monastic holiness, the best possible type. But there are graces and graces and graces of monastic vocation and Christian experience, and she represents, I think, a very important strand in our monastic tradition, but by no means the only one. This is another thing, the mystery of Christ is so incredibly vast. It's that it takes in practically everything. And that's what the word Catholic means, kataholon, according to the whole. So it just draws everything together in the unity of Christ. And I'm thinking of my own evidence. whose personal spirituality is really extremely austere, and he loves Colorado, and he speaks a great deal about God's presence by means of his ancestors and things like that. And Father Timothy told us that when he was giving a conference down in one of our South American communities of Trappist teens, you know, this very austere interior

[01:04]

solitude and interior poverty, and so forth. At the end of it, the abbess, well, if that's your spirituality, you can have it, but we go into this more vibrant kind of joyful. And I think both of those attitudes are perfectly valid. So I thought, before I get to Alice's death, I'd just read a poem about a man whom I think represents an absolutely wonderful type of monastic tradition. which might be meaningful for some of us, and to our old father, Stephen, whom I miss so much. And when I came to the monastery, he was already really quite old, and obviously in his second childhood, except a number of the brethren who knew him said he had never gotten out of his first childhood. But in those days, we used to have all of our sermons in chapter. We never had any homilies or anything in church during the liturgy.

[02:06]

And so the priest used to take turns with their homilies and they couldn't go beyond a half an hour. And in the old days, before I came, there used to be strict rules about you had to have an exhortium, you had to have at least one quotation from St. Bernard, you had to have one paragraph in which you turned to our Blessed Mother and had a prayer to Our Lady, and you had to have a certain kind of prorogation, and you got proclaimed in the chapter of Paul if you didn't fulfill all justice. But Father Stevens, the last sermon I heard him preach—I only heard him preach a couple They were all alike. I had no reference whatsoever to the feast day that was being celebrated. But he would tell stories, edifying and not so edifying stories, about his days back in the marines in the early part of the century. See, I didn't even know that we had invaded Nicaragua. But I remember he was telling me about how he gets in the gunboat and he dashes across the sand with all of the other

[03:08]

And this is typical of Father Stephen, then he suddenly realized he had left his gun in the boat. And there are wonderful stories about the mascot of his barracks, which was a big gray kangaroo of all things. All of this I heard about in the chapter room on the Feast of the Blessed Trinity. He loved, he just absolutely passionately loved flowers. And Don James created a special job for him. He made him what he called guardian of the wayside shrines. We didn't have any real wayside shrines. Well, this gave our father, Stephen, an excuse to grow flowers and things like that. And then he would make this big bouquet when our families would come. And then he would sneak out without permission to the gatehouse and rush into the room and flood my mother's lair with an enormous bouquet of flowers. Well, let me just begin reading.

[04:13]

And so I think you'd recognize this as a real monk, a man of such simplicity. And I have to explain when he died. He died in his little plot of ground where he had dug a little trench to plant some seeds. I think he had either a stroke or a heart attack. So he died amidst his flowers. Oh, he was so funny. I remember he used to, Tom James used to distribute the work in the afternoon. And Father Stephen would be there with some special request. And I remember one day he was trying to whittle a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes out of Dom James. And he said, well, Father, it's only going to cost $125. And Dom James gave him some kind of evasive answer as usual, which, of course, Father Stephen took as a yes, an affirmative answer. And I never will forget, Don James gave him this evasive answer, and Father Stephen turns around and pees out, and he whispers aloud what he should have done.

[05:18]

He says, ha ha, it's really going to cost $400. So as Teresa of Avila used to say, if you don't have one in the community, you should go out and get one. This is an elegy for Father Stephen written by Father Lewis. And for me, it's especially touching because Father Lewis wrote it at a time when he was writing these, I thought at the time, rather stupid anti-poems. You know, these kind of poems of the absurd. And all of a sudden, something happens that moves Father Lewis deeply. And then there's this beautiful, really deep poetic response that comes out. And maybe some of the youngsters might not understand the opening lines, the terminology. Maybe the monology Do you know what the monology is?

