There is such a kind of friend in the world, you want to see once in a while. Nothing, just want to meet and chat.Francis was such a friend.I made an appointment. On weekends, I would drive an hour and a half by car and wait for him at the door when the midday service was over.After he changed his monk's robe, he asked the abbot for leave, and went to a restaurant with us to have a meal and chat. At this time, I have a sense of illusion.Why, just as the year 2000 is approaching, are we sitting here with Francis?In the dark, too many accidents that have passed by have naturally gathered together and become an inevitability at this moment.

one Twenty-seven years, said Francis.Twenty-seven years ago today, he returned to the United States from a short trip in Europe to face a life-changing event. Thirty years ago, Francis was a college student.In the 1960s, the Vietnam War and anti-Vietnam War, women's rights and sexual liberation, the black civil rights movement, hippies and rock and roll. The youngest and most promising president was assassinated, and the symphony was suddenly interrupted.Martin Luther King Jr., who advocated non-violence, was assassinated by violent members of the Ku Klux Klan.Maxim X, who advocated "necessary violence," was assassinated by black Islamic brothers who had heard his teachings.In college, professors smoke marijuana with students.When we were reading "Quotations from Chairman Mao" and believed that all the secret thoughts in our minds could be unified under one great idea, the Black Panther Party in California drove a car and bought this small book in bundles from the Chinese bookstore in San Francisco. Red books, twenty cents each.After driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, it was sold to radical students for a dollar each.After receiving the money, go back to buy, buy, and then sell, back and forth, using a typical capitalist method to make a quick profit.Then, with this profit, they buy guns.Thirty years later, the Black Panther Party who came up with the idea said on TV that he hadn't read the Little Red Book until today.

Francis was not so ferocious.Their family was workers in Philadelphia.Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, early Quaker immigrants from northern Europe, in a word, some well-meaning people.What are young people looking for in turbulent times?Francis and his friends feel that they see that there are still many weak people in society who have not been given equal opportunities; the government wants them to die in Vietnam for dubious reasons; Problem; there are so many unresolved problems, how can people around them turn a blind eye and still live happily?Francis believes that the world is hypocritical, and so is religion.In a big family that has been devout believers for generations, he deviated from the religious tradition alone.He became a hippie.

Once the ban is lifted, the young people are completely relaxed.Francis drank beer, smoked joint, wore rags and had long hair.He has girlfriends, and girlfriends are constantly changing.He went to the streets, marched, and the books he was studying well turned out to be a mess.If the past was good, the present is bad.Assuming that the past was bad, the present is good.Why, no one can tell, and no one wants to ask.Asking this question is traditional and a taboo. Why ask why?No need to ask why.Complete liberation, from reason to sensibility, does not require reason.Liberation is good, restraint is bad.What is liberated and what is restrained is irrelevant.After completely relaxing, he, like everyone else, bumped into nothingness.

We prefer to bring hippies and red guards together.In this way, we are more in line with the trend of the times and more idealistic.There are ups and downs in the great turmoil, and there are all kinds of extremists.But in general, the hippies advocated the liberation of individuality, while the Red Guards emphasized loyalty to the leader.The slutty hippies have a kind of goodness, and there is no sadism in the logic of the hippies.Therefore, after the movement, respect for civil rights, caring for vulnerable groups and individuals, and pacifism naturally became a common appeal in society.The Red Guards in military uniforms are to eliminate "enemies" for the class. During the movement, killing relatives with righteousness, being cruel and ruthless to "enemies", eliminating imperialist revisionists, and even looking forward to the outbreak of a world war have become the keynote of society.

Finally, the seventies came.Nixon began to withdraw troops from Vietnam.The "Civil Rights Act", which was supported by successive presidents starting from Truman to varying degrees, finally began to be implemented under President Johnson.One by one, the demands of the civil rights movement fell into the bill.The blacks began to have the protection of the "Civil Rights Act", and a little bit of understanding, in fact, nothing is as important as the vote in their hands.The rock music still blares everywhere, but the students in the classroom are back.The muzzle of the Black Panther Party has also become aimless.For hippies, after the highs, come the lows.Not just a low ebb, but also a sense of collapse.

What about the hippies?After waking up, those with better aptitude and not much homework should go back to class quickly, before they can get their degree in time.After a few years, they changed their guns and became yuppies. The yuppies will miss the hippie years in the future, and they turned back to normal life in time, and there is not much to regret.They are walking a negation of negation.They broke some traditional confinement, but regained the spiritual wealth of their parents.They began to understand the principle of panning for gold in the sand, and they accepted as soon as they were good, and enough was enough.The countless Mao Zedong Little Red Books sold were read by people who were as devout as us, or even more devout than us, but the Jinggangshan revolution did not happen.

