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Study
Ewell Monastery
As a Christian disciple, the Cistercian monk relies a great deal on those times in which he can settle down in peace and quietness to consider the meaning of the gospels and their precursors the documents of the Old Testament.
Real study and meditative thinking go hand in hand as he seeks to deepen his awareness of the meaning of Christ’s life and of the new life offered by Christ to all people. The church and the world are always under the microscope as far as the monk is concerned. His own life depends upon the reality of this search for the meaning of his experience of the life that he shares with the risen Lord.
Books are essential in that search and enable the monk to anchor himself in the real world of his contemporaries as well as of those who have gone before him.
So when he is not working or at prayer he is with his books, linking himself with the personal endeavours of all thinking people.