The Politics of Happiness~ Joy to the World

Joy to the World

Hey, there,

Top of the morning to you.

Did you catch any of the Olympic Figure skating these past few weeks?

Jim and I are avid figure skating fans.

I love the grace and beauty combined with athleticism.

Our top figure skaters embody Physical Intelligence. Their Flexibility, Grace, Strength, and Bearing (perfect posture) are exquisite as they travel 35 MPH across the ice.

Are these top ranked athletes masochists?

Geoff Colvin, in Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else says the most successful skaters hit the unforgiving ice as many as 10,000 times on their way to the podium.

What a drive to personal excellence.

One of my favorite performances was US Silver Medalist’s Meryl Davis and Charlie White’s short program.

They offered a “Tribute to Bollywood” in their short skate program.

Davis and White combined genuine Indian classic dance moves with fantastic skating.

I posted the video of their fun (and inspiring) Olympic medal winning performance on my blog.

Enjoy their 3:38 seconds of perfection:

Alan Davidson,

PS What one thing are you gifting to your body today to raise your Physical IQ?

PSS Leave me a comment below to share just how you’re raising your Physical IQ today.

PSSS Or leave a comment below to let me know how you liked the skating.

Alan Davidson is the founder of ThroughYourBody.com and the author Body Brilliance: Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences, the #1 bestselling Health & Wellness book and winner of two National Book-of-the-Year awards.

Alan is also the author of the Free report “Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a Sensational Life” available at www.throughyourbody.com

Love Your Way,

www.ThroughYourBody.com

1103 Peveto St.
Houston, TX 77019
713-942-0923

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Internally Fit: How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Fit

Phys Ed: How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young

Alan Davidson is the founder of ThroughYourBody.com and the author Body Brilliance: Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences, the #1 bestselling Health & Wellness book and winner of two National Book-of-the-Year awards.

Alan is also the author of the Free report “Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a Sensational Life” available at www.throughyourbody.com

Love Your Way,

www.ThroughYourBody.com

1103 Peveto St.
Houston, TX 77019
713-942-0923

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slimmer doesn't always mean fitter

By GINA KOLATA

IN his new book, “Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance,” Matt Fitzgerald, a sports nutritionist, writes about an amazing running experience. He worked out on a special sort of anti-gravity treadmill, the AlterG, which uses a cushion of air to lift the body, allowing you to effectively decrease your body weight as you run.

Mr. Fitzgerald started out on the treadmill by running without the machine’s assistance. Then he ran with it adjusted to lift him just enough so that he was 10 percent lighter.

“I felt as if I had become 10 percent fitter,” he writes. Running at his usual pace was suddenly “utterly effortless,” he notes, adding that “it felt like normal running, only so much better.”

Exercise physiologists agree that if your sport is particularly affected by the tug of gravity — running, cross-country skiing, cycling up hills — you are penalized for excess weight. But that leaves some questions: What is the ideal weight for your sport? And how much difference will it make if you actually achieve it?

There have been few direct tests of the body-weight effect, said Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Most of them were done in the 1970s and involved subjects who were asked to run with weights on their backs or ankles. Sure enough, the heavier the people were, the tests showed, the harder they had to work to run at a given speed.

But the runners’ forms were not affected by the extra weight, Dr. Tanaka said. That means that you would probably run the same way if you were heavier. But it would be a lot harder to run at your usual pace, and you’d end up running more slowly.

How much is less clear. Beth Parker, the director of exercise physiology research at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, said that, for runners, the general rule is that a 1 percent reduction in weight leads to a 1 percent increase in performance.

So, why not just be as thin as you can be?

The problem is that everyone has a point at which further weight loss actually makes their performance worse, said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a muscle metabolism researcher and physiologist at McMaster University in Ontario. Dr. Tarnopolsky, who is a nationally ranked athlete in winter triathlons, adventure racing and ski orienteering, said that people vary so much that there is no formula to figure out the perfect weight.

When Dr. Tarnopolsky was in graduate school, he saw the delicate balance between losing just enough and too much. He and his friends would experiment, losing or gaining a few pounds and testing their VO2 maxes, a measure of the body’s ability to get oxygen to muscles during exercise. In theory, the less you weigh, the higher your VO2 max should be, relative to body weight.

