".... There are still men on this miserable, noisy, cruel earth, who taste the marvelous joy
of silence and solitude,
who dwell in forgotten mountain cells,
in secluded monasteries,
where the news and desires and appetites and conflicts of the world no longer reach them.
They are free from the burden of the flesh's tyranny, and their clear vision, clean of the world's smoke and of its bitter sting,
are raised to heaven and penetrates
into the deeps of heaven's infinite and healing light.

They are poor, they have nothing, and therefore  they are free and possess everything, and everything they touch strikes off something
of the fire of divinity.
And they work with their hands, silently ploughing and harrowing the earth, and
sowing seed in obscurity, and
reaping their small harvests to feed themselves and
the other poor. They build their own houses and
make, with their own hands, their own furniture and
their own coarse clothing, and
everything around them
is simple and primitive and poor,
because they are the least and the last of men,
they have made themselves
outcasts, seeking, outside the walls of the world,
Christ poor and rejected of men.

Above all, they have found Christ, and they know
the power and the sweetness and the depth and
the infinity of HIS love, living and working in them.
In HIM, hidden in HIM, they have become the poor
brothers of God. And for HIS love,
they have thrown away everything, and
conceal themselves in the secret
of HIS FACE.

Yet because they have nothing, they are the richest
men in the world, possessing everything:
because in proportion as grace empties their hearts
of created desires, the spirit of God enters in and fills the place that has been made for God.
And the poor brothers of God, in their cells, they taste within them the secret glory, the hidden manna,
the infinite nourishment and
strength of the Presence of God.
They taste the sweet exultancy of the fear
of God, which is the first intimate touch of the reality
of God, known and experienced on earth,
the beginning of heaven.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven.

And all day long, God speaks to them:
the clean voice of God, in HIS tremendous peacefulness,
spending truth within them as simply and directly
as water wells up in a spring.
And grace is in them, suddenly, always in more
and more abundance, they know not from where,
and the coming of this grace to them occupies
them altogether, and fills them with love, and
freedom.

And grace, overflowing in all their acts and movements, makes everything they do an act of love, glorifying God not by drama, not by gesture, not by outward show,
but by the very simplicity and economy of utter
perfection, so utter that it escapes notice entirely.
......"