In East Germany, the church provided the only free space in connection with the groups—people who wanted to discuss topics that were taboo, such as the refusal to serve in the army, military education. Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in East Germany in which people were free.

Here [at St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig] we have said peace prayers since 1981 and every Monday since 1982. That was something very special in East Germany. Here a critical mass grew under the roof of the church—young people, Christians and non-Christians, and later those who wanted to leave [East Germany] joined us and sought refuge here.  The church became a very special place, and in particular the Nikolai Church, which we could describe like this: the church was finally on the side of the Lord, on Jesus’ side. In other words, it was on the side of the oppressed and not on that of the oppressors, with the people and not with those who had the power. The special experience we had here was that the people accepted Jesus’ message, especially the message of the Sermon on the Mount. We experienced in a very special way that everything that is written here is true. If you don’t believe, you won’t stay. The “comrades” did not believe, and they did not stay. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.” “He pulls the powerful from their throne and lifts up the poor.” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” We experienced it just like that—the church as a refuge and a place for change, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, no mention of paradise and redemption, but the daily bread in the reality of political hopelessness.

Pastor Christian Fuhrer

The special experience that we had during the years of peace prayers and then with this massive number of non-Christians in the church, which was exceptional, was that they accepted the message of Jesus. They grew up in two consecutive atheist dictatorships. They grew up with the Nazis who were preaching racism, the master race, prepared for war, and replaced God with Providence, as Hitler liked to say. They also grew up with the Socialists preaching class struggle and vilified the church by saying Jesus never existed, that’s all nonsense and fairy tales, legends, and your talk about nonviolence is dangerous idealism; what counts is politics, money, the army, the economy, the media. Everything else is nonsense. And the people who were brainwashed like this for years and grew up with that. The fact that they accepted Jesus’ message of the Sermon on the Mount, that they summarized it in two words—no violence—and the fact that they did not only think and say it, but also practiced it consistently in the street was an incredible development, an unprecedented development in German history. If any event ever merited the description of “miracle” that was it: a revolution that succeeded, a revolution that grew out of the church, remained nonviolent, no broken windows, no people beaten, no people killed—an unprecedented development in German history. A peaceful revolution, a revolution that came out of the church. It is astonishing that God let us succeed with this revolution. After all the violence that Germany brought to the world in the two wars during the last century, especially the violence against the people from whom Jesus was born, a horrible violence, and now this wonderful result, a unique, positive development in German history. That is why we are so happy that the church was able to play this role and enabled this peaceful revolution.

The most important thing for us was the power of prayer, which is still true today. We are not praying to the air or to the wall, but to a living God. We did not pray for the wall to come down. It was more comprehensive: [We were praying] for peace, justice, and the preservation of our creation. We addressed the very specific needs of human beings in our prayers, and God has blessed those prayers in such a way that nobody could have predicted. We went on, step by step. It got bigger and bigger, and in the end the prayers prevented us from drowning in fear and gave us the strength to face the opposition outside. In other words, more and more protests came from the church and spilled onto the street, combined with the strength that we got from our faith. The fear was very powerful, but our faith was more powerful than the fear, and the prayers gave us the strength to act. That is still the same today.

What motivated me was Jesus’ saying “You are the salt of the earth,” which means that you must get involved; you cannot stay in your church. You must get involved in this situation; the salt must be inserted in the wound, in the place that is not in order, that is sick. That’s where you must go. This thought to get involved in politics is a thought that Jesus already voiced in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Someone is beaten and lies there, those who beat him are gone, and now two people coming from temple are approaching, are looking the other way and walking away. Jesus says that they are guilty, not because—they did not do anything, they did not beat him, but they did not help him. If we just leave the world alone and do not get involved, we are just as guilty as those two, as Jesus said in that parable, who looked the other way and did not want to hear about it. You must get involved, because you are the salt of the earth.

St. Nikolai Church

[Dietrich] Bonhoeffer really impressed me with his philosophy in approaching the atheist, the non-Christian, with the Christian message in a way that is easy to understand. I first learned that from Jesus—the simple language. Jesus did not speak the language of the temple, but the language of the people. He talked about the mustard seed, the farmer, the worker in the vineyard, the jobless who are waiting in the marketplace, hoping to get hired. Those are all things that people can understand, and then he introduced the message of God’s love into this clear language. And Bonheffer said that we should apply Jesus’ language in such a way that it can be understood even if you were not born into the Christian tradition or into a Christian household. That was really impressive. In addition, the examples impressed me very much, the fact that people applied the Sermon on the Mount one-to-one. First, to put Christians to shame, it was a non-Christian and Hindu who did it: Mahatma Gandhi. Very much in the spirit of the Sermon of the Mount, he engaged in nonviolent resistance and freed his people from British colonialism, but gave his life for it, as did Jesus. He was shot in 1948. The second one was, thank God, a Christian: Martin Luther King. He prepared and executed this idea of nonviolence, peaceful resistance, in a wonderful way. It was a very tense situation, and the fact that it was possible for an African-American to become president of the United States today even exceeds Martin Luther King’s dream. Then it became our turn to apply the teachings of the Sermon of the Mount here in Leipzig. But you cannot forget to mention Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. They have always impressed us. We felt that we were walking together with them to fulfill Jesus’ legacy.