Dr. Tarnopolsky said that he got his best VO2 max — 86 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight — when he weighed 156 pounds. “Like everyone else, I said, ‘Maybe if I drop some body fat, it will go higher,’ ” Dr. Tarnopolsky said. So he got his weight down to 152 pounds. But to his surprise, his VO2 max decreased, to 82.

The likely reason, he said, was that he had reached a point where his body began burning its own muscle protein for fuel. He was weaker, and his performance was worse, even though he weighed less.

“You could see on the VO2 machine what your body knew was right,” Dr. Tarnopolsky said. “You’d feel tired, stale, lethargic when you tried to drive your weight down.”

Often the only way to know your best weight is by trial and error.

My running coach, Tom Fleming, a former elite runner who won the New York City Marathon twice, in 1973 and 1975, said that he always tells his competitive athletes “that the perfect weight is the weight you are the day you P.B. in your event,” referring to the time you achieve your personal best — or fastest — finish.

“Your body will tell you” your perfect weight, he said, and when you are there, “you will feel fast, race fast.”

Dathan Ritzenhein, an American who is one of the world’s top runners, used a similar system. Mr. Ritzenhein, who broke the national record last year in a 5,000-meter-race and who, at ninth place, was the top American finisher in the marathon at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, said that it took him about 12 years of trial and error to learn his best racing weight. He discovered it last year, his best racing year ever: 121 or 122 pounds (he is 5 feet 8).

That weight is not a natural one for him, he said. If he were to stop training, he would weight about 127 or 128 pounds, and when he is training but not trying to control his weight, he is about 124 or 125. His goal is to try to be at his perfect racing weight a couple of weeks before a big event, losing about a pound a week in the preceding weeks to get there.

He has learned, he said, that if he tries to lose weight too fast or if he continues to lose weight up until his race day, he does not have the energy he needs for his best performance. And if he tries to lose weight too fast, his training suffers.

“It’s a hard line” between losing just enough at the right rate and losing too much too fast, he said.

Other athletes say that they learned through similar experiments.

Andre Agassi, the tennis star, and his longtime trainer, Gil Reyes, discovered through experience that Mr. Agassi’s best weight was between 178 and 182 pounds (Mr. Agassi is 5 feet 11 1/2.)

“We came up with a number, but we did not seek a number,” Mr. Reyes explained in a recent telephone interview. “It was all about him feeling strong and fit.”

Tennis is different from distance running, Mr. Reyes noted. Athletes like Mr. Agassi never know if they will be playing for one or five hours, and they have to be ready for every possibility.

Before he retired from tennis, Mr. Agassi would sometimes gain weight and then stop eating, trying to shed the pounds fast. Mr. Reyes discouraged this. “I said to him, ‘Why do you feel like you have to stop eating to lose that weight?,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘What if you were to eat 10 to 15 percent more, but train 40 percent more?’ ”

Bicyclists in grueling races like the Tour de France also have the problem of maintaining their strength, but for them a little extra weight can make the difference between winning and performing dismally on days when the race has steep hills or mountains.

“I knew from experience and results that I had an ideal weight — or what I thought was ideal,” said Andy Hampsten, a former Tour de France rider and the only American ever to win the Giro D’Italia, in 1988. “If I set too low of a weight goal, I would be weak and stressed,” he said. “If I weighed 4 or 5 pounds more than ideal, I could see I was slower than my competitors.”

Mr. Hampsten, who is 5 feet 9, said that he aimed for a race weight of about 137 pounds, deliberately reducing his intake in the two months before racing season. In the off season he would let his weight drift up to a more comfortable 145 pounds.

The lesson is that, even if the laws of physics and an experience on an AlterG may seem to prove the benefits of a lower weight, exercise science is nowhere near making good predictions for specific athletes, Dr. Tarnopolsky said.

“I know an individual who is one of the fittest ultra-sport athletes,” he said. “She competes in 100 milers, and her body fat is close to 20 percent.”

Yet, he said, “she is one of the most talented athletes I have ever seen.”

Mr. Reyes said that he and Mr. Agassi learned not to let the scale rule your life. “We had a little bit of a phrase,” he said. “The weight scale to most human beings can be like a Ouija board. It can start messing with your head.”

