"I needed to put my faith in my hands." He had learned that certain mental and spiritual problems could not be resolved intellectually; they needed to be worked out physically, with one's own body. Manual labor was the ancient monastic cure for many a spiritual ailment. "I see work as very incarnational. Jesus became flesh, muscle, sinew. He put his body where the question was. And then he walked the question."
I asked Dismas what he meant by the question.
"Human sin. Broken relationships. Loneliness. Take the most agonizing question of your life--that's the question Jesus came into and walked." Which seemed a good way to think about what drove men like Dismas and Anthony-Maria to become monks. An agonizing question for which there were no immediate answers, a yearning without apparent remedy.
That is, until a way avails itself to the seeker...The monastery anchored your spiritual life through life in the body: getting up at 3 A.M., packing cottonseed hulls into columns, putting the faith in your hands.
You put your body where the question is, then you walk the question.
{Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith
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