Jeff's corner: A Radio Interview, a Trappist Monastery & Steps Toward Inner Peace

When Peace Pilgrim explained her Steps Toward Inner Peace during an interview on KPFK radio in Los Angeles, the interviewer was so taken with her message that he transcribed the talk and mimeographed copies to give to people.

After Peace Pilgrim’s 1981 passing, a group of friends created the book, Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words. [See our Sept. 25 post.] Two years later, John and Ann Rush opened a Peace Pilgrim center at their home in Whittier, CA, and began offering the book free to anyone who asked. They also mimeographed the Steps and included a copy with each book they mailed.

One of the people who came across a mimeographed Steps booklet was a Catholic hermit from Texas, who traveled every year to the New Melleray Trappist Abbey in Peosta, Iowa for an annual retreat. During one visit, he brought the booklet and gave it to Brother Mark, a New Melleray monk. 

Brother Mark appreciated its content enough that he thought it would benefit by being typeset instead of mimeographed. He contacted John and Ann Rush in California and offered to typeset the booklet on the monastery’s huge linotype machine. Developed in the late 1800’s, the once-popular printing technology injected molten lead into a mold to cast metal type line by line. 

John and Ann, already planning to visit their children and grandchildren in New Hampshire, decided to stop at New Melleray to confer with Brother Mark in person about the typesetting details. By a miraculous “coincidence,” I had the great blessing to have lunch with Brother Mark and the Rushes during that visit, but that is a story for another day. 

We have printed over two million copies of Brother Mark’s typeset Steps Toward Inner Peace and are ever grateful to him for his contribution. I've always thought that the type was particularly beautiful and stands out from computer-generated type so common today.

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About New Melleray Abbey: In the 1840s Irish monks from Mount Melleray Abbey in Ireland came to the United States and founded New Melleray Abbey. One of the monks was an architect and the stones for the buildings were actually quarried on the property. I was blessed by staying at New Melleray for about a month and would highly recommend visiting them. One of the highlights for me was visiting the beautiful chapel, built by the monks themselves in the 1840’s, for the chanting of the hours. Learn more at New Melleray Abbey