[06:19]

It's the book that used to be read at the beginning of the chapter with a list of saints for the coming day, and we had it read in the refectory through the list of Cistercian saints who were being venerated on that particular day. Maybe the monology, until today, has found no fitting word to describe you, confessor of exotic roses, martyr of unbelievable gardens. Whom we will always remember as a tender-hearted, care-worn, generous, unsteady cliff, lurching in the cloister like a friendly freight train to some uncertain station. Master of a sudden enthusiastic gift in an avalanche of flower catalogues and boundless love. sometimes a little dangerous at corners, vainly trying to smuggle some enormous and perfect bouquet to a side altar in the sleeves of your cowl.

[07:30]

You see, in those days we weren't allowed to have flowers in the church, except under very special circumstances. So Father Stephen was always sneaking flowers. and to the church to put up the altar of Our Lady on the sleeve of this big cow. You all knew what he was up to. Now this tells about his death. In the dark before dawn, on the day of your burial, a big truck with lights moved like a battle cruiser toward the gate, past her abandoned and silent garden. front entrance works, the delivery trucks went into an entrance down an alley in front of the monastery, and that's where Father Stephen had his garden. So, this big truck with lights moved like a battle cruiser towards the gate.

[08:31]

The pastor abandoned the silent garden. The brief glare lit up the grottoes, pyramids, and presences one by one. Then the gate swung to, and clattered shut in the giant lights, and everything was gone, as if Leviathan, hot on the scent of some other blood, had passed you by, and had never saw you. hiding among the flowers. And that is so incredibly typical of our Father Stephen, you know, this big truck that represents the monster Leviathan and everything, just surging out as prey, and there's Father Stephen, hidden, simplicity, and absolutely overlooked. And so I think this is the type of sanctity that we have in our monastic tradition too. A simple, wonderful people who have a kind of childlike purity and aren't involved maybe in the big dramatic things of life, have no particularly great type of spirituality that you could identify.

[09:46]

but just have returned to a kind of a real innocence and are deep in the mystery of Christ without their even being aware of it, maybe themselves. So, Leviathan just passes them by, and he never sees them hiding away among the flowers. So, that's a very valid strand of Arthur's tradition and Benedictine tradition, too. But to get back to Alistair. There's a terrible description of her now and her state of leprosy. She's literally rotted away. She has a somewhat morbid sense of humor, I guess. She quotes lines from the Song of Songs about her condition. Now, I don't know that much about leprosy, but it describes her hands as being like wooden, and like bark, you know, the bark is peeled away, and just a terrible condition.

[10:48]

She was accustomed to sing in transports of joy, my hand for the work of the turner's laugh, full of blue flowers. The skin of the chest, head, and arms was equally similar to the bark of a tree, bearing its various furs from excessive dryness. The legs were quite like an ox calf after it had had its skin removed, and they and also the feet were swollen. From her body, flesh and pus flowed abundantly. And then it speaks about her blindness. So not one member did she retain still restful, not one still unpossessed by infirmity except for this one, her tongue. With her tongue, or as long as she was able, she ceaselessly chanted praises to God. And, you know, just a theme of praise is something that you can spend a couple of retreats on.

[11:51]

This is one of the things, you know, that we really miss nowadays. It's a little problematic, especially in communities where people are really intent on, say, contemplative prayer. or the things of the Spirit, or are interested in Eastern techniques for a good reason. Because their attention is so much centered on themselves. But in the medieval tradition, It was very clear that there was a relationship between God and us, but God was the determining starting point. And when you get to the Renaissance, it's man the measure of the universe, and God almost as a means of man's perfection. And the Middle Ages, maybe the tendency of the really authentic Christian tradition, was not so much centered on our own perfection as just on recognizing God's goodness and God's mercy, and more leaving, as Tom Damascus would say, a particular degree of our perfection up to God.

[13:02]

And I remember Damdasus being somewhat irritated because among the many hundreds of people we had when he gave us our retreats, he said that there were a couple who expected him to tell them exactly where they were in their spiritual ascent, which mansion they had entered into, according to Ray's structure. And he was just constitutionally opposed to any counting in any detail like that. And rightly so. At any rate, now, here is Alice able to praise God in this incredible situation. And I just, it's so wonderful when you find a real community of praise. But it's nothing that's the least bit superficial. You know, so many of our songs now are hymns and contemporary liturgical music. It's just filled with these kind of superficial formulas of praise, it seems, sometimes. Now, when you can praise God in the midst of all the things that are happening, and the horrors of, you know, the wars, and the decline of our culture, and the deaths of people from AIDS, and the inner cities, and the violence, and everything, you really have to really think about this, and still God has to be praised.