From hippies to yuppies, time, space and people have all returned to a balance, to the mean. There are also a large number of hippies who were abandoned because of this, they were completely thrown out of the original life track, and they never went back.Whether they regret it or not is unknown.But the experience of hippies at least made it easier for them to face wandering, and most of them started their long-distance drifting in life. The hardest ones are those who are too sincere.Because of sincerity, they are sincere and accept death.It is not difficult to take the first step with good intentions.Go back and take the second step, but it is difficult and I can't figure it out.Our Francis is such a man.

The Francis family has a profound religious tradition, and everyone has always been a believer and abides by the rules.With the Quaker tradition, the family is still very tolerant. When the brothers and sisters reached high school, they chose different churches with their partners.Some went to Lutheran churches on Sundays, others to Methodist churches.As a teenager, one of his buddies, Mike, fell ill and died. Francis was so sad that he changed his name to Francis Mac, and the friend lived with him ever since. While we plow the fields of the countryside and reform souls, Francis finds a way for his soul.The hippie's counterculture and anti-taboo movement is over, what will he do?Is it possible to go back to the past?Doesn't going back mean that past thinking and rebellion were all wrong?But what if you don't go back?Others are returning to the past one after another, transforming into yuppies.It was not so easy for Francis.

He couldn't go back because he was serious.The religious atmosphere in which he grew up made him accustomed to thinking that the secular material in the colorful world is not the most important thing, but the most important thing is the value of life and the purpose of life. However, in the early 1970s, Francis, who was in his early twenties, was at a loss, and the value of life he had just grasped in the past few years suddenly disappeared without a trace, like the sea being evaporated.He froze, he almost collapsed.He once believed that the original life was false, so he came to today.But life today has become unreal again.Can he go back to the past because of this?

