Looks like Paradise out my window. Pure blue sky; silvery leaves flickering in the late afternoon sun, an occasional human voice wafted across the lawn from a small group having a picnic on the monastery lawn. I am at Holy Spirit Abbey outside of Atlanta Georgia and it's good to be here! I am responsible for over-seeing the Junior Seminar held here from May 2 to May 14—an intensive formation program for monks and nuns in Simple Vows. If a Novice represents monastic childhood, Juniors might be thought of as having grown into their adolescence as Cistercians. These are serious men and women of prayer—twenty one of them from seventeen U.S. Trappist monasteries, studying scripture together for the next two weeks. Two were born in Vietnam, two in Peru, one in Wales, another in Korea, and one is here from Nigeria. It was remarkable to me to see these men and women, so different from one another, seated in choir this morning at Vigils, shoulder to shoulder. It was 4:00 in the morning; all were sitting attentive and very still as the scripture was read by a monk from the lectern. Then the lights went out for a period of meditation. For the next thirty minutes, I watched their quiet figures barely visible in the light cast into the church from the tabernacle. How still they were! I was deeply moved to reflect how vastly different our lives prior to the monastery have been, and yet, at the sounding of a bell, we can all sit side by side, serene and perfectly still, having arrived at the place we have sought with all our hearts since the day we were born. We are with Jesus the Lord. We have found Him in our hearts, or rather, He has found us, and in Him, we have found each other.

Father Raphael