The trick is not to let it.

From the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/fashion/04best.html?scp=1&sq=gina%20kolata%20slimmer&st=cse

Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe~ "Just Kids"

The Night Belongs to Us~ JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

Apart from a certain shared apprehension of immortality — complacent in one case, but endearingly gingerly in the other — the skinny 28-year-old on the cover of Patti Smith’s seismic 1975 album, “Horses,” doesn’t look much at all like Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. But because the shutterbug was Robert Mapplethorpe, who was soon to become fairly legendary himself, that exquisite photograph of Smith on the brink of fame is as close as New York’s 1970s avant-garde ever came to a comparable twofer. The mythmaking bonus is that the latter-day duo were much more genuinely kindred spirits.

Born weeks apart in 1946, Smith and Mapple­thorpe played Mutt and Jeff from their first meeting in 1967 through his death from AIDS more than 20 years later. They were lovers as well until he came out of the closet with more anguish than anyone familiar with his bold later career as gay sexuality’s answer to Mathew Brady (and Jesse Helms’s N.E.A. nemesis) is likely to find credible. Yet his Catholic upbringing had been conservative enough that he and Smith had to fake being married for his parents’ sake during their liaison.

Though Smith moved on to other partners, including the playwright Sam Shepard and the Blue Oyster Cult keyboardist-guitarist Allen Lanier, her attachment to Mapplethorpe didn’t wane. After years of mimicking her betters at poetry, she found her calling — “Three chords merged with the power of the word,” to quote the memorable slogan she came up with — at around the same time he quit mimicking his betters at bricolage to turn photographer full time. “Patti, you got famous before me,” he half-moped and half-teased when “Because the Night,” her only genuine hit single, went Top 20 in 1978. Even so, his “before” turned out to be prescient.

All this is the subject of “Just Kids,” Smith’s terrifically evocative and splendidly titled new memoir. At one level, the book’s interest is a given; to devotees of downtown Manhattan’s last momentous period of 20th-century artistic ferment, Patti Smith on Robert Mapplethorpe is like Molly Pitcher on Paul Revere. The surprise is that it’s never cryptic or scattershot. In her rocker incarnation, Smith’s genius for ecstatic racket has generally defined coherence as the rhythm section’s job. The revelation that she might have made an ace journalist had she felt so inclined isn’t much different from the way the lucidity of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” upended everything Stein was renowned for.

Nonetheless, she can’t help being the Patti Smith her fans know and love. If a given event occurs within hailing distance of Arthur Rimbaud’s or some other demigod’s birthday, she won’t fail to alert us. Just as predictably, her reverential visit to Rimbaud’s grave on a 1973 trip to France is only a warm-up for the main event: visiting Jim Morrison’s. For that matter, anyone willing to buy her claim that she learned of Mapplethorpe’s death as “Tosca” played on early-morning TV — and not just any old bit of “Tosca,” but the heroine declaiming “her passion for the painter Cavaradossi” — lives in a happier, sweeter world than mine.

The reason nobody will care about Smith’s occasional fatuities — except to decide they add period flavor, which by my lights they do — is that “Just Kids” is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she’s always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed.

No nostalgist about her formative years, Smith makes us feel the pinched prospects that led her to ditch New Jersey for a vagabond life in Manhattan. Her mother’s parting gift was a waitress’s uniform: “You’ll never make it as a waitress, but I’ll stake you anyway.” That prediction came true, but Smith did better — dressed as “Anna Karina in ‘Bande à Part,’ ” a uniform of another sort — clerking at Scribner’s bookstore. That job left Mapplethorpe free to doodle while she earned their keep, which she didn’t mind. “My temperament was sturdier,” she explains, something her descriptions of his moues confirm. Even when they were poor and unknown, he spent more time deciding which outfit to wear than some of us do on our taxes.

Soon they were ensconced at “a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone”: the Chelsea Hotel, home to a now fabled gallery of eccentrics and luminaries that included Harry Smith, the compiler of “The Anthology of American Folk Music” and the subject of some of her most affectionately exasperated reminiscences. For respite, there was Coney Island, where a coffee shack gives Smith one of her best time-capsule moments: “Pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register.” That “and the astronauts” is so perfect you wouldn’t be sure whether to give her more credit for remembering it or inventing it.

