JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The lumber shed at the Abbey of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky. It’s late February. Each night at 8:00 Brother Paul Quenon walks to the shed, as he has every night for 20 years. He goes around back, where he finds his mattress. This is where he will sleep—outdoors, no matter the weather.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON (The Abbey of Gethsemani): I can’t be a full-time hermit, but I can be a night-time hermit, and there’s something about waking up in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody around. There’s a kind of an edge of solitude that you cannot experience in any other way.

VALENTE: Here, a monk seeks to live every moment in the presence of God, in unity with God. Brother Paul came to Gethsemani 52 years ago. He was 17, inspired by reading the autobiography of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who introduced many Americans to the contemplative life. Merton would eventually become his spiritual director and would encourage Brother Paul to write. Thomas Merton said monks and poets are people who live on the margins of society. Brother Paul decided to become both. He says monks and poets remind us to pay attention to the world around us, to focus on what’s essential.

BROTHER PAUL: Poetry is the language of the heart, and it’s the language of the imagination, and so the mind abides in silence. Contemplation is an abiding in silence, and what comes out of silence are words of the heart, words of love. When the heart is really full, the mouth goes silent.

VALENTE: Indeed, many contemplatives say the transcendent is beyond words. Brother Paul has published three books of his poetry and is working on a fourth.

BROTHER PAUL: “The Hood”: —a hiding place / for the head / a portable anonymity / a refuge from / artificial light / a cover to make / dimness dimmer / to make time slow down

VALENTE: Ideas for his poems usually come to him on long, solitary walks across the monastery’s vast stretches of woods and fields. During each walk he writes a haiku—a Japanese form of poetry usually three lines, seventeen syllables and set in nature.

BROTHER PAUL: The monastery is a poetic context to begin with, and we live in a beautiful environment, and nature is so present day in and day out. I discovered the haiku, and the haiku is such a short form I started combining it with my meditation practice:

“Above dim snow fields / lone light of Venus, lone wail of goose / pleading for spring”

You’re in God’s beauty, and it’s physical. It’s almost like a symphony flowing by me as I walk along, relaxed, and it’s a beautiful experience.

VALENTE: Occasionally over the years, he would climb to the top of this water tower until finally the abbot closed it off. Brother Paul quips, “This used to be a fun place.”

It was this little cottage, The Hermitage, where Thomas Merton spent years in isolation, praying and writing. Retreatants visit the abbey year round, seeking to slow down at a place where prayer is the main form of activity.

BROTHER PAUL: I think they come here seeking for quiet and, you know, an atmosphere of prayer, and maybe some seeds of wisdom, and just to see what it is to live this kind of life.

VALENTE: What purpose do you see in living the Trappist’s life in the modern world?

BROTHER PAUL: Well, I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are, so you need to shatter that. You know, somebody has to come along now and then just say listen, you know, that’s not it. That’s not what life is.

VALENTE: Forty-eight monks now live at the abbey. Once, there were more than 200. Brother Paul says many people are still attracted to the regular prayer and quiet rhythms of monastic life, but few are willing to stay.

BROTHER PAUL: I wish they would perceive the genuineness of the life. A man has to have, you know, a home and a career, and these are ways of achieving identity. Well, what we do is in a sense forsake our identity. We give up our identity to get a new identity, which really God formulates for us.

VALENTE: And yet Brother Paul says you don’t have to live in a monastery to seek what is important.

BROTHER PAUL: If you just sort of rest with what you have, be grateful for it, there again the chemistry of gratitude can transform what you have. Contemplation is simply maybe a big fat word for gratitude. To sense the presence of God in life and around me and in other people gives me a very deep gratitude.

VALENTE: Today the average age of the monks here is 70. Funerals are a regular part of life.

BROTHER PAUL: A monk lives in the presence of death, and you come here to die. You’re going to give up your whole life. If you decide to give up your whole life to Christ, well, it’s in Christ’s hand.

“Curved Walkway”: The burial ground fills with practical sounds from Tierce bell, drenching the dumb unheeding crosses. Alone I skirt around this rim of destiny, stirred by the bell… ‘til someday I’m left un-busied in this ground’s silent keep.