[14:22]

I won't read the text from Thornton Wilder, but in a strange and wonderful early novel of his called Kabbalah, he has some flashbacks. He's writing as a young college student or postgraduate when he got a scholarship in Rome in, I think, a school of archaeology. And so he wrote about his various experiences in Rome, but conflating with his present experiences a lot of things from history, from the past. So you really don't know what period you're in. And he tells in one episode about he and a friend of his visiting a dying English poet who lives near the Spanish steppes, actually on the Spanish steppes. And so it's a poet who's very poor, and he's being taken care of by a guy named Francis. So they go just to pay a brief visit to this dying poet, and he's dying of TB.

[15:26]

And Francis is out the way, so they walk into the room, and they see, you know, the room bandages and handkerchiefs and cloths just covered with blood that he's spit up, and this oppressive, nauseous smell. And so they introduced themselves, and of course, you know right away that it's the poet Keats, who died of TB in Rome, and his little house is still there as a little museum right on the Spanish steps. And so they begin talking. And Thornton Wilder asks him, is there anything I can get you or any books that you might like? And Keats replies, well, anything. And then he says, well, what specifically? And Keats says, well, perhaps Chapman's Homer. And then the American, Thornton Wilder says, oh, but Chapman, he's not really a translator. And then Keats breaks out into tears suddenly.

[16:32]

And all of a sudden, Thornton Wilder realizes that he's hurt this dying man. And what this dying man really wants, in all of this misery, And in all of the horror that comes from the fact that he's dying before he's an established poet, before he's recognized, and just at the point when he felt he was going to begin his real writing, at this point he has to die. And what he wants to hear before he passes out of this fearful human existence, if things praised. And so then in Fortune Wilder it just begins talking about this and that and just praising life and it's just absolutely beautiful. And then only then after that passage Keith says, upon my tombstone you write, My name was written in water." And that's what you read on his tombstone now. And then Fortin Wilder says, when I came back a few weeks later, he was dead.

[17:38]

And only then did his name become well known in all places. But this thirst, out of all of this misery and this existence, to hear things praised. And this takes insight, and it takes courage. There's another book of Thorson Wilder's, which is an early work, if I can find it, which I love very much. It's called The Woman of Andros. And it's based on a Latin play by Terence, but it gives it a new twist. Now, the island where this woman lives is actually a place called Chios, I think, and she comes from a different island, so she's an outsider, someone who's not accepted, and also the village or the town on this island is just filled with kind of bourgeois ordinary people like the families in our town.

[18:42]

You know, good people basically, but they have their little businesses and their family concerns and they're worried about getting the daughters married and the boys established in business and things like that. So they're bound up in a kind of a material type of experience. And she's an outsider. And also, she's what they called a hetera, which was not a prostitute, but a woman, okay, who was very cultivated, and she would gather intellectual people around her, and youngsters, and so forth, and read the great poetry, and the dramas, and so forth. But so here she is, having an influence, particularly on the young men of the island, And she's a total outsider. She's an incredibly wonderful woman. Her name is Crisis. So, for example, this is one of the stories she tells, just like the story about Emily in our town, about the hero who's able, after his death, to return to Earth and be with his family for one brief time.

[19:46]

And suddenly the hero saw that the living, too, are dead. And that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure. For our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment. That's the question of love. And not an hour had gone by before the hero, who was both watching life and living it, called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream that God heard him But before he left, he fell upon the ground and kissed the foil of the world that is too dear to be realized." And then the text goes on. It was with such eyes that Pamphilius, this young man, who comes from this merchant family, and whose father and mother wanted him to get married off and so forth, but he was just trying to find the meaning of life and was floundering around. It was with such eyes that Pamphilius now saw his father pass into the house and that he had seen his mother moving about, covering the fire and going about the last tasks of the day.

[20:54]

And it was in the light of that story that his eyes had been opened to the secret life of his parents' minds. It seemed suddenly as though he saw behind the contentment and the daily talkativeness into the life of their hearts. Empty, revined, pathetic, and enduring. It was Crisis's reiterated theory of life, she's the woman who's dying, dying of cancer. It was Crisis's reiterated theory of life that all human beings, save a few mysterious exceptions who seem to be in possession of some secret from the gods, those the mystics, the saints, you might say, the poets, the visionaries, That all human beings except these merely endured the slow misery of existence, hiding as best they could their consternation that life had no wonderful surprises after all, and that its most difficult burden was the incommunicability of love.