The police were always very violent, especially on October 7th when they beat hundreds of people. With this violence they wanted to prevent people from gathering here, here in the church and on the plaza. They gradually increased the amount of violence, but achieved the opposite of what they expected. Especially on October 9th, they had created such a frightful scenario that they thought people would not dare show up here. Instead, even more people came. In church people had learned to turn fear into courage, to overcome the fear and to hope, to have strength, as I mentioned before. That was very important, and during those years and in particular during this frightful time, people overcame their fear. They did not bring their children, because you had to fear for your life. The children stayed at home. They came to church and then started walking, and since they did not do anything violent, the police were not allowed to take action. “We were ready for anything, except for candles and prayer,” they said. If the first group had attacked the police, the police would have known exactly what to do. You can see it on TV every night how police and armies react to demonstrators. That did not happen, and the officers and generals called Berlin and asked what they should do, but they did not get any instructions. Those in Berlin did not say anything, the officers here did not do anything, and thus the movement that did not result in any violence, as the people learned in church, began to spread, and that is when the following became clear in East Germany: This is the beginning of the end of East Germany. It cannot go on, the people got what they wanted. Peace prayers were held all over the country. When they saw the images from Leipzig on October 9th, they started demonstrations everywhere else. The crowds became larger and larger, and then [Erich] Honecker handed in his resignation, and on the 18th the politburo resigned. On November 9th, on this very important day, on this day the wall was overcome from the East. Those are experiences that you cannot learn in college, and I would like to summarize them as follows: the Nikolai Church was open to everyone. The church was open to all people, no matter if they were Christian or non-Christian. The next thing is that throne and altar do not belong together. That is a huge mistake that the church made during the past century. No, the street and the altar belong together, just as Jesus did not hide in the temple, but was mingling out in the street, in the houses and on the plazas. We as a church must go into the street and let the street come into the church. The church must be open to everyone. We can teach nonviolence as a practical application of the Sermon on the Mount, turn swords into ploughshares as in the Old Testament, open to all, as mentioned before, and we are the people. We have to learn to have a certain self-confidence, overcome fear, find our voice once again in church, approach bad situations with this self-confidence, be able to make changes within society, reject injustice, and refuse to go along, and I think what is important in all of that is the power of prayer. Without prayer we would not have changed anything, we would not have been able to overcome fear, we would not have had the strength to change things and to take the message of the Bible seriously, being able to interject yourself into a social reality, finding the message of Jesus and the Bible and applying it to the current situation, not uttering long sentences but finding the right word for the right situation, knowing how to act. For me the main criterion for action was: What would Jesus say in this situation? Then I came to the conclusion that we needed to do it the same way he would have done it.

The role of the church did not diminish, at least not here in the Nikolai Church. It continued. Huge protests against the war in Iraq, peace prayers involving many people to save jobs…It continued, but under different social circumstances. However, there are always certain peaks, unique times, such as October 9th. It was a peaceful revolution which was a unique process. You cannot expect that it will go on like that every day. What this revolution aimed to achieve was indeed achieved, and then people stepped back. The important thing to remember is that we did not do that to get people to join our church, but because it was necessary. That is what Jesus did as well. When he provided help, he never asked if that person went to the temple or if that person said all his prayers. He just realized that this human being needed help, so he helped. That is exactly how we did it. We never said “but you must return the favor,” the way it is done in politics and in the world. We created something, and the blessing continued for the people. The most important thing is that the church has to remain open. Whenever people need the church again, in everyday life or in very specific situations, they should find the church open. The church should be there for the people, the way Jesus intended. An inviting, open church without the expectation that people join; an inviting, open church offering unconditional love, just as Jesus did, and [we must] act in this spirit.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Seventy-eight-year-old Sister Phyllis is near death. Over a period of three days around the clock, the sisters have been taking turns keeping vigil at her bedside.

SISTER ANNE SHEPARD (Prioress of Mount St. Scholastica): In our monastery, sisters do not die alone. We stay with the sisters night and day, so that they know, they’re comforted by the fact that they joined a community, and as community they’re going to go home—the real home that we’ve been waiting for.

VALENTE: The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica die much as they live—peacefully, prayerfully, and surrounded by community. It’s a way of life that Benedictine monasteries have shown the world for more than 15 centuries, and it’s a message that still resonates.