VALENTE: Brother Paul says that to be a monk is to live at the heart of a mystery, to live in a perpetual state of becoming. To him, that is both the power and poetry of monastic life.

BROTHER PAUL: We never get there. As Merton said, you know, if you think you have arrived you’re lost. People in the world come, you know, they come here on retreat. They ask me, “How long have you been here?” I answer as, what, another elsewhere, 52 years. But it is a fiction. How long have I been here? Excuse me, I haven’t gotten here yet.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

KATE OLSON, correspondent: On a recent Saturday morning at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, church members and neighbors gathered to hear Brother David talk about living “a spirited life.”

Church group singing: Viva, viva la musica…

OLSON: For Brother David, it is grateful living that makes everything come alive.

BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB: The practice of gratefulness that I’m concerned with is grateful living. That means every moment of your life you practice gratefulness. You practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. We forget that, and so gratefulness can help us see that, can help us realize that.

OLSON: Though Brother David acknowledges there are many things for which we cannot be grateful, he encourages people to be open to the opportunity being given in every situation.

BROTHER DAVID: We cannot be grateful for war. That’s an unmitigated evil. We cannot be grateful for exploitation, for untimely death. But we can be grateful in every situation. The key word is “opportunity.” If you catch onto that, then if we are in practice, when something comes along for which we cannot be grateful, spontaneously we will—our mind will say, “Well, what’s this the opportunity for now?” And there’s always an opportunity for something positive, usually the opportunity to learn something new, even in the worst situations, or for the opportunity to do something. If we learn of an injustice we have the opportunity to stand up and to speak up and to do something.

OLSON: During the day, people reflected on moments of ‘epiphany’ in their lives – what brother David calls mystic or peak experiences, which often include an experience of profound gratitude.

BROTHER DAVID: The mystic is not a special kind of human being, but every human being is a special kind of mystic. We all have mystic experiences, and in these peak moments, in these peak experiences, all of us have this experience of being one with all. Those are the moments in which we feel most alive, most truly ourselves.

OLSON: Grateful living is something you can practice moment by moment in your daily life, he says, and like other spiritual practices, such as Zen meditation, its goal is to live in the present moment, to see everything as “word of God.”

BROTHER DAVID: “Word” is not just vocabulary, but “word” is everything that speaks to us, and in this sense a flower can be a word that speaks to me. A poem as a whole can be a word that speaks to me, a piece of art, everything. It speaks to me. It tells me something, it tells me something about ultimate reality. That’s a mystic insight that every human being can appreciate, I think, and experience, if we only allow ourselves.

OLSON: Cultivating this aliveness in life is central to Brother David’s vocation as a monk and to his message. Born in Austria, he immigrated to the US in 1952 and joined Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.

Brother David singing: Alleluia …

OLSON: For decades he has lived part of his life as a hermit, in prayer and contemplation and writing books. The other half he travels the globe lecturing and leading retreats, helping people discover this “aliveness” in their own lives. Finding the deeply shared personal experience is at the heart of Brother David’s work in interreligious dialogue.

Brother David speaking at retreat: “…always checking it back with your own experience, always checking it back against your basic faith…”

OLSON: A pioneer in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue, he returns frequently to Tassajara, a Zen monastery in California where he lived for several years. As part of the dialogue with Buddhism, Brother David trained in Zen meditation and joined in Buddhist rituals. He says the task of interreligious dialogue today is to understand the meaning beneath the words of particular creeds or beliefs, to discover the faith that underlies these words that we all share.

BROTHER DAVID: Deep down there is only one faith that all human beings have, and that is that deep trust in life. Even our body expresses that trust in life by always taking another breath. We can’t even stop it. We can’t stop breathing. So that deep trust in life—that is what all humans share, and that expresses itself, then, in a Buddhist way, in a Christian way, and even in ways that we don’t recognize as explicitly religious. Many atheists have a deep faith. They all have that deep faith, but they express it very differently.

OLSON: Beliefs are not faith, he says. Faith is deep trust. And the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.