[22:03]

To have a love that you can't manifest and communicate. Certainly that explained the humorous sadness of his father and the dreadful affection of his mother. And now, as his father passed him in the courtyard, this interpretation shook him more forcibly than ever. What can one do for them? What, to be equal to them, can one do for oneself? He was twenty-five already, that is, no longer a young man. He would soon be a husband and a father, a condition he did not invest with any glamour. He would soon be the head of this household and this farm. He would soon be old. Time would have flowed by him like a sigh, with no plan made, no rules set, no strategy devised that would have taught him how to save these others and himself from the creeping gray, from the too easily accepted frustration.

[23:05]

How does one live? He asked the bright sky. What does one do first? And you know, for those who are sensitive in contemporary society, things haven't changed very much, have they? Actually, this immersion in a life that we don't understand, and there's just no strategy of life, no plans made, and death coming, and what does it all mean? Well, a lot of things happen. On the last page, after young Pamphilius has lost everything, the woman he loved, the baby that was stillborn, that's okay, so that's just everything. He learned from this woman, Christus, to accept all things. When she was dying, she told him, perhaps we shall one day meet beyond life, when all these pains shall have been removed. I think the gods have some mystery still in store for us.

[24:09]

But if we do not, let me say now, and her hands opened and closed upon the cloths that covered her, I want to say to someone that, gosh, I have known the worst that the world can do to me. And that nevertheless, I praise the world and all living. That's a quotation straight from Tovet. I praise the world and all living. All that is, is well. Remember someday. Remember me as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark, and you likewise." The gods have some deep mistruth in store for us. Then on the very last page, The same paragraph that this wonderful work opens with, just a description of the geography. On the sea the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high pastures the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him.

[25:19]

On the hills the long dried stream beds began to fill again, and the noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones in the way filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds, the moon forward radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking mountains. And in the east, the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called holy. and that even then was preparing its precious burden. So this novel of classical antiquity, you know, stands with a pointing towards the incarnation. And this suggestion, that meaning of all of this, is going to find some kind of fulfillment when God becomes man and takes all of this on himself. And so the answer to, you know, how does one live?

[26:22]

What does one do first? You know, for us Christians, it's so ridiculously simple, in a way, because the answer has been given us in Christ. Jesus has taken the initiative. God has taken the initiative. His love is prior. And so, after all this wonderful, you know, period of classical antiquity about this waiting and the straining, towards the fulfillment in the Incarnation. We're the ones who live after this. And we should be able to rejoice with so much optimism and joy, and live in this new age, in this economy, and be able, really, to praise. If this woman, Crisis, you know, could praise God for the dark and the bright in that way, how much more, you know, we—well, for what, anyway, one of my criteria, I guess, when I'm with at least a superstitious immunity is, if there's a spirit of joy and praise in that community, no matter what the suffering and the pain and the historical circumstances, that's a community that's really living the mystery of Christ in a very deep way.

[27:30]

Okay, so now, Alice. It's now the vigil of the Feast of St. Barnabas. And she's anointed with holy oil and she knows this is the day she's going to die. So it's getting towards Compton and she says to the young nun who's sitting next to her bed, she says, it's on this day, or rather it's the young nun who says, this is the day, Friday, on which the Son of God was handed over for our redemption and was scourged and was condemned to crucifixion. And then, this is the eve of St. Berenice's Day, and as she said this, then Alice says, and kindled with an even deeper desire, she answered her in this way, Tomorrow, towards dawn, I shall go forth from this world. And in Latin, so simple and so beautiful. And it happened exactly as she said.

[28:32]

After Compton, the Virgin of God, Like a bride adorned with the jewels, a bride adorned with the jewels and ready for the nuptials, hastened towards the gate of death. and saying farewell to her friends." That's interesting. She doesn't say to her sisters or to the other nuns. These are her friends, the way Jesus calls us friends. That's one of the most beautiful words. Maybe sometime you can have some conferences on what it means to be a friend. Okay? Saying farewell to her friends, she commended her soul to God and to their prayers. And then towards dawn, as though slumbering and taking her rest, and that's straight from Psalm 3, I shall lie down and take my rest, a psalm which is interpreted of Jesus' death and burial and then his resurrection.