Valhalla for them both was the back room at Max’s Kansas City, where Andy Warhol, Mapplethorpe’s idol, once held court. By the time they reached the sanctum, though, Warhol was in seclusion after his shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968, leaving would-be courtiers and Factory hopefuls “auditioning for a phantom.” Smith also wasn’t as smitten as Mapple­thorpe with Warhol’s sensibility: “I hated the soup and felt little for the can,” she says flatly, leaving us not only chortling at her terseness but marveling at the distinction. Yet Pop Art’s Wizard of Oz looms over “Just Kids” even in absentia, culminating in a lovely image of a Manhattan snowfall — as “white and fleeting as Warhol’s hair” — on the night of his death.

Inevitably, celebrity cameos abound. They range from Smith’s brief encounter with Salvador Dalí — “Just another day at the Chelsea,” she sighs — to her vivid sketch of the young Sam Shepard, with whom she collaborated on the play “Cowboy Mouth.” Among the most charming vignettes is her attempted pickup in an automat (“a real Tex Avery eatery”) by Allen Ginsberg, who buys the impoverished Smith a sandwich under the impression she’s an unusually striking boy. The androgynous and bony look she was to make so charismatic with Mapplethorpe’s help down the road apparently confused others as well: “You don’t shoot up and you’re not a lesbian,” one wit complains. “What do you actually do?”

Even when Smith tempts a skeptical reader to say “Uh-huh” to anecdotes like the one implying she was the first to call Janis Joplin “Pearl,” her forthright presentation of herself as the minor hanger-on she then was restores our trust. “I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments,” she writes. Most often, you’re simply struck by her intelligence, whether she’s figuring out why an acting career doesn’t interest her — actors are soldiers, and she’s a born general — or sizing up the ultra-New York interplay between the city’s fringe art scenes and the high-­society sponsorship to which Mapple­thorpe was drawn. “Like Michelangelo,” she sweetly but not unshrewdly comments, “Robert just needed his own version of a pope” — which he found, more or less, in the form of the art collector Samuel Wagstaff, who became his lover and patron.

Peculiarly or not, the one limitation of “Just Kids” is that Mapplethorpe himself, despite Smith’s valiant efforts, doesn’t come off as appealingly as she hopes he will. When he isn’t candidly on the make — “Hustler-hustler-hustler. I guess that’s what I’m about,” he tells her — his pretension and self-romanticizing can be tiresome. Then again, the same description could apply to the young Smith, and we wouldn’t have the older one if she’d been more abashed in her yearnings. This enchanting book is a reminder that not all youthful vainglory is silly; sometimes it’s preparation. Few artists ever proved it like these two.

Michael Pollan "Food Rules"

Rules Worth Following, for Everyone’s Sake

In the more than four decades that I have been reading and writing about the findings of nutritional science, I have come across nothing more intelligent, sensible and simple to follow than the 64 principles outlined in a slender, easy-to-digest new book called “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” by Michael Pollan.

Mr. Pollan is not a biochemist or a nutritionist but rather a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. You may recognize his name as the author of two highly praised books on food and nutrition, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” (All three books are from Penguin.)

If you don’t have the time and inclination to read the first two, you can do yourself and your family no better service than to invest $11 and one hour to whip through the 139 pages of “Food Rules” and adapt its guidance to your shopping and eating habits.

Chances are you’ve heard any number of the rules before. I, for one, have been writing and speaking about them for decades. And chances are you’ve yet to put most of them into practice. But I suspect that this little book, which is based on research but not annotated, can do more than the most authoritative text to get you motivated to make some important, lasting, health-promoting and planet-saving changes in what and how you eat.

Reasons to Change

Two fundamental facts provide the impetus Americans and other Westerners need to make dietary changes. One, as Mr. Pollan points out, is that populations who rely on the so-called Western diet — lots of processed foods, meat, added fat, sugar and refined grains — “invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.” Indeed, 4 of the top 10 killers of Americans are linked to this diet.

As people in Asian and Mediterranean countries have become more Westernized (affluent, citified and exposed to the fast foods exported from the United States), they have become increasingly prone to the same afflictions.

