My lens is one of hope, based on six years of research and writing “The Monks of Tibhirine,” the book French director Xavier Beauvois called his “bible” for making his movie about Christian-Muslim friendship. My hope is also based on knowing the back story that goes untold in an otherwise excellent film focusing on the monks’ struggle to be true to their Trappist vows of poverty, charity, and stability when faced with their fear of a brutal death.

Some people today might say that Christian-Muslim love is an oxymoron. Yes, there are Muslims who preach hatred of the Christian West, even though fewer and fewer in the West (outside the US) are practicing or even professing Christians. There are no Muslims I have heard of who preach hatred or even disrespect for Jesus Christ, who is a much revered and sinless prophet in Islam.

There is, however, an active Christian minority that preaches hatred of Islam and regularly insults the Prophet Muhammad. Elements with political agendas on both sides benefit from blackening the other, and the media have been willing accomplices to this downward phobic spiral. “Of Gods and Men” is film that could help right perceptions.

Despite pleas in 1996 from both French and Algerian authorities to leave for a safer place when threatened by Islamic extremists, the monks remained at their remote monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains out of deep sense of commitment to their extended family of villagers who depended on them for moral, medical, and material support. Like their neighbors, the monks trembled with fear at night. They argued among themselves: does the Good Shepherd abandon his flock when the wolves come? Does a mother abandon a sick, infectious child? Does their vow of poverty allow for them to flee to safer ground when their friends cannot?

When seven of the monks were kidnapped, it was not their neighbors who did it. Instead, it was a contract job that employed a group from outside the area to take the monks away from their dangerous situation—to be traded, in effect. But something went wrong along the way. Of one thing I am certain: killing them was not the plan. If that had been the case, they would not have been schlepped around the country for two months nor would negotiations for their release have taken place. Yet for some viewers, I suspect this will be seen as simply another “bad-Muslims-kill–good-Christians” story—exactly what the abbot of the monastery feared when he wrote his last testament, read at the end of the film.

The film works very well dramatically as a struggle between faith and fear. By necessity it leaves out important and broader story components. The tenacious commitment of Abbot Christian de Chergé (played by Lambert Wilson) to serve God in Algeria had been formed in him as a soldier serving in the French army during the Algerian war for independence from 1954 to 1962, when his life was saved by a Muslim friend, an Algerian policeman named Mohammed who faced down local rebels who wanted to shoot Christian one day when they were taking a walk—a time when they would discuss their faith.

That friendship cost the Algerian his life the next day. For Christian, Mohammed’s sacrifice was a gift of love reinforcing his belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ resides in all his children. For the rebels, the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

The film doesn’t have room to tell about the seventy-plus imams who, based on the same logic, were assassinated in the 1990s for denouncing what the terrorists were doing in the name of Islam. The terrorists themselves could show respect for the monks. In a dramatic scene in the film, Saya Attia, head of the terrorist group that intruded upon the monastery on Christmas Eve 1993 with demands for medical help, apologizes to Christian for disturbing their celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Left out are the leader’s final words to Christian when he extends a hand in friendship: “We don’t consider you foreigners…you are religious.”

Nor does the viewer know that the tiny hamlet of Tibhirine was inhabited by families whose homes in the mountains had been bombed by the French during the war for independence. They had fled to the protection of the monastery, a holy place where the Christian “marabouts” (Arabic for religious teachers) sheltered them until they could build their own homes.

I have one regret about the film. It might have ended on a more positive note for Christian-Muslim relations by showing the genuine remorse of much of the Algerian population. Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers received sacks of letters from ordinary Algerians after the monks’ deaths were confirmed. The letters expressed a deep sense of solidarity with the monks as well as a sense of shame that was captured by this one: “No matter what has happened, we truly love you. You are part of us. We have failed in our duty—to protect you, to love you. Forgive us…You must accomplish your divine mission with us. I believe it is God’s plan.”