[29:36]

As though slumbering and taking her rest, she lay back in her little bed, lector lo suo, and this is contemplative terminology, you know, St. Gregory the Great points out that the bride in the Song of Songs doesn't have a bed, but a little bed, a narrow bed, because this is the bed of contemplation. It has a certain constriction about it, but it opens up into something wonderful. So in monastic literature, it's always a lectulus rather than just a plain old bed. Lying back on her little bed, At the rising of the sun, and that's straight from the Gospels, this is the Christ, the Son of Justice, with a gentle sigh, she breathed forth the Spirit. The same terminology that we find in the Gospels about the death of Jesus. And so this takes place towards the dawn, when Jesus rises from the dead.

[30:40]

And so it's clear that the author is placing the death of Alice in the context of the death of Jesus. And the resurrection of Jesus is towards dawn. And the sun is rising. And this has got to be true of the deaths of absolutely every one of us. We've had dozens of monks die since I've been in Gethsemane. And I guess I can truly say that there are just no two deaths that I would say are exactly alike. There's many deaths, Christian deaths, as there are individuals. And I guess to don't talk very much about Christian death and monastic communities. I remember how wonderful he was with us, how he spoke what a beautiful thing it is when a monk dies, that you're going to be judged by the same God who died for you, who redeemed you. And you judge if you fail. And that is nothing in our lives. worry about that's been done under obedience and with faith and with love.

[31:47]

The only things for which God can judge us are the things that are contrary to love, contrary to obedience, contrary to faith. And so that to die as a Christian, as a monk, really means just to give oneself over wholly to this descending love of God. So this is from Alice. So she put off the tunic of mortality and misery, and donned the tunic of immortality and glory, full of happiness and joy. So she breathed forth her spirit on the 11th day of June, towards the rising of the sun, as I have said, before prime, in the year of the Lord, 1250. And then there's a little epilogue, which will be marvelous if you know your liturgical rites for the burial of a dead. The response to that was sung, and you had it in your monastic ritual too, was the response, subvenite sancti dei, O come, all you saints of the Lord.

[32:52]

And then there's an enumeration of patriarchs and the angels and so forth. So you're asking the court of heaven to come and escort the soul that has just departed from the body, to the heavenly Jerusalem, into the heavenly Jerusalem before the throne of God. Okay, so get in your mind this image of this heavenly cortege with all of the patriarchs and everyone coming out to meet Alice, to take her into the holy city where the Lord Jesus is going to be waiting to welcome her. Well, what these two people see is something rather different. It's Jesus himself with our Blessed Mother who is heading the procession that comes out from the heavenly Jerusalem to welcome Alice. She doesn't have to wait to find him inside the heavenly Jerusalem. He takes the initiative to come forth himself from the Holy City. I mean, this is just a beautiful little doubtful point. And so then he welcomes her and he embraces her and he says, well done, my daughter, and you'll receive the crown of martyrs and the crown of virginity, and I'm going to place you now with the fair of him.

[34:08]

And remember, the hierarchy of the angelic spirits differs from those who are closest to the throne of God, and whose essence it is just to burn with the praise of God the whole being, is to witness and stand before God, and just to be consumed without ever being consumed for the love of God. For all of this fire and light and glory now, she has been absolutely transformed, and she has become herself. She has this living flame. to God's glory and God's praise. And so it's just an absolutely wonderful, wonderful life. I guess beyond us all. But this type of spirituality, I think, is something that's very valid. for our communities to this day, to think of being this living flame of praise and love that stands before God forever and ever, and to have gone so deep into the mystery of Christ and to be identified with him. See, in the monastic set-up and monastic spirituality in the 12th century,

[35:11]

Their idea of contemplation was somewhat different, maybe, from what we read in a lot of contemporary books on prayer and contemplation. For them, they had a funny idea about the nature of sense knowledge. For them, the idea, for example, of seeing something is that a ray of light goes out from our eye and it hits the object that we're looking at and it returns to us and it creates within us. the likeness of the reality that we see outside us. So that if we hear something, we create what's outside us inside us. If we see something, we have within us that which we're looking at. So if the object of your contemplation is the glory of God, That means we receive the glory of God within us, and it transforms us. And so, the object of their contemplation would be, for example, the passion of Jesus.

[36:14]

And this means that they have that reality within the interior, and it's something that really transforms them. And so, when they're contemplating, and it's based on the Word of God, And it's not some kind of blanking out in a Zen type of experience or a concentration on one's inner faculties as an objective contact with Christ in his mysteries in such a way that you interiorize it and make it your own. And this has a transforming influence on Europe. And so when these people, for example, are just absorbed by the passion of our Lord, you shouldn't think that it's any kind of a gloomy type of spirituality, unless you think that the mystery of Christ is something that's extremely gloomy. It's something that's extremely profound. But we don't choose. you know, the object of our contemplation all the time. It's God who chooses it for us and disposes it for us.

