I am sometimes asked how I reconcile being a monk with my involvement in movements devoted to the Alternative Society. I think we should turn that question upside down. A monk is ipso facto involved in the enterprise of the Alternative Society, and the wonder is that so few seem to realize it.

After all, what do we mean by the alternative society? We mean, I take it, that we have glimpsed, far away, a vision of what it might be like for man to be free; a dream of human society in which love is all you need, in which death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more (that’s from the Apocalypse, actually). And not only that. We have decided to stake all on that vision, that dream. We have committed ourselves to living as if man were really like that, as if society could really live by love alone. We have let ourselves be subverted by utopia, and can never be the same again.

And that is the definition of the Church, and most especially of the religious orders. The Church is, according to the Second Vatican Council, the present sign and nucleus of the future kingdom, the new creation; and religious orders are in particular called to live their whole lives as a witness to this future, this Utopia.