The second fact is that people who consume traditional diets, free of the ersatz foods that line our supermarket shelves, experience these diseases at much lower rates. And those who, for reasons of ill health or dietary philosophy, have abandoned Western eating habits often experience a rapid and significant improvement in their health indicators.

I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.

In his last book, Mr. Pollan summarized his approach in just seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The new book provides the practical steps, starting with advice to avoid “processed concoctions,” no matter what the label may claim (“no trans fats,” “low cholesterol,” “less sugar,” “reduced sodium,” “high in antioxidants” and so forth).

As Mr. Pollan puts it, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

Do you already avoid products made with high-fructose corn syrup? Good, but keep in mind, sugar is sugar, and if it is being added to a food that is not normally sweetened, avoid it as well. Note, too, that refined flour is hardly different from sugar once it gets into the body.

Also avoid foods advertised on television, imitation foods and food products that make health claims. No natural food is simply a collection of nutrients, and a processed food stripped of its natural goodness to which nutrients are then added is no bargain for your body.

Those who sell the most healthful foods — vegetables, fruits and whole grains — rarely have a budget to support national advertising. If you shop in a supermarket (and Mr. Pollan suggests that wherever possible, you buy fresh food at farmers’ markets), shop the periphery of the store and avoid the center aisles laden with processed foods. Note, however, that now even the dairy case has been invaded by products like gunked-up yogurts.

Follow this advice, and you will have to follow another of Mr. Pollan’s rules: “Cook.”

“Cooking for yourself,” he writes, “is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors.” Home cooking need not be arduous or very time-consuming, and you can make up time spent at the stove with time saved not visiting doctors or shopping for new clothes to accommodate an expanding girth.

Although the most wholesome eating pattern consists of three leisurely meals a day, and preferably a light meal at night, if you must have snacks, stick to fresh and dried fruits, vegetables and nuts, which are naturally loaded with healthful nutrients. I keep a dish of raisins and walnuts handy to satisfy the urge to nibble between meals. I also take them along for long car trips. Feel free to use the gas-station restroom, but never “get your fuel from the same place your car does,” Mr. Pollan writes.

Treating Treats as Treats

Perhaps the most important rules to put into effect as soon as possible are those aimed at the ever-expanding American waistline. If you eat less, you can afford to pay more for better foods, like plants grown in organically enriched soil and animals that are range-fed.

He recommends that you do all your eating at a table, not at a desk, while working, watching television or driving. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re eating, you’re likely to eat more than you realize.

But my favorite tip, one that helped me keep my weight down for decades, is a mealtime adage, “Stop eating before you’re full” — advice that has long been practiced by societies as diverse as Japan and France. (There is no French paradox, by the way: the French who stay slim eat smaller portions, leisurely meals and no snacks.)

Practice portion control and eat slowly to the point of satiation, not fullness. The food scientists Barbara J. Rolls of Penn State and Brian Wansink of Cornell, among others, have demonstrated that people eat less when served smaller portions on smaller plates. “There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion,” Mr. Pollan writes. “Special occasion foods offer some of the great pleasures of life, so we shouldn’t deprive ourselves of them, but the sense of occasion needs to be restored.”

Here is where I can make an improvement. Ice cream has been a lifelong passion, and even though I stick to a brand lower in fat and calories than most, and limit my portion to the half-cup serving size described on the container, I indulge in this treat almost nightly. Perhaps I’ll try the so-called S policy Mr. Pollan says some people follow: “No snacks, no seconds, no sweets — except on days that begin with the letter S.”

Click Here for Food Rules:

'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

Varied Forces Pushing Obama on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

Deir Mar Mousa: Modern-Day Pilgrims Find Interfaith Bond in Ancient Syrian Monastery

DEIR MAR MOUSA, Syria — As darkness falls over the vast Syrian desert and the first winter stars emerge, a trail of modern-day pilgrims is slowly climbing the stone steps of this remote cliff-top monastery.

They are a motley crew of religious seekers and backpackers from a dozen countries, some hoping for divine wisdom, others merely curious. But all are hoping to meet the Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, the burly and dedicated Jesuit priest who has made this ancient sanctuary a center of Christian-Muslim dialogue.

