The Life and Work of a Monk

This morning in my reading I came across this wonderful quote:

The ascetic [the monk] is simply a stunningly normal person who expresses "a kind of Zen in the art of maintaining a life of 'right worship' [or praxis]" in the face of an abnormal world in which violence, greed, and arrogance have become the norm. ... the asceticism at issue here has as its goal the activation of aesthetic capacities that lie dormant in all of us. Such an ascetic wants to be rooted, embodied, alive, real. The goal is not "faith in God" or "belief" in a doctrine, or even to discover the "meaning" of life, but the simple enactment of a form of life, a life of "right worship," which provides the living foundation for all doctrine, all belief, all theology, and without which they are empty shells. -- After Prophecy, by Tom Cheetham, p. 46.