here is all the monastic ones - mono, monk, monastic - they lived as hermits alone in the desert. now we live in a community together, so we built a wall all around the land but till now, we live alone ourselves. we work together, pray together, eat together one meal a day in our dining room, but we live alone ourselves. every cell has two rooms, small kitchen, small bathroom, in every cell, for one monk - comfortable sense - but no radio, no tv, no newspaper, no refrigerators, no fans, no heater, nothing; only light and water, enough for our life. a simple life. >> we're here at st. macarius monastery, a coptic orthodox christian monastery, located deep in the desert between cairo and alexandria. as i followed brother mark around the monastery, i had the uncanny feeling of crossing some invisible boundary into another space and time, and indeed, i was crossing into the rarified atmosphere of sacred space and sacred time. brother mark was a pharmacist before he entered the monastery, and he told me that the majority of the 100 monks dwelling here were formerly professional men - d

but this church is not just a superb example of monastic architecture.t's a model by which we can understand the whole of high romanesque architecture in france. as a pilgrim or a member of the lay congregation, and found ourselves in the wide and splendid nave, this building through a porch either in thcentral aisle, where i'm standing, or in the wide side aisles. we would have moved up the church to the crossg behind me, so called because it's here that the nave of the church crosses with those side spaces called the transepts. and beyond them, the most holy part of the church, with the choir, the high altar-- behind which the most important relics were displayed-- and beyond the altar, the curving ambulatory with the chapels radiating off it. hundreds of pilgrims crowding into the church were dangerous and noisy, and so the medieval architect evolved this superb corridor around the high altar, which we call an ambulatory. this solved perfectly what one scholar has called "the traffic problem of the medieval pilgrimage." but perhaps most distinctive of

the church, and it grew to become the ecclesiastical capital of all ireland. 800 years ago, this monasticmunity was just a chapel and a round tower standing high on this bluff. it looked out then, as it does today, over the plain of tipperary, called the golden vale because its rich soil makes it ireland's best farmland. on this historic rock, you stroll among these ruins in the footsteps of st. patrick, and wandering through my favorite celtic cross graveyard, i feel the soul of ireland.