Universal fraternal love is the essence of Christianity and all true religion. Otherwise, religion degenerates into celestial nationalism. Christian himself frequently said that if religion doesn’t help us to live together, it is worthless.

The idea may seem laughably naïve in a post-9/11 world. Love, however, has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with good will, justice, empathy, and respect for others. Like their Savior, the monks’ lives were not taken. They were gifts of love.

John W. Kiser is the author of “The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria” (St. Martins Press, 2002).

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JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The Abbey of St. Benedict, founded in 1857 …

Benedictine monks praying together: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit…”

VALENTE: The abbey is located on the campus of Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Fifty-two monks live here. They lead lives of prayer and contemplation. The abbot is Barnabas Senecal. He has found a spiritual practice in photography.

ABBOT SENECAL: Taking photographs reminds me of the positive. Monastic mindfulness is pursuing what Benedict taught about being aware daily of your presence of God with you and in the world. It’s mindfulness of creation and of sharing that with others.

VALENTE: About 40 of his photographs are now on exhibit at the abbey. His photos include his fellow monks.

ABBOT SENECAL: Those who didn’t know his name call him Father Time. He was an inspiration to us—just a gracious man who also swam every day until he was 100 years old, a man of prayer, a man who came to our communal prayer even when he was 100 years old. We give thanks for a man of such character.

VALENTE: Father James Downey…

ABBOT SENECAL: Late in his life liked to read, liked to sit out on the porch and smoke his pipe. What we save is a memory of a man, a face that’s—he’s very content with life and just a wonderful smile. You know, in Benedictine life we take a vow of stability, and it means that this community is where we live out our life, even where we are buried.

Father Bruce Swift—he loves going down to Lansing to the state penitentiary twice a week, hears confessions, offers Mass for the prisoners. It’s a ministry to him, and he’ll do it until he can’t move. At some point in time his health will give way, but he’s ready to travel that road.

VALENTE: At the Vatican…

ABBOT SENECAL: We sit in silence admiring beauty, and this is beauty from centuries ago. We ought to let it influence our heart, let it be a moment of reflection and yet not be intimidated by it.

VALENTE: At St. Peter’s Basilica…

ABBOT SENECAL: They let you go on this upper balcony above the Bernini altar, so I shot through the grate into the south transept gaining a sense of depth by the size of the people. This is an amazing place where amazing grace is found by many.

VALENTE: The pews at a church in Brazil…

ABBOT SENECAL: I liked the image of light—an inviting light inviting people into the church, into prayer. There’s lots of images of light in the Scriptures. Christ the light of the world, the light that enlightens us in our hearts and minds.

VALENTE: You take a lot of photographs of children.

ABBOT SENECAL: They’re natural. They don’t have to pose. People feel that if you got everything lined up it will be good. St. Thomas talks a lot about order as reflecting God’s presence. This is a fun moment, and yet we can interpret it as a way of seeing life.

I am nourished by taking pictures. Yes, it’s a spiritual exercise in that I don’t just take a picture and store it. I will reflect on it. Entering into these moments of photograph is a conviction that I’m seeing something that I didn’t make, the other person didn’t make. It’s there, it’s there because it’s part of God’s creation.

VALENTE: A grasshopper on a leaf. He wrote this reflection on the photograph.

ABBOT SENECAL: A quick camera shot, up close, holds that beauty before me. I don’t own such beauty. No one does. It is the Creator’s forever, and mine for now, and I share it with you.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of St. Benedict in Atchison, Kansas.

Originally published October 30, 2009

“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).

“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: 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.

Lasermonks website

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.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There is a group of Benedictine nuns in Missouri who bake and sell millions of Communion wafers, small and large. But some would-be communicants complained that they are allergic to the gluten in the wheat in the nun’s wafers — the hosts, as they are known. So they could not receive Communion. For the sisters that was a challenge, as Betty Rollin reports.

BETTY ROLLIN: They are the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. They live in Clyde, Missouri, a remote — a very remote — part of the state, and what they do is pray.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: Our main work is prayer. That is what we see as our mission for the Church, for the world: to pray for the needs of people of all places of all times.