SHEPARD: When I look at the condition of the world today, I see a world where there’s violence, one where there’s greed, one where there’s selfishness. But also one where there’s a craving for a rejuvenation of family life, a rejuvenation of spiritual life. It speaks to me of the need more than ever of a monastic presence in this world.

VALENTE: Monasteries such as this one stand in contrast to the prevailing culture. They value community over competition, service over self-interest, and in a world of Internet, cell phones, and 24-hour talk, they stress listening and silence.

SHEPARD: It’s a way of life here. It’s an absence of noise and clutter, and we come together first, and we’re just silent. We’re in the presence of God. It’s not a deadly silence. It’s a very reverent and beautiful silence. We don’t need noise to be productive. It’s just the opposite. We don’t need noise to communicate. It’s just the opposite.

Monastic life is a life of living together in prayer and community. We as Benedictines, we monastics—we’re not founded to do a particular work. The particular work of a monastery is community, and believe me, that’s hard work. Living with 165 women is hard work.

Sister saying grace at mealtime: Ever faithful God, bless the food we are about to eat and unite us in mind and heart to your son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

SHEPARD: The common table is central to who we are. You listen, and you listen with the ear of your heart. You listen with what’s inside you. That’s what it means to be a listening person, and that’s going to happen in the dining room.

VALENTE: Sister Anne says these and other practices at the monastery can be applied to family life and even to the professional world.

SHEPARD: You bring in everybody into a decision and learn from the newest members, as well as the wisdom of the older members and everything in between. So you have prioresses and former prioresses and PhDs in English and math doing dishes along with those that just entered, that don’t have those same higher degrees. That’s a radically different way than a top-down way of doing business.

VALENTE: The monastery reflects a spiritual way of life, but one that also contains practical wisdom.

SHEPARD: A major countercultural difference is that we hold things in common. That is a major thing, that it’s not the greed, that if I have a computer, if I have a laptop, it’s because it’s for the use of the community. For us, the less we have the more single our purpose. We don’t need things. We need the gospel call, and we need one another.

VALENTE: The sisters do a variety of work. They teach at Benedictine College. They operate a women’s center in nearby Kansas City, Kansas, where volunteers teach money management…

Sister teaching money management class: Budgeting is simple but it will bring, you know, a little bit of the peace of mind to your house.

VALENTE: …English as a second language…

Sister teaching language class: Out? Ought. Ought? Ought.

VALENTE: …and provide child care for mothers taking classes. Others work in the medical profession or in massage therapy. Until recently, one was even a firefighter; another, a funeral director. But the most important work of the monastery is prayer.

SHEPARD: We use the words of the Psalms and of the scriptures that nurture us, that give us life, that give us meaning. Our life is about seeking God together and bringing that God into our hearts. It’s so profound, it’s hard to even explain. But it’s the daily-ness of the prayer. It’s that we need the prayer.

VALENTE: Monastic life began to flourish after the fall of the Roman Empire. Men and women retreated to the desert to live solitary lives of prayer and penance. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia, known for his spiritual wisdom, left the solitary life behind and founded communities where like-minded individuals could seek learning, find security, and live a life of prayer. Today, every monastic order in the world, whether Benedictine or not, follows Benedict’s model to some extent.

A young woman comes to the monastery for music lessons from Sister Joachim Holthaus, a composer. Ever since the time of St. Benedict, monasteries have been important centers of learning and culture. This is Sister Paula Howard. Eight years ago, at age 77, she discovered her talent for creating icons, which the monastery then sells. She’s done nearly 200.

SISTER PAULA HOWARD: Well, I think all appreciation of beauty lifts your heart—that beauty belongs here. It’s a foretaste of heaven, we hope, and I just think that beauty is an image of God.

VALENTE: Both artistic beauty and the beauty of nature.

SHEPARD: A contemplative life is being in tune with the spirit, in tune with nature, in tune with creation. It’s a communion with all that is around you. It’s a sense that everything we do is significant—the way I plant a garden and care for the garden. Everything that we do has meaning, and it has meaning because we’re intentionally trying to be more prayerful. You can live a contemplative life outside of a monastery. As a matter of fact, that is our hope, that people can come here and find a sense of peace.

VALENTE: The sisters earn some income by offering spiritual retreats. These high school girls are spending several days here. The monastery has 70 lay employees and an annual budget of $4 million. Most of it goes toward operating a nursing care facility for elderly sisters. The monastery also receives donations and bequests and government funding for its nursing home. Another source of income: the salaries of sisters who do outside work, like Sister Mary Palarino, a clinical social worker.

VALENTE: You could do this work as a lay person. I’m wondering what you think being a sister brings to this.

SISTER MARY PALARINO: You know, I really don’t think I could do it as holistically and as comprehensively unless I were a member of my community and living the Benedictine way of life.

