With their privileged intimacy and a loving and unobstructed access to God their creator, Adam and Eve had little excuse for reaching out and eating of the forbidden fruit. We, by contrast, begin our human existence estranged and largely ignorant of the One in whom we live, move, and have our being. Consequently, we have some excuse for reaching out to our contemporary equivalents of that forbidden fruit. Unfortunately, much to our distress and frustration we experience similar results for doing so—namely, further estrangement from the One we seek, and a hunger that remains not only unsatisfied, but deepened. So much of our monastic journey involves resisting this reaching out for what can never satisfy the deepest longing of our heart and, instead, returning to the One who alone can satisfy our deepest hunger. He himself is that living bread come down from heaven which, unlike that forbidden fruit, brings us, not condemnation and exile, but that fullness of Life that is nothing less than partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life—that Tree that is no longer guarded by the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword, but of which we may now freely partake.