My spiritual director gave me When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön fifteen years ago, when I was forty.

I was appalled. I'd been reading the Desert Fathers since college. I did not need, I thought, the Buddhist version.

It took me four years to pick it up. She was right. It *was* the Desert Fathers. They just had different sandals.

What I could not hear in one voice I could, somehow, hear in the other. I don't know if that's a failure of my tradition or an honoring of it.