He was depressed, so depressed that he couldn't help himself, and only beer and marijuana kept him alive day by day.Nothing makes sense, and if hippie rebellion doesn't make sense, what's the point?The hippie friends are all gone, who else will support him and guide him.But he was looking for meaning.Until he finds meaning, he has no way out, he cannot be saved. In the spring of 1973, after a cold and hopeless winter, Francis' sister invited her brother to live with her for a while.My sister's home is by a lake.Before going there, he called a hippie friend from the past.This friend said that among so many printed garbage of human beings, the Bible is still readable. In fact, he has read the Bible since he was a child, and has read it since he was a child.However, this sentence left an impression at this time.In those days, Francis sat on the platform outside her sister's house, facing the calm lake and water, and read the Bible day after day under the dual effects of alcohol and marijuana. two Francis drank beer, smoked marijuana, and read the Bible. The blank scene in front of him must have been repeated countless times in human history.When the meaning of life is subverted, what people live on is still the meaning.The sensibility that hippies appeal to is sincere, real, active, and life-like. However, when the meaning is subverted, sensibility loses its support for existence. Anti-tradition depends on the existence of tradition, and anti-taboo depends on the existence of taboo.When meaning disappears, everything ends together.Our friend Francis is having a crisis of meaning in life. God must be looking into the hearts of men. Go back in time for 1,500 years. In 480 AD, St. Benedict of Nursia was born in a wealthy and noble family in a place called Nursia in Italy.He received a classical education in Rome, but was deeply disappointed by the corruption and immorality of Rome.He left the bustling city, entered the barren mountains and old forests, and lived in a cave to reflect on the walls, looking for the meaning of immortality.Around 520 AD, in the mountains of Cassino, he and his followers built a monastery and wrote down the institutionalized guidelines for the monastic community, which is the famous "Rule of Benedict" (The Rule of Benedict) .Pope Gregory I (Gregory I) incorporated the monastery system established under this rule into the entire Western Catholic system, thus making it the entire Western Christian monastery system. St. Benedict is well aware of the weakness of human nature. His rules created such a monastery system, so that the weak, the weak of human nature, have the opportunity to seek the meaning of life pointed out by God in the closed and boring monastery life day after day.The monastic system he established was progressive and practical.What he established was a collective, mutual support, and institutionalized monk life with common rules.There was strict discipline in prayer, study, physical labor, eating, and sleeping. The legendary Saint Benedict is a man who can perform miracles.He foretold the day and hour of his own death.On March 21, 547 AD, he had him carried to the church at Cassino, where he received communion and died peacefully.Since then, every year on this day, Catholics all over the world commemorate St. Benedict's Day. For more than a thousand years, the monastery system of Western Christianity has not been interrupted.In unknown and remote places in the mountains all over Europe, monasteries quietly resisted the long years.When the monk died, he was buried in the mass grave in the backyard.Brothers in life, brothers in death.The dead died quietly, accompanied only by the singing of the monks' requiem mass and the bells of the bell tower.New ones are coming quietly, and the first lesson is to study the rules of St. Benedict. Alien invasions, wars, famines, plagues, ups and downs in the world - although monasteries are mostly built in the mountains and deserts, deliberately staying away from the secular world, they are not a paradise.Some monasteries crumbled and became a heap of ruins, lost in the wind and rain.Some monasteries were destroyed, and the monasteries became killing fields.However, institutionalized monasteries have not been interrupted in the thousand-year history of Western Christianity.In these remote monasteries, relying on these silent monks who bent slightly and bowed their heads, Western civilization preserved the institutional genes derived from Roman culture.When Western societies began to modernize, they had a ready-made institutional culture deeply rooted in history, and they only needed to change, expand, and innovate on this basis.Generations of silent monks for thousands of years have contributed a lot. In 1098 A.D., in a place called Citeaux in France, St. Robert de Molesme (St. Robert de Molesme) felt the slack and hedonic atmosphere in the Benedictine monastery and was determined to reform.He established a new monastery at Cidol, thus inaugurating a monastic community in pursuit of asceticism.Through the efforts of the third Abbot, the English-born St. Stephen Harding, this new community became a new monastic sect, the San Scythians. In 1119 the statutes of the Cistercian Order were published, thus institutionalizing such abbeys. The San Sisterhood monastery is penance-style, and the monks do physical labor every day except for prayers, and the monastery is supported by the monks' own labor.They have prescribed long fasts and sleep very little each day.They canceled all resplendent decorations, and pursued simplicity in churches and altars.They developed a unique architectural style that profoundly influenced the history of Western architecture. Over two hundred years passed, and the Cistercians showed signs of decline.The rigorous and assiduous style produced by the early pursuit of God was worn away bit by bit. The wars, plagues, and sectarian schisms within the church in the 14th century accelerated this decline.By the end of the Middle Ages, the entire monastic system took on a slack appearance. The Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries further impacted this ancient monastic system and at the same time prompted its own reformation. In 1664, in a place called La Trappe in France, Armand Jeanle Bouthellier de Rance initiated a reform movement of the Cistercian monastery system. He combined more than 300 monks into one The most rigorous and assiduous monastery in human history, all monks must obey extremely assiduous and extremely strict monastic discipline.Every day, apart from praying and meditating, the monks are working—heavy physical labor.They talk to God collectively through prayer, and they talk to God individually through meditation.They do not speak to each other, but only use simple sign language.As a last resort, they had a brief conversation with the dean alone.This way of silent ascetic practice is called Trappist. During the French Revolution in the 18th century, all monasteries in France were destroyed, and almost all monks were wiped out.Only a group of monks from this faction, led by Dom Augustin de Lestrange, fled to Switzerland to rebuild the monastery.The time is 1790. Until the nineteenth century, the most rigorous monastic system of this school gradually expanded from the only seed that survived the French Revolution.It gradually spread to other parts of the world.When there were only fifty-three monasteries of this school in the world, one of them was in China, in a remote and poor mountain valley not far from Beijing.Gradually through recuperation, this school of monasticism was considerably restored and expanded in the 20th century, especially in the United States of the New World. When our friend Francis was at a loss, the religious edification he got from childhood told him that life is meaningful, as long as you look for it, you will always find it.God has prepared a way for you, a way for more than