VALENTE: Mount St. Scholastica is nearly 150 years old. Some 2,000 women religious have passed through its doors. Today the vast majority of the sisters here are over the age of 55.

PALARINO: I do get concerned about people not joining us, and I don’t understand that, I mean, because it seems like young people today are—they seek, and they have a hunger for community, for prayer life, for social justice issues. They have a hunger, you know, to follow something greater. We have that.

VALENTE: Sister Anne Shepard:

SHEPARD: Where it’s going to go in the future? It’s going to go wherever God takes us. We’re going to be smaller. We’re going to be just as vibrant. But it’s not easy. Any genuine commitment isn’t easy. That gift of unselfishness is the reason we make a promise to be faithful for all our lives, every day of our lives.

VALENTE: These sisters believe that as long as there is a need in the world for quietude, simplicity, balance, prayer, and community, there will always be a purpose to monastic life.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente at Mount St. Scholastica in Atchison, Kansas.

“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

BOB FAW, correspondent: At Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee, four-year-old Ethan Barker might seem carefree. But his parents, Chris and Tamara, are frightened about Ethan’s upcoming brain surgery. So when neurosurgeon Dr. Stephanie Einhaus asks if the family would like to pray, they readily agree.

DR. STEPHANIE EINHAUS (praying with family): We come before your throne today, Lord, asking for your blessing on this sweet child of yours.

FAW: Ethan’s surgery is delicate. Einhaus takes a bone from his skull and modifies it to cover a space created by an earlier surgery.

DR. EINHAUS: (in operating room): …the bone of the skull is kind of in two layers and so you can split it like an Oreo cookie…

FAW: For this skilled practitioner, praying benefits her as much as the patient’s family.

DR. EINHAUS: If I’m having a hard time doing something, getting a catheter in a fluid space, I’ll just pause and in my own head I will pray, “Please, Lord, help me get this right.”

FAW: Einhaus says praying with families helps them with the stress and gives them hope.

DR. EINHAUS: It helps them to hold on to something to get through, you know, that crisis that’s going on. Most people want to do it. They’re like, they’re so relieved.

FAW: Eleven-year-old Holly Barkley, about to undergo surgery to drain fluid from her brain, does not face a crisis.

DR. EINHAUS (to patient): How’s your head feeling?

FAW: But her family also wants to pray.

DR. EINHAUS (praying with family): I pray that you will let this family feel your power, let them feel your peace, Lord…

FAW: Prayers like that, family members agree, can bring comfort.

CHRIS BARKLEY: It puts a sense of comfort in you. Normally, doctors don’t do that, and it probably makes people feel closer to the doctor. You want them to care just as much as you do.

LAURA YOUNG (Holly Barkley’s mother): It was more of the Lord was on our side, and it told me then it was going to be okay, and you know I was ready to—if anything came out negative, I was ready to face it.

DR. EINHAUS (to Ethan’s family): Hello. We are all done, and it went great.

FAW: Einhaus, raised Catholic and now a Southern Baptist, was once reluctant to pray with patients in the beginning for fear of being ridiculed. But as time went on she felt more comfortable asking patients if they would like to pray.

DR. EINHAUS: Once you start doing it you realize how much people really like doing it and how powerful it can be as a support for not only the patient but for the families.

FAW: You regard your role as a physician as a kind of ministry.

DR. EINHAUS: I do, I absolutely do.

FAW: In this part of the Bible belt, many patients—like Marletta Scott, facing difficult triple bypass heart surgery at Methodist South Hospital—say they would welcome a chance to pray with their doctor, even though Marletta Scott’s doctor, heart surgeon Alim Khandekhar, happens to be Muslim.

MARLETTA SCOTT: He did explain to me that, overall, that, you know, it was in the Lord’s hands and that he’d be watching over him as well as me during this procedure. I mean, and that’s all that we can ask for.

FAW: That makes you feel good, that gives you comfort?

MARLETTA SCOTT: Yeah, it does.

FAW: in his 32 years of professional experience, Khandekhar says he has found that patients with faith often recover faster.

DR. ALIM KHANDEKHAR: Because they rely not only on the doctors, the medicine, but they rely on a power that is more powerful than all of them, that puts them at ease with themselves, at ease with the decision they are making.

FAW: What all this suggests, especially in this part of the country, is a growing trend by physicians to treat physical and spiritual problems together. After all, says the founder of this Memphis clinic, 50 percent of the patients who come here for primary care do not have medical problems.

DR. SCOTT MORRIS (Founder, Church Health Center, and United Methodist Minister): Many of our physical complaints come about because of our spirits being broken. What they need is a way for us to help them deal with this spiritual devastation.

FAW: So here at the Church Health Center, which since 1987 has treated 60,000 low-income people without health insurance, the spiritual needs of a patient are addressed before they ever see a doctor.