“Some say this church looks like a mosque,” said Father Dall’Oglio, as his guests warmed their frost-stiffened hands over a wood-burning stove. “We are very proud of that.”

Father Paolo, as he is known here, presides over a group of 10 monks, nuns, and volunteers who welcome guests year-round and struggle to build harmony around a religious fault line that has only grown more volatile since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His passion for interfaith dialogue — he recently published a memoir titled “Believing in Jesus, Loving Islam” — has helped draw ever-larger flocks of visitors up the mountain to sleep in the monastery’s stone huts and take part in its multilingual prayer services.

Father Dall’Oglio, 55, is a big, ebullient Italian who seems constantly in motion. He is almost single-handedly responsible for restoring the monastery of Deir Mar Mousa, which is set in a craggy hillside 50 miles from Damascus, the Syrian capital.

When he first came here in 1982, he found only an abandoned Byzantine ruin, with faded 11th-century frescoes open to the wind and the rain. He spent 10 days praying and meditating here, he recalled, and conceived the idea of building a new house of worship that would help to address the region’s religious conflicts with an emphasis on manual labor and common spirituality.

“At the time, the Lebanese war was on, the Israeli-Palestinian problem was getting worse, the Islamic movement was growing,” he said.

Father Dall’Oglio set to work at once, and has lived here full time since 1991. Today, the frescoes and church have been painstakingly restored. Stone guest houses blend seamlessly into the hillside, along with offices, a library, and a broad esplanade where guests gather and eat. Recently another monastery was refurbished 30 miles away, along with some ancient caves where hermits once took shelter. The monastery draws thousands of visitors a year, many of them Muslims, who often come during religious holidays to pray. Father Dall’Oglio also works with local Muslim leaders on educational and environmental projects, and convenes conferences on theology.

In a sense, Deir Mar Mousa is one of the last outposts of a shrinking faith. When monks built the original monastery in the sixth century A.D., this was the geographic center of Christianity. Today, Christians are a minority, and many feel increasingly beleaguered, with the rise of militant Islam and the violent persecution of Iraqi Christians.

But Deir Mar Mousa’s rituals emphasize mutual understanding rather than Christian preservation.

“We try to be a positive voice in this collective scream of anguish,” said Father Dall’Oglio.

That voice can be heard in Deir Mar Mousa’s prayer rituals. On a recent winter evening, candles provided the only light in the chapel — a cavelike structure whose walls bear inscriptions in Arabic, Greek and Syriac, an ancient Aramaic language that is still used in the liturgy of Syrian Christianity. Two dozen visitors sat meditating for an hour in silence, a standard feature of the prayer ritual. A fresco showing the Last Supper glimmered on the wall opposite the altar.

Then Father Dall’Oglio entered and donned his robes. Gazing out cheerfully at the visitors, he explained the Syriac liturgy, like a college professor giving a familiar lecture. He recited prayers in Syriac and Arabic. Later, he cheerfully asked visitors to contribute their own prayers and thoughts, shifting easily from fluent Arabic to English to several European languages.

Afterward, the visitors slowly trailed out the church’s tiny door, and filed into a makeshift tent where supper was served: a hot lentil stew, with bread and olives spread out on the floor of a makeshift tent. Meals at Deir Mar Mousa are a cooperative affair, with guests helping prepare the food and wash the dishes. Accommodation is free, but visitors are expected to bring food or make contributions.

“As you see, our dinners go back to the Eucharistic tradition of the Lord,” Father Dall’Oglio said.

Part of Deir Mar Mousa’s tradition, Father Dall’Oglio added, includes manual labor as a spiritual exercise. Guests cook and clean, and help collect trash from surrounding hillsides.

As dinner ended, visitors huddled around a wood-burning stove, drinking tea and discussing theology. They were a remarkably diverse group: Indians, Japanese, Palestinians, various Europeans. As always, they plied Father Dall’Oglio with questions.

“If you hold one belief about God, and I hold another, aren’t we bound to come into conflict?” said one earnest-looking American.

Father Dall’Oglio weighed the question, rubbing his thin beard and looking a little tired after a long day. “I don’t claim to know the absolute,” he said. “I consider it a road, a path, that we are on together.”