a thousand years.However, you have to look. three Our friend Francis drank beer, smoked pot, and read the Bible. Nothingness, still like a pool of deep water, he couldn't extricate himself.Gradually, he began to have an understanding of the Bible.A long-lost feeling of reverence for the transcendent holiness and holiness slowly descended.For the first time, he had the desire to regulate himself, and began to step from the wet pool to a solid ground.For the first time he wanted to go to church and talk to a priest. That afternoon, when he walked out of the church, he had a book about Mother Teresa given to him by the priest in his hand.Today, the late Mother Teresa is the recipient of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize.In the seventies, no one knew who she was, and neither did Frances.He held the book and thought disappointedly, what would a nun mean to him?But he read the pamphlet anyway. For the first time, he knew that there was such a nun who gave up luxury and devoted her life to charitable activities in the slums of Calcutta, personally serving the poor and sick at the bottom of society, helping the weak bit by bit.It is true that all men are equal before God. Francis seemed to see a glimmer of light in the tunnel. He began to ask where Mother Teresa was at the moment.Through the relationship of the church, it was learned that she was attending a conference in London.Francis immediately set off for London. In London, he finally met Teresa in a black nun's attire.Francis still has long hair and looks like a typical hippie.Mother Teresa listened to him quietly, listening to him talk about his loss, his recent touch, and his sudden determination.He said that he will not be afraid of hardships and will never regret it. He will follow Mother Teresa to Calcutta and devote himself to a cause of helping the weak.After listening, Mother Teresa said that helping the weak is a sacred cause, and it is brave for you to step into such a cause.However, you do not have to go to India because of this.You have spoken your mind and your resolution, but what is the will of God?What is the path God has shown you?What you have to wait for is God's guidance. Francis thought about it and came to the conclusion that Mother Teresa had only politely declined his request. Farewell to London, Francis arrived in Munich, where the summer Oktoberfest has just begun.Francis got drunk again at the Oktoberfest. From Munich, he went to Rome.He accidentally learned that Mother Teresa had also arrived in Rome, and he asked to see Mother Teresa again.They have a second conversation.The nun still firmly believes that you should seek God's guidance.How, then, can I be guided by God, asks Francis?Mother Teresa said, you must seek. You seek and you will always find.When you find it, you'll know it. In this way, twenty-seven years ago, in the autumn of 1973, our friend Francis returned to the United States from Europe. Four March 21, 1944, was Saint Benedict's Day.Twenty silent American ascetic monks came from the north to a place called Conyers, east of Atlanta, Georgia.There are dense forests and rolling pastures.They liked the remoteness here, and they wanted to build a Trappist monastery that abides by the Cistercian canon, and named it the Monastery of HollyGhosts. On this fourteen hundred acres of land, there used to be a large barn of unknown age.This became their earliest shelter.The first thing is to pack up a place to worship God.They took out half of the barn and built a church.In the other half, cows and chickens are raised below, and the monks' sleeping beds are in the attic. They immediately began the monastic life.Get up before dawn every day, pray, and then work.Little by little, they cleared the wasteland and produced their own grain, milk and cheese.They grow grass and sell it to nearby herders after harvesting in autumn.They are famous for their bread.They never speak.Most of the surrounding farmers are Protestant Baptists. When encountering unfriendly treatment from others, the monks only bowed their heads and prayed. Day after day, year after year, the monks are getting old, and new young people are joining.Completely self-sufficient, they also built austere but magnificent cathedrals, exactly as they were traditional in France thousands of years ago.The statue of the Virgin and Child inlaid with stained glass above the altar has an abstract and deformed style.The glass color sheets in the corridors on both sides re-decompose and combine light and shadow.The high dome is cast with a layer of mystery, and then forms a huge space in the church.The songs and prayers of the monks praising God in ancient Latin echoed under the dome every day. They built a complex of monastic buildings, and the houses for living, praying, and studying formed an inner courtyard with colonnades.From the outside, the building of the monastery is closed. Outsiders can only set foot in the church open to the public to pray and entertain guests from afar. The inner courtyard is not accessible to outsiders.In the inner courtyard, there is a well-manicured garden with every plant and tree, a path paved with pebbles, and statues of saints.There is sunshine all over the courtyard here, and the birds are chirping, but there is no human voice. The monastery is a silent world, a world of asceticism, it is isolated from the world, and it only talks to God. Fives Sitting in that Chinese restaurant, Francis continued to tell us his story. Twenty-seven years ago, he returned to Philadelphia from Rome.He still drank beer, smoked marijuana, and read the Bible.He also went to church, talked with priests he knew well, and listened to the advice of others.Finally, one day, a priest told him that there was a Trappist monastery in a place called Conyers in southern Georgia, and it was planning to recruit a probationary student this year. He was from the north and had never been to Georgia, but he knew the place.This is the most backward state in the South.When he was a hippie, he took a car to Florida, and he didn't dare to get out of the car when he passed Georgia.He was a hippie with long hair and beard, ragged clothes, and profanity of all things decent, and he was ready to be beaten by a Georgian. Trappist monasteries, he knew too.He knew that these monks used to be silent and silent, and he couldn't imagine how this could be endured.He also knew that after the Second Vatican Council decided to reform the ritual in the sixties, Trappist monks could now speak. However, he still wanted to go to Conyers to have a look.He took a letter of introduction from the priest and headed south from Philadelphia.Take Interstate 20 out of Atlanta and head east, turn to Interstate 138, turn left at Route 212, and walk through the forest for ten minutes. He saw a small sign saying that the Holy Spirit Monastery is coming soon.The entrance, long driveway, is lined with tall Magnolia trees on both sides.Suddenly there appeared a large lawn with solitary old oaks, walnuts, and chestnuts.At the end, the bell tower of the white cathedral, shining in the southern sun. He was greeted by the aged Father Bohr.Father Bohr said that in the history of mankind, in any civilization, there are always such people who are willing to alienate the worldly society, give up the wealth and luxury of the worldly society, and spend their whole lives and all their lives in a place isolated from the world. The wisdom, focus on dialogue with God, looking for God's guidance, looking for the meaning of life.Monks are like that. Our friend Francis said that he distinctly heard, from the depths of the unknowable, a voice saying, Here it is, you have found it. He burst into tears. He wrote a letter to Mother Teresa, telling her that he had found God's guidance. In this way, twenty-seven years had passed, and he was living in the monastery. This is our friend, the kind, brooding, humorous Friar Francis.