Dear Granddaughter, Your life is ahead of you. Flashes of insight will come, but real understanding takes time. My hope is that you seriously consider the path contained in this letter. The greatest conquest of your life is to defeat the foe within–your ego–and to obtain union with God. It wasn’t until I was eighty that my “aha moment” happened. It was in the reading of Sermon Ninety-Five by fourteenth century Dominican friar named Meister

“Empty space tends to create fear. As long as our minds, hearts, and hands are occupied we can avoid confronting the painful questions, to which we never gave much attention and which we do not want to surface. ‘Being busy’ has become a status symbol, and most people keep encouraging each other to keep their body and mind in constant motion. From a distance, it appears that we try to keep each other filled with

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God.1 During a recent reading of Eliot’s Choruses from “The Rock”, the busyness of my life came