DR. MORRIS: From my point of view, if we want to be healthier, you must have a healthy spirit as well as a healthy body. We know, I think, in our heart of hearts, that being at peace, being bathed in what a person perceives as the love of God, makes people healthier faster.

FAW: But mixing prayer with medicine can cause problems, especially when the goal of reducing suffering conflicts with the wishes of devout patients. For example, a recent AMA [American Medical Association] study found that patients of faith demand and get more aggressive treatment than is medically warranted, and there are also concerns that a patient can be exploited if a doctor uses prayer to proselytize, to promote certain beliefs.

PROFESSOR MARK MUESSE (Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Rhodes College): It might take the form of a particular kind of prayer that the patient might be uncomfortable with. It might include accepting certain kinds of creedal statements that the patient would not otherwise accept.

FAW: At Rhodes College, where he teaches comparative religion, Mark Muesse also worries that praying with a patient could compromise a doctor’s relationship with a patient.

PROF. MUESSE: There could be a boundary crossed there, that a doctor begins to lose his objectivity in relationship to a patient. You’re losing some of the critical distance, I think, that’s oftentimes necessary for proper medical treatment.

FAW: Physicians like Einhaus counter that even if that boundary is crossed, no harm need result.

DR. EINHAUS: No matter what, you’re going to develop a relationship with your patients, okay? So the fact that I’m praying with them may make that bond a little stronger, but in no way would it affect my judgment.

FAW: And that element of compassion, physicians argue, is what is often missing in the training many doctors receive.

DR. KHANDEKAR: During my training, you know, being a cardiac surgeon, I don’t think that part has been stressed enough. It helps me to have another power behind me to do what I do. I do not think enough doctors use this power.

FAW: Here, though, that recognition—that the spiritual can affect the physical—seems to be growing.

PROF. MUESSE: In the past, you know, doctors would take care of the body, and the ministers and the chaplains would take care of the soul, but now we’re seeing that those two things cannot be separated.

FAW: Shortly after his surgery, Ethan was almost as playful as before. Holly, too, was doing just fine. For each, medical technology prevailed.  But in this medical theatre, more and more physicians seem to be sharing a belief that there is more at work here than science and skill.

DR. EINHAUS: We’re not always in control. God’s always in control, and so things may not turn out the way we want them to. We may not like it.  We may not understand it this side of eternity. But we have to trust that he is still in control and that if they go and they die, that heaven is really a good place.

FAW: Here, where there is recognition that when in comes to healing, fixing the body alone is an incomplete, indeed, flawed approach.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Memphis, Tennessee.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For people of faith, services which acknowledge, indeed commemorate, death can bring comfort or anguish. Thomas Beveridge’s Yizkor Requiem recognizes both. Performed here by the orchestra and chorus of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the music is emotional and cerebral—suggestive, even, at times, haunting. Conducted by Sir Neville Marriner and recorded for the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music, the Yizkor Requiem was composed by Beveridge not just to remind listeners of what Beveridge says “really matters,” but also to combine, musically, two faiths.

THOMAS BEVERIDGE (Composer and Conductor): I realized that I could put together a piece that kind of stands on the bridge between the two religions, the Christian religion and the Jewish religion, and takes a look at, simultaneously, at the ritual for the dead.

FAW: Beveridge says he was inspired to compose this piece after the 1991 death of his father, an Episcopal priest and scholar who immersed himself in both faiths. It was, says Beveridge, “a quest for spiritual roots.”

BEVERIDGE: My quest and my father’s quest. My father inspired me to look at the origins of Christian liturgy in the synagogue. I mean, that’s basically what we’re talking about here.

FAW: Was it an attempt to come to terms with his death, or to memorialize him, or both?

BEVERIDGE: I think both. I find it a very cathartic experience to make this effort in his memory, and in the process I learned a lot.

FAW: What Beveridge, a church organist, choir director, and composer of more than 600 works, learned over the two years he spent writing the Yizkor Requiem is that despite profound differences in theology, the two faiths share enormous common ground.

BEVERIDGE: I went through the Requiem Mass and found passages that were almost exactly the same as passages in the Yizkor service or in similar synagogue ritual, and that’s where the Mass came from. It came directly out of the synagogue.

FAW: “Yizkor,” Hebrew for “may he remember,” is a memorial service for the deceased. The Requiem is the music for a Catholic funeral service, seeking eternal rest for the departed. While a Requiem emphasizes comfort, and the Yizkor can be sad, musically they reinforce one another.

Here, for example, as the cantor sings the Kaddish in Hebrew, the chorus underneath sings the Lord’s Prayer in English—each of them a doxology, a hymn praising God.

BEVERIDGE: The Kaddish is a doxology. The Lord’s Prayer is a doxology, though the Yizkor Requiem begins with the Kaddish prayer, which is what every Jew says at the Yahrzeit, the annual remembrance of anyone in his family who has died.