BROTHER DAVID: The one most frequently repeated command in the Bible is not “love your neighbor,” but “fear not.” And if there is one thing that we need in our world, if there’s one thing that we should write on our mirror and see every morning when we look into the mirror, it’s “fear not.” If we went into the day with that command deeply tattooed on our heart, “fear not,” we’d be completely different people and create a completely different world—a world of faith.

OLSON: This deep trust in life is at the heart of what he sees as “the round dance of grateful living.”

BROTHER DAVID: So we participate in this tremendous dance in which the gift comes forth from the source and through thanksgiving returns to the source, where the word comes out of the silence and through understanding returns to the silence. Gratefulness is not just saying “thank you.” It’s acting. It is being your self. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science. That is what the Bible calls “in God we live and move and have our being.”

Church group singing: “Viva, viva la musica…”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Kate Olson reporting from San Francisco.

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ROB BUNDY (Buddhist Chaplain Trainee, speaking to patient): Instead of pushing that pain away, just let it be. You are not the pain. That pain is something that doesn’t have to be who you are. Just let your breath take that pain away from you. Beautiful.

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: Rob Bundy is one of 24 Buddhist chaplains-in-training at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

BUNDY: Just breathe down into that pain.

ROLLIN: Audrey Alasia has multiple diseases of the spinal cord and is in constant pain. Rob uses the Buddhist techniques of meditation, visualization, and a focus on breathing to help ease Audrey’s suffering.

BUNDY: The pain comes and goes, right?

AUDREY ALASIA: Yes.

ROBERT CHODO JUSSEI CAMPBELL: In our practice as contemplatives, as Buddhists, as many other contemplatives do, it’s to come back to the moment. What’s happening right now? Come back to your breath. Can you breathe right now? Everything else is going on, but can you come back to the breath? Can we slow it down a little? Can we start to relax?

KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: I think one of the most important things you can do for someone is to hear their pain and how miserable they are.

CHODO CAMPBELL: Rather than “You’re going to be fine, Mom. You will be home in a couple of days, the operation was a success, bought some flowers, you know, you are going to be great. You will be back on your feet again soon.” That’s not addressing what’s happening to me right now.

ROLLIN: Chodo Campbell and Koshin Ellison, both Buddhist monks, are co-founders and directors of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which runs Beth Israel’s Buddhist chaplaincy program, the only accredited clinical program of its kind. Chodo and Koshin minister to patients themselves and train others, who are both Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Chaplains may also provide their special kind of care to patients’ families and staff. Part of the chaplain’s training consists of learning about other faith traditions. Sister Maureen Mitchell is there to answer questions about Catholicism.

BUNDY (speaking during training seminar): Is it inappropriate for me as a Buddhist to make the sign of the cross as I am helping a Catholic or praying with a Catholic?

SISTER MAUREEN MITCHELL (Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, Veterans Affairs Hospital): No, it’s not inappropriate. For you to join with the person may give them great joy. They also might think they are converting you.

ROLLIN: Rabbi Jeffrey Silberman is one of the Jewish instructors.

RABBI JEFFREY SILBERMAN (Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor, Norwalk Hospital): When do you offer direct prayer to people that you are working with?

ANNE REIGELUTH (Buddhist Chaplain Trainee): Most patients you can ask them just would you like prayer, and they will tell you.

(Praying at patient’s bedside): Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, may Anne be at ease. May she be free of all pain and suffering.

ROLLIN: As part of the medical team, chaplains often provide insight about the spiritual needs of patients. Buddhists relate to patients in a non-theistic way.

CHODO CAMPBELL: Many chaplains coming into a hospital, they are coming from a theology, and they are coming from a doctrine, that this is what you do, this is how you tend to the sick. You give them the sacraments; you give them the last rites, whatever it is. For us, we are coming in from a place of just being present to whatever is arising in the moment.

KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: I was training with other seminarians of Christian or Jewish tradition and sometimes their theologies would be an obstacle in connecting to a patient, because they had ideas about, and moralistic views from their tradition.

ROLLIN: Patients usually request chaplains of their own religion, but Buddhists tend to go everywhere, although Chodo has found that not every patient welcomes him at the start.

