Almond and honey paste
Supplier: Barroux Abbey - Monastic crafts from Provence - France
Ingredients: Almonds (40%), sugar, glucose, honey (8%), water.
Average nutritional value per 100g
Energy (kJ) / (kcal): 1812/433
Fat (g): 0.2024
Carbohydrates (g): 0.5206
Protein (g): 0.0932
Net Weight: 200
Made in France by the monks.
Manual work
Sometimes young people come to help the monks. One day, six boys from the Southwest participated in the weeding of the vineyard with three monks: they were excellent boys, full of good spirit and courage. But they all had one small flaw: they had no restraint in the lyrics. So one of the monks challenged them: to work in silence. And he understood from their gaze that the sun, the heat, the hardness of the earth were less frightening than the silence. But they did. Some time later, the same monk asked them the reason for the manual work of the monks. And one of the boys answered immediately and in Latin: mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). Which is already good. But here is what the monk answered them. Manual labor has several reasons.
The first is to participate in the creation of God. God created the world but He leaves us the responsibility of cultivating the earth, of taking care of it so that it bears fruit. For one who sees in creation a gift from God and, to some extent, its reflection, there is real joy in collaborating with God in work. The winegrower will never tire of contemplating the tender and clear bud emerging from the hard and dark bark of the vine. The heart then rises without difficulty to the Most High, so wise and so good, the Father Creator. The liturgy begins there, in the fields.
The second reason is human development. It is not good for the monk, nor for any man, to remain idle. Through manual work, the monk learns to return to reality. The winegrower knows that nature has its rhythms and its laws. Saint Benedict also says that the brother will be truly a monk when he lives from the work of his hands. And this is what we are trying to do, even though because of the time spent reciting the office and lectio divina, we must, in part, rely on the generous help of the faithful. Let us add that the working monk relaxes from the stress of the effort of conversion, study and attention to God in the recitation of offices. The pickax protects the monk from modern gloom.
The third reason is penance. The monk is a penitent simply because he is a son of Adam to whom God said, "You will work with the sweat of your brow." The monk does more penance by work than by fasting and sacrifices. Work is so closely linked to pain that it derives its etymology: "work" comes from the Latin trepalium, instrument of torture! We know that pain has become its faithful companion. The monk does penance joyfully to associate himself with Christ who came to save us through the Cross. In the fields, the monk continues the Holy Sacrifice of Mass, in silence, in his own body. What graces obtained in the fields by a pure heart associated with the sweat of the forehead! Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus said to one of her somewhat slow novices that a mother of a large family had no time to waste. The family of a religious is all of humanity.
And the fervent monk lives all this in silence, in contemplative silence, in the school of Saint Joseph, the model of workers. He works by trying to imitate Jesus. he thus carries the world. And he makes his own what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I understand for the first time one of the mysteries of religion from which the civilization that I claim as my own has emerged: bearing the sins of the world. And each bears the sins of all men ”.
