The weather is less muggy this morning, so I thought I would devote a few minutes to analyzing our web site and seeing if I could track down some coding errors that I know exist but have not yet put right. The search terms used to find us are always fascinating. There are more spellings for "monastery" than I would have thought possible, but most people have no difficulty with "nun", except for one confused soul who put "nunk" (I sympathize, believe me.) Someone googled "new potatoes" and found us. That must have been unexpected, to say the least. Someone else navigated to us via a most unlikely link about political gossip in Washington D.C., which makes one wonder whether the Pentagon is interested in our emails (answer, probably: not much escapes surveillance these days). But it was when printing out the email requests for prayer that I was brought up short. I always find them moving, but this morning there was one that wrung my heart. At the end the writer asked the Lord "to forgive my sins of poverty". It is an evocative phrase which can be understood in many ways. Monastic "poverty" can be beautiful: an absence of clutter and the uglier artefacts of our age, but that is not what the writer meant. St Clare of Assisi, whose feast we keep today, knew poverty as a joyful freedom; but that is not how most people experience it. The "sins of poverty" can be ugly and brutal, and only those who know what it is like to be hungry or diseased or enslaved really understand. Fortunately, we have the psalms. They are the cry of the poor to the heart of God. When we pray the psalms in community, we are articulating the prayer of Christ to the Father, "who does not despise the poverty of the poor" and who has cancelled our debts by his death on the cross. It is a great and humbling vocation.