CHODO CAMPBELL: I knocked on the door, and I said, “Hi, Mr …. I’m the chaplain on the floor.” And then, “Are you a Jew?” I said, “No.” He said, “Get out!” And I said, “Okay.” He said, “Where are you going?” “I’m leaving. You told me to get out.” “He said, “Get back in here,” and I sat down and he said, “So what are you?” And I said, “I’m a Buddhist,” and he said, “Really? Tell me,” and this was the beginning of the most wonderful relationship I had with many patients in this hospital.

BETTY ROLLIN: Chaplain services of any kind are not covered by insurance. Hospitals usually pay for them, but they do not pay for Buddhist chaplains, who are privately funded. Buddhist interns are not paid at all. Paid or not, the Buddhist chaplains get a lot of appreciation not only from patients, but from staff.

SHIRLEY ESCALA, RN (Patient Care Services, Oncology, Beth Israel Medical Center): When you have nurses who are so busy and who are taking care of cancer patients, or even in the CCU, patients who have just had heart attacks or are in hypertensive crisis, and sometimes you have a patient who just wants to sit and talk, and my nurses do the best they can, but they don’t always have the time. So this is another way to support a patient that’s just incredibly valuable, and they’re able to make them look at things in a contemplative way, being present in the moment, and that helps calm, relax. It brings peace.

ELAINE MESZAROS, RN (Clinical Nurse Specialist, Oncology, Beth Israel Medical Center): If they are calm as we are trying to treat them, they actually get better sooner in terms of their outlook.

CHODO CAMPBELL (praying with patient): I pray that you watch over him…

ROLLIN: Hospitals don’t need Buddhists, but they provide something that more and more hospitals are unable to give to patients—time and loving attention.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in New York.

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KATE OLSON, correspondent: It’s early morning along the Pacific Coast. Norman Fischer, a Buddhist priest who’s been teaching meditation for over three decades, opens a day of silent meditation for practitioners of Zen Buddhism.

NORMAN FISCHER (speaking to group): Thank you all for coming, and I hope that everybody has a good day, a peaceful day, a day in which whatever needs to arise in your heart will do so.

OLSON: Other days, Fischer is at Google in Silicon Valley offering the same meditation practice to employees participating in a class called “Search Inside Yourself.”

FISCHER (speaking to class): Lengthen the spine, open the chest, and let your body pull itself up.

OLSON: Or he may be at a Jewish contemplative retreat sharing the practice with Jews seeking to experience their own faith tradition more deeply.

FISCHER (speaking to retreat): The practice that we’re doing on our cushions is fundamentally the practice of just feeling our life.

OLSON: The various hats that Fischer wears are part of his effort to help enrich everyday life experience by sharing the spirit and practice of Zen with the world.

FISCHER: If you really do the meditation practice and you continue that over time, your life really changes. You really have a sense of purpose, you really have a much greater sense of connection to other people, and loving kindness and interest in others and wanting to help others. Nothing makes us feel better about our own lives than that.

OLSON: At Google, Fischer is helping employees increase their so-called emotional intelligence on the job. Since the class began just over two years ago, close to 600 employees have taken it with the full blessing of management.

FISCHER: At Google it’s very explicit. Our brief is let’s get smarter about our feelings and emotions. Let’s go deeper than we usually go for the purpose of getting closer to ourselves and being able to be more empathetic and more understanding of others, and that’s the whole realm of emotional intelligence. There is no better technique or practice for going into and working through and really understanding our heart and the hearts of others than meditation practice.

OLSON: Developing emotional intelligence is not a cognitive process, Fischer says. Understanding the heart calls for another way.

FISCHER: This doesn’t work by thought and will. It doesn’t disregard thought and will, but thought and will are not the engine that makes this go. The engine that makes this go is taking a step back and trusting the body, trusting the breath, trusting the heart. We’re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort.

So the practice really works with sitting down, returning awareness to the body, returning awareness to the breath. It usually involves sitting up straight and opening up the body and lifting the body so that the breath can be unrestrained. And then returning the mind to the present moment of being alive, which is anchored in the breath, in the body.