ROLLIN: They pray together five times a day, and they pray alone two-and-a-half hours a day. But that’s not all they do. The mission of the Benedictines is both to pray and to work. These sisters’ work is to bake, and they’ve been baking for nearly 100 years. Today, they are the largest religious producers of Communion wafers, shipping two million wafers a week.

Sister LYNN D’SOUZA: We as Catholics believe in the true presence of Christ in the Communion wafer, in the
wine that we use at Eucharist. In the Gospel, Jesus says those who eat my flesh and drink my blood dwell in me and I dwell in them. To receive the wafer and to receive the wine is integral to the faith life of most Catholics.

ROLLIN: But a problem arose when the sisters began to hear from some Catholic parishioners who couldn’t receive the all-important sacrament of Communion because the wafers contained wheat. They had celiac disease, a disorder which makes the gluten contained in wheat undigestable.

Sister JANE HESCHMEYER: I was working in the customer service department in the early ’90s and a woman called in and said, “Do you make hosts that have no gluten in them because I’m intolerant to gluten and I need that?” I’d never heard that before, and we certainly didn’t, because wheat has gluten in it, and that was that.

Sr. D’SOUZA: The Catholic Church requires that breads used at Eucharist contain some wheat, and this is in keeping with the tradition of the Church. It’s believed that’s what Jesus used at the Last Supper.

So the Catholic Church is saying we need a wheat bread to be used. People with celiac disease are saying, “We need a bread that has no gluten in it.” Wheat equals gluten pretty much, so that was the dilemma we were working with.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: And gradually more and more calls started coming in. So I started doing research and talked to technicians, bakers, lawyers, doctors, people who couldn’t tolerate gluten, to try to find out everything I could about it.

ROLLIN: Years later, in 1999, Sister Lynn, newly arrived at the monastery after receiving a degree in biochemistry, joined the baking effort.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I just like happened to cross Sister Jane in the kitchen one afternoon working on these breads, putting stuff together. Just because I have somewhat of a scientific background, it intrigued me as a science project-type thing. It wasn’t that I had high lofty ambitions of providing someone’s need. I just thought, oh, this is a science experiment.

ROLLIN: Given the Church’s insistence that wheat had to be in the wafer, they thought that wheat starch might be a solution, since most of the gluten is removed.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: What the scientists were telling us what we were trying to do was impossible. If you add wheat starch and water you get glue. Or if you bake it, it gets very hard, which is what we found out. It was a certain intrigue for me when they said it was impossible.

I said, “Oh, that’s a challenge!” And so, if the Holy Spirit was asking people to ask us to do it, the Holy Spirit had something in mind. There was just something in me that just said go with this thing — we could do it — although I had no idea that 12 years later I would still be doing it or trying to do it.

ROLLIN: A supporter from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took their plight to — where else — the Vatican.

Sister HESCHMEYER: He had been in Rome, and when he came back he said he had just talked to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict, and said that Cardinal Ratzinger said if the sisters in Clyde can produce this bread, we will fully support it.

ROLLIN: With that encouragement and armed with two different kinds of wheat starch supplied by the bishops, the nuns gave it one last try.

Sister HESCHMEYER: We decided to try mixing both of those together with some water, and what we came up with was like sticky goo. It stuck to our fingers.

Sr. D’SOUZA: I mean, really, it’s like we could not get it off the spoons. We tried to scrape it off the spoon to the finger. It stuck on our fingers. It was such a mess. We put a blob of it on the waffle irons we were using, and we went to clean up. We said this batch isn’t working. We are just going to start over and try something else. We had cleaned up everything, and we left some of the dough on the waffle iron, and we opened up the waffle iron and –

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Voila!

Sr. D’SOUZA: Voila! There was a bread.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was not pretty. It was a very interesting looking little bread on the plate, but it had withstood the baking process. It was intact. It was not gooey. It didn’t stick to the plate. We picked it up. I mean, for us it was beautiful

Sr. D’SOUZA: Yes

Sr. HESCHMEYER: We knew this bread had potential.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Our first reaction was to eat it.

