BE A BROTHER

I've worked with people all my life, since eighteen actually.
During discussions I've kept repeating, "People need people."
Whether it meant keeping mentally retarded in single flats, with no common areas, elderly living alone in their homes forgotten by family and with no friends left or the lonely kids in school, somehow not accepted by their classmates, (as if that possibly could be the lonely kids' fault). Nobody chooses solitude without having been severely hurt.

My friend Ole is a Benedictine monk in the Netherlands. I'm in closer contact with him than most of my friends in Norway. I even stayed in the monastery for a week. There was friendship and genuine care between the "brothers" and towards the guests.
They live by this rule to greet and embrace every stranger as if they were meeting Christ.
Of course there will be problems in a monastery as well as everywhere else in this world, but they can always be dealt with because of their fundamental, indisputable rules.
It would not be a bad idea if other churches , not to speak of our Civil Service institutions picked up some of old St. Benedict's wisdom.
One even might get tempted to try it in one's own family...