Then, of course, other things happen. You have thoughts, you have feelings. You might have a pain, an ache, visions, memories, reflections. All these things arise, but instead of applying yourself to them and getting entangled in them, you just bear witness to it, let it go, come back to the breathing and the body, and what happens is you release a whole lot of stuff in yourself. A whole new process comes into being that would not have been there if you were always fixing and choosing and doing and making. This way you’re allowing something to take place within your heart.

OLSON: Fischer says the meditation practice, which includes meditative walking, is not an escape from difficult or painful emotions and negative thoughts, but a way to be present, and not attached, to whatever arises. This opens a whole new way of seeing oneself and others.

FISCHER (speaking to class at Google): I begin to notice others are rather like me and I’m rather like them. There’s not so much difference, you know. I’m scared. Well, probably they are too. I have yearnings or longings. Well, maybe they do too. So maybe there’s more of a felt sense, not a theoretical sense, but a felt sense of actual kinship.

OLSON: And this has implications that go beyond working more effectively for a company.

FISCHER: You end up coming to a place where it becomes more and more difficult to be harmful to others. It becomes more and more difficult not to be kind, more and more difficult to push for a result and not notice the consequences.

OLSON: At the Jewish retreat, Fischer teaches meditation to help Jews experience their own faith more deeply. He draws on traditional Jewish language and imagery in his teaching, such as Jacob’s ladder.

FISCHER (speaking to retreat group): A ladder rooted in the earth and stretching up toward heaven—that’s the human body. That’s the spine is that ladder.

OLSON: Fischer, who is a practicing Jew, feels much of the teaching about Judaism today doesn’t do enough to support a personal connection with God. Meditation not only deepens this relationship but helps one see God in everything, as he says the Torah teaches.

FISCHER: When we sit we recognize the crucial, divine importance of absolutely everything that arises—every thought, every feeling, every breath, every unspeakable, unnameable impulse. But also we recognize the ultimate importance of the others—of the sky, of all the sounds inside and outside the room. As the mind becomes a little more quiet the sacredness of everything within and without becomes clear to us.

OLSON: So how can a practice from Zen Buddhism, a tradition that does not speak of God, help practitioners from a tradition where God is central?

FISCHER: Buddhism in general is not committed to God or no God. It’s committed to awakening. So taking this practice from Buddhism and applying it to Judaism, it’s a way to go deeper into our heart, our mind, our consciousness and in a Jewish context, when you do that I think, at the bottom, you find the divine. You find God, and there’s nothing in this practice nor is there anything in Buddhist or Zen thought that would deny this possibility.

OLSON: Fischer, who has served as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, says it’s important on the spiritual journey not to ignore the emotional realm, which is sometimes overlooked in religious practice.

FISCHER: When we think we’re going to go from, you know, everyday life straight through to the divine, leaving out maybe all the many needs and feelings and human foibles and frailties that are actually there, they need to be processed and dealt with.

(speaking to retreat group): The thing about this practice that is, to me anyway, so sweet is that we are doing it together. We’re walking the big long line all together, like one person walking.

OLSON: Wherever Fischer teaches, he says the practice is an ongoing contemplation that leads beyond the self to a deep connection and compassion for others and all life.

FISCHER: And if you stay with this practice long enough, you basically will work through all the knots and confusions that your life has sort of set up within you. The practice will help you work through that and see below, below, below, below all of that to the place where you see what’s really important to you, and what really matters to you is that you are alive, and you are alive in a world with others. You really feel like my life is a life of complete connection, and it’s a life of joyful connection and concerned connection, and then you have to act on that.

OLSON: Fischer says the practice he teaches doesn’t conflict with other faith traditions, but can be helpful to anyone on the spiritual journey, a journey he calls “to the bottom of the heart.”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Kate Olson in San Francisco.

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In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. We talked with Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt who explained why these open spaces are also sacred places.