FAW: Another similarity which Beveridge accents musically: the word “holy,” repeated here three times in Hebrew—kadosh, then three times in Latin—sanctus.

But make no mistake: while much of this composition is solemn, parts are also light-hearted, or what Beveridge calls “lickety-split.” “I wanted,” says Beveridge, “to give the impression of a train that gets going and keeps going, going along.”

BEVERIDGE: It’s not all very ponderous stuff. There’s a lot of joy in it—the joy of recognizing that a departed soul may be resting in Eden, in the Garden of Eden.

FAW: Perhaps the most dramatic moment of all in the Yizkor Requiem comes at the end, when a single flute plays a plaintive theme. Finally, with the soft refrain of “Amen” by the chorus, the flute slowly fades away.

BEVERIDGE: The flute player turns around and walks out of the building and disappears, and the last phrase is played over and over and over again until the player can hardly be heard any more. I wanted to depict the departing soul somehow, and the flute playing the melody of the ninth movement, the words of which are “the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.”

FAW: What Beveridge has done, says one reviewer, is “bring us back to our beginnings—and our endings” in a work which Beveridge says is meant to be reassuring, a peaceful work about the experience of death.

BEVERIDGE: I mean we are the ones who are left. We’re the ones who have to deal with this event in our lives and to try to understand it, try to find a way, through ritual or through musical experience, of coming to terms with it.

FAW: A spiritual lesson in music—bridging traditions which differ, but which also experience the same thing and which here come together as one.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Washington.

RABBI IRWIN KULA (National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership): The central ritual on Yom Kippur, besides prayer itself, that’s most well-known, is fasting. What fasting does is it says I’m not going to concentrate on my physical body right now. I’m going to concentrate on a different kind of food. Rather than nutrients for my body, I’m going to concentrate on the nutrients for my spirit, and my heart, and my ethical way.

So when you feel hungry at two o’clock in the afternoon, the feeling of hunger is not so that you’ll be in pain. The feeling of hunger is to stimulate two things: What am I really hungry for—because it’s more than just food. What am I really hungry for in my spiritual and ethical life? And who really is hungry that I need to feed? And if you take those two insights from the practice seriously, it’s working. That’s what atonement—that is what “at-one-ment” means.

Kol Nidre is the first prayer of the Yom Kippur service. What we do on Kol Nidre is the confrontation and the challenge of having to look at every promise and obligation and commitment that I have in my life and starting by saying okay, fine. You have none of them. You have no obligations, no promises. Kol Nidre—all the promises are null and void. Okay, now what? It’s very frightening to imagine that we have no obligations, because it is our obligations, our promises that define who we are.

The rest of Yom Kippur, in a sense, is taking back the obligations, reassessing them. Okay, I am married—do I want to be married? What does it mean to have that obligation? Hey, I am a father—what are the obligations that come with being a father that may have gotten distorted in between last Yom Kippur and this Yom Kippur? What are my obligations to my work and my craft and my calling? What are my obligations, what are the promises that I’ve made to myself? So Kol Nidre is a very profound method and technology for stripping us of all promises and obligations that may distort us, so that we stand there naked, just us, with the ability to take back promises, take back obligations over the next 25 hours.

The focus of the High Holiday period is not on death. The focus is on life. It turns out that one of the great ways to focus ourselves on life is to think about death. That just turns out to be the paradox. So if on Yom Kippur we fast, if on Yom Kippur we deny ourselves certain bodily pleasures and engage in a kind of deep introspection on the moral, psychological, and spiritual level, well, it turns out we will become better people. I mean, that’s just what happens. But, again, there are no guarantees. You can go through everything on Yom Kippur and go through the motions, and on the other hand you can sit in Yom Kippur and never use a prayer book but just really think about who you are and it can make a difference in your life.

Psalm 23

A psalm, by David.

God is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You lay me down in lush meadows.
You guide me toward tranquil waters,
reviving my soul.
You lead me down paths of righteousness
for that is your nature.
And when I walk though the valley, overshadowed by death,
I will fear no harm, for you are with me.
Your rod and staff—they comfort me.
You spread a table before me
in the face of my greatest fears.
You drench my head with oil;
my cup overflows past the brim.
Surely goodness and kindness
will accompany me all the days of my life
and I will have dwelt in the house of the Holy
for the length of my days.

Psalm 32

By David, a psalm of understanding.

Blessed is the one who lifts up her transgressions to God;
her sins will be forgiven.

Blessed is the one for whom the Holy One
need not reckon his faults;
whose spirit is clean of deceit.

When I ploughed the fields in silence,
my bones wasted away;
they groaned all day as I worked.

For day and night your hand weighed heavy against me;
the juice of my breast went dry, like the brittle fruit of summer–Selah.

I made my sin known to you.
My wrongs I no longer attempted to hide.

