Over the last few weeks I have based my Homily and told you a Story. This is the original story. Enjoy. The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times. Once it was a great order but now there were only five monks left, the abbot and four others, all over seventy years of age. All its branch houses were lost. Clearly, it was a dying order. In the deep woods surrounding the monastery there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation, the old monks had become a bit psychic, so they could always sense when the rabbi was in the hermitage. "The rabbi is in the woods, the rabbi is in the woods again," they would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if, by some possible chance, he could offer any advice that might save the monastery. The rabbi welcomed the abbot ...
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