Sr. HESCHMEYER: Yes, we have to try this, and it tasted delicious. It was light and crisp. It was just what we were looking for, we hoped.

ROLLIN: So what did that feel like?

Sr. HESCHMEYER: It was wonderful.

Sr. D’SOUZA: It was. I can see in hindsight that we were being used by God. You know, we were God’s hands, God’s instrument, and when I look back on it, I’m kind of awed.

CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE (speaking to Sr. D’Souza): And Sister, I left you all the low-gluten orders, and I think there are five new accounts that we’ve gotten today.

Sr. D’SOUZA: Oh my gosh! All right. It must be because of Easter.

ROLLIN: It is peak season for wafer production, both for the wheat variety and the now thriving low-gluten specialty. Business is booming. A patent is pending.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Clyde, Missouri.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Four years ago our correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro visited an AIDS hospice in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. This year he went back and discovered that low-cost new drugs are keeping many patients alive, and the hospice is also a museum, teaching visitors, especially young people, about AIDS causes and consequences. Nevertheless, AIDS education still has a long way to go.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Thailand’s Prabhat Namphu Buddhist monastery is an unlikely combination of two things: AIDS hospice and tourist attraction. Amid a display of cadavers, visitors — including many school kids — observe what HIV does to the human body. Beyond hospice care, the temple’s goal is to educate the public.

Abbot PHRA ALONGKOT DIKKAPANYO: I hope that this year maybe more than 300,000 people come to our temple.

DE SAM LAZARO: When we last visited in 2002, dozens were dying each month, abandoned as they were in life by families who did not even collect their remains. But that same year, Thailand began to make available the once prohibitively expensive antiretroviral or ARV drugs for AIDS.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: It has changed the whole understanding of the place. I would say it’s the “temple of life.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Michael Bassano, an American Catholic priest, is among several foreign volunteers.

Reverend MICHAEL BASSANO (Volunteer): People come here with HIV, and they sense that here they find family, acceptance, nourishment, and a willingness to keep living, and that changes the whole reality here — that it’s not just a place of people in their last days.

DE SAM LAZARO: A few patients still succumb to daunting infections, but more and more are surviving.

Some have even formed a dance troupe — testament to how ARV drugs can restore life to normal — normal, that is, as long as they stay inside the walls of the temple, which is in central Thailand city of Lopburi.

One thing has not changed.

Rev. BASSANO: This is a new man. He just came.

DE SAM LAZARO: That’s the stigma faced by AIDS patients.

Rev. BASSANO: He’s 50-years-old. His family just left him, and they came over and just dropped him off and left him here with us. When he came he was all scaly, all full of scales this morning. So now we put Vaseline all over his body, and it’s cleared up pretty well. So I wonder — we wonder why at home they didn’t take care of him.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many like this man are dropped off, their disease untended, many with tuberculosis, an infection they must survive before they are physically fit to go on to the AIDS medicines.

NOK ENG (Temple Resident, through translator): The only time I go out of here is to get my medicine. If I put a long sleeve shirt on my arms are covered and people won’t notice my scars. I’d be very uncomfortable if I wore a shirt like this one.

DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-two-year-old Nok Eng left the temple when her health improved. But she came right back in a few months. Health care was harder to find for her and her HIV-positive husband, and it was especially tough at her factory job, where people knew she was HIV-positive.

Ms. ENG (through translator): Everyday at lunch I could hear people whispering next to me, gossiping about me, being sarcastic. I just couldn’t take the criticism.

DE SAM LAZARO: Most painful, Nok’s parents, who live in a rural community, wanted little to do with her.

Ms. ENG: I told my parents that I wanted to come and visit, and they said, “Just stay where you are.” They said that I would humiliate them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Abbot Alongcot hopes the temple visitors will help improve things in a few years.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: They take their children to our temple and learn about this problem, because father, mother have not enough knowledge.

