headed straight for the monastery. And thank God, it was so crowded with postulants and novices. I managed to slide in under the door. They were taking just anyone in those days. And so it's quite a wonderful slide, and there's things. And Don Damascus was just one of the greatest graces that anyone could have received there. So I'll come to that. So we'll be leaving about 10 or 10, or 6, or more, quietly.

[44:58]

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