The monastery has often been likened to a powerhouse of prayer, providing light and energy for the countless numbers who make up the Body of Christ. This image has inadvertently furthered the view of monasticism as separate from the rest of the Church, apart from the concerns of the world. In Lovers of the Place, Abbot Kline provides a fresh Vision of the monastic life as one form of the Christian vocation which now must struggle to find its place alongside other expressions of Christian life, for he firmly believes that as monasticism renews itself for the Church, it will in turn renew the Church.

Abbot Kline shows that monasticism can renew itself in its very essence by giving of itself for the sake of the Church. In looking to the baptized, who discern in the monastic way their own journey, monastics can find new energies for the journey ahead. Having had their own treasury blessedly looted by the baptized, the monastics find themselves loose in a world which has become more and more their place and their home. By exploring this theme of monasticism in the Church and the Church in monasticism, readers will find answers to such questions as How do we belong to the Church? and What can we give to the Church in a more obvious way?

Lovers of the Place weaves together allegory, narrative, and poetic intuition, gathering images and insights around an experience of conversion to the monastic way of humility. Through his insight and experience, Abbot Kline invites all the baptized to a participation in the monastic charism now loose in the Church at large. Francis Kline, OCSO, is abbot of Mepkin, a Cistercian (Trappist) monastery near Charleston, South Carolina. He has studied at The Julliard School in New York and at the Pontifical Athenaeum Saint' Anselmo in Rome.