11 Days Non Smoker

Well I've made it this far, might as well go on and finish it up. I have to say I love being a non-smoker, and now when the urge strikes, thoughts of how nice it is to not smoke keep me faithful. Amen.


Today I will complete at very long paper that I've been working on for two months. It's about how the Constitutions and Statutes of the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, has nothing in it that prevents us from living the life in a new way, but with the essentials of the Charism. I am in no way saying that Lay Cistercians do not already do that. It's just a small contribution to a discussion I would love to get going, in print, exploring the literary illumination of the emergence of the Lay Charism.

People should be writing about this, not just me. In the Cistercian Studies Quarterly, there has only been eleven articles with the word Lay in the title, and six of those deal with Lay Brothers in the 12th Century.