Before I became a nun one of my great delights was to go "steeple-chasing", the churchy rather than horsey variety. From the grandest of cathedrals to the plainest of meeting houses, I was fascinated both by the buildings themselves and what they revealed about the people who used them. It began with a childish enthusiasm for Gothic which grew with the years to embrace almost everything. I began to see that architectural "mistakes" might have a beauty that had nothing to do with their material construction. I even discovered a fondness for the ugly little Catholic churches squashed into mean back streets which were commoner then than now, the gothic all wrong but the intentions all right: churches built by the urban poor and kept going by innumerable small sacrifices and struggles. To begin with, I was a bit fastidious about the bingo and sweepstake notices pinned at the back, but over time I began to see that one will do almost anything for whom and what one loves. The Catholic obsession with money is not an obsession with money per se: it is an obsession with what money can do for a good cause.

Which brings me to my point. People sometimes ask what they can do to help the monastery, usually prefacing their remarks with the words, "I don't have a lot of money but . . ." Don't worry if you haven't any money. If you use the internet at all you can help us greatly by making use of two services which will cost you nothing but which will bring us a small referral fee.

If you use our easysearch portal do your internet searching, we get something like a penny each time you make a search. Doesn't sound much? In the course of a week, 41 regular users generate anything between 30p and £1.50 for our charitable funds. If we had 400, it would pay for one new audio book for the blind a week. If you do any online shopping, please consider going to your favourite retailers, or finding others, via our easyfundraising portal. About 2000 retailers are now taking part in this scheme. When you use the portal, the referral fee which would normally go to Google or some other search engine is split half and half between easysfundraising and ourselves. You don't pay any more, indeed there are often special discounts and offers for users, but we raise some useful cash - almost £500 to date, which bought a new digital recorder for our work for the visually impaired and paid Veilaudio's telephone bill for the last quarter. Finally, if you don't want to support the monastery but would like to sign up another charity, please consider using our referral link and help two good causes at the same time.

As they say in all good churches, spread the word (and help us spread the Word).