Digging deep and drawing generously from the wells of experience and expertise, Professor Aguilar throws open the richness of dialogue that happens in the depths of silence and solitude that characterise a life of hermitage. Theologically imaginative and spiritually inspiring, the book recovers the potential of presence, poetry and prayer for dialogue in fresh and fascinating ways. Gene: That’s uncanny. But we’re told that - “We need not enlarge upon these evils. They are apparent to all and lamented over by all, and it is the duty of a Mason to do all in his power to lessen, if not to remove them… There is no obligation resting on us to trumpet forth our disapproval of every wrongful or injudicious or improper act that every other man commits.”

Angela Del Greco, a lay consecrated hermit in the Catholic Diocese of Saint Cloud and an Oblate of Saint Benedict Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Paul Hedges, Associate Professor of Interreligious Studies at RSIS, NTU, Singapore and author of Towards Better Disagreement: Religion and Atheism in DialogueGene: Exactly. They were basically an appeal of last resort. Here’s another quote - “Accusations were made mysteriously, often by nailing a notice up to a tree, and failure to appear for trial was punished by death. The possible trial verdicts were death, banishment or acquittal.” To write The Way of The Hermit, Will spent a year travelling to and from Ken’s cabin in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands. Interviewing him long into the night and meticulously scouring his extraordinary diaries for stories of his adventurous life very well lived – this book represented one of his greatest challenges as a writer; drawing on all his skills, including those wrought in expeditions overseas, and ultimately changing him profoundly as a person.

Gene: Well, the Lecture starts off by saying “You are especially charged in this Degree to be modest and humble, not vain-glorious nor filled with self-conceit. Be not wiser in your own opinion than the Deity, nor find fault with His works, nor endeavor to improve upon what He has done. Be modest also in your intercourse with your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant to ascribe to them evil intentions.”My dictionary says a hermit is someone who lives alone (true in terms of people, untrue in terms of all the other living things I’m up here with), apart from the rest of society (mostly true, but not strictly so), and especially for religious reasons (depends on your definition of religion, I suppose, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me, I’d say). David: Ooh… yeah. I’m sure it does denote that. The thing I noticed about both forms of the Jewel was that they both show representations of right triangles, with the shape formed by the arm and sword. and the two right triangles formed by the arrow bisecting the triangle in the second form of the Jewel. David: Right. It’s Language that clouds our vision. It is the way we manipulate the world… thoughts and plans that get carried out in action. We talked about this in the last degree when we discussed Thoth as the inventor of writing. But the point here is, that once you have language, you can think and plan and transmit information, which are great… but you can also lie and deceive. Pre-descent column on first descent of the Moro in Salone/Liberia for the Daily Telegraph April 2013

David: That’s a good question. I think the point is that you have to do both. Be self-reflective, but don’t cross the line in the sand into just beating yourself up all the time. Try to do good in the world, but understand that you can fix everything, and even if you could, maybe the way you would try to fix it might even make things worse. The way I see it, it’s a life-long balancing act.

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David: Ok, so anything else that you want to say about the Degree before we begin looking at the Degree Lecture? This is post-modern nature writing that embraces beauty where it finds it and marvels at nature’s tenacity (…) But there’s more here than just fish. This is also a book about growing up, about how to retain a connection with those who raised you while forging your own identity – what to keep and what to discard. And it’s about men. The strong surges of emotion that both draw them together and keep them apart, and the shared pastimes which recognise that intimacy and meaning aren’t always accompanied by words’ Olivia Edward, Geographical Gene: Yeah, that’s Matthew 7:2 - “... with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

As I mentioned in the opening of my book I always wanted to be a hermit. However, this wish had to wait for years as I was a missionary in Africa and then started an academic career. To become a hermit or a monk requires a long process of discernment and this process was carried out over a period of twenty years with the informal support of different spiritual directors. I would say that the decision was taken when Cardinal O’Brien encouraged me to follow this different path within the archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. The hermitage and the daily routines developed out of an ongoing prayer life rather than out of an institutional setting. This was seven years ago in Scotland and then I opened a hermitage in Chile. The Old Man and the Sand Eel is a treat. Told with winning enthusiasm and a wide-eyed boyish glee at being outdoors in all weathers, it promises to do for angling what Roger Deakin’s masterpiece Waterlog did for wild swimming” The Cardiff Review Dr Maureen Sier, Director of Interfaith Scotland 'How great the multitude of truths which the garment of words can never contain!' ~ Baha'u'llah

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Gene: Which leads to my last quote in this section which says - “Nor let him have any alliance with those theorists who… are wiser than Heaven; (and) know the aims and purposes of the Deity, and can see a short and more direct means of attaining them, than it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords in the great harmony of the Universe… but equal distribution of property, no subjection of one man to the will of another, no compulsory labor, and still no starvation, nor destitution, nor pauperism.” It has always been the challenges from outsiders who want a writer and a monk to become a small celebrity. I have had to clarify many times that hermits do not need other hermits to carry on their lives and that I do not have meditation classes in my hermitage. The keeping of a daily structure and discipline gets interrupted sometimes but I return to read the lives of hermits I admire and that set a very clear example for me: Abishiktananda, Bede Griffiths, Raimon Panikkar, and those sadhus without name who have inspired me in India over many years. Gene: Up to a point, yes… but “there’s a line in the sand there dude and across that line, you do not cross! The Reverend Dr Peniel Jesudason Rufus Rajkumar, Programme Executive, Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation, World Council of Churches, Switzerland Gene: Well, the Vehmgericht actually did some of that. Their membership was made up of Knights, Princes and other nobility. But they weren’t supposed to supersede the established authorities or laws. They were where you took allegations of abuses of power.