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Good Morning. Ever since I went to Kentucky to visit the hermitage of the American monk Thomas Merton, I’ve wanted one of my own. So over the past year I’ve been creating just that – a sanctuary not quite as big as Merton’s but nonetheless a place for prayer in the heart of the English countryside. The former workshop, graced now with icons and candles instead of hammers and saws, has become a secret and sacred space, a way of surviving spiritually in a culture that places little value on silence.

Merton’s hermitage, hidden in the woods near his monastery, was no haven of escapism but a means of encountering God in solitude. For Merton this required a harsh regime, rising for prayer at 2.30 in the morning. But there, alone in the hermitage, he attended to the presence of God which, he said, could only be known by faith alone.

Through the solitary experience of meeting the Divine in the bitter night and through the rising sun, he came to discover time and again that God lets himself be sought in order to be discovered. As a hermit, you lose yourself so you can be found.

And so, in the words of Thomas Merton, we pray: ‘My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end … I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.’ Amen