Burning incense

In Burning Incense, Raymond moves the action from Europe to the United States, narrating the vicissitudes surrounding the founding of the Abbey of Gethsemane, which he describes as "a crossroads that God has placed behind the hills of Kentucky since the mid-nineteenth century, which, for hundreds of years, has been attracting the unwary, laying a trap for them and then blinding them with its beauty, inflaming them with its love and filling them with its peace." With this work, M. Raymond continues the trilogy entitled The Saga of Citeaux and composed of Three Rebel Monks, The Family That Reached Christ and Burning Incense. With the name "saga," the author expresses his intention to poetically trace the history of the primitive Cistercian Order that, in time, would receive from the monastery of La Trappe the name of Trappist, by which the white monks are known. In Nordic literature, the saga is a genre equivalent to the epic poems of southern and western Europe. But they often lack an individual protagonist: the hero of the saga is a collective, a family, a tribe, a people. In telling the story of the founders of the Cistercian Order, M. Raymond used this ancient literary genre and, taking extraordinary events from real life, infused them with a poetic and legendary breath of the highest emotional value. His intention, in composing the trilogy, was to divulge the history of the first European Cistercians of the 12th century, and that of the first American Trappists in the 19th century. In Burning Incense, Raymond moves the action from Europe to the United States, recounting the events surrounding the founding of Gethsemane Abbey, which he describes as "a crossroads that God has placed behind the hills of Kentucky since the mid-19th century, which, for hundreds of years, has been attracting the unwary, laying a trap for them and then blinding them with its beauty, inflaming them with its love and filling them with its peace."

M. RAYMOND O.C.S.O TE

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