The monastic tradition began in Christianity with the desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries who retreated into isolated places in Egypt and other countries around the eastern Mediterranean. They sought out silence and solace to commune with God. Their monastic spirituality was practical to the core and many of their teaching stories have an evergreen quality that makes them relevant to any era. Monasteries thrived for centuries in the East and the West and now in postmodern times, many people flock to them for retreats and mountaintop experiences.

Editors Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild have put together a top-drawer collection of writings from what they call "the monastic way." It contains material from the desert fathers and mothers as well as thoughtful and inspiring quotations from a wide range of contemporary Christian writers in this tradition including Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Basil Pennington, Joan Chittister, Thomas Keating, John Main, Laura Swan, William McNamera, Kallistos Ware, Michael Casey, David Steindl-Rast, and many others. This mix of ancient and modern wisdom is very appealing and makes this book of daily readings a very substantive resource.

The material is matched to the twelve months under these thematic categories:

January: Starting Out
February: Seeking Guidance
March: Living with Others
April: Going to Work
May: Balancing Life
June: Talking Money
July: Learning to Listen
August: Working for Justice
September: Opening Our Eyes
October: Saving the Planet
November: Giving and Receiving
December: Endings and Beginnings

There is a wealth of monastic wisdom here on waiting, silence, beauty, openness, hospitality, devotion, loving our neighbor, being kind, gratitude, and dealing with injustice. Here is a sample reading on joy by Andrei Louf:

"Real joy is very deep-rooted and we have to dig down deeply within ourselves to bring something of it to the surface. This must be the meaning of the expression we may use spontaneously when we speak of being very happy: ' I am deeply happy.' For that reason all great happiness is 'speechless.' It cannot be voiced. It is inexpressible. It seldom comes to the surface and we can never show it off. We are 'inhabited' by our joy, somewhere close to the roots of our being.

Joy is the seed-bed in which all life strikes root in order to manage its own existence. Without joy we cannot live or, rather, we cannot survive. Joy wells up, especially at extraordinary moments in which we may experience our own reality or the beauty of life. Think of the joy that art can furnish, 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever.' In the enjoyment of art genuine delight arises in us precisely because through it we can discover and, as it were, touch the very essence of people and things. It is not something we observe in the usual way through the senses, not something that can be verbalized — this deep reality in others and in ourselves. Thus joy is always a sign that we have been granted a deeper sense of communion with 'being' or 'existence' itself."