I said, I will confess my rebellions to the Eternal–
and you forgave my sins and errors–Selah.

For this, let the one who loves you
pray at any time she can find–
do not let the flood of waters overtake her.

You are a hiding place for me,
protecting me from anguish.
You surround me with a loud cry of rescue–Selah.

I will enlighten and illumine for you
the path you should walk.
My eyes will give witness.

Don’t be like a horse,
a mule without understanding
with a bridle and halter put on to restrain it.

In such a way God cannot approach you.

Many are the pains of those who persist in their wrongs,
but those who trust in their Creator are surrounded by love.

Take joy in God and let the righteous rejoice.
Cry out with gladness, all who are steadfast of heart.

Psalm 90

A prayer of Moses, man of God.

God, you have been a dwelling place for us
from one generation to the next.

Before mountains were born,
before earth and its people came to exist.

From eternity until eternity you are holy.

Mortals can turn to you until they are crushed.
You say, “Return, children of Adam.”

Because a thousand years you can hold in your sight
like a yesterday passing into today,
a watchman’s hour of relief at night.

You flood the years; they pass like sleep.
By morning, they vanish like grass.

At dawn a person flowers and is fragrant;
by evening we become withered and dry.

For by your wrath we are extinguished.
By your anger we are made to feel afraid.

You have laid out our transgressions before you,
our secrets are illumined by the light of your face.

All our hours pass by in your fury.
Our years come to an end as though imagined.

The days of our years are seventy;
if we are strong, maybe eighty.

All our boasts are toil and delusion,
because life passes and rushes and flies away.

Who can bear the force of your rejection?
Our fear of you seems to us like your anger.

Make known to us the portion of our days
so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Turn back to us, God—-Oh, how long?
Have compassion on those trying to serve your will.

Fill our morning with acts of your kindness
and we will sing and rejoice all our days.

Bring us joy in proportion to our days of affliction,
years we saw only strife.

May your acts be visible to your servants,
your splendor to their children’s eyes.

May the sweetness of the Holy One, our Creator,
be constantly before us.

And the work of our hands, give us direction.
And the work of our hands–give it direction toward you.

Psalm 27

By David.

You are my light and my hope,
whom should I fear?

You are the strength of my life,
before whom should I tremble?

When the wrongful approach to devour my flesh,
my oppressors and enemies,
it is they who stumble and fall.

If an encampment pitches tents against me,
my heart will not quiver.

If a war rises up against me,
in you I still trust:

One thing I have asked from you,
one thing I seek,

to dwell in your house
all the days of my life,

to behold your beauty,
to enter your innermost temple.

You cover me with the tabernacle of your presence
on days when hardship comes.

You shield me in concealment of your tent.
Upon a rock, you lift me high from harm.

And now, God, raise my head above troubles that surround me.

In your tent, I will make my songs into offerings,
singing forth all my melodies to your name.

Listen, God, to my voice when I call out.
With compassion, answer my need.

It is to you my heart calls,
“Seek out my face,”
because your face, God, is what I constantly search for.

Don’t hide your eyes from me.
Don’t push away your faithful in anger.

You have always been my help.

Don’t tear me out by the roots;
don’t abandon me–

for you are the one I count on for help.

My father and mother may leave me,
but you have gathered me in.

Teach me, Source of Joy, your ways.
and lead me down the level plain
because of the dangers that surround me on every side.

Don’t give me over to breath of my fears.

For distortions have risen up in name of truth,
they breathe out visions of destruction.

If only I could believe that I would see God’s goodness
in the land of the living…

Keep up your hope in God.
Strengthen your heart and sturdy it;
Keep up your hope in God.

BOB FAW, correspondent: For 900 years this has been the hallmark, indeed, the passion, of Cistercian monks—prayer seven times every day. Nearly five hours each day are devoted, says the superior of this abbey, to the solitary pursuit of friendship with God.

THE REV. BERNARD MCCOY (Superior, Cistercian Abbey): It’s really about a relationship with God, and prayer is just the word we give to the conversation and the relationship that we have with the divine person.

FAW: On nearly 600 remote acres in south central Wisconsin, even private time, as when Brother Stephen Treat walks the Stations of the Cross, even that time is spent, he says, lifting his mind exclusively to God.

BROTHER STEPHEN TREAT (Cistercian Abbey): The main part of our business is going into that church seven times a day and praising God and praying for the safety and well-being of the world.

FAW: Even when Father Bernard relaxes with his Spanish hotbloods Alejandro and Tinaco, or with the ordinary Bert, there is meditation.

FATHER BERNARD: Theirs is about being and about awareness, and there is a quietness to them, obviously, for the most part, so they are a very contemplative presence in our life.

