A View from a Monastery: The Vowed Life and Its Cast of Many Characters Book

  Combining memoir and paean for modern monastic life, Br. Benet Tvedten creates this charming book out of his love for his brothers, his place, his tradition. It has now been completely revised with many additional stories and colorful characters, and a new foreword from Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota, Cloister Walk, and many other books.

  It is often presumed that people who live in monasteries are either exceptionally holy or exceedingly strange. But A View from a Monastery portrays monks as ordinary men, some of whom are as quirky as the rest of us. Although monastic life differs from secular life in many remarkable ways, readers will discover that the monks themselves are not extraordinary. There are, however, certain characters in every monastery whose lives and personalities provide good material for storytelling—and Br. Benet is a charming teller of stories. This book is not intended for the reader who will be disappointed to learn that monks are fully human and always fallible. The wall around this monastery has come crashing down. Br. Benet concludes that he and his fellow monks are not yet saints, but they have come to the monastery because this is their place to search for holiness.