A short time after my conversion to Christianity I had a desire to spend an informal retreat at a Trappist abbey some few hundred miles from my home. As my train sped through the natural wonderland that is New England in the springtime, my thoughts were mostly of a religious nature centring about life in an abbey, ideas gathered from several books that I had recently read.

As my train travelled along I became aware of a sense of doubleretreating, one physical and the other spiritual. My own city being far behind me, and the strange towns and villages going by my window as though framed in a movie film, gave me a strong sense of world-abandonment. I had a feeling that the world, and all that it means, was receding into the distant past. Not only was it receding physically, but spiritually too. I was en route to another kind of world, a world of peace and contentment within the confines of an abbey.