FAW: The rituals, the routines here are familiar, but what sets this abbey apart is that while it keeps one foot in the 11th century, the other is firmly planted in the 21st. On the grounds nearby, with a background of Gregorian chants, is a high-powered Internet operation run by two laywomen which permits the abbey to flourish.

CINDY GRIFFITH (Co-Founder, Monk Helper Marketing and Co-Author, “Laser Monks”): We allow them to be what they were put on the planet to be—to be monks, to do good, to pray for the world.

FAW: All this began seven years ago when Father Bernard went to buy toner for his printer.

FATHER BERNARD: I said, you know, wow, this is just way too expensive for a bunch of black dust or a few squirts of ink. There has got to be a better way.

FAW: So in 2002 Father Bernard started LaserMonks, selling ink and toner to charitable groups at prices far less than office supply stores. In Colorado, online marketing experts Cindy Griffith and Sarah Caniglia noticed and gave Father Bernard a call.

SARAH CANIGLIA (Co-Founder, Monk Helper Marketing and Co-Author, “Laser Monks”): He said come on out to Wisconsin. He said there is beer, you know, there is beer, there are brats, come on out—we’re on 600 acres—and see what you think.

FAW: Sarah and Cindy didn’t just visit; they stayed.

SARAH CANIGLIA: I saw an opportunity to take the monks where they needed to be and to relieve—to take a business idea, the germ of an idea which he had, and turn that vision into a success.

FATHER BERNARD: It’s a wonderful symbiosis that lets us use our talents, lets them use their talents, and helps us do a lot of good work.

FAW: I would regard that as serendipitous. I gather you regard it almost as providential?

FATHER BERNARD: Both. I would call it sacred serendipity.

FAW: Now they also sell deluxe coffee, Benevolent Blends, with profits supporting families who pick the coffee beans—also chocolates, creamy caramels, jams, and jellies made in other monasteries. Sales last year were nearly five million dollars. Eighty percent of that was for expenses, but ten percent went to fund the abbey, and the remaining ten percent went to charity, from a camp for kids with HIV to Buddhists in Tibet.

FATHER BERNARD: So we’re a for-profit whose bottom line is to not make any profit at the end of the year, because it’s all given away in some form or fashion. That’s social entrepreneurism, really, at its radical best.

FAW: Their product line also includes Benevolent Biscuits, treats for dogs prepared in the abbey kitchen, rolled, stamped, and baked by the Cistercians themselves and sampled by the abbey’s quality control officer, Ludwig, the abbey’s Doberman Pinscher.

Here no talent is kept under a basket. What Father Robert Keffer paints will someday be sold to help maintain the abbey.

THE REV. ROBERT KEFFER (Subprior, Cistercian Abbey): You work during the work hours. You stop, you go to prayer. It’s a very—regimented is the wrong word, but it is a very disciplined life. So that’s a little hard for an artist: Oh, I’ve got this great inspiration. I can’t stop and pray now.

FAW: But you have to.

FATHER ROBERT: Yes, you have to, and you most certainly can.

FAW: So here there is a balance between the rigors of monasticism and the demands of the marketplace in an abbey which is both in the world and apart.

FATHER BERNARD: We have cell phones. We have Wi-Fi. We have, you know, things like the normal world. But we know when to turn them off.

FAW: Even though that takes some getting used to, says Brother Stephen Treat, who left what he says was a satisfying job for a Quaker social service agency because he felt the need to do something more.

BROTHER STEPHEN: You do miss certain things, but you would be surprised with what you replace it with, that here I am in a community of six guys, that if all works out I will spend the rest of my life with them and whoever comes after, and I will be buried on that hill, and that falls into an 80-year history of this house and a 900-year history of this order.

FAW: And for those who contend this way of life, this withdrawal from the world, is ultimately selfish, Cistercians have an answer for that.

BROTHER STEPHEN: The Christian tradition understands places like this, contemplative monasteries, as these lighthouses, these beacons where people are joined together in prayer and praying on behalf of the whole world.

FAW: Theirs is a calling which appeals only to a few, but a calling which transforms those who embrace its rigors, just as being part of this community has changed a lapsed Catholic and a divorced grandmother.

CINDY GRIFFITH: Personally, I think I’m more grounded, more settled, more peaceful. The abbey has brought that kind of religious part of me that I didn’t have before I came here.

SARAH CANIGLIA: For me it’s been as much of a spiritual journey as it has all other types of journeys. It’s really brought me back into the fold in a really slow, step-by-step, peaceful way.

FAW: So here, in this oasis of serenity, seven times every day the Psalms, the chants will continue to echo.

FATHER BERNARD: In some ways we perch a little bit more lightly on this planet, and, you know, we have one foot firmly planted in the earth and another one off in the heavens.

FAW: Here, where they live both simply and smartly, having learned, as one put it, “only those who can see the invisible can accomplish the impossible.”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Sparta, Wisconsin.