[37:15]

So we just have to pray the way God gives us the grace of praying. And if we're not called, if we're more like our Father Steve, to be hiding there among the flowers, just praise the Lord and just live that type of monastic experience to the full. But I have a suspicion that in a modern culture, in modern conditions now. There is an enormous amount of suffering going on that needs to be redeemed. And that more and more people within the cloister are going to be experiencing the sort of thing that poor people have to experience outside the cloister in a kind of way that they don't understand and can't. And somehow we're part of this redeeming process. I'm sorry I'm just floundering all around. It's something just too deep to express in very clear terms. But I remember, for example, when I went to Lesur for just a half a day one time many years ago, and I just went into the crypt where they were showing a documentary of Thierry and a very well done documentary.

[38:28]

And in one part of it, they put on the screen photographs of important people in French culture and civilization towards the end of the 19th century, when Little Flower was living. And people like Paul Claudel before his conversion, when he was still a pagan, no faith in God or anything. And important musicians and poets, government figures, who didn't have the faith. And then they suggest with the pictures of Therese that when she went through her last year and a half, When she had the experience, it was as if she said she didn't have the faith. Everything was as if. She had the acne as if she loved God, as if she believed in God. That this poor little innocent Norman bourgeois girl in the cloister, you know, who had never had any contact with these things, atheism, agnosticism, anti-clericalism,

[39:30]

and all the horrible things typical of the French culture of the time, that she was experiencing what those people outside were experiencing. But in the final analysis, by saying, shame, I love. It's God's love for her and her love for God that finally triumphs over everything and all the temptations to infidelity. One of her sisters was praying like mad that she would die without having lost her faith. It just seemed to be touch and go for a while. It was so terrible, so heart-wrenching. And I think that type of experience can affect people sometimes a bit in the cloister. So, at any rate, we just have to be in the Glorister, in the heart of the mystery of Christ, and just love the whole world passionately, and as much as God gives us the possibility of doing so. And, you know, Dom Odekar-Fell, whom all of you, I'm sure, know about, you know how much he loved classical antiquity, and I'm just translating clumsily from the German,

[40:35]

an inscription, a funeral inscription, that he talks about in one of his essays. And so this is an inscription of a man whose wife has died, and the woman's name is Paulina, and the man's name, her husband, is Vecius Agoris Praetextatus, almost as nice a name as Grisogonus. And anyway, the funeral inscription says, that her husband had allowed her to be initiated into all of the mystery religions in his presence. And the inscription reads, in your presence, I was initiated into all the mysteries. So, a second funeral stone explains that she was initiated in Eleusis, in Greece, to the god Bacchus, to the goddess Ceres and Cora. and Laena to the god Liber, to Ceres and Chora again, and Aegina to the demons.

[41:43]

And then further, she had received the Taurobolium, a kind of baptism in the blood of a bull. And she was a devotee of Isis, and of Hierophant, a kind of a priestess of the goddess Hecate. And so here is this poor woman, I think with probably great sincerity, just floundering around, looking for some kind of meaning in her life and her redemption, and all of these mystery cults. And of course, you know, for us, we realize that whatever was good and noble in these mystery cultures handed to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the mystery of Christ, which we may have with a certain fullness even now. So, my brethren, we should just be so happy that God's love has brought us all together here in Christ and put us where the action is real and where our lives are filled with meaningfulness and where we can be in contact with the whole world.

[42:46]

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

[43:54]

I've been baptized three times and sometimes I don't know whether any of them have taken. But at any rate, when I was received into the church, I just wanted to go all the way. And I didn't know anything about religious life, you know, really about monasticism. But the priest who received me said I'd have to wait a year. And so I waited a year and then headed straight for the monastery. And thank God, it was so crowded with postulants and novices, I managed to slide in. Under the door, they were taking just anyone in those days. And so it's quite wonderful. So I've been there since. And Don D'Amicous was just one of the greatest, greatest that anyone could have received there. So God bless them. Now, so we're leaving about 5 or 6 o'clock.

[44:56]

@Transcribed_v004
@Text_v004
@Score_JJ