Produced by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly production assistant Fabio Lomelino and Web producer Fred Yi

In 1996, Tom and Kitty Stoner started the TKF Foundation in Annapolis, Maryland, to create spaces that would “offer a temporary place of sanctuary, encourage reflection, provide solace, and engender peace.” The foundation has helped develop more than one hundred sites, from urban community gardens to labyrinths and healing spaces at hospitals, medical centers, churches, prisons, and correctional facilities. Each project is developed in partnership with local community leaders. Watch founder Tom Stoner and executive director Mary Wyatt explain why these open spaces are also sacred places.

November 10, 1958

…It seems to me that, as a contemplative, I do not need to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world; rather this poor world has a right to a place in my solitude….

December 22, 1961

…The question of peace is important, it seems to me, and so important that I do not believe anyone who takes his Christian faith seriously can afford to neglect it. I do not mean to say that you have to swim out to Polaris submarines carrying a banner between your teeth, but it is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate stand on the question of nuclear war. And I mean against nuclear war….

September 1962

…The illusion of America as the earthly paradise, in which everyone recovers original goodness: which becomes in fact a curious idea that prosperity itself justifies everything, is a sign of goodness, is a carte blanche to continue to be prosperous in any way feasible: and this leads to the horror that we now see: because we are prosperous, because we are successful, because we have all this amazing “know-how” (without real intelligence or moral wisdom, without even a really deep scientific spirit), we are entitled to defend ourselves by any means whatever, without any limitation, and all the more so because what we are defending is our illusion of innocence…

April 5, 1963

…It would seem that small contemplative communities are needed which, while preserving jealously their solitude and life of prayer, might also in discreet and limited ways offer opportunities for dialogue and spiritual communication with members of the surrounding society, particularly the intellectual and religious leaders, whether Christian or otherwise. There is a spiritual work of mercy which has almost become a corporal work in our time: offering to others some small share temporarily in the silence and solitude of a monastic setting.

May 7, 1963

…There is no question that the mystics are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone has….

June 9, 1965

…The more I see of it, the more I realize the absolute primacy and necessity of silent, hidden, poor, apparently fruitless prayer….

September 28, 1965

…Did I tell you that I had moved out to the woods? I came out over a month ago. Go down only once a day, for Mass and dinner, then come back. I get a little supper for myself and as I don’t like to bother with cooking or washing dishes I try to keep it as simple as possible. It is really a wonderful life, a revelation, even much better than I expected. It is so good to get back to plain natural simplicity and the bare essentials, no monkeying around with artificialities and non-essentials. It really gives a wonderful new dimension to one’s life. I didn’t realize, until I got out here, how tense and frustrated I really was in community, though of course I love the monks….I like being a hermit, and I do have real solitude. There is never anyone around in the woods expect an occasional hunter, and we are trying to persuade them to go elsewhere. It is real solitude, and just perfect.

June 6, 1967

…as far as I am concerned the question “why do you have to be a monk?” is like a question “why do you have to live in Nebraska?” I don’t know. It’s what the karma added up to, I guess. Here I am, and it would not be physically easy for me to get somewhere else, but on the other hand I have what I want: a certain amount of distance, silence, perspective, meditation, room to do the things I know I must do. I would go nuts trying to do them in a city. Is this better? Certainly only for someone who knows he has to do it this way, more or less, or something like this. But not necessarily for anyone else. I am sure you are quite right about the ordinary life etc. This is a more ordinary life than you think, and also I wonder if I am more out of life or more in it? To me, the woods are life. Of course there is a lot wrong with it. Certainly it would be wonderful to have children to look after and as you say learn from. But I know for my own part that being married would be a very difficult proposition, much too complicated. Loneliness can be terrible too, but somehow I can handle that better. I’m only saying that is the kind of compromise with life that I have ended up with, and not making out it is wonderful: but it is what I can handle. More or less…

Midsummer 1968

…I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical change. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another….But the problems of man can never be solved by political means alone. Over and over again the Church has said that the forgetfulness of God and of prayer are at the root of our trouble. This has been reduced to a cliché. But it is nevertheless true. And I realize more and more that in my own vocation what matters is not comment, not statements of opinion, not judgments, but prayer. Let us pray for one another and try in everything to do what God asks of us.