DE SAM LAZARO: Not everyone likes the temple’s approach. Mechai Viravaidya, Thailand’s best-known anti-AIDS campaigner, says it could actually promote discrimination against people with AIDS.

MECHAI VIRAVAIDYA: People go in there, they get frightened: “I’m afraid of these people; I don’t want to see because they look terrible.” And I would say the last choice would be to have a community of those living with HIV, like a leper colony.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai is best known for quirky family planning and anti-HIV campaigns that tackled the stigma against using condoms. Now, to fight stigma against AIDS, he’s taken a different approach — a program that offers HIV-positive people loans to start small businesses. It’s called “Positive Partners.”

Mr. VIRAVAIDYA: We lend money to a pair of people, one infected, the other not infected. Together they must do business. The uninfected person encourages you and also creates, tries very hard to create understanding, compassion within the village so that people know who that this person is living with HIV, have a chance on a daily basis to communicate, to listen, and somebody explaining, “Look, that person is perfectly normal. You watch, I go with him. I let him ride on the back of my bike and all these things.”

DE SAM LAZARO: In the village of Banjan, Duang Deenok accepted an invitation from her HIV-positive aunt to start a food business. She admits she was nervous at first.

DUANG DEENOK (through translator): At first everyone was pretty scared. So we went to talk to the doctor, because my auntie was taking care of all these children, feeding them. The doctor said that if we’re afraid that the children were infected, we could bring them in to get checked.

DE SAM LAZARO: Both women say they’ve been open in the community about the aunt’s HIV status.

PLAK DAMLAKO (through translator): I go to hospital, and when I see people they ask me, “Where have you been?” I tell them I was at the hospital. They ask me, “Why?” And I tell them I have AIDS. They say, “No, no, you don’t have AIDS.” I have to convince them that I have it.

DE SAM LAZARO: Over time the two women say there have been few problems with social acceptance, possibly because Plak shows no outward signs of illness. The business — fried chicken and spicy vegetables — has been brisk, and there’s only the occasional snide comment at the food stall, they say.

Ms. DEENOK (through translator): Some people say, “Hey, did you bring AIDS with you today?” When they act like this I say AIDS isn’t that easy to get. You can’t get it from the ticks on a dog. I tell them that you only get AIDS from needles and sex. Think about it. What I made here, you can eat. But if you do get AIDS, I’ll take you to where you can get medicine. Sometimes I’m just sarcastic because they’re not always nice to me.

DE SAM LAZARO: Because of awareness campaigns in the 1990s, most Thais learned how HIV is and isn’t transmitted. Thailand’s once-high HIV infection rate came down almost 90 percent through the decade. But complacency set in, and public education also tapered off, says Mechai.

Mr. VIRAVAIDYA: And because public education had died down, knowledge of HIV, to the extent to which it’s discussed, goes down and down and down. So stigma is still around and gets stronger because — for the lack of public education. So we just have to continue to do more, and that stigma with come down. But nothing works like actually seeing a person living with AIDS/HIV and getting them to have an experience with HIV people. That’s the best experience of changing attitudes.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mechai’s nongovernment agency is trying to bring that experience to schools. HIV-positive individuals spend time answering students’ questions.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN (through translator): People can tell that even though I have AIDS I’m still living my life, doing my work. I just want to tell you guys, “Don’t discriminate.”

DE SAM LAZARO: On the day we visited this rural school, the lectures were followed by frank sex education sessions for these high school students — a particularly critical group. After declining for years HIV infections among young Thais has gone upward again.

Abbot DIKKAPANYO: More than 50 percent of the new cases who are infected with HIV are the children — our children. Big problem for our country.

DE SAM LAZARO: Experts say the message [to] fear AIDS but not people with AIDS must be repeated again and again, in temples and schools, or it will get lost. Millions of Thais consume Coke and Pepsi everyday, Mechai says, but that doesn’t stop the soft drink companies from spending millions of dollars to remind them to